Samuel_Tow

As I remember his feedback on the issue, what he'd done was made aerial knockback root for a time equal to the "getting up" animation of ground knockback. This was still said to be faster overall, since it didn't factor in the time spent flying backwards, which could sometimes be significant. The logic given at the time was that Hover was never meant to serve as knockback protection, and was still better at it than standing on the ground anyway.

That said, I feel the "knockback time" in Hover has gotten less now than it was at the time of the change, if by a very small amount. There's much less dead air after being knocked back while Hovering, at the very least.

Either way, it's still superior to ground knockback as you barely move and take less time to recover, so characters with only mag 4 protection will still not be in too much danger even against enemies who do punch through that.

ParagonWiki says neither Steadfast nor Karma are buyable with Alignment Merits. I haven't actually checked the B.O.T.L.E.R. yet, so I could be wrong.

I'm not sure I can agree with that. Personally, I prefer smaller teams, ideally of no more than four people. Anything more than that and it stops being a social and personal environment and turns into group think, which I don't like. With myself and at most three other people, I can consistently remember everyone's name, everyone's conduct and personality and everyone's appearance and power. And four people don't quite give enough of an audience for people to start feeling like they can act stupid in front of a crowd.

To be honest, I hadn't noticed that. What you describe seems to work relatively well, and it routes me to the US server status page, to boot.

I was thinking of having a server status readout directly on the Launcher itself, including readout for the login server, but I guess a link to the proper server status page would be sufficient, as well.

The reason I want a link to the login server is because it's the one thing you always have to guess at. And if you get it wrong, the game hangs for 30 seconds until the connection times out, and it hangs so completely that Windows interprets it as "not responding" and starts wanting to kill it. Once you try to log into a downed login server, you cannot cancel your decision and you cannot even Alt-Tab out of the game without going through the task manager.

I'll definitely be using the NCsoft Launcher to check server status from now on, though.

I'm pretty sure knockbakc and knockup are the same effect as far as stats are concerned. Knockback and knockup effects are both resisted by knockback resistance and negated by knockback protection. Sub 0.75 mag knockback turns into knockdown, where your character lifts up in the air and lands on his back. Sub 0.75 knockup turns into a similar thing - your character gets lifted off his feed, he does a full one or two spins in the air and lands on his back.

Check out Air Superiority vs. Heavy Mallet for comparison.

I really don't want to get into that, but I'll split the problem into two categories:

1. I don't know what I want, or more specifically, what I'm supposed to want. Optimization tends to focus on plugging up holes in characters, whereas I'm just fine with characters having obvious weaknesses and obvious strengths as distinct from each other. Provided the weakness isn't too jarring (like run speed floor slow or lack of knockback protection), I don't have a problem with it.

2. It always ends up as a halfassed job, as making a complete set is part impossible, part undesired. One of the things which makes me want to bother with Knockback Protection enhancements is that they're just one thing that I can get done once and stick it at 50. It's not an ongoing process that will never be done.

Again, my reasons are not convincing, and people are already lining up to toss low-brow insults at my face over them, just as happens ever time I mention this. It is what it is. But at the end of the day, what matters is how much I want to do something and how much I want to play the game with it. Other people's preferences are all fine and well for them, but I don't necessarily want to copy them, and I won't necessarily enjoy them as much as they do.

Common Inventions are about as "involved" as I'll go. If dual aspect Commons existed, I'd probably get involved with those, as well. But set bonuses don't interest me. They're too close to your typical Fantasy RPG set of +5% fire resistance, +20 health, +10 magic, +2% critical chance, +11 Fortitude, +etc. I don't like complex game systems made up of multiple small gains. I much prefer simpler game systems where progress comes in fewer, larger steps that I don't have to crunch numbers to notice. That, and "loot" in general no longer interests me, thanks in whole to City of Heroes' launch design.

Whether my reasons are good or bad is irrelevant, because at the end of the day, it's still my time in my game.

To be honest, I'm in the same boat. I appreciate a formal apology, even if I didn't feel like one was necessary, but this "compensation" is more trouble than it's worth. On several occasions I got jumped by wolves because I clicked on the wrong door, and no less than three times I had to sit on my hands and wait for zone events to end so I could finish my zone-specific hunts.

All that topped with the fact that, even if I wanted to run a Banners event, I never saw the opportunity to. Whenever I'd run into a zone that had one going (and I ran into a lot), a /whoall would reveal me to be either the only person in the zone, or one of, like, three people. I did catch calls for event teams here and there, usually when I was half-way through a long instance or about to log off, but the fact of the matter is I never got anything out of the event but aggravation.

And mosh-put zombie invasions just suck.

My school teachers always taught me that money is "universal goods," though that may be due to different terminology used in different languages. But, yes, I do agree that Inf is not necessarily interchangeable with "money," in the sense of "dollars" that most people tend to use.

However, Inf is still "like money," in that we own it in concrete measurable amounts and are free to trade or invest it, and otherwise use it in situations where its nature becomes irrelevant in the face of the pure numerical amount of it.

If we treated Inf like how Influence was explained under Jack's reign - that being a collection of favours people owe you - then it would not be tradable in a blind-bid consignment house. Furthermore, if it really were that, then favours wouldn't be measurable against each other and couldn't be given an objective numerical value representing their worth.

To put it simply, how many free cab rides does a free gun purchase equal? Or, more relevantly, how do you consign the fact that a city official owes you a favour to a consignment house and how can you pay a listing fee on that?

Inf may not be money, but it is A currency.

Heh, would that I could But I like the game when it's easy in more than just combat difficulty. I like the game when it's not a lot of work, and Inventions are a lot of work. Combat becomes easy, but investment becomes hard, and it's just trading one bad for another, and a much worse one in my eyes.

I'm not an optimization-minded player, is all. It's not that I can't do it, so much as I feel it ruins the game for me. Defence belongs to defence sets like Shield Defence or Super Reflexes. Then it's proper gameplay. Capping melee or ranged defence on a Fiery Aura character is so meta-game I might as well start calling her a "toon." Easy isn't always fun. Attainable, repeatable easy is

I can respect that. You wouldn't believe how many times I've gotten in trouble with my friends over refusing to swap characters and partake in planned events, or how often I've refused to SK or EX down 30 levels to play with them. If I complain about forced teaming content, this is part of the reason - I like doing my own thing, with people only if they feel like coming along, which they rarely do. It's not a very fair approach, I'll admit that right out the gate, but it is what makes the game work for me.

Truth be told, I'm here for the game. I enjoy playing with my friends whenever possible, but not at the expense of the gaming experience. That's experience, not XP. The simple reason is that the more I deviate from what I was planning to do, the less enthusiastic I am to log back in the next day.

You may not realise how powerful a tool it is to have a valid excuse for not participating in a planned event. Some people are very understanding, but some... Just aren't. "So switch over! So exemplar! What, can't you make an exception for me just once!" It's much easier to say that I CAN'T because my build would unravel than to out-and-out say that "No, I don't want to make an exception, because it makes me not want to look at the game when you force me to do something I don't want to do via emotional blackmail."

I can handle myself either way, but one way is definitely more pleasant than the other.

Is flight speed capped even without a flight speed enhancement in Fly's default slot? That could make things simpler. And, yes, I do have Hover to use in combat. A number of people have remarked on how unusual it is to see a perma-hover Scrapper, but that just makes me feel all the more proud

I'll have to check that when the servers come back up.

That's what I planned to do. I checked my Reward Merits and discovered I had 91, which allowed me to snag a level 10 Steadfast Protection enhancement for 75 right on the spot, and I currently have that slotted in Temperature protection. I'm working on acquiring two Alignment Merits now and hope to be done with this by the time my vacation is over. I will proceed to hoard those alignment merits until said character turns 47, at which point I'll swap that Steadfast Protection out for a level 50 BotZ. To people's resounding disapprovement if necessary

Gotcha. This puts things a little more into perspective. So the worry with knockback mag higher than 4 is less so with how debilitating it can be on direct survivability and more so with how much it can contribute to a Tanker losing control of his "herd." I've avoided playing Tankers in general, and even when I do tank with Brutes and Scrappers, it's not with Fiery Aura, so this shouldn't be a concern. That's one point against going for multiple special Inventions and sticking with just Mag 4.

Thank you! This puts quite a few things in perspective.

I've seen knockback stacking happen before, but it's always been my impression that the window of opportunity to stack is VERY narrow. So much so as to be negligible for most common situations, and stacked knockback seems rare enough to not bother accounting for it. Moreover, the "pinball effect" happens less because of stacked knockback and more because of concurrent knockbakc that recurs faster than I can regain control of my character.

I wasn't aware of how knockback scales with level, but knowing that this is part of the concern is a relief, since I don't intend to tackle missions higher than +0 if I have a choice. I realise Incarnate content is inherently +4, but that's a whole other subject of discussion. Suffice it to say that this does not concern me, and I would not bother building for it.

Finally, the exceptions of higher knockback seem to be fairly rare and/or special, which to my eyes constitutes and acceptable vulnerability. My chief concern is avoiding the pinball effect from regular repeated spawns. Being knocked around by an EB or the occasional boss is acceptable, so long as I can resist being tumbled around by Hurricane or Earthquake.

Finally, all Dark Armour and Fiery Arua characters I have are fliers, either with just Hover on top of other travel powers, or via Hover and Fly. I know BABs made aerial knockback equal ground knockback in terms of length, but this seems to have been shortened thereafter, since aerial knockback at least FEELS to take slightly shorter than ground-based one, or at least doesn't feel like it has such a huge pause after the tumble. This means that what knockback does get through shouldn't be so debilitating, provided it's not repeated many times, which it shouldn't be with this rarity and exclusivity.

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More than anything else, the cost of investment for all of these feels fairly low and easily acceptable. 75 Reward Merits or 2 Alignment Merits may be a high cost if I planned to spend them many times, but once for a grand total of four characters... If that? Yeah, doesn't seem like a big deal. I should have done this much earlier, but it's only now that I abandoned Blasters that this has really become a feasible example.

I'll consider doing this for Masterminds, but I don't think it's quite as relevant for them.

Some days I feel like you're allergic to me in general

Thank you for the insult, and for not reading my previous posts. It's appreciated.

It is a benefit because it gives me an excuse to not exemplar. I do not want to exemplar, I will not exemplar, and the more excuse I have in addition to "I just don't want to" the better off I am. I see no benefit to it, I see no reason to do so, and I never intend to do it.

In fact, I have to wonder - why does everyone always assume that everyone wants to build to exemplar as low as possible? Yes, I know some people want to have access to all the game's content, but I have a zillion alts to access said content. I don't need to backslide my level 50s and lose the bulk of their powers when I can be playing alts, instead.

Ouch! Yeah, I had not noticed that, but thank you for pointing it out

I mean more specifically - what can and cannot be stopped with 4, 8 or 12 points? I ask because I don't mind the occasional knockback from a boss or a mass stack of enemies. What I hope to fix is the insulting instances where I'll be juggled endlessly by three ******** with shotguns, or a bunch of Rikti Drones.

My bad. I saw wrong. So they're interchangeable, then. Good to know. I'll look into that. Thanks