Samuel_Tow

That's... Wow. You know, there are few things that cause me to really hulk out, but people preventing me from GIVING them my money for their services is one of the few that will. I realise it's a case of theft prevention, but as the grade school teacher said to the little kids - USE YOUR WORDS! If there's suspicion of a stolen credit card, verify it. There are channels for just that purpose.

Man... I feel for you, Lady. That sucks.

The latter would generally be the problem. As I design builds without Stamina as a general rule of thumb (with exceptions), I tend to run into this a lot, so I've taken to slotting to mitigate the problem. Thing is, with a limited number of slots available to devote to this, I need to know what I should slot and... I actually don't. Not objectively.

Years ago, I used to slot the highest cost powers first. Until I realised that often high-cost powers will actually cost me LESS than multiple faster powers used in the same time, or within the same cycle. But even supposing I break my fool's rule of slotting highest cost first and foremost, what then? What will help me run out less - slotting high EPS powers or slotting high DPS powers? We're assuming a static attack chain here. I'm not looking to optimise my power usage, only my power slotting with a static usage.

Yeah, that's probably what killed them for me, too, or at least half the reason. I just hate episodic power like that when I'm fighting things that are a bit too tough. I ESPECIALLY hate episodic power when my status protection is in it. On the one hand, a Dominator has better status protection than a Blaster. On the other hand, a Dominator even HAS status protection only sometimes. And since I don't build for perma-Dom, that's rather rare.

I actually do the same thing - I keep saving the power and saving it and saving it... Only to really need it literally the next fight after I break down and use it. It's kind of like Scrapper T9 God Mode powers... Only not. It's like them in that I shepherd the power, but it's not like that in that I can play a Scrapper without touching his T9, whereas playing a Dominator without Domination is... Harsh.

So, yeah, AT gimmick really kills me on the AT.

Speaking of which, Gauntlet ensures I will NEVER play a Tanker ever in my life. Will not. Vigilance used to be another turnoff, but ever since it started giving a damage buff, I've seen it much more favourably. Still won't try Defenders, though. My failure to play Kheldians and Dominators in the ways I preferred has soured me on trying anything new.

But they don't do better solo! Not for me, anyway. I gave them a try (more so than I've given to any other AT "I don't like") and I just couldn't force myself to play them. On this one, I can admit that I suck because I know I'm doing something wrong. But here's the rub - from what I understand it, I don't want to do what it takes to play Dominators right. It's not fun for me. Same way I probably COULD play Defenders, but I just WON'T. Not how I like to play.

Outside of the obvious (that is to say Scrappers, Brutes, Stalkers and Masterminds), Blasters are the next best AT I've found at soloing. They move fast (faster than Scrappers by a fair margin), they're not boring like Tankers are, they're not tissue paper like Corruptors are... And they have Aim + Build Up Really, I'm sure other ATs are safer than Blasters, but they just bore me to tears, Tankers especially, or stress me out to the point where I feel like a two-dimensional loser. Not what I want out of my games.

I'm not saying I CAN'T play Blasters solo. I very much can. Somehow, I ended up with two of them at 50 without realising it, and more are on their way. So it's not like they're BROKEN. It's just more... Stressful to play them than practically everything else I could be playing.

'Course, just as I'm typing this my 41 Sword/Regen Scrapper is getting MURDERED by Malta and Crey, but I managed to get by without too much real trouble. I'm seeing more incoming damage than I remember.

That's not quite what I said, though. My biggest beef with Blasters is that their Secondaries are just a frikkin' mess of leftover powers that could have been a LOT better. Seriously, every secondary has at least one power that's useless, and some have multiple.

And I STILL want to see damage auras gone. Even if that leaves them with 8 power picks. Seriously.

Please understand that I'm not trying to be ugly here, but I'm just not sure what you're saying with this one, at least in relation to my quote at the top. That we shouldn't generalise anime? I guess, since it's a wide-spanning media, but there ARE a few key points you CAN generalise on.

I don't know why that is, but American cartoons have always struck me as reactionary to whatever the latest greatest thing is at the time. A rare few crop up every now and then to revolutionise the medium, such as the Simpsons, but by and large what you get is... Well, more of what you're already getting, but cheaper and of worse quality. Maybe I'm biassed in that I get most of my cartoons from the Cartoon Network and the Disney channel, as that's all my provider gives me, but from the stuff I see there, I'm not impressed. And even before, when there were actually GOOD shows on the air, I still wasn't impressed.

By contrast, anime - at least the anime I've seen and liked - doesn't tend to follow in the footsteps of trend and hype. Sure, when you get right down to it a lot of anime shows recycle each other, but at the end of the day, anime by and large is a LOT more daring with the subject matters it involves and the way in which it involves it. Maybe times have changed, but something like a little girl wielding a giant scythe and fighting an Edward Scissorhands version of Jack the Ripper in wire-fu style would have been laughed off the set of most Western cartoons, or if actually done, would have been TERRIBLE. Yet anime pulls it off. I don't know why that is, but I dare say it's because anime writers are more willing to take goofy ideas more seriously and run with them, whereas Western shows either won't do them or will parody them.

Good point.

I think that's kind of how they tried to sell the Origin of Powers arc when they introduced it, deliberately having the different faction contacts tell contradicting stories... Only the stories are so poor the only one I could tell contradicted was the Magic one, and only because it's a rehash of the Oranbegan storyline and the Scroll of Tielekku information. The rest are just... Weak? Even if we ignore the fact that they trod all over people's concepts, they're just not well written.

Yeah, no. No, thank you. That's not how things work.

Especially since trying to play a Dominator like a Blaster gets you killed. A lot. I tried. And I died. A whole lot. I asked Dominator veterans what to do, and was given bizarre advise like leaving mid-mission to go build up Domination, immobilising things so I can run away and rest, altering my difficulty so I'm fighting fewer things of a higher level (thereby removing any fun to be had in the game) and generally things that made me scratch my head big-time. If THAT is what it takes to play a Dominator well, then I want no part in it.

Besides, Dominators just aren't for me. I can admit it when an AT just isn't fun for me and when I just can't play it well. I try to play them like Blasters and I die. People tell me to build them like Controllers first, and I just remind myself why it is that I never wanted to play Controllers in the first place. Their playstyle just bores me. I don't know how much slotting I'm supposed to give to my control powers, but I do know that by the time I have enough spare to slot my attacks I'd have lost interest in the character twice-over.

'Sides - no nukes, no ticket.

I'm not dismissing team performance. I just don't accept "get a team" as a valid fix for the problems a solo Blaster faces. That's just an extension of my general dislike of the "get a team" response to ANY complaint whatsoever.

Yes, I'm well aware that if there are other people for the enemies to attack, a Blaster will have a much easier time. It kind of goes without saying that if the enemies aren't attacking you, you're not going to die. Having someone else for the enemies to attack is, however, not an option as I'm not rich enough to own my own slave and the game doesn't seem very willing to provide AI bots every time I ask for one.

Blaster team performance is fine, but team performance for all ATs is more or less fine because teams are generally overpowered against normal content. There's really no point in discussing the obvious when it doesn't actually help.

There was never a prompt. The system used to tell me "this post already exists" and it didn't do that now. I highly doubt it's been removed, too, so I wonder why it didn't trigger.

Needing several inspirations EVERY FIGHT is abusing them, because they simply don't drop that fast. Most ATs can run around with only having to "resort to" inspirations from time to time. Blasters are the only AT that I am continually told to just use inspirations all the time on, and it has actually been suggested to me that I drop out of a mission to go buy more.

Against... 10 enemies? Care to elaborate?

Ooor... You take Hover. When enemies aren't running hopelessly in circles underneath you, they're forced to use ranged attacks. So, no.

I don't recall ever saying PBAoE powers aren't PBAoE powers, I merely said that not all of them count as melee. In fact, I dare say not more than half of them do. The reason I say this is that if you can hit an enemy with a power from outside his melee range, you're not using a melee power.

I might have, but if I did, it was wrong. I lost the post several times, so it's possible I left a few mistakes from one of the re-writes. At one point I DID say World of Confusion didn't count as melee, but that was before I checked its range. I went back to weed it out of the post, but I could have missed a spot.

"Powers that deal damage" is not the same as "attacks." Beanbag deals damage. Taser deals damage. Tesla Cage deals damage. They are still not attacks. So if we're counting the number of powers in Manipulation secondaries that deal damage, then that number is rather a lot higher, but it's also meaningless because things that "just deal damage" are actually useless for the most poart. The only things that are useful for their damage are actual attacks, or in the case of Controllers, the next best thing.

Speaking of World of Confusion, yes it deals damage... Just about.

OK.

Total Focus deals 197.97 points of damage and costs 18.51 endurance points, giving it an efficiency of around 10.694 points of damage to the endurance point used. Shocking Grasp deals 101.16 points of damage and costs 18.2 points of endurance, giving it an efficiency of only 5.558, or roughly that of Fireball, only fireball hits multiple targets and tends to generate multiple times that efficiency.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Fire Breath is not a power from Fire Manipulation. Yes, Fire Sword Circle is a decent AoE... It's also AoE, and is balanced as such, both in terms of recharge and in terms of cost. I don't feel like running another full set of numbers right now. Are you suggesting that Fire Sword Circle has the efficiency of a single-target attack? That could be interesting if it were true.

I should have a spreadsheet for a Fire/Fire/Pyre Blaster somewhere, but I don't think I have access to it here. Never mind, found it. And it sucks. Don't have "per activation" stats on it, but I can already tell that Fire Sword Circle's endurance efficiency is less than half that of Fire Sword and its DPS is between a third and half of that of Fire Sword. Doesn't look good if you care about endurance.

Fast-recharging knockback that's single-target. The stuns, at least, last for a while, and I actually DID forget about the stun in Total Focus, you have me there. On paper, that's how it ought to work. I'm not sure why I don't remember it working that way when I played it...

Are you seriously counting chance to SLEEP as meaningful mitigation? Most people wouldn't count guaranteed high-mag sleep, let alone random chance to sleep. And as far as Thunder Clap goes, its knockback does fat lot of good. Yes, it knocks a spawn back, but it also scatters it making AoE less effective and, really, what have you achieved? You've delayed the enemies by two seconds. The stun on that power is worth more than that unenhanced.

As far as Lightning Field is concerned, it's probably one of the few damage auras I'd be willing to actually take and use... But not for the damage.

I'll grant you Ice Patch, but Hot Feet? Yeah, I was told it's mitigation, too. It isn't. I'd give you World of Confusion if it actually did ANYTHING. Pity it actually doesn't. A low-mag confuse effect that hits at .6 base to-hit, lats half the power's cycle and doesn't even do much when it lands is pretty much nothing. And the damage on it isn't even worth talking about. The end cost isn't bad, though.

I wouldn't count Thunder Strike as mitigation, because it isn't. It has a chance for knockback and its damage on the AoE scale is laugable. It may stun, but it only stuns what you hit.

And as far as that Mentalist goes, I'd love a world where I could casually walk up to a Chief Mentalist and give him a Shocking Grasp before he's hit me with Mesmerise from range, but that just doesn't happen when I play. And even supposing I COULD do that. What do I do about the other Mentalist that spawned right with him? And, yeah, that happens. It's always happened. I still have nightmares of double Malta TacOps spawns back before the Defiance changes.

In melee the whole time in long fights? I'd really like to see that. See what I'm doing wrong. But the last person who showed me a FRAPS video of that had capped ranged defence and I believe 30 or 40% melee defence. I usually don't, what with Inventions not being mandatory and all that.

Well, then I'd like to know what you're doing that I'm not, or possibly what you're not doing that I am. Because every time I walk in melee, all the enemies fire up their melee attacks they had been saving and I lose half my hit points. That's what got me to stop trying to use Combustion in the first place.

Yeah... Every one of Siege's minions, lieutenants and bosses has Power Burst. Every one of them. That's what they open with. And when I'm facing a spawn of around 8 minions and 2 lieutenants, I very much AM on the receiving end of ten Power Bursts. Seriously, go fight them yourself and you'll see what I mean.

And I actually don't know what Defenders and Controllers could survive. I don't think they would, but people are constantly beating their chests about how they're tanking 8-man spawns on their Controllers and Defenders, so I figure there must be something to it.

I will freely admit that it looks like the Praetorian's henchmen break the usual rules of how many of what power are available to each enemy rank, but again - they are in the game in several very large, very long, VERY TEDIOUS missions each.

I'm actually talking about the mission to beat Siege at the top of the that tall tower in one of the industrial complex outdoor instances. I finished that mission, killed practically all of the robots there were to kill, beat up Siege himself and completed my objective. Only it took me two hours on the clock and many more deaths than I'm comfortable with.

Right, I misread that. Thought it said they evolved "beyond the need" when it said they "evolved to need." My bad.

Still... That's kind of a lame explanation for gods, to be honest.

Wasn't Atlantis ahead of its time technologically, though? And are we confident Oranbega was "ahead of its time" more so than just being very affluent and powerful? I mean, just because a nation is prominent, powerful and famous doesn't mean it's actually advanced.

One is sunk underneath the ocean somewhere out there. The other is sunk into the ground in mainland USA. That makes a difference.

The whole of the Circle's backstory was originally told in the Envoy of Shadows arc, which has most of what you describe, as well as the story of Hequat's hatred and so on. Before that, Hequat is only tangentially mentioned in the Scroll of Tielekku along with Ermeeth, as I believe her first students. An Envoy of Shadows is a 35-40 arc.

No, but there would still be griping from people who don't enjoy howling like madmen every time they zoned. It would just be directed at other people and other aspects of gameplay, and I can assure you that the notion of a prompt would have definitely surfaced at some point.

Additionally, the notion of refusing or cancelling unsolicited buffs (i.e buffs from people not on your team) or buffs in general has existed for years, and while I may not always agree with people's reasons, I am very much a proponent for it. If a person wants to remove a buff from himself, he should be allowed to do so, Standard Code Rant notwithstanding.

To claim otherwise - that is to say, to claim that people who don't like buff should just deal with it - is no better than the running complaint that people who want the buff are hurting the people who don't want it. Any time you try to tell people to just deal with, that's not a good argument.

*edit*
Speaking of prompts, can we get the option to auto-accept resurrections? Yeah, self-contradiction, I know. But if I can ask for an option to auto-reject Mystic Fortune buffs, I should be able to ask for an option to auto-accept something else, shouldn't I?

Ooh! Oh, OK. OK, now I get it

So, I ask where the dummies go and the response is "The dummies went blue-side." From this I am to infer that the things that went blue-side are the dummies, and the things that went blue-side are the heroes, hence heroes are dummies (or punching bags). OK, that makes sense.

See, I was reading it completely the other way around. I read it to say that the dummies - the disembodied inanimate Rikti torsos - somehow left or were taken blue-side for... Some purpose I couldn't determine. However, I assumed that the purpose for which the dummies went or were taken blue-side was the joke, whereas it turns out I was missing the point completely.

OK, in hindsight, that should have been obvious even to me

Yeah, yeah. And my neighbours won't stop having stomping rows, and my ****** power company won't stop randomly cutting my power for no reason and overcharging me anyway, and my cable provide won't stop sucking and I won't stop having to go to work if I want to pay my bills.

Don't mean I'll start liking any of those over it, either.

It's not all melee attacks, it's just melee cones. I don't know if that's ever been "right" or when it became unfixed if it was, but I've been seeing it for at least a year. If you want to use, say, Hack, you can chase just fine and hit the enemy from behind. If you want to use Slice, though (or Head Splitter), you need to overtake the enemy by a good few feet.

Um... I was looking for them from blue-side. If they'd gone blue-side, I expect I'd have seen them.

You're counting a lot of things here that you shouldn't be. First of all, I don't recall saying that what Blasters lack is high-level melee POWERS, but rather high-level melee ATTACKS, and that's true. Total Focus is the only real one, and Shocking Grasp is about a half-way attack in terms of investment efficiency and stupid-long DoT. Furthermore, within the context of the discussion, I made the distinction between dashing in and out of melee and STAYING in melee for long periods of time. Almost all of those powers you mentioned can and really SHOULD be used with quick excursions into melee without the need to actually STAY there. This is usually limited to the animation time of the given power, but shrewd Blasters have been "jousting" to enable them to use melee attacks while effectively avoiding being in melee range with enemies pretty much at all.

Furthermore, you're counting a LOT of things as melee range that actually aren't. Specifically, PBAoE attacks ARE NOT MELEE, not unless you want to Nova as a melee attack, which it honestly isn't. Off memory, things like Lightning Clap, Combustion, World of Confusion and TIME BOMB are not melee range at all. Melee Range is defined as 7 feet away from your character, which damage auras like Blazing Aura ARE, but control powers like Frozen Aura ARE NOT. Hell, even Hot Feet is more than that.

Lastly, you CANNOT count pet summons as "melee" attacks. Not only are things like Time Bomb and Trip Mine not actually melee-ranged, but the concept of a melee attack is something that has to be used within melee range OF YOU, because it assumes that when an enemy is within melee range of you, you are within melee range of that enemy, thus imparting the danger of NPCs much stronger melee attacks. Melee range of something that not only isn't you, but isn't actually even attackable... Isn't melee range at all. I don't know about you, but I don't tend to drop my Ice Patch at the feet of my enemies. I drop it around a corner I expect them to come around, and then back out of it so they can't swing at me in-between bounces.

Seriously, what powers require you to STAY in melee range? More to point, what powers beyond Blazing Aura, Lightning Field, Chilling Embrace, World of Confusion and the like? In fact, let's do a bit of number-crunching to see why damage auras LOOK like a good investment, but actually aren't. Let's compare Fireball to Blazing Aura.

Fireball does about 3.708 points of damage to each unit of endurance cost and has a DPS value of around 3.312. Mind you, that's per target, so if you hit, say, three targets, both values triple.

Blazing Aura does about 7.128 points of damage to each unit of endurance cost and has a DPS value of around 5.560, again per target. So you'd think Blazing Aura would obviously be better, but I remind you - this is PER TICK. In order to get that kind of efficiency, EVERY TICK needs to catch enough targets and hit enough targets.

I'm gonna' eyeball it and say that a non-suicidal Blaster will only spend around a tenth of his time in melee. Yes, if you wanted to fire all of your secondary powers in quick succession, that would take some time, but let's take a less suicidal practice and go for just two at a time. Say Fire Sword and Fire Sword Circle. This gives you a time in melee of four seconds (exactly), assuming you go in, hit the powers and go out. Even with a bit of leeway for movement time, that only gives you two ticks on Blazing Aura, with the rest of the time spend running an aura which costs a not insignificant amount of endurance, but does nothing because enemies are out of range.

At a 10% time spent in melee, Blazing Aura actually has a DPE of around 0.7 and a DPS of around 0.56. You have to understand that the only reason Blazing Aura looks good on paper is because on-paper calculations assume you are always constantly in melee and hitting all targets... Which simply isn't the case. It's not the case in how I find it to be at all survivable, and it's not the case in how I see other people playing their Blasters, including people who are rather a lot better at survivng than I am.

Blasters are not Scrappers, but they more or less HAVE to play like Scrappers if they want a damage aura to be at all worth it. And considering damage auras have lengthy, rooting activations and long-ish recharges, toggling juggling with them doesn't really work.

Yeah, saying the powers are "support" is akin to saying that the man who mugged you was, in fact, a man. Yeah, that's useful to know, but it doesn't really say much, does it? Especially since there's practically NO support in Fiery Manipulation.

This does not even begin to be true. Disconouting Energy Manipulation, "the majority" of Blaster secondaries are very much not designed to deal damage. You counted a lot of non-damage powers in your "melee" list, but let's count attacks only. I'm instantly going to exclude T1 immobilize powers, because while these DO deal damage, their cost for doing is is absurd. You CAN use them for damage, but then you CAN use Beanbag for damage, or indeed you CAN use Soul Drain for damage. As in, you can, but why would you want to?

Fire Manipulation, the "damage" secondary, gets three - Fire Sword, Fire Sword Circle and Combustion. Consume does not count and Burn REALLY doesn't count. I mean, OK, I can give you a fourth power if you REALLY wanted a crappy Avoid damage patch and didn't mind wasting oodles of time that could be better spent on actual attacks, but four out of five is still not "the majority."

Ice Manipulation has two: Frozen Fists and Ice Sword. A few other things do deal damage, like Freezing Touch, but that IS NOT AN ATTACK. It deals far too little damage at far too high a cost with far too long a recharge. It's basically Brawl. In fact, Brawl has better DPS than Freezing Touch, and a zero cost.

Mental Manipulation has Mind Probe, Telekinetic Thrust, Scream and Psychic Shockwave, and I actually see Psychic Shockwave as the equivalent of Total Focus, a T9 attack that's out of norm. I have a bit of a hard time counting Scream, as that's a power which should have been in the PRIMARY (it's a Psychic Blast power), but somehow migrated in the secondary when they were proliferating, once again proving that what goes in the secondary is "whatever powers are left lying around."

Electric Manipulation... OK, I'll give you that. It has Charged Brawl, Havoc Punch, Thunder Strike and Shocking Grasp, which while not a very efficient attack, is still very much an attack. And that's still four out of nine.

And I'm not even going to look at Devices, as you mentioned.

Basically, you have to count attacks that aren't attacks to get an impression that Blaster secondaries are mostly about damage. They're not. As a matter of fact, you can't even count damage auras, because their contribution is silly. If you get all ticks on all targets, maybe, but seriously - what kind of Blaster stays in melee with 10 people for 10-12-14 seconds to get a decent return? Because I can very much blast 10 people into dust in about three seconds FROM RANGE on your average Blaster. Seriously, if I can't get even JUST Fire Sword Circle and Combustion before I'm either in the red or in the dead, what use is Blazing Aura going to be when its range is shorter than BOTH powers?

Except they don't do that. You keep citing Fire as THE damage dealer, ignoring the fact that it's really not. You have Fire Sword, which is the only decent damage power in the set. Fire Sword Circle is both slow and not very strong and Combustion is EVEN SLOWER. They'e not bad AoEs, but unless you go Mental Blast, your primary AoEs are better and SAFER. Basically, unless you're Electric or Energy, the damage your secondary deals is incidental. It's not BAD, but it's more than made up for by the risk you take to deal it, especially when it's AoE AND SLOW AS HELL.

And as far as adding mitigation... They don't really do that, either. Yes, Ice Manipulation kind of does, Devices doesn't do a whole lot else (or a whole lot in general) and I'd be hard-pressed to say Mental does. But Energy Manipulation? Electric Manipulation? The only mitigation they have is an orphaned status effect, and in the case of Electric, a mag 2 one that doesn't even catch lieutenants. I can get more mitigation out of that from Munitions Mastery... Or Force Mastery, or Electrical Mastery... Or practically ANY Epic pool that Blasters get access to.

So your argument is that because it deals ANY amount of damage, Blasters need it? Brawl deals damage. Do they need that enough to have it as part of their secondary?

Yeah, if you intend to do that with SECONDARY attacks, I dare say that's pretty ambitious. Discounting the fact that Fire is the only one with meaningful AoE in its secondary, even that doesn't have enough punch to kill sufficiently meaningful enemies before they kill you. And if you think I'm looking at enemies that are too hard, these are the same enemies I can take out at range with relatively little trouble. And if you think you'll jump in and use mitigation... WHAT mitigation? Outside of Lightning Clap, you have no AoE mitigation in any secondary, and even Lightning Clap will just scatter enemies and make it impossible to kill them before they wake up. It's not exactly long-duration. And even then, it won't stun lieutenants, which if you happen to meet a Mentalist, will tend to kill you in pretty short order.

"Depending on your personal ability" is a pretty... Unconvincing argument. Specifically since it depends most of all on BUILD. Inventions build, more specifically. And if I need to use some inspirations AND DON'T HAVE any because I needed to use some inspirations on every fight in the entire mission and I simply ran out, what then? Run out to buy more and sink ten minutes into that? How many times per mission?

Furthermore, if we're going to be feeding on inspirations constantly, then my Scrapper is going to ANNIHILATE the same enemies without even noticing they are there, because he's currently capable of facing them without inspirations. It's a REALLY bad argument when you compare Blasters with inspiration use and other ATs without inspiration use. And if you compare them with inspiration use, Blasters come far behind. And I've looked.

What are you fighting that doesn't insta-hold you or two-shot you? Because even basic sapwns of Nemesis and Rikti enemies basically kill me before I can get a word out if I come into melee range of them. Nemesis lieutenants, especially, who don't stun from Lightning Clap, whom you DO NOT want to kill first, and who both stun you AND deal a ton of damage with their bayonets. And who, might I add, keep spawning in twos, and on one particular day insisted on spawning in threes.

Yes, I'm sure proper aggro management will save my life when I'm all by myself with nothing else for the enemies to aggro on in the first place. And please, let's stay out of the "just get a team" arguments here. If I wanted to get a team to do my fighting for me, I wouldn't even spare a thought about what I'm actually doing to build my character. Teams in this game scale in power so severely you could get eight blind monkey's together and they'll be just fine unless they decide to crank the difficulty up beyond reason or logic. Obviously, playing Blapper on a team with people to pull my *** out of the fire is easy. It's easy because I could be NOT PLAYING on that same team and the difference in spawn-to-spawn speed would hardly register.

"I could as well fall asleep" is not a good basis for power comparison. OF COURSE if there's someone to get attacked instead of me, it'll be easy to do. I'm talking about when all the fire is coming at YOU for lack of anywhere else for it to go. All other ATs seem to be able to do this, including ones that aren't really intended to be. All the ones I've played certainly can. Only Blasters can't, not really, not without crutches and cheats.

And again - if you want a decent test of merit, try fighting the Praetorians. Say, pick Siege's minions, decent-sized spawns of them. And when 10 people hit you with simultaneous Power Bursts, let me know how that goes. Because that exact situation is what made me rage-quit the last time I played one of my 50 Blasters.

I want to take every opportunity I get to agree with Venture, as that doesn't seem to happen often. But here, I agree completely. The "box" storyline is just BAD, and I try to pretend it doesn't exist.

Wait, what? Where does it say they're nature spirits? Moreover, how can they have evolved past the need for worship if the Rikti killed all of their gods by killing all of their worshippers? I believe that's said either in Angus McQueen's arc or one of the Midnighter arcs.

If I never see another temporary power in a booster pack, it'll be too soon.

On the subject of "unwanted" buffs, the only solution I can think of that would satisfy everyone would be to allow us to kill our own buffs, or at least buffs cast by other people on us. Not via prompt, mind you, but by a system similar to how you kill temporary powers.

I happen to be an avid hater of temporary powers. If all the temps suddenly disappeared, I would not bat an eye. But they exist, and I deal with them, largely by deleting or shelving the powers I get. I'm not a fan of "drive-by buffing" for the simple fact that I try to run on my own merits, but I don't go off on people who do it because their buffs usually expire pretty quickly, and I can always take the opportunity to go to the loo. The buff is usually gone by the time I come back.

But the Mystic Fortune buff is just... Bad. It has a REALLY annoying sound effect every time you zone, it has the potential to apply a debuff which, while not major, is ANNOYING and INSULTING, and it's tagged at 20 minutes GAME TIME. I've been hit with Mystic Fortune, logged off and found I had 18-ish minutes on it when I came back the next day. Even death doesn't remove the Mystic Fortune effect, and I should know - I've tried using Self Destruct to remove it. No dice. It's as persistent as the Vahzilok Disease, the Crey Narcotic and the Curse of Weariness... All of which I see as about the same level of annoyance as Mystic Fortune.

The prompt for the power is just an easy way to allow me to get rid of it. I honestly don't care if this is transformed into a UI prompt to let me autodecline, or if it's an option to delete the buff itself after the fact. My primary concern is that I do NOT have Mystic Fortune on me, however that may be achieved.

I still don't get it.

Only what he said is no matter what happens, the two things we won't get are more powers or more slots. Even just one. I'm not making this up to be ugly here, that's what the man said, and it honestly is his call.