SirDook

1) There is a strong tension in the game between teaming on the one hand and following story arcs on the other. This becomes especially acute in 40s when a number of storyarcs become impossible to solo because of the number of AVs. Are there any plans to address this, either by making it possible to bypass AV fights in these stories or allowing a mission completion to count for all team members who have the same mission?

2) Speaking of those late game AV missions - why do the same AVs keep popping up in more or less the same ways?
Are there any plans to change this to make the story more interesting?
The 45-50 contact who gives out the Praetorian missions says at the beginning she wants your help in executing her plans to weaken these AVs. Too bad her plan to weaken them is pretty much: 'Fight them and defeat them.' Even missions whose description/story sound like they needn't involve fighting the AV do, and it's all the more disappointing when I have to fight the same AVs again later in missions from the same contact.

3) In the first storyline of the new comic book, why were super powers suppressed so inconsistently? Did Statesman lose his powers (thus allowing his initial defeat in issue 1 and his subsequent death-by arrow) or keep them (thus allowing him to survive attacks from the three villains torturing him)? Why did the tech in Positron's suit stop working but not the holographic projector in the Phalanx HQ?

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Did anyone else look at Prometheus and think, "Why does Prometheus need a starship?"


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I must have missed something. What's this about Torchy and starships?

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It's a line from Star Trek V; there's a wierd alien who pretends to be God and wants to use the Enterprise to escape the part of the universe he's imprisoned in. Kirk asks him, "What does God need with a Starship?"

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The fact was that it was too "Controllery" for a Defender power. There were also a lot of redundant debuffs that made the set VERY powerful.


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I see how all the listed changes make the set less powerful, but it doesn't make it any less 'controllery.' The powers still do all the same things. They'll just do them less effectively.

I'm not opposed to a defender set that 'breaks the mold' (to the extent that there is one; one thing I like about defender primaries is their variety), but when judging how powerful it is at what it does, keep in mind what it doesn't do.

It provides no status protection or healing for the TA defender or for teammates. So the debuffs/slows/controls have to be effective enough to make up for this. I've only tested my TA defender up to level 4, but I'd be interested to see how well one fairs solo or as the lone defender/controller on a small team when faced with Tsoo or other mezzing enemies.
Do those stacking abilities still seem too powerful under those circumstances?

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I found myself GDFing a group, then wormholing them onto say a burn tank that was already toasting a separate group.


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If I have to use GDF to make the new wormhole effective, then I certainly don't want it. GDF has a long recharge time, especially on a toon without Hasten. If the new Wormhole is supposed to be another form of group control, it should be something I can use while I'm waiting for GDF to recharge.

If Crushing Field was changed to have a -kb magnitude like GD/GDF, then that would make for a more useful combo I think. It would also fit thematically with the powerset - I'm keeping you from moving by weighing you down; that extra gravity also keeps you from being knocked back.

Well, I know this is pretty much old news by now, but I wanted to wait until I'd had a chance to really try out the changes before forming an opinion.

I play a Grav/Kin. Through various respecs I've had all the grav powers at one time or another.

I got rid of Dimension Shift on my first respec because, while it was spectacularly useful on a couple of occasions (it helped me save a cape mission that was about to go down the drain), there were too many other powers I wanted to keep one that was useful so rarely. I have no plans to work it back into my build, and I can't really imagine any changes to it that would change my mind.

On my second respec I finally gave up on Propel. It is far and away the coolest looking power in the game, but it just wasn't doing enough for me (high end cost, low damage, long animation time). I would like to try it again with the new changes, but in my post I4 respec I just couldn't find a power I was willing to give up for it.

The biggest disappointment for me was Wormhole. When I first took wormhole in I3, it took me a little while to get the hang of it. But once I did I found it both fun and useful. It was great for shunting off DE buffers and Sky Raider force fields out of combat, and also for grabbing problem minions like sappers or Quantums out of a group to be dealt with individually.

With the I4 changes, however, I ultimately decided I didn't have a use for the AoE version, so I respeced it out in favor of the new improved Speed Boost (which I've so far been happy with).
At first I thought an AoE version of the power could be useful, but I found that the accuracy penalty introduced to balance the AoE made it ineffectie at grabbing an entire group. Even if I had teammates to draw the agro, it still just created a mess. Instead of grouping the mob closer together (for blaster AoEs or tanker control), it split the group apart, working against control.
I suppose I could have added another Acc enhancement or two and some disorient durations to make it work a little better, but ultimately the power was just too different from what I had gotten used to.

The change certainly didn't break my build, but I miss the unique kind of control that the single-target Wormhole gave me.

Without having read all of the thread (yeah, yeah, I know), I just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of praise.
The Moonfire tf was a bit disappointing (No badge? But we love badges) and my group followed it up with the Bastion tf, so there was standard Council map overkill.

The Hess task force is superb because it makes sense (as another poster has said) in terms of the progression of missions. The variation from standard maps was great (especially since it's the third council tf in a row in roughly the same level range). But most importantly it was short and geographically limited. There wasn't a lot of time lost in transit from one mission to the other.

So people that may not have time for most other task forces can have time for this one. Both times I've done it, it took right about two hours.

Great job.

Thank you, Statesman. This decision has reaffirmed my confidence in you and your development team. From the moment I joined the game a few months back, I got the impression that the developers really had a sense of what makes their game interesting, and I've seen where my monthly fees are going.

I look forward to seeing the boss difficulty raised again following implimentation of the other changes you mentioned. (While the new bosses were an almost insurmountable obstacle for my controller, they've been a great challenge for my solo scrapper.)

Keep up the good work.