SpittingTrashcan

1) Energy Manipulator: Chance to Stun has a 10% chance to fire per target hit. With enough targets and enough powers proccing, something is likely to be stunned. However, those things are also likely to already be knocked down, immobilized, slept, held, confused, and/or end-drained, so you don't get much extra mileage out of it. It's not bad to throw in Jolting Chain for giggles, but I would recommend slotting Chain Fences for endurance modification instead. As for the chance-to-provide-benefit-to-caster procs such as chance for heal, chance for +rech, or chance for build up, they don't work.

2) Energy Manipulator: Chance to Stun and Performance Shifter: Chance for Endurance both apply their effect to the target of the power they are slotted in. If you put the chance for stun in Conductive Aura, it will have a chance to stun enemies in the aura. If you put the chance for end in Conductive Aura, it will have a chance to give endurance... to enemies in the aura.

3) Energy Manipulator: Chance to Stun would be great in Gremlins - if Gremlins took end mod sets. They don't. I'm sad too.

4) I plan to take both Gremlins and Paralyzing Blast. The former add damage, control, and endurance drain; the latter is a decent panic button and a nice place for four Basilisk's Gazes. If you forced me to decide between Gremlins and Paralyzing Blast, I'd drop Jolting Chain.

Khazakhstan is full of villains.

Given the great diversity of animals, I seriously doubt that everyone will be satisfied by the contents of the booster. I will probably be pretty happy with it, though; I make monsters more than I make specific animals, and monsters can be assembled from all sorts of parts.

What I find puzzling is not that people respond in the usual fashion to a Skinner box, but that the developers don't seem to realize that their game trains their players to be reward-driven. It's kind of inexplicable to me that they are, time and time again, surprised that the player base tries to maximize rewards even when the maximum-reward path is not something that would necessarily be enjoyable without the incentive, and conversely that they neglect activities that do not have rewards attached. They even attach larger incentives to content that they acknowledge is inferior in quality. Why would you do that?

I love comics. I actually don't particularly care for capes-and-tights superhero comics, so I'm glad this game is not only about capes-and-tights superheroes. I like this game because it lets me play powerful people who punch dudes for various reasons, and look cool doing it.

I agree that it is silly that some costume pieces must be unlocked on each character, while other less generally useful ones are available by default.

Yes, sexism prescribes and proscribes for men as well as women. A Proper Man should be athletic, courageous, stoic, and confident. He should dress in man-appropriate clothing only. He should work hard in his chosen field, attract a wife, and support a family. He should be ready and willing to respond to threats and insults to himself or his family with violence, on both a personal (fights) and societal (war) level. All of these are unfair expectations to level against men, and violating those expectations leads to anything from lesser respect to physical attack. Sexism hurts everybody.

However, the expectations placed on women are just as bad at the very least. Think very carefully before you label a set of expectations that drives one gender to be more confident, aggressive, and successful as worse for that gender.

As for comics: I suggest reading Empowered. There, at least, the blatant sexualization is both explicitly acknowledged and applied evenhandedly to men and women.

(Also, the G-d Damn Maid Man.)

Let me put in a good word for a Fire/Fire/Pyre Tanker. Why? You do everything with EXPLOSIONS.
- Attack nearby enemies? EXPLOSIONS.
- Attack distant enemies? EXPLOSIONS.
- Heal yourself? EXPLOSION.
- Buff your damage? EXPLOSION.
With the Tech Booster, you can even kill yourself with an EXPLOSION, and then resurrect yourself with another EXPLOSION.

tl;dr Fire/Fire/Pyre = EXPLOSIONS

Reformed villains, GG. Working off their debt to society, under careful supervision, alongside good role models.

(manichean. :P)

I have confirmed through independent testing that Energy Manipulator does stun things at about the rate I expected. The stun is not very long, and it has no spinning-circles-over-the-head animation, which is probably why its effects can pass unnoticed. I am sad that it cannot be slotted in Gremlins, and hope this changes in the future.

Maybe HOs and SHOs are the way for you to go, then. Yes, they're tens of millions of inf apiece, but they are all level 50, they provide more raw enhancement value than anything short of an ultra-rare, they require no crafting, and they're simple. If you want a way to buy better performance without bothering with IOs, they're pretty much ideal. And for certain applications, they're still better than any invention that exists. So what if they cost a lot - what else were you going to spend your inf on?

Broadly speaking, the reason why Gladiators failed is the reason why any other system in the game could "fail:" the initial implementation was flawed, and no effort was made to correct it because it didn't break any other features. Gladiators are profoundly unbalanced, and this has never been addressed. Basically, the problem that Gladiators have always had is the same problem that has driven nearly every AE fix since the launch of the system: individual NPCs are not individually balanced against each other. Of course, it was a much bigger problem for AE, because unlike Gladiator matches, AE grants rewards.

A correlation to this, of course, is that if this problem is ever fixed for AE, it would also be fixed for Gladiators if they bothered transferring the knowledge over. Another correlation is that if you want work done on improving a feature, attach rewards. The flaws will come to light very, very quickly.

If you're coming at this from the angle of "oh god, fine, I'll slot some sets, that'll shut 'em up", then you reallly shouldn't bother. Because as it is, your approach is kind of a non starter - you don't know what's possible, and you don't know what you want, so it's extremely premature to exclude options from the set of acceptable responses.

I just dropped an Energy Manipulator in Jolting Chain recently. If it doesn't do anything, I should notice pretty quickly. With a 10% chance to activate per target, that comes out to 65% chance to activate against at least 1 of 10 targets per cast.

(The numbers get even better if it turns out Energy Manipulator does work and can be slotted in Gremlins. Two Jolting Chains, 16 targets, 96% chance that at least one target will be stunned. If the Force Feedback or Performance Shifter proc worked optimally in Jolting Chain, it'd be nuts...)

Suppose Alice murders Bob. Bob is now dead, and Alice killed him. Alice surrenders to the police and is sentenced to a term in prison. When, 20 years later, Alice is released, her term of punishment is over, but her act is not redeemed: Bob is still dead, and Alice still killed him. Alice goes on to save Charles from certain death. Her act is not redeemed: Bob is still dead, and Alice still killed him. Why is this distinction important? Suppose Alice first saves Charles, then voluntarily spends 20 years in prison. When she gets out, does she have a license to kill Bob?

There's an important distinction here between "irredeemable act", an act that cannot be compensated, and "irredeemable person", a person who has lost the ability to do good. I believe in irredeemable acts, but I think that the majority of irredeemable acts are not done by irredeemable people. From a societal standpoint, it behooves us to motivate everyone, including people who have done irredeemable acts, to do good from this time forward.

Interesting. Let me see if I have the reproduction steps down:

1. Summon FFG.
2. Summon pets.
3. Upgrade pets.
4. Lose a pet somehow.
5. Resummon pet. Pet does not have upgrades.
6. Resummon FFG. Pet now has upgrades.

Correct?

Has anyone tried it? Does it give all their abilities - the jolting chain, the electropunch, and the damage/drain aura - the chance to stun? Do they then actually stun things? Inquiring minds want to know.