Void_Huntress

The AE is more than a system. It may not be a zone, but it is still a content nexus.

Yes, a lot of the help the AE needs the most is in the form of UI corrections, so it'd lean a lot harder on engineering than a 'real zone', but a lot of the categories of effort that'd go into a zone revamp would be applicable to the AE as well.

New maps, of various flavors. It could be the opportunity for environment artists to do what the character artists are now getting to do thanks to the paragon market: One-off environments that aren't part of anything in particular.

Since they wouldn't have to be intended to serve a specific set piece, they could be distinct or unusual without requiring a lot of the fiddly details that go into maps like what the SSAs use.

Plus, any new map that gets generated here would be part of the toolkit for mission designers down the road.

I'm not saying this is necessarily the best idea, but I don't think it's without merit, and I think someone sufficiently impassioned to consider other facets could sell it.

It's important to note that a big part of why they leaned on phasing for Atlas was to reduce the number of instanced maps. They're expensive from an operational resource standpoint. It's a LOT cheaper to manage players and mobs in a shared zone than to spin up a lot of instances. And since a huge percentage of active characters at any point are low level, Atlas Park would tend to be busy.

There's tradeoffs involved. Sometimes a suboptimal approach gets used because the optimal approach just costs too much.

That makes as much sense as saying there's nothing random about 20% of your attacks triggering the proc.

The PPM is an aggregate rate, not a schedule.

Now I'm curious.

Playing with combat suppression in a support set?

The Knives of Vengeance are a weird bag. I honestly believe it's one of the less well considered enemy groups we've gotten in a long time. Overall poor internal synergy, and kind of a weird aesthetic grab-bag. I don't know if they've changed since I was poking at I22 Beta (I haven't played DA on live yet), but they presented LESS of a threat to me than the Knives of Artemis on my blaster, despite all the -def they carry around and the complete lack of def debuff resistance a blaster gets.

Strangely, a friend of mine who plays Energy Aura has a hard time with them. I have no idea why.

This is what I get for skimming; I somehow overlooked the fact that Kim was a stalker. I always have a moment of amazement that people actually play SR stalkers (instead of abandon them midway through their career), because to me that set is kind of messed up (especially when Ninjutsu is standing over there being superior).

Sadly, fixing that problem is outside the scope of this discussion.

Alright. I kind of see where you're coming from, particularly with the powers you seem to be favoring. I personally would have taken drastically different power picks if I'd somehow made a DB/SR stalker, among other things more pool +def and not Elude (I have a thing about crashing clickies), but... yeah, I guess this is an unfortunate edge case.

For what it's worth, if you can muddle through DA on -1/x1 long enough to assemble an Agility Radial or Nerve Radial for your alpha slot, that'll lighten some slotting load, and be a small improvement to your overall defense. Enough to be noticable, I expect.

I mean, just swapping out one power for Maneuvers (I picked Web Grenade at random), and slotting most of the defense powers (hide, focused fighting, focused senses, dodge, agile, evasion, maneuvers) with two L50 common defense IOs, tier 2 agility radial results in 40.9% melee and ranged, and 43.9% AoE.

Adding a couple L50 defense IOs to combat jumping is 41.7% melee and ranged.

This same slotting WITHOUT the alpha slot is still 38.2% melee and ranged, 41% AoE. Both of these are quite a bit better than the 30-35% you mentioned, and I'd expect it should be able to handle normal-ish difficulties in DA, maybe a little higher, with reasonable slotting in the rest of the build.

This doesn't change the fact that the praetorian +tohit is going to be rough on you, but it SHOULD still be managable.

Well, for what it's worth, while I have characters I IO the hell out of (like my blaster), but a lot of my characters run on SOs and commons (with the occasional proc added). I do honestly believe SR is perfectly servicable in normal play without a high end invention build, and I find it difficult to imagine any melee AT powerset combination that's at any risk of being 'left behind' in any practical sense.

I know it's late in the conversation, but I really do think it isn't worth stressing over. As someone who enjoys fussing with IO builds as a minigame, sometimes I just want to roll up a character and go punch/shoot/whatever people, and I don't bother worrying about slotting. I do think this option is still there for you, regardless of what others might think.

But if you really want to do more.. I strongly suggest pretending set bonuses don't exist. Just go for frankenslotting. It's cheap, it's quick, and there isn't the same degree of facet juggling; all you have to do is add up all of the aspects from all of the pieces.

Unfortunately, there's a level of complexity that's pretty much unavoidable in a game that wants to provide a certain level of flexibility in how you achieve strength. And, in a good design, it ideally shouldn't be possible to point at something and say, "This is clearly better than that, in all cases." Things should be contextual, depend on what else is involved, and that means a lot of details to consider.

If this is something that will always bother you, then you'll probably always be happier with common IOs.

Spoiler: Kin defenders are cheating.

We've had several occasions of SGs having their bases corrupted after editing, requiring long convoluted processes with GMs to try to get the bases recovered. (including insane things like 'no characters in your SG can log in at all for a few hours after maintenance or you have to wait until the next maintenance window for us to try again')

Even without any changes from devs to the base system, it's currently unstable.

And this is why leaks suck for the devs. It's hard to manage expectations when they're fed by rampand speculation.

That's because werner is bad at maths!

How odd.

Peculiar, even.

If I'm following correctly, I think BRA means the Z axis. So 'tilt' might be a more correct word than 'turn' here.

** For values of 'anywhere' equaling 'public zone'. You can't use it in missions or SG bases.

I'd suggest Mercs/Pain. It's a low synergy build that doesn't have much standalone capability in either powerset. A good candidate for this kind of test.

I'm not sure you're aware, but the plan was never for the monthly stipend to be issued up front. The topic in question are the Paragon Rewards tokens, which WERE initially intended to be issued up front.

Monthly stipends were always supposed to be monthly only.

That makes sense for running missions you have from contacts, but I'm curious how this works for repeating the missions through o-zone. Do your teammates get credit, or is it only the team leader there as well?

... really guys?

The dev team looked at the sequence of events to use character items and concluded the solution was to disable one of the USEFUL features (specifically, the ability to stock up multiple charges)?

This change means if you want to maintain a continuous XP booster during a play session you now have to navigate the character items UI MID PLAY.

Really, you need to fix account/character item interface. The mail paradigm doesn't work, especially with that HORRIFIC UI.

Also you need to fix the temp power interface. That's been horrible since forever, but it's less awful than the character item issue because at least we can make the powers window taller. We can't do that with character item claiming.