firespray

I've played a couple different toons that have to deal with redraw, and it seems to affect them differently.

My archery/NRG blaster didn't mind it at all. I would mostly use the NRG buffs before a group, use my archery AoEs and blazing arrow, then finish up with the NRG punches. So I only had to draw the bow once. And since I would usually open my AoEs with rain of arrows, the redraw wasn't so noticeable next to its 4.5 second animation time.

I tried a DP/MM blaster when DP first came out, and couldn't stand it. I tended to use my MM powers more in the midst of a fight, rather than NRG which was used at the beginning and at the end, so I ended up doing a lot of redrawing. And the DP animation seems to be one of the longest. That was a major factor in me deleting the toon.

Overall, redraw will have a negative impact on your character's performance. How major this impact is depends on what you're playing and how you're playing it. Whether or not it really bothers you just kind of depends on what kind of person you are.

I can't stand most characters from about 10-22. That's when endurance issues get to be really, really bad, and my power choices are basically made ahead of time (travel power and fitness). I19 should fix that though. The late 30s and early 40s seems to be another dead zone for me. Not so much that I'm having issues with the character, it just seems like it takes forever to level through those levels. 45-50 seems to go by much quicker somehow.

What is up with purple prices. I go on a business trip for a week and come back to see that purple prices for a lot of things have close to doubled. Something to do with the halloween event I guess?

Great, just what I wanted, more boring invasions that interrupt my gameplay. And one wasn't enough, we had to have two back to back. Thanks devs.

I'd be fine leaving things the way they are if the powers which were forced on you all had roughly the same degree of usefulness.

For example, compare invulnerability and shield defense as secondaries.

Invulnerability forces you to take resist physical damage. It's moderately useful, but nothing special. A decent number of people would probably skip it if they could.

Shield defense on the other hand forces you to take Deflection, which is an extremely important part of the set. Almost no one would skip it regardless of whether it was forced on you or not because it's such a critical component of the power set.

There are quite a few other sets that force you to take powers which are sub-par or situational.

This isn't a game-breaking thing of course, or something would have been done about it already, but it would be a nice QoL improvement if something were done about it.

YES YES A MILLION TIMES YES!!!!

I started playing back in the day when a tank could herd a whole map full of warwolves, and a blaster could take them all out with a single nuke. That looked like the coolest thing in the world. My fire blaster was in his late 20s when the target cap on AoEs was put into place. I was devastated that I'd never get to do it.

If we could go back to those rules, even for a single day, I would be freaking ecstatic. I have ALWAYS wanted to do that, even if it was just once.

The way I see it, there are three ways that this could be implemented.

1. Allow players to choose a weakness, and balance it out with a strength in another area. I'm against this idea, since it would lead to a lot of min-maxing. I've played quite a few tabletop RPGs over the years, and many have these sorts of flaws and associated buffs. They almost always end up making characters more powerful. Unless the penalties of the weakness are much, much higher than the bonuses of the strength, it's impossible to balance. And even then, sometimes it doesn't work out. So IMO this is a bad idea.

2. Allow players to choose one weakness instead of another. For example, a stone armor tank could choose to have a weakness to smashing damage instead of psionic damage. Or a fiery aura tank could choose to have a weakness to energy damage instead of cold. This offers slightly less potential for min/maxing, but it still has some. The biggest problem with this is that it seems like it would take a ton of time to create and balance. And honestly, I think that time could be better spent on other things.

3. Allow players the option to choose a weakness, with nothing else about their character changing. This would be the easiest to do, but it seems like something that not a lot of people would want to use. If it could be done quickly, without a lot of effort on the devs' part, then I don't have an issue with it.

/unsigned. This is a terrible idea for so many reasons.

The devs need to stop wasting time on PvP.

OP, I have a small experiment for you to try. Roll up an /sr scrapper or brute heroside. Level them to 50. Spend the money to softcap them. Run around and do all sorts of epic stuff for awhile. Tank AVs. Laugh at 8-man spawns. Enjoy the feeling of being almost unkillable.

Then take a trip to the shadow shard. Find a good size group of rularuu that includes a few of the giant eyeballs. Go try to kill them and see how long you survive without using any inspirations.

Then come back and tell me there's no kryptonite in this game.

To be a little less tongue in cheek, nearly every character in this game already has something that they are weak to.

My softcapped fire/sr scrapper as I mentioned gets shredded by anything that has large +tohit buffs, and attacks which do not have a positional component (I'm looking at you mind control).

My stone/fire tank has some pretty serious problems with psi damage.

My NRG/NRG blaster has trouble going up against enemies who have KB protection.

My earth/fire dom has problems going up against enemies who have mez protection.

I have:

Intel Core i5-760 OC'd to 4.2 Ghz
8 GB DDR3 1600 MHz
Radeon HD5870
22" monitor at 1680x1050

With that setup, and all graphics settings completely maxed, I can get 20+ FPS anywhere. Praetoria, Grandville, you name it.

To get into the low 30s, I have to either turn down FSAA or Ambient Occlusion.

To play in Praetoria, I have to turn shadows way down, due to the annoying graphical flicker I constantly get outside (did anyone ever solve that by the way?)

EBs should be able to be soloed relatively easily with basic tools (i.e. SOs and inspirations). This is generally the case, so they seem to be working out pretty well.

AVs should be able to be soloed by people who have invested a lot of time and (fake) money in the ability to do so. This is generally the case, so they also seem to be working out pretty well.

I always kind of felt like GMs should not be soloable, but I'm not sure how you pull that off without making them inaccessible to casual team players as well.

I have soloed several AVs with my fire/SR scrapper and I love the feeling of success I get after I win a tough fight with an AV. And part of the reason that it's so rewarding is precisely because it is so difficult. I've invested significant time and resources in building that particular character, and even still I can rarely beat an AV the first time around. If everyone could do it, it wouldn't mean much.

My wife and I generally like to play on big teams, but there are times that we can't find one to join and don't feel like starting one ourselves. So we're creating a duo for just the two of us to play together. We both like damage, and are well aware of the power of stacked buffs, so a pair of corruptors seems like it would work well. I'm just trying to figure out what powersets to play. Right now my thoughts are leaning towards either fire or archery for the primary (neither of us will be happy if we're not doing good damage) and traps or dark for the secondary. I've played dark a few times, and I know how good it is. I've never played traps, but it seems like it has potential, especially since with twin force field generators and twinned maneuvers, we would be close to the softcap by level 22. We'd kind of like to both play the same powerset, but would be willing to give up on that idea if using 2 different sets would be better for performance reasons. Any thoughts on the above sets or other suggestions on what would make a quick and powerful corruptor duo?

Which would make a better duo? And which would deal more damage (considering the new defender damage buff)?