macskull

Leave my Fault, Ice Patch, and Touch of Fear alone, thankyouverymuch. Unlike, say, Lightning Clap or Stun, those powers are actually quite useful - Fault lets me shut down every NPC in a spawn except bosses, permenantly; Ice Patch isn't a click that only knocks back mobs once (rather it persists and NPCs keep flopping around as long as they're in the patch); and Touch of Fear comes with a sizable tohit debuff.

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I am simply asking if it has even been explained why certain NPC's can do damage with Hand Clap where as we cannot.

Probably much the same reason that BaBs has an AoE version of Energy Transfer, or Statesman/Hero 1 can become 100% resistant to most types of damage, or Ghost Widow has a mag 100 hold, or Nemesis bosses have a version of PFF that makes them phase, and so on. In short, NPCs cheat in order to make up for their lack of intelligence.

There is nothing wrong with Super Strength - it's got good single-target and great AoE, with the price being that you have to wait until a higher level to get access to that AoE. Unfortunately, in the case of Psi Assault people complained about having to wait, so the set was rebalanced and now it's simply mediocre.

Pretty sure the defense and tohit values granted are intended to be as small as they are, but the psi resistance value probably has a decimal point misplaced (should be 17% instead of 1.7%).

It lasts as long as the in-set version, but the debuff values are extremely small and the recharge time is long. As anything other than a set bonus mule it's more or less worthless.

Defense stacking, not just from IOs, can trivialize much of the game. However, it should also be noted that defense sets can only benefit from defense set bonuses up to a certain point, while resistance sets can benefit from them quite a bit more. Your Elec Armor character with 30% smash/lethal defense is going to be substantially more survivable than the same character without that defense, and your smash/lethal softcapped Fiery Aura character is going to be on par with, say, an SR (assuming the enemies are primarily smash/lethal, which is often a safe assumption) - the SR has its softcapped defenses, scaling resists, and 20% recharge bonus to keep it going, but your softcapped Fiery Aura character will have that defense on top of 30-40% resistance all the time, plus a self-heal that's up every 15ish seconds.

Yeah, this. I always take merits rather than the Hami-O (I take the Hami-O on the RSF, but that's because the merit reward is piddly for the time spent), but when I can take those 53 merits, convert them into an alignment merit, and send the 5 random rolls I get to whatever character(s) I want, there's little incentive to do redside raids.

It's unfortunate, really, because while redside raids take a bit more pre-planning and advance notice, and more coordination and effort, the tradeoff is that a standard redside raid can be finished faster than a standard blueside raid simply because there's lots more damage flying around. I like redside raids because individual effort and competency goes a lot farther than it does on blueside raids, but at the same time I realize the reason most people go to Hami raids is for merits, and now that those are essentially cross-faction...

Purchasing purples with alignment merits is something lazy and/or stupid people will do, because they'll see they won't have to deal with the market or pay lots of inf, completely ignoring the fact that it will take them far longer (and if they convert their merits instead of doing morality missions for them it'll actually be more expensive, sometimes by a lot).

For those who know how to weigh their options, and don't assume the market is some sort of witchcraft which is forbidden to practice by their religion, alignment merits are a really poor way of obtaining anything other than non-purple/PvP recipes. The only time I could see it being useful is purchasing the +3% def PvP IO, simply because they're so rare to begin with, and most are sold off-market (even if you save up the 2 billion inf to bid on one, you're going to be competing with hundreds of other players for the one or two that come onto the market every day).

It's because they don't want the market getting flooded with the really good stuff - if you could convert as many times as you wanted in one sitting I could rack up potentially dozens of alignment merits at once. They're basically time-gating how fast you can obtain items, the same way that they time-gate how fast you can obtain alignment merits by doing morality missions.