Dev Chat Highlights, August 10: Time Manipulation and Powers Q and A with Synapse

I'm up getting snacks when Zwill and Synapse start and tangent about shortness when I walk in.

We'll be going in depth, ability by ability, with Time Manipulation. There ought to be an Intrepid Informer article, but it's not up yet.

CoH community talk. We went into open beta.

We found some major bugs in the first 5 minutes, and had an obscene number of people log in.

The market exploded sometime last night and is still not back up.

They are heading to GamesCom and PAX.

In chat Beastlye says that Street Justice has knee to the groin attack. We're advised to try it out once the store comes up, since it's coming down soon since it's not an I21 powerset.

Time Manipulation article is up: http://goingrogue.na.cityofheroes.co...r-issue-9.html

Zwill says the powerset is for numbercrunchers and minmaxers.

Synapse: "It's a pretty balanced set as to what it can do. It has buff, debuff, control, and heal."

First power: Time Crawl

Decues target's movements speed, recharge on powers, and regen rate. Inflicts a status called Delayed.

Sexy Jay stops by the say hello.

Delayed targets will suffer from greater debuffs. A lot of them are AoE and thus can be used to focus on a single target while debuffing crowds as well.

Temporal Mending

Different than other heals, longer recharge than Healing Aura or Soothing Aura.

It offers a good heal and also a heal over time effect and -recharge and slows are reduced on allies.

It's good at the start fo a fight as well as during as preventative maintainecne.

Time's Juncture

Toggle AoE around you, -dmg, -tohit and -speed. If they get close to you while delayed the buffs get bigger.

Temporal Selection
+Damage +Rech +Regen

Accelerated status, Heal power becomes 50% more effective

Zwill: "Think Fortitude type effect. This is one of it's signature abilities. It's a huge reason to get a Time Manipulator in your group. The buff is just huge."

Zynapse: "Two time manipulators can put this on each other and it's crazy."

Distortion Field
Ranged (Location AoE), Foe(-Recharge, -Speed), Chance for Hold
Approx 4% chance to hold every second.

Critters have a hard time getting out of it.

Time Stop
Ranged Hold, Foe -Regen, -Heal
Longish recharge and reduces healing on foes. Time Crawl makes this a Mag 4 Hold.

Farsight
PBAoE Team, +To-Hit, +Defense(All), +Perception
Three slotted with SO's can perma this. It does not stack.

Zwill hates Blind the most out of all status effects.

Slowed Response
Ranged (Targeted AoE), Foe -Defense, -Resistance

Pretty fast recharge, up every spawn or two. Delayed will have the debuffs boosted.

Zwill: "This set is a really good all around one."

Chrono Shift
PBAoE, Team +Recharge, Heal, +End, Moderate Healing over Time, +Recovery

This one has an amazing animation. This is the one with the big portal.

"It looks like you're travelling through time."

Described as "Kind of a buff nuke or a heal nuke"

Zwill: "I'm killing you with healing... er... defeating you with healing!"

Tips and tricks with the powerset are something new they're doing with the articles.

Synapse: "It's not a definitive way to play the powerset."

Zwill: "It's scary because all the players combined are smarter than all of us."

The set is more proactive than reactive.

Temporal Mending and Foresight can be used to buff up before battle.

Time Crawl is good for the tough guys, since it drops regen,. Damage, and boosts further debuffs.

Temporal Selection is useful for damage dealers that you want to deal damage quickly and folks you want to assure stay alive. It's kind of a grab bag and is pretty much good for everybody/ You can get two of these out at a time with only minor +Rech.

If you have Time Juncture slotted for -to-hit and have Farsight running you're going to be pretty tough. Dark Watcher's or Gaussian are recommended.

You can be a support character that can be in the thick of things, but watch out for Incarnate trials.

Time Crawl and Time Stop can let you lock down a boss for a few seconds.

Zwill: "It can be a wipe-prevention tool. Lock down the boss and book it out of there."

Synapse: "Don't underestimate a well-placed Distortion Field at a chokepoint. Stacking ti with like Caltrops and that sort of thing."

"Make good use of Accelerate and Delay, so you can focus on single allies and enemies both."

Zwill finds it's a very flexible set and goes well with a lot of different powersets.

Grav/Time is a little slow on the DPS factor but is amazing on the "OMG nothing is moving" factor.

Arbiter Fancypants the QA guy in the background has played Time constantly and is asked for his thoughts.

He likes get enough global recharge as possible, hasten, and once hit the Global recharge cap with the Tier 9. He also likes Beam Rifle. Time/Beam defenders are supposed to be pretty fun and Beam/Time Corrs are almost obscene. Disintegration + Scourge. "Discourgigration."

The QA guys have loved Street Justice and beam rifle.

We'll have a Beam Rifle cast sometime in the next few weeks.

Going over previous things about the aesthetics of the powers without the clocks and gears type of thing. Thus wanting the set to have it work with as many character concepts as possible. Clocks would be good for a steampunkish Victorian look.

Zwill: "But what would you do with the 50 million time lords?"

Synapse things it will work with just about every origin.

Zwill: "The Terminator! Time Manipulation and Assault Rille!"

Zwill is going through puberty again and has his voice crack. Blames it on his cough and Convetion Rot and Nemesis Plots.

Chat room dubs Zwill the Typhoid Mary of PAX.

Zwill: "Now is the on Sprockets when we dance!"

Zwill will not touch ZombieMan's monkey. Not even if he says it in German.

Zwill refuses to say it as he always gets in trouble when he tries to speak German or French.

Beastyle has used Time Manipulation on the chatroom to enable Slow Chat.

" Delay/Accelerate only buffs your own heals/debuffs? Or it gets beneffit for other powersets to go ahead and debuff/heal better too?"

Only buffs and debuffs Time Manipulation heals and debuffs. If you're working with another Time Manip guy their powers will be boosted.

They have tech qorking under a cone of silence to fic the store on Beta.

Nothing new on PvP.

Zwill has to remind the chat room to keep it on Time Manipulation and Powers.

Delay and Accelerate do not stack, spread it to more targets.

Beam Rifle and Time are confirmed for I21, Street Justice soon after, and Titan Weapons ever later.

"Icy Bastion on Scrappers when it gets ported over?"

He says no, because Stalkers have Hibernate.

Chat room reminds him that Scrappers have Stalker pools.

"Will Mind Link take recharge soon?"

Not designed to.

Time Manipulation +Rech does not effect incarnate powers.

He clarifies earlier that they it is likely that Scrappers will be getting Icy Bastion then.

Dominators are not going to get nerfed or get buffed they're "Going to get stuff."

He wanted Time Manipulation to be competitive with Radiation and Kinetic/

He doesn't want them to be overpowered, but not underperformers either.

Time Manipualtion has changed a great deal from the feedback. Things have been buffed, toned down, and adjusted.

Everything but the +Rech will affect pets.

Zwill did not know that.

"Will missing Mastery sets ever get proliferated."

Synapse: "I'd love to! Get those thematic gaps filled."

They didn't want to do everything at the same time, so Defenders aren't getting Poison this time around, but will eventually.

He doesn't have a problem with Masterminds getting Empathy and Defenders getting Pain Mastery now that they've blurred the lines between the sides.

Titan Weapons is not announced for Issue 21 or 22, they're not saying.

Every character will get a Freespec with Issue 21 due to the epic pools being lowered to have the powers available earlier.

Zwill is complaining about having to repsec his purpled out controller to get Burnout.

Burnout does NOT affect Incarnate abilities. Only primary and secondary.

Time Manipulation does have a tendancy to "nom your endurance" with really effective, long recharge powers.

Street Justice has quick animating powers, so it's not overly endurance intensive. On par with Dual Blades or Claw.

Brutes will probably get Martial Arts in the next round.

Peacebringers get a version of Afterburn and also a panic button for scary situations, dubbed Quantum Acceleration in their secondary.

Warshades get a zone-wide teleport power called Shadow Slip.

We will NOT be getting more new power selections. But Synapse wants to be able to give us a few more slots. It'll be hard though, since they tried it in Beta and it broke things.

Zwill says hopefully we'll be able to get Street Justice before it's pulled from the store.

Regen is one of Synapse and Zwill's favorite sets.

Reminiscing of the good old days of Regen.

Synapse wants to fix Energy Aura's mez protection/taunt aura combo, since it currently drops. He wants to make the taunt effect merely suppress and keep the toggle running. That's something that is on his agenda for today.

Neither of them knows if the next round of power proliferation will have the animation team able to help out.

Synapse is about to say something about Stalkers but stops himself talking about some sort of Ice power.

They've moved away from the Tier 9 nuke type penalties. Synapse has been thinking about maybe lessening the crash from the nukes. But if they did that, they'd have to lessen the damage.

Respeccing individual powers instead of builds? Zwill mentions enhancement unslotters, but it's currently not possible in the system. Synapse says they want to be able to improve the Respec process.

Synpase thinks Burnout is affected by global recharge, as it is affected by slots. He says it's not possible to perma, but it would stack if it did.

You can now right click and remove buff abilities that do not have negative effects. Like removing Hasten to stop the glowy gloves.

Next week: Likely a chat about Beam Rifle

Quote:

Originally Posted by reiella Until I see something that states to the contrary, going to assume VK is right .

Thanks for posting this VK!!

Uh, it may prove to be different when playing, but Time Manipulation sounds pretty OP. AoE + High Mag hold is exactly the same amount of holds my Dominator has. Dominator /=/ Defender.

EDIT: That's not the only thing. Just an example.

When thinking about Soon™, keep this in mind:

We will be releasing new content on a weekly basis in the Paragon Market.

Thanks again again again again, Von Krieger!!!
Time Manipulation really sounds like a fun, all around buff/debuff set. I'm actually getting interested in trying it out (I pretty much always play damage dealers or tanks!!).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Von Krieger You can now right click and remove buff abilities that do not have negative effects. Like removing Hasten to stop the glowy gloves.

Oooh... Another technical hurdle they've worked around then. Good job on them. I had started to think we were going to see new options for hiding visual effects before we ever saw this.
Just remember that example of Hasten's effects... it's not just the visuals, you're canceling the buff.
I see this as more valuable for ally armors and such, especially during costume contests and the like (I saw a contest recently that had a troll endlessly putting ice armors on everyone the entire time. People did a good job of ignoring him, but still... what a tool).
So, that is a nice little feature/option.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Von Krieger They've moved away from the Tier 9 nuke type penalties. Synapse has been thinking about maybe lessening the crash from the nukes. But if they did that, they'd have to lessen the damage.

I'm always torn about this.
I love the crashless nukes on other sets. And I don't often use Thunderous Blast... However, when I do... I love it's damage, hehe...
*stops himself from breaking into Veruca Salt's favorite song*

So every week I have to keep looking for my videocamera emote?

You are shamelessly cruel, Zwill...

*sob*

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

If they updated the store with a single chest emblem, would that count as a weekly update?

Or will we get a new powerset every week? If so, expect some weird filler such as Bad Guy Control or Punch-Stuff Assault. Eventually it will get so silly that is cool, like Drunken Style Gun-Fu. Which I would happily pay 1600 credits for.

Lewis

Icy Bastion for Scrapper Ice Armor! Wewt!