Nalrok's Really Fast Coffee Talk Writeup

If it means taking the cottage rule out into a back alley, beating it with a spiked bat, decapitating it, then running over it about 50 times with a monster truck, while setting it on fire, while playing Jenga on it's dead corpse, to get improvements to barely if ever used pool powers . . .

I say the devs can have it good sirs and madams.

Man, they just keep rolling out fantastic changes and updates one after another. The only thing that could make this critically improved is if they announced additional power picks for characters to make use of so many upcoming pool abilities.

SO MUCH WIN....so much win...mm mm...*shakes head and cools self down with funeral home church fan*

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim Hopefully this will shut the folks up who keep saying 'Melee Power Creep' over and over and over and over and over until I want to barf every time I see it.

Well Nalrok you know that it's true lol. This will shut me up though!

Pretty exciting stuff. I was worried about the change to the nukes, but it sounds like the damage will be stabilized more than outright lowered. I'll wait to test it out.

I'm concerned about what is going to happen to Unstoppable, though. Post I3 and Pre-GDN it was worthless, but ever since Invuln had its non-S/L resistance gutted, I've relied on it for tanking non-S/L AVs. I hope they don't turn it into SoW (which is fine for Willpower, but I'd rather have something that can cap non-S/L res for Invuln, even with the crash).

Since they're adding a 5th power to all the other pools, does that also mean the tier 3 will be selectable without a pre-req, like the travel pools? I doubt it, but I thought I might as well ask.

I'm pretty sure most of the argument about the "cottage rule" has been about whether or not this is an example for the sake of knowing if the devs break it or not. For those worried that any example of the devs actually doing this is scary, because it might mean they'll start changing all sorts of things, I don't think that's likely at all.

I should let the devs speak for themselves, but I doubt they'd "break the cottage rule" (see quoted Arcanaville reference for how this is actually a whole set of guidelines) without investigation of the impact. I suspect this power is an orphan among powers, despite it being available to pretty much everyone.

I'm not going to sit here and claim no one takes or gets use of the Presence Pool, because I know that's not true. But I consider there to be awfully good anecdotal evidence that a significant minority of characters probably have the Presence Pool. Of those that have the pool, I bet not many probably have taken Challenge. I'd like to remind folks that anyone who just wanted a set mule could have taken Provoke (getting an AoE taunt instead of a single-target one), and if they took Challenge and still want a Taunt Set mule, they can use their freespec to change Challenge into Provoke pretty much free of charge.

Only the most narrowly defined of concept builds could be such that their concept would be harmed by having to replace a single-target taunt with an AoE version. So with a free respec on hand, it really seems to me that if there was ever a power the devs could feel safe "breaking the cottage rule" with, this is it.

Based on feedback threads in the Beta boards, the devs still give strong consideration to existing powers, and don't just throw out how things currently work without good reason. Since they're basically throwing out how Challenge works, and I personally find it hard to imagine getting people to invest in the Presence Pool is considered an important balance change, I'm betting it's a sign that making this significant change will have minimal impact across the player base.

If I24 is 'fix everything', I hope they add Mayhems/Safeguards to Oro...

With all these changes/improvements, I wonder if they'll improve Dimension Shift (by removing it! ).


De-rail thought: Was on a Magisterium itrial one night with my Grav/Thermal Controller (he has DS); it was a small league and for some reason Chimera really liked my toon that run.

So I thought...hey I'll use DS to phase him so he can't hurt me for, at least, 20 seconds!

I run up to him, use DS, he's in the DS field, I run away and fight the other AVs and oh look...Chimera isn't phased/affected by DS because he just 1-shot me again!

I think they said that in order to get access to the 3rd or 4th power, you need 1 of the first 2 powers. To access the 5th power, you need any 2 of the other powers.

On the one hand I'm happy with the changes planned for crash nukes, on the other hand I wonder what will prevent the game for coming down to "spam nuke" then "spam nuke + Judgement".