NeverDark

I'm not crazy about the name (maybe Home Turf Advantage?), but otherwise I like it.

That's because it's the worst case of bloat in the history of the game. It's 24 missions long, containing 7 Defeat Alls, 5 Defeat 50 hunts (which require mobs from specific sections of Firebase Zulu), and travel from the Shard to across Paragon City, including potentially Galaxy City.

And for all that bloat, the story is terrible: Crey and Nemesis have portal technology. That's it. There's no big AV fight at the end, terrible pacing, no sense of progression whatsoever. It has no point at all; you can see that Crey and Nemesis have portal tech by looking out of the military base in Zulu.

At least all of the other Shard TFs show off the aspects of Rularuu and have you see interesting sights in the Shard. You could run the repeatable missions and get just as much of the Shard's story, and it wouldn't require you to wrange 7 other people into doing a terrible TF that requires at least 6 hours and possibly up to 12.

Only in self-defense!

Bah, I say just guess. It's like Russian Roulette, except the whole gun's loaded.

Nice to see you're doing well, A_C.

Where did you find that? I don't see anything that in-depth on the main site.

Some time ago I noticed that debuffs seem to cause running behavior far more frequently than it seemed they were meant to. A single debuff had a high chance of causing an enemy with near full health to book it across the map. I could understand if this was happening on targets that were reasonably close to death - the debuff was triggering flight a little early - but it seemed that a debuff guaranteed the behavior period.

Around the time that it happened, S&I had a couple of big problems.

There were many posters (a few in particular, but I can't remember their names) who believed that disagreeing with their suggestions was tantamount to trolling. If you weren't going to agree unequivocally with their ideas, well then you should just not read the threads. Never mind that there were more of these threads than there really needed to be, or that you thought that most of the idea was bad but you could come up with something to salvage the rest. If your post was anything but complete approval for the ideas within, you got reported to the mods.

The problem wasn't entirely on their end, though. There were quite a few posters who did troll through negative responses to suggestions. They would respond to any suggestion, whether well thought-out or foolish, with either personal attacks or just a simple "no". It was nonconstructive and greatly hurt the signal-to-noise ratio.

This phrase always really bothers me. It tends to get used too heavy-handedly against any discourse in S&I at all. Yes, there are problems with the section. Personal attacks happen a little more often than they should, and there tends to be a little overreaction to dead horses.

But I'd rather S&I be too harsh than not harsh enough. Good suggestions don't happen when everyone agrees. For a suggestion to reach proper merit, it needs to be beaten, raked over the coals, and torn to shreds until all the suck is pulled out. Those offering suggestions need critics to point out all the flaws so they can fix them.

It takes a thick skin to stay and argue your point. You have to understand that attacks on your idea are not attacks on you. People can disagree with your suggestion without reflecting anything onto your intelligence and character. You have to be willing to change your suggestion if someone pokes holes in it.

So if someone's feelings get hurt because their suggestion wasn't met with agreement and praise and requests to have their children, then good. It means S&I is working right.

Hami-Os work exactly the same as SOs, in the sense that they only work for a specific level range. Once you hit 53, those Hami-Os do literally nothing. As they require an extraordinary effort to obtain, it's highly, highly unlikely that the devs are going to invalidate that effort without an even more extraordinary reason.

This suggestion comes up at least twice a month. It has been argued so many times that there's nothing left to say. Both sides have spoken their piece often enough that we don't need to do it anymore. We're all sick of doing this dance over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...

It's something we want to let die a long-deserved death. And when someone thinks they need to dig it up again, we tend to get a little irritated. It's nothing personal.

Heck yeah! Party at my house!

That's what it looks like. If you don't have a pass already, you won't be able to make it. Which kind of defeats the purpose of announcing it here this late.

Haha, oh man. The times we live in, buddy.

Getting a program that isn't bugged is like curing cancer. Except the latter might actually happen.

Reducing the amount of defense from IOs and screwing over those who spent billions to softcap is a whole lot better than adding more -Def and screwing over everyone.

Is it that the boxes don't appear on your screenshots? Make sure you've got the UI turned on when taking them. There's an option under Keybinds in the Options menu to toggle UI. I always take a screenshot, toggle it, and take another so I know I get what I want.

Energy Aura's problem is that it has a whole bunch of little issues that combine into one big one:

1.) It uses typed defense. This means that it's open to being hit with anything that's only positional. For example, Web Grenade is only considered a Ranged attack. SR or Ninjitsu will protect against, but EA won't. There are a whole lot more powers that are positional only than there are typed only. It also means that it's harder to softcap with IOs, because you need to reach 45% with all 6 of its types, rather than only the 3 positional (and you still have holes).

2.) The types it has exclude Toxic (because Toxic defense doesn't exist) and Psionic. It has a little bit of Toxic resistance in one of the passives, but the only method of getting Psi defense is in Energy Cloak, and even then it's not very much.

3.) The passives are underwhelming, and they don't stack with the rest of the set. Being resistance rather than defense, the passives don't contribute as much as, say, SR's passives, which stack with the rest of the set. Being passives, they're automatically not very potent, so the lack of stacking makes them even less appealing. But at least one (Energy Protection) is still necessary, because it's the only place to get protection from Toxic damage.

4.) Its esoteric protections are lacking compared to other sets. It gets less defense debuff protection than, say, SR, which is particularly bad because it doesn't have as much defense as SR. Where SR gets slow protection, EA gets resistance to repel and teleport, which aren't important in PvE.

EA's tradeoffs for lesser mitigation are protection to effects that rarely show up, and a power that restores End and heals a very small amount. It's not exactly broken; I took my EA brute to 45 even before the change to Energy Drain. But all of the other options for both archetypes that get access to it tend to be better.

Technically, if you really wanted to, you could create an entire AE arc in Notepad. The files that the game saves on your hard drive are just text files. You'd need the spreadsheets that have the exact variable names for the pieces you want (for example, you need to know what the system calls a computer on a desk, or which reference calls the office building you want), but it's entirely possible to write an entire arc without touching the game client at all.

Someone (I think it was Positron) said in interviews that the AE came from an attempt to create a better tool for themselves to use. They decided they could modify it so players could make their own arcs, and thus AE was born.

While defense-based sets generally have DDR, how much they have varies by set (SR can get nearly 90%, while Ice and Energy only get about 50%), and the big problem is that it scales by level. That 50% resistance only happens at level 50. The entire way up they have a good deal less, and even then 50% isn't really all that much.

That doesn't touch at all on the fact that the proposition completely breaks the game for anyone who isn't trying to softcap. You're a blaster who uses SOs? Might as well delete your character right now. In order to strip away enough defense from those using IOs to softcap, you have to introduce enough debuffs to cripple anyone below that level.

Not only would that not work, it would fail to work in an absolutely spectacular fashion.

That is, without question, the worst suggestion in the history of mankind.

The devs never came to the forums and said, "You'll never have SSK. In fact, you're lucky to have SKing at all." They have done so on allowing you to keep more than 10 enhancements during a respec.

This. Switching ammo will be Dual Pistols' "thing", like knockback is Energy's "thing", end drain is Elec's "thing", and -Def is Rad's "thing". They aren't going to let AR step on DP's toes here.

Except that Thermal Clips were possibly the best addition to ME2.

And there is no way that the 10 enhancement limit will be changed. Respecs are meant to let you change your power selections, not to let you rip out all your enhancements. They're supposed to be semi-permanent.

On my Elec/Energy, I regularly handled groups my scrapper couldn't with a single application of Power Boosted Short Circuit. It required me to build specifically towards it, and it become less effective against higher level enemies, but it worked extremely well.