PleaseRecycle

Hear, hear! I used to go through fairly regular periods of waxing and waning interest in CoH but since issue 18 or so they've had my undivided attention. The SSAs in particular are deviously appealing on a number of levels.

Willpower seems like it most thoroughly meets your thematic requirements. In addition to that, it's low on visual effects and doesn't have any clicks outside of the tier 9. These could be hard to explain in terms of a guy who's supposed to just be innately resilient, but also TW seems to me to be a very active set so it also happens to mean less redraw for you.

Even if we hadn't had today's release spoiled yesterday, this thread would still have been moot since it is impossible to release something more underwhelming than the undead survival kit.

That said, how is anyone complaining about this? New story arcs and a new costume piece? Isn't that exactly the kind of thing everyone tends to hold up as the best stuff they can release? What would you have had them put on sale instead? Are you expecting a new power set every single week?

Whew, sorry! Just slightly baffled that anyone is calling this a lame release.

Ha, never noticed that there. Thanks!

This might be a silly question but how does one change themes? I looked in the CP and couldn't find the option. I'm sure it was staring me in the face.

The extra trays actually increase the size of the enhancement window rather than making the enhancements smaller so you don't have to worry about that. They're freaking expensive but the QoL improvement they provide is so ginormous I personally had to go for it. You've clearly got my number, Paragon Studios.

In my experience the slightly higher values you can get by slotting level 50ish IOs just don't make that much of a difference compared to the advantage of being able to exemplar down to 30 and retain virtually all of your set bonuses. There are some exceptions: obviously you use level 50 common IOs, and if you're frankenslotting a power you might as well use 50s anyway since there are no bonuses to lose. In general though every good set has a minimum level of at most 30 and the convenience of being essentially full strength for most content you'd exemplar for is too good to pass up. This is truer than ever with the signature story arcs.

I totally agree that the best option suggested thus far is enhancements. In my opinion it would be ideal if it took two slots to completely reduce a high mag knockback effect to knockdown. That would be much closer to balanced and would give people who really truly hate knockback a way to get around it without making it in any way a reasonable expectation that people would always choose to do it. I know EvilGeko has said that they tried and failed to do this but I'm pretty sure that if they really wanted to they could find a way. My suspicion, though, is that even this is going further than they think is a good idea for balance. Sure, you couldn't get the best set bonuses out of shockwave anymore, but you could still fill it with hami-Os and go to town in AE.

Maybe BurningChick has the right idea by suggesting that KB in general not be a toggle, but KB in a couple specific powers be optional. This, though, has that "too fiddly" feel that I think the devs try to avoid to keep the game from looking shoddy. They've said that Null is well outside their comfort zone in the first place, compared to having the toggles be UI options.

Regarding hand clap, we need to consider that it isn't just a power in isolation, it's a power in arguably the most popular set in the game, a set which already contains one of the aoe attacks with the strongest mitigation available in the game. If hand clap did KD, a high recharge build would I think be able to alternate hand clap and foot stomp in such a way that enemies never got a chance to stand up. I don't remember what hand clap's recharge is, if it's twenty seconds or less then that is true. If it's thirty seconds or more then you'd have to include another power in the chain as well but it would still provide ludicrous mitigation to a set that does not need any buffs.

Shockwave is, in my view, already very overpowered. It breaks the rules of damage per endurance and recharge in the same way that foot stomp does. The only thing keeping it from being atrociously broken is the fact that it isn't always ideal to knock back an entire spawn. Sometimes that is ideal and it's one of the only powers that can do that as it is. This is combined with the fact that claws is overall one of the better melee sets in the game for both aoe and single target, and already gets extremely potent mitigation from KB-shockwave and focus' guaranteed single target knockdown. Again, if you make a change to the game that increases the power of claws even more, you're begging for nerfs for it.

I don't play PBs because I don't like the form changing thing and they honestly don't seem very good so maybe they could stand a buff. The thing is, you can buff PBs without incidentally buffing all of these other sets. Maybe PBs are in such a sorry state that giving them a better-than-footstomp aoe wouldn't be as insane as it sounds to me. That's a decision that you evaluate entirely in terms of PBs as a whole, though. It shouldn't be a byproduct of something else.

Hmm well if I previously gave the impression that I thought it was weird to take travel powers it was accidental. It seems pretty clear that skipping them is the more niche behavior. It just isn't so niche that one can say it doesn't happen. I was more talking to Jagged, whose pool-reorganization suggestion I find pretty clearly out of bounds of what the devs have done in the past and what they are likely to do in the future.

I know I'm just some jerk so who cares what I say, but I'd like to take a moment to invisibly point out that rsclark is not in fact alone in skipping travel powers and that earlier in the thread I too posted that I never take travel powers. At least two of us exist so you should stop trying to portray him as completely unique.

Here's the thing, Socorro. This will be something like the sixth time I've said in this thread that I don't see people being griped at for knockback and I don't see people being kicked for knockback. So, now you're asking me to extrapolate my own non-experience of this non-phenomenon to a situation that will never happen in the first place. The cat is out of the bag. I've already revealed that the actual reason for asking for this option is the buffing of powers that it entails. Who cares whether people would be kicked from teams or not?

That's like asking whether people will be kicked from teams for not flipping the switch that makes them do a billion untyped damage with every attack once we convince the devs to add that feature.

Let me phrase this more constructively. If you want to argue for a knockback toggle, you have to provide a solution to the very real balance problems that this would introduce. Right now every set that has knockback in it is balanced around having knockback. You don't get to just take that away and pretend it makes no difference because you know it does make a difference, I know it does make a difference, and the devs know it does make a difference. So, what's your solution?

Deus, it's getting a little sad how quickly you resort to shrill-voiced pantomime the second you worry your position may be untenable.

Okay I'm working from memory here because city of data is down, but you're saying you don't see any balance problems with an attack that has a 100% chance for knockdown, recharges in 11.2 seconds, costs basically no endurance, does scale 1.14 damage (more for brutes), animates in one second, and hits ten targets in a massive cone? Are you sure you want to claim this? A high recharge build will have shockwave up again before the enemies have finished their standing up animation. Super balanced!

Since Silas brought it up, let's look at super strength. Now in addition to foot stomp, a power which most people would say is already far outside the realm of balance with its enormous radius and high chance for knockdown, it would have a (iirc) 20 second recharge guaranteed knockdown mag 3 stun for basically no endurance with a huge radius. So, it's like Fault but even better and requires less thought. Wow, what's unbalanced about that in a set that already outshines stone melee in every measurable way?

To put it another way, you're demanding huge nerfs for one set that doesn't deserve it and one set that does deserve it but is so popular the devs would be insane to comply.

Ah but I didn't specify what sort of shenanigans I meant! Saving a flat-lining squishy with a well-timed rebirth or holding off an unexpected ambush on one's own fall under the banner of scrapper follies yet surely anyone can appreciate those.

I don't like how incarnate powers reduce the diversity of what players do, but I do like how incarnate powers increase the pace of a team so drastically. It sucks to build up, aim, reach for your mininuke and then see someone just judgement the spawn into rubble. What happens next though, for me, is that the next time we're coming up to a spawn and I think someone might vaporize it I'll just keep running to the spawn after that, blast that one instead, and suddenly we're making really good time. Are your teammates trivializing the mission with their destiny powers? Great, then just start pulling larger and larger groups of enemies until the aggro is so diffuse that challenge is restored. I'm not trying to imply that I'm attempting to punish my team for displeasing me, but rather to really squeeze some efficiency out of what could be a boring situation if you were just slowly steamrolling a mission.

If the team is so heavily incarnated, IOed and skilled that even if each of you goes in a different direction you'll still be steamrolling the mission, then it becomes time to up the combat level.

Scrappers are fun because of the crazy feats of derring-do you can pull off to impress your TF teams, but the drawback is that by now everyone knows scrappers are lunatic beasts so you really have to work at it to turn heads anymore.

Blasters are the new scrappers in this realm, I'd say. It's a lot harder to pull off something that blows everyone's minds, but that's what makes it effective! It's a risk versus reward type of calculus.

So, one of those two. Who knows.

I was being completely facetious.

I like the fact that everyone is a pedestrian. I have to imagine that if they'd intended there to be vehicles in the game, players wouldn't have a default walking speed of like fifteen miles per hour or be able to leap twenty feet in the air as a matter of course. Everyone in Paragon City and surrounding areas is really damn fit since vehicles were eschewed. Also you have to imagine that the air is awfully clean when it isn't converted to zombie-ridden smog.

I also don't want Claws to get nerfed into oblivion to make up for the fact that shockwave would suddenly be the best aoe attack in the game by a huge margin.