Void_Huntress

... dang, how did I miss that?

Ouch... Okay, I do think that's a bit much... ... well, that's 12 badges. At least post-I21, those'll come once a month for VIPs, or once per 1200 points purchased, so it'll be in reach if someone's been around a while.

We've already been told in community rep posts that Controller/MM access would be available with a certain degree of Veteran Reward/Paragon Reward progress. They haven't told us how much yet, but they seem pretty confident that anyone who would qualify as "early adopter" wouldn't lose out if they'd kept a subscription a meaningful period of time.

And yet, they're both. Funny that.

The component drop is random. The merits are deterministic. Both can get you where you need to go.

Getting to a reasonable target (rare) doesn't take a whole lot of time to get even if you somehow only get threads for your end of trial reward. The components have a chance to make that go faster, and a chance to let you get to Very Rare. As Arcana has noted repeatedly, Very Rare is a pursuit goal.

Nobody should have any expectation they have a right to it in any particular span of time any more than they have a right to purples IOs in any particular span of time. (Of course, there ARE clearly documented Maximum Effort Paths for both).

Once you have exclusionary choices -- which we agree is critical -- you effectively have a tree. Your available options naturally narrow as you make choices that cannot be combined.

"Free-form" is a loaded term, because to a lot of people it means roughly what Cryptic tried to do for their second game: I can pick whatever powers I want.

I think this is rather unfair. Simply failing to meet specific desires of some of the veterans is not a lack of desire for wanting to improve play experience for veterans.

Yes, they want new players, but that's not ALL they want. They want to also make the game awesome, but Paragon Studios has finite resources. They have to decide what they can budget to do for us, both in time and in finances. They do what they think will have the greatest returns in the near term, and plan for setting up the ability to do larger things longer term.

A key thing to note is that 'Near term' is 'the next 9-15 months' in a studio like this.

If you look at what happened after Paragon escaped Cryptic's management, it's fairly evident that they began positioning to do larger things immediately, but those larger things took a while to even be hinted upon. Never mind when they actually showed up where we could see it.

Have you considered that they might need a larger playerbase in order to be able to budget larger projects?

As a friend of mine just pointed out, people keeping score IN the beta were stunned, too.

Real life speech, what people really use in general, is what determines what is correct. There is no standards body for the language.

Using singular they may be less PRECISE, and in academic papers, precision is important, but that doesn't make it incorrect.

If that's enough for you, cool. For me, it's not. I'd even be happy to 'pay' for a perma Lore pet by sacrificing the level shift even at rare/very rare. I just don't like infrequently available abilities, especially when I can't fix their frequency.

They as an indeterminate gender third person singular is absolutely grammatical. Prescriptionists may complain, but it's part of English, and has been for a couple centuries now.

This is still the case; the Kheld flag is indeed infectious.

I personally think devs should just turn off the bonus adds entirely.

Yeah, this.

I apologize for my poor delivery, I was just making a joke about my nonexistent stalkers not being able to complete content, simply by virtue of... being nonexistent. No other reason.

I honestly don't think any of the core ATs are crippled. Defining 'crippled' for the purpose of this post as 'being unable to complete solo the content they're expected to complete' or 'being unable to contribute to teams'.

Stalkers are in a weird space design-wise in that they have an awkward purpose that isn't really served by the game content; the way missions are designed, stealth is a difficult thing to balance around. That said, I think the last set of changes did a lot to make stalkers more viable to the typical players (and they were always viable for people with high skill or high investment capacity).

... I still think the kheldians need attention, but that's a different conversation entirely.


(Also, I need to find a new avatar. I set this one a while back because it amused me, but it's raising the incident rate of people calling me 'he'.)

Stalkers are not in my roster. Characters which do not exist cannot complete content.

I've never enjoyed a stalker well enough to get it to 50, is all. They aren't my thing; for melee I go with scrappers or brutes. Tankers feel like punishment, and stalkers feel (comparatively) frail.

... of course, my standards are a little skewed since I have my main rigged up for tanking, so most things seem frail in comparison. Which isn't fair, because it takes a lot of IOing at level 50 to meet that kind of survivability (except on a tanker, of course, which I don't enjoy due to the perceived punishment factor).

I'd bet on my blaster over any of my stalkers for completing content.

Actually existing is an important prereq.

Alternate perspective:

I find those task forces so very not fun, I instead opted to do an alignment shift, and look for mayhems with villains of various lower levels, then alignment shift back to hero instead.

An alternate possibility for the taunt aura case would be to have the power pick grant two mutually exclusive toggles, one with and one without a taunt aura.

YES PLEASE WANT.

This would be AMAZING for my blaster (when she's tanking) and one of my MMs.

I'd find a way to fit the presence pool in for that.

I find it curious that you equate not wanting a taunt aura with not being competent.

Is it hard to believe that there might be competent players who prefer not to be automatically pulling aggro?

Taunts are why I can't play tankers. I feel like I'm being punished for participating in combat, specifically because of Gauntlet. At least brutes get something for being attacked, and some powers scale up in strength with enemies nearby.

Having enemies pile on me JUST because I'm there, not because I'm the biggest threat? That is very unfun for me.

That is a great idea that I would dearly like to see as an across-the-board improvement to those powers.

I've always disliked the clickie-status protection in SR/SD, but dealt with it back in the day because there were genuine tradeoffs in play. I don't really feel it provides tangible advantages in today's incarnation of the game.

My blaster can tank any enounter in the ITF that doesn't have Kheldians. An SR tanker who hits soft cap (maybe even just near it) should definitely be fine unless the difficulty is cranked up.

On the other hand. If the difficulty is cranked up, the performance difference between SR and some of the other Tanker primaries is going to be pretty blatant, I expect.

The potential concern here is SO-slotted SR tankers played by people of common skill, and how survivable such a tanker might be compared to other tanker primaries that are SO-slotted and played by people of common skill.

Of course, I don't play tankers, so my view is kind of slanted.

As Tony and Strato were noting, there was tech implemented a while back to cycle billboards autonomously. Did that tech get dropped somewhere along the way, or could it maybe be leveraged to allow, say, the community team to cycle billboards? Freeing up production?

... Am I the only one who giggles at seeing phrases like this?

You forgot the large number of primal earth tip missions in issue 19.

Mostly, it means there's people in the D.