macskull

Oh, they go way back, think the whole thing started over Mezmera thinking slotting Power Push for KB was stupid (lol @ not doing so). In terms of Doms in general, Con's been playing them since well before I even heard of this game and he's been PvPing with them for almost as long. He's one of the first people I'd go to if I had questions about a Dom, especially for PvP.

1. People can't read minds. People see someone on the street killing mobs, and maybe having a tough time of it, and say to themselves, "Oh, I can buff him and help him out." So they do. They don't know you don't want the buff, and since 90% of the random people out there appreciate these drive-by buffs, they're not going to just stop doing it on the off chance they buff someone who doesn't want it.

2. Your point might have more validity if you were constantly being assaulted by a stream of buffers who never left you alone as long as you weren't in an instanced mission. Using your own logic, why shouldn't you appreciate these drive-by buffs, as once they wear off you'll have a comparatively harder time (and apparently, by your definition, a comparatively greater challenge)? As it stands, you're probably not hit with these buffs more than a few times per play session, and I can't really see anyone spending most of their play session outside of instanced missions, unless they're either making a point of street-sweeping for XP or doing a story arc that has a lot of hunt missions (these aren't all that common, you know). At any rate, you have to wait at most four minutes for a given buff to wear off (and most times it's more like 60 or 90 seconds). Really, your options are to either go hide in a corner of the zone to do your hunting, quit complaining when people buff you and kill stuff anyways, or just stop entirely and get no fun out of the situation. It's what you make of it, nothing more, nothing less.

40% damage and 20% base tohit isn't exactly weak. It's better than Fortitude, discounting the defense bonus (but you get the Therm shields, which provide an additional layer of defense between your minion's inherent defense and whatever else you're using).

No, it's not. Here's what happens when you're leveling a VEAT starting from level 1:

Levels 1-23: pick the main powers (no branch available)
Level 24: forced respec upon training up, starting over from level 1 - during this respec you are able to start selecting powers from the branches
Levels 25-50: train up as normal, picking either powers from the main pool or the branch you chose

And here's what happens when you respec a VEAT that's higher than level 24:

Levels 1-23: pick the main powers (no branch available)
Level 24: forced respec upon training up, starting over from level 1 - during this respec you are able to start selecting powers from the branches
Levels 25-50: train up as normal, picking either powers from the main pool or the branch you chose

Point: the respec system, as well as the dual build system, treats your character exactly like it were a native level 1 once you begin the respec. When you're doing a respec (or a second build) on a VEAT, you must level to 24 once and then essentially do a respec-within-a-respec. I wish it didn't work that way and it's hella annoying, but it's probably how the respec code is written and the odds of it changing are extremely unlikely.

wutwut

Did you think I was being serious with half those suggestions?

But seriously ban Defender TK

Can we also ban the sleep proc, TK (especially the Defender version), Heat Loss, Shiver, Flashfire, Stalagmites, Fossilize (the Tanker epic power), Vengeance, Heat Exhaustion, hold/stun procs, Ball Lightning, Stunning Shot, Screech, Power Boost (because of PB'd mezzes), double phase builds, Taunt and related powers, Neurotoxic Breath, and any knockback power with enough mag to get through Acro?

No, it's not. KB resistance works in the same way as mez resistance - 100% resistance means its mag (duration in the case of mez) is cut in half (mag 4 knockback would turn into mag 2). Even if you had 10,000% knockback resistance with zero points of protection, you'd still get KB'd every time a knockback power hit you (well, it would get turned into very low-mag knockdown, but since the mag of the effect would exceed the mag of your protection, it would happen nonetheless).

Really, all of this bellyaching about sets lacking KB protection makes me wonder what people did before IOs.

Poned deserves every bit of **** that he gets, jussayin'

This is one of the problems with PvP after the I13 changes - with the exception of a few builds, a good PvE build is very different than a good PvP build and there's not much overlap room.