Adeon Hawkwood

Well, if you've followed my post history at all what I am about to say should come as no surprise: I do NOT like this. In all honesty I'm not sure this is worth posting, I made my views on the matter clear in Beta and was told at the time that things weren't going to change. I consoled myself at the time with the knowledge that it was only uncommon sets but now, lo and behold we are getting rare sets as well (I'm not surprised since frankly I doubt the uncommon sets sold particularly well but I am disappointed).

You are billing this as an issue of convenience versus time but the fact of the matter is it isn't. It's selling power. Touch of Death and Mako's Bite are both very solid sets that any melee character building positional defense will want to use. That in and of itself doesn't bother me neither does the fact that they scale up as you level. What does bother me is that unlike normal Set IOs they scale down with you when you exemplar. That gives characters using them a huge advantage over regular set IOs.

Now the "solution" suggested by the devs was to make two builds one using level 50 IOs and one with level 30'ish. As I said at the time I don't consider this a valid solution for a few reasons. One is that the store bought IOs are still better between level 31 and level 46. The other is that level 30 rare IOs are frustrating to acquire due to low supply.

Considering the upcoming release of Titan Weapons this really seems to me like a naked money grab. Given that I will reiterate my request to do something to make regular set IOs competitive. Personally I'd like to see all IOs adopt the same level-less structure as store bought IOs. Baring that I'd like to see the ability to use the level slider to make random ticket/merit rolls at a particular level in order to help loosen up the supply of mid-level IOs.

Well for damage my basic rule of thumb is that if I'm over 95% pre-ED it's to much. At that point each 1% of damage enhancement increases my final damage enhancement by 0.15% of the power's base damage so from a practical point of view I'm wasting slots. I'd do better of using those slots to either increase recharge (which will have more impact on total damage) or use them to improve another power. Now in this case it's worth wasting slots for the set bonuses but that isn't always true.

Accuracy is similar. You never have better chance of hitting than 95% so anything above that is wasted except for countering enemies with high defense and/or to hit debuffs. Personally I tend to target getting a 95% chance to hit against +4s in the absence of either defense buffs or to hit debuffs. The general theory is that if I'm facing +4s I'm probably on a team so team buffs and debuffs will cancel out the enemy's buffs and debuffs (this is based on my personal playstyle, depending on your preferences you may want more or less accuracy than I do).

To formula for chance to hit is:
HitChance = BasePowerAcc * (1 + AccEnhancement + GlobalAccBonus) * (BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods)

With both the final vlaue and the (BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods) section having a minimum of 5% and a maximum of 95%.

BaseHitChance against +4s is 39%, I'm an AR/Dev so BasePowerAcc is 1.05 and ToHitMods is about 19% (going by memory here, I don't have exact values). Plugging that in tells me that my combined Power Enhancement and Global Accuracy enhancement need to be about 55%. Now I know I have at least 74% global accuracy (1 x Ragnarok set, 2 X Thunderstrike, 4 x Positron's Blast and a Trap of the Hunter) so I don't actually need any accuracy slotting in individual powers (although I still want some for exemplaring down).

It's on the wiki:
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Invent...t_Bonus_Values

Correct, most sets can be used as much as you like. There are a few speical IOs which are unique and the Purple sets are all unique as well.

Sort of , the rule is that you can't have more than 5 identical bonuses. So you can (for example) have 5 x 7.5% recharge bonuses but also have 5 x 6.25% recharge bonuses. There are two little wrinkles that often catch people up:

1. Special IOs are counted separately than Set Bonuses so you can have 5 Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge IOs and also 5 sets that give you a 7.5% recharge bonus.

2. Defense bonuses are a little complicated since they each increase 3 different defenses. Basic rule of thumb is always compare the higher bonuses for rule of five purposes. You can find a detailed explanation here

In general IO sets provide higher power enhancements values than SOs for the same number of slots. The catch is that they don't always provide the optimal combination of enhancement values. It is possible to make an IO based build that is worse than an SO build (believe me, I've seen some horrible builds posted on these forums) but with a bit of care an IO build will generally be superior to an IO build.

Let's take a specific example, you mentioned that your Blaster has his attacks slotted with 3 damage and 3 accuracy. my Blaster has his single target attacks slotted with a full set of Thunderstikes (an EXCELLENT set for Blasters). Now before factoring in ED my enhancement values are:
Damage: 143.1%
Accuracy: 68.9%
Recharge: 68.9%
Endurance Reduction: 68.9%

Now obviously ED drops the Damage bonus to about 100% but even with that I have significantly better slotting than I would with SOs. To get comparable slotting from just SOs I would need about 9 slots, 3 damage, 2 accuracy, 2 recharge and 2 endurance.

Now this brings us to the point that Flower mentions which is Frankenslotting. Honestly my Blaster's attacks are pretty overslotted. I've got so much damage that I'm losing a good chunk of it anyway and my accuracy is quite a bit higher than I need as well (between Targeting Drone and Accuracy global bonuses I don't need that much in individual powers). I keep the full set for the ranged defense bonus but if I didn't need that then I would at the very least take out the Damage/Accuracy enhancement and move that slot elsewhere.

And my prediction comes true. Ok, it's slightly out of context since my post was more countering you contention that the random syllable names do not work in CoX rather than insulting you for being unoriginal but I think it's close enough .
As a side note, I have no objection to people who want more traditional names, I just object to the assertion that going with the random syllable type cannot work in CoX. Personally I find that the idea of secret-identity style names in a city where 50% of the population have super powers strains my ability to suspend disbelief so my characters have character names which are either their real names or a title that supersedes their name (but with the assumption that their real name is public knowledge) but to each their own.

Well if you aren't giving a specific order you're generally relying on the ones with a Fire AoE catching it by chance and unless you get lucky with a cone attack that probably means the Ember Demon's fireball. You're probably best off either attacking it yourself or manually ordering a minion to attack it (the Fiery or Hellfire Demonlings would seem a sensible choice). You might even consider making a bind/macro to specifically target the slick and order a minion to attack it.

Sure it does. The majority of my characters are human and I tend to select a first name I like and then give them a surname by throwing random syllables together, for example:
Marcus Taldari
Empedocles Mastrik
Dr Alec von Chronite

So the itent of Enzyme Exposures is that they are supposed to enhance Defense Debuffs but not buffs. However due to the way in which enhancements work they will enhance Defense Buffs so long as the power in question accepts Endurance Reduction enhancements. This is technically a bug and as such it is entirely possible that the devs will one day fix it however until that happens Enzymes do buff defense.

This is the big thing for me. A no-frills weapon draw animation would make the set a lot more enjoyable to play (at least for me). The other nice change would be if Piercing Ammo applied it's resistance debuff for all ammo types.

It depends a lot on the rest of your build. As Wyatt_Earp mentioned your best bet might be to just stick a couple of IOs in there and use excess slots for other things (although I'd probably use a To Hit Debuff/Rech instead of the Defense/Rech one). In terms of sets the most useful non-knockback one is probably Dark Watcher's Despair. It enhances the to hit debuff in Earthquake (which is generally more useful than defense debuff if you have Quicksand) and it has a 5% recharge bonus for four slots.

Unfortunately the wiki is read-only at the moment.

The problem is that the basic gear level needs to be the same for VIP players and free players just from a content balance point of view. Content in an MMO is balanced assuming a certain level of gear, if standard content is balanced around SOs then SOs should be available to all.

Honestly though I think at this point the discussion has pretty much run it's course, we're pretty much reduced to quibbling over semantics .

Well, I can only speak for myself but I feel that using DOs from 12-22 and SOs from 22-50 should be available as "basic gear" for all players (TOs I tend ignore since the 1-12 levels go by to fast to bother).

Basic gear in an MMO is not a static target. Changes to the game adding new types of gear results in a rolling target where as the power level of the top end goes up so does the power level of the lower end. When the came was new making full SOs somewhat difficult to obtain made sense. They were all that mattered so giving a bit of a stretch goal made sense. Since the various new enhancements have been added I think regarding full SOs as basic gear is a reasonable assumption.

The other side of it is that the difficulty level of content has not remained static throughout the life of the game. Newer content, and in particular the new level 20-29 story arcs, are more challenging than the older content, especially for solo players. Several of my characters struggled with doing them using SOs, having to use a mix of SOs and DOs sounds very painful. This is another reason for rebalancing the games to make SOs more viable as "basic gear", the game difficulty has increased so increasing the power level of basic gear to compensate makes sense.

Good point.

Someone will counter those insults with a claim that the names presented aren't "real superhero names" and that something should be done to allow everyone to have "proper" names.

There's a line there however. Make it to hard and they quit in frustration and tell all of their friends. While F2P games rely on people deciding to spend money the converse is that if the free portion is to frustrating people quit before they decide to spend money. I consider "able to acquire basic gear without spending real money" to be a core requirement for any Free to play game. If I feel I can't do that I'm not going to play the game long enough to decide if it's worth spending real money on.

Indeed, I think I could probably write the entire thread myself.

Lets see, some people will come in and post in support, some will post in opposition (mostly citing the poor impression it creates for a possible returning player).

A few people will come in and make implied insults that anyone in favor of it is unimaginative and listing all of the good names they have recently acquired.

Someone from the old EU servers will come in and request a global name purge so that they can get back their old global name.

Someone will bring up the CharacterName@AccountName system used in a certain other MMO and will get shouted down.

I think that covers it .

Honestly, this is (again) not something I can agree with. Respecs in this game are, for most players, a finite resource. We are talking here about players without market access which means they really only have the 3 Trial Respecs plus the occasional freespec (no vetspecs and no crafting respecs) telling a player that in order to afford the basic level of gear they should use up one of their limited respecs seems to me like a very poor idea. If the TV trial gave unlimited respecs I wouldn't object but with only a few respecs available I think that's a bad strategy.

It depends on how the proc is implemented in game. Some procs affect the caster of the pwoer while some affect the target. Unfortunately RedTomax is still down so I can't verify but if I recall correctly all of the Proc120s (which includes Numina and Miracle) are set to affect the caster so won't propagate to teammates.

As Mega_Jamie mentioned there are some other procs such as Panacea (and I believe Performance Shifter) which instead affect the target of the power (which is why you don't slot Performance Shifter in Electrical Balst ).

See, that's the thing. I have no problem with it being a "gear chase" for higher end stuff. IOs, HOs, heck even +3 SOs should require a decent investment of time to achieve. It's when the cost to maintain the basic gear outstrips the rate you earn it while leveling that I see a problem.

I'm not saying that a free player shouldn't need to earn SOs but they should be able to afford enough SOs to fill their slots without needing to resort to using debt or XP locking to farm influence.

Another option I'd suggest to help soften the impact would be the reintroduction of enhancement rewards for story arcs and task forces for anyone who isn't a VIP or Tier 4 Premium. Basically if you can't earn merit rewards for task completion you should at least get an SO instead.