Biowraith

Let me set up a direct debit for base rent. Or at least let me pay remotely via the Supergroup window.

Also I'm getting awfully long delays when selecting a server or going back to the server list - anywhere from 20sec to a minute+. So if the devs could sort that out that'd be super.

Marcus & Stefan's Dance-Off Challenge

If I were re-doing Poison my first thoughts would be as follows:

Alkaloid - reduce the endurance cost a bit.

Envenom - small aoe splash, similar radius to Acid Arrow.

Weaken - small aoe splash, similar radius to Acid Arrow. Reduce recharge to 12 to match Envenom. *Maybe* increase the values of the -tohit and -dam a bit (-special is great and all, but it's extremely situational).

(if either of the above have to stay as single target I really think they need higher values as they're not really any better than the aoe debuffs other sets get, besides the situational -special and -regen/heal... and since higher values may end up a tad too much I think a small aoe is a better/safer route to go)

Neurotoxic Breath - no change.

Elixir of Life - no change.

Antidote - no change.

Paralytic Poison - no change (*maybe* some -spd/-rech for targets that resist the hold).

Poison Trap - heh, pretty much any change here would likely be an improvement. Direct replacement with Traps' version would be fine. Or make the sleep part more like Static Field. Or the Hold part more on par with Volcanic Gasses. Or any number of other things.

Noxious Gas - allow it to be toggled on a player character (now you can proliferate to Corruptors!), and if the tech allows remove the scaling effect when placed on lower tier/level pets. Wouldn't say no to a reduced recharge, either.


I've tried all the MM secondaries, and Poison is the only one I've abandoned - it measures up when you're solo against small spawn sizes, but once teamed or fighting higher multipliers it's not doing much that other sets can't do just as well in a wider area.

I tried repeatedly toggling Sprint on and off, and also bubbling the entire league all fight long, (and spamming pet commands, like as fast as I could hit the keybind) for the full duration of more than one baf, didn't seem to impact my mediocre-to-average rewards. There's another game I play that uses power activations as its metric (regardless of what the power does - and yes it was abused), but my experience is saying either CoH isn't using that system, or it's using a more complex version of it.

My MM actually gets roughly what I'd expect if it were truly random - so far 53.33% Commons, 33.33% Uncommons, and 13.33% Rare (No V.Rare yet, but "only" 15 runs so far).

It's just that the other alts I've run get nearer 5% Commons, 15-20% Rare, 5-10% V.Rare, and the other 65-75% Uncommon (and while Uncommon isn't valuable in itself after the first 8, it does suggest a higher chance of scoring Rare and V.Rare).


I'm tempted to try door sitting with a pet targeted and an FF buff on auto, see if I get the 10 threads or whether it thinks I'm participating and gives me a Common/Uncommon. Just don't know enough people to do that without getting a bad name for myself

I'd fix/balance #1, but I wouldn't deploy that fix until the players started to notice that Shepard's Crook was overpowered (possibly via covert prompting). That way when I do deploy the fix it looks like I'm listening and responding to player concerns instead of needlessly nerfing a power that was just fine.

While I can see the point that an Uncommon is, once you have all you need, worth less than a Common, I've yet to find myself needing a Common as the one thing missing and not having the threads to craft it. I have found myself in that scenario with Uncommon, albeit only once on one character.

I pretty much agree with the overview in the OP.

My own personal gripe list, after playing fairly intensively for the last week, would be:

• The LFG system is a bit too fond of minimum or near-minimum sized leagues. Couple that with it only adding "join in progress" players if the league is below minimum size (am I right in thinking that?) and preformed teams become a far more attractive option. Which reduces the number of people using the LFG system. Which makes it even less likely to give a decent size league.
  
  
• While I can accept that it's a new system and we'll get more trials later on, I really wish there'd been more ways to get ixp for unlocking the slots (and to a lesser extent, components). With successful BAFs becoming faster and faster, and more and more streamlined, my ixp per completion has been going down (I was getting less than 10% Lore per run yesterday). It wasn't so bad on my first character, but with only one activity available to unlock each slot, once I move on to my alts it starts to look and feel overly grindy. Hell, even just letting Apex and Tin Mage contribute there would be nice.
  
  
• On a related note: ixp should be shared through the whole league, not just your team. At least if the bulk of the ixp is coming from killing the "trash" - on leagues that designate one team to killing reinforcements, if your slots aren't unlocked yet you best hope you're on that team.
  
  
• Not being able to skip the cut scenes.

And that's it. Overall I'm having a lot of fun (with the odd bit of frustration - check your ******* temp powers for acid!) and I'm eager to see what's coming down the line.

I never had too much bother racing through on either my MM or Defender, but I also didn't feel like I was helping much when I did (by the time I caught up with the survivable guy that didn't need to be careful the crate was half dead already - and while I was ok, my MM's pets were dead).

And yeah, there's always at least one person that doesn't realise they have an acid. Which is sorta fair enough if you're new to the trial and all, except that a) at the start we ask "anyone not familiar with how the temp powers work on this one?" and get silence, and b) as soon as we finish the labs we say "check your temp power list for molecular acid, it's crucial for the next stage". If after that you can't find and use the acid (or at least say "where's my temp power list?" or "I have an acid, how do I use it?"), well, I despair.

For what it's worth, on my Mastermind running BAF I was FF bubbling the entire league (which took longer than killing Nightstar...) and still getting mostly Commons with the occasional Uncommon. I tried a run of spamming pet commands needlessly and got a rare, which made me think I might be onto something, but next run with spamming pet commands even more (while still bubbling everyone), it was Uncommon. I'm gonna continue to monitor what I'm getting vs what I do.

Depending on what time zone that 1am is, I may have been on that BAF.

Certainly I was on one in a similar situation: leader had organised one team of almost pure scrappers (I think they were to take down the reinforcements or something, or were a roaming team for commandos that got through the net, I forget) and then just as it filled the leader disappeared. Except on the one I was on about 8 more people disappeared. Few minutes later he was back on broadcast forming a baf again.

However, it turned out (assuming he wasn't lying ;p) that they'd disconnected and he assumed the whole zone had, so he was trying to reassemble (asked "dc's to pst for reinvite"). But by then the remainder of our league had written him off as a griefing jerk with some starting to hurl insults in broadcast, so we didn't merge back to see if it was true

In any case, after a few more quit because they didn't want to wait for us to refill the slots, the BAF started and went on to success, so it worked out for me, and in the end that's what really matters.

Fwiw, the results of my Bots/FF MM running the BAF today:

Common
Common
Uncommon
Common
Common
Uncommon
Rare
Uncommon

If it continued like that, eh, it's still more Commons than I'm used to on my other chars, and it does seem a little odd that it happens to be my MM that's getting them, but it's not bad enough for me to be majorly concerned - I did pretty much exactly the same thing each run so there definitely seems to be some level of random in there. I intend to continue to track what I'm getting though, just out of curiosity.

As I said in a similar MM-focused thread, I hope it's not based on participation/contribution. I can maybe see a 10 threads for doing almost nothing vs random table for anything else, but I don't to see the reward roll to be influenced by how the game perceives your contribution.

Every MMO I've played so far that had a system like that it was heavily flawed, with certain actions given more weight than they warranted and other actions that were actually contributing a lot in real terms getting little or no credit from the system (the classic one in more traditional mmos is that healing gets less credit than damage - and buffing none at all - yet it's viewed as vital to accomplish the challenge, so who's gonna be the one to gimp their rewards to fulfil that crucial role?).

Also, once the players figure out how such a contribution system works it becomes possible to game the system - you're no longer just trying to use your powers to best overcome the challenges of the trial, you're now trying to ensure that the powers you use are the ones that give the best reward roll, even if they're doing nothing at all to help the league's success. One other game I played got around the damage-gets-all-the-contribution problem by instead giving contribution based on number of skills/spells used... except once players figured that out they were spamming the zero cooldown resource-node-tracking powers for max contribution while the poor saps that didn't know were getting lower rewards by actually taking part in the battle.

Especially in a game like ours, where there's such an array of different buffs, debuffs, mezzes, and other mechanics - and they are of hugely variable magnitude - I just don't think anyone could come up with a truly fair and accurate participation or contribution system.


So yeah, hope it's just plain random.

My Crab went:

Judgement: Ionic - closest thematic fit given that his blasts are energy.

Interface: Reactive - the others just seem weak, at least if they're resistible as people are saying they are.

Destiny: Barrier - although my crab can take on a lot, he's not actually softcapped (about 1% short on range, about 8 on aoe, and about 10-15 on melee), so coupled with incarnate mobs having higher tohit this seemed the way to go. Plus it keeps my pets alive a bit longer.

Lore: Originally took t1 of Warworks, with the intent of getting the Battle Orb, but the look of Vicky didn't fit with the feel of my character (though the ACUs do), so I switched to Clockwork. I don't think I'll actually get the buff pet now tbh, Barrier does nicely as it is.

I'm hoping that it's 100% random tbh, because contribution based systems almost never turn out fair - every game I've seen them in so far there's stuff that in reality are valuable contributions but which aren't rate highly (if at all) in the contribution system. And as much as I have faith in our devs, I don't really expect they'd crack it where everyone else has failed, especially with all the ways you can contribute in this game.