Bosstone

Momentum's not really a 'stance' as defined by other games. You can't control it. You might as well call current Defiance a stance. And people do dislike Momentum shutting off; for some people it's a dealbreaker.

Swap Ammo is definitely a stance power though, and I don't think players have an issue with the concept so much as the execution.

The main reason posts get derided, ignored, or deleted is because they come in with guns blazing and act angry, entitled, or both. Your post isn't either, so I wouldn't fear.

I think this really points to a problem someone else mentioned in another thread. There really ought to be a better explanation in-game of what you can and can't do. Like, if you have a character with IOs, there needs to be a pop-up saying "You've got IOs slotted. We're sorry, but without an Invention License or VIP subscription IOs will not work." Something that helps a Premium not feel quite so alone, even if it's just nudging them to pay more money. Something that provides grounding and context for why things are the way they are.

Admittedly, I really haven't seen the game from a Premium POV, so I don't know if such things actually do exist somewhere.

Edit: But, yes, Paragon wants you to spend money. So they're going to restrict non-essential aspects of the game. The takeaway shouldn't be "Premiums are second-class," but instead "Being a VIP is so much better, and it's easy to be one." How effective Paragon is at communicating that subtext is something else altogether.

I severely dislike fail conditions.

Nothing turns me off to a game more than getting 75% of the way through a mission, failing, and having to start all over again at 0%.

I much prefer the typical MMO style of simply not making any progress if you die. If you hit a roadblock at 75%, you just stay at 75%, you don't fall back to 0%. Then it's in your hands whether you want to keep throwing yourself at the mission or come back later and try again.

I don't think it's melee sets in general. My impression is that while Street Justice is a solid set with an interesting mechanic, it wasn't greeted with the same kind of anticipation as Titan Weapons and Staff Fighting. The interest in it was very much "Oh hey, this is neat, so what else is coming out?"

What gets interest is weapons. Beam Rifle got more overall interest than Street Justice, at least from what I saw, and it's because of weapons. (Admittedly, the interest wasn't THAT much more, since Beam Rifle got pretty shorted on weapon models.)

There's only so many ways you can project energy or attack something unarmed. While they have made an effort in making two animations available where possible, it's just not as big a part of character customization as weapons can be.

One's weapon is a huge part of one's identity. Your hand is your hand, but if you use a gun or a sword or a polearm there are loads and loads of different models available. One Titan Weapons character can use the Plasma Sword while another can use the Purgatory Sword, and though they have the same fighting style the concepts are already very different, even without going into the actual character. Weapons are a very neat and fun way of integrating character identity into the actual combat.

TL;DR: People like weapon sets.

You're smarter than this, Snow Globe. Do you really not think that you would have only gotten 8 threads on that run without the Windfall? Random is random. You got a bad streak that time, most likely. Reasonable conclusions can only be drawn with a larger sample size.

T_Immortalus has a better understanding of probability than is shown in this thread.

Now that's something to chew on. Thank you for pulling the info.

Looks like you certainly got less in the way of threads, but a little more than 1.25x the drops, and more than 2x the influence. Obviously to folks who use the market on a regular basis, an extra 3 mil inf is peanuts, but to some it does matter.

It'd be interesting to break the drops down by type, but I'm not going to do that nor would I ask you to. The smaller the sample the less consistency, in any case. It's a 50% increase in drops, we know that. It just happens that some drop chances are pretty damn small.

Where's the tally of a UGT run without Windfall? It's hardly scientific to evaluate something that boosts your odds without checking both before and after.

Windfalls give a pretty direct increase in influence, shards, and threads, primarily because those all have high drop chances to begin with. Recipe drops are so low to begin with, though, that you can still go an entire hour without seeing an orange or purple. Still, a 1.5% chance is better than a 1% chance.

As DreadShinobi alludes to, the best places to use them are TFs and trials with high concentration of enemies. The ITF is pretty much made for Windfalls, and trials like BAF are pretty good too.