Erratic

Word of advice. . .never tell the other person what he said (unless you're going to quote them and show them in contradiction) say what you understood.

It represents a barrier. The level of subjective significance is all in if you get past the barrier or not.

I thinnk its rather funny how many people think they are so witty to find something funny. Because when the conversation is about what is/was POSSIBLE you're talking about the limits, not the run of the mill and not the suboptimal.

Talking about how fast a human can run versus how fast a cheetah can run is not talking about the human jogging and the cheetah trotting, its talking about them both at full runs.

That said, the IO period is definitely more interesting than pre-ED days, even considering no other factors than ED and IOs.

Don't confuse you not liking it with it being horrible.

Key words bolded above, echoing what I've stated.

No. What I am telling you is that people aren't lying. If a person tells you they are finding it difficult why are you here saying they aren't?

I've told you how their difficulty comes about. If you want to maintain otherwise I have better things to do than try to convince you otherwise.

Nice and wonderful but you do realize generalizing from one's own perspective is not going to put you in place to understand someone else's?

I bet Bill Gates can tell a nice story too about how all he did was going to school and found a company. Thing is there was a bit more involved than that.

Fact of the matter is I have encountered multiple people in my time back who look at the totals tossed about, compare what they earn and make the conclusion that they are missing out on something. I've seen that time and again. In fact just this past weekend I had the SG leader of one of the SGs one of my characters belongs to off me 50 million influence and when I turned it down, noting I knew he was struggling to come by influence and that I had tons more than he was offering socked away had him asking what I did to earn it. That does not happen if it is as straightforward and as obvious as you and Nether Goat maintain.

Add too that some people campaigned for ED, arguing that they felt they couldn't optimize or were somehow being penalized for making choices other than 1xAcc,5xDamage for powers.

No, influence does NOT grow on trees.

No, but you have to know the methods that pay the rewards and those are not obvious for people who either were not around when those methods went in or have joined the game subsequently. Its part of a learning curve that you may never climb without substantial investment in time spent not playing the game.

I bought one set of recipes and the requisite materials to craft them and it cost me a little over 200 million influence. Hmmm. . .how did I happen to have the influence to do so? I'll tell you it did not come from running regular missions. I got incredibly lucky in my grouping with 50s and got 3 purple drops in a month that sold for 1.2 billion. Before that the concept of even having 200 million was a prospect of months of effort based on what I knew of the game from having played it in its first year.

For those of you lipping off about riches, the dessert may be rich in things to survive on if you know what to look for but for most people from the inner city its barren. The same applies here with regard to acquiring influence in the quanitity necessary to kite out a character in the fashion that is being talked about here (because I am pretty sure we're not talking common IOs putting a character at being on par with pre-ED characters).

Heck, I've been back in the game for 7 months and only last month learned there was a process for memorizing recipes for common IOs. Now take the run of the mill character who downloads the game and starts to play with no extra knowledge. Factor in too that most people who play aren't frequenting these forums and don't have any other regular source of information about the fine points of the game. Heck, the help system is far from straightforward to access. Just how much inforamation is at Paragon.wiki--a site that the average person won't know exists?

Yes, there are methods for generating influence. Acting like everyone knows them and thus has an easy path to doing so is beyond credible.

Influence and money grow on trees now?


I think you could have cut that sentence off after the fourth word and been plenty accurate.

For those that can afford them. For those who do not have the understanding of how influence is made in the game IOs themselves are largely inaccessible and that leaves them definitely in the land of the have nots.

I levelled a DM/ElA Brute to 50 last month and would be very interested in hearing about how things work out for you as my Brute is one of the few characters I've had that feels like I've engaged cheat mode. I would have to imagine with higher resistances and in combination with the healing to be found (Siphon Life and Energize) that you're just about unstoppable.

So many things to remember, something was inevitably going to slip by.

90% vs. 75% isn't it?

Damage was not the only criteria though.

Force multiplication is not, by itself, enough to guarantee the top when you throw in survivability and/or things like being able to continue non-stop.

Admittedly Kinetics does cover a lot of angles all by itself--endurance, healing, force multiplication.

I am not sure I can agree.

I am thinking a suitable team of Brutes backed with damage auras will pretty much do as they will. Choose the sets to be highly resistant to damage, have high defenses, shrug off annoyances like endurance drain, and have a method to generate healing and endurance and you're pretty much good to go.

8 DM/Electric Brutes, for example.

If they all run into a spawn and pop Soul Drain, aside from the fact they have just tossed out 8 AEs they have also just ramped their own damage considerably, including the damage each is putting out from Lightning Field. Granted Soul Drain is unlikely to be highly slotted for damage (though with the AT set you could probably make some headway by using half the set and then filling out the rest Recharge/Damage frankenslot style), but the damage boost they have will be lasting for the next 30 seconds.

Of course DM is not exactly the set for AE damage, but with suitable density Shadow Maul will have little trouble hitting multiple targets and AEs can be had from Epic powersets--say Mu Lightning or Soul Mastery.

Its not like between Power Sink and Dark Consumption any of them is ever going to run low on endurance. It is not likely the case that healing will be an issue as each has Siphon Life and Energize (which also helps with endurance usage). Status effects obviously aren't an issue as Static Shield covers that. And Grounded pretty much guarantees that nothing is going to allow anything to drain their endurance so as to turn off Static Shield.

I am guessing the method to approach AVs is with an idea toward aggro control. If none of them can sustain the attention of the AV for long (and they aren't debuffing except possibly through their Epic powerset--I'm looking at you Darkest Night) then they will have to trade off aggro to allow each member a chance to heal in turn. As Siphon Life should be up every 3 seconds (near perma-Hasten) it shouldn't take too long for each member to be ready again to take his turn as target.

Or of course it could all fail miserably. But I'd certainly be game to try it.

While I am sure Clarke did not believe in magic, the statement holds regardless. Even in CoH, if the technology were advanced enoughyou would have no way to tell it from magic.

A person disappears from in front of Paragon City Hall and shows up in Perez Park. Was it magic or technology? You have no way of knowing. The game recognizes this in that our powers can come from any source.

Depends on how you read the movie and the line from Thor in the movie:

"Your ancestors called it magic. . .but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same."

I think the impression they were trying to give was that where we (humans) see a difference between science and magic, the Asgardians understand them to be the same. This is not saying that there is no such thing as magic or that anything done by technology can be done with magic, but rather that on some deeper level the two are equivalent.

For comparison, consider liquid water and ice. Either way you're dealing with a bunch of molecular H[sub]2[/sub]O. But in one form you can build structures whereas the other form doesn't allow for that. I think the statement on magic and technology is saying something similar--you can do a set of things with one, another set of things with the other, but on a fundamental level that requires understanding we humans don't have, magic and technology are different forms of the same fundamental thing.