Eva Destruction

Because my S/L is only around 31% with one foe, and that's before debuffs.

There is already precedent for level-locked accolades.

You can't roll a recipe below level 10 anyway, so there is no point in letting people have their "freebies" before that.

No, but they could change the reward so the free merits are only awarded to a character upon reaching a certain level...say 20. Then they won't be instant anymore, and people looking for the fastest route to merits would still be better off running a speed TF than PLing characters to 20.

In this case it would be, but....

What are the most popular arcs usually? This system would also make it impossible to downgrade arcs that truly deserve it.

The date last updated is more important that the date last played; a recently updated arc will be less likely to be broken (by which I mean still technically playable but not functioning as the author intended), while treating arcs as "fresh" based on when they were played will only further punish arcs that aren't played as much, for whatever reason, and will only point people toward arcs that are already popular, namely farms.

Counting "last PLAYED" instead of "last RATED" would alleviate this somewhat, as you could move your own arc up the list by playing it yourself, but again it would still move farms up the list since you can play through them much faster than many legitimate arcs.

HoF is edit locked?

DC arcs can be edited, but it is a process, and I'm not sure what happens if the author doesn't have a free arc slot available. The thing is, some sort of safeguard needs to be put in place for these arcs, or DCs would have to be limited to "the trusted few," which is unfair to anyone who isn't "trusted," and could be exploited anyway.

In my example above, I maxed out the alpha values with attacks. It would not let me add more by adding more attacks. I understand the reasoning behind it - a critter can only use one attack at a time - but since damage auras do not factor into an attack chain, they should be treated separately.

Again, this comes down to "what are you playing?" If you're a Scrapper, mez protection is in many cases completely irrelevant. If you're a Dominator, not so irrelevant. Due to the nature of enemy mez protection powers however, in that they offer very high mez protection against nearly ALL mezzes, which AFAIK no dev-created critter shy of an AV has except in Tier 9s, they may need to be rethought.

Fire Aura has its own problems, due to the ridiculously high Fire protection it gives. Again, that's dependent on your powerset.

That's the big problem isn't it? Everything is balanced around "what does this power do on a minion," which gimps the reward values for higher-rank critters.

Again, it is a situational thing. Power Sink does nothing to a ranged Blaster, but for a Scrapper it can be an instant toggle drop > dead. There is a reason everybody gangs up on the Sapper, and Power Sink is autohit so it can't be mitigated except by a few power sets. Is it worse than getting hit in the dead with a tier 1 attack? Yes, by far.

As for slotting it, even unslotted in the hands of a boss Power Sink can drain half your blue bar. Unless you are heavily IOd so as to be running at full end all the time, it is nasty.

I base my complaints about Dark Regen based on the fact that it makes a fight go on longer. Looking back over the numbers, that extends to stuff like Dull Pain and Reconstruction too; they have low values but make a fight last far longer, for any character regardless of damage type. Again, tweaking these values is problematic due to the fact that they are near-useless on Minions.

Dark Regeneration might have been given an artificially low score in my examples simply because I had maxed out the attacks as well.

I am thinking more and more that this is the problem. It's trivially easy to make a minion and even a lieutenant that gives full XP even with a weak defensive secondary (regen with only the passives for example). Bosses on the other hand, are extremely difficult to balance, especially if you are looking to create a Melee/Defense boss, because you can only get so much out of the primary and the secondary doesn't add much.

There is precedent for this, as critters without ranged attacks max out at 40% XP.

But it always stops at 00:01. So not even then.

A second ranged attack, although for a lot of sets it would be difficult to find one that fits conceptually.

Or you could kite them, which amounts to the same thing. I understand why they have a lower value, but what you end up getting is something that, in order to give full XP, has to have an attack that hits for 1200 damage at level 50. My heavily IOd Invul Brute will point and laugh at the KO-Blow using boss; a /Shield Scrapper with just SOs, not so much.

Whenever you notice something like that, the wizard did it. Or the Mender.

Well I bugged it...and here I was thinking, "hmm, this SS/Elec boss I made gives full XP without KO Blow, nice." Oh well. *Adds KO Blow in anticipation of fix.*

Correct. Allied entities appear to only be a drain as long as they are present on the map. This means:

When captives and escorts leave the map, they stop being drains.

When friendly entities are defeated, they stop being drains when the body fades.

Friendly entities are not drains until they spawn. Which means, if their spawning is triggered by another objective, they will not drain XP until they actually spawn. Also, if it's a big map, they may not spawn immediately upon loading, in which case they won't become drains until they actually spawn.

Yes.

The most recent rating is applied, although only the first one awards tickets. So if someone 1-starred your arc "by accident" (ticking off the stars one at a time) their final rating would be applied.

The original reason for allowing arcs to be rated without completing them has turned out to be invalid, as those arcs that were supposed to be so horrible and uncompletable that we'd be 1-starring them as a public service are just going to languish in unrated limbo forever, unlikely to ever be seen or played even if we can't 1-star them without finishing them.

So my suggestion: Require the completion of, if not the entire arc, a certain percentage of the arc, before it can be rated. This will effectively put an end to 1-star griefing, as well as people using friends or second accounts to 5-star their atrociously difficult arcs, but will still allow us to down-rate farms (most of which are specifically designed to be easily completed once you reach the ticket cap).

Yes.

Other changes I would like to see, many of which have been suggested elsewhere:

-A publicly visible "favorites" list. You can choose to use this feature or not; if you choose not to use it your global will not be attached to other people's arcs in any way. If you do choose to use it, clicking an arc that you have added to your list will display your global, and clicking your global from there will display your list. You can add your own arcs to your "favorites" list, thereby allowing a little shameless self-promotion for authors who also play other people's arcs. This list could also have an option to show up for friends, global friends, and supergroup only.

-Searching for "my level" should not display arcs with a range of 1-54. They're pretty much all custom critter arcs that, going by the warnings on many of them, are totally inappropriate for lowbies.

-Allow us to EXCLUDE certain things in searches. Many players do not wish to fight AVs, I refuse to fight Extreme anything, but things like custom groups in general, enemy groups you don't want to fight (Longbow and Arachnos for example), tags that indicate an arc that does not interest you (for example, if you're a squishy, you might choose to avoid arcs tagged as "challenging"), would also be good candidates for exclusion. This would help players narrow down searches to things they would actually want to play.

-Some way of removing outdated and abandoned arcs from the search. I am in favor of simply hiding anything that hasn't been updated in X days, as that would be least punitive but still put onus on the author to actually care. Arcs that are invalidated by a patch should be immediately hidden until they are fixed.

-In keeping with that, albeit a minor thing: when a patch changes something that could have major consequences, it should simply invalidate all affected arcs, not replace the changed thing with some lame default that effectively breaks the arc. I am specifically thinking of all those Hydras with "invalidcritter" over their heads, but I believe arcs have had issues with removed maps and changed objects as well.

The boss/EB/AV requirements need to be tweaked downward a bit, I think. Still, it's way better than the old system, where it was impossible to get past 75% without some really nasty powers on most powersets, even at lower levels.

Side-switching is irrelevant. CoV is a valid part of the game. Pure villains are valid characters. They should not be ignored "because they can just switch sides if they want more content," they should be given a level 30-35 TF. Or they will find out where you live and come over and kidnap your puppy.