Frosticus

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I think it is fair to say that the devs in this game do a good job overall, but they have no direct competition and they are still only able to garner approx 200k subs? When they have two direct competitors that are shiny,new, and participating in active marketing, the cox team is going to have to step it up another 10+ notches.

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If the fantasy genre is any indicator, the most likely outcome is the market will be elastic enough to accommodate all three games. The established games all continue to exist and be developed even as newcomers elbow their way into the space. Even the 800 lb gorilla of WoW didn't cause the extinction of existing fantasy MMOs. An MMO with an established subscriber base that paid off the initial development/launch costs is extremely hard to kill.

Should times prove too tough to support all three, the risk of one of the new games falling by the wayside is far higher than for the established one.

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If the fantasy genre is sex then the hero genre would be hot wax fetish.

do you already have the toon? dirt/therm would seem like the way to go to me.

in i13 they made an attempt at transforming pvp into a "solo" viable experience. By DR'ing everyone to the point where team cohesion no longer really matters and by making everyone have similar/same damage and similar/same survivability.

Of course they failed entirely in the survivability department. But they are taking care of that in i14 by now ensuring def will be pretty useless to.

So res, heals, def, buffs, and most debuffs now don't really matter and even phase is counterable (maybe). So the only thing that matters is damage. But don't think for a second that some toons won't have better everything still. Not until Castle is able to execute his final pvp vision.

Castle's goal is basically to reduce everyone down to brawl and sprint and he is doing a good job.

Some might find that fun in a game about supers, in a game that they introduced loot to, in a team based MMO, but it isn't.

The goal of "everyone is the same" is entirely flawed in an MMO that brags about player customization. They would have been so much better served by embracing the wild and chaotic team based balance that the early dev team aimed for.

However, the same [censored] that whined in pve about not being able to solo all of the content and was listened to, whined in pvp and was listened to, just look at the anti-gank mechanic Castle tried to jam in and was ONLY removed because it was bugged and could not be fixed (for now).

However, Castle (and crew) live in spreadsheets, which is why it takes literally yrs for most changes to occur and why it makes them seem totally out of the blue. Team based balance can not be governed by only an excel spreadsheet, it has to be playtested, observed and tweaked basically on the fly with a scalpel.

Castle only has a sledgehammer, the dev team are pve carebears, and you can count on one hand how many times they observed high end pvp.

So we get brawl+sprint as the end goal for pvp and each issue Castle takes steps toward it.

needs moar powerpool attacks to count

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Hurl + shark blasters

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they got nerfed i14, now its flurry, jump kick, boxing and kick blappers

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oh ya, still an ok blaster though.

I kind of what to make a powerpool attack dominator considering it would do more damage than an /elec dom.

Hurl + shark blasters

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gl everyone and now back to your regularly scheduled OP's topic "Powers Vision"

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this is the same topic.

You, and folks of the same mindset, including the OP, are making a big fuss about things you do not understand and then blaming the most convenient scapegoat for your lack of understanding.

What is it you're trying to do here? Y'all are like someone who's read the Divine Comedy in translation and now are getting mad when people discuss its poetic structure because you don't see any of that... and if you don't understand how something could be, clearly it's because there's some malevolent conspiracy among those 'in the know' to keep you out.

Arcanaville flatly did not do the things you're holding her responsible for. I mean, please. I've seen that woman blamed or argued with in the most ridiculous fashions, entirely because the people doing so have no understanding of mathematics or proper logic to speak of. It's not about whether I like or agree with her; you just don't walk up to Alan Greenspan and tell him he doesn't understand money. (Well, maybe now you could.)

Castle and Positron are not omniscient. I spend some time working on a 16+ year-old text game, and the lead developer there is still rooting out things from the earlier code that have unintended consequences -- and it's an exponentially smaller project that he has personally rewritten several times! That's just the way that things work.

Now, I'm a pragmatist, so I'm not going to give this as an imperative. Think of the following as a suggestion: Improve your comprehension or decrease your prolificity. This is the same suggestion I offered to the OP, and I think it applies equally as well.

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I was of course mistaken that when they pulled Arcana's idea and applied it I made the assumption that her close working relationship with the team would provide an environment for her to ensure it was implemented correctly. We all know what happens when we assume... and boy did it. Granted the numbers used for elusivity in i13 wouldn't have worked without DR either, so I guess I'm just curious where it all broke down and at what point they cut her out?

I wonder if she is upset that they took her idea and did a poor job of it, especially when she has them all on speed dial?

I'm guessing she is steaming about it as she is extremely detail oriented and that explains her disavowing any knowledge of DR and tossing Castle under the bus.

I'm am honestly sorry this time for tearing open an old wound, that wasn't very nice. Are you still working with Castle regarding elusivity, or have you walked away from that project? I'm curious because I do recall you mentioning you were writing a paper explaining why DR+elusivity isn't working properly (that hopefully would have some fixes) and because you seem like the type to see things through to completion. We are stuck with the mechanic now, so hopefully you, the devs, or someone else can get it working soon.

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I'm honestly not interested in your vendetta. It's just growing old that every thread, no matter what it's about, has a 50/50 chance of getting SOMEONE complaining about PvP. It's the new ED, I guess, and no less annoying to listen about.

As for your passive-aggressive dance, I find myself unmoved. You're playing the victim card horribly poorly.

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You are of course right. I'm just getting my disappointment at them ruining pvp out as I wasn't here at the time it went down.

I don't wish for them to kill any activity in the game that occupies 80%+ of your time and effort, but if it does eventually happen then PM me and we can share sob stories lol.

PvP and ED are actually two very different cases, though I can fully understand that the whining sounds the same even if it is coming from a different place. All whining sounds the same.

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With those new games coming out, there isn't even a guarantee that this game will be alive in a year. It's currently still a cash cow for NCSoft. I believe it's the second biggest source of revenue behind GuildWars. But the upcoming competiton will surely change that.

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Definitely. I don't think playing dress up with our toons and now enemy toons is enough to maintain any kind of sustainable competitive advantage.

MA seems like it could be a golden ticket, but the current edition of it is pretty weak. I don't think they have years to improve it either.

Every 'feature' in this game is only half complete whether it be pvp, base building, modding, raiding, loot, market etc. Not every game offers everything that cox does, but cox doesn't do a good job on anything it does offer, so unless you take advantage of a ton of their packages we will likely find better games elsewhere.

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I think you're dramatically underestimating the advantage a game has when it has been out for 5 years. It's true that newer games will have new graphics engines and are designed for things like power customization that will require tremendous effort to achieve in this engine. But any 1.0 version of an MMO is going to have tons of shortcomings and balance issues and a fairly shallow pool of content compared to when that same game has been out for a couple of years. And if you think CO and DCUO won't have devs equipped with nerf bats, you're an amazingly optimistic person.

WRT to the MA, what we have now is just a 1.0 release. What's there already is good, and it'll get better.

The most important game-changer is the additional staff that they hired on. And they are still hiring. I manage a software team for a living and I can tell you the difference you can make when you grow a team the way they've grown theirs is HUGE. The product I manage has more than a million lines of code. It takes a smart programmer typically about 6 months before they can make meaningful contributions. I expect it's about the same with COH. A lot of the hiring was done in the last half of last year so I'd expect the payoff to come in the second half of this year. Time will tell.

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I'll guess we'll just wait and see. I don't believe cox is going to die, but 3-4 servers instead of 11 is something I could see come to pass considering they could already consolidate down to 6 ish now.

I don't think anyone believes that either of those games won't have significant nerfs. In the case of CO it looks like cox2 at this point and DCUO has already made some sweet announcements about it being a pretty pvp-centric experience and of course it will have all the icon power associated with brandname power. Cox is like noname cookies, they are good and a good value, but everyone wants an Oreo.

Cox launching a modding tool is wicked, best thing they have ever come up with by no small margin. The fact that everything is instanced indicates to me that there is no reason it can't or won't eventually be as good as offline and non-mmo modding tools, but at this time it is not - to say the least. It looks like they are betting the farm on MA, so hopefully they get it good enough in time.

I think it is fair to say that the devs in this game do a good job overall, but they have no direct competition and they are still only able to garner approx 200k subs? When they have two direct competitors that are shiny,new, and participating in active marketing, the cox team is going to have to step it up another 10+ notches.

Hopefully the new hires make a huge difference because if we get things like i13 pvp and now the pet recharge nerf when they have ample time to work on them, I'm worried about what we'll get when they are forced to pump stuff out at a much faster rate.

The cycle is vicious though because imagine hypothetically if cox subs cut in half once CO and DCUO were up and running - is it then feasible to keep on all that extra staff when you are pulling in half the revenue even though you need them then more than ever?

It is always the case though that many businesses skirt along - complacent - performing the status quo until it is crunch time, but when times are tough the money isn't there.

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This is because in i12 you could get def so high that only a few solo builds could hit you (namely blasters, but some others), or they would need team buffs (ie pb'd fort). However, in i13 (aka everyone is the same) almost any build will be able to generate enough tohit+acc to hit def toons while solo.

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I dont believe the same i12 builds, i.e. Fire Blasters, can generate the same kind of dmg now, that when facing a def based toon made it instakill. they'll have to work at it.

if anything defense based toons i think would be worried more about melees, mainly SS, because of there dmg potential if they are able to hit.

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Yes you are right, fire blasters aren't 2-3 shotting anymore, but they drastically increased the amount of toons that can 4 shot with damage = activation formula. Bare in mind part of the reason you don't see as many people being insta-vaporized is the free res that they get and those that didn't get it had high def+high elusivity. Def toons have 10% free res - psy users, rad blast, sonic blast, some of the melee sets like SS are going to cream def and so will fire and ice blasters still along with most sets now.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I guess it doesn't really matter as so many def users just hide until their tier 9 is up, so that won't really make much difference, they'll still be pretty hard to hit.

We/they did. I think there are like 6 left now. If that wasn't the goal then they couldn't have succeeded better had they tried. I came back due to MA and haven't touched pvp in some time.

MA drew me back, but is so far much less robust than I was hoping and had built it up to be in my mind due to the issue delay and devoting an entire issue to it.

Unfortunately the "everyone is the same" approach to design is now spilling out of the pvp testbed and into the pve game which is frustratingly unnecessary.

Anyway, that is neither here nor there. I apologize to the OP for steering the ship astray and I apologize to Arcana for speaking ill of her in front of her disciples. I knew what I brought up would be sensitive, but didn't realize it would be so touchy it would cause browbeating, bullying, and personal threats. Point taken.

gl everyone and now back to your regularly scheduled OP's topic "Powers Vision"

before anyone jumps in and says something about aim+bu being used recall that the dr tohit cap is ~30% and most builds can hit about 25% pretty easily. All builds w/ aim can hit the limit.

Additionally since i13 most pvp'ers have been building for excessive acc bonuses (both in power and global) to even have a hope of hitting def toons. A power slotted with 80% acc and the build having 70% global acc is not uncommon.

These toons and the ones several tiers below in build power will be hitting most def toons easily. Def is once again not going to be very effective except likely even worse than in i12.

This is because in i12 you could get def so high that only a few solo builds could hit you (namely blasters, but some others), or they would need team buffs (ie pb'd fort). However, in i13 (aka everyone is the same) almost any build will be able to generate enough tohit+acc to hit def toons while solo.

or at least that's what the numbers are indicating for any mediocre to good pvp build when I look at them.

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Meh, does anything make sense under the new system?

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[censored] no.

I12 made more sense than this piece of [censored] we have now.

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i12 was actually pretty close, it needed some things done pretty badly, but the overall "team" philosophy was almost there.

Course pve being balanced so every whiner and noob alike can solo any build (in an MMO lol) and then trying to have team based balance in pvp obviously created some discord.

i13 shift toward to solo play was and is retarded. I don't think squishies getting +elusivity instead of free res is a good idea, but then again giving free res was horrible too.

Everyone one and the same is some of the worst MMO designing I've personally seen; especially when the opposite was true the previous issue.

By giving free anything in pvp they admitted defeat at being able to balance pvp at all.

lol I think you believe you have far more impact than you actually do. Defibrilator, smelling salts; I have to give you points for your sense of humor. I do find your personal threats quite intimidating, like the blue jay that sits outside and squawks at me on weekends

gj throwing Castle or whoever is responsible for DR under the bus and suggesting he is unable to properly balance elusivity in all its complexity and DR. Bite the hand that feeds you right off... I'm well aware they didn't use your exact numbers, hopefully the reported 10% it has been set to now (cough, might as well be 0 ) works a bit better.

Forgive me if that isn't the correct value, I haven't pvp'd in months now since that pond was poisoned.

Anyway, just because I can build a house doesn't mean I should build the city bridge. Do me a personal favor and don't use pvp as a testbed for your ideas anymore. You're a beloved pve asset (yes even by me) but I don't ask my dentist to transplant my kidney. Pve can be completely governed by spreadsheets as it is entirely static. PvP is a fluid an ever-evolving creature. You need to live it to know it and you need to know it to improve it and then you dig into the numbers. PvP is similar across all games so knowledge is generally transferable.

The problem is you don't understand pvp and neither does Castle which is why it has tanked. Maybe your elusivity legacy can be salvaged in pvp, but the newest patch seems to be leaning toward its removal.

You are a pve expert, maybe the most knowledgeable non-red name active, but that is where the train stops. I think I speak for most of the long time pvp'ers that bailed recently in that we didn't presume to know what was best for your area of the game and we would have appreciated if you had shown the same level of respect.

On a more personal note, you must be pretty dang old. I remember using the internet in grade 8 or 9 (gulp 14 yrs ago. I'm too old to be playing games still )and it was pretty new then for the general public. Then again I did live in smaller area, so maybe some places already had it for a while.

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Yeah the problem....our problem...is that we might not get to the point where this game is finally fixed to the point of actual playability. We seem to agree that it will take them like a year to fix even something as simple as elusivity. With those new games coming out, there isn't even a guarantee that this game will be alive in a year. It's currently still a cash cow for NCSoft. I believe it's the second biggest source of revenue behind GuildWars. But the upcoming competiton will surely change that.

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Definitely. I don't think playing dress up with our toons and now enemy toons is enough to maintain any kind of sustainable competitive advantage.

MA seems like it could be a golden ticket, but the current edition of it is pretty weak. I don't think they have years to improve it either.

Every 'feature' in this game is only half complete whether it be pvp, base building, modding, raiding, loot, market etc. Not every game offers everything that cox does, but cox doesn't do a good job on anything it does offer, so unless you take advantage of a ton of their packages we will likely find better games elsewhere.

The only thing holding me back right now is that I really like supers and I have played so much fantasy games in the past that they don't interest me anymore. I suspect a lot of people are like me and just waiting for either CO or DCUO .

The dev i13 vision of "everything the same" is now spilling over into pve too which has people getting pretty fired up. I'm sure if Castle could he'd jam DR into the pve game too.

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So umm...why even leave elusivity in the game at all? If the value is so low that it will not make ANY difference in any scenario, what is the point of all that extra code? Just get rid of it, and don't confuse people any further.

I mean, that's if the devs' goal really is to drive away as many people from PvP as possible. All jokes aside, I'm really starting to think that's the goal.

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Castles goal is to get an equal number of ATs and sets into PvP, that means [censored] anything thats outperforming others and pulling things down to the lowest common denominator. As it stands his retarded design has pool power attacks beating ANY primary/secondary attack which is rediculous.

The good news though is Champions Online will be out soon, even though I dont see myself playing CO for any great length of time it will do untill DCU is out which is currently sounding sweet with interactive PvP missions (and SOE know exactly what not to do to chase away subscribers after the SWG debacle)

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The problem is that you may as well just be asking someone from the SIM's to be balancing pvp. They could create the same dartboard that Castle is using and they might not be so blinded by their previous work that they might actually 'listen' to what pvp'ers want. At the very least they wouldn't recruit a pve'er to make important balance decisions like Castle did.

lol blind leading the blind; that usually works out well.

Ya the newest screens/vid for CO doesn't look half bad. I hated the early art style they were going with, but it looks like they may have abandoned it, or at least partially.

Dcuo has my hopes up as well.

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So defence being a joke in PVP is OK, but being slightly Over adjusted (and tweakable) is ruining PvP ?

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Defense being a (tweakable) joke in pvp was NOT ok and neither was making it grossly OP'd (and still tweakable) and now in i14 back to being a joke (and still tweakable).

lol slightly overadjusted. Anyway, I apologize this was the wrong time to bring this up. I just thought it appropriate to hang everyone's dirty laundry out in light of her feeling that was ok to do to me.

I'll shamble back to the pvp forums and wallow in the sludge they left us to play with there. Maybe in pvp 3.0 they'll bring in someone from hello kitty island adventure to add ideas, proly work out about as well.

take care.

I'd hold off on doing anything with a fort or widow cause they are now gutting elusivity to where it will be pretty useless. So full swing from being OP'd.

They'll eventually get it right, course they haven't yet. Maybe in pvp 3.0 they'll do another "bring your kid to work day" and let another player from the pve sector balance the PvP game. They are clearly are out of ideas about how to balance pvp and have even attempted to shift away from a team pvp approach to a solo approach in i13. Which of course fell flat on its face.

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Now, am I in favor of publishing such documents anyway? Absolutely not. First, we have the melee range slotting issue of the past. Even for something *that* obvious, we had players arguing that it should be allowed. Just imagine all the design document rules the devs would have to be arguing over on the forums and in PM for years after such documents were published. Second, at the moment we have players making the claim that Castle promised [u]never[u] to change existing powers to make them immune from recharge buffs, and the actual fact that he said that decision was subject to change in the future if game conditions changed is legal technical mumbo-jumbo.


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Preach it. You sit with venerable poise atop a sandstone pedestal and it is awe inspiring. Your complete disregard for the crumbling foundation and the subsequent fall empowers us all.

Thank goodness your throng of followers don't pvp, or else they'd be exposed to your legacy failing worse than anything put into the game so far.

Preach on, but do us a favor and just leave it at preaching in the future, I don't think I could handle your deific touch damaging another aspect of the game like your elusivity idea did to pvp.

Your services as a dev interpreter and personal assistant to the stars is invaluable, so please don't take what I'm saying the wrong way. I really hope you got MMO pvp development out of your system and hopefully the devs don't do another "bring your kid to work and let them run stuff day" in the near future.

Other than that keep on keepin on, your pve efforts are always appreciated.

OP, your idea is a pipe dream, it is unrealistic to imagine a business publicly releasing their plans for the upcoming year in such detail. I'd be happy if they just made use of the "known issues" a bit better and if the patch note writers were occasionally given complete and detailed information. Not to say I dislike your idea, or your intent behind suggesting it, but it just isn't realistic.

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Maybe they are testing the extremes. Hopefully, the final result would be somewhere in the middle.

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this is probably the case, but we all know that their "testing cycles" take at least 1 yr, more often 2 yrs. Amazingly though, the cycle of elusivity being set high was unusually short (only 1 issue), so it must have been off the charts OP'd in datamining.

Like more OP'd than gun drone even, which is pretty crazy.

It is hard to make small adjustments when the only tool you own is a sledgehammer.

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Said they would NOT go back and give the SoW treatment to existing powers. HUNDREDS are being set to ignore recharge. Ok with that?

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First of all, misleading - not to hundreds of powers. And real smooth linking to Red Tomax's Dev Digest Database - did you actually READ what you linked to?

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I've been considering addressing this myself. The hundreds is simply hyperbolic, but I suppose "TENS of powers" just doesn't have the same rhetorical punch. Pets are not that ubiquitous.

Then the links. Yes, Castle said they had no plans at the time to give anything the SOW treatment...in 2007.

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ok, now that Kosmos has shown us all how to count (I too use my fingers and toes ) I suppose I should address this.

btw 247 = hundreds, or so I was taught in school. Admittedly that was some time ago, so maybe that has changed.

At any rate I'll just sum up my interpretation of my sig and the quotes in it. If you feel like discussing it further PM me. If you feel it is slander, report it and it will likely get edited by a mod whether you are accurate or not. If you feel that compelled to stand up for someone fully capable of fighting his own battles then so be it.

Anyway, just so we are clear I'm not calling him out as in "omg you broke teh truce!!! you lied to me!!! what you said is written in stone!!!" like some would have you believe. They are of course entitled to their opinion no matter how contrived. I expect to sway them as much as they should expect to sway me.

Ok (sorry, rambling). Castle's quote has a lot of conditions attached (it also has a really funny joke in it, but that is another discussion altogether); notably "if the game changes" and of course "this is my guideline - aka if I change my mind"

We'd be stupid to believe it is acceptable to hold him to this statement given how rapidly MMO's evolve and surely things have changed right? I mean I'm a logical person and I do have moments where some light sparks in my brain.

Oh sure, lots has changed except well.... pets could already be 'creatively slotted' to improve their personal attack rate and psuedo-pets of doom like VS, LS and of course the power that keeps him up having sweaty nightmares because it is so OP'd - gun drone could already be 'exploited' too.

Yes RIP sets made the issue more prominent, but the game did not change because everything RIP does could already be done.

What changed - likely after a sleepless night of getting pwned by gun drone - was his perception of the issue.

So he enacted the "unless I change my mind part". Big deal right? It kinda is. Changing your mind when the technical caveats aren't met is sort of unfair. We've probably all done it though and he is only human, but that does not excuse accountability.

Anyway, if you want to discuss it PM me. I'm a friendly guy and up until this change I always been constructive and informational. Unfortunately Castle has rubbed me the wrong way with i13 pvp and now this, so in my mind he is in the dog-house.

from that same quote I think it seems fair if a handful of powers were treated this way and he prepped us for that by including accolades and vet powers (for instance), but to slap it onto hundreds of powers is just shocking - an overload if you will. I think not many people actually realize just how many powers this is being applied to.

take care all.

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unhh can we have a secondary and/or primary respec instead lol.

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No.

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k

unhh can we have a secondary and/or primary respec instead lol.

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I appreciate you not taking the opportunity to antagonize me further it is noble of you.

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Honestly, I walk that line very closely, and I consider it a sign of respect. I do wish I could clarify the argument, that it isn't really LS that took a beating because of the AI, or true pets that were nerfed because of LS, but it's kind of both. And I think you get that. There really isn't anything further to say that isn't rehashing old arguments.

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I definitely get that. But I guess I'm sort of with Ryu in that they can choose to exempt things that never were bugged and weren't the target of the nerf, but they are now choosing consistency when applying an inconsistent nerf and when they haven't defined any pet consistency via slotting.

It is confusing and just feels like they are arbitrarily picking and choosing based on convenience rather than logic, thematics or even precedence.

it's all good though. Ok take care guys, gl with this issue. I gotta go find a new toon to level up and pending that fails I'll just take a break until the next round of proliferation is complete.