Fulmens

I generally get my entire health bar back from hitting two guys. It's hard for me to believe that's an underpowered heal, taken over the entire career of the character.

Going Rogue, for me, falls under Infernokrusher syndrome.

tl;dr version: Some people decided "Slipstream" was a lame SF genre, and should be replaced by "Infernokrusher", SF about running people over with monster trucks. On fire. Someone associated with Games Workshop objected to the name on the grounds that GW had a magazine named "Inferno." I suggested T-shirts that said "Sue Dante."

Thread contains NSFW text including suggestions of giant robot monster slashfic.

I'm sure, but cannot produce proof, that IO's are weighted by individual recipe and not by category. Thus, you are dramatically more likely to get a Miracle: Recovery than a Miracle: End/Rech . (When we start doing L20+ rolls, we will find out if my words are tasty.) I believe that the weighting of the recipes is also fairly coarse- perhaps weighted on a scale of 1 to 5?

A very rough estimate of weightings gives me around 121 "points" of weighting, so each "point" is around 5 or 5.1. So we would see clumping around 25, 20, 15, 10 and 5- with a lot of noise on each, and more on the lower numbers. Looks like that to me.

I don't know about anyone else, Harkness, but I stopped trying to understand you after you said

Pinnacle is the drunk server and proud of it.

There's an even more ridiculous amount of inf floating around Wents' and the Black Market now. And you can still Frankenslot a character for the cost of one good IO. Not even a spectacular IO.

Point 1: You don't get either "a better ratio" or "better tools".
Regardless of whether the base ratio is fair or not (I tend to think "fair" for reasons I'll get into below): I would expect that the ratio is a single number in a spreadsheet somewhere, or a single constant in a #define statement, or whatever. I realize that I'm making predictions about code that I haven't seen, but I would be greatly surprised if it took more than an hour to find and change it. "New tools" seems like a much, much larger project (programmer-months, probably.)

Point 2: I think the ratio is close to fair.
The devs have to take the most severe cases into account. There are people who make 50 billion inf a year playing this game. There are people who can generate 2 billion a week and have done so, repeatedly. I think I make a couple hundred million a week, and I don't spend that much time on it. There's a lot of people who could buy a base worth of prestige already. PVPers, Marketeers, Farmers, these are some rich people and there's a lot of them. In fact, since most of the inf farmers make is from drops in one form or another, you can run in SG mode and it doesn't hurt your earnings significantly. You might be able to make a case that the inf-prestige ratio is overly generous.

I personally did some experiments by funding "half price Prestige" and I think most of the people who converted at 250-to-1 are also people who would have converted at 500-to-1. I don't see a philosophical problem with 250-to-1; I think it would increase the amount converted and remove inf from the game, which is a goal of mine.

It's interfering with his coherence, apparently.

OK, very approximate build on my L36 Fire/Ice blaster [for Noght]:

Fire Blast: 6 frankenslots (overslotted to work well at low levels)
Fire Breath: 5 frankenslots
Fireball: 5 frankenslots
Aim and Buildup: 2 slots of recharge
Blaze: 6 slots, mostly Thunderstrike
Blazing Bolt: 5 slots
Inferno: 5 slots (extra Rech)
Ice Sword: 4 slots
Ice Patch: 1 slot, rech
Shiver: 3 slots, acc/slow/rech
Sprint: 1 slot, stealth
Hover: 2 slots, speed and -KB
Flight: 1 slot
Health: 4 slots, one Regenerative Tissue + 3 heal
Stamina: 3 slots
Hasten: 2 slots

It's your really basic "Blow them up before they know you're there" blaster build.

The phrase "one hundred million influence" should probably be avoided when claiming people are giving you an extortionate exchange rate.

If you owe $100,000, you have a problem. If you owe $1.1 billion, your bank has a problem.

Ask Mr. Trump.

No matter how stupid or pointless, there is SOMEONE who will go through with any moneysaving scheme. Not very many, but saying "Nobody would do that" is almost never right.

Yeah, you should have your backup name chosen well in advance.

"Drugs are bad, mmmkay?" is one of the things that almost every comic everywhere has agreed on for the last eighty years. It's up there with "Protagonists can throw cars" in the comic consensual reality. ( My standard-reality beliefs are less rigid, but... drugs actually ARE bad. Mmmkay?)

Mr. Quizzles, I don't think Defenders did get that boost. I'm pretty sure it's always been 5.2 endurance per damage scale for everyone. We didn't have Real Numbers back then, so it was harder to tell.

Quick moment of Tomax. Same power for Blasters and Defenders, same price.

PennyPA:

They put in an across-the-board improvement in end usage for everyone when they put in ED (3-slotted Stamina gave the same results as 6-slotted Stamina used to, so the pre-stamina game got a bonus) and people continue to ask for improvements in END usage.

They put in an increase in Flight speed and people continue to ask for improvements in Flight speed.

They put in an improvement in Dark Armor performance, (several improvements) and people continue to ask for improvements in Dark Armor...

Dark Miasma, protectionwise, is enough for me if anyone else on the team is paying any attention. If I get a bonus "oh dear" button from my primary (for instance, tar patch + Psychic Scream hammers their recharge flat; Siren's Song puts most of 'em to sleep) that's gravy. I have a Dark/Psi and a Dark/Sonic that work very nicely for me.

Actually, it's for midlevel crisis- generating merits, and Rare Recipe rolls, at levels below 40. [spam] I buy sub-40 rolls for 15 million inf each, by the way. Any server, any side.[/spam]

I mostly run with a Dark/Sonic, E K Nachtmusic ,who's got some partial Thunderstrike sets [so 14% global acc.]

Decimation and Devastation. Both Acc/Dam/Rech. Both L30. Both redside. Both listed as recipes.

Symmetry, or something.

People learn about the game in stages, usually.

Stage 1: WOWbrain. "Need tank, healer, damage." Mostly concerned with figuring out what THEIR powers do, how to use the train, how to stop running out of mana, like that. We were all there once. Some of us got over it.
Stage 2: Actually noticed something someone else did that wasn't a Big Green Number or a nuke. Most commonly Kinetics, but sometimes Force Fields or rarely Rad.
Stage 3: learned some things that are common sense on the Def boards from someone else (in a SG, or from the boards, or whatever)- like "You need a Rad to take out AV's" or "The really good part of Empathy is the buffs" or something.
Stage 3.5 (optional): Found the forums, started arguing with people.
Stage 4: Started to actually learn something to do with numbers, and what various powersets do.

People in Stage 1-3 - and there are people who've played for years and are still in Stage 1, I've teamed with them- have no idea what Dark Miasma does. They're winning and they don't know why. Heck, I played Force Fields and there were a lot of people who never made the connection between little bubbles around them and suddenly winning. Force Fields is subtle to these people. You can't miss Speed Boost, and it's hard to miss Fulcrum Shift because those are your OWN orange numbers getting doubled. But "oh, my health isn't moving?" They can miss that.

EDIT: I was typing while PC Guy posted. I don't think Freedom is QUITE that bad. I do think it's worse per capita, so it's enormously worse per zone, because Freedom is so big that even if you suck, there's still someone who hasn't heard the news. If you suck on Pinnacle, everyone knows in a week. You have to get better because they won't put up with you otherwise.

Rezzing this thread to ask: If you were going to lock a character at level 33, what's the best way to 3- or 4-slot Dark Servant? Hami-Os are clearly out, of course...

Actually, the first video on Youtube that I found was a Stormie doing it. I think someone posted a bunch of Traps videos as well in this very forum a while back. And I can't guarantee a Darkity can do it ... but I'd be amazed if they could not.

While four different Defender primaries soloing an AV is not a guarantee that "defenders are good enough" ... it's a data point.

Nobody wanted to mention the videos of defenders soloing AV's, huh?

I don't even know if it counts as a scam. Point 10 is right there in black and white.

Edit: I though the artist got 15% of total value every time it changed hands. Just 15% of any profit. My bad.