Fulmens

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  1. Milady's Knight said
    [ QUOTE ]
    This is getting to be a novel

    [/ QUOTE ]

    ... and I was like "Yeah! It's great!"

    It's always nice to see someone with one actual fact, never mind several, in a discussion like this.

    Factless opinions: I agree with you that your points 6-10 almost certainly eliminate more than 4-5 create. (I was a little surprised that the 1-35 non-TF game creates as many merits as it does, but I think you said those were optimal conditions- nearly every XP thing you did created merits.)

    It'd be interesting to know what percentage of merits were created by dedicated experts [minimizing 6,9, and 10] and what percentage were created by relatively new people doing the TF for "a variety" of reasons [minimizing 7 but giving more weight to 6,9, and 10.]

    8 is the killer.
  2. ... hero or villain side?
  3. The Devs vastly underestimated people's abilities to answer a leading question like Kirk instead of Spock.

    "12 times the cost of a random roll is a really bad deal, so you should do what?"

    " Complain about the ratio and do it anyway!"
    " Work 12 times as hard!"
    " Ignore merits, because they're obviously a trap!"
    " Give up and only slot SO's!"
    " Threaten to self-destruct the ship! " (self-destroy the ship?)
  4. There are some other weird Shadow Shard reflections, I think, but I don't remember exactly what they are. I thought it was kinda neat seeing "the paragon protectors that they didn't make... but could have."
  5. I don't know if pre-merit supply of pool C's felt right because it was what we were used to, or because there is some intuitive "rightness". (I don't know how to measure rightness, but there's probably a way that I'm missing. )

    I will agree that merits had some gruesome unexpected results. Yes, I can do posi/synapse/sister psyche/citadel and get 12 rolls instead of 4. But for every one of me there's a whole lot of people going for the guaranteed LoTG. Or waiting till 50, Tragedy of the Commons-style. Or not knowing what to do with their merits, so doing NOTHING.

    I think there probably are enough "of the top end things" (by I9 standards, certainly - top end builds didn't have any purples or PVP specials) to go around if you want to put in some effort, but only when you hit level 50.

    How are you estimating "merits produce 1/3 of the total supply we used to get", by the way? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that I don't have a guess on that. There's some multiplier for "no more half hour katies", some multiplier for "people who have two hundred merits and don't know it", some multiplier for "taking the guaranteed LoTG" and some multiplier for "people who used to run Sister Psyche, and now run Sister Psyche for twice the number of recipes."

    I dunno.
  6. I don't think fixed price is the way to go. Fixed SUPPLY. One lists per hour, high bid gets it.

    That way, you see someone burning money you know they're not just ebil... for one shining hour they were the ebillest.
  7. Knight: I believe the weighting is on a 1-to-5 scale based on popularity at the time of the weighting, with some fudge factors added in. You're 5 times as likely to roll a LoTG: Recharge as a Trap of the Hunter triple.

    How much more imbalance would you like them to add?

    You can call a 50% increase (over "all good recipes") a drop in the bucket if you like. I see it as "half a bucket in the bucket" myself.

    On the salvage side, I think the most expensive tech rare was about 100K before the change; it went up to half a million or a million. I don't remember the arcane prices but I think high-end arcanes went down by half a million or a million.

    And on the costume side... well, I agree that costumes parts are fairly minor. That's why I didn't mention them in this context.
  8. Lacrymosa, earlier, said
    [ QUOTE ]
    I did notice the price of Costume Wings drop dramatically when no one bought them for the laughable price of 14mil.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    ... or else it was this. But hey, don't stop ranting on my account.
  9. Yup, my search-fu was weak. I was searching on "Cascading".

    The scariest thing about that chunk of text is, I understood it.
  10. Congrats! Random roll is random, but I choose to believe that the weighted roll table had something to do with your good luck. Thank you, Devs!
  11. By the way, a handy tip for stalkers with Parapros: Don't start with an assassin strike. Scrap then down to about 1/4 life and then placate/assassinate. No pesky Tier 9!
  12. Rad/Psi defender. The Plan B is "slow them all tremendously". (Lingering Radiation, Psychic Scream.) Plan C is "put a stack of three inspirations- Break Free, big defense, big defense" in your fourth inspiration column, and just hit F4 three times." (Plan C works on any character you play.)

    For Rad/Sonic Plan B is generally Siren's Song, but consider that everyone does a lot more damage if you're on a Rad/Sonic.

    Neither Plan B works on archvillains; that's why you have plan C.

    Plan D is generally filling slot 5 with an Awaken, Break Free, Catch A Breath, and some sort of big Luck.
  13. Someone's marketeering in the market forums!

    Delightful to see. Carry on, my good villain.
  14. In other news: JDouble, you are going on /ignore. You don't have a shot at the arguments, so you're taking a shot at the posters.


  15. Milady's Knight said, in the same post:
    [ QUOTE ]
    1) With the exception of costume recipes (which are cosmetic only and don't change any game function), every patch that the devs have put into place that have any thing at all to do with "loot" and the market have been to make the best "loot" more rare not less rare.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    and
    [ QUOTE ]
    the MA was massively over rewarding tickets and by extrapolation "leet loot."

    [/ QUOTE ]

    I guess the TL;DR version of this is "They make changes both ways. Saying they ONLY lower supply is inaccurate."

    Three instances:

    1) Adding magic salvage to Council and DE did nothing except make "leet loot" more common. Before you say "Salvage isn't what I mean" consider that in the I9 timeframe if you wanted an Impervium Armor: Resistance, you spent three times as much on the Enchanted Impervium as you did on the recipe. I picked up several Psi Resistances for a million each, and the salvage was MUCH higher. My point is that while the juicy items have changed as the market changed, those counted as leet loot at ONE point. And supply has gone up repeatedly on them.

    2) Adding tickets BY ITS NATURE makes "leet loot" more common. It removes trash and replaces it with treasure. Your points in 3b, i through iv, are true and not going anywhere.

    3) The devs weighted the Rare Recipe drop table so you get about 50% more of the good stuff. People on Test who did hundreds of rolls went from "40% good, 60% crap" to "60% good, 40% crap" .

    They've made things tougher in some ways, easier in others, and sometimes they did it on purpose. But it hasn't been a one-way ratchet, Knight.
  16. I need to start a "things I learned from burning 10,000,000,000 influence" thread.

    Because I tried a lot of the things JDouble thought would work, and they didn't work... culminating in spending over 2 billion infamy on Respec Recipes and not moving the price an inch. It's ok, I got most of it back.
  17. well, I'm out of the bidding. Jojo, you have the contract.
  18. My brain went "Mind probe" and my fingers went "Subdual". Mind Probe is a fine power, but I think I'd probably go with Assault instead.

    ... is there a specific reason why you need that exact level of recharge?
  19. Fulmens

    New Player

    I'm going to go into a little more detail on Defenders, because that's what most people "heal and buff" with. Specifically, I'm going to talk about healing and buffing.

    Buffs and debuffs are VERY MUCH MORE POWERFUL THAN HEALS- but they don't get there until, roughly, level 22. In most cases. The example I use- not the "Best" defender, but the best example- is Force Fields. A Force Field defender can add 45% Defense to everyone on the team, which [through bizarre math] means that enemies will have 1/10 the chance to hit them, compared to a completely unprotected character. To rephrase: 90% of would-be hits just... don't. An environment that would normally kill you in six seconds won't kill you for a minute.

    The equivalent amount of healing would be to heal everyone on the team for ten times their hit points every fight.

    Oh, and that Force Fielder has 75% or more of their time free to blast enemies and otherwise engage in their other hobbies.

    To be fair, at level 12 that Force Fielder only stops about 60 or 70% of hits. So makes the team two or three times as tough.

    I understand that in some games, if you're a "healer" it's a full time job and if you stop healing, the team dies. This game is not those games.

    Welcome to CoX!
  20. Sorry about the inconvenience. If you let me know what server and roughly what time you play, I'd be happy to get on and help form a team. I have low level characters nearly everywhere.
  21. Architect Entertainment [AE] system is the new thing in the game. You can make your own missions, write stories, play other people's missions.

    Naturally enough many people's first action was to make something to allow powerlevelling and farming (basically, find the easiest enemies for your max-level character, make the most repetitive content, and repeat until your eyes bleed.)

    There are good missions in the AE, but there are a LOT of bad ones, for a lot of different reasons.

    There is at least a year of "regular content" in the game, if you stick around that long.

    Welcome to the Rogue Isles! Check your watch and wallet.
  22. I'm one of those people who you can hope gives you the money.

    References.
  23. My experience is with the Defender version, so not a perfect match.

    It's good for single tough targets, and it's good if you don't care who you aggro (say, you're inside Force Fields or something.) Other than that, it's kind of unimpressive. It's got no attention span- you'll probably never hit the same guy twice with it unless there is only one guy TO hit. I used to say it has about the offensive power of an Empathy Defender.
  24. Assault would give you 10.5% more damage and NOT cost you 100 million inf.

    Force of Nature would let you survive otherwise unsurvivable things.

    I'd much rather have either of those than Scare, and even Subdual is something I could probably live without.
    I'm not coming down from the mountain saying "THOU SHALT" or anything, but that's how I'd do it.
  25. Fulmens

    New To Game

    I don't PVP, so can't offer any useful advice on that.

    Here is a mini-guide to Blasting I wrote up so I don't have to repeat myself quite so much. There's my PVE advice.

    Welcome to the game!