Justaris

While I can see your point, it doesn't necessarily follow that the empath is going to feel the pain of the enemies he/she is battling. First off, there's robots, zombies and (arguably) mutants and 'aliens' from other dimensions - all of whom either lack emotions or might be too alien for a receptive to pick up.

As for regular humans, it's conceivable that an empath could take action to defend his/her comrades despite the pain felt at causing harm to others. That's rather heroic when you think about it.

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Thanks, very helpful.

As for this:

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Also, please don't identify yourself as a "healer" or fall under the false assumption that heals are the best form of team support available to a Defender.

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Don't recall doing that, but thanks for the reminder? Just wondering why some other folks' heal powers were stronger than mine.

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As mentioned, it's most likely either people using Power Build Up / Power Boost or it's someone using a more powerful heal power such as Transfusion, Twilight Grasp or Absorb Pain. You just describe yourself as a 'healer' so it's not clear what you're actually playing, though an Empathy/something Defender is probably a fair guess. Several other Defender powersets have heals which are more powerful than Healing Aura or Heal Other.

Generally speaking, investing in healing exclusively as a form of team support is pretty lacking anyway, which is why you get the replies you do. It's less important to get the highest green numbers possible and more important to be well-rounded with buffs, debuffs, controls and/or attacks on top of the heals.

Yes, granted, and I enjoy the control over what we do and where we do it that being team leader/organizer gives me, which is part of why I lead pickup teams myself. I suppose it would be more proper to say that currently there is no substantive in-game reward to being team leader: no badge, no numerical bonus. Any benefit is strictly abstract in nature - which is probably the way it should stay.

What game are you playing? I've been running mission teams all week, just did a TF this last weekend. Teams are there if you look for them. As for the AE "nerf", that's not a nerf, that's a bug fix. Bugs get fixed, that's how things go in any well-run game and this is no exception.

If you're upset you can no longer exploit the bug, well, that's too bad, if you've truly been playing as long as you say then you should have known better. This game is still going strong and is likely to be getting even better in the not too distant future. Seems to me that NCSoft is doing alright.

No, I'm not, because there've been more buffs than nerfs and plenty of free new content steadily coming out for us, the players. Someone not too long ago went to the trouble of cataloging the buffs and nerfs in the history of the game to demonstrate this truth.

As for the recent AE "nerf", when an exploit is corrected, that's not a nerf. That's a fix. Exploiting bugs is cheating, it's not a playstyle and it's not acceptable. I'm just sorry that it took so long for the Devs to take action to shut it down.

I think it's far, far too early to get into overly excited or overly DOOM over this. It wasn't even supposed to be announced yet and it's obviously a long way from seeing even the test server. There's been a lot of concerns about the way mixing the ATs would affect balance on both sides, but it's not remotely clear how (if?) this system intends to address that.

Until that and many other things are known, it's far too early to be planning out one's blaster's career in the Rogue Isles or worrying that one's Scrapper won't be able to get teams because of the Brutes. For all we know you might have to go through some process that changes ATs in order to take the final step in sideswitching - assuming that switching sides means you get to inhabit the 'actual' other side that the other faction does and not an alternate other side in a separate world. There's a great deal we don't know yet.

To play Devil's Advocate, however, I'd say that broadcast recruiting isn't necessarily the worst method. All methods have their pros and cons and so long as you understand those, it's all fair game.

If you have a solid SG with stable, drama-free leadership and dependable officers, then broadcast recruiting makes sense. At that point what you're looking for is bodies to fill the ranks. Hopefully some of them distinguish themselves and stick around as friends and longtime members, but if most don't that's fine too so long as they bring in the Prestige.

You establish a clear-cut system for activity and promotion, you have regular events, and everybody's happy. Members recruited in this way are regularly kicked for inactivity or just up and vanish, and that's fine. They're easy enough to replace and you pick up a few more long-term folks each round if you're lucky.

The benefit of this system is that it creates the impression of a large, active SG and it's a great Prestige earner. The downside is that the signal to noise ratio is quite poor and a vast majority of the players you recruit will be duds.

On the flip side, a teaming system in which you extend invites only to solid, interesting players whom you've met and played with has a much higher retention rate. You know them, they know you, and you have a far higher chance of keeping those people. Those people are also far more likely to care enough about the SG to take on extra responsibility as officers and help you run the things. The downside of this approach is that it's very time-intensive. It's high quality but low quantity.

There's other methods as well - hosting events such as costume contests, badge tours or various TFs gets your name out there and may win you some recruits that way, with varying quality. Forum-based recruits tend to be more reliable than broadcast, but can run the gamut.

Seriously, if you don't care enough to give your suggestion some basic composition, why should anyone else care enough to hack through it. If Eis hadn't translated this I never would have even read it - and probably neither would most other people.

As for what you've said - they've already greatly relaxed the SG base pathing rules and this has led to an explosion of what you can do with the Base Editor. When was the last time you played with it? Because you can do some very impressive things now.

While more items would certainly be welcome, there's quite a bit that can be done with what we have, especially now that we can stack and intersect things in a whole new way, allowing players to 'build' decorations in a way not previously possible. Give it a shot. Read up in the Base Construction forums if you can't figure it out on your own.

Adding MA terminals to the base just contributes to emptying out the zones - the same with arena terminals, Market access or direct mission access. It's not a good idea because it empties out the zones. Anyone in a decent SG never sets foot in any zone again for more than a minute or two. Most of the game is instanced anyway, but this moves things to another level of insular.

There is a medium. If you're going to post asking for changes to the game, do your research before posting. It's called the Turbine Generator/Ley Line Tap and it's crafted. Same goes for control, though that must be unlocked with a badge (an easily obtained badge).

Um, anyone who knows the game would tell you pretty much what you've already been told. Because they're right. You haven't addressed any of the points that were brought up - instead, you seem to feel it's easier just to suggest that they're wrong because they don't play the game (Why? Because they post on the forums? Uh huh, right. I'd wager most of the people posting in this thread not only play the game, but have been playing actively for longer than you've had an account).

The fact is, people don't fight over the star because a vast majority of players don't want the star. The effort of putting together and maintaining teams is trivial, but for many players it's too much to bother with and they don't want to deal with it. However, currently there is no advantage to being team leader. Your suggestion would change that and the result would more than likely be what others above have predicted.

No, thanks. /unsigned

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What is a "Teaming Day?"

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Like say, you always have free time to play on Saturdays. You talk with some others in your SG and they do also. So, you set a time to meet and play together on Saturday each week. That's a teaming day.



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Pretty much this, but you can adopt any definition that works for you. It might be TF Saturdays, or Tuesday Night Missions, or whatever. The point is to have a regular event you can put in your MOTD so that members, even those who have just joined, can see that there's stuff going on and have a chance to get in on it.

I'd also agree with Lemur that a high turnover broadcast recruiting strategy may be a big part of your woes. If you recruit in that way, you're going to get a lot of people that join and then quit, or join and then never log in again. You'll also get a few that are on at odd hours or run in hide all the time. Probably 10% (and that's generous) of those you recruit will actually stay with the SG as active, contributing members. And that's just members - of those, most aren't going to want any further responsibility and will look to you to do all the work of setting up events and organizing playtime. It's a largely thankless, behind-the-scenes task. Focus on building a strong, small SG first and push for expansion once you have a solid corps of officers behind you. Trying to run a large SG all by yourself will burn you out (or drive you insane).

You almost have to rate Granite separate from Stone, since it's incompatible with the other armors and makes such a drastic difference. If you're considering Stone Armor as a whole, though, obviously it's going to come in #1 for survivability, trading a lack of maneuverability and a hefty recharge debuff to get that #1 spot (though that can be largely mitigated with Speed Boost).

As for the others, it's going to vary based on what you're fighting and the situation in general. More survivable versus three 8-man spawns on Invincible or more survivable versus AV and Giant Monsters? More survivable versus Carnies or more survivable versus Malta? There's too many variables. Some powersets will pull ahead in some niches (Dark's great against Psy, for instance) and drop behind in others.

Ranking's just kind of silly given how variable it is.

Also, encourage other people to do things like Teaming Day. Not many will, but those who do are your officers. The key to any good active SG is officers.

You can't do it all yourself, you just can't. You should probably be doing at least one event (such as a TF or a "teaming day") every two weeks or so at minimum, but where things will really take off is when other people are also doing events in about that timeframe. This way nobody feels pressured (no one likes to think of their SG as a second job) and yet there's still plenty of stuff for the average member to log on and do during any given week.

If you can manage get just a couple reasonably reliable folks on board with you, you're good to go. Just keep in mind that most of your recruits (the ones who even stick around) will be of the 'log on and play' variety and won't be looking for the added time investment that officership represents. It may take wading through several dozen recruits to come up with one decent officer.

Also beware of anyone constantly asking for promotions. Good officers want to get involved and don't do it so they can have a different meaningless title next to their names. Someone pressuring you to give them a promotion may have serious entitlement issues and bring needless drama into your group - or they may just be trying to rob you blind.

Yeah, what Aett said. Let 'em play around with your characters some and then let them make one or two of their own and see just what the character creator has to offer. Then let 'em go back to looking exactly like everyone else in their other MMO.*





*Yes, it's hyperbole, but not by all that much in many cases.

1) New villain zones & content are long overdue and I agree that redside needs more. At the least, an SF to fill the 30-35 hole would be nice.

2) The Cathedral of Pain Trial won't be back until they can figure out how to close the exploits that went rampant when it was live the first time. They've released restrictions on bases, which is great since we don't have to follow raid rules anymore. They'll have to reintroduce base raids (hopefully by having two kinds of bases so the rest of us can keep our awesome non-raid ready bases) before they can bring the CoP Trial back.

It's something that was always advertised as part of CoV and it really does need to come back sooner rather than later, but right now realistically it's months away at best.

3) Raising the level cap is, always has been, and continues to be a terrible idea. I'm sure someone will copy/paste the long list of reasons why at some point, or you could just take the trouble to do a search and find them for yourself.

Battle not with brewha, lest ye become a brewha.

And if you answer the stupid, the stupid answers also unto you.

So you found a good Mission Architect arc.

Where could you post that? Hmm.... the Mission Architect forum, maybe?

Black Helicopter has two separate lines, one of which is a Cap-Mercy line.

Touché.

I'd go into the standard explanation on how it's not as simple as "Press X to fix Bug Y" and there's a great deal of work to be done to figure out just why Bug Y is occurring and resolving it without causing Bugs A, B and C in the process, but somehow I think that'd go right over his head.

Not to mention it's a 'solution' to a nonexistent problem. Just because you're not bombarded with blind invites upon login doesn't mean teams are impossible to find. With a bit of effort, teams can be fruitfully formed on any server. It takes a bit more effort on servers with lower population, but not nearly so much more than Dev intervention is called for.

Ah, irony.

Well, it's largely unnecessary here. We already have bars on the contacts which serve essentially this function, but there's really nothing for reputation with whole factions to do because our game isn't laid out in a setting which has travel between various nations (like another you may be thinking of). The only nations we have are Paragon City (part of the US) and the Rogue Isles, and we can't travel between them except in instances. So we really don't need this.

That said, developing a grudge against a certain group or a close working relationship with another, with in-game effects, might be an interesting addition.

If he sinks, he's a witch. If he floats, he weighs the same as a duck.

Belongs in Suggestions Forum.

The model for him is for the Cathedral of Pain Trial, in which you do fight Rularuu or at least an aspect thereof. That said, since it's been offline for a long time now and likely to remain so at least until base raids are fixed if not longer, perhaps it's time to use him for something else and revamp the Trial at a later date.

Interesting and creative notion, though.