Lothic

I'm not strictly against this suggestion for people who seem to need it. But I will counter that it has never taken me more than about 5 minutes from the time I start looking for Tips until the time I get one. I have "hunted" for new tips like this at least 20 times that I can think of so far.

The key for getting them quickly seems to be street sweeping the highest level bosses you can handle. Based on my experience it never takes more than maybe 2 or 3 +1/+2 bosses to drop a Tip for me.

Perhaps instead of this suggestion people should just be made aware that the easiest way to get Tips is to fight the biggest guys you can find.

As games like this age there's always a tendency for the Devs to allow a certain amount of "power creep" to accommodate their top-heavy playerbase. This happens because a growing majority of players become veterans and constantly demand more challenge and correspondingly more power. Years ago when people first started to suggest some kind of "Automatic Stamina/Fitness" I suspected that it would eventually happen in some form or fashion because that was an obvious way to boost everyone. I didn't strictly "predict" that Inherent Fitness would happen, but let's just say when I heard that it was coming I was not surprised in the least.

So is Inherent Fitness good thing? Time will tell of course. I do think the general difficulty of the game will need to be tweaked upward to accommodate it. With more power the game really needs to be made a bit harder across the board to match it. This game is relatively easy already and if the challenges aren't raised to meet it it's going to be even that much more simple with everyone having Inherent Fitness as a common denominator.

I'm one of those folks who didn't really think we NEEDED Inherent Fitness, but I understand why it happened and I realize most people will love it. Like most things in this game I'll adapt to it and move forward.

As I mentioned before I played a few years with CC and now a few years without it. I feel I have the experience to truly understand the difference between those two build scenarios. All I can say (based on my opinion of course) is that I definitely feel I improved my overall gameplay without it.

I initially took the same tack you did with the idea of wanting to "maximize control" on my controller. Theoretically there's nothing wrong with that mindset. But in practice I realized that Fire/Rad offers so many tools to both effectively control and do damage that more often than not CC proved to be either a limiting factor or an overkill factor, either of which was less than ideal. There is a balance between controlling and damaging and to my mind I realize now that a CC build leans a bit too conservatively towards control. That amount of conservatism is frankly unnecessary.

Bottomline there's nothing strictly wrong with CC and I'm sure people who still use it do well with it. I just think it's pushing it to say if you don't use the Hotfeet/CC combo you're playing it "wrong" or some-such. I prefer to realize the powerset combo has more flexibility than that.

I admit I thought that 20 million INF value was a bit steep at first myself.

But to embellish on what I mentioned earlier each time I've used an A-merit to roll for 5 rare recipes I've been able to craft and sell those 5 for a combined 50-100 million INF on the markets. Obviously there is some randomness to it and I'm sure it's possible to roll unlucky and lose INF on the deal (assuming you choose to spend 20 million on a conversion). All I can say is that I've seen nothing but net gains so far.

The part that worries me about these nukes being considered "an exploit" by the Devs (if that is indeed what happened here) is that it leads us towards the "any legitimate usage of a power can be considered an exploit in any given situation" death-spiral.

My guess is that if any group of players spams several dozen copies of -any- power at -any- AV it's going to be a major overkill regardless. Is that necessarily the players' or power's fault? Does that mean any power could be banned if it's used enough times in one place? I just wish (for once) the Devs would fix a problem with the finesse of a scalpel instead of the hamfistedness of a sledgehammer. This power ban has all the hallmark smells of the Devs effectively telling us, "There's something going on we don't like but we don't really know how to fix the specific problem so let's just randomly nerf/ban stuff until it all goes away."

That is, as they say, a really crappy way to run a railroad...

I'm sure they could do something like this that would be balanced enough. The problem is that people would figure out which ones are the most useful ones for specific ATs/Powersets and no one "in their right mind" would ever use anything else.

This idea falls into the same trap that would happen if they allowed costume items to grant in-game bonuses. Everyone would figure out which items provided the best combo of bonuses and everyone would end up looking identical.

Therefore this is not technically a bad idea - obviously it works in other games.
It's just one that I feel would ultimately lead to less diversity in this particular game system.

I'd prefer our Devs attempt to crush their MMO gaming competition as completely as possible. Since this is one of the few things this game's competition actually handles well I think there's more than enough justification to spend a little bit of time on it here. *shrugs*

Well I don't think anyone, even the OP, was talking about "giving them away" for free. Even though I don't agree with the "attach them to the purchase of the existing Super Booster Packs retroactively" idea at least you would have had to spend the money on those Booster Packs to begin with. That's not exactly giving them away. I still think they'd be far more suited to be a part of -future- booster packs but either way the Devs would be getting EXTRA money for them.

Yes I don't think anyone was denying that was a method to get it. But even if you aren't personally involved with the teams running the raid you'd still be at the mercy of some group of people doing the raid to drop the shields in the first place. Basically a raid has to happen to get this badge, period.

Apparently (due to time zone considerations) the OP is having trouble even finding active raids in the first place. *shrugs*

Yeah I've got a Peacebringer (without the Glowing Touch ally heal power) who has a few thousand points healed to her credit.
I figure it can only be from missions like this one. *shrugs*

Bingo!

I've only bothered to do this a few times so far (trade in an A-merit for 5 random level 50 recipes) but each time I've managed to craft those recipes and sell them for far more than the 20 million INF it'd take even if you just "bought" that A-merit via the conversion cost.

Basically if you're looking to get Purple/PvP IOs it's easier to use A-merits to generate INF (via crafted recipes) to get them from the market as opposed to directly buying them with 20+ A-merits. Based on the results I've seen I think anyone could get any Purple/PvP recipe they wanted within say 2 weeks as a worst case scenario.

Yeah regardless of the merits of a "wild west" zone for this game the fact that the "other" major superhero MMO already addressed that theme pretty much makes it off-limits here. I'm assuming that's what you were referring to. Anyway it'd be hard for anyone to take it seriously as it would just be seen as some kind of copy-cat maneuver.

I'm not exactly sure what kinds of new zone ideas might be cool here. Maybe the classically suggested moon zone? But I do know that whatever they come up with here pretty much needs to be original, or at least not exactly like that other game at the very least.

Or technically speaking, the basic game itself...
If you take your argument to its simple conclusion we've all paid real money for -every- badge we have.

But despite that fact many people pitched such a fit about having to "pay money" for the Pocket D VIP Gold Club Member Badge in the Good Versus Evil Edition "goodie pack" that I highly doubt the Devs will ever release a single badge in a Booster Pack like that again.

They got away with your Agent of Order/Chaos example because that was part of a bigger retail expansion with lots of other content (and other badges). I guess as long as people don't feel like they are paying money "just" for a badge they are fine with it. It's a matter of perception. *shrugs*

I'll just add to what others have said about this mission with a general observation:

Every AT/powerset in this game has an enemy type against which they do the worst at. It's basically the closest thing this game has to the concept of "Kryptonite". There are some situations a Controller finds trivial that a Scrapper completely falters at. There are other things a Tank or Brute can do a Blaster would never dream of.

Basically this mission, for you, was your Kryptonite. Most people react as you do and automatically assume the game is at fault. It's hard to accept that even if you can breeze through 99% of the game the other 1% is MEANT to be hard. That 1% is hard to keep you on your toes and make things challenging. If you think about it this game would become fairly boring fairly quickly if you could do 100% of the content with your eyes closed wouldn't it?

So step back, dust yourself off, change your tactics and you'll figure it out.
Good luck to you.

God forbid the Devs figure out a way to not only make more money for themselves (by selling optional costume slots to existing characters) but giving people another avenue for enjoying this game. These kinds of revolutionary ideas are clearly evil and have no place in a game like this... *sigh*

Now to be perfectly fair I don't actually like the idea of stuffing costume slots retroactively into the existing Super Booster packs. I think the Devs would be better off offering them for sale as standalone upgrades (like Champions Online does it) or as part of future Booster Packs. But beyond that quibble I'm obviously all for this idea.

Yes the save/load feature we now have does exist. Of course it took many years before we even got that.

I won't even bother to seriously address the idea that the tailor is an effective "INF sink" for this game. That idea might have held some water back in like 2005, but now? Hardly...

As to the idea of getting more costume slots per character being something that only a "small" number of players want and therefore is something our Devs shouldn't spend any time on I would say that's a completely unsupportable position. I'd be willing to bet there's a relatively small subset of players who still go on Hamidon raids, still engage in PvP, still bother creating SG bases, are into marketeering big enough to earn billions of INF, bother to fully Purple IO their builds, bother to try to collect every badge in the game, etc. Even for the people who do like some of these various things it's quite likely they don't enjoy doing ALL of these things equally as much as other activities. So if not everyone likes to do these "side" activities why are they maintained in the game? None of them directly provide XP to level characters to 50 - perhaps they should all be removed because, by the extension of your argument, they serve no practical purpose.

I tend to believe that this game is superior to Champions Online in many, many ways. But one of the few things that other game provides that we sorely lack here is a means to obtain additional costume slots (beyond the current few we have) for characters if desired. I played Champions Online for several months before I gave up on it, but one of the cool things I was able to do was have a character who by level 5 had 12 different costume slots set up. I was able to easily do things like have "helmet on" and "helmet off" versions, multiple causal clothes looks, and even have multiple "damaged outfit" looks all ready to switch to instantly. Granted you might not care about RP in any serious way and there's nothing wrong with that, but the ability to have all these variations ready to go instantly (without having to save/load anything) is a godsend for people who care about it.

Just because you don't care about this game being inferior to Champions Online in this area doesn't mean that this feature would not have any value here. Think of it this way: if something like this made a bunch of fashion-obsessed catgirls continue to throw money at this game by staying subscribed and buying more costume slots then that would indirectly support whatever version of this game YOU like to play.

I knew what you meant. I was just being general about the idea of "cutting-n-pasting" all the content that's important about both the red and blue side Ouroboroi and merging that into one instance of that zone.

All of those little details you rattled off (plus probably 10 others we're not aware of that are "under the hood" so to speak) would together combine into an overall effort that I think might be deemed by the Devs as "more trouble than it's worth."

I know what I'm about to say is going to sound very weird, and players who love MMs will probably think I'm insane, but frankly if they made it so I had to control my Fire Imps the same way MMs control their henchies I might very well stop playing my Fire Controllers.

I have absolutely nothing against MMs and I realize the people out there who love to micro-manage their henchies do very well with that. But for me I simply CANNOT stand that level of pet micromanagment. After years of play I've learned how to manipulate my Imps via my own character movements very well. Sure they occasionally still run off and do something stupid on me, but the frequency of that happening is far, far lower than most people seem to think it is if you know what you are doing with them.

I actually happen to think it's one of the strengths of this game that not all pet ATs work exactly the same way as far as pet control goes. If Controllers/Dominators worked the same way MMs do that would be a net loss for the diversity of this game.