Moridin_

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theres also no need for Erratic to be "fixing my statements" That is condescending and insulting, even though he was right on the money.

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There, fixed that for you.

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Deliberately misquoting people is a highly reprehensible activity that will get you labeled, correctly I might add, as a troll in most internet forums. If you are interested in real discussion you should avoid it, because it will cause people to completely disregard anything you may say, and rightly so.

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Statesman, I've noticed that you've been talking about making mobs tougher (although increasing their xp), and also making changes (making them weaker, I am assuming) to blaster AOEs, all because you believe that the game post 30 is too easy.

Is this the correct way to fix the issue at large? Making mobs tougher and making our AOE weaker will only make our job as blasters more tough. Some will call it challenging, but I don't see it as challenging in a fun way, rather more frustrating to gain xp. This is especially true since most of our attacks rely heavily on alpha strike. We really can't survive long term engagements. You must know this, yet you seem set on this course.

The larger issue - making the game more challenging post 30 - cannot be solved by making the same mobs that we've been fighting all this time suddenly tougher. In fact, even though I like what you did with update 2, introducing different types of mobs is only a short term solution. People will soon get bored with doing the same thing over and over again. Instead, if you want to make the game challenging, you should really focus on pvp and SG-specific issues like HQs.

ANy way, this is my 2 cents. This is not intended as a whine.. just a concern from a dedicated blaster who hopes to see the game grow into a more enjoyable form

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The fights after L25 are simply to short. This will most certainly be changed, and a side effect will be solo AoE blasting will all but disappear because you can’t have alpha strike AoE kills and longer fights. The two are mutually exclusive. Blaster soloing should never have been about alpha strike AoE’s to begin with, so removing it from the game is not a big problem.

The simple fact is, three whole AT’s, and even a large part of the blaster AT, become pointless if you can kill stuff with alpha strike AoE’s. The devs would be irresponsible to keep this in the game so people using two primary sets won’t have their feeling hurt.

BTW, you will likely see a few other things removed as well. Tanks that can survive +7 level mobs without a healer will likely be gone, as will tanks and scrappers that can survive in crowds of hundreds of mobs.

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What he intends to do is make everything more difficult after level 22 so that you 4 player team can’t take down those mobs and needs to find smaller spawns of lower level mobs.

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How is it nerfing the 4 player team? They can still find spawns of the same difficulty they were fighting before just labeled with different (more accurate) colors. Since rates of advancement are all relative there is no right or wrong rate of advancement it doesn’t really make a difference whether they tweak them or not.

My guess is that they would of course, given that they have stated that they are satisfied with the current rates overall. This is, however a relatively easy thing to tweak so it certainly isn’t going to be a deal breaker either way.


Ah, so by nerfing 4 person groups, 8 person groups will become more desirable. Lovely solution.. Hope they're serious about increasing xp gains proportionately, because it'll be very frustrating otherwise.

I thought it was a nice change from other MMORPGs, where we actually get more powerful as we level, capable of taking higher cons. Too bad it was unintentional, and they're "fixing" it.

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Basically, think of +2 after his change as being what +4 is currently (XP, difficulty, etc. I'm assuming XP here). In that case, the change still has the following negative effect:
Harder to find appropriate enemies to hunt. Why? Because right now my level 32 blaster can get some return for everything from -2 to +4 (-2 isn't much *per* but the fights are at least very quick) That's a far amount of spawns that I can tackle, without much time looking for just the *right* one. Cut that range in half, from -1 to +2, and even though the XP is the same for the mobs I *do* fight, it is harder to find them.


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First of all given the previous comments that they are happy with the rate at which people are advancing I thing it’s a given that the rewards will increase as well. If you don’t consider a -2 “worthless” now it is unlikely that you will consider a -4 worthless under the changes he is looking at.

Secondly since the drop off point is still 5+ levels you can still go after things that are +4 without running into the purple patch. Sure it will be as difficult as something 8 (for example) levels above you was before the purple patch, but that was doable for groups then I don’t see why it wouldn’t be now.

IMO what he is looking at is reclaiming the -3 to 0 mobs so that they would be viable and desirable targets. This in fact widens the range of viable/desirable mobs considerably. Instead of single players looking for small groups of +3/+4 and small teams looking for large numbers of the same soloist would (hopefully) for -1/+1 2-4 player teams either for +2 to +4 of larger groups of 0 to +2 and teams of 5-8 could look for moderate size spawns of +3/+4 or very large spawns of +1/+2.

Notice it doesn’t reduce the options at all it greatly expands them because the “usable” range of mobs more then doubles.

This also reduces the level spread problem because the group as a whole is not going after mobs close to the drop off at 5+. If you have a team going after +2 - +3 a damage dealer even 2 levels down is pushing their limit. If you have a situation where the sweet spot for that same group is 0 to +1 the same damage dealer can be 4 levels down.

Think more in terms of shifting the whole difficulty scale by 3-4 levels. If you are happy going after -1 level mobs (at level 30) then you would be able to go after -5 level mobs for the same difficulty and reward afterwards. If you consider +4 the norm you get the same results by going after +0 which in turn still leaves lots of room for teams to go after +1 to +5, though, as he indicates 8 person teams may still need to search out places where the spawns are very large to take suitable risks and get suitable rewards.

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Now, this *might* actually not be harmed by Statesman's changes. Suppose the "purple patch" stays exactly as-is (+5s are too tough to fight). But +4s are worth as much XP as +8s currently would be worth (and as hard etc). Now you've actually gotten rid of the purple patch, effectively. Yay!


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This is why he said the purple patch wasn’t the issue. The effects of the purple patch were a symptom of the real problem. (That people were forced to go far above the content designed for them to get a suitable challenge) What he wants to do is fix the real problem at which point the symptom becomes irrelevant.

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The numbers I have seen in an 4 person group that fights together is about 70k but less risk.

If I have a full 8 people in the group I am lucky if I can see 50k/hour.



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You still don’t get what he was telling you. Your 4 person balanced team was fighting mobs intended balanced teams of 8 a level or two higher then you. This leaves no place for that team of 8 to hunt.

What he intends to do is make everything more difficult after level 22 so that you 4 player team can’t take down those mobs and needs to find smaller spawns of lower level mobs. You now have plenty of headroom to form a team of 8 and take on those more difficult spawns and get more total xp to divide among your team member. If done correctly, this, along with the group xp bonus will increase the xp of participating in a larger group past that of a smaller group provided you hunt in zones where the spawn size is appropriate.

If executed properly his solution will work and is IMO superior to any other option. The only thing it is lacking is a way to deal with the fact that larger teams almost always have some sidekicks that can’t enter the hazard or trial zones where the right spawns are found.

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Statesman,
There are many many great posts here that I feel sum up the games shortcommings pretty well. Don't get me wrong I enjoy this game very much. You elude that the purple patch has nothing to do with these issues but I respectfully disagree. Please try to keep an open mind and take a look again at the purple patch because for me it's pretty cut and dry. Before the pruple patch I found group play to be 100% more fun. The purple patch has changed my solo game 0%. Is it just a cooincidence group play took a fun dive when the purple patch was introduced? Also I would appreciate if you could respond to the questions of the only good large group hunting areas (hazzard zones) only being available to groups without sk's which in a group of 8 is rare. I'm not saying the purple patch needs to be removed but there are better ways of dealing with the problems the purple patch was meant to fix without hurting groups.

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Sigh I just don’t get why people keep bringing up the purple patch. Statesman has indicated the direction is which he wants to go and it clearly address everything that removing the purple patch does and doesn’t unbalance the games content in the process.

To put this another way, if the fight is the same difficulty, what does it matter to you if the mobs are +10 and con as purple or +4 and con as red? ([Edit], I know I know +4 cons as purple but this was just an example and I wanted to differentiate the colors sue me [/Edit]) In either case the devs need to tune the xp rewards so people are advancing at an acceptable rate, so that never enters into it.

The only difference is that with his fix you don’t end up cramming all the content that was supposed to hold you to L35 into the first 25 levels. If you roll back the purple patch, (And allow those levels into the hazard and trial zones so they can fight the mobs there before they drop below purple) here is what happens to the games content.

By level 25-30 you have explored any zone that spawns mobs in the 30-40 range. Pre issue 2 this includes Atlas, Kings row, Steel, skyway, Perez, Boomtown, Tera Volta, Dark Astoria, Brickston, Talos, Founders Falls, Eden, the sewers and the abandoned sewers.

This leaves you with the following zones to hold you over for the next 20 – 25 levels. (Far more then half the game.) PI, the Rikti crash site and the Hive. See the problem here?

One of the biggest problems in this game after level 30 is that you have already explored most of the zones, or at lest had the opportunity to. The reality is that you couldn’t come close to experiencing them all before you out leveled them and are now relegated to spending the remaining 2/3 of your total game time in a tiny number of zones.

So, there are 2 ways to go roll back the purple patch and develop massive amounts of new content for the people above level 30, or simply make the mobs close to your own level challenging and rewarding.

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Statesman, im not sure if this has been bough up already but there is one major flaw in group xp that I personally hate. That is, the highest level person in group usually gets horriable xp. When doing the brickstown TF. I gained half my level when I was 31/32, when I was 34/35, I gained little over a bar.....thats about 3 times less xp if you are the highest lvl in group as opposed to people 3-4 levels below you. How is that fair to the high levels that preety much carry the groups anyways? Unless the amount of xp you must gain doubles every level, you cant possibly tell me that xp in groups is scaling fairly to everyone.

This is one of the prime reasons that offset me about grouping, I usually dont group unless I AM one of the lower level guys, even cons give crap xp.

So can you please consider re-doing the group xp equation so it calculates everyone that is in group and distributes xp accordingly? I really think that fixing the xp given to higher level players in groups will go a long way into fixing the game and will also encourage people to SK too instead of leeching.

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This is IMO why most scrappers and blasters will prefer to solo. It isn’t just that group xp isn’t very good, when these 2 AT’s are in a group they are *expected* to be among the highest level characters in the group and if they are not they are *expected* to accept the highest sk possible.

The result is that the best solo builds are also the builds that get the worst xp in groups. The net result is that many avoid groups like the plague. It also creates an exaggerated impression about how large the disparity between solo and group xp is.

I like the idea that there is a catch up factor. It helps keep people who play together regularly around the same level, but maybe it should be reduced to help damage dealing AT’s/builds feel less like they are being used by the rest of the group.

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Adlerian:

You, and others, might have a misconception about what is going on with powerleveling. Just as powerleveling is a small minority of how people play the game, powerleveling a new player's toon from 2-50 is also an action taken by a very small minority of the powerleveling players.

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Maybe maybe not.

Most of the higher level SG’s operate something like this. They decide they need a particular set of skills and actively recruit people with those skills. Miraculously these people gain anywhere from 10-30 levels in a few days. Take a quick inventory of the L50’s on at any given time and these people will make up more then 50% of them in my experience.

Sorry but most of the people defending power leveling fall into one of two categories. The ones who want to but can’t because they don’t know the right people and the ones who think they are power leveling but are so pathetically bad at it that they can’t outlevel people playing naturally.

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And the REASON for it was that powerleveling is not cheating. The method of powerleveling you keep using involves an AFK toon and the tram. One can powerlevel with the exact same team makeup you use as your example and NOT be AFK and be following the team around. It is still PLing.


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No it isn’t at worst it’s leaching, but when people talk about power leveling this is not what they are referring to, unless they fall into the second category of people I mentioned above.

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My criteria for staying long term in a MMORPG is the ongoing ability to solo and experience the game fully.



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My criteria is that there be significant amounts of group content to explore. Clearly both of us cannot get what we want, and my requirement is far more reasonable then you. After all I am not demanding there be no solo content in the game, why then should you demand that the things I want to do not be put into the game?

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However, my definition of forced group play means that if I cannot experience ALL content as a soloer, then that missing content is forcing me to group. Not forced grouping to play the game, true, but forced if I want to experience it all.

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Then go out and buy standalone RPG. MMO’s need to have group content to be attractive to the majority of people who play them. IOW they need group content to even survive.

If every activity in the game can be performed solo then there is zero group content and this is a serious flaw that the majority of CoH subscribers will not tolerate. Simply put you have no right to demand this be a game with no group content since that is something that most people do not want.

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However, I am seeing a general trend in these posts, and reports from test server, that the ENTIRE GAME is about to become group-only in order to survive in the field.



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I’m not sure what you are trying to get at. If you are suggesting that you should be able to solo all the content in the game you are flat out wrong.

MMO’s are a group experience first and foremost, ya it’s nice to have some things you can do solo for the times when you are waiting for a group and it’s even better to have enough solo activities that you never need to group. The latter is what the devs are trying to provide, and it’s what they mean when they say everyone should be able to solo.

What you seem to be complaining about is that there are things you can’t do solo. Consider this, if you can do something solo how much fun could it be for a group? Unless something requires coordinated effort and cooperation it is not truly a group task and is not going to be enjoyable for a group to do.

If you were to be able to do everything in the game solo this would necessitate removing all group content from the game, but a majority of people playing are looking for group activities and therefore group content. The single biggest problem with this game and the one most likely to kill it is that there is very very little group content, and very few things that benefit at all from having a group.

You have plenty of things you can do solo and will continue to have plenty of things to do solo. This even includes many things that were supposed to be group/team activities to begin with.

Why is it that you object to having things added to the game to give the people who want to group (the majority) interesting and fun things to do? Is it because being able to solo group content has made you feel like legitimate solo activities are beneath you?

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This statement seems to imply that making people group is not an intention that they have with the current AT system.

Thanks,

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There is a big difference between making people group and limiting what they can take on without a group. If you want quotes try this one from statesman (Posted today)

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No - we're not done with Super Reflexes. It's still "on the list" of ongoing issues, but it's sort of on a back burner right now.

The number one priority is to get Expansion 2 live. After that, it's fixing the problem that the game is TOO easy post level 25ish (and AOE attacks just rule). Then I'll be returning to dear ole' SR. Promise.


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Actually no. This idea stomps all over those of us that form a group of 8 and then split into pairs to hunt.

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Er, wouldn't it be just as effective to just make multiple teams? I can't imagine the XP would roll in much differently. Bigger pieces of smaller pie vs smaller pieces of bigger pie.




-np

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No there is an xp bonus as teams grow. A team of 8 gets more total xp for the things they kill then 4 teams of 2 would get for the exact same kills.

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Moridin, its interesting that you say that becuase when most people think about a blaster destroying hordes of enemies in the post 40 game, they are thinking about skills like Inferno


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IMO this is mostly coming from people who have seen the power but never actually used it. These powers are fun but you simply do not use them to level.
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And of course we both know well that 5 minutes doesnt mean 5 minutes. It means just under 2.


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The original 5 min was rounding. The base is 6 min, with hasten it’s just under 4. With hasten and some recharge reducers you can get it to a little over 2 min with decent damage but it still doesn’t matter. When you need 2000 mobs to level killing 10 every 2 min adds up to 60 hours of game time.

Full on the other hand Auto can kill 10 mobs every 16 seconds with hasten and deal comparable damage because it doesn’t need to waste slots on recharge. FA does nearly 10X the DPS of the other blaster L32 powers, and that’s the good ones not blizzard.

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agreed, but if I were a fire/* blaster, I'd Inferno, pop a chicklet or 2 and kite the boss if it were worth 10x the exp, after all there are no minions or Lt's left after my Inferno.

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How is this a problem when you can do it once every 5 min? The real problems comes from AoE’s and combos that can be used every 15 seconds and kill large numbers of yellow/orange minions.

The L32 powers are supposed to be awesome but most come with such a large downside in the form of recharge and end drain that they do not even come remotely close to unbalancing the game. On the blaster side it’s the Full Autos, Fire breath and flame thrower that are the real problem.

Lesser AoE’s from scrappers and tankers who can survive to throw them almost indefinitely can also be a problem since they do not need to kill everything in the first 5 seconds. Instead they can do it over 10-20 seconds and get nearly as much xp/hour for very little risk.

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They may try to make allowances for it but there is no way to compensate completely. The complexity of such filtering would make data mining all but impossible. The best they can do is come up with a fudge factor to try and compensate but this is not an accurate method.

So, perhaps you should try again.

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Haha, okay; we're not talking about solving calculus equations here, man. There is no such thing as an "accurate method" of looking at this data and trying to decide how to much subtle changes to the game mechanics, XP, minion statistics, etc.



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Sure there is its called data mining.

It is not outside the realm of possibility that the devs have a full and complete record of every hit and miss since the game went live. More likely they have used some algorithm to reduce the amount of data they need to track, but there are plenty of databases out there that far exceed the transaction rate and size required to track every action taken by every player, and there are plenty of tools for extracting this information. The problem is they break down when you have to account for such things as “this player is identified by this filter to be power leveling at this time so we will not count this action”.

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It has been stated previously. The rate that players level and total character levels are data points that the devs use for analyzing game content and mechanics. If the developers make changes to the the content to limit the rate of advancement or skew zone developement to favor one caste of player over another it holds the potential to negatively effect others.

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*snore*

Please read a thread before posting in it. This point has been made (and clearly refuted) about 6 seperate times in this post.

The developers do not look at numbers and "data points" in a vacuum. They are fully aware of certain techniques which speed the rate of advancement beyond that which is achievable by the "average" player, just like I'm sure they are fully aware that certain types of players are leveling much, much more slowly than the average person (poor power choices, dying too often and accruing prohibitive debt, etc.).



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Try again. Just because they are aware of such techniques does not mean they have any truly accurate way of accounting for them that is realistically usable.

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The fact is, on most servers there are only a small handful of people who have actually earned a L50 character at this point.

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Well, I made 50th last Saturday. It took me over 530 hours to get there. So, just so I can tell if I actually "earned" my 50 levels or not, what are the magic qualifications? Is 530 hours too few? Do I have to put in another hundred or two? How many hours do you have in yours? Would help so that I can get an idea how far behind I am on qualifying?

Btw, just so you don't think I was playing one of the FOTM's, it was my Invulnerability Axe Tanker that I got to 50th. I have not yet seen another one of them myself that was over 40th level on Virtue. Maybe they are just hiding....

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My guess is you did earn it, and no it’s not questions of the hours you put in, even for a FoTM that levels up quickly. (Which may have similar issues but they are not what we are discussing here.)

Some simple questions, did you ever stand around portal corp gaining xp while a couple AR/Dev killed everything in sight? Did you ever play on a team with an anchor standing around the train in bricks or the entrance to founders falls? Were you ever sidekicked to a L46 that was not even on the same team as you? Did you ever share account information so you could have a whole bunch of afk teammates while you solo herded the in the mission? Were you ever part of a team that had the specific goal of sidekicking you to 5 levels below a blaster, fire tank or other heavy damage dealer for hours on end so you could gain levels without contributing to the team?

While these do not cover all the PL scenarios by any means they probably identify the worst exploits. If you answer no to all of these you probably worked your way up legitimately. Hell, even if you only did them a little would say you earned your level.

The truth is, only you know for sure whether you earned your way or not. As and outside observer I may have opinions if I had seen you progress, but only you know for sure. Of course this does not mean you are willing to admit it, even to yourself, if you didn’t.


BTW, read my previous post. It's possible to PL someone to 50 in under 50 hours of game time. Just out of curiosity how do you feel when you go on a hammie raid with 10 of these people?

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i would also like to see proof that majority of the lvl 50 heroes were powerlevled.....If you have none dont state the fact...if you cant debate a fact with solid evidence dont bring it up.



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Unfortunately there really isn’t any way for us to prove this one way or the other. The devs may be able to do some very complex data mining but I doubt they would ever share the results with us. But, just because something cannot be proven absolutely to be true does not mean it is false.

http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/distract/ig.htm

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Arguments of this form assume that since something has not been proven false, it is therefore true. Conversely, such an argument may assume that since something has not been proven true, it is therefore false (This is a special case of a false dilemma, since it assumes that all propositions must either be known to be true or known to be false.)


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By the way least you accuse me of the second form of this fallacy, my comment was an observation based on my own personal experience.

As someone who was in the higher level zones before they became crowded at it is fairly easy to see what was and is going on. The early L40’s and later L50’s are a small community on most servers. You will have bumped into almost all of them on a regular basis. When I first worked IP a /whoall would seldom have more then 10 people in the zone same story with bricks and FF. TV never had anybody in it.

Under these conditions it’s not that hard to notice when someone shoots up 6 levels in a day or two. You also know who is in what SG and what they are doing. If you see the same people camping outside portal corp day in and day out while gaining levels at a high rate it is not hard to guess what they are doing.

Any time I go on am hammie raid these very same people make up the vast majority of those present. Sure there are some who rocketed to 50 and were never heard from again. While I know longer personally know most of the L50’s on my server I do know who they associate whit and what they do, and I have had ample opportunity to see them parked around portal corp in PI before they ever hit 50.

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The fact is, on most servers there are only a small handful of people who have actually earned a L50 character at this point. Yet the devs use these numbers to determine things like the rate at which they want people to hit 50 and the rate at which they want to give out rewards like Epic AT’s.

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Yes, and they do this with full knowledge of PLEVELING and its affects on the rate at which people are able to reach level 50.

The developers don't work in a vacuum, you know? They have access to all the information you do, and rest assured they're not making decisions about XP rate based on how fast someone can be PL'd to 50.

Try again, please.

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They may try to make allowances for it but there is no way to compensate completely. The complexity of such filtering would make data mining all but impossible. The best they can do is come up with a fudge factor to try and compensate but this is not an accurate method.

So, perhaps you should try again.

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Actually, I took one of my scrappers from 17 to 28 in about 2 and a half days without powerleveling.


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I know someone who routinely levels characters all the way to 50 in 2-3 days.

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The difference is that those things are against the law... they are illegal.


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Things ore outlawed because they are bad for the community as a whole. Laws are not the determinate of whether something is right or wrong they are a consequence. This means that it is very possible for something to be illegal when it should legal or legal when it should be illegal.

Appeals to “the law” on arguments about what should and should not be legal are inherently circular and should be discarded on site. Make no mistake in game terms that is what we are talking about. Legal = it’s ok and no action needs to be taken. Illegal = it’s not ok and the devs need to work to stop it. Sure you will never see a law about it since it does not effect society as a whole but laws are simply rules and for the community effected the analogy still holds.

Clearly power leveling falls under the second category and if you have any doubts about how they feel about it (it is their game and they ultimately make all the rules) consider the suspension to the person who posted about the “anchor” bug that many power levelers exploited several months ago.

For those who do not think power leveling hurts everyone else consider this. More then half the current L50 hero’s were power leveled at least part of the way. A great many were PL’d most of the way. (And, a great many of those that were not power leveled made extensive use of some form of exploit or overpowered power like burn, caltrops, smoke grenade or some undesirable technique like AoE blast and run or herding. )

The fact is, on most servers there are only a small handful of people who have actually earned a L50 character at this point. Yet the devs use these numbers to determine things like the rate at which they want people to hit 50 and the rate at which they want to give out rewards like Epic AT’s.

Power leveling helps to completely hide the incredible grind most people face. This grind seriously hampers the fun factor of everyone else who plays the game.

Secondly when players do put their blood sweat and tears into accomplishing something it is seen as old hat bye most since they have already seen it dozens of times over, much of the time from people who never paid their dues.

For example I was one of the first eng blasters to hit level 32 on my server. Nearly every time I played with a new person, even in my 40’s, I got the “Holy S***” reaction the first time they saw it. Today anyone with a high level character can build themselves an eng blaster in a few days and get Nova if they want it. (Most are to busy building fire controllers or scrappers)

It’s no longer special unique or particularly hard to get so the people that actually earn it are completely derived of the satisfaction of doing so. How do you think people will feel about finally getting their epic AT’s knowing that thousands of people got theirs simply by having someone build a L50 for them without ever putting forth any effort. I don’t care what you may claim there is no satisfaction in working your [censored] off for something that most others are getting for free.

Finally it helps create situations where people with high level characters simply do not know how to play them because they never had to learn.

Here is what I am betting on. All mob HP will increase after level 20, not just minions. It will not be a small increase either, 50% or more when it’s all said and done. Naturally this will not be a wall at L20 but rather several steps or a continuous rise to that level.

Secondly enh will take a big nerf. Rather then 8% 16% 33% damage enh will be 5% 10% 20%. There may be some fiddling with build up/Aim and the damage cap as well.

I would bet they also hit defenses. Tanks can stand there and laugh at mobs 7-8 levels higher then themselves once they get their defenses slotted. Many scrappers can do the same against mobs 4 levels higher then themselves. I think this could be addressed by reducing the effectiveness of defense enh.

Hasten may or may not take a nerf, but scaling it down would be a convenient way of making the game more difficult across the board.

At the same time you will likely see an increase in mob xp, and possibly more weight put into boss xp and less in minions so the focus of the game shifts from killing lots of minions for xp to killing the minions to get at the boss, which is where the xp is.

I doubt you will see it all at once but over the next year or so I expect to see a lot of these things happen.

/speculation

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Nothing like stopping a boss dead in his tracks, and have him stand there like a practice dummy as you wail on him since he can't hit you back.


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Well that's cute and all but if you were using fire he'd already be dead.

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I doubt it. Elec still kills single targets quickly, it just doesn’t have the immediately useful secondary effects of ice or eng, both of which can take to boss out of the fight on their very first offensive move. Elec does have fewer single target attacks, which is a problem, but If I’m not mistaken the ones it does have do more damage. Overall I think I would prefer elec over fire going one on one verses a boss, but eng or ice would be even better.

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Again this is a very very common mistaken assumption powerlevellers/FOTM players make about regular/roleplay players. When regular players demand balancing they always resort to the wierd accusatoin that we are just powerlevellers in denial. Like I said you probably will never "get it" because your mindset is so different from the rest of the gamers who aren't FOTM rollers.


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I’m not talking about role players in general; I’m talking about you in particular. YOU came into a thread about the best way to power level and started trying to complain about the fact that your AT didn’t have quite the same power leveling capabilities. There can be no other interpretation for this than that you want you’re preferred AT to be better at power leveling.

BTW, in case you missed it I am not a power leveler. I share some of their techniques when I solo, but decided against some of the most important ones be *gasp* they didn’t fit the character I envisioned.


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I can however tell you that if you seriously think the developers will not care one way or the other that an archetype is attracting a large number of powerlevellers because it levels "so much faster" than the rest of the archetypes then you're either living in a dream world or simply naive and haven't played too many online games. If indeed what you say is true (that blasters just naturally make xp much, much faster) then you can bet that they will be nerfed.


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Did you even stop to think a little before you wrote that? Someone who is power leveling will easily advance 4X faster then someone who isn’t and the difference is potentially much more then that. This means that whatever AT the power levelers choose is going to advance significantly faster then the others overall. It’s an all or nothing proposition.

Secondly blasters in general do not power level signifincaly better then scrappers, this only applies to the AoE blasters. Scrappers can tackle the same mobs as single target blasters and do so nearly as quickly, so if blasters are nerfed so they are less effective for power leveling (again proably not even possible without completely destroying the AT) guess who is next up on the list. You guessed it scrappers because they are the second best power leveling class.

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What is the threshold for what is an acceptable discrepancy in XP rates?


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I have to question whether you even read my post. Among people who are not power leveling I see no significant difference in who levels how fast nor do I believe a significant difference is even possible given that unless you are power leveling most of your time will be spent moving from place to place. Furthermore, if you are not power leveling there is a good chance you are working in a mixed group and therefore advancing at EXACTLY the same rate as someone else your level.

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Blasters can XP at rates 2-3x that of other archetypes, that's not an exaggeration and you know it.



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Not an exaggeration so much as a deliberate bending of the truth on your part. Blasters power leveling advance at least that much faster then someone of another AT who is not power leveling. Blasters who are not power leveling enjoy no such advantage.

Blasters power leveling may enjoy that much of an advantage over defenders and controllers. For tanks the difference is much less and I defy you to point to something in the first post of this thread under the single target blaster category that cannot be done by a scrapper almost as quickly.


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I also take offense to your insinuation that other archetypes aren't gimp relative to blasters because leveling rates are not a useful gauge for measuring archetype balance. There is nothing in this game but levels do you even realize that??

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That has to be the best characterization of the mindset of a power leveler I ever heard. If you think this way then I do not see how you can possibly be anything but a disgruntled power leveler at heart. Have you ever heard of a little thing called fun? If your only source of fun in these games is leveling then I assure you that despite what you claim, you are a power leveler.