Nihilii

Ridiculous assumption! Exactly what I was referring to by "playing the game nonstop". Sorry, but not everyone checks in every month, much less week, much less day.

Huff and puff all you want, regardless of their activity anyone who pays a sub has the same right as you do to have an opinion about the state of the game and to express it, given it's not deemed unsuitable by the powers in charge.

Because everyone plays this game non-stop and has enough free time to do just that.

Sir, this is the second time you've said something absurd today. This will not do!

While Shubbie's usual hyperbole deserves being laughed at, your apparent misunderstanding of averages makes the nerd in me want to punch you through the Internet. Why are you doing that to me why why why why why

Wanting to get rewards fast enough that you wouldn't have to farm anything seems complementary rather than mutually exclusive to me. What you see as irrational I see as cause and effect.

To use myself as an example, about two years back I wasn't satisfied with the leveling experience rate, because if I played normally, I would inevitably do the same content over and over. Fast forward to now, and between all the new stuff devs added in the level 20-40 range, various buffs making characters more powerful and hence faster at obtaining experience, paragon rewards giving various patrol exp and exp boosts, and my playing time shrinking considerably (giving me full patrol exp almost everytime I play any given alt), it's all good and I don't even look at AE as I feel I'm making progress fast enough to have fun.

The worst thing about it is many of the sound effects are quite nice, but the disparity in volume is so big you have pretty much no choice but to do the above if you value your ears.

I just got a new computer and didn't set the sound low right away, and was surprised to hear footsteps and other ambient sounds of the same kind. Unfortunately, at that level a loud AoE is ear-shattering.

What's also fairly dumb is sound effects just seem to stack to get louder the more targets you hit with a particular effect.

It seems to me I could interpret what you're saying as raid content being so inherently boring it needs raid-only rewards to be played at all! I know that's likely not your intent, but surely if raid-style play is fun in itself it shouldn't need specific rewards unobtainable in any other way.

I was really trying to make a general statement, not specific to raids. If the content is fun and offers similar rewards, it will be played. If there has to be an additional carrot to lure players to it, that's a possible hint it might not be good enough to be played.

We're not merely talking about bigger rewards, here. We're talking about exclusivity.

Yes, MMO players tend to flock to the easiest option - but there's ways to balance that so every set of particular tasks is roughly in the same range of rewards, and despite a particular one still being "best" and a particular one still being "worst", players will run fun content first. The merits system for TFs achieve that quite well. For that matter, even at the height of Katie runs when it was a rare reward roll regardless of TF length, you still had plenty of people running the other task forces.

To hide a particular reward behind a particular task removes the constraint of quality. Players will run the content even if they are miserable doing so because they want the shiny. It's a monopoly, and it's just as bad and bad for the same reasons in a MMORPG as it is in real life economies.

Only if they're tied to each character. There's been means of progress introduced in the last issues - ATOs, for example, and those are alt-friendly.

Incarnate content is also alt-unfriendly in the sense that you must be a level 50 incarnate to participate in much of it. If we just got 10 additional levels, up to 60 (not that I'm advocating such a thing), you could still team up with lowbies and make progress.

The Alpha slot was great. You had incentive to run TFs and large teams, and no reason to shield yourself away from "mere mortals". It was incarnate content done right, IMHO.

A fair point. Still, I think it is anyone's [deity] given right to throw a tantrum whenever a significant interface change is made without any notice nor an option to opt out. Warn me about it being not recommended, tell me I have a stupid face if I don't use it, but just let me do what I want with my UI.

It's a bit like, to my mind, if they made the League chat mandatory in your bottom chat tab and wouldn't allow you to delete it or move it to another tab without also removing the option to join a league.

This feels like the extended chat window debacle once again. Ok, maybe not as drastic, but still... It baffles me a little that in a game touted for its great player customisation, mandatory changes like this are enforced time and again. To be fair, the devs come around more often than not at some point down the line, but still...

First thing I tried. The game won't let me do that. A right-click gives me "Info", and no other options.

Ok, going through the temp power tab I can delete it and it works as you said (and I suppose that's what you meant and I misinterpret it as "delete the hotkey"). Whew! Thanks. I do like looking foolish when it fixes my issues.

This doesn't work for several reasons.

First, you make the assumption any potential disparity between powersets is always of the exact same amount compared to its best option in any given archetype. That just isn't true.

Second, you're comparing a primary to a combo - especially on an AT where your role is largely determined by your secondary.

If people were crazy about performance they should definitely play nothing but SS/fire brutes, though. It's an underrated combo. Yes, I'm saying this with a straight face.

If and only if you only care about ST damage (or use some extremely weird AoE equations ignoring radius, perhaps) and ignore the -HP penalty (which is significant, roughly equivalent to -200% regen).

In actual gameplay, it's closer to the bottom, if not the absolute bottom - might share that spot with Axe. Ice Melee and Mace used to be down there as well, but with the buffs they got they don't really fit anymore.

"Doing just fine" doesn't mean much either when everyone says that about every set. If you had a scale of 1 to 10 and ranked everyone 10 regardless of their performance, what good it'd be? Fact is, by any sane ("sane" being the keyword) metric most other melee powersets perform better than EM.