Nihilii

For the record, I, personally, have no problem with Traps on teams. I'm just saying I doubt soloing AVs is likely to make people who believe Traps suck on teams change their mind about it, because it's two completely different environments.

I'll admit I don't get you. On one hand, you complain about ending up with idiots when you PuG, on the other hand, you say you enjoy challenges.

My own way to look at it is if my teammates play poorly, it's more challenge for me. Win/win situation for everyone involved.

I'm not sure static fights against tough targets has ever been the perceived issue. For some unknown reason to me, people tend to believe radiation is the only powerset with regen debuffs , but that's not specific to traps - every other debuff powerset is affected.

What seems to be the problem for many players I've met who dislike traps is the static nature of most of the powers make them believe it doesn't mesh well with steamrolling teams.

Besides, as someone who builds every alt to be able to solo AVs, I can tell it doesn't necessarily translate to being efficient on teams. In one situation, you need good personal mitigation or great holds, and strong ST damage or strong regen debuffs ; in the other, you'll want great AoE damage, fast debuffs, team buffs or aggro control. It's really two completely different games, and while some builds can be good at both, by itself being good at one of these two things doesn't mean being good at the other one.

Time spent using DA is time not spent using higher damaging attacks. Doing less damage translates to having to live longer, hence needing more mitigation to survive the same encounters than a build with comparable numbers without DA would.

Using DA also means you won't have that defense for the very first alpha strike, that you might lose it if the time to travel from mob to mob is too long (and indeed it's usually the rule and not the exception for me, I still have one DA up but not two, and end up below the melee softcap for the next alpha strike). Being accuracy based, high defense foes can be more than a simple annoyance too.

You can't just consider effects that are impossible to be always on to be the same thing as effects that are always on. You can argue it's up often enough for your needs, you can argue the way you play the difference is irrelevant, but ultimately it still makes a difference when compared to the same effect from a source that is truly always on.

It's a pet peeve of mine when people include Hasten numbers in global recharge, but I don't make a point to derail threads just to mention it.

Unless, of course, a specific comment is asking for it.

Combat's comments on the build he posted are even more ridiculous, assuming the force feedback proc is on at all times. It's not ! It suppresses a significant part of the time (I'd say 50% but I never bothered to time it), and even if it didn't, a 10% chance to go off with a target cap of 10 isn't a 100% chance to go off at the target cap.

Rant ends here, we now return you to your schedulized theorycraft builds that don't actually work like that ingame.

As you said yourself, the only people you see are people who want to be seen. For someone who's looking for other players to play with, anyone on /hide might not even be playing, it makes no difference.

As always, I'll also question the "many players are on /hide" comment, by nature it's an unverifiable number from players and everytime I hear that it sounds like the usual "I'm going to use my social circles as a metric". Granted, "many" is subjective and you could argue 10% is many. I know at the public spots with relatively large amount of players (Atlas statue during CCs, Cap market, AEs during I14), the amount of people on /hide were constantly below that number. Of course, you could argue people on /hide also physically hide from crowded public places like AEs or markets, sitting in missions all the time... Could be true to an extent, but claiming there's "many" doing this is still stretching it IMO, as it's unverifiable.

The difference here for me (and I suppose there's other people feeling that way) is that time spent earning ten millions per hour is time spent playing. I don't look at my influence meter rising while I play - I just kill stuff, have a good time, and my influence happens to increase at the same time.

From my perspective, bid creeping is a timesink. I'd waste my time to avoid wasting virtual currency. My time is much more important than virtual currency, so I usually don't bid creep, and if I want to use the IO right now I'll pay premium for it.

Of course, I don't have unlimited influence, so I will bid creep or let a bid sit for a few days if we're talking about items costing hundreds of millions, but most of the time I'm not going to think twice about paying stuff twice as much as if I was patient.