Obitus

When you're discussing the performance gap between the low end and the high end, you are by definition discussing SO builds. The only point is that a non-purple build is competitive with a purple build. They are in the same league. An SO build isn't in the same league -- not even close.

Thus, purples are materially insignificant from the point of view of the low end, or should be. I'm frankly shocked that that statement would be so controversial. It seems to me self-evident.

[EDIT] I was going to go point-by-point here, but the rest really isn't that important, and I'm beginning to bore even myself. With that said, just one tiny note:

The 260 number only represents +90% in global recharge from sets. You get 100% from slotting three level 50 generic IOs in the power (or the equivalent), and you get 70% from Hasten. It's not unfair to say that +90% from set bonuses is a lot; personally I'm usually happy with 70-80%, but +90% is not so massive a bonus that it's generally impossible for a non-purple build to achieve.

It was an illustration, and not an unrealistic one, either.

When I can IO a build with non-purples and get three to four times the performance of an analogous SO build, then yes, the extra 10% or so I'd get out of purples is materially insignificant. Frankly, I view this entire line of discussion the result of an overblown nitpick; you latch onto my use of the word "any" and type two exhaustive lectures about game mechanics that I already know -- when it should have been fairly clear that I was talking about the practical performance gap between SO and IO builds.

There are not many builds out there that make huge proportional performance gains with the upgrade to purples. The most significant over-arching boosts are generally from DEF -- which purples do not provide in significant quantities (with one exception). Recharge certainly plays a part, even a very large part of a build's overall performance, but again, purples generally do not represent a night-and-day difference.

You know what the difference is between +260% and +275% recharge on a 60-second power? 0.67 seconds. How about a power with a 120 second base cooldown? 1.33 seconds.

Unnecessary Disclaimer: Those numbers don't technically show diminished returns on the recharge rate, but they do illustrate how insignificant the upgrade to three purple sets is for most builds in practice. You can miss the bonus if you blink at the wrong time (hesitate before re-activating the power), or if you happen to be attacking when the power recharges. (The only true diminished returns on recharge bonuses come into play as you approach the bottleneck of the power's cast time.)

I have acknowledged repeatedly that there may be some very unique cases wherein that extra purple-granted recharge is the difference between having an absolutely essential power permanent and not. Those cases are nowhere near common. Regen Scrappers don't qualify.

I have also acknowledged that purples can save you slots, which can free up room for other bonuses (usually from non-purple IO sets). But let's be frank: We're not talking about such a massive savings in slots as to constitute a practical performance difference that is even noticeable to the SO-using observer. Either I have soft-capped DEF, or I don't. Either I have perma-Dom, or I don't. Those are the most noticeable distinctions. Everything else is shades of grey, the kind of stuff that powergamers find important, but almost no one else does.

If you want to toss the PvP +DEF IO into the mix, then yeah, I can accept that that's a real game changer, especially for Scrappers. But the PvP +DEF IO isn't a purple. It's similar to Purples in the sense that it's absurdly expensive, but the availability of PvP +DEF IOs actually went up with the introduction of A-Merits, and thus I find them exempt from the discussion.

Seeing that you seem to agree in spirit, I'm not even sure what we're arguing about. My wording? Ok, fine. Purples are not materially significant to practical performance from an SO-build player's perspective. How's that?

Now, in no particular order, a nitpickish collection of responses to your nitpicks. Feel free to ignore them:

I'm talking about the demographic that wants to close the bulk of the practical performance gap as quickly as they can. Those players now have more avenues to do that. If they decide later to add purples to their already wonderful builds, then that's great -- but in the meanwhile they have a more powerful character to play. Often by leaps and bounds.

And they don't need to speed-run TFs to do that, anymore. Almost by definition, speed-running of TFs is not a casual activity. If you get lucky on a PuG? Sure. If you have a dedicated team? Sure. Otherwise, not so much.

You seemed to argue at one point that sticker shock from purples (and purples above all) would drive casual or new players away from the market, and that you wanted them to participate in the market. You may or may not be right about that; I can't read the minds of the playerbase. What I can say is that people who only look at the most expensive items to get an idea of what the market involves probably don't deserve our consideration.

1. If I can get 80+% in global recharge, and soft-cap DEF on a Fire/Mental Blaster, then Doms can easily do the same thing. They have access to Scorpion Shield, too. The Blaster is significant because it has four targeted AoE powers, and you'll note that targeted AOE sets are very light on helpful DEF bonuses. What Dominator power-set combo do you think would present the most difficulty? I'll supply a build if you like.
   
   
2. Personally, I'd like to cap a positional defense instead too -- but that's not advisable on a Dom, because (as you note) Doms tend to be in and out of melee range. You have to pick your poison at some point. S/L is the best singular choice for a melee/range hybrid. Doms have so much freaking control that it's not like they're relying on the DEF anyway. It's a spectacular supplement to their control, though.
   
   
3. The difference between having soft-capped DEF and not having soft-capped DEF -- whether it's to S/L or ranged or whatever -- isn't necessarily the most materially relevant factor when we're discussing Doms, but clearly it's one of the more noticeable practical distinctions in general. The most materially relevant factor for Doms is perma-Dom. The ability to toss around mag-6 stuns in a 25-foot radius, and have permanent status protection, and get a free full bar of endurance every ~80 seconds -- well, all of that's pretty hard to miss.

I hate to tell you this, but "Duh." Try playing an Ice/Storm Controller.

The point I was making was that Purples don't provide nearly the benefit of Numina/Miracle/Performance Shifter for mitigating endurance drain. Many builds can, in fact, eliminate their endurance concerns with those non-purple enhancements. If we're looking at the issue from an SO-build's perspective, those enhancements provide a much larger leap in overall performance than purples do.

As far as the +recovery from purples goes, yeah, it's nice, but there are a lot of sets that offer +2.5% recovery (the aforementioned Performance Shifter being one). Getting 4% instead from two purples isn't a night-and-day difference.

Bottom line: For most builds, adding purples won't suddenly enable you to perform tasks you previously found impossible. For bleeding-edge, Scrapper-forum, no-inspiration-or-temp-use builds, then yeah, maybe. Still not sure how those builds are materially relevant to a player who's used to SO builds. I think your perception has been warped by your own uberness, which I suppose is fitting given your handle.

Let's back up a bit here. The context of the discussion centered around the comparison between so-called casual players and so-called hardcore players, and the builds available to each. Your position seemed to be the following:

• That the introduction of A-Merits drives down the prices of valuable Pool C/D recipes, and drives the price of Purples up -- which means that you have to sell many more of the former to earn enough influence to buy the latter.
  
  
• That casual or new players may see the higher prices of Purple IOs and get sticker shock, thus driving them away from the market.
  
  
• A-Merits therefore increase the divide between casual and hardcore players?

My position is that purples are irrelevant when you're comparing the two extremes among the playerbase. A well-planned non-purple IO build is generaly more than competitive with a purple IO build. In most cases (as you acknowledge, above), the vast bulk of the practical performance boost you get from a high-end IO build comes from the non-purples.

What makes more practical difference? An extra 12-15% in global recharge, or the ability to soft-cap your defense? Or how about the ability to solve, once and for all, your endurance-management issues? Purple sets generally do not contribute to either of those goals. Purples are, essentially, nice-but-overpriced upgrades to otherwise very solid +recharge sets like Crushing Impact and Positron's Blast.

With all of that said, it is absolutely correct to argue that purples have no material influence on the over-arching performance comparison between high-end IO builds and baseline Single-Origin-Enhancement builds. I have a lot of respect for what goes on in the Scrapper forum -- spent, in fact, probably my first two whole years here hanging in that forum -- but the builds people post there are often fantastically extravagant.

Those Scrapper players obviously have the right to post and to play those builds, just as you do, but (again, as you acknowledge) many of those builds would be within spitting distance of their current lofty performance levels with fewer purples. We're talking about maybe a 10% average performance gap between the purpled and the non-purpled, if even that. Yes, there are some notable exceptions; if you're building a Dom and you're absolutely in love with the character, then you should strive for the purples. If nothing else, using purples in a perma-Dom build will save you some slotting headaches.

But it is not only possible, but eminently reasonable, to achieve perma-Dom without purple sets. It's even possible to achieve perma-Dom and soft-capped S/L DEF without purple sets. Aren't those two things by far the most materially relevant factors in evaluating a high-end Dom build's performance?

The point here is that the casual player was helped more by the increased supply of (and their increased non-market accessibility to) non-purple IOs than they were hurt by the increased cost of Purples. Now, thanks to A-Merits, casuals can earn an LoTG once every four days with about 3-4 hours of total, solo playtime. You seem to be suggesting that casuals should pine for the days when you had to speed-run TFs to earn R-Merits fast for the essential non-purples.

That strikes me as bizarre. The performance gap is what matters. Purples comprise a miniscule part of that performance gap. Of course purples aren't entirely irrelevant, but they are insignificant when we're comparing SO builds to IO buils. In fact, I think one of the reasons we see so much bitterness directed at the supposed Ebil Marketeers is that there's an over-emphasis on purples. The sooner the player base at large comes to realize that you can compete with purpled builds at a fraction of the cost, the better, IMO. And we're not going to ween people off the strange notion that purples are all-important if we have established and insightful posters like you arguing that Purple prices drive the market.

That's a good point, and another reason that I believe the Alpha +damage bonus will be most popular. If your build is predicated on high DEF or high recharge on this-or-that power, then you're best served by getting those bonuses before Alpha is considered.

Or four LoTGs.

As Nethergoat points out, purple prices will likely fall from an increase in supply. I don't foresee any other significant factors to influence purple prices.

The corollary is that mid-level-range non-purple IOs may fall in supply. Again.

+Damage seems to me to be the big winner in the Alpha-slot comparison. It won't always be the best option; if you're playing a character with a low base-damage AT mod and/or a character with craploads of +damage already (like a Brute), then you'll probably benefit more from something else.

But more damage is always good, and damage is one of the hardest things to wring out of IO bonuses. Recharge, endurance management, and even ToHit/Accuracy can all be supplemented pretty well already through IO investment.

Happily, given that +damage bonuses from IOs are so hard to stack to any significant number, I don't think the +damage Alpha slot power will affect the market much.

Yes, but there are also diminished returns on recharge as you get closer to the activation-time bottleneck. I remember that quote, and it's a good rhetorical flourish, but the fact is that you never can have a seamless attack chain of Headsplitter, Headsplitter, Headsplitter. As a practical matter then, any extra recharge beyond what you require to chain one or two next-best-DPA attacks with Headsplitter is effectively wasted.

And if my non-purple IO build has +260% recharge in every power (or every power that matters), adding another 15% from the upgrade to three purple sets isn't going to make or break me. Again, purples are nice to have, but unless you have a very specific reason to want them, they're generally not worth the extra inf -- even if you have money to burn, because this game heavily encourages alt play.

IOW, for the price of a single purple set, I can probably improve an entire alt's build by a factor of three or more. Doesn't mean I never personally use purples; doesn't mean I think they're always undesirable; I just don't see how they're materially relevant to any practical performance discussion.

I haven't foggiest idea how many complaints there have been about Purple prices. I'm sure a lot. But they don't matter. The game has shifted in so-called casuals' favor whether they realize it or not.

The new player is, in my view, less likely to get sticker shock from purples than he is likely to get sticker shock from the various more common recipes. Purples are supposed to be rare and expensive. Anyone who only looks at the price for the most extravagant item on the market and concludes that he'll never be able to afford anything is -- well, let's just say that, like you, I have no sympathy.

You seem to be arguing that, in order to keep new (and/or casual) players from suffering sticker shock, the game should be changed counter to their interest. That's sort of an odd twist on populism.

In any case, A-Merits make crafting an exemp-friendly build easier, on the whole.

People generally go for S/L because it requires less build sacrifice (easier, with an important caveat), and because it's more Blapper-friendly.

The caveat is that you need to take either Cold or Mace Mastery as your APP. Ice Armor or Scorpion Shield, by itself, will get you about 17% S/L DEF. From there it's easy to pick up Tough and Weave and fill out the rest with IO sets. You don't even necessarily need Kinetic Combat sets; Smashing Haymaker will do for a ghetto build if you play your cards right otherwise.

Hover + ranged DEF is certainly a viable option too. Ranged DEF, provided you don't often use melee attacks, is at least as safe as S/L DEF, and it's generally more exemplar-friendly too -- given that you're not relying on an APP toggle. The downside is that Ranged DEF cuts into your opportunities for other bonuses.

These days, as a general rule, I personally give the edge to S/L DEF. Mace Mastery is worth taking for the AoE immobilize alone, and if you're gonna take Mace Mastery anyway, you might as well play to the pool's strengths.

I don't have the energy to look over your build very carefully right now, but your build seems to have no ranged AoE attacks at all -- which is a good thing in the sense that targeted AoE IO sets don't have any useful defensive bonuses; that's why Fire Blasters are such a pain to soft-cap without lots of help from pools. Only you can determine what'll work for your playstyle, but it seems to me that you're gonna want to go into melee fairly often, which means that your ranged DEF will be effectively wasted.

I've never quite understood the quoted thought process. To torture an analogy: Purples are the Ferraris of IOs, and Pool Cs are the Porsches. While it's technically true that the Ferrari performs better, the practical difference in performance doesn't even come close to justifying the difference in price. A Ferrari doesn't drive so much differently from a Porsche unless you go to a race track. On normal streets driving a Ferrari is like painting a "ticket me" sign on your forehead, but that's neither here nor there.

Purples are and always have been overpriced for the bonuses they offer. You can make a spectacular IO build without ever touching a purple; you can make a really spectacular IO build with a purple proc or two (not bothering to use whole sets). Some IO builds are actually hurt if you try too hard to cram purples into them.

The more significant gate to so-called casual players was always the rarer non-purples -- the LoTGs, the Numinas, the Miracles, the Regenerative Tissues. More recently, Kinetic Combats and their ilk got added to that mix. Purples are basically icing; their general appeal stems primarily from the +10% recharge bonus, which is great, but a given purple set also generally replaces a set with a 5% to 6.25% bonus already. The net difference is therefore pretty small, except where the enhancement values on the purple set allow you to save a slot or whatever.

With some few relatively limited exceptions (like Coercive Persuasion for the ranged +DEF), it's the non-purples that do the heavy lifting. It's the non-purples that provide the most significant performance increase over SO builds. Casuals weren't complaining because their IO builds performed at 95% of UberGuy's purple Ferrari build; they were complaining because UberGuy's build combines soft-capped DEF with copious +recharge bonuses and whatever other goodies that combine to make his build several times more capable than their mostly SO builds.

The high price for Pool-Cs was compounded by the fact that they were only dropping in any significant numbers for TF-skewed players. Speaking personally as a casual player, I can count on one hand the number of TFs I've run in the last two or three years. The problem isn't that TFs take too long, per se; it's that I'm very sensitive about wasting other people's time, and so I'm uncomfortable committing to any potentially time-consuming and group-dependent activity in an online game. If I have to leave the team early (because, after all, RL takes precedence), I'll feel guilty -- so it's better to avoid the issue entirely.

I've had plenty of Inf since the market was introduced, but let's pretend I'm one of the virtual downtrodden. Thanks to A-Merits, I now have a consistent means of earning most of the big-ticket non-purples outside of the market. More important to me, I have a consistent means of getting those non-purple recipes at the exact level I desire.

So yeah, long story short: your own playstyle may have been indirectly penalized by the introduction of A-Merits. But I don't see how speed-running TFs for hordes of Pool-C recipes to sell on the market in return for purples is a relevant playstyle when we're discussing the nameless casual. Seems to me that the devs aimed A-Merits squarely at reducing the practical divide between casuals and the hardcore (or if you prefer, soloers versus teamers), and it seems to me they've succeeded.

Sorry for the novel. I think all that talk about Ferraris at the beginning got me spinning my wheels.

How small CoH is in proportion to other NCSoft properties is almost irrelevant. What's pertinent is whether CoH is profitable. As long as it's profitable, it'll probably survive -- either at NCSoft or somewhere else. Businesses generally don't randomly shutdown profitable enterprises just because they're small.

$5 million is far from chicken feed, anyway. The fact that NCSoft's other properties dwarf that number is a good thing for CoH, unless of course those gross revenue numbers hide truly immense offsetting costs.

Which seems doubtful.

Seems CoH is holding its own in the recession. Always good to hear.

Which is still a huge boost, potentially bigger than all of the Uncommon Alpha-slot bonuses combined, except perhaps for +recharge. (There's no analog for +recharge in the relative-level scalars; everything else, though -- accuracy/ToHit, +damage, +control, +debuff, survivability -- all of those can potentially increase more from a level shift than they can from Uncommon enhancement bonuses.)

If it were a true level 51, then there'd be a downside to go along with the relatively minor boost in HP and damage: You'd get lesser rewards for fighting current content.

Yeah, sorry: I do feel a little more comfortable with the idea that a Soviet-born Superman would be less morally upstanding. I'm sure there were decent people living in the USSR, but the government had eyes. Are you seriously trying to draw a moral equivalence between modern-day Kansas and the Soviet Union?

The point of that Red Son story, as I saw it, didn't really have anything to do with the Soviet Union in particular. The Soviet Union could just as easily have been substituted for any totalitarian state. In fact, Red Son highlights just how important those hickish Kansans were.

And this new book, if WarpFactor's video review is any indication, is a new twist on that same theme. Instead of arriving in Metropolis with an ingrained moral compass, the modern Superman is unsure of himself until we (humans) inspire him, ultimately, to become the paragon of legend. Kansas values, if you will, are supplanted by, or supplemented with, life experience in the modern world.

It's fine to say that our contemporary, information-overloaded, introspection-ridden culture would change the boy. It may even be fine to tinker with the characters in Clark's Kansas upbringing, make them less attractive. There's a difference between, "Here's an alternate-timeline story showing how Superman could have turned out if he were born in X place at Y time," and, "Here's an alternate-timeline story showing how Superman turned out to be a reactionary nut-job because those idiots in Kansas have suddenly somehow regressed in the last 60 years."

Do you really believe that Kansans were more enlightened before the Civil Rights' Movement, before Post-Modern Feminism, before the Federal Highway Act? Nevermind countless advances in science and communication

You were replying to someone who said that a Superman brought up in 21st century Kansas could gain a solid moral compass, just as he was given one in 1950s Kansas. Your reply? A gratuitous slam on modern-day Kansans.

An Elseworlds title featuring a Soviet-raised Superman is a different animal entirely.

So ... You're saying you've never seen Terminator 2?

(I was joking.)

Suffice to say that one of Superman's main themes has always been that he's a paragon of virtue, even despite god-like power that we all know would likely corrupt any one of us. Part of that virtue is tied to his Kansas upbringing. Whatever your broad-brush views of rural society, Kansas people were no better educated or fair-minded 60 years ago than they are now. Common sense tells us that the opposite is true.

Just think about what's changed in the last 60 years. Think. If it was plausible that Ma and Pa Kent were upstanding, virtuous people back then, it's equally plausible now. Thus, your thoughts on the current political climate are irrelevant.

And thus, yours is a gratuitous (and ineffectually ambiguous) political cheapshot. In future, if you think that you you have to preface your post with a skirting-the-rules disclaimer, then it's probably not a good idea to post it. It's sorta like saying, "No offense, but ..." What follows is rarely polite or constructive.

So ... You're saying that Willpower renders Invulnerability obsolete?

Looks pretty good. Am I the only one who's distracted by Superman's resemblance to Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker here, though?

It's no more necessary than it was before -- which is to say, not necessary at all. You should, of course, raise your HP as much as you reasonably can, but there are other priorities to consider. +DEF and +recharge generally trump HP, for instance.

I should say +DEF definitely trumps +HP. Recharge is more subjective, depending on what kind of build you're looking for -- hyper-defensive, balanced, scranker-ish.

Given that hitting the old cap was pretty hard to do on WP Tanker, the new cap probably isn't worth worrying about. I'm sure it can be done, but once you get past a certain point, your net gains begin to diminish into near meaninglessness. What's a couple hundred HP when you already have 3,000+? A little under 7%.

My gameplay style is irrelevant. In fact, when I'm choosing builds, I almost always go for style over mechanical effectiveness. The desire to choose a given Epic pool is, in fact, largely influenced by thematic concerns.

I'm talking about game-design principles. A fun game with a shallow story generally sells better than an un-fun game with a good story. When possible, sure, game designers will mold the mechanics to fit the theme, but there are any number of thematic compromises that aren't given a second thought. In this case, we're talking about one set of pools that are tied to certain story arcs, and another, analogous set of pools that aren't. Theme alone isn't justification enough to explain such a wild mechanical inconsistency.

You wanna argue that Hero-side APPs should be tied to story arcs? I'd be fine with that.

It takes a minimum of four days and 22 missions to switch sides -- not an unreasonable time investment for alignment switching, but it isn't nothing either. The bigger issue is the one Moonlighter raises in this thread: If you have Hero or Villain merits saved up, you lose them when you switch sides. And there's a hard limit on how many you can spend in a given day.

So our four day figure can become much, much, longer, and that's before we even get around to doing the Patron story arc in question and switching back (if that's your desire).

It just seems like an unnecessarily convoluted process, an arbitrary penalty for wanting to use Villain pools instead of Hero pools -- which are mechanically analogous.

Ah, that's a good point -- but that little wrinkle still doesn't rise to the level of cherry-picking lethal-susceptible mobs, or KB-resistant mobs, for a Claws run.

We've all heard of Fiery Armor characters cherry-picking demons or whatever, but that's a defensive consideration -- understandable if you're just trying to determine AoE damage output. It's another thing entirely to rig your test in such a way as to fundamentally change the function of powers (like Shockwave).

BillZ's abstract numbers did not include Shockwave. His conclusion was still unequivocally on the side of Claws. If his numbers are close to practical reality, then the inability to use Shockwave regularly shouldn't be an issue; Claws should still be ahead of, or at least in the same ballpark as, Super Strength.

We haven't seen conclusive evidence either way yet -- mostly because no one seems to have an IO'ed Claws/Fire Brute -- but the preliminary evidence seems to favor SS. If the tests thus far have been unfairly biased in SS' favor, then that'd be good to know.

How? By people hoarding absurd amounts of Hero/Villain Merits and then spending them all in one go and flooding the market? That doesn't seem like a credible danger, even if you do subscribe to the notion that massive (and ultimately profitable) market manipulation is even possible. It just takes too long to earn H/V merits. If someone really wanted to go to the extraordinary effort you're describing, they can use alts to do it even now.

But if you're right, then why not limit regular merit spending?

The story arc is a thematic issue -- and theme must almost always yield to gameplay considerations.

As to the rest, what if I have a whole stable of characters who were level 50 long before Going Rogue was even a glimmer in the devs' eye? What if I now want to respec a large number of them because of a huge, imminent change to every single one of their builds -- like, say, Inherent Fitness?

Saying, "You should have done X," potentially several years after the fact just doesn't strike me as a compelling argument. Anyone Villain-side has immediate access to Hero Epics, whereas anyone Hero-side has several rather large obstacles blocking access to Villain Epics. The subject of this thread may be the largest of those.

The introduction of side switching and Praetoria only makes the disparity look sillier. Now more than ever, alignment is an arbitrary distinction.

Why do you say that? In what ways do the farming tests specifically favor SS/Fire? If anything, the refrain in this thread has been that AE farm missions tend to favor lower-radius AoE powers.

Yeah, that would fall under endurance management, which I said was the only real perk for an SS Tanker in the Energy pool.

I wondered why the spending was gated too -- but unfortunately I think you've discovered the answer: Spending is gated to help deter people from switching alignments regularly.

That said, if I'm right about the devs' intentions here, then it really is crappy that Villain Epics require an alignment shift, but Hero Epics don't.

I'll bet you'd get even more inf per minute with Ball Lightning and Electric Fences. C'mon, you know you want to.

Yeah. Unfortunately SS doesn't need Focused Accuracy, so it comes down to endurance. The extra regen you can pick up from Physical Perfection is a nice little perk, but it doesn't amount to a whole heck of a lot if you don't enhance it (and let's face it, who has slots for that?).

Jab's base damage at level 50 is 30.25. A single Mako's Bite proc adds 71.75 damage 20% of the time, or 14.35 damage on average. That's the equivalent of ~47% in base damage bonus that ignores ED. Make your proc a Hecatomb and you're looking at the equivalent of 116% in base damage bonus.

Ideally, of course, you won't be using Jab very often. Since your attack chain is rather light, though, I expect that you do use Jab alot -- and that's fine; Bruising now gives us a nice consolation prize for using T1 attacks. But if you're going to use Jab then it's best to get as much mileage as you can out of it. Happily, Jab doesn't need much in the way of Recharge or (because of Rage) Accuracy slotting, so there's comfortable space for at least one proc, maybe even two.

As always, YMMV.

I would have thought you'd like to have Rage and Hasten earlier, if you like to exemp down to level 30. I'd probably move KO Blow back down to 20, too -- but then I'm obsessive-compulsive about exemping.