PleaseRecycle

As just one example, it's very easy to sell a level 30 Numina global for more than twice what they fetch at level 50. The other upside is that I always want my best set bonuses to last down to 30, and if I generate loads of level 30 recipes myself I don't have to worry so much about trying to get everything from the market. Though please, everyone run out and start doing this, it would take a small army of 30-sitters to put a dent in the unmet demand at that level.

Thanks to street justice I finally made a brute, a counterpart of sorts to my SJ/EA scrapper. Brutes're pretty decent. The damage sucks less once you're IOed out and don't have to stop moving in normal circumstances. Sadly not all circumstances are normal so sometimes it gets a little ho-hum. Overall, though, the damage deficit is small enough that it is still fun. I don't really see a big difference in survivability since both of them can solo AVs blindfolded, but the difference between regen on the brute and a hypothetical SJ/Regen scrapper would be fairly pronounced I imagine.

The main reason why I never will switch over to brutes over scrappers in general is that sinking feeling I get when I'm running up to the first spawn in a mission, or the first spawn after a short pause in the action, et cetera. Hit build up if you want but those first few hits will still have defenders trying to hide their laughter.

How is it bad that people can manipulate the market? It seems like some people feel that it's a problem when you can't get exactly what you want for exactly what you were initially planning to pay, right now. The fact that you might occasionally have to adjust your expectations or, heaven forfend, use a bit of strategy makes it all the more interesting than if it were a simple auction house.

You can put three damage procs into caltrops if I recall correctly, and this combined with the fact that in "ideal circumstances" they proc five times over their lifetime makes them a very cheap way to deliver a large amount of area damage. Potentially. I tried this once via scrapper weapon mastery and while it basically does do what it says on the tin, in actual play you tend to want your fights to be over in under forty seconds, and when they are that long it is unusual for most of the enemies to remain clustered up in the same area. The obvious exception there is farming, but seeing as this is the stalker forum that's probably less of an issue.

So, in short, they can do good damage in certain cases but you still might not find them worthwhile.

Huh, well that's rather definitive evidence that they're planning to do this then, isn't it? Sounds like a pretty surmountable bug. While I like the balance of slot value how it is now, it's hard to complain about the addition of three more slots in that range. Seems like I start to bottleneck there in terms of what I'd like to spend slots on on just about every new character lately.

I don't feel like I've been slighted when people don't respond to my tells about teams. I have no idea what they're doing, they could easily be AFK or in a fight or something. Maybe they just don't want to reply, which is also their prerogative. The only thing it means is that I need to slow down recruitment slightly to give them a minute to possibly reply if they are interested in teaming, but it's vanishingly rare that anyone gets exercised about how long recruitment takes prior to running an hour long task force. At least, that's been my experience on several servers.

Yes, the proof is in my posts, which is why it's frustrating that some people persistently fail to understand. I obviously did a poor job of explaining it. Anyway, I'd say the thread has become significantly more interesting since we ceased hostilities, wouldn't you? Let's keep it that way.

Sure Schismatrix, and your repetition of the claim that I want everyone to be forced to team at all times makes even more sense given that I said at least three times that that specifically was not what I meant. I understand you're still trying to pick a fight, but I'm done with that, sorry.

Given the huge popularity of street justice and the twice-as-huge popularity of titan weapons, it seems like the price point was rather shrewdly chosen. As for salesmanship, well, it's true that there isn't any in-game preview exactly (or can you view the powers at the creation screen before purchasing them?), but it's also very easy to do a quick youtube search to see if anyone has uploaded demonstrations. At this point the answer to that for all paid sets is "they certainly have!"

Heh Void, I don't exactly consider myself the life of the party but I guess I could be a heck of a lot more introverted than I am, it seems.

Due to this thread I've spent some of the day whipping up pick up teams to just do whatever I had available. An arc, some tips, a SSA. I don't usually start teams quite that often but it was a good time. Sure, people would drop out and need replacing with little explanation when you're just filling spots with anyone who responds, but in each case a sort of core group built up and developed the beginnings of a rapport.

Not sure what else to add at this point other than to reiterate my recommendation of trying it to those who haven't lately.

Forbin, have you ever tried to fill out a TF at off hours? It turns out you can rapidly find seven interested parties who were "not seeking" without much trouble on the smallest of servers. Seeking implies action on your part, it says nothing about receptiveness to the concept.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, "Bosses are fun from level one!"

Well in any case, sorry about that part, it was my mistake.

All right, Void, I'm convinced. Good point. I would like to see some sort of mechanic added that would increase the appeal of random teaming to the point where people would think twice about avoiding it even if the random player did seem to have some syntactical insufficiencies, or didn't think to give adequate notice before sending an invite. I still think that there exists a class of players who don't really have any fundamental problem with pugs other than that they decided to avoid them one time.

Nalrok, there's a difference between pointing out a cause and suggesting a remedy.

I was going to say, "But it doesn't require coercion, it requires changing your mind." That'd be pretty ironic in the context of the discussion though. That reminds me of those ancient threads about how to encourage people to team up more, before they changed experience scaling on teams. Maybe it needs to be further subsidized somehow. Team with a new player, get a sliding experience bonus, the more and newer players the better.

This is re: Bosstone:

Telling people how to play the game is the foundation of this forum as you are probably aware.

I disagree that finding teams is a trivial matter. Broadcast can work, help channel can work on some servers (not on Virtue, let me tell you!), but the devs did revamp the search function recently for a reason. They specifically made it possible to see someone who was solo on a mission. I don't know about you but that was the point where I started getting way more requests to join than I ever had before. It was expressly designed to work this way, and it seems to work pretty well. That's part of why it bothers me when people revel in avoiding the system.

Fine, you're right, it isn't that big of a deal, and it wasn't worth this big of a to-do. I maintain that if each of you went out and invited some hapless lowbie with only a single star of veterancy to their name when you logged on this evening, you'd have a surprisingly good time showing them the ropes.

The part I don't get is if you don't understand that I'm the one accepting the blind team requests, or if you think you're really sticking it to me by pretending that you don't.

Void, I'm guessing then that you're not one of the people who never leaves /hide.

Bosstone, unfortunately for a new VIP today the search function essentially is "the world" as far as CoH is concerned. Most of us are probably members of a dozen or two global channels, the newbie is not. She may not even know the global chat system exists, or have ever visited the official forum. Most people in this thread were not advocating opting out of the most basic in-game tool for just that kind of player to have any access to teams at all, but a few were.

It is like, my opinion, man, but that is what I was trying to express here even though I clearly could have put it slightly better. Or is that overstating it?

I solo most of the time too, Void, but that's the thing. There's a difference between soloing a lot and shutting out the outside world. One of the things I suppose I should have brought up sooner instead of getting into a giant slap fight is that one of the advantages of making yourself available for pugs and random sidekick requests is that you're improving two people's experiences at once. The person who was having no luck finding a team, and probably your own as well. It seems to me that being as open to random teaming as possible is a good thing to do in a game of this... seniority in the market.