Roderick

That's because of how quickly Fury ramps up to its "equilibrium" level, where it builds as fast as it degrades. People who don't learn the tricks to push Fury higher than that tend to cruise at that level, and see very little flux in their damage bonus. People who learn the Art of SMASH! to its fullest extent are more aware of Fury's highs and lows.

This may be true for the truly NEW player. However, for the players who have come from other games (and I speak from experience here), it's not the mindset they usually come to the game with.

In most other games, there's a category of equipment generally referred to as "Vendor Trash". It comprises the lowest tier or two of equipment. While you can function with a character equipped only with "Grey" or "White" equipment (In WoW terms), you're not going to function well.

When you begin upgrading to "Green" equipment, you start getting stat bonuses. As you progress to "Blue", "Purple", "Orange" and "Red" equipment (their tiers follow a different color-coding than ours do), the bonuses get greater in number, and more numerous per piece of equipment. In addition, you can get even more bonuses if the equipment you have all comes from the same set.

In these loot-based games, the quality of your gear is everything. If you don't have at least some good gear, you will die. A LOT.

So someone with a long experience in these games is going to see the TO/DO/SOs, and even the common IOs as "Vendor Trash" and avoid them at all costs, heading straight for the sets. And that's where the sticker shock comes in.

Another contributing factor is that our market doesn't scale. In those other games, most equipment has a minimum level, just like here. The higher the minimum level, the more the equipment costs, often increasing on an exponential scale - that's where things deviate so much here. Go look at the difference in prices between the minimum and maximum levels of special IOs like Karma: Knockback Protection, Steadfast Protection: Res/Def, or Luck of the Gambler: Increased Global Recharge Speed. The lowest level will usually be about the same as the highest, if not more expensive. But a newbie seeing that a level 10 Karma: KB Prot costs about 50 million may make the assumption that, by level 50, they will HAVE to spend hundreds of millions, if not billions, PER ENHANCEMENT, for every enhancement in their build, because that's on par with the games they've played before. While costs in that range DO exist, and it's possible to make a build where every enhancement is in that range, it's far from the norm.

I think that the claim that Elec's T1 and T2 does extra damage was true at one point, but when the first two blasts in all sets were normalized for new Defiance, the bonus damage got normalized right out of them.

1- Who said I was using more than a couple purples?
2- Who said I wasn't softcapped?

I've got one character, out of dozens, that has Hasten.

And it's not my Dominator. When I'm done his build, he'll have over 10 seconds overlap on Domination, without touching Hasten. what does he need it for?

How does this help?

Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

And this is why it shouldn't be automated. What good does it do anyone if the rampage happens in the middle of the night, when there's nobody there except Bob, the night security guard, who doesn't know a Gigglebite from a DIP switch? Who's going to bring the servers back up then?

Instant humor. Just remove commas.

Oh, wait. You already did. ;P

I don't get it. Why would I lose my set bonuses?

Wait, you mean someone actually USES all those level 50 recipes and IOs that I throw at the market? Pft, level 25's FTW! You still get more enhancement value than SOs provide, you rarely suffer the effects of enhancement scaling when exemplared, and the set bonuses stay with you unless you're running REALLY low-level content... and then you don't need the set bonuses anyways!

My first Dr Q was about 11 hours long. 13 if you count the downtime for THREE different meal breaks.

Nobody ever said that they'd extend the levels at which the Alpha Slot functions. As far as I know, even when i20 goes live, the Alpha Slot will still cease to function below level 45. Ergo, no level shift on Dr Q. Nobody except you is talking about shards on that TF.

No there hasn't. There wasn't last week.

On the Titan forums, someone confirmed that that's a bug, and that double clicking will work again in the future.

Drag and Drop doesn't work for slots, or at least, not on all systems. It doesn't for me, last I tried.