Sailboat

It's not just that teams can succeed with very different compositions of ATs and powersets -- it's that they can succeed in different ways. Not every team that succeeds does so by steamrolling willy-nilly. Sometimes a team uses control, sometimes AoE damage, sometimes numerous competing single-target attackers going wild, sometimes herding, sometimes just buffs itself into invincibility, sometimes carefully picking off and isolating a few enemies at a time, sometimes melting everything with debuffs, and so on. I've even been on an oddball "drop-centered" team using placed debuffs and Trip Mines to do the bulk of our killing.

Variety is the spice of life -- I find it more interesting when I have to adapt a bit to work better with other players' playstyles or their given powersets.

Heh. I've been wondering about this myself -- I got a character to 1 billion this weekend, but didn't post anything, because I can't decide if it's the round number of one billion or the functional cap of two billion that "matters."

Of course it's a silly question; I probably can muster 2 billion across my entire account, and e-mailing influence will trivialize the classic monocle-and-teabag screenshot soon enough anyway.

But 100 billion? That'll require 50 characters just to hold, if you don't park it in WW slots or convert it to PVP IOs. How would you "prove" it, anyway? 50 screenshots will try any reader's patience, and how would we know it's not the same 2 billion being e-mailed around? It's almost too cumbersome to be interesting.

Edit: oh, and regarding what to do with that wealth...I bought two IO recipes last night. Level 30-ish melee damage triples for frankenslotting in a level 30 character. They set me back 55 Inf apiece.

I would allow it if special code was included that absolutely prevented it from working dual-or-multiple-boxed.

Because that's what people want it for. Nobody wants to play buff/buff, but every dual boxer is underutilizing the attack powers of the buffbot(s).

IMHO there's something fun about every Scrapper powerset. Even the sometimes-maligned Martial Arts not only has the beautiful animations, but also can out-pound several of the sets for single-target killing -- whether I'm the player or not, I frequently see well-designed MA Scrappers using several hard-hitting attacks (Crane-Crippling Axe-Storm-Eagle's Claw) to steal LT and boss kills from other Srcappers.

Therefore I advise you to fool around with concepts. Somewhere there's a concept, look, or idea that will resonate with you, and that Scrapper will be more fun per minute of time payed than an equally-efficient Scrapper that doesn't have the same special something. Watch other higher-level Scrappers in teams; try things you're interested in, and see how they feel.

Ran into a good one today.

An engineering technical presentation was sitting in the printer, with the following slide titles (among others less applicable to COH/V, of course):

Need to get T. F. from Rod to Power
Control of Kinetics
Now add a Controller

Those look like regular thread titles from our forums, don't they? Uncanny.

Does it seem to happen with particular enemies?

What does "WTD" stand for?

I still don't understand the point of farming +4s.

Okay, you don't like capitalism. I don't either. To borrow Winston Churchill's complaint about democracy, it's the very worst system there is, except for all the others.

Let's replace it. The problem with replacing it with a system of fixed prices from vendors, such as you have postulated, is, who decides what those prices are? Clearly you don't mean for the Devs to decide; they've already made their intent clear, and you don't like it; it's what you're trying to overthrow.

Would YOU be the one to set the prices? Why you and not someone else -- say, someone with 100 times more money than you, who only wants to play one character, and that one character is already IOed? What if he sets the prices really high just to spite you?

Clearly someone is going to get to set the prices in your new regime, but how will it be determined? Will one strong player seize power and dictate to the rest of us? Would we like that?

Wouldn't it be better to have some kind of competition to determine who sets the prices? But what if that winning person then leaves the game? How could we adjust prices as the changing situation warrants if that person sets them once and leaves? Ah, we need system that will constantly adjust prices to reflect what's going on in the game, taking input from many, many players into account. Perhaps everyone will get to vote.

But why should voters be equal? What if I play the game a lot and you only play it for an hour every Saturday? Shouldn't my decisions about prices outweigh yours, reflecting my greater attention to the changing ebb and flow of the game? Maybe I should have more votes if I spend more time playing.

Let's call these votes "influence." So now we've arrived at a system where each player gets influence for playing, more if they play longer and more successfully (avoiding debt, for example), and can use that influence to affect prices of IOs in some kind of publicly-accessible polling place.

But we're not all online at the same time, are we? We need the polling place to be open round the clock, so people can vote any time, then come back later and see how their votes weighed against other player's votes on what the prices should be. A proxy establishment, if you will, that will hold our votes in trust for us while waiting for other players to vote. Or perhaps "consignment" is a better term than proxy.

Yes, yes, it's beginning to take shape now, isn't it? By God!

The TT Team I was on had 3 Macers and 2 Energy Melee Tankers, which was kind of unusual. We were also the baby team; quite a few of us were pre-Stamina. Seeing as we were

• Lowish-level Tankers (poor damage-per-endurance)
• Pre-Stamina
• Mostly single-target (thus using a lot more attacks)
• and fighting Freaks (who had some endurance-draining electrical attacks and also self-rezzed, requiring additional beatdowns)

I thought we did okay. I actually had to occasionally stand around and get beaten on because I lacked the end to attack, and sometimes I just used my best-slotted attacks instead of a full chain of badly-slotted attacks.

One of the few times I've really appreciated the refilling of the endurance bar one gets from leveling; that happened at several key moments last night.

I was pleased also to note that at level 12-15 or so, just with DOs, my Shield Tanker, the Sewer Knight, was able to muster 34% defense at times (standing with my peers to leverage Phalanx Fighting, and using the 2.5% defense veteran pet, which normally is too fragile, but it survived a lot better with 5-6 Tankers holding the enemy's attention). 29-34% isn't bad for a DO build.

The Sewer Knight also got to play host to the team in his own desmene for some of the missions.

Not sure there is a "hating" of Dark. But, assuming there is some feeling against it, I'd say it's this: the heal, Dark Regeneration.

Dark Regen is a GREAT heal. It can heal any damage at all, given several targets; it can bring you from a handful of hitpoints to full with as few as 2 guys nearby when it's slotted.

BUT...the Scrapper version does the same thing. As few as two enemies nearby lets my Scrapper heal up to full from any damage that hasn't killed him.

Tanks have more hit points and better resists and some other advantages, true; but a /Dark Scrapper has a lot of offensive output (not specific to /Dark, but because he's a Scrapper) and can still heal himself with one click every 10-15 seconds...and still gets the controls and wide variety of resistances that Dark gives.

In short, I think players don't hate Dark; they just get almost as much benefit from Dark as a Scrapper secondary and get the offensive perks of Scrapping to boot. So I think they are making Dark characters...just not necessarily as Tankers.

The point of my link suggestion is not to disallow long bios, but specifically to "ghettoize" them -- to keep the long ones out of the prime real estate. If you don't want to bother to click the link yourself, don't argue for long bios -- if a click deters you, a wall of text will, too.