Sardan

As I noted in my post, I had bosses aplenty in my CoT, Longbow, Arachnos, and PPD Ouroboros missions.

I'm sure their marketing people would have loved to have GR out by Christmas. It's not exactly rocket science to figure out that a product on the shelves for Christmas is preferable to a product on the shelves in the first quarter. The problem is you can't just pull a Picard and say "make it so."

I've shipped software to retail for Christmas in the past and my experience is that you have to commit to the retailers 6-9 months ahead of time (they don't take kindly to "we'll probably have it by Christmas") and have a master ready no later than early October to allow time for mastering, box manufacturing, assembly and shipping to retail. I'm sure Marketing had a sit-down with Development around March and asked if they could make Christmas and were told it just wasn't feasible.

We don't have specifics yet, only that at San Diego Comicon they had a presentation on GR that said that they intend to add a serious end game that will make current end game content look like a piece of cake. And that there would be a way for level 50 characters to advance in power--the way they said it made it clear they're not talking about raising the level cap. Probably the Universal Enhancement Slot idea they floated in the August '08 marketing survey.

I'm with Smurph and ST on this one. I had an Elec/SD brute that I IO'd out pretty thoroughly. He was good but once I leveled an SS/SD I stripped him of all IOs to equip the SS. With high recharge Footstomp cranks out the damage. It's also nice in that it's a big round AoE; you avoid having to constantly position cones.

There would be no challenge to track the price of that IO. It would always sell for 2 billion, never 1 inf less, because nothing can sell for more than 2 billion. It would create a huge advantage in PVP.

I know this isn't the main topic of the thread, but I read a cartoon on this topic that was incredible; informative and full of pathos at the same time. Check it out.

Obviously the guess at the feature being in i16 was off, though.

Wow, that is not what I expected to hear, given that the old difficulty system allowed us to increase the level of TFs for years. I hope they continue working on this. I understand not wanting to allow TFs to be made easier, but sometimes it's just plain fun to take on a harder one.

I agree with the previous suggestion that increasing mob level should be integrated into the challenge settings.

Okay, I've had just about enough of this. Lady Sadako, as a member of the Forum Cartel, you know good and well about the official Forum Public Opinion wiki maintained by your fellow Cartellians. I came to this thread following my marching orders to bash this "Bad Influence" person. As a loyal forum sheeple, it's my duty. I don't even know what B_I did to rile up the authors of Forum Public Opinion, but hey when I'm told to come here and uphold the status quo, I follow orders.

But seeing your disingenuous disavowal of the existence of the official Forum Public Opinion sickens me. It's as if scales have fallen off my eyes. I was blind, but now I see. I can have my own opinion! I don't have to blindly mouth the empty propaganda of Forum Public Opinion!

All I can say is: thank you, Bad Influence. I'm not sure I ever would have broken free of the Cartel's grip on my lemming-like forum posts if you hadn't been brave enough to speak truth to power.

I'm sure that Lady Sadako will now turn the vast resources of the Cartel against me, but I am not afraid.

Maybe you're talking about level 50 characters that can easily farm maps set for 8. I've been leveling up a new brute and my experience is radically different from what you report. I've been forming pugs and I see a far higher percentage of people teamed than I used to see when I do a /search.

Even so I'm able to form a team pretty rapidly every time. I've had to unlearn old habits about inviting only folks who are close to my level. My most recent team had me as the highest level character at 31 and the rest from 20-28. And we had a great time.

I think the secret in i16 to happy teaming is to remember that you can invite an extremely wide range of levels.

It is definitely difficult traveling with only SS; but there's a Raptor Pack vendor in Grandville. You can easily get there with a lowbie, so you don't even have to do the mayhem missions for the temp travel powers if you don't want to. I bound the Raptor Pack to a key so I just leave SS on and toggle on the Raptor Pack when I need some vertical then immediately toggle it off again. It becomes second nature after a while.

If you're not familiar with keybinding you can enter a command like this:
/bind numpadenter, "powexec_name Raptor Pack"
That makes the Enter key at the bottom right of your numeric keypad toggle the Raptor Pack on and off.

Actually he'll do that now if you call him lazy or stupid in /Local.

Right, that's where I'm coming from. It's not that I'm too lazy to go visit the notoriety contact, it's that I dislike making the team wait while I do so.

I'd love Longbow to get an infusion of recostumed PPD forces. The power armor looks totally cool. When they fly they get rocket flames coming out of the bottom of their boots. Style points! But if PPD models/powers ever get ported, please for the love of humanity, cut the duration of those awful glue guns. Those feel like they last forever in mayhem missions.

Well said. I totally agree with Sapphire (the OP) and with this. I am constantly surprised and delighted with the level of dev openness in this game. It takes extra work on their part, and sometimes an extra thick skin when some immature hothead storms into the forums and accuses them of hating players, being stupid/lazy, etc.

That's been referred to as "the Frankenstein walk" and I'm pretty sure it's new to i16. I love it! But it's definitely not the same as the crouching-zipping walk I'm referring to. It's sort of like someone is trying to be a stealthy sprinter. Just looks odd to me.

I think you're on the right track. We don't know what GR will do for sure, but the August '08 marketing survey mentioned a mechanism called Universal Enhancement Slots as a way of making your character as powerful as a hypothetical level 60 without actually bumping the level cap. The survey made no mention of how you'd earn the slots, but presumably it's not through XP.

BABs cautioned that some stuff on that survey has been dropped or heavily modified though, so we can't even be sure the UES system will be included. We can be sure that something that allows character advancement withough bumping the level cap will be included, though.

I didn't see that post either but it makes sense. The timing of the loyalty program makes it appear that they're hoping for closed beta of GR to start sometime around mid- to late November. That would make it the next major release, and thus i17 would be its sync release.

True, but it'll make it much faster to respond in an authoritative way.