Sardan

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Is the late game balanced around fully slotted SO's or IO's?

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You can certainly do just fine using SOs. IOs can give you a lot more flexibility. For example, instead of slotting a power with 1 Acc/3 Dam/2 Recharge, you could slot using inexpensive "multi-aspect" IOs like "Acc/Dam" and "Dam/Recharge" etc. In attacks, it lets you build for the same level of damage and recharge as SOs, but with more accuracy and more end reduction. Basically better all around. This tactic is known as Frankenslotting.

It really helps to get Mids Hero Designer so you can experiment with slotting without spending any actual inf!

One advantage FA has over SD is it has its own End-replenishment power in Consume. Lacking external buffs most high recharge SD builds will be sucking wind if they attack nonstop. At least, mine does.

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Certain bosses have a chance to critical on some attacks.
Council Martial Artists spring to mind.

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Cimeroran Traitor bosses and KoA bosses can crit too.

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When the entire rest of the game is built around being easily and immediately accessible to players, sticking in items that require huge amounts of grinding, luck and time to get when nothing else in the game is similarly inaccessible is both inconsistent, and clashes with the rest of the game design, which does nothing really except encourage deviant gameplay in order to achieve them. When you make a game so casual-acessible, adding items that are counter to that encourages them to play the game in unintended ways to achieve those items.

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I suspect the devs' are trying to deduce how other MMOs retain players. While you're right that part of the appeal to this game is how casual-friendly it is, the fact is that there's not just one type of player, there's a wide spectrum. It could be that the devs want to introduce a slow trickle of uber-elite goodies to get hardcore players something to strive for. Even in this casual-friendly game there are hardcore players. Players that are willing to pay 100M+ for purples and LotGs, and 600M+ for the PVP uniques.

Exactly the type of confirmation I was looking for, thanks.

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One thing that bears emphasizing is that it requires a hefty bankroll to go from mild to wild.

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This is not true for tanks, at level 40 and by just doing normal (no TFs) content, my Shield/Stone Melee tank is soft capped for melee and ranged with AoE at 39%. I can see it being true for Brutes and Scrappers since you have lower numbers to start with.

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Correct. I should've clarified that my only Shields experience is with my Brute. Hadn't considered that it might be quite different for Tankers.

Can you enhance the defense debuff resistance of Active Defense with an HO? I've seen builds with a Cyto in there, I've seen builds with a Membrane, and I've seen builds with a Ribo. Color me confused. If debuff resistance can be enhanced, what's the proper HO to use there? And if you could, tell me what the combat attributes monitor shows for the HO-enhanced value. The base debuff resistance I'm getting for my lvl 50 brute from Active Defense is 17.30%.

Others have talked about specific gameplay aspects of Shields. One thing that bears emphasizing is that it requires a hefty bankroll to go from mild to wild. You can build a strong Regen/WP/Invuln inexpensively. But to get a really tough, survivable Shields character requires investing in +Def bonuses to get to or near to the defense soft cap. Use Mids to plan your build and then look hard to see if it's realistically within what you'd plan to spend, because there's a world of difference between 35% defense and 45%.

When doing your planning, you want to prioritize Melee defense, then Ranged. AoEs are less common so if you need to economize that's the place to do it. Oh, and don't count on Phalanx Fighting. It's great when you have others close by but if you're taking the lead and charging into a large spawn to soak up an alpha, it's not going to be helping.

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Best farm or AOE brute for boss spawns would be SS/SA. IO'd out, they are unstoppable!

Best farm or AOE brute for LT's is either SS/SD or SS/FA. I've never seen a good SS/FA but I have a fully IO'd out SS/SD and he absolutely murders LT's!

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You could take your Fire Armor Brute against Fire Blast bosses. Then you'd be equally unstoppable, have more damage tools and not have the penalties of Granite.

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Smurph knows a thing or two about building optimized characters. I'd have to agree that an IO'd-out SS/Fire on a map of fire-based enemies would be the ultimate farming brute.

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I'd probably have just gone with "Forever Burning" but, hey, not my mind.

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Yeah, but a name like Forever Burning suggests a round of treatments with antibiotics to clear it up.

I, for one, will be avoiding the AE building in Sharkhead from now on. Thanks for that important safety tip, Red_Zero.

QR

I loved MacSkull's OP in this thread, and I liked his suggestion about adding more Arena options. If they added the flexibility in Arena to pick from all the maps available in MA, you'd have custom zone PvP on demand.

Speaking as a PVE'er, even though the intent of the PVP changes was laudable, the problems Mac and others have pointed out just seem to doom PvP from ever getting popular. If I like to play a buffer/healer in PvE, I'm going to be confused and disappointed by PvP.

But more than that, just like Firespray posted earlier, new PvP essentially requires dual builds and dooms defense-based sets. The build you've invested hundreds of millions into for PvE is almost certainly going to be laughably sub-optimal in PvP. I'm not a game designer but it seems to be that it's user-hostile to create a system in which uber attacks like Blaze are suddenly neutered, while joke attacks like Flurry are buffed. Absurd.

Not sure if G_B got enough participants. I know that I've pretty much stopped monitoring this forum now that i15 has been released. If not enough people showed up, I'd suggest reposting the event request to the Market and PVP forums. Those are the areas heavily populated by folks who care a lot about drop rates and the rep system. Should have no problem finding 10 volunteers between the 2 forums.

Check out the brute guides forum. ThugsRus posted a guide to Elec/SD then later posted another guide to SS/SD. His preference has clearly swung to SS.

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i'm leaning towards having lvl 10 be the minimum lvl the ae becomes available and allowable to use.

for many it really isn't an inconvenience to get to 10, and for new players the game has a chance to appear a bit larger than just the ae building and learn a few basics along the way.

having said that, it would mean taking the ae offices out of atlas and co.

no, it doesn't solve the human condition.

/2inf

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I had a similar suggestion in another thread: a character would have to be level 30 OR have a 3 month vet badge to be able to use AE. That way at least you'd know the regular contact system etc before getting sucked in. Because of the twist of vet badges, you could start AE at level 1 if you'd been playing the game for a little while.

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Now since I haven't started a new character since I14 dropped it was news to me (or so I'm told, still haven't made a new character since I14) that the contact for the AE tutorial pops up when you first zone in from the new character tutorial, bumping your normal first contact off of your nav bar as the waypoint. This leads new players who don't know better straight to the AE building.

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Holy unintended consequences, Batman!

Only read the first few posts, but I'd say the only way to really fix the lowbie experience would be to require AE be unlocked by EITHER hitting lvl 30 OR having your 3 month vet badge.

With this either/or idea it would allow players who have experienced normal non-AE content to start in the AE from level 1 once they've been playing the game for at least 3 months. For newer players they simply will have to play traditional content until they hit 30.

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The thing is, we've got Colossus-like characters in game and enough swords can kill them just fine.

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What a specious argument. That's the difference between a game and a comic book. If you're literally immune to any type of attack it breaks game balance.

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Five swords or fifty-five swords shouldn't matter.

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One person against a soldier with an automatic weapon stands no chance. A huge mob will kill him if they're enraged enough not to run. Or for a slightly older analogy, one Sherman tank didn't stand much chance against a Tiger, but what about 5 Shermans or 10? This idea that "one of something isn't a threat so tons of that same something can't be" is rubbish.

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Keep the scrub weapons and scrub enemies in the scrub levels.

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A sword doesn't have to be magical or a light saber to be dangerous. Who says Cimeroran Traitors are scrub enemies? By your reasoning I guess all Natural Origin broadsword scrappers are scrubs too, because all they're using are the same big pieces of sharpened steel the Cimerorans are. If Cimerorans are lvl 50-53 in the game world that means these dudes are tough and a huge threat, just the same as any broadsword scrapper can be a huge threat.

Fair enough. I shouldn't have been so snarky in my reply anyway.

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Yes. Rick Dakan is the "father" of City of Heroes. It was his idea, not Jack's, as so many people seem to think. Rick created Nemesis, the Rikti, the 5th Column, and who knows how much else. He was a writer for the game at least through Issue 2 (he claims to have had some writing involvement with the Shadow Shard, I don't know how much). There was a much more detailed article on warcry.com from just before Issue 3's release, but it seems to have been removed.

[/ QUOTE ]I think Jack gets credit because game media sucks and doesn't do any research or doesn't care. Everyone interviewed and chatted with Rick during the early days of development, but once they brought Jack in as Lead Designer suddenly it was Jack's creation. Most people interviewing Jack probably didn't interview Dakan or really know anything about previous developer interviews.

Then players read all that and don't know any better and ultimately you end up with Rick Dakan basically being entirely unknown except and virtually uncredited ("Special Thanks" in the manual, but game development credits are incredibly sketchy generally) with a few exceptions while Jack gets to tromp around Cryptic Studios as the father of City of Heroes.

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Wow, I've been playing the game and reading the forums for years and had no idea who Rick Dakan was or his involvement with the game. I really believed it was Jack's brainchild.

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I do agree that the idea of soldiers with swords being able to go toe to toe with level 50 heroes and villains is just ludicrous.

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Agreed. At least the Rikti are believably threatening.

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I don't agree at all. A sword is low tech but it'll kill you just fine. To use a comic book analogy, while someone like Colossus would laugh at swords, a solid sword blow could kill Spiderman and most other characters in a heartbeat if it landed. What it would take for swords to be a threat to the average comic book character would be extremely large numbers of trained swordsmen with an absolutely suicidal desire to engage in combat. Which is exactly what's present on the ITF. I honestly don't see any verisimilitude problems at all.

I didn't misunderstand. I just peevishly didn't like something that wasn't official being self-declared official.

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It's really quite funny and cool how Marketeering has evolved into a subculture.

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And the funny thing is that people have realized that there's no need to even be secretive. For every person who reads and heeds this forum, there are 100 who blithely pay "gotta have it now" prices.

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It would be easier to have pvp IOs drop off mobs during a TF/SF. This would improve the supply to the market a lot. Tweak it so it don't work through flashbacks and you're set.

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They're ===> PvP <=== IOs. They're not for the PvEers. If people aren't willing to step into a PvP zone to try and earn some, then they should be at the mercy of the people who do to put them on the market.

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There's more than one way to get rewards in this game. I can buy a recipe that only drops from the rare TF drop table on the market without ever having to actually do a TF. When people talk about supply to the market, it's a valid point. There's nothing wrong with a PVPer earning inf by selling his recipes to a PVEer who wants to pay an agreeable price. But I think most of us would say that there's a supply problem if recipe prices are topping 700M.

Even at those prices you have a problem that new participants don't have incentive to go there. Let me use an analogy: if I offered you a job to work for me and said that every year at your annual review there was a random 10% chance that I'd increase your pay, would you like that deal? Of course not. You want a guarantee that if you put in the work, you get compensated.

For a new PVPer under the new drop rules it's incredibly likely that going into a zone and participating in PVP for an hour or two will result in two things: utter humiliation and no drops. For something to act as an incentive, there has to be at least a perception of a reasonable chance of receiving the carrot.

If the devs meant for PVP recipes to serve as a way to benefit those who live their lives in PVP zones, then mission accomplished. If they meant them to be an incentive to encourage participation in PVP, then not only was the initial implementation a failure but the latest changes are failure squared.

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but it doesn't, and IMHO making them too rare reduces their effectiveness as the carrot on the stick for the non-hardcore.

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What would completely fix this would be to have an occasional event that dramatically increased the drop rate for PVP recipes and XP too. Like, insanely hugely bump the drop rate to something amazing like 1:5 instead of 1:100 and double or triple XP too. Such that PVE'ers would have the same kind of slavering reaction they have to double XP weekend.

This would lead to a rush of people going to participate in zone PVP. Would there be farming? Of course! But out of the thousands of people going just to get the pretty-much-guaranteed phat loot, it's likely that dozens or hundreds would go "hey, this is pretty fun. I want to do this more often." Thus PVP drops would serve their (IMO) intended function, which is to encourage and reward more PVP participation.

At the end of the special event weekend, drops and XP return to normal. Supply quickly dries up, and people are clamoring for the next PVP special event weekend.

What makes this work as an incentive for mass PVP participation is that it's temporary and the loot is virtually guaranteed. Just fiddling with small tweaks to the current drop rate won't do it. Change the drop rate from 1:100 to 1:80? Yawn. Still no incentive. And the problem with tiny incentives is that if a zone has 10 people in it and 1 guy is encouraged to go there by marginal drop changes, he gets repeatedly owned by the hardcore guys that live there. In a massive influx, the hardcore PVPers would be like sharks in the water, but there'd be so many that you'd have a lot of noob on noob action, which would be a lot more fun for all noobs concerned.

Because drops are tied to rep, this would have to be tied with MacSkull's suggestions of changing how rep timers get started and (not) reset.