Sardan

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Dotn't take Fulcrum Shift whatever you do, it draws more aggro than Darkest Night does.

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My impression was that FS is a foundation power of the /kinetics set...?

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Cat was kidding. There's no point in rolling a Kin without FS.

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I'll be skipping Hot Feet though, I can promise you that. If that's the one I'm thinking it is.... requires you to be on the ground to use. Also an auto-skip: Inertial Reduction. STUPIDEST. POWER. EVER. Especially if you'll be taking a real travel power, which I will be.

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First, Hotfeet does require you to be on the ground to turn it on, although you don't have to be on the ground to leave it on. It is an End hog and an aggro generator. It's also a HUGE source of damage, especially with containment. Take it early, but don't even bother running it until you get it double or even triple slotted for EndReduction. But it's well worth 6 slotting, 3 dam, 3 EndReduc. If you can't stand the thought of running that power, I'd seriously rethink your goal of playing a Fire/Kin since that power is a cornerstone of Fire.

Keep in mind that containment is the reason controllers can do decent damage now. In the early game your AOE immob is mainly useful for getting you killed, since it just gets mobs angry but you don't have the tools to mitigate the aggro. But importantly, it sets up containment. So later when you have Flashfire slotted up you can Flashfire a group to stun it, hit them with Fire Cages, then go stand right in their midst (where you want to be to use your Kin powers anyway) and fry 'em with Hotfeet. Fire Cages recharges fast and costs little End, so you can get away with very few slots in that power.

Flashfire is the most important mez you have. It's up far more often than Cinders, which I mainly use as an "Oh Crap!" power. Six slot Flashfire, get Hasten, use Siphon Speed as often as possible and slot for Recharge set bonuses. The result is Flashfire will be up for every group your team encounters.

IR is very skippable, I agree.

Re: your question upthread about when to take SB, I make it a habit to take it at 20 and add 1 or even 2 slots to it at 21. At that level all of your teammates have End issues. With the added +Recharge from SB they'll have even worse issues. Slotting multiple EndMods in SB really helps the overall team's speed through a mission tremendously. Later on use a vetspec or freespec to remove the extra slots since by the early 30s virtually all your teammates will be able to go full speed with just a single-slotted SB.

Note that by taking SB at 20 and forgoing Stamina till 22 you'll be sucking wind badly. But you'll be the only one on your team doing that, and you can tell them that in exchange for their nice full blue bars they should drop their blue insps on you. It works well.

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I liked this idea when I posted it, and I like it now.

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You obviously used your Ouro portal to steal it from me in advance.

I'd like to make high threat minions or LTs. Think Sappers. But like Sappers, I'd like them to be unique in a spawn, or at the most have 2 in a spawn for a team of 8 on challenge level 5. For example, it'd be neat to have a Kin that has Siphon Speed, but it's no fun to get hit with 5 siphon speeds either. So when I'm designing custom enemy groups, I'd like to be able to mark characters as "rare" or "unique in spawn".

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that and somone noticed on the poster somewhere it says issue 16

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Link please? Many people (including me) assume it's going to be i16 but I haven't seen any confirmation yet.

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Why is it no matter what the question is, someone answers with a "market is the key" answer? Maybe not everyone wants to play that aspect of the game. I have hundreds of millions and all i do is sell on the market the drops that i get. I'm not or not going to be a "marketeer" and alot of others feel the same way.

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"No matter what the question is"? Please. The guy was asking about the best way to obtain purples. He was only thinking of farming, but the unsurpassed method is to make the most inf per unit of time invested is the market. I guarantee that he could farm to his heart's content for purples but a marketeer could make enough inf during that time to buy way more purples than will drop in the farms.

You don't have to like that answer and you don't have to play the market. But the OP asked a question and I was trying to help him think outside the box.

I loved the Pandas vs Rikti arc. I'm not sure how team friendly it is; I solo'd it with one of my strongest characters. But the dialog and panda costume design was seriously entertaining. Solid 5 star arc IMO.

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Supposedly the drop rate is a 1 in 5000 chance.

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Where is that from ?

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From here. Doesn't make it true, of course.

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Oh that's good.

For a moment there, I was starting to wonder if we were living in a subjective reality where nothing existed until we were around to witness it.

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Actually the entire shebang is here just so we can witness it.

I'm not sure why but I love these stories of P_T's pug disasters. You can see the trainwreck coming, yet it still delivers.

If your intent is to get purples, that raises the question of what is the best investment of your time. Supposedly the drop rate is a 1 in 5000 chance. So is it better to be level 50 farming a lvl 48 map directly for purple drops? Or better to do something else that generates better influence per defeat and just buy whatever purps you want on the market? Either a lvl 50 farm or maybe something like the ITF where you not only get a ton of inf but merits that you can use to get recipes that you can sell to generate inf to buy your purps.

That's a bit of a trick question, of course. The best investment of your time is to learn to make money on the market directly. It's amazingly easy in this game.

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There's simply no way to cover all sensible combinations with just 3 levels. There needs to be several per powerset.

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Clearly not. And some of these are just insane, like giving Darkest Night to Minions on Standard. That is a far worse debuff to give them than Tar Patch like before. It's like no thought was put into this at all because many of the bad changes should be bleedingly obvious.

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Even stacked Tar Patch is bad; it can quickly elevate incoming damage to nuke levels. It wouldn't be bad if they could put in "no stack" code, like is done for the Comm Officers when they summon portals. I.e. if it was made such that only one NPC in a group would use Darkest Night or Tar Patch. If they can stack 'em, it's bad new no matter which one we're talking about.

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The Devs don't care about the paying customers time spent in game to build their toons. Just go with it and praise them a lot.

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Well given that the entire reason for this change is to prevent more people from spending big inf on a useless IO, I'd say that pretty much invalidates your claim of "they don't care."

And before you say something like "if they cared they'd fix the bug", you have no idea how deep in the code the bug goes. Obviously if it was the same amount of work to put in the warning as to fix it, they'd just fix it.

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I think you need to look at the bigger picture, some of us arent using the AE to farm but to create challenging non-wussified content unlike what the devs created in the past. So if I create a bunch of misisons with luietents set to extreme with deadly powersets does that classify me as a farmer?

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Nope. And I'm sure there were legitimate missions that used the Vampire incubators and snake eggs too.

It's obvious the honor system doesn't work for curbing farming/PLing. The safest thing to do is to put in controls that simply make certain types of exploits impossible. I am 100% sure there are lots of legitimate story-based arcs out there that have maps with all minions or all LTs or all bosses on them. But the truth is that most of the farming also uses maps of that type. So don't be surprised to see them go.

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I'm not saying I am in favor of you getting your account banned. I'm only saying that from what I've seen you had to be going pedal to the metal to get a character deleted, so I can only infer you had to be in full-frenzy mass PL mode to get your account banned. If you weren't farming that map heavily then I'd say you have good grounds to appeal the punishment and get it overturned.

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So, if someone created a character and sped their way to 50 through normal content, say Task Forces, and got from 1 to 50 in say 12 hours, wouldn't that be pedal to the metal? Should those characters also get deleted?

This is the underlying problem with that rationale.

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First let me be clear that I'm just observing what seems to be the case for MA content, not defending/advocating the devs' actions.

There have been longstanding highly publicized ways to get insane levels of xp per hour using normal non-AE content. A couple of fire/kins dual running Battle Maiden with a perma-46 will give the SK'd lowbie a fast ride. A team of 8 fire/rad controllers can basically self-PL. I'm sure the devs aren't happy with that, but as long as that activity doesn't become dominant they focus on other stuff. To take your example, if people occasionally got to 50 in 12 hours via TFs then the devs for sure wouldn't do anything. If it became widespread they would. In practice, it's always a matter of degree.

The issue with AE farming wasn't that it existed, it was that it dominated the AE, IMO. I suspect that they'll eventually change MA so that you have to have mixed ranks for the main group in a map and they'll eliminate the auto-SK system. Once they've done those you'll still be able to farm to your heart's delight in the AE but the rate of return will be no different than traditional farms.

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The changes the devs made have been steps in the right direction. They just need to change it to prevent maps of all one rank (i.e. no more all-boss, or all-LT or all-minion maps) and eliminate the auto-SK system.

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Not sure I get this one. As long as the risk:reward ratio functions as it should, why would any of these examples matter?

I've only been in one arc that had an all boss spawn. If it had been the first mission in the arc, I probably would have dropped it. However, it was not and I wanted to complete the arc.

It was hard. Made doubly so because all of the bosses looked the same and had the same name, but only one was "the" boss that had to be taken out.

Since it was very challenging, I would not consider that a farm

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It doesn't matter if you consider a map a farm or not. Just go to the AE and look at the constant broadcast for all boss map farms. If it's being farmed heavily, it's a farm.

A team having a granite brute, a Kin, and 2 permadoms plus various AOE damage dealers can destroy pretty much any map. But when they are unleashed on an all boss map the rewards are significantly higher than on a normal map with mixed ranks.

I think the devs will be satisfied as long as farming is kept to something that's happening in the background as opposed to dominating the AE. I don't think that goal has been met yet. The changes I suggested would further tilt the balance.

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hey guys!!!

Recently getting my fire/psi dom to 50 and obtaining 150mill, I decided it was time to IO. So all of today, I've been IO'ing out my new character and after a while, I completely ran out of money, leaving me with only 67.50% global recharge.

I was hoping to aim for 70-ish percent, but was unable to (for today), and so I was toying around to see if I could perhaps still obtain permadom with my low recharge rate

And surprisingly, I was able to.

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I've been thinking of creating a Dom as my next character, pending seeing Castle's upcoming changes. And I've been wondering about what the budget should be for permadom. I've heard people toss around wild figures well north of a billion. But you were able to do it with 150 million--nice!

My question is: is this typical? Assuming I'm a reasonably thrifty shopper (defined as: I don't pay "buy it nao" prices, I buy recipes rather than crafted IOs, and I'm willing to post a bid that takes a week or so to get fulfilled) what kind of budget is reasonable to plan for?

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Seriously... try it. A spawn of all (8) Fake Nemesis bosses is about as hard as you can get short of AV/EB spawns.

Again, these are mobs you find in game, and Synapse even made a challenge mission using these guys.

That's it... there were NO other factors. Nothing to help us out... nothing exploitive. Just spawns of litterally the hardest non-AV/EB mobs in the game (maybe all Master Illusionists would compare)... and because we were able to do it quickly... BAM! Accounts banned!

Add to it one final thing... that NO ONE will respond to me as to HOW this is exploitive, and perhaps you'll begin to realize why my accounts have been cancelled and I'll be leaving the game when the time runs out on them and several of my friends in game have also cancelled in the wake of this.

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I don't think you're telling the whole story. You make it sound like you created this mission and the magic ban stick whacked you in the back of the head without warning. I know players that got over 20 levels in meow farms that didn't get banned. As far as I know, deletions only happened for the most egregious farming benefits (benefits not tactics. These punishments seem to be the result of datamining rewards gained. So If you did a run or two of a meow farm, no punishment. Got from 1-50 on a meow farm? Character deleted. No difference in tactics, it's a difference of degree.). How many times did you run this map? How many folks went from 1-50 in a few hours on it? Because as it stands, your story doesn't add up.

I'm not saying I am in favor of you getting your account banned. I'm only saying that from what I've seen you had to be going pedal to the metal to get a character deleted, so I can only infer you had to be in full-frenzy mass PL mode to get your account banned. If you weren't farming that map heavily then I'd say you have good grounds to appeal the punishment and get it overturned.

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I'm not sure the devs are concerned about a specific team being able to achieve high, or even extremely high, reward rates, even on tailored maps. They are definitely concerned with maps, and especially tailored maps, where anyone can achieve absurdly high reward rates. So taking the MM group through extremely hard boss maps should be fine, since most teams would get eaten alive by them; datamined reward rates for those maps should reveal they're in line with the rest of the game. Hopefully.

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That's a point that isn't often made but is critical. For example, I heard that Posi isn't happy that a blaster can soft cap ranged defense. (This may or may not be true, it's forum hearsay.) But as long as that remains expensive/difficult/uncommon, he has bigger fish to fry. There will always be hyper-optimized teams out there doing tasks in one tenth the time of average teams. The key is not that that exists, but what percentage of the total it is.

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The SS/fire+fire/kin duo farming difficult foes who all happen to do fire damage is the real brain twister. That combo lampshades the real weakness of the reward system: it can't really take into account the real effort involved in any given combat because it's pre-determined. I suppose a really finely tuned system would recognize the "rock paper scissors" effects in the game, and reward rock less for beating scissors and more for beating paper, but that's a bit much to ask.

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That one really is a toughie. I remember being shocked a couple of years back when my Elec shields brute ran a mission full of the PPD Peacebringers and police drones. I had previously run that mission with a different character and it had been challenging. But most of their attacks were pure energy and did pitiful damage against my Elec shields.

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For the record, Making a 20 min mission that gives you the same reward as the Statesman Task Force/Recluse Taskforce and Shard TF's or better is what got all this mess started in the first place.

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First, you posted your OP in the wrong forum. Should've posted to Suggestions.

Second, you pointed out that in the original implementation it was trivial to create 20 minute missions that gave the same rewards as the most difficult TFs in the game. And your suggestion is to revert back to that system? Do you remember what Croatoa was like with the Speed KHTFs? That's what the AE would be like under your proposal. It wouldn't fix anything. It'd be constant non-stop farming. But after someone hit their daily cap, they'd go on to other things just like people did with KHTF.

The changes the devs made have been steps in the right direction. They just need to change it to prevent maps of all one rank (i.e. no more all-boss, or all-LT or all-minion maps) and eliminate the auto-SK system.

I haven't read through this entire thread, but I'll chime in with my current favorite suggestion to improve the rating system: weighted voting. The more missions in an arc you complete the more your vote counts. That way "drive by downraters" will still happen but their votes won't be nearly as impactful.

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the game's a lot like it ever was with some incremental improvements.

If you liked it before, you'll probably like it more now. If you didn't' like it before, I doubt anything they've done will change your mind.

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Basically true. With the exception of PVP. That has changed so much that if you liked it before, you'll probably not like it now. It's a work in progress.

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I'd like to emphasize something that you probably know: If you're working on set bonuses at a lower level, watch that you don't get "understrength" in the power itself.

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That's what I was most concerned about when reading that the OP wanted to softcap positional defense. If you go for IO sets and wind up a few percentage points low in damage it's not a big deal. But when the whole point is to softcap defense you don't want to spend lots of inf on your various shields only to find that the cumulative effect of using lower level IOs is that you're not at the softcap.

What I'd suggest is working out your build in Mids and set the IOs all to level 40. You can start slotting those at 37. See if your build at that level gets you to the softcap. If it does, you can keep tweaking the level lower (there's an option that allows you to set the level of all IOs at once, or you can do them individually) until you find out the lower limit that still lets you hit your goal.

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I have a sd brute and was wondering if slotting res/rech IO's in One with the Shield would help that powers recharge since plain recharge enhancements cant be slotted?

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One with the Shield does not simply disallow recharge enhancements - it ignores ALL changes to it's recharge speed.

This means you cannot speed it up, but it also does not get hit by recharge debuffs.

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Just for other folks who may be reading this, there are other powers where this trick works. For example, the VEAT power Mind Link doesn't take recharge enhancements, but you can slot Def/Rech enhancements in there which do reduce its recharge.

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I'm taking Synapse at his word that from this point on grindy badges are not going to be added, and the main thrust will be on a variety of badges for tasks, rather than several tiers of rewards for the same task

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Yup. I think this is a good change but I believe that this is going to be very poorly received by current badgers.

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My suggestion:
Master of X Task/Strike force, for each and every T/SF, but mix up the challanges required in each case, so they are not all no temps/no defeats.

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Excellent suggestion. I like that because getting those badges reward doing challenging tasks at an elite level, as opposed to simply doing something a billion times.

I think this would be a good QoL improvement for the MA search window. The ability to mark an arc as "I'm not interested in this" would thin out the visual clutter. Of course this'd have to include a toggle filter (like "missions I've already voted on") so that if a player changed his mind he could delve into this list.

It would also help people like me that have poor memories; I sometimes see an arc title and think, "is this familiar because it was mentioned on the forums or because I perused it last week and decided not to play it?"