UberGuy

Wait, what? We can't even adjust them upwards in level?

Please don't restrict that.

Pretty freaky. No idea how the system behaves then.

From what I saw, subjectively, it seemed to affect rates in bulk. I did get rares, commons and uncommons all, and my rates of all three were sucky by past standards. This was to the extent that it was noticeably less created inf per time because I wasn't getting common recipes.

I can't say it wasn't something like what you said, but I sure have a hard time imagining the pattern behind it.

I could go back and do a breakdown, and since I think we know the ratio of rare:uncommon:common we could see if it held or not. I may be too lazy now, given a declared fix.

I hope this doesn't happen, but you could lose the name before the store comes back. There are people who can still create new characters - they just have to not already have 12 on that server.

Back when extra slots were very first available, an announcement post came out advising people to be sure to claim their veteran ones because there was a limited window of availability. There was a small uproar over this, and ultimately the message about limited availability was modified or retracted, but during the discussion the link between the on-line store and the extra slots was mentioned. I think this was back when Lighthouse was still the community liaison, and that it was one of his posts.

The reason this loss of slots doesn't always happen when the store is unavailable may be that there are different degrees of "unavailable". The common version we may experience most times is "you may not use the store, but its back-end data source is still available for game validation". Whatever is up with it currently is apparently (based on duration) very extensive, and perhaps that means that everything about it is unavailable.

But others weren't. If it was as simple as giving drops to "virtual" teammates, everyone would have seen 1/8. We would have shown those results in these test threads, realized we were all seeing the same thing, and quickly have declared this the problem.

It's probably not likely that I can help, because I think this is going to come down to personality and preferences at a level that runs pretty deep. But I'll try to give some insight into how I look at things when I'm making a character and whatnot, in the hope it might trip over a switch somewhere in your brain and turn on an unused light.

Late-game CoH is about incremental improvements. Each individual improvement isn't that impressive, so it's not very compelling to look forward to dings and new slots or power selections as they come. However, there's a lot of those little increments between, say, 30 and 50. You end up with a lot of slots, and depending on AT, you can end up with a few gems in your epic pools. (Armor toggles on squshies are a big deal to me.)

I plan for the long haul. I get a feel for what ordinary characters can do, and then try to do more. That means I start trying to add up all those little increments, the bonuses from IOs, the benefits from accolades, all to get to the point that where eventually I've got perks like 30% more HP than normal, all my powers use 3/8ths their base endurance, I can fight through a big spawn without running out of endurance, or I have more defenses than normal. Or all the above.

My sense of what's "super" isn't founded in the fiction of the game. All of our characters can run around and mostly shrug off bullets and explosions. No, what makes me feel super is when I feel like my characters are above expectations in the context of the game and its challenges. I get a sense of thrill in feeling like my characters can kick butt and take names. "I built that!"

Achieving that level of butt-kicking doesn't come easily in the mid-level game, though it can be done with the right builds. It's a lot easier in many ways to achieve it with a high-level character, who has many more slots and access to all their utility powers.

So since it's a (more) natural achievement for a high-level character, and its something I really enjoy, I am motivated to reach 50, and indeed, to play my 50s extensively.

I hope not. We want them to be more popular!

We've known it wasn't that basically all along. That's too easy to measure. If it was 1 person with 1/8 the drops, we would have measured 1/8 the drop rate. It didn't work out that way. Indeed, it never worked out to less than about 1/3 the normal drop rate, and some decent measurement streaks had it at about 70% of expected rates.

With a Blaster that can't actually handle the aggro on his own? No, honestly, it doesn't happen that much, and if it does, it usually doesn't get repeated a lot.

However, it's rare that I have nothing I can do to help such a player out, at least the 1st time or two they do something like this. Usually I have HT in reserve, so I can mez a chunk of the foes and slow the rest. It's also not uncommon that Dark Servant is recharged, which I can plop in the middle of whatever the Blaster just POd. On teams, I also rarely use Darkest Night unless we're taking things slow because the foes somehow outclass our team, so I can throw that on them too.

So, typically, I don't actually need all my tools to help a team roll along. If something hits the fan, I therefore usually have a few things ready to throw at a problem.

Now if the team has already jumped out of the pan into some fire and then the Blaster runs off on his own, that's his problem.

Aww, you aren't going to tell us what it was?

Thanks for sticking with it, Synapse, and for letting us know.

I absoutely do.

They can be. It all depends on that distinction I made between speeding the team up and reducing how much the foes slow you down.

Against wide swaths of content, it's possible to assemble a team of characters who face no meaningful threat from foes. This is usually only likely if you put together a bunch of characters who are IO'd to the gills, very high mitigation builds with a more modest build investment, or more modest builds with some modest tools, such as a bunch of SR or Shield characters with several running Maneuvers, or multiple Arachnos Soldiers/Widows running on a team together. Without picking examples that so obviously fail to benefit from defense stacking, we could instead go for a team of */Emp controllers, running around Regen capped with mez protection and making statues out of everything. (OK, Empathy has some +recharge and +damage, but I was hard pressed to come up with much besides FF that had mitigation and no force multiplication.) This has actually been a complaint about FF before. I don't think it has a ton of merit for practical play, but it has some game mechanical foundation.

There comes a point where you don't need any more mitigation. Once you've reached that point, your foes stop slowing you down, and more mitigation does nothing to speed you up.

In such a situation, adding a Scrapper is going to speed you up more than adding a bubbler, because a Scrapper, while an additive increase in team damage output, is a large additive increase, while a bubbler is a small additive increase.

Honestly, I don't really forsee that, but if it ever comes, I'll gladly accept it.

Hah, damn. I noticed something that made me wonder about this. I ran Breaking Knives in Ouro the other day, and it seemed to me that I got quite a lot of recipes. In fact, I posted about it here. But I never followed up to gather a significant set of drop data on it. Now I feel chumpy for that.

Great work. This looks promising.

Frankly? No. Once the slot is purchased, it blows major chunks that it relies on the store for verification. The way this functions is analogous to being unable to use costumes containing pieces bought from a booster pack because the booster was bought from the NCSoft online store.

Do I get how they could have designed the system this way? Sure. Until I saw them post about it back when they were announcing the vet rewards, I never would have dreamed they did design it that way.

This seems very inconsistent.

When Villains first got their patron pools, there was a hubaloo over the fact that Stalkers ranged attacks used their ranged damage modifier, which is typically a sucktastic 0.5 for melee ATs. This made powers like Dark Blast, which is a 1.0 damage scale attack, exceptionally lackluster. At the time, part of the stink over it was that it was different from other melee ATs, who it was argued got to use their melee damage modifier for their ranged epic attacks.

I have to wonder if these Dark Blast examples aren't some copy paste error from the original powersets, which would use ranged AT modifiers. Are other Scrapper/Tanker/Brute (epic) ranged attacks using melee or ranged scales? I don't have a lot of time to research right now - maybe this evening.

I agree.

I also want to take the opportunity to make clear that I am not trying to convince anyone that Scrappers (or other damage delivery focused ATs) are inferior.

For example, I wouldn't want to convince anyone that they should universally choose a buffer over a damage-dealer. They do different things for the team. So while the nature of force multiplying powers (in the game mechanical sense) means you can do exceptionally with a team of nothing but buffers and debuffers, there's no need to play the game that way. In practical terms, it's usually easier to assemble a balanced team with a core of damage dealers and a few buffer/debuffer characters, optionally including some sort character capable of aggro management (depending on how good the team's mitigation is). Sometimes one character can provide more than one of those things.

There are people who fixate on what's optimal and only seek to play or play with that combination of powersets, ATs, or what have you. Its fine to play that way specifically because you enjoy it, but I dislike when people preach it as the "best" way to play, or proclaim on the boards how they never invite "X" to their teams because it's not up to their standards. That's definitely not what I'm trying to promote here.

What you described is not force multiplication.

Force multiplication has been explained multiple times in this thread. Its definition here is not the same as the military term. Instead, it is more specific. It is a game mechanical definition, while the military term encompass effects such as morale, terrain, or equippment/arms.

In the game context, force multipliers are things which multiply the game mechanical statistics of the team, usually DPS, through direct effect. The most common examples are +damage on the team or -DR on foes. Effects such as -Defense and +toHit can also assist under the right conditions. +Recharge is also a powerful effect, though it's multiplier is more dependent on the character's powers than some others. (A character with long recharging, fast activating powers benefits more than one with long activating, fast recharging powers.) +Recovery is sometimes used an indirect example, as it but this is crossing over into mitigation, which is subtly different.

Force multiplcation in this context is not effects which prevent your team from taking damage, such as +Defense, +DR, or Controls (which the Dark Armor Scrapper above would specialize in). The term "force multiplication", in this game community, is typically reserved for offensive multipliers. While defensive multipliers can increase a team's speed through battles by reducing the need for caution, offensive multipliers increase their speed even in a situation where the team needs no caution at all.

Scrappers do not provide this game mechanical force multiplcation, except through some Leadership powers or -Defense debuffs. These force multipliers they can provide, for those who can provide them, are quite weak when compared to those provided by ATs with strong buff or debuff features.

Your DA Scrapper can slow the speed at which foes are able to harm your team, but not multiplicatively increase speed the speed with which your team can harm the foes. At best, you can reduce the amount by which the foes can slow your team. This means your ability to benefit your team is limited by how much the foes actually threaten the team, where as offensive buffs are limited only by the AT caps.

Please read the thread.

The devs have told us they are not doing this. No such change is intended. Drop probabilities are not supposed to depend on difficulty settings. Note the emphasis on the word "probabilities." Synapse posted here that the drop chances are per mob. That means that if you defeat 10 mobs, you have 10 chances to roll for a drop. Therefore, fighting on a larger "virtual team" size therefore should not be penalized, because you get the same probability and more mobs.

Link here. Relevant quote:

At this point I disagree with the dev's conclusion that there's no problem, but based on what they're telling us, any problem would appear to be a bug.

But that isn't what you said in the post I responded to. You laid it instead at the feet of the powerset, which, without further qualification, implies that the powerset can't supply the needed support no matter who is at the helm. It's cool if that's not what you meant, but I certainly read it that way.

I certainly acknowledge that buffs are simpler by the very fact of their fire-and-forget nature, and even said so in my post above. That's just inherent and there's nothing that could ever change that. Even if debuffs didn't scale with foe level, they'd still be fire-and-forget.

I do like those better. My names were just suggestions to get the point across, but yours are good.

That's an oddity? That's SoP for melee powersets with ranged attacks.

That's not really true. The majority of powersets that had mez protection toggles could run them concurrently. Several powersets had penalties baked in to running that toggle, such as Invulnerability's Unyielding Stance rooting you in place, and some had to run multiple toggles, like Firey Aura (and it didn't get sleep protection without a Burn patch). The only powersets which had exclusive toggles were Stone and Dark Armors.

In a thread titled "Rant?" Say it ain't so.

This many pages into the thread the primary "nerdrage" I perceive still manifest is the righteous indignation of someone perpetuating an argument on an internet forum. Someone whom nerdrage has apparently reduced to such intellectual impotency in that argument that they are reduced to ad homenim attacks on the opposition without even the veneer of ongoing debate. Someone no longer discussing points of relevance present in the original rant or the subsequent discussion and instead slavishly hamming how the OP contained an unprovable assumption (which also cannot be disproved).

I guess we better get some posts so we can prop the dead horse up.