UberGuy

It appears that the never-ending chain lightning from the Blue Hamidon Mito blasts may be back. Or it may be only back for one reuse of that same effect from a different mob.

One of the Rikti War Riders in the Lady Grey Task Force, Famine, uses this attack. Once my LGTF team was hit by it, it lasted for the rest of the map on which Famine appears.

Re: Celidya

I guess all the other power-gamers I play with are doing it wrong when they are happy when I bring one of my Darks on a speed TF, invincible kill all, or even a farm. You know, since it doesn't bring much to the table when you have a tank, mow down mobs really fast, etc.

Seriously, it's obvious that this is "paper" knowledge you're working with here. You have looked at the numbers or the power descriptions and concluded that this is how it works. It's either that or you've played alongside people who did a mediocre job of playing Dark Miasma and judged the powerset based on their performance. You said yourself you never actually played them beyond a certain point. It's obvious to me that you stopped too soon.

The folks I chatted with, in fact, had some serious problems communicating in English. They hardly "detailed" any of this for me, and I'd love for you to actually quote where I said they did.

They also had the other hallmarks. They were running multiple accounts where the characters generally looked alike (in one case they were all identical), moving around as an autofollow cloud. They generally spent their time running the same well-known farm missions in PI, though one was an RV farmer (back when Heavies could be healed). Their characters were typically multiple Fire/Kins, sometimes named all the same except like ".1", ".2" etc at the end.

If these people weren't farmers, they sure were working hard to look like them.

The premise here is really basic.

Better characters farm faster and easier.

You said it yourself. Farmers want it easy. They can get the same farming done with 3-4 active characters and the other 4-5 characters idling somewhere. Futzing with 8 accounts every time you cycle the map, making sure none of them is hung on a curb somewhere, that's more effort, not less.

All the farmer has to do is take those basic characters and invest in them up front. They're making plenty of inf, and once they invest, they make the inf from then on faster and easier. The only reason not to do this is if they expect to be banned and so lose the investment. Even at the best PL rates we've seen with the MA, it makes no sense to do things to get your farming level 50s banned frequently. Have things changed? Are they devs banning the RMT farm caracters? I don't know. They clearly were not back around I11.

What do you think is cheaper to set up, and reduces the farmer's real-world overhead costs? Running 8 machines that can keep a character moving on follow without lagging out, or letting 4-5 instances of the game idle on crappy computers that just need to be good enough to run a couple of idle instance of the game at a time?

If you're a full-time inf farmer, buying IOs to trick out a character or four is really going to be pretty easy. Unless your activities are getting you banned, there's no reason not to do it. Just because you see plenty of them playing on bare-bones characters doesn't mean they're playing smart.

So keep laughing. It just makes you look like some juvie wiseacre who isn't actually able to defend his assertions. We're not laughing with you.

When a new issue comes out, I usually have one of two reactions.

1. I am excited by the issue's prospects, and playing up until its release seems kind of hollow knowing what's coming. This tends to depress my time played until the new issue launches.
2. I am depressed by the new issue's prospects, usually because of some change that negatively impacts a character I like a lot. This tends to depress my play time until some time after a new issue launches.

Sometimes an issue has enough of both (1) and (2) that I end up neutral on the issue, but I still end up playing less until it lands.

I can think of only once or twice that I was so ambivalent about an issue that my play styles didn't change.

So yes, I think that "new issue-itis" probably has a real but indirect market effect. It's not that a lot of people market less, but rather that they play less in general, reducing the number of people left poking the market. I don't necessarily think it's always big enough to notice, but it often seems to be.

All the other factors people have mentioned seem likely, too.

He must have some rockin' air conditioning.