UberGuy

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If I pay $10-15 extra dollars a month, why shouldn't I get double credit for veteran rewards? Or just a flat $15 a month to "catch up"?

What exactly is so threatening about allowing people that haven't been playing for five years some way to compensate NCSoft to receive the same benefit as those that have?

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No one feels threatened by it. Suggesting that's the problem is really dumb.

The reason you shouldn't get it is that that's not what it's for.

It's a reward for cumulative time you stayed subbed. Nothing more, nothing less. You weren't subbed, you don't get it. Is that really hard to grasp?

I mean heck, you aren't even suggesting paying up to the levels of someone who has been subbed that long and asking for it. Even if you were, though, that's still not what it's a reward for.

Hm, I think +5 recipe slots is pretty hot, actually.

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Uber, would you ever team with me if you didn't have to?

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Definitely not. I don't want fleas!

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*plots solo 8-man teams for the Visionary and Weatherman badges villainside*

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Holy crap, I hadn't even considered that. I am so all over that.

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And if there's a penalty involved in doing this solo...guess where the farmers will end up again?

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IF there's a penalty, I expect it to be in the form of some limit, decay or other impact to an individual's rate of reward. Doing so in this way would ensure that it doesn't matter what size team you're on, or where you farm or PL. You won't exceed target return rate limits.

Note that I do not want such a feature and would not ask for it. But if I was tasked with implementing it, that's what I'd do.

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That is a bloody lot. Has purple price inflated so badly recently? Is this red or blue side?

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Someone in a global channel I'm in sold a Purple (crafted) for 300 million last night... at WentWorths.

The prices on them have indeed gone up a lot.

On the other hand, the prices on a lot of things have been on the rise, though I think the effect has been distributed an subtle. I've been able to sell nearly anything that's not complete crap for 5M a pop crafted on villains. At that rate, it really doesn't take that much time to save up 100M, and that's not even considering the things you can sell for 50-150M (usually the high-popularity uniques like Miracles and LotGs).

Right now, my villains blow my heroes away in raw inf. Their high-end target purchases tend to cost more, though.

Anyway, if you bought all your IOs off the market and didn't get any good deals, I could easily see it costing 4.5B, at least on villains.

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As to what is being discussed, it's the only thing I actually don't like about I16. I've never thought that the ability to modify what level and what size the game sees you as would be a good thing. It discourages actually filling out teams.

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If you're only filling out a team because you have to, you aren't doing the game or anyone any favors when you fill those spots. Meanwhile, if you're the kind of person who teams because that's what you enjoy about playing an MMO, you're not going to stop doing that because of the ability to pad your own teams.

Yes, there are some edge cases to consider where someone who didn't want more teammates might meet someone they liked because they were required to have more teammates. To me, that's a far too intangible benefit for me to not prefer this option to it.

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I thought pvp drops were now rep based? I thought the arena didn't have rep?

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The patch notes explained that it was enabled to function on the rep timer in the Arena, even though there is no rep rewarded there.

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You joked, but that might potentially be an issue. Does this new feature only apply to missions themselves, or if we set ourselves to be seen as a team of 4, let's say, does our character count as 4 people in the zone itself? Imagine the nerdrage if you could kill a Hami Raid just by having a couple of people set as a team of 8 get in the zone and camp.

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Let's just not forget to test for that (whoever gets in Beta) and I'm sure they won't let that one fly for long if it works that way.

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I'm not sure of the Devs' rationale for this as it SEEMS to discourage teaming, which is contrary to anything they've ever done before.

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Enabling solo play against stuff you couldn't obtain without a team is not discouraging teaming.

If I have a character that can tackle a bunch of stuff solo, getting me to team just so I can pad out my missions isn't doing the happily teaming members of the game community any favors.

On the flip side, people who are teaming because that's why they're playing an MMO are not going to stop just because they can now pad a map solo.

Like others, I am reserving judgment on this feature till I see what other changes it comes bundled with. I would not be in the least surprised to see some sort of limits, decay or other kind of control aspect intended to limit the overall speed of reward this feature will enable. This is in no small part because there's little reason for the devs not to enable this if they have some sort of reward governor in place. We shall see.

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I am very concerned about balance. I can't tell you why, but finding an imbalance in a system, whether it be a game, a law an insurance company or whatever, just grates on me. In this case, it's simply like this: Both characters have to be able to accomplish the same things in the game, but one is largely unable to to it - there's a disparity between the ATs (at least, that I'm seeing). I just want to see a more level playing field.

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The problem is that you fequently engage in Quixotic stuggles made so by your own inexperience or lack of awareness in the matters you are tackling. You have this rather bizarre build, your experience with which is part of the foundation of your argument. I can't say precisely here, but I know that in past threads your playstyle has also been relatively unorthodox.

If you are essentially playing against the grain by playing either builds others wouldn't play or by playing in a way that others do not frequently do, it's very hard to conclude that you have identified meaningful imbalances. If you could show that a significant number of players were joining you on this path, that might be a problem where the game was misleading people. I haven't seen consistent evidence of that though.

I play debuffing Defenders/Corruptors a lot, and I think I understand their solo abilities rather well. I also play with a lot of buffing Defenders/Corruptors, and though experiencing their benefits, I think I also understand their benefits very well. These ATs are some of the most important things to seek on a team if you desire high levels of performance, usually measured in terms of speed of completing content.

The decision that such characters should be weaker on their own in exchange for how much stronger they make a team is explicit. A concept of imbalance or unfairness or unfairness rooted exclusively in solo ability, is, in my opinion overly narrow.

It also depends on what side you're on. You can a significant number of uncommons Villainside for 3-5M. Given that you get 53 bronze rolls for one gold, you need to be rocking the profit on the gold rolls to make up that you could probably average 2M per item after costs.

I tend to play the market with my villains more these days, so I'm not sure if it works out that well at WW.

The kicker is dealing with it all. At times I roll gold just because I can't be bothered with processing 53 recipies and crafting the 30-odd good ones.

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UberGuy: Well, to be fair, EM Pulse has a -1000% regen debuff, you may have been thinking of that.

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Doubtful, because I think I always forget about EMP's -Regen until someone reminds me of it.

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So the bug is actually on the MM version then? Because I do have Cloud Sense slotted into both Darkest Night and Dark Servant for the +max end and the +rech. I hope that doesn't get changed! Not that it would be build breaking by any means, I just like the extra end.

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Yep, the MM version is ostensibly bugged.

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As far as +rech goes, TP and HT should both be perma with this build I think.

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I don't think HT can possibly be perma there. You have less recharge in it (+global) than I do on several builds (yeah, I play Dark ... some >.&gt, and I don't have it perma.

One very minor comment on the build. Don't bother with +fly enhancement in Swift. It's really not worth it, even if you plan to hover/fly the vast majority of the time. I'd slot it with run speed, for the times you want (or are forced) to be grounded and want to hoof it faster.

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The good news is that this means +recharge isn't such a priority. In fact I can do without any of those LoTG pricey bahstads (not that it's a real problem using those, If someone wants to add them back in to make improvements go right ahead).

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One thing I'd suggest here is that +Recharge is really nice to Dark for general purposes. Some of DM's best tools are clicks. Two of those you'd use for AV/GM purposes are Tar Patch and of course HT.

The awesome thing about rapid recast of Tar Patch is that it stacks with itself - something you can't do with any comparable power. (Edit: Er, it occurs to me that you might be able to do that with Freezing Rain/Sleet, but I don't know if they can be recharged fast enough.) That's probably a less important feature with Sonic as your primary, but it's still notable.

Obviously, the faster you can recast HT the less your foes will be able to regenerate on average. Be careful about rapid casting HT though - it's an expensive puppy. Be sure you slot it appropriately for end if you do design around casting it a lot. Basically the power pays a lot for being an incredible rez. I gripe about it when I'm using it to solo hard things and then want to marry it when I use it to recover 10 people at once at a Hamidon raid.

On the non-AV/GM front, being able to spam Fearsome Stare rapidly is devastating to the effectiveness of most lesser mobs.

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I agree with everything Uber said; well, aside from the Lingering Radiation is -1000% regen bit (it's actually -500%).

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Yeah, sorry. Not sure where I came up with that. I believe all the big -Regen powers (HT, LR, Heat Exhaustion and Benumb) are 500%. The exception is Traps/PGT, which is -1000%. I was probably thinking of PGT when I typed that.

I'm not sure why you'd think that. Cross-pollinating the ATs is vastly less disruptive to the status quo than reworking all powersets that provide stackable buffs or debuffs.

Note that, unless I missed something, GR is not being billed as a "stand alone" expansion the way CoV was. If so, it's not as if players of GR are going to be people who don't also experience CoH/V.

The "cost" I was referring to is not (just) man hours invested in development and testing time, though I believe that would be significant to do the change right. It's also the community and potential subscription impact of disruption of existing playerbase's experience.

Two popular ranges are 35-39 and 40-44.

These are both popular because they can catch recipes that you can't get otherwise as a level 50. For example, 40-44 not only get the stuff that runs up to level 50, but can also produce things like Miracles, Decimations and Impervium Armors. 35-39 can catch additional recipes that cap out at level 35, such as Entropic Chaos. However, you do have the situation that the more level ranges you open up, the more "pollution" you get in the pool of possible drops.

I'm not 100% up on current pricing, so I am unsure whether adding the stuff that ends at level 35 brings the average up or down. I tend to shoot for the 40-44 range.

Going lower doesn't seem especially useful these days. There was a while where 10-15 was a really good bet, mostly because of the price of Basilisk's Gaze. After a while that dropped and the value there faded. I haven't checked that for a while, though.

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Each time we ran this prior to the patch, we did so with no problems and a non-optimal team and finished in under an hour. You don't need to have one of each AT to complete the SF. It's a nice-to-have, but nowhere near a requirement.

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And how much faster would it have been with a working MM temp power?

That was my real point.

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I drop one tar patch, -30% resistance. My teammate drops a second, -60% resistance. My team's damage (in a resistance debuff free environment with no resistances) goes up by 30% on the first one, but only +23% on the second one (1.6/1.3 < 1.3/1.0).

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Just to expand on this, because I think it can confuse people...

As mentioned earlier, most things in the game work as linear increases. If you've got a base of 100 of something and add 30 more, you get 130, or 130% of your base.

If you add 30 more, you get 160, or 160% of base, or 123% of what you had at 130. In the limit, as you keep adding more and more, the percent increase of adding another 30 becomes less and less.

However, just to be really clear, that's not diminishing returns, though some people refer to it like that. (I know G_Tanker wasn't saying that.)

Actual diminishing returns would be that you start with 100, add 30, and get 130. You add 30 more and get, say, 145. Add 30 more and maybe you get 152.5. In a diminishing returns regime the more you have, the less each point you add actually contributes to the total.

It's worth noting that the idea of adding diminishing returns to the game is hardly new, and debates about it come up every few months. Castle did weigh in on this. In essence, paraphrasing his post as I interpreted it, doing this would be a sweeping rebalancing of the game. While it would provide the devs headroom they currently lack, the current state of affairs doesn't tie their hands all together (clearly), and people are enjoying the game as it exists now. Performing that sort of rework of the status quo was deemed unlikely, presumably because the overall benefit was not deemed clearly worth the cost.

IMO, Dark's capabilities shine brightest on large teams against scads of lesser foes. Rad isn't incapable of shining in those situations, but I think Dark outdoes it there.

But PF seems likely to want to beat down hard targets solo. The combination of +Dam, +Rech, +Recovery and -Regen in Rad is practically tailor made for that.

EF is indeed weaker on a Corr than a Defender. However, IMO the single strongest tool /Rad brings to the hard-target-soloing table is -Regen, and the -Regen in powers like LR is consistent across ATs. DR debuffs are tremendously useful and clearly shouldn't be ignored, but they scaling your damage, and so are strongest when multiplying an already strong base DPS. When you're solo on a Corr, the effective DPS contribution of [edit] 500% -Regen, even with AV/GM resistances, greatly outweighs even the impressive -DR capabilities of Son/Rad. (When you're on a team with high base DPS it can swing the other way so that -DR gets the nod.) The higher the base HP (and thus HP regen rate) of the foe, the bigger this contribution is in effective DPS.

Because of this, the thing that really raises Rad head and shoulders above Dark for hard target soloing is that you can get Lingering Radiation to be permanent and even stack. Having LR with 1/2 the base recharge time of Howling Twilight means that, under high global recharge conditions, Rad can swamp the smaller extra -Regen that Dark has in its other powers (TG and DS's TG). "Out of the box," Dark has a slight advantage under reasonably ideal conditions, but with more Recharge, Rad pulls ahead rapidly.

Of course it's best if you can stack -DR, +Rech and +Damage on top of -Regen, and Rad can do all three. Dark, for all that I love it, just doesn't have that ability to focus fire.

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Anyone who's played either TF once likely doesnt wanna play em again. Theyre both at best 3 star arcs quality. And the AVs are buggy. and the battles can take hours if you arent prepared well.

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Eh. I run with a group that runs multiple TFs pretty much daily, and the 5TF is in the list we rotate through, so we run it basically daily. I'll concede though that it's nowhere nearly as fun as the ITF, even with its massive lagfest.

I want to concur with the folks saying that the reason no one was doing the BSF is because it was borked so that one of the most important powers for being able to finish it in times people consider reasonable was totally non-functional. Supposedly that was fixed just yesterday.

I like even a working version of the BSF even less than the 5TF, and I'm not that hot about the 5TF. I dislike the fixation on locking the temp powers in to certain ATs. "BSF team looking for AT X just so we can complete it in an hour" is asinine.

I agree that moving the buildings wouldn't hinder power leveling. What I think might be valuable, though, is somehow modifying the social landscape, so that brand new players who aren't necessarily looking for a PL don't automatically wander into a hub of it and risk concluding that the game is somehow all about that. First opinions, and all that.

The only ways to achieve something like that modification, though, are to limit the AE in some way for either new players or high-level ones. Ultimately, all options are distasteful to someone, including the option of doing nothing.