UberGuy

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Edit: I also wanted to add this may be something as simple as server ticks allowing them to stack. The same way AAO, RTTC and alike powers will stack for a fraction of a second. They allow a split second to stack but quickly revert back to the normal buff but since the proc has a times effect it has no choice but to last its duration before going back to one debuff

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Those powers are (intentionally) not flagged "does not stack from same caster". So it shouldn't be that.

We're telling you, it doesn't matter how many casters it has.

People have tested this. A lot, actually.

What's kind of funny is that I was in this forum arguing your position, because I was convinced I had seen it stack twice.

Then someone pointed me to the RedTomax info on it, and I couldn't figure out how to reconcile that with what I saw. When I tried retesting it, I could not reproduce it. And that jived with what other testers were telling me.

Now I'm convinced the RedTomax info is correct.

Multiple casters can grant a temporary set bonus power to a target. However, the "rule of 5" setting on the power is set to 1, not 5, so the target can only benefit from one copy. That one copy has the recipient cast the -DR debuff on himself, and that debuff is flagged "do not stack from same caster."

The only way this can result in stacking is if the above rules fail to apply. In other words, if you're seeing stacking, it's a bug. It's also relatively recent.

Edit: Do not measure the proc's function by seeing icon stacking. Icons are notoriously misinformative. See: Winter's Blessing global.

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Was doing some late night shopping and I noticed some new salvage under the Invention listings, several "Android" pieces like "Undamaged Android Brain" as well as some others.

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Clear indicators that CoH will be rewritten using Google APIs to run on cell phones. Doubtless the servers will run in the "cloud".

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When I read the Market forum, I'm a bit bemused by the obsession with making huge amounts of money. I'm not complaining here, just making an observation.

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I can't speak for others, and shouldn't particularly because I don't put as much "effort" into my marketeering as some. I mostly act as a supplier by playing the rest of the game, and sell my spoils into the billowing winds of cash that flow through these markets.

That said, I have come to view my wealth a little like most of us do my XP bar. To some extent, I hoard money because I like seeing the number go up. Even when I spend a huge scad of money buying purples or something, I will then spend some effort building up money again, even if that character doesn't need it.

Another behavior my "shiny big number" causes is that, just as we want to see XP and levels go up on all our characters, I like the shiny big number on all of them. I tend not to pool my characters' wealth. As a result, my net wealth is very significant, because I have multiple characters with 1B+ wealth.

It's certainly not the most efficient way to manage my in-game money, but I enjoy it, and it helps keep me interested.

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And the way you explain it means it would not stack from another person on the team having it slotted as well.

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It doesn't.

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I agree with all of your points except the last one- if the prices weren't high, nobody would have whined about the mini-game or city of stockbrokers or any of that. If everything was available at a 'reasonable' price they wouldn't have been demanding an end-around.

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There's a distinction between what was at the root of why people complained, and why the devs took action.

People complained about having to take part in the market mini-game. The level of price that caused them to complain about this was wildly inconsistent from person to person doing the complaining. I believe the devs took action because they accepted the resulting complaint - people did not want to be "forced" to use the market to get IOs. That is a very different position than taking action because they objected to particular market prices. In my estimation, the devs did not care at all what the actual prices were, because the actual prices weren't actually relevant. All that mattered were that prices existed that made people dislike visiting the market.

Under that paradigm, there is possibly no such thing as a market price that will drive the devs to take action. They would not, for example, datamine prices and then decide that they have become so high that they must add the item to merit vendors. Instead they would try to measure levels of player dissatisfaction at having to use the market to obtain these items.

While the end result may appear academic, since (as you say) no one is likely to complain about cheap items, it isn't fully academic in that sense. Consider for example the thread in this forum where a poster proclaimed that they were going to marketeer the prices of purples into the stratosphere in order to convince the devs to increase supply. If the devs don't use price as a determining factor in such decisions, that's a fruitless endeavor.

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This directly contradicts what I was told before. Can anyone please confirm?

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I can't confirm, but I can corroborate.


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And if so, why aren't they purple...or even some new rarer color?

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I guess they ran out of colors.

Purples have other stuff going on, so I sort of see them not being that. Purples have the largest set bonuses available and a larger enhancement scale than any other type of IO. However, PvPOs have pretty different characteristics compared to "normal" Set IOs. In addition to the exemplar behavior, they provide an extra set of bonuses in PvP on top of the ones they give in PvE, often of things you can't find in set bonuses anywhere else (+range, for example).

Unlike purples, they drop and can be slotted at levels other than 50. They also are not each individually unique - only some pieces are, just as some regular Set IOs are.

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So certain customers are expendable?

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Do you really need me to confirm that for you?

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merits and tickets considerably undermine this logic.

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I think "considerably" is something of an overstatement. If you set out to equip your character with merits you're going to spend considerably longer doing so than if you use the market. What merits do in theory is damp the high-end pricing of items. Amusingly, prices on most high-priced recipies you can obtain with merits are currently back where they were before merits were introduced or higher.

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whatever other gameplay goals they serve, they absolutely were designed as an end-around the market and it's "ridiculous" valuations of certain goods.

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I do not believe this was their intent. Merits were not created to "fix" high prices, but to address the concern of players who did not want to be "forced" to interact with the market. Certainly it is impossible to fully extricate dislike of the market from dislike of "high" prices, but I think the distaste is as much directed at the various concepts of playing "city of day traders," of being "gouged" by other players, or of market PvP than the inability to actually pay the prices found there. In other words, merits were intended to bypass the market mini-game. Bypassing "ridiculous" prices was simply a by-product of that.

Tickets undermine the logic only for non-common salvage. For set recipies, they are simply an alternative random supply.

In any case, neither tickets not merits appears likely at this time to provide purples, PvP IOs, or HOs. I could envision purples and HOs appearing at merit vendors someday, but I do not believe PvP IOs will ever be available there. I could imagine a PvP-only variant, however - some sort of bounty-like system.

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Debilitative Action: Disorient Bonus
This enhancement adds a 2% chance to disorient your foe.

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Worst. IO. Ever.

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Isn't the Unspeakable Terror disorient worse, since it's the same chance and mag and will only proc on something that's already feared!?

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Wow, I didn't think something could be worse than Triumphant Insult (above), but you found it. It's a 2% chance for a MAG 1 stun in a fear power.

...I'm in awe.

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That's its real proc. 95% chance to make you ask "WtF"?

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The NCSoft Store is down and has been down for a few days with no Announcements or ETAs. Are me and my coworker the only ones troubleshooting this?

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It was fine for me just a few minutes ago. I didn't buy anything, but it was there and I could enter it.

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And the loss of those players means less money for the game as well as fewer people in the PvP zones. Neither of those things are good for the future of the game.

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The point was that the band of people that POs having a significantly higher drop rate would actually keep is going to be so small, I just can't see it being a meaningful argument to use against this change.

I mean, seriously, we're talking about the subset of PvE players who would arena farm POs for money or PvP players who were only attracted to play PvP in order to get POs. Then we filter just the subset of those two groups who will be so upset over this that they would leave the game if they didn't have ready access to POs.

I mean, come on, really? Does anyone really think that's compelling?

I'm not especially for or against this change, but if you're against it, you really need a better platform.

I'm with Pum. All the MA has done is made it especially convenient for these people to get to higher levels. I'm not advocating any particular change here, but one of the simplest factors in that is that they can find a PL right in the starting zones. And remember, even if the devs hack and slash the MA down to where we can't build anything better for PLing than regular missions, these people will still be able to get a PL in the starting zones, because the reality of the game is that you can be PLd in normal missions. There's just normally no incentive for 50s to hang out in starting zones to run them.

There's a new copy of CoH/V on store shelves. There's hubub about this novel new feature, the MA. These people are n00bs in the most basic sense of the term. The MA didn't make them n00bs. It didn't rob them of any intelligence (though I'll concede some might be low). People with horrid builds and/or no real clue how to play have made it to 50 before and would still be doing so if the MA had never been conceived. It's just made it more accessible to more of them, and there just happen to be more of them around than previously.

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Unless the prices are SOOO pie in the sky that players just give up on them and stop playing PVP (and possibly the game)...

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a) If you're giving up on PvP because you can't buy POs, you're doing it wrong.
b) If you're giving up on the game because you can't get POs, you probably really didn't want to be here very much anyway. I get pursuing the shiny as a motivation to stick around as much as anyone, but I mean, really now, it's not like there are no other shinies to get.

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Way to go devs. Makes me wonder if they even think before they act.

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While I may not agree with their perspective, I'm not sure why you'd assume that the devs would conclude this was a bad idea if they thought about it.

They probably want stuff like this to be super rare to extend the carrot stick. Super rare = super expensive. I'd be shocked if the devs saw "outrageous" prices on certain stuff and took it as a sign of something they should fix.

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cant decide between Regen/Inv/SD/ Possibly SR.
I like invuln on my kat scrapper, regen is fun too. Could use some advice for those who have played these combinations

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I'm afraid my advice won't help you choose that much. DM is a fantastic addition to any set. The extra mitigation is a boon to Regen. The self-heal is a boon on sets with no intrinsic (or long-recgharging) heals. The -toHit stacks nicely with SR's and Shield's +Def, and DM just adds more tools to the mixed assets of Invuln and WP.

Essentially, I would recommend you chose either a theme/concept or a design goal, and then decide (or ask) which secondary will do that best, and then perhaps slap DM on it.

Of course, depending on what goal or theme you choose, we might recommend another primary, but DM is definitely a nice set.

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Still no stf fix?

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Which STF fix were you expecting?

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Even if mezzed or defeated on arrival, the repair men still execute their full repair effect on the towers.

It's damn ugly. Anyone without a big masochistic streak is avoiding this TF right now.

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I'm confused. Do the devs want more or less PVP IO's than before i15? Because it seems like they're going to be getting a TON less with this change. From looking at how many were for sale, they were more rare than purples before i15...I thought they'd want to see more of them around since they're only orange and not purple.

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I'm not hugely clear on how this will make less PvP. I get the impact to small servers, but if there are so few people in those servers' zones that you only got POs by killing the same people multiple times in the same 5 minute interval, I'm not sure that POs were going to be enough draw to really sustain a healthy PvP environment.

If the real complaint is that the smushed farming, well, that's a different objection all together.

The price of these things sure isn't going to go down. The scary thing is that it literally can't go that much higher percentage wise on some of them, because the game doesn't support transaction numbers that high.

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It may seem that way, but what does the description for regeneration say? I'm at work, and so if someone could quote from the ingame description that would be awesome, but I got this from Paragon Wiki:

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Regeneration lets you regenerate more quickly from damage and effects. Regeneration offers almost no actual damage resistance, but your Hit Point and Endurance Regeneration can become so incredibly fast, that your wounds heal almost instantly. Those who possess this power set have little downtime, but risk the effects of spike damage.

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If I remember correctly that is the quoted description text from in game. I have a mind like a steel sieve, however, so anyone with access to the game feel free to correct me.

My point is that the original intent was that burst damage was clearly Regen's hole.

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Dude, with zero snark intended at all ... have you read the in-game description of the Controller AT? We really can't use those descriptions as the basis of arguments here one way or another, because the game has changed while most of those descriptions have not. When the game came out and that description was written, -Regen effectively didn't exist as a debuff players encountered. That changed in I4.

My point was that this change, adding -regen as a foil to the Regeneration powerset, appeared extremely intentional in the context of the times. All I'm saying is that I do not believe it was an accident that it hit Regen particularly hard in the same sense that it was (apparently) an accident that cascade defense failure hit SR particularly hard.

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The only problem with most of what you said, is that I can easily turn it around with the same exact examples you used and say that it was an unintended consequence of trying to bring regen into balance with the other sets. That in their attempt to 'whip' regen into balance, they accidently added *too* much against it, and as a consequence, other sets continue to become much better while regen sits on the side-lines, stunted by the past perceptions of it's performance, and fear of making it as overpowered as it used to be.

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That would be a fine counter to what I said if that was the position I was presenting an argument against. It wasn't.

Arcanaville explained that the devs felt that defense debuff cascading had unintended behavior with SR. Defense debuffs were not added explicitly to counter SR, but were a (largely thematic) attribute given to various powers, especially attacks represented as bullets. How these attacks then interact acted in practice with SR didn't work out the way the devs intended. Cascade defense failure apparently hadn't occurred to them.

That was used as an analog in a claim that -regen as a weakness for the Regen powerset was probably also some sort of accident of fate. Given the progress of the game's history and Regen's place in it, I find that incredibly unlikely.

That has nothing to do with whether or not it is relevant, appropriate, or balanced now. It's a counter only to the claim that it was not an intentional "hole".

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I think he means that when you use the copy tool link its spits ya to the normal user/pass web page and then wehn you hit submit all it does it tell you you are logged in. No server select, no toon select.. no nothing after that. Please fix this

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I have a direct shortcut/bookmark to the tool, and for a while there it was giving nothing but a "Page not found" error. (It was a site error page, not a browser one.)

Since it's progressed to actually offering a login page, I'm going to guess they're working on it in some fashion. It'd be nice to know what's up, though.

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I don't think regen's weakness was ever intended to be debuffs. If SR was never intended to be weak against defence debuffs and INV was never intended to be weak against resistance debuffs, then i don't kow how you can't say the same for regen. It's not a designed hole, it's coicidental.

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I wouldn't be so sure.

In early days, Regen was incredibly survivable, and it got a reputation as something of a whipping boy as the devs tried to bring it in line with their vision of what should be going on.

As mentioned upthread, there used not to be many meaningful -regen debuffs in the game. That changed in I4, which, as it turned out, introduced Arena PvP. At that point, many player powers which did not previously have -regen debuffs had them added. (Back then, there was no significant split in how powers behaved in PvP and PvE; the main different at the time was that you could detoggle people - another attempt to deal with how indestructible certain ATs and/or powersets were otherwise.)

Remember that, at the time, it was common for people to skip Reconstruction, because Regen simply didn't need it. Regen built that way was actually very much all about +regen buffs, so high-magnitude -regen buffs were actually pretty dangerous to it. This means that, back then, -recharge was far less significant to Regen characters, primarily affecting their ability to keep Dull Pain up. Without -regen, Regen actually had only one weakness - burst damage.

At the same time player powers got -regen added in, so did NPC powers. Death Mages never debuffed regen with Twilight Grasp before I4.

So in the context of the times, it actually seems quite likely that -regen was designed to be a hole for Regen, possibly primarily in PvP, but also in PvE in general. That progression felt very different from the one SR had. The devs were trying to bring Regen down while they were throwing things at SR to improve it, because there were people pointing out that SR was arguably your worst choice of secondary in the period beween perma-Elude being canned and I7's critter accuracy changes (and I9's IOs).

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Everything else about Malta is fun except for Sappers, IMO.

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Actually, while I agree they're a pain, Sappers aren't why I avoid Malta. Especially solo, they seem to have toned down how many Sappers you see in a regular Malta mission.

No, the reason I avoid Malta on characters lacking mez protection is the stun grenades. The Stun of Doom. The "go read a book while this wears off" stun.

I think it's notable the the stun grenade mez from a +2 boss will outlast a single Break Free. "Well don't play on CR:5!" you say? Well, I can against all the other foes and generally not be mezzed all day long. Even Rikti, who are a wild mezfest, don't mez that severely. Does it say anything that I'd rather face +2 Rikti than +2 Malta? I think it does. Oh, and the Rikti give better reward on top of it.

And now, hey, they mez even more. Cool.

Just sayin'.

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Again I keep asking, why is anyone against this? Especially if you are a regeneration player? It seems backwards thinking to reject a buff? I mean yeah I'd understand arguing against a nerf, but a buff? I think some of you need to stop drinking the retard kool aid and start thinking a lot more clearly.

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I wouldn't want a drink of that, because it appears you've been soaking in it.

Reasonable people support improvements when they're appropriate. Experience shows, for example, that if you get improvements you didn't need, they often come with some sort of compensating downgrade, possibly at a later time. Things don't happen in a vacuum.

For people who don't agree that Regen is somehow subpar in places we are confident the devs weigh heavily in their balance analysis, and/or who don't want to see Regen changed for the sake of change itself, your suggestions don't look that attractive.

If you can't understand that, I don't think you're in a position to attack other people's mental development.

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By 'vastly', do you mean 9 months?

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Yes. Given that the game's 2-year anniversary fell in between the events, that was a long span of time in the scope of the game's existence.

And even on an absolute scale, events 9 months apart certainly aren't coincident.