UberGuy

In terms of how badly the AT needed a buff, I suspect you're correct. I suspect that the reason Stalkers got a buff first was some combination of (a) lower total overall creation, (b) higher rate of abandonment at early levels due to hide/AS playstyle [pure speculation on my part], (c) low-hanging fruit. Part (c) refers to how the devs found a way to radically alter the performance of the AT by changing one power that all Stalker primaries share. I would be shocked if what Blasters need could be achieved so narrowly and directly.

No matter what, if they are more attractive to play, then people playing them more are not playing something else. I'm confident there is some aspect of "new shiny", but if the changes to Stalkers were successful, they cannot help but reduce the time people play other ATs by some degree. If it's true that some people have a preference for playing melee ATs, then it may be that a more attractive Stalker AT may "steal" players disproportionately from the other melee ATs, including Scrappers.

I know that the I22 changes are likely to defer my playing both a Scrapper and a Brute I have in the wings, as I have a non-50 /Regen Stalker I was probably not going to level because I did not like how Dull Pain worked on Stalkers after the base HP buff, and which I now want to level again due to the MaxHP change and an interest in experiencing new AS at lower levels. (My other Stalker was 50 before even the base HP change.)

Er. That's not what my early experience with CoH was like. No one I knew had a stone tank - they were all Invulnerability. And Empaths weren't "must have". Sure, they were common and got invites, but my SG? It was Radiation Emission that "must have", if anything. We used Force Fields for +defense, not Fortitude, though we certainly thought Fortitude was very nice.

Long before IOs, long before Incarnates, observant people figured out that stacking buffs and debuffs made you need so much less healing that "lesser" heals were sufficient. You could heal less often, or for less magnitude, and maybe both, and do fine, which meant you didn't really need an Empath, whose big perceived forté was lots of healing. You could get by instead with other sets that offered other buffs which in turn made healing less important.

Inventions and Incarnates certainly accentuated this, since they both let everyone need less healing overall or, in the case of Rebirth, let everyone potentially provide some healing.

I will say this. While Rebirth gives a nice big green number up front, and gives everyone pretty rocking regen for a short while, the fact that it tails off to lower benefit in the later half of its duration means it's not a complete substitute for things like Regen Aura, which is full-strength for its full duration. Yeah, if you bring a bunch of people to stack Rebirth, that can address the decay, but then you could have had something else, like stacked Barrier, and brought one or two Empaths (who could bring Barrier, btw), and likely end up better overall.

I don't disagree. I probably seem to have been implicitly supporting change to Confront by arguing about Confront with those arguing against changing it. (That made my brain hurt to write.) But I'm not joining up with those asking for Confront to change, particularly. I'm mostly arguing against New Dawn's extreme stance on how useful it is, and on how a Scrapper lacking it is somehow clearly deficient. On that, I call baloney.

Now, I don't think many Scrapper players take Confront on their Scrappers. I've seen Scrappers with it, but very, very few. If, and this is a big if, the devs were looking for a power to radically change for every Scrapper, a power that every Scrapper has access to but not that many actually take would be an obvious place to look. Now, I don't think the devs would make a change like that without a really good reason, because it breaks the "cottage rule" across a whole AT. And I think that Scrappers do not need a buff, which therefore means I do not think they would do this, because they don't have a good reason to.

Oh?

Hmmm.

I'm sure it's possible it can. That's a completely separate question from how often it does. Perhaps you frequently team with folks where a Scrapper with Confront does something useful enough for a team to justify having it in a build. I do not, and I am not referring to how often I solo. It's a power that I would rarely every have a use for, which means I can usually find powers that I would get more frequent use from to put in that power pick. Any power that does something provides some utility. The question one asks when picking powers is what is most useful, and how often is it useful? When I look at the utility of various powers I can fit in a build, it's not that Confront is gone from the list, it's that it doesn't make the cut. There are too many things I find more useful more of the time. I believe, based on common player perception of the power, that this is a common experience.

I will, therefore, continue to skip Confront in my builds. As a result, I'm sure that once in a blue moon when Mercury is in trine to Mars, when Confront and Confront alone might have saved some calamity from befalling a team, I won't have it. I'll chalk it up on the same mental scoreboard where I note when Dark Miasma/Black Hole or Whirlwind might have been useful and we'll all get back to playing.

I'm pretty sure that's not a typo or spelling error, per-se. That one strikes me as more an artistic license thing, as in they intentionally made that one up.

Late to the thread, but I found this a really strange expectation. People re-run the same trials all the time. Yes, people like their Empyreans, and sometimes will change characters. But many, many more people will accept whatever trial is being run, because what they really want is more reward tables, and possibly iXP.

Putting presentation errors there would never fly where I work. If we prioritized it above the things you have prioritized it above, we wouldn't have a job for long. And this is for internal customers. They don't buy our software: we work for them.

Then again, fixing text errors in our environment is easy, and rarely makes it out of testing. Most such errors that go live are in places users don't see, like diagnostic logs.

Seeing as how a lot of the discussion was pretty specifically about whether that term was a valid/appropriate, I don't see your point.

But, Zwil, you missed a key part of the real complaint! "You don't care ... as much as they want you to".

As far as I'm concerned, both Paragon and a lot of the posters in this thread are simultaneously right and wrong. I agree that this thread is, in my not very humble opinion, hyperbolic. FFS, it's text. We'll live, and if you personally won't live to the degree that you have to denigrate the Devs over this problem specifically, I think there's something wrong with you.

On the other hand, I agree with the posters that eight years of this does get old, even if we'll live. Does anyone proofread the text? It sure doesn't seem like it, or if anyone does, they are doing it in a big hurry and not doing a very good job. Face it, your game is a 3D game environment whose story interactions are driven by a text interface. That makes the text pretty important, though not as important as powers or client crashes. You guys clearly do care a lot about the stories, dialogs and NPC interactions, and so do we, so we're letting you know that the presentation of this thing you care about is damaged when someone doesn't at least paste the text into something like MS Word to let it grammar check the sentences. Spend some of the presumed profits from Freedom's micro-transactions on an intern who spends a couple of weeks poring over the text bug reports, or something.

Nice.

Agreed. Every so often they would invert for items with low supply rates. I always sort of assumed this was because market "cycle" times on such items are longer, meaning corrections are slower. I still think that's probably true, but what we've seen post-converters suggests to me that there's a significant "silo effect" going on too, where people just don't look at both.

That really does depend on the T3. I always pick the 75% chance of one of the two effects. The T4 has the same chance of that with generally a T2-grade chance (often 25%) of the other "branch's" effect.

This. Increased supply creates competition. Competition on our market drives prices down by creating a prisoner's dilemma for sellers. Since the higher you list, the less likely you are to get the sale, if you want the sale, you list lower. The more people you are competing with, the more pressure there is to list low enough to undercut them all, because if you don't they might all undercut you, stranding your offer on a beach your sale of overly-high asking price. And if someone bid-creeps and finds a lower sale price, it will show up in the history, (some) people will see they can buy lower, and pressure on sellers to list even lower can mount.

Even if all the players here on this forum colluded, all it takes is one affluent or well-supplied player (and I know several who do not post here) to put big cracks in the dam by undercutting us all to get the sales. Once one person starts sales at lower prices, it would create tremendous temptation for colluding folks to break ranks with the coalition.

Since the price disruptions introduced by converters, people have fairly consistently bought recipes as much as 3x the price of the crafted enhancement for some of the stuff out there. I can only explain this the way you have here.

Blasters are one of the more popular characters created, making it quite common to see them. However, they have a high rate of abandonment as level increases, and they were found in the recent past to underperform all other ATs in terms of leveling rate as measured by the devs, whether solo or teamed, and regardless of powersets.