Void_Huntress

Yes and no. There are several ways to interacting with Minecraft that reduce the monsters to incidental issues, and sometimes they can be completely irrelevant. Sometimes their relevance is only measured as a delay to whatever task you're doing. It's important to note that while there are folks who play in 'hardcore mode' -- you delete the world if you die -- this is completely player-enforced. Normally, death simply takes you back to the spawn point, dropping all your inventory where you died.

There's also 'peaceful', which has no monsters. The only things that can hurt you, then, are things like lava, falls, drowning, and suffocation -- and health regenerates.

So I'm not sure if it's a game within a sandbox, or a sandbox within a game, or a sandbox with a game glued to the side of it, or what. It's very hard to classify.

Already imagining the Mayhem/Safeguard mission.. One hero gets a key (tradeable between teammates via drag and drop, maybe?).. Villains have X minutes to get the key from the hero in question, grab loot from the vault, then get off the map via the getaway car.

Like in PvE, blowing crap up gets more time, but puts markers on the map so the heroes know where villains are being destructive. Otherwise, heroes don't know where the villains are coming from.

The hero with the key shows up on the map clearly as an objective marker, so no hiding the key.

This puts the heroes on defensive -- thematically appropriate -- with strategic choices like who holds the key, where they set up shop, what percentage of the hero team stays with the key holder, how many go after rampaging villains in the streets.. Does anyone keep watch on the vault, to make sure the villains aren't securing that..

Villains get to decide whether they just go for a straight blitz after the keyholder then the vault in order, or if they try to set up their fight first. The overall situation favors the heroes slightly, but the villains get to have the initiative and decide where and when the fight happens.

Where do I sign up for this?

I'd like to see more non-invention enhancements that do interesting things. Stuff like the Titan/Hami enhancements (though not necessarily at HO strength) that provide interesting combinations of benefits to allow interesting slotting.

Being able to pick one of those, or get (cringe) a currency to buy one of those, would be interesting. Also, a PvP-based currency could give us a better path to get to PvP IOs, like has been mentioned.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm still thinking in terms of rewards for objectives, not rewards just for fighting. I'm of the opinion there should be little reward for just attacking people at random in zones, it should be for completing an objective or keeping someone from completing an objective.

Lead a horse to water..

I have too much recovery. It turns blue in my combat monitor. :(

I was quite disappointed when I realized I couldn't get everything Mids suggested I could.

That was pretty close to outright accusing her of attacking you, which is not what a friendly, peaceful person does without cause to people with whom they're conversing.

Masterminds should get their own tutorial.

I mean, it'd be nice if every AT got its own subset tutorial, but masterminds need it more than most, because it's bordering on playing a different game, with the differences in what is enabled and expected.

It's not always about you. Sometimes, it's about making a point and making sure it's heard in the context of what someone else said.

"Not terribly impressive, for a MM set" is my experience. Their survivablity is lackluster for an MM set, and a lot of their utility is tied up in long-cooldown powers that the AI simply cannot make effective use of, and the inability to keep them at range the way you can bots makes it hard to keep them alive, particularly the medic (who is a tier 1, instead of tier 2 like with bots). The tier 2 pets are pretty much useless except as bodyguard fodder, I feel.

I've been maintaining for a while the biggest issue with the Mercs set is it looks like their powers were designed assuming a certain recharge. The pet fixes a while back kind of conflict with that.

Interesting. I didn't know about this, so I looked up the attack mechanics article in Paragon Wiki.. This actually indicates a -1 critter has a -10% tohit relative normal. Is the wiki in error here for its

At that point, I just inform them, "Guys, I'm going to go clear the courtyard. Anyone who wants to help can join me."

Thanks to you, Bosstone and I have been comparing notes on what to call the inspirations.

If + is respite..
Catch a breath: ~
Enrage: *
Insight: @
Wakey: ^

From there, the project breaks down. Mostly because we're giggling too much.

See, this reminds me of conversations I've had with ITF pugs.

"Aren't we going to clear the area first?"
"Why? We'll just take him out."
"... Well, what if something happens and the fight ends up drifting into the spawns?"
"That won't happen."

... one wipe later...

Yep.

Edit: botched that. Screw you, paragon wiki.

/inspexec_pet_name <inspiration> <petname>

or

/inspexec_pet_target <inspiration>

... I have to pick one?


Oh, very. I'm sharing that story with friends.

.. I hope that's getting brought up to someone on the dev team, because hilarious as that is, that can't be the intent.

Doesn't work. You have to get a character out of Praetoria before you can pick Hero/Villain, on the new accounts.

As Eva says, if you're full on things you don't have use for, you should either be combining them (if you have three of something) or deleting extras.

And an orange will do a lot more for your survivability than you seem to think. So will a yellow.

I'm a bit of an aberration, but on my blaster I consistently use Concentration together with Drain Psyche and Hail of Bullets. It's fun.

Conversely? We wouldn't have a game without those folks. It wouldn't be profitable without the high volume of 'average and under' players.

I said "completely". As in, folks believe if a confused enemy kills another enemy, no matter what the circumstances, zero XP and inf are earned for the players.

Which is decidedly not how it works.

I've met folks who don't understand that standard enhancements TURN OFF after a while. And have vet badges, and multiple characters played to SO levels. They just thought higher level enhancements were stronger, and that they could get them at their leisure.

I recently (within the last few months) had to badger three friends of mine to keep their inspiration tray open and to use them. They previously were just playing the game entirely without inspirations.

Mez is definitely something that gets glossed over by a lot of players, and protection seems to be poorly understood. I've seen players use a single mag 2 stun on a boss, then turn to face other enemies genuinely believing they've done something to mitigate damage from the boss.

To be honest, I don't really know large sections of the enemy groups very well, or what powers they can leverage. Mostly because I can't tell what they're doing most of the time, and I'd have to go look at an outside source and try to correlate it with the in-game entities. I think it would be helpful if the game had more feedback about what enemies were doing, especially when it's significant like tier 9s.

Similarly, the number of people I meet who actually understand what an anchored toggle is, what it does, what the implications are for the fight... is substantially lower than the number of people I've played with.

The difference between "power build up" and "build up" is totally lost on some people.. They see Build Up and conclude "It makes my powers stronger", and this leads to people using Build Up just for, say, a mez. While the hitrate benefit is there, it's certain suboptimal.

Of course, this goes both ways.. I still occasionally come across players that still seem to believe that confuse completely steals kills (and thus XP/inf) from players. About four or five months ago, I saw a mind control character get booted from a pug for "wrecking our rewards". My attempts to clarify what was happening were met with 'yeah, whatever'.

Pretty much this.

Does this vary by faction? Last night I set my blaster to +0/x3 with bosses and ran five tip missions.. I faced: Crey, Knives of Artemis, Circle, 5th Column (with splashes of Malta and P.Clockwork thanks to Maelstrom's party buddies), and Freakshow.

For the first four factions, I faced 1 or 2 bosses per map. For three of them, I think the only boss entities were at the final objective. Enemy quantities varied a bit, of course, and I didn't actually tally the quantities. (I do have logs, so I can probably go back and pull them later)

Freakshow, I ended up with I think six bosses (a few of which respawned, giving me extra boss kills).

Has anyone else had experiences like this?

Anecdote. I see a LOT of full teams steamrolling +0/x8 in the communities and PUGs I've been with over the years. It's been pretty common in my experience on Virtue.


(This was supposed to be posted an hour and some ago, but real life intervened)