macskull

1. You are correct in that it is my opinion. However, you'll find that most agree with me. Before 22, the few enhancement slots that you do have are filled with subpar enhancements because you can't slot SOs yet (with a few exceptions). Villains have some decent low-level arcs, while heroes are generally forced to slog through the "old stuff" (arcs full of useless filler defeat-all and delivery missions spanning multiple large zones, often before they have a decent travel power).

2. My characters are built to run several toggles and always being doing something, whether that is buffing, healing, or dealing damage. Even with fully-slotted Stamina I need expensive set IO bonuses to keep from having to pack along blues. The only characters I have that do not have Stamina are my Warshade (Stygian Circle), Spines/Regen Scrapper (no room for a 5th power pool), Fire/Psi Dom (3-second downtime on Drain Psyche and 75 seconds between Domination recharges), and my various PvP Stalkers (whose sole purpose is to AS someone after they've been KBd, then go back into hide until it's time to do it again). If you doubt my playing ability because of my reliance on the "Stamina crutch," I'd be happy to arrange some friendly in-game competitions.

3. You attack the validity of my assertion with an aside comment about how there is no level zero, yet you simply dismiss my statement with "it's not possible." I wouldn't say it was possible if it hadn't seen it myself. I wasn't lucky enough to get one of those sub-1-hour 50s but I know even before double XP weekend, there were reports of one or two of them going around. Exploitative? Perhaps. Did it happen? Most definitely.

Holy ****, lrn2play before you whine. Most zone Blasters are completely incompetent and are easy kills if you have half a brain.

The first 20 levels of the game suck, plain and simple. You don't have Stamina and you don't have SOs. Heck, you don't even have most of your better powers. Things start to look up around level 22 but for me things don't get interesting until around 30-33.

I'm not sure where you're getting this "wow let's speed everything up" vibe from either - the changes to the SK system in particular will greatly reduce the extreme high end of the leveling curve. During the last double XP weekend, there were people going from 0-50 in less than an hour, even though the norm might've been more like 5-8 (speaking strictly from a PL standpoint). These changes to the SK system mean such ridiculously fast leveling isn't possible anymore.

That being said, those who think this will put a stop to farming or PLing are sorely mistaken. The one thing these changes will do is put an end to the broadcasting for fillers or bridges, which even I'll admit got annoying at times. PLers will continue to PL, because these changes mean they no longer have to look for bridges or fillers outside of MA missions. Farmers will continue to farm, because the new difficulty system makes it that much easier for them to not have to look for fillers.

Ok, I lol'd, someone put "corny" in the comment box when they repped that post.

Doesn't seem like it to me, at least not how I understand it.

Some examples I can think of are the mayhem mission kill badges, the Illusionist badge, and the Anti-Matter mission for the Portal Jockey accolade. The latter two missions are in the 40-45 band so I suppose I'll level the character that has those missions to 50 so I can still breeze through them. The mayhem missions? I'm not sure. I keep pushing for those to be available in Ouroboros but I think that's been falling on deaf ears. *shrug*

1. This doesn't eliminate farming. Might slow it down, certainly, but definitely not eliminate. Notice it's made PLing far far easier outside of the MA because you no longer have to find bridges for the lowbies. It'll be slower XP but farmers will still farm and PLers will still PL - you can't stop them no matter how you try. So yes, you're still wrong. I PL now, I'll be PLing after I16 hits. It'll take me longer (no more 8-hour 50s, oh well), but PLing will always be faster than playing the game "normally."

2. The RMT spammers will go back to using tells. Since most of them are using paid accounts instead of trial accounts, they can do that.

Even if Energize is as good as it looks on paper, Elec Brutes will still not do as well as Fire Brutes. With DR the lowest you'll probably get the recharge on the heal down is 45-50 seconds and that's still quite a bit slower than most other self-heals. The regen boost looks nice as well but it's not much in the scheme of things.

Elec Armor is a purely resist-based set. Resist-based sets do not, generally speaking, have baked-in defense debuff resistances (the notable exception is Invuln since it's reliant almost as much on defense as it is on resistance). I think this power change will be for the better, but we'll have to give it a shot during open beta to see exactly how it plays out.