Adeon Hawkwood

Yeah, it was a poor word choice. I don't particularly mind if players want to complain about it but I, personally, believe that the devs should make these sort of changes when they feel they are justified.

The only reason I say it shouldn't be labeled an "exploit" is because of the negative connotations associated with the term. From a practical point of view drawing him into the corridor is defeating him in a manner not intended by the devs and from a literal point of view that makes it an exploit. Now in this particular case it's pretty much harmless and there is no indication that the devs did not intend this behavior so if the devs actually treated it as an exploit by punishing players who used it I would be the first to say "WTF?". I don't like using the term "unintended behavior" because it feels like a weasel word but since "exploit" has negative connotations it's probably a better word to apply.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree here. I do tend to agree that herding players down a "one true path" is a poor idea in a pen and paper game but conversely I tend to agree with it in MMOs. In P&P games you will, generally, only have a particular encounter once so whatever way you do it it's interesting (assuming a good plot). In MMOs you will likely do the same encounter many, many, times so different parameters apply and, IMHO, eliminating methods of subverting interesting encounters is a worthy goal for the dev team.

As for how it makes the encounter better, it's preventing players from changing the fight from one with moderately interesting mechanics to a simple tank n' spank. Fighting Trapdoor in the main room he is marginally more interesting than most other EBs/AVs in the game. He has very high regen which anyone can "debuff" by killing the bifurcations as well as the possibility of luring him into the lava for more damage. Out in the hall he's the same as every other EB/AV int he game: a large bag of hitpoints you have to pound into submission.

Now in this particular instance I wouldn't have cared if they had left it alone. It's a story arc I'll run once per character, solo, so what other people do doesn't affect me. However I think the dev's willingness to fix this shows a good mindset, they don't want players using unintended behavior to avoid interesting encounters. MMO players are primarily reward driven and if they can find a way to do an encounter faster/safer they generally will even if it's less interesting.

For example suppose the Battle Maiden fight in Apex had had a bug where dragging her to a specific area eliminated the blue things of death. Pretty much every team would use that bug because it's easier than dodging and, to me, that would be a huge waste.

I disagree. It's not something we see regularly in THIS game since the devs here are really only just starting to experiment with specifically designed encounters but it's a lot more common in other MMOs. I can think of quite a few cases from a certain fantasy MMO where the devs did similar actions and I barely played that MMO.

Now in this particular case I think the devs handled it poorly, people were kiting Trapdoor in Beta, if they didn't want that they really should have fixed it then. However I consider it to, overall, be a promising sign. I think it shows that the devs are thinking about encounter design at a more than superficial level and are willing to change things when they make a mistake and release an encounter that doesn't work the way they want it to

Like the Wiki it's something the Devs of most MMOs rarely bother to support directly (in fact I can't think of a single major MMO with a dev made offline build planner). From a practical point of view this actually makes a lot of sense for the devs (of any game). The main reason is of course cost savings as mentioned above but there is also the fact that a community supported tool will (in general) be more responsive to the actual needs of the community than a dev made tool.

A good example of this is the item database sites for a certain Fantasy MMO. In theory the devs of the game could make such a site faster and easier than the community (after all they have access to the raw data rather than hiving to gather it from the game) but the fact that there are so many different database sites (I can think of 4 off the top of my head) shows why, in some ways, it's better left to the community. Each one is (theoretically) providing essentially the same data but the way in which it is presented and the ancillary features of the site allow each to provide a different take on it that supports the needs of some fraction of the community in a way that a dev-developed tool cannot.

Obviously in Cox we have a smaller community which means we don't have the wider variety of tools but the same basic principle applies. If a situation ever arose where it was not practical to serve the needs of the entire community with a single build planner I have no doubt another tool would arise to fill the void.

Given the quote marks I think he meant "buy" in the sense that you will have to re-run existing content before being allowed to do the I20 content. The I19 example being that you have to get shards/components from older content before being able to do Apex/Tin Mage

Maybe, the problem I have with imagining that happening here is that support ATs are so ridiculously overpowered. I could see a DPS meter causing more discrimination against particular support power sets (particularly the ones that don't provide strong +dam or -res) but I don't see it causing people to pass over support ATs for an extra Blaster or Scrapper. Stack 8 support ATs with a -20% resistance debuff (which quite a few sets have) and the total team DPS would be higher than 8 Blasters.

Correct. For the curious here's the reason for that. Internally Damage Resistance Enhancement and Damage Enhancement are the same thing (this is why, for example, slotting a Ribosome Exposure Enhancement in an attack boosts the damage). Therefore it is necessary for the devs to ensure that any resistance bonuses in powers are not affected by external buffs (since if they were your damage bonus would increase the resistance they provide). However due to the way the power system is implemented they have two options for doing this: they can tag a single aspect of a power to not be affected by both enhancements and buffs or they can tag an entire power to not be affected by external buffs. They cannot tag a single aspect of a power to be affected by enhancements but not buffs (probably because the power system automatically adds those values together). As such any power that takes resistance enhancements is not affected by global buffs at all.

This primarily affects people using power boost but it also comes up in a few other sets when looking at set bonuses (such as the fact that Reconstruction does not benefit from global recharge or +healing set bonuses).

The -perception is auto-hit, the -to hit is not. If you just use it as a stealth boost this doesn't matter a lot, but if you're using it to boost your effective defense it's worth slotting an accuracy enhancement (unless you already have plenty of accuracy from set bonuses).

The logic is that since the combination AR/Dev lacks both Aim and Build Up it has a weaker Alpha Strike than other combos. Adding a damage bonus to the Sniper Rifle/Targeting Drone combo was an attempt to rectify that. It's similar to the reason that Dominator snipe powers have a higher base damage than Blaster snipes despite Dominators having a lower ranged damage scale.

Yeah, -recharge makes a lot of sense, I missed that when I was reading your original post .

That's pretty much it. The other option which some people use is to place very lowball bids on high value recipes. For example placing 10 bids for 100million each on Gladiator's Armor +3% def IOs would store 1billion inf and unless the price of those IOs drop by 95% there's no risk of them filling (and if they do drop that far chances are you would notice enough in advance to withdraw the bids). Personally though I just use gleemail to pass excess inf to various alts. You can potentially store 24 billion inf per server this way and it's probably the safest possible way to store it since the market server has had hiccups from time to time but NCSoft has never deleted characters.

Ah, I missed that one, good to know the truth.

I think they must have been, recall that pre-AE there was quite a bit of variation in T3 rare salvage prices. Some (such as Diamonds and Rikti Alloy) went for <100K while the more useful ones were going for 5-10million. The AE stabilized the prices by introducing a steadier supply of the more useful rares (such as Magical Conspiracy). With level 50s leaving the AE to farm incarnate shards we seem to be seeing rares returning to their pre-AE prices variations.

While I agree that a DPS meter would not be particularly useful in this game I really have to question the assumptions made in this post. You're basically assuming that teams would pass on buffers/debuffers due to them not having "optimal" DPS. While it is true that their DPS is lower I think most players realize that the buffs/debuffs they bring more than outweigh their lower base damage.

I can believe that people would discriminate between characters of the same AT based on DPS but I have a hard time they'd drop a defender for a blaster because the blaster does more DPS.

Am I insane or is this the first they've said about a 3rd freespec token?

That's only true if you assume that money would never change hands without market fees. If there weren't market fees then virtually no inf would leave the system. Market fees effectively set a cap on the number of times a single inf passes through the market at 10. So for every inf farmed up people will buy 10inf worth of goods at WW (actually slightly less due to other inf sinks but close enough to 10 for our purposes). Without the fee every inf farmed up would allow people to buy infinity worth of good at WWs (ok, sooner or later it would be removed by other means but it could easily go through the market hundreds of thousands of times before that)

Good point, that would probably be the best way to do Boost Morale, it's basically the same mechanic Fulcrum Shift uses in reverse. The only real issue I can see is that it would probably need to be limited to team-members only which makes it less useful than the other AoE Heals in Hamidon and MS raids (the server load from spawning 50+ pseudo-pets every 8 seconds or so would be enormous).

For Phalanx Maneuvers though I think it would still be too server resource intensive unless it was changed to a click power (ala Mind Link).

As a more general contribution to the discussion, I've been thinking about it and I do like the concept but what I'd like to see are fewer buffs and more debuffs.


Here's how I'd do it (values where given are for Defenders):

1. Bolster Morale: A single target heal over time effect (say 1.5 times the effectiveness of heal other but spread over 10seconds). Also provides a moderate recovery buff for a short period (maybe 30seconds? I want it to be a bonus from the heal, not something you pre-buff with).
2. Advantageous Terrain: A patch debuff giving -50% speed, -20% defense and -20% resistance.
3. Coordinated Maneuvers: AoE Toggle, provides Defense (10% or 13.3% all positions and types), also provides a little bit of DDR (maybe 20%?)
4. Determined Advance: AoE Mez Protection Toggle (Immobilize, Hold and Stun for sure, maybe Sleep, other similar powers have that as a hole but in this case it's solely mez protection so I'd throw it in).
5. Up and At Them: Ally rez, maybe with some sort of buff thrown in
6. Demoralize: A Cone Terrorize effect, unlike yours I would make it mag 3 but no to-hit debuff (I think the stacked -to hit and +defense would be a bit to good)
7. Tactical Assault: An AoE toggle power that provides a damage buff (maybe 30%) a to hit buff (maybe 5%) and a perception buff.
8. Focused Fire: A single target -resistance (30%) and -defense debuff (20%), similar to Surveillance from Bane Spiders.
9. Lightning Assault: Basically a combination of Group Teleport, Shield Charge and Wormhole. It teleports you and any nearby allies to the indicated destination provides a strong damage buff (maybe 50%?) and has an AoE Stun/Knockdown effect around the destination.

The basic concept is that most of the buffs are toggles and the debuffs are clicks. This represents that you provide your allies with ongoing tactical advice (i.e. a toggle) but your actions with regard to the enemy have to be more spur of the moment based on the current situation.

Bolster Morale and Up and At Them are the exceptions to this rule and are intended to represent you bolstering a flagging comrade and both provide "healing" for that very reason. I view Hit Points in most games as an abstraction that represents a characters overall ability to continue the fight rather than literally how many hits they can take. A character who has taken damage (or been defeated) has probably taken some wounds but those aren't necessarily serious, what has really been damaged is their will to continue. Your character provides support and encouragement which reinforces their will allowing them to fight on through the pain (represented by healing them). I changed Bolster Morale to single target for this reason, you can't bolster your own morale and a pep-talk to one of your allies needs to be specifically directed for maximum effect. Up and At Them is a reference to the scenes in various war movies where a sergeant/officer hauls another character to his feet and tells him to get moving.

Advantageous Terrain thematically represents the team using existing terrain to their advantage in-order to draw their opponents out of position (-speed) and deny them cover (-defense and resistance)

Like Traps and Forcefield it provides a defense and mez protection to nearby allies but unlike them it needs two powers to do it so the powers are a little stronger.

Demoralize: This is the primary active mitigation in the set, I removed the -to hit debuff because I think it would be to good stacked with the defense buff from Coordinated Maneuvers. I think it might be worth putting in some sort of debuff as well, ho hum.

Tactical Assault: Nothing Fancy, it's basically Assault + Tactics. My only real issue is that it does come kinda-late in the set for what it does, still it seems to be the best spot for it.

Focused Fire: The intent was to give some more -res to stack on bosses. However now that I think about it I'm not sure I like it, especially so late in the set. I think it makes sense to have a debuff here but I'm not sure what.

Lightning Assault: This is intended to represent a sudden attack by your team taking the foe in a surprise assault getting in amongst them before they can react. Functionally this is basically an inverse wormhole with some influence from Shield Charge and Masterminds using Group Teleport.