UberGuy

There's no such thing as a "permanent" level shift. You can unslot it and slot a lower level version of the power.

I don't even understand how you can not see the answer to this question. High-end Incarnate level power is going to make existing level 50 mobs the equivalent of gray con mobs. Sure, they might not mechanically be as bad at hitting and damaging us, but we're going to roll over them like they aren't there, and that doesn't even include the level shifts.

Now stack level shifts on top of that. Does it really make any sense to you that these increasing powers should just mean that we get faster and faster at earning existing reward levels off of existing mobs? That doesn't make any sense to me. What makes sense to me is something like what happens when we outlevel mobs now.

Simple. A lot of paper/scanner missions are easier. A lot of tip missions are "go click on box, then face ambush, then lead hostage, then fight ambush, then click pseudo contact" etc. I don't object to that, but it is not what I always want to do. Most paper missions are simpler than that, and a lot of the time, I just want a mission full of butt to whup on. I'm not going to restrict myself to tip missions just because I can get an A-merit at the end of five of them.

Moreover, that's only for my level 50s. I still do "normal" content when I am leveling. I only run paper missions on non-50 characters to unlock contacts. I don't run tip missions on non-50 characters unless I want to change their alignment.

The vast majority of the time I spend on my level 50s is spent in TFs.

I'm not interested in finding something to do. I'm interested in either leveling a non-50, which I typically do solo, or tagging along with what the people I'm playing with are doing. By and large, that means tagging along for TF/SF/Trial content. The majority of that content is either blue-side-only or coop. Making my Villains into Rogues is the minimum effort I need to make to allow them to participate in all of that.

This is true in theory, but I don't find it true in practice. I'm not going to spend the time earning hero merits on nearly a dozen characters. I have a few heroes that I run them on, and anything they earn using them I can send to anyone on either side. Meanwhile my Rogues and Vigilantes can attend any trial, SF or TF for the other side except the CoP, which concerns me very little. Most of my villains have become rogues, and I see no need to move them further.

Diggis is definitely right. It's important to not just apply the "only 5 of a given name" rule to whole categories of set bonuses, like recharge. You can absolutely have more than five recharge bonuses. What you'll see is that +recharge set bonuses of different size have different names. For example, 7.5% set bonus is a "Huge Recharge Bonus" while a 6.25% set bonus is a "Large Recharge Bonus".

Complicating this example, the recharge bonus from the LotG special enhancer, which also grants a 7.5% recharge bonus, has its own name for that bonus, meaning you can stack five of that bonus even if you are getting five Huge Recharge Bonuses from sets like Panacea, Basilisk's Gaze or Sting of the Manticore.

I would completely ignore anything that worked like this. If I want to be a spectator, I'll go downstairs and watch TV. I'm logged into a video game. I want to do something.

I doubt it's a bug. Things that con as even level to a level 50 should drop shards. It's been confirmed multiple times that things that use the GM scaling code, such as invasion Rikti, apocalypse Zombies and Winter Realm Hordlings all drop shards - even the non-EBs. (I personally got a shard solo from a Winter Horde minion.)

The bombs are EBs, and happen to actually be level 50 critters behind the GM scaling rules, meaning they can drop purples, for example. But because they use the GM scaling code, they should (and apparently do) drop shards for a level 50 character. Whether their shard drop rate is out of whack for what they are is a different matter.

But that's the thing, it's not great. Basically no one cares if it gets development time. Where's the player passion asking the devs to come up with that time for the Gladiator system? If it was there in any meaningful way, they would have invested more into it, and maybe it would somehow be awesome. (I seriously doubt that, but I can't say it's not possible.)

If I someday think some (as yet unimagined) new system I could be wonderful fails to capture the imagination of the player base as badly as Gladiators did, I'll accept that I'm alone in my thinking.

I know I'm confused.

That's not normal, and seems a bit hard to believe. I run these TFs all the time, and they have a lot of "kill all" in them, and I've never even gotten more than 10 out of them including the fact that you get two at the end no matter what.

The best thing I know of per kill is Mitos at a Hamidon raid. (Not the LGTF version.)

Actually, no, you can do with HOs anything that they will slot into based on any aspect that they count as enhancers for. In fact, they do things no set enhancer does, like how Enzymes enhance both defense debuffs and defense. Set IOs "know better" in the sense that the combination of what sets powers take and what those sets enhance don't let us combine them that way.

Mind Link is like that on purpose. Castle posted that he knew you could do that with it and described it as an "experiment".

I think he meant in terms of what's included. We've known what those slots will do mechanically for a long time now, but we haven't known when we'd get them. Presumably, other stuff might also be included in the mid-issue release, which would also be detail that could be included.

There's cartoony that looks a bit like you might see it on a Marvel or DC (or any other of a handful of publishers') comic book's pages, and there's cartoony like you might see on, say, the Teen Titans cartoon series. While there have been comic book artists for whom the latter version of "cartoony" has been their stock in trade, it's not what I think of when I imagine comic book art, and it's not what I prefer my characters (or really almost any of them I look at) to look like. CoH doesn't really exactly look like comic book art to me, but it doesn't look like a television cartoon, and so I prefer what it does look like.

I took what Heraclea meant to be that chasing Director 11 around through the warehouse isn't conducive to avoiding his spray of mines, not that it was directly a requirement.

If I conveyed the notion that I had trouble getting the badge, it was a failure of my communication. I have Master of the Apex Tin Mage Task force of four characters.

Three of them were done more or less as you have described. One of them had the same basic result and was completely by accident of team composition - a cargo-shipload worth of buffs and debuffs and a few very high DPS characters, combined with well-over-softcap defense (a mix of IO builds, team buffs, and ispirations).

But except for that one case, that's what I meant by people using more firepower on Director 11 than they use on Bobcat and Neuron. Unless you're going for the land speed record for completing the TF, there's just no reason to dump that kind of artillery on them.

I agree wholeheartedly about the NPCs. I know they are like that to reduce poly count and texture size, but we have examples of them being improved. Take a look at a lot of the NPCs in Praetorea, who are standing around doing emotes. Most but not all of them use player character faces. I don't know what the impact might be of upgrading the NPCs who sometimes wander en masse in Paragon and the Rogue Isles, but it would be nice to see.

Honestly, I don't have any real problems with our player characters. Not only do their faces not bother me, the mitten hands have never bothered me. The only hand examples I can concede look kind of lame to me are the hands of Huge characters, or sometimes regular male/female characters wearing thick gloves. These larger hands reveal the low poly count more clearly, and on top of it the textures giving faux depth between the fingers are stretched by the larger object size to a degree where your eyes can't be fooled by them.

That's not the definition of "raising the bar" I either use with others or am regularly exposed to from other people. Raising the bar is just that: you set it higher than it was before. There's no expectation that you raise the bar to the stratosphere. For it to mater, you do have to move it upwards some meaningful amount, sure, but if your default is to move it to 10,000 feet, you're guaranteeing that no one will clear it when they finally jump.

Well, that sounds like it would potentially trivialize the point of the challenge. That said, I'm not clear on what you can do that affects the challenge positively at all, other than to overdose on defense buffs and mow D11 down as fast as possible to limit the window for bad luck to deprive you of the badge.

If brute force is actually what the designers had in mind for the approach to "solving" how to get the badge, I guess that's fine, but in my experience it often leads to people who want the badge laying out more defenses, planning and firepower for Director 11 than they do against anything else in the TF, including the final fight against a Praetor. Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't seem like the way you'd want to design it.

I would also be a bit surprised if this is the expected solution, as that's not how the devs have historically designed things. I say that even though some other things have led to similar solutions by players, such as the end fight in the Lord Recluse Strike Force. That does have known alternate solutions to raw brute force, and I find those are actually the ones many people seeking the "Master Of" badge resort to. (Sleeping AVs, single-pulling, etc.)

It boggles my mind that the things I bolded above are something that fall under the list of things we would prioritize for CoH to match for its peers.

Guys, this game is going on seven years old. I want them to continue to push boundaries, but when we're talking about things this game can do to try and compete with brand new games whose engines are starting from ground zero with five-to-seven more years of PC and MMO innovation under the industry's belt, I think there's stuff that's going to get them way, way more mileage with way more people than this kind of visual fluff, even acknowledging that visual "fluff" is very important to a video game. Visuals are not going to bring people here from competing games if those games have better gameplay or content, and anyone who is going to leave this game for better eye candy alone probably wasn't going to stay no matter what.

Non-mitten hands that don't actually have individual bones for each finger they could slip in by accepting a potential hit to the minimum spec to the game. That's basically just a poly count increase per character model being rendered. More realistic faces, with things like bones or deformers for facial animation? That's tech that just doesn't exist here, and I have a hard time imagining adding it would be remotely trivial.

Definitely not. I think a lot of PvPers expected this based on what was described, and the ones I knew had a fair degree of satisfaction with the idea, but it's not what was delivered.