Adeon Hawkwood

Personally, I'd just like them to decrease the animation time on Ignite. I think the power as is works well with the feel of the rest of the set. Assault Rifle is an AoE damage monster but pays for this with weak single target damage (Ignite in palce of a third blast and no Aim). Ignite is essentially the 3rd blast in the set twice about twice the damage of a regular third blast (like Power Burst) but with twice the recharge. This means that AR has much weaker single target damage using normal attacks but they can get comparable single target damage against tough targets as long as they can hold or immobilize the target. This encourages ARs to use AoEs against multiple enemies and only bother with single target attacks against a single foe (i.e. a boss).

In theory this works well, but in practice it has some issues. Blasters are generally ok, with the exception of AR/Energy they all have an easily spammable immobilize power to setup Ignite (EM doesn't but it provides more single target melee damage to compensate). Defenders and Corruptors are a lot more problematic however. Trick Arrow and Traps are the only sets with an easily spammable immobilizes and TA, Rad and Dark are the only ones with options to hold a boss (which are all less practical than Blasters get). Epics help a bits, Defenders can pick up either Electric or Psychic for an easily spammable immobilize or a less spammable single target hold. Corruptors are worse off since they only get AoE immobilizes or 32s recharge holds.

So given all that I think is a practical reason to change it so that an immobilize or hold is not required but I'd still like to see it designed to be of limited utility on weaker enemies to help maintain the "feel" of the current power. I'd also like to avoid turning it into any sort of real AoE since that would invariably mean it has it's total damage lowered and thus AR would have even more trouble with tough single targets.

My Suggestion:
Steal the mechanic used by the Incendiary Swarm Missiles the Assault Bot gets (but not the stats obviously). Essentially Ignite becomes a single target DoT attack which applies a high DoT (both damage and duration) to it's main target but also summons a small fire patch that damages any enemies entering it. Keep the total damage and recharge roughly the same as the current version but split the damage between the main target and the patch (maybe 80/20). This would mean that it has roughly the same impact as the 3rd blast from other sets when used on a boss but it's unappealing to use on lesser enemies since it has double the recharge of a normal 3rd blast and is a DoT meaning it frequently won't deal full damage to them. Immobilizing/Holding the target is no longer required but does give a damage boost making it desirable.

-Rech and slow are very different things. -Rech reduces the rate at which enemies power's recharge while slow just reduces the speed at which they move. Slow is mostly only useful if you're a ranged character fighting melee enemies. Additionally Slow enhancements only work on speed debuffs, not recharge. That being said most powers that debuff speed also debuff recharge (there are some exceptions such as Caltrops).

The need for both currency and item sinks in a game is pretty well established. Everything players do in a game generates both influence and items, if there are no means of removing them then they accumulate until supply of both reaches the point where the existing supply far outstrips the newly generated supply. An ever increasing supply of currency means deflation, currency is worth less than it was before and you need to kill more enemies to have the same earning power. An ever increasing supply of items serves to further accentuate the difference in price between "good" items* and "poor" items. The supply of "average" and "poor" items builds up causing their price to decrease and people can afford to spend a higher portion of their income on "good" items. Over time you reach a point where the price of "good" items is out of reach of most players. Eventually you would theoretically reach a point where there are so many "good" items in the game that they start to decrease in value but that would take a long time.

Good MMOs have both item and currency sinks to remove the excess from the game and try to keep the economy reasonably balanced. In a lot of MMOs gear is "Bind on Pickup/Equip" meaning that once used you can't transfer it which effectively removes it from the game as far as the economy is concerned. Here we don't have explicit binding but the difficulty and limited nature of enhancement removal serves as a sort of defacto binding. The fact that we can "unbind" any items at all is pretty unusual for an MMO but I think the nature of character design here makes it a good idea to allow some leniency.

At the moment you can remove unlimited IOs by using a respec recipe. This is good in terms of the economy since it means the price to remove an IO is flexible based on the amount of inf currently in the economy and the relative prices of IOs. The downside is it's extremely inconvenient. Adding a recipe that allowed you to remove a single enhancement would have a similar effect although it might require tweaking to the drop rates for respec recipes to compensate a bit.

*side note: What constitutes "good", "average" and "poor" items are of course subjective, for my purposes I'm basing it on the number of an item desired by players divided by the number available.

Actually if you've got a spare HD or a large memory stick you can copy most of the files over to avoid having to redownload it. It's pretty much the same process as doing a fast install of the test server:
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Test_s...p_Installation

I assumed she meant a Cylon.

Well you can actualyl only have one of the craftable ones. The point I think the poster was making is that you can have both the Raptor Pack and the craftable one. This could be useful if, say, you log on for a Hami raid and realize that your Raptor Pack is almost empty and you don't have time to go to the Shard for a new one. It's a pretty limited application but it does exist. Although I would say the main usage is to get a pack for a mew character without needing to trek to PI or do a safeguard mission.

Of course

Yep, if you check the thread Cat linked several other posters gave similar figures. 300K+ an hour is very much on the high end but it's definitely doable.

Well there are two things to keep in mind. First off it's not about the quantity of money it's the profit margin. As long as the profit from the sales generated (after subtracting operating expenses to generate the Inf) exceed the costs of the account then it's a net gain for them. Secondly they probably don't pay for the accounts themselves, a lot of the gold farming businesses acquire accounts through less than legitimate means such as using stolen credit cards or stealing accounts from their customers.

The intent of the feature is that it serves to indicate how well regarded a particular poster is by his peers. However since it's so easy for people to work together to either boost their own rep or lower someone else's it's essentially useless for that purpose. Therefore as the mods stated it's a forum game.

I turned mine off because I think the rep system as implemented is basically pointless. I (occasionally) check my old posts for rep because I like to see the comments people give.

I was going with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutant

Not really, the general definition of a mutation is a change in the DNA that isn't found amongst the general population of an organism. Being a redhead isn't a mutation, it's simply the result of a genetic combination that occurs infrequently in random genetic pairings. If we wanted to as a society we could set up a program to deliberately breed for redheads. Pretty much every trait started as a mutation but once it becomes present in a decent percentage of the population it can't really be considered a mutation anymore (otherwise we're all mutants for having spines).

I completely agree, and to be honest I think the same applies to the various shield powers as well. From a balance point of view balancing them around frustration and inconvenience is crazy. The design should be done so that either they are balanced with a 100% up time or they don't have 100% uptime. Personally I'd advocate either changing them into a PBAoE power (that has a reduced or non-existant effect on the caster) while keeping the current recharge and duration or keep the current setup and increase the duration to 30minutes. The main downside is that for both cases some method of not-accepting the buff would be almost required due to the potential for griefing.

If making either of these changes means that the powers need to be nerfed than as far as I'm concerned they need to be nerfed now. If the only thing balancing a power is frustration then it isn't really balanced, you're just hoping people can't be bothered to use it.

As others have said a change like this would actually benefit marketeers at the expense of everyone else. Most marketeers plan on a turn-around on items of less than 1 week in the first place unless they marketeer on a lot of alts. If it has to sit for more than a week it's almost certainly a poor option in terms of profit per slot-hour (or more realistically slot-day). Additionally every marketeer has felt the pain of an item that doesn't sell and has to be re-listed (incurring an additional listing cost). A decrease of 10% if it doesn't sell after a week would actually work in my favor more often than not.

Agreed. Long term I think it would work out ok as the extra inf currently in the system got used up in market fees or re-distributed but in the short term it would cause a lot of problems. Ideally the best solution would be to go back in time to just before Issue 16 and tell the devs "look, don't fix the level 50 influence bug, ok? It's going to cause a lot of inflation". Maybe Mender Silos could take care of that?

Well the mastermind AE bug caused a massive boost in the amount of infamy generated during that period. It could be that we're still seeing fallout from that as players who primarily play heroes transfer their extra infamy to blueside.