UberGuy

>.>

That depends on how many accounts you have. =D

(I actually never do this. No, I'm really serious. But I swear that probably 3/5ths of the people I hang with in game have two accounts or more, and farming with a lowbie in the mish on the other account is a health part of many a character's progress to 50.)

</threadjack>

Where I'm a skinflint and wait longer than I probably should for bargains. But then I do derive some joy from the bargains themselves. Like most people seem to, I get a sort of rabid mania about the last few enhancers I need to complete a build, but I am pretty good about suppressing it. I don't always, though.

The streak breaker has always worked on mob attacks, and the better something's chance of hitting you, the more aggressively the streak breaker will intervene on misses. That's the way it works for us, too.

It's when the mob has a low chance of hitting you that the streak breaker is at its most relaxed. I believe in its lowest band, it allows a streak of 100 misses in a row before it intervenes.

According to the Wiki, I remember correctly.

Huh. That's interesting. I fairly frequently go for the level 25-30 badges just to get the extra salvage slots, and I have yet to not make a profit despite outright deleting stuff like Hold and Range enhancers. I typically make what feels a ridiculous profit on the Accuracy, Damage, Recharge, Heal and Endurance enhancers. And I am doing this on characters who don't yet have the recipes memorized, so I'm usually buying recipes off the market to get enough of them.

I'm not saying I don't believe you. I'm just curious what's going on there. Maybe my luck with timing has just been good and/or yours bad, but I tend not to assume that by default.

Nope. That's incorrect. Self-applied buffs can be used to exceed the soft cap. For builds that can muster enough self-applied +defense to exceed the soft cap, it is often desirable to do so at least slightly so that there is an amount of "buffer" defense to keep -defense debuffs from easily drawing you away from the soft cap. Why? Because fighting stuff you can only survive by being at the soft cap and having your soft-capped defense reduced is a bad thing!

That's correct, and that's the only reason for the "soft cap" distinction. The "soft cap" is amount of defense point at which a foe's chance to hit you won't go any lower, while the "hard cap" is the point at which your defense won't go any higher.

I see your novel and raise you an encyclopedia!

My perspective on this comes from this: how many threads did you see on these forums where people complain about the price of LotGs? Miracles? Now how many did you see about the drop rate, rarity or cost of purples? I have no quantitative answer to my own questions there, but my feeling was that there were significantly more of the latter.

To your point, I think a lot of the people doing that frequently did so without regard to the actual value of purples in any given build. They leapfrogged right over the fact that non-purple sets would have given them a huge uplift over what's needed, and seem to just infer that, because purples have the largest bonuses and the highest costs, they must be something they should aspire to have.

Now, let me reiterate, I happen to have limited amounts of pity for people who get stuck in the mindset that they're a victim in a video game. A lot of threads griping about access to purples were made with what I consider a really poor mindset. That said, I think there's some value in trying to control sticker shock, because I think that the worse the shock is, the worse a new player's (or at least new market user's) first impressions of the market are, even if they will eventually learn better. It seems we can't help that newbies don't know that purples aren't the end-all, be-all outside of specific build goals. And honestly, maybe it doesn't matter. But at least on the forums, it seems to cause undue angst for a subset of the community that purples and PvPOs are very expensive, and I just think it's worth trying to avoid making that angst more severe or common. If nothing else, it might spare us more threads like another that's running here in this forum.

For those that really, honestly have a grasp of what purples can do for them and want them, I also do think that using merits (of any type) to buy pool C/D stuff and selling that for inf to buy purples was the primary viable alternative to marketeering to buy purples. I don't think there's anything wrong with marketeering to buy purples, but I dislike that a viable alternative was worsened in comparison. Again, marketeering is the source of a lot of angst and confusion, and I don't favor changes that risk making more people feel like they have to participate if they had an alternative. (Note that I don't want to advocate people avoiding the market altogether. When I say "marketeering", I'm talking about using the market as a self-contained profit tool, such as by flipping, etc.)

Can anyone show that most players forming teams ask this question when deciding what to invite?

Ad homenim by third party. But fair enough - I happen to think the people you know are wasting time and game money bothering to build specialized exemplar builds. Buy hey, if they're having fun doing it, who cares, right?

I suspect I know what you mean, but from my perspective, it's literally impossible to remove the purples and have the build come out ahead for recharge. Set bonuses do nothing to decrease bonuses from Incarnate powers, so removing the purple set is a straight up reduction in the recharge of every power over having both the purples and the Incarnate buffs.

Moreover, if you remove the purples, the build becomes less viable at lower levels, when you could just keep the purples and retain their bonuses at any level. The only reason to do that becomes the cost.

No disagreement. Of course, that has something to do with why I don't bother with second builds if I've invested heavily in the main one, which I typically do.

I think you're trying to subtly overstate your case by using the word "marginalize". I have very few builds where I would not benefit from both the global recharge benefit of the incarnate slot power in question and the purple set's recharge bonus. However, I also tend to favor very click-happy powersets and worry about optimal DPS chains.

More exemplar friendly in what way? The purple set never loses its bonuses. Unless you're worried about the total enhancement of the Stun power (one of the last things I'd have any concern about in that build at any level), the purple set is more exemplar friendly than anything you could add to it. Or did you not mean in reference to the purple set at all? If so, it was unclear given the conjunction with the first part of the sentence.

Personally, my version of that build would have more purples in it, not less. I would not be six slotting the +defense powers, likely investing saved slots in my primary attacks to improve my DPS. Also, I probably would not choose the +recharge as my Incarnate power. (But I might.)

I don't know of anyone anyone I play with that's ever used a second build on more that one character, and I can only think of two people who did that. Both were VEAT builds. I don't know anyone who's ever gone to the expense of making a 2nd build for purposes of exemplaring. The reason is that a high-end IO build usually exemplars fine unless you're highly optimizing for farming at a low level or something. I typically build with max-level sets, and all my builds work fine down to Positron levels.

As a developer, I think you could easily be applying rules of common-sense English usage to something where they probably don't apply.

If I was looking at code for a system where interacting with a Widget had a side effect of notifying other Widgets, I would reasonably expect to find a Widget had method called notifyWidget(). I would totally unsurprised to find either that notifyWidget() did work suggesting it should instead have been named "notifyWidgets" (plural) or that there was no explicit method for multiple notifications, and that each action that caused such cross-Widget notification instead explicitly iterated over multiple Widgets, calling notifyWidget() for each one.*

The effect of notifyMoB could easily be to run something like this.

for (MoB in spawn) {
notify(MoB);
}

* The object oriented nature of the example is just for simplicity. My understanding is that CoH is not written in an OO language.

That's my theory, too.

CoH was my first MMO, but I was exposed to "mob" as "MMO-speak" early on. When I'm talking about things CoH, I use it to refer to a single "critter", and a group of "critters" as a spawn.

I'm sure we have had posts by people though who said they originally were anti market, but who read stuff here over time and changed their mind. I'm pretty sure some of them posted both before and after conversion.

I don't think anyone has ever done that in the same thread, though.

Oh, I'm not sitting around. I do play a lot. (Well, not the last two weeks, but in general.) I spend the vast majority of my time playing my level 50s. I solo a lot on high difficulty settings, so while I'm not farming, I'm producing more drops than your typical non-farmer.

So you've got someone putting in 2-4 hours of play a night, playing 50s that mostly bootstrapped themselves into rich builds that let them fight lots of stuff and kill it pretty damn fast. Then, once they're built, I continue to put in lots of play time on them, benefiting from their high efficiency for weeks or months of additional play.

Moreover, when I team, I pretty much only team to run TFs or to attend Hamidon raids. I run with people who are big into high-powered play. (Not all build tricked out builds like mine, but if you make sure every team has enough buffs and debuffs, you don't have to.) Thus, I earn lots of merits as well.

My intent wasn't to claim that my results were typical by any stretch of the imagination. But then, I don't think everyone even tries to trick out as many 50s as I do, or cart around barrels of money just because they can. Edit: The intent was to show that there are other ways to make really good money. Diversification works very well for me. It keeps me from getting bored or sick of any one method. I also suspect I'm much more patient than the OP.

It wasn't an especially large bonus if you were at the ED cap. The amount that bypassed ED was increased towards the end of its beta presence. The largest benefit was for things that you didn't already have near-ED slotting for. The remainder was about on par with good set bonuses, at least for equivalent things. (For example, there's no such thing, currently, as a global end reduction set bonus.) But again, there's no reason to replace set bonuses with Incarnate bonuses except as an optimization for things you either don't need more of or you can't get more of due to attribute caps.

Almost everyone I play with in game makes some concession to it with their IO builds. It's one thing to be willing to lose set bonuses that go over and above good enhancement slotting when you exemplar down today. It turns out that some of the best global bonuses - good enough to consider replacing slotting benefits - come from purples, which conveniently ignore exemplar rules. So for most builds, easy exemplar concessions come from slotting low-level globals (LotGs, BotZs, etc.) and purples.

With what we know of Incarnate bonuses, you get global enhancements that could entirely replace slotting for some things across your powers. But if you took such a build into an exemplar setting at any non-50 level, it would be quite gimp, possibly lacking adequate slotting of things everyone considers fairly key: recharge, endurance, accuracy or damage. I don't play with anyone who would be willing to do that to their builds, though I know a couple of people on the forums who might be willing to.

I haven't seen anything that suggests to me that my characters wouldn't benefit significantly from having both set bonuses and complementary choices of Incarnate benefits. Not all the things we saw in I18 were things any enhancement today can do, and remember you can only slot one effect at a time in each Incarnate slot. (That's confirmed public info on the updated system as of today.) The way I'm going to min/max that is to choose the best combination of benefits for my goals, and I'm convinced that's going to include plenty of set bonuses with Incarnate benefits giving me things sets can't, or things they can give me more of than my powersets can slot sets for.

This has been experimentally shown to be untrue.

Bear in mind that I am answering this concern with I18 beta information, from before the early Incarnate features were pulled from GR. (I would have to be breaking an NDA to answer with info more recent.)

Unless I19 significantly alters the nature of the Incarnate system, I don't think you need to worry in the way you are, for a couple of reasons.

First, Incarnate effects we could see in I18 were relatively orthogonal to those from Inventions. Sure, picking one of many examples, if you get a global endurance discount, that competes with +recovery bonuses. You could maybe avoid needing global +recovery bonuses in a build that had global -endcost. But you could also have both and have even more lasting power. It's really no different from saying that having a strong team of buffers and debuffers makes IO bonuses unnecessary. It's true, but misses that, barring slamming into attribute caps, having both is still probably better.

Second, the Incarnate features only worked at level 50. If that's still in effect in I19, and if you plan to exemplar at all, you will need a build that doesn't assume Incarnate slot benefits.

Personally, I suspect that the best Incarnate builds will still involve set bonuses. They may change the prioritization of what sets are considered "best", but I think that will be the worst extent of making your build efforts worth "nothing".

This is always a tricky part of anything that does at some level come down to opinions about what's better, whatever "better" may mean (more enjoyable, etc.)

There are several things that I think frequently get overlooked, both by those who present statements of opinion and those who rebut them. One of the most likely to cause an argument is forgetting to qualify opinion so that it appears as a statement of fact. Sometimes the implication should be clear, but other times it isn't, and few things seem to rile people up as opinion seemingly stated as fact.

But there are subtler bits even to things stated as opinions. Except for very subjective things, like what tastes or smells are pleasant, or what facial features are most attractive, opinions about more complex concepts are often constructed on a foundation of facts.

Let me give an example. "Widgets are commonly available. Widgets have been shown to occasionally cause blindness in children. I believe therefore that Widgets should be treated as a controlled product, and not be made generally available." There are two statements of seemingly observable facts in there, and one statement of opinion. Opinions stated in this way are a cross between a subjective judgment and a logical conclusion. It takes objective, factual information and feeds it into a subjective conclusion.

This is important, because if someone can show that the objective information is incorrect, or is incomplete in a way that could significantly change its interpretation, it could completely change the subjective conclusion drawn from those facts. This is the usually unstated nature of many debates about opinions. People argue that their opinions can't be wrong, but their opinions can be formed on the basis of (or sometimes defended with) objective "facts" which are actually in question. If you can invalidate the objective foundation of an opinion, then you can at least show that the opinion should be re-evaluated in light of new factual information.

Honestly, Ultimo_'s statements of opinion could probably stand as just that if stated in a stand-alone fashion. Maybe a lot of people wouldn't agree that they'd like to see the game work as he does, but that would truly come down to competing opinions, possibly taking the form of a "vote" thread, where people post to inform of their own opinions on the matter. I've rarely, if ever, seen Ultimo_ do that. Instead he usually tries to defend his opinions against being outvoted by providing objective defense drawn from observable phenomena from the game. The issue arises that other posters find these phenomena contrary to their own experiences. That leaves his defense of his opinion open to attack on the basis that it's founded on incorrect factual observations.

Now, if Ultimo_'s opinion predated the observations and the observations simply reinforce the opinion in his mind, that may not be true. As usually presented that seems hard to accept, for me at least. The observations seem to come first, and an opinion seems to be drawn from them. After all, we're talking about playing the game and then deciding how it should be different. You have to observe how the game actually plays before you can decide that, in your opinion, it should play differently.