UberGuy

I'm sorry, but that is not what "random" means. Random does not imply equal weighting. Random events are not all equally likely to occur.

It's essentially random who gets struck by lightning. Obviously, it greatly increases your odds to actually be under a thunderstorm, but it isn't required. Likewise, holding a golf club up while in an open field during a thunderstom is a good way to make it way more likely that you will be struck, but it doesn't make it certain.

You can have something be random and one outcome be much more likely than the others. The outcome is still random.

If random meant all possibilities were equally likely, you could conclude we all have a 50% chance of being struck by lightning all the time. Wouldn't that suck?

By the way, Hamidon Enhancers are not equally weighted. As far as we know, all purple drops are equally likely with respect to one another. As has been mentioned, this is actually somewhat unfortunate, because some of them are much more in demand than others, so an equal drop probability means that the less desired pieces are oversupplied.

I think it's important to remember, though, in a lot of the cases we talk about it's hard to view the buyer as "getting soaked". If they don't even bother to bid creep, and walk up and throw from 2x-10x what they needed to buy something (or 500x in the case of 100k for some salvage), no one really soaked them, unless it's possible to ... soak yourself.

That sounds either kinky or wrong, or possibly both.

I would vastly prefer that it got -recharge resistance.

(a) The regen debuffs out there are preposterously large. You would need on the order of 90% resistance to make them not automatically floor you regardless.
(b) While I am regen debuffed from time to time, I cannot ever remember that alone getting me killed if I still have my click heals.
(c) When I am recharged debuffed (which happens a lot more often than I am regen debuffed), my regen alone is never enough to save me except sometimes if I can still use Instant Healing. My click heals and Reconstruction in particular are a much larger component of my regularly-available survival tools.

However, I do think that such a buff would be "nice to have", and aren't "needed" per se.

Heh.

Blasters are probably one of the most widely loved of ATs. People play them because they do container ships worth of damage. Yeah, they die pretty easily. They're the game's "glass cannons". There are plenty of folks, though, who adore that about them. For these players, it's a rush to play something so fragile that wipes things out so well.

Just so you know, they've gotten some overhauls in the past. They really didn't focus on the AT's fragility, per se. Data mining by the devs showed that the AT lagged others for rate of XP gain, apparently because they died a lot and so had lots of debt. (This was a source of intense debate on the forums, because some players, while acknowledging that the AT was fragile, did not die so often that they were in frequent debt. Other players reported living in a perpetual state of debt.) It seems likely, based on the data mining, that a Blaster that didn't suffer debt drag was the realm of players of above average skill. It should be noted that Blasters were still rather popular, despite that this revelation from the devs about leveling speed didn't really surprise a lot of people.

The first change the AT got (which was now a very long time ago) made Blasters deal more damage the more injured they were. (The AT was also given a HP boost at some point, and I think it was at this time.) I don't know what data mining said, but I'm of the opinion that this probably backfired more than it helped, because Blasters would actually try to get hurt just so they could deal more damage.

The second major pass on the AT gave us the one we have now. The more you attack, the more damage buffs you get, and you can use your littler attacks even when mezzed. Their ranged damage was increased at the same time. (The HP increase was retained.) Again, I don't know what data mining says, but this version seems a lot more popular.

I don't think you should ever expect the devs to change the fact that Blasters get something that feels like two attack sets. It's an intentional, defining characteristic of the AT, and there are a lot of people who like it.

Edit: It's extremely important to note - Blasters are expected by design to have teammates, with the presumption that those teammates can help keep them alive. It's very common for CoH players, especially those who frequent the forums, to strain against that particular design limitation in every AT where it applies, but it's still worth pointing out.

* Raises hand.

I only have one VEAT, and it's a melee spec Night Widow. The biggest challenges were managing endurance burn and hit streaks, since a VEAT has comparatively low HP.

I didn't solo everything. Part of that was I just did it a few times to see if I could, and then kind of lost interest. Some if that was that there were AVs that were just stupidly hard for me (Back Alley Brawler sucks the cold vacuum of space), and I gave up on ones that felt like I was "praying to the RNG", to borrow a phrase.

I saw lots of screenshots from someone who did it with a Fortunata spec, but I don't remember who it was. I seem to recall thinking that I didn't recognize them from the forums at the time.

In my experience, it's always a squishy.

Well, except that one time it was me on my Scrapper. I swear it was (client) lag, because from my perspective, I got the whole initial damage + DoT in one instant, leaving me no time to react.

Typical MO tactics for teams I run with are to clear the surrounding CoT while staying out of LoS, then have the "hard" ATs clear the front vines while at the defense softcap by whatever means they have at hand. If have good +def/DR buffs and we're feeling cavalier about it (sometimes we just figure "hell, if we fail we'll try it again later") we don't even clear the CoT. Usually, the only time that doesn't work is when someone hanging back doesn't watch their LoS to the tree and it jacks them when they aren't expecting it.

Yeah, that's probably it. PvPers tend to drive prices on goods that they find important.

That's interesting, since, IMO, you're vastly more likely to be blinded or face a stealthed foe on red side.

Isn't that pretty obvious? The discussion is around reasons why they might do that.

I'm sure we could trot out the old "the game is dying" shtick, but there are others, ranging from the nature of this game de-emphasizing end-game gear, to relatively accessible ways to earn (gobs of) money, to changes that have made it harder to spam sales pitches.

CoH has always been small compared to the elephant that is <the-fantasy-game-not-to-be-named>. It's probably never had a big return on investment for RMTs. If there's any chance it's getting harder for RMTs to sell product here, it may well make sense for them to move on to other, more productive environments.

Nope, it definitely did not do that before. If it was doing that, it did not report it correctly. I had no idea it was doing it now. I hope it sticks around. >.>

I wasn't clear, for which I apologize. I wasn't trying to defend the low reward by saying I didn't think this qualified as "end-game" content. I was just using your mention of end-game content as a springboard to mention that I don't really see what's so end-gamey about it. I don't know, I guess needing large-scale coordination has an epic feel about it, but somehow this feels like all the "epicness" is front-loaded into the planning stage and not in the actual execution.

If you want people to do something, you motivate them with either a good reward, or excellent enjoyment. IMO, this trial provides neither mechanical reward proportional to its required effort (mostly the "cat herding") nor sufficient intrinsic enjoyment to provide motivation without a better mechanical reward.

Telling people "don't play it if you don't like it" is dumb, because the problems with this trial seem likely to mean that most people will not play it very long after its creation. We don't want the devs to create content people don't like to (re)play.

I am at a total loss as to how it is that this can't be reproduced internally. He consistently attacks while protected. He always has.

Unless you changed something related to that this patch (which isn't in the notes), I expect he still will.

It doesn't have any special "end-game feel" for me. It feels like a TF run on settings I play the game at normally that happens to have a variation on the Winter Lord in it.

Despite having some nice new technical features in it, such as the coordination needed for the pillars (complete with display GUI) and of course the ability to get multiple teams into an instanced zone, I consider the Trial to be very weak in terms of "content". The fact that the Aspect is essentially nothing but a large sack of HP who requires an epic beatdown is at the core of why Warburg nukes are an issue. If the encounter completion required something more complex than epic DPS interrupted by a phase timer, Warburg nukes probably wouldn't even be that useful.

Compare what we have to do in the CoP with the old Sewer Trial, where damage buffs or summoned pets can't even help you defeat the end boss.

Edit: IMO, even 21 merits isn't worth cat herding the 24 odd players needed for this. This is exacerbated by the fact that the encounter itself is just a DPS-fest - if it was really engaging that might help counter the cat herding aspect.

I know plenty of people in both camps, and while my anecdotes don't prove much, none of them bother with RMT. The most positive among them tend to ignore RMT as a waste of their real-world money, and the most negative tend to view it like I do. I agree that PvPers are probably the most likely to have the right motives for RMT to make sense, but I'm not sure that many actually use them.

None of the PvPers I know are particularly hurting for money. Most of them are the most capable players I know of for wringing the absolute most reward for least play time from the game, be that via market use, farming, or outright exploits. A few of them could probably lap my net worth 10x over, and I could fork out for several PvP +3% defs this very moment if I really wanted them. When you also consider that most of the ones I know will strip down older characters for IOs to use on new ones, they don't usually need that much wealth, even if you consider that they might have to buy respecs. (But don't forget that vets get all their vet respecs on new characters.)

As for PvErs, I find that people who actually fork out the cash to make "uber builds" while not knowing how to or being willing to milk the game for the money that it pours from its virtual heavens tend, well, not to be the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. It's either that or they are just immensely impatient, and when one is that impatient in PvE in a game like this, I'm back to feeling they're dumb.

Don't get me wrong, I'm big on the idea that our characters should be able to mow down lots of bad guys.

But seriously, the foes we're facing are not average enemies. Especially not level 40+ stuff. These foes are metahuman in capability, even if some of them look mundane, like the Nemesis and Malta human troops. The game fiction makes clear that they're using high-tech gear that's tailor designed to take down metahumans.

There are a few places where we get what really seem to be truly mundane foes taking us on, like the low-level Paragon Police. However, by and large that's confined to the lower levels of the game, where it makes more sense if not good sense.

It may seem to stretch credulity that people like Malta could fill maps wall-to-wall with troops equipped with such fancy gear, and so those armies must actually be more mundane troops. Consider the flip side - where on Earth have all those Freakshow filling your map been hiding?

I disagree vigorously that any mob should ever be consistently be given this particular brand of bypass as a full-time benefit. We have examples of things that bypass particular strategies already. It's called typed damage and typed defense.

The change to get mobs to have 50% base toHit was sought for so long for very sound reasons. I have problems with them making a fairly blanket reintroduction of it; having it apply to an entire faction of mobs full-time is overly severe, IMO. Having powers that grant it temporarily or conditionally (like build-up) I am more OK with.