UberGuy

It is not 100% chance of knockback.

If you are tanking the STF AVs on FA without teammate buffs, bravo. If you are tanking the STF AVs with teammate buffs, then the point is moot, because you could probably go AFK with taunt on and stand a good chance of surviving them. Being buffed heavily takes the pressure off to do just about anything with critical timing.

If Recluse is constantly missing you with anything then you are operating under extremely high order defense buffs. Of course it doesn't mean much if you are knocked back every so often when hit when your enemies can't hit you consistently to begin with.

Out of curiosity, on what settings?

You have to be in the zone between 15 and 30 minutes early on Justice. You then spend from 10-30 minutes defeating DE Monsters. Depending on how proactive the raid leaders are, you may spend 5-10 more minutes for the teams to get organized. Then a good raid takes an additional 40 minutes.

If you're cakewalking through any given situation, and you are therefore not in need of your click powers (particularly heals) pretty much as soon as they recharge, then yes, knock back/down isn't going to be a serious or frequent problem. If you are running on the ragged edge of survival, it's a serious problem by definition any time it happens. This is Spar... er, the Scrapper forum. A lot of us here consider playing the game at anything less than the ragged edge to be a slow death by boredom. That subset of us are always going to find knock effects to have a negative impact on our peak performance, and that's why we don't like it.

When we can just choose a different powerset and, by and large, not be any worse for wear and completely avoid that performance penalty, that says to me at least that the penalty is pretty unfair. Pretty clearly I don't think most of us want the rest of the powersets to start suffering from knockback, so that leaves asking for the knockback hole to be closed.

No, it's not. If you ever do a story arc with Nemesis in it, every Fake will knock you back. If you ever do a story arc with carnies in it, Master Illusionists' Phantasms will knock you back with their Energy Torrent (it has much higher KB mag than the player version). If you ever go on STF or RSFs, the AVs will kick you around. If you ever do a Hamidon raid, you will be useless against yellow Mitos.

How do I know these things for sure? Because I use 1 KB IO on my flying Defenders, Corruptors and Controllers, and all those things kick them around. But since they usually hover in combat, and since they don't usually stand in the middle of a pile of foes, they can usually tolerate that to a greater extent than my melee characters who have significant survival tied up in click powers.

I think it's patently absurd to suggest that every hour that I am faced with Nemesis or Carnies on settings high enough to have bosses every spawn that I run to the market and my base. And I can forgive lack of awareness or lack of caring that your base buff will probably expire early if you try to use it at a Hamidon raid, and that leaving to refresh it probably means you lose your spot at the raid.

So, yes, for some characters I think one KB protection IO is adequate. For my melee characters I do not.

Hm, if the updated Mids is to be trusted (all I can check currently) you're correct. I'm not sure where I got 30 seconds from.

Consume is now +5% recovery per foe hit for 30 seconds, enhanced by slotting, on top of the 20 +end fer foe. PP is 12.5% recovery, flat. How those balance out are going to depend on how you slot them (including PS procs, if any), how often you use Consume, and how many foes you hit on average.

On a build I have that's not very tweaked for recharge (not where I want it to be, certainly) I have Consume on a 75s recharge not counting Hasten.

Honestly, I don't use Consume often at all on that character, and that's a Stone/FA Brute. The only time I can run that Brute out of end is when I get drained or stand toe-to-toe with hard targets and spam my attacks non-stop. Some how I do that is having four sets of Impervium Armor slotted, but I'm considering turning some of those into Gladiator's Armor (for slot "free" KB protection) and letting the new Consume pick up the slack in EPS recovery. (Edit: That change only loses EPS through reduction in max end - GA actually has the same +recovery.)

It's enhanceable via +damage. That's one of the whole points of the change. Operating at high buffs shoots the new FE's performance well, well, past the old one. This also makes it very nice for Brutes.

Personal opinion here - there's not been many things over the years I have felt they could do that would make me stop playing other than this.

When this game came out, I gravitated to melee ATs because they had status protection. I have always despised the wholly binary nature of being mezzed in this game. The fact that now toggles suppress doesn't change the binary nature I'm talking about - I'm referring to the fact that when my character is mezzed, I'm not playing the game. If mezzes were vastly less common, I might be able to accept it, but in general being mezzed without recourse is a death sentence, and one that happens far too often. There's a line between challenge and tedious annoyance factor, and for me, mezzes have always been well over that line on the annoyance side.

Now, squishies don't have mez protection, right? I do play squishies, but I make a habit of only playing squishies with tools that let them avoid frequent mezzing, usually through mezzes of their own and/or or heavy duty debuffs. Then I try to layer defense on top. If I can't do that, I tend not to play them for long, and being mezzed is the top of the list for why.

I don't understand this perspective, and I disagree with it.

I am very pleased with improvement. I've been waiting a long time for some improvement to MA, and I'm not willing to wait an unknown number of years for them to arrive when they're being offered now.

I fairly rarely respec. I have most of my vet specs on most of my characters, and have never used a Respec Recipe (only ever sold them). I usually respec once an issue at most, using my freespec just before a new one is issued. Sometimes I make a mistake and need to burn the new one too in order to correct it, but that hasn't so far happened more than once an issue.

Woah, really? Hell the round trip worth it to me if that's how it works.

Edit: Is this verified? Because it contradicts what the devs told us. They've been wrong before, though.

Some folks may remember that I posted a hypothetical scenario like this. I made up the numbers, but not the outcome.

This seems like it will reduce the price we can get for selling things that reward merits can produce on the market, because it will increase their supply. However, it doesn't look like it's going to reduce the price of Purples or PvPOs by appreciably increasing their (market) supply. That means that if you're running TFs and earning reward merits and selling your resulting loot, it is now going to take you more reward merits to buy a Purple or PvPO. And that sucks donkey butt.

Of course the above assumes two things. (1) That a lot of people who supply the market do this. I don't know how valid that one is. (2) That most of those market actors are rational and will do what is most time efficient. I know this one is false. Therefore I don't know how this will work out in the end.

Yeah, if it's Blues then, I wouldn't recommend a Blue team either, just for those reasons - we want most of our best DPSers on Hami for sure. I'm thinking more a couple of people specifically appointed by the raid leaders to go poke Blues.

It can, as long as it can be sold on the market. It may take a lot of inf, but you can still buy anything that RMs buy now or AM's will buy after GR.

The shortest answer to what I think you meant to ask is that the devs want people to do different things. If they let people buy everything with one currency, then you can do anything, including just beating up minions all day, and use it to buy anything (which they can still do today on the market). Adding extra currencies are an inducement to get people to do other specific things, or (viewed another way) a specific reward for people who do them.

For better or worse, the devs want to reward people for doing certain things, like play story arcs or stick to the polar alignments, rather than just go neutral and farm minions all day.

Very, very qualitatively, I would put the odds of getting a pool C off a boss at around the odds of getting a purple off of a boss, except you can only get a pool C off of a boss. I've gotten a boss pool C maybe two times since they added it, but even including other people's reports of it probably heard of it happening less than 20 times since they added it. It's pretty rare, so I too am betting regular merit production is swamping it.

It might cause a reduction of purples sold on the market if it causes enough of a shift in how people play. From the sound of things, you can probably still get purples while working towards Alignment Merits, so unless it drains away farmers it isn't clear to me how it would reduce production.

That is, of course, unless it comes bundled with either a drop rate change in purples or some other indirect game-mechanical impact to the aggregate rate of supply we have to day.

Reward Merits outright replaced the mechanism that preceded them of a drop after every TF or trial, no matter how short. That was definitely a direct reduction in the production rate of recipes. It's not clear that this new purple store is really an analog for that change. We don't know all the details, so it might be, but it doesn't particularly look like one so far.

Indeed. Let's focus on this bit.

That statement seems potentially self-contradictory. I wonder if what he meant to say is that the average time per purple recipe obtained is consistent. Leaving aside whether or not that's reasonable (since it would seem to depend on what playstyle you're pursuing), lets look the consequences of my assumption of what he meant. If you want a specific purple, there are N different purples you can get, and you're getting purples as mob drops, you have a 1/N chance of any given drop being one you want. So really, your average time to get any specific purple as a drop is N times whatever the average time between purple drops is. (I am of the belief that purples are not drop weighted, as I do not believe any pool A drops were made to be that way. If anyone has data to the contrary, that would be cool to know about.)

So if the new system delivers the same rate of purple recipes per unit time played, but every one of them is exactly the one you want, that's actually a lot faster convergence on your target build.

Of course that may still not make it faster than the market, but it seems likely to have an impact on the market, since it would bleed off some demand. How much is unclear, because it's not clear how many people will grind out this new currency, or how it really compares to current production rates by, say, drop farmers.

Now maybe the devs included all that in the calculation of the time/reward Posi mentions, but if so, I think he said that rather strangely.

I believe you'll find that most, if not all, of the folks who want the market "fixed" disagree vehemently with this perspective.

They argue that a video game should not require "investment" of time and/or effort, because that's not fun. This despite the fact that, you know, basically every mainstream, subscription-based MMO (and a lot of the free ones) are fundamentally designed around that concept of (average) time investment to make X progress. That's usually conveniently ignored, because some of the other things you do that require time/effort investment are considered acceptable levels of investment, while anything that's over the player in question's tolerance is "broken".