UberGuy

I didn't actually notice that the base was excluded, but I can assure you it counts crossing "actual" zones, at least most of the time. When I run missions on characters who can solo high team size settings, I come back to the market every few missions to dump my salvage. As far as I have noticed, every time I do that I am prompted again, even if I have not logged out.

The problem is that they never told us it worked that way.

Fixed.

Mkay. I think those people were dumb.

The devs added "switched side" versions for the names of badges that only one side could get years ago.

While everything you said is true, was there a reason for bringing it up in this context?

We know that there's mathematically no way for the devs to make such a boost actually give the two ATs equal damage under all circumstances without actually giving the same AT damage mods, damage buff mods, etc. I still think it's significant that they chose a buff level for the new inherent that, all other buffs but enhancements aside, set their damage equal.

That's one explanation. Another is that the impending ability to play two different ATs, one of which extremely similar but a better damage dealer might have had something to do with it. It's notable that Defender base damage, +30% damage buff + 95% damage slotting puts a Defender at the same damage as a Corruptor with 95% damage slotting to 3 decimal places, not counting Scourge. Of course, it's only that strong when solo.

It's not impossible that you've ever identified real issues, but what's a "real issue" gets pretty fluid when viewed over six years of shifting player focus and new features. If you have a favorite gripe long enough, and the devs of a game are making changes, odds are good they'll eventually at least touch on your complaint. They don't always have to improve it, though.

Your side in this argument is that this is a problem that needs address. Using hyperbole the way you did exaggerates your position, suggesting that you have a stronger basis for your argument than you actually do. Leaving that unaddressed leaves you looking better off in this discussion than you actually are. Sorry, but I'm not going to do that.

In your opinion. And sure, maybe they will. I won't complain if they do. I simply disagree with the assertion that they need to.

I mean as in Sprint. I have a very strong appreciation for a high tactical ground speed. As terribly useful as things like CJ are for getting around in a fight, particularly when you need to do something 3-dimensional, I very much like being able to zip around on the ground when the situation allows for it.

This says volumes about the differences in how you and I play. I essentially always expect my health to go down in fights, because I build to fight at the ragged edge of sustainability. Anything that pushes my green (or blue) bars back towards full extends that envelope of sustainability. Health is one of the biggest things along these lines you can add to a build that lacks inherent +Regen or a self heal. Yes, it's a fantastic foundation upon which to build further with IOs, but that doesn't mean it's "negligable" without them.


Yeah, except there was a pile of precious gems out there big enough for everyone to fill their pockets, but you didn't like quartz. So instead you came back empty-handed and complained you didn't have any fun.

No one is taking this away from you. You just don't think you should have to make an effort here. The rest of us make it past the difficulties of endurance, and have done so since before any of the mitigations the devs have introduced. I don't look gift horses in the mouth, but I already had a full stable.

That's not so unreasonable a position as you seem to suggest. If people like the game as it is, it's perfectly fair that they would resist change - especially if they're concerned that there will be some knock-on effect, either because of real balance impacts, or just the idea that the devs will carry changes beyond what was really asked for.

This is a terrible generalization on your part. It speaks of a persecution and/or inferiority complex that you have to paint everyone with that brush. Are there players like that? Of course. The notion, though, that all people who see merit in their being obstacles to overcome in a game are out to create a caste system of "haves" and "have-nots" in the game is ludicrous. Persistent worlds are about achieving things; without that, there's no use in persistence. You attain levels, loot, bangles, etc., and you keep them to use and/or show to others. If there's no personal sense of accomplishment in attaining them, what's the point?

In every such system which tries to create that sense of accomplishment, there will be people who think it's an annoyance and too hard, and people who think it's pathetically easy and thus boring. It's impossible to find a middle ground that will please everyone. Positron pointed out that the "solution" to the endurance "problem" ultimately removes Endurance from the game in the limit. You'll notice that they haven't done that, even though they could. Do you ever wonder why?

Then expect me to dismiss the claim.

I think this thread is rather firm proof that not everyone hates the mechanic. While I certainly don't love it, I just see it as a progress goal to be achieved, just like getting to level 22 for SOs, 32/38 for my "tier 9" powers, 41 for epics, and 50 for ... being 50.

Also, I almost always want the two Fitness prerequisites, and I'm not just pulling your leg. I recently built a Regen Scrapper who I decided to skip Fitness on so I could take a different power pool. A Regen doesn't need Health much, but it regularly bugs me a ton that this Scrapper runs slower than all my other characters. On everyone that's not a Regen or something similar, I really want Health - it's a huge boon to survival, especially characters with good +Defense or +Resistance.

Nice try, but the difference is that we've all had the game's analogy equivalent of flying around the solar system. We're all coming back and talking about what we saw, and you're part of a small number of people claiming it was totally different than the rest of us. Don't imply we're all just repeating some party line without actual experience, here.

Opec has a monopoly to run. What's our excuse? Do you think NCSoft is paying us to disagree with you?

I'm genuinely interested in what this list of implemented suggestions was.

Uh.

I can say with absolute certainty that if you think any of those things is required to be successful or to have fun (or any interrelated combination of the two) then you are "doing it wrong".

When large numbers of people come along and point out to you that your position doesn't seem reasonable, or that your experiences don't seem at all common, it seems worthwhile to at least consider that they might be on to something. To instead claim that all those people are in collusion to misrepresent the truth doesn't seem reasonable, especially when they don't really know one another.

About all I have in common with most of the people on the same general side with me in this thread is that a lot of them are veterans, and apparently most of us are pretty successful at playing the game. Hell, I argue a fair bit with some of the folks in this thread. It's not like we're some consistent opinion block come to unify against you.

I know I have generally only ever played "FotM" characters by accident, often before were recognized as such. I typically solo all the way to 50, not teaming until I get there (I play 50s a lot). I don't have anything anyone would call a good farming character. Despite that I'm stupidly wealthy in game, and have what I consider plenty of 50s, most of whom got there without much outside help.

This game is not hard. Endurance management is not hard. Even if it's not fun for you to manage your endurance, it's almost ludicrously easy to gain levels and get to the point where endurance is much easier to manage. The notion that it takes a Regen or something with comparable endurance tools to be able to manageable endurance reasonably is just silly. It doesn't just not jive with everyone's experiences, it doesn't even jive that well with the math for the game's mechanics.

This game has an existing balance framework, and other than ED and IOs, it hasn't changed much in six years. I've been embracing that framework since I started playing the game. Not because I love everything about it, but because I find everything about it manageable, and because by working with it, I can make excellent, highly effective characters. They aren't all good at the same things, but they are all very good at something, and they're all capable fighters. I don't particularly care if they don't all fight with the same level of capability - all I particularly care about is that each one function as best as possible for that character, given their AT and powerset choices. Try working with the system some time, instead of at cross purposes. I know I have more fun that way.

Sure. Regen and FA were just examples.

Depending on your build and what you're doing, it's not a fallacy.

Purples are a potential source of intense recharge bonus. There are two situations where very high recharge is key to improved survival.

1) Your mitigation/survival powers are click powers. Regen and Firey Aura are obvious examples. Also fair to include are the control powers of ATs like Controllers and Dominators. While there are some categories of fight where +defense is the only thing that will really make it likely you survive (such as AV or GM fights), at least solo, things like high recharge on a Regen or a Controller are key to survival against large numbers of more mundane opponents.
2) Even if you have a high +defense build, depending what you're fighting you can still find yourself suffering enough DPS to defeat you. The simplest key to victory here is to out DPS your foes. Especially if you have AoE attacks (which usually have comparatively long recharge times), high recharge can have a dramatic effect on what you can fight and survive. This is not because recharge necessarily directly improves your mitigation, but it improves your ability to cut down on your number of enemies rapidly, which in turn dramatically decreases total incoming damage.

There are other ways to obtain high recharge, but purples are something that, generally, every build can slot at least 1-2 sets of, for which you usually get very large +recharge returns. That's part of why they're expensive - they're rare, everyone can use them, and a lot of builds can benefit from them. The same thing is true of LotGs.

Oh, I'm not sure I do either. I was just throwing out an alternative already mentioned elsewhere in the thread that wasn't clearly a boost to recovery.

Another big reason that SoM is very handy, by the way, is that it's an AoE. If can use it to hit multiple foes, it's a big chunk of DPE for those levels.

As an aside but related to your comments, it seems to that "Beginner's X" effects should probably last until a bit beyond level 20, perhaps level 25 (since the effects at the end of the range are small anyway). Ending at 20 still leaves a couple of levels before SOs can be slotted.

The only technical way they could achieve that is to give everyone a new inherent power that's a weaker version of Stamina, and not let anyone slot it. Then you reduce Stamina by an equivalent amount.

Of course, you want it to work out to the same place when Stamina is slotted, and players can't slot it, you have to make it a larger proportion of unslotted Stamina. That means, then, that someone who takes Stamina and doesn't slot it actually comes out ahead compared to previously. As I mentioned earlier, then everyone else who uses anything other than Stamina to boost their recovery also comes out ahead - they just plain have more endurance recovery than before, both base and peak. You only achieve before/after parity for builds that have Stamina and ED slot it.

Certainly we think that's a lot of builds. Is it a doable change? It seems so, though the devs now have to define a new auto power and give it to every player AT. Of course, one has to wonder if the devs think that it's worth even thinking about. The people who want the performance they have today would still want Stamina. Some people who are on the fence would now have more room to skip Stamina. Some of those people might still want Swift/Hurdle or Health. So how many people who aren't already doing so would skip the Fitness pool. Is that number of people worth a balance change? Are there any other versions of the changes with more clearly limited chance for balance impact? "Beginner's Luck" type endurance discounts might be one (assuming even that is required).

The thing is, I doubt they're worried about this. Just look at the per merit costs of things. Broadly, the biggest spread in merit costs is a factor of 2. Making merit costs track market costs effectively negates one of the stated purposes - for merits to act as a "pressure" valve for prices. I have no way to prove it, but I'm quite sure they do act this way - if random rolls were the only source of LotGs (for example) I suspect their prices would be far higher, both because supply would be lower (people buy them with merits just to sell) and because demand would be higher (people who currently "buy them nao" with merits would have to buy them off the market.

But this goal would conflict with that pressure valve one. Merit costs would come under supply/demand pressure just like market prices (probably because of market prices). I'm basing this on an ideal where, somehow, merit prices tracked market ones to ensure that outright purchases were always worse than spending merits outright. Of course, I have no idea how you'd fully keep people from gaming this on the purchase side. If there hasn't been a level 47 widget sold for 6 months, you could probably create that level instead of a 50 and save both time and money.

It depends on the recipe. There are recipes that absolutely blow the curve, so that it's better to buy them outright than it is to depend on average returns.

The idea that it should always be better to choose a random roll than to choose a specific recipe assumes a few things. In particular, it assumes that the price of an item on the market should have some proportional relationship to how frequently it appears (on average) as a random roll. For example, something that's twice as rare as a Widget: Damage/End should also be twice as expensive as one. We all know though that the weighting isn't that specific, and probably never could be. We have items that are wildly expensive in relation to the number of merits it takes to produce them, and items that are wildly worthless even though they are relatively rare. Those two factors and the merit price of a random roll can work out such that the average inf/merit of a random roll is worse than a specific buy.

It gets even more complicated when you start considering short term strategies rather than long-term returns. If you have some shopping list goal that you want to complete as soon as possible, you might look at what the fastest way to earn enough money to buy what you want. One way to do that is to determine what items sell for the most inf, and use merits to create them. It may not be the best return per merit, but it might be the best return per merit you can achieve in, say, a week. Getting enough random merit rolls to hit the average can take a while, unless you're lucky, and that's exactly the sort of determinism people use merit purchases to lock in.

Your combat log tells you who reads your fortune. You don't need the prompt to know.

I'm with him. I was so freaking happy when you removed this prompt. Now, rather obviously, I'm really freaking annoyed that you're putting it back. Why can't it be optional?

Ugh. Are you kidding me? I missed that.

Maybe in some other channels than I was in. I never saw that level of adverts for KHTFs until after I9 was baked in. I considered public searching for TF teams a fair rarity everywhere except the badge channels until then.

For the sake of clarity, would you spell out what this statement means? I don't want to respond to it without making certain I know what you're saying.

Edit: I know what the mods are. I am looking for clarity on the idea of "balance against each other" and "within" those mods.

You act as if that's the only example in the game. It's not. It's not even the only example between Tankers and Scrappers. Overlap is allowed. Your claims that it is not are ridiculous. We have Controllers who overlap with Blasters, Defenders who overlap with Blasters, and Tankers who overlap with Scrappers.

It's not trying to hide anything. Your ability to argue this seems to be really losing contact with some pretty simple realities, and I really can't wrap my head around why.

You've asserted that any Tanker powerset that's not considered overpowered for Tankers is fine if ported directly to Scrappers. This is almost certainly false if that powerset would exceed all existing Scrapper powersets performance for some broad measure of DPS, such as AoE DPS.

The claim is that, if a Tanker powerset, on Tankers, which already have a lower set of damage and damage buff modifiers, are operating in Scrapper performance territory, that when ported directly to Scrappers, they will almost certainly outperform existing Scrapper powersets in exactly this way.

Your counter claim is that this suggests the Tanker powerset is broken, because it overlaps Scrapper performance. It might be true that the powerset is overperforming, but this is not clearly implied simply because it operates anywhere inside the Scrapper performance band.

No one claimed equivalent powers. I am talking about whole powersets. Footstomp on its own is not performing in the way you describe. Footstomp + Rage is.

Again, we're talking about powersets, not individual powers. SS is not balanced based on KoB or Footstomp viewed in isolation. It is balanced on all the powers viewed together. Scrappers get a nonlinear performance increase out of a direct port of SS, because they possess higher damage scales and higher melee buff scales. I believe the math shown in this thread does not support your claim that that's fine when ported to Scrappers.

I find it very unlikely that this is the sole arbiter of the upper bound.

But that's not how the ATs are balanced against one another. You're assuming it's just about setting the AT mods and power scales and calling it done. But it's not at all clear that this is the case. What matters is the product of the two. In general, Tankers do more damage than their AT damage scale suggests, because they have large damage mod attacks. The same is true of Brutes, and the only thing that lets them to damage comparable to scrappers is an immense persistent damage boost compared to what any other AT has. Rage in particular would function far more strongly on a Scrapper than on either a Tanker or a Brute.

Look at what happened to Psychic Assault when ported to Blasters, and yet it was not changed at all on Defenders. If it was fine on Defenders, then why was it changed on Blasters? One possible answer is that the devs did not like what it could do in terms of absolute single-target DPS.

Are you talking about after merits or after inventions? I was talking about after inventions. Even including using it to PL and farm for +3 SOs (lol) I don't think people were running KH before I9 anything like they were after inventions came along and had been out a few months.

This assertion is based on the predication that the damage bands for the ATs are not allowed to overlap. That assertion is not true.


No, we can't. Some degree of overlap is intentionally allowed, and I personally consider it desirable. That overlap also exists among nearly all the ATs. Specifically disallowing it between Tankers and Scrappers doesn't make sense when it's so prevalent.

You only can maintain it's broken if you maintain that the cross AT performance overlap is to be disallowed or that we can arbitrarily move Scrapper performance ceilings by porting sets, or both.

You're trying to assert that the relative performance of Tankers cannot encroach on even low-end Scrapper performance at all, while simultaneously asserting that no matter what's going on between Scrappers and Tankers, that the absolute performance of Scrappers has no upper bound. I believe that both of those assertions are incorrect. It's possible for the performance of a Tanker set to be such that the it's relative performance is acceptable (say, below those of most Scrappers), it's absolute performance is acceptable (because it's below those of most Scrappers) the absolute performance of Scrappers given the same set unaltered would be above their absolute performance bound.

Do I know that SS meets those criteria? No, only the devs do. But I sure bet it meets at least the last one.

But we've had that dance before. If a set makes a Tanker able to creep into Scrapper damage-dealing performance levels, that's potentially OK, because both ATs have performance bands, and those bands overlap. There's some level of creeping into the Scrapper band, definitely not formally stated by the devs and possibly not formally defined at all, that's not going to be acceptable to the devs. Your argument states that, if a Tanker exists in the top end of the Tanker band, and possibly in the low end of the Scrapper band (which is allowed), then the porting that powerset unchanged is acceptable even if it would raise the top end of the Scrapper band. I don't agree with that, and I would be shocked in the extreme if the devs did.

Does SS have that characteristic? Not in ST DPS. AoE might be a completely different bag of chips.