UberGuy

I think they recognized that having a different carrot on TFs, generally unavailable elsewhere (until Gold Ticket Rolls), was an effective way to get people to keep running TFs. I think it worked - people ran TFs way more post I9 than pre I9.

Now, we can get into a pretty deep discussion over the merits (pun sort of intended) of intentionally giving people reasons to re-run the same content over and over. That said, the merit system definitely opened up better variety in what people ran. Networking effects do mean that people tend to flock to scenarios that offer clearly superior rewards, and that meant that there were scads more people running Katies and Eden runs than anything else. Nowadays you defintely see more variety. Unfortunately, Katie and Eden are pretty much bottom of the heap - I've only seen people run them for the badges since merits came along.

They were pretty clearly a nerf by design, but they offered the choice of, well, self-nerfing.

Most of us here like the market as a tool to get access to inexpensive shinies, where "inexpensive" is measured in the time it would take to get one randomly or (often, even the time it would take to earn merits to buy them outright). Hence, we dislike things that reduce market supply, because that degrades that tool's utility. Merits did that by design by, for example, taking away Quick Katies and Speedens. On the side, it also reduced supply by giving people new freedom to never even generate a recipe after a TF.

But it's fair to point out that people like more freedom, even if they choose to effectively "nerf" themselves (or others) with that freedom. I have difficulty taking a hard line on removing that freedom, even if I'm not a fan of what people do with it from an overall market perspective.

If IOs were removed from the game, I would probably stop playing, as chasing them is one of my sole long-term interests. By your logic, I "need" IOs. Should we therefore conclude that it's OK for other people to claim to "need" IOs, and thus conclude that IOs (and the levels of performance they offer) should be far easier to obtain?

The same line of thinking arises from the existence of Stamina. Nearly everyone likes what it does for them, (they "need" it by your logic) so the argument is that everyone should get its benefits automatically. I don't believe that follows.

My list of constraints pre-20 was given in response to the claim that endurance woes are the primary reason people race to level 20+. I certainly do think it is one reason. I think it is inaccurate to claim that it is the sole reason, in support of the claim that something should be done about pre-20 endurance.

The issue here is that endurance management pre-20 doesn't exist in a vacuum, and is actually inextricably intertwined with other limitations that exist in the pre-20 game. To name a few:

• Limits on available slots, because we only get 2 every 2 levels until the 30s.
• Limits on damage per endurance point (DPE) spent not just due to endurance slotting, but due to limited damage slotting induced by limited slots and weaker enhancements.
• Limits on accuracy, which incidentally affects DPE. (Now heavily mitigated by "Beginner's Luck" until level 12 or so. If you want to hold up something players griped about in the low levels, I think it would be missing.)
• Limits on number of total powers available, especially if you do also choose pool powers in addition to primary and secondary powers, including any prerequisites to open up pool powers you really want.
• Limits on available power recharge, due to lack of available slots and the need to slot accuracy, damage and probably end reduction.
• A lot of highly desirable "special" IOs don't open up until level 20 or 25.

Singling out endurance pre-SOs or pre-Stamina is ignoring a bigger picture. There are lots of things that get a lot better once you're in the level vicinity of SO-strength enhancers. DPS, DPA, general durability, mez protection - most characters really just start to mature at that level.

I can't begin to express how ludicrous that level of laziness is.

I guess we can return the favor by being too lazy to parse your posts.

As I've already explained, this is not a proof of that assertion. All it clearly shows is that more endurance is near universally considered better, not that pre-Stamina levels are considered inadequate.

Hopefully obviously, I don't take any exception to exploring that question. Something I do have some trouble with is the implication that because someone has a problem (or considers something a problem), it must be a systemic problem. Now, reading your follow on posts, you don't seem to be trying to suggest this so strongly. Your original post, though, read to me pretty clearly as an assertion that this definitely was a problem that needed address.

I do think there can be something to the notion that, if a lot of people dislike something it might be worth changing. That said, I want to remind folks though that argumentum ad populum is considered a logical fallacy. "If many believe so, it is so" is not actually a valid argument. It might be compelling on the basis that we're talking about an entertainment channel.
If a sufficient number of people dislike something in it, it might be detrimental to the success of that channel.

How likely that is in this case seems to depend on a large number of factors. How many ways out of the unpleasant situation are there? How long does one have to wait to attain those ways out? Is the situation so disliked that the availability of "ways out" isn't acceptable unless the "ways out" are offered immediately? How many people fall into that category?

Oh, there's definite qualitative differences between them. That doesn't invalidate the comparison, though, it simply makes clear that the comparison only applies to a point. I happen to think that the discussion at hand falls within that range of applicability.

That low-level, pre-Stamina (and other, similar tools), solo play is limited by endurance is inarguable. What's arguable is whether that pre-Stamina play is intolerable. I think it's also fair to include in that discussion the question of how long one has to tolerate that condition, assuming one considers it intolerable. I find it quite easy to get to the 20s, even when doing something like soloing a Defender.

The key here is that I didn't try to solo any Defenders that would clearly be poor at soloing. When you have a wrench, just because you can use it to drive nails doesn't mean it's very good at it. Not all powersets are designed with rapid soloing in mind*, and it's not reasonable to ask that they solo as well as ATs that are specifically designed around rapid foe defeats.

* It seems likely that some "team AT" powersets are better at soloing than others by accident, but let's just accept that they exist and leave the question of why to another thread.

I disagree that it's as distant an analogy as you suggest. Saturated attack chains are something that usually takes most of my characters some time until the low 30s to achieve. Before then, it's extremely common for me to be waiting around on some power to recharge, and even once I'm in the 30s, I'm probably waiting on something to recharge unless I have Hasten.

This effect is very pronounced in the same levels about which we are complaining about endurance.

Is that a problem? After all, I don't find waiting on powers to recharge to be especially entertaining. I don't consider it a problem. I consider it a goal. The benefit of getting to be "high level" (for some threshold of what that means which varies by player) is that your character improves. Getting rid of attack chain gaps and (more) limited endurance is one of those improvements I look forward to.

In any case, the argument I was making wasn't predicated on the strength of the analogy.

That the above represents the distinction between playable and not playable is a matter of opinion.

Would you like a screenshot of my multiple support tickets where they refunded my lost inf? Because, you know, the fact that the CSRs could find what happened in the logs just a wee more reliable than "anecdotal".

This may not prove the argument that you think it does. Consider the parallel argument that the ubiquitous use of Hasten (or other global recharge bonuses) suggests that the base recharge times of our powers are too long.

While that's possibly a logical argument, it's not the one that's usually presented for Hasten's common use. Instead, people point out that Hasten is often taken because the benefits of doing so are so high.

So applying that to Stamina, the alternative argument is not that people take Stamina because their base recovery is too low, or that their powers cost too much, but rather that the return on investment for taking Stamina is so good that a lot of players choose to take that route. Whether that means life without Stamina is inadequate is more of a "glass half full/empty" discussion. Most everyone likes to be able to fight longer and faster, so most people will consider more endurance to be better, but that fact alone doesn't make clear what level of endurance is objectively inadequate.

Which is extremely strong evidence against the implied assertion that your level of experience with the game has translated into either a) a level of competency in playing the game comparable to other players of comparable play time, or b) a degree of acceptance of the game's intentional design limits.

Other players have learned how to deal with these problems. That's where the suggestions people have given you (in various threads) come from - experience with what worked for them. Either you are not able to implement those suggestions mechanically because they don't work with your build goals (suggesting that those builds goals might be rather different than the norm) or your target for what's acceptable play is somewhere very different from that of the players offering the suggestions.

It looks to me like it's often the latter.
You bring this up in a lot of your threads. The thing you need to understand is that there is a difference between assigning the root cause of your problems to your play and build preferences, and disparaging you personally. One can say such things in a disparaging way, but if the claim itself is always considered disparaging, you've got a pretty impenetrable shield for yourself in these discussions.

Every time the devs make a design decision, they have to weigh their goals against how they think players will perceive and react to it. There's a huge spectrum of response to every hurdle the devs put before the players - some people will look at a new hurdle as a challenge to be overcome, and some will look at it as a needless annoyance. Pre-20 endurance (and endurance management through the rest of the game) is one of those things that different players view differently. Could the devs change it, in any of various ways suggested in this thread? Absolutely. Should they change it? I think that's far less clear.

I did always think that meeting Mu when you're like level 12 was terribly annoying.

Not having an excuse has never stopped Ultimo before.

Oh, I took it as a hint, but I like to be sure of these things.

This, is pretty much me too, but I especially want to emphasize my agreement with the bolded part. I don't like being exemplared down very much. (the I16 changes that grant +5 levels make me very happy.) I spend the vast, vast majority of my time at 50, so that's where performance is important to me.

I do make some concessions to playing exemplared, because I want to do some things that happen to involve it. I'll look for low-level global IOs, and order my powers so I get certain things by certain levels. I prefer to stay 50 once there, however.

I'll leave it to other readers to decide what's more likely - that everyone here who's disagreeing with you is actually a moron who can't achieve that same basic level of wit, or your arguments are specious.

The autocomplete behavior forces the market user to seek ease through shortcuts such as those you suggest, whether it's desirable for them or compatible with their market strategy. You've stated that you don't care enough about the actual prices for that to matter to you, and therefore you find the mixture of that with the actual improvements in the new interface fantastic. Bully for you. The interface shouldn't force the rest of us to bid/list like you do.

You're joking, yes?

I ask because I hope you realize that end cost reduction and endurance recovery are two radically different mechanisms. This is important, because improving both of them together can be much more powerful than simply increasing one.

In particular, they interact to serve your blue bar much the way +Regen and DR interact to keep you alive in combat. If you have lots of +regen, you can sustainably survive a lot of incoming damage even with marginal resistance. If you have lots of resistance and more modest regen, you can sustainably survive a lot incoming damage. If you have high DR and high regen, you can sustainably survive amazingly high amounts of damage.

The same thing happens with high +recovery and strong end reduction, with the "damage" to your blue bar being the base end cost of your powers. The time you can go on activating powers before you drain your blue bar has a term in it of the form 1/(EndBurn-EndRecovery)*. The closer you can get your end burn to your end recovery, the longer you can fight, and the graph isn't linear. The smaller the difference in those two numbers, the closer your time-to-empty gets to infinity.

*Strictly, it's 1/max(EndBurn-EndRecovery,0)

Posi's, and most of the TAoE sets, are special cases, because they have a damage/range piece where ranged damage sets have X/Y/Rech or an X/Y/End. With such sets I always sacrifice the dam/range.

It should be noted that the PvPIO TAoE damage set does not have this situation. If you six slot one of those sets at level 50 (or five slot the non-proc pieces), you end up with about 90% damage, but 85% slotted recharge, 60% slotted endred, and 66% accuracy. That could be considered better than the base stats on the purple TAoE set depending on how badly you want to ED softcap your damage. The set bonuses aren't great, though, at least in PvE.