UberGuy

This is not true. GMs share the same resistances that AVs do.

That's why I discussed my slotting goals. I want as much end reduction as I can have. There's no such thing as a global end reduction set bonus. If I want a lot of both end reduction and recharge, I have to get the end reduction from end slotting. Because I have a lot of global recharge, I can afford to trade slotted recharge for more slotted end and still have very good total recharge.

I don't avoid slotting the power for recharge. Because of the way the piece permutations work out, and because its possible to get (very large) global recharge bonuses, the dam/rech is the piece that gives me the optimal 5-piece slotting for maximal acc, end and rech. Removing any other piece reduces either end or accuracy. (As I said, sometimes removing the acc/dam is OK because I have large global accuracy, and in those cases I keep the dam/rech.)

Here's an example, using level 50 Crushing Impact as an example. Lets say I want 5 slots of that and a proc. If I skip the acc/dam I get 42% accuracy, and 69% of both endurance and recharge. But if I skip the dam/rech instead, I get 69% acc and endurance, and 42% rech. If I already have 60% global recharge, and I want more than 42% accuracy, I get the maximum preferred stats for the power by skipping the dam/rech.

This does indeed appear to be the quality of suggestion with which A_F now graces us.

I am done going back and forth with him on this. As another poster mentioned earlier, he'll almost certainly wander away from this full of the notion that he won the argument. I'm sure that the fact that so many folks posting here disagree with him is just evidence of how superior he actually is.

Yeah, I've been thinking the same thing.

I also absolutely believe it's the Pool B thing.

I will add, though, that I also tend not to slot the dam/recharge in my sets, even for "final" builds, in any set that I'm not interested in six-slotting. I typically aim for high levels of global recharge bonus, and I tend to desire high levels of both endurance reduction and high levels of accuracy. If I don't accrue enough global accuracy bonuses I need the acc/dam and acc/dam/[end/rech] pieces, and I almost always want all the pieces with end reduction. If I'm going for 5 slots, that tends to edge out the dam/end.

There are exceptions; if accrue enough high accuracy bonuses, (such as purples) I can stop caring about getting high accuracy via slotting, and tend to reinsert the dam/recharge piece.

No, it doesn't suck, for any reasonable measure of suckitude. It's just not as flashy as Katana, and not quite as DPS-y as Katana, and yet what it and Katana do for the user are otherwise functionally identical.

Unless you're planning to make a career of soloing AVs and Rikti Pylons as fast as you can, the performance difference between the two really isn't large enough to care about. If you like the idea of BS or it fits your concept, you should absolutely roll a BS Scrapper. If you end up not liking it, it's definitely not going to be because it can't kill stuff.

Good to know. That's probably ever so slightly faster than what I was doing (as you say), but I'm looking for all the corners I can cut. Thanks!

Maybe, but right now even the most expensive of them is on the order of several hundred thousand inf. That's a drop in the bucket for anyone who marketeers especially, but even just if you play at 50 much.

Supply on most of them is just really high. I've seen just about every new recipe at least once, and some of them (the Taser and the two "original" melee temp powers in particular) I see constantly. I've deleted more sluggers than I can remember.

I love this thing. Most of my Scrappers have no range and even fewer have ranged AoEs. The KB is also nice if I get in trouble. Not that a Scrapper is ever really in trouble, mind you...

I don't need these in general, but every character I've been playing seriously since I17 has one in stock, because I regularly do things that people don't do ... in general.

Resuscitator. My damage dealers can rez the Dark Miasmist or just someone with a more normal rez to help get a team or raid back on its feet? Yes, please.

Something that helped me a little bit with this is the realization that you can use the mouse to highlight the previous price. I click on the item, possibly click again in the price box (if I missed), click and drag the mouse over the price, then start typing. This is opposed to clicking the item, possibly clicking again in the price box, then having to backspace over the previous price.

It's all still a hell of a lot less convenient than just clicking in a price box that didn't move around with an expanding slot and starting typing, but at least it's a little better.

They changed things that they knew needed to be changed because of feedback, and they changed things that no one is aware of any feedback requesting the specific implementation they created.

"The market interface is non-intuitive, fix it" is not a valid interface design requirement. "The market interface crashes me, fix it" is a whole lot better. "I want a vertical list of market slots that does not show me unused slots" is a fantastic interface design requirement. Who asked for it?

Very, very few of the voices heard in this forum who were anti market use even bothered to include this. People who hated the market hated the idea of the market. Even some people who liked the market had complaints about its interface.

But you can change the interface without changing the market. People who dislike the interface can like the market, and vice versa. While they act as parts of a greater whole, they are not wholly interlinked.

I view the market here broken up as something I'll call "Model, View, Community".

The Model is the domain design of the market rules. This is things like "highest bid will be matched with lowest sale price", how many market slots we can have (by level), how transaction fees work, and so on. These are rules that are invariant with how the View presents market data to us.

The View is the interface. It's about things like whether our slots are shown vertically or horizontally. It's about how many digits we can type into a transaction price. It's about our search interface.

The Community is what people in financial and economic forums usually mean when they use the word "markets". It's the collective mass of people who interact via the View and the Model. Their interactions encompass a vast array of other influences, like what's hot farming this week, what new powersets are out, and how many people are playing CoH or CoV.

Most of the posters who have come here with dislike about the market have primarily disliked the Community part of the system. They don't want other players "taking advantage" of them. They don't want to feel like they're "fleecing" other players. They don't like the prices the Community has settled on. Some of them also dislike the Model, because it engenders a certain aspect of PvP. While there have been things about the interface they don't like, the only one that consistently contributes to regular complaints about this game's market is the history display ... which has not changed whatsoever.

Yes, the three pieces act as a cohesive whole. Both the View and the Model influence the community. For example, the history of last five is not only a good example of this, but it's also something that doesn't have a clear home - is it part of the Model or the View? But the View can change without affecting the Model, and even if the Model changed, the Community would still be there, just acting under different operating rules.

Oh? Please quote specific posts to support this claim.

That example is a fine strawman. Your use of it is a fine way for you to try to save face, and that's about it. Spreadsheets are not optional in-game marketplaces in a superhero game. People who hate having a market in CoH, hate having it linked to getting their shinies, hate that there is a perceived "old guard" with lots of money and market sway, and don't want to spend time understanding the markets dynamics; those people will never like the CoH market, no matter what user interface it is given. Those people are the ones that have come here and been part of great flamewars about the market. Never once did one of them come here and participate in a great debate about how they refused to use the market because the interface sucked. Did people gripe about the interface? Sure - market pundits and haters alike. That doesn't mean you could meaningfully lump people who disliked the interface with people who hated the idea of the market.

Frankly, you weren't very good at using the old interface. That you would claim this means I am not proficient with the new one is laughable, especially when the reasons have been explained (and which you have not answered at all in your great wall of examples).

On the old interface, I always typed a small substring of the crafted name. By now, I had the substrings for most recipes memorized. I could usually find any set of IO in three or four characters of substring.

Now I have a list. Scrolling through a list is a single mouse movement. The way I matched them, the only thing that made lists long enough for that scrolling to be laborious was if my level range for matching was too high. My response to that was to select the level I wanted in the minimum level widget and then select "1" (or anything under the minimum) in the maximum level widget, which would then snap to the max. (Doing this with the max widget took less target level discrimination, and so was faster.)

With the new interface, whether I have to do any level searching or not I always have to scroll the bottom of my market list. The last item interacted with is always off the bottom of my window, because that many of my market slots are always in use. That means that every transaction requires me to drag, scroll, click, scroll. Every. *******. Time. That's on top of any searching I might have to do.

Yeah, I thought the same when I read that. The only reason I can think of for eliminating direct merit purchases is to try and force people to use the market. While I might be willing to agree that's be better for market health in theory, whether it works out in practice is basically moot. That cat's long out of the bag, and I think it would produce nothing but ill will to try and put it back in. Hell, I want a healthy (healthier) market, but *I* like being able to buy some stuff with merits. In the most extreme cases, it provides me a way to "buy it nao" even when something isn't even for sale on the market.

I think it's probably important to consider that, from a dev perspective, this wasn't true for most people playing the old TF. You were running the TF with an extremely practiced hand, with a character pretty heavily optimized - perhaps not specifically optimized for the TF, but still far more optimized than most characters in general. You probably knew every corner to cut, you very likely stealthed past as much stuff as you could, and you probably know all the best ways to minimize cross-zone travel time.

The fact that you were getting way better reward for your time was then at least partially because you were completing the TF in way less time than most people. As a result, your baseline for what makes a "good" reward/time is in a quite different place from where the devs are at.

The new TF, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not, has some features that are likely to compress the range between the best and average or median completion times. Reducing cross-zone travel is a big one, but there are a few features that throttle you as well, such as the CoT ambushes that make you wait at the door, enforcing mission tasks in serial (barring a team from splitting up to complete them faster) and so on.

I'm not saying I think the new TFs merit rewards are what I like to receive either, but I also suspect that I might be spoiled by my (and my in-game friends') ability to cut corners in content and reap merit rewards at unusual rates. If I'm spoiled, you might be too.

Let's assume for a moment that the character build goal is solo play. I'm not for or against building a Dark Corruptor with that goal, I'm just proposing it as a hypothetical goal. Now let's assume you can hit the defense softcap to at least ranged attacks, preferably both ranged and AoE. At that point, no matter whether or not you have the slots to spare, there's not a major value in slotting DN for -toHit, because its -toHit won't make things miss you more often. The main benefit of the power in this situation is the -damage, which can't be slotted. If you're not worried about what you can do for allies, it makes sense to look for another home for those slots.

Is choosing to do this a bad thing? Well, it's certainly not very team friendly. For that reason alone it's not a build choice I'd make, despite my focus on soloing. Like a lot of things, it depends. That's why I spoke earlier about what people want for their characters, what it takes to get there, and what middle grounds are they willing to accept. I want my Corrs to be good at soloing and respectable at teaming, so I "only" have moderate self defenses and all my debuffs heavily slotted. Other people may want other things, and their split may work out differently.

Read my first reply to Smurphy. It contains a quote. I specifically responded to that quote, which means I very much did address what he actually said. I also more generally addressed the relative value of even the strongest -toHit over an extremely broad range of situations, taking in to account things like AV and GM resistances to that type of debuff.

I then conceded that I think people should still take and slot their Dark Miasma toHit debuffs, if for no other reason that +def set bonuses only benefit the IO owner.

His response was to then ask (presumably me) to prove that there's a build out there that can't spare slots to slot Darkest Night... which does nothing to answer the points I made about not always being able to cover all foes it always being effective on all targets, and doesn't make much sense given that I agreed that people should slot the power.

Something like 95% of the time, that's what works for me. Sometimes, though, you get situations like stuff ends up trickling in through a doorway. At some point, like 1/2 of them are in the room and shooting at you and the rest are still coming. You have to choose to mez/debuff the early folks and hope you can deal with the rest as they enter, or try to soak up the damage until more come through the door.

There's also the occasional issue that you're badly toHit debuffed or the targets have a lot of +def (Cimerorans), so FS misses a lot of targets.

On very rare occasions, I've also been swarmed from three directions. I usually try to throw HT at the third direction.

Now bear in mind. We're talking about edge cases of edge cases - unusual circumstances where I'm already doing things like using my Darkies to fend off stuff that's probably intended for a team of 8 players. I'm hardly complaining "oh noes, Dark Miasma is teh suck! It needs +Def IOs to work!" But if something like this does happen, +Def is a lot more reliable.

It should be noted that my own Dark Corrs and Defs only have about 25% ranged defense, and only about 10-15% for melee or AoE. I would like more +def, but preferred high global recharge and +damage instead.

Did I miss that this is National Strawman day or something?

Maybe re-read my last post carefully, and see if you think I am really arguing a position that would be defended by such a proof even if I had a way to prove such a thing. ("Don't have slots to spare" is an awfully subjective thing to prove.)

A question was asked, and an answer was given. I think that answer has been state pretty succinctly. So what are you arguing, exactly?

I might buy this argument if there was any indication that most of the market changes were actually requested. During beta there was a lot of discussion about how most of the actual user interface changes (as opposed to the functional changes, like deferring search results until the search was entered) were not known to be asked for. As far as we can tell, the interface was redesigned with new widgets from the ground up, and no one doing the redesign actually looked into the use cases in play for existing users.

In short, there's no clear indication that the changes "broadened the appeal" except for the cases where the old interface actually made it impossible to use. The changes to the interface go well beyond that change, and most of the complaints revolve around those additional changes. (It should be noted that, in beta, the original version of the new market interface did not allow you to disable autocomplete, and this feature was added back in based on player feedback.)

That thread was talking about learning about prices, what to sell, when and so forth. It was about how easy it is to make money off of other people on the market, no small number of whom are in no way being fleeced - they pay high prices willingly to have what they want as fast as possible.

Interacting with the market is the process of finding a good price to buy or sell at, or a way to make money from other players. Interacting with the market interface is a sequence of keystrokes and mouse movements required to execute a given functional activity, like "sell 7 silver salvage" or "buy level 20 Miracle:+Recovery". You have to interact with the market interface to get at the market.

The people who were complaining in those threads did not want to or could not understand how to interact with the market. That is wholly separate and distinct from changes to the functional interface for using the market. Those of us who are annoyed are annoyed because we consider the interface has become less effective.

Anyone who didn't like the market before still will not like it now.

People who wanted to market before but could not will of course prefer the new interface, because no matter how less efficient it might be for the rest of us, it's infinitely more efficient for them. That doesn't mean it couldn't or shouldn't be better.

People who thought the market was fine before have every reason to complain about it, because there is nothing they are asking for that would come at a cost to people who like the new one with one possible exception. Folks who really want a horizontal market slot list back are probably out of luck. However, I think there are things that could be done to the vertical list to restore most of the functionality that the horizontal list used to provide.

I've got screenshots of it. They're definitely independent.

Smurphy, I've taken four Dark Miasmists to 50. I'm well aware of what one can and should do with Darkest Night. I'm also (sometimes painfully) aware of the fact that, sometimes, foes come at you from two directions at once, or spill around your anchor, or you get mezzed and your anchor toggle drops. (Defense from set bonuses don't drop when you're mezzed.)

You can't put Darkest night anywhere you want once it's already deployed. If you drop it from your current target, you have to wait for it to recharge, and even at around the 5 seconds most of my builds have it down to thanks to high global recharge, that's a long time if something is running up in your grille to smack you around.

And if you're facing an AV or a GM, you still only net about 15% of the normal effect from all your -toHit. At that point the -damage is more meaningful, but it doesn't convince said critters to miss you with mezzes or debuffs.

Dark Miasma is good. Very good. But +defense is functionally superior to -toHit. That doesn't mean that everyone should run out and try to build to the soft-cap, but it does mean that folks who do try to get real benefits out of doing so. Whether those benefits are worth the requirements needed to get there has to be measured by each player against what they want out of their character, what they are willing to do to achieve it, and what middle ground, if any, they'll accept.

Perhaps to your point, that doesn't mean people should skip or not slot the -toHit powers. Except for Shadowfall and possibly Maneuvers (if you take it), +Defense only helps you, while -toHit helps protect everyone on your team from stuff you do debuff. It's just wise to understand the benefits and limits of each type of effect. After all, if you get killed, your debuffs aren't helping anyone! (The Vengeance they get off of you ... that may be another matter. )

A mob can, but most mobs do not*. In particular, no mob I am aware of will ever drop more than one recipe per drop pool it can drop from. For example, minions can drop from pools A and E. (Pool E has temp powers and such in it.) A single minion can generate one pool A and one pool E recipe on defeat, maximum.

I actually don't know the rule for who gets the drop. Killing blow is probably a safe guess.

* A few critters drop more than one inspiration or salvage per defeat, and can give them to multiple people. The only examples of this I can name easily are Devouring Earth Monsters, which can give multiple people inspirations, and Hamidon Mitochondria, which can give multiple people salvage.