UberGuy

Agreed. I hope it's not a part of any planned gap-less attack chains.

Man, that has to do wonders for one's self confidence.

EoEs should not be interchangeable for Ambrosia. The two inspirations provide 100% resistance to different damage types. Ambrosia grants 100% resistance to damage type "Unique1" and EoEs to damage type "Special".

You can get much more weird and yet apocalyptic theories about the ultimate end of the universe. Consider The Big Rip, a name I cannot help but grin at in the context of this thread. It postulates that eventually the ever-accelerating expansion of space itself would overcome even the most fundamental of the forces that hold together the little quantum mechanical bits that make up all matter as we know it.

Has anyone discovered a perfect gameplay experience?

I seriously don't see how something like this could work. I don't have any pain points that lead me to log out. I log out because I have other things to do, because my legs start falling asleep, because I get hungry, or because I want to hang out with real-life friends. I also idle around in the game for long periods of time chatting with people or while poking these forums or fiddling with builds. I sometimes switch characters rapidly to check markets, to get badge credit on different characters, etc.

Can you imagine trying to watch the kind of activity patterns I'm describing and trying to figure out why I logged out? I sure can't.

This isn't likely to improve your lack of love for things IO-related, but if you make a habit of exemplaring, including TFs, Ouro and the AE, you're probably better off with a low-level one, and possibly not a Blessing of the Zephyr.

The "special" single IOs that give a set-bonus-like benefit, such as the KB protection IOs, LotGs, Aegis Mez protection, etc., stop working if you exemplar more than three levels under the IO's level. So if you slot a level 50 Blessing of the Zephyr, you will only keep your KB protection down to level 47.

Because the BotZ set offers incredibly nice set bonuses, and the KB protection IO is a merit/gold ticket roll, the level 50 KB protection IO for the set is one of the most expensive items on the market. The level 10 version fluctuates wildly, but can be even more expensive. Levels in between can be hard to find.

So you might want to stick with Karma or Steadfast unless they just don't serve your slotting needs.

It's just flagged (conceptually, I don't know the implementation details) to drop you from the team if you log out. This prevents, for example, you logging back in later, finding yourself the only member of a team that's all logged off. (This can happen with a TF, Ouro or AE.)

Call me selfish, but I don't like the team rez thing being in a power pool, where anyone can access it. I dig that that idea is unique to specific AT powersets. (It's only one powerset, but I'm not specifically wedded to that idea - I just don't like giving access to it to just anyone no matter even what AT they are.)

Edit: I should mention that I like the idea of most of the rest of it, though.

That's not quite in the same category of complaint, though. Sure, it definitely impacts the market, but if people could convince them to, the devs can do something about that without ever touching the code, configuration or interface for the market itself.

In fact, they already did this once, by applying weighting to the drop tables used by merits and AE tickets.

Haha, <3

Also, Leo... Grats!

Hard to argue with, but saying "the game is dying" is a far cry from saying the game is imminently about to die. A more fair statement, assuming that subscriptions are trending lower, might be that the game is declining. That's not the same as saying it's about to die, which is without any question the implication intended by anyone saying "the game is dying".

It could be "dying" and last another two years.

Actually, I'm not sure they proved your points much as you might think.

Emphasis mine. We know, without any reasonable question, that this is what the devs wanted, because their community reps have told us so. Given that, almost all the other characteristics of the market can be seen as stemming from it. Whether it's better or worse depends on who you ask and what they think is "better", but we have it on good faith it's how it is.

It's shocking how few of the people who come to the market forum to gripe about something can actually put up decent debate. The observation has little to do with the merits of their complaint or suggestion, but it sure as hell does nothing for the argument when so many of them seem to be ...

• Unable to use punctuation or capitalization in a way that at least generally resembles formal printed text. This one could be forgiven, if it didn't so often come bundled with...
• Overly willing to resort to ad homenim arguments against either existing market users and/or market forum regulars who try to debate with them, even when the respondents have not (yet) done so.
• Willing to make hyperbolic claims - such as how this game is dying, or how people are quitting over the market, etc. and so forth.

Notice I left out "not knowing how things actually work." Personally, I can forgive this one for anyone who is actually willing to learn things they didn't know or understand. Very few such posters seem to exhibit that willingness.

And then these same posters also seem to be the same ones that get all in a bunch when they don't get much respect from other respondents.

You don't have to agree with anyone else, but for frack's sake, at least try to make an argument that has a chance of convincing someone who doesn't already agree with you and who isn't going to fall for an army of straw men.

They truly are a thing of beauty exactly because they decoupled different dimensions of "hard". I think a good system should allow different people to do different things. I think it's awesome that the new system makes both you and I, who have quite different preferences, to both do what we enjoy.

Oh, I agree with you. I try hard to make clear the distinction between want and need, and I often weigh in on those threads that you don't need those things. However, I do also note that one's characters will often perform better with them. The question then, is do they want to perform better?

No one needs to play on higher difficulty settings (even the old, pre-I16 ones), but its evident that lots of people want to (sometimes to a fault). If one wants to solo and play on higher difficulties, having more endurance management, better chances to hit, and faster recharging powers are going to be important for their success.

If one doesn't really care one way or the other, then no, none of it matters.

I am one of those people who wants to perform better. I seek the outer edge of the envelope on whatever character I play. I couldn't tell you why I like doing that any more than I could explain why I dislike the taste of brussels sprouts, but so it is.

Then I think you probably should have said...

...not...

I get that you're OK with the benefits of SOs, and I'm not trying to argue that you should not be.

But broadening the scope of the discussion a bit, let me give you a bit of an insight into why I think this sort of wish is actually very pervasive with the broader playerbase... How many times did we see discussions about whether or not one needed Stamina? Hasten? How many discussions in the old days about hating missing?

I don't know about you, but I think these kinds of discussions have become less frequent, and I think IOs are a big part of why. Part of that is due to the "special" IOs like Kismets, Miracles and LotGs, but part of it is also because "frankenslotting" or set slotting often already moves people towards better accuracy, end management and recharge, at least for powers with multiple aspects such as attacks, mezzes and click buffs/debuffs.

Which is pretty clearly what HK wants, having mentioned how "everyone hates bidding".

I think you haven't read some of the discussion.

A Scrapper that's dead isn't doing any damage. Believe it or not, there are people who can die to a foe before they defeat it when playing a Scrapper. Sometimes that's a matter of player experience, be that with in-combat tactics or build, but sometimes it's a matter of how the foe interacts with your secondary. Try taking a SR Scrapper up against a Rularuu Overseer, especially when it has friends, and you might wish you had a way to set the Overseer aside.

While I don't disagree that 24 feels like a long time for these purposes, I wanted to point out that 24 is not "almost halfway" through your playthrough experience. The time it takes to level tends to increase with level, meaning getting to 25 isn't half the time it will take you to 50. I would put this more like "around one third" of the way through your play through.

Compared to effects that completely lock a foe down, it's clearly not as powerful. Or course, if you use it on a foe you're not actually attacking, it's (usually) effectively a complete lockdown. (Usually the only time it's not is if the foe likes to run off, like CoT Thorn Casters, or if it has ally buffs/heals, which it will still use.) My usual M.O. for a power like ToF is to fear some foe you I want to deal with, defeat everything else, then come back to that foe. (With good recharge slotting you can keep two foes out of the action like this, even without global IO bonuses.) Given what removing a foe from a fight does to total damage taken in that fight, it's a pretty good deal, assuming you couldn't just kill the foe in question outright.

Even on a foe you're beating on, terror slashes their DPS. Foes still cower, even while you smack them around. It'd say they attack something like 1/2.5 as often as they do otherwise. That's a pretty big reduction, but the key question is whether a Scrapper needs that sort of reduction for anything ToF actually works on often enough to justify the power pick. For me the answer was eventually no, but it used to be a definite yes.

But, Sam, I don't "normally" slot for those "bonuses" because I can't. With SOs and Common IOs I literally can't have all that much enhancement, but I absolutely want it. I can't get more damage in my attacks than around 3 damage SOs worth because ED won't let me, but once I've taken up 3 slots with damage SOs, that just leaves me with 3 slots to get accuracy, recharge and endurance reduction. But long before IOs, I usually wanted at least two SOs worth of all three of those things - I would have needed nine slots per power to do that. Yet IOs let me achieve that, and that's not counting any set bonuses.

Because you don't fool with these kinds of enhancers, you may not realize how just how much more effective even just that 9 slots per power effect can make a character, but I promise you, it can be quite dramatic.