UberGuy

What you're doing is a mix of two logical fallacies. First is "Burden of Proof" - arguing that you're right until proven wrong, which is not a given. Second, you're using "Excluded Middle," which says that only the extremes matter, or raising a Straw Man - if we can't show it doesn't ruin the game then it should be done.

Given that your argument is being presented in such a way, I don't think you should be worried about winning an argument. Especially on the internet.

That's a load of crap.

I think your bar for "dead" vs. active is skewed by the fact that WoW has millions of players.

WoW is an internet phenomena, and that cannot be definitively laid at the feet of the game's mechanics. It had an immense guaranteed following at the outset based on nothing more than its namesake, and that snowballed into a subscriber level that allowed it to achieve a stability unheard of in MMOs before or since. There are lots of things wrapped up in that - huge social ecosystems have a certain stability just because they're big. Do the game's mechanics matter? Of course they do - if WoW was universally suck no one would play it, Warcraft name brand be damned. But we can't point to any one feature in WoW and say "WoW is a success, you should emulate its features."

You don't like the market. You like WoW's better. We get it. This isn't WoW, and the devs do want the market here to be a mild form of PvP.

Fundamental lack of understanding here.

If someone buys it, it was worth that price to them. If it's not worth that price to anyone, no one will pay that price. This happens all the time. Why do you think there are so many of some salvage listed for sale? (Mathematical Proofs, anyone?)

I think that's a totally fair reason to not want to deal with the more advanced aspects of IOs. Getting into set bonuses and even frankenslotting can be quite complicated. There are people who hate that kind of bookkeeping, and there's not much anyone can (and possibly should) do to convince them otherwise.

As one last parting thought on it, though, someone has saved you a ton of spreadsheet work with Mid's/Titan Network's Hero Desginer. There's really nothing that competes with it, and it will only very rarely lead one astray with respect to what it shows and what happens in game. I would always recommend it to anyone, even just for frankenslotting. Heck, I recommend it even just for non-IO builds, since it has all the latest powersets in them.

Hm? I'm not sure I understand. I give a couple of examples in my bullet list up above. Is that not what you're talking about?

It was a suggestion to make this game more like that game. It was a suggestion to solve a problem that not everyone agrees exists, or is meaningful.

You received feedback on how to work with this system. On how you could do things slightly differently and get what you wanted at prices that make more sense to you.

Your reaction to that is a poorly typed tirade, filled with proclamation making clear that your opinion trumps all plus a dose of certainty that you speak for the otherwise silent masses.

In other words, you don't give a damn what anyone else thinks, anyone who disagrees with you is a troll worth only of your disdain.

I think you see where this is going. Have a nice life, but don't expect us to care about it.

I'm afraid you've gone for one of the places where (basic) IOs and SOs converge. Simply replacing L50 (or higher) SOs with Common IOs isn't going to realize a whole lot of benefit for most things. (Note that replacing 1-2 "even-level" SOs with level 50s is actually quite a bit more noticeable, because you are not yet into the hardest hit area where ED eats away the benefits. Edit: This will become more noticeable when you are level 50 unless you upgrade your SOs to level 53s, because right now level 50 SOs are +3s for you.

IOs offer three broad categories of benefit.

• Common IOs don't wear out, and if you buy them around level 25 or 30, they're basically as good as SOs. Since they never wear out, you never have to replace them again. You're already buying level 50s, so this doesn't do you much good, as mentioned above.
• Set IOs let you fit more than 6 SOs worth of enhancement into 6 slots. Even ignoring that single-aspect IOs can give a bit more enhancement than +3 SOs, they additionally have the following benefits. These benfits allow you to get ED maximum for, say, damage in an attack, plus a lot more accuracy, endurance reduction and recharge than SOs could ever allow.
  • Two two-aspect IOs is more enhancement than two single aspect IOs. For example, Acc/Dam + Acc/Dam is 1.25x more enhancement than Acc + Dam.
  • Two three-aspect IOs is the same enhancement as three single-aspect IOs. So Acc/Dam/Rech + Acc/Dam/Rech is the same enhancement as Acc+Dam+Rech, but in two slots instead of three.
• Set bonuses. If you look at set bonuses on their own, they don't look like much. The design intent is that you are expected to stack multiple bonuses together to achieve larger effect. Some bonuses really are too small or dispersed to be considered worth much. Others, such as defense, recharge, recovery, regeneration and damage, can actually add up quite significantly, especially when stacked on your own powers (and don't forget pool and epic powers here). Clearly, this is probably the most advanced approach to IOs, and also the most expensive and likely to make you want external tools like Mid's builder.

Sadly, I think a MM is probably the AT that gets the least out of set bonuses. That's not to say MMs can't benefit from IOs, but because set bonuses don't generally transfer to pets (there are a few special bonuses that specifically buff the pets) the general effect is more watered down.

I say this in the spirit of trying to be helpful.

You are doing it wrong.

If you frequently see 5000 in the market interface, then you can probably get it for 5000. If you can't get it for 5000 right now, place your bid for 5000 and leave.

No one, ever, needs to get their salvage right now. They can want it right now, but the two are not the same thing. If you know you are going to slot some set or craft some doodad, then plan ahead. Seriously, like one hour is about all it should take for salvage unless you are trying to buy something at a serious discount below what everyone else buying that thing is paying (in which case you may be out of luck for a long time - blame the other buyers, not the sellers).

No one should ever be being scalped* for salvage, not even rare salvage, unless they are overly impatient. If you can't leave a bid up for a little while, you're overly impatient. If you're standing at the market waiting for your bids to fill, you're doing it wrong.

* Scalped is always relative to what other people are paying. If the history shows consistent sale prices at price X, other sellers are likely to come and try to sell at or near price X, and if you're bidding way below price X, the other buyers are likely to outbid you. Marketeers may have nothing at all to do with this.

The clue fairy must owe you a lot of quarters.

Edit: Nevermind, I see that you did not leave all your clues under your pillow.

What a load of overanalyzed crap.

It's a score. When you play 50s a lot especially, it's the only "score" that goes up any more. People like summaries and executive dashboards. Having one number that goes up is an easy indicator that they're achieving something.

Not everyone views it that way, but it's a hell of a lot more likely than the "disease at the core of Western civilization."

I think the core place where you and I view things very differently is this idea of what "the end" means. Based on your examples with other games, for you "the end" means you've done everything you could possibly do. You want this game to offer a distinct checklist of things, and once you've done them all, you feel free to start over. To me, CoH isn't like that even now. I just about always can come up with new ways to tweak my existing characters, primarily with regards to what IOs they have slotted, but that also interacts in some ways with what powers they have. My characters are "done" when I decide they are, and I am free to come back and pull them out of "retirement" whenever I feel like it. Of course, declaring a character "retired" isn't something I've ever actually done with any of my characters - I just haven't played some of them in a while (I have 9 50s).

In this regard, CoH was practically unique when it came out, and I think its still fairly novel. The flexibility found in the combination of powersets, power picks within the (locked) powerset choices, slotting, and now IOs, not to mention the costume creator, for me, this allows a single character to remain interesting an awfully long time, if not forever.

By the way, something I didn't mention that's probably important. I am quite so dedicated to the notion of "crafting" each character as I go that I actually take longer than I have to. No one has to take as long as I do, even to get the fairly loot-heavy characters I get, because I insist pretty heavily on paying my way with each character. All my IOd 50s are multi-billionaires, yet by and large, I don't share their wealth between them. I could easily twink another 9 characters to quite high levels of IO builds if I dumped my inf from my existing characters into new ones. But since I actually do enjoy the journey quite a lot, I set myself the goal of earning the inf anew each time. Trust me, I'm sure a lot of people who read that will think it's completely nuts, but it really ensures that I both really enjoy playing the character (or I'd stop) and I know how to play it inside and out.

Thing is, this is basically already "filled" (no pun intended) with the unpopular set IOs, and with "frankenslotting". If you ignore their bonuses by not trying to get more than 1-2 of any given set in a power, such IOs basically become what you're describing. They're usually dirt cheap on the market, when available. The main problem is finding them at arbitrary level ranges, not because they aren't common, but often because people delete them rather than list them.

That gets into another facet - if these are drops, they dilute supply of "real" IOs. That's bad for anyone who doesn't want these things - it reduces supply and raises prices.

I doubt that it would have any meaningful effect. The people who are compelled to use RMT or whatever do so because they want the best of the best. People willing to settle for middle ground aren't running out to pay real money for it unless they're very strange.

Sorry to poo-poo the idea. It just doesn't seem to me that it would be that halpful, and might make some things worse, depending on how it was done.

Moreover, when people don't even know what's going on what they often think they don't like isn't even happening. We see that with great frequency in the drive by rants posted in here in particular, and in some other places on the forums as well.

Even if you see a majority here say they do, I wouldn't read a lot into it. The forums are, almost by their nature, frequented by a type of player who's often more curious or looking for a deeper understanding of the game. A tremendous chunk of the forums are dedicated to discussing how the ATs work, power mechanics, etc. A lot (but not all) of the people who come here are the kinds of personalities who have a willingness to explore a more complicated system like IOs. If they're willing to ask questions and read up on things, then they're already "investing" in playing the game.

People who you meet in WW or the BM are another set of folks more likely to have IOs. But when I look at the powers' tabs for characters in other PvE contexts, set bonuses aren't very common in my experience.

I wanted to digest this for a while before I responded to it. There's a lot here I don't agree with.

What's "replay value"? I think that for most people it probably means literally the value of playing the game again from the beginning, more or less.

But that assumes you need to replay from the beginning to be entertained. That you can't continue to enjoy what you got after the 1st (or in my case, the first handful) of times "through". There's no defined "end" in CoH any more, and that's great for people like me. I don't avoid replay because I can't bear the notion of it. I am just having too much fun still playing the first times around. Why would I start over if I'm enjoying what I have going on now? (To be fair, the answer to that for me is that I want to try something different to hopefully enjoy it on its own merits. But that doesn't mean I'll abandon my older characters.)

People who build models, restore classic cars, paint or sculpt, I think many of them would disagree with this on certain levels. Sure, they almost certainly love some part of the process of creating, but there is a goal for I daresay most of them. I'm certainly not trying to really compare creating a character to fine art, but I'm saying there are similarities in the process being time invested in order to achieve a goal. In these example analogies that goal is a finished item that can then be enjoyed on its own merits, separate from the enjoyment of having created it. (Of course, there is also often pride in knowing that something "cool" or beautiful was the output of your own effort.)

I don't understand why this should scare anyone. You're looking at this very much in glass-half-empty way. I wasn't disincentived to play my alts. I played alts because I felt no reason to play what I really wanted to play - my favorite characters. I9 gave me a reason to do what I really wanted to do but couldn't stay focused on without some carrot. Playing alts wasn't so much what I wanted to do in the first place - I'm perfectly happy sticking mostly to my most favorites. (Don't get me wrong, I do create new characters, but not as prolifically as I did when getting to 50 felt like "the end".) You're afraid of the game offering me the option to do what I really wanted in a way that keeps me engaged?

No, I think you're adding the +recovery and the +regen. That doesn't happen.

The bug is that the +regen and +recovery are enhanceable ... assuming that you can slot the appropriate enhancements in the power.

Edit: The only "doubling" comes from adding 100% (or ED 95%-ish) enhancement to a power that has one of these IOs in it.

Hm, no. Instead of adding 50% enhancement there, you doubled it (added 100% enhancement).

So your 1st row really should be...

If you replicate that correction in your tables I believe you'd have the correct values.

IMO, the easiest way to understand the "bug" is to just add the effect of whatever unique we're talking about to the base effect of the power. So a Regen Tissue is +25% Regen, and Health is +40% Regen, so Health with a Regen Tissue in it is a base of 65% Regen that you can slot heal enhancers in.