UberGuy

I don't hate bunny hopping, but I don't prefer it. If I can run fast, I prefer that. Since I normally take Swift and leave Sprint on, I normally can run fast.

I'm bummed about the whole thing on my most recent Scrapper, who didn't get the Fitness pool at all. She feels slow.

Currently, getting to 1B or 2B inf is a lot less common than people getting to 50. Among other things, not everyone cares to hold on to the cash long enough to hit such levels.

I'm sure lots of people get to these marks who never post about it, though.

This is a terrible generalization. Min/maxers and people who care about XP aren't so black and white, and people who aren't min/maxers aren't always oblivious to leveling speed or reward rates. If such generalizations were true, no one would play anything but FotMs (Elec/SD Scrappers, Rad/MM Blasters, whatever), and they would all be farming and/or PL-ing full time. None of those things is true for most people.

By the same token, the people who are more ambivalent about reward rates or what powerset has the best DPS still often notice if they play for an hour and get a lot less progress, or if they build a character that kills half as fast as some other one they've played. They may not care to go about quantifying it, but they often notice.

I'm a min/maxer, and I play all sorts of sub-optimal things. I might have a higher bar for minimum absolute performance than some people, but I don't just play what's "best". I also don't spend all my time worried about optimized XP/hour, inf/hour, whatever. (I do like my shinies, so I do try to be fast, but I'm also OK with being, for example, a fast example of a slow character type.)

Depending on what the mission has in it, the AE can be a lot worse reward/time. That's due to a combination of reduced rewards and unusually challenging critters. I'm not going to care if something is 10% worse XP/foe (that happens all the time with normal foes). I may not notice if something takes me 15% longer to win against. If my foes take me twice as long to defeat and give 1/2 the XP, that's a big difference. That's the kind of thing you can run into with the AE currently. (There is an expectation this will improve with I17.)

Basically I'm cautioning you not to give in to a bad case of prejudice where you paint everyone into one of two camps, when the reality is much more blurry. Giving in to that tendency is likely to taint your experience with the game and its community.

Hello, RMT wet dream come true. Custom made characters, just tell us what you want and we'll build it for you and transfer it over... for a small fee.

This is easily disproven, Sam. It's perhaps not a discussion best made in this thread, but all we have to do is build some attack chains in comparative sets - work that's already been done. EM is a notable DPS laggard now if you operate under any kind of decent recharge buffs. Remember, you don't have to be some sort of IO'd god to operate under large recharge buffs - all you need is some teammates with powers like Speed Boost, Accelerate Metabolism or Adrenaline Boost. As soon as you do that, EM goes way behind many of its peers. If it had strong AoE damage that might keep people interested in it, but it's actually in the bottom of that pack (it always was).

Right now, if you choose what to play with an eye to relative performance between sets you'd never choose EM. You'd choose it when relative performance isn't a factor, such as when you choose it for concept. Performance considerations say you shouldn't choose it.

Stacking. Your ability to survive things is inversely proportional to your damage admittance, which is defined as 100% minus your mitigation percentage. As your mitigation approaches 100%, survival time approaches infinity. This makes your survival increase for, say, +5% additional damage resistance or defense accelerate in benefit every time you add it. That makes it potentially undesirable from a balance perspective to provide anyone with +5% DR, because they might be able to add it to existing mitigation and get a major bump in survival, even though it doesn't do much for people who don't have any mitigation to start with.

Making such boosts proportional lets them affect the survival time in a consistent way, no matter what the existing base mitigation is. This is seen as allowing more balance flexibility in the survival benefits you can offer characters, because it benefits everyone equally. You can freely offer boosts for people who have no mitigation baseline without creating gods out of those with a high existing baseline.

Edit: Consider a Tanker with 75% damage resistance, and a Blaster with none. The Tanker can already take 4x as much damage as the Blaster, even assuming for some reason they start at the same hit points. Now give both characters an additional 15% damage resistance. The Tanker goes to 90% DR and the Blaster goes to 15%. The Tanker is now able to take 10x as much damage as the unprotected blaster (a 2.5x improvement), while the blaster can now take about 18% more damage than when he was unprotected (1.18x improvement). Contrast that with a change that just improves how much damage that both of them can survive by 15%.

I'd love to see stats on what that did to the percentage of EM characters played and created. My anecdotal experience is that the set is now very rare, and no one I know creates new characters with the powerset any more. Hence, I feel they still have work to do on the powerset as a whole.

There was at least one yesterday (when you posted this). It was already extremely IOd.

Edit: Ah, nevermind. It was Ra's.

Far, far more was wrong with what Geko produced (or was in charge of producing) than the disconnect between damage and cast/animation time. Completely independent of such consideration, certain powers were insanely strong, ridiculously weak, or simply impractical with the reality of the PvE environment.

I don't remember the specific time line, but this state of affairs persisted what felt far too long. What I do know is that this was where I started soloing, because being a sidekick who was even just -1 to foes on a team was pretty rough under the regime, and being -2 was right out. That broke teaming badly, and so I soloed in order to feel like I was achieving something. When they finally fixed it, I still soloed a lot; the experience strongly shaped my long-term approach to the game.

As Werner said, it's these times that are hammering DPS.

If you want to illustrate the effect of redraw on DPS, calculate the effect of these times with and without any redraw and then compare those numbers.

That's a false dilemma. Your implication is that pursuit of "fun" should dismiss the numbers completely. There's no reason for that to be the approach any more than it is for proper balance to obviate any attempt at "fun".

It's possible to create beautiful, long animations and then adjust the mechanics of the attacks to account for them. Systems for this already exist in the game and have examples in use today for melee ATs. In order to be better balanced, the attacks should deal more damage the longer their animation is. (If this results in an obscene level of damage, common sense may suggest that the animation is too long and should be sped up or trimmed for balance reasons.)