UberGuy

I'm not sure why you think 1000 merits would suggest you should ever have seen a purple.

The most optimistic numbers I've seen suggest that, on average, a purple drops once every 1500 mobs. (This is a very round number, as it treats all mobs as a kind of aggregate, even though drop rate varies by mob rank.)

When you run on a TF, you are almost certainly doing that on a team. When a mob drops something, it drops one thing. When you play on a team, that one thing a mob drops is randomly assigned to someone on the team. So if you are playing on a team of 8, you're reducing your odds of getting any given drop by a factor of 8. That takes that (possibly very optimistic) on in 1500 chance of a drop and makes it one in 12,000.

Frankly, I'm not at all sure the teams I play on would come close to putting down 12,000 mobs in the number of TFs that it would take me to earn 1000 merits. On a very conservative number of 25 merits/TF that's 40 TFs, meaning we'd have to defeat 300 mobs on every TF just to hit the average number of mobs for me to get one drop. And of course, probabilities don't work such that you're going to get a success just because you did the number of tests to get a result on average.

Here's the thing. The devs aren't going to redesgin Placate, or Stalkers in general, at this point. There are several reasons that Stalkers work "good enough". The devs don't change things just because they could be better. They change them when either data mining and maybe popular sentiment that something is poor, usually in terms of average leveling speed.

First, Placate/AS works fine with defense-based sets. You get interrupted far less if stuff misses you most of the time, even when the fur is flying in a team setting. If you are playing a non-defense-based secondary, you can improve on this with +defense bonuses.

Second, recent changes to the AT make it far less dependent on AS, primarily by increasing the AT's base damage and also by making random criticals independant of any status or conditions for either the Stalker or their target. Moreover, this actually improves on large teams, because the chance for random critical increases with team size. This effect is dramatic; a Stalker's criticals flow quite freely on 8-man teams. Admittedly this factor takes a while to mature, as many Stalkers don't get a full attack chain until the mid-to-late 20s.

And if you really want +stealth (the attribute) to stack with, say, a Stealth IO, you should consider Super Speed, at least for PvE. (SS has no stealth component for PvP.) In addition to (obviously) not debuffing run speed, SS has the advantage of being yet another place to slot BotZ set pieces. Of course if you have not already planned on using the Speed pool that may limit the attractiveness of this option.

I didn't mind the guts of the event. Carnies was a nice change of pace, and it did get people the Illusionist badge or lots of progress. It was also just kind of fun to see huge mosh pits of L54 Dark Ring Mistresses.

But the server lag really did pwn it, especially in Steel Canyon. It wasn't too bad in Cap, but it was effectively unplayable for most of the event in SC. I was logged in to both sides on two accounts, and I could queue a power on heroes, go fight a L54 boss on villains, and come back around the time my hero-side attack finished.

I think those changes are unlikely, because I suspect the IO system's design is also fundamentally related to the market and (indirectly) the earning rate differential of characters of different levels.

During I9 beta, the devs stated that they saw the market as a mechanism for influence and infamy to transfer from high-level characters to low-level ones. The only way that's sensible is if the low-level characters are selling things the high-level ones want to buy. Certainly there are some desirable items that you just can't get at high levels, such as Miracles or Achilles' Heel procs, or Basilisk sets, but I can't help but believe that the way IO bonuses stop working as you exemplar is actually the main mechanism they were thinking of here. I believe this is even more compelling when you consider not just PvE exemplaring, but PvP zone exemplaring. For a very long time, level 25-28 IOs were in high demand, because Siren's Call was the pub PvP zone of choice, and people wanted set bonuses that worked at that level.

Other mechanisms now seem based on these presumed foundational assumptions. For examples, one of the several attractive things about both Purple and PvPO sets are that their bonuses are exempt from the usual 3-level exemplar cutoff.

Changing how IO bonuses stop working now would have several effects outside being handy for people who slot sets. One would be that demand for low- and mid-level items would be reduced even more than it has already by changes making it easier to level faster. Another would be that some of the special benefits of Purples and PvPOs would no longer be special (though I am not sure this would really affect their prices at this point).

The devs pretty explicitly intended IOs to be an alternate progression mechanism, not one we're particularly intended to get for free in parallel with our XP progression. They also partially intended them to be something for level 50s to chase after once they're already level 50, so making them easier to obtain as you level up would run counter to that purpose.

There are things I don't like about the system myself, but I'm pointing out what look like design assumptions in the overall picture that make changes of the sort you're suggesting seem pretty unlikely.

It looks like the answer is "no". The effect is a temporary power granted to the target, which effectively means it terrorizes itself. It also applies only in PvE, so it would never apply to a player, meaning int would never have the opportunity to be in the presence of such global buffs (since NPCs don't use IOs!)

No idea, but it may be unlikely depending on how they store the info in the coding that underlies the game. It's typical in 32-bit programs that the largest signed integer you can represent is 2^31, or 2,147,483,648, which is just slightly larger than our current cap.

At the time the game was created, there was almost certainly no imagining that some of us would be running around owning or buying things with more than 2B inf at a time, and it seems quite likely then that no one would have had the foresight to set this number to be a 64-bit number behind the scenes, which would be what is needed to usefully raise the cap. Of course I have no way to know no one did that, but I consider it unlikely.

They could change it, of course, but that's likely to require just all sorts of intensive testing to make sure they don't forget to re-declare any and all variables that might store inf as 64-bit numbers. Miss it in one place and you not only truncate someone's wealth, but potentially corrupt adjacent memory. There would also probably need to be database table conversions as well.

Now, if the above speculation about what's involved is close at all to reality, the devs would probably be reluctant to undertake that effort without a really good reason. Right now, there probably aren't very many players, percentage-wise, faced with the happy problem of having more than 2B inf to toss around. My best guess is we're stuck with workarounds for the foreseeable future.

It never showed up as variant during the validation testing once they had purportedly fixed the drop level check bug post I16. People were doing their testing in all sorts of different configurations, and none seemed especially variant once the fix went in.

People interested in min/max analysis of characters are a lot more common on the forums (as a whole) than the game in general. It makes sense, if you think about the fact that the people who actually do come to the forums are often looking for information and a deeper dive into knowledge about the game. Many such folks are either already of a min/max mindset, or sometimes become such after gaining detailed knowledge.

Certainly not everyone who comes to the forums is like this or will become this way, but it seems to me that it's a more common motivation here than it is among players in general.

This is an oooold bug. I first heard of it back in I4 when the arena was first introduced. People would try to join an arena match and end up in someone's mission. Sometime after I6 I know there were some people who found a way to do this consistently and tried to grief people by leading them into Stalkers hiding in a hero mission. (They were petitioned and got banninated.) I still occasionally hear things like this from people in game, but very rarely now.

Nope, it's a hard cap. You can't carry more than 2B on your person.

However, you can bid on nonexistent goods in the market interface. Examples: Level 53 recipes, Market Teleporter inspirations. Your market bids will follow you to the other server, and you can cancel the bids to retrieve the money.

If you use the above method, take the following precautions.

• Make sure you don't already have money on hand when you cancel a bid if the total would cause you to overflow 2B inf on hand.
• Do not create a bid stack that's value exceeds 2B inf. You cannot get part of the stack, so if you try to retrieve it, you get it all, and anything over 2B is lost even if you have zero on hand
• Make sure you are bidding on something that doesn't exist. If you aren't sure and don't have another place to ask that you trust, post a question in the market forum.

I often use the buff on people I know. Unteamed, I also use it as a kind of "tag, you're it!" drive-by power on those people. Both are pretty common among folks in the crowd I hang with.

It wouldn't really occur to me to use that particular power on folks I don't know, even on a team but especially not as a drive-by. There's a small chance it will debuff their toHit - small enough that it's probably not normally a big deal, but potentially annoying depending on level, foes in play, and team or self buffs.