UberGuy

I had no idea anything being discussed here sounded anything like any political party platform.

Am I to conclude you think that the Republican party thinks everyone is lazy yet secretly capable of more, while (by inference) the Democrats think everyone is an ignoramus?

That's perfectly understandable. It's not very obvious. I won't even lay that one down to apathy, because a lot of times, you have no reason to assume you don't know how it works.

OK, I think anyone who actively dismisses info like that in game is a dummy. They may not actually dumb in the intellect sense, but they're dumb in the unwise sense. At the least they should ask for some backup on that, which you could easily provide them. I can get them not just believing anything, but they should at least consider the possibility of what you're telling them. I've met people like this in game myself, but not terribly often. I don't like them.

Seeming to lack common sense is one of those things that it's very hard to tell whether someone actually is a moron, or if they don't care. In my experience, a lot of people just don't care.

Again, not being good at math doesn't mean they can't be good at math. I can easily mean they hate math and don't want to be good at it. I know tons of people like this in game and out.

No, most of the players don't do it. That's not the same thing as they can't. Sure, in the end, from my perspective, there's no functional difference. But if they cared, I think far, far more people are capable of it, and just don't care enough to bother.

Anything that you're actually firing or throwing should benefit from range. A long time back, range used to affect "true" melee attacks as well, but this was changed specifically to deal with dual function enhancers. In this case, Hamidon Centrioles, which enhance both range and damage.

What's being discussed here are the aptitudes needed to make money on the market. I have 10s of billions of inf. Is someone who does not earn money on that scale actually lacking in aptitude? Or are they just not quite so monomaniacal as I am? I rather suspect the latter.

I actually don't apply many of my aptitudes to the market, because I am not much of a marketeer. I am a supplier, because I apply my aptitudes to game mechanics and to seeking out like-minded players. I am a power gamer, and I use that and some basic market knowledge to make sure that the rewards I earn as a power gamer net me as much wealth as they can. I actually don't need to know that much about the market, other than to pay attention to the little numbers in the windows when I come and drop my goods off. It's the ability to interpret those little numbers I'm talking about, not how often someone comes with a cartload of self-earned goods to convert into cash.

The poor are poor because they either (a) have not discovered that there are easy ways to not be poor or (b) are not sufficiently interested in any of the ways they have discovered to actually pursue them. Option (b) can be said to be being poor because they want (edit: I do prefer choose) to be.

I believe instead the conversation has been reduced to you refusing to admit that certain levels of wit and intellect are within the reach of the majority of people with at least a middle-school education in the United States. Which, honestly, isn't saying that much in the industrialized world, which is the only place we should expect to find people able to spend US$15 a month to play a video game.

It's not about it being easy for me. It's about me acknowledging that I haven't done anything special at all.

What's more arrogant: to assume one has done something anyone else could do if they were interested in doing it, or to assume one has done something others actually lack the facilities to achieve?

Are you stating that 1.5% as the magnitude of the base debuff? Because I don't believe that's correct. Most debuffs from mobs, including those from bullets, are on the order of 8% to 10% from a single hit.

The AT mod for critter defense debuff looks like this:

• Minion: 0.8
• LT: 1.0
• Boss: 1.0

Most of the defense debuff powers that we encounter have a 1.0 scale debuff effect. Here's an example of a Family Minion's machine gun attack. Here's Tsoo Katana/Hack.

Edit: And naturally, those are the even-level values. For +1 to +5 enemies, this increase from 1.11x to 1.55x as strong.

What sort of software? I believe, firmly, that the in-game market is proably an order of magnitude simpler to understand than a significant amount of the software on my computer, including things most computer users consider staples such as my word processor and even the browser I'm typing this reply in. Sure, if all you want to do is fire them up and type or surf, they're easy enough. But if you screw around with them and change some setting, or install some plug-in, if you aren't computer savvy then good luck figuring out what the hell is wrong when they stop working or start sending you to hotsex.ru.

There's not that much complexity in using the market. If you read the tutorial, talk to the "info" contact nearby (something I have to admit I think is poor because it's really not that obvious, but they do tell you to do it in the tutorial), and have some basic grasp of algebra, you can figure it out. I think it's easier than figuring out which of six "options" menus/tabs you need to look at to twiddle any given setting in most software.

By the way, a lot of people who call the help desk for software problems where I work are actually often surprisingly savvy, and the problem they have is because they're doing something we never thought of, or that someone never documented they could do and they found out anyway. The rest of them need their password reset or something like that.

I think it's funny, because you frequently berate people on this forum for their arrogance, but the notion that you'd confuse people who aren't good with computers with people who lack the aptitude to learn to be good with computers sounds impressively arrogant to me. I believe, like I said earlier, that most people just don't care enough to spend time figuring stuff out. That's not the same thing as being incapable of it.

The list wasn't meant to imply that those things are equal, or even in any particular order of significance. The fact that you are a marketeer alone can easily swamp all the other categories. The people who really feel the pinch are the ones that do none of those things.

Seriously? I don't buy it. There are only two kinds of people who "can't" knit: those who honestly have a disability that makes it infeasible and those who aren't interested enough to apply themselves to the craft. Count me as one of the latter, certainly.

There are aptitudes that are pretty fundamental in life. It's true that not all people have them, and there are cases where that makes them disfunctional in our society. Polite people assist them when they see these people having difficulty with something.

The market requires aptitudes that are, frankly, pretty fundamental to a lot of adults and a fair number of young adults. They're things that they can learn easily in real life situations, or through fairly standard education (even in the US). If they actually lack these aptitudes, it's going to make their real life a lot harder.

Some people who play this game may actually lack these aptitudes. I do not believe that it is true of most of them. What I do believe is that they are not interested in applying these aptitudes. Perhaps they are not interested in applying them in a game, or perhaps they are not interested in applying them at all. I find it unlikely that most of them fail to apply them because they actually lack them, because I don't meet many people like that here or in real life.

Knockback is not like other mez powers. The KB of those bombs and of a few other things (Statesman's footstomp equivalent) used to knock you back not just down) even with old mag 100 Acrobatics, and it also knocks you down with mag 10 protection and 10,000% resistance. In other words, they seem to simply ignore any mitigation.

* read to the tune of the cartoon theme song

o.O

Actually, he kind of did prove it, upthread where he posted the mitigation values vs. end costs for the toggles.

IOs do lose effectiveness, in two ways.

One obvious way is that their enhancement values are lower at lower levels. A level 25 enhancement enhances less well than a level 50, for example.

However, for many people the most important level-varying feature of IOs is what they do when you exemplar. If you exemplar more than 3 levels below the level of an IO, it stops contributing to set bonuses the set may be providing you.

LotG +Recharge IOs are, as Cat mentioned, part of a special category of IOs that basically give you a special set bonus all by themselves, without more of the set slotted. Thus, if you exemplar more than 3 levels below the IO's level, they stop providing their benefit (the +7.5% recharge).

This makes level 25 versions of such IOs valuable to people who like to run TFs, Ouroboros arcs, or just play with friends who may be on lower level characters.

Note that "chance of" and "for 120s" IOs like Miracle uniques, Performance Shifters and Mako's Bite procs do not provide a set-bonus-like effect, and will work at any level so long as you can activate the power they're slotted in. Thus they "stop working" if you exemplar below the level you have access to the power they're slotted in.

Purple IOs and PvP IOs are exempt from this exemplar cutoff behavior. They will provide their set bonuses no matter how low you exemplar relative to their level. It's one of the many reasons they are so highly valued.

Not only don't I have a Shield character, I don't even yet have a Willpower one. Just too many other things to get to 50 first.

When you make a statement about A being superior to B, it's very important that you make clear you're basing that on qualitative reasoning and not hard numbers.

And when it hits most of the time due to proper slotting (proper in the sense that it accounts for the need to hit with it), it is far stronger on average.

Really now, you should stop and look at these posts. Pot and kettle and all. Here you admit that maybe I haven't been attacking you and yet you seemingly can't resist taking a shot at me.

If you want to say you prefer FA to DA, that's fine. That's not what you said - you said HF "was not weaker by any means". You also said that DA paid more endurance for less survivability. Both can be shown untrue quantitative statements over a significant range of non-trivial circumstances.

Again, my personal disagreement here is not with your opinions, but with what appear to be assertions of fact that just don't jive with either my own play experience or the good analytical work of folks like Arcanaville.

I'm sorry, but both experience and numerical analysis disagree with the assertion that FA's heal is "better" than DA's. When you state falsehoods there's no other conclusion than that you're wrong.

I'm sure that makes you all kinds of more qualified to make these (false) statements, since, you know, the same qualifications can apply to other posters here.

No, it's actually rather bewildering that you'd make such assumptions about what I (or any other poster here) is doing when they've said nothing about how they play their DA. You might want to go tooling around the Scrapper forum more than you apparently do now to determine what people do and don't do with their DA Scrappers.

Given how incredibly reservedly I made my statements, I find this statement (in response to me in particular) amazingly childish of you. Telling you that you're statements are in factual error is not mud slinging.

This fact shows a considerable and fundamental lack of understanding of DA's strengths. Without you accepting that the above statement is factually in error, we'll never be able to convince you of the set's strength.

You're correct except for the fact that it lasts until level 20. However, it's strongest at the lowest levels, so over level 10 or so, it becomes less and less noticeable. If you take advantage of this to fight over-level foes you can get really impressive leveling speed at these low levels (even more impressive than the normally rapid pace down there). The limiter for many characters becomes Endurance, since the "Purple Patch" effect roll off still degrades your damage.

Actually they are (as others above have reported). This also applies to +recovery special enhancements such as the Miracle unique if you can enhance the power you slot it in with Endurance Modification. An example of a power that can accept a Miracle and EndMod IOs is the Physical Perfection power in the Scrapper epic Body Mastery pool.