UberGuy

Did your character have Patrol XP? It wouldn't have applied in the AE, making the AE reward appear smaller. The ratio of your non-AE to AE rewards is exactly 1.5 - the same as patrol XP.

I do, or mostly so. I slot high-value singletons, like Miracles or stealth IOs much earlier, but frankly, it's so easy to get to 50 I rarely see the point. And bear in mind that this is coming from someone who frequently turns XP off to flesh out contact progress bars, so I'm not even trying to hurry to 50.

To the OP topic, I think it's sad that person has such misconceptions about this game. Personally, I love the power of IOs, but I consider them highly optional for success. (See above comments about not bothering to IO significantly until very high level.)

Frankly being a Rad Emission anything is pretty much a free pass to get on TF teams.

It's not. The server doesn't render costumes. But the server is struggling on that map.

Imagine that the server constantly runs in a loop. But it's not just a "tight" loop where it processes as fast as it can. Each pass through the loop is effectively on a timer. When the timer ticks off a mark, the server runs through all the updates it has to do to make the environment reflect changes since the last timer tick.

This bookkeeping to involves a lot of things. It has to process all the commands all the clients send it, decide what all the AIs on a map do, count down power durations and activations, and update the position of mobile entities. When it's done with all that, the server basically waits for the next timer tick, and then does it all again.

Now imagine that the bookkeeping takes too long, and the server can't actually finish it all before the next tick comes in. Basically, it has to defer the next tick until it finishes all the bookkeeping for this one, then immediately start the next one. But that one takes too long too, and so on.

This is why our powers recharge more slowly on that map, at very crowded Rikti raids, and at pre-I9 Hamidon raids. There's too much bookkeeping to do to update it all in the window of the server ticks, so the ticks start taking longer. But the game defines one second of "game" time in terms of a certain number of ticks, so longer ticks mean that one second of game time starts taking longer than one second of "real world" time.

At one point someone told us that there were two performance issues on that map. One was the number of patrols and ambushes and another was the Shield Defense powerset of the Cimeroran mobs. Consider what that powerset does. Several times a second, for every Cimeroran mob (well, the ones with Shields) the server has to figure which other mobs are within a certain radius around it and use that to control the defense and mez protection of each mob.

Now, if the Cimerora mish makes your framerate go down, that's different. That won't affect your actual power recharges, or generally cause your character to rubber band.

I agree with you, but then the change to Energy Transfer is especially bewildering to me viewed under that lens.

Ironically, defense debuffs outside of Cimerora are far more common in the low-level game. These are levels where characters are vastly less likely to be able to be softcapped as a matter of course, and so these attacks are far more likely to hit and lead to cascade mitigation loss.

To address something said upthread, cascading defense failure actually is far worse on characters that depend heavily on (in powerset) +defense, because they tend to have little or nothing behind that. A "pure" resistance-based character debuffed until their opponent has capped hit chances against them is taking roughly double average damage (190% of baseline), but a "pure" defense character with 30% defense starts taking double the average damage if they're debuffed just 20%. If they're debuffed 45% (just enough to cap foes toHit against the resist character) the defense character is taking 325% as much average damage as they were at 30% defense. Thats way worse off than the resist set. If they're debuffed all the way to where their opponents are hit capped they're taking 475% as much average damage.

As Frost said, it depends on your machine. High sound quality is heavily dependent the codec in use, and generally the higher quality the codec, the more resources it needs on the client. I don't notice any impact from running Skype, but I have a fairly high-end system. (It was extremely high end about 3 years ago.)

Maybe I never used a Vent server set to use the highest quality codecs Vent supports, but the first time I used Skype it amazed me. It sounded like nothing I had used before. For me, since my machine (and bandwidth) can handle it, I much prefer the serverless nature of it. And of course the call quality.

Why should they? Why shouldn't they put any effort they do put into one of the most globally recognizable holidays on the planet?

You'll note that there's actually little association with Christmas itself other than the gifts and the naughty/nice reference. Most of the explicit trappings for the event are related only to the New Year and to generic winter concepts.

I have to say, I noticed a several people either idle all subscriptions or at least secondary ones during this downturn period. Some of those people did so because they lost their jobs or because of similar circumstances. (One lost the family breadwinner and then could not find a job.) Despite that the downturn has been going on for a while, the obvious spike in US unemployment is more recent. However, it's certainly been going on longer than just this quarter.

It resets both, and distance.

Whereas there's a significant likelyhood that I only played this MMO because it felt very much like an FPS. (CoH is the first MMO I played and the only one I've ever more than dabbled in.)

Edit: Yes, all my characters have both golds...

That mission's problems are server side. It's easy to prove that - the client isn't responsible for actually determining when your powers are really recharged. In fact, your client often lies to you about your powers being recharged on that mission, because it thinks they should be recharged when the server says they aren't yet. The server is running behind.

PP's base recovery bonus is 12.5%. A single level 50 Endurance Modification IO increases this by a factor of 1.424, which works out to a recovery increase 5.3% or +0.0883 EPS (with 100 max endurance).

So as the only enhancement in the power, the Perf Shifter proc is worth more on average (0.2 EPS vs. 0.0883 EPS).

Specifically, they don't have mez protection unless their shields are out and they are adjacent to another Cimeroran. Cims who do not have their shield or who are alone are just as easily mezzed as any other mob of their rank. Note that Cimeroran Surgeons don't carry shields, and can always be mezzed.

Of course Shout of Command gives them protection no matter what. Cimerorans do not get Fear protection from their shields, but Shout of Command does give it to them. Shout of Command does not affect its caster.

As of a couple of issues ago, Cimeroran spawns are sometimes enter an aggressive stance similar to what they would do if they saw a player character (and with their shields out), as soon as the game spawns them. This appears to have been an intentional effort to make sure they get their mez protection against "alpha strikes" by players.