UberGuy

I mean your "side" in the sense of the position you're taking in the argument. Not some nebulous group of people who agree with you.

Games take different forms. This is a persistent world MMO. All such games have as features a series of ladders to climb that lead from the place of weakness from which players start to heights of power which they can attain. Climbing those ladders takes effort. Because it is a game, that effort is supposed to be manifested in ways that are entertaining, but it still an investment in effort. The rewards of that effort are persistent and can be accumulated upon over time.

If people do not want to deal with the "effort" of cumulative progression, then they should play an FPS, or checkers. If they play a persistent world MMO and demand effortless progress, then they are playing the wrong type of game.

That analogy is ridiculous. There's no analog to that in this game. No one here being rich when you got here is meaningfully retarding your ability to get rich too, unlike the analogy you give above.

No, I feel that the people who are disadvantaged should get off their self-entitled ***** and make use of the multiple tools in this game that let them catch up with the Jonses. Your side in this makes it sound as if there's some barrier to that besides these people's own outlook, and that's just not true.

Look, IOs are part of the game, and the in-game market is the most efficient way to get them. If they don't like it so much they refuse to use it even remotely, that's tough, because it's part of this game. Complaining about "having" to use the market is like complaining about having to take travel powers because you hate the idea of them for your heroes. This gets back to the sense of entitlement wanting the game to change to what they want it to be.

If there was no upper bound on cost for what you need to equip a character, sure, that analogy might hold more water. But the truth is that you don't have to play the market mini game much at all to make absolutely stupid amounts of money, and you only need so much money for a build.

I don't "marketeer" in the classic sense at all and I've made 3.5B inf just playing the game in the last 5 weeks. I play the game and sell the stuff I get. I could do a pretty good job IOing something out for 3.5B inf, don't you think?

For every option we can come up with for how people can get loot, someone can start complaining about how they don't want to do that. If they don't want to use any of the options, maybe they need to step back and really look at the kind of limitations they're saddling themselves with.

The rules of this game includes gear you can gather and/or buy in-game. You are allowed to carry that gear into a PvP zone. You're saying that people have a sense of entitlement about using the resources available within the rules. Is it entitlement to buy all the boardwalk hotels in Monopoly? Is it entitlement to buy the better rifles in Counter Strike when your team has been winning? Those things are provided for within the rules. There's no sense of entitlement about using the resources available. The sense of entitlement is from the players who think the rules of the game should change to allow them to individually come out ahead even though they have no hotels or their team never wins.

No, it's not obviously false.

If you suck, having IOs isn't going to change your win/loss ratio against good players in the least. If you're really good, having a hyper-IO'd out build isn't going to change your win/loss ratio against a bunch of raging fools, even if they have hyper-IO'd out builds - you're going to clean their clocks. If you have a really IO'd out build and bring the wrong inspirations, or the wrong AT/powerse to a duel, you can get your face eaten by a good player with an SO build.

When they're clearly going to affect your win/loss ratio is when your skill and AT/powerset choices are closely matched. And guess what? That's what it's supposed to do. Either gear does something or gear does nothing. If it does anything at all it makes a difference - that's by design.

That makes no sense.

That seems like something the devs could be persuaded to improve. The question is when they'd prioritize it to.

Sorry, you aren't the final authority of what people should get over, and frankly, neither are the devs. I consider spending the better part of two issues building something a tiny segment of artistically-minded players will use is a colossal pissing away of time that could have (and should have) been spent on something else. If they couldn't come up with ways to handle the issues that player-generated content opened in a manner that made it such that everyday players were willing to use it, then the time should have been spent on something else.

But they did spend the time on it, and therefore it's worth ******** about the fact that a lot of people clearly don't think it's worthwhile. I want to see a better return on their investment. I don't really give a damn what a little segment of "real" artists want; I want a tool the general CoH gamer wants.

Yes, they double. You can have a maximum of 5 of each type. In PvE, that's more KB mag than you're ever likely to need. You can get by with 4 points, get by really well with 8 points, and probably never have to think about it much with 13 points or more. (Yes, I intentionally skipped right to 13. 12 doesn't buy you much over 8.)

It would always be on. The only "special" IOs that have to be slotted in an active power are the ones that say things like "% chance" or "for 120s". As Werner said, this seems an unlikely place to slot such a thing. You'd be much better slotting them in +DEF toggles or passives, or slotting the Steadfast Protection version in resistance toggles or passives.

No; see the previous answer.

What secondary powerset are you looking at? The majority have perfect KB protection in PvE, meaning not only do they have 10 points of protection, but they also have 10,000% resistance, an overkill value that ensures that nothing will ever actually inflict 10 points of KB over them. The powersets that lack this are Dark Armor, Firey Aura and Electric Armor. It's possible to be KB'd on SR and Shields if your click mez protection is down, but hopefully that's not something you're trying to address this way.

Yes, but that's not compelling evidence of anything, because it says nothing about the player skill behind that SO build, or what your two ATs and powersets are.

Just because I don't participate in PvP doesn't mean I'm clueless what's going on there. Consider me like the guy who watches games on TV to know about football. I couldn't QB a game to save my life, but still know how the game is played, some of the players and what they're known for.

Is gear going to make a difference in two equally skilled players? Of course it is. Percentage-wise, do you know how many "skilled" players there actually were running around in the zones, which is how most people who experience PvP actually experience it? Not very damn many.

Being a skilled player was, and still is, a lot more important than being IO'd out. Meetings of "equally skilled" players weren't very common unless you count an awful lot of "equally bad" players facing off in zone PvP, usually some sort of "fiteklub". A skilled player could go in the zones and win against on multiple such folk even with gear that looked pretty inferior on paper. Skill, teamwork, and AT/powerset were more dominant than good gear. They still are, with the possible exception of KB protection.

If IOs didn't do jack in zones, people who got discouraged and left probably still would have.

Does gear matter at all? Of course it does. You really want good gear to compete in arena contests against skilled players. Basically, if someone doesn't want gear to matter, they shouldn't PvP in an MMO.

I hear you. That makes my teeth itch.

With all due respect, this is full of misinformation.

I was one of the people doing testing in I16 beta. It was trivial to show that the drop rate bug did not match the behavior you're describing. Having a N-player virtual team would mean you got 1/N as many drops. This was not the case in general. I believe TopDoc did report such low statistics, but mine were never that low.

More importantly, though, the devs told us what the bug was. It was related to the check for whether you were too high a level for the defeated foe do drop anything. There was a variable used in that check that had, essentially, random numbers in it, so sometimes you got the drop and sometimes you didn't.

And yes, it has been fixed.

When they changed AV regen rates to the ridiculous levels they did at first, the only hope you had for defeating them was with copious -Regen. Back then, LR was unresistable, so you always floored an AV's Regen rate with it. Without that, they were basically impossible to kill. At least as far as I know.

Now, after that was mostly repeaeled, AVs have a lower absolute HP/s Regen rate than GMs. That means there are a lot more options that are viable for overcoming their Regen, and -Regen debuffs just become one of them. For example, Scrappers can burn AVs down through raw DPS.

I would still maintain that if you're soloing an AV on an AT with a relatively low damage mod (like a Defender), even with a good DSPS attack chain, you're likely to (but may not always) get more mileage out of -Regen than out of -DR. One of the main exceptions would be if you're using Sonic Attack as your blast set if you can stack it with -DR from your buff/debuff powerset.

Edit: There are some edge cases where -Regen can still be immensely useful even if you don't have to rely on it in the general case. When an AV pops an Unstoppable clone or similar power, you can scale back their Regen to help deal with the fact that you suddenly take a huge cut in effective DPS. It's for this reason that when I run on LGTFs I regularly reserve my -Regen debuffs on the Honoree until when he pops Unstoppable (or just before).

That's right. Heal enhancements actually boost both heal stats and regen stats of powers, and they never care if the base stat is positive or negative (buff or debuff). However, most of the Regen debuff effects are marked Ignores Enhancements and Buffs, meaning that even if you slot heal enhancers in them, the -Regen part of the power ignores the benefit.

Drain Psyche isn't flagged like that. Both the player +Regen and the for -Regen benefit fully from enhancement.

Yeah, why?

Envenom is a 50% regen debuff. After GM resistances, that's -7.5%. Compare that with powers like Lingering Rad, which work out to -75%, or Traps' version of Poison Trap, which is -100%, perma.

There's no -Regen in Poison's version of Gas Trap.

So ... what are you referring to?

It's true. My concerns are actually mainly based on another server's past raid drama, which spilled pretty visibly onto their board forum (or I never would have known about them).

The thing is, if you don't like a team, it's extremely lightweight to leave that team and either find or form another. That's not true of a raid. Even on a server that raids regularly, you're not likely to find another raid to go to for at least a day, and on most servers, it'll be the same crew running it the next time. Even if you're so ambitious as to go about running one yourself, you're not likely to get the raiders to come until the next day, being very optimistic. So while I agree with the theory of what you're saying, I don't think it's that realistic in practice.

Something like that would be cool. I have a hard time imagining the devs prioritizing it, though, especially given their attitudes in past forum posts on people who disconnect. (Paraphrased, it was "It doesn't happen that often." Frankly that pissed me off.)

I'm with you on wanting a way to manage DCs and accidental exits, but I'm with Flea in not wanting to see someone with full power akin to a team star on a Hamidon raid. While it is a completely sensible idea from an organizational perspective, there is far too much risk of excessive drama from people who think much too highly of themselves.

Depending on how much backing they have from a clique of allies, this may not be a self-correcting situation the way having a lone rogue would be. After all, if some lone guy's a jerkwad all the time, people could just boycott his raids. But if you get on the wrong side of a big ego who's part of a crew that manages raids, now you've got a problem.

It's one of those "this is why we can't have nice things" problems. As much as it'd be nice to be able to have the control to do things like kick leeches and the like, I think the open structure of the current raids (both Hami and RWZ) is far less drama prone.

That doesn't mean I don't want to see any improvements. I'm just leery of certain powers the raid leader(s) could have.

Yes, I can. You would probably know that if you weren't busy twising my words into something I didn't say.

Do you think that everyone that ran through boss farms was greedy scum? How about everyone that got PL'd in the AE, or ran a ticket farm? Of course they weren't. They were players chasing shinies that suddenly rained from heaven.

But even if we don't villainize those players, how many people here think that giving them access to that was actually a good idea? I don't mean what was intended, but what actually happened?

If we gave that PLing and farming ability to them again, do any of you actually believe they wouldn't go back to using it? I believe they'd be back at it in a New York minute. Taking the easy route is simple human nature. It's why games have rules and limits, and why the devs are on a never ending quest to close loopholes and exploits. People seek out the easy routes. Does everyone? No, but an awful lot of people do. Enough of them that keeping them from constantly taking routes far more easy than intended is an ongoing quest by the devs of every game.

The old Hamidon raid was a very easy route. The social scene was a symptom of how easy it was combined with how boring it was. The easy reward attracted people, and the presense of a lot of people doing something boring produced a social scene. People enjoyed that social scene, and that's laudable, but it was only possible for it to spring up in that form because there was something wrong with the underlying mechanics. Seriously, can anyone point to any content that they think the devs intentionally designed to be performed on /follow with a power on autofire? If you can't, do you really think that what was the game's only end-game content - the hardest challenge it offered - was supposed to be executed that way?

This isn't about whether or not I liked the old raid or like the new one. It's about simple common sense regarding whether or not the old one was a functional challenge. Anyone trying to defend this notion of comparing the new and old raid and seeing which is more "popular" are completely sidestepping that question. The old raid was broken, plain and simple. Almost all the "good things" people remember about it were community add-ons that didn't actually have anything to do with the actual raid or the mechanics.

The old raid was a slog that people did because it yielded the best reward, and they socialized because slogging isn't fun. That doesn't mean a slog is a good idea.