UberGuy

I'm sorry, but I do not accept that the majority of random PUGs operate this way. If you happen to be encountering experienced players running this who know what they're doing and drag in some random players, that's not what I call a PUG.

If the majority of random PUGs ran things this way, the reward based on median completion time for this TF would be much lower.

Edit: I suppose this is all dependent on what the definition of "speed" is. For me a Speed ITF is under 30 minutes.

Random PUGs don't speed ITF.

You're making the mistake of mixing subjective judgments with objective ones. In terms of performance, getting MoG back 5 seconds sooner off each cycle is very likely vastly more quantitatively beneficial to your character's average survival than 70% more regen.

What you're arguing, rather vehemently, is that you may not care about this distinction. That's not the same as the absolute claim that the distinction does not matter. It matters if you're really seriously interested in how to be absolutely optimal about your character's survival.

Note that there's a significant distinction here between this and some similar types of debates. For example, if people were advising you to skimp on, say, your attacks because you could use that to improve your total mitigation, that's a far more subjective trade-off. Not only might it actually have measurable negative impact on your overall survival (often victory is about the race to see who is defeated first), it might conflict with the idea that beating foes down faster is more fun, even if you broke even on victory criteria. It seems unlikely, though, that the kinds of trade-offs being debated here fall under that category. Powers like DP, Reconstruction, MoG and so forth contribute so much more to your net survival than the +regen in FH that even large sacrifices in that power to make small improvements in those others are likely significantly worthwhile. The question then is what would you find so subjectively preferable about slots in FH that you'd be willing to make that decision.

You're not going to win any arguments claiming that such things are not true. By and large, they can be illustrated with simple math. All you can do is argue that you don't care if it's true or not, which seems an odd thing to be arguing, givin the original point of the thread.

Well, I did too, but I dug them because they were super-efficient farms. For me, there's a rush associated with getting reward that fast.

If that's what people mean, I guess I get it. But I didn't find the AE farms inherently more entertaining aside from their outsize reward potential. I didn't assume that's what people were complaining about, though, because that would be yelling at the devs for taking the fun out of the game because we found the actual existence of exploits fun. I mean, it might be true, but it's a little weird to fault the devs for it.

Very small quibble, it's actually 53. I suspect the 52, which was advertised in the threads where they announced the increase, was one of many rounding errors on merit rewards. (Whether the posting or the in-game values are the error, I couldn't say.)

Either way, it's enough merits that I never, ever take a HO for a Hami raid. While some of them are extremely valuable (either to slot or sell), the odds are heavily weighted to a few that there is glutted supply on, so you're usually trading 53 merits for a Damage/Range or Damage/Mez. If I want a shot at a good HO, I go on an STF/RSF. These days even the STF is a hard sell at ...38?

That's not how it was sold to the community. No one said "we don't want you to have such easy access to T3 inspirations." They said "heroes can store tons of these in bases, and villains have no equivalent." It was pitches as PvP-related, which made it even more popular with the folks affected.

Of course it's not like it was a major movement or anything. It didn't affect many people, since not many "farmed" Kora missions anyway. And, of course, it made a few people significantly wealthy, since if you had such a mission, all you had to do was keep it, just like old Drek farms.

I could trot out the much-decayed horse of the PvP base raid trial, but I'll go for a couple more obscure ones. Changing the Kora Fruit missions to be medium inspirations when base storage came out was declared to be temporary until they could come up with some way to control how many people would store. Also, the 30-minute timer on the PvP zone mission completion bonus was supposed to be temporary until they fixed the core exploit that people were using with them.

Do I really think TF difficulty will suffer the fate of any of those? No, I don't. It's probably not as systemically complex as the PvP trial (or its replacement), and it's likely more visible than the Kora or PvP missions. But it's worth noting that claims that a band-aid fix being "temporary" can mean we're stuck with it for a damn good long time.

They haven't committed to restoring it. If they do, he'll probably come back. (Unless, I suppose, it takes so long he moves on to something else.)

While there was only a short while where you could run TFs at something like +4, Smurphy basically only ran them at Invincible/Relentless (+2) even before I16.

Actually, not quite. At least, that's not all of it. Apparently, when you hit 50 you were always supposed to be getting the XP mobs were worth as extra inf (unless you had debt to pay off) whether you're exemplared or not. No one knew it was wrong, and no devs ever noticed until very recently. Now it's "fixed."

Very roughly, this caused the following for +2 foes.

• Minion: 2.4x inf
• LT: 1.8x inf
• Boss: 1.8x inf
• Mission Complete: 1.6x inf

Given the usually higher frequency of minions to LTs and bosses, I'm guessing this works out to about 2x as much inf overall.

Umm... You do realize that this paints an absolutely no-win situation for the game's makers and publishers? If they are silent, then that will be taken as tacit agreement with the doom calling. And yet if they protest, that's taken as a sign of desperation, reinforcing the doom calling.

I mean, reallly now.

Yeah, I know Pum knows you can't give merits away directly, so I'm thinking that sort of "what do you want me to buy?" is the reward he's thinking of.

That or he's really sleepy.

Edit: who reverted our nicely anti-aliased smileys back to these lame original ones?

Translation, because I am not happy, everyone else must be unhappy too, and if I am ready to unsubscribe over not getting the changes I want, clearly everyone is about to quit with me.

Seriously, Ryu, you cry wolf too much for that kind of post to have a lot of weight - if such a post ever could have much weight.

That's one of the things that makes me feel that hanging high expectations on the subscription effects of GR isn't really sensible. It's not as if GR is CoH2, or somehow re-imagining this game from the ground up. Everything we know about it so far of is a tweak of or expansion on the existing game and its core mechanics and engine. We know of some new capabilities (morality system, for example), and there will be new zones and new story content, but nothing radically different from CoH/V as it stands now. My expectation for the features we don't yet know about is that they will be similar in this regard.

If true, that means that GR is going to (a) mostly affect subs by appealing to people who already like CoH/V as it stands but might be burned out or looking for something new, (b) hopefully keep existing subs interested, and (c) maybe bring in new people who might have liked CoH/V before but who either weren't around for its previous box releases or not attracted by the previous package/marketing.

To me, that sounds like something you hope will bring in a nice but possibly limited-duration peak in new/reactivated subs, maybe reset us to a slightly higher subscriber baseline, and hopefully flatten the decay rate of existing subs. My guess is not for dramatic long-term changes in subs rates, so it doesn't make sense to me that decisions about dramatic staff reallocations should be hung specifically on the effect of such a release.

Naturally, I don't expect NCSoft to ignore performance and pitch money and resources into something they don't think has a long-term payback. But I am not at all convinced that GR's subscription results make sense as a benchmark to shift direction on.

Based on...?

Seriously, unless you attend the strategic planning management sessions or sit on the board, that's so bold an assertion I think it's nothing more than you saying something you think makes good sense as if it were a fact.

(WARNING: SPOILERS)

BaB vs. Twilight.

Agreed. They did this once, when they introduced "banking" for flight animations, and I hated it.

Sorry, Bill, but this response seems ridiculous when it applies to most of the villains you can play at that level. How many ways do how many characters have to one-shot eliminate the mob? When missing the ghost with your one hold, or your assassin's strike means you have to eat an chunk of yellows or be effectively incapacitated for 60 seconds, that's stupid. When you might face more than one of them as part of successive ambushes in the side missions, that's stupid.

Rularuu live off in the wilds of a zone most anyone can ignore, and a lot of them suck for someone or other (not just one type for most everyone). You have to do paper missions to get your initial contacts in the zone. Why should we just be OK with this 5 level range of mayhems being sucktastic if you're stupid enough to try and play them? Part of the point of the forums is feedback on the game. My feedback is that these mobs blow hard for no obvious reason.

Same. What that means for me is that I will sometimes buy the low-level stuff I want on a high-level character with merits, because even if that's inefficient in terms of average earning potential, it's far more efficient for me in terms of time. I can usually earn the merits to create something like a L25 LotG faster than the average time it takes me to convert random rolls into the cash needed to buy such off the market. It's oblique form of "buy it nao" translated through the merit vendor.