UberGuy

That's ridiculous.

(1) There are reasons to stay redside other than immersion. I prefer redside content.
(2) A merged market would not in a million years break my immersion. I think anyone who finds it immersion breaking has a weaksauce imagination.

The problem is that this planned market mechanism is effectively punitive. If they want redside to be played, it should be because it's attractive to do so, not because taking a villain to heroes is actually a partially crappy experience.

That is indeed the way it works.

To overcome this, they would need an entirely new category of pet.

We were told that here on these boards by our community rep at the time.

It's a self failing prophecy. There's no way for the villains to catch up on inf, because there aren't as many of them. Either it's an oblique way of saying "it'll never happen," or a view into radical inability about basic math.

FF is possibly the worst buff powerset you could bring along to speed yourself up. This is often a complaint about the powerset - of all the buff/debuff sets, FF is the most purely defensive. It has no ability to actually speed you forward; rather it can only reduce how much foes slow you down. If your character is such that foes don't slow you down much anyway (not just an IO thing, you could have been playing a tougher AT), then FF isn't going to have a strong effect in general. (There are some cases where this might not be true. It's possible for the increased survival to mean you could leverage AoEs on far more foes at a time. What really matters is how much slower than your absolute optimal speed you have to go to survive foe packing that optimizes your attacks. The tougher you are, the closer you can get to your optimum.)

In contrast, buffs that increase your recharge, recovery or effective damage all can speed you up directly.

I was never at any point unaware that what you said here underlaid your position. I wasn't arguing with that. My whole point, which you have at different times seemingly ignored or (at one point) dismissed outright, is that this is not an IO-related problem. I even either directly mentioned or alluded to both Controllers and Corruptors as replacements for Defenders in multiple of my replies to you.

When I've challenged you here, you brought up defenses for your position. You picked the defenses. You are the one that chose the qualitative and quantitative arguments you rebutted me with. You then chastise me for actually refuting them? If I was gyrating on a pin it was because you mounted your arguments on one.

I have never once argued in this thread that there aren't viable replacements for Defenders. I disagree with your assertions (and subsequent defense of) involving IOs as a major contribution to their replacement.

Hm, I never do that. I won't go so far as to say I hated the way SOs worked, but I think the way IOs work is just a freaking ton better. The only time I slot SOs now is when they're just immediately handy and immediate is what I need. Like I level up on a TF or something and I need just any old thing to enhance my powers right then.

I will make an exception for level 53 SOs when I'm 50. I don't seek them out, but I've slotted ones on hand on occasion in powers that don't take set IOs (or where I wanted a common anyway), because the difference in a 53 SO and a 50 common IO isn't really that big, and a 50+ isn't ever going to need replacement. I've no doubt that extreme performance seekers like Werner are noting to mark me as a leper for such heresy, but I am guilty of it from time to time.

Excuse me? Smoke and mirrors? Care to explain? Where am I using misdirection here? I'm calling you out on making a sweeping conclusion that I think is wrong except under specific conditions. It's smoke and mirrors to explain how you're wrong? Oh, poor me indeed.

Yes, yes, all this is understood, though see my OT responses below.

None of it means people are not going to want Defenders.

That's your thesis here - that Defenders are under threat of being replaced by IOs. That people with IOs don't need buffs and debuffs, so they won't invite a Defender to a team. That they don't need buffs or debuffs at the level a Defender can provide, so they'll invite someone else who can buff or debuff to a team.

When I disagreed, you proceeded to give this example, fleshed out over multiple posts, of how your Blaster can get by with IOs and inspiration cascade. When challenged on how your Blaster could perform even better if you added a Defender to the IOs and the inspiration cascade, you started limiting your optimization goals to loot drop rates. Since your Blaster can solo large spawns quickly, and adding any teammates dramatically reduces drop assignments to you, you used this as defense of the idea that people wouldn't want Defenders if they have IOs and inspirations. This conveniently ignores whether other goals might have the same constraints as drop optimization, or whether a drop optimizer/farmer wants anyone else at all on their team

This supports your thesis, but it is not sufficient to make clear it's a problem. When faced with discussion about indiciations that it's not a problem, you continue to harp on the hard numbers. But the numbers on their own don't prove anything. They just show that, yes, everyone has some increased potential to get closer to some attribute caps, being able to benefit less from less total stacking of buffs. The question I've been raising is whether there is still room for improvement to be had by filling out the rest of that space. The answer for the way I play (and most of the people who hang out in that global channel we were talking about) is a resounding yes. Regarding the actual numbers, I want to start out by noting that, at some level, every build is going to find some of these bonuses to be mutually exclusive. You can't have all of these things - you can only have some of them. You can still want buffs for the bonuses you can't get much or any of.

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You're doing it wrong. I have characters who can pump out status effects, damage, and debuffs at extremely high rates, and it is not possible to slot enough +recovery to sustain my endurance burn, even when my attacks typically have 60%+ endurance reduction. I have a Stone Melee brute that has 75% or more endurance reduction in every attack and I cannot sustain my attack chain indefinitely. All my level 50s have all the +end accolades and every endurance recovery singleton IO and and often multiple large or ultimate recovery bonuses. The Brute above has three sets of Impervium Armor slotted, and still I can attack at a speed that will drain my endurance. Once more, you seem to ignore that other people have build goals different from yours - my Brute is a single-target damage oriented build, designed for beat down against those hard targets you eschew as fast as possible. AccMet and Speed Boost are her friends.

Do you really feel anyone is worried about this one? I slotted this IO on a character once. It's coming out on the next respec, because I don't really miss it on anyone else.

You're right, I'm pointing it out.

Defense bonuses make me love getting +def from teammates, because primary shields from one Def/Con/Corr or a handful of lower-tier buffs like Man/Shadowfall can take a character with moderate set bonuses to the softcap. You probably view the softcap as unnecessary. I view it as an enabler to my play goals, which are not the same as yours.

And more is always directly better, right up to the cap.
10-20% damage boost (especially 20%) is tremendously difficult to obtain while obtaining other high-order bonuses such as +defense or +recharge.

And more is always better up to the -DR cap, which it's going to take real debuffers to achieve. The Achilles proc does not self stack from any number of sources. It only stacks with the new PvP -res proc, which also does not stack with itself. (Also, few builds are going to be able to reliably apply -res to large spawns using procs).

By the way, defense debuffs are not that impressive in general, and I can't think of any situations where I'd want them that I wouldn't prefer +toHit bonuses. Defenders, Controllers, Corruptors and VEATs give the best toHit bonuses, and if I'm fighting high +DEF, they're who I want along. Again, I'm happy to stack their Tactics, Fort or bonuses on top of my Kismets. A Kismet alone isn't all that impressive. It's just a lot better than nothing.

Well, I'm not sure that's wholly true. An awful lot of both the Marvel and DC universes actually regularly spin off into the idea that a lot of high-powered goings on do happen all across the universe/multiverse. A lot of times some problem visiting earth is the result of some distant war, prison break, or other significant event in some other place that happens to have found its way to earth. (Insert presumptions about earthly conditions being favorable for lots of intelligent life elsewhere, making it a likely stop for those that come across it in distress, angry, hungry, what have you.) Some good examples of this are things like Marvel's Shi'ar Empire with their Imperial Guards, and DC's Green Lantern Corps. They don't hang out on earth, but they sometimes come there because there are a lot of either troublemakers or potential allies there.

I would say there are a couple of common themes that do go along with your description, but they don't always directly suggest earth is central cosmic goings on. The first is the notion that the earth in the stories is an absolute hotbed of demigod-like beings, be they actual godlings, evolutionarily advanced humans, technological/scientific achievements, accidents, etc. The frequent conceit here is that humans in particular have extraordinary potential, far greater than most of the other non-earthly races. As this potential is realized, more and more powerful beings congregate on earth, sometimes including peer beings from other worlds. So even though other races have either their own super heroes or are actually all super by human standards, either earth has more heroes or ours are somehow superior despite smaller numbers.

This actually isn't a theme unique to comics or superbeings. Look at things like Star Trek, where Starfleet High Command is on Earth, and Starfleet membership is seemingly overwhelmingly Human, despite Vulcans providing most of the original technology and early military might. A pretty significant chunk of space sci-fi over the last 50 years assumes that Earth spreads far and wide even in the face of alien opposition. It's often humans that produce the truly extraordinary military or scientific minds. Humanity is shown as extremely good at overcoming ridiculous odds, seemingly on sheer hutspah - human tenacity always seem to surprise non-human foes that face us with slavery or extinction.

Interestingly, Primal Earth in CoH isn't actually clearly an example of this superiority. First, it seems that if you spit through a dimensional portal you probably hit a meta-being on an alternate earth. It comes across that non-superpowered earths (like ours!) aren't the norm. Additionally, there aren't a whole lot of known alien races crawling around, and those that are practically all are on peer power levels with earthly metahumans. Moreover, some of the examples seem to have these levels of power in all members of their race. The Kheldians come to mind. They may not all learn to fight the good fight with their abilities, but they seem to be inherent nonetheless. This goes with the idea mentioned upthread that there may be remote, alien threats to all space-time that powerful, local forces put down. Since alien races seem uncommon and distant, Primal Earth's metas might just never hear about it.

Now, in universes where there are a wider array of known alien races, and they do traffic more with earth, earths concentration of super beings sometimes directly leads to earth being front and center in cosmic events, even from alien perspectives. When you combine this supposedly extraordinary human will and adaptability with access to concentrated power, you open yourself to Earth periodically producing folks like Parallax ("When Green Lanterns Go Bad!"), who end up making a grab for absolutely stupefying amounts of power and escalating themselves to a threat to all space and time. This is a fairly common theme in comics, or at least its incredibly epic scale makes up for the fact that it usually doesn't happen more than once every few years of real world time.

I hate to break it to you, but AF has very much been here before, and used to be quite active, though generally in a contrarian manner to many posters here (not meant in the investment context use of that word).

More conditions. Merits are part of the game, and TFs are the fastest way to get them. XP and inf are a part of the game, and I'd hazard a guess that XP is a bigger part to more people than drops by a massive margin. Your most critical efficiency criteria are not shared by everyone.

No one intelligent brings a Defender to drop farms, because no one intelligent brings anyone else on their farms. At best they might bring their own alt accounts along to buff and maybe debuff if they've got a good multi-box control setup going on. This isn't a Defender-specific problem.

And as I said, while mob drops are clearly important to you, they aren't everyone's primary motivation, and the problem you describe holds true for any teammate. It's ridiculous to say this is specifically bad for the Defender AT when a drops optimizer would never invite anyone on a team.

Which, again, is the primary consideration when you want to optimize drops and not XP/time or merits/time.

Um, no. I took caps into account with the number I gave you, which I made sure was insanely conservative. All you need is someone who can put out a base 30% DR debuff every spawn to achieve around 24% kill speed increase against +2 mobs. I gave the +1% as a freebie on the assumption that most buffers can provide some other kind of force multiplication, be it +dam or +rech. Several builds can do that, especially if they are built with high recharge. IOs don't just help the non-Defenders, you know.

I didn't have it that hard on my Blaster. I played a Blaster who was actually pretty good at soloing thanks to things like stealth abilities, mezzes of their own, and soft controls like KB and slows. A good Defender sped me up, but it didn't speed my reward rate up by a factor of two, because my baseline reward rate was not so sucky that a survival boost lifted me up that dramatically. I primarily soloed a Blaster to 47 before we even had IOs.

Holy understatement, Batman. You didn't start out by calling this "a contributing factor". You mentioned it by name, and practically called it out in its own post, indicating it as responsible for a shift back to pre ED/GDN days, which you then declared to be the reason a Defender is no longer "integral on a team". (Personally, I don't ever recall them being "integral" to teams, and frankly, I don't want a game where anything is "integral" to a team. I like it to be pretty wide open for general play. I'm reminded of many debates on the Tanker AT.)

What you fail to show is that this effect is actually a problem. Sure, stated the way you do, it seems perfectly obvious that somewhere, a Defender didn't get a team or someone didn't play their Defender. How strong is that effect in practice? How many people prefer your optimization goals to others? How many people prefer teaming to soloing irrespective of efficiency? How many people aren't heavily IOd?

I see. Well, my anecdotal experience suggests to me that it's not actually happening very often. I haven't been denied a team in years until today. Today I was kicked off a team because I was on a level 24 character and the leader only wanted 45+s for his banner team, not because of my AT. (You might be amused to know I was kicked while playing a /Rad Controller. And yes, I think that person was incredibly ignorant.)

Woah, nelly. You assume that market prices on IOs are driven by "casual" players? I don't think I share that view at all.

All I need to see to know that the "casual" player is sub optimal is to look at the majority of the TF median rate rewards. The exception? The RSF. My interpretation of the reason? The sample set of people who play and/or complete the RSF is composed of more hardcore players.

Why should it be? The cause for concern would be if a Defender could not bring enough that anyone would want them on a team. Your argument is extremely binary - because (under your conditions of choice) a Defender is both not required and needed less than before, they automatically devolve all the way to not desirable. The problem is that your viewing this through the lens of the specific goals you have laid out: that of optimizing for drops on a AoE-centric Blaster. Because IOs allow your Blaster to solo at a reasonable pace without a Defender to prop him up, you conclude that no one would ever want a Defender thanks to IOs. But that only holds up under your specifc goals. Moreover, that criteria is biased against everyone, not just Defenders. Surely you would never invite a single-target melee character on that team with your Blaster, because most of them would do even less than the Defender while leeching away your drops.

Sure, some people might take a Controller (or Corruptor) instead. It's apparent to me that most people don't actually care which they take, because for most purposes, people consider a wide array of them interchangeable. It's not automatically a problem if someone else can bring what Defenders do - that problem has existed since the game released for multiple ATs, and hasn't stopped people from playing any of them. It doesn't matter if a Defender (or any buffer) does less for a team than they once did as long as they can do something some reasonable number of people considers worth having. Your concern is that this will stop happening. Given the criteria you're using as the foundation of that concern, I'm not convinced it's an issue.

I know that wasn't addressed to me, but I want you to know I am pleased by all of it. A lot of what you have said prior has had an undertone of nerf-calling on ... well potentially a lot of things. Sometimes that's valid, but in this case I disagreed enough with the reasoning behind the (perceived) calls that I didn't want to let it lie.

While I have no major issues with the Defender AT (other than never being a fan of their inherent), if you can convince someone to buff them, I'm not likely to complain.

So, wait, having long-term player goals in a persistent world MMO is foolish? Fascinating. You might want to let the developers of every major MMO (and most of the successful smaller ones) know.

Sorry, you're correct. I was thinking of "Ultimate" when I said "Huge".

Not all the bonuses from PvPOs are "Huge", though many are. Some of them are merely "Large".

It's probably worth noting here that the new spawn rules we got in I16 can, indeed, create situations like this. I recently ran a Cimeroran mission spawned for three people where I encountered 5 successive spawns of two bosses.

However, I take that as less a defense of the notion that DPS should be a overriding consideration for character design and more of a suggestion that the new spawn algorithms may not be doing sensible things.

It's hard to say anything should be balanced around what happens when you solo things meant for 3 characters, of course.

Yeah, this is what I'm looking at too. This is going to drive the price of things towards around twice what they would have been without that change. I expect this effect will be gradual, though, and thus hard to perceive through other market shifts.