UberGuy

I never saw this, and am pretty disappointed to read this is what the aspect is.

I also wasn't very impressed with the mob reuse for the various critters at the banners. Don't misunderstand - I get that you guys don't have time to churn out a ton of new critters just for a once-a-year event, but the variety of mobs means you have started re-using a ton of stuff. They don't feel at all like special mobs to me - they're all to familiar. Could you slap possibly slap some non-intensive auras on them or something? Recolor them perhaps?

The timer on making the banners vulnerable was much, much too short. Even with devs calling out zones, if I had to switch characters (which I was doing to try and test both hero and villain events), with a really fast loading CoH (I can load back in so fast it says I'm still logged in), I arrived too late to fight the banners twice.

I would rather the banners did something interesting besides flee.

I sort of wish the ToT spawns honored player reputation settings.

Because they are level 30 mobs. They happen to use the GM code which makes them scale to be "even level" to anyone they fight.

Notably, the EBs are actually level 50, and drop level 50 stuff.

The Rikti invasions are the same way.

Heh.

Just a little variation on that and we could have had another fun uninitialized variable.

"WHAT?? I just defeated this minion and it subtracted 2 million influence!@#"

On both the Tanker and the Scrapper?

Edit: You really aren't seeing what I'm talking about. You don't have to have Invincibility to get that much defense. Obviously it helps, but there is nothing highly dramatic about the +defense values from Invincibility. It's pretty significant if you are talking about saturating it, but that's not trivial to do. At levels like 5 targets you it's comparable to two large defensive IO set bonuses, at least the positional ones. That precludes my considering it "incredibly potent" in this context.

But that's true of any defense, whether it comes from in AT/powerset choices or not, and isn't really very informative to point out when talking about Invulnerability itself.

My point was that, on its own, the Tanker version, because of its higher melee defense buff modifiers, gets more for each foe, and therefore is a stronger effect - strong enough to possibly qualify as "incredibly potent". The Scrapper version, not so much, IMO.

If you don't get find the value, try looking for 1/2 of it?

Sometimes?

I think maybe you're confusing that (sometimes overly strong) advice with your views on inherent value. In your post you mention holding on to -KB IO because it's inherent value, which I take to mean the value of access to a -KB effect, basically never changes.

Price and inherent value are related, but can't be interchanged. Price is just what someone is willing to pay for a particular thing with some presumably inherent value. Price changes with lots of outside forces, like how much currency is in circulation and supply of the item or suitable alternatives.

Advice that rolls and drops be converted into currency is based on the mathematically and statistically sound observation that over the long haul you earn the money to buy most things faster by rolling random drops and selling them, then buying what you want on the market. There are a few items for which this is not true - they tend to be the most expensive things on the market that merits can buy.

This advice really says nothing about the inherent value of what you want to buy. It is merely a bulk observation about the price of most market goods. The above justifications for the advice have no inclusions for objections to using the market in ways that optimize sale profit, which you have previously expressed (in other theads) that you hold. This, I think, is why its foundation in math and statistics doesn't really make it any more valid for you - you have additional constraints.

And as Cat said, I'm not denigrating those constraints. I'm merely trying to make clear where differences in perspective seem to me to be coming from.

That's not correct. At least not on average.

Stamina has a base recovery bonus of 0.4167 EPS. Adding two level 45 endmod IOs is 79.9% enhancement after ED, which adds 0.333 more EPS recovery. Adding a third level 45 IO increases to %98.23 modification after ED, which is 0.41 EPS. The difference in three and two IOs then is 0.41-0.333 EPS, for a net of 0.076 EPS.

This proc is a 20% chance for 10 endurance every 10 seconds. On average, that's 2 endurance every 10 seconds, or 0.2 average EPS.

So making the third IO into the proc gives more benefit on average while retaining 1.799/1.9823 = 91% of the non-random benefit.

I always slot two endmod IOs and the proc in the third slot. As a side bonus, if I use one of the endmod IOs from the Performance Shifter set, I get a run speed bonus.

Lordy, no. They work in auto powers just like they do in toggles. Auto powers are just toggles that never turn off.

"Incredibly potent" is a bit much unless you're playing a Tanker.

Adding to this, it's extremely difficult to make anything like the analysis we did here unless you run solo. When you're on a team you can't correlate drops with defeats, because you defeat things that give their drops to other people, and you get drops for things other people defeated. Even if you gathered all the logs for the whole team it would still be a daunting task, and that assumes everyone's log timestamps were perfectly in sync.

Even once they were nerfed, HamiOs were the ultimate reward available at the time. Even today, in a world of IO bonuses, go look at the market price of Membrane or Ribosome HOs. Using them extensively after they were nerfed, and even after ED, still allowed things no one else could do.

Observing that, once, something powerful existed and was nerfed, and then holding that as sure evidence that something powerful will be nerfed again is foolish. Every time through this the devs learn something new. I can promise you that vastly more testing and consideration has gone into the design and implementation of IOs than ever went into the original incarnation of HOs.

That's not proof that they'll never be nerfed either, but in the context of the history of the game, there's a hell of more evidence that the devs are mostly comfortable with them than there is that there's some great nerf lurking, just because a nerf happened once long ago.

By the way, the HO nerf wasn't actually that horrific except for category "B" enhancers. HOs used to be 50% enhancement in all categories, even for boost types that were normally 20%, like Defense. The nerf made them follow the same rules SOs follow - 33% for category A (damage, recharge, etc.) and 20% for category B (defense, toHit, etc.) Notably, a common level 50 IO is 42.5% enhancement for category A.

Lets set aside all the "aberrent" things players might do in play. Lets say you and I both play for an three hours. In that time, I solo a Scrapper. I'm inherently decently tough, and I hit hard. I go fight +2 foes in missions as fast as I can. You play a FF Defender. You spend some time looking for a team, updating your costume, and running a Master Of the ITF. You get a good team, but they approach the ITF cautiously to get the badge, which you all do.

At the end of the 3 hours, I have earned a level and a half and a lot of drops. I quite likely defeated more foes in that 3 hours than the whole ITF team did on the TF. Do your character and mine really deserve the same rewards, just because we both logged in for three hours? I'm not trying to twist your words here. Rather this is what I see you saying, and I'm asking you if it's right.

You mean like you seem to want?

As pervasive as IOs may seem here on the forums, they are not that pervasive in game. The percentage of people who invest in extremely powerful builds seems to be very small even this long after the introduction of IOs. Don't be fooled by the fact that those people make a higher percentage of forum posters than they do of players.

It's already worthless to do. It yields absolutely zero XP, inf, or drops, unless you happen to maul some Rikti along the way. It's a lot like soloing AVs - it's crap reward for the time it takes. People do it to say they can.

You remember the history of the game and are viewing it through a heavily filtered opinion of what it all means. I don't find your interpretation of history especially compelling, and I consider it to be formed by discarding information that don't fit your interpretation of things. It's a common thing people do, and I won't swear I am not doing it myself, but I think you're doing it really severely. Again, if no one is supposed to be able to do these things, why did we get the difficulty options we just did?

(And as Cat said, Sidekicking was a wonderful idea implemented in a way that made sense for the comic genre, but that didn't actually work out that well in practice. Its mechanics were fantastic primarily for power leveling and not really that wonderful for everyone else. The devs didn't undertake this change with the justification that the old SK system was broken, but rather that they had come up with something better. I agree with them.)

And here you expose a dirty little bias. You think that people who do this sort of thing are motivated by a desire to lord how good their characters are over other people. It conveniently vilifies the people with significant IO investment, and is often used in an effort to plant the seed that this villainous nature justifies that their advantages be stripped from them and given to everyone else.

I couldn't give much of a damn about what most players think of my characters, because I don't interact with most players. I mostly play the game solo except for running TFs, which I do with a long-standing group of players who share my interests. I almost never pug, and almost never have - it's got nothing to do with getting drops. I get deep personal satisfaction from putting together a character that can take on ridiculous odds and win. I enjoy it even if I do it all by myself where no one can see. The other people I am most likely to tell about it are other power-gamers like myself, who have characters of their own who can do these things. I am actually careful not to be perceived as lording such achievements over others, because I don't like people who do that sort of thing.

The structure of that paragraph confuses me, but no, I don't even remotely agree with that assessment. If team content is not to be soloed, then why were we just given settings that allow solo players to fight 8-man team spawns? Why did Invincible/Relentless give AVs even when you're solo? This is why I don't think that much of your interpretation of the history of the game - you seem to ignore really obvious counters to your positions.

Let me be clear. I'm not nuts about the fact that teaming dilutes drops more than I think typical team speed counters. Really bad-*** teams I think do make up for it, but I don't think the mythical casual player ends up on those very often. I accept that things work like that, but I don't think it's inherently good just because it's how things are. I sometimes wish that there was some sort of drop rate boost for being on a team. On the other hand, I can imagine some reasons the devs might not like that. No system is going to be perfect.

Except we know they didn't do that with IOs. We know they expected people to trick out characters fully. They made it easier than people with HOs ever had it by giving us a cross-server market! You have to stop comparing these devs now, who have 5+ years under their belts and quite a lot of new staff, with ones from just 1 year after releasing their first MMO. Yes, our devs still do make some boneheaded mistakes - they're human and all humans have some good bonehead potential. There's always the possibility of change, but the motivation for change is different. It's vastly more likely that individual IOs will be tweaked, or individual categories of function, like +Recharge or +Def, than it is that the whole system will be redone. HOs were created at a time when the devs had almost no damn clue how to balance the game. IOs were created by a team much more comfortable with balance, with a lot more experience with their player base, and who therefore thought of a lot more possibilities.

Then stop having it, because you're the only one here promoting it now. Well, I guess you and Heraclea. They're "have not" if you refuse to do the things that get you purples. I have never been much of a farmer. I stick with my 50s, play the game, I sell my drops. It's gotten me billions of inf for market use and let me purple 5 characters. I'm not doing anything you couldn't do. You just don't want it to take as long as I was willing to accept.

No one shot themselves in the foot, because that gun wasn't loaded. Do you actually read things like, oh, the Dev digest? The devs are keenly aware of what people are doing with IOs. Castle even posted in the thread we had way, way back, about the "Scrapper Challenge" where people were doing the +4 hazard zone RWZ thing. Are you really this in the dark about what a totally tricked out character can do? And do you think that just because you are, the devs are too?

Seriously, why do you think all the sudden we have difficulty settings that allow one player to take on +4 foes spawned for an 8-man team?

Speaking of shooting one's self in the foot...remind me why casual players need something that's so good that you think it's surely going to be nerfed?

You missed the point by a country mile.

They exist for people who want unneeded benefits to strive for. For people who want to do things like solo pylons, or take on level 54 spawns of Rikti that have three bosses in them. Those are things that some people like to do, but they are not required for anyone to be able to do. Nothing in the game calls for such antics except the drive of some people to strive for them.

And strive is the operative word. Your suggestion is that no one should have to strive to be able to achieve ridiculous heights of power. Yet, by definition, achieving ridiculous heights of power is not something a casual player does.

Don't you understand? These things are like this specifically for the people who want something to strive for. You want to take that and, essentially, communalize the them to an extent that no one needs to do any (or much less) special striving to get them. And that defeats their purpose.

It's acceptable for them to exist in this form for those people who are compelled to strive for them, because no one needs them. If everyone needed them, then there would be a reason to make sure everyone had a simpler chance at achieving them.

I have come to the conclusion that only a small percentage of people must check the prices. If everyone checked them, the prices would be far more tightly coupled, even with the "lag" phenomenon I have described. I also suspect that this is related to the "buy it nao" effect that allows crafted IOs to be sold for so (sometimes vastly) much more than the recipes.

For a very long time, when the villain market was a lot slower than it is now (IMO it's been on the rise since around I11, with I14 being something of a peak), the users on the market seemed to be a lot more picky and careful. For a lot of items the crafted IO only sold for maybe a million more than recipe + salvage costs. Now you can make 3-5M minimum on an awful lot of chaff items. On the good stuff? Oh my.

Edit: Something to bear in mind about rarity in the recipes - it seem to me that this may often be cause by "craft-flippers" - people who buy the recipes specifically to craft and sell at a profit. I say this because you'll often see recipes with only a few for sale and lots of bidders, but the crafted item with lots for sale and few bidding.

Another bubble-related glitch: when you have the ally bubbles cast on you, they no longer track vertically when you do big mid-air animations like Eviscerate or Eagle's Claw Kick. They just hang out at ground level while you jump up and out of them.

Totally didn't think of that.

In any case, if I were to take PP, it would be for the +Regen, not the +Recovery.