UberGuy

As has been discussed many times before, the only thing one needs purples for is builds that are, honestly, fairly outrageous. They only apply at 50, so you've cut out a whole lot of "casual" people right there - not only do you have to get to 50, but to get much out of them you have to keep playing an existing 50.

So we're talking about level-50 characters with fairly outrageous builds that have capabilities well above what's needed to play the game very successfully.

How do "casual" players fit in this picture?

In my opinion, the moment they try, they stop being casual, and they have to change however it is they play to account for it.

That's pretty interesting, as it seems to fly in the face of stuff we've been told about rewards in the past. I am pretty sure we were told they were the same thing with different labels.

In the most recent patch? No. Previously, yes. About 2 issues ago, I think.

It was actually discovered during a forum discussion trying to figure out why someone's combat attributes monitor was giving results we didn't expect, so it should be easy to verify in-game if anyone can pop some enhancements around, possibly on test.

I think your prediction is pretty reasonable. I would have hoped they would have thrown out the bath basin of split markets when they tossed the baby, but I'll likely be one of the people riding the grey line. I suspect that means I'll benefit if your prediction is correct. I'm not going to complain.

Well, it would work better. Kinda. If you're willing to really think outside the box on how to use it...

Request and Broadcast are both per-zone.

I know I don't actually want /request re-purposed like that, as it's used by raid and event leaders to distinguish their updates, orders, etc. from general chatter. That would be impossible if it was server-wide.

I think a default server-wide channel (/server?) is a pretty decent idea. The Arena channel works this way and probably the Help channel too (I never use it). I think such a channel would become a defacto replacement for most uses of broadcast.

About the only thing broadcast has going for it over a server-wide channel is that if you ask for a team in /b you're presumably going to get mostly responses from people in that zone's level range. In practice, though, I see people hawking themselves in the most bizarre places. Yesterday I saw a level 41 tanker broadcasting "LFT" in Striga isle.

The most useful other thing might be a message for new characters that tells them the command to list all the global channels, with a red button that invokes it. I think a lot more people would poke those channels if they were more visible.

Cool.

Now, who was disagreeing with them?

So, imagine you built a car and let some friends drive it most of the time. One day, after you do some work on the radio, they start telling you the steering feels funny. You know you didn't work on the steering, but you check anyway. You look at all the things that you think can affect the steering and it all checks out. You tell them you think they must be mistaken. There's nothing wrong with the steering.

But they keep telling you it's not right, and doesn't feel like it did before you worked on the radio. They start telling you more and more about what they do that doesn't feel right, and you keep looking and looking, but don't see anything. You know the radio can't affect the power steering. You get frustrated and begin to doubt your friends.

Finally, you are doing something else and notice a problem in the electrical system. You find a loose wire that occasionally touches metal when the car hits a bump. That wire never had power before you hooked up the new radio. Now, when it touches metal, it very briefly shorts out the power steering motor. So your friends were right, but the problem wasn't exactly with the steering, meaning you were looking in all the wrong places.

Even that analogy only goes so far here. One more reason the devs probably needed a lot of evidence that the steering was broken in our case was that we were all talking about something that's random and kind of infrequent by design. That means there's no simple way to say "look, it's doing X!" Just about the only way to say anything quantitative about the problem was to get a bunch of statistical data and crunch it, because, well, that's about the only way to describe what random stuff is doing.

What QoL upgrades have been mentioned in this thread?

I'm not sure how this is a response to what I said, which was a response to you pointing out that defense would always benefit a defense user more than a resistance user. Any resistance user who can hit the softcap, even probably just to the melee position, has much more going on against that position at least than a (typical) defense user does. They can get the same max benefit as the defense user (at least to capped positions) and still have their resistances underneath. (I say typicial because the typical "defense" powersets don't have strong base resists going on.)

It depends on what you apply it to. The first reference I found quickly was from Wikipedia (and has a citation). "The German prefix über can have connotations of superiority, transcendence, excessiveness, or intensity, depending on the words to which it is appended."

We have to know what you were attacking. The base chance to hit higher level mobs is lower than it is for even-level mobs. Also, defense and toHit debuffs lower the base chance. Your accuracy then multiplies this value.

Because that probably wasn't the center of the range. Your base chance to hit an even-level mob with no defense or -toHit in play is 75%. It's 65% for +1 mobs, 56% for +2, and 48% for +3. I should probably commit the +4 and +5 values to memory nowadays, but I don't have them handy.

Just based on the above, probably not. I haven't noticed anything. If anything systemic has changed, I expect some people to notice and start gathering data. Given the values we know, above, and the Hit Chance channel, it should be easy to test out.

That depends entirely on how much defense you can get, and what AT you are.

With the right builds on a non-tanker, you can potentially achieve higher defense mitigation than any amount of resistance will ever give you, because of the lower resistance cap.

The best data we have suggests they're less than that. By a factor of 15 or 20.

Directed at all parties who've mentioned this, not just you... I sure hope a nuke isn't needed, since no one on a Mo* team can cast one.

(I suppose you could get someone parked outside to drop one on you though.)

I don't know if this is the reason they consider important, but if it's unwise to have "too much" of one, it's even worse to allow both to have "too much" available. If you have easy access to high defense and high DR, you drive everyone's net mitigation up multiplicatively.

If they had to make just one of them widely available, I actually prefer they made it defense. Positional defense always just comes down to three positions, while even after the recent set bonus pairing, resistance still comes down to five categories (L/S, F/C, E/N, Psi and Toxic). Even if they oddly combined Psi and Toxic into one category, positional defense would win out on ease of build.

Also, more characters have access to more sources of positional defense, even if they don't have mitigation powers in their powersets. Things like Hover/CJ, Weave, various PBAoE buff powers like Steamy Mist and Bubbles. There are a lot of places that have defense already. (It seems likely that removing or reducing that existing defense to make room for +defense set bonuses would be received extremely poorly by those who do not use IOs.)

So for the sake my own characters, I prefer that defense be the one there's "too much" of. Even if they are characters who depend on a lot of resistance in their powersets.

Defense sets that you play can likely achieve more average mitigation from their defense powers than your resist characters can get from their resists alone. This comparison is largely only valid within the same AT, and isn't counting things like attacks that bypass either, such as "positionless" attacks against SR or Psi against Invulnerability.

My point was that defense is pretty much allowed to achieve higher heights, period. The whole thing with DR inspirations is just a manifestation of that.

Fundamentally, your "resist toons" (which are actually not really existent now Electric Armor has a heal/regen power) have the same access to +defense as everyone else. If you aren't nuts about how they perform you can always slather defense all over them. Indeed, Defense and +regen or a self heal stack very nicely with solid resists. Just ask my Invuln Scrapper!

Statesman Decries Praetorian "Tax Havens"

In a press conference held on the steps of Paragon city hall, Statesman spoke out against various metahuman organizations' practice of essentially "banking" their prestige and influence with various reputation brokers on Praetorian Earth. Despite recent changes in fees and taxes levied on licensed metathumans that were, previously, charged based on how well-known or visible they are here in Paragon City, many have begun using these same ratings as a kind of currency in Praetoria. Various brokers there allow metahumans from other worlds use this "influence score" to establish a line of credit, which is then used to buy equipment, training, or various technical and arcane items used in the construction of "meta" goods. The stated concerns are about the sometimes dubious origins of these goods and information. It is feared that many may have originated with villains from the Rogue Islands here on Primal Earth, meaning they may have been taken from fallen Paragon City heroes, Longbow operatives, or other agents of law and order.

"This practice undermines the trust all citizens have in our city's licensed heroes. This is a trust that goes all the way back to the Right for Might act, if not before. A trust that was cemented at terrible cost during the Rikti War, when so many heroes paid with their lives to ensure our city's survival. Now, all those hard-won coffers of trust may be drained by this unwise practice. Some heroes using this exchange system are well-intentioned, pursuing greater power to that they may better serve our citizens. Yet this is a dark and unwholesome act which threatens to dirty the hands of our heroes with unseen blood, and to embolden our enemies in the Rogue Isles. I am working with the lawmakers of our city to find a solution that helps ensure our heroes hold to the virtues their predecessors held. Rest assured, we will find ways to both encourage our heroes to find solutions here at home, with their fellow heroes, and to firmly punish those who do not heed this call."

The rest of the Freedom Phalanx was present at the speech, though Manticore left near the end, when Statesman gave a broad outline of the legislation he was proposing. It is unknown if some crisis called the often secretive hero away, but he left at what appeared an unhurried pace.

Assuming they don't actively attempt to bar this, of course. The reason I don't think they will is that the simplest ways to do it would impose incredibly onerous restrictions on characters that switch, like either losing or losing access to all their existing inf and/or, even worse, enhancements; having items become bound, etc.

There are a couple of other things they could do that would be less onerous on the players, but that sound like a lot of work for them. For example, they could flag items themselves as "belonging" to one side or the other. However, it seems incredibly unlikely that individual items have such flags now, given what we know of the shared nature of the drop system. Adding them means that every persistent item gets a new flag in a database somewhere for which side it dropped on (or something like that). How would they treat items dropped in shared zones? You could assign it based on the alignment of the recipient, but what if they fell on someone with a "grey" reputation that lets them float between sides?

If they really want to bar this sort of thing, I think they could. I hope they don't for a number of reasons. One of the most basic is that I despise that I cannot give inspirations to an "enemy" even when we share a cause. I would love to see that artificial restriction removed.

Yep. Before it really took off in the internet vernacular, "uber" was floating around with a meaning like "significant" or "big", or even just "intense". An "uber hot dog" would have been a big hot dog with all kinds of stuff on it.

Once it permeated the internet, it evolved to mean something more like the old "l33t". An "uber hot dog" now would have whipped your butt at Unreal Tournament and then squirted mustard on you.

That depends. Specifically, it depends on how much of each mitigation type you already have. Whichever you have more of may make a big difference in which one helps your survival more.

The devs have always seemed loathe to allow people who already have DR get a lot more. In contrast, they seem comparatively willing to let people who have no defense get a fair bit of it, and a people who have a lot of it get a lot more. All you have to do is look at defensive vs. resistance set bonuses in IOs to get a feel for that.

This is supposition, I've always figured this is because DR "always works" in the sense that there's no random behavior involved in its mitigation, while even being defense capped you can still get slapped silly if the RNG doesn't come down on your side.