Arcanaville

If by "relaxing" you mean a build that will provide a relatively easy leveling path that does not require a lot of stressful combat, then I would recommend Mind/Dark dominator. Mind control dominators in general are just stupidly powerful. Not necessarily fast, but their control is just plain wicked. Every single power sleeps, holds, knocks, or confuses foes, and if you want you can just confuse your way through almost anything. Just hit it once or twice and you'll still get most of the XP, while the critters mostly just assassinate each other. Mass confusion turns leveling into a spectator sport.

Dark Assault has a heal, and tohit debuffs, and a power boost equivalent to increase the duration of your controls.

On top of that, Domination itself is good for a full refill of your endurance bar. Even during leveling when its not perma that's still a good thing.


Now, if you want to relax by punching things over and over again while they crunch beneath your shoes relatively ineffectually, then I would suggest SR/DM tanker. You'll be basically perma-eluded quickly, almost unhittable outside of tohit buffs, and have a heal built into a decent DM attack. Heal + High Defense = melee monster. You'll basically be Unicron smashing through most normal solo content, and you'll be a decent-to-great tanker in most teamed content.


If your idea of relaxation is to have at least two brain cells active while the rest of your mind replays the Cosby Show in your head, and you want to level kinda fast, then I would give Katana/Electric Brute a look. Brutes tend to level faster with Fury in general, Electric has good resistances and almost unlimited endurance, and Katana has divine avalanche which means you'll have a ton of melee and lethal defense basically for free. You'll be hard to kill with DA + Ela, and have good offense with katana and unlimited endurance and fury. You'll have to think slightly more than the previous two suggestions, but not too much, and as long as you don't scale your missions too ridiculously, you should be fine even if you accidentally daydream about Lisa Bonet and forget to hit Energize.

Given the depreciation of enhancements, that would appear to be a slightly more challenging goal than before.

Ah well, I actually slept through the initial market burst, because I didn't want to set an alarm. I don't like waking up early for real money, much less pretend money. So I guess its time to sharpen my pencil and start thinking about arbitrage opportunities.

This particular strategy is sometimes known as an inside straddle. That's been the basic strategy for skimming a flipper since the markets released.

As far as I've seen, there hasn't been a genuinely new market strategy invented in a very long time.

Converters do not make the resulting new enhancement account bound. As far as I've experienced so far, they can be used, traded, or sold without limitation.

I guessed the phone part when AoE turned into ask. But I prefer a soft control addition that was on all the time than one that followed BU and Aim simply because not everyone has BU and/or Aim, and each has very low uptimes outside of extremely high invention-boosted recharge builds - the very builds that least need help.

Also, if you happen to get mezzed, neither BU nor Aim are currently usable while mezzed so you couldn't use them to assist with deploying your countermez, and this would also force blasters to keep one of their offensive weapons in reserve to deal with mez rather than using them primarily for offensive power. BU and Aim are often used on the alpha strike, but that would eliminate them from being used as counter-mez weapons after the first few seconds of the fight.

At the right price, yes. Markets always overcorrect.

The thought has crossed my mind to make Build Up and/or Aim into a powerboost-like power that boosted control effects, going back a long long time. But the problem with that is that its not that Blaster control effects need to be stronger, its that they need to exist more.

Also, I think you mean Devices for blasters, not Traps. Devices is problematic because it doesn't have Build Up. And I don't know if you meant Assault Rifle, not Archery, because AR doesn't have Aim. So the combination of AR/Dev lacks both Build Up and Aim.

They are a bit dark but not dense, so ironically they can also be a casual read (they are also not long: each less than 400 pages). I would say the ending (as in the ending of the third book) is the weakest part of the story, but its a good read all the way through.


Brin was mentioned so I should mention my favorite Brin work: Kiln People. Although coincidentally it too has a bit of an issue with the ending: some people think the ending goes slightly loopy, but the main premise of the story is fantastic in my opinion. Basically, in the future people can make disposable copies of themselves to live their lives for them, and then absorb the copy's memories so they can have the benefit of them, and the story follows a detective investigating a crime. And he does so using copies, so the narrative follows both the original and different versions of himself that know they are copies and are only going to live a very short period of time.

The question you should be asking is why do Blasters need a guide on how to function, when no other archetype has required such a guide in the past, and lacking such a guide every other archetype did not find themselves managing to be mezzed more often than other archetypes, mezzed longer than other archetypes, definitely dying more often than any other archetype due to mez - and just in general - and ending up dead last in terms of their ability earn rewards in the game. Rewards like XP for example, which directly translates into leveling speed.

Also, have news for you. Mez is already 95% removed from controllers, because controllers mez the targets first. When your primary powerset's primary mission is to disable the ability for your enemies to do anything, you find you get mezzed far less often than the one whose primary design feature is to get hit in the face.

Mez protection is not the only way to avoid mez. Dominators are protected from mez when Domination is up, and countering mez with their own mez when Domination is down. The last dominator I leveled to 50 was a mind dom, and I have to tell you that I used domination more for the free endurance than for the mez protection. Nothing was ever *shooting* at me, much less mezzing me. I felt safer than I do on the current scrapper I'm leveling to 50 a willpower scrapper.

No one is saying, at least I'm not, that Blasters must be free from mez all the time because they are supposed to be shooting all the time. The last time Blasters were adjusted in Issue 11 with Defiance 2.0 they were allowed to use three attacks when mezzed not because they were meant to ignore mez but because they were dead all the time.

On the bright side, you were not ignored.

The article you link to has nothing to do with what you're talking about. The predestination paradox is a statement about how closed time loops violate the intuitive sense of cause and effect: events within the loop do not have root causes outside the loop.

You're talking about something else totally different: the viewpoint partially reinforced by general relativity that there is no cause and effect: that the fabric of space-time exists as a manifold, and time is an illusion, and therefore cause and effect are also an illusion.

Its worth noting that while this is consistent with general relativity, its not consistent with quantum mechanics, at least to the limits of my understanding of it. Its unclear to me how to rationalize a fixed space-time with the requirements of quantum mechanics. In particular, I suspect a totally fixed space-time has a way of tripping over Bell's inequality. I suspect fixed space-time is an incomplete description for that reason.

I'm mostly a proponent of Novikov self consistency myself; I particularly like the way it appears, at least from a relatively casual eye, to be consistent with path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams. It seems quite powerful and compact to say that paradoxical paths sum to zero.


In any case, Recluse Victory exists in the future relative to us now. Its existence is not precluded by physics that either enforces or disallows predestination paradoxes per se. If Novikov self consistency exists in the City of Heroes universe, the existence of Recluse Victory only means that whatever else we attempt to change relative to the future, we cannot preclude the events that create Recluse Victory. And as of yet, there is no proof that anything we do canonically has done that yet.

I'm not sure it does. Based on the revenue trends from about two years ago, we should have about negative 22,000 players by now. Its possible that we're all dead and this is the game dead people play until their souls are ready to move on. Kind of like Lost but with more Freem.

Its not necessary to go there, but its an integral part of the incarnate lore now. Technically speaking you do not need to step foot in Cimerora or Kings Row, but that doesn't automatically make it possible to dismiss them from the game lore.

Game mechanics are game mechanics until the devs open their mouths and try to explain them. The moment they do so with actual in-game story, as opposed to out of band rationalization outside the story, they become accountable for that particular canonicalization.

There's no in-game canonical explanation for targeting reticles, or how global channels actually work, or whether other servers are alternate dimensions. That's all just game mechanical necessities the devs don't explain in the actual game fiction, so its ok to dismiss it as game mechanics. They could have done the same thing to Ouroboros, but they decided to actually wrap a story around it. The moment they did, it and its mechanics become fair game for being assessed relative to the lore.

Any player can of course ignore any part of the game they want. But they don't get to decide what is and is not canonical.

That's why I said "depends on how they scale down." A literal rank scaler would retain the purple triangles, but there are game mechanical ways to scale AVs down to EBs in a way that removes the purple triangles if the devs wished to pursue that.

I think the fact that AVs generally retain purple triangles when scaled down in normal content is intentional for a variety of reasons. Moreover the purple triangles are not a special AV power, that protection is generally baked into the defensive powers of the critter, and stripping the purple triangle power literally would also remove other defenses the critter is actually supposed to have.

Even *that* is addressable by altering the way the defensive powers are created to allow just the AV-specific protection to disappear under scale down in theory, but now you're talking about hand editing the defensive powers of all the critters being discussed in DA.

Stargazer knows all of this, so it didn't occur to me to articulate that for context.

Yes and no. "The devs" can choose to do anything they want in theory, but in practice "the devs" are a collection of individuals each with a different set of priorities and perspectives. Every significant design decision that happens is the result of a dynamic consensus of a number of different people. Almost *nothing* happens with unanimous consent: in particular no decision I'm personally aware of did not have a number of dissenting voices against it.

The equation for doing anything is often tenuous, and removing a promoting factor can shift the equation from likely to unlikely in a very permanent way, by altering the dynamics of how different developers evaluate the priority of an item. It has happened before several times to my knowledge.


Well, from a timeframe expectation perspective, even if the devs decided to implement AV scaling today, it would likely be weeks to months before we saw it implemented. A non-critical change like that which made changes to many different things in many different places would almost certainly require internal QA and balancing passes, and mandatory beta server testing.

Incidentally, this is not true for Elude. Elude only has an endurance crash, but that crash isn't reset by stacking Elude. Stack Elude, and you'll experience both crashes. I think in general, health crashes reset, endurance-only crashes do not. Power Surge, for example, resets and that means only one crash, but also only one EMP burst.

I don't see it as a significant issue now. If the devs want to use this opportunity to investigate a method of scaling mission content without scaling individual critters, that's likely to be far more palatable to everyone and I think that's the better option to take. The problem with quick fixes is that they preempt the requirement to create better fixes.

In particular, its taken as an axiom that a mission actually *must* "scale" to be equally appropriate for weaker and stronger teams, but that's actually not logically mandatory. I posted a method for mission difficulty design in Aeon's thread that presents essentially the same mission to the everyone, and the stronger the team is the more difficult it becomes without actually changing *anything* in the actual mission content. It can't be used in isolation to span the complete range of difficulty desired, but the notion that its obviously impossible a solo player and a team could both attack the same mission and both claim to have completed the same mission successfully at equally challenging difficulty is just one of those assumptions that get glossed over when discussing subjects like this.

I'll elaborate. You said:

You're suggesting that the "blame" for being mezzed more often, and as a consequence defeated more often, rests in part with the players because they did not play correctly. But whether the players play correctly to your standard or not is irrelevant: you aren't the arbiter of proper play. The devs don't have an arbiter of proper play. They know what *average* play does in the game, and that is the measuring stick by which they balance all the archetypes.

The problem with setting a standard of play is that there's no way to decide what a reasonable standard is. Which is why I mentioned specifically something people actually did just to make a powerset work which today would be seen as absurd. It is absurd, but on the other hand it works. On what basis would you claim it was unacceptable to expect players to be able to do that, but having them replicate whatever it is you do is reasonable? And I'm giving you a softball example in that I drew the most extreme one I could think of. If you cannot make an airtight case with that, you are unlikely to be able to do so with any other example.

Dismissing the example because its extreme rather than addressing the extremity of the example misses the point.


I care, because the number isn't arbitrary. The lower the number, the lower the advantage *especially* relative to the ability for critters to counter attack. If you say 80 feet, the problem is few blasters can really be offensively effective at that range. If you say 40 feet instead, the problem is that the advantage of being at range at all at that distance is severely curtailed for most blasters. And there is no goldilocks range that eliminates both problems.



Edit: accidental double cut and paste error snipped

That would depend on the mechanics of the scale down. There are lots of potential ways to do that which generate different results. I can say, however, that statistically speaking EBs tend on average, to be scaled up Bosses but Archvillains are not scaled up Bosses. Normalized for modifiers AVs have on average a significantly higher level of offensive output. Had the developers been told *originally* to make the NPCs AVs that would then scale down to EBs, the net difficulty would almost certainly be higher than it is now.

As far as I know, the crash on the first unstoppable will be canceled and replaced with the crash from the second unstoppable. You'll get one crash, two minutes after the second unstoppable activation.

The predestination paradox does not preclude changing the past. If the laws of physics demand consistent causality, the only thing precluded is changing the past of the traveler. You cannot go back into the past and change something that would prevent you from going back into the past. But you can change the past in a way that would not interfere with you going back into the past. This preserves causality for all independent observers.

Actually, this specific principle forms the basis of something I wrote up for a friend a while ago to use as a counter to the current cottage industry of claiming that the time travel exhibited in the terminator movies is illogical. Actually, its even more logical than the screenwriters intended, if the laws of physics are applied *correctly* rather than haphazardly.


I'm pretty certain Temporal Scaling is a byproduct of the Mender's method of time travel, not time travel in general. Two reasons, one lore-based and one meta-based. The lore based logic is that time travel is not associated with temporal scaling when powerful beings use it to challenge the players, only when players move through time.

And there's strong evidence to suggest that somehow Mender Silos has figured out a way to bypass the worst effects of temporal scaling. Its entirely possible he's figured out how to beat it, but obfuscates the truth because he wants to keep that secret for himself.

The meta reason is the writers are highly unlikely to bind themselves to Temporal Scaling when its inappropriate to the story they want to write. Its a way to explain exemplar, and NPCs less frequently exemplar in that way.

For real; my Ninja/Demon/Thugs mastermind kicks some serious a**.

I tend to note EBs per mission, not EBs per arc, because the unit of content in City of Heroes is the mission, not the story arc.

I would suggest that since Aeon elaborated upon what he meant by that phrase implicitly by stating what was done to target them, that deconstructing that term is unlikely to be particularly fruitful. Unlike players, who can be goaded into semantic arguments, the developers are actually (at least as I understand it) explicitly warned not to engage in them.

That seems unlikely, since as bad as the marketing seems to have been for the movie they spent a gigaton on it. No one spends a hundred million on deliberately half-whacked marketing. It seems that this is not a case of the suits deliberately tanking the movie, but the suits actually doing their best and totally messing it up.

Well I'm working on a new challenge arc, if that helps.

By the way, is the architect options button only broken for me, or has it been broken for a while now? Kinda tricky to test things without it.