Arcanaville

I don't think he does. This is one in a long line of exploratory questions Blue_Centurion has been asking about different kinds of archetypes and builds: blaster mitigation, melee resistances, range, etc. They seem to be as much thought experiments as they are what's-the-best-X questions.

As mentioned by others, DDR only mitigates defense debuffs. The spirit of your proposal is one I lobbied for often off and on: use Elusivity to rebalance defense sets in the presence of higher tohit, and give it only to defense sets and sets that rely on defense in certain very specific ways.

The devs have been reluctant to take the time to do that right, though: vis-a-vis their original sledgehammer approach to using Elusivity in PvP.


As to "rebalancing" scrappers, that would be like giving welfare to the second richest person in the world because the richest person in the world has a bigger yacht.

'Cause this was a rare case where I got there before you did and scooped up a ton of purples from 2-40 million. But at 100 million, the purple economy, while still having a lot of profit potential, is now closing in on the point where if too many people jump into it the profits will be harder to extract, requiring a lot more time marketeering to bid gap everyone else. For me, the equation started to become a bit too risky for the amount of time I put it.

Besides, the other thing I started doing is the same thing you did: take profits now. I took about 40 billion off the table immediately and stored some and turned some into prestige for future bases rather than sink it into more purples, because bird in the hand.

As to why more people aren't doing it, the fact is most people don't even think about it. When enhancement converters were announced and people were saying "what possible use could these have" I about fell out of my chair. I can understand why some players wouldn't use them, but the notion that they weren't extremely valuable made me realize most players do not think along these lines. Lets face it: there isn't much to spend the inf on when you amass it. After all these years, the devs still won't put the blimp on sale, so I can't spend inf on that.

Although, I saw a base the other day that literally blew my mind right in front of my face and made me want to tear into the base editor, so there's always prestige conversion.

One of the things I predicted even *before* Freedom was announced and repeated often after it was announced was that F2P would create a schism in the playerbase between those who thought selling things you could not also earn in-game was unfair, and those who thought selling only things you could also earn in-game was pointless.

There will be peace in the Middle East before that gets reconciled.

That's another one of those fundamental dichotomies that this game is going to make repeated compromises on: neither side is going to "win" that particular argument.

The compromise is not between what we want and what the devs want. The compromise is between the principle that the players should get as many options as can be created and the principle that tying exclusive rewards to content is a reasonable approach to improving the sense of value of both the rewards and the content. Anyone arguing unilaterally that either principle is just wrong, is just wrong. Both have advantages and disadvantages, and like essentially every aspect of this game's design the Roman pack is a compromise between competing principles that are mutually exclusive at their logical extremes.

To put it another way, the compromise is between the developer at Paragon that says "lets release everything" and the developer at Paragon that says "lets keep content-connected rewards content-connected" and I'm sure there is at least one of each. They are both right, and both wrong, and neither is going to get everything they want, and by extention the segments of the playerbase they each represent will likewise not get everything they want.

Eclipse is on my list of powers that I wonder what the devs were drinking when they gave them to us. Eclipse would be considered a major exploit in most other MMOs.

Of course, Warshades also get Stygian Circle, so its possible the devs just really like Warshades.

Pet AI used to be incredibly twitchy with regard to how pets decided which powers to use. Its a lot better now, but still not 100% predictable. Changing either the cycle time of a power (the sum of cast and recharge) or the total amount of time casting powers (the sum of the cast times of the powers) can on some occasions radically alter how the pets behave. This means if Synapse so much as blows in the general direction of a pet power, he's probably just bought himself a couple of cycles of QA on that one little change.

Its also possible that the internal view of the Zombies is sufficiently controversial that Synapse did not want to engage in that conversation. MMO development is a collaborative process, and while its probably done differently in different companies, at Paragon different developers have different ideas about what works and what doesn't, what's too powerful and what's too weak, and the game we get is a compromise among all those interests being represented. Rarely does something happen by authoritative fiat. So sometimes a designer will not want to touch something because hidden under it is a touchy compromise among many developers, and touching it will open up a big can of worms.

Or, Synapse could have been getting really close to hitting level 50 on his new corruptor and wanted to work on that instead.

At long range archery doesn't compare well to psychic blast. Psychic blast has *four* single target blasts with 80 feet of range, and as a group they have better DPA than Archery's attacks. Psychic Blast's tier 1/2 attacks have better DPA than Archery's tier 1/2, Psychic Blast's tier 3 beats Archery's tier 4 (its third single target ranged blast) and then Psychic Blast has a fourth, Will Domination, which also has good DPA (better than the tier1/2 attacks). The set also has Aim (focus), and has a snipe. Archery's main advantage is its long ranged non-crashing tier 9 Rain of Arrows. I'm not sure if that's enough to compensate for its disadvantages at long range, but with enough recharge it might be. Its probably worth putting into the mix just for that one power.

I don't think this really puts a dent in the problem, in the sense that I think it only seems interesting because its not done at all, but once it is done the fundamental complaint would still exist, but on the other hand I wouldn't be opposed to adding more elements like this to co-op missions either. It does, as you say, add some flavor to the gameplay.

If you want to take the concept farther, consider this. Every Lambda I've ever been on has had some players leave immediately and others stay behind after Marauder is defeated to clean up the courtyard. The clean up part doesn't require the entire league, obviously: mostly individual players can decide for themselves whether to stick around for a little while longer or not.

You could add very small side tasks at the end of co-op trials where the heroes and the villains go their separate ways and complete an optional goal which sets them back on the heroic or villainous path again, and sets them onto the story paths you describe above. So perhaps at the end of Keyes, you could actually allow the villains to break into a bunker and steal something, and conversely have the heroes go back to a reactor and collect samples.

The only problematic aspect of doing that which I can see is that on many servers leagues run trials back to back, and having it be entirely optional for individual players to extend the trial by more than a couple minutes would be disruptive. But this would have the alternate side benefit of providing a way for players to get a wind up of just what the heck happened during the trial, which many players tend not to get. This might be more practical in co-op task forces than iTrials, though, due to the back to back problem. For iTrials, *unlocking* a mission which the player can do any time to wrap up the trial might also work.

There is one big unknown with regard to those IOs, and its the same unknown related to why Steadfast is a hundred million and Glad Armor is two billion. Everyone who wants Glad of course gets Steadfast first, but only a fraction of the people willing to buy Steadfast are then willing to bid up Glad.

If prices on purples and PvPIOs goes down in general, it may open the pool to more people actually deciding to jump in and make high end builds. After the initial burst of PvPIO conversions, there may be enough demand to push prices upward on the big three. Probably not all the way back up to two billion, but possibly much higher than hundreds of millions. Its difficult to say what will happen when a much larger pool of players gets a taste of purples and PvPIOs, and then just has that one PvPIO to go, and lots of influence with nothing else to spend it on.

In an MMO, unlike a real economy, there's two ways to cause inflation. One is obvious: increase the currency supply chasing the same stuff. But the other is not obvious: eliminate things to spend inf on, so the remaining inf is chasing a smaller set of stuff. The irony of making purples and most PvPIOs cheap is that in effect we'll all still have about the same amount of influence, but we'll have less stuff to chase after. That's actually why the big three cost what they cost. They aren't actually twenty times better than other enhancements: they are what's left for people to chase after, after they've bought everything else in sight and there's nothing left to spend inf on.

That reverse pressure is very difficult to predict, because its all based on psychology. What will players do when presented with a lot of inf, nothing really to buy, but a couple of high value things which aren't worth very much either, but there's no other choices to bid up. Do they sit on their inf, or do they decide to chase. Auctions themselves are a bit irrational in the real world in the first place: when the money itself isn't actually worth anything either, people become highly unpredictable.

It sounded like the OP was asking which resistance sets have the best survivability, and technically speaking I can't count a rez as a survivability power. As a measure of the overall utility of the set, Soul Transfer certainly should count for a lot in my opinion: I'm a fan of the power myself.

The real problem is no one wants to give up Granite itself, and you're not going to get the rest of the set buffed up and still keep Granite. It just isn't going to happen beyond minor tweaking.

I think Dark and Electric are tied. Electric has the better smash/lethal/energy resistances but has a toxic hole. Dark has higher toxic and psionic resistances. If you are willing to use power surge, while its up Electric will be capped (scrapper or tanker/brute) to smash/lethal/fire/cold/energy/negative and have substantial toxic resistances.

Basically, Dark is the more well-rounded resist set, while Electric wins overall in the smash/lethal/energy/psionic race. Dark has the stronger heal, Electric has the big resist boosting tier 9.

The most dramatic shift in situation isn't the long-duration insps, which can be helpful, but the arrival of very high damage Lore pets, which reduces the equation from "beat GM regen" to "just stay alive."

I think the team insps buff pets as well, so the combination of the two opens doors to player characters that traditionally didn't have the tools to solo GMs.

Watch the markets carefully. Because of some upcoming developments in the game, the markets for very rare and PvPIO recipes and enhancements is a bit in flux. At the moment, Gladiator's Armor +Def procs are still going for about two billion inf, but make certain before you put the item up for sale because if the market adjusts downward to 1.6 billion and you put it up for 2, remember you don't get your deposit back if you have to cancel the sale.

Assault Rifle/Energy

Assault Rifle's tier 1/2 attacks have higher than normal range: 90 and 100 feet instead of the normal 80. And Energy Manipulation has Boost Range which can be made perma and boosts range by about 60%. So AR/Eng could hit targets with its tier 1 and 2 attacks at between 143 and 159 feet, which is basically sniper range.

Slot enough recharge, and you would have the ability to open with a snipe, then continue hitting the targets with single target shots at very long range. Slotting Cardiac or Intuition will get you an additional 20% range, which brings you up to an effective range of 160 feet+, double the range of normal blaster attacks.

That's going for maximum range without having to resort to range slotting. The other thing you need to do is deliver effective damage at that range. My Energy Blaster slots a lot of global recharge *and* slots the Force Feedback +rech procs. The net result is that I can deliver an almost continuous attack stream with Power Bolt, Power Blast, and Explosive Blast at 80 feet. You might be able to do better with Electric Blast because Ball Lightning activates faster than Explosive Blast, and you might be able to do better with Psychic Blast which has a number of good DPA 80 foot ranged attacks: Telekinetic Blast in particular has excellent DPA at range.

Of the three, Telekinetic Blast has the best shot at high single target damage, Electric Blast has the best shot at overall damage with the faster AoE, and Energy Blast has the best shot at keeping the targets at range with knockback.

The "passives first" thing was debated a lot in the past, but with inherent fitness its justification is much weaker: you can run FF with unslotted stamina without running out of end in the lower levels, so swapping dodge for FF just lowers the initial protection of the set.

If we're asking for a cottage rule exemption anyway due to rearranging the set order, I suggested this back in I6?ish:

Focused Fighting
Focused Senses
Dodge
Practiced Brawler
Agile
Quickness
X
Y
Elude

Fold AoE defenses into FS and Agile, and replace lucky and evasion with two new powers. Lots of potential options there, and some of the ones I suggested back then are obsolete today. I still like the idea of an endurance discount/+regen passive in X, though. Today, I would probably invent a mechanics specific to SR to go into Y. All sorts of possibilities for that spot.

If you tell a computer to do X, it will do X. If you tell a program to do X, it will do whatever the programmer told it to do.

A fundamental, critical selling point of this game from the very beginning has been that our costumes are disconnected from our power except where necessary. We don't have to specifically wear a specific costume to get a specific level or degree of power. Many, if not most MMOs have that sort of functional gear where you have to decide if you want to look a certain way, or look a different way because its more powerful to do so. This game explicitly chooses to not do that.

This is a foundational core of the game that should not be tampered with cavalierly. It simply isn't worth tarnishing one of the most consistently promoted parts of the game by making costumes with power bonuses, when its a major reason why many of the players play the game in the first place. In every single thread that has ever been started on these forums going back seven years, when the question "why do you play" or "what makes this game good" comes up, freedom to choose appearance gets mentioned more than any other single item, every single time.

The risk/reward for doing that even a little seems to me to be far too little reward for far too much risk.

At this point it would be worth reviewing the definition of sexism. You cannot argue that when comic book artists hypersexualize *all* characters that its only sexist towards women because only they care enough to be insulted. Oversexualizing both male and female appearance isn't specifically targeting women for discrimination and therefore by definition cannot be sexist. On the other hand, saying women are less able to tolerate that *is* specifically targeting women.

Which is not to say that there isn't sexism in comic books and comic book art in general. Just that the thesis that its obviously prejudiced against women *because* men don't care is illogical. It is ironically a sexist position.

It is obviously true that female characters are more *overtly* sexualized in many ways, but that would be a matter of degree. It would undermine the entire thought process to declare that the less overt sexualization of male characters is actually *also* sexist towards women because men like it. It is so illogically undermining that it damages the point equally so if the statement itself is either true or false.

She's actually invisible, and that's an image of another woman painted onto her.

What happens when the exact same justifications come from women?

That's not exactly relevant to the issue of someone having the point of view that women are overly objectified in media because when it happens to men it doesn't count because men like it.

That would be using a gender stereotype to justify objecting to a gender disparity. And that's equal parts funny and sad. Read the article. Of course the female costume depictions are sexist because no women would wear that; on the other hand no male costume depiction is sexist because all men would wear that. He implies this is obviously degrading to women because no woman would dress like this:



Fair enough. But this is not being equally sexist to men specifically because all men would dress like this if they could:



Quote: But it's not ridiculous because he's wearing a superpowered Speedo: That's how any man would react to being well-built, usually glistening and most often found on the beach.

And for good measure, he says all guys would also dress like this if they could get away with it:



Quote: Namor is the ultimate exemplar: He's exactly what any guy would wear if he thought he could get away with it. Even when Namor puts on more clothes, they're ridiculous and show off more chest than Tom Jones during heart surgery.

I'm not 100% certain, but I think those two sentences when concatenated together like that insult all men. Could be wrong there: is the current men's fashion "Tom Jones ridiculous?"