Arcanaville

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I think that I would be happy if they did this:

A. Slightly reduce the effectiveness of IH as it stands, but turn it back into a toggle.

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I would be happy if they slightly reduced the effectiveness of Elude but turned it back into a toggle also.

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I think you are talking about concept mechanics wise, while the post you are responding to meant concept as in, "I am an alien from the planet XYZ, and being in Earth's atmosphere gives me superhuman strength and resilience" or "I was trained from birth as a cage fighter, I know martial arts and have incredible reflexes". Marathon builds and the like are a different kind of concept that I don't think people like Statesman and Positron even think about. I do think they wanted people to build characters based upon the other kind of concept.

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I think most people's visions of their characters is something in between "I'm from outer space and punch things" and "I evade sixty-two point seven percent of the punches thrown at me." Its often a "I envision my character being able to stand toe to toe with her opponents and hit them way more often than she gets hit back" sort of thing.

That sort of thing probably creates circumstances where the player would sacrifice some offense for some defense, if it significantly improved that feeling of not getting hit. But do they know how to do that? Do they know which trade offs will work and which ones won't?

I recently posted about a no-stamina MA/SR build I experimented with for a few months. You do not stumble into such a thing by accident, and you don't just try it out with random slotting until it works. You might not need a calculator, but you do need to know what things cost and how endurance reduction works, and especially how ED works, to have any shot at doing something like that.

If someone's concept involved taking so many powers that there was no room for stamina, could they pull that off if they didn't fully understand how everything worked, at least with regard to endurance?

And Inventions will only make this worse, in many ways, by giving players so many more options to build non-optimal concept builds, but making it very hard to figure out how to do it at all.


Being from Planet X is backstory: you fulfil that by putting it in your character description. Being super strong has mechanical implications. So does being super evasive, super sturdy, etc.

I remember reading once a long time ago where Buffy (of the Scrapper/Tanker guides) said that her original vision was a Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) like character, which sounded Reflex-like. But in retrospect, her vision was actually more Invuln-like when she saw how the sets played. That's a case of the numbers and mechanics not connecting with the mental concept, which has nothing directly to do with mechanics, but much more visual/conceptual (but perhaps less abstract) character vision.

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The less you know numbers wise, the more you are likely to just pick powers that go for flavor, which is what this game was attemping to appeal to.

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The devs think that to a degree, but its not true. Or at least, its not as true as it should be. If you want to make a "marathon build" that is a conceptual decision. But can you, if you don't know the endurance numbers and how endurance reduction works and what stamina does? You can try, but a numbers-aware person can do better. If you want to make a non-stop shooting blaster, can you do that if you don't know how recharge works? If you want to make a scrapper that sacrifices offense for defense, and you are willing to hit softer if you get hit less often, can you do that if you don't know how defense works, and how defense stacks? If you want to make a flying tank, can you do that effectively if you can't figure out how the balance the endurance costs of fighting while flying?

The problem is that its all fine and good to say "we want players to design by concept" but how can they do that if there are no accurate textual description of what any power does, and more importantly, how every power interacts - even qualitatively - with every other?

Which one protects you more: tough or weave? If you are a blaster? A super reflexes scrapper? An Invuln tanker? Not easy questions to answer, and very difficult to encapsulate into the text descriptions of the powers even in theory. But knowing that can be important to someone's concept, even if its not a min/max concept.

How do you translate a mental concept for a character with the powers you have to have, unless you actually know what the powers do?


Honestly: the devs original design for this game was not to encourage building for concept. It was actually to be forced to explore the powers system. In effect, the game wasn't designed around you eventually building exactly what you wanted, it was designed around you getting bitten by a radioactive spider, and not knowing if that was going to allow you to walk on walls, or grow eight legs. You were not *supposed* to know what you were going to become.

If you were supposed to get exactly what you wanted, respecs would be unlimited.

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But it's so superior in PvP that bringing any other set for a Tank is basically like not bringing a Secondary.

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Actually, superstrength is a legitimate rival for Energy Melee. Fire can be, if its specifically paired with Fiery Aura.

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Am I the only one that already has a headache from Inventions?

Sounds far too complicated to be fun or exciting to work with at all.

Read the guides and still lost, none of them were particularly helpful but given what we know that's not unexpected.

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I love all these little quirks and complexities in the game mechanics systems. Heck, if the maths in this game weren't so secretive and screwy, there wouldn't be any need for people like Arcana and myself on these forums.

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One thing I've said for quite a while now is that while its nice and all to be the Numbers Maven, the players of the game would be much better served if there was no need for a Numbers Maven. So much of the game's mechanics are not just non-transparent, but non-intuitive or difficult to explain, that it creates opportunities for people who know the numbers to get more out of the system than people who don't. Not just min-maxers, which is always true to an extent, but even concept builders, who have a tremendous advantage in executing concept builds when they know what everything does and how well, over someone shooting in the dark.

The devs need to understand that when Iakona and I lose, everyone else wins.


And Iakona is safe anyway: his spreadsheets are much more useful than the Prima Guides are even if the devs released all the numbers.

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A Set Bonus which gave +Regeneration would *always* be active in Dull Pain, while an Enhancement which grants +Regeneration would only work for a set period of time after Dull Pain was activated.

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Hmm. Well it looks like Invuln took quite an IO-beating in the last two days. DA and Regen still look pretty good though. Time to go to plan C for my Invulns on build optimization.

Suddenly, SR options just got even narrower. To buy into the res&defense special IO, your only option is tough in the fighting pool. To buy into Numina, as a practical matter the only option is Health in the fitness pool, unless you plan on spamming aid self on yourself constantly and not attack anything. Which is just as well, I suppose, because there's no way to get enough +recovery from slotting the medicine pool anymore, so stamina is virtually a requirement again anyway.

And Castle you can forget about that suggestion for Practiced Brawler now, and focus on the SR passives instead.

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Just wanted to say I read it all the way through, and I was fascinated. (Side note: and I thought *I* was thorough writing the Kheldian guide. Hah. Disabused.)

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Well, I wrote a short thing comparing SR, Invuln, and Regen in I3, and the feedback was "it doesn't include this" and "you can't be sure about that." So I wrote another one for I4. And then I5. And then I6/I7. Each time responding to the most common (and rational) objections. The next iteration would look at primary/secondary synergy, but I kinda lost the energy to do it, although its in the back of my mind to attempt that at some point (its mentioned in the analysis pieces above).


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Another thing to consider: given how much SR benefit from lucks, consider the difference that Divine Avalanche/Parry makes; if you're bold, you might even ask what cost it has relative to another choice (ie, the weaker of the initial two attacks which is usually skipped, or cycling other attacks faster) in terms of lost DPS, but what gain in survivability you yield.

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Parry makes a heck of a lot of difference. The thing is that Parry is so strong, you can get to the tohit floor with just it alone: its base 15% defense, slottable to 23.4% defense, and stackable to 46.8% defense. That's the tohit floor right there, with no other defenses. What SR can do is not require you to stack it, and that's a qualitative advantage SR has over other sets, but a difficult to quantify one because the opportunity costs for stacking Parry are not as high as it might appear: parry and DA are both reasonable attacks in their own right, and do a lot more damage than, say, cobra strike or stun, and they are in sets that tend to have attack chain gaps that allow it to be used without a high attack chain penalty.

The difference can be extreme: my Kat/Invuln can tank Snaptooth and his reinforcements on Invincible, almost (but not quite) indefinitely with divine avalanche spammed, without unstoppable. That would be the best case scenario for Parry/DA: an awful lot of either melee or lethal (or both) attacks.

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Fascinating! Just 7% would do it. I guess that's why people see such a dramatic improvement when they pick up Weave and/or Maneuvers on a SR or EA, because those "solve" the "problem" of the Defense sets.

It might be a good course of action for SR and EA to get a buff of at least half of that to help it out. Oh heck, the whole 7%, why not? Regen can pick useful things like Tough up too (and it doesn't even "need" it) to become even more uber.

Thanks for the info!

BTW, do you think Regen is in need of further nerfing, or is it more a matter of buffing the underperforming sets to bring them into line with it?

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As I mentioned in the original posts, I don't think Regen is specifically in need of a nerf. If I had designed the set at the beginning of time, I would have not given the set Dull Pain, so that burst damage was more of an achilles heel for the set, and focused more of its protection on +regen; but as it stands, there's no specific justification for making that change now.

If regen was all by itself at the top of the food chain, one could make an argument that it was overpowered, but DA scrappers can approach and exceed its performance, albeit at higher build costs and with more caveats to that performance level. Given that, it would be simpler to bring Invuln and SR in line with DA and Regen than the other way around.

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1. Make sure every power set has a specific defensive weakness, such that possession of the offensive ability to exploit that weakness offers a significant, material advantage to the possessor, verses that power set.

2. Make sure every power set has a specific defensive strength, such that anything that offensively focuses on that strength will be at a material disadvantage verses that set.

3. Make sure its non-trivial to buy your way out of your weakness.

4. Make sure that for every power set, one of two things is true:

4a. The set contains the offensive means to exploit its own weakness

or

4b. The set offensively focuses on its own strength

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But that does increase homogeniety. If everyone adheres to the formula then everyone is more similar.

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What formula are you talking about? The quote above describes a design methodology for power sets, not builds. Saying that enforces homogeneity is like saying that the current system enforces homogeneity because everyone is currently forced to be one of twelve archetypes.

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No, it's not. And if your design methodology does what it suggests then homogeniety will be increased because similarity will be increased. That's what the word means.

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Theoretically speaking, I could use those design principles and design more different archetypes than CoH currently has powersets. They do not in any way specifically require any additional homogeneity. In fact, I could take the *existing* powers, and reshuffle them in a way that expresses those design priniciples also, which again implies that they do not make any sort of diversity statement at all. They make no specific restrictions on what can exist, only what specific combinations of things can exist, and the same restriction currently exists for CoH now.

The only options it eliminates are specifically unbalanced options. But it creates at least as many as it eliminates, which makes it a non-issue for diversity.

You're going to need to be very specific, because I do not see what you are suggesting is self-evident.

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Ice, well, I'll give you Ice, because really Ice isn't weak at anything. High single target damage, decent AoE, good control, strong mez. Its only missing element for a blaster set is that it has no long range snipe, which given how the devs designed snipes and how they engineered the game environment, is not a significant loss given all of its other advantages.

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I don't see the 'decent AoE'. Ice Storm is more of a control. Frost Breath is slow and narrow. Blizzard is very good.

I think Ice's downsides is that as you said it lacks a snipe, which I personally do not believe is a big deal. It lacks a targetable AoE. It lacks a decent width cone. In exchance it's the best single target killer in the AT.

It's why I picked it when it was 'gimp'.

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Frost breath does 50% more damage than either torrent or explosive blast, and has an accuracy bonus. In actual practice, the activation time of frost breath is not as much of a problem as it appears, because the normal ice ranged attacks activate so fast that there are always gaps in Ice chains.

Ice storm does a fair amount of damage if you can keep the targets under the effect. And unlike some other sets, Ice actually has slows to try to keep targets under its rains.

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Most balance posts in the PvP forum tend to point to the favored sets and say either: 1) Make all sets like them; or 2) Nerf them so they are like everyone else.

The problem with that is that many of these sets were specifically created with the advantages they have because they aren't good at other things. So to fix this would require that we increase the homogeniety in the play experience. This is something that the developers really don't want to do.

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What is Energy Melee not good at? - ridiculously high damage, rarely resisted dmg type, insane amounts of stuns which are less resisted than many other side effects.

What is ice blast not good at? - high dmg crazy fast attacks, with slows that are rarely resisted and fatal when stacked

What is spines not good at? - crazy range, slows that are rarely resisted and fatal when stacked

The problem with these sets is they have powers for which there is no check or balance. The simple solution outside of nerfing said powers is to provide players a way to check the effects that make the powers overly powerful. Make stun resist and slow resist powers available to players via new pool powers. Energy melee simply needs a nerfing, I think anyone who is being honest and neutral that knows anything about game balance would admit this (and I have 3 toons with energy melee and love it for obvious reasons...).

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Those sets are designed to function in a game with both PvE and PvP elements. Energy Melee has strong single target damage but weak AoE. Spines has strong AoE and range, but costs a lot of endurance to power continuously.

Ice, well, I'll give you Ice, because really Ice isn't weak at anything. High single target damage, decent AoE, good control, strong mez. Its only missing element for a blaster set is that it has no long range snipe, which given how the devs designed snipes and how they engineered the game environment, is not a significant loss given all of its other advantages.

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My hands hurt from beating that dead horse, MoG. I'm going to rest here for awhile with my Regen brothers and sisters and dream about Toggle IH.

Hmmmm! Toggle IH is like Thin Mints Girl Scouts cookies, I will always want them no matter how long its been since I had one last.?

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I'm just waiting for someone to figure out how to make IH perma (effectively Toggle IH). I suspect that someone will try to make it happen or will make it happen.

If there is a way to break the system, the clever and ingenious minds of the Scrapper forum will figure it out.

All because we scrappers (especially us green glowing types) are smart AND good looking.

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Perma-IH...umm. No.

Perma 800%+ regen rate... No problem. (Well, it's not quite that easy, but I think it's possible.)

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Perma 800%, I haven't figured out yet. Boosting reconstruction into the stratosphere, that one is possible (all that +Heal and +Recharge).

I think I can get to about 650% total regen, though, and perma-DP. Also, the equivalent of about 700% regen with reconstruction's heals. That's like 1700% regen without any DP or recon, which just grazes the lower edge of the non-DP non-recon pre-I5 regens.

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1. Make sure every power set has a specific defensive weakness, such that possession of the offensive ability to exploit that weakness offers a significant, material advantage to the possessor, verses that power set.

2. Make sure every power set has a specific defensive strength, such that anything that offensively focuses on that strength will be at a material disadvantage verses that set.

3. Make sure its non-trivial to buy your way out of your weakness.

4. Make sure that for every power set, one of two things is true:

4a. The set contains the offensive means to exploit its own weakness

or

4b. The set offensively focuses on its own strength

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But that does increase homogeniety. If everyone adheres to the formula then everyone is more similar.

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What formula are you talking about? The quote above describes a design methodology for power sets, not builds. Saying that enforces homogeneity is like saying that the current system enforces homogeneity because everyone is currently forced to be one of twelve archetypes.

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How much Defense would SR need to provide so that SR performs above the 3 minion mortality line? How much would it need to be equal to Regeneration?

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If we ignored power pool defense stacking, then curiously (at least in my opinion) both answers are the same: approximately 7% defense. 7% defense makes three even minions of damage indefinitely sustainable, and it also pushes SR into the same range of damage mitigation as Regen. Factoring in a lot of intangibles, especially mitigation breakdown, it would be slightly lower than Regen performance at sustainable levels, but would be much stronger than Regen in extended burst damage situations. Overall, that would wash in my opinion.

One problem is that 37% defense for SR puts them in easy striking distance of going all the way to Elude-level protection with about 8% more defense, which is easily doable with power pool defenses (specifically, with weave and one other). However, its unclear just how much of a problem that is, if Inventions give both SR *and* Invuln the opportunity to get to, or exceed, those protection levels anyway. Regen will be able to stack enough protection to also exceed those levels, mostly by approaching SR/Invuln levels of damage mitigation, on top of its regeneration (not exactly, but within the ballpark of: enough to take the edge completely off of burst damage issues with regen and high order damage pyramids).

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The system you propose appears sound, but it would also entail a complete rebuild of CoH, essentially CoH Mark II. Do you consider the current system hopeless?

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Offered only as direct counterexample to the belief that a balanced PvP system is impossible unless homogenous. Actually, were I to design one myself, it would be diversity itself that would assure PvP balance, and that's just one element of how that might work.

Its not impossible. Its not even really all that difficult in principle.

Do I think the current system is hopeless? Well, that would depend on what you mean by "the current system." It isn't balanced now, so hoping it will be tomorrow isn't going to generate any results. The only influence players have on a system is to amplify imbalances over time. That's what players of games ultimately do. So on its own, it can only really get worse.

But that doesn't mean it couldn't evolve into something much more balanced. The Invention System was a golden opportunity to do so, but as it stands now, while it seems to offer certain interesting improvements in areas that might improve balance, overall it tends to give those who have, more. My impression of the Inventions currently available in the Invention System says, for example, that Ice/Energy blasters aren't going to be hurting when it comes to leveraging IOs, and neither are Regen scrappers. And even though the devs all but admit publicly that tohit buffs are problematic for defense sets in PvP, the IO system is *loaded* with tohit buffs all over the place. Today, most PvPers have tohit buffs. In I9, if you don't at least have perma-rage's tohit buff permanently plastered on you, you just aren't trying hard enough. That's not good for defense sets.

It *could* get better. In a way, the Invention System is a theoretical way to introduce very radical changes to the game, without radically changing the game. Look at how it tosses certain cherished dogmas aside: blasters are dogmatically barred from getting mez protection or resistance in general, but they can now invent it in some cases. Change is possible, if difficult and not a little circuitous.

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Most balance posts in the PvP forum tend to point to the favored sets and say either: 1) Make all sets like them; or 2) Nerf them so they are like everyone else.

The problem with that is that many of these sets were specifically created with the advantages they have because they aren't good at other things. So to fix this would require that we increase the homogeniety in the play experience. This is something that the developers really don't want to do.

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This is not necessarily true, it just happens to be true for most trivial balance suggestions.

Here's a set of possible principles you could design a "balanced" PvP system around. They are neither necessary nor sufficient on their own, but they directly address many problems some players believe are intractible.

1. Make sure every power set has a specific defensive weakness, such that possession of the offensive ability to exploit that weakness offers a significant, material advantage to the possessor, verses that power set.

2. Make sure every power set has a specific defensive strength, such that anything that offensively focuses on that strength will be at a material disadvantage verses that set.

3. Make sure its non-trivial to buy your way out of your weakness.

4. Make sure that for every power set, one of two things is true:

4a. The set contains the offensive means to exploit its own weakness

or

4b. The set offensively focuses on its own strength


This is possible to do with tremendous diversity, but it creates two balancing mechanisms automatically.

1. If there exists a "most powerful" defensive set, then the more common it became in PvP, the more often it would be forced to either face off against other things that possessed its specific weakness, or would be forced to attack things it couldn't defeat. It becomes self-annihilating for everyone to build identically, and it would then be impossible for a "most powerful" build to actually be popular: popularity would automatically equate to relative weakness.

2. Casual PvPers might be disadvantaged by not leveraging their builds as well as hardcore PvPers, but its much less likely that they would be penalized for choosing "weak" PvP combinations.


This is not perfectly straightforward to do in CoH, because every AT has multiple powers sets, which complicates things. But that doesn't specifically invalidate the principle. Take the simple case of a game with nothing but regen scrappers with nothing but +regen, SR scrappers with nothing but +defense, and Invuln scrappers with nothing but +resistance. If regen scrappers were the only ones given high -regen, SR scrappers were the only ones with +tohit, and Invuln scrappers were the only ones with unresistable damage, there would be no "best secondary" if they were reasonably well balanced in terms of average damage mitigation. It suggests, as a proof of concept, that PvP balance does not mandatorally require homogeneity.

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BTW... how have you managed to make missions more tactical? The only way I have found is to build a toon (mainly /dev blasters) that find the need to use tactics more necessary.

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Try soloing Rularuu missions on invincible with a blaster. It gets fairly tactical for me.

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Do you mean the regular Kora fruit/clear cave x of Rularuu missions? I've done those with my Blaster set to Invincible... it's a pain in the keister but not really hard. Well it was hard for me but I'm not an uber player either... I consider myself to be about average. I don't think I'm capable of soling an AV in any case... I'd think for the really good players the Rularuu missions on Invincible would be fairly easy.

*Looks back at my post* Ugh. No sarcasm was intended there, though it may possibly look that way. I'm sick with the flu and doped up on codeine cough suppressant and NyQuil... cut me a little slack please.

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Its been a while since I've done the Kora fruit missions. Do those have +3 bosses in them? The ones I'm thinking of do.

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BTW... how have you managed to make missions more tactical? The only way I have found is to build a toon (mainly /dev blasters) that find the need to use tactics more necessary.

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Try soloing Rularuu missions on invincible with a blaster. It gets fairly tactical for me.

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I have solo'd AV's with out temp powers.

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If that is what I was trying to do, I would have just said so. I've done that many times.

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Opinions of Ulitmas's motives....

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Never have I seen my name so butchered since Castle called me Optimus... then again there was a time back in Everquest when I was tanking a raid mob after our first tank went down and he yelled

GO TULIMUS

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You have no idea.

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Disable travel powers while carrying meteorite samples.

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Bloody Bay is empty most of the time. So I'll just walk from meteor to meteor instead of superspeeding, big deal. What difference does that make? 30 minutes instead of 15?

I'd prefer the acquisition method be kept as-is, but the power limited to one charge.

Villainside I don't have über power builds, and getting a shivan has been the only way for me to get past EBs solo.

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OK, then disable travel powers AND add frequent Shivan ambushes towards the carriers of the meteorites. Also suppress all stealth powers.

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And then, the Langoliers come.

Well, had a chance to test both MA/SR under Elude, and Kat/Invuln in the Snaptooth mission at invincible.

My experience under Elude says two things:

1. MoG is not a good idea
2. EvilGeko is one unlucky guy, and is not to be trusted on matters of defense.

Under Elude, Snaptooth and his various horde were hitting more or less as expected for high (but only reasonably high) accuracy foes. If I ignored the minions except for periodically dragon's tailing them, and focused strictly on Snaptooth, eventually I'd be mobbed by minions, which became LTs, which became bosses, because of repeated DT. Snaptooth is an AV-class threat: he hits sometimes very hard, and occasionally *really* hard. If you're hit by *really hard* you had better be at full health.

The problem is that that darned fight takes forever: almost as long as Elude lasts, and he's *going* to hit you. Elude by itself cannot keep up with him. Of course, this is my no-stamina build, so it also doesn't have health either, but I don't think that is strong enough to make enough of a difference to the damage levels sustained. I needed aid self *and* respites, because when you're hit by the big one from Snaptooth, you really can't wait around for three aid self cycles all the time.

You do better if you keep killing the minions, to get them out of the way: it lowers the chances that you'll be randomly hit by too big of a burst. But it makes the fight a lot longer, and you'll still need aid self/respites.

Basically, Elude doesn't work without a lot of extra healing. Which means MoG won't work period. At least I don't see how it could under Invincible. Especially with any scrapper set besides dark melee, which has fear, and a less resisted damage type. With MA, redcap smashing resistance is so high I might as well be trying to kick my way into the hillside.

However, dead in fifteen seconds? EG is definitely not the one to send out for the coin toss. With MoG and DP, I'd expect the average Regen to last about 45-60 seconds into the fight if you saved MoG specifically for the EB, and didn't fritter its health away on the minions and LTs that you fight before the last spawn.


Katana/Invuln was *really* interesting. I just let the minions come, and focused solely on Snaptooth (I did hit the minions with my AoEs, though). By the time I was fighting the EB, I had fully saturated invincibility, and I was stacking DA. Nothing but melee and lethal, and essentially I was perma-eluded with Invuln resistances (to lethal, no less), and dull pain, and aid self. This is actually doable without unstoppable, but you have to get just a bit lucky. What will periodically mess you up unless you have tactics is that SR never has to worry about the head-pounder knocking out perception, but get hit by that as Kat/Invuln, and say bye-bye to divine avalanche: you can't target anyone. If that happens, and Dull Pain is down, and aid self is recharging, and they get lucky, you're dead: can't catch up with all the damage unless you run.

Otherwise, Kat/Invuln actually has a chance to complete this mission at invincible, without inspirations. People who try this will get I3 flashbacks. A mission with swarming lethal minions: its a gift from the invuln gods (but I wouldn't recommend this without parry or DA for a scrapper: invincibility is not strong enough on its own. An Invuln tanker, though, could probably tank them all just fine).

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Does that 30-40 minutes include the time it took you to get Shivan's and/or nukes? If not, how long do you spend in prep time before each of these solo runs?

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A Shivan takes me about 10 minutes to get. That also comes with 5 charges or 5 runs. Additionally, I VERY RARELY use nukes. (They do take a lot of time)

The COV respec Trial I beat with just a Shivan. Same with the 25-30 Strikeforce (Renault)

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Solution: PREVENT EARNING A MISSION COMPLETE BONUS FOR ANY TRIAL, TASK FORCE MISSION, OR STRIKE FORCE MISSION IF ONLY ONE MEMBER OF THE TEAM IS ONLINE AND ON THE MAP WHEN THE OBJECTIVES ARE MET ...!!

Now, you CAN'T solo them - you HAVE to have two or more people online, and on the relevant map - which sets the spawn sizes accordingly. Problem solved.

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There's just too many ways around this, such that adding complex rules to prevent could impact casual players unaware of the rules.

In this case, the correct way to dodge this is already well known to CoV respec afficionados. Log out everyone but one person, one person spawns the entire map, everyone else then logs back in. Someone who wanted to solo a TF already has to have at least one other member attached to the TF, possibly logged out. At the last mission, just log that placeholder back into the game, after the final map has been spawned. Problem solved.

It is not easy at all to regulate who gets what reward. As it is, real players with no intent to exploit the system are occasionally not getting mission rewards, because the devs have some funky rules that determine who has been "on the mission long enough to receive a reward" (which is pretty obviously not just time-based).

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Here's another suggestion to prevent farming:

Limit Trials/TF awards to once per 24 hours similar to how the Recluse Strike Force functions. This would prevent people from farming these solo.

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Dude, what the hell.

Go screw up some other game.

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Screw over another game? Inventions aren't even live if they made it so that invention rewards were only given in TF/Trial once a day how would that be different where now they are given 0 times a day?

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Read your own quote. You didn't suggest that they limit drops to once a day. You said limit rewards to once a day.

And given the way it sounds like drop rate schedules work, I still think that's insane. You aren't guaranteed anything great every time through.

If I want to spend a weekend day and do 2-3 trials, I damn well want a reward for it. I don't need your BS screwing me out of options.

A limit, maybe. A limit of one a day is utter crap. Once an hour? Once every 90 mins? OK. Not once a damn day.

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I believe the idea is to limit one per trial per day. You could theoretically run six different task forces in one day, and get the appropriate reward for each task force in that day. You just couldn't run Positron eight times in one day and get the special recipe drop.

At least, I think that's the idea. A limit on drops period is not a good one. Run two task forces in a 24 hour period, and you should get the reward for both. Many groups make a game of it: task force tuesday, or whatever. Its not really worth penalizing those people, who are really playing the game as intended.

I think whether we like it or not, they'll eventually institute some sort of per-trial/TF limit. *Some* TFs are probably just a little too quick to be allowed to do over and over again (think Croatoa).

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That's interesting to me, Arcanaville. I enjoy the fights I get and the feeling I get from defeating EBs without the use of any inspirations or temp powers.

That's not even a possibility with AVs. With ANY build.

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I'm still working on a long term feasibility experiment I don't want to discuss a lot yet, but lets just say that I have a build that is soloing things you wouldn't believe without video proof: no temp powers, no inspirations, no nothing.