BellaStrega

What about a Vanguard HVAS? I have one of those.

Are you sure it's you? There's no cocky Kirk avatar.

I forgot about what? I had access to the market when I didn't have access to my IOs. Which, I should add, I didn't complain about. I just played characters without any IOs until I got paid and upgraded.

Learn to read English. I said "requires more overhead and/or money." In other words, your suggestions are time-consuming and require pointlessly complicated procedures or costly.

You either misunderstood or are misrepresenting what I wrote. I said it would cost money or simply be too much work. As in, the overhead necessary to manage multiple respecs just to reclaim ten IOs at a time, and finding a way to store them may not cost money, but it requires a pointless degree of work.

The guy can choose not to take the only reasonable advice he's been given, which is on him. If he doesn't want to spend the $2/month to get the license, there's not much he can do about his problem except I guess complain and be sad, but did you really think it was clever to post exactly the same thing multiple times just to make a single point?

It's knockdown. I have never seen anything get knocked back by it.

+70% damage means another 8-9 points.

Dark Consumption's damage isn't bad, although it does less damage than spring attack, and on a longer recharge. I do use it to inflict damage, but it only gets some global damage buffs, which means it's still not all that amazing.

Soul Drain I use to hit the cap and prime the use of Spring Attack, Judgement, and sometimes Dark Consumption.

Dark Regeneration I use when I need to heal. If you hit the damage cap with it (~65 damage or so) it's probably worthwhile to hit it as often as you can, but most stuff I fight already dies fairly quickly.

It looks like without soul drain, my dark regeneration has a chance to do up to 35 points of damage, thanks to the fire dot from Reactive Interface. That does make it more worthwhile.

Soul Drain + Spring Attack usually gets all the minions, and the lts. are either dead or running away. Stuff that remains stuck in place due to Cloak of Fear (Mids claims a 9.91 second duration - three lysosomes + Cardiac Partial Radial Revamp seems to do some kind of trick. That and the 127% boost to accuracy.

It isn't too shabby but it is kind of shabby. It has enough room for improvement that adding another AOE makes a big difference. It was easy to make room for that AOE because I already had two karma -KB and a steadfast -KB and dropped acrobatics years ago.

This is precisely why I suggested Spring Attack. For me, at any rate, it fills a hole in the combination that I've found frustrating for years.

Because totally the best use of one's respecs is to clear out all of the IOs so you can slot SOs and play your characters on a premium account. Right...

And also because letting your often costly IOs go up in smoke for a relative pittance in a respec is something people are likely to do.

That was sarcasm, by the way.

I would assume that people wouldn't typically suggest solutions that can cost up to 8550 points (19 packs of five unslotters each, ~100 dollars) to avoid paying a $2 or $15 monthly fee.

Every suggestion you've made aside from using the alternate build, requires more overhead and/or money than simply buying the invention license. In other words, you're not really helping.

The OP's solutions are to go ahead and buy the license, upgrade back to VIP, use alternate builds for SOs if available, or not be able to play his characters. Respeccing over and over again to recover IOs so he can use them later, buying 95 enhancement unslotters, etc. are just not practical solutions.

Why I think it's disingenuous: Your suggestions are not helpful and I can't imagine that you don't know that, given the sarcastic manner in which you've delivered them.

To the OP:

Have you spent all your reward tokens? That alone might unlock the invention system. When I renewed I was only two short of tier 7 after I spent all of my unspent tokens.

Otherwise, your options are what I said above. That's unlikely to change.

It does explain - it's a leftover from when Sister Psyche was inhabiting Aurora's body.

As for the rest, maybe I've just read enough X-Men that I don't find such things confusing (whether or not I find them a worthwhile plot element is another issue).

Oh, you mean Castle?

Actually, he's a pretty nice guy.

This is disingenuous, since enhancement unslotters are not free and unless you've upgraded your inventory, you get 10 enhancements recovered per respec.

When I came back and saw I didn't have access to my IOs, I shrugged and played different characters.

Admittedly, I had 17 server slots, and was only a couple reward tokens from permanent IO access. Plus, I upgraded to VIP so I didn't have to worry anymore.

Actually, this was due to the fact that my guild only raided three days out of the week because they didn't want to burn out. There was certainly enough content to raid all week if we really wanted to, but there was no need.

Well, I've leveled up and geared alts and the process was fairly quick and painless. Some games are not quick and painless.

Actually, I've found a lot of people enjoy doing that. I've also noticed that in some guilds sometimes people will hit the same level band and be able to do a lot of group quests together, which makes helping mutually beneficial.

I don't find playing alts to be unmanageable.

This statement makes a lot of sense to me.

I don't mind running the same content, unless I dislike it (I am so glad that Atlas Park was revamped - the prior content was not that good).

Indeed. This is the perspective I'm coming from: What games are like now.

Quality of life seems to be a big thing for a lot of (not all) MMORPG designers these days, so pointless and frustrating roadblocks aren't left all over the place. They're more likely to add ways to funnel you into the fun stuff.

I did get to the end in another MMO. I got to the final boss, downed him, and, uh, then what? I was geared up well enough to do all available content and trivialize most of it. I did all the fights. I was done. I wasn't impeded from getting to that point. At some point the level cap was raised, more content and more raids were added, but that wasn't an impediment. It was an extension, and eventually people hit the final boss for that expansion.

If players are irrelevant to this discussion, however, then there's no point to the discussion at all. Given that players are central to the point of an endgame.

I have the suspicion you're assigning arguments to me here. I also have the suspicion that a lot of the complaints about soloing speed for incarnate stuff in DA is exaggerated.

Why are you throwing out new definitions of words that they don't have? Altitis doesn't mean "Creating them and not really playing them." It just means creating a lot of characters. So when I say I have a lot of characters I like to play, you assign a different meaning to the word than I used and then tell me what my playstyle is from your reinterpretation of the word. This kind of thing is one of the reasons I find your posts in this thread so incomprehensible: "Endgame isn't fun, except when it is. And players are irrelevant to discussions of the endgame, only how it's designed which isn't fun except the designers want it to be fun."

I can't untangle what you're saying to make sense of it. I'm not saying whether that's your fault or my fault, but something like telling me how I play the game based on how you use a word without taking a moment to consider that not only do I not use the word that way, I have never heard it used that way. How can you base an argument on such a thing? It's like we're not even speaking the same language.

I have no idea what you mean. It took me two nights of doing trials to reach +2 on my scrapper (T3 in Alpha and Destiny) and T2 in Judgement and Interface. Another night, I will have +3 and at least T3 in every slot. I have a second character just getting started and she won't be any slower. You're using the words "time sink" to mean something that simply doesn't apply.

But see, this isn't because getting your incarnate filled out to T4 is hard or time-consuming, it's because you don't want to participate in the content in which it's accessible. You've developed this interpretation of what the content is like that does not reflect the reality of said content. I am not saying you should like it or want to team, but what I am saying is that if you do not want to team, that's a choice with consequences.

Dark Astoria does take much longer, but the time it takes to get your most substantial rewards on one character isn't really much, and they're on a 20-hour cooldown. So you can probably work on multiple characters without investing a lot of time per character to gain some incarnate advancement.

And here you're speaking another language again: CoH's replayability to me is basically the same whether you include the Incarnate system or not. Actually, the Incarnate system makes it more fun for me, as it gives me more options. I have more fun playing my incarnate than I did before she was an incarnate. Not that I didn't have fun before, but there's something satisfying about having a nuke on a two minute timer.

The actual endgame tends to be stuff you do when you're at the level cap. For me, that's doing the SSAs once a week for the rewards, doing incarnate trials when I feel up to it (which is not every night), doing tip missions for merits and drops, and playing my characters that aren't 50 yet. And I have characters scattered from 16 to 43 outside of my 50s.

Trials don't come down to massive organization, communication, and preparation. They're not even a blip in comparison to raids as far as complexity or need for organization. Basically, you need 12+ people (depending on trial) who have enough level shifts to actually fight the mobs in the trial, who can listen to basic instructions (like "mez Mother Mayhem and pull giant monsters onto her"), and who know how to play their characters. There is nothing in City of Heroes that is approaches other games' raid difficulties, nor does anything take nearly as much time.

Given that you were complaining about endgame and trials in this thread, I don't see why it should be surprising that I have focused on the concept of raids.

I'm sort of gobsmacked that you keep describing systems that I've found to be relatively painless and fun in the MMOs I've played as boring, but again that comes back to I feel like at this point we're speaking different languages.

Trials that aren't level 50 in CoH were a mistake when they were introduced. The Eden Trial had such a narrow level range, for example, that getting 8 people who could do it was not easy. I remember having to call one off because the 8th person we could find was 38.

I made sure on my first character (the same one I currently take on incarnate trials now, actually) to do all of the task forces and trials as they were level appropriate (and of course this was prior to exemplaring). It was a pain, but the trials were much worse than the Task Forces. I also got into a Sewer Trial by virtue of organizing one on the forum, and I don't see them forming either.

On the Champion server, I seem to recall that a couple of years ago that Hamidon and mothership raids were fairly common, twice a month each I think. I certainly recall the latter I was usually on the leader/organizer's team, and in the former I ended up leading the ranged teams a few times. I don't know if people still do them (I haven't bothered to look) but you can get incarnate stuff (at least shards) from them.

But they're not time-consuming treadmill grinds that require you to waste your life away doing nothing but trials. I don't understand what your complaint about what they're used for is because it's at odds with what I see when I actually join one.

ChaosExMachina brought it up.

Heh, I didn't think you were calling me out. I was just curious.

Which claims?

Perhaps you should find out what people who play the Incarnate trials think of them, how long they take to run, how long they take to organize, and how often people fail them. Or how many are unwillingly roped into participating. How do you even pull that last one off? Everyone I've ever known who hated raiding either stopped or wouldn't start. No one could force them to do it, or rope them into it.

I am fairly suspicious of your argument because you're making how people view and interact with the contentin practical, empirical terms irrelevant in favor of theory about what endgame content is supposed to be as you describe it here. As long as people who participate in it and the ways they do so aren't a factor, it's not hard to use theory to propose all kinds of things about it, but all of this is irrelevant if the people involved only matter insofar as they can be made to fit what you're saying.

So what you're saying is that it makes people who don't really have much experience with raids and who don't understand them hate them for all kinds of arbitrary reasons that practical experience might easily debunk, depending on the game?

Except endgame raiding is all about progress, so you can handle the next tier of raids. Yes, that's something of a treadmill, but it also means people aren't expected to simply run the same raids over and over and over again forever, but to run a particular raid until the next raid is released and they're able to handle it.


This is super bizarre. I raid and I have as much altitis as anyone else. Right now I'm playing probably a dozen characters over two separate MMOs and participating in that endgame content in one of them. When I get tired of a game, I stop playing it until I decide I want to give it a go again. I know hardcore raiders who had filled up every server slot with characters at the level cap, who not only did their guild's/SG's raids, but also did PUG raids with their other characters. I have no frame of reference for understanding this statement.
In other MMOs, the only reason I've had to pick a main was for the sake of raiding, because raiding is much more focused and time-intensive than it is here. But even when I was raiding regularly, nearly all of my actual playing time outside of raids was leveling alts. I was never forced to exclusively play one character all the time. The current game I play other than CoH lends itself fairly handily to altitis by giving each character type its own storyline.

I feel like we're arguing over an idea of what an endgame represents, rather than the reality of what endgames are, at least in many American MMOs. Nothing you've argued here really resembles anything I've done in the trials I've done here. When I log into CoH, sometimes I do trials. Sometimes I do tip missions. Sometimes I run SSA missions. Sometimes I hang out in Ouro and chat with global friends. Sometimes I log into a sub-50 character and get them through about 2-5 levels. None of these things is particularly more difficult, time-consuming, etc. than any of the others.

It's not secret info. It's been talked about repeatedly over the past several years. Castle alluded to it when it came time to revise the blaster inherent.

Your argument that the data must be bad because you don't like how Castle revised PVP is irrelevant. Datamining doesn't tell you how to fix disparities, it can simply show you the disparities that exist. Analyzing the data (which is going to be the same unless you twist it or change it to fit your perceptions) is a separate process from implementing solutions to the disparities identified in the data. Thus, your reference to PVP changes is completely irrelevant.

As Arcanaville says, this is unfalsifiable, and thus not useful.