Ben_Arizona

It would, however, introduce the new problem of people using ID to grief other people in the streets.

I have reason to believe your source is inaccurate.

Anyhow, that doesn't say anything about whether Elec Control will be a knockoff or unique. I quite like the "sapper control" idea and hope it's what they go with.

Might as well. Unless you're punishing very severely for an incomplete set, it wouldn't change much. I was figuring on, in general, being able to get 50% merit return on your sets, so that on average it takes 11 recipes to get the most expensive reward or 8 recipes to get a LotG.

Recipes in the lowest level ranges tend to be 3 or 4 pieces. Even for a six-piece low-end set, there tend to be at least two or three pieces that fall in the "junk" category, and in some cases the entire set will. Naturally, if you pick up a non-junk piece in this process it's more profitable to just sell it, but it won't be too hard to get set majorities for a lot of sets, which might push it up higher than the 50% I was thinking about.

Oh, one other thing: it occurs to me that it would be quite sensible under this system to have a "respec mule" character who you powerlevel to 22 or 27 and leave standing around while your other characters play normally. Mail all your junk recipes to this character so that once he's filled up his slots he can liquidate them to merits and mail back delicious LotGs to your actual characters.

The price would certainly become higher than it is now. I don't know how long it would take for it to reach the point where doing this for LOTGs (or Numina/Miracle uniques, or Performance Shifter procs, or Steadfast uniques, or whatever settles into the top spot) is unprofitable, but either one of two things would happen depending on how many "junk" recipes continue to enter the system through normal play. (Bear in mind that this can be a lot, because if you use the AE to powerlevel your way up you will have enough tickets for a lot of low-end bronze rolls, on both the mule and the powerleveling character.) Either respeccing for merits remains a profitable endeavor, or low- to mid-level recipes and the corresponding salvage become unaffordably inflated. They would have to become ridiculously overinflated before it was unprofitable to liquidate them for the top-performing recipes, because the biggest merit price differential between recipes in the game is still only 5.5:1. This could be avoided by making the merit returns on liquidation low enough (which would sort of undermine the reason for doing this in the first place) or drastically changing merit vendor prices (which would require making low-end prices very low or making high-end goods much more expensive).

Aren't there people who powerlevel a character to 22 in an afternoon? For someone with a couple of vet respecs, it could be a profitable use of time to:

(1) Roll up new character.
(2) Powerlevel to 22. Buy the cheapest rattiest IOs you can to slot into powers, and fill every slot with cheap IOs.
(3) Back-convert them into 50 merits each (the cheapest any given recipe goes for at the vendor).
(4) Buy LotG +recharge recipes with those merits.
(5) Repeat until out of vet respecs, delete character.

Buy it back at a discount? Okay, you only get half your merits back. Eight Volley of Velocity pieces for a LotG is a fair trade, don't you think?

As I've said, I don't think the double-buff set is a good idea.

However, it would not be inherently impossible to solo it, and it would not be useless if it existed. It would be optimal at a low team proportion, and decrease in utility as its team proportion rises, approaching (but not reaching) zero as it becomes 100% of the team (including solo).

I know this isn't the point anyone cares about, but I think it would be nice if the complete text for the respec trials varied a little from origin to origin.

"Looks like all that radiation threw your mystical energies into a flux! If you wanted to bind them with new spells, I bet this would be a great time to do it."

"That weird glowing stuff that was all over you after you wrecked the Tree is putting out some crazy energy readings! I bet you could make all kinds of new gadgets with this stuff as a power source."

Or whatever.

The tools are also there, if one is sufficiently masochistic, to solo with a character who doesn't have or use any direct-damage attacks from his primary or secondary. Isn't this what used to be called man-style or some such nonsense? Of course, they didn't have two buff sets perpetually cranking up their Brawl, and it wasn't endurance-free back in the day...

(You see I bring it all full circle with my amazing powers)

This is true for people who play the AE. I tend to prefer not to since the writing and mission design can be a pretty severe crapshoot.

This is true if you're reasonably lucky with salvage drops and market fluctuations. If you're not, it can be tough to afford steadily updated SOs without muling money over from another character. This is especially true if you are either an infrequent player or rather alt-heavy; I'm a little of each (I don't play every day and I have a lot of alts) so I'm usually going through patrol XP, which reduces the ratio of drops to levels gained.

Sometimes, a character just doesn't get good drops. The salvage is all stuff that's "1098 for sale, 0 bids" and the recipes are all things that market for under their vendor-sell value. If I'm on a server where I have well-established characters I'll mule a few million over to cover the cost of SOs; if not, it can be uphill keeping them maintained.

(Yes, I am aware there is "free money" to be had in arbitrage of underpriced market items to resell to vendors. I will withhold my feelings on this subject to avoid even more unnecessary flamewars than this thread has already had.)

It would also be nice if everyone could afford to fully kit out two builds per character while leveling up. Although if you don't care about IOs it's not too bad.

There's also the simple issue that even with the hold slotted for damage earth/cold is going to be a pain in the *** to solo before the pet, so going through the hassle of building a second build that's marginally better at it is not hugely tempting.

Technical objection: Force Field gets two powers that can be slotted for damage, even if people looking for bubblebots would rather pretend they don't exist. It's not much, though, especially as one comes at tier 8.

That said, on my pre-pet earth/cold, the vast majority of the damage solo comes from veteran Sands of Mu. One thing to bear in mind is that an earth controller who slots Fossilize for damage is going to have little to no actual control ability at lower levels before Earthquake, Stalagmites, and Volcanic Gasses are acquired and slotted up. It makes soloing marginally faster to slot Fossilize for damage instead of hold, but significantly reduces team utility - the damage added by slotting Fossilize that way is a drop in the bucket on a team, but the loss of the ability to lock down problematic enemies in a pinch is fairly significant. You can slot Stone Prison for damage, but the damage is still pretty bad even if you do.

It is also not the case that a defender will output exactly half as much damage as a scrapper, or that a scrapper contributes no buffing elements. What I was describing is an illustration of why a force multiplier is strongest when mixed in even ratio with substrate, because people seemed to have great difficulty grasping the concept of why an AT might be weak at both extremes of "too many on the team" and "too few on the team" but very powerful in a range between those. I'm also not sure why you think a double-buffer would get corruptor/controller buff/debuff values (you know, the ATs that have those sets as secondaries) in their primary. The suggestion of lowered values for their secondary seems likely, but it would seem more likely to me that they would have defender values in their primary and corr/troller values in their secondary.

TL;DR: It does not "hinge on" a precise 2:1 value, but using nice round integers makes it easier to illustrate the principle at work.

If only someone had raised this issue about the diminishing returns of the proposed double-buffers before this very moment.

The same thing a scrapper before his mez protection does under the circumstances: Pray, get out your throwing knives, and wonder when the Council started using web grenades.


To clarify something: I don't think this proposal is a good idea, because I don't think an AT with two of the same set class is a good idea. I'm mainly raising objection to the premise that someone who doesn't spew out orange numbers is "dead weight".

"Dead weight" is an exaggeration, because the FS and buffs are contributing. Now, you can certainly make a case that it's contributing less than half the buffs + defender damage would be, but that's not cut and dried. A kinetics/dark miasma Double-Buff on a team packed with non-buffers (say, seven scrappers and a Double-Buff) will most likely add more team damage with Fulcrum Shift + Tar Patch than he would by hitting Fulcrum Shift and then starting to plink away with his blasts. On a team with plenty of buffers, the blasts would be better - but that's just what I said before, that you'll face diminishing returns faster with double-buffs than defenders.

Basic math follows. Don't keep reading if you're scared of math.

People like calling buffers force multipliers. Let's take a moment to think about the term "force multiplier" and what it means. We have two basic elements to the team here for this purpose, which I will call "buff" (including debuffs, as they function as buffs taken via another direction for this purpose) and "substrate" (the thing being buffed, in this case offense). Let us say that, for example, scrappers provide two substrate while defenders provide one and Double-Buffs provide none (as a scrapper has more to buff with a higher cap than a defender, who in turn has more to buff than a Double-Buff). Likewise, scrappers provide no buff, defenders provide one buff, and Double-Buffs provide two buff.

In this case, we multiply the amount of buff by the amount of substrate to get a relative sense of how much improvement the group has over the sum of its parts. For example:

Eight scrappers: 16 substrate x 0 buff, total 0. There is no synergistic improvement, and the killing goes about as fast with eight scrappers working together as it would with eight scrappers working separately. (Of course, given that scrappers kill things fast solo, eight scrappers separately can be pretty nasty anyway.)

Eight Double-Buffs: 0 substrate x 16 buff, total 0. Everyone is multiplying each other, but there's nothing to multiply. They're hitting with the most amazing Brawls conceivable, but... it's still Brawl. There is no noticeable synergistic improvement.

Eight defenders: 8 substrate x 8 buff, total 64. If you've seen eight-defender teams in action, you will appreciate the massive synergistic improvement that goes on there. Their individually weak substrate becomes a wrecking ball.

So far so good and it matches up largely to real-play experience. (Worth noting is that it's not perfectly accurate: scrappers do provide a small fractional buff value from secondary effects, RttC/AAO debuff, and so on, while double-buffs would provide a small fractional substrate from Brawl and Air Superiority. This does not significantly affect the demonstration of principle.) However, when we are talking about a few defenders or buffers on a team of scrappers, we see something else:

Six scrappers, two defenders: 14 substrate x 2 buff, total 28.
Six scrappers, two double-buffs: 12 substrate x 4 buff, total 48.

This is why I predicted that double-buffs would be very powerful in groups with small numbers of buffers but reach diminishing returns much more quickly than defenders would. When we are talking about multiplication (and buff/debuffs are, in a fairly literal sense, force multipliers), the way to get the highest possible result from a given quantity of input is to equalize the inputs as much as possible. For a group already skewed towards substrate, this means that the highest effect comes from adding characters heavily skewed towards buffs. Because there is no set currently as heavily skewed towards buff as scrappers and blasters are skewed towards substrate, the Double-Buff would be an improvement in such situations but the advantage becomes less dramatic as the number of buff sources increases.

One other exception worth mentioning: due to buff/debuff caps, you will inevitably hit a point of diminishing returns. One force-fielder is a huge boon to team survivability compared to none; three is not much of a step up compared to two. The previous numbers presume full "stackability" which is not guaranteed in the case of groups with multiple buff/debuffers of the same type. Redundancy is likely to increase in the case of double-buffers, since there is a limited variety of buff/debuff sets available and this would increase the number of buff/debuff picks present on a given team.

Right, that jerk casting Fulcrum Shift ought to be using his Power Bolt instead and contributing some real damage.

One or two buff/buff characters in a group would be pretty powerful, but they would hit diminishing returns much faster than defenders do. Double-buffers don't themselves provide a substrate for being buffed (which is what I think people may be trying to get at with the misleading "dead weight" argument) so they enhance everyone else in a superior fashion but don't enhance each other, meaning that their value drops off dramatically with the number of other double-buffers on a team in a way that defenders don't. This makes it more complicated than "useless solo, overpowered on teams".

I would be amused by seeing a kinetics/dark miasma try to brawl to victory, though.

Well, as I said earth control is the only one where I felt it was a problem. All the other controllers I've played had at least decent damage in their primary - obviously not blaster or scrapper levels, but enough that I didn't feel like Sands of Mu was my primary damage source. As a result, I'm not in the habit of taking pool attacks on controllers.

At least a few, although Raven from the Teen Titans (with her healing empathy) is the closest to how CoH Empathy works - the others actually sense emotions rather than healing people.

Now, how many claws scrappers can you think of? Bonus points if you can think of any without a direct relation to Sniktbub.

People should have their End requirements under control for normal circumstances by 50, but that doesn't mean they'll last indefinitely in lengthy AV or GM fights without running low on gas. This is more of an issue on small teams, though; large teams make these fights go fast enough. Aside from that, at 50 it's still worth handing out Speed Boost for the hefty +recharge, since short of high-end IO builds everyone can use more of that one way or another.

As for Transference, I mainly use that to keep myself topped up - as you said, everyone should try to get their end issues under control by then, and transference is a good way for the kin himself to do it.

I have. She was massively more soloable than Earth even with a much less solo-friendly secondary (empathy). A ST immob deals hugely less damage than Spectral Wounds; the healback is only a minor issue since you're pretty much guaranteed to finish off the target before it's fully done, so Earth's single-target damage output is a joke next to Illusion's. Illusion also has better single-target control than Earth and does so at very low levels, since it has two ST powers that actually render a target unable to attack (Blind and Deceive) compared to a ST hold and a ST immobilize. Superior Invisibility let her pick her fights or weaken a group with Deceive before starting them, and once Phantom Army comes along the damage skyrockets at half the level Earth has to wait for.

Earth, meanwhile, has to very slowly grind down the target with Stone Prison, Fossilize, and Sands of Mu when it's up (and if you want any real ST control you won't have room to slot Fossilize for damage). Salt Crystals can be helpful when soloing, but that's about the only time it'll be helpful and it's not making the killing any faster, just safer. Your AoE control gets credible once you have Earthquake and Stalagmites slotted for recharge so you can alternate them, but again, you're not killing things faster, you're just (mostly) keeping them from killing you while you slowly grind them down. As an added bonus, because fights go so long and you're maintaining AoE controls to keep from dying, you also guzzle blues to keep from bottoming out before the fight's over.

I don't know, maybe I'm missing something huge and obvious about how to solo Earth before the pet comes along, but out of my five controllers Earth's been the least solo-friendly. I enjoy the heck out of it on teams, but solo is very, very slow.

(For the record: mind/storm, ill/emp, plant/therm, earth/cold, fire/rad in roughly the order I rolled them up.)