Bosstone

Surprisingly often in hero tips.

Black Scorpion, Mace Mastery, Shatter Armor. It's an ST melee attack, not a cone, so it's less useful for mobs, but it does -20% resist and is a significantly powerful attack, for -40% resist total. I took it instead of another AOE attack because my Crab is already pretty butch on AOE, but when it comes to taking down single hard targets his damage is a little anemic.

The scaling resists are there to allow you to survive long enough to top your health bar off. If an enemy is pounding on you for 100% damage, you might only be able to survive two hits getting through defense. With the scaling resists, you might be able to survive 3 or 4. That can make all the difference in getting a heal off.

Yep. The trope may be overused enough to be called a cliche, but it's always better when I can opt to bring my Brute along on a TF with my friends' blueside characters. Side-switching has alleviated that somewhat, but only in that everyone just goes blueside.

I just want to add that this has also been my experience on my own blaster. Being Fire/Dev, he essentially can't blap and must play at range. Mezzers are utterly destructive, and the Carnie tip missions are particularly painful, since even with bosses off they use LT-grade Master Illusionists. Defiance doesn't particularly help when you're surrounded by phantoms and a Dark Servant the moment you aggro the spawn. Even using a Break Free, I have to use hit and run tactics and burn greens to stay alive. He uses IO sets, but I didn't build him for S/L or Ranged defense, which I suspect is going to be more common for the average player, since building defense on a blaster is bloody tough and expensive.

I have managed to work through a 0x8 (or possibly 0x6) mission of Longbow with the level shift, but even then I died about 3 times in each room.

It was not until this post that I finally realized you guys haven't been talking about EvilGeko.

That's what you're saying. Venture said nothing of the sort.

That's nonsensical.

0/x1 is base solo difficulty. The game's content has been tuned so that anyone and everyone, regardless of build, should have a reasonable expectation of soloing at 0/x1. That's baseline, not the norm. Some ATs, some builds, and some players are able to run at higher levels. Great, that's more challenging. But if you fail that challenge, then that's entirely on you, because you opted to run at that higher level. The only guarantee is at 0/x1.

Absolutely incorrect.

The creative side of game design says "I want to give a damage resist bonus to a powerset that's linked to health. When the player's health drops below a certain point, they start getting damage resist, and it keeps going up until they've got a whopping chunk of it when they're almost dead. It keeps them from dying immediately and makes fights more intense as the player struggles to finish off the enemy while watching their health hover around this tiny little sliver. But they can't have so much of it that they'd just be invincible."

The math side of game design says "Okay, the best way to do that would be the formula y = -x + 60. When the player's health drops below 60%, they start gaining 1% damage resist for every 1% health they lose, up to just below 60% damage resist, since they'd have to be at 0 health to get a full 60% resist."

Math explains this to creative. Creative may want the damage resist to be gained faster, like 1.5% damage resist for every 1% health but starting at a lower threshold, or maybe they want damage resist to be gained at an ever increasing rate so that from 50% to 25% health the player wouldn't get a lot of damage resist, but below 25% they start earning buckets. Whatever creative thinks would result in the most interesting yet balanced outcome, math would come up with a formula to represent it.

Once creative approves of math's math, the math goes to the actual programmer, who translates the equation I gave above into code, applying sanity checks so that the player doesn't have -15% damage resist at 75% health, for example (unless creative wants that to happen), and generally making sure that it actually works in the game. The programmer doesn't necessarily care what the equation is and might not even be all that proficient in math except insofar as they need to know it to be able to translate it into code.

So no, the math side of game design is not the same as programming. When players reverse engineer the algorithms in the game, they don't know or care how it's implemented in the programming. All they want is to figure out that y = -x + 60 so that they can know that when they're at 15% health, they have 45% damage resist. You think the formula given for hit chance at the top of this page has anything to do with real code?

That's actually a fairly interesting way to look at it and is something worth chewing on.

I will say, though, that the quoted bit is applicable precisely because of the nature of City's gameplay, which the Incarnate trials theoretically will change. Even the fight with Battle Maiden is different. It doesn't require that you have sufficient power to bull through, it requires that you be alert and aware of the attacks coming at you so you can dodge out of the way. Power isn't as important as skill in that case. It's not much skill, true, but it is undeniably something you can't achieve by buying a set of purples.

Tongue in cheek indeed. My understanding is that PVP multiplayer is the biggest reason by far for the popularity of those games.

I suppose the difference is that I can separate the game fiction and the game mechanics pretty easily. The concept of influence as capital is not a difficult fiction to swallow; at the same time, the actual mechanics of trading between players is a game mechanic that may or may not intersect with the actual fiction. It should line up where it can, but it doesn't always. That's the trouble with design by committee and a game that outlives its original creators.

The game needs more money sinks. The Notice conversion is an attempt at introducing one. As it happens, existing fiction works with that. It's not really justification in and of itself; the fact that the game needs money sinks is all the justification I require to be content with that. It just happens that the mechanic can be rationalized into the fiction as well.

Mechanically, adding inf to the Notice conversion is no different from being able to trade reward merits + inf for alignment merits. I think that's a bit harder to line up with fiction, since there is no given fiction for merits, but eh.

I really wish you would treat your opinion as your opinion instead of objective fact. You can't accept it; that does not mean it is wrong.

That's rather condescending, considering I explicitly acknowledged it in a previous post:
Favors are currency just as much as dollar bills. And while I've been trying to respect your viewpoint throughout the whole solo debate over the past few weeks, I find it increasingly harder to give you much credibility when you're going to make patently ridiculous statements like that last sentence.

Yes. You're asking for too much stuff. You're calling in more favors than you're actually owed. It's political capital, and it can be used up if you try to take more than you give.

There are.

Actually that's not all that unreasonable. Remember what inf stands for: influence and infamy. (And information, but that gets phased out by 20.) The canon has always been that you're not paying for upgrades, as such; you're using your reputation and "spending" credit you've built up with the people of Paragon or the Rogue Isles. In that sense, it's perfectly reasonable. "I've become incredibly influential, and I'm using that influence to draw the notice of the Well."

I'd like to draw your attention back to Arcana's post directly above yours.