BurningChick

Just to go off on a tangent ...

Prior to Incarnates, I had rarely done TFs (outside of the occasional RO ITF run) because getting together a team was something of a PITA. I don't generally have enough time for doing the TF AND waiting for a team come together.

Post Incarnates? I've done a bunch of TFs ... because it's straight-forward to get a team going simply because there's a critical mass of people looking for TFs. I've even done a PuG STF on my fire dom -- a toon that outside of RO teams receives requests for PLing ... but precious few invites to team. And that PuG STF? Set up in about 5 minutes, finished in about 70. A damn near perfect gaming session. Same thing with Kahn yesterday -- quick to set up, a nice 45 minute run through.

From someone who likes teaming, but generally doesn't, the Incarnate system is a work of genius.

Edit: for some time, I had been despairing that CoX was on the road of becoming a solo grind-fest. And now it isn't. And that makes me happy.

Going s-l-o-w-l-y.

Must be a lot of people trying to get the patch.

Hmmm ...

I just dropped my level shifted Traps / Dark into a KoA mission.

All her drops worked fine:

Force Field Generator
Triage Beacon
Seeker Drones
Caltrops
Poison Gas Trap
Acid Mortar

Of those powers, PGT leaves behind a field (additional summon?) upon its destruction.

I also ran my fire / fire / fire dom through a few missions -- no problems with imps and RoF.

IIRC, the guaranteed map server issues are with one of the Illusion pets, Carrion Creepers, and upgraded Assault and Protector Bots.

Weird thing, eh, but it sounds like you're on to something.

Just woolgathering ... but I noticed that my imps were level shifted. I wonder if the issue shows up with some summons summoning additional summons that are ... or aren't ... level shifted? Works for some powers, doesn't work for others.

Last night was mapserver hell in Atlas. This morning? Smooth sailing, even with my level-shifted Traps / Dark walking around with summons (FFG, Seeker Drones).

My guess (and, really, just a guess) is that level shifting is causing additional load on the servers. Nothing showed up on the Test Server (maybe also I20's CB) because there wasn't a critical mass of players to stress them out.

I'm probably completely wrong, but you never know.

Anyway ... crap happens. Yeah, it sucks that some players lost rewards. But we should cut the devs some slack -- MMOs are monumentally complicated pieces of software. No amount of testing will reveal every single bug before a patch is pushed to live. The very nature of bugs is that they're unpredictable and that they'll show up unexpectedly.

I would, however, lose faith in the devs if this bug were allowed to continue unsquashed for days on end.

4 damage procs and two recharges.

FWIW ... I could probably do 1 recharge and not notice much difference. Between hasten and 75% global recharge, I don't think the second recharge is doing much.

But this is on a Traps / Dark defender, so YMMV. I have the 2 cones (6-slotted), the 2 non-snipe ST attacks (5 slotted), and a couple filler powers, Life Drain and Dark Pit (base slot). No Aim, no heavy-hitting third ST attack in Dark, so it's an efficient set for adding slots and powers just for procs. And giggles.

Edit: you can also ram 4 damage procs + the KD proc into Caltrops. On a recent ITF, I tracked my defender's damage -- 500k, 325k of which was from procs.

If I'm in a slow fight (AV / EB, runners), I'll pull other spawns into the mayhem. No use letting good debuffs go to waste!

Lots of fun during ITFs. Some people go into WTF mode when they see my trapper herding EBs, but I say the more the merrier. But setting up traps and pulling mobs into the traps? Zzzzzzzz.

Also ... you can ram oodles of damage procs into Traps, so the time "wasted" by setting up can be compensated for just by watching crap get blown up by Caltrops and PGT. My fastest ITF runs have /all/ been on my Trapper (50 minute kill alls).

There was also a large(ish) (100+ meg) pre-download last week.

So ...

During this double XP weekend, a non-50 could head to RWZ, participate in raids, get a holy crapton of expees, rack up a bunch of Vanguard Merits (I can land about 600 - 750 / raid),
and then, at 50, craft a bunch of common components, deconstruct those into shards ... and get a headstart on Alpha slotting?

Fascinating

Prestige / inf conversions should've been a good way to burn inf ... but, at the end of the day, bases blow chunks. And then, once they're built, they're almost free to operate. I can pay off the rent for a blinged out base with what ... a couple TFs? It might, ultimately, be better to nuke prestige and have everything paid for straight-up with inf.

Enough critiquing.

To your list, I'd add early access to new primary / secondary sets -- akin to how the devs gave out access to demons and DP with pre-orders of GR. To add extra enticement, attach a badge to the transaction.

The hardcore solution to the inflationary system we currently have, IME, would be to cap how much inf is in the game. But I'm not sure how people would react to AV defeats being worth 10 inf one minute and full value the next depending on how active the market and the hospital vendors are.

Uhhh ...

Hmmm ...

I think it got tricky by % number 5.

So, really ... DR is even more complicated than I gave it credit for

I'm again left wondering why the devs, who had previously been proud of the move towards numeric transparency, chose this system. It's nice they have a system with lots of numbers to twiddle ... but if they have no intention of twiddling the numbers, ever, why bother implementing it?

Hey Arcana,

I think you're over-thinking my suggestion. I was thinking of a simple slider that would convert, for instance, 35 def into what you'd get post-DR. The mechanism would not pull up numbers from your individual powers. Or from anywhere. Or break def down by type. The user would just adjust the slider over to 35 and the UI would spit back how much def you'd get post-DR for your particular AT. It would be really, really basic, but would give clods like me an understanding of what the effects of DR are, if not the underlying mechanics.

I fully understand that trying to get the game to spit out what happens when Healing Flames stacks with Insulation would be ... ummm ... difficult, but even having a rough guide to DR would be good.

My point, if I had one, is that DR is a goofy system at odds with other CoX systems. Fine, lots of games have goofy systems. But what's particularly egregious about DR is that it's simply not explained in-game, and it goes against the devs' explicit promise to make the numbers for the game transparent. But ... calculus? Really?

You know the slider on the info screen for a power, the one that shows the effects of the power at a given level? The interface for that UI element should be repurposed to demonstrate DR in-game. I.e., you click on the "Powers Button" on the tray, and next to "Combat Attributes" and "incarnate Abilities," you'd find "Diminishing Returns". Click on DR, and a window pops up that with the different elements for which DR exists, "def", "res", "+dam", "+ToHit" and so on. Click on "def", and you'd have a slider with two numbers "Anticpated" and "Actual". Anticipated shows the numbers you'd get by simply adding up your def bonuses. "Actual" would show the DR-adjusted values for your AT.

Introduce it at the PvP contacts in the zones. Explain the difference between hold "protection" and "resistance". And explain all the other rule changes from PvE.

FWIW, I think it's appalling that a game that set the standard for casual, approachable MMOs has such an impenetrable PvP system that functions so differently from the PvE system. Screw whether or not the system is fun; the current PvP system places a barrier to casual PvP that helps to deter people from PvP and ensures that PvP will never appeal to any but a tiny minority of the game's players.

Edit: I think it shows an inordinate amount of disrespect to the player base to apply a scorched earth policy to an existing system; rebuild it with rules that exist nowhere else in-game; say that the new system allows the devs a greater degree of variables to tweak for balance; promise on-going development to achieve balance; and then ignore the system. States, for all his faults, at some point would've at least faced the music, owned up to mistakes, and said some platitudes about "limited resources" or "not enough player interest" ... something. Posi and WW have simply ignored the problem.

Just for giggles, (and for my benefit, not Arcana's) I took my bubbler into RV. In AP, she had just over 26 s/l def.

In RV, 15.

In RV with 10 small purples, Combat Jumping, Dispersion Bubble, Maneuvers, and a + def unique ... 20.87.

Like, really?

The DR defense curve for defenders appears to start at something less than 3 since, with only the +def unique active, her s/l def is 2.83 and /rapidly/ escalates since a fully-slotted dispersion bubbles adds less than 10% def (i.e., less than its base value of 10). With DB, CJ, and the unique, I come up with 13.3 s/l def, and it gets bumped up to 15 with a slotted Maneuvers.

I.e., the amount of def added by FF's ST buffs is borderline meaningless to a squishy standing somewhat near my bubbler. Or, conversely, DB and Maneuvers ARE meaningless to someone covered by the small bubbles.

To me, this flies in the face of the "every buff useful" mantra of the GDR days.

But I digress.

DR would be somewhat more palatable if it were described in-game somewhere. Like, for instance, in the powers descriptions that says that DB gives +16.05% defense ... in PvP.

Hey, Posi,

Have you guys actually tweaked DR at all since I13's release?

I mean ... you could.

Just like those guys I know with sheds full of power tools could finish their basements, but never seem to get around to it.

Well ...

If the baseline for the shields became one hour, SB one half hour, and mez prot 15 minutes (the current ratio is 4:2:1, I think), you'd see people with second accounts furiously PLing emps, kins, bubblers, and ringers. You'd see second account toons in RWZ and Cim. They'd be buffing people for high-end TFs ... and nothing else. They wouldn't even have to be invited to a team.

The insane whackiness a coordinated group of people could get up to is nucking futs. A team of blasters could go into the ITF with /hard/-capped defense and resistance (to all but psi); unbreakable mez protection; hard-capped recharge; endless endurance; possibly silly amounts of regen (not much mention of Regen Aura in this thread, mind you). I've done kill-all ITFs on RO teams in 50 minutes. A team of buffed sonic blasters could probably do it in half that.

To combat that level of extreme power-gaming, what would the devs do?

My fire / fire dom:

1.) Flashfire > Cages > Rain of Fire > Fireball > Acid Reflux Breath

Next spawn:

2.) If Flashfire not up then Cinders > RoF > Fireball > Acid Reflux Breath

3.) Otherwise 1

4.) Occasionally hit Dom or Hasten to break the tedium

That is, IME, every bit as repetitive, and possibly more so, than playing my FF / rad -- because I can use buffing to break up the tedium of my attack chain. But I prefer my dom. Why?

The subtext to people disliking re-buffing is, IME, that they object to clicking powers that don't cause orange numbers [edit] or provide some form of direct self benefit.