Cavatina

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Excellent information in the first post. Just to stir the pot, there are a few additional factors I think we need to consider:

- The value of having 100% HP. This game provides binary protection against one-hit kills. Either you are protected against one shot-kills or you are not. You are protected anytime your HP are full. Defense helps you avoid incoming shots, making it less likely your HP are less than 100% and less likely that the follow up shot hits. Healing restores lost HP to 100%, reapplying the protection, but the heal needs to be timed between shots. Resistance needs to regen the HP. Most tanks aren't worried about one-shot kills, but...



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The thing is, if you have a buff heavy team, even those squishy controllers may likely have tank levels of resistance/defense buffs on them, so the likelihood of them getting twoshotted becomes rather close to nil at that point.

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I'm tired of hearing from folks who are leaving the game because the devs are trying to make the game challenging, and fun with limited exploitation. So many people are screaming "No Fair!" because their ability to exploit the game is being curtailed. Other MMO's do pretty much the same thing. They want to reduce the ease at which players exploit the game. Players think it's their right to "play the game the way they want to" even though it hurts others. And, yes, farming excessively does hurt others.... how do you think RMT'ers get their influence/infamy? They exploit the game... getting salvage, recipes, etc.. sell them for lots of influence.. then sell that influence for real money. And there are plenty of players who buy the influence which is against EULA. If there weren't customers for it, they'd soon go out of business. I think those who complain the most should go to another game... and find something to moan about there. So you folks who love to farm... find a game where farming IS the game... and farm to your hearts' content. Or perhaps, stick around here and play the game the way it is intended to play. (What a novel idea.)

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One..you didnt even read his post..and two..if you think the devs are making the game more challenging..you're quite frankly, Insane.

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The problem was that, with MA specifically, people were using the system in ways that hampered other people's ability to use it as intended. See, here's how:

If one wanted to get the "free 500 hostages" badge, it would be TOO EASY to make a mission with 50 hostages set to "single", who would all get free the moment you entered the mission. And then add 50 glowies with 1 second duration just for fun. Make every enemy on the map an ALLIED patrol so you wouldn't get ganked while running around.

All the while, this arc is PUBILISHED. Now, that's not horrible, but multiply one doing this times a thousand (assuming just one thousand players were making farm missions). Suddenly, that's a very significant amount of missions that's clogging up the database and making it harder for people to find genuine content!

Then factor in people who bribed others to mark their mission 5 stars just to get to the top (or get the badges for themselves), even though their mission probably doesn't deserve it. That means you and I get annoying tells from these people asking to trade votes (happened a lot in the early weeks of I14), and then, people who worked hard on their mission (but aren't willing to vote-swap or anything) don't get any votes because nobody can find their mission.

All that, plus the so-called vote-cartels running around and down-voting every 5 star arc they could find just so they and their friends can get to the top, and that means many people's badge-attaining abilities were now out of their own hands. This game does have PvP badges, but none of the AE badges were supposed to be gotten or denied by a PvP mindset.

So there you go. This change was ultimately to equalize badge-gaining opportunities while discouraging publishing arcs just for xp/badge grinding. There's still work to be done, but don't take this all as a bad thing.

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Pity this won't fix a thing.

Griefing wont stop, Steele. if you honestly think it will, no offense buddy, but you're full of [censored].

Yes. but my overall point is its not the farm arcs to blame.

Its the devs and their absolutely [censored] search that they gave us for finding arcs tools.

And as for the original topic. No badges shouldn't be fair in the sense of everyone getting them all.

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Let me break it down If I lose one badge that I have grinded so hard for I will close both of my COH accounts. Look I don't want this to come off as a threat

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Yeah, you fail.

BTW, the good news is that you're missing a metric [censored] ton of badges still, so there's lots more grinding you can still do!

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Yeah. true. We should get rid of those badges too. Its unfair that the average casual cant have Empath today instead of in a year or two.

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Some of the badges criteria are not fair. And I've since given up on them.
Ever since I found out that more scrappers have the empath badge (for healing) than a defender... that threw logic out of the window for me then and there.

Those scrappers got their healing badge from the longbow warden in the arena heal farm. Without doing any healing themselves. So how the heck is this fair eh? They might as well hand out honorary awards to the melee types for other powers that are not in their power sets.

My 2 year old empath defender only got her 4th healing badge recently. And she does not have the pvp rep badges. And she is my main.

My dominator got the first healing badge from using aid other. Aid other dammit. You got any idea how long that took me? Then I found out about the arena farm, and I had a subsequent tantrum. And yes, my dominator (my main villain) also does not have the pvp rep badges.

Until glaringly ludicrous issues like this are sorted out, I don't ever see badges as being fair.

Oh and don't even get me started on all the players who got their pill box and heavy badges prior to those exploits being fixed. >_< along with other retrospective nerfs. This is why I have given up on the badge hunt.

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Just because you don't like the system doesn't make it fair. you have the same opportunities to as I do, because your uhh, moral? standing "won't let you" isn't a burden the rest of us should be forced to bear.

and for the record my empath that has been mothballed since i9 has the 5th healing badge and didn't arena farm anything.

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trying to reason with "moral guardians" is a useless battle. These are the same sort of mindsets that thought prohibition would work or who bragged about driving people to suicide. (hooray for anthony comstock)

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I hate cold dom and i really hate cold dom when out of nowhere i get some huge ice armor beamed on my toon. I hate that frozen armor and it stays on forever. Bubbles rule cause they are mostly see through

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*grabs cold dom, frozen armors you and runs* :P

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people asking for a "healer" want at THE VERY LEAST one heal

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If only that were true...

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I did a LGTF last night with an Emp Defender that spent all his time blasting. Didn't use any buffs unless asked and didn't even heal. We didn't often need the heals, but they would have been nice when we did.

Lol Emps that think they're Blasters.

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And this is where you jump the shark. You accuse people of "hating healers" and point to Empaths who do the exact opposite, but equally stupid thing, to support your position that "a healer is helpful".

Most people who hate healers aren't saying that healing is bad and should be avoided. I hate healers, and I know the value of a heal and expect a heal to be used when the time comes to use it. I hate people who do NOTHING but SPAM heals endlessly.

It's really that simple.

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This.

If you're an empath, and you're on my team, you better be using your buffs , healing when appropriate, and blasting.

Else I'm kicking your gimp [censored].

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The rating system is terrible. They need to remove the ability from players to downrate an arc at all. Either give it a "thumbs up" or no rating at all. You'll be able to see if there are a significant number of people that liked the arc, not some average that can be heavily skewed by a few griefers.

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..thats a horrible idea. Making it so that only good ratings are allowed means sorting the crap from the diamonds would be absolutely impossible.

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When it comes to something like Mission Architect, which was intended to give EVERYONE a fair shot at badges earned from having people play them (which in reality means a shot at story exposure and recognition), Yes. It absolutely must be fair.

Let me explain:

It's this simple. Accolades [u]must[u] be obtainable by everyone who exists in the game. They [u]must[u] be this way because this is how the game's creators wish it to be, fair and equal.

In particular, Developers did not want people to miss the opportunity on the great rewarding privileges that come with mission architect. That is to say, there shouldn't be a specific way to gain this opportunity, like creating a milkable farm,

And honestly... Why should someone who creates exploitable reward-dumping farm content gain the Engineer's Accolade while someone who pours their heart and soul into a complex story arc gets widely overlooked? This is what Synapses is saying!

The standard for "5 star" content quickly became "What gives you the best reward?" instead of "What was creative or thoroughly developed or interesting and fun to play". To Synapse, this is not fair!

Everyone should have a shot at exposure with their peers, the same way everyone should have a fair shot at getting on a Team, or into a Super Group. This shouldn't be only possible by bending or breaking the rules in their favor.


Yeah, I'll admit, I am a little disheartened with the player base for reacting the way it has. Its very saddening because I wonder why I try so hard to create a good story for people who cry and threaten to leave the game because a silly exploit was fixed. Fortunately I do not get paid to do this like the Developers and am not forced to do this to pay the bills.

But that is why they Ignore people like they do.

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1: just because you create story content doesnt mean its any good, so stop being blinded by some selfish delusion about it.

2. Please. nothing survives at 5 star. not even omgreward arcs. The law of averages makes staying at 5 star in an unweighted setting downright impossible.. Do you even LOOK at page one? at best an arc can stay at 5 star to about 70 plays. them either the law of averages or a few bitter people 1starring it will wreck it.

3. if you want better exposure, you should be pissed at the devs for not adding in a better search tool, because the one we have right now is complete [censored].

4. the accolades were fair and equal. None of the badges required for it required that much work. Just write a decent arc, advertise it immensely, and its not that hard to get the requisite play counts.

All in all, I can sum up my thoughts on your whining in one sentence.

Stop being lazy.

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The other 87 are, ultimately, fair. Except the "play x Hall of Fame" line, as the system currently stands, since other people's actions can keep you from getting them. Some of them are still pretty dumb, namely the higher-end virtual ones.

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we're talking about the Evaluator line.
I think that badge is unfair to the authors, not to the badgers. The added reward for HOF arcs favors running those arcs on the merit of their existing ratings, instead of running any arc on its own merits.
It's a "rich get richer" mentality, and that's a lousy side-effect of the badge, so the badge is a bad design. The same way a badge for kill stealing would be a bad design even if fairly available to anyone.

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To be fair. if you have 999+ plays, you're going to get richer on sheer advertisability of your arc anyhow. Mines up to about 400+ now, and at this point I dont even bother advertising ingame anymore and pretty much every day log in to 10-15 new ratings.

Having a lot of ratings generates a lot more ratings.

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You complketely miss the point.

We dont hate the term healer for being the descriptor. We hate it because it generally is used by a certain type of person who promotes a stereotype.

back a couple years ago, if you were not an empath, you NEVER found a team unless you grouped with friends.

Everyone was so caught up in "healers" that they completely ignored you if you didnt fall within that tableau.

After a long while of this, people finally started inviting other types of defenders, and frankly, you try living through multiple years of being ignored (and many still are. ask a trick arrow or cold defender how often they get teams), you start to get a little angry about it.

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I get the point, its just so trivial that even to complain about is xeric. My first Villain was a Dark/Ice Corr, my first defender was a dark/dark/. So I know the life of having either one heal or just a buff/debuff combo. I still got on teams. A simple "dont kill my anchor" helped with teams who where new to aoe debuffs. If not I explained what they did. I've found teams with non emp AT's just fine. I've played on Protector, Guardian, Triumph, and Pinnacle. I've never had a problem getting teams with a Defender that wasn't an emp "a couple of years ago".

I don't know what your doing but if I cant find a team, I make one. And I have much success. "Never" finding a team is how YOU feel and or YOUR experience. I on the other hand have had no problems.

As for getting angry over not getting a team because of your AT...make one. People are always looking for teams, at all levels. If you've been playing for a "couple of years" you should know this very fact.

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I( know that fact. its why I generally dont bother with pick up teams anymore and only group with friends.

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However, I don't believe we've reached a general agreement as to what a "healer" really is, in CoX terms.

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A healer is any character who takes responsibility for maintaining teammates' health on an ongoing basis via the use of healing powers.





what?

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except to some people it means "has a healing power" or to some it means "didnt bother with their blast or control set and bought the stealth and medicine pools"

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Elitism can work in both ways, you know.

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Being a veteran who doesnt wince at a phrase is far from elitist. I play the game for fun, I leave my ego at the log in screen, I dont care if I'm considered or called a "healer" on my defender since its pure semantics and has nothing to do with me personally. If you get kicked off a team because somone wanted you to heal, then hey tough. But honestly how much does this happen? and in the end you'll get another team. And so the world keeps going. See in the end , after you sign off and head to the real world, the giant ego you have on the boards about a phrase, is diluted by real life problems and or agendas.

Thats what people are doing here, arguing over semantics. Because you just cant accept a phrase as "healer". I suppose your one of those people who call waiters "servers" or Stewardesses "Flight attendants". Whether you do or you dont, its all semantics, if you let some thing like that bother you, then you seriously need some down time. Rethink your life, because you failed somewhere along the road.

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You complketely miss the point.

We dont hate the term healer for being the descriptor. We hate it because it generally is used by a certain type of person who promotes a stereotype.

back a couple years ago, if you were not an empath, you NEVER found a team unless you grouped with friends.

Everyone was so caught up in "healers" that they completely ignored you if you didnt fall within that tableau.

After a long while of this, people finally started inviting other types of defenders, and frankly, you try living through multiple years of being ignored (and many still are. ask a trick arrow or cold defender how often they get teams), you start to get a little angry about it.

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I'm almost terrified to post this...

My intention is not to start a flame war. (Period) Took a break from the game just prior to i13 and I had the chance to toy around with shields last night but didn't get to play with PD yet. I haven't logged on a villain yet so I'm curious, player's aura rocking? Seems like a bad [censored] set for a MM though, I can forsee an awesome Thug or Merc set. Can't really see it relavant for a Corruptor though, but thats coming from someone who likes to solo alot. Thanks.

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Pain is awesome for a soloing corruptor. And if you're aura rocking, you're doing it wrong.

Between having a 1.5 second tick heal aura toggle that slotted out restores about 90+ hp every 1.5 seconds, having to-hit and damage buffs from World of Pain, and having an aura heal to self heal as needed, not to mention an aoe debuff, you have quite a few decent soloing tools. and in teams it gets even better. Your rez buffs your damage. your self-damage heal buffs your damage. and you get Painbringer, which turns a teammate into a walking deathgod.

oh. and Fire/pain. Ftfw

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The moral of the story is PuG's are worthless and if you participate in them you're pretty much asking to fail.

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Boy, it's a good thing everybody that plays has the luxury of a developed group to play with on call at all hours.




Oh wait, they don't.

I guess those of us normal folk just have to get by with what's available.

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I've never had a static party. Never had a particularly supportive SG (never particularly threw myself at one either, so not complaining). For me, PUGs are where the rubber meets the road; I'd get bored playing with the same ATs all the time.

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That's pretty much how I feel. Most of the regulars I played with quit after ED and GDN. The ones that stayed through that quit after the issue 13 PvP cluster [censored]. The only teams I get now are PUGs because I tend to play some odd hours. I personally like PUGs. I think it's more of a challenge in a game that has few challenges left.

If anything, PUGs have made me more tolerant of bad players. Too bad not everybody can look so kindly on others.

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Tolerance just lets them fester. I'll give advice to lowbies, but half the time they just ignore me or tell me off, so I really see it as pointless in most cases.

I'm not saying all pugs are bad, but I've found that for every time I've ever found a good pug, I've found at least 6 that imploded massively on the first pull due to sheer incompetence.

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SStingray:

Let's look at the "natural" regen of that Tank- not even Regeneration Aura. I am working these numbers out in public, so I may not prove what I expect.

I can get to almost 250% Regen with nothing but 5 slots in Health and, umm, a couple hundred million inf. (Numina's Heal and unique, Regenerative Flesh unique, and two generic Heals.)...

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Good catch. The 240 seconds to go from full from 1 HP is 4 minutes, not 2. But otherwise it checks out.

Dull Pain would heal 1492 HP, once every 360 seconds, so it can be worth about 4.1 HP/s in healing, technically. Health pool would add a +125% regeneration from its own effect and IO enhancements, with the two procs adding 20% and 25% regeneration on top of that for a flat 250%. (Mids' reports 294%, but I don't know how it's computing that number.) Dull pain will increase the total by 746 when slotted for healing, which would get the total up to about 2600 or so.

Natural healing boosted by health and procs would be about 27 HP/s, with Dull Pain counting for an additional 4.1 HP/s on its own. So in this case, our Invulnerability tanker self heals close to what a real healer would do. Score another point for the healer-haters. Now if we can only do something about those crappy energy and element resistances when Unstoppable isn't running we would be in business.

Actually, I really can agree with you in that there isn't one "best" way to deal with the whole mitigation issue, even though some people swear left and right that they've read the numbers and found healers useless, period. But I think you got me this time. If you can get a tanker with Health of Aid Self with a +HP build, or even a self-healing tanker like Fire or Dark, an actual healer does become useless, and a two person team of tank + forcefield can cover the whole team as long as the tank keeps control.

I can't help but to wonder what those tankers are doing to survive before level 50 and the purple IO set.

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Theyre tanking just fine without it.

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Problem is, people set the bar too high for empaths.

Asking the average player, who is not always that great at the game to have an awareness of everyones health for healing, everyones buff bar for buffing whilst maintaining a view of the battle so that they can help out with blasting is just asking for too much. Yes, good players can do this. The average player will struggle to achieve it.



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I agree completely. That's why, in my opinion, people will want a healer of one type or another.

Bad players are bad no matter what you try to do to help them. In that LGTF I mentioned, we tried repeated to get this guy to use his primary. All the helpfull comments turned to sarcastic remarks, then demands for better performance till finally he got kicked.

PUGs are full of bad players. A bad player with a healer mentality just might keep a team alive, while a bad player with a blaster mentality might just get a team wiped. I know which one I'm gonna take.

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a bad player with a healer mentality will be afk and on autofollow on said blaster with the heal aura on autofire.

The moral of the story is PuG's are worthless and if you participate in them you're pretty much asking to fail.

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So you'd prefer he ignore his blast set, get the medicine pool and heal constantly? Because lol thats even less helpful.

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If I have to choose between two kinds of useless, yeah I'll take the heal spammer. In most cases those heals are far more usefull than some weak blasts. The exception being Sonic Blast. That's some good stuff there and that Defender would get yelled at for not blasting.

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Nah. either ones worthless. someone rocking the auras isnt going to save anyone's life.

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people asking for a "healer" want at THE VERY LEAST one heal

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If only that were true...

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I did a LGTF last night with an Emp Defender that spent all his time blasting. Didn't use any buffs unless asked and didn't even heal. We didn't often need the heals, but they would have been nice when we did.

Lol Emps that think they're Blasters.

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So you'd prefer he ignore his blast set, get the medicine pool and heal constantly? Because lol thats even less helpful.

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i would have thought its more that set bonuses matter to some degree in RV, but the pve game is so easy that they really are not necessary, but thats probably crazy talk.

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Necessary? Maybe not. Fun to have? Heck yeah.

And considering some of the whining on the market forums, some people apparently do think they absolutely NEED a purpled-out Warshade.

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Of course. its totally not fair that someone who spent months purpling out a shade can fight even 1% more efficiently than johnny uses only SOs, I can only have fun if I'm the absolute best with no work. >_>

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Oh. and furthermore, theres a reason why 50's in RV have more set bonuses than those in PI.

Most people in PI powerlevelled their way to 50.

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So did most people in RV. They're just better at it.

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True. My point in general was simply that a retarded monkey could play the market. Anyone saying there's have and have nots in this game is simply lazy.

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The error in terminology isn't actually lost on me. But with surprising regularly I do hear people claim that "healing is the worst damage mitigation," in the healer-hater vs. healer supporter threads. The fact that the bubblers and tanks simply don't take a large chunk of the damage to begin with is very different than having someone restore the damage after the fact. But people do need a way to somehow compare recovery with prevention in order to make a good decision on how to build their own characters and recruit teammates. Such is life in CoX.

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Thats the thing though. healing is reactionary, and doesn't scale to content.

A heal doesn't remain as potent when the mobs do to keep parity. A buff does.

Not to mention that healing as you said, happens after the fact. Ask any regen scrapper what the one flaw is in their powerset. Its the fact you cannot regenerate from zero HP.

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I have seen people limit thier choices for a kin, a rad, a stone tanker, no dark armors, etc. It is not limited to just defenders but defenders get the most bent out of shape.

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Exactly. I can't remember the last time I did an ITF without the leader waiting till he found a Kin to start. I was kicked from a LGTF just before starting because the leader found his Kin at the last minute and my Widow was deemed expendable. If anything, I would say that more people get left out or kicked from teams in favor of Kins then they do Healers, but we don't see people complaining about it here.

Stupid people are stupid. Getting all worked up over it and coming to the forums to whine about it isn't gonna change that.

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True. The moral of the story is to never ever ever pug. Its just not worth the stupid.

Oh. and furthermore, theres a reason why 50's in RV have more set bonuses than those in PI.

Most people in PI powerlevelled their way to 50.