Chrondeath

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But why would you need to bait people to play missions, their the best part of the game.

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IIRC, one of the essential design observations for MMOs is that players will do whatever they get rewarded to do, whether it's fun or not. (No, it's not entirely rational, but it's true.) The point is to make the fun things the most rewarding things, because then people will spend more time on them and come away with a better impression of your game overall.

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Mentor, you'll just need to stay within 300 ft of your teammates now. As long as you near the killers, you'll get their kill xp. If you truly are support, you should be near the team anyway, so it's not a change in your tactics.

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Minor point: You have to stay within 300ft of the mobs, not 300ft of your teammates.

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So if you're on a kill X mission and you're 200 feet away from an enemy that somebody on your team has defeated, you don't get credit?


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No - that isn't what I said. As long as either YOU or YOUR teammate is within 200 ft., you'll get credit for the defeat.

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I believe in this comment, States is referring to badge credit or credit for kill missions, not XP.

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But that is what you said. You made no such distinction in your original post:
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If a player is in a zone, did NO damage in a combat and has dead for more than a minute, he receives no XP. If a player is more than 300 ft. away (an increase of 100 ft.) from the mob when it’s defeated and did NO damage, he receives no XP. Otherwise, the player receives his full share of XP.


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The implication is that if you do no damage, or are too far away, you get nothing. If that's not what you mean, than you should be more clear about it.

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That quote says that you don't get XP if you don't meet the requirements.

One quote says you don't get XP if you don't meet the requirements; the other says you DO get credit on a kill mission if you don't meet the requirements, but one of your teammates does. No inconsistency.

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Just as giving items from a higher level character to one of your own lower level characters is not only immoral, it's a BANNABLE offense.

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What? What game is that? That's a ridiculous policy, considering that it could be easily fixed in the code (level limits on items). And I fail to see how it's "immoral" in any way, either.

I'm paying for my graduate studies with a scholarship funded by a successful prior graduate of the university; is that immoral?

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Winter Lords were a programming error.

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No, they weren't. They were a design decision with an unintended consequence. The intentional change to Monsters (or Giant Monsters, or whatever) that said Monsters should be treated as the same con no matter what the level of the player, and give the same XP rewards, was responsible for it. It wasn't a matter of a misplaced decimal point in the reward tables.

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Delivery missions require walking great distances without any reward gaining for a lump sum reward at the end of the mission.

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So, why does this "walking of great distances" count as effort deserving of a reward, but following a level 50 around getting XP for his kills still counts as powerleveling? (I'm not saying the latter isn't PL'ing, I just want to know what the criteria is.)

Is it because the reward comes over time, instead of in one large sum at the end? Or is it because following the level 50 is much more rewarding than doing the delivery mission?

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Powerleveling requires minimal actual effort and you are constantly gaining xp without having to do much yourself.

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Minimal effort compared to what? This is my point--the characteristic of powerleveling is that the effort is minimal compared to the reward. Beating up -3 minions is minimal effort for constant XP, but it's not PL'ing.

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Following a person around while mooching off his kills is quite different from progressing through enemy-infested territory to perform a critical task.

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Oh, please. Enemy-infested territory? Jaunting through Steel Canyon and Atlas to bring yet another artifact for Azuria to lose is hardly a trip through "enemy territory," and travel through any zone without snipers (except maybe the Shard) is trivial as soon as you get a travel power.

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Also, delivery missions are non-repeatable, there's no way to actually exploit them.

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So it only counts as PL'ing if it's something you can repeat?

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Except that very example IS powerleveling. You're not actually DOING anything to get that XP. The monsters you kill are your own xp. You get a little less by having a second person on the team, but it's made up for and more by the other person hunting. Basically, you could stop hunting altogether and still be receiving experience from your teammate's kills. That's powerleveling. How is that ANY different from standing a tram while receiving credit from another's kills?

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So...what's the argument for why he should receive LESS experience than if he was hunting solo, if the other guy isn't helping?

The only thing I've seen is this concern that you could get faster PL'ing by keeping the bridge out of range, and I'm not entirely convinced that's a major problem...it would require a lot more coordination in the positions of the sidekick and mentor for, what, maybe 20% more XP to the sidekick at the cost of none to the bridge? And it requires finding someone to bridge who doesn't mind doing all this for zero XP--and you can't just two-box it, because auto-follow won't keep you at the right range. The bridge now has to be an actual player, performing a non-trivial task for no reward.

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Powerleveling doesn't have to be profitable to be powerleveling. Even gaining 1xp per hour could be considered powerleveling.

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I think this is an overly zealous definition of powerleveling. If your definition of powerleveling doesn't include any component about the rate of XP gain being higher than usual, the only thing left to distinguish "PL" XP gain from "non-PL" XP gain is designer intent. (You can't say it's "anything that doesn't involve combat effort on your part," because then taking a delivery mission is PL'ing. And Winter Lords involved some effort, too, it's just that the gain was far out of whack with the effort.)

And designer intent just isn't that easy to determine. I don't see any reason to think that before this change, split teams getting XP from each other was unintended by the designers. It's not like there's zero reason for it--the point of the group XP bonus was to make fighting in a team more rewarding than fighting on your own. That's only true if you get XP from others' kills. It makes sense (to me, at least) that if grouping is encouraged, then two players fighting separately, but grouped, is also encouraged.

And why should it only be "teaming where the whole team stays together" that's encouraged? It's only teammate-targetted powers that get better when the team is together. Two scrappers together aren't doing much more than they would have been doing apart. Why is it OK for them to get extra XP for killing (say) five minions each if they do it together, but not OK to get extra XP if they do it apart?

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Very thoughtful post. Some comments

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1. Allow the team leader to exclude team members from XP calculations, setting them to "non-combatant" or something. The team member should obviously be informed in some easily noticeable way. To be clear on this before people point out exploits, I just mean in terms of dividing it up based on range. This should not work for characters who are outside acceptable level ranges.

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They can already do this by kicking them from the team and then reinviting them. If you enable this capability within a team, peopel could bridge AND the PLers could give the bridge no XP to boot. That would make PLing better!

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The problem with kicking and reinviting is that it doesn't work on task forces and trials, it interrupts communication among the team (unless you set up a global chat channel for each team you're on and talk each member through how to join it), it still doesn't allow for splitting up to handle "kill X" missions or badge hunting, and it's just overall a lot of micromanagement for something that shouldn't to be such a hassle.

I like the idea of being able to designate subteams. If you're worried about the "bridge out of range" PL problem, just say that sidekicking doesn't work if the mentor is on a different subteam, or designated non-combatant, or whatever.

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Probably none. But then, why not just kick him then? The times your teammates go to sell, you'll be making an increased amount of experience. The times YOU go to sell is balanced out by this. So, if it's such a big deal to not waste xp, just kick the guy and reinvite him after. He can even send you a tell when he's finished. It's not an enormous inconvenience and you're actually getting more experience out of it, which you'll need when YOU go shopping. Still not a huge problem.

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I guess my problem with this is that it makes avoiding XP waste a potential micromanagement nightmare, and destroys team unity. If there were some way to automate the process...like a tool that would create a global chat channel for the team, put everyone on the team in the channel, put the channel text in the same window as team text for each player, and remove or add members to the team as they came into range...this would probably be acceptable.

I'll point out, though, that just splitting up XP for a kill among the people who qualify for it (with the corresponding smaller group bonus) would amount to the same thing--solo XP if you're alone, two-person-group XP if you're with one other person, etc. The only differences between an automated "drop and add while leaving or entering range" system and a split of the XP among people who qualify is that the latter works on Task Forces, provides better team communication, and allows for this silly "mentor out of range" trick that seems to be the only argument against it.

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You have to be the fifth moron to misinterpret that phrase. If you notice from the rest of my post, your interpretation would not fit. Let me clarify it in two-year old terminology.

This has no effect on you if you are just killing things like you are supposed to be doing. Not in a particular way, not in a certain fashion, not from some [censored] *********** hunter's manual, just KILLING THINGS IN GENERAL!

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Maybe you should switch to decaf.

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If -you-, and only you not the lagger, are defeating enemies, then -you- will not be affected any different xp wise.

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Uh....ok, yeah, I guess I agree with that. If I was the only person on the team who ever attacked anything, then I agree that my personal XP gain isn't affected.

You seem to be assuming that I don't care about my total XP production, though, and you're assuming that I never benefit when I'm the one who has to go sell (or run back from the hospital) while the team is hunting.

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The experience the lagger misses out on is not your problem.

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The experience I miss out when I'M the lagger IS, even if all I cared about was my personal XP gain.

This whole thing is like taking the Prisoner's Dilemma and removing the option to be nice. Before, you could get some personal gain by booting your teammate, but it was at the cost of hurting them, and as long as your teammate wasn't a total leech it wasn't worth it. Now the effect on your teammate is as though you had booted them, whether you wanted to or not. You can still choose to be nice or nasty, but the effect on your teammate is as though you'd chosen "nasty" either way.

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You're not losing out on anything. He is. But then, he's also not offering anything.

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He's offering the chance to not get YOURSELF booted when you're the one behind, later.

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Just because some xp is being wasted doesn't mean you suddenly have to revamp your teaming ways.

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If you don't like seeing things going to waste, it does.

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If you do not kick people on Live, why in the hell would you kick them now? Just because THEY'RE not getting XP it is suddenly hurting YOUR XP gain? Hell no.

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It's hurting my total XP production. It's also hurting my XP gain, but on Live this is countered by the fact that booting them would result in lower XP production, and what I lose by having them on the team I make up from the XP I get from their kills (whether they're with me or not).

Let me ask this question: With this XP range, if you go off to sell and your team leader asks "Why shouldn't I kick you?" what possible answer can you give?

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Are you completely daft?

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Would I be off-base if I said I was detecting a bit of hostility here?

(Daft like a FOX!)

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This is EXACTLY how it currently works on Live. Instead of throwing away the extra experience, they do give it to the person lagging behind, but it's not like YOU get it, even on Live. A person lagging behind is ALWAYS a drain on team experience. They are not helping AT ALL with the battle, but are still stealing a chunk of your experience.

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The XP is going somewhere, not being thrown away. Currently the pizza guy doesn't throw out the extra two slices of pizza--he lets you give them to your friend anyway, even though your friend isn't there at the moment. You honestly don't see a difference between XP going to waste and XP going to someone else?

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There IS an option if you want a smaller pie. GET A SMALLER TEAM!

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So, the only way to not let XP (or pizza) go to waste is to dump your friends if they're ever not with you. Great.

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But this is not discouraging teaming as so many have said because THE EXACT SAME THING happens on Live.

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On Live, the XP is going somewhere. Booting the teammate gives the rest of the team a greater share, but the mob will produce less total XP. You're being more productive by letting the missing teammate stay, even though your share of the reward is less. Additionally, there's an expectation that next time, when you're the one out-of-range, the other guy isn't going to boot YOU, and you'll make back what you lost by not booting him.

On Test, booting the teammate makes you MORE productive, in addition to giving you a greater share. And the other guy can't "pay you back" if you end up out-of-range.

Bottom line: On Live, there are several reasons not to boot somebody out-of-range. On Test, there are none.

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Meaning? THIS DOES NOT AFFECT YOU ONE LITTLE BIT IF YOU ARE HUNTING LIKE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE!

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Who the <bleep> decided this was the "proper" way to hunt? Your personal XP gain is indeed affected if you ever take a bio break, shop, or visit a contact, and your total XP output is affected if any of your teammate ever do these things. Are we intended to drop from the team every time we have to spend five minutes away from a fight for any reason?

Hmm...

The 300' range might be long enough, I'm not sure. I'm skeptical, but now that it's only affecting street hunting, it might be that occurrences of people who really participated in a battle not getting XP for it will be rare enough to be acceptable.

I think the one-minute death timer still needs to be re-thought. From a standpoint of losing XP for a battle you participated in, the death timer now worries me more than the range thing.

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Still confused about one point: if (for example) you've got a three person team, each person on the team is 400' away from each other person, and person X defeats a bad guy -- does person X get "solo XP" or XP for being on a 3 person team?

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He'd get XP with the 3 person team multiplier...BUT that XP would still be divided appropriately between each teammate. The others, however, wouldn't receive their shares.

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From a standpoint of split teaming, though, this is still a bad change. You're encouraging people to disband if there are members of their team out of range. I don't think this is a good thing to be doing.

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Your point is completely true, but it presents the devs with an interesting conundrum that I mentioned earlier in this thread. If they changed it so that XPs were calculated based on only the number of people in range, so that you get the "right" amount of XPs that you deserve, then it would be instantly exploited by powerlevelers. Using the common SK/Mentor (Bridging) method of powerleveling, the sidekicked player would stay in range of the guy fighting and the mentor (bridge) would stay in range of the sidekick but not the mobs being fought. That would give the SK even more XPs than if this change had never been implemented.

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But the PL'er is now in range for the battle, and "at risk" (at least, by the logic that prompted the XP range in the first place). Isn't that the point of this change, to get the PL'ers out of the tram station and at least within viewing distance of the fight?

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OMG *SOB*
So Kronos shows up slaughters the half the team, then the other half of the team drags the titan 300ft away from the bodies, so what, 3 times the distance between the IP tram and the steel gateway,

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Uh, no. The base of the IP tram ramp is 154 yards away from the Steel entrance. That's 462 feet.

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and then the survivors kils it after you have been dead for 1minute and no one has bothered to raise you then yes you would not get exp. Also lightening could strike me three times in row while I type this because those odds are roughly the same. Though I admit a 2-5 minute probably would not be much of a problem and might make some sort of peace.

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Now who needs to re-read the XP range rules? There's no need for the battle to wander 300ft away; they can be right on top of you, and if you've been dead for a minute, you'll get nothing (if you did no damage).

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Conceptually nothing. These changes have no effect on your personal xp gain. A lagger left behind would drain your experience exactly as much as it does currently on live. Sure, the total team xp is lower, but who cares if the guy who decided shopping was more important doesn't get any xp? You're still getting the same xp as you do on Live. A person sitting in a team not doing anything is ALWAYS a drain on team xp, regardless of whether or not they themselves get any xp by it.

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So, you've got a group of four friends and you're all hungry. You decide to buy a large pizza for everyone, and everybody can have two slices.

But oops, one of your friends is late and hasn't arrived yet. Instead of letting anyone have an extra slice, though, the pizza delivery guy just throws out the extra two slices before he lets you have the pizza.

The next night, you're the one who's late, and you pick up the pizza on your way there. You pay for a large, but this time they only give you two slices and throw the rest in the dumpster.

And each time, when you find out about this policy and ask if you could buy a smaller pizza so nothing's wasted, they tell you that's against the rules unless you swear nobody else is going to show up. If you're going home to eat alone, they'll sell you a small, but if you've got three people there it's a large or nothing.

You're getting two slices each time, but is this pizza place giving you a fair deal?

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You can barely tab target something 300 feet away. Only way you can snipe something is to put in a bunch of hami range and boost range it. Already on live this often doesn't register in the combat log. And even then when you snipe something in FF from the entrance to the nearest 5th near the square if they run away from a snipe such as moonbeam you don't get credit for the defeat since they run out of visual range.

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The point is that you could do something non-damaging to help the battle (Fearsome Stare, buffs, heals, etc...) and then pretty easily go out of range for some reason (fell off a Skyway overpass, moved away to help a different team member, etc...) Or the mob could jump off the overpass (they do this all the time), or decide to fly away.

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With such an insane regen rate of AVs and Monsters, the slow, whittling down process basically seems like a kick in the face to groups that don't have scrappers/blasters.

With such high damage output that Warrior Hewer Elite bosses have, the hit/run process basically seems like a kick in the face to groups that don't have tankers.

... see where I'm going with this?

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No, I honestly don't. The regen rate of AVs and the damage of Warrior bosses is just a piece of data that they can change in a spreadsheet somewhere. The linking of the generators with the Hydra shield is clearly something that required special programming just for this Trial (there's nothing similar anywhere else in the game, AFAIK). If the head was intended to be held to death, that's a lot of effort to go to...and for what? They could easily have said "You have to hold the head, period, so you need a controller for this trial." I just don't see the point of them spending so much time designing a complicated system, just so it can be meaningless if you have a controller.

And controllers already had a point in the trial. They handle the Rikti ambushes while everyone else is attacking the head. They've also got a use against AVs; we took on Malaise last night and we would never have made it if we didn't have an Earth controller sending in Animated Stone to tank him. I don't think there's anything wrong with encouraging controller use, but I don't think they would (or should) do that by letting you skip the entire generator system and making an insanely hard, barely-finish-it-in-time Trial into a ten-minute Controllerfest.

Can anybody who claims that "holding the head takes down the shield" is intentional explain why the generators exist at all?

Without head-holding, the generator/shield sequence represents a very tough exercise in coordination for a large team.

With head-holding, the generator/shield sequence seems like basically a kick in the face to groups that don't have controllers.

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Could you make that a little more clear in the power's description, then? We've all been operating under the assumption that intangibility enhancements enhance intangibility duration, not intangibility magnitude. What is the reasoning behind this? Would you be amenable to making these enhancements duration-based instead, if this is how your player base would prefer to use the power?

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Well its understnadable since the enhancements say "Enhances Intangibility Duration"!

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Not to mention that it's different from every other magnitude-based effect in the game, AFAIK....

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I got TWO Elite Bosses the other evening in a mission I was doing Solo I /bugged it.

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What mission has two Elite Bosses in it? Did they change the Skulls/Hellions pseudo-leaders in the last mission of the Bonefire arc into Elite Bosses?

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"We will be making it so that a Boss will NEVER show up on the mission for a solo player at the lowest Reputation level (Hard-Boiled, though we’re changing that to Hero). Instead, any named villain will be a Lieutenant."

Has this been put in place already? I've been doing solo missions a lot the last few days, and all the named Archons I've seen have been Lts, not Bosses.

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I think this is live. I was amazed the first time I saw a Lieutenant-class Eidolon.

So...what happens when a gang of tough melee mobs is aggroing on the defender's location (because there is no tank or the tank doesn't have taunt)? They're closing in on the blaster, who is obediently standing near the defender. You're saying that the blaster should just stand there and take it, relying solely on your healing aura to keep him alive, instead of moving out of melee range? I sure hope your healing aura's six-slotted, because it only takes a couple of seconds for that blaster to go from full to dead.

I can buy this sort of thing in situations like the Hamidon bubble maneuver, where you've got a dozen people with AoE heals on auto-fire. But if you're the only defense and there's a gang of freaks heading my way? Sticking around for the melee damage is suicide. Running out of heal range might be suicide, too, but I'll live longer.

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How are you more fragile?

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I use shields.

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Ok....

Shield base is 27%, right?

Setting "blaster HP" at 100, with -30% resists, 113% hp, and an unslotted shield, a 100-point attack is doing...

(100 * (1.3 - .27)) / 113 = 91.1% of your health

A fully slotted shield (59.4%) would make it

(100 * (1.3 - .594)) / 113 = 62.5%

With 0% base resists, blaster HP, and an unslotted shield, it's doing...

(100 * (1.0 - .27)) / 100 = 73% of your health

With a fully slotted shield:

(100 * (1.0 - .594)) / 100 = 40.6%

I suppose that if you have fully slotted shields AND regularly team up with enough +RES members to put you at the cap (that would be six of them, I think?), you'd be more fragile because you wouldn't get any bonus from removing the resistance penalty....anything less than that and you should be gaining survivability in human form, though. Even if you've always got five +RES teammates and they're always in range, you'd be going from 18% damage taken to 15% damage taken.

If you've got perma-Eclipse and it's always enough to cap you, you're losing out too, I guess.

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In large teams, a Kheldian is going to be just as powerful as now.

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No, it'll be more fragile, with the fewer hit points.

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How so?

I assume from the comments about teams that you're talking about human form. (Dwarf form will clearly be more fragile, since it doesn't gain anything).

Currently, with a full team of seven +res members (each member is +10%, right?), you'll have 40% resists (before shields), and your HP (according to geko) is 13% more than blasters. If we say that base blaster HP is 100, an attack doing 100 points of damage will do

100 * (1.0 - .4)
------------------ = 53%
113

of your health.

With base blaster HP and no negative resistances, you'll have 70% resists on the same team, and the 100-damage attack will do

100 * (1.0 - .7)
------------------ = 30%
100

of your health.

(Oddly, I think Nova form comes out a wash in this change.)

How are you more fragile?

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The way I am playing my warshade right now is to not slot up Nova, but put all my slots in human form, at least until I see Dwarf and decide if I should slot that up.

To be honest I hate being in Nova form. I don't like the look of the character. Right now I have Nova just so that I can fly at lvl 6, and because I prefer that versatility to Orb Death or Grav Snare.

I will be slotting up my resists and attacks as a human form and try to get as many of the human form powers as I can. The only power pool choices I am getting are Hurdle/Health/Stamina and possibly Hasten.

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This is the biggest problem I have with the Kheldians. Nova's not fun and Human's not powerful (it's outclassed by Defenders in both the ranged offense and defense categories).

If Nova was fun, or Human had damage between a Defender and a Blaster, I'd be all happy with them.

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You made our primary a blast set but gave us less damage than two AT s that have damage sets as their secondaries.

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Agreed. Even if you're getting a 30% (say) damage bonus from the link, the lower base damage means you're still worse off blasting in human form than a Defender. Even if the secondary and link bonus gives you as much defense as a Defender's primary, I still don't see how you're coming out "second to none" on the damage/defense combo.