ClawsandEffect

Defiance changes didn't violate the cottage rule.

It still gives you a damage bonus, just like it did before. The basic function of the power never changed.

Current set up: Pay $15 a month, or you can't play the game at all, in any way shape or form.

Freedom set up: You don't have to pay $15 a month to play, but you lose access to some of the stuff in the game.

Seems fair to me. If you want to play the game for free....well, you aren't going to get the entire game. As opposed to NOW, where if you want to play the game for free.....well, that option doesn't even exist right now.

This jumped out at me.

YOU. SKIPPED. PARRY.

Parry, all by itself, will double, or even triple your survivability.

And Death Shroud will actually IMPROVE your endurance consumption, not make it worse.

Why?

Because while you're fighting ONE enemy, all the others around you are taking damage. What that means is that you will have to use fewer of your endurance sucking Broadsword attacks to take them out.

I don't have much time here, so I'll try and take a look at your build when I get home from work. I have the feeling you did some rather goofy things with it, and I can offer some advice (I have a BS/DA softcapped to all positions, with sustainable endurance, that cost me less than 500 million to build, so I know a thing or two about building them)

Werner and Desmodos would be good people to ask as well. And Dechs Kaison can help on the Dark Armor part, if not necessarily the Broadsword part.

I use it to mule either a LotG or a Kismet +Acc (since it's always on it's a perfect place for it).

If I have a spare slot I'll put both of them in it. I never slot for defense in that power beyond what the LotG will give me when I slot it in there (and the defense isn't why I'm slotting it)

They really can't buff the damage too much. Sure, Defenders don't get much out of it, but Controllers on the other hand get some decent AoE out of it when Containment damage is applied. If you buff the damage of the power, it could quickly end up being overpowered when Controllers get their hands on it.

You can't change a power across the board without looking at ALL archetypes it is available for. And besides, it's a helluva lot better than it used to be. Remember when it was a power you cast on your ally that knocked everything away from him? I can't think of a better way to kill an Invuln tank.

Defense builds are generally fairly inexpensive and get good performance.

Now, whether you build for typed or positional depends on your primary. If you happen to be a Sword/Dark scrapper (Katana or Broadsword, not Dual Blades), you will get good mileage out of building for positional defense, just focus on Ranged and AoE and let Divine Avalanche/Parry take care of the melee defense.

For pretty much everything else, you will get better results out of typed defense.

You can also slot for recharge if you like.

I wouldn't slot for regen on a Dark Armor. Regen is useful either A) when you have a LOT of it (which DA will never get above 230% or so), or B) when you have enough defense to make the regen more valuable (don't have to heal back damage that never lands) If you decide to go with a defense build, more regen wouldn't be a bad secondary goal. It will help your end bar immensely if you don't have to lean on Dark Regeneration quite so heavily.

This.

My currently existing weapon based characters were envisioned as being exactly what they already are.

I have a couple ideas for a ginormous weapon character, but none of my existing concepts would translate well.

And how many companies actually do what the customers say when they are told how to run their business?

You can tell them what to do all day long, they are under no obligation to listen to you.

It doesn't sound like feedback to me.

It very much has the tone of being DEMANDS.

Feedback is saying "Hey, I don't really like how this works. Any chance you can look at it?"

What I'm seeing lately has the tone of "GIVE US WHAT WE WANT! GIVE US WHAT WE WANT! GIVE US WHAT WE WANT!" And it is largely the same group of people saying it.

When the same people use different words to say the same thing over and over again, it ceases to be feedback and starts to become a demand.

It very much seems to me like a lot of people making these demands are of the opinion that "listening to the players" means "do whatever the players say", and when the devs don't jump at their command it means they aren't listening.

There is nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, we can do to convince the devs to do something they don't want to do. And there is nothing we can do to make them do anything any faster than they are.

They will do things when they are damn good and ready to do them, and NO amount of "feedback" will convince them to do it once second sooner.

Which really makes all this complaining, going on across a dozen different threads, pretty much completely pointless. The devs are very well aware of what some of the players want. Continuing to complain, and being rude to anyone who dares to disagree with your complaint is not going to make it happen even one second faster.

It'll happen when it happens, is it REALLY necessary to beat the issue to death and then continue beating it long after it's decomposed? Or do you think that because it didn't happen the day you said it, it means the devs aren't listening.

By the way, has anyone thought about what those "signature story arcs" we heard about actually ARE? It is entirely possible that those story arcs are the solo Incarnate content that the game is apparently broken for not having yet.

If you got everything you needed from running the trials once, what would be the point of them even existing? They would be just like a cheap drugstore toy: played with for a couple hours, and discarded in favor of something else.

Why do you have to get a tangible reward EVERY time you do something? What is wrong with earning something over time? Especially since that something was intended to be a timesink in the first place. That's all endgame systems are: timesinks. The devs want people to keep playing the game, so they introduce something that cannot be gotten done and over with quickly.

A Task Force is not an endgame. It does not earn you anything you can't get elsewhere, probably easier. At level 50 there isn't even any character progression.

Before the trials we were told: "Do the same things over and over, and get the same stuff over and over. There's your endgame."

Now, with the trials we are told: "Here's some new stuff to do over and over, but hey, now there's new stuff to be earned from it that we didn't have before."

People don't like running the trials repeatedly, okay, I get that. That does nothing to explain why a lot of the same people who dislike running trials repeatedly will run the ITF repeatedly and see nothing wrong with it at all.

You're doing the same content over and over in either case, why is one okay and one bad? it also makes little sense to me from a rewards standpoint, you get more out of running multiple trials than you ever will out of running multiple ITFs. Yet people are perfectly willing to do ITFs ad nauseum. People are so willing to repeat ITFs that a system was introduced to make sure you can't grind them over and over for massive amounts of merits (though, honestly I think that had more to do with Katie Hannon being doable in 10 minutes for a guaranteed rare recipe than anything else)

And you can't tell me that people do that just because the ITF is fun. I know just as many people that despise the ITF but enjoy the trials, so sheer fun factor can't be the only reason for it.

Running ITF repeatedly = Good, but running trials repeatedly = Bad. I don't understand why people who are not only willing, but eager to do things repeatedly are balking at the idea of doing THIS repeatedly.

And as far as being able to do what you want to get the rewards, I WISH the world worked like that. If it did I could sit at home and play video games and collect a paycheck, instead of going to work. Yes, I know a job and a video game are not the same thing, but the analogy of doing the thing that earns the reward (instead of what you'd prefer to do for the same reward) is valid.

Okay....come up with a definition of "fun" that every single player in the game will agree with, and they might get on that for you.

One person's fun is another person's horrible waste of time. That isn't going to change, because it's human nature. No two people in the world will enjoy exactly the same things to the exact same degree, and have the exact same opinion on what is fun about it. It just won't ever happen.

"Make the game fun" is a ridiculous demand, simply because what is fun varies so widely from person to person.

If everyone enjoyed exactly the same thing there would only ever be one kind of entertainment in existence. One kind of video game. One genre of movie, one sport, one type of music, one book. It might even go even further and there would only be one example of any of those things. If everyone liked the same movie, and didn't like any other movies, what would be the point of making any other movies? If everyone liked WoW, and nothing else, it's unlikely that anything would exist BUT WoW.

The very fact that there is such a wide variety of things you can do to entertain yourself is, in and of itself, concrete proof that "Make it fun" is a completely impossible demand to meet.

Well said.

I've been saying similar for quite a while now.

Why are these things so difficult to acquire?

Because the devs know damn well that if they weren't a whole lot of people would burn through everything in a week and be right back to complaining that they need more stuff to do. It is quite simply completely impossible for the developers of ANY game to deliver content as fast as that game's players can blast through it and get bored again. It just can't be done. It takes nearly a year of development to design something that we can play, master, and get burned out on in less than a month. With that kind of ratio of effort to player entertainment, the devs have no choice but to design things that we will have to linger on for a while so they have time to design the next thing.

I do think gating things that a brand new level 1 character can use behind level 50 exclusive content is a little extreme, but they have to put it somewhere, and they have to give us a reason to keep running the content they've busted their butts for the past year making.

If we could unlock all this stuff easily, without having to run trials, well, the devs would have worked their tails off on the trials for nothing. Because the trials would quickly go the way of Kahn and Barracuda: Played to death for the first few weeks of their existence, and now only occasionally done for the novelty of doing something different.

Comicsluvr is right about another thing. The end game only exists because WE ASKED FOR IT. Not every individual player asked for it, not trying to say that. But, enough people had been asking for some kind of end game to be added for literally YEARS now that the devs finally decided to give it to them. Is everyone going to enjoy it equally? Highly unlikely, I have yet to see ANYTHING in this game that received universal acceptance and praise from every single individual player.

I gotta admit, I respect the devs' stance that, since they know damn well they're NEVER going to please everyone all at once, they're not going to TRY to please everyone all at once.

Another thing I've noticed is that what I suspect the devs have done is working. Very few of us are complaining that there is nothing to do. We're just complaining that we don't like what there is to do. They've succeeded in delivering content that we can't just burn through and get all the rewards from in a couple weeks. And people are getting downright PISSED that they can't burn through it and get all the rewards in a couple weeks.

Long term rewards, they exist now. You can't get them through solo farming, and you can't buy them. How many people got their PvP IOs through actually PvPing like was originally intended? Not too damn many, I'm sure. The ones on the market almost definitely came from AFK farming instead of active PvPing. The devs have introduced rewards to the game that you CANNOT gain through exploits, and it seems the lack of ability to exploit something to get them is pissing people off.

We brought this on ourselves. If we weren't so damned determined to gain as much of a reward with as little effort as possible, the devs probably never would have felt it necessary to gate anything behind a task we HAVE to do to receive it.

You didn't waste them.

Now you can unlock capes and auras on a brand new level 1 character without having to run the missions (the aura mission is particularly annoying to me)

I wouldn't slot it.

Does it really matter if 1 out of 5 enemies is attacking you 20% slower? Since there's no way to tell if it's actually working, I wouldn't bother with it, and the enemies you would WANT to use it on are nearly immune to recharge debuffs anyway (AVs and such)

This.

I've found it's actually faster to use threads to craft things, due to the better drop rate and the fact that you can convert Astral and Empyrean merits into threads.

I ran a few trials with my blaster and I had the uncommon Alpha crafted and was only a rare component away from the Rare before I'd even unlocked the Alpha slot itself. (I did it as an experiment to see how long it would take, turns out it was pretty quick)

You will craft it a LOT faster if you use threads instead of shards, mostly because of the horrible drop rate on shards.