DrMike2000

I agree with Ultimo in some ways.

Endurance management can be tedious, especially for new players. I dont find it a problem in the long term. I usually take Stamina, unless I've got an alternative plan, and my 50s sometimes run out of endurance if they really hammer their AoEs and other expensive powers still. But that feels as it should be. A superhero should be able to go all out and temporarily expend all their energy in a big sustained salvo.

Back when I started though - hoo boy! Took me a while to figure out that turning sprint off was a good idea. And that was on high DPE archetypes, mainly Blasters.

Its good to have limiting mechanisms, but endurance as it stands is slanted far too ehavily to the start of the game. The feeling of relief you get every time you hit 20 and get your END under control is not worth ther fact that the game is less enjoyable and more grindy than it should be in the 10-20 range.

The end return on Elec attacks is negligible. Power Sink will get you through your end problems and allow you to skip Stamina, but it doesn't kick in until level 35.

Maybe take Stamina as you level and then use a respec or your second build to switch out of it when you get Power Sink

I like the idea of effectively forcing people into random rolls with a proportion of their merits.

I hoarded merits the first time round with them on heroes (playing a group of ten from 1-50), and they're now sitting unspent on various characters I never play in varying amounts from 70 to 240.

The second time (group of 10 villains) I've spent them as I go and its made me much better off, and had a positive little drop into the market too with a few mid-level LoTG and Miracles I've created. I still have two characters with emergency hoards (240 and 480) just in case I really need a particular recipe one day, so I'm not completely cured of my hoarding tendencies.

For a solo-oriented build you can take Tough (which holds the Steadfast IO) and Weave, Manouvers and Combat Jumping or CJ. Slot them to stack defence with Dispersion Bubble. Thats around 32% Defence to everything, including Psi attacks, right there, and achievable by the late 20s.

Add in a few IO sets and you're the toughest "squishy" on the block. You'll never be the fastest solo-er, but you will be survivable.

You can do this without skipping the ally shields to create a more team-oriented build.

The guide in my sig has some more details.

The topics of inflation and inf sinks have come up in a few recent threads and got me thinking. My main conclusion is that the game lacks direct influence sinks, and that introducing them could be a good thing.

Prices for desirable items have risen. This seems to happen gradually, and also in bursts such as occurred red-side when the MM/AE bug created a sudden influx of influence. A common response sems to be that while this looks like a barrier to a new player, inflation is inevitable and works both ways and allows them to make more money, which is true.

This is examining the problem from the perspective of the individual.
There is the individual player,and then the rest of the world, ie all other players and the game. The game gives you resources through playing it (inf, recipes, enhancements, merits, temp powers) and you can interact with other players either directly or through the market to shuffle these around. If you play with some 50's and gte a few level 50 recipes to vendor, thats the game giving you some nice inf directly. If you're lucky and the game drops a Steadfast +Res/Def, the main reward comes from other players rather than the game itself.

I'd like to look at the problem form a global perspective, ie the sum of all players vs. the game.

Every time any player plays the game, assets are generated, and the game gives to the players. The game also takes from the players through costume charges, market fees and direct buys from stores and crafting tables.

Five types of transaction can occur:

1) Rewards from the game itself in the form of direct inf for defeats/mission completion and vendoring items that drop. This is 100% dev controlled, and goes from the devs to the players. Merits also count here, as they can be exchanged for items that can then be vendored. This has grown. When I started playing I got inf and enhancements. I now still get them, but also recipes, salvage, merits and temp powers, so each new system has grown this amount.

2) Transactions between players through the market. This is primarily player controlled, and goes from players to devs in the form of market fees. The more the devs can convince players to shuffle around large amounts of inf, the more inf gets lost. Most items will get transacted twice at most, maybe by a flipper, and then a consumer.

3) Direct gifts from alts, costume contests, random benefactors. 100% player controlled and has no net efect on this model, since it doesnt change the total playerbase inf at all.

4) Things that players buy directly. Costume changes, temp jetpacks, PVP temp powers, inspirations. 100% dev controlled, this is a pure inf sink.

5) Player destruction of items. Deleting recipes, deleting characters, cancelling subscriptions and old characters who no longer get played. All these destroy inf.

Inflation will occur roughly when the gains from 1) exceed the losses from 2), 4) and 5). ie the playerbase inf total grows.

Recently on villainside, an AE exploit allowed masterminds to tear through content, increasing 1) dramatically. Prices for certain items skyrocketed, and have not gone down since, suggesting 2), 4) and 5) are not big enough.

Currently, influence is valued primarily because it allows you to buy top items off other players. If you have a windfall via whatever means (a lucky drop, costume contest) chances are you'll spend it on the market on a recipe or IO (transaction type 2) rather than blow it all on inspirations or jetpacks, simply because large direct purchases do not exist.

Imagine if they did.
Some suggestions are:

Temp powers available directly from the store, and for different costs. For example, the "18 Stun Grenades" power costs 100,000, making this temp power accessible to new players. The mutually excluisve "64 Stun Grenades" power costs 10,000,000. Its very much a luxury item, all it does is allow you to skip going back to the store, but players do exist with that kind of money to throw around. The cheap Kinetic Dampener Shield lasts 10 minutes, the expensive one lasts for an hour, but costs 1000 times more, and so on.

A 10-use crafting table for a large amount, 25 million maybe. Once again, this just makes life convenient. Combined with email of temp powers and salvage, this allows you to pop out a mobile weapons platform mid-mission, and hand out some temp recipes, which would be a rather cool "status" move.

Larger tier inspirations. Make them expensive enough be prohibitive for everyday use, but at least available for the billionaire who's just had his behind kicked by a tricky AV (or the forward thinker who wants to avoid that).

A purely cosmetic status power. Like someone suggested once here, a summonable butler who follows you around for several hundred million. Maybe add some badges and costume items here.

Balancing these items would be a case of working out the rate of inf created by playing vs. the rate of consumption. Say for example you spend all your inf on Kinetic Dampeners while playing solo at +2/x1, it would be possible to calculate a price for these items that allows you to have your shield up 100%, 50% or 25% of the time using datamining available to the devs. The expensive versions (eg the 1 hour shield) should be priced to be unsustainable, since the purpose is to shrink the ever-growing total playerbase amount of inf.

The big potential problem is the fixed prices. These values I've pulled out of my hat today may be chump change in the future at some point, similar to the way SO's used to be expensive but are now extremely cheap. Currently, the lack of meaningful direct purchases means that the devs don't have to worry about inflation too much. Hero and villain side balancing should be identical, since direct rewards are equiavlent over both sides.

What do you guys think?

I've always dismissed the +Damage bonuses from sets as a borderline useless.

I built up a bit on my Sonic/Energy Defender and can't say I noticed much at all.

Playing around with my MA/SR stalker the other day I realised I could get a pretty decent boost (+25% or so) using 2 Mako's (4-slot), 2 Touch of Death, and 4-slotting my passives with Red Fortune (as well as 6 slotting the toggles), Adjusted Targetting in Focus Chi and Gaussian's in Tactics. All of which works pretty well towards building defence too.
I'll grab Assault on the way for an extra +10% Damage.

For a Stalker, this could have a very quantifiable difference, eg being able to one-hsot a taregt I couldn't otherwise.

Anyone had any good or bad experiences with this approach?

I get the idea that a lot of power pool powers are balanced based on wasted power selections.

When I started playing and stuck to Blasters, it seemed like Aid Self was deliberately placed out of reach, because self-heals were the province of the other less offensively balanced archetypes. If I wanted one I had to "waste" a power on Aid Other. As a solo Fire/Fire Blaster, I really found Aid Self to be worth its weight in gold.

Ditto for the Fear powers in Presence, or Tough and Weave, they all have dubious filler powers between you and them.

Then again, some pools seem to have it backwards, specifically Superspeed and Flight. Hasten and Air Superiority are five-star powers, while Whirlwind and Group Fly are novelties at best.

I'd personally love it if Stamina didn't have two pre-requisites. I have a few characters who couldn't squeeze in one particular power because of it. Too many of my melee characters have dropped a melee set power for Kick or Boxing to get Tough, and consequently do a bit less damage or go with one less Gauntlet attack.

I'm having a really hard time thinking of any reasons why this wouldn't work, or cases where it would clearly overpower a character to get rid of these filler powers.

Yeah, the problem I see with them as an influence drain is that they (and their components) are just more drops to be shuttled around by players on the market.

This means either:

a) There's a plentiful supply and they're cheap. They do consume salvage, as you point out, Fulmens, but that just raises the price of that salvage a little bit perhaps. (Plus you can always buy the 10-25 version that uses cheapy orange salvage once youve worked out which one it is)

b) They're scarce, and only the rich use them, and they experience price inflation the same as certain recipes have, (eg LotG +Recharge). They get flipped, putting them further out of reach of the casual player. Market fees take their toll, but history has shown I guess that these dont counter inflation.

Seems we're in position a), which means theyre a fun addition tot he game but not an inf sink. (Which is cool, by the way )

If they sold from a shop for 1,000,000 for a Recovery Serum, say... that would be an inf sink.

Numbers made up here, but... say playing a 50 makes 1 million per hour, and playing a newbie makes negligible inf. People play 50's half the time, and newbies half the time. This means every character can have one Recovery Serum every two hours if everyone spends all their earned inf on Recovery Serums. Prices could be balanced using some ballpark figures like this, eg if a 50 really likes Kinetic Shields, they could earn enough to have a 50% uptime.

Yep. Devices used to offer a bit of Defence, a bit of Stealth and some extra accuracy and some extra perception amongst other things. Now anyone can get any of these using IOs.

That's how to nerf a set without changing a single thing about it

I've bought Kinetic Dampeners but havent used them much, if at all. I think I crafted a couple of Envenomed Daggers and Recovery Serums but havent used them yet.

I've outfitted a few of my characters with Stun Grenades and Grenades, and love them. These are the winners in my opinion, and round out my non-powered Stalker and Space marine tank very nicely, to name but two characters.

I've got Smoke Flash on my Stalker, but havent used it yet.

The one thing they arent doing is draining my influence, though. They're ridiculously cheap.

Just to warn you, Logan, Electricity is the lowest damage Defender secondary. Its not terrible, just maybe 80% as effective as other sets.

Ice also makes a nice thematic pair with Storm and does better damage overall. Freezing Rain and Ice Storm are very nice together.

I'm not saying that Electricty is unplayable by any means, just a little bit weaker than other blast sets.

I love Bonfire on my Fire/Energy Blaster. Especially in the Peregrine Island Safeguard missions, where the jailbreak can pit you against two carnie bosses at once in a confined space

I have no problem with getting a tell asking to join my team, and also no problem in turning people down if they do, and I'm not in the mood.

At the times I play (Aussie evening, before or during maintenance time) it makes a lot of sense actually, as there are often single figures present in a zone. In that context it makes perfect sense to ask the teamed ones if a team is going, when the alternative is to shut up, wait and see if they broadcast that they're looking.

I'm afraid Synergy only works with keystrokes (broadcasting them to two computers) and mouse moves (effectively sharing a long desktop between two PCs).

It won't do anything with two applications on the same PC, and doesn't support controllers.

Hey Biospark!

My initial thoughts were that Tough is fine as is. As a rough rule of thumb it halves the incoming S/L for elemental Tankers, ie you take just over 1/4 damage instead of just over 1/2.

Going any higher and you start to encroach on Invulnerbaility's territory (capped S/L resistance of 90%).

With your suggested changes, I'd imagine a lot of Tankers taking Hardiness, so you're pushing them up to 80% S/L on their mature builds? Electrical Armour also gets a bit more resistance than most in its AT toggles, so they'd easily be approaching Invuln level resists.

Sure, Invulnerbaility gets Defence too, but Electric Armour also has capped Energy resist, Psi resist, end drain resist, damage aura and end management tools.

I think you might be pushing things a little bit too far here.

(And yeah, Defenders can get some pretty impressive numbers, since they use the same values as tankers for resist toggles. )

Devices has a niche playstyle, sure. The stealthy toe-bombing, set-up and deliver the payload is very cool, but its just inefficient.

With the way the core game is set up - defeat more enemies to get XP, and you nee dlots of XP to get new shinies like powers and slots - its really hard to come up with an alternative playstyle to repeatable one-click AoE damage. Anything that slows down the "find group, carpet bomb group, next group" playstyle is going to have trouble, and I think thats where Devices is now.

I agree that a damage buff for targetting Drone would be a good idea, since that was the original pre-ED deal - it gave you +33% damage.

I'd also lower the interrupt and recharge on Trip Mines a bit. The large trap for Ebs/AVs is a nice idea, but suffers a bit too much from the time it takes to set up currently in 99% of the game. When it works (eg Mary MacComber mission) its awesome, but thats the minortiy of gameplay currently.

Check the link in my sig for Synergy.

It's free open source software that allows for keystroke broadcasting across the LAN between two PCs I've also got a set of binds you can grab for basic dual-boxing functionality.

If I was in the driving seat, I'd modify Sappers a little bit.

1) Get rid of the 50% Energy resistance
2) Get rid of the 100% resistance to End Drain

I first ran across them as an Elec/Elec Blaster, and was not happy about these two stats. Sure, I had Tesla Cage, but being unable to end drain a Sapper was just frustrating from a poetic justice standpoint.

I'd recommend a Blaster as a first character.

Blasters are fun right out of the box. They peak early and start to have problems much later on, like in the 30s and 40s, as mezzing enemies become more common. But they're great to play while you're figuring out the basics of the game in the lower levels. You don't need to chase enemies around and get some flashy special effects to boot.

Scrappers can feel a bit weak at first in comparison, but really hit their stride in the early 20s, and become killing machines both solo and on teams.

Tankers and Controllers can both be a real drag to solo in the early levels because they output less damage for the same endurance. You're safe, but run out of steam easily.

Defenders are a mixed bag - their primaries have much more diverse effects than any other archetype.

I played Blasters first. When I switched to a scrappers I really appreciated the extra toughness and surviability, whereas a Scrapper to Blaster switch would be a lot rougher.
I then branched out to Controllers and Defenders, and by then I'd got the hang of the game to the extent that it didn't take forever to get to level 20.

And whoever you play, turn off Sprint while you're fighting, to save endurance.

The new Kinetic Dampener temporary power should help a lot against a number of bosses, since its adds to S/L Defence (and also adds some energy resistance).

If you can afford that, it'll make your early career a lot smoother.

I play on two PCs full screen.

I make groups of ten characters, five per account, and mix and match them as I level them up.

I tend to nominate one account as "front" and place my characters who play better as the main one in a duo there - melee-ers, ones with lots of location based powers and so on. The "back" account gets characters who require less attention and have ally-only buffs, eg Sonic Resonance is a great "back" powerset. Liquefy is infrequent enough for the location click to not bother me too much.
Ninja MM = front, because I want my pets running into melee, Thug MM = back, because they'll do OK just following.
Front characters usually get the aggro because they engage first, so buffers like Force Fields do better at the back.

Having said that, I have played two melee-ers at times. Just run round the back of your target and the back character will get into range and flank pretty well.

My favourite duos are usually two support characters. Mutual buffing can give some very powerful results. Two Empathy Defenders? Oh yeah!

You'll find Fitness very useful. You'll need Stamina to not be sucking wind after a round of AoE's. Its three power picks to get to Stamina, but its worth it.

Medicine is not bad. It has interruptible heals and buffs, my take on it is its good for a Blaster to patch themseleves up between fights and save their green inspirations for use in combat. It may be worth taking Stimulant instead of heal, giving a support character mez resistance is often more useful than a quick patch up after a fight, and will often benefit you in return if they're free to buff and heal you rather than held or stunned.

Hasten is a very good choice. Not only do your AoEs come up quicker, but so do Aim and Build Up, your all-important self Damage buffs.

Don't bother with Fighting on a Blaster.

I agree that mass Tesla Cages would be an eyesore. Using Gravity Ditortion Field with the lockdown proc (where 20% of enemies get the Tesla Cage) is unsightly enough.

I disagree that End Drain should do -damage or any other effect. How about leting end drain actually drain end and floor recovery by putting some decent numbers into a power that isnt a slow animating PBAoE?