Eiko-chan

I won't refute which one is better than which because I don't know for sure, but with taunts, the magnitude isn't really that important - the duration is, because it's the duration that determines the threat multiplier. (Taunt is not, despite intent, an "on/off" mez. Instead, it adds a multiplier to your "threat" rating on each target it applies to. This is in PvE, of course. I think it actually works how it's intended to in PvP.)

I've never been clear on whether it stacks or not; it's possible that 13.5s every half second is superior to 16.875s every second. If taunt stacks, Chilling Embrace is likely to be the strongest. However, if it does not (and I don't think it does; only the longest duration applies, IIRC), then AoO/Invincibility are the strongest.

Duration is why Willpower's taunt is the weakest; RttC only gives a 1.25s duration taunt.

Yes, you can have all 15 that way (for 10*5+5*5+2.5*5 (assuming medium is 5 and small 2.5), or 87.5% bonus regeneration.)

Yes, exactly. You could have 6 such bonuses slotted in your build, but you'll only get that 10% added 5 times; 50%, not 60%.

Sam's dilemma stems from the disparity of "because"s offered him. His because choice was "because slavery is wrong" vs. "because Seers protect people". The game's because choice was "because the Resistance can use them" vs. "because the Loyalists can use them".

The most prominent place this weird justification comes is at the very end of the Power arc, in the solo mission after you have finished Neuron's arc. If you're not familiar with it, the choices amount to "Yes, my Emperor" vs. "LOL, blow it up!" Seriously. (The stated options are actually "shut down the experiment as Emperor Cole has commanded" and "blow up the lab because the Resistance would like to see Neuron's lab blown up".)

Sam has always railed against the "lackey" style many of the game's arcs are written; Praetoria, ultimately, is still just boiling down to "whose lackey are you?" (Some choices less so than others; the Warden and Responsibility end choices (meaning end of Neutropolis, not each individual one) aren't so much lackey choices (well, actually, they're more "do you continue to be a lackey, or think for yourself this time"), but Power and Crusader are.)

I have never used the term "social anxiety" (except right now when I'm quoting you). My recall isn't perfect, but I think the people throwing around "social anxiety" have, by-and-large, been the "pro-team" side of the argument. It's a bit of a loaded term.

What I did say was that introverts that lacked social skills largely did so out of lack of practice, and not because of any inherent deficiency in developing them.

As Nethergoat already pointed out, but as I shall now explain in a bit more detail, online interaction on a forum is vastly different from online interaction in the game. For that matter, "chatting on channels" (another thing I do frequently) is vastly different from "playing on a team".

I like to think about what I'm going to say. In written communication, it's pretty easy for me to do that - the parts of the brain that control written communication are also the parts of the brain introverts are naturally wired to use. Being able to pause, collect my thoughts, and then process them is easy (and even relaxing) for me. I can do that on a forum. It's also something I can do while chatting on global channels in the game; there's no pressure for me to react immediately.

On a team, this ceases to be the case. I must react instantly to input - a call to switch targets from an anchor, or a rush to move to the next mob, or a sudden need to throw a heal or buff on an ally in trouble. I don't have time to think about what I'm doing, formulate my options, and move forward. I can't think - I must do.

"Do" comes naturally for extroverts, and they are empowered by doing. Introverts are natural "think"ers, however, and are empowered by thinking. We can "do", but it's effort - just like it's an effort for many extroverts to slow down and reflect on things before moving forward. Extroverts feel antsy and bored when they aren't "do"ing, when there isn't activity (and change). Introverts feel anxious and overwhelmed when there's a flurry of activity.

A lot of us can keep up, for a while, but eventually we're going to be worn out and shut down. The longer we have to do it, the more drained we get - we might be perfectly fine to team for a couple missions before breaking up (which, in my experience, is about as long as most PuGs last anyway), but the long stretch of a Task Force may be too much - or if we are going to do it, we need to be well-rested and recharged (which means we've spent a long time alone/thinking beforehand) before we can tackle it. When, as is the case for the vast majority of introverts, our actual lives and work require us to be expending that energy instead, we won't have the excess to spend on a video game.

If you watched me while I soloed, you'd probably notice the difference pretty quickly. While I'm not sure how others solo, judging from the way most teams roll I suspect the majority of people run missions as fast as their builds allow, taking just enough time to recover from the last fight before diving into the next. I don't do that (and I suspect many other introverts would see parallels to themselves here.) I take in as much as my character can take, but when the fight is over, I generally take quite a bit of time getting to the next one - far longer than is needed to rest/recuperate back to full for my character. It's mostly unconscious, but a lot of what I'm doing is reflecting on how the pull went, what I did to overcome it, what I might expect to see next, and what I could do to make the next one go smoother. I'm taking a moment to catch my breath and let my "think" smooth over the "do" I just went through.

I also like attack chains, and hate ambushes. Attack chains let me focus on the "think" in combat, and ambushes force me into the "do". "Do" is probably also why I hate Battle Maiden so much.

Looking at time stamps, this post took me about twenty minutes to compose. I paused in the middle of sentences, went back to read over what I'd already written, thought carefully about what I was putting down and in general took my time making my points and observations. There is no way I could have gotten away with this on a team.

I just wanted to thank you for stating a reasonable expectation, rather than the hopeless optimism for i20 that has heretofore been espoused. If a solo option does come, it most certainly will be in a later issue or rushed out in a hot patch sort of fix like the WST (probably after i20, making it "i20.5", I guess.)

I've always hated exemplaring, because I've always hated losing my powers. The alpha slot is no different in this regard from the APPs/PPPs my high-level builds tend to rely on.

I don't think this is an uncommon dislike; I think it's probably the central driving motivation behind requests for "end game". People want more stuff to do with their awesome powers, and don't want to have to go back and do lower stuff without their powers instead.

At the time I signed up for the one-year plan (which was eighteen months ago,) I liked where the game was going and hadn't seen any reason to doubt it would continue there. When it renewed six months ago, the same was true - GR was slated to come out soon and everything I saw of it was great stuff. Even the first part of the Alpha slot looked good.

This team-gating for the Rare/Very Rare parts really blind-sided me. It came out of nowhere; I never in my wildest dreams suspected they'd pull something like this.

That'll teach me to be optimistic.

(PS, I'm going to slap the next person that tells me to "wait for i20" - unless you want to tell me you're in the Closed Beta and can verify explicitly that "Incarnate Trial" doesn't mean the same thing as "Trial" has meant in the past.)

I probably didn't explain it correctly (though I'm sure such people do exist); it's not really so much that hey can't enjoy it if there's a possibility of failure, but more that they feel the pain of failure more intensely, and that the thrill of overcoming the challenge doesn't give them the same "buzz".

Extroverted brains are wired to really run off dopamine - the "excitement" hormone. Introverted brains, however, are wired for acetylcholine - the "reflection" hormone.

So extroverts are driven to seek out thrills and challenges to get their dopamine flowing (introverts doing the same things tend to feel overwhelmed and overstimulated; they are more sensitive to dopamine and thus require less of it) while introverts are apt to seek out reflection and contemplation (which probably explains why I love looking over character builds as much, or possibly even more, than actually playing the game itself.)

What is an exciting and inspiring challenge for an extrovert is going to be an overwhelming experience for an introvert.

(And I want to be clear that I don't want to take those challenges away from the extroverts; just not force the introverts into them.)

That's more typically extroverted, though it's impossible to peg someone based on a single instance. Still, extroverts are comfortable with whatever group setting they find themselves in, while introverts, when they group at all, are far more comfortable grouping with people they know and are familiar with.

Six months is a long time. The devs have a pretty big window to address my concerns. It's entirely possible that they will do so and I will renew. It's less likely they will do so if they decide to listen to you rather than me, of course.

At the moment, I've done all I can to assure my departure (my account is not set to renew; there's not a lot else I can do about it.)

Varies by tank, of course. You're probably not pulling aggro off Shield Tankers, and probably not Invuln Tankers either (those two have the strongest taunt auras). It would not surprise me at all to see Shield Scrappers and Brutes stealing aggro from Willpower Tanks, however, or other tanks with weaker taunt auras.

Some of them, yes. Not all, by far, but as with anything that expresses preferences and philosophies, some are going to be extroverted, some introverted, and some neither. That one particular song happens to be written from a clear view-point of an extrovert. An introvert isn't going to be inspired by the song the same way an extrovert is, because our brains work differently.

We literally* do not get the same rushes that extroverts do. Our brains don't give us the same charge from excitement and thrill that yours do. We're different. You really need to get used to it.

*I actually mean literally here, not in the hyperbolic, metaphoric way people like to use literally.

Pay me for the six months I have to stick around for because I already paid and I'll gladly leave right now. Otherwise, I have as much right to voice my displeasure at the developer's actions as you have to voice your support.

So missing the point.

That is such an extrovert song. Not everyone is a thrill-seeker; we don't all get enjoyment from it.

Best game ever. Seriously. I'm all now.

When I lose, I don't want it to have wasted an hour or two of my life.

The very first "Hello World" program I ever wrote compiled bug free.

A technical semantic that doesn't really make for options that are "non-team". Just because you don't formally use the in-game system to make the team doesn't make it not a team activity.

Non-team options are not coming with i20. Only non-TF options.

Sam doesn't use sets and set bonuses because he doesn't want to bother with the complexity and because he's CDO and likes seeing "50" all over the place on his enhancement screen (which isn't possible if you're really serious about going after set bonuses).

He exclusively uses generic, non-set IOs, so it's not like he "refuses" to touch IOs.

I'm not trying to keep up with any one. I still want my characters to be stronger, however. The game is offering better tools with which to overcome its non-player obstacles, and I am being denied these tools because they're supposedly "for teams only". That +1 level would be incredibly useful in lots of solo things - the Mender Silos TF, for instance, or the Vanguard arcs, to name two. Getting builds that can solo AVs, to name another.

We've received no guarantee, promise, or even indication that the developers are taking seriously the idea that soloists should be able to get the level shift. Black Scorpion's "investigating" quote was followed immediately by "but you've got to expect us to create stuff to encourage and reward teaming in an MMO". The coupling of those statements is the troubling part; it creates a feeling of "yeah yeah, we'll look into it, but you don't seriously expect us to design solo content in this multiplayer game, do you?"

This isn't an issue of being patient for something we've been promised will come in the future (the developers don't make such promises anyway). It's an issue of being asked to be patient for something that very well may not ever come.

Not really. The fault lies in designing a Task Force that "pretty much requires a tank". A prime aspect of this game is that most things don't "pretty much require" anything. If a task has been designed that does, and that task is flagged by the developers as "what you should be doing this week" (which is precisely what the WST is), the developers are at least as culpable, if not wholly responsible, for the problem of having no tank.

And keep in mind that it is working as intended that you cannot replace a lost team mate on a Task Force. That makes it even more their fault.

He was running Jenni Adair's arc, GG. When's the last time you saw a villain running arcs in Talos?

It's not a mistake for some of them to do it. It's a mistake for all of them to.

Frankly, at this point, MMO developers should be trying like the dickens to do anything but what WoW is doing - because if their players wanted what WoW was doing, the chances are very very high that they're just going to play WoW.

The video game industry is in a very peculiar place right now; production costs are so high that everyone does the same thing because it's a "sure bet", and yet they're leaving out so many potential customers - and forcing themselves into very competitive markets - by doing so. Doing the same thing as everyone else is not a very reliable way to pull in more customers; you have to be sure you're doing that same thing better than everyone else, and that everyone knows you're doing it better, to have a chance at pulling customers from your competitors.

Doing something different, pulling in a new customer base instead of trying to siphon off portions of the old, may be a bit riskier (you could design something no one wants, after all), but when you've already got a track record for doing that, it's a much safer bet. Nintendo knew this, and did this, and they're now the kings of the consoles again.

For City of Heroes, which has long bucked many MMO trends (intentionally or not) to decide now they need to be like everyone else is peculiar at best, and destructive at worst.