Eldorado

This game seems to be stuck on the never-ending teeter-totter of "We want more End-Game™! Give us more End-Game™ NAO and we'll have excuses to grind until the end of time for Cool Stuff™!" and on the other side, "You devs have got be KIDDING us! Seriously, make it easier: can we at least e-mail thing to ourselves, or trade threads for other things, or something? This is getting silly."

Most of the comments I see on the forums are from the second group*, of which I was a part of from the start. I didn't like how the "new improved end-game" "helped" EQ1 years ago, and I'm getting kind of sick of it here. Still, this is what the devs CLAIMED we all wanted, right?!?

*(Yes, this may be my perception affecting my reality, but either there aren't tons of posts crying "YAY MOAR GRINDINGING LOL!" or else I'm selectively blocking all those posts from my vision and short-term memory.)

While you don't say how long you've been on hiatus, a lot of the game has actually gotten easier with Invention Origin enhancements and Incarnate content, to name two.

On the other hand, PRAETORIA seems to be a lot harder than Paragon or the Rogue Isles, and as a result it's sometimes even harder to find teams on some servers.

Try taking your MA/SR back to Paragon and see how he fares?

Thanks -- I'm not sure how much more virtual money I would have squandered to get "the last one" but I'm glad I didn't burn that many points.

The minor bit of good news is that (unless you hopefully did something egregiously wrong with a build) you don't really "need" six Catalysts, just really really REALLY want them. And you want them NAO!

...which puts you in the same boat as many of the rest of us who are looking for catalysts, or for salvage for t4 Incarnate stuff: go grind through some more trials. Many, MANY more trials! It's the "new and improved end game that the players wanted," right?! (Frankly, I'm not sure how a couple of people I know can still stomach running four or five trials a night these days. I got my main all t4ed, a couple others with a t3 Judgement, and now I just plod through two or three trials a week now.)

I'm really glad they do, since I was suffering from "want it NAO" too!

I bought 24 packs the day after they came out and got two catalysts. "But I want three, I think!" Then there was some discussion in the Help channel of how people could or couldn't use catalysts to get different set bonuses within the same power (you can) so I went to Test and bought 48 packs 'cause they were free and got 9 catalysts!

[Then I proved on Beta that yes, you CAN get ATO set bonuses and Superior ATO set bonuses within the same power -- my scrapper slotted 3 of each type and got two (2) bonuses and two (3) bonuses. The forums got it right as usual; the person who was wrong in the Help channel was, well, wrong.)]

So then, hating myself for it, I bought more Super Packs back on Live, playing the justification mini-game. "I've got enough points left over for 4 more. I just had bad luck before." Then I decided to buy something else from the Market I'd been thinking about and spent actual money to get more points. "And now I've got more points. I'll just buy 4 more...today. And I only need ONE! And...I might the the rare wolf pet...and...and...." The NCSoft Marketing department was laughing at me. "Look! It's working!" And still no 3rd Catalyst -- of course.

Later that night, I ran some trials because I'd heard they were dropping on Live and got nothing.

The next night, I THOUGHT about squandering some more points and ran two Trials instead. Wouldn't you know it? Got one as a drop just that fast, catalyzed my three ATOs and I think I'm done with Super Packs -- for now.

I've got a spreadsheet to track my INF and marketeering across 25 characters, and I list the SSA times and dates on that. I've got a spreadsheet to track alpha slot progress across 12 alts who want those, another spreadsheet tracking AV's across nine characters I'm working on, and ANOTHER tracking incarnate shards and the next four incarnate abilities for nine other characters.

This game has gotten a little too complicated to be totally "alt friendly" these days.

This always makes me feel a little bad for the players saying it -- but then I wonder about how often they play, how long, and at what sorts of level.

I got 10 purples in 32 calendar days back in the days of "Unyielding" difficulty -- hanging out with friend's level 50's, levelling my new blaster to 50 and then running around to see what I could do solo. (Yeah, 32 days -- couldn't have been 30 or 31 days and "a month." )

I completely stopped counting purples on my main character, who's closing in on 5000 hours of play and something like 17 million SG prestige -- so that's a LOT of defeats. I don't farm per se, but I play all sorts of different content -- A LOT.

I got two purples within 2 hours running radios with friends last night -- one on a 50 helping them level, then on my 39th SoA when they were helping me! But before that...wow. Think it was mid-December when I last got one. Purples are indeed random but seems like they arrive in small groups with long droughts in between, at least for me.

You slotted for typed defense (smashing/lethal) on a powerset that's based around positional defenses (melee/AoE/ranged)?

I could have sworn I've read where people can softcap all three positionals with just SO's and a Steadfast Protection unique, but if it's working for you, great! I'm just wondering what the advantage to the Kin Combat method might be.

That's exactly what they're trying to do -- force demand by artificially limiting the supply. "Only available for a limited time" means "maybe more people will buy it now because of the upcoming shortage." In Disney's case, they're gambling that more people will buy the "(Insert Copyrighted Title)" DVD during the short window when it's available than the number of people that would buy it over the next 10 years if it was always on the shelf at the store.

Say what you want to about the ethics of such a practice, but since Disney's got a net worth bigger than some small countries, they probably know what they're doing when it comes to money.

If you're really not concerned with your health at all, a Miracle proc will give you a smidge more recovery than a Numina's proc.

If I'm remembering right, the Panacea gives similar bonuses as a Numina's -- but with a "chance of Endurance" rather than a guaranteed bonus. As others have mentioned, the huge prices for those is the fact that they're PVP IO's and the supply is far less than the demand.

"Sub" in the first quote would mean "subscribe" and become VIP.

There IS still a lot of "free" stuff to do at 50 besides incarnate content, but right now incarnate content is new and shiny and that's where a lot of the VIP players are.

Sounds like it's time for more alts, then!

A while back, I finally gave up trying to remember which character had how much INF, and finally just threw together a rudimentary Excel-type spreadsheet. Columns = characters. Rows = INF per character. Then I use "sum" to add up each row into another column. (OMG! It adds up each row for me! ...yeah, I know there are kids in second grade who can run circles around me on Excel and other programs, but my system is easy and it works -- I just leave it in the background and alt+tab when I remember to while I'm marketing, or when I switch characters.)

It's kind of amusing to look back over the years at the ebb and flow of INF, as well as my "comments" column when I spent a pile of INF on a new character or made a minor killing on a niche, like a "market diary" or something.

I laughed. I laughed entirely too loudly, but it's two o' clock in the morning here.

And even though I laughed, I still agree -- that's a LOTTA wrong. But still funny. And still wrong.

Fine -- my apologies, and I stand corrected. There are TWO snipes out of eight pools and how many other NON-snipe ranged attacks within those pools?

I wouldn't be caught dead with either of them, hence my unfamiliarity with those two.

"If your cat had kittens in the oven, would you call them biscuits?"

Call them whatever you want to, because YOU'RE going to be the one explaining what you're talking about!

Six words: call it a "ranged ancillary or patron pool attack."

Those aren't terribly long range, they're not terribly damaging, and they're not interruptable -- and they don't take long to animate.

All of the above are features of the only attacks in the game which are called "Snipe attacks," which take the "Snipe" category of IO's.

Or paragonwiki sums it up even better: "Snipe attacks are interruptible, very high-damage ranged attacks with nearly double the range of normal ranged attacks.

Either my Mid's is really broken, or else it's not importing your above build correctly.

I don't see Hasten as a power choice IN that build anywhere. What level did you take it?

I'm not enough of a numbers cruncher to say anything for certain, but I'm wondering about exactly how much delay you're going to have in the BF -> AV chain with +47.5% recharge and a Musculature alpha.

I had crammed 37.5% recharge into my DB/WP and went the Spiritual route, and I had to get to t3 to to make the short delay in the same chain "acceptable" to me. I'm a lot happier now that it's a t4 and the chain is pretty much seamless unless I get hit with some sort of debuffs.

On the Endurance front, I think I agree with you -- 218% recovery and 3.7 End per second might not be enough for long drawn out fights, but there's always inspirations. Personally, I like to overbuild most of my WP and regen characters to the point where they can fight all day against an AV or pylon and not run out of endurance. Cramming three Perf Shifter procs into a build (in addition to 4 or 6 slotting Stamina or QR) tends to work nicely for me, though there's inevitably an "uh oh" moment when none of the procs fire for a time and the blue bar starts sliding downwards. Luckily that's usually followed by a balancing-out when two fire at once.

It sounds as though you're going about it the right way!

As a new player, this game is extremely forgiving, especially if you're teaming with other players, and depending on which server you're playing on, people aren't as likely to criticize other player's builds or power selections than in some other MMO's out there.

For every power selection, there are probably a half dozen "best" ways to slot that power, and a hundred or more good-to-decent ways (especially if you delve into Invention Origin enhancements), but if you're not planning on attempting to solo some EXTREME late level content you'll probably never notice a significant difference.

Admittedly, when starting out there's the potential for building a train wreck of a character, but that's part of the learning curve. To help avoid that, there's the Player Guides section of the forum, the individual AT sections, and the "Build Workshop" section, and of course Paragon Wiki. In-game, there's "alternate builds" and character respecs which can be earned through three task forces (or strike forces for redside), or as vet rewards, or earned as a 'drop', or purchased at the Consignment Houses, or purchased at the Paragon Market with real money as a last resort.

One thing to remember when looking at some builds and the ensuing arguments in some forums is that after almost eight years, some of the veteran players are really trying to push the envelope in regards to what their character is capable of soloing, just for bragging rights. Spending billions or tens of billions of INF to eke out a few extra points of recharge or defense is seriously "late game stuff" that the mythical "average player" probably won't even notice when on a team -- a 1.88% defense buff becomes almost insignificant when you just got a TWENTY percent buff from the defender on your team, AND another one from a controller!

Go out, have fun, make mistakes (and learn from them) and correct them later, but just enjoy yourself for now!

Ye olde historical "No": It's been like this since Issue 6, and the devs had originally said something along the lines of "it's a massively MULTIPLAYER online game, and we'd rather the players socialized and pooled their resources rather than everybody having one [or more] solo SGs and bases."

The more things change, the more they "Maybe": On the other hand, it's one of the most frequently requested quality-of-life features in this forum, and those were also the same devs who said things like "you don't need 'real numbers' to have fun with this game!" -- but we got those, didn't we?

VIP and f2p and "A New Day Dawns" and all that, so "Yes": On the OTHER other hand, now that base ownership is strictly a VIP perk, and because money talks, they might want to give the paying customers what we want most!

We're getting away from the button issues, but for mouse pointer issues, have you tried turning down some of your settings to cut down on other people's graphics? This game has gotten a LOT more colorful and splashy and thus sometimes more annoying than it used to be over the years.

Probably a better solution that I haven't personally tried yet, but I'm seriously thinking about is in these threads about "better visibility mouse pointers": http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=276167 and also http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=254276