EvilGeko

Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill

And unless you've been on my teams, you're making an assumption with nothing to back it up.

Originally Posted by Jot

My only char that I play is a peacebringer so I'm am very picky about changes to them. One main thing is I DON'T want to lose my KB, I'm with Bill here, although making Solar Flare KD would be great. And I dont want to have to use up a slot for a +KB when slots are in short supply anyway. Changes I would like are:

Solar Flare changed to KD

Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill

Non-answer. My build does not affect what's thrown at me. And while you may want to throw a few billion at IOs on a build, it shouldn't be seen as a requirement... and doesn't tend to come into play until late-game. I get Solar Flare at 26 (and the dwarf version, obviously, earlier.) So how do you propose I "build and play so I never need one" at that point?

Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill

Call it a "pause button."

Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill

Ambush/extra aggro runs in to melee. You need to get them away from you. Solar flare gives a little extra time than just plain old KD would, and either the mobs are now in (typically less hazardous) ranged attack mode or have to take extra time re-closing to get back to melee.

Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba

Oh yea, here's my biggest wish: give Kheldians access to Air Superiority.

Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill

And for mine, it was one of the most fun... *shrug* but I'm not a numbers guy, either, and came from an Elec/Elec blaster. The OP's describing himeslf as a min/maxer, too.

I'd almost be curious to see a breakdown of like/dislike versus - well, whatever came before (squishy vs melee, say) and/or interest in min/maxing.

Originally Posted by jhonny3232

The other problem i've been having with my fm/sd is that my end is horrible. Every power has atleast one end reduc in it, and stamina is 4 slotted with end mod SO's, but I run out every group

Originally Posted by Aett_Thorn

I was toying a bit with that, too. But I was thinking of going with more of a fairy-dust using creature, not a warrior fey. Though melee is not out of the question, I think I'm aiming for a support-sprite.

Originally Posted by Kasoh

Guy Gardner

Originally Posted by Durakken

A reboot of the universe means all my characters are gone so if it is an actual reboot I am more than likely going to stop reading...as I suspect most people are.

Apparently the people making this decision are too stupid to realize that their most popular characters will be completely shunted out of existence or rewrote in such a way as to make them not that character.... and yes the most poplar characters just happen to be the ones i like and the ones that sell the best, Tim Drake, Stephenie Brown, Cassandra Cain, Barbara Gordon as Oracle (i enjoy her as batgirl, but Oracle is much better)...hell i'd even say that most of the young generation of superheroes sell better and are better characters than the older generation and all of them will be shunted or changed irrevocably... With that being the case many readers will just turn off.

The reboot will also turn off those who love the older characters because those characters are made more kid friendly which takes them back, rather than forward, over crap that we've already read.

THey're making a huge mistake, one that will cost them.

Originally Posted by SinisterDirge

Must be that invisible PITA accolade you have that grants a critical chance for vr drops.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

This is B. F. Skinner at his finest. The theory goes that if you give people a definite goal with defined requirements, say "run 50 Trials," then people will not be motivate towards the beginning, because they'll know the first or second or third Trial will not give them the reward. They'll become very motivated and increase their playtime when they're near the goal, say on Trials 47, 48 and 49, but then once they have that reward and they're looking at the next one another, say, 50 Trials away, they'll pause because they'll be satiated with the reward and disincentivised by knowing that the next one is far away.

Heartless game developers fear these pauses, because YOU MAY NOT COME BACK!!! So they don't want you to stop playing ever ever, for which they need a different design, one which gives you incentive to try hard ALL the time. Enter random drops. With a random drop, players are motivated to try hard ALL the time, because you don't know when the next drop will happen. It might well be on this very Trial, even if it's the first one you do. It won't be, of course, but it won't stop players thinking that, who knows? It might drop on the second one. And so on and so forth.

At least that's the expected reaction. As someone told me earlier in the thread "[I'm] not responding." And I'm not, because when I look at this kind of random drop system, my thought isn't "Holy addiction, Batman! I might get my reward on this very run!" but rather "I have to run how many of this thing? And I may still get bupkis at the end? Sod this, I have better things to do with my life."

Originally Posted by Rubberlad

Power proliferation aside, will we ever see any new non-Incarnate power sets or were electric control and kinetic melee the last new sets we will ever get?

Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba

I'm running an ati 5870, not 3870.

Originally Posted by ThatGuyThere

But your suggestion that the WST provides an alternative to me, when my post is about how I find it difficult to run Task Forces seems ... well, it doesn't actually sync up well with the well-reasoned observations made in the rest of your post.

Originally Posted by ThatGuyThere

I'm only speaking for myself, here.

I don't play much; maybe 6-8 hours a week, broken into 3-4 play sessions. I have only ever done two to three Task Forces, back when I had more time to play. I mostly run Tip Missions, because that way I can "save up" my play time (by earning Hero Merits) to get "good stuff". I run solo, or team with my spouse (who plays even less than I do), or with a very short list of friends.

Before the Incarnate system, I was excited at the prospect of getting to Level 50 on either of my "mains". I could then fine-tune them with the Invention system, particularly with Hero Merits, and get them to the very upper levels of performance. Even with my quite-limited time investment, I could "max out" a character. And as others have mentioned, CoX is actually pretty good, in general, at making sure you do feel that you're getting better-and-better - you can take on larger spawns of higher difficulty; there was an "awesome level" that I could attain, even playing on a purely casual basis.

Now, there's a level of power I'll simply never obtain.

It is my feeling - and I understand some will debate the "truthiness" of it, but it's definitely my feeling - that my play-time doesn't suit itself to Incarnate Trials. And I now feel as if the "upper echelons" of gameplay - which I was once able to look forward to reaching, on a "wow, imagine that I can get there someday" - are now out of reach. And it's dramatically altered my interest in playing characters over level 40.

I still make new alts, and I still enjoy the game. And yeah, I still run Tips on my 40+ characters, sometimes. But on the whole, the entire game is less engaging, specifically because there's a whole scale of power I know I'm never going to reach.

A solo option that I could work on at my own pace - even glacier-slowly - would keep me working towards Incarnate power. But currently, they're essentially unachievable to me.

tl;dr - The reason the "fun" drained is that the goalposts moved. I was working on the old goalposts, and comfortable with my rate-of-advancement towards them; I now feel I'll never reach the new goalposts. That changes the "fun quality" of running towards them.

Originally Posted by Arilou

Honestly, I can't really see any launch game decisions I really disagree with. A bunch of bugs or unintentional mishaps? Yes. A bunch of stuff that was badly designed from the start? Yeah. But otherwise? It's mostly just been improvements to a rather flawed undergirding.

Originally Posted by Ms. Mesmer

I have a different theory. The argument that any change is just going to annoy a portion of your subscriber base to the point that they quit is a dead end. For any of those changes, including the introduction of endgame, the argument can be easily adapted to both sides. For all of those that are annoyed by the introduction and quit, there is likely a significant portion that have been annoyed by the lack of repeatable endgame over the last seven years, who have also quit. Thus, the argument would leave the developers in a position where they simply couldn't win, and should be completely discarded.

Originally Posted by Dispari

Your opinion is weird if you're all for intentionally annoying your playerbase (incidentally, lots of "annoyed" players have canceled subs and left the game over the system; I personally have dramatically reduced my playtime and would probably take a hiatus if my account wasn't on a three monther) on the off chance you can get a "non-zero" (which could easily be "one") number of people to enjoy a system they might've overlooked before (and even had just as much fun doing something else, like the solo/alternate path).

PS: parenthesis

Originally Posted by Dispari

I'm curious what your answer is. Is it "nobody would ever run trials despite their insanely huge advantages over spamming the ITF because I think that all people are predictably drawn to what I personally consider to be easier content" ?