Fulmens

Weird, people usually say Force Fields is the worst-designed set... I'm in the tiny minority of people who actually play it and like it, but I wouldn't recommend it to other people.

To the OP: one thing that takes a lot of getting used to if you're coming from another game is how very, very powerful the buffs and debuffs are around here. Dark Defenders have had a couple of nerfs; they used to sit in the middle of large enemy spawns doing /e newspaper . Now they get hit every ten, twenty seconds and keep losing their place. Buffs like "the entire team does a third more damage" and "+2 spawns hit so rarely natural healing takes care of it" are unimpressive. You can probably get those in the same set. (I don't think Rad gets there, quite, but it's pretty close- in four powers. The other five are pretty good, too.)

What are your goals? To be loved? To be useful? To keep your team from ever, ever dying? To be able to solo or team with equal skill?

... who am I kidding? Jock Tamson was right.

... and getting the hat trick on answering myself:

Wikipedia has a very non-Pareto characteristic when measured one way but a very Pareto characteristic when measured another.

0.7% of the users made 50% of the edits. 2% made 74% of the edits.

But it turns out, BY NUMBER OF LETTERS TYPED, that totally breaks down.

That might explain our non-Pareto system here:

If 2% of the users are involved in 74% of the transactions, or similar, we might get a hideously skewed inf distribution.

Topdoc: I was told that the AE pet trick was "zero to inf cap in an afternoon." I didn't do it because I am here to get RID of the inf.

I'm not going to talk about sonic/dev specifically, because /dev does not work with my playstyle. I'm going to talk about the things I always talk about: the Defense softcap and the market.

I don't know anything that plays like Ill/Storm.

I have had a lot of completely different experiences that I really enjoyed a lot . Oddly, one of my favorites wasn't one of the highest-power ones: soloing a "near-softcap" Dark/Trap corruptor. It was an interesting combination of things-can-go-wrong and I-have-the-tools-when-they-do . When all the enemies were in both cones, and my FF generator didn't go on strike midfight, and I didn't miss too many guys, it was an absolutely trivial fight. So I had to pay attention every fight, but when something DID go wrong I had time and space to fix it.

That's a totally different experience from my Blasters, or my Force Field Defenders, or my elec/invuln brute, or my rad/sonic defenders, or ... well, you get the idea.

I guess I'm trying to say you may not ever find anything you like as much as Ill/Storm. But the place to look may not be "things very much like Ill/Storm."

Maybe your altitis has sufficiently covered these things that you won't find anything else you love like that. *shrug*

Just had a brief period of time that was officially Very Different- one mission each on "nearly the same" team.

Team was one Mastermind, all blasters scrappers and brutes other than that. L40 mission owner.

First mission, we're up against a big batch of CoT (with my Scrapper).
Second mission, we lost a couple of players and we're up against a big batch of CoT PLUS THE ENVOY OF SHADOWS.

So three rolling teamwipes later, I embezzle a big chunk of inf from myself and start passing out large red and purple insps like they're lifejackets.

At least I got some practice in playing like it was 2004 again.

I like the idea that there's only 100 trillion-or-so floating around the market at any given time. It makes me feel like I've had a real effect with my couple hundred billion of burn, and my couple hundred billion of goading (err... inspiring and supporting) other people into burning inf.

I think the distinction between "possible" and "omnipresent" is a good and important one.

It's also important to remember that the market generates shortages (and price spikes) all by itself, just through random noise. I saw this when I was buffering common salvage for a year or so- if "Standard price" was 20-30K I had a stack of 10 up at 80 or 90K and a bid for 10 in at 5K. For all midlevel common salvage. This was back, I don't know, the first year or two of the market when people still screamed at the price of Alchemical Silver.

Most of the time I sold a full stack or nothing at all. But occasionally I'd sell 1, or 3, or 6 . I can't tell a full stack sold to manipulators from a full stack sold due to a random shortage, but a half stack is ONLY random shortage.

It happens pretty frequently that the market randomly runs out of stuff.

(PROTIP: With all the AM's going into converters these days, it's happening more often.)

That's kind of shocking on the debt. I mean, I vaguely remember that one of the reasons 21 is "level suck" is that debt goes up enormously compared to previous levels. (other reasons: it's a *wide* level in percentage compared to the previous and next level, and of course it has no SO's in it. And, used to be, your DO's were stale as well. )

I don't know if Paragonwiki is out of date or not, but here's what it says:

I don't have a lot more to offer on the original topic; I think the idea of "several different populations that act very differently" is an interesting one. 80/20 in real world money comes from a system where, with a few minor exceptions*, people need money. You might have 80/20 among the "invention people" and 80/20 among the "SO's are fine" people and the groups could differ in wealth by a factor of 10 and size by a factor of 2, or in wealth by a factor of 50 and size by a factor of 10, or whatever.

* Umm, people in monasteries don't? I'm sure there are more examples.

Electric: My "six second" estimate (actually, normally I say "Four second half life" ) is based on playing Fire/Electric, Fire/Energy, and elec/Fire blasters (my first three), generally from level 1-49, mostly in sizeable groups.

End drain has a vicious all-or-nothing aspect to it-if you tried +1 [so some groups would be +2] I would expect to see a lot of sudden failures.

I chose +1/x3 as something that "nearly anything" would be able to solo at reasonable speed at level 38: Tanks, Scrappers, Brutes, most Corruptors and most Defenders -as far as my personal play experience. I imagine nearly all Controllers and Dominators and EATs would be able to solo that. (38 chosen because the hold in question is a L38 power.) FF, Sonic and Empathy defenders would have issues- FF mostly a question of speed.

If I was comparing to L38 "Scrapper, Brute, Stalker... " I would have picked +2/x4 because I consider that a practical minimum for those AT's. Well, maybe not Stalkers, I haven't touched a Stalker for a long time and I just don't know. Heck, at L38 most Tankers can finish a fight in pretty respectable time.

MeanNVicious: I've made two hundred billion provable inf* using nothing more than people's desire for convenience and/or unwillingness to plan a few days ahead and/or buy five pieces of salvage and find a crafting station. Have your grandiose mind-control schemes really gotten you that much more?

I mean, really, when you list something for 30 million, it doesn't instasell, and it sells for 45 million overnight... people are pretty much working to give you their inf. It's hard to take too much credit for evil genius in a situation like that.

Speaking of which: Thanks to the person who slipped a zero and bought a 30 million inf item for 120 million!

* I have the prestige scores to prove it.

I'd like to reiterate up a related, more general, point: I ONLY HAVE SIX SECONDS TO LIVE IN MELEE RANGE. And even that's pushing it. So I have a place for about three attacks. Those attacks have to be CONSIDERABLY BETTER THAN WHAT I ALREADY HAVE or there's no point in stepping up and exposing myself to all those fresh, high damage, unused melee attacks. (I haven't measured lately, but doesn't one hit from a +1 Freak Tank do about 80% of a Blaster's hit points at level 38?) Blasters have enough trouble taking ONE alpha.
I'm going to check this right now.
Exemped down, L34 blaster, no accolades, 941 HP.
Tank Swiper slashes you for 548.7 points of lethal damage!

So only 60% of my hit points. Clearly I got thrown off by the 220 point sawblade and the 220 point grenade.

Electric-Knight said

Ran through the Monty missions on both. To my surprise, they took almost exactly the same time. Same number of deaths, but only because Contemplative had a combat rez go bad, whereas Spindizzy managed to survive hers. Range as a defense, maybe?

Contemplative _felt_ a lot more comfortable between the scaling resists, the defenses, and the most-of-the-time mez protection. Ruin Mages are rough for both, but Spindizzy ate an entire tray of insps, twice, to win whereas Contemplative could probably have done it in one, if she'd taken two purples at the start.

Inexperience and getting used to the character cuts both ways. I'm a lot- a LOT- more casual and fearless running the scrapper. And I almost always get away with it. (Rest? I have, like, 25% health and some endurance. I'll be FINE. I've got a combat heal!) And I got planted on the blaster once at the very start, whereof I went "Oh. right. That's how this works."

So far, so [relatively] balanced.

Out of nowhere this just came to me: How about a secondary where one of the powers was passive +damage? Not in place of Build Up, in addition.

I'm cranky, Strat, and I'm probably not making the arguments I should be making.

My main disagreement is with the devs who didn't decide what constitutes a "good Blaster secondary" back in beta. Really, if I could roll back the cottage rule on something it would be Blasters as a whole, or Blaster secondaries as a whole.

Having said that? I think "melee" is accurate for Fire, Elec and Energy the way I use them. It's not accurate for Ice or Mental.

I'm angry that I have to consider a secondary where I actively like two powers "one of the good ones"; but here's my list of the powers I actively like in the various secondaries.

Devices: I recuse myself.
Darkness: Not enough experience.
Energy: Energy Punch, Build Up, Bonesmasher, Conserve Power. [1]
Electricity: Charged Brawl, Build Up, Havoc Punch, Power Sink. [2]
Fire: Fire Sword, Fire Sword Circle, Build Up, Consume. [3]
Ice: Build Up, Ice Patch, Shiver.
Mental: Psychic Scream, Concentration.

This is my playstyle only, I repeat. But Ice and Mental, the way I use them, are in no way melee sets. If I don't have two really good melee-range powers I don't get up close on purpose. Yeah, I'll ice-sword or mind-probe someone every once in a while, like you do, but it's not the job I pick the set for. Electricity, Energy and Fire are "melee sets" with additional functionality for me. I jump in, use the powers, and try to make it back out alive. Maybe I'm living in the past, but getting hammered flat by a Freak Tank (warrior mace, rikti sword...) is not a good insurance risk.

[1] There are arguments for Boost Range, Power Boost and Total Focus but I don't tend to use those powers much myself.
[2] I've used Shocking Grasp very occasionally. Thunder Strike barely fits in "good" for me.
[3] "You'd like those other powers if you ran all of them at once" hits me like saying "You'd like beer if you drank a whole lot more of it."

Running at level 51, or 52, or 53 seems to make the inf flood in. I haven't measured precisely, just noticed my level 51 has half a billion inf and I don't remember doing a lot of marketing. Maybe some kind zombie donated a purple or something?

There were a lot of things in the original CoH plan that just didn't work the way they were supposed to, especially according to the received wisdom of the time ("Holy Trinity", small buffs, etc.) Some of those gave results that were unique and beautiful- winning when outnumbered 20-to-1, "money means nothing", Green Machine superteams, for three of my favorites- but some of them just didn't work. I'm by and large a defender of the Devs, but giving Blasters a secondary with ill-defined goals and terrible, designed-to-fail powers is something I can't support.

I think we're arguing about what the secondary "was designed to accomplish" and, honestly, I've never in eight years heard an explanation that made any sense to me. I wasn't here in Beta, I started after they put in Peregrine Island and before they put in the Shadow shard. I think someone who HAD been here in Beta described them as "a last-minute thrown-together hodgepodge of weak Controller powers and Tanker attacks." That's not a great explanation, but it certainly fits.

Thank you! Very gracious. (You'll probably make a couple billion by accident on the way, especially if you hang out in Dark Astoria for any length of time.)

I think I've just put my finger on the difference in our worldviews.

Martial Arts isn't a secondary for you guys. It's ANOTHER PRIMARY.

I feel Blasters deserve a secondary that at least tries to keep them from dying horribly. In which category I'd put Ice and Mental. Maybe Energy, with boost range? I don't LIKE blaster secondaries, in general; they're mostly composed of 50% crap powers that don't do what they are supposed to do, and if they did it still wouldn't help. The other 50% is melee attacks and Build Up. . . your solution is to make a set that does melee attacks and Build Up, REALLY WELL. *

They haven't done a secondary like that... I guess there's room in the world for it.

* Or in Strat's case, about 12 sets that do melee attacks and build up, really well.