Grouchybeast

Yes, but not very often. There's a Cadao Kestrel mission where you have to rescue PPs from the Circle of Thorns. You even get a thank-you note from the Countess herself.
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Cadao_Ke...rcle_of_Thorns

There was a thread about this on the EU forums a while back, and people suggested it would be nice if Crey spawned as friendly units, rather like police units, in non-hazard zones. Then in missions and hazard zones they would spawn as enemy mobs. It would better reflect the supposedly good public perception of the Crey, rather than having the public cowering and fleeing whenever they get near a Crey unit, and Crey attacking heroes at will on the streets.

I've noticed that when you exit a mission map, the spawn points near the exit seem to be automatically cleared of mobs. I noticed it first in PI, when I'd had to sneak into entrances close to high level spawns, but on the way out the same spawn points were empty.

I've always wondered what happens if you exit a map while another character is 'fixing' the nearby spawns by watching them, but I've never actually been curious enough to try it and find out.

I just checked, and it's working okay for me. If you still can't get to it next time you try, could you let Archie know? Thanks :-)

My guess is that they were mostly from the 16th Oct file, which was run since the patch with the xp-->inf fix.

Some mobs have different ranks which share the same name (e.g. a Gunslinger can be either a lieutenant or a boss rank mob). In those cases, DropStats tries to work out from the inf awarded the rank of the mob. That inf award depends on the relative level of the mob to the toon defeating it (-4 to +4), and the xp modifier of the mob type (e.g. a Night Widow awards 1.33x the xp of a 'normal' mob). Unfortunately, the inf award isn't exactly predictable -- it's often out by a tiny amount from the expected value. This means that the -4 to +4 awards for all the different xp award scales had to be collected by defeating example mobs and recording the exact inf awarded.

The patch to fix xp-->inf conversions therefor broke all the heuristic rank checks. To fix it, we had to go back and recollect all the data to get the matching inf+xp values. We did that over the weekend, Archie updated DropStats, and you can download the new version which should take the new values into account from the Dropstats page:
http://www.glasspaw.com/dropstats/

They can be sold, yes, but don't forget that one of the nice things about both common and set crafted IOs is that they don't degrade. Once they're equipped, they'll give you the same bonus no matter what the relative level of your character. Also, in terms of performance, there's very little benefit from moving from a lvl 30/35/40 to a higher level. To give you an idea, a lvl 40 Damage IO gives a 38.60% bonus, while a lvl 50 Damage IO gives 42.40%.

So any crafted IOs you equip from now on, you can keep until you hit 50 and they'll never wear out :-)

That would be nifty! With the SSK, it can be annoying to have to wait while people scuttle off to change rep, especially some of the more idiosyncratically placed ones. (Talos Island field agent, I'm looking at you.)

And that's exactly what I use my Snipe for. Preemptive retaliation.

I remember a bit in one of the Saint books where a sidekick goes around knocking out guards by hitting them on the head, and when the hero checks on them later he finds they're all dead, as knocking people out without killing them is much more difficult than the sidekick thinks. I thought it was a nice little aside.

Seriously, I cannot relate that to the game I play in any way, to the extent that I don't even feel like we're both talking about CoX.

I have one super-purpley character, one character with a couple of purple sets, and a bunch of characters who have either modestly priced set IO or common IOs. I've never, ever felt that they provide much of a different teaming experience. There are so many buffs and debuffs flying around on most teams that pretty much anything feels uber.

Maybe it's different on other servers, but I've never, ever seen anyone putting a team together care a whit about IOs, either. Offer a team a purpled-out blaster, or a generically-IOed rad/rad defender, and I think most teams would rather have the latter.

The one area I'll grant that puples do make a big difference is exemping down (kind of the opposite of end-game content, but let's ignore that). Purples are *great* for running the low-level TFs and still having enough recharge etc to splat stuff at a satisfying rate. However, I understand that it's possible to maintain high numbers with all sets, by buying the doubles, triples and quads at the appropriate levels.

If casual players care so much about not being able to buy purples that they give up playing the game, that seems like a rather strange definition of casual, to me.

I consider myself a semi-casual player, despite the amount of time I spend on the game, because I'm not all that into the numbers, or min-maxing builds. F'rex, I'd rather stick X-ray eyes in a build because it looks cool, even if I have to drop hasten to fit it in. And, like I said, I have a couple of characters with purples in their builds, and they are just not so awesome that I feel I'm missing anything by not having them in other characters. It impacts my enjoyment of playing them not at all. I see plenty of 50s, including long-term vets, running around the game with zero set bonuses, which suggests there are large numbers of very experienced players out there having a fine time without any sets.

I think it does more service to casual players to tell them 'no, really, purples are not as uber as you might think, they're candy for the hardcore, just don't worry about them', than to suggest that if they don't have them they won't be able to team well.

No, there isn't a Monstrous Fur option for Tights, and I really wish there was. My eponymous heroine is a mutant werewolfy-critter, and she can have a furry chest and arms under a shirt, but I can't make her a costume with a skirt and furry legs.

The main problem at the moment with checking for problems with the purple drop rate is that no one knows what it's supposed to be. The 1:1500-1:2000 is calculated from one set of data. The Wiki lists 1:5000 as the drop rate, with no supporting evidence. So, basically, could be anywhere around the low thousands. Narrowing down the estimate for the purple drop rate is one of the things Archie's trying to do with log analysis.

Or, a dev could pop in and tell us! That would be awesome, and in return I would happily send them flowers. And cookies.

I really don't understand what you're saying here. How would it be possible to both a) guarantee that 1% of recipe drops at 47+ are purple AND b) not change the drop rate? How would it help level the disparity you perceive between soloers and team players? Farming soloers would still be getting their 1% purples much, much faster than non-farming players on a team, because they'd still be getting each 100 recipes much, much faster.

As far as I can see, the only way to deliver what you seem to want (parity of purple drops between different play styles) would be to use data-mining of kill rates to set soloing purple drop rates individually not just by archetype, but by powerset combination -- presumably in some way which would then be factored into drop rates for different team compositions. As well as being insanely complicated and highly gameable, I suspect that kind of change would prove mildly unpopular with some segments of the playerbase.

OTOH, it might be nice to have categories for French- and German-language arcs. With the overwhelmingly English-speaking population of the game, they're not going to have any chance of winning awards otherwise, however good they are.

Even with Ghost Falcon trying to explain what to do, I found it pretty confusing. There's nothing to indicate that it's the mobs, not the banners, which need to be attacked first I'm still not sure if the banners need to be made vulnerable simultaneously, or if it's possible to make one banner at a time vulnerable -- we tried to test that, and it seemed as though it was necessary to attack mobs at all 4 banners simultaneously. Is that correct?

Having an NPC somewhere with an explanation of what to do would be really helpful.

These seemed to be fine.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to test this, or most of the other questions, as we didn't manage to sucessfully complete the event after 2 attempts.

Subjective feedback:

There were around a dozen people in the zone, mostly high-level damage dealers, and I think it's pretty unlikely that we could've completed the event successfully. On the second attempt, we got the banners vulnerable and took one down to about 1/2 hp before we ran out of time.

As things stand, I can see it being very, very difficult for people to get the badges anywhere but the busiest servers, especially after the first couple of days of the event, which will be frustrating and not fun. On Defiant, it's pretty typical to only get 1-2 teams worth of players show up for a zone event once the first excitement is over.

To make it possible for people to complete the event without requiring large teams would require some combination of extending the time limit and/or reducing the hp of the vulnerable banners. I don't know if there is any way to make this scaleable, so that it's possible for quieter servers or people who have to play at off-peak times, and not too easy for busy times and servers.

ETA: Did a couple more trials on test (thanks, Avatea:-) and finally managed to get all the banners down with a single team of 8, this time including some decent buff/debuff. So, it is doable with some practise for a team that size and composition, at least. However, that was with the whole team already standing in the zone when Avatea pushed the event button, so it would still be nice to have more time up front for people to assemble in the zone. I also agree with people saying the Aspect needs beefing up - even with only 8 of us, it went down really fast.

Hopefully, the mob types are just temporary skins for test. If not, it would be nice to have rewritten descriptions, and a little more customization. As someone else suggested, at the very least maybe an aura to match their banner?

All in all, though, I really liked the idea of the event. It was different, and I can see that with enough people around to complete the event it would be a lot of fun. Also, the graphics for the banners are reeeeeeeally pretty. Nice job!

It's rational if you consider that for some people the most important factor is time. Either they can creep bid up to get salvage they want, or they can put in a bid which they know will guarantee buying what they want on the first bid. If you have more inf that you know what to do with, and limited playing time, or you're in a hurry to make up a recipe and get back to a mission, then putting in the bid you know will fill immdiately is the rational choice. Inf is play money, but time is a real-world cost.

That would be pretty nice. So long as the conflict between globals could be resolved, I'm hard-pressed to think of many arguments against it. But, despite how smoothly the board-merge went, I think conflicting globals could cause more upset than conflicting board names, if for no other reason that the greater numbers of people involved.

I guess it depends on how you look at it.

I'm sure that Paragon would love to have *more subscribers* coming in. But that isn't necessarily the same thing as full servers.

When I joined the game, I deliberately chose a lower population server, because that was the best match for what I personally wanted to get out of the game. Judging by this thread, many past threads about server merges, and the fact that there are plenty of people who presumably know that the high-population servers exist but choose not to use them, I'm far from alone in that preference. Whether it's because of play-style, because their machines can't handle busy zones, or whatever other reason, people are *choosing* low population servers. Right now, people who want to play on a high-pop server can join one, and people who want a low-pop one can join one. Make all the server populations uniform, and you make the game less appealing for a proportion of your existing and potential customers.

Now, financially, is it worthwhile to run the lower-pop servers to please that segments of your customer base? I have no idea. To give a useful answer, we'd need to know exactly how much less profitable the players are on the low-population servers, how making the server population experience uniform would affect subscriber numbers, etc. But NCSoft are still running the servers, so I would assume that at least they aren't losing buckets of money on the low population ones.

Also, I'm not sure how plausible it even is to make all server populations the same unless you run an active balancing programme to force people to spread out evenly. Would you constantly merge and split servers to keep each one at maximum population, with no spare capacity for new subs, reactivation weekends, server downtime etc? If not, then as soon as you leave room in the system, people's natural preferences for different play styles will tend to create population disparity between servers over time, just as they have done so far.

Are you on the Defiant Events channel? That's the best place to go to if you want to get any kind of TF going and you don't have a SG to help. It's possible to get a TF team together pretty much any time of day, and if you can play during prime evening hours you shouldn't have too much trouble. If you don't want to organise it yourself, then just keep an eye on the chat tab and sooner or later someone will start a 5thTF team.

Things are a lot quieter redside, but even there Defiant Events is a good place to start looking for a SF team.

Proper little force-multiplier, you are! ;-)

{gives pie}

This isn't quite correct. Some people, under some circumstances, are seeing better drop rates than other people under other circumstances. But what those circumstances are is wildly variable between different accounts, due to the nature of the bug. One or two people reported better drops in TF mode than in an ordinary mission, but others were getting equally bad drop rates in TF mode and normal play. It's entirely unpredictable, and not necessarily even consistent over time on the same account.

The only real way to find out is to monitor your own drop rates and see what's dropping where.

There's a trick to those hunts, which I noticed while running it for Ourob badges. A 'finger' of the Misty Woods area points NW out into the lake in the centre of the Croatoa map. The little strip between the lake shore and the main part of the Misty Woods is loaded with spawn points which produce both Fir Bolg and Red Caps in abundance. Once I'd found that I blasted through the hunts in no time at all.