Gurney

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I don't know what "John Boys" means.

It probably would have been better if it were REALLY a kill all like the title of the mission indicated. If you really can just go in, wipe out the main boss, and exit with 700 tickets, then I can see how it could be farmed.

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You have to destroy two objects, one of which is in the freak tank room. As well as kill the red fire using boss in the freak tank room.

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OK, this IS awesome fun. Tried it out with Sergei on invincible. I saw the room of tanks, and thought I couldn't be happier. Then I dove in, and the biggest ambush ever ran in to liven things up. I was wrong. I COULD be happier. I tore things up for about 15 minutes, grinning from ear to ear in pure scrapper BLISS, then poof, dead. I was slightly injured already, then two of the tanks hit me for 782 points each at the same time.

Ran back in, probably made it another five minutes. This time, they just wore me down. They burned me out of greens and oranges, and my health headed down. When it got into the scaling resistance territory, they had a hard time finishing me off, but they eventually did.

Heh, faster each time. Only lasted a couple minutes on the third try.

Couple more minutes. Do these tanks ever end?

Fifteen seconds. Seriously?

And then another fifteen minute stretch, and the room was finally clear. Boy, I was sick of tanks by the time it was done. And I think that makes it perfect.

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I did this on diff 1 just fine with my DB/WP. So I went back and tried on diff 5 similar thing, I was fine with insps but it ground me down until I ran out of purples. I got half the room but pruple freak tanks take a lot longer then orange ones.

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I categorically oppose making it positional Defense. We already have SR, EA needs to be its own set, and thematically Force Fields in this game (which is what EA is) use typed not positional Defense (positional means you're agile and dodge incoming attacks, typed means things hit you but just get deflected harmlessly).

Energy Defense should be 45%, I completely agree. Energy Resist of 25% (or more) on top of that should also go into the set, I also agree. This is a thematic necessity.

Defense debuff resistance in the set needs to be brought to SR levels (Defense based sets just fail to do their jobs without it given all the -Def in this game on top of the streak breaker artificially limiting the effectiveness of Defense compared to Resist).

We should probably keep in mind powers being removed from or added to the set is highly unlikely to happen. This set is a live set not a beta set, and live sets simply do not have powers removed, added or rearranged. Keep suggestions and expectations in line with this reality.

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I agree about the switching it to positional that would be kind of silly when put into context.

A major part of the problem though is IO's. Positional defense is much more readily available and is only 3 categories.

Typed defense IO's need to be more prevalent and perhaps typed defenses should almost always be paired on sets so that you don't need 7 different sets.

In the end this is a more prevalent problem than just EA. Trying to increase the defense of Willpower is also very tricky since its typed. Fortunately its not a linchpin for WP.

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The less you know numbers wise, the more you are likely to just pick powers that go for flavor, which is what this game was attemping to appeal to.

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The devs think that to a degree, but its not true. Or at least, its not as true as it should be. If you want to make a "marathon build" that is a conceptual decision. But can you, if you don't know the endurance numbers and how endurance reduction works and what stamina does? You can try, but a numbers-aware person can do better. If you want to make a non-stop shooting blaster, can you do that if you don't know how recharge works? If you want to make a scrapper that sacrifices offense for defense, and you are willing to hit softer if you get hit less often, can you do that if you don't know how defense works, and how defense stacks? If you want to make a flying tank, can you do that effectively if you can't figure out how the balance the endurance costs of fighting while flying?

The problem is that its all fine and good to say "we want players to design by concept" but how can they do that if there are no accurate textual description of what any power does, and more importantly, how every power interacts - even qualitatively - with every other?

Which one protects you more: tough or weave? If you are a blaster? A super reflexes scrapper? An Invuln tanker? Not easy questions to answer, and very difficult to encapsulate into the text descriptions of the powers even in theory. But knowing that can be important to someone's concept, even if its not a min/max concept.

How do you translate a mental concept for a character with the powers you have to have, unless you actually know what the powers do?


Honestly: the devs original design for this game was not to encourage building for concept. It was actually to be forced to explore the powers system. In effect, the game wasn't designed around you eventually building exactly what you wanted, it was designed around you getting bitten by a radioactive spider, and not knowing if that was going to allow you to walk on walls, or grow eight legs. You were not *supposed* to know what you were going to become.

If you were supposed to get exactly what you wanted, respecs would be unlimited.

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I dunno I agree with Raph Koster, players will reverse engineer a game and do so very quickly.

At least a certain set of the players will.

Purposeful obfuscation rarely works and so anything designed with that in mind is a three legged stool missing one of its legs.

Humans are pretty smart when they want to be.