Hopeling

I'm not sure what you mean about a longer route, unless you've missed the scroll bar in the t4 recipes. So I'll explain that: when you go to craft a t4 power, there's a scroll bar on the right, listing multiple recipes, one for each of the 6 possible pairs of t3 powers. So, for getting a t4, it doesn't matter which t3s you pick.

3% is unlikely, but not astronomically so. It's only slightly less likely than missing when your hit chance is capped... and as I'm sure you've noticed, that happens quite frequently. You've basically encountered the game equivalent of hitting every red light on your way to a destination: not a likely occurrence, but still common enough that almost anyone old enough to drive is all too familiar with it.

...incidentally, although BotZ is less unreliable than many sets since it only has 3 pieces, it's still generally not worthwhile to attempt to convert to a specific item. Too random and unreliable for too little return. For 32 Astrals or ~60m Inf, you can buy the recipe outright, guaranteed.

Generally, I save my Emps for VR components. Occasionally, I get lucky with drop tables and end up not needing that, in which case I can send a bunch of threads to my next character or whatever.

Remember also that Invincibility gives no bonus at all unless enemies are in range. If you're checking your attributes while standing around out of combat, you will indeed appear to be missing a good chunk of defense, but it should show up again when you're fighting something.

The exact amount of recovery needed will vary from build to build. It's pretty straightforward to calculate the total cost of your attack chain, and divide by the length of the chain to get an end/sec consumption number. Add that to your consumption from toggles, and that's how much recovery you need to break even while using that chain.

As a rough guideline, you can also divide the cost of each of your powers by its cast time to find how much EPS each power uses (similar to DPA, except for endurance cost). If many of your most frequently used powers have a higher EPA than your net recovery, you are probably not sustainable; if most of your powers cost EPS roughly as much or less than your net recovery, you're probably OK.

And of course, you don't need to be able to sustain endurance indefinitely for most purposes, since most fights are relatively short.

...cure? That would be like trying to cure hunger, or the need for sleep, or the desire to make new characters. No, wait. Something's gone wrong in this analogy.

But yeah, I agree with Samuel_Tow. For me, at least, I quite often lose interest in one character and gain interest in another - but not necessarily a character I don't have yet. If I make a character, lose interest, and come back later, great! If I never regain interest, that's fine too. I have never been able to predict which characters I would enjoy most and which I would lose interest in; it doesn't really seem to correlate to their in-game performance, nor how much I enjoy or develop the concept, nor the quality of their costume, nor anything else that I can evaluate by any method other than playing the character for a while.
Yes, this means a significant fraction of my characters stall out indefinitely. Some do so long before 50, some long after. But who cares? I'm always playing a character that I enjoy.

Masterminds can do some awesome things, but the kind of farming you're talking about where you're surrounded by a bazillion guys would mean you're getting shot by an aggro cap's worth of guys, and so are each of your minions. And since you and your pets are generally not as tough individually as, say, the Brutes that like being in such situations, it probably won't go very well.

Basically, unlike most situations, having pets in a farm does not divide the same incoming damage across more targets, it just increases the total incoming damage.

Now, in different kinds of farms with less ridiculous swarms of foes, you might do well. I wouldn't expect to dethrone SS/Fire, but I've heard of MMs doing pretty well.

In a damage aura, it should get a chance to fire every 10 seconds like most procs, and the PPM uses that 10 seconds as the cycle time to calculate the proc chance. With 5 PPM, that should mean ~83% chance, which would indeed give you 2 stacks pretty consistently. The Superior version should have a 100% proc chance, but since it can only proc every 10 seconds and lasts 20 seconds, it won't get you past 2 stacks.

This is an absolutely spectacular idea for a powerset. I'm not sure I grok the mechanics and numbers you've suggested well enough to provide useful commentary on that, but I love the overall idea.

I was quite pleasantly surprised to find Grandeur available on Freedom recently.

Certain controller combos might be loosely comparable - damage coming from pets, confuses, etc that are not directly under player control, while survival comes from choosing which enemies don't get to attack.

It is an interesting idea. I've seen similar ideas batted around before in other games, but never implemented that I can recall, so I'm not quite sure how it would work out.

Secondary effects are usually free, actually (compare Siphon Life to Disembowel). And again, there's such a wide range of values for this that you really cannot say in any meaningful way that there is an expected time required to defeat a given enemy. We can provide a range of expected times, but it's a pretty wide range, and often gets turned on its head (but no less wide) when you consider spawns rather than individual foes.

Moreover though, when you're trying to suggest a powerset, it's basically pointless to come up with numbers other than as ballpark estimates. Even if you're a professional game designer with a perfect understanding of everything about CoH, coming up with the numbers is not much better than guesswork until you can actually playtest it. In fact, trying to supply numbers detracts and distracts from the meat of a suggestion, which is the concept and the mechanics.

We can establish a range of plausible values by looking at what current powersets can do, but really, there is no such thing as an expected average time to defeat any given enemy nor group of enemies. You could calculate one in the statistical sense of average, where your expected value was in the middle of the actual values, but few if any of the actual values match the average, but that doesn't sound like what you're looking for. If you're trying to figure out if your idea falls into the range of acceptable values, that's simple: see if it falls into the area of what existing sets can do. Without some kind of detail of what your idea is, or at least what category of set it is, it's difficult to be any more specific than that.

Auto-run isn't particularly special; it just makes you move continually forward until you toggle it off or move manually forward/backward. If the autorun function didn't exist, you could do much the same thing with /++forward (which is basically identical except that it doesn't play nice with backward movement). But there is no /hover nor /++hover command; you need an actual flight effect to hover or fly. Unfortunately your idea for Teleport has been suggested many times before. I'm not sure of the exact technical reason it doesn't work, but since we still have the current version of Teleport it's apparently not as easy as it sounds.

I'm kind of against the idea of permabans for this, but it's worth mentioning that attempting to argue with such players over it is almost never productive. Report the character and let a GM do their job.

That's a figure that varies so wildly between powersets, and even more wildly across ATs, that it would be near-meaningless to assign an expected value to it. I've never heard of any standard value for such a thing. We do know that the devs use the rate of reward gain as a balance metric, but that measures more things than just enemy lifespan.

What's your idea? Perhaps addressing it directly could illuminate things.

I would pay good money for account-wide storage. It isn't strictly necessary with the email system, but neither are, say, extra enhancement trays, and I paid for those long before they went on sale.

Yes, you can use email. Yes, you can sorta fake this with a solo SG base. But both of those things have obstacles, limitations, and annoyances of their own.

Try Crimson or Maria Jenkins, there's some kind of random element to contact introduction.

EA and WP are dissimilar in enough ways that it is very difficult to say that either one is better overall. However, they are both very good sets in a wide variety of situations, and I doubt you would be disappointed with either. EA relies mostly on defense, and has some excellent endurance tools, and a recharge bonus. /WP has less defense, and is more susceptible to defense debuffs, but also suffers less when its defense doesn't work due to its increased hp/resistance/healing.

It might also be worth noting that Stalker /WP does not get Quick Recovery.

Greer's arc is entirely soloable, and unless you need 10 more threads and cannot get them any other way for some reason, not necessary for a level shift.

For one thing, as Agent White said, it won't be the same every week. For another, since apparently the goal is to get people to log in and check the market, saying "free XP booster" is maybe not as enticing as "free mystery gift, check the market to find out!"