Hopeling

Earning a 1200-point AT or 30 days of VIP time just for reaching 50 would be quite excessive, I think. Getting to 50 seems really hard the first time you do it, but once you know your way around it is much, much easier. My most recent character went 1-50 in less than a week, and no, I was not powerleveled.

I'm not totally opposed to the idea of earning points or something for various in-game activies, as some games do. It would be nice. I wouldn't go so far as to say it "should" happen, though. Other than chat restrictions which are removed after a single purchase, f2p accounts get more stuff for free now than we got for $15/mo back in 2004.

I'm not saying it is a large factor in how rewards are already calculated, you're of course right that a trial rewards the same amount no matter how long it took to form. But it is certainly a factor in the rate of rewards - as in, the amount of play time it takes to obtain any given goal. In this measure, yes, it is a penalty to play on a smaller server where leagues take longer to form. That's quite difficult for developers to address directly, though. But if, say, 10 minutes out of every hour I spend on trials is actually spent waiting in Pocket D, then just to break even with a solo path, I should be able to expect the remaining 50 minutes of actually doing trials to give similar rewards to what I could've gotten for a full 60 minutes of soloing. Really, to make the trials attractive enough to draw a dozen or more players on a regular basis, the 50 minutes of trial should be more rewarding than 60 minutes of solo play. Plus, waiting for a trial is boring (DA street sweeping will hopefully make this less true), which will further drive players away from trials if the reward rates are only equal.

Currently, the trials are at least a couple orders of magnitude better than the incarnate progress I can make solo in the same amount of time (by soloing for shards to turn into threads, mostly). That margin could be way, way smaller and trials would still be attractive to many players, just as TFs are attractive for reward merits even though you can solo for not-so-much-lower returns from story arcs.

All that said, I personally wouldn't mind if the solo/small team path was wildly overpopular, and trials became as infrequent as mothership raids or the less popular TFs. But that's only my opinion, which isn't shared by all players, nor by the devs.

Redlynne is correct that there are a great many variables to consider. I'll take a guess at filling some of them in.

When talking about -regen, I assume we're discussing AV fights? An AV regenerates .33% health/sec, and at level 50 has 28,271.7 hp, which means its base regen is 93.3 hp/sec.

Time Crawl does -100% regen, but that's mitigated by AV debuff resistance. A level 50 AV has 85% debuff resistance, so only 15% of the debuff gets through. That means you're only really applying -15% regen, which is (.15*93.3) = 14 hp/sec. So Time Crawl is worth 14 DPS there. If you have a level shift it will be slightly more, due to the purple patch.

On the other hand, if you're fighting a level 54 AV, it has 87% debuff resistance, and regenerates 101.2 hp/sec. But the purple patch will reduce your debuff as well, to 65% effectiveness assuming you have a level shift. This means your Time Crawl is negating (.13*.65*101.2) = 8.6 hp/sec, and so it's equivalent to that much DPS.

On the other end of the spectrum would be a level 1 AV (which you'll never encounter outside AE, although I think the Hellion leader in DfB is level 2), which has 60% debuff resistance and regenerates 2.8 hp/sec. If you're also level 1, Time Crawl will reduce its regeneration by 1.14 hp/sec.

In any case, you're only removing a small fraction of the AV's regen. Time Crawl isn't a very good regen debuff, really - Lingering Radiation is five times stronger, and Poison Trap is ten times stronger! You can add a bit more -regen with Time Stop, but still far short of what some debuff sets can do.

Edit: Numbers taken from here: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Archvillain and http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Health_Regeneration

Your DPS numbers are right. The Pulverize chain requires about 22% more recharge, but with Interface should actually pull slightly ahead.

According to this thread, it's a buff used by the Conduits:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=278684

The Paragonwiki entry for the Awakened is sadly incomplete, but yes, I do recall some of the Awakened having some kind of ugly tohit buff.

Edit: You could check with a power analyzer.

This is so bizarre. Is the Marvel Universe spilling over into our reality?

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news...-are-Not-Human

Ooh, I like that explanation.

Even just being able to down-convert single insps (large to medium, medium to small) would address the first problem, and might be simpler to do.

I've always interpreted buying insps from contacts as seeking out their help/advice - maybe they can provide me some Insight, or wish me Luck, or even just tell me about how horrible my enemies are, helping me work up an indignant Rage. This works fine for normal contacts, but does kinda break down with the nurses.

Well, when I tried it earlier with my Broadsword character, it (correctly) found the attack chain of Headsplitter-Hack-Disembowel-(short pause)-Hack. It didn't put Slice into the chain at all, even though I had entered it. So it appears smart enough to not include all the attacks, even in a tricky case like Broadsword where you can get better results by spending .2s doing nothing than spending 2.244s doing a poor attack.
I would assume that it takes longer to calculate and compare the possible chains when there are more attacks to choose from, is all.

Fritzy, most of the stuff will be instanced, AFAIK, just like the rest of the game. Street sweeping just gets brought up a lot because it will also give rewards but not interfere with forming/queuing for trials.

Well, the ad is clearly working, Primals have been flocking to the TPN campus like teen fangirls! I don't know the exchange rate between Paragon dollars and Praetoria Colebucks (?), but the money spent on that ad has to have paid for itself already!

It is, technically, a targeted AoE. It's centered on the enemy, like Fireball, not yourself, like Footstomp. So it's not totally illogical to put it in that category...

But it's still dumb. The only other melee TAoE that I know of, Thunder Strike, uses PBAoE sets.

It might be less galling if there were some decent TAoE sets. And/or if they didn't all have range enhancement that Spinning Strike can't benefit from.