Neuronia

And Nites ftw .

This is a hopelessly naive thought process.
Players will always use whatever loot is available, whether it's Hamidons, SOs, IOs, PvP IOs, Accos. We're going to get the best gear, equip with the best gear and use the best gear. Given that, the Devs would have been wise to give other ways to acquire it, PvP Merits perhaps granted on completion of an Arena match, which could be cashed in for a PvP IO after a while. Award additional Merits for victory, defeat, damage dealt and prevented, etc.

100% correct and well stated.

• The new hold system is questionable at best. You end up getting held no matter how many Clear Minds you have on you. Break Frees are all but useless.
• The new damage per activation rules have made some sets all but laughable (Hello, Ice Blast!) while some powers are quite frankly over the top (Spirit Sharks...).
• Cages are nigh useless with their durations.
• +Res Shields are useless because of DR.
• The big Mez protect bubbles are useless.
• You need 43ish points of KB protect so that you don't get back juggled and insta-killed.
• PvP IOs drop about as often as manna, and high end builds need multiple procs and PvP sets to remain competitive.
• Sudden Death in Arena is awful, with no option to turn it off.
• Innate Damage Resistance has all but eliminated the need for shield granters and means you need 3-5 Blasters to bring down a single target.
• Nukes are useless, wheras before a "Nuke Rush" was a viable, though risky, strategy on some maps.
• The buff protect period encourages laziness.

I could go on, but unless an I12 Arena button is forthcoming, the new system is a gargantuan mess that we're forced to deal with on a daily basis. What the Devs failed to understand was that those 2-1 matches were the result of evenly matched players, all on Ventrilo and knowing their roles to a "T". The really, really good teams would absolutely roll the newer teams, until those teams practiced...and were rolled a little less.

Oh, and we lost Base Raids, no one knows why. Likely has to do with IoPs which are garbage for the most part and relegated to CoP.

Also:



People nostalgic for the glory days simply miss a time where you could legitimately bring Kins, Forcefields, Sonics, varying line-ups and throw a wrench into things once in a while. While Ex was awesome, she was given a rough time from start to end, but she gained a ton of respect from the community by at least trying to understand and integrate into it.

I had this happen to me once in Steel Canyon.

I friended, switched to a 50 and knockbacked every mob they were attacking. When that failed and they went into a mission, our sg camped the door and followed, making snide comments about his costume, peppering it with Monty Python soundbites.

He never did that again on my watch.

As for the trademarked costumes...one person got their Iron Man costume genericed under my very eyes, was quite hilarious.

Now I'm just disappointed I missed Sam, whom I've only ever encountered in Cozmic's Playground global...

Yep! See you then!

I don't think we've had a new player go nuts about market prices since that one fellow started calling out Fulmens and threatening marketeers with RL violence because player-controlled prices were too high.

I imagine most new players won't really come into contact with the market until they are well along the path, since it's not mentioned in the tutorial.
There may be some sticker shock on items, but once that goes away and some experience is gained, the millions will outfit their play style and they'll either go back to playing the game or find a way to maximize their market work.

The Devs have given casual players a lot of safety valves:

• Purples drop from any 47+ mob.
• Alignment Merits are easy to get.
• Reward Merits are obtained from a variety of in-game tasks.
• Rare salvage and recipes can get you decent income...two to five million for salvage and much more for recipes.
• AE lets you get recipes and salvage in another vein.

There isn't a lot more that can be done here. At some point a player needs to decide if they want to put in "effort" to get stuff or just go with SOs.

I have a practice on Wednesday but if we do this early enough I can make it. I could make 6 or 7 on Wednesday, but 9 or 10 would be dicey.

I don't get this.

A friend of mine returned from a loooooooooooong break. He has a big family so he can't game regularly, but he re-subs occasionally to see how his Fire/Fire Tanker still fares against stuff. He saw the high prices at the market and didn't panic. He loaded up one of his farm missions, sold EVERYTHING...he vendored commons, listed everything else at the Market and made 60 million within a few days. He used that to get himself some KB protect IOs, a few Resist IOs and so on. Eventually he did some TFs, cashed in some Merits and sold that stuff...I mean, did he "dig into the market"? Sure, but this is as casual as it gets folks.

If a mid-30s man with 5 children can purple out his Fire/Fire/Fire Tanker, just by logging in once every four months...there has to be some goodwill put in by players too.

You can play the game normally and just vendor all your dorps and get SOs. Heck, you can get Invention: Accuracy, which probably works out better on your wallet since it won't degrade. The question is, what do you do with the five to ten million in pocket at level 50? You don't NEED to eat, pay rent (well, Prestige does this...) or buy clothes (well, free tailor sessions help...) and so on. Thus, you can tweak your builds. My Dark/Dark/Dark Def is the perfect example. I swore I would use drops and sales and that's it. She has uncommon sets, the odd rare set and so on but no purples, few rares and she plays great! Then I have my Kat/Regen with two purple sets, PvPIos, Lotg 7.5s...she solos +2/x4 at the moment and I wonder if that's underperformance for a Kat/Regen.

Just...when you see 200,000,000 for a LOTG 7.5 don't go:

"ZOMG soooooooooooooo expensive!"

Instead, go:

"Hey, I could run five tips today, five tips tomorrow and a Morality and buy one. Then I can sell it for 130,000,000 to 200,000,000 and buy stuff or just get SOs!"

The game REALLY does work fine on SOs. My Mind/Cold's primary build had ONLY SOs and I got TONS of team invites. No one kicked me off teams. I eventually added a Confuse purple set, then a few others...you'll be fine.
The casual player will be fine.

You only REALLY need IOs for three purposes:

i)PvP, where you need the uber maxed build.
ii)High-end, stress-test builds...soloing pylons, soloing AVs, soloing Lusca...
iii)Gaudiness of set list.

There are ways to get your stuff..A-Merits, Reward Merits, sales...I mean, the Market people here aren't even pricks. Even Nethergoat, whom is somewhat prickly, is helpful. So are Fulmens and the rest. There are guides, players will help.

Don't think players will help?

From Dec 1 to Jan 1 I've been Gleemailing, daily, 20,000,000 + random IO from my bins (everything from HOs to purples to PvP IOs to procs to...and yes I know HOs aren't IOs >.<).

That's...700,000,000 inf influence, billions in IOs (I gave Nucs, Purple triples, low-level LOTGs, high level LOTGs, PvP IOs)...and I *STILL* have TONS of inf just from selling drops! Just running a Lady Grey at +1 or +2 gets me tons of cash.

It's...not that hard to make money and to get rich in this game, really.
Compared to WoW and other games, the grind here is super, super easy.

Agreed and this is another strike against Apex. You can bring down the ones in Tin Mage in fairly short order because they're there...you don't have to wait for a wave to arrive, then another wave, then another wave...and finally it's over. If level 54 mobs are the new standard, then at least scale back on the Elite Bosses in these missions. A couple of War Walkers is fine but eight in one mission and then more still in Apex...*looks at ITF/LGTF longingly*.

Both of these are pretty easy.
Did a one hour or less Master RSF run last night on Infinity, perma Mind-Dom, Sonic/Sonic COrr, Energy Blast/Rad Emission Corr, SS/Inv Brute, Kin Melee/Inv Scrapper, Fire/Kin Corr, Sonic/Cold Corr, VEAT...we slept the whole bunch then single pulled every AV, no deaths and no sweat.

I'll agree on Midnight Dodger being the hardest part of Tin Mage so far.