Rodion

Yes, but I'd guess that the effort required to make melee set animations look right is much greater than ranged power animations. Melee animations involve a lot of body motions that have to be timed properly with the activation time and interact with other characters. Most ranged powers, dual pistols being the major exception, involve a relatively simple posture change, some hand waving or gesturing with an implement.

In the case of new power sets like blaster Dark Manipulation and the new controller dark set, many of the powers already exist in some form and will require very little tweaking.

So there does seem to be a pattern for charging for sets that require more development. And, honestly, I think that's totally logical and I'm 100% behind it.

You're completely free to play the marketing minigame. But you can't really complain if your overpriced IO isn't selling. You took a gamble listing at that price. We all know the devs make regular changes that completely undermine the prices of items on the market, but them's the brakes. Remember when Breath of the Zephyr was a fabulous set that everyone got for the great defense bonuses?

The converters and the super packs are indicative of a movement in the game towards gambling-type rewards. The converters are basically rolling the dice, giving you a do-over if you get a useless rare or purple recipe. The super packs are like Magic: The Gathering cards you buy in sealed boxes.

Changes like these are democratizing the rewards in the game, making them more accessible to more players. That's good for the game in general, and in the long run, that's good for the market.

Like anything, once you get used to them they're not so bad. I think the devs have done the right thing, though: no new content uses them, only old missions. Note that all the tip missions that use caves take place in the smooth caves.

I hate them as much as the next person, but I'd rather have the devs spend their time adding new content, instead of removing old content. When it becomes time to revamp the radio/paper missions and the other content that uses them the devs should dump them. But before then, don't waste the time.

If you really don't like these missions, just avoid the contacts that give missions in them. Also remember that you can abandon radio/paper missions, so there's a way to get rid of a cave mission without having to burn a "complete mission" opportunity.

Don't be scared off. You can get Kinetic Combat without the market by getting alignment merits (basically, run 5 tips a day) and buying KCs in Fort Trident or The Crucible. You can also get alignment merits by running the signature story arcs (the first episode is easy to solo for melee chars), and by converting reward merits to alignment merits (costs 20 million, but when you consider how much KCs cost it's a deal).

Finally, you can get KCs with 16 or 32 astrals from Astral Christie in Ouroboros.

You can speed up outfitting your character by doing these things on multiple characters and emailing yourself the recipes.

My question is, what exactly do you plan on farming solo? Premium accounts are limited in several ways depending on how long your account has been active: there is a maximum influence cap, you don't have access to AE, recipes and salvage won't drop, you have no access to Wentworth's/Black Market, etc.

If you can't use IOs, then the only drops you're going to get are SOs and influence, and most players would not consider these things worth farming.

You should check out the capabilities your account will have to make sure you can do what you want to before you invest any time and effort in creating a build.

In addition, I don't think there's any way to get a perma-dom solo without IOs. Hasten won't do it, and that's the only real source of recharge bonuses that you can get solo as a Dominator. On teams you can be buffed by several +recharge powers (Speed Boost, Accelerate Metabolism, etc.), but solo you're pretty much stuck with what you get.

I'm with you, as long as "modified damage" means substantially lower damage.

Sniper rifles are used at extreme range, taking into consideration windage and other environmental factors, with long aiming times to make sure that the attack hits a critical spot such as the head or heart.

Gunfire becomes much less accurate immediately after another shot due to recoil. Less accurate means less damage because you're hitting a less vulnerable spot on the target.

Instead of modeling this after Momentum, it would make more sense to model it after the proposed change to Assassin's Strike. A snipe initiated in combat would have no interrupt time, but its damage would be one third the damage done when aiming (the interruptible part of casting), putting it in line with the Tier 1 attack.

For example, Archery's Ranged Shot does 172.7 damage at level 50, with a 4.88 sec casting time and 3 sec. interrupt time. Archery's Snap Shot does 52.55 damage with a 1.19 sec casting time. Using Ranged Shot in combat would therefore do 57.6 damage with a 1.88 casting time.

This would make me much more likely to take snipes, because they could be used in combat. Such a change would be especially beneficial in Electrical Blast, for example, because it has so many utility powers and no shorter-range hard-hitting blasts like Power Burst or Bitter Ice Blast.

The tricky part is defining what "in combat" means. The mechanic for Assassin's Strike is easily defined: outside of Hide, you do less damage. The problem with snipes is determining whether you want to take the time to aim carefully to get the extra damage. Forcing a character to wait some amount of time before initiating a full-damage snipe in combat would substantially change the way existing characters play and should be avoided.

It's slotted for Taunt to get the 2.5% S/L defense bonus. As such, it's not an unreasonable choice, especially if it's a step on the way to a fully soft-capped build.

Sapping is rather hit or miss as mitigation: I use extensively it on my SS/ElA brute, but I've got Mu Mastery with Electrifying Fences and Ball Lightning to back up Lightning Field and Power Sink. Without those additional sources of end drain, PS and LF by themselves don't stop the spawn from attacking you. It slows them down somewhat, yes, but the question is whether that is worth the loss of 2.5% S/L defense. The options for squeezing the last 5% S/L defense out to hit the soft cap are rather limited.

Since the main problem with this kind of build is the defense cascade failure, keeping your defense as high as possible is key.

So, depending on the character's goals it may well be better to trade off sapping ability for that defense.

It seems unlikely. Heroes all get the same effect with their alignment power, and that is a "selfless" team buff. That's just the heroic way, and the sacrifice you have to make to have a Heroic alignment.

I've switched both brutes and doms to Heroes, and I don't find it particularly limiting. When brutes are the focus of aggro, they build Fury very quickly. The lack of "instant on" Domination is much less convenient, but I have perma-dom on my dominators, so in general it's not much of a problem, especially when you're on a large team and Domination is building quickly.

You want a certain number of adds to appear to make sure that you defeat enough to get the astral before you defeat the AV. But you should still close some or most of the portals to avoid having pointless deaths and potential failure.

The problem with sLAMs is that you miss out on astrals by not getting both grenades and acids. It also doesn't save much time -- if you've got all the grenades you still have to wait for the timer to end and the AV to appear, and if you don't get all the grenades in time you miss out on another astral. And if you defeat the AV before enough IDF forces are defeated you miss out on yet another astral.

If enough characters are dying during the AV fight (especially debuffers), it will take longer to defeat the AV because there's less concentrated fire on him, and the whole thing can take longer than if you if did it the right way.

Finally, unless the team is actually capable of withstanding the attacks of all the adds, the odds of failing the trial are high. Half the time I do a pickup slam on Freedom (where it's de rigueur) it fails because there aren't enough players who are +2 or +3, and don't have the necessary incarnate powers to survive.

So instead of getting several astrals, several threads, an empyrean merit and a random salvage roll, you get just one or two threads for the sake of saving five minutes out of a 25 minute trial.

I used to get them quite frequently -- whenever I ran one or two trials -- and I haven't had one in a long time, though I have been running fewer trials. It seems to have definitely improved.

There are a couple of options for endurance management for corruptors using just SOs: if you take the Electricity Mastery APP you can get Power Sink, and Power Mastery has Conserve Power. I tried both with my Storm/Electric defender before IOs existed, and finally settled on Electricity. In combination with Short Circuit PS allows you to completely sap many targets.

Once at level 50 the only end problems I remember having were in protracted AV fights trying to run Snowstorm all the time. Fire probably uses a bit more end than Electric Blast, but then your targets are dying that much faster, so it may be a wash.

The problem is that everyone is convinced that they have to build leagues by hand, rather than just let people queue and run with the league with whatever players you get. This is partly justified: queuing for a BAF or Lambda and then winding up with no melee characters who can handle aggro will make the AV fights rather sticky. The other trials are even worse, because some require very specific role players (Keyes, for the way most people play it, requires one or two aggro magnets for pulling Anti-Matter around by the nose and one or two dedicated healers for them).

Even for trivial trials, such as Death from Below, people still think they need to build a team. That trial is absolutely trivial, and can easily by done by any four characters regardless of AT, yet if I queue by myself it's very hit or miss whether I'll get into one. Most of the time when I queue myself on Freedom (in particular), and the queue dialog pops and says there are 4 or 5 players, 1 or 2 players will decline and the trial will not start. I've completed that trial with just 2 players for the last two parts, so it's not really that hard.

Another issue is that the tools for building trials are so primitive. The LFG queue interface needs to be expanded to allow everyone to see who's queued and what ATs they, and there needs to be at least two states for players in the queue: looking for trial and queued for trial.

Instead of recruiting in broadcast channels players be able to click a "looking for trial" button in the LFG window. Then other players can see them listed in a window similar to the looking for team window. League leaders can then recruit players as needed, inviting them to leagues.

If you're in a mission there's no reason you couldn't be in the looking for trial state, and when the trial was ready to go you could hurry up and finish the mission or just exit out to Ouroboros, then get invited to a league or queue for trial.

The LFG chat channel should actually be chat for people looking for trials, not just messages from the LFG interface.

The restriction that everyone must be in the same zone to start the trial should be removed. It's obviously unnecessary, since people not in the same league can be folded into the trial, and when you actually start the trial the interface disassembles all the teams anyway (and frequently does not rebuild them properly once everyone is in the trial).

Finally, I suspect that in the long term the trials will have to be cross-server if the devs intend people to play all of them on an ongoing basis. Someone on Triumph will never be able to get into an Underground trial, but if the LFG queue worked across all servers anyone would be able to get any trial pretty much any time, even after the intense interest in doing them dies down.

I would agree with this, but with a caveat: if your team is having trouble running at this difficulty, you're actually losing experience compared to what you'd get if you were steamrolling spawns at +0. The reason is that your DPS is zero when you're dead. If you're dying all the time, and spend any amount of time doing nothing, your effective XP/sec is seriously degraded. This is especially bad if you have to come back from the hospital.

I have seen literally dozens of pickup teams painfully picking themselves off the floor and limping back from the hospital because they insist on running at +2 when they're just not equipped to do it.

Most level 50 teams can handle +2 because melee characters have fully fleshed-out defenses, squishies have epic shields, and many characters are often IOed out or have incarnate powers. But lower level teams will have trouble if they lack force multiplier characters (ATs with Kinetics, Thermal, Empathy, etc.) or debuffers (radiation, Trick Arrow, Dark Miasma, Sonics, Cold, etc.). If you're running a team at level 30 and you don't have two or three of these characters, or you don't have a tank/brute that can reliably take all the aggro, you're better off running painlessly and efficiently at +0. Stubbornly trying to run at +2 when the team doesn't have the oomph will make you level significantly more slowly.

Remember, if you're not cruisin', you're losin'.

It seems that, at least at one point, the devs made an effort to give characters rewards for participation if they aren't actually present at the end of the mission, at least if you were still logged in. Another test that should be conducted is to log out or DCing just before completing the mission, and then log back in, then have the character in the mission complete it without inviting you back.

I'm getting all my characters into the same hero SG on Freedom, so I don't have any more slots for alts to be a placeholder.

I've also found a new owner for the SG, so it's no longer available.

Yes, to me Gravity's real problem is Wormhole. Other sets have Flashfire and Stalagmites, which can be used pretty much anywhere, anytime, in extreme safety. As one would expect from an area control power.

Gravity has Wormhole, which can't be used most of the time because it teleports the spawn away from the rest of the team and puts it in an essentially random place (as far as the rest of the team is concerned). It then scatters the spawn across a broad area unless you have a wall to prevent the scatter. And the spawn has enough time after you start activating the power to walk over to you and beat on your noggin.