Rodion

We don't know this for sure, but since the maximum value of a positive 32-bit integer is a little more than two billion, the cap is probably two billion because that's the biggest integer number most applications running under Windows are programmed to represent (and probably store in the database).

It is therefore probably a technical reason, and not one based on a conscious decision to rein in inflation or check greed.

It seems that the devs chose to store influence/infamy in a 32-bit number when the game came out, long before there was a market and before there were IOs, and before there was anything to spend lots of influence on (the only thing worth a lot was Hamidon Origin enhancements). Two billion probably seemed like a number that would never be reached, and if someone hit the cap they were so rich that it didn't really matter.

The patch on the Training Room seems to fix the bug. You can now bid on 10 enhancements, and a stack of 10 appears in you bought tab. Then you can get them and they're placed in your enhancement tray.

However, you can't place a stack of enhancements or inspirations up for sale -- each one is a separate slot in the market.

That doesn't have to be the case. If you use Mass Hypnosis you can safely sleep a large mob (say, if you're running solo at +0/x6), then run in and use Fulcrum Shift. Then step back and use Terrify (which I slot for damage), and you also get the containment bonus because they're slept, and any other AoEs you've picked up from your Epic. Total Domination can also be used for the same effect, and it works better because containment will work for all your attacks and not just the first one. TD just recharges slowly, so you wind up having to use Mass Hypnosis a lot.

Alternately, if you're on a team you can let the tank go in first to draw aggro, then you go in to use FS, catching yourself and the tank in the radius. I find it worthwhile to use Mass Hypnosis and then Terrify immediately. It wakes them up, but gives you the containment damage bonus.

I can't imagine anyone would possibly want to be prompted for every player-cast buff. Say I'm in the middle of a big fight, where defenders and controllers are cutting loose with Recovery Aura, Regen Aura, Accelerate Metabolism, Speed Boost, Clear Mind, Fortitude, etc.

There are technical issues of having to queue an arbitrary number of dialogs for these buffs. No one would ever want to deal with that many popup dialogs, and in the heat of combat no one would be able to pick and choose which ones they actually want. Which means no one would ever actually turn this option on, except perhaps people who only solo and don't like getting spam buffed at the market or in Ouroboros.

The only workable solution is for there to be an option with two values: decline or accept all friendly buffs. A popup dialog for all buffs is simply not a viable option.

Another possibility would be another option to reject all non-team buffs. That way you could stop hit-and-run spammers without affecting team play.

I had a plant/thorn dominator that I deleted at level 35 because the attacks just didn't seem to mesh well with the controls. And plant is just so ... ugly.

The inherent power gives you a full endurance bar, so endurance isn't really that much of a problem, especially on teams where Domination builds quickly. Your exact build will make a big difference on how you feel about this AT. Slotting for recharge and getting Hasten will make the character play much better. And IOs will make a huge difference in terms of End consumption (as long as you make sure you slot sets that give good end reduction).

Brutes are a pain till you get some kind of Endurance-restoring power. But running an /Electric or /Energy brute is great -- you can go non-stop because of the fast-recharging energy drain powers on them. Both of these are generally considered to be somewhat squishy, but they can be built to be very sturdy, though it does require getting the Fighting pool and IO sets that grant defense bonuses. But with Energy Drain and Power Sink you have plenty of Endurance to run Tough and Weave and attack as much as you like.

I ran the Ice Mistral SF with an Energy/Energy brute last weekend after mostly soloing with the character. I wasn't quite sure how she'd hold up on a big team, but she was the last one standing in the final confrontation. The hard-hitting single-target attacks were quite useful for finishing off the AV.

I have a Fire/Dark and Rad/Kin. The Fire/Dark was much easier and fun to play the whole time leveling. It had more damage than the Kin before 38 (before Kin gets Fulcrum Shift), and much more control and therefore soloability.The /Dark can keep enemies at range with Tar Patch and Darkest Night keeps them from hitting you quite well.

The Rad/Kin is now fun after respeccing at level 50 to a near-softcapped S/L/Energy/Ranged build using Scorpion Shield, Tough, Weave, Combat Jumping, a couple Obliteration sets. You get stunned a lot when you run into mobs and use FS and your PBAoEs, but if you carry a few Break Frees it's not so bad because they miss you most of the time.

If you like a ranged/pull/toggle type of corruptor the /Dark is excellent throughout your career. If you like to mix it up in melee and hate toggles the /Kin is good once you have all your defenses in place.

Doesn't that seem like a bug? Is there some technical reason why they can't flag summoning the pet as an action that breaks hide?

While certain combinations of primaries and secondaries are definitely not no-brainers (scrappers and tankers often have a hard time fitting everything in between attacks and defense), many really are. For example, in an Ice/Ice blaster you have ranged holds at tier 5 and 8 in the primary, and a melee hold at tier 8 in the secondary. If your concept is a ranged blaster, it really is a no-brainer not to take that melee hold. (I often take the two ranged holds to hold bosses straight out of the chute, so don't get the idea I'm against the holds.)

Then there are power sets like Claws, which has four relatively fast-recharge single-target melee attacks, two of which are nearly identical. It's pretty much a no-brainer to omit one of the melee attacks after a respec into a high-recharge build (though picking which one may not be). It's also a no-brainer to omit Confront (I have never actually seen a scrapper take it, though I'm sure some do and you wouldn't be wrong for taking it).

Also, if your character never dies, it really is a no-brainer to omit self-rez powers like Revive or Resurgence. Because in cases of extreme unction you can nearly always combine inspirations, or let your team help you. And while it's not always a no-brainer, it's very easy to justify the omission of Tier 9 defensive powers like Unstoppable, especially if you're replacing them with something that increases survivability without a crazy hit-point and endurance crash (say, Tough and Weave).

But don't get the wrong idea: I'm the one who advocates taking little-used melee powers like Stun so that you can stack mezzes on bosses easily. On my Ice/Ice/Arctic tanker I took Freezing Touch and Block of Ice to easily hold bosses. And I advocate taking sleeps: they're much better than they're given credit for, especially when you solo.

I might have agreed with you more in the past, but especially now with multiple builds, you can have access to all the possible powers with one build or the other. For example, I have two builds on my Ice/Ice blaster: one is ranged, and the other is melee-oriented with Frozen Fists, Ice Sword, Chilling Embrace and Ice Patch, and high S/L defense.

I'm not saying people are wrong for not taking Stamina. I'm just saying that I feel no limitations when I take it. I'll gladly accept fewer powers for the ability to run faster and last longer in combat.

The Fitness pool makes my characters seem more "super," and isn't that what the game is about?

Of course the Fitness pool isn't required. But this is really not the issue: the question is whether the things you're giving up are actually worth more than the benefits provided by Stamina.

A character gets 24 powers. There are 9 primary and 9 secondary powers. If you take all your AT's primaries and secondaries, that still leaves you with five powers to take from the pools. If you take three powers from Fitness and two from Travel, that leaves you with nothing extra. Sounds terrible, doesn't it?

But it's not really that bad. There are many primary and secondary powers that aren't particularly useful, or duplicate other powers in either the primary or secondary set. Omitting them is a no-brainer.

Then there's the issue of an attack chain. If you've got a tight attack chain with four to six high-damage, high-recharge, low-endurance attacks, adding three more suboptimal attacks is more of a waste than taking three powers that let you jump higher, run faster and last longer in fights.

If you're a ranged blaster, for example, you may not take any of the melee attacks in your secondary. I've got a blaster that took only four of the nine secondary powers (and actually only uses two of them in the 95% of fights -- an Ice/Ice blaster with with Chilblain, Ice Sword, Build Up and Ice Patch).

Furthermore, those powers you take instead of Fitness will use more Endurance than you have. For example, many players these days want to maximize defense. That means taking toggles like Maneuvers, Tough and Weave on top of any defensive toggles you may already have. These use Endurance at a higher rate than most primary/secondary defenses (often 50% more). If you've got four or five defensive or damage aura toggles, then you add Tough and Weave, you're going to be hard-pressed to stay in combat very long. Slotting attacks for endurance certainly helps, but won't solve your problem.

Then there are powers that allow you to recover endurance by draining it from enemies (Dark Consumption, Consume, Power Sink, Energy Absorption), or things like Conserve Power. These are great and I take them frequently. But most of these powers have a very long recharge and cannot keep your endurance up -- though some can. And many of these powers you can't get until level 26, 28 or 35.

Finally, the charge of "power gaming" is off the mark. I take Stamina and slot powers for end reduction because it makes the character easier to play. I don't have to sit around and wait between fights. I don't have to decide which attacks to use, which toggles I can afford to turn off for this mix of enemies. In effect, I can just play the game without having to know details that power gamers know to maximize their character's effectiveness. A power gamer would take an obscure power because of its utility in rare circumstances (like those who took Vengeance when it gave outrageous buffs). A power gamer takes essentially worthless powers in order to slot an IO set that gives a specific set bonus.

A person who takes Fitness so that they can just leave their defensive toggles on all the time and attack non-stop is not a power gamer. They're using the "fire and forget" method of play, which is the antithesis of power gaming.

That's why people automatically recommend taking Stamina. It's not out of nerd-lust for ultimate power (though Stamina is often required for that). It's because the average person will be much more satisfied playing a character with Stamina than one without it.

If you go to any beach you'll see a wide variety in women's bathing suits. But for men you see just one or two basic designs. The same thing is true in business and social settings: men have one or two basic uniforms, while women have a wide variety of dresses, suits, pants, skirts, etc.

The game is simply reflecting the general trend in American society for women to have a large variety of clothing options, while men have a much smaller selection.

More simply put: how many different outfits does Barbie have? How many does GI Joe have?

The power's obvious antecedent is the archetypal "Berserker" rage. The conceit behind the berserker is that they are immensely strong while berserk, attacking mindlessly and paying no heed to their own defense. Afterwards they collapse.

From Wikipedia:

A toggle doesn't represent the concept of the berserker rage at all.

Many paper-based RPGs have a version of Berserk, and these often involve a defense penalty the whole time you're berserk, increased damage, increased to-hit, a chance to attack allies, and/or increased hit points, often followed by a crash of some sort.

If CoH's Rage is to stay true to its inspirational sources, the piper will always have to be paid. There are several other powers that have a far worse crash than Rage (Unstoppable, Elude, etc.), so Rage's crash is exceedingly mild. When my characters that run Rage crash I use some kind of control power (Hand Clap or Footstomp if I'm taking too much damage), Taunt, heal, drain endurance, or use a Vet power like Sands of Mu (which isn't affected by the crash -- which seems like a bug to me).

Finally, it's not unreasonable that certain combinations of primary and secondary don't work well together. It would be nice if you could mix and match any sets, but since there are sets that have synergies and sets that don't, why not sets that actively interfere with each other? SS/Ice isn't the only combination that has problems: Martial Arts and Invulnerability have a certain degree of incompatibility because MA has so many KB attacks, while Invulnerability grants defense from proximity to enemies.

Another possibility would be to have two versions of Rage to choose from: the current Rage, or a version of Build Up.

I used to work with a guy who always said, "All things are possible in software." Yes, there's no way the game engine can handle running on walls -- right now. It's within the realm of possibility that the game engine could be modified to allow it. The problem, as others have mentioned, is the time, money and staffing required to implement such a change.

The problem with continually changing a piece of software is that, like a piece of metal that you constantly bend back and forth, it will eventually break. No matter how superior the design was originally, when you try to add things that had never even been conceived of in the design you have to make changes that compromise the original assumptions, sometimes causing inherent contradictions in the software. These changes cause bugs. At some point, every time you add a new feature you wind up causing more bugs than you can fix in a reasonable amount of time.

Add to this that any software project that lasts more than a few years has a certain amount of turnover, and you lose the "institutional memory" of why things are the way are. New programmers wind up making changes that cause more problems than they solve. On the other hand, new programmers sometimes bring in new insights and can simplify or see new solutions to old problems. And sometimes new technology can make certain things easier (such as the improvements in graphics card technology).

In a well-designed system it's often possible to rewrite subcomponents to accommodate new requirements without compromising the whole system, so certain projects have a longer useful life than others.

So, when developers say, "this is not possible," the unstated assumption is that the impossibility is due to some combination of staffing, budget, technology, hardware, infrastructure, marketing plan, management structure, and so on, and may become possible when any of those things change. And like any corporation, when internal conditions change they don't announce them immediately for competitive reasons.

So instead of whining that the devs keep saying something is impossible, we should be glad that they communicate with us honestly, and keep coming up with ways to make the impossible possible.

That defense does decrease when you've been discovered, but every little bit helps when you have a lot.

Finally, you can get full PvE invisibility that allows attacking very cheaply by taking Stealth and Superspeed. The movement penalty when running SS is irrelevant.

I had a Fire/Ice tanker that had 8 -KB for a long time, and got KBed very rarely. When I started running against Fakes I got KBed more frequently and so I got another Steadfast -KB went all the way to 12.

I'm not sure why you're even asking the question. If you never team, how can it ever make a difference? Anything you want to do is acceptable if you never intend to team.

I skip the rez power if it doesn't make sense for the character, or if I can't afford the power slot. I have an Empathy/Psi defender that I took it on because it's pretty much a given that the Empath takes it and it fit the concept. I have an Illusion/Empathy controller I skipped it on because it just doesn't fit the concept, and I needed the slot for something useful. I took the rez power on my Dark/Dark defender because it is an extremely useful offensive power, which I use all the time for stunning and nailing AV regen.

On my other characters that can take a rez (Rad, Thermal, etc.), I usually skip it, but I do pick up the Day Job rez accolade. It's actually a very decent power, with very fast recharge.

Also, since the change to allow inspirations to be combined, the need for rez powers is drastically lower. Six times out of 10 the dead guy can rez himself, and 9 times out of 10 he can if he gets one inspiration from another player. Even when I have a rez power, by the time I can get over to use it the dead guy has rezzed himself.

Finally, the main reason I don't take rez powers is that I mostly team with people who don't get themselves killed, and I do my darnedest to make sure they don't. Why take a power that will be used in one mission out of a hundred?

In what context are you saying this? Generally, the vast majority of characters that play on teams don't need any defense at all. There are so many things that eliminate the need for defense on teams: a tanker taking all the aggro, controllers locking down entire spawns, Dark and Rad defenders debuffing the enemies' to-hit, Storm's Freezing Rain knocking down spawns and pretty much preventing them from doing anything for many seconds, Fortitude from empaths, healing from half the defenders and controllers out there, defense from Ice and Force Field, etc., etc.

Soft-capping is overkill for most characters that are running at standard difficulties. It's big boon for someone running at +0/x8, but it's not essential for survival. Resistance-based tankers, especially, can get along fine without softcapped defense just by using inspirations. Solo at x8 they drop like a soft rain, and with the ability to combine them it's even easier.

The entire game is a "simulation." There's no mechanical difference between running "real" missions and AE missions except the mission entry mechanism. Your powers work exactly the same, the debt mechanism is identical, everything is the same except the reward system, which is mostly the same except for tickets and differences made to prevent exploits.

When you come right down to it, radio/paper missions are functionally identical to AE missions: most of the time you don't have to travel more than a few hundred yards after each radio mission, and often you get sent right back to the same door. There is no overarching story for radio/papers. These days radios are essentially purple recipe farms for players running solo at -1/x8. You can run the same mission ad infinitum by simply zoning in and out until you get the same old easy defeat Archon Manuela mission. You never have to fight Carnies or Arachnos if you don't want to.

When paper missions were first introduced they were exploited in much the same way as AE. Teams would enter the mission and wait at the door while the stalker stealthed to the boss in the end room. Whack the boss. On to the next mission. I never figured out why they did that: I can't believe the mission bonus was really worth all the wasted time. But there was no risk, so I guess efficiency wasn't the issue.

Even today most pickup teams I get invited to just run radios in Brickstown. (And for some reason they always want to run at +3 or +4 even when the team's constitution doesn't warrant it. Note to team leaders: you get more XP/minute when you steamroll mobs at +0 than when you run at +4 and spend more time coming back from the hospital than pounding bad guys.)

Finally, AE was not the first thing to introduce the concept of running the same mission at the same door over and over and over again. Players have been doing that for much longer. There are several Unai Kemen "close 20 rupture missions" that feature various types of mobs. Players would get to the mission that had mobs that favored their build (say, the Family mission) and farm it forever by leaving before completion and then switching to another mission, then switching back and running the farm again. If the team leader didn't tell you it was a farm in his invite, you quickly learned this when you got yelled for clicking a glowie.

Many nerfs were introduced into the game because of farms like this (the timed wolf missions, the Family and Freakshow XP nerfs, and the latest, much-detested non-targetable-rez nerf).

So, while AE has caused some spectacularly bad exploits due to various bugs, it's by no means the only feature in the game to do so. It's a cool feature and I just wish it hadn't had such a rough introduction.

I have a Rad/Kin corruptor, and it was underwhelming for 50 levels. I eventually was able to softcap him for S/L defense and he become much more fun.

But my Fire/Dark was fun the whole time.

My guess is they're sitting around in the market bidding hundreds of millions on purples and complaining about how expensive they are.

The sure-fire way to get purples is to solo level 47-50 missions. You'll either get what you want or you'll get something you can sell. Since the purple drop fix I've probably gotten 10-15 purples, all solo, and that's probably at less than 20-30 hours a week, much of that time playing low-level missions that don't drop purples and running on teams where your odds plummet drastically.

While it helps to be able to solo x8 with multiple AoE attacks, it's not at all necessary -- depending on your character, your defeats/minute may be higher at x4 or x3 because you can be more daring. This is especially true for squishies.