Rodion

While it's true that Dark doesn't have any defense debuff resistance, softcapped S/L defense is still worthwhile for a big chunk of the game. And the 5-6% that you get from Cloak of Darkness is extremely helpful in reaching the softcap, considering that 5% S/L defense will otherwise cost you hundreds of millions in rare recipes.

The question is really whether your defense is going to be debuffed enough of the time to make softcapping pointless. But if it's not softcapped, you're certainly going to get hit a lot more frequently. I think Dark Armor is sufficiently squishy to warrant softcapping. It'll deflect enough attacks to seriously increase your ability to take alphas, even if your defense does eventually get debuffed.

Plus, there are plenty of times when even tanks can use stealth. Say, in just about every Task Force, when stealthing missions can save you hours.

The main problem with CoD is that it causes a serious performance hit on a LOT of graphics cards. Just turning it on drops my FPS from 60 to 30, regardless of whatever else I'm running. However, if you use power customization and select the option to prevent yourself from becoming invisible it's not so bad. And if you set the personal effects range to some outrageously high number like BAB suggested, you can eliminate the poor graphics performance of Dark Armor altogether.

And remember that you can slot Terrify for damage, and combined with Containment from something like Total Domination or Mass Hypnosis, you can do respectable damage. The basic Terrify duration is almost 30 seconds, which is plenty long without enhancement.

I've skipped Combat Jumping on a Scrapper that has Air Superiority and Fly. But I've got it on all my other Scrappers.

It's a Dark/Dark scrapper that has stalled out at 47. It seems so wimpy compared to all my other characters. I finally broke down and designed a soft-capped S/L defense build (with Combat Jumping, of course), but my graphics card doesn't handle the effects well (especially Cloak of Darkness). So it's on the shelf again.

I know this stuff seems to simple to you, but for a large number of people it's a total mystery. They think that they're "unlucky" and will never get good drops or won't get the best price when they post an item on the market. My guess is that an awful lot of decent recipes are just sold to vendors out of laziness and ignorance.

The problem is that there's so much detail. The "casual" player doesn't know what's important and what's not. Players with years of experience know how to work the system to their advantage, while players without that experience just miss the boat repeatedly, for any number of reasons.

There's nothing magic about this knowledge, but from reading all the complaints from players about the market, getting desired items, and all the rest, it's clear that there's a large segment of the playerbase that is completely baffled by this part of the game. As you can see from other posts in this thread, there are people who don't really care about the numbers at all; they just want to have fun. And these are players who bother to read the forums: the vast majority of players never visit these august pages.

I've been saying pretty much the same thing that you're saying in this thread since IOs came out: anyone can outfit their character with decent stuff if they just plan ahead. But it requires that you have patience and understand and adapt to the market, and not just treat it like a store.

And I think that's what frustrates people: they want what they want when they want it, and they want it to be the same every time. They want a set procedure that's easy and reliable. SOs are exactly that: you pays your money and you gets your SO. Markets are obstinate, unpredictable and cantankerous.

I think the real cookie-cutter road to outfitting your character with IOs runs through AE: with tickets you can get common IO recipes and salvage like clockwork, and never touch the market. With Bronze rolls you could pretty successfully Frankenslot a character without having to buy anything on the market.

It would be interesting to compare that character-building strategy to a market-based one. It's a completely different emotional dynamic: instead of being at the mercy of the frustrating and confusing market, you just keep working till you get what you need. But AE is in such disrepute it might be a tough sell.

And weren't there two kinds of endurance modification as well, one for boosting end and another for draining?

The comment is also saved on your hard disk. There's a button on the arc in your list of published arcs that you can click to see all the comments that you've received.

The trick for this is to just cancel the mission if you're in a hurry (I used this when slotting my Dual Pistols characters in the beta). It's especially annoying having to do the mission if all your enhancements are red, as they were after the level 50 bump.

Your analysis is dead on. I have said much the same thing many times.

The problem with IOs for the casual player is that you have spend a lot of time planning ahead: you have to either bid on salvage ahead of time, or place bids on made IOs, or pay through the nose if you want it now. Even if you have the salvage, you have to go to the University or your base to actually make the things. And invariably once you're at the University you find that you only have two Luck Charms and you have three Accuracy recipes, and then you have to fool around getting the extra salvage all over again.

It's just too much planning, too much fiddling around, too much overhead for a "casual" player. Most of them haven't heard of Mids and haven't decided what power they're going to take next level, much less the next five.

In short, making IOs is too much like work for many casual players.

Recently I've started characters without slotting any enhancements until level 12. I spend an hour or two around level 7 getting 600 tickets and getting an item of rare salvage and some tier 1 arcane salvage (Luck Charms are good for getting enough capital to let me list a Prophecy or whatever happens to be hot), which I sell for more than a million on the market. Then I bid a little more than the crafting price for level 15 IOs, which I then start slotting when I hit level 12.

The problem with this strategy is that it fails if everyone uses it. If there's suddenly a demand for level 15 IOs players will start outbidding each other, and then flippers will get into the act. It would be short-lived because no one would be able to make decent money in the long run, but it would discredit the methodology and discourage casual players from using IOs.

That's the problem with any market-based solution: when demand increases, prices go up and casual players get edged out of the market.

The best tactic is to bid on made IOs, but save your salvage and recipe drops in case you don't get lucky. But again, it's too much like work for players who just want to knock heads for a couple of hours. You have to know a lot of stuff to do this effectively (just figuring out what salvage you'll need for the next few levels is terribly confusing for casual players -- the whole system is rather opaque, especially when you start talking about IO set bonuses and the rule of 5...).

In my experience the flag stays set until I exit the game. That is, it stays set when I zone or switch to another character.

Free server transfers have their problems, but other MMORPGs have a single server and it's a non-trivial change to make CoH use that model. The naming problem would have to be resolved in ways that many users have complained bitterly about.

The devs might consider a "just visiting" transfer: you send your character to another server for a single playing session, retaining all your SG and name information on your "home" server. When you log out you get sent back to your home server automatically, without losing any of your status on that server. While visiting you can't join a SG or do anything permanent (though you can give things to other characters). The number of free visits would be limited to some reasonable number per week; more than that and you would pay.

People could go to particular servers for specific reasons: PvP events, global costume contests, dev-hosted events, etc. Your name could be qualified by the home server name while you're visiting. With all the multiverse hopping that goes on in the game, it could even be worked into the mythology and become part of the story line for the game.

That kind of service might actually generate more revenue than permanent transfers if the cost (above the free ones) were low enough to fall below most players' threshold of pain. If it only cost a buck to visit another server after you've done it three times in one week, you might just go ahead and do it if your buddies are all getting together for a PvP session and you've already had your three free visits that week.

If the devs are considering such a change the free transfers they're giving us now would be a good way to see how people use the free transfers to inform how it should work and be priced.

Actually, with /Dark Blast you should definitely be attacking because each time you hit an enemy with one of your blasts, you're debuffing their accuracy by almost 10%. That's very nearly the same as increasing your team's Defense by 10%. By comparison, Maneuvers three-slotted with Defense Buff gives a Defense buff of only 5.49%.

That means each time you hit an even-con mob with one of your blasts, you're effectively increasing your team's Defense against that mob by almost twice what Maneuvers does. (Higher-level mobs are affected less by the debuff because of the "purple patch.")

This is one reason why ghosts can be so deadly: their Dark attacks debuff your accuracy so you can't hit them.

That accuracy debuff is why /Dark Blast's damage is so anemic. It's not so great for soloing, but on a team where someone is attracting all the aggro so that you can use your attacks without fear of reprisal, that debuff can definitely improve a team's survivability.

It also seems weird to spend 31 levels getting these other armors, which you will never use again after level 32.

This is a set that desperately needs to be redone, but since so many players like it the way it is, the best we can hope for is a new "earth armor" set that gets rid of all the warts of Stone.

I think true casual players don't use generic IOs -- they just renew SOs -- and they spend a lot of time on pickup teams. Real casual players don't generally have the wherewithal to solo because they don't have the skill level you do. They waste a lot of time dying and running back from the hospital. Real casual players don't know what's worthwhile selling, and delete it, or sell it to a vendor, or list it on the market for a tenth its actual value

So I'm not really sure what this will prove: yes, if you have years of experience playing CoH you can still be worth hundreds of millions by the time you're level 50. Even if you fight with both hands tied behind your back.

Basically, whether you wind up rich by level 50 depends on whether you find one or more items that's worth a lot of inf, and you know enough to sell it for what it's worth. Given that over the character's career you'll wind up getting hundreds of drops, you're almost certain to find something that will give you hundreds of millions.

I mean, in three hours of farming tickets in AE you are probably 25-50% likely to get 100 million worth of recipes on Bronze rolls alone.

Better enhancements are available in the Origin-based stores in Steel Canyon. Look for them on the minimap with names like Mutant Store and Technology Store. If your origin is Magic you can use Magic/Mutation Dual-Origin enhancements for sale in the Mutant and Magic stores, and Magic/Natural DOs for sale in the Magic and Natural stores.

The best thing to start off is to go to the store for your origin.

Invention Origin enhancements are somewhat simpler (and cheaper) in the long run: there's only one kind that any origin can use, and they never wear out. You can buy them on the market, and you can also make them yourself. The process is more involved than just buying a DO from a store, but the result is superior to "regular" enhancements at level 15 and 20 and from level 30 on. Level 25 IOs are not quite as good as SOs, but they never wear out so on average they're basically as good as SOs.

You should do the mission for the dean of the university to learn about IOs.

Yes, players drastically overestimate the number of misses because the human brain reacts very strongly to exceptions. When you hit 19 out of 20 times, you quickly become conditioned to always hitting. When you miss that one time out of 20 you think something is seriously wrong.

I did once find something weird with accuracy on a Dark/Dark scrapper. My attacks seemed to be missing a lot. When I looked at the combat log the misses were mostly due to the Strikebreaker forcing a miss. Oppressive Gloom was not slotted for accuracy and the interaction with the regular attacks caused the Strikebreaker to fire. Turning off Oppressive Gloom made the problem go away temporarily, and slotting accuracy in OG made the problem go away for good.

It really depends on what level the character is, and what enemies you're fighting. For example, if you're fighting ghosts your accuracy is drastically reduced (debuffed) by their attacks. Some of them have a toggle that debuffs your accuracy as well.

You can see what your chance of hitting is by looking at the Combat tab. If you don't see your to-hit chances you'll need to edit the tab to cause them to display.

You use the global handle of the receiving account to send the email (a new feature), so there's no conflict.

I'd like to fight other people's characters in mayhem/safeguard missions. Instead of having the same old Crematorium or Rose Thorne you'd have something new each time.

Actually, this is not quite right. In signed two's complement eight bits represents values from -128 (0x80) to +127 (0x7f). The value -1 is 0xff. Unsigned eight bits can hold values from 0 (0x00) to 255 (0xff).

One's complement can represent values from -127 to +127, and you can have -0. One's complement was used on some mainframe computers designed in the 1960s (from Control Data, in particular), but I've never seen it used on microprocessors.