Rodion

I'm seeing similar expected rates over a few hundred defeats each across several characters and even got a purple yesterday.

However, to be fair the recently fixed drop bug wasn't a bug in the drop rate. It was a bug that caused mobs to intermittently appear to be gray and therefore drop nothing. It's a subtle but important difference.

It may be that the OP has found another case where this condition arises. The only way to be sure is for him to collect data and check the stats. I find that even doing one radio mission on x8/+0 is enough to get close to the expected rates.

R. Talsorian did some of the early Cyberpunk-oriented tabletop RPGs. They had a gritty feeling with lots of Japanese flavor (from back when it seemed that the Japanese would take over the world, though everyone knows now that it's gonna be the Chinese and the Indians ).

Unfortunately, R. Talsorian has to be careful about their trademark. If you hold a trademark or copyright, and knowingly neglect to defend it, you can lose it. It's not that they're being bastards about it, it's simply a requirement for companies that wish to maintain their trademarks. The only way to keep using the name in the game would be for the two companies to enter a contract granting CoH specific rights to the use of the name, but I'm sure neither company wants to waste time and money on something so minor. So it's just better all around to take the name out and keep both IPs "pure."

Most people display little understanding of the difference between copyright and trademark, and what sorts of things are subject to them. Trademarks are essentially reserved names within a particular field that companies can keep forever (company names, product names, etc.), while copyrights are placed on specific works (books, movies, games) for a limited (though quite long) time. Patents have a much shorter period of exclusivity than a copyright, but with very broad potential for licensing.

There is a great deal of disagreement about what sorts of things are patentable these days, resulting in numerous preposterous patents in the software industry (like Apple's recent application for a patent for forcing you to watch ads).

I'd go for Tactics over Vengeance. The Confusion, Fear protection and +Per buffs can be very nice, and you benefit from them yourself.

Letting someone die to get the Vengeance buffs just seems like an exploit, and if you're worth your salt as an Empath you shouldn't be letting people die accidentally.

Yes, I'd agree.

The canes can only be redeemed during the event, right? When it's over, there's no way to get that respec, right? So after January the canes will be useless again, and everything will return to normal. Unless they're planning to put the cane-redeeming elf somewhere in the always accessible universe?

I second this. My first corruptor was a Rad/Kinetics, and it was kind of hard to solo. My Fire/Dark easily solos x5 mobs. Haven't tried a bigger team size, but don't anticipate any problems doing it.

The Fire/Dark is an excellent choice for avoiding aggro due to the pet, Darkest Night and Fearsome Stare (fear cone), and Tar Patch multiplies your already significant damage as well as helping to keep melee enemies away from you.

Fire/Rad would also be a good choice, but there your mitigation depends almost completely on your toggles. If you're stunned or held, you become extremely vulnerable. Fire/Dark's Darkest Night is similar to Radiation Infection in that sense, but that's where the pet and Fearsome Stare come in: the pet has its own accuracy debuff toggle, as well as heals, holds and immobilizes that debuff acc, and it is a great aggro magnet. Dropping the pet in the middle of a spawn is a great tactic. Fearsome Stare is a targeted AoE click with a wide and long cone, with a -15% acc debuff.

Both Fire/Rad and Fire/Dark are good for fighting AVs and Giant Monsters for the big -regen debuff on Lingering Radiation and Howling Twilight. You can't go wrong with either of them, but I'd give the edge in survivability to Fire/Dark.

Given that anyone can buy temporary travel powers in-game with influence, or earn temporary travel powers in-game by doing missions or with day jobs, I don't think that the ability to buy travel powers with real money is any cause for worry.

People are paying for the cosmetic effect of this particular travel power, which, it may be argued, is much less effective and less unbalancing than the various flight travel powers that can be had for nothing.

Stalkers are probably the biggest reason that PvE players find PvP uninteresting. I think most players want a more-or-less fair fight. But getting backstabbed and dying in one or two hits is just tedious. Sure, there are ways to avoid it. But why bother?

Stalkers have been given two huge advantages (nearly impenetrable stealth and massive first-strike capabilities). I really don't get why something so unbalanced was put in the game, when it's probably the biggest reason controllers, blasters and defenders are not interested in open-zone PvP.

Your current experiences sound like PvP hasn't really changed at all (people just running around and stalker backstabbing), despite the revamp.

Yes, I've seen bosses as well in these situations. Bosses have been spawning in duos for quite some time now -- long before I16, and on difficulties 2 and 4 when I was running solo. In general I like the way it works, and if I'm on a character that doesn't handle bosses well I just use the boss->LT difficulty option. It's not perfect, but pretty darn close.

Some of those might be keybounces. I've accidentally typed an extra zero when I'm in a hurry. Man, that hurts.

The problem with any market scheme is that if more than a couple of people do it, it no longer works. You wind up competing with someone else for the same market niche, outbidding each other for the same items, until it's no longer profitable.

You need to take the general principle "buy low/sell high" and find some unique niche to apply that to. Getting the specific items to buy and sell from suggestions on the forums guarantees you're going to be competing for that niche with someone else.

Find your own niche (something that sells for a lot that you know how to get cheaply) and keep mum about it. Odds are you won't be able to keep that niche forever; you'll need to adapt over time as conditions change.

Time was you could buy base salvage in bulk for pennies, craft base components from that and then sell the components for a hundred or thousand times profit. I have no idea what people were using those components for (self buffs maybe?), but that stopped working when they unified base and invention salvage. I made millions that way, back when millions was real money .

There is no one trick to getting rich. The "easiest" way is to just play the game and have fun with your level 50 character, defeating tons of level 50 mobs. One day, when you're least expecting it, a purple recipe will drop and you will become much richer. Or you might just want to use that recipe for yourself. Just make sure your salvage and recipe inventories are never full!

I think it's perfectly reasonable to post this here. Posting it in the PvP forum would be preaching to the choir.

The difficulty ratings you give the different ATs are kind of confusing. I'm not sure what the number means. You list Stalkers at 1/5, Defenders at -4/5, and everything else at 2/5 or 3/5. Is the -4/5 for Defenders an error? Should it really be 4/5?

If that's the case, then you seem to be implying that Stalkers are easy to PvP with, and Defenders are very hard. Which makes sense. I can't see how Defenders could possibly survive solo.

I want to like PvP, but when I've tried it it's been very dissatisfying (it's been a very long time I have to admit). People would fly and jump around never engaging unless they had numerical superiority, in which case the fight was over in seconds. The other annoying thing was getting teleported by a gang of Stalkers into caltrops and immediately assassinated. In general, being one-shotted or two-shotted is not fun. Getting backstabbed like that a few times pretty much turns you off of PvP in less than 10 minutes flat.

So, my questions are: is PvP any different now? Is it a total waste of time even trying to play controllers and defenders? Do people PvP on teams in a coherent and coordinated fashion, or is everyone always boinking around like crazy? Is PvP still dominated by Stalkers trying to backstab everyone in the zone?

At the other end of the spectrum was Scrapper vs. Tanker: the scrapper couldn't do enough damage to hurt my tanker, and the scrapper never stood still long enough to take any damage from the tanker. It was a pointless stalemate.

My desire for PvP is that it should be a big epic fight, like a fight with an AV or those fights in the comics and the movies. The reality of PvP was nothing like that. It seemed artificial and gimmicky, with everyone constantly running away (or, just as annoying, having their movement suppressed), or getting ganked. There was no enjoyable middle ground.

What would be the best way for someone with these particular hot buttons to approach PvP these days? That is, what kind of character would be best to try, and under what conditions?

You will sing a different tune when you see female characters sashaying around Paragon City!

Seriously, the guys who do this have nothing to do with fixing task forces. It seems like a new-guy project to let one of the new programmers/animators that were hired some months back learn how the system works.

If no one is running content at those levels, recipes won't drop. The events should give us an uptick in level 30 commons and uncommons, but if more people are running level 50s that's where the majority of recipes are going to fall.

Part of the problem is that for years sets like Multi-strike never sold. If you put them on the market for more than the vendor price you were just wasting slots. So it may be that people who pull down lots of recipes are just vendoring the things that, in their experience, have not sold well historically.

The same thing is true for many common recipes. The level 10-45 recipes usually sell for a fraction of what you would pay for them on the crafting table, and usually much less than the vendor price (while, inexplicably, certain ones sell for much more!). It makes more sense to vendor a level 50 Acc for 110K (or whatever it is), than to waste a market slot on it and net maybe 90K.

A significant problem is that the random rolls don't allow you to generate recipes at a selectable level. The bronze ticket roll (and the 20-merit random roll, if I'm not mistaken) give you recipes at your level, or the closest available level for the recipe.

I'm one of those who would like to generate recipes in the 30s, but have to settle for 50s a lot of the time. Being able to select the level of a randomly generated recipe roll would be a great change.

When you're teamed Shocking Bolt will stack with any other character's hold to hold most bosses, so it can be extremely useful if you coordinate with a teammate. For example, a SS tanker's Knockout Blow is a hold, which means the tanker can charge in, use KOB on a Carnie Ringmistress, while you use Shocking Bolt, and BAM she's held.

Mine recharges in 7 seconds and has a 24-second duration, so once you hold most bosses you can keep them held. That also means you can hold most bosses in less than 10 seconds with two applications of Shocking Bolt.

Siren's Song and sleeps in general are better than most players give them credit for. If you do any soloing it's quite useful. Even on big teams you can let loose with Howl and follow up with Siren's Song, and the aggro you just generated starts snoozing. Odds are they'll be awakened by someone else and the other team mate will get the aggro. Depending the team makeup and attack sets, mobs can stay asleep surprisingly long. And until they wake up, it's as good as a hold.

Yes, it's just like a task force.

Everyone has to be together when you start Ouro mission (you can also start it in the base if you have the crystal there), and everyone gets the merits at the end of the TF.

We've learned a lot about what constitutes an art form in the last century. Any medium that combines creativity and craftsmanship is essentially an art form. An art form's tenure really has no bearing on legitimacy. Whether or not society has granted its imprimatur to legitimize an art form is beside the point. Something becomes an art when the artists and their audience agree that it is.

Now, while most objects of any type of craft are mere handiworks, there are exemplars that are definitely works of art.

For example: an authentic Ming vase is a work of art. The flower vase I buy at Bed, Bath and Beyond is mere handiwork. Pottery is an art form. The vast majority of pots that have ever been made are simple objects with no artistic value.

Paintings by Rembrandt are works of art. The illustration on my cereal box and most book covers are handiwork.

Film is an art form. The vast majority of commercials and popular movies are simply handiwork.

Handiwork becomes art when its aesthetic sensibility and craftsmanship exceeds the mundane and becomes something more than its basic functionality. But it's more than that. We as a people imbue things with a sense of time and place that reflect their origins and history, and our feelings about them.

That means it is possible for a mundane, well-crafted object to become art over time. Like the pottery of ancient Greece. Or some of the common, mass-produced yet well-made porcelains of the nineteenth century that have now become rare -- and somehow through the magic of time -- works of art.

So it is with computer games. The problem with computer games is that they are so complex, crafted by so many different hands, that it is almost impossible to maintain a high level of craftsmanship and artistic sensibility throughout. They are filled with rambunctious and profane players who constantly break the mood of the artistic sensibilities of the game.

Yet there are almost certainly many beautiful and artistic images throughout the world of computer games, wonderful pieces of music, well-crafted words and set pieces combining all these elements to evoke a sense of mystery, wonder, joy, foreboding, fear, elation: the whole gamut of emotional reactions.

And isn't that what art is all about?

I've tried every AT but one (Arachnos soldier) to at least 10. I switched servers and so my first couple of characters are either deleted or still stranded at 41, but I've got more than a dozen 50s and three or four dozen characters total.

I'm partial to ranged ATs (controllers, defenders, blasters) because you can "see the board" better. Melee characters often miss out on what's going on around them (see: scrapper lock), and aren't always aware when something nasty's going down. I played an empath defender and controller early on, so I got used to watching out for the rest of the team.

If I didn't play a lot of characters I would have quit long ago. I like being able to do something different all the time -- ranged to melee, high to low level, hero to villain, etc. I also like playing all different ATs so that I understand how to work better with them. You can't understand a tanker till you've herded a mile in his shoes (though I'm not a big fan of herding).

One of my earlier characters was a Storm/Electrical defender. I'm still partial to Storm because of the controlled chaos. It's a good all around set with some healing, lots of debuffing and good mitigation. If only it had some -regen...

I still play some of my earliest characters at least once or so a week, but there are way to many to go back to all of them on a regular basis. I'm still doing respecs and second builds on the old characters to try different things. I've put one purple set on three or four characters because I got drops I could actually use, so I got the rest of the set. But it's way too much work to get three or four sets for one character, and they really don't offer much of a variety of bonuses. Really, only +Recharge is all that fabulous.

You actually don't need to store everything up front. If you just buy IOs on the market ahead of time as you can use them starting at level 12, then slot 20s at 17 in the new slots, etc., you never need to be in a hurry for anything. If you've got a mix of 15 and 20s at level 22, you don't have to upgrade to 25s, or 30s at 27; you can plug in 30s as you get the ones you need on the market. The acc bonus from a 15 and 20 IO is 44.8%, which is soft-capped for hitting at least +1s and +2s.

Furthermore, if you save the salvage needed for crafting IOs in your personal vault, you can usually keep enough of the high-demand stuff in stock for when you need it (and these days most salvage isn't crazy expensive -- just a few like Luck Charms). Then you can always craft the odd IO that you need immediately if you don't happen to get one on the market before you level up. Recipes are still dirt cheap on the market, and you can always buy them from the table if you don't want to wait. But most of the time you can get the IO you want for a reasonable price if you just wait a day (because people going for the crafting accolade have to unload hundreds of the things).

The key is to keep the IOs you'll need for the next couple of levels on your character. Then you can also buy or craft what you need ahead of time at your leisure.

If you have a crafter character you can outfit your alts with level 30 IOs for much less than the cost of SOs (excluding salvage). You just need to make up, say, 10 at a time of what your alt will need next, put them in base storage, log in with that alt, then store them on your character or in the market slots as needed. No need to store hundreds in the base.

I wind up storing a fair number of IOs for the next few levels in the enh slots on my characters. I may miss some drops, but trainers and DOs are next to worthless, so it doesn't really matter if I miss a few. And in the grand scheme of things, SOs aren't really worth much either.

Given the precedent with City of Villains, the logical thing would be to give four new character slots with Going Rogue, and increase the total number of slots possible to 40 or 48 so that all subscribers would be able be able to receive their new slots.

I'd go a step further and recommend putting two or three more Crushing Impact sets of five for the extra 10-15% recharge set bonus. Even a set of level 35s gives you better numbers than common 50s. The hit point set bonus is useful too. If you're willing to wait a bit, you can get CI for pretty reasonable prices (a level 50 tank can earn enough for a few sets pretty fast).

Be careful you don't take too many of the same bonus, though. Remember the rule of five.

Definitely go for The Atlas Medallion, Portal Jockey and Task Force Commander. This all increase hit points or endurance, two things you can never have too much of.