Sailboat

Sorry about the lack of responses to this. I've never heard of this, and don't know anything about it, but I'm interested in seeing what the consensus is.

I had a differently-annoying sort of "encounter" with an ITF last night.

I log on to a 50 which has been parked in Cim for the day job. I get a /tell out of the blue; the guy is forming an ITF and wants to know if I'd join.

Hrm. I check the time, estimate that a PUG ITF will take 90-120 minutes in my experience, look at my character and determine this isn't one that can earn Incarnate shards. So I type out a sentence saying I'll join if he doesn't mind my switching characters, and send it by return /tell. Elapsed time maybe 2 minutes of cogitation and typing, tops. Probably closer to one minute.

"Oh," he replies. "That didn't happen. I couldn't find enough people."

Yes, you may have noticed, he's talking in the past tense for some reason. It turns out this guy expects to talk a bunch of strangers into spending perhaps two hours cooperating for a major Task Force, but if it takes longer than a minute or two to find everyone and organize it, he's not going to bother.

Some questions spring to mind. Has this guy been able to start a Task Force from cold calling strangers in under two minutes at some point in the past? Maybe he's just been spoiled. Why the past tense? Is he living at an accelerated rate like that old Star Trek episode? Maybe the player isn't a "he" at all, but a Valley Girl: "Honestly, the ITF is SO two minutes ago."

I don't get it. if you're going to give up and move on before I can even finish typing, I

I made it on a Scrapper because I figured if I want to focus on the blades and combos, they might as well be the primary, and I'm not so much a villainside fan (also I felt, possibly wrongly, that Stalkers would limit my use of the blades and Brutes would make me feel too much pressure to keep Fury up to enjoy what I was seeing onscreen. But those are personal quirks and likely not universal.)

Thanks for confirming. But why is it there?

Someone suggested to me in-game that it's to limit profiteering. But it seems to me that a typical user who is buying IOs for himself, not for resale, would want to buy a whole bunch at once after a respec, for example, and not carefully extract one every 20 hours and hoard them in a tray until the respec...whereas a user intending to market the IOs could indeed dole out a large supply of alignment merits as one regular purchase a day as part of a long-term strategy. And the ability to earn them in the first place is already limited to a steady rate by the fame point system.

I'm not really worked up over this, but it just seems like such a strange rule to have devised.

Alignment merits too? Heh, I guess one can throw away the rewards of a heroic reputation; we've seen it often enough. Just admit to taking steroids, have an affair while your spouse is dying of cancer, be caught making racist remarks, stab two people and get acquitted...there are plenty of ways. Or just click too fast.

I just recently started accumulating some Alignment Merits (I know, I'm behind the curve). I have some questions about them:

It appears that not every recipe is available? I get the impression that the yellow/uncommon sets aren't available? Is there some rationale for that? What if I wanted to buy a specific level of uncommon set IO and it wasn't avaialble on the market for weeks at a time, wouldn't it be reasonable to let me drop an alignment merit or two on it, even though that would be a "waste" of their value?

Also, it appears there's a limit not only on how fast you can acquire them, but how fast you can spend them? A 20 hour limit on purchases? Has anyone given a rationale for that? If a given character banks 12 Alignment Merits, is there something unbalancing about letting the player spend them all in one sitting to buy a full set?

One thing that's funny about this game is that I've played medieval games with swords and bows that totally lacked the satisfying feeling those powersets have here. In good old Diablo 2, we used to obsess about better swords, but actually using the sword usually consisted of repeating the same single move over and over rapidly (no cooldown/recharge issues, you see) until the tiny flicking blade made the monster fall down.

Here, I select between powerful moves, and chain them together to knock foes down with powerful strikes or toss them like ragdolls. The sword swings like it's heavy and sounds like it hurts. My crits here are noticeable and usually mean immediate victory, not just a statistical increase in kills over time.

In some games, arrows are just little sticks that remove hit points. Here, BOOM, I hit him with a fire arrow, he shudders, and flame splashes everywhere and he continues to burn.

This game is about so much more than medieval weaponry (heck, we're routinely invaded by space ships, and can call down a Warburg rocket from orbit), but even so, it makes medieval combat cooler than most medieval games.

What if it's not an archetype, a powerset, or even a particular power, but a status effect?

I love knockback/knockdown/knockup (even moreso since they put ragdoll physics in the game). I have many characters with some kind of knock- effects, and I have several built specifically around exploiting knockdown/knockback: an Ice/Storm Controller, a Storm Defender, a Shield/Axe Tanker, a Forcefield/Energy Defender, an Electric/Shield Scrapper, and my new Energy/Energy Blaster. I even put a Ragnarok knockdown proc in my Spines Scrapper and another in my Fire/Fire/Pyre Tanker's Fireball, just because they were missing out on it.

I have used lots of control and debuff powers over the years, and I enjoy them; I like putting Rad debuff toggles on an enemy and greatly weakening him, or encasing a foe in solid stone to hold him. But even though those effects arguably work better than knock- powers, I don't find myself exulting like I do when I see enemies falling down or going flying.

Talking smack to my monitor works better with knockback too. "You've lost a significant percentage of your to-hit!" doesn't work nearly as well as "You're on your ***!" or "You're goin' DOWN!" or "See ya!" as a foe sails off a ledge.

Although most of the rest of this old discussion is now incorrect, because the Devs changed the bug that enhancement in +recovery powers made procs perform differently, there's still some useful math in Muon Neutrino's post: