Samuel_Tow

I actually felt the same way when I first heard about Inventions. "We'll be using enhancements that enhance many things at once often? Gah! Do not want! Too complicated!" And to be fair, I held that belief for at least a couple of years until someone gave me 5-slot slotting with theoretical multi-aspect enhancements that had greater values than the 6-slot slotting I'd been using just to shut me up, and I've had a gnawing doubt since then. I keep thinking that if I can avoid the root of my problem, which is actually set bonuses and limited combinations, I could actually get into the system and have fun with it, too. We don't have that yet, however, and I have SERIOUS doubts we ever will, so I'm not looking at multi-aspects too closely for the moment.

Tell you one thing, though - I'll be jumping for joy if we did get dual-aspect commons. I don't want to bother with triple-aspect ones for the moment (or ever), but dual-aspect ones would definitely be a good addition in my opinion.

That was actually kind of the point. I usually cite "complexity" when talking about why I don't want to deal with Set enhancements, but that's usually a major case of "can't be arsed" stemming from issues of availability and inconsistency, as I outlined in my previous post. Instituting a "clean" category of enhancements that enhance two aspects, but are otherwise not tied to any other conditionals like level, specific set, additional bonus or cost to acquire would remove all the chaff that bugs me and actually allow me to get down to the nuts and bolts of the the thing and iron out a few rules of thumb. I mean, I cite complexity, but I still have a degree in applied mathematics which should be good for SOMETHING

That said, I doubt I'd be examining DPS, though that's not out of the question. I tend to use enhancements to take a concept build power-wise and see what I can do to make it work number-wise. I'll almost always compromise power for concept when it comes to power selection, but almost never compromise power for concept in slotting, as I don't view slotting as a concept-expressing tool. I don't "see" enhancements. They just alter behind-the-scene stats. It's kind of like having a flashy car and wanting to keep it shiny on the inside, but you're gonna' get dirty if you want to keep it actually running.

That said, standalone multi-aspect Commons is what it's going to take to get me to mess with this. Nothing in the CURRENT system will do it, and you can take that to the bank.

Just about, yes. These would have to be hand-made every time, however, because of the HUGE number of combinations we could be looking at. As far as I can tell, there are currently 26 aspects to enhance, which would give us 650 unique enhancements, ignoring aspect order, and that's for each 5-level spread. Granted, the likelihood of you needing, say, Sleep/Damage isn't great... But then you have Frozen Aura. The likelihood of needing Intangibility/Defence is even more remote, but who knows? Maybe there's a power that does that that I just don't know about. Or maybe we could see a power in the future that's kind of like Syphon Speed - makes an enemy intangible by draining its "essence" and boosting your defence. The point is, there aren't many aspect combos we can look at and say "This will never ever ever EVER be useful!" and just drop them from the list. And even then, those wouldn't be many.

As such, the idea I was mulling about was actually a kind of pick-your-own aspects situation, where you'd pick each aspect of the enhancement separately and forge it together to "craft" the right effect, as it were. It would avoid the MASSIVE clutter that such a huge pool of enhancements would create, and it would actually make the economy to do with them rather much more friendly. If you're looking for a specific recipe out of six hundred in a non-weighted drop list, you're not likely to get the right drop, and you're not likely to see many for sale, or indeed many bidders. I'm not sure what kind of effect relatively easily available dual-aspect enhancements would have on the game, so I'm somewhat leery of making them cheap, but as you mentioned, there are still benefits to be held for using ACTUAL Sets.

To reiterate your point, Set enhancements still have Set bonuses, which more Common dual-aspect enhancements would simply not. Having seen people with set bonus lists longer than my average post size has convinced me of that. As well, things like "Knockback Protection" are not actually enhancement effects, but rather specific aspects to Set enhancements, and those would not transfer over to these. There's also the other side of the issue - powers with only a single aspect, or only a couple of aspects. These powers would still be better-served by single-aspect enhancements, because they are rather a LOT stronger per aspect.

Now, there's also something that I've been asked (in a roundabout way) several times that I also want to address: Why not use Hamidon or Set enhancements? A couple of reasons, really.

Hamidon Enhancements are only available at the very end of the end game, at the point where you're done with almost all of your levelling up. I'm looking for something that's available earlier and that's capable altering most, if not all of the game. Secondly, Hamidon enhancements come in very limited combinations. ParagonWiki lists only 11, in fact, and I've already established that there'd be more than that required to cover all bases. Additionally, Hamidon Enhancements are "epic loot," which is something I'm trying to avoid by making these more common.

Set Enhancements do cover all level ranges, but they suffer from many of the same problems. The number of different combinations in any one level range is limited, and limited further still by some sets having such good bonuses that they end up very rare and incredibly expensive on the Market. They are further limited, as far as I'm aware, by your inability to slot the same set enhancement from the same set multiple times into the same power. Being that I don't use Sets, I could be wrong on this, but so I read. Set enhancements are further burdened by their Set bonuses, which are sometimes, if not oftentimes, a much bigger consideration than the enhancements' actual enhancement value.

A dual-aspect Common enhancement would have none of the above problems. It would come in all aspects at all levels, and it ought to have a relatively much more stable cost, though I could easily see it having a significantly greater cost than current Common enhancements. I would nevertheless like to see these available for purchase at least as recipes from the University tables, or as vendor items if we decide to go this route. In fact, I don't see why we can't have both - one SO-lite-style enhancement that works like ye olde enhancements and is about 60% of a SO per aspect, and one common variant that's about 60% per aspect from a Common of the same level. It would still make a good mix of things and make different enhancements useful at different levels. In fact, due to how ED works, dual-aspect SOs might end up being stronger than Inventions for longer than actual SOs, which ought to be interesting to see.

That's basically the suggestion I was working at, in a rough draft with no forward planning. I'm sure it's full of holes and potential problems, but I can't say I've really ironed it out yet, so that's to be expected.

I'm looking at whether there might be some merit in creating dual-aspect enhancements that are not tied to any specific set, are not restricted to only one instance per power and come in all varieties you could need. As you can tell, there are plenty of unanswered questions with these, and a lot of things left to think about, but I want to know if there's anything to be gained from it before I think about the details.

Hmm... Well, I WAS looking at adding recharge to the power, but it seemed to me that it would cost too much of the other things to do so. Lemme' run a few numbers.

...

Huh? How the hell did that happen? Yeah, my spreadsheet confirms your numbers and, indeed, it does show a 53% rise in Recharge slotting without actually showing any decrease in any other aspect of the power. Hmm... I'll have to look into this a bit more, but you have a point. Seems there's something to be gained there. Probably worth investigating.

Because that's 63% before ED. With ED values, it goes down to about ~20%, which is a lot less than two thirds. As it turns out, there was a way to gain more out of the switchover than just that. In fact, with Krogoth's slotting, I'm actually seeing an increase of 73%, which is HUGE! Huh... That's actually more than I expected, though I can kind of see why.

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Well, I guess that settles it. There is merit in looking into dual-aspect enhancements, so it's back to work on that one. I can't promise anything decent will come out of this, but I'll try to put the data to good use.

I should probably have given a little bit of background on this, but I was worried of generating wrath for posting too much

The original idea is sort of a legacy of something I and a few others have been throwing around for some time - the divorce of the dual-aspect enhancement concept from that of "rare loot." In other words, I'm looking at dual-aspect enhancements irrespective of the sets they are in and what else those sets supply. The "why" of it is too long to explain (though I will if you want me to), but what matters here is the relationship that dual-aspect slotting has with single-aspect slotting.

The original need for this question came up when I was making mental preparations for suggesting something along those lines at some indeterminate point in the future, when I realised I didn't actually have any idea as to what the concrete numbers are. I eyeballed the ratio at around one multi-aspect enhancement aspect being about 2/3 of a single-aspect enhancements', but it's actually a lot worse, roughly at around 63%. So what I originally figured would be a massive gain based on "finger maths" ended up being a lot less impressive in practice.

The whole merit of even thinking about suggesting anything in this regard is the level of gain and flexibility the system in itself provides which, as of right now, does not look like it's very high. I COULD look into triple-aspect enhancements, that much is true, but for the purposes of what I'm actually dealing with, they are kind of besides the point. I'm trying to see if I can't see measurable, meaningful gain to be had with such a system. If I can see that, then I'll move forward with my research and planning. If not, then there very well may not be a point in continuing this line of investigation at all.

I'm kind of stumped at the moment, since it feels like I'm missing something, but I just don't know what.

True, some things just don't sell, but knowing what sells isn't important. By and large, common recipes do not sell well and uncommon and rare ones sell well only SOMETIMES. Common salvage sells well hero-side, but not villain-side with a few exceptions, and uncommon salvage rarely sells well. Rare salvage almost always sells well, however.

But you don't need to know any of that. Just know what things sell to at the Vendors. Common salvage sells for 250, uncommon for 1000, rare for 5000. Common recipes start out low, but get very expensive in the upper levels. I don't actually know HOW expensive, but since they never sell well on the Market, I don't really care. Uncommon and Rare recipes don't sell too well to vendors practically ever, but I'll generally list them for 5000, and generally when it looks like they either won't spend ages in my transaction inventory or will give me a lot of money for the wait. Baiscally, a recipe needs to either have many (or, really, ANY) bidders or look like it's been going for a lot of INF, which is basically 50 000+.

The biggest problem with selling on the Market, though, isn't not selling at a profit, it's clogging up your transaction inventory. If you don't want to do any research, then basically sell Salvage for 250, 1000 and 5000 respectively, sell any Set recipes for 5000 and just take back anything that doesn't sell by the time you're done going through your transactions. Anything that sells will usually give you a pretty good profit, and if you list low, you won't lose much in listing fees.

Well, that could work with either of the two suggestions I made. Either you could earn a costume TOKEN from the ITF that you can then trade to an alt (but not another player) or you can do the ITF 10 (or 100) times on any combination of characters, earning you the pieces at character creation. The former would be (relatively) easy, but would be worth for a one-time only use. The latter would be permanent, but would be much harder and longer to achieve.

It probably has a more proper meaning, but I've always seen it thusly: It's easy to open a can of worms and let them all out. It's much harder to pick them back up and stuff them back in to close it again, and you can't really just ignore it. It represents an issue that is fairly minor if left alone, but becomes a huge mess if you try to mess with it, and it becomes something that has to be fixed NOW.

In other words, a small problem that generates much bigger problems if you try to solve it.

To be honest, that's kind of his point, and in this I agree with him completely - THAT is annoying busywork that even I'm not going to bother with. Flipping Inventions, grinding tickets, playing the Market, all of that might seem easy to you, but to me it's doing the dishes - it's a chore I don't want to have to do.

But at the same time, you DON'T have to do that. Just selling your own drops at the Market is more than sufficient. Even as the Goat suggested, just selling everything for, like 100, is going to earn you a serious amount of cash. The point is to make money off the Market the same way you make it off the vendors - show up, sell things, leave. THAT is not a lot of work, nor does it really need any specific knowledge. Just sell whatever sells and vendor everything else.

Techbot, there are a couple of points I think I need to address here, in both directions, as it were.

1. I keep forgetting you play on the EU servers (you do, right?), and I don't know if we share a Market with you, guys. If we don't, then I can see how that would suck big time. If we DO, however, you have options.

2. What was promised was that the game would not be rebalanced with the expectation that you would have many Inventions. However, as Training and DO drops were removed from the upper-level game, the economy was clearly redesigned with use of the Market in mind. If you do not use the Market AT ALL, you're screwed. I don't mean that as an insult, you really are behind the 8-ball. You don't have to "play the market," as it were. Just drop by occasionally and see what you can sell there. A LOT of Rare invention pieces will go for around a million in the Market (the one I have access to, at least), and a single one of those is enough for DOs, while a couple will get you SOs.

3. You're operating under the assumption that buying a full set of SOs is a given right that the game should provide us with, and not being able to is a step down from what the game was before Inventions. This is not true. Before Inventions, very few of us could afford a full set of SOs at 22. When I hit 22, I could buy MAYBE a third of the enhancements I needed, if that. I could MAYBE buy a full set of them before 27, but this wasn't common. I'd have to intentionally get a lot of debt to avoid my enhancements expiring before I could even fully slot everything. It wasn't until 32 that we could actually afford to buy a full set right out the gate, and from then on it was fairly easy.

In conclusion: You can use the Market with practically no effort involved and almost no time cost above travel time. Like I said, it's as simple as looking at the last five bids and the bidders to sellers ratio. Only sell things that went for a lot the last five times and have more bidders than sellers, and you'll be in the money. That is, provided you have access to the NA side of things. If our Markets are not unified, then I don't know.

True, true. But I rely on a little caveat - anyone who speaks Russian is going to instantly know "****** Russian," as in text that attempts to be in Russian, but is in no language whatsoever. Text in Bulgarian shouldn't really have the same effect, as it's a fairly proper text, just in another language. As long as you don't pretend it's Russian (and I wouldn't), it SHOULD be smooth sailings. And since We were still part of the old Soviet Union, it ought to be fairly easy to go with ex-communist characters with such a background.

Well, easy for me, anyway

P.S. I made that text up on the spot, so it might not be GREAT. It was just an example.

Ugh! Don't remind me. I spent all day yesterday fishing Rikti out of walls. Some of them would come out after a few minutes, some of them I could kind of push out with Force Bubble and there was one who wouldn't budge until one of my bots actually got itself slipped into the same rock the Rikti was in and was able to fire at it from inside.

THIS SUCKS! Please, Developers, fix this, because it can be game-breaking when an enemy you need to kill gets jammed into a wall or ceiling and cannot be killed. I can drop a mission only so many times a day!

Anyway, just putting it out there

Thank you, Arcana, for the link and for the explanation. That proves I didn't know what I was talking about when it comes to processor parking, and it proves that asking before doing something stupid was a good idea. I guess it pays to know when you don't know

I'll fiddle with Windows God Mode. That should save me a LOT of crap and curse words in the long run. It's nice to have everything in one place so I don't have to remember which options is hidden behind each rock. I can't try it right now since my work PC is running XP, but I'll definitely give it a shot when I go home.

Yeah, I know how to do it. I eventually found out how to force the thing to show me the original menus, but MAN... Why hide them so deep such that you can't even reason out where they are? I mean, I know a thing or two about how Windows works, but when every new version basically jumbles the menu so I don't know where everything went and when it makes no logical sense where to look for it...

For instance, to show my menu bar in Explorer, I have to go to Organise -> Layout -> Menu Bar. Knowing where it is, I can kind of see that it makes some sort of sense, but NOT knowing where it is, why would I even look for that in Organise? It has Copy and Cut there, why would the main menu be hidden behind THAT? Worse still, Internet Explorer hides its main menu, but THAT is hidden behind a cog-icon button that represents Settings, so I was looking for a settings options somewhere, which doesn't actually exist outside of the main menu, which I was trying to show.

Beyond that, the Folder Options menu is the same as it was in XP, which is the same as it was in 95. It's just hidden in different places every time, I guess to make the hunt more interesting every time I upgrade.


The who of the what now? What does that even mean?

That I did not know. I'm used to looking at Properties for My Computer, from where I usually get to my Windows Update and Device Manager. When you mention it now, I actually remember I found that option on XP at one point (I actually followed a motherboard manual to find it), but it seems like I forgot where it was since then. I don't think I'll forget again, though, since it's actually easy to remember.

And, by the way, the "Search programs and files" option in 7 is a godsend. As long as I have a reasonable idea as to what the thing I'm looking for is actually called, I can find almost anything. That still leaves a few things open to question, such as how to find the settings for a network connection I may have disabled (say, the Local Area Network Connection on a Laptop that uses only Wireless), but I'm sure there has to be a list of them somewhere. In fact, searching for "network connections" reveals a "View Network Connections" link that, judging by the icon, ought to be available from the Control Panel. I did set it to Small Icons, by the way, and it has been a GODSEND, because that doesn't seem like it's hiding any options for my "convenience."

Goat's point isn't that this shouldn't be looked at and possibly fixed, but merely that this is not going to happen by tweaking recovery values or adding recovery buffs, but by radically redesigning the "cost" system in its entirety. Which, by the way, I'm not specifically an opponent to, but if that's what we're looking at, let's talk about that, instead.

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By the way, I'm constantly reminded of something Arcana said (when pressed) about possible alternative ways to formulate power costs. To avoid misquoting Arcana, let me see if I can't examine a few inspired ideas on what form this could take.

The current system of Endurance we have is a sort of "battery" set-up. We have a limited amount of energy that we drain with power use, but which recharges on its own at a fixed rate. That's fine, as that's one way to handle it. How about something else?

How about an "Ammo" system? Thee Ammo system would give you a certain number of "shots" which would not regenerate on their own. You would have comparatively much more ammo to spare on attacks than an energy bar would permit, but since they wouldn't recovery, you'd be hard-limited on how much you could do before you had to "reload." Now, reload could take many forms, but the one I'd give it is a relatively long-animations, debuffing power that slows you down in combat and puts you at risk, meaning that you have to take cover to do it. This would constitute a tradeoff between having more shots to fire without running out, but facing a stiffer penalty when you DO run out

An "Overcharge" mechanic could give you a LOT of recovery for your powers, but a SERIOUSLY limited amount of energy to go around, with a penalty of no recovery for some time if you overcharge your energy bar. The benefit of this would be that you had almost instant recovery which topped you off as soon as you stopped attacking, allowing you practically infinite action, but capping the amount of actions you do and the speed with which you could do them. As long as you kept under the limit, you could go on forever, but overstepping that limit would always be a potential danger.

A "Building up" system would, on the other hand, be something similar to what Champions Online has. Under this system, you would have a large pool of energy to draw from, but NO natural recovery whatsoever, requiring you to use an energy-building power to recover your strength. Unlike "Ammo," this energy-building attack would not be crippling and paralising to use, but would probably not be very strong. And, as with Champions Online, this could probably be allowed to put you some distance above your natural maximum, from where your energy will drain back down to 100%.

I realise that none of that stuff is applicable to a game this far into its life cycle, but I'm just trying to illustrate a few options that could exist to give "energy management" some more variety.

That argument doesn't really work. Repurposing old powersets requires only additional balance concerns, but no or little additional artwork. That's why powerset proliferation is hailed as an easier alternative to brand new powersets. Even constructing a new set with old powers from old powersets is still a considerably smaller investment than drawing, animating and putting together a brand new one. There's a reason we're getting Demon Summoning only now.

And, no, it's not "far better" to make new powersets when we have perfectly servicable ones that just aren't available to me because the ATs they exist for me don't play as I'd like them to. Instituting Brutes as an AT that used Tanker sets without being a Tanker is the only reason I've ever been able to play Tanker sets at all.

Actually, they very much did - Masterminds. As per Jack's explanation and Castle's admission, these were designed to be the functioning tanks of City of Villains, but they are currently functioning damage dealers. Masterminds possess SIGNIFICANT amounts of survivability via Bodyguard and the ability to use team-only powers "on themselves" by proxy, they have strong support ability via HAVING those team-only powers, and they have very serious offensive capabilities via the use of their henchmen and whatever debuffs they may have in their support sets.

Seriously, if anyone wants to try and claim an Assault/Defence AT is going to be any more powerful than a Mastermind, then allow me to scoff in your face.

That's ignoring Castle's comment that most attacks in Kinetic Melee are melee-ranged, and ignoring the precedent set by powers like Spines and Claws, which somehow didn't end up being hailed as "Ranged/Defence" despite Spines having an AoE toggle damage aura, a large-scale AoE, a ranged attack and a large-scale cone.

Jack did that I know of, but I wouldn't put too much stock in five-year-old, half-remembered comments from the guy who isn't even with the game any more. He explained that NPCs, by and large, had a higher damage modifier on melee attacks than on ranged ones, conveniently neglecting to mention things like the Nemesis Army, the Matla Group, the Rikti, Crey, the Sky Raiders, the Praetorians and so forth who have MORE than enough purely ranged damage to hurt a ranged character really, really badly.

In fact, a series of enemies are EASIER to fight in melee than they are at range. Gunslingers used to only use their basic gun attacks if you were within 15 feet of them, and Titans will NOT use any ranged attack if you are within 5 feet of them, or basically in melee. Considering how NASTY Zeus Titan rockets are, that's not a small decrease in outgoing damage. Soldiers of Rularuu watchers would not use their Eye Beam if you were close enough, sticking to their quills burst attack, thus not turning everyone else's attacks on you into auto-hit. Anti-Matter's blue clockwork will resort to their melee punches in melee, holding back their damaging, debuffing Radiation blasts. Tsoo Yellow Ink Men will fight hand-to-hand when challenged in melee, avoiding the use of their status effects. Turrets of all kinds (aside from the Pop-Up Turrets) will not be able to fire their main guns if you close into melee, switching instead to a MUCH weaker flamethrower.

And that's not even counting Nemesis Dragoons, who DON'T EVEN HAVE melee attacks, or all the enemies who will back up and shoot at you from twice your snipe range just fine (like Rikti Drones) against which range as a form of defence is utterly worthless. Range as defence works sometimes against some enemies with some characters under some circumstances. But not even Hover can keep you as safe as people keep claiming range can. Things fly, things shoot, things can still reach you.

Um... Practically EVERYONE who worked on City of Heroes under Cryptic Studios went over to PlayNC when the switchover happened, minus Jack Emmert. There isn't "a little bit of staffing overlap," they're the exact same people, plus additional staff hired after the fact.