Samuel_Tow

Straw man aside, at this point in the game's life cycle, it's more than a little unreasonable to try to hold people to task for not reading mission briefings. If you grabbed a new player by the neck and Batman-d "Why aren't you reading the text!?!" then I could see the logical progression, but look at how long many of us have been here.

I've done all the missions the regular contacts have to offer. All of them. I can quote almost every one of them off memory. I've been to all instanced maps to the point where I know all their layouts, let alone every room inside and out. I've memorised almost the entire game. I benefit nothing from reading texts I remember by heart. The drama is gone, the impact is lessened and I just know what it says already. It is no more reasonable to expect me to read Montague's inept dialogue or Maria Jenkins' typos than it is to expect me to watch the level up sequence at the end of each level of Knights of the Round or read the dialogues in Capcom's Aliens vs. Predator. I've seen the story. I just want to play the game and possibly shoot people in the face.

Really, trying to extend "farming" into a much broader meaning than it strictly has, solely as some kind of emotional blackmail tool designed accuse people of guilt is just not a good basis for a thread. The only purpose this serves is to call people hypocrites, and I struggle to see what this thread was trying to achieve. All it does is make those of us who don't consider ourselves farmers irked because we feel accused and it makes those who consider farmers feel accused of being hypocrites. At best, "farming" is a semantics argument, and a semantics argument REALLY shouldn't carry any moral weight.

I don't tend to kick people, but whenever I do, it's always about attitude above all else. Incompetence I can handle, even malice to some point if the person can be reasoned with. But when it devolves into "Sod off, you're not the boss of me!" then yeah. Kick and forget about it.

This is kind of a complicated question, but it's one that's been bugging me for a very long time. It's one instance when my math and my instinct contradict each other, and both are so strong that I cannot really draw a conclusion on my own. Let me explain:

When looking at what a power costs and what kind of an impact it has on your endurance bar over time, it's useful to look at not just its direct cost, but also its cast cycle and activation time. EPS or Endurance Per Second (or EPC, if we want to be technical) gives me a good idea of what the power should cost me in the long run with repeated use, and EPA or Endurance Per Activation tells me how the power compares to other powers when used in an attack chain, considering its immediate cost. Now, I generally trust those to give me a good estimate of which power is expensive and which is cheap, so that I know which to slot for how much endurance reduction.

But, and here's the big problem with that - my math tends to put the smallest attacks at the highest of costs. Long-recharge powers end up with very low EPS and slow-activating powers end up with low EPA. As such, big powers like Total Focus or Thunder Strike become "cheap," whereas comparatively small powers like Energy Punch and Charged Brawl end up significantly more expensive, at least in the short term. Now, I know Charged Brawl isn't exactly cheap at the cost of 10 endurance points, but Thunder Strike costs me a FIFTH of my endurance bar. Instinctively, that feels a lot more expensive, because it hits my reserve for a lot more.

What this comes to here is "feel," and I have this inexplicable feeling that Thunder Strike hurts my endurance more. I can't really explain why, it's just the impression I get from actual hands-on experience, though that might be just because it takes a clearly visible bite out of my endurance bar, whereas something like Charged Brawl or Havoc Punch takes smaller bites but more often, thereby being a little less obvious.

But even if we were to go purely by the numbers, even they aren't always consistent with themselves. For instance, while Charged Brawl has a high EPA cost, it has a relatively lower EPS, whereas a semi-attack like Electric Fence has a low EPA, but a VERY high EPS, meaning that if you spam it, it will cost you a lot. The problem with those estimates is that they don't necessarily give me feedback on the cost of the power so much as they do on its speed. Charged Brawl costs a little over half of what Thunder Strike does, but its animation is around a quarter long, while Electric Fence doesn't cost too much, but recharges very fast even for its lower cost. And this bugs me. I don't doubt that my numbers are correct, I'm just starting to doubt if I'm drawing the right conclusions on them.

So, really, I have to ask - Are my smallest powers really my most costly, both in the short and long terms? Am I really saving all that much in a once-over attack chain if I drop a 6 point cost to a 5 point cost, rather than dropping an 18 point cost to 14 point cost? I realise that stringing faster attacks together may end up adding up to more cost than a few high-cost slow ones, but it just seems... Unintuitive to do this. It seems unintuitive to slot Pistols and Electric Fence for a lot of endurance reduction while leaving something like Thunder Strike and Lightning Clap unslotted.

This is one of those cases where I honestly just don't know, and contemplating it on my own isn't going to help.

This is really starting to bug me at this point. You know how, when you define the level of enemies you want to fight in a mission (say, +0, +1 and so forth), the game will actually spawn that or one above? Here's how it works. When you pick what level enemies you want to fight at, what this actually affects is the level of your mission. Before you start it, the mission in your missions list will be displayed as your level, but once you enter, it will go up or down to match the level you have selected. From the level of the mission, enemies will spawn either at the mission's level, or at the mission's level plus one.

I don't want this.

So, I'm here to suggest an alternative. How about an option that says "I'm very picky, and I want to fight EXACTLY the enemies I've specified!" which will force missions to spawn enemies of the level I've requested and THAT LEVEL ONLY? I mean, I picked -1 as my level. Wouldn't it make sense to respect that? Instead of, you know, disrespecting my wishes and filling my mission with even cons anyway.

My personal interest here is that I want to fight lots of weak enemies, and the only reason I can fight as many as I can is because they're low level. If the game ignores my difficulty and boosts their level anyway, it just makes it needlessly, unamusingly hard when I didn't want that!

It's actually worse now that enemy level has been dissociated with spawn size. Right now, picking "I am equal to this many heroes/villains" will give you a set spawn size that will remain as big regardless of what level it spawns as. Before, higher-level spawns would show up much smaller with low-level spawns spawning larger. Right now, they're all large spawns (because that's what I picked), so I end up fighting spawns that are both large AND high level. That just sucks, and it's the source of the bulk of my grievances with difficulty.

So, to put it simply, can we please have an option to force missions to spawn only the level we specified without ever deviating?

I passed the weekend just the way I would have loved.

Friday I did a House MD binge, watching about 15 episodes and making that my ENTIRE day.

Saturday and Sunday I managed to get a little playtime in by myself, which is just the way I like it. No team-mates to try and be responsible to, just me and my own missions. I had a couple of friends drop by the house for much of the weekend, and I probably ended up spending more time playing Battlefield 2142 than I did City of Heroes.

I also ended up seeing Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief on a friend's invitation, but it didn't end up being as good as he'd hoped. I decided against explaining to him I expected about as much.

My Dual Pistols Blaster went from level 9 to level 24, and the "stale" content doesn't seem to be affecting me. I know most mission briefings by heart, but all this means is I don't have to read them, which saves me a bit of time. I said it six years ago, and I'll say it today: All I want out of this game is more Nazi to kill. I don't exactly have many Nazi to kill right now, but there are PLENTY of substitutes that do just fine.

I don't get people. Yes, the multi-level cave room I can sort of see the hatred for, specifically from those who don't have a habit of watching their step, but the Nazi Fish Farm? What's wrong with that? It's basically three flat storeys with soldiers on them. How is that problematic?

And the huge Arachnos room (rooms, actually, as there are at least two variants), what's wrong with those? Yes, they're big, but beyond that... What? I mean, yes, theoretically you could fall over the edge, but... Who does that? I've been in those rooms dozens of times and I've never fallen off. I do knock enemies over the edge, granted, but they eventually climb back up and you usually meet them on the single pathway down as they come up anyway.

I'm much more bothered by the various wilderness outdoor maps where you have no cover and spawns are spread out.

Outside of the few characters I have who sold a lucky 50 million drop, I generally don't have more than about 50-80 million on any one of them, so 100 million is filthy rich to me.

2 billion, on the other hand, doesn't interest me.

Personally, I'd like to see a /petcom variant that takes two target parameters, so that I can command two tiers of henchmen without having to put key words in their names and using /petcom_name

For instance, let's call it /petcom_pows <summon power 1> <summon power 2> <stance> <command>?