Silencer7

Any TF produced in the last couple years will be miles ahead of, say, To Save a Thousand Worlds in terms of its variety (maps, objectives, if not necessarily enemies) and storytelling. They'll also be much shorter, which is nice for those of us who don't have six hours at a stretch to play City of. But that isn't the point I was trying to make.

The point is that the game should avoid, to the extent it's possible, directing people back to the same old content over and over again. The OP's seeming belief that players need to be actively encouraged to run the same arcs that've been in the game for five or six years is ridiculous. They should be directed toward the newer, shinier, more interesting stuff.

Obviously new content doesn't just fall from the sky, so repetition is inevitable, and the WST is a good way of getting folks to run a variety of things, rather than a particular TF over and over. But that doesn't mean that every last bit of content is worth funneling players toward (I for one will be taking the week off whenever Synapse is the WST.)

If you still really want to run Worldwide Red, bully for you; it hasn't gone anywhere. I don't see the virtue of asking people to run it over and over, or asking newer players to run it.

The problem with nerve isn't the defense enhancement, because defense is great and lots of builds use it.

The problem is the accuracy. Not that accuracy is bad, but most of the characters I'm regularly playing at 50 are long since acc-capped via slotted enhancement and set bonuses. There's always room for more recharge or more damage, but piling on more accuracy is literally useless for most of my builds.

I have been hoping for a while that some variation of the Trapdoor/Neuron/some other bosses' ability to spawn clones was going to be an incarnate ability. I was pretty bummed when the lore slot didn't turn out to be that.

Man, don't run fire/rad with a cardiac, get a musculature. It buffs basically everything you do.

Getting the musculature total core (or whatever the T3 with the endmod enhancement is) turned my fire/rad from a pretty solid if plodding x8 soloer into a dynamo. I can toss out attacks and controls basically at will while running hot feet/choking cloud, defense toggles and enervating field.

Yeah, if only we could go back to the days when people ran old story arcs instead of newspaper/radios and the ITF over and over again.

Oh, wait.

I've done Worldwide Red, I've done To Save a Thousand Worlds, I've done a bunch of the old story arcs, and you know what? They're terrible. Bunch of repetitive missions against the same enemy groups that send you all over the city, and the story barely manages to tie them together anyway.

So, wait a minute. What is it that OP wants, precisely? Larger rewards for completing old story arcs?

I think the idea of using existing mobs from the game as player pets is pretty dumb.

Making it work out from a flavor standpoint is a pretty tough ask. Even if you had access to every enemy group in the game, it's never going to entirely make sense to see people walking around with an IDF guy or warwork or CoT mage or whatever in tow, especially if they have particular powers that make them appeal to certain ATs or powersets.

I'd like it much better if they were nonhuman objects of some kind; dancing swords, little gun turrent/targeting drone things, nictus-style fuzzies, whatever.

You can lose one of those KB protection IOs. Probably dump the one in shadow fall and replace it with some more endred. More than three +rech IOs in hasten is pretty wasteful; three slots to have hasten up four seconds sooner or something like that is pretty wasteful.

I would probably dump tactics and use the slots somewhere else. Since the only defense you're capping out is s/l, ou're not really getting a ton of benefit out of six slot gaussian's.

I think Hail of bullets might root you longer than the warning time, if you get unlucky and use it just before the circles appear.

Anyway, I really enjoy the criticism that "it's a gimmick," which people say as though it somehow means something. Everything's "a gimmick."

man, this is a dumb argument. Income is fungible.

That's because the pet set is terrible

The only games that offer lifetime subscriptions are games that don't expect to last very long. The only reason to offer a lifetime sub for 100 bucks or something is that you don't think players will want to spend more than five or six months playing your MMO anyway.

You could always just lead the TF.

I don't really understand OP's beef either.

It seems likely from your phrasing that you were killed by the falling swords, so, do you think Battle Maiden is too hard? Or too easy? Or the mobs should have different resistances or something?

I also don't really understand this "I don't like raids" attitude. We haven't seen the new content yet (most of us, anyway.) There's two raids in the game, and it doesn't seem like either one is going to be a particularly predictive example of what the new content will be like.

The conversion isn't even there because "solo players" are supposed to want to grind out their incarnate abilities that way. It's there for the folks who have a big surplus of shards can do something with them, and to keep old content from becoming "useless" to people who don't need any more alpha slot stuff.

If you never find yourself with a blue bar shortage, there's really no reason to have consume. It's hard to judge that until you have everything slotted up, though.

With the exception of "get rich," all of those possible motivations collapse into "destroy the world" or "take over the world," or aren't actually villanous. Hell, Tyrant does want to control people's minds.

At this point it's pretty easy to become an incarnate if you're spending any time at all playing a character at 50. One weekly TF and thirty or forty incidental shard drops and boom, you've got your level shift. I've got three characters at +1 right now, and I'll have a fourth fairly soon.

Have to think it's going to get more time consuming as time goes on, given how many slots there still are to open up. But for now, it's pretty easy.

I read the threads on this board sometimes and I wonder if you people ever even read comics. There's a long and distinguished history of writers finding contrived reasons for heroes and villains to work together.

I do think CoX sometimes does a bad job of making the cooperation seem appropriately tenuous, but that's a level of storytelling that is probably pretty tough to do outside of direct player input. I mean, my rogue blaster just got done breaking into city hall to free Reichsman, then she trucked off to save the world from the rikti. That seems silly and contrived until you realize that in a game like this, some of the onus is on the player to provide the story (or to get comfortable with relative lack thereof.)

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, what do you want villains to do, if not try to take over the world? I don't think it'd be any better if the praetorians wanted to rob banks or whatever.

Also, Joker had a backstory, at least before the Heath Ledger rendition. And I suspect the Ledger Joker didn't need a backstory because people already "know" who the Joker is. He doesn't need to be explained.

I frequently unsub for a month or two, and every time I do I set up 30+ lowball bids on purple recipes across several characters. Every time I come back, I find I've won two or three of them.

I'm not talking super low bids, more like half to two thirds of prevailing price, but it's still a pretty substantial savings if I plan to use the recipe, or an easy profit if I relist it.

They're a good investment, too. Purple recipes/IOs hold their value a lot better than inf does.

It seems likely to me that Cole took the "quick" path that's mentioned in the incarnate storyline.

I like the thread's seeming premise that praetorians are old hat before we've even fought most of them. The two TFs that we've done are meant to be the start of the whole 'praetorians invading primal earth' story arc, but some folks have already seen it and it's old news.

One wonders what 'new content' you're waiting for.

Eh, not really. Use the proc and you'll avoid that issue, especially once the alpha slot is unlocked.

Anyway, there aren't that many builds that really strongly benefit from purple sets. Dominators and other builds with extreme +rech needs get the most out of them, and builds that need a lot of recovery get some help (although in that case you're often better off frankenslotting them for the sake of the +rec bonus.) Defense builds often can't get away with using many purple sets at all, just because most purple sets don't have defensive bonuses.

Lots of folks have the attitude that they want to work toward the most expensive and 'best' thing, and that means purple sets, without putting much thought at all into what's most useful for how their character actually plays. Compare the set bonuses on, say, obliteration and armageddon, or on posi's blast and ragnarok. Is it more useful for your character to have one set of fancy purples, or 4-5 sets of oranges?