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To be excruciatingly fair, Consume also has a radius of 20 feet to Dark Consumption's 8. This does make a bit of a difference.
I sure wouldn't complain about FA getting a buff, but it's working pretty well for me at the moment. -
I tend to go about this in a somewhat backwardish way. I generally start with a concept that gives me a spectrum of possible ATs and powersets that could be used to express that concept. From that spectrum, I pick the AT and sets that have the right look and feel for the character, and good performance and synergy. I then optimize my build around the strong points of synergy that those sets have to offer. Where I use IOs, I tend to build on the existing strengths of the AT and sets instead of adding capabilities not naturally present. The end result of this process is usually a good, solid, but not hyperoptimized build.
For me, the advantage is twofold. First, on an aesthetic level, I like characters who are really good at one particular thing. Second, on a practical level, building on the inherent strengths of the powers I have available tends to insure my performance against future changes to powers or to IO sets.
As an example, I had a character in mind whose powers arose from manipulating entropy. Based on this, I chose to make an EM/DA Brute. Looking at the powers available to me, I noticed that EM and DA had a synergy in stun powers, so I took the stun powers from EM and DA and slotted sets that gave me bonuses to stun duration and recharge so that I could stun things faster and longer. When Total Focus had its stun magnitude reduced from 4 to 3, my character's performance was not significantly harmed because Oppressive Gloom and Total Focus still combined to let me stun bosses in one attack. Even if all set bonuses were stripped from the character, the level of performance would still be adequate for me because I made no build sacrifices for the sake of set bonuses.
It's not the most wildly clever or inventive methodology, but it's safe, effective, and makes me happy. -
I'm pretty sure "Villains of Paragon City" is taken on Virtue. Also, pretty much any name that sounds like a house of ill repute.
I ain't judgin', I'm just sayin'... -
One of the discoveries of behavioral economics is that a price cue - any price cue - has an effect on what buyers consider an appropriate price for an item. The "last 5" is a form of price cue, and once it has been moved in a particular direction - usually upward - it tends to stay there even when the economic pressures that moved the price have lapsed. It has happened more than once that the last 5 buy prices for some item are particularly high, yet when I look at the for sale / bid ratio there seems to be good supply, and when I put in a low bid, lo and behold I get the item.
This does tend to stabilize prices somewhat, and it also gives you a rough heuristic on the buy-it-now price, but the last 5 bids tend to be a very poor indicator of how low you can actually bid to get the item if you're willing to wait, and it leads to misperceptions of true market prices.
If I had my druthers, I'd display the lowest bid that was fulfilled within the last minute, 5 minutes, hour, day, and week (or some other time scale stretching from short to long term). This gives the prospective bidder a better idea of the price to time relationship, though it could undercut some flipping strategies (not that I would shed many tears over that). But I don't get to decide these things... -
Thanks for the info. I'll just have to try it out for myself and see how it goes.
The obvious follow up question is whether there's a more reliable alpha strike mitigator available to Ice/Earth. I suppose the ideal is to drop an ice patch from around a corner, but sometimes there's just no corner available... -
Claws, I agree that the problem the zones try to solve is real, but I don't necessarily agree that the zones are the best solution to the problem. The question for me is whether the zones do more to promote PvP or discourage it. Frankly, neither one of us has enough information to answer that conclusively - for you, it worked; for me, it didn't; we can find anecdotes going either way. Obviously I believe the zones do more harm than good, and I have reasons for that belief, but I don't have hard data and I never will.
I could talk about ways that you could get me interested in PvP, that don't have the drawbacks that the zones as implemented have. But again, I can't speak for anyone else. -
It depends on what NT did to earn the merits. All TFs used to give a random roll. Some now give less than a random roll's worth of merits, and some give significantly more. I believe that if you play a diverse selection of TFs now, you will end up with more random rolls' worth of merits than you would have had random rolls under the old system, for about the same time. This assumes an average player who is not speed running or making selections to optimize merits/time, of course - both the old and the new system have significant room for optimization.
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A very simple question, for those who have experience using Flash Freeze from Ice Control: if used as an opening attack on an unaware group, does the sleep kick in fast enough to prevent enemies from launching an initial volley? I am hoping to use Flash Freeze on an Ice/Earth Dom as a means to set up Ice Patch and get in melee range for Arctic Air and Tremor without being excessively chewed on.
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Quote:It's the equivalent of 33 end-of-TF recipe rolls pre-Merits. For someone not dedicated to pursuing them, it's quite a few.So many people quoted me, I thought it worth looking to see how many merits I had. Just logged in and checked my badger, the character I play the most. 663 merits. Is that a lot?
--NT
Out of curiosity, if you had automatically received 33 invention recipes, what would you have done with them? -
Worth noting: Psychic Tornado takes the Force Feedback proc, and caps at 16 targets. If you hit all 16, the proc has a better than 80% chance of going off.
Of course, if you're perma-PA, you've got recharge coming out of your ears already. But there's no such thing as too much recharge. -
Quote:Of course I have no more access to the data than you do. The devs could run the numbers, if they were so inclined. I hope they do. In the absence of information, I would call your estimate of your fellow players excessively optimistic, to put it nicely. More to the point, under the current system, any rating that is not 5 stars is a de facto downvote - the only difference is that in an up/down voting system, this would be explicitly stated.While here we have a community, people do care about the arc they just played or they wouldnt have played it to the end (I assume), and the voting pops up automatically.
I am sure there are at least more 2, 3 and 4 star votes here than on youtube.
Quote:Yes, the upper gives more information, but its not an all fair comparison. Just having up and down doesnt imply it tells you how many ups and downs it had. By default, such up/down votes often show just as:
200 plays, 80% (80% of the votes were up votes) which leaves you hardly more informed, and the star rating could just as well show as
200 plays, 60 ***** votes, 40 **** votes, 25 *** votes 10 ** votes, 5 * votes, and still be a star system.
200 plays, +75
This still tells us more than the average of the star ratings, for two reasons, one facile and one fundamental. The facile reason is because at least now I know that 75 more people recommended it than recommended against it.
The more fundamental reason is because the star ratings are more subjective than the simple up/down votes and thus mean less in aggregate. What star rating do you use for "this arc is good, I would recommend that others play this"? What star rating do you use for "this arc is not notably good or bad"? What star rating do you use for "this arc is terrible, I would recommend that others avoid this"? I guarantee that you will not find a consistent answer to this question. And that is why the star system is less useful: even once you know what star ratings were given to an arc, unless you can ask each person who rated it what they meant by their rating, you don't know any more than you knew before!
Quote:I totally agree that more information about how people rated would be very nice.
(Which is the reason why I'd like to be able to see WHAT they liked about it, of course.)
TL;DR: I don't want to know how many "stars" anyone gave an arc. I want to know if this arc is recommended for play. Stars are a poor proxy for this information. -
In general, I do what I'm bribed to do. That means PvE in general, then MA (when I can spare the effort to find an enjoyable arc), then badges (at least the ones that give me stuff), then exploiting PvE rewards in PvP zones. Actually PvPing is a waste of my time, since I have a poor chance of winning and don't get anything for losing.
I expect I am not terribly unusual in this evaluation. -
Quote:I would not necessarily agree with that. I would also say that Dominators and Blasters have more in common than Stalkers and Blasters.... stalkers and blasters have more in common than stalkers and scrappers.
In any case, there's no direct equivalence to be had. I would expect new APPs and PPPs for the ATs that didn't have them before.
This also means that if I want to respec my Vigilante-bound Brute, I'd better do it before I lose access to Mu Mastery... -
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Quote:You are correct that this suggestion is designed to roll back the majority of changes associated with merits (and thus the majority of changes they have brought about to recipe supply). The one change that it doesn't roll back is arguably the main purpose of merits in the first place: to make TF rewards proportional to their length instead of identical.Nope, would still be a bad suggestion. It goes against the very nature of one of the reasons why merits came into existence. At that point you might as well get rid of merits all together and go back to the old table at the end of a tf that popped up.
Edit: That said, I am completely unsurprised that this suggestion is the least popular. Note its position in the list. :P -
Quote:In isolation, yes. However, in this case each suggestion assumes that all the suggestions before it have been implemented, so the forced random roll would be at a selectable level (so you wouldn't have to lock a character at a level to get rolls of that level).Forcing rolls is bad, especially for those people who are insane enough to lock a character at a specific level for rolls.
It might actually be detrimental to supply, as it will cause an oversupply at low levels where few people buy recipes while not allowing those who roll at levels of reasonable demand and low supply (30-40, for example) to save up. -
Wait what.
Is this the same PvP community that excoriates carebear PvEers for crying when their Shivan/nuke runs get ambushed, complaining about a PvPer griefing their PvPIO farms? Because outsiders collaborating to exploit rewards is bad, but when it's among friends it's OK?
You may wish to explain why this isn't as hypocritical as it looks. Because I am totally bookmarking this thread. -
You quoted the beginning of a sentence. The rest of the sentence is a pretty good rebuttal to this argument.
I'm not disagreeing that someone will try it, though. Probably a disgruntled PvPer with an inflated sense of self-importance.
Why yes, I am getting enough irony in my diet. :P -
Here are some changes that could be made to Reward Merits to cause more of them to be turned into recipes, in order of expected popularity from most to least.
* Make merits mailable between your own characters.
Good for: altoholics.
Objection: merits are something the characters are supposed to accrue through their own actions.
Rebuttal: so is influence, and we pass that stuff around all the time.
* Make merits a single account-wide pool.
Good for: altoholics, villains (who can mooch off their rich hero co-alts).
Objection: violates hero/villain separation.
Rebuttal: so do tickets earned through MA ratings.
* Allow players to set the level at which they want to roll merit rewards (for instance, if you roll in the 30-34 range with level set to 43, you will receive a recipe that could be generated at levels 30-34, and it will either be level 43 or max level if that is below 43).
Good for: people who want sets at particular levels for exemping or other purposes, marketeers.
Objection: technically, this can be done already by leveling to the desired level and then locking XP while running TFs.
Rebuttal: nobody but the most bloody-minded optimizer does that.
* Remove non-random rolls entirely. Force a random roll immediately whenever enough merits have been accumulated.
Good for: marketeers, people who don't know what to do with merits.
Objection: removes path to earn specific items without resorting the market, you evil marketeer person.
Rebuttal: I care more about whether the market is useful than whether it can be circumvented, because I'm an evil marketeer person. -
Shorter: 3 minutes per merit holds for the median run, but not the median player. Slow players don't run fast SFs. This is more true for some TFs than others, for a number of reasons - mission design skewing initial numbers; slow teams not actually completing runs at all due to difficulty; non-merit rewards that encourage play of some TFs regardless of rewards (see: TF Commander). Median time heuristic is better than flat rate, but not perfect.
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Quote:No, that's the lead developer's job. The zone developer has to bulldoze Trolls and Hellions all over the Hollows.I thought a typical day on the job involved being fanned by giant palm leaves held by interns, and being brought grapes on a silver platter?
And now that Posi has been evicted from his intern-cooled hammock and made rewards developer, he's working his fingers to the bone cramming handfuls of inf, various weird items, and invention blueprints into the orifices of NPCs. It's a hard life. -
Now, see, if this is a common behavior, that would be a way that merits are affecting the market: by reducing supply of recipes.
And in fact, merits have decreased recipe supply in a number of ways: fractions of a random roll not being redeemed; merits being held onto; merits being used mainly at level 50 and mainly on the top tier, leading to the majority of supply of recipes being at level 50; and merits being spent on a few expensive specific items instead of on many random rolls. But they haven't made obtaining items easier for people who don't use the market - they've just made it harder for people who do. -
Quote:Yes.Perhaps an alternative to the markets was never the point of the system at all, then.
Quote:In that case, the Reward Merits system may be working as intended, as it certainly does a better job at providing fair, proportional rewards for the lengthier tasks in the game than the pre-I13 system. -
No, we're just talking about the continued patronage of the people who are paying $15 per month for the privilege of designing some of the best content the game has to offer. I wouldn't want to risk aggravating that kind of player unless the situation was dire, especially when there are other solutions available. A better ranking system tends to sink trash pretty fast, and that's all that is really needed to improve the average user experience; the final remedy for farms is closing loopholes, not deleting arcs, and that's not something that can or should be rushed.
I'm sympathetic to the spirit of the suggestion, but the problem is that it's not just you and I who would have this power in our hands. The kind of person who would grief-report as a joke is the kind of person for whom an account ban is not a particularly effective sanction. Remember that you have to consider all features from the perspective of a person who is thinking only "how can I use this to wreck things?"