Supernumiphone

I got a "Runtime error 9: subscript out of range" when opening a certain demo. Would you like a copy of the demo?

Edit: I found where I originally got it if you want to download it yourself. Link here.

I'd like to see a magic-based blast set along the lines of old school Dr. Strange. It'll never happen because in order to be done right it would very clearly be magic, which would fit only one out of five origins.

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What I'd do is swap power blast and bonesmasher for the higher damage/recharge blaster versions, give power push the damage of a 6s recharge blast, and improve the knock/stun soft control to the point where, if you're continually beating on one target, it'll stay out of the fight. At that point, I think the set would actually be pretty decent. You could do some DPA tweaking on power burst, too, if you like.

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I think these are some good changes. Would they be enough to get me to roll an /EA Dom? Probably not, but maybe. The pathetic AOE is a real sticking point for me personally. There's not much that can be done about it aside from improving Whirling Hands unless we ignore the cottage rule. I think the idea someone put forth of increasing the radius on WH by adding a sort of shockwave effect was a good one. Combine that with some of the changes listed above and I think it'd be a playable set. It still wouldn't be one of the top sets, but at least it wouldn't be the set only for masochists and newbs.

A lot of people seem to think of Power Boost as almost worthless on their Doms, but I like the power. It would be nice if the choice of secondary wasn't so clear cut for someone wanting PB.

Seems like most of the people who don't like the idea are voicing some variant of "I'm ok with it, so you should be too." Yes you can "pace yourself" at the lower levels. But is it fun? Let me ask you this, after you get your end usage under control, be it through Stamina, slotting, or whatever, do you continue to pace yourself? If so and that's fun for you, fine. I'm guessing most people don't.

Pacing at the lower levels means either standing around during a battle not firing an attack when you have one recharged, or pausing or moving more slowly than necessary to get to the next spawn. The alternative to this approach would be to move at full speed, but pause as necessary between battles to regain health and/or endurance. If the first approach works for you and you enjoy it, great. If it's not fun for me and I can't enjoy it, I'm supposed to suck it up and learn to have fun your way? If rest recharged faster I could enjoy myself the way I prefer, and you could keep doing what it is you enjoy. I see no one being harmed.

Since pacing myself just doesn't work for me, when rest isn't recharged and I'm low on end, it's time to go AFK. There really is no other option for me. Pacing myself is boring for me. Trying to do that would make the lower levels a horrible grind for me. That other people can enjoy it is great. I can't.

I'm not asking for free Stamina or anything like that. I just want an option that will allow me to enjoy the lower levels without requiring constant AFKs to regain end. That's not fun either. When I log on I want to play, not play in short bursts with frequent breaks to do chores while I regain end.

Endurance problems at the lower levels are why it takes any new toons bloody ages to get to 20 for me. They tend to take off like a rocket after that.

Yes please. It's one feature that seems so obvious I'm surprised it wasn't included in the initial release. But that also means it will probably be added in the first round of enhancements, barring technological impediments of course.

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does this make it any faster to complete sets by using tickets?

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The drop pools are very large. You will have to grind a lot of tickets to put together a specific set by random rolling. Looking at how many tickets I've earned so far, and doing a rough calculation of the number of bronze rolls I've done, I'd guess I've done somewhere around 250 bronze rolls so far. Out of those I've maybe got one full set of Thunderstrike, and less than half a set of Crushing Impact.

What you can do is sell the rolls you don't want and use the inf to buy what you do. I'd guess you'll be seeing more availability on the market with all the ticket farming and recipe rolling going on.

Well I'm one of the people who has massive end troubles at the lower levels. Rest doesn't recharge nearly fast enough, so once I'm out of end and rest isn't recharged, I tend to go AFK for a while, or Alt-Tab and do something else for a while. IMO no game should force frequent periods of inactivity on you, especially at the lower levels where newer people will first experience the game.

Yes, I slot accuracy. I know better than to waste big attacks and AOEs when they're not necessary. I like to keep moving, and usually one or two spawns is it, and if rest isn't up, time for a break.

I see the long recharge on rest as a legacy of old game design that hasn't been rethought in the modern gaming environment.

As for brawl and the origin temp power, maybe it would be going too far to make them end free, but at least lower the end cost. Brawl has a much worse DPE than any standard attack. Same for the origin temp. Why, of all things, would the powers that are used almost exclusively (aside from Brutes) at the lowest levels, pre-Stamina, have such unusually high end costs? It's completely backwards. If anything it should be flipped, so they cost less end than regular attacks to help through the lower levels.

As for an end discount at the lower levels, along the same line as beginner's luck, I'm all for it. When we first got beginner's luck I figured it would take care of most of my end troubles, since I wouldn't be missing as much. It did help, but is not nearly enough. Being able to rest more often would have a similar effect, but an end discount would remove the need to constantly pause every two spawns.

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Secondary effects are not considered when balancing a power's primary effects.

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which effects do you consider "primary"? well, you probably mean damage, and DPA or DPCC, right? but where does End, Rech, ToHit and such factor in? That -Rech effect has to come with a cost somewhere.

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Are you being deliberately obtuse? You've been around long enough to know what's meant by "secondary effects."

In a blast set a blast power's secondary effect is not considered in the cost. You can compare any power with the same damage and recharge, and regardless of whether that power does -rech, -tohit, -def, slow/-rech, etc., the cost is the same. Hence secondary effects are not considered when balancing most powers.

So there's no point in looking at the -rech in Psi Dart if you want it changed. The formula is pretty basic. If you want more damage out of it, you give it a longer recharge. Some might complain if you took away their fast Domination building power though.

If I'm reading it correctly the workaround is probably to specifically pick each one rather than letting them be random.

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If only there was a branching feature where say completing mission A would lead to mission B but failing A leads to C. Or Failing A leads to B but completing A jumps right to C with B your chance to fix things.

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Well that would be pretty sweet, but for my purposes I'd be happy if I could just say "Well you blew it, see ya."

But yeah being able to branch and give people a chance to redeem themselves, that would be even better. Still I don't consider ending the arc early that big a penalty when it's a short one and you can just try again immediately if you want.

It may seem strange, but it's encouraging to read about how generally poor many of the arcs are. I realize there's some really good stuff out there, but if what I've read about the general state of things is any indication, even my arcs are probably slightly above average. That's not saying much, but considering I've just started and haven't really been focusing all that much on the story, it's not terrible either. I'd say my stuff so far is probably about on par with average dev-created content. I realize that's not what people are looking for, more of the same, but it's a start. I've gotten some positive ratings, but that might just be people being kind.

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Take time to write up a good souvenir

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Interesting. So far I haven't filled in any clues in my missions or any souvenirs. I'm not in the habit of looking at them, so I guess I didn't consider them to be important. It didn't occur to me that someone might be disappointed that I left them out.

It's been suggested that the devs may not have had much opportunity to focus on optimization during the development process, and that will come later. If that's true, then presumably once they've got the MA stable and can take a step back, they may be able to look at ways of simplifying and compressing the data for network throughput. Depending on the gains made from that, we could see increases to the file size limits coming eventually. They'd be crazy to promise it at this point, and there's no way to be sure, but I'd say do the best you can with what you've got, and try to be patient.

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The merits or demerits of farming need other justifications beside where it may lead some people or not.

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That's fair. I guess it seemed clear-cut to me because I don't see farming as a great evil, so my perspective is not that it's an bad thing that leads to a good thing, but rather an...at worst perhaps slightly unsavory thing that's worth putting up with. I'm fine with farming personally. I don't engage in it for the most part because I get bored quickly, but for those who enjoy it, more power to 'em.

My "farming" currently is playtesting my own published arcs. It keeps my interest because I'm seeing how things play out and looking for things I can improve. That I'm racking up a bunch of tickets along the way is very nice too. 8)

Ok thanks for the replies. Back to the drawing board....

Just checking. Is there any way to make failing a mission fail the entire arc? I'm guessing no but hoping I'm wrong.

I'm hoping we get a FAQ soon that covers all this obvious stuff. I keep revising my ideas to fit within the system's limitations but it's getting to the point of frustration for me when I get pretty far into building the thing then find out I can't do what I want.

Well I just checked and it's not invalid anymore. ;shrug

tl;dr version: Farming got me interested in MA, and from there I expanded into other areas.

MA didn't interest me at the start. I didn't touch it during open beta, or even when it first went live. I just kept playing the game like it didn't exist. Then I read some posts from people about how great the bronze rolls were treating them, and how fast they were racking up tickets, and I got curious.

So I gave it a try. I just wanted to get some tickets fast so I could try out some rolls, so I searched for farm missions. Tried a few, but none were quite what I was looking for, so I made my own. Very basic at first, but then I tried adding a little story to spice it up. It was kind of fun.

Now I'm working on a "real" arc, not geared towards farming in the least. If I hadn't gotten my foot in the door of the AE building from the start, that never would have happened.

I may be in the minority here, but I'm sure I'm not alone. Then there are the people who will never create their own missions, but will play others'. Many people are technophobes, and getting them started on anything new like the MA can be difficult. Farming in MA is popular now. It may die down over time, it may not. I'm sure some of the people will get bored of it after a while and will start poking around to see what else they can find.

So it seems to me that it's getting more people to use this new feature than would have otherwise.

Ah thank you that makes sense. Looks like I'll have to experiment a bit to get it how I want it, but I should be able to pull it off.

Mine has only custom critters, so it's not that. I don't think I'm using any Rikti maps but I'll have to double-check. If a mission has the now-invalid Rikti in it, when you edit the mission it will tell you that's the problem, yes? Mine is not showing any problem at all when I edit it.

I think I saw a post about this somewhere before but I can't find it now. One of my arcs is marked invalid, but when I edit it, no errors are shown. Is there any way to find out what the problem is?

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Anything is possible.

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Good to know. Can anyone tell me how it's done then?

I'd like to know if it's possible to create a mission with no enemies in it until some objective has been met. It doesn't make sense for one of my missions for enemies to already be standing around everywhere. Patrols would be ok, in fact I'd like to have some. I just don't want the usual fist-punching spawns.

Besides that I'm wondering if it's possible to have an ambush with unique enemies. By that I mean I'd like it to have a custom boss in it, but it just wouldn't make sense for there to be more than one of them. The rest can be random minions and lieuts, but I don't want the boss duplicated. Based on the looking I've done so far it seems like that's not possible, but I'm hoping I'm wrong about that.

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I do like the idea of dependable secondary effect from it. I just think that if you're permanently stunning 2 minions, 1 Lt, or a boss for about 1/2 to 2/3 of the time

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I see the draw of this change being that you don't have to spend time applying low-damage controls and can just attack. If the boss isn't stunned 100% of the time, that negates the advantage. I'll still be stacking my hold, and the stuns might as well not be there.

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Fiddling with recharge and damage on all the powers is just a dead-end.

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I don't agree, it seems to me that it would help.

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The Dominator attack chains aren't quite full enough to really take advantage of such a change...<snip>..If you're curious try out the Attack Chain Generator linked in my sig, it can help shed light on the situation.

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If you look at the secondary in isolation that may be true. I spent a little time with your attack chain generator, and adding in a few primary powers I didn't get many gaps, even with the higher recharges for /Energy powers that have been suggested in this thread.

For some builds, and some play styles, it may be true that it wouldn't amount to much of an increase in DPS, but what about paired with a primary with some decent attacks? What about those who play more like a Controller, mostly focusing on locking things down, and throwing attacks when it's convenient? You can't look at the secondary in isolation and say the changes wouldn't be an improvement.

Exemplaring doesn't affect them. The only difference the level of the IO makes is the level at which you can slot it. They are all equally effective once slotted, and will continue to function at any level as long as you have the power they are slotted in available.

Edit: For further clarification you might want to read the Mini-Guide to Unique IO's stickied at the top of this section. Probably will answer your questions and then some.