UberGuy

Most of the Keyes' I have been on have also not had a ton of deaths, though certainly plenty of folks did die. I wasn't usually one of them, but then /Regen is hax for this trial.

The biggest complaint I have from that perspective is really the fight with the AV. I dislike that phase much more than I do the AM pulse. If I ran it on more different characters, I might feel differently about that. Given that my /Regen is my main badger and not enough people I play with want anything to do with Keyes beyond getting MO, it seems unlikely I'll experience it on a non-Regen.

I don't think the same characters has died at all on a UGT barring one time a bomb got her.

Er...

1/2 is a percentage of your health. 50% to be precise.

Did you mean a smaller percentage?

I never wanted that, particularly, but given the overall revamp of the system, I'm completely OK with that. If someone wants to plunk down several hundred dollars on a game I like playing, with a past history where profit windfalls result in earlier/more content releases? (We got SoAs early because one of the costume packs brought in more money than they planned.) I'm good with that.

Ultimately, my "status" in this game (and how much should anyone be worried about status in a game?) is not represented by my vet rewards. To me, that's about how I act with other players, how much I know about the game, and how well I can play it. I do like being able to show I've been here a long time, and I can still do that with the annual badges. I kind of miss the finer granularity of the quarterly badges, but I'll live.

You should just have to unlock it, not fill it. Filling it would get you tier 8.

I don't know if I'd say that. I was here, and I didn't like that.

But I'm pretty satisfied with the way it's been working of late.

These days, I pretty much get everything I need out of per-issue respecs. While some of my oldest characters used their "Respec Trial" respecs, most new ones never use them, only running those trials for badges (especially the hero one, which is stupidly boring).

I like my characters fixed. I don't want to change them all the time. As Chase mentions, I feel strongly that my characters are individuals, and their powers (and AT) fit into that sense of individuality. If their powers were constantly changing, that part of their identity would cease to become "them".

Despite that, I do change them when there's something to be gained in terms of new powers or enhancements or something like that. The respecs we're granted with new releases usually coincide with changes of this sort, so using one of them is normally sufficient for my needs. I also normally have one banked, so that if I screw up my new build I can use the most recent "freespec" to fix it. I have never actually had to do that, however. I don't plan my builds while sleepy, distracted or tipsy, so I usually don't mangle them.

To be fair, "it's not as bad as this really horrible example" isn't really a great endorsement.

I think it's a fair point to suggest that there may be some ways to turn paid Incarnate access into a way to make money. That's been suggested a couple of times. It seems likely that it could be done in a way to make that possible.

On the other hand, if only a minority of new players are going to ever make it to 50 (not something I'm sure of, but also not something that sounds impossible), all this thread's sound and fury might not amount to anything that meaningfully affects the bottom line.

A rather common example of this, somewhat ironically given the powers of the critters under discussion, is Cloaking Device. Check out some time using a Power Analyzer the amount of defense critters like Knives of Artemis get from theirs. I am pretty sure this is the original (pre-GDN) version's power scale, and the reason it's a lot better than anything a pre GDN Blaster ever got is that critters have much better AT mods for self +defense buffs.

I'm not sure if this question is a good segue into my response or not, since I'm not 100% sure what you were really trying to figure out by asking it. That said...

A fairly tried and true way to make steady, but not amazing money on the market is to find something where there is a large price gap in the recipe and the crafted enhancement. Then you buy the recipe, any salvage you don't have, craft the enhancement, and list that. There are tons of desirable IOs out there where you will clear 5-10M inf doing that, even if you have to buy rare salvage to craft the enhancement. A lot of people value their time way more than their inf, and/or hate crafting so much that they pay sometimes staggering markups for the service of someone crafting an IO for them.

It may not seem like it, but there aren't actually that many pieces of salvage. Once you deal with them enough, you'll start to remember them easily. At this point, I recognize most of them by graphic alone, and usually know if they're junk as soon as I recognize them.

What I recommend is that you carry them to the market, toss them in, and look at the history that pops up next to them. If the prices you see don't meet your "penny rule" as Fulmens puts it, then that will eventually start to sink in. "Hm, Mathematic Proofs sell for jack." (They do, by the way.)

Finally, everything is subject to change. If some new patch or release introduces a big enough shift in the type or level of salvage or recipe people are producing, or introduces new powersets or ways of slotting, this can dramatically affect supply and/or demand, and all your existing rules of thumb can become invalid. You don't have to pore over the market all the time, but it helps to check its pulse now and then, to make sure you're up on its latest shenanigans.

Here's the best part. I really don't have much of an opinion about it. I am not opposed to it, and I don't see any harm in it, but I also don't think it's a big deal if they don't. Could be a good thing to drive more subs, or it might not matter.

I mostly got drawn into this thread in a vain effort to inject some sanity into the semantic argument, mostly in the hope it would stop

Let me then call up another part of my own post, just to reinforce the point about the ridiculous semantic deep dive we're continuing.

My context was meant to convey at release. In fact, I used that phrase elsewhere in my post.

If you go out and buy CoV today, it refers to features that no longer exist, like base raiding. That's why the boxes also have a disclaimer on them about online features being subject to change.

Because what you bought, whether you cared or not, contained a bunch of other stuff. It's that stuff that you get to retain access to. The other thing, Incarnate access, which the devs more or less arbitrarily linked to Going Rogue*, and which wasn't specifically released with the boxed set, was not retained.

We get you don't like it, but the fact is that, in a very narrow, literal way, you really truly didn't get Incarnate stuff when you bought the boxed set. You can't argue that this is wrong. It's a cold, hard fact - when you bought GR there was no Alpha slot to be had. Is it the whole story? No. But that doesn't matter. You can argue against it all you want, but you aren't losing something you got with the boxed set, because in the most literal sense of the words, GR at its release did not include any Incarnate features. Full stop. All the "yes, but" in the world doesn't make that untrue.

Even if Alpha had been there, that was the extent of the Incarnate access that specific expansion would have given you, right then when you installed it. Even had they met their original plans, the absolute most anyone would be getting as a Premium would be The Alpha slot, with no iTrials or later slots.

Human communication is wonderfully vague, relying heavily on context, which, sadly, can be unclear. The people who said you get "nearly everything ... including... expansions" weren't writing a legally binding contract, no matter how many claims to the contrary some folks have tried to suggest. It was almost certainly someone trying to convey, in a few words, that most things previously bought would still be there. That's a true statement when looked at across the features we've been able to buy - CoV's bases and PvP, costumes, emotes, temp powers, etc. GR's zones, side switching for existing characters....Most of that will still be accessible to a Premium account if they bought it.

Because the devs qualified the statement ("nearly"), and because even the Alpha slot was not on the actual feature lists on the box or the online stores (that anyone can find), it's not provable that the devs are being dishonest. Clearly, some folks posting here think that conclusion requires a play on words, twisting the meaning of "included", but either interpretation requires a reading meaning into the words which is not unambiguously intended. Neither interpretation is absolutely, obviously correct.

I'm not a dev apologist here. I don't like everything they're doing with Freedom. But this is a ridiculous deep dive into semantic meaning that isn't productive. If you don't like Incarnate stuff being locked behind subscriptions, then by all means, tell the devs, as many of you have. But stop trying to prove that they denied something they promised. You can't. The evidence is circumstantial at best.

* The actual story of the iTrials is clearly linked to the Praetorean universe, along with Cole's ties to the Well of Furies, all of which is laid out in Going Rogue. I'm unaware on any mechanical reason Incarnates needed to be linked to Going Rogue, and that's why I call the linkage "arbitrary".

I tried again, and I do get a hand on their heads in first person mode, but there is a "dead zone" stretching from the top of the patch saying "POLICE" to the bottom row of pouches on their vest.

I was testing on the officers inside and outside the Steel Canyon entrance to Perez. (I happened to have a mission there.)

This sounds like you might think I was suggesting it was OK because I (now) understand it. I don't. I was just providing details on what, exactly is wrong with it.

It looks like the problem is that the "collision box" for the SWAT officers is offset not vertically, but horizontally. It's out in front of them. If you use the over-the-shoulder view that many of us do use, this causes us to need to click lower because that's how being in front projects when we look down on it at an angle.

The only way to get the hand to work on their chest or head is to lower the camera angle so that you're looking straight at them. Using "first person" mode should work too.

That doesn't sound right. It's "only" mag 20.

Leadership only affects teammates (and their pets).

This has never been formally allowed. There has been post by the now long-since-gone Cuppa Jo about this being disallowed stickied at the top of every forum. The official stance is not changing, here.

I should have made clear that I wasn't picking that one point out in an effort to negate your larger argument. That's why I didn't respond to anything else - I was just responding to that one bit.

On topic, I do think, that while it's obvious that the devs can do whatever they want, there's some value in making mobs that are more difficult follow one of two conventions.

• The difficulty should be gradual to some degree, so that there is not a sudden step change in difficulty. (Some kinds of step change be hard to avoid on a case-by-case basis , however, if a mob group uses damage types to which a character lacks protection, or if they can cause cascade defense failure, etc.) This way you feel like you're building towards something.
• Step changes in difficulty that affect broad swaths of characters should be explained. This is the source of my complaint with these particular critters. They are particularly bad-*** against a large segment of characters when, in lore terms, they aren't even that special. That cheapens the sense of challenge, for me. Vanguard are a decent example of something that a lot of people found startlingly hard to win against, but it at least made some sense in the lore - these are people that arguably have the best gear and training in the whole world.

Actually, this is not true, not in the general case. There was a point where they did not do this except for what appeared to be timing reasons, such as activating an attack that completed animating after they phased. I very much noticed when this changed, as it made fighting them on characters lacking mez protection significantly harder, because they could mez my characters at times when my characters could do nothing proactive to the Illusionists to prevent it.

People posted about defeating him within a few days of that TF's release. I don't know if that was a bug that has since been fixed, or if it's still possible.

I would be terribly amused by all of that if I didn't think you actually believed it.

Where does the evidence for the third bullet point come from? I don't take that at all from what Positron said. New iTrials will be published, and when they do, people will flock to them, especially when they're associated, directly or indirectly with new slots. Edit: OK, we do have to assume they won't make many more iTrials that go over like Keyes. If they do, the whole thing is toast.

Even if bullet three is true, bullet one invalidates the notion that giving premium players access to incarnates would meaningfully affect that outcome in any case.

Heh.