UberGuy

What ZM said here. I'm sorry, but if that wasn't a poorly transmitted joke, I think that any blocking of power/patron/epic pool customization by PvP concerns pretty deeply ignorant.

Besides which, we know you can control the two independently.

They are significantly different. They are more akin to GMs.

Edit: On top of that, PvP "diminishing returns" rules apply to the Scrapper's self-affecting powers, meaning their survival and mez protection powers. That changes the game pretty significantly.

I don't think there's anything new there. The devs have always struggled to justify time spent on fixing QoL things when those things compete for time with new stuff. It's been like that pretty much since the game came out.

That said, the last couple of years have been thick with things that I consider QoL improvements. For me, the biggest example is probably "Real Numbers", particularly the on-screen monitor window. Is a lot of stuff still broken or sucky? Absolutely. But I don't think its fair to say the devs have done nothing - they just may not have done all the things we individually want or think are most important.

I think this is unsubstantiated. The system they have put together is strongly weighted towards retaining existing subscriptions, and towards turning "pay as you go" players into subscribers. There's still room for them to turn the system into one where they nickel and dime us to death, but that hasn't materialized yet in my opinion. Despite some radical stinkers on how they have priced certain things in the Paragon Market, none of them to date are anything other than "nice to have", IMO, so if they're too expensive, I just won't have them.

Unless the max attribute doesn't honor the cap somehow, this wouldn't give them what they're being short-changed. It would still heal proportional to their (capped) max.

I still grit my teeth about this. They need to increase the Stalker HP cap, or make DP into something that won't run afoul of it, like resistance(all). (That's still not mechanically the same, since it would stack and not layer with other sources of resistance, but the way it works now is the pits.)

Standard crits are bonus base damage, and are fully affected by both enhancements and damage buffs. (This applies to most other crit-like mechanics, including Scourge and Containment.)

I would be cautious about that. I will be completely unsurprised if the next round of Incarnate slots require completely new Incarnate salvage. That's Posi's openly stated design philosophy, to prevent exactly that sort of thing: banking progress on prior content to leap ahead on new content when it's released.

Are you looking at it from a perspective of milking it for Astrals, or in terms of progress on Incarnate powers?

If we're just talking about Astrals to buy recipes (which I realize is the thred topic), then I agree that the UGT looks like pretty good stuff. It's better reward/time than any TF I know of, equivalent to a roughly 1 hour TF that gives around 62 Reward Merits, and I expect the time to go down as people learn to run it better.

A lot of people seem to feel the UGT is great for Incarnate progress. Now, from that perspective, it seems to me that the most important reward we get from running Incarnate trials is not the Astral or Empyrean merits, and not the iXP that only unlocks our slots, or the Threads, but the reward table at the end.

Threads (and by extension, Astrals) only reasonably create common salvage, maybe uncommon salvage if you're really swimming in them. By themselves, the only Incarnate progress these things will get you is common and uncommon Incarnate slots. If you want a level shift, or if you actually want Very Rare versions of Incarnate powers, you really want lots of reward table rolls, because lots of chances provides the fastest way (in calendar days) to get to Rare and Very Rare drops needed to create Rare and Very Rare incarnate powers.

Right now, the UGT takes about an hour even if you steamroll it. I'm sure some time can be shaved off what people are doing now, as I think it's possible to run past some of the spawns. But even at 45 minutes you could do two BAFs or maybe a Lambda and a BAF, and right now you could probably fit three BAFs in depending on how fast you can form between missions. Even a factor of two is really pretty big difference in number of reward tables/day.

So if more reward tables are the fastest way to earn Rare and VR powers, it seems to me like people eager to run the UGT are eager to run something that gives them possibly the worst Incarnate progress.

Now, if they're doing that because it's more fun for them, then more power to them. I'm not going to rag on anyone for earning progress doing what they find most fun. But I'm seeing a lot of people talk about how great the reward is though, especially the iXP, and I'm really kind of confused by how people are prioritizing that.

Yeah, like EarrthWyrm said, if they needed MARTy to find them, they're doing it wrong.

On top of that, that notion doesn't make much sense. What makes you think MARTy can't log what would have been extreme rewards while clamping them? Just log what conditions caused it to clamp rewards, and bingo, the devs know where to look. I suspect that combined function is the biggest point of MARTy. It reduces the urgency to rush out a fix for something the devs might otherwise feel needed immediate remediation, while still letting them see that a reward rate threshold was passed.

MARTy applies to a lot of things than the AE. If MARTy was too aggressive in clamping down on rewards, it would affect people who aren't explicitly trying to PL or farm, but who can come close to farmer/PLer reward rares, even if for a short time, thanks to the power we have available to our characters through IOs and Incarnates, and the access to critters available with I16's difficulty settings.

That's axiomatic. If something they build for us lets us achieve reward rates above what they intended, then of course they're going to feel that our making heavy use of it is us "exploitng" the system. Sometimes they handle this sensibly, IMO, by changing the system in question and moving on. Sometimes they throw a hissy fit, as I feel they did in I14 with the AE.

Where?

I run with some of the heaviest farming, PLing, rich and IO-laden people around who steamroll content as fast as they can just to see if they can beat their previous time. If I knew anyone who was being affected by MARTy, I might care more.

Uhh... they said this in what I considered the equivalent of 48-point, bright red font, way back in issue 14.

I say this as someone who has no issues with people farming the thing ... how could anyone have missed what they've said before?

Given that the listed DPS numbers were not calculated but measured, it seems that they do hit those DPS numbers, because that's where the numbers came from.

Unless they missed the mark significantly and just haven't corrected it, I don't think this is the case. No one I know has hit MARTy in the AE on live, and that includes the week before the critter rez change. Is there a thread somewhere with someone who did?

Edit: On topic, I don't see purple prices changing based solely on the change to rezzing critters. Slower AE farming that's still better reward/time than anything else is still going to be used.

I wasn't there, but I would not have bought a costume code for that kind of money. And I believe that's saying something, because I probably have more disposable income than most folks here.