UberGuy

I'm on Win7 with Firefox 3.6.16 and have the issues.

I really think it's basically random, maybe affected by server load. I'm not sure anything on our end has anything to do with it, except possibly things relating to data in client side cookies we send to the servers. I'm not sure load really matters either, as sometimes I can't get pages to load reliably even in the dead of the night US time.

I still think it might be something in the PHP or database is because I never seem to have a problem downloading the server status XML feed. I'm guessing it's served up by a very simple app that may never have to visit a database table. At least not one stored in the database that underlies the forums and/or main site.

FA is beastly these days. It's an awful lot of fun to shore it up with IOs and go completely ape with FE.

I'm not sure I20 is moving Regen much deeper into the constellation of top performers in terms of stunts like soloing AVs, but it's definitely elevating it in the "normal" game, where for me "normal" means soloing on something north of +3 or +4 / x6

As I mentioned, I have 3 L50 Regens. Two are Scrappers (meaning one is a Stalker), with DM and DB as primaries. The DM is very durable for a Regen, having MoG, Shadow Meld, and now Barrier Destiny. I went for even more mitigation with the debuffing Void Judgment. (I went for the -DR side of Reactive Interface.)

The DB isn't as durable, but defeats large spawns much faster. On the DB, I don't have Shadow Meld, but I do have DB's AoEs. When I play her against large spawns, it's always about using AoEs to whittle the spawn fast enough than its DPS drops to where it can't defeat her. I decided to go all offense with my Incarnate stuff, taking the high-burst damage Pyronic Judgement and the DoT side of Reactive Interface. I figured, hell, just kill faster.

But something completely unexpected happened. The DoT Reactive Interface makes stuff run away. With DB's AoEs, it's almost like spreading caltrops. Foes focus way less fire on her. Now, on the one hand, I think that slightly slows down how fast I defeat stuff with her, if it runs completely out of my AoE range. On the other hand, it tends to drop incoming fire to a degree way below her survival threshold, which is amusing to me, since I was trying for all offensive benefit.

You can blame people like me for that. When I'm not in a TF or trial, I'm generally solo on difficulty settings set for 6 players or more. All of my 50s can hold between 62 and 85 salvage. I run 3 or so missions, go to the market and list 25-40 pieces of salvage, aimed to undercut anyone selling at "reasonable" prices. Why? I want sales badges, because I like badges and extra market slots.

There are a lot of people producing as much salvage as I am. Not all are listing it as low as I am, but they are listing pretty low if they want it to move. I agree there's definitely no point in listing common or uncommon salvage for profit. The only reasons I see to do it are goals like mine or market altruism.

I don't think you should extend this outlook to the broader player base. It's fine that you feel this way, and I think we should be careful with the word "need" in any case, but I would not be able to do the things I do with my characters with Incarnate abilities alone. I will still be richly IOing my characters and obtaining Incarnate abilities for them.

I think there are a lot of things acting together to reduce prices.

One is I think that alts drive the demand for newly produced IOs, and the new progression system, aimed at people playing 50s, is necessarily reducing time spent playing new alts. Another is that having a lot of people play at 50 is simultaneously increasing the supply of level 50 goods. My market experience suggests to me that level 50 IOs (or generally max-level IOs) are the ones most frequently consumed by people IO-ing new characters.

There's another supply increase I think is going on out there. I think more people have started availing themselves of Alignment Merits. The most expensive non-purple recipes went on a long price decline after I18, and I think a great deal of it was due to supply competition. At the same time, it's possible that more people started cashing in Inf and Reward Merits for Alignment Merits. So at the same time supply of high-value recipes was on the rise, it may be that net rate of money supply was actually declining, which would have a deflationary effect.

Potential deflation, with the decrease in rate of new alts proposed above, might help explain why purple prices declined as well. It's possible their production rates are up, too, since a lot of people seem to be playing at 50 fighting 50+ foes. I've gotten two on trial runs, for what that's worth.

I'm confident that some people who are on the edge about IOs will find Incarnate powers a good reason to just skip dealing with them, but I am also confident that the serious min/maxers will seek both.

Not really. I vastly prefer the way Regen plays. I like having how the fight turns out be reliant on how quickly I can react, and having many fights be a serious race to see who falls down first. I certainly enjoy the things a other secondaries can do at their peaks. The way Regen works means it is in more danger doing them, and may not be able to do them, but I still prefer the way it feels, and get more satisfaction from pulling off hard stuff with it. (I have 3 level 50 Regens, and play two of them very actively.)

If I ever found myself in a parallel universe where I was a MMO designer, I think I would tend towards reactive or short-term proactive mitigation tools (MoG, SoW) rather than the passive ones (most toggles) that are so prevalent in CoH.

Totally me.

The thread was an interesting read, because it did make me think about why I like playing at 50. I have 10 level 50 characters, and they get a lot of playtime. How/what do I do?

I solo a lot, but I also team for TFs and Trials. I basically solo characters to 50, and I solo them for stuff like tips, earning cash, some grindy badges, etc. I team on TFs or for badges that need/want a team to get. I IO out my characters significantly, and I need Merits of various sorts to do that efficiently. And I do want the Incarnate shinies, even if I am not enamored of the system that grants them or the currently limited content where that system is in effect. (I do like the Trials, I just want more stuff, either like them or soloable. I hear both are coming.)

So basically, I do a little bit of everything, except for PvP. That keeps me from radical burnout on any one thing, and helps keep me playing what I enjoy - max access to the true power of a fully armed and operational batt..er level 50.

No crash. 15 seconds doesn't sound like a lot, but it's 15 seconds where you practically can't die unless you have a sliver of life left. I use it to survive alpha strikes or ride out taking too much damage while Reconstruction is recharging. You can defeat a lot of standard foes in 15 seconds, which tends to significantly reduce incoming damage. So I use it to buy time, smack down stuff around me, and by the time MoG expires, what's left is much less likely to defeat me.

(The old MoG left you unable to heal and at 1/4 HP. The 1/4 HP and the high resists basically canceled out - you took ~1/4 damage but only had 1/4 HP. Unless it was Psi damage, in which case you were hosed. You also couldn't heal or regen for the entire duration. All those downsides are gone now. It still doesn't help against Psi, but it doesn't hurt either, and against everything else it makes you about 40x more durable.)

Does this mean that the League's degree of success at the challenge influences the distribution of the table in terms of Common/Uncommon/Rare/Very Rare? In other words, does having a higher level of success at the Trial make it more likely that (everyone) will see higher "rarity" rewards?

Edit: One other question. Any response to feedback on curious reports with Incarnate Experience? For example, getting more or less iXP than someone else on the same team with you, even if neither character was defeated?

He has.

Possibly. I have tinkered with Greasemonkey, and know it is capable of a lot of things, but I don't think this is one of them. Java script manipulation of the DOM is well downstream of the HTTP protocol management of the actual files. I could be wrong though, as my knowledge of what Greasemonkey can access is very limited. I don't know much about Stylish.

I don't have a yahoo anything installed.

The script is coming directly from the CoH forums. I can see it being downloaded in Fiddler, which is a proxy. You can't lie to Fiddler about where something originates the way you can using script tools within the browser.

I seriously doubt Comcast is inserting something in my HTTP packet stream in a way that would make the script look like it's coming from a particular forum site when it's not. It's not like I see this file on every site I visit.

Edit: This file is deployed with at least certain versions of vBulletin. It is an open-source DOM utility library published by Yahoo!. Please note that I do not think this script is at fault. I still think there is something wrong with the web servers. This script is large and is therefore a frequent candidate for the long delays and/or timeouts we experience when the forum web server is supposed to be sending our HTTP clients (usually a browser) a file. Sometimes the thing it refuses to send is the web page we are asking for, and sometimes (as in the case of the YUI script) it's an included resource that the "outer" page has our browser request.

I've got to admit, I have a hard time correlating all the info into a cohesive idea of what's wrong. I can't see it being a routing issue, because I can always get to the server status XML feed even when I have problems with the forum and/or main page. But I don't understand why some only systems seem to have problems with the forums and/or main page, when they seem to at least sometimes use the same OS and browser.

Maybe it's correlated differently, such that people who have what they feel are "working" systems are actually using those systems at times when the problem is not happening, such as the low concurrent sign-on times that Mandu noticed. But that doesn't seem to line up with his Evo showing him stats even when concurrency is high.

I've sometimes gotten iXP in the hospital. I'm not sure why/how. Maybe it's sort of like how when you have damaged mobs in an open zone (like the RWZ), even if you die and hit the hospital, you still get rewards for mobs you damaged that are subsequently defeated far out of "leash" range. Perhaps I am getting iXP for mobs I damaged/affected before I was sent to the hospital.

Bear in mind, the pets appear as ghostly apparitions, translucent and surrounded by wispy tendrils like fog. Based on the descriptive text, some people have likened them to the bound souls of defeated Praetorean foes. Certainly that in itself would be a rather concept-limiting idea, and not terribly heroic at that.

However, I don't think this interpretation of the descriptions is correct. I read the description as meaning that you have been studying these foes and have used the touch of god-like power from the Well to take your knowledge of that foe and manifest it physically. This makes a lot more sense for the non-human pets, since it seems hard to imagine a Battle Orb would have a soul to bind.

If you're up for that explanation, it's sort of the ultimate "out" from a concept perspective, assuming you're willing to go with the concept of gaining godlike power at all.

I am not at all sure of this. One relevant experience comes from last night. While playing with fellow players I consider to be power gamers, we ran a Lambda with intent to poke the "participation" system. Our results for the end table weren't so hot (possibly because we were all doing crazy things, and the system may compare us in relation to one another), but I got nearly 2.7x as much iXP as another player on the same team. The main difference I can imagine allowing that? I was laying AoEs on everything I could find, while she did not have as many AoEs to pump out. (Dark/Dark Corr vs. Sonic/Energy Blaster.)

Whether I somehow got better results, or actually "stole" iXP from a teammate is completely opaque to me at this point.

Err... Sorry, ZM, but that's not whatever happened there. Javascript and Java are two completely different things. Javascript has its name only because it is syntactically similar to Java, and that's about it. There isn't a browser out there that relies on Java to execute Javascript found in its pages, unless that browser is, itself, implemented in Java.

I suspect you hit a smooth spot after that Java upgrade. I was able to access the forums with very few delays most of the weekend.

You get Thread drops on the trials. More importantly, you get Astral Merits, each of which you can convert into four threads. If you get an unneeded Uncommon salvage (which happens a lot), you can convert it into 8-10 Threads. You get more Astral Merits the more objectives your league completes, including badge objectives. This makes the BAF much friendlier for crafting progress - once I get all my Physical iXP unlocked by running Lambda, I prefer running the BAF for components.

Fulcrum Shift definitely affects allies, not just teammates.