UberGuy

I just have one nit to pick here, and I'm pretty confident the only reason it's here for me to nit is that you didn't say exactly what you meant, but I just wanted to make sure in case someone read this and didn't know any better.

Only +0 minions actually have a 50% chance to hit you.* Everything of higher rank and/or level has accuracy bonuses that make their actual odds of hitting you higher than that. What actually happens at 45% defense is that most foes hit you at 1/10th their normal probability. So if they would normally have an 85% chance to hit you sans defense, at 45% defense they have an 8.5% chance to hit you.

Standard disclaimers apply about this all changing if the foe has +/- toHit applied, of if you have -defense successfully applied to you.

* Even then it's possible a +0 minion has an attack with > 100% base accuracy. I don't know of any examples offhand, outside of the AE.

I cringe when I read stuff like this. Why? Not because I think it's wrong-headed. Because it's highlighting an old, pervasive imbalance in how good AoEs are in this game. I file stuff like this under "be careful what you wish for." One way the devs could deal with disparities in "efficiency" like this between AoE and Single-Target stuff is to bring the hammer down on how much more effective AoEs are in time and endurance. I'll be honest, I hope that never happens, because I love what we can do now, and thus I have some hope that it's so pervasive and baked in that the devs leave it alone. On the other hand, being imbalanced forever and a day hasn't kept them from addressing some other "broken" things.


I think I would start by asking if that's a trade-off we have to make? Given Stalker HP, and so many things they can bring to a team could be offered by something else, is letting them have an unconditional critical bonus out of whack?

(In terms of whether it's technically feasible, standard code rant applies, but the way the Defender damage buff unconditionally decays with team size seems to suggest it's possible.)

If the answer is "no, you can't have both"... I don't know. I guess it might be OK. The 33% works pretty well for me, because teams I run with tend to run around in a clump, especially around hard targets.

Hint: I know how to play the game, and rather well. I'm pretty sure I don't need your "hints" to help me understand anything relating to game mechanical differences in ATs, powers or powersets. I run with speed teams, stealth objectives all the time, participate in steamrolling of AVs on teams, and also solo AVs all with a variety of ATs. I am not laboring under any misunderstandings about what's possible.

Your argument comes down to "well, if I've got someone on the team who can do everything that any Stalker might bring to the team, why invite one?" And once again, we can ask that question of any character, especially characters who bring narrowly focused abilities. We've got a Cold, Rad and Kinetics... should we invite that FF/Psi Defender? We've got two Illusion Controllers and a Plant Dom... should we invite that Tanker?

I get that the narrow role specialization of the Stalker means that plugging in any other melee AT is probably going to bring conditionally comparable or probably simply greater damage capability (assuming comparable build powersets), and maybe more AoE (depending on what the other AT's version of the powerset offers - I don't think we should be offering a Dark Melee Scrapper many nods for greater AoE capailbity, even though it's technically true.) I get that the Stalker is more fragile thanks to its lower HP. I get that Placate isn't very teammate friendly.

I don't think that always unambiguously means I am going to prefer a Scrapper in every conceivable scenario. Is it a safe bet? Sure. I'm probably going to be happy with the Scrapper. If the Stalker's player is not what I think is an idiot, I doubt I'm going to be unhappy with the Stalker. Adding them to my team never makes my team worse than it was before adding them. It may not make my team as good as adding something else.

By the way, Stalkers are not at a disadvantage at self-defense. They are at a disadvantage in HP. (If that's what you meant, my apologies, but I don't consider HP "self defense".) Their direct copy mitigation powers share the same scales as Scrappers, except for cases where things were done to make room for Hide in their powers list, such as happened with Super Reflexes.

No, frankly, it's not. Seriously, do you have to ask me that, reading as many threads as I know you do here?

You made statements that contained no internal qualifications about teaming comparing the performance of Scrapper and Stalker. They did not read like they were talking about teaming, despite the context of the thread. I took them at face value as a complaint about the unconditional relative performance of the Stalker AT, and that you were using that as justification for not inviting them to a team, rather than that they were conditions that held specifically on a team.

In other words, there's a difference in: "Stalkers are always weaker than Scrappers, therefore I will not invite Stalkers to a team" and "Stalkers are less useful on a team than Scrappers, therefore I will not invite Stalkers to a team." I read your quoted post as the former.

If Dispari wants to clarify that the quoted statement meant that Stalkers "bring only cons when invited to a team", I'm willing to drop the sub-argument. Even in the original post's context, and in their subsequent response to me, that intended meaning is not at all explicitly clear to me.

For what kind of content? What are my play goals? Am I speeding to the end of something? Are there a lot of glowies? An AV at the end? Do I have to defeat 300 foes? What powersets do the AIs I'm choosing between have?

[Placate]

If you don't think that's a meaningful advantage, I think you don't know how to leverage it. It's of little use on a team (and some people consider it a downright negative when used there), but I can tell you I damn well wish I could placate some things when I play my Scrappers, especially solo.

I think it's a crock.

What I think is far more correct to say is that the Stalker's advantages are widely considered not to outweigh their advantages, particularly on a team.

Nothing but disadvantages? I'm going to be horridly blunt: that's just stupid, and anyone claiming it is trying too hard to railroad their opinion over others.

I don't know why it's so hard for people to discuss something that might actually be a problem without dissolving into such ridiculous hyperbole.

No.

I would nominate Leadership for that.

What suggests to you that these TFs' rewards are not (or at least will not be) intended to be balanced around median completion time?

I want the badge, but not so much that I am cramming in more TFs just to get it. I'm an active badge hunter, but I'm fairly lazy about it.

I do want the Incarnate slots, and yes, I'm the kind of player that cares about, say, the difference in the Rare and Very rare versions, at least on several of my characters. When it comes to something that I will get some kind of increased performance from, I'm definitely not willing to wait years to have it. Those years are time I could spend playing with the thing I want, and having it to play with is the point of wanting it - it's not an abstract goal. Also, I don't know if CoH will be here next year. I don't know if I will be here next year. There is a limit to the timescale to which I am willing to defer goals.

Here's the thing - I'm not actually hugely manic about getting things like this either, but I've learned a lesson about the social behavior behind things like this, from years of past experience with how the community reacts to other time-gated events, like holiday badges. Here's what happens. When the gates open, tons of people do pile in and work on the event. If you join then, it's really easy to make progress or achieve the new shiny, because there are lots of people doing it.

The longer one waits, the more "desynchronized" the community becomes in terms of performing the activities in question. The longer you wait, the harder it becomes to find other people doing the activity of interest. In my experience, even if I don't actually have a burning desire to blast through an event's shinies in one day, I find that if I wait until the hubbub has died down, actually getting the shiny takes far longer - and for annual events, that's longer than I am willing to wait. So I cram my activities in when the hordes are pouring through the gates, even if I don't actually want it so badly that I need it on the time scale that results in. I actually want a middle ground timeframe, but one that meets my wishes isn't usually available.

Incarnate content combines this kind of time gating with performance-related goodies previously associated more closely with either leveling or with Inventions. Those are both things that, while playing with other people can help with progress, there's really no equivalent to something like the WST. (The closest equivalent I can think of would have been using TFs to earn Reward Merits to obtain IOs.)

So combine these, and I want to run a lot of very specific TFs, I don't want to wait months and years to finish them, other people are running them right now, and to take advantage of as much of that as I can, I want to fit in as many TFs per time as I can, which means I want those TFs to be short. That means I want people to run speedy TFs. Fortunately, I know a core of other players who share my play goals, if not my specific motivations. We don't really do pug TFs, though we do invite others to join ours. Most of us tell people it's a speedy run when we advertise those pick-up spots, and I always do if I'm forming the TF.

We are seriously nowhere near that.

The only things that sell over the cap are extremely rare and desireable PvPOs. The only things that sell for a large fraction (>15-20%) of the cap regularly are purples.

These items are a tiny fraction of the market's transaction volume. The vast, vast, vast majority of the volume of items that pass through the market do so for less than 50M inf per item. That's the part of the market that constitutes the bulk of the "economy". It's nowhere near collapsing.

Could we get to the place you're worried about? Yes, I think it's possible. The devs would probably have to do things that got us producing on the somewhere on order of 10x as much inf/time (total, across the playerbase) as we do now.

Barring that, I really think what you said, or at least the way you said it, is rather alarmist.

I don't think I've ever seen any of the hard ATs run around in that pile. Most sit squarely in the middle right up against the computer, with the AVs right there next to them. Often some of the squishy ATs are up in there too, depending on whether they can either stay away from or get protection from Requiem's stun aura. For a lot of team compositions, huddling up in the middle is actually the safest place to be. Sure, it's under the concentrated fire of everything and it's uncle's dog, but it's also the center of every AoE buff and heal the team has. I know I find it the safest place to be on most of speed run-throughs I attend.

I didn't miss that point, I just didn't imagine you could be trying to make that point.

The devs don't want it to be easy to get two of those. One is harder to get because they want it to be harder to have two than just two times as "hard" it is to have one.

(And no, while I have some of these IOs, I either bought them or created them with A-Merits.)

No, sadly it is not that smart. It will refuse to give you your money. You can request the issue be cleared up via petition.

We warned them about that when that feature was still in beta, but they left it like that. I'm guessing that soaking up the occasional support request was easier than changing the market interface.

Did you stop reading the post there, or something?

My favorite is when we're hip deep in Phalanx robots, looking around at each other going "OK, who was supposed to go get the AVs?"

OK, I have to agree, not many teams I've been on could we afford that many uses of Assemble. For that mission we usually do race from spawn to spawn as a team. It's only really the last leg to the final room with all four in one spawn that's really ugly. I don't particularly enjoy doing those sprints on my squishies, but usually all I need to survive all but maybe the last stretch is some break frees.

Per some of the discussion in the "other" inflation thread, I'm not sure it has to be fixed, at least in the sense that I think your solutions are trying to go about it. It's not clear to me that the problem is truly one of ever increasing storage of inf. I don't think that inf in the system is growing without bound. Instead, I think we may still be in a period of change in the rate of both inf and stuff production as more people swing into the "playing mostly 50s" camp to partake of Incarnate-related content. At the very least I think there's enough of that going on that it would obscure any purely inflationary trends.

I suspect that two things happen with our created inf. Some of it flows through the market and 10% of it burns away with every completed transaction. Some of it is stored. For most players, there's a practical (though large) limit on how much inf they can store. Not everyone is going to sock away stacks of 2B inf on every alt. Eventually, for any given rate of inf production by the community, we should reach a rough steady state for how much is in storage, how much is flowing through the market, and how much is being created. If inf production rates remain stable, eventually the amount being stored should approach some limit, and market prices should rise to the point where the the 10% fee roughly counteracts the production rate.

I believe that what we've seen is a long period of time where the inf production rate has not been stable, and has almost relentlessly increased. If that keeps happening, price inflation will continue.

As long as this price inflation continues to be because our inf production capabilities continue to increase, the inflation is, almost by definition, tracked by increases in earning power, so the inflation doesn't hurt the buying power of those strong inf creating characters. If that happens, I really see only two problems with the ongoing inflation.

(1) Non "end-game" characters fall further and further behind. A level 50 always produced more inf than a level 20, but most of the inf creating accelerations I know of make a level 50 even more productive than a 20 than they were before, even though a level 20's productivity may have also gone up. So the earnings gap is not a new situation, but the changes make the effect stronger.

(2) If earnings and thus prices continue unabated, we'll theoretically eventually reach the point where the 2B inf market price cap represents such an amount of inf trivial enough to actively played 50s that it will become a meaningful market price cap on common goods. This is A Bad Thing™ not because I think there's something wonderful about Mako's Bite procs costing more than 2B inf, but because that would mean a Mako's Bite proc and a Hecatomb proc would both be pegged at 2B inf price on the market. Anyone who could afford a Mako's proc could just throw a bid up on a Hecatomb because it's better, and we'd get waiting lines instead of bid-resolved purchases.

In both cases, the potential problems could be addressed by revaluing the reward (and fixed price) tables. If a level 50 critter was with 250 inf instead of 2500 inf, market fees and other less effective inf sinks would eventually drain away the huge stockpiles of inf we have now and prices would fall dramatically. If, at the same time, level 1 and level 50 reward rates were made to have a less extreme reward/mob difference, lower-level characters would be more able (though never as able) as a level 50 to participate on the market just on the basis of mob defeats.

Note that I'm well aware I glossed over a potentially huge question of implementation details on how to revalue rewards, what if anything to do with existing stockpiles of cash, etc. I was mostly interested in the end result - how to deal with the bit in the middle is probably a much more interesting question, but possibly not actually critical to understand in order to predict the high-level outcome.

This... really seems to miss at least one point about this IO.

Anyone with a half a brain cell who's going to slot one of the PvP +3% defense IOs already slotted its cousin from the Steadfast Protection set. There's little point in comparing the two, because you don't use one as a substitute for the other. People who want a lot of defense want both. I'd agree that anyone who plans to slot just one and who slots the PvPO instead of the Steadfast is probably a nutjob of one sort or another, but that's not what the general population who's getting this IO is doing.

Your open minded approach to the topic is refreshing and appreciated. (Really.)