UberGuy

I don't actually agree. Well, I guess I don't disagree, but I think there's more to it.

On what I'll dangerously refer to as a "well-balanced team", the stats of even-level, non-AV foes make them trivial to disable and destroy for level 50 characters. Layered combinations of debuffs, controls and applied damage (which can be buffed) can cripple them to a radical extent, and ally buffs can mean the NPCs are rendered nigh-impotent against the players. The devs could reply by giving the NPCs lots of resistance to effects and buffing their stats, but increasing their level does this implicitly. I agree that there are probably some undesirable side effects of this, such as the rapid "roll-off" of the effectiveness of Mastermind pets, but the general approach has some value.

Fundamentally, +0 NPCs who aren't at least AVs just aren't that challenging to a player character team with a good mix of buffs, debuffs, controls and DPS, almost without regard to what powers the NPCs have. To have much of a chance, the foes need higher stats.

I think the core question is what is the assumption about a player team? If we assume the team has this well-balanced mix of capabilities and we want to ensure they face some higher level of challenge, then adding levels to their foes makes some sense.

It seems to me that some of the angst here is really about that team composition assumption. If a team that's not well-balanced comes along, they're going to have a potentially much harder time of it. Who's the baseline? Pretty clearly, the devs seem to be aiming for a high water mark on the performance scale. (Despite this, some players are still mowing their way through the Apex and Tin Mage TFs.) Also pretty clearly, setting the bar high in that way is not popular with everyone. Is that a problem? I don't know. I know I generally like what they're doing, because I'm in the high-performing group of players.

Oh, I know it started then, but it really didn't seem to "sink in" in terms of people losing jobs and homes becoming something of a mainstream experience for a while after Wall Street started taking hits. Toss in people with quarterly and annual subs, and the subscription valley would probably lag the unemployment peak by a good six months at least.

I think the core problem here is failing to see a middle ground. Some people are railing against any notion that there be a significant difference between doing things solo or running a WST. Some people are rejecting any concern about the screen captured crafting costs as groundless. People with strong feelings are focusing heavily on the posts that are most extremely opposed to their own view, and sometimes posting hyperbolic complaints in response. As usual, the best target is probably going to be somewhere in the no-man's land in between those views. It's human nature to try and argue for the appeal of making that target land as close as possible to one's own preferences.

I think sending the sort of ambush overlap we're primarily talk about is best sustained by characters of at least level 35+. Obviously some ATs and powersets will "bloom" in this regard earlier or later than others, but level 35 is the place where I think an SO-equipped character is hardy enough and has the kind of DPA or DPE to have a running fight with more foes than they can kill outright and come out on top.

It seems odd to point this out when one of the core complaints is about overlapping ambushes. The actual design of the mobs is one thing, but what started this thread is being flooded with large numbers of foes on a sub-20 character.

Just on a personal note, I prefer my challenge through "volume", so to speak. I don't enjoy repeatedly fighting a small number of mobs who outclass me - I prefer large numbers of more mundane foes as the norm, and the high-risk singular mobs as knots along the rope.

They aren't. They're balanced around median completion times. There's a difference in balancing around speed runs and actually accounting for the fact that they exist. When you list a piece of content's completion times and sort them in descending order, and enough people are running fast times that they displace the slow times down to the bottom half of the list, the devs feel that enough people are running the content fast enough to warrant the reward being lower. I think they could use different methods to calculate this, but the principle is sound.

Whether they balanced the Shard cost of Notices around the high end or not is unclear at this time. Those numbers may simply be a S.W.A.G., given that they represent pre-open-beta values.

Would you propose that content should target the bottom, middle or top of this slider's default setting? Should that target be consistent, or wander across the slider's dynamic range, such that the player is recommended to regularly adjust that slider?

IOs were absolutely the next evolution of my charaters, and those characters absolutely gained in power in ways comparable to leveling up. IOs were explicitly described by the devs as an "alternate progression" method at the time of their introduction, especially for level 50 characters. They just happened to be something you could start progressing on before actually hitting level 50.

I know. And Hamidon Mitos have a huge chance to drop a Shard if you spit on them before they die, even if you're solo. The only reason I can think of that you'd raise this point is that you think I was trying to make a point about shard drop rates for soloists. I wasn't. I was responding to a mention of how fast some people can earn shards, and giving an example to reinforce the point. In that context, the means I used isn't as important as the result.

As an anecdotal example, on one character alone, I got 17 shards tonight. I attended a Hamidon raid, went on both the Apex and Tin Mage TFs, and ran a Kahn TF. (Total time for all those activities, around 180 minutes, including time taken to form the Hamidon raid, but not including time taken to form the TFs. That was probably another 15-ish minutes for all three.) I took Reward Merits as my reward from Hamidon, so I also earned something like 133 Reward Merits, a Notice, and a Dimensional Keystone.

Right now there are no examples of anything that works that way. That's not to say it's impossible, but I take that to mean they would have to add tech that allowed two unrelated activities honor the same reward time gate.

As examples: You can buy an Alignment Merit the same day you get one from a Morality Mission. You can buy a Gr`ai Matter with Vanguard Merits the same day you can buy one with Shards. The STF and the RSF are on independent Hamidon Enhancer timers, even though both offer you the same type of HO. All TFs and trials are on independent Reward Merit timers. (I actually wonder if the Abyss and Hive Hamidon instances are on different timers - it wouldn't surprise me.)

Just because they can't do it now doesn't mean they can't add it, but adding it may not take trivial time. If it did, I bet we'd have it already.

I don't know for sure about the highly personal type you describe, but maybe I just haven't clearly experienced it. I duo my own missions a lot with dual accounts, and if I leave one character somewhere, part of the heat seeker ambushes always seems to seek out each character. But like I said, maybe I'm just not running the right missions.

There are currently two different forms of ambush. One type rushes to the place you were when they spawned, and don't have any special awareness of you. The other type knows where you are, has aggro on you, and will not lose aggro unless you die or somehow manage to placate them all. The one most people are annoyed with on Stalkers or any character with strong stealth is pretty obviously the latter.

Stealth in any form, including that given by [Hide], is a means of avoiding being detected by mobs. If they cannot detect you, they will not aggro on you. The problem with the second ambush type is that they bypass the detection step completely - they spawn knowing where you are.

If more ambushes worked like the 1st kind, I think there would be less annoyance. Sometimes the "heat seeking" ambushes make sense, but they seem to be used willy-nilly with no real convention by Dev mission authors.

I don't really disagree with much that you said. By and large, I feel I'm on the same side of the topics discussed in this thread as you seem to be. But there is a difference in making it easier and making it easy. I can see a lot of room for them to adjust the numbers seen during the "sneak peek" down without making the solo option easy to the extent that it undermines the WST.

I mean, let's look at this. Assuming you've got a good boss thrashing character, the boss smashing route is probably your best option. Based on Leandro's estimates, it would take you four thousand hours of play smashing a boss a minute to craft all 10 incarnate slots with shards. If you play two hours a day, six days a week, that would take you 333 and change weeks to wrap up.

Let's compare that to the WST + TF approach. Crafting a Very Rare with nothing but TF-produced components requires running 16 TFs, plus four WSTs. Let's assume the worst case that you never manage to overlap a WST and a component-producing TF, so you have to run 18 TFs. Even though the actual calendar thresholds mean it can take less, let's call the elapsed time to get four WSTs four weeks. Let's say each TF takes your team 1 hour to complete (high, from what I've been seeing for the ones run so far), and 30 minutes to form. That's 27 hours spent forming or running TFs over the course of four weeks. You could fit that in if you play 2 hours a day six days a week and still have 21 hours of play left, so I don't think we need to call it more than four weeks total time on that basis. Now we have to repeat this 10 times, so 210 hours of time spent on TFs, over 40 weeks.

So 333 elapsed weeks of logging in for non-stop boss smashing, or 40 elapsed weeks where you spent about 1/2 your time running TFs.

Maybe it's just me, but that seems like there's a lot of room for them to add a little slack in there without undermining the WST.

Edit to account for Arcanaville's post, that came in while I was typing mine: Fudging Arcana's rate up to 3 Shards/hr gives us about 160 hours of running fairly normal content, which sounds a hell of a lot more appealing than 400 hours of (as noted, impossibly optimistic) boss smashing. That works out to 1600 hours for all 10 slots, or 133 elapsed weeks. That still sounds high, but it's less than half of the old estimate and also based much more realistic play activities. I'm a lot more comfortable with that.

It's been mentioned a few times now that this metric was based on 480 shards, not 88. 480 is the number of shards required to create a Very Rare Alpha slot from nothing but shards - what would be required for someone who never runs a TF/SF, trial or raid.

The 400 hour number for that number of shards is based on the measured probability for a boss to drop a shard, and assuming a player defeating one boss per minute, non-stop. Pretty clearly, that's probably a wildly optimistic rate compared to normal play. Other than that wild optimism, unless the probability measurement for bosses is severely off-base, this seems like a reasonable way to come up with a rule of thumb on elapsed time to gather those shards.

The post estimating this was by Leandro (who was involved with if not directly responsible for measuring the drop rates by rank) in this post in the thread.