UberGuy

My "cure" has been anything with strong crowd control, even if it's soft control. If it is soft control, or perhaps not very long-lasting hard control, it's best combined with debuffs, to help cripple what foes can do when they get to do something. A self heal also helps a lot.

This means I gravitate towards Defenders, Corruptors, Controllers or Dominators, and on the first three towards sets like Dark Miasma, Rad Emish, or now Time Manipulation.

This cuts down (but sadly can't eliminate) mezzing, plus cuts down immensely on the amount of damage you take. I have non-softcapped squishies who can take on (and win) against things only my softcapped melees can, as long as they keep a few Break Frees handy. (At 50 I always get Clarion Destiny for my squishies unless they have some other way to get mez prot.)

Nope. Never felt compelled to.

Something that helps me here is that I never create a character trying to meet some external concept using in-game powersets. All of my characters are created specifically as whatever powersets and ATs they are at character creation. I decide I want to try, say, a Kin/WP Scrapper, or a Dark/Dark Defender, and create a character whose origin and backstory fit that, not the other way around. This means I pretty much never feel compelled to re-roll someone because new powersets come out that better match their concept.

That and the notion that I don't level something all the way to 50 unless I enjoy it a lot means my characters are pretty stable.

Yeah, because, you know, pain is so totally the only thing the devs have given us over the past couple of years, right?

Welcome to playing an online game. Online experience is subject to change. Sometimes we'll like it, sometimes we wont.

Yeah, the Standard Code Rant seems to apply here at at some of the greatest levels of minutiae that exist in the game. We know they rolled their own object store, and that accessing it is not pretty.

Consider this. Unless something has changed, nothing is ever actually updated in the game's database tables directly by folks like powers devs. There's no tabular database interface anywhere that they can click on a field and change Marauder's Lethal Resistance cap to 0.9. Instead there's an excel spreadsheet that is itself somewhat nightmarish. And a perl program parses that spreadsheet and injects data from it into game piggs and, presumably, where appropriate, the "databases" the game servers read such attributes from.

While I wouldn't sit around and twiddle data in an on-line production copy of our application databases at work .... usually ... I would sure not need a process as arcane as that to pull data in and out of them.

Melle sounds like someone who would have the female gunslinger hair.

* Goes and rolls "Melle Melee"

I mentioned this in an unrelated thread that linked to the cropped version of this picture. I want to give serious props to the artist who produced that image for capturing in "ink" the look and feel not only of in-game characters complete with in-game costume pieces, hair, etc., but even the poses of such characters. Except for most of the pall bearers and the Vindicators on the stairs, who are all in poses that are natural for the scene but not in game, all the characters in the scene seem captured as though in actual idling poses from the game. Indeed, it would be easy for me to imagine this piece of art transitioning into actual in-game footage but for the characters in the procession.

Also, I did like the read of the eulogy, its smattering of grammatical oopsies aside.

Good work all around.

All Paragon-Market-bought enhancements have this behavior. As ATOs were originally only available on the market, I guess they carried that over even though they now have other means of acquisition. I always took the inability to boost "market-Os" as sort of a trade-off with the way they are always functionally the same level as your character, meaning (among other things) that they can be slotted at any level and will be full strength when you are level 50, and never lose their set bonuses when you exemplar*.

* For market-bought "normal" sets, like Touch of Death, they lose their bonuses if you exemplar to a level below where the set exists.

Just to hopefully toss in some additional clarity, there are usually two uses of the word "rate" used together when people talk about this.

There is the "rate" at which mobs drop purples (or whatever). Strictly, people are talking about the odds of getting a purple drop per kill. For critters of a given rank, this "rate" is fixed. It does not matter what level they are, other than to determine whether it's possible for them to drop the item at all. All minions of level 47+ share the same chance to drop purples, all LTs of level 47+ have their own chance, etc.

Then there's "rate" that's the rate per unit time you can receive the drops. This is simply the the number of eligible critters you can defeat per unit time multiplied by the odds of a drop per critter. Of course knowing your total "rate" here is complicated to calculate since there aren't strictly fixed ratios of bosses to LTs to minions on most maps.

So the odds of getting a purple are the same for any given critter at any level 47+. That means the drops per unit time for which you can get drops goes up if you can can mow foes down faster. Since you can mow down lower-level foes faster, they give you the best average purple drop rate.

As others have mentioned, their level can mess with other things, like how non-level 50 uncommon and rare drops are usually much less valuable on the market.

It's less "why is she needed to help" but more "why would an incorporeal being stick their hand on it". It's mostly a rhetorical question from my viewpoint. There are lots of answers we could propose: their maintaining appearances, they can actually manifest to touch stuff, etc.

That's a good point. That does look like that hair-do, doesn't it?

Edit: I don't have a clear screenshot of the character in game, as the ones I have are obscured by powers effects. But I did snag a shot of her info window, which yields this.

It may be a vain hope, but I would love to see them do something with HOs to return them to some of that glory. They aren't very shiny any more compared to IOs, though they still have uses. They would be in great demand as slot savers if they had their old 50% values, even just for Schedule A enhancement. (I'm guessing Schedule B bits of HOs would end up around 33%, not 50% like they used to be in the old days, but that wouldn't suck, allowing the kind of slotting some of the more mundane exploits of Enzymes allowed, but using Cytos.)

Numina doesn't actually look like she's holding the casket. She looks to me like she's in the game's classic hover idle pose just behind it. War Witch, on the other hand, does look like she's holding it, which raises the same question anyhow.

It's a long shot, but that could be a grown up Penelope Yin. Hard to tell from the image size and angle, but the face has a sense of possible East-Asian and/or young features. The skin tone is not right for that, but everyone in the shot seems to have a pallor. Compare it to the faces of the Longbow and Ms. Lib's legs in top center.

Edit: I'm also curious where the original image was from.