UberGuy

The problem is that those of us who breeze through content really, really are not the norm. The devs would be making content tuned for a rarefied part of their player base. On top of that, almost by definition, even if we could not breeze through that content, we tend to be the type of players who would burn through it as rapidly as feasible. So they'd be making stuff for a small part of the player base that they would be "done" with in record time.

I just don't see that as sustainable in a game that's not strongly predicated around the progress ladder we see in a lot of other MMOs, where the low-level areas tend to be ghost towns because everyone is racing to be with the crowd in the end game. We only just got an end game, and after the "ooh shiny" wore off, there aren't a ton of people "hanging out" there.

I think difficulty settings are a much more sensible approach. They leave the devs free to try and create a more or less consistent difficulty for general content and then let us crank that up if we're strong enough to handle it.

I agree that a team of eight folks who can solo on +4/x8* clearly aren't going to be challenged by a mission even set to +4, because there will be 8 characters who could solo everything present. There's likely a mechanical limitation there on how many critters the devs can spawn in a map - they've talked about that on and off in the past.

One thing I wonder if there's any technical possibility of would be a "rank shift" setting. Can you imagine if you could up-shift just the HP and AT mods on everything in your missions one rank? Minions->LTs, LTs->bosses, and bosses->EBs. Think of it like the AV downgrade in reverse. Given lessons learned in the AE, I think they probably could not let shifted ranks give the full reward of the new ranks, but I would think some elevated reward would make sense.

Soloing anything at +4/x8/Rank+ would be exceptionally bad-*** in my estimation, and could add a new dimension of challenge even for a team of 8 bad-*** characters.

* Bearing in mind that I am tossing +4/x8 soloing out in a vague and unqualified sense, when in reality even most high-end builds can't solo on those settings against arbitrary mobs.

Edit: By the way...
On what basis do you say that? I think the slider changes were directly made in response to the capabilities evidenced by people with high-end builds, and those builds were primarily made possible by IOs.

And just today, that info changed.

They're an upgrade doodad that lets you make ATIOs into "Superior" versions of themselves. That sounds like it turns a rare into a purple, though I'm not sure if that implies enhancement boost strength, set bonus magnitude, or both.

How about a motorcycle mounted on a stick?

Or maybe just a Segue held by the handle? (I think this would make me laugh every time I saw it for months if it really happened.)

Dude, our characters live in a city where flying people take the elevated train, aliens from more than one dimension invade fairly regularly, Halloween is motive for hiding in a bunker with food and holy shotgun shells, there are retail stores that sell bazookas, and walking down the street can get your body co-opted by ancient ghost wizards.

If someone's fortune cookie contained ancient mystic secrets which imbued Bulletproof Monk style powers on the opener in a flash of light and music, I am not sure anyone would notice. Having it just contain a really strange fortune would probably be a relief!

Honestly, almost no IO set crosses functional domains like this. This seems to have been a wide-scale design philosophy of the IO system. Sets enhance single functional aspects of powers, plus operational aspects that all or most powers share.

For example, all sets enhance recharge and endurance. Many sets used in powers that usually require toHit rolls enhance accuracy. Sniper sets enhance interrupt (a very narrow example). But other operational aspects of powers are usually the only thing the sets enhance. Damage, Healing, Defense, Resistance, Hold Duration...

The only example IO set category I can think of that provides cross functional enhancement like this is slows. It always struck me as incredibly weird that Slow sets provided damage enhancement, and made me wonder if the designer of that set had a thing for Ice Blast.

(I frequently frankenslot Dominate with Acc/Mez and Dam/Mez HOs, with a few pieces of a ranged set like Thunderstrike.)

Look, I don't like the forum problems either, but you're drawing a dumb conclusion from the facts at hand.

Forum maintenance for CoH was displaced by live game release maintenance for another game NCSoft hosts.

Forum versus live game.

Seriously, get some perspective. I work in IT in a shared services environment. My team's applications have release and maintenance schedules that get bumped so other applications can load changes. Even if you're fixing a real production issue with your product, if there's a work-around (and there is for most of the CoH forum issues except the spontaneous logouts) that actually makes it easier for people to bump your maintenance.

There are lots of things outrageously wrong with what's going on with the forums here, but stop translating that righteous indignation into ridiculous indignation over things that actually make sense, but happen to extend or exacerbate the problem. The real complaint here is that someone really should not have jacked up the live forums in the first place, with a possible side complaint that overall maintenance procedures for them need to be scrubbed with a wire brush. But let's not flip out that a production load for another game in a shared services environment bumped our forum getting fixed.

This is a pipe dream.

Edit: Let me be clear. I'd love to see you produce a build like this. Then, I'd love to see you generalize it to the easy inference from what you posted that lots of people are able to do this with arbitrary powersets. Remember: you said IO sets only.

Reinforcing this, there is no direct mechanical equivalent to defense debuffs or mobs having +toHit in the resistance realm. It's easy for the devs to counter players with +defense. They have fewer tools that behave less dramatically to counter +resist.

From what's been discussed, the intention is that they will be able to be traded on the Auction House, to compensate for the random delivery system of the "Super Packs". There has been some vocal negative feedback to the Super Pack concept, so it's possible things may change, but they seem likely to proceed as something planned for some time now.

I don't think it's a good idea, personally, for reasons that aren't game/AT balance-related.

I missed this. Where was this said?

Edit: By the way, the devs balance lots of things with IOs in mind. There's a difference in setting the balance point to assume IOs and to consider what someone with IOs might be able to do in the content.

Actually, it's a good point, because I didn't even go there in this discussion, and I don't even always build for the softcap. I have four Dark Miasma characters that have defense in the low-to-mid 20s, but lots of +recharge. As a result, sure, I can't always solo certain things like GMs or something, but I can most of the major things a Dark Miasma can do much, much faster.

Now, to be fair, it was mentioned that +defense and +recharge are the two main things people go for. I would argue +recovery belongs ranked pretty highly too. But again I think that's because of how the game overall benefits from those things, not (just) because they are prevalent.

While there are examples of this, this one isn't well argued. I have a number of characters with around +20% damage, and I certainly notice that. I should point out that this is about what you get out of Rare Core Musculature if you're already ED slotted, and I know people who swear by that. So I don't exactly buy this particular example.

Resistance would be a much better argument, but frankly unless the devs do something dramatic to combine damage typed resistances in sets, positional defense will be much easier to slot for. This is not a set design issue, this is a game mechanics issue. So to with stacking of both defense and resistance. People choose defense not just because it's easy to find, but because of how stacking works.

I am finding the Incarnate system's goals far shorter, more immediate, and honestly, less flexible than the IO system's.

Why?

Please show me where you can do that with IOs only. You can not readily get 25% defense in set bonuses only in the general case. If you want to do that you do make tradeoffs - you have to take powers (usually pool powers) to supplement them.

The notion that you should have to decide between one kind of bonus and another is one way to build such a system, but I'm not at all sure it's an unambiguously better way. The reasons you think it's better seem to be because you have a pretty clearly view this game as either a competition or a race. I don't view it that way at all. I love achieving what IOs let me achieve for the mere sake of having it to run rampant with.

Being able to do that sort of thing was what got me to fall in love with this game when it came out, but with IOs, it's far more equal in terms of what characters can do it. It's not just Fire tanks or what have you that can go nuts, and I think that's great.

Goals. Level 50 is a trivial goal. For someone like me who enjoys playing existing characters more than making new ones, not having a goal is a problem. I need a reason to play my characters. Chasing IOs gave me staged goals, ranging from the short-term of frankenslotting to the long-term of tricked out AV soloing, +4/x8-vs-lots-of-factions gosh darn supah heroes. I don't try to go from zero to hero with IOs any more than I try to go from 1 to 50 in a day. I'm here to play the game. Goals keep me interested.

Who the hell is competing? I'm sure as hell not. On iTrials, team buffs and Incarnate powers swamp the contribution of IOs. Where IOs matter most is when you want to run off and solo crazy stuff. To a lesser extent, they let teams do crazy stuff with less stacked buffs. Who's having a competition?

If you're talking PvP, sure, you might have a point. PvP here is an unmitigated disaster, IMO, so the degree to which IOs mess it up is lost in the noise is far as I can tell.

Ironically, Shield's +damage contribution is unambiguously numerically superior on a Scrapper. Which pretty much reinforces the point that it pretty much doesn't matter.

There aren't many attack powersets that aren't crippled by that situation. Especially if the Spectrals are over-level.

Yes, let's throw out the distinguishing characteristics of the ATs to facilitate this strange balance paradigm.

By the way, my SM/FA Brute was able to generate high fury about as high as we can get it now even with just one or two foes around, because I have a high recharge attack chain of fast-activating attacks. These days, Fury is easier to get to its effective "maximum" (the most we can usually hit under normal circumstances). Whoever the Brute in question was, they either had a very long-animating attack powerset or they just weren't attacking that much.

Anyone who doesn't expect this sort of thing on corporate Facebook walls is, unfortunately, kind of out of touch. I'm not saying I think it's great, but it's standard fare, and I don't just mean for Paragon/NC.

Personally, I think it's a poor use of Facebook, but most companies that use it for stuff like this seem to treat it like a billboard that other people on the network can see, but then don't expect to have to deal with negative feedback. And they don't want it there, because they're treating the update like an advert.

Because Sexy Jay left? Your post doesn't seem to make sense after what you quoted.