UberGuy

It is?

Broadsword versus ... just about anything, actually. Let's pick something that's not wildly difficult to analyze: Martial Arts.

The optimal attack chain for BS is something like Headsplitter, Hack, Disembowel, <pause>, Hack. Ideally, the <pause> should be removed, but doing so completely requires unsustainable levels of recharge in Hack.

The best Martial Arts chain is, IIRC, Storm Kick, Crippling Axe Kick, Storm Kick, [Cobra Strike OR Crane Kick]. The Martial Arts chain can be achieved with no gaps with relatively modest levels of global recharge plus a recharge-boosting Tier 4 Alpha slot, or high-ish levels of global recharge without the Alpha.

If you add up all the power damages, and then divide that buy the sum of all the power activation times*, the Martial Arts chain delivers more damage / time than the Broadsword one does.

Now, Parry is a pretty powerful defensive tool, so maybe that makes up for this difference. Martial Arts has mitigation tools, but none are quite so widely applicable as Letha/Melee defense. So maybe that explains it? Well, now we get to throw Katana in the mix.

Katana and Broadsword are, in terms of basic function, identical powersets. A long time back, Katana and Broadsword had identical attack animations. The only differences in the sets were that Katana did less damage per attack (and cost lest endurance per attack proportionally) but the attacks recharged faster. Then, Katana's animations were revamped to make them unique, and in the process they were sped up. Even though the damage of each attack was left alone, because the DPA was increased (by decreasing the activation/animation times), using its own optimal chain, Katana now does greater damage over time than Broadsword does.

Edit: The example of Super Strength versus Energy Melee takes this into whole other realms. SS has an immense AoE attack, while Energy Melee has only a very modest AoE. The size and damage scale of Footstomp compared to the more mundane size and modest damage of Whirling Hands means that, once you account for the number of targets SS can hit (and for how hard), the total damage over time of the two powersets lie in different zip codes.

* The correct time here is the listed activation time for the power plus an adjustment called "Arcanatime", which accounts for "jitter" in the start of an attacks activation and the next subsequent update in the game's internal event processing clock. You can find out more here.

Yeah... I don't really see that being sustainable as a design process, completely ignoring whether they could pull it off at all. I mean, they've design four Incarnate Trials, and they're already re-using gimmicks.

Like I said in the rest of the post, open leagues still sometimes scramble which team leader ends up with the league star, but the teams themselves never seem to be internally scrambled the way closed leagues end up.

Are you responding to the right thing? Eve was talking about making it scale with team size, and you seem to be talking about the situational awareness (dodge the blue patch) stuff.

I'm not sure how making it scale would reduce playability.

As others have said, a 50+5 enhancement is not the same thing as a level 55 enhancement.

This really is an important distinction. If you were to take a level 40 enhancement and make it 40+5, it would not give the same enhancement values as a level 45 IO. It would actually be better.

(Interesting rule of thumb: it looks like a level X(+5) single aspect IO works out to having the same enhancement value in its one aspect as taking a level X dual-aspect IO and doubling that per-aspect enhancement [or adding the two aspects together, which comes out with the same result]).

I don't know what I did there to end up with that, but I fixed it. Thanks for catching that. (By the way, isn't a level 50 IO 42.4, not 42.5? )

Edit: It only just now dawned on me that a +5 level 50 has the same enhancement percentages as a Superior enhancement (like a "purple").

You would look much sillier in hats, though.

Well, if you were Barney you would look pretty damn silly all the time, so never mind.

I think there's lots of room for interesting (and theoretical) discussion about ways the devs can do that while retaining some of the things that (I think it can be argued) are unique attractions of CoH.

Now, I do think that any end-game is just plain incompatible with certain things that long held true here, such as the frequent alting. I don't think that's a bad thing or an error on the part of the devs, but rather just a simple observation that any progress "beyond" 50 is going to compete with time spend making new alts. But I think that sort of problem is a bit separate from asking what an end-game should "feel like" given that you've decided to add one.

And I'm very interested to see how this "feels". Creating new challenges for small teams or even solo players that is substantively different from prior content doesn't sound like a slam dunk to me. I am cautiously eager.

I have said real life money, and I'm not sold on the superiority of attunement. If you split a lot of time both exemplared and at max level then they are going to work out very nicely. If you're like me, and spend most of your time at 50, with only occasional exemplaring, then they're not nearly so attractive.

Especially when talking about things like LotG:+Rech IOs, you pay less points per enhancer to buy a level 25 and boost it with IO boosters. This gives you the maximum exemplar range with near-level-50 enhancement levels at all times.

I don't see how you can know that. Perhaps more importantly, how do we know who the endgame was aimed at? Maybe they targeted it specifically at people who play mostly at 50 running repeated content. Note that I am not going to claim that's the best strategy, but you have to admit, nearly any endgame was going to have limited appeal to some seemingly significant parts of our playerbase, such as those who regularly roll new alts.

I find it hard (though not impossible) to believe that the devs are that naive in their data mining. I give them the benefit of the doubt on looking at number of unique characters or accounts which do something repeatedly/consistently, as opposed raw totals of times something is done. Doing otherwise would be like counting total web hits versus unique visitors. I find it hard to believe that they would either make something only a tiny part of the player base was showing behavioral support for, or make such a grievous error in identifying patterns indicating such support existed.

I have zero proof, but I feel that what I have seen people doing in the game over the years lends credence to the idea that the statistical support probably existed. I am basing that off of more than just what my friends do. I live in a number of global channels, and of course read the forums. It's light years from perfect analysis of trends, but I at least think it doesn't clearly contradict my interpretations.

On a per-enhancement basis, it takes a less points to achieve, especially if you buy a large pack of boosters (which reduces the points you pay per booster). I'm with Ultimus on this one - in general, I feel the non-store enhancements are superior. Folks who like to exemplar a lot are likely to prefer the store-bought ones, and that's fine. I don't think it makes a case for unambiguous superiority, however.

I am not arguing the above points. I never claimed what you are arguing against.

Let me be clear. I don't claim that "my playstyle", as you call it* is somehow superior or "right". What I claimed, very specifically, is that it has existed all along. Our devs seem to be heavily data driven. I don't think I always agree with the conclusions they draw from their data, but they seem to look for trends in what the players do. I can't prove anything, but I think the "follow the easy path" herd mentality combined with that dev data mining suggest that grinding looked to the devs like something players do in CoH to a sufficient extent that they figured getting us to grind iTrials would work out.

I am not claiming therefore that it's going to make everyone happy. All I started with was the claim that this probably wasn't some completely radical idea on the part of the devs - past data on pre-existing player behaviors probably helped shape it.

* You seem to be making the leap that, because I know how to describe then, I subscribe to all these behaviors. I do not. I have never PL'ed any character in the AE (mine or anyone else's), for example. I am willing to grind for rewards in general, but long disliked having only Lambda and BAF to grind for Incarnate stuff, both because it was intensely repetitive and because I like to solo at least some of the time.

OK, sure. Back when speed Katies were going on, I'll concede that IOs were new, and they hadn't caught on to even whatever extent they have now (which I suspect still isn't with a majority of players). What matters isn't how much of the total playerbase ran quick Katies, but what percentage of those who were interested in IOs did. In the context of Incarnates, people who don't care about the incarnate powers, or even playing 50s clearly don't really factor into the question of who is going to farm iTrials, whether there are alternatives or not.

The simple point I'm making, and which I find your responses to inexplicable, is that grinding for whatever goals people have is nothing new, and became far more explicit with the advent of IOs. Before IOs, we all "ground" for the same reward, pretty much: XP. But IOs opened up a new category of grindy behavior - people who ran repeatable content (TFs and SFs) solely because they offered a new reward. Calls for TF formation in global channels before I9 was infinitesimal compared to calls for them after I9. Why do you think that changed?

Of course people who didn't care about IOs didn't grind for them, and neither will people who don't care about Incarnate powers grind for those. But Inventions showed the devs that part of their player base was willing to grind content for years to earn ongoing rewards. I'm not being cynical here, but are you really going to try and tell me folks who mostly play 50s and run several TFs a night aren't "grinding" content, just because it's varied? Trust me, I agree in a heartbeat that having variety makes it feel less "grindy" (and want more iTrials for that very reason), but it's still grinding at its core. Who do you think is supplying all that stuff that makes the market such an efficient way to obtain stuff? Why do you suppose the overwhelming majority of supply is at level 50, or other max levels?

Why are you raising this? I never once have claimed that what I'm talking about covers every player. But when it comes to people who want a given thing, there are always a chunk of hard-core people who make repetition mainstream. The rest is just the result of networking. Don't fall into the trap of a notion that most people hold the extreme views we see represented on the forums - most are far more laid back. Everything I have ever seen tells me most people do what is most convenient to earn progress, and what's usually convenient is to hook up with whatever "everyone else is doing".

You want a better example? Damn near everyone wants XP. Where did you find vast swaths of players in I14? In the font of infinite XP called the AE, all running one of a tiny handful of missions that only changed when the devs stamped each exploit out (sometimes taking weeks). Was everyone in the AE? Of course not. But the behavior was so pervasive we created a name for people who knew nothing else: "AE babies". People were complaining on the forums about not being able to find non-AE teams. And you really don't believe that lots of people will grind repetitive content till their eyes bleed for reward, even if it's just because it's what everyone else is doing?

Is the whole essence of the game grinding, then? If not, what was what happened with the AE all about?

Heh. My answer to that is a hearty "whatever". Who cares if it's not most efficient if the alternative gets you much more than what you need to get what you want? I have literally 10s of billions of liquid inf, characters outfitted with rares, purples and PvPIOs, and I don't "play" the market. I get what I get, sell it and buy what I want, or (these days) earn merits, buy stuff that I can sell for maximal income to buy cheaper stuff.

Unless you mean "use" when you say "play", that's a non-response.

Edit: More to the point, you post suggests that "speed farmers" were some outlier in the community, this group of people not acting like most everyone else. I hate to tell you, but that's a far cry from the truth. So many people were "speed TF farmers" when Katie was the rage that folks were here on the forums complaining about it, and it showed up strongly enough in the data mining that the devs changed the game, introducing merits to try and normalize reward rates.

In case you haven't noticed, the bulk of people follow the path of least resistance. I can say with great certainty that most of this game's players do not consider "playing" the Auction House a path of least resistance for themselves. I think enough people use the market for it to be useful, but not many at all master it. But the point really was that if there is a significantly easier path to something, a large chunk if not a majority of players will treat it as the way forward, even if other paths exist. Case in point: people grinding the heck out of BAF when Keyes and the UGT existed. Keyes was made much easier, but the UGT was not, and it's now run several times a night on Justice. What changed? The reward.

Yes. I run one of everything daily on as many characters as I reasonably can, (usually 1-2) plus some stuff more if people keep running them (or I get the gumption to form them myself).