UberGuy

But apparently you're not?

Try going back and reading the example builds. Try going back to my description of my characters. They are specific, concrete examples of things that are not at all likely to be the same choices made by me and others. It is unlikely that everyone who replaced Fitness with three other powers chose to replace Fitness with the same three powers. Therefore, more builds are likely to be different from one another that before. And that is the only sensible definition of "diversity" in builds - how many are different from one another. As Obitus says, measuring them by how many pools they have in common is a quite superficial measure.

Actually, this is a stupid argument to make, because even abstract combat visuals are not the same thing as the story being told. Yes, when your Martial Arts character is punching one of the Aspects of Rularuu, the combat animations are an abstraction of how that punching is happening. What is not an abstraction is that your Martial Arts character is punching what amounts to a demigod. Now, I'm open to the argument one could be such an fantastic martial artist that it's actually useful for them to punch a demigod, but I contend that a martial artist is well beyond any conventional meaning of "natural" at that point. Whatever the true origin of their power, they're now achieving something so superhuman that it's not much less far out than throwing fireballs or lifting things with your mind.

Animations aren't the whole story.

When I heard of both Afterburner and the Rocket Board, I was immediately annoyed. For a very long time, we were told that the speed limit on Fly, aside from balance considerations, was a server limitation - that somehow 3-dimensional movement modes actually had to be slower than 2-dimensional ones like Super Speed or the server would somehow get out of sync with our clients as we traveled. The fact that this "physical" speed limit is now bypassed with extra powers annoys me, because it means, in fact, that Fly's cap could simply have been increased.

Well, yeah. It just happens to be that this is the first pre-existing event that's been transmuted to gate behind the LGF queue from something that was otherwise an open zone. As others have mentioned, doing this makes some things about the event more convenient (forming the event "at will" if you have enough people) and other previously possible things impossible (starting the event with a small team). We're objecting to the loss of the latter in the service of the former. The higher the minimum league size, the further away from what was possible before the new interface gets.

It is neither. The notion that these pools were not previously near ubiquitous is ludicrous. Only someone who has no experience with common build strategies would even suggest such a thing. They are taken as replacements to fill the slots vacated by Fitness because they are desirable powers with minimal slot requirements. The fact that they are desirable powers means that many people have them. What changes is that people who previously did not have room for them because their build was composed mostly of primary/secondary powers and other pool powers that provided higher build utility.

The only definition by which you could define this as "less diverse" is by defining "diversity" as the number of characters that exist, in total, divided by the number of builds that have a given power. That number probably did go down, for, say, Combat Jumping. But that, or anything similar to it, is such a completely abstract definition of "diversity" that it serves no useful purpose. It completely ignores that more builds are likely to be different from one another, the only definition of "build diversity" that makes any practical sense.

My SM/FA Brute became more unique among the total population of SM/FA Brutes, because most of them almost certainly had Health and Stamina, but now mine has some Leadership powers, while others may have added Super Speed or Teleport Friend.

I'm frustrated, not agitated, and there was no deficit of thought in my post.

What I don't understand is the logic could lead to you to even try to consider "diversity across the playerbase". No such concept even makes sense. You can't compare a the relative diversity between a Defender's and a Tank's builds, or a Dominator's and a Mastermind's. The only useful sense of diversity is going to come from comparing how alike (or different) builds are between at least comparable powerset combinations. (Some cross-AT comparisons can be valid since we have shared powersets that are usually pretty similar, but even then, AT modifiers can affect this.)

Again, total number of people with a given power is not a useful measure of non-diversity. Even worse, a lot of the powers we're talking about are pool powers. It's normal that lots of builds include them, almost by definition because they're explicitly the filler that goes in the gaps where you can't take a primary/secondary power (or don't want one of the ones you can take). What is a better measure of non-diversity is how many builds for the same AT/powerset combos are near identical. My Brute is now more likely to be different than other Brutes with the same primary and secondary, and that means that SM/FA Brute builds are now more diverse, not less.

Every powerset combination has a number of combinations of possible builds. Diversity should be a measure of how many of those possibilities are in play, and by what percentage of the playerbase. Before Inherent Fitness, our set of in-use combinations was smaller and the combinations using Fitness and Stamina were used by a dominant portion of the player base. Now, all those builds that made up the chunk of builds using Fitness are more likely to have different things from one another.

Well, there seem to be at least three other people here on the same side of things I am, so I'm not terribly concerned that the comprehension issue is on my side. In any case, I think I comprehend it just fine, but I recognize that it's not an unqualified truth.

Let's me show you a specific example. Let's say we have a game where there are 20 powers people can choose from, but they can only pick 5 of them. Assuming no other constraints, that's 20!/(5!(20-5)!) = 15504 theoretical power permutations.

But lets say in practice people almost always take power 7 plus one of either 2 or 4, but rarely 2 and 4 together. Basically power 7 is our analog for Stamina+Health, and powers 2 and 4 are our Hurdle and Swift. So in practice, people mostly have two variations on 17 powers taken 3 at a time. 17 powers taken 3 at a time is 680 permutations, doubled to 1360.

So now let's give everyone powers 2, 4 and 7 for free. Now they have 5 picks again, but only from a list of 17 remaining powers. 17 powers taken 5 at a time is 6188 permutations, 4.55 times more choices than we had people making before.

We can choose the power list size and the number of powers we can pick at a time such that your scenario becomes true, but it is not true for all situations. In the limit, yes, 20 powers taken 20 at a time has exactly one permutation. But you are making the claim, as best I can see from your posts that what was done unequivocally reduces the number of permutations in play. I have shown that it does not, in general. I believe that the Inherent Fitness change is more likely to have resulted in more build choices, as in my scenario above, than less, as you claim. Because of the complexity of things like the four pool limit and how complex player choices are in terms of taking primary and secondary powers (for example, very few people skip their mez protection toggle on melees), I am not prepared to accurately model a proof for CoH. Nonetheless, I believe my experience with my own builds, plus the arguments of the others in this thread, suggest it is more likely to have increased the number of different builds in play for given powerset/AT combinations.

It does. Well sort of. I think it's weird to object to the beam in the context it has been given, but I understand objecting to that context itself.

I kinda get why the devs would want to sandbox player-made content into a supposedly virtual world, though. Could they have achieved that in a different way? Probably.

And you can now live in my ignore list. Take comfort that you're keeping such illustrious company with Another_Fan and Golden Girl.

Er, OK. I think that's a weird objection, but to each their own.

Sort of a cross between a false dichotomy and a strawman, you've presented a position that I'm pretty sure no one here has taken and then pointed out how unreasonable it is. Most folks here have either asked for the option to enter the WLR through the gift to remain with the TuT version, or for the league minimum size to be reduced.

Given that, I find your post trollish and ignorant. Way to spend previously earned respect.

As others have mentioned, I'm not sure that's the case. I have taken cover with no line of sight to the War Walker and had all the various effects apply.

Well, for what it's worth, the MA beam is supposed to be fake. The "contacts" outside it are explicitly presented as holograms that can look like anything (within reason), and everything inside is a fantasy within the fantasy. It's not much of a veneer, but it least it has one.

Previously, we got into Lord Winter's realm because he invited us there with big teleporter gifts. I don't know why he was doing that, but he was. This year, how exactly are our characters managing to invade Lord Winter's realm? Apparently we're just that good.

The main thing it does to NPCs is slow down the rate at which they can do things. Contrary to popular reports on the matter, fear does cause NPCs to have to wait around between attacks. I'm not 100% sure it's 3 seconds, as I never carefully measured it, but the effect is definitely noticable. As you mention, you can still eat some ugly alpha strikes (at least if your fear doesn't come bundled with other debuffs), but it does at least cut down on the DPS that follows.

That's not really correct. Placate from NPCs does not end until they hit you. You can keep them from applying critical damage to you hit them first, but you cannot target them until the placate expires, or they land a hit on you. Since I play a lot of high-defense characters, this drives me nuts. I can be alone with a single foe that's placated me and I can't even target it until it lands a blow on me, which it struggles to do.

People whining about people whining about large group events in a MMO environment make me sad.

Threadjack here, but I took her on with quite a few SO-equipped non-50s. I won't claim it was always fast and easy or that I never died doing it, but I always succeeded.

Wow, I hadn't thought of a Kender in a long time. It actually took me a while to remember what one was.

It lasts longer because it does not disable you as severely. None of your toggles are suppressed (or dropped, in the case of offensive ones), and you are occasionally allowed to move or attack if you are being damaged.

Edit: late to the game!

It works like you think it does. It's 8 stacks of the DoT on a single target, no matter how many people are trying to apply more.