Void_Huntress

Not one with a stable audience, anyway.

You don't have to. Demorecord on live. Play back on beta.

Are you specifically referring to the Pathfinder Society? (as distinct from the Pathfinder RPG)

It's mostly doing things similarly to how RPGA did things. I used to play Living Greyhawk, back before it got axed due to 4E, and it was pretty similar to how PFS goes about business now.

I've made the "organized tabletop play is kind of like a distributed authority MMO" argument before, because I do think there's some merit to that comparison.

This is what DDO does. More to the point, most enemies within the instances do NOT provide XP at all. Instead, if you kill most/all of them, you get an XP bonus at quest completion.

(you also can get an XP bonus for killing /none/ of the enemies. There's lots of little things like that.)

That's so cute.

*grabs popcorn*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bBD5yyT-s0

When I've seen descriptions like that happen in other environments, it often turns out that two people touched it. One person was confused about a concept, and described it wrong, another person realized that a feature wasn't mentioned and added it, not realizing that the weird description was the same thing, and assuming whoever wrote the earlier bit knew what they were talking about.

My guess is, the 'bypass defense' was for debuffing defense, and then someone later added the 'debuff defense' phrasing not realizing the bypass defense was the same thing, assuming that was another mechanic they just didn't know about those powers, but hey, they know it's got -defense, so let's put that in there.

There are people who would accuse you of bragging if you said you drove a taxi for a living.

That's an awesome technique that works wonders for people who don't have a psychotic break somewhere in between the first and the end of the last.

That's pretty close to my issue, too.

Well, when you consider that an invention license -- and IOs are a huge part of the game -- required regulary monthly purchase, or quite a lot of investment in the reward bush...

Or that a lot of features weren't simply keyed to "is premium" but rather "got this high on the reward bush"

Their archetype-like constructs are more along the lines of an AD&D class progression.

Oh, and most of them require purchasing. You can't make a gadget-based character without shelling out points, even accepting the linear progression the archetypes offer.

Oh, and they are /inferior/. At the end of the day, an archetype gets genuinely less than a free-form character, even outside of the fact there's precious few choices in powers (a handful of A or B), and a lot of limitations in viable talent and advantage choices.

I really feel Cryptic missed an opportunity here. Archetypes should either be more effective bait to either subscribing or purchasing a free-form slot, or a set of viable choices that's of relevance to VIPs.

We CAN buy those now, by the way: A free-form slot is a mere 5000 zen.
... at 100 zen to the dollar, that's only $50. For a single free-form slot.

This does not include power customization.

To elaborate on this: APB was a /subscription only/ MMO when it died, and when it was /brought back from the grave/ it was made F2P. City is /already/ F2P and successful at it.

Oh hey can we blame you then?

Ooh, oooh, we finally get this?

I've always felt one of the unfortunate early mistakes that still affects things today was the decision to let us slot all of these things in arbitrary powers with absolutely /no/ indication from the game what would or wouldn't help us.

Even with the advent of real numbers, I'm of the opinion the game just doesn't give us enough information to work with to make some kinds of decisions in a reasonable timeframe.

On the other hand, once you know that "activated powers burn more endurance than toggles" you now have a general rule to work with and you don't need to sit down and math out whether you should slot end redux in attacks or toggles on future characters. You've got a basic heuristic you can work with that will get Good Enough Results on levelling builds.

I just think the game should /tell/ us this somehow.

To echo others, while I've long fistshaked at the stylistic quirkiness of the set, there are people who were given this and made it work, and taking it away from them seems unfair.

I'd personally be happier with the new pieces, but I don't think this should be categorized as a 'bugfix'. This is just as bad as when Metallic was changed, and I think that just as Paragon has power consistency guidelines, they need to maintain aesthetic consistency as well.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

So is it easily impossible, or impossibly easy?

I've been meaning to ask: almost all of them?

Who else is using your account?

This is a very strange way of looking at it. The Primary/Secondary powersets are not "This is the thing they do, oh and they have this too." If this were the case, then scrappers would be judged solely based on their primary, as well.. and in the absence of their secondary, we'd have a lot of trouble seeing scrappers do the things they do.

You have to take it as a whole.

It may not be "purely" emotional, but it's driven strongly by "I should have this even if..."

Personally, I think that snipes could have had a more interesting tweak for the game, but given this is what they've aimed for, a hard build/tactical decision in order to get the full benefit of the snipe is sensible.

I think if they correct the fact that blasters have a notably higher gap to cross than defenders and corruptors, it should be fine.

Outside of that, I'm just waiting for them to inevitably see that the sustain changes aren't enough, and realize that they'll have to do something more for blasters.

Also, nukes. (Not that this will likely affect me; I don't play any characters with access to a crashing nuke right now)

The Paragon Studios team, for better or for worse, believes very strongly in incremental development. They'll want to see just how game changing their current marks are before they go further... Hopefully, they'll see the information they need in beta and will be able to work from that. If not, they've already committed to continuing to work on the matter if they need to.

If you feel you can't trust that, then there probably isn't anything at all they can say that will give you more confidence.

I took it because CONFUSE IS THE BEST MEZ.

I felt that World of Confusion in conjunction with Hail of Bullets really did exemplify the 'gun kata' aesthetic I wanted (because Equilibrium is just that awesome and I'm not at all ashamed to admit I was aiming for it).

Conceptually, I can figure that the Confuse effect is just my character's positioning and movement causes enemies to attack at the wrong direction and time, and hit their allies by accident, or simply fail to make an effective attack at all due to too many changes in the local combat circumstance. (Similarly, I conceptually slant Drain Psyche as less 'draining from enemies' and more 'taking advantage of the increased local chaos to expend less personal energy and to overall take fewer serious blows')

Aside from that, the particular tinting of WoC with the subtractive blending mixes amazingly well with Scorpion Shield, as well. They look like they belong together.

That said, for some reason I always forgot about Psychic Shockwave. It's a mix of things..

For one, I don't like weapon redraw once I've engaged in the fight. It's a pet peeve of mine I can't really defend beyond "I just Really Don't Like My Weapons Going Away".
For two, my concept of my character doesn't involve actually dealing damage to enemies via psi. Like I said, I only have Mind Probe because it can carry a Kinetic Combat; if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have the power, despite the potential uses against some enemy types.
Third, I am really really really tight on power picks.

It would fit my playstyle, there's no real doubt of that, but I really wouldn't be happy with it.