Werner

I'm strongly against it. Part of the fun of playing my 50s is throwing myself over and over again against near impossible odds. For instance, I think I have 50 failed attempts to take down Ghost Widow. While I can afford it, I'm going to be VERY upset if I suddenly have to PAY 100k for the priviledge of having Ghost Widow hit me with her death hold. It will also substantially dampen my enthusiasm for other insanity like running on invincible (now +2x1) with all of my toggles turned off, or running +4x8 for the challenge.

And frankly, it doesn't matter how small it is. I'll just find it offensive, "Oh, sorry, was I trying to save the world against impossible odds and ended up in the hospital? You're right, the city certainly shouldn't cover even my hospital bill. I guess I'll raid my kid's college fund to cover it. Next time Dr. Planet Killer attacks, you're going to have to find another super hero, jerks. I hear Arachnos is hiring."

That's not to say I'm opposed to influence sinks. I'm all for influence sinks as long as they're ADDING something. But it should be something that offers at best a trivial advantage, such as new influence-only costume slots. If we didn't already have the tux and monacle, for instance, allow the rich to buy that costume for a billion influence. That's right, a billion influence. Want to be in the billionaire club? You have to blow the whole wad on the billionaire costume.

That kind of thing.

LOL! Good to know that Invuln isn't an exception to the rule of getting owned by Arcanaville's challenge.

Regen is the LAST secondary that should be slotting it for health. Regen gets less additional survivability out of additional regeneration than any other secondary.

Well, I don't personally solo very fast because I have a playstyle preference for single-target survivability scrappers, to the point where I rarely have any AoE, and my DPS has never broken 200. Maybe I should be asking for drop rates to be increased for single-target attacks or something. I mean, why should the AoE specialists be getting all the good drops? Shouldn't all playstyles be equally rewarded?

So, 449-499 xp each on your big team vs. 1376 xp solo, or about 3 times less XP. That's about what I already said, but actually slightly better (I figured 3.2 times less XP).

So then the question, which I already posed, is can your team of 8 REALLY not plow through content a mere THREE TIMES faster than I can solo? It's a serious question, and from the two answers so far I'm starting to get the feeling that no, the average team can't, but that really frightens me.

A team of 8 has a 2.5x XP multiplier, right? So... you're saying that despite all the possible force multipliers, your team of 8 not only can't kill enemies 8 times faster than I can (for drop parity), they can't even kill enemies 8/2.5 = 3.2 times faster than I can (for XP parity)? I mean, I don't know, like I said, I don't team. I know pick up groups suck. I just didn't realize how BAD they sucked.

Seriously, someone tell me that teams don't suck THAT badly.

Ah, that would explain it then. Go devs!

Even sets that come with endurance management can have this issue. I used to be able to (very slowly) burn out my endurance on my Katana/Regen before they nerfed Focused Accuracy. I'm running a surplus now since I haven't respec'd, but if I were redoing my build, my guess is that I'd find some way to take advantage of the extra endurance instead of reducing my recovery. Hard to know, though.

I guess we're going to have to chalk this one up to different build experiences, and Umbral has probably put together quite a few more builds of more types than me. Perhaps the handful of high-performance scrapper builds I've put together have been outliers on their endurance use.

Likewise, but it saves me a lot of trouble, so maybe I can get to work on time and keep putting food on my table. Thanks, Uberguy!

Still, just to say "dittos" on one point:

Maybe I'm missing something, but it appears to me that you're saying that the devs didn't intend for us to be able to solo team content. Can you then explain what the new difficulty settings are there for, most specifically the setting that lets you tell the game what size of a team you want to be considered the equivalent of when soloing?

And as he said, AVs spawn in solo missions. Are you suggesting that this is a bug, and we weren't actually intended to solo them?

(Edit: And to quote the issue 16 overview:

"Players can now fine-tune their difficulty levels by telling the game exactly how they want to be treated. They can choose to be regarded as a specific size team (even if they are soloing), and even have control over the level they are detected to be when it comes to the dynamic spawn system. So if you ever wanted to see if your Scrapper could take on a map that is populated for an 8 person team, four levels higher than your own, now you can!"

Seriously, do we still doubt in some way that soloing team content wasn't intended? Do you think the devs are surprised that Scrappers ARE now soloing +4x8 maps?)

Well, OK, yes. Once you've removed all compromises for endurance and are still at endurance sustainability, no, you won't get much benefit out of even more recovery. Does that happen? I always seem to find a way to burn through all the endurance I can get my hands on despite having made compromises to lower my endurance consumption.

I'd recommend playing the market or playing your 50s. Either will get you quite a bit of influence. The market is faster, but you might have more fun just playing.

Wish granted. If you play your 50s, you're likely going to get a lot of purples dropping, whether that's farming, running task forces, or just doinking around on radio missions with your friends. The drop rates aren't so low that you can't purple out a character by just playing the game and trading the purples that dropped for you for the purples that dropped for others via the market. I purpled my first character by simply playing the end game content "the way the devs intended" for a few hundred hours. It wasn't one per night, but I think that's asking a bit much.

Now fine, yes, if you have a hard core farming build and are hard core farming, you're going to get more purple drops than the role player that runs one mission per night because they're busy talking instead of fighting. I suppose we could call that "penalizing role play" or something. But I think that's going a bit too far. Even in "role play" terms, the hard core farmer has done MUCH more to turn the tide of evil during a night's carnage than the role player.

Now, you WON'T get purples is by leveling up, playing your lowbies, or playing exemplared down to other lowbies. I don't see that as a problem. You don't get raid gear when you're running lowbie missions. You don't get raid gear when you're palling around with your lowbie friends. You get raid gear when you raid. That's about as standard as it gets.

(Edit: Conveniently, this game DOES let you get raid gear without raiding. The drops aren't bind on aquire, so you can buy and sell them on the market. It's going to take you this side of forever to buy them if you're a casual player doing nothing but running low level content, but buy them you can.)

I took it for both. I wanted more recovery, and I wanted more regen. Poof! Thanks, devs!

HAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHA!

Oh, wait, are you serious? Because see, I like games where I have to EARN my loot. And my levels. And so on. Maybe you don't. You might prefer a nice first person shooter. MMOs are time sinks, and reward time played.

We could apply your same argument to your level. "By definition, NO ONE needs to be level 50. So let's either get rid of level 50 altogether, or let's balance out the ability for ALL players of ALL playstyles to earn level 50 equally." So... it shouldn't matter if I play one hour a week or 10 hours a week or 40 hours a week... I should have my 50 just as fast as everyone else?

Look, you're not WRONG. There's no right and wrong here. There's just how people want their game to behave. I do NOT want to play a game that levels me automatically to the maximum and then showers the best equipment on me, all with no effort involved on my part. Similarly, I do not want to go to a school where everyone gets an A. I do not want to work at a job where everyone receives the same pay. I do not want to play an MMO that rewards casual players with builds just as strong as people who have put over 5000 hours into the game and have studied and mastered it intracasies. I just don't.

And I'll say the same thing playing a new MMO. I'm PLAYING another MMO for the first time that others have been playing for years. I don't WANT to just suddenly be as powerful as top tier raiders and PvPers. I haven't paid my dues. I don't know what I'm doing. I haven't earned a thing. I don't deserve respect, I don't deserve good equipment, and I don't deserve being max level. I have to earn those things through the hours I put in playing and learning the game. I might never put in those hours. And if I don't, I will always be mediocre. I'm FINE with that. I can still have fun in that game with a perfectly mediocre character, and that's enough for me for now, and possibly forever. If I ever want to be top tier, I know what to do. I have to put in the hours, and I have to study and master the game.

If that's not the game you want to play, cool. And I realize that City of Heroes has always been pretty casual-friendly. It's part of the niche it has carved out. That's great, and if I were the devs, I would definitely err on the side of being casual friendly. But as a player, I want the hard core. Conveniently, the game also caters to ME, not just to the casual player. Can't we all just... get along?

The magical mystical "casual player" doesn't need purples. They don't even need sets. This game is frickin' EASY. Heck, a true "casual player" wouldn't even know what to do with a purple. They'd get significantly better performance from a cookie cutter SO build made by a build expert than they would sprinkling purples willy-nilly into a poorly-conceived build.

Purples are one of the rewards for quite a bit more than mere casual play. I'm fine with that. I WANT to have to work HARD for my rewards in my MMOs.

Sure there is. Endurance reduction is often a performance compromise. You might get additional performance by increasing endurance recovery and simultaneously increasing endurance usage. That is very much what I found to be the case on my Katana/Dark. Over the course of a few days, I went from a Performance Shifter proc in the default slot in Physical Perfection to having it fully slotted. Many of my toggles are more poorly slotted for endurance reduction now, and I've lost some endurance reduction in a couple attacks as well. But my net EPS has improved slightly, as has my overall performance.