macskull

5 Hecas (proc, not damage piece) and the Unbreakable Constraint proc work alright.

You're missing the point here - you wouldn't have to see any of that if you didn't want to. Of course I'm not necessarily in favor of adding that (I wouldn't use it) but I can understand the desire to do so. Lack of data on price trends is one of the reasons prices fluctuate so wildly on the markets here, and that sort of thing might alleviate those fluctuations a bit (i.e. more stability due to more information). That information would be there for those who wanted to see it, and completely ignorable for those who didn't.

You do realize that when the game launched, Scrappers didn't crit at all? Scrappers got the ability to crit added in order to differentiate themselves from Tankers - basically, to give people a reason to play Scrappers instead of Tankers. There are two major reasons Stalkers got a revamp to the way their crits work:

1. Team usefulness. As an AT who performs best by dealing massive damage to single hard targets upfront (as they're by far the squishiest melee AT), they were eclipsed both in AoE output and damage by Brutes - Stalkers just weren't all that popular. The crit changes helped boost that by improving their performance on teams, thus addressing one of the major complaints about the AT.

2. While the Stalker buffs happened around I11, VEATs were on the table at that time, probably in the design stage. Someone decided some VEATs would have the capability to crit from a hidden state (Banes and Night Widows/Fortunatas), which meant they were essentially Stalkers without AS, but with more AoE, more control, more team buff ability, and a higher HP cap and survivability threshold (higher resistance cap and higher base regen/recovery). Like Scrappers getting criticals to differentiate them from Tankers, Stalkers also had their critical system overhauled to differentiate them from the upcoming VEATs.

I know, but if he sees his name in a post he'll play, right? <.<

Stalkers have lower base damage, less AoE, and are substantially squishier (about 200 HP lower base and 800 HP lower cap) than Scrappers. Additionally, the "increased crit rate with larger team size" only applies to teammates that are within a relatively small (30 feet I think) radius. I think I'd call that pretty even.

Oh, and on topic: In both PvE and PvP it's actually possible for an attack to critical more than once if more than one condition for a critical is met.

Not at all.

Right, except now they can hold you for six seconds and you can't do a damn thing to get out of the hold, except hope you don't get mobbed by Stalkers and AS'd before TK detoggles, whereas before two Break Frees would break the repel and you'd be on your merry way.

The mez changes were probably the the stupidest part of the I13 changes simply because they hosed so many sets and instead of penalizing players who weren't prepared (i.e. didn't bring Break Frees or something with mez protection), everyone gets penalized (yeah, getting stunned for 6 seconds and not being able to do anything about it is so much better).

Because having the option (option meaning "optional," not "required," in this context) to do more advanced things with data is bad? The beauty of having that option means if you never ever wanted to look at that data, you wouldn't have to, and if you wanted it, it would all be right there at your fingertips.

Has the same problem as Orbiting Death.

Honestly it's a waste trying to pick up -stealth that isn't autohit when simply moving around will go a long ways.

Sort of - the game's short help descriptions refer to a few different types of powers/buffs/debuffs:

* Self (just what it sounds like)
* Foe/enemy (just what it sounds like)
* Ally (anyone that cons friendly to you, regardless of whether they're on your team - ally buffs affect the caster as well)
* Team (anyone on your team, including pets of teammates)

Any PBAoE buffs (whether ally or team) will always affect the caster (but maybe not with the same attributes - Grant Cover provides the caster with defdebuff and recharge resistance but not extra defense like it does for teammates).

This bit about yellows is true, but 90% of the time people won't have yellows in their tray (usually just greens, reds, and maybe a few blues these days) so unless you want to be constantly burning yellows to see enemies that may or may not be there, it's not really reliable.

This is a fairly good assessment but it misses two things:

1. VEAT stealth cap is 880 feet (lower than Stalkers, higher than everything else). Unlike any other AT, though, a VEAT cannot hit their stealth cap without outside help (unless they're using Invisibility which means they can't attack) - they can get 500 from Cloaking Device/Mask Presence and another 300 from a stealth IO, which still leaves them short 80 feet.

2. Stealth on non-Stalker/VEAT ATs is largely useless if your opponents have capped perception. While this is generally the case in large-team arena matches (one application of Clear Mind will perception-cap someone or get them pretty close, plus most PvP builds already run Tactics and the +perception IO), it's not always the case in duels or zone PvP, as most builds are not capable of self-capping their perception. The exception here is any build which has in-set perception (Dark, Nin, SR, Willpower, etc) and adds Focused Accuracy and the perception IO. Running just FA, Tactics, and the IO will get you close (the distance varies by AT since the perception buff in Tactics uses AT modifiers) if you aren't one of those powersets. You'll find that many zone builds don't have capped perception, which means you can sometimes get the jump on your opponent, or toggle on Invisibility to make a quick getaway when they can't see you. Villain ATs don't generally have to worry about maxing their perception (in zone at least) because they don't have to deal with Stalkers (and to a much lesser extent VEATs) but that may change with Going Rogue.

Even in the real world, sellers can't realistically price their goods above what people are willing to pay for them - for example, if Mattel suddenly decided they were going to charge $200 for a Barbie doll, no one would pay that and they'd have to lower their prices to something more reasonable. If Starbucks decided to charge $20 for a small cup of coffee, the same thing would happen. The reason I'm not using an example like higher gas prices is because things like Starbucks and Barbies are basically optional luxuries (like IOs), not necessities like gasoline or food (equated to SOs in this analogy). The real world market is also a bit different than this game's market because there's a limited supply in the real world so one person can control that entire supply and thereby set the price.

Luckily, the CoX market doesn't work that way - supply is generated out of thin air (especially salvage, which seems to be the brunt of your complaint here). Someone can buy up all the supply of a particular salvage and attempt to raise the price (I've done it more than once as an experiment) and sometimes even profit off it, but keeping up with it and knowing when to get out before prices crash again and you get burned isn't something that always happens. It requires a lot of constant effort to maintain control over a specific piece of salvage and it is impossible to do so in the long-term. Why? A player can't control supply coming into the market, so eventually supply catches back up to demand and prices settle down to where they were before the manipulation. Usually, price spikes due to manipulation last a matter of hours at most, and it's quite rare to see them last more than a day or two. If you're at the market and you see Luck Charms are going for 500k and you know they were going for 50k a day ago, place some bids for 50k or 60k and come back a few hours later (or maybe the next morning) and the odds are really good that bid will have filled.

A solution to a problem, by definition, has to solve that problem. Implementing a solution to a problem which does not solve that problem by definition is not a solution to that problem. What you're really saying is "you can fix the market without involving the market in a fix" which is a load of crap (and, incidentally, is why that thread is full of fail).

Making things more available off the market doesn't solve the problem with the market, it simply shifts focus away from the market - and as Arcana puts it, why even bother having a market if you're going to encourage players to bypass it entirely?

Well then, it's a damn good thing the market and the entire IO system are entirely optional. I'll let you in on a little secret though: unless it's a game like Snake or Pong or Tic-Tac-Toe, every game with a rewards system rewards players who spend more time working toward those rewards. That's just how things are, and that's the model of an MMO. CoH happens to be incredibly friendly to the casual player since there are no raids to speak of, and all "gear" is entirely optional.

Luckily, alignment no longer matters economically with merged markets. The easiest way to curb inflation is to create an inf sink, and seeding the market with IOs upon the merge would go a long way toward this (as 100% of inf would be destroyed instead of 10% like with a standard transaction). I'm not sure that's what they'll do, but we'll see in a few months.

Inf sinks aren't farmable. Problem solved. It should be obvious that the 10% inf sink for transactions (the only real inf sink, as costume costs are insignificant in the long run) isn't enough to keep pace with the inf entering the economy. For every 1 billion inf entering only 100 million is destroyed - if we assume 1 billion inf enters the game every hour (a very likely number) that means hundreds of billions are entering the game every week and only a fraction of that is actually disappearing. That means there's more money to spend on the same amount of items, ergo prices go up.

This is true and will presumably always be, seeing as IOs (and the market, again) are entirely optional. The inf sink method of reducing inflation isn't tied to either system (SO or IO) so it doesn't unfairly penalize one or the other.

Encourage and require are two different things. Encouraging players to participate in the auction house is a great thing because it means more activity, which means more price stability. It also means players are much more likely to list their non-max-level drops, which means supply of those will increase for those who wish to build their characters with such enhancements.

Are you missing the point here? Rare and hard-to-get items are supposed to be rare and hard-to-get. If they weren't, there would be no drive to obtain them, thus you end up with disinterested players.