macskull

Currently everything on the market sells for well under the inf cap except one or two items. In that case it's not the market or the inf cap that's the problem, it's those items. What about them makes them cost so much? The two I'm referring to of course are the Panacea and Glad Armor procs - I really don't understand why the Panacea proc sells for so much because it's a terrible proc, and the reason the GA proc sells for ridiculous amounts is because PvEers want it to softcap their builds and it only drops off rep-valid PvP kills. Simple solutions there are either nerf the benefits those procs provide, increase their drop rate, or introduce another way to obtain them off the market other than drops (i.e. a "merit vendor" just for PvP IOs, which would use PvP reputation as its currency).

If the inf cap was raised beyond 2 billion, the highest they could make it would be 2,147,483,648, as that is the largest number allowed by a 32-bit signed integer. They could remove the signing bit and raise the cap to slightly over 4 billion (4,294,967,295) but that would likely open up a whole new can of worms. If they switched to a 64-bit signed integer the inf cap could be as high as 9.2 quintillion (9,223,372,036,854,775,808) but that would require rewriting the entire game to be 64-bit compatible (I think? someone who knows more than me about this might be able to verify).

I have a funny, funny feeling that the amount of enhancement storage allowed will be reduced at some point (kind of like what they did to salvage racks when I13 dropped - going from 999 to 30 was so much fun! *rolls eyes*). I have no insider information to go on, of course, I'm just basing this assumption off the fact that Posi mentioned to a friend at PAX that one of the issues with high prices and low supply was people hoarding enhancements. Of course, the reason people hoard them in the first place is because of the supply and price...

I'm guessing you've never tried to IO a character using non-max-level sets. The few pieces that enter the market at lower than max level are generally cheaper than the max-level ones (sometimes by a power of ten, or more) but there isn't a reliable enough supply where you could expect to IO a character that way in any decent timeframe. I recall in November 2007 I placed a few bids on non-max-level Decimation triples (don't remember which triple) redside and my stack of bids didn't fully fill until March of the next year.

I won't argue that redside content is better, but blueside has more of it and it's generally more rewarding for the time spent. I seriously doubt enough people will be going fully villain (they'll probably just go vigilante to keep access to the hero market) to impact the Black Market in a positive way.

Just a patch, probably to fix [redacted].

This closed beta has been unusually long, I'll admit, but I assume that since it hasn't gone live yet, they're working on ironing out kinks and such - adding a bunch of new graphics stuff that they need to ensure runs on a wide variety of hardware configurations will probably take a while. However, this probably means open beta will be short-ish if they want to get this live by the end of the month.

Castle said after the ET/TF changes that Whirling Hands would not be getting a buff to compensate, so I doubt this will happen.

Have you played an EM Brute/Tanker/Stalker since the I13 changes? Between free base resists for just about everyone and DR on damage buffs and slotted enhancements, ET might get to around 400 damage (more on melee characters without significant resistance, like Regens or SRs). Prior to I13 (even after the animation change, but before all the PvP crap) you could take off at least twice that and sometimes even more. While I have no doubts that the change was prompted at least in part by PvP, I don't think it was necessary to change the Tanker or Brute versions as those weren't a serious threat in PvP (Stalkers could AS + ET for a quick two-shot kill, or ET + ranged followup if they had enough +dam). The problem was that EM was far and away the best single-target set for PvE, which came at the expense of being an absolutely horrid AoE set. Now EM is only slightly better than other sets at single-target damage, and still has terrible AoE. In other words, you can find sets that have better or comparable (maybe slightly worse) single-target damage that can also crank out better AoE, making EM a bad choice.

Problem here is when you start getting into the higher-end builds, where you start becoming limited by animation/activation time more than the recharge time of powers. Once you get enough recharge, EM just doesn't have a fluid attack chain, and the long animations hinder Fury building on a Brute.

Did ET need to be changed? Yeah. Did it need to be nerfed as badly as it was? Not really.

No one is immune to recharge or movement slows, some are just more immune than others. Slows were not broken pre-I13 (a case could be made for slows being broken in duels, but then it was a matter of what builds the duelers were using and how they were being played):

* Kins could give an entire team slow resist
* Emps could give one teammate slow resist

Neither of those powersets were uncommon pre-I13. These days movement slows are laughable unless you can stack a lot of them (hello, Ice/Cold) but recharge slows are still very potent.

You forget, though, no one plays squishies in zones because of the retarded ruleset.

Purple procs are resisted (except the hold smashing one), and a few of the non-purple ones (Lady Grey, I think, maybe ToD) are resisted as well. Reason people rely on procs so much these days is because DR puts a limit on damage buffs (remember when Blasters used to bring a bunch of reds instead of a bunch of greens?) and because all the base resistance further neuters the ability to put out damage. Procs are basically like getting a free attack in. It's ridiculous how much some of the procs cost, but in DR-land they're almost necessary for any high-end build.

Evasion provides a good chunk of your def debuff resistance, I wouldn't skip it unless you absolutely need to. Old-school SRs used to skip the Fitness pool and alternate Elude and CP for their endurance issues but I'm not sure how well that would work these days. For comparison: my DM/SR's 95% def debuff resistance gets DR'd to around 75% in RV. Considering DR on enhancements, and the removal of unresisted debuffs, 75% DDR is nuts.

They do stack but both Parry and DA are wastes because you're gimping your own damage by spamming them. Good PvP BS builds skip Parry, and Katana isn't all that wonderful so you won't see many people playing it. Fire's still better than BS but it's not like BS is bad...

That 66% ranged defense will probably get DR'd to the low 40s and melee/AoE would probably be in the upper 20s to low 30s (those are numbers when Cloaking Device isn't suppressed, so when you're actually attacking/being attacked it'll be a few percent lower).

Reason I built for ranged defense on that build is because of all the Blasters and Stalkers who like their Sharks. Even without elusivity to back it up, 40-45% defense means something outside Aim/BU won't be hitting you reliably unless they're an SS Tanker or something. Regarding melee and AoE defense - just stay out of melee range and there's one problem gone, and the fact that no one takes AoEs in PvP anymore means that you don't really need to build for that either. The resists are a bit low, yes, but it's a defense-based character. You've got teammates and Phase for a reason.

Yeah, that chance for a "critical mez" has been there a loooooong time, but it never showed up in combat logs or gave a visual indication. The "overpower" text was added in I12, same time as they revamped the combat logs to show things like critical mezzes or proc effects.

It's more a combination of the -res and -regen. You don't need -tohit when your teammates have their own defense (or defense buffs from Colds/Bubblers/VEATs/whatever), or -def when your teammates have slotted attacks and team buffs (lots and lots of +tohit out there, really). -Res and -regen are the only debuff types which allow you to essentially stack your team's effectiveness against an encounter. For example, you can't get higher than a 95% hit roll against a mob, so any -def or +tohit that would raise hit rolls higher than 95% is essentially wasted. Mako, Viridian, and Ace McKnight are the only (relatively common) AVs/EBs that have Elude, and are therefore the only AVs/EBs that can give some teams issues with hitting them.

Meanwhile, -res means everyone is doing more damage and damage buffs on yourself or teammates are doing more work. -Regen means you don't need to deal as much damage to down an AV or GM because they won't be regenerating HP as fast (essentially it's like adding more damage into the equation). As far as sets that bring both -res and -regen, there's Rad, Traps, Poison, Dark, Cold, Therm, and TA (am I missing one? I know TA's -regen is in EMP Arrow, which many skip, but it's still there so...). Sonic, Pain, and Storm bring -res but not -regen, and Kinetics brings -regen but not -res.

Considering most other encounters in the game are designed to create problems for any other characters, I'd say one or two that cause problems for melee characters isn't a bad thing.

Right - you want things simple and repetitive, ergo, you don't want a challenge. Why is this thread here again?

Isn't this just a tad bit ironic?

She uses those powers as often as they are recharged as long as she can get to the target of the attack. If, for example, she is immobilized and being taunted from range, she will not use her Dark Regeneration attack even if there are targets for it around her because she is not aggroed by those targets. This is why the "immobilize, taunt from range, Scrappers attack from the back" method is very reliable (assuming competent teammates, something this thread shows is not as common an occurrence as it should be). Ghost Widow would at that point only be using her Life Drain heal, and it might not even hit the target, only the Tanker might get caught in Soul Storm, but he'd have enough mez protection (external buffs, maybe just not getting hit in the first place) for that to be a non-issue.

Is Heraclea really trying to say "Scrappers aren't good for STFs because they are useless against Ghost Widow?" Please explain to me, then, why I completed an MoSTF with not one but two Scrappers, and Regens at that (no defense to speak of). There is no content in this game that player competency cannot overcome.

Unfortunately, the AI in this game is really really bad, so they only way they can make encounters "challenging" is to give NPCs brokenly good powers (or in the case of MA mobs, clones of player powers). A far, far better solution would be to rewrite the AI to make NPCs more intelligent, but then we'd never hear the end of "BAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW THE NPC'S AREN'T LETTING ME HERD THEM AROUND A CORNER TO AoE THEM TO DEATH."

Yeah, no reason to do anything else from a powergamer perspective.

Because Hide is still running and stealth works exactly the same for Stalkers as it does for any other AT?

I'm not sure why people complain about Hibernating Stalkers, because they need to be in Hib for 8 seconds for Hide to come back up (and 10 seconds for the rest of their stealth). That's 8 seconds after they hit Hib that they're completely visible and you can drop whatever you want onto them. Most don't take Phase so if you can damage/debuff them when they drop Hibernate you'll also drop them out of hide and get a relatively easy kill. Usually when I'm on a team and I see a Stalker hit Hibernate I think "free kill."