rsclark

No, the power of the sets went up as well. I used the words I intended to use. My ill/sonic went from buffing and then standing around doing nothing waiting for my energy to come back enough to PA, to buffing and then blasting and holding away because I was using 1/7th the amount of energy to do the same job. That is a dramatic increase in power. On the trials, it's even more dramatic. Whether you count it as more players (and collaterally pets) buffed OR much less energy and time spent buffing everyone (leaving more for blasting and/or controlling), it still represents a huge leap in power.

I agree that TA needs attention before anything else, but the idea that emp is somehow better than cold is alien to me. At best, I would say that emp and sonic are battling it out for second worst after TA.

I fail to see how anything you said there is unique to a stalker. A scrapper could be played with that exact same desire for mobility options - or a brute for that matter.

I certainly think the next content out needs to be 1-8, but just as a multi-team trial represents a different type of challenge, a max 4 trial would do the same. It is no more exclusive than the current trial content is.

A little check when you take the tip that says "Incarnate". Then it makes everything level 54 with praetorian accuracy. Do 10 of those and you get an incarnate salvage table roll.

Such an easy change that would bring such joy.

Just because dumb people praise it doesn't mean it's living up to the adoration.

I'd call that 22-50, not 1-50. Pre-SO FF helps significantly, but you still die easily enough.

Here's the direction I am looking at the current system from. Not counting alpha, I have not unlocked a single slot without immediately sticking a t3 in it. I have always had enough to create the t3 before finishing unlocking the slot.

Additionally, I don't give a flying fig about t4. The jump in power between t3 and t4 is barely noticeable, and the cost difference is huge.

So, from my standpoint, I want the t3 (in destiny and lore), because it makes me not die instantly when I step into a trial. It makes any future trials have a slightly better chance of actually being fun. It is all I want, and is one step up from nothing. Either I don't have the power at all, or I have everything I want - there is no inbetween.

So, there is no slow playing grind for that unless you like doing something you don't enjoy for no reward. The only sensible option is to hold my nose and swallow whatever icky stuff they are feeding me to get done with it as fast as possible, because along the way there is no point where I get a moment's reprieve to appreciate some small reward. I'm either chasing something in the far future, or I already have it and have no reason to ever play the content again.

And that is literally how I play. LAM until I unlock destiny and then never touch that pile of bad seafood meets large intestine again, then the same with BAF until I get lore. Oddly, I have no reason to play Keyes ever. Once it's unlocked (and immediately slotted with a t3), I place no value whatsoever on getting anything past that.

The top post of the page is you.

No. I want it to be something that the average person can work gradually at, but be working at a long time - you know, the necessary elements of an endgame.

What we have instead is a system that lets you get big things fast and then has marginal improvement so far away that it's easier to just not do it at all. It's like offering a free steak dinner to tempt people to come in your $300 toothpick store.

But it also wasn't meant to be be used only one person like AB. It was meant to be used on as many people as possible, and given it's short duration, that equals a low qol for anyone who uses it. Yes, it would be way to powerful if it were a group buff, but after this buff (and largely before it), empathy is by far the least enjoyable defender to play. The QoL is in the toilet.

He didn't say it was funny. He asked if it was intended to be.

They should have known it would be demanded the second they started on the incarnate content. This is something they should have been planning from the first moment they started looking at incarnate content. For this to be some kind of surprise to them does not reflect well on their ability to anticipate the customers.

If this were some bizarre idea for a new powerset based on summoning chickens that suddenly received a lot of support, then I can see how expecting a response in 6 months would be pretty demanding, but this is common sense territory here.

"Endgame" has always been a bit of a misnomer. A less concise name is "advancement after level 50". That requires that the characters still be able to advance in power, and that they have something to do with that added power.

The problem with almost everything you list there is that they have the same avenue to power advancement - IO enhancements. Mothership and ITF and LG and AE and Tips are all just alternate ways of getting the same advancement. It works, and it is good to have so many different paths.

But it's also bad for several reasons. First off, it's not simple. Do what my roommate does and grab the highest (purple>orange>yellow) set you can get and 6 slot it in the powers you use the most, and you get a slightly improved character compared to what you would get with some bizarre, frankenstein of mixed sets and HOs and everything else built with a specific purpose in mind.

Secondly, inf and the market exist. It is an endgame you can effectively skip if you have some other means of earning money. You can hit 50 and instantly poof yourself to the end of the endgame.

The problem is that endgame needs to be really slow and have tons of stuff to get, but cannot greatly increase power, because as the power creeps up and up, you need more content to justify the need for that new level of power. The IO system has the slow, tiny power creep, but the tons of stuff doesn't exist because of the limited number of slots you have to stick stuff in.

It's a fine system, but it has an effective than many people can reach - or at least give up on going any further into. So, you need a further endgame to play after you reach the end to the first endgame.

Then comes the incarnate system. The absolute worst excuse for an endgame that I can imagine. First off, the rewards are not small, slow increments of power that you can grow into. With the exception of interface, every slot is a tremendous increase as soon as you slot anything. The equivalent of 30 pre-filled slots in your powers. A crashless nuke that's more powerful than a normal one and on a fast timer. A massive heal for those heal-less melee sets who used to scrape by with throwing 2 powers at the medicine pool. A pet that's better than an endless supply of shivans. Then three of them give another huge burst of power when you hit t3.

This is bad design. Gradual rewards are better than huge lumps all at once, because people will accept getting gradual rewards gradually. The way it is set up now, you get nothing,nothing,nothing,nothing,nothing,nothing,no thing,nothing,nothing,OMGTHATSAMAZING,nothing,noth ing,nothing,nothing,nothing,nothing,nothing,nothin g,nothing,nothing,nothing,HOLYCRAPIAMGODHERE,nothi ng,nothing,nothing,nothing,nothing. As a reward structure, it is moronic. The only sensible thing to do is burn through to get to whatever you want as fast as possible, because there is absolutely no reinforcement during the process at all.

What I want is a well designed endgame system. The kind where I can get on and play as I would like and on occasion see some new content as I grow out of the old stuff, but generally, just play and see an improvement - no matter how slight. As it stand now, you have a choice between "do this specific content" or "keep pushing Sisyphus", neither of which is enjoyable.

I will say as bluntly as I can that I have never seen a single person say that. Not one. In fact, it would be a silly thing to say given that pretty much everything CAN be unlocked in a day. The most common complaint is the huge disparity in how long it takes to unlock everything, not the speed in an absolute sense.

I would truly like to see an example of anyone complaining that you cannot unlock everything in a day.

So is playing the game in the first place. If we can't talk about the requirements and consequences they have placed on the game in terms of people actually playing it, then we may as well remove every post on the board and replace it with the word "Bluhhhhhh" repeated over and over, because we have nothing else to talk about.

Just preface every post everyone ever makes with "If I wish to play the game".

I wish there were a checkbox I could click whenever I logged in that said "I am not playing incarnate content because it sucks." Other than canceling my account, I have no way to tell them that their current drive in producing content is doing absolutely nothing to retain me as a customer. That's the problem with the binary nature of subscription voting. I need a line item veto. "Please use none of my subscription money to produce incarnate content, as it benefits me none at all." Currently, every time I pay, I feel like I am subsidizing someone else's enjoyment by giving money to people who don't care if I'm having fun.

If I could stay VIP and pay less to not get incarnate access, I would.

If you can't try it out first, there's no reason not to try to sell a polished turd.

They aren't better. But they give better rewards.

That's the same reason to run tips even though they are the most repetitive of all.

If they weren't 3 for 3 in designing trials I hate, I might be more excited about those alternatives.

The incidental damage is what worries me about this. If that last hit really is 99% damage, then not only do you need to heal up after the second hit, you need to heal basically to full, AND not take 1% incidental damage in the meantime before the last one comes in. Unless timing (and lag) are really tightened up, then that's just roulette. I already have Progress Quest for those times I want pure randomness to determine success.

Differently and worse are not mutually exclusive terms.

Emp plays differently, and those differences result in reduced performance the larger the group becomes. And that's a huge problem when you look at the direction endgame content is taking.

Emp +1 = oh look, I turned that guy into an unkillable god
Emp +4 = 3 tough group members and one god
Emp +23 = why did we invite this guy

People are quick to point out that Emp excels by buffing instead of healing, but there are only 3 powers that scale well to larger teams. 2 of those are up half the time. 2 are also basically just healing/regen. The only large group friendly, non-healing power they have is recovery aura. Of the Emp powers (as opposed to whatever other powerset you might have), the most productive thing an emp can do in a trial is rock the healing aura, as that actually scales to remain somewhat useful.

Debuffs remain equally useful no matter how many people you have beating on the target or being attacked by the target. And this change makes buffing (for those powersets affected) for a 24 man team the same as a 2 man team.

If you want to compare, it is basically the same shortcoming as poison vs rad in terms of debuffs, and in that comparison, no one is going to side with poison.

Call it QoL all you want, but it is also a huge increase in power.