seebs

I've been on a TF run by Dechs, it was a blast. I would not worry about it.

The team teleport design is... interesting, but on the whole I think it's probably the right choice.

FWIW, my bots/traps just made 38, and I am in love with detonator because it's so silly. I even have macros set up for each of my bots to make them say "WHY AM I TICKING, MISTRESS?" and then explode.

I have no clue what I want from patron powers. Right now, I have hover and fly but no teleport stuff. Taking Team Teleport would eat three power picks, and that's a lot, but... Being able to get the bots into a spawn without spreading out away from FFG would be SO handy. But I love my leadership pool.

If I'm soloing a lot, I'll do a bunch of common IOs at level 7. Those IOs are better than TOs can ever be, and close to as good as DOs. At 12, I go to level 15 IOs, which are better than DOs. At 17, I get level 20 IOs, which are even more better than DOs.

Of course, that's if I'm soloing a lot, and thus levelling slowly. If I'm teaming a lot, I tend to pick up a few level 15 IOs (mostly accuracy) at 12 and not bother to replace them, but I do add level 20s when I make 17. A bigger deal is that I put in a kismet +accuracy as soon as I have either hover or CJ (or a defense power, but I usually get either hover or CJ pretty early). The +to-hit bonus (it's really to-hit, not accuracy) is worth the few million inf, easily.

Oooh, team teleport does sound lovely for bots. Sadly, my bots/traps is already sorta tightly packed for Awesome Tools.

Actually, that's super handy, because I was just trying to figure out how to get that much global recharge.

The global recharge bonuses I know of are a few sets with 5%, 6.25%, or 7.5%. Rule of 5 says I can have:

5 * 7.5% set bonus
5 * 7.5% LotG bonus
5 * 6.25% set bonus
5 * 5% set bonus

... and that's 130%. But that's a LOT of very expensive bonuses to have. Are there other global recharge bonuses I'm missing? For that matter, most of the +recharge set bonuses are 5-piece, so that's 80 enhancements at least partially dicated by set bonuses (5 for each of the 15 set bonuses, plus 1 for each of the 5 lotg).

UberGuy, you make a very good point. I'd tend to view failure to show accurate information about how powers work as a bug, on the grounds that the documented "feature" is to show players what happens when they use their powers. Obviously, not having that at all was not a "bug" in the same sense -- the system was working as intended before that.

There's a second sense in which a "bad design" might be considered a bug -- the entire concept of hiding the numbers from players is just plain a bad idea, so it shouldn't have been done, but that's a different, and broader, sense.

One of the problems we face is that when a specification suddenly changes, it can expose a lot of vagueness in the original spec. When we suddenly say "we should show the players numbers", it's not always totally obvious what numbers they want. But in general, it seems like the purpose of the feature is to show the player how their powers will actually work, so showing data which have no effect on any game mechanic is probably a "bug" meaningfully. So the 2.00 accuracy on Rain of Fire is the wrong data to show because that 2.00 accuracy never does anything, that we know of. Or for Teleport Other, showing the 25' range instead of the 225' range is probably wrong because that doesn't actually seem to be the range of anything.

My problem is mostly that I wouldn't be happy without all the addon packs I've gotten (I love to play with my dollies!) and the CoH online store is a nightmare for me for some reason -- I can't buy multiple things from it without it freaking out.

If they had a shopping cart so I could just put all the boosters in a cart and pay once, I'd probably have a second account.

Lazy? Me? Naaaaah.

I would totally not mind an option for "automatically vendor" or "automatically drop on market". Of course, I run out of market slots quickly.

Maybe make a special rule where items listed for 1inf don't take up market slots.

Actually, to be fair: Price capping, in the sense of "setting a maximum allowed trading price", is bad for the economy. Look how little traffic there is in PvP IOs through the market, where the fair market value is above the 2B the interface will let you bid.

Price capping, in the indirect sense of "guaranteeing that everything is for sale at some price", is... well. In the real world, it's disasterous, because you can run out of things. In CoH, where the devs can manufacture all the LotG +7.5% recharge they want, it's... maybe not so disasterous. It would tend to stabilize market prices at a little below the fixed-purchase-price.

In short, if you could craft and sell Black Market Teleporters, they would sell for some amount under 10k inf. If it were enough cheaper to make them, people would probably do so, but there would probably be very little demand over 10k. (Though not none. In another game I played, you could auction vendor-purchaseable stuff for tens to hundreds of times vendor price and get some sales.)

I actually think it might not be bad for the CoH market to have some way to convert inf to desireable things at some fairly expensive rate.

Okay, imagine this. Imagine that we allow you to buy a reward merit for 1M inf. This would impose an effective cap not much over 140M for any recipe which could be purchased for 2 a-merits, because the maximum cost of it would be 100 reward merits plus 40M in conversion costs. However, the actual cap would be a bit higher, because you can't do that every single day. (Similarly, in a hypothetical other game, crafting-with-cooldowns had a higher market value than crafting you could spam, usually.)

The thing is... Obviously, this would result in a massive shift in market prices. But one of the biggest effects would be that people would be spending immense amounts of inf on reward merits, which would be promptly turned into some of the most valuable recipes. So prices on stuff like LotG +rchg would drop noticably, while prices on a lot of other stuff might not change as much right away. But! There'd be a functional cap on the costs of a lot of those things. Without any worry about cooldowns, 240M inf => one lotg +rchg. As often as you want. Now, that's not something that's going to hugely impact the market, while LotGs are selling for less than 240M... But it would have one effect, which is that people who don't feel like messing with the market have a guaranteed path to getting anything they want at a reasonably effective price. And, for a lot of recipes, that price is under 100M, which is "pocket change" for a marketeer.

If this happened, I'd probably spend close to half my money buying specific recipes at specific levels, because I'd rather spend 100M today than bid 40M and wait 1-3 weeks or maybe a month. And I bet a lot of other people would, too.

So I think that would be a very effective inf sink, and while it would have the side-effect of creating a functional maximum price for a lot of things, it wouldn't have the catastrophic side effects of a "price cap".

I have serious altitis. I make alts. Then I make more alts. I was like this in another game, too, where I had three accounts so I could have one of each class on each faction plus a couple open slots for bank alts and the like. (All now deleted.)

Couple things:

1. Players, more than content, are fun. I like to meet people and play with them. Except I get burned out on socializing.
2. Play different games within Cox. Spend a week marketeering. Spend a week roleplaying. Do things that aren't all the same.

YMMV.

As I understand it: If you have enough global recharge that dom comes up again before it ends, the bar is magically full. It only drops when dom ends. So if it comes back to fully recharged before the previous one expires, you can reactivate it for another 90 seconds.

Let's see. It's 200 seconds, we want recharge under 90, so 200/(1+x) = 90, so 200 = 90 + 90x, 110 = 90x, 11=9x, 1.222..., so 123% global recharge, probably plus a little for the activation time, so about 140% global recharge. At that point, you're sure looking like you might want to shoot for perma-hasten as well. As it happens, perma-hasten only requires about 110% global recharge. That seems really low, but:

1. You can 3-slot hasten, getting you about 95% recharge.
2. While hasten is up, you're getting a 70% recharge buff.

That gives you 165% already, you need about 275% total, so... 110% or so.

So if you have 110% global recharge, and take hasten, you now easily have permadom.

Of course it is "getting harder". That doesn't mean it's hard, just harder. I have tried to pick names and had them be taken. Oh noes! But I seem to be able to find names.

Names I've used recently:

Captain Chroma (da/dm tank)
Miss Wormwood (plant/thorny dom)
Meri Sioux (mind/psi dom)
Perfect Dork (dp/dev)
Shadie Hawkins (ws)

I'm not having much trouble finding available names.

So, early guides said Mental Blast was awful, but later comments suggest it may have gotten fixed. Any suggestions? I'm a bit unsure of what to be doing. (Level 15 and counting.)

Edit: 17 now, and about to start actually slotting enhancements and such. Any suggestions for a reasonably viable build? All I ask is that it include hover for my kismet proc. (I'd rather have hover than CJ on this character). Apart from that, I've been pretty happy with all the mind control powers prior to telekinesis (which I don't have yet), and the various psionic assault powers have been usable, at least.

I figure I'll use my fauxspec (second build) to correct any newbie mistakes I've made. Right now, my powers are:

mesmerize
levitate
dominate
confuse
mass hypnosis
psionic dart
mind probe
mental blast
psychic scream
hover

Spent quite a bit of time teamed, had fun, felt like I was useful -- if the three toughest things in a spawn are attacking the spawn, that makes our lives easier.

mind/psi is now 10. I can confuse one, sleep one, hold one, and then do interpretive dance while they eventually fall down.

My wishlist:

1. Implement Quinch's wishlist.

Or, as the saying goes: "This friend speaks my mind on this matter."

Even with regeneration, taking half of a spawn out, even if they come back at full health later, is probably a net win for the player characters. A spawn that could probably cause a wipe being split into two spawns half that size would usually be, well. Not as bad.

Well, given that definition, there's never a bug unless stray cosmic rays are flipping bits, because the computer always does what it was coded to do. I call it a bug when the computer is told to do something other than what it was nominally supposed to be told to do. In The Zen of Programming, one of the koans ends with the master conceding that in theory you could have a program which did exactly what it was "supposed" to do, but points out that it would nonetheless sometimes not do what the user wanted, and that is also a bug.

Viewing any failure to perform as-desired as a bug, regardless of whether or not it seems surprising when you look at the code, seems to produce a better user experience.

Looking at the case of pet/pseudo-pet powers: Things like Time Bomb and Trip Mines seem to do exactly what I'd want for stuff like Rain of Fire.

Arcanaville, do you mean powers where there's a to-hit check on whether or not they summon?