seebs

It would have the same effect price caps have in every market, which is to move people out of the market into another channel without the caps, which would basically screw everyone.

Imagine that we imposed a cap of 10k on, say, alchemical silver in WW.

What kind of idiot would you have to be to sell one there for 10k when Atlas Park is full of people who will pay 50k or more?

This comes up occasionally in the market forum, and the actual economics types have been pretty consistent in thinking it would be a disaster. Real world price caps usually are too.

Play style > efficiency.

I love the semi-control nature of the set; caltrops are one of my favorite powers ever, for instance.

TD is a fair hunk of +to-hit and also to-hit debuff resistance. I am much less afraid of CoT on a /dev blaster than I am on most of my other toons. Cloaking Device, well, sure, I could replace it with stealth and some kind of speed bost or something, I guess, but I like the defense and I like the stealth. Stacked with a stealth IO, it's amazingly useful. Without the speed penalty of the pool power.

Yes. Especially true if you're playing DP and have no Aim.

Yeah. I think that's sort of the key thing in my experience -- /dev implies a very careful play style when you're actually trying to use it, and that's often unnecessary or wasteful. So /dev doesn't shine on, say, a team that can steamroll the content.

See, I view this one exactly the opposite way. Cloaking device plus the stealth IO is amazing. Full invisibility is not just slightly better stealth; it's a complete change to how you can play. You have full control over positioning and setup, including being able to wander around mining things, search for the leader of a leader-and-guards quest, etcetera.

I suspect it's more useful with invisibility-class stealth than it is without. I'm probably gonna take it just to find out what I think of it. Freespec coming soon anyway.

I might try it. Splitting aggro up is sorta cool, especially if you already have everything heavily mined...

No worries. Part of a useful guide is catching not just strengths but weaknesses.

A /dev guide that doesn't warn you that the set relies on a play style that many people don't enjoy is a worthless guide to /dev, IMHO.

I'm pretty sure that is very much the intent of the system.

In The Other Game, the intent is not that, once you make 80, you have enough resources to immediately acquire all the best top-tier raid gear.

The intent is that, when you make 50, you will be able to have all level-appropriate SOs, and anything past that is a bonus. You are very definitely not intended to be able to fully purple your first character the moment you make 50, unless you spend a lot of time and effort acquiring wealth through other means.

Quite possible. But I've never seen it, only seen references to claims that such a thing once existed.

Linky?

Hmm. It's true, but I don't think it's significant. You can already have endurance issues now for some sets, even with decently slotted Stamina.

For the most part, my guess is that people who already have Stamina, and are having endurance issues, will go for utility powers like Recall Friend. These don't have any impact on combat endurance availability, but are handy to have. Or set mules which they put a single proc in. So they'll be better off, just not necessarily substantially more effective in combat.

But overall, every character is better off as a result of the change. The worst case is that you end up with enough more global recharge that, if you press buttons all the time, you can run out of blue. Well, if that happens, you're still better off than you were before; you now have the ability to put out that much more damage/healing/control in a short time (and focused power tends to matter more than longevity), and if you need to fight longer, you can sometimes not be using a power, and you're doing at least as well as you used to. Or you can carry a couple of blues.

I'd guess most high-level characters are close enough to being activation-time bound already that the real effect is purely one of extra IO bonuses, utility powers, and a few more options in combat -- no downside at all.

Okay. Here's my rational argument:

On my characters who currently don't have fitness pool, I'll have more endurance and health available (because of increased regeneration and recovery), as well as moving a little faster and jumping a little higher. They unequivocally win.

On my characters who currently do have the fitness pool, I get three more powers to pick. Any three powers. They can be situational powers which I tend to only use outside of combat (where endurance is usually a non-issue); that's a pure benefit. They can be powers which I'd use inside of combat. Now, I might not have any more endurance, but frankly, most of my stamina characters are activation-time bound, not endurance bound, already. The limitation is not on how much endurance I have, but how often I can click. Three more powers won't change that, but it gives me more flexibility.

Maybe in That Other Game, where there exists an optimal "rotation" for many builds, it would be useless to have more powers. In CoH, flexibility is a huge win. It doesn't matter that I might use a power only occasionally; having it as an option makes me overall more effective.

So, for instance, my dark/dark defender might pick up Dark Pit. Sure, that's not a very heavily used power, lots of people consider it skippable. But on top of Howling Twilight, it's a pretty solid hunk of stun. Even a single acc/end or acc/end/stun IO in it would make it hit often enough (I have 50% or so inherent accuracy and a base to-hit over 90%) to be awfully useful. ... Occasionally.

But I'm still better off having that option than I would be not having that option.