The Purple Answer

I wouldn't go quite that far. You're not going to get your attack chain down to followup, slash, focus, repeat while solo without purples.

I use them to get gobs of recharge while putting other things in the usual suspects, such as Numina sets in my heals or ToD in my melee attacks. It helps me focus on multiple set bonuses at once for builds that can use them. (+Def and +Rech on a /Regen character comes to mind.)

But they still aren't a universal end-all-be-all for sure. I really like them, but like anything, they have their uses and aren't a panacea for every build. (Pun mostly unintended.)

Standard intro = As per my other threads, people can know, I am complainer. About the rain. About people. About Paris Hilton on Supernatural. About everything. If you hit 40 years old+ like me, knock on my door and come show me how you’re a nice guy halo-head; then more power to you. You’re better than me.

I complained about the AE badge removal. Few people agreed. It didn’t get reversed. I didn’t leave CoH. I’m just doing MUCH less AE, that’s all. No interest? No playing. The end.

However, I can’t in good conscience complain about purple drops. I’ve moved from doing regular content, having read almost all of it; to repeating my favourite arcs, and chip away at the INF needed to get purple recipes / ENH. I get a purple during a run? Cool. I either use it, or sell it to get an equivalent purple.

I play with Zero, Zip, Nada, Bupkis challenge, and I like it that way. I play CoH (when I solo that is… different animal with RL friends and with wife… they now like to charge and sort the bodies, ours or theirs… later) like Tetris permanently stuck on L1. 1-3 times a week, I try either my favourite Task Force (A Hero’s Hero, just for the variety), or, another on a whimsy, and spend 2 hours daydreaming, thinking about my day, clicking auto-attack when an Elite Boss is a guaranteed win, but a long Fred Flintstone fight (you hit me, I hit you, you hit me, I hit you…) and get myself a drink.

I don’t think you get more casual than that.

Out of the 30 Purples I want, I have 18. 18! And some are the “good” ones. You know, the 200M+ ones. Sure, some are the cheap 50M. but most are 110M+. If I really wanted to, I could have played 2 TF a day, 4-5 days a week, and I’d have my sets by now.

But, for me, why would I rush to get to a point where Redeemer (my main) is essentially shelved until Rogue, or some other expansion / issue comes up? Why hurry to be on top and have nothing to do? (Obviously, I’m not PvP, so I’m not commenting about that aspect of the game)

Hate to be old, crotchety, and all that, with the usual platitudes, but I gotta. It’s the journey, not the destination. I like playing CoH, so I play it. That why I ran… RAN away from EverQuest when I found CoH. EQ, for me at least, had been 8 years of destination > journey, with the first 3 being tolerable only because RL friends played. Then they quit. So now I’m here.

So, Purples are, well, just fine the way they are, at least for me. Between purples, and the now more reasonable “epic” badges, I’m in no hurry to make the game obsolete for me. And, as many others have said, CoH is almost unique in its measure that end game equipment is Timesink based, not raid based.

Can’t get better than that for me.

So, if you forget all else I said, remember this please = enjoy playing the game. Don’t focus so much on the goals. Don’t rush to make the game obsolete for you. After all, it is a game, not a job. Enjoy it while it lasts…

I loved that post.

Someone around here has a quote in their sig from another forum poster, saying something like "Racing to 50 in CoH is like racing to the end of your vacation." Purples are supposed to be like that too. When we have no more goals to achieve, why are we playing?

I'm pretty sure you're right.

I'm not crazy about PLing or racing to 50. There are some great story arcs in between 1 and 50 including all of Faultline, some in FF, and Brickstown. One of my favorites is the Revenant Hero Project, I wish they'd revamp that story and bring it up to date with some new features.

Excellent post. I especially enjoyed this bit:

Quote:

If you are not prepared to jump through the hoops the Devs created in order to earn purples, then you do not deserve them. If you feel you deserve them simply because they exist, and you pay your $15/month, I recommend you keep it quiet. You have a sense of entitlement that people in this forum will laugh at. It's about as silly as demanding a Hummer just because you have a Driver's License. Things do not work that way in the real world, and they don't work that way in the game. The high end loot in this game is already far easier to get than in most other MMOs. The Devs will NEVER make purples common enough that casual players can get lots of them.

Announcement: The following comments are not intended to be self-aggrandizing in any way, shape or form. They are , however, intended to support the OP's thesis and point out the utter futility of time spent shiny hunting just for the 'look at me, aren't I l337' attitude.


I have spent countless hours in endgame content in EQ2 before coming to this game. During the last two years, nearly all of my time was spent in raid zones when not farming to support raiding (vicious circle, yes indeed ). During that time, I was able to acquire zero, yes zero pieces of endgame armor for my Inquisitor. Most of this had to do with rarity of the drops, but the other bit had to due with my horrible luck.

"OK Dom, we get that you couldn't win a lotto with noone lotting against you and loaded dice...so what?"

A valid question. The point is this. As those around me began to acquire their respective gear, a very curious thing happened. While watching parses, we all discovered that everyone's performance was relatively the same as it had always been. I would routinely place first, second or third on the healing parse dependant on what we were fighting and other factors related to the specific encounter in question. Of the 6 healers on the raidforce, 3 of us would rotate within the top three. The other three never made it past fourth. This same scenario was repeated among the different classes of damage dealers.

The Takeaway: gear is not a substitute for knowledge and skill.

All to often we heard complaints such as: " if I can just get the Helm of (X), I'll be awesome", and " I can never top the parse because you all have the (x) and I don't." That last was was particularly amusing as only one person of those pointed out actually had that item, and they were never at the top of the parse...

So in the end, MMO's have three types of people when it comes to endgame. Those that work hard and (sometimes) earn their gear and rep. Those that ride the coattales of the first and whine about not having the best gear untill they are placated. And the last group, to which I now belong...those that no longer care and just want to log in and have a good time.

Eric Nelson: What exactly do you do at 50 that is so much better than what you do at 49?