What's Wrong with IO sets?

(examples below use the Hero side market prices)

I like the IO enhancement system. It's clever and really makes a massive difference. But sets drive me up the wall. I am not one to go into minutii and a scientific level of data analysis, so I would like to pose a question for people who do. The availablility of desirable set IOs seems incredibly twisted. It appears that the sets have been created to be all things to all people, but there are many wierd quirks of the system.

The cost of a recipe is often determined by whether or not the recipe has an ingredient which costs ~1m inf (as a rule of thumb) - then the recipe is often worth less on WW than to sell to a merchant.

Recipes which are used by lots of powers within lots of popular classes - e.g. Rech/End of ALL in the resist sets - are useful for every melee class. That's almost if not always several powers on every Scrapper and Tanker. But that's not all. Recharge is almost useless on most resist toggles, so why is it in every resist set?

Players appear to prioritise powers as follows:
In Damage Powers:
Damage, then Accuracy, then End OR Recharge then the other one of End or Recharge. Bearing this in mind, it's not surprising to see that Dam/Acc recipes are usually rare and expensive, whereas End/Rechs of the same set are usually cheaper.

Peculiarly rare powers have recipes of incredible comparative cheapness. Let's compare Sleep with Melee damage:
Fortunata Hypnosis - recipes 2-10~ million infs
Hecatomb - recipes 40-250~ million infs

I'm not 100% sure, but it seems to me that drop rates are not adjusted to take into account the popularity of a power-type, recipe-type or a specific recipe within it's set. Perhaps it should?

Now, I realise that it depends on what type of character you are playing and that, maybe in some twisted way this is a lesson to play a style which you don't enjoy, but that hardly seems the right thing to do, does it?

I'd really appreciate it if anybody would like to crunch some numbers on this, and I would also like to see what you think of it, so I ask once again: "What's wrong with IO sets?"

Sorry, but I don't understand what you are asking. Maybe post again with a more focused question than "What is wrong with IO sets".

I don't think anything is wrong with IO sets. I don't think there's any reason to have drop rates correspond to popularity. I don't think there's any reason to have every IO in a set be useful to a particular build. I don't think there's anything wrong with having some IOs worth two billion influence and others not even worth the time to vendor. I agree with Reptlbrain that trade offs are an important part of the game, and that IOs as currently-implemented are good at requiring build trade offs. I believe that acquiring expensive IOs is a separate sub game for people who really like playing their 50s, and I would be sad if this sub game was taken away from me through reduced prices/increased availability.

If I understood your question correctly... The thing that's "wrong" with IOs is that those IOs lots of people want are more expensive than those very few people want.

There are a couple of things I think you're overlooking, hero2.

1) The best stuff in the game is available in limited quantities. People with a lot of money want the best stuff and bid against each other for it. This is a bad thing if you're buying, but a good thing if you're selling.

2) You can get very good results by "frankenslotting" with cheap stuff; you just can't get good set bonuses. A Ruin Acc/Dam/Rech and a Thunderstrike Acc/Dam/Rech give you the same as a generic acc, generic dam, and generic rech but they do it in two slots instead of three.

3) The IO system is designed to reward multiple styles of play. Run a lot of task forces and you can get merit recipes, with a good chance of things like Numina's +rech/regen dropping. Beat up a lot of level 50 badguys solo and get a good chance (well, relatively good chance) of purple recipes dropping. Beat a lot of level 30s and you can get Regenerative Tissues and Kinetic Combats. About the only thing you don't get rewarded for is dancing under the Atlas statue.

4) The IO system is intentionally designed to produce small amounts of stuff that is worth a WHOLE lot and large amounts of cheap stuff, some of which is useful. Before the IO system, you earned all the money your character would ever need by level 42 or so. After that you just piled up useless, pointless wealth. After the IO system... well, nobody's ever complained of having too much money.

Hmm, my first thought when reading the title was - practically useless bonuses.
The 02% disorient imob. proc.
Debt Protection - seriously, Who really cares that much about Debt anymore?
Especially in such small percentages... Same thing with the +02% Knockback Bonus, and Confusion resist % (or any of the tiny % Mez resist bonuses).


Beyond that, it would be nice to see some small-ish sets, for things that currently only accept Common IO's.

A like maybe 3 piece - (Recharge), (End Red.), (Rech/End Red.) with some small or moderate set bonuses. to slot in Empathy's Rez maybe?
OK, that's not a great example - as some people just one slot it with a Common Rech. IO, people do the same with some other powers just slotting one-slotting Acc. and forgetting it.

Possibly... something to go in stuff like Siphon Power? Maybe a 3 or 4 slot IO Set with some combination of (Rech.Red., End. Red., Acc., Range)
and give the set some minor/moderate (but "non-useless") bonuses?

Perhaps, they could even give the sets the purple/pvp "trait" of not being affected by exemping - to go along with the new SSK rules?

Players often take powers just to be "set mules" - this might give people another slightly more useful option, and people love new shinies... even if they aren't that shiny.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville City of Heroes didn't fail, City of Heroes was killed. If a 747 dropped on your house, you'd say you were killed, not you failed to find a safer dwelling.

I think the worst things about the IO system are that:

1) The Devs didn't combine all the "mez" type IOs into the same sets, like the "mez" attribute on Hami-Os does. If Sleep/Hold/Stun/Slow/Immob/Fear/Confuse/Intangible/Knockback were all offered on "mez" set IOs, instead of being split into separate sets (with Intangible having zero sets at all, currently - not that I care), then it would mean less "clutter"/"junk" in the drop tables. Any mez set IO being dropped would have a chance at far wider usefulness/application for those who looted it, compared to players looting a Sleep set or a Confuse set. In terms of nomenclature they'd be just like Hami-Os, so you could have Acc/Mez IOs, Acc/Mez/Rech IOs, etc in sets, where Mez was a stand-in term for any control effect that could be enhanced. Sure, it might be overly helpful for some powers that have multiple effects (Carrion Creepers springs to mind), but not too overpowering I shouldn't think.

2) The Devs have separate snipe sets. Another source of junk IO drops - snipe sets should have just been ranged sets with Range and/or IntRdx added, for those who wanted to slot for that. It's not like every aspect of existing IO sets is actually useful in some powers anyway (Resist passive powers gain no benefit from EndRdx or Rchg boosts on Resist sets). I might have gone further and combined PBAE sets with melee sets, and Targeted AEs with Ranged sets, just to further cut down the number of set categories, while increasing the number of slotting options on each power.

3) The Devs allowed IOs to drop for every level from L10 onwards (within each set's level range):

a) I think it would have been better if IOs only dropped for every 5th level (i.e. L50, L45, L40, etc.). This would have reduced the clutter in personal storage and at WW/BM, and made bidding on (and listing) IOs at WW/BM a lot easier, as you wouldn't have to "spread bid" across several level ranges to improve your chances of getting certain IOs. As for what level would drop for certain players, I'd have made it so that L47+ players would only get L50 drops, L42-46 players would only get L45 drops, L37-41 players would only get L40 drops, etc.

b) I also don't think Set IOs should have started dropping until L30 (even though I do actually start using them in the early L20s myself), and I would have scaled every single set in the game from L30 all the way up to L50 - that way you have a wider choice of sets at those levels and no set becomes obsolete at higher level (such as existing sets that cap at L20 or L25). It would have made a lot more sense to me if TOs were kept for L1-10 only, DOs for L10-20 only and SOs for L20+, but also introduce common IOs at L20+ and then set IOs at L30+ as the "advanced enhancements" for endgame players.

4) Set bonuses are lost when exemping. I think they should always be available if the power they are slotted in is available, regardless of the level of the IOs slotted there - to do otherwise just punishes high level players for using set bonuses in their build when they exemp down.

5) Too many different salvage types. Halve how many there are, or if IOs had been L20+ for commons and L30+ for sets then you could have just had two categories of IOs for all level ranges - one type to make commons and one type to make sets from.

6) Some sets have too little choice in IO boost types. I'd like to have seen IO sets having more IOs in them than you actually needed to get the highest set bonus. I might have limited it so that the highest set bonus you could get would be for slotting 4 of the same set, just to encourage some variant slotting from players, with perhaps 6-8 different IOs in each set (so you could have a few IOs in a Ranged set with +Range without rendering that set totally pointless for players who didn't want +Range). Then, rather than the usual 5xPosi+proc we see in Targeted AEs in builds (usually skipping Dam/Range unless in a cone attack), or 5xCI+proc (rchg builds) or 6xMako (positional def builds) we see in melee powers, it would usually be more like when you see 4 Kinetic Combats and 1-2 other IOs in melee powers (in builds going for typed def) or frankenslotting 2 from one set, 2 from another, or 3 and 3, etc. - just a bit more variety in slotting - and for attacks it might not always be the same 2/3/4 IOs being used.

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The IO system just suffers for having too many IOs in every drop pool and level range, so the chances of getting one you can use from a drop is miniscule, there are just too many categories on WW/BM to bid in, and yet at certain levels you have very little choice over which sets to use. Plus it suffers from too many arcane hidden rules that can confuse new players (like the rule of 5, how procs work in toggles, how the 120sec duration IOs work, etc.).

Loot systems don't work by having everything be good, they work by having lots of crummy stuff, some pretty good stuff and a little bit of REALLY good stuff.

The devs have already taken steps (too many, IMO) to 'concentrate' the good stuff (tickets, weighting, merits, etc). They can't go too much farther down that road without invalidating the entire point of the system.

Actually, I think merging mez recipes is a good idea, provided that droprates were reduced so that people could not achieve high-end builds any faster. (To be honest, I think this game is already too generous with its rewards, if IOs are meant to be a long-term goal for level 50 characters.) You would have fewer drops, but when you found one it would be more likely to be valuable, so your income remains the same. Common/Uncommon salvage drops also ought to be cut, severely.

IO's, and I have no direct evidence for this either, seem to serve a LOT of purposes. They can provide direct SO replacement. (but without going red, and with slight improvements as you level, and with 20's being clearly better than 15s and worse than 25's and so forth. ) They can provide ultimate power to max level characters. (Except for the things that are "reserved" for HO's, like Dam/Range and so forth.)

... and they can provide several levels of middle ground, from frankenslotting at level 32 to "oh, just one expensive stealth or kb" to "just the cheap and easy 25% Recharge and a little +Acc".

... and they can do it for levels 15 through 49 as well.

I don't play my 50's much and I get a LOT out of the IO system. Please don't gouge me for your perceived "real" purposes.