Are Min/Max'ers common?

While that's somewhat true... i did overgeneralize for emphisis a bit.

My main point was this though... In CoH, it was 5 years before I had a toon with the Task Force Commander Badge. It wasn't because I didn't want it... it was because my play schedule wasn't such that I commit to running 2+ hour TF's. However, I still have min/max'd charictors that rival the best achievements of anyone playing the game. In most other games, my lack of ability to commit to 2+ hour play sessions might mean I never even get a max level toon... and there's absolutely no way I'd ever have max'd out gear if I couldn't raid high level dungeons.

Some people may feel that they'll never have the best IO's in this game... but it's not because it's impossible. It's because, there's something they're not doing. If they choose not to do it, good for them, that's their choice. But it's not impossible.

There's different aspects to the min/max game that correspond with the characters role. In terms of DPS, it's obviously generating the largest end number possible. You can sacrifice some recharge to gain some damage and the end result may be that you gained 0.5% dps out of that act. Do this across the board and you've netted yourself a 5% gain in damage because you've completely optimized your slotting. The other guy that didn't take the time to figure that out and thinks that faster is better will be under performing in terms of sheer damage output.

Does that 5% damage gain really, REALLY matter? It does if you're a min/maxer o.O

It especially matters if you're on the cutting edge of content or trying to bring down the roughest challenges present. Being that there's no Lich King that needs dying in a City of X, it's mostly just the rough challenges you're looking to tackle.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

That's hard to say. I'm sure there are people out there who, for whatever reason, can't commit to playing the market or farming, the way you can't commit to playing 2hr TFs. I do like how grinding and large time commitments aren't required in this game, though. And even if you do chose to grind, it's orders of magnitude less tedious than some other games out there. In a certain game made by the producers of the largest MMO on the market right now, the chance of the rarest rune dropping was something like 1 for every 65 million highest-level monsters killed. Compare that to only 6000+ level 50 kills for a purple.

If you're optimizing for single-target DPS scenarios such as pylon or AV soloing and the drop in recharge does not change your attack chain or un-perma critical self buffs, then yes. On the other hand if the drop in recharge leaves a gap in your attack chain, it may not be worth it (and as a counterpoint to that, the highest-DPS BS attack chain showed that sometimes living with a gap in the chain actually produces higher DPS). There could be a situation where getting that last 5% recharge bonus produced a slightly higher gain than someone who didn't crunch the numbers and assumed hitting harder is better. If your powersets have long-recharge key powers (e.g. Shield Charge) then you could argue that some slight sacrifice in single-target DPS is worth the shorter recharge on AoE burst damage. It really would depend on the character in question, your playstyle and what sort of content you usually play against.

This is half of what I like about the CoH minmaxing scene. I like character optimization, but at the same time there's rarely a solution that's clearly "best" (if not, it's usually a symptom of a poorly-balanced game) and how you get to that point is an entirely different story. There is tons of room for customization to personal tastes and concept. Some people believe minmaxing is just sitting down with a calculator and a spreadsheet to produce some magical set of numbers, or claim that there's no point to minmaxing in this game. Like the sheep who mindlessly criticize anything related to character optimization, they don't know what they're talking about. What you can say is that minmaxing isn't required for the game, and that's the other half of what I like about the CoH minmaxing scene.

Speaking as someone who has actually teamed with the dangerous little monkey, I can attest that Shred's build performs.

He runs into a mob, flurry of stuff happens, mob falls over, bosses and all. By the time the last guy drops he's (whoosh) gone!

Was fun, although I suspect most of the PuG never even knew what was going on.