What does Pre-ED: stand for in Mids hero designer?

To be fair ED was a cataclysm. It drove many away for a long time. Most I know in game are first year players, and most admit to breaking for as much as 2 years after ED.

It did help lead to a better age however. I love IOs and crafting and its largely a direct result of paragon studios efforts to bring back some of that super feeling lost to us in ED.

So although I do agree ED in the end became a good thing, at the time and how it was done( jack promising no major changes would come with COV and pvp,a nd ED was largely done to try and bring balance to ATs in pvp) lead to probably the worst blow to coh rep we ever had.

Ofcourse that major hit to our rep left with cryptic so now we can go to CO forums and laugh at them all day long

lol yeah id almost forgotten that one. the age of way to easy to get soft cap def for all. Id never even touched those IO sets at the time and still dont really ever go for set def, more a global recharge guy myself. Now if they ever nerf LOTG 7.5 specials down to like 5% there will be hell to pay I tell you HELL!

To be fair with the Zephyr nerf...

Those were extremely odd builds from this - which was the main reason the devs set the bonus that high on a 3-piece bonus.

That explanation doesn't hold water.

Common advice back then was 1-2 Accuracy and 4-5 Damage SOs. Let's assume 1 Acc/5 Dam. The rule of thumb is that ED lets us get to 3 Dam. But that's just a rule of thumb. Typical results from 5- or 6-slotting damage sets puts you easily in the 120-140% raw damage enhancement, and will easily get you to around 105% damage enhancement after ED. Then we consider set bonuses. A lot of my builds get around half an SO's worth of damage bonus from sets by accident - I'm not building for it, it just works out that way. So we're already easily up to around 3.5 SO's worth of damage slotting. Because of the way enhancements add to the base, that puts us up around 75% of where 5 SOs got us. That's before including the damage boosting benefits of something like a damage proc in your attack, compared to those of adding a 6th piece that enhances damage.

Then we have to consider that we can now get all that damage while, in the same 5-6 slots, getting more than an SO's worth of accuracy, more than an SO's worth of endurance reduction, and more than an SO's worth of recharge. Typically you can get around two SO's worth of each of those and one SO's worth of one other. So our 5-6 slots are earning us something like 9-10 slots worth of enhancement, not counting any set bonuses. Then you include that we can probably also have a decent chunk of additional global recharge, a moderate amount of defense to at least one major position vector or damage type pair, and gobs of endurance recovery, and we're able to fire those attacks that are up around 75% of pre-ED damage per activation more often, for longer without stopping, at least as accurately, while being more survivable.

And that's all before Incarnates. If you happen to pick up tier 4 Musculature, you get just shy of an extra SO's worth of damage on every attack, potentially putting you at 4.5 slots worth, or about 93% of where our damage per activation was pre-ED. Before any Interfaces.

If the primary goal of ED was to calm down the rampaging damage we were doing, somebody took that goal out behind a shed, garotted it and dissolved it in a vat of acid. The body has never been found.

That was back around the time of the Cryptic 15: knowing something was coming was totally irrelevant to knowing when it would come. God couldn't have told you when the invention system was coming. In fact, I don't even know who originally worked on it, but I can tell you the original system was started sufficiently early that by the time it was handled to Castle the original person that worked on it wasn't there anymore and had not been there for quite some time. Castle couldn't answer most of my questions about the thought process behind the invention system because he literally had no idea at all what that was.

It didn't help that Jack was not a numbers person, and did not have the intuitive grasp of what was going on that would prompt him to make specific statements like that. Honestly, not many of the devs talking to us at the time did. By his own admission, Castle didn't even have an intuitive grasp on how accuracy and tohit worked at the time of ED and was not in a position to question anything. In a response to one of my posts complaining that under "enhancement diversification" Super Reflexes had nothing else to slot for besides defense anyway Positron said that was an advantage of SR because it didn't "need" slots and could use them on offense. How I emerged from Issue 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 with a reputation as a "dev-apologist" confuses me to this day, as I was one big facepalm throughout 2005 through 2007.

I can say what the purpose(s) of ED was, but that's informed judgment and extrapolation from talking to people at the time and over time. The "smoking gun" for the true proximate reasons for initiating ED doesn't exist anymore in any public record. However, I can say it wasn't a single reason, but a confluence of them that combined with an opportunity that existed with the development of City of Villains.