Top 10 Most Useful Game Elements People Never Use

Two points:

1. What's it to you? If "I don't wanna" is sufficient for you, then why the flying Dutchman do you even read why I don't wanna?

2. What does that have to do with "perspective?" That I should realise other people have resigned to using ugly workarounds and never look into actual solutions? Not how I roll, bub.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That's kind of what I mean, though - it's a fixed flat speed. Is that really more comfortable than mouse look? Maybe I just notice the excessively bad examples, I don't know. But I keep thinking there'd be less complaining about camera control in caves if more people used mouse look.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Another vote for this. Ran across an Empathy Defender who deemed Clear Mind as worthless, so he didn't take it.

I wept.

/signed especially the part about inspirations. I can STILL recall a number of years ago, shortly after Faultline was revamped, joining a team with an EMP defender and having the leader tell me. "Now don't bother attacking just keep healing us" During the course of the battle against the Skyraider AV several of the Scrappers were bragging about never bothering to carry rezzes or even respites.. "OH I see. tell the pitiful little defender not to attack and just stand there with healing aura on auto while we bash stuff so we don't have to do anything as mundane as say.. try keeping ourselves healed? Then lets run all over the map so she has to rush around like an idiot trying to hit everyone that's trying SO hard to die with Heal Others and rushing into mobs to try and rez your sorry butts when you get in over your head." Unless I know the mission I am about to do involves an EB or AV where a few added Resist Damage/Enhance Defense inspirations will help.. my trays have nothing but respites, catch a breaths, a few rezzes and a couple break frees (skip those last on characters that resist that through their normal defenses). I swear some people think that tray is for decorative purposes only LOL

Let's add TEMP Powers to the list.. I collect them but and will go out of my way to do arcs and missions that award them. But unlike some people I actually USE them. Okay so if my normal attacks are working fine I don't waste a temp just to say I used it but the Bow you get from a mission in Croatoa has 75 arrows and is a great way to pull a mob away from another in a mission. Warwolves and Shivan come in very handy against many GMs or AVs... call it a form of team defense I just added a few more bodies to share the damage output. The Wedding Ring Stephanie gives you in Striga is a nice added defense against an EB or AV. And I use my Raptor pack when I am in the Hive battling Hamidon or on an STF battling the Arachnos flyer... uses less, if any, END and allows me to spoend more END doing damage.

To the people complaining about teammates not using inspirations: I didn't use a purple when the Longbow ambush hit us because I'd used them all up. [Insert tirade about Longbow.]

To the people complaining about teammates not using temp powers: I didn't pop a Shivan for the tough AV fight because I didn't have any. [Insert tirade about PvP zones.]

Tirades about Longbow and PvP and bases have nothing to do with complaints about people with a FULL INSP TRAY and A WHOLE BUNCH OF TEMP POWERS and A FULLY FUNCTIONAL BASE not taking advantage of those things.

It's kinda hard when you use the arrow keys to steer so you can use your left hand to activate powers. I honestly have no idea how people manage to move with WASD and still attack.

Because it seems a lot of people are about speeding through things as fast as possible and getting as much XP as possible in the minimum amount of time. That....doesn't really work with AE. Authors don't necessarily follow the devs' unwritten rules for mission creation (Anything important is at the back. Objectives are marked as "Defeat bad guy" and "get the thing" in the nav bar. "Seek clues" and "get the thing" means a blinky. Reading anything is unnecessary, the mission is idiot-proof.) The newer missions we get in Praetoria and tips break those boring old rules, but AE authors were doing it first. Plus you get no mission complete XP and no patrol XP.

This doesn't matter if you're 50, since tickets are a constant, steady source of inf; to (mis?)quote Nethergoat: AE allows you to print your own money. This does however require that you have some idea how to spend those tickets and how to use the market.

And we come to the last hurdle: Unless you read the forums or are a member of the MA Arc Finder global channel, finding good arcs to play is a massive pain. You find something that looks interesting, click Play, and it turns out it hasn't been updated in a year and you get creamed by the named boss and his five clones in the first room. Or it won't even start. Or the author has no idea how to design a custom group balanced for the arc's level range (tip: If you see "level 1-54" and "Enemy group: custom" in the same arc, skip it) and you die horribly on the first spawn. Or the author has taken lessons from the crappy, outdated i0 Dev content and the first mission is a lead-out on a four-story lab map with multiple elevators. And you only get that outdated, poorly balanced, poorly thought out arc after sifting through four pages of farms, spelling errors, Extreme everything, one mission one-note jokes that aren't funny (usually containing the aforementioned 1-54 custom group) and "look how cool me and my SG are."

tl;dr version: Playing AE = effort, Path of least resistance = paper or Council Empire farm.

By the way, to anyone reading this who wants to try AE anyway, there is a newly stickied thread in the MA forum, "A Contact Tree for MA Arcs (by level range and theme)" A lot of those arcs are really good, and none are farms or badly written and plagued with typos.

Well, if you can tell that a person has a fully-functional base complete with these things, then yes, I can see how that question would be interesting to get an answer to. I didn't get that from the original post, or any of the subsequent ones. All of them assumed people already had bases and why didn't they do that with their bases.

All I'm saying is that some reasons that you don't see as many people using Empowerment buffs include:

1. Not having/wanting a base to begin with.

2. Being a member of a SG that doesn't give you permission to add one.

Of course, I'm sure you can snark me over that, as well, but using empowerment station buffs is not as much a no-brainer as you guys make it out to be. It's like me being AMAZED that people don't use Mastermind binds - yes, they are useful, but not everyone wants to mess with binds. Or macros.

*edit*
If you want to say that my posts are off-topic, then go ahead and say it. Allusions do no-one any good.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I can tell they have a base with empowerment stations if they're in my SG. I can tell they have a base with empowerment stations if they're in an SG I team with frequently and whose base I have visited. They still don't use empowerment buffs.

Your tirades about the problems you have with SGs and bases are off topic. Your posts about mouse-look are completely on-topic, I'm just explaining why I personally don't use it.

I only use these on Task Forces where the team is low on support or early in the game to solo faster. I don't use them more often because even with 3 recipes per buff, chances are I won't have all the salvage needed for any of the recipes and have to waste time at the market getting something to complete a recipe.

Indeed. My Plant/Fire Dom has Seeds of Confusion slotted to be so easily stackable that it gets used in nearly every fight.

We don't have 20 or more slots until pretty late into the game. Plus the game seems to love to get stingy at times and leave you with several empty slots for a good while if you're eating them like candy. Then there is the combination mechanic, which only works with 3 inspirations of the same type and size; not very helpful when I have a small blue, a medium blue, and a large blue.

Because of all that I like to save them for when I actually need them. Fighting minions is not a time to be chowing down on inspirations. Fighting tough bosses, EBs, and AVs are what they're for in my opinion.

Because most of the vet pets suck and die in the first AoE that gets thrown at you. Plus they cannot keep up if you like to sprint from spawn to spawn like I do on Brutes, Scrappers, and Stalkers.

I don't use binds as there are very few things I would want to use on all my characters besides the default ones. Plus I have a hard time remembering all those binds. The only macros I bother with are target macros on my Dominations for quickly picking out Mages, Nullifiers, Spectral Lords, etc...

Sounds like the most annoying team ever, drone jams in every g'damn door. Also chances are that everyone else is here to fight, not watch a third of the team do all their work for them.

/signed 1000x

Fair enough. I didn't get that from the previous posts, but I could have missed it.

Fair enough. Will stop.

Oh... I actually read that as sarcasm My bad, will re-read. Gimme' a sec.

...

OK, so you're saying you use the arrow keys to steer because you don't like to use WASD, thus you can't have the mouse in your hand at all times to use mouse look. OK, I can see that. I didn't think people used the arrow keys to steer, however, and that's probably personal bias showing up.

Once upon a time, used to use the Numpad and the mouse to play FPS games, until I played Oni, where I couldn't alter my keys without digging though settings files. Oni used WASD, so I had to get used to that. Battlefield 2, then, forced me to use WASD because the Numpad was taken up by functions I could never find in the keybindings (I assume system functions) and the game did not allow me to override previous binds. Since then, I've taken to using WASD in City of Heroes because I got used to it, and because it's closer to the bulk of the keys on my keyboard. I tend to have around 18 binds on most characters, give or take, so the Numpad doesn't cut it.

To each their own, I guess. I just know I'd fly out of my mind if I had to use the keyboard to steer. The last time I did that was Duke Nukme 3D, and I do not miss that game.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Lisa tilts her head in thought....actually.....I think if there were a list of AE missions that give ok XP and good tickets, people would play them.

I know I would...heck...I would play for tickets alone.

Is there such a list somewhere?

Lisa.

Like Rularru later?

Ask and thou shall receive.

You can also click the link at the top of my signature, all of my arcs give proper XP and Tickets within the constraints of the AE system.

Yeah, my Illusionist thought her Deceive power was so underwhelming, she ran out and got herself some Nectar, bought an excess amount of clothing to show off her Socialite status while in Pocket D, which just lead to a World of Confusion.

Angel Red
"We're heroes. Fighting injustice is the thing we do." ~Rebel Scum

Im one of those Well i use W for left, E for right and the arrows for general direction. I also use the numbers to activate my powers I cant see how people play with clicking the powers

SHHHH!!! First rule of Confuse Club, and all that...sheeeesh!

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."

I hate Inertial Reduction. I already have a travel power and would prefer that my air control be consistent at all times thank you very much.

Please stop spamming it at the damn market/wentworths as well. Better yet, Devs please make that area a no powers zone already.

As a lefty, this (http://www.simhq.com/_technology2/technology_091a.html) has pretty much saved my gaming/mmo'ing life. I always had to re-bind all my relevant keys to the num pad so I could keep my left hand on the mouse pad, and then steer with the arrows... very messy setup in a lot of games, trying to decide which most vital keys I could bind around. The Zfang is the best lefty-friendly pad I've come across, easy to use, and I can bind different layouts for the different games I play. I <3 it.

You know, I'd kinda put "keybinding" in the list of 10 useful elements people overlook. You can really customize your game playing keys, be they on the keyboard or a pad, to do most of the useful things with the most convenience to you. I know that's one of the first things I do in any game.

This could be the number one most useful game element I never used. I don't really look at the Control tab (except to turn off screen shake, another useful game element I didn't use until recently)....until now. I just turned my turn speed up to 560% or so, and it's working out quite nicely. Thanks.

This. I unbind a lot of keys (the tray swapping ones in particular, I don't swap trays, ever.), and set R to "target nearest." What do I need autorun for? So I can accidentally press it at the most inconvenient time? Target nearest, on the other hand, I do need readily available, since tabbing through all the enemies doesn't cut it, and whenever I try to mouse-click on an enemy someone/something else always seems to get in the way. I actually started using it when I was playing Blasters a lot, and the nearest guy needed a Bonesmasher to the face, NOW.

You're not likley to notice the people who turn well without mouselook.

If bases weren't so difficult and annoying to build and manage, I might investigate this. As it is, though, it's too much of an aggravating time-sink to be worth it to me.