IOs have irrevocably tainted my ability to give advice...

I really love the way IOs let you build your character to great strength, but there's a downside; for a lot of my characters I literally don't remember how they played without them.

For example, you might tell someone asking about Banes that they are strong but somewhat squishy and I'd want to say "What?! My Bane never dies and can easily solo multiple boss at o... oohh, that's right, I softcapped him." Or someone might complain that soloing psi-resistant mobs on a primarily Psi-dealing character makes them want to kill themselves, and I'd want to say it's not that bad on my Mind/Psi dom... but then I remember that I have such high levels of recharge I can pretty much chain Levitate and Telekinetic Thrust endlessly and I'm very likely to have my Toxic Tarantula out as well.

Anyone else unable to help newbies with the sets they have the most experience with because of this?

Flip to Build #2 and drop a bunch of SO's in...

Instant and Direct comparison toon....


Cheers,
4

Like I'd ever play that build, it'd suck.

Yeah, when I'm teamed with people who say, "My enhancements just went red!" and I know that for myself even generic IOs are generally only a stopgap measure until I come up with a real build -- well, it's hard to know what advice I could possibly give them. I haven't used SOs in so long I don't remember what it was like.

I do still have characters who have mostly generic IOs... but then, they're generally toons I don't play much. If I played them more, I'd come up with a nice set build.

There's a reason I like to play my 50's. They're really well built and fun to play!

Yeah that happened to me on my first villain. I'd been playing other characters for ages and finally went back to him. He had only SO's and I was dying like flies in Lysol.

I don't have that problem personally, since I'm an economist. I don't like going through the trouble to slot a bunch of low-level IOs just to throw them in the trash when I want to upgrade them.

What I do instead is use Single-Origin Enhancements all the way up to level 47, at which point I generally respec and frankenslot with level 50 IOs. Those last three levels are epic.

The Haves rarely meet the Have-nots and in my experience they find it difficult to relate when they do.

i run all my toons with SOs until 50, then i start building them with IOs which usually takes me quite a long amount of time (i only have 1 toon which is actually fully slotted, then my next closest to fully slotted is still missing like a dozen purple recipes)

Sometimes IOs have that effect. Especially with characters that have been IO'd since I9. I really don't have a good picture of how they were before IOs were introduced. However, I play all of my characters to 50 using generic IOs from level 27, and only start dabbling in set IOs in the high 30s or low 40s, so I usually have a good idea how the sets perform without being excessively boosted through IOs.

I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, but this isn't news to me. Most people lost their ability to give me advice practically the moment I9 hit. It has become almost impossible for me to ask what a power's good for, what to slot in it or how it works without people climbing over each other to tell me about "set mules" or how it's good for this or that set bonus or how it helped them softcap their defences and suchforth. It's gotten to the point where I no longer want to ask for advice because I'm tired of explaining and re-explaining why I don't do Set Inventions.

Quote:

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 use TOs until 12, DOs until 22, and SOs until at least 47, if not 50. That's probably just the traditionalist inside of me seeping out through the cracks though. A large majority of my 50s have at least some IO sets slotted/frankenslotted, but a lot of them also still have a ton of SOs. This method is probably the only reason I can stay invested in some of the toons I have.... So no, I generally don't have issues giving advice about powers/builds since I still have very recent working knowledge of how most of the powers in-game work "as intended" (without IOs).

I tend to use SOs when leveling, because I am impatient: sure, IOs save time and money in the long term, but I want to punch dudes now.

I also tend to slot IO bonuses to play to the strengths of the sets I am playing, rather than to conjure capabilities that are not inherent to the character, because I plan for the possibility that set bonuses may be altered, reduced, etcetera and I would prefer if my characters degraded gracefully under those conditions.

These two factors tend to counteract the advice-inapplicable issue being discussed.

See, I have the opposite problem. I use IOs on most of my characters, and I use sets for Frankenslotting, but while I have put the time and effort to get a few my alts really twinked out, I simply have so many that if I tried it with all of them, I'd spend more time playing the market than playing the game. So I'll see things on the boards here especially with someone saying "I need help with and X/Y build", and I'll be all, like "Oh, X/Y! I'm pretty familiar and comfortable with those sets! Maybe I can help!" and invariably, it'll be a question about the best way to soft cap, or something similar.