Raise the inf cap

I've tried slotting my MA/SR Stalker for +Dam, got about 30% in set bonuses as well as softcapped defence. It was OK. But I'm sure slotting for Recharge (just like my Empath, Warshade, Pain Corrupter duo, every Dominator, ad nauseum) would have resulted in better damage output, what with better attacks recharging more quickly and Focus Chi being up more often. That seems wrong.
I'm pretty sure the values for +Dam set bonuses could be doubled without brekaing game balance.

Lack of good resistance bonuses - I can live with that. Resistance can't be overcome like Defence can (except by unresistable -Res debuffs, which are almost non-existent) and allowing us to build for both could be tooo much. And resistance users still benefit form layering defence with their native resistance.
And we have the alternative to build for +HP. I havent tried that route to see how effective it is yet.

Meaningful mez resistance values would be nice, and very much worth building for on some squishies. If a Malta stun grenade could be brought down from 30 seconds to 15, I'd probably do that for some characters.
Likewise, hold duration and Stun duration bonuses could be made at least twice as big. Currently they're measured in fractions of a second for most powers.

+Movement speed bonuses are an odd one. Make them too strong and they could get unwieldy or unwanted. But, it would be nice to be able to build a dedicated speedster who could have unsupressed combat movement via set bonuses and slotted sprint maybe? I must try that...
[Edit - this had really got me fired up, actually. My Elec/Elec Dom is a superspeedster....Screw recharge, I'm going for movement speed and ranged def and kiting tactics. This could really work...]


I love Kyria's post too, by the way

I hardly ever slot more than three purple sets because I don't have room to slot them. Part of this is what's available on any given character - most can get one each of a ranged damage and a targeted AoE damage or a melee damage and a PBAoE damage, and maybe a hold. Some can get ranged, melee, PBAoE and hold. But melee and ranged damage slots are precious for +defense bonuses.

Most of my characters have 60-70% global recharge. A part of that comes from a few purple sets, the rest from LotGs and assorted 5% bonuses, usually from Doctored Wounds.

Remember, too, that Purples sets have other benefits.

While very few people talk about it as a desirable set bonus, the large +acc in purples can be very useful when you're slotting attack sets with comparatively low accuracy enhancement, like Touch of Death.

Also, some purple sets give relatively significant +recovery bonuses - three of them is about half-way between Numina unique and a Miracle for +recovery.

Purples give fairly excellent enhancement. Even if you just want one of them (very expensively) frankenslot something, there's nothing better in total enhancement percentage except for Hamidon enhancers. It may seem incredible that anyone would frankenslot with purples, but it is done in a few, hard to enhance powers. The example that comes to mind is Siphon Life from Dark Melee; frankenslotting it is the only way to get good enhancement on all its aspects.

Finally, for some players the fact that purples set bonuses ignore exemplar rules is a big deal. Being able to run a level 10-15 Ouro arc and retain 30% recharge and 45% accuracy is a really big deal. In practice I care more about it for TFs than arcs, but Ouro offers a more extreme example.

Purple damage procs, of course, are in a class all their own.

So when I pay 100s of millions of inf per purple for a purple set, I am definitely not just thinking about the recharge bonus. It's probably the thing I care the most about, but on most of my builds, I want all the other benefits too.

Basically, on a tooled-up time-invested main character, recharge helps absolutely everything.

It makes you tougher - Demonic/Eye of the Magus is up more often. Being ablke to cheat death when you plans go awry every 8 minutes is pretty big.
It solves end problems - Geas of the Kind Ones is up more often.
You hit harder - Frenzy or Call to Justice are up more frequently. Moreso than unehanced Build Up in fact.
Powers designed as "sometimes powers" become part of your way of life - once per radio mission god-modes instead. I definitely felt this on my level 50 Grav/Empath once I started purpling and collecting LotG's.

And then numerous powers like Mind Link, Eclipse, empathy Auras, World of Pain all cause recharge to boost other characteristics far better than the set bonuses to those characteristics could.

_23X_'s comment: "also recharge isn't splintered like say def is you don't get recharge to AOE range and melee so it adds up a lot faster."
really got me thinking. Imagine if recharge was splintered, like you got a bonus of "+5% Recharge on damage attacks" or "+5% Recharge on defensive powers"

Misaligned said

I liked smurphys suggestion of introducing inf tokens that you could store inf in.

Misaligned: You've got an 88'er and you are worried about wasting inf?

I don't think I have any purples slotted (I could... I've been wrong before in public.) But I'm not going to say that I do anything smarter with my inf than a purpled-out crazy person does.

I know this isn't helping put the game on track, but there are some more aspects of the game that make this kind "long tail" on things like recharge (where the last few percent improvement are the hardest - and often most expensive to obtain) important.

There are two effects that play into this. One is HP regeneration. The fact that foes, especially big, tough foes like AVs and GMs, have high HP regen means that the benefit of an increase in DPS is not linear in terms of the time it takes you to beat them down. That means that the seemingly decreasing gains in DPS we get far out on the +recharge graph can translate to better improvements in kill than they may appear to. This is most important to people who build to do things like solo AVs, but it can matter even in more typically team-oriented fare. Beating down Reichsman comes to mind.

This also works on the flip side when you're talking about things like your own click heals (self or ally). A 5% increase in how fast you can dump healing on people could be a much larger increase in the time it takes mobs to kill you (or your allies). That can translate directly into the ability to play on higher difficulties, which probably means more XP or inf/time played. (Not that healing is usually the strongest effect we have going in our favor, but it can be extremely helpful as a backstop behind other mitigation types.)

Finally, getting your AoEs back faster can have a way, way nonlinear effect on how much stuff you can survive. This is because the damage you take over time is a function of how many foes you're facing. The faster you can kill them off, the less damage you take per unit time, and the more (or the higher level of) foes you can survive in the same timeframe. Going back to the footstomp example, killing off the minions in a x8 spawn 20% faster might reduce the damage you take per spawn by two or three times that. (I tried to quantify it better as I wrote that, but there are just a ton of factors.)

Anyway, the above isn't meant to try and convince anyone they should spend a lot of money on purples if they aren't interested in it. It's just to put a tiny bit of science into the idea that high order recharge buffs can be really a lot more valuable than their raw recharge ratio (or absolute time change) benefits might suggest.

aaaaaaaaaaaaand UberGuy makes my point 1000x better and uses logic and facts and stuff.


=(

For some reason, this thread seems like Dejavu I could have sworn I read this before, well at least up to page 2 about a few months ago... weird... any way carry on.

ummm guys and gals we have to figure out how to help 95%+ of the players afford SOs before we can tackle inf caps.