Ridiculous Ideas: Changing how exemplaring and IO's work

I find myself thinking stupid things sometimes. Even after only typing the subject line, I find myself mulling over a myriad of problems with my idea and how it will never work and even if it was implemented everyone would hate it and hate me for mentioning it.

But what is the loathing of the masses if not a first step on the road to acclaim? The bottom rung of a ladder if you will, a ladder which you will climb, with your enourmous clown-shoe clad feet, precariously teetering and over balancing yourself with each step, occasionally catching the needlessly long false toes of the shoe on the rungs as you try to maneuver your foot into a position that allows you to ascend. But ascend you shall.

So what dubious notion has weeded it's way into my head?

I don't like how exemplaring and IO's work. Yeah. I'm whining that the game mechanics don't adhere to some imagined ideal that might not even be ideal, or even imagined. It's needlessly complicated, and makes high level players compete in the market for low level inventions, when perfectly good low level characters could be buying them instead. Or something. There's this incredible pressure to buy "Level 25 or the lowest possible level" of inventions, resulting in prices for low level stuff to be way higher than high level stuff. ED prevents the higher enhancement bonuses of higher level stuff from being that much of an attractive force away from the promise of "having all your set bonuses in sirens's' call" (no I do not know how to use plurals' apostrophes). Part of what bothers me about this is that I, as a player of a lower leveled character, don't have the option of saying "To heck with it, I'll just slot the level 50 version of the set".

Aside from demolishing the value of hours of effort on the part of thousands of players, in the assembly and collection of the components of their builds, inverting the value of both salvage and recipes as levels increase, throwing the market into chaos and anarchy and making everyone mad, how bad is the following idea:

Hold on, I can't find the formatting stuff to change text size and text color and stuff, so I can't really highlight my text satisfactorily. I'm "BBcode" illiterate, so lemme have a couple shots in the dark here.

Ah, there, hexcodes, you're like an old friend.

What if when exemplared, you had:

>All of the set bonuses of sets slotted in powers you still "have" at your new combat level
> All of the set bonuses of your Purple Sets

Really, this is an awfully large amount of writing for "I don't like the 3 levels below rule change it", but I will say that I've always found the rule puzzling. It seems terrifically artificial and wierd, and inconsistent with the rest of the exemplar system's treatment of your enhancements. After all, you aren't deprived of enhancement values based on the level listed on the enhancement.

Sure the change (modestly) removes value from Purple sets. It turns the whole market for salvage and recipes on its head, all in the name of helping some level 25 jerk slot some sets as he levels up? Screw that guy, the entire WORTH of low level recipes and salvage is at stake here, by devaluing low level drops, you're robbing that very same player of the ODIUS amounts of INCOME that he could be GLEANING from his drops.

Is this too much to ask? Is it worth exploring what would happen, in a strictly theory craft environment? Have I answered my own question already? Here, let me click the mad-face icon for my post, that'll get attention.

I think this would deprive mid-level recipes of even more value.

I wonder if it might make sense to have non-purple set bonuses scale, rather than disappearing entirely.

Heh, thanks for confirming. I just did a little reading up too. I was confusing and combining the functionality of procs with the functionality of normal IO set bonuses.

This BASICALLY tosses my idea on the midden-heap, at least in my eyes. Unless I wanna go out on a limb and say that ALL IO's should have exactly the same benefit that was supposed to set Purple sets apart, in the context of exemplaring.

Actually, I'm on a roll, why NOT say it, I'm in that kind of mood.

All IO set bonuses should be available at all levels, regardless of the color of their text.

Purple sets have ENOURMOUS set bonuses, and enourmous enhancement value, which should be more than enough to set them apart and help them maintain their value in the face of a sweeping buff to every IO in the game.

Prove me wrong.

And for a final touch I'll add a sunglasses icon to my post. Because HECK YEAH SUNGLASSES.

I HATE YOUR IDEA.

I HATE YOU.

I'M REALLY MAD.

... wait, what was the idea? Lemme go think about that for a minute. I'm easily led.

It wasn't really the idea to make you mad, or anyone mad, though usually mad people work harder to put people in their place (although not neccessarily more effectively), which is something I might need. Putting into my place that is. I'm like a plate that's fallen off the shelf, and onto the floor of the market forum. The question I'm posing is "Am I broken and destined for the rubbish bin, or did I land in one piece?".

Or is it?

Truth is, I'm pretty sure "I'm wrong and my ideas are bad." and I should be devoting my time to another thread about fixing defense-stacking instead, because at least I myself am confident about the quality implementing my (as yet unarticulated) ideas would confer upon the game.

I <3 this thread. It's nice to see interesting discussion that's fun and respectful all at once.

I've been confused by the exemplaring rules too. It's nice to see them discussed. My intuition would have led me to expect that slots would grey out as I exemp'ed down, but they don't. If the rule was, for most IOs, the IO works if the slot it's in had been taken at the level the player is exemped to or lower; and then as effective as the IO's level, but not more effective than three above the exemped level? To me this would "unlevel" the character to their exemped point. A higher level IO would never be less effective than a lower level one, but that difference would generally only be slight.

I also recall reading somewhere that the game doesn't record the level each slot was granted at.

I really like the idea of it being power based. That players are encouraged to use weaker enhancements over level-appropriate ones seems like either an oversight or just a problem that would require a really complicated solution.

Like you said, the biggest problem is inertia. A ton of players would feel slighted on the investments they made both in low level and purple enhancements. Even if we could all agree on a perfect solution just changing anything at all about a system that's been around so long would aggravate people.

Second would probably be that it would mix up AT effectiveness in weird ways. Different powersets would be able to slot the good non-damage sets in earlier than others and that might limit the number of competitive ATs further.

Then lastly it might throw off the merit balance of the lower level content. Players blasting through that content with their full set bonuses might decrease the average run-times and result in merit reductions. That would probably also anger the playerbase.

So really I have no idea how you'd fix it. I would probably just determine what set bonuses persist based on the minimum level of the set itself. If your level is above the lowest level at which you could have that bonus, it's fair game. It'd cause a ton of problems, but I feel it'd be a net gain. That's just me though.