Risk = Reward, yes?

1. The point to spawning level 54s is, in fact, to make it harder to defeat the critters.

2. Not only does it "draw out the fight longer" it also seems to actually kill players on occasion. That's part of making it harder.

3. The devs are well aware of the effects of the purple patch on targeted effects vs self buffs. We went through this discussion when discussing tohit debuff enhancements years ago.

4. +DMG is not a "workaround" for -RES. It doesn't work like that.

5. I've never seen a task force team attempt to "work around" the purple patch by carefully constructing the team to replace foe debuffs with analogous ally buffs. That sounds like a hypothetical made-up objection that doesn't actually happen in real life.

6. The LRSF does not need specialist teams. In fact, the entire week it was the WST I did not personally run on one "specialist" team, nor did I have a single failure. I'm not saying everyone succeeded, only that non-specialist teams succeeded every time I was on one, which means specialist teams are not necessary. Right now, Tin Mage and Apex seem to require strong teams. They can't have a lot of people without Alpha. They can't have players that appear to have trouble just getting from point A to point B without drawing aggro from several different spawns and getting killed. They need characters designed to kill things quickly, or support a team strongly, or both. The margin for error on character strength right now is very low. As players progress in Incarnate ability, the margin for error overall will rise.

I bet my farmer is bigger than your farmer.



Am I doing it right?

Just quoting one bit, but that whole post really put things into perspective for me. Thanks!

That said, one thought about the Inf:XP. Minions' Inf:XP ratio is lower than Lts., and Lts. are lower than Bosses. Not only that, but bosses have substantially tastier individual drop rates (although... I haven't calculated the Drop:XP ratio, Lts. may be better in that respect :-? Shard-wise they're identical at least).So in a way, seems like the game does reward taking a higher risk and chasing stronger enemies.

Yet one cannot simply fight a sea of bosses, whereas setting up a fight against a sea of minions and Lts. is easy as pie . AE efforts to have all-boss farms were strongly stopped too.

It all seems to me a bit schizophrenic. On the one hand give bigger rewards for the stronger, more dangerous mobs, and on the other hand prevent one from fighting too many of these. I get the feeling that if the devs decided to up rewards for +4s, they'd change spawning rules to either have them mixed with level 50s, or having spawns go all the way from 50 to 54 in missions. But I don't really understand why, is it the AoE?

Running the same thing over and over for the rewards = farming. How fast or "correctly" you do it is irrelevant.

Someone who finishes an ITF in half an hour by skipping over as much as possible is speed-running just as much as someone who finishes in 20 minutes. Someone who lets their friend's lowbie door-sit in +2 tip missions is PLing the friend just as much as the guy using a +4 Battle Maiden.

So you can run through the same thing over and over faster than everyone else. Congratulations, I hope you derive much enjoyment from being a better farmer than everybody else. Everybody else who is doing what you're doing slower or "not correctly" is still farming. For real, even.

Again, it has to do with thresholds. Although I don't fully agree with all of the collateral sentiments, the discussion above mentions that at some point, the difference between a -1 and a +1 can become too small to be significant. The same thing is true for minions and Bosses.

Important to note that the rewards that critters give is tempered by two factors: how long it takes to kill them, and whether or not they themselves pose enough of a threat to slow you down (or outright kill you). If you're a blaster, the latter is more important than the former. If you could shoot from phase shift, the best thing to do is run a mission full of bosses: setting AoE aside for a moment, Bosses return more rewards (in most cases) than the increased time it takes to kill them, particularly because of the high level of overkill involved in killing minions (you tend to deliver far more damage to a minion than it actually takes to kill them, which means some fraction of your damage output is "wasted" and doesn't generate actual rewards). But bosses are a far higher threat to a blaster: a boss can easily kill the average blaster. For most players playing blasters, bosses offer a higher reward for an even higher risk, and therefore they become a once in a while target, not a continuous target.

But at some point, the amount of personal defense you can put on a character can break that risk calculation. My MA/SR scrapper is soft-capped, has aid self, runs tough, and has over 300% regen. No boss can kill her. No boss can even threaten her outside of some Rularuu and Master Illusionists, and things with high enough tohit buffs. The only difference between running a mission full of minions and a mission full of bosses is how long it will take for me to clear it. The risk side of the equation disappears and it becomes purely a matter of kill-speed: what is faster to kill per unit of reward: minion, LT, or Boss.

Very few games that allow the players control over character development can fully avoid this from happening: players can drive themselves into degenerate areas of the risk/time/reward space. So on top of the general rules governing how much risk is required for what level of reward/time, most reward systems including ours have boundaries: rails that prevent the players from venturing outside some maximum reasonable limits. Farmers are always trying to push the limits of those boundaries, because they've already figured out how to break the risk/time/reward tradeoffs. The devs, in return, have two choices: alter the reward systems globally to force everyone back into the box, or put a fence at that location to prevent people from exiting the box. Usually, they opt for the latter so that players still have maximum freedom within the limits proscribed by the reward system, while still limiting the ability for players to escape it completely.

This is often interpreted by some as "punishing" players who the limits affect. Its not. Its really an artifact of the fact that designing reward systems that have implicit limits such that the system itself simply doesn't have the ability to exceed certain limits is hard, whereas its much easier to create reward systems in which the system in most cases keeps most players within certain limits averaged over time and which have exception rules to deal with deliberate attempts to exceed those limits.

So: bosses tend to have higher rewards because the devs want players to feel rewarded extra for dealing with them when they come up. They do not want the players who can explicitly ignore their threat entirely to be able to set them up like bowling pins. Preventing players from arbitrarily farming maps full of them is a compromise solution.

I don't have any problem with the existences of subcultures dedicated to optimizing particular things. Where I have the problem is when that subculture forgets they are a subculture and starts thinking they are the One True Way.

A while ago I started a thread half-joking and half-serious about a new build I was thinking about for my MA/SR scrapper. Among a lot of interesting ideas, two of which I adapted and incorporated into the build actually, I got one joker claiming that what I was doing wasn't "min/maxing" because they knew what min/maxing was, and min/maxing was all about generating the maximum amount of recharge to power the maximum rate of AoEs. If I wasn't looking for advice and discussion, I wouldn't have started the thread. But if you think its your mission to explain to me what min/maxing is and what it specifically involves, you better have a better story to sell than "min/maxing is about high recharge" or I'm not going to be impressed.

Just like with min/maxing, there are lots of optimization possibilities for farming. Not all of them are acceptable to all players. I invoke the scrapper challenge rule, which is if you can do it at all, you're ahead of the game. The rest is details.


Interesting side note: the majority of good min/maxers I know in the game are almost paradoxically non-elitist.

You make it sound like farming is difficult, which is laughable at best. By your definition, anyone without a purple'd out SS/Fire is not a true farmer.

Well....realistically couldn't i just call it "speed farming" then? I wouldn't mind if that would solve the problem to be honest. If we're a subculture that's branched off of farming, it would kind of need a different name to represent what we do, and "speed" would obviously show the difference, since we try to achieve being the fastest.

Also, i read that MA/SR thread, and i remember that guy arguing about min/max. I'm sure he could have just called it "Min/Max for recharge for AoE" and gotten away with it.

You make it sound like anything in this game is difficult. I remember at the beginning of the game when we used to fail stuff, and now i don't recall failing anything for the past 2 years. Closest i got was at Rom with 4 people, i ended up web nading the nictus' and we all killed rom, then the nictus'. Killing the healing one was such a pain, and overall it took us probably 4 hours. Was horrible. And don't get me started on that 13 hour Dr. Q -_-

Farming -can- be difficult the same way pvp can be difficult, because you're competiting and only one can come out on top. You can call it easy, but there's going to be 1 winner and 10 losers.

Yea i changed it to "speed farming" above just to make it easier. Anyone can farm, but basically, yes, you do need a purpled out farmer to speed farm. That is, have low enough times to compete with some of the best.

Competitive farming in CoX sounds exactly as boring as competitive farming in real life.

Hey, don't knock breeding pigs and growing vegetables!. That can be quite riveting. (especially worrying about a night of frost ruining your prize tomatoes...)