Where are the casual players?

It seems like the only discussions on AT builds and play strategies to be found on these forums are relevant to power gamers who are intimately familiar with "the numbers" and have seemingly unlimited access to every IO in the game, no matter how rare or expensive. Am I the only casual player who also isn't a complete newbie?

How do you guys afford to fill up an entire L50 (+1) character with the rarest IOs in the game? How does one do this without farming or spending three years playing the same toon every day? I mean, farming is a metagame practice that I find somewhat puzzling. Farming itself isn't really fun, is it? It is something you do, not for its own sake, but because it is the only way to accumulate the insane amounts of influence necessary to create these ridiculous builds with all those IOs. And yet this has become so common, or so it seems from the working assumptions of threads on builds on the forums, that things like IOs and set bonuses can't be regarded as just "influence sinks" intended to bring equillibrium to the in-game economy. They are now part of the unwritten Standards for End Game Play.

So how are casual gamers expected to participate at what has become the new Standards for End Game Play without farming? When I join teams with my old L50s, which pre-date the Incarnate system, I am self-conscious about the fact that I might get booted for being less than half as effective as everyone else who seems to have full sets of "purple" IOs (or whatever), top-tier Incarnate powers, and so on. I found WoW to be a dreadful experience because keeping up with the requirements of "end game play" was like a second full time job. Prior to the Invention System, COH had always felt like an MMO that had escaped that trap. I'm not so sure it is like that anymore.

Is there still room in this game for casual players who want to experience the max-level content, but who don't want to turn farming into another life's career just to obtain the necessary IOs to be useful on a team nowadays?

Getting to the TOP tier in almost any facet of life requires something akin to 'farming'. Getting promoted, getting the company you founded to be a household name, getting famous (for something besides being famous)... usually, those things require putting in a lot of time and effort. On rare occasions, they don't. Similarly, tricking out a character build requires a lot of farming, either for Incarnate components or for purples or simply for inf to buy stuff on the market. On rare occasions, you get exactly what you need on the first go, and you don't need to farm any more.

Farming is not what the casual player does, though. Even so, a casual player can still join in on end-game fun. All you really need is a little determination (and if you want to run the two Incarnate TFs rather than the Incarnate Trials, you'll also need the first Alpha power -- the first power in a tree is actually really easy to get).

The reason you see so many hardcore builds on the forums is because relatively few casual players even bother with planning out builds, relatively few casual players bother to post on the forums, and few casual players do both. It's the hardcore players who go though the effort to research the archetypes and powersets, who need to plan the build so that they can get the power they want out of it. So it's the hardcore builds you see posted on the forums.

In no particular order:

1) People who boot you for not having purples slotted aren't worth teaming with. This sounds like a platitude but it's absolutely true. You don't need purples. They're very nice to have, but you don't need them. I have no purples slotted, I've never been kicked from a TF or trial.

2) You don't need to farm to get stupid amounts of inf in this game. Yes, you'll probably need to interact with the Market (Wentworths/Black Market, not the Paragon Market) at some point, but you hardly need to become a hardcore marketeer. Sell the drops you get, for a recipe maybe take a minute to see if a recipe is worth more crafted, if so craft it first then sell it. You know how salvage prices on the market are currently ridiculous? Yeah, you might not hate it so much when you're the one selling. Farming is necessary for bleeding edge high-end builds, but those aren't necessary for max-level (pre-Incarnate) gameplay. The pre-Incarnate game is still balanced around SOs.

By the way, try running some tip missions for Hero/Villain Merits (assuming you're not Vig/Rogue, of course). You can get some pretty nice stuff for not very many H/V Merits, and either use them or sell them on the market for quite a bit of inf. A single LOTG +Rech IO can net you as much as 200 million. That'll take you 2 days. 200 million inf in 2 days. No farming, just running missions.

3) It really depends on how you define "fun", but depending on the farm I can find it fun. If I'm playing a well-built and survivable toon, leaping into piles of enemies and pounding them into a fine dust is quite enjoyable.

4) You don't even actually need any Incarnate powers to be able to join or participate in the end-game trials. Yes, they make it a lot easier, but in a full League I doubt anyone will notice (especially if it's a Lambda or BAF and everyone is already used to steamrolling it). You may not find yourself contributing much at first, but with a couple runs you'll be able to start making Incarnate powers. Sadly in order to get the highest tier of each Incarnate slot you do need to grind the trials quite a bit, but you don't need the highest tier. Ideally you'd want tier 3 of Lore and Destiny for the level-shifts (and T3 of Alpha but that one isn't nearly as grindy), but it's a progression, you don't need to be there immediately. And as more trials come out, it won't be quite so grindy (assuming the playerbase at large ever stops being lazy and does something besides BAFs...).

I guess what I'm wondering is this: has the game become one in which the top tier stuff is necessary to adequately participate in all the end-game content? If so, then it seems to me that the game design needs to find ways to make this doable without such an artificial and unpleasant metagame practice as farming. If not, then why are so many players chasing the top tier stuff as if it was necessary?

To my mind, simply expending effort is not farming. In game terms, doing missions and TFs and Trials (without repeating any of it) should be effort enough; it becomes farming when the only reason you are repeating content over and over and over again is to accumulate rewards in a manner and at a rate not supported by the mechanisms of normal play.

And for the record, my day job doesn't feel like farming. I do not repeat the same tedious task over and over again (or sit in a "room", raking in the rewards, while someone else does all the "work"), and even if I did I would regard that as a miserable commentary on my career choice, not as an unenviable but necessary stage in personal development.

There is no content in the game, save the two incarnate tfs, that require you to have any purples of Incarnate powers at all, and the requirement for those two can be gotten in a single TF if you are lucky enough. Both are helpful, especially the Incarnate powers, and you will need them to do MOs fo the trials, but you can get along just as well without.

The casually players are mostly playing the game, casually. They aren't hanging around on the boards plotting how to purple out their warshades.

IO bonuses are great, but once you start teaming they're really overwhelmed by the buffs and debuffs. You can get most of the benefit of IO sets by frankenslotting, and that is very cheap. Then there are some excellent Uncommon sets like Crushing Impact and Thunderstrike which can give great enhancement values and some nice bonuses.

I suggest that when you're waiting for a TF/Trial/whatever to start, you check the info of some of the other characters around you. You'll see that there are plenty of people out there who never even touch the invention system, or who might have a handful of low-level bonuses from frankenslotting cheap sets.

As for what you see on the boards, some people get a lot of fun simply from planning builds.

Thanks, Grouchy! I will check those out.

I remember the apps from the early days that did what Mids does. I forget what the one I used was called, but it let you plot out a build and see the effects of different combinations of enhancements. I used to use that pretty regularly. But that was before the Invention System came along and made the whole process of build exploration feel like an order of magnitude more complex. And, of course, back then obtaining SOs wasn't such a treasure hunt since they could be bought at any level-appropriate vendor for influence.

Having to navigate the auction house, and play virtual day trader, just to obtain IOs (or the recipes and ingredients for them) seems like a lot of work. I know for lots of players it is a game-within-the-game, and they enjoy it. I can only hope that maybe once I get a grasp on it, I might like it too. But I never liked it in any other MMO I've tried, so I'm not sure why this one would be any different.

I believe all the casual players are busy playing their purpled-out warshades.

Here's something that might interest you: the Paragonwiki table of relative values of the different types of enhancements.

That gives a pretty clearly laid out summary of the relative strengths of IOs, and shows why you could completely ignore any question of set bonuses, and still find IOs useful. Mix-and-match slotting of cheap Uncommon sets will give you performance better than SOs, with the added bonus of never wearing out.

('Dual Set IO' means something that enhances dual aspects of a power, e.g. Acc/Dam or Hold/Rech. 'Triple Set IO' would likewise be, e.g. Acc/Dam/Rech. The percentage shown in the total bonus for all the aspects added together.)