Is There a Glass Ceiling For Improving Enhancements?

Honey, I was an English major. We're allowed to repurpose the language whenever we see fit. How else can we win at Scrabble?

Now don't question me.

But why a Glass Ceiling and not just a Ceiling? Adding that word modifies ceiling in a specific way. I would have also accepted "Maximum" and "Cap".

Even before things like the latest enhancement boosters it was relatively easy for many builds to bump up against the limits of ED. There's only so much more anything like the boosters can do before they push us up against all of the existing hard limits.

So no there's not really a "glass ceiling" as much as a concept of "diminishing returns" at work here. That was probably the kind of phrase you were looking for.

Ooooooooohehehe! That made me laugh a lot!

I used the phrase "glass ceiling" because while there are still limitations, you have to know where to look outside the game itself to find out what they are and how they'll limit your toon's effectiveness. Meanwhile, unwitting players are buying/using these improvements not realizing they'll be useless/wasted if used on the wrong toon.

Smarter, more IT proficient players know where/when to research or drill down to find the right info, but to others, there's an increasing risk of burning through market points/improvements that won't always work depending on the toon's build.

I've got a ton of boosters and AT sets I could slot on my main 50 who is already decked out with purple sets, stacked IOs and Incarnate level bumps so I think I'm sufficient but the system still lets me buy in and use boosters, AT sets, etc so I worry these will hit the glass ceiling on total effectiveness and I'll never be none the wiser.

After 7+ years on playing this game, I can't recall all the limitations put in place/rolled back anymore, but i'm still encouraged to buy improvements?! So how can I be sure what i'm buying will still be effective?

And truth be told, I build a ton of spreadsheets at work, so the last thing I want to do is number crunch more spreadsheets when I get home. This is when I wish the game was more plainspoken about what a certain build has achieved, how much more room does it have to grow, and how long before I cap out on enhancement effectiveness?

Because you can't look up women's skirts from the floor below if it's a regular ceiling.

Yes I would agree that depending on where you put things like the Enhancement Boosters they can provide you more or less benefit. But it's not really up to the Devs to tell us the "best" way to use them. There's a certain implied responsibility on our part to either figure our how to get the most value out of them on our own or be content to blindly spend money to get things that we don't fully understand. After all no one really said these things have to be idiot proof.

Some players of this game love to tinker with the numbers and min/max their builds as much as possible. Other people could care less about those things. It's arguable that the only people who are even really going to care about getting the most out of Enhancement Boosters are the people who are knowledgeable with the way the system works anyway. Or to say it another way the people who don't worry about min/maxing probably won't worry about "wasting" Enhancement Boosters either.

A person would only have themselves to blame if they bought a bunch Enhancement Boosters and got upset that they somehow didn't get their full bang-for-their-buck out of them.

Hey! That has nothing to do with biology; it's purely a cultural artifact! If female heroes were encouraged to improve their enhancements the way male and huge heroes are then the gap would disappear in the next generation.

You win the thread.

Huge heroes don't need to enhance their performance; they've already got everything the male heroes are striving for.

That's a difficult thing to communicate because it's so contingent on different conditions. There are general rules of thumb like 3 SOs will max out the enhancement value for most powers before really biting into diminishing returns. There are cases with things like Hasten where, as soon as you reach enough enhancement to perma it, anything more is overkill. I don't think there could be any ingame presentation that would adequately cover or convey the "best" slotting or usage of boosts.

Heck, it's hard to get people to break with the old Habit of 3-slotted Hasten when 2-slotted +5 level 50 IO's works as well, and that's with person to person communication.