Pre ED vs. IO's/Incarnate

Pre-ED my Dark/Dark Defender was flooring -to hit on mobs and I always had multiple Dark Fluffies out thanks to six slotted Hasten. While I do indeed miss the days of seeing fire tanks herd the entire map and dive into a dumpster to burn everything and watching blasters nova all over...I definitely like the modern era a lot more--things are a lot more evened out nowadays.

Overall I think things are better off now than they were in pre-ED days, and if you count incarnate abilities, in general, we're all more powerful too.

But I sure do miss being able to kill 300 guys at a time with inferno on my fire blaster.

I just hate to pile onto Shubbie but he's even wronger than he appears prima facie due to super sidekicking. Remember bridging? Who could forget? I can't even explain the concept without using profanity so I hope it's fresh in everyone's minds. Suffice it to say that I can now take basically any of my incarnates and powerlevel seven arbitrary door sitters. That's somehow worse for teaming than it used to be? Sure.

On topic, I liked how sturdy my old regen scrapper was but what could we really do with it? In considering now versus then balance we must also consider what was on offer in terms of activities. The only way to challenge yourself was pointlessly soloing giant monsters for no reward, tanking hami which said regen scrappers could do while unconscious, and the thrilling challenge of trying to complete a task force back when a disconnect of any kind meant you were permanently kicked. I didn't see anyone bring up issue zero smoke grenade but it's demonstrative of my point: great, you can kill everything in dark astoria with literally no risk. Then what? Then you probably cancelled your sub in anticipation of WoW's fantastic launch. Now we not only have plenty of absurd power, we have challenges to apply it to.

If you just play the game, sell your stuff when you find it, you will comfortably earn (without exaggeration) billions.

I did it myself - after I stopped bothering with flipping on the market and I just did a bunch of hero tips and 50 content.

It's so easy to make money you just play your character and you'll be right.

You used to get around 200-300 millions influence if you played from level 1 to 50 normally, without farming anything, selling your common stuff (enhancements, standard IOs) to the vendor and listing your remaining drops for 1 influence on the market. With the introduction of hero merits and signature story arcs and enhancement converters smoothing out the worth of rare IOs, I'd wager that total would be higher now.

So the capacity for learning and knowing things about the game is an onerous requirement and a bridge too far for you?

For the ED vs. IOs conversation, I really prefer it with IOs. They opened many alternative build strategies in addition to leveling the playing field for powerset combinations. Most of my characters are now way more powerful, due to bug fixes, buffs to powersets and most of all, improved knowledge of the game mechanics. I do miss AoEs with no target caps, though




As for the second conversation in this thread:
I think it's rather funny that people assume you are talking about a totally min/maxed super expensive build when all you did was mention the phrase "IO build". If getting an IO build made up of uncommon sets is too much of an obstacle, all that tells to me is that you aren't willing to put the slightest bit of effort in getting IOs. Just doing missions has uncommons raining on you.

Claiming that IOs are difficult to get is just ridiculous, claiming that it is difficult to maximize the benefits of the various IO set bonuses is a whole other thing. And, to be honest, there is nothing that difficult about the market that a little bit of effort and thinking wouldn't get you through. That effort might very well require you to - *gasp* - ask someone for help or actually find out about it on the internet on your own if getting help is too much for you.

As Nethergoat said, I don't think there should be any sympathy for those who claim it's too hard to get stuff in this game. For the past year I've been playing on a very limited time schedule (military service, woop) and still have managed to get billions worth of stuff just playing the game and not even touching the market for anything else but selling drops or buying stuff I'm actually intending to use. It might require some knowledge on the game, but it really isn't that hard to come by if you want to find out.

In any other environment people wouldn't have any qualms about people telling you to do something if you wanted to reach a goal, but in MMOs it seems many think it's the goal that should move to reach you.