So Blasters never got fixed?

The discussion ? Ehh not so much. Watching how the sides are shaping up and the patterns of attack and defense, that's like looking at a grain of sand and seeing all the world* mirrored in it.


*Well at least all the issues that lead up to that steep decline in subs when the rest of the industry was growing.

If you want, I'll explain in PM.

AF: Now paying a sub fee to read my 'discussions!'

...What?

not since august.

Is that a singular your or a plural your? If you're speaking about me in particular, I think you're mistaken due to being somewhat autistic. Either that or you are genuinely pulling the same bait and switch that everyone who has been on the internet for over a year has seen.

That must be it! Good job, you figured it out. Please accept your prize with humility and move along.

Yes, unequivocal, from the latin un-equi-vocal meaning to speak from back end of horse.

un·e·quiv·o·cal/ˌəniˈkwivəkəl/

Adjective:

Leaving no doubt; unambiguous: "an unequivocal answer".

Arcanaville: Unable to tell a horse's *** from unambiguity since 9/20/12 at 12:34 AM!

While I agree strongly with this, I will at least say I doubt that was the original intent. I think they just didn't think it through that well. Granted, a lot of us told them that it was going to work that way, but probably very late in the total design.

The issue wasn't so much the IOs themselves. You can build pretty decent exemplar builds assuming unlimited access to the IOs you want. Not as rocking, perhaps, as a build slotted with straight 50s, but still way, way better than it would be otherwise. The problem is that "unlimited access to the IOs you want" was not close to typical. I gather it wasn't an insurmountable problem for a lot of posters in this thread, actually, but I don't think we're very typical.

I will definitely concede that some powersets are way, way stronger with one or two of their powers, and that they can be comparatively mediocre without them. The thing is, whether people can have fun progressing stuff we consider mediocre is very subjective. As long as a powerset met a certain basic level of functionality, I could play it through 25-odd levels on baseline or near baseline difficulty, then start bumping it up once I picked up the heavy hitters. I realize not everyone has that patience. To me, though, this was more a matter of "could be done better" as opposed to "is really bad".

What is terrible about intentionally playing the most advantageous character? That sounds like winning to me. Are you one of those people who picks the worst character in fighting games and then whines when they get the hell beaten out of them and blames character selection for it? And who said anything about "least restrictive circumstances?"

Yeah, winning by playing only the most advantageous characters. Congratulations; you took the biggest handicap the game will allow, and you won, whatever that means. Me, I'd call restricting yourself to a tiny subset of the game's possibilities in a game that is valued for its breadth of possibilities "losing".

So what is the alternative? Intentionally not playing the most advantageous characters? So I should spend time and in game resources playing and developing characters and builds that I know for a fact will not perform as well as others? I see nothing logical about this.

No no, I'm not saying to avoid any character that is advantageous. Just that specifically seeking out advantageous combos, as the primary consideration, is deliberately seeking a handicap.

Congrats, you did stuff with your Archery/Mental. Other players did similar stuff with characters that are, according to you, weaker. That would, by most estimations, make you the inferior player.

Calling advantageous investment a handicap is a logical fallacy. If we were discussing another means of investing money and time for personal gain (which, make no mistake about it, is exactly what MMO's are.) Say, the stock market for example- Would I have a handicap because I intentionally invested my research (time) and money (money) into the most advantageous stocks I could find? Or would I just be demonstrating that I can make logical decisions that I am able to profit from?
So choosing to handicap yourself and obtaining similar, while not optimal results (because the results won't be optimal in comparison) makes you superior? I'm sorry, but I'm just not able to follow your train of thought to a logical conclusion.

Also, just to clarify, because this isn't a point that I don't make often enough...

I do believe that there is a place for playing suboptimal characters. I do it on a fairly regular basis, in fact; I have a well build but unpurpled Peacebringer that I am very fond of playing, for example. He is just enjoyable to play for me. I have other alts too- And that's how I make the distinction. I have my serious, well-built and heavily invested in characters who I expect to perform at the highest possible standard. These are the ones that I put the most emphasis on and spend the most time playing- Hopefully for good reason. But I also have my "casual" characters, or my alts, that I play for purely lighthearted and often sentimental or investigatory purposes, or, because I'm bored or curious.

The moral of the story is that I put quite a bit more time and inf. into my mains than I do my alts, and for good reason- Because they perform at a higher level. When I knowingly play my Peacebringer, or my Energy Blast Corruptor, I know for a fact that they will not perform as well as my mains. I don't whine or gripe about their level of performance, and I don't expect them to be as good as serious characters. That's where the disconnect seems to be occurring here, when people expect sets that are known to perform at suboptimal levels to be as good as sets that function at and reach the highest levels of performance.

This is the fundamental disagreement. Whether or not MMOs are about being as powerful as possible, rather than some other form of "personal gain" with character power only maybe a tertiary goal at best.

We're talking about a game where the ability to use Excalibur at level 1 (even though you can earn it for free at level 50) costs more than any IO and most full sets of IOs. Saying that optimizing performance is more important than having a good costume or playing out your character concept or whatever is, in this game, factually incorrect.

So, congrats: you brought a gun to a knife-fighting club. You win, but you kinda missed the point, and insisting that everyone else in the club isn't as good as you is kinda annoying.

Edit: (This response was composed before I saw your edit above. Please note that I really have nothing against you, and at most mildly disagree with your approach to the game. I'm just holding a silly face to see which of us cracks up first, since that has appeared to be the theme of this entire thread.)

Those things cannot be quantified. Character performance can be logically understood and right or wrong, best and worst, can be determined in a logical fashion. I can't import the quality of your costume vs mine into excel nor the amount of fun that you're having vs me. The only thing that we can reasonably understand and compare is character performance.

The difference is that whereas your approach to finding enjoyment in the game is entirely subjective and unprovable by logic and reason, thus making it unreasonable and pointless by nature, my approach to the game can be understood and explained in a sensible fashion. I think logic is fun, you think it's fun to be illogical. I have to say that if we're attempting to establish which of our approaches makes sense and which doesn't, it has to be advantage: me. But then you have fun by making no sense, as we've demonstrated, so I won't hold it against you.

In principle, maybe, but I've never seen you manage it. OOH BURN

Sorry. I get testy when people call me factually incorrect.

The only problem is that in COH, there's no rule saying that guns aren't allowed. So if I'm the only one who brought a gun, I didn't do anything wrong. Everyone else is just retarded.