Willpower. Why an aggro penalty after inherent stamina?

There is a chicken and egg thing going on there. The first time I leveled a character, before endurance costs everywhere got slashed with ED, I felt I had lots of fun with the game. It was once I experienced the game with Stamina that rolling a new character was torture.

In fact, recently I started leveling a new willpower character and I felt the same way again... I was tired of crafting random enhancements only to get by until I was able to do a real build that I just went with SOs.

Not having access to an IO build, with pure SO, reminded me of the same deal all over again. With IOs it's easy to have 95% damage, +30% accuracy, +40% recharge and +40%-90% endurance discount on all attacks. Especially if you are willing to do some frankenslotting.

So even with "dual stamina" on a WP tank, I felt endurance was lacking drastically.

I think the biggest reason for players to not stick around long was lack of content. No high end content forced players to re-roll new characters to have something to do, and that forced them into a much harsher experience than they remembered, not to mention before free-to-play, the low level content was spread all over the world making travel powers nearly a requirement.

I do agree if I was to make the game anew I would definitely change the endurance mechanics, but mostly with the goal that they are constant throughout the game, across every build with very few very carefully considered exceptions.

One thing I would definitively do is grant players a startup travel power pick.

I think Arcanaville wanted toggles to cost no endurance, at least primary/secondary self-defense toggles. The toggle-dropping that came out of endurance cost is one of the most annoying things of the endurance system.

I argued a few things, like "what is the point of toggles being toggles?" or "don't you think that would boost damage too much proportionally speaking (since more endurance budget now goes to damage.)

An Idea that crossed my mind out of that conversation and I wanted to push in the future was to change how endurance works for toggles. For one, remove endurance cost on all toggles. Then add all toggles a self -MaxEnd debuff. This results in a "burden" from toggles that justifies them being toggles and not passives, removes the randomized toggle dropping from running out of endurance while also keeping a significant design choice that toggles should lower your damage endurance budget.

Rebalancing this would have been tricky, though, the entire model may end up changed and new rules set for different types of toggles. One of the reasons I was planning to propose this post i24, needed more time to come up with a balanced proposal.

For me, the invention system was the end game. It was something that all of my characters could assist each other in, pooling their drops for planning builds. Because this game (another of its excellences) lacked the nonsense of character binding, I never felt like I was wasting time playing a max level character; or for that matter bringing a high level character to a lowbie task force. I always had an alt that could use that purple recipe. I could always use another piece of rare salvage, especially the first and second tiers. I could always use some more merits for random rolls. It gave purpose to super groups and bases.

I was rather disappointed that most of the recent new content relates to progression raiding. That was always the sort of thing I came back to this game to get away from.

Funny, I had a really similar idea from that.