arcane

I sincerely apologize that you’ve been this week’s scapegoat for my ire and angst. Someone’s gotta do it. This post reads like you understand 🙂 This is all relatively inconsequential. I just think the raid issue feels inconsequential too once you take into account the fact that each character needs to make a grand total of one Null trip for the rest of eternity for the Group Fly fix. Even if you miss one raid to do it, in doing so you’re set for life. But I digress.

Now to turn off the sarcasm and give my real thoughts on Gull. I certainly couldn’t care less about “punishing” other players - what a vivid imagination... Here’s the thing about Gull. Gull is an ugly, inelegant monument to this game’s developer’s failures. It is the in game equivalent of expressing that “I can’t fix this, but I can clumsily apply a whole roll of duct tape and call it good enough.” Null literally only exists because the devs had a few issues that needed a fix and they couldn’t make heads or tails of how to do it with the game’s code/settings. If I’m a dev for this game, I not only want there to be no more than one Null, but I’d also kind of prefer he be shoved into a janitor’s closet in Pocket D so the stain on this game is less visible. Null is a last resort that we only barely want to exist, not something to be proliferated and celebrated. Although it is mildly comical that he manifests as a wisecrack bird. I would say P2W Vendor is in a similar boat although its offerings are a good bit more addictive. But I wouldn’t mind changing her name to GameShark or Cheat Code Store so we’re all a little more honest about what we’re doing there. These may be petty reasons to those personality types here that can only ever seem to ask “why not?” when presented with a truckload of free candy, but I think it’s reasonable to want the developers to pursue a product that is elegant. And when I think of all of the ideas to which some can only say “why not?”.... maybe one or two wouldn’t destroy everything, no. But the responsible developer must think what will happen to the game after 1,000 “why not?” ideas are implemented if they are going to rely on that philosophy at all. It’s not a good argument.

“If it doesn’t hurt other players then there’s no reason to oppose it” is a nonsense argument. It’s a variant of the infamous “if you don’t like it you don’t have to use it / participate in it” trope that just won’t die. Let’s just have a dozen Nulls, P2W Vendors, trainers, and merit vendors in each and every zone. It doesn’t harm anyone, and I can’t stand to move more than 100 ft to find any of them. WHY ARE YOU PUNISHING ME. And yes, that temp power that kills every NPC on the mission map too. We need that and if you don’t want to use it you don’t have to. None of this clearly obstructs your fellow player’s experience and therefore it is all a good idea.

I refreshed my Ice/Regen Brute’s build last night. We’ll see how it goes. My memory of past times with it have always been that it’s effectively as good as the next set as long as you’re mindful of cycling all 4 of your Regen click powers. Basically it seems to play like your goal is “MoG->3 other click powers to survive on for ~45-60 seconds until next MoG->rinse repeat.” I snagged Burnout this time as a failsafe for the rare occasion all 3 clicks are not enough to make it to the next MoG. Barrier Core and Ageless Radial both help too, which one depending on the content. Think I’d prefer Ageless Radial since Regen has vulnerabilities to even more than just defense debuffs.

Also would recommend considering the possibility of a +20% recharge buff somewhere since so many sets get that now, but, otherwise, these are the kinds of modest tweaks that would be welcome but not overpowered.

You can pry the current version of MoG from my cold dead hands. It’s one of the two best god mode powers in the game right now, along with Icy Bastion.

Just noting that meta builds were being painted as (1) sticking to SS/SJ/Leadership/Fighting/Flight/Concealment fairly religiously (2) building for defense set bonuses and (3) probably disregarding weak suboptimal powersets. None of those apply to me. I highly value variety in my pool picks, rarely pick up defense bonuses at all, and play everything indiscriminately from Fire Blast to Kinetic Melee, Force Field, etc. IO’s and Incarnates do apply to me, yes. Otherwise, thank you.

You could be quoting “We cant balance the game.” and I can’t see why anything here would change really. It’s pretty much impossible. Be abundantly careful about giving people toys. They will scream armageddon if you try to take one back. Power creep is like heroin.

I don’t really want to continue this little tussle, but I’m very much sick of the seemingly willful representation on particular topics. Half of my posts on this forum are talking about unconventional build choices I like/make, and the other half are defending me from implications that maybe I’d find things challenging if I started liking/making some unconventional choices once in awhile. You can call it ignorance or dishonesty, but it’s definitely one of the two.

Where did I say I have all meta builds with soft capped defense in any of those posts? Interesting to me that Peregrine Falcon has more ranged defense on his one blaster than I have in ranged or S/L defense on any of my ~15 blasters, but I guess you guys know me better than I do, right?

Do you want me to provide a list of each time this tactic was used against me before I got frustrated enough to say something hyperbolic myself? Or can we acknowledge that and move on. Reprimanding someone for something your cheerleaders engage in is not an effective way to convince me of anything.

Please show me your source. Because I think you’re a good dude but you’re kinda making shit up.

The constant misrepresentation in this thread is so dumb. Imagine thinking you’ve read my posts and still thinking my characters are all meta builds with soft capped defense. Let me give you a hint: you haven’t been reading.

“The problem” what problem? All these TO-slotted friends of yours have the entirety of the game already catering to them. Telling people to go run Aeon over and over does nothing to change the fact that 99% of the game remains tremendously easy. If your friends don’t agree with me, they are in luck, because there is no shortage of “easy mode” difficulty settings. Let’s see, you’ve got -1/x1... then there’s +0x1... heck, there’s even -1x2! In total there are 47 other level/spawn size combinations available to all your friends who don’t find +4x8 to be easy. Why on earth should we believe that they’re at any risk of being left behind? I don’t know why you are content for challenge seekers to only have one TF while you have an entire game designed around YOUR casual speed. I think the risk of this game becoming too difficult overall is precisely zero, but your reactions seem to indicate you feel otherwise and I haven’t the foggiest idea where you’d get that.

Basically what’s broken is that toggles are only supposed to have a chance to proc every 10 seconds, but with the way IG creates patches every pulse, it has wound up with a chance to proc every new patch (much more often than every 10 seconds). This was acknowledged as broken by a dev - I want to say it I think it was in a Sorcery thread because Enflame was doing something similar once? Though Enflame couldn’t capitalize on such a thing because it used to have Fear too. To put it in context, my Rad/Fire Brute didn’t have this power procced at all for a long time because I didn’t know any better. Then one day I tried 6 procs in this power on my Bio/Rad Tanker. I *immediately* shelved my perfectly functional Rad/Fire Brute and regarded it as “gimped” until it could be rebuilt the second I saw those procs firing like crazy. Because it really is that strong.

I need to respec my regen brute to finetune it, but my experience was always positive. Most regen critics conflate “clicky” with “bad” to a misleading extent.

Guys I don’t care how accurate this 20-sided die analogy is, comparing video games and tabletop games sounds dumb as hell. Also, nerds. Also I agree that some things will never be fixed. Challenge settings are nice but the regular content will probably remain a joke for eternity. For example, I do not think “x8” will ever come close to meaning “8 players recommended or risk (even the slightest) consequence”.

If this ever were to be a thing, the PvP versions of the zones should not be the versions made into “echos”. I don’t even PvP anymore and I still see that as a bit too blatant a middle finger to them.

I would prefer we circle back to here AFTER doing these sorts of things to... almost every other zone. It’s actually fun to street sweep Moth Cemetary, so I don’t see the logic in crowding the one zone that is already well-used and a ton of fun. Liven up something that *needs it*.

I just want to say I had to look up Staff Fighting on my phone to remember Mercurial Blow, and was on the brink of asking you (sarcastically) to share with the class how you got Moonbeam and Water Spout on one character 🙂

Damn guys. I got scared off of pylon testing reading pages like this one because I can’t seem to break the 1:40 barrier on ANYTHING.

Name me one other game where conventional wisdom is that having maxed out characters and finding the game challenging are regarded as mutually exclusive. You're misrepresenting me and you’re misrepresenting how video games work. Well, a little later on in the post you’re just flat out lying, but I’ll ignore those parts. EDIT: I altered the quoted post so it actually reflects things I have ever said I don’t want to do. Most of the bullet points were just blatant lies if you are attributing those positions to me, so deleted them for clarity.

Yes, that is the case. I, for one, find it unreasonable to suggest people should never reply to others within a thread without drawing everything towards some grand conclusion about the original post, so I do not post that way. If I take issue with a post or have something to contribute related to a post... I post. The GM’s are free to clean up threads as they see fit, but I don’t see “hey I have something to say to a post right here in this thread but I’d better muzzle myself because no discussion is better than slightly off-topic discussion” as a very useful approach to discourse.

I am allowed to respond to posts in the thread that aren’t the original post. Notice you and I are able to quote each other and not just the OP. Obviously I am not concerned about the context of the OP because I am replying to points raised by others and not the OP. You keep trying to bring the OP in where I regard it is irrelevant because that’s not who I’m replying to and I don’t care. Call me off-topic all you want. My posts are relevant to ideas brought up in the thread even if not by the OP, so maybe don’t bring up those ideas if you don’t want them talked about?

And I like it that way dammit. If I have to gut my character of all the things that make it fun to build etc... well I’m just not going to do that ever because it’s a ludicrous suggestion. Again... and I’ve said this surely a hundred times on this forum in the pasr year... playing maxed out characters and having engaging and challenging content are not mutually exclusive things. Any post that pretends they are must immediately be regarded as illogical. Btw you say “and yea, sure, a bunch of procs” like it’s a relatively small piece of the puzzle. But considering I don’t have Fire Ball or Psi Tornado or anything, I would have nearly zero DPS on that character without damage procs (and yes Judgement). Considering Jack is dead half the time at that difficulty, the only thing I have left is literally Block of Ice / Frostbite base damage. So yeah, basically nothing without procs.