Yoru-hime

I remember back around Issue 5 my Emp/Elec defender wasn't completely unplayable, but he felt pretty darned close. He could contribute to teams with his Emp skills, but even firing off his feeble attacks I felt like my only value was as a heal-bot. And solo was a nightmare. His damage was trivial and his endurance sapping was too weak to empty the bar and do any meaningful good. Don't think I got him much past 20. Maybe if I'd gone farther, his sapping might have started to shine, but I just wasn't having fun with him.

I ran Dark/Dark as my main throughout legacy and I'm restarting it here now that I've gotten home. Dark definitely has all the tools to turn a snarling, cranky AV into easy pickings. Lots of tohit debuff, plenty of -regen and a dose of -res to go with it. Plenty of control to keep their horde of friends in line as well. Whether or not it's the absolute best at it, I couldn't say, but I never felt like there was any AV or GM I couldn't effectively neutralize.

I'm not that good wit the vagaries of the market, but I do loves me some math. Assuming all outcomes are equally likely, if you have a set with 6 enhancements in it and you want to draw 1 specific one, it'll take on average 5 conversions at 3 converters per try. Every time, you need 1 converter, 80% of the time, you need a second, 64% of the time you need a third and so on, so the average number of conversions is 1 + 1*.8 + 1*.64 + 1*.512 + ... or 1 + .8 + .8^2 + .8^3 + ... The answer to how many conversions you can, on average, expect to need becomes a geometric sum, in which case the answer is: 1/(1-f) where f is your chance of failure, in this case 80%. 1/(1-.8) = 5 This generalizes out to: If I'm trying to draw 1 IO from a set with N pieces, my average cost will be N-1 conversions. If I'm OK with any M out of the N pieces available, that average cost drops to (N-1/M) conversions. That said, there is no top end to how many tries an individual conversion may take, so for smaller sample sizes you'll need to be prepared for really lousy RNG. About 5% of the time, it'll take more than 13 conversions (or 39 converters) to hit a single IO target in a 6 piece set and we all know how often we manage to land that kind of critical fail. Remember that all events are INDEPENDENT. Just because you've failed 4 times in a row doesn't make try number 5 any more likely to succeed. Your chance to hit a winner with that next conversion is the exact same as it was when you started, no matter how good or bad your prior luck has been.

RNG can be brutally mean. I have been tempted more than once to try to scrape my combat logs to see whether our attack rolls are actually uniformly distributed. It feels like high numbers show up an awful lot compared to really low ones, but I know how dangerous observation bias can be in this sort of thing.

I need to add my voice to the chorus. I've been back about a week and there really hasn't ever been anything like it. So happy to be flying again.

Former Infinity veteran reporting in, seeing a few names I recognize. So glad to be back in the sky, playing my Dark/Dark Defender again on Everlasting.

I tend to play very mercenary villains, so I do run a lot of paper missions, but they end up feeling kinda hollow after a while. I loved Brother Hammond's arc though. Clever, ruthless, and not written as someone else's idea. Your character is the one that thinks: "These unwashed morons aren't generally worth my time, but they sure are gullible. I wonder if they'd be useful..." and builds out a plan of your own from there. The souvenir at the end is just priceless. It's just too bad that things wound down when they did because the writers were really just starting to get a feel for how to write a real and independent villain. I do love Mayhem missions. Not just for the gratuitous joy of vandalism, but because I go in, rob a bank and walk away with something to show for it. When I'm redside, it's all about profit margin.

I don't completely avoid redside, but it's definitely my exception, rather than the rule. The chaotic and frequently blocked streets make getting around early a pain and for the most part, the zones are just plain ugly, but I think the writing is the big thing that convinces me not to bother. To be fair, though, writing villains is HARD. It's hard to write a single villain and it's even harder trying to write stories that are going to appeal to villains in general. Heroes share a theme in that they generally want to help people, but villains have all sorts of goals, not just reversing that into "hurt people". Sure, there are some sadists who are just out to do damage and make babies cry, but for the most part, a villain simply doesn't care who gets hurt in their pursuit of something. Be that conquest, personal power, revenge, knowledge, wealth, amusement or whatever. Trying to write a story that makes ALL those villains feel like they're nearing their goals (and not just being a flunky or a patsy) is just about impossible. The writing got a lot better with the later arcs, but a lot of the initial CoV release arcs were very City of Minions.