roleki

Wondering if, and this is just me spitballing, but wondering if there could be some way to piledrive different types of content into temp powers/badges that grant temporary/scaling inf/exp bonuses to characters/accounts. Like say, for every N story arc missions you complete in a week, you get an X inf/xp multiplier, up to a cap of Y and for a duration of Z. Same goes for TFs, participating in raids, radios and so forth, and the duration stacks but not from the same source. Figure that way, people who prefer playing one specific kind of content get a small boost, but those that do a little of everything get even more, which would kind of keep the LFG lubed up and maybe keep the AE squeaks a little quieter. Dunno, just an idea that I bunsourced just now.

Dang it, just when I cycled Taunt back into my builds 🙂

Also entirely possible that the constant treadmilling of this topic inherently lends it to digressions that some would view as trolling when it's really just done in service to how pointless the discussion is in the first place. Me, I just think it's funny that we have "your words are destroying the community!" and "they aren't playing the way *I* want them to so the activity they engage in should be curtailed!" all on the same sheet of glass. I mean, people have tried to prop up homogeneous communities before, but the effects of inbreeding take a huge toll on them. Diversity, now that is viable and evergreen.

It is possible, however unlikely, that Jub was not actually hurt by those statements but rather offered them as a flat echo of the kind of things people seem to let slide without objection before singling Jub out for using hurty words.

@Bopper I can test this tonight; I've tested procs in IG before and not come away impressed, but that was months ago before I was actually logging numbers

In this case (Rad/Fire) I've got multiple AoE clicks and auras, but I can't seem to 'level' the procs. I either get high peaks with long valleys, or sustained low bonuses that don't seem to offer much payoff for how much is invested in them.

Is there a 'rule of thumb' for ATO proc slotting per archetype, ST vs AoE vs Toggle? For example, I had read on these forums that the Controller Font proc should go in an AoE like Crushing Field, and having done so I *do* see more Fonts, but, taking that over to my Rad Brute, I am not seeing the same proc rate on the Fury bonus proc in Atom Smasher. I'm burning through unslotters like crazy trying to find the most effective slotting for my Brute ATO stuff, and referencing builds, people seem to put them darn near anywhere.

/Kin absolutely can make good use of Wormhole - in fact, Wormhole is what makes Grav/Kin 'work' as well as it does. As designed, /Kin wants you in melee to get the best of your own buffs, and offers almost NO mitigation in return... as designed, it's all risk. But Wormhole that mob into a corner, and you suffer zero Alpha, siphon all the +Speed and +Damage you want, fill up on Endurance if you need to, and crush the daylights out of your mob without taking so much as a loud noise in return. As mentioned everywhere, with the KB-KD proc you don't even need to find a corner to do it in. Until /Time came along, /Kin was THE perfect complement to Grav/, with only a few weirdos opting to go /Rad. One thing I will say is that with the way the game has changed over the years, past a certain point, Grav/Kin is only 'useful' to solo with. Between IO bonuses and Incarnates, your impact on a team is kind of unnoticeable if not nonexistent. That's not to say there's anything bad about Grav/Kin, just that for much of the game, buffs and debuffs are about equally valuable, then buffs drop off a cliff and debuffs are all anyone is looking for. Doesn't nix my love for Grav/Kin, but if I get a rando invite to a team, I'll ask to switch to something a little more dramatic.

And then there's crap like this.

I don't often agree with @jubakumbibut seems to me y'all are shooting the messenger here. There most assuredly IS an undertone of moral superiority that comes out whenever a thread about the in-game economy bubbles up, and that is soon followed by the calls to outlaw AE, strip its rewards further, or "just buttonize" 50 or suggesting people just play on Test "...because they're skipping the game anyway..." These are suggestions that marginalize the experience of other players, assigning a status of 'lesser' to those who somehow find enjoyment in the behavior you condemn. It's especially passive-aggressive to come in here suggesting changes to the system that your bad-math-brain thinks will affect you naught. To be quite honest, this world already has too many people trying to force others to live by THEIR rules, we don't need it in video games on top of it. To that end, I will always support any effort to stuff the control clowns back into their car.

That's any /Time I've ever run. I can count on one hand the number of times that a chain of Time Crawl -> Time Stop -> Slowed Response-> Attack have all hit.

This. While flipping lumps of brown stuff into gold is the most efficient method of padding your wallet in CoH, it doesn't move the needle on leveling a character or exercising a build, so FOR ME, it's not something I am interested in. That said, just to give it a fair shot I spent about 30 minutes last night converting slows and sleeps to Resistance/EndMod/Healing procs and made about 40M. Still not my cup of tea, but, it appears to be a working strategy.

My experience is skewed a bit because I generally only farm my own alts, but even funneling purples, PVPs and evergreen stuff like Red Fortune/LotG from the camper to the farmer, the camper hits 50 holding a good 15M in inf just from selling common IOs to NPC vendors. That's not a LOT, but if I had let them keep the good stuff, they'd be sitting on about 90-120M, which is about halfway to a middle-of-the-road IO build. Overall, I do not understand A) why people would complain they are destitute when they're the ones who opted to 2XP their way to 50, and B) why many of those same people beg for someone else to PL them when they could easily dual-box, get the inf AND the XP.

Then tie it back to hardware. This isn't rocket science.

Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but to be compliant with X, I shouldn't have to refer to Y when there's already something right in the client that tells me whether a server is lightly loaded, medium loaded, or overloaded. Just make those little icons translate to a number we all can relate to and voila, it's all in one place.

Do the Server Status 'glyphs' on the server selection screen correspond to a certain number of logged-in users? Any chance THAT could be updated so each 'star' or whatever represents, say, 300 users, and if a server is at 4 stars or less, multiboxing is allowed under ToS? Or some other number that is easy for the player to discern before just blowing past the server select screen and doing whatever they want?

I think the lack of available names is a good thing, it's a sign there are a ton of us logging in and doing all the stuff. Unfortunately (or, fortunately?) since all the straightforward names/concepts are taken, I have to resort to naming gimmicks, like adding formal titles (Mister, Captain, Doctor and so forth) or steering the character in question in the vein of a 1950s-era comic book "teen sidekick" which is how my Plant/Natural guy got named 'Lawn Boy.' Another way to go is make the character unusually large/small and make the name a play off of THAT, or choose a color theme and go that route a la the Brown Hornet. Sometimes I might throw an adjective in there, or make the character season/era-based, or, occasionally I'll use a single word that can be both a noun and a verb (not a gerund!). Like, my Rad/Rad defender is just called Draw, and that is still one of my favorite names for some reason. I sometimes choose names based just on how it would read when inserted in NPC dialog. I don't know why, but at the time I rolled it I thought having an NPC yell something like "Stop Something Else!" or whatever was funny, so I hung that on my TW/Bio. It does kind of bum me out when I think I have hit on a great name only to find out not only is THAT taken but someone has snapped up all the logical variants of it, but that just gives me a reason to come up with something that will bum someone ELSE out later on down the road.

Thanks for the replies; I usually play Controllers so all this inherent/damage cap stuff is a bit foreign to me. I hadn't thought about the impact Spiritual would have on PPM, but aside from ATOs and +Recovery I didn't rely too much on Procs on either dude. I figured, all things being equal, a power that deals 125 on a 20s timer does less damage per minute than one that does 100 on a 15s timer, but that doesn't factor in toggles or AoEs that would hit harder and so on and maybe obviate the need for a quicker attack cycle. That said, I had wanted to try Musculature to 'amp up' attuned enhancements from sets like Touch of Death.

So I have two nearly-identical Rad/Bio Brutes, the biggest difference between the two is their Alpha and where the ATOs are slotted. Anyway, on one of them, I notice he's consistently peaking in the 94-95 'Fury' range but has never approached 100. The other usually peaks around the 91-92. This is on a farm map where I can spend a good ten minutes solid killing hundreds of mobs without a break. What do people usually see out of Brutes, Fury-wise, and what does it take to hit 100? Another question, I was under the impression that your Fury level indicates how much of a damage boost you get, but they both start at +29% enhanced and get to around +215% (before Insps/buffs) just from facerolling, even though one has 4 or 5 less 'Fury' than the other. Is the damage boost tied to 'Fury' peak, or 'Fury' duration, i.e. if they are both in a long fight they would get about the same damage boost? Last question, the way I read it, Fury is kind of a way to reward you for scrapperlock. If that is the case, would I be better off with Alpha Spiritual (recharge) or Alpha Musculature (damage) Incarnates? I ask because the Brute with the consistently-higher Fury is using Spiritual and everything recharges about 25% faster than the Musculature dude, but I find myself using Taunt more often on him because Lt's and Bosses last a little bit longer than on the Musculature dude. Is there a, no-doubt about it, take THESE Incarnates approach for Brutes?

I don't know how long it takes a community to vote on raising a plaque to commemorate an event, let alone fund that plaque, have it created, arrange to have it installed, then have an inevitable dedication ceremony, but there is a plaque that talks about "Eochai was defeated here on October 31 2004" so we are easily well into 2005, if not closer to 2006 for all of that to have taken place. Given the state of vehicles/technology in-game, I would say this is what I would expect a pre-iPhone society to look like if it were constantly Ground Zero for alien invasions, intra-dimensional warfare, attempted occult kidnappings, organized crime operating openly in the streets, gangs terrorizing citizens every 80 yards or so... and having "heroes" swoop in firing beam rifles indescriminately, firing off Novae every 37 seconds, deploying Phantom Armies and Tar Patches all over the place... I mean, who would WANT to drive a newer car in that environment, let alone insure it?

I have a feeling the resulting spreadsheet would weigh about as much as the Sun. What would be cool is if HC found a way to, once or twice a year, unleash a redacted Character DB and let US burn ourselves out querying and analyzing it. I think it would be interesting to try and figure out what the "average build" is for a given power combination, or, see what the "average" slotting is for a given power, if they even keep that data in the CharacterDB.

I can't find any numbers on Traps; are its debuffs really that much better than /Dark? Because in my experience, Ill/Dark just melts AVs if the pilot knows what the buttons actually DO.

I love Grav/Kin - it was the first controller I took to 50 on Live - but it plays a little scarier than it looks in Mids. First off, your three main attacks are ST, so, no matter how much +Damage you get off Fulcrum Shift, you're still going to be cycling through single targets until they are dead. You can stuff some Procs in Crushing Field to speed things along, but for the most part you'll be firing Propel like a madman until you get your Incarnate Nuke. While the variety of objects you Propel will keep you from being bored of the visual, you'll learn to hate the noise. Secondly, your +Heal and +Recovery buffs require you to be either IN or NEAR melee if you want to actually benefit from them. Once there, your only damage mitigation is to do something else to agitate the mob - either reduce the strength of their attacks, trap yourself in a bubble with them, or fire them across the map with Wormhole. Which, by the way and thirdly, Grav/Kin literally lives and dies by ToHit. If any of your /Kin powers miss, it's an agonizing wait until they are ready for the next try. Nothing sucks more than Wormholing a mob into a stupor, eagerly firing off FShift or Transference and seeing a bunch of MISS! floating where your buffs should be. Then you're stuck there at a +25% damage bonus and no endurance while you race to Lift and Propel them to death one at a time before the Stun wears off. To mitigate, I highly recommend Tactics with a full set of Gaussian's. Overall, Grav/Kin is fun and I was sure to roll one on HC soon as I could, but having played them both deep into the 50s, I very much prefer Gravity/Time over Grav/Kin; the buffs and debuffs out of /Time aren't as spectacular as /Kin, but they are much more consistent and let you play from as safe a distance as you want. Case in point, I rarely ever need the Heal out of /Time, because I usually have the mob well in hand before they can do anything to me.

@The Philotic Knight: What app IS that, and where would one get it? And where could a lowly so-and-so get their hands on Powers.def? I happen to have a little experience in creating data-driven dashboards; if I could stuff that into a DB, there are a few things I would like to take a crack at.

This! I never realized how much I relied on Red Tomax's site on Live until I tried to get by without it on HC. While it is nice to have the web archive version, it is incomplete and outdated. What would be awesome would be an online/web-based planner that included look-ups for powerset quantification, so I wouldn't need to jog halfway across the internet to see that Shiver hits for -81.25 Recharge, or wonder what each of the Oil Slick Arrow pseudopets REALLY does, by the numbers.