Neogumbercules

And don't worry about those DPSers fake-queuing as healers. You don't need a healer.... probably. But, more to your point, if I was put in charge, the drop rates would not be that painful. In fact I'd guarantee drops of the loot of the day from AV kills and mission arc completions to make it worthwhile, not a pointless time sink. Plus with the loot rotation, it wouldn't be as repetitive. Players could also trade. If I got a Def/End and needed the Def, and you needed the opposite, we could trade (or convert).

I play/have played ESO as well and enjoy the levelessness (that's a word, damnit)! And it also has a concept of targeted loot in that each zone has specific loot sets and each event type in those zones drops specific parts of each set. I spent plenty of time in the public dungeons in Skingrad getting all the zone set weapons, or repeating the big event with the anchor things to get the amulets and rings. You're right, though, totally different game, different ruleset. Would be a challenge to implement here. There are a ton of challenges beyond just the technical issues to be solved. I haven't tried multi-classing yet in ESO. I heard it's pretty broken.

So there's a thread in the market forum that got me thinking about itemization in the game. I've been out of the loop lately so if I misremembered something, feel free to correct me. Currently, I believe you can use reward merits to purchase the specific items you want if you don't want to engage in the market. It's fairly expensive, but doable. Besides that, you're basically just praying to RNJesus for the pieces you need for your build to drop naturally. Given the sheer quantity of sets available, it seems like this is not viable. So in a nutshell you're heavily incentived to engage with the market because anything you want is likely available there and plentiful. That's fine, and as a player who's inf capped himself multiple times on /AH, I don't have a problem with that. However, there are a lot of players who do not use the market, don't want to use the market, and don't want to farm up hundreds of millions of influence for a build. What I'm suggesting is a pathway to allow such players to "target farm" enhancement sets (and possibly other loot) by simply playing the content in the game. First I'll describe how it works in other ARPGs, and then I'll suggest how it can be implemented in CoX. As an example, I will use a game I've been playing recently called The Division 2. D2 is basically a hybrid of a Diablo style ARPG and a cover based third-person shooter. It's very fun and I recommend it to anyone. The game has "set items" which are pretty much a 1:1 analog to enhancement sets in CoX. You get more set bonuses the more pieces of gear you're wearing. The structure of the game is that it's a large open world map with missions dotted all around it. You can replay any mission you want, and every day the "target loot" for the missions is rotated. What this means is that as you play a given mission, the chances of getting drops for the specific gear set assigned at the moment is much higher. So if I need the backpack for my Heartbreaker set to drop, and The Jefferson Memorial mission has Heartbreaker as it's target loot for the day, I'm gonna be farming that mission. In fact, you're guaranteed to get items from that set from boss kills. This is a good system because it encourages players to engage with all content in the game, not just the most efficient or meta missions to farm for drops based on RNG and kill speed. It spreads the player base around and helps keep the game from getting stale. Homecoming currently has the weekly TF/SF which is kind of a similar idea, but it's not quite as targeted, and you're still just spending merits on stuff slowly or, more likely, selling them and trying to buy the stuff you want from the market. Again it's just funneling people away from content and it farming/marketeering. So the way I would envision this working in CoH is multi-tiered: Tier 1: Target sets for TFs/SFs. Straight up, specific IOs would have much higher drop rates in specific TFs/SFs and these would rotate daily. Can you imagine a system that encourages players to remember that the rogue isles exists? Well you better believe it, because the Strike Force in Cap is dropping LotG today so get your ass to the bird. Tier 2: Zone Drop Targets. Any contact mission, radio/paper mission, or street sweeping activities have an increased drop rate for specific IO sets. Can you imagine people remembering that hazard zones exist? Well you better believe it because Perez Park has Miracle today. Tier 3: Salvage targets. It doesn't just have to be IOs. How about the Katie Hannon task force has a loot target for Rare invention salvage today? Or perhaps the ITF has increased drop rates for incarnate salvage for level 50s? Again this would be spread out through the whole game and all content. Zones, missions, TFs/SFs, hamidon, etc. Now there are issues of course that would need to be solved. The first issue is levels. Perez Park wouldn't be much of a challenge for level 50s street sweeping for Dominator ATOs so.....make ALL hazard zones leveless. As for contact missions...remove the level caps, make enemies con to the player (taking into account their chosen difficulty setting) and make all contact missions repeatable. This change would require the implementation of new tech, and making all zones leveless would in itself be a huge change for Homecoming (I support this no matter what, btw), so I know it's never gonna happen, but I'm bored, and that's my idea. Thanks for reading my Ted talk.

I understand the similarities but I think this imaginary form of Rage would be more active and enjoyable. Also my suggestion is a power that you activate manually whenever you want and would be less forgiving than Fury in terms of maintaining it (as well as still having the crash if you let it drop) so it's similar in concept but mechanically very different.

Make Rage a power like Domination that you can't use by itself, with a bar that fills up when the user is attacked. You can activate the power at any time as long as you have more than 0 'Rage juice" and the duration of Rage will depend on how much roid rage you had when you clicked it. Your rage juice will slowly deplete during activation, and if it hits zero, Rage wears off and you have a crash. You can choose to use it in a pinch for a short burst of power or wait for it to get full so you can keep it active for as long as possible. Staying in combat (being attacked) will fill the rage bar even when it's active. Math it out somehow so that if you actually PLAY hard enough, you can keep that bar filling up, and stay in permanent rage mode. Yes it's still perma-rage (OMG so overpowered in a game where controllers can farm +4/x8!!) BUT hear me out, we balance it out by the fact that the player has to put in effort (not just 2 50+5 recharges and Ctrl+click the power) to keep it going. This works because it's not just a boring flat buff that has an annoying crash, or some kind of modified static power... it's an actual mechanic that promotes a "Hulk Smash!" playstyle and would be FUN to play against the Rage bar meta to get the most out of it. Also, because it promotes a fast and dangerous play style it actually creates more problems to solve with your build, which is a good thing, as it makes the entire leveling and playing process more engaging in an RPG sense. You'll also have more fun keeping your teammates moving (and possibly annoyed) and rushing headfirst into potentially stupid situations to keep the bar up, which is exactly what a roid raging superhero/supervillain would be doing.

I'm not going to get into a big counter quote discussion, but you've completely missed the point I was making. Nothing about vigilance has any impact on how you play a defender. It's a completely passive and invisible inherent, and despite the fact that you think inherents are not designed to impact your power picks or how you play, that's demonstrably false on many of the ATs. Domination is the obvious example, as the endgame for a dominator revolves around the inherent and when you press the button you explode in a flash and gain an awesome glowing aura, plus your controls all have that satisfying Domination! text. You literally pick when you use it, so it's an active gameplay element, and yes you bet your booty I'm taking powers that work well with domination, so it 100% influences how I build a dominator. Another one, Fury benefits from having a high recharge attack chain and encourage a brute to jump in and fight like crazy. Plus the damage numbers get waaaay bigger when it's full and enemies die everywhere. Critical Strike on a scrapper encourages you to attack the boss, and several scrapper powers have enhanced crit strike chance, which, wouldn't you believe it, influence your power picks. They get a big critical hit text when it procs. These ATs and others also have ATOs that play into the inherent, which turns the inherent into a gameplay consideration, in this RPG, where you pick complementary powers and try to find synergies. One of Arsenal Control's biggest complaints in beta was that it didn't have a good way to set up containment. Again, another gameplay and power pick implication for the inherent of the controller. Controller has many builds that use containment to synergize with power picks. Fire/Kin controllers are a good example of this. Controllers get the big Containment! text pop up, too. Even Scourge, which is largely passive, has gameplay implications, as you know I'm looking for the boss with low HP so I can incinerate them with blazing bolt or blaze and seeing that big orange SCOURGE! damage tic is satisfying and gives good feels because you, as a player of a videogame, get to see that great visual feedback of what you're doing. Tanks entire play style revolves around Gauntlet and, yes, powers like Burn are great picks on a tank because I can now get a ton of damage out of it because my passive is going to ensure that the foes won't run away when I click it. You see it in action because the enemies crowd you and don't run away. It synergizes on teams, too, as many toons will use powers that make foes run, but they won't run when a tank has aggro on them. I could go on but I don't need to beat it into the ground. A lot of the inherents have audio and/or visual feedback and they DO change the way you build and play your character. Vigilance gives zero visual or audio feedback, does not impact how you build your defender, cannot be manipulated or exploited or synergized with in any way, and yes, the endurance part of it remains, but that's a reach because that aspect of it is so unbelievably useless in any phase of the game past maybe level 12. But forgot about the damage and endurance thing or the mechanics of what Vigilance does. That is truly not the point I'm making. The point I'm making is that it's boring, it provides no feedback, and the player doesn't engage with it -at all-. Put another way, if Vigilance made you turn super Saiyan with glowing yellow hair and a flaming aura around your body when half your team was dead, but was mechanically 100% the same as it is today, I would consider it way better than what we currently have.

The viability, usefulness, or necessity of Vigilance as it's currently designed isn't even the real issue in my opinion. Vigilance is poorly designed, simplistic, boring, and only exists to throw defenders a bone when solo'ing or playing on small teams. It doesn't help define defenders, or have any impact on how a defender plays. It doesn't factor into your power picks or cause any kind of engagement on behalf of the player at all. It's not visible in any way, and it's literally turned off when you're on a team. On many defender primaries it's pretty much useless, because the defender can boost itself. I just think from a game design standpoint, it sucks because it's...boring, like I said. Even completely passive inherents, like Scrappers critical hits, or Corruptor scourge are visible and satisfying when they pop. And you can actually play around them to an extent. Vigilance is just invisible and literally non-functioning most of the time.

I agree with you and I really wish they would take the range and target cap nerfs off sentinel and give them a decent inherent. That said I would also love a hybrid melee/support primary, Mastermind secondary AT, so I'm a bit of a hypocrite.

I would assume it involves manually tweaking these rescue missions to count as complete as soon as the rescue is complete, or as soon as X number of ambush waves are defeated. In missions where you have to lead an NPC to another asset like a computer terminal, tweak these so the NPC teleports to you when you arrive at the location. I would be completely in support of this, even though it sounds like it would take a lot of effort, or just be a band-aid solution to some bigger problem like maybe the mission design process and toolset internally is just jacked to begin with, so even doing something like what we're suggesting in this thread would require a redesign to the internal tools. Beats me, but yeah, escort missions are trash.

Hate to sound negative but I agree with the folks worried about changes to DA being done. They will absolutely overcomplicate it and change the feel of the set. At times it feels like their aim is to shave all the edges off until we're left with watered down mediocrity, or stuff that only feels strong when specific conditions are met as @ShinMagmus suggested. My first character way back in Issue 4 was a Claws/DA scrapper and I've enjoyed dark armor ever since. I agree DA is a pretty underwhelming set, but I also have an S/L soft-capped perma-hasten DB/DA scrapper that absolutely rips. Of course I only use half the powerset, which sucks. The only changes I would be in favor of would be to give DA KB protection and straight up buff cloak of fear and oppressive gloom numerically without changing them. The self rez... I dunno. DA doesn't really need a tier 9 godmode power. I would turn it into a Diablo 3 style cheat-death auto power. When you are defeated, you instantly unleash a blast of darkness that stuns all enemies in an x foot radius (stacks with oppressive gloom) and restores half your health. Give it an unenhanceable internal cooldown of 90 seconds or something. Then I'd call it good to go. The only reason I wouldn't change Dark Regeneration is because I flat out reject the notion that this game needs to be balanced without consideration of the existence of IOs, and therefore, DR is pretty good with IOs.

Ditto.

If there was one UI update I could get it would be an overhaul to the character item menu!

I only get like 30-60 minutes to play a few nights a week, but I'm up to about a billion inf on my new guy now (my other farmer was inf capped so I went full "buy it nao!" for this new guy and spent 1b on his build). His penance is that he has to build back that bill and mail it to my other toon as repayment. I thought about trying to low-ball some of those 500m D-Syncs and flip them but for some reason I'm afraid! Last time I went hardcore marketeering I would buy 100 super packs. I would always make more back then I spent but it was mind-numbingly tedious. I'm kinda considering doing that again just to see if it still works.

Are you guys still converting uncommon yellow recipes or have your methods evolved? I've kinda gotten back into that converter rat race, buying up tons of yellows and converting them to something better. I'm doing zero fishing and just throwing everything I get on the AH for less than what it looks like they're selling for. Over the last week and a half I've made about 700m just doing that. I'm also being stupid and buying converters for 69,420 because I'm immature and it gives me a chuckle.

I don't know if I still have a mids build saved but I can look later tonight after I get the kids to bed. Basically take Force Feedback in Explosive Arrow, Gale, Tornado, and any other power that does KB. Also take Spiritual Core Alpha and Hasten with 2 50+5 IOs. Slot every power with sets that give +recharge. You can double dip with one of the Corruptor ATO sets by splitting it between 2 powers because the +Recharge is the 3 slot bonus. That's an easy +20% right there. If you're cycling your KB powers fast enough in big enough groups you'll have that proc active most of the time. It's pretty fun.