Neogumbercules

Thanks for the advice. It's a fun distraction from the usual and I'm enjoying pulling that slot lever. I'm curious how it will compare to doing AE. Usually on a full run of 5 maps on 125 I'll get about 25 million inf for about 15 mins of playing. That includes selling my recipes to the vendor and any orange salvage I can AH away. I can see how with some prep though I can use converters to flip uncommons into rares and then selectively target expensive items.

I'm just starting to dip my toe into the market again. Back on live I used to just craft and sell. I think I used AE tickets and rolled bronze. I managed to cap out a couple of characters this way. Here on HC I've decided to do some converting. Right now I'm just using my brute to farm AE, taking every yellow recipe I get and crafting it, then using converters to convert into something valuable. I just kind of pray that I get a defense set or healing or something valuable along those lines and when it hits, I'll do an in-category conversion for something like LotG and then in-set conversion for the valuable proc or whatever. I know I shouldn't be using level 50 recipes for this because of the 490k crafting cost but I'm really just screwing around at the moment. I've noticed I end up converting a lot of IOs that sell for 1-2 million influence on average but I'm addicted to those big rolls and honestly converting is basically addicting like a slot-machine so I usually just keep rolling to hit BIG MONEY! At some point I've spent more influence on converters than I'll make back from an IO so it's almost like a sunk-cost fallacy where I realize "Oh shit! Now I HAVE to way for that LotG proc just to make up my losses!" Is this a wise course of action, or should I just dump the IO the second I get one in the 1-2 million range? I definitely have to stop using level 50 recipes.... I know that for sure.

Munitions Mastery overhaul. Energy Melee Buffs. Definitely nerfing regen. Sentinel buffs. Instant 50 tokens?

I haven't really used any of the new origin pools. Are they any good?

Yeah I agree. It's good right now that's for sure. I've noticed though we've gone from constant updates and communication to kind of an abnormally long stretch of nothin'. Not even a "Hey we're still here" kinda post (maybe I just missed it though). Again, all in respect to the current situation globally and the riots now, it's understandable that things would slow down.

If they did do a huge backend power system overhaul I can see that being the cause of the quietness. That and Covid, the riots, work, life, stress, etc...

I'm down for both!

Now granted I don't follow the discord which is probably the best source of info but what's on the table right now? I know we got some upcoming changes to low level SO access, and some kind of back-end overhaul to the powers system maybe? Besides that it's seemed pretty quiet as far as announcements go. So what's coming up? Powerset revamps? Buffs? Nerfs? New Content? Freem?

It's not even really the damage of LRM that's the issue. I made an AR/Dev/Mun Blaster on Test and IO'd the shit out of it and it's a very capable and fun combo. The problem with LRM is the massive interrupt and recharge. Blasters don't need an attack that they can't use in combat. It's also the cumulative effects of a bunch of bad to mediocre powers makes a bad to mediocre ancillary pool. The whole set needs buffing.

I think most, if not all, melee characters get access to Mu Mastery. You get ST ranged attacks, a snipe, a cone, an AoE immob, Targeted AoE, etc depending on your AT. You do have to do a redside patron arc to unlock it though.

It is when the counter argument is baseless and boils down to "no because I said so."

Is it like a forum game that I've never caught on to where people come up with arguments to resist the simplest and least affecting suggested changes just for the fun of it, or is the gatekeeping so strong in this community that people actually feel compelled to argue stupid shit? If you take a pretty decent peak player count from a busy weekend day, let's say 4,000 toons, and you take the 2 billion seeded white salvage and divided equally among each of those 4,000 players, each player would have a stack of 500,000 of each type of white salvage. In other words, letting the handful of people who want to disable white salvage drops do so would have practically zero impact on the supply, or anyone else's gameplay experience! What a ridiculous argument!

Good suggestion. There's what like 2 billion of these seeded on the market? May as well let us turn it off. It's completely optional and in line with other P2W options so it can't hurt.

This might actually be the best suggestion yet!

Man if there's one thing I didn't miss during the shutdown it was this kind of smug forum warrior shit. I'm checking into the burn unit to take care of myself now. On the way there I'll respond to this. This discussion relates only to the levels in which enhancement values actually start to matter, "SO level" and up. Yes you are technically right (the most important kind of right) that low level IOs are worse than SOs. Yes there are even a few percentage points of difference between the two kinds until IO 35. This is a well known fact. However, these minimal differences are functionally meaningless in terms of actual gameplay as soon as a character hits 22. That couple of percentage points of enhancement will not have a noticeable impact on performance at all. The difference is, as you know, the IO will never expire and the money spent on it is a perfect investment because it will always work until the player chooses to replace it. So, cheap and easily available SOs from 1-22 might be great because we can actually really boost our characters but I would still argue that it would be a smarter choice to just save your influence for permanent basic IOs at 22. The only way it would make sense would be if SOs were very inexpensive. I've played plenty of characters "naked" up to 22 and it is actually a decent experience especially since the payoff of saving up is so great. Even still, keeping an enhancement type in the game that is completely outclassed (I'm talking about everything taken into account, not the minuscule percentages you got hung up on) very early on in a toons career seems pointless. We could take out SOs, make basic IOs attuned and always equal to SO strength, and the spirit of this patch will be preserved and the game will be simpler and less confusing. Should we do that? Hell, probably not. I just think it would make more sense then having SOs coexist with IOs. It's also completely backwards that a huge influence sink exists for lowbies (SO upgrading) but not for mid to high levels (permanent IOs). Anyway, the ambulance just pulled up to the hospital and the nurses are rushing out to get me so I'll be seeing you.

True. Alternatively they could put a minimum level requirement of 23 on them. Kinda makes sense then as players get used to using SO enhancements at lower levels they unlock the ability to slot "set and forget" IOs or keep trucking with SOs. Actually that exposes another weakness of the system where SOs still have practically no value at all. I think we need to either delete regular enhancements from the game, or basic IOs. Or do something drastic like give SOs Hami-O style dual values with reduced effectiveness on the extra value. Like a Damage/Recharge SO would provide 33% damage and 16% Recharge. Right now it makes no sense at all that SOs and basic IOs co-exist when one is unassailably better than the other.

I really think that along with this change, all crafted basic IOs should basically be unleveled and essentially "attuned." I really don't see the point in keeping them. They will make zero sense pre-22, and they're 100% useless to slot between 30-47 since the cost to benefit ratio is way out of whack compared to level 25s. They're only worth crafting at level 50 if you're trying to save a slot by +5'ing two of them. Right now it's just a needlessly complex waste of time to have leveled basic IOs. At worst it's a trap for new players or players that don't understand the system to even allow them to craft higher than 25 IOs.

Other servers have implemented something like an inherent toggle power that converts all that KB to KD and it really seems like the simplest solution, while also being optional, which should really make everyone happy. With the ability to use IOs to turn off KB selectively, or a toggle that works globally, every preference should be satisfied (except the preference of those who believe the mechanic should be left untouched, which honestly is probably just a small minority considering this has been one of the most requested features for this game since freaking forever).

I did a video about this back on live because I noticed it happening a ton on my Traps Corr. It's still on my old channel. If the video you can see that my Rad user with all debuffs experiences no fleeing, however with acid mortar, an enemy would flee every single time.

I feel like it would be pretty easy to buff Elec without breaking anything. Speed up the DoT on Ball Lightning and Short Circuit, and in short circuit, give it the Irradiate animation so you can blast it out faster. Give the hold T3 damage and turn voltaic sentinel into a toggle as a QoL feature (end cost equal to re-casting on cool down). Maybe swap the positions of Volty and the hold/attack (can't remember the name). Increase the range on Thunderous Blast. It seems short but maybe that's just my bad memory. If you want to get creative, throw some chaining effects into the set to spice it up. I feel like once we start digging into screwing around with endurance drain and recovery debuffs we turn it into a big fiasco.

No doubt changing powers is within the confines of the rule, like how I was describing the blaster sustain powers. The issue is in some cases you can do something sensible like turning IH back into a toggle, or on the other hand you get something weird like a Blaster damage aura that gives +rec and healing over time, which is completely wild, considering how damage auras were originally conceived. Like hey I'm all for it, but to me it would have made more sense to move the old Blazing Aura's damage somewhere else in the set (maybe just increase the damage of Hot Feet and remove the fear from it) and created a new power at level 20 for the recovery and health. Instead we have a weird damage aura that heals and gives endurance. All because a more reasonable change couldn't be considered due to cottage rule restrictions. Sticking with AR, let's suppose we needed to add an Aim equivalent to AR. How would we do it? Look at the FOTM threads and see that only 1% of players (or whatever) haven taken Beanbag (or whatever) and remove it in favor of the vastly more useful Aim. If course we wouldn't do that so AR doesn't get Aim and in return AR has Ignite basically, which is a largely terrible power in 99% of situations in this game. So from there you start looking at giving AR some big buffs but then you see that according to the damage formulas all the powers are "right" but the set still plays like shit in the context of actual gameplay, especially compared to the more popular sets like Fire/. From there you're back to looking at making wide scale balance changes (time and resource intensive task) for a set that is not widely played, or you're making cottage rule violations, or at least you're back to stretching the rule to Cauterizing Aura levels of weirdness. More flexibility to be creative with existing sets would be much better. Again that's just my opinion, I know some people would flip out if Beanbag got replaced with Aim or Ignite got replaced with Incendiary Missiles.

I mean you're kinda getting at the root of the problem, where a lot of power sets are just copies of existing sets but better. Archery is a better version of assault rifle. Actually your solution is perfect for cottage rule purists (of which I'm convinced few actually remain). It would be more in line with the cottage rule to release a powerset called "Assault-ier Rifle" that's just Assault Rifle with Aim, a T3 blast, and a better nuke than it would be to actually change Assault Rifle to be more competitive with it's peers in 2020. Such is the lunacy of the cottage rule.

These things you've mentioned have stretched but not broken the cottage rule, per say. Blaster Cauterizing Aura for example, actually as a perfect example of how stupid the cottage rule can be sometimes, was a standard damage aura that is now a damage aura toggle that gives +recovery and a heal over time, and yet still deals the same damage as before. There were many lunatics who argued emphatically that the snipe changes shouldn't be implemented because of breaking the cottage rule even though it was an obvious massive improvement to every powerset with a snipe, and snipes were borderline useless beforehand. Yes some people would prefer powers remain broken and useless rather than change with the changing meta of the game, that's how deep their devotion to the cottage rule runs. That's why they still function similarly to before when out of combat. That in-combat/out of combat bullshit didn't need to happen, and yet the cottage rule had to make everything more complicated and argumentative than it needed to be.

I know a lot of people don't see it this way, and I'm not going to outright discount their opinions, but my opinion about the cottage rule is it's consistently been the biggest detriment to this game's evolution. Like let's make Beanbag a T3 attack instead and call it armor piercing shot. Cottage rule violation, we changed the function of the power. Ok lets add T3 damage to beanbag... can't do that either now it's OP because it's a T3 attack with a strong mezz component. All the cottage rule does is make sure that bad powers and somtimes bad powersets just stay bad because it'd be way too much work to justify the time investment to figure out how to bring up a set like AR without violating the cottage rule, but also without making the set OP in some way.

Yeah what I mean is that if implementing more flexible systems is out of the question, we're forced to make some decisions regarding the powers themselves. Like for example how many people will be upset if we, say, make some changes to Munitions Mastery that involve some new/different mechanics. Then we ask, is it worth it? There are some examples in the older powesets where it seems like the original devs intended players to make certain complimentary picks. Going back to AR, perhaps they assumed most people would go /Dev, therefore, AR/ didn't need Aim. We can clearly see how that was a problem now.