Doc_Scorpion

Truthfully, you're missing pretty much everything. You mostly compared and contrasted the various features of recipes and IO's (both have advantages and disadvantages). But you gave no reason why a player would WANT to buy a crafted IO rather than a recipe. Seriously? Workbenches can be had for free (at a base or university), salvage can easily be obtained via the AH (influence sink), and if you can afford the IO at the AH (influence sink)... How is the sink of the crafting cost a problem? As far as reasons to WANT a crafted IO over a recipe, they're pretty weak. Taking a quick look at the AH, some Attuned enhancements are much cheaper than a Catalyst + Crafted IO, others are much more expensive... So, yeah, if you search you can find a bargain on less desirable crafted IO's. It's not clear to me that it's a universal rule for all enhancements. Plus, it's not like buying and using a Catalyst is difficult or a significant investment of time. So far "a player should want a crafted IO over a recipe" sounds like an ungrounded assumption that everyone presumes is true, but nobody can provide actual reasons to support. The only actual reason I've seen to justify that preference is the availability of crafted IO's over recipes - and that's rooted in HC's culture, not game mechanics.

Quite the contrary, there has been zero discussion (or explanation) of why a player would want to buy a crafted IO rather than the recipe. It's simply been stated as a fact.

Now that I've gotten support types up into the 40's... I'm not so sure I agree. The majority of the time other folks on the team are IOed out or (worse yet) loaded with Incarnate powers, and I end up feeling like a ninth wheel. My rad/rad defender almost never gets his debuffs off (unless there's a particularly nasty AV), leaving him mostly acting as a low rent blaster. And not a particularly useful low rent blaster at that as the mobs are all but melted before my first blast is recharged. It's demoralizing and actively makes me not want to play those toons. We're facing two problems here on HC... The first is the lack of Incarnate content that was in the pipeline and stillborn when the game was shut down. The second is that HC (as compared to live) has a MUCH higher proportion of IOed out and Incarnate characters. You can't really directly compare the high level experience on Live to the same on HC.

They didn't make it an all incarnate zone because they didn't know the game was soon to be shut down and that we'd be stuck seven years later without incarnate content.

You must be new to the thread - because there's very little "back and forth", it's almost all endless running in the same circle. In the same vein, there's very little experience... it's almost all opinion. The latter is weak feedback. The former is all but useless after the third lap. (And we're up to ten or twelve laps in this version of the thread alone.)

I can see why "need a healer" could be a warning sign? But other AT's? I've called for 'em now and again because the team has a weakness, a hole that needs plugging. Or, sometimes when playing story missions I'm familiar with, I have a plan as to how I want to approach the coming mission.

Huh, TIL... Never occurred to me to do that, mostly because my f/f blaster almost exclusively teams and scattering enemies is rarely welcome. Might be handy for Belle, who is running solo much of the time. Ended up snagging Assault instead, with the stacked +DMG from her attacks it seemed to me that starting further up the curve might be handy. With Assault, I've managed to touch 40-50% +DMG a couple of times, and that's with DO level recharge. I suspect she's gonna be a monster in that respect once I get to SO's.

Good point. On the other hand, you want rare goods to retain their cachet as that's what keeps people striving for them. (And the money rolling in.) And on the gripping hand... when they introduce significant new combat ability, you want to minimize their effects on the overall game. Balance isn't easy.

There's no difference between "limited supply of goods compared to cash" and "oversupply of cash compared to goods". They both mean the same thing.

Quick question... Looking at Ice Storm, is that the equivalent of Rain of Fire? The latter never struck me as all that useful, and thus the former is potentially skippable. Also, Frigid Protection is.... Whoah! Very useful. (As in "how has this not been nerfed?" levels of useful.)

Before you accuse other people of not reading, you might give it a try yourself. You stated, and I quote, "I'm not sure I buy that it drove the popularity of farming up." I addressed that statement. No more, no less. If you don't believe that the accumulated pre-market wealth had no effect, I invite you to provide a foundation for that belief. Otherwise, we're back to the economic equivalent of believing 2+2=3. To repeat what I said above - that accumulated wealth set the bar. That bar had a social and psychological effect that lasted well beyond the point where the original accumulated wealth had been sunk from the economy. That's a critical point, and one often missed or misunderstood. In addition - the structure of the auction house enforces that bar and raises expectations by matching the lowest offer to the highest bid, and then displaying that high bid in the price history. The equivalent in the real world is an economic bubble (such as tulip bulbs or Beanie Babies). In such cases expectations and inertia drive demand and prices as much, if not more, as the laws of supply and demand. The result is self perpetuating positive feedback loop. That loop is difficult to break (in game) so long as farming provides a fountain of wealth that far outstrips the capability of sinks to remove it from the economy. The lack of such a bar also goes a long way towards explaining why prices haven't soared to such heights on HC. Also, due to the lack of inertia and expectations, the brakes built into the economy (merit conversion, enhancement conversion, seeded salvage) have a greater effect.

o.0 No offense, but how can you possibly believe that going from "no place to spend significant quantities of Inf" to "lots of really cool stuff to spend Inf on" would have no effect on the desirability of ways to acquire Inf? Economically speaking, that's the equivalent of believing 2+2=3. Which should lead to thinking about why, if all the "old" Inf (accumulated over a period of three years) was gone, did prices continue to rise? (Especially in a game with steadily declining population.) That can only happen if Inf continues to flow into the system, and does so at ever increasing rates.

I also think a lot of people vastly underestimated the amount of time and effort it would take to create a new game from scratch. There were multiple confident predictions that we'd all be back in a new (spiritual successor) within a year. Here we are seven years later, and the biggest effort with the most sustained support... Is only just now releasing a beta of the costume creator.

Not entirely irrelevant. The Day One prices (actually IIRC the first month or so as the unleashed torrents of Inf sloshed through the system) helped set the bar and contributed to farming's rise in popularity.

It's hardly considered not-stupid to have a beef with reality. I was there, I saw the insane prices for all but the crappiest IO's. I can't tell if you're exaggerating or putting the finishing touches on a strawman, either way, you're dead wrong. There was a tremendous amount of inf piled up in the wallets of thousands of characters, and when the auction house opened for business, prices did soar to the moon and beyond. Desirable IO's (Such as the Numina unique) sold for hundreds of millions of inf. Desirable common salvage (such as that used in End Rec IO's) sometimes went for 1k+. (And could and did spike much higher on occasion.)

I was looking at that today... how animation time affected the damage bonus. It's dominated by recharge at the moment, but that will change. (I skipped Frost Breath for concept reasons.)

Leveling an ice/ice blaster, and even at lvl 9 I'm finding she's pretty fun to play. (Those controls are sweet when solo.) Anyhow, what are the key powers in the sets? What should I avoid, what should I be sure and not miss taking? What are the combos/tactics available? Generally, I'm a hoverblaster... Blapping is only for emergencies or finishers.

Sounds more to me like they have a bunch of once-in-a-blue-moon situational powers that they want visible and available 100% of the time. Or, in other words, the very edgiest of edge cases.

It's mostly long forgotten now... But the early attempts to create a replacement for OG CoX were... Well, riddled with spectacular explosions and implosions. There was a ton of disagreement on practically every facet of every revival effort. Just keeping track, let alone trying to understand them, of the various efforts and schisms was practically a full time job.

Indeed. And the unpleasantness and ill will generated in such forums (unless very heavily moderated, and sometimes even then) will invariably spill out into the rest of the forum. I've seen power kegs lit in an off topic forum explode and take down the entire forum... (And that was before the current political environment.) It's a lot of work for a mod team to keep a lid on, and can (and probably will) generate a lot of ill will between users and users and users and mods. So, yeah, I'd be highly tempted to /jranger this idea too. What you gain is not worth the the cost.

Yeah. No feedback happening here, just the same people arguing in the same well worn circles.

(Orchestral piece, no lyrics.)

As I said back on the first page, the trails that used to lead to the Hollows were blocked off when they revamped the zone.