Luminara

Information is easily shared. We have a community filled with intelligent, helpful players, many of whom are here as much for the opportunities to both learn and teach as they are to play the game. Incentive is on the shoulders of the individual, though, and you're right, interest in IOs and high end builds, or even common IOs, isn't universal. But the option to do so isn't walled off, the informational have-nots aren't restricted by anything but their own preferences. As such, I believe it would be better expressed as haves and choose-not-to-haves, because there really aren't any have-nots now. The players who don't have, can, if they wish.

How... how do you go to the wrong door when every door mission in the entire game has a waypoint which leads you right to it? Am I missing something here? Has there been a sudden rash of missing waypoints? Have people en masse suddenly lost the ability to follow the bright yellow or ominous red arrow to the correct location and somehow find themselves on the wrong side of the map, clicking furiously on every door they stumble across? 🤷‍♀️

Yes. Even if you only boost one enhancement in the set, all of the bonuses are still applied when exemplared.

Miracle 15% Recovery, Numnum 10% Recovery/20% Regen, LotG 7.5% +Recharge, Synapse's Shock EndMod/15% +RunSpeed. Those are the only ones I always use. Everything else is determined on a build-by-build basis.

When the Invention system was released in Issue 9 (May 1, 2007), there was a lot of excitement for what it represented. Inventions allowed players to sidestep Enhancement Diversification (which had been implemented 18 months earlier), added the potential for significantly greater flexibility in designing and playing characters, and suggested a much more interesting development direction in regard to content. Many people expected the next several Issues to include content aimed at, using and requiring IOs. Issue after Issue came and went, and the anticipated IO-dependent content never arrived, which left a lot of people scratching their heads and expressing disappointment and discontent. There we were with all these great new things, and nothing to test our limits. The question is why that content was never created. To answer that, we have to go further back, to Issue 6. Issue 6, coinciding with the release of City of Villains, added supergroup bases, prestige and base salvage. Prestige was a new currency, one which, at that time, was earned mutually exclusively with inf*. You could earn one or the other, not both (later changed due to the unpopularity of the prestige system, bases... and the fact that not earning inf* while leveling meant not replacing out-leveled enhancements). For veteran MMORPG players, even in those early-ish years, the advent of a new currency implied newer and harder content. Adding a new currency with each content update was a common approach in MMORPGs, a method of preventing players from blitzing the new content by purchasing all of the new gear with their old currency, which they'd had months to accumulate. So the addition of prestige represented, from the players' perspective, a wave of newer and harder content... which, like IO-dependent content, never materialized (the Cathedral of Pain trial wasn't any more difficult than other trials and *Fs). And that raises yet another question - what was the point of prestige, if it was never intended to be used as a gate to newer and harder content? If you were around in those days, you'll recall one of the developers mentioning that they were always working two or three Issues ahead. By the time an Issue went live, Cryptic was in the planning and implementation stages of future Issues. You'll also remember that it wasn't uncommon for features to be pushed back one or more Issues. And this tells us the real purpose of prestige. By the time Issue 6 went live, players had been accumulating influence (infamy didn't exist until Issue 6 and the simultaneous release of CoV) for 18 months. And there just wasn't much to do with it. Enhancements and inspirations were the only things which could be purchased at that time, and at level 50, players weren't buying more SOs, they were switching to HOs, which could only be acquired through Hamidon raids and direct trades with other players. Nor were they wasting influence on first tier inspirations, and if they did buy those, they were so inexpensive that it would've taken years of endless clicking to burn enough influence to be broke. There was, literally, nothing to do with influence beyond funding alts and giving it away. This meant there was a shocking amount of influence, hundreds of trillions, being banked and hoarded by players, just waiting to be flooded into any economy created to utilize that influence. This was likely recognized even before Issue 1 was released, but it wasn't until Issue 6 that the first efforts were made to address the problematic nature of having influence and not having anything to do with it. Prestige was not, in fact, a gate currency. It was an attempt to liquidate and destroy the enormous influence stockpile which was lurking in the shadows, waiting to be unleashed. In requiring players to forego earning inf* (now applicable because it applied to both heroes and villains), and to spend 1,000,000 inf* to purchase 2000 prestige, Cryptic hoped to reduce the total unspent influence to a manageable level. We know this by reference to their workflow and design methodology, always looking a few Issues ahead. When Issue 6 was published, they were already at some point of work on Issue 9, the Inventions and player market Issue. They may have even intended to go live with those features before Issue 9, as it's not uncommon for content to be pushed back to later releases, not even for large development teams. What Cryptic wanted was for the massive influence backlog to be whittled down, so there wouldn't be a class division when Inventions and the player market went live. They made two critical errors in judgement, though. First, they set base costs for the desired effect, the draining and destruction of influence, rather than at an attractive point which would have encouraged the majority of players to participate in that aspect of the game, and coupled with the total loss of inf* income when earning prestige, and the destruction of base objects in base raids in addition to the overwhelming rents, the result was far too little inf* being converted to prestige, and far too few players earning prestige instead of inf*, to have the desired impact. Second, they failed to make base building and ownership engaging. The base editor was confusing and counter-intuitive. Bases were too limited in how they could be designed even when players figured out how to use the editor, and the expense made experimentation a risk that turned many away. And most players didn't want the complicated, finicky system they were offered, they wanted something simple and straight-forward. They wanted a cave, a chateau, a trauma ward with doctors and nurses wandering around, a forest, an underwater complex... having to try to build these things themselves left them frustrated, disappointed and turned off by the whole thing, not to mention short on inf*, which, as noted above, they needed to upgrade their SOs. Consequently, when Issue 9 finally went live, that horrifying surplus of unspent influence was still present, and it was even more disastrous than Cryptic had anticipated. Co*'s player-driven economy, newly introduced and still sparkling with promise, immediately went into a state of hyperinflation. It happened so quickly and with such ferocity that it dwarfed the inflation of the German mark in the 1920's or the Hungarian pengő in the 1940's. Those who had stored up vast amounts of influence were able to immediately dominate the market. Those with excess sums of inf* simply dumped it on the market to acquire what they wanted immediately, setting a bar for pricing, and those with desirable items noted that pricing and listed them accordingly. Where a list/sale price discrepancy existed, what was referred to as a niche, other players moved in and owned entire supplies of items, buying at any price to control that niche and relying on long-term sales within the controlled niche to net profits. The end result of this was a complete disenfranchisement of new players. Those who didn't have, couldn't have... ever. Or, at least, not in what players considered a reasonable time frame. Not less than six to twelve months of endless repetitive grinding after hitting 50, in a game coming from a development team which stated that their goal was to make a game in which players could log in, play for an hour and log out feeling like they'd made progress. The entire Invention set system was essentially walled off from new players by the mass of influence dumped onto the market in its first weeks. The wall was expanded considerably when very rare (purple) sets were added, and it was firmly reinforced by players manipulating the market to build their own wealth (observation, not accusation, unbunch your knickers). Coupled with low drop rates to counter farming, and even lower drop rates on the most desirable items, anyone who didn't start the game with several hundred million inf*, or discover an untapped niche in marketeering, was effectively restricted to SOs. By the time Paragon took over management of the game, only six months later, there was nothing they could do to pull everything back on course for IO-dependent content. The damage was done. They did make an effort, with merits, but like prestige, merits were too heavily gated and items purchased with merits were too expensive for the comparative work put in to earn them (in Paragon's case, this was a short-sighted effort to increase long-term player retention, though equalizing IO set availability would probably have had a stronger effect on long-term retention), and they failed to bridge the gap between "I ain't got no inf*" new players and "I wipe my butt with 1,000,000 inf* bills" old hands. They tried again with converters and catalysts, but, again, gated by micro-transactions and, at that point, new players weren't bothering when there were easier ways to get what they wanted in other games, and for less cashy-money. In the end, they had no choice but to abandon any plans of IO-dependent content that they might've imagined, and stay on the "SOs are the baseline" course. Every power they designed, every critter they created, every story arc and mission they envisioned, had to remain consistent with the expectation that players would only have SOs at their disposal, because the gulf between those who could afford IO sets and those who couldn't was as vast as the Atlantic Ocean. We're playing a different game today. The HC team implemented numerous counter-inflation tactics, the most important of which was making merits the "gold standard" and inf* "gold certificates", which, in concert with merits being easily obtained and widely available now, ensures that even first day players can immediately start kitting out their characters with IO sets. But we still have 24 Issues, more than 8 years, of legacy content which can't be revised or restructured around IO sets as the baseline, not with the size of the HC team and time available to them. Future content can be designed around the expectation that players are using IO sets, and the new super-uber-LOLSO difficulty modes are evidence that the HC team is interested in doing that, but the foundation of the game is too large and expansive to retrofit into that design model. Could Paragon have used some of the same approaches that the HC team did? Probably, and they likely considered some of them. Salvage seeding would've eased the constriction on that supply, but salvage without recipes is of little use or value, and it was the tightly controlled supply of recipes and crafted IOs by players which determined who could use IOs and who couldn't, and nothing short of a complete reboot of the market, combined with a global inf* wipe, would've had any effect. They stuck to the belief that long-term retention could only be accomplished through forcing players to grind, either for drops, or for the inf* or merits to buy what they needed/wanted, and the drop rates would've remained consistent. Ultimately, even a complete reset would've only temporarily stabilized the market. Inflation would set in as soon as a few players accumulated enough inf* to dominate a niche, then another bout of hyperinflation would've followed, because Paragon wouldn't decouple the grind from the market. Here's some more food for thought: the Incarnate system was intended to smooth out the discrepancies between IO-heavy builds and strictly SO builds so they could, finally, develop more difficult content. Going beyond 50, in some manner, was always a given with any post-50 content they created, but taking everyone there was far more important, and the only way they could do that was to create a comparable system which didn't require seven to fifteen times the inf* cap to get there. They had to devise a solution which would include as much of the population as possible, not content which would only be accessible to the wealthy, immensely patient or incredibly lucky, and not another SO-only bore-fest which left the IO crowd feeling underwhelmed. Thus, Incarnate abilities, which simulate the effects of having IO sets and procs, without the market dependency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics All it takes is a reduction of entropy. The more order imposed, the less heat there is. Thus, it can be best envisioned as the super-powered individual reducing entropy between the target(s) and him/herself, or at the target(s') location. A field which controls the resonance, spin or charge of particles between the icer and the target(s). A spell which does the same. A swarm of nanites forming a highly ordered envelop in which they reduce entropic activity. Lasers (yes, lasers). Manipulating the atomic and/or molecular particles in the air. Et cetera.

I've been looking at a sampling of melee cones and PBAoEs from the other archetypes, and from what I see, it's as haphazard as the brute sets. Banes, widows, stalkers, scrappers, tankers, they're all in the same state. Some powers shared by dominators and blasters are also missing AoE flags. Having played almost from the beginning, I know which sets were original release and which were added later, and if it were just the original sets missing the flag, or just the added sets, it would be explicable, but neither is true. Some of the original cones/PBAoEs are properly flagged as AoE type, others aren't. Spines, for instance, has three powers with AoE flags, and one without. And it appears that when sets were proliferated or borrowed to cobble together Assault sets and blaster secondaries, they inherited whatever flags were on the powers initially, which explains why some of those have AoE flags and others don't. The work @Captain Powerhouse has done on various Manipulation sets and melee revamps, as well as the sentinel *PPs, does appear to have been appropriately flagged (but i didn't dive deeply into the Manipulation sets, so there may be outliers). But that still leaves between two thirds and three fourths of the melee cones and PBAoEs in the game missing the AoE attack type flag. And poking around in the archived content from Red Tomax's original City of Data, they're not showing up there either (and that data is a snapshot of the game at closure), so this wasn't a ghost change or a mistake, they've always been a mess. I have no idea what the original powers developer intended, since there is no design methodology behind the variances. One set will have a PBAoE with an AoE attack type flag, and another set will have a similar PBAoE with no AoE flag. A cone in one set will be properly flagged, and a statistically identical cone in another set won't. Maybe it was intentional, but if it was, there's no indication of what was intended, or why. If the AoE flag was originally supposed to be reserved for ranged AoEs, but mistakenly applied to some cones/PBAoEs and no-one caught it, then it wouldn't have been applied to cones and PBAoEs which were added later, especially powers which aren't copies of other powers. If it was supposed to be applied to all AoEs, including melee, it was mistakenly left off of a shocking number of them, and that still doesn't explain why some cones have it and others don't. There's no rhyme or reason to it.

I did. But I only used it for this.

That's fine. The little ones are cute, too. 😁

Going through the brute versions as a starting point, I'm seeing: Whirling Axe, Pendulum Slice, Whirling Sword, Head Splitter Spin, Eviscerate, Shockwave Typhoon's Edge, Sweeping Strike, One Thousand Cuts Jacob's Ladder, Thunder Strike Fire Sword Circle Flashing Steel, The Lotus Drops, Golden Dragonfly Burst Dragon's Tail Psi Blade Sweep Proton Sweep, Atom Smasher Ripper Guarded Spin, Eye of the Storm, Innocuous Strikes Sweeping Cross, Spinning Strike Defensive Sweep, Titan Sweep, Whirling Smash, Arc of Destruction Whirling Mace, Crowd Control All of the above flagged as Cone or AoE Effect Area, but not AoE Attack Type. And the powers which are flagged as AoE Attack Type: Shadow Maul, Touch of Fear, Dark Consumption, Soul Drain Lightning Rod Whirling Hands, Power Crash Frost, Frozen Aura Repulsing Torrent Mass Levitate Irradiated Ground Spine Burst, Quills, Throw Spines Fault, Tremor Foot Stomp There's no discernible pattern. Some cones are flagged AoE, but others aren't. Some PBAoEs are, others aren't. It's not only cones, or only PBAoEs, or only ranged cones/AoEs, or only cones/PBAoEs above a minimum recharge time, or only cones/PBAoEs with less than a set radius/arc. In fact, only about a third of the cones and PBAoEs are flagged as AoE Attack Type, despite all of them being listed as Cone or AoE in Effect Area (except Irradiated Ground, which is given SingleTarget Effect Area, but spawns a pseudo-pet which uses AoE Attack Type). The revamped sets, like Stone, Dark and Energy, are properly flagged. Some of the powers in older sets, such as Spines and Ice, are properly flagged. But even within sets, there are discrepancies. Spines' Ripper isn't flagged AoE, but the other three cones/AoEs are, for instance. And, again, this is just combing through one archetype. I'm not looking at scrappers, stalkers, tankers or sentinels, or pools, just this one sampling. Yeah, this shit needs to be straightened out. There's no consistency in this, and there should be. Having only a third of the melee cones/PBAoEs flagged as AoE leads to players making uninformed decisions based on the expectation of cones/AoEs being treated as cones/AoEs. Some hard and fast rules about what qualifies for the AoE flag need to be drawn up and corrections made ASAP. I would've turned Castle's ears red if I'd seen this ten years ago.

Well, you do stop taking damage while you're in the Defeated state, so...

ED applies to enhancements only, not set bonuses, not globals, not procs, not power buffs (such as the mentioned Tactics). Accuracy/ToHit and Recharge Reduction, yes. Damage, no. Damage is locked on Sands/Ghost Slaying Axe/Nemesis Staff/Blackwand.

The HC team is still trying to negotiate an agreement with NC, and aren't legally permitted to engage in this kind of activity. Additionally, the HC team has stated, publicly and adamantly, that they are opposed to RMT transactions (which, consequently, tend to be accompanied by sales spam, pleas for farm-spots (even when the player isn't farming), begging for in-game currency, and inflationary reactions in the economy, all of which would be undesirable). Your proposal would, at this point in time, either result in this rogue server being shut down permanently, or the development team abandoning the project. Likely, both. Edit: And considering that merits are the base currency on the HC servers, not inf*, and that merits are so easy to acquire that one can collect nearly 250 without engaging in any combat or using any powers, the monetary value of inf* would likely be unappealing as a tradeable cryptocurrency, and it would decrease further as more people engaged in RMT with inf*, making it even less appealing as a long-term investment, or even a short-term windfall strategy. The only way to increase its value would be to remove or tightly restrict merit acquisition, which would, ultimately, revert the game's economy to the state it was in when the servers shut down... and that would piss off a lot of players, as well as make the game largely inaccessible to all but the handful who spent real money to purchase inf*. The demise of these servers would be inevitable at that point, even if the HC team could be coerced into continue supporting them (they can't, don't bother trying).

Hypocrisy isn't cool. Pass on this one, folks. Just walk away.

The game isn't balanced around scrapper Resistance caps. Stick that in your spreadsheet and figure it out.

Pancakestermind.

It's only described as risky when the ship is at warp speed, or in Enterprise, when it was a "new" technology. How many times have away teams, including the captain, transported right into the middle of a meeting room, a cavern, a star base, transported something ridiculous onto the ship (like a whale into a giant aquarium)? I've lost count. At least three to five times every season on TNG. On DS9, O'Brien used the transporters (which were probably the least safe in the entire quadrant, as they were hybridized from Bajoran, Cardassian and Star Fleet systems) to beam all over the station at least twice; Sisko and others did it once; visitors to the station were frequently beamed directly to the command center; transport between Runabouts was depicted half a dozen times; Nerys and Dax transported into caverns on one of Bajor's moons (to pick up a sub-light fighter, which caught on fire while they were flying, demonstrating how much safer transporters were)... In every series, they beamed to and from other ships without a thought (fortunately, or Scotty would've become a distant memory after decades of being trapped in that buffer). It was so common they had personnel stationed in every transporter room. It wasn't infrequent or risky, it was as normal as walking. It was used more often than shuttlecraft. Oh, they even dedicated an entire episode to transporter psychosis. Lieutenant Barclay's fear of being transported, his phobia of having his molecules scrambled, the "aliens" stuck in the confinement beam, who they really were and how Barclay overcame his fears. You remember that one. When transporters failed them, it was always a loss of confinement, a pattern scrambling, a buffer failure, some odd chemical or compound or energy causing a malfunction... there was even an assassination on DS9 which was done by attaching a device which scrambled a woman's pattern mid-transport and left her a charred, smoking mass. But those were never because they were transporting through matter, that was portrayed as the easiest way to go anywhere within transporter range, and almost always the safest (barring Enterprise, which was shown with nascent transporter technology that crew members typically didn't trust). No, but the bubble does move relative to its surroundings, and carry its contents at its relative speed. If you aim that bubble at a mass, it will carry its contents into that mass at that relative speed, and the mass is stationary relative to the contents. The fact that the spacetime around the bubble is what's "moving" is irrelevant, the contents would still make contact with the stationary mass (stationary in relation to the bubble, even though the mass might be moving at a high speed, such as an orbiting planet or a ship traveling at impulse) at the bubble's speed. When that bubble contacts the stationary mass, it isn't going to carry the stationary mass with it, it will either dissipate or continue forward, and in either case, the passengers inside the bubble would contact the stationary mass at the comparable relative velocity of the bubble's warp factor. In other words, whether you're flinging people at a brick wall, or curving space to relocate the brick wall to where the people are at a comparable relative acceleration, there's still going to be a mess. That's why starships require computers so complex and fast that they can create self-aware holodeck characters. The navigational requirements of traveling at warp speed aren't limited to plotting out a line between two points, they include avoiding large masses, such as stars, black holes, planets, nebulae. The shape and waveform of the warp bubble could move small masses, such as interstellar dust and primordial hydrogen, but a sufficiently large mass wouldn't react to the warp bubble, due to the bubble's size relative to the larger mass, and the ship would collide with catastrophic results (unless it had a phasing cloak). Also, warp drives in Trek aren't (quite) Alcubierre drives. They don't bend spacetime, they envelop the contents in a warp field which bends "subspace", not real spacetime, consequently reducing the inertial mass of the whatever is contained within the field. For example, in the episode in which Q is made mortal, a moon is falling out of its orbit and into a trajectory which threatens to decimate a significant portion of life on the planet below. When Q is asked to help find a way to stop it, he suggests changing the gravitational constant of the universe. Everyone else expresses disgust with Q, but it gives Geordi the idea of using the Enterprise's warp drive to change the gravitational constant of the moon by wrapping the ship's warp field around part of the moon, thus reducing the mass of the moon enough for them to (attempt to) stabilize it with a tractor beam. An Alcubierre drive would've been a much better approach, considering that the effect of traveling at, or even approaching, light speed causes the mass of the object in motion to increase infinitely, and as such, even an infinite reduction in mass would result in a need for infinitely increasing energy to continue accelerating. Even in the pseudo-science of Star Trek, dilithium-moderated matter-antimatter reactions don't provide infinite energy, nor would any amount of energy be sufficient to counteract the effects of infinitely increasing mass. But the concept of Alcubierre drives wasn't conceived until 1994, so that idea wasn't available for use when Star Trek first aired in 1966, or even in 1990 when the above-mentioned episode aired. Lastly, being beamed through space in a warp field traveling at a factor of light speed would still take time, during which the passengers would be unprotected. They'd suffer the effects of decompression, radiation exposure and worse. Even if the journey seemed instantaneous, there would be adverse effects to their health. They'd have to make every trip in a protected environment, such as a shuttlecraft, or in space suits. There would also be no inertial dampers in a naked warp field, so when that bubble dissipated or continued forward upon contact with the stationary mass, the people, even if they weren't instantly turned into an energy release likely to destroy whatever they hit, would, at the very least, be paste. They'd absolutely need an encapsulating environment in order to survive. In an incident like what occurs in The Search for Spock, trying to beam down to the planet would result in the entire crew perishing, either when they collided with the surface at greater than light speed, or when they crashed with the ship because they were busy suiting up/loading into a shuttle. And a dead crew wouldn't have been able to travel back in time to Earth's past to find whales to take to the future, and say things like, "Double dumbass on you!", or "A keyboard. How quaint." That would've been your fault. Yours.

Wouldn't work from the show's perspective, though, given that they frequently transport through walls, ship hulls, etc. Force = mass * acceleration. Mass traveling at factors above the speed of light (warp speed) and striking a stationary mass would result in an energetic reaction which would make Tsar Bomba look like a firecracker. A Black Cat, not an M80. Fantastic potential for a weapon, terrible for an away team. Unless your away team was intended to be an improvised explosive device, in which case, fantastic. Maybe not for the away team... Yes, they did something like that in Into Darkness, when the prototype ship flown by Robocop fired on the Enterprise while both were traveling at warp, but since they were both at warp, the relative velocity of the projectiles would've been much, much less than warp speed, no greater than it would have if fired from a stationary position.

Which other dimension would one travel through? Spin? Charge? Amplitude? Eigenvector?

Due precisely to that excessive rate of incarceration, felons can be granted furloughs or paroled for "good behavior", or released on probation, despite their records or offenses, long, long before they've completed their sentences. Also due to that excessive rate of incarceration and the extraordinary burden on the judicial system, plea bargaining has become commonplace, resulting in shorter sentences than would otherwise be mandated, and even earlier releases than would otherwise occur. A sentence doesn't equal time served, or even reflect the true gravity of the crime in our current society.

No, he didn't. What did materialize was two Rikers. The original, and an exact duplicate. Two. More than one. There was one, then there were two. Equating to twice the matter. The matter from which that second Riker was assembled came from... ? It didn't come from the first Riker. With half of his mass missing, he would've materialized as a corpse, or a pint-sized version of himself (if he was lucky (or hilariously unlucky, if the episode needed more comedy)). The answer is, obviously, the increased power to the annular confinement beam (energy), the second transporter beam (energy), and the energy in the unstable atmosphere. m = E/c2. The transporter created matter, without violating the laws of conservation. Theoretically, this could've been used to bring Professor Moriarity out of the holodeck and into real space, but I believe they'd abandoned that story line by that point. Sadly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary,_Dear_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_in_a_Bottle_(TNG_episode)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chances_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)