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I have a complaint. Where's my goddamn deep dish pizza, @Jimmy? I'm not paying a subscription for this lousy service! 🔪

I'm dinging the big 5 0 in a few months, I'm running out of time. I already addressed that. But to dig a little further into that, the lucky drops which would fund an entire build, recipes like LotG +Recharge, Crushing Impact, Decimation, Red Fortune, Karma, or Steadfast Protection, yes, those would pay for a (very, very modest) build with common IOs and IO sets, but you'd be using Sleep sets, and Immobilize sets, and Slow sets, frankenslotting and making do more often than not. The cheap shit, primarily uncommons or rares which offered no desirable bonuses which justified flipping, and that was if you could afford the salvage. At level 25, common IOs have values close enough to SOs to be considered an even swap, but the common IOs most needed and wanted, like Accuracy IOs, had the downside of having a higher salvage cost than expected, making even those difficult to justify or benefit from for the average player. And drop rates were atrocious on everything. LotG +Recharge recipes and Steadfast Protection +3% Def (All) recipes didn't rain from the heavens. Luck Charms, a common magic salvage item, weren't lying around, waiting to be collected. Getting that lucky drop to pay for an entire IO build wasn't assured, by any stretch of the imagination, and what you did get, and could afford to craft, typically resulted in having a wildly varying collection of IO levels, not always in complete sets, leading to wildly varying degrees of efficiency and total collapse of the build when you exemplared. Luck isn't a progression plan, it's the last, desperate hope of success when plans have failed. Buying and crafting is an investment, investment costs, and if you don't have start-up capital, you can't invest, so the foundation of this idea is still dependent on luck. That precluded the vast majority of players. Players who were lucky enough to get that one drop of sufficient value to begin marketeering were still playing the long game, relying on incremental profits and small margins to gradually build wealth over a long period of time. Market niches? Limited. There were tens of thousands of players logging in every day, but there weren't tens of thousands of niches. Most players were already locked out of niches by controlling interests, and niches never opened up again in a way which would permit new players to move in. If a niche controller quit, the next one, who already had billions of inf*, moved right in before you could sneeze. Flipping could not be argued, in any way, to be a strategy for new players. It wasn't even a strategy for most existing players, because of the inherent limitation of a set number of items. There just weren't enough recipes/salvage in the entire game to give every player a niche. That lack of niches to go around also precluded the use of flipping by new players, in the event of a population increase. If you only have enough niches for 10,000 players, it doesn't matter if your player base is 150,000 or 1,000,000, you're still leaving the majority of players without niches. Market arbitration could be reliable, but with common salvage priced at 100x the vendor value, and even "trash" recipes priced higher than vendor value, it was an extremely long-term approach. Put in lowball bids and wait (and wait, and wait, and wait) until someone dumped salvage or recipes at a low enough price for your bid to fill, and make your piddling amount inf*. Rinse, repeat ad nauseum, and eventually, you'd make sufficient profits to amount to something tangible. You're also forgetting that we were restricted to 22 market slots (at level 40, fewer slots at lower levels), which strictly limited the number of bids on "cheap junk" unless we spread our bids across multiple alts. In addition to limiting access to niches, bids and sales, that market slot restriction also imposed a purchasing/selling power contradiction, because the "best" level for drops was 25. At level 25, you had a chance to acquire LotG +Recharge recipes (which sold for around 125,000,000 inf* at that level, the highest value non-PvP, non-purple recipe), could still pick up Karmas and Steadfast Protections as drops (not as expensive as LotG, but still damn spendy), could still acquire Luck Charms (25k minimum sale price)... this created a disparity between when it was best to freeze a character's XP and remain perpetually at a set level while grinding, and when best practice marketeering could be accomplished, due to that restriction on market slots. E-mailing to oneself wasn't an option until Issue 17 (far too late to address the economic situation), and even when it became possible, it was limited to 20 emails and they had a 60 day time limit (at which point the e-mail was automatically deleted, so too bad, so sad if you lost 20 valuable items/amounts of inf* you'd mailed to an alt to hold and didn't remove in time). So engaging in high level marketeering before Issue 17 required a second account to transfer goods/inf* to alts, and after Issue 17, when it became "easier", was still time-consuming enough to qualify as a full-time job. These weren't solutions for new players. With niches filled, arbitration and crafting being slow, they weren't solutions for most experienced players. That was what I meant when I said, "immensely patient or incredibly lucky". Most of us weren't incredibly lucky, or patient enough to spend hours every day bouncing between alts to juggle items/inf*, flipping, scavenging for crumbs in the form of "underpriced" salvage and recipes, crafting and listing, scouring the market for opportunities and collecting tiny amounts of inf* which only felt like an accumulation of wealth after months of toil. That wasn't the game we paid a $15/month fee to play, it damn sure wasn't going to be the game new recruits would pay to play. Both Cryptic and Paragon were efficient in dealing with gold sellers. Not 100% successful, but enough to prevent them from seriously impacting the market. They were irrelevant in the long run. I've had no contact with any Cryptic or Paragon developers since Issue 19.5. My conclusions are based on an extrapolation of the design philosophy and process specific to this game, comments made by developers on the original forums, comprehension of mathematics, game mechanics and economic principles (nowhere near what can be attributed to other members of this community, but i'm not completely uneducated) and knowledge of the game's history. And copious amounts of caffeine and nicotine, but I swear, those are the only substances of which I partake. Pinky swear. Short term, not a bridge. A leveler. A new baseline from which they could proceed with future development plans. Incarnates would have allowed them to be completely certain that players entering new content would meet specific minimum requirements. Yes, the difference between an IOed Incarnate and an SOed Incarnate would still have been significant, but the Incarnate system would have accomplished the goal of assuring that the SOed Incarnates were performing at the expected level for the difficulty they envisioned. The IOed Incarnate would have been more powerful than the SOed Incarnate, but with the Incarnate foundation in place, they could begin addressing the power difference in future updates. It would have bought them the time they needed to implement a more thorough and lasting solution to the haves versus have-nots problem created by hyperinflation, without resorting to the solution other MMORPGs tended to use (gear treadmill). Bear in mind that the first iteration of the Incarnate system wasn't even completed when the game shut down, and Positron stated in AMAs that future development would have included more tiers of Incarnates, comparable to the max level bumps used by other MMORPGs, without the actual level bump. As each tier of Incarnates was added, the difference between SO builds and IO builds would have diminished, because the increasing levels of power offered by Incarnate abilities would be cumulative, but provide the SO builds with greater advantages since they weren't soft-capped on Defense, they weren't rocking massive amounts of global +Recharge, they weren't playing at the Damage cap at all times. Your build with 200% global +Recharge and someone else's SO-only build with 0% global +Recharge perform very differently... but +Recharge is capped, and when the SO-only player begins accumulating global +Recharge from Incarnate abilities, even though you can also benefit, the SO-only player benefits more (because of the way the recharge reduction formula works, you adding another 30% +Recharge to your maxed-out build isn't as pronounced in effect as it is in the build with less global +Recharge. you might shave 0.2s off of your favorite power's recharge time, whereas the other player might shave 2.3s off of an identical power in an SO build) and isn't bumping into that cap as quickly as you are, so has more headroom to use those click powers like Ageless. Consequently, after a few Incarnate tiers, you're no longer a god compared to the SO-only player, you're merely slightly more powerful. You might have a few extra tools and tricks compared to that SO-only build, but if you're both at or near the Recharge cap, the Damage cap, the Accuracy cap, et cetera, your IO build is only offering you more flexibility in how you approach and accomplish the content's directives, not more gross power. Long-term, the gap would have been all but bridged, and at the very least, made irrelevant. All we have now is the first round of Incarnates, which make a notable difference in play when comparing IO builds against SO builds, but, again, that was just the first round. There was more coming. And when that goal had been achieved, the hyperinflated economy would've been comparatively less pressing, something they could address gradually and without disruption. Carried to its full extent, the Incarnate system would've alleviated the problem of IO builds versus SO builds by bringing everyone into the same boat, side-stepped the economic instability and permitted development of more complex and challenging content without kicking players in the groin by expecting them to dump billions and billions of inf* into the market to progress. The game now, with 5% of the Incarnate system implemented, doesn't reflect that, but it would have if Paragon hadn't been shut down.

I cannot express how frequently and with what glee I would pick up the civilian and throw him/her back on the ground, in retribution for all of the misery they've caused over ten years of playing.

Oh, look, someone new to stalk.

Content balanced around SOs has to be restricted to a narrow range of critter capability and strict limitation according to player slot availability. This is why critter damage output ramps up very slowly, critters have comparatively few powers and they don't have many tricks up their sleeves. SOs impose a high cost of slots, which created restrictive slotting models as the norm as players pursued valued effects and eschewed slotting for other effects. SOs can also lose efficiency as players level up, and frequently need to be replaced, but due to the inf* cost, players rarely replaced (or combined) them at every level, which imposed a further limitation on design. Common IOs permit a more varied approach to slotting without sacrificing overall capability. As stronger IOs are acquired, fewer slots are necessary to reach the same result as what can be accomplished with SOs, and this would have allowed a design approach which didn't need to be quite as limited by slot availability. In other words, they have a lower slot cost than SOs, which permits more powers to be better slotted across the board, and/or more emphasis on secondary effects in slotted powers. IOs also never lose efficiency, they can't be "out-leveled", and their measurable improvement every five levels would have permitted a greater emphasis on critter and encounter variety across the entire range of the game, from levels 7 to 50. If 90% of your players slot their attacks with 2 Accuracy SOs, 3 Damage SOs and one Endurance or Recharge Reduction SO, then you're limited in how you can design content to challenge them. But if 90% of your players are slotting one Accuracy IO, two Damage IOs, one Endurance or Recharge Reduction IO and one or two other IOs to improve secondary effects, and have sufficient additional slots to improve other powers which would otherwise be left unslotted if they were using SOs... you can approach your content design from a much wider and more varied perspective.

See the second paragraph of the post you quoted.

If their attempts to bleed off the influence glut had succeeded, common IOs would very likely have replaced TOs, DOs and SOs entirely within the next few Issues. That would've been critical to designing harder content, because it guaranteed that anyone who had reached maximum level would also be using enhancements with known values (not values scaled by level difference, not potentially out-leveled enhancements), thereby assuring the developers that all players would've had specific minimum enhancement values. The new baseline would have been common IO values, and the post-50 content they created could then be made with the expectation that players were using level 50 common IOs, or would upgrade their existing common IOs to level 50. Concurrently, sub-50 content would be created around lower level common IO slotting expectations, and be neither too hard nor too easy. Even set bonuses wouldn't skew the curve much if they'd succeeded, because players typically slotted mid-level sets, rather than all 50. We didn't have attunement in Issue 9, or for a long time after, so slotting set IOs at specific levels, to ensure that they were maximizing the powers in the ways most important to us while simultaneously assuring us that they'd be viable even if we exemplared down a few levels, was de rigueur. And functionally, the difference between a build with level 25-30 set IOs and bonuses, and a build with level 50 common IOs and no bonuses isn't as great as the difference between a strictly SO build, and a build with level 25-30 set IOs plus set bonuses. And that was the sticking point for the developers. The bar had to stay where it was so the players who weren't marketeering, who weren't sitting on piles of inf*, who weren't using IOs, weren't driven completely out. They could've simply forced everyone to switch to IOs, removed all other non-IO and non-HO enhancements from the game and pushed forward, but they already knew such an act would raise more Hell than they cared to consider. Even common IOs have an associated cost, and like everything else, that cost was set with the existing influence situation in mind. Compare a level 50 Damage SO, 60,000 inf*, with a level 50 Damage IO, 464,400 for the recipe plus 464,400 crafting fee plus the cost of salvage. While a level 50 Damage IO does provide a larger bonus than a level 50 Damage SO, or even a level 53 Damage IO, the associated cost is still disproportional to the benefit if one is looking at having to replace every enhancement in a build. The uproar that would've ensued if the developers had deleted TOs, DOs and SOs and told everyone to replace them with IOs would've made the GDN and ED threads look like pleasant tea-time conversations. Even if they'd written a script to replace all TOs, DOs and SOs with comparable IOs, the future slotting of alts or respecs of characters requiring new IOs would have made it painful for a lot of players. So they could never integrate IOs into the base enhancement system more than they did, and they could never mandate a global IO change-over, either. The influence problem was just too profound and wide-spread.

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).