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The cats I have now won't even touch my food. And I try! I offer them bites of everything, they just give me that "This isn't up to my standards, you unrefined cretin" look. I can pick up a food bowl and crinkle the bag of dry food and Jessica goes into meerkat mode, even if the food bowl was full, but she refuses to touch cheese, or milk, or bits of meat. And May only eats what Jessica eat... usually when Jessica is trying to eat it, but, fortunately, they're not combative over food. Now Ivan... he loved eating my food. Didn't matter what I was eating, he wanted it. And he didn't want it because it was tasty, he wanted it because... he loved me. If I was eating it, he wanted to share the experience. Plums. Granny Smith apples. Pistachios! I shelled and fed him half a bag of pistachios once, and he had the biggest, most adorable smile the whole time. If I tried to eat one, he'd reach out with a paw and divert my hand to his mouth. I miss him. It's been over 10 years and I still miss him. It's good to remember the better times, like this, though, all of the ways he wormed into my heart and made me happy. Thanks for bringing those memories to the surface. They're what keep him close, even now.

Until more content was released. Content has to be created. Creating content takes time. Time spent doing nothing leads to players complaining (or leaving). Thus, grind is traditionally included in content, which gives development teams time to create more content (with more grind) before players complain about a lack of content (or leave due to lack of content). The vicious circle I spoke of previously. Some grind slows down progression. The gear grind, for example. Games with gear grind typically require players to run through the recently released content numerous times in order to acquire all of the new gear. There are other types of grind, which don't delay progression. Let's imagine that @Piecemeal releases a new story arc tomorrow, and in that arc, there are five different endings, each with a different badge, plus a super special, really difficult to figure out sixth ending which unlocks a future story arc if you do everything exactly right. That's grind, but it's not progression-delaying grind. That's the purpose of grind. That's all it's for. It's a mechanic intended to give developers the time they need to make more content. Sometimes it delays progression, sometimes it doesn't. Grind never prevents players from complaining about a lack of content, because no amount of grind can do that. Players always finish content before the next update, no matter how competent, well funded and expertly run the development team is. A little well-placed and carefully designed grind can make the difference between players complaining the day after the content is released, or several weeks after. Excessive grind also leads to complaints, so it's a narrow path to walk.

It didn't prevent complaints, it delayed them. That's all the grind ever accomplishes, or is intended to accomplish, a respite. That's already in the game, in the Praetorian (gold-side) content, and it achieves all of the goals you've outlined in those two sentences. It's also the least played content. Correlation, or causation?

🔪

The difficulty of acquiring IOs was entirely due to the abhorrent state of the economy, not a deliberately set balance point. By the time the Invention system was released, players had been stockpiling inf* for years, across multiple characters, simply because they had nothing to do with their wealth. This was what drove IO prices to nigh unreachable levels, creating the perceived progression limitation. The economy was broken, and something being broken is never a balancing factor. Yes, the HC team has made some IO sets more readily available than they would otherwise be, but players always used alternatives to those sets with little (or no) loss in overall character efficiency when they couldn't acquire the "best". Being able to pick up some PvP IOs/recipes without paying 1.5-2x the inf* cap, or having the option to buy 5x full purple IO sets for 60% of the price for a single purple recipe on the original servers, didn't remove balance, it repaired the oversight on Cryptic's part when they allowed players to stockpile inf* for years and gave them nothing to spend it on. I linked several articles written by Emmert in another post recently (check my post history, or find them on the wiki, i'm not digging to find them), in which he outlines Cryptic's design goals and hopes for the game. He very clearly states that they always wanted Co* to be a casual-friendly game, something people could log into for a short time, do what they wanted to do, then log out and feel that they'd made progress. The state of the economy on the original servers, thus the artificially restricted availability of IOs across the board, was an obstacle to that vision, not part of the design, and it's only now, nearly two decades later, that we're playing the game as it was envisioned. If the ease of IO acquisition makes the game too easy now, it's indicative that that was the intent, not that having a healthy economy has disrupted the planned progression. And as far as the Incarnate stuff is concerned, if you're suggesting that a grind might improve the game by slowing down Incarnate ability acquisition, grinding isn't progression, it's stalling progression. It's putting the players on a hamster wheel until you can find a way to engage them again, and it goes against everything this game was designed to do and represents. It's also pointless, because, in the end, it'll only slow down progression for a very short time. There's still nothing to do once those Incarnate abilities are unlocked and fully kitted out, once your players step off the hamster wheel. You've got nothing planned to engage them when they complete the grind, so you've got nothing to justify the grind itself. It's forcing players to run in place for the sake of forcing them to run in place, and in the end, all it will accomplish is delaying Incarnate completion by a few days, at which point the people who complained about having nothing to do because it was too easy will start complaining again. That's not a solution, it's extending the diameter of the vicious circle by a couple of inches and hoping it'll make everything sunshine and roses.

All my cats do is eat, poop and keep me company. Clearly, they need to up their game.

It's at an acceptable balance of damage output and availability for this character. Into Fissure, so I could slot a Positron's Blast proc. 107.1 damage in a single target power, versus 71.75 damage in a 16 target power. If I hit two, I'm dealing more extra damage overall than I would with the Unbreakable Constraint proc in Seismic Smash. I'm also getting an opportunity to ignite OSA without having to use another power, like Apprentice Charm. I never allocate a slot, or slot an enhancement, without consideration of the whole picture.

What are the set bonuses associated with each proc? What's my slotting in other powers? Would I benefit more from another Movement Speed bonus, or a little more Recovery, or changing my slotting so I can use that slot more efficiently, instead of another damage proc? Would that proc do more good for my build if I changed the slotting in a different power and put it there? Objectively, there's no way to know where that jigsaw puzzle piece goes simply by looking at the edges. I need to see the picture and the other pieces.

Objectively, no, because PPM rate is only one facet. There are other considerations, such as the expense, the powers in question and how they interact with different procs, what the build needs versus what extras it can support, which bonuses accompany each proc's set, et cetera. It's never apples to apples, unless you're just slotting every power you have with procs exclusively. That might make an interesting challenge...

Then I'll also mention that the actual slotting on Grav/TA build is just the five Hecatomb (sans Damage enhancement). No sixth slot, no second proc. I have no vested interest in either side of the debate, I'm just here for the math, and to ensure that the facts are accurate so any decision made is based on reality, not FUD, or defensive posturing, both of which have been excessively used in this thread. Or you can have a high DPA attack available more frequently and part of a continuous attack chain, contributing higher DPS overall and making better use of that DPA. The end result is what matters to me, not how it's achieved, so with procs, without procs, whatever.

Subjective. No different from saying that one kind of pet (cat, dog, sugar glider, hedgehog, etc.) is better than another, based on your personal preference.

gla·cé /ɡlaˈsā/ adjective 1. (of fruit) having a glossy surface due to preservation in sugar. "a glacé cherry" 2. (of cloth or leather) smooth and highly polished. verb glaze with a thin sugar-based coating. "glacéed cape gooseberries" You were saying?

I believe I just pointed that out, by saying that the build was otherwise identical, with only the slotting in Seismic Smash changed. And the math showed that having a pile of global +Recharge and +Accuracy only resulted in the proc bomb offering a minute increase in DPS. In other words, the traditionally slotted Seismic Smash benefited from the same global bonuses that the proc bomb Seismic Smash did. Capping the damage on the build, the proc bomb hits harder. Per individual use. When you use it, it hits for a lot. The Hecatomb Seismic Smash also hits harder when it's also at the damage cap. Not quite as hard as the proc bomb, but it's still a lot. But it also cycles faster. Cycling faster, the Hecatomb Seismic Smash narrows the gap by 2.1 damage per second, rather than falling farther behind. With all other things being equal between builds, at less than capped damage, the proc bomb is slightly better damage per second, only slightly, than the traditionally slotted power. At the damage cap, that lead diminishes, not increases, because the more rapid cycling of the traditional slotting brings it closer to parity. Yes, you can find ways to increase the proc bomb's cycle time, but those same improvements would apply to the Hecatomb slotting. I suspect the only slotting which would show a clear and sizeable advantage for the proc bomb would be if both powers were examined at the damage cap and very near the recharge cap. The Hecatomb slotting would hit the recharge cap sooner, at which point the procs would finally begin to edge ahead, and possibly display a sizeable advantage when it hit the recharge cap. But at that point, we're talking about extreme edge cases, and we both know the HC team isn't going to nerf procs because of edge case performance. Which you also used in your example. You can't use them to demonstrate a high DPA proc bomb, then disallow them in a DPS comparison. Barring the 10% from Hecatomb, the builds I compared had otherwise identical global +Recharge. The difference in cycle time, and therefore DPS, wasn't due to that 10% global +Recharge, it was due to the 89.92% Recharge Reduction in Hecatomb. And if you're going to test with additional global +Recharge, it has to be applied equally, to the comparison build as well, to ensure that the comparison is accurate.

I happen to have Seismic Smash on my Grav/TA. I took her existing build and replaced the 5x Hecatomb with 6x procs to make a comparison. No other changes were made. With 6x damage procs, which includes the Hecatomb and Unbreakable Constraint procs, 41.15172835729581 damage per second. The endurance cost is 17.84, the recharge time is 11.36s, the hit chance is 131%. With 5x Hecatomb (excluding the Damage enhancement) and the Unbreakable Constraint proc, 35.60713561727144 damage per second. The endurance cost is 13.52, the recharge time is 8.15s, the hit chance is 189.2%. 5.5 damage per second gained, at the cost of 4.32 extra endurance, 3.21 slower recharge and 68.2% lower hit chance. There's nothing to fix here. The DPS increase isn't huge, it's miniscule. That miniscule gain isn't free, it has costs associated. And capping damage doesn't give the proc bomb slotting a lead, it actually decreases the gain. Just switching the secondary from TA to Kin and bumping FS up to 10 targets to cap damage, as a quick and dirty analysis, I see a DPS differential of 3.46336754116357 in the proc bomb's favor. 2 DPS lower than my previous calculations. If this is the shining example of why procs "need" to be nerfed, I'd advise the nerf-herders not to hold their breath. The HC team isn't going to be hornswoggled that easily.

We covered that in the other thread, too. "Bad" is subjective. Someone disliking a KB proc doesn't mean someone else can't like it. Someone finding little or no utility in a ToHit Buff proc doesn't mean someone else's build doesn't rely on it. There are no bad procs, because a proc is just "something extra". There may be procs which aren't right for you, or me, but they aren't bad, they're just not the bonus we want. Going werebear on spawns may be one of the foundations of the game, but it's not the only foundation.

Ah, yes, the slightly larger cousin of the Shire. Have to be careful when giving out the scritches to those, though. That's how earthquakes happen.

What kind of animal murders red boxes? I'm calling PETRB.

An observation isn't an attack. That and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee. In the initial beta for Issue 5. You can't draw this correlation because that version of TA existed for a very, very short time and disappeared with the first I5 beta patch, and the majority of Co* players at that time never used the test server, never participated in beta and never had the faintest idea what TA did or how it worked, nor is it possible that even a single player who joined after the first I5 beta patch could have developed that impression since that TA never existed for them. Sorry, but no, you can't say that a couple hundred thousand people who never saw TA with 4/9 location-targeted powers shied away from it due to that. Additionally, you didn't say the set had that many location-targeted powers "for a while", you said: You use the present tense in this sentence, not the past tense. You make no reference to that brief period during at the outset of the I5 beta, you don't say, or imply, that the set had location-targeted powers "for a while", you discuss the set in the now. Just not buying this backpedal. Still not seeing the weird. I have seen numerous requests for more power interaction of this nature, both on the original forums and here, though. Give players an interaction between, for instance, Ice powers and Water Blast powers that causes the Water Blast powers to do something different and I can guarantee you that no-one's going to say it's weird. OSA could always be ignited by either Fire or Energy damage. Always, even in the first I5 beta release. It's never been restricted to only Fire damage. The power says "may burst into flames if fire is used near it", but it's never been restricted to Fire as the only ignition source. You left out Radiation Blast, Beam Rifle, Dual Pistols with Incendiary Ammunition, Electrical Blast, Energy Blast, Sonic Attack, two Assault Rifle attacks and two Water Blast attacks. As well as the Magic and Tech origin powers. And temp powers which deal Fire or Energy damage. And critters using Fire and Energy attacks. And Arcane Bolt and Enflame. And everything in the *PPs. The game was overflowing with ways to ignite OSA if you happened to play it without any Fire or Energy damage in your primary or secondary. I mained a TA/Dark for six years. /Dark is one of the three defender secondaries without any Fire or Energy damage. Number of times I couldn't ignite OSA: 0. This was a far greater concern to /TA controllers than it was for TA/ defenders, and even for them, it wasn't really a problem due to the abundance of options. That was not your original contention. You stated that it was You implied that the purpose of EMP Arrow was to affect targets flagged as Electronic and that affecting other targets was just a side-effect. That was wrong. Veering off on a three paragraph monologue about AVs and blaster nukes doesn't correct the misinformation, or distract the reader from the fact that it was wrong. You're making the mistake of conflating the current state of the game with how it existed before Incarnate abilities, before the P2W vendor, before IO set recipes and enhancements were easily available and affordable. Again. We didn't have soft-capped blasters soloing Master of * runs at +4/x8 in those days. We didn't have rotating Judgement nukes on teams. We didn't have a lot of what we have now, and we didn't have the leeway to consider EMP Arrow to be inconsequential when it was capable of doing with one power what all eight of our other powers couldn't do even a tenth as well (mitigate damage). On the contrary, it was significantly better than blaster nukes. Blaster nukes, during the period in question, had a crash - a complete drain of the endurance bar - in addition to the -Recovery applied to the character. EMP Arrow had a sizeable cost, true, and a 15s -Recovery penalty, but there was no crash. No, not even in the I5 beta. Wrong. The negative aspects of EMP Arrow existed not because it dealt damage, but to balance the insanely long duration of the Hold (controller primary AoE Holds have a base 14.9s duration at level 50, EMP Arrow for a controller had a base 27.9s duration at level 50 (base 22.35s duration at level 50 for defenders), the 50% chance for +1 mag Hold, the sizeable -End applied to targets, the higher base hit chance than other AoE Holds... the fact that it also dealt a pitiable amount of damage to Electronic targets wasn't even a factor. It meant absolutely nothing to the developers, it was just flavor. One: soloing AVs wasn't the norm on the original servers, and it wasn't because of a lack of -Regen, it was because the economy was a hideous mess with individual IOs going over 3 billion inf*, preventing players from acquiring set bonuses like they can now, which means you're once again referring to the current state of the game as though it's the only version of the game that's ever existed (losing track of how frequently you do that); and two; TA could maintain two stacks of Disruption, toss on Acid and throw in a couple of -Res procs (which were dirt cheap in those days, compared to other valued IOs), using only TA powers. 100-120% -Res (extremely high +Recharge builds could triple-stack Disruption for a few seconds) tends to work rather well as a substitute for -Regen. That's not, of course, including other options, like Sonic Attack stacking more -Res, or pool powers. Or adding in the damage from a burning oil slick acting. Storm defenders and controllers could solo AVs, with stacked Freezing Rains and two pseudo-pets dealing bonus damage for them, and Storm had 0% -Regen. TA couldn't, but not because they lacked sustainable -Regen, rather because the total mitigation offered by Flash, Glue, Entangling and PGA was horribly insufficient. We had enough stackable -Res and additional damage output to do the job, we didn't have enough survivability. EMP Arrow applies a mag 3 Hold with a 50% chance for +1 mag, not a Stun. Oh, are you're going to bring some expertise to this discussion? That would be a refreshing change.

Not if it was part of a meatplot.

I discovered a place on horses where you can scratch and make them kick their back leg like a dog.

And head cannons.

In 2004 and 2005, I played a couple of the "least effective" characters it was possible to play at that time, a Trick Arrow defender before the buffs to TA in Issue 7, and a defender who only used melee attacks. I learned a lot from playing those characters, but the most important thing I learned is that most people honestly don't care what you're playing or how you're playing it, as long as everyone is having fun. You're good enough. And if you're having fun, you're doing it exactly right.

Are you playing for your own entertainment, or to impress others and meet their expectations?

It's Wormhole doing the work for my Grav/TA. Even though critters aren't supposed to overlap, for a brief moment, they do when they're teleported as a group and dropped at the reticle. In this shot, I'm hitting one well outside the range of melee attacks. That's Wormhole in action. Sands of Mu is queued before Wormhole's animation is complete, and it activates before the critter models are even fully visible after Wormhole's teleport moves them. They stack, my cone hits the melee cone limit and then the spawn spreads out to a normally spaced distribution, but they're still taking damage from Sands. Should work similarly with Fold Space. Can't say for certain, though, haven't taken that power on any character (yet).

Yes, they stack. Use Siren's Song first, though. It deals damage, damage breaks Sleep, there won't be a Sleep to stack if you use it after Mass Hypnosis.