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Do not listen to @EmmySky. Stay out of the water. Don't trust her, she eats pineapple pizza and she's trying to feed you to her pet piranhas. Oh, and welcome home.

Those numbers were for a single server, not all five, and not for the entirety of the HC server group's existence. It isn't trivial, and the longevity of the game is the bigger picture. I'm sure @SwitchFade would be delighted to explain the benefits and methodology of controlling inflation, if you'd prefer to hear this from someone with a degree.

*starts packing for the vacation in @Frostbiter's back yard* I WILL HAVE MY PERFECT CHRISTMAS THIS YEAR!

Beat you to it! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Flash Arrow doesn't have a hit check. Give it a ToHit Debuff, Recharge Reduction or Endurance Reduction.

My main is a Staff/Willpower brute. It was the only way I could fool the universe into buffing TA, making it think I gave up.

It's fine. Someone will always be miffed by choices they wouldn't make, but it's not common here. Most people agree that we should all be allowed to play what and how we choose. Nope. Despite all of my number crunching and mechanical knowledge, I've never actually spent any time looking at endurance usage, recovery and play style choices which affect these things. I go by feel, and wait until I'm at 50 with a character to determine whether I have "enough" recovery. That said, I also make it a point to slot all of my toggles for Endurance Reduction as much as possible, and use IO sets or frankenslot IOs, so my other powers are typically manageable. I go by feel. If it feels good, it's good. Either is fine. If you're not going to be tanking AVs and GMs, a single -KB IO is going to be sufficient for almost everything you do, and can save you both a few power selections and slots. Toggle on Combo Level 3 and Form of the X, then hover your pointer over the affected powers (Eye of the Storm and Sky Splitter) and look at the effects in the info panel.

*raises hand* I know how readily inspirations drop. I have an e-mail box stuffed with tier 3 inspirations. I have inf* coming out of my orifices, so I can afford more inspirations if I have to buy them. And when I do use them, it's grudgingly and with great dissatisfaction. I don't have the same mentality regarding the LRT or Ouroboros portal. I know those are going to recharge, I know they're conveniences, I know using them isn't skewing my perception of my characters' performance or ability, I know the game is less irritating when I don't have to hoof it from the ass end of Boomtown/Crey's Folly/wherever to the nearest transit location, and I know I'm not going to finish missions in such a short time that I'll need more than those two. I'm fine with both the way they are, and fine with using them. I can't address the effect of day job base portals with charges. I don't have a base, nor any inclination to use anyone else's base, so I haven't made those a priority. I have one character accumulating time toward that day job so I can use it a few times to see what it does, but it won't impact my play in any way because it's not relevant or useful to me. Same applies to the P2W powers, which I've only taken on one character and immediately revoked after reading the full description and power info because they didn't fulfill any of my particular needs.

Yes. That wasn't changed. Only prior to level 40 IOs, or level 35+1 IOs, and discounting multiple attribute set IOs (the more things an IO enhance, the greater the total "budget" assigned to the IO). It's better than a level 20 IO, or anything below a level 20+4 IO. Level 25 or higher IOs are better than -1 SOs.

"Shepard." "Wrex."

I'm glad to see so many people experiencing that thrill of having "made it" before TA was improved. It was 2005 the last time anyone could say they did that. Enjoy that, you've earned it.

Take Grant Invisibility instead of Stealth.

The market pools crafted IOs, so all unattuned versions can be purchased as attuned. Completely ignoring expense comparisons, merely having the capability to pursue set bonuses from level 7 onward is a very good reason to use IOs exclusively. And with attuned IOs retaining relevance and utility all the way to 50+3, I'll probably never have any reason to use SOs again. They felt necessary a decade ago, when the economy on the original servers was so bad that some IOs cost 1.5-2x the inf* cap. Here, now, I have no use for them, thanks to the inflation control measures and ease of accumulating large sums of inf*.

Foe-targeted powers which spawn a pseudo-pet have a mechanical issue. Specifically, they stack effects unintentionally, and there are currently no ways to prevent or limit the stacking. So a couple of TA's powers had to be changed to either location-targeted AoEs created by pseudo-pets (invisible, normally untargetable entities which exist for the sole purpose of creating an effect in an area), or exclusively foe-targeted with no pseudo-pet. The latter was tried and proved to be less preferable for players, as it failed to create a persistent AoE into which enemies could run or be pulled. So they were changed to location-targeted to make them work, both the way they should and the way players expected them to.

The biggest problem with both approaches, simply lowering the recharge time of LRT or allowing players to incrementally reduce it in various ways, is that it devalues the relevant P2W powers. The P2W powers are necessary, and having players incentivized to purchase them is also necessary, for the HC team's inflationary control measures to succeed in the long term. This is vital for the growth and future development of the game. Without control, inflation will spiral right back up to the way it was on the original servers. Objectively, acquiring a single badge in each zone represents less investment than purchasing the P2W powers which supplement and augment LRT and the Fast Travel macro. Also objectively, the P2W powers are necessary, and encouraging players to buy and use them is equally necessary, because the benefit they provide, improved economic stability, helps everyone equally, and offers a greater benefit for more people than a reduced recharge time on LRT would. This is why the HC team decided to set it all up this way. It may be clunky, it may be annoying, it may be personally egregious for some players, but it helps everyone in the long run and creates a more stable foundation for building the game over time, and still gives players the ability to use the Fast Travel menu in the same way they could a use reduced recharge LRT alone. It's also worth noting that many people have spent inf* to pay for the P2W powers, and while they wouldn't necessarily lose anything if the recharge on LRT were reduced, the value of what they've invested in acquiring those powers, both in time to raise the necessary funds as well as the inf* itself, would be significantly reduced, as would the powers themselves. It would be rather churlish of the HC team to obviate the obviate both the utility and purpose of those powers for the people who paid for them. Note that I am not one of those players, I have none of the relevant P2W powers on any of my characters, so that is an objective perspective. Subjectively, I don't think it's much to ask of us, the players, to give a couple of minutes of our daily play time to ensure the long-term health, growth and development of the game. We're investing in one another when we do this, and that makes the game a better place for all of us, in more ways than most people realize. We're all here together, we might as well cooperate and try to make the game better and more future-proof, even if we can't all agree on everything.

I've been tooting this horn since 2005.

Character and power, collectively. Generally speaking, you can't stack -Res from the same power on your own. You can stack your -Res from that power with someone else's -Res from the same power (Bob's Shriek and Kate's Shriek). You can stack -Res from different powers on your character (Bob's Shriek, Bob's Shout, Bob's Disruption Arrow). If you try to stack your own -Res from the same power (Bob's Disruption Arrow x2), it overwrites, rather than stacking.

When I was working as a laptop repair technician in the IT company supporting the local school system, I came across three units registered to kids named Unique, not related to one another. Three. Even Unique isn't unique.

Extensive testing has indicated that LRT doesn't go where the huskies go. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, it also doesn't eat that yellow snow.

Learn how to cook it, instead of killing and eating it in the dirt, silly cat. It tastes much better when properly smoked and basted. 😛

It's illegal to cook men. Even turkey men. As apropos as it is to reference cannibalism in a feedback thread, don't cook people.

It's more appropriate to go from the other direction. Create the gate, then determine a suitably compelling reward. If you create the reward first, then you're obliged to make the gate fulfill preconceived expectations, whether those expectations are developmental or perceptual, and you face the very real possibility of tuning the gate too far in one direction or the other. You can very easily find yourself with an unpleasant gate that no-one wants to bother with because no reward justifies it, or a gate which you thought you were designing to be difficult to match the quality of a reward, but players skate through it like it's tissue paper and have a huge bonus in comparison to other rewards. Another way I can say it is - you don't create the rewards, then build the game and content around them. You create the content and build the game and gates, then set down rewards where necessary to entice players through gates. If you show up for a tabletop game and tell everyone that you've created a list of cool gear, but no world, no encounters and no system, they're going to molest you with your own dice. Obviously, since this game exists and there are already numerous gates, the mind immediately turns to how to make those gates "better" simply by scattering around more rewards. But skipping straight to adding more rewards still isn't the correct solution. Fixing bad gates, improving other gates and creating new and more interesting gates, that's the way to address the problems of grind and lack of perceived challenge. People in this thread haven't expressed consternation over the rewards, they've outright stated that it was the removal of the gates which led to those rewards which bothers them. The rewards themselves were of secondary consideration, it was the loss of the gates, the measure of progress, the moment of cresting the mountaintop, that affected them. And grinding is, in the end, just excessive and excessively bad gating, which is also directly relevant and important because it emphasizes how bad some of the gates were, and how bad some still are, and how meaningless some rewards were, and are, when placed behind bad gates. The gates are what really matter. So that's what we should focus on and address. Once we have suitable fixes for bad gates, improvements for bland gates, and interesting and exciting new gates, then we look at how to reward players. Gate. Reward. In that order.

Allows you to click LRT, look at the list of destinations, decide not to select one yet, close the list, and not have the power go on cooldown immediately.

No, because all of the changes you refer to were not changes in the original live game, they were done here, recently. As you note, bases used to cost Prestige. The HC team made them free. The Incarnate system was heavily restricted and unwieldy to navigate. The HC team removed several restrictions and made it easier to work with. In the same manner, the HC team has applied their vision of easier and better access to zone travel with these changes, making inter-zone travel less burdensome than it was on the original servers. It's the same reasoning and approach they've applied to other aspects of the game, improving problematic areas by making them more universally accessible and less of a grind. Calling it arbitrary because it resulted in the loss of access to the slash command if the player isn't in a base or within 45' of a base portal is wrong because that slash command was never accessible to players on the original servers.

Don't make me bring my cats to your house. 💩