Luminara

*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. 💩

He's upgraded. He's pluralized. He's an infestation now. He is... @Bionic_Flea! Now with self-reproducing nano-technology! Nano-nano-technology, the nano-est of technologies, swarming a forum near you!

Teleport Target's stat panel only displays info for Teleport Foe. There's nothing related to teleporting friendly targets. The description does mention teleporting allies, but there are no stats listed on the info panel, it just says Teleport Foe and gives the data on that half of the power. The toggle for asymmetrical shoulders buzzes when you move the pointer over it. It doesn't make a click, it makes a constant buzz until the pointer is moved.

In fact, the thread appears to be focused on the rewards for gated content, rather than the gates themselves. I think that's a backward approach. We've primarily discussed what kinds of rewards we had, rewards which were made freely available, rewards which could be implemented, but that's putting the cart before the horse. Gates have to exist for rewards to have meaning and purpose, to be rewards. Without the gates, they're just handouts. Since I'm no less guilty of diverting the thread away toward discussion of rewards instead of gates, I'll nudge it in what I believe is the proper direction, toward gates and gating. Right now, the primary form of gating is combat. You need to engage in combat to earn XP. You need to earn XP to increase in level. You need to increase level to access more, more varied, or better powers. You need more, more varied, or better powers to continue to gain XP at a reasonable rate, due to the scaling increase in XP required per level. It creates a self-sustaining gate, and the rewards appropriately reflect the time and effort involved in passing through the gates presented by the XP/level/powers loop. Other gates exist in direct relation to the XP/level/powers gated system. Most story content is gated by level, with a gate "passkey" offered in the form of sidekicking. IO sets are gated by level. Various temporary powers are gated by mission or arc. Some story content is gated by specific powers (Lost Cure, for example), which are only obtainable once you reach a certain level. Faster travel used to be gated by both level (14) and power selection (2 powers to Fly/Superspeed/Super Jump/Teleport). Some gates have been removed. Team size used to be a gate for accessing some story content. Level used to be a gate for accessing some cosmetic items. Progression used to be partially gated by debt, which cut XP gain significantly in the past. So what kinds of gates do gate-seekers actually want? Level gates? Team size gates (solo is a team of 1)? Power specific gates? Archetype gates like EAT/VEAT story content? Or are there gates which don't exist, but could? Branching missions can gate story content, like what @Piecemeal has already accomplished. That's one. @Lockpick suggested using veteran levels as gates, as they do little at the moment, and linking them to existing gates in a unique way, so that's another. How about some more? Let's hear some creative suggestions for gates, whether they're existing gates used in a different way or entirely new gates. When we have some decent gates to talk about, then we can talk about what kinds of rewards to offer. And remember, gate doesn't necessarily have to equate to grind. A gate can be very difficult to surmount without being grindy, or it can be grindy and still easily accomplished by placing a power on auto-fire and going AFK for a while. There's no inherent conflation between the two, it's just how they've been traditionally viewed. If you realize that everything is gated in some manner, even if it's just pressing the button to log in, then you can look at the game in a different light, see the gates for what they are and let your imagination guide you in improving existing gates and making new ones which are both interesting and relevant.

OSA is a nested pseudo-pet. When you fire the arrow, it doesn't do anything except cause the OilSlickOil pseudo-pet to spawn at the targeted location. OilSlickOil immediately begins using a PBAoE which Slows and Knocks Down, and spawns OilSlickTarget, the invisible box that you can target and destroy with Fire/Energy damage. When OilSlickTarget is defeated, it despawns and sends a call to the server to spawn OilSlickBurn, which uses a PBAoE damage aura to create the damage dealt by OSA. This is why Ranged AoE Damage procs don't even make hit checks until the oil is ignited, because the entity which has access to those sets doesn't exist until that very moment. So to answer your question, the reason Defiance isn't applied to OSA is because the damage portion of the power is a pseudo-pet "owned" by another pseudo-pet, the target dummy, and the target dummy is "owned" by the oil slick. Your buffs are only applied to the slick, they don't transition two steps farther down the chain, and the slick doesn't deal damage. Can it be changed? Well... no. The Slow/KD patch has to be generated by a pseudo-pet to be persistent. Using Redirect doesn't create a persistent patch. And the damage has to be generated by a pseudo-pet to be appropriate for the power's persistence, in that it can't just be a 15s long DoT applied because foes can leave the AoE and the effects are supposed to end. And the target also has to be a pseudo-pet, simply because there has to be something there to hit. I said no, but technically, nothing is impossible, if one spends enough time and effort. Right now, though, there are no existing mechanics which could be substituted for nested pseudo-pets, and spending the necessary time and effort to create the mechanics for one power might not be the best use of the HC team's resources. It took almost two years to get OSA working the way it does now, and it does work well at this point, so the HC team is probably disinclined to mess around with it or try to replicate it. At least, for now. I suspect this may be on @Captain Powerhouse's private list of things to revisit when he's in a better position to do so. He's not a fan of pseudo-pet powers because they act independently from the player, creating the potential for problems and/or abuse. But I wouldn't hold my breath. Making something like OSA without pseudo-pets won't be easy, nor will it be happening any time soon. Any other questions I can answer?

THIS! ONE BAZILLIONTY FOUR TIMES THIS! @Jimmy! Make this happen! DO IT! Don't make me swamp the forums with that picture!

Urushiol, the compound in poison * plants, bonds with the skin. That's what makes it so frustrating. Once it's in, it's essentially part of your body until the skin peels or flakes off. Note that the compound itself becomes inactive eventually, some hours later, so it doesn't continue sinking in until it reaches your vital organs or anything, and it's not the compound itself causing the reaction, it's just an evolutionary quirk that we're so drastically affected by it. Humans specifically adapted this reaction to it. It's one of those natural world anomalies, like humans being particularly susceptible to funnel web spider venom despite not being a species preyed upon by that spider. Other mammals don't have the same reactions to poison * or funnel web venom. I wish I had access to scientific study tools, equipment and data. I'd love to trace the DNA sequence which causes this and find out where it came from. Neandertals? Homo Habilis? Homo Heidelbergensis? An older branch of our tree? Or is it native to Homo Sapiens? Did it come from a specific genotype, or was it common throughout the species in which it originated? Was it a response to the last ice age ending? SO MUCH TO KNOW, AND I CAN'T DO ANYTHING TO LEARN ABOUT IT! 😞

Oh, well... big hair went out of style. Casual dress, jeans and t-shirts, became fashionable. Grunge. You missed grunge. Several countries have had different heads of state. Recycling became "a thing". The educational system went into the toilet in the United States. Pet rocks stopped being "a thing". So did Chia Pets. And The Clapper. Oh, the Cold War ended, but another one sort of started relatively recently. Japan got weirder. China got angrier. Poutine was moved from the "junk food" category to the "cuisine" category. Some mountains grew, others shrank (erosion). Gasoline prices went up. So did inflation. Wages didn't match either, but smart people still found ways to stretch their money. The planet continued spinning, despite our best efforts. Some wind blew, somewhere. Top Gear happened. Then it stopped happening. Then The Grand Tour happened. It's still kind of happening. I think that about sums it up. Welcome to the next century! 😄