Luminara

Man, the GMs are working overtime this week. It's a good thing they're people of a singular focus, of commitment, of sheer fucking will. That they're not the bogeymen, they're the people we call to kill the fucking bogeyman.

This is better than Singularity.

Last time the ODP was activated, it was just a splash page. Once the behind-the-scenes verification was finished, it redirected to the page you were trying to view. No Captcha (that did pop up briefly three-ish years ago, but not since), you weren't logged out, just a few seconds delay.

It didn't work. 😁

Two people with cleaning towels and a cup of industrial-strength bleach. Absolutely. Also. l2oblique, n00b.

Hey, @Cipher, activate the orbital defense platform.

Stay home and watch porn. Three birds, one stone.

We all appreciate how quickly you ladies and gents handled the spam. Heroes, the lot of you (even the stinky villains)!

Make it a debuff and call them scrapper taints.

Well, that trailer was a whole lot of "What the ever-loving fuck..." Promising. I hope it's as good as Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. Also, the Wikipedia article on the real event from which the movie is drawn (and wildly deviates, but it's a dark comedy, so it's okay) is rather dull... except the part about the bear having 75 (SEVENTY FUCKING FIVE) pounds of coke in its stomach. The bear ate almost half its body weight in cocaine. Ho Lee Shitballs.

BUT WAIT, BEAR'S MORE!

Why not ask for all of the drop tables to be changed to 100% purple recipes, super pack and Winter packs while you're at it? Maybe a pony ride and a side of fries, too.

The one that bothers me is the office map with something like 17 floors. It doesn't bother me because it has 17 floors, it bothers me because 10 or 11 of those floors are nothing but a short corridor to the next elevator. They aren't populated with critters. They have nothing interesting or engaging in them. They exist solely to add time to the mission. It's lazy design, and as an explorer-type player, the least rewarding to play through.

For the same reason the walls are made of chicken wire. They were all designed by Richter when he was 5. He probably wanted blanket forts, but decided that "metal stops bullets".

Aw, you shaved off your beard for us. And bathed! You're so thoughtful.

No-one recommended 2x XP to me when I started playing here. I feel excluded. Someone explain things to me like I'm a n00b so I can experience a sense of belonging.

Boosters are stripped from enhancements when they're moved to the market window (deleted, not moved to your salvage storage), and the enhancement is restored to its crafted level. TO/DO/SO/HOs can't be boosted, nor can any attuned enhancement (which includes Winter, Universal Damage and ATO). Boosters don't alter the level of the enhancement. A 50+3 IO is a level 50 IO with improved stats, not a level 53 IO. Also, boosted IOs never "don't work at all" due to exemplaring. If it's a set IO, you can lose set bonuses when you exemplar more than 5 levels below the crafted level, but not the effects of the IO itself. TO/DO/SO/HOs can't be attuned, IO recipes cap at 50 and crafted IOs don't drop. Booster don't drop. Merit vendor, super packs or market only. Well, you were right that attunement caps at 50.

The point I was making is that the path toward better balance only has two routes. One is to nerf the shit out of everything, drag it all down to the same level as the weakest sets... and we know from looking at @Cipher's metrics and graphs that doing so would have driven nearly everyone away. The other route, pulling the dogs out of the shithole and cleaning them up, can't be accomplished without introducing a significant amount of power creep in the short term, but it opens up a brighter and better future in which everyone is at roughly the same level and the content can be balanced for that level. So it really comes down to what kind of power creep you want. Cryptic/Paragon's power creep benefited the top end and left the bottom further and further behind. HC's benefits everyone, but it entails more short-term power creep and a longer path to the point where it's controlled. Cryptic/Paragon's balance was a line in the sand, which they scuffed out and redrew every time they wanted to drum up subs or increase micro-transaction sales. HC's approach is to balance the archetypes and sets as well as they can without turning everything into pre-HC TA, and then retune the content to match it so no-one is a dog in a shithole. Do you remember when Council lieutenants could self-defeat and respawn as boss Warwolves? Do you know how I dealt with that as a TA? Pop every goddamn inspiration I had, use every TA power that wasn't recharging, and pray. Invariably, hospital trips were made. Restock inspirations and try again... and again, and again, and again, until it was whittled down enough to finish. That was pre-HC TA. Couldn't handle one boss. TA wasn't a 1, it was a -1. And with Titan Weapons, the bar was raised to 11. It's impossible to achieve balance with a spread that immense, a spread which continually grew as new sets, and new content designed to challenge those sets, was released. How many more Issues would Paragon have released before TA was so far behind the curve that it literally was unplayable? How many other sets were facing the same fate? How balanced could the game ever be when a disparity like that is allowed? The game was never balanced the way it should have been under the old regime. The power creep we're discussing, the improvements to underperformers and releases of new sets and powers designed to perform at a higher level, is better, in my experience and opinion, than the power creep Cryptic/Paragon saddled us with. At least with HC's power creep, we know everyone's going to be capable of completing content, even if they're not top tier, and we know it's a short-term problem, not a continuing situation of ever widening gulfs.

Or you could just use City of Data. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=rikti_war_zone_pylon

You do have a point, Cryptic/Paragon certainly didn't spend much time on the buff treadmill. Look at how they treated Trick Arrows. One balance pass in I7, and even that was so light-handed that only TA enthusiasts bothered to play it. Rational people looked at a set with almost all of its powers on recharge timers which mandated Hasten just to use them every third spawn, and debuff strengths so low that they did have to use all of them and stack controls on top of that to have any impact, and knew they were looking at a bad fucking joke. OSA's failure to spawn OSBurn wasn't fixed until two years after the set went live. PGA received an adjustment to its Sleep chance near the end of the game's life. Not the debuff, the goddamn control. And that was it. They invested more effort into dicking around with the animation times than they did addressing the glaring problems. If the Invention system hadn't been released, I doubt even I would've stuck it out with TA for the seven years that I did. No, if something was underperforming, Cryptic/Paragon abandoned it and focused their attention on creating newer and better sets and powers, continually expanding the gap between what was under the baseline and what was over it. Their approach was to shrug and move on. For example, creating Time Manipulation, a set so strong that I can use it as a petless mastermind at /x5 solo, whereas with pre-HC TA I would've been limited to /x1 on the same character... with heavy inspiration usage and a lot of running away. You're also glossing over the work the HC team has been doing to narrow that gap between the underperformers and overperformers. Yes, they've been buffing, but they've also been nerfing. Or, did you forget that Titan Weapons was reworked so it wasn't so far over the top that it was the most popular melee set by a wide margin? The balance passes which applied the standardized damage formula to many powers, resulting in nerfs to numerous powers? The imposition of standard target caps which led to a lot of cones and PBAoEs having their number of targets reduced? This group of developers hasn't been on an endless spree of buffs, they've taken the hammer to a hell of a lot of powers, and entire sets, in an effort to fix the wild disparity in effectiveness between the top and the bottom, and some of their adjustments have been very heavy-handed (Martial Assault being a poster child for this). Yes, there are some outliers in what HC has created, but in honesty, no more than what Cryptic or Paragon created. At least HC is making an effort to minimize the difference between the high end and the low end, something Cryptic/Paragon only did at a rate that made continental drift seem rapid. It's also worth reminding you, and everyone else, that the HC team raised the baseline, from 3 +0 minions to 3 +3 minions. The underperformers have to be brought up, and new ones have to meet that minimum. That's the overarching goal, make everything playable at the new baseline, and with hundreds of sets and thousands of powers, a very small team working in their spare time (and, like everyone else, they have less of that in the post-quarantine era) to fix bugs, create new content, revise old content, create new powers and sets and revisit old powers and sets isn't going to accomplish anything overnight. Those outliers, those exploitative uses of powers, will be addressed, once the groundwork is complete. There are a lot more sets and powers in need of attention to bring them up to par than there are newly created powers in need of a bump downward, and if they spend all of their time trying to deal with imperfections on the ceiling, they'll never get around to completing the floor.

It's probably "stuck". It happens from time to time, something listed just doesn't move, no matter how long it's there. I've had LotG IOs get "stuck" for months, even with prices well below the standard. Take it out, mail it to an alt and stick it back in. Oh, don't forget to jiggle it.

39.23% Energy Defense, 4.95% -ToHit if it's in melee range, 120 Endurance, 5.28 end/s (a Recovery pulse every 1.13s) on my Staff/Willpower... sappers aren't a real problem, they're free XP. It's the Gunslingers you have to worry about. Four firing Liquid Nitrogen Rounds will mez you, at which point you lose the benefits of Rise to the Challenge just long enough for the rest of the spawn to use your face as a toilet brush.

Defiance wasn't added until I5.