kingsmidgens

This is a really bad change that fundamentally impacts the basic design of the game. Defense was intentionally designed this way and fiddled with through the years in various ways. Initially, sure, we didn't have all the tools now that we did then to protect our character by focusing on S/L defense, but people had been building for it since the beginning of the IO system and the original devs never touched it. The only justification I could see would be overly complicating things by allowing you to selectively defend against certain damage types within the same power but that's not happening any time soon and doesn't really make sense in all contexts, either. For instance an Electric Punch - you ignore the smashing completely, but the electricity still zaps you. Ice Blast - You're impervious to cold, but the smashing still hits. Resistance basically already does this anyway, for the damage you do take. Additionally, changing damage to favor the more unusual damage type - like the example of 40/60 Energy/Smash becoming 60/40 Energy/Smash from enemy Energy Melee and changing the defense type to be singularly Energy inadvertently shifts what's expected of characters even in regards to Resistance, which already underperforms compared to Defense. This will impact non-armor chars, which will be more likely to have Smash/Lethal resist via Tough rather than Energy resist, which in a high value would also come with generally higher S/L like Charged Armor from Electricity Mastery. Not even diving deep into the changes of Defense calculations, this will typically increase overall damage every character takes. If you need to make adjustments or add more difficulty to the game I really feel like they should be new additions which leave the existing game untouched. "Incarnate ToHit" is a good example. They gave us new tools and a new challenge to overcome. In that content, enemies had more ToHit, so we needed more Defense. It was not a very large increase, but enough that people skirting the softcap and NOT getting additional outside help were taking around 4x more damage than they were just by figuring the increased rate at which they were getting hit alone. This was content you signed up for and your character was just as good as it was before during existing content - much, much stronger, when you got the Incarnate goodies, even. This was the intention behind the design - adding more challenges to the game, ways to overcome those challenges, with the idea that you could go back and crush older content to see how far you've grown. Essentially - give us reasons to change our builds that are not nerfs, but ways to overcome the challenges of these advanced difficulty modes. Speaking of advanced difficulty modes - There exists Ouro and TF challenges where your characters are under constant debuff. It's probably too late to incorporate something like that into challenge modes, if that's the intent behind changing typed defense, but I think that would be a good solution for reigning in player power creep in select situations. Start at a lower level but retain the same caps and buffs. I'm reading a lot of "This isn't really that big of a deal" in defense of.. the defense nerf... so, I counter with: Why change it then? Re: Empathy Going off-topic but since people are bringing it up I'll say Empathy is just, simply put, one of the worst options and it always has been, outside of extremely niche scenarios. Fundamentally it is a bit one-trick and what it offers outside of the multiple heals doesn't really pair well with having extra heals. Honestly I feel like it's due for a buff but I know the set still retains a lot of fans and probably won't be seeing one. Importantly I don't think it should be used as a benchmark for "support" sets as a whole and how they fit into the overall meta of the game. You can play a "Healer" like Nature Affinity which has HoTs, Absorb, +RES effects (which reliably slow down incoming damage for you to, you know, heal..) and debuffs to boot. The -RES you provide, at a certain point, acts like a force multiplier for all of the other damage on the team and still has a place if you're pushing the limits of, say, getting things done ASAP. Basically they're not "needed" but still have a use, which I think is the way the game has been designed for ages and has stood the test of time.

It's too late to make this change. If the server came live with no AE? Okay. At this point, it's a bad idea to push out existing players from the game while reducing avenues for new players to pick up and compete in the game in an effort to please a minority. Vet levels in particular are of questionable value to begin with and already cap at 99 in terms of non-bragging rights rewards. Are you going to take away the (literal) thousands of vet levels some people have farmed in AE on specific characters? How will new people react to seeing that and hearing they can't realistically do it anymore? Add new content and new rewards in an effort to inspire people to leave AE. AEther Particles, for instance, are a great and I'd say healthy addition to the game. Don't remove or reduce existing rewards.

Character Items is the tab of your email which has redeemable consumables, currently you get these from superpacks for instance, it will tell you that you've got 2 of a certain type of Inspiration or 5x reward merits, etc. On live, you could purchase 4 Threads for 1 Astral Merit in Ouroboros, and it would go into your Character Items. You could have thousands of charges, just clicking that button on whatever character you'd like to buy threads. IIRC you could also do a larger option for Empyreans. They'd appear separately, and you'd have to click redeem for each bunch of 4 or 20, but it was pretty quick. Since we can trade merits, including Transcendent Merits for bulk transfers, I think it would be nice to have the above mentioned system again, perhaps with a slight fee in addition to the merits. I'm not sure if there's some technical limitation as to why this was removed, but I have a lot of stuff in my email from superpacks that I just haven't claimed and I don't suppose it would be much different from that. Additionally, this system, but for storing influence would be amazing. Pay your inf, get it in an email you can redeem on a new char, rather than manually making individual emails with however much. I would gladly pay a percentage fee to just have a lot of 50m I could claim on a new char. Anyway, I feel like this would be an incredible convenience since these are things you can do in a roundabout way, and in some cases, could do (on live) - and if you tack on a little Inf cost, you could consider it an inf sink to burn some out of the economy.

Was right-clicking and pressing G to Give recipes, I had 3 recipes and I gave one and then nothing was happening when I was clicking give, even though it said I still had 2, I tried opening a trade to trade it manually, it would close as soon as I would drag it into the window. Could give/trade other recipes, so figured I had given one (I had) but it said I had 2 more, and my alt only had 1. Logging out caused the 2 remaining to disappear from my first char - relogging caused the 1 in the other char's inventory to become a 3. So recipes didn't get deleted but there was presumably some kind of desync between both clients and the server, simultaneously.

I noticed that this is rather new, if it happened on live / before on HC, it was EXTREMELY uncommon. When did this start happening and is there a fix planned since this seems to be a known issue? Also, TY for the workaround, I will let people know about that.

This has been happening a lot lately, typically when the team is just formed. Essentially, it seems as though you can create a TF, but not be "on" the TF, resulting in you clicking the door only to have it sit there, waiting with an hourglass icon, and nothing happening - until you can move again. Clicking on ANY door results in the same, instead of the usual "You can't enter this door" generic message you'd otherwise get. I have noticed in this case it does not kick my level down and while I'm still on the team, for all intents and purposes on the TF, I am not really on the TF. Another oddity, likely in the same vein: We tried to reset a mission by logging out, logging back in. The leader logged back in first, and the rest of us followed.. the leader wasn't on the team. Very strange. Go into the mission door... there they are. Blue (instead of green) name, in the same mission as the rest of the team, but not on the team. After that mission completed, it immediately set to the same mission again (same door, same map) but a new instance. After that, nobody on the team could talk to the contact. Assuming the former leader was still the leader, but no longer on the team. Not sure how to reproduce it, if it has to do with using the LFG queue, other than just trying to form TFs and see if the first mission works. It happens somewhat frequently but not frequently enough to reproduce it with certainty.

FWIW I have never seen a tag similar to "Ignores level differences" or anything of the like, even on powers that did ignore level differences. I'm not arguing against the existence of the "purple patch" but rather that the behavior of the -RES debuff specifically was changed to take it into account when it was not taken into account before. Every AV I checked on Live with a Power Analyzer to see what level of -RES we were doing had exactly the matching values of the powers thrown on them being only ultimately reduced (or increased) in effectiveness by their pre-existing resist values. Other debuffs? Absolutely floored by a high lvl AV. -RES, not really. My understanding of the why was due to the fact that your damage itself is already scaled down and reducing the debuff would be a bit of a double whammy there so to speak.

Did you look up that patch note or are you going off of memory? I just looked through all of the patch notes 2004-2006 that are on the wiki which seemed like a pretty comprehensive list, just missing stuff before launch and it wasn't mentioned from what I saw. There were a lot of patch notes. I know the change you're referring to, but as I recall -RES was not included as a debuff that was impacted by relative levels. I looked at this in depth circa issue 22 and the only resistance to -Resist was Resistance itself, relative level was not taken into account. Using Power Analyzers, I could see that -20% RES would equal 20% more damage (compared to their base RES) whereas now it'll be reduced to -14.whatever%. Damage itself is already scaled based on level so the debuff itself didn't need to also scale down.

Didn't see this mentioned in any patch notes but I notice that there are changes in the behavior of -RES between here and at least Live, in fact, I think it's working differently than it was at the launch of this server. It boils down to Resistance debuffs taking relative level into account. Previously, this was not the case. If it's a -20% Debuff, it'd take 0% to -20% and you're doing 20% more damage. Resistance to Resistance debuffs is (still) Resistance for better or for worse - and the damage you deal is scaled based on relative levels, regardless of what their base Resistance is, -20% would result in 20% more base damage. So could anyone enlighten me if this was an intentional change and just not mentioned anywhere? The closest thing I can find is a patch note for Tar Patch being Unresistable and removing a flat amount of resistance which I would wager was leftover from a change that changed the underlying -RES mechanics to facilitate level differences being taken into account as it definitely did not work that way until recently. Essentially, would further discussion belong in bug reports (unintentional change) or suggestions (intentional change)?

Debuffs/damage are nerfed considerably. They're balanced to where I believe on average you may get more procs total, but since you're not always hitting Max targets, the overall effectiveness is essentially reduced.. Especially when you're on that one final stubborn boss or AV. Essentially, the proc rate considers the amount of targets you could hit, not how many you do hit. Buffs I believe do not differentiate between AoE or not and go exclusively on recharge and animation times.

Same. ATO and Winter-Os. My theory is that the history is just bugged. I can't believe that there is such a volume of people going "eh, whatever, 1 I guess." with these rare/theoretically expensive items, especially if the history shows as 100 when they're posting.

I do not believe there's an internal cooldown. Let's say a Stalker for instance instantly recharges their buildup, which has the Boost Up proc in it. You'll two-stack Boost Up, by using Build Up two times in a row. This can happen in roughly 2 seconds, so if there is an internal CD it's much shorter than other sort of timers that I am aware of. In fact- I recall when the Overwhelming Force proc came out (KB->KD one) it was essentially broken in Bonfire, as that checked so frequently for KB that enemies would be knocked down again BEFORE they hit the ground. That was, as I recall, sort of the inspiration for PPM, as they quickly nerfed it for a lot of powers and took a pass at others. They had just fixed certain proc interactions with other psuedopets, like ice patch caltrops. They only noticed that when Reactive was applying a DoT tick immediately upon application, and had an obscene proc rate on Pseudopets, ignoring their intended global stack limit, as fresh applications immediately did damage - and did was capable of an absurd amount of damage.

You will be introduced to appropriate contacts if you do radio and newspaper missions. But yeah since like i22 you could pretty much just walk up to any contact and start their missions. Might have been when they revamped Atlas and Mercy, since the old origin contacts weren't the "main path" anymore. If the combat/zone instancing thing hadn't been received so negatively they probably would have continued revamping zones, but as it is they were going to just keep adding trials like dfb and the one in bloody bay to new level ranges.