Parabola

Anything beyond 'big steel box with random kit scattered around one corner' is witchcraft as far as I am concerned.

One shouldn't be as far ahead of the others as it is (in my opinion). Of course farmers are always going to farm whatever it is that offers the greatest return for their time, currently that's AE farming. I do remember the Katie Hannon's and I remember what happened - they reigned in the outlier. AE farming is now that outlier.

I'm surprised you didn't mention RP. Yes, of course, some in game activities aren't directly comparable. Farming and regular play though are. In both you are engaging in the core gameplay loop, you are taking on challenge and defeating mobs for rewards. And I think there is balance to be pursued in that. So yes, I do mean it thanks.

Well this thread is serving predictably little purpose. Other than filling out my ignore list so that's something I suppose. I fail to see what is so threatening or even controversial about the idea that different in game activities should have rough parity in rewards/time but there we go. Apparently by saying that I'm accusing people of badwrongfun and trying to change the way they play. I don't see it myself.

I have to echo the thoughts expressed by others on the different ways offensive and defensive toggles are treated. I am absolutely all about game balance and avoiding powercreep but this is one of those areas of legacy game design that could really use a fresh look. Why do different toggles need to react to mez differently at all? Is it really a significant balance point that must be maintained? One of the more attractive things about this game is the variety of ways it allows you to take the game on. Buffs and debuffs are potentially really powerful compared to what tends to be allowed in other games. However, debuffs are still limited by a couple of factors and any character relying on them for survival is always in for a tougher ride than a conventionally armoured character. The purple patch is a big factor, and in my opinion it is too biased against debuffs, and another is the whole issue of mez. Characters that rely on debuffs for protection are generally those without native mez protection. No other subgroup of characters run such a risk of most of their mitigation being suddenly turned off. Buffs stick around (and aren't cut down by the purple patch) and armoured characters have mez protection built in. I have gripes about the whole implementation of mez in this game but relevant to this discussion in particular is why do we not just suppress 'offensive' toggles just for the duration of the mez? If there has to be a balance point with cast times and damaging toggles then that could make a certain amount of sense. In that case could these not be split into their own category? So damaging toggles require manual retoggle or have the kind of delay being trialled here, but non-damaging debuff toggles just behave exactly like buff toggles currently do?

I've not tested but the way similar powers have been set up in the past is to have the two parts operating as separate powers with respect to procs. Therefore slow procs will only fire from the slow cone and fear procs will only fire from the fear cone.

Yes indeed, you'd have to completely isolate the farmers. It wasn't a serious suggestion - just that it would be interesting to do so we could really see what would happen to the market.

The second question seems to be lacking an appropriate response given that I'm massively against the first idea? I don't often say things like this (or ever before to my knowledge) but if all content was made lv50 I'd leave and never look back. The journey is the game for me - I have much less fun at 50 (mainly due to how terrible I find the incarnate system). Besides, we're not being given instant lv50s? They are only for PvP. And I'd vote against allowing them for PvE even harder and faster than I vote against making the entire game lv50.

My thoughts are really along the lines that the exact details matter less than the idea that no one way of playing the game should result in disproportionate rewards compared to other ways. If people want to ae farm all day every day then all power to them but the rewards for doing so shouldn't be completely out of line with the rewards for playing the more traditional game all day every day (chance would be a fine thing, bloody real life...). I never farm anymore. I built a fire farmer to check it out and pl'ed a few alts but I quickly found that what I enjoy is the levelling process the traditional way. I make enough inf by a bit of very light marketeering as I go along to meet my needs and that's good enough for me. In general I am happy with how I play and happy for others to do their thing too. But, what I don't like is any nagging feeling that my time could be more profitably spent farming than what I'm doing. Of course traditional play is going to be a bit less rewarding, that's fine, but when it feels it's an order of magnitude less rewarding then that's not so good. More importantly if it feels that way to me then any new players are likely to feel the same thing too. As much as I can see the appeal of farming, and I wish its proponents well, I think a farm is a terrible introduction to the game for a new player. There is so much to this game that gets skipped over in the confines of the ae building. The majority of content is sub 50 and while it's fair enough that a jaded veteran might want to avoid it (I love all the old low level stuff but to each their own), I don't think it's a good thing for new player to be given the idea that 'the game' is blasting to 50, racing to incarnate, purpling out and then wondering where the content is. I think this is more or less the angle the devs are coming from too. They have stated several times that they don't have a problem with farming itself, but they are acting to reign in its more disproportionate rewards.

I've actually played both. The corruptor is part of a static duo (it is amazing what a pair of these can do) but the defender is the better soloist by far. In general I want the buffs before the blasts and this is particularly true for time. In terms of epic I've been avoiding the power boost/farsight combo for a while now. It is possible to softcap ranged and aoe without it and everything in melee is debuffed, possibly without end and dying anyway. That leaves the door open to dark mastery and its much better version of soul drain.

Add me to the list of people who never even knew this conversion was a thing. Given that, and given that I don't AE farm I don't stand to lose much by this change or its predecessor. That said, this does feel like the broader impact solution.

Great combo but mines also a tank and I would recommend it. Dark melee is great on tanks with bigger aoes, more freedom to proc and more return from soul drain.

I thought it did but I could be wrong. I'm not sure I follow your second paragraph I'm afraid? It wasn't a seriously thought through suggestion to be honest, it just dropped into my head reading your earlier post. I don't have a problem with the lower -res numbers but some clearly do and I just wondered if this might sweeten the pill.

This brings up an interesting point. If some of the -res was made unresistable (with defenders getting a larger chunk of that) it might make the lower overall numbers more palatable to the support focused folks? Honestly I feel the purple patch is a little too harsh on debuffs overall anyway. The recent changes to trick arrow did this kind of thing with the flash arrow change so there is precedent. Just a thought?

The really interesting experiment would be if the ae farming community was sectioned off onto a different server with a completely isolated instance of the market*. The influence farming has on the market gets bandied around as both a reason to restrict farming and a reason to allow it - I would love to be able to actually run the experiment. * I know this is probably not technically possible.

They are never going to do this because making the squishies safer under those circumstances wouldn't lead to better gameplay. Everything becomes very static in a fight if one character has perfect control over aggro, in the same way it would if one controller could perfectly control every mob. A static fight is fun for the character that gets to feel powerful but boring for everyone else. All characters have tools for personal survivability, all are designed to be able to handle a bit of overflow aggro. This game is based around combat that is a bit more dynamic than the traditional mmo trinity and that is a big part of its appeal. Handling those moments when extra mobs turn up is when the team game really comes alive, otherwise it's just 'follow the tank, buff the tank, blow up mobs, rinse and repeat'.

Spent a fairly annoying hour or so this afternoon parking all my sub 50 characters in pocket d for the fast log offs. Going to echo the calls for better sorting tools on the character frontscreen to make keeping track of everything easier. Quick question - if I have a character who has dinged 50 but hasn't yet trained up are they counted as a 50 for the purposes of name retention?

Just noticed that Genetic Contamination (Bio) is flagged as a Melee attack rather than an AOE. All other damage auras are flagged as AOE attacks so this looks to be an outlier.

I fear there is reasonable chance of players going on a 'creating work for a gm' type rampage when they find a name has been taken. They will know someone is out there with 'their name' and we all know how reasonable humans are when they feel something has been taken from them.

If there was no difference between fire farm enemies and council then AE farms would be populated with council. But they aren't. Anyway, I don't care about this anywhere near as much as you clearly do so I'll leave you to it. Peace.

Apart from only fighting enemies custom designed to have no buffs, debuffs, mez or damage resistances, and who exclusively use a uniform damage type? Even council, as weak as they are, manage some variety in the threat they pose.

Back on live I had a character who I really struggled to name and who wasn't all that important to me so I generated two random words and stuck them together; Kidney Bench was born. I grew kind of fond of Kidney over the time I played him, he certainly acted as a conversation starter. In many respects that name gave him far more personality than a 'Captain Heroic' derivative would have.

As reluctant as I am to get involved in this dumpster fire there are a lot of comments here along the lines that there is no difference between AE farming and regular mission farming the way it used to be. The devs have previously stated that this is measurably untrue in that AE farm maps place a disproportionate load on the servers. This is to do with the density of active enemies I believe. Whether this is still the case and is a contributing factor to these changes we'll have to wait and see.

For me the question isn't whether the new sonic blast is less powerful at team support than the old version, that much is obvious from the numbers. The real question is whether the old version was too focused on team support, too much of an outlier to the other blast sets. I feel it was and that it can afford to lose some of that to make it function better in its primary purpose; as a blast set. It will still be the go to support focused blast set because -res at any magnitude is always useful.

A few. Some are ideas that are waiting for me to find the time, others are concepts that require at's/sets that I consider to be underperforming and are awaiting buffs. As I said before some of those are names that I have previously played to a much higher level but then decided 'this really should have been something else' and rerolled (sometimes many times over). I'm very likely to spend a bit time powerlevelling these characters so I don't have to log into them as often (ironically by dusting off my alt account fire farmer that I otherwise never use). But for me the journey is the game. 1 to 50. I often lose interest at 50 and almost certainly do if I ever fully incarnate. So any character powerlevelled to get around this policy is always going to be rerolled back to 1 when the time comes to play them for real. The thing I particularly don't like about the implementation of this policy is that it will change how I play. I know I am going to feel pressured into sticking with characters to get them to the higher level thresholds whether I really want to play that character or not. I like dipping in and out of characters, some I'll play for a concentrated period of time, others don't hold my attention. That doesn't mean I don't like the concept or don't care about the name. This just feels bad to me.