Parabola

To reiterate my earlier point I think it might be hard to buff dark armors SO performance without also buffing it's IO performance which is already fine or better than fine. One thing might be to give it knockback protection natively. If you are SO's only you are forced to run an extra toggle to get this with the resulting endurance cost. Having knockback protection would benefit IO users too but only to the tune of freeing up a couple of slots, I think it would be a bigger buff to SO users overall. I still believe that cloak of fear is a weak power and needs buffing even though the overall set performance is fine with IO's. At the moment it's an automatic skip for me in favour of oppressive gloom and no power should be that easy to drop. I'd also like to put in a good word for the self res power. I absolutely love it and take it on every dark armor character. It's so thematic to rise from the brink of death sucking life out of nearby enemies. And it does a mag 30 stun. 30! I have occasionally let myself fall just so I can use it. I know this goes against some people's religion (particularly on a tank) but falling down isn't failing, you've only failed if everyone is dead and in hospital. Mind you I saw someone arguing the other day that having to use dark regeneration on a tank was failing in some way... My only complaint about it and all other self res powers is the toggle drop. It takes ages to retoggle everything, particularly running the number of toggles dark armor is likely to. Could we not change the unconcious state to suppress toggles like a mez effect rather than turn them off completely? Then all we'd need to do is retoggle damage auras and could get on with the fight. I imagine that would make self res powers much more popular.

Oh I'd love to make proper use of it. It feels like it should be one of the set defining powers. I bet plenty of newcomers to coh pick dark armor on the strength of the description of that power alone. They are likely to be bitterly disappointed by the reality. Yeah this too. Once it has been buffed to point where it's useable the graphics could do with an overhaul. I bet it could be made to look awesome now. Actually, on the subject of graphics. Something that I think dark armor in general (and many other sets for that matter) could benefit from is a saturation slider in the customisation options. This can be manipulated to some degree with the colour choice but it would be great to be able to exert a bit more control. With most colour options you are basically a walking cloud after a while, there's usually a great costume buried under there somewhere!

Doesn't energy font draw aggro? I haven't played with it much but I thought it did unless I was imagining things. My biggest issue with both the orbs is they are concept limiting. I have one controller that the font fits perfectly but the others not so much. If all pseudopets and other proc effects could be customised that would be great.

Dark armor is in an odd place because it performs badly without IO's and very well with them. All the gaps in the set are exactly the things that are easiest to build for with IO's: defence, end management and even knockback protection. There is also a siphon end proc that looks like it was designed specifically to be used in dark regeneration. I ran a dark armor character pre issue 9 and had a generally miserable experience. Now I absolutely love the set but only because I can throw IO's at it from low levels. This makes it a tricky set to balance though, it's all very well saying that everything is balanced around SO's but an eye has to be kept on the high end too. Ignoring wider set balance issues there is a power that really needs looking at: cloak of fear. I would be interested to see the figures but if cof isn't the least picked power in the set I'd be astonished. It's end cost is too high and it's accuracy is too low, both by a considerable amount. No amount of slotting can currently turn this into an effective power. Fear is a tricky control anyway, particularly for a set with a damage aura, so even if the acc and end were sensible it would still be debatable whether it would be worth running for the -tohit it provides. Like all debuffs the biggest problem is that this will be resisted heavily by anything you'd really want to effect. Making it unresistable like flash arrow could be an interesting twist?

A thought has just occurred to me. If I bid 100k for an uncommon salvage piece am I buying directly from the seeded stock or do I pick up the next in line piece listed by another player and only buy from the seeded stock if there is no supply? Buying from the seeded stock effectively destroys all the inf and creates an item so acts as a deflationary measure across the economy as a whole. If I am buying from another player only 10% of the inf is destroyed and the supply is reduced by 1. If it is the latter I could see salvage prices getting stuck at more or less the seeded prices and staying there eventually.

In a way it makes perfect sense that uncommon salvage would go for around 50k. Rare salvage stabilized at around 500k not long after the hc servers came up and have been at around that mark ever since. The seeding price for rares is 1m so they are on the market at generally half that. In the same way the 50k mark for uncommons is half their seeding price of 100k. I'm not sure of the exact ratio in drop rates between uncommons and rares but I wouldn't be surprised if the demand for uncommons wasn't actually much higher relative to the drop rate than it is for rares. Crafting requires quite a lot of uncommon salvage, particularly given that in general people aren't crafting rares because there is no margin in it due to converters. The rise in uncommon salvage prices happened so quickly though it does feel to me like there was some human involvement in the process. I suspect someone or many someones came to the conclusions I have above and decided to see what would happen if they bought low and sold higher using 50k as a 'half of the seeding price' target. As it turns out they were right, the pressure of demand has driven the prices up and they are now where they are. In fact the demand for uncommons is so high we are now seeing prices nudging up towards the seeding price at times. I bought some for 100k yesterday while doing some converting because I'm a patient seller but an utterly impatient buyer. At the end of the day 100k is still not a huge amount, it certainly doesn't hurt the bottom line in the converter business so I don't see it as a huge problem. And of course it can't get any higher.

The luck of the gambler market is definitely down. They are trading at least 1m below where they were a couple of weeks ago. I know this with some confidence because I have stock that hasn't sold sitting there with prices that look a bit silly now. I consider lotg a decent benchmark for the whole rares market given how in demand they are.

As I understand it there isn't really a right answer to this. If you put it in a tier 1 or 2 the chance to proc will be so low that there is very little hope of building up enough mag of protection to break you out of any mez. If you put it in a slower recharging attack there is the chance of accumulating more stacks and possibly preventing a mez in the first place but no chance of helping yourself if you do get mezzed. If you had a tier 2 that was part of your normal attack chain and that you could afford to slot as a proc attack with no other recharge in it then that might be the ideal option but that would mean splitting the set...

It's funny I still take my travel power at 14 on every character. It just feels wrong to do it any other way. I also travel oldschool without using base tp but that's more to do with not wanting to get used to something that will be going away. On that subject I was on a synapse the other day and it got to the bertha mission in boomtown. Most of us were in the north of steel canyon anyway but I noticed a couple of people disappear into the sg base, at least one of them must have been within sight of the entrance. I had to smile when it turned out the mission was much further away from the base entrance than the steel one.

It's just all so clear when you lay it out like that. We're through the looking glass here people. But wait. What if the train is the prize and it's the nemesis that are tan? Or it could be an ant train? Or anti nemesis raze print? Burning books will defeat nemesis!

Yeah I hadn't really paid attention to this either. I have my farmer on a second account for giving level bumps so the last couple of days I've experimented with afk farming her while I've been playing a proper character. It does feel a bit off to be honest. Idle speculation but a way of nixing this (and afk door sitting in general) might be to introduce a timer that freezes out xp, inf and drops gain if an input hasn't been given for a certain time. I think it's reasonable to expect the game to actually be interacted with in some form or another to benefit from rewards.

I played a time/dp defender up to the mid 40's (who was a reroll of the same sets on a corruptor) and I have now rerolled her again into a dp/temp blaster. The defender version was fun and powerful but I realised I just wanted to blast, it just fitted the concept better as much as anything. OP, dp/temp/mace may be what you are looking for. Temp offers an extra aoe and some bonus recharge to fuel your ability to spray bullets around with abandon. You get an aoe chain early (ff+rech procs help when they are working properly) and it can get quite tough. My planned build will be more or less softcapped to s/l/e/ranged. Most importantly I've found her a huge amount of fun to play. You operate from the edge of melee, jumping in for pbaoe, jumping out for the cone. Single target feels a bit slow but that isn't what she's for. And she looks damn cool doing it all :).

Yeah just an option to scale them down a bit. I don't want to change it for everyone, I just find them a bit too intrusive. I've played enough melee to feel slightly embarrassed when I stone cage a group and know that all the melee guys can see is my power fx for the rest of the fight. Yeah this too. I think there are several powers in the game that keep amplifying when they hit more targets. Stone cages seems to do this. The stuttering has improved for me since the hc team made a recent change to particle fx though.

Yeah Victory Rush was a late addition when I realised I was going to have endurance problems. There is also that temp power that is cheap and gives recovery, it just seems a bit cheaty to rely on a temp power. Haven't made any progress with this, altitis is biting hard at the minute...

Wondering if it would be possible to provide the option to scale down the graphics for earth control (thinking mainly of the immob and the hold)? They already scale to the size of mob affected so presumably there are some settings for this somewhere? By default they seem a bit big to me, and they are very obscuring. If we could set them to be about 80% the current size I think they might be a bit easier for everyone?

You'd need 22% +ToHit out of Tactics and Kismet +Acc combined plus 60% Global Accuracy for Acid Arrow to fire off at 95% against +4's, assuming you're not using an Alpha like Nerve to fix your accuracy. I've done a bit better - 25.7% to hit and 69% acc: I've still not finished leveling her so don't have the purples in place but she has all the core powers and slotting. On the plus side she is an absolute beast damage wise. She can rotate Oil Slick on one spawn with Blackstar on the next (depending of course on the speed of the team). Acid Arrow, Torrent and Tenebrous Tentacles all have two procs each that can light Oil Slick. And on the single target side Moonbeam does absurd damage even without the purple proc and of course Ice Arrow hits very hard indeed as well. The problem is as I feared it would be - endurance use. The aoe rotation of TT, Torrent and Acid Arrow burns through endurance. I was basically fine until I had all the defence shields in place, running these alongside firing off powers with no end slotting in them is just too much. So, it looks like my hopes of using Intuition Radial are out the window and I'm going to have to use Cardiac or Vigor. As discussed the accuracy situation is fine so Vigor seems unnecessary leaving Cardiac Core as probably the best bet.

Wow, missed all the fun here. Yeah, no thanks op, this would be a terrible idea. It might work better in a game where you were expected to play a very limited number of characters and the end game was 'the game'. CoH isn't that game. I have over 50 alts, 5 at level 50 and I only play one of those with any regularity. I very rarely see purple drops but that doesn't matter because I have the funds to buy what I need. I'd actually like to go totally the other way and make them more available. Perhaps give them a very small chance to drop at lower levels.

TT does immobilize though making it a little difficult to directly balance against those other powers. Dark Blast as a whole trades damage for utility (although it procs very well). The overall question of balance would depend on how the devs see the performance of the set. I am just hoping to convince them that it could be a bit easier to use.

You beat me to it, I had a similar thought. And you saved me from having to do more maths so I thank you! My issue with Torrent and Umbral Torrent is that they don't exist in a vacuum, they are used alongside at least one much shorter cone in Tenebrous Tentacles. That 41 foot of width is only available at the full 80 foot range which would require engaging the spawn from so far away TT likely wouldn't hit it at all. It is much more likely that most engagements will be conducted from the range that puts the back of the spawn at about 40 feet away. Then the Torrents are blasting out the back of the spawn and the extra width and area are wasted. Worse than that they have a habit of randomly hitting extra mobs behind the current pack. So I really feel that for the overall good of the set (in either form) the ranges of the cones should be brought closer together. I certainly agree though that some compensation in terms of the arcs would be nice, but not entirely vital (other than Night Fall which flat out needs a buff). These would be great but may be asking for a little much? I was trying to keep the changes roughly 'balance neutral', feeling that making Dark Blast a bit more user friendly would be enough of a buff on it's own (again with the exception of Night Fall).

I can see both ways really. On the one hand everything apart from pvp's and purples is either available in packs or covert-to-able so why not those. On the other I see what you are saying about preserving some natural drops in the market (but with a ceiling price set by the merit cost). Not sure which side I come down on to be honest. If purples rise much above 25 million then the pack idea might start to look more tempting.

Yeah I wasn't advocating that they extend the converter system just pointing out that they could and that it would really shake things up. I like the idea of a purple pack though.

Very true. Every time I've posted in this thread I've had this in my head:

Ok, I think I may see the problem here. I think you have convinced yourself of a couple of things. Firstly that wealth inequality is a problem and that it drives inflation. And secondly that this change was made specifically to stop farming because the devs don't like it as a playstyle and all the talk of limiting inflation is just a smokescreen excuse. At this point I'm not sure anything anyone says on the matter will change your mind. I will for the sake of it say that the first genuinely isn't a problem, and that is why we aren't talking about it rather than some conspiracy of silence. As for the second I am obviously not a mind reader so I can't state the devs thoughts or intentions, but I simply don't think this is the case. Think of people converting enhancements as manufacturing companies. They take raw materials that no-one wants or can directly use and turn them into goods that people actually want. This is a good thing for all involved. They make a profit from doing it but they increase the supply of worthwhile stuff, driving the price down. I don't imagine you think Ford are a problem for the economy because they take metals and plastics and create a car out of it? Of course not, we want cars and the more of them that get made the cheaper (relatively) they are. Going back to the original point wealth inequality does not drive inflation. You only need to look at the real world to see that. We have vast wealth inequality all over the world but not runaway inflation. Someone sitting on billions of inf is no more likely to want to pay over the odds for an enhancement than someone with just millions. Rule no1 of how to be wealthier is to learn how to spend less. Increasing taxes on market transactions is a dangerous business as others have pointed out. The last thing the economy needs is for transactions to be driven off market. I suspect the fact that this was happening back on live was directly the reason converters were added to the game. Demand certainly does drive prices up. That isn't just in game, that is a universal economic principle as we have been saying all along. The thing you are missing is the supply side of the equation. What matters to the overall economy is how many new goods are added to the market vs how much currency is added into circulation. This is where the exemped xp->inf was a problem, not just in farming, but that was the most extreme example. In effect they have already done this. Inf can be converted directly into merits and merits can be spent directly on recipes and enhancements. The pricepoint they have set is 100 million for a purple etc. But they have also provided us with a market and we rejoice because the prices on the market are nowhere near those pricepoints. Removing the market as things stand would just make everything much more expensive. A change that I could see being much more likely is removing the ability to vendor recipes. Lv50 common recipes are a significant source of income that is generated outside of the market. Also uncommon recipes are the lifeblood of the supply side of the economy. If these had to be either sold on the market or deleted it would pump up supply. Since these discussions have been going on I've actually been making a point of dumping every uncommon I pick up onto the market, it's something we can all do to help keep inflation down. Another huge change would be to provide a mechanism for converting into the pvp, ato and purple tiers. No idea what a sensible number of converters would be but it would immediately limit the price differential between those tiers of enhancements and the uncommons and rares.

Because one adds currency to the economy creating inflation and the other just moves it around which doesn't. As has been said over and over again. It really isn't. The auction house was designed to create an in game economy. If the devs had only wanted people to be able to buy and sell items at cost then it would all still be done through vendors. There is nothing that sets the amount of currency there is in the real world beyond governments not printing more of the stuff. We moved away from backing currency reserves with something tangible like gold a while ago. Even then who actually gets to say how much gold is worth? The point is the in game economy works far more like a real one than you imagine. It is subject to the same forces and basic principles. The key one for the purposes of this discussion being that turning the 'printing money' tap down a bit has a limiting effect on inflation. As has been repeated in dozens of different ways throughout this thread.

No comments? Not even a /jranger?! The tl;dr is Night Fall is too narrow, Torrent and Umbral Torrent are too long, and Tenebrous Tentacles is probably fine but if it could be longer that would be great.