Parabola

I've been running a few pugs over the weekend and I got to thinking about ways the experience could be improved. I feel like this kind of play should be the backbone of the game and should be made as easy, interesting and rewarding as possible. These are what I came up with: 1) Radio missions are certainly convenient but they are limited and repetitive. Would it be possible to unlock all the old contacts and add them to the 'find contacts' list? By this I mean all the old issue 0 run of the mill contacts who have the odd story arc but mostly have just loads of missions. This would make it much easier to provide a bit of variety in pugs. 2) As an addition to the above it would be great if all the hunt missions could be stripped out of non story arc content or at least have it arranged so that these old contacts will always have at least one door mission in the two missions they offer. I don't think anyone really wants to do hunts in the modern game. I'm assuming the hunts in the story arcs should be left alone as they are part of the story but they seem a bit pointless outside of this. 3) It would be great if the looking for group UI could be updated so that as well as being able to see if someone is leading a team (purple name) you can also see how many people are on that team. Some sort of flagging to say 'looking for members' would be ideal. Recruiting after each mission as people drop out is a bit of a chore and I imagine puts many people off leading teams. 4) I have absolutely no idea if this is possible but in the same way as there is a bonus xp modifier when playing on a big team it would be great if there was a bonus drop modifier too. My solo toons accumulate salvage and recipes at a much greater rate that my teaming toons - to the extent that deleting stacks of salvage is a regular activity. I know that they tend to be blasting through team size spawns and hoovering up all the goodies so it's not an entirely apples to apples comparison but some bonus in drop rates when in a team may help to encourage team play rather than 'teh farming'. This becomes particularly relevant when talking about the drop rates for purple recipes which is a subject that has been mentioned a couple of times recently. 5) In the same vein as the above it would be great if it were possible to pick up a minor merit awards for random team play. Task forces and story arcs require organisation and a time commitment from everyone involved and don't suit the kind of drop in, drop out pug teams I've been involved with recently. However, everyone loves merit rewards! Maybe some of the longer missions offered by contacts like the kill alls could grant a single merit to everyone at completion or something like that? I was originally thinking about having a 'time spent on team' timer that was linked to merit rewards when you leave the team but I have no idea of the feasibility from a technical point of view and it would probably be abused to afk farm merits. That's all I have for now, let me know what you think? Any more ideas to make teaming more interesting, easier or more rewarding?

+1 on this. My no numbers gut feel is that absorb is more useful than +maxhp in more cases than the opposite being true.

IIRC this was because taunt modifications affect your threat level so that part of the power is actually affecting you rather than the enemies. Therefore a proc working on the taunt part of the power hits you not them. I can't remember if that really was a thing or whether it was one of those things that I just assumed to be the case though!

I've just picked up the brutes fury proc and want to put it somewhere in my build. I've had a bit of a look around to try to find the received wisdom on this but am more confused than ever. My initial temptation was to go for quills (and write off the recharge enhancement) to have it constantly ticking away but I've read that might not be the best idea? Throw spines? One of the single target attacks? Is there a 'best' place for it?

It looks a little odd when you have a full body aura to have wings (and possibly other back objects - I haven't tested) poking out and not covered by the aura. Could the aura be extended? Perhaps offering a plain body version and a body+wings for flexibility? Also while we're on the subject the smolder used in smoldering wings has a different speed to that used on the smoldering aura meaning the only current option to match the wings to the body doesn't actually match. Could this be changed?

Just an idea but could the queue message also display the current length of the queue on other servers? That way we don't have to lose our place in one queue to check out another. It would probably also encourage people to jump over to a less busy server if they could see that there was very little waiting.