nihilii

EM/Bio is an absolute beast. Personally I'd rank it as #1 scrapper ST DPS for a couple reasons: - high damage-per-activation and damage-per-animation attacks get you great mileage in real gameplay. You hop left and right, and 1-shot lieuts, sometimes even 2-shot bosses. - most of the damage you deal is energy damage. - unlike just about every other contender (IIRC), EM deals its damage without -res procs. So on a team where someone else applies -res procs, your damage output skyrockets. Beyond that, the heal is indeed pretty nice. On a high level scrapper we have basically controllable crits with the Critical Strikes proc, and should you wish to do so, you can build an attack chain where ET is almost always a heal. What a twist. There's yet another advantage: ET costs 0 end. This makes EM especially light on end. It's so much easier to, say, build a fully procced out attack chain without Ageless. Giving you Barrier or whatever your heart desires for Destiny.

For what... what? 🤨 Your increasing brevity sounds increasingly trollish... coupled with deleting the post of yours where you quoted me, that I replied to but didn't quote. Jesus Christ, man. It's a video game forum. You don't need to be so upset about "losing the argument" you become more and more vague and succinct to the point you don't feel "trapped" when someone shows a statement of yours to not be fully accurate. There is no great forum PvP game here of being perfect and immaculate. Just two posts ago, *I* admitted I was completely unaware of the only one per build limitation of Origin Pools specifically. So there you go. I make mistakes too. I am dumb. You win. It's frustrating how 99% of these balance discussions are derailed by a handful of forum posters playing some childish ego metagame.

I don't believe origin pools shouldn't be balanced relative to each other. I don't believe stronger numbers in a vacuum demonstrate overpoweredness. Neither of these beliefs are mutually exclusive. All T5 origins could be buffed to 120s. All other T5 origins could be buffed to 120s, with RoP remaining at 90s. Or any other change upwards. Origin Pools can be 1) balanced between each other, and 2) balanced as a power pool pick. Not an either/or, but both. They can and arguably they SHOULD be. My opinion, shared by some, is that Origin Pools, RoP included, currently aren't optimal choices. The logical choice under that perspective is to buff Origin Pools towards parity, not nerf the slightly more powerful Origin Pool that still isn't up to par down to the other severely underpar choices. The "buff" solution solves a practical game balance issue. People would start using Origin Pools more often. The "nerf" solution solves a theorycraft problem. The only realistic externality to that solution is a reduction of the number of characters who pick Sorcery, and that reduction is unlikely to be compensated by a proportional increase ot the number of characters picking other Origin Pools.

Interesting! I don't know whether I should be thankful you just educated me, or sad that Origin Pools are so bad overall I've never been tempted to fit more than 1 into any of my builds. 😄

I can't disagree with that, but I disagree with the premise these powers should be looked at in a vacuum. Even your quote is somewhat misleading: Rune is significantly better than *equivalent Origin power pool* options. It's not significantly better than the other options in terms of power picks (or at least the current numbers have not demonstrated that), the most obvious of which would be whatever your 4th power pool is. Say I become a dev tomorrow (and god save you all). I make 4 nihilii-themed power pools, named N1 to N4. As I am a very creative person, all nihilii pools are comprised of a single power, a passive HP boost. N1 gives +0.01% HP. N2 gives +0.01% HP. N3 gives +0.01% HP. N4 gives +0.1% HP. Is N4 "overpowered"? Within the context of nihilii pools, you might be tempted to say yes. But in the grand scheme of things, I'd call you a fool if you picked N4 over Leadership or Fighting. Or even over Sorcery or Experimentation. Relative power in a vacuum cannot in itself make something overpowered. The numbers I would like to see come down to characters with RoP significantly outperforming characters without RoP... Even within a specific subset, i.e. let's say squishies only; if we see players who pick RoP experience ~20% less defeats than the average squishie, that would be an interesting data point that might support the dev stance somewhat.

Thank you for the hard numbers. It does support the thesis many of us intuitively had, without access to data: RoP usage is minimal. But... it doesn't help the dev thesis we're hearing, that of RoP being overpowered. You'd expect the playerbase to gravitate towards overpowered picks, as they do in every other part of the game. RoP being "new" cannot explain away lack of popularity. People took but a few months, if not weeks, to start playing Titan Weapons and Rad/Fire brutes massively. It's very hard to see and trust the logic, without having at least an idea of the numbers that led to this conclusion the power is overpowered.

On that point specifically... Is anyone under the belief most people take Hasten because they have "speedster" as a theme? Combat Jumping because they're roleplaying an acrobat? Tough/Weave because they're a brawler? Maneuvers/Assault/Tactics because their character is a natural born leader? If a specific distinction is to be made between origin pools and generic power pools, where origin pools must be picked only for theme and generic power pools for any reason, then invariably origin pools will be second class citizens. The moment an origin pool is at least as good as the 4th best generic power pool, it's going to be an alternative pick regardless of theme; and by corollary if only thematic reasons must lead to origin pools, then the best origin pool will always be below the 4th best generic power pool...

1) ITF - solid medium difficulty content with good pacing and unique maps. Never gets old after all these years. Many other task forces come close, but I think the ITF hits the sweet spot between "so standard it's dull" and "too special to flow nicely for everyone". FLOW. That's perhaps the biggest thing about the ITF, it just works no matter how you approach the content. Speed, kill all, split the team, stick together, start with the AVs and work backwards, start with the minions and progress to the AVs. Snarky mentioned the LGTF. It is another good pick and at first I was struggling to justify "why the ITF and not the LGTF"; but in comparison, if you try to play the LGTF "kill all" then it's just a drag of killing hundreds of riktis in almost standard rikti maps. ITF just has excellent variety even in its most basic gameplay loops: first mission starts you in caves then brings you outdoor, second mission has you in caves against nictus, third mission has you outdoors with generals and monsters and nazis, and fourth mission finishes with a glorious romp. Liberal use of ambushes and patrols helps too. The environments are so different encounters against the same foes play differently. There's beautiful verticality thorough all the ITF, too; with the notable exception of mission 2, which actually enhances the rest by contrast. Not only you can approach the ITF in many different ways on the horizontal plane, but you can also make ample use of the vertical plane. 2) Apex - fun Incarnate romp with special mechanics. Short and sweet and action-packed. The gimmicks force you to switch things up but they don't force you into a single specific strategy. 3) Dark Astoria story arcs. It truly pulls you into the hopeless fight against Mot, and the adventure keeps on going and going. It's satisfying both mechanically and in terms of atmosphere. Story arcs after that were good too but didn't quite get to that level of epic, using the word literally, DA does a good job at making you feel like you're the hero of a self-contained story.

You can't run newspaper in a low level zone if you outleveled the zone... as far as I know? So, (say) a Daily Strike in Port Oakes and Kings Row would force you to run at level 5-15 or so.

I think you're just disagreeing with my definition of the word elitism. We are saying the same thing: one had to spend significant time (whether on the forums or elsewhere) to access information. It wasn't as neatly packaged with the devs giving us combat attributes and real numbers, and the resulting array of high-quality third party tools like CityOfData and Mids. The information was less accessible, which led to a much steeper learning curve.

I don't know, man. I remember I4-I5 days of very few of us knowing anything about game mechanics. I wasn't part of the "in" crowd but I did notice defense seemed disproportionately strong, and I would chug lucks and do things most people on my teams thought impossible at the time. Guarded information creates an elitist system. Those who are in the know and those who are willing to go through tedious trial-and-error or spend just as much time discussing with others who will go through that process, get a significant advantage over anyone else. Most of what we can do now we could do on Live. The performance ceiling has been pushed perhaps by a factor of 2x; but the spread of performance in your average PuG could be as high as 10x or 20x back on Live, with a single well-informed player significantly more efficient than a full team of more casual gamers. Whereas nowadays, information is widely available and progression has been smoothed out, so what was accessible only to the few is now available to many if not most. This game was always a beautiful broken mess you could exploit for unlimited power. I think when people lament the state of balance or of teaming or what have you, they're really pointing their finger at this: the game is more accessible than it used to be. Which makes sense. When everyone is super, nobody is, yadda yadda yadda.

You can play EM exactly as you did before and you will just get better performance out of it. - TF animates much faster - EP and BS animate slightly faster - ET is all energy damage - Whirling Hands does more damage Just ignore the new mechanics. Pretend the circle isn't there. The only thing you will miss out from old EM is the mag4 stun on TF. That mag4 stun can be replicated with TF + Barrage, which is barely longer than old TF alone. It's all pros and no con.

I immediately scrolled down and hit the sadface, then I read your post and wished I could hit double sadface. Not only I don't see the need nor like the idea of a widespread power nerf, I think the purple patch is the worst thing about this game and we need less of it, not more. Likewise with difficulty harder only for certain characters (incarnates). There's no point to progression if you then invent systems to specifically negate that progression. I would rather see: - global rebalance of xp/inf rewards per enemy difficulty, automatically weighted on a weekly basis based on what enemies the playerbase as a whole fights. Council is weak, Cimerorans are OK, Awakened are deadly. But most players fight Council with maybe a little bit of Cimerorans, because the XP is the same. - more dangerous enemies in weaker factions, possibly as an alternate difficulty setting, but also possibly not. It can be subtle things like the added Freakshow Stunner bosses, didn't change the dynamic of the group significantly but it did give them an extra threat to watch out for. - extra merits for ticking challenging settings in Task Forces (players debuffed, enemies buffed, no insps, no temps... no enhancements!). - new difficulty settings, like the "Hard" group size in AE (3-4 bosses per group on x8 rather than 2)

The peak of the Pylon Testing Experience has to be just minding your own business and then watching confused Broadcasts asking if they can join the MSR. Never gets old.

Going to have to vote for the DB/EA based on costume here.

To be fair, 90 seconds is your suggestion, not mine. If we're getting on that topic, I personally feel we need to buff everything to 120 seconds, not 90. Then datamine and see if it moved the needle on the overprevalence of Speed/Jumping/Fighting/Leadership. But that's my personal and possibly extreme opinion on balance. My main take here was it's absurd to cheer for a nerf to a rare power on the basis "munchkins" enjoy +defense and +recharge bonuses. Exactly the things you give up, at least in part, when you switch things up and go for Sorcery. You and me both! That suggestion would be the opposite of my perspective. I believe performance always matter, and that it's illogical to invent arbitrary exclusions to the notion performance matters based on a supposed and ill-defined caste of low brow powergamers. There is nothing about nerfing RoP that specifically penalizes high end builds and specifically benefits low end builds. The duration should matter even more to a low end build, who doesn't have the benefit of high recharge or possible synergies with T9s and Hybrid. There is a much longer antimez gap to bridge. It's likely a non-zero number of players have picked RoP as a reactive breakfree to be used rarely enough the duration change wouldn't matter, and it's possible a non-zero number of players within that previous population would enjoy the extra resistance more. But I'm not sure it's plausible that final number of players outnumbers the number of players who use RoP preemptively and/or prefer the resistance than the antimez and/or would prefer longer duration rather than resistance. If anything, my level 20 on SOs is much more likely to want everything he can get out of RoP. I'm going to milk that 90s duration for every second to take down an elite boss or to beat up a large group. Whereas the few level 50s running RoP/Hybrid/RoP/gap will, in practice, quite often NOT click the rotation religiously, content in their many other tools to deal with situations either proactively or reactively. I hear you on impactful choices. That's the thing. Unleash Potential and Adrenal Booster hardly qualify, as is. Maybe RoP at 120s would be too strong. I don't know, I don't particularly care. Let me rephrase the entire point actually... We're factory workers arguing about who got a salary raise, while Hasten and his buddies are funneling billions to their offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. The power pool balance tends to go something like this: A+++ tier COMBAT JUMPING A++ Hasten A+ Tough/Weave A Maneuvers/Assault/Tactics ... B Rune of Protection (MIGHT sometimes bump to A in specific conditions) C/D Everything else So yeah, RoP is significantly better than AB or UP right now. Buffing RoP can sound crazy in that microcosm. But in the greater land of power pools, you will not convince me the RoP buff is going to impact choices any. AB and UP don't even give mez protection anyway, so if the catch for you is mez protection (which is likely if you want to use it reactively, which is where the buff will benefit you), you're getting RoP regardless. I'm good with buffing AB and UP to 120s and leaving RoP to 90s. I'm good with any experimentation upwards with these underpicked picks. Let's move the needle, and let's not destroy builds players are attached to. (I'm honestly indifferent to the nerf on a personal level. I shy away from my few RoP/Hybrid/RoP alts because I don't like to manage my mez protection so actively. It's easier to just chomp on amplifiers, or heck, just play a Scrapper/Tanker rather than a squishie which is honestly my choice 90% of the time. Nerfing RoP duration will just cement that playstyle for me.)

To me, your "if no" argues performance matters, your "if yes" argues performance doesn't matter. My opinion remains the same: consistency is needed here. If performance doesn't cause any build diversity for the greater portion of the playerbase, then there is no harm in giving RoP an added boost (that could qualify as a bugfix).

There is an age old forum subculture of pretending to be somewhat better than the riffraff of "powergamers" by virtue of doing things differently. But difference for the sake of difference does not make one clever. A truly open mind evaluates all choices, and does not settle on something unusual for the sake of being a special snowflake. It takes much harder work to genuinely strive for the best option in a particular combination, than to be a surface contrarian and avoid the perceived best option. Doing exceptionally well has little value because it is subjective. Anyone could do exceptionally well using a Defender with no other powers besides unslotted Brawl, if their definition of "exceptionally well" is "soloing most content available at base reputation". It's better to reach for quantifiable metrics; an imperfect figure beats no figure at all. Does this power let me do task X under conditions Y? Does this other power improve my time or my survivability at said task under said conditions? Those are points that can be compared and discussed. The RoP nerf will affect Poison builds who incidentally don't rely on softcapped defense at all, and instead opted for an unorthodox approach of resistance + damage debuffs. Repeat for emphasis, this WILL push more builds into cookiecutter territory. So to sneer at implied low brow powergaming and cheer for the RoP nerf in the same breath is somewhat bizarre. It's a "pick one" situation, not a "have your cake and eat it too". Especially as if performance doesn't matter, then there's no need to nerf the performance of RoP! I will happily don the mask of the low brow "powergamer" here. This change makes things easier for me. I won't consider Sorcery anymore, and instead stick to the 4 mentioned pools above. So slightly easier building. Less diversity. Boring.

I tried +4/x8 801.A blind on my SD/Rad offensively specced. I'm high on amplifiers and I like to chug insps so this should be fine, right? Oh boy. This 300+ DPS build needs constant focus on one target to take a single EB in roughly a minute. And I had to chug, chug, chug these lucks and oranges. I think I killed about 3 of them before I finally faceplanted. 3 enemies, not 3 groups. Licking my wounds, I moved on to the much more relaxing Mr G missions. You know something is HARD when +4/x8 Vanguards with Elite Bosses becomes your go-to comfort food to make up for it.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Your signature picture felt way too appropriate for this post.

This is a really good point. 90%+ of my builds use Hasten + CJ + Tough/Weave + Maneuvers/Tactics/Assault. A short number of them would replace Leadership with Sorcery. This change will likely inch several of the Sorcery builds back to Leadership. If we can't have nerfs to Speed, Jumping, Fighting and Leadership (and frankly, I don't want nerfs!), we need buffs to everything else. If anything, RoP should last 120s rather than 90s, and all other T5 origins should follow suit.

Players primarily want reward merits because the Homecoming team purposefully chose to open almost everything to reward merits. i.e. some costume pieces used to be exclusive to Vanguard, now they're available to you at level 1. Reward merits were also improved in being able to trade for almost anything in the game, and costs lowered. They're almost as liquid as influence, save that you can't transfer them easily and that conversion tends to go in one direction. It's normal for people to converge to the most liquid currency. I think extra currencies can make sense if you want to have extra levers to direct player activity. I can't see the paid business or free hobby game factoring much into that picture. Nor even grind, for that matter. You could have a game with 30 different currencies where maxxing out each currency takes only 10 minutes of gameplay, and you could have another game with just one currency where maxxing out said currency would require 100 hours of gameplay. There's nothing inherently evil about wanting to encourage people to experience a variety of content, even if some approaches are more heavy-handed than others. Go to the logical extreme and remove all alternate currencies from CoH. No Vanguard merits. No reward merits. No incarnate threads or components. Influence replace all of these, at a rate at least as great as what is currently possible with the current options. I guarantee you you'll see most of the playerbase in an AE farm. The easygoing nature of Homecoming when it comes to rewards has already encouraged a sizeable number of players to live in AE. The more freedom of choice you give, the more people as a whole will choose the path of least resistance. It's only natural. Ideally, players should be gently nudged towards options, without feeling like they're constrained. One man's grind is another person's incentive - and that first man's non-grind might cause a playerbase-wide convergence towards a select few activities that cause boredom in other players. In conclusion, let's add a dynamic autorebalancing xp/inf multiplier on enemy factions based on how many of these mobs have been defeated the last week. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I'd love something like a Dutch auction, shared amongst the whole playerbase. The badge starts at 100 billion inf, slowly decreases in price over time. Once someone (anyone) buys the badge, it bumps back to x2 what it currently is. So presumably you'd have a couple of whales buying it for 20B, 10B early on... Then a bunch more people getting it in the 1B range... Then it'd hit an equilibrium point at whatever range is considered affordable enough by many and fits with the demand over whatever interval of time is required for a 2x decrease in price.

What you're touching on here is not that alternate currencies aren't successful motivators, but rather that the net rewards for Vanguard Merits are too lackluster to encourage pursuing RWZ content specifically. Warp back to the early Homecoming days where Vanguard Merits had a much better conversion rate, and Mothership Raids were so popular they, in fact, prompted a change. Economic incentives work. If anything, in MMORPGs they work too well. Flip one switch and you change the gameplay landscape.

It's such a drag some people find pleasure in destroying the things others give for free. Hopefully Sanctuary rises again.