Loc

The meta is: ice/cold, ice/nature and ice/kin Other off meta but decent sets: force field, elec affinity and tactical arrow for primary ice is your best bet if you proc but obviously fire is decent, as is assault rifle. Psy and rad are okay.

It is certainly possible as there's kill most missions but it would require quite some work on the backend to make different modes for tfs I imagine. The fastest kill most of any TF wouldn't be as interesting, though. It'll be 8 fire/fire blasters all splitting up and killing mobs as fast as they can. It would probably come down to making sure there's no runners from mobs of enemies to get the fastest time.

Fair, I suppose I was making a more general comment. To your specific point I'd say that even if procs were not a thing, going for other set bonuses is still a better value proposition and that team buffs would still be the way to get any decent +dmg. The problem is not really procs at this point but just the low values of these set bonuses.

I get your point but that's not the entire picture, though. The trade off is far bigger. If you proc out a power you need to compensate for the following stuff: - You'll likely have less accuracy than a full set so you'll have to keep on top of your global accuracy bonus/tohit bonus and/or supplement with inspirations - You'll likely have less normal dmg slotted in the power so to make up for it you'll have to supplement it with your alpha, team buffs and inspirations to get full value out of that procced power - The power will cost a lot more endurance as you don't have a set slotted to mitigate that so you'll have to be very smart in your other set slotting, use temps, waste your destiny on ageless core or rely on your team buffing you - You'll need to be on top of your global rech as you won't have a set to reduce the rech reduction of your procced power. In fact slotting rech in it is really bad for your proc rate. If you don't keep up on that you're probably better off not proccing in the first place - You're losing a whole set with 4 or 5 bonuses for every procced power you use. So yes, it's the best damage but it's a huge trade off to do so. If procs got nerved from where they are now, you'd basically invalidate their use and take out a whole path of speccing out a toon.

Slotting for +dmg is one of the most inefficient ways to actually get more damage. A min/max damage build would go for procs (giving up set bonuses to get more damage output on the attack) and recharge (enough so that you can easily rotate your high dmg procced powers). The impact fully slotting for +dmg would have compared to procs and recharge is negligible. + dmg is not inherently bad but set bonuses just gives you so little of it. You'll probably never get over 60% if you go really hard in your slotting and a kin corrupter can give that to yourself and the whole team with just 1 fulcrum shift on a single target. Buffs from powers (mainly kin) are the best way to increase overall damage and procs/recharge is the best way to increase your personal damage. Picking corrupter over defender is another way if we're specially talking about that AT.

Let me know how you're planning on changing human nature. Every MMO works on reward structures. Content can be the reward (like Oldskool runescape where you have to do quests and level skills to get certain quest unlocks that then give good rewards or unlock certain areas) but you need a reward structure or your game will slowly die. Unlikely even if the rewards are pretty high. Reward merits are already too easy to come by for people who'd be interested in regular HM 4stars. Not very often. Its rewards aren't very good though if that was your point. Seems fair if it's the WST. DR Q isn't hard though. Just long and relatively boring.

The prices dropping seems quite normal to me yeah. I'm almost certain that the vast majority of buyers is a small amount of players stockpiling in wait of the news tiers; I'm one of these players. I'm personally starting to stop buying them as I'm pretty happy with my current stockpile and there's probably others like that, hence the rapid drops in price. I think that unless the new tiers are a high price (as in tier 3 being 1000+) these prisms are gonna crash almost right away to 1mill if that and then almost never bought as their utility is really small and the supply is way too high compared to what you'll need. In another thread I mentioned that I understand that the devs need to make comprises but they need to pick between either low supply or making them non-tradeable and in both cases there need to be high priced rewards. If you totally disagree with that please read the rest of my post so you can see my reasoning. If they have to be tradeable you'd have to tie them to HM content only as that's the only real way to curb the supply in the long run without killing the playerbase willing to do that content. Eventually that 2% drop chance on any mission and WST rewards are gonna accumulate and make HM content not needed to keep up the supply of them. (Trials add to this but I think the former are the bigger issue in the long run) However, I think that is probably too harsh for people who don't wanna do that content so the logical step is to make them non-tradable. Make the WST drop prisms for sub 50ies so people who don't play on 50ies all the time get more than the 2% drop chance and keep the higher rewards on HM. That way everyone gets their shot at these and if they aren't tradeable farming them isn't gonna throw a wrench into everything. Now for the price of costumes. This is mostly to reward people wanting to do the HM content. The fact of the matter is that unless HM gives you substantially more prims people aren't gonna do them very often (and more or less not at all once the novelty wears off). ASF before this update is proof of that. We have that gap in rewards compared to other content now which is a big part of why they are being ran so much. But even if they aren't tradeable you'll get the same result of the content dying if it's only a couple of 100 prisms for the highest rewards. You only need to run them so often to get that amount. So even if you don't run HM understand that this is basically a requirement for it to be played in any meaningful way besides a rare run here and there. Finally something slightly unrelated to the point of my post but that Ukase mentioned: Having to alt for every trial. I mentioned this before as well but this is an all around bad idea. The only thing it does is either making people with no alts or wanting to farm incarnate salvage on their new character feel like they're wasting their time and giving the league leader a headache because of the logistics. The new reward merits given by each trial don't work like that so why do prisms?

I made a little mistake in my post. You have to be 50+ for the weeklies sorry. It's tied to the notice of the well reward

It's 30. I run a 4star ASF at least once a day. Let me quote you from the post you linked: That makes 30 in total if you add the reward of completion into the equation. I'm also curious why every reward in the game has to be easily accessible to everyone in the game. No other multiplayer game works like that; not even literal pay to win games. What's wrong with having some rewards that are easier to get for people who wanna put in the effort? Besides, not having these rewards has been tried. Remember oldskool LRSF? The only time I see anyone run that is for the reward of the badge. Relentless ASF stopped being ran for anything other than the combat dummy a month or so after its release and even those runs were rare. The reality is that this new salvage is getting everyone to play the HM content more because they have an incentive to do so. There are exceptions to this but that's a minority. And maybe after everyone got their baby mode it'll die off too. I'm actually in the other camp and want these to be account-bound and not given out so easily but I understand that's going really far the other way and appreciate the balancing the devs did. I also think the criticism in this topic has been somewhat dishonest in how gated these prisms are to the general player base. Yes, A 4-star hardmode will only be completed by solid teams and casual pugteams are more than likely to fail or spend 3h on it. But a 1 or a 2 star still give okay rewards and are a lot more accessible. Also I haven't seen the mention of trial rewards once; 1-3 salvage per character per day for each trial. You also have the reward for weeklies; 1-2 salvage per character per day for each weekly. Both of these are significantly better than the 2% drop chance for every mission completion and can be done by virtually every level 50 player. Obviously the rewards aren't as good as HM but see my previous paragraphs or the posts of many people who already responded before me for that.

Overall I'm digging the update a lot and can't wait for the new costumes to release. Really happy that the ITF rewards got bumped up. I mentioned it before and this seems way better. (Although ASF is still more efficient than ITF if you just wanna farm the salvage by a considerable margin) One thing that does seem to be a real issue however is the cascading reward system. For ITF and ASF this isn't really an issue but for trials it's a pretty big deal. Right now if you don't want to waste your reward potential you HAVE to alt after every trial. I sorta get the cap of 3 salvage per 18h but because of the way the rewards work you also can't combine a level 1 and 2 trial without losing out. I wouldn't mind the timeout being on a trial to trial basis personally but if we're keeping it 3 per character per 18h why not let a level 2 and level 1 trial give full rewards on a single character? That way people won't be discouraged as much by the hassle of constant alting. Or am I missing a reason for the design choice? If it's to curb the amount you can earn, that is being circumvented by alting anyway so it's merely an inconvenience. And most important, it's an inconvenience for the people hosting content which we probably don't want.

I've had this happen several times when converting a +5 IO. Attuning it should also fix the issue.

The update states you have 1 check against a positional and 1 check against a type. So your example would hold if fire was not the main damage of the attack and the other type that is the main source of damage is lower than your 22% ranged. But like others have mentioned this update shouldn't be a huge impact when you actually just play the game. Apparently the devs have also changed some of the outliers that could have a huge impact on this change. For me personally it doesn't matter as I've found that unless you're a tank building for high defense is actually a very inefficient way to play the game. But while I can't speak for the devs, I'm assuming this change was made as it does make a lot more sense. After all, if an attack is nearly all fire damage it's sorta weird that your smashing def can absorb all of that. But technically if you want to build for the best coverage your positionals will mater more now (although even in the old system going for your positionals was a better coverage as well).

If you don't need emp merits for alts they are far from useless. Buy super inspirations with them. Even if you don't like the idea of using them just put them on the auction house. Super reds can sell between 500k and 1.5mill right now. Even if that drops a bit it you'll still get some infl for them. Super reds in particular are always gonna sell as speeders buy these quite often. Purples and ultimates are another option. It obviously is far less profitable than merits but that's sorta the point of the update after all.

It wouldn't just auto-hit unless it's already an auto-hit power. The way I understand it is that the main difference is that it now looks at the highest dmg type of the enemy instead of your highest defense. Here's an example with the type def: I am 30% smashing def and 10% fire def. The incoming attack does 20 smashing damage and 80 fire damage. In the current system it would check against the highest def I got, smashing (so the hit-check will be against 30% def). However, in the new update it would check against the highest damage of the attack, fire (so the hit-check would be against 10% def). Even if your defense is 0% it still wouldn't auto hit as enemies always have a chance to miss an attack just like we do when we technically have a 100% hit-chance.

I just started getting into farming for infl as I never needed the infl before and I'm getting 1mill so that's what I'm basing that on. So I'm replying to all three as it's essentially the same response. It misses the point of my post entirely. To repeat the essence of my post, speeding simply isn't scalable like farming is. I'm not making a theoretical analysis here. You can't use just tinpex to make your analysis because unless it's the weekly you have no chance of doing tinpex after tinpex with regular speeders, a lot of them don't even really like tinpex and those that do still aren't gonna be willing to run 5 tinpex a day to farm merits. And if you are doing straight up LFG pugs you will get the worst scenario in my post (or even worse--I was being generous). You're also restricted to the peak hours if you go the straight up LFG route unless you want those times to form the TFs shoot up. (I'm sure you've had those 30min+ form times before) None of that is true for farming infl. You don't have to rely on anyone else to farm, can do it whenever you want and for however long you want. If the the question was "can I make more from one tinpex than I can make farming with one account in that time" this argument would hold weight but that is in no way a proper way to analyze this. And on top of all of that you're still left with having to learn the market, keep track of it, having to do the smart conversions and selling and the fact that speeding tinpex over and over (or just speeding in general) is harder than just farming which is one of the easier things to do in this game. Or what about the market itself? Could it sustain every speeder doing this? Manipulating the market is something that not everyone can be doing while remaining a competitive thing to do. I could go on but I hope I made my point as to why this is not a realistic way to look at this comparison of speeding vs farming I didn't really see you put the form time in your analysis which was the main thing that "rang the alarm bell" in my head. That and the scaling of it like I said. I just recently started getting into farming for infl as it's just a lot more profitable for a lot less effort if you scale just a little. By the way, I am actually against farming but I understand that you cannot stop it and even nerfing is hard due to player reactions. If devs completely removed the infl from AE or make a rule that you cannot have more than one character across all shards in AE then farming would lose a lot of its potency and maybe you could start getting closer results with speeding but then all the other points I brought up would still be a concern of course. Not trying to attack you or anyone else here but I felt that the perspective of speeding wasn't really being represented so I wanted to give my take.

As someone who does a lot of speedies I feel I need to address the supposed profitability of speeding as I completely disagree with what has been said about it so far. Don't get me wrong, speedies can be profitable enough to fully IO your characters assuming you don't make a new one every week, but it just doesn't compare to what farming can give you. The main reason for this is the consistency that farming provides compared to speeding. On a small scale speeding is more profitable assuming you're a decent speeder. However that completely falls apart if you either scale your farming or just farm for longer periods. This is gonna be a somewhat long post but I wanna go through all the different scenarios to give an idea of the profitability of speeding compared to farming. First of all, tinpex is the best merits/min for speedies so it's not the best benchmark. Secondly, I don't see any mention of the time it takes to form a speedy which is often half the time it takes to complete the TF these days (and that's being generous in a lot of cases). Speed trains mitigate this somewhat as between TFs you'll usually only have to fill a couple of spots so we can use a speedtrain as an example. I'll pick some popular speed TFs and assume you're in a team of mostly top speeders so we have a baseline of earnings in near ideal circumstances. So let's say the speedtrain is MLTF (43 merits (37+6) / 11min) - LRSF (25merits / 9min) - ASF (80 merits / 17min) - ITF (26 merits / 6min) - LGTF (37merits / 9min) - tinpex (80 merits / 12min (2*6min)) - Khan (20 merits / 8min) - 20mins for everyone to trickle in and fill the last spots and avg of 2mins in between tfs (12min) So the result would be 311merits / 104mins or about 3merits/min You might be thinking "that's even better than people said" but these are more or less ideal circumstances I used as a baseline. If I take ideal farming circumstances instead (let's say 9 (semi-)afk farmers spread across the shards doing 1mill/min each) then in that same time I could have farmed 936mill while watching a movie. (not taking drops into account on either of these but drops would obviously be better for the farmer) Now let's say you have a team of regular speeders instead. You can basically add about 50% to that time to get an accurate average completion time, slashing the reward down to 1.88merits/min instead. Still good right? Yes, but these speed trains are still somewhat rare (4 times a week if you're lucky I'd guess) which is the crux of my argument. farming has no such constraints. The only constraints on farming is your PCs processing power and the initial time to level and slot the farmers. Even if I run just one AFK farmer while playing the game I could easily make 50-60mill/hour while playing the game on my other account. If we look at normal LFG speeding you'll find that most of the time it's a single TF where the time to form is often 50%-100% of the time it takes to complete the whole thing. So even if we take the most profitable scenario of a tinpex, in a normal LFG pug the average time to form is probably 10min and each TF will take about 13-15 min on average in this environment giving you a total of 36-40mins on average instead. For all the other TFs the payoff is significantly worse. ASF is probably an average of 15min to form and will be 25-35min on a random LFG pug. ITF will probably be about 10min to form and take 15min to complete and so on. Add onto that that the profit for most people will be far lower as they don't know how to use the market to its fullest extend. Not to mention most people will find playing the market and converting extremely tedious and want to avoid it. (most people I talk to despise having to convert stuff) I should address one caveat to this: WSTs. The double bonus on some weeks will actually give you a huge boost in merits/min so if you have a lot of ioed 50ies you can join the WST trains that week and earn quite well. Most weeks are not that profitable though and I'm still pretty sure farming will eclipse the better weeks if you scale it.

It's funny how different people's experience can be. Speedies are done at +0 because it's much faster with pugs and costs less resources for the same reward. A +4 speedy isn't actually harder and if everyone on the team is an experienced speeder, it's only slightly slower than a +0. (some won't be any slower at all). The main issue is that in a pug team a +4 speedy is simply boring (and sometimes even frustrating). If you end up with a team that has people not used to speeding it can take up to twice as long without actually being any more difficult. Or even worse, if you have very little debuff and damage some AVs can take over 5 minutes to kill sometimes. And it's not that the fight is hard, you're just doing your attack chain over and over while his health slowly goes down; in most of these kinds of AV fights you don't even have to be looking at your screen to complete them. If you want a reference point for what I'm saying try doing a lot of tinpex. Tinpex is pretty close to being a kill all and is forced to be played at +4. If you get a bad team, it can have many wipes and take 30+ minutes for each task force. On the other hand, if you have a solid speed team you can complete each TF in under 7 minutes. Tinpex is actually one of the easier speedies and many people of the speed community don't like doing it because they find it boring (I do like it by the way). I'm not taking a shot at +4KM TFs or even +4 speedies here by the way. If you enjoy that you should certainly do those like many people have said. I'm just trying to give some insight into the experience of the people who do these +0 speedies and how many actually hold the same opinion you have of +0 content when it comes to +4 content. Luckily everyone can choose what they form or join or even switch between the two depending on their mood.

Using a lot of purple sets is good but using only the best sets and 53 hamis won't actually yield the strongest character; mainly due to the limit of 5 of the same set bonus. Maximizing a character's strength is all about slotting the highest amount of good (and complimentary) set bonuses with the least amount of slots, while still picking useful powers.

I would say that if you don't do speedies or get phase shift from the stealth pool I agree with this. Being able to phase shift during a speedy is quite important. You can just turn off super speed in combat of course but I admit that this is a work around. If you got the room for the pool I would say that's a valid point yeah.

I don't really see how speed of sound is a better power than super speed in any way. They both give you the exact same speed and take the exact same enhancements so we're comparing their other effects. Super speed has speed phase and -100% threat level. Speed of sound has a teleport ability. If you plan to do speedies or stealth some content, super speed wins straight away just for its threat reduction and speed phase is handy if you aren't going deep into the stealth pool to get its superior version phase shift. If you are never going to either do a speedy or stealth certain parts of your missions, threat reduction is still handy to have to avoid aggro in certain situations as a squishy. So the only thing speed of sound has going for it is its teleport ability. I tested it on beta a bit and it's basically an in-between of combat teleport and teleport. It goes further than combat teleport but gives no +tohit and is far slower. It is also far shorter than teleport and only a tiny bit faster (unlike what its animation might suggest it is not instant). And of course it recharges A LOT slower than both so it's a one time use thing. If the teleport ability is important for you I'd say that super speed +teleport pool is a better option. Any good build will have hasten so you're sorta having to take two pools anyway and the teleports from the teleport pool are far superior. If the teleport from speed of sound was actually instant I could see its value even though not have the threat mitigation is still an issue.

It's great if you're a speeder and wanna optimize movement. It's great for when you get a bit too much aggro and need to back up. It's great to position yourself in the middle of a mob and pop your nuke. It's great for when you get stuck on something like a pipe or a torch and want to quickly get out. It's great for when you have to get up a platform or get through an opening your can't normally fit through. It's great to spam on afkers while waiting for a task force to start to move them in a weird position. Yeah... my conclusion is that it's great. Bind it to a key or a mouse button with powexeclocation to your cursor though; you really need to be able to quickly cast it to get any utility from it.

If all you wanna do is run past enemies to get to the end of the map but don't want to use superspeed, even just the stealth proc without the stealth pool or just infiltration should be enough if you're reasonably fast. If the enemies don't get a lot of time to notice you, you don't require high stealth. (Some enemies can always spot you however) Running only SS for example would be the best way to run to the end of the map if you could only pick a single power. I use the stealth proc with it for extra safety and easier time clicking glowies. However, if you are really uncomfortable at even moderately fast speeds a good option for you would be to just spec into phase shift.

No need to take stealth pool to stealth. Super speed + stealth proc in sprint will be more than enough. Doesn't hurt to take the stealth pool if you want to of course.

I've just finish reading through this topic and would like to add some of my thoughts. On advertising/streaming I lumped these together because the way to advertise the game is certainly streaming. There's a reason streamers get huge sponsorships these days and that's because streaming is the new TV, certainly for gaming related stuff. I don't think HC or anyone should shell out big money to get a big streamer to play it though. It's probably a legal liability and it wouldn't be very effective to have one streamer play it a week or so. Instead I would be in favor of highlighting a random streamer on the homepage/launcher so the streamer has an incentive to stream. As for the streamers, I would advise to try and have a set schedule; even if it's just once a week. Not having that and keeping at it will kill your growth. Having an active streaming section on Twitch is the key here. Cause if a bigger streamer (even with just a couple of 100 viewers) would play it, his/her viewers would then check out other streams when they go offline and be more inclined to play/be part of the community. On farming/powerleveling Farming is a really difficult issue. There is no doubt that a new player getting PLed is a problem. While this game is not so hard, being PLed to 50 and then attempting endgame content without even understanding enhancement slotting means you're gonna have a bad time. I see and understand the argument that you should be able to play how you want. I agree with this to an extend. The issue is that people will take the easy way most of the time if it's there--that's just human nature. On the flipside, removing farming is both impossible and bad for longtime players. Someone who's on his 20th 50 has no real advantage to leveling his character normally unless they personally enjoy doing so. And even if you remove AE farming you can simply farm certain missions with similar success. The only thing I can think of is leaving AE as it is but maybe disabling it for accounts with no level 50 on it. This means that farms will continue to stay in AE as farmers are not new players and new players will have to level their first character learning the fundamentals and enjoying the early and midgame at least once. On new content to attract new players/retaining players I'll address the "attracting new players with fresh content" first; this is mostly irrelevant if you ask me. If they aren't attracted by the current content they won't be attracted by the new either. New content is all about keeping the current playerbase and getting back people who quit. In that respect I think that the system Aeon did is pretty good. Have different tiers of difficulty with better rewards for higher difficulty. So the way Aeon was structured was good for the most part. The problems it has in my opinion are: - It's redside and for some reason people seem to avoid something just because of that - It's long which discourages kill alls. This is bad because on a whole most people probably prefer kill all. On top of that, having to learn speed without having first done a slower kill all is considerably harder and Aeon is probably the hardest speedy to learn. - The rewards are both good and bad. Good is the DOs which give you a good reason to speed it but bad since higher difficulties only add more emp/astral merits and incarnate rewards. This is not worth the effort since people who can complete that can also farm which is an easier way to get a reward of similar value. This means there is little incentive to do it other than novelty (hence why you almost never see relentless ran anymore). And yes, there's the dummy but most players don't care about that--let's be real. Adding unique stuff on higher difficulties is a good idea for rewards but will live and die on how easy it is to obtain. If it's too easy and the market gets flooded so you can just farm a little to buy it, it'll die just as fast as relentless Aeon. On the new player experience I only have two small points on this: - Have a banner on the homepage that says something like "Install city of heroes: homecoming edition" in big letters that you can click on to download the launcher. If a registration on the forum is required first, that's fine but have that registration link straight back to a download of the launcher with a form to make your game account. Or even better, have that part in the initial registration form. The game right now is way too hard to get going and I'm quite sure this has made people quit before beginning. - If I'm not mistaken there are some beginner arcs that teach you about this game. Throw those in the face of new players so anyone who doesn't know the game already will certainly do those first. Most players want to have their hand held a little bit before they start exploring the different parts of the game themselves. Maybe even add just a few missions that explain LFG (both the system and the channel).

I'm gonna try and give some perspective here as someone who speeds almost daily cause I think there's some really broad generalizations going on here. I'm not saying any of you are lying when you say that your AT was rejected in a speedy. There are some people who'll do that occasionally because they're trying to get a good time. I know most of these people and the reason is not because they hate your AT or you as a player or anything like that. (To be clear some of them might actually hate that AT but that's not the reason for the rejection) It's cause getting that number is fun to them just like some of you would reject someone speeding to the objective in your team because having that slower grind is fun to you. I think it's totally okay for both of these things to happen. It's why I said that being upfront about what you're doing in the LFG message or before starting the TF is important so people are on the same page. The reality is that in the VAST majority of speedies nobody really cares about what you bring. I host speedies and have never rejected ATs unless it was a speed MO where you need a somewhat good team makeup. In fact I don't really care if you're below 50 and will let a 45 join my speedies if they so desire. While most speeders probably expect you to be 50+1 that where the requirements end in 95% of the cases. And everyone can easily become 50+1 doing any content they desire. Getting instructions is another thing. I'll personally always do so if asked but that is not something every speeder will do. However if that happens once or twice don't give up and just keep joining teams if you wanna learn speeding. You will start getting the hang of it and you will encounter people who'll take the time to teach you some stuff that you just can't figure out by yourself.