ZemX

I guess that depends on how the "Upgrade" button works exactly. Does it even work on TEs or do you have to manually combine them still? If it does work, does it ignore the fact that you can't buy higher than level 20 TEs or does it stop working at level 21? If you do need to manually combine to go over level 21 then each level above that adds another 5% chance of failing since you have only level 20 purchased TEs to combine with the ones you have slotted. But I suppose you can just consider that the cost of buying each new level of TEs. And you're paying that every level on every slot. Not every five. At 40 you have zero chance to upgrade further. Well... unless you unslot all those 40s and repeat the whole upgrade process. Then you can combine your full set of slotted 40s with your unslotted 40s to produce 41s with a 100% chance of succcess. You can imagine the cost from there. 🤪

Isn't that whole section what was added with the new Vahz story arcs? What I learned there is that I need to update my Vidiot Map. 🤪

Okay, so you can go as far as 23 before they all disappear and they only cover acc, dmg, endrdx, and recharge? As challenges go, that certainly would be one. You'll have no def/res/health enhancement in mitigation powers for a melee AT. I'd suppose it might work best (or least bad?) on a Blaster then. Archery or Gun primaries. Dev, Martial, Ninja, or Tac Arrow secondary? You'd still have some powers that can't be enhanced meaningfully but it wouldn't be as bad as unslotted armor toggles on a Scrapper, I'd think.

And they call @Snarky a villain?!

I don't think they meant harder as in difficulty. Harder to maintain interest is how I read it. But it's also an odd thread. I don't delete a level 4 character and then wonder why I've done it. If it really was repeated defeats wearing you down, you'd know that. If the oppressive gloom was getting you down, you'd know that. Or the villainous story arcs annoying your heroic sensibilities. If it's simply not being engaged by level 4 on a new character in Mercy, I can see that. But I'd say the same about Atlas's original contact missions too if I had to judge them by the first four levels. The only starter area that has grabbed me from level 1 all the way to 20 was Praetoria. It obviously took that long for the Live devs to really figure out how to stretch this mission framework to its limits. It's hard going back to the old content. I gravitate to the newer additions blue and redside as well because of this.

That would make it easier to track people's levels when they're not on their SO characters, yeah. I created one for myself last night, since I have no other alts on Excelsior, called "SOLucky" and put in a few basic items. As for common IOs, I will probably slot a mix of 25s and 30s when I get in that range. I'm not so nostalgic that I want to maintain and upgrade SOs all the way to 50 just to experience the up/down and occasional red-out while on a mission. Though these days I guess it's as easy as visiting the enhancement window with cash to fix that.

I don't know if it will end up being a regular time thing. I'm central U.S. and work during the day. Might be just a "soloing unless people are on at the same time" thing for me.

Judging by the quality and reputation of the people on your ignore list... thanks?

I started an Ice/Rad Stalker, "Critical Missy" on Excelsior (variant of my Ice/Shield Stalker on Everlasting). Teamed up with Flea for a short bit at 7-9. I used 2xp to catch up a bit and gave myself a 1mil starter bonus. I am interested in the SO-only build and not really any other challenge stuff. I'll probably at least sell off converters for cash when I need it.

Yeah, but a generic IO build isn't what people are talking about when they say "balanced around SOs" anyway. It's really about IO set bonuses. This is what gives you stuff like soft-capped Blasters. I think as long as you're not allowing set IOs, you're probably exploring the question of "balanced around SOs" fairly well. I've just been reviewing powersets and it's really interesting thinking about this from the standpoint of NOT having set bonuses. Some powers become a lot more valuable. I'm seriously considering sets that have recovery or regen since you can't just plop in the usual procs to solve endurance problems. On the other hand, you can't slot recharge set bonuses and LotGs all over the place either, so we'll all be using a bit less endurance there too. In any case, I'm not particularly interested in a leveling challenge or classic challenge. If this is just limited to SOs, I'm good. I just want to know now because I'd probably like to team with other people doing it and it's only fair everyone on the team is following the same rules. I'd seriously consider @Rathulfr's suggestion about common IOs too. Up to level 35, you're not exceeding what SOs can do. You're just removing the tedium of upgrading them. PvE, it's the same. You're only enhancing what the AT and its powersets can do. You're not giving them stuff they don't normally get, which is what set IOs and procs can do.

I may roll something up, but I'll probably use P2W. Maybe not 2xp or the temp buffs but definitely the prestige attacks and most definitely the travel powers. That just relieves some tedium. It doesn't affect, in any major way, how the content is balanced around SOs, I think. As for what...hmmm. I know what I DID play back in the SO-days and they were: Ice/Rad Controller, Rad/Rad Corruptor, Nin/Nin Stalker, and AR/Dark Corruptor. At least those were the ones I remember playing most. The Stalker worked surprisingly well and that's back when Stalkers were terrible. But its main advantage was the +def in Divine Avalanche allowing for soft-capped melee defense from level 18 on, a decent self heal for what got around the other defenses, caltrops and (eventually) Blinding Powder for further mitigation, But... I'd be sorely tempted to re-create my Staff/Nin or Ice/Rad stalkers for this. The Ice/Rad in particular I'm curious about. Or maybe Ice/Bio. IOs right now make defense builds king for Stalkers and Scrappers but Resist/Regen hybrids might measure up more evenly if the defense sets can't as easily soft-cap. I'll have to roll that around in Mid's. Can't promise I'll be around for a regular team up, but if I'm around, I'd be up for an SO-only team. I'll post here when I have something started. Hammi-Os? Titan-Os? Hydra-Os? SHOEs? 🤪

Well, sure... if you're not allowing yourself even to sell converters on the market. For this SO-only thing being talked about here, I wouldn't even consider it if it was wrapped up in some type of classic challenge too. If the point it to see how the game is balanced with SOs, I think you can answer that without other restrictions on HOW you get the SOs.

Anybody has the inf for them. Merits from soloing story arcs can self-fund SOs from 1 to 27 at least, which is as far as I've taken any of them before switching to IOs.

Mission-wise, it's no different from blueside in terms of how much fun the missions are to actually work through. So I figure for most people it's the latter complaint they don't like. But... I kind of feel like people are missing an essential part of getting into redside there. You SHOULD start at the bottom. For real, you WOULD start at the bottom of whatever pecking order exists and work your way up from there. That means making a name for yourself running someone else's schemes. It was much more a problem later where it seemed, as you leveled up, you were only trading one boss for another more powerful boss rather than becoming one yourself. But there was only so much that could ever be done within the framework of this game. The whole system is based on "Something happened! Go react to it!" model which fits heroes more than it fits villains. The best they can do here is make contacts seem like people who are just helping you set up schemes of your own (which they did eventually in some later story arcs). You still can't, as the player, have complete freedom to develop those schemes without a whole ton of new game mechanics added.

I'm convinced a large part of the "drab and unappealing" complaint is literally the weather. It's ALWAYS overcast. Sunlight, even virtual sunlight, has a large affect on a person's mood. I think it was a mistake. There was certainly an attempt here to underscore the "City of Villains" as being where the bad folks lived by having the weather be as oppressive as Recluse's rule. But in reality there would be sunlit days in Cap Au Diable and St. Martial just as there are in Steel Canyon or Skyway City. Grandville, sure, should probably always look like an industrialist hellscape where the poor and diseased live in a literal gutter, but not every zone redside needed to look like that. As with a lot of things, they eventually got it right in Praetoria, which didn't need to look like Grandville to be just as unjust and oppressive. You get these beautifully clean city zones but you still have alleys filled with gang members, protesters demonstrating against the government, and billboards of propaganda exhorting you to report your neighbor if they seem suspicious complete with monstrous caricatures of Resistance members.

I love how you admitted this is because you put people who disagree with your anti-redside opinions on ignore. It's not the sort of thing I'd be proud of, personally.

Yeah, that's why I asked. It looks kind of messy. You'd have to look at each primary attack since the last AS and figure the individual chance each one adds a stack of AF (stacking chance times hit probability). From that you'd have to figure the odds of zero stacks, the odds of one stack, the odds of two stacks, and the odds of three stacks. The total would be 100% but you'd multiply each probability by the damage it would do (where I'd just multiply crit chance times damage). Which is why I'm curious, but not that curious because as @Omega-202 pointed out, leaving out just one AS in a chain of six kills the advantage of waiting. My intuition is that just hitting that whenever it's up is probably better. It's still the highest ST DPA of any attack a Stalker has, right?

Have you worked out the DPS of that plan vs. just using AS whenever it is the highest DPA attack ready to fire, regardless of stacks, as you would for any other chain? I haven't. Just curious if anyone has.

For Long Range Teleporter, you just need to grab an exploration badge from inside Pocket D. I think what you're talking about might be a separate thing that ALSO teleports you to Pocket D. If it's still in the game. Useful if you want to get there and LRT is on cooldown.

City of Data Whirlpool hits 16. Ice Storm and Blizzard both hit 10.

You're probably talking about something on the order of an extra 3-6 endurance per fight there. If you really are running directly from one fight to the next, there's not a lot of seconds to shave just by boosting your run-speed 33%. It's a tenth of his recovery. That's not nothing, as I said. But it's not bottoming his blue bar in the span of just a couple fights all on its own either. He didn't actually say, but I am assuming it wasn't as gradual as "I can only go 8 or 10 continuous fighting spawns without taking a knee." If it was, then sure... it could be the straw that broke the camel's back, as they say. Note I am not saying don't turn it off. Absolutely turn it off... just that it's unlikely to solve the problem. It will extend, a little bit, the time before you bottom out completely.

Nah, lots of games do that. Skyrim has magic for it (or just Vampirism). Fallout 4 has a perk for it. Tomb Raider has a rebreather. Assassin's Creed: Odyssey has a magic (or first civ tech, if you prefer) enhancement for weapons that does it. When I play AC:Odyssey these days, one of my first stops once out in the open waters of the rest of the map is that little island where you can sneak Poseidon's Trident away from a chest guarded by high-level lions. 🤪 But outside any other means of underwater breathing, I still think it's more common for video games to underrepresent the ability of a person to hold their breath underwater just as a means of making it more of a gameplay obstacle than it really would be.

Sprinting, holding one's breath, and... oddly enough... flashlights (also torches). Video game light sources are notoriously temporary. Much more-so than in real life. I get the desire to make them a limited resource but it's out of all proportion to reality. Forget Lithium Ion batteries. Even an old D-Cell flashlight would last longer than 30 seconds. This one I think most modern video games have finally gotten past but it was heavily featured in such high profile games as Doom 3 and Halo, to name just two. There'd always be some noticeable duration bar that would pop up and drain whenever you turned on a personal light source. Skyrim was a little better but (unmodded) you could only hold a torch for 4 minutes before it would burn out. A real torch would last at least an hour, if not two. Sprinting? I am replaying Mass Effect again because of the remake and even though they've allowed Commander Shepard to sprint outside of combat now, he/she still only makes it about twenty feet or so before gasping for air. I mean Shep is in active-military shape and has been genetically enhanced (presumably for strength and endurance). At least the first two games have this problem. They might have finally gotten rid of it by 3. I don't remember. And yeah, swimming underwater. This one is a mixed bag. Some games feature breath holding I'd have trouble keeping up with but I'd say more often than not I can hold my breath much longer than a typical video game character's "breath bar" will last. But on the flip side, video games have their share of superhuman feats performed by ordinary people as well. Snarky mentioned one: unnatural ability to take a beating that should kill someone. Another is exemplified by just about any game featuring climbing. Assassin's Creed, Tomb Raider, Uncharted, etc. Granted, the Assassins in AC are supposed to be at least a little superhuman, but they still climb with unnatural speed and manage to grab ledges from a fall that should rip their arms off. If you've watched a real free climb up a rock face, it's impressive... but really slow compared to a video game. And that two-story fall? It didn't hurt because I... rolled out of the landing! Yeah... that works.

Welcome back! On the subject of bankrolling your alts though, you should do some searching on these forums for advice on building wealth. These days, there are likely faster ways than farming that particular mission. A 50 can run Task Forces for the reward merits (particularly the Weekly Strike Targets once each for double merits) and turn those merits into inf in several ways. Easiest is to buy enhancement converters with the merits and then sell the converters on the auction house (/ah). You can make about 65-67K inf per converter. You get 3 from each merit. So 5 merits is about a million inf. Another more time consuming way is to use the converters to convert less valuable IOs into more valuable IOs and then sell those. But if you prefer just grinding through enemies, you can usually find someone (or start one yourself) running a "kill most" ITF. In addition to the merit rewards for the task force itself, you chew through so many enemies in this one with a good team that you come away with plenty of inf at level 50 just from all those defeats. Also, don't forget to make yourself an SG base if you aren't already part of an SG. Building one is free on Homecoming. It's handy having all the teleporters, work tables, and storage bins. Add your alts with /altinvite name. When you come across or craft useful IOs for your alts you can drop them in the enhancement bins here. Same for rare salvage.

If you were noticeably struggling with end, shutting off Sprint will make minimal difference. Every bit helps, but we're talking about 0.29 end/sec here. Based on the procs you've mentioned, your recovery should be sitting at around 3 end/sec. So running Sprint was eating about a tenth of your recovery. Any other toggles you had, assuming a little end slotting, were eating up another 2-3 tenths. Everything else is your attacks, which each typically consume around 0.8 to 1.0 end/sec if used every time they are recharged. I mean it's not nothing. Turning it off is like adding another Perf Shifter +end proc to your build. But it's the sort of thing that will slowly eat your end bar over the course of several fights. If you're chomping blues in every fight, or every other fight... you need more endrdx in attacks. Or less recharge.