ZemX

Interesting. I tested this just now with a level 20 TE Acc. I had just slotted all level 20 SOs at level 17. I am now level 18., so when I hit Upgrade it tells me the price of upgrading to level 21 enhancements. I changed out one of the SO Acc with a TE Acc, same level 20. Punching "Upgrade" gave me 32 enhancements that could be upgraded. Exactly how many I had including the TE. Used an unslotted on just the TE and it came down to 31 enhancements. The difference in cost of the upgrade (level 20 to level 21) was 25344 inf. Which is exactly what the wiki said an old level 21 TE acc should cost. So I guess it does auto upgrade TEs. I'll leave it in there and see if it will keep offering to upgrade it as I earn a few more levels. You would normally be able to 100% chance upgrade a Level 20 TE using another level 20 TE. If it still allows this for Level 22 then it's offering an upgrade you can't normally do by hand. Loophole? 😁 Edit: Got to 20 and it was still telling me it would upgrade TEs. I'll check on the cost again with another unslotter next time I'm in and again when I'm at 22. But it does look like it's just charging a single TE's worth of inf per enhancement to upgrade. That's astronomically less than it would cost to do the upgrade by hand, of course.

I'm not sure I do. It looked to me like @Luminara's point was that the more complex, more involved, and more challenging content and enemies of Goldside simply aren't a draw for most players. You then appear, to me at least, to be providing a second example of that same point. Redside is newer and generally better content than original blueside, with a few more challenging enemies. It's again less played. It's not that there aren't people who value that kind of content. I'm certainly one. It's that there are few of us compared to the whole population. What you see in global chat channels more than anything is people running repeatable easy content like fire farms in AE, DFBs in Atlas for newbies, and PI radios for easy enemies that can be wholesale stomped repeatedly for easy XP and leveling. Mothership raids. "Kill Most" ITFs. We all see that stuff 10x more than anybody saying "Who wants to join a mission team in Night Ward!?" I'm not saying don't try it. I think the devs have the right "add, don't change" attitude here and if that's what you're saying too, I don't have a problem with it. More options are better than fewer. I just don't see it as solving some game-wide problem. It will make people like me happy. The folks sitting inside the door of a fire farm won't even notice.

Enemies like this already exist and most people actively avoid them if they can. I once asked why it was so much more common for people to run radio teams than tips teams, given the tip missions seemed so much more interesting to me. The answer I got? "It's not as easy to control what enemies you get." And that tracks my experience. I see plenty of people advertising for "Council PI Radio" teams. About nobody saying, "Come join my Carnie radio team! Find out which of your teammates has no psi protection!" As far as I can tell, the problem with your whole proposition here is that this sort of challenge is not what people are seeking. Pre-50, people seem to be looking for one thing only: Getting to 50. The only place new and interesting challenge content will be welcomed by all is at the Incarnate level, I'm afraid.

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.