Miss Magical

But you can. Your newly 50'ed character can just continue to sit in an AE farm and gain empyrean merits from veteran levels, which are convertible to reward merits, astral merits and incarnate salvage. And this is by far the fastest way of gaining vet levels and hence, empyrean merits. In fact, I suspect this is one of the non-economical reasons why farms are popular -- when combined with veteran levels and the lack of travel time, it's nearly a one-stop shop. Are you seriously trying to suggest that farming does not give, by far, the very best rewards in the game? Farmers would not circle the wagons around their golden goose if it were not. I may be relatively new to this game, but I am not stupid. This is why I am skeptical of pro-farming arguments -- they all seem deceptive in nature. I'm done replying to you.

I don't see how that is relevant. The point is that the lack of sustained inflation cannot be used as an argument that farming does not raise prices, because in this game the economy trends towards an equilibrium. Farming can still cause higher prices (raised equilibrium) without being able to cause sustained inflation.

Thank you for understanding the real issue at stake here. Ultimately, I consider all economics arguments a distraction from the issue of a subculture of players demanding the privilege to receive vastly more (as much as 10x) rewards than anyone who simply chooses to have a different playstyle, for no reason. However, I also do not think AE farms can be balanced in a vacuum. If you do that, the farmers will just move on to the next farmable thing. It may slightly less convenient and lucrative for them, but they will still find some way to vastly outstrip the earnings of casual players. What I think this game needs is a comprehensive review of reward systems that ensures all kinds of content and playstyles are incentivized -- and I don't think that is ever going to happen. Right now, the only thing that has anything close to the sort are task forces (balanced by time-based merit rewards, the WST, and diminishing rewards). I was astonished to hear that there was apparently never anything of the sort in this game -- that the vast majority of all content was just made with the assumption that people will do it simply because it exists, and no thought was given to the questions of "how will we keep this content rewarding long into the future? What can we do to support players who enjoy it so they'll continue being able to find teams for it?" It all made sense when I learned that this was apparently the developers' first MMO, because there are a lot of clues in this game that it was someone's first rodeo, and this is the most obvious one.

Not necessarily, because farming also increases demand for those same recipes and IOs. Farming produces new characters very quickly; you can go from level 1-30+ in a single run, and to reach 50 takes between 2 and 3 hours. All those mass-produced characters that come out of the AE factory are going to want enhancements as well.

I think this argument is naive, because it ignores the fact that inflation in COH is subject to a negative feedback loop, i.e. the greater the rate of inflation, the stronger counterinflationary pressures become. And the reason for this is that inf has value as a commodity itself. As the supply of inf in the economy increases, spending inf on things such as super packs, amplifiers, P2W summons, etc. becomes more attractive, which then increases the rate of inf removal from the economy. Eventually, we reach an equilibrium where the inf inflow and outflow become approximately equal. However, this equilibrium would be much lower were it not for the continuous and massive influx of inf from AE. So, AE farming does cause inflation.

The secret low-level anti-Vahz weapon is the stun grenade from the P2W vendor. It is an aoe stun that recharges in 16 seconds.

It comes from AE farms. Farmers produce about 100 M/hr. By contrast, a 54x8 kill-most ITF produces about 10-12 M? over the same time (I can't recall if I had Windfall turned on, but I'll edit this comment the next time I do one). Farm rewards are on the order of 1,000% of those of all other playstyles, and they are scaleable in a manner that is not possible with other playstyles - you can triple-box and afk farm in AE, it's much less practical to do that with story arcs or task forces, and you don't need to spend tine recruiting for a farm, though some do. While farmers try a variety of arguments to defend farming, what they are really arguing for is the special privilege to receive about 10 times the rewards of other people, simply because others choose to enjoy the game differently. I would be interested to see economic data from the HC devs to show the ratio of influence to goods that farmers generate, and hence, to what extent they contribute to prices. But without a large amount of influence in the system in the first place, it is difficult for prices to rise high, and the largest source of raw influence - an order of magnitude above any other - is AE.

To be fair, there are actually a lot of situations where being able to instantly softcap your teammates across a wide area has great utility. In those situations there is one powerset that shines above all others. It is Force Fields Vengeance. On a defender, fully enhanced Maneuvers + Vengeance gives +44.5% def to all. It also provides a small heal, damage and tohit buff. Supposedly, it's even powerboost-able like force fields shields are. "But Miss M," you say, "unless someone dies you can't use it!" Well, here's the beauty of the situation. If nobody dies, clearly the shields were not needed and a forcefielder would've been superfluous anyway. If someone does die then the vengeance will prevent any further deaths. So the difference between vengeance and force fields is one dead leeroy jenkins. Use Vengeance. Available at your nearest trainer.

I would play force fields if the playstyle were more active. I play cold domination, which has comparable powers, and while the +def is valuable, at low level the set contributes little to the “play” part of “gameplay”; the shields are buttons you press once every 4 minutes and forget about after. There’s nothing engaging about that. While cold changes at high level with sleet and heat loss (which make the player think about the positioning of teammates and critters), force fields has unattractive offerings of repel and knockback. I would find knockback more useful if you could precisely knock an enemy to X location on demand (more like that Gravity control power) rather than something vague like “magnitude xx knockback”. I don’t like the fact that moving enemies around with the repel bubble means I can’t attack because characters cannot animate attacks while moving. Conversely, set bonuses offer an engaging challenge of balancing +def bonuses while achieving other design goals such as procs, endurance consumption, accuracy targets, enhancement values and more. I’ll happily tinker with a build for an hour before deciding that the old one was just fine and closing mids with a satisfied nod. I’m not going to complain if a forcefields character joins the team (provided they do not reduce the effectiveness of my powers with their knockback) but personally, I don’t find the set attractive enough compared to Cold to play.

Combat jumping and jetpack solve those. Combat jumping is deceptively good at scaling heights. Unless a surface is completely smooth (eg. wall), you can often just walk or hop all the way up with combat jumping. Try it out on eg. some of the hills in Cimmerora sometime.

The difference is not that great: Sprint + athletic run + synapse proc and 2x performance shifter in Stamina = 62 mph. Unslotted super speed = 71 mph. I often have a travel power for concept, however the only content I have found where travel powers offer a really large advantage is speedrun TF’s. For those, super speed is ideal (for the stealth, and because leaping does not navigate small tunnels well, while flight is too easily grounded by Arachnos web grenades).

Note that you can buy unslotters or enhancement boosters to sell, too, and they offer the same (occasionally much better) merit:inf ratio as converters. I typically sell boosters if I want to convert large amounts of merits - I am not dragging 3000 converters into the AH 10 at a time. Unslotters should be sold for 100k apiece minimum. Boosters should be sold for 1M apiece minimum. You can try to get a better price if you like but they sell very quickly at these prices and I typically get paid more anyway. IO’s don’t need to be replaced, so it’s alright if you have ones that are 20-30 levels below your current level. Level 25 ones will last you all the way to 50. It is normal that your very first character cannot afford to update all the enhancements every 5 levels if you are using SO’s. (So don’t use SO’s.) However, money is very easy to come by in this game once you have at least one character at level 50 and access to the full range of potential WST’s and lucrative endgame content like hami raids, tinpex and the ITF. The only one of my characters who did not have a complete cost-no-object IO build ready to be slotted upon hitting level 50 was my very first one, and I neither farm nor profiteer on the market.

Customize your phantom army to look like your character. You can now enjoy your costume 300% as much, from multiple angles and perspectives, while remaining comfortably invisible.

I don't think farming, in the sense of repetitive grinding, is bad; there are certainly players attracted to that style of gameplay (and it was a hallmark of the old school of classic MMO games). I think objections arise from the fact that farmers demand special privilege: they want their content to give vastly more rewards than everyone else's for no reason (and while afk, no less). From experience, it takes me around 20 to 25 hours to level from 1-50. A good AE farm will get you there in 2h. In other words, farm rewards are on the order of 1,000% those of non-farm content. Imagine if I created a Decuple Exp Boost P2W power that gave +1,000% exp, and arbitrarily limited it to only players who PvP or roleplay, etc. and you'll see why farming provokes objections. I don't think farmers (the players) nor farming (the playstyle and associated missions) deserve any more - or less - rewards than normal (I've seen some suggestions to remove AE rewards entirely, which isn't an improvement either). If AE farm rewards were balanced to be approximately the same as you could get from other sources of content, I doubt anyone would complain about farming again; it would be a win-win situation for everyone. But I doubt the developers have the manpower to implement the kinds of systems needed to effect this kind of change, especially since - as I mentioned previously - merely balancing AE farm rewards alone won't solve the problem without some comprehensive review of the game's reward systems.

I don't think anyone needs to be concerned about this. Games inevitably get easier as they age - it's almost a law of thermodynamics. With the passage of time, successive buffs and "QoL" (ie. difficulty reduction) changes degrade the integrity of the gaming experience, and the temptation to appeal to the instant-gratification crowd gets too strong for developers to resist. I can't think of a single MMO that has managed to consistently maintain its difficulty floor rather than allowing it to sink over time.

In the mission where you travel to Cimerora, the midnighters specifically mention they are bypassing ouro to travel back in time by their own means. I always wondered if this was due to some in-character reason such as not trusting Mender Silos (who seems a rather shady character overall), or just a contrivance to introduce the midnighters and Cimerora with the same set of missions.

Personally, I'd hate to see the challenge-less "let's just press a few aoes and delete all the critters in sight" playstyle be catered to even more than it already is. I'd rather see more challenging content with commensurate and exclusive (so that you can't get them by participating in abovementioned playstyle in an AE farm) rewards that actually makes such niche abilities more useful. I was pretty tickled to blow up half a vahz mob by confusing one of their suicide bombers, why aren't there more situations where this is the optimal tactic? No increases to the dpa of any powers, and especially no increases to aoe damage, please. Also, absolutely no removal of knockback from any powers. Knockback is a disadvantage, but one that you can turn into an advantage with proper use of IOs, terrain or tactics. That's something that should be more prevalent in powerset design.

I strongly suspect that the AH sometimes glitches on certain items and either: 1) does not show the correct purchase price in the last history, or: 2) does not correctly assign the highest buy order to the lowest sale order. I first noticed this when bidding on Defender's Bastion: acc/dmg/end and dmg/end/rech during a period when I was leveling many defenders. The "normal" price for these is between 7 and 8 M, as standard for an ATIO. But these two pieces semi-regularly show sales prices ranging from 1 M to as low as less than 1k, yet my bids ranging from 3 M to 4 M never filled. In fact, looking at the AH right now, I can see this: ... which is not a normal sight for any ATIO!

I have been working on one, but it is still only hypothetical; the character is still 44 and has not slotted her purples yet. Features: 44.7% ranged def 165% global recharge 20% tohit (for the bonus damage from Blazing Bolt) This build is a ranged defense hoverblaster. The attack chain is flares - blaze - flares - blazing bolt. You can use bonesmasher in place of one of the flares when it is safe, especially on a team, but beware, most AV's and GM's have foot stomp or other aoes that do not check ranged defense. You can open with bonfire, powerboosted stun, or inferno, and they recharge fast enough to be used one after another. I did not take rain of fire because in my experience so far enemies do not last the full duration. Power Boost adds about 5% defense to all. I would not rely on this to softcap because it has a short duration and frequently refreshing it spends animation time that decreases damage output. Personally, I am not completely sold on the idea of softcapping range only through IO's myself. A lot of the hardest-hitting attacks in this game actually check aoe, not ranged defense. I am considering a different build with more moderate 32-35% ranged def and as much recharge as possible.

I think this is just a symptom of this game's failure to properly incentivise different types of content. AE farming is the biggest and most obvious symptom of this problem, but balancing farm rewards alone won't fix it, because it's far more widespread than that. Almost all content seems to have been made with the assumption that players would do them just because they exist, without thought as to how they fit into a coherent reward scheme, resulting in entire swathes of the game's content being dead zones. If any MMO's newest expansion zones were ghost towns, like this game's are, heads would roll at the studio. No surprise this game got shut down! You may say, "but Miss M, does it really matter if nobody plays some dinky level 1-20 zones, especially when the game no longer needs to wring subscription money from players by preventing them from grinding too fast?" Yes, absolutely. There are players who play purely to accumulate rewards, players who play for the story, players who want to team with others, etc. and none of these playstyles are inherently wrong. For as long as the normal story, missioning content is also the content that provides the best rewards, they have a win-win situation. However, if you create one specific kind of content that provides disproportionately high rewards for low effort, then those who play purely to accumulate rewards will naturally congregate there, and resist any changes to it in order to preserve their golden goose. You've now produced two warring camps, and worse, arbitrarily decided that one playstyle should have vastly greater rewards than the others. Yes, there will always be differences in playstyle and rewards that are difficult to accomodate. But where possible, it's in the interest of the game and its community to minimize rather than exacerbate those differences. Yes, some people will demand the freedom to only camp in their sweaty little basement and do nothing else. But theirs comes at the cost of a far greater and more important freedom - the freedom to be able to play whatever you want because the entire game is your playground. For an MMO to have lasting, broad appeal and a thriving, vibrant community, all content should be incentivized and all players should be encouraged to mingle and play together, regardless of their motivators for playing. And the way to achieve this is through a balanced, coherent reward system that properly incentivizes all kinds of content. Fail to do that, and you're left with a 17-year old dead game, which survives only on private servers played by a diehard few, who no longer have the manpower to fix this kind of systemic problem.

I found combat readiness useful for situations where that annoying critter simply must die. e.g. Ruin mages, Master Illusionists, Awakened bosses (which spawn minions and eat them to heal up if you fail to kill them quickly), various destroy X objectives in missions, etc. It is also a vehicle for precious energy/negative resistance from 3x adjusted targeting (3%, or 1.5%/slot added - not bad at all). I picked Sweeping Cross because I just can't see waiting until 28 for my first aoe. But my street justice was also a shield defense tank, and in my opinion melee aoe sets benefit them more, especially obliterations.

Excelsior has one raid leader who does hami raids daily at 10pm EST. On weekends, it is best to arrive around 15 min early to secure your spot, since the zone tends to fill early on weekends. This raid usually does not advertise in LFG unless unusually few people show up. The 10pm raid will do 3 clears. This one is held in the Hive so only heroes, vigilantes and rogues can attend. There is another raid leader on Excelsior who does hami raids on Mon, Wed and Fri around 5-6pm EST. This raid tends to take longer to fill and will advertise in LFG. This one will do 2 or 3 clears depending on time available. It is held in the Abyss so all characters can attend regardless of alignment.

I've occasionally noticed this behavior as well, and it can be annoying if you're trying to kill things with small aoe attacks (e.g. burn). But I found that there's an easy solution: pull more enemies! And by more, I mean the next 3 groups, and the AV at the end, too. It won't matter at that point if a few enemies are spread out, because the entire field will be filled with enemies too. This also works well as a counter to knockback: most powers have target caps of 10 or 16, so if there are at least 32 enemies surrounding the party, your damage isn't negatively affected.

After you have your keybinds, chat and windows set up the way you like it, you can go to options and press the buttons that save to default: Keymapping > Save to default file Windows > Chat settings file > Save to default file Windows > Windows settings file > Save to default file The game loads from these files whenever you make a new character (no action needed on your part). I started using this once I had a setup I was comfortable with, now I won't have to redo it for every alt. I use a setup that binds keys to specific tray slots (press 1 to activate the power in slot 1, etc.), rather than specific powers. This is the way that all modern MMO's handle keybinds, and it's what this game does for your default tray. This way, I can easily try out new hotkey layouts on the fly without messing with a binds file. The command is: /bind <keyname> pow_exec_tray <slot#> <tray#> So, e.g. /bind F pow_exec_tray 6 3 Will execute whatever power is in slot 6 of tray 3 when you press F. This way, when I make a new character, all my chat and windows are already loaded in the positions I want. I can just drag powers into the tray and press the relevant hotkey to use them.

If it was anyone but @DreadShinobi posting that, then I would be inclined to agree with you. But they often post things that, while sometimes counterintuitive at first glance, turn out to be very well-reasoned if you think carefully. In this case I can see their point: skilled high-level blaster play involves proactive use of inspirations to both softcap and maintain high resistance. One needs to consider the slot-efficiency of inspirations as well. Since defense inspirations give much more mitigation per insp than do resist ones, a build with resists from the APP, moderate +def from IO's and the rest of the way to softcap from 1-2 small purples, is tougher than one that gets all the way to softcap from APP and IO's and gets only resists from inspirations. And just going for softcap with no resists is the weakest option of all, especially if your softcap is mace's S/L/E or ice's S/L only which is very vulnerable. Maybe a less-skilled player who cannot manage inspirations effectively or someone going for a no-insp challenge can still find Mace or Ice the best choice for them personally? I agree with you on one thing though: the number of 50's one has is eminently unimpressive. The same goes for what enhancements one uses, or how long one has been playing. After all, one can just farm and AFK to thousands of levels and billions of inf, and I've seen some seriously kooky advice from supposed vets of the game. Show me someone who produces elegant and capable builds, who regularly runs Carnival of Chaos, 801.x and other high-difficulty AE missions with success, or who holds good TF speedrun times - now those would impress me.