MHertz

"Patience, yeah, yeah. How long will that take?" —Ed Gruberman

How about: Only use trains, ferries and zone gates for zone travel Must train only in Peregrine Island That won’t add a tremendous amount of difficulty once you reach your first travel power, but it would almost certainly require that you take one; that way you can’t use that power choice for something else.

Brute: easiest to play, most expensive to equip, least likely to learn about the game’s enemies. Brutes have good survivability, and with all of their status protection and built-in damage bonuses, they can fly through content. The flip side of that is that Defense and Resist enhancements tend to be among the most expensive (Damage and Healing are tops), and with your lovely status protection shielding you, you won’t even notice that certain enemies have stuns, holds, confuses or immobilizes until the late game bad guys roll around. Sentinels: on par with Brutes from an expense and learning standpoint, and not as powerful. The least expensive to equip are probably Controllers, but they aren’t easy to solo. However, as with playing any squishy type (Blaster, Defender, Corruptor, Dominator) you do learn a lot about what the enemies can do. Any archetype can make money on the auction house if you do a small amount of research.

Every archetype plays a little differently and you have to get used to its limitations. I'd say you're going about it the right way — by trying them. It's too easy in this game to hop on a team, zoom past 10 levels, and the realize you have no idea to play the archetype or the power set you've chosen against the enemies you're now facing. Being on a team, even a poorly slapped-together one, doesn't teach you much about solo tactics, and being on a good team will cover up a lot of your mistakes. First: different archetypes have different target priorities. As a Tanker you can afford to charge at the boss and let the minions fall by the wayside due to your AOEs. Your high durability and status protection means you're in no danger from the little guys while you whittle down the big guy. Switching from Tanker to anything else, you might say, "Gosh, I didn't know those guys had Stun. Huh. Who knew?" You never felt it. As a Brute, you have similar durability, but you're on this non-stop crusade of smashing everything in your path without rest, to make best use of Fury. Not all archetypes play like those, and wearing your Brute hat on a Blaster will get you crushed. As a Blaster, you might want to cut down the number of minions early, from a safe distance, before taking on the boss. Or maybe you want to focus on a lieutenant with mez powers (like in the Lost) or a summoner (as in the Banished Pantheon) or AOE knockdown (Ruin Mages in the COT), because you can't fight those as easily. You'll also learn which bad guys need 3 hits, and which you can eliminate in 2 or 1, and which ones you want to keep out of melee range. You'll learn when to switch targets. ("Let's see, I'll immobilize that guy, move over here, blast this guy, oops this one's getting too close but I have some punches ready to go. Now back to the immobilized one...") As a Scrapper (as with a Brute) your defenses mature later, but you get critical hits, so you have to figure out the best way to make use of them. Both power sets have some soft control powers in a few things, like -Def or -ToHit or Slow, so figure out where to apply those. You just have to think more, is all. Some of it also comes down to your build. As a Blaster, yes, you could take Boxing/Tough/Weave plus Combat Jumping to give yourself a sliver of defense. But maybe you're better off taking an extra high-damage melee attack for anybody that gets in your face. "Dead" is the best status effect you can bestow on an enemy, and Blasters do it better than anybody. Back in the day, people used to use all kinds of tactics to take on enemies: sniping from far away, pulling a small group of enemies, herding them into a small space with a Tanker ... now the teams just steamroll everything, and you don't learn good tactical approaches for solo in that environment.

What are you thinking, maybe Steam/Thermal or Steam/Cold? Maybe make a Steam/Empathy and call him Spa-der Man.

This is all doom, most likely, or maybe it isn’t, but I’m certain it’s one or the other! Or maybe both or neither. In any case, it is news. All we need now is someone who understands the old animation systems and can start making new power sets. Plus a total upgrade of all of everything. Plus I could use an iice cream bar. You know, the usual.

I don’t know about pseudorandom; maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. I figured it was some kind of hash or algorithm that could be calculated to maintain consistency without having to have the character online. If players were allowed to set their own colors, I fear you’d end up with a huge proportion of players going for Evil Blood Red Super Darkity Evil Maroon color.

I like the feature where individual names are assigned different colors in the chat. It helps keep things sorted and draw the eye toward people whose colors you recognize. It would be wonderful if we could preview the color of the name in the character creator / rename window, so we can make adjustments if there's a specific color we're shooting for.

I used to be a voice actor like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee.

Debt is the game's way of telling you to be more careful. That's about it. It does slow down your XP gain, although you still make money (unless you have 2xp turned on). So it's also the game's way of telling you to spend more money on your build, I guess.

No, it wouldn’t make me want to PVP. The question is, why would it make PVP any more fun for anybody? As it stands, there is a community of people who like to PVP, and who have a modicum of skill. I’ve heard PVP described on this thread as more exciting combat against more engaging enemies. Am I wrong, or does this idea propose to water down the experience? “I love PVP because it’s such a dynamic challenge! Let’s make it better by luring in some clueless and unenthusiastic loot-hunters!” I think not. Besides, if the devs wanted prisms to be easier to get, all they have to do is tweak some drop rates. But as far as I know, they don’t want them to be super-available. If there were to be any loot, it wouldn’t be that.

Here are some silly names I thought of for characters I will never actually make: A rodent with ice powers: Mousicle A canine in a suit with fire powers: who works for the FBI: Fox Smolder A chicken with psionics: Professor Eggs

There’s an easy compromise. Charge by the letter. Different rates for different channels. HELP: free. GENERAL: first 100 characters free, then 10 inf/letter. LFG: free, but 10,000,000 for each letter in the word FARM. LOCAL: Free when your speaking range is set below a certain threshold. BROADCAST: Your character is deleted.

I’ll do you one better. Why are you?

Stan and Lou, obviously.

Accidental double post.

Your health bar moves pretty fast. If you don’t look stop and around once in a while, you’ll miss it.

I am experiencing problems with multi-boxing and additional monitors that I haven’t seen previously. This may be due to a recent change in video display; I noticed it about 2-3 days ago. Some screen display options disallow Alt-Shift-Arrow (to move one instance of the game to the other monitor) Some screen display options are offset by the height of the Windows Task Bar, resulting in mouse displacement (what you hover over is not what gets clicked on) Activating an idle game window can cause the previously-active game window to spawn the Windows task bar I have not yet noticed if there are specific video settings (eg, 1920x1080, 1920x1080 desktop, Borderless monitor 1, etc) that tie to certain behaviors. Mostly, the options appear to work at first, but then experience problems after Alt-Tab occurs. I will keep testing.

You have to have hero banter! The trick is to fight a couple of groups first and see how it goes before opening up the floodgates to banter. Sometimes there isn’t time, but in many cases there is.

Sometimes other people just suck, and it makes me want to see fewer of them. Sometimes this happens in the game. Unlike real life, there is a solution for in-game drama: the ignore feature, and remembering that participating in the game is voluntary. Have you ever had one of those moments where you say, "No amount of entertainment is worth the human drama going on here" and want to take a healthy break?

It isn't. That isn't the system that I would call "inventing." It's more like gambling. Converters are just a slot machine that you hope comes up LOTG once in a while. Inventing implies the character or player has a purpose: "I need one of XYZ." They set themselves to getting it, scavenging for just the right parts, or just the right recipes, to target the thing they need — basically, quasi-customization of loot drops. The player specifies they want a better chance to create X type of IO, and a lesser chance of all other types. Of course, we don't have much to do in the game except combat, so the invention (loot drops) would have to happen by that path. Sitting next to a table and clicking the UI's brains out in order to defeat an RNG, well, that's video blackjack.

Yeah, but that feels more like buying something than inventing it.

If I were to change the system at all, I would do so from the opposite direction. Create a menu for inventors that says “what are you working toward right now?” and let them choose a particular category of item: Healing, Resist, or whatever. Tweak the drop rates so you are more likely to get that one thing, at the cost of a lower drop rate overall. Suppose the % chance to drop an IO from a minion is 2.5%. You set yourself for “healing” and your drop rate goes down to 2.0%, but when you do get something, you have a 40% chance of finding healing recipes. Maybe if you have invention badges you can boost that to 50%. That would feel more like an invention system to me, and less like a loot-drop gambling system.

So if Storm Blast suddenly did massive amounts of up-front nuke damage, what is it? It’s the same as everything else — just a competition to see whether you or your teammates can mash the button first. That’s not a bad thing, but it does make the game and the power set much less interesting. Is there a particular reason why every powerset must be built in that way?

There's that word again. I'm not trying to disparage the fact that people want to play the game and "have fun" (whatever that means to the individual), but if we are using "contributing" as our yardstick, we need to know what that means, and how we tell when it's happening for everyone. On my FF defender, I "contribute" by shielding, holding position to keep everyone in the big bubble, and using attacks whenever I feel like I can spare the time. On my Elec/Elec blaster, I "contribute" in different ways depending on the team I'm on — sometimes this means using my nuke, and sometimes it means rounding up strays that escaped someone else's nuke. On my Staff/WP Brute, I "contribute" by running headlong into big groups and taking enough of the aggro that the team doesn't wipe out. What is it about Storm Blast that makes people feel like they aren't "contributing?" Is it because on the very toughest teams, the big T9 power outlasts the bad guys? If so, what's the end goal here? How do we know when we have reached the proper level of "contribution?" How do we do this without crowding out some other powerset, like Ice Blast with its T9, Blizzard? And how do we do this without homogenizing all Blaster sets to become bland, insta-nuke lookalikes? To put it another way, what role in team dynamics does Storm Blast presently fill, and what would we lose if we turn Cat 5 into a copy of Thunderous Blast? Is Storm Blast really good at, say, propping up a team without a Tanker? Really good at dealing with add-on attacks or ambushes? Really good at dealing with maps when full-sized groups are too close together? What is it good at, and does it have to be good at insta-nuke too?