MHertz

Yes, and I did say "I don't understand" and "it seems to me" rather than "you're only saying that because you feel X." The former I can condone as an opinion or a viewpoint — we all try to understand why others are motivated the way they are, or why we hold certain opinions — but the latter isn't helpful. One is telling you how I think unspecified people might feel; the latter is telling you how you feel. This is especially unhelpful in a context where some people have implied that "feelings" are not a valid argument. But I recognize that could be unclear, and I apologize. If you have a hard time telling those two modes of expression apart, I'll try to do better to put a little blue sky between them.

This topic amuses me, because last night I created a character that is the most freakin' fun to role-play, ever. He is a staff/willpower Brute, and his name is Stickbonker. He bonks people with sticks, and he's obsessed with it. When he runs around, he talks to himself in /local constantly. "Green Shirt Lady say I gotta go talk to Doctor Man. What he know about stick bonkin'?" "Man, stick bonkin' in dis city gets complicated." "If at first you don't succeed at stick bonkin', stand closer." "If it bleeds, we can bonk it with sticks. We prob'ly do dat anyway." It would never occur to me to try to role-play an all-powerful being of any kind.

This is true, but a player who is experienced enough and wealthy enough to create a build capable of soloing an eight-man team's worth of enemies probably has a pretty good idea at what level grouping becomes unpleasantly futile. Don't tell me you haven't checked the powersets of a team going into a TF and said, "This is gonna be bad."

That is certainly one strategy when you have a player that can absorb the alpha strike. When there is one. 🙂 It isn't the only such strategy. And if, as you say, the team is able to steamroll the content without the need of someone to fulfill that role, then that Scrapper or Brute or whatever doesn't have much purpose on the team. They may as well go off on their own, if the team is otherwise not in need of that function. I have no problem with that. I'm still not sure why a Scrapper would want to join a team where a) they don't feel useful and b) they can solo the same content, if more slowly.

If they can't acknowledge the reality of combat mechanics and team efficiency, that's just foolish. Still, it's not particularly helpful to tell people what their feelings are. Contrary to some of the squabbling that's been going on, feelings do matter. We play this game because, well, it's supposed to be fun (for a certain personal definition of "fun"). If we didn't like it we wouldn't be here, so we have to figure out what it is that makes us feel good and why. Part of the problem is inherent AT imbalance. This leads to support types wanting to team in order to play that role. The player might get anxious if the meatshield is off doing his own thing, not paying attention to the team's catastrophe curve. And it could lead to the solo-ready ATs wanting to go off on their own, because they don't really need that much support. At heart, both of the players want to be useful. Both players want to feel like they're making a solid difference. Unfortunately, the ATs were built with opposite tactics in mind for achieving this.

Isn't a melee player much more than a damage hose? Yes, in theory, if the remaining team members are steamrolling the content without any difficulty, there should be no problem in letting one particularly well-built Scrapper run off and do his own thing. In that situation, I got no problems. I've been on TFs with no meatshield at all, and nobody's in any trouble because the DPS and control are through the roof. I've also been on teams where I'd have traded my left arm for just one competent Tanker. I get how it can feel like there's nothing to target — and I get that feeling on a Blaster. By the time the animation cycles, the target is already well dead. I understand that. Still , looking at the problem purely as one of wasted DPS is to diminish melee's entire role to that of a one-dimensional squishy Blaster, and it's not.

I can see how this argument makes sense. The extra damage is wasted. This applies even solo — the bad guy has a sliver of health remaining, but you've got to waste an entire fully-slotted attack to dispatch him. However, in any realistic world, you can't whittle down the team to the bare minimum of DPS producers and expect the same results as you get with a full team of diverse ATs. You can do 200% of the damage needed to destroy a spawn and still not kill the whole spawn. That's because success isn't entirely about attacks, it's about soaking up aggro and centralizing the enemies for AOE attacks. It's also about finding the stragglers and mopping up efficiently. It's about watching your teammates' back and having more eyes on the prize. As I said in my post, I recently played on a task force where the melee artists and DPS hoses had moved on to a spawn down the hallway, leaving a Controller to face a +4 boss alone. I only had a FF Defender, so I used Force Bolt to keep the boss knocked down, but the Controller and I couldn't do anything to take it out. We had to call for the team to return and do its job. I guarantee you we had already done more than 100% of damage needed for the spawn, as a whole.

People play for all kinds of reasons and get their enjoyment from different experiences. Personally, I think the most fun to be had (combat-wise) in this game is when you have a team that's juuu-uust barely in over their heads. Life bars are turning yellow, then orange. Maybe a squishy goes down. Maybe the tanker is in trouble. An extra group got aggro'd or a patrol swung by and it's just slightly more than you're prepared for. You're clicking buttons frantically, spinning the camera, looking for the best targets, trying to drop inspirations on your teammates, flinging buffs and debuffs, clicking attacks as soon as they come up, and your team just barely scrapes through by dint of heroic effort, good luck, and the proper teamwork. You see a squishy that's in trouble and you bash the enemy that's going toe-to-toe with him. You throw the tanker a heal or a bubble. You realize the defender is taking too much aggro and you run to intervene with a well-timed hold. You see the brute's life bar is turning bright red and you laugh help. That's fun — to me. But not to everyone. I can see how some people might prefer to steamroll stuff without ever being in danger, because it would feel more powerful. I can see how some people are more impressed by watching orange damage numbers fly. That's fun for me, too, but not when it's too easy. Not when I don't feel like I make a difference. So I can also see how some people might get frustrated by constantly trying to target stuff and finding everything dead. Or they have to go on an unannounced AFK and nobody noticed. Or when your damage line is MISS! MISS! MISS! MISS! before someone comes in and one-shots the two +4 guys you're fighting. That's frustrating. So yeah, maybe I can see why some people would prefer to solo, because it feels like they're doing something. They're getting their adrenaline rush from taking on just slightly too much. What I don't really understand is why it's necessary to be on a team for that. It seems to me that teaming, only to go rogue, is trying to have the best of both worlds for the solo artist. Cake, and also eating said cake. Other people are earning you quick XP and frequent drops by steamrolling, while you feel important and cool and essential all by yourself, doing your thing, even though you're slogging along more slowly than the group would as a whole. (If you think Solo can defeat a group faster than Solo + Teammates, you're going to have to show me how that works, because it would mean Teammates have a negative net effectiveness. They would have to be making the enemies stronger.) And yeah, communication is the answer. "Hey, let's stick together for this first group, to see how things go. Let's see how well this low-level tanker can withstand aggro. Let's see what our DPS looks like. Let's make sure we're going to be able to roll pretty well." Because I've been on missions where people try to go rogue and solo whole groups, and they're Not Good At It. I have to run after them with heals or bubbles, chasing down a tanker, two brutes and a stalker who all want to do their own thing, except they can't really handle it, and the support team is getting nailed too because there's no meatshield. I've been on teams where I have to say in chat "Hey, dummies, there's a +4 boss attacking our only controller back there, stop aggroing that next group." Or where I have to say "Team is split, come back, we're in trouble here." That isn't much fun to me. It's stressful, because as a support type I feel responsible for herding those cats.

I haven't played with one since Live, but I never found anything wrong with Voltaic Sentinel on my elec/elec blaster. Sure, it doesn't divert enemy attacks away from me like a pet or soak up aggro, but I don't have to micromanage its targets, either. I can focus on other things, like keeping bad guys' endurance drained or healing teammates or whatever. The part I like best is that it's pretty efficient. It uses a relatively weak blast, but shoots fairly often, so there's not a lot of overkill going on. Nukes and similar front-loaded damage powers can sometimes do so much overkill that your DPS rating is deceptively high. Not all of that DPS is being put to good use.

Funny, I like the Blyde Square music too. When it plays. Often, the Copper District music overrides it. I also like ... I believe it's Steel Pier in IP.

I know you probably didn't mean for this to be a tutorial, Ignatz, but it was nevertheless a very clear explanation of the process. I can't say I'm a billionaire, but I was lucky enough to get some recipe drops to experiment with and made 8 million in a few minutes. That'll give my starter toons a leg up — in purchases, but also in making more cash. Thanks! Now I have an idea what I'm looking for.

The best part about playing an Adam Savage character is all the costumes. Pirate, astronaut, Macgyver, James Bond, Indiana Jones...

So how would you put together a group based on the cast of Mythbusters? Silent Walrus: archery/devices blaster Deathblow: robotics/kinetics mastermind But what about the others?

First, that's a pretty keen system. I was not aware of that feature on HC. It doesn't change the fact that playing on +0 earns you more drops than defeating the same number of mobs on +4. That suggests to me that the system is, indeed, imbalanced, regardless whether this has any long-term effect on market prices or item availability. Sure, the connection between this drop rate and the market is tenuous and I can't prove any direct causality to anything; that's not my point. If nothing else, people doing content on +4 have fewer raw materials to work with and fewer things to sell. Seems like an imbalance to me.

This is true. However, there is also the effect of filling slots over time, because recipes are leveled. You have to fill slots at 30, at 35, at 40, at 45, and so on, if you intend to be effective. Not all of those recipes will be ideal for your final build. If you first started making IOs around level 30, you won't have a lot of really recent ones if you play on +4. According to my spreadsheet, you'd get about 94 recipes for levels 28-30 while playing +0, but you'd get 38 recipes for levels 28-30 while playing +4. Okay, you say, not every player wants to build out IOs at that level. At this point we have to further divide our population. There are PLers who skip straight to 50 as soon as possible, filling no slots over time; there are people who play the game as they go, trying to fill slots with the best gear available; there are people who make do with SOs and DOs and never get IOs; there are people who want the IOs but feel they aren't a good use of cash until later. The PL crowd, who slot nothing from 1-49 and wait to build out once they reach the top, those guys probably lower overall demand (for lower-level stuff, at least). But even as they're playing at Level 50 on +4, their drops per mission will be lower. They'll be falling behind in production behind players who play +0.

Yes, I know. My argument is that changing the level difficulty nerfs your drops per mission, and drops per level, irrespective of whether you are doing it fast or slow. The important figure isn't time per level, it's mobs per level, because the number of enemies your team defeats is the foundation for the drop rate. The nerfed drop total would hold steady no matter what AE mission you built for yourself, at any drop rate. Playing the mission on +0 yields more drops than playing that same mission on +4, because there's more enemies. Consequently, playing at +0 means you reach level 50 with more stuff in your pocket. This ought to have the effect of depressing market prices. You may say that this is balanced, because it's a tradeoff the player chooses: higher XP, faster speed, and greater theoretical risk in exchange for a lower number of drops per mission. But I would argue that this is one potential origin for imbalances in the game economy.

You ... actually may be on to something. I know you were being flippant, but hear me out. First, here's a question for the thread. Is drop rate still based on a per-mob-defeated formula, or is it normalized to scale with the XP value of the critter? Because if it's the former, you could make the argument that certain kinds of farmers (not all) and certain players who do non-farming missions (not all) are actually increasing demand for certain things faster than they increase the supply. Here's my math: Suppose for argument's sake that the recipe drop rate for Group A recipes is the same as listed here, 2.6667% per minion, and that it doesn't scale with level differential. Let's also assume it takes 9,000 XP to get from level 22 to level 23. And let's say +0 minions at level 22 are worth 52 XP. You would have to defeat 173 minions to get to level 23, and you'd average 4.6 recipe drops from them. As I understand it, it wouldn't make any difference how big the mission was, or how many you fought at the same time; it's always 173 minions to bridge those levels, regardless of rate of speed. Now let's say you were running missions on +4. Now you're level 22, fighting level 26 minions for 110 XP each. Now you only need 81 minions to level up, and you get only 2.2 drops from them — presuming the per-mob-defeated drop rate is still 2.6667%. That's less than half the drops. I plugged in the values on that "Experience" webpage for XP needed to level up for each level through 46, and the XP value of minions at each level. (I didn't have XP values for mobs over 50, so I stopped at level 46.) If you could fight only +0 minions from level 1 through level 46, you'd average 1,132 recipe drops from 42,445 minions. If you could fight only +4 minions from level 1 through level 46, you'd average 676 recipe drops from 25,358 minions (again, assuming the drop rate doesn't scale). Fighting +4 minions over your career from 1-46 results in 40% fewer drops, having fought 17,086 fewer minions. That's the equivalent of playing about 14 additional levels at level 50, just to break even with the amount of recipe drops a normal 50 gets. Ergo, it seems like the thing that affects the market most isn't farming, per se, but level difficulty. Assuming the figures from Live are still roughly in line with those on HC, when you fight tougher mobs, you increase XP gain per mob at the cost of overall drops per level. And as a farm-fresh level 50 has the same number of slots as any other kind of 50, you have a situation where you have more slots to fill, and you've reduced the supply. As I said, this is irrespective of speed, so it's not about farming or PLing. The solo player who plays on +4, one mission every weekend, will have the same overall effect (over time) as a farmer who plays on +4 and power-levels up to 50 in a few hours. You're just going to see the effects later or sooner, depending on the rate of defeats. So if my assumptions are true, you could actually say that playing on an increased level difficulty is imbalanced. It's not good enough. If farmers just switched down to +0, they'd level more slowly, but they'd have more stuff to show for it. You could probably put a dent in the market prices if you farmed at -1 and really cranked up your drops-per-level rate. You'd get 1,290 drops by level 46, a 14% increase over +0 enemies and nearly double the rate of +4 enemies. Of course, my math could be wrong, or the figures could have changed. Obviously this is a purely hypothetical minions-only situation, where in the real world players have the option of creating AE missions that are all bosses (tougher fights for a higher drop rate). And of course any effect on the market depends on whether the player vendors those items or tries to sell or craft them, and whether that player is trying to fill slots with other than DOs/SOs. Otherwise, I think the comparison is fair, but if my math is mistaken here, please correct me.

(My emphasis.) I don't know what the bolded part means. Converts "easily" to a rare?

Here's my answer: I have no earthly idea if it's "imbalanced." I don't have access to any numbers which would indicate what a perfectly balanced system would look like. And I don't much care whether farming is or isn't "balanced." As far as I can tell, we're talking about farming, not cheating. They haven't broken any rules that I'm aware of. This isn't hacking. It isn't item duplication or aimbots or likewise. Farmers are using the same system everybody else does — maybe with a few extra resources, like additional computers — and making XP/inf faster. Is it the fastest way? I dunno. But it's faster than the way I do it. Well, so what? Whatever the fastest method for gaining XP is, that's what farmers will do. It's not the way I play the game, because I know my game has downtime. I talk with people, I crack jokes, I schlep across zones to talk to contacts, Sometimes I Super Jump around Steel Canyon for no reason at all. I visit Wentworth's instead of typing /ah on the command line. Sure, I grumble about these things sometimes, but I could be more efficient if I wanted to. And farmers are more efficient. They know which enemies are easiest to defeat with their builds, they know where to find those missions, and they know how to maximize combat time. I could do that if I cared enough, but I don't. If all the farmers stopped farming and started playing "normal" (whatever that is), I'm pretty sure that nothing would change except the rate at which those players leveled. Again ... so what?

I understand that loot is very important to some players, but let's keep it in perspective. Just because it's something that you want doesn't mean that it's the only thing people want, or that you are empowered to speak for all players. I personally don't give much thought to loot. I don't care for crafting and I don't care about the marketplace — never have, never will. The introduction of Wentworth's didn't keep me from taking a break, back in the day, and Invention IOs lost their shine very quickly after building out one character. I don't doubt that acquisition is something that motivates some players, but let's not overstate the case.

Power Sink. My first 50 on Live was an elec/elec blaster, and there was nothing more entertaining than draining a whole mob down to zero endurance. They stand there and look at you, unable to do anything, as your team pummels them.

Yes and no. On the one hand, if it is possible to gain lots of XP while AFK, then it is possible (if unlikely) to level without skill, practically by definition. On the other hand, even assuming that it is true in theory, I already concede that there's a very small and only hypothetical possibility I would ever meet any such player. All of which is to explain farming doesn't bother me.

I'm not a big fan of farming, and I have to concede this is true. I can only thing of one possible, maybe, kinda-sorta way that farming could impact my game, with a ton of ifs and caveats on top. Farming a character from 1 to 50 in a couple hours could, maybe, produce a player that has no idea how to play that character properly. It could produce a player who considers himself an expert on whatever AT it is, because he has a Level 50 Sizzle/Wham PowerPuncher with fully-slotted Everything Os that he bought on Craigslist or that he farmed up AFK while taking a long hot shower. He's never played that character at level 10, at level 20, at level 30, so he has no idea how to handle mid-game content, or how to prioritize his slotting, or how to deal with certain enemy groups. He doesn't know what his character can handle, or what other ATs can bring to the table. If you ask "how did you deal with Malta and caltrops?" or "should I take travel first or mez protection?" he may not have any clue. He's never played on a non-farm team, so he thinks it's normal to run around mashing buttons in melee range with a Controller and somehow never dying. And this guy might, maybe, someday, team up with me. Or he might team up with some actual newbie who looks to him for advice he can't give. Yes, yes, I know what you're going to say. You're going to say a) sometimes non-farmer players don't know how to play very well, either, and b) maybe the farmer is a veteran from Live who played that AT up to 50 already, or c) maybe the farmer already leveled up a few characters some other way and has a pretty good idea about the content, and furthermore d) if you're not a farmer, who says that farmer is going to team up with you anyway? And you'd be right on all counts: farming is not a guarantee that you'll end up with a player who lacks fundamental game knowledge. It is not a foregone conclusion that the player will thereafter end up on regular non-farm teams, only to screw things up for everyone. I'm only saying this is possible. Like I said, I'm not a fan of farming. But this series of ifs and maybes is the worst way I can think of, where possibly, once in a while, hypothetically, a farmer's playstyle might affect me. It isn't all that much, if I'm honest. So I'm not too worried about farming. Let 'em have at it.

Yeah, thanks, Statesman. Way to go, with that secret pact with Arachnos to keep people from wearing Circle of Thorns robes.

Stepping around the debate around farming, let me offer an answer that hasn't been supplied yet: if everything is too expensive, stop trying to buy everything. Seriously, don't. It doesn't matter. You'll be able to play even without the Best Stuff, especially at lower levels. Your lower-level characters who lack wealth also lack slots. This means they have much less need to fill slots with new toys, and the toys will have much less effect on how well you can play. When my DOs are green, it takes 3 hits for my blaster to destroy certain mobs. When they're red, it takes ... 3 hits. So what did I spend 25K influence on? At that level, not a lot. One less miss in 20 swings? I dunno. It's a minuscule improvement to put a couple of percentage points from a DO into 1 damage slot at level 12. It's a lot more important to put in more hefty SO or IO enhancements when your main attack has 6 slots at level 38 ... but by then you'll have more cash. If you want to be frugal, make a diverse set of alts (blaster, controller, defender ... natural, magic, mutation ... and so on). Start a supergroup and put your alts into it. Drop off those Enhancements for one of your alts to find. Somebody's going to be able to use that DO or SO or recipe you found. Don't get me wrong, you can make money if you want to, but don't feel like you have to.