melancholicmoods

Or even better, have it auto rez anyone who dies within its range while it's running, including the caster.

I've got smoke grenade on my blaster and any group that has stealth powers seems to get aggro'd by it, that means Knives of Artemis, Malta, even Crey now. It makes the power pretty useless for stealth purposes at high levels. I'm not sure if this was an intended change or is broken but the description still reads that enemies won't be aggro'd by it.

Exactly, blappers were those blasters who almost solely fought in melee range, and often got themselves killed because of it since blasters were much squishier back then. But most of the strongest blaster powers are in the secondary so if you want to do the most damage you're going to "blap"!

I'm not doubting you, I'd just never heard of those uses. How would it allow you to go anywhere in the game, like in missions and what not and not just to an SG base? Even then, why not just change the code so that it only allowed you to transport to your sg base? They did that anyway, just that it only works now if you're standing next to an sg portal.

It had to be difficult for the original devs and I'm sure continues to be with the HC devs (maybe even more so) to find a way to introduce new features into the game without screwing up the existing game's balance and enjoyment. I agree though that some of the changes are real head scratchers and seem like they could easily have been implemented better. I wasn't in the game's original beta (and I've learned to never believe people who say they were, waaaayyy too many people have claimed they were to make it believable) but I did start playing the first week the game was release, I'd gotten it as a birthday present to myself. A lot of the early changes and additions were great but some were truly awful and made zero sense. Many of the changes came as a result of PvP being added to the game and the devs being unable or unwilling to make the necessary code changes at the time to have powers work differently in PvE vs PvP. I'm still upset about the changing controllers so they couldn't have multiple pets out at once. All the reasons given made no sense. They were worried that high level controllers were too powerful yet a good Tank could literally herd an entire map then destroy every villain on their own, Controllers were still weak in comparison. Besides, controllers were specifically described in the original documentation as being a difficult class to play early on but with mastery became one of the most powerful. So they worked as intended until hit with the nerf bat. Travel power suppression is another one that still drives me crazy and should be removed. Enhancement diversification I'm on the fence with. I sort of understand why they did it but then they went and introduced the IO system which largely negated it anyway, just made it more expensive and difficult to get to the same end result. With HC I think most of the changes have been largely for the positive but totally agree with you on the SG macro leak. I agree it was one of my favorite things about HC and to take it away seemed more about someone's ego than logic. They were forced to introduce a bunch of changes into the game to keep people from getting too angry about it and for no reason, having it there didn't hurt anything and made a huge quality of life difference, made using SG bases way more enticing, and made sense from a story perspective. If teleportation technology exists in this world, and your SG base can have teleporters that can send you to any zone AND can initiate a medical teleport directly to the base if you're "killed", it doesn't make sense that you can't also teleport to your base just to go there. It also doesn't make sense to me that effort is being put into creating new powersets when there are still powersets that need some serious improvement (I'm looking at you mind control). Now, mind control on paper isn't terrible and can be fun to play but one of its signature powers is a group sleep. As much as I love using sleeps when soloing they are next to useless in group play, especially with pick up groups. You sleep the whole group allowing everything to safely get picked off one by one and the next thing that happens is someone with a big AoE can't stop themselves from using it and waking everyone up again. Then you have the final power in the set. A power that literally costs you and your group to lose potential xp by using it. Not to mention that with the introduction of plant control they get roughly the same power early in their progression.

I'd already acknowledged the average price and the difference in cost if you wanted to try to grab it right away. Even then, you are using your ability to quickly defeat mobs solo against a group that has multiple bosses for your example. In a group you'd make far less influence per group and would get less drops. So you either need to solo or be in a good fast moving group to make influence that quickly. You didn't mention what your AT or build was but most average players can't do that unless they are very specific AT's and already well slotted and can therefore either afford the IOs on their own or feed influence to their alts. Most IOs aren't level set to have you wait until you are level 50 before buying them, they are meant to be able to be purchased. Yes if you are a melee fighter it's much easier, and good players could do this fairly quickly even at lower levels but support ATs don't have that ability and you can't have prices balanced for only those ATs and players that are the fastest at defeating mobs. Try gaining enough influence quickly as a solo controller at level 20 to buy IOs. Maybe you are newish to the game and don't remember the days of suffering through using DOs until well into your 30s because you can barely afford SOs for your most important powers. I'd trade affordable IOs over that scenario any day.

A Mako's Bite Accuracy/Damage is selling for an average of 1.25 to 1.5 million right now. That's pretty typical from what I've seen over the last year. Recipe's for a Mako's Bite Accuracy/Damage are at the time of me writing this showing between 50-100k but I tried buying one at that as a test and had to go up to 300k to grab one. If you're patient you could wait it out and hope for the best but there were only 57 available for sale (lvl 50 recipe). Then you have to either have had the right salvage drop or buy it and then you have to pay for creating it. For that recipe you don't need much for salvage but it's still a few thousand more for that. Then you need another 490k to build it so you looking at around 800k just to make that one IO. Everything is relative and what's expensive for someone isn't for someone else but that doesn't seem that cheap to me. When you look at putting IOs accross an entire build that's still going to be millions of influence which is out of reach for the casual player. In fact it's more likely a casual player won't even go to the trouble of figuring out how to buy a recipe and build it and would be more likely to just buy the enhancement straight out. More experienced players that know they want to exempler down a lot would likely buy the enhancement as an attuned as well, unless they happen to be sitting on a treasure trove of catalysts. So now your looking at 9 million just to fill one six slotted power with IOs. If that's cheap to you I wish I had your influence.

To take where you're going with this further, the game will never be balanced because xp/influence gain was designed wrong from the start so we are just going to have to live with the fact that this game (and most mmo's for that matter) will never be "balanced". Ideally the game would reward you for playing your character well, not for defeating an enemy. If the game could work like that Controllers would get "paid" for how well they control the enemy and support the team, defenders would get paid for how much damage they heal or mitigate on top of doing damage themselves, tanks would get paid for how much damage they prevent their team from taking, etc. A support character should be rewarded for being a good support character, not for doing the same thing a scrapper is always going to be better at, "defeating" an enemy. Think about some of the best support characters you've been teamed with, healers that keep the worst teams alive, bubblers that never let the bubbles drop. Or tanks that know how to move from group to group and force coned attacks to fire off in the direction opposite their team all while maintaining most of the aggro. For me at least it would make certain ATs or builds within ATs much more enjoyable to know I would be getting rewarded for being good at my role even if I couldn't damage anything. Of course, trying to come up with a system to reward players this way would be quite a challenge but I think it would be doable. Solo missions for example could take your AT into account and give you your rewards based on the role of that AT. Support characters could be provided with NPCs who can provide damage and the support character could be rewarded for healing and buffing the NPC and for controlling the enemy. Think how much xp/inf a support character could earn while trying to keep Fusionette alive! Increasing the difficult level in situations like that might give the support character more xp/inf. for doing there thing while making the NPC simultaneously weaker and harder to support. Of course a system like that would require a complete reworking of code for any existing game so it will never happen but I'd love to see a game do this. If anyone knows of a good one that offers rewards in this way let me know!

Decent IOs aren't affordable to anyone that isn't being bankrolled by either someone else or yourself if you've already made a ton of influence on another character. That's not much different than when it was SOs and friends with more influence would help their poorer teammates with keeping their SOs in the green.