Lazarillo

Thanks guys. I thought maybe I was just legit starting to have senior moments. So yeah, allow me to continue to welcome our new Rage overlords.

Are you absolutely sure about that? Because maybe I'm indeed remembering wrong, after 7 years, but as I mentioned to Haijinx, I distinctly recall having to deal with crashes even on my characters where I attempted to have Perma-Ragers. Not as punitive a crash, but a crash nonetheless. I also recall that the current non-Beta-HC crash was introduced by the original devs anyway...

In general, the genie's pretty well out of the bottle on shutting down private servers as a whole, as the code in general was leaked out to the public (heck, it's even possible to run a personal server at this point). HC has sort of the double-edged sword of being both the biggest platform for players to re-experience the game, but also is therefore painting the biggest target on themselves. They are trying to go legit, but it's not impossible that things will go belly-up on that front, as, well, if NCSoft were reasonable and predictable, the situation would likely never have been needed anyway. That all said, I feel like my characters on Homecoming are "safe" from any fate more terrible than me going "eh, screw it" and hitting the delete button. I'm having some real fun with the game, and encourage you to do the same!

I dunno, maybe that has something to do with it. I just know that the worst part of the Rage crash for me was always the "you do zero damage" part, which, IIRC, was the case even if the buff was multi-stacked. I definitely remember giving up every SS character I ever played due to frustration at Rage back in the day...but this change has me absolutely ecstatic to dust off some of those old concepts.

Maybe I'm the dumbest of all, because I really can't understand your reasoning. Can you break it down a bit, because here's what's got me confounded: -Current Rage - Will crash, no matter what. You can double stack it, but you'll have that many more crashes to worry about. When crashed, you lose all your damage and about 40% of your mitigation. -Beta Rage - Will crash the same as you have been previously only if you use it like you have been previously. If you don't activate it while the big red "don't push me" button isn't on it, it won't crash ever. When crashed, you lose all your damage and about 40% of your mitigation (though some of that mitigation has been moved from Defense to Resistance). It seems to me like if you're unhappy with the way Rage works now, then you don't have to use it that way and get a buff from it, and if you're happy with the way it works right now, then nothing is changing in terms of how you have to use it. I truly, honestly, feel like I must be missing something, because I legit don't see how this isn't a straight buff.

Probably the same as he mentioned about Foot Stomp. Since the buff only applies to stuff of range 10 or less, the base number was nerfed so that that the buff can, well, buff it (as it will thus now be 20 feet).

I believe Powerhouse said the extended range came from the changes to the Tanker inherent, rather than to the powers themselves, so it won't show up in the creation screen.

And that's what I get for saying "I haven't played anything with Rage yet, and thus don't think it'd be helpful if I participate in the testing". Sounds like they already thought of my idea (if in reverse).

Random Thought: can Rage perhaps get the "colorful ring" treatment when it's not active so that you know it's "safe" to use again? Keeps people from having to squint at their buffs to be sure.

I don't know that I'd go that far. I'm not sure what he did and didn't write specifically, but there's plenty of stuff I liked that came after he was hired, including: -Everything about Dean MacArthur -Pretty much all the Praetorian starter arcs -Some of the Tips (these vary pretty widely though, I admit) -Dark Astoria (which has kind of a lame ending, but pretty good up 'til then) -The aforementioned Skulls arcs, which were good, just suffer greatly for being incomplete -The ideas he had for Kallisti and the Battalion arcs in the Lore AMAs sounded pretty good too, though admittedly here, there's a gap between concept and execution. And yes, that all said, there were also some real story stinkers in the game's last couple of years, too. I don't know which of those he did or didn't write, specifically, either, though.

I've actually been meaning to replay the Graves arc at some point (I never played it on the legacy servers, played it only once on Homecoming, and since I didn't know the ending at first, I wanted to see how it holds up when you know the "twist" ...if it's internally consistent as we talked about with Slot Machine, so to speak), but haven't yet so it's not as fresh in my mind, but I do remember for sure that the arc establishes at the very beginning that part of the "competition" involves mandating you act ignorant, in order to keep Arachnos' eyes off the participants. So flip-flopping does kind of make sense, in a vacuum (like I said, I don't recall the points you're referring to in a specific nature, so that may or may not be what you're getting at).

You better stop that, man. We start finding too much common ground, discussion in this topic'll die off really quick.

For what it's worth, I agree with pretty much all of that. My point is more that "lack of choice" does not necessarily translate to "bad writing". I could be remembering wrong, but I don't recall Twinshot or Graves ever telling you what your motivation was either. Does that put them on the same level? Eh, not really. I just don't think it's cool to trash them on the "don't tell me what I want to do!" factor when every arc is doing that to some degree or another.

So speaking of choice, I've been re-running an old villain arc for the first time since relaunch, and as I noted in a previous post, since it's in a story arc, there is no "choice" in it, no backing out from it because you're already locked into a story arc, and it's definitely not going to be appropriate for the self-aggrandizing evil types (even if it's just dandy for my morally gray, former-Power-Loyalist Rogue). But I'll be cold and dead before I'm okay with someone calling the Slot Machine's arcs "bad writing".

The Neo-Skulls arc. It was never finished. It "ends" with some unresolved deal with Atta, Morana disappearing (with clear plans to destroy the Zig and break her brothers out of jail), and a mysterious third party hiring an assassin to put BaBs in the hospital (and said assassin succeeding). This went along with extending the Skulls level range another 10 levels past where the arc that starts with Shauna ends, and was intended to be followed up by the original Dev team in i25 and beyond, but, well, we know what happened to that...

Aren't unresolved cliffhangers the real evil?

Not sure when you left, but for reference, the Twinshot and Dr. Graves arcs came out with Freedom/Issue 21. They were part of the revamped approach to telling the tutorial: expanding it out through several story arcs after a quick basic overview in Galaxy, rather than cramming everything into Breakout/Outbreak.

You get 37 up front on completion. You get the second 37 when you choose the "Reward Merits" option for your reward. If you take the Hero 1 DNA Sample, then you still get the "extra" merits but don't get the "base" 37. Note that this applies to any TF with multiple rewards, so level 50 TFs, Respecs, etc...

It really depends a lot on the content you're doing. If you focus a lot on iTrials and/or DA, Shards don't drop there, so you're likely to have a considerably smaller number of them, but a considerably greater number of Empyrean Merits and Thread-based components. If you do all 'round content, especially if you do stuff that drops what you need for the Shard-related recipes, Shards are far and away more economical, as you need fewer per component when compared to Thread recipes, and you only need them for one slot. Outside of the Incarnate specific content, Shards drop at about a 1:5 ratio compared to Threads, but are only needed at a ratio of 1:20 or so. Speaking from my personal experience, of the 5 level 50s I've managed so far, all of them hit their biggest Incarnate speedbumps over a lack of Threads...I don't want to waste what I do get on my Alpha, if I can help it.

Yet it seems to me like it's not the writing that's being inflexible? The game is, ultimately, pretty limited on choice once you start a story arc, any story arc. You don't even have the option of backing out, really, due to the nature of open-arc caps. You can pre-plan and choose mostly to do story arcs appropriate to your character; you can choose to do no arcs at all and do in-character stuff while street sweeping or the like; you can choose to consider your character carefully and come up with reasons that you are going along with a plot point you don't like.

"Shouldn't be that hard" are famous last words, 'round these parts, though. It sounds easy, but spaghetti code and all that.

I'd be all for this, but Standard Code Rant applies; I'm not sure it's just as simple as shifting an entire zone into the LFG. It'd definitely be cool if it were that easy, though.

...and then you look at the Water Blast options. Not that I'm saying that that's a reason to "open up" Ice per se. I think I recall this discussion when Water was released way back in the day.

Sure, but one would assume that if, say, there are 10 people leeching a group of 200, then there are only a couple leeching a group of 50. The Hive doesn't magically just give the leechers priority.

I've been using my dude with SS + Celerity this morning, and it seems to be working as expected for me. The numbers in the attributes window still match last night too. Is it possible you've got some sort of aggro power on?