macskull

Storm does well solo when paired with powers which keep enemies in Storm Cell or Cat5, and does well on a Corruptor with those same caveats but it performs poorly on teams because it relies so heavily on location-based patches and DoTs to deliver its damage. On a team that's moving even somewhat quickly the setup time means you're often corpse blasting and are only getting a fraction of the potential damage from your nuke. It's a shame, I really wanted to like my Storm/FF Corruptor but it just feels so icky on teams.

Leveling pacts were apparently very broken. Post-shutdown they experimented with allowing up to 8(?) players in a single level pact but ended up disabling the system again entirely. Re; sidekicking and exemplaring, I don't miss that even a little bit. Your mentor gets teleported across the map? Have fun when those grey-conning mobs are suddenly 30 levels higher than you! Want to run a task force but don't have enough people in the native level range to support exemplaring the higher-level characters? Guess you're doing something else! Hit level 46? Better be ready for a deluge of "will you bridge for me?" tells!

That makes two of us, then.

To be fair a lot of people who play this game tend to get upset if they can't just stand in one place and mash buttons.

That's kinda why being in task force mode doesn't kick you from the team when you log out - it was designed to support a single team running content across multiple play sessions. Of course, that's not something that happened often, but luckily now even the longest content in the game (4* content with a PuG that doesn't know wtf they're doing) only takes a few hours.

I dunno, based on this thread I'd say most people don't even know the channel exists. It's also not in your chat windows by default which means people just aren't going to see it unless they want to (which isn't the case for LFG, help, or general chat).

2009 (which should tell you exactly how likely it is to get people to switch over to using it for AE farms).

Just double-checked ingame and PB does boost Acrobatics' hold protection for the roughly 15 seconds it's active.

You said "45% defense brings you to a point where most critters are at the 5% minimum," which is only really true if you count even-con or lower minions as "most critters." Yeah, my addition to your post makes things more complicated, but it's a pretty common thing to see "45% defense means mobs only have 5% chance to hit" around here, and then people get confused when they find out most things still have a >5% chance to hit.

Don't forget enemies also have accuracy multipliers based on relative level and rank, and accuracy is factored into the hit chance equation after the 5% minimum clamp, so unless you fight exclusively even-con or lower minions everything will actually have a greater than five percent chance to hit you, sometimes more than double that, and there's no amount of defense you can add to reduce that higher chance. Also also, in addition to making you immune to (resisted) -res debuffs, being above 100% pre-capped resistance will make you immune to damage debuffs.

So patrol XP, at least, functions the same way it did back on live. I'm also not aware of any "XP boost" that's been added post-shutdown either, unless you include the XP boosters but those are optional.

When you say "recharge enhancements" do you mean recharge SOs or generic recharge IOs?

CoD doesn’t show the hold protection as being unaffected by enhancements and buffs so it should in theory be affected by Power Boost, but if it is it would only be affected for the duration of PB. I’ll have to check in game to see whether that’s actually true, since I know PB does affect mez protection powers like Clear Mind.

Yeah, this cuts out most of the traveling you need to do - the only movement that should be required is to get to the zone of your choice and find the right mob. After that it's just going between your SG base's rez station and the entrance portal (and mine are close enough to each other than I can click the portal from the rez station), EDIT: Caught the edit from your second to last post - I have been using this method to get debt for accolades for a while now and I can't recall a time when I've zoned back in to find the mob that had been there earlier has despawned. It might be because I'm using PvP zones and those tend to be so empty that you're 1) the player who causes the map to be loaded in the first place, and 2) the only one in the zone so there aren't any other players around to mess with spawning/despawning.

I just did the exact thing I described this past weekend while burning patrol XP for the debt badge to get High Pain Threshold, so I know it works. I tend to use Siren's Call though, the middle of the map has plenty of packs of Warriors and Tsoo that are big enough to kill you quickly. Just to be super extra sure though, I logged in while typing out this post and hopped into Siren's Call. 90 yards from the blueside helicopter I found two +2 Warrior bosses that killed my Dominator in 6.21 seconds. Went to SG base, zoned back in right on top of the same mobs, and died in less than 7 seconds. Did it a third time and was dead within three seconds. Including load times, none of those die -> base -> zone -> die cycles took me longer than a minute, and I'm running the game on a 10 year old laptop that has horrendous load times. The reason I say it has to be a PvP zone (or trial zone like the Hive, Monster Island, or the Abyss) is because zones without SG base portals will drop you right where you left if you go back out through the entrance portal in your base, while zones with base portals will always drop you at the portal. EDIT: I do want to point out that I'm not opposed to your initial suggestion. More options are always good. I'm simply pointing out that you can burn unwanted patrol XP pretty quickly with methods that already exist as a stopgap until something like your suggestion is implemented.

You can access Bloody Bay at level 15 (the wiki says any level, but I'm not sure if that's correct) - run into a mob, die, go to SG base, go back out through the portal and zone in to the same mob again. Rinse, repeat, and be done in about 5 minutes.

Dying when you have patrol XP burns patrol XP instead of accumulating debt, so a potential solution is just to die a few times until you burn the patrol XP.

The proposed changes don't add any lower-level grind. They present an alternate option to SOs at lower levels and make lower-level IOs more appealing. The only real way I could see there being "grind" here is having the inf to afford the lower level sets, but again... optional.

That's not how boosters work. Each booster increases an enhancement's effectiveness by 5%, stacking to a maximum of 25%. Looking at, say, an acc/dam IO for our purposes: A level 30 acc/dam IO provides 21.8% enhancement to both acc and dam. A level 35 acc/dam IO provides 22.9% enhancement to the same. A level 50 acc/dam IO provides 26.5% enhancement to the same. Seems pretty straightforward, right? But... 30+5 does not equal 35 because enhancement boosters always provide a fixed benefit of 5%. A single enhancement booster would make your level 30 into a 30+1 which would boost your acc and dam by (1.05 * 21.8% = 22.89%). So in this case, we see that 30 plus one equals not 31, but 35. If I use another four boosters to make that level 30 into a 30+5 my acc and dam is now boosted by (1.25 * 21.8% = 27.25%). As you can see, 27.25% is greater than 26.5%, so instead of 30+5 = 35, you get something more like 30+5 = somewhere between 54 and 55.

I'm a bit confused here by what you mean. A level 30+5 IO provides larger enhancement values than a level 50 IO. Yes, that was what part one of my suggestion entailed. The second part had to do with set bonuses, but the majority of the issue as I see it is just that large dropoff below the 25-30 range. Set bonuses open a whole different can of worms, but I think adjustment of lower-level enhancement values could be done independently.

You've got that backwards. For dual-aspect enhancements a 50+5 provides 33.1% bonus to both attributes while a level 50 Hami-O provides 33.3%, and a level 53 Hami-O provides 38.3%. Of course, once you go into combining certain Hami-O's it's really a question of whether that extra boost is worth it, and there are still some cases where a 50+5 is more cost-effective than a level 50 Hami-O.

It should be in the mids file, but IIRC the Elec/Rad AFK build uses Agility. It's worth pointing out that the Page 5 aggro changes did make actual AFK farming a lot more difficult especially if you're not on a Tanker. You almost have to be constantly checking on your farm, which I suppose is part of the goals of the changes.

I disagree. There are plenty of sets that are useful at endgame that run from levels 30-50 (or even 10-50) and catalyzing them allows you to slot them earlier while still getting full effectiveness at level 50 (and also keeping those set bonuses while exemplaring, which for some characters like Dominators is A Big Deal). Aside from very specific powers with very specific slotting, I find I almost never boost non-generic IOs unless I'm using a set IO piece to provide accuracy or damage in a proc'd out power. If I'm not stuffing a power full of procs odds are very good I'm already getting close to ED numbers without having to boost enhancements.

All these are true, but boosters do not provide a negligible improvement. That level 30 Volley Fire, when boosted to +5, is actually more effective than a level 50 piece. I see people 4-slotting Basilisk's Gaze for the recharge bonus saying "man I wish this set wasn't capped at 30" but if you +5 those enhancements it's like the set does go all the way to 50.

At least these days if you bring a team where everyone's got Team Transporter and the like you can do the whole thing in 60-90 minutes, which is probably worth the time spent if it's the WST.