macskull

What amuses me about this is farming is pretty awful in terms of inf gain over time compared to much lower-effort things like playing the market. If it helps, you can look at farming as a necessary evil of sorts. Regardless of your views on farming the majority of recipe/enhancement supply probably does come from farming and if that goes away supply goes away and prices go up accordingly. For an actual in-game example of this we can look back to the time when PvP IOs were first introduced in Issue 14. Originally there was no time-based lockout on getting a drop from defeating the same target and the drop rate was low but reasonable. People started farming PvP IOs in arena matches which prompted the developers to both nerf the drop rate and implement a lockout period. All this really accomplished was to cause the price of the desirable PvP IOs to skyrocket to the point where some of them couldn't be bought through the market because sellers could get more inf by selling them directly to other players.

I think most of the "Vahz are overpowered" sentiment comes from the lieutenants and bosses having some pretty hefty debuff ability and CC when most players are at a level where they can't handle those. If I get smacked with a bunch of -rech at level 50, sure it sucks but I probably still have a complete attack chain or two. If I am level 6 and have like two attacks with no enhancements it's a different story.

If the "farmers contribute more in inflation than they do in supply to the market" argument had any leg to stand on we would have seen a gradual trend upward in prices over the last two years. The market was all over the place for the first few months when HC popped up but eventually players figured out what things were worth and prices have stayed pretty stable, if not lower. You can grab some of the more desirable purple recipes for 11-15m right now, during the summer of 2019 that was closer to 20m. EDIT: Also, anecdotally, I'm idling on Excelsior right now and LFG is mostly people forming teams for non-AE content with the occasional one or two people spamming about looking for a farm.

The only "regulation" that happens on the market is invention salvage being seeded, which is just a safeguard in case salvage prices spike since the going rate for salvage typically never even approaches the price it's seeded for (rare salvage is seeded for 1 million inf but typically goes for 450-600k). Several market-wide changes have been made but they're less about regulation and more about how the market as a whole works and were designed to keep the market functional with a much smaller playerbase. Those changes happened post-shutdown but before HC popped up, HC just used that codebase as a starting point.

DoT will do it, but it's gotta be an attack that takes off almost your entire bar on the first go and then rapidly follows it up with damage ticks. A reasonably quick person should be able to easily pop a few greens in between the initial damage and any follow-on DoT though. I do like SR's not needing to invest heavily in building for defense which allows you to focus those resources elsewhere, like resistance or HP.

When HC launched Torchbearer was the only server, and in an effort to split up the loading as new servers were added HC turned on double XP on the other servers. Quite a few people migrated because of that, or because of the niche things (RP, PvP, EU, what have you), but several former live server player groups moved to Excelsior so it ended up with the largest population.

Players haven't been able to be one-shot since... I dunno, issue 4 or something like that? A one-two punch, perhaps, but the odds of being hit twice in a row by even a +4 AV are like... just north of 1% if you have 45% defense. Does it happen sometimes? Yep. Does it happen often? Not remotely.

I don't recall this happening but I have no reason to doubt your story. I suppose I wouldn't be surprised considering it was a highly desirable enhancement that only dropped below level 30. I did do some digging while researching for my previous post but didn't find anything about prices for that IO specifically - I did a bit more just now and found a thread from July 2010 at which time the going rate was 40m. Keep in mind that's also from back in the time when the redside and blueside markets were separate and things were really weird with certain enhancements. I do remember a whole bunch of threads back on live where people would complain about prices and then insist putting price caps on enhancements would solve the problem. This always made me laugh because anyone who understood the market would realize if an item was worth more than the arbitrary price cap imposed by the AH, sellers would simply take their item off-market to the highest bidder and the already-low supply would get even worse.

Pretty sure they changed comm officers to be minions that con as LT (and give LT XP) after they got rid of XP for the minions that pop out of the portal.

The only part of the post that's wrong is the price of the Steadfast Protection Res/Def IO. Everything else is pretty spot-on. Here's a thread on the old forums from a week before the shutdown was announced where players are discussing purples costing between 200-250 million. Another post from April 2012 discusses purples going for about 300m each. Here's a post from August 2012 where a poster discusses prices of set pieces like LotG: Defense (not the global recharge IO) selling for 40 million. This thread is from July 2012 and puts the price of the PvP +def IO at around 1 billion which is significantly lower than its peak, but by that point converters existed and people were starting to get wise to how useful they were (there are multiple threads from mid-to-late 2011 where people are buying/selling these for 2-3 billion). Also, the market was (and still is) cross-server. The items you saw on Liberty were the exact same ones someone saw on Freedom.

The Steadfast Protection unique didn't cost that much (because it dropped from mobs) but the Gladiator's Armor unique absolutely sold for more than the inf cap off-market. I made a good chunk of my inf farming PvP IOs and 3-4 billion was the going rate for those. Panacea and Shield Wall uniques were up there too but those were closer to 2 billion. From the last time I can find any meaningful data (early to mid 2012) the more desirable purples usually went for 150-200m each. FWIW, converters were a thing starting around I22 or so but they were character-bound and they cost 10 merits each from merit vendors instead of the 3 converters per 1 merit we have now.

Uhh, you're aware /getlocalname has been around for a long time, right?

Unless it's been changed, slotting it into a pet power will cause it to proc on the caster when summoning the pets and then on the pets afterward.

Fun fact: travel suppression is disabled entirely in PvP yet is still present in PvE so this argument isn't a good one.

I think one more thing that could stand to be locked is this thread, since the last ~3.5 months have been necro posts by the OP.

PB doesn't affect Cold shields.

Endurance and recovery are separate mechanics, just like regeneration and health. PB has never affected recovery or regeneration. Neither the descriptive text nor the power attributes say the power affects recovery, just endurance drains (and since +end is just negative endurance drain it is also affected).

The absorb cap is equivalent to the target AT's base hit points: 803 for MMs, 1017 for most squishies, 1071 for Corruptors/EATs, 1205 for Stalkers/Sentinels/Blasters, 1339 for Scrappers, 1499 for Brutes, and 1874 for Tankers. It used to but that was changed in late 2019 IIRC, along with the interaction between multiple +special powers (+special would boost +special so people were using things like Clarion and Power Boost to do some pretty silly things).

Nothing was changed re: endurance costs in the previous major patch, or in any smaller patch since then.

The mez system still favors Dominators and Controllers, but the PvP system as a whole favors damage dealers. Even back on live during large-team PvP events with AT limits teams would run Blasters and Dominators but Nature is sorta overtuned right now so people started swapping out the Doms for Corruptors (Scourge is nice and having 1070 base HP instead of 1017 makes builds less tight).

In an environment where even a one-or-two-second mez can get you killed, an eight-second one (before enhancements or other boosts) is indefensible. You're approaching this from an either/or perspective where the options were either to rein in blasters or nerf Dark Grasp when in reality that isn't at all the case. All outlier mez durations were adjusted - some were made longer, some were made shorter, Blasters got the +range from their snipes removed in PvP, and there's still been talk about how to approach Blaster balance. It's not like it's being ignored. AT limits (and limitations on certain powersets, e.g. Poison) have been a part of team PvP in this game pretty much since HC came back. Zone PvP is a different matter entirely and you can't really "police" things at all in that environment. The I13 changes had the unfortunate effect of making Dominators and non-support Controllers way worse in a team PvP environment than they used to be and I know you're a Dom main so I absolutely understand the frustration but giving those ATs intentionally broken powers isn't the right way to fix things.

It's been discussed on the PvP Discord before, but most people lack the coding knowledge to make it happen and those who do have the knowledge lack the time and resources.

To be entirely fair, the Dark Control hold was completely broken and getting hit by it was a death sentence.

WTB the version of CIT a different server has so I don't have to guess which character has that random PvP IO sitting on it...

People can make excuses for lower redside population all they want (zone layout, graphics, enemy factions, etc) but redside has never had a large playerbase. It was added over a year after the game launched and required a separate purchase, and then I18 put the nail in the coffin when you were finally allowed to create any AT blueside so the only real reason to play redside (the villain ATs) was gone. The live devs as much acknowledged this when they merged the hero and villain markets.