macskull

This channel just tells you when an event is starting and stopping. If you've logged in in the middle of an event you'll have no idea there's an event going on unless you happen to be in that zone. EDIT: As far as timing/rotation goes for zone events: Zombie invasions are triggered in a random zone whenever a team completes a KHTF. Rikti invasions are triggered in a random zone whenever a team completes an LGTF. Croatoa event has a 25% chance of triggering every 1-2 hours.

Sure, that reasoning might work if the developers responsible for the change were still working on the project, but... gestures broadly

Playing an MM in zone can get pretty boring because you're not mobile enough to pose any real threat and any player who is competent will just ignore you.

Ah, so a conspiracy involving a development team (well, actually, not a development team, but rather the three development teams of Cryptic, Paragon, and now our current overlords) that had the perfect opportunity to gain popularity by reverting some unpopular nerfs but chose not to. Got it. You know as well as I do that if NPCs were able to complain as loudly and as frequently as players this game would have been nerfed into the ground eons ago. Looking at the history of how travel powers have behaved throughout this game's history you'll find the following: At launch, Fly had a 50% tohit debuff at all times while active, to provide an incentive to turn the power off while in combat. Super Speed and Super Jump did not. In Issue 4, SS and SJ had the 50% tohit debuff while active added to match Fly. In Issue 5, all three travel powers had the tohit debuff removed in exchange for a suppression period whenever activating any power affecting an enemy. This was later adjusted to only occur when casting click powers which affect enemies. TL;DR: Combat penalties for travel powers have existed since the beginning of the game, before PvP was added.

Hurricane, so close enough. The tick rate was specifically adjusted so you couldn't instantly floor someone's range to zero.

If this were the case, they would have rolled back all the nerfs in PvE once it became possible to separate PvE and PvP powers effects, but here we are.

...Because it wasn't introduced as solely a PvP-based change? In this game's entirely history there's only been one nerf to a power or mechanic specifically for PvP reasons.

The issues with Empathy are twofold: Empathy tends to attract players with the "healer" mindset because of its power names and descriptions despite healing being the weakest form of mitigation once you get past the lower levels where players lack key powers and don't have enough slots to go around. If I had a billion inf for every time I'd been on a team with an Empathy player who did things like follow the tank around with Healing Aura on auto I'd have enough inf to fund character builds for the next decade. I have been on teams with Empathy players who played the set well but those are far rarer. Empathy is a victim of "Issue 0 syndrome:" it's been largely unchanged since the beginning resulting in it being outclassed in almost every respect by newer sets. It isn't a bad set on its own merits but most other support sets offer a similar toolkit and more. Fortitude is probably the best power in the set because you can actually keep it on multiple teammates but other than that Adrenalin Boost and the RA's are on a stupid long timer, the rez has no additional effects unlike other sets, and three of the remaining four powers are heals and nothing else. Even Clear Mind is a vanilla mez protection power which lacks the added bonuses other support sets get (slow resistance for Thermal, toxic/cold/slow resist for Poison, KB protection for Kinetics, +rech/+spd for Pain, etc.). If you're on a team where another player has defense buffs (Cold, Time, VEATs, Dark Affinity) you're not getting much mileage out of Fortitude and you lack any of the debuffs those players bring to the table. There is no other support set that completely lacks enemy debuffs (you could argue FF but even that has a bit of soft crowd control). While I won't turn away an Empathy character simply because they're Empathy, all other things being equal if I have a choice between an Emp and anything else I'll pick the latter.

I'm a PvPer too but I also understand that PvP is the only use case where Absorb Pain sees any significant amount of use (to the point where its -heal penalty and duration were reduced in PvP only). Share Pain at least has the nice bonus of giving the caster a damage buff but even with that I don't see it used often. Many PvE Empathy builds will skip AP entirely because it's complete overkill most of the time. EDIT: More on topic... I think Thunderspy overhauled AP to work like the OP describes and it's pretty cool. That being said the set needs more help than just changes to AP.

It's extremely unlikely that you'll ever get more than a teaser or two for upcoming content/changes until it lands on the beta server, because these things can and often do change significantly between what shows up in the first testing builds and what makes it to the beta server. It was the same way with Cryptic and Paragon back on live.

There's a lot more that would need to be changed than your list suggests. It would be a colossal amount of work with no guarantee it would bring in any significant amount of players so it just isn't worth the time to work on. The game has changed so much since Issue 12 that simply rolling back all the I13 PvP changes would result in a pretty broken system. For what it's worth travel suppression and heal decay have been removed (they're still options in arena but are off by default) and a recent patch added in mez protection vice resistance for ally-cast powers (Clear Mind, etc.). Things like wholesale mez system changes and damage scale changes aren't going to happen because every power in the game would need to be changed individually.

The /enterbasefrompasscode changes/LRT rework, travel power rework, and Sorcery rework come to mind as being pretty polarizing. I didn't really have a horse in the race for that last one but at least for the first two the majority of players correctly saw them as buffs after a while. I think some other examples of "things getting tweaked or rolled back" include some Dark Melee and Martial Arts changes and changes to the way the Rage crash works. That being said... the new difficulty stuff is being tested, and it'll get more testing when it shows up on the beta server.

I wouldn't be too worried about this. EDIT: The first paragraph, not the second one. As far as bickering about hard mode vs not, as long as team leaders clearly state what their plan is I don't think that'll be a big deal either.

If I recall correctly from some earlier discussions, the new difficulty tech is taking a long time to implement because there's no easy way to do it but the hope is for it to be easier in the future. I'm not sure I'd expect much existing content to be backfit with the new stuff though.

You don't want this, unless you only want to be able to slot one of any particular HO in a power.

I don't know about the license agreement, but you've never been able to skip cutscenes in the manner you're describing. The only time that really applies is during iTrials if all members have already completed the trial.

Nature Affinity/Corrosive Enzymes is the same, as are most damage auras. The damage auras I can kind of understand so they're not cluttering up the combat logs, but click powers should always show a hit roll.

Higher-level teams are popular because they give more XP and inf over time. If your team is steamrolling 0x8 it will probably be fine at 4x8 as well. You might get fewer drops in the same amount of time because each defeat will take longer, but it isn't that much slower than even-level content.

The pre-baked marble rye is selling for those higher amounts because people are willing to pay those higher amounts. If no one was willing to buy the items at that price the people trying to flip things would just get stuck with a load of stock that they'd have to lose money to unload.

I should have been clearer in the OP and linked the initial thread where this discussion originated, or maybe worded my actual post better, but to sum it up my initial statement could be read as "I don't think farming is bad for the game and I'm curious as to why you don't think it is either."

There's probably a not-insignificant number of players who don't really care about the clipping and just want to use the costume pieces. That being said, I don't think this is a fair assessment of Rebirth. Their content and additions are fairly well-polished and I would kill for Guardians over here on HC. The only thing I don't like about Rebirth is their insistence on maintaining "the grind" as part of the core gameplay experience.

Maybe this is just Poe's Law at work but I honestly can't tell if this is a serious take.

I took the advice of @GM Flints and started a new thread. Come join me!

And why did you answer "no?" Discuss.