macskull

I'm not entirely convinced OP isn't trolling, looking at post history they disappeared for like three years and then came back recently. Every thread they've started since then has been an absolute banger.

People don't play hardmode because it is actually difficult and requires high levels of coordination to be consistently successful without wanting to suck start a shotgun and I'd wager the vast majority of this game's players don't actually want a challenge.

I said it on Discord, but unique enhancements that can only be obtained through PvP merits or bought/traded on the AH might be another good incentive to earn PvP merits - think things like universal debuff sets. People will, naturally, complain that they have to go into a PvP zone to get them, but... they don't have to if I can sell them my drops. I'd be more than happy to have someone else pay me to PvP.

Nope. I'm more than happy to let other players subsidize my builds so they can get their PA costumes. You don't wanna run the content, that's fine, but everything about hard mode stuff is entirely optional.

Yeah, go ahead and wander into a 4* PuG where no one talks in team chat and let me know how that one goes.

And Freezing Rain, which gets to break the rule Just Because. EDIT: I feel obligated to point out that it's not the change in the -res/-def values I take issue with because I always expected that to go this way. It's the change to stacking which was unexpected and pretty unnecessary since it's now the only pseudopet that behaves that way.

Hey, they did try to change Frostwork into an absorb, so they did try to buff Cold. Also… gestures broadly at Blasters. The AT-specific differences are kinda whatever though, it’s the stacking change that’s the weird one, which means Cold now has what is objectively the worst location-based AoE -res power. It doesn’t. Cold takes several seconds to get the same -res as Sonic, and one of those two powers has a recharge time on the order of minutes. Meanwhile all Sonic has to do is throw Disruption Aura on the Scrapper once at the start of the mission and occasionally toss Sonic Siphon at things. That’s the difference - Sonic can lay down that much -res with almost no setup time while also giving mez protection to the caster and entire team. Cold requires setup time to get there. Yes, Burnout exists but due to its long recharge that’s the exception rather than the norm. The lead powers dev has explicitly said powers and sets aren’t balanced around the existence of Burnout and the decision to allow debuff stacking via power/Burnout/power is intentional.

The debate, from my perspective, is whether there was an actual “bug” in the first place, and it ended up being handled with a “trust me, this is how it is supposed to work.”

There seems to be some misunderstanding in this thread about exactly how Sleet works, specifically with the way it stacks (or doesn’t stack). The previous behavior was the debuff was set to “replace,” so every tick of damage that hit would refresh the debuff for an additional 30 seconds (which realistically resulted in a 45-second debuff). It is now set to ignore new applications, so it will never last for more than 30 seconds after the first tick of damage. Multiple applications of the power from the same caster still stack because different pseudopets are considered different “casters.” The change in stacking rules is, to me, a far more impactful change than reducing the -res. Reducing the -def on non-Defenders really only hurts lower level characters and Masterminds (who are the ones who need the -def the most, go figure). The change on the stacking rules means that not only is the debuff duration 1/3 shorter than it used to be, but the amount of time you can overlap debuffs with different applications is now much shorter. My point of contention with the way the change was handled is that we were essentially told “actually, Sleet was just copied from Defender Freezing Rain and has been wrong since 2005” when pointing out the power was originally on Corruptors so should have been adjusted upwards on Defenders instead of downward on every other AT. Because there’s zero way to prove that is either true or false, we are unable to argue with that justification (but, like… why would the devs have copied a power from one AT to another in a different powerset, take the time to change the name and icon of the power, but not change the debuff scaling?). The stacking change, though? That was definitely not a bug, and the fact that Freezing Rain wasn’t changed and also got its -res boosted for Defenders rubs me the wrong way, especially since you can’t seriously argue that Storm needed the help.

I like.

Are the alpha/beta values for XP on critter trip mine and time bomb being raised, since the interrupt is being removed? The current live server values give no additional XP when adding trip mine to bosses, and 1% additional XP when adding time bomb to bosses. That made sense before because the powers were broken, but now they’re powers the critters will actually use.

Why do we have bad PuG experiences? Because this game is deceptively complicated and I would venture to guess the majority of players never grow their understanding of the game beyond "see enemy click button." There's also the issue of communication - for example I was on two PuG Aeon SFs today. Both were advertised as speedy, but on the first one the team leader said "come here" right as they started the TF, expecting the entire team to go to the contact instead of the door to the first mission, then got upset when people zoned into the mission and started finding scientists instead of escorting Becky - because apparently the team leader wanted the badge for that even though it was advertised as a speed run and the leader had said nothing about it before actually starting the TF. Needless to say we didn't get the badge, the team had mostly no idea what was going on, and it took us nearly 40 minutes with things like the Brute using Fold Space on the lines of enemies in the last mission, except pulling them all away from their spawns so no one knew which mobs were actually the ones we needed to defeat. I turned around and immediately joined another team that finished in just over 20 minutes despite virtually no talking in team chat the entire time. TL;DR: The PuG experience isn't always bad, it's just wildly inconsistent and we remember the bad teams more than the good ones.

Statistically speaking, if the sale price of the non-catalyzed enhancements is over about 20-21 million, you come out ahead getting them through super packs, but if you lowball bids and are patient paying under 20 million is more efficient than buying them directly with merits since the current going rate for a merit's worth of salvage is about 200k.

It's around 1.2 per pack, same as the ATO packs. If you add up the other tradeable items you got as drops from the pack you almost certainly came out ahead, especially if you are willing to burn a catalyst and unslotter to make the enhancements into the superior versions.

Some people still use things like HeroStats, which doesn't work correctly with the 64-bit version of the game client.

Team Teleport is straight garbage. The range on the power is less than the radius, the endurance cost is too high, and it didn't get any of the QoL buffs that Teleport got a while back. About the only thing Team Teleport is good for is trolling unwitting teammates by taking them on Mr. Bean's Wild Ride since they can't get away from you once you drag them along on the first teleport.

I am supremely lazy and am willing to line other players' pockets, so unless it's purples or the occasional PvP IO I just buy the crafted versions of what I need.

You haven’t been able to convert emp merits to reward merits for a while now, so the only way to make inf via emp merits is converting them to threads and using those to buy and sell super inspirations since it is probably not worth buying converters in bulk with the inf.

Devs: introduce a bug fix to reduce instances of blank/incorrect price histories Game: makes blank/incorrect price histories happen more often Devs:

…then that goal has already been accomplished, because every player has the same ability to make inf to buy enhancements.

I suppose it is possible that it used to be an even split between all non-teamed characters, but even that isn’t the behavior the other poster is describing (and is really the exact opposite), but the share of inf/xp for a defeat within a team has always been divided evenly across all members of the team.

Apparently not. Apparently not. “It was hidden, trust me bro” is a poor defense when there is zero evidence of it ever being unhidden to work the way it does now. You are the only person ingame, on the forums, or on Discord that I’ve ever seen make this claim. This one’s gonna fall squarely in the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” category. If it had originally worked the way you claim and had been changed to its current behavior at some point, there would be a patch note referencing it - but there isn’t. EDIT: If this were actually how inf and xp worked when the game launched, the “fire tanker herds whole map into dumpster full of tripmines” era of the game would never have happened - no one would have ever joined one of those teams because they wouldn’t receive any rewards unless they were the Blaster, and power leveling would have never been a thing.

That's... not what that means. That patch note means that if I were on, say, a level 1 character teaming up with a level 50 character, but was not sidekicked to that level 50 character, I would not receive any drops from defeated mobs in addition to not receiving any inf or XP. Due to the way sidekicking works now that mechanic isn't relevant anymore, but that patch note says nothing about inf/XP division based on the share of damage dealt to a target. In fact, looking through every patch note from 2004 to present there are exactly zero mentions of removing the behavior you're describing. Given this, I'm pretty sure you're Mandela Effect'ing yourself here.

Said it in another thread, but at least one developer has said that players are expected to interact with the auction house as they level to earn inf for enhancements if they want to keep their enhancements current.