macskull

This is the second time I've seen this argument in this thread and I've gotta admit I'm a bit confused. How do you "seamlessly" introduce something into the game? One day it's not there, the next day it is. Minus the story-driven content that started popping up near the end of the game's retail run, most things were just dropped into the existing game.

It's not wasted time if it makes that part of the game more enjoyable for those who do participate in it, even if that number is small. Okay, where do I start here? I guess I'll make a list. Just because something was not in the game at launch does not mean it was not a feature the game was intended to have. See also: supergroup bases. Did you know that if you didn't purchase City of Villains you couldn't use SG bases at all until CoH and CoV were merged - more than four years after the game launched? In the entirety of this game's history there has only been one power - one - that has been nerfed in PvE solely for PvP reasons. Do you know what that power is? Probably not, that's how obscure a nerf it was. Every other nerf that the playerbase has blamed on PvPers has had just as much a foundation in PvE, if not more. PvP was always going to be opt-in. The way it was handled could have been better but having the arenas and later PvP zones worked fine. Players weren't forced to engage in PvP if they didn't want to (granted, initially there were liason contacts inside PvP zones that blocked progress from the rest of your contacts until you talked to them, but that got changed pretty quickly). I'm not sure what your second paragraph is - or your third, for that matter - except a bunch of roleplay justification for why you think PvP is bad. That being said, Warburg has always been a free-for-all zone where anyone from any faction can attack anyone not on their team. If you want to fight someone of the same faction Warburg is an option, or simply join an arena match. There's no requirement for hero vs villain, except in Bloody Bay/Siren's Call/Recluse's Victory. At no point did I ever say PvP was a core design element of the game, or that it was ever going to be. What I did say was that PvP was always an intended game mode for this game. Source? An early alpha gameplay demonstration where the demonstrator discussed the three planned game modes, which were missions, hazard zones, and the arena. Check around the 8:00 mark in the linked video if you're curious.

The wiki is usually pretty good with answering this question. That being said, there is a rule of thumb for these sorts of things - if they show up in your set bonus list they act as set bonuses (though you do have to either slot the IO or find someone who has in order to confirm this).

Basically... I'm not really in favor of any changes that further dilute the game's PvP population. Open-world on-demand PvP a la Champions Online might be cool but outside of the arena it's difficult to find consistent PvP anywhere that isn't RV on Indomitable and making more zones PvP-accessible would either mean the small existing population would spread out, or the new PvP functionality would simply go unused.

I don't know to what extent PvP was planned for in this game but I'm pretty certain open-world PvP was never on the table. At any rate it wouldn't be possible today with the way the game handles PvE/PvP powers differences.

I'm not sure how you got that from my post but that was 100% not what I said. I was addressing the (incorrect) statement that this game's PvP was "shoehorned" in.

How can you shoehorn something into a system that was designed with that thing in mind from the very beginning? I am curious to hear your logic here.

This is due to a difference in how some attributes are expressed on a per-power and overall basis. In the case of Sprint, right-clicking on the power in your buff bar will give you the run speed value for base plus Sprint (14.32 base + 14.32 unenhanced Sprint = 28.64). The combat attributes window breaks that down for all sources individually (14.32 base + 5.01 unehanced Swift + 14.32 unenhanced Sprint = 33.65). Same thing goes for some other base attributes such as regeneration and recovery - in the case of Up to the Challenge the power info in the buff bar is again showing you the base plus UttC value.

The MM pet aura IOs function as set bonuses, not global procs, and as such they follow set bonus rules.

I think T9 powers are the weekly discussion topic this week. I think the newer armor set T9s are in a good spot - they don't provide overkill level of bonus, they don't have a harsh crash, they provide some extra benefit the set might not already offer, and they're available more often. Think Rad, Shield, Willpower, and Ice (Stalker/Scrapper version).

The devs would know.

Yep, that'll be a bug then.

IIRC back on live a dev posted datamining info revealing about 80% of characters didn't use IOs at all.

I think that's the key part. Making the game more difficult as a whole should be an optional decision, not one forced onto the playerbase in some ham-fisted way. My two cents: if content is going to be made more difficult it should be optional and should come with increased rewards for the increased difficulty. As long as those rewards are meaningful it might convince more players to give it a shot.

While the first part is true, the second part shouldn't be. If an enemy-based buff is being modified by level differences it's a bug.

I have not played goldside at all but based on what I've read both here and on the forums back on live it seems goldside content is significantly harder and there's a good deal of complaining about it. I think DA is a different thing altogether as incarnate level shifts apply there and once you've got all 3 level shifts pretty much all content there is trivial. Like... yeah, you can make content that's more difficult for IO'd characters versus baseline content, but then that same content is that much more difficult for characters that aren't using IOs. Whether that's seen as a problem is a different story, however.

My question stands, whether you're talking 50+ or sub-50 content. The problem is once you begin to balance content around IOs the IO system is no longer optional for participation in that content and you're locking out players who would otherwise be interested in participating. At least with incarnate-based content you can grind that out and simply playing the game will eventually get you the resources you need to participate, but the same can't really be said for IOs. Besides, if you're making new content more difficult without increasing the rewards to compensate you're already ensuring that content won't be significantly utilized. Players will continue to gravitate toward the content that maximizes rewards for the time/effort which will continue to be existing content.

How do you take the IO system into account without making the game incredibly difficult for characters who aren't IOd? Even at that point, what do you balance against?

No on all accounts.

So the Rage thing ("nerf via bugfix") happened after shutdown but before Homecoming launched - back on live if you stacked Rage you avoided the defense debuff but that was apparently a bug and the defense debuff is no longer something you can avoid. As I understand it the live dev team was aware of the bug but chose not to fix it while they decided how they were going to rework the Rage crash. The Tar Patch/Twilight Grasp nerfs happened with the Page 5 update - all ATs previously used the same pseudopet for these powers so the -res value on Tar Patch and the heal value on Twilight Grasp were the same across all ATs. These powers now obey AT modifiers which is a nerf for any AT that isn't a Defender.

Even if you're doing it once every five minutes that's still 120 merits per hour which is okay but not particularly great. There's way more effective ways to earn merits.

I feel like Judgement is a much bigger offender in the "everything dies too fast" department than Destiny or Hybrid.

Oh hey, more wrong information in a thread full of wrong information!

MMs do get incarnate shifts as part of Supremacy to mitigate this, but what hurts them the most is the prevalence of high-damage AoE powers in iTrials because pets aren't subject to one-shot code so the T1 pets just spend their time inspecting the floor. At least in the case of Masterminds you bring (usually) decent damage and buff/debuff but it can be difficult to leverage. Won't argue about up-leveled content though, the purple patch really starts to screw over MMs like no other AT once you pass +2 or so.

I think just about the only "underperforming" AT right now is Sentinel. Pretty much every other AT still has a role to play in a team. Is that role different than it used to be? Maybe. Is that a bad thing? No, not really. The game has been constantly evolving and changing throughout its lifespan and at the very least it's helped keep things interesting.