Yomo Kimyata

This is the beauty of this game! There are fifteen different blast sets, and if you like one, you can play it. You can play the hell out of it! And if you don't like one, you can not play it. You can not play the hell out of it! What I do not accept is someone not liking a set then calling for a mandate on how it must be changed. Knockback is a bit of a sticky wicket, I admit, since it can adversely affect people other than the user. Hold on a sec, I see a cloud formation that I do not like the looks of, gotta go yell at it, bbl.

I've got the solution! Lock all KB powers so that you cannot access them at all until you have unlocked a level 50. Using the VEAT requirements adds a level of aptness, since so many hate the kb of peacebringers.

I know this goes against the cardinal rule of never ever judging someone else on their abilities or game play choice, but aren't you saying that knockback is bad because bad players are bad? Bad players are, in fact, bad, and I'm not planning on changing the game in order to somehow work around that fact. Hate the player, not the knockback! Also, being a bad player doesn't necessarily mean that they are physiologically mentally undeveloped as one person said or that they should be compared to a toddler as you said. It just means they are bad by my standards, and that badness is easily remediable by practicing not being bad. No bad players were hurt in the writing of this post.

If we made everything free, then no one would have to farm and then we could use Pocket D for its intended purpose -- awkward sexual overtone chats. I am somewhere between 5.0% and 95.0% serious on this.

For me, the answer to something like this is scrappers. It's always scrappers. I've been able to play every scrapper I've gotten to 50 through a series of +4/x8 content solo, and some are markedly easier than others. I've not run that arc in recent memory. The problem I always run into with Cim content is that every minion has defense debuff powers and resistance to mez (through boss shouts), so blindly setting +4/x8 and running through pell mell is a recipe for disaster. Also, very few of my preferred armor types have much or even any def debuff resistance. That said, I think my staff/bio scrapper could do well with something like this; I'll check it out.

The Praetorian ones bother me a lot. Before I knew much about game mechanics, fighting Anti-Matter's Clockwork was brutal for my broadsword/invulnerability scrapper. I'm getting swarmed by dozens of menial laborers named things like "Vacuum" and "Scrub" who each hit me with ranged (not high ranged defense) energy (not high energy resistance) attacks that debuff my defense. I'm being destroyed by, literally, a bunch of scrubs.

I seem to recall there is a limit to the number of story arcs you can have running at the same time. At one time it was three but that might be from a decade ago.

Enchanted or not?

You first set your eyes on sweet Molly Mu'Lone.

People tend to be on one side or the other in terms of knockback. And I think that it is interesting that people seem to have different views on what "knockback tax" means to them. To me, who mostly solos, knockback/down is a form of crowd control which vastly increases my survivability. When they invented the knockback to knockdown IOs (which work by the interesting mechanism of taking one tenth of the current knockback value), I think it was mainly because by that point *most* people had moved past worrying about survival. It will be interesting to see how/if current devs deal with things like knockback (knockback is no longer a desirable tool for many but is rather a detriment) or dark melee or kinetic melee (which both enhance your survivability by making you harder to hit or take less damage but at the cost of not being the most damaging sets). For me? I'm still team knockback, and I'm not a big fan of giving away free KB2KD since to me it is a clearly defined tradeoff.

It's been a long time, but I seem to recall that how or where they spawn has something to do with it.

I liked reading this: by definition only half the population can be below average intelligence, much less idiotic. I prefer hearing Nessus stating, "The majority is always sane." To what I think the original topic is, one of the things I like about how this game treats crowd control is magnitude and duration being different things. With zero uncertainty, you know how your cc is going to affect mobs by rank, and you know how mobs cc is or is not going to affect you. Plan accordingly.

you saw right through me

Nice! This is the sort of thing I like to do with scrappers. Two things: The overbuff of Dark Armor with the latest page is absolutely bonkers with respect to this, especially Cloak of Fear. Also, kinetic melee has a strong -damage debuff that tends to be overlooked, even though you'll only have one AoE -damage power as a stalker.

I certainly believe this, but I don't see what I would consider a lot of forensic evidence, and that is almost certainly affected by my biases. The best explanation I have is that people are storing their wealth in asset form, specifically enhancements. Every character can have their own SG, every supergroup base can hold 1800 items. I absolutely get that, and take advantage of it, but since I tend to categorize my wealth in terms of straight inf homie, I don't keep it in the same part of my brain. If I've got a thousand lvl 53 Cytoskeletons, I might be able to exchange that for inf or other items eventually, but I personally don't include that in my "rich-ness" although it certainly makes refitting new lvl 50 characters more convenient and it saves my having to buy 4-5 new cytos from the market. You can store inf in characters and you can store inf in emails, but that's limited to 2bn per character and 100 emails at 999,999,999 inf per email, per account. Don't get me wrong, that's a lot of inf, but once you get over a few hundred bn, you have to store it SOMEWHERE. Since I don't want to have thousands of characters or a dozen accounts, I store it in the /AH through bids that (currently) cannot be hit. That was my solution, and I haven't observed a lot of that going on in the /AH. I may not be seeing it, and the conclusion I've drawn is probably not the same as other oligarchs. I will say that there have been consistent "factories" in the PvP and purple spaces as long as HC has been public. I dip in there and skim off the cream every now and again, but if that is the work of one or even a small number of players, and if they have been able to monetize that in terms of inf rather than full SG storage bases, they might easily have several orders of magnitude more wealth than me. I figure it is so much work and there is so little to spend inf on that it wouldn't be worth my while, but they're kept it up for years!

Clearly, my doppleganger.

Because some jackass walked into a store, slammed their palm against the counter and thundered, "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!?" I'm 0 for 3 so far, by the way.

If you're not having fun with a combination of powers by level 50, how is getting incarnates going to change that? But I will take props where I can get them!

Another meister balance balance meister! Good to see it! I don't like this, because the whole reason (IMO) procs got changed to a PPM was abuse of the flat percentage. Suddenly everyone is 6-slotting Parry with damage procs again. I'm ok with the current system, although I'm watching the advent of Adjustable Recharge with suspicion. I'm ok either as is or reverting having to go to special spots to open the interface. It's a tremendous convenience as is, and I'm not sure it's disadvantaging anyone as stands. Doesn't matter to me either way. I'm guessing that it's mostly used nowadays to store inf, but there are other ways to do so. I have no relevant experience or axe to grind here. I'd love it, LOVE IT, if there were some sort of governor on incarnate powers, which would help slow the power creep at top levels. My suggestion has been to limit incarnate powers to two characters per account. Want more? Make more accounts or retire one of your godlike characters.

This has come up a few times in the past. I believe the rationale for keeping it (and keeping it seeded in the /AH) was an overwhelming demand for it by roleplayers for some reason. But now, I heard from my doctor's receptionist's chiropracter's dogwalker that if you gather 100 Exotic Compounds, insert them into the magic slot machine in St. Martial, and cross your fingers, you unlock the secret room from the Atari 2600 game Adventure. But no, training enhancements needed to be deleted...

I like it! Walk into Image Inc., buy some enhancements, then when they ask you to pay you slap your hand on the counter and thunder, "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!?!?!" I'll give that a shot at Whole Foods later this week, let you know how it turns out.

Nice and well written! I think a big aspect of this is that not only are we geared psychologically to like newer and better things, but there is no governor to keep the system balanced. It's kind of like (and bear with me on the metaphor), driving the kids home for dinner and they are screaming, "Take us to Chuck E. Cheese!!!!" because it's fun and the driver is saying, "No, we have food at home." When this was a commercial enterprise, there was an incentive for someone to be that driver, to keep everything running smoothly, to patch up any problems in Spines or to fix typos or to stop exploits. When HC came out into the public, I really felt that the drivers were saying, "Hell yeah!! CHUCK E CHEESE. F*** vegetables, nothing but pizza and ice cream!!!" and it was (and is still) difficult for me to justify that. Like I said, my impression is that they are walking some of their changes back, but it's difficult to be the uncool parent who says, "We have food at home, eat your Spines" rather than, "Hey, let's introduce new sets that make it easier to solo GMs!"

I remember this, and I agreed with you at the time. It was more efficient reward-wise to afk more farmers to 48 than fewer farmers to 99, and if one was doing this for cash or real assets, one certainly would. Where it all falls apart, of course, is at a very early point efficiency becomes irrelevant. I still wrestle with this -- I don't count anything as wealth except cold hard inf, and that's partly because I know firsthand the dangers of mark-to-market inventory management. And yet, there are plenty of folks who are Tier 2 or 3 "Rich" who are in the exact same position as me of being able to buy anything and everything without a care, and they aren't wrestling with anything at all!! Makes you think that maybe I'd be more content without all that rassling. Thanks for the therapy session, HC forums!!!

This is a great write-up. Good work as always. Radiation Armor is no longer the clear cut winner of "Best Secondary to prop up damage on full farming maps", but really hasn't changed that much. The change in Ground Zero was primarily to cut down its effects to the aggro cap, rather than affecting over ten times the aggro cap, so I'd call that fixing a bug. Most of Rad Therapy changes seem to be in order to change it from a power mostly useful as an offensive weapon through proc useage to one that fits in a defensive set. I really haven't noticed much of a difference other than kill rates are lower and character survivability is higher.

Thanks to both of you for this. @The Trouble I'm going to suggest you also look into scrapper secondaries as well. On that note, remember that the Crit Strikes proc only needs to go off once, so that when it is in a power that affects more than one target, the effective chance to trigger goes up. Example: you are looking at a choice between a single target attack that triggers at 75% probability, or you are looking at an AoE that can affect up to five targets at 50% probability (assuming 100% chance to hit for simplicity). If you are fighting one target, the first choice seems obvious to maximize chances of the proc triggering. But let's say there are three targets in close proximity. The AoE power can trigger zero, one, two, or three times, but we only care that it triggers at least once. So the odds of it NOT triggering at all is 0.5*0.5*0.5 = 12.5% and there is a 87.5% chance that it triggers at least once.