Ukase

So, I'm not the only one that was braced for "Doooom"? I find that amusing.

What makes me spend time playing a character? For me, it tends to be badges that keep me playing it. The more you get, the more you want to get.

I'll just come out and say it. The others, bless their hearts have been too kind. If you look carefully, I think you'll find your Sentinel DOES hit the target. The problem is, it's a Sentinel, and it doesn't do any damage. So, yes, the proper course is to delete it and re-make it as a blaster. I'm sorry. None of the above is true - I'm just joking. I can resist anything but temptation, and it was too tempting to not crack that joke at the expense of the Sentinel. Serious question: are you using offensive adaptation? It should give a boost to accuracy. Log your Sent in, open combat attributes and go crazy in a mission. Use snip & sketch, (or equivalent) and show us when you've missed more than 3x in a row. Then, you'll have some basis for a legit bug.

Gaussian offers a story arc against the Vanguard Swords, which are required for one of the defeat badges. You can either run the first mission a couple of times at 0/8, or run the second mission and quit the arc, if in ouro. Or proceed. To each their own.

<smacks forehead> I have got to get my eyes checked. If I hadn't read this, it would have never even occurred to me to look on the map, and I do have the latest update. When I had read that these 6 were found in the ASN, I simply went to the lab, where the badge is...pretty much empty of any of them. I did find Gray Matter and Cortex, but they were in the new area. I had just assumed they spawned at different times. Glad to get them all knocked out and done!

So, anecdotally, this is an example of how this can play to an advantage. For those that farm, you run a few missions, you've got your salvage topped off, or close to it. Me, I craft everything, then convert. Others have differing strategies as to what they do with the drops. But for me, after I craft the recipes, often, I'll still have a slew of common & uncommon left. The Rare salvage is placed in my vault, to give me more room. So, using threads for tickets, I would get the random rolls in the 45-50 range (because my farmer has that salvage on hand) and just craft & convert those, until I run out of salvage. Given how super insps aren't working in a lot of the newer Master trials, demand for them has decreased, so the prices of them have dropped. I haven't done the math yet, but I think this may be a viable path to dealing with surplus threads/shards on farm characters.

I play zoomed out as far back as I can get. But there are some maps, or areas in some maps where if my character is against a wall, I'm limited to how far back I can be.

I don't think it's a bug - as last night, on Discord, my teammates would say "you don't see that gold beam?" and "Bricker is counting down, back up". So I know they're visible to some - just not to me when I'm too close to the action. Pretty sure it's on my side of the keyboard, not a bug with the tf. Otherwise, they'd have fixed it or addressed it by now.

What sound would that be?

I think the patch notes were a bit confusing for the average "reader" - simply because the average person doesn't really read, but skims through information. And doesn't necessarily retain what was skimmed over with accuracy. And, I am one of those average "readers" sometimes. I was very surprised to see Incarnate powers being allowed on the Aeon SF on the increased difficulty level. And fun fact: I think I need a new video card. Apparently, I can only see that gold beam above the brickernauts before they explode when I'm a safe distance away. If I'm in melee, I don't see any countdown numbers or a gold beam. But that's my problem. I play on the "recommended" setting, rather than ultra or Performance. Guess it's past time to upgrade...but prices being what they are, I'll have to suffer through it. Could be my eyes, tho...<shrug>

That interesting...I was completely ignorant of this. I thought it was like 5 guys, & some volunteer players for testing. This makes it seem like a much larger number of people than I would have thought.

There's also the chance that the sale may not start until next Tuesday, the first Tuesday in December. I could be wrong, of course. There are still packs that are listed from players left from the last sale. I was joking in Discord about buying a large amount of them. Like...all of them. But, that's a bit rich even for me, 10M*10M. Too damn many zeroes. And, the only reason to do such a thing would be to relist them, as opening that many would take a looooong time. Even bidding for them would take quite a bit of time. Reposting 10M items, 10 at a time...if one character could even hold that many..probably 10K is max. (I aim to find out, lol) I suspect they have an auto-reseed bot/command in place, too. But I can only speculate about that.

Doesn't seem odd to me. "Running out of time" suggests a deadline. Self-imposed? How would any of us know? You're right, they're gonna do what they wanna do. But - when those with responsibility make decisions by themselves for everyone, they will eventually find themselves by themselves. Many counsels assure victory. When in doubt - do nothing, until you have more information. There must be a half dozen other platitudes I could use. I'm just sayin', no need to rush on the players' behalf. There is no need to squeeze things into a deadline, as far as I know. The world keeps spinning either way.

I don't understand this. There was no law or rule that I knew of that stated the patch must hit the servers by the Friday after Thanksgiving. You could have easily taken until January or March, even. Or even the Summer. In fact, based on something I read on the discord, I wasn't expecting any of this to hit until January. If you & the rest of the Dev team are feeling rushed for the benefit of the players - don't feel that way. Go slowly. No sense stressing yourselves. In my mind, there would have been a lot more perspectives added if you'd given it more time. Granted, you can't please all the people even some of the time, but I think it would have been better to wait.

So, there will be different strokes for different folks, to be sure. I have played both with a fair amount of fun & "success". The thing about corruptors is their inherent, scourge. You can get a nice double damage when scourge hits. This is what allowed a number of us on Torch to take down Tyrant in the Magisterium trial without lore pets when HC first opened up, a couple years ago. It wasn't all corruptors, but at least a dozen or so. Scourge is not a guarantee though. At least, anecdotally, I've not seen it "every time", but I've seen it quite often. The lower the npc's health, the greater the odds of it firing. To be candid, I really don't even look for it and take it for granted. With the debuffs of radiation secondary, a corruptor can be a game changer - debuffing regen, giving out accelerated metabolism for a 20% damage buff and 30% recharge, lasting for 2 minutes. With IO sets, you can get this perma fairly easily (but expensive if you're on a budget). I would say the only noticeable differences between my fire/fire blaster and my fire/rad corruptor is the strength of my blasters nuke and the debuff ability of the corruptor. While leveling, the fire blaster was much easier to solo, because there wasn't any waiting for scourge to kick in. On a team, though, the corruptor is every bit as worthwhile. It's tough to see any real difference as far as dps goes, because the debuffs make the damage higher. But, a lot of that depends on how you slot your characters. One guy can take a blaster and make it outpace mine as far as dps goes, quite easily. I build my blasters more for survivability, trusting the base damage they dish out to be sufficient. There's a line between dps and defense. Anecdotally, ,If I try to balance both - I won't have enough dps or defense to out-survive the difficult foes, So, you kind of have to choose which way you want to go. But that's a whole different topic, and quite the rabbit hole. You have 1000 slots, you might as well give both storm and rad a try. Worst case, you delete them and try something else.

Where do you think I got all the inf I have now?

So...that's interesting to me. If these players are not interested and/or competent, why are they pursuing a badge? To me - that doesn't make sense. I can count on one hand the folks I've run into in game that have a badge count greater than 500 that were not both competent and interested. (that's not to say that there aren't competent/interested players with badge counts of less than 100 - there certainly are.) I'll concede the point though, you're making sense, as much as it pains me. And, what's worse, you're confirming something some of us have always thought. Our fellow players, on average, are simply not smart enough to read, or perhaps worse, can't be bothered to do so. This is what you're telling me, right? It's just my opinion, but I don't think a leader is supposed to dumb things down and spend needless moments of time explaining things to those who are joining a league or team in pursuit of a badge. The players should have experience in the same trial or task force prior to a master effort. Not just the leader - all the players. Again, that's just my thought on the matter. To have a new player expect to badge with no experience? That's an unfair burden on the rest of the team. Now - if you're in an SG - I'd expect the SG to break things down very clearly and be patient. But for a PUG Mo run? No, that's too much to ask.

Sorry, but I disagree with you on #4. This is the squishy's fault, absolutely. Unless you have control of their keyboard and mouse, in no way is this any leader's fault. Anytime you're going for a Master badge, everyone on the league should have run the content before - perhaps not on that character, but on an alt, at a minimum. They should already have a clear understanding of what's expected. For an incarnate trial, most of the time, inexperience isn't much of a deal breaker, as there's so many buffs/debuffs in a league, it covers a multitude of errors. But for a Master of Task Force that doesn't allow defeats, if they've never experienced the explosion of a Cyst in ITF, and don't stay at range, that's something they should know before hand. It doesn't hurt for a leader to remind them of it - but if they don't, that's something I would expect people on a Master run to know before hand. The leader's role is simply recruiting & inviting and sharing the strategies. With your criteria, nobody but you would be leading anything. You have to leave the onus of familiarity of the trial or task force with the players. Granted, different leaders will employ varying strategies - and it's the leader's role to make those strategies clear. But we shouldn't set the bar of leadership so high that nobody will want to lead anything.

If you're not a praetorian, for whatever reason, it won't show for you until you're level 50.

They will likely need to. Having nothing else to do with my inf, I intend to buy a ton of them, just for the merits. Gonna buy so many I won't even get to open them all and won't need to buy any next year. Like maybe 100 Billion worth. Or maybe I'll just buy all the enhancements on the AH. But that'd be a damn lot of clicking.

So, fun fact about To Hit. In game, not shown in the combat attributes is something called "beginner's luck". But - the toHit value in combat attributes will reflect the base amount of 75%, the Kismet Accuracy (I place it in Combat Jumping, a toggle I tend to keep on at all times) Note that 75% and 6% should equal 81%, but my level 9 character's To Hit is listed as 89%. The 8% increase comes from the Beginner's Luck mechanic. You can read more about it here: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Attack_Mechanics#Beginner.27s_Luck Beginner's Luck is the community's name for a scaling ToHit bonus for low-level characters that was added as part of Issue 12. Under Beginner's Luck, characters at Combat Level 1 get a +15% ToHit bonus — exactly enough to raise their chance of hitting equal-level PvE enemies to 90% from the standard 75%. This bonus steadily decreases as the character gains levels and eventually disappears after Combat Level 19. The full table of Beginner's Luck bonuses, by level, is at the end of this article. It is almost, but not quite, +1% per level under 20. The Beginner's Luck bonus also applies to player pets and pseudopets, though it's based on their levels, not the player's. Also, since Beginner's Luck is based on Combat Level, it is affected by Sidekicking and Exemplaring.

Candidly, I agree with you. But apparently, while they don't wish to discourage solo play, they seem to be hell-bent on encouraging team play. At least, that's my take-away from all these changes they're making. I mean, the new content is really compelling from a story telling perspective. I just wish they'd left things on Beta for a couple months longer so some of us could have found a way to spend more time testing over the holidays - even though I detest going to test because any gains are washed away without notice, and have no bearing on any characters on the regular servers. But, I was convinced recently that time spent there is worth the investment. Just wish I'd had more time. And I hope I'll be able to revoke the 8 hours worth of empowerment buffs I got from p2w since we can't use them in iTrials anymore.

I would pay a billion influence to p2w for toggles to suppress when mezzed as opposed to being turned off. Re-toggling is what I detest the most in this game.

The short answer is - it's faster and easier to get the t-3 in alpha using shards - IF you're trying to get t-3 in lore and destiny as fast as you can. I'm good with burning a trancendent merit to get there in some instances, but usually, just by running content organically (MSR, Hami, a few tfs) I'll get my Alpha t-3 without burning threads within a day. But I also try to avoid lengthy incarnate content until I get my t-3 in alpha complete. Shards do not drop as often as threads, that's true. But - if you do MSRs, Hami Raids, and other content that's not in Dark Astoria, they do drop. And they drop fairly often. Now, my ...methods aren't practical for everyone. I can blow through influence and reward merits and not miss any of it. Another player may not be willing to do things the way I do them. But, when I have a fresh 50, I will want to do the weekly. Not for the double merits, but for the Notice of the Well. I will also want to do Mortimer Kal (can be solo'd in 20 minutes without much fuss) and get the extra notice from the Flames of Prometheus conversion. But, in order to use the NotW, I need 12 shards for the Alpha t-1, and 20 shards to make the Alpha t-2. And 8 shards and the notice for t-3. So, 40 shards. But, if I do an MSR, I can trade in 150 vg merits for a gr'ai matter, which saves me 4 shards. Sometimes 8 shards, depending on the recipe. If I do a lady gray tf, I can get a hero 1 component. If I do an ITF, I can get an Ancient Nictus Fragment. I won't often do those, but I will do a 3x hami raid, which is generally good for 9-10 shards. I realize I could use threads, but threads drop in lumps only 8 times (aside from iTrial bonuses). So, in running these tfs, it's not out of the question to get t-3 alpha fairly quickly. Just depends on the rng sometimes. Because of that, I find it much smarter to save those threads for the other 5 slots. Once I have the t-3 in Alpha for the level shift, I don't even look at shards again until I'm t-4 in all the other slots. By then, I've usually got enough shards to finish the t-4 in alpha. If I do a lot of in incarnate stuff, say...a few underground trials, Keyes - - those leave a better chance of better rewards. (view the table below) But - in the past year, I've found myself growing weary of these trials. Regardless of whose leading these, it can take up to 20 minutes just to form up the league. That's a lot of time wasted that I cannot get back. Time is more precious than money. I can accumulate money, stash it for a rainy day. I cannot stash time away. When it's gone, it is gone, there's no getting it back. That's the biggest reason why I hate teaming. Whenever you team, you can bet that 95 times out of 100, you're going to be waiting at least 5 minutes for someone to show up and get in zone to get things started. I'd rather not wait. I will if I have to, I just prefer not to do so. So, I will three box heather townsend as fast as I can for 3 reward tables. And I'll do Mu's as well. And so on. I find that even though these are not as fast as heather's arc, they're still faster than waiting for a league to form, and complete the trial, than if I just proceed on my own. And each character will get a reward table 3x. Once you spend a thread on alpha - that's a thread you can't spend on any of the others. And they're limited in supply. They only drop 120 at a time, 2 vet levels out of 3. If one were to not use shards, it would cost you 320 threads (or 16 common components), 120 threads (or 2 uncommon components) 16 emps (or 2 rare components) & 30 emps (or 1 very rare compenent) ... and that would be for hybrid, Lore, Destiny, interface, Judgement AND Alpha. 440 threads x 6 vs 120 threads at vet levels 1,2,4,5,7,8,10,11 =1080 threads. But I need more than 2x that many, even not using Alpha. So, yeah, to me, better to save those threads for the non-alpha stuff. Now, threads will drop in a farm, or other content, just as shards would. But, you need SOOO many more threads than shards. Seems like a no-brainer to me to use them if they drop for you. If they don't, well, then, use what you get. Me, I'll use shards. Your experience may differ. A lot depends on the rng on reward tables, of course. The only trial I seem to get lucky with is Underground. Just anecdotal evidence that tells me all the other itrials suck.

Depends. For work, my job requires I build relationships with candidates and clients alike. I get to wear the white hat and put people in a better position than they're in now. Usually more money, better perks, etc. (I'm an executive recruiter) On LinkedIn, I've got over 8K contacts. It's a lot of damned Christmas Cards I'm mailing out each year, I'll tell you that. Over $260 in postage! As for people outside of work - I haven't related to anyone in person since the pandemic, outside of interaction at the grocery store. I mean - how could anyone? Socially distancing and all that. The game was always a place to get things done without having to team up to do them. Now, I still have teamed up for various badge efforts - Really Hard Way, Avoids the Green Stuff, other iTrials and the occasional Master of TF/SFs. I just don't enjoy the teaming experience most of the time. Occasionally, I do. And the new patch won't change much about that. Nobody's putting a gun to my head saying I "must do these things". I just would rather the new badges not be team dependent. But I'm just one voice. I'm simply not going to do them until I want to do them. The new SF is about 3x as long as it should be. But hey, at least it's new content. They'd have been better served making it Aeon Pt 1, Pt 2, and Pt 3, but that's just one person's opinion.