Ukase

Figured I'd ask this here, rather than clumsily file a petition and possibly waste time for our hard-working dev team. One of my characters only needs Worthy Opponent and Legatus to be "complete". I'm not terribly into masochism (though being a badger might contradict that statement), so I'm going to wait until January for Legatus. At least, that's what I'm telling myself now. I was unclear how my character would fare without IO set bonuses, so I thought I would start the TF and take a look at my combat stats. But, I'm confused by what I see. Numina Regen/Recovery is active. Celerity: Stealth is active. Kismet 6% ToHit is active. I thought set bonuses were negated when you selected both "Old School Challenge" and "Master of Lord Recluse's Strike Force". Near as I can tell, my other set bonuses are negated. Am I missing something?

I should wait until I at least try it on Relentless before I talk about it. But, man, I hear those numbers and wonder how retoggling, etc. that many times can anyone be having fun. I'd be putting a hammer through my screen.

I've heard about these higher difficulty settings and numerous defeats. The problem is...for me, I can't accept being defeated an average of 9 to 20 times in a Strike Force as being "fun". Or even interesting. It's like some of my jokes. So stupid, you can't help but laugh. I don't comprehend why people are subjecting themselves to it - when it clearly surpasses "challenging", and enters into unreasonable. And the additional rewards for the greater difficulty is laughable. Toss a transcendent merit into the mix, then maybe you'll have something worthwhile. Had a friend yesterday who wanted to run it on relentless. A group of friends did not. We ran on Malicious, and after three missions, he was still recruiting. I wouldn't be able to state for sure, but I think the folks that are clamoring for the higher difficulty options are but a vocal minority. Thankfully, they're options, and not forced upon us.

I have a lot of feedback to give, but it's still incomplete, because I've yet to try it on Relentless mode. My very first take, soloing on Villainous, was a bittersweet reaction to Becky. It was amusing. But, I also knew that after a few times, it's going to get stale, pretty quickly. She'll soon be rated right up with Glacia and Infernia with her propensity for dialogue. Still, a good impression from the start. The dialogue in the mission with the security/bouncer guy, is interesting too. I like interactions like this, because you can always choose a different answer the next time, and perhaps get a different result. And my third time, I got the best result - but I'll keep quiet about that, cuz, you know, spoilers. On Malicious, I really only have one issue with it - and it seems to be more of an issue on my end. I can only tell the Brickernauts are counting down, with the words over their heads, and the yellow beam, from very far away. I've taken my tank in their twice, solo, and neither the numbers or the beam are visible to me. Pretty sure it's just on my end, because everyone I've teamed with sees it clearly. It's just me having this problem. But that doesn't stop it from being annoying. The count-down, from far away, looks a lot like the count-down over the Demolition Charges in the Underground Trial. It would be good to change the coloring of the lettering to red, or something more noticeable. It's not really apparent, or clear, that there are more than 10 Aeon Scientists. If you're not paying attention, you can end up waking up a sleeping scientist without having to do so. Although the dialogue that ensues is amusing, once you do wake him up. There are a couple of parts that are...well, annoying. Midas doing whatever it is he's doing where we get ported to what seems to be the second floor and can't target him - it's a bit annoying, because it always takes me a second to get my bearings and see where I am, where I'm supposed to be. The landing, after being "rifted" when fighting the car, is a bit disconcerting with all the "Rippled" wording in red. I'm never quite sure how my character will take the landing, so I use the jetpack to break my fall. One other thing - I noticed that medi-porters can get unlocked. But, it's not obvious from the start that you'd need or want to do this. The only way I learned is when the system message splashed across the screen. Otherwise, the only way you'd know is if you got defeated and didn't have a rez handy. The biggest issue, as far as the content of the story goes, is this idea that there's somebody in the car. I was thinking the car itself was the entity, not some punk driver. That really should be ret-conned in a future patch, as some kind of imposter, not the real high roller. But then, that would reek too much of Fake Nemesis, so another option, maybe. More of a minor issue is the Beast Within badge. You have to really want this badge to solo up to the car rifting you to the right place. Not that you have to solo it, It's just annoying to have to find folks that want to do just this badge in order to make quicker work of it. Sure, there are "some" of these Lycanthropes outside this SF, but hunting for those seem like it would be even more tedious. Hopefully, more content will be coming in the future that will allow an easier time of hunting these. As is, it's annoying. I think you'd have to run this 34 times to get the badge organically. And that's about 30 times more than I want. I get it. It's a badge, if you want it - prepare to grind. But, it's just my observation that it's annoying to have to do so.

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.