Ukase

I was just wondering that myself. It's so crazy. Pugs can be super fantastic, or super putrid. You just never know.

Yeah, when it happened to me...the first thought in my head...well, the second. The first was "hurry up!", but the second was to check the bid count which was at 0. And I know this couldn't be true, because I had placed my bid. Then, it iterated one, and then the sale went through. My thinking was that, a newer player, or someone not well-versed in the AH were impatient (like me) and had extra funds (like me), they might be inclined to overspend when they don't need to. They just need a little patience. One thing every somewhat serious player of the AH will agree with - Patience is key when winning the AH game. The longer you can wait, the cheaper you can buy stuff, and the more profit you can make if you're going to re-sell. And that extra inf income comes from the players that are not patient.

Thanks. I shouldn't complain, as I'm sometimes every bit as convoluted with my posts as CoD is with the data.

Thanks - but all that did was show a very long list of powers that Fiery Embrace would have some affect on. ("Powers bearing tag "FieryEmbrace") Doesn't answer the question of what's going on for those 20s. Ultimately, it likely doesn't matter. I'm still going to take and use the power. Just trying to stretch my brain and get smarter.

I'm on a fire/MA tank. And I've a choice; I can take Fiery Embrace, or I can take Focus Chi. In the grand scheme of things, I'll be taking both. But it makes sense for me to look at what both do. I know both boost damage. I went to CoD to see how much, if any, FE boosts toHit. Doesn't seem to do so. Fine. But what does this mean: Something is going to happen (or not happen) for 20 seconds. But what?

I merely state the server I was on when I used the AH and experienced the issue; this way people aren't inclined to think it's because the server is so densely populated. I have known the AH is cross-server since day one. Thank you for making it clear I need to be more clear when I write.

In this particular section of the forum, do I need to spell out what's wrong with this picture? I hope not. I don't know the who, or which server, but between all of us who monitor this particular section, we should be able to let folks know these are still seeded at 10M. I have noticed, more than once, on Indomitable, that a bid for 10M will sit for about 10-15 seconds before it goes through. I can only assume the hamsters that feed the wheel that drives the AH are malnourished.

I remembered the base buff station that the patch notes mentioned; finally found it in another room. The buff station stacks with celerity and super speed for 90 feet. Now, I can't say with certainty, but anecdotally, my perception was the more level shifts I had, the better the stealth worked. As ridiculous as it sounds in my head, because it's the test server, I might respec for phase shift.

This is also my experience. The first night I was on test, probably the 2nd night after the post hit the forums telling us about the beta patch, I had 10 level shifts. He did hit me - no idea with what, but it was only for -600. And he missed a fair bit - now, I was using one of the draught insps. and I had used barrier, so there's that. And I didn't stick around too long after. Another time he one-shotted me, at least, it seemed like it. So...when is the beefy powerset coming out?

I'm such a bum sometimes. I did finally take FA on a character that had zero end issues to recognize it's no longer .52/s! So, I have done the respec, and it's crazy how I seem to miss the same amount with FA as without. It's just perception bias, I'm sure. I just hate missing so much. I set up this optimal attack chain only for the first one to whiff. Madness, I say. This game will drive me to drink more.

So...I plan to run this 2x. Once through ouro, and another with a character within the level range, just in case the difficulty is something troublesome for an SO only build. But the first mission, the objectives are confusing me. Leave no witnesses. Defeat the boss. Why not just call it a kill all? I killed the boss and the minion next to him. Then I cleared the room. Not like these guys saw anything. The mission didn't complete. All the glowies were clicked, still the mission isn't complete. If I have to kill all - it should say that. Leave no witnesses implies it - but with the defeat the boss and the leave no witnesses, it suggests to me just clear the room with the boss in it. Second mission: The "Hero Corp Clone" wasn't really a clone. At least, not as far as I could tell. It was simply a Paragon Protector with different colors. Not really looking at all like hero corp to me. 3rd mission: Go defeat 20 trolls. Absolutely not. I'll do this once if there's a badge for it, but I do not enjoy open zone hunting. If I wanted to open zone hunt, I can do that without interacting with a contact. Thumbs down! 4th mission - go see the contact in person. Just another episode of busy work. There's absolutely no reason to make the player use their lrtp or base teleport or travel power to go zone hopping for this. If the story can only make sense with this, change the story. It's just annoying. 5th mission - Go visit Neal in AE. What? So, no mission tp. No Team TP. I have to travel for a chat. This is the kind of stuff I don't like. Needless chats the contact could do without us hero types getting involved. I used the QA tester power to auto-complete 3rd, 4th and 5th missions. Mission 6 - The map looks awesome with the different skin! I'm not at all sure why we have to go from terminal to terminal when it could all be done on the first terminal. Other than that, this mission is pleasant. Mission 7 - Interesting. Desert Freeze has a fantastic costume. Because it was apparent I needed to rescue her, I assumed the other heroes would be in a similar situation. The codenamed PPs were apparently the heroes to recover. Because of this - you may want to reword the objectives. Defeat the mind-twisted heroes that are now dressed like paragon protectors. Stop with the hero corp clone theme - just call them paragon protector clones. It doesn't fit the story, but the costumes fit better. Finale: The creativity and subtle humor are great. Gloryhound looks awesome! The names and costumes are clever. Well done. The ending...no blood bath. No option to defeat anyone. Honestly, quite a let down. What about that warning to restock on inspirations? Pointless. Overall, some good creativity. But other than that - this arc is a stinker. Needless zone hopping about. You could trim a couple of those missions and the story would be the same. But, that's just my opinion.

Well done getting surveillance off! I love the name of the power "beefy". When you're the only one in the labyrinth, it won't take long for the minotaur to find you - particularly if you stop to get a gladiator to talk with you - or fight you, or spend more than a few seconds standing still. I think if it hits as is, the best chance I'll have to explore what I want to explore and get the badges I'll want, it'll have to be on peak times when there are a lot more players in there. I do not envision much chance of success on a low-pop server. As it is, on Excelsior, without a competent group of players, beating the minotaur will be something two teams or more will probably have to do. But I don't know that for sure. His level at 54+6, just out of the gate..that's almost Really Hard Way Tyrant level. It'll take some cooperation, for sure. And it'll be a little easier because there won't be any crackles to avoid, but there won't be as much room to joust about either. I think these are potentially the types of "challenge" that some of the vocal minority want. I'm not sure why, but I don't need to know why. Other than the badges, I can't see myself engaging. Now, the maze itself, the ??? rooms, and omg - The server room. @lemming helped me find the server room. And in it, if I hadn't had the stun badges already, I probably would have earned one. That mapserver hits hard. But it stuns even more. The best thing about that is I got my costume turned green again. I wish I could make my own costume that kind of green. It never looks that way when I do so in the costume creator. But clearly, there's a lot of creativity in this effort. I just hope it's not a ghost town after the first week.

I agree with your suggestion here. I didn't have any real specifics on duration, but I did make this suggestion in the focused feedback thread. There were only 7 or so folks in the labyrinth when I was briefly on last night. Given my previous experiences solo, there's just not a lot for me to get out of it unless I resort to using the beta tester "I win" buttons. And I don't want to do that on the minotaur because that removes it from the zone for an hour, and another player might want that interaction. So, I definitely agree, the 5 minutes isn't the right duration for lower populated times. I don't know what the proper duration would be. But it isn't 5 minutes. At least, I don't think so.

Ugh...such an unsavory thing to suggest, but I'll suggest it anyway. Menu-options-windows: Look for the chat section: The reason I suggest it is so you can have a record of everything said. It might be easier to share with a GM than trying to type it all out by memory.

If the labyrinth appears this way to you, I don't think you've given it a fair look. So far, it has been different for me each time. Because the success or failure of other players can add level shifts to you and everyone else in zone, you can find yourself looking at a herd of level 54+1's and they con grey. But you missed the level 54+10 in the middle who kills you with one attack, seemingly. Maybe it was some DoT and I was just too slow to react. Either way - this might be "farmable" by a team of competent players. But, it's certainly not risk free, and the rewards are fairly low. Three reward merits for beating up a pinata that doesn't attack. But what's not in the fine print is while you're attacking this pinata, a level 54+11 minotaur wants to gore you. You can't just ignore a minotaur and tackle the pinata. The hp on this thing, I haven't checked, but you'll want your lore pets to help with dps. There's a lot more to this zone than your post suggests you're aware of. I'm not saying competent players won't use this as an option to increase the rate of influence or xp if they can - but there's absolutely nothing wrong with earning it. And you would earn it here doing something different than what we've been doing. Different in terms of content. Same in button mashing. But there's no real way around that.

This is 100% accurate for some players. It's a challenge, but I continually try to remind myself that the player behind the avatar might be an 8 year old kid. Most of us are likely on the older side of 45, just based on things I've read on the forums, discord and other chat channels in game. What's fun for an 8 year old is likely not going to be the same for someone on the darker side of 50. And yeah, some people are just stupid - and that includes the leaders. They do not know they don't know. They have no idea that there is something to know. Worse, they've managed to get to level 50 without being aware of it. And I'm not talking about something obscure like how to get to the gas station in Pocket D. An example might be how to get to Peregrine Island or Pocket D. My favorite was a player who had Portal Jockey at level 45, but had no idea (or claimed to) how to get to Peregrine Island - until they got there. They'd been there before, but they didn't know that's what it was called. Doesn't mean they couldn't make their character function with some degree of competence, it just means the details of some things weren't important to them, so they may lack terminology knowledge, or any number of other things. I look at it like taking a Calculus course. Calculus is challenging for most people. A smart student might be able to tutor 7 others into getting a passing grade. But if one of them hasn't taken Algebra before the class, it's going to be much harder. Unfortunately, because some gamers are talented, and very much so, there's no fair way of establishing a pre-requisite to increase your odds of success without excluding some of those very good players. This is where old Snarky is missing Cosmic Council. It was generally pretty clear from chat and badge count who knew what they were doing, and who would need extra instruction. And at least some of that instruction occurred over discord before the scheduled Master run took place. In a PUG, it's terribly difficult to set that kind of structure up. It would probably suck the fun of the game right out for Snarky, but since Cosmic is mostly dormant, if not dead, he might just as well set up his own group of blood suckers.

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.” ― John Lydgate

I guess I'm problematic. Mom will be so proud! The way I see it, the term as you define it is nebulous. Loose and malleable as needed by whom? For what? Hate to be a pain, I'm just trying to get smarter. No easy feat for me.

Opinions will definitely vary on this topic. There's right ways - the ways that work for whomever is doing them, there's wrong ways, and there's probably right ways done poorly, and wrong ways that work out through sheer luck or ignorance. Mine might be the latter. Meet Catabolic, an ice/rad brute on Indom. Cat has started the game with zero assistance from any of my alts, or anyone else - unless you count joining a league to clobber GMs in multiple zones as assistance. I do not do this particular practice of self-attuning, not even with a character that starts off broke. What I do is look for the cheapest IOs I can find that are closely related to what I want. And if I can't find them, I'm prepared to burn some converters. I do this mainly so I don't put influence in Yomo's pockets. He has enough already. So far, I haven't spent over 200k for a crafted IO. I did spend 3m on 3 different pvp recipes to get those "big three" taken care of. I do not recommend doing this until you understand the odds of converting an attuned Detonation into a Steadfast Resist/Def 3% (all). You can get lucky and get it within 10 converters. Or you can have expected results and take about 30. Maybe more. But 30*65K +200k is still going to be less than buying a patient bid of 3M for the attuned Steadfast Resist/Def 3% (all). When I make these decisions, I completely understand it might take me 60 converters. I'm prepared to take that risk, as I've had that same attuned detonation convert into an LotG7.5% on one conversion, and I've seen it enough to know that over time, things come out in the wash. You just have to have the stacks of converters high enough to sustain you through the crappy rng. And what is just an anecdotally based tip - not at all scientifically backed - if it takes more than 10 conversions (not converters, but conversions) STOP. Tab out for a moment. Watch a silly cat video. Get a drink. Something. Then return. The RNG will likely favor you now. I have done the old AH Attuning trick with some PvP IOs. I didn't like it, because when you're trying to do that with desirable IOs, invariably, someone else will buy them right out from under you. Maybe the very same price you were going to buy them from yourself for. And you can't jack up your price to keep people from buying it, because if it's too high, you end up buying someone else's IO. Then you have inf - which is great - but no IO - which is not good. It's really a bad plan if you ask me. If you've the expertise and patience to make it work for you, that's great. But it's not my way of doing things. I'd rather each character just use converters to get what's desired, rather than attune the crafted stuff I have through the AH. I have, at times, taken certain characters and sold certain IOs in a stack of 20 to 50. Then I'll re-purchase them in attuned form over the course of week and stash those in my base for alts to use. But, I just think it's more interesting for each character to use the market to outfit their respective build. ******************* No representation is made to suggest my way is "better" in any fashion than any other method of accumulating, generating or earning in-game influence. The word "Yomo" referenced above is used without permission, but we'll risk the lawsuit.

You say that as if it's a bad thing. Or something undesirable. Not that I expect a team of competent coders to raise their hands and scream out "Me! I'll do it!". Trust me when I tell you this: if it existed, people would like it. They may not like it at level 20 when they want to do a tf and the team lead is 50 and they get slammed because their level 20 build is insufficient vs level 50 mobs, but when they're level 50, they'll love it. At least, I think they will. Unless those level 50 powers for clockwork really suck - like that thing paladin does when he drains your endurance. Literally, it sucks.

Every time I see the word "balance" in reference to powersets and ATs, I immediately picture Ralph Macchio in a paddle boat standing on one leg trying to do a crane kick. This concept of balance needs proper definition so it means the same thing to everyone. Because your version of balance may not be balanced at all. And my idea of balanced is not on the level, I assure you.

So, it's no secret during the day, I work and play. Need to take a call? Tab out, take the call, come back. Because of this, I do not normally travel to any missions. I always use mission tp and team teleport. They are always recharged. Because I generally have to tab out during every mission. In the evening time, depends on if I've gotten the badges in that zone. If I have, I literally use base teleport, tab out and watch youtube until the mission tp is recharged. I see no point in not squeezing every inf worth of value out of these teleports. If I haven't gotten the badges, I'll zip around, get them and hustle to the mission door.

One of these days, just maybe....a TF/SF will scale to the level of the team lead, without respect to level range. Level 50, want to do a posi? I present you a level 50 Dr. Vahzilok to fight. Or, a level 50 simulacrom, depending on which posi you do. Want to do a synapse? Of course not - but if you're motivated by some sinister force to do it anyway, do it at level 50 and use judgement on those level 50 gears before they run away! I can dream about it, right?

The crazy thing, I was on Indom. I've been trying to be helpful, in a small sense. Just trying to help with GMs and such with addtional (if just slightly better than mediocre) manpower. There was no debate there. I didn't bother to argue. I just didn't have the energy. I also still feel like a visitor here. No sense in antagonizing some player I don't know over a question that can cause such a distraction, the player that asks the question leaves with more questions and confusions than they came there with. My old self would have made it clear - the content you do tends to determine which salvage you'll be using. Doing iTrials tends to encourage a player to use threads - because shards don't drop in iTrials. Doing TFs - you'll get both. I have a clear memory of getting t-3 in alpha on day 1 of being 50 by doing a TF train with K (I have no recollection of their global. Special K, maybe?) I took the shard component in lieu of reward merits, so it was a costly effort, but reward merits drop from the sky more cheaply than shards. Because of the cost of merits, it would be crazy to suggest that to a newer player. Still, I can't help but think players DID do just that on retail. I don't remember doing that, but it seems plausible. That doesn't mean it's the right advice of course. I just want a newer player to be told about both pathways if we're going to have two paths.

To be as transparent as I know how - I should have never made the suggestion. I was just so ....I guess the word is frustrated. I see a new player asking a question. Another player answers the question with such certainty with incomplete information, they do a dis-service to the newer player and anyone else asking the question. We're all different as people. So, it's certainly reasonable that we're going to play different content with chances of different rewards. But it's very time consuming and a bit challenging to relay this to a newer player who may not understand certain terms used or what part of the interface to use to accomplish certain things in help chat. What I'd love is for every player who wants to answer the inevitable question about Shards vs. Threads to recognize that not everyone is going to do Speed Lambdas repeatedly, with maybe a BAF thrown in to get their loot. They see the threads drop, particularly at specific vet levels. But they never explain to the new player that because there are 5 more incarnate slots that will only take threads, and you need 5x more threads than shards to make the same thing, it makes perfect sense that threads drop more than shards. What I should have suggested instead was the vet level 1 drop 10-20 shards for the t-1 alpha (if they don't have it already) Or something along those lines so the folks that are literally pushing threads over shards can finally recognize if a player has shards - why not use them? They just tell them to convert into threads. In some cases, absolutely, the right, efficient move. But in probably half the cases, it's a foolish move. And I hate referring players to information on the forums. (I'll do it, of course) Having to tab out and read is just not my idea of a good time while trying to play. I get that we all had to learn the game in some fashion by reading, but the more we can get in game, the better.