Ukase
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Posts posted by Ukase
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20 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:
This is a counterpart to a recent thread about the Mothership Raid. I'd like to talk about the ITF and why it is one the best dungeons in an MMO. While there are some things about it that detract, overall I think its design is a runaway success.
To me, this dungeon hits several specific key marks:
- It encourages and allows every member of the team to participate
- It is not likely to be carried by a single player
- It respects the player's time by breaking the action into 4 purposeful missions, with no filler content
- It provides rewards to make it worth the effort
- It pits players against a variety of planned encounter types, including some all-boss and all epic boss spawns that create key "moments" that reward different build types
- It equally rewards AoE and single target damage
- It's approachable enough that even players who have never done it can probably follow the team and mostly understand what to do
- It is loaded with enemies who are dangerous in just the right way. Enemies have -Defense and very little mezz. Also there is some variety in enemy protection against mezz, which rewards using debuffs like -ToHit and Slow
I could expand on this but I think you're getting the point. IMO the ITF *is* City of Heroes. I'd love to see more content designed using it as a template, and not just for CoX. It stands out to me among MMO content as a high achievement.
I think I'm gonna hurl. I hate ITF.-
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11 hours ago, Without_Pause said:
Biggest thing I have seen is LotG: +Recharge not being a consistent 8 mil anymore. Numerous ones are being sold in the 6 mil area.
Umm....I can't say every day, but since the change to 0XP/2xINF, the price of Lotg 7.5% has dropped (at least when I look) from routine 7-8M to routine 6-7M.
I haven't seen it at a consistent 8M since then. Every now and then, sure. But mostly 6-7m.
I've definitely seen pvp IOs drop a good bit...but only in spurts. Not consistently.
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6 minutes ago, arcane said:
Addressed already, stfu 🙂
Um...I don't obey any suggestion with profanity, despite emoticons. Use proper words or you lose the argument.
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2 hours ago, Ston said:
You have to dedicate 12+ slots on Fiery Aura and Dark Armor to resist Lord Recluse's knockback on the MLTF. Rad Armor can make 2 mini-nukes with those slots and still have plenty of KB resist, resistance, absorb, regen, recovery, etc. to be an amazing tanker. This is incredibly unbalanced and should definitely be changed. Aside from Lord Recluse, there are plenty of attacks in the game that will require more than a couple KB protection slots. These slots are very valuable on armor sets that already have glaring weaknesses.
Sure, Fiery Aura has Burn and Fiery Embrace... and Dark Armor has Cloak of Fear and Oppressive Gloom... but are these powers really tradeoffs for KB resistance when you consider the tools their competitors have?
On the one hand, I see the point. Not everyone is like me, with different tanks that have different strengths & weaknesses.
If I am going to tank Recluse, it would never occur to me to bring a fire tank. I mean, it just wouldn't. There are so many other armors that are better suited to the task, so I'd just bring one of those.
I am curious, how one of my fire/ice tanks would fare, they've got pretty good resists across the board. And ultimately, I'd kite Recluse anyway. (is that still a thing? I think so. It's been ages since I've tanked LR.) And I use Glad Armor in a number of the armors, plus the kb protection, as well as six slotted Overwhelming Force. So, he doesn't get KB'd, except very rarely. Still, I'd love to free up the slots for something different.
I mean, Fire tanks are fun. In fact, for me, more fun than any of the others. Something about burn that just makes the weaker resists/defense, lack of DDR worth it to me.
But, not everyone is gonna think of it the way I do. I just wonder..if you re-tool this for Fiery Armor - what's the offset? That's what scares me. If they keep changing things, the games not going to the same game. And that is my concern. -
5 hours ago, arcane said:
Every set is carefully balanced.
Rubbish.
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5 minutes ago, Snarky said:
First I want to thank everyone for their responses.
Glad I could help.
For the rest of you folks - I strongly encourage you to recognize what the name "Snarky" means. If you find yourself getting riled, look at the name again, and chuckle.
One last thing about the MSR. I had a brute and respec'd it specifically to pursue vg merits in AE. I had thought that if I was going to afk farm, I might as well get vg merits as well as all the other goodies while I was at it.
From an efficiency perspective, my spines/fire outperforms it in fire maps. From a vg merit perspective, the number of vg merits earned are ...well, quite unremarkable. I can't recommend it. Someone else may have better luck, but I seriously doubt it. Even if I were to have somehow kayoed 10x as many for 10x as many vg merits, it still wouldn't have gotten me as much as an MSR. It did, however, defeat a poke in the eye on the satisfaction meter.
Hedgefund, whom I find myself terribly upset with because he has a better name than I do, stated that the MSR is the only way to get those rewards. Well, technically, he was incorrect, but the spirit of his comment is true. You're just not going to get 800 to 1500 vg merits (I always got more vg merits in the zone msrs than the instanced, but that may have been because on Excelsior, Apparition's MSRs didn't have a full league at the time. ) in 30 minutes doing anything else.
You might get a few hundred in an hour doing missions, but you're just not going to beat an MSR for VG merit gain. There is no substitute.-
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The problem with this question is the answers are going to be different for just about anyone you ask.
There are a few common threads, though.
Don't worry about your impact. Play what you will enjoy playing.
The beauty of CoH has always been about the ability to change your character; that is, to log off one character and begin to play another. It can be catching. They call it alt-itis, as if it were some sort of disease to be cured, but that's not the case. We have 1000 slots in this flavor of CoH. Make several versions of the same character if you wish, and as you train, perhaps choose different powers, or slot them differently. Whatever floats your figurative boat.
It can be said that there are a collection of players whose characters can simply stand in the middle of npcs and withstand whatever aggro they dish out without fear of defeat. Some of these players cannot dish out enough damage to defeat the npcs, though. Some can.
Some blasters can simply nuke them, kill them all in a couple of seconds - IF they don't get stunned or mezzed and die quickly. Some can mitigate the mez more easily and still nuke them quickly.
All of these players can do what they do, with or without you. Might as well be with you. I've only seen ONE jerk in this game who is specific about which AT/Powerset combo they'll accept onto their teams. And often, this same jerk literally quits mid-task force/trial, if there are players who do not read his mind and do what he wants them to do. He knows what to do, I think. But he doesn't relay his expectations to the team. As a result, half the team has no clue what to do on some occasions, and they fail. So, you wouldn't want to team with this guy, or guys like him anyway.
Nobody's going to complain about the buffs/heals you give. 90% of us are too focused on the task at hand to even notice any other player. We may notice if you are lagging behind. We may notice if you go on your own path. But if you're with the majority, nobody will notice that you're not attacking, but just buffing/debuffing/healing. That said, if nobody needs to be healed, and the buffs haven't worn off, it would be proper to have an attack chain ready to use, and to use them.-
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3 hours ago, arcane said:
That should probably lessen your opinion of yourself a bit, yikes 😢
Not a bit. The notion that someone just goes afk for 30 minutes should disappoint everyone who's actually playing their characters. Why should they get free xp/merits and do nothing but put one power on auto? Add to that - if you're on a team with several of those folks - your own rewards will be less for your trouble. It ain't right.
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15 minutes ago, KC4800 said:
The only thing I dislike about the MSR is that there is an exploration badge smack dab in the middle of the ship that you cannot get unless you partake in the MSR.
This isn't entirely true. You don't have to participate in the MSR to get this badge. Let the msr form, sit back, let the league clear pylons, then you have 30 minutes to simply fly over head, drop down into the bowl while solo, in the midst of all the chaos with all those team buffs going on, so you'll be fine. Check your chat box for the badge system message, then hop out and go about your merry way.-
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Oh my!
Anecdotally, when anyone one player clicks on a bomb, nobody else on that team can do so until 30 minutes has elapsed. Keep in mind, there are 18 total grates that contain a bomb in them.
So, if a team of 8 were to click 8 bombs, that still leaves 10 more grates with bombs in them. If nobody on your team has clicked - go for it. Fortunately, if someone on your team has clicked, you do get credit towards that bomb click badge. In some cases, if you time it just right, you can get 2 clicks per MSR.
I completely understand the frustration though! For every player I encounter that seems to "get it", and play with competence and civility, there's another couple of folks that are just in it for their own brand of fun, regardless of how that impacts with other players.
As for MSRs, I can only think of 3 reasons to do them.
The merits.The social chatter.
The badges.
Once you get the badges, the merits become less desirable. It's particularly maddening when you learn you have to do the msr one more time because your team didn't do at least 10% of the damage to get credit for the GM kill.
And, a peeve of mine has always been the folks who go to a different pylon instead of sticking together as a league. I get called petty for wanting those extra VG merits, and I'll take that label. I want 'em all!
Another annoying thing is the folks that go afk during it because they can. Put a power on auto-fire, target through an HVAS and come back in 30 minutes. What kills me is some are what I consider friends in this game, and it lessens my opinion of them a tiny bit. On one hand, I get it. It's dull, routine, and nobody seems to have an issue with it, so why not?Add to that, while it's been a good while since I've heard it, there used to be a loud minority who thought/(still think?) that stealth impacted spawns of Rikti. I've yet to see any proof of this, but I've no idea how to effectively test it. And ultimately, as someone once told me, "If they think it's true, then it's true for them. What's to be gained by proving them wrong?"
There's always the instanced MSR that @Apparition does. App used to do them on Excelsior, and for whatever reason, now does them on Torch. Hey, we get 5 free transfers a week. Wouldn't be a problem for me to switch servers if I wanted to do an instanced one. In those cases, everyone is at least level 35, so while some folks might still do the afk-thing, there's a lot less chance of needless team wipes because someone wanted to PL their character in an msr instead of a farm.
Or, could always just host one yourself. There's less lag in those - at least, that's my understanding. I don't get lag in either one, so I can't say.-
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On 2/7/2022 at 8:41 AM, Galaxy Brain said:
With this laid out, the question I have is why the dislike of them?
I should say, I don't dislike all of them. But, for me, here are my reasons, specifically against dual blades.
I like the idea of the game pointing out an optimal attack chain. The problem is - in my builds, anyway,
I run into using the initial attack (no circles to tell me which to use first), then, a second. Then I get a circled clue, mash that, then the 4th circled is ready, I do that, and then the next attack is ready, and then..the next attack is not recharged. By the time it does recharge, it's no longer circled.
Additionally, I haven't paid attention to the specific numbers, but these attack chains do not seem optimal. I seem to get higher dps from different attack chains. So what good are they if they aren't a clear benefit?
Premise: The combo mechanic (for dual blades, anyway) will ALWAYS be limited the way CoH is played presently. ALWAYS.
Why? Because it's depending on slotting. It's relying on the player to slot for recharge, rather than some other attribute. And even if you do, it's sometimes not enough recharge anyway. Sometimes, you have to opt for defense & resist over recharge, but a lot depends on what you're fighting and your playstyle, and your secondary armor choice.But if I'm just going off of feedback from the game - (do I have enough endurance? do I have enough defense? etc) - then I'm not always going to choose recharge to get that attack up and ready on queue.
Now, if each power's detailed info gave specific details on how much recharge was needed for a given power to be ready to fire, then perhaps I'd use the set more. A thousand cuts is a hoot to fire off in the midst of a mob. But, when the circled attacks aren't ready to fire when called for, it just fills me with frustration, and I'll soon log and choose something that doesn't rely on this stupid gimmick. I call the gimmick stupid because clearly, I'm too lazy/stupid to do the math to determine the proper route. But, should I really have to? It's the game's combat mechanic. If it's relying on recharge to use it properly, the detailed info tab for the attack should reveal the recharge required, or alternatively, adjust the damage from the attack accordingly. If used in 1 second - it deals X damage. If used in 2 seconds, it deals 2X damage, 3 seconds 3X damage, etc.
Of course, X should be some low scale value, with a cap of some higher value, so it's not taking unfair advantage.
But, hey, that's just my thoughts on it, since you asked the question.
As for Savage melee, I kind of like it...but I would prefer it give some notification beyond the icon in the buff bar. I was probably level 25 before I even knew what it was. I had seen no indication that I was building any kind of frenzy. Fury, yes. Frenzy? Those icons didn't really make themselves noticeable to me. And some attacks don't seem to give an icon at all. I just use Blood Thirst as a build up and don't really worry about building Frenzy.-
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So, this can be a bit of a rabbit hole, if we're not careful.
The math says that if it's YOUR characters, it can pay to have them on the same map.
It is true that each character doesn't get as much inf or xp when teamed as when solo - when looking at a per mob basis.
Examples were given earlier in this thread to illustrate this fact.
So, if they're both your accounts, if the mood strikes you, put one on follow to the other and burn the baddies as you see fit. It may be worth your while to tab in/out to the alt to make use of Destiny/Judgement buffs, if that's your cup of tea. I honestly can't be bothered, I'm an afk type guy. I don't care how fast the map clears. I make more from the drops than from the inf from the kills.
As far as best pairing? Don't fix what's not broken. You can go with a pair of spines/fire, a pair of rad/fire, or one of each. They're pretty much the same. That's the beauty of the fire farmer. In that environment, there's no need to complement it with anything. It's good solo. Put burn on auto and walk away.-
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Six-six, who was the first responder in this post captured my position on poison quite well.
I'm someone who's never played Poison before. I had read a thread somewhere in these forums where someone went to great lengths explaining the positive traits of this power set. So, I made one. I got to level 13 before I concluded that it simply doesn't put out enough DPS to suit me.
So, you can put me in the camp of one who simply didn't enjoy it, so deleted the character in pursuit of something else. You could also make the case that I don't understand the set well enough to play it where it would be enjoyable.
You may thank me now - I just read over my response and trimmed four paragraphs as unnecessary! -
Rather than make a new thread, figured I'd resurrect this, as it's on point, but on the other end of the spectrum.
This recipe only calls for TWO common items! I've certainly never seen this before. -
Maybe someone knows...I do not.
This morning, the Nemesis Event was triggered in Steel Canyon. We started slow, with just a team for the first few minutes, but eventually got more than 3 full teams, after maybe 5 minutes.
After about 20 minutes of spawning Nemesis...the event ended and nobody got the Nemesis Plot badge. That seems kind of strange to me. I have been trying to think as to why this didn't happen, and my only conclusion is he spawned, but a drone took him out, despite our being far away from Positron and any other npcs. They spawn where the player characters are, so if someone was training, he could have spawned there, as well as where the league was, right?
Is there some other mechanic I'm missing, why we didn't get badge credit? -
4 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:
That's what they always say right before they get arrested!
Seriously though, it's nice to see it spelled out like this. I'm not ever hurting for money, but I wouldn't mind having a larger chunk ever-present to draw from. Now if I can just get past the "this is boring like homework" aspect of the whole thing...
The only way I ever did homework was when I liked the teacher. If I didn't like the teacher, it just wasn't gonna happen. So, to that end, in order to graduate, I had to find things about the teacher to like. Harder for some than others.
With marketing, for me, it's often a hoot to be there, at level 2, with the AH open, and starting with zip, being able to kit out the character with all the toys in short order. Doing it all by myself, only tangentially relying on others who sell recipes for reasons that escape my logic. I've only ever sold common recipes on the AH, and those were for a badge. But, some folks, instead of vendoring for 80-110k, will list on AH for 1 inf.
It is these people that I must credit for my billions. It would have all taken me much longer to get there, otherwise. Still, I get a kick out of doing it. Call me a masochist, I guess. I also like relying solely on the rng to slot out a character every now and then. I would probably do it with every character if the npcs would follow the games original rng and have Hellions drop magic DOs, (or SOs), Trolls drop Mutation enhancements, etc. And lord help me, I don't get why an End Mod enhancement (or common recipe) is so damn rare to drop.-
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Purchase? You guys are crazy enough to actually bid for and BUY an IO?
Surely you jest.
I thought you guys knew better. Have I taught you nothing?
In this game, just like in life, "Every dollar (inf) you save multiplies to the bottom line." - A.M. Agapos, Economist (deceased)
Agapos was the smartest professor I ever had the privilege to learn from. Now, I don't think he was famous, or anything, like Friedman, but I suspect he was on par. He wrote the most tedious book I ever didn't finish: Government-Industry and Defense: Economics and Administration.
We've established that if you have a farmer, converters are free, via emp merit conversion. We also know that when you farm, either afk, or actively, the rng gives you recipes. Some common & uncommon, a few rare, and on occasion the very rare. Why would you buy?
Yeah, I know, I know. Time is money, and there's no wrong way to turn a buck. And if it works, by all means, proceed, I'm just being silly.
Hopefully, the OP will suffer through the first several lines and see this:
NEVER buy a recipe with merits! I would venture to say that the most that pvp IO should cost you is 2m to buy the recipe. (They're attuned, remember?) The rare salvage is now going for less than 500k. So, crafting, salvage and recipe for this item would be certainly less than 2.5m. 3M if you just had to buy it all instantly. And, if you couldn't stomach the idea of crafting, it would be what? 5m? 6m at the most?
100 reward merits for a recipe that YOU have to craft and spend another 500K inf on, and if it was level 50...how much more to craft it, another 500k or so. When you could have just about instantly sold the converters from those reward merits for 18M at least, after AH fees.
Yes, that was an insane purchase with merits. I get that for some folks, they have more merits than inf, and clicking can be tedious. But just break it down into smaller portions, sell them as you earn them, and it's not so bad. Or reach out to me and I'll buy them in bulk, as a courtesy. (70k each)
Just know you'll always make more using converters than selling them.-
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18 hours ago, DoctorDitko said:
Sorry to see you go!
(On the other hand, now you can free-lance as a consultant at twice the pay!)
Farewell!
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That's the one good thing about the market. We are very, very rarely sure who's doing what. Someone might say it's them...but it might not be. I'm still inclined to believe there's a dozen or so folks that just farm and/or just market every spare moment they have. They just stockpile the inf.
That's part of the reason I'd love to see a bank of sorts. I used to check in with the City Hall registrar often to see which group was "winning" the prestige war. And for the sake of nostalgia, this was a shot taken the day the servers shut down. (on Liberty) -
I was just trying to be helpful. No gifts/donations are necessary.
But if you already sent it, I'll find a home for it, be assured. -
A darn shame I only had one to sell...but maybe I'll buy more! Who knows how many bids for this clear error are left?
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I usually only present my sage wisdom on the market, or badge acquiring details. And then, only in the help channel. From time to time, I'll see someone in the SG present a dilemma about wanting X, but only having enough inf to get 1/3 of X, or something like that. Then I simply DM them my very long, detailed methods for acquiring 300X while they sleep.
Sometimes, I'll see someone give what they think is the right or optimal answer, but it's not presented in a way that lets a newer player understand all the nuances at play. Like the old "Shard vs Thread" controversy. Then I'll chime in with more information, always being sure that they understand that the RNG can only do so much. Back on live, it was more commonly known that an ITF would get you an Ancient Nictus Fragment - and you'd forgo merits and such to get the component. (some wouldn't, they'd grab the merits and let the shards drop when they drop) Run the right TFs in pursuit of those components (MSR for the Gr'ai matter, Lady Gray for Hero 1 DNA component) and you can fill the alpha sooner than later.
But that's a whole other topic.
Or, I'll see someone suggest using merits for recipes to maximize inf - which is simply bad advice, as it's not true. Granted, there are occasional circumstances when the price of certain Winter-Os may exceed the revenue from selling 300 converters acquired from the 100 reward merits you'd spend on the aforementioned Winter-O. But, given the volume of cheaper winter packs in circulation, that circumstance isn't likely to be the case for another year.
In those cases, I simply can't help myself. I have to be helpful and share the math.-
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I've not made it a secret that I deal with PvP IOs in the market. While I do have a character that only does this, in the past few months, I've only checked in with the character a couple of times a week. I've actually been enjoying a Savage/Shield brute lately; it's been a bit of a distraction.
But, like all good things, they come to an end. Each of my alts typically starts with zero, and I let them earn their own billion to use and/or hold as the mood strikes me.
So, knowing my own character was idle in this area, I set out small, just going for the small kills...buying enhancements & recipes & salvage cheap, selling them to a vendor to get some start up inf.
Buy a few level 41 resist recipes, converting, selling. Nothing 90% of you haven't done yourselves from time to time. Certainly not on a large scale. Just enough to get me a few million to get starting in the area that has served me well.
While I haven't been getting the usual 8-10M I'm used to, I'm okay with it. But, when I slapped 30 of them in the AH, and they all sold instantly for 7k, I have to wonder who the rascal is that's buying them...and if my math is right, and I can somewhat trust the "bidding" and "For sale" numbers, they are simply reposting them. I can't definitively state it, but that's what it "feels" like.
So, let's say that I'm not a savvy marketer, just someone who's trying to follow MY suggestions that I've made in this forum and others - you've just armed someone with all the influence they need to buy more and sell more in your efforts to try to keep the prices up to where they've been, instead of this downward trending price of 6-8M instead of 8-10M.
I'm not trying to discourage anyone from anything - I'm just wondering if maybe this is a bad strategy on the part of this player buying and re-listing for higher (if that's indeed what's happening. Seems that way to me.) It may work in the short run, but I think it's gonna take you a while to unload these, cuz I'm fairly sure there's other players in this niche that are already wise to this tactic.
And for those of you that aren't in this niche - suggest, if you're in the market, be patient. The lower bid prices will probably fill sooner than they otherwise would. -
I basically just went in and killed Mistah-Static. Got zero souvenirs. The mission would complete if I cleared the mobs around him, so I left them alone.
As it turns out - my desire to save time by saving this mission just shows how fuzzy my thinking is. I have 6 characters that have Tarnished Star already. I can just have any of them run the arc for Tarnished Star. I don't know why my brain didn't go there in the first place, but it didn't.
*******************************So, I went ahead and completed it - with an alt that hadn't done Freaklympics. I am unclear about how these Souvenirs work. The mission was completed, my alt was on the map, remained on team until the team lead called it in after it was over, and my alt still doesn't have the souvenir. Apparently it's a mission holder only type deal. Not a big deal, but I had thought this would have worked.
ITF is great, and possibly one of the best designs in MMO history
in General Discussion
Posted
Fixed that for you. ITF isn't fun for ME. You can go nuts on it if you like, I will avoid it unless it's the weekly.