battlewraith

It's an opinion based on my experience. I said "relatively" minimal effort. I don't give a crap about badges and still have some of those "Master of" badges. The only thing extreme about it is expecting players to read and follow instructions. Badging is time consuming, I'll give you that. So in terms of spending time doing it, yes it takes a lot of effort. But the majority are for things like exploration, killing certain numbers of enemies, doing game activities, etc.

Badgers want every badge to be available on all of their characters with relatively minimal effort. So anything that requires a challenge or style of play that is out of the ordinary will get pushback. Let alone an accolade that actually grants some sort of combat advantage. Sad but true.

LOL, no. There's a reason you invest billions of inf in special IOs and grind out incarnate powers. And it's not to be mediocre in comparison to other people's performance. You completely glossed over the point of that post. The secondary approach you're talking about is completely hypothetical. It assumes that those upgraded pets, if summoned over and over, would be sufficient to zerg hard content. Nonsense. Those trash pets would get rolled over without having the backup of the secondaries. The closest anyone has come to supporting this notion was Rudra and his hilariously underwhelming "lazy day"-- walking an IOed build through 0-2/+3 content. And that only worked because after each fight, he'd stop and let the pets rest up.

This doesn't make any sense. You're describing two different scenarios. In the first, you have a build (and presumably a "strategic" playstyle) where you try to keep the pets alive. This is the world that current MM players live in. One that involves a lot of repetitive upgrading because the pets die if you are doing content that actually poses a challenge. They die while you are actively trying to keep them alive and they have been upgraded. In the second scenario, you build for recharge and end reduction and just zerg the enemies. Mmmm okayy.. but if you gimped your build to prioritize recharge and end reduction (and took less pains to keep them alive with the secondary)--there's no reason to expect better success than in scenario #1. It just sounds like an ongoing cascading failure unless your strategy is to constantly run away, respawn the pets and then come back. If that's what floats your boat, but it's not an improvement over the first scenario. A Kitted out MM with incarnates should be able handle something like +4/+8. And I think you're right that the OP won't make these struggles easier because the suggestion is about quality of life, not about making them stronger. And if you're saying that this change and the zerging you imagine won't help in higher difficulty--than that's kind of an admission that that objection is baseless.

I'm curious how people picture the carnival of shadows masks actually working. The descriptions I've read on places like the wiki describe them as porcelain masks. I've always pictured it as, once the mask is put on, it actually becomes the wearer's face. So the effect would be like whiteface and makeup rather than actually wearing a mask. The old comic from the retail days seemed to support this somewhat--when Vanessa becomes pissed her mouth is clearly represented as an actual mouth moving, not the static opening of a mask. This would also make sense in terms of porcelain mask breaking easily, restricting vision, and being a potential weakness if someone could just run up and pull it off of your face. Also, despite the fact that all of the carnies are psychically connected, there is still some sense of individuality as indicated by the various named bosses. Anyways, just curious on people's takes.

Because people change their minds about things? Or maybe they'll find some other solution to address the issue? Why spend so much time arguing with people if you're convinced that it's never going to happen anyway?

Your posts always read like a confession. I think what actually happens is they disagree with me for x reason. I argue with x reason. People dig in and they get offended. I think that's the cost of not living in a silo.

It doesn't even sound like you read the post you quoted entirely. I'm perfectly fine with open discussion, I'm also not the one clamoring for threads to be locked, people being forced to stay on topic, etc. My suggestion was really about disingenuous posters weighing in on everything out of self-interest or habit. I think it would be better if they didn't feel so entitled to derail discussions and then clutch their pearls and demand threads get locked when their feedback isn't appreciated. I certainly don't see how this would make anything worse.

Back in the day I had a dm/inv scrapper and it was badass, I could herd all of the wolves on that one AV map and bring them all over to the corner where the blasters would nuke them. If you were one of the people waiting, you'd see this writhing carpet of wolves approaching. People want fun. They want something epic. And they will always seek out the option that is different, the one that allows them to outperform in a cool way. Under those circumstances, you expect the cool thing to be nerfed. Even things that are just somewhat overperforming get nerfed. When that happens, the fun experience is gone. Nobody gets anything positive out of it--people just don't have a reason to be jealous of other players. But that type of player just thinks perfect balance is wonderful. Unfortunately, I think they are the easiest to please.

I know plenty of people that left the game because it was the same old thing. The people that moved on, for whatever reason, far exceeded those that stayed. But by your logic, making things more or less generically useful is a huge win because there's a population that keeps on playing. It's a myopic assumption. And even if it does point to some factor that is integral to the game's success, it doesn't follow that everything has to be either rock, paper, scissors or blandly generically useful.

I find that to be worse than what he posted.

I think that kind of sums up the problem though. "Every AT with any combination of powersets will have a place at the table" in practical terms means a bland sameness to the game. There will still be favorites, but the end goal is to make characters broadly interchangeable. And the things that might make a specific set or build stand out get nerfed into mediocrity so that nobody else feels insecure that their character 's performance in general. An example of this mindset, for me is impale. Back in the early days, impale had a long range like a sniper. It was a cool little feature that I liked about the set. Then at some point the devs nerfed the range "to bring it in line with other ranged attacks blah blah blah," Why? It's not like impale was a super damaging power that was upsetting game balance. It just fell prey to this impulse to put everything into neat little predictable boxes. I has hoped early on that the different sets would be given different zones or TFs or somewhere that they would shine, Instead they went with the assumption that the entire game is one table(except for pvp) where anything should perform at the same level in any context.

If you're at the bottom of a dogpile, it's going to take some tenacity to crawl out from beneath it. That was the point of the statement you quoted. One engenders the other. If you make a suggestion and the usual suspects show up with the usual complaints, which they make repeatedly--there's your dead horse in tiny pieces. There's an implicit bias in that direction.

As I said before, I don't have a problem with your moderation. It's a mostly thankless job with limited tools to work with. If I can offer a suggestion, it would be to manage expectations maybe slightly differently. At least with respect to this subforum. In my experience, there are a group of players that view themselves as helpers. And quite frequently the "help" is about explaining why an idea is bad in their opinion. This is wholly unnecessary. Ideas sink off the page fairly quickly. If you don't like something, don't engage. All these individuals are doing is making the thread tedious and contentious for people who may actually be interested in the topic. Furthermore they tend to bring the same litany of objections to every discussion and then complain about repetition. I'm not against people objecting to an idea. I'm against people treating these threads as a "cleanup in aisle 5." If you have no interest in an idea and think it's horrible, by all means say so. But then move on. If you look at the "phantasm sucks" thread, it went on for a while with people making the same repetitive assertion that changing phantasm would be a buff to the set and therefore they were against it. At one point someone said "this thread is done, gms put a fork in it." That's the mentality I'm referencing. "I made my good arguments against this, now stop the discussion." The thing is, the thread did not get locked and people kept discussing it. And I noticed in the recent beta patch notes: Known issue: Phantasm is stupid. That's the point. The hope is to get a message across to the developers, not convince a subset of forum regulars. Someone taking the initiative to articulate a suggestion shouldn't be condemned to playing whack-a-mole with people who are simply not interested in the idea.

I think we, as a community, should probably be more empathetic to the deep trauma associated with being a second-class Kheldian. And maybe this trauma could explain some of the personality disorders that we see crop up in other places. At the very least, tell your doctor.