Clave Dark 5

Any of the Maria Jenkins (sp?) arc, anytime I end up on a team and then step onto one of those maps I sigh; usually I just never go if I know that's what the team's up to, and I'll quit after the first one. Might as well be farming in the AE. Not much else! I play this game for the fun of being a superhero flying and around zapping bad guys or whatever, not to concentrate on numbers - that's like being given a handful of candy bars and just sitting around measuring and weighing them, you've missed the point!

I'll agree such seems to be worse today; I understand that drivers have gotten worse since the pandemic alone, but Live was not half as bad as things are now. Live devs tried to contain most farming, HC devs do not, only the most exploitive aspects (see: Scrapyard). HC devs have made any number of changes to the game to make life easier for players such as making IOs cheap and plentiful in ways they absolutely never were on Live. Zoom to 50 with a couple of hours, slot your your cookie-cutter slots with cookie cutter IOs and T4-out your Incarnate powers by the end of the day and you're ready to farm! A heavily-IOed out toon can speed-run and/or eradicate crowds of foes unlike anything we saw on Live, and now anything less than that is taken as a profound insult to such numbers-obsessed players (you can probably find examples in nearly any section of these forums, keep your eyes open). I don't think think that's "just people" I think that's learned behavior... and probably "enabled" behavior as well, much as I generally like our devs.

Discussing this topic casually on a recent team, it dawned on me that farming may very well be the source - the sugar rush leveling, speed runs, the chasing metrics of "merits-per-hour etc. Some people maybe did some rushing just for the sake of "can I make this work?" which can be fun, but dear god anymore it's an insult to wait for hardly anything; just today saw someone advertising for a Katie H and after the second LFG chat post, said, "I don't wait to take all day to gather a team." Farming, and those "I've played this game a lot, I don't have the time to do a normal run but I still bizarrely feel I deserve all the rewards anyway" types. These are also the sort to downvote anyone pointing this out, ha ha. And there's that whole people-being-jerks-online things, which is a bigger problem than in just this gamer. 😃

Yeah, we've all been there once or twice at least. Kung FOOOOO!

https://www.inquirer.com/entertainment/tv/norm-macdonald-death-frank-stallone-saturday-night-live-snl-20210915.html

I've seen people do this with Hurricane running, and there's Water attacks that just turn my screen into basically static. TAB is your friend, you'll probably make it through on that.

Yep, you guessed it: Frank Stallone.

Or kitten fists!

@MonteCarla And you overthought it well, can't deny it!

I often seem to get pairs of recipe drops like that, and always some of the least valuable ones, sigh.

Really anything you like, play what you enjoy playing and can all agree on, no need to overthink this.

I've seen this image as part of a story that there's accusations of using AI to generate art; no idea of that's true though. This basically reminds me Tod McFarland (sp?) drawing Spiderman's webbing, it's more exciting because it's more detailed! Meanwhile in the real world: girl, you need to buy a brush.

Many players* now feel that hunting out short cuts to fast and easy rewards is the best and only reasonable way to play, that's why we get threads here like "what's the fastest way to get merits?" I figure AE farming really set up that sugar rush mentality for them. But yeah, better mission design all round helps. My fave example is Summer Block Buster: you're capped to (what is it, 35?), no hiding behind your purples and Incarnates, no speed running around half the arena battles or anything. You have to know how to play, not snooze your way through. *who weirdly taking insult when I ever say these things, but I'm used to it by now ha ha.

And which one winds hands down for having more visual panache? I'll take Nems every time. Also,

I'll still call them wrong for cheating at the game*, mainly because they're missing the fun of it all and will get bored awfully fast. 😃 But I know that's just me. Agreed on the bit about "mofo" though. *I mean, the devs didn't design it to be played that way, and speedruns are intended to get the same rewards faster and with less effort, so the term feels applicable.

Water Blast set with a wild array of colors + the fish head. Maybe Open Labcoat to simulate an artist's smock.

Not punish but the evolve up to meet the power creep (that they themselves have encouraged and created). Although I have sympathy with your stance, I fairly often don't bother to obsessively number-crunch every build, chase every accolade no matter how bored I am of Citadel or whatever... This game used to be more for casual play, and while it still largely is, the creep has crept just a bit more...

OK, "it would seem that the means to accomplish this dissuades Devs from making this a priority, because players have asked for this since before Live shut down." There's levels of difficuly to be considered. I probably could fly using tarps and sticks, or at least glide, but the difficulty of achieving it means it's probably not worth it. Or to put it country simple, "a dog can kill a skunk, but it aint worth it." I seriously doubt the devs sat around "ya wanna fix the name thing with that server suffix idea? Nah, let's make some Council guys rez." Not at all in the same ballpark, unless I guess you want to hold some seething distrust for the Devs.

Indeed, this idea is very old at this point, I'd think we would have had it by now if we could.

Comic books alone published hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of heroic stories up until what the 1980s? Superman alone wasn't focuses on the times he got lazy or deteriorating. There were movie series, westerns, pulps, and you can even go back further to Homer Beowulf... heroes aren't dull. Only writers are. That's a failure of current imagination.

"This doesn't make sense" ha ha! Anyways, cheap shots aside, yeah, tired of "the Jedi were all failures or corrupt or worse," plus the go-to for current pop culture "ooohh, these bad guys are really bad-ass, doesn't that make them interesting?" No, that makes them bad, not bad-ass. Heroes are passe these days, which is exactly why we need more of them, not failures and corrupted people. That aside, the samurai-leaning takes in The Mandalorean were it's best aspects, so that leaning here might work out. Just please no more CGI rock-fights like Obi-Wan degenerated into.

Nope. I don't like repeating power sets usually (I know I wouldn't have to, of course), and and I just don't care for red side - played there a bit on Live when it came out, got real tired of being squashed like an damned bug all the time. Maybe I'm a better player now, but still have no desire to go back to face that possibility of irritation ha ha

People run BAF all the time, and I have seen and done a few of the others; I'm not a big fan of them so I don't generally pay much attention for them though. But yeah, on the flip side, people are using their Incarnate powers everywhere else. Meanwhile here I am even rarely dropping a Lore outside top level stuff because it feels like cheating to me... like a chump!

Yikes! Say... did you try updating Vidiot Maps recently? I started having problems with that for a bit when I did last time a couple of weeks ago. It later cleared itself up a little bit later, without my intervention, iirc.

@Nostromo21 Even if you make some "mistakes" and you can't hit perma-Dom, the character will very most likely still be quite playable. Maybe you can't make insane-o runs thru solo TFs at 4/8, but still playable! My most recent Dom is at Vet Level 30 or so, and she never reached perma, and is still a beast. I usually PUG, but Doms are about the safest soloists (apply hold, then move in to attack the helpless), apart from Stalkers, but both may be a tad slow for today's cracked-out style of play. Most of the sets listed above aren't all that pricey TBH either; heck, shoot me a forums-note with your global and I'll send you some Inf. Early Doms can be rough, but when they start to bloom later, woo boy, the wait is worth it!