tidge
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Posts posted by tidge
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3 hours ago, BlackSpectre said:
Rich Gameplay:
Variety:
Depth:
Gameplay: I wouldn't say the gameplay is "rich", even if I find it rewarding. The basic gameplay is "defeat enemies" with a sometimes addition of "click glowie". It isn't as if there are a ton of alternate win conditions or even strategies that don't require one or both of the above. The only alternate win conditions I can think of are costumes and base building, but those aren't games everyone plays. I guess marketeering might count as a minigame that requires no physical combat.
Variety: We do get a LOT of variety within the narrow gameplay restrictions... and via Ouroborous we can even replay a LOT of it... including stuff we missed while leveling up.
Depth: Because it is very likely to miss level-appropriate content without disabling XP, I'd say the game is pretty deep. We do get to start blue, red, or gold.
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I can't speak for Ice or Stone, as I've never used them as armors... but Invulnerability is nearly perfect, except for its joke of a T9... MHO is that if Unstoppable could be traded for 4 more inspiration slots I think I'd respec immediately to take advantage of it. It can be a mule for an IO without investing any slots, but that is about it for ultimate utility IMO.
In my experience with Invulnerability, it doesn't particularly shine at low levels (resistances don't mean much, and toggles drain endurance) without relying on temp powers or global IOs (starting at level 10)... so some ATs may feel 'slower to start' than others... and running all the toggles can make it feel like "where is my sustain?"... but because of the way the resistance are grouped with certain toggles it isn't necessary to keep them all toggled on, or even to take each of them ASAP. For example: I've often delayed Resist Energies until the late 20s because there is some pool power that would be more useful to me below that level.
If given the choice between a Dull Pain (+MaxHP, Heal) and an Absorb (with or without a secondary effect)... it would be something of a close call for me. For 99% of the games content I don't even touch Dull Pain.... so a faster recharging Absorb would probably suit me better. It's the last 1% of the content for which I'm comfortable working below full Health but want a heal and +MaxHP before things go truly pear-shaped that would probably get me to stick with Dull Pain... there are just too many extra things I've built into my Invulnerables that kick in once the Green bar starts burning. (Like %+HP, %Absorb, Scaling Damage Resistance). It's possible of course that if I hung sufficiently below top HP and also got Absorb it would go even better... but for some content my Invuln Tanks feel like they can hang longer than my Rad Tanks.
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I definitely agree with the @Neiska sentiment that there appears to be a peculiarity amongst some 'measurers' by which nerfs get called for... and both Pylon and Trapdoor metrics contribute to it, specifically with their 'DPS/defeat times'. I was super impressed by Ston's attempt to compare three melee classes... and when each of them solo, across (almost) all of their primary/secondary choices finish certain specific content within percentage points of one another, it was declared to be the end-of-game-balance. To this day, I don't see why three different melee classes achieving parity of completion times (by leveraging all possible tricks at their disposal) is seen as anything except a success for balance.
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I don't understand the use of the word "grind" to describe playing the game. No one needs to grind to accumulate stuff... just complete content and get rewards. Some minigames don't even need players to complete content: The costume editor is free (up to level 10), the base editor is no cost.
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2 hours ago, battlewraith said:
No the argument I was making was intended to illustrate that there are different types of players with different motivations. It was a rebuttal to your characterization of other players as unclever and/or stubborn because they won't conform to your standards of how the game should be played.
Please describe to me what this hypothetical player of yours is going to do in game, given that they aren't motivated enough to have stuff from the AH or base storage, unless that stuff is free. I have no preference on how people play the game, I literally just want to know what you think they are going to be doing that isn't
22 hours ago, battlewraith said:because they have done so thousands of times over the course of twenty years.
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1 hour ago, lemming said:
Sorta. I think I decided to run both sides and I forget if it was red or blue that enforced that, and the other side did not.
I've seen the same behavior each side, and (from memory) the timer from once side applies to the other side as well. It is possible to rerun the arcs as often as desired for 5 merits, but each 'extra' reward is (essentially) once-per-week.
The extra rewards are similarly time-locked, for characters that qualify (e.g. Astral Merits for level 50s)
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The first time you repeat one of those arcs, you can claim an extra 20 merits. After the first repeat, you can repeat an arc once per week for 20 merits.
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33 minutes ago, battlewraith said:
It's also a distorted view of the people you're criticizing. People don't avoid things like the AH because their widdle tiny brains are not clever enough to use it to make enough money to skip grinding. They avoid it because they don't like it for some reason. Maybe it breaks immersion. Maybe they ask questions like this: "why am I sitting here engaging with a fake economy when there's a real economy I should be worrying about? "I bought this game to pew pew things with energy bolts, if I'm going to be buying and selling this much, shouldn't I be playing Farmville or something?"
So your argument is: people don't want to play the game they were given... a game that gives them what they want... so we should just give them stuff they want so they don't have to play the game? You don't need to buy anything to pew-pew with energy bolts... unless you pick an AT that doesn't have energy bolts, at which point the game lets you buy energy bolts (Plasmatic Taser).... but maybe you want those to be free too?
36 minutes ago, battlewraith said:This is not rocket science. By way of analogy--you start the game with a bicycle and after progressing though content you end up with the option of building a hotrod.
And then you either drive the hotrod around all the time, or you repeat the process. Most people will repeat the process.
Over and over and over and over again. For over 2 decades (lol).
Maybe you should buy an analogy, because this free one seems to only be 4/7 complete.
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From my MM (not a Corruptor) I found that 4-slotting Undermined Defenses (reasonable set bonuses, plus Recharge), a level 50+5 Accuracy and a %-Res piece was optimal. Any %Damage wasn't noticeable compared to getting a "damage boost" via -Res for the henchmen.
There is a slight subtlety (for me) for the choice between Achilles and Annihilation: Enemy critters can only have one %debuff from a particular (proc) source at a time, a second application from anyone simply extends the duration of the debuff... my MM happens to have a lot of powers that take Annihilation, so (when solo) there is a balance between maybe extending the duration of a smaller -Res, or maybe getting some periods of a bigger -Res.
On 7/5/2025 at 12:52 PM, Maelwys said:Poison Trap from /Traps doesn't proc well either
I find Poison Trap to be excellent for Superior Entomb's Recharge /%+Absorb.
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Is Dull Pain not a thing?
EDIT: If this is about wanting a sustain... I don't see the need. In my experience, Invulnerability doesn't need to run all of its (resistance, travel) toggles all the time. and as a practical matter slotting them with Resistance, Resistance/Endurance gets them pretty good values and lower End costs. No matter the AT, there probably should be some Endurance reduction in attacks.
For Regeneration: The large Tanker/Brute HP pool already puts them high on the HP-refill side, a single slot of Power Transfer %Heal is shockingly good for those ATs. The contribution to slotting a single Healing/EndMod pieces in Health/Stamina goes far (for all AT), even before considering IO globals.
The only hard-to-get bit of 'layering' survivability for Invuln from my PoV is Absorb... if a desired change to Invuln is requested, a choice between a +Absorb and Dull Pain makes more sense to me than to ask for a Sustain.
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- I don't use the changeling exploit,
- I don't mind that it exists,
- I do wish players would only use it solo.
The Kheldian HEATs can be IMO a pretty miserable AT to play, at least once I've experienced their arcs.
Many ideas have been kicked around in the HEAT subforum, I get the sense that the reason the changeling exploit hasn't been addressed is:
- Folks literally can't figure out how to disable it without somehow eliminating/highly restricting a key feature of the AT (i.e. changing forms)
- The HC powers team hasn't (through reluctance, blind spots, whatever) demonstrated a willingness to directly increase damage output on the scale that would be necessary to otherwise make Kheldians compete with non-control ATs
I am putting very little judgment behind the second bullet point... it's more that because the Nova form attacks don't ever really become better than low/mid-tier blasts, and the Dwarf form isn't supposed to be a DPS form I get the sense that the powers team is pretty stymied about what an alternate to changeling would even look like.
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On 7/6/2025 at 7:02 PM, Frosty15 said:
Do iTrials drop hero merits?
Hero/Villain merits are a currently just a 'higher denomination' of Reward merits. The $50 bill to the $1 bill as it were.
The game has a cap on 9999 Reward merits, so a merit vendor allows players to effectively exceed that cap. It is also a convenient way to email merits between alts on an account.
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10 hours ago, battlewraith said:
In other words, if they avoid doing things that they don't enjoy the game becomes even more grindy--but that's just them being stubborn and dumb in your estimation.
I never called players dumb. Stubborn about what they won't do, sure. Unclever because they can't figure out how to play only the content they want without figuring out how to do it.
You are going to have to explain how each of the following is simultaneously true:
- A player who doesn't want to play content (which rewards them with powers, slots and means to get enhancements for the powers and slots), and
- A player who wants a full-kit character with all powers, slots, and their preferred enhancements
It looks like one of the poster-children is a player that only wants to play level 50 content... and won't accept anything less than a fully-slotted character... which if is the case, that sort of player is pretty much skipping over a LOT of the game's content just to grind their preferred content. There is nothing wrong with this, but let's not pretend that such a playstyle is being kept behind some gate... Play level 50 content and leverage the rewards from that.
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27 minutes ago, battlewraith said:
I read a couple people saying that in this thread and I'm not sure what they're smoking. Yeah if you have some big stockpile of resources, there is no grind. If you don't, there is a fair amount of grind setting up a new character whether you have 50s or not.
If a player is playing content (even Farming! even below 50!) the game provides a LOT, even if that player never visits the AH. One simple example: Merits can be converted into recipes and some IOs directly. My initial HC character simply ran a lot of content via Ouroboros well below level 50 and accumulated hella many Merits. That character did have something not currently available: the ability to earn Inf at the expense of XP, but I wasn't earning much Inf relatively speaking (such as level 49s could at that time). This ended up funding my next character, and so on. I don't think I decided to make some bank on the AH until maybe my fourth character, as I was having too much fun playing the game without the AH.
The "magic" about having a level 47+ is this: once level 50 common IO recipes drop, each of them vendors (on average) for 100Kinf, so it takes little time to accumulate Inf... of course if the player eschews content that rewards merits and also ignores the AH completely, that's being stubborn as opposed to clever.
For those two stubborn forum members who insist on never leveling their large stable of alts above 30, and also insist upon upgrading SOs... and complain about these choices... again, I'd judge that to be a "not clever" strategy. If the game is a grind for them, it isn't because they can't afford what they want.
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1 hour ago, battlewraith said:
I think a clever player would understand that this is actually an indictment of the game. It's saying that, if you remove the grindy aspects, the actual gameplay, design, worldbuilding, etc. doesn't really amount to much of a game. A clever player would also likely realize that people who skip over leveling, earning enhancements, etc. probably do so because they have done so thousands of times over the course of twenty years.
So why would people not ask for free badges, free XP, etc.? For anyone who has played to level 50 and beyond, there is no "grind" involved with getting 99%+ of what is available on the market. Especially not if they've played thousands of times over the course of twenty years.
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The mechanics of the game are pretty well-understood (by me, for me), so my (solo) enjoyment has been coming up with a concept, translating into a new AT/primary/secondary and running with it.
The Homecoming variant has a tremendous number of Quality-of-Life-over-Live improvements which allow for all sorts of drudgery to be side-stepped. In particular, I find the changes to the market and other means of earning enhancements to have been life-changers.
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On 6/30/2025 at 1:50 AM, BurtHutt said:
I am also wondering about a good secondary. I think I'll try ELEC as I don't have it on a troller yet. Thoughts on this? What about time?
This is the combination I've decided to try... I also haven't tried an Elec Controller yet. The character is still low level, and I'm mostly soloing to get a feel for the Primary poers. Eventually I will reconfigure the character to work in more of the Secondary, I like that this is a bit of a balancing act with when to take the ally-affecting powers from the Secondary.
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There is no need for more Incarnate powers IMO.
The Incarnate system was one game tacked onto another game, with (on Live) extra grind for subscribers.
In terms of "Game Lore"... I don't love the Incarnate add-ons, mostly because the Live dev team essentially broke the 'evergreen' nature of the CoX content. Dark Astoria was reworked... I'm still not a fan, but I can't argue that it was (next to Terra Volta) probably the least engaging of the Hazard zones. Praetoria was canonically destroyed... this is far more upsetting, since the First Ward story demonstrated just how to make an 'evergreen' zone. Let's not talk about Galaxy City. All signs were pointing to the Live dev team growing both bored and desperate, which was a deadly combination for a narrative game.
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One of the few things I'd change: Critters should have some amount of travel suppression like players do. I find it especially frustrating on fliers that zip away at super-speed. I understand that the original dev team had a fascination with HUGE body types often having superspeed and an immunity/resistance to almost all forms of control, so I see the grounded ones as more of a lol focused at players... but rando Cabal etc. that simply make an attack and then hightail to some corner of a map is pretty annoying.
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20 hours ago, OdinAZ said:
This works for what I am envisioning. As a side question, why don't yo see many Dominators? I've played controllers before and thought, "I wish I had more damage." But, in play, Dominators seem pretty rare. I may go Dom this time around, but wanted to see if there was anything obvious I was missing.
As noted by @Uun, in order to really maximize Dominator performance it is necessary to achieve perma-Domination.
Writing only for myself: I find it somewhat tedious (and repetitive) building for perma-Dom... at which point I've got great controls but damage can be a bit of a dog's breakfast. This leads to me being somewhat bored by them.
One of the things about perma-Dom is that depending on the approach to achieving perma-Dom it may not scale down well for any given build. In high-level/endgame content, there are (or were) some places where a Dominator could really shine, but it feels like this is far less common (to me, anyway). Confuses in particular used to be top-notch, mileage varied for other controls.
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7 hours ago, OverkillEngine said:
What I am talking about is bypassing incredibly jank process of manually shuffling through the various storage types to do stuff and watching the game visibly chug and reload and the inventory itself skip around and change order and the overall fiddliness of the inventory mechanics. Absolutely nothing directly to do with the tiers of salvage or the specific piece of salvage within a tier. Buying and selling the desired piece from the AH has nothing to do with what I am talking about.
Basically the fiddliness of the base storage system strikes me as odd in a game that recognizes there was no gameplay value in forcing players to manually click on dead mobs to loot them.MMV, but I've been using a SG base to store salvage. Most of the SG inventory space is for Salvage, as I keep about 10 each on hand. I see the occasional 'jankiness' with the alphabetic order shifting, but I find it to be a pretty minor thing, as no rack has that much variety in it. If things become really confusing (say on an enhancement storage with lots of variety) all it takes is a closure and reopening of the storage item to fix it.
The 'jankiness' doesn't seem to be an apt description for what was originally described as 'tedious', and the jankiness is almost entirely due to the underlying database and not much else.
The personal storage for salvage takes some getting used to knowing what is on which tab, but I don't think it is the most confusing part of the game.
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I tried the Sorcery pool with one MM 9for flavor), I found it to be extremely meh:
- The Travel power is nothing special for MMs
- Spirit Ward seems like a good fit for the henchmen, but in practice I found it to not make much of a difference except at the lowest levels with few slots
- Arcane Bolt isn't really needed, unless the MM attacks themselves are a poor fit
- Enflame also seemed like a good fit for Henchmen, but I was underwhelmed.
- Rune of Protection is a panic button, with a spot for a couple of mule IOs... and requires two other prior picks!
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Renaming is no big deal, from my PoV.
I've taken a few characters I leveled up but didn't love and created new characters (same name and costume) but different AT/primary/secondary and given them the original's name.
I've renamed beloved level 50s when I have thought of a better name for them.
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2 hours ago, OverkillEngine said:
This sort of thing can easily retain the same fundamental limitations as far as total pieces of storage, etc, but can also be far less onerous to deal with.
Free people up from the inventory manipulation tedium to get back to what they actually enjoy. Hunt. Kill Skuls.Invention salvage is fungible (by tier), so it takes little effort (and the market vig) to convert owned salvage into desired salvage.
Beam/traps for soloing GMs
in Corruptor
Posted
I'm curious if this is possible (Beam/Traps Corruptor) without relying on Lores. I have no experience with the Bombs in Traps, and I think (depending on attack chain) you want to be trying for as much Knockdown from Beam as possible. You absolutely will want Poison Trap for -Regen, I suggest the Superior Entomb Recharge/+Absorb be in the mix.
I'm pessimistic about the chances against most GMs solo because of the i28p2 changes that improved their ToHit and MaxHP. With Lores and Barrier, you stand a chance against several of the softer GMs if you can keep their regeneration down. You shouldn't skip Disinitegrate, and you will almost certainly want a tight attack chain with Aim.
Without Barrier and DPS from a Lore pet, I'd worry that most GMs will eventually score big hits on you simply because the fights last longer. This is a scenario where Triage Beacon may actually be beneficial. For Adamastor, you'll probably want Trip Mine.