Coyotedancer

I prefer solo SGs, myself. It's not an anti-social thing,.. I just don't want to get into cat-fights with other people when I'm building the base. 😆

I suspect more will just say to hell with it and go back to whatever they were doing, writing the whole system off. ETA: And for the record, shameless and frequent farmer or not... I have far less than that. I have a little under 2b at the moment, and three characters (Archie, Chujak and Aris) who will need a good chunk of that for their builds at some not-too-far-in-the-future point. I may farm up the INF to get the MiniMe for my cat-girl, but I'm not looking forward to it, and won't be leveling or equiping any new alts while I'm doing it.

How many people have 15 billion INF to throw at it? (That's assuming the MiniMe stays at 1500 PAPs and the market price settles around 10m per-)

Hush you. I'm already going to be spending a few hundred farm runs getting the 15+ billion I'll need to buy enough PAPs to micro-size my token cat-girl. I can't afford anything else fancy.

I have to admit I got a certain level of entertainment out of watching them pop off down the hall to get away from my scrapper and her swords... only to end up instantly zarked straight into oblivion by the ranged lightning blasts of her Adept partner, who was having absolutely none of their teleporting nictus shenanigans. 😆 It was a very *SET* and *SPIKE* kind of thing... I enjoyed it.

Ah, let us raise our hands in praise to our Kind and Benevolent Masters for the bounty of crumbs they've cast to the poor and unworthy BadWrongPlayers. 😝 But hey, if they want to push more people into INF farming to get their Particles... so be it. I just don't want to hear any future belly-aching from them (or from the Anti-Farming League) about how awful it is that "everyone is farming" to get the things.

Just what we needed, right? 😆 I do like the idea of the costumes, though, I'd love to have an old school Death mage outfit for Tavaris... and the MiniMe is pretty much perfect for making my little black witch-cat tiny enough to, you know, look like a little black cat. I'm just afraid that I'll be too old to still play Snickers by the time I've gotten enough Aether to buy her the option. I'm no spring chicken over here. *waves cane* *says something about whipper-snappers and her lawn*

Has anyone asked for HM task forces to be soloable? Not that I've seen... That's not the issue. My concern is that currently the only way for solos and small teamers to get Aether Particles at any reasonable rate is limited to the auction house. As you say yourself, not everyone can solo or duo even the non-HM task forces. That, along with the requirement that characters be 50 to qualify for the reward, limits the WST's usefulness for collecting PAPs. Random mission-completion drop rates for them are set to 2%, With the RNG being what it is, that works out to a pretty paltry rate of acquisition in practice. (As an example, I went through enough DA runs to completely open and then equip my latest 50's Incarnate slots and got ONE.) Getting ten that way? Not too horrible a grind as that sort of thing goes. Getting a thousand? That's a whole different animal.

I'm with River... It's the Grand Tour of Paragon laundry list of hunts that make Numi's TF a pain, not Jurassik's lack of a badge.

Are you sure they aren't more intent on alienating people who do play... in any of the ways they don't approve of. 😝

I wondered how long it would take for someone to trot out that old line... City is, and always has been, a very solo and small team friendly game. As a result it has had, from Day One, a substantial number of players who don't regularly run around in groups of eight, No matter how much the TeamsTeamsTeamsOMGTEEEEEAMS!-types may disapprove of the practice, that's a feature, not a bug. It's a little late in the game to be telling us we're SOL because some portion of the current dev crew want to turn the thing into a different sort of game.

I ran enough of them to build all of Tenk's iToys and only got one... So it's not impossible that you may come out of it still a member of the Zero Club, The RNG is a harsh, harsh thing. 😝

Same here. I've gotten only one as a mission drop in the last two weeks. On Tenkyoku, a 50, from a Dark Astoria mission. My other four? From duoing a pair of WSTs with the White Thorn version of Kai, My two in=progress lowbies have yet to see one,

RL is such a grindy game...

I'm still just a little annoyed at the position solos and small-team players are in, for all practical purposes, when it comes to getting these Aether Particles anywhere but the auction house. In the last two weeks I've managed to accumulate exactly five of the things through regular game-play.... Four from duoing a pair of WST task forces (Which not everyone is capable of-) and exactly ONE from a random mission completion drop. If you aren't running HM with a team, in other words, these things aren't exactly falling from the sky at a generous rate. Stingy drop rates are probably fine for the lowest tier, least expensive costumes... but if the MiniMes and other, more interesting options are going to cost in the 1000+ range? Yikes, o_0 I mean, I get that the devs are trying to encourage a very particular playstyle here, and that solos and small-teamers are like the proverbial red-haired step-children when it comes to their Vision of the Game... But still... Like I said, as one of those step-children, I do personally find the situation annoying. I can (and probably will-) just farm up the INF to buy my Particles when the time comes to get the MiniMe costume for Snickerdoodles, so my cat-girl can be cat-sized, but just like soloing or duoing task forces, that's not something that every sans-a-full-team player can do. And no. I do NOT believe that there should be any prizes in the game that are reasonably accessible only to -~The Right Sort Of Players~-. That sort of thing is bad mojo,

To be fair here, though... The old devs sort of shot their own OMG-INF-ISN'T-CURRENCY!!! lore right in the foot when they introduced the auction house. And had it run on INF. So, you're "trading" your reputation to someone else for goods... and paying the "taxes and fees" for that transaction with good looks and a smile? Yeeeeah. Sure you are. 😝

Another fun trick for support types.... If you happen to have one of those nifty toggle-style enemy-anchored debuffs, put it on one of the grates closest to the bowl. The range on those is long enough to keep it running while you're back down in the bowl, and every group of Rikti that respawn next to that grate will instantly hate your guts and come running down the ramp without ever seeing a brute or a tank.

And Offenders... Can't forget the pointy, angry Defenders. XD *pats her beloved Nemissary on the head*

I don't hate the power,,, I just don't need it on anyone who now has it.

How many of your characters suddenly found that their former invisibility power was no longer invisibility but stealth? How many of them had their Stealth turned into a redundant travel power that they didn't need because they already had Superspeed or Flight?

Yep. Pets can target and attack them long before player characters can.... I've watched Kestrel's Adept and Amtes' demons tear into rezzing Freaks the second they start their stand-up animations.

Oh, don't even get me started on how much I hate what The Powers That Be did to the Concealment pool... I still absolutely LOATHE the changes there. It's a pool I take on the majority of my gang, and honestly? The changes ought to have forced me into respecs for every damned one of them. I'm just too stubborn to have done it yet, because respecs annoy me. Much less the idea of doing 70+ of them just because some dev or other had a solution in search of a problem they just couldn't wait to implement. <_<

My Stalkers are for it... It's always been a pain to click off Hide just to make the things targetable when a whole mob is made of nothing but the things. I kind-of imagine it as my Stalker just stopping and looking at them all standing there in the middle of the cave... In the way real trees absolutely do not... And breaking their cover by saying, "You guys *AREN'T FOOLING ANYONE*!" as loudly as possible. 😝

I still need to go back and add pictures for a few of mine... The text is all up to date, but I've gotten pretty lazy about sorting my screens. XP

I don't solo my Defenders generally, so speaking from a with-partner-or-team perspective... Either my Time/Dark or Darkity/Dark/SoDark. I find them both a good combination of support and debuff, so useful for most things.