Coyotedancer

Exactly... At least one person reading this thread gets it. <_< (Actually, at this point I suspect Jimmy does, too. He's no dummy, It feels to me like he's being deliberately obtuse about it to dodge having to have that conversation.... Which I can't really blame him for. If I were in his position, I'm not sure I would want to open that particular can of worms either. )

And... AGAIN... theinflation issue *isn't* what I'm talking about here. How many times do I have to repeat that?

Again, farming really ISN'T the most efficient way to get a pile of INF, though... Marketeering is. I get that farming is probably an easier thing for you guys to monkey around with, but it might be useful to at least acknowledge that when you really get down to it, if a player wants to make serious bank the way to do it is via the auction house not AE, all "But that could cause inflation!!!"-arguments aside. Curbing inflation is good. But if you want people to feel like they don't have to do anything but play normally to afford to kit out their characters... if you want to eliminate the "have and have-nots" issue... Curbing farmers isn't the only thing you'll need to address.

Gal, actually. This coyote is a lady-type gamer. XD

I wasn't addressing the inflation issue. You're completely right there. I was thinking about the "haves and have-nots" aspect of it all. If the devs are interested in fostering some level of... I don't know. Let's call it 'Income Equality'... then targeting the AE farmers seems like looking at the lesser of the supposed Evils. It's the marketeers who are playing Scrooge McDuck, not the AE-crowd playing City of Farmville.

While I'm personally all for removing the lvl49/patrol XP exploit, I also have to admit that I would be a lot less annoyed by the additional No-XP-for-Extra-INF change if the HC devs hadn't *ALREADY* halved INF and XP rewards for all AE content last year. The combination of the two is starting to get into "Maybe you've nerfed this a little too much, guys"-territory. And I'm saying that as a relatively casual farmer who basically just does it for fun, to help alt-a-holic roleplayer friends level or to equip the relatively small number of characters in my own crew. If I wanted to make a fortune? Beating up hordes of angry cosplayers isn't the way I'd do it. Marketeering is, in all honesty, an order of magnitude more effective for that. Farming is just more fun in my opinion. That aside? Nice job, guys. The new costume toys are ace.

I did that, too, with my favorite in the Live days... Red side, then blue. Her name was Grey Kestrel. She was a Rogue DB/WP Stalker with a perma-summoned Adept companion. (Read: Full-on, not-kidding-around, for-serious recharge-monster with a ludicrous build that it had taken me a couple of years to put together) It was good fun. I've never really tried soloing the TFs. FlyingCodeMonkey and I have duoed quite a few of them with Prince and Nemissary (Titan Scrap and Dark Defender), but soloing just seemed like it would be tedious to me. We also duoed most of the giant monsters. With a pair of Masterminds. (Suspended was Bots/Time, Hanano was Ninja/FF. As far as I can remember, a Rikti drop ship was the only thing we couldn't manage. Group Fly wasn't quick enough for the gang to keep up with it. We did TRY on several occasions, though. And we actually took down both the Arachnos Flier and the Seed of Hamidon that way Poor Caleb we actually caught out on the beach. XD) The most interesting thing I've done solo on Homecoming was finishing out all of the Dark Astoria arcs at +4/x8 solo on my favorite Stalker. The "White Thorn" version of Kaikara (KinMelee/Bio) is still proudly wearing her "Knows No Fear" badge. Taking out that army alone on a stalker was no quick and easy thing, even with a pretty solid build.

It may be a reflection of the server I play on, or just the different focus of the players I often find myself running with.... But from observation, the proportion of "Knows and enjoys tinkering with character builds, and can do it well" vs. "Not interested/not skilled/not really sure it's all worth the bother" people really doesn't seem that much different from the Live days.

Sorry, but you're not going to get to rebalance the game around high-end set-builds, much less min/maxed Incarnates... That's a bad idea, because in the process of making it a "reasonable challenge" for that set of players you'll end up turning the game into City of Dark Souls for EVERYONE ELSE. Not everyone out there in the City teams. There are a lot of solo and duo/trio players. Also, NOT everyone is running even a mediocre set-build. Most of *US* here on the forums take advantage of IOs... But we're not "typical". We're not a representation of the Average Player. Forum users never have been, and probably never will be, no matter how forgiving HC's market economy is. You have to recognize and accept that when you start looking at balance changes. You don't get to throw out the low-end and the middle-of0the-road just for the sake of entertaining the above-average much less the Bleeding Edge.

Is the game OMG!TOOEASY? I'd say the only real answer is.... It depends. If you're rolling Council scanners in PI with an 8-player team made mostly of full Incarnates with MIDS-tweaked set-builds owned by focused, experienced players, then yes... The game is a total cake-walk. No challenge at all. A Master STF run would be no big deal with a team like that, much less any of the "regular" content. That's not a new thing. Quite a few of us learned how to blow a proverbial hole through the middle of the City LONG before Incarnates came along. If you're running more than Council missions... While solo, say, or in a duo or trio or small group, or in one made of characters with less-than-great builds, less skilled or experienced players, or just with people who are faffing around and "in it for the lulz" then your experience is apt to be much, much different. You'll see team wipes on Carnie maps, multiple deaths when Crimson sends you after Malta, bad pulls that result in the group being overwhelmed by... lots of things, honestly. (Yes. I've even seen it happen on Council missions. o_0) It's a very different world from running with a smash team. Among those of us here on the forums, I suspect that the first example I mentioned... The wrecking-ball smash team... is the more "typical" experience. That's going to color our perceptions pretty strongly. It's going to make the game seem "too easy" across the board, because that's the way we tend to experience it. For full teams of experienced players running well-designed and equipped characters, it IS easy. But not everyone is an experienced player. Or running with a full team. Or on a character with a half-billion INF+ min/maxed build. Yes. A lot of very vocal forum users are... But us forum users have NEVER been a good representation of the "average" City player. That was true back in the Live days (and mentioned pretty frequently when discussions about changing game balance came up-) and I'd be beyond shocked if it didn't still hold just as true today. Just because the game is a cake-walk for most of us doesn't necessarily mean the same is true for Joe Anybody with his first-ever Corruptor, who avoids game forums on principle, has never seen MIDS and is running on a mish-mash of SOs and what-ever-he-got-as-drops. Players like that exist. There are a lot of them. They have a very different experience of the game's difficulty than we do.

I'm with the flea on that one... "Sweet" is a good follow-up to the 7th year's "Lucky". And it would make an adorable character badge title.

'Not always easy to find, though... For example.. Here's the Beta Patch Notes thread where the change is mentioned: But That's NOT the thread where we were talking about why the potential change was a Questionable Idea.

My Sorcerer character over in Aion would grin. Books are one of the sorcerer's two weapon choices in that game. (Orbs are the other, but it's not nearly as silly to ping an orb off of something's head as it is to fling book pages at it. XD) Having a book with a swirly rune effect or something as a hand-anchored combat aura would be fun, I think. Most of my own magi wouldn't use it, just because it would mean giving up their glowing eyes (Oranbegans gotta Oranbegan, yo.) but it would be a neat option for other people to have.

Not entirely a rumor, I'm afraid. There was some mention on the Beta section of the forum about altering the damage calculations for AE goons, and as-proposed it did pretty seriously increase the amount of damage higher "ranked" spawns (Bosses, EBs and AVs in particular-) would do. It was discussed at some length in one of the now-locked Page 5 general discussion Focused Feedback threads.

Mr.Coyote would have given you the evil eye anyway. XD

There aren't enough /jrangers in the world to express my opinion on that idea. Endlessly grinding iTrials until our eyes bled was never fun, and the so-called Solo Path they reluctantly added in DA was, to put it kindly, a complete joke with its ridiculous timers. Removing all of that crap was one of the BEST things HC has done.

And, at this point, I'm going to gently remind everyone in this conversation that NOT EVERYONE who plays this game does so on 8-player teams or huge leagues... I feel like I've had to remind people of that a lot lately. <_< Keep in mind that the way the game plays, and the way iPowers affect that experience, are a bit different for soloist and in duo/trio/small team play. "Rolling Judgements" aren't such a constant thing when there are only two of you, much less when you're out there facing a horde of goons alone. Given that, any big change proposals really need to take more than just full-sized smash team dynamics into consideration. Those 8-man smash fests ploughing through Council scanners in PI like proverbial wrecking balls aren't the only thing running, so you can't just make changes based on how they run.

Most of my magi live in the Sanctum of Shadows, Tavaris' otherworldly lake house...That would include Tav himself, Kaikara, Artemian and Ajda, along with Andris and his sister Narada, as well as their Thorn Wielders Semnai and Ferrian, Semnai's sword Xhelethe, the magi's airship Karnaim and the Sanctum's keystone ward, Aegis of Serenity. A few of my magi AREN'T Sanctum residents, though... Amtes and Edratarees are from the Temple of Primeva in Nerva. Niari (Restless Ghost), the Thorn Wielder who's lost her blade, doesn't actually have a home. She wanders. Likewise Tahlim (Abyssal Blade), the sword she lost. Like his owner, he's a nomad... They're each out looking for the other, but the world is a big place and SOMETHING seems determined to keep them apart. They're too driven to settle anywhere. The Nova Primeva time travelers are also independent of the Sanctum... Olympia and Morgan (Code Merlin and Code Mordred) have an apartment in one of the high-rise buildings in Steel, while the Stanton twins (Lasya and Dorian. aka Graceful Ivory Mask and Gentleman Spectre) have a brownstone in Founders. Of the non-Oranbegan characters, Mina (WInterlight) is a native of Salamanca and still lives at home while she's attending university there. Her Tuatha friend Carwyn lives in Croatoa as well, though he occasionally manages to escape the influence of the mists long enough to wander elsewhere. Shonokin has also taken up residence in the village. He's just not comfortable in the city proper. 'Much too noisy and crowded for a country boy from the backwoods of Eastern Tennessee. Since she's supposed to be a witch's cat who's using purloined magic to look more human, I suspect Snickerdoodles is from somewhere in that neighborhood as well.

Now you need a shark in that water. XD

Limitless Radial Freeem, even. XD

That's true. Good ol' "Captain Hotpants" deserves that. XD

Merit rewards are based more on arc length, IIRC, than on arc difficulty... So a few missions with an AV/EB at the end might well end up giving less than one of those old-school, way-too-many-filler-mission slog-fests.

The attack sets need a damage pass... AR needs a bit more serious tinkering. That's it. As another one of the "plays them quite a bit, so knows how they handle" people, that's all I think they really need. I'll also admit to being very, VERY wary of all these calls to change them completely. As a mostly-solo, I enjoy my Sents as they are, and feel like they do their job pretty well. I'd rather not see efforts to supposedly "fix" them that end up completely ruining them. <_<

I plow pretty much everything back into my crews' builds, either getting New and Better Toys for older characters or equipping new ones as they come along. I've never seen a horde of INF just... sitting there, doing nothing except being a big number... as all that much fun. So, I try to turn it into something I *do* find more entertaining instead. 'Big Damage numbers or big Defense numbers or big Recharge numbers or what-have-you. XD

So... you want Cato as a base item. XD