DSorrow

This is one of the things I hope Homecoming would develop the most. There's a huge range of difficulty available right now even just in terms of enemy groups (consider Council vs Vanguard for a pretty extreme contrast), yet all of them have pretty much the same rewards. The issue is, though, that while I definitely think the rewards should be different depending on the difficulty of the enemies, it's dangerous to make them scale too much as we might end up with a very bubbled community: power gamers who only want to do +4/x8 Rularuu and such because comparatively everything else is a waste of time, and so on, which might limit team availability depending on the IO / Incarnate status of your character. I can't really speak for AE as I haven't used it for anything besides fighting specific AVs, but I find that with DXP the game has a pretty good rate of progression. I'm getting a new 50 roughly once every 3 weeks at 15-20 hours playtime per character, which is mostly spent doing TFs. That said, I know that continuing without DXP would feel like an absolute slog so I can see why after AE farming everything else would feel extremely unrewarding.

Flashbacking back to when I started CoH and rolled my main (Kat/Inv Scrapper): I only took Unyielding in the 30s after a more experienced player explained why I should do it: originally I skipped it because the description said "you'll be hit more often" (Unyielding had -Def back then) I had both Flurry and Jump Kick well into the 20s (maybe even 30s?) because I thought as a Scrapper I should take as many attack powers as possible I took the Concealment pool because it sounded cool and Phase Shift could be toggled on perma back then, but it took a good while to figure out the interaction of Invisibility + Taunt Aura or, in other words, why I wasn't invisible (Only Affecting Self was added to Invis later, I believe?) Since then I've grown up a bunch, got more interested in game mechanics and so on so my builds have become very optimized. Sometimes I'll run into people with odd builds and wonder why but then I only need to remind me of myself as a new player.

For purely selfish reasons I want to say yes, but I can't actually come up with any proper arguments to support a change like this. 10% +Rech for everyone wouldn't break the game for sure, but it's still power creep and that's something we should generally be wary of.

I kind of disagree with this description. Whenever I'm bothered with something I often find it easy to manage my reaction by considering whether someone tried to intentionally bother me and if my reaction is proportional to what's happening. If someone would kick me intentionally, that alone justifies being livid but if it's an accident, then I'd consider how much it hurts: being slightly bumped by someone's heel is a completely different thing from taking a boot in your face, to exaggerate a little. To me it works the same with words: if it's an anonymous post that's kind of thoughtless and not directed at me, I'd be doing myself a disservice by spending time looking at every facet of the post that could possibly offend me. Then again, if serving in the military taught me one useful thing it's ignoring most of the ultimately meaningless things that bother me, so maybe I'm just very thick skinned. Feelings, both good and bad, only stay alive if you feed them so I choose to focus on the good side. 100% agree with this.

If we could easily run +4/x8 Vanguard, Rularuu or Dark Astoria content with SO builds, then I guess there would be a pressing need to explore harder difficulty options. Right now, though, at the point where you can deal with those types of enemy groups with relative ease you're probably looking at a full team of IO'd incarnates which by definition have "beaten the game". I'm not necessarily completely satisfied with the way the end game groups are made "difficult" nor the fact that there's basically no incentive to fight them over easy mobs like Council, but more difficult stuff does exist if you want to go for it.

This isn't really a fair comparison: you're looking at Cinders + Fire Imps + Char vs. Confuse. The former can be repeated maybe once every couple of spawns while the latter can be done all the time. The latter is also completely risk free in that even if you miss, nothing is going to attack you, Cinders + Char strategy can fail pretty badly if either of the two misses or if there are more than one boss in the spawn. I still don't see anything wrong with Confuse and changing it to aggro things would be a nerf, in my opinion.

I kind of like the form switching gameplay my Warshade has now, but I have to agree that in longer sessions it does become a bit irritating to hop in and out in order to be able to use something like Hasten, Eclipse or Mire. Additionally, with all the powers you get from the different forms it feels like my slots are spread extremely thin leading to many powers only muling IOs and my human form only existing for the self buffs. Completely changing the forms is probably a no-go because of the cottage rule and the fact that getting rid of them would fundamentally change how the ATs play. However, it would be nice if instead of a bunch of form specific powers, the forms just gave you maybe one or two unique powers, the shapeshift and some applicable modifiers. For example, the Dwarf form might only get Taunt as a form specific ability, but be able to use all the human form abilities including Range but suffer a significant -Range debuff. Dark Nova could work pretty much how it does now: extra Recovery, Damage and ToHit but with a penalty to Resistance which could be offset by the toggles. These aren't obviously very finalized thoughts, but basically I'd like the forms to go at least slightly into the direction of Bio Armor's Adaptations in terms of QoL.

My guess is 15-30 mins if you do any of the starting contacts. Basically this. Tradition is a poor argument to oppose a change, but I haven't seen any convincing arguments for why this should be changed in the first place. The minor power creep currently seems like the best argument which is why I'm against free travel powers.

I really don't see a pressing need for this considering you can already get a travel power by level 4. Getting a travel power for free would also be a form of power creep as that would allow many builds to take an additional power compared to what they have now. If the issue is RP builds, why not just make travel powers available at level 2 so you can then use the primary/secondary powers you're forced to at level 1 and then pick the travel power at level 2?

It's a common and old misconception that Confused enemies cost XP. In a vacuum, yes, you get less XP for each enemy that has been damaged by a confused mob, but due to the way the calculation works the increased defeat speed more than makes up for the loss in XP. For example, if you confuse mob A and it hits mob B for 50% of its HP, you'll still get 80% of the XP even though you only have to deal 50% of the damage. All things being equal, you can defeat mobs twice as fast while being completely safe thanks to Confuse so in the end you end up making 60% more XP per time, which is a much more meaningful metric than XP per defeat. As far as I know, confuse mechanics work the same as they did on live so you can check this article for more information.

My favorite tank is the one with common sense and some flexibility. Some teams have so many buffs that a tank isn't even needed so it's great if the tank doesn't have an ego too big to accept that, and other times you might need to herd/pull just a bit if aggroing two mobs poses a risk to the team.

Huh, wonder why this never occurred to me. Guess I'm going to branch out to a different server once I start rolling duplicate roles / ATs. Thanks for the idea!

Converters are probably the best way to turn merits to inf. Maybe not optimal in the sense that you could use them for converting yourself, but if you just want to run a TF, get something with your merits and sell them at the AH for simple profit, then converters are a good go-to.

My experience of those kinds of MMOs was that it didn't really matter what the tank did for DPS if he had enough to hold aggro, but I guess that depends on the game. Well, to put it bluntly, sometimes it just doesn't really matter. I'm a power gamer but sometimes I'm just playing lazy and won't use BU or Aim. Other times I'm skipping maximum efficiency if going for it doesn't fit maximum efficiency. Even then, all my characters are extremely efficient in terms of what the game is balanced against, but they aren't necessarily at their performance peak because it just isn't needed in CoX. That said, personally I don't understand why someone would want to play a taunt-bot or heal-bot either because both seem extremely boring to me, but if the build works for them and doesn't hold back the team then I don't see an issue.

My guess is it comes from some of the more traditional MMOs where the roles in a team are much more clear cut. If you're a healer, you heal. If you're a damage dealer, you deal damage. If you're a tank, you tank. Everyone only has one role and that's how the classes are designed. Fortunately CoX and especially CoV ATs are designed to allow overlap into several roles.

I'm running Devastating > Radioactive > Siphon > Radioactive on mine. Haven't looked at how the new snipes could change this, but it's simple and effective.

Well, then you can probably easily give me an example of an otherwise valid argument that suddenly becomes invalid when the motive of the arguer is revealed (or the other way around).

You're almost there. Like TheAdjustor said, the only thing that's relevant when it comes to motivation is considering extra scrutiny on the arguments: what has been presented, why it is right/wrong, what else should be presented. But, as I've had to repeat a million times, just having motivation doesn't make their argument right or wrong. Consider: "My opponent argues on and on in favor of allowing that mall to be built in the center of town. What he won't tell you is that his daughter and her friends plan to shop there once it's open." If he's arguing that the mall is going to increase employment rates, does that argument's truthfulness change according to whether he has a daughter at all, let alone what the daughter's intentions are?

Why is it different? You can disagree with someone, but it's a choice to disagree and insult them. Not sharing an opinion doesn't justify attacking the person. EDIT: More importantly, whatever someone's stance is has no bearing on whether the arguments for their stance are valid or not. If you really think they're wrong it should be easy to demonstrate why their argument doesn't hold rather than attacking the arguer (their motives, number of 50s, etc., that isn't a part of the argument is irrelevant). Just to give an example, if person A claims "TW is OP because of X, Y, Z", then person B retorting "you just want to ruin it" doesn't actually refute any of the claims made, B is just attacking the arguer because they can't or don't want to address the arguments. To me that's the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and starting a circus because you can no longer defend your position.

Now this is what you'd be right to call a joker trying to ruin the game.

And like I said, I'm not looking for purely logical reasoning, I'm looking for reasoning that isn't just thinly veiled insults and substanceless rhetoric. There is a stark difference between "you jokers are trying to ruin the game" and an actual reasoning for why it's fine that TW gets all the extra goodies it has. This isn't mathematics where there are objective truths so it's impossible to get to a conclusion with logic alone as in the end it's an arbitrary decision (= opinion) to draw the line between an outlier and a top tier set. However, insulting others, trying to derail the thread with irrelevant arguments and generally just not addressing points is just against basic etiquette, not just some "debate handbook". Just "being honest" doesn't excuse bad manners or poorly constructed arguments.

Strictly speaking, motives have no bearing on whether an argument is valid or not. Motives may have a lot of bearing on whether someone wants to intentionally muddy the discussion by using arguments they know aren't valid, not addressing valid points by their opponents or trying to start a fight to stop the other party from presenting actually valid arguments in the first place. As I've repeated several times already, I'm not pointing out blatantly insulting or otherwise unproductive arguments "to win anyone over", I'm pointing them out because I'm frankly sick and tired of that kind of poor argumentation strategy. To me it's important that whatever conclusion is reached has been achieved with good justification rather than an emotional shouting match, so I'll continue calling out anyone trying to substitute argumentation with insults and other toxic attention grabbers. Just because this isn't a formal debate club doesn't exempt debates from the basic rules of any argument: civil discourse and justifying your arguments.

Looking forward to this. Though if the incoming Tank and SS changes hit servers first I might just go for an /SS Tanker and fix the noticeable lack of Tankers on my roster. I have a Super Strength concept that would work with both a Tank or a Scrapper so...

Not gonna lie, I would support adding SS to Scrappers. To make them competitive with Brutes or something.

I'm not mistaking this for a team debate thing, I'm just getting annoyed at the consistent use of ad hominems and other non-arguments to support a position. I don't expect anyone to make a perfect argument as we're all human beings and all that, but when the argument is consistently and constantly hostile and lacks substance then I'm not going to sit by and let anyone think it's a good argument. Neither am I here to win an argument because like I said, I don't really have strong feelings for any specific outcome so long as it's reasonable (anything like the EM nuke would not be). If it turns out TW isn't that much better than other sets in simulated average play, then it's reasonable to keep it as it is. If it turns out it's too good, then slightly tuning it so that it's "only" top tier would be reasonable. Opinions are needed because at some point we're going to have to jump into the opinion territory anyway because "being OP is fine / not fine" isn't about facts, it's about opinions. However, the "nerf = bad" / "you're just anti-fun" / "just stop criticizing something I like" is an incredibly unconstructive way to demonstrate an opinion, because it doesn't help exploring whether any changes are actually justified in the first place nor reaching a consensus on what a reasonable change would look like. EDIT: Just in case it was not clear, I'm only nit picking arguments that I think are out of line. While this is not a formalized debate, I don't think that frees people from the responsibility of civil discourse or allows people to outright dismiss the arguments of anyone else. As in any discussion, if you can't find arguments to support your own position and your only retort is to insult your opponent, it's a pretty big ask to expect anyone to take your opinion if you can't justify it yourself. There are perfectly valid ways to voice an opinion contrary to adjustments, such as "I think nerfing TW is bad because reasons X, Y and Z" or "I think it's fine that some powersets are significantly better than others because A, B and C" that don't have to resort to attacking other people or using other types of rhetoric to blatantly avoid addressing points raised by others.