DSorrow

True. I still feel like the difference between AoE immobs and stuns versus KB is pretty stark. AoE immobs have pretty standard areas of effect so anything affected by them can be blown up by your standard AoE aimed in the middle of that pack. Stunned enemies wander around pretty slowly, so you'll still catch most of them and at least whatever you don't hit is out of the fight for ~20 seconds. Compare to KB which can literally launch a pack of enemies all around a room. Maybe a bit hyperbolic to say KB is the only thing that demands player attention, but it definitely has the most team flow disruption potential if player awareness is lacking.

Well, that's only one part of it. Back in the day I had a massive badge collection on my main and I was really committed to badging. The more impactful reasons include: not being a part of any badge hunter/TF community so to say, I mostly play with a RL friend or then just random people at least closer to the launch of Homecoming I was really skeptical of how long it was going to last so I didn't focus on long term goals like badge hunting I've had other priorities like leveling up alts and building a bankroll I value being a completionist much less than I did almost a decade ago And only then we get to the fact that I don't really have a main character. I'm closing in on the saturation point for 50s (one 50 for pretty much any role) so after that I'm probably starting to focus on the end game stuff. For example, none of my characters have more than one T4 at the moment only because it hasn't been a priority for me, much like badging. Don't get me wrong, though. I'd definitely like most badges being shared between characters, but I think there are at least two things I'd want to consider: where do we draw the line? what's the opinion of the people with 1000+ badges right now? My biggest badge collection right now is maybe 300 badges, a number you can easily achieve in one evening by getting exploration badges so badges becoming devalued doesn't affect me at all: I haven't put any effort towards getting them. Basically the two sides I can see to the change: maybe it will vitalize the badging community by lowering the threshold to join, maybe it'll make some already invested people pissed off. If the latter is true, is it a reasonable cost for the former?

If it were up to me, I'd draw the line at badges rewarded for specific activities, like TFs and such so that they wouldn't die out. Then again, if everything else was account wide I'm not sure how many character specific badges would be left behind and we'd still be left with the problem of adjusting badge requirements. It's not really a huge problem for me as I'm not a badge hunter (well, not yet at least), but on the other hand at least part of the reason why I'm not hunting badges is that I don't feel like picking a main character when there are several characters I enjoy pretty much equally.

I both agree and disagree with this suggestion, and I'm not really sure which way I'm leaning. Let's look at some of the (IMO) biggest pros and cons: Pros: even if you don't badge hunt, getting accolade powers one every character is kind of boring because it forces you to repeat specific content so avoiding this might be nice some badges can't be earned "naturally" on many characters (e.g. healing badges on a Scrapper) so it would even out some disparity between classes Cons: a sweeping change like this would devalue badging if the required badge values weren't adjusted: what are reasonable adjustments (5x, 10x, other?) and how to deal with badges already earned? it might kill many TFs, pretty much nobody would run stuff like Synapse if you only had to do it once per account In the end I'd say the cons are too big to do this. Maybe the devs could look at showing an "account badges" type of counter besides the current badge count, but that would most likely be pretty difficult to implement.

But I think this exactly highlights the problem with KB: it's the only type of secondary effect that requires a player to be aware of its effect on the team to avoid being annoying. Having said that, most of the time KB doesn't bother me too much, either I'm playing a ranged character or the other players have a decent idea of how to manage KB. Besides, KB is a funny mechanic, but it can extremely irritating in the right (wrong) circumstances, which unfortunately usually means a new player trying to have fun with his character who's powerful enough to toss enemies around only to be told to stop or else. Then again, for PBs specifically, the issue with KB is that basically every attack does it and you don't really have the slots to put -KB in everything to counter it.

I have it on my TW/Elec's Lightning Field and I can't say I've noticed it knocking things back unless it happens stack with some TW KB. I do see it knock things down quite often, though.

Sounds pretty good, although somewhat more powerful than I would've expected. Still, this version sounds much more fun than what we have now so I'd be happy to have these changes.

Top tier: Illusion, not really in the traditional control sense maybe but it is extremely good for soloing TFs / AVs / GMs and provides pretty good damage Earth, for the traditional hard control Plant, a great mixture of soft / hard controls and damage Good tier: Fire Control, your standard (above average with KB>KD Bonfire) control set spiced with good damage capability Weak: Mind Control, difficult to set up containment, no pet and nothing that really makes up for it. Ice, lacks AoE controls and damage, doesn't really provide anything special. No idea because I haven't played: Dark Control, seems good, though Gravity, in terms of available control it seems pretty standard Electric, no idea, End Drain isn't particularly powerful in PvE but the set has a bunch of interesting power I wouldn't say any of the sets are unplayable, but Ice definitely needs something and Mind Control probably too.

I quite like this. The social pressure argument is pretty fun even now because many people will just kick you out of teams for using disruptive KB already so it's not like this option would spawn a new problem. This. Personally I quite like the concept of KB because it can be hilarious (a team of 8 Storm Summoners) or it can just be downright irritating (one bad Energy Blaster) all depending on the team's powerset composition - a problem that doesn't exist for any other type of secondary effect. In the latter case, I would kick the responsible player or quit the team because while I realize knocking things around is fun, I'm not looking to be irritated during my gaming time. Nothing personal in it, I just don't think that heavy KB and some playstyles can coexist in the same team in a way that all players have fun.

1 hour sounds like a pretty reasonable estimate for someone who knows what they're doing. My weekly/biweekly marketing sessions usually take around ~30mins each and I make between 200-300mil profit per session with pretty lazy strats. I mostly sell stuff that gets me decent margins at no risk with the fewest number of clicks. I could trade other stuff with higher volatility and more clicks for probably more than double the profit, but personally I find there's no point in doing so as the 200-500mil (before drops) I get per week more than covers the rate of new 50s (one per ~3 weeks), and the clicking/converting game becomes irritating very quickly.

Same here. I feel like they're not available frequently enough to be part of the flow of combat naturally like Follow Up, so I've actually started reducing the amount of +Rech enhancement I put in them. ~35 seconds vs ~25 seconds recharge is basically the same thing to me in terms of actual gameplay, so I'll usually just shoot for whatever recharge value makes it match my nuke's recharge. It's definitely not optimal in terms of DPS, but nothing in this game requires optimal DPS so I can happily choose to be lazy and avoid making changes to my gameplay behavior.

This I think is the only thing that should be fixed about Rage, which brings me back to my earlier suggestion: two mutually exclusive Rage picks, the current one and an alternative with -40% Res crash. Simple but not very elegant, however it would at least allow the player to choose a crash that doesn't essentially negate half their defensive set. I think it's also worth noting that while the -Def heavily impacts current sets like Ice, EA and SR, it's also going to be an issue for any future Def based sets we might get.

That depends, really. With converters, I don't think it's necessarily the case as they stabilize the price difference between highly sought after items and "garbage", so even without lucky drops a new player can make a decent bankroll just by selling uncommon IOs - provided that someone is buying them.

Definitely, but I don't particularly miss the time between ED and IOs. Other than that, I'd say most of the stuff I don't miss is the menial busywork such as unlocking capes, costume slots and auras. The crazy market prices, too. I could afford to do buy anything I wanted, but it took a whole lot longer to recover from making a maxed out character than it does now.

I might be missing something, but so long as we have a chat functionality being able to use a vomit emote seems pretty far from the highest levels of trolling / bad behavior available to the players. Besides, do people actually care if someone walks up to them in-game to vomit / slap / use some other emote? I think the potential fun factor clearly outweighs any negatives from implementing barfing as an emote.

For the purposes of hit chance calculation, they are +0, though.

It depends. I would say usually (at least 90% of the time) it's the other way around, but it's not impossible for End Mod to be more valuable, or valuable enough. End Mod only boosts the powers that help your Recovery and for many characters the only power this applies to is Stamina, which in itself is pretty meager, whereas End Reduction applies to all your powers and is usually pretty substantial. This is where we get to the it depends part. Basically when you're looking at Endurance economy, the one metric you should look at is Net Gain (or Loss) = Endurance Recovery - Endurance Consumption, where the latter includes your toggles and attacks. Base Endurance Recovery is 1.67 End/Sec, which is modified by Stamina (Base x 0.25) and other similar powers, which are again modified by End Mod. For example, Stamina slotted to +100% gives you 1.67 x 0.25 x (100%+100%) = 0.835 End/Sec. Typically the modifiable part of your End Recovery is 25%-55% depending on your powersets, so T4 Agility will give you around 1.67 x 0.55 x 30% = 0.28 End/Sec, maximum, though some characters might get more. Contrast this to your Endurance Consumption, which for most characters (in my experience) is between 4 to 6 End/Sec so Cardiac's benefit to you will be around 1/(1+0.5)-1/(1+0.8) = 0.83 End/Sec assuming an average of ~50% EndReduc enhancements before Alpha. So, Cardiac is definitely better in terms of improving your Endurance economy. However, to further complicate things we have to look at what the actual gap between your Recovery and Consumption is. That 0.28 might be able to plug it completely or to an extent it won't matter. The +Rech from Agility might also let you use abilities such as Conserve Power more often. On the other hand, the +Rech might also make you use your expensive powers more often causing a net negative. TL;DR: When in doubt, pick Cardiac if you have Endurance issues. The part of your Endurance gain Agility can modify is much smaller than the part of your Endurance consumption Cardiac can modify.

It's a judgment call, really. What benefit would that slot get you somewhere else and do you value that more than whatever it would get you as a 6th in your attack? With some sets there isn't much functional difference between slotting 5 or 6 pieces because of ED (for example, a superior Scrapper's Strike caps Damage and Recharge enhancement even without the Dam/Rech enh), so the 6th slot would be there just for a set bonus, a proc or just some enhancement values. In another power, you might be able to get a valuable set bonus or slot a universally useful enhancement such as -KB or LotG +Rech. I generally start builds with 5-6 slots in abilities that want 3 or more enhancement categories maxed (see attacks: acc/end/rech/dam), 3-4 in abilities that want two and 1-2 in those that want just one. Two 50+5 generic IOs max out one enhancement value category so it's enough for stuff like Hasten or Stamina. Once this "default slotting" is done, I'll generally move around slots to chase set bonuses and add global IOs like Shield Wall +Res. I would do something like that. A mix of cheap set IOs (you can find many uncommon recipes at less than 10k a piece) and generic IOs shouldn't cost you more than 5-10mil. Consider getting the enhancements between 30-40 for maximum cost effectiveness as, relative to lvl 50 enhancements, you'll get ~80% of the enhancement value at ~30% the crafting cost. No, not at all. Most of my builds take one because they have space for it and it's convenient, but I just hit level 50 on my Fortunata who uses Sprint + Ninja Run. I also had several characters on the official servers who didn't have a travel power. I have both on one of my characters. I took CJ at level 49 because there wasn't anything I needed and in addition to the couple of points of Defense, it could hold a couple of useful global enhancements.

More total inf. The mechanics are a bit complex, but essentially any XP/inf from an enemy defeat is split equally between teammates. However, the total XP/inf the enemy awards is also increased based on team size. End result: you get less XP per player per defeat, but more total XP and when you factor in the increased defeat speed from added teammates, you pretty much always come up ahead in XP/inf per time. Arbitrary example time: by playing in a duo, you get a 1.25x modifier to XP/inf drops, but the rewards are also split in two so you get 1.25 x 0.5 = 0.625 XP/inf per mob relative to what you would get solo. However, to break even the added teammate only needs to up your defeat speed by 1/0.625 = 1.6 or 60% and in most cases you can easily get that or more which leads to equal or better XP/inf over time. Drops (recipes, salvage) don't get increased as a function of team size but rather just the number of enemies which typically increases with your team size. If you're running at x8 already, adding more teammates will not increase drops but they'll be split more ways resulting in smaller drop rates per person. Again, the increased defeat speed usually makes up for this so it doesn't really matter. While adding teammates rarely results in less rewards/time in normal teaming situations, farming is a common situation where that is true (and explains why people charge money). The farmer is already running at x8 so adding teammates only decreases the farmer's personal rewards. Even worse, if the added person is a door sitter or otherwise can't contribute much (common in a farm setting), they don't make up for the increased reward splits in any way. More info: https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Experience

Hasten isn't really needed by any build for any sort of normal gameplay as you can get a lot of global recharge from other sources, it just happens to be a really convenient way of getting 7 purple sets' worth of global recharge. High recharge helps basically any build perform better: you get your incredibly powerful stuff like Chrono Shift, Heat Loss, Phantom Army more often (or even up 100% of the time) you get to use your most powerful attacks more often (and can potentially avoid picking a weaker one altogether saving slots) you get to use utility like self heals, crowd control, build up, etc. more often So for me at least, it's the numbers game combined with the fact that having Hasten allows me to use the most fun powers more frequently.

I feel like we're talking in circles, but at the risk of repeating myself: defense debuffs don't have to be autohit to wreck your defense. After 10 attacks at 7% hit chance, there's a ~50% chance at least one of them hit you and primed you for a cascading defense failure, after 20% it's ~77%. That's basically every other mob where your defense does squat beyond the alpha, and most fights where it does nothing past the second volley. Larger mobs and higher hit chance, well, it's pretty obvious that your chance of avoiding a cascading failure is even smaller. Resistance does nothing to stop them? Resistance resists resistance debuffs. It does a whole lot to stop them. Yes, yes. I know, experience. I have that too. I also like to analyze the numbers. It seems to me you're missing my point. Defense is great. Avoiding debuffs is awesome, but on a character with no innate defense and no DDR, the ultimate value of defense is far less than on one with both. S/L Defense helps you avoid most melee attacks, but it works against far fewer debuffs which are often associated with more exotic elements. This basically summarizes what I want to say. Sure, if your team only needs a tank to cover the alpha, get your defense high and let them nuke everything after you hop in. Cascading failures don't matter at that point. Building a lot of Defense with no DDR on top of decent Resistance just doesn't get you quite as far as having high Resistance and decent Def with no DDR in content where you actually need to tank. There's a reason all of my other 50s are soft capped against one or more attack types/vectors: being soft capped is valuable. The difference between them and my Brute, though, is that either they have DDR or I don't expect to rely on their Def to tank. Well, actually that last point applies to my Brute too. I didn't get ~35% S/L Def for fun, it's there because it's useful, but I just can't think of any enemy groups I currently can't tank/survive that I could given a 10% increase in my S/L Def, as the danger to my TW/Elec is strong debuffs, NE, Psi and toxic damage. Most dangerous debuffers would peel that 45% Def away just as easily as they do with 35%, and in incarnate content you'd need 59% Def to achieve the soft cap which is a pipe dream for any non-defense sets. Anyways, there aren't really any DPS checks in the game so if you're happy with sacrificing offense to get soft capped S/L on top of your Resists, go ahead, I'm not going to tell you it's wrong especially you like the build. Based on my experience and some numbers, though, I prefer high Resistance and high offense given Elec's lack of DDR. Key takeaways: soft capped def is great capped resistance is also great both have their advantages and disadvantages defense without DDR is less reliable, resistance provides its own debuff resistance

Well, the effect I'm after is not so much attuning the enhancements (hence "attuned" with quotation marks), but rather make their boost fixed (instead of relative to your level) and increase their working level range from 5 to about double that (reason for the expire date). Plus, of course, making them effective enough that you can notice a difference in gameplay after slotting them.

I'm not saying it's not valuable, I'm saying Defense without DDR is much less valuable than Defense with DDR against actually tough enemies. Against conventional enemies 35% Def takes roughly 140% more damage than 45% Def which in percentages is a significant difference. However, at 90% Resistance that 140% difference might be pittance in terms of absolute damage as 140% of not very much won't be all that much either. I would take my Brute to 45% S/L Def if I could do it without sacrifices, but at this point I don't feel like the trade offs in offense would be worth it. That said, if you don't have any resistance, the gap in absolute damage is huge between 45% and 35%. If you have 90% Resistance, then it doesn't really matter all that much. Going from 15% incoming damage to 5% incoming damage is the same relative change as going from 3% to 1%, but there are very few enemies that become sustainable at some point within the 3% -> 1% gap while there are a lot of enemies who become sustainable between the 15% -> 5% gap. Just look at what Werner posted: And you can see damage doesn't scale linearly. Going from 80% total mitigation to 90% total mitigation doubles the incoming damage you can sustain infinitely, which is what you're seeing with the 35 -> 42 increase: some enemy groups that become infinitely sustainable as opposed to sustainable for a moderate time and you increase the time you can sustain "non-infinitely" against by a large margin. Consider an arbitrary example: you have 1000HP, 50% total mitigation, regenerate 100 HP/second so you can infinitely sustain 100 / (1 - 0.5) = 200 HP/sec incoming damage or take 250 HP/sec damage for (1000 / (250 * (1 - 0.5) - 100)) = 40 seconds. If you bump your total mitigation by 10% to 55%, you can infinitely sustain 100 / (1 - 0.55) = 222, which is slightly more than a 10% increase. However, you can sustain 250 HP/sec incoming damage for (1000 / (250 * (1 - 0.55) - 100)) = 80 seconds, which is a significant increase from 40 seconds. The closer you are to what you can infinitely sustain (i.e. a natural place to find yourself in actual gameplay where people play against stuff that most of the time can't kill them), the bigger the difference through any incremental change in your defensive stats. Basically what this means is that if you play at x8, that arbitrary example would allow you to have a much easier time given the same difficulty settings as you'd double the time you can sit under the same incoming DPS = seems like it's an "infinitely" good improvement. Still, any enemy groups that actually pose a challenge do so through debuffs so:

Yep. Given how incremental Def/Res works and because nowadays it's equally feasible to build for both, it just makes sense to me to focus on what your character already has and get the other as a secondary bonus like I did on my Brute.

I'm pretty sure I don't need that demonstration as I have several soft capped characters myself and hundreds of hours of gameplay experience with them. I'm just questioning the value of soft capped Def on characters with no DDR because you won't keep your soft cap against anything remotely challenging for more than one mob's initial volley. Consider an aggro cap's worth of enemies with an average of 7% hit chance, their alpha of 16 attacks has a ~70% chance of tagging you. After the second volley of attacks, you only have ~10% chance of remaining unscathed. Basically, if the enemy group has a lot of -Def as many end game groups do, the cascade happens most of the time after the alpha. At 90% Res and 35% Def I'm already at (1 - 0.9) * (0.5 - 0.35) = 0.015 or 1.5% incoming base damage, which is absolutely ridiculous in terms of damage mitigation. Cutting that down to 0.5% by soft capping doesn't really make a difference because I can't think of any enemy group with enough base damage to be dangerous at 1.5% incoming damage. The actually dangerous enemies use debuffs to peel away your mitigation, and against those defense without DDR is much more limited in its usefulness. As for Resistance, they can't take that away as easily as Resistance resists Resistance Debuffs. However, in a no (meaningful) Resistance scenario such as Ice Armor or SR, the same thrice-the-survivability gap is much more meaningful as taking 5% damage vs. 15% damage actually has practical implications as to what enemies you can consistently beat. Before the advent of easily available Resistance set bonuses Defense was the only meaningful way of getting more survivability through set bonuses, but this is no longer true for everyone. Give me a Def based character and I'll soft cap it every time. Give me a squishie and I'll soft cap Ranged or S/L or both. Give me a tanky character with little to no innate Def? I'll work in as much as I can, but because I can't build for DDR it's not quite as important for me to soft cap as it is to maximize Resistance.