DSorrow

The way I see it, CoH (or any other PvE game) doesn't really offer the kind of challenge the OP is seeking. Chess (and PvP) is engaging because making mistakes isn't the only road to a possible loss as you can make really good plays but your opponent just outwits you. Against AI, you're not really going to see that kind of engagement in the long term because eventually you'll learn the AIs abilities and it won't be able to surprise you. After that point, it's just a punitive mistake system, to borrow a term from someone else in this thread. In CoX, much of the PvE challenge comes from designing a build that can do X, and that's definitely something you can fail at. After the build's designed, it's pretty trivial to actually get all of the gear. Everything else is just mostly down to chance: RNG breaks through your soft caps, a critical debuff misses, etc. That said, I've had fun challenging myself with a solo ITF and solo LRSF even though I mostly like to play CoX casually and save the sweaty gameplay for stuff like Dark Souls and PvP shooters I also like.

I think what the original devs intended or not is a completely secondary argument, the primary discussion should be whether or not the current crash is a good/fun mechanic. Most people (me included) seem to think it's not because: Spending ~10% or more of your time not being able to contribute at all isn't really that fun The -Def affects different sets very disproportionately: pure resist sets like Elec have incoming damage increased by ~40%, Def sets like SR have incoming damage increased by up to 400%* It's unresistable unlike most debuffs in the game which makes Defensive sets extra susceptible to it as they rely on their high DDR in normal gameplay I don't think anybody is disagreeing that there needs to be some kind of downside to Rage, but it's current implementation leaves a lot to be desired, which is at least somewhat evidenced by the fact that the original devs let it slide for years. I'm still of the mind that a simple solution would be two mutually exclusive Rage powers in the SS, one with a -Res crash and another with -Def so you can at least choose the one that less gimps your defensive set. *This is obviously simplifying the situation, but I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption to have the pure resist set at ~0% Def and the high defense set at the soft cap. Of course, going far beyond the soft cap mitigates the Rage crash, but that's a pretty unreasonable assumption considering the game is supposedly balanced around SO level performance. At the same time, the high resist character with no DDR is at 5% dodge rate against most enemy groups so Rage crashing actually doesn't increase incoming damage at all.

It could work. That said, even with SOs available from lvl 1 I probably wouldn't buy any because the 1-22 part of the game lasts for 2-2.5 hours so redoing SOs 4 times would probably end up slowing me down. Anecdotally, though, I did play with a new player in the 40s who had no enhancements slotted because his only experience with TOs had taught him "enhancements don't really seem to do much" and "DOs/SOs seemed too complicated with their different names to be worth the effort", to paraphrase.

I wish something was done to Stone Armor. Right now it's one of those sets I have never played and just looking at its downsides, I have no intention playing either. While you can make an Invuln nearly as survivable as Stone (soft capped to all except psi, 70% Res to all) with a meaningful amount of +Rech on the side, it's impossible to make a Stone even close to as good as Invuln is offensively with all the -Dmg and -Rech. Second, there's the whole slow movement and being groundlocked unless you pick TP which isn't a fun gameplay mechanic. Finally, 4 powers out of 9 in the powerset are pretty much useless except as set mules the moment you get Granite Armor, after which you also start being unable to affect your character design. Yeah, Stone definitely needs some downsides to offset the insane survivability it gets out of the box, but right now those downsides are far too big, especially when we consider survivability potential of other powersets with IOs. I'd start with reducing the -Jump from Rooted and Granite so that you could jump over small obstacles, making the -Speed (and potentially the -Rech) resistable, and severely reducing the -Dmg from Granite.

As others have stated, the question is very open ended as there are so many variables to account for. The simplest answer I can give to you is that you want to find the minimum number of attacks (and gaps) that fill a rotation which prioritizes the use of your highest DPA (damage per activation) abilities while being constrained by available recharge modifications (+ other enhancements) and endurance usage limits to achieve the highest possible DPS. But that's only part of the truth: then there's also the potential for different procs, secondary effects (notably -Regen or -Res), etc., that might skew calculations case by case depending on the build. Because it's not really an exact science, usually the way to go about it is to first assume a reasonable maximum of recharge enhancements (0%, 50%, 100%, 200%, 300%, depends on the person and build) and check how often you can cycle your strongest attack (=best DPA). Second, you figure out what you're going to fill the gaps with (typically your second and third most powerful attacks), and calculate backwards how much recharge enhancement those abilities need. Optimizing past this point gets more complex as you'll want to compare the trade-offs between small gaps of doing nothing vs. no gaps but longer intervals between strong attacks (i.e. 0.3 seconds wait for "good attack" vs. 1 second of "weak attack" and activating "good attack" 0.7 seconds late), filling gaps with lower DPA but shorter animation attacks, adding procs vs. damage or recharge enhancements, injecting abilities with secondary effects and so on.

That. Also get the Performance Shifter +End proc in Stamina as well as the Miracle and Panacea uniques. The PS proc has 1.5 PPM (IIRC) which amounts to 1.5 * 10 end per minute or 0.25 end/sec, Miracle +Recov gives you +15% base recovery which amounts to 0.15 * 1.67 end/sec = 0.25 end/sec, and finally Panacea as the best of the bunch with its 3 PPM gives you 3 * 7.5 end each minute or 0.38 end/sec. Combined, these three enhancements give you 0.88 end/sec on average which will be modified by any +MaxEnd you have so just having the two passive accolades boosts this to 0.97 end/sec which is very substantial.

This is definitely a great point. I'm playing a lot of duos with a RL buddy I used to play with back in the day and he's been absolutely overjoyed with the availability of stuff through minimal marketeering. Back then, his builds were mostly uncommons, frankenslotting and cheap rares whereas now he's getting builds with rares, LotGs, uniques and such with the same effort. This is pretty similar to my view that there's been a "tier shift": what used to get you a really good build of rare IOs now gets you a top of the line build loaded with purples.

Because of the bucketing and attuning in the market, that "worthlessness" or price changes would only apply to lvl 10, 15 and 20 generic IOs so it's hardly a requirement to rebalance the entire IO system. Besides, I don't think it's a huge issue if there's a 10 level range where generic IOs aren't objectively the best choice to go for, especially when they still have the advantage of not needing to be replaced. Like I said, not a huge issue as it takes me on average less than 3 hours to get to 22 (1-2x DFB + Posi1 and Posi2) without slotting any enhancements at all.

TOs/DOs aren't a critical issue, but they're pretty much completely irrelevant in the game right now. So far on Homecoming I haven't bought or slotted a single TO/DO/SO on any of my alts, because there's just no reason to do so, especially if you play with DXP on like I've done ever since my first 50. It takes an hour to get to lvl 22 and buying or slotting TOs won't make any difference in that. Two additional hours and you're at 22, again, DOs will only make an ever so slight difference in how that gameplay feels for a short while. SOs would have a noticeable impact, but at the same level I can already slot equally powerful IOs that I won't have to replace. I'd probably combine DOs and TOs (DO enhancement values, TO costs) to be the training wheels enhancement category and make SOs drop from all enemies from lvl 12, plus cut their costs by at least half so that they'd have a short term cost advantage vs IOs. Even then, I probably wouldn't buy any but I might stop to slot stuff that drops for me instead of getting to 22 without enhancements. Why?

Whatever the original reasons for it were, I don't find -Res is any less fitting than -Def when it comes to being exhausted. While I'm not a boxer, I'd guess hitting an exhausted opponent in their defensive stance probably does more than the same hit against a fresh opponent. We know it's technically possible for a powerset to have mutually exclusive powers at the same tier because such powersets already exist on Homecoming. I'd be extremely surprised if existing powersets couldn't have mutually exclusive powers added to them.

How about just giving Rage the same treatment as Practiced Brawler on Sentinels? One version that comes with -20% Def and another that comes with -40% Res. Enable the player to pick a poison rather than force them to one that disproportionately hits Defense sets.

I definitely felt pretty weak for a good part of leveling my TW/Elec up to 50, but the build really started to pick up in the 30s once I started to have more slots and powers to play around with. At 50 with a full IO build the character is a monster with perma Hasten, almost perma Energize and capped S/L/E/F/C Resistance. With the lower Resistance caps on a Scrapper, I imagine it would be possible to go for capped S/L/E/F/C Resistance with soft capped S/L Def for some pretty serious survivability (my Brute build has ~30% from tertiary IO set goals).

This. Basically what this means is that adding door sitters actively reduces your farming efficiency, but adding contributors could increase it depending on how much they can contribute: if a second player doesn't double your enemies defeated per unit of time, you're most likely losing out. This is why people often ask and offer to pay for joining efficient farms. As for XP and inf it's slightly more complicated as they're also divided between teammates but the XP/inf drops are at the same time increased by a modifier that depends on the number of teammates: larger teams get larger modifiers (1-2.5x), but the reward is also split more ways so an 8 man team gets more total XP for defeating an enemy (2.5x), but each individual gets less (2.5 x 0.125 = 0.3125) than they would for defeating that same enemy solo. In normal gameplay, this should always result in better XP/time as you add teammates (8 players can usually defeat more than 8 bosses in the same time 1 player defeats 1), but in a farm setting this is not necessarily true if the other members contribute significantly less than the farmer. More detailed info: https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Experience

I often check other players' profiles mostly out of curiosity. A quick glance at their powers / set bonuses typically gives me a good idea of what to expect from them in terms of experience and knowledge, but I can't really think of a build that would be a deal breaker because a good core of 1-3 players is all you really need in a team. There are a couple of builds I remember that had me raise my eyebrows: a /Rad controller somewhere in the 40s who only had the PBAoE heal, AM, resurrect and EM Pulse but skipped all the debuffs, an Empath who only had the heals, resurrect and AB and a /Traps Corruptor who only had Web Nade, FFG and the two bombs. Maybe it's the influence of other games that has these players thinking buffs/debuffs aren't impactful, maybe melee classes just are more straightforward or then it's just coincidence that I only remember these odd support builds.

Help and LFG channels are the only places I've found ignore worthy players, but fortunately only a handful (maybe 3 or 4?) of them since I started in the beginning of May. Even then, I haven't removed either tab because I like answering questions and forming/joining TFs. I definitely agree with this assessment. Sounds like someone who just finds it off-putting that you'd actually have to play the game first to get your gear rather than the other way around, while also being completely oblivious that you can easily get all the level shift T3s in a couple of evenings from a combination of a few veteran levels and iTrials.

The math has been shown earlier in this thread that it's generally worth it to do in-set conversions (in large volume) if the price difference between what you're converting from and to is more than the cost of converters to do so: (N-1)/M conversions x 0.3 million inf for an N piece set where M number of pieces are acceptable. For a 6 piece set where 1 piece is acceptable, it takes on average 5 conversions or ~1.5M inf to to convert from a random piece to one specific piece. What's harder to account for numerically, though, is the time cost of doing this. Usually the within-set cost differences max out at around 2mil, so personally I wouldn't bother doing several in-set conversions for an extra 500k. Because I already have a good bunch of inf (and merits) stored up, I'm pretty lazy in my 1-2 weekly market checks: I mostly trade stuff that usually gets me profit after one conversion. Sure, I could make more money per week by doing something else, but this is pretty much a sweet spot for me when it comes to inf per time invested in marketeering activities. One conversion per item as opposed to 5 on average works out even if the former makes 50-75% of the profit.

While an inf storage would be convenient, I can't see it being all that useful. On Homecoming a full purple / winter IO type of build costs less than a billion so there's very little point in having significantly more than 1 billion on a character. There's also the consideration that any inf storage object would probably be subject to the same 2 billion inf cap we have for characters, so using those wouldn't differ too much from just spreading the money around your alts. This sounds like a good work-around, though I'm not convinced adding a new currency would be worth the trouble unless it's really easy to do so.

If you're not looking to spend much influence on IOs, get SR because it's going to be much more survivable on a low to medium budget. Otherwise I'd pick Invuln.

You could, but buying stuff with merits wasn't really a viable way to get a whole build (LotG +Rech and such were 200 merits each, IIRC) and I'm pretty sure purples and PvP IOs weren't available at the merit vendor.

I'd mostly like cool vanity powers. Stuff like being able to summon a huge lightning at your location, turn into a Rularuu eyeball and so on.

Everything is a bunch cheaper. I remember spending around 8 billion on my main's build back in the day when the +3% Def PvP version was going for 2 billion a piece. A couple of full purple sets, 5x LotG, some Hami-Os, a full set of Panacea with the Shield Wall / Glad Armor uniques and all the other toys cost me an arm and a leg. On Homecoming, I've recreated a similarly expensive Ill/Cold build I also had for around 700M.

Was just about to say this. Any conventional build just doesn't really need T9s, especially if it's an end game IO build. For example, my TW/Elec Brute has capped S/L/E/F/C res all the time so the benefits of power surge are capping NE resistance and getting a good bunch of toxic resistance, neither of which are worth the crash. On top of that, both damage types being so rare it's hard to justify the power pick when I could just as well use Eye of the Magus, Wedding Band or orange insps for the same end result. Even if we don't talk about end game builds, most T9s are still massively overkill because they go well past the hard or soft caps relevant to the powersets. Sure, Elude might have its uses for a no-toggle-plug-the-gap-with-phase gimmick build, but for a majority of the players it is factually very close to useless when a no-IO SR gets to the soft cap with 1 small purple and any half decent IO build is there all the time, and SR doesn't have to care about -Def at all due to its capped DDR (if you pick the toggles and passives). Unstoppable is probably one of the most useful classic T9s out there because invuln has pretty low exotic resistances without IOs and it caps those, but even on an invuln I'd never pick it because the crash isn't a part of my preferred gameplay loop and actually needing it is so situational it's hard to justify the power pick in the first place.

I'm so used to the Shift+Number default in CoH I actually carried that to other MMOs with me.

This sounds good. T9s definitely need some work as most of the time you can get the same end result with a couple of inspirations on top of the resist/def your set already provides, just without the crash or cooldown.

I'd definitely want to see something done to KB because I have a love-hate relationship with it. Reliable, single target, ranged KB powers? I really like them because their behavior is predictable and rarely disruptive. I slotted a full set of Stupefy into Screech on my /Sonic Defender and that had me giggling every time I used it. The high base recharge combined with the PPM of the KB proc made it work basically every time and it was just so funny seeing them get up stunned. Unreliable KB? Nah, especially if it's AoE. A very high chance of KB (80%+) is fine, but powers that come with 40% or similar values are just unpredictable and often seem to KB when you don't want to and refuse to do so when you'd really like it to happen. Melee powers with KB? Stuff like Power Thrust is fun on a Blaster when you can just follow up with a salvo of ranged attacks, but on a melee AT? Nah, I don't want to throw people out of my attack range. AoE KB? Also nah - while it's funny to toss mobs around when I'm a ranged character, I know from experience how disruptive that is to melee players or anyone trying to use location based AoEs on the same enemies. Basically I really like KB as a concept, but in practice I can't bring myself to play anything with melee or AoE KB powers because they usually end up being counter productive unless I'm willing to spend several slots on KB>KD IOs. I think a Null the Gull solution would be pretty good to start with.