DSorrow

Then I'm even more confused about this thread. You started discussing a problem that doesn't exist (inflation), then moved on to discussing the cost of top-end builds vs. regular gameplay earnings during leveling up and what you actually wanted to find out is what kind of build is required to participate in end game? All the while said information is readily given out to anyone who can phrase their build related question in to "what do I need to play end game" rather than "what's the best build for soloing +4/x8". I'm completely and utterly confused.

But you're completely innocent of this with the dismissive attitude, calling marketeers scammers and anyone not agreeing with your lack of evidence "rabble with pitchforks"? Yeah, I think we've seen enough of this thread.

Reading through the thread, I'm getting more and more confused about what the OP actually wants if it's not an arbitrary top-end build for very little effort. If we're talking about getting a "reasonable" build, then I'll make the claim that it's already statistically impossible to get to lvl 50 even with DXP on without enough influence to get a full set of lvl 25 IOs which are basically SO equivalent. If we're talking about inflation, we already have effective price caps in place. 1M inf = 1 merit = 3 converters. If we're talking about getting the Ferraris of the build world, it doesn't make any sense measuring achieving that in units of "regular gameplay" because that is both ambiguous, high in variance and a completely different meta from playing actual high-end builds. You should rather use a stable, deterministic and efficient farming rate and then realize that it's already at a very fair point. If we're talking about the premium sedans of the build world, you can very reliably build an incredibly good uncommon/rare IO build with the resources you build up while you get all T3 incarnates which, again, is an extremely fair rate of progression. If we're talking about non-goal oriented gameplay for achieving a very specific high-end goal in a short amount of time and how the devs should implement something to support that, this discussion makes no sense.

Not at all. What I'm saying is, if you walk into a car shop that mostly sells Ferraris and ask the salesman for car recommendations he's going to assume you're looking for a top end sports car. If you specify your budget and needs you'll get other recommendations. 1. And why is this bad? The converters are factually an efficient way to earn things in this game, and there's still options to avoid "speculation" if you wish to do so. 2. Yet merits can be earned at a very deterministic pace that yields you a top of the line tuned Ferrari in 100 hours of gameplay at most. New players aren't the players who look for high-end builds and nobody should expect to get high-end builds with no effort put in. That's just entitlement, especially when CoX demands a very meager amount of effort compared to pretty much any other game.

Just saying, using what the archetype forums say a lvl 50 build looks like is showing a Ferrari catalogue to demonstrate what a normal car looks like. The archetype forums are the high-end store for builds that are crafted by and for the more hardcore crowd. Anyways, other people already went through a lot of why manipulating the market is impossible so I won't go into that, but rather discuss the time value of builds and what I consider reasonable when looking at them. Most importantly, anything in the game can be run on SOs or generic lvl 25 IOs which cost maybe 4-5 million for a fully loaded level 50. Anything beyond that is gravy and we already have soft price caps (P2W vendor gives you 1 merit for 1M inf plus the whole converter<>catalyst<>booster relation). Also it's notable that these soft caps are significantly lower than item prices we had on live. Back in the day I paid 1-2 billion inf several times for a single PvP IO, here that price is capped at 100M for anyone reasonable enough to investigate loot sources. Same with purples, some of those used to go for 100M+ while they're effectively capped at 100M here. Now if we look at the time cost of lvl 50 builds on a theoretical level, you get 24 powers + 67 slots to spread around + 2 base slots in health and stamina, so most builds have 24+67+2=93 slots they want to fill with something. I don't think we have to go through the math to establish the low price point of ~5 million for lvl 25 generic IOs / SOs, so let's move on to the high end. If you want to fill every slot with ATOs, purples and PvP IOs, your build will then cost 93*100 = 9300 merits assuming you get nothing as drops or from AH. You can very easily and consistently earn 1 merit / min from many TFs and Ouroboros so completing the ludicrous theoretical build is going to take you around 9300 minutes or 155 hours of gameplay which I think is incredibly lenient when compared to pretty much any MMO out there. If we consider a much more realistic high-end build that's actually built to achieve goals rather than to include as many expensive items as possible such as the perma PA, soft capped R/S/L Ill/Cold I have, we're looking at 24 purples, 2 PvP IOs, 6 ATOs, 46 rare IOs, 13 uncommons with the rest being generic IOs. Getting this build just from merits would require 5760 merits or 96 hours of efficient merit farming. So basically, 100 hours of gameplay for an extremely optimized top end character that can solo LRSF. Considering that merit farming is not your only option, it's actually going to take significantly less than 100 hours to complete this. I also want to note that I'm talking about efficient merit farming hours because I don't think "hours of regular gameplay" is a meaningful metric when we're talking about achieving a top-end build. In all other MMOs I have played it's literally impossible to get top-end gear unless you're willing to move away from "regular gameplay" and into raids or hardcore PvP, so I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a little from the player to get there in CoX. If you don't want to learn marketeering or farm, you have the absolute freedom to make that choice as you can just use generic lvl 25 IOs and play just fine, but it just rings of entitlement if you want the high-end stuff without going through the steps of earning it. EDIT: For the record, getting all those pieces of stuff for my Ill/Cold took me less than 10 hours of gameplay in the AH which is incredibly time-efficient and something anyone else could do, too.

The (somewhat simplified) formula for hit chance in the game is (Base_ToHit + ToHit_Mods - Target_Def) * (1 * Attack_Acc_Mod * LvL_Acc_Mods * Rank_Acc_Mod), clamped between 5% and 95%. For the most part when you consider an enemy's chance to hit you, it's convenient and practical to assume both ToHit_Mods and Defense DeBuffs are absent as most enemies can't buff their ToHit value and Def Debuffs usually are irrelevant or they cascade enough that your Defense is irrelevant. Additionally, you can't affect an enemy's Accuracy as all Debuffs available to players modify enemy ToHit. Thus, the formula we want to minimize simplifies to (Base_ToHit - Player_Def) with a 5%, 95% clamp. Most enemies have a Base_ToHit value of 50% and because (Base_ToHit - Player_Def) can't go lower than 5% no matter how much Def you stack , 45% Def is enough to reach that, thus it being referred to as soft cap as opposed to hard cap. For incarnate level opponents, the Base_ToHit is 63.75% so again, to minimize their hit chance value you want 63.75% - 5% = 58.75% Defense. All this is basically a long winded way to explain that you need 5% less Defense than your opponents ToHit to minimize their chance to hit you and for most enemies in the game the ToHit value is 50% and thus the corresponding Defense value is 45%. Accuracy bonuses are applied after the clamped base hit chance value is calculated and this results in higher level and rank opponents as well as some higher accuracy attacks having a higher than 5% hit chance floor.

Heh, by default I always disable any language filters because I've never come across one that was actually useful. Censoring individual "bad words" are pretty much meaningless and you'll anyway encounter them somewhere, but any written communication that might actually have a negative impact always gets past those because at that point it's no longer about individual words. This kind of reminds me of the Dark Souls series censoring the word "knight" (k***ht), which is also pretty amusing considering the magic, sword & shield theme of the game and Knight actually being one of the starting classes.

For me it's mostly a combination of several factors like travelling and seeing family / friends because it's the holiday season, enjoying the weather outside while it lasts and generally just not playing quite as much as in the first month of CoX being back. In the first weeks I logged on every single day, now I'm down to "only" 3-5 days a week if I have no other obligations. But I'm here to stay for a while as CoX is one of my all-time favorite games and I can't think of another game that would offer the chance to play at the high-end (iTrials, fully decked out builds, etc.) unless I can commit to play several hours pretty much every day.

True, but it would already be better to have a mix of different gimmicky or cheap enemies rather than having all enemies do every kind of debuff out there. What if we had some enemies that were incredibly mez resistant, others that did debuffs, ones that buff, tanky enemies that use taunt and so on within one mob? Already much more interesting than "haha every attack from these guys does every type of debuff" and instead of priority targeting depending on your team comp, it's just Judgement cycling because nuking is the only counter to an enemy who makes all your stats melt in even a short engagement.

8 points of -KB should be plenty for most content. Minions have no KB attacks with a mag higher than 4 Lieutenants have 3 attacks higher than mag 8 (0.7% of all LT grade KB attacks), all belonging to 3 named LTs I don't think I have never fought Bosses have 17 KB attacks higher than mag 8 (1.5% of all boss KB attacks), of which most are either Malaise's Nightmares or random named heroes, while the only ones you'd encounter "normally" are certain Longbow bosses (Gravity), Fake Nemeses and some iTrial enemies EBs have one attack above mag 8 (Longbow Ballista Force Bolt at mag 12) AVs / Heroes have 105 attacks above mag 8 (16.7%), but the average mag of this subset of attacks is 22.5, or 18.1 if we exclude a couple of mag 200+ attacks, and 63 attacks would still be above mag 12 (10%). Basically when you account for the frequency of the enemies you'll face, personally I would go for mag 8 protection and get the -KB temp power from base as needed. While I haven't played a lvl 50 Tank who relies on -KB IOs, I've had several Scrappers and Brutes with just 2 -KB IOs and never felt like I needed a third. Source: https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Knockback/Enemies_with_Knockback_Powers

Depends on several things, really, but here's my main question: if I intend to list new things tomorrow, I'll price towards the lower end of the last 5, if I'm pretty sure I won't list new things until much later, I'll set my prices towards the higher end. Other than that it's a combination of knowing the item's "going rates" (e.g. something that usually goes for ~4mil and is now at 2.5, I'll probably list at 3.5 and wait) and looking at individual statistics such as how many are for sale (listed > bids, I'll set price towards the lower end, very few for sale, I might list higher than any in last 5). Also people tend to be pretty lazy when they set bids. If there's an item that's going for a pretty steady 2M, I'll usually list at 1.6M because most people move from 1 or 1.5M to 2M without trying anything in between. This ensures that my items move (= cash flow) and fetch the market price. Sometimes I'll lose out a bit of money on random 1.65M lowball bids, but because I list in bulk I can just put the next ones for 1.66M and get my 2M sales.

My guess for the lowered def is that your build doesn't have the Steadfast +3% Def IO in it, while I guess your live version did have it considering you have the more expensive PvP version slotted.

In slightly over 3 months on Homecoming I've added 3 or 4 people to my ignore list which is significantly better than any other online game I've ever played. In most other games I've played, that 3-4 would be weekly. Here I find most people are generally well mannered and even inexperienced players are rarely disruptive, so it's easy and fun to be helpful because most people appreciate being helped. The few baby birds that want you to solve their problems for them rather than help them do it themselves? Well, that's what the player ratings / ignore list are for, but fortunately I haven't had to make many negative notes.

On my Ill/Cold I have PA down to about 57 seconds. I'd say about half the time it's enough to keep an AV perma aggroed, but every now and then the first decoy that comes out doesn't attack the AV before the last of the previous decoys phases out, and then the AV has a chance to attack me once. The main benefit of the overlap is that the AVs don't get a second chance at attacking me, so high damage attacks with DoT are pretty much the only thing that can kill me.

If there's any danger of aggroing something, this is what I'd do, too. Other than that, I'd start at the top or bottom of the team list just to conveniently keep track of who I've already TPed, but it really doesn't matter. This case just sounds like you had a teammate who takes this game far too seriously.

A few additional points on the Perf Shifter proc: [*]It doesn't care about -Recovery, so even if your Recovery is floored, it will get you some endurance back. [*]While it is better on average than an EndMod in stuff like Stamina, it's also more volatile than just enhancing your Recovery rate, sometimes you'll get a good streak of procs, other times you'll go a good while without any.

This right here is correct, the quota of 5 is based on the set bonus name which most of the time is uniquely associated with a certain set bonus magnitude but not always.

On my first character, I just slotted lvl 25 generic IOs until level 50, funded by selling some rare salvage I had earned (alternatively, use ~10 merits on enhancement converters and sell those). Every character after that one has done with enhancement drops until 22 and then started slotting attuned set IOs, this time funded by the billions of inf I have accumulated on my marketeers.

When people talk about soft capping Defenses depending on the context it usually refers to one of: Soft capping all (or several) positional Defenses (Melee, Ranged, AoE) or all typed Defenses (S/L/E/NE/F/C) on a powerset combo that has a starting point for all of those, such as Super Reflexes, Invulnerability or Time Manipulation Soft capping just S/L Defense. This can be done with relative ease on Melee characters with no S/L Def from their defensive set as many melee IO sets provide S/L Def. It's also pretty simple on most squishies as your epic shield (e.g. Frozen Armor) helps you out a lot. Soft capping Ranged Def on a squishy. Very beneficial and not extremely difficult to do due to the abundance of Ranged Def bonuses in ranged damage/control IO sets Soft capping both Ranged and S/L Usually, you don't. At least not on a non-melee character that doesn't have stuff like Farsight because they have lesser access to S/L Def bonuses so you either flat out can't accumulate enough S/L Def bonuses depending on your powers, or you could but that would gimp your slotting. Positional defenses such as Ranged. Many control/ranged damage sets have pretty sizeable Ranged Def bonuses so it's much easier to stack those. The resist cap for Controllers is 75, not 100, but you'd have to have a pretty niche build to go for 75% Resist over Defense.

Ahem, they (I'm not referring to our dimension Longbow) might be listening to our forum conversation. I'd only ever beat up evil Longbow (not the ones in our dimension).

So you can't run faster from one end of IP to the other with SS than I can fly? Uhm, no - not buying it because I've seen it and experienced it many times. IMO there should never have been separate travel pools - just a single inherent "travel" where you can toggle if you want to run fast, jump high, or fly. Yes, in one zone SS beats Fly in getting to missions. What about stuff like Shadow Shard? Does its existence validate an improvement for SS vertical travel? We can compare anecdotes all day long if you want to, but I doubt I'd still agree with you that Fly needs to be buffed. What it loses in straight up speed it makes up for by being able to choose the shortest trajectories and convenience. In most cases that ability to to avoid geometry makes travel times pretty even, sometimes better (Shadow Shard) and only in zones with notable stretches of flat ground (IP) you clearly lose. Like I said before, the only thing I'd consider is increasing the base speed cap for flying so that there would be a point to Flight speed enhancements for characters who don't take Afterburner. For the record, around half of my characters take flying for their travel power because I like the convenience of it and Hover is basically melee immunity for ranged characters.

I would guess the biggest challenge in creating challenging enemies in CoH is that most ways to do that would be pretty obnoxious, especially if applied across the whole enemy groups like they did with the debuffs. Enemies that are heavily resistant to damage? Annoying. Enemies that have high defense? Also annoying. Protection to mez? That just makes Controllers useless because of the binary way mez works. High damage? Many squishies would like to have a word with the designer. Debuff parade? Doesn't really make a difference to squishies, doesn't make the enemies the enemies glorified punching bags with extremely high effective HP, doesn't hard counter controls and they can at least partially be countered by strong buffs. In my opinion a better way could have been a mix of all of these. Malta Sappers were a good starting direction for this, the idea just could have been elaborated. For example, an end game enemy group could have some enemies that have high resists and taunts, enemies that are mez or taunt resistant, enemies that debuff and some enemies with particularly high damage, so that each mob would sort of mimic a hero team. Basically give a bunch of potential priority targets and potential counters depending on your team's composition: mez the taunters so you can focus fire the other enemies, taunt the mez resistant ones so they don't bust up your Controller buddy after they lock down the rest of the spawn, debuff the spike damagers so they can't destroy the tank, and so on. Currently the design is just pretty bland: either hard control or nuke the whole spawn, else they'll just stack up enough debuffs on you that it doesn't matter what class / powersets you have because you'll die in 2-3 hits regardless.

Sounds fun. I'm all for repeatable any enemy group in any map missions if it isn't a pain to implement. I'd change the original suggestion slightly, though Absolutely no enemy group restrictions. If you get Vanguard, you can just abandon it and pick a new mission. Longbow should also be available for heroes, they gotta be evil in some dimension. Restrict some mission type and map combinations: for example many of the Shadow Shard maps probably won't work with hostage rescues.

This. Many things are very straight forward logically (like this suggestion: just compare current time vs. last completion time, information that already exists somewhere), but an efficient implementation into existing code can be extremely difficult (Where is it saved? How would the user view what rewards he's eligible for?). Hell, sometimes at work I have a hard time adding new stuff into code I've written myself if the new ask is something that was never even considered originally. Just look at what Sniktch posted about the power cooldown timers: that data had to exist somewhere so the server would know what powers we can use, but displaying that to the players was apparently a pain in the ass because showing hard numbers to the player wasn't the original design philosophy. I think this is a very minor problem or maybe I just don't have enough time to play to lose track of which TFs I've done within the last 20 hours. So, unless it really is very simple to solve, I wouldn't spend time on this as long as there is something more critical to do.

This. I have 4 fully kitted out 50s (and I mean the purples out the wazoo, soft capped, perma Hasten variety of fully kitted out) plus around 4 billion in inf/merits, and I haven't touched a farm yet because I can make 50-200M per day in the market. Yes, starting up was kind of slow but even on my first character I had somewhere between 500M and 1B inf by the time I hit 50. Going from 5M to 100M took me around a week as I wasn't familiar with the converter thing or the bucketing Homecoming has, so I made my money from just buying recipes, crafting them and selling them for a profit. Later on I discovered converters and did that in addition to my crafting service, and finally I stopped the crafting thing altogether as the profit margins from converting were better. Haven't really done any marketeering in the past couple of weeks because I don't have an acute need for more inf, but I'll probably get back to for a while it once I settle on what my next character is going to be. Until then, I'm just fishing very low priced popular IOs (purples, LotG +rech and the like) for my future alts.