DSorrow

The way hit chance is calculated is as follows: HitChance = Clamp( AccMods × Clamp( BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods ) ) Clamp limits the value of the bracketed statement between 5% and 95%, so in the absence of any additional Accuracy modifiers, your final hit chance will always be between 5% and 95%. However, if you do have Accuracy modifiers (basically a given, unless your level is in the single digits), then your final hit chance will be between 5% x AccMod and 95%, e.g. with 33% AccMod, your hit chance would be limited between 5% x 1.33 = ~6.7% and 95%. What comes to NPC opponents, BaseHitChance for a vast majority of the mobs is 50%, so you end up cutting that down to ~45%. AccMods for mobs is typically between 1 and 2, depending on their rank, level and the used attack so with 0% Defense they could have up to 95% HitChance (2 x 50% = 100%, limited to 95%), which with 5% Def would be reduced to 90% (2 x 45% = 90%). 5% Def does some, but not much when solo. However, it does give you a headstart when Def bonuses start stacking which can actually be quite important because survivability doesn't work linearly. To give a simple worked example, let's say you have an enemy with 50% BaseHitChance, no additional AccuracyMods (AccMods = 1), base damage per second output of 100 while you have 1000 HP and you are capable of regenerating 10 HP per second. With 0% Defense, the enemy deals 1 x (50% - 0%) x 100 DPS = 50 DPS and you regenerate 10 per second, so your net HP loss is 50 - 10 = 40 per second -> it takes 1000 / 40 = 25 seconds for the enemy to defeat you. With 10% Defense: 1 x (50% - 10%) x 100 DPS = 40 DPS -> net loss = 30 HP per second -> 33 seconds to defeat. With 20% Defense: 1 x (50% - 20%) x 100 DPS = 30 DPS -> net loss = 20 HP per second -> 50 seconds to defeat. With 30% Defense: 1 x (50% - 30%) x 100 DPS = 20 DPS -> net loss = 10 HP per second -> 100 seconds to defeat. With 35% Defense: 1 x (50% - 35%) x 100 DPS = 15 DPS -> net loss = 5 HP per seconds -> 200 seconds to defeat. With 40% Defense: 1 x (50% - 40%) x 100 DPS = 10 DPS -> net loss = 0 HP per second -> infinity seconds to defeat. Basically, as you stack up your Defense stat, your survivability time starts increasing very rapidly as you approach 45% (the soft cap). In a team environment any existing buffs might help you considerably even if they don't do much when soloing.

Just to echo many others, a lot of the older TFs would be much improved if they didn't consist of several mutually identical missions. Synapse and Citadel are probably some of the worst offenders with their "Clockwork in warehouse" and "Council in caves" missions that are virtually indistinguishable from each other. I think, from a story progression point of view, each mission in a TF should be unique enough that the objectives, location or something else would distinguish it from the others in the sequence. Additionally, defeat all type missions should be avoided unless it makes sense given the story context and the mission can be arranged to be in a smaller, less convoluted map. Additional reward merits for playing at higher difficulties and using the optional difficulty settings is a pipe dream, but I'd really like to see it happen.

I'd be willing to bet a good bunch of influence that a significant number of those bids are well under the going market value of LotGs. Some of them are probably extremely old and have been left there at a point in time where the going rate was lower. Some of them are opportunistic low balls by people who are willing to wait to save a million or two. I do the latter on items like LotGs, winter IOs, purples and ATOs with my excess influence, either my influence stays saved in a bid or I score a stack of very useful enhancements at a low price, it's a win either way. They could, but dumping bucket loads of LotG +Rechs into the market at an arbitrary price would most likely be a pretty big disruption. Without speculating further about the possible impacts of something like that, I don't think there's any reason at all to have the devs generate them into the market given that there's already a big supply with multiple ways to get them outside the market, too.

A lot of people deliberately turn other less sought after items into LotG +Rech because they sell quickly for a consistently high price. This results in high (absolute) quantities of both supply and demand.

As a rule of thumb, +ToHit is usually the way to go unless you have very low Accuracy enhancement values. More specifically, the two elements multiply, so in most cases you'll want to increase whatever you have less of which is usually +ToHit because against higher con enemies you'll typically be at around 40-50% base hit chance vs. base 100% Accuracy (or 150%+ after enhancements). However, +Acc is usually easier to come by, it comes in significantly bigger amounts and it effectively raises your minimum hit chance so the comparisons aren't always trivial, but in my experience every point of +ToHit is typically worth ~3-4 points +Acc when it comes to hit chance.

You can continue throwing around your strawmen, but just pointing out that this is not something that most people are requesting. In fact, I think it's quite hilarious that you think there is a sizeable population that wants to make CoH into City of Dark Souls, when in fact what people are after are optional settings to provide some gameplay decisions where the answer isn't always more damage in order to make gameplay more interesting. Of course, choosing the optional difficulty of having to make more gameplay decisions is, by definition, harder than having to make less of them, but none of this would force anyone to anything, no matter how much you want to pretend they would. Is this based on facts or just a part of your gish gallop?

I don't think what's being proposed is making the enemies impossible to beat without mez, but rather making enemies where something other than damage could be the best solution for a change. So, basically diversifying the solution set of "bring X to make this mission faster" from the current X = Damage to X = Damage or Mez.

Damage type distribution, courtesy of @Galaxy Brain: Speaking of personal experience, Smash, Lethal and Energy are used by most enemy groups. Fire and especially Negative and Psychic are more tied to specific enemy groups and usually you either face a lot of them at once or pitiful amounts as secondary effects. Toxic and Cold are also like this, but even less common to face in large amounts.

I'm not at a PC with Mids' installed currently, but do procs yield more damage than a straight Damage IO or the Damage IO from Armageddon? I'm pretty sure at least the latter will add more damage, so I'd probably replace the Scirocco proc with either a +5 Obliteration: Damage or +5 Armageddon: Damage, depending on the combination of set bonus / Damage enhancement you prefer. I wouldn't bother either. In an attack like that, I think it's better to do an extra 70 now rather than an extra 70 on your next Whirling Hands. Although, sometimes you'll get the -Res on the boss, which will help your ST, but it's not like EM needs help in that department.

Tell me about it. I'm trying to avoid repeating powersets between my characters so most likely I'm only going to have one EM character and I can't settle with the primary if my life depended on it. Rad/EM is currently at the top of my list, but how do I make the choice between so many potentially great combinations?

I think this is just a result of how Defense effectively works as Debuff avoidance in addition to damage avoidance. Each attack might hurt a Res and Def set similarly on average over time, but if the attacks come with some components that increase damage taken (such as -Def, like in the test), the Res set will end up taking more. This is just how it seems to work in-game, too. The main difference I see between my Res capped and Def soft capped characters is that Res is basically immune to "bad luck" whereas Def trades the immunity against bad luck to what's essentially an overall immunity to most debuffs. Case in point: anything like the incarnate Banished Pantheon eat my Res based characters alive after the debuffs are stacked, but on the other hand they can be 100% care free against hard hitting enemies like the Cimerorans. For Def characters it's the opposite way around: debuffs aren't all that scary but a few coinciding big hits can lead to nasty surprises. It might be look like a lot, but I don't think that kind of influence is objectively a huge task to obtain. Just playing with any team at 50 will probably make a baseline of 5-10mil inf/hour, which I think is extremely reasonable considering that the only actual "money making strategy" involved is playing at level 50. Playing with teams running at +4x8 and focusing activities into merit yielding content will easily bump that up to double or triple, at which point you're looking at ~10-20 hours of gameplay for an end-game build. For example, I soloed the Dark Astoria story arcs (20 missions total I think, so let's say 10 hours) some time back on a fresh 50, bumping up the difficulty as I unlocked more level boosts from my Incarnate abilities. I never ended up running even close to +4x8, died every now and then and my progress was slowed by being solo anyway, but yet I made ~50mil excluding merits and recipe drops over 10 hours. Not bad for just playing the game.

This is something I've been looking at for EM. Many */EM combinations can easily opt for Gloom when Body Mastery isn't that needed, which is another nice boost to DPS.

Besides the PBAoE damage that was mentioned earlier, Frozen Aura can also house the Call of Sandman proc which I believe currently is a ~15% heal that has a pretty much guaranteed chance to fire when FA is used in a big crowd.

All of my characters are based on a concept, so most of them get a bio. However, usually it's just one or two sentences that very generally describe something about the character.

What I like: Alpha slot is probably my favorite. The effect isn't extreme but Alpha slots offer a lot of flexibility in slotting as you can choose to push one particular stat above the ED cap or free up slots by getting some of your "necessary" stats from the Alpha. Most of the Alpha abilities are also pretty well balanced in the sense that they give something generally valuable to any build (basically those that offer Damage / Acc / EndRedux / Rech / Def / Res), but there are a couple that could be slightly improved to match. Interface is also cool, the increase to character power isn't massive, but it can be thematically cool. The only thing I dislike about Interface is how Reactive and Degenerative are quite a bit better than the others, so I'd give a look at some of the debuff values and mez effect chances to make them more enticing. Lore, while it's hideously OP it isn't available all the time, so at least it doesn't completely trivialize everything. Hybrid is also in a nice spot, the passive effect isn't groundbreaking and while the active effect is nice, it isn't an extreme buff that's available all the time. What I don't like: Destiny and Judgment. There's nothing wrong with these inherently, but I think that the team buff effect from Destiny should be scaled down significantly outside of actual Incarnate content so that a couple of people running Barrier/Ageless doesn't make all support mostly useless. As for Judgment, I'd just increase the cooldown to somewhere between 5-10 mins, at least outside of Incarnate content. The nukes itself are fun, but again a couple of people having them within a team means everything melts pretty much instantly all the time. For attacks as powerful as they are I think they're just usable way too often. Where I'd like the system to go: Not sure, honestly, but I think we already need higher difficulty settings and additional Incarnate abilities will only make them more wanted. If any new Incarnate abilities are added, I'd like to see the level shifts apply only to Incarnate content (and maybe not all of it so we don't end up with -1 Apex, for example) and the new Incarnate abilities having a more limited boost outside of Incarnate content.

I don't think it's so much a question of how reasonable a certain number of unlockables is, but rather what purpose the concept itself serves and how it would be an improvement over what we have now. Going back to your beret, those have a purpose to help others identify people with an exclusive skillset in an environment where that kind of skillset is required. This is similar to a doctor's coat, raid armor or competitive rank in environments where it's important to know your teammates' qualification as the environments are purposefully built around separating people into hierarchies based on skill. However, CoH has nothing where much more than average skill is needed, so there's absolutely no need to be able to identify player skill by their unlocks, so traditional unlocks here would only be arbitrarily exclusive. If the whole game was to move into that direction, I could see unlocks (with multiple ways to get them) fitting in but as things current stand I think they'd only serve pointless elitism and/or add an inconvenience for those who don't enjoy the content it's gated behind. ETA: besides, there are already literally over 1000 badges for anyone who just wants to unlock achievements. I don't think there's any need to expand that to costume pieces or anything that restricts the players from properly representing their characters or playing the content they enjoy. If there's content that's not played, what should be done is research why it isn't played and then focus on fixing the problems rather than band-aiding the situation by gating something behind it.

Only because you refuse to argue your position when presented with follow up questions. My disagreeing with you isn't a universal constant. I don't care who started what, you yourself decided to use that course of bad faith strategy out of free will to attempt to discredit me, and that's what I am pinning on you. That's it for me, though, not going to waste any more of my time if you can't be bothered to make a good faith attempt at actually discussing your ideas.

Well, you are trying to convince an audience about your suggestion, and typically that means you owe the audience an explanation of why the suggestion should be implemented. If you are unable to, or even blatantly refuse to do so especially when asked to elaborate, it shouldn't come to you as a surprise when people don't readily agree with you. Hypocrisy? People discussed the issue back then and some arguments were more convincing than others, end of story. There was no hypocrisy, bad guys or victims just like there's none of that now, just better and worse justified arguments and points of view. Besides, back then I would probably have supported gating, so trying to play the "your team" card is hilarious at best. I don't root for any "team" except the one whose arguments make the most sense and you don't even try to elaborate on yours. That said, as you don't seem to want to explain your position, I don't think there's much point in trying to continue what I hoped could have been a calm and rational discussion.

Probably not, but I think gating valuable content (costumes, accolades, etc) behind intrinsically bad content is a backwards approach to fixing bad content. With TFC, most people do Synapse at most once per character, while Posi and Yin probably get several playthroughs even by people who skip TFC by getting the equivalent accolade redside. Obviously it's much more resource intensive to revamp whole TFs, but I think in the long term that's a better use of resources. As far as gating goes, I don't mind if functionally "useless" items like badges or contacts are gated. For contacts, it often even makes story sense, but none of that affects how your character plays or how it can be represented costumes which are the two most important about this game. When you start gating the important things behind content, you create a grind because you force people to play through content they don't necessarily enjoy, which contributes to burn-out. And, because what's enjoyable content is quite subjective, I'd be extremely wary of gating core gameplay elements or power-ups behind any specific content.

Most of which amounts to "I think this would be fun" or "MMOs do it so it's great", and whenever pressed for specifics, you cop out with "I've already explained this", "this can't be explained", "you didn't digest what I said" or something similar. I've asked you time and time again, if the completion of the rite of passage (optionally available) or the intrinsic value of the unlockable item (available either way) don't constitute the whole value, what is the rest of it? There are only two things that I can think of which are: There's some value added by the unlockable being exclusive to those who completed the rite of passage = others not having it. This is an attitude I can't empathize with. You skip the rite of passage because that can be done and subsequently miss out on the value of it. This is also something I can't really empathize with. So, if that's not it, what is it in plain English? Well, from my point of view you want changes that make the baseline game less fun, gates that provide relief from said less-fun, and with all of this framed as fun with no actual explanation as to why this is fun instead of gated relief from not-fun ("fun" by contrast). If I'd see positives or a reasoning why the change is necessary even though I don't like it (like the TW nerfs), of course I'd compromise, but here I don't see either.

So, if you already enjoy the game, what purpose do gates and exclusive medals serve except to separate you from the average player? The rite of unlocking said things is still available if you want to prove yourself that you're capable of it, and the aura/cape will be the same either way so its intrinsic value doesn't change. If those are not where the value comes, then what else is there besides exclusivity? This is where I can't grasp what else you want if it's not inflating the apparent value of something you have by gating others from it, but yet you keep claiming it's not about elitism. What I see is a bunch of quite selfish demands with very little explanation as to why these specific changes would add value to you, from which we could extrapolate how they could add value to others. There's also seemingly little regard to the negative impact on players who want to keep the game minimally gated (merits aren't free) or addressing the points of the people who disagree with you. Overall it just comes out as a selfish demand with a lot of avoidance and going in circles when pressed for the reasoning. If you just adamantly state that this adds value, but then avoid explaining how (besides "MMOs have gates so they are great") and I only see negatives, why would I compromise? Would you compromise if someone suggested making HC into We Have Cake 2.0 because "they'd like it a lot and it will be great, but it is impossible to explain if it is something that you are not already aware of and part of. It quite frankly is something that just can't be explained because there are no words in the human language that can explain it" and then followed it up by "it was suggested, but people like me had no choice in the matter and cake was taken from me so I'm a victim here"? Until I see proper reasoning, I can only conclude that just because you want to be forcibly held off of capes, auras, etc. until a specific rite of passage is completed isn't a reason to impose hard limitations on everyone. No reasoning, no compromise because that wouldn't make any sense.

I don't think you properly explained why the value of a video game equivalent for a household chore is increased if digital shinies that separate the player from others are tied to it. In my opinion gates make unenjoyable content always worse: if I didn't enjoy the activity before, I won't suddenly start enjoying it but because of the gate I'm more or less compelled to spend my time on it. If I did enjoy the activity, I'd do it anyways without exclusive rewards. If the content is so bad that exclusive rewards are the only thing keeping me in-game, then I really should find another game to play. Implementing digital rewards to compel me to do something I don't actually like is a bad solution, it doesn't fix why the content isn't rewarding on its own but rather works as a consolation prize for perceived misery. Also just pre-emptively stating this, I'm not against rewards in general, I'm against gates and rewards exclusively tied to specific content: for example, I don't mind level gates because there are a million avenues to achieve that so that everyone can enjoy their way there, but I really dislike stuff like cape missions. What comes to digestion, if there indeed are no words in human language to better explain your point of view and it just is what it is, then all I can say is there isn't much to digest which leaves me completely unconvinced and we do have to agree to disagree.

So this is a discipline issue? To be brutally honest, it very much seems to me that doing something "the hard way" doesn't hold meaning to you in itself, otherwise easier ways being available wouldn't matter. Because of that, the only conclusion I can draw is that the significance of accomplishments is there for you only if other people can't have them, and that's an attitude I really can't empathize with.

This is the generalization I disagree with the most. Having some gated things is most likely good, but how much and what those things are will be subjective to each person. Personally, I view any gate that's not unique or a challenge in any way the same way I view generic household chores: an annoying necessity that distracts me from the stuff I actually enjoy. There's no dopamine for me in a cape mission, just the same temporary relief I get from loading the dishwasher and knowing it's done until I have to do it again. Only quite recently I've understood that for a long time I had a really hard time distinguishing between the actual dopamine hits and the sense of relief after getting rid of a checklist item I didn't like, but now that I can separate them, relief is not a feeling I want to play video games for. I'm guessing this is something pretty close to what @Luminaraalludes to: checking off chores only feels good temporarily at the time of completion (a pessimist would say you actually get a stress hormone hit while doing it and get back to normal at completion, which feels good only by contrast...) whereas doing something that promotes personal fulfillment gives that dopamine hit all the way through. What about having the costume unlocks available at the P2W for free instead of being automatic? Then we'd actually be very close to your original idea of not having to work for those things unless you want to. I still don't quite understand why other people should have to pay merits for items you want to unlock the old fashioned way.

We are not going off just the players who post on the forums, people can vote with their wallets just as well and if consecutive changes towards more casual gaming positively impact the bottom line, then the majority had a say and it was followed. Like I said, it's important to listen to and fulfill the wishes of the (apparent) majority, Research consistently shows that most gamers are casual. The audience is still probably mostly casual, so the majority had and still have a say, and I'm pretty sure most people (including the past and current devs) are aware of how (un)representative the forum regulars are. Nobody is arbitrarily changing the "rules" to wrong you, the fact is that most gamers have been casual for a long time and this is the audience most games have and continue to cater to. Safe travels.