DSorrow

No, by that logic you have to think about what you give for free and what comes with a cost. Even in the official CoH, a vast majority of the things were given to the players for free: most of the costume parts, powersets, etc, without any work required to have those things. So yes, it's okay to have to work for some things but not others. The big notion, though, is that when the status quo is that very few gates exist because the overwhelming community sentiment seems to be that many of the gates don't add value, implementing new gates has to be justified in an extremely solid manner and proved to benefit the players. Like in any democracy, it's the majority of those that go out there and cast their vote, though I'd be willing to put money on the line that the gamer population is significantly skewed to the casual side. I'll also have to disagree with you on the giving away things for free point, because I don't think we've ended up in a place where everything is given away for free. You don't get automatic instant 50s or full IO builds for free, you don't get accolades or a large badge collection for free and you sure as hell have to put in a good effort if you want to have a chance at something like a Werner ITF. Whatever has become "too easy" has been made up for with things that have become barely possible. 100% agree with this, especially the bolded part.

How does a merit cost equal not having to work for it? It adds an inconvenience or a grind at minimum for anyone who isn't predisposed to challenges or unlocking gates. If "working for it" isn't difficult beyond a scheduling challenge, then it's an inconvenience or a grind for pretty much everyone. While I understand your frustration, I completely disagree with this sentiment. For any game to stay alive, you cater to the population you have and if a majority of that population feels like some game elements don't add value, then the logical thing is to get rid of them or change them so that you appease the majority, unless the developers have solid evidence to react differently. It makes little sense to meet half way unless equally significant parts of the population feel opposing ways on the issue, and at least based on this thread, it seems to me that introducing time sinks or gated content would mostly be seen as a bad move. However, I do agree with you that more risk should result in more rewards, much like turning the + and x sliders in the difficulty already work, but I'd limit this to merit rewards (and add these options to all content). As I've said before, I'd like some more challenging content but if there are only a handful of people in addition to me who would like that over some more popular development ideas, I can accept that such content goes to the bottom of the prioritization queue. I won't make demands that it has to be half way up there because there's no justifying a placement like that even if I'd personally like it. I play most games on higher difficulty because it makes the games more engaging, and that's all there is to me. I don't think there's anything positive about excluding other people from content and rewards through gates and unnecessarily high difficulty requirements, because none of that adds anything to my accomplishment, but it negatively impacts a lot of people. Though, as I've said before, risk should equal reward up to a point, which is the dev defined level of appropriate challenge in response to the community. Anything beyond that is just for the player's own entertainment and bragging rights.

But you do know you did what it took even without getting a shiny medal that says so, wanting a super exclusive unlockable trophy is something else. What I'm trying to say is that there has to be a dev defined scope of challenges and related badges, and to make best use of developer time and to keep things fair, those should be doable with any AT/powerset combo. Any challenges beyond that should strictly be for the player's own entertainment. Basically, I don't think it's justifiable to have unlockables for stuff like the Werner rule ITF. The furthest I'd go is reward modifiers for using the additional difficulty settings and expanding the special difficulty options for all content. Edit to add: Don't get me wrong, I'd love some more challenging content but I completely disagree with gating anything unlockable behind it. I absolutely love games like Dark Souls, but I also recognize they're not the type of game most people enjoy and by virtue of that, implementing similar levels of challenge in CoH would most likely be, relatively speaking, a waste of our scarce developer time. Gating unlockables behind content like that would be unjustifiable, and nobody wants to use our dear devs for something that's an unjustifiable waste of time.

This is my major gripe with Dominators. Every build needs to be loaded with +Rech to be fun, and missing a Domination cast or getting slowed down stops fun for a bit. I'd probably change Domination to work without Recharge or having to click it: at 25% of the Domination bar the power activates and you get one third of current Domination's effect. 2/3 at 50% and full effect at 75% and above. So long as you keep using abilities, you'll probably stay at around 100% and then the bar starts emptying if you've been out of combat for a bit.

Just to address these few points, how is this not a challenge the game offers if it is available by tweaking the game's difficulty settings? I agree with you that any kind of "no enhancements/pool powers" type of artificial difficulty through gimping characters by disabling innate abilities is BS, but the Werner rules aren't that. As far as rewards go, I'd definitely like to see increased merit rewards for actually using the extra difficulty options, but beyond that I don't think there needs to be anything else besides bragging rights for a vast majority of the accomplishments in the game. First, it just doesn't make sense to use development time for creating a shiny medal or unlockable for silly challenges a majority of the players will never even attempt, especially if it's something only very specific AT/powerset combos can complete. Second, I really don't understand why we need something to show for completing something like the Werner rules ITF. To shove our superiority in somebody else's face? At least in my mind, those kind of challenges exist for me and only me, and most likely nobody else gives a crap if I could do it, especially in a game like CoH where you need at most above average skilled player (not top 0.1%) for some of the dev designed challenges.

Lost a more eloquent post thanks to my browser crashing so here's the same thing condensed: I get the nostalgia because I have it for CoX too. That said, I don't think the feeling I miss is achievable anymore, at least in CoH mostly due to reasons beyond changes to the game. Some of the things I found exciting back then, such as sprinting through Hollows (with the nearest hospital in Atlas), I'd now consider annoying or bad design. Some of the challenge or difficulty I remember was, objectively, just me making bad build and gameplay decisions rather than the game offering more challenge. These days the game is pretty much "solved", most of the players are veterans who don't make basic mistakes, and, IME, players tend to research games and look up guides much more these days so fewer people are unaware of the basics. As far as the nostalgia goes, I don't think the phenomenon is specific to CoH, but for most of the games I really liked back then. Many of the games aren't hard like I remembered because I'm more patient and mechanically a better gamer, thanks to an additional decade of game (and life) experience. Many gameplay elements and mechanics are frustrating or boring simply because these days I'm much more critical about what I actually enjoy in games. As perhaps the most exaggerated example, the games that "looked so real" are a actually a bunch of boxes on top of each other, and this kind of perception change can happen to a lot of mechanics in addition to visuals. Hell, nostalgia isn't even specific to games. When I look back on my military service, I mostly have good memories but I honestly can't imagine enjoying it again because 1) I'm not the same person with the same priorities as I was 10 years ago and 2) in all honesty I just don't think about the bad memories and only look back to the good old days. In conclusion, I think nostalgia provides an extremely biased point of view to our past and with 99% certainty things actually weren't as great as we remember them to be. And if they were that great, there's a good chance we're not attributing the greatness to the right things: at least in my case personally, I don't think it was legacy Hollows that was great, but the generally much more care free life of a young student that was great even while I played in the Hollows.

I don't think it's maintaining it if some players are now forced to spend 100 merits x (number of characters) x (whatever unlockables they desire) rather than keeping said unlockables ungated. It's still just a difficulty of finding the time to do all of those things rather than creating something that's an accomplishment in itself because it's challenging. That is, unless you're talking about badges purely because I don't really care for those anymore beyond. To be honest, I think catering to the population that are here rather than those that maybe could be here is the smart move. As much as I like challenging games, I don't think CoH ever was one and it's far too late to change it to be one. I'd absolutely love some challenging content, but realistically speaking it can probably never be a priority. I share this sentiment in some ways, but I also recognize that I have changed a lot in the past decade, as have probably a lot of other players. I don't find it impossible to accept that some part of the game evolves with the population (even into directions I don't particularly prefer) and some parts stay stagnant while I grow in another direction, but that's just how life works with a lot of things.

I think this sums up a lot of my concern with gating stuff behind specific content. If the main issue is finding the time to do those things rather than figuring out strategies, then I have a really hard time justifying it as an accomplishment rather than an inconvenience. For example, getting the four passive accolades + Eye of Magus is very strongly in the inconvenience area, in my opinion. None of the required content is difficult, it takes a bunch of time and forces you to do the same things on all characters. I'd absolutely hate it if we got more of these time sinks back as "mandatory" content such as cape and aura missions or costume piece unlocks.

I don't think anyone is saying healing is irrelevant, but rather that it's just the least effective main support for your teammates. Pushing +Res/+Def allows your allies to passively avoid a vast majority of incoming damage which is usually a lot better than relying on a teammate's reactive ability to keep you alive. For example, if your tank is at around 70% Res, adding any +Res buff will basically cut incoming damage to 1/3 of what he was taking previously, and this will pretty much always be more useful than healing if you have to choose between the two. Then there's also the question of what "needs healing" even means. Most of my characters dip into the yellow or even red quite regularly, and almost as regularly make it back to green without anyone's help so I wouldn't say they "need healing" even though it surely helps every now and then. As far as people dying goes, I think there are two things that matter: would they be dying significantly more often with buffs instead of heals and is avoiding the pittance of a defeat penalty worth the reduced speed for having a healer? Personally, for the former I'd guess buffs are more foolproof for pretty much the same result and for the latter I'd always pick speed. However, as @rolekipointed out before, CoH is extremely lenient on team composition so when it really comes down to it, it doesn't really matter. The difference between having a team of 7+dedicated healer and 7+buffer is going to be unnoticeable for anyone besides a team of powergamers trying to achieve a specific goal. But such is human psychology that people will prefer any advantage they can get, even if they won't be able to notice it.

I think the response you're seeing is a reaction to several things. First, healing is the weakest source of support in CoH. The gameplay of CoH never really supported reactive sets thanks to comparatively long delivery times for most heals. It's also a "full time" job because you can't commit to an attack because that even further increases the delivery time of a much needed heal. So, because of that and the power of buffs it's just much more practical to get a teammate who can buff you once every two or four minutes to a point where your natural regeneration and incidental heals keep you topped off and spends the rest of the time helping you dispose of enemies. Second, Empathy suffers a lot from being a support powerset that doesn't offer anything that isn't easily available through IOs. When you have soft capped defenses, no endurance worries, capped hit chance and enough recharge to run your preferred attack chain, Empathy can only offer you some extra buffer on those stats in case of debuffs. You didn't need the heals before IOs so you sure as hell don't need them now. The most valuable thing you're basically getting is the mediocre +DMG from Fortitude and Mez Prot from Clear Mind if you're a squishy. Obviously, in lower level and un-IO'd teams Empathy is much more beneficial. When anyone who agrees with these viewpoints sees someone advertising themselves as a dedicated healer, it's pretty natural to draw the conclusions that the player doesn't know what kind of force multipliers are most valuable to teams in CoH. Furthermore, the term "dedicated healer" just sounds like you're committed to doing the least useful thing you can do in a team at the expense of more useful activities. My favorite analogy of this is somebody playing "dedicated medic" in an FPS game by using only med packs when some use of their gun would greatly reduce their team's need of said med packs. This isn't to say that Empathy is a bad set or that healing is completely worthless, but I feel like advertising Ill/Emp as a dedicated healer just skips the best parts of the combo (crowd control and buffs) and creates the image of a player who doesn't understand the strengths of the character.

Storm/Energy Defender is probably right up there. Get the version of Clarion with +Special for even more oomph.

Based on my experience with a TW/Elec Brute, capped Resistances will do the heavy lifting of your survival. My build has S/L Def in the low 30s, mostly from incidental bonuses, CJ and Weave, and I honestly can't tell if it actually helps me. Most of the enemies that don't debuff Def couldn't hurt me through capped Resistances and Energize and the ones that can usually demolish my Defense. I guess the only circumstance where it does help me is if I'm in a team that can provide me with another ~30% Def: enough to push me well past the soft cap, but not enough on its own. And even then, the difference is obviously there only against some of the nastier enemy groups.

I think Elec Blast would already be a much, much better blast set if Tesla Cage did T3 blast damage. Fine tuning the efficiency of the secondary effects probably needs more of a deep dive.

Cool if I could clarify, probabilities are often so unintuitive I usually have to double or triple check before I can have any confidence about how they should work...

I'm not sure I follow the logic of why streaks are more likely to follow just because granularity is increased. On a 20 sided die, the probability of rolling range [20, 20] for a miss is 1/20 (i.e. "miss" occupies 5% of the outcome range). Assuming rolls are independent (and no streakbreaker), the probability of a n attacks missing in a row should be (1/20)^n. If you have a 10000 sided die, the probability of rolling range [9501,10000] for a miss is 500/10000 (i.e. "miss" occupies 5% of the outcome range). The probability of n attacks missing in a row should be (500/10000)^n = (1/20)^n. Increasing granularity should never increase streakiness because you're checking for if you hit a certain range of outcomes. The only way I can think of how it would increase is if you'd roll once for every potential failure (i.e. roll for 9501, check if it happens and if not, move on to 9052, etc.) until you exhaust all failures at which point you declare success, then increasing granularity would have a huge impact, but that's with an abomination of RNG process. If you roll once, then check whether you're in the range of failures or not, it doesn't matter how granular the range is. Basically, the "significantly wider range of potential failures" is completely offset by the significantly wider range of potential successes, or as in your example every "added chance of fail" is balanced by 19 "added chances of success". Or in other words, there isn't a significantly wider range of potential failures because you're still going to land in the fail probability mass with equally likely whether it's made of 1 or 1000 discrete parts comprising the same fraction of all possible outcomes. As a thought experiment, would the chances of streaks continue to increase up to infinity (if not infinity, what is the limit?) when we'd be able to generate infinitely granular numbers on a number line? Would the chances increase or decrease if the length of the number line and the part of it representing the outcome "miss" were scaled up or down by the same factor?

In no particular order: Electric Blast: weak damage (no real T3 blast), pretty much useless secondary effect. As an emergency buff I'd just increase damage scale slightly across the board if Elec still has the damage penalty for -End and make Tesla Cage do standard T3 blast damage. Mind Control: no pet or a reliable 60/90 second AoE control, reducing Mass Confusion to 60 seconds base CD would be great, Levitate could do a small AoE for the knockup Mercs: weak damage, Serum is crappy, henchmen special abilities have way too long cooldowns Broadsword / Battle Axe: they're just weaker versions of Katana/WM, respectively Ice Melee: Greater Ice Sword really needs some improvements so that the set has more than one good ST attack Stone Armor: this set needs a total revamp more than emergency buffs... Assault Rifle: weak single target damage with mediocre AoE at best, no Aim Sonic Attack: good as a support set, bad as an attack set - cones could use harmonization in range/arc and Shout really needs to do more damage or have a shorter cast time Sonic Resonance: it really needs to do more -Res, add +Toxic/Psi resists to make Sonic the king of Resistance manipulation. Endurance costs need a look at and Liquefy should do -Res and have a much shorter cooldown Force Fields: I don't even know where to start, an emergency buff is probably not enough, maybe a variety of Debuff Resistances in the shields Empathy: not sure how I'd improve Empathy, but shortening RA cooldowns and giving AB some Debuff Resists might be good. Ice Armor: triple damage type hole (Fire/Psi/Toxic) along with relatively low base +Def values for S/L/E/NE, low DDR and a bad T9 if you're a Tank or Brute. I'd probably bump up S/L/E/NE Def values, improve the +Toxic res in Hibernate to a meaningfully higher level, but really the set needs more rework... Kinetic Melee: a lot of the later attacks in the set suffer from the same problem: insanely long animation times without the damage appropriate damage, this also works out against the BU in the set... Stalker Ninjitsu: just grab a few pages from the Scrapper Ninjitsu playbook Fire Melee: it only does damage, and it's not even a top contender for dealing damage Traps: a couple of really good powers carry the whole set, also the playstyle is a relic of a world long gone. As an emergency buff, make basically everything in the set follow the player Kheldians: they feel like the beta version of Sentinels, probably more work than an emergency buff is required

There's always a very fine balance between more stuff to do and a checklist of chores to get to do the stuff you actually want to do. There's always the danger that the list of things to do is so intimidating that some people will just pick another game. I keep coming back to CoH because we don't have a grind, and I can just instantly hop on to do whatever I like instead of thinking of the stuff I "have to do" before that. For me, at least, the type of grind you have in WoW and many other MMOs fosters a short term commitment: I'll play a lot in the short to medium term, then get frustrated at how much of my precious game time is going to activities I don't actually enjoy, quit and never come back. That said, while I don't care for unlocks that basically boil down to "spend a bunch of time doing something simple", I wouldn't mind mastery sort of achievements. Spending a bunch of time getting better at something so that you can complete a skill based thing is much more satisfying. But that's me, though. Different strokes for different folks.

Even easier: Do the signature story arc in Brickstown to get the Hero Slayer badge Switch alignments to redside You can now access a contact (name escapes me) in Port Oakes who lets you "flashback" to all the mayhems for easy explorations The whole process takes maybe an hour solo and you can do it in 5 min segments if you're busy with work or life in general and can't commit to a full TF, let alone 6 of them.

As someone who really dislikes the 1-22 part of the game, I think there's a lot of logic doing it "backwards". I don't care for the pre-22 levels because my characters feel weak, their attacks miss often and I'm stopping for endurance every few minutes. Basically, because my game time is limited I'd prefer to only play the parts of a super hero game where I get to feel like I'm playing a super hero. Fortunately, the 1-22 part is over quickly with DXP (2x DFB -> Posi1 -> Posi2), so it isn't that annoying, but if I had a farmer, I'd probably have skipped to 22 on all my alts. However, what I'm getting at is that I start enjoying the game when my character has access to SO-power enhancements and attuned set IOs, someone else might start enjoying the game properly only when a character has a "finished" build. When you exemp down with a finished build, you're going to be significantly more powerful (=enjoyable to a lot of people) than you'd actually be at that level. Another reason is that some of us (like me) have done the accolade TFs way too many times. I only join in on Posi and Yin these days because the rest of the 6 TFs are boring and prefer getting my TF commander accolade through the mayhem explorations. So, PL through the levels you don't like and avoid playing the content you don't like, quite logical to me. That said, I'm super stoked about the changes to SO availability because I might finally look at the 1-22 content as something else than a necessary evil I want to be done with as quickly as possible.

Completely agree with this. Procs offer an alternative to the standard +Def/+Rech builds everyone went for before PPM. They also improve the build system by making previously less interesting ATs such as Defenders viable now that ATs with inherently higher defensive / lower offensive modifiers can skip some of the +Def bonuses in favor of procs to even up the game.

I think this is pretty wild conjecture. I don't think people leave because they were power leveled, people leave because they find the gameplay / content less interesting than some other activity they could be doing with their free time. If the gameplay loop can keep them attached, then powerleveling doesn't make them leave and can even make them stay (see some replies in this thread). If the leveling up gameplay loop doesn't cut it, then surely removing effective ways of avoiding it doesn't make them stay.

Not very far. My characters are optimized within the confines of their concept, but that's as far as I'm going. Basically I just avoid picking powers or making costumes that wouldn't make sense for the character, such as obviously techy equipment for a wizard or fire powers for an ice elemental. Sometimes I'll make concessions if the power isn't graphically intrusive, e.g. Scorpion Shield can be played as generic Tech/Magic/whatever force field for characters that want S/L Def, whereas Ice and Rock Armor...

Not really sure what you're asking here, but given that procs add "constant" damage in the sense that they aren't affected by +DMG, a proc setup that would give a 100 DPS to a /SR should give 100 DPS to /Bio also. However, Bio also comes with -Res which does affect procs, so you actually get slightly more. If you're wondering about the top of the top end builds which are usually /Bio, what you're probably seeing here is just the "physical" limitation of the test we've chosen. Because the top end builds down pylons so quickly, small swings in proc outcomes introduce a huge source of volatility to the best times. The relationship between pylon times and DPS isn't linear, which means that, for example, at the 90 seconds mark, +-5 seconds = +-25 DPS. At 60 seconds, the same +-5 seconds is +-50 DPS whereas at 150 seconds the difference is only +-10. Given that it's basically impossible for other sets to get close to the average high-end performance of /Bio, procs might seem to introduce higher than expected difference between "average" and "top end". Additionally, it's important to note that pylons (like everything else) regenerate their HP in ticks. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we even know when the regen ticks start. Is it when the pylon enters the combat? Maybe when the zone is loaded? Or perhaps something else completely, but basically this also introduces a source of volatility that's especially important to note for very low pylon times: there could be a significant difference in measured DPS between a run that started right after a regen tick (best case) or one that gets the first regen tick right after dealing a regen tick's worth of damage (worst case). None of these invalidate any results, but IMO they're artifacts of the test/measurement that we should be mindful of. Back in the days when 3 minutes was an exceptional time, this wasn't as much of a problem as procs and other such effects had a longer time to average out which mitigated the volatility. So, basically you're seeing a compound effect of the test slightly breaking and procs actually giving /Bio a slight bit better damage increase (-Res) than other sets.

Aww yiss! Everything about this patch looks great, but I have to say this is one of my favorite things. No more "forced" DFB for the buffs and thanks to the low level SOs and upgrade options, I think I'm going to enjoy the 1-22 range more than I've ever enjoyed it!

Slowly accumulated tokens would've been a solution in my case, at least. Deterministic progression is what I like most about CoX, as long as whatever you're doing gets you inf or merits, you're always a step closer to whatever your build goal is. In other games it's frustrating to do 10 raids and be right where you were 10 raids ago. Several ways to do reward trickling, and I think 100% RNG is just doing it wrong. I wonder if there are any studies on staying power in the long term. Extremely low progression probably turns off people at some point because it's basically equal to lack of progression for people who have "finished everything". People getting bored and wandering off can be an issue, but some of them probably come back at one point or another unlike people who get burned out and just quit. Would be interesting to see a quantified analysis of where the optimal rate of progression and RNG vs. deterministic rewards is on a population level.