DSorrow

I think the biggest issue we have is how increasing damage works linearly, but increasing defenses gets less and less linear the closer you are to the respective defensive cap. For example, if we assume a Tank is at the 90% Resistance cap and does 90 DPS, then apply the tank/brute defense/offense logic to an identical brute build, we should get a brute that has 81% Resistance while doing 100 DPS. In this case, the tank can survive roughly double the incoming damage compared to the brute while only suffering a 10% difference in damage output. Depending on your build, that 10% damage might be pretty easy to bridge with procs because you can skip more than a handful of 5-6 piece bonuses (usual places for +Def/+Res), and thus you'd end up with a Tank build that has Tank survivability and what's basically Brute damage. Given the current rules for Def and Res, I don't think this discrepancy can be solved without either breaking the game apart and rebuilding it. Disclaimer: I don't actually have a Tank on HC, so this is just me thinking out loud.

Mu mastery: This PPP is great for melee ATs with Zapp + Ball Lightning or Elec Fences + Ball Lightning at two picks. I think it's also good for MMs, but nothing special for other ATs. The concept and graphics are generic enough that you can use it on pretty much any character that can justify using electricity. Soul mastery: Great power picks for several ATs. Top pick for Tanks, Brutes and VEATs (Gloom + Dark Oblit) and quite useful for some Scrapper/Stalker builds (Moonbeam + Shadow Meld). Defenders and Corruptors get a lot out of this if their support sets benefit from Power Boost. Several ATs also get access to Soul Drain which is generally a really useful poewr. Like Mu Mastery, the concept and graphics are generic enough to fit into many character concepts. Mace mastery: I don't think I've ever picked this for anything other than Scorpion Shield, and on MMs also for Power Boost. From a numbers perspective, it's the best +Def shield for squishies, available at the first power pick into the pool and pretty light on graphics or at least easier to justify than an ice shield on many characters. Other powers in the set just feel pretty bad, honestly. The mace attacks are slow animating, require redraw, deal bad damage and they're hard to justify unless your character is some sort of gadget user or affiliated with Arachnos. Leviathan mastery: In my opinion, this PPP comes with a bunch of issues: the shield is arguably the worst PPP shield given that Cold damage is the rarest damage type in game, so any other exotic type on top of S/L would be better there's no good single target attack to build into your attack rotation, besides maybe KOBlow everything is sharks or vomit, so it's hard to fit them into character concepts the animation times for basically everything are atrocious In general, I think Mu and Soul patrons are pretty well implemented. Scorpion Shield is nice, but otherwise the PPP needs work. Leviathan is mechanically so far behind other PPPs and EPPs that I'm not even sure what can be done without violating the cottage rule. As for the pets, I don't really like them. The cooldowns are insanely long while the pets aren't all that useful and generally die pretty easily. Then there's the whole issue of them being Arachnos related, which goes against a lot of my character concepts at least. The only pets I've ever picked out of the PPPs are Mace because they can at least be justified as stolen/modified Arachnos tech. Finally, there's the unlocking part which I have slightly mixed feelings for. On the one hand, it's not really a huge effort and there's some value in having to unlock some things through gameplay. On the other hand, I do dislike having the same shopping list of things to do on all alts (passive accolades + PPP unlocks), because some of the required content gets really tedious when you've done it a few dozen times.

I'd guess it is because the standard set of mez protection includes Hold, Stun, Immobilize and KB, so you're only notified if a set deviates from this. That said, the information about status protection is available in-game even without changing the set descriptions if you look at the individual powers with "detailed info" toggled on.

Players playing like they want to is probably the best way to keep a game healthy. Forcing them to do something they don't like will just have them leaving for other games, and in either case they never played story lines. What was gained? I feel like the "problem" is just a strawman here. I like these suggestions. This sounds cool, too.

You'll probably make a tiny bit more money on average by going for the big sellers, but I'm far too lazy to spend the extra time rerolling the same enhancement multiple times. Usually I just convert something I know will make 1-2mil profit after one conversion very consistently to minimize the time I spend converting. My strategy is selling in bulk so typically in my (bi)weekly marketeering session I put up ~300 enhancements for sale, so anything that reduces the number of clunky conversions needed is good for me.

Corporations can be extremely slow when dealing with stuff that isn't a high priority to them, especially when the stuff has little monetary upside, potentially significant downsides and all of the downsides can be mostly avoided by ignoring the thing. Going by my own experience with development projects in big corporations, it wouldn't surprise me at all if "talks" in this case were synonymous with an email chain where the corporation responds to your inputs once a month.

This is a really interesting observation. I haven't spent much time browsing other people's builds while I play so it could very well be that my "knowledge" on this is outdated. Maybe the economy changes by the HC devs as well as the prevalence of veteran players from the end days have actually changed things and people using set IOs is the new normal.

I'm not opposing giving players increased options to add difficulty, what I'm saying is that any of these OPTIONAL things should Consume very little development resources because those could also be used to service the larger player population instead. Be generalist enough options that they increase difficulty equally to most builds which is something the numbers game in CoX can't realistically accomplish, and that is why the SO vs IO build or even Resistance vs Defense and Buffs vs Debuffs question is extremely relevant. We don't want to end up in a place where only a couple of powersets/builds can play at max settings because the difficulty is implemented in a certain way. Even with these OPTIONAL things being OPTIONAL, it doesn't make sense to put a lot of resources into developing something that won't be used like the existing OPTIONAL difficulty settings we already have in Ouro, for example. Won't be an easy task, in my opinion.

Fair enough, I certainly don't have a comprehensive view into the average player base so anything I say on the topic is based off of a hunch. That said, I still think that the spectrum between SOs and optimized IO builds is so wide that an optimized IO build is still miles ahead of a build with set IOs* despite both being much better than SO/common IO only builds. Essentially, if the difficulty options allow us to go from -1/x1 to +4/x8 I'd say an average SO build performance cap is around +1/x3, a build with set IOs* at around +2/x6 and for a fully optimized build it's beyond +4/x8. Note that I use the term "build with set IOs" to mean a character build that slots set IOs, but with little to no regard to an optimized performance goal. This could mean anything from slotting whatever uncommon sets fit into powers just for better enhancement values to a build that just slots "best" sets per power basis without maximizing efficiency in the big picture. Even within this category the performance gap between the low and top end is significant.

I'm glad CoH doesn't have blocking or other reactive measures because the design of the game isn't really compatible with them. How would you even balance 3+ second animations for attacks with the requirement for twitch reflexes without either invalidating or reanimating them? In games where reactive defenses such as dodging, blocking and parrying are implemented well, basically every single player action has an animation time of less than 1 second. Additionally, you're basically never fighting crowds of enemies so it's actually possible to keep track of individual incoming attacks unlike in CoX where you can be swamped with particle effects. While I'm not saying CoX has the perfect fighting system (far from it, in fact), I do think adding reactive measures like blocking would just make it worse.

I think the biggest issues CoX faces when we talk about increasing difficulty are the following: The power gap between a "pick conceptually nice powers and use SOs" and "PhD in Mids' fully optimized IO build" is enormous. We are basically talking about level 1 vs max level power gap in most other MMOs type of difference here. I'd wager the people (me included) who would like to see additional difficulty options represent a vanishingly small, although vocal, minority so any solutions that we come up with should be very effective when it comes to resource expenditure (developer time) Pretty much nothing in CoX numbers game works linearly so finding a sweet spot in the numbers game is extremely difficult, especially given the condition of wildly varying player power. For example, give +5% ToHit to a class of enemies and suddenly they're doing double effective damage against everyone who is soft capped and only ~10% more against someone who is not. Add a small debuff to some stat in a couple of attacks and you end up with horror groups like the Vanguard who are manageable in smaller groups but absolutely decimate you in seconds in large numbers. So, in addition to being the most boring way to increase difficulty like some others already noted, I also don't think it is a very effective method in this game given how quickly things go from "survivable for a minute" to "survivable for two seconds" under exponential returns. With a steady baseline like in most FPS games where everyone has the same HP and damage output with little variance the +con difficulty is easier to manage, but it's still boring. Under these constraints I guess the favorite solutions I've seen and/or thought of are the following: Introduce more specialist enemies to high-level enemy groups (think Sappers and the like) Increase the ranks of spawned enemies so that LTs and especially bosses become more common Face Incarnate characters with special Shadow Simulacrum type enemies, much like Kheldians get Quantums. These could be clones or just boss / EB level enemies with preset player and Incarnate power selections. Scale the number of these per mission according to the number of Incarnate teammates Enemies that summon helpers or have adjacent groups come in for help so that the first volley of AoEs doesn't solve everything

Any character I'm seriously playing has an end-game build planned out well in advance of them hitting 50. I'm pretty good at valuing builds so usually I just send whatever amount of inf I think is appropriate to buy everything and most of the time I get it right within 10% of the actual cost. This kind of strategy allows me to set bids on pretty much the entire build at level 1 so I can low-ball most of the stuff I need. There are some items, though, that I'm willing to spend a bunch on to get them right now such as the various +Recovery / +End IOs, Kismet +ToHit and the +Def/+Res uniques as well as the final missing pieces of a build if I haven't caught them by the time I hit 50. That said, the capital requirements for this would be pretty much unbearable at my current rate of marketeering if my playstyle wasn't pretty much 1-2 actually active leveling up projects at once.

I generally enjoy playing lower levels in big teams with DXP, but without that especially soloing and playing in smaller teams often feels slow and annoying. I think part of the issue is problems with accuracy and endurance where my 50s are the benchmark for enjoyable gameplay: no endurance issues and a consistent 95% hit rate. These requirements are more or less satisfied in the 1-10 range, but in the 10-21 the gameplay experience turns gradually worse as Beginner's Luck fades out and I get more powers that increase my Endurance spend. Then from 22 onwards the situation is pretty much fixed as I can slot a bunch of common and set IOs. I don't farm or PL, but I'd be lying if I claimed I didn't want to skip the 10-21 zone as fast as possible. My leveling up process is pretty much solidified right now: DFB twice so I get the +recovery and +tohit powers, then Posi1 and Posi2 which most of the time gets me to 22. After this I pretty much do level appropriate TFs, run story arcs or whatever else I like because the gameplay doesn't frustrate me like it does in the teens. Essentially, I guess I'd just like the gameplay experience to be comparable to the really low levels or 22+ game and not take a dip that's exacerbated by many enemy groups such as low level CoT, Vahzilok, etc. That said, if I had an active SG or more friends who played CoH, I'd probably do lower level story arcs and red side content much more often. After all, good company can offset lacking Accuracy and Endurance issues.

To echo some other posters, I don't think you're missing much at all. As far as efficiency goes on any character / team with access to AoE damage, increasing spawn size is better than increasing enemy level. However, spawn sizes have a cap to them and once you can instantly delete a spawn at +0, +1 or even +4, why not play at +4? Then there are matters of personal preference when it comes to challenge level: some players want to breeze through with minimal effort and others want the opposite. Usually I like playing +2/x6-8 in while leveling and in smaller teams, but sometimes you get an abundance of support or just teammates powerful on their own that playing anything less than +4/x8 feels like the enemies are made of paper. As far as recipe drops go, your best bet obviously is whatever method that lets you defeat as many enemies as quickly as possible, but for farming purposes I guess there are at least two other factors that have to be accounted for: Target saturation: at lower difficulty levels you're potentially defeating enemies so quickly that new patrols don't reach you quickly enough to provide full target saturation at all times so your defeats / minute could be more or less the same regardless of playing at +0 or +4. Mission resets: the faster you clear a mission, the more time you spend in loading screens. Also in regards to AFK farming, it's not really AFK if you have to reset a mission every 5-10 mins. Both of these can't really impact you significantly at the same time, but depending on whether you do a classic contact mission farm where you jump from one spawn to the other or an optimized AE farm, one of these could be meaningful.

IMO, Traps suffers from the problem that it's incredibly powerful against stationary targets, but feels utterly useless in fast moving teams. Unfortunately, there are very few (none, really) strong, stationary foes in the game where the strength of Traps would truly shine compared to other support sets, and 99% of the game is moving fast across a map. As a player this basically results in a gameplay experience where I feel like my other powerset is doing most of the work as the long cooldowns and setup animations allow me to use maybe 1 or 2 Traps powers per spawn. I'm not sure how this problem could be solved without changing Traps too much, but I think either cooldowns and animation times need to be reduced across the board or many of the powers should be changed into mobile drones that follow you, much like FFG, but hopefully with better speed and pathing.

Huh, never knew this. Unfortunately I'm still not sure if it improves (imo) MA's bottom position for Brutes, but at least it's then a closer competition between MA and EM.

For melee ATs at least I'd say Martial Arts is definitely up there for the worst primary. It has a mixed bag of secondary crowd control meaning none of them really ever get applied, its ST damage is mediocre and AoE is pretty garbage. For secondary, I'd say either Ice (the Scrapper version is ok) or Stone Armor, but with IOs I'd say Stone takes the cake as Ice's shortcomings are easier to deal with. Basically the worst melee AT I can imagine is MA/Stone Brute that doesn't even get the +Def from Storm Kick like Tankers.

I like the animations of Martial Arts, but numerically the set just isn't particularly good at anything with its mediocre single target damage and below average AoE. What I think the set needs is something that either improves it defensively (the +10% Def Tankers get is great), gives it more reliable and effective crowd control (Stone Melee) or improves its damage output.

These kind of design formulas already exist and most powers follow them: any attack with a given damage scale is (most of the time) accompanied by a specific recharge and endurance cost. However, there are a couple of things that make powersets (and their performance) different from each other: Secondary effects. What if the power stuns or drains endurance. How do these factor in? Going back to your example, Fire's secondary effect literally is more damage whereas Ice Blast slows and Elec drains endurance. Power selection. Some powersets get more AoE, some get more ST attacks, some require you to be close up, others allow you to stay at range. Basically the differences draw from the identity of each powerset and I would really think twice before tinkering with those. I do agree with you that Elec Blast is pretty weak compared to most other blast sets, but that has more to do with the powerset lacking a T3 blast (Blaze, Bitter Ice Blast) than it has to do with individual attacks doing less damage than comparable attacks in other blast sets.

1. I try to avoid this. I've been trying to play powersets I never got to 50 back in the day, but I've also recreated a few of my absolute favorite pairings. I also try to avoid repeating powersets and so far I've been successful at it, but this is a rule I'll have to start breaking soon as there are is definitely a subset of powersets I enjoy playing more than others. 2. In a way yes, I don't copy the exact same look over, but for example I do have a couple of magic characters that use slightly altered versions of the same costume template.

Stamina gives you +25% base recovery. Numina gives you 10% base recovery. Basically this means that higher than 40% EndMod enhancement in Stamina is going to beat Numina's. However, Numina's also gives you a bit of Regeneration and depending on what you've already slotted in Stamina, ED might cause the slot to be more worthwhile as a Numina's rather than an additional EndMod in Stamina.

I don't really have one main character, but I can easily identify a subset of my characters that I enjoy more than others. In my case this is usually due to character concept and gameplay feel just clicking better, for example a crunchy melee set like War Mace or TW just feels better to me than Spines.

You can want it, but if you don't want to put in the time to learn marketeering or other efficient money making methods let alone putting in the time actually doing those methods, the better question is, are you entitled to the best items the game has to offer? While I think your whole argument is baseless, CoH does actually allow you to get a full set of uber level gear at a very reasonable and deterministic time investment and I'll show you why. Consider that a character has 93 slots to fill (24 powers + Health / Stamina + 67 slots) with set IOs. Even if we assume the most outrageous investment of you wanting to have a purple / ATO / winter IO in every single slot, you'd need 9300 merits or roughly 9300 minutes of average merit yielding content (which award you roughly 1 merit / minute) coming in at 155 hours. Now because this slotting scheme is completely unrealistic given that not all powers can even take those enhancements, let's say you want to fill half of your powers with those things and the rest with rare IOs in which case you'll need just under 7000 merits to acquire everything or 116 hours. Now keep in mind, this 116 hours is just counting the merits from average merit yielding content, such as most TFs. Once you start adding in more efficient means of getting merits (Apex / Tin Mage / Hami), influence drops, random drops, level up merits, etc., I'd be surprised if it took you much more than 60 hours of just playing the game. When you look at just about any other MMO out there, 60 hours for a full uber build is a ridiculously reasonable time investment especially when you factor in that it's just doing basically whatever you want, not farming or grinding or requiring end game attendance.

I'd add that another important point is to consider which attack you want boosted by the proc. Ideally, you want to fit two attacks into that 3.25s window, one of which is your best DPA attack. For example, in a chain of Radioactive Smash > Radiation Siphon > Radioactive Smash > Devastating Blow you'd get the best proc chance in DB, however, DB is also the attack you'd most want boosted by the proc. In this case, you'd better slot it in Siphon or Smash of which I'd pick Siphon because then you'll always get to activate DB within the window whereas in Smash you could "waste" the proc on Siphon instead.

No thanks, I like being able to stack AD for more DDR.