DSorrow

I have two main issues with Regen: it's very susceptible to debuffs and burst damage which makes it relatively weak in end-game it gets no offensive boosts to offset all the time spent using the various clickies (IH, DP, Reconstruction, MoG) It just seems to me that there's no upside to the very active playstyle the set demands. Unfortunately I have no idea what offensive boosts could be baked into Regen that would fit the theme of the set so stuff like +Absorb and Debuff Resistance is probably a better avenue for improvements.

I generally start slotting attuned sets at 22 but I still respec at 50. The power up isn't massive that way but often I want to get rid of at least one low tier attack and sometimes I'll make adjustments to the build depending on how it actually plays.

Would be nice to have sort of incarnate shift difficulties on top of what we have now. Something like (+1) grants all enemies an additional powerful ability (let's say, Fire Blast enemies gain Blaze), (+2) adds some special enemies, (+3) shifts everything up a rank (minions -> LTs, LTs -> Bosses) and so on.

If you ask me, IOs were a very successful attempt at undoing ED because I'm having much more fun with all the possibilities granted to me through IOs than I ever did before.

I don't think by any means that microtransactions aren't a valid way of collecting revenue, I just dislike gambling because the randomness only decreases the value for me. To give an arbitrary example, if it takes on average 5 rolls to get something, then for me getting it by roll 4 is a much smaller positive than getting it by roll 6 is negative, so on average I'll be pretty pissed off after gambling. It doesn't matter quite as much if we're using play money, but I still prefer being able to directly buy what I want because I find unlucky RNG streaks extremely frustrating.

It's a good point, but I'd argue HOs were so hard to come by they were basically unaccessible to a large part of the population. Considering that you'd need probably at least ~30 to fill every slot that could meaningfully benefit from HOs it would take months of Hami raids to get them for one character. The server I played on organized one per week, IIRC, and even then it wasn't always successful. And at no point in the time between ED and Inventions did I think the new ruleset was better than what we had before. Fun is subjective and I think ED+IOs > no ED but no IOs > ED and no IOs when it comes to fun. Like I said, I don't think I would've continued to play the game for as long as I have if ED had never been fixed with IOs.

Rad Melee is definitely strong. I expected it to be good but I was still surprised positively by my Rad/SD. The set has strong single target damage and the damage aura combined with Contamination does a great job at whittling down minions while you take down the boss. Typically it's Atom Smasher -> focus on boss and by the time the boss falls, everything else is down as well.

True, I remember running my Scrapper with all attacks 6 slotted for Damage because thanks to Conserve Power, Hasten and Focused Accuracy there was no need for Acc/End/Rech slotting. Similarly all my main defensive powers were slotted with 6 Res or Def depending on the power. That was bland, but in my opinion ED didn't really fix the blandness, it just changed it from 6 Dam to 3 Dam / 1 Acc / 1 End / 1 Rech so the way I see it, ED was just a global nerf up until the introduction of IOs. Right now, I'd never switch ED+IOs to a world of no ED and no IOs, nor do I think it would make any sense to get rid of ED while keeping IOs.

I'll never buy a gamble loot box. If the contents are random, I'm not going to pay because I want to decide what my money gets me. In an ideal situation where the item in question is only cosmetic, I really like it, it doesn't cost too much and the pool of items only available via credit card is small, I would probably buy it. I have bought cosmetic items in games before so it's not out of the question I would do it again, but the implementation is key and the only two hard rules I have are the ones I mentioned, rest is case by case.

But it wasn't ED alone that made the game more fun, it was ED as a stepping stone to IOs. I can't speak for anyone else, but without IOs I would've left the game a long time ago because with ED restricted SOs build variety is actually pretty limited if you want your build to be effective. I do agree with you on the target / aggro caps because the way they worked before promoted a pretty boring playstyle.

There are two things I hate about loot boxes: contents that provide a meaningful gameplay benefit (or any benefit at all in PvP games) because that's just P2W random contents because that means I can't decide what I get with my money If either of those things is true, then in my opinion the loot box design is terrible. I strongly prefer everything being achievable through gameplay, but I don't think it's necessarily unacceptable if some cosmetic items are only available through microtransactions. A lot depends on the context of the game, the amount of things only available via credit card, how much they cost and so on. I have never bought a gamble loot box with real money and I never will.

This is my position, too. If it was a justified negative impact to one of my characters, then no biggie. A significant (well, even a minor one) to all of them, justified or not, is just too much for me personally. Even though I don't want Hasten nerfed, I think it's a completely unreasonable standard that things need to be broken in order to warrant a nerf. Besides that, I don't think it's even possible to "prove" anything is broken unless it literally makes you invincible or something similar. The flip side of this argument would be that anything doesn't need to be improved unless it's completely and factually useless which is equally silly. Hasten definitely warrants a nerf based on the numbers because it's blatantly obvious that it's far too good for a T1 pool power. However, nerfing it would impact so many characters that it would cause a huge outcry (I mean, just look at this thread where it's only proposed...) and I don't think that would be worth the gain in balance.

I don't want Hasten nerfed for purely selfish reasons, but there's no way I could argue there isn't an issue when Hasten is in its own tier of good among pool powers. I'm not a game designer, but to me it would make sense that everything within category (melee powersets, pool powers, ranged T3 blasts, etc.) would be in the same ballpark. Perfect balance is obviously impossible and some things would always have better synergy with specific builds. Looking at the issue from another angle, I think things like Presence Power Pool and Ice Armor could use some tuning upwards because they aren't in the same ballpark as their peers. You could just argue that "someone can just CC better than you, so what" or "someone just takes hits better than you, so what", but somehow that doesn't really seem like a sufficient argument to not enforce parity. But repeating it just in case, any changes to Hasten that would have a negative impact on my builds is a no from me. There definitely is an issue with Hasten, but I'm not willing to fix it at the expense of all my builds.

I think that's a bit of a tangent. I'd like more difficult content for sure, but I don't want content being made "difficult" by reducing the efficiency of my characters via breaking all of their builds.

Disclaimer: I realize my builds are definitely on the extreme outlier end of the scale and I agree that Hasten is too good. However, nerfing Hasten would change how every single one of my builds play and that's not something I can agree with. If it was just one character and a minor change at that, then I wouldn't really oppose the idea. Looking at the individual characters, many of them rely on perma Hasten to be able to use an attack chain or have another ability perma: Fire/Time: perma Chrono Shift and by extension, perma Farsight. Pretty obvious impacts to my attack chain and survivability. Ill/Cold: perma PA, Heat Loss and Benumb. TW/Elec: perma Energize, my attack chain. Rad/SD: perma double stacked AD, significant against some enemy types but other than that this character would suffer the least by far. Therm/Sonic: perma Heat Exhaustion, Melt Armor and PPP pet. WS: perma Eclipse Ice/Fire Blaster: my attack chain My reasoning is 100% selfish, but having to re-do all of my builds and even then potentially losing performance is getting too close to ED for me. That said, though, I don't really have any solid answers as to what can or should be done to Hasten. So far the most reasonable suggestion I've seen is putting +20% Rech to Swift and taking Hasten down to +50% so it isn't quite as good as it is now, but it would probably still be comparatively much better than most other pool powers. Inherent but otherwise like it's now? Maybe. EDIT: Appears I missed at least a page's worth of new posts while typing this one. This seems reasonable, too.

The way I see it, making Hasten an auto +20% Rech is a pretty significant nerf to everyone who actually picks Hasten because it's worth much more than that even with basic SOs, let alone with any IOs.

True, but in my opinion the outrage alone is reason enough not to do it. Whatever the numbers say about Hasten, a sweeping change like this causing many people having to alter most of their builds is a pretty good reason to be pissed. And then we'd get to looking at the side effects the change had on the performance of some recharge reliant powersets...

Can't disagree with this but my only fear is that any meaningful nerf to Hasten would see ED levels of outrage. As much as the numbers prove Hasten being too good, I'm going to have to go with a no.

I think whether or not players use their optimal chains is beside the point. The game doesn't require anything close to an optimal attack chain anywhere so I don't think it's out of line that you'd have to make some specific choices to push the envelope.

Hasten can already be skipped with IOs, I don't see how 10% +Rech in Swift would make any meaningful change to the status quo. I generally oppose unjustified power creep because I don't think a constantly increasing power curve is good for the game's balance. EDIT : Personally I wouldn't mind getting +10% Rech, but I just can't come up with any proper arguments why it should happen, which to me implies that the status quo should be maintained. I'm being a bit sarcastic but, why don't we just increase everyone's damage by 1.7%? It wouldn't break the game either.

Strictly speaking, I'm not using a slippery slope argument which would be more akin to "give this it and will lead to X". I'm not making any claims to +Rech in Swift leading to any other changes. What I am saying is that we can't easily quantify the point at which "the scales tip" which makes incremental changes just for the sake of more dangerous. I just don't see any strong arguments for why this change should be done.

Maybe, but I don't think that's a solid argument for why we should get even more. Not that I wouldn't mind that extra recharge for many of my builds, but I just don't think it's reasonable to consider any change that alone doesn't break the game completely fine. The line of reasoning I'm trying to illustrate is that buffing everyone's damage by 1% wouldn't probably even be noticed by the vast majority of the players, but buffing it by 100% would "break the game". If we just started buffing damage in 1% increments, at what point do we stop if none of the increments by themselves qualify for breaking the game?

I don't assume my world view is universal, but it's also not a universal truth that nothing can be done to manage one's own reactions to things. I also do have to make some assumptions as to what is a reasonable level of thickness of skin, otherwise we're pretty limited in what can be conversed at all. While I understand sometimes small things compound in the short term and cause everything to be seemingly annoying, I find it pretty unreasonable to consistently get offended by anonymous posts that aren't either blatantly offensive or confrontational. I can be snarky at times, but my intention is never to attack anyone. It's literally impossible for anyone to be 100% considerate of every individual's context so I'm happy with people being mostly considerate. We shouldn't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by something far less villainous, and sometimes it's worth considering whether it's helpful to call people out on it especially if confronting said perceived malice will likely just make the whole thing take a turn for the worse. We do have rules and mods to take care of the blatant cases, anyway.

Alpha (T3 or T4) gives you a +1 shift that's active all the time. Destiny (T3 or T4) and Lore (T3 or T4) both give you an additional +1 that's active in iTrials and some zones (Pocket D and Ouroboros, at least).

I think there's a lot of potential in implementing highly liked AE story arcs to actual contacts.