ForeverLaxx

I only ran into two major issues with my Elec Affinity character. The first is that the powers recharge too quickly for buffs that last awhile, so the set feels like it's extra clicky when it doesn't need to be, as those buffs often don't stack with each other. I'll forget to "rebuff" often just because the cooldowns and buff durations are so far apart. 5 second recharges on buffs that last 1-2 minutes just makes the set feel weird unless they hit everyone 100% of the time (and it doesn't). The other issue I kept running into is admittedly narrow overall, but since we can't control who the buffs bounce to, Illusion Controllers can be your worst enemy when trying to buff/heal multiple people at once. Phantom Army, pets that can't be buffed or healed, will take up a bounce (or more), often wasting your use of the power. This is the only time I find the short recharge helpful and it may not be possible in the game code to exclude these targets for one reason or another. I just know that I was on a TF with an Illusion Controller and was getting increasingly frustrated with being forced to use my multiple heal/buff powers as single-target ones despite them being balanced as an AoE.

Many Blaster secondaries are going to have around 2-3 melee attacks in them as that was the standard from the start. Newer sets try to buck that trend a bit, with Tac Arrow being the most obvious. There's also Devices to consider, but you may have to like toebombing to really get into it. I'm going to throw /Plant into the ring, even if it has a few melee attacks. It has a ranged immob and hold, a good passive recovery/regen power, and even a toggle debuff and area hold if you want them.

Since old conventional wisdom regarding the Leadership pool was "skip Maneuvers unless you want a LotG mule" (before capping defense became "the thing"), this doesn't surprise me.

No, I read everything. It's nice of you to cut off the rest of that sentence though so you could pretend I didn't. Comparing your wishes to that of a spoiled child isn't off the mark considering the entire basis for your complaint is that you don't want to wait and can't play CoH like a "second job" in order to afford your builds. Many people throughout this thread have pointed out ways to make money that takes even less time and energy than afk farming the AE; if you didn't want to read the whole thing (and I honestly don't blame you, we're 57 pages in), don't use that as an attack angle to presume someone else hasn't been paying attention. No one said anything toxic, your thin skin about a comparison notwithstanding. If you still think you have to dedicate 8 hours a day to "afford a build", I once again direct you to my previous post where it seems I play even less than you and have no issues buying what I want from the AH. There's obviously some fundamental thing or belief you're doing (or not doing) that causes you to fall so far behind. Finding what that is should probably be your first goal rather than loathing the loss of a minor amount of farmable influence.

You want to lock the thread because you're impatient and think you're owed a certain amount of an item's sale price, and people are telling you to just lower your price or wait 3 days? I'm sorry man, but this is just absurd. I play this game so slowly that I still don't have a 50 after being here a year and I have no problem getting enough money by just selling converters gained from merits doing mission arcs and TFs in my tiny 2-4 hour play windows I allow myself every couple days. Some days I get to play longer than that, but most of those are spent standing around doing nothing. If you can't acquire "enough money" to play your characters, and *I* can, either you're doing something wrong or I found a secret dimension where money just falls into my characters' laps for merely existing on the server.

Once again, this is not a counterargument. The issue is NOT that people have lots of influence. The issue is that farming was GENERATING too much out of nothing. "Playing the market", as you suggest, does not generate new influence; it merely REDISTRIBUTES IT somewhere else (usually to one person). I repeat, for what seems like the hundredth time at this point (a feat, considering I don't have 100 posts to my name), the problem is influence being added to the economy, not influence being moved around within that economy.

It's because the people who only farm are trying to change the argument into one about "haves" vs "have-nots" and are pointing out that marketeers have more money than they do. They've decided that the "real problem" is that other players have more money than they do so why did it matter that they were abusing an exploit. It's an attempt to deflect the argument, and 50 pages later, it still isn't working. All they see is that they gain 500 million in a session with multiple accounts and the other guy hits 500 million with one account "doing nothing". No amount of telling them the difference between farming (influence generation) and marketeering (influence redistribution) is going to convince them that they're arguing from a faulty position. In their mind, it's already decided that the devs just hate them specifically.

This is a problem with humanity in general, unfortunately. They'll act open to learning why they're wrong, but you have to provide evidence they haven't already dismissed. Problem is, they've dismissed all available evidence already so you're stuck. They'll continue believing what they want to believe, grumbling about it, to the end of time.

Since this seems to get repeated ad infinitum, the problem wasn't that people had money to spend on any singular character; the problem was that there was too much money being generated out of thin air which causes inflation to happen. Playing the game normally generates influence out of nothing, but not at any appreciable rate, which is why farming was so popular -- it generated a lot more influence in the same amount of time. The problem was, due to an exploit, this amount of generated influence was crossing a line that the devs drew in the sand and has since been corrected. You're still generating more influence than everyone else who plays normally, just not enough to potentially impact the market and drive prices up. Marketers do not *create* influence by doing their conversions. All they do is shift around the wealth that already existed. Stop looking at this as "the devs don't want players to be rich", because that's not what this change is targeting.

Just replying to my own there here to update that as of the latest patch, this is still an issue. I'm sure it's a very minor issue, all things considered, and has a low priority to fix but it's still pretty annoying.

There were April 1st pranks, but most of them were aimed at dataminers and not the players directly.

Still loading up Dark Souls 3, Destiny 2, and Synthetik the most, outside of CoH. Random other games here or there, but I usually make another run in Bioshock/Bioshock 2 at least once a year.

I don't agree to anything, but it's very clear you never had the intention of being rational. I'm moving on for that reason.

You double-posted, in case you want to fix the second post. Just giving you a headsup. I don't necessarily disagree that removing bonus influence while exemplar'd might have been unfairly targeted as a preemptive response, but it's clear they didn't like the practice of farmers exemplar'ing to 49 to AFK farm for faster influence gain than you'd get at 50 doing regular content. Maybe they'll have extra rewards in the future to offset it? Only they know, but as it stands currently, it's not even that big of an issue in the grand scheme of everything. EDIT: then you repeated yourself a third time, quoting a different post of mine. I really don't need you to do that to see your posts, you know.

It wasn't a stealth nerf, it was an exploit fix. That's not even a semantics argument, so don't try pulling that one out either. Converters aren't a problem and are, believe it or not, one of the reasons the prices are so low to begin with. How in the world you can argue that it's an issue is entirely beyond me.

If you want to argue a point, then argue a point. Making up a bunch of stuff to be mad about so you can mad isn't productive.

You know what happens when a dev team announces they're about to remove an exploit in the next patch? Everyone using it will double their efforts and people who weren't aware of it suddenly start using it too so they can get in on the action before it's gone. Not announcing an exploit fix before the fix is shipped is how you avoid that scenario. Whether or not you like that practice has no bearing on it being the right way to do things with regards to exploits. It's unfortunate that removing all bonus influence while exemplar'd went away with the exploit, but clearly the devs felt that fixing the exploit alone wasn't enough to slow the flow of influence entering the market. Converting merits into converters is something else entirely and not really a problem anyway. It's not about people having money, it's about an economy that has too much money coming in with no exchange of resources. Merits have their own value and turning them into influence through selling converters removes those merits from your inventory, puts product on the market for people who market flip, and removes influence from the market through fees. Again, it's not about reducing the amount of money individuals have; it's about lowering the amount of incoming "free" money.

People crying "doom" over farmers losing some influence gain and everyone else saying how childish that is.

Considering they pointed out one of the good things about farmers is that they inject drops into the market, I doubt it. Hell, more drops are going to show up because now the farmers have to farm for longer to get the influence they used to get. The problem was too much influence generation, not market drops. Try coming out from under your tinfoil hat sometime.

Fair enough. I really should have stated that not many like nerfs. Point taken.

Your intentions aside, what was said is certainly a threat. The idea of "make too many changes and people will leave" is exactly the kind of thing used for that. It warns against being "unpopular" in favor of keeping the people who are already here (who, by the way, have no guarantee to stay anyway). It strikes me as the "cool parent" who's more concerned with being their kid's friend than being their authority figure/compass. No one likes nerfs, even if they're good for the game overall, because no one likes losing their toys. Some people might leave for it, some won't, but the fear of losing players is not a reason to avoid change.

You are. Most changes are done incrementally to reduce their impact to the overall game over time, not in some desperate bid to maintain a playerbase.

Not that I disagree with your premise, but the person you're quoting was using the "go to another server" as a threat against making "unpopular" changes. They weren't telling people to leave; they were telling the devs that if they tinker too much then they won't have any players anymore.

In every game I've ever played, attempts at curbing farming have always been met with the same forum vitriol. Those players always say the same things, and they're always thinly veiled attempts at sticking up for "the little man" when that's not their motivations for being upset. In fact, that angle of attack shows a lack of understanding basic economy. No game I've played in all my years gaming has a reduction in farming efficiency become the "doom" the farmers on the forums say it will. This is a reduction, not a removal, after all. Now, are some of those players going to quit being "generous" with their money, or start farming less? Yeah, probably -- reactionary players usually do follow through on this kind of threat. Is it going to impact the market in any meaningful way? Not likely, considering there are many more players out there who will just farm an extra hour than usual to make up the difference, incidentally increasing the amount of drops and offsetting the spiteful. The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems.

As the title and image state, the Ascendant enemy type seems to have invisible Force Field powers. Even the iconic "shield" they use when under their PFF doesn't show. In addition, when they put the player under a Detention Field, it doesn't have any graphics either. While all other FF powers are incredibly faint (I have them at the default setting and particle count up to max, just to clarify), any "bubble" cast by Ascendants seems to be non-functional graphically. This has been a long-standing problem, though it doesn't really affect gameplay much and is mostly just annoying, I figured I'd post it here on the bug forum to at least try to get some exposure to it.