ForeverLaxx

Oh, I don't think you're judging anything about me or my character, so we're fine there. I'm just wary of changes that could fundamentally make null particular character concepts that aren't someone's super-niche or rare pick (like a petless MM. Yes, I have one, and until they make Whip Domination a set I'll continue to have one). I think the deal with Dark Armor is that they wanted to put in the effects other Dark sets had that made them stand out. The devs of yore decided that "darkness" was nebulous enough to encompass a bunch of different effects. Damage over time, stealth, lifesteal, fears, stuns (minorly), and tohit debuffs seem to be what they wanted from a theme perspective, so the OG devs put as many of those into Dark Armor as they could. This does mean that the set has a bit of an identity crisis and sometimes seems to work against itself at times. But that mishmash of parts can create interesting synergies, like my Dark Armor/Stone Tank being a melee-ranged stun machine that can lockdown bosses forever. Cloak of Fear can be combined with Touch of Fear to affect normally resilient foes, though admittedly fear has far fewer in-AT synergies to leverage. It's unfortunate too since I think Cloak of Fear is more thematic to what Dark embodies than Oppressive Gloom is, but CoF is just not useful. The ToHit debuff isn't that great, even if you're using it as pseudodefense and I've never liked the graphic effects of it (though I know plenty of other people do love being a mass of screaming faces). I'm not sure what to do about either of these powers, be that a removal or overhaul of what they provide or how they work. If I had my way, I'd probably move the ToHit Debuff to Death Shroud. I doubt many, if any, people skip their damage aura and this would just be a flat boost to DA's survivability. Spines has a damage aura that has soft survivability in the form of -recharge, so having some survivability stats on a damage aura isn't out of the question. Doing this also opens up more set possibilities, which is neat. The immobilize protection could probably be moved to one of the other armor toggles. Not everyone likes Combat Jumping or having to take a Stealth power just to not get rooted, and even as a tank, Cloak of Darkness comes in pretty late for a very common mez effect resist. Otherwise I think the power is fine -- it lets people who want stealth for sets or concept keep it. Now I'd like to keep Oppressive Gloom for reasons stated above, plus I like the "drain health" aspect (it's not even that much; will basically never get you killed). It's boring, but a chance for increased mag is probably warranted so even those who aren't leveraging synergies can justify trying it, and I'd look into maybe seeing if they can apply a slow to targets as well so they don't stumble about too far. For Cloak of Fear, I'd redesign it into a click power rather than a toggle. Perhaps something like Fiery Embrace, where it adds bonus Negative damage to your attacks with a mag2 fear on each attack, duration scaled with the base recharge of the attack power in question. Not sure if that'd be possible, but it would keep people who take it for the fear satisfied (I hope) while giving the player control over when it's active, limiting how much the set steps on its own toes. Yes, you'd "break" your fear just by attacking in order to stack it, but a boss getting off one attack instead of 3 is still worth it, I think.

Not sure if this is the case for other blast sets, but using the Instant Snipe from Energy Blast with the alternate animation for it (not the wide stance charge, but the standing straight, right arm out version), this animation is sometimes applied to the other blasts. Since I haven't selected that animation for those attacks, though, the energy comes out of the character's belt instead of their hand. It's difficult for me to pin down exactly why it does this because it doesn't always trigger, but it triggers more often than it doesn't. I can reset the animation by using one of the prestige "staff" attacks or by waiting long enough for the game to realize it's calling the wrong animation.

I never put anyone on ignore. Not only is it not worth my time, but sometimes I get enjoyment out of watching the argument unfold. Besides, I'm not a fan of only having half a conversation. I'm sure some people have put me on ignore more than once because I tend to be very blunt and to the point about things, but I don't ignore other people with a command. If I don't want to interact with someone, I just use my own willpower to resist sending them messages. Sometimes this results in gold as they think I've ignored them and they start getting braver. Reading through the section about the knockback hate, I made an Energy/FF Corrupter that spends her time knocking things down instead of putting defensive bubbles on her team. You're welcome.

I ignore the Reveal power but still insist on revealing the map manually, especially with elevator rooms.

Removing Oppressive Gloom's stun would completely destroy one of my character's niches and I'd rather that not happen.

My Dark Armor character is a Dark Armor/Stone Melee tank that tries to lean into the notion that DA wants to be a "controlish" armor and combines that with Stone Melee and its plethora of low-mag area stuns. To do that, though, one has to run Oppressive Gloom and someone touched on the main problem with this -- the power works against itself due to how stuns cause enemies to wander around aimlessly. Very often, they'll split entirely and now the mob is split with only some of them stunned. It's fairly annoying and I can only manage it somewhat due to SM's stuns also coming with knockdown. I've also tried fixing this with a Chance to Immob IO proc in OG, but it doesn't seem to ever work or I'm very unlucky. Anyway, the set itself is mostly fine barring the stagger and oppressive endurance costs. In a game that's supposed to be balanced around SOs, feeling like one needs multiple IO procs to manage your endurance if you pick the "wrong" combination feels bad. Even with IOs for recovery, I still find myself toggling the energy resist armor off and on depending on what I'm fighting, and while I'm not necessarily against this sort of thing it feels like only DA really has to do this anymore. DA's resistances really don't necessitate this level of micromanagement just to keep yourself afloat on endurance, and woe unto you should you take on Tough and Weave to further your survival. To me, it feels like the set was originally designed to be paired with Dark Melee in a world where everyone was expected to only run "relevant" toggles. We left that world a long, long time ago and I feel either the costs of the armors need to be looked at, the resist values need to be looked at (to justify the overall cost), some kind of recovery bonus be added to an existing power where it thematically would make sense, or maybe even consolidate the armors to free up a slot for a brand new power to manage endurance. I dunno. Seems like most everyone is saying the same thing here: the set is mostly fine but has endurance issues that aren't really balanced around SOs correctly.

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.