GlacialGadgeteer

DISCLAIMER: I know this is a focused feedback thread. This post is a general defense of leaving AE farming alone in the future. I've read through this thread over multiple days, and I don't see a lot of screaming about the sky falling. I see a lot of folks who have a preferred way to play, and if that doesn't jive with another player's preferred way to play, they're at least articulating it as personal preference and admitting it would drive them away from the game instead of into other content. Farmers (goal-oriented people who have made personal evaluations of balancing their personal experience and time and invested in playing this way) can have all kinds of different motivations for what they do, but it tends to get treated like a nefarious attempt at homogenizing optimal gameplay and somehow forcing other players into it. I multibox my 3 fire brutes on a team for a couple nights each month or two. I farm up my alts and kit them out with IO sets to prepare for family game night - a couple hours of low level play every two weeks. Veteran levels in AE only mattered much for those fire brutes, as it's been pointed out that leveling a farmer is difficult in normal content. When I really play, I play to exemp to my wife and in-laws who played during live, pre-IOs, several of whom have reached a point where they have trouble navigating the UI, can't adjust to using tab targeting instead of clicking, take long periods of time to vendor normal enhancements, etc. Things like typed defenses are nigh incomprehensible to folks who like playing but have trouble copying data to a specific flash drive when two are plugged in. They like to make new characters often, so me leveling alts and kitting them for set bonuses helps me take point and balance the odds in our missions without exclusively running white/grey enemies. They'll never get to 50. They'll never click with incarnates or IOs. That's okay, and we can still have fun arresting slews of ne'er-do-wells while my goofball father-in-law RPs team leader. I know most folks' experience is formed around how easy the game has become... I think there's some bias on this forum, since people who love this game and are active enough to follow the forums at all tend to have a higher overall aptitude with the game - veterans who maintain veteran player skills and knowledge. When one of my alts does hit 50 and gets their kit is when I take them back through all the task forces, the accolades, the runs for incarnate salvage rolls, a few MSR or Hami runs for fun, and get some early vet levels on the road. All that is really just to say I would never have the time to pull alts up to get full set bonuses and exemp back down if I was doing it the "normal" way. Nor would I have the interest in running all that pre-50 content for the god-knows-how-many-nth time. When MSR merits got nerfed, it didn't motivate me to find the merits elsewhere. I just started playing less. When AE gets nerfed, it won't impact me much (this time). I don't afk farm. In fact, I hard agree that afk farming shouldn't be possible. I can even understand the argument for AE being off-limits to accounts that don't have at least one level 50 character. Really, I think Peacebringers and Warshades used to be limited access for the same player skill/knowledge related reasons (as opposed to them being purely rewards). I don't necessarily feel strongly enough about those, though. Player choice is player choice. I do like that farming, in its current measure, allows me to continue watching shows and talking with my wife in the evenings even though she's not playing. If I have to be significantly more active and choose (assuming the trend of making AE less desirable instead of making existing 1-50 content more rewarding continues), I just play less again. There might come a day when it's not worth it anymore. Probably game night lives on and we just go less, hunt less, and kill fewer Skuls. What won't ever happen is me magically finding more focus and time to reach my personal goals if those goals start requiring more focus and time than they currently do. Unpopular opinion, but exemplar gameplay is my favorite part of the game.

It might sound unintuitive, but I don't think adding damage to Ice Slick was for actual DPS purposes. It was just lagging far behind usefulness compared to every other power of its type (and honestly still kinda does). The major boons for Ice Slick I see: Now allows players to build toward set bonuses when slotting the power. Now has potential for proc slotting (see below). Annihilation - Chance for -Res Positron's Blast - Chance for Energy Dam Bombardment - Chance for Fire Dam Ragnarok - Chance for Knockdown Javelin Volley - Chance for Lethal Dam Frozen/Superior Frozen Blast - Chance for Immobilize Overwhelming Force - Chance for Knockdown I'm not familiar enough with the powers to know if knockdown procs eligible to be fired could activate if an enemy managed to not fall on the slick. Those are just the proc enhancements that can be slotted now. I'm personally excited to have a second -Res patch.

Excellent call! I think you might be right on the money. I was using the salvage rack to transfer boosters to a poor alt, withdrew all of them, used as many as I could, then ran off when the alt ran out. *Edit* Confirmed the items returned to storage as the posters above and below explained.

*Edit* The posters below are correct, and I've changed the title to reflect that. I understand this is at least somewhat known now, but I'm letting the topic sit. Before adding a booster (27 in inventory). Added a booster to combination tray (26 in inventory). Cancelled without combining and put another booster in combination tray (25 in inventory).

I thought the lighting in icon shops were supposed to illuminate the costumes, but they're all nearly completely black from being covered in shadows. Turning down Shadow Quality or disabling Advanced Graphics Settings and changing overall settings to Minimum/Performance makes some costume colors apparent.

Talking to Annah in Croatoa, the Carnival Strongman Costume and Scrapyarder Costume both require "PWTIFailOwned" as salvage. No Need/Have populate.

Big thanks to Coyote! +1 Inf for addressing all my questions so succinctly. I was thrown off by this specific phrasing: To clarify, I'm not unaware of how defense stacking typically works, and I am aware that ParagonWiki exists (+1 post count is +1 post count). I was leaving the possibility open that "You cannot stack multiple shields" meant "a player cannot have two instances of this buff active at a time" as opposed to the actual meaning of "You (the caster) cannot stack multiple shields..." Further cementing my confusion was "...however, the shield can be improved by another ally using the same power" which sounded like it was altering an already existing instance of that buff. The change in terminology between statements led me to question the mechanics. Unintended consequence of being a test engineer and playing a lot of board games/MtG, I guess.

Has anyone ever run the numbers on the effects of multiple force fielders in a party? Specifically asking with regard to the Mastermind secondary set (which I believe are at 75% base effectiveness of a Defender equivalent), but any info would be appreciated. [*]Powers that "improve" when cast from multiple sources - Deflection Shield and Insulation Shield. [*]Powers that don't specifically say they don't stack - Dispersion Bubble. My guess would be multiple Dispersion Bubbles would be additive, but I can't even hazard a guess on duration/effectiveness of "improved" Deflection Shields and Insulation Shields.

The freaking out about "quarantine" and "elitism" is unreal. Additional channels just give players further options to customize the chat boxes based on what is relevant to them while playing. No channel blocks anyone out from posting whatever they want. If I'm not specifically online to level a char 1-20, I'm generally looking for any TF, iTF, Ouro, story arcs, etc I haven't done on any of my characters - literally anything that isn't DFB. You could tell me to go look for a half dozen or more different specific channels made by other players and hope anyone not running DFB is aware to post there, but that makes the LFG channel the DFB channel. On the flip side, I'd be glad to roll up a new char and just join a DFB channel to home in on those groups for 20 levels, occasionally checking an LFG tab for Posi 1/2 TFs. In support of adding a DFB channel, when I look at LFG, I'm looking for anything my current char or any alt might need or be interested in. I'll message team leaders and ask if I have time to switch characters or sides to run X content with Y character. There is never a point where I see DFB and go, "Oh wait! Hold that spot! I've got a character who needs to run that!" because a group is guaranteed to be running at all times and that makes it pretty unique next to literally all other content in the game. Why do people think adding the option to an already existing system to gather up all DFB requests is bad? People are treating this idea like a sin of segregation rather than a matter of organization and convenience. Numbers in this thread show DFB is popular enough that it would benefit from having its own channel. Unlike other content (and even channels like Help) in the game, DFB does not suffer from not reaching a larger pool of players not already specifically looking for DFB. *[EDIT]* I think, in a perfect world, /dfb would be its own channel on every server, joined by default for every char made in the default chat tab like /Broadcast, /Help, and LFG. New players (who wouldn't know what DFB was to begin with) would still see them by default with exactly as much explanation as they have now through LFG. People who are done running DFB on their chars or prefer DFB in a separate chat tab get to opt out per character when they're done.

This is easily the most elegant solution to wanting to contribute exclusively to the Homecoming server. It isn't over-engineered. It doesn't create additional points of potential liability or systems to break. It doesn't require extra admin and management. It doesn't gum up the boards with personal spectacle of impatience. Perhaps most importantly, it helps extend the life of the server by saving for future costs when the quickdraw donation population inevitably starts to taper off.

Thank you for all your hard work! Seeing updates to this software really helps fill out the feeling that the game is just as alive as it ever was. Its continued existence goes beyond just min-maxing new builds and gives weight to the game continuing to flourish. Workplace antivirus programs are terrible. They also flag (and remove) the test software I've written every line for work. I'm running this on my un-managed test PC, so I can avoid having yet another conversation with our IT dept. for the 5th time this year. :D

Just a clarification on the past three comments, Glacier is a PBAoE and always centered on the caster - i.e. doesn't give a target ring. The macro advice is, however, applicable to a power like Ice Slick. Also, AngriestGhost is correct. Glacier now works during flight after the most recent patch.

I like it! This is extremely similar to my personal favorite build, and I think it gives just the right mix of utility and synergy for the power sets. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! A general guideline for slotting: 1 slot Gale: Knockback to Knockdown. Ice Slick: Plain recharge IO. O2 Boost: Healing IO? Recharge IO? The buff part works regardless. Hibernate: Based on what kind of trouble you tend to find yourself in, a Recharge, an Endurance Mod, or a Healing IO. Ice Storm: I think a Recharge IO is fine for this. I went old school and slotted a proc chance for immobilize, but ever since procs changed to X per minute instead of purely chance per hit, this is definitely not optimal. I'm definitely still doing it. 2 slot Hasten: 2x Recharge IO. 1-3 slot Health: Slot this anywhere 1-3 based on how many fancy health procs you can afford. Naturally, the most-used powers wind up being 5-6 slots. I personally dedicate 4-5 of those to best-in-class IOs or ATOs with recovery/recharge time set bonuses + one extra slot for some proc I really enjoy - e.g. chances for knockdown and hold on Frostbite, chance for +2 magnitude hold on Block of Ice and Glacier, chance for Build Up on Jack Frost because I spoil the boy. I don't really get into min-maxing match up stats, etc, but I can use anecdotes. I used to notice a few enemies always slip through a Glacier cast. As crowd control experts, we know enemies become more susceptible to a status the more they're exposed to it in a short period of time, but in emergency situations or in a dangerous opener, I probably haven't hit every mob in the group with Block of Ice recently. The recharge rate of Glacier + procs/minute of Lockdown: chance for +2 mag hold basically guarantees that when Glacier hits, it will treat enemies as though you've already cast some hold on them. It also adds a visual electric field around the enemy when it procs (which isn't so thematically bad for Ice/Storm), so you'll be able to pretty clearly notice when it's doing some heavy lifting.

Ringo and carpenlov already hit some key points. Ice/Storm was also my first 50 on live. I loved it then, and Homecoming just made it better. There's no better time to play Ice/Storm! It was traditionally considered a toolkit powerset. A lot of powers were incredibly situational, but the recent patch here opens up a lot of synergy. The damage output on this set has never been phenomenal, so my perspective is mainly based on group play. Now that Ice Slick and Freezing Rain KD through immobilize, you aren't at odds with other controllers using their immobilize as DPS. Immobilize also turns all your other storm powers' KB to KD, so Tornado, Lightning Storm, and even the humble Gale can be used without destroying your teams' ability to AoE if you're just focused on lockdown. Hurricane is still situational due to Repel. Must-Haves Block of Ice - Bread and butter hold. Don't leave home without it. Gale - Pretty literally a must-have. You don't have a choice. Emergency herd if not slotted for KB to KD. One extra chance to KD if targets are immobilized. Frostbite - Better than ever after KB/KD patch. Why herd to patch when you can lock them on patch? This power offers synergies with literally every other power in both sets now. Ice Slick - Leave it at one slot and slot for recharge. Great when additional enemy groups are accidentally aggro'd or just stacking with Freezing Rain/Frostbite. Glacier - AoE Hold that can now be used while in the air. That change meant a lot to me, as I prefer Hover as a defensive ability and previously had to be positioned on the ground with the tank to use this. (Circle of Thorns quake powers can suck an egg.) Jack Frost - Jack is the kind of child that makes you rethink whether putting children on a leash in a supermarket is unreasonable. I love him anyways. Sometimes he inflicts hold when he hits something. Snow Storm - This is my primary slow of choice. I find that later stages of the game don't have room in a power rotation to constantly cast AoE slows. This power is set and forget and does not aggro. If you can get close enough to a boss or AV to drop this without noticing, it doesn't take any combat time. Steamy Mist - Defense and stealth for the team. Pair the Steamy Mist stealth with Super Speed's stealth, and you can run off and be sneaky if you want. That combo has always made me want to add team teleport powers, but I've never found the room in a build for them. Freezing Rain - Ice Slick but better. With the right end-game build, you have multiple of these going at a time. Tornado - I used to never take this, but after the most recent patch, this is a lot better for group play. Frostbite first and spawn this wild child for more KD. Lightning Storm - Damage, End Drain, and KB/KD. This was good enough before the patch that the KB was a perfectly acceptable negative side effect. It's just better now. If enemies are close enough, this damages multiple per bolt. With my build, I can have 3 spawned at a time. Situational O2 Boost - I hear people give this power some flak, but it's the perfect post-wakie pick-me-up. Treat it as a fast-cast buff or a way to help your team self-res and get out of combat to recover faster. Arctic Air - Underrated for confusion proc, but even confused enemies can't blast each other if they're constantly slipping in place. Has the advantage of being a toggle, but also the disadvantage of keeping you in melee range. Hurricane - Pros: Repel herding. Keeps you safe. Good in tight hallways. Cons: By end-game, it will not be enough to save you from AVs. Most lesser mobs are getting nuked within seconds of the group engaging in combat. You can try spending your time nudging mobs around, but a blaster will have already picked off that straggler and you could have spent the time casting 2-3 more immobilizes and holds. Maybe Just Don't Chilblain - Single target immobilize. Yuck. You will never have a reason to use this, let alone the time to use this. Flash Freeze - Frostbite, Jack Frost, Freezing Rain, Tornado, Lightning Storm, and the entire rest of your team spamming as much AoE as they can will all break sleep. Regrettably, no part of the meta of this game is sleep-friendly. Shiver - Nah. Just nah. Everything this does, Frost Breath will do better (if you take Ice Mastery) and Snow Storm does without you having to activate it more than once per group/fight. Thunder Clap - I find you've got to put in a lot of work to get mileage out of this power. You just have better powers that lock down and can be used at faster rates. Ice Mastery - It's Thematic! Ice Blast - I'm going to pretend I'm a blaster and no one can stop me. While I'm waiting for Ice Slick, Freezing Rain, Glacier, Tornado, and Lightning Storm to recharge, I'm cycling between this, Block of Ice, and Frostbite. Hibernate - This is my favorite self-preservation power. If I have done something to gain aggro above all other members of the group, I can smash this and pretend I'm a tank until the tank gets aggro back. Frozen Armor - I like looking like Jack Frost and also slotting another Luck of the Gambler 7.5% global recharge. Frost Breath - I like Snow Storm better, but this does have a really cool alternate casting animation. Ice Storm - It's like Freezing Rain without the slick. When it says "Minor DoT," it's not kidding. Can't say this is good, even if I really like stacking Ice Slick/Freezing Rain/Ice Storm on the exact same spot.

FULL DISCLOSURE: This was way more long-winded than I intended it to be. I nuked my entire lunch break writing this out and have to get back to work, so there's been no proof-reading. Please bear in mind I am not meaning to attack anyone or anyone's ideas with this post. It was more or less an exercise in thinking (typing?) out loud and seeing where it went. There's a TL;DR at the end. I apologize in advance. Questioning the Premise of the Issue Some other hyperbolic questions: Why run any content aside from DFB until level 25? Why forgo XP boosters when you can level to 50 twice as fast? Why roll a character that isn't Spines/Fire Brute if you can be a super fast unkillable farming machine? Assumptions I believe are flawed: [*]Players are nearly exclusively running optimal content. [*]Players are nearly exclusively using merits for enhancement re-rolls. [*]The merit rate in the assumption is maximized - very high end of merit accrual with minimal run time/no setup time. [*]The normalized merit accrual rate is entirely balanced. Talkin' 'bout Them Assumptions 1. The playerbase will always eventually find the optimal content, so this change is what we refer to as "moving the cheese." The cheese will always be found again. For incarnate materials, it's Tin Mage and Apex. They run too fast for incarnate materials! When is that nerf coming? This is a private server with other quality of life improvements. Along those lines, I've viewed this merit ratio as a quality of life option there for the people who want to run it. I understand the rate discrepancy is wide, but this is the same of all "quality of life" avenues: XP boosters "cheapen" all content prior to 50+incarnate content. P2W Vet Reward powers "cheapen" the value of travel powers. Enhancement re-rolls "cheapen" the value of all non-optimal enhancements. Invention enhancement sets "cheapen" the value of Hamidon enhancements. All AoE damage powers "cheapen" the value of sleep powers. Burst damage powers "cheapen" the value of general control. (Cheapen is a weird sounding word now. Also, I grant that RMS was likely not intended to be a QoL avenue for merit accrual.) In each of those cases, what do players value and why do they value it? What is the motivation for merit farming? Is merit farming a roadblock or a nice-to-have? I think it can be both. 2. The merit enhancement re-roll mini-game... I've seen the recent posts about people using re-rollers to gain on the market. I think it's great that the option exists. I think it's even better that more players can know about it, but, getting anecdotal, the 5-6 people I regularly play with don't frequent forums, subreddits, or discords for tutorials/strategies. In some cases, they are new to the game. In more cases, they were never meta-obsessed in the original live server run. That's not to say they don't want to reach end-game, but they are likely to do so with as little market knowledge as possible outside of what things cost at the merit vendor and what the last few sold-for prices are at Wentworth's. How high should the barrier of entry for end-game enhancements be and/or what types of cost should they incur (in-game currencies, wiki-knowledge, community involvement)? 3. More anecdotes! I see people quote raid times of 30-40 minutes, I've personally never seen one complete that quickly, especially taking into account setup time. I've also never gotten nearly 1600 Vmerits running one either - usually more like 800 with the understanding it's possible to get more. I'm personally winding up with about 100 merits per hour. That's still really good compared to other avenues of merit accrual, but is it an inherently problematic rate? 4. I think it's a little weird no one is questioning whether the normalized rate of merit dispersal is good. I see it phrased in terms of purples per hour, but what is the negative effect of having that be higher in a game where most folks have a main, but also have more alts than they would in other MMOs they'd like to play and see "capped" one day? I think part of the question here should be "How much time should be mandatory to "finish" a character build? Great... Now I Have Questions... [*] What do players value and why do they value it? What is the motivation for merit farming? Is merit farming a roadblock or a nice-to-have? [*]How high should the barrier of entry for end-game enhancements be and/or what types of cost should they incur (in-game currencies, wiki-knowledge, community involvement, market manipulation)? [*]Is 100-150 merits/hr an inherently problematic rate? [*]How much time should it take to "finish" a character build? Thinkin' 'bout Them New Questions A lot of these are tied into each other. [*] If "most" players are only interested in running the content that gives them the most merits, there are a few possible reasons. Most player interest is not contingent on the breadth or depth of content. Most player interest lies somewhere beyond anything which requires merits to obtain (Late-game content? "Finished" characters?) [*]It could be that merit farming is a roadblock. I personally enjoy experiencing content at least once, but if given the option to run 10 unique TF 1x each plus 1 mindless thing 30x VS run 10 unique TF 11x (all per character I want to play), I will take the first option every time. It also begs the question of why I have to run that hard to finish a single aspect of a single character (I'm looking at you, 14 years of anniversary badges that cost 100 merits each!) In both cases, there is significant repetition to fully slot my hero/villain out, but in one of these cases, it just shifts the farming onto a single area and saves me time. [*]Merit rate is usually expressed in terms of merits/time spent, but it is ultimately time spent/rewards gained by cashing in those merits. At a rate of 30 merits per hour (which I think is the intended normalized rate, feel free to correct me here), getting all the anniversary badges takes 6 days of play time, still having to repeat a large portion of content, just over a potentially wider range of content which may very well lock out all the enhancements and powers a player has worked toward gaining in the first place. 100-150 merits/hr is definitely the relative fire hose here, but what about ways to make other content more rewarding? Something more along the lines of the Weekly Strikes system. Maybe an initial merit boost for any first-time (character lifetime? weekly? monthly?) completion of a merit-rewarding event. [*]Heck, I dunno on this one. I've got a bunch of characters I love and want to trick out eventually. I hate the idea of spending 6 days of in-game time farming merits for anniversary badges, but my brain is probably sick enough that I'll do it at some point. I'm not the player who min-maxes the in-game market/plays enhancement rolling, but also not too casual to not be reading these forums. All my incarnate on my main are T2/T3 from staying up until 2am most weeknights and devoting basically an entire day every weekend to playing. I still don't have my character fully slotted. I'll tough it out on my main for nostalgia. Do I wish I had the time and patience to do it on 10 more characters? 1,000%. Will I be able to achieve that and maintain my work and home life? Not by a longshot. I'm not an unemployed student anymore (thankfully)! No kind of farming is fun forever, even when it's running a five different TFs 3+ times each to slot out one power on one character. Nerfing even an unintended merit fast track guarantees the most exploitative players and players who have run the game hardest so far both maintain a wealth gap and allows the wealth gap to matter. The real calculation should be based on what merit/time spent should be required for the most average of players to "finish" character builds with a few (I think) safe assumptions: 1.) players aren't expected or required to keep coming back month after month as if the game is dependent on a subscription model and 2.) most players honestly love playing the game enough that they want to push more different and unique characters to their limits than in any other MMO. The replayability of the game just by rolling a new character in CoH is one of the game's greatest strengths. TL;DR Buff merits across all non-RMS content! Provide incentive to run all content at least once per character! Keep in mind all forms of farming time is potentially multiplied per character a person wants to play. Re-balance merit/reward/time invested to better fit the timeframe a player should be expected to invest in a single character to "complete" it (e.g. three times the number of hours of unique content)!