Andreah

About once a week, I tally up my character's Influence wealth which includes cash on hand, stored in various ways, tied up in market sales and bids, and in inventory of things I intend to sell or use in crafting things to sell. What I don't keep track of is the value of slotted enhancements. Today, I'm musing in my head over how one would easily estimate the value of enhancements sunk into a build, without laboriously looking up the fluctuating market values of each item. There's a certain fungibility of enhancements via the converter process; so one could estimate a rough value by rarity, or by category. So, if one knew how many SO's, Common IO's, Uncommon IO's, Rare IO's, PvP IO's, Regular and Superior ATO's, Purple IO's, and Hami-O's in a build, one could estimate a value. Maybe one would call out a few specific uniques, as well, like LoTG's, Miracles, Steadfasts, etc, whose value might be a bit over the average for their rarity or category. That value would be estimated using Mark-to-Market, less extraction cost. So imagine one were about to delete a character, and wanted to sell off everything first. You'd have to unslot all the IO's at the cost of one unslotter each, and the list them for sale (at a price they would sell at reasonably soon), pay the 10% market fee, and send the money off before deleting. Of course, you'd liquidate everything else first, too; salvage, enhancement in tray, recipes, outstanding auction bids, etc. If the intent was to get the best value for the things sold, one might do some conversions on them before listing, too. If I were to do that for one of my builds, I might come up with this: SO's - 0 Commons - 8 Uncommons - 21 Rare - 20 PvP - 5 Purple: - 24 SATO - 12 I looked pretty quickly, and at just one build, so I may have mixed up some uncommons and rares, but this is illustrative. That's 90 items, and a WAG for value by category might be: SO-'s: not worth extracting to sell; Commons: 200,000, Uncommons: 1,000,000, Rares: 3,000,000, PvP: 10,000,000, Purple: 15,000,000, and SATO's 12,000,000 each. I plucked these numbers arbitrarily out of thin air, so don't take them to the bank. That would yield a liquidation value of 0.9*(8*200,000+21*1,000,000+20*3,000,000+5*10,000,000+24*15,000,000+12*12,000,000)-90*100,000=518,940,000. Maybe reserve a few million for converters to swap the poor sellers in each category into slightly better sellers. That would leave about a half billion, which I feel is not unusual for the value of a decent end-game IO-sets build. So a person with no- or very little Influence on hand, but who has a number of fully kitted out end game builds, has a lot of wealth, even if it's not liquid. Also, it can cost a lot less to make a build than one would get from liquidating and selling it in the long run. The combination of buying smartly, and building up from recipe drops and conversions can save a lot of inf (except in the sense of opportunity cost, if the drops and conversions used to make a enhancement could have been sold for more than that enhancement was worth.)

The less played combinations are often interesting, but there's also sometimes good reasons why they don't get played! 😮

I'm good with this right here. Let MinFX make these invisible.

We still have them there on Everlasting, as well in the new (mostly empty) co-op zone Kallisti Wharf.

Yes, that would be Everlasting. The servers have personailties; here's a good summary in the Unofficial Wiki: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Servers

Team resist effects inspirations; Protection Imbuement, Greater Protection Imbuement, and even Superior Protection Imbuement, can be used by anyone, so it's always possible someone else on the team could help if they knew and were prepped for it. All they have to do is see where you are, get close enough, and pop the insp. I always keep a few on me, and have a few of the 'Greater' insps in my email.

Oh wow, and glad you found each other!

Some parts of the game are tedious and slow. A few are not only tedious and slow, but actually to the point of being painful. The recent change to how Catalysts and Boosters are applied was very good, but there are other bad ones, too. I would like to suggest a simple change to the Enhancement Conversion window that I would find to be much less painful to use than it is at present. The problem is that to change one enhancement to another, a long series of RNG conversions need to be done, and each one requires the enhancement to be dragged from the tray back up into the conversion window after each step. Let's have a look at the conversion window in an example case where I am trying to convert one ATO into another. If I'm trying to make one for say, a Blaster, and start with one for a Tanker, my first change might give me a Controller ATO as shown here: That's not what I want, but my "Convert" button is greyed out, and I have to reset the window with the new enhancement in the top slot to try again. This requires a click and a drag with the mouse from the tray back up into this window. This may not sound so bad, on its face, but since this is an RNG process, I may have to do it many times. And then I will have to swap to in-set, and repeat several times again to get one specific missing piece. Worse, some of us convert IO's around to resell on the market, and go through long chains of conversions, many times over, sometimes hundreds, to get from the enhancements we had, which no one wants, to the ones we'd like to sell, which are in demand. I believe, having done this many times, the worst part of the process is the mouse click and drag to reset the window for the next conversion. So, boo-hoo, some wealthy players with too much time on their hands get sore fingers doing this. Well, not so fast. This is a major source of supply and demand management that benefits everyone by keeping the prices of the enhancements everyone want down and their supplies up. It seems to me it is fair for it to take some time, but not to be physically painful or even injurious. What would I like to see changed? There's a few options. First would be to take the "Clear" button -- Which, IMO, never serves an important function. Clicking this button does nothing that dragging the next enhancement to convert up there doesn't do, and isn't needed to get the enhancement out, or anything like that. Rename the "Clear" button to "Reset", and when it is clicked, move the enhancement from the Output line up to the Input line, clear the output, and enable to "Convert" button to be clicked again. Then, a long chain of conversions is done entirely within the one window. Drag an enhancement up into the Input field, click Convert, click Reset, click Convert, click Reset, etc., until the desired enhancement comes out of the RNG process. Second, and I think better, have the "Convert" button turn into "Convert Again", and when it is clicked, move the Output up to the Input, and instantly run the conversion again, creating a new output. Possibly add a half-second delay or VFX to keep the total time to process one conversion about the same. Then, the "Clear" button, when clicked, would have the minimal function of clearing both Input and Output, and resetting the "Convert Again" button back to Convert. Dragging a fresh enhancement into the Input field should also clear the entire window. The process is now even easier; drag an enhancement up into the input, click Convert, click Convert Again, click Convert Again, and so on, until the desired result is achieved. Then either close the window, clear the window, or drag the next enhancement in for another conversion. There are other parts of the UI where we have excessive repetition, but this is the one I think would have the most beneficial impact.

I could get on board with this, especially if the damage would be added to the less used powers in SS, i.e., not into Footstomp.

How about the toggle plus two pop-up options, only one of which can be chosen to be available at a time. The first one is a crashless rage boost with recharge that cannot be enhanced or reduced. The second in a short term boost with a crash much like the current one, but it can be affected by recharge. Balance such that the total average boost over a full cycle is about the same for a character with modest total recharge.

In fact, if you start playing again, you will the community is every bit as helpful and friendly as it was before, and probably even more so. We have the help and general chat channels in game on all servers; we have the Homecoming Discord, and we have these forums here. All of these are filled with people ready to answer questions, give advice, solve problems, hold hands if needed, and even help you get good names and design costumes. Just about the only thing we cannot do is get your characters from Live back again. Many of us dearly wished we could resurrect ours as well, but it just is not in the cards. But there are compensations. All the premium, cash-paid-for perks and items and systems from Live are here, and either free or paid for with in-game monies, not real monies. All the costume pieces we had to buy, and almost all the ones we had to tediously unlock are available from the start. The base editing systems are vastly improved. We've had many, many bug fixes, powers fixes, and even new content we never had on live back, and more in the pipeline. All provided by volunteers working from their passion. The servers are paid for by donations and no in-game perks go those who donate -- it's from our joy at being able to play together, again. If you can get a computer that will run this game again (and it does not take an expensive high-end one to do a good job!), this game is here for you. We want you back with us and we help returning players get going again!

I don't like the Kickstarter method for large projects. It's great for smaller project that small, amateur teams could reasonably handle. An MMO is not in the category today, if it ever was. I wish them good luck too, but it's a steep, long hill to climb. I prefer venture capital as a means. Those providing the money there have a stake in it, expect the possibility of a financial return, and can monitor and push the team with some firm authority. It has a bad side, too, which is these resulting games end up being focused on making money, which is not inherently bad, but if it becomes the primary focus, it also becomes self defeating. They make a game designed to pull in cash via all the bad additive methods we've seen so much of.

Here's alternate math: Converters: ~70k each on market, 3 per merit -> 3*70000*0.9 = 189,000 Inf per merit, 630,000 Inf per stack transaction (per number of clicks) Boosters: ~1100k each on market, 1 per 5 merits -> (1/5)*1100000*0.9 = 198,000 Inf per merit, 9,900,000 Inf per stack transaction. Boosters are just as profitable and 15x easier to claim and sell. YMMV.

😄

I love this suggestion. That power's VFX are so awful I usually stop in the middle of combat to find the icon for it and get rid of it.

I love kinetics as is, too. No buffs needed. We have to be careful what we consider for buffs, some sets and combinations of sets are just fine.

Well, not for the whole server. But a group of players working their own internal continuity might decide their story took precedence over the other, official, arcs. I haven't been with a group that has done this, but again, theoretically, they might, and then their stories are it.

I don't see that they need any special justification. Within the continuity of players I group with, these are NOT AE stories at all. They're real stories, on an equal, and often higher, plane than developer written stories. They require no further justification. They just need the current artificial justifications we're forced to ignore to get out of the way. It's like this: Me: I use the User Interface to start a story I created using these authoring tools. My character to my team: "Hey everyone, I heard Azuria at MAGI in Atlas Park has some trouble she was us to look into." We go there and she is the first contact for my five-mission arc. She might send us to a cave door in Talos for the first mission. At completion of that, she might send us to talk to yet another contact for the next mission in another zone. That next mission might be a board train to start. After that, maybe it's back to Azuria, and mission three is a building door in peregrine. And so on. Remove the AE pretense that it's a simulation.

I'd like to see a new variation on AE where you can pick an existing open-world contact to be your arc point of contact, and use radio-mission style door selections in zones yo specify for each mission. At least, for some arc, let us abandon this fiction that this is all inside a holo-simulation and make convincing analogues of real story arcs and task forces. Let me start one of these for my team using the mission architect remote tablet, or something like that. Get me out of the AE building. %$!^#$#!!

Instead of Invisibility and Superior Invisibility, we could have Inferior Invisibility, and Invisibility. Or! -- Visibility and Invisibility.

This is my recollection and belief as well, but it would be great to see it be confirmed from code inspection.

I want more end game content; and more middle game content. I don't want more game-breaking mechanics on bosses. I want bosses that are strong and play better within the mechanics rules we have. I want bosses that act like commanders and not champions. Bosses that are difficult because they exercise direction over their underlings, and these underlings are dangerous because they're coordinated and directed by that boss. I want my team to have to overcome tactics and good play, not stupid stuff. It's a lot to ask for, but we're in the future.

It's almost always better to sell the catalyst and buy the attuned version of the random set IO off the auction. Don't waste a catalyst on anything other than an ATO or set IO that costs less than 20 million or so.

One could also sell the catalysts, and then buy back more when you need them. Sell high, buy low, and you'll even make a modest profit.

I also have an absurd number of catalysts, and would be happy to increase the pile.