Andreah

Err.. how about an accolade for just defeating all the monsters, with no powers or effects.

As long as we're brainstorming, I'd like to see counts of sold and bought auction items. Or perhaps the title of the top mission from the mission tab, if any.

It might be interesting if Flurry had some explicit synergies with the other powers. For example, Flurry out of Whirlwind did double damage, or built up a stacking damage or to-hit buff, or increased the magnitude of its disorient, or even splashed damage to close nearby foes.

I like Kinetics/Repel the way it is now, thank you. I've built my kineticists to be able to sustain that toggle, with it converted to knockdown, even while I'm in the middle of large crowds of mobs. I don't believe Speed Pool/Whirlwind is taken often, and perhaps it could be used as a trial balloon for the sorts of changes you'd like to see; but not reach out and hit all these powers at the same time. I could see there being another topic to discuss changing all the repelling powers as a group.

I understand the desire to revise a lack-luster pool, but if you mess with hasten, I hope you have good torch & pitchfork insurance. Look at how the other pools have been revised. If a character went into the change with a certain set of capabilities, by and large they did not come out without them, even if they chose not to respec. The individual powers have not been severely nerfed, and certainly not in ways that would hit large numbers of carefully tuned builds. I believe there are a large number of build that have at their core, taking only one power from the speed pool - Hasten; and those builds depend on it delivering its current amount of recharge and having its duration and recharge period be what they are now.

I remember the phrase from live, but it went like this: "Red side best side". And it was because the zone design and story writing on red side were considered superior, since the devs had the experience of blue side development to build on. Yet the saying didn't drop when Gold side was introduced, probably due to a lack of good rhyming words, and the few that people could come up with rhymed with "Truck", not "Gold".

Mine too. That's the one, and yes, it doesn't fit perfectly, more as an analogy. It's been many years for me since my coursework. I also think of the Extreme Value Theorem, which I believe is a more accurate fit. In this case, the function is the expected value of the influence return per unit time invested, and the range is the mix of time spent on two strategies -- pure farming & selling, and pure snipe conversion marketing. Call this F(x), where F is the return per unit time, and x is the fraction of time spent farming ( (1-x) would then be the time spent marketing). F(0) is the return of pure snipe/conversion/marketing, and F(1) is pure farming/vendoring/auction listing. In this case, if one can successfully argue that the mix points of these two strategies are always and only a linear sum of the two, then we would say that F(x) = (1-x) * F(0)+x * F(1) . And if that's the case and if F(0) =/= F(1), then the derivative of F on the interval (0,1) is always non-zero, so the extreme values (one minimum and one maximum) are the two end points. It could be argued they are not linear if there's synergy between the two sets of actions, or useable overlap of steps, so that, for example, clicking that would need to be done twice in each pure strategy, but only needs to be done once in the mixed strategy; or data lookup that would not need to be done in a mixed strategy. I can think of one case already -- farming will get you a lot of invention salvage, and the random salvage will on average speed up crafting even if the cost is a wash. On the whole, I think there is non-linearity, but believe, again without much evidence, that it's weak.

😄 This is why I generally prefer to go the boosters route from my merits. It's often a wash, value/merit-wise, but the boosters are 15x less clicking/inf. And this leads me to another part of the equation; it's not just Value vs Time vs Clicks vs Fun, but also Complexity. A wealth building strategy that is complex will appeal to some people and less to to others. For example, if there's a simple and infallible steps 1, 2, 3, method, that's not complex. One's fingers can learn the motions to do it efficiently. But if one must stop and collect information, evaluate options and make choices to make a strategy work, that's more complex. Most people get overloaded by that fast. When I give advice to other players, I tend to tell them simple rules that I know will work for them, instead of complex ones that will require they look at the market and figure out best options. It's easy to tell people to vendors all the X's, and list all he Y's for 1 in the /ah. A little more difficult to flip rare salvage, harder to explain how to do the conversion game from low-ball snipes. And for myself, there's a limit to the complexity of a scheme I will tolerate. For me, there's a fine line between an interesting pastime that supports my active multi-player gaming, and one that is, frankly, work I ought be paid real money for.

Well, let me say that I believe (without proof) that if up-converting recipe drops from farming is worth the time it takes, there's a high chance that just low-bid buying recipes off the auction and upconverting them full time will be better than a mix of farming and upconverting. There's a "pure" strategy of farming/selling, another of buying/upconverting, and a mixed strategy of doing both. And, iirc, there's a theorem in game theory which has some harsh things to say about mixed strategies in most situations.

I just want to emphasize this. I tell people in /general, in /help, in my global chats, and in my SG discord DON'T SPEND 100 MERITS ON ANYTHING WORTH LESS THAN 20 MILLION. And they still do. I wonder about the time efficiency of the converter game on the usual grab-bag of recipes drops from say, an hour of farming. Everything we do has opportunity cost (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost) associated with it. For example, the time you spend getting the right salvage, inventing the recipes, and up-converting to valuable IO's could have been spent running the next farm. Surely there's a large luck component, but that tends to average out if this is something one does often. Has anyone collected data on this? Most of the farm advertisements I see seem to be oriented around faster leveling than inf gain, but a couple of people I know have said on occasion they farm now and then when they need Inf. It leads me to wonder if they're doing it efficiently, or if they might do better taking Yomo up the the signature offer, or accepting inf/enhancements/advice from me. Your friendly neighborhood Ebil Marketeer can help! Simple advice that saves YOU Millions! Don't Delay! Act Now! Call 1-555-CRA-ZY88! Marketeers are standing by!

Why not just make these powers behave completely the same in PvP forever, and then change them to something appropriately useful in PvE for those oh-shoot moments. Or, on the other hand, don't do anything to these. If they were worth taking, I'd have to respec to take them, and my PvE characters don't need them now. I don't need to be more powerful. I'd much rather more of the content caught up with my current levels of power. My Inv/SS Tanker doesn't need unstoppable. Even if Unstoppable were a good emergency power, I probably would not take it. I already have emergency powers sitting in my temp powers bar and in my inspiration tray. Those don't make me lose when they wear off. In principle, I don't like powers with crashes. I think these were a bad design choice from the beginning, leave them for the annoying NPC's to use. They are not fun, and I almost never take them. Now, too much of what we have is predicated on them being useless or essential, for when and where they are. If we make Unstoppable decent in PvE, the rest of the set would need to be balanced for it, and I can imagine the trouble that would stir up. I think that would go for all the crashy T9's across all the sets. These powers should be fixed only if it's deemed worthwhile to give the entire powerset a substantial balance pass. Not just tweaks -- a full rebalance. I hate them, but I don't think fixing them should be a priority right now, if ever.

I have recently re-spec'd my pre-existing grav/kin, as I now consider Repel, slotted with Sudden Acceleration KB->KD to be essential.

Instead of moving him to a better spot, make his spot better. Dress it up a bit. Add a vendor or two, a mission contact, a few benches, maybe a street performer. How about a longbow flier with a couple good destination? How about some reporters asking him questions? He's more famous and photogenic than those nobodies they crowd around by city hall. Be imaginative. His spot has potential, it's just unrealized right now.

I'll probably keep the power as a LotG mule, but may not use it, since stealth has more stealth radius than before, and that's more than enough for most situations. Or I might trade it out for Grant Invisibility, which might situationally be more useful for a hover-er support character, and also can mule the LotG.

I see in the notes that Infiltration offer Air Control, which Hover does. Is this something that can stack with the air control hover (presumably?) provides? It just sounds like Infiltration works great with all the travel sets except fly, and I'm looking for an upside.

Is there any synergy, for good or ill, between hover and infiltration?

I like O_T's breakdown into Raw Force archetypes and Multiplying Force archetypes. But I would follow the metaphor more closely and call the first group the Additive Force archetypes. And none of them are purely in one or the other; e.g., if a tank has maneuvers or assault, that's multiplicative. The tanks management of aggro, done skillfully, is a multiplier. Defenders and corrs have some mostly additive attacks, and so on. So perhaps a 1-10 rating for each archetype for being Additive or Multiplicative would make sense. Except, the choice of primaries/secondaries is huge, too. And the pools, and then the slotting. And even then, some players can play multiplicatively, or others additively, by their skill and understanding of game tactics. I don't think an exhaustive list is practical. Which takes me back to O_T's list, which with the caveat "YMMV", I like very much.

I have one blaster, rushed to fifty to use for ebil marketeering purposes. I compulsively built it as best I could along the way for damage output, and this description fits very well. I was amazed at how survivable it was simply by rapidly defeating threats. And getting out to distance when things were too dangerous next to the tank.

Ahem, I had the same thought! But let's be honest, you shouldn't be killed, or nearly killed, by your travel power. That's your T9's job.

I'd like to see the various fly poses (emotes), including the standard hover pose be actual customizations for fly. And I think it would suit a lot of people to be able to fly in a lotus emote. 😄

I wonder if it's time to open a Page Three specific thread somewhere, to discuss things we'd like to have done for travel powers that go beyond the scope for final changes/fixes to Page Two.

I tend to ignore the non-thread/emp side of the incarnate system, and just convert it all over already. I'd be happy to see it removed for simplicity's sake. I suspect in the beginning design, there were going to be multiple tiers of different kinds of incarnate drops and components. New slots they added might use yet additional incarnate currency groups to push people on to the additional, harder trials that would have been added for them.

I concur! Allow the listing portion of the window to be made larger. Allow for more sorting options in the Character Items section; especially to sort by type (temporary powers, inspirations, IO's) and subtype (pets, buffs, etc; small/medium/large, dual/team insps, archetypes) as well as by name. In addition to a claim button, add a claim 10, and claim all button. And if there's not space for the claim to complete, don't lose stuff (like how the Get All Inf button in the auction doesn't claim all, and even loses inf if it goes over the cap.)

On Everlasting, these MSR's are about a lot more than maximum vanguard merits, or power-leveling. Yes, lowbies can get levels in an MSR, but it's not about how fast they get them, but how much fun they have while getting them. And our raids are productive as well -- typically 1200-1600, and I've seen as high as the low 1900's. It's one of the most open and fun community events we have, and it's multiple times per day. People start gathering almost an hour in advance; yes, some to be sure to get a spot on the main raid league (it fills to capacity by the time we're in the bowl virtually every run), but also to hang out and be social, both as regular players and as roleplayers. And afterwards, some hang around in the Vanguard base to chill and interact as well. I feel it would be utterly terrible for Everlasting if the open zone MSR were retired. If other servers prefer people to use the instanced version, create and maintain a server tradition of doing them that way.

Just spit-balling here. What if there was a Null-the-Gull style setting to suppress everything in walk mode, or not? Or perhaps such a setting to suppress all powers' effects VFX while in walk mode, but leave them running? Kind of like a Super-Minimal-FX temporary customization.