Llewellyn Blackwell

Most of the actual wealth that is stolen annually in the U.S. is done by white collar criminals, a classification for crime that inherently exists to treat the wealthy who break the law better then the poor. Likewise Serial Killers and mass murderers often come from wealthier families, and it is well documented that Sociopaths and Psychopaths are mainly found in the fields of Corporate management, law enforcement, the medical fields, the clergy, and upper education. From pyramid scheme scum fleecing thousands for their retirement funds, to a doctor overseeing and abusing scores of young women gymnasts, these actions by singular individuals outweigh entire poor communities worth of crime. Anyone who denigrates and demonizes the poor would certainly not be a person who lived in Paragon that is for sure, sounds like the kind of thinking that belongs in Praetoria.

There is a common misconception among players that the world in which we play is largely like ours, and do not tend to dwell on what the Rikti Invasion did to the rest of the world. Paragon was far from the only city attacked, and in fact likely was far less hard hit then most, as most did not have beings on par with SM and the rest of games core iconic characters. Basically i am saying that one of the reasons Recluse and his isle even exist is because it is likely in better shape then much of the world. It really is not hard to imagine that in the wake of Coles death Stephan being largely unrivaled in power could take control of a vast swatch of the globe largely unchallenged.

This actually is something that matters to actual game devs quite a lot. For example over in Path of Exile, they have a setting for solo self found only. Doing this actually makes it so a player can not trade with others, and is entirely dependent on their own loot drops. It increases their chance for good loot to drop by a very large % but RNG being RNG still means getting the uniques they may need for certain builds much less likely. It exists however to help balance the game for those who do not want to engage in player trade. In DDO they have struggled for years to find a way to not let guilds who raid together and happily share raid loot to quickly get entire top tier BIS gear kits have an overwhelming advantage over those who run as pugs with each man for themselves. From a dev pov loot sharing like that in such a guild borders on exploiting the system, and for sure see it as a real balance issue. Because when a small % of players can reliably always get BIS gear kits quickly and then over power the current content, how does a dev design for them to be challenged while not punishing the players with average gear? In pen and paper dungeons and dragons its sop for a DM to regularly have such super loot stolen from characters to depower them if they are too out of sync with the group. CoH has a pretty flexible dif system, but we still are all aware of how a perfected toon basically breaks the game these days. Anti farming mechanics are a real need, and honestly at this point I think it should be something as simple as make inf earned from the AH go into its own storage and put a cap on how much can be withdrawn each day. It does not have to be anything too low, but keeping it to like 500 million a day would at least discourage that kind of behavior a bit. And yes it is behavior we should want to see discouraged. The goldilockes zone for loot rewards should always be aimed at pug groups doing actual social group content.

Honestly why not just several new channels with varying degrees of range? To be honest one reason I rarely bother with the D anymore is how chaotic it is, you have a small group talking actively and it can drown out and overwhelm anything else. Which would be fine if they were actually interested in others joining the conversation but it is far more common these days for it to be a clique of friends with no interest in random pug RP. Nor do they grasp they should keep it in a group chat as no one not in their RP group wants to have the local channel overwhelmed by private social drama RP none of us have any desire to hear about. Honestly it gets a lot of RPers on ignore these days as I see it as a sign of inherently uncivil RP to keep what is private RP in public. For example channels with a real close range akin to a typical pbaoe attack, so only those right up next to you can see the text would be great for those of us wanting to be seen, and approached while having our personal chit chat without it impacting anyone around us.

Sorry but taking a break does not ever fix the need for new shiny shiny. Looter motivation is a core motivation in the RPG genre going back to the earliest days of P&P table top gaming. You literally invalidate yourself even suggesting taking a break by the way as that is a well established non point in gaming forum debates. I enjoy the game play loop of COX very much and always will but new loot and new ways to create a build with that loot is a core mechanic of the genre that if ignored kills player interest like nothing else will. To even try to deflect or argue against this suggest to me you actually want to keep HC from ever growing beyond our modest little community of extremely fragmented players. Not surprising considering some of the stuff you have posted before, makes me think you dont even play anymore and seek to drive others away.

Elude on its own is all the def you need. What you want is to layer it with other things. I usually go with rebirth for the heavy healing to back up my near perma elude. I use phase shift to cover the down time (if I use agless I have perma elude but lack the handy healing, and phase shift is actually the best oh shit button anyone can have. Yes we have to waste powers on the stealth powers that dont do much else for an SR, but hey I hover in a fight to so it does add a touch to the total def. Finally its really about the primary with SR. a Dark Melee/ SR utterly laughs at AVs, especially melee ones. Claws lol, that is for regen users man. Claw on SR is about as gimp a pairing as you could take, and should not expect to push into the realm of meta builds reliably with it. You certainly should not expect to be a match for cosmic foes like Rul with finger nails and agility;)

I can agree with the OP that well as a looter the games loot is very stale. New IO sets, and other shiny shiny to motivate. I wont lie it is a large part of what keeps me on games like Warframe and Path of Exile. Warframes riven system makes it so you have an endless form of RNG based boosts to every weapon in the game, allowing players to take even low teir starter weapons and get them worthy of high end content with time,luck, and mat sinking to change the effects RNG wise on the things. Path of exile every league brings new Uniques, including what are called buil enabling uniques that have special effects found on no other item and allow a player to create entire new never before seen builds when utilized. They also have passive skill jewels with RNG aspects that can further allow a character to specialize in truly unique ways beyon the already massive fleixible tree, and make a character literally unique and 1 of a kind that no one can likely replicate without insane RNG luck getting the exact same effects on the jewel which is highly unlikely. Stale rewards are a sadly very sure fire way to get tired of the endless battle. Hell at this point I would take a single charge and no cap on max charges special summons for each AV we beat down, and get another charge each time we beat them down. At least that would be useful and amusing for a while. Heck it would even be a reason to go red side to collect hero AVs on my hero character for allies and vice versa .

Well for me there are quite a few in the form of the many comments this thread has gotten;). Say what you want imo it proved an atypically informative thread as the GM post was truly useful to help wade through the cesspool of those at the D who try to use the guise of RP to harass and abuse.

You have much to learn about the art of civil discourse and debate. A statement like the above would get you removed from a formal debate and likely kicked from a debate team for life. It quite literally invalidates anything you have or could further argue to make such a statement as you have here. And no I do not think the idea remotely adds something better to the game and would not agree with nor endorse it. However you need to learn to construct actual arguments rather then insults and denigrating language to try and push your pov. In other words if this was a formal debate, your post actually gets the other side points. Was that your goal to help the OP get their wish? Because that is what your post is basically doing.

Ive pondered an idea on this issue off and on. Along the lines of what if when a power only has a single slot giving it an inherent boost to all %s equal to what a DO gives. This bonus would vanish the moment a 2nd slot is given to a power. This would at least make a new power pick feel like it has a touch of oomph to it before you can invest slots into it. Down side is it is technically power creep to any power we tend to use as a single slot special IO mule would get a bit of a boost. However i dont think powers that get used as an lotg mule like vengeance would be that game break if when it did get used now and then it had those modest % increases I suggest.

Ok gotcha. That makes sense to me then. Back on live towards the end I did actually have a single toon that one day it struck me we had costume slots roughly equal to years the game had been active, and so took one of my 1st year toons and tried to assign a costume slot to represent each of the years by doing my best to recall what the main costume I had worn for that character around then had been. Kind of a costume slide show of year one year two etc. Obviously he did not look much different in face or body size as he was an adult already, but I could see someone doing a penny yin type growing up through the years approach to costume and character concept.

You uhm do notice he did say to keep the 6 slot limit per power right?

There was a short lived bug on live for just kheldians I recall, before the coming of ED, that allowed them to put as many slots as they wanted in a single power. It was a glorious few days of hilarity as many a PB flitted through the sky with a super fast combat flight and just used eye beams to one shot hamidon. Yeah it didnt last long sadly. But wont like it was some of the craziest amusement I had in this park.

If you dont have at least 80% acc into an attack it should feel pretty whiffy imo, especially against def based mobs. You should be having to run additional to hit buffs to hit them reliably. Otherwise they may as remove mob def entirely and just go with heavy amounts of DR on all mobs.

This would pair well with the idea I had a few years ago for a cox version of the nemesis system, where instead of making something custom we could exploit, instead make it so as we build a rogues gallery from the in game villains they become regular ambushes on the streets and can pop up in missions the way Qs do for khelds.