aethereal

I recently got Savage Leap on a character. In terms of UI/playstyle, it's a lot nicer than other teleport-type powers, since it pops you to a target instead of a ground reticle. Obviously, there are things that are nice about the ground reticle, but it's just fussier. And powexeclocation doesn't fully solve its problems, since that's still a line of sight reticle under the hood. For example, I often, in buildings, jump up a bit to see some mobs on a different floor and then savage leap into the middle of them. I'd never try that with powexeclocation, even if there theoretically was a line of sight at some point, my experience is I'd almost certainly teleport nowhere. So it'd be nice if we had an option to get at least other short-range target-focused teleports (Lightning Rod, Shield Charge, Burst of Speed) to behave the same, and honestly I wouldn't say no to having the OPTION to have all teleports, even plain old vanilla travel power teleport, work the same. Some ideas for how this could work: A Null the Gull flag changes the behavior of the power. (most preferred) When you take these powers, you get two powers (a la switch ammo), which share a cooldown, one of which is a ground-target and the other of which is a target target. (least preferred) if you use them while targeting someone they pop you to target, otherwise they bring up the ground reticle. A new powexec command, or modifier for powexeclocation (like /powexeclocation target:force lightning rod) that worked for these powers only that let you create macros and binds that give the full Savage Leap-style experience. Mutually exclusive chosen-at-power selection versions of the powers that work differently, a la how Sentinel mez protection works in Super Reflexes

That's a laser broom. HTH.

How would that work though? Like, how would you get the altitude to glide down from in the first place? You could like go through the doors on the (relatively few) buildings that have doors to the roof and then jump off, and that'd be, you know, conceptually fun, but I don't think it would make for a functional travel power.

More so, something definitely isn't a trap because you could theoretically possibly discover it and avoid it. Like, can anyone reading this thread say that they found out about the AH pricing of enhancement converters without being pointed there by another player? Sure, some people have stumbled upon it -- probably a handful out of thousands of players. That doesn't mean that it's practically possible for people to discover it.

The idea that we're terribly infringing on people's god-given liberty to spend 100 merits on an ATO instead of spending the same 100 merits on enough info to buy three ATOs is stupid. Nobody is proposing taking anything away from people. I'm sure that there's somebody out there who for some insane reason thinks that there is an advantage to them to buying an ATO for 100 merits. That person is wrong, but I don't want to argue with them. They can continue to pay 100 merits for an ATO. But the vast majority of people who spend 100 merits for an ATO aren't doing that because they made a considered decision, it's because it's completely not discoverable that you can get massively increased efficiency out of your merits by spending them on enhancement converters, then selling the enhancement converters on the market, versus just buying an ATO. There is no reason to suspect that this is the way to get much more for your merits. Unless you either read the forums (or other sources of player community info) or else make a habit of looking up literally everything in the game on the AH all the time to figure out what sells well, it's just not discoverable.

I am not double adding, and my example was well short of the cap. You are correct, enhancements are part of the cap, if you have a kin or two, or eat a tray full of large red insps, or whatever, you will not see a difference between damage enhancements and no damage enhancements. But, critically, the cap isn't that important unless you always play with someone casting fulcrum shift, or you're farming. Most people, even on 8 man teams, will not be at damage caps unless that team includes a kinetic.

I disagree. It's entirely possible that we have a rump population of 20% or so who could engage more with the game if they were given a chance, and I think it's worthwhile to target them.

You're overlooking normal enhancements, which shift things somewhat. A stalker with a 100 damage base attack almost certainly enhances it to +95% damage, so 195. A brute, if he does that, gets to 146.25. Now let's assume 80 fury, so that's a further 160% damage (of the base 75), leading us to: 266.25. If a stalker is on an 8 person team, his basic crit chance pretty exactly closes the difference between 195 and 266.25, so then the auto-crits from hide and the proc hide and the superior build-up uptime (build up is also better for Stalkers than Brutes) and the presence of his really high-damage Assassin's STrike certainly causes the stalker to pull ahead. Solo, it's a bit more of a matter of whether the stalker can actually effectively broker the auto-crits (etc), or whether he leaves a lot of that on the table.

If lots of people switched from buying converters to buying inf directly, and we seeded the market with converters at a somewhat higher cost than is typical now, the net effect would be to sink inf, not create it. If there are large numbers of people who are currently stockpiling merits or spending them in inefficient ways, who would convert to selling them for inf, it would inflate.

Whether this would cause noticeable inflation depends a bit on how many players there actually are out there who previously have been sitting on merits/using them inefficiently, who would switch to using them to buy inf. My intuitive guess is that the amount of inf created by this is negligible compared to the amount of inf created by farming and general high level play, but I could be wrong depending on the numbers.

I agree, it just mitigates some of the difference in size.

Albeit with many fewer characters slots per account.

There aren't enough whip animations for a whip melee, but there are enough for a hellfire assault or manipulation set.

But that's actually not true at all. Selling a merit for 200k remains less remunerative than selling enhancement converters has ever been at any time I've seen. It's much less remunerative than actually using enhancement converters, or other auction-house related strategies. It's less remunerative than farming. All it does is close some -- but not all -- of the gap between low information and high information users. It doesn't preclude any activity today. It certainly doesn't preclude anything that actually requires effort.

I feel like I addressed that at the bottom of the post, did you read it all the way? My suggestion also gives less inf per merit than you'd ordinarily expect to get on the AH -- the floor price for enh converters is almost always 80k ea, so that's 240k for one merit, -10% for AH fees, leaves 216k per merit. At the high end, you might get as much as let's say 270k inf per merit. Players who know about enhancement converters will presumably continue to sell them. But players who don't will be much closer in income to those who do. This may even get some of those players to engage the AH -- right now, people who don't understand how to make money in the game look at the AH, see prices in the millions, and just in many cases shrug and ignore it, because they think it's out of their reach. If the market for enhancement converters does dry up, we can seed them at 110k or 120k each. That way, players can still sell them, but if nobody is selling them, the people who play the converter game (of whom I am one) can do so at minorly less profit than they do so today.

Can't you bet on the monkeys in the original MFC in Sharkshead? NPC dialogue suggests that you could, but I never actually tried it.

They have not so far implemented the name clearing service, but if it were implemented as-described, it basically would allow a name to be taken from a character based on a combination of how long it is since the... account? That specific toon?... had been logged into, and what level that toon was. So if you made a level 1 character and never played it, the name would fairly quickly be back in action, while if you took a character to 30 and then took a hiatus for a few months, the name would be safe. At the other end, as you said, if you reached 50, the name would never be freed up.

I remember an SG-mate telling me, with some pride, that now that her character was at or near 50, she had blown her lifetime earnings on some sets. What were her lifetime earnings? 30M inf. I was like, "Oh, uh... no. No, that's not what needs to happen. How many merits do you have?" She had like, I dunno, 120, she had already blown a bunch on ATOs at 100 merits per ATO. So I walked her through converting her merits to enhancement converters and selling those, turning those 120 merits into let's say another 24M inf and making her aware that she'd blown several times her "lifetime earnings" already. This is not an uncommon story. While the people reading this message probably broadly know that you can net a lot of money per merit via simple strategies like "buy enh converters, sell on market," or yet more money by slightly more complicated strategies like actually using enhancement converters, this is by no means an obvious fact to new players, or indeed older players who don't read the fora. Let's just... let people sell their merits for a reasonable price. It's not like we're adding gameplay challenge by making people go through the process of converting them. It doesn't even add grind, the difference between: Go to merit vendor > buy enh converters > put on market and Go to merit vendor > buy inf is like maybe 30 extra seconds of work. We can seed enhancement converters on the AH if this means that the market for them dries up. I don't think that we gain anything by making players who aren't aware of the market for converters (or boosters or whatever the currently-optimal thing is to sell) jump through this hoop.

That's not my understanding of what a "pseudopet" is. My understanding of a "pseudopet" is that it's something that a naive player of the game would not think of as a pet, but which was coded as one in the game because it's a way to get continuous effects and other things that are hard to code as a single power activation. So, patches like Rain of Fire are pseudopets (that is, there's an invisible pet that sits there and applies damage to everything in a radius around it). Voltaic Sentinel and other untargetable pets like Lore Radials and Phantom Army are still, to my understanding, pets.

I don't think we really disagree on this. I'm absolutely not advocating for a wholesale shift of everything to balance around IOs. I'm saying, we can bring up the reality that IOs exist and are used by some huge percentage of the userbase (my guess is it's the large majority of relatively active players, but that's just a guess). We don't have to pretend that IOs are the exclusive province of the top 1% of the playerbase.

My original suggestions are flagrant cottage rule violations, though. Like, they aren't arguable. It's not like, "Oh, well, it's a change, but they are pretty similar." The powers for the most part wouldn't even be able to keep the same names. And I do think the cottage rule has a lot of value. People should not, in general, log onto the game and find that their character is no longer recognizable. But the cottage rule has the least value for powers that really suck. Between "the power irresolvably sucks" and "we have to break the cottage rule," we should break the cottage rule. Between "we should homogenize the sets by making all T9s provide def/resist/absorb," and "we have to break the cottage rule," we should break the cottage rule. I think it's really hard to save the god-mode T9s without either breaking the cottage rule or making them overpowered. Maybe someone smarter than me can figure out a way, but this is my best attempt.

I see how you could think I'm making that kind of slippery slope argument, but I'm not. My affirmative argument is: 1. Crashing "god mode" T9s are currently not useful to anyone, SO or IOs. 2. Non-crashing "god mode" T9s are marginally useful to SO builds and not very much at all to IO builds. 3. We should change T9s to be marginally useful to all builds, which mostly means not god-modes (but perhaps a few god modes that will play well with IO builds, depending on the set). 4. We should do this without making T9s huge amazing powers because armor sets are basically fine. To which you and others have responded with black-and-white slogans like "This game is all about accessibility" "The game is balanced around SOs." My comments that you're now responding to are negative arguments saying that we should dismiss a strict view of "only balance around SOs." Those comments aren't the reason we should make these changes, they're just the reason we shouldn't automatically dismiss the changes. I don't think that my suggestions are irrefutable. They ignore the cottage rule, and I think the cottage rule is pretty valuable! I'm just tired of people saying, "only balance around SOs" as though some comment made by someone not currently involved in the game 10+ years ago in a very different environment were an unalterable law of nature.

Genuinely: consider that maybe I'm not missing the point. I don't feel like you're actually engaging. I did read your suggestions for changing the powers. The conversation I'm trying to have is about why I think those are bad suggestions.

Then I assume that you're advocating for my "balance around people who simply are unable to wrap their heads around slotting at all?" Or perhaps we can balance around exclusively slotting what drops to you, but never going to the store. My 4.5 year old daughter wants to play this game. She does not currently understand the state of a power being in cooldown and unable to be used -- she just mashes the buttons and hopes for the best. Also, she can't read and definitely can't understand slotting. There are changes we could make to make the game more accessible to her! Should we? Obviously not. This is not because my daughter is not a wonderful human being who deserves fun and excitement -- it's that there are tradeoffs in this world, and by making the game accessible to illiterate, innumerate people who don't understand the screen iconography of powers, we make the game less fun for people who are literate, numerate, and able to understand and absorb the interface. We have to pick a line, and what line we pick is somewhat arbitrary. I argue that picking a line which recognizes the availability, popularity, and ease-of-use of sets (not multiple-hundred-millions builds, just the use of some sets) is: 1. A game that is more interesting and appealing to the people who play it the most often and most avidly. 2. Not actually particularly disenfranchising to the people who stubbornly insist on using SOs for whatever dumb reason -- they will not stop being able to run the game at low difficulty levels because T9s give a different benefit than a short-lived god-mode.

1. Sure you can. You can do anything you want to, including prioritize the needs of the broadly engaged players instead of the stubbornly unengaged ones. 2. You can get plenty good slotting to soft-cap any defense set without using its T9, using maybe at most 100M in inf. Will that build also perma-hasten and have every unique proc in the game? No. But there's a huge excluded middle between "no IOs at all" and the very tip-top builds. 3. Also, why is it unreasonable to ask people to spend, I don't know, 30 minutes a week or so doing their money-making and slotting? Should I get to demand that the game be balanced around literally no enhancements at all because I find it too mentally challenging to figure out how ED works and what it even means to slot a power for endurance modification, man, and also I don't make enough money to buy SOs, and also it takes too long to go to the store and buy SO's? I mean, obviously not. We get to demand that people put some work into their characters or else we balance past them. Why is it this particular line? Why SOs and not "a few sets"? The fiction that the game isn't balanced around IOs is thin already, and it is in many ways cheaper and certainly less time investment to build with low-cost sets than it is to keep yourself in SOs. And you don't broadly speaking even need to understand ED! 4. Nobody really needs tip-top builds to be "helpful in a team situation."