New efforts!

[LaughingAlex]

For plenty of people, silly min/maxing WAS fun.

I min/maxed quite a bit actually and still had alot of fun.  I'm not a stop having fun guy sillies :).  In fact a certain character of mine, people would praise me for the kind of fulcrum shift stacking I was doing with that character, and were disappointed I didn't play the character more often.

[JanessaVR]

For plenty of people, silly min/maxing WAS fun.

Exactly!  I fully specced a character out in Mids and evaluated them at L50 before I even considered actually building them for real and investing time in them.

Mids was "try before you buy."

And, yes, as a programmer/developer, I absolutely loved tweaking builds and looking at the #'s.  Heck, I still do!   :)

[LaughingAlex]

The real goal here is of course to break 125 pages of the thread. Gotta derail it with something until there's more actual news.

Hehe, I know right?  I think we should see if we can get to 150 pages before august I say :).

[roribeedm]

Hehe, I know right?  I think we should see if we can get to 150 pages before august I say :).

10 pages a week? 2-3 pages a day would do it easily.

[JanessaVR]

One need not look any further than this very thread at the sense of entitlement people still feel for the purchases of virtual items from a company that no longer wants anything to do with them, for something that amounts to no more than a few bits in a database somewhere (that may or may not even still exist).

I dispute "sense of entitlement" for items, even virtual ones, that I paid actual real-world money for.  That falls under different terms...earned and rightfully purchased being the top two I can think of at the moment.

[Codewalker]

The value of a power pick depends highly on the powersets. Something like a force field defender where half the powers are skippable and you have a ton of free picks? No big deal.  Or a brute where you don't really need the T1 or sometimes T2 attack for a fluid chain, or a small passive +Res power because you're at the defense cap and it wouldn't make much of a difference.

I ran into it the most with Controller builds. Both their primary and secondaries have so many powers that are too damn useful to skip. Being able to pick a travel power without the prereq was a godsend. My 'second main' was an Earth/Storm and is of the few characters I min/maxed or used purple sets on. It was a VERY tight build both power and slot-wise.

[Fanta]

One need not look any further than this very thread at the sense of entitlement people still feel for the purchases of virtual items from a company that no longer wants anything to do with them, for something that amounts to no more than a few bits in a database somewhere (that may or may not even still exist).

Hmm, are you mad? Lets not go there please.

[Codewalker]

I dispute "sense of entitlement" for items, even virtual ones, that I paid actual real-world money for.  That falls under different terms...earned and rightfully purchased being the top two I can think of at the moment.

That depends. Are you talking about being angry with the company for shutting down the game, which is one thing, or does it translate to an in-game environment? Taken to the logical extreme, would you team with someone and think to yourself, "I paid $100 for this Sword of a Thousand Truths that one-shots bosses. I deserve to be more awesome than that guy over there who didn't."

If not, then I wasn't talking about you. :)

While it's a completely natural reaction to spending $100 on a virtual item, it creates a toxic environment that I don't agree with by selling in-game items to begin with.

Hmm, are you mad? Lets not go there please.

Not in the slightest. It was a purely objective comment from a game design perspective, not a moral judgment or anything like that.

[JanessaVR]

The value of a power pick depends highly on the powersets. Something like a force field defender where half the powers are skippable and you have a ton of free picks? No big deal.  Or a brute where you don't really need the T1 or sometimes T2 attack for a fluid chain, or a small passive +Res power because you're at the defense cap and it wouldn't make much of a difference.

I ran into it the most with Controller builds. Both their primary and secondaries have so many powers that are too damn useful to skip. Being able to pick a travel power without the prereq was a godsend. My 'second main' was an Earth/Storm and is of the few characters I min/maxed or used purple sets on. It was a VERY tight build both power and slot-wise.

Heh.  You sound like my friend.  His beta character was a Fire/Kin Controller.  He also number-crunched in Mids and left out a travel power to further max his build.  The Ninja Run power and the Raptor Packs were his primary means of travel.

Me...I wasn't quite that committed.  I mean, sure, I crunched the #'s, too, but I enjoyed having travel powers as well.  Heck, I typically took 3 travel powers - Fly, Super Speed, and Teleport - for every character, even though I could have used those slots for more directly useful Primary/Secondary powers, and Controller was my favorite class as well (best ever - Illusion/Time, loved that).

[LaughingAlex]

The value of a power pick depends highly on the powersets. Something like a force field defender where half the powers are skippable and you have a ton of free picks? No big deal.  Or a brute where you don't really need the T1 or sometimes T2 attack for a fluid chain, or a small passive +Res power because you're at the defense cap and it wouldn't make much of a difference.

I ran into it the most with Controller builds. Both their primary and secondaries have so many powers that are too damn useful to skip. Being able to pick a travel power without the prereq was a godsend. My 'second main' was an Earth/Storm and is of the few characters I min/maxed or used purple sets on. It was a VERY tight build both power and slot-wise.

Go figure, it really depended.  Most of my builds you see, I needed about 5 slots per power, as I had alot of recharge-heavy characters.  But I always asked, see, because I also had slight altaholism, "Is this practical?".  That changed over time, more as I could afford more expensive IOs and take on more enemies at a time solo.  I always had a pressure to do things somewhat differently than other players to.  I enjoyed fighting malta and knives of artemis, and even carnies.  My first "main" was a kin/energy defender that I tweaked to hell.  I had given her about 67.5% global recharge, and even later added IO's with +recharge procs.  This was with stuff earned in the game as 99% of it was before freedom.  The only things i could think of was +recharge procs, even then, they were earned in game.

I didn't have snipes, as I felt they were useless.  I did have Nova, but didn't have aim(wasn't needed, instead I had leadership: Tactics for both build reasons and roleplaying reasons, the +perception was important thematically, I guess i'm a complex player).  With the kind of recharge I had, fulcrum shift was also given alot of recharge, I could double-triple stack it.  I didn't go beyond oranges though, as I felt it wasn't worth it at the time after thinking about it for a while.

I could see what your saying, I guess my style of min/maxing was a bit different, then again my style of min/maxing was very different than others.  I did know other min/maxers who frequently told me I was a very unusual player.

[LaughingAlex]

By unusual player, well, I'd use time manipulation with energy blast and had no qualms against knocking enemies around, even if time manipulation was designed around keeping them close.  Knockback was, in fact one of my favorite things to mess with and experiment with.

[Codewalker]

knives of artemis

Knives were one of my favorite enemy groups. All the tankers, scrappers, and brutes complained about them on and on and on and would always groan if we were in a mission with them.

Controllers, and to a lesser extent blasters just laugh at them. One of the easiest groups in the game, and posed almost zero threat to a ranged character with good mobility and/or control. Never even get close enough for them to throw out their popcorn (caltrops).

[JanessaVR]

That depends. Are you talking about being angry with the company for shutting down the game, which is one thing, or does it translate to an in-game environment? Taken to the logical extreme, would you team with someone and think to yourself, "I paid $100 for this Sword of a Thousand Truths that one-shots bosses. I deserve to be more awesome than that guy over there who didn't."

If not, then I wasn't talking about you. :)

Angry with NCSoft for closing down CoH?  Well, yeah, I actually am still rather a bit upset about that.

Do I think I deserve to be more awesome (concrete/primary powers-wise) than someone spending a lot less $ than me?  No, I wouldn't want that.  In my book, that's the true "pay to win."

Me, I was most of fond of the convenience powers.  Remote market access?  My #1 fave.  I loved the team teleporter as well, but again, I don't see that as too much of an advantage over people who didn't have it, especially when it specifically includes other players getting to benefit from it, even the freebie ones.

My litmus test – if it's purely cosmetic (like more/prettier costumes), or just allows me to do more quickly and/or more easily something I can do in-game even if I didn't have it, then it's fair game to have in a cash shop.  If they were selling things like "super nukes" that could only be purchased in the cash shop, then yeah, there's a problem there.

[Aggelakis]

I'll say this about enhancement boosters.  You weren't going to get a big difference out of them due to things like ED.  At the most you'd get a small boost in accuracy/endurance reduction, the former of those two being nearly useless, since if you have IO's to begin with, your likely to have 30-40% extra accuracy on top of like 45-50% accuracy anyways.  The endurance reduction would also be very, very slight.  If you were going for recharge, any powers you were doing that with were already at the ED soft cap, so that .1% or so would be very pitiful at best.  At best, your looking at like 1 slot saved, not a big deal(unless you have that extreme black and white min max view which, even as a min maxer, I think is pretty silly).

I know CW addressed this already, but I really want to emphasize it: The difference between having a leet IO build and having an uber leet +5 IO build was enormous. Especially if you're frankenslotting and not going for set bonuses. Holy crapoly, that is some brokenness right there. Play around in Mids if you don't believe me. A level 50 damage IO goes from 42.4% to 53% - that's the same as turning that generic IO into a purple. And a purple damage IO goes from 53% to 66.25%! An acc/dam/rech goes from 21.2% per aspect to 26.5% - functionally equivalent to THREE -2 SOs in one slot.

- not going to get a big difference? - are you sh**ting me? You never actually used them, did you? lol

[LaughingAlex]

Knives were one of my favorite enemy groups. All the tankers, scrappers, and brutes complained about them on and on and on and would always groan if we were in a mission with them.

Controllers, and to a lesser extent blasters just laugh at them. One of the easiest groups in the game, and posed almost zero threat to a ranged character with good mobility and/or control. Never even get close enough for them to throw out their popcorn (caltrops).

Aye, I found my corruptors and defenders also laughed at them.  Even on a melee character I didn't complain, I just figured it'll be tough for me.  My fortunata, likewise, would just utterly dominate them.  I could fight 2-3 mobs at once on her as I'd control the battlefield with her, rather than just try to overpower things.  I'd confuse mobs, nuke them with judgement or mind scream(the later also stunning them), hit them with holds.  I didn't let enemies ever do what they wanted to do.  I'd played controllers before, I just mixed that crowd control mentality and the blaster mentality of "destroy to eliminate damage" together.  On top of having near soft-cap defense to boot :).

[LaughingAlex]

I know CW addressed this already, but I really want to emphasize it: The difference between having a leet IO build and having an uber leet +5 IO build was enormous. Especially if you're frankenslotting and not going for set bonuses. Holy crapoly, that is some brokenness right there. Play around in Mids if you don't believe me. A level 50 damage IO goes from 42.4% to 53% - that's the same as turning that generic IO into a purple. And a purple goes from 53% to 66.25%! An acc/dam/rech goes from 21.2% per aspect to 26.5% - functionally equivalent to THREE -2 SOs in one slot.

- not going to get a big difference? - are you sh**ting me? You never actually used them, did you? lol

Untill you hit ED.  Your really ignoring the ED effects.  And your looking at someone who frankenslotted to.

[Aggelakis]

No. I'm not. Especially with frankenslotting. When you hit ED with something, you move that unnecessary slot somewhere else and hit ED in *that* power *too*.

[mrultimate]

Starting to feel like CoH forums in here.......perhaps our game is destined to return!

[LaughingAlex]

No. I'm not. Especially with frankenslotting. When you hit ED with something, you move that unnecessary slot somewhere else and hit ED in *that* power *too*.

Yeah but what are you gaining with that?  Your already in the awesome yet impractical range, where your spending billions of influence when the reality is force multipliers in a team will always trump anything else.  So your spending a ton of time, globals and then even trying to pay your way to victory on ONE character when odds are I'll have a character making entire teams invincible with not even a tenth of the effort....

....Because all I need is a 10th of that effort to get something at 95% or even 97% of your character build effectiveness.

Because I also didn't use the same tactics on all of my characters.  Instead I looked at the powerset and how it was meant to be played by design and apply the active defense rules to it.  I know many players relied entirely on build to keep themselves alive with blasters, for example, yet I was curb stomping things without all that smash/lethal/energy defense that, honestly, I laughed at, because I knew somewhere along the line the devs were likely to come up with enemies that didn't use smash/lethal/energy attacks much, bypassing that defense.

And I really find it funny how people think something that'll only make 5-6% difference in damage is going to mean that much in winning/losing.  ED was at 85-95%, if you were in that range, improvements beyond that were very weak and diminished.  Not to mention each % increase past that when it came to damage meant less than the last, unlike defense where, sure each % increase meant more.  But even then there were better ways to soft-cap defense than just IOing that, even, in some ways.  The incarnate system especially.  My fortunata had 42% defense in all categories yet, I was content to stay there, because I'd throw in the diamagentic if I felt I needed more defense, and I had another layer, change that about 3-4 in front of that.

And I was at ED on all my abilities without any boosters AND had all the slots I needed in everything WITHOUT BOOSTERS.

I'm honestly just seeing a typical "OMG fractal increas in power THATS TEN TIMES MORE VALUABLE THAN SECOND BEST!!!111oneoneone", which, I hate to say, it's kind of old especially when, the way I played CoX, I was getting comparable results with less just by actually playing well.  It makes me as a min/maxer, laugh a bit :).

[ag88t88]

Starting to feel like CoH forums in here.......perhaps our game is destined to return!

Maybe we can get a moderator in here to point out that this post is wildly off topic at this point?   

Sooo... Any more news from the front?  I know its not August yet but the waiting is killing me.