OrsonScottCard Posted:

I think Trolls may be overbalanced, but I think the OP’s comparison may do just as much to point out how underbalanced Hackers are. The issue is that Hacker attacks tend to be so extremely long-cycle compared to equivalent attacks in other clbumes, and also that Processing Power is the least available and fastest draining secondary. The frequency in which I run out of PP on tough forums, even with the best PP stack available, is ridiculous.

I have no problem with superpowered Trolls. We’re competing against the game, not other players, for the majority of things, so what another player can or can’t do doesn’t matter too much to me. I do think that Hackers should be given a little more, though, to make harder forums a little more evenly matched.

I’m not sure if Hackers are really underpowered, at least from a “I’m level capped, and have leet swag” perspective. I can pwn any forum out there without using consumables (though I can speedrun very few, I almost failed 74 seconds at 9 threads on Suburban earlier). The problem, if anything, with Hackers is that they tend to be tedious, and underscintillating (if that’s a word) at high levels. Due to long cycle attacks, I end up with something ridiculous like using 8 different attacks (avtr, ipz, recipe, 404, poetry, flipr, bg2, and fnt) when pwning engrish lessons because PP is in such limited quantities that you can’t afford to spam avtr (which really isn’t that good anyway).

In terms of “fixing clbumes” Hackers really just need to be thrown something interesting, other than “really high luck”. I mean, increasingly with forumbuildr, forums are going in where the effects of background changing results don’t even show up because they have a solid color in front of the background. That’s just a slap in the face Log in to see images! It would be at least nice if I could see the results of my woefully underpowered attacks, but that’s neither here nor there.

But again, how much do we really care? Everybody (except challenge clbumes) at sufficiently high level, with sufficiently good gear and build, can pwn anything without using consumables. Only one clbum can really speedrun effectively, but that’s only really an issue (as Scully pointed out) for Dom and for Job grinding (and Hackers are actually good at job grinding), so that’s not terribly important… then again, when you’re sitting there at level 35, what else is there to do other than grind for peens and play dom?