Zen_Concern

I recently went and started a Strong and Pretty squad on Champion with a few friends.

Strong and Pretty people are still alive. Don't let other powersets get you down, be Strong, be Pretty.

That is a nice enough guide to get them started and on the right track Fulman's, which is what I think you were aiming for but I could be wrong.

Sure there are details and debates on the individual powersets and play styles but your guide gives an idea of what to expect in a nice bite sized piece of text. Something people will take the time to read, rather than just glance at before ignoring it. Good Job.

I have to admit that I also want to make a War Mace / Shield Brute, but I am a bit worried about the Shield secondary.

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joke topic?

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which is full of comedy gold.

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and prophecy as it turns out.

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I wonder how many developers were laughing at this thread knowing what was to come....

Yeah, VTM is more fun than I remember it being, but that may be because I have a more chaotic and fun loving attitude in RPGs now.

Still, it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when passing over written details of what my character is planning to do in the night, the GM looks over at me and politely begs, "Please let me get in at least one plot hook or even a complete story."

Nothing like pointing out to an experienced VTM GM that they left you an opening to kill not only every person in your current part but also the Prince, his Sheriff, his Scourge, and a Sabbot Deacon all in about an hour leaving you several hours to set-up an Anarch revolt and that there is nothing short of out right saying "NO" that the GM can do about it. Seriously, priceless.

Oh, and I use Mace and EA in VTM because I am strong and pretty in that game.

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It doesn't matter what AT I'm playing, either solo or teamed, my role is to enforce violence and chaos.

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Do you put that in your BIO's? I only ask because I respect that attitude in RPGs and MMOs. If people only knew what I was doing to my poor Vampire GM...

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Don't be like me. Don't play an Elec/EA instead of a Mace/EA... You may still be pretty, but you're not strong! And what is pretty without strong? I've made such a horrible mistake!

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It's never too late.

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I think it is.

I heard from this guy that I know that when he talked to his cousin's roommate's uncle he thought he remembered that the developers were going to disable selecting EA if you already selected Mace because the strong and pretty was threatening to crash the servers. All of them. All the Internets.

Dear lord, I saw 5 Mace/EA brutes today in Mercy. It was too strong and pretty for my evil soul so I had to log off and find solace in the dark spots of the PWNZ forum.

Strong and Pretty is spreading, I fear it.

Second post?

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When he tells me the Horde and Alliance cannot talk and that there are queues to enter zones all I can think is that "I wish we had such things".


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We do have such things, we also have the option to change such things. Well, we don't have ques but I wouldn't want to wait for my PvP. Perhaps if we did what WoW did and had cross server PvP we may have multiple zones of a couple of PvP zones.

Looks like there is still no point to haveing a TA defender on this raid. Thanks Devs.

I suppose they could put that in the TA description when you are chooseing a character to play for the game rather than actually fix the Hammi raid.

From what I just heard, nothing is changeing significantly in regards to damage mitigation or the resistances of the Hammidon, at least according to what they have said. This means that defenders are still getting the shaft on this raid unless they happen to be empathy.

Would be interesting to see how the developers would approach fixing the hammidon raid if the Empathy set didn't exist.

It is bad enough that they are adding loot to the game. Now they are adding a guessing game to boot, just to waste more of my time.

It would have been really nice if I could have just looked, seen what the lowest price was, bought it, and moved on with my game. Dear lord, why complicate something that takes us away from the game? Perhaps this is a new mini-game that the developers want players to play? The, Auction House game, where you to can sit and instead of makeing a hero, make a banker!

Thanks Devs, for adding something that I never wanted to see.

Now let me get this straight, players with loads of influence are unlikely to go looking for enhancements with this new system. Nor do they "need" to auction their enhancements when they can just sell them and add to their already vast sums of money. So, no reason to go to the auction house other than recipes. Guess the recipes will likely go towards the largest servers.

New players will likely find everyone lowballing enhancement prices right around where the stores would buy them at. Which means from a seller standpoint, why would anyone sell anything when the prices are that low? It is less hassle to just sell them to the nearest store rather than WAIT for an auction to finish. So, few people will likely sell enhancements at the auction house. This in turn makes it easier for the players to do what the developers don't seem to want them to do, which is absolutely hillarious.

Fewer people use the system except to abuse it, and the system ends up becomeing a hassle for people to use normally instead of something straightforward and upfront like an auction that actually uses consignments.

I can't believe that developers who live in America with all of its examples of free markets would think of this system as being anything but another drag in CoX.

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Dark consumption does not specifically have the same issues as consume in that light. It does not underperform its peers just because its endurance management is inferior - almost the opposite.


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I am somewhat curious, I have always felt that Dark Melee was the safest melee primary but also at the same time the weakest in terms of damage output. What does Dark Consumption add to the melee set and why is an end recovery power in the melee set to begin with in your opinion?

I realize you can only guess at what the original design conept was but what I am specificaly wondering is how you see Dark Consumption functioning with the set as a whole as it stands now after 8 issues of changes.

I'm just looking for your feelings on this, not a proof

If it isn't a bug, there goes alot of the 3B Bible.

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Anyway, this guy is getting way more aggro than any toon I have ever played. Things even aggro him when he is not doing anything. This is not retarded "I am standing next to you" aggro or "extreme AoE usage" aggro. I mean, I am seeing baddies that actually run past the person that first attacked and head straight for me who was standing a bit of a way away and doing nothing. I did not even have toggles running.

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Yes, this happens. It isn't just you.

When and why does it happen are harder questions to answer. I suppose the team as a whole is on the agro list of the entire spawn. Which is why the mobs will turn and attack you after killing your teammate even if you did not specificaly attack them.

I usually see this happen when players are out of LoS but still within the mobs agro range. When someone agros the mob, some mob will for some reason "see" the person who is out of LoS and if not agrod by someone else, will head for the person around the corner. I have been on the recieveing end of this and watched it happen to others while playing my defender.

I don't really see anything extremely wrong with it, except that sometimes I find it odd when a mob will run by a team of players to hit one guy standing in the back. It just looks odd when you see a warwolf skamper by the Tank and head straight for the empathy defender . It's like a strange game of Duck, Duck, Goose.

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This, as has been mentioned before, is the inverse of what was requested and stated by the majority of the player base. That the early and mid game was fine, it was the late game that the Blaster Archtype needed a boost in.

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If Arcannaville was right about what factors the developers look at when decideing what to change, it doesn't matter what we, the players, asked for. I am not criticizing what you wrote Red, especially since I happen to agree with your post in toto, but throwing this out as a little side point to stay on topic.

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But isn't that three more brain cells than is needed to turn on your defense toggles and click Elude when you want to own?

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The blue bar under the green bar. Most of us have to watch that one, too.

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We have to watch it. That long blue line is very relaxing and zen.

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The blue bar is me?

*Looks down*

Hmm, I am long.

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Often mathematical modeling will uncover truths that no amount of outcome-based data mining or gross averaging can ever reveal.

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Even though Law is the work field that I will be going into, I have decided to also take courses on Math Modeling. I may dislike math and the monotanous repitition that is math, but I also see a huge benefit from learning it. If nothing else, I will be able to make better arguements on MMO forums!

I just want to post some a few comments before I head off into obscurity.

What Arcanaville describes when she mentions the "sliver of health" is something I think every blaster sees. In fact, several blasters, includeing those in this thread have pointed out in multiple other threads that they wished their snipe or some other attack did just a little more damage as without a build-up or aim type power they left a "sliver of health"

This becomes more obvious in the AR and Archery sets which are lethal based for the most part and it makes sense for those sets to leave that little sliver of health considering mob resistances.

It is interesting to me, the contrast between pre-ED and post-ED bias when it comes to the use of certain powers. Pre-ED it was popular to slam both Aim and Build-up to cap damage for a little while and unleash with AoE killing everything. Post-ED many Blasters alternate between aim and build-up so that their attacks will not leave those little slivers of health. At least, that is my personal experience, I know some chained aim and build-up Pre-ED but I recall them being shouted down pretty frequently. Hell, I took the time to learn the most efficient attack chains would kill a yellow or orange mob with build-up running and which ones would kill a yellow or orange with Aim running with my main blaster specificaly because of that "sliver of health". Incidently, melee had to be included.

Thinking back about that "sliver of health" concept, hasn't every blaster under the sun looked for some way to increase damage? Some have asked for just a straight boost (similar to Arcanaville's suggestion of raising the floor of defiance), others have asked for a damage resistance bypass similar to what we have in PvP (something I think fits the theme of defiance and would work just as well as increaseing damage).

Is there any question that blasters feel like they are just not doing enough damage? There must be something that blasters are seeing that are giveing them that impression.

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I'm of the opinion that defiance damage should be a separate floating number, like criticals. That way, blasters can actually see the defiance boost in a way more psychologically satisfying (and perhaps a bit more obviously). This was done recently for defense: the various "dodged" and "deflected" messages which show that defense is actually "working" were added purely to give a psychological boost to the visibility of defense. Defiance damage should probably get similar treatment.


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That would be nice.

Also, I want to thank you for going to the trouble of doing the tests and the math to nail defiance down. It doesn't make me stop believeing that defiance either needs to have the bottom end of the curve smoothed out or to be replaced by something a bit better suited for the end game, but it definately gives us a solid platform from which to discuss the subject of defiance.

Kudos to you.

Random damage isn't worth while to Blasters if the blaster is getting all the agro. It not only isn't worth while, it doesn't make any sense.

No statistical data is necessary to come to that conclusion, just some plain old common sense. Sometimes you need to datamine, sometimes you just need to fix the obvious.

I was specificaly responding to the concept in that quote, not your entire post Enmity. Challenge is good, to a point. That was my point.

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I even posted something called "all fights should be AV fights" or something like that, as a part of this idea. The notion was that the stuff that *really* counted, should be like one AV fight, not like 1000 minion fights.

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Where was I for this? Man, I really missed out by missing that thread. I would have been behind the concept whole heartedly. Honestly, the big fights are what make comic book action entertaining, it isn't the hordes of minions. I will say that if you are going to fight hordes of minions, it should be done well and the gameplay should reflect and provide the visceral never ending combat that you are in. I always fault CoH for not really enhanceing it's strongpoint in my opinion.

In other news, what do you think of Alan Wake? It looks like a great game, part shooter, part puzzle solveing, part RPG and the pace is kinda left up to you the player. I think it may be a model for how a non-linear game should be designed, but I may be getting ahead of myself and reading too much into the reviews.

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As far as "valid arguments"... man this place makes me sad today... I'll only go so far as to say 'challenge extends gameplay'. This is of course only true with respect to gamers who enjoy challenge, which are in turn the only gamers I respect.


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This is true to a point.

I have great fun setting up difficult battles for myself in Dawn of War Dark Crusade (2 computer opponents or maybe a map not in my favor). Now, I am [censored] while I am playing, but I have a blast watching the replays and seeing what my opponents are doing while they fight me. It keeps me fresh for LAN nights as well, but that is a side benefit. Really, I just enjoy watching that really tough fight I had and what happened dureing it without haveing to worry about the outcome. Lets me watch a good battle without getting stressed out.

When I am relaxed and feeling pretty good, then I'll gear up for a challenge again.

What am I getting at? It is good to have challenge but it needs to be in moderation. When game developers stop putting the challenges in moderation, I start breaking out the cheats just to relieve my stress. Dawn of War is great. I can fight a really tough battle, then relax, then do it all again if I want.

Now, depending on what a players goal is every player will have a different challenge in this game. If your goal is to defeat the enemy, then the challenge doesn't exist in this game. If you are trying to hit 50 in 3 months then you have a different sort of challenge.

I realize this is a bit off topic, but several people have been talking about how difficult or not difficult some new games are and it has inspired me.

The great games I have come to find, mix challenges with relaxing moments in the game or give the player time to come down off of his edge and steel himself for the next challenge.

MMOs don't really do that though, unless they have crafting. Then the player basicaly takes a break from the grind and goes about crafting. Even crafting can be a form of a challenge though and eventually some players may view it as not so much as a break but a hinderance of their goal to the end game.

In CoH the breaks in the game are the Paragon Dance Party, and Travel time to contacts or missions.

I had a point to all of this, but I think I forgot it somewhere along the way. Maybe I am just hinting that if someone is challenged enough for too long, people just start getting burned out and looking for a new form of release.