Wing_Leader

I'd like to have more for my L50 main to do that isn't repeatable content.

I also wish I could get the names I want for my characters without having to resort to plumbing the depths of alternatives. There are many times when the name that exactly fits my character's look and concept is already taken. "Be more creative" is a condescending suggestion, and about as useful as the equally obvious "just pick something else". If the best name for my character, in my estimation, is Thunderfist, then I don't want someone telling me that I'm somehow creatively deficient for not wanting to use an alternative.

But the reality is that CoX is designed so that no two characters on the same server can have the same name. It makes a lot of sense from a software implementation point of view, and it makes a decent amount of sense from an in-game milieu point of view (only a handful of Marvel or DC characters ever shared the same name, and rarely were they active at the same time). To my mind, this "problem" isn't one of poor game design or lazy implementation, but is purely a product of having too many player heroes in the same environment together. There are more active players on any given server than there are main characters (i.e., starring roles) in any city in the Marvel or DC universes. Name conflict issues are an artifact of overpopulation (too many damn heroes), not a software bug.

Whachoo talkin' 'bout, Willis? CoX has been more successful, IMO, at balancing the solo and team aspects of the game than any other MMO out there.

While I don't feel that MMO's are meant to be experienced primarily solo (any more than ships are meant to stay in port, even though they can), the fact that the CoX design has always made solo play an equal partner to team play has been one of its best features.

Yeah, but where did they flee to? If they fled out of Praetoria, then who is left in Praetoria for Cole's successor, whomever it might be, to take care of?

So, um, let me get this straight. LegionAlpha had heard about something that sounded like ten level shifts, something "equivalent" to being L60, and was looking for details. GuyPerfect responded with information that was exactly what LegionAlpha was thinking of. So, in effect, if we were to delete every post except LegionAlpha's original, and GuyPerfect's reply, this thread's purpose would be fulfilled.

But for some reason folks are fixated on the fact that GuyPerfect said everyone was "dead wrong", and people just can't let that go, can they? The devs should do us all a favor and delete all but those two posts (including this one) and lock the dang thread.

I have precisely one character that really needs the Excalibur TW to complete her look. Eventually there will be a glut of Excalbur recipes on the market and I'll buy it for a reasonable price. Unfortunately, the success rate for taking Tyrant down is abysmal right now, and so now is not a good time to grind Magisterium for the recipe drop, IMO (at least half the trial runs right now are "mini-Mag" runs purely for the AIxp anyway).

It's really quite simple. Find an AT/powerset combo that is 10000% better (more fun) than all the others. After 8 years I finally found it: Street Justice/Willpower Brute. Upon making that character last August, my alt-itis was cured.

To my mind this whole discussion merely makes clear two flaws in the game's underlying assumptions:

1. That Tankers should be a form of the D&D fighter class.
2. That Superhero MMOs should conform to outdated medieval fantasy design motifs.

If the Tanker class was meant to be a representation of characters like Superman, Hulk, Thing, etc., then the implementation fails epically precisely because of a severe lack of damage output and environmentally-provided ranged attack stunts. Consequently, the Tanker class is little more than the classic EverQuest "meat shield" in spandex. Wrong genre, wrong design conceit.

Unfortunately, to implement Tankers "correctly," which is to say implemented such that they perform like Superman, Hulk, etc., would be to make them way too powerful. Brutes come closest to this idea in terms of mechanics, which is why I think a lot of players roll Brutes when they want to make a classic superhero "strong man" (i.e., brick in Champions parlance), so we don't need Tankers for this. IMO, Tankers as currently envisioned and implemented have no place in this game because this isn't EverQuest and because Brutes perform more like superhero bricks than Tankers do.

CoX has a healer power set (Empathy) as a choice for support ATs, which essentially equals a "healer class" insomuch as any AT/powerset combo can be called a "class" at all in this game. The reason I claim that Empathy Defenders represent the de facto healer class in CoX is because that is how players have always treated it. Players coming from other MMOs always seem to bring their Must Have a Healer mindset with them and scour the game for the healer "class". They find the Empathy Defender, realize it is the closest thing Cox has to one, and then they start advertising "looking for healer" in the hopes of landing an Emp.

I'd go with 1) Rad, 2) Dark, 3) Kinetics as top three. Not necessarily in terms of popularity, but in terms of usefulness on a team. Kinetics are incredibly powerful to a team when in the hands of a player who really knows how to use the set, but it is one of the sets you see the least on Defenders. You see it all the time as the secondary for ATs like Controllers, and sometimes I think that is because players are bitter over not being able to Speed Boost themselves (buffing your Fire Imps, however, is akin to buffing yourself, hence Kinetics' popularity as a pet-class secondary).

I almost never see Force Field or Sonic Res even though both are also pretty darn useful. And IMO, the least useful or necessary power set is Empathy. Whoever decided (Emmert?) that a superhero MMO needed a "healer" class was a moron.

I am a Champions/Hero System fanatic from way back (as in, 1982). Up through 4th edition it was the best RPG system I had ever used. Its flexibility is unparalleled. But so too is its potential complexity. For anyone trying to do superhero action in a way that is both logical and detailed, Champions/HERO is the way to go. But I would use the 4th edition of the rules since they (still) represent the best compromise between flexibility, elegance, and complexity IMO. The 5th edition, while addressing some holes found in 4th, is like Abduction from the Seraglio, it suffers from too many notes, as it were. And the less said about the 6th edition, the better.

The other frequently expressed complaint about Champions is the time it takes to complete a battle. It is true that it can take many hours to conduct a full-on battle between 6-8 hero PCs and an equal number of villain NPCs, especially if characters are fairly evenly matched. There are, however, little tricks you can employ to speed things up, like not using the speed chart directly (or computerizing the phase sequence), forgoing post-12 recovery, not allowing villains who are down to take any recoveries at all (this is an especially good rule to use on thugs/minions). But the truth is that one does have to go out of one's way to find ways to speed up combat in Champions because the default approach of using all the standard rules (which don't even include the "heroic level" options like hit locations, wounds, long-term endurance, etc.) does tend to yield time-consuming battles. This is not the game for "quick 'n dirty" RPG action, not unless you spend some time before-hand streamlining the system for your campaign.

I can't recommend GURPS Supers since it is based on the GURPS engine, which strains under the stresses of truly superpowerful characters. So much of GURPS assumes that a normal human power scale is the baseline for everything, that too many subsystems and basic mechanics have to be utterly reworked to handle characters with the strength potential of Superman or the movement speeds of the Flash, etc. And in my experience, all those re-jiggered mechanics don't really work properly or satisfactorily.

All the other games mentioned may offer faster, looser play, but they will almost certainly sacrifice detail and the ability to accurately mimic the powers of CoH (assuming that is a priority). Mutants & Masterminds might do about as good a job as Champions, but it is based on the d20 system which I have a number of issues with from a basic design point of view, so I can't whole-heartedly endorse that either.

"I can't have it NAO!" means NCSoft is punishing them.

"I can't have it free without using my PP stipend!" means NCSoft is stripmining their bank accounts.

"I can't have everything that long-time players are getting as special rewards!" means NCSoft is insulting them and making them feel like patsies.

The foul odor of entitlement that comes wafting from people who think the world owes them every privilege and every benefit for no extra effort or cost continues to astound me. If this is all it takes for NCSoft to lose a their subscription, then I dare say they were bound to lose it at some point anyway, for any number of completely innocuous reasons. Keeping such players "happy" is usually more costly, business-wise, than they are worth.

I don't engage in PvP because due to the bizarre artifice of its mechanics, it doesn't feel like superhero combat to me. The whole cat-and-mouse, hit-and-run style of combat is anything but superheroic. It is Quake Arena with spandex avatar skins. I don't play CoX as a surrogate sport; I play it to experience virtual superhero comic book action. Moreover, PvP is so isolated in its own "world", that it feels like an entirely separate game. Nothing that happens in PvP affects the PvE game, and vice versa.

Maybe if there were unplanned, triggered PvP "raids" in regular PvE zones, it might be more interesting to me. Sort of like how a random zone gets a Rikti Invasion when a group turns in a Lady Gray Task Force. Suppose there were instanced Mayhem/Safeguard PvP missions going on all the time. And suppose that if, in a 20 hour period, enough of those instances were won by one side or the other to trigger a random zone of the loser's side opening up, for a short time (10-15 minutes, say) to world PvP where there are all kinds of rewards for causing trouble (for villains) or cleaning up the streets (for heroes). PvP would then have potential impact, even if only for a short time, on the PvE world, making the two more integrated.

Of course, in order for this to work and not just turn into a 10 minute grief fest, PvP combat has to be overhauled so that characters can't be pwned in seconds. "Hot spot" markers would appear on the mini-map anywhere a fight between players is taking place, allowing allies to jump in and help. But that only works if such fights aren't simply over and done with in a few seconds. Even 3-on-1 fights have to be able to last a little while. One of the most distasteful aspects of PvP in just about any MMO I know of is the he-who-draws-first-wins nature of the mechanics. You have a few seconds to pwn your opponent or you get pwned. No time for tactics or for escapes or for allies to come to your aid (they must already be present and ready to intervene to be of any help). Some people like this because they have mastered it, but I don't find it fun and I doubt I would find it fun even if I mastered it myself.

I find it interesting that the problem is seen to lie entirely with the player base, and not the trials themselves. I would argue that the nature of the trial designs, in their misguided approach to providing "a challenge", have produced these antagonistic conditions. They create a perceived need to filter out certain characters, be it by level shift, IO build, AT, or whatever. If they weren't so gimmicked out the butt, with this level shift nonsense as a cruch mechanic, I don't think we'd be in this position (of either having to filter, or having to argue for/against it in a forum).

We shouldn't be criticizing the players for trying to compensate for bad game design/mechanics. We should be criticizing the mechanics for fostering harsh divisions of character/player capabilities. In the standard 1-50 game, differences in level is mitigated by the sidekicking system. But there is nothing equivalent in the Incarnate system that mitigates the differences between 50s and 50+3s on the same league. It is a mechanical rift that can't be compensated for mechanically; one can only hope that some combination of player skill and non-combat AT benefits will make up the difference. Good luck with that given how most trials run with at least half the league composed of melee characters whose primary value is in either dishing out or taking massive amounts of damage.

Oh, and to the poster who asked how anyone could fail MoM, it is worth mentioning (again) that MoM is the only trial in which the final AV fight must be accomplished in less than 3 minutes. The only success vector available is overwhelming DPS, and that is where the purple patch hamstrings any league not composed of enough level-shifted damage dealers.