Samuel_Tow

But I like it and I want to use it more often...

Walk stopped working in Studio B when the bug which broke the suppression field in there was fixed. Walk was previously tagged to be exempt from suppression fields, but I think whoever reintiated the power suppression field in there just used the "Disable_All" mode which all powers are I believe coded to disable for by default. It seems like a quick solution that simply ignores the problem of walk in the same way as fine-tuning problems have been ignored lately.

*edit*
Correction, Walk appears to only ever disable itself when you're hit specifically with a "Disable_Walk" mode and specifically NOT under Disable_All conditions. I'm thinking they used something on a lower level to disable our powers in the Architect.

The Lucky defence buff is rolled into Agile, which now gives ranged and AoE defence. You lose a passive for the health-dependent resistances, but the remaining two passives give a higher resistance bonus to compensate. It doesn't even out entirely, but it's close.

Ignoring the specifics of a situation and how it differs from other situations is not a good standpoint to argue from. It's like comparing Dark Melee losing Dark Consumption for Assassin's Strike vs. Electric Melee losing Lightning Clap. Oh, no, not Lightning Clap. It was such a useful power.

You can't replicate the effects of damage auras lost for Hide any more than you can replicate the effects of a lost AoE power, but you CAN and probably SHOULD replicate the effects of a utility buff power by rolling those effects into an already existing one in the same way SR retains most of the use of the passive it gives up for Hide. You can and you should.

No, I'd actually like that. It does make a certain bit of sense provided the copy didn't know it is a copy. It feeds off existing content, such a the old "A Hero's Hero" arc with only minor changes and it builds on existing content - the mission where Anti-Matter creates a perfect duplicate Praetorian Clockwork Statesman that fails because we stop it before it's properly programmed.

This is also a real play-through of Automatic Villainy, in the sense that this time, the plot is not a ruse. You have a Statesman copy that's so perfect it thinks it's the real deal, but it's not quite perfect enough to match the man in all aspects. If we claim that Tyrant granted the copy a portion of his power as he does with his other followers, then the copy can even wield the Statesman's true powers and even respond to spells tied to these powers.

This would also explain the man's erratic behaviour in SSA1.5 and his dumb death, as well as open the door to a whole other story of how the copy went through a crisis of fate when it started to realise it was not a real creature but just a simple machine. It would actually justify the copy wanting to die, feeling it doesn't belong in this world, possibly unable to fight its programming to sabotage Earth's defences against Tyrant, with Primal Cole's real memories bleeding in and mixing with its software.

This has the potential to take a HORRIBLE story and wrap a much better one around it, in the process redeeming the horrible source and indeed turning it into a positive plot point. It also leaves the door open for a lot of psychological drama and quite a few existentialist questions and it presents the opportunity for a story that I really like. I like it enough, as a point of fact, that I may want to draw from the idea for my own use.

I'm not sure how in-canon the novels are, and I sincerely hope that this is never followed up on because it removes pretty much the sole reason there is to make your own hero in this universe. Without that, we may as well be borrowing other people's signature characters for a spin.

That's a big problem red-side, and it really is the worst in Sharkhead Island. There seems to be a grand total of ONE cave entrance used for all cave missions, and it's on that beach to the North where Freakshow tend to hang out, ONE warehouse door that's the door you go to fight Barakuda and about two or three others that you get rotated between. Worse still, your contacts are all concentrated around the city, for the most part, so you don't see much of the zone going to meet them, either.

Sharkhead Island is not a BAD zone, strictly speaking. It has a lot of variety to it. It has that Freakshow fort, small as it is, that you never really get to see if you move from mission to mission. It has that prison-looking building that's apparently the residence of Kirk Kage, of which you'll see about as much as that fort in Port Oaks. There's Villa Requin that, if you didn't look on your map, you wouldn't know it even existed. Potter's Field gets used for a few Oranbega maps so that's good, but most of the time you're either going to the Hell Forge somewhere, going to that one beach on the North side or going to Potter's Field, with the only thing you'll see of the Hell Forge being mostly it from the air as you leap over it to get to the other side.

Granted, Sharkhead does have a few missions in a few unorthodox locations, but almost the whole time, you'll be charting a polygon between three or four doors, going past the same few buildings and seeing only a small fraction of the island. Even at its best, Sharkhead isn't that diverse. It's just brown and black and more black. But even then, what the game takes you to see isn't even a third of it. Not only is this bad in that it makes the zone seem smaller, it's bad because it teaches you to follow specific paths and that REALLY shouldn't happen.

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Personally, I feel the zone could gain a MAJOR facelift by doing just a few very simple things:

1. Make Kirk Cage's residence pretty. The guy is a rich man exploiting the poor to work in his mines, so make him LOOK rich. Raise the exterior barb wire wall to twice the current height, then paint the building inside white, set up an exterior pool on the roof, with a lounge chair and a little garden. This would be the perfect visual metaphor to show both the disproportionate distribution of wealth when one man can live in what is effectively a five-star hotel while his workers live in meagre hovels just outside his front gate. It would also demonstrate the hollow nature of such an existence when you realise this luxury requires a 20-foot wall and an army of dirty guards in order to exist.

2. Clean up Villa Requin. This is supposed to be the refuge of the rich and powerful of the Family, yet it looks like a slum. Grey roads wind around grey buildings with grey roofs on a grey island and the only "elegance" you see is the occasional hedge row. It looks like a dirty, depressing part of town that only looks good because the rest of Sharkhead Island is considerably worse. I get that part of City of Villain's "moral lesson" was that even the best of villainy was still worse than the worst of heroism, hence why rich villains live in bad homes and good people live in a bright and sunny city. But come on, now. Put some colour into it, put in a few gardens, maybe a walled-off pool, maybe a few tennis courts. Make it look like people go there to live the high life that you can't find in the mining town on Sharkhead proper.

Doing both of these would give enough visual contrast to Sharkhead Island such that it doesn't feel like a square mile of the same thing over and over again, I think. It's the juxtaposition of nice and rotten that does a much better job of depicting a corrupt state than just having everything be black and grey and brown.

It's the grimiest and darkest of the zones, though, and my monitor is situated facing an exterior window, which makes playing in Sharkhead Island quite difficult during the day. Besides, it's 10 levels playing in the same relatively small zone, and visiting the same small subset of locations over and over again. It's the place where burnout can be felt the most strongly because it really feels like the whole game consists of black sand and brown buildings.

City of Heroes isn't exactly better-looking or even all that much more varied, but it has more and larger zones with doors popping up in all manner of locations so that I'm not looking at the exact same locations all the time. It doesn't have to look better so long as it looks even slightly different.

That would go a LONG way towards fixing status-effect-related problems in a very direct way, and it's something I never thought would even be acknowledged. To be blunt, since about Issue 1, I've had zero faith in NPC status control and generally NPC power selection to be under any kind of scrutiny, and this problem has seemed to get worse and worse with every passing Issue, with I18 being one of the worst offenders. It simply seems that as time goes on, NPCs of any level range gain more damage, stronger debuffs and more status effects than what had been seen in previous issues.

I forget at what point I made this decision, but I simply decided to never play anything without status protection for exactly this reason - many enemies are just badly unfair. Malta Spec Ops 45s Stun Grenades come to mind.

My point here is that if you can do this and actually put enemy potency under some kind of standardized control so I'm not forced to overbuild to handle the very frequent outliers, then what constitutes "enough" might drop significantly.

I'm with Bill on this one. It took me a good year to get more than a single villain past CoV's 20s because I got FRIKKIN' SICK of Sharkhead Island. Every time I hit 20, it's the same drab black sand piles and grey houses and perpetually cloudy days that make it difficult to see. In CoH, I never had this problem because the game would always run me all over the place to it never got boring. Even if I knew how the maps looked, travel was always an active part of the game since my attention was required. City of Villains only using about three doors per zone just means I form regular "paths" that I move along with about as much involvement as your average WoW flight path.

And I can't see how Skyway City is difficult for anyone without Fly, considering that both Super Jump and Teleport make light work of the zone and Super Speed is well fast enough to be able to look for ramps going up, even when there aren't direct routes under the bridges. The only way the zone could be a problem is if you tried to play it without a travel power, in which case I direct you to Independence Port for how much fun THAT is.

There's nothing specific to Skyway City because all of the old Launch contacts are interchangeable between the zones. You can get the Vahzilok Plague arc from a number of contacts between the zones. That doesn't mean the zone is "superfluous." It adds variety and it adds a feeling of size to the city, something the game sorely lacks, especially villain-side. The last thing we need is to drop meteorites on another zone and reduce our levelling path options yet again.

Kind of like a PBAoE Mastermind -> Traps -> Detonator, only just affecting the Time Bomb. It ought to be doable with two powers, and we already have more than enough precedent for one power pick granting several. And I'd still restrict the bomb to blow up 15-20 seconds after it was set even if it weren't detonated to preserve a similar dynamic to the old one, where you could have it blow up mid-way through a Full Auto.

Speaking of blowing up other Blasters' Time Bombs, wasn't it fun when one Mastermind's pet commands could bleed over and command the pets of another Mastermind on the team?

I've made suggestions regarding Snipes, and one of those was to drop the interrupt time and up the damage to scale 3.56 to match Dominator snipes, this making them regular attacks with longer range and heavier damage, with only cost and recharge serving as balance. If that means longer recharge, then so be it. It's not like Snipes before this change can ever really stick to their cycle anyway.

To me, the "minigame" around gaining three or at least two stacks of Assassin's Focus is just the right kind of gate for a Focus critical as big as this one. Clearly, I'm looking for an easier game than most people and have admitted to in the past, but to me, Assassin's Strike ought to set the example. To me, it's just the right kind of balance between awesome and annoying. It's one of the few powers in the game where the limitation actually makes it BETTER, as opposed to feeling like a millstone around the neck.

The fact that they have nearly full-strength support that's only really limited by range and only slightly by cost. That as of the last round of changes, a complete resummon is relatively cheap and very fast and equal to a VERY large effective heal. That they can deal very serious damage over a very large AoE range and have significant survivability on top of that. That I can more or less forget I have a secondary and do just fine for most normal missions. Of all the characters I've ever played, Masterminds have done most thing the easiest. Sure, certain enemies can rip the various henchmen apart, but that's where support comes in. For instance a Bots/FF Mastermind can run around with robots at the defence soft-cap who put off considerable AoE damage.

I don't know how they do in Trials since I've run a grand total of two iTrials, both of them BAF, and in both cases having absolutely zero idea what I or anyone else is actually doing to contribute to the success of the task. So I guess Masterminds might not be that good at Trials. For me, that's not a meaningful concern since I really don't intend to run many more than I already have. Now that solo options exist to obtain Incarnate rewards, that's not as pressing a concern any more.

So you'd think, but that's really not the case if you have an even half-way decent set of binds, and I happen to have one that's packaged such that I can give it to other people over in-game chat. It's a variation of the Mastermind Numpad Binds that I worked out along with that system's original creator that requires no bind files, no messing with your PC and nothing more complicated than being able to paste into the game.

And even otherwise, most of what I do with my Mastermind is order all henchmen to attack one target after another, order all henchmen to move to a location in aggressive mode to pick their own targets, move all henchmen to a location in passive mode to avoid ground patches and occasionally have all henchmen drop into Bodyguard mode. The system of binds I have set up for myself is many times more complex than anything I actually need to do, since all I really do over 90% of the time is order all henchmen to attack my target and then key my Mastermind attacks so I'm not sitting on my hands.

Occasionally, some secondaries might require a more active participation. Dark and Poison come to mind, but even they aren't that bad. Occasionally, some secondaries actively refuse to allow me to be involved in anything that happens. Forcefields is one such. Throw up the big bubble, cast the AoE buffs exactly once, then let the robots do their thing while I try to figure out what lies I told myself to justify taking Pulse Rifle Blast, Pulse Rifle Burst and Photon Grenade.

And for as overpowered as Masterminds are, I STILL want to see their personal attacks made either stronger or faster or cheaper so they're not a complete waste of space. So, yeah, even though I just spent so long saying how overpowered the AT is, I still want it to be slightly stronger.

"Way too much" is precisely what I like in this game. Brutes, Scrappers and Masterminds have been getting away with having way too much of a lot of things. Consequently, they're my favourite ATs. Stalkers were always an AT I played but never quite enjoyed until the Stalker changes because I always felt I could do more with less effort if I played a Scrapper. Not any more. Now when I play a Stalker, I feel like I'm pretty much on par. Sure, Stalkers can occasionally do a little too much damage, but the bother of managing Assassin's Strike and dealing with the fairly broken "Hide" mechanic balances this out.

I like RPGs the most when they don't try to fit some crippling weakness into my character that forces me to seek out other people to plug it up. In fact, I like RPGs the most when I get to feel like I'm overpowered against most enemies and only ever face true challenge from the few, the rare, the strong mission end bosses. This informs the ATs I choose to play.

The problem with Blasters has always been the same - while other ATs get to be balanced like they're in a single-player game and are thus given significantly overpowered main strengths, Blasters are always balanced around trying to be fair against content. Because pretty much no-one else is balanced to be fair against content, this puts them dead last on any comparison scale. Me? I'd rather they too were overpowered, because that's what makes this particular game fun. If I want to be "well-balanced" there are a thousand other games out there I could play. I'm in this one in large part because here I'm not balanced, I'm strong. It's why Jack Emmert's "1 hero = 3 white minions" idea was so opposed.

In short, there's no such thing as "too much." The whole game's tank-mages, and that's just fine.

Inventions are really one of those things that I want to be as tangentially involved with as possible, for the simple fact that I don't appreciate the loot aspect of it. That, and planning around inventions is easiest when a build is "final" and has all of its slots, since then I can just plan around final values and I don't have to worry about which combination of what is available at which level and so forth. Considering all my 50 Blasters are gone, that pretty much leaves Inventions out in the cold.

But again - it's a bother for me, and a bother I didn't have to go through with any of my other characters. SR is kind of reaching that level of bother in Incarnate content so we'll see how that goes, but other than that? It just doesn't seem like it's worth the effort to reinvest in an AT that pissed me off so much when the most I can look forward to is about break-even performance. I can get that much easier from the ATs I actually like. Besides, I clearly have a different idea of how Blasters should be than most people, so it just makes sense to let the AT be what it will for others to enjoy and just stick to the ones I like.

So, essentially, it being a decent power makes it dumb? Well, then let's hope the whole game gets dumber because I'd rather have fun than play a "smart" game.

Because inspirations aren't always available. I went through the same with discussing Incarnate content - why don't you just use inspirations? Because they're kind of sort of single-use only, and they don't drop nearly as often as people insist they do. When I use inspirations, I run out, especially if I need to use inspirations in order to fight effectively. Yes, that's even with combining them.

And that's actually one of the biggest problems Blasters have - the need for inspirations. I was told that a Blaster with a purple inspiration or two is a lot easier to play... And it is, but I don't get a purple inspiration drop once every 60 seconds, and I don't get three of a kind of anything else every 30 seconds, either. Blasters also really benefit from Break Frees to deal with status effects. Blasters will now also really benefit from Insight inspirations, as well. There's only so much that an inspiration tray can carry and that drop rate can account for, and leaving to buy more is very counter-productive. Yes, I could walk half a mile out through the twisting halls of Oranbega, travel to a vendor, travel back to the mission and then trek half a mile in again, but it takes so long that any advantage they may have given me is simply wasted in travel time.

The fact of the matter is that any Blaster I have ever played burns through his or her inspiration at rate many times greater than any non-Blaster character I have and, crucially, at a rate far greater than drops can compensate for. And indeed, that's working as intended. Inspirations are consumables, it's why they disappear when you use them and you can only carry a finite amount of them. You're not supposed to be able to benefit from their effects constantly, you're supposed to save them for special situations, or at the very least use them sparingly. I'd love nothing more than to run with an Insight inspiration active all the time, and not just on Blasters, but I've yet to find a way to actually do this consistently.

It's not that other ATs can do more while held than a Blaster can, even discounting the ones that don't get held to begin with. It's that what a Blaster can do really isn't all that useful. The Defiance attacks firing though status effects are quite literally only ever useful for ending a permahold, but the problem of a permahold isn't that it lasts forever and you can never get free. In fact, most "permaholds" are only permanent because they end in death and prior to that last about 5-10 seconds.

The thing is, a Blaster lives or dies by the action he takes, and a hold simply prevents you from taking action. You can't move away from what's punching you in the teeth, you can't stun that high-damage enemy over there, you can't kill the minions dropping your health. All you can do is toss out weak attacks that really don't have the kind of damage a Blaster needs to survive. Oh, sure, Flares may have pretty good DPS all on its own, but DPS doesn't count for much when you're so reliant on burst damage to remove dangerous enemies from the field.

There's nothing quite as fun as shooting at a gunslinger and having him freeze you for 10 seconds before your attack even animates. What then? Just the Gunslinger himself deals so much damage he can flatline you in a few seconds, and he's usually accompanied by people with grenades and rifle or, even worse, giant robots. And that's not even mentioning those lovely 45s long stun grenades. That's when I get told to use inspirations, and I do. Thing is, break frees drop really frequently that your average Malta mission robs me of all the break-frees I have by about the mid point, and from there on I'm keeping my fingers crossed, or otherwise take a long break to go buy some more.

There is only a single instance in this entire game where "permahold" itself is a problem, and that's a Malta Sapper. Sappers don't deal damage, or if they do it ain't much, but they rob you of your endurance, shut down your status protection and proceed to keep you held FOREVER. Long ago, in a distant land where Break Frees didn't exist and only Iron Will inspirations could be found, the only real way to solve this was to log off and reset your mission. And the only reason this is a problem like that is because you can't die and thus can never get away. In every other situation, it's not the hold that kills, it's what it prevents you from doing to avoid getting killed that... Well, gets you killed.

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I really don't want to speak about Defenders and Corruptors and so on since those I never really even wanted to play to begin with as they had much the same problems, and indeed had it much worse a lot of the time. What I've fought for since I started playing Blasters was to NOT tag them as a team-only AT, because they really do function well enough on teams. But as I watched the Extra Credit video this week which talked about how awesome it was to get five friends together and fly a straship together, the only thing I could think of is "I don't HAVE five friends, let alone five who play games." That doesn't get in my way when I play any of the other ATs I do. If it will when I play Blasters, then not playing them was the right decision.

I think he's referring to Chimera in Belladonna's arc, where he gets a Tub Chi type level shift mid-way through the fight.

Yeah, their gameplay was decent and they had good graphics. If you honestly feel the did as well as they did because they had murder and prostitutes in them, then you're just riding the Hot Coffee bandwagon.

The worst mistake City of Villains could have made is try to be GTA, especially when you consider that pretty much every GTA game out there goes out of its way to make the protagonist sympathetic and the least bad thing to happen to the city by comparison. Even a messed-up ridiculous game like Saints Row 3 made it a point to downplay the less savoury side of the Saints' crimes (aside from prostitution, 'cause it's funny, right?) and focus on how much bigger ******** the Syndicate are.

What City of Villains should have shot for isn't horrifying disgusting villains that make people sick to their stomach. It's why people asking to be able to kill civilians and see blood were doing it wrong completely. If the game is to follow the themes of comic books, then our villains needed to be less like serial killers and monsters and more like actual archvillains from comic books, allowed to have their own grand master plans and have ambitions for beyond sucking up to an established villain group and beyond doing things "for the evulz."

That's why Dean McArthur/Leonard do so well. That's why Vincent Ross is a good idea. That's why the new villain-side Cap arcs are so cool. Games about playing straight-up serious-face villains do not sell well. They never have. When you see "evil" games sell, it's because they do something to either glorify villainy or downplay it. In Prototype, sure you're a monster but LOOK! I can elbow-drop tanks in half from the top of the Empire State Building! How cool is that! And besides, have you seen the Blackwatch? They're psychotic bastards who want to kill every living person in New York and enjoy doing it, too. Surely they deserve to be snapped in half and eaten? Even something as relatively direct as Dungeon Keeper takes refuge in audacity, with a ridiculously chipper narrator chuckling as he talks about how bad everything is becoming, to the point where the whole game comes off like a parody of evil.

I can give you a 100% guarantee that if City of Heroes were disgusting and unpleasant it would have bombed and failed on the spot. As it is right now, it's just sort of unpopular, but people still play it regularly and it has a stable player base. If you think people complain about "I don't want to be the bad guy" NOW, with as mild as the evil generally is, just think for a second how much worse that would have been with a much darker and more disgusting setting. And no, the people who buy into that aren't as many as GTA would have you believe.

And really, if we're going for mass public appeal, FarmVille has GTA beat.

And it's also the source of my irreconcilable problem with them - an AT which is designed to be fragile with the expectation that others will exist to take the damage just doesn't work for me. OK, it CAN work if - like in the case of Masterminds - I'm guaranteed to have "others" who will follow my orders to the letter and exist at my beck and call, but that's not the case for Blasters.

In general, I don't consider having a crippling weakness of some kind to be a decent way to make something unique. Having a strength that no-one else has, sure, but when you give someone a crippling weakness - and getting permaheld and killed kind of is - is not something an AT should brag about or indeed be balanced around. Especially not when the game likes to toss multiple elite bosses at you, as it has done recently.

To me, Blasters (and to some degree old-style Stalkers and Stone Tankers) are a backwards argument. People often seem to praise an AT's weakness as a benefit, when what they're really praising is the strength this weakness allows the AT to have. And like I said before, there's really no way Blasters are going to get much more damage than they already have. Even now, with just their basic powers and no nukes, a lot of Blasters can damn near insta-kill a lot of spawns. Fire Blast, especially, with Fireball, Fire Breath and Rain of Fire.

The problem that Scrappers and Brutes outdamage Blasters isn't really down to Blasters not having enough damage, it's down to them not being able to USE that damage in any real way. Even on a team, between errant AoE status effects and AoE damage and the dangers of melee, a Blaster just can't afford to dish out as much. I myself have been able to put TOW Scrappers to shame simultaneously with a single Electric/Electric Blaster without too much effort, so I know the damage is there. That's what pisses me off so much - I KNOW what Blasters characters can, I just never get to do it.

Don't get me wrong, I REALLY tried to like Blaster. I got an AR/Dev/Muntitions to 50, I got an Energy/Energy/Foce to 50, I got a Fire/Fire/Flame to 50, I got a Pistols/Electric/Electric to 42, an Ice3 to 42, and my experience just kept getting worse and worse with all of them. By far the easiest of those to play, counter-intuitively, was my Fire/Fire/Flame since I could easily take out those pesky Gunslingers and Mentalists and so forth before they became a problem. Char one Malta Spec Ops, Blaze + Fire Sword the Gunslinger, lay into the Spec Ops before he wakes up.

And it worked when I was still having to have my Brutes wait between every two fights and my Scrappers take so many endurance reduction slots. Then inherent Fitness came around, and all of my Scrappers and Brutes and especially my Masterminds became ten times better. All of a sudden my Brute could do what my Blaster could - wipe out huge spawns quickly - and all it took was a spawn or two to get moving since I didn't really need to stop and rest. And then the Fury changes happened which made gaining and maintaining Fury up to 75 was very easy. All of a sudden my Masterminds could resummon mid-battle and NOT run out of endurance. Then their upgrades became AoE. Then they became much cheaper and their buffs became AoE, too. Then Stalkers gained amazing damage AND more survivability AND Demoralisation on every Assassin's Strike even if the target died.

And all this time, my Blasters were playing the same way they played back in 2005 - very slowly, very carefully, dreading any and every encounter. See, my Brutes really didn't care too much what they fought. Mentalist, Gunslinger, Mushroom or basic soldier. Sure, they all had different quirks to them, but at no point did I have to stop and say to myself "I really don't want to do this..." Because that's what was going through my head while playing a Blaster all the time. Oh, no! What's around that corner? Oh, no! A boss! Oh, no, an ambush! Help! With a Brute or a Scrapper or a Mastermind, the most I'd think was "Boss, huh? Bring it on!"

I get why people like Blasters as a "challenge," but what they did to me is make me feel weak, insignificant and afraid. I had to work twice as hard to be only half as good... Or I could go play a Scrapper and be awesome and welcome more enemies. With my Blasters, especially in the 40s, every fight felt like a boss fight, and it was so, so draining. I ran through the Mender Ramiel arc with my Fire/Fire/Pyre, and despite making good time, I simply never enjoyed the experience. In fact, it was so unpleasant that's more or less what made me scrap all my Blasters, no pun intended. And having seen Praetoria, and seeing what the late game was becoming and how the game damn well EXPECTED me to play well on the top end of the difficulty scale... Yeah, playing characters that were struggling to impress me even at base difficulty just wasn't gonna' happen.

And it still won't. It'll take more than a token downtime mitigation tool and a non-crappy Snipe to get me to return to that AT. As a point of fact, it'll probably take a whole new AT that's either Range/Defence or Assault/Defence.