Antimatter_NA

Some things make sense being proliferated from hero to villain and vise versa, but I don't like to see too much of it becaue I think there should be some uniqueness to the sides.
For example I thought thermal should have stayed a villain unique set because heroes already have empathy and we got nothing in require.

Giving storms to masterminds was an excellent idea. A very good set for them.

Earth control was a poor choice to give to dominators IMO without taking the time to modify domination so all it;s powers that it properly benefits from it.

Electrical assault has been the second coming for dominator assaults, but it's TOO good. It has overnight rendered energy assault obsolete in the minds of most dominators because they now have a better secondary to pair thematically with gravity.

I still don't think defense is working properly...

Why does toxic not have an attack tag?

Why does psi not have a positional tag?

Some defense sets REALLY get screwed over here because of this. Like positional based elude, which gets owned by some mob types that have nonpositional mind attacks or status effects.

Illusion decoys also seem to have nonpositional attacks, which is another big problem.

You need to change teleport so that the rooting hover can be disabled at the player's will by pressing the forward or backward key.
This would still allow them to turn around to find a suitable teleportation target while hovering, but for all other times (such as combat teleporting), we need the ability to break the hover immediately and hit the ground fighting.
The hover is especially annoying when you want to get off an interruptable power but can't until you've already been dropped.

It would be a huge quality of life issue change for my teleportation dedicated characters.

I love the zone and TF....
Having spent a lot of time in this zone and doing the TF there are a few issues:


1. I find the Chimeran's to be too brutal to defense based sets. I cannot fight them outside of elude, even though I'm near the defense cap from IOs.
What happened to super reflexes supposedly having RESISTNACE TO DEFENSE DEBUFFS? Because I sure don't see it taking effect. Once a few blows land, it's like a cascading effect that cripples and kills me very fast.

2. Romulus at the end is bugged sometimes. My team once killed him, but he did not res. Then we were stuck with one healing nictus that we couldn't get rid of because it would heal off anyone who came within firing range (it's heal range is not just melee range, but out to the range of ranged attackers. Only psi attackers were able to hit).

3. There should be a way to get inspirations in the zone if you're having trouble in the TF. You cannot portal out if it's a co-op team without getting dropped from the task force.

4. The third mission where you must defeat requiem is broken in terms of performance. No matter how good your internet or connection speed, the map server will always start to bog down after you get over the bridge and will only get worse until you get out of the canyon, at which point things go back to normal.

5. I'm not sure I understand why the mobs are made so resistant to status effects, maybe because they have no debuffs or AoEs and you're forced to strait up fight them? That's all well and good, but where does that leave the domiantors for teaming? At least controllers can rely on their secondary for support. All a dominator is left with is subpar damage.
A dominator is only going to be able to do anything while in domination, so he better hope he's got permadom.

5. Oddly, the nictus AVs at the end seem immune to debuffs like radiation toggles. This shouldn't be IMO.

6. I hope that this is the last co-op zone we see, because I really don't want to see the game dumbed down to the point where heroes and villains are constantly teaming with each other in every new major piece of content that comes out simply to save development time.
It breaks the immersion of heroes vs villains. If you're going to continue to do this, you may as well just let heroes start walking around rogue isles and villains walk around paragon city - Then you'll never have to worry about trying to provide side specific content again.

I've been working on a very detailed outline I will propose soon for a new moon hazard zone. Basically it's a PvP zone with PvE content, and it involves the Center of the council base on the moon being taken down. The reason it's a PvP zone with meaningful PvE content is because we don't have a high level zone like this yet (I'd love to see a zone where heroes and villains don't just fight, but fight over more tangible PvE goals with more tangible rewards), and I would love to see one.

The basic plot Im outlining is that Recluse wants the power of the Nictus locked in the The Center Citadel, and is working with Requiem and his 5th columnist loyalists (who want to regain control of the part of the council that was theirs originally).
The heroes want to disable the center base and the nictus central wormhole. Longbow is leading the assault probably with support from Vanguard.

The zone involves fighting in trench warfare style combat of bunkers up a hill to the citadel, and only those who clear a path can assault the citadel directly, which then unlocks a strike force or task force to complete the objective for either heroes or villains side.

There are a lot of rewards and incentives tied to this which I'll go into later...

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Actually Slick, after watching the video, I can confirm that, besides the transitions (and the Chinese take-out), that's all based of of in-game elements, either generated live or through a demo.

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They need to turn that talking hand thing into a real emote then. Where does that appear in the game?

On another note, is it me or does it seem a little ironic to be sponsoring a contest about superheroes/supervillains, whose theme is "Bring out your dark side,", and have rules that say you cannot use

<ul type="square">[*] any nudity, profanity or violence;[*] any display of physical injury, death or property damage or conduct or activity that could cause physical injury or property damage or that is reasonably likely to do so;[*] any... content that displays, appears to display, encourages or implies that any activity or conduct that is otherwise unacceptable in reality, has been or could have been involved;[*] any use (or display of use) of equipment, facilities or property... that would reasonably be considered unsafe; [/list]
Kinda lets out doing anything other than standing around talking. My heroes do at least a dozen unsafe things before breakfast...

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What the hell? You can't make a superhero movie without FIGHTING of some sort, especially if it's suppose to be about the darker side of things.

Screw the contest. I'm going to make my awesome movine WITH violence and destruction, and I don't give a damn whether or not they like it now.

And while we're on the issue of stalker buffs:

Nobody likes the animation that looks like one is taking a dump.
And one thing everyone should know about CoH is that the coolness of how a powerset looks in action has at least half as much to do with why player's pick it and enjoy it. Raw power is never the only concern.
Hell, I made a claws stalker just because they look so awesome in action, especially their assassin strike.

I guarantee you that a big part of why DA and MA are underused attack sets for stalkers is that there's no graphical glitz to make people wow over when it comes to assassin strike.
EA is only popular in spite of this animation, because it's so darn powerful people are willing to put up with looking like they have a constipated assassin strike.


I propose three unique animations for the three sets:

1. Dark Assassination. The eyes of the stalker light up, staring into the target's soul. The stalker raises his left hand up to the heart level of the enemy while his right hand is arched off to the side building up a dark skull.
The stalker then violently one hand thrusts the dark skull into the chest of the enemy while the left hand remains in it's original position of aim and steadiness.
The stalker follows up immediately by violently wretching out a chunk of the enemy's soul with his right hand and arcs his right hand and hole upper body back in a dramatic fashion.

2. Martial Arts Assassination Strike. The stalker starts out in a martial art's stance similar to practiced brawler, starting to build up blue energy around his firsts. he slowly moves forward into a second stance, raising his right hand up to his head with the palm facing the enemy, and moving his left hand down to his chest with the palm facing the enemy, as the power continues to build his hands (The ultimate focus of chi). From that position he then lunges forward powerfully bringing both his hands together with the right hand facing upward palm towards enemy, and right hand facing downward palm towards the enemy, striking the enemy in the chest and releasing a burst of pure chi strait into the enemy (It would look kind of like the Ryu Hadoken from streetfighter).
Pictoral Aid of final result:
http://nosoul4evr.cyberfuturism.com/...yu/hadoken.gif
(although I don't imagine the chi burst would be anywhere near that big in CoH).

3. Energy Assassination. The stalker arches back looking slightly upward (lost in focus), his hands angle at his sides with his his firsts and arms clenched. His is building up energy throughout his body and concentrating a huge amount of it at his fists. As he tries to maintain this level of buildup without it bursting prematurely, he slowly brings his firsts togehter around his chest area, combines their power, and then violently thrusts both firsts forward at head neck height into the target. The result is a violently large explosion of energy on the target. The graphical animation of releasing the animation should be taken from powerburst (you know the forward cone of radiating energy)
Keep in mind that while doing this the stalker's feet should not be planted firmly in the same spot the whole time. When he moves forward to attack his legs and body should angle forward with his firsts stretched strait out.

While the HP buff to stalkers was appreciated, an oversight was made in not increasing their HP cap along with it.
As a result, key +HP powers from WP, Regen, and EA no longer can grant their full benefit to a stalker. And a stalker who happens to have accolades, or got forbid +HP set IOs, will virtually render obsolete and useless their very own +HP powers, because the accolades already put them so close to the cap.

Please address this ASAP.

Three problems with villain patron powers:
1. They generally lack flexibility of uniqueness between the four choices.
2. Most aren't powers worth taking.
3. From a concept and thematic standpoint the powers don't always fit a character. Hero epics had much more diversity that allowed one to take an epic set that fit their primary/secondary concept better.

Solution:
Give us an option to access recluse epic archetypes (by completing the RSF), at the cost of dropping our patron powers. We wouldn't have to respec out of our patron, when doing a respec we'd simply choose the recluse epic style and once one is chosen our patron power pool is locked out along with the other epic set choices.

Kind of related to TF/SFs: Taking the settings and triggers you have for task forces and using such an interface to improve general missioning:

Relentless missions are no longer a challenge for most toons at 50 even without IOs, we need a way to increase mob sizes, or increase the amount of bosses - Challenges which have rewards attached, as opposed to debuffing/crippling ourselves which is just stupid and yields only frustration.
I didn't achieve this level of power just so I could run around with one hand tied behind my back to bring challenge back into the equation.

And getting more people on the team is not an option because that's only going to make things easier at high levels if the people you invite have half a clue what they are doing.

Of course there's the alternative method of inviting fillers, mapping mission, and then having a challenge, but it's tedious, time consuming, and doesn't always work out. Not every toon can effectively map out a mission either.

Why not just take what players are doing already with fillers and let them do it with some mission slider settings?
Makes life easier on everyone all around, and funner.

Just an idea I had while ghosting missions for a storyarc - What if things were made more interesting by making it a challenge to actually ghost missions.

While it's something that would be easier to craft into new storyarc content for the future, I think it would be awesome if these mechanics could be worked into the random mission generator to spice things up.


*Note: Not all of these would necessary have to be in every mission. It could be random which components you get*.

Here are my ideas, please add your own:
1. Put in some alarm motion sensors like the bank side mission "Smash and grab".

2. Have the sensors trigger a variety of effects like traps, ambushes, pop up gun turrets, or all of the above.

3. Have roving patrols of enemy groups. Some of them might be equipped with new enemies that have high perception (like rikti drones). These could be normal enemy types but given new names and IR goggles or a magic wand of perception or something, depending on the villain group.

4. Have panels that can be destroyed to turn off the motion sensors. But you have to assassinate or disable the guards quickly who guard these panels, otherwise they will call in an ambush.

5. Create fortified guard points at chokepoints in missions that have a turrets and traps, along with a +perception boss. But before this point would be a panel you can hack into to turn the turrets against the boss, thus allowing you to ghost past while he's distracted.

6. Have side objectives that can be completed to make the fight against the end boss easier in some way. Such as making his some of his minions leave to attack you by themselves, debuffing the boss, immobilizing or slowing the boss, or granting you a temporary buff. There are a lot of creative ways in which this could be implemented.

7. Have force fields or gates that must be bypassed by either destroying them or killing the guards of the key switch or generator. Stealthers may want to do the later to avoid a large fight with the enemies guarding the door point.
Destroying the barrier outright would also trigger an ambush, which may be what some brutish types want, but not what stealther types want.

8. Have computers you can hack into, or maps you can find, or mobs you can "interrogate"; The result being that you gain information about the map. The whole map is revealed as well as objective locations and traps, etc.

9. Same as number 8, but instead of granting intelligence, it could grant you buffs based on the concept that you've learned your enemy's local weaknesses and now take advantage of it. Or maybe you've commandeered a device that they were using which gives you a shield bubble or something along those lines. The possibilities are endless.

10. Have anti-stealther boundy hunter types that roam the mission with high perception AND high stealth, trying to track you down. The longer you take on the mission the higher the chance he has of fixing on your location. Probably best suited to large outdoor maps.
The neat thing about this is that it would give players another reason to have +perception in PvE, so they can see these guys coming and not get assassin striked.

Every player needs a signature power IMO, something they can craft for themselves in look and effects from a variety of options.

Personally one I really want to complete the concept of my brute character is a type of illusion/shadow cloning, where about four decoy copies of myself appear and then engage anything nearby as an aggro distraction.

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Second, the list does not include suggested fixes, as explicitly stated in the introduction.


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Only if you didn't read it. I gave specific suggestions on how dimension shift and propel could be fixed.

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Third, all of your issue points are already included in the list. The problems with Gravity are nothing new.


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My suggested fixes are new.

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Fourth, you contradict yourself in this sentence:


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It's not a contradiction.

Ask yourself what the only complaint given when people suggest removing propel is; The fact that some like the concept of it.

What I suggest preserves the concept that everyone wants while giving dominators something that addresses two gravity issues at once: 1. The fact that the current propel is useless as a damage power, and 2. The fact that gravity needs some kind of AoE soft control early on.

Dimension Shift.
Problem: Your team can't tell the enemies are dimension shifted very easily, and waste many attacks, endurance, and time attacking the wrong things.
And while the new "Dimension Shift" tag appearing over them when you cast is welcome, it's not enough.

Solution: Give dimension shift a new effects animation that renders the phased mobs nearly invisible (as though they had activated the invisbility power), then make them enter a held pose while immobilized so that it's crystal clear to your teammates that the enemy has been put into dimensional stasis.
The problem with having them sit around in their normal idle combat poses is that it makes it further difficult for your team to tell the difference between mobs that are actively fighting and mobs that are phased.

Propel:
Problem 1: Animates so slow that no one will use it in an attack chain beyond low levels because it will only slow down your DPS.
Problem 2: The animation time doesn't justify itself as a tool for knockback.

While this power did have a purpose for controllers with minimal attacks, dominators just have too many attack and control options to ever make propel a viable power as it currently is.


Solution: Rather than replace propel with something else and piss off people who like the power for concept, or people who WOUD use the power for concept IF it functioned better, I suggest that the power be changed into a dominator specific version of propel, possibly even renamed to something else because it is so different.


How the new propel would work:
1. Same range and damage.
2. Faster animation time (Down to 3 seconds would be the bare minimum, but somewhere around 2.5 seconds would be ideal).
3. It is given a small cone area of effect.
4. Possibly higher end cost to compensate.

This change would solve two problems at once for gravity dominators.
1. The fact that they have no form of early AoE soft control, and nothing to use while wormhole is recharging. So now they have a narrow cone knockback which activates fast enough to be a viable addition to your attack chain.
2. The fact that propel was never useful as simply an attack because your secondary had better alternatives. The animation time helps this, but if it were just that then this power would still be skipped by most IMO. It's the AoE damage component that would really make dominators lacking AoE in their secondary consider taking and using this power on that basis. But if all you did was make it AoE and not reduce the cast time, then you probably wouldn't see much of an upswing in people using it, because nearly four seconds rooted is still just too long whether it be for the control OR the damage aspect of the power.

I started out on CoV, and stick with it mainly because I prefer the smaller number of zones with shorter travel times between missions.

I don't like CoH because while it may have more quantity of zones and missions, there's a lot of unfocused and poorly thought out stuff to wade through. For instance too many missions that all feel the same, send you adventuring across too many zones with long travel times, and too many "kill X mobs" type of filler.
When it comes to zones, there are too may useless or redundant zones. And most all of them are far bigger than they need to be.

I also hate the disjointed travel system in CoH where you've got everything set up on different lines with some places only accessible from one zone. It might make sense for other MMORPGs, but not CoH.

TFs/SFs are mostly fine with the exception of one thing - We need a way to choose what level of reward we want.

We shouldn't have to make level 30 and level 40 characters devoted to just farming those rare recpies we need. We should be able to have fun doing the TFs on our level 50's while still getting the level of rewards we need.

People should never be punished for leveling too much.

I would absolutely love to see a moon zone as part of some epic level 48-50 stomping grounds.

I'd look over the powersets, both hero and villain, and go with whichever one fits your character concept the best.

An illusion controller might fit.

What is the list of music used?

I tried recording a demo exactly as listed on the test server but nothing happened.
No file was created in the COH directory.

I8 was unplayable. The latest patch is better, but crashing still happens the memory leak still persists.

When I log on to the game FPS is great.
The more players I'm exposed to, the more powers go off, the more combat there is, and the longer I'm on all compound to make the game eventually unplayable - Requiring a restart.

Mastermind
- I hardly see anyone use poison, although I hear it's a good set. I guess the concept of it just isn't very appealing. I know it isn't that appealing to me.
- Trick arrow, obviously.
- Zombies are the least used.

Corruptor:
- Sonic Blast
- Sonic Resonance
- Traps
- Cold Dominaton
- Energy Blast

The problem I've found with fire is that your Rain of Fire has a fear effect that will cause all the mobs to scatter - Which can be REALLY bad for this style of play.
You can't use it in most circumstances.

Because of that, Radiation might be a superior AOE choice because you get to fully employ all three of your AOE attacks at any time without fear of messing up the mob grouping.

Some think that a team of all /Kinetics can equal the /Rad team, or even surprass it. They are wrong. Here is why:


Kinetics can't even come close to the sheer debuff capability of the Radiation Emission set.

As for things dieing too fast at higher levels... Well, probably no other Villain team type is going to GET you to those higher levels than a /rad team.
Plus, as a /rad team you'll be fighting purples on relentless at higher levels - And not many 4-6 man teams can keep it together against such odds.


All Kinetics really has going for it in this kind of strategy is Siphon power, and all it does is debuff the enemy's attack damage by 15% and increase yours by 15%.

Kinetics also uses a point blank AOE, rather than ranged AOE, meaning you have to make yourself vulnerable to alpha strikes before it goes into effect.

A radiation Emission team, in contrast, can (at range) debuff an entire group's accuracy, defense, resistance, and damage output down to nothing - And the effect is a constant toggle as opposed to a one shot AOE.


Going down the list power by power:
-Kinetics has a much better heal, but if you're playing your /rad group right you won't need much healing anyway.
-Repel is counterproductive.
-Siphon Speed is not needed.
-Increase density has no use in a /rad team, where you nothing will be able to hit you and you'll kill them the mobs too fast for them to do anything.
-Speed boost is totally unneeded.
-Inertial Reduction is totally unneeded.
-Transference is totally unneeded to this style of play.
-Fulcrum Shift. Again, all it does it debuff damage and buff your damage. And do you really want to wait until level 38 to get one of the only three secondary powers that is useful to the /rad team style of play? I don't think so.


Let's compare it power to power with Radiation Emission:
-Radiant Aura. A good heal that gets the job done.
-Radiantion Infection - Targeted AOE, radius 20ft, casting range of 70ft. Debuffs the enemy's Accuracy and Defense by 22.5% unslotted. It's a toggle power, so it never misses and stays up infecting all nearby enemies until the target dies.
-Accelerate Metabolism. A PBAOE with 25ft radius that allows you to boost the Damage, Attack speed, Endurance recovery, and Run/Fly speed of your entire team for 2 minutes. It also grants them resistance to all status effects. This power is a great boon to the /rad team combat style.
-Enervating Field. Targeted AOE, 15ft Radius, 70ft range. It decreases the enemy's Damage and Resistance by 22.5% unslotted. It's a toggle power, so it never misses and stays up infecting all nearby enemies until the target dies.
-Mutation. Ressurect fallen teammates. Technically it fits well with the /rad style of play, but ultimately it's not needed if you've got awakens around.
-Lingering Radiation. PBAOE with 25 radius. Decreases the attack speed and movement speed of all effected enemies for 30 seconds. Not essential if you've got the other two debuff toggles running, but it still fits the /rad team theme well and is useful against tougher foes like Heros or Giant Monsters.
-Choking Cloud. A toggle PBAOE with 15ft range that has a 50% chance to impart 5 second holds in pulses every 5 seconds. Not required when you've got so many /rad teammates using their toggles, but it still fits the /rad team style well if you ever come across the need to hold a bunch of targets in place after debuffing them.
-Fallout. Useless. The only useless power in the /rad set.
-EM Pulse. Again it fits the mass AOE theme of /rad well, but ultimately isn't required when you consider how powerful your massed toggles already are.


Conclusion: The vast majority of the Kinetics line is useless to the /rad style of team warfare.
Just about every /rad power IS useful to this style of warfare, even if a few of those powers aren't actually required because the ones you already have are SO powerful that anything more would be overkill.