Samuel_Tow

That depends - are you talking constant toggle drain or individual power cost? If it's constant toggle drain, 1.0/s is HUGE. That's probably as much as Stamina grants fully slotted, though I'm speaking off memory. If you're talking about an individual power, you probably want to see what that power's EPS and EPA metrics are to tell. Remember that constant recovery doesn't just matter to offset your combat costs, but it also counts in recovering from one battle to the next. If your recovery is good outside of combat, you won't have much downtime.

Err... EPS stands for Endurance Per Second and counts the power's entire cycle of recharge plus animation, measuring use over time. EPA stands for Endurance Per (something of) Activation and counts endurance use only against the power's animation time, measuring how much of a chunk that power takes out short-term. These do matter.

I tend to count the effect of damage auras as significant mostly in longer fights, by which I mean spending 10-15 seconds in the company of many enemies. Outliers such as Hail of Bullets (which also grants a defence buff for the duration, so that's kind of cheating) do exist, but even at best you're running in and out and taking away seconds that the damage aura damage needs to build up. You may also have some kind of defence soft-capped, I don't know

This I can agree with. Fighting outside is so uncontrolled that it really doesn't make sense for it to give "double debt." I use quotes, because that's actually normal debt, and the in-mission debt is actually half-value. Regardless.

The original intention of half debt in missions was to give people more of a reason to run missions since, at the time, rewards for mission completion were complete ***. These days, it's convenience that keeps people running missions more than anything else - being able to tweak your difficulty just right and have a predictable experience is valuable. Taking out what has become a penalty for fighting outside would surely help.

Damage auras on squishy characters are a whole other kettle of fish, and one I actually HUGELY disagree with. I've had dozens of people try to demonstrate to me how running damage auras on Blasters helped stay alive, but for me, they always got me dead. And when they didn't get me dead, they ended up doing nothing because I spent almost no time near my enemies.

The damage from damage auras adds up, so they work best for characters who spend a lot of time surrounded by many enemies, as most melee folk tend to do. For melee, damage auras are an under-appreciated help. For squishies... Well, put it this way - I've yet to see a Blaster damage aura that's worth using for its damage.

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Sideways of the point, damage auras screw with your Streakbreaker. Under normal circumstances, a miss at 95% to-hit forces the following attack to always hit. With a damage aura, however, that forced Streakbreaker hit goes to the damage aura and your next attack might still miss.

In the case of Dual Pistols -> Bullet Rain, those bullets' trajectories are being curved and the bullets are being guided by pulling them in a certain direction. This actually works, in the sense that the projectile retains its ballistic trajectory, but still impacts with force. Artillery can do this in much the same way by having gravity pull the shell down, but when the shell speed is as high as it is coming out of a cannon, his effect is much more gradual. By making the shell arc more due to gravity, you make it feel like the muzzle velocity is much lower, to the point where the shell should actually tumble.

I'm not saying this just to pick a tangent, by the way. There's something I forgot to mention - I DO NOT WANT any sort of con trail or flight path displayed for this cannon, and I REALLY don't want to see any of the projectiles in the air. This cannon should fire shells as several times the speed of sound, meaning we should never be able to see them in flight, and the hits should be instantaneous. One of the things that really bother me about Dual Pistols is the bullet paths. I understand they're necessary for that set to depict the different round effects, but for this portable cannon, I want the hits to be instantaneous and the projectiles too fast to see. The cannon fires and the target splats with nothing in-between.


Huh... OK, so essentially what you're saying is we swap the power for a whole new concept. Call it an "auto-loader" - for ten seconds, you can dire your cannon without having to reload it manually, possibly with some degree of accuracy and low-grade damage buff. If we draw up ALL Portable Cannon powers to have a manual reload part of their animations, then we can have this power simply remove it.

I like it, actually. I just worry it might be a bit too close to Titan Weapons. Nevertheless, I still want to see the cannon spit out hot shells, I just expect it to spit them out of the side like a conventional gas-operated firearm, rather than requiring the user to open the breech and remove the shell manually. Best of both world

It might step on the toes of the T9 power, though. We might have to turn this into fully automatic, but VERY slow rapid fire.

Well, my original idea envisioned this cannon being held like a rifle, with the breech of the cannon being roughly above the trigger mechanism, so I assumed all of the custom weapons would break at the same point. Furthermore, I know it's possible for powers to trigger weapon animations. If you notice the Automatic and its spawn with Dual Pistols, they have active, moving slides which jump back and forward as the weapons fire. This is distinctly different from the Mastermind version of the same guns, where the whole weapon is static and unmoving. BABs remade all the legacy automatic pistols to move their slides with Dual Pistols, but did not retrofit the change back over to Thugs Masterminds.

This sort of system is what I expect to be used here. I don't really foresee the character interacting with the weapon a whole lot. I could even see the weapon break open by itself and eject a shell casing by itself, then just have the character ram a new shell roughly in the location of where the breech would be and have that pop up into place.

Honestly, in this case, it's the visual I'm after more than anything else, and I want a system which causes this to happen often without actually making the whole set incredibly sluggish. I'm still open to better proposals as to how to implement this.

Awesome! This is an amazing idea! The character would be loading the same-looking shell every time, and we'll get to see a lot of it. We'll see it as it ejects, we'll see it as we load it in, and even if we go with a power that skips reloading, you'd still see it ejected out the cannon's side during semi-automatic fire. Sweet!

This also has the extra benefit of making this not JUST a technology-based weapon. Suppose one of the customization options were a glowing magic rock? Suddenly you can claim this isn't just a conventional cannon, it's a magical cannon because see? You're loading it with very clearly magical ammunition! I like that a lot!

Like the Resistance Heavy Barrels, yes, but theirs are still kind of on the small side I get that it's good cannon design to have the largest bit of metal around the breech where most of the initial pressure is, allowing you to have a slimmer and lighter barrel, but these guys take it to extremes - big fat breech, long spindly barrel. That thing looks almost like a vacuum cleaner. I want one that's considerably longer and more uniform along it length.

Which brings me to a point I've forgotten to make three times now - the weapon stance. It was suggested that this cannon be held over the shoulder like a rocket launcher, and the Resistance Heavy Barrels hold theirs slung underneath like a minigun. I dislike both of those stances for the simple reason that I want to depict this weapon as having incredible force behind its shots, which needs both recoil, and it needs that the weapon be held securely against the body so it can't jump out of your grip. Rocket launchers have almost no kickback as the propellant gas just escapes out the back of the tube, and tend to kick FORWARD at times, and your average minigun has so much weight in mechanisms its recoil is greatly diminished. About the only physical effort it requires is holding the thing up, which is why it's usually mounted.

I have a confession to make - my inspiration for this lies in a... Weird place. If you've ever played Emperor: Battle for Dune, you'll find it's a mediocre RTS at best. However, one unit there just blew my mind, and it was the House Atreides anti-tank infantry, who were... Snipers? Yeah, these guys were armed with "anti-tank rifles" bigger than they are, fired at extremely long range and tore tanks to shreds while hiding in cover. To date, this is the ONLY game where anti-tank infantry has not been armed with some kind of self-propelled rocket launcher. The concept of having a rifle that's big enough and powerful enough to punch hole in tanks at range... And that you can carry it with you never really left me

It should be, until you realise that in most situations, you need all three of Dark Armour's shields anyway. Everything and anything you fight will deal physical damage and most things in the upper levels will have some kind of elemental or energy component to their damage, and pretty much everything since I18 will also have status effects.

That's what people told me to do with my Stone/Stone Brute, too. Then I fought Arachnos, who usually had, within the same spawn: Bane Spiders who deal physical damage, Fire Tarantula who deal fire damage, Mu Mystics who deal energy damage and Fortunata seers who deal psychic damage, all of whom have status effects when they show up as lieutenants.

The problem with trying to account for what damage type your enemies will be using is very similar to trying to match your Dual Pistols ammo to exploit the weaknesses of enemies you're fighting - knowing who does what damage is NOT trivial and combat spam scrolls by quite fast. Enemies don't deal the kind of damage you'd think they'd deal - Spectrals aren't Smashing/Dark, they're Dark/Psi, for instance. And even when you do know who does what, half the time you end up having to run all toggles anyway, or otherwise leave yourself exposed to a major component of incoming damage.

If all or even most enemy factions were as simple to fight as the Warriors or the Rikti, this wouldn't really be considered a trick. It's only a trick because there are so few situations where it actually works.

How about these? I never said we were missing horns, I just feel we could use a few new ones with a few new shapes. They don't have to be anything fancy, just so long as it adds new options.

Yes, I did know about that, actually. I saw that much of the ground was grating instead of solid plate with tunnels below. I explored it, I found the tunnel that leads to the beach are and to the Fab. I explored the Web and found all the "Highlander 2" lifts that take me on top of the Web. I got to the Master of the Airwaves badge using only Sprint. I found all the lifts that lead out of the Gutter and the all of of ONE lift that leads up to the Web, as well as the one that leads to the outside terrace of the Arachnos tower.

City of Heroes and especially City of Villains has a lot to explore. True, there are no rewards for doing so, but I consider this to be a good thing. Otherwise, you'd just see people going to Vidiotmaps to find the exploration milestones and miss the point. The reward for exploration is the sights you discover.

All of these I consider to be good things, and all the things you seem to be missing I consider to be intrusions. I don't want other people butting into my fights, I don't want to meet new people, I REALLY don't need to encounter overly powerful enemies and I HATE the fact that enemies respawn. The ideal mission for me is the one I can complete by myself and bring people in only if I choose to. I've only quit this game once for two months, and a large part of the reason is I felt compelled to keep seeking out people to play with. Yeah, I'm playing an MMO - because a single-player of City of Heroes doesn't exist. But if the whole game were instanced, I would not bat an eye. I don't need or indeed even want other people I didn't specifically invite.

I would pay real money for a game that's full of soloers, personally, but that's besides the point.

What you're describing is exactly what I hate about most MMOs when it comes to outdoor content because it kills my suspension of disbelief dead. You can even see this in existing events. The giant octopus that shows up around town is nothing but a nuisance and people just walk around it. 9Dragons had named enemies spawning multiple times concurrently and other games I've seen have the same event happen over and over again. Just how many times is that politician's limo going to get in a firefight before he buys an APC? Having "events" take place outside seems like a good idea at first, but loses its appeal very quickly when you realise it will never end. Instanced missions, at least, have a defined beginning and an end and only repeat if I specifically choose to repeat the mission.

I, by contrast, have frequent nightmares about being lost in unfamiliar places, and it's never, ever pleasant. I mean, don't get me wrong, I enjoy the unexplored wilderness aspect of the Shadow Shard, but more for the atmosphere rather than for the sense of being lost. I HATE being lost, which is 90% of why I never got past the first few hours of Gothic 3. I kept getting lost in the woods and unable to find any of the stuff I was looking for, eventually leading to a frustrating experience.

The same old problem then occurs - you end up with a world that's constantly destroyed, because I guarantee I'll always be too late the see the destruction happen. And if they respawn like those cars and trucks the Skulls are constantly blowing up in Kings Row, then it loses its point. Even the Steel Canoyon Fires (which I actually like, since I can do them by myself) have this problem that it doesn't really matter if you save the building or not. It'll respawn within a few hours anyway.

I never wanted to spend a lot of time in the overworld. I like "travel missions" through world, occasionally, where I'll fight everything along the way and enjoy the terrain, but I prefer to do this by myself.

*edit*
And I won't be getting Guild Wars 2. There's nothing in it that's compelling to me personally, "events" least of all.

No, it's not. It's about being a developer and doing things you consider to be good, but that you know people wouldn't like. That's what Bill started out asking about. Not about intentionally trolling players with **** changes designed to tank the game, but actual legitimate changes with actual legitimate justification that would nevertheless be very poorly received.

The easiest example is Diminishing Returns in PvE. The way buffs stack in this game is frankly broken, and this would fix it, so it's a legitimate balance change. Nobody would support it, however, including myself. That's what the thread is about - things that would improve the game on a theoretical level, but would be so poorly received no-one would ever approve them.

To be fair, that's not me saying it. That's how the writers represented Praetoria in storyline. If they'd stuck with Cole's representation in 1-20 Preatoria, I would have bought the ambiguous storyline. I mean, that was the point of the "morally grey" alignment, right? If it were a question about "security vs. freedom" then I'd have been on board with discussing morality, especially since I put very little value in freedom, personally, and a lot more in security. We could have argued if it was better to control the population for their own safety, if the Praetorians were just protecting themselves.

That's not the representation they went with. No, all the Praetorians are evil ********, Cole is a puppet who never defeated the Hamidon and the whole dimension's armed forces just want to Krush Kill 'n' Destory. There's nothing to argue when it comes to morality any more. The writers pretty much up and said "Praetoria is evil and needs to be destroyed!" abandoning the moral ambiguity of the matter entirely. These days, the Praetorians are as morally ambiguous as the Church of Unitology is interested in self-preservation. And that's not me dismissing arguments to the contrary, that's the writers going the route of elemental evil.

Speaking of Legacy pieces, there are quite a few that represent a unique, unexplored costume theme that newer items have never really gone into. To avoid derailing further, let me give a few general ideas:

*Large Robotic gloves: Eight years after the fact, Large Robotic are still by far the game's largest gloves and the only ones that are big and round. They don't clip at the hand, they look pretty good and I'd like to see more gloves of that nature.

*Medieval shoulders: Eight years later, these are one of, um... Two or three sets of large shoulders and the only one with this particular "shoulders" form. The Olympian Guard shoulders are a great step in the right direction, but we need more large, bulky round shoulders,

*Large boots and gloves: This is an old idea - a static model that can have all the existing textures used on it. We can use a few more of those, I think, since it only really requires one mesh, but makes for a whole host of different items. They're not GREAT, but they're very versatile.

*Medieval helmets: These have had nothing new added to them since 2004. I'd really like to see a bunch of new helmets, beak helmet, for instance, as well as a bunch more fantasy-looking helmets. There's room for more.

*Glam hair: The female Glam hairdo is amazing, and we need more like it, both for men and for women. I get that this works VERY poorly with back details, but we can just not use back details with it. More very long hairs would be welcome.

*Horns: I don't really recall seeing any new horns for a long while. I guess the Organic Armour "horn crown" counts, but we can do more, I'm sure of it.

*Tails: We haven't had a new one in ages. I mentioned these, but allow me to mention them again - TAILS. Robotic tails are a big thing, and larger versions of the old ones would also be welcome.

*Stealth/ExoProto boots: These look like bare feet with socks pulled over them. See also: Zombie Feet. These are ten times better than the "bare" texture for the flat boot foot. These are not bare feet, they're boots with toes painted on them. We need a better bare foot model that looks like a bare foot, and the mesh for it already exists in the game.

*Large gloves -> Wrapper: These are what I like to call "man hands. Large gloves in general have a much thicker, larger hand, and with the Wrapped gloves, we have a skin hand that simply has big fingers. I'd like to see a hand option which gives us a hand this big without it being wrapped up in a glove.

That's all I can think of at the moment.

On ignore, as far as I'm concerned. His rampant disregard for other people and often trollish behaviour makes him not worth reading.

You're almost correct. The best way to troll people is to tell falsehoods but present them as the truth, thus putting the person on the other side in a position of having to justify his position, at which point you can just aloofly dismiss that justification thus egging the person on and on. It's a very basic malicious argument that I've seen on these forums time and time again.

The real solution to it is to realise that this kind of troll feeds off your attempts to justify your own position, thus ignoring his words is simplest recourse. Hiding behind "the truth" when hurling insults is an easy trick to make, but also an easy trick to solve.

Speaking of this, here's a feature you didn't know existed:

The game has a bugged "fake combat mode" which you can accidentally get stuck in. Normally, out-of-combat mode has your character stand straight up and look around while combat mode has you hunched over. However, if you're in out-of-combat mode and use a Build Up type power (i.e. a power with that animation) it will put you in combat mode, but keep returning you to your idle stance. This looks very ugly and has the potential to cause your power animations to fail to play.

If you ever catch yourself jolting back to a gromless uninvolved posture in battle, the easiest solution is to hit Escape two or three times to cancel out of any combat mode, then be sure to use a legitimate attack to go back into the proper combat mode.

This only works for powersets with a "regular" activation sequence that doesn't put anything in or on your hands.

"The number of people" are asking for more options from a wider variety of theme. No-one ever complained that women were too sexy, but rather that it seemed like new costume sets would never give them anything BUT sexy. Sexy is not bad, it's simply not enough.

The size of pistols varies greatly with the pistol. The Match Compensators are huge, and the new Mecca Armour pistols are ABSURD (and I love it!), while at the same time some having huge hilts like the uzis or unconventional shapes like the flintlock. As far as I'm concerned, we need one of two things:

1. A holster shape unique to the pistol
or
2. A system that simply hangs the pistol on the side of our legs in the same way our shields are held on our hands with no straps or anything of the sort.

I want to run into Standard Code Rant for a minute. Here's what we know: Weapons are animated costume pieces which have two major "states" to them. Weapons are ALWAYS present on our characters, but they toggle between the states of visible and invisible depending on the activation sequence a power is used with. Provided this is true, let's say we have a separate, related costume piece, say a holster, which has two states - full and empty.

I'll give you an example: Let's say I pick Match Compensators as my pistols choice. These would come in two versions - one with just the pistols and one with pistols and holsters. The pistols would be rigged to be invisible in all activation sequences EXCEPT the Pistols one, when they'd be visible. The holsters would be rigged to be empty in the Pistols activation sequence ONLY, and full in all other activation sequences. Essentially, they'd have a "reverse weapon" in them. Each time your character drew his pistols, he'd do it exactly as before. He'd grab somewhere in the vicinity of his holsters, the pistols in the holsters would disappear and the pistols in the hands would appear. The character doesn't have to interact with the holsters in any way, they'd just be decorative, with their state of visibility corresponding to the REVERSE of the state of visibility of the weapons in the hands.

That's a good idea and I agree with it. I'm not adamant about seeing this for all future assets since I KNOW metallic reflective costumes can be done tastefully, as the Clockwork set proves. What I want an option for is legacy sets that get "upgraded." For instance, I want to old Tech Sleek back because the new one is ridiculously reflective to the point where it's unusable for what it used to be good for.

I do agree with the general premise, however. I want to see fabrics given a choice between matte, glossy and leather, metals given a choice between chrome, dull or flat and skin given a choice between flat, oiled up or porous.

I don't disagree. What you say makes a lot of sense. I just wanted to dispel the claim that "nobody cares if the holsters are animated." I don't disagree with adding holsters and scabbards as static costume pieces... I would just personally have no use for them whatsoever. I've never used the pistol/night stick belt because it makes no sense for me to use it on a character who can't use those weapons.

In other words, you could add static gun holsters, but they really wouldn't solve the problem of drawing weapons, at least not for me.

Here's the problem - my SR Scrappers DON'T have defences in the 60s because SR doesn't provide this much defence. I need to gather that from Inventions sets. Now, I know the general consensus is "too bad so sad," but here's the thing - my Invulnerability characters don't have that problem. Sure, they get hit more often, but they have resistances to overcome this. I don't start meeting enemies with "resistance penetration" that makes my resistance mean less ON TOP of hitting harder. I don't feel the need to build for extra resistance via set bonuses on my resistance-based characters, which I can't say for my defence-based ones.

This is what I did, and it solved all of the endurance problems my Dark/Dark Scrapper was facing. I know some feel it's a great power for the defence debuff, but it's RIDICULOUSLY expensive and the "fear" part in Cloak of Fear ain't worth a crap - low inherent accuracy, low magnitude, short duration.

I disagree. I've never been fond of man-sized heroes fighting building-sized monsters. It simply devolves into an impractical improvised fight that has flash but lacks any sort of grounding. Suppose I have a sword that's about six feet long. What am I going to do with it against a monster that's 100 feet tall, with limbs 30 feet across? Whenever I think about that, I'm always reminded of how Bleach's Ichigo suggests fighting a giant demon thing:



Maybe in a movie or a written work, you can come up with some flashy way for my hero to fight the monster, but in-game, that's exactly what it looks like - we walk up to the giant monster and proceed to kick it in the shins with about the same amount of grace and dignity as a chihuahua biting a large man on the ankles. And even in stories, the narrative tricks these use just come off feeling cheap. Pretty much unless your character can produce large blasts and/or fly, you're not going to fight such a thing with much dignity.

I'm not saying truly giant Giant Monsters shouldn't exist, I'm just saying that "giant" shouldn't be the only way to be truly powerful in this game. I honestly do enjoy seeing the most powerful of the powerful guys not being the biggest, but instead being a normal-sized guy or girl. That's why I like Requiem so much - he used to be the big bad of the 5th Column, but he didn't need to be big, slow and unwieldy to do it. Essentially, it's the Dragon Ball Z style of power, where a couple of normal-sized people can lay waste to an entire city and wipe out entire armies.

In fact, speaking of Dragon Ball Z, I find one of the most disappointing aspects of it to be the "giant apes" that the Sayans originally started transforming into. It simply made fights a lot less interesting and a lot less technical. Luckily, Akira seems to have forgotten about this after a point, and I'm all the happier for it. Even for a show with such absurd power levels, I still found it came off better when it was condensed into man-sized actors.

Nice! That's my biggest wish, really, so having that on a list as "looking into" is pretty satisfying. I just hope something comes of it eventually.

I have a few more requests that I forgot but people have reminded me subsequently:

Hair

Long hair for men: Since the game came out, we've been asking for more long hair for men other than the one single Long hairstyle. Jay gave us a second one which is SHORTER in the Barbaric one, but that was years ago. We need more. We need the Glam hair from women made for men, essentially, and we need a lot more like it. Men can have long hair. I used to have shoulder-length hair, but mine is too weak to be that long.

Long hair for women: This goes both ways. Women have plenty of long hair, but most of it is pretty old, with most of the new hairs being short. We need more long hair for them. We can also use a few more "big" hairdos.

Dreadlocks: I really want to see this, and the hairstyles we have posing as this don't cut it. Take your average Rastafarian and do that. I'm talking about longer, thicker locks and a generally much bigger hair.

Animal feet

I agree with enabling regular plantigrade legs to have digitigrade feet. Pick pretty much any Disney movie and you'll see what I mean, though Baloo is not a bad example. Or, hell, check out the Swat Kats. We actually do have a legitimate digitigrade leg under Tights for women, at least, which is a significantly less curved Insect foot. Maybe we can have more of that?

As for the actual Monstrous feet, I agree - cat's paws without the claws would be nice. More monstrous feet in general would be nice, as well, with boots, with ornaments and armour strapped on and so forth.

Tails

It's been so long since we got new tails it's actually frightening. I guess the scruffy copy of the Mutant Pack fox tail that was in the Animal Pack counts, but that was STILL a long time ago. I want to see a robotic tail, I want to see a tail made out of energy like the Celestial wings, I want to see more monstrous tails.

Also, BIGGER tails. Aside from the two fox/wolf tails, all of the animated versions of legacy tails are very small. The cat's tail is tiny and the devil tail is just string-like. I'd like to see a few tails with more meat on them. The "tastes like me" tail was a good example of a thick, furry tail, which is what I mean. We also need a legitimate reptile tail, since the lizard one we have right now just isn't very good.

That's all I have for the moment.