Samuel_Tow

The fact that City of Heroes has bright zones, dark zones, clean zones, dirty zones, orderly zones, run-down zones and so on and so forth is part of its charm and an expression of its quality. Kings Row, along with Independence Port and Brickstown, give the game its quota of dark, seedy, crime-ridden alleyways where a Batman might fight petty criminals to haunt, while Atlas Park, Steel Canyon and Talos Island provide the bright, shining metropolis that a high-profile Super Man might watch over. It takes all kinds.

Oh, boy... Where's the guy handing out Awakens for people's faith in humanity?

If it were me, I'd have e-mailed him the finger and sent him on his way as soon as he started losing his head, but I guess your way of handling it was better

Shame on you, using your Mastermind powers! You should have fought him with nothing more than your Pulse Rifle!

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Why then when I select a teammate in a mission on another floor and set them as a waypoint, it often says that they are X number of yards above or below me?

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Never seen that happen. Every time I select a team-mate as a waypoint, it's 700-900 yards away from me horizontally. I've even caught a bug that showed me the map for all four floors of a Blue Lab map and they were drawn broadside-by-broadside in a row, I believe in an East-West orientation.

Regardless, my point was for breakaway walls between adjacent tiles where tile links are. Or, more simply, where those doors you click to open usually are. Now, imagine an office building. You come to one of those glass doors. But you don't open it, you PUNCH it, the glass shatters, the struts bend and you walk through anyway. Or, more interestingly, imagine walking into one of those rec room dead ends with the vending machines and little tables and so forth. Instead of turning around, you punch the wall, it breaks and you walk into another room (tile) just as though there had been a glass door separating the hallway from the room.

Or, heck, why not a hidden door? A door that looks exactly like a piece of wall, but when you click it, it opens. They really need to do more to make instances more interesting.

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Buh whu!
I guess I can't keep up with the forums like I used to T_T
But dang, there will be a new MA assassin's strike!? Damn, now I gotta make one of those so I can see it...mother [censored!]! It's hard to imagine it as a kick too.

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I'm quite interested in seeing it, myself. I know people raised hell when they first saw it and have been complaining it looked like the character "is taking a dump" for years. Makes sense they'd add an alternative, and you have a point - if the current Assassin's Strike is a punch, the alternative will most likely be a kick. And it will be AWESOME!

Lacking a Martial Arts stalker of any sort, however, I'm more excited about the changes to the rest of the set's powers. I actually used Martial Arts to describe ACTUAL super-human strength in my indestructible cyborg woman, because she was intended to have AGILE superior strength, not UURK! superior strength. It kind of bugs me she's all kicks and will be switching her to as many punches as I can manage when the changes go through. Hell, I'll get rid of Boxing, most probably. Or at least trade it for Flurry

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Why isn't this technology being used?

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Because tilesets aren't next to each other, they are on top of each other, and like, hundreds of "feet" away.

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Um... Each tile in a tileset is directly adjacent to the one next to it. If they weren't, you'd fall into blackness. Each "floor" of a tileset isn't above or below any other floor, it's about 800 yards to the side on the same plane. If they can put a door between two tiles that you click on and it opens, they can put a "door" (or, heck, a door) between them that you shoot at and it breaks. So why haven't they?

Ah, here's ONE!

Introduce breakaway walls in missions. You know how they introduced doors that have to be clicked to open the path between two tileset pieces? Well, why not have WALLS that have to be DESTROYED to open the path between two tileset pieces. They don't have to have any more hit points than a Mayhem Mission bus stop or trash container (aka, one-hit kill) And they can just as easily take the place of doors simulating dead ends.

Think of it this way - you're walking down an office hallways and end up in a place that looks like a rec room dead end. Except, you can punch the wall and it opens up into an adjacent room, knocking down a couple of vending machines, say. Now imagine a string of small rooms lined by breakaway walls that you have to go through, Juggernaut style. Break one, enter the room, break the next, enter the next room and keep on rolling.

The technology for this already exists in the face of jail doors all over the place. Well, instead of a door frame with a destructible jail door on it, why not have an "frame" of indestructible, conventional wall with a blending section of destructible wall to serve as the "door." Or, to think more appropriately, imagine a large Mayhem Mission shipping container stuffed in a doorway. You can't pass through it while it's there, but you can break it and walk over the PhysX pieces it leaves behind.

Why isn't this technology being used?

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Heck, the devs haven't even said the new MA attacks would be punches but everyone thinks it is and loving it.

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Actually, they have

I'm not saying people don't want a Martial Arts that punches. Hell, I want a Martial Arts that punches, and will make full use of this when it comes out. My point was that I don't believe just adding punches to Martial Arts will reduce the need for a Street Fighting set. I also don't believe a "Street Fighting set" means "like in Street Fighter" so much so as a down-to-earth, gritty fighter.

'Course, we have to see how much the changes in animation to Super Strength and Martial Arts close the gap between each other. It's tangentially possible for the two to cover so much space that a fighter can easily fit in one or the other.

Now that's an interesting concept. If it gets grabbed or caught on something, it simply tears away and doesn't impede. Cool!

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and access to the Shadow Shard- my brute wants the Rularuu axe without having to farm the same stupid mission over and over and over and over for the three bosses that spawn there >.<

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Um... You don't have to. Do either Technician Naylor's second arc or Efficiency Expert Pyther's only arc and that badge will unlock the Rularuu weapons. Villains have it easy, it's heroes who have to suffer the indignity of hunting Overseers.

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I sort of wish the Events would be expanded on beyond just Rikti and the occasional ZOMBEEEEEEEHS! Nothing fancy. Maybe just basic factions, like Freakshow or Carnies or something, could swarm a zone every now and then for no other reason than because they were bored and begin wrecking the place. Go get a shiny badge for stopping them.

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I wish events were more than "wave after wave of <insert enemy> spawns in and players have to fight them." Every frikkin' event we have is like that. That, or "one big enemy spawns in that players have to fight." Bo-ring! Take a cue from the Hellion Fires and give us events that aren't about beating up hordes of enemies. Instead, make us have to fight natural disasters. It doesn't have to be revolutionarily novel. If I can settle for a building on fire with lots of Hellions and Fires to "beat up," I'll deal with, say, spires of evilnessnessness sprouting all over a zone that we have to find and destroy. The Rikti bomb hunt, for instance, is one of my favourite activities. It doesn't involve massive power spam and there's an element of both exploration and excitement as you wonder if you can finish with this bomb before the one next to it blows up. If anything, when the Rikti beam down, they ruin my fun.

The Chistmas event with the presents wasn't a bad idea, though even that involved fighting hordes of enemies, as well as fighting off hordes of speed-clickers.

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The Incredibles and the wisdom of Edna "E" Mode aside, it depends on how they are used. Cloaks were historically used by fencers as defensive devices. Obviously, most superhero capes these days are just fashion items, but different uses are not inconceivable.

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Seeing her quoted again and again and again over the years, I feel Edna Mode did more damage to the image of super heroes than anyone else I'm aware of. Capes are only impractical if you're some wannabe who tied one around his neck and went running around the streets. However, if you're super strong, able to fly and nigh-on invulnerable, what's a cape really going to do to impede you? At worst it will get torn off, but when your muscle strength exceeds the cape's tensile strength by a thousand fold... So what?

And that's neglecting to mention heroes with powers to use their capes or, even furthermore, powers that ARE their capes. I don't recall anyone chastising Spawn for having his when it can shield him from bullets and turn into spikes.

Oh, sure, I'm not open to everything, myself. Super fighters fighting hand to hand in 10 inch stilettos bug me, personally, partly because it looks AWFUL and partly because it's the most impractical thing in the world, but if there's a logically illogical explanation for it, then why not? Again, a colleague of mine insists she never actually steps on the heel of her high heels when she walks, walking practically in her toes, so eh. Why not? Long as it doesn't look tasteless, why not?

Fair enough

I'm just saying that I've spoken with a few people who were afraid to make certain characters because of how others would look at them, and I've been there, myself. For the most part, sticking with it just so you know you've done it once tends to open up new possibilities in the future. It doesn't HAVE to, but once you get over the "shock value" of making and playing one, you might find this creeping into future characters and future costumes ever so subtly.

'Course, if it doesn't do it for you, it probably won't, but it's a general thing

See, that's why I keep saying they should include a combined pack that has everything in it. There ARE people who want to buy everything, but buying each pack one by one is, apparently, a big problem.

You'll note that that particular Serpent Drummer mission IS pretty much just "beat up everybody and rescue this hostage," just like pretty much every other mission. All it has extra is a cutscene and a room full of clickable NPCs that never notice that you just had a massive firefight in their base and that Nemesis apparently kidnapped six negotiators. I suppose locking the door leading back to the conference room might help mitigate that little loophole.

Generally speaking, I like the mission and having a scripted, static section like this would be pretty cool to see in other missions. Specifically, you could have a huge mission where you descend, say, down the sewers into underground caverns, and half-way down you come into a room safe room with an NPC who heals, a reclimator and even a basic inspirations merchant. It might turn an instance experience into more of an interactive, world experience.

We'd need the ability to pick which reclimator we respawn at, though, because this has to unlock when you find it.

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Long Answer: This year and last, we scheduled time together as a group and head out into the great pea soup for a bit o' adventure. Maybe because we're on Virtue? The personalities. Their responses are priceless. The wild costumes and running dialogue in the /request and /broadcast channels made it a blast. We consumed the zone(s) we visited and one another's company and just had a blast.

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That's interesting. Any invasion I've been to has only ever seen broadcast of "$name lf invasion team." And speaking of costumes... Forget about seeing other people's costumes! I couldn't see MY OWN... Hell, I couldn't see ANYTHING aside from a sea of sprite effects. My experience with every Rikti invasion is a sea of special effects and absolutely nothing else.

As for the social aspect, even ignoring the fact that I've never SEEN any, is probably something that depends on the person. I remember being told about what a wondrous, exciting social experience Hamidon raids were... Until I went to one and all the "social" experience was watching a bunch of [censored] call each other names over broadcast when there weren't engaging in juvenile arguments. There's only so much "UR MOM!!!" I can take before I remove Broadcast from my tabs.

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... but when all it comes down to is finding a target you can attack then fingering your number keys like you're playing the guitar...

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Pets will always have a target if there is one available. For me, it's not stop action because there's almost always someone who has a Singularity, Dark Servent, Decoy, Imps, etc up and I just target through them.

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It's not a problem of not finding a target, it's a problem of finding a target you can ATTACK The Rikti have this annoying tendency to teleport in, then spend the next 10 seconds standing around intangible until I can actually attack them. Whether that's caused by server lag or an overly long lockdown on their teleport in animation I cannot say, but my henchmen are in the same boat - they pick a target and sit around waiting for it to "unlock." That's EASILY the most annoying part of the whole event.

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I probably have "issues" ; I found myself feeling awfully self conscious on the rare occasion I made one running around in little more than her underwear, it was almost like I was creeping myself out.

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What you have, most likely, is preconceptions about what preconceptions other people would have when they saw your character. I used to feel the same way, feeling bad about playing scantly-clad girls. But the fact of the matter is that, for the most part, what we are upset with is not how we look at the characters, but how we project other people would look at the character. "Man, this makes me look like some 13 year old hormone addict little boy!"

For me, admitting this to myself was my release. Fact of the matter is, I like the look of a scantly-clad girl. I never hated it, not as a kid, not as an adult, but I grew up with a heavy taboo about it. Only perverts liked seeing scantly-clad women, and I sure as hell wasn't one! Except I was and I am. No sense in trying to act up and not do things I like just because of how other people might see it.

Oh, sure, there are tasteless morons who make barefoot women in a string bikini and run around the world giggling to themselves. You don't have to be one of those people even if you made a character pretty much like this as long as you pulled it off with style, though... Pulling that specific one off with style might be pretty hard. The point is, DO creep yourself out from time to time and DO stick with it. Once you get past the taboo, you might find that you actually like it. Or find you hate it, who knows. Either way, don't stop just at the gut reaction of "I'm creeping myself out." There's a broader world out there, and some of the coolest stuff is the stuff that we, for one reason or another, have an abject taboo against.

Quick question - what does the rest of your team do while you're conversing with the Skull. For that manner, what do the rest of the Skulls do while you're conversing with one specific Skull? If the answer is "wait," we have a problem.

If we have to go with "danger," then let's keep in line with the danger that comes with powers like Detonator and Noxious Gas - big return for the cost of endangering your henchmen. So, why not have this be a temporary buff to one henchman which turns it rogue (either right off the bat or at the end), but has it ONLY target your own henchmen. Not you, not other players, not other player's henchmen. Just your own henchmen. Danger, yes, but not such danger that your own power can KILL you. Strip your of your offence and defence, yes. Kill you, not so much.

Personally, though, I'm not a big fan of this type of "danger." I'd much rather have a character well in control and go in a different direction. Have a power that infects enemies with a demon. Single-target only, acts like a confuse, but when the enemy dies, a demon spawns off his body and follows you around for a short while. Depending on how strong we want this demon to be, we could either treat it like Soul Extraction, where one powerful demon follows you around and is controllable, or like Gang War, where you can Possess frequently and easily amass two-three weaker impish demons at a time.

Or even something more traditional - put a powerful fire aura on one henchman that does a LOT of AoE damage, but also does damage to the henchman in question at a fast rate.

There are options

The problem with grappling is making it look good. A selection of games do have it, but very few of those actually make it look good. Let's take Prototype as an example:

In prototype, you can grab and hold two things - people and large objects. Grabbing and carrying around people looks relatively good, because you're strong enough to whip people around like they're wet laundry, even when jumping and scaling building. But humans are human-sized, the same size as the protagonist. The other things you can grab are large items - trucks, cars, air conditioning units, large boulders, etc. This looks TERRIBLE for two reasons. Firstly, these items are supposed to be heavy, but they do not APPEAR to be heavy either in how they're lifted or how they're thrown. They appear to be made of cardboard and stuffed with beach balls. You know how Propel garbage has no weight in City of Heroes after it's been propelled? You know how that's very ugly? Like that. The second problem is that holding a large item blocks most of your view, which means the item becomes transparent, which in turn means you don't really know what you're carrying, which in turn makes it INCREDIBLY ugly.

Why is this not applicable here? For one, size difference. Enemies in our game range from tiny like the Rikti Monkeys, Red Caps and Wailers to huge like Greater Devoured and Zeus Titans, to humongous, like the Kronos Titan, Babbage, Baphomet and so forth, to weird, like Swarms, Storm Elementals, the Cap Au Diable Demons, the various ghosts, stuff like Seeker Drones and so on, to outright STATIONARY like the different Howitzers, Arachnos turrets, Vanguard turrets, to say nothing of wall-mounted computers, statues, power generators, SUBMARINES and so on and so forth.

There really is no good way to pick all of these things up unless the power had several different animations for the different things, which I'm pretty sure isn't even possible. But even if we assume it's possible, even if we assume you could grab small things with one hand, big things with both hands, huge things with both hands over your head and even if we imagined some way for you to grab a swarm of insects or a storm cloud, you're still left with the problem that this is a self-crippling action - you need both hands free for your combat animations to work, and even a one-handed grab would require that ALL OTHER animations in the game be re-made to work with one hand like they did for shields. And that's only against small stuff like Imps and DE Shards. Big stuff would take up both your hands (or look REALLY stupid) and just prevent you from using powers at all. Trust me, no-one would use something that disabled all their powers unless it was REALLY powerful, and there's no way any one power would be made REALLY powerful. That, and dropping stuff from high up does trivial damage to high-level NPCs.

I could, probably, see two ways for this to even be conceived. One would be to give all enemies a size statistic and make the grab only work on enemies of a particular size, allowing you to grab them with one hand, then use them as a shield providing some manner of defence, while you used your other hand to fight with. This has the very unfortunate consequence of not only not working on all enemies, but not working on enemies based on a completely random factor that has never counted for anything, meaning some factions would be vulnerable all the way up to elite bosses (say, Kurse) while others wouldn't be vulnerable at all, like the Devouring Earth replete with gigantic walking plants and rocks. Having a power not work on bosses is one thing. Having a power plain not work on anything from a faction is quite another.

The other is animating a bunch of "throw" animations to account for the various sizes of enemies and excluding the "holding" phase altogether. Just a straight-up pick-up-and-toss for some degree of damage and enemy relocation. This might work, though either a certain size of enemy or a certain class of enemy would need to be resistant.

Both of these "solutions" are not possible currently. There is no way for the game to play a different power animation based on what enemy it is used against - there's one animation that the power calls for each state, and state does not take target into effect. This right there makes this impossible short of the introduction of a brand new functionality. Holding enemies to you, as well, or even affecting their position in any way other than teleportation or knockback/up. Neither of those applies, as you need a COOPERATIVE animation between yourself and the enemy. I'm not even sure if this is even possible, but supposing it is (shooting an enemy causes him to play the reeling animation), there's no way to coordinate and sync up the animations between the two models. Hell, there's no way to force them to have a common orientation, nor do any powers in the game actually care about what orientation your enemy has. What you need is for both models to animate together, orientated correctly and in sync, all the while not actually being able to be animated together, and then have to somehow have the thrown model transition into knockback. But remember - animations do NOT move your location in the world, so if you pick someone up and throw him, he'll snap back to where he was on the ground before being knocked back.

It's just... A technical impossibility without some serious new technology, which would require entering an enemy as a prop in the player's own animation and... Well, that goes into Standard Code Rant.

I still don't think those will count as "street fighting," but one only hopes that will happen for all powers in at least the powersets that actually have meaningful animations. Say, something like Katana or Dual Blades and so forth, but... Fire Blast? Unless we get to pick where (or what) we shoot our powers from, I don't see any way for them to be customised.

All that said, I'll be retooling my indestructible cyborg woman into as much punching Martial Arts as I can

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What grind?
Seiously. The "grindiness" of a game is a state of mind. I don't look at this game as a "grind" at all, I look at it as a fun means of escapism that allows me to realize a concept for a character I find intriguing. It only becomes a "grind" when you see the rewards and the XP as the "fun." Socializing and seeing what my character can do, and the challenge of keeping a team together in the current post-AE game is half the fun! Occasional RP and base design is also rather enjoyable, not to mention badging and running TFs.
There are a limited number of avenues to procure advancement for a reason: XP and loot should not be the only things in this game that you are looking for. If it is, then IMO, you are doing something wrong.
Therefore, I ask: where is this grind of which you speak?

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That's pretty much as far as I'd go. Cover it up as we may try, this is ultimately a game about killing stuff over and over again. If that's not your thing, then it will always be a grind and no amount of "alternatives" will make that go away. If all you care about is the reward and don't enjoy the fight, then there is simply no working around that. If, however, you enjoy beating stuff up with your cool, custom-made characters, then there is no grind to speak of.

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If a character has more than a quarter inch of hair, you have no business talking about how "practical" or "impractical" their outfit is -- if you have hair you aren't prepared to fight. Necks are weaker than arms, and hair tends to be stronger than neck muscles, so hair is nothing more than an invitation to getting your face slammed into the nearest hard object. Almost all heroes and villains have hair that is way too long to fight in, after which point it's just silly to worry that their shirt looks too easy to pull off in a fight.

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Oh, you're not thinking sideways enough

When making Crash, my indestructible cyborg chick, I was facing this exact problem - she's invulnerable and supposed to be able to take any impact without budging an inch (after all, I was going to take Unyielding STANCE). See, she's a martial artist, so I couldn't very well make her 20 tons heavy or she wouldn't be able to prance around, yet she had to be "heavy" so as to be unmovable.

The solution? Technobabble! Between artificial inertia control and magnetic repulsors pointing in every direction, a reasonably competent computer subsystem could actively counter any amount of kinetic force delivered from any direction. Combine that with a completely indestructible body that doesn't take damage and transfers any impact into fully-body kinetic force and you have the recipe for... Well, not yielding Which is pretty cool when I fancy writing her getting hit by a speeding van, tackled by a rampaging giant monster or shot at by a tank.

I don't know how that came to happen, but purely in terms of plot and concept, Crash turned out to be by FAR the toughest of my characters and ALWAYS the one who seems to take the heaviest fire. It's pretty funny when you write about all these big, burly men, some in armour, some covered in stone, and the one standing up-front and taking the punches is an average-height woman in short pants and a jacket. That has GOT to make them feel really inadequate

To comment on what someone said before, about how comic books at large are boy fantasies and women in them are hard to take seriously - that wholly depends on the writer, and I don't mean just "if the writer is a woman." Some people do make women because they want a weak woman to be kidnapped and saved and even the strongest of women are touted as "almost as strong as a man," as a friend of mine aptly put it. That doesn't have to be the case, and I know of at least one author who makes female characters with the sole intention of being really, really, REALLY badass

Now, there is a distinction between females as strong leads and females as bombshells, and I see no reason why a character cannot and should not be both. I make most of my female characters because I have an interesting idea for a powerful character, but I have one (OK, a few) whom I made just because I thought they looked sexy. That hasn't stopped me from giving them serious concepts and sufficient ability to hold their own (one of THE most important prerequisites for my characters is that they hold their own), but the fact remains that this strong female character's appearance was designed to make me look at it and go "Oh, yeah!"

I don't see that as a bad thing. Looking good is not a crime nor is it despicable. As a matter of fact, it's often interesting to design a character such that she looks exactly like a male fantasy cheese cake ON PURPOSE, then giving her a personality that crushes balls. All in all, in my head, a good concept and a well-made story can work with ANY starting point.

Wraparound cloaks and jet packs.

The ability to WALK when the situation fits.

The ability to use glowing colours for our costumes that glow in the dark (sic).

No minimal team size for TFs with AVs scaling down to EBs, with the appropriate removal of TF-only drops, for all I care.

The removal of the atrocity that are simultaneous-click missions.

The reviewing of old content to update old stories to new events, and to update old missions to new maps and enemies. If I'm going to drop Outbreak off in Paragon City, I could at least be fighting the PPD rather than Longbow.

A change in the contacts writing style, both hero and villain, to make the narrative more proactive for our characters, rather than "Go there, do that, come back to me, me, ME!"

Oh, wait. You said one...

Holy hell! A power to remove all the fog of war... I am SO gonna' love this power! My friends might love it, too, if it makes me move faster on teams not having to explore so much. I suspect I'll only ever use it outside, though.