Samuel_Tow

No, not really. I needed both hands behind me to hold my balance. If I tool my hands and tried to hold them in front, I'd tumble over backwards, which is what I reference before. Maybe I'm just not built with the right centre of gravity for this, but I tried pushing my chest out, I did what I could to hold my hands in front, but I kept leaning back. I guess if I had a 20-point cup of coffee in my hands as counter-weight that might have worked.

Yeah, I get that feeling from time to time. Frankly, I enjoy the game the least when it's designed such that I'm supposed to think of an existing character or story to get the necessary context, largely because I usually don't know what anything is referencing. However, I'm always left with the feeling that a character is supposed to mean SOMETHING, I just don't know what. It's the same feeling I had running through Praetoria and suspecting everyone I met was an alternate version of a Primal Earth character, but being unable to tell of whom.

Personally, I don't have a problem with A Hero's Epic swapping the Statesman for Positron. It's supposed to be taking place "now," and "now" the Statesman is dead. It makes sense, therefore, for the arc to feature someone who's alive.

A Hero's Hero, on the other hand, is in the past. It took place in 2004, it took place before the destruction of Galaxy City. It's an echo of an old event. There's no reason for it to change. It may not make sense, and it doesn't have to. It's referring to a previous time that has since lost its context.

Don't re-write the past, please. We don't need another "group that was superseded by the Council."

Can't change the status quo, so probably. That's why I feel Dean McArthur and ESPECIALLY Bane Spider Ruben succeed so well - because their stories aren't so much based around the result as they are around pandering to the player villain in the process. In neither Ruben nor Dean's arc do we leave with any tangible gain, but in both cases we make sure that our enemies leave with EVEN LESS, and in both arcs we are treated like the big bads and instigators of the story.

That's why I have a problem with the villain-side SSA1s - they present us as a lackey for Wade, with our motivation being benefit. OBVIOUSLY we can't benefit in a meaningful way because we can't change the status quo, so that promise of "power" is empty. At the same time, the process of getting there is still undignified, because it's still someone else's plan.

As far as I'm concerned, villains are the most entertaining when they are defiant. "OK, I have a plan! You'll go there and do that!" *backhand* "I have a better plan. You shut up and do as you're told, and I'll go do something even more ambitious." It's when a player villain gets to flip off the game that it's really, truly satisfying on a very visceral level, even if the result is ultimately still just status quo.

In other words, I would sooner lose MY way than win for somebody else.

I think it's the back that gets people. Right now, I'm sitting pretty much yoga on my swivel chair as I type this, with both feet underneath my thighs and it's comfortable, but the reason it's comfortable is because most of the weight on my torso is resting on the spring-loaded back-rest of my chair (first and only swivel chair I've ever seen that had a spring-loaded backrest but NOT a tilting seat O_o). I'll also often sit sideways on couches, with one elbow on one armrest and both legs dangling over the other, almost like I'm in ancient Rome. But again, that's the entire side of my body taking my weight.

Mary-Jane is essentially standing on that couch, with her shin and her foot taking the entire weight of her body. As you can see in the pics of people trying it, that causes your foot to sink into the cushion and, on a futon with removable cushions, usually cause it to stick out in a very ugly way. It's also incredibly difficult to balance that way as the bulk of your body weight is is in your back, causing your entire torso to tip backwards. If MJ were resting her back against the backrest then I could see that. It's actually pretty comfortable, and her back would be spreading much of her body weight so she probably wouldn't sink in as much. However, she's not. The way she's arching her back, she's literally balancing on one shin and one foot.

I also don't think you can really sit on your leg like this. It puts essentially your entire body-weight over your ankle and jams the foot back, and it also compresses your knee, which is something I know a thing or two about. Usually when you see people sitting on their legs, they're not directly OVER the leg, but a bit sideways of it. Either the leg is tilted inside so you're resting partially on your shin and partially on your thigh and NOT directly on top of the ankle, or the leg is tilted outside and you're resting on the inside of your leg.

I tried this seat just now, and the result is I over-compressed the springs on my mattress, my ankle hurts and I nearly tumbled over backwards, avoiding smacking my head on the window sill behind just barely. And I'm not a big or inflexible guy.

I don't disagree, I just don't think costumes should be it. Costumes cannot be graded from better to worse because they're a matter of opinion. And, no, it's not true that newer costumes are better than older ones. I'll still usually pick the Glam hair over all the new ones.

Literally ANYTHING but costumes I'm fine with. Badge titles, name colours, temp power, what have you.

What are you talking about? The only thing I commented on about the speech bubbles is they change too fast and I can't read the text in them fast enough. I never even brought up style or comic books or... What are you talking about?

You and I play MMOs for very different reasons, then. I've played quite a few since I started with City of Heroes, and I've yet to find one with "cool gameplay." Pretty much the best out there is, really, City of Heroes, because it has by far the most inoffensive gameplay that lets me play it with the least amount of hassle.

PBAoEs are, unfortunately, often lengthy animations that require you to place yourself within melee range of multiple opponents for extended periods of time. This can get you chain held or outright killed. Being able to execute most of the animation while away from enemies helps mitigate this.

Or you can be cool like me and exploit that bug no-one ever wants to hear about, where if you're out of combat mode, use Build Up and start moving, you can keep using most of your melee and PBAoE attacks without being rooted, so long as they don't have unique activation sequences. This means pretty much all of Electric Manipulation, Mental Manipulation, Electric Blast and probably a few others.

Yeah, I'm tired of reporting this bug and having nothing be done about it, so I'll see about making it popular instead.

Agreed. That's an "old vs. new" problem. Cryptic Studios were big on kicking the player into the world and letting us sort ourselves out. You want a cape? YOU figure out how to get it. You want to shop for enhancements? YOU Find the shops that sell them. As a result the City Representative is one of the old-style contacts who you never get introduced to, but who will speak with you if you approach them. Rodney, by contrast, is a new-style contact who needs no introduction, uses the welcome pop-up and shows up in the Contact Finder. He benefits from modern convenience in a way I do wish the City Rep would.

I agree with this. Accuracy is highly dependent on the enemy you fight. Spectrals debuff you, Rikti Drones are plain hard to hit and Nemesis soldiers often benefit from Vengeance, especially in the chaos of the AoE-heavy Titan Weapons. I agree completely that low accuracy hurts the set.

I just wanted to oppose the common misconception that you can somehow get bad miss streaks regardless of your accuracy. I've seen people triple-slot ++ Accuracy SOs in their powers because they're convinced their accuracy is not enough.

My advice for anyone worried about streaks is to do two things. First, monitor your Last Hit Chance from your Combat Attributes. This gives you the accuracy at which you made your last swing. If this reads 95% and you whiffed, that's rotten luck. If that reads 78%, though, you can't expect to hit all the time because something's preventing you. Secondly make a brand new chat tab and put ONLY to-hit rolls in it. If you think you're getting hit too much or you're missing too much, take a look at your swing accuracy and take a look at your rolls. Don't be surprised if you see yourself rolling 96 and 97 seemingly a lot more often than you should, and don't be surprised if you see enemies rolling 2 and 3 quite often. When you start getting streaks of hits through your defences or misses with supposedly high accuracy, that's usually the reason.

Well, toying with people might be an issue, because that statement was literal. Praxis does not care for our reality or anything in it where it is not of direct use to her. She does not have fun, she does not know hatred. About the only real regard she'll give sentient beings is to allow them to choose their fate when the outcome of their chose is irrelevant to Praxis. "End your life or be ended. Your decision is irrelevant, therefore it is yours to make."

That's why I liked the Ruben speech so much. It really didn't give those guys a meaningful choice. Either they serve Praxis in all ways, or they die by her power. The result is the same either way. What really doesn't fit Praxis, though, is the Crosscut level of messing with people's heads.

That should be present in the Hollows, though. Melissa Bianco redid the zone a while back and I was pretty sure she added those. I can see how those would be useful.

Those should be there on all missions where relevant. I don't mean "should" in the sense of "it would be nice if" so much as in the sense of "if they're not there, it's a bug." Timed missions, simu-click objectives and elite bosses began being coloured in brown since the I3 Boss Buff. If you run into any that aren't coloured, /bug them.

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I thought you were referring to contemporary missions' tendency to colour the names of people and place in case we can't read, as well as to employ judicious use of italics and bolds. I actually remember having Ghost Falcon (I think he was) comment on one of my Architect arc that it's good, but could use some more colour in the text. It killed me to decline the guy since he made that arc Developer's Choice on the Test server, but I really do dislike the use of colour unless absolutely necessary. Warning of problematic objectives is absolutely necessary. Giving arc episode numbers... Not so much, but I can live with it since it sets the title apart from the first person narration briefing.

Yes, the video was supposed to be fun as well as educational, or else it would have been 10 seconds of a black-on-white text screen. And even at a minute and a half, the speech bubbles still changed too fast for me to read them, so I had to rewind the video and pause it in a few places. This is why I don't like speech bubble spam in newer content.

She also had a generic face from out of the editor. Since she's getting shoved in our faces, someone clearly thought she needed a unique face, hence the new one. The new face is... Weird, though. Either her eyes are too wide apart or her nose is too wide, neither of which appeals to me. I'm no artist, but I'm told that the distance between the eyes should roughly be the width of one eye, which I'm not sure is true here.

I'm also not sure why they felt the need to swap skin tone... Maybe because she's Asian and all Asian people are supposed to be pale? I don't mean to insult, but it just seemed like Penny already had her skin tone set. I know this might just be tan, but it's still weird. It's twice as weird because the darker skin tone of her childhood would have made that costume work better. A lot of the problem is that her belly is so white it kind of blends in with her white pants. If her belly were darker and more tanned, it would have stood out more and made the costume a bit less confusing.

*edit*
Also, and this is something I've discussed with a few people, but you always want to take your character's physical appearance into account when designing a costume. You generally don't want to match or even approach physical characteristics with artificial costumes just because it makes the physique look artificial, itself. At the very least, it makes the costume confusing to look at. Whenever I look at Penny, my brain will alternately either see her midriff as being covered in white fabric or her bottom as going bare-butt. And it's distracting.

"Streaks" are impossible if all attacks involved have 95% final to-hit. The Streakbreaker won't allow it. If your "overall accuracy," which is your worst accuracy since your last hit, is over 90%, then the Streakbreaker will kick in after a single miss and force a hit on the following attack. It is functionally impossible to miss twice in a row with attacks that have 95% accuracy.

The only way you can get a situation where two 95% accuracy attacks in a row miss is to toss in a lower-accuracy attack before them, have THAT miss and have it drag you down to a lower Streakbreaker bracket. This happens most commonly with unslotted brawl or any of the Veterean attacks, or any other Temp attacks. These have a base accuracy of 75% and will drag you down into at least the 70-90% Streakbreaker bracket where the Streakbreaker will only kick after two consecutive misses.

However, this is no longer an environment of 95% accuracy. Once you start tossing in inaccurate attacks, you will miss more. That goes without saying, but it's true twice over because you will be helped to hit less often. This is also not an issue in regular usage of Titan Weapons. To achieve Momentum, you need to hit with a Titan Weapons attack, which means it doesn't make sense to toss in non-Titan-Weapons attacks and then complain about not hitting fast enough. If you ARE only using Titan Weapon attacks, then those can be slotted to the 95% to-hit cap without too much difficulty. At the very least, it is simple enough to slot them to have THE SAME accuracy, so if one of them is hitting at 95%, they should all be.

Titan Weapons suffers from a few problems, I will admit, but Streaks at maximal accuracy are not one of them.

You know... I think you're right. It still won't be great thanks to the face clutter, but yeah. The costume you suggest would actually be a lot less confusing to my brain.

Why didn't I think of that?

That would be horrible, actually. I was one of the chief opponents of this back when costume recipes were rare. Putting a price tag on costumes is like putting a price tag on opinions - there is no grading on what's better than what else. They're just options. The more options you give people, the better.

Again, I refuse to support costumes that I have to unlock per-character under any circumstances. The one good thing that came out of Freedom was it let me put my money where my mouth is - literally. I said for years that I'd pay actual money to have those unlocked for all my characters at creation. Now, bar a few holdovers, I can.

I don't think this should be necessary. We already have precedent for powers getting new animations without getting new effects with the previous Blast set additions. They weren't very good, but that's down to the animations being lacking and too few to cover ALL Blast sets. We also have something of a precedent for giving powers new effects but not new animations with the swaps Stone Melee and Stone Armour get. Stone Melee in particular retains all of its animations, but the alternate effects just swap the props. For a broader example, just swapping from a bright to a dark version of power effects can work as a precedent. Besides, look at how many of the older powers are the same animation with different effects.

Now, I'm not saying I'll turn down a combination of new animations AND new effects, just that it's easier to sell them as separate projects so as not to reach the point where they may as well make a whole new set out of it.

Yes, but again - we're delving into the territory of intentionally bad. I respect David so I don't want to bring Yahtzee down on him, but let's just say that even if an intentionally bad costume makes an ironic statement, it's still bad. And this is twice as notable because Penny is getting such a push that it feels like she's cheating. People WILL latch onto any obvious defect she has, and an ironically bad costume is a primary one such.

I don't disagree. What I'm saying is they're not waging open war against humans. Sure, they'll kill or kidnap people where they could, but they haven't established battle lines yet. You could call it guerilla warfare if you will, but I just don't see it as open war. Not in the sense that it was with the Rikti pre-release or with the Praetorians, where you have two armies standing either side of a divide.

That's what makes clandestine threats inherently more interesting. We don't know where they are, we don't know what they're planning and defeating them isn't as simple as going where they are and punching them all in the face. Open warfare is uninteresting because it really boils down to that, in the grand scheme of things. And it's the grand scheme of things that's the only place where one doesn't feel like a grunt.

About the closest we have to open warfare is Arachnos vs. Paragon City and Longbow.

I actually spoke with Viking the other day, and we were discussing why Praxis would offer a deal based on something I'd said. My response was something along the lines of "Praxis does not offer deals. Praxis commands." That was two or three days ago, and the game quoted me before I even thought to say this! The phrasing in that whole speech is just... Inspired! I love it! I wish you could see the kind of mile-wide grin I have just typing this out! All of the out-of-character nonsense was worth it for this. I can ret-con the rest out, but this is how Praxis should act!

And that's not the whole of it, either. It's not just me being happy because it fits one specific character, oh no! This speech, this arc, "gets" villains. It gets the big, bad, arrogant, uncompromising kind of villains that CoV just never seemed to be able to comprehend. Some guy tries to stop Praxis, she orders him to move and the guy just recoils like a slapped puppy. The game sends Praxis to a stage, and she just tells all the people gathered there that either they obey, or they die.

THIS! This is what I want my villains to be like. Not just Praxis, not just Zik, not just Cedric. This is what I want my big bads to be. They know they're the best and most important, and they WILL act like it. Even Dean McArthur, for all the praise I heaped on him, didn't really get that. He got close, but we were still buddy-buddy by the end. Not with Ruben's arc. Here, my villain gets to look the game world in the eye until the game world backs down.

I love it. Do you have any idea how many years I've been waiting to say this? I love this story arc!

*edit*
Funny observation: As soon as I was done with Ruben and got one over on Arachnos on the way out, I have to say... Cap Au Diable seems a lot brighter and more cheerful than I remember it. I'm sure nothing has really changed about the place, but now that villain arcs don't make me feel like a horrible, horrible person, even the drab grey-and-brown colour scheme actually looks less depressing. Interesting... I'm just happy that someone on the writing team seems to have finally cracked how to make being evil actually FUN. It sure beats the old "crime does not pay" moral being shoved down my throat because at least in this arc, crime really did pay.

Excellent!

Hey, if it's a matter of subscription, I say go for it. The missions do indeed have pretty cool mission maps, and especially SSA1.7 has a lot of decent action in it. I find the stories themselves to be garbage, but if you have a grudge against the signature characters, then the SSA will provide, in spades.

Well, unless you enjoy spelling and grammar errors, you may find you share my opinion on SSA1.7 But, yeah, maybe you'll like 'em. To me, they came off as petty and needlessly cruel. I might have bought the story if it were told better, but the stories are just so poorly handled for as ambitious as they are.