Samuel_Tow

You say that like it's a bad thing.

In order for you to accuse me of lying, you need to assume I believe one thing but claim something else. If you really DO believe this, then that is actually quite rude. I'm hoping you don't actually think I'm intentionally saying something that I know is false, because I'm not.

What I say is exactly what I've seen. What I say is exactly what I've experienced. I've been playing Stalkers since the old round of changes, and I've been teaming with those Stalkers since the last round of changes. Every time I did, I was either looked upon as a gimped Scrapper who wasn't contributing anything, or otherwise simply not invited. I actually got into an argument with the Satanic Hamster on exactly what my Stalker was contributing to the team I was on.

Your experience may vary. That's fine. Disagree with me, contradict me, interject your own anecdote. But to accuse me of lying is tantamount to insulting me to my face, and "no offence" really doesn't cut it. I have never said a lie in my entire time on this forum, counting as far back as eight years. I've been wrong plenty of times, yes, but never intentionally.

From here on out, I'm going to ask you to either present evidence that I'm lying or to otherwise refrain from making these accusations. If you don't like what I'm saying, then please find a less insulting way of saying it.

Everything I've tried to do so far is exclude "playstyle" from the equation entirely, and instead focus on the results. It may seem one-sided for me to say this, but ultimately, what matters in an MMO from a mechanical standpoint is the results your chosen playstyle generates, and these results are actually very directly measurable. Levelling speed, number of drops per unit of time, frequency of defeats per instance and so forth. I get that the game is supposed to be fun subjectively, but whatever way we pick to make it fun must still conform to some overall standard level of results objectively.

Where I feel we keep talking past each other is I'm really, honestly not trying to discuss playstyles and preference. I feel all playstyles (within reason) should be catered to and allowed access to roughly the same results with roughly the same level of investment. That's exactly what choice is born out of - when you can pick a playstyle based solely on what you like and how you prefer to do things AND NOT on what works and what doesn't, that's when you have a meaningful choice.

I get that Trip Mines, for instance, just aren't for me. I don't have the patience to have my preparations wasted if I sneeze at the wrong time. If I could be convinced that Trip Mine minefileds were equal or better performers than just blasting stuff - a practice which takes considerably less effort - then I wouldn't have a problem with them. From my own experience, however, they don't measure up, at least not on Common or SO builds. I want to see that approach, and others, give people access to the same results, that's all.

I don't think it's subjective to say that most playing most sets should produce similar levels of progression. That's the driving mechanic behind the combat system in its entirety - you kill stuff and you get stuff for it. That's the only thing which is constant between all powersets and the one thing that should be balanced around regardless of a set's actual implementation.

I'm sure that works wonders in caves and buildings with a low ceiling. And are you saying that every Energy Blast Blaster should take Hover?

Something else I want to clear up because I missed this post somehow:

I'm not claiming you're spouting nonsense. Far from it. I just find your claim to be one-sided, valuing "variety" above all else, and at the same time ignoring that variety is really only useful when it works. When a powerset or an AT is considered, it needs to perform in a way that's comparable to most others in its category, and it needs to be able to perform without requiring an abnormally large investment. In other words, you can't make a powerset or an AT that's intentionally.

Yes, I'm sure there are plenty of people who might like a weak powerset, but they will like it DESPITE its weakness, not because of it. "Hard mode" powersets are not a good idea, for the simple fact that City of Heroes did what no other MMO has done, and put my difficulty in my own hands. If I want "hard mode," I can achieve it. I don't need my character to be weak. I can make my character weaker, I can make my enemies stronger, and all of this IF I choose to make my game harder.

You can't ignore technical problems with powersets just because you like their style. Almost without a shadow of a doubt, those technical problems can be fixed without ruining what you like about the powerset. Niche appeal is no excuse for sub-par performance.

My only experience with Forcefields is as a Bots/FF Mastermind, as well, and I don't really share your experience. I mean, yeah, FF is kind of hands-off, but a Mastermind isn't an auto-pilot AT with just a secondary. You still have your Mastermind pet controls, you still have your primary attacks, you still need to worry about resummoning and reupgrading henchmen, and even ForceFiends isn't entirely hands-off. You have Force Bolt if you took it, you have Force Bubble which shouldn't be always on, you even have Repulsion Field if you hate yourself, you have Repulsion Bomb... You have stuff to do.

To me, the only drawback to Forcefields wasn't that it's boring - I play Scrappers all the time. It was that it was just endless busywork. This doesn't make the set more fun or more compelling, it just means you have to do the same thing about either times in a row.

*edit*
Oh, and let's not forget Dispersion Bubble. That's always a lot of work keeping everyone in, especially with wonky henchman AI which sees them running all over the place at times.

If someone holds that belief, then that someone doesn't have a leg to stand on. That someone is also not me, because that's not at all the argument I'm making.

I'm not talking about bringing things up to "my" standard. I'm talking about bring things up to an objective standard of performance that's at least somewhat standard. Again, you're mistaking the way a set is PLAYED with the way it PERFORMS. I really wouldn't mind setting down zillions of Tripmines if that actually resulted in a faster defeat of my enemies with greater consistency than just punching them. Of course I would. I tried to achieve exactly this result for years, and it is NOT faster and it is NOT more consistent. OK, I admit, it is safer... Somewhat, but if I wanted safety at the cost of performance, there are ATs which do this better.

I'm fine with playing other ATs in different ways, and simply not playing an AT at all if it has to be played in a way I don't enjoy. There's a reason I don't play Defenders, for instance, and it's not because they're poor performers. They just don't conform to how I want to play. But you don't see me suggesting to "fix" them. That's because I see them as different and NOT underperforming.

No. Of course not. "Boring" is not a balance concern. A "boring" set doesn't perform any better or worse than a "fun" set. This is that difference of opinion you were talking about, and I'm right there with you. I don't support changing a set for the sake of changing a set, just because someone would rather it went about things in a different way. Even though I find Repulsion Field to be the worst power in the game and Force Bubble to be situational at best. Even though Repulsion Bomb is a suspect attack. Even despite all of those things, Forcefields is a strong set that works. Exactly HOW it works really doesn't matter. So long as it works, it gets a free pass in my opinion.

Admittedly, I disliked the set for being a right pain in the ***, but this was elegantly solved without actually changing the core mechanics of the set. AoE buffs didn't force players to play a different way - you're still buffing allies with shields. It just made said gameplay simpler and faster, leaving time for all the other things the set could do, as well. If you have an argument about why this was bad, I'd actually be interested to hear it, and not just to argue against it. That's me being genuinely curious.

Um... Yes. Of course I do, or I wouldn't be making this argument. For instance, I say Snipes suck because they do. People have salvaged some use for them as pulling tools, but as an attack used for damage, they're a terrible waste of time and energy. Does that mean Snipes should be changed into something completely different? Not necessarily. If we want to keep the same gameplay behind them, we can, they just need better stats, which is to say faster activation and more damage.

What the developers are doing with them, I honestly can't say, but it IS possible to salvage things that don't work without stomping all over the cottage rule. Not always, of course, but most often, even if I do wish I my Build Up would build a cottage sometimes.

And what I'm saying is I want all of those different folks to have the same shot at being powerful and not having their time wasted. That's why I say preference and playstyle are irrelevant - because no matter what you like or how you want to play, you deserve a character that works, that levels up on par with the others and that won't get laughed out of most teams. Even if you do, indeed, prefer to spend most of your time laying Tripmines, you deserve to be able to enjoy this AND level up quickly.

My point is that no matter how you like to play (within reason, of course), you deserve a well-balanced game. You should never have to pay with performance or progress or outright fun just because of how you prefer to play the game. That's what balance is all about - not giving us one or two or five "correct" options out of a hundred, but making sure ALL options are correct, so that you CAN choose based on preference and not be forced to pick what works, even if it's not what you want.

I know what you're saying and I agree with it. Hell, I'm one of those people with a non-standard playing preference, keeping mostly to myself and trying to ignore complex Inventions as much as I can. Hell, this whole thread was started to suggest that sets I already like be made more "interesting" in ways that would make me like them less. I'm certainly not trying to step on anybody's toes.

What I disagree with that you seem OK with, however, is that it's OK for some sets to objectively suck so long as someone likes playing broken characters. This I will never agree with. You can ALWAYS improve a set without messing with what makes it unique. We don't have to take people's toys away in order to bring their sets to a more fair place. People should never have to "pay the price" for their personal preference if at all possible.

I assume that's stigma from when bubbles had to be handed out individually. I played Forcefields before the change, and it was a massive pain in the ***, to the point where I was often tempted to just throw my hands in the air and not bubble my stupid robots. That, by FAAAR, was Forcefields' greatest drawback. Now that that's gone, I really don't see a problem with it. It's a hands-off, relatively simple set.

That's not true even in the slightest. I've fought Terra with Trip Mines. I laid around 10 mines slotted for as much damage as I could manage and that only took out about a third of her health. The rest I had to fight traditionally. I can't imagine laying down 30 Trip Mines before they start exploding, considering those come with a 20-second cooldown and a 4-second set-up time. Even if you slot them for recharge at the cost of accuracy or damage, the time you're taking to set them down is CONSIDERABLY longer than most other Blasters would need to fight Terra the old-fashioned way.

Specifically, I'm comparing this to my Fire/Fire Blaster, who took her down in around 30-40 seconds with just Aim, Build Up and tossing attacks as quickly as they recharged. This isn't a question of simple preference. Setting down Trip Mines took me twice as long, if not three times as long as my Fire Blaster's entire fight, and all that did was take a third of Terra's health away.

And that, by the way, doesn't even compare to my Stalker. I didn't fight Terra with her, but I did manage to take down Adamastor in about 20 seconds. Build Up -> Assassin's Strike -> Placate -> Vengeful Slice -> Weaken -> Focus Assassin's Strike -> Attack Vitals -> Focus Assassin's Strike -> end combat. 20 seconds, if that. No set-up time, no hoping a minion won't run in and blow up all my mine, and I did it with considerably more personal protection on top of it.

Not only that, but Blasters don't fight JUST elite bosses. They spend most of their time fighting regular spawns and much of their time fighting on teams. In both cases, Devices either simply can't use many of its powers (like Trip Mine) or otherwise wastes more time doing it than that time is worth. You always need a corner to pull to if you're setting up mines, but there aren't always corners around, as is the case with many wide open outdoor instances. Devices, then, begins to depend on terrain where most other sets don't. You're also always running the danger of having just one weak minion run ahead and detonate all your mines, wasting your set-up time, which I've had happen far too often. You can try to set up a Caltrops field over the mine so you slow the minion down and get more enemies between the trigger radius and the explosion radius, but I spent six years trying to figure this out and the best of my efforts were still little better than crap shots.

I tool Devices to 50, then a second time up to 40. In fact, I still have my 40 Archery/Devices Blaster. At not a single point in time did I ever find Devices to perform better than very much any of my other Blasters. My Devices Blasters simply levelled up so... slow... And it always took them ages to clear out a simple mission. I'm no fan of Blasters in general, but I've played all of their secondaries, and none has been as slow to level as Devices.

That, and the thing has a whole host of nearly useless powers. Smoke Grenade barely has a reason to exist, Time Bomb is horrid even when you manage to hit anything with it and Cloaking Device offers about the same benefits as Stealth from the Concealment pool. As I don't accept that a set having "skippable" crap powers is a good thing, I consider this a drawback to the set, as well.

You're misreading what I'm saying. I don't want stuff to work exactly like how I say they should work. I want them to work AT ALL. I don't know how you can argue with a straight face that having to work twice as hard to be only half as good is anything but broken. That's not a matter of opinion nor a matter of preference. It's a matter of game balance. No player should be put at a disadvantage for picking a specific class or picking a specific set of powers, and in a lot of cases, that's precisely what happens.

That's precisely what happened with the old Stalkers, and I know a thing or two about it. With a Stalker prior to I22, you were always the black sheep of the team, there because you got a pity spot, or because you're friends with someone on the team, or because they had an open spot they didn't care too much about, but most people saw you as not contributing much BECAUSE YOU WEREN'T. And you weren't contributing much because your AT was fundamentally broken on a very basic level. You could circumvent the broken nature of the AT and just about break even if you were really luck and a very good player, but that's not a sign of good balance.

Certain things are considered "cheap" for a very simple reason - because a player can abuse them to great results with very little knowledge and effort, relative to what others can do. People don't like others using "cheap" tactics because it sucks for you to be crunching numbers out the wazoo, working your *** off and on top of your game and some yahoo with a kit-built Brute comes along and outclasses you, then laughs in your face, as I've had happen to my Stalkers. This is not a question of preference or opinion. The AT was clearly and very really under-performing irrespective of what you did with it. The best you could hope for is to break even with a LOT of effort while other people still excelled with no effort at all.

Yes, we all know about SWG. Most of what I've heard about it is very, very negative. I don't know how much of this is down to the game's own merit and how much of it is down to Sony's handling of it (people still spit at me when I mention "NGE"), but I'm really not sure what that has to do with City of Heroes any more so than trying to bring up MineCraft as an example. There is no farming for DNA or levelling up through dancing in City of Heroes because it is, at its core, a fighting game. The harder the mission designers try to pretend that it isn't, the worse the content they produce, as Dr. Graves and Twinshot prove to great evidence.

As a fighting game, City of Heroes' combat needs to be balanced such that no-one is ever left with a "non-combat" character. There is no room in City of Heroes for non-combat characters because combat is what the game is "about," mechanically speaking. Oh, sure, you may play an entirely harmless support character, but you're still supporting others in combat. You can't be a farmer or an entertainer or an inventor... I mean you can, you just can't make any progress in anything that way.

That's what makes at least the balance GOAL of City of Heroes so straight-forward: Make sure everyone levels up at roughly the same rate, and make sure everyone levels up with roughly the same level of required skill, knowledge and effort. There can be variances, of course, but they can't be wild. And all of this only speaks of what a character is capable of. HOW a character achieves this is not relevant, thus is never set in stone.

I'll give you a simple example - what matters for a Tanker is that he's tough to kill. Whether this happens through lots of hit points, lots of defence, lots of resistance, enemy debuffs or some combination of all of those isn't relevant, so long as it happens.

And when someone tries to obfuscate the very real and very necessary aspect of game balance with quasi-philosophical circular arguments like you do, that's doing a disservice to an actually functioning game. You can have all the high ideas and great vision you want. I'm sure Jack Emmert and Peter Molyneux would be proud. But when you game plain doesn't work, none of that matters. You keep trying to sideline the actual, real argument by using ad-hominem criticisms about what I "think" and what I "feel" and so forth, but all you're doing is ignoring the elephant in the room: When a character does is harder to play AND WEAKER than the others, that character is not balanced, and there's really no argument to be had about it.

That's not a case of "a particular player." Do you honestly believe that Blasters got Defiance 2.0 because "a particular player" couldn't make use of the suicidal and useless Defiance 2.0? No, of course not. Castle himself explained that the entire AT was underperfoming in all aspects, and under-performing badly. Do you honestly believe that Stalkers got the changes that they did - the SECOND set of changes - because "a particular player" couldn't make the best use of the horribly broken and gimped Stalkers of I6? No, I played those and they sucked. They sucked irrespective of your playstyle.

I played Stalkers before I22, as well. I knew they could perform at best at a mediocre level, some sets better than others. But if you were Martial Arts or Energy Melee, you were in trouble. You had to bust your butt just to get to the point where most other ATs even start at. There's a reason Stalkers were seen as just gimped Scrappers, and it's not because people like me were being sarcastic. An AT is NOT balanced when a player has to work twice as hard to be half as good. If a player should be forced to work twice as hard, then that player should be rewarded by being twice as good. That, more or less, is where new Stalkers are now. They're currently one of the most complicated ATs to actually play, but the performance they bring to bear is worth the effort.

You continually argue about variety and diversity and choice and all of that, but you also continually ignore that people will, more often than not, pick the option that WORKS first and foremost. Nobody wants to waste his time and throw a lot of effort into something that's never really going to measure up no matter what the player does. It's the same reason F2P games often come out as so unfair - when you bust your *** gathering "free" resources and finally get an even somewhat decent item to become competitive with, you just get creamed by some yahoo who joined yesterday but paid a ton of cash to get the best stuff out the door. Effort and complexity are not bad things, so long as they are actually worth it.

Then you're simply ignoring the long and arduous history of City of Heroes. When Geko designed many of the original powersets, he was pressed for time, apparently lacked enough experience with how people want to play City of Heroes and generally made a complete mess of quite a few powersets. Regeneration was hideously overpowered, leading to around three issues of reducing its power until Jack Emmert threw his hands in the air and just made Instant Healing a clikc instead of a toggle. SR was the laughing stock of the game and Elude didn't allow you to attack. It was only supposed to let you "elude" the enemies you were fighting, which is a complete waste of a final power. Oh, and Forcefields defences didn't stack with SR toggles.

Someone genuinely thought it was a good idea for the Vahzilok to use honest-to-god "untyped" damage which could never be resisted. That proved to be an idea so bad we got a new damage type - Toxic. That's also why we don't have corresponding Toxic defence. Blaster Nukes used to have a 5-second unresistable stun on them, too. You know, just in case anyone surviving your nuke wasn't completely guaranteed to kill you, the game left them five seconds of you being helpless to do it. Oh, and speaking of which, Blasters have had their damage strengthened multiple times. They started out with pathetic melee attacks which exposed them to great damage for little return. Those were improved significantly, which is why Blaster Bone Smasher is scale 2.12 whereas everyone else's Bone Smasher is scale 1.64. It took several years and lots of horrid Blaster performance to convince Castle that Blasters needed more ranged damage and to not be constantly chain-held and killed.

Oh, also, Gravity Control didn't use to have Singularity. It had I believe "Fold Space," which was a group teleport as far as I can remember. And now Black Hole will no longer suck after years of player complaints, and I hear Snipes might be made to not suck, either.

And I don't even want to bring up the "purple patch," where players went from being able to fight +10 enemies with relative ease to getting slaughtered by +3 enemies. Or the GDN, or ED, or the Experience Smoothing changes, or all of the other fundamental core game mechanics changes which were necessitated because the game simply didn't end up playing like the developers thought it would.

Yes, City of Heroes was designed with a few outliers, but in today's environment, there cannot be said to have been anything "intentional" about them. A few things in this game genuinely suck, and most of them date back either to 2004, or are otherwise at least several years old that no-one has had the time and will to fix yet.

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You're making this a lot more complicated than it has to be by putting "diversity" above "a working game." And a working game is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of numerical balance. Only AFTER the game has been made to work correctly can you start looking for diversity within the parameters required for correct operation.

Not unless you can elaborate on what you mean. If your powers of any kind come from you being put into a robot, that robot is the origin of your powers, and that robot is Technology.

You essentially described Positron, who's more or less the poster child for the Technology origin, despite the source of his power being the mutant ability to generate large quantities of anti-matter at will. In his own words from the Origin of Powers, this power is useless for anything other than making large explosions, but it's the technology he's built to harness it that gives him his actual super powers, thus he's of the Technology origin.

Spider-Man really isn't Mutation. He was mutated, but again - a mutant isn't of the Mutation origin. If your argument for Mutation is that he was somehow "different" and only he could have survived the bite, I've never heard that before. Could you cite a source? As far as I'm aware, pre-Spider-Man Peter Parker was actually a pretty un-special loser.

Someone with a red name mentioned this at some point, but he wasn't a writer. I don't think that's ever really established anywhere officially, at least not that I've seen. That doesn't mean it isn't true, just that I can't really confirm or deny it.

You're making it a lot more complicated than it is. I don't hate Devices because it's "different." I hate Devices because it takes me three times as long to achieve anything as it takes my Fire Mastery or Energy Mastery Blaster, and that's if I'm lucky and my mines don't fizzle. I don't dislike Dual Pistols because it uses Swap Ammo and not Build Up. I dislike it because its overall DPA is horrid and I keep getting killed winding up over-long animations that an AT of such fragility doesn't benefit that much from. I disliked Stalkers before the change because they were forced to play smarter and harder and still only ever match Scrapper and Brute performance, who could achieve the same by falling asleep at the keyboard.

What the goal of game balancing should be is to let every player reach the same level of progression and performance with roughly the same level of skill and involvement. Exactly what the player has to do to achieve this isn't relevant, nor is the specific difficulty of achieving it, what matters is that all ATs and all powersets strike if not exactly that kind of balance, then at least something close to it.

At the end of the day, I will not play an AT or a powerset that constantly makes me feel like I'm working twice as hard to do half as good as most of my other characters. I don't care if its playstyle is an outlier, unique or interesting. If the character can't perform up to par, then there's something wrong with that character. And if I can't fix what's wrong with the build, then something's wrong with how that character is balanced, and something needs to be fixed. It's really just that simple.

I don't believe in "hard mode" characters. Hard mode is easily achievable by increasing your difficulty, and you're even rewarded more for it. If a character is "harder" to play than others at the same difficulty, all that means is that character is levelling up more slowly. That's precisely what got Blasters to Defiance 2.0 - Blasters were dying more, playing less and levelling slower than all other characters by a significant margin. They were clearly and provably underperforming, so they were improved. Not enough in my book, but apparently enough for people to play them again.

Variety and diversity can still exist in a system where most characters using most builds do roughly as well as each other. They don't need to accomplish this in the same way using the same tactics, just so long as they level about equally as fast in the hands of the same player. It's not about preference, uniqueness or technique. It's about performance. Nail that and you can proceed to be as unique about how you do it as you want.

I agree, and I want to take a stab at possibly describing what you're referring to. I believe you're less interested in an axe that's overall "bigger" so much as one with a longer hilt, which therefore makes wider swings when you attack with it.

I agree that Battle Axe REALLY suffers from lack of weapon variety. Unlike Broadswrod, which has a fair few long, two-handed weapons in it and unlike War Mace, which has a few long-shafted maces, Battle Axe has pretty much all decidedly one-handed, short axes. You can make the axe head as big as you want, but when the shaft is only as long as my forearm, it's simply not big enough, because it's not big in the right way.

It's a simple matter of practical physics that the longer the weapon you swing is and the farther out its centre of gravity is, the more it will hurt when you hit somebody with it. Short weapons like the Gladius are primarily good for thrusting with, but battle axes are slashing weapons, and you really need a wide swing arc to slash with.

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I will freely admit that I want to see new, unique animations for Broadsword, Battle Axe and War Mace. Of course I do. That'd be awesome! I also want to see entire new "weapon packs" for them, like what we had for Titan Weapons. Say, six new axes in a variety of sizes and themes. I'd buy that in a heartbeat. It would give the set a brand new fresh look and feel, yet it will remain the set I know and love on the inside, and I REALLY do love Battle Axe.

I believe Fly and Hover are envisioned as lifting you up via some sort of updraught, so if you hover over particles on the ground, they get sucked up along the length of your body and spat out in a shower over your head. So, yeah, that also works.

It's more a case of latching onto the supposed need for gimmicks in order for a set to be seen as popular and not being that interested in the rest. I know that's the case for me, and it seems evident that that's the case for quite a few others. The problem, really, is that the OP makes an assertion which flies in the face of convention and offers no argument to back it up aside from "old stuff is old." It's the combination of these that personally irks me.

That, and gimmicks. I've been an opponent of gimmicks very much since Dual Blades, and I remain one to this day. Gimmicks utterly ruined Dual Pistols for me, as I consider Swap Ammo to be a major cause for the set's poor performance in my eyes. Yes, the slooow animations contribute to this, but the gimmick is also at fault. For the longest time, sets have had to pay for their gimmicks with raw performance, usually being forced to mess with the gimmick just to break even. It wasn't until Titan Weapons where a set's gimmick actually allowed it to be STRONGER for having it than it would have been if it hadn't had it. Synapse wasn't kidding when he said he'd have to gut many of the powers if he stripped their requirement to have Momentum to use them.

My central point that gimmicks don't make a set "better," so they're not the one-size-fits-all solution to making a set more desirable. As a point of fact, one of the key draws for some of these old sets is that they DON'T have a gimmick. If a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, then it really doesn't make sense to change old sets and cross your fingers. Make new ones for new gimmicks, and focus on just giving old sets the kind of stats they need to measure up, if they even need them.

What everyone's referring to is this:

The problem is what this paragraph seems to be suggesting. Dual Blades is a TERRIBLE set. Not in terms of performance, of course - it's pretty solid - but in terms of gameplay experience. Dual Baldes is probably second only to Dual Pistols in terms of having the worst, most intrusive, irritating gimmick in the game. The whole set is a "my way or the high way" thing, where either I dance to the set's tune, or I'm playing a weaker version of other sets. And you know for a fact that I have enough experience with the set to hold an opinion on it.

I don't want any more sets like Dual Blades. In fact, Synapse doesn't seem to want any more sets like Dual Blades since his take on the "combos" mechanic is greatly superior. Street Justice manages to capture the concept of stringing together combos without requiring me to follow its precise instructions step by step, but that just shows you that less gimmick is a better gimmick, at least in this case.

As for sets being changed into something COMPLETELY different, of course not. But I'm not talking about "completely" different, so much as having a different feel. It's as simple as a DB/SR Scrapper and a DB/SR Brute. Same powersets, same powers, same in-set gimmick, but the added gimmick of Fury turns the whole dynamic around. It's not a deep, complex mechanical change, it's as simple as adding a gimmick and the set becomes entirely different.

This comes into play a lot - people wanting to introduce gimmicks to old concepts. You were there for the thread about Johnny Butane... I mean, the thread about being concerned for Scrappers, and you saw what the suggestions there were like: Add gimmicks to them. I forget all the ideas, but there as here, if we're going to be "doing" something with old sets and ATs, I'd rather we messed with their basic stats than messed with their basic mechanics.

I like Broadsword because it's simple. I don't have to worry about combos, I don't have to worry about maintaining a buff, I don't have to worry about attack order, I just have to remember what each power does and simply wail on my enemies. I want that to remain, and I don't want it to be made even a smidgen more complex. If I want a more complex set, there are others which fit the bill, and I do play a Dual Blades Stalker - pretty much the pinnacle of gimmickness. Hell, that Stalker has so many gimmicks they blend together, since Assassin's Focus uses the same yellow ring over Assassin's Sttrike as my Empower and Weaken combos do.

My point is that old sets don't need to be changed for the sake of changing them. If we can prove that they're underperforming, then I'm open to suggestions that improve them, but only if they leave the set's core gamplay mechanics intact. I'm not against change per se, I'm against change that threatens to once again rob me of something I like for... No real reason other than because what I like happens to be old.

Setting their damage mod to 2.0 would have had pretty much the same effect - Stalkers deal more damage - with considerably less effort. Balance issues aside, a stat boost would have sufficed, the development team simply chose another gimmick to add to Stalkers other eleventy of 'em.

Your insensitive sarcasm is welcome as always, but it misses the point entirely. Sets that need to be made better can be made better in ways OTHER than adding gimmicks to them.

And again - nowhere has anything of the sort been said. I and others have been discussing sets WE ACTUALLY PLAY AND ENJOY and ways in which to improve them in this very thread. You CAN improve a powerset without messing with its core mechanics and adding gimmicks to it. This is the entirety of what I said in regards to Mercenaries - a set I feel has pretty much all the tools it needs, it just has the wrong numbers to make those tools work.

Leo, some days I feel like you respond to these threads for no reason other than to put people down. While I generally don't have a problem with arguments on the forums - that's what they're here for - I still prefer if we could stick to the thread and not toss around accusations for each other. I know you didn't direct that comment at me, but the point remains: Leave the posters alone and stick to the topic, please.

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Should old sets be improved? Yes, they should, in cases where they under-perform or are using awkward mechanics (Crane Kick chance for critical hit)/ Should sets be revamped and turned into different-feeling sets by the inclusion of gimmicks? No. Why would they be? If you want to introduce a new gimmick, do it in a new set. There's no reason to mess with an old set that people already like how it is.

Honestly, I've lost enough content I liked in this game to the horrid argument of making it "better," only for it to return considerably worse (new Atlas Park vs. old Altas Park + Galaxy City, for instance) that I would really like a much more solid argument in favour of this than "peeps might like it more" with no backing or confirmation. Trying to browbeat me into submission with sarcasm isn't going to change my mind. If anything - and you know this well enough - it's just going to make me dig my heels, and that's how communication breaks down.

That's been the case since before Launch. Katana and Broadsword have essentially none of the same numbers for anything. Animation speeds, recharge speeds, effect strengths and so forth are significantly different between the two sets. What's similar between them is the overall set design.

Agreed, and I get the impression the development team agrees, as well. There were comments on various Dark Blast threads about how bad it was the set had a snipe, with a red name (I want to say it was Synapse, but I don't remember) said that these were misdirected complaints since they would be doing something to snipes in the not too distant future. Nothing concrete was said, but it left an impression that we should stop complaining about the set having a snipe since snipes would stop sucking at some point.

Also agreed, and I've said so in other threads. I get that, for as powerful as these are, they need some kind of drawback, I just don't feel that one which essentially prevents you from using them but once a week is the right choice. At least they no longer hit you with an unresistable mag 5 stun.

Didn't that and Resurgeance receive 10 seconds of untouchability to match other powerset self-revives? I'll freely admit that Revive is a terrible power, but as long as it at least WORKS, I can deal with it. Can't say I'd refuse stat buff of some sort, though.

Also agreed. Mastermind attacks are more or less garbage for most sets, and I could live with this if not for the fact that they're garbage that comes at a huge price. It's actually only the AoE which is really expensive, and honestly, it doesn't have to be. Most Masterminds don't take their personal attacks anyway. The only thing this higher cost does is make those of us who DO take, slot and use our personal attacks feel like fools for doing it.

This is another case where a power's drawbacks worked so well everyone just agreed to skip it. Ultimately, the point of having powers in powersets is to make people WANT them, with drawbacks only existing to make sure people want all of them, not just some of them. Instead, these drawbacks have ensured that quite a few otherwise really cool powers never get used.

I disagree with the basic design of the entire set, but I'll leave it at that.

They're not doing it now. Shoot a rifle and watch your shell casings slowly float up into the sky, ignoring collisions along the way. I 21, I believe, had an "upgrade" for ragdolls which broke them and particle physics and they haven't been fixed as far as I can tell.

Mercs can use help, but all they really need is stat tweaks. Serum is a terrible power not because it's bad, but because it's a mediocre power on a 1000s recharge time, which makes it practically useless. The Spec Ops control effects are also problematic not because they're bad, but because players have no control over them, thus the Spec Ops usually waste them. Messing with the duration and recharge on those powers should help significantly.

The Medic is constantly dying because, near as I can tell, the wires in his brain are crossed. He's trying to heal an ally, so his brain orders him to move into melee range of that target. However, because he has targeted an enemy, he will move within melee range of said enemy and use Aid Other from 50 feet away, since apparently the power is not melee-ranged at all. Fixing his AI would help.

Still, Mercs DID get a pretty significant performance boost a couple of years ago. It used to be that Spec Ops would only ever use their snipes if they were at extreme range, but never at anything closer, and the Commando would refuse to fire Long Range Missile Rocket in the same way. A change made them willing to use all of their powers at all ranges (within reason), giving Spec Ops their snipe back, which is a decent attack, and giving the Commando his LRM Rocket back, which is a decent if fairly rare AoE.

I don't believe Mercs need any new gimmicks, they just need for their current ones to actually work.

Making it more desirable FOR YOU to play when you're not currently playing it, perhaps. It makes it considerably LESS desirable for me to play, and I am indeed playing those sets. I have multiple Axe characters, multiple Mace characters, more Broadsword characters than I can count and Samuel Tow himself uses a Katana. Ruining my sets so that they might possibly appeal to a theoretical unproven audience who needs gimmicks in order to play something strikes me as robbing Jack to pay Jill, and that's a best case scenario.

I am not in the slightest interested in having sets I've always enjoyed changed from under me. Improve them visually, by all means. Then I can choose which new additions to keep and which to leave behind. But don't mess with set balance for the sake of messing with set balance. You're not improving the sets. You're making them different, and a fair few people like Sword/Axe/Mace/Katana exactly where they are in terms of feel.