Samuel_Tow

Partly. I created this guy as something of a tribute to Arcanum: Of Steamworkds and Magick Obscura, where electrical currents could be used to protect against magic. I figured that if someone could understand WHY that works, who knows what he might achieve.

Of course, this guy is a tad too preoccupied with his "infinite power" and more traditional scientific experiments, which is how I avoid having him step on the toes of proper mages. Well, my own proper mages, at least, can't speak for other people.

Not really, no.

Gimmicks are not a good thing or a bad thing, they're just a thing. Gimmicks don't make a set better, just different. NOT having gimmicks in a game that seems to be increasingly more gimmick-centric, on the other hand, makes things different just the same.

Battle Axe, War Mace, Broadsword and Katana appeal to "peeps" well enough as it is. Some of us actually prefer the simpler, more straightforward melee combat of the past where I didn't have to be multi-tasking three different gimmicks at once, and all of those sets will be considerably less interesting if you tried to mess with them. The reason you see relatively fewer people use those sets is many of their animations are old and most of their effects are very underwhelming, not to mention how long it's been since some of those have gotten decent new weapons.

I tend to interpret the origin of a character's powers to constitute the nature of said powers, not so much the means of acquiring them. Thus, irrespective of how a character has acquired the technology or how it was developed, if this technology is at the centre of the character's powers, he's Tech. This is, obviously, where subjective interpretation comes into play.

I actually have a character whose name I really should fix, who's a scientist that cracked the natural laws behind magic. Ignoring how intrusive this is to other people's characters (I don't RP or presume to share a fictional world with other people's stories), he's still of the Tech origin, despite the fact that he is using what is for all intents and purposes pure magical energy. The way his machines are designed, magic is used as a power source. Despite the fact that he had to use the knowledge of magic to develop this technology, it's still a piece of technology no different to Doc Aeon syphoning off the heat from a slumbering demon, spoiler alert.

Dual Pistols is one of the primary reasons I gave up on Blasters. The set looks AMAZING, yet the overlong animations kept killing me. Faced with the moral dissonance of disliking something I actually rather like, I opted to instead vacate the whole AT. I'd rather play one which can absorb sub par set performance if I can make it look awesome.

Good point. The way City of Heroes defines its origins, mutated characters are actually Science.

Fine by me, it was a horrible goal to begin with. "Something, anything, no matter how shoddy as long as it's new every week" is simply not something I want the development team to aspire to. Far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't be one bit upset if they only released new stuff on the Market every month, with every week just seeing random promotional sales. Good stuff takes time to make, and I'd rather they had more time to make it.

The reason I say this is because of something I've seen from a fan community I'm a member of (yes, I do have friends, actually). There, they've made sort of a form for presenting player-made characters, including screenshots, mugshots and a whole bunch of esoteric categories like race, age, marital status and so forth. Sure, not every category is applicable to every character, but those always make me think that slight bit harder about what I'm describing when I have to fill them in. They're like leading questions. Having that in City of Heroes, with the option to skip categories or skip it entirely, would be welcome.

At the very least, it would be a useful tool for another player to get a quick rundown of the personality I'm going for if I didn't really care to get that across in the bio field.

Praetoria has this based on origins. My favourite is the giant bomb you have to disarm. Tech characters are able to spot the hidden wire which is the the best way to disarm the bomb without setting the timer and Natural characters are able to pull both wires off their leads so fast the timer fails to trigger. The results aren't meaningful, I don't think, but it's still a nice character moment.

This is actually where "personality" would come in handy. Not all tech characters are technologically inclined. Some are, who use this origin because they MAKE tech, but those who ARE tech aren't always scientists and engineers. For instance, my invulnerable super-string cyborg woman is a soldier first and foremost.

Now imagine if you could pick any combination of the following perks:

*Tech expert
*Magic expert
*Science expert
*Superior intelligence
*Superior strength
*Superior speed
*Street savvy
*Rich
*Famous
*Mechanical life form
*Attractive
*Intimidating
*Connected

None of this necessarily has to impact the game, but it could offer alternate options for a dialogue here or there. And not really ALL of those in ALL dialogues. For instance, say you're speaking with a gang member informant of yours and he tells you to go to a warehouse to look for somebody. You can trust him, but if you're "street savvy," you'll have heard that something big's going on in that warehouse, you can press the contact and he can admit it's a trap. You still go to the mission as you would have, but now you know a little bit more about it.

What you're seeing is a bug I'm sick and tired of reporting. Normally, the game matches run animation speed to movement speed so your feet don't slide on the ground, but this is not true for the transition animation, aka the first step. Every time you strafe, jump or stop, the first step you take will play at a speed appropriate for base run speed without Swift, Sprint or whatever other run speed buffs you have, but the rest will be appropriate.

Now, I will fully agree that running animations IN GENERAL are pretty bad in City of Heroes, but I personally DO NOT WANT the slow animation to play all the time. It's not appropriate for someone moving this fast, and it looks like a ballerina hopping around a stage. Well, to me anyway, since I tend to notice it mostly on my huge female characters.

"I have a mental time bomb!!!" is all I feel needs to be said as a counterpoint. Much of the newer story arcs that feature dialogue choices are much, MUCH more specific even when they give options. To my eyes, the best way for dialogue to be generic is for it to describe the decision you made, but leave out the words with which you said it. For instance, you could have an Agree/Refuse/Agree but insult choice and then you could fill in your own words that would fit for your character. Or not, as was the case for my Stardiver who can't speak.

I have no problem with personalities at character creation, but the game has no real system to account for personality. Dialogues aren't "special," they're just custom content a writer stuffed in. Besides, I feel that making dialogues more generic is a superior idea nevertheless.

Still, though, I'd love to define my characters' personalities even if it's just cosmetic. I'd love to see something of a form to fill in, which included categories like Sadism <-> Compassion or ADD <-> Infinite Patience or Personal Gain <-> Altruism where we could rate various personality attributes.

It makes no sense to go through the trouble of designing a cool enemy group and NOT use it in regular content. It's a ton of wasted effort for some false sense of novelty that's going to disappear the second time you run said TF. You're committing the easiest mistake in MMO development - you're thinking of the first-time experience when an MMO is purpose-designed to be repeated. There's no novel content. There's never going to be any. A piece of content can only shock and impress a player once, and you need to account for the other dozens of times that player will be running the content. "Novelty" doesn't really enter into it.

Furthermore, one of City of Heroes' greatest strengths is its fictional universe and how everything which happens feels like it was both born out of that universe and then also feeds back to set it up. Creating a bunch of beach episodes because you're bored defeats the purpose.

A lot of the old arcs are good because they take the source material seriously. Most of the new arcs treat the old City of Heroes factions like extras, just critters to throw at the player because the story didn't specify a enemy to fight in the mission. You're fighting your double, but you need generic critters, so... Freakshow! Why not? You go to speak with Akharist and the Nemesis Army attacks. Because it might as well, right? You need to build a magical time-travel-blocking device, so you go raid a Crey warehouse. Eh, they'd have generic high-tech devices, so it works, sure.

It's really only those old legacy arcs we have left that take most of those factions seriously. The redemption of Alexander "the Great" Pavlidis is actually a very good mini-arc in this regard. Goofy as the Warriors may be in concept, this gives them credence because it shows that they still value honour and integrity. Corporate Culture is great for depicting not just how cutthroat the Crey Corporation is, but also just how easily they can get away with murder and still keep a solid public image. Far more than their Tanks and their Agents is Crey's propaganda, and this has really been missing since they were reduced to an obviously evil criminal organisation that we can raid without warrant or even suspicion.

Personally, I'm partial to Division: Line because I still feel it tells the story of the Rikti situation better than the entirety of the Rikti War Zone. Back in the day, the Rikti never spoke. Ever. They had no NPC chatter, they never left spoken clues. We didn't even know if they could. Hell, an entry pop-up on a Freaks vs. Rikti mission explains how the Freakshow are constantly spitting taunts and insults while the Rikti fight in complete silence. They're presented as the perfect dogmatic monster alien race who will fight us to the death and want nothing short of our complete annihilation, they can't be reasoned with and they will kill us whenever they get the chance.

Then Division: Line turns this on its head, because all of a sudden the Rikti are fighting among themselves. Huh? But I thought they shared a hive mind of sorts. I thought they were completely unanimous in wanting us all dead, why would they fight each other? Then it turns out they have factions, they have a culture, they have actual morals, ethics and they're really just trying to survive, seeing us as exactly the same kind of dogmatic aliens who want them all dead as we see them. All of a sudden, they no longer feel so alien after all.

If there's one thing Rick Dakan's old writing did well, it was to subvert itself. It would present most of its concepts as simple, one-sided affairs that you always felt you knew everything about, only for it to turn out there was a lot more circumstance surrounding the whole thing and nothing is as clear-cut, at least until we figure things out for ourselves. It wasn't so much shock reveals as just surprising depth. I'm partial to it because I like the style of storytelling that focuses less on the events we're immediately involved with and more on the grand tapestry they weave together. It's how I've taken to telling my own stories, in turn.

And though some of the old stories may have had dark elements to them - poor Edgar Torvald - they still had solid, satisfying conclusions. Even running through the old story arcs now, they're a lot more positive than most of the new content. Each down is counter-balanced by an up, and they leave me happier when they're done than I was when they started.

Such as? About the only things I remember from him is that "you will no longer have to bow down to those who deem themselves your superiors" and "grasp with both hands the glorious future of havoc" and that's only because that ******* speech plays on an endless look while I'm trying to speak with Terrance Dobbs.

To expand on this a bit, the build is all Commons right now. This will probably change when I hit 50 and will go into yellow Uncommon sets for those powers I have slots to devote to, but the thing is that I don't think I'll be able to build up much extra defence from them. There might be some, but I wouldn't count on it, and I honestly don't want to mess with my build any more at this point. I have nothing I want to skip. In fact, I'm already skipping a power I wanted. Basically, optimising the build is really not a priority at this point. I just want to make the best I can of it as is.

Right, I'm counting on that, plus any level shifts I might be able to score. Someone ran the numbers for me a while ago, and told me that with enemies at -1, they more or less come up to where non-DA even con enemies do, which is a good thing to hear. Also, don't Destiny buffs spike huge protection numbers for a short amount of time up-front? I imagine this would be very useful.

SR Stalkers seem to have something of a head start on SR Scrappers, since Hide offers a few percent of defence extra even when suppressed. Also, with just toggles and passives, I'm already running ~87% defence debuff resistance, so the set doesn't really suffer that badly from defence debuffs. Turns out it's also resistant to recharge and slow, which REALLY helps, I'm finding. It seems like even if SR on base values isn't hugely survivable like Stone or Willpower, it resists a hell of a lot of the more irritating debuffs. That was a positive revelation.

And, yes, the goal is to bring Elude back faster. If I can't cap with the toggles and passives, I can still cap with Elude. I haven't run a Set Inventions build through the ringer, but I expect that'll give me a few recharge bonuses, so this plus Elude recharge slotting plus an Alpha that gives recharge should be groovy.

Speaking of an Alpha, I had a long, hard look through them, and the one which seems to offer all stuff I want and no stuff I don't need is Agility. It starts off with an endurance modification boost, which isn't that useful to me, but by T3, it offers both recharge and defence. I'm not sure how much either of those will help, but they're things I want. Going with either Spiritual or Nerve does give me buffs for things I want, but it couples those with buffs I don't precisely need. I CAN get more recharge out of a Spiritual buff, but not THAT much more, and I'll miss out on defence and better endurance recovery powers.

Truth be told, with a faster Assassin's Strike, I AM paying a cost in endurance. But the power is so worth it!

Well, when an Overseer pisses me off, I can always go Elude and eat about eight small purples and THAT pushes the thing down into the ~10% to-hit range, but it still sucks. Honestly, the giant eyeballs are just cheating. They have insane accuracy, they're hard to hit and their chomps deal ridiculous amounts of damage. I got chomped for 1000 hit points back in the day. Oh, and they see through Stalker Hide, lest we forget The regular ones aren't too bad, since they're not that sturdy. It's the Overseers which I simply HAAATE!

Funny enough, Devouring Earth eminators aren't very bad for a Stalker, just because it's fairly trivial to kill whatever will be setting them down before they even aggro. Hidden Assassin's Strike is still a useful tool It works well on everything but Sentries since they're Lethal-resistant. Specifically, it works well Guardians. One stab and they're dead, and this saves me a lot of Quartz trouble. Cairns are still a problem, they're just less instantly deadly.

*edit*
And before I forget - thank you kindly

You don't know me well enough.

I'm not sure if you were really asking for examples, but one of my own Mutation characters is an alien brood queen around several billion years old, who gave birth to her own species of hive mind drones. I consider her Mutation because I consider her drones to be her species, and compared to that species, she is clearly different and vastly superior.

Most of my other Mutants are typically the X-Men kind. Either they were just born different, or otherwise born of super hero parents, but developed powers not entirely related to said parents.

While I don't want to argue against how you define your own origins, I do want to point out that this is inconsistent with how City of Heroes defines Science and Mutation. Science is most often accidental and Mutation most often innate. Science is Spider-Man or the Hulk, it's people who were exposed to "science gone wrong," an experiment that either wasn't supposed to happen or wasn't supposed to have the result it had. Mutation is essentially the X-Men. You don't have to stick to these definitions of the origins, of course - that's the best thing about the Origins system. That's just what they're described as officially.