Talen Lee

Arc ? - The Origin Of Power
Rating: No rating, reported as a farm

I lost the arc ID somewhere along the line, but quite frankly it's for the best - this arc will hopefully be being pulled down soon and the ashes scattered to the wind. I'm only going to review it for the simple fact of highlighting just how terrible the entire MA system has been for writing and farming. Come with me, noble readers, and learn of just how pathetic people can be in the pursuit of the reward.

I was doing this arc with my stalker - though I hear the author did a blueside version of the same arc - and first, let me outlay the most important thing to me: The writing is terrible. The writer writes each NPC who speaks to you to speak to you as if you are retarded - and forces responses that confirm that view. Then, to compound it, he has those same NPCs (who are, let me remind you, smarter than your character) say things that are utterly retarded.

The premise of the plot seems to be at its core that the arc wants to talk to you about how origins work, which is an okay enough idea I suppose for giant gobbing slabs of text to get crammed down a player's throat but a slightly more nuanced idea would be better. There's no 'arc' per se. Instead, you travel from randomly-selected but supposedly-appropriate NPCs selected from the Cap Au Diable map (which makes sense since they vaguely have the edges of personality, and even the most fumble-fingered writer such as this one can feign a moment or two of character voice), who will then churn out a massive screed that treats you like you're stupid and highlights how stupid the person you need to learn from happens to be.

The arc contains at least one massive clanger for me. Dmitri Krylov is the guy who you talk to about mutants. This makes sense because, despite his basically being a mad scientist without any mutation at all who sends you out to collect bodies for his mad science experiments, wants transformative chemicals for his science experiments and talks about his scientific research, there really isn't anyone else to talk to about mutants in Cap Au Diable, or indeed, anywhere in the whole of the [censored] Rogue Isles. Mutation has to deal with being kicked to the kerb all the time in blueside, breaking the trend redside would be too much to ask, especially from some half-[censored] farm-padding writing.

I keep mentioning that word, yes, I know.

See, once you have the five whole talk-to-npc-padding [censored] done with, there's an actual mission to do. Now, just as a note, you know that technology they use in the oroborous arcs, where you don't need to go back to the contact when you're dealing with a chain of conversations? "Go talk to X," and then the mission just makes them your next talk-to-person, without needing to go back to the original contact? This is the kind of mission that thing would be great for. Since this is just an AE farm's barely-scribbled soft-padding, I can understand however, why it doesn't. If an actual developer had done this arc, though, I'm sure they, with barely five seconds of thinking, would realise what a great idea this is, especially since the actual construction around the missions is so wafer thin as it is. Would be nice to see the character taking some initiative, but since we're all being written as if we walk around with a government handler making sure we don't drown in our own drool I can understand why we need to jog back to the contact and derf merrily while she sends us the next basic bit of research that insists on enforcing the writer's one-eyed and quite frankly embarassingly prescriptive view of the game lore onto us. Apparently, there aren't any albino people in the Rogue Isles, or anywhere else in the world, at least before 1938. Thank you Stefan Richter, for making sure the world was so genetically diverse. Maybe that headed off the whole World War 2 thing, since everyone was all from the exact same genetic stock.

Anyway, once we're done with the pile of so-called writing, we get to the 'mission.' I'll spare you the details, but let me just outline the basics:<ul type="square">[*]Annoying map.[*]Both enemy factions involved offer bonus XP.[*]It spawns bosses very easily, with even small teams.[*]There are an excessive number of glowies.[/list]As a bonus, this is, apparently, because the faction in question are somehow mystically tapping into 'the origin of power', which means not only is the writer telling me that my character is quite stupid, but he's also telling me how my powers work, and that any mid-level pack of dinguses can with the right magical whatchmacallits make it not work. I can imagine how, in the case of my natural origin stalker, this makes any sense at all. The writer just doesn't seem to think through the writing he's put in front of his mission.

So why did I report it as a farm? Because once I was done, I blinked and I checked - I had gained something like two and a half bars from that one mission. I wasn't even trying - it was like I'd gained an utterly outrageous slab of mission bonus XP, for an arc that was about as thick as wet tissue paper, and did not feature any real challenge except the growing despair for the playerbase that could produce a writer who would produce an arc like this.

In the end, this arc is a fine example to me of exactly what's wrong with player-driven content. There's this school of thought amongst those who create the tools for player-driven content, and as a veteran of Total Annihilation, Quake 1's heavy patching and TC scene, Baldur's Gate 2 and of Dark Reign and other moddable games that made it tricky but not hard to expand the content, that every player out there has some amazing ideas, inspired by the game, appropriate for the game, and can be brought out with just a breath of fresh air and the slightest encouragement, beautiful peonies that burst into light under the crabgrass of the day to day and ignite your world with unforgettable experience. The problem is that they're only right if you lower your standards to the point where you'd be happy with this kind of simpering nonsense. I hold the much more cynical view that a certain barrier for entry is good on game modding content because for the most part the kind of people who would do something because it's easy are exactly the same kind of people who will exploit systems and produce self-serving infantile crap because they just plain out want to, and the idea of writing well or producing good content for other people to enjoy, for its own sake, is a lost art. This arc has the dubious honour of at least trying a little to hide its farm effect.

In the end, a total embarassment for the writing community of Mission Architect and I personally feel like I need to write something clever, funny, or witty to rebalance it. Note that that's not this review, but it's a start. Still, it could be worse - could you imagine the kind of editorial staff that would pay someone to write crap like this?

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Dual Blades / Willpower is a great combo. Heraclea has no idea what she is talking about. Role a DB/WP brute or scrapper and love it. There is a video in my signiture that shows you my DB/WP. Keep in mind the baddies are all +4. I'll give you one pointer about DB...don't try to use every attack and every combo.

[/ QUOTE ]Also, to bear in mind that JJ here isn't entirely cutting his bread with a sharp knife as well, remember that he's talking about a brute. Having two endurance recovery powers on a brute is like cheating.

What the heck else are you taking?

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Always one person like you that has to whine about something a bunch of other people would enjoy.

[/ QUOTE ]He said it seems like it'd be fun. Don't act persecuted. He pointed out what was to him a likely problem with the idea - redraw or code complications.

I got a mind/elec waiting to run around. I also have been holding off my fire/fire to 50 since I heard about these changes coming.

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Looks good on paper, but would either be redraw hell, or a coding nightmare, either way seems like fun.

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I think so too (without the coding nightmare part, lol). If there are traps, I'm wondering if I need to kneel down. Maybe the setup/animation time is a problem too. But anyway, it's always good to be natural.

[/ QUOTE ]On an animation level, I actually think you could do quite a fine job of a 'thrown' trap. Has anyone seen 'meet the spy'?

The main synergy you can get out of Dual Blades is with Willpower, a set which does nothing and asks nothing that will interrupt your Doing Nothing But Dual Bladesing. If you like Dual Blades, go for it. If you don't, you'll find any combo boring.

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Looks good on paper, but would either be redraw hell, or a coding nightmare, either way seems like fun.

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Why is every good idea a coding nightmare?

[/ QUOTE ]They're not. Just the complicated and arduous that require nightmarish code are. A lot of the 'easy' stuff was done during the low-hanging fruit period of CoX's life.

Okay, this is less a 'suggestion' in that I intend to mail it to Castle and crusade for it and as much an idea that I think I need to talk about with people who are better at math than myself and who understand the formulae that drive this game better. To provide the simple outline:

Would it be feasible to adjust the recharge of powers based on their animation times, normalising them for PVE?

I don't mean to make all DPA normalised. I also think that these changes should not adjust the endurance cost or damage scalars of the powers so affected. This is literally just about the recharge of the powers. What I was thinking was one of these two ideas:<ul type="square">[*]Powers with animations that deviate from a mean, ( for example, let's say 1.5 seconds) then have that deviation applied to the power's recharge, an outright subtraction.[*]Powers with long animations have a slight discount on their recharge time to, without recharge enhancements, give them the 'lost' time in animation back.[/list]The problem with the first idea is that I think it's not doable. I imagine it would look like this, and forgive my terrible formula attempt:

Recharge Time = ((the formula as it exists, handling global recharge and everything) - Animation Time-1.5), reducing the recharge time to a minimum of the power's animation time

That's probably more complex than the formula can handle. The alternative is a bit more of a problem - it would involve setting the power's recharge lower overall, giving its base recharge a discount, until its recharge was low enough that it started recharging 1.5 seconds into its animation. The main problem I see wth this idea is that global recharge then reduces a smaller value.

Right now, PVE's power-balancing rules seem to be completely agnostic to animation times. While animation can be a control factor - the Energy Transfer animation change, for example, indicates the developers using the animation of the power to throttle back the overall damage rampage of the set, for example. On the other hand, the rest of the set of Energy Melee has a significant number of slow animations, and that seems to bother people. Equal to that, other long-animating attacks and powers have a certain distaste to the number-crunchers because they eat into your mobility, eat into your time, etcetera. It'd be nice if there was an effect to adjust that. On the other hand, it might mean a technical nerf to alternative powers - with recharge changes, some powers can be quite a bit better, I imagine.

Once I set aside the math and the number crunching part of it, I think about, if my 1.5 standard was used, what it would mean?

Blaze would recharge .5 seconds slower.
Total Focus would recharge 1.63 seconds faster.

Which now that I look at it makes me wonder if this would be significant enough to improve the feel of the slower-animating powers and yet not so significant that it would harm those powers that already do animate quickly.

(This post was not made with FOE, but I did use colours to try and make Player happy.)

For what it's worth, we're missing a greek letter.

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Five bucks a slot? Geez.

[/ QUOTE ]Then don't buy 'em.

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I'm sure this has been discussed before,

[/ QUOTE ]It has, but primarily when other archetype boards bellyache about not having 'enough' natural options. Hearing scrappers whine that claws, dark, willpower, super reflexes, invulnerability, broadsword, martial arts or katana aren't 'natural enough' for them makes bile rise in my throat for more or less this reason.

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What about blinding feint being dbl stacked? No penalty there?
I'd also like to point this out for those who may not have seen it. Nice little spreadsheet by Billz
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....e=0&amp;fpart=1
He did all the math for us!!

[/ QUOTE ]Clearly, scrappers need buffs.

Oh ho ho ho ho.

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If you really 'love ss', then you shouldn't be asking for changes. Are you new, lol? The last time the devs tried to 'fix' rage, they added a -recovery that made the crash flat out deadly, so deadly in fact, that the devs, who rarely ever reverse a move, reversed the move, lol.

[/ QUOTE ]The change never made it to live. It was on test. They tested it. And shock and horror, after testing, they decided not to do it. Not quite the same scenario you outline, which I know is kinda bad because it makes your point a bit weaker, but still.

On the other hand, constantly repeating 'the set is weak' doesn't make it true. The set is out of whack, yes - KoB and Foot stomp and Rage all behave differently to what they look like they should - but to act like the set needs to be so ridiculously powerful because otherwise it would be feeble and weak is disingenuous.

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Talen, would being a hoverer keep it at range as well as an immob?

[/ QUOTE ]It's what my empath does, but he doesn't have fiddly cones to position, nor does he have the kind of shortrange that Blaze does. If you find you can leverage it, go for it - but certainly in a majority of missions, unless you're willing to skate backwards a lot, I think you'll find that hover isn't great at protecting you compared to what it could be doing.

I guess what I'm saying is: don't be surprised if you find you don't like it. This combo can probably manage it well. I know I'm going to be trying it on my fire/fire, so I certainly don't think it's a bad idea.

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Does anyone else feel that the level 32 mind control power should be buffed up a little bit?

[/ QUOTE ]A whole mess of people. You might have found them if you'd looked around.

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I mean no one thinks they are right all the time right? No one could possibly think the opinion they is the absolute right one for every other being right?

[/ QUOTE ]I do, but I try to reign it in around other people. Then the guys with the labcoats put the needle in my neck and it gets easier to manage.

In all seriousness, some of this discussion is completely psychotic. Do people just not socket endurance reduction?

I suppose, but it's not all that hot at doing it, you know? It's not reliable enough for my tastes, I guess.

Not to rain on your parade, but I feel that the main thing to make ranged def good on a dominator is a way to force range. The best way to do that is an AE immobilize - which mind doesn't have.

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Can you form your comment in a little more cogent a fashion?

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Must be Happy Hour!!! Hi, Talen!!!

[/ QUOTE ]Bye Ditzy!

Can you form your comment in a little more cogent a fashion?

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Does a Blaster have to build Domination?

[/ QUOTE ]Do you need to be seen to build domination? Don't you have an entire secondary to build domination?

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Did you read more than the first sentence?

[/ QUOTE ]... Ummmmm...

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Legitimate question,

[/ QUOTE ]Oh, yes, I just thougth there was great comedy value in that response. Hear the 'umm' with a sort of childishly guilty admission.

I got my computer back. I can play Psychonauts. Everything is groovy.

Every time I wonder if my position on this issue is unreasonably positive I see the sort of people who oppose it and feel better.

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Does a Blaster have to build Domination?

[/ QUOTE ]Do you need to be seen to build domination? Don't you have an entire secondary to build domination?

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Did you read more than the first sentence?

[/ QUOTE ]... Ummmmm...