Arcanaville

Dark Armor/Fire Melee tanker will be plenty mighty. Your primary weakness is you will run low on endurance if you use everything you have in Dark Armor - every toggle, and the mega heal - and you have no knockback protection. Getting Increase Density from your hubby and endurance buffs from everybody will close both weaknesses completely. If you want a little self-sufficiency some things you can do are go Leaping for your travel power and take acrobatics when it becomes available - that will make you basically immune to most knockback powers in the game. You will want to slot Stamina (we all now have inherent fitness if you were not aware, so everyone gets Stamina, Health, Sprint, and Hurdle now). And you will want to aggressively slot Dark Regeneration for endurance reduction. Its a very big heal and it heals a big amount for *each* target it hits, so you usually do not have to slot it very much for healing. You want some accuracy so it hits often, and then lots of endurance reduction so you can use it a lot.

If you have advanced questions about building a strong Dark tanker, just ask around: there are lots of tricks to make that build smooth. But in your team, as long as everyone is buffing each other, you won't have problems while you are all playing together. I'll toss out one little piece of advice to get you started. Most heals people want to use as soon as possible to keep themselves at high health. Dark Regen you will want to manage a little better. Because it gets stronger the more enemies that are around you (and it can't work at all if nothing is around you) you may find yourself in situations where, lets say you have most of a spawn defeated and there's just one guy left. And you are at half health. You might think about using dark regen and get a little health back. But if you believe you can survive that fight with the health you have left and still have plenty left, your best bet might actually be to finish him off, dive into the next spawn and use Dark Regen first: actually hit all the targets with Dark Regen as your first "attack." Chances are you'll hit many of them, and with just a few hits you will go all the way up to full health. Its a way to try to maximize the strength of that heal while spending the least amount of endurance on it.

Beyond that, the tanker forums (and really all the melee archetype forums that have a comparable version of the set: Scrapper, Brute, and Tanker) should be able to give you good advice on playing the set. But I would recommend go charge out there and start hitting things first. Play it a while and get a feel for the character first, then start asking questions. The first fifteen or twenty levels are pretty forgiving for a team like yours, so there's very little you can do that's really wrong.

On the other hand, you can now run a completely separate independent tournament on all Premium accounts in parallel with your primary VIP tournament. Because why limit yourself to only one tournament when you can now run an unlimited number of them?

I'm not sure its practical to advertise openings on a trial for people who don't suck.

That's actually not true. It situationally depends, and usually isn't that bad. Take my energy blaster for example. Her energy powers start off Power Bolt and then Power Blast. When mezzed I can use both. Ignoring the ridiculous amount of recharge I have in the build now, if you shoot both as often as possible, then ignoring collisions for simplicity you will be taking up 1 second in 5 for power bolt and 1.67 seconds out of every 9.67 for power blast. Ignoring ArcanaTime/recharge fun, that is approximately 37% of your time spent just shooting those two powers. With one SO of recharge which is likely at higher levels, that number increases to 47%. Those are close to the worst case scenarios in terms of opportunity cost: even if I could shoot all my attacks instead of just two, if I was slotted 1-recharge I couldn't do any better than about twice the damage. So mezzing cuts my offense roughly in half in that case.

And its not even that bad. Bolt and Blast have 80 feet of range. But Burst has only 40 feet of range: it won't always be usable against a ranged mezzer even if it was available. Ditto Torrent. Only explosive blast has the same range, and honestly the only attack that would be highly advantageous to be available while mezzed besides the first two would be power push (because its a guaranteed soft mez and could actually push the mezzer out of range it *its* mez). Of course, I say attack because the power blasters would most want available while mezzed in general is likely to be Aim.

Of course, energy blast is actually special in some ways in this context, making it not fully representative of all blaster primaries (among other things, its DPA is very flat). But the principles are the same: allowing the first two attacks is substantially useful and not just a tiny fraction of a blaster's total capability. In terms of killing a single target the first two powers contain a significant percentage of the total offense of the blaster. The other powers tend to have more situational properties: they have shorter range, they are AoEs with long recharge, they are snipes. I see the same thing with Archery, with AR, with Electric Blast. Time was, long ago, blasters used to skip one of those two attacks as being unnecessary. Some because they were crap (power bolt, flares) and some just because other powers were simply better. These days, however, you'd be crazy to not take them both, because it provides a substantial advantage while mezzed, and the lesser powers were rebalanced to not be complete crap anymore.

That's true, and its been brought up before. However, the balancing metric for the devs is not intrinsic performance but rather performance generated by the average skill level of the average player. So by definition (since its their definition) the devs are datamining the correct thing in this regard.

You could argue that this is not the same thing as "true" performance and you'd be correct as far as that goes, but the question becomes whether we balance an MMO based on what the tools do, or what the players do with them. And the answer is, as is often the case, there is a balance between the two. The devs look at on-paper performance, and they look at datamined performance. They try to make reasonable boundaries for maximum optimal performance, but those are not going to be the same for everything. And the try to make everything have reasonably similar in-game performance when played with the average player of our playerbase.

Now, actually by this measure Blasters could have the best theoretical performance, having just as much damage and AoE as any other archetype in the general case, and being able to deploy it from range. What hampers that performance is the inability to consistently stay alive in high density combat. But that's a question of build strength and skill, not theoretical performance. If a single player demonstrates by example they are capable of, say, herding as much stuff as a farming Brute and killing it all just as fast or faster, that would prove that in terms of absolute performance that blaster was just as good as any brute. But it doesn't, at least to my thinking (or the devs) say something interesting about whether the archetype as a whole is properly balanced. Its an edge case that proves the best case scenario, but most players never see or sustain that best case scenario.

You understand that if I'm the one designing the powers, and I have no obligation to explain my design to the devs I just have to submit it for review, the odds of me getting really interesting things in there that only I fully appreciate are incredibly high. For them to not specifically ban me from such submissions, the devs would themselves have to be incredibly high.

The part I was objecting to was the part where you said:

Ignoring MMO limitations completely, the HERO system is *not* even remotely balanced if you actually make any serious attempt to min/max it. And I'm not talking about weird tricky rule-bending exploits that all PnP game systems have, I'm talking about something simple like just taking all the defensive powers, or just focusing on a couple point-focused killing attacks. HERO's "disadvantages" were only interesting if both the players and the GMs played them straight. Even if you eliminate players picking lactose intolerance and coulrophibia quantitative disadvantages tend to be too easy to game, even for non-exploitive players.

But mostly, the problem is that the points system is a little too simplified to make a balanced game as focused on the kinds of combat that MMOs have, even if you had a human GM in the driver's seat. Its not a good starting place to make an MMO powers system, and there isn't even anything interesting to learn from it except what not to do.

I can see adapting something like HERO for a single-player game in theory, with some guardrails. But not an MMO.

So why specifically are you quibbling with the issue of not giving even more stuff away to people who don't pay a subscription? You just made a case for taking even more stuff away.

That's like saying you can alienate a former player by sending them a check for ten dollars, when they want fifteen instead. We're essentially going to be sending them a message that says "you can now play *some* but not all of the game for free" and you're saying many of them will say "well if its not everything I want for free screw it I'm not coming back" *and* this is a bad thing.

Its not a bad thing to tell people who want too much for free that they are not going to get it. I would rather have the ones that won't look a gift horse in the mouth. I'm willing to lose the rest, because we didn't have them in the first place. These are, after all, people who are currently not subscribers.

Why stop there? Aren't we alienating those players by not allowing them access to the Incarnate system? To the VIP server? To *anything*? Why block access to anything if we care about "alienating" people who are not paying us money.

You're drawing the us vs them line wrong. This is not a case of us being everyone who has ever played the game before the Freedom conversion, and them being all the new nobodies that will be joining later. This is a case of VIPs vs everyone else: the people who pay vs everyone who doesn't. And in second place, its a case of veterans who don't pay vs neopytes who don't pay, among all the people who don't pay. VIPs win, everyone else comes in second. Premium players come first among all the people who don't pay, which is still second place.

If you are speaking for the Premium players, then let me speak for the VIPs: you don't pay. You're getting access for free. You won't get access to everything. Fair has nothing to do with people who are getting things for free without paying. If you need more free stuff than we're giving you as people who don't pay just to grace us with your presence, even though most of these things can be bought and most of these things can be earned by enough veteran status, so in the case of masterminds and controllers we're talking about veteran players who aren't paying anything and quit the game and were around for two whole years, then I guess we'll have to make due without you.

Fire/Dark will deal a lot of damage, and Dark Armor will be pretty strong as a tanking brute for the team. You have two weaknesses that your team mates can easily fill. One: you don't have knockback protection. But your hubby is Kinetics, so he can buff you with Increase Density which will give you more resistance and knock protection (you can also get acrobatics later if you want to be self-sufficient). Your other weakness is a cost of strength: you may end up burning a lot of endurance powering dark regeneration (a mega huge heal) and all your toggles (particularly if you run your damage aura and cloak of fear on top of your defense toggles). But you have a Kinetics on the team that can give you speed boost which boosts both recharge and recovery, and later transference which basically refills your end bar. *And* you have a Radiation-in-law that can buff you with accelerate metabolism which also provides increased recovery.

So between those two guys, you should have knockback protection, lots of speed, and practically unlimited endurance. Which turns Dark Armor into a monster most of the time.

One more thing: if, perchance, you are all playing together in the 40s one day and you team wipe for some reason, Dark Armor has possibly the best self rez in the game in Soul Transfer: it rezzes you and restores health and endurance by draining all the foes around you *and* hits everything with a mega mag 50 stun. That will basically stun everything except AVs with purple triangle protection up. That will give your team mates time to pop rezzes while everything is walking around dazed. The only rez I hold in higher regard is Howling Twilight.

If instead you go Fire/Fire, you won't have as much defensive protection or Dark's mez toggles. But you will probably (depending on build) have a lot more damage: Fiery Aura has Fiery Embrace which actually adds an additional damage component to your attacks, sort of like a critical hit except it always hits while FE is up. If you have a Kinetics on the team and you're always damage capped with Fulcrum Shift (eventually, at higher levels) then damage buffs won't help above that, but Fiery Embrace will.

So, Fire/Dark makes a good balance between damage and damage mitigation, plus some control (Oppressive Gloom and Cloak of Fear). Fire/Fire will have less control to contribute and less damage mitigation, but between Fire's DoT damage, Burn, and Fiery Embrace you'll be doing a serious amount of damage.

If you want to be able to switch between helping the Pistols-in-Law deal damage and helping the Significant Controller disable everything while defeating them, I'd go Fire/Dark. If you want to jump into the fight and start incinerating everything in sight and leave it up to your team mates to buff you and deal with control, go Fire/Fire. Either way, which ever you pick as being more fun sounding, I think this triple will do well. You don't find many teams with a kinetics controller, a rad corruptor, and a melee anything doing badly. I would give the slight edge to Fire/Dark. The ally synergies are a little better. Cloak of Fear plus Spectral Terror? Everything's feared. Dark Armor + ID + SB + AM = very happy Dark Brute. Rad debuffs + Phantom Army are a decent combo: you can't buff the Phantom Army but you can debuff the foes. And once you get high enough in level and have relatively mature builds, there are few things you won't be able to take on. That team would have no problem taking out, say, The GMs in Croatoa (Jack in Irons and Eochai): I've done it with less. If you could get someone to fill (so you can launch with less than the minimum) I think that team could easily take on any of the standard task forces. As long as you stick together and support each other, you'll do fine in any content you set your mind to run.

That was my shtick for six years playing an energy/energy blapper. In I19 I decided to make a funky range-focused speed demon (even though speed is less advantageous to energy blast) because of all things I really liked just shooting non-stop in the Infinite Freem mission, without needing the short ranged Power Burst attack. But focused so much on pure recharge (including slotting FF procs in all energy blast attacks) does sacrifice enough blapper features to make blapping now significantly more hazardous than it was in the past.

I'm thinking of spending some serious inf making an alternate Blapper build just to have it around, because back in the day I used to blap with just SOs and HOs, and then with an I9 build that wasn't remotely optimized for blapping. Today I know a hundred times more about squeezing performance out of the invention system than I did when I9 released, and I'm sure I could make a wicked blapper build.

The problem there is that "popularity" here is ill-defined: it means different things to different people. Suppose you had two people playing the game, and one is playing controllers and one is playing blasters. The blaster and the controller are both played one hour a day, every day, but the blaster dies a lot and is permanently in debt. It thus levels only half as fast. In one sense its sort of obvious that both archetypes are equally popular in terms of gameplay, but if you phrase the question in just the right way, you could say that high level blasters are highly unpopular relative to controllers. Because there aren't any, so none are being played. Multiply that by thousands of players, and you could have cases where the number of characters at different levels says one thing, while logins and playing times say something else.

I think, though, that when the data was last looked at many different lines of thought were leading to very similar results. In other words, when we say blasters are the most popular archetype from at least 1 through 49, it turns out that it is simultaneously true that blasters are the most commonly created character *and* they are the most commonly logged in character *and* they are the archetype that is most common at every level range (except 50) *and* they are the archetype that is played for the most accumulated time (below level 50). At least, that was my interpretation of the results the last time around when they were discussed. So I believe most or all the factors point to the same conclusion, which makes the notion that it could be skewed by perspective unlikely.

Its trickier to make statements about, say, who is *least* popular, or who is played for the least amount of minutes, that sort of thing, because there is less statistical agreement there: it depends on your definition of least popular.

Lets stop right here and grant everything you've said up to this point. Lets grant that the point of an F2P system is exactly that: to attract as many players as possible by making the game free, and then hoping to make money by encouraging the impulse shoppers among them to buy small low-friction items with microtransactions. In other words, fundamentally the model that games like Farmville pursue. Lets say we accept that as a given, and define the semantics that way. That is what Free to Play is, period.

So lets say I'm in charge of City of Heroes, and I don't want to do that. I have a pretty loyal subscriber base, and I don't want to shift my priority 100% from subscriptions to microtransactions. My playerbase does demonstrate that up to a point they are willing to buy ala carte additions to the game, as long as they are perceived as having sufficient value - booster packs, in other words, and the occasional boxed expansion.

My game is seven years old, and its not easy to drum up marketing noise for a seven year old game. But it does seem like when people *do* subscribe, a high percentage convert to long term subscribers. And those that convert to long term subscribers often become *very* long term subscribers. So what I want to do is to figure out a way to get more people to play the game, so that the game itself can create subscribers: rather than market the game, I will let the game sell itself.

I do have trial accounts, but those are highly limited and there's no easy path from trial to subscriber: you basically have to make one big jump. However, other games have shown that there is another option: some MMOs have created free to play options. Some are all the way free to play, and some intermix free to play and subscriptions in a tiered value manner. I want to tap the opportunities that such a game offering provides in terms of an increased audience for my game, but I do not want to infringe on my subscription base more than I need to.

So I have an idea of what my subscribers will tolerate. They will tolerate ala carte to a point, and that point is roughly the booster pack history of the game. I can offer free access to the game, but each free player costs me money in terms of resources. And I want a way to provide stepping stones for free players to either buy their way into a better game experience, or even jump up eventually to a subscription model. So I want a way to make large parts of the game purchasable in theory though an ala carte store.

Ok, at this point I've admitted I do not have the same goals that the free to play model has. I don't have them, and I don't want them. So by your definition of free to play I should not adopt a free to play model: it has different goals than I have, and I'm not changing my goals.

Instead, I'm going to adopt a new model that has a free access option with no subscription required that has very limited access to the game, and essentially no access to parts of the game which are subject to abuse which can only be remedied by revocation, because the cost to a player of revoking a free account can be made arbitrarily low or zero if they wish to abuse the game. I will continue to offer subscriptions that have the same access to the same game as before, more or less, with the option to buy ala carte additions to the game that are similar to the options that have always been offered in boxed expansions or booster packs. And because I'm going to have an ala carte store anyway, I will allow free players to buy expanded access to the game: I'll call those players premium players because they have now made an actual investment into the game by buying things: it means the cost of revocation is now non-zero and options unavailable to free players can begin to be relaxed for premium players, because revocation now has teeth.

But by your own definition this thing I just made, which is perfectly logical and addresses *my* goals and values for the game, is *not* a free to play system. It does not match your definition of one, or the goals you state are associated with one. Its something different because you say so, not because I say so.

If it was my game, that assertion I would make, and you can tell me all you want that I just don't understand what I want or what I'm doing, but that will fall on deaf ears. I've just articulated what I want and what I would do to get it, and there's nothing self-contradictory about what I want.

All you have to do now is make the leap to recognize what I just said I would do, is what the devs themselves have actually explained they want to do. And this is something I've heard expressed to me face to face in direct conversations with them. So I don't think there's any wiggle room for misinterpreting their intentions in that case. What the devs are doing is a hybrid free to play system, but ignoring the semantic games its not a free to play system as you define one. It isn't one, and they don't want to make one, period.

It might not be that the content gets harder, it might be that the incentive to keep doing it drops suddenly because you stop leveling at level 50. That's the primary discontinuity at level 50: from level 1 to 49 you're playing for a lot of reasons, but one of them is level advancement. At level 50 that specific reason suddenly and abruptly vanishes. Its not the only reason people play, and its not the only reason to play blasters, but it can have enough of an impact on enough players to shift the popularity of that archetype specifically at 50 downward by enough to alter its placement among the top archetypes.

What's interesting to me is not that Blasters fall to #3. What's interesting to me is that even with all the information we have about blasters being the most problematic to play at all levels, they are still as high as #3 even when the reward of leveling them is removed. It suggests that the gameplay reward of shooting at range and generating big floating numbers when you do is significant, and it hints that it might even *be* the fact that blasters are the most risky archetype to play that might be attracting a specific segment of the player population for whom that is a draw.

Keep in mind, I think this sort of thing is doable in theory with certain very strong restrictions, but I think it would be extremely difficult for the dev team to pull off while working on all the other things they are working on. I've thought through the process enough to be able to state that I'm convinced I could do it within the development limits of the current game, but even if the devs were willing to hand me the data and let me do everything, the amount of impact such a system would induce would be so vast and potentially damaging there's no way they wouldn't require a huge amount of oversight and review, which itself would take up almost as much resources as building the thing in the first place, if not more.

You're talking about engaging a sizable amount of code time from the programmers to make changes to the game (even if its only altering the game to handle more data, and it would require more than that), power system oversight, probably Positron oversight, definitely a ton of iterative Q&A contributions - and all of this ignores the fact that whether the devs were to do this as a special project or someone like me were to do it, the powers team itself would have to be trained to use it and manage it correctly in the long term. That's more load on the powers designers to learn, understand, and be able to deal with glitches, bugs, exploits, and customization of an entire new powers system that would be obeying a different set of rules than the current one.

The people who say its impossible I believe I can safely say are wrong. But the people saying its really really difficult and possibly out of reach of the devs given their current resources are probably right unless they completely lose their minds one day and decide to do it on a bet.

The point, though, is both scenarios (and the truth is clearly a little of both as I mentioned) perfectly explain the data without assuming a statistical fencepost glitch.

Also, we can make reasonable assumptions about how they gathered that data, because we've a) seen how they collect data in the past and b) we know the game has these statistical datamining tools built into the game, so its not being rewritten ad hoc every single time.

The numbers that BaB posted for archetype popularity, plus the statistical data presented by Castle, plus dev comments in the past provide ample description of the basics of the statistical data the devs collect. Statements in things like development diaries going all the way back to CoH Beta have stated these same datamining tools were built into the game at the beginning of time.


Incidentally, the devs focus (or have focused on in the past) on three primary metrics for popularity and frequency measurements: character creation rates per unit time, unique character logins per unit time, and unique characters existing at a moment in time (the last two sliced per combat level, among other things).

I know there are a few secondary ones that indirectly measure play: the reward statistics can report on the amount of time characters are logged in and in-combat and the amount of rewards such as XP or drops they earn per session and per unit time, and from this they can extrapolate playing per archetype per window of time (say, per week or month) if they wanted to.

The incentive is you get full access to the game again. Your "model" seeks to extract the maximum amount of free stuff from the game, while trying to marginalize what isn't free so that you can claim on paper there are still advantages to the VIP subscription model while making sure they are things you don't care as much about.

The VIPs and the people who actually resubscribe will have none of the problems you mention. Only the people who decide not to subscribe will have those problems, *and* those problems will have remedies that do not require actually subscribing if they which to avail themselves of them, *and* represent small but meaningful elements of the game.


None of this is relevant to my initial assertion, however, which is that you seem to think there is only one kind of free to play model, and ironically the devs aren't implementing it. Which is ultimately a logical contradiction. Your difficulty is due to the fact that the devs are not implementing a free to play model that prioritizes what the people who do not pay actually get. The priority is first and foremost on subscribers. Not previous subscribers. Subscribers. Previous subscribers get many advantages over new players. Full access to everything they had before for free is not one of them, because that runs contrary to the purpose of the Freedom model. If you understand the purpose of the Freedom model is not to be attractive to people who don't pay, but to be attractive to people who do pay, and everything else is secondary to that, then it makes no sense to argue that the reason to give returning players who continue to not pay everything they need to be "happy" because that is not the devs' goal. The goal is first to preserve the VIP subscription experience as the highest value offering, and *obviously* so. The second goal is to get new players to *try* the game on the assumption that the game's historically high retention rates implies the act of playing the game gets a high percentage of players to want to subscribe. And the third goal is to offer returning players an opportunity to return to the game with a leg up over the free players, by offering them rewards in the form of the new veteran system.

None of those goals states, or implies, that one of the things we need to be worried about is how much value people expect to get for their zero dollars.

Its a strange thing to say, if only we give returning non-subscribers *more free stuff* they will be encouraged to subscribe. I say "strange" but I mean "bewildering." The goal is to give them *enough* to make the returning experience worth it for enough players. Not all of them, just enough of them. And right now they are getting a huge amount of the game for free, and more than beginning free players.

Since you're clearly not going to address the "why two totally contradictory views of free to play" issue, perhaps you can explain what possible reasoning would lead you to believe that the more stuff you give away for free, the more likely people will subscribe to get what little is left after you give away more free stuff. That seems, at least on the surface (and everywhere else) to be counter-intuitive.

At 10 dollars a review I'd be playing a completely different game from the rest of you within a month.

That's a rather remarkable amount of wrong packed into a single post. From the top:

I actually quoted the two posts you made in which you first said that City of Heroes was going down a path that was contrary to what you think is appropriate for a free to play system, followed immediately by a post where you call everyone who tries to say that City of Heroes Freedom is *not* a free to play system like all the others is naive. So first *you* say its not like all the others, and then you say anyone who thinks is not like all the others is naive. There is a logical conclusion you can draw from those two statements, if you assume they are both true.

Second the devs never said that allowing free to play players access to masterminds and controllers would cause server issues. They said those were two of the most resource-intensive archetypes that exist so in thinking about which archetypes to make free for VIPs but ala carte for everyone else they were the logical choices. That was combined with the fact that they are also seen as two of the more challenging archetypes to play.

Third, no one ever specifically purchased unlimited access to controllers or masterminds. Trivial proof: stop subscribing, and see if you still have access. In a hybrid free-to-play and subscription model, its no longer simple login rights that are the primary gate to gameplay as it is in a pure subscription model. It is access to discrete gameplay options that are the true gates, since the login gate disappears. So *all* gameplay options that used to be bundled with a subscription become subject to review in a hybrid system. This is presumed to be automatically understood.

Is it unfair to premium players? Lets review: Premium players do not pay a subscription. They do not pay for access to *anything* by default. They are being given access to the vast majority of the game for free and being asked to pay for only a small fraction of the rest. Will this cause players to be turned off? Perhaps: but this is a game that has to be self-sufficient: I think its perfectly acceptable to "turn off" players who are given most of the game for free and still complain about the rest they don't get for free. I'm willing to lose such players, and I suspect NCSoft is as well: they are the least likely to be the target for the game: people who will be enticed by the free to play options into eventually becoming subscribers, or at least ala carte premium purchasers. So its not unfair, and its not even deleterious: it actually seems to screen out the very people we don't want: people who will look a gift horse in the mouth and complain.

You did not propose a system that would be better for the Freedom model, because you refuse to acknowledge what that model even is. You keep insisting that "free to play" must be what you expect it to be, and that therefore its implementation must be what you believe satisfies that target. But the devs aren't aiming at your target. They are aiming at a completely different target, a target that values subscribers first, and the people who don't actually pay to play the game second; a target that makes calculated decisions on what they will give away for free and what they will charge for that preserves the benefits to subscribers first, provides a path to buy into greater gameplay second, and cares about what the people who don't actually spend any money on the game dead last. Its a model that attempts to encourage previous subscribers to return by giving them *some* but not *all* of the original gameplay for free and tries to see which of them will recommit to the game, either partially as Premium players that buy access to extended gameplay ala carte, or VIP subscribers that pay a subscription. The people who decide to play completely for free, forever, we'll tolerate, we'll accept as part of the overall game community, but they will never be a priority.

As to the devs NEVER listening to the players, that's random silly hyperbole barely even worthy of responding to. At this stage of the game a sizeable percentage, perhaps even a simple majority of the game's features and implementation incorporates player feedback, commentary, or suggestions. By any objective measure the devs have listened and incorporated player feedback to an extremely high degree. Perhaps they don't specifically do what *you* want, but you are not the player community representative. They have listened to and acted on the feedback of hundreds if not thousands of individual players. That's plenty enough to make your assertion false on its face.

The value of healing largely comes from the fact that players cannot tell how much damage is being mitigated without being taken due to tools like taunt, mez, resistance, and defense. So if they aren't getting hit, they assume everything is fine and try to do more. They keep thinking they are indestructible and taking on increasingly difficult content (or alternatively taking on the same content more cavalierly) until they actually start to take damage. And then, of course, they need heals.

Heals are what you use when you've taken damage, and many players ultimately take damage because ironically its only when you take damage that you know you're in over your head. Heals are usually the last ditch mitigation mechanism that will work in the specific situation where people exceed what their other mitigation schemes can deal with, and most players eventually drive themselves to that point.

I don't think there is enough money in all of creation to support this type of thing, and that's not even counting all the powers people you would have to keep hiring to replace the ones that are going to be shooting themselves in the head.

It sounds like the kind of thing Black Scorpion would threaten the powers team with enacting if they don't meet their current set of deadlines.

When they start selling a linux-based launcher in the in-game store, then you'll know.


I'm not quite sure about Premium. I'm definitely keeping my primary account subscribed. I have two others I keep around for testing and some other stuff, and I might downgrade them to Premium if I can configure them with the right Premium options. Alternatively, I might choose to keep them subscribed and add more associated premium accounts I can use for things like letting people test drive the game, having younger and somewhat unpredictable relatives goof around with CoH with me having to worry about what they'll do to the account, etc. Heck, maybe I'll make five more Premium accounts and use them to launch task forces with eight character minimums when I decide to try to solo them instead of begging for fillers. It might be the quickest way to get some of the Master badges.

The short cut is you take the time you spend not playing the game, and subtract from 24.

Well, you probably lost count when you ran out of hands.

Hmm, well you should play what you like, but I think if I was going to assemble a team that played to the sensibilities of the players expressed above and tried to open the most doors starting at level 1 in terms of performance besides that, I might try something like:

Illusion/Kinetics Controller
Electric/Dark Brute
Sonic/Cold Corruptor

Keeping in mind that all the suggestions in here are good suggestions, and almost any three things would work reasonably well, my thought process here is:

Hubby: battlefield general. Illusion has three sets of pets, nearly as much pets as masterminds do. On the negative side, he won't have as much control over them. On the plus side, two sets of them will be indestructible. And he gets the Kinetics buffs which means he will be tactically looking at the positions of targets, who needs what buff, and so on. He'll be trying to optimize powers like transfusion and fulcrum shift.

Brother-in-law: Leroy. I gave him the primary with Lightning Rod, which is a great charge-in-and fight power (you teleport into the middle of the spawns and make a big bang, which is great for that mindset). You have a secondary that is potentially one of the strongest, but it suffers sometimes from burning too much endurance if you actually try to get maximum strength out of it. Which won't be a problem with a Kinetics on the team, so he can just go to town. He'll have a damage aura, decent resistances, the strongest heal in the game, and two mez toggles: he'll be pretty powerful. He also won't have knockback protection, but that's again what the kinetics is for: Increase density will remove that weakness.

You: buff/debuff ranged attacker. Sonic is a decent ranged set with two interesting properties: it debuffs resistances so you will be amplifying the damage of your team mates every time you shoot at anything. And it has this ridiculously powerful cone sleep that you can use when you want to dive in and alpha a group: it can get pretty ridiculous what you can do with that power. You can, if you want, just go berserk with sonic attacks.

Separate from that, you also have cold domination which gives you some really good ally support powers. You have cold shields which will be wrapping your resistance-based brute brother with defense, significantly improving his survivability (and your husband's), and you have a +health buff that just increases the health bars of your team mates as well, also a very good buff. And you have a number of very strong foe debuffs in infrigidate, benumb, and heat loss. That might be a good balance for you.


There's lots of other possibilities: I was also thinking mastermind, scrapper, dominator combinations. But I think that the selection of archetype is incidental to the selection of powersets that work well with each other. You want something that will appeal to someone that just wants to charge in and fight, you pick something with personal defenses and offense suited to charging in and attacking: probably a melee type like brute or scrapper. Stand-off battlefield generals tend to be controllers and masterminds mostly because of their focus on pets, support, and foe control powersets. I tend to think Illusion control is a good set for that kind of person, or Bots, not necessarily "controllers" or "masterminds." And for someone that wants to do a little of both, I tend to think Dominators or Corruptors first. Dominators are probably even better as a dive-in or ally support balanced archetype, but in a team with a controller and a brute a corruptor seemed to fill in the blanks just a little better. Replacing the Sonic/Cold corruptor with, say, a Plant/Fire dominator would be perfectly fine: less ally buffing, more control and offensive playstyle.