Arcanaville

The bottom line is that its probably not too much to ask for, but that fact doesn't help the suggestion at all. Suggestions require compelling reasons to do them besides "is it too much to ask" or they just won't ever happen. They never do.

40% resistance to regen is also probably a lot higher than you'd get, even if the devs ever decided on their own to add it for their own reasons.

First of all, regeneration's thematic role isn't lower downtime, that's more its mechanical advantage. But Stalker Regen still recovers health faster than other sets even with low or zero endurance. Regen still regenerates without endurance. You seem to be trying to construct the argument that the purpose to regeneration is to recover endurance faster and the lack of QR makes that impossible. But that's a circular argument.

Second, there's the question of whether Regeneration has intrinsically better or worse endurance consumption. Looking at Dull Pain, Reconstruction, and Instant Healing if we add up the eps of all three powers unslotted if they are used as they recharge we get about 0.218 eps. If we slot them all for recharge and basically double their recharge rate we get 0.436 eps. That plus Integration at 0.26 eps, the cost of the average mitigation toggle, is Regen's endurance cost to run at full power, assuming we don't slot any of those powers with endurance reduction. With just one endred in Integration the total cost is 0.631 eps. That's pretty low for a stalker set. I'm pretty sure its lower than Ninjitsu, Dark Armor, SR, and Willpower while still being competitive with the performance of those Stalker sets. Only Electric Armor and Energy Aura, which both have endurance manipulation as a *core* ability of the sets would likely beat out Regen in terms of endurance.

There's no stalker invuln, but if we compare stalker SR with stalker Regen if both have zero endurance the regen will still return to full health faster due to fast healing. If both have low but non-zero health the regen will return to full even faster by being able to turn on integration. The only way the Regen will recover endurance more slowly than the SR in this situation is if the SR turns off his or her toggles, regardless of the use of Regen click powers. Stalker Regen still has a significant mechanical advantage in both health and endurance downtime, just less of one for endurance than Scrapper Regen has.

If it was operating both randomly and powerfully out of control, yes. But that's not necessary or sufficient to explain the scene. Its only necessary to state that he had no conscious control over the exact manifestation of his power, so it acted without conscious control. He may have been angry enough at the guards and Shaw to project raw magnetic force at them, and that force crushed the guards helmets killing them. It did nothing to Shaw because he can absorb electromagnetic energy harmlessly and he had no metal on his person that would have injured him indirectly. The objects in the same room tended to be crushed because that might have been the way Erik's power manifested the thought "kill." But once that thought faded because the guards were dead and Shaw seemed untouchable, the objects in the other room were thrown around because without a specific target for his anger his power acted in a less focused manner; that was the manifestation of unfocused anger. It may also have something to do with those objects being farther away. It took a lot of time for Erik to learn to channel that anger into specific control, but at this early stage the only control he had was basically "do something over there" but without being able to specify exactly what.

You said, in direct response to Shagster asking the direct question did you find Schindler's List equally unrealistic when the camp prisoners didn't attack their guards, that "Schindler's List is a film about real person. X-Men is a film about super heros/villains from a comic book. I'm sorry that you are unable to tell the difference between the two." That's only remotely relevant if you are saying that because Schindler's List is about real people, Shagster's question is not appropriate. Otherwise its a non-sequitor deflection.

To reiterate Shagster's question, do you find it unrealistic that the camp prisoners in Schindler's List don't attack their tormentors. I'm asking specifically because Schindler's List is in fact about real people, so I'm directly asking whether your compass for judging realistic behavior actually works correctly in judging whether reality is sufficiently realistic. I believe that is as unambiguous as the question can get.

Say what? Iron Man came kinda close, I'll give it that. Thor and The Incredible Hulk don't come anywhere close to the comic book backstories of those characters: they are more "inspired by" than following the origin stories of those characters and their surrounding cast.

The X-Men are closer to the spirit of the comic book's backstory than either the Hulk has gotten in two movies or Thor got. Personally, I liked all four movies at least a little, although I think the Ang Lee Hulk really went way off the reservation. But even the Incredible Hulk is closer to the television show than the comic books. And Thor? What I like about Thor the most is that they *adapted* that story for a movie, keeping a remarkable amount of the "mythology" of the story while basically tossing all the parts that really aren't important to telling a Thor story, like Donald Blake for example. In other words, the creative people behind Thor were smart enough to take inspiration from the comics without being beholden to them, because a direct translation of Thor would have probably been a failure. It needed to be grounded somehow, and they managed to do that.

Are there any sets that can claim to be able to fulfill their thematic role while out of endurance?

I'm actually not fond of endurance drain in City of Heroes specifically. Its a pet peeve of mine that endurance drain really violates the principles of good game design in the way it interacts with the way powersets and individual powers are designed. Especially when its specifically used as a deliberate weapon against the players, such as in the case of the Sapper. I wouldn't characterize this as specifically a Regen problem, though.

For me personally, the question comes down to something simple: at what point did I believe my character become a hero or villain? Was the addition of the magic sword the moment when the character was "born?" If so, magic origin. If my character was a hero first, and then got a magic sword, natural.

Take Batman from the Nolan movies. Bruce Wayne becomes the Batman through natural training and skill. The Batman *uses* technology. But the Batman was created by Bruce Wayne through natural skill. So to me, Batman is natural origin. I consider origin to be what created the character, not what the character uses after origin.

The real glitch in CoH is the assumption that what created you is what also sustains you. So what created you will be what enhances you. The Nolan Batman is clearly a natural origin character. But his "enhancements" so to speak are mostly tech, because that's how he develops his abilities beyond his original skill. In City of Heroes, origin and enhancement are considered to have the same basis, and its actually that connection that is most at odds with how superheroes and villains work in comic books. Spiderman is science origin, but then enhances himself with technology (web shooters). Cyclops is given optic beams, but naturally learns the skill to harness them (with some minor technology). What first gives you your powers and what you do to leverage or enhance them are often completely different in comic books. In the case of Magic or Technology characters, the most common way to improve is with more magic or more technology. But science characters far less often continue to experiment on themselves, and mutants continue to mutate less often. Natural characters tend to both continue to enhance themselves with natural methods and seek out supplements such as technology.

This dichotomy is the thing City of Heroes handwaves away, and causes the most issues with the concepts of origin and ability source.

Its a bad argument, because there is no such design intent. First of all, the sets with defense debuff resistance don't have DDR just because of an intent to provide resistance to debuffs against their primary mitigation. They have DDR to prevent cascade failure. It is cascade failure that is the critical difference between resistance and defense. Basically, resistance resists its own debuffs and defense avoids its own debuffs. But resistance continues to resist resistance debuffs at full strength even while it is being debuffed (by resistable debuffs). Defense avoids less and less defense debuffs as it is debuffed. That difference means defense can cascade fail while resistance cannot.

If it wasn't for cascade failure, the protection that defense sets would have against defense debuffs would be actual defense: the ability to evade attacks and debuffs with them. This argument for DDR *only* applies to defense debuffs: it applies to no other debuffs.

Ignoring sets with defense and DDR, is it true that at least the other sets have debuff resistance to ensure that no set lacks it? For at least one set I can say with certainty the answer is no. Invulnerability only gained debuff resistance in I13. It gained them not because the set was lacking debuff protection, but rather because Castle wanted to buff the Invuln's passives. He didn't want to go crazy buffing the resistances and defense of those passives, so he buffed the resistances a bit in some cases and gave them a rainbow of debuff resistances.

Invuln is illustrative. Invuln didn't get debuff resistances *because* it was missing debuff resistances. Invuln got debuff resistances because there was a justification to buff the set, or at least some of its powers. It ended up with debuff resistances because it needed something and that something just happened to be debuff resistances.

If you lack debuff resistances, that might be a good thing to add if there is a need to add anything. But without that justification to buff in the first place, the absence of debuff resistance is meaningless.

One more thing: Invuln needed a *small* buff to its passives, so it got small buffs. Just because every set has debuff protection, doesn't mean everyone has *high* debuff protection. Without a justification for a massive buff, the best regen can hope for if the devs decide to make this argument go away is to get something like 20% resistance to regen debuffs. If your primary worry is getting hit by massive multi-hundred point regen debuffs that can halt instant healing, 20% resistance to regen debuffs will probably not be impressive. But this argument dies. Worse, the existence of the debuff resistance will mean you lose the ability to make a stronger argument for stronger resistance later. Changes are made when a threshold of requirement is crossed. Adding tiny less productive buffs makes it harder to prove that threshold has been breached.

I'm guessing Shagster is pointing Schindler's List specifically *because* its different: its different in that Schindler's List explicitly holds itself out to be a small dramatization of real world events, whereas X-Men First Class obviously doesn't. Therefore any objection that the scene with Erik is unrealistic due to his reactions ought to go double for the actions of the people in Schindler's List. You can't say Schindler's List is too realistic to complain about the realism: at that point you're in reality is unrealistic territory.

Its harder than normal content sure, but if you're a blaster then being in content that can kill you in the blink of an eye if you're not careful, do something stupid, get lost, or fail to use appropriate inspirations should be just another day at the office. If I'm not actually paying attention and have an empty insp tray one even con master illusionist can send me straight to the hospital. So actually, being surrounded by level 54 mezzing bosses and Lts that can two-shot me are only slightly more dangerous, because its hard to get more dangerous than "can kill you in a few seconds" and the standard content can already do that.

The way I look at it, my blaster can't get any more squishy and I'm used to it: scrappers and tankers are the ones that are going to have more difficulty adjusting. And in fact it took a little bit longer for my scrapper to adjust to the difficulty increase than my blaster, because my scrapper is almost indestructible anywhere else. In the trials, I'm still plenty tough but significantly more situationally vulnerable.

If he started kicking and biting Shaw, I would have walked out of the theater right at that moment.

When could they *not* completely ignore anything that happened with the ST name on it that was inconvenient? Like when they invented a Borg queen for Star Trek First Contact? Or retconed Zephram Cochrane as being from Earth rather than Alpha Centauri? Or invented a whole new previously non-existent Starship Enterprise for Enterprise that was apparently pivotal to the birth of the Federation, except no one seems to have remembered that. The entire animated series is considered non-canon, except the parts that are (i.e. the parts DC Fontana wrote for Spock, just because). Scotty thinks Kirk has come to rescue him in TNG, the guy he thinks he saw die in Generations? They even retconed Star Trek to launch DS9 by making Sisko a survivor of the Wolf 359 fleet. The same fleet the Enterprise flew through in TNG apparently totally destroyed. You'd think they might have mentioned there were survivors when they were passing through, instead of sightseeing the wreckage.

The irony to Star Trek is that the technical people kept technical continuity fairly clean, but the story writers didn't feel the same obligation not to break continuity if they felt it was important to their story. Orci and Kurtzman put more effort into maintaining story continuity than most Trek movies, actually, insofar as they gave any explanation at all for the situation they placed themselves in.

I wonder if it will ever happen to me, that I stop thinking about this game as an actual game. I find it comforting that I still read posts like this and find them unfathomable. When I start nodding, that's when it'll probably be time to hang it up.

Mostly because both guns and arrows have been used as volley firing weapons for nearly their entire history as weapons of organized warfare. The primary skill involved for both is "shoot thataway" and the primary lesson you have to teach a rifleman is reloading. Archery requires significant skill just to loft the projectile, much less loft it in the general direction you're aiming in. Archers weren't being taught expert aiming skills for most of their education, they were being taught to actually draw a bowstring without ripping off a finger or ear.

However, just because organized warfare doesn't usually *prize* riflery skill doesn't mean it doesn't exist and wouldn't help in less organized or more specialized circumstances. It might only take weeks to become at least reasonably competent as a normal rifleman, but it might take substantially longer to become an expert in CQB combat tactics with pistols, say. Shooting to hit qualified targets while missing non-combatants in high density situations, for example, is something that a superhero might train years to get good at, even longer than an archer might under certain circumstances.

During the American Revolution the Continental Army did have specialized units of sharpshooters that were experienced hunters and outdoorsmen: their many years of skills proved to be at times highly advantageous relative to standard army training. And in World War I it was discovered that pilot recruits from rural areas performed statistically better than their urban counterparts because so many of them were hunters, and understood the concept of deflection shooting instinctively from years of hunting.

You have to learn one less thing with a gun than a bow and arrow, but that doesn't mean skill isn't a strong differentiator in areas where skill matters.

This is something I spend some time on with challenge missions, and its why I do not simply make extreme critters in things like the Scrapper Challenge or the team stress test one. Extreme critters blow through endurance too quickly. That's actually normal: standard no-AE critters would do the same. But it means the minions can in effect nullify their ability to use many powers after the first minute or so of combat: you actually want at least some of them to pace themselves so they are still buffing and shooting high damage attacks deeper into the fight.

In fact, you don't want to give all critters all three of the first attacks in the typical offensive set. One or two, and then the harder hitting ones. That will lower their overall DPS, but increase their jumpy burst damage which is a different kind of challenge for players.

One way to keep some minions in the fight is to give them Willpower. You can then give them both regen and recovery. Willpower is less dangerous to give to a minion or LT than a Boss or AV, and it will mean if you don't kill them quick they will come back for more, and still have endurance to shoot with. I also like Regen with Dull Pain and quick recovery for the occasional minion.

Somewhere I have some notes from way back in I14 when I designed the scrapper challenge. I will try to dig them up this evening and write up how that was designed, including the critters, just to add a counter-point to mauk's design methodology. The mission has been around for a very long time now, so I don't think I'd be spoiling anything to say how everything was put together.

To a certain extent, it still is. You have to be quick on the draw with Ion to prevent other people with Ion from pre-empting your jumps, and most people have Pyro and Ion making Ion collisions common (Void seems to be the third most common but it is less problematic because it can't be launched from range).

This "what happens if everything is dead" gets held up a lot in talks about who's redundant. Let me set this straight: if you are on a team and that team is vaporizing every spawn before you can get to it, its not that they don't need your scrapper or your defender or your controller, its that they don't need *you*. Even if you swapped in a fire blaster you'd only be fireballing things that would have died immediately anyway whether you chose to shoot or not. I suppose you can self-deceive yourself into thinking you're helping because you see floating damage numbers, but in actuality what you are really doing is probably slowing the team down slightly by generating slightly more lag.

As to healing and other mitigation buffs, if you find the team literally not needing them at all, its probably because the team already has an overkill level of those buffs. So its not just you that is redundant, most of the people you think are making you redundant are also redundant. That's what overkill means. Most players don't mind occasionally contributing to overkill, both for damage and for mitigation.

As to the higher end content like the trials, or even most task forces, I have yet to be on one with my controller where I wasn't using heals at least occasionally. If you think healing has become completely redundant, I invite you to take radiant aura completely out of your rad/rad's tray while you play.

Keep what you can, throw away the rest. Reboots and restarts are always like that, especially in comic books. The whole concept of Hypertime in the DC universe was originally intended to make sense of all the crazy contradictions by saying that in a sense everything we've ever read actually happened, but not in a way you can linearly chronologize. It happens in the same sense we know (or at least Watterson has described) what happens in Calvin and Hobbes happens, but not in a way we can reconcile with reality. Calvin sees Hobbes alive and Calvin's parents see Calvin playing with Hobbes, and both realities are supposed to be correct. Similarly, all the myriad events that have happened to Batman, Superman, Spiderman, and the X-Men are supposed to have happened because those events inform us about the characters in important ways. But they can't have all happened within a linear chronology or they are sometimes ultimately contradictory. Sometimes the stories attempt to explain this with alternate timelines or dimensions or magic. But those are post hoc explanations for the artistic rationale, which is simply keep what you can, eliminate the rest.

Whenever a power simultaneously is allowed a target and a location it has two ranges: primary and secondary. The primary range ("Range") is usually the maximum range to target. The secondary range ("RangeSecondary") is usually the maximum range to the location. Recall friend, for example, has 10,000 foot range and 25 foot secondary range. It can (unslotted) grab a friend up to 10,000 feet away and teleport them to your location, but that location must be within 25 feet of you.

The way Team Teleport works, the primary target is self (the caster). That determines what the area of effect of the power is centered on. The secondary target is a special kind of target called "teleport" which means "the location target of a teleport effect." Its why teleport powers have a selectable location: teleport powers have those and location AoEs have those by mechanical design. So technically speaking the power targets self and self must be within 25 feet of yourself, and teleports to a location which can be up to 225 feet away from self.

So of course, also technically speaking, the primary range could probably be zero and it would still work, but my guess is that this is a legacy error: the original designer thought the primary range should be set to the radius of the power, and the radius of team teleport was once 25 feet (perhaps even as early as pre-beta). Because the setting isn't really used** the bug had no reason to ever be corrected.

The number of twists and gotchas in the system is really quite substantial. I keep saying if I taught a class on the powers system, I could probably fill several days. That's not really an exaggeration: if you were starting from scratch and didn't already know most of the mechanics in detail there's thousands of little rules for things in there.

It is interesting to do power system archeology though. Teleport could have been the single target restricted case of team teleport, so there's no reason to give the two powers different definitions. This suggests the powers were not created at the same time, or not created by the same person, or tech had to be added to allow for the Team Teleport functionality (via secondary targets) after teleport was already created.


** Even more technically speaking, its possible the range just has to be a small non-zero number, although I suspect zero would in fact work.

The way I interpreted that scene Magneto wasn't in any control of his powers at all at that point: he was just wildly projecting magnetic force fields at all the objects around him in random ways. He didn't specifically crush the soldier's helmets by conscious choice, he crushed them simply because they were hollow metal objects nearby. I'm certain there was no purpose to causing the metal objects in the test lab fly in circles: that's clearly just Magneto's powers going wild.

Shaw probably figured - and probably correctly - that random electromagnetic power flung around by Erik was no serious threat to him, nor were metal objects moving at any conventional speed. An exploding grenade and a hail of bullets meant nothing to him, a bunch of flung metal wouldn't either. Shaw's later actions clearly project a not-conservative person. He couldn't be *sure* of being able to absorb Havok's energy either, but he was infinitely confident in his abilities.

Magneto isn't a magnet or becomes one to exercise his powers. In the comics, the explanation for his powers is that he can control electromagnetic energy, and what comes most easily for him is magnetic fields. But he's been shown to be able to manipulate almost any electromagnetic energy in at least certain ways. This theoretically allows for immense power and ability, limited only by control. If Magneto was simply projecting magnetic fields to do what he's shown doing, he'd affect every magnetic object between him and his target, and probably within the surrounding area.

Controlling electromagnetic fields could allow him to manipulate even normally non-magnetic objects with electromagnetic fields. It would allow him to levitate himself even though his own body is not magnetic, as he does near the end of First Class. It may even be that Xavier was foreshadowing this potential when he said in First Class that if Magneto learned control, he would have access to a power no one would ever match.

Well, I started reading x-books in the seventies, and I liked First Class quite a lot. Its a different spin on the Xavier/Magneto relationship, but I think it captures the central point. The X-mutant books had fun moments to be sure but also very serious ones, and the whole "revel in their power" thing was always tempered with feeling like outcasts. I should point out here that God Loves Man Kills dates from 1982, and the world hates mutants was already a well-established theme by then. For that matter, by then the Xavier/Magneto relationship had also been well-established as rivals rather than pure enemies.

The one moment I think X3 got right, among all everything else they got wrong, is the moment when Pyro tells Magneto "I would have killed the Professor if you would have let me" and Magneto stops him cold and gives him this hard stare and says "Charles Xavier did more for mutants than you will ever know. My single greatest regret is that he had to die for our dream to live" and then walks off. Erik believes Xavier is misguided, and possibly dangerous, but he also considers Xavier a protector of mutant kind and that counts for a lot in Magneto's eyes.

In any case, my recollection is from the late seventies up to the early nineties the X-Men bounced from one soul-crushing adventure to the next, always wondering what was going to jump up and bite them next. The fun moments were interlude more than the norm. In fact, the 80s went from Dark Phoenix to Days of Future Past to the Brood, the Morlocks, the Mutant Massacre - I'm trying to remember a time in the 80s when the X-Men were allowed to be a bunch of kids playing around for more than a minute. In fact, at one time Xavier kicked Kitty Pryde off the team and relegated her to the New Mutants specifically because he claimed the X-Men was not a place for "children." That was before being brainwashed into being a ninja assassin, of course.