Arcanaville

I'm not a supporter of blasters getting direct mez protection, but I also do not know in what way mez protection would "throw off balance" specifically.

I'm not sure having to set up the power in advance is better on the player. Spring Escape has the same limitations as Spring Attack and other location-targeted powers and they haven't seemed to be problematic to this point.

Also, keybinds can help here. The teleport bind works equally well for powers like spring attack/spring escape providing a one-click way of executing the power. Its how I use spring attack itself.

If DKR has a weakness, its that its influence was so powerful its difficult to see its innovative take today.

Schedule someone to talk to your development partner and fix the situation. During normal business hours.

Many's the person I got hooked on reading comics using Watchmen. Also, I've loaned it out so many times and not gotten it back that I'm up to my ninth copy of it. Which is currently loaned out.

The nice thing about it: you don't need to know anything that happens before, or anything that happens after it. It is 100% self-contained. And for an 80's comic with an omnipotent blue man, its gritty realism was far enough ahead of its time that the story holds up well today, even with the story being anchored in the 1980s itself.

Scott McCloud said that comic books are not novels that happen to have pictures, or movies but in book form, but a unique form of expression that has the ability to tell stories you can't tell in any other way. Book four of Watchmen is still, twenty five years later, my best example of that principle.

A quarter century later, I still consider Watchmen to be state of the art sequential art story telling.

As far as I'm concerned Highlander is the greatest music video ever made by Queen.

I don't see any specific problem with making spring escape the utility power and disrupt chi more of an attack power, its just my thought process went the other way instead. Actually, in the original suggestion it was closer to your way: spring escape was a repel-like power that did no damage (called Chi Push) and disrupt chi was a cone that did damage in the original 2006 suggestion. When I looked at it with 2012 eyes, I realized Spring attack gave me a better option than the repel, but that then made it seem like there were too many AoE attacks in the set, so I changed disrupt chi from a cone to a PBAoE that did no damage.

This is an interesting question, because this situation has never actually yet occurred to me. The answer is "I don't know." There has never been a time when I wasn't playing "for" something. Prior to I9 and the invention system, my main could reach 50, then slot HOs, then respec into every epic one at a time, fill in the few story arcs I had not done leveling up (or that didn't exist while leveling up), and work towards badges I didn't have yet. Even if I didn't think about it every single play session, there was always the thought in the back of my head that I hadn't literally done everything yet, so there was always another accomplishment I could eventually work towards, even if I did not do so consistently or all the time.

I don't know what I would do if all of my alts were in a situation where all of them had done everything. But I don't think that will ever happen either, so its an entirely theoretical question. But if the question is what would I do if XP and influence and drops no longer existed, the answer is that would not mean there were "no rewards to influence what I did in the game." It would only mean I would have no rewards left except the ones I made up for myself.

When those are gone, I'm probably gone, although I'm honestly not sure. But those will never be gone.

My own intent was not to differentiate the set from Martial Arts itself, but to make it as close a cousin to Martial Arts as possible.

A Storm Kick cone would have to be in a different slot than power #1 in a manipulation set because that's the defiant-capable attack, and you'd want it to be either a ranged immobilize or a melee knockback or something similar for that reason.

A Storm Kick cone could be an interesting addition to the set as a Dominator assault remix, replacing Siphon Chi perhaps. Or you could start with Angelxman81's version, and convert that Storm Kick into a cone.

In any case you'd probably want to redo the animation to speed it up a bit: the original Storm Kick had a 4 second animation, and in today's game that would drive many players batty.

Jurassik prefer term "isomorphically inclined."

Seriously. Most tankers have knockback protection.

Here we can fly under our own power without wings. The wings are decorative. Maybe in Aion, they actually produce lift.

Well, my thought process for Spring Escape was that it would be nice to have an attack that could simultaneously be used to escape a group of attackers. In general, I prefer blaster moves to deal damage whenever possible, although there are exceptions.

Like this one. It could, although my worry would be that anything other than trivial damage would cause the devs to think the recharge should be higher. I would rather it be available more often than do damage and be available less often. As a utility power (with -res and stun) its value would be decreased by being available less often, even if it did actual damage. Given that, preserving its utility would take priority for me.

If it could have a small amount of damage without affecting its effects or recharge, I'd certainly be fine with that.


Also, a note on Placate. Placate does not make you invisible. Placate, the stalker power, places the stalker into the hidden state and places the target in the placated state. The hidden state for stalkers doesn't make them invisible, it is just a word that means they are in the enhanced state for criticals. In fact, in CoV beta I lobbied for it to be called the critical state instead of the hidden state for this reason. The placated state for the target places them in a state where they cannot aggro the caster unless the caster hits them with an attack first, until the effect expires.

Maybe the problem is you're the only one playing tankers that is inept at arresting and defeating bad guys.

I think the two strategies to employ are:

1. Find a local comic book shop so you can be exposed to a wide selection of stuff, so you can find out what you like. Not only will there be a wide selection of stuff, you can also get advice from the patrons and employees. In fact, you may end up with more advice than you know what to do with. Alternatively, if that's not an option, the advice earlier in the thread to find a local library with comic books is another option.

2. Stick to trade paperback collections initially, so you can read complete stories. Less of a chance of having to hunt things down, and its a better way to get absorbed into the storylines.


Most importantly, comic books are a medium, sequential art, like movies are a medium. You're probably not looking for comic books to like, but rather comic book authors you like, or comic book characters you like, or comic book genres you like. Just like most people aren't cinema fans, they are fans of John Carpenter the director, or James Bond movies, or romantic comedies.

It starts somewhere, but everyone explores the medium in their own way. I liked Stormwatch, which led me to read its successor the Authority, which caused me to follow the author to Transmetropolitan and Planetary. Swamp Thing led me to Watchmen, and V for Vendetta, and From Hell following Alan Moore. My appreciation for the quirky led me to Captain Carrot, and then to the Tick, the Maxx, and tons of others.

Perhaps this seems obvious, but you start with something you like, and then you see where that takes you. And you use the same strategies you use for other media: what else has the writer done, what has the artists done, what else is in the same genre, and ultimately what do people who read what I read also read.

Balance is one thing, but you have to give credit to the launch design team, ne Jack, for setting our original power system around Damage, Control, Support, and Defense. They *also* tried to add an element of Tank, DPS, Healer with Tankers, Blasters, and Defenders, but that doesn't change the innovation that while we do/did have a dedicated tanker class, we don't have a dedicated DPS or healer class, because in City of Heroes damage is something everyone does and healing is just a subset of buff/debuff, and something available to most archetypes with access to Support.

We have a game system that started as a hybrid of a trinity-like system of archetypes and a power system based around a much more modern set of skill groupings. The lucky accident was that our original devs didn't know how to add, so they couldn't balance archetypes quite right. That sort of left their power system more "exposed" to the world, so much so that we the players very quickly began seeing the game less as the archetypes and more as the powerset types: damage, support, control, and defense. No healers, no tankers, no DPS: if a team had enough damage, support, control, and defense in some combination, it was good to go.

I am seeing a teleport-based attack set. I could see such a power for MA in general, but I didn't think it was as appropriate for a blaster manipulation set. But its an obvious base attack in a teleport-melee set.

A powerset with seven or eight teleporting attacks might actually be too much; constantly teleporting doesn't seem as interesting as optionally teleporting. So perhaps a teleport-attack power pool set makes sense one day. That way you could add teleport attacking to any other set's repertoire.

So what I should have said was that while Star Wars may have had a very large impact on pop culture, its Star Trek that has had the largest impact on the world.

In the article I read, it seems Guild Wars 2's paradigm changes from DPS/Tank/Healer to DPS/Support/Control.

Which is basically what City of Heroes' paradigm has been from the beginning, even before the devs themselves fully appreciated their power partitioning (from the very beginning, City of Heroes power partitioning has been Melee Damage, Ranged Damage, Control, Support, Defense).

So far as I can tell, Guild Wars 2 is reinventing a concept City of Heroes stumbled backwards into eight years ago and has been fairly preeminent in this game's design since launch. Maybe its new for classic medieval MMOs, but I have yet to hear anything about this that is particularly innovative relative to CoH from a design perspective.

You know that Peters couldn't possibly be thinking about CoH in any way when he wrote:

It gets a bad name everywhere but here, where Controllers mature into juggernauts and no one belittles crowd control, especially when combined with buff/debuff in the controller archetype, or pure offense in the dominator archetype.

In what universe does Star Wars have vastly more cultural impact than all of classic Marvel Comicdom? They are both so pervasive that I don't see how you can make that case.

Avengers ($1.18b) surpassing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 ($1.33b) seems likely. Surpassing Titanic ($2.16b) and Avatar ($2.78b) with this release of the movie seems highly unlikely.

To me, this feels like its heading in the direction of a dominator assault set more than a blaster manipulation set given its structure. More attacks and more conventional ranged attacks and less utility powers.

I don't think that's a fair comparison because the Avengers is not the beginning of something like the original Star Wars trilogy was. The Avengers is the culmination of something, more comparable to the prequel movies than the original series.

In terms of pop culture influence and creative impact, it would be more proper to compare Lucas and Star Wars with Stan Lee (plus Kirby and Ditko) and 60s Marvel Comics. To say that the Avengers lacks new and unique signatures compared to its components is like saying The Clone Wars just recycles light sabers and droids. The Avengers have been around for 49 years, the Hulk for 50 years. Captain America has been around for 71 years and he just featured in the biggest movie in the world not directed by James Cameron. I'm sure Star Wars will still be around in three decades but if Han Solo features in the biggest blockbuster of 2048, then Star Wars will be able to lay claim to the pop culture longevity represented by (but not exclusively comprised of) the Avengers.

Another related area where there appears to be discontinuous populations is prestige. I get the sense from the numbers that the highest prestige SGs form a separate population from the rest for the very obvious reason they are generating prestige by dumping influence. If most SGs only convert inf rarely, and mostly for utilitarian reasons, then most SGs' primary means of generating prestige is through gameplay, and that might exhibit a pareto-like power distribution. But at the top where influence conversion dominates and there's literally no use for the prestige besides ranking the prestige curve can, and apparently does follow a completely different curve.

Its entirely reasonable to suggest that the highest influence earners form a similar discontinuous population of players earning influence for no purpose other than to amass influence. That would suggest to me that there could be three nearly discontinuous populations of the highest earners, the conventional market participants, and the mass of players that ignore the markets compeletely or use them only as a pseudo-store. For the last group, the markets might actually be a strong influence sink, and not an influence generator at all. For the middle group, the market might be an influence earning opportunity that can form a pareto-like population. For the highest earners, a separate population of earning for the sake of earning players may possess gigantic sums of influence without implying anything about the rest of the player population's worth.