Asimov

More badges: always good.

Billion-level badges: hey, need to have something to shoot for. No problem there, but while I like collecting things, I'm not as obsessive about a perfect list as some seem to be.

Croatoa badge size: way too large. I appreciate the art, but it makes both the info screen cluttered, and the badge window harder to search through. Only accolades should be that big.

Badge sorting: While not really directly related to the issue, I second the request for a more sensible sorting of badges. Collapsible sub-categories would be real nice, especially for the exploration badges. If nothing else, a more logical sorting rather than the half-random it is now would be excellent.

The frequency for the events needs to be turned up on the test server. It's hard to give feedback when nobody can take part in them.

Overall impressions so far:

I really like the animations. I'm not quite sure why, but they seem to be about the right look for a comic-style 'sound' set; rippling, air distortion, etc.

The sounds could use some work. None of them are bad individually, but they seem to be drawn from different sources. A little more coherency would be good.

The initial blasts also seem very strong. Not sure how they'll stack up later on - the mid/end powers seem more control-focused - but it seems at least 20-40% faster than the other blast sets, even before the debuff. I can also really see a problem once you get two or three sonic blast-users in a single team; imagine AV or monster resistances dropped by %100+? Don't want to neuter it, since -Res is a handy and unique effect, but it may need toning down.

Rockberry, on Virtue. Who, despite not being in my sig, is still the best-dressed alt.

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And crey power tanks, protectors.

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Who cares about stuns? Those suckers'll knock off 80% of your health in one shot with a Total Focus or Thunder Strike. One shot after that, and faceplant.

... Of course, both of those stun too...

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Imo, the bosses didn't make the squishies less useful, they made them more useful, but required that they do very specific things.

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The biggest issue was, basically, the improved bosses required squishies to team. Yes, yes, teaming is good and all, but having missions spawn the minimum of a red boss was a bit too much, especially in the mid-range levels. There's a point where it goes from 'requiring good tactics' to 'if the dice go badly, you die, regardless of your skill'. Unfortunately, at the moment, that point happens to be way further back for Blasters and Defenders.

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It is kinda funny but I was doing a hollows mission with 2 controllers, 2 fire tanks, 2 scrappers , an empathy defender and myself a lowly Ice/Elec blaster.

It seemed as though the only person who could see the bosses was my little blaster. Even the controllers wouldn't bother holding the bosses except when they were the only thing left. At one point one of the team sent me a private tell asking me what I was killing because it was taking so long to kill the minions. I then asked him how many of the last 6 bosses he had killed. When he responded with "What Bosses?" I just ignored him from then on.

Seriously I don't get some of these new players. I think the game is too easy for some classes, extremely easy when I get statements like this from scrappers only in their teens.

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In fairness, it's not like Troll or Outcast bosses really stand out all that much from the minions/lieutenants. Even the Skull and Hellion bosses have bigger differences in appearance than them.

... Okay, the Bone Daddies tend to blend in, but everyone back in the days they had Shadow Maul learned right quick to pick them out in a crowd.

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I think that's quite literally backwards. The intent of the status effects is not to get through the defensive AT's. Why would they have status protection if it was?

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Yes... except... most of the defensive sets didn't have complete status protection, or it was given with severe drawbacks. Unyielding Stance used to root; Rooted used to, well, root; Wet Ice was exclusive and didn't protect against sleep. Fire armor had to use healing flames(!?) and burn(!?!) for status protection, and they still don't have innate knockback resistance. And so on. Integration and Practiced Brawler were the only status resistances that had no real drawbacks, and there were included in the (then-considered and still-considered) weakest defensive sets. Thus, the original intent behind status effects were to force the AT to chose between maximum protection that could be blown through, or having to give up something to keep their protection. Squishies suffered then, but so did everyone else.

Naturally, this changed over time, because it just wasn't fun. It took a few issues, but all the defense sets now have pretty damn good levels of innate status protection, even if several defensive sets still need work on other fronts. However, in doing so, the devs made two mistakes. However, in the process, the defensive sets became too strong. Or, rather, they always were too strong overall, but getting the maximum potential out of them was taxing work, and strategies for achieving it took time to develop. Teleport-Unyielding, Perma-Unstoppable, and so on; now all you need to do is click on a few toggles and not worry about it. As a consequence, the endgame (30+) is overly biased towards blowing through the defensive sets. It doesn't take a genius to figure it out; a decently-built scrapper can pretty much have no difficulty at all while soloing even-con missions, and tankers are only worse from there. See how many people flippantly mention how they blow through Invincible missions. Don't believe me that the devs are balancing things around the defense sets? Then why are there so many psionic-using foes in the endgame? My oldest character may be a Blaster, but I play every AT, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out which is harder.

The prevalence of status effects and other defense-mangling tricks (see: Sappers) is the devs flailing attempt to try and get the game balanced; even status resistances can eventually be overwhelmed. But... and this is the big but... anything that can do that will completely blow undefended ATs. Again, see how they buffed bosses a few patches back, and look at the carnage that resulted. Adding more status effects and more damage just isn't doing the trick, and I'm positive the devs know it, but they still persist on it.

I guarantee any villain group in I5 will have numerous foes with -Resistance and/or -Regeneration attacks. I'd put money on it. There's already signs of it in I3/I4, with the sonic-using council mobs; only the somewhat limited (arena-focused) scope of I4 kept there from being further changes, IMHO.

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Just some general ideas - I don't really have any new ones, though. It just seems to me (still) that blasters don't have the right tools to do what they're intended to do in all of the situations they're expected to do it in. They can do it, and they can solo - they're not gimped, at least. It is clear that quite a few players are frustrated with them, though.

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The issue isn't so much that Blasters are 'gimped'; they're alright from 1-20 or so, and on par with everyone else until 30-something. The real problem is that, once SOs factor into the equation, there's really nowhere to go but down. At that point, you're just keeping pace with mob scaling, in terms of raw damage. The single-target melee attack sets get more attacks that allow them to fill out attack chains and do more damage, while the single-target blaster sets are still stick with the bolt/blast combo they've been using since day one. The endgame mobs are balanced around scrapper/tanker defenses, because they'd have no challenge otherwise, but that leaves Blasters (and Defenders, and Controllers who mess up) in deep trouble. There's a few things I'd like to see done with the game that go beyond just rebalancing blasters; they're more a symptom, not the cause.

1) Decide whether Blasters should be area-effect or single-target, and adjust their power sets accordingly. If they're really supposed to be the MMORPG 'mages', then all Blasters need to be able to do excellent area-effect damage; the Nova powers are nice, but they're not as useful as having several focused lower-damage but more-frequently-used powers. If Blasters, or certain blasters, are supposed to be single-target, then make their powersets more like certain scrapper primaries. Up the range on the burst-style attacks to be comparable to the rest (or even just give one at all, in Elec's case), swap the sniper blast for a hold/disorient (Ice has it right, here), and add an additional ~7 BI ranged attack on the level of Head Splitter or the other end-game single-target scrapper powers. Being able to cycle through at least four single-target attacks at range will guarantee a continuous chain of pain; not even has (or is supposed to take) Hasten, after all.

2) Range is mostly a tactical advantage, not a defensive one. This isn't so much a problem as a dev perception that was once true, but is no longer valid. When the game was originally released, mob ranges were a lot shorter than they currently are, several types of enemies didn't have ranged attacks, and the AI was set up that mobs would only shuffle about a bit if they were sniped from long range, rather than run. All these have since been changed, and that means a Blaster is just about guaranteed a counterattack, no matter how far out he may be when he attacks. There's still advantages to range, of course - the ability to select targets with a button press, and most enemies do tend to cause %30 less damage or so at range - but it's nowhere near an increase in survivability that the devs think it is.

3) Status effects, as they are now, are horribly broken. Almost every status effect in the game is a binary proposition; either nothing happens, or you're unable to act and have your toggles dropped. The intent of the toggle-dropping is obvious, it's the dev's way to try and get through defensive powersets... but, and this is the big but... all the defensive sets are immune to status effects. This means that they hurt the 'squishy' ATs far more than they hurt hard-target ATs; every time they try to increase the number of status effects, blasters and defenders die en masse, and yet for some reason they seem utterly baffled as to why this happens. The only thing that can be done here is reducing the prevalence of the high-end status effects across the board, and adding lesser debuffs that circumvent status protection while not completely crippling those sets in the process. -Resistance debuffs are an obvious one, and there's already a fair amount of -Defense debuffs. How about -damage, though? Or more examples of slow that don't come with the caltrop ping damage? Maybe more examples of Immobilize, since at least you can use inspirations and attack while stuck? Regardless, something needs to be done; status effects are just salt on squishy wounds, instead of the defense-equalizers they're obviously intended to be.

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There's also the frustrating effect of getting them to a sliver and missing with the final followup... That's mainly bad luck, though.

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Accuracy has not been nerfed! ... It's just been coded by Murphy.

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DAMAGE ENHANCEMENTS ARE NOT ENHANCING DAMAGE. That's right, damage enhancements do little more than allow you to keep up. They're an actual boost right when you get'em, but enemy HP scales up such that for the other 10 levels you have'em for, they're actually doing little more than letting you keep up.

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Actually, once you reach the 40's, they do even less than that. A Blaster is arguably less effective against even-con enemies at 50 than they are at 30, since mob HPs and resistances scale up faster than player damage does; a 'two hit kill' becomes 'two hits and a sliver of HP' left. This is true for every AT, but they have control or defense to fall back onto. And it's doubly painful for single-target-focused sets like Energy and Elec, since having to take an extra attack to defeat a foe means that's another second or two they and their friends are shooting you.

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if a blasters role is ranged damage, why do defenders have their own special range secondary secondary that blasters cant take?

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Eh, this is fair enough, really. It's no worse than, for instance, scrappers have defensive sets tankers don't and vice versa, while scrappers (and me) pine for EM/SS as scrapper primaries.

(Granted, I'd love to see all the 'exclusive' sets made available to the relavent ATs, but I can at least sort of see the dev-logic, annoying as it may be.)

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The overpowered nature of Blasters during issues 1 and 2 had been addressed by two things: The fixing of Smoke Grenade and the Purple Patch.

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Don't forget the various announced and unannounced changed to mob AI that have taken place over time, virtually all of which done in a way that (intentionally or not) hurt blasters. Mobs running if sniped from too far away, mob groups scattering when hit by AoE attacks, the fear effect of rain powers overriding all other forms of control, etc.

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Their range is just f'd right the hell up.

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And half their damn shots are cone attacks. Nothing like one of them fighting the tank across a room, and spamming you with bullets too.

And guess what, folks! Check the current training room patch notes. Super Speed and Super Leap have a -%50 accuracy, in PvP and PvE, the same as Flight.

Apparently Blasters just weren't dying enough. And so much for any future hope of actually keeping enemies at range!

(At least I still have my six-slotted hover...)

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1. You can already do this, take the Speed Pool Power "Whirlwind" and run it before any other animation changing toggles(fly/hover) and you will no longer root when attacking. You will also knock up enemies who close to melee.

Be careful on the endo cost though

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Holy carp... just played around with a high-slotted whirlwind on Test. Aside from the noise of it in use, this is awesome... running around like a madman, flinging energy bolts without stopping. This is how a blaster should feel.

I still maintain that, say, %80 of the aggrivation with Blasters could be dealt with by the following two changes:

1) Ranged attacks in the primary power sets no longer root while activating. Don't even need to change the actual activation times, simply make it so you can continue to dodge/run while firing. This can't be impossible to implement, as you can already do so with a proper leap-joust. And even Ice, with its fast animations, needs to hold still for the second they take to fire. With this, you'd actually be able to keep enemies at range, and thus have range be a viable defense.
2) Scale Blaster damage upwards as they level so that net effectiveness remains the same. Post SOs, Blasters actually decrease in effectiveness, as mob HP and resistances continue to rise, while there's no further way to self-improve damage. This leads to being able to obliterate yellows with a snipe at 22, but only being able to one-shot whites with a snipe at 50. Since offense=defense for blasters (more or less), this steady decrease in objective effectiveness is a big harm.

Boom. These two changes alone don't seem that hard to implement, but they'd go a long way to improving the 'feel' of the AT without (presumably) requiring drastic code rewrites.

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But why? Champions already exists. Although I suppose a Paragon City sourcebook would be cool.

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Better face it. Champions is an... acquired taste. Although there's something to be said for the current cinder-block-sized HERO rulebook.

Personally, I think Mutants and Mastermind is a better match for City of Heroes, as it's level-based but still fairly free-form, but here's hoping the Eden came comes out good. If nothing else, they at least know what they're doing when it comes to game-writing!

I concur.. I managed to organize a Hess TF yesterday, and it was a blast. Easily the best TF I've done. Was helped by the fact that everyone worked well together, a well-oiled team if there ever was one... amazing, especially for a completely random pick-up group. I can't say for certain, but I suspect everyone was having too much fun to get bored or restless. Aside from a near-wipe in the final chamber, it went without a hitch.. and even that was fun! It's just about perfect... not too long, only took us about two and a half hours, limited travel time, and what few repetitive missions there were were mercifully short. Definitely has my kudos.

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Yes. Because now I'm most likely going to have to stand within punching distance of somebody to shoot at them with a gun....and still risk missing.

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I suspect it'll probably be to the same range as Impale or Focus; long enough to not be melee, but nowhere near the range of blasting. I can see some PBAoE's in a set like that too, among other things. Main trick is the impressive I've gotten is that it's not just firearm useage (that's assault rifle), but more cinematic gunkata.

Of course, we'll see how it is when it comes out.

Level 5 Broadsword/Invul vs. Outcasts
Level 5 Broadsword/Invul vs. Trolls
(...)
Inspirations used were two Lucks, one Discipline and either two or three Respites
(...)
Of the primaries only Claws and Martial Arts are problematic as neither has an AE at level 5.

This is exactly what I mean, though. You have a build that's, while not uncommon, the exact sort of scrapper that's good for hazard-mining. Multi-hit attack, decent resists for the level, and using a third to half of your inspiration tray. Pretty good for hazard-farming, certainly, but that doesn't mean it's easy; it just means you're prepared ahead of time for it. What level mobs? 5, 6? That's a limited region of the zone, to say the least. And I can't see that sort of performance against 7 or 8's, simply due to the way to-hit rolls scale, and the difficulty of boosting both defense and accuracy at newbie levels.

Did you recover enough inspirations between the battles to make up for what was spent, in the right distribution so that you could beat the next? That's part of the crux of the argument with Hollows missions, especially; you can win just about any near-level fight if you blow enough of the right inspirations, but that doesn't mean it's sustainable, or worth the effort to. I find this part especially hard to believe; disciplines, especially, are rare(ish) inspiration drops, so are not a reliably renewable resource.

And what if you were a single target build? Most tankers, defenders, controllers? Or if you didn't have invulnerability defense powers? Or...?

Where, by the way, someone should tell people that the Hollows is a horrible deathtrap, no one can survive, etc. because frankly, the zone was crowded. Took me forever to find the spawns for these shots.

Well no crap, it's a new zone, and one that just about anyone can access. Of course it'll be crowded early on... especially since it isn't obvious that you can skip the Hollows missions, if you don't know about it ahead of time. Or maybe all those people lurking around the mission doors begging for groups was my imagination?

As it is now, the way I see it.. the minions are fine. They shouldn't ever stun, but that seems to have been fixed a patch or two ago, so it's pretty much a non-issue. The real problem is the Lieutenants, and to a lesser extent, the bosses. The Outcasts stand out too much here, with both the Bricks and Shockers having the ability to chain-stun, even now. The Boss versious of both can do more, including the Lead Bricks' immobilzes, and the Lead Shockers' hurricane.

Now, I'm willing to argue that Hellion and Skull and Clockwork Lieutenants are underpowered. But... they were the baseline everyone went by before for lower-level enemies; harder-hitting and more durable than their associated minions, but not with a drastically more varied power sets. The Clockwork lieutenants can stun and hold.. but I've never seen a single one chain them, either. Now, if everything else is notably easier, then there's two likely conclusions that can be drawn. The first is that the prior enemy groups were underpowered... but this doesn't seem to be the case, considering the constant downward tweaks of the Outcasts and Trolls, and Statesman's comments about them. The second is - the Outcasts and Trolls (and thus by extension, the main zone(s) where they congregate) are more powerful than comparable opponents.

It's not any one problem that make the Hollows aggrivating. The Tsoo, for instance, are more varied than comparable opponents, but (most) people don't complain too much about them. But... you don't have to run through a zone full of Tsoo five or more levels above you, in massive packs, to get to missions. You don't (usually) have to face red-con Tsoo bosses in missions. You don't get a contact that sends you on a wild goose chase to said theoretical Tsoo-filled zones. You don't have to fight Tsoo at level 5. It's all of these things, put together, that become a problem... any one of them can be overcome.

You only needed a "perfect or near-perfect" group in EQ if you were taking on raiding targets. The corrolary here would be AVs -- are you prepared to argue that AVs should be solo material, or that you should be able to take them on by just throwing any old bunch of people at them?

Irrelavent. We're talking about novice level mobs being too powerful, not about archvillain fights requiring support.

In any case, missions will continue to scale to the number of participants, which means soloing will always be an option.

But not if the base scaling, at the minimum (one-person/solo) level, is too high.

No, it isn't. This is the point -- it's an artificial increase in difficulty. Because it is artificial, support classes -- three out of five in this game -- are never truly needed. That means they'd might as well not exist. Because it is artificial every defeat and every victory is hollow. If you are defeated it is only because you chose to be, by taking unnessecary chances. You could have played it safe and levelled just the same. And if you win, so what? The people playing it safe get the same rewards.

I'd argue there's deeper problems at work here than just that. 'Support' classes should be able at solo at a reasonable percentage of the speed of a blaster or scrapper, at all level; some can do this (fire and illusion controllers post-32, fire/* tankers post-burn, etc.), some just can't (mind/* controllers, etc.). There's a fine line between 'desired' and 'essential', and many people want to push it over into the latter. In my supergroup, we can get along alright without a controller or defender; it's not essential. But when there's one or more in the group, things are much much smoother, and downtime is minimized or eliminated. If they're essential, however, that means we wouldn't be an effective team without one; and how much fun is waiting for the right sort of player to join up?

Ask Batman.

Yeah, he snipes and hides around corners all the time.

Sure it is. The lack of defenses on Blasters is supposed to mean something. They can stack pool defenses to get almost as much Defense as a Reflexes Scrapper (which is not a good thing, but that's another argument), and they can even get small amounts of protection from Immobilize, Hold and KB if they take Leaping, but they can't protect themselves from Disorients. That means they need someone to take the shots for them (Tanker) or to pre-empt the enemy (Controller) or protect them when they do get hit (Defender). The faster that is made evident, the better. The bulk of this whining is coming from Blasters who suddenly discovered they couldn't just fire at will and blow everything to pieces. The weaknesses of the various ATs should be manifest at all levels of play so that people won't become spoiled by not having to deal with them at the lower levels.

There's more to defense than just status protection, and there should be. Damage plays a signifigant part, and (for the most part) blasters have little to no ways to mitigate that as well. There's pool powers, but again, that's irrelavent; other classes with better defenses can and do take those as well. And as mentioned, it's not blasters who have difficulty with chain stuns and sleeps; what about fire tankers, or ice tankers? Or Dark Armor scrappers, who have to choose between being held or being near-one-shotted? Or Empathy or Kinetic defenders, who have no self-usable status resistance powers?

Right, because mobs that a level 5 Scrapper can fight 8-10 at a time are just too powerful.

Irrelavent. What build, what powers, what slots? What levels are the mobs being fought? Just because one or more carefully-specialized and planned builds can do it doesn't mean it's somehow universally easy; it just means they're throwing off the curve.

My main problem with the 'It's too easy! That isn't interesting!' crowd is that they never consider the reverse end of things. What if the mob difficulty was closer to FFXI, or EQ, where you'd need a perfect or near-perfect party in order to safely take down an enemy? How is that any more interesting? Especially with the sheer variation of builds, and the numerous fun-but-'imperfect' characters that can be made. It's always easy to hunt over your level, or do other things to artifically increase difficulty, but it's much, much harder to try and work around overpowered mobs. I'd also argue that dramatically higher difficulty makes for more interesting gameplay, in and of itself, at low levels; is 'pull, hide around the corner, repeat' really any more fun or heroic than 'wade into the fray'?

As for the Outcasts and Trolls themselves... well, I do like the changes, but they are overpowered. Not dramatically, but they shouldn't have had status effects at that low a level. It's not fun to be chain-stunned, or even to be whacked around and have to restart your toggles every ten seconds. It isn't any fun at the high levels either, poor Fire and Ice tankers, but that's no reason to bring that sort of gameplay dynamic down to the lower levels. Even Lieutenants and Bosses should use these sparingly, or not at all - it's not dramatic to be punched dizzy by a Lead Shocker, and then chain-stunned and battered down to a hospital trip.

The overall damage, as well, was much higher... moving from 8's in Perez to 9's in the Hollows with a novice showed this; even with resists on, the overall survivability was much, much lower. If the two groups can keep the variety of powers, but possess no status effects and damage somewhere between where they are now and where they were before, it'd probably work out well, without ruining their uniqueness. Of course, this is probably exactly what Statesman is planning.

Actually, the Boomtown Phalanxer badge is northeast of the entrance. It's also on ground level, for the record.