Barata

I'd ask the devs to reconsider this change, explaining to them like you explained to us. It sounds very reasonable and seems like it'd greatly further the story-telling potential.

How does your avatar get her chest to shimmy like that without moving the rest of her body? I find it.... hypnotic.

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I have a strong opinion on the topic. I have deleted one character over level 20, I think, ever. It was a L29 fire/dev blaster.

My other fire/* blasters are fire/ice at 35 and 19, fire/elec at 50, fire/en at 50 . So it's not the primary.

A blaster generally does about 50% more damage (when free to go postal at any time for no reason) than a scrapper using their primary and secondary combined. This is based on almost 150 levels of Force Field defender.

A blaster using their primary ONLY can do, maybe, 10% more damage than a Scrapper. The rest comes from melee attacks, Build Up, etc. - none of which Devices has.

Devices mostly has Trip Mines and Time Bombs, for damage. These take a high-damage-per-second class and add a lot of seconds sitting around doing no damage.

It is possible that two /Dev blasters can get good results by setting one Time Bomb each, in the same way that two Elec/ Blasters can get good results by both using Short Circuit at the same time.

But I didn't stick around to try it.

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/devices is a lot there for fun. I would never do a toon blaster who didn't get at least aim or build up. AR is a nice set, its best paired IMO with ice manipulation.

As far as Fulmen's argument, they REALLY need, and about time, they gave targetting drone a 40% damage buff to it. Would end a ton of complaints about the set, especially in the later levels.

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A permanant Damage boost to targeting drone would lead to endless complaints of how OP it is. And 40% is jsut to much of a damage boost to give perma also. About 25% would be more balanced. Also its to hit would have to be reduced to about 4% also as the power would have to provide the same overall over time effectiveness as Buildup. And it gets a 13.9% To Hit Continuously to compensate for it not adding Damage.

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I think it should be a permanent damage boost, but at a reasonable level. Figure AIM gives a 50% damage boost for 10 seconds every minute. If you really enhance AIM so that it can be used every 30 seconds, you're getting a roughly 15% or so damage boost overall. A 15% damage boost isn't overpowering since all damage boosts are based off of base damage, not enhanced damage.

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Post number, what, 6 or 7, on this same thing in the past couple of days?

There are threads here and in the AT and Power Forums on this already.

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Sorry. I realize the general concept was brought up many times, but I didn't know if it was ever suggested to be tied to leveling rewards, and feel it's worthwhile to bring up again.

I specifically chose to tie it to leveling several characters to 50 because if you stick through all of the levels and content enough to progress several characters to level 50, you should be knowledgeable enough and seasoned enough to deserve that option of making a mid-rank character. Even at 25, the majority of work is still ahead of you to it to 50 if you want.

One of the biggest wishes for players who have created multiple level 50 characters is that they could create characters higher than level 1. A player, when they hit 50, unlocks new archetypes, so why not have it so that if you hit a certain amount of level 50 characters, you unlock the ability to either advance a low-level character to a certain level, or create one at that level.

Maybe have it so that if you have three level 50 characters, you can advance a character to level 25, or start them out there?

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Can't see what else he could mean and seeing as how that has little to do with the overall game. I don't see the devs putting any work into it.

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Costume pieces, emotes, faces (new ones being added next issue) and other unlockable content also doesn't add into the overall game, yet the devs do spend time creating them.

To answer the first question, yes, it's the grunts and groans you make when jumping, and also the taunt sound effect. What I find interesting about the taunt sound is that with my female stone tanker, she makes a female taunt..... until I go into granite mode, at which point she suddenly has a male voice.

I find it very disconcerting to jump (which you do a lot in this game) on my kid sidekick and hear this very adult and masculine grunt come from him.

So devs, if you can create new faces and costume pieces, how about giving us better sounds our characters make so we can actually have youthful voices on our youthful characters (for which there are faces for).

I created a young character, kind of like a Robin, and his voice stands out as being totally inappropriate. How about, on the character creation screen where you choose male/female, you have a choice for Young Male, Young Female, Male, Female?

I prefer content over exp. Whether that content is dialog forming a story, or creative use of powers, or interesting battles, I want to play something that interests me. It's been quite a while since I realized that I'm not in a hurry to get experience because focusing on experience or recipes or any other type of reward is what makes for grinding. If it's a farming story with interesting battles and creative costumes (and possibly even good dialog), then I'll enjoy it.

Unfortunately, farming missions don't have interesting or fun battles. The very things that make an opponent interesting or challenging or fun go against the very nature of farming.... quick easy fights for fast exp.

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Ah, you both are making the common fallacy of "I know it when I see it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

The phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which the user attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly-defined parameters. This phrase is best known as a description of a threshold of obscenity, no longer used, which is not protected speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Exhibition of obscene material may be a criminal offense. The phrase notably appeared in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), decided by the United States Supreme Court.

But this isn't really about that. Its about expecting people to follow rules, but since you never tell them exactly what the rules are, they have no way to ensure they are doing so.

This is no different than when some ISP (was it Comcast?) declared they would terminate your internet service for exceeding their bandwidth cap - BUT they refused to tell us what that cap was.

You can understand WHY they wanted to keep it secret, but it's still wrongity wrong to do that.

Having secret rules people are punished for breaking is WRONG.

I can't be more clear than that.

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But people aren't really being punished. Someone puts up an exploitative farm mission, and it just gets removed. Certain mechanics are proving to be good for farming and are giving more rewards than they should for the difficulty level? Those mechanics are changed.

Really, nobody is "punished" unless they've done something extreme, and then only after they've been warned and they continue to do it.

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Here you go, direct from Positron:

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I should probably take this moment to talk about what the Mission Architect is not meant for. It is not meant for “easy leveling” or “badging” or “farming”. Those are things that we specifically wanted the Mission Architect NOT to do. This may be a disappointment to some, I know. The goal was to give creative minds an outlet to tell the stories they have in their heads. We didn’t want the system clogged with Farm missions, so actually finding someone’s story that they lovingly crafted became more a chore than it was worth.

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This Mission Architect primary purpose is for telling stories. We do not want people to spend days making a great story only to find it shuffled into a list of missions with titles like "Get your Rikti Monkey badge here", "10 badges in 5 minutes", "Down on the AV Farm", etc. etc.

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The reason we need further guidance is precisely because that is not clear enough.

Let me try to be VERY clear and VERY simple:

Among the ways missions can be examined is how rewarding the mission is. There are THREE broad categories of mission with this regard:

1) Missions that require more effort to gain a certain reward
2) Missions that require less effort to gain a certain reward, BUT not so MUCH less as to run afoul of the rules.
3) Missions that run afoul of the rules.

What devs have NOT done is clearly defined the difference between Category #2, which is clearly fine, and Category #3, which is clearly not. The blurb you quoted does NOTHING to shed ANY light on this.

I can, if I want, create a very aesthetically pleasing story-based mission, which ALSO happens to be very rewarding. As far as I can see, from the devs mouths themselves, its not whether or not the mission has a story that breaks the rules - for example, the devs do NOT CARE if you make a lame and superficial mission, if that mission has poor rewards.

Missions with poor stories, as far as I know, do not break the rules and have not been removed - I know because I see so many on MA.

Missions with greater rewards than the devs like seem to be what the devs are going after. However, until they give use much more specific guidance, neither they nor anyone else can be sure where that line is drawn.

We need to be explicitly told. The only ones who would disagree are just the people who are RP snobs and don't like people playing this as a game in the first place.

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The problem with explicitly telling the people what is unacceptable is that you've also just told them all the things they are allowed to do. As long as what they're doing isn't exactly like what was said, they'll scream "I'm doing what you said I shouldn't be doing, how dare you try to stop me."

It's why lawyers make so much money. Laws explicitly state what you can and can't do, so there are thousands and hundreds of thousands of them to cover more and more scenarios.

With generic IOs, I start slotting them at level 12 (when I could use the level 15 ones). With set IOs, I'll start frankenslotting them as soon as they're available and feasible. That is, if the recipe and salvage are reasonably priced and useful, and I have the influence, I'll make and slot them.

Many powers take IOs from multiple sets, and sometimes it's beneficial to frankenslot some you normally wouldn't choose simply because it's cheap. For example, Assault Rifle's Burst power takes Ranged and Defense Debuff IOs. Acc/Dam for the Ranged sets usually cost quite a bit, even if they're crappy. But an Endurance/Recharge from the Defense Debuff set may cost a LOT less, and decreasing both recharge and and endurance are very useful. Looking for these less-desired IOs do make a difference to your powers, and if you can get them cheap, it's worth it.

I generally drop cheap ones like that into my powers when I'm still young (levels 9 through the teens). I then usually leave the IO alone for about 10 levels, at which point I'll upgrade it. By doing it like that, at any given level I generally only have a couple of IOs that I'd like to upgrade. My character is steadily improving because of the steady upgrades, but if I don't upgrade something, he still functions well.

Like Cat said, about the only drawback is that it uses a slot and you can't manually turn it off (it stays on for 120 seconds). Other than those two very minor things, they're very nice IOs. And if you do have stealth already, it stacks with them to give you virtual invisibility.

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Rest, for instance. I personally think it shouldn't even have a timer. If a person wants to rest every 10 seconds, that's fine with me. I also wouldn't mind if the preliminary wait before it kicked in was shortened too.

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Okay, I'm not sure why I've been arguing with you then.

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Maybe because I haven't advocated some of the recommendations people had where they wanted Stamina to be inherent. I'm all for decreasing downtime, but I just like it when I see my character progress from one that's rather weak and clumsy to a wonderful powerhouse.

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As far as the "slow pace = challenge" straw man, I've already discussed that, and don't want to belabor the point too much. Suffice it to say that the faster pace in the mid-to-late-game in no way diminishes the necessity for strategery or planning, and in no way diminishes the overall challenge. I consider the "you just don't want the game to be on easy mode" argument to be extraordinarily ill-posed; in fact it's really more of a baseless assertion than an argument. Unless, of course, you could defend the proposition that tedium implies difficulty.

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I was merely responding to multiple instances where someone invariably brings up "that's not fun" as if the argument is over as the final trump card has been played. You find the early game tedious. That's OK. Many people don't. It's a very subjective topic. I personally enjoy starting out kind of weak and building up to be a powerhouse. It's why I play MMORPGs. In any case, there's things that could be done that were mentioned here I fully agree with.

Rest, for instance. I personally think it shouldn't even have a timer. If a person wants to rest every 10 seconds, that's fine with me. I also wouldn't mind if the preliminary wait before it kicked in was shortened too.

I also suggested once that we get an endurance discount for the first 20 levels. An overall endurance discount is a buff built into the game (you can see it listed in the Power Attributes window), so I was thinking something along the lines of the Beginner's Luck that we currently have where all players get an accuracy boost that gradually diminishes. Give everyone a good endurance discount that gradually dissipates. This, I'll admit, isn't perfect since the biggest discount occurs when you have the least endurance-hungry powers, but it could help, especially when you exemp down to run an early task force or flashback arc.

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In the upper right corner of the costume creation screen (at Icon, at character creation, and in the critter creator), there are two buttons, labeled "Save" and "Load."

Suggestion granted, five months before you asked.

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Wow. I didn't know that. It's been a while since I actually had to change my costume, so I didn't know that it was already added. That's great. Thanks for the info.

I wish the cap would be raised quite a bit, and the starting speed raised along with it. Instead of 58 mph, I think it should be 65 or 70. When I drive to work in the morning, I can cruise along at a legal speed of 65mph. I really dislike the idea that in the gameworld, I'm rushing to a mission and traveling slower than when I commute to work.

Don't forget that selling items on the market does remove influence from the game. You get charged a surcharge for selling, and that money is effectively destroyed.

Thanks again for reviewing my arc, A Clean Break. I took your advice and worked on the dialog a bit. I found a couple of errors in my text that I corrected, and I cleaned up some of the dialog to tighten up the story a bit. I also moved the ally to the mid-point in the final mission. I was surprised at how many little things I missed.

I'm overall pleased. I have six votes so far and am averaging four stars, which I think is about right.

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If anyone has the time, I'd love to get some more reactions to my arc. Some background.... I came up with it as I was writing it. I had a picture in mind of a villain group reminiscent of the silver-age villains you'd find in the comics (the ones with campy names or themes, like the Royal Flush Gang who dress up as characters in playing cards).

ID: 30821
Title: A Clean Break
The Pool Gang were just a bunch of local homeboys frequenting the pool halls in Kings Row. When capes started proliferating, they found an excuse to put on tights and hassle the local gangs. But someone seems to be leading them into more dangerous waters, and you're asked by a friend to come down on them before they get in too deep.

Even though the story was spontaneous and, admittedly, a learning exercise while I was discovering the Architect, I spent time polishing dialog, costumes, mission objectives, and story. I worked on picking out powers for the villains so they'd be a moderate challenge for the average player. I also spent time adding small details to make it look more professional (proper wording for clues, navigation text, etc.). I'm rather pleased with how it all came out, and got good feedback from the few people who played it (two so far), so I wouldn't mind hearing from more people.

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Mission 1: I have to nitpick and say that you should break up some of this text into paragraphs. It is a bit hard to read. Your contact's speech is a bit tough to read, but I get that he is a pool hall hood and is supposed to talk that way. Good beginning to the story though. Wow, what a GREAT custom enemy group! I love the look of them! I can't say enough good things about them. They are tough little guys though. Are they all WP defense sets? That might be a bit rough. Just a fun group to fight though.

Mission 2: 8-ball is an excellent custom boss. Nice story progression with Crey. Just a fun story arc so far.

Mission 3: You might want to check the pop up that comes up at the mission entrance. I think you have a wrong name in there. Good finish to the arc. Another nice custom boss, totally fits with the whole theme. Ally maybe a bit over powered, but he was nice to have in the EB fight. You might want to experiment with having him spawn towards the end of the map. Having him for the whole mission made all the fights trivial.

Overall: Well, the story is not going to win literary awards, but it is good comic book stuff - and most importantly it was a fun story, fun custom group, and just all around good time for the whole family!

5 stars!

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Thank you. All your points are well-taken and I'm going to examine those areas tonight.... try to make the dialog a bit easier to read with paragraph marks, make sure I'm keeping the names straight, stuff like that..

Yeah, they're hardy little guys. The melee minions have superstrength primary and either Invuln or Willpower (if I remember correctly) as a secondary just to give them a little bit of toughness. I also intentionally gave the melee minions flight so that players who hover would have to keep on their toes. The ranged minions have Super Reflexes to help them avoid attacks a bit, which is particularly effective when the ally is helping you in the final mission as he has trouble hitting them. Since he was there to mainly keep the final boss from being too overwhelming for a low-level squishie who may be soloing, I don't mind that he's only marginally effective against the minions.

The lieutenants were meant to be mildly buffing/debuffing. One day I'll have to try this in a larger group setting and see how they work when there's larger spawns with them.

Thanks again. I'm really glad it's being enjoyed. Like you said, it's a light story not about to win a literary award. The story sort of came together while I was playing around with the MA, and I kept working with it to try to tie it together in some way where even if it wasn't a complex tale, it would at least be coherent and viable. And I do really appreciate the advice as I'm going into it tonight to look at those areas you mentioned.

Is "The Power whose name can not be mentioned" some kind of bizarre mystical force where simply mentioning it forces all who read it to engage in debate as to its merits? Considering the purpose of the thread was to discuss the pre-20 levels, a debate on a power you can't get until 20 is horribly off-topic.

And seriously, what is it with the "Fun" trump card? Anytime anyone wants to enforce their argument about why certain things should be done certain ways, they pull out the Fun card and go "it's simply not fun that way". If we add up all these Fun cards, we'll find the game only becomes "fun" when everyone starts out at level 50 at full power and never have to engage in any kind of challenge or be forced to think or use strategy. "If I have to actually strategize or pace myself or in any way think, then that's simply not fun!"

When in Icon or the villain equivalent, and you're modifying your costume, how about having a "Save" button like in the Mission Architect critter creator? This will let us....

1) Call up a design we like when creating a new character so we don't have to start from scratch, and then just make whatever changes we want.

2) Call up the design when making custom critters for MA arcs, so we can place our characters as NPCs/villains in our missions.

3) Keep that same design if we decide to delete a character because we want to recreate them with a different primary or secondary (or even archetype). You're at level 10 and decide you don't want to be a fire/ice blaster, but an ice/ice blaster, you don't have to design the appearance of the character all over again if you liked what you've done.

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The pre-20s end management issue is one of the thing that can make me stay away from leveling new alts, and sometime from the game.

It's not a really clever game design choice either knowing that people who try and discover the game will only see this aspect of CoX (trial accounts stop at level 14).

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The only reason you think there's anything wrong with pre-20 is because you're used to post-20. Newcomers have no preconceptions about how the game should work and won't know any different until they get to SOs and Stamina. Pre-20 is perfectly viable and not nearly as difficult as folks make it out to be, otherwise nobody would ever even get to 20.


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This is what I believe too. Pre-20 is very simple, goes by very quickly, and only requires that you pace yourself. It's no more grindy than any other part of the game. If anything, it's the least grindy period because you level up so quickly.

This thread was supposed to be about tactics and playstyles to help the pre-20 crowd before they get Stamina, not a debate on endurance or stamina itself. We've had plenty of those. This is finally a thread that is useful to everyone in that nobody can get Stamina before level 20.

Pre-stamina, you have two options to manage endurance.... pacing and slotting. Both should be done in tandem. Damage is usually fine and doesn't need much slotting as pre-20 mobs aren't nearly as resilient as later ones. Make sure you're accurate enough to hit them (and beginner's luck helps in that you get an accuracy boost early on that dissipates and is gone by level 20, so you can gradually work on accuracy), and add in some DO endurance reductions here and there when you hit level 12. Pace yourself properly and endurance shouldn't be a problem.

Look at it like this, if you use up 1/3 of your endurance bar per spawn, that endurance is back in 20 seconds. You don't need to wait a full 20 seconds though, you can pause for five or six seconds to get somesome of the endurance back, then jump into the next spawn. After three or four spawns, you'll probably need to rest for at least health reasons.

Some archetypes do have it harder. For example, a blaster has only his attacks. All of his endurance is used to cause damage. A tanker does less damage though (meaning he has to attack more and use more endurance) and he also has to run shields. Defenders have their defensive powers, but if soloing still need to attack. So yes, some archetypes have it more difficult. But pre-20, don't worry as much about to-hit debuffing or adding defense or resistance, spend some slots on endurance reduction.

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I have recently been struggling whether or not to make use of clues in my arcs. I feel like they can be a nice way to advance the story of an arc, however I worry that players often never realize they get them (esp. on teams), or forget to check them, and that these end up getting lost in the shuffle.

Is there any specific advice people have about how/when to use clues to the best effect?

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I'd take the time out to put clues in. While a lot of people won't check, if someone does, they'll see the clues there. It'll give your arc a more polished professional feel. If you have a glowie, fill in the clue text with a sentence or two. If something is mandatory to complete the individual mission, fill in the clue text. It only takes a few moments, but can impress the people who do check for those clues.

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All the following suggestions are excellent, and should be required reading for new players. I'm not a new player, though, and everything you suggest is part of my normal playing style. (Except for early IO-set slotting -- I've not generally had good luck finding low-level IO sets at good prices, but I haven't been looking that hard.)


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The trick is to grab endurance reduction from the IOs that aren't as much in demand. For example, if you look for Acc/Dam, that's going to be very popular because accuracy is important, and who doesn't want to increase their damage. But other ones from the set can be VERY useful. Look at, for example, Fire Cages. You can slot not only targeted AoE sets, but immobilize too. Dam/End from the targeted AoE will go for less than Acc/Dam. If you choose from an immobilize set, you can add Immob/End or Rech/End. An Immob/End IO will go for much less than an Acc/Dam.

Dark attacks defenders use also accept to-hit debuff, so you can get good pricing on to-hit debuff/end. All those separate IOs, even at early levels like the teens, do make a difference.

Pre-20, unless you have some power that gives you endurance recovery (like Accelerate Metabolism), you don't have much choice other than slotting.

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if you can't solo a mission on heroic, maybe you need to learn 2 play?

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Have you like, actually played the custom missions? Because even on heroic, a boss can be designed with full defense, full mezz protection, and a huge array of attacks. Much much more difficult than normal heroic game content.

Thank you for looking at that Catwhoorg. I tried to send you a thank you in-game, but for some reason just couldn't get a message to you. Thank you!!! I really appreciate you looking at it as I knew I couldn't be objective. I kept the bosses and powers the same, but brushed up the dialog just a little to add some more flavor to it.

I played your arc and loved it. I liked the power combinations you used, and the villains surprised me a few times, giving me a lot of enjoyment. I believe it was the first one in your sig that I tried. I had loads of fun. When an ambush started coming at me, it was a total surprise and gave me a really good time surviving it.

Thanks again!!!