Barata

First, let's get accurate when describing this. Blasters are not "broken" because broken things don't work. Your car breaks down, it doesn't work. Your refrigerator breaks, it doesn't work. Blasters? I make one, I play it, I see mobs die, I get experience, I level up, I hit 50. That sure doesn't seem broken to me.

It took pages of discussion to finally get to why some people think blasters are "broken". They set their difficulty to +2 or +3 mobs for an 8-man team, and can't run a mission solo. That's very different from being "broken". For one thing, when you're solo, you don't have to set your difficulty that high. You're basically saying "if I set the difficulty higher than what my character can handle, I do badly". Well, don't set it that high. You're solo. You have that option. If you're on a team, it doesn't matter what the difficulty is because you have other characters grabbing aggro and debuffing mobs and buffing you up. If tanks and scrappers are able to solo the highest-difficulty content meant for the largest teams, then it doesn't mean that it's the standard for all characters. It more likely means that the game is "broken" because some archetypes are too powerful to have any significant challenge regardless of difficulty level.

I'm comfortable playing my blaster with +1 or +2 content set for three or four players (with bosses). It offers a good challenge and while still letting me actually run the missions. If other characters like scrappers and tanks can run through more difficult content just by mashing attack buttons, well, good for them. It's not a playstyle I find particularly engaging. I happen to enjoy that I use strategy for my battles.

And also, I fully disagree that blasters don't bring much to a team. On every team I've been on, blasters bring lots and lots of damage, which ultimately is what completes the missions.

I have a fire/ice blaster, and I never had a problem soloing him. Ice as a secondary is a very good powerset. Chillblain is an excellent power. Besides doing damage, it roots enemies, grounds them, and debuffs their attack rate. Add in Shiver and Ice Patch, and it's quite a lot of mitigation.

Hover is a great power for blasters. When you add in Defiance, you have access to up to three attacks even while mezzed, and you stay hovered unless someone hits you with a -fly power, which doesn't happen often. You can be totally held or stunned, and still hovering out of melee range of that pesky boss, blasting him with your Tier 1 and Tier 2 powers.

I even have Chilling Embrace on my blaster. It mitigates a LOT of damage. Besides debuffing the enemies' attack rate, it debuffs their damage by about 15%. That's like having a 15% resistance applied to you. Enemies attack more weakly and much less often.

I like the idea of having Fitness as an inherent, but I never found felt that the current method isn't fun. At the early levels, even with little slotting, enemies drop quickly. You don't need to max out the damage to be very effective, so slotting some endurance enhancements on endurance-heavy powers make a difference. Most of my characters don't wind up getting to Stamina until their 30's, and then it's only because I have the powers I want.

To me, part of the fun of MMORPGs, and CoH in particular, is tweaking your character so that he's as optimal as can be with your current powers and slots. I don't mind if damage or debuffs or whatever aren't capped until late 20's or early 30's because I enjoy seeing my character get gradually better.

The only thing that concerns me about getting Fitness as an inherent is that to take advantage of it on a good portion of my characters, I'll have to respec them, which is arduous and boring.

/unsigned

Only because with that many slots, why even have assignable slots at all? You may as well automatically have the powers given to you with six slots as a default. Characters are already powerful to the point that the game is very easy, giving more slots just makes them even more powerful and would trivialize current content even more. The change in Fitness, making it inherit, means every player becomes more powerful automatically. They either have enhanced recovery/regen/speed if they didn't choose Fitness before, or they get to choose up to four additional powers (depending upon how many powers were chosen from the Fitness pool).

Powers don't need to be six-slotted to make a difference in gameplay. Even attacks can get by with as little as two or three slots. Every single power six-slotted to max out all or most of its attributes is a lot of power that's unneeded with the current difficulty of the game.

If we get Fitness as an inherit, like what I read they're working on, then most likely it'll be most characters that will have to respec to take advantage of that. That's a lot of time players will have to drop into respeccing. I've been wishing for a real respec system, rather than just a power reboot, for years now and only hope it'll be something that the devs will realize can be one of the biggest QOL features possible.

Having been with this game for quite some time now, I think it's about time that the respec system was revamped to be more intelligent. I'll list the reasons why....

When respecs were put into the game, it wasn't envisioned that players would respec very often. Whether it was believed players wouldn't want to respec often, or that there was a desire to keep players from respeccing too often, I don't know. But it was created with the idea/goal that respecs wouldn't be numerous. Three trials were created to allow respecs, and it was felt that those three trials would be sufficient (along with free respecs added in because of power changes).

It's obviously very clear now that respeccing is much more desirable than it was previously thought. Besides the three trials, we're given respecs as veteran rewards (and we get several respecs as rewards), and there's also respec recipes that drop. Looking at the price those recipes command on the market, they're indeed very coveted. There's no argument that respecs are highly desired by a large number of people.

But look closely at our current system. The current system is barely a system. All it does is wipe out everything from character creation on and force you to totally rebuild your character. Not a single thing was placed into the system to aid in this process. You have to carry out every single leveling action you ever performed on your character, make every single decision you ever made when assigning powers or slots, and reapply every single enhancement. It requires as much work as possible, and doesn't do a single thing to save even a single step on the player's end.

Besides this, the advent of the invention system has made respeccing even more cumbersome and difficult than it was before. Before, all you had to do was take a screenshot to see what TOs/DOs/SOs were in a power. Now with the IOs, you can't easily tell by a screenshot. If you have three melee powers, all with Pounding Slugfest, they all look the same. One power though may have Accuracy, Acc/Dam, Dam/End, and another one may have Acc/Dam, Acc/Dam/End, Acc/Rech, or something like that. But unless they are all different levels, they all look the same unless you hover over them with the mouse.

Devs, please, it's time to give us something more intelligent. We have to carry out every single step just to drop a single power or move a single slot. Veteran players and power players who respec often will say "I can breeze through it in five or ten minutes because I've done it so much, it's no big deal", but the point is that they can only breeze through it that quickly because they've already spent so much time doing it so many other times. Unless you have a low-level hero, respeccing is a long arduous process in which it's easy to make mistakes. Even during the process, if you see towards the end that there's something you have to change (you have an IO left over and realize you forgot to assign a slot), you have to back up and start all over again.

Simply, it's as difficult as it could possibly be. There is not a single mechanism in place to streamline or facilitate the procedure. None. It is as basic and stripped-down and threadbare as possible. It was a nice bandaid when it was released, but after many years, that bandaid needs to be changed. What would be nice is a system that lets us target individual powers and slots and enhancements, changing them without the need for changing/touching every single power and slot and enhancement you have. The recommendation people make to use the 3rd-party designer programs just reinforces this argument. Sure you can respec in five minutes once you spent an hour in some program figuring it out. It's still a time sink.

On a personal note, I hate respeccing so much, all my characters have most of their reward respecs, their granted freespecs, and still haven't done all of the respec trials. It's why I won't make any more Soldiers of Arachnos (you're actually forced to respec at one point). I want to play, not spend 20 to 30 minutes, or even an hour at times, juggling slots and enhancements and worried that I missed something.

I'm not in favor of this recommendation. Why? It only partially addresses the issue at hand. That issue being that the respec system is the worst it could be. What we need is an intelligent respec system, not this aged frayed bandaid.

About half of my characters get it, usually ones that have weaker attacks or ones that don't rely on personal fighting (masterminds, defenders, etc.). For them, it's nice having something that does a lot of damage to at least certain enemies.

I've noticed that the latest changes to flight really increased my hover speed (I haven't been playing much lately). I think if I respec and get the inherent Fitness, I can gain a slot or two from Hover since I like to add a slot or two there for speed. On my one blaster, I actually have it five-slotted for speed, stealth, and a Kismet +Accuracy.

That is, if I can bring myself to go through a respec. I DETEST respeccing. It bothers me that after all this time, they still have respecs executed in the most unfriendly cumbersome way possible.

I pulled my names from a series of books I read about three demon brothers

Demonlings: Connor, Cain, and Caleb
Demons: Gabriel and Cressida
Demon Prince: The Traveler

Not crazy about "The Traveler", but there were no other demons to choose from, and his proper name was never given.

Well, I bugged it and hope they fix it. It's frustrating to have to call up a calculator to figure out what the damage and resistance is actually working out to be.

I can empathize with you. I'm just not a dastardly person. I tried playing Grand Theft Auto 3 (I think it was number 3), and I got to a point where I was supposed to do a drive-by, and I kept thinking "I don't want to do a drive-by!" It's about as far as I got.

It's not as bad in CoX because most of the time, I feel like I'm just beating up people, and most of the people I beat up are thugs anyway. One mission though had me collecting people from Paragon City to turn over to the Vhazilok, and I had a very bad taste in my mouth after completing it. Like you, it's why I have tons of heroes and just two villains.

This isn't really that much of a problem..... unless you use logitech Setpoint software. If you use Setpoint to program your mouse buttons to generate keystrokes, and then have CoX programmed to activate certain powers, etc., upon those keystrokes, it will stop working. Unless UAC is disabled, Vista and Win7 seems to isolate CoX from other programs, and those keystrokes generated by Setpoint never make it to the game.

Someone once recommended making a copy of the Cohupdater.exe file, and that seems to work. I copied it to another name without "upate" in the name, and when I run it, it runs fine. Now, I run the regular updater just to check to see if there's updates, and then the copy to actually play the game. If there's been an update to the updater, then I just recopy it again. It's a real pain, but at least it lets me use my mouse like I want to use it.

I'd like to see this topic pursued as I have the same problem. I solved it in Vista by turning off UAC, but since it's supposed to be less obtrusive as it is in Vista, I'd like to keep it running in Win7.

The problem I notice is not that Setpoint doesn't work well in Vista/Win7, but that CoX in Vista/Win7 doesn't register itself quite right. For example, every time I try to run CoX, I get the Windows message asking if I want to run software from an untrusted publisher. Even if I set the Cohupdater and the client to run as administrators, Vista/Win7 sees my installation and doesn't trust it. I'm getting the impression that because of that, it's isolating the game somehow from fully communicating with other programs (like SetPoint).

Is there a way, other than turning off UAC, where COX can be run without getting that prompt? If it doesn't prompt other people who are running UAC, then how did they/you install or configure the game?

I think TP could use some love. It does have advantages over other travel powers, but it does have quite a few negatives too. It's the only travel power that absolutely needs enhancements or Stamina (unless you're doing short jumps). It's tricky to use and is not very accurate (explained later). Also, while it's fast as a travel power, the activation time makes it difficult to use in fun ways.

Accuracy. Yes, you can teleport right to a spot, but that spot must be something that can be pointed at. If you wanted to teleport on top of something, you can only do it if you can adjust your camera angle or pull the camera back far enough to see the spot and cursor it. With range enhancements, you can easily overshoot your mark and have to teleport back down again. If someone is running away, it'd be nice to be able to teleport to them, but you have to instead try to target the ground ahead of them and time it so that you'll arrive there when they hit that spot. These aren't major things, but they make Teleport not feel like what you'd expect. To me, endurance is one of the least of its issues.

I don't have a problem with a lack of mez protection on my squishies. It's not like they're not strong enough to win. If anything, the game's gotten easier and easier over time. How easy do we want it to be?