BellaStrega

I've had one drop. It made my brute instantly...not poverty-stricken.

This is true. I didn't see the UK stuff until after my first response.

I admit I haven't played for very long for the past month or so, but when I was playing last month, Champion didn't seem very empty...and I got into full teams at 5 am on more than one occasion. Which servers are empty?

Er, why not? He's an actor. They needed to employ actors to be Jedi Knights. Samuel L. Jackson was into the movies and the role, and his lightsaber had "BMF" written on it. I don't see anything that makes him spectacularly unsuitable for being in the movie.

Elitism.

Back in the day, I knew some invuln tanks who'd use rikti monkey spawns to buff their invincibility.

Yeah, a nice change. Originally, the barrels were just clickable glowies. Are they actually destructible now?

And do destructibles still stun, knockback, and do heavy damage to you if you're too close to them? 'Cause nothing says "superhero" like destroying a barrel, or drug lab and nearly dying from it.

Imagine if you came across a two-three sapper spawn.

Ah, the good old days.

If you have some way to aoe stun, you should be fine. Or fear, or hold, or whatever.

If you have no control, then it sucks a lot.

Me.

Oppressive Gloom for the win, as they say.

It happened to me at every level band but 1-5 and 45-50. I think only missed a few missions out of all those available, and I started teaming a lot more in the 30s-40s.

Back in the old low-content days with no real bonus for teaming, you could run through all of your contacts fairly quickly. So you'd be like 17th or 18th level and your contact is "I have nothing more for you until you're 19." So you hit 19 after grinding or teaming (which was grinding because you didn't get mission complete xp for other people's missions), go to the contact, and they're like "Pick one of these people in Talos Island or Independence Port." And you do, and say you don't know much about the game yet and pick an IP contact...and you get to the zone, and he's in the NW corner. So after taking too much time to cross IP, you get to the new contact, and he's like "Come back when you're 20."

And then this happens every five levels, forever.

Yeah, true. I think I tended to have the same - I didn't bother with recharge due to perma-hasten.

Oh, yes, the buffed bosses. Those were ridiculous. And the 5th level Outcasts... I remember on the training room several of us were saying "If this goes live, people will avoid the Hollows like the plague after a slaughter of epic proportions." And it did go live like that, and oh the screams (and deservedly so).

I agree that his ideas of being hard or challenging were odd, but I think that what the guy said above was harsh too. I mean, we don't have to speculate about what he was really thinking or about what he could comprehend. The fact that he said some problematic things and made some problematic decisions should be sufficient.

Heh. I said when ED happened (and I was by far not the only one) that ED would be fine, it was just really frustrating that we were told "No more major powerset nerfs" and then a month later "Oh, we're just going to nerf the stuff that makes your powers stronger." At the time, it was after dealing with changes in issues 4 and 5 that hit my characters pretty hard, and I was seriously thinking about leaving the game. I also felt that ED + GDN was hitting melee characters way too hard. Also remember "You can six-slot your defenses" in the weeks before ED.

I think someone else pointed out that Regen was nerfed into a different playstyle.

I also should point out that Geko had a big hand in this.

I don't agree with this. I mean, I totally agree that what he said and how he said it was pretty bad, and telling people that he expected compounded failure so we'd all feel great about finally winning, but I think this had more to do with putting in more interesting and challenging fights. I don't remember if he meant it to be about boss-ranked mobs (which would be pretty awful) or AVs/EBs. I think (and have thought for a long time, but perhaps not since 2005) that AV fights could use some more complexity and challenge, rather than simply hitting hard enough to one-shot anyone who wasn't a tank or well-built scrapper.

But I don't think this was ego. I think Jack was trying to explain something he found fun, and he explained it in a way that people were prepared to take in the worst way (esp after the cascade of nerfs and the "three minions = one hero" even though he clarified the latter wasn't going to ever happen in CoH due to the way design evolved.

Actually, I disagree with this. He understood, but didn't agree. I tried to have a conversation about the prevalence of status effects in the game a few years ago, and I'm pretty sure he understood what I was saying (which was that fewer hard controls and more soft debuffs might be more fun than lots of hard controls, even if his response annoyed me at the time.

Really, I think Jack the Egomaniac is not accurate. I think Jack the Enthusiast Who Gets Ahead of Himself And Says The Wrong Thing A Bit Too Often is more accurate.

Welcome back, Taser.

They changed the text on regen in yesterday's patch, and when they put the beta server back up for two hours, someone read the new text and started a "ZOMG THEY NERFED REGEN" thread that generated some funny hysteria, at least until someone pointed out that it had been working like that for a few days now, and there was no nerf.

When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: "Have ya paid your dues, Jack?" "Yessir, the check is in the mail."

I don't know that any CoH groups are copied from Champions, but Champions Online suffers from a relative lack of background information in the game. Just about all the groups have fairly extensive backgrounds that seem fairly sparse in the MMO - at least they seem so without having found all the bits of lore scattered about.

Huh, really? The Maniacs were mentioned in the Millennium City sourcebook published in 2003, along with the New Purple Gang, the Cobra Lords, and the Black Aces. The Freakshow are just a stereotypically violent streetgang with cybernetics, so it's not at all surprising that stereotypically violent streetgangs might resemble them. Which is why, I guess, that they all bear some resemblance to gangs like the Black Queens, Brainiacs, Slaughterhouse, Back Alley Brawlers (!), Maelstrom, The Philharmonic Vampyres, The Bozos, Voodoo Boys, and so on.

(there has to be someone who knows where these names come from)

The Maniac disguise mission, btw, at least involves you walking into one of their hangouts and talking to one of them, rather than sneaking through the sewers and interacting with no one.

Which gang is all about Clockwork Orange?

I don't think that this is a serious concern at Blizzard, but I don't expect anything less than absolute hysteria when WoW's discussed around here.

I should be in beta because I was repped down for mentioning a joke arc.

A joke arc, I might add, that no longer exists.