BellaStrega

I'm sure real live actual transgender people love being used as jokes like this. You're not mocking the person who's trying to do the flirting, you're mocking people who have to put up with a lot of **** from everyone else already.

Part of what twitter does includes responding to information. It's a social network - you can respond to tweets in a way that you typically don't respond to blog posts. I mean, blogs are great, but they're not the only possible solution, or even necessarily the best.

I could be misremembering, but on the first day the forum opened (the day I resubbed), it listed a previous record that could only date back to the old forum.

There are people like this everywhere.

Blizzard can announce that subscriptions are at an all-time high and there will be people right on the front page of the general discussion forum yelling, "WoW is dying! Everyone's leaving in droves because of this one feature/bug/nerf that I personally despise!"

I'm actually, maybe I have a weird perspective not having played in a year (and not having played a lot in the past two years), but CoH seems healthier to me than it was the last time I was seriously playing.

It's pretty de rigeur for superhero universes to have at least one Superman-like character. Majestic, Apollo, Supreme from Wildstorm and Image, for example. Champions and Mutants & Masterminds have homage characters who died in 1992 or 1993, roughly when Doomsday killed Superman. DC actually has multiple characters - Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, Sodam Yat, Mon-El - that fit into this category. I don't think Doomsday or Darkseid do, though. Superman's simply a paragon among superheroes. Darkseid is an evil god, and Doomsday is a genocide machine.

They're Pool A drops, but very rare and only from level 50+. So, at that point, most mobs have a chance.

Oh, I don't mind people complaining about farming, but it seemed a bit over the top to be all "You're not farming *good enough for my standards*."

I don't find it confusing at all. Blizzard had a strong fanbase to begin with, and WoW was virtually guaranteed to be a pretty big success just on the basis of people who like their games in general. That it also eliminated a lot of the nuisance factor present in Everquest and other MMORPGs made it easier to attract players from other games. I do think people around here tend to sell other games short out of brand loyalty, though, and WoW's actually better than most are willing to credit.

I was responding to your statement that no one suggested changing tankers' damage scale.

Again, not really relevant to the point - which is that the situation as it exists now and has existed since 2004 is that we've had scrappers, and scrappers are not like rogues.

I don't think that aggro control and mitigation being easier actually makes for a superior tanking experience. Threat management in WoW is more active than it's ever been in CoH, and requires not just the tank to generate enough threat to hold aggro, but the dps to keep an eye on their own personal threat. The tank also has to ensure that he or she has threat on everything so nothing veers off to smite the healers.

At the same time, WoW's current design makes threat management much easier than it's ever been. All four tanks have access to aoe tanking tools, making it relatively trivial to pull groups and get them focused on you while your dps AoEs everything down. Threat management is primarily ensuring there are no stragglers and the rest is up to your dps to not pull anything away from you.

I think these kinds of comparisons are pretty bad, though - WoW and City of Heroes are two different genres, and the superhero genre tends to be much higher-powered. WoW and CoH comparative popularity have nothing to do with relative power levels - in fact, relative power levels are meaningless to most people. What's important is playing in a genre that people enjoy and having a fun experience while they play it. Most people who play WoW don't care that a tanker in CoH can round up 16 mobs and fight an archvillain too. They care whether their own tanks can withstand what they set out to tank.

I also think that CoH players tend to look at WoW's raid model: "40/25/10 players all attack one mob while in CoH up to 8 players take on limitless numbers of foes" and ignore the context of that model. That is, that one mob you're fighting (and it's not always one mob) is Arthas' second in command (Kel'thuzad), or a manifestation of an elder god (C'thun), or a cosmic entity sent to wipe the world clean (Algalon the Observer), and the bosses leading up to those fights aren't just mooks themselves, but fairly potent enemies in their own right. Nobody's getting excited over fighting just one mob, but each one of those mobs is individually more challenging than nearly anything you'd ever fight in City of Heroes. The new Hamidon might be an exception.

WoW's popularity comes from a few factors. One major factor is that it was part of an already successful IP with five prior releases (three games, two expansions). Another was accessibility - even though WoW took a lot of Everquest's mechanics, Blizzard did so in a way that was actually fun for a lot of people. It still had tedious grinds (Timbermaw rep), but most of those tedious grinds were not required to take a character to 60 and raid. Further, with each expansion, they've been reducing and removing many of those grinds, opening more options for more classes, and rebalancing gameplay so that any tank can tank, any dps can dps, and any healer can heal. WoW at 60 had one viable class for raid tanking. WoW at 80 has four. A druid that specs balance or a paladin that specs retribution are not jokes.

In general, people enjoy playing WoW because it's a fun game and they prefer fantasy.

Yeah, I think people tend to undrerrepresent WoW's power level, or label it as not heroic by default (in contrast to CoH). It has a different scale and different assumed power level, but I think in terms of its own genre, the characters in WoW are fairly powerful and compare well to their superheroic counterparts.

Old Moment of Glory gave you a 90% max HP debuff. It was changed to 75% after non-tanker resists were capped at 75%, since using MoG actually made it easier to kill you if defense debuffs were involved.

If a tribunal of what are likely to be heterosexual people get together and decide that an anti-gay slur is not really anti-gay, it must be true. It's not as if heterosexuals routinely decide that what they're doing isn't anti-gay, no matter how hostile it is. Just on this thread alone, multiple posters have described themselves as not having anti-gay prejudices, but are opposed to LGBT-friendly supergroups, or think that LGB people flaunt their orientations when doing the same things that straight people do all the time.

What has happened is that a term referring to a group of people has been appropriated as slang to mean that something is bad. This is not the same as gay people using gay to refer to themselves as people with same-sex attractions, because previously, "gay" was used to refer to an emotion or a demeanor, and not a group of people, nor was it used by gay people in an insulting manner. I'm not sure how gay people adopting a positive identifier for themselves is comparable to heterosexual people using that word to mean "bad" after it's been thoroughly associated with gay people. In what world are these two events remotely equivalent?

It is true that language evolves, and that this is an example of language evolving. In this case, it's a matter of a positive word that is used to identify a group of people that is being changed to describe stuff as bad. You can't honestly pretend that the evolving usage has absolutely no connection to the existing usage.

I should add that I've seen it happen against one of three mobs in the AOE.

I haven't been paying attention since, though. I've been fighting larger groups and it's hard to tell if it's not firing when you have 8 whatevers trying to punch you in the face.

Well, this is an old (and somewhat valid) complaint, along with the fact that gauntlet doesn't help tankers while solo.

I would argue that while a scrapper adds more than a tanker in terms of raw dps, a tanker still adds enough dps to be effective if you end up with two on the same team. In addition, a second tanker adds the ability to effectively control larger groups of mobs with less danger to the rest of the team.

It's kind of funny, because Johnny suggested that tankers be good against bosses and harder targets, but that scrappers be good against minions, and then I said that "minion killer" was a terrible niche for scrappers, because they die so fast.

Anyway, no, tankers shouldn't have scrapper-level damage against an AV, with or without crits. I liked an idea I saw for stances for gauntlet, where you could choose threat or damage. It shouldn't ever be higher than .9, though, and that's probably pushing it. Definitely never 1.125.