BellaStrega

I already pointed this out once earlier in this thread, but I don't recall you responding to it:

Brick powers are not tanking powers. Brick powers are basically "heavy melee powers." Super strength and heavy weapons, for example. You can design characters with these powers to be melee DPS or tanks, but you're not forced to be a tank just because you go for that powerset. At best, they're biased toward a melee role, just as sorcery is biased toward support roles and most elemental powersets are biased toward ranged dps. But you can take any of these powersets and build toward tanking, dps, support or possibly any two of the three if you can manage it. Your earth character can just as easily use way of the warrior as you could defiance.

They really could, and they may very well in the future.

Is there any particular reason for this cutoff date? I purchased $50 worth of points on August 22, and I don't see how I got any more use out of them than someone who purchased the same number of points two days later.

If that's a reference to something I can't figure out what it is.

Usually it involved people teleporting me because they saw I was taking damage, and this resulted in possibly being teleported into more danger and faceplanting or whatnot.

That combined with the old sidekick leash made me even less inclined to team with friends who had somewhat odd ideas about how to play.

Er, did someone call you a bully? I missed that. Unless it was me, but I didn't want to call you a bully. Or a redacted.

If I came across that way, I apologize. I just love the arguing.

There are definitely inspirations from the Cthulhu mythos, although anything you see in the promotional materials that looks like Call of Cthulhu actually isn't much like Call of Cthulhu.

As far as combat being WoW with a heavy dose of Call of Cthulhu... no. The combat system is more actiony than WoW will ever be, and higher powered than Call of Cthulhu will ever be.

I'd say it's closer to the original Guild Wars but even that's misleading.

I was never victim of creative uses for TP. I was victim of people trying to be helpful and failing.

Recall Friend has caused my most frustrating experiences in CoH ever.

Yeah, I don't mind these effects being weaker, and I appreciate they haven't built entire powersets around buffing, debuffing, or control. Most powersets have some element of these things, however. And few powersets are designed strictly for one role and no other. Some are extremely versatile. You can design a power armor character for dps, for tanking, as a hybrid of both, as ranged, as melee, or as a hybrid of both without ever picking a power outside the set. However, that versatility was the outcome of post-release expansion. I just hope they continue expanding existing powersets like this.

Well played.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1uS2ztPaCU

Earth, Heavy Weapons, and Might all have powers to build an offensive (DPS) as well as defensive (tank) character. One of my beta characters was a non-tank might character that did a ton of damage.

Celestial actually has two powers that heal and do damage, and two pure damage powers, which makes it a bit less "tiny". It has fewer pure heals than it does damage-dealing powers.

There are also powers that do some of the control effects you've listed. Earth has quicksand, for example. What this game does not have is purely dedicated control to the degree that controllers have.

The best thing they were good for was unlocking costume pieces.

I still have a few unused power replacers in my characters' inventories.

You used to be able to add electric damage to melee attacks, but power replacers no longer drop, and keeping them equipped was problematic compared to the equipment that buffs your stats directly.

Well, when I played around launch, it was more like:

CoH > > CO

I would also have put DCUO a lot closer to both if the endgame were better.

My own impression is CoH = CO > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > DCUO.

Yeah, he was Claude Rains, the invisible man.

Too bad he disappeared quickly and was never heard from again.

Well, a blaster with active and - if you want - passive defenses, self-heals, and even buffs or heals for the rest of the party. Or because of the active defenses and self-heals, you can reasonably survive with an offensive passive.

But I agree with your point. Conceptually, one is limited. My DM/DA scrapper translated to CO became a bestial supernatural with a couple of darkness powers because melee was more important to me than having every single attack be a matter of darkness, and I could at least have some dark defenses (ebon void) and one dark melee attack (void step).

They have been adding more options to powersets - like the addition of more laser sword attacks to power armor to make melee a viable build path. I hope they do similar with the elemental sets. They did similar when they split supernatural into bestial and infernal, and gave might the chain attacks while giving infernal its own set of chain attacks.

With CO, I am fairly certain that the launch day patch that a) made combat in what was supposed to be a fast-paced actiony MMO rather painful for everyone and b) made it impossible to reach the level cap with quests alone, resulting in guides so people could find and do every single quest in the game and minimize the grinding after running out of quests. I remember getting from 38-40 in Lemuria by during a circuit in the deepest darkest part of the zone where I could find the mobs that were my level.

The game is not like that now. If anything, defensive passives are close to where they were during beta and the early access weekend, and offensive passives are stronger defensively so taking one can still help survivability on top of simply killing everything faster.

I'm not really bitter about the launch day shenanigans, but I do think that this had a pretty profound impact on initial reactions to the game. When you basically had to walk on eggshells everywhere even after taking a defensive power and taking the specific superstats intended to support that power and getting shredded by a handful of henchmen, well...it's not going to get good reactions.

I think he has a point about half-finished systems as well. The level 40 lairs were not very well balanced, the "tells" were not consistent and many of the bosses were so large you couldn't see the tells until they added it to the UI as well as appearing over the mob's head. UNITY was an interesting idea, but: the need to run your full complement of UNITY missions to be able to get into a level 40 instance once (and god forbid if you leave for anything, as you can't get back in without another key), and some of the UNITY missions were simply broken and couldn't be completed, so you wouldn't get that every day.

You are so dogmatic, so committed, and so very, very wrong.

This is true. There are things I think need blocking, though. Robot cowboys with their lassos for one.

I was messing around with offensive builds last night and survival powers outside of defensive passives are pretty viable, and going with an offensive role and offensive passive means dealing out a lot of damage.

I do like having block options like force sheath (to get endurance from every hit) or the darkness block which provides a lingering damage resistance buff.

I have something like 80+ free tailor tokens on my main. Too lazy to check right now, though.

I only use them if my costume costs more than a million.