CapnGeist

For the record, Brawl goes Right, Left, Kick, Right, Left, Kick, etc, skipping animations as your current mode denies. (If you have a shield, for example, you just go right, kick, right, kick.)

Pistols goes Right 1, Left 1, Right 2, Left 2, and then cycles back, so you alternate hands with each Pistols shot, with two animations per hand.

DP's Pistols and the classic power of "Brawl" show it can be done: an attack that cycles through animations. It's NOT random, but every time you use it it flips. I'd like this in Martial Arts and Super Strength. Additional options called "Bright Switch" and "Dark Switch" where you set the color for it to always be, and then it flips back and forth between the two animations.

I don't think a power that acts as a break free once every 90 seconds would be used. Build Up/Aim have the equivalent of about four inspirations, and they're always useful. in every situation ever. If I didn't expect to use one more than every minute, I'd just... carry break frees. A power like that would need to do something more useful than that.




From what I'm looking at, these power ideas just seem... Not good. The purpose of the Assault/Manipulation set, from what I can tell, is to get more damage out of a primarily ranged character at increased risk. Or, in Assault's case, once you've shut down the risk. Pairing it with a random pile of random is, well... You're making an EAT, one of those classes that supposedly does a bit of everything but excels at nothing. This isn't inherently bad as a standalone, but where does it fit in a party? I honestly can't tell at all what this AT is trying to do or be.

Most ATs have a primary that does their thing, and a secondary that supports them and either a) makes doing their thing possible or b) adds damage because their thing isn't DPS.
Scrappers, Stalkers, Brutes, and Masterminds have a secondary that just makes it possible to do what their primaries want them to do, while Defenders, Dominators, and Tankers get more damage. Blasters get more damage because their thing is DPS. Corruptors and Controllers are different, yes, in that they're the most 'balanced' between primary and secondary of any ATs: while you might begrudge any of the other ATs for taking too much secondary and not enough primary, Corruptors and Controllers can get away with it because their secondaries are almost as good as their primaries.

Now with this AT you're showing me here, it looks like you've got some sort of weird blend between scrapper and corruptor. Its primary is clearly DPS of the single target variety because you gave it no Area of Effect attacks in its primary, so we should assume its purpose is to be something like a scrapper, picking an enemy and hounding it till its dead. But then its secondary includes more attacks and only defense powers. This means it's doing the following...

-When enemy threat is high, its staying back, using its defense powers and distance to keep it alive. It's only using about half its attack powers, and is thus being less effective than any of the other ranged DPS classes.

-When enemy threat is low, its moving in. It's now in melee without all the good melee options, making it worse than any of the melee DPS classes.

Except you've gone and put AoE attacks into its secondary... Ranged AoEs. This is supposed to... boost its damage, I presume? If anything, it just gives it more of a reason to avoid melee. This AT is, well... You've just recreated a Blapper, but with less damage and more survivability. And without the nuke. It's better than a Blaster solo, perhaps, but on a team, it's pretty bad. Now, if your goal is a blend of DPS and keeping your allies alive... That's a Corruptor. Assault/Survival just seems like a bad way of saying Blast/Buff



Long story short: Please set out a mission statement for this AT in two sentences, one saying what the primary does and one saying why the secondary is a good fit. For example.

"The scrapper's purposes is to deal heavy melee damage. A defense set secondary allows it to survive in melee longer than most ATs."

"The Masterminds purpose is to summon many pets to fight foes and disperse aggro. A buff/debuff secondary set allows it to keep these pets alive effectively."

Well it's a good /idea/, it's just, you know... Already been addressed and discarded. **offers cookie**

No, my point is... the devs have already been asked if they'll ever put an AE made arcs into the game as a whole, and their answer was that the amount of work it would take to rebuild an AE arc into real game arc was so great that the dev effort saved in doing that instead of just making their own arcs was pretty negligible.

The issue with this is that the AE tools are /not/ the same tools as real missions are built with. The developers have said multiple times that they are NOT at a loss of arc ideas or plans, but what they are at a loss for is time to program these arcs into the game, test them, work out bugs, etc etc.

I just don't see the point at all. In team play, if you're ranged, why do you need all those defenses? It might be good for soloing, but it just seems... not good overall.

The prepurchase order is only 30 dollars. Wasn't there also to be a 40 dollar version with bonuses? Is there any way to get those bonuses AND the Dual Pistols/Demon Summoning early releases?

Before this happens, or as it does, can the whole set get a buff? Trick Arrow seems to... underperform... in comparison to most Buff/Debuff sets.

Well that's just not fun. They shouldn't let us try things that aren't possible to win unless there's some sort of trial where you can do "better" each time... Like a never-ending swarm of heroes at some point...

I think us successfully destroying the world would have major issues.

Bonus idea on how this will work, to keep tankers from NOT attacking... Numbers are rough, and not really balanced, but it's an idea.

-You gain a bar, like Fury, which I will for now refer to as "Smash." This is a stupid name, but it works for now.

-Your bar settles at 0 out of combat, slowly decreasing like a Brute's does.
-Your bar increases your damage by a max of 50. Not as strong as a brute's, but your base is higher.
-Whenever you attack, your bar increases by (2.5 x enemies in gauntlet range x cast time).
-Whenever you are attacked, your bar decreases by 2.5.
-Whenever you use Taunt, your bar raises by 10 for each target.

This requires tanks to stay active and close to foes to increase damage output, and taunt frequently. It also means tanks are best when paired with someone with AOE mezzes.

---

Alternatively...

-You gain a bar like Fury, which I shall refer to as "Stance."
-The bar settles at 50 when out of combat, raising or lowering to get there.
-You gain a damage modifier equal to (Stance minus 50 x 1%)
-You gain a defense modifier equal to -(50 minus Stance x 0.1%) and a resistance modifier equal to -(50 minus Stance x 0.2%)
-Whenever you attack, your stance increases. (more damage, less def/res)
-Whenever you are attacked, your stance decreases. (More def/res, less damage)
-This should be such that on Solo x1 your stance will pretty much always be about 50.

This forces opponents into a delightfully bad decisions: Don't attack the tank and get pounded by him, or attack the tank and watch him suck it up and take it like a man with +10 defense and +20 resistance while keeping him at -50% damage.

I think the idea of a toggled single target confuse would be pretty cool, albeit very expensive on the endurance... But yeah, you can't just up and replace powers like that.

As someone who's put a great deal of work into his base, I have to say that while I respect that you're trying to simplify this, I think you're oversimplifying it and assuming everyone wants a base in a manner that most people don't.

First off, multiple buildings as the norm is an awful idea. While some supergroups have multi-building outdoor areas, this is the exception by far, and when they do they're usually massive supervillains or government owned. The most well known supergroups are...

The Justice League, who have one building: the space station known as "The Watchtower."
The X-Men, who have the Xaiver Institute which is as well, one large building, a boarding school.
The Avengers in either SHIELD HQ or the Stark building, depending, still one building.
The Teen Titans have Titan Tower.

As far as villains go... Penguin's got a nightclub, Luthor's got the Lex Corp building, and most villains, like Joker, Poison Ivy, Two Face, are transitory because their bases are only safe as long as they're unknown.

The only major comic book villain I can think of who ever really had a huge, expansive base was Magneto, and even he has had more than a few different locales over the years.


The idea of a mini-zone, well... It just doesn't make much sense. Yes, there's a small subset of villains and an even smaller subset of heroes who have multi-acre plots, but even those tend to just focus on one building in the middle.



Now, on the other hand, what is a good idea here is ready-made structures. Rooms are, well... They're a pain to put together. I've spent many days if not weeks working on my base, and yes, it shows because my base is awesometastic, but wow if that doesn't eat up everything I've got. And most people just want a quick base that looks decent, not a base that looks OMGAMAZINGTASTIC.

What we need is pre-fabricated room options. That is, when you make a "control room" the option to set it up as a Full Tech Control Room or Full Arcane Control Room and have it just... put itself together right there. Certainly the crazies like myself wouldn't touch the stuff, but it would make making a nice looking base a lot easier for the masses.

I think the way to do this, in part, would be to make "Giant Monster" versions of each of the Rogue Isles Villains. I don't mean 20 feet tall and uber damaging, but rather the "purple to everyone, takes and deals damage based on the player's level." Each villain would be tied to an enemy group, and for some, more than one villain would spawn. For example, while Pyra would spawn with, say, The Hellions, Bad Penny's team of 8 villains would randomly spawn in groups of 2-8, depending on zone population at the time.

The problem with no making them con as Giant Monsters, of course, is that it'll be kinda dull if one level 35 guy runs around Kings Row and kills the AV the instant its up.

A link to a long post on the ideas of NPCs and how to make them make bases amazing is in my signature.

Umbal, I was implying Sorcs are blasters and Rangers are Scrappers... But yeah... Off topic, and I'm much more familiar with 3.5 than 4E, so... I'm just gonna end the discussion there.


3.5's only really effective methods of letting a character Tank are Taunt powers and a few abilities to raise the defenses of characters near you.

The balance is the primary/secondary thing. Yes, Brutes get less bang for their buck with their defense sets, but they get more with their melee sets. If we were to change this, we'd need to also lower the secondary effects of all of a Brute's defense powers and all of a tanker's attacks.

And the zombies can combine to some sort of composite monstrosity!

-While I admit that it's not a perfect comparison, your comment about strikers is, well, wrong. The PHB2 added a new striker called the Sorcerer which specializes in AoE DPS. The Striker is defined as the highest damaging class, and while the first 3 strikers focused on single target damage, the Sorcerer is absolutely a Blaster. And while Scrappers don't have target choosing capabilities... neither do Rogues or Barbarians (the latter also PHB2). For a Rogue, the target is chosen for you. You can either Sneak Attack or you can't and it's more the Defender's decision than yours. And Barbarians just have super criticals and even more damage than anything else. Yes, MOST Strikers mark a target and then focus exclusively on that target, but that's not the defining trait of the archetype, it's just the way a lot of them get more damage.

I'm not sure what you mean about Superior Mobility there, either. I don't recall any Striker other than Rogue really having "superior" mobility to the other types, and I seem to remember Wizard and Druid, Controllers, having all the coolest movement powers.

-Controller Primary=Controller. Yes, Controller secondary varies more from what D&D Controllers can do but, really... Controller is about screwing the opponents over so that they can't attack. And yes, Controllers have AoE damage, but it's still about half as much as a Striker's. Druid basic AoE is 1d6 damage. Sorcerer at-will AoE is 1d8+Cha+Str damage, +str again if the foe decides to attack you in response. Controller AoEs do moderate damage and have a heavy control element to reduce their attacks. Sorcerer AoEs do massive damage and when they have a debuff attached it's a lot weaker than the Controller has.

-My purpose in that post was not to say that City is just like D+D. It was to say "Here's a system for which something similar works, how can we make it work in city?" We have gotten off topic.


-Yes, Giving Tankers the ability to penalize foes who choose to ignore them, like Defenders in D&D 4E have, is a good idea.

I like Umbral's idea. Dungeons and Dragons has a similar method of using Tankers (which they call "Defenders." Their Defenders are called Leaders. Controllers are still Controllers, and Blasters and Scrappers are both Strikers).

In D+D, the tanks have the ability to Mark enemies. This doesn't force enemies to attack them, but instead penalizes them for NOT attacking them. For example, if you neglect to attack the Paladin, you take holy damage. If you neglect to attack the Fighter, the fighter gets a free attack on you. And both give a -2 penalty to hit foes who aren't you (the CoH equivalent of a -10). If you neglect to attack the Warden, the Warden can choose to slow you or take an attack that gives a -2 defense if it hits. Note that D+D does set it up so an enemy can't be Marked by more than one defender at a time, but you only get one foe Marked at a time, so more tanks just mean they each hold one guy.

I'm not sure how this would work with City's mechanics, but I'd agree that what tankers really need to remain competitive with Brutes is the ability to do bonus pain to foes who ignore them. Either bonus damage or bonus debuffs.