Captain_Photon

Depends on your view of "too much," I suppose. I mean, for most superheroes the "super" is the whole point. Without their powers they wouldn't have taken the job in the first place, right? And there's a whole class of heroes who are only able to function, much less operate as superheroes, because of their powers. If he couldn't breathe underwater, Aquaman wouldn't last long as king of Atlantis...

On the other hand, there's Araña/Spider-Girl, who, at around the time she changed her name, lost her powers, was too stubborn to quit, and discovered that there was arguably greater satisfaction in just punching evil in the middle of its face anyway. I have a character with a similar sort of schtick, although the Torch of Victory (as her name suggests) used to be a Fire Blaster, so the transition to Puncher of Villains was perhaps more radical for her.

(I find Torchy confuses other players. They read her bio, which notes that she lost her powers but declined to pack it in, and ask how I did that, as if the fabled powerset respec might have come along while they weren't looking. Then I have to explain that no, there never was a Fire Blast version, the idea is that she was just an obscure sidekick before she lost her powers and came into her own as a Natural MA/WP Scrapper. That's about when the "whatever" and the sidling out of the room comes, but I don't care, I'm having fun with the concept, anyway.

There used to be access from Kings Row to Perez Park once, long, long ago. You can still see the abandoned checkpoint along the northeast wall. With Galaxy City gone, perhaps the time has come to reopen that access point to the park. (I'm not sure what the rationale was for eliminating it in the first place, but the general attitude toward ease of access in the city has changed significantly since those days anyway.)

I have to say I question the OP's definition of "casual" if it involves running the same trial four times in a row, then two consecutive task forces. That's like calling NFL players "casual" because they only play one game a week.

The fact that Kheldians' inherents only help them on teams is entirely by design; they were introduced back in the days when the development team's attitude was overtly "lolsoloists". Revamping that would require a complete re-evaluation of the archetypes (which might be called for, actually), but is a little outside the scope of this thread.

That said, I quite like your idea for a new Tanker Inherent. I would think you'd want it to be a straight Damage Resistance buff, though; its accumulation would be based mostly on how much you're getting hit, so making it buff Defense would be counterproductive. Maybe mild boosts to regeneration and recovery, too. The more you get hit, the less it hurts, but if you rest, it goes away; and since Tankers put up such lukewarm damage, the tradeoff for that near-invincibility if you're alone or in a small group is that it's going to take you all week to finish everybody off.

As for Defenders, I'm not sure. Again, the whole AT is an artifact of the early dev team's "team up already, jeez" policy. (This can be seen somewhat in the villain ATs - Corruptors are basically just fixed-up Defenders.) A number of Defender primaries aren't even helpful to the Defenders themselves, which has always struck me as more than a little messed up. Maybe their Inherent should just be the ability to buff themselves.

The Beam Rifle model I liked best in beta doesn't seem to be available in the production release. Sadly, I can't remember what it was called. Seems to me it was after the DUST Cannon in the list; it looked a little like the Vanguard rifle, but shorter and with a nifty circular glowy bit on the side panel. Does anyone know whether that got removed for some technical reason, became an unlockable variant (and if so, how it's unlocked), or what? I'm reasonably sure I didn't imagine it...

So last night I was flying around with one of my characters whom I'd just put a Retro jacket and sleeves on, and I noticed something odd. For a moment I thought I was imagining it, but indeed I was not. I grabbed this shot with her flying toward the War Wall because it makes the problem quite apparent:



She's got no upper arms inside her jacket sleeves! Creepy!

I took her to a tailor and changed her Chest texture to Dress Shirt, which normally covers the arms, to see if that made a difference; it didn't.

Earlier today I happened to remember something that occurred very early in my CoH career. I was playing one of my earliest characters, the Silver Spectre - an MA/SR Scrapper and old-timey two-fisted mystery man (and an homage in style, if not backstory, to the Gray Ghost from Batman: TAS).

To help set the scene a bit, here's what he looked like back then, vs. what he looks like today, with many years' worth of costume pack additions and graphical improvements to work with...



(Amazing how much the look of the game has improved over the years. I always get a chuckle out of it when people claim it "hasn't changed" since 2004.)

But I digress. Anyway, Spectre's big thing back then was that he was especially pleased to fight the Fifth Column, since he had once personally punched Hitler back in the day. One day I rounded up a mission vs. the Column in an abandoned warehouse - pretty standard stuff. This was long, long ago, before the mission difficulty adjuster, before the Council, before any of that stuff, and I had just acquired the mission, so I hadn't outleveled it, and I was alone, so there was nothing to bump up the spawn sizes. Everyone in there ought to have conned white or yellow (with the occasional orange lieutenant) and appearing in groups of two or three. I zoned into the warehouse, walked around the corner...

... and discovered, clustered in front of, beside, and on top of the first group of shipping containers in the hallway, a horde of -2 Fifth Column minions. More than would normally have appeared in even the most wildly frontloaded mission back in those days. More than you'll find in one of those big crowds of Skulls in Perez Park. There must have been 20 or 30 of them jammed into that section of hallway.

And here's the thing: That was by far, hands down, no questions asked, the greatest fight of the Silver Spectre's career. Because he was exactly the kind of hero who would punch 30 Nazi mooks in the middle of their face. (Well, back then, without the alternate animations for Martial Arts, he was more kicking them in the middle of their face, but you know.) The Silver Spectre wading through that army of green minions, beset on all sides, easily overpowering them individually but utterly swamped by their numbers, was as close as City of Heroes has ever come to being properly, heroically cinematic for me. It was awesome.

The rest of the mission was normal, and nothing like that has ever happened to any of my characters again.

So that's my suggestion, basically: make moments like that available to player characters. It'd need to be something at least partly configurable by the user - I'm certainly not advocating dropping green hordes on unsuspecting players by surprise - so perhaps a special difficulty setting? Or a handful of unique new missions, a la the ones that provide badges (Negotiator, Spelunker, that kind of thing)... I'm not sure of the best implementation, but I'd really like that brand of experience to be available as part of a regular crimefighting career. (And yes, that means "just set up your own little greenie farm in AE" isn't going to feed the bulldog.)

Icon's been adding a lot of branches lately. Maybe they ought to have a mall-storefront-style outlet in the regular part of Pocket D, like Vault Reserve does. Or in Studio 55, come to that.

It's probably easiest if they just flip whatever bit controls the super-tailor ability on the backend controlling Rita, but frankly I find it so irritating that she's standing outdoors that I'd rather see a new location introduced. It's ever so much fun when night falls during a tailoring session in Imperial City. Or an invincible pedestrian comes along and pushes you halfway to the Trading House.

The nice thing about having been a Shining Star is: Now that I'm operating in Faultline, working with Fusionette doesn't really seem that bad. Compared to Flambeaux the girl's a frickin' genius.