Captain_Wacky

I have numerous Defenders.

My 4 highest are:

MegaBass: Lvl 50 Sonic/Sonic
Cryon 6: Lvl 50 Cold/Ice
Hard Radiation: Lvl 48 Rad/Rad
Force Guardian: Lvl 46 FF/Rad

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I had the worst experience on Saturday with an AE bunny. We made the mistake of advertising our Synapse in Atlas and got a 17 Kin/Arch. He assured us he was a good Defender since he had 2 x 50’s both Defenders. Being the only Defender in a melee heavy team we told the Tank and Scrappers to stick together and for the Kin to hit them when he can with Transfusion. First engagement tank and 2 scrappers die with zero coming from the Kin other than lots of arrows, so we look at his build..OMG! He has all Archery powers up to Aim , Stealth, Kick, Flurry and Siphon Power!! One whole power from his primary !! We asked him why he didn’t take any of his primary powers , he said and I quote. “ I never needed taht stuff b4 the blobs never attack us” .....Ugh.......I died a little inside

P.S. should have looked at him ahead of time then I would have seen his 14 total badges ( no vet badges ) 11 of them AE badges and his power choices. Ah well.

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Always look at the badges before a task force. They aren't always an accurate picture of a person's play experience, but they will let you know when something is way way wrong.

Just out of curiosity, if Defenders are given a boost to soloing, will Scrappers have to be given a team-oriented ability to make them more desirable on teams? Will Tankers have to have their defense toggles modified to include teammates? Will blasters need more defense? Will controllers need their pets moved to a lower tier so they aren't too slow leveling in the early game?

The five archetypes and the dozens of powers within those archetypes are designed to have strengths and weaknesses. Some tankers are squishier than others. Some tankers don't handle aggro as well. At least one controller set has no pets and another has extra pets. At least one Scrapper secondary and a tanker primary sacrifices some self-defense for some extra team defense. Dual blades does more dps at the expense of burst damage. Stone tankers get wasted by psi damage.

To make all characters level equally well against all foes at all levels within teams and in solo play, you'd end up with one archetype and powerset.

I'll be honest, for me, it has nothing to do with leading, following or responsibility and has everything to do with time. I rarely get to play for more than 30 minutes at a sitting. Enough time for a tf is a rare commodity. Forming a team myself or even being only the second or third person to join a tf team that usually takes a long time to scrounge up enough players to start spends a considerable amount of time I can't afford.

Typically, I join teams, especially task force teams that are just looking for one last teammate. Which means I solo a lot of newspaper missions.

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Interesting then, that so many De Fen Der characters can't De Fend themselves...

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But they can defend the heck out of everyone else.

Maybe someday they will create a new archetype: Self Defender.

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You mean the Defender AT is specific in who it's defending?

Hmm... if a tree falls alone in the forest, does it make a sound?

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The funny thing is that my Sonic/Sonic defender doesn't feel particularly squishy when he solos. His damage doesn't feel subpar. He isn't even designed specifially to solo. Isn't that weird?

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Interesting then, that so many De Fen Der characters can't De Fend themselves...

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But they can defend the heck out of everyone else.

Maybe someday they will create a new archetype: Self Defender.

Defender.

De Fen Der.

Defender.

That's all I'm gonna say.

A lot of people view Bodyguard mode as a resistance.

I see it more as communal hit points. My minions and I share a combined hitpoint pool. As long as they are in range and in Body Guard mode, I effectively have more hitpoints than a capped tanker. As my minions died and I resummon them, I am effectively casting Dull Pain.

If you picture your minions as extensions of your hitpoints and damage, I think it really gives you a better picture of how to use them most effectively.

Nothing dooms a task force more quickly or completely than people who leave as soon as the going gets tough instead of sticking it out and formulating a new strategy around the team's strengths and weaknesses.

It's also a great power choice to conserve slots for other powers that need a lot of them.

You know what makes a great team healer great? Having another great defender on the same team.

Demons aren't evil enough. I want clowns.

Unfortunately, fire/kins are a bit of a rarity so finding people to give you build tips might be difficult.

I played with a couple friends a trio of thugs/traps.

It was obscene.

A Parkour/Free Running Travel Power would be as awesome as it is improbable.

I'm going to be wanting that little costume changing spin now.

Nope. Photoshopped. DOn't pay any attention Devs. Move along, nothing to see here.

*points* Look! It's Bigfoot! *runs*

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What if MM's were allowed to summon pets during the set up timer? 10 seconds isn't much, but its better than a stick in the eye. But it also doesn't give them all the time in the world to set up all their pets and buff them.

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What if all classes were set at various times based on the need/prep time to be fully functional.

I know some classes should be up for killing again right away, others need a 10-15 second prep time, and being able to opt out of prep time would also be a fairly cool feature.

Anyway just saw this portion and was intrigued enough to comment.

Ex

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What about something like that red square at the entrance/exit of outdoor instanced missions? When you enter, you could be in the square and unable to be attacked or to attack. You can leave the square at any time and it vanishes after 15 seconds.

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The explanation that the devs gave us as to why power customization was not possible was that the auras and power effects could not be changes, they were 'baked into' the animations themselves.
Of course, redoing the animation without them and adding a way to select which power effects you want and their color and stuff (basically power customizaiton) was possible, technically. But was not realist in term of work load for them.
Now, if there is a way for the player base to give them these animations already done... then, I guess, power customization become doable.
It is one of the most desired feature for the game, from what I read...

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No, the colors for a lot of particles are 'baked in' to the particle's texture. The FX scripts themselves are completely separate from animations. In fact there's a lot of animations that are shared between different powers with entirely different FX.

Power customization has some pretty big hurdles to overcome.

1) Powers currently point to one animation and one set of FX scripts. There's no way in the our engine at this time to have them reference a different animation or different FX without just changing it in the power definition (which changes it for everyone). This isn't a small or insignificant change and without it we literally can't even begin to do costumized FX or animation.

2) Colors in FX are often baked into the particle textures. Most of the time they're not, they use a greyscale texture and tint the color with an RGB value, but there's enough that do use a colored texture that it would require quite a bit of work to overhaul and set everything up for customization. We did test a more global system that could just shift the hue of the entire FX script around the color wheel, but it's not a complete solution to the problem. Namely that FX aren't normalized to a common color, there's no way to dynamically change this 'shift' value, and there's still issues with blend modes.

3) Particle FX most often use an additive blend mode. Additive means that the closer a color is to white (in RBG values), the more opaque it becomes. Secondaries like yellow (255, 255, 0) are more opaque than primaries like red (255, 0, 0). Black (0, 0 ,0) ends up being completely transparent. So to take the Energy Melee FX for example and make a black version or even a dark purple (64, 0, 64) or dark blue (0, 0, 64), we'd have to do more than just shift the RGB values around.

4) Even if the system could accept more than one animation or more than one FX script for a power, we don't have an in game system for allowing the player to choose this themselves. We could make one (probably based off of the costume editor in some way) but it's still another chunk of time to devote to this.

Those are the major issues that I can think of right now, there's other minor little issues here and there but it all adds up to a tremendous amount of dedicated work from multiple departments to pull it off.

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The $64,000 question is; is it worth it?

My opinion is 'yes'. But I won't pretend my opinion is anything more than my own. *nod*

I guess it wasn't bs afterall.

Somebody in game said that between issues 8 and 9, that several changes were planned to a number of powers, particularly blaster powers. He read off a list of powers and seemed qute in-depth. But I can't find anything on ths in the forums. Has anybody heard anything about this? Is it likely, or even plausible, or was this guy a BS artist?

I chose costumes, but I feel the need to elaborate:

I like the variety. Not just costumes, but origins, archetypes and powers. Especially powers. The more variety I have, the happier I am. I would LOVE to have more freedom among the powersets to choose combinations. I would LOVE to have orgin-specific abilities to choose from. I would LOVE to have more character complexity and uniqueness.

I know that there are always balance issues and min-maxing issues and that development of new powers, archetypes and abilities are very development intensive, but in my opinion, it's the most unique thing CoH/CoV offers. Your variety of character options are almost unmatched. I think you should continue to play to your strengths. *nod*

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Not it at all. Many of the issues in the list already make it into our bug database. Most of the things I am looking at are considered fairly low priority in the grand scheme of things. Yes, I know that there are some fairly egregious issues on the various user compiled bug lists, and they should probably be higher priority than they are -- and that is why I take time during my lunch hour and when generating data from spreadsheets to look at issues that are important to you guys, rather than just looking at our bug database.

As for other community reps, that's on the "Things to do" list. After CoV beta ended, we decided we wanted to continue the idea, but being short on personnel, especially those who have an in depth knowledge of the powers system, we've not yet decided how to go about it. It will probably happen at some point in the not so distant future, but it is also possible we never get a properly trained core group to divvy up the responsibilities effectively.

In the meantime, I do what I can.

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Heroes DO exist!