ClawsandEffect

I like both ideas here.

Retail price at WW, last 5 WW at vendors. The retail price isn't a big deal for me, I know roughly what I'll get for most stuff. The last 5 WW sales would be VERY useful for me.

If I don't play for a few days I'll vendor things that have had a price jump since I was on last. It's logical...last I checked a Brass was going for 100 inf, so I vendor it. Then I go to buy one to craft something and find that they're 10k now. It happens quite often if I'm in a zone where there is no WW and my next mission doesn't take me near one.

Good suggestion.

I've wasted a teleport numerous times that caused my scrapper with no travel power to have to traverse 3 or 4 zones to get to the mission I was running. Not a huge deal, just annoying.

Would also make blind invites slightly less annoying. You still didn't ask to be invited, but at least you'd get an idea of what the person is inviting you for.

Unfortunately, the people who tend to blind invite a lot are also the people that probably wouldn't use this feature.

Yes, I can go along with the "invalid target" mechanic.

My main is one of those apparently blasphemous NO SB people. He is built in such a way that Speed Boost provides almost zero benefit, while having the downside of making him difficult to control.

It is important for a melee character to not be continually overshooting their intended target. It is especially a problem on large teams, when my computer has a tendancy to lag if there is too much on the screen at once. If I get Speed Boosted in that situation you have just effectively removed me from the fight.

It is even worse when I am Speed Boosted unexpectedly, and go sailing past the mob I was aiming for and into the next one. Since I tend to jump into a mob so I can get into the middle of it, badly timed Boosts usually hit me when I am in midair. Suddenly, I am moving a great deal faster and my planned trajectory is out of whack, causing me to agro a group I wasn't aiming for. Guess who gets blamed for the extra agro? Not the kin that SBed me at a bad time, that's for sure.

Every other character works beautifully with Speed Boost, just not that one.

I like the different color for trial account names. That would make things a little easier. We could then tell who is on a trial account and won't get miffed when they don't respond to a tell. For those like myself who enjoy showing new players the ropes (Here they are...we have 50 foot, 100 foot, and 200 foot spools), it would make it easier for us to figure out who needs a rope tour.

The Cimerora GM is a good idea. I came up with one myself a while back...a Colossus.

Zombie invasion could happen, just reskin some of the existing zombies to be zone appropriate.

The rest of your ideas are kind of silly. I have nothing in particular against them, they're just......silly.

Drop rates are exactly the same as when we had more supply.

No one is playing the missions that stuff comes from. Well, some are, but that's just why we have such a limited supply instead of it drying up completely.

Hopefully I16 will coax some people out of the AE buildings and into the places that that stuff comes from. I'm not goping to count on it though. The ability to set a mission for an 8 man spawn is going to be too tempting for the PL fiends.

I actually doubt the market prices are going to go down at any point, at least not a whole lot. As the prices go up, the people selling stuff are making more money, so they can spend more on other expensive stuff, which means someone else now has a lot of money to spend on something.

It's not so much that the prices got unreasonably high....it's just that the value of the INF crashed. There is so much of it in the game, and not enough sinks to get rid of it, so after a while you see stuff that listed for a few thousand listing for a million. Influence/Infamy is so easy to acquire that the people who have a lot of it think nothing of spending 100 million on a recipe, because they have it to spare. Unfortunately that hurts the players who aren't inclined to play the market or farm, because they are not acquiring inf at the same pace. The people who HAVE the money tend to control the price, albeit indirectly.

Server: Pinnacle
Location: Western Iowa
ISP: Local cable company, unsure of specifics.

Has been borderline unplayable at times. It seems pretty random, with several hours of no problems and then a 20 minute time span where my connection and frame rate are just mush. There generally isn't any obvious cause for it, as one of my worst rubberbanding moments was in Boomtown, which is dead even on it's best day.

Personally, I'd much rather have a story to follow.

If you actually read what the contacts are telling you, you find that a lot of the them say "Go see Dr. Sheridan so he can give you the pink ooze you need to survive in the dimension you're going to" or something similar.

Of course you ask "Why can't Dr. Sheridan just give your contact some of it?"

The answer: Because Dr. Sheridan invented the stuff after you got out of the last mission, in which you collected the information he needed.

Everyone complains about repetetive content, and fails to realize that CoH is a story, with your toon as the main character. From your character's perspective, this is the first time any of this stuff has ever happened. It's like reading a book, and then reading it again and complaining that the story stayed the same.

I avoid AE mostly because, in 90% of the arcs I find, there is little or no story. One mission I loaded up had the scintillating mission introduction of "go level". Then the contact inexplicably said "left", and the nav bar read "right". Out of every ten random arcs I find, on average, there is ONE that has a story. The rest are all variations of "I don't want to write anything so here's a bunch of random words you can ignore on your way to stupid high amounts of xp"

I don't care if you want to make a farm mission, but seriously, you can't be bothered to even type a couple sentences? I had a farm mission during the Comm Officer craze, the difference was mine had a plot, if you read it, there was actually a reason to be there. I have an arc that is designed to level one of my own characters, it is technically a farm, but it has 4 missions and a storyline. If you were unaware that it was designed for a spines/fire scrapper to rip through, you'd never guess it was a farm.

If a mission contact can't even be bothered to make sense, why would I want to help them? Telling me "jksuahbi" to explain what I'm going to be doing, and then saying "asyfgwbj" when I go to enter the mission just doesn't imply that I'm doing anything of any importance. For Pete's sake, at least tell us WHY there's a thousand Maniac Slammers infesting the same few city blocks that everything else has infested.

I would much rather travel from PI to Atlas, via zone gates, than run a mission where the most compelling thing the contact has to say is "kill". And I'd rather run a FedEx mission than spend 20 minutes looking for an arc that has even a rudimentary plot.

Cool.

We just got our new puppy over the weekend. Another Chesapeake Bay Retriever. We had to drive to Wisconsin to pick her up because there were no breeders with any litters in the area where we live.

She's 7 weeks old and her name is Asthe (pronounced Ah-sta). This will be an interesting experience for me, as I have never trained a puppy before. I'm relying on my wife's years of experience to see me through the early stages.

You know....now that I think about it...a WWII rifle would be a cool option for War Mace.

Pistol Melee is never going to happen. The devs said exactly those words on several occasions. Almost verbatim.

Also, joefrompa74, they kind of are giving us a Street Fighting set (in a roundabout way) by giving us animation change options for Martial Arts. You can select a punch for everything except Crane Kick and Dragon's Tail. I will be rolling a MA/WP with all of the animation options (yes, even the Eagle's Claw option)

The way I read it, Brutes and Stalkers are getting the change to the power, they just aren't getting the power any earlier. Also, if you look at it Electric Brutes will get Energize at the exact same level they currently get Energy Drain (Energy Aura) so, they're not really missing out that much.

Tanks and Scrappers will probably get Lightning Reflexes and Energize swapped around.

If they changed the order of the powers for already existing characters it would break a lot of builds that took Lightning Reflexes at 20 or 22. If you can't get the power until 28 after they change it, it would just disappear. Energize being taken at 28 wouldn't matter, because it would still be available by then.

I expected that change to be honest. They CAN'T let tanks and scrappers keep Conserve Power, because it's available in their APPs. They aren't going to allow the potential for perma Conserve Power by doubling up on it.

Hopefully with that in mind Brutes and Stalkers DO get the change, seeing as how Conserve Power and Power Sink in the same set are kind of redundant.

Eh, Speed Boost is annoying to use. The bubbles...not so much.

With Speed Boost you're applying it every 90 seconds or so. The bubbles all last 4 minutes each.

It is also worth considering that if they made them AoE they would probably be nerfed in effectiveness. Otherwise you'd have FF defenders running around with almost 30% defense to everything between the bubbles and Dispersion Field.

I'd rather not have a "gather for bubbles" situation either. Buffing on the fly disrupts a team's combat flow less than stopping to rebubble.

It's set up that way so you are contributing around the same amount as you level.

At low levels, you aren't killing as many foes, and you aren't killing them as fast.

At higher levels you kill mobs much faster, and you kill a lot more of them.

Looking at just the amount per kill isn't the whole picture, you have to look at how many you kill, and the speed at which you do so as well.

I'm pretty sure if you compared a low level character to a high level character over the course of one hour the high level character will be earning more prestige. At the very least it will be about the same.

I don't remember exactly, but I believe the offical reason is so that you don't have to be high level to feel like you're contributing to your SG.

Just for the record: You mentioned that you're running a DM/SR I believe?

If that's the case you shouldn't need Aid Self for 99% of situations, Siphon Life should be enough to keep you on your feet.

Yes, the softcap is a good thing, but it isn't mandatory. I have a DM/SR brute that is just beastly already and he's only at 34% or so, the to-hit debuff from DM makes a lot of difference when you're fighting a small number of targets you can switch targets between. Against 3 targets I can consistently keep at least a 7.5% debuff on all of them at once.

A lot of times your primary will have quite a bit to do with how important hitting the softcap is for you. For example: Hitting softcap is more important for Dual Blades and Claws than it is for Dark Melee or Katana. That's because Dual Blades and Claws don't really have anything that adds to your survivability in their set other than a couple soft controls (knockback and down), Dark Melee debuffs enemy to-hit with every attack, and Katana has Divine Avalanche, which will easily get you softcapped to melee by itself.

Bill hit the nail on the head though, if it works for you, it's fine.


EDIT: Werner had a good point as well. If you were the last man standng on an ITF and only died once, there is nothing wrong with your build at all. Tweak it if you want to, but it isn't necessary.

Everyone else covered your questions pretty well.

Just wanted to say welcome back!

The higher in level the character is, the higher the likelyhood of pissing someone off gets. If a character is level 5 and hasn't been played for 2 years they obviously weren't too attached to it, especially if the account has only been inactive for a year.

Come to think of it, I'm probably going to go through the servers I never play on and delete the toons there I never play, just so the names are available. I'll also be locking down my main's name everywhere it's available. I've wanted to try claws with other secondaries and that just sounds like a good excuse

I play almost exclusively on Pinnacle.

I have about half a dozen neglected villains on Triumph, and I have a few characters on Guardian and Champion.

I prefer the lower population servers. My system can't handle the lag that Freedom generates, and my brain can't handle the dumb. (I actually have a couple characters there, that's how I know) Not to say that all Freedom players are dumb, I've met quite a few that were good folks, just that for some reason the idiots on Freedom are less avoidable and ignorable than elsewhere. I may roll an alt on Virtue, just to check out the RP community (I RP once in a blue moon, so I may be in the mood for it within the next few months)

Eventually I'll get around to locking down my main's name on all the servers it's still available on, especially after brutes get claws.

No real reason why not. Just want to point out there is a really simple fix to that problem.

Press "Tab" before you start typing. It puts the cursor where you need it with one keystroke.

5 slots at 50 would be a nice compromise. Everyone would still have the same amount so it's still fair, and the people who have a level 49 power they'd like to 6 slot would be able to.

Yes, TA is coming to corruptors.

Will most likely be the same situation where if you choose Assault Rifle on a corruptor it will grey out Trick Arrow.

With Defenders if you choose Trick Arrow it will grey out Assault Rifle.

Very much the same way that two handed weapons sets (Claws, Spines, Dual Blades, Katana) grey out Shield Defense when you choose them.

Since they couldn't or were unwilling to allow that, it doesn't seem too likely for them to allow Trick Arrow and Assault Rifle on the same toon, and even less likely they would allow, say, Katana and Broadsword in the same set.

Looking at all of the difficulties involved here, I would say this idea is probably never going to see the light of day.

First, the weapons and weapon stance problems would have to be addressed, and I'm not sure if it would even be possible to come up with a solution good enough to take live.

Second, as I mentioned earlier, certain set combinations would be massively overpowered, even if they were less effective. On the flip side, other set combinations would also be gimped to the point of unplayability. You really can't have one extreme without the opposite existing as well.

Third, as my Stone/SR example pointed out, some combinations would let you eliminate the weaknesses or disadvantages that were designed into each set to balance their strengths. In order to prevent it from being overpowered you would have to nerf it so much that a character using that combination would not be on par with a character using either set alone.

Those concerns are taking the 75% and 50% effectiveness into account. Much less than that and there would be no reason to use two sets, because your performance would be so much lower than a single set. Any more than that, and my hypothetical SS/Fire/Stone/SR brute would go from "overpowered" to "god-mode".

It's an interesting idea nonetheless, and I commend you for thinking outside the box, but there are so many balance issues that even if the devs DID figure out how to make it work it would be a nightmare to try and balance that many powersets in combination with others.

I would say it would be 99.9% certain the devs will never go for this idea. They just recently got the powersets into a reasonable level of balance across the board, it would be far to much to ask for them to do the same thing on this much larger of a scale.

You mentioned that corruptors have 8 primaries and 9 secondaries. That's 153 powers available to corruptors. Not only would they need to remain balanced within the sets themselves, but they would also have to be balanced with every possible combination. And then you have 9 other ATs to do the same thing with. That is, obviously, a staggering workload.

In order to make this happen, the devs would have to pretty much halt all new development for at least a month or two. I'd rather not see that happen, and I don't think you do either, since your reason for suggesting this is to have more new stuff to play with.

Unfortunately, anything more drastic than that would make the set just about unplayable. In order to keep it from being overpowered you'd have to nerf it so bad that you would actually be severely penalized for using that feature. You would end up with a hybrid of Stone and SR that cannot keep pace with either set by itself. And that wouldn't be fair.

Also, did you consider the implications in the weapons wielding sets? I know you originally meant for blast sets that had no drawn weapons, but to be fair, you would have to give this option to everyone, not just those with no drawn weapons.

As per BaBs, all weapons sets have their own combat stances, that is why powers like Kick cause redraw, when you wouldn't think they would. (I PMed him myself on that a while back, I can post his response if you like)

Additionally, each hand only has space for ONE item in it. I'm not a programmer, and I don't know how the game's code works, but I doubt it is mechanically possible to draw a weapon, enter that weapon's combat stance, make an attack, put that weapon away, draw another one and enter a DIFFERENT combat stance, and make an attack. In fact I would be willing to bet that when Defenders get Assault Rifle you won't be able to use it with Trick Arrow for exactly that reason.

The two weapon problem aside, how do you solve the problem of there being two different combat stances in the same powerset?

I don't think it is possible to code it correctly, and even if it is I doubt Castle and BaBs will go to all that trouble for something they are unlikely to look favorably on in the first place.

I like it.


Make it so!