ComradeCommunism

Not much I can say that hasn't already been said, but I'd like to add to the idea that truly "superpowered" superhumans are practically impossible to build into a video game, particularly an MMORPG. So what I'd like to talk about is Superman. Namely: there has never been a good Superman video game ever made in the history of video games. The following article is an excellent example as to why.

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/vide...e-terrible.php

How do you build a game where the main character is essentially god? The traditional strategy has been to either create contrived, stupid reasons as to why he can't take full advantage of his god-like powers, or alternatively, you pretend he doesn't have god-like powers in the first place. Neither approach has lead to very good games.

Hell, it's a problem even in the writing of a character like Superman. There are two decent types of Superman story: the ones where he's fighting enemies that are at his level of power and the stories that are for lack of a better term, existential. Stories where Superman fights god monsters can be very good, but they're also intensely limiting: an audience doesn't want to read about a character that punches Darkseid in the face every issue. So the alternative are stories where Superman deals with the limits of his omnipotence. Alan Moore wrote some of the better ones.

Take a look at some of the better Superman clones titles:

Irredeemable
The Plutonian, (a Superman archetype) goes completely mad from a combination of guilt and loneliness, because he's fully capable of protecting everyone on the planet. Unable to cope with his omnipotence, he takes a ten minute break on the moon just to get away from it all, and in those ten minutes hundreds of innocent children are killed. The Plutonian is in a real sense responsible for their deaths: he could have prevented them. Even worse, people blame him for it! Unable to live with this responsibility, the Plutonian goes mad and begins slaughtering the people of the world.

Supreme
After Alan Moore took over the title, Supreme became less of a superhero comic and more of a literary and existentialist journey for a god-like entity. The stories are fun, engaging and interesting. They also have very little to do with material that could be made into a video game.

Astro City
In Astro City, there is a superman archetype called the Samaritan. He is the last son of a dying world, a superman who chooses to live amongst humanity, the writer even goes so far as to give him a job at a newspaper. The Samaritan is also fairly miserable. He sleeps 3 hours a night. His every day is spent saving the lives of people, and even stopping to say hello, or allow people to see him as he saves them can cost another person their life. His civilian identity is a pointless sham; he can only spend a few minutes a day pretending to be less then superhuman.

Superman: Red Son
In Superman: Red Son, Kal-El crashlands in the Ukraine and is raised in Soviet Russia. Unlike his American contemporary, The Man of Steel eventually ends up running the entire communist economy on his own, because after all, HE CAN. He builds a world where people are well cared for but where the achievements of human beings are always essentially meaningless. When he is finally defeated by Lex Luthor, he isn't beaten physically, but by having it revealed to him that he has become no better than Brainiac, creating a world that for all intents and purposes might as well be in a jar on his shelf in the Fortress of Solitude.

How do you make such an MMORPG, RPG or any video game platform? Will you have a save vs. existential angst? Maybe every mission arc could end with: "Congratulations SuperGuy! You saved the world from Dr. X, but unfortunately while you were doing that a busload of orphans fell to its death. You will never be able to save all of us." It's just not possible.

Finally, the existence of the Superman in comics naturally reduces the meaning of every other superhuman within the game. Who cares for a Colossus or a Captain America or a Spider Man or frankly, any Marvel hero, when you can be the Godhead? Why play a Firestar when you can be a Firelord?

Recently, I've seen a lot of discussion about changing the "crashing" Tier 9 powers so as to either remove the crash entirely, or make them work more like Willpower's "Strength of Will". I am fairly ambivalent about any such change, particularly if it reduces their bonuses. However, I think that there's a change that could be implemented that wouldn't require the powers to lose anything. Namely:

Make Tier 9 "crashing" powers work like the Hybrid pseudo-toggle

Here's my reasoning: I use Tier 9 powers on a lot of my characters. They're great panic buttons in solo play. The problem is that once you've used the panic button and hopefully dealt with the danger you end up making one of two, less than stellar choices:

1. Jump into the next mob and keep your fingers crossed that you kill them all before you crash; or

2. Sit around like an idiot waiting for the crash to happen.

This is annoying in solo-play, and incredibly frustrating on teams. Teams don't generally like to stop and wait 1-2 minutes for you to crash and recover. If you're the tank, there's a good chance you might face-plant while fighting the next mob, possibly taking your teammates with you. Even if you aren't taking the alpha, the odds are high that you will die if you continue to fight, particularly if you are relying on Power Surge or Unstoppable. On the other hand, if you were able to CHOOSE when you were going to crash, you could quickly get back into the game, pop a few inspirations and not force your team to sit around waiting out your power. The Hybrid pseduo-toggles have the perfect mechanism for making this work. You could hit your panic button, kill the mob, and then purposely crash, so that you could recover faster and return to combat.

Thoughts?

I want to know more about the Orb Weavers section of Arachnos. You get a feeling from the lore that the Orb Weavers were the dominant force in arachnos before Recluse came along, and I always thought that they sounded pretty interesting. Who would choose to transform themselves into a cybernetic spider?

Alternatively, I want to see more about Atlas and Talos. Frankly I'd just like to see one of the big guys show up in a mission.

I've been away from the markets for a long time now, almost a year. I'm still sitting pretty on 1.5 billion influence, but as I want to SPEND it, I need to start making money again. It looks like a lot of my old niches (particularly the salvage ones) are no longer as profitable as they used to be. Back in the day I used to run AE missions for tickets and turn them into bronze recipes or common salvage depending on the day to make my money but the 200-400 million I'd pull per run has dried up. Salvage is cheaper as are a number of my old favorite bronze recipes. What are people selling now for profit? Or are the returns just much smaller than they used to be?

I have a lvl 50 Spines/Electric with 35% S/L defense and decent recharge that is tons of fun to play. My advice is to embrace the strengths of electric armor. Between Power Surge and Energize you will be able to handle as many end draining toggles and attacks as you want. My scrapper runs 12 toggles with no problems and has barely any endurance reduction slotted into his attacks. As long as you can find a mob and have 13 end, you'll be able to return to full every 30 seconds or so.

I feel like one major problem with how many people have reacted to the Incarnate system is assuming that their 50's will need to get all of the Very Rare Slots. This to me is like assuming that all of your 50's will need to be outfitted with all of the PVP and Purple IO's. If your starting point is to assume that you will get the ultimate level of power for all of your characters in an MMO you are probably going to be disappointed with the amount of work it is going to take. For me, that's not even an option: I have 15 level 50's and 2 more on the way. 8 of these 50's are "favorites" that I play a lot of and expect to play through all of the Incarnate content.

I have no plans whatsoever to get very rare slots on any of my 50's. Based on my playstyle, I imagine that 2 or 3 of them will eventually get the very rare Alpha in maybe 3 or 4 months as a result of being played more than my others, but most of my 50's will probably never move beyond the 3rd tier on any of their Incarnate slots. For me this makes sense: all of of my 15 level 50's have IO's but only 3 have any serious number of purples and/or PVP enhancements. Most of the time I'm perfectly happy with "second best" IO's and powers. I think if players look at the top tier incarnate slots as aspirational rather than "MUST HAVE NAO" they'll probably be perfectly happy.

I absolutely love my Spines/Electric. He runs 11 toggles simultaneously and never runs out of endurance. I farm at +3/X6 with him and while I have more effective farmers, he's FUN. Electric is an excellent choice and a rival for Fire and Dark. While Dark has a lot more tools in the tool box and Fire has a decent endurance recovery power, nothing matches the sheer ridiculousness of being able to have a toon with 11 toggles NONE of which are slotted for endurance. Between the endurance reduction in your heal and Power Sink you are golden.

I'm currently playing an Psy/Fire blaster up to 50 and I am planning on investing a serious amount of money into it. I'm currently level 38 and I'm wondering if I've made a mistake in taking Hot Feet and Blazing Aura. Hot Feet in particular has an extraordinarily high amount of End drain, and as my "final build" will probably have Weave, Tough, Combat Jumping and Frozen Armor all running, I don't know if I'll be able to afford it.

My final build is going to be a soft-capped S/L defense Blapper. Could someone try to sell me on Hot Feet and/or Blazing Aura? Are they worth running? Should I only have one? Am I too worried about the endurance cost? Any advice would be appreciated.

I did the WST 4 times last week. 3 were cake-walks with no problems at all, but the 4th one, dear lord... First of all here's our team dynamics:

1. Warmace/Shield Brute (Me)
2. Gravity/Empathy Controller
3. Plant/Radiation Controller
4. Soldier of Arachnos
5. Robots/Dark Mastermind
6. Fire/Fire Tank
7. Invul/SS Tank
8. WP/DB Tank

So I look at the team, and I'm like "okay, this might be a little tough on the DPS front, but otherwise I think we'll be fine". I'm not crazy about having 3 tanks, but 2 tanks are great, so one more won't kill us. I'm also worried because half of the players have not done the task force before, but again, this doesn't really worry me: the learning curve isn't that bad. We start the task force make it all the way to the final mission when I discover that NONE OF THE TANKS HAVE TAUNT. NOT ONE. Only the Brute (me) has taunt. After the team wipe three times in a row because the tanks cant handle LR, I order them to go pound on the pylons while I take on Recluse. We succeeded because I "hover tanked" him, which I hate doing because it feels so cheap, but at this point I realized the only way this TF was getting completed was if I did the hard parts.

I have a level 50 Illusion/Sonic that I am fond enough of that I've created a "decent" build for her that provides her with 43% ranged defense. The big problem with sonic is that most of it's effects are fairly subtle; adding 40% resistance to every teammate doesn't have the same kind of feeling that /rad has. The other problem is that it is an endurance nightmare. I have the Cardiac Alpha and a Miracle proc to offset the end drain, but it is still very high.

I view Illusions/Sonic as a big moving bunker. Everyone who stays close to you can benefit from increased survivability and an army of pets and pseudo-pets to take aggro.