Cuppa_Lux

I'm not going to be doing any more PVP testing until the stamina bug is fixed. As an Illusion controller, many of my powers have a very high endurace cost, so after I'm defeated once I'm pretty much unable to do anything except try not to die again. And with most teams taking the tactic of 'kill the trollers first!' PVP becomes Not Fun very quickly.

I have to say that so far, I'm not finding PVP as much fun as I had hoped it would be. I know that it will get better with more testing and balance, but right now I'm having more fun levelling up alts than I am PVPing.

My PVP experience is also making me think I will not be interested in COV when that game comes out.

Tactics is THE power to have from this pool. Six slotted, it makes a very significant difference in your accuracy, especially when you like to play with the difficulty slider moved up.

I tried Assault thinking it would help with pet damage but dumped it after a respec for Maneuvers. However, I have not found Manuevers to be worth six slots so have it single slotted.

Liberty

General-purpose chat channel for members of the Liberty server.

I took ST in the Test server into a Malta instanced outdoor mission, lvl 46, and it Feared even-con and +1 minions, including Sappers, quite effectively. Ditto Rikti on the PI beaches and +2 monkeys on Monkey Island. It was not quite so effective against Lieuts but I didn't have it slotted; a few accuracy or fear enhancements might make it more powerful. It does jack against Nemesis minions. This is not surprising, since I was never able to effectively Deceive Nems either.

Overall I was pretty pleased with the power and if it does not change would consider it worth using, although still somewhat situational.

I'm really itching to see what it does in the Arena though. If it's effective in PvP I'll settle for it being only somewhat effective in PvE.

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you could ask them? sure they could lie, but I'm always willing to let people know what they are up against.

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And there's just no way I would want to PVP you with that kind of slotting. Why bother?

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I have an HO. It doesn't make the screaming difference you folks seem to think it does, honestly.

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It's like the difference between a power when you first get it and when it's fully slotted. One HO is not a big deal, but 5 or 6 of them will make a significant difference.

The one 'good' thing about Hamidon enhancements is that they're only available to a limited number of players. It's going to unbalance the post lvl 45 PVP scene, but lower than lvl 42 it's more or less a non-issue.

And remember, all it takes for the Devs to stop Hamidon farming is a few more tweaks to Hamidon's hold resistance. Just because they have not done it yet doesn't mean it's not going to happen.

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omg she didn't... she didn't...

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(by joining the Kill Skuls channel from Test)

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She did!

CuppaJo said "Kill Skuls!"

*runs in terror*

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Not only that, she chatted in the channel.

10:24 AM PST: chat is down on Liberty server.

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People always talk about "respecing out of those weak attacks", but often, you can't. You can sometimes reduce the # of slots in them, if you have something early that needs slots (Buildup and HASTEN for me).

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The log jam of powers to be selected from in the early levels is a sneaky way of making sure that you can't end up with a character with no useful powers.



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It's also a sneaky way of making sure characters cannot have all high-damage powers. Score one for balance.

I will probably take MC even after my respec but I doubt I'll slot it next time.

I'm not a number cruncher, so I can't back this up, but as I play more and more I'm seeing the wisdom of either fully slotting a power or not slotting it at all. With many powers it seems that with less than four slots you might as well not slot at all.

I'm really enjoying BS/DA. Tried MA and Katana and neither really did it for me. BS does.

I'm wrestling with exactly how useful Murky Cloud is, though.

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2 - A "message board" where ranked members can post things to be read. The message of the day does a bit of this, but it would be great to have a real SG message board.



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It's not an official COH service but http://combatgamer.org/ does offer free message boards to COH SGs.

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What tweaks would you like to see for Super Groups?

What new features?

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-More members. 75 is not enough. Or make it so that it's accounts, not characters, that are at the 75 limit. Otherwise you end up with a host of 'side' SGs just to hold people's alts. Once alliance chat is enabled this will be less of an issue but right now it's a real pain in the butt.

-The sort by last date online feature currently seems to be broken.

-Our SG has a problem that some members have been inactive for several months but because their characters are 'leaders' they cannot be removed from the SG. This needs to be fixed. Just because a character was promoted should not render it immune from being removed from the SG. An alternative would be to create a setting for the SG so that each team can set a default 'boot if no login' time -- say anything from 30 to 180 days. That way groups that value active members could set it to auto-boot characters after 30 days of non-play, but other SGs who don't care about inactiveness would be able to adjust accordingly.

-An SG 'bank' or some similar feature so people can more easily trade inf, enhancements, and inspirations within the group.

THANKS!!!!

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Now that is a list I would love to see. As an aside - I think it would be fun if the Devs posted.... say the top ten and let players vote on what ones they wanted to see. Might be interesting if the devs are planning on adding two, let the players vote on one and then pick one themselves. *shrug* might be fun at least

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The reason why we don't do this is because players don't necessarily understand the effort that goes into features. Not everything can be voted on equally; some things take MUCH more effort than others. And this is not transparent...

Also, there's a lot of other things going on, often underneath the proverbial hood, that players don't notice. They don't know what's a priority and what's not just from a plain ole' stability standpoint.

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If it were framed properly it could be managed, I think. You could say something like: "Here's 10 items from the wish list. Numbers 1-5 are easier to code and could be released sooner. Numbers 6-10 require more complex changes and would be in the pipeline longer. Given that, pick the top 3 that you'd like to see us focus on."

Thanks for the post. it's nice to get so detailed an explanation.

I'd like to address one of the forced grouping issues that has not yet gotten much play -- that of how it takes away from the ability to enjoy content in the game.

As a bit of background, I am a co-lead of an active SG and team very regularly. I also take pride that my main character has done every single story arc that was available to her at the time. I like to go through story arcs in depth. I read all the clues, pay attention to the back story, and generally try to enjoy the content as much as the battles. Arcs like The Wheel of Destruction, the Freaklympics, Ubelmann the Unknown, and the Organ Grinders are clever and unique and add a lot to the normal grind of the game. At least for me. Some of my teammates get more enjoyment out of the group dynamics and the fighting (which I also enjoy).

BUT -- no matter what your feeling about the content is, it's a lot harder to really savor content on a team, because you're likely to be switching from arc to arc, depending on who has missions in which zone ("why schlep to Talos for that next mission on your arc when there's two others right here in Brickstown?"), and who can call a contact for new missions instead of having to run across the city for more missions.

So for me at least, there's a contradiction. Teaming is a lot of fun, but it's harder to really appreciate significant parts of the content when you're teaming. I solved this contradiction by soloing my story arcs. That doesn't work so well anymore. Now, as my Controller hits her upper 30s, I've run into the problem that as I get more powerful, I am less able to solo. This Boss change has made life harder -- and my Ill/Rad controller is a pretty solo-friendly build. My Controller can generally avoid being one-shotted by a boss, but if my holds miss and/or my toggles drop I am one dead Controller. Not fun.

In other words, it seems to me that the goal of encouraging grouping and the goal of content enjoyment are somewhat mutually exclusive, and that this change has sharpened the contradiction there.

DA: STACKABLE ARMOR

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Yeah! And he should have a deep Austrian accent!

"I vill crush you wis my rock hard ABS! Then I vill balance the snow budget... FOR I AM THE ABDOMINATOR!!!!!"

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Pheer the Kaleeefornian!

I miss snow. I haven't seen any in 2 years. Snow in Paragon City would be fun.

But I'll settle for an Abomiable Snowman to kill.

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Dang straight. Post your ideas/thought/opinions. I read 'em - and so does the design team. And I'm not such a prima donna that I can't go back on a past decision and eat some crow.

The most important thing is the quality of the game. That's it. Everything else is secondary (including ego's).

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Good, now how about putting the 5th Column back?

Agree and disagree.

Faultline is a ghost town. I got 1 or 2 "kill x" missions there, did them as quickly as I could, and never went back. The biggest reason is that my only travel power when Faultline was level-appropriate for me was SS and Faultline really stinks when you have only SS. The other reason was that it's located way down at the bottom of Skyway City and is a pain to get to.

Boomtown, OTOH, was and is a favorite hunting spot for toons in their teens. You can get around it reasonably well even without a travel power, and the approach to it is less hazardous than the approach to Faultline.

# Supergroup Name: HOT CHICKS OF PARAGON CITY
# Website (if any): forums on http://www.koreclan.com/HotChicksBB/
# Leader or Recruiting Officers: Savage Souljah, En vy, Electra Dame, Raederle, a few others
# Preferred Method of contact: ingame tell or email.
# Guild Description: We don't care if you're a guy or a gal in real life, but your character needs to be a gal. We have a range of levels, although nobody over 40 - yet - and enjoy teaming up, having fun, and laying the smack down on any evildoers we see.

I like the 'international' flavor that having everyone on one set of servers brings, and will be a little sad to see that go. However, it's good that German and French and Italian etc etc speakers will soon be able to experience the game in their native languages if that's what they want.

I crossed paths with the problems internationalization brings to software at points in my past. Now, it's possible to create software that is internationalized from the get-go, but a large chunk of the time it doesn't happen like that. Then, later on, you have to rework the software to make it work better internationally.

This seems to be what's happening with City of Heroes. It is easy to say, "oh they should have written it the other way from the start". It is much easier said than done. The price you pay is additional time and complexity in development when your main focus is getting the software to work at all.

There may be other issues as well which made it advisable for COH to develop a seperate version for Europe. EU privacy restrictions, which are very different than US ones, come to mind as a possibility. There may be some truth to the rumors about the 5th Column causing a problem in Germany. Probably others I am unaware of. At any rate, it's their decision to make.

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Maybe the dev's are being creative and trying to make archetypes that aren't in comics yet.

Yes this game is based on comics but that doesn't mean that everything has to be from comics

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BINGO! The goal of the Epic Archetypes is NOT to reflect paradigms that already exist, but rather to create a gameplay experience that reflects the City of Heroes mythology.

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Obviously you know what you're referring to much better than I, but I gotta say, if they're so unique why do the Warshade sound like an echo of the Goa'uld?

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That pretty much makes City of Villains unplayable for Controllers! Thanks!

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Not for an Illusion/Radiation controller.

When your accuracy and damage have been debuffed and my Phantom Army, Phantasms, and decoy Phantasms are all circling you, ready for the kill, who cares if you can't stay held? You're still going down.

I did my aura mission along with 2 other SG-mates who had also hit lvl 30. We had the whole thing done in about 30 minutes. It is MUCH easier than the cape mission.