DamageSponge

I really like I9 all around. However I only gave it 4 stars and 1 thumb instead of 5/2, because one of the things I've always liked about CoH is precisely that you didn't have to grind for better loot. I have to say I'm enjoying grinding (and using the market) for the loot, but that special aspect (not the only one of course, but that one) of CoH that set it apart is now gone.

DS

[ QUOTE ]
You know, I hate to be a killjoy, and I'm really glad that it went relaly well for msot people, but I think I'm with Captain Photon on this one. If I were trying to have a conversation or somethign, and then a whole bunch of archvillains magically apeared out fo no-where and ganked me "for fun" I wouldn't be entertained: I'd be veyr, very irritated. Frnakly I've never been terribly impressed by the "some meet a signature NPC" sort fo thigns in general.

Still, we seem to be in the minority, which is probably why I don't ussually bother to attned dev-sponsored events anyway, so as long as most of the people there had fun, I supose the objective was achieved.

[/ QUOTE ]

I gather from the hypothetical tone of your post that you weren't actually there, much like Captain Photon. (Neither was I.) Without first-hand experience, and lacking a detailed description of what actually happened, how can you judge whether what happened was suitable or not?

From the reports in this thread of those who were there, it sounds like (a) there was plenty of warning, and (b) the players ASKED for AVs to be spawned. Not at all like you're describing above.

There's nothing wrong with not liking an event, and expressing ones' opinions on the subject, but at least it should be based on something that actually happened rather than speculation


DS

[ QUOTE ]
Planetside may have been the best game ever -- I personally would not know, I would *not* pay a monthly fee to play an FPS when I can play Counterstrike for free.

[/ QUOTE ]

Planetside got a LOT of things right. Unfortunately, the expansions they came out with were unpopular, game-breaking (or at least bending), or both. The addition of BFRs to the game (massive robots, I'll let you figure out what the acronym means) ended up driving away a lot of the long-time players, although eventually I think they did manage to balance them reasonably well in the game. Other problems were introduced when they merged multiple servers (realms) into one and decided to let players have characters of more than one empire on the same server, like unbalanced empire populations (it was easy join the "winning side" if you could have multiple characters of different empires) and "spies". Despite all that, though, in terms of the fundamental implementation of a MMOFPS, they nailed it pretty well.

What Planetside offers over a transient FPS like Counterstrike are, in part, (a) Longer-term objectives that focused on further than the next 5, 10, or even 60 minutes, (b) much larger-scale fighting (c) the evolution of higher-level strategic planning that results from A and B. Just like getting that next level in CoH, taking control of a Base or Continent in Planetside gave you that feeling of accomplishment that you wouldn't get from just playing Counterstrike for the same amount of time (even if you know your side is going to lose the base by the same time tomorrow).

If you're really curious, they do (did?) offer a more-or-less permanent free trial - called "Planetside Reserves" - where you can play for free, but you can only get up to Battle Rank 6 (out of 25). Still, that's high enough to try most stuff and get a feel for the game.

DS

[ QUOTE ]
Player Auction houses are a great example of PvP content that is typically embraced by PvE players.

[/ QUOTE ]

Why do I get the feeling that you've played EVE Online?

DS

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The only thing I can say is the mobs must be doing an aggro check of every player in range and the AI is splitting the aggro among the whole team so one player is not the main focus of the whole spawns aggression.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's correct. It has been this way since release, I believe -- I remember being aggro'd while running Invisibility back in beta. In a nutshell, the entire team is put on the awareness/aggro list, not just the person who initiated the combat. It's not quite that simple, since there are a number of extenuating circumstances that can happen, but in general it is correct.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wow that explains some behaviour I've noticed for a long time but could never figure out:

I'm in a team, with stealth on, so I'm up closer to a group than the rest of the team. Some doofus in the team shoots one or gets a little too close, and they all decide to shoot ME.

So what I'm getting here is that the reason for this is they automagically become aware of me (though I'm stealthed) and the rest of the team, but since most of them are only within (aggro?) range of me, they all choose me as the target in that scenario. Does that sound about right?


DS

I'm a bit late to this party, but fan-[censored]-tastic. 2 hours well-spent plowing through this guide. You mentioned a link to download the simulator code?

DS

[ QUOTE ]
/Fire ABSOLUTLY needs an overhaul, from lvls 1 to 50 the only secondaries I had were ring of fire ( required), Build Up, and Hot Feet, (cause I ran out of things to take before the ancils came out).

[/ QUOTE ]

While I'm sorry to hear that you get little use out of your secondary, ironically Fire/ is probably the power set that least needs that /Fire brings to the table. My Ice/Fire blaster, on the other hand, so far has and uses a number of /Fire powers (including the much-maligned Combustion) to good effect. Just because you don't like the powers doesn't make them bad or totally useless powers.

DS

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I like Super Jump because of its combination of speed and vertical movement. It's also handy in PvP. It's a maintenance power, though. It's difficult to chat when you constantly hold down the spacebar. (Yeah, I know...remap the key!)

[/ QUOTE ]

/bind z "++autorun$$ ++up"


[/ QUOTE ]

Exactly - remap the key

The problem with autojumping though is that it's too easy to get stuck on something when there's a lot of buildings around (balconies, awnings, etc.) And it definitely slows you down as well, as you can't optimally place your jumps to keep above obstacles. Flight is way easier!

I had played some 100+ levels of hero before I picked up Flight on one of my toons (I had taken SJ, Teleport, and SS already). It blew me away and it's my favorite travel power now

DS

[ QUOTE ]

And they're hidden away, effectively in their own dimension. Other people can see my costume and go 'wow' simply by my flying past. To see my base, they have to be in a coalition with me, or on my team while we go there (and for that to happen, we need to have a reason for them to go, other than me saying 'come check out the base'). They can't simply happen across it and go 'wow!'

When something has substantial show value, you have to be able to show it off!

[/ QUOTE ]

Not only is it (relatively) hard to get access to someone's supergroup base, but you ALSO have to go out of your way to go and visit it. Unlike a costume , which you can just notice while doing something else, to see someone's base you have to take time out of your regular play to go and look at it. I've done some base creation myself, and worked to make it look nice, but at least I had my other supergroup members I could show it off to (and they had a reason to go there )

Also, because bases are tied to PVP as well, often PVP considerations outweigh aesthetics.

I don't know what a good solution to these is. :/

DS

Wow. That has got to be one of the most articulate, well thought-out, and rational posts I've ever read on these forums. Kudos to you!

DS

[ QUOTE ]
Wait wait wait.....

does this mean we may get a Filipino stick fighting martial arts set?


[/ QUOTE ]

I was hoping *exactly* the same thing!

Great article, Gilgamesh - it was a nice, moving piece.

DS

When Taunt gets fixed, the high defense ATs will actually be able to help protect the low defense ones properly without killing everyone's fun.

DS

[ QUOTE ]
This is only with the No Travel Power option.

You can have PVP with Travel Powers, if you want to use them.

[/ QUOTE ]

The same applies to Combat Jumping.

DS

[ QUOTE ]
Your ground speed is capped at Sprint speed.

Your jump height is capped at slightly above normal jump height.


[/ QUOTE ]

And also air speed while jumping? I can move along at a pretty fast clip with Super Jump by hopping along very close to the ground (which I do in missions a lot)....

DS

[ QUOTE ]
When I create my characters, I do the research and find out what other people find effective so I don't find myself in a situation where I chose stupid powers and can't even beat up on an even con minion or two.

[/ QUOTE ]


When has ANY powers change rendered any character (which wasn't completely dependent on a sole power) incapable of beating up a couple of even-con minions? Or maybe you meant to say "large spawns of +4s".

DS

[ QUOTE ]
Now, of course, some of you are right to point out that such a system is ripe for abuse... you can scout out enemy positions for your buddies and the like.

Thats why we made these Observer cameras targetable and easily destroyable. This is a very cool feature that adds another dimension to gameplay.


[/ QUOTE ]

Very cool indeed - although I can see a lot of abuses there too.

Running your camera up to some Kinetics defender running Repel (or some similar power which costs the user per target like Oppressive Gloom) and causing them to lose endurance, thus directly affecting the fight while an Observer. Heck, just getting a half dozen cameras buzzing in my face while I'm trying to fight would be annoying

On the other hand, maybe I can get a horde of my fans to cluster around me and boost my defense and acc buffs from Invincibility

Or any number of draining kinds of powers... having a friend always nearby in camera mode so you can always fire off a targeted heal or other self-buff (soul drain, consume, transference, etc. etc.) on a target which doesn't have souped-up defenses would be awfully handy in many cases.

DS

[ QUOTE ]
Heres an idea:

when Rage wears off, instead of endurance dropping to zero (thereby losing all toggled defenses, the heart of the tanker), You instead have incredibly sllloooowww recharge time on all powers.

This would simulate how tired the hero now is! Perhaps a minute or more. And the hero will need to be placed on the untimate defensive position untill then..."catching his breath", so to speak.



[/ QUOTE ]

This is an excellent idea. The recharge slowing would also impact the ability to make Rage permanent (and Hasten or other "perma-able" powers for that matter).

DS

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

However the slow recharges is the best penalty I've heard yet since AFAIK this cannot be mitigated in game by anything. Any endurance based penalty can be mitigated by a decent Emapthy defender or even some blue pills or unstoppable. Any stun based penalty can be mitigated by the basic defense powers or a good empathy defender or disciplines. But slow recharge ... I guess a radiation defender has a minor fix for this ... but there's no innate tanker powers or inspirations that will solve the problem ... which makes it the perfect "penalty". It wont kill the tanker but it will slow them down.

[/ QUOTE ]

Also the Kinetics power "Speed Boost" would offer some mitigation for the recharge slowdown.

[/ QUOTE ]

Also the Kinetics power "Fulcrum Shift" would make the +DAM from Rage completely superfluous in many cases. I don't see how another AT's powers are relevant here - we're SUPPOSED to be helping each other and covering each other's weaknesses in ateam.

DS

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
In levels 1 to 22ish, this system works perfectly. Things are about as hard as we wanted them to be. But as soon as players can purchase single origin Enhancements, they rapidly make the above calculations almost irrelevant. A player enters a mission – or a zone – and can rapidly breeze through +1 to -1 leveled spawns using the calculations above.

A solo player (unless the mission calls specifically for a boss in a spawn override) will create spawns with minions and lts. ONLY. My concern at the mid and higher levels is that a solo Archetype isn’t all that powerful. Their inherent weaknesses and strengths really come into play post level 25.


[/ QUOTE ]

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? You first say that a solo player can breeze through a mission, and then you say that a solo player is not all that powerful. A well-built solo player has no problem with +2s and +3s for the most part, and any solo player that could effectively solo bosses before is not going to have any trouble doing so now, because this game is about enemy neutralization rather than fighting them straight up. Things only go bad for good players when neutralization becomes impossible.

This holds true for pretty much any non-Blaster archetype, as follows:

<ul type="square">[*]Controller - Before pets it can be fairly slow going, but afterwards it's no issue for pretty much any controller to solo enemies. (This includes Mind Control; the experience drain from confuse is greatly overrated.)[*]Defender - A defender specifically built for soloing will take a bit longer than a blaster, but be extremely difficult to kill while doing it, with less downtime. (Rad, storm, dark, and kinetics primaries mainly.)[*]Scrapper - An extremely well built /DA, or just simply a decently built Inv/Regen/SR don't have any trouble at all. Heck, my SR was taking Terra Volta Raider packs by herself with very little downtime during the 20s, and with the exception of the gaping AoE defense hole, breezed through the 30s. And we won't talk about post-Elude, where I can take on maximum sized mission spawns of +4s, including bosses, just fine if I pay attention to what I'm doing.[*]Tanker - A decently built tanker that sacrifices some defense for offense can start really pounding the snot out of things in the 30s, especially once they get to their 35 and 38 slugger hits.[/list]
Note that all of these are due to support skills, including defenses, debuffs, knockdowns, and the all-important Stamina. That is a large part of the problem with this: The game is too binary right now. You have the support abilities to nullify the enemies, or you don't. That's pretty much it. A /dev or /ice blaster can almost nullify a heck of a lot of enemies. A /fire can't. (Actually, what the crap is /fire good for anyway?)

So, exactly how do their weaknesses and strengths come into play in the late game? As far as I can tell, my Scrapper can ignore the attacks of 99% of the enemies she faces, including bosses, Monsters, Archvillains, and so forth. It takes either an acc buff, def debuff, or something to hit for more than my maximum hit points for me to give notice. Seeing as how enemy buffs/debuffs are comparitively rare, and only a few Archvillains can even hit that hard, this leaves precious few enemies to pose an even remote threat. Exactly what is my weakness here?

My controller gets the amazingly stupidly overpowered EM Pulse, and with the standard Gravity holds can keep the enemies locked down indefinitely while the sings crush them into paste, while the Rad secondary neutralizes what enemies are not held. I don't consume much endurance doing this, I just sit there and toss stuff out occasionally to pretend I'm doing something. And he doesn't even eat the alpha strikes of most groups, since he pulls the Singularities into the group with SS stealth. Where is my weakness? Enemy Dispersion Bubble, which is nonexistent outside of Possessed Scientists post-35, and Fungoids, which are also almost nonexistent post-35. Beyond that, it takes a ridiculous quantity to even bother me.

The simple fact is that enemy difficulty is still there, it is just that some characters are much, much better at nullifying what the enemies do than others are. If you look at the predominant builds in the game, you'll see that a large majority of the successful soloers nullify a large portion of what the enemies do to a great extent. It's not really fighting the enemies when they can't do anything to you. Look at the laundry list of the most popular builds for higher levels right now: Fire and Illusion controllers. Regen, Inv scrappers.(and as soon as people figure it out, SR too) Fire tankers. /Dev blasters. Etc. All of these can nullify the majority of what the enemy is capable of doing, eliminating a large portion of the risk involved.

It isn't SOs that do it, it's the fact that enemies are outright nullified by the available powers. Increasing boss power doesn't make it any harder except for those characters that have not chosen to neutralize them, and this will further sideline builds that cannot. Don't get me wrong, I like the tougher bosses. I really do. But conceiving that it's going to make a huge difference for anything but the players of the game with lesser builds is a joke. The real solution here is to make the enemies buff/debuff more than they currently do, to offset the neutralization that they receive. Don't just make it more difficult for the average players, make it difficult for the good ones too. (The Council Sonic guns are a step in the right direction IMO.)

Were I in your shoes, I would start looking at the situations that cause this and what can be done to rectify them, rather than attempting to modify the numbers involved.

[/ QUOTE ]

I have to say that's an extremely perceptive &amp; well-thought-out post.


DS

[ QUOTE ]
Actually, Devs can be quite sneaky, you think they'd be uber players, but that might not always be the case.

I remember when Scrappers were getting upgraded, and States said he spent a lot of time playing scrappers. He'd often join a group and ask scrappers "Hey, how do you slot your attacks?". Of course, HE had all the numbers and knew the best way to slot up, he just wanted to here what the information (or misinformation, as it was) was out there among scrappers.

[/ QUOTE ]

Misinformation like "there's one best way to slot your attacks, and it's X".

DS

[ QUOTE ]
*gets out his Statesman decoder ring*

[/ QUOTE ]

DON'T FORGET TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE

[ QUOTE ]
Honestly what i see being the biggest pain in the [censored] for PvP is all of the different Z axis issues. There would almost need to be a bubble of war or some sort of street instance that comes up so you don't have the crazy running around of fighting. Pretty much I see claw and spines/* taking the place of tankers in groups as they are the only ones with range. The only skill that will level the playing field for any non range AT will be AS since itll bring them to the ground, even then you gotta get in range. If they allow you to tp foe on PCs that will be a fight saver and bring all ATs back into the playing field but who knows...

[/ QUOTE ]

I think PvP will take place mostly in mission scenarios. That is, you'll be inside office complexes, warehouses, caves, instanced outdoor missions, etc. In many of these scenarios, going vertical is pretty much impossible, so while fliers may have an advantage in certain instances, there will be others where it confers no benefit at all.

DS

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
PVP will either make tankers useless or one of the most important things to have. It all comes down to if Taunt forces a PC to not be able to target anyone but the tanker or not.

[/ QUOTE ]

I definately hope it doesn't cause come down to a choice like that. Personally I would like to see a taunt cause an accuracy debuff to the effected targets against all other targets except the taunter (coding I am sure would be impossible but hey I can dream).


[/ QUOTE ]

Aggro control is hardly the only thing a Tanker is useful for. Many Tankers' melee attacks have some potent secondary effects (knockdown, disorient, slow) which can cause problems for their enemies. And a Tanker's damage output, while not as high as a Scrapper or Blaster, is not something you want to be receiving in the face either - and it will be very difficult to stop them.

DS

Ok I'll have to admit I'm not especially familiar with Adrenaline Boost as a power, but going from your comments:

- Using it inflicts the caster with a 20 second disorient
- It has a duration of 90 seconds

Based on these facts, couldn't use simply use it *before* entering a tough combat? Tack on an extra 5 seconds to re-enable your toggles, and you still have 60+ seconds of pure goodness with which to thrash the villains.

DS

[ QUOTE ]
For those suggesting end recovery be halted, I'm fairly sure "halting" end recovery would simply be applying a -100% endurance recovery debuff on said player.

Issue with that? Same as with the same effect on Nova and the like - it's overcome fairly effectively with Recovery Aura.

I don't know the numbers, but here's an example using assumed/made up numbers:

100% end recovery rate with the following modifiers: + 100(RA) - 100(AB) leaving you with endurance recovery of normal.


[/ QUOTE ]

Moment of Glory halts healing pretty effectively, so I don't see why it couldn't be done with AB. I'm not saying it's necessarily a great idea (although it sounds interesting), I'm just saying I don't think there are any serious technical hurdles involved.

DS