Failsight

Sure, ideas need to be stated. But I can't really agree with yours. Objectively.

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and one cant ignore the fact that as a tier 9 power, SoW > unstoppable

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if it were a fact, I wouldn't ignore it. Too bad it's not.

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Offensively, I think the ability to crit at will via Placate lets Night Widows catch up significantly to Scrappers in DPS, as well as having a toxic damage part in addition to the lethal.

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While NWs can definitely compete with Claws Scrappers for damage, Placate really doesn't help much.

The value of Placate is essentially the Crit damage minus your normal DPS times the Animation Time of Placate. Generally speaking, the Crit is worth less than the time taken to Placate. Since the Crit is 2/3rds of the damage of the attack and Placate has a somewhat longish 1.716s Activation (ArcanaTime) that means it doesn't really add as much to the Widow DPS as you might hope (if any).

Here are the effective DPA numbers for Placate when followed by the various attacks in base DS/s:

1.066 Slash
0.711 Lunge
0.559 Strike
0.405 Eviscerate (5 targets)
0.355 Follow Up
0.309 Swipe
0.256 Spin (10 targets)


Swipe has a 0.905 base DPA and Strike is 1.216. So basically, the best case for using Placate for damage is just a bit better than using Swipe instead and inferior to using Strike, the two most commonly used filler attacks. Given its longer cast time, you usually have to delay the following attack if you use Placate, so it's better to compare it to using *both* filler attacks. At which point it's a wash at best.

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Hmm...hadn't run the numbers. Good point.

Yes, they're fine with mostly common IOs, if you make an exception to frankenslotting Mind Link with the relatively inexpensive def/rech IOs from sets.

Basically, with just that, a Night Widow can be quite a competent killer on its own. Adding sets on top of that and they become speedy, sneaky terrors that are near unstoppable. Start putting them on teams with other SoAs and...well, not much will remain standing for more than a few seconds.

Note: not "no" defence debuff resistance, just "significantly less." On the flip-side, it's a lot easier to perma-or near-perma softcap a Widow (especially a Night Widow) than an SR Brute or Scrapper. Also, it's much easier for a Night Widow to recover from an Elude crash, considering roughly half their defence comes from a passive and a long-lasting click.

Offensively, I think the ability to crit at will via Placate lets Night Widows catch up significantly to Scrappers in DPS, as well as having a toxic damage part in addition to the lethal.

So basically, I really see no reason why a moderate-to-highly IO'd NW can't solo AVs compared to a moderate-to-highly IO'd out Claws/SR.

I don't even remember what the issue was about. My personal experience has been that even just counting on taunt auras, a Tanker can hold aggro 99% of circumstances excepting two conditions:

1) It's not WP's RttC

2) The enemies actually stay within the taunt aura's range.

Adding in Gauntlet (especially with AoEs) and taunt mechanics in general tends to mitigate much of both of those two remaining conditions, perhaps not perfectly, but by all means quite well.

If I had time for video evidence, I'd provide it. But that's been my experience for a long, long time.

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It always amazed me that they wouldn't think players wanted it. I mean, they knew we would want to customize the appearance of our characters, and gave us the most amazing character design system extant, then dropped the ball with customizing the powers themselves...

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While it's definitely a shame they did, and I agree they dropped the ball, well, remember that post of mine you so heartily agreed with. It really shouldn't be surprising when taking the history of this game's development. Disappointing, yes, but there's not very much that even the devs can do now except change values, animations (animations and powers are quite different things) and add new systems. The old stuff, in many ways, is practically set in stone.

Ding!

Most people aren't against this stuff in theory (well, in wishful thinking), but are explaining why it simply is too much of a burden for the devs to do now, with the engine that they have to work with. It's sad but true.

Regarding War Mace and Axe: even if it's possible to "throw" a weapon and have an effect to have it return (an effect not altogether different from Twilight Grasp), it'd would probably run into issues since a) weapons are handled differently from "regular" effects powers (the hammer, etc. might be thrown, but still have a copy in the character's hand) and b) would have no way to have it spin correctly to land back in the hand correctly. There's also c) the fact that throwing boomerang hammers/axes is very much a speciality of only a handful of characters in known comic universes, and is...well...highly unbelievable, even compared to people who can sling energy and netherworldliness, at least IMO.

In other words, I'd be against having boomerang weapons in this game: it'd look bad, and boomerang weapons that actually hit targets...tend not to come back.

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Biggest problem I have with click mez protect powers is that I cant have them and hasten on auto. So im inevitably forgetting to fire one of them off, either of which will bone me in the...well, bad place to be boned.

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Missing Hasten is that problematic? I've never had that problem before.

EDIT: On a melee character, anyway. A perma-dom would probably have trouble missing Hasten, but they don't get Shields....

After you get Shields high enough to accept SOs (or level 25+ IOs), three slotting it for recharge means a substantial time of double protection. For Tankers that basically means some of most comprehensive, highest mag mez protection in the game. Add on to that the extra protection from One With The Shield and it's possible to get mez protection in the 30s just by yourself.

Active Defence also provides you with a substantial amount of your def debuff resistance, which means double stacking it is highly beneficial in that regard as well.

Lastly, it helps keep the set's end usage down overall, as it averages lower end usage consumption compared to most toggle mez protection.

The only real downsides are: if your recharge is debuffed massively for an extremely long period of time, you may have gaps in your mez protection (assuming OwtS is down); also if you happen to be defeated right after it was activated, being revived means waiting until it's recharged.

Pros and cons ultimately, but after level 22, it has yet to have failed me on my 50 SD/SS Tanker.

Essentially my last word on this topic (unless someone really incites me, but I've got better things to do today): there are a lot of things that should have been possible to do with CoX that the devs have said "no" to. A few of those things have eventually become features, some never will.

In my personal opinion (though not entirely substantiated, but highly likely), if the game had been designed with massive modular expansion in mind from the beginning, we'd be looking at a lot more possibilities. But it wasn't--it was designed to get specific things done for a specific release now five years past (where they had begun design and development up to four years prior to that). When a team of programmers, especially in a new field (as MMOs still were at that time), are working on something as diverse and unpredictable as an MMO, they take shortcuts and close off modularity for the sake of simplicity and performance--very understandable for anyone who knows anything about developing large programs that can often easily hit their performance caps. It takes a very large amount of forward thinking, as well as a very large time investment for testing cases where high modularity can actually mess things up. Unfortunately, once a product is released to the public, it becomes exponentially more difficult to add that modularity back in.

Add in the fact that since two requisite factors for MMOs that single-player games don't worry about are 1) running essential services with 2) high up-times just so players can play, and MMO systems are often very static when it comes to many aspects of their core gameplay.

Also, Cryptic was a small developer at the time of CoH's inception. CoH was their first product. In such a situation, it's very hard to realistically expect a massively modular and expandable game to have been developed by them: first products by un-established developers are usually designed to, well, establish themselves, get further funding so that they can then create better games. It is very rare indeed for a new development team, especially one without the industry pedigrees that are more often available now (as there weren't many places people could get experience developing for MMOs then) to plan so far ahead to allow the kind of expansion necessary to make these kinds of sweeping changes and additions easy. It was near impossible for Cryptic back then (there having been less MMOs on the market than I have fingers on one hand), and though it'd have been nice if they did, expecting that would be foolish.

Finally, I tip my hat (if I were a hat-wearing person) to the dev team of the past two years or so for having made as many excellent additions as they have. It's not easy to do these things, considering what they've had to work with was a stagnant (the initial programming team was long gone), poorly documented (shown by how taunt mechanics had to be largely rediscovered by the current devs), middle-budget (i.e. SOE or Blizzard does not have this excuse), MMO (see two paragraphs above).

The accomplishments of the devs that took stewardship of this game are extremely laudable if you understand the history of this game's development. Of course, I'd be foolish if I thought many players understood, or even cared, about this game's development history. But not understanding or not caring about history isn't license to ignore it, it's simply license to be wrong.

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Essentially, it boils down to this: there are lots of things that you point out that I'd love to see, but I understand that if I'm likely to see them,

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What that boils down to is the devs are unwilling to do what it takes to deliver on those things that people want.

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To be more precise, they're unwilling to do what it takes to deliver on those things that [u]some[u] people want that would cost them so much it'd put them out of business within a year. See? I can use formatting, too!

The reasoning is quite simple in the end: it is simply not cost effective to make all the changes that you want. While I'll agree that there are many ways that this game could be modernised, the fact is that they're making solid profits the way they're going and a complete revamp is, at this juncture of the game's life, riskier than branching a development team to make a sequel.

Ultimately, the things being asked for are generally not things that a dev team with a product coming up to five years are going to just get up and do. They don't have the mandate to do so from the publisher. They can make small tweaks where they see fit and the occasional large focus enhancement, such as IOs, flashback, or side switching, when it is deemed the investment (which is often much more substantial than you seem to think) is going to bring interest back to the game.

While a complete revamp of the AT system or the addition of full world material physics would definitely drum up some interest, the development risk is simply far too high to be deemed worthy when what already exists is deemed by the majority of players as acceptable.

Essentially, it boils down to this: there are lots of things that you point out that I'd love to see, but I understand that if I'm likely to see them, they'll be from other games--other games that have their own flaws, which will have to be weighed on their own merits. That is, after all, how business works: look at the iPhone vs. Pre for a good example of this in other markets.

SD is definitely the easiest to cap all around (Ice is also very easy to cap, but typed, not positional, which has a few [small] downsides). SD + CJ + Weave is already in range for a very cheap IO build to soft cap. You'll probably spend more on end recovery so that you can attack a lot than on actually soft capping.

Define "most."

Widow Claws are more like the strange but beautiful offspring of Claws and Spines but without the bananas sticking out all over you, and without Claws' innate benefits. However, Widow Claws' DPA is amazing if a) you get the recharge down (not too hard) and b) you have the sustained endurance to keep it up as long as necessary. Basically, if you can get Widow Claws close enough to Claws' recharge and endurance performance, you'll in fact quite outstrip Claws' performance.

Nothing ever done to this game will ever make you happier, J_B. Tankers still have a very substantial role for the majority of this game--especially on non-optimised teams, where a decent (not even great) Tanker can allow a team to take on challenges that they would otherwise not be able to do. Optimised teams are where Tankers begin to become superfluous, which is why I tend to make my Tankers as offensively based as I can (within reason).

As for concept, there are so many ways to approach concept that it's simply foolish to say that Tanker concept doesn't work; it doesn't work for you, and that's fine. It's where you start to say that concept is a factual issue that I (and so many others here) really take issue with what you say. It's a preferential issue, not factual, and a lot of us are fine with the concepts for our characters, just as we're fine with our roles.

Well, you've got every right to strike out on your own and gather a crack team of programmers, designers, artists, and support staff to make your own superhero MMO so that you can "make it right in the first place," but considering the tech of the time, I certainly don't think the devs did a bad job with the power FX (for their design ideologies, I'd give a different mark). It's certainly not something worth investigating without a large amount invested into somehow making a brand new engine work without losing a large portion of the player base, while on a manageable budget.

Ultimately, the issue is that EB PtoD is too much. No complaints about AV PtoD, though.

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and now I don't have to play a tank in order to be a hero and have decent shields.

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If all you want are decent shields, you never had to play Tankers at all. Scrapper defences have always been decent. Tanker defences are simply superior.

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*shrugs* And I disagree. I'm not willing to trade defensive capability for damage. If I play a Brute, I can have both.

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I'm sure you know this already, but Brute base values are the same as Scrappers. It's only Brute caps that are at Tanker levels. So what I say about Tanker defences being simply superior is absolutely true. Absolutely.

Brutes are what I call a "conditional," much like Dominators: their performance is ideal under certain circumstances, and under others, they can be some of the worst in the game. If you are damage capped and you're getting enough buffs to cap everything defensively (which is, of course, easier on a Tanker), then you've got a wrecking machine, no doubt about it.

However, when looking at Scrappers, when factoring criticals and assuming enough buffs to max out their caps, there's generally as little to worry about as either capped Brutes or Tankers.

Of course, this is all assuming quite a number of buffs. Buffs that could go to you, sure, but could just as easily benefit the rest of your team even more. Less buffs need to go to a Tanker, more can go to a team, the team as a whole wrecks everything in the mission as fast or faster than the super-buffed Brute/Scrapper.

Now, the fact that you said you wanted decent shields is what I was replying to initially. And again, without looking at caps, Brutes and Scrappers are at the same identical level.

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and now I don't have to play a tank in order to be a hero and have decent shields.

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If all you want are decent shields, you never had to play Tankers at all. Scrapper defences have always been decent. Tanker defences are simply superior.

Yeah, it'd be fun. Just pointing out that it's something the devs wouldn't do.

Too bad Inv isn't an attack set!

And it'd look horrible. We've already got SS ripping chunks of ground out of the earth and the ground having no lasting damage done, the chunk not looking like the ground it came from. Where would the cars and poles come from? "I'll just pull this Buick from my pocket and toss it at ya."

Hurl's the closest we're gonna get.