Fraktal

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Worse, sometimes on pick up groups you'll have people freaking out "OMG! Invisible mobs are attacking me! My client is bugged! (Character logging out in 30...29...(dead)...28)

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Well yes this is a problem to be fair.

The issue is that there is a severe -- and I mean severe bug in the COH/V client(s) that causes some players (it seems to happen to certain people on my SG and not others) to get the "vanishing mob" syndrome. This is not tactics or mob abilities; it is a bug, and a very, very bad one. If this has happened to you as a bug, you're likely to assume it when it happens to you under correct behavior.

The devs are in part at fault here because in 2 years they still have not addressed this "invisible mob" bug, and so players who have seen this bug for 2 years make the wrong assumption -- but an entirely understandable one.

Before the devs put legitimate disappearing mobs with invisibilty powers into the game, they needed to get rid of this bug completely. That they did not is actually poor IMO. They need to kill this bug. Now. Then the Night Widows are just a tactical challenge.

Until they do, for people who get this bug (I don't but 3 of my SG-mates do on a regular basis), it's going to look like a bug and just what you described will happen. We worked it out on my team and we can usually figure out what is going on (through group chat communication), but it's very disconcerting to people who have seen the bug before. This bug needs to be squished.

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I'm gonna agree with UberGuy on this one. I think they're one of the few actual tactical challenges in the game. Most of the 'challenges' are just "you have to hit it more times" (AV vs. say a boss), and little else.

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OMG look at the cost for the invisibility buff! That's more than the cost for five (5!) basic telepads! For a 15 minute invis buff???

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This seems more than a little excessive. I would've expected the empowerment stations to use basic salvage, not crafted components.

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Not sure if someone's already corrected this, since I'm only about halfway through reading the thread... but auras came out in issue 2 with the capes, did they not?

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Yes, they happened at the same time.

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The big problem with front-loaded missions was that a lot of teams, especially in the lower levels, could not kill the frontloaded parts. A similiar example that still exists is the Positron TF, where the first two missions are arguably the toughest of the whole TF, and I would argue most teams (or at least a sizable proportion of them) that start the Positron TF do not even get past those first two missions.

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Actually, one of the biggest problems was, the toughest baddies, often +1s or even up to +2s depending on team size, would spawn RIGHT in the front room. You're the first to zone into the warehouse, and there to greet you are a bunch of oranges with a red LT or two and maybe a purple boss. By the time you finished loading in, you were dead. Followed one by one by each of your companions as you frantically typed into group chat "DON'T COME IN!!"

This was a real problem in the early days, actually. The issue was not simply front-loading, but having a full team spawn in a room where people were loading into the zone, and having them die before they finished the load screen bar... that was a major issue. It happened a LOT, in beta and right after launch.

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My human-only PB guide can be found here:

Reflections of a Human-only Peacebringer

However, it's a work in progress, and only goes to level 20 (because I just got her to 21 the other day). It will get updated gradually as I continue to work her.

It is up to date however (I6 compatible, etc).

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I fear that I will not be as powerful as someone who has no issues about power-building their character without consideration of concept or theme.

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I agree with you, although I must say this isn't anything new to COH. It's always been true that if you wanted a really "uber" character you had to be either VERY flexible about concept, or ignore it entirely. I have friends who do both.

I do neither. I stick with concept. If it hoses me, retire the character. So far it's never gimped me to the point of a character being unplayable, but it's definitely made it so I won't go near open PVP, because I know I'd get crushed by power-builds.

Luckily, I've never liked PVP anyway. I'm a cooperative, not competitive, player.

I think the main problem here is that although the whole game has always been like this, the effects and powers have been generalized for the most part... So you weren't forced to go completely out of concept to take a power set. Pool powers are all generalized (could flight be any more generic?), for example. They don't really "look like" anything and they could work for almost any concept.

The patron pools are the most specific and least generalized powers in the game to date. That makes them much harder to explain away easily. You can't realistically explain away Ghost Widow's powers, example, as a technological invention, the way you could explain hover or flight as an "antigrav belt" (I've done that). Most of the other powers are the same -- the Arachnos mace for instance. If you don't want to be whipping one of those bad boys around for whatever reason, the whole set is out the window.

I'm not really sure why the devs went this way on this one. The only thing I can come up with is that they just don't believe most people have a strong enough character concept that it'll matter one way or the other to us what the epic pool effects are like. They might be right about that for most people.

They ain't right about it for me. I'm not taking any of these powers on any of my characters, unless they end up looking/acting WAY different than their current descriptions have me picturing them. I think I'll be able to do the "content" anyway (quests to unlock all the patron powers or what have you), so as long as I'm not barred from content for refusing to take a patron pool, I don't care that much. It is rather disappointing to look at them all and hate EVERYTHING though... it's a shame there couldn't be at least one rather-generalized one for those of us a bit more married to our concepts.

/sigh

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I don't have too much experience with dominators, so I'm just guessing here, but maybe dominators would've gotten too powerful if they had acess to buff/debuff and/or mez protection? (those two options seem to be what isn't represented either by primary/secondary or these new power pools for doms)

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Speaking strictly from a PVE standpoint (since I don't really do much PVP, and then only in the arena with good friends, not in open environments like bloody bay -- won't go near that), there actually *isn't* much my Dominator needs, to be honest. She's pretty damn self sufficient and she's not the only one. I know a Mind/Psi dom (now 40) who could usually solo the spawn of a 6-man team when she was bored. Yes, it was mildly dangerous if she blew a to-hit roll, and yes it took her a while, but, she was usually able to do it. And that's in an unreasonable circumstance. In reasonable circumstances there just ain't much my dominator really needs.

So part of the problem may have been coming up with stuff that could be useful to dominators without making them over-powered (which I think giving them buffing/healing abilities or something could well do). However, it seems like they gave doms things they theoretically LEAST need -- endurance? I can't recall the last dominator I saw over 30th levelhaving endurance problems. A pet? Most doms already GET a pet. More attacks? Our whole SECONDARY is attacks. Why would we need any of that?

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I'm sure the devs must be in love with the characters they created, but those should only serve as the backdrop for the characters that players create.

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This is an EXCELLENT point. The player characters should be in the spotlight. Grey Dog lives and works in Paragon City, but he certainly doesn't see himself as subordinant to The Freedom Phalanx.

Statesman may be more powerful than my character, but he's my PEER, not my boss.

It just seems like villains don't ever get to be independently mighty. (Sure you don't HAVE to do the new content or take the new powers, but I don't HAVE to play the game at all.)

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Also, to be perfectly blunt I do not like a lot of the concepts the devs come up with. Now of course I am being a bit self-centered here, since clearly I like my own concepts better... But really, Kheldians are bad enough (forcing ALL epic AT characters into a particular background concept) but at least it was just one thing. This is basically trying to force ALL player characters to fit the devs' 4 favorite concepts.

Concepts that I, frankly, find lackluster if not downright ugly.

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Doms get: Attack OR End buff, Armour, ranged AoE damage, pet.


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Yep.. not one of which my Plant/thorn dominator needs. Her attack chain's been complete since she got her 3rd attack... and she has a 4th now. So why I'd need a new attack is beyond me. I don't.

Her endurance bar, with stamina ONE slotted, hardly ever budges except in very long fights, and I can't remember the last time she dropped below 25% endurance unless it was a huge long fight AND I forgot to turn off stealth (which I usually do after the opening salvo, since she only needs it to start things off with her AOE confuse).

Armor? My dominator never dies as it is. Stealth + TP + AOE confuse opener = nearly no danger. Why would I need armor?

Ranged AOE damage? With my cone confuse, the bad guys do the damage for me. I do not need it.

And a pet? I already have a pet. Why would I need another?

Looking over the patron powers, frankly I don't see a single effect that fits ANY of the concepts of any of my characters, nor a single power any of my characters would want or need. Which means I'm probably not going to even bother with them.

That's nothing new of course... I only took a single epic power (Not pool -- one power) on my 50 (conserve power), and it turns out she doesn't need it... and if I ever got another respec for her I'd get rid of it.

Hero EPPs at least were a bit more varied and could at least somewhat be bent to fit into most of my concepts (the fire EPP will fit LL's Inv/Fire concept pretty well for example). But these Patron pools... yuck. Hideous. Not interested in any of them conceptually at all. I mean... throwing SHARK PUKE at people?? You have got to be kidding me.

Whoever came up with the effects and 'themes' of these pool powers, IMO, needs to be strung up by his thumbs.

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translucent pillars with SG emblem - MUST OWN


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Oh yeah!

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Back during Arena testing:
Playing a level 50 Invul/Ice tanker. It was a 5 on 5 test. The rest of my team died very quickly...after about 10 minutes (3 cyclings og Unstoppable) and me killing 2 or 3 of the opposing team, the test was called...because I was essentially unkillable.

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Stories like this always make me wonder if they've led directly to nerfs.... "OMG Invul pwnz, we must nerf it, it is so unbalanced!!!111oneone!"

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My overall thoughts on this basically boil down to my perception that Controllers shouldn't have Defender Primaries for their Secondary sets.
<snip examples>

Controller powers don't have this with the possible exception of Ice/Storm and maybe (pushing it) Grav/Kin. This makes controller power set selection more of a mechanical issue (how the mechanics of the power sets complement each other) than a conceptial one (how the ideas of the power sets complement each other). A great example of this is the (once, I'm not sure anymore since I haven't kept up) UBER Illusion/Storm set ... [censored] - how do Illusion and Weather powers fit together without coming up with some convluted explanation? They don't .. the build works like magic, the concept - not so much.

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I've been saying this since launch. Last time I grumbled about it was in oh, October or so, and a bunch of people said, "Wait till COV, doms are what you want."

Well that's nice, but that does ZIP to fix the problem that, still to this day, controllers' powersets are not conceptually well-blended. I can think of a few -- your Ice/Storm and Grav/Kin examples are great. And Mind/Empathy, if you really want to stretch it (empathy being technically a form of ESP as 'empathy' is normaly defined, but not really as it is implemented in COH). But for instance, what does one combine with earth control? I would think Earth/Earth would make sense but there is no such thing, because there's no "earth defender" set. And oh how I wanted to have a fire/ice or ice/fire controller -- I mean you can do it with blasters so why not? But nope. Or heck just fire/fire or ice/ice. Again, in all the other power sets, you can take secondaries and primaries that "match" -- fire/fire tankers, MA/SR scrappers, Dark/Dark defenders and scrappers, ice/ice tankers, Invuln/SS tankers, fire/fire blasters, ice/ice blasters, energy-energy blasters.

There is just no such synergy for controllers. We have it for doms -- Plant/Thorn, Mind/Psi, Ice/fire, fire/ice, ice/ice, fire/fire, etc, etc.... just not for controllers.

It seems almost like controllers were put together as an afterthought, and like you, I have not ever been able to make up and stick with a controller because there just was never a concept I could shoehorn into the controller powersets.

/sigh

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And if that doesn't work, put them on /ignore.

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My first thought was, "Oh I wish we could do this in real life" -- put people on /ignore that is.

Then I thought, "The government would immediately collapse, because all politicians would end up on everyone's /ignore list." LOL.

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Precisely why I avoid saying what my tastes in music are. When someone asks I usually say "A little bit of everything. I'm never sure if I'll like a particular song or not". It is true enough, but I would rather not go into the "Haha.. they suck" thing. It just makes me feel stupid.

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I'm the opposite. I'll state my tastes. They are after all MY tastes. It's not up for a vote by other people what I like or don't like.

If anyone says, "Oh they suck" I just smile and file that person away in my mind as not worth paying attention to anymore, on any subject.

For what it's worth, I've not once ever had anyone say that. Usually I just get a blank stare (not many people in the Seattle area know who Deana Carter is, for example, since she's a "country" singer).

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RPG seems to have come to mean 'A game where your character(s) grow(s) in power/ability throughout the course game and that growth is determined, in part, by the player'

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Which is why us RPG "purists" or traditionalists or snobs or whatever you want to call it, don't consider most computer-based "RPGs" to be anything of the sort.

To me, a roleplaying game is a game where each player takes on the role of a character and they work together to tell cooperative stories. But then, I grew up on D&D, Champions, Star Frontiers, Rolemaster, and the like.

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What you listen to says a lot. Hit "random," "shuffle," or whatever you have on your music player currently, and list the first ten tracks that play. And prepare for belittlement!

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You know.. for some of us that will only tell you what CD we happen to have in atm.

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GET WITH THE TIMES, OLD MAN

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Heheh... well sometimes you feel like listening to a particular artist. I have an MP3-CD player with an MP3-CD on right now that I burned this weekend, all of one artist -- Deana Carter. On shuffle play, this would just shuffle between songs on any one of her 5 existing albums. The most recent random installment:

1. Strawberry Wine
2. One Day at a Time
3. Michaelangelo Sky
4. Getting Over You
5. Everything's Gonna Be All Right
6. Angels Working Overtime
7. Color Everywhere
8. Just a Girl
9. Ordinary
10. The Story of my Life

Deana Carter's pretty much the only artist whose albums or set of albums I'd listen to on shuffle play. Even others I'm a fan of, I don't like enough of their work to make it worth it. Most albums, I'm lucky if I like 50% of the songs on them... which perhaps explains why I don't buy many CDs anymore.

I basically have never heard a Deana Carter song I didn't like. She's unique in that way, for me. So I can listen to her on shuffle play.... but nobody else. I suppose I could make a CD of basically "all the songs I like by every artist I've ever listened to" but that would require a bunch of ripping and burning and well... I'd rather play COH than bother with that.

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But why should ToHit buffs be worse on Defense than Resistance when there are sets like Ice and EA that have little to no defense to psi and toxic anyway?


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The question is, should there exist "undefendable attacks" as a mechanism, given that there are unresistable (or less resisted) damage as a mechanism for resistance. In my opinion, such a mechanism has to exist in theory, or else Resistance has holes Defense does not. The issue is moderating tohit so that it is infrequent instead of pervasive (like toxic/psi damage), less devastating (DE Quartz eminators must die), and possibly have alternate counter mechanisms (psi resistance does exist, albeit less commonly).

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I have always questioned the wisdom of having global "undefendable" (or very had to defend/rare defense) power types. It's entirely reasonable for a single power set to have a specific Achilles' heel (e.g., Psi makes sense to me for Invuln). But having all (or most) powersets have the same Achilles' heal, given how different the sets are in "special effect" (fire vs. cold vs. dark/negative vs. invulnerable) has always seemed utterly nuts to me. It's entirely unclear why Fire, Cold, and Invuln characters should have the same weaknesses, other than "it makes the devs' jobs easier."

But oh well... that horse left the barn a long time ago...

I definitely agree that if any character has to have an Achilles' heel, they all need to have one -- fair is fair. SR should have a weakness just like Invuln does. I just wish the weaknesses were different, rather than all the same thing (basically, everyone gets hit by the same auto- or near-auto-hit attacks, everyone is weak in res to Psi and Tox, and everyone is best vs. S/L, no matter what the effects).

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Math intimidates people in a way that grammar never will.

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I don't know, Kali... You read these forums a lot. Clearly some of these people would be more intimidated by grammar.

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There's a way to do that and still be perfectly fair to defense and resistance sets. Just give higher level villains accuracy increases instead of tohit buffs. Higher level foes would now hit more often, but in a proportional manner. Problem solved.

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And by this Arcana means that the equation for to hit is something like (leaving out the MINMAX but remember you can never break the 5%-95% barrier):

Chance to hit = (BaseToHit + BuffToHit - DebuffToHit - Def) * (BaseAcc + EnhancedAcc)

So Arcana's saying... take the NPC level buff out of BaseToHit and give it to BaseAcc. Plug in some numbers and you'll see what Arc's talking about.

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Statesman --

What a great change. I applaud you for this.

It's so nice to see some MMO devs actually listen not just to what we gripe about,but also the better solutions -- and take those!

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This made my day.

Very cute!

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A link to format and length guidelines would help a lot.

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Any other design would mean it would be better to have higher level characters in an SG than lower level characters. That was something the developers have stated they designed the system specifically to avoid. They want it to be just as valueable to an SG to invite a level 1 member as a level 50 member.

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This explains why prestige earned per mission or per villain is about the same for level 1 and level 50. I have no problem with this.

It doesn't explain why a level 25 should have to choose Inf *or* Prestige, and a level 1 shouldn't. That actually makes lower levels potentially more valuable, as there is no reason to go out of SG mode until level 25, but there is after that.


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Actually people at level 25 are usually given a ton of INF from a higher level toon/alt. At least in CoH that's been my experience and I think it will be the same in a few months in CoV.

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It's not clear to me that the design should be implemented from the standpoint of assuming that there are level 40+ "patrons" for every SG member who needs influence.

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In fact, the current prestiuge system encourages higher level toons to stay out of SG mode and earn INF for lower level members so that those lower level members can stay in SG mode. Another benefit of the present design: it encourages inter-dependency within SGs.

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Again, only assuming you have a large # of high level patrons as bankrollers. I have not seen this to be the case in my SGs (Hero, or villain). The highest member of the villain group right now is 28 and thus more strapped for "cash" than anyone else. Everyone's primary character is now level 25 or higher and most of us have (guilty though we feel) gone out of SG mode. This makes those characters *less* valuable to the team than some newbie who is level 2. We may have enough to be super-rich by 40, but that's going to be a long grind, and by the calculations of the 28 (who has an MBA and is good at crunching numbers) he will be about level 34 or so (out of 40) before the enhancement drops and XP gain rate and XP needed to level are such, that he will be able to go back into SG mode. That's 9 levels of him being unable to earn prestige -- him, and every other one of the mains in the SG.

The point here is that, yes, numerically over time it may work, but in real terms... you're talking months and months before players have enough influence to start bankrolling each other, unless you're talking about hardcore powergamers, which I and my SG friends are not. And the question remains, should this be a deliberate design element -- the assumption of higher level uber-characters to bankroll the newbies.

And how does this help encourage newbies anyway, since, for example, my level 50 can run missions faster and with less risk than, say, my level 10, and will still, in the long run, rack up more prestige per hour... meaning that once you have a bunch of level 50s, it's actually smarter to just let them churn prestige, than having some level 28s that need to be bankrolled *or* lowbies in the single-digit levels.

I understand their goals. I do not agree that their design is matching those goals. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.

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Now we are at a point where we want to buy SO's, but you have to make that choice between earning prestige for the group or earning infamy for yourself. It makes no sense. I would think that the higher level characters, as high powered representatives of their SG, should be earning more prestige than anyone else. All this system does is discourage people from playing in SG mode later on. And then it adds guilt to it!

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Yes this is the part I don't understand. The logic is bass-ackwards.

People keep saying that the "lose inf for prestige after 25" business was designed to lower influence (or infamy -- same difference). But that's not what it does. People at level 25 are usually (unless they've been in perma-debt on purpose or doing lots of exemplaring) really, really strapped for inf. They can't afford their enhancements even with full influence earned, let alone dropping it by 10+% over time. So what happens? People don't stay in SG mode and gain less influence... they go OUT of SG mode, so influence isn't being earned at a lower rate. Instead, prestige is being earned more slowly.

Thus, the system is not accomplishing the stated desired effect, which is to lower the rate of inf gain.

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When a game goes from being fun to being work, you can count on seeing people leave. The bases simply don't provide enough reward for the amount of effort put into them.

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I agree with this.

One thing people also haven't mentioned, but I will: the Base/SG/VG system discourages allowing alts on the same team. If you really want to earn max prestige at max rate, you want 75 different people on your SG. Why? Because you can only play one character at a time. A 75-character SG with 10 people each playing 7 or 8 alts, is only going to earn prestige at roughly the rate of a 10-man SG with no alts, because you can't play multiple characters at once. So not only are they, because of how it works, effectively pushing big groups, but they're also pushing people to limit groups to 1 character per player, etc.... so they're really pushing HUGE groups.

That's really a shame... I see no reason why a 5-man SG shouldn't have a functional base. Small, sure... but functional. The way things are now, you can only have a small NON-functional base in a reasonable time frame.

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