Futurias

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So where are the devs on this.

States in beta said he would be keeping a close eye on Dom's after all the Dom's are too weak calls.

Then they said in I7 they were still looking and here we are a month later and nothing said.

So where are the devs in all this, it seems like they really dont care much. Its like dom's dont have enough players to be worth spending time on.

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States plays a plant/psi Dom (I think), I don't know what level he is yet. Around the end of April, I started a Fire/Energy Dominator on Justice. I'm level 37 now.

Fun? You bet, and I've played all the AT's in both games at pretty much every level. Dominators are definitely my cup of tea.

States and I -still- keep a close eye on Dominators. Datamining supports SOME of the claims made on these boards, but refutes others. Personal experience with the AT also lends credibility to some of the complaints, while showing others are simply blown out of porportion.

I read a bunch of the posts in this thread, not all of them though (yet). A lot of users hit the nail on the head when stating that you can't think of Dominator as "CoV's Controller". We went through a lot of effort to make sure that the ATs played and felt different between the two games. Dominators give up a bit of control for some good direct damage attacks that Controllers would give their left mouse button for.

Then of course there is the Domination ability, which is the real Jekyl and Hyde of the AT. A mild-manner Dominator with a full Domination bar can, at his or her discretion, become an unstoppable machine of destruction and control. While it never lasts "long enough" (even I am disappointed at hearing the sound effect of it wearing off), I've had missions where I have gotten Domination off four times from mission-entry to having Mission Complete appear on the screen. Good times indeed.

We've got a nice tweak to the Domination ability coming down the pipe (it will crank up your Mez resistance while it is active), and are currently data-mining PvP to see what effect our last set of tweaks to the AT have had.

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>.<

Once again the other squishy ATs get short-shifted on the mezzing.

Is it really tough to understand that having absolutely no mezz protection as Defenders, Corruptors and Mastermind (innately per AT) really sucks? Even my Warshade and Peacebringer become limp noodles from Crey billy clubs that detoggle.

Probably one of my greatest abilities in Dark Miasma is utterly *USELESS* in the post-40 game, because there is such a prevaliance of mezzing that I can't keep it up long enough even on solo to use it.

Gah. I wonder why I even bother. It's obvious that you guys think that a little bit of mezz protection against minions would totally imbalance the game in the high level instead of just remove the greater aggravation of retoggling that everyone else has to do.

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I wouldn't rule out the possibility that a couple of the AVs have the ability to hit a phase shifted enemy. Afterall it is possible for the base defences to do it now so its not impossible from a coding side like it used to be.

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We haven't given this ability to any AV's or GM's.

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I have been killed after Quantum Flight was activated. It even made me recharge the power.

I no longer have QF on my peacebringer.

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Just finished it. I started off LOVING it, then liking it, and ending being very disappointed. Much of it was a fun compelling read and I had a hard time putting it down.

I understand in any given genre there are conventions and essential elements you must remain true to. It’s based on comic book superheroes; so of course you are going to have certain traditions to uphold. Of course the super villain is going to want to take over and/or destroy the _______ (Insert: city, county, state country, continent, world, universe - in the blank) The pitfall is that it is very hard when dealing with such familiars to put a new spin on them so you don’t fall into the trite or obvious. The challenge is to do something new with the same old ingredients.

The biggest problem I had with this novel me was the way Laws represented Sister Psyche. She was demoted from long standing full-fledged hero to helpless female hostage. The only woman on the team and she was scarcely allowed to do anything heroic. Almost immediately after her first appearance in the book, she is sidelined and incapacitated.

I kept waiting for Psyche to have the opportunity to redeem herself and do something heroic – the further I got into the story and the more she was kept in helpless captive status, the bigger this heroics she would need to pull off to pull her own weight and for the author to win me back.

Even in her escape from the super villains, she was marginally competent and needed the aid of TWO male superheroes to rescue her.

I continued to wait it out as her hopeful redemption needed to grow to mammoth proportions to balance her out with the other male heroes and be justified in the story, but then I soon realized that such mega heroic save-the-day last minute reversals would be reserved for Statesman – and they were.

When Psyche did face off with the Shadow Queen – the only female hero squaring off with the only female villain (another tired cliché) – the showdown was in a toilet for Pete’s sake! So finally Psyche does this pathetic smack down with her foe perched on the crapper. If that’s not adding insult to injury, I don’t know what is.

Laws pummeled Sister with the nerf bat and hung that poor gimped girl out to dry. What hero would want that loser like her on their team? According to Laws at best she can give foes a bad headache. Big deal. In fact one of her most powerful attacks in this whole story is when she --- scratches Protean’s face with her fingernails and draws blood. I KID YOU NOT! If that isn’t the most pathetic helpless female cliché in the world – I don’t know what is!

Yes, I’m a Sister Psyche fan. But I would have felt equally outraged if the helpless female captive was a non-powered ordinary woman - still a tired old convention and needs to be avoided. Done to death! Think of something new! Or make the helpless female captive a man if you have to.

Yes, I understand the core of the villain’s plot was based on psyche manipulation and this required Psyche to be taken in by the villains, but that still does justify her substandard representation overall.

No, I’m not a raging political activist screaming for equal rights for women. My charges of sexist in this novel are based not on social issues, but on being a reader who felt ripped off.

For the most part Laws did create some fresh new spins on superhero story telling. His story was well plotted and engaging. It grabbed me and pulled me right in – which made the let down all the more disappointing because I LOVED the first half of the book and I wanted to keep liking the whole book, but the tired story convention nearly ruined it for me. The first half of the book led me to expect better. If the whole novel was crap and he used worn out clichés, I would not be so upset.

I would have given the book a B+, but for how he handled the whole Psyche thing I give it a C-.

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Laws also had to work within her powers and abilities. She's an incredibly powerful psychic, the only way to neutralize is to neutralize her brain (and hence her ability to react.)

I think the very strange fight she had to go through to "overcome" the Shadow Queen and device was very intriguing to say the least.

That mind control device was in there quite a bit. I think they even mentioned that it was unbalancing Statesman a bit, making him more depressed than normal.

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From Cuppa:
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The Mitos are AVs and are acting according to this patch note:

AVs/Heroes and Giant Monsters now ignore threat level damage multipliers for different Archetypes. They are still affected by Taunt as before.


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From _Castle_
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The Hamidon and the Mitochandria were specifically exempted from the original AV/GM changes. As such, there is nothing to roll back for them, in this regard.

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Which is it?

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He was obviously referring to the Regen increase, not the AI change. Probably had a pretty long day of fixing bugs and getting them to QA.

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...The Hamidon and the Mitochandria were specifically exempted from the original AV/GM changes. As such, there is nothing to roll back for them, in this regard.

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Oh, so it's not like you guys forgot to mention in your patch notes the OTHER things you specifically decided to do to him and the Mitos, right? You kept mum on purpose? Brilliant.

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They have always stated that Hamidon will continue to change to be a challenge.

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Allegedly, there was a patch note that may have had some indication of impact with regard to Aggro rules but I haven't been able to locate it.

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That's what I hear, but I don't see it. I have to resort to taunt a lot more when hopping around punching things used to be enough. This is especially noticeable with AVs now.

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Now I have to figure out a way to fit taunt onto my tank. It really wasn't my concept of "super" tank.

Bah humbug.

I couldn't find that post with all the really good binds in it? Did it never make it into the guides?

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The semicolon means that they are two separate effects. They stack.

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Correct.

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Castle, is anything going to be done to rebalance NPC stealth versus PCs? Right now NPC stealth is far mor powerful as it will totally make you lose targeting on NPCs, yet the NPCs will never lose target on you unless you run away.

It is incredibly agravating that they can continue to follow and fight (waxing my Stalker that I've been tooling with) and yet when I'm hit with smoke grenade or they activate stealth I no longer have a target.

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Tried a Mayhem mission.
Will avoid them in the future.
Why?
BECAUSE YOU CAN'T TARGET JACK !
I spent more time cycleing thru civilians, lamp posts, cockroaches then fighting - meanwhile 20 MOBs are blowing me to hell.

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I finally got to do a high level Mayhem Mission that took us to founders falls.

Died once (lackey/boss fault. My boss was too far and I died) and then I was stuck in prison. Normally, this isn't too bad, but there were two bosses PPD Enforcers.

We could *not* defeat these guys for some reason. They were insanely tough (and only +2 to me.) So we ended up giving up and not even trying to get out of prison, as that was just massing huge debt.

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Lag aside, I liked most of it. The jousting gets a bit old, but that's how the system works.

The only shocker - PLEASE tell me this is a bug - is when a Stalker hit my AR/Dev (I'm a glutton for punishment, I know) with a Confuse. I don't know if it was AoE or not, but I died very, very suddenly. Not because he hit me, but because my own trip mines detonated, my own Auto Turret lit me up, and my own Caltrops slowed me down.

Please - this IS a bug, right? Sheesh.

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No, that's actually *not* a bug.

Mind Control FTW!

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why is that a shocker? you're essentially recharging your end instead of a timer. Regen, not heals- regen, can be treated the same way.

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I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around it actually. It just seems like an involved process so that Stamina functions on a dimineshing returns function.

Which it probably was. With other stamina boosting powers, you are effectively locked down to +83.333% recovery at the very best (which is an impossible to get buff, as that is a 500% increase in recovery.)

Hmm....

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An easy way to consider it is:

Without any modifiers, you go from 0 endurance to full endurance in 60 seconds. So, Temp powers or Accolades which increase Max Endurance are also, effectively, increasing Recovery rate.

Stamina, 3 slotted with +3 SO's grants 149% Recovery, or roughly 2.5 End/second if you have the normal Endurance maximum.

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:blink-blink:

Endurance recovery functions like recharge enhancements? On the 1/1+enchancements?

WTH?

They aren't going to remove debt from the zone. I don't think they can actually do it that way anyways.

Debt is given by NPCs defeating you. Not for where you are. We don't get debt in PvP normally because we fight other PCs.

Probably a *better* idea would be that the Signature Hero/Villains don't give debt, as they are fairly overwhelming (and defeating them for XP is very laughable.)

Nuetral Turrets spawning at 54s, but PC turrets at 50... Even so, they didn't die too quickly.

Played a bit with a sorta-PvP human-form Peacebringer... and again found out that Mezzing is the winner. Even solo Brutes and Stalkers nearly took me out several times

Yawn.

Stalkers, brutes and masterminds seemed to be the only PvP FoTM for villains, while scrappers seemed to be FoTM for Heroes.

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The problem is, the Night Widow's smoke grenade is much more powerful than the player version.

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The Night Widow's Smoke Grenade is exactly the same scale for both Perception (-90%) and To Hit debuff (-0.5) as Smoke Grenade (and Fire Controls 'Smoke' and Trick Arrow's 'Flash Arrow'.)

The issue you are describing of critters being aware of you even after you blind them is the same problem Stalkers have with Hide -- once you have Aggroed a critter, it always knows where you are, despite Stealth or Perception changes. It's how our AI has to work, currently. It is something I'd like to see changed, but it is 'difficult.'

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So that would be technically that critter smoke grenade *is* more powerful, as we are forced to "lose track" of them by them becoming invisible.

Sorry, I have to call BS when I see it. If the critter SG would allow us to even know where they are so we could get close enough to use melee attacks, it would make things much more fair for people with no range.

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HO's increasing Range was a bug.

The cone sizes for the melee powers is part of the Recharge/Damage/Endurance calculation. Increasing Cone sizes means reducing Damage & increasing End costs or increasing Recharge time to compensate.

In general, though, this probably will not happen.

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Um, could we just get Shadow Maul turned into a single target attack then? It's way too expensive for a very, very stupid cone that it has right now.

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Whoa, whoa, whoa. Liquid. I have to greatly dissagree with you here. Most people have 1 character they dedicate to badge collecting. Now replay value aside. Your saying that those people should not be able to earn badges outside of missions that our theirs?! Forget that.

There is nothing wrong with the replay value of the game. Playing this game thru as a scrapper is vastly different then playing it thru as a blaster. /End Hijack

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Yes, I am saying that. Especially since then the Dev's would be able to implement Badges where you could only earn one or the other, thus helping individualize the different characters by showcasing what paths they have taken through "life".

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Couple problems with that. 1. Are you going to individualize by archtype, or by origin? And then when you've made that choice, then you better darn well make sure that one AT or origin has the exact same as another, because you KNOW someone is going to complain that magic origins have more badges then mutants, or that blasters have more badges then scrappers do. And then there's the factor that we're going to have to dedicate devs and support to plan this, then impliment it, and test it. Then send it to the test server. That costs money. I'm sorry, but I'd rather have them save that money for a new zone, zone revamp, or new missions/story arcs or even for new powersets.

Leave it to the playerbase to make this distinction in their own minds about their characters, that's one of the reason the biography feature is there in the first place. Also there's wonderful sites like Crey Industries Threat Database and the CoV version of that, whatever it is.

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Actually, I'm talking about individualizing through moral choices made during the course of gameplay. Example:

Lets say a Story Arc in City of Heroes involves you having to track down a Hero who has suddendly taken to a life of crime. So, as the story arc goes on, you learn why: His daughter got deathly ill, and the only ones who could cure her was the villain group he was working for. So, you would have a choice: Let him escape, because his intents are noble, or arrest him, because no matter what his intents are, he was still breaking the law.

Letting him go would result in the "Angel of Mercy" badge.

Arresting him would get you the "Letter of the Law" badge.

Obviously, it wouldn't make sense to allow access to BOTH badges. And this would help personalize your character, by showing what moral decisions he/she/it has had to make. Plus, each badge could "unlock" a different contact, allowing story arcs showing the consequences of your decisions.

For example, if you let him go, the villains would now have access to the stuff to build a doomsday style weapon that threatens everyone in the city, with you having to stop it.

But if you arrested him, you would have to deal with him breaking out of jail and seeking revenge (As you essentially sacraficed his kid).

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Choice-badging is cool, not getting a badge because you didn't do "unlocked story arc" that was added later is bad.

I only really did most badges on my first character. I don't even have "all" of them yet, because tracking down specific missions is a PITA.

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Also...

I predict a "Trenchcoats at 3 months?!" frenzy.

And am I the only one amused by the fact that Pann had red devil eyes in his picture, and looked nothing like Peter Pan?

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Well, a lot of people are just going to get some of these instantly, I think when logging in!

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SG size issues, such as basing membership on account rather then character -They looking into it, but its not a high priority because relatively few supergroups are running out of space.

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Um, what the heck are they smoking? With alts in a SG, it only takes 20-25 people to max out SG (or be close to this.)

Just because you only have 72 or so, doesn't mean you didn't want more people in the SG.

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And "100 times" isn't accurate, it would actually be 100 minus however many Infected you actually did defeat in Outbreak. You have to defeat at least 9 (IIRC?) to get out of Outbreak, so 91 times at the most

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The thing is, the number of Infected you defeated didn't start getting tracked until Issue 2.

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Wow, good point! Never even thought of that. Which means my main (created before I2) would have to get 100 kills.

Not like I'm going to loose any sleep not having that one badge which isn't needed for any accolades (although I know some are super-obssesed)

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You *have* to defeat at least six or seven to actually go through the tutorial. So if you have an i0 (before you could bypass the tutorial) it should be incredibly easy to check dates and "retro-award" defeating that many.

Well, it's obvious that there's still a huge bias in PvP. Anything that has a mezz uses it in the high level, any AT that has no innate Mezz protection (and no, team-mates do not count) are just meat.

Guess I'll have to hope they have something in another couple of years that fixes it.

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Nor do they change the rating of the game by allowing players to kill helpless civilians.

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Is there some way civ-only knockback or something can be added to at least clear them out of a big fight?

Also, when AoE target counting is considered, does a hit on a civvy count towards your AoE limit?

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I suggested that when you hit NPCs that they are "teleported out" with the TP friend animation, that makes it villainous, but that you failed to hurt them as they are rescued by "friendly" heroes with Teleport just before they could be seriously hurt.

It would also clear them out ASAP and make it so that you don't have Civilian Clutter! (TM)

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Did my second mayhem mission today - Got it in St. Martial... 400 yds from contact... Super jumped in 5 seconds. Entered mission. Had 8 minutes left on the clock.

[censored]?

This issue seriously needs to be addressed.

Also, longbow from side missions once again spawned in prison after being defeating. makes it pointless to break out of cell since door wipes out HALF of your health the longbow finish you off 2 seconds.

I'm really enjoying it - but it's sometime frustrating.

Also, for the side mission in Brickstown - with the hostage. The longbow ambush spawn IMMEDIATELY when you attack PPD. They should spawn when you finally KIDNAP the hostage. When we did kidnap the hostage - no ambush. The absence led me to believe the logbow we encountered in the beginning was for the kidnapping.

After getting the hostage you STILL have to drag them halfway across the map to the exit - this mission should give at LEAST a fifteen minute bonus considering the time it takes. Or remove it.

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Heh, didn't really notice with my level 26 SS/INV brute, but she's a tough as nails character.

But the super-tough-plastic-explosive doors are a bit odd, don't you think?

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Ok, going to try and post the page with the villains from issue 13. I hope this works

Villain Cameos

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Even though I didn't make it again (dang it!) I have to say that is an awesome shot and could have been any disctinctive group of villains in any comic book, bar none!

Very cool and amazing work!

The signature heroes *are* very tough, but the EB version of Aurora Borealis EB is soloable.

I mean, if you were reading a comic book about a "named" villain robbing a bank in Metropolis and Superman showed up, I think you'd expect a really tough fight and possibly getting beat up by the "premiere" hero of the world.