Geoff_NA

Please Please Please listen to this thread and make changes accordingly devs. My own Notes:

Faultline - not only is terrible to navigate, but is one of the only places where it's very hard to find mobs with less than 2 bosses, making soloing and duoing extreemly tough. If you fix the travel or the mobs it'll get more people.

Talos - does get way too much traffic. It's not just what OP said (but that's true too), but also people want Sorcerer and Mask Spirit badges, and this is the best place and 2nd best places for these, there are stores, and lastly it's a fun and good looking zone. For all these reasons, make more links to PI and FF so the lag here is reduced and possibly toss some of the totems and add mask spirits in DA. Why the heck are there ~ 4 mask spirits and 1 totem type, but there are like 6x as many totem spawns? I think also for missions I've faced more Totems than masks.

Hollows - Too big - wish you could do something here and think the best thing would be to make the zone 20% smaller (total area) or so. One more doable suggestion is to move the skyway entrance to be from the SE instead of it's current entrance. It would at least allow people easier access to the high ground on the other side of the zone.

PI - Have only been there twice and both times was laggy - 2 for 2 is not good in this case. We have 2 cities for every other level range, I think it's time to make 2 for lvl 40-50 (or maybe a 42-52, since 1 city is usually a little tougher than the other). While you're at it, this seems like a good time to make more links to other zones (via the new city).

Thank you Statesman for repeatedly stating the obvious until we finally get it

Thank you Cuppa for countless things - may your Jo be hot and tasty with a nice little cookie on the side

Thank you geko - I saved a lot of money on my... ohh wait...

Thank you Positron - for having the coolest avatar

Thank you Lord_Recluse - though I have to say, lord of what exactly? Is update V going to have a hidden castle? Hmm...

Thank you Vyvyanne for vehemently vilifying trollish vitriol

Thank you Case for working on our technical glitches and disconnects - I haven't had a "lost connection to mapserver" error in like 6 months.

Thank you Bruce for knowing the George R R Martin books - when the heck IS that next one coming out? I preordered it with a gift certificate I got last christmass (no joke)!!

Thank you Bridger for bringing the game to those wacky foreigners

Thank you Ravenstorm for having the coolest name

It seemed only fair to give as many of you as I could think of some direct (if silly) thanks. I know I missed some of you guys out there, but I do appreciate all of you and this game a lot.

I know have complained when you have changed something I liked, but I want to make sure you know this is the best game I've ever played, and I have been playing video games on nearly every platform available since the very first ones ever were available, so that's saying a lot.

All right, well I've been up for the last 18 hrs and need to play some CoH before bed so I better go home from work.

Thanks again to ALL the devs for your hard work.

Magnitude or MAG -

The power of a hold or other control power.

A typical hold has magnitude 3 hold power, but you can sometimes get a critical hit of MAG 4. If you do, it will hold a boss with 1 hold. Bosses need a combined hold of 4 or more mag to be held, which is why 1 doesn't usually do it but two always do (if they both hit of course).

Excellent post

While I agree that an experienced player can usually get where they're going even with high level mobs around - The Hollows especially should not have this issue.

I have had those Lvl 31 missions in the back end of FF guarded by lvl 40 DEs. I personally use some stealth (Steamy Mist) to make it fairly safe, but unless DEVs want to requre stealth of one form or another, this is a problem. Just making the spawns not happen very close to doors is probably enough for the lvl 20+ game, but below that you have to take into account the newness of players and lack of both travel and stealth powers combined with a lesser understanding of Aggro and mobs.

Unless they slot Hurdle (or combat Jump), and I gotta think pretty much any SSer gets hurdle instead of Swift as their power. Yea, I know hurdle does so little it's tough to waste slots on, but I feel the same way about fly.

[ QUOTE ]
I'm going to suggest a change of perspective, here. Instead of seeing any zone that is friendlier to fliers/jumpers/'porters than speedsters as penalizing speedsters, what if you were to see them as giving the less-utilized (and they are, don't fool yourself) travel powers a boost? In which case, every zone but for those eight you list actually penalizes EVERY other travel power than SS, since SS gets around them faster and for less power investment. By that reasoning, if you really want equal treatment of travel powers, there should be MORE zones that require vertical movement!

[/ QUOTE ]

Hmm... This statement seems pretty false to me. You mentioned a skewed perspective, so maybe this is why you posted it, but are you really saying SS is the most easy power to get around with?

Have you been to TV with a superspeeder? I don't just mean moving around in there, which is a pain, but just trying to get there with SS. What a huge waste of time. All areas that have height changes (SC, Sky, etc.) are a hassle too.

Fly is terribly slow but probably the safest, is easiest to use (you can go AFK for 2 min while traveling), and allows for aereal battles. SJ has the issue that you can land in mob groups. SS has the nice bonus that you're stealthy, but it is easily the worst to get around with (unless you have lag issues, in which case TP is due to the extreem falling issues).

I'm not saying superspeed is bad, but it's not the best power to get around with - Superjump is. For that reason I think most people think that is the best travel power, not SS. People who get SS often get SJ also. They use SS in battles and sometimes traveling flat areas, and SJ when they really need to get somewhere.

Anyway, the point of the thread was why are many hazard areas severely underused. I think one of them is SS. If you have a team without TP, your SSer will often refuse to go to those areas because it's such a pain to get there and travel through it.

I don't advocate changing the travel powers. I think they have been looked into thoroughly and are pretty balanced (with TP having the most issues). I think to make the hazard/trial zones more usable traveling to/in them needs to be easier.

I agree for the most part.

Faultline has always been horrible. It's visually disorienting, by far the worst zone to navigate without Flight, TP, or SJ, the group sizes nearly preclude soloing, and the landscape minimizes herding.

Boomtown is better. I have spent a fair amount of time here both solo and in teams. It's a more fun run, though still very awkward without the 3 aformentioned travel powers.

Most of the Hazard zones are less traveled though. I think there are a few good reasons for this (in order of importance):

1) Teaming has become less important in the game (see the long winded explanation below).

2) Less little spawns in towns and more in hazard zones. I realize this may be counter to the point of hazard zones, but at the same time you could probably put a few higher level guys together (like +1 to +3 lvl from typical area mobs) as a change up from 8-15 lower level guys in the same spawn areas.

3) Make Hazard zones more accessable by adding hospitals, more train stops, contacts like in the Hollows that are area specific, and more entrances and exits (why is perez the only hazard zone with more than 2 entrances, and only about 2 others have 2 entrances?).

Teaming continued: The XP reward given to teams just does not justify the huge amount of time taken to get a pickup team together. At this point I have a lvl 30 controller, meaning I pretty much have to team. When my SG buddies are not on and I search for members, there are typically between 1 and 3 players within a level of me in the entire game that are looking for a team and usually all of these are either controllers or defenders. This does not mean I want forced grouping, but making the game more group friendly would not be bad.

IMHO this is a huge problem with the game now. Some possible fixes: better XP for teams, more large groups of mobs in cities, making hunt missions give XP to players other than their owners more often (if I got a hunt 30 mission before I teamed, then I team up, they get no XP bonus even if I haven't killed a single guy but if I get it after teaming they get it? This seems broken, and you might even give a partial reward for helping kill part of the group), and making it a little less easy to pick out guys in mobs with Stealth/Superspeed type combos would be good (a guy gets shot in the middle of a gang and only he flinches? I don't think so. They might not see the guy shooting, but they might all run away together). BTW: I have a stealth SS lvl 19 blaster, so I'm not hating here. I just feel that, like the old smoke grenade effect, mobs act in a way that is completely ridiculous.

Well, just my 2c worth, and I realize much of what I said was covered some in one form or another above.

This guide is superb.

I wanna know if Group Fly would be helpful for these guys or no. If anyone's tried this, please post.

thnx

Stimulant was greatly reduced in the last update. Are you still looking into it or should I just get over it?

Thanks

The heal enhancements do nothing from what I've heard on other posts.

Tried to use Stimulant several times since my last posts. Yes, it's just about worthless.

Interruptibility + short duration + melee range to use = worthless

Using this in battle is about as fun as trying to Brawl a tanker to death as a controller.

Here's the excerpted minutes of battle using it: (From minutes 0-120) Oops, I was still drifting from flight so the power was interrupted, oops I'm still not close enough, oops it wore off again, oops area damage interrupted it, oops after holding two of my teammates aggro shifted to me while I was using the stimulant on someone so interrupted again. (from minutes 121-end) No attempts at stimulant use.

At least if I could increase it's duration with enhancements this could be made into a useful power (but you can't). If it were ranged it'd be useful (but it isn't). If it's recharge time were 4 seconds, it'd be useful but set me back on endurance before a battle (but it isn't)

The point of this gigantic nerf (has any power ever been cut down to 1/6 of it's original duration/power since launch?) was to make this power weaker than Clear Mind. Could you then at least bump the time back up to 90 seconds or 120 seconds? There'd be no doubt this power would still be weaker at 90 seconds (or 120 sec IMO), but hey it'd be useful again.

In all fairness, there is a use for stimulant in it's current form. Put it on 1 guy before a battle, and it will last through the whole battle if it's an easy battle and not if it's a tough one. If you have a provoking tanker in the group, they are probably the best target unless they have protection already. For me particularly, since my character with this power is a controller (grav/storm), I generally draw the Alpha strike aggro when we don't have a tanker because I have good defense (Steamy mist, hasten and Hover), and can toss out GDF to minimize the Alpha strike, so I get held/slept by the bosses (who are only slowed by my first hold). In this scenario, stimulant becomes completely useless (since I can't use it on more than 1 person before battle, and am now held throughout the battle so can't use it again).

I couldn't let it rest with just my earlier re-post.

[ QUOTE ]
it used to be 20 seconds. I meant to change it to 60 seconds, but accidently made it like 600 or something. That made it 5 times better than the Defender Clear Mind power. Clear mind was 60 seononds, and it is now 90 seconds. Stimulant must not be as good as clear mind.

[/ QUOTE ]

This power used to be 20 seconds and you chanced it to 600? Maybe you did that on purpose. 20 seconds is pathetic.

You seem to be under the impression that stimulant even at 90 seconds, this would be a better power (or equal). Please disabuse yourself of this thought. It is very wrong.

I will give you that 360 seconds may have made this power more powerful than clear mind. Though I'd agree to this, I don't see why this is unacceptable. Every other power in the Medicime pool is drasticly weaker than anything empathy has already. It's not like it's against some law to have 1 power in a pool better than 1 power in a single AT. In fact most pools have at least 1 power that's more powerful than ones in an AT, or are more useful than most other powers in any AT. See rant below for more specifics if you can deal with a little melodrama.

** REM: Start rant **

Are you saying pools can't have any powers that are better than characters primary or 2ndary powers? If so you'll want to look into nerfing all the travel powers. They are better than siphon speed after all. Maybe superspeed could be a 5 second power with a 10 second activation so it works 1/2 the time, dropping you in and out of superspeed if you have it on auto. That sounds about as fair as lopping off the usefulness of stuimulant. Flight and Superjump could have the same thing, so you plummit out of the sky, and teleport should obviously have that way overpowered hover effect taken out to cause similar falls.

Hasten should of course be completely removed or nerfed into oblivion. It is after all useful now even after 2 nerfings. Lets not forget Provoke. That can be much better than Taunt. Of course Teleport Friend also would need a severe nerfing, there's nothing any AT has that's anything as useful as this. Making it only recall people who are 300 yards away or less should do the trick. It's just enough to have a tiny bit of use to it (like if someone can't get over X wall or similar). Don't even get me started on Stamina, and some of the other 4th powers in some pools. These are madly unbalanced and clearly need to all do nothing for a few months to make up for all the time they were very useful powers.

Well I think that would be a good start. Anyone else have any suggestions?

** REM: End Rant **

I wrote this on another post before I found this one. BTW: I'm not 100% certain I have the exact #s, but it's close to this.

[ QUOTE ]
This power already had issues. It's interruptible, melee range, with a long activation and recharge time, fairly high end cost, and only usable when facing some foes, and not usable on yourself.


Before I could put it on everyone before a battle (if they had the patience to wait 70 sec for it), and get some good milage out of it. Now if the group is more than 2 people (as in myself an 1 other) I have to pick whom I put it on and it will generally wear out on someone before the battle ends if there are more than 3 of us. I can't use it in battle because of the combo of being interruptible and melee range.


So you made it almost unusable, especially when in larger groups. Your patch notes say this fixed a bug so it wouldn't be longer than clear mind.


Wanna tell me why in the world it has to have a shorter duration than clear mind?


Umm.. Before your change, clear mind vs Stimulant:
uninterruptible vs interruptible
7.5 end vs 15 end
70 vs 10 range
3 vs 4 sec activation time
4 vs 10 second recharge time
60 vs 360 seconds - now it's (90 for CM, 60 for Stim)


So stimulant has to be worse in every category before it's acceptable as a pool power? This makes no sense. Couldn't it have had the same duration?? If you have some special reason why you want it to have less time fine, but then make it ranged like clear mind so I can at least use it during a battle. Otherwise it's basically a pointless power. Good thing I respec'd to get it

[/ QUOTE ]

I read a few of these and thought I'd toss in a few bits:

1) If anyone's system crashes more than before, they should not just blame devs. Windows XP SP II patch ruined the game for me for about 2 weeks for a bit there. I'd say I've had a few more disconnects going from area to area than I used to, but mapserver disconnects in-mission or in zone have gone way down since launch, greatly reducing my frustration with this game. Some of this was me kicking my cable company's butt, some may have been NCsoft. I certainly haven't noticed them making things worse anyway.

2) IMO Smoke Grenade was stupid before. I could just see the mobs:

"Gee, it got real smokey in here all of a sudden after that BOOM noise, ooh well must not be a big deal." says mob 1
"AARRGG!!, I've been shot" says his buddy
"Ohh well, I can't see where it came from, guess I'll just stand here" says mob 1

Gimmie a break. It was awfully nice to get easy XP, but it was really way too lame. I'm glad it was FIXED (I would not say nerfed in this case).

3) I do think the Hollows still has issues. Nowhere else in the game that I know of can a low level guy (under travel power level down to lvl 7 or so) have to wade their way through lvl 15 mobs to get to a mission in a hazard zone. Add to it that some spawns are close enough together in the hollows to make it nearly impossible to get by without drawing aggro (I'm an experienced player and I have a little trouble. What about that newbie with their first lvl 7 guy?) and that there are big dropoffs making navigation sometimes tougher than Perez, and I think there is a problem. Is it terribly flawed? No, but it could use improvement (IMO).

4) For the Mobs in levels thing. After patch 2 we had all those +1 cons pissing some people off and making others happy. Going back more towards primarily even level was necessary IMO for the early game, but the game post 22 or so should be mostly +1s, and post 33 or so could be mostly +1s w some +2s IMO. Yes, I think the level slider would be a smart addition as well. I just think the default could do this. This would bump the challange up (if you're lvl 33 you know what you're doing by now) and would have a feel that I think is appropriate for the game. As your character gets more powerful, you'd kinda like for them to have a bigger advantage over the evildoers, which we have now (what is so super about your superhero after all if they are no better than the average guy?). I think there's no need to try to skew the mobs much tougher (a little'd be OK by me).

5) I believe Hasten has been nerfed 2x now. Once to about 3 Rech reducts to make it permanent (not sure what it was before this, I didn't have SOs till just before Patch II), and now you pretty much need all 6. I like this. Call me crazy, but I don't like how much this power felt like a "must have". Now I gotta decide if I really wanna burn both a power and 5 enhancement slots to make my guy perma-hasten. I still mostly go with it, but now I don't feel like I've intentionally weakened my character if I skip it. (This is the general opinion of my SG - 10 members, all friends)

6) It seems to me there's something wrong with the enemy kill counters (I feel like someone must have posted this before). I dusted off my lvl 18 blaster last night from about 2 months of disuse and noticed he had no gear kills. He had made a small living killing Clock Princes before, and I know I wiped up a fair # of gears too. Similarly, he had no kills for any other boss type. Were the counters reset after the badge patch, or do you have to kill at least 1 of something post-badge patch for the kill badge counter to come up or what? I feel there's a bug in here somewhere.

7) There's been a bug since day 1 where missions do not always stay in the Nav window after selection (again, I feel this must have been posted somewhere before). This is especially annoying with teams because the mission isn't visible either (if you haven't gotten there yet), and in mission if you have to destroy x or something, sometimes it doesn't update, sometimes you just can't see it. You guys really gotta fix this. It's annoying and it looks like you don't care, leaving such an obvious bug up for so long.

8) Stay the course Cryptic. You will have people upset whenever you change something. Deciding what you really should do is the tough thing. So far your changes have imprved the game IMO, not made it worse.

OK, opinions and ideas exhausted for the night. Gotta go shake my butt at a club.

Peace in Paragon!

- Madfro

Logmo –

Do you do anything other than cut down other people? Ooh wait, yea you play MMORPGs like 60 hours a week. I can’t say I’m very interested in your EQ comparison. After all it’s once again irrelevant. What I said is:

[ QUOTE ]
You say this game is easy compared to EQ or WOW? Yea right. Whatever. Way to just toss out stuff. This game can be hard or easy depending on how you play it.

[/ QUOTE ]

The point, which you COMPLETELY missed, was that that’s a different game with different rules, and comparing the difficulty here to there is a non-sequitor because this game was designed with the possibility of soloing in mind, whereas EQ was not (and no, I’m no EQ expert and never pretended to be). It make sense for Heroes to be more powerful than most enemies they face in this game, because that is the dynamic of this game (ever seen Spiderman take on 1 minion and loose – not under any normal situation).

So I guess it comes down to how you’d like to define difficulty. If you mean ability to kill 1 guy with your 1 guy, then fine, EQ’s tougher. I never actually argued this or claimed leveling was slower or faster or any of the stuff you really seem to want to argue about. I said that you can make the game harder or easier if you want to (see my post pg 21 if you'd like a ref). If you have a character designed to be uber then you’ll have to hit bigger guys, but the challenge can still be there. If you can solo +4 lvl 12 mob groups with a boss or two without a problem well then I’m wrong.

Then there’s stuff like this:
[ QUOTE ]
Don't whine when you 6 socket end regen in your primary attacks and can't solo yellows+.
Don't whine when you're lvl 5 and expect to solo a whole group of 12 lvl 5-7 outcasts and can't.

[/ QUOTE ]

Um, no one did. Your arrogance is ridiculous. First off, I never claimed to be the master of enhancement slotting, but I realized pretty quickly that damage enhancements are the most useful for most attack powers (and have read the forums enough to know what some of the limitations are), and aside from people trying to do dumb things for kicks, no one comes close to 6-slotting End Regen in lower powers. A lvl 5 soloing 12 lvl 5-7 outcasts? If someone whines about this they deserve to be flamed. However the posts have nothing to do with this (how many times do I have to use the word irrelevant). Most people (myself included) who "complained" have some idea how to slot stuff. We don’t like red con bosses in lower level solo missions, and some don't like the +1 minions and LTs (though I’m OK with them except when combined with lots of stun and caltrops powers). You don’t seem to run levels anyway based on your posts. You don’t run missions, so why dump on us who do? Heck, why are you even posting here? Come on, dude, come back to reality and give your fellow CoHer’s a little respect. We aren’t the morons you’d like to pretend.

Speaking of morons, you expect us to believe you ran one character from scratch to lvl 21 and another to lvl 12 in the 6 days and 12 hours since the patch release? (time calculated from release to your statement on pg 23) You’re either a huge liar or you play this game WAAAYYY too much. I’m a momma’s boy? Hah! You never leave the house.

While we’re at it, though I tried to put humor in with the fat girls analogy, it was not intended to be directed at you, though I can see how you’d read it that way. I have nothing against any girl, though I will certainly admit that the “roll out your 300lb girlfriend” part could have been toned down. Humor often can offend someone, especially if they see it the wrong way. Well, you went off on everything else I said with ridiculous statements and worthless profanity. No sense expecting you not to bite on something that easily attacked.

Now why you’d confuse a wartime protest with customer support and complaint handling I can’t imagine, but as I said already, [ QUOTE ]
enough about complaint handling. You'll either learn or not.

[/ QUOTE ]

Anyway, if you feel like writing back blasting me, please do, but I doubt I’d respond again unless you seem to be interested in focusing on what I’m actually talking about, and being just a little reasonable in your statements. A few insults are fine by me, but I don’t deal with people who like to pretend they’re better than everyone else if I don’t have to.

[ QUOTE ]
Huge outcry? lol... You do realize that those that visit this forum makes up for an amazingly insignificant amount of the actual player base right? And even then only a few among this number(you included apparently) actually whine about the changes. The rest are all positive posts saying how they loved the changes. It seems to me there's a few griefers here trying to wreck the fun of others by calling nerf just because they don't have a clue of how to play this simple game. Trust me the "difficulty" of this game is very very vastly lower than most MMOs out there. You wanna go try EQ2? WoW? go ahead, you'll be killed by a single even con rat or beetle in the newbie zone if you think CoH is hard.

[/ QUOTE ]

Logmo - Why you gotta bash people, especially when you're not even right?

Not a huge outcry? Did you notice how many threads people have posted about this? Have you noticed how many times statesman has responded to this? It's probably the most posted and replied to complaint since launch.

Why is it a huge outcry? It's not because "only a small portion of people use the boards." you say? Irrelevant! A large % of people doing anything won't complain if there's a problem. What matters is the volume of posts complaining about this vs the normal post volume for any other given issue, thanks given, or whatever. Ask any customer service group. If it helps you see the issue better, I run with an SG of 8 people. Everyone in it disliked the +1 lvl bosses. However, I am the only one who posts here.

Anyway, enough about complaint handling. You'll either learn or not.

I love a lot of the new update additions, however it does seem to me they tried either to do too much or release it too fast. I could have waited for any of the new things, and now I'm in a position where my lvl 8-20 or so characters are fairly unusable for the way I play the game (and of course I'm far from the only person who plays missions, or had issues with the +1 con bosses).

BTW: Logmo - You say this game is easy compared to EQ or WOW? Yea right. Whatever. Way to just toss out stuff. This game can be hard or easy depending on how you play it. In your earlier post you already showed what kind you are. You go for perma-hasten, fitness ect. with every character. Well, yea if you make the game as easy as you can it'll be... um... easy? This game doesn't have any kind of easy to hard slider (yet), so if you make only the best builds it will be easy unless you make it hard by fighting +4-6 lvl mobs, bosses, tougher villain types, etc.

Dating fat, ugly, low self esteem girls is a lot easier than dating other girls. If someone complains that dating supermodels is tough and getting older makes it tougher, don't roll out your ugly 300lb girlfriend to proove them wrong. (Do I need to explain this analogy to you?)

OK, I feel I've bashed you now. Not my intention exactly, but jeez man, you were asking for it.

It seems to me another method for determining level could be made (though it would take time and significant coding/testing effort) that would give good levels. Use a character's past history to determine level. If a character hasn't died in say 1 full level (maybe 1/2 level, whatever), all their missions get a +1 "difficulty" - probably a combination of +1 lvl mobs and more +0 mobs. Similarly, if they've died more than twice within the last level, their missions get a -1 difficulty. Start at even con of course, and slide up and down the scale based on deaths/level (so if using no deaths in 1 lvl as the guide, if you've made it through 2 lvls with no deaths, missions become +2 difficulty).

Alternatively, an easier fix instead of the mission slider (which seems to have lots of possible exploits and bugs) make a very simple hard/med/easy selectable setting for the game (maybe with a very hard and impossible setting too). Hard is +1 cons and/or more enemies, med is normal level normal #s, and easy is -1 cons and/or less cons. It could be changeable up to when the mission is accepted. To change it you have to abandon the mission, then change difficulty, then start again. For missions with multiple characters, it could be an average of what everyone has selected, or could be based on the mission owner.

Just my 2c worth. This is still a great game, I am just frustrated soloing with most of my < lvl 22 characters right now, as they don't handle red bosses well.