Goldbrick

Not a bad theory, but it seems to me that waiting until the end of November is not giving themselves a lot of time to reallocate the servers to GW2 to meet a Xmas shopping deadline, so I'm not sure that this is the whole story.

My initial assumption was that the devs presented a plan to NCSoft to upgrade CoH's dated graphics and the cost would eat up the meager profits of the game for the next ten years. But the abrupt cancellation of the title indicates something else, because CoH could have gone on for a few more years even with dated graphics.

I now suspect that it's a purely mundane reason: ending the game and closing the studio adds more to the bottom line in the short-term than keeping it all going. And CoH is probably not considered a long-term profit source any longer.

I'm of the opinion that as MMOs become more numerous, leveling will get easier and easier. Even WoW is speeding up the leveling process and getting ever more casual-friendly, which frustrates the elitists to no end.

There's no going back. MMOs want to get new players heavily invested in their characters as fast as possible, because there may only be a window of a few weeks or a month to get them hooked.

The crappy old model of devote-your-waking-life-to-our-MMO is a failed one. MMOs are no longer a niche entertainment, meant just for kids or basement-dwellers. They're now going after all ages, all demographics. But regular folks have regular lives, and can only spend a couple of hours a day, at most, on an MMO. If they can't make progress in a handful of hours per week, it isn't their regular lives that will suffer, they'll dump the MMO. Making very slow progress week after week is very b o r i n g for those who have balanced, fulfilling lives. And they can go right back to those lives without regret.

If the devs thought they could get a million subscribers by giving away a lvl 40 kheldian to anyone who has a VIP account, I'm sure we'd quickly see kheldians everywhere, like death knights in WoW.

If CoH hadn't adopted the elitist model of the olden days (Everquest and even earlier games like Kesmai and Kingdom of Drakkar), I bet this game would have a few million subscribers today.

The elitist model only made sense when the market was almost exclusively basement-dwellers with unlimited time to play, and had nothing else in their lives to stroke their egos.

Comic book travel powers so far unused in CoH:

Jetpacks (permanent costume jetpacks, not temporary, and not steampunk).
Vehicles (motorcycles, cars, boats, dirigibles, invisible robot planes).
Line swinging.
Wall crawling.
Tunneling.
Instant travel via phone lines (somehow the Atom did this).
Decomposing into the muck and reappearing out of the muck far away (Swamp Thing teleportation).

As we can see from the above, vehicles are the last big category. The rest are niche powers, used only by a few. Vehicles have been desired for almost as long as the game has been live. Cars, motorcycles, stuff that "unpowered" Batman-style characters could use to get around.

The hoverboard is the first thing in the game that characters actually ride. Perhaps the hoverboard is the harbinger of similar rideable machines. I suppose wall crawling is likely to appear eventually, but I bet people will want to take Super-Jump with it because some buildings are rather far apart. (I take Hover with Teleport so I can pause for thought, and Combat Jumping and Hurdle with Super-Speed so I can get over fences and walls easier.)

Well, if you want a tank-brute, my advice is to go stone armor. I have a stoner brute and he's very tough and hits hard. Closest thing to a comic book brick in the game.

I only have tanker invulns, and I'm not sure I'd recommend invuln on anything other than a tank. In my (considerable) experience, invuln doesn't start to come together for a tank until lvl 40, and doesn't really get supreme until level 50 and well slotted with IOs for high typed defense, with some decent positional defense as well. I imagine it must be even slower going for scrappers and brutes where invuln is the secondary.

I have a nice lvl 50 willpower scrapper, great survivability. Willpower is great out of the box.

I would never have altered powers in PvE because of PvP. There were quite a lot of changes made to powersets because of PvP (quite true, even though many forum posters insist otherwise). Also, I would have added a dueling feature.

I would have made every effort to open up the back slot for costume rocket packs, backpacks, quivers, etc. Seven years and counting, devs.

I would have altered teleportation considerably, because it's a lame, annoying travel power that only got worse with ED. Extend the base range considerably, please.

I would have implemented a secret identity feature, and added some events and places to the city that "regular folks" could attend. I would have added personal apartments. The contrast between everyday society and the superhero world is a large part of what makes comics exciting.

I would have steered the game away from Statesman's original "arcade game" idea and added some depth much sooner. An economy from the get-go, various detective or inventing skills, etc. Instead, anyone can make any temp power or gizmo, which does nothing to individuate the heroes/villains.

I would never have cordoned off villains from heroes as if they were separate games. And I would have added the option for villain characters to infiltrate hero missions and vice versa. Also, an archvillain feature (entirely optional).

I would have started early on the idea for destructible mission environments. Currently, that's a feature that is still only available on bank missions, and to a limited extent.

And new zones: alien worlds, underwater zones, outer space zones. Possibly I would have spent the development time on these exotic zones rather than the now hardly-used villain zones, and villains would roam the same cityscape as the heroes.

And veteran rewards would scale up in quality, not fade over time into mere meh tokens. I wouldn't have bowed to the impatient forum loudmouths who feel entitled to all the vet rewards on day one. I would have made the vet rewards a real incentive to hang around.

It's been years since I've seen anyone suggest this. I've always been in favor of it, even though way back when Cryptic brushed us off by saying that our real world lives are our secret identities.

Yes, we can reserve a costume slot for civilian attire and hit the walk key, but our character name won't change and any bad guy near our character's level will attack.

I would like a secret identity "slot" that would use an NPC model, complete with NPC name, whose superhero persona would not be identifiable by other players. Also, villain NPCs would not attack as civilians are beneath their notice.

Secret identities would not be able to enter mission doors or PvP zones, too exploitable. Otherwise, walking/running movement and the ability to use portals. Perhaps our secret identities could be randomly asked by the game to become hostages in newspaper missions? (I bet NCSoft could think of plenty to do with secret identity characters.)

Anyway, the idea adds depth to the game, and more depth in CoH/V is always a good thing.

Your forum-fu is not all it could be. An open-ended request like this will eventually have every single power in the game suggested, even those that already have alternate animations.

If you're still reading this growing thread -- and my request may have been mentioned before -- I would like an alternate animation for Energy Transfer (in the energy melee powerset).

I nominate the alternate animation for Eagle's Claw (in the martial arts powerset). The alternate Eagle's Claw is a nice big one-handed roundhouse punch.

Also, it would be nice to have the option to completely switch off the Dark Armor powerset's smokey shields (particularly cloak of darkness and obsidian shield).

Thanks, and costume jetpacks would be nice too.

Ahem, actually, Liz Allen was Flash Thompson's obsession in high school, and "Petey" as she called Parker wasn't interested in her, he was all about Betty Brant, who was his first big love interest. Liz was interested in Parker though, and her persistence kept him in hot water with both Flash and the rather insecure Betty Brant. This was the main relationship storyline for Spider-Man during the classic Ditko years.

Mary Jane Watson was the niece of a friend of Aunt May's. And those two ladies were always trying to arrange for Peter to meet MJ, but he kept wiggling out of it. Parker didn't even see MJ until some time after Betty Brant (and after Ditko, during the John Romita years).

One of my big complaints about the movies was that they skipped over the Ditko years thereby making a mess of the original Silver Age timeline. I suspect Sam Raimi didn't start reading Spider-Man until the 70s.

No.

If you think you are making logical sense, I suggest you should only join MMOs that are just starting up.

You'll get them just like every veteran, in due course. Completely fair.

I'm on your side, because it would be great if this game could more closely resemble the comic book universe, rather than the tired mage-warrior-ranger-enchanter-healer fantasy MMO class recipe. But in the comics, one writer is playing all the heroes so the story doesn't devolve into, "Let Superman do it." Or even worse, "Let's all roll Superman characters and steamroll through the game that's designed for varying power levels."

You seem to think that only a few people would select Superman over Batman. In MMOs, virtually everyone goes for the Jedi character over the boring smuggler. Without class balance, this game would rapidly become City of Invuln/Super-Strength or whatever is most powerful. Alt-itis is the lifeblood of this game, and it would be seriously compromised.

I can't stand the Energy Transfer animation also. I don't care about more AoE damage, but I would like the old single-hand animation back with the very fast animation time. Retain the long animation and double-hand pattycake for PvP, that's fine with me.

NO REAL TANKER INHERENT
How about a brute-like fury bar that fills half as fast for half as much extra damage?

Granite/Super-Strength. I fully IOed my stone/ss tank and it's not possible for a tank to be tougher. 90% s/l resistance, 80%-83% elemental/toxic resistance, soft-capped typed defense and 35% ranged defense (to deal with psi and toxic). Many of the disadvantages of granite are toned down by the IO set bonuses. And I can run faster than normal sprint speed.

My second-best tank is my invuln/warmace. Also fully IOed, this tank has 90% s/l resistance, 33%-35% elemental resistance, and is at typed defense soft-cap across the board vs a single foe, with 30% ranged defense. In addition, the aoe and two cone attacks from the mace secondary provide a lot of damage mitigation as well as significant damage output.

I have a willpower/energy melee tank, and he's pretty good, doesn't need much IO slotting. His only weakness is big spiked damage (multiple boss-level foes hitting at once) which I can mitigate easily by using Strength of Will and/or a purple inspiration. Willpower tanks are all-around solid, and a little investment in IOs and accolades will put your tank at the hp cap permanently.

Yeah, I have two lvl 50 tanks with energy melee, and I wish I could change them both to something else. The old Energy Transfer was the reason I made them.

I have granite, willpower, and invulnerability tanks at 50, and hands-down the best tank for survivability, if you are willing to spend the influence to fully IO your tank, is invulnerability.

My main character Goldbrick can easily reach the soft cap in defense with just a few adversaries nearby or by chewing a single small purple inspiration, has 90% smashing/lethal resistance, approximately 35% resistance to elemental damage, and has decent positional defense that helps surprisingly well against psionics.

Goldbrick has none of the drawbacks of granite, and thanks to IOs doesn't need Unstoppable (so I dropped that power as never used, and took another attack power). He has 50% resistance to defense debuffs, and 40% resistance to slows (slows can turn granite tanks into statues pretty easily).

Goldbrick is the one tank I have with the Master of the Statesman TF badge, and he breezes through Mothership Raids which have a nasty incoming combo of physical, elemental, and particularly psionic damage.

Caveat: It can cost billions these days to IO out an invulnerability tank, and invulns are not high performers for most of the trip to 50, only starting to get really tough post-40 when the synergy of powers gets solid.

If you want a tank that is strong 1-50, willpower is a good choice. WP will also cost relatively little to IO up. I permanently maxed my willpower tank's hps at 3212 and called it done. The only weakness of willpower is damage spikes, and carrying a few purple inspirations blunts that worry. My willpower tank can laugh all day long at nictus Romulus and his essence pets, and can do the same to pretty much any AV outside of the STF.

My granite tank is quite ridiculously solid without IOs, but while in granite has that big psionics hole that basically means I don't like to take the granite tank to Mothership Raids. I switch to mineral armor when facing Mother Mayhem and have no worries, but a mix of high level psionics with other damage forms causes trouble. Almost all of the drawbacks of granite including running speed can be compensated for with pool powers and IO sets, and I've done that, but slows and psionics remain a big weakness for granite tanks, unless heavy spending is done to soft cap defense. Stone tanks are decent enough from 1-32, but then really become the terror of evildoers when granite armor becomes available.

No question. Tanks! Because tanks in this game can become as tough as the big modern-day comic book tanks like the Thing. CoH tanks can't hit very hard, but I'm okay with "pulling my punches".

Scrappers are okay too, if what I want to play is a Batman/Daredevil/Blue Beetle type. Scrappers have a decent enough modern comic book feel.

Blasters I like too, when I don't feel like working too hard. CoH blaster power is down around Silver Age levels of damage, like the early '60s Cyclops, but I like the Silver Age.

Defenders - I have just one at 50, a dark/dark, and thanks to IOs he's a great Silver Age
Master of Black Magic.

Controllers - I don't like 'em. I don't want to watch pets have all the fun. I don't go to spectator sports either.

Villainside, I have a stone/stone brute at 50, and he plays very much like a Silver Age level Thing. Strong survivability and good damage output. But I don't play villainside hardly at all anymore. I'll try to get this fellow over to heroside eventually, I think.

Possibly not.

Right now if you see someone wearing the boxing set you know they've played at least 39 months. If your suggestion is implemented, the recognition value of the costume vet rewards is broken. I think the vet rewards are supposed to be visible indicators of veteran status.

I agree that the devs will never again offer costume pieces to vets who are currently at the outermost 72 month+ threshold. Whatever vet costume pieces are out there are all there will be, unless they are retconned in at an earlier stage, and there's plenty of room for them in some of the skimpier rewards.

Am I happy that I won't see any more vet costume sets? Of course not. But I don't entirely blame the vet reward system, I mostly blame those who will inevitably complain if a costume set is placed years beyond reach.

I resign myself to the vet reward being reduced to little utility gadgets from now on because putting a costume set at 75 months means there would be endless schemes posted on the suggestion forum to modify the vet system.

Just about the only fair thing I can think of at this point is for the devs to introduce new vet reward costume pieces AND at the same time nearly identical costume sets at the tailor shop for all other players. I think they erred by not doing this from the beginning.

I agree with the above, remove the stacking and get rid of the 10 second downtime. Without the overlapping potential, however, the power would really boil down to a to-hit bonus, so I would hope the to-hit would stay as it is.

The new ET animation is ugly, you aren't imagining it. Also, ET was nerfed because they gave it to high damage characters like stalkers who were practically insta-gibbing people with it in PvP zones.

But I don't care much about the longer animation, dps is a secondary concern for me. To fix EM so that I would play it again -- and I have it on two lvl 50 tanks -- just beef up Whirling Hands a decent amount and give me the option of choosing the Knockout Blow animation instead of the current ugly doublefisted strike. That's not much to ask.

You aren't right about this, and it would be nice if you would stop insisting you are. You are sounding like a troll or nerfherder to me. The performance of super-strength and stone armor are neither "ridiculous" nor "obscene".

Once again, they are not "a helluva lot" stronger than their counterparts in "virtually all areas". Perhaps you don't play invulnerability and stone tanks, but I do. I have, all at 50, three invulnerability tanks, one stone tank, one stone brute, and one willpower tank. I've been tanking in this game for six years and have had plenty of time to compare these powersets.

They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and they are well known. Look them up. I can survive much better now with my IO-ed out main invuln tank in virtually all situations than my granite tank can, which is still all too vulnerable to psionics while in granite form, and the penalties of granite form drag it down even more in performance, even with all of the compensating IOs/pool powers I've added.

Okay, it's plain you really don't play these powersets. Knock it off. Rage is not permanent build up, it makes super-strength comparable to, not better than, the other secondaries, and we have to wait a while to get it. My warmace tank does more damage and has more mitigation than super-strength provides, and does it with cones/AoE and doesn't even need to use build up to clear groups faster than super-strength can. Gonna start nerfherding on warmace now?

My willpower tank is fully as survivable as granite as long as I keep an eye out for potential damage spikes. That's the only weakness and there are no built-in penalties. So I suppose willpower is godmode too?

Go away.

Perhaps a weak, slow-charging fury bar?

My more selfish wish is for Energy Transfer to get an alternate animation. I cannot stand the two-fisted forward push-smash. And I'd like to switch off the glowing part too.

Well, I've seen this myself the past few years. Perhaps it's merely from a combination of ever shortening attention spans and changes to CoH that have made all toons hardier. Goldbrick really only gets to use the "old way" of tanking when it's a challenging task force that really will chew up non-tankers if they are too bold.

But I remember a couple of years when my inv/ss tank was weakened by a series of nerfs prior to the introduction of the invention system. I turned away from tanking as many did, and fewer tanks were to be found. Teams compensated by developing non-tank team strategies, which seemed to be based on controllers locking things down as an opening move -- anathema to tanking since aggro can't be easily concentrated. Today, in the era of very tough IO-buffed tanks, controllers still do it whether or not there's a tank on the team.

If I may throw in a possible external influence for your consideration: I see this current style of team play in WoW, where the warrior/bear/paladin must grab that aggro either by running on ahead or frantically in that crucial split-second before the team opens up. So maybe what tanks in CoH are experiencing is also influenced by the fact that plenty of people bounce back and forth between CoH and WoW.