Hephaestus

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

If you can't solo everythign your contacts give you then they shouldn't stop giving you stuff when you come up against somethign you can't solo, forcing you to either get a team or to not do any more missions. IMO, THAT, is what is horribly broken.


[/ QUOTE ]

I agree there are times when the contacts are not clear about what you can solo what you may be able to solo and what you cant solo. I would even go as far as suggesting there be a way to give missions back to contacts if they contain tasks you can’t perform solo.

[/ QUOTE ]
But even when the contact is clear, suppose you really want to do this game soloing all the way, no teaming at all. Plenty of people like to do that. Now, you are willing to avoid, let's say, 50% of the content, if that much is team-based. That seems fair to you. If you can just do half the content entirely soloing you are happy.

Now, street-sweeping, and, frankly, street-sweeping missions, count as a negligible degree of content. they tend to be repetitive, boring, with identical plots. So you want only instanced missions.

So let's say all content is clearly indicated as team or non-team. You go up to a contact, the first instanced missions is indicated to be doable solo. Great, you take it, you do it. The next one is indicated as requiring a team. Can you skip it and go to the next solo instanced mission? Nope. You either do it with a team or go look for other contacts. So you go look up another contact. You get a solo mission from him. You have fun with it, but then he offers a team-based mission as the next choice. Ok, on to the next contact. The next contact starts out offering a team-based mission, so you pass him up, and visit the fourth of the five contacts you have during this set of levels. He offers you two solo missions in a row, but the next one is team-required. Fine, we head for the fifth and last contact. We manage to get one solo mission there done before he also only offers team-based missions. In total I managed to do five of the, what, 75 or so missions that I could have gotten from these contacts? That's only about 7% of the content. After that it's street sweeping for me. Whoopee! Now, this assumes that, supposedly, 50% of the missions are set to allow solo play and 50% are for teaming. You can set it to 80/20 or even 90/10, but the problem is that that ratio isn't really reflective of how much content you will actually be able to do if you are dedicated to solo play. If you are perfectly happy doing team play and solo play then yes, you can do that percentage of your missions solo, but so what. The point is to try to accomodate those who really do want to solo everything, or almost everything.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

AS for solo versus team difficulty, they had a very nice system in place already where the difficulty of a mission ramped up considerably based on the number of people entering it.


[/ QUOTE ]

My experience was that unless you were dragging along 3-5 team members that were well below the level of the group most of the missions were still very easy.

[/ QUOTE ]
AS I said, this may well have been the case, in which case you incr4ease the differential difficulty. Make it so that if you have two people it gets a LOT harder then it did before, but the fact is that many peopel who wanted to solo did not find their missions too easy. Many people did. But it varied a lot on the person, and, frankoly, with the difficulty slider, I think those who found their solo missions to easy were already being accommodated.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Tell me, does anyone actually enjoy street hunting?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes.

[/ QUOTE ]

Really?

I stand corrected then. There is at least one person (presumably representative of some kind of group of people) who do enjoy street hunting. Frankly I'm a bit astonished. Nobody I have met in game has said they enjoyed this, but tastes do differ. Enjoy then. At least that is still perfectly doable solo.

[/ QUOTE ]

As a solo'er I enjoy street hunting because it allows me to pick the groups I feel will give a challenge and the most xp. In a door mission you are pretty much set to whatever the mission is going to throw at you. I have many a times lvl'd myself by just taken out street groups. I like to vary things and street hunting gives me that variety.

As to the one peep that mentioned about not doing pickup groups that's good that you have a group of friends you can play with. But I came into this game without knowing anyone so for me if I wanted a group or team to play with pickup groups were about the only way to do that.

[/ QUOTE ]

I enjoy it as well. I got most of my lvl's from street hunting.. only until I2 when badges came out did I do more missions.

Perez, Boomtown, Faultline, TV, DA and crey folly was good to me. I only made one lvl in RCS because I was helping a guy to 50

[/ QUOTE ]

Just FYI. Doing street hunting to level faster and because it's easier does not necessarily mean you enjoy it more. You may also enjoy it more, I'm not disputing that, just pointing out that enjoyment means that you actually have more fun doing that activity, not just fun gaining the benefits faster that may result from that activity. Everyone enjoys leveling faster. The vast majority of people I speak to recognizxe that street hunting is probably the fastest way to gain levels (and herding is by far the fastest, if you can do it) but most also find those activities deadly dull.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

3. The missions are _single player content_ not group. The second you do them as a group you end up re-doing the same missions for different people which really hurts the "suspension of disbelief". If you like the story then it runs better when you ignore the rest of the players.


[/ QUOTE ]

This is completely mistaken. Missions are all the standard content and storyline for both teams and solo players. Other activities like task forces and trials or the extra-difficult content to give well coordinated groups and a planed activity that offers a very high level of challenge. As such they make up perhaps 1% of the team content and a fraction of a percent of all the content in the game.

With this in mind it should immediately become apparent that being able to solo everything in the missions your contacts give you is horribly horribly broken for a team oriented environment like an MMO.

I do agree that tough to solo content should be better labeled so solo players do not end up with tasks more suited to teams but under no circumstances should you be able to solo everything your contacts give you.

[/ QUOTE ]

If you can't solo everythign your contacts give you then they shouldn't stop giving you stuff when you come up against somethign you can't solo, forcing you to either get a team or to not do any more missions. IMO, THAT, is what is horribly broken.

AS for solo versus team difficulty, they had a very nice system in place already where the difficulty of a mission ramped up considerably based on the number of people entering it. Maybe, if when missions were ok to solo they were too easy to team, they should hav focused on changes to that system to ramp up the difficulty even more in teams, rather then making wholesale changes to bosses rqeagrdless of who enters the mission.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
and if you aren't a scrapper, a tanker, or a fairly narrow specialized other AT build that can deal with it, your soloing days are over. We are just saying the choice shouldn't have been taken away.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well let's face the facts too, these missions have always favored one kind of AT or build for soloing. ...So maybe we need to shift our focus towards new TYPES of missions. Give Tankers "Protect Squishy" missions to solo where all they have to do is Survive an Onslught. Give Controllers and Defenders Infiltrate missions, Protect/Heal tasks, and "Garrison duty" where they buff and heal NPC fighters. And give Blasters spread out missions with very light resistance and tons of objects to blow the sh** out of

If things are going to change, then why not demmand some new changes that benefit ALL of our playstyles instead of demmanding a return to the same old crusty stuff we've already done way too much of.

[/ QUOTE ]

Great ideas here. I'd venture to say that this is probably the way to go. Statesman wants to keep the game challenging because people are losing interest, but the way to make it challenging is not simply to turn up or down some numbers. The way to make it challenging is to present more complex, and varied, not simply more difficult or tedious, situations.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
So you dispute that the player base is dwindling? This is hardly surprising yet, at the same time, now is the time to look at who are going to be the long term loyal segments of the player base and start working to keep them loyal.

[/ QUOTE ]

IMO, that would be the casual, slow-leveling, story-oriented players who enjoy the game for its story and its variety, and who will keep logging in for months to do arcs and try out alts. NOT the people who race to 50, get bored, and wander off to try the next Kewl New MMOG.

Just my opinion, of course.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm one of those casual, slow-leveling, story-oriented players, and I think the boss changes were a big mistake.

[ QUOTE ]
Hephaestus, Thanks for reminding me to update my Alts lvl :]
The Mission I did was at my Current lvl of 24 and yes i do have SO's for 95% of my powers. I should be lvl 25 tonight or tomarrow,and then i will go after a Boss solo and see if I can do them. Will let you know.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good luck. By all reports is will be possible for your tank, but very slow, but might be imopossible for your defender when that char meets 25+ bosses.

[ QUOTE ]
Defenders have buffs/debuffs. This gives them a slight up on blasters. They typically have a heal in their sets, which extends their healths. When they get their APPs, they'll have improved crowd control. But they are still two or three very quick hits from the hospital.

[/ QUOTE ]
Most defender bufss debuffs do not work on themselves. The vast majority of their buffs/debuffs. Many of their heals also don't work on themselves. Not only that, but their damage is much less then blaster damage. In general defenders are probably worse off, in terms of soloability, then blasters. However, most defenders builds are based on being team-friendly. Most players who play defenders are more interested in teaming, and when teaming, the defender has no real probalems with the new bosses, they just make the defender more valuable. In contrast, many blastes had ideas abotu soloing their way through teh 1-40 content and will probably have to give up that idea.

[ QUOTE ]
Now the high level game jumps significantly in boss survivability with the scrapper. They have good defense, respectable hit points, and some of them have ways to restore HP. They also have forms of damage mitigation (resistance). But it is still a three-hits and you go to the hospital issue for some of them. On a plus-side, they can survive well enough that their damage does reduce the fight-time.

[/ QUOTE ]This is true, but for lower level scrappers, between, say, levels 25 and 30, but even up to about 40, the game against bosses got significantly harder. Until 40 or so most scrappers don't come anywhere near the ability of tanks to take damage and they don't come anywhere near the ability of blasters to dish it out. They simply don't have the slots. This is one of the less-advertised but more annoying aspects of playing scrappers.

[ QUOTE ]
I run solo alot,now mostly with alts.I recieved a mission with an alt last night which said you should bring a couple friends or something like that.I ran solo anyway,and dang if i didnt run into an Elite Boss at the end.Well it took some work but i took the Boss down. Granted even the sun shines on a dogs butt once in his life,and i may have been lucky. But it was one of the best fights ive had soloing in a while. So it seems some Boss's although thougher are still within reach of the solo players.

[/ QUOTE ]

I notice in your sig that you're alt is level 22. Most likely you enountered a level 22 boss in the mission. The difficulty was only upped on bosses 25+. Also, at 22 you are first able to buy SOs. My guess it that there is a significant sweet spot between 22 and 24 where the bosses you encounter haven't gotten really nasty yet, and you (if you had the influence to do so) were able to outfit your characters with SOs. I assume that since you do have a level 50 you were able to afford all SOs at level 22.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Tell me, does anyone actually enjoy street hunting?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes.

[/ QUOTE ]

Really?

I stand corrected then. There is at least one person (presumably representative of some kind of group of people) who do enjoy street hunting. Frankly I'm a bit astonished. Nobody I have met in game has said they enjoyed this, but tastes do differ. Enjoy then. At least that is still perfectly doable solo.

Frankly, there were two reasons I even bothered trying this game. I had played two MMPs in the past and disliked both because the obvious best path to advancement lay in teaming up with people and I found I didn't enjoy doing that. The first reason I tried this game was because it was superheroes. I like the genre. The second reason was because, unlike the other MMPs on the market today, it was billed as allowing you to solo well. That means a lot ot me. In the past, the vast majority of my experiences teaming have been highly negative. I get far more fun out of the game solo. Also, although I don't have kids, like others I have time constraints. Sometimes I just want to get on for half an hour, sometimes I suffer sudden interruptions in my game play. Neither of these are particularly well-suited to playing in a team where it usually takes 10 minutes to get into a team, (assuming you are even willing to go with pickup teams, if you want to be with friends it can often be a long wait) 5 minutes to get together and decide what to do, and often another hour or so to actually acomplish much of anything as a team. By myself, pre-issue 2, I often got on with my scrapper and soloed for 10-15 minute increments quite productively, knowing I wasn't letting anyone down by skipping out in the middle of a mission.

Yeah, there's street hunting, wheee! Tell me, does anyone actually enjoy street hunting? Nobody I know. They may find it the fastest way to level up, but if so, it's the leveling up part they enjoy, and the street hunting they just do to get to that.

That doesn't mean I never want to team with anyone. I started an empathy defender focusing on healing and buffing (rather then the secondary powers) in order to see what teaming was like from the POV of a character made for it. THis game does a good johb with teaming, and, at times, I am quite happy teaming, but there are also many times when I want to solo, and making the game unfun for soloists, well, I see no reason to stick with CoH if that is where it is going. I left two other MMPs already due to this issue (in large part).


Also, let's be a little realistic here. If you don't like street hunting, each contact is really only offering one mission option at any given point. If you take that option, and you can't solo it, not only can you never get any other missions from that contact, but once you get three like that you can never get any other missions from any other contact either. This is unacceptable unless every single one of the missions I can get solo is...well...soloable. Now, if you change the format, if you can just say something like "cancel this mission, give me the next one" or if you can keeop getting mission from every contact which is active regardless of how many you have and/or whether you already have one from that contact, then fine, it's ok to make many missions unsoloable because I can just get other ones. As things stand though, the only real content in the game (missions, task forces, trials) is going to require teaming. Even if several missions don't, the way contacts are set up, if any do that means you eventually stop being able to get new ones.

I wish this had been explained as the intent when I bought the game. Something like "Soling is perfectly feasible if you are willing to skip all the actual content in the game". I would have known it was just like all the other MMPs on the market and would not have bought it then, nor would I have paid for a year's subscription in advance.

A small suggestion:
if bosses, which currently con as a color as if they were two levels higher then an equivalent level minion, are supposed to be abotu one level tougher then they were previously, could you maybe have their color con be three levels higher then an equivalent level minion? In other words, if you encounter a boss that is the same level as you, instead of having him con orange, have him con red. I think this would better reflect the real difficulty level of the new bosses so that new players (and old) could more accurately judge the relative difficulty they will be facing. A lot of players don't stop to check out what level the mobs are, but they (players) do notice the colors that they (the mobs) con.

So I started another alt on Guardian. An empathy defender called the Vicious Killer, the concept just struck me as amusing (ok, small things amuse small minds, whatever, I'm having fun with it). So today I was thinking abotu background and, since there's an RP board, I thought it might fit well there.

First, the full background, which is way too long to fit in the stupid little background box you get for the character:
In the early 1900's, When Heriun Kell'ar migrated to the States from the small country of Haranagalaland with is family he spoke virtually no English and was at the mercy of officals who, perhaps in boredom, perhaps in humor, dubbed him Harry Killer on his immigration workup. Mr. Killer did quite well for himself, as have the successive generations. The "Killer" corporation is now a well-respected fortune 1000 multinational corporations specializing in data processing and retrieval services of all sorts. They are, in fact, one fo the more prominent and well-respected families in Connecticut, and are occasionally referred to, somewhat humorously, and the Connecticut Killers.

In 1976 David Killer maried Harriet Wells, both of which had a rather cruel sense of humor and little regard for long term consequences, this they named their children Mass, Vicious, and Bloody. Despite her rather unfortunate name, Vicious Killer decided all she really wanted out of life was to help people, and her parents helped support her in her desire to become a medical doctor. She graduated medical school at the top of her class and went on to intern at Massachusetts Children's Hospital.

However, one day, a famous hero's child was brought in with a bad case of food poisoning to Children's hospital. The hero in question was none other then Mr. Tougher-To-Hurt-Then-Average (froemrly Mr. Invincible). His arch-nemesis, Boss Uber1337H4xX0r, realizing the hero's soft spot for his kid, set up an ambush for him at the hospital near the room his kid was kept in (the real name of Mr. Tougher-To_hurt-Then-Average's kid has been deliberately kept secret to protect his secret identity, but shall be referred to as Ralph). When our hero showed up to visit ralph, the villain promptly sprung the trap and a massive fight started. Realizing the hospital was no place for such a battle, the hero tried to escape, but he had to fight his way out, and in the process Miss Killer was accidentally locked into the Radiation lab where she was just cleaning up after having done some experiments. The radiation lab was a new addition to the hospital (funds donated by a former employee who became fabulously wealthy named P. Panner) and was originally designed to allow for experimetns in using extremely localized, brief bursts of very strong electromagnetic radiation to mutate various aspects of the immune system in animals and humans to help fight disease, regenerate tissues and, it was hoped, even deceleqrate the aging process, if successful. Unfortunately, during the fight several failsafe systems...well...failed, and after gettign locked into the radiation lab, Miss Vicious Killer was exposed to enormous amounts of this highly experimental radiation treatment in a completely uncontrolled setting.

Now, had this been a comic book, Miss Vicious Killer would probably have mutated and developed some awesome powers but, tragically, this isn't, our bright and studious intern found her career abruptly cut short as she fell into a coma instantly and the doctors determined that she had, at most, another week to live, after they were able to examine her after the fight. Her death was a virtual certainty. Or, that is, it would have been, if the Killer family had not had the enormous amount of resources it did. Using vast amounts of money, contacts, and resources they were able to gain the help of many other heroes who, working in concert, were able to prevent her death, and even restore her, but not exactly in an unaltered state. The combined effects of the mutations due to the radiation, and the subsequent healing she received, has given her powers for both healing others (sometimes at a cost to herself), improving the abilities of others, and projecting powerful beams of energy from her hands. The cost of the healing was not only money but, when the heros involved realized the gifts Vicious Killer had gained, they insisted she had to devote her life to helping others both as a healer AND a superhero. Although it was not precisely what she had planned for her future, she was more then willing to help heal others as a means of preventing criminals from destroying millions of lives, and thus, another hero was born:
The Vicious Killer, Empathy Defender.

the background I plan on using on the character will be something more like:
Vicious Killer originally intended to become a medical doctor, but her plans were sidetracked when, as a result of an accident in a hospital related to damage done during a hero versus villain fight, she mutated, acquiring strong powers to heal others and do damage with energy bolts. She now travels the world trying to help other heroes to stop villains from destroying millions of lives.

Vicious Killer? That's her real name. What, you have a problem with that? How would you like it if I made fun of your name? Yeah, so she didn't know how to talk to the press when she started and they asked her who she was, everyone's entitled to some mistakes aren't they? Odd name for an Empathy defender? What? Look, just shut up about the name already, ok?

[ QUOTE ]
SHould you be able to solo everything. No. Get over it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Should you be able to solo nothing? No. Shut up.

Well, folks, you heard it here first. Statesman posted, and it was stated in the thread that the epic power pools will hopefully be coming by Christmas.

*snarf* *chortle*
Sorry, I couldn't resist.

[ QUOTE ]
We're working (or more precisely our wunder-programmer Martin) on a change to melee combat that will enable you to hit runners. No more angling just in front of the fleeing foe - yep - you can punch him from behind!

We hope to get this into Update 3, but it needs testing. But I thought you'd like to know.

[/ QUOTE ]
I can die happy now.



Well, maybe not die, but this is really good news. Thank you.

I was waiting in the express lane with my twelve items or less
At the checkout counter at the local grocery store
I was only passin' by
But a paper caught my eye
And I learend a few things I mever knew before

It said your pet may be an extra terrestrial
It said the ghost of elvis is living in my den
You can learn to cope with stress
You can beat the IRS
And the incredible frog boy is on the loose again

Oh, Mignight Star
It's in the weekly Midnight Star
Aliens from outer space are sleeping in my car
Midnight Star, I wanna know, I wanna know

Eat jelly donuts and lose twenty pounds a day
Hear the story of the man born without a head
And top psychics all agree
That the telephone company
Will have a brand new service that lets you talk to the dead

Oh, Midnight Star
You can believe it if you read it in the weekly Mignight Star
They're keeping Hitler's brain alive inside a jar
Midnight Star, I wanna know, I wanna know

Tell me, tell me, tell me how to make my bust-line grow
Midnight Star, I wanna know

Oh, Midnight Star
Well, don't you know that I read it, I read it in the weekly Midnight Star
The UFOs have landed and we'll tell you where they are
Midnight Star, I wanna know, I wanna know

Midnight Star
Well, you can read all about in in the weekly Midnight Star
You can use you ESP to learn to play guitar
Midnight Star I wanna know, I wanna know

(Ah, Midnight Star) I wanna know, I wanna know
(Ah, Midnight Star) I wanna know, I wanna know
(Ah, Midnight Star) I wanna know, I wanna know
(Ah, Midnight Star) Inquiring minds like mine wanna know

(You can read it {x5}, Midnight Star {x2}) (Ah, Midnight Star) I wanna know, I wanna know
(You can read it {x5}, Midnight Star {x2}) (Ah, Midnight Star) I wanna know, I wanna know
(You can read it {x5}, Midnight Star {x2}) (Ah, Midnight Star) I wanna know, I wanna know
(You can read it {x5}, Midnight Star {x2}) (Ah, Midnight Star) I wanna know, I wanna know
(You can read it {x5}, Midnight Star {x2}) (Ah, Midnight Star) I wanna know, I wanna know
(You can read it {x5}, Midnight Star {x2}) (Ah, Midnight Star) I wanna know, I wanna know

--Midnight star by Weird Al Yankovic

It just seemed appropriate here.

[ QUOTE ]
My relatives and friends believe I am in a self-destructive spiral from playing City of Heroes too much and they have decided to stage an intervention just for me.

My question to you all is should I even go to this? They tell me I have an online gaming disorder. I am the only one in my family who plays a massive online game.

I think they are all wierd, they think I am wierd. I'm tired of people telling me what to do with my life. What should I do about COH?

[/ QUOTE ]

Here's the thing. CoH is a game. It is designed for you to have fun playing it. If it is an important part of your life, that's fine. If it is ruining other important aspects of your life that's not so good. You are the only one capable of judging where CoH falls there. If, for example, you could hold down a job before, but can't now because you are playing CoH too much then you are probably playing it too often. If you are losing all your real life friends because you never speak to them because you play CoH too much, and you do want real life friends, then that is a problem. If, on the other hand, you are simply spending less time watchign TV, or reading books, or playing other computer games, or seeing friends a little less (but still maintaining regular contact with them, then that's probably fine. Do what you enjoy, but don't become obsessed with somethign to the point whre it is ruining your life. Remember that the game company could go bankrupt any day and the servers would shut down, so if you are counting on having a character for years and years that's probably a mistake. If you enjoy putting thought and effort into the game though, that's fine.

Make sure you are very clear on where you stand in relation to the game in your own mind, and if you feel changes need to be made, then you should prepare to make them.

Then let everyone who was planning on having the intervention know how you feel, and why, and what you do or don't plan to change. Remind them of the things they enjoy and that what you enjoy isn't intrinsically any worse then what they enjoy (some people like tanning themselves on the beach, is getting skin cancer twenty years from now by utterly wasting time now worth it when you could be doing something that keeps your mental acuity and improves hand-eye coordination while providing at least as much fun?).

I think a lot of people just don't understand the draw of video games. Therefore they think it's a waste of time. That's their problem, not yours. On the other hand, some peopel really do get way too involved in video games to the extent the games start to ruin the rest of their lives. This issue isn't 100% one way or the other, but, after thinking about it yourself, you really are the ONLY person able to decide where video games fall.

I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this. I din't see it with a cursory glance at each of the posts, but I might have missed it.

It was mentioned that Teleport allows you to "move" while in Unyielding Stance or Rooted. This si true, but I didn't see the underlying reason for this explained. Teleport is the movement power that works when other movement powers fail. You can teleport when you are held (so you can't move, but can still attack). You can teleport at the same speed as ever while slowed. You can teleport between spaces which are blocked by walls (as long as some camera view gives you an angle around that wall). Teleport can't be interrupted (though, technically, no other movement power can be either). If you are slept or stunned you still can't teleport because you can't activate any power, but I believe if you get slept or stunned after having started to activate teleport you will still teleport. If there are a group of mobs in between you and your destination you may, by having them positioned midway between start and end points, be able to avoid aggroing them.

Teleport has a lot of drawbacks. It is probably, once slotted up, and especially at low levels, the fastest power, as long as you have end for it. It is not the safest and God is it ever lousy for hunting things. However, Teleport does have some nice advantages too, which shouldn't be overlooked.

[ QUOTE ]
Actually, serious begging plea here - reclaim Perez Park! Or at least burn down all the trees.

[/ QUOTE ]
I'm thinking it's time to hire a big logging company. If the CoT or the other villain groups there balk the logging company can offer to hire them at decent rates. I'll bet most of those folks are just upset at the high unemployment rate and the fact they can't find jobs anymore.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
New threat? From the fifth column? Anyone here ever see the Keystone Cops? That's what the 5th column reminds me of after you get to 20th level and up. They're wacky sure, and good to cut your teeth on as a young hero, but as a credible threat to a child's Pez dispenser, let alone world safety, they are sadly lacking.

Ok, they have one tough leader type. Maybe they'll get another, but when all the rest are well-known to be every heroe's favorite punchign bags because they are so easy, well, pardon me if I'm not exactly quaking in my boots at this new "threat" to our fair city.

On the plus side, this is great news. If the worst threat is a bunch of fifth column guys showing up our city is in good shape.

[/ QUOTE ]

I didn't know vampyri were considered such pushovers...

[/ QUOTE ]
Vamps aren't as much of a pushover as the rest of the fifth column, granted, but they're not that hard compared to many other things at that level and they don't spawn in huge numbers. By far the most common are the play old human 5th column that do no status effects (other then the very rare knockdown or slow), only do smash/lethal damage, and not all that much of that, have no great powers for movement or resistance or regen, have lousy ranged attacks which they use way too often, and aren't all that tough to kill either.

the big thing about 5th column is their general lack of status effetcs. Vamps and mek-men get some, but they don't work very often, and in any case, vamps and mek-men are a small minority.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
What if the 5th is preparing for the Rularuu invasion by amassing more troops?

[/ QUOTE ]

Read the article... it's something happening from inside their organization.
Also do not forget. It's almost All Hallows Eve. Werewolves and Vampires abound!

[/ QUOTE ]

Halloween is just the red herring.

Right after that is the real target: election day.

The 5th Column successfully stole the last US Presidential election
through high level corruption and low level bullying in the streets of
Florida.

Even as you read this, several states have discovered that firms paid
by the RNC (the 5th's official political wing) have engaged in
enormous voter fraud (thousands of Democrat voter registrations
shredded rather than turned in in Nevada for instance) aimed at making
sure their fascistic aims remain on target.

Their candidate showed himself to be a fool and a puppet in recent
debates and is falling in the polls. It's time to divert the public's
attention...

Raise the threat level to: Purple.

Leak ominous threats containing little information to the newspapers...

Then take to the streets and suppress as many intelligent voters as they can...

[/ QUOTE ]
I play this game as an escape. Please don't inject real-wrold happenings into it.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
New threat? From the fifth column? Anyone here ever see the Keystone Cops? That's what the 5th column reminds me of after you get to 20th level and up.

[/ QUOTE ]

Never thought of that, they do look like Keystone cops! That reminds me of doing a Nemesis mission once, we had a lowbie SK'ed and he hadn't seen the Nemesis gunmen before and he said it was like fighting a high school marching band.

[/ QUOTE ]


Bahahah. You're right. I never thought of that one, but that's exactly what they look like with all those bugles and their natty uniforms.

New threat? From the fifth column? Anyone here ever see the Keystone Cops? That's what the 5th column reminds me of after you get to 20th level and up. They're wacky sure, and good to cut your teeth on as a young hero, but as a credible threat to a child's Pez dispenser, let alone world safety, they are sadly lacking.

Ok, they have one tough leader type. Maybe they'll get another, but when all the rest are well-known to be every heroe's favorite punchign bags because they are so easy, well, pardon me if I'm not exactly quaking in my boots at this new "threat" to our fair city.

On the plus side, this is great news. If the worst threat is a bunch of fifth column guys showing up our city is in good shape.

[ QUOTE ]
4.a) Do not turn on your travel power before entering a fight if it is Super Jump. Turn on Combat Jumping instead - it costs less end, gives you a Def bonus, protects you from Immobilization, and Super Jump has no discernible activation time.

4.b) Turning on Fly while fighting is probably also a bad idea.

4.c) You can't turn on Teleport because it's not a toggle.

4.d) Rule 4 really only applies to Super Speed.



[/ QUOTE ]
4.d.2) In fact, it's generally a good idea to have Superspeed on anyway because it prevents random things from aggroing you as often, so maybe you shoudl just disregard rule 4 completely.

By the way, most of these rules seem to be geared toward team play. Nothing wrong with that, but, as someone who really likes to solo, it would be good to see a big set of rules/guidelines to help in solo play as well.

May I just say that, as a scrapper, I am very glad of the change. Hopefully this will bring tankers up to the point where they are both wanted and needed again. Hopefully this will make them as useful as scrappers, in general, even though their defenses are still a bit better, and their offense will still be a bit worse.

This seems like an excellent change to me. Thanks Statesman.