HyperVirtue

Agreed Kelp.

The whole comic book thing wouldn't have happened for me had Troy not stepped in and gave me the tools I needed to break into the biz. Now that I am in, things are going well, very well and it was all because I looked at REAL work.

[ QUOTE ]
Okay i've been trying tons of scripts and ideas for a cartoon, so i'm just going to try and improvize a script using my imagination for you guys (I use my imagination for everything but I gave this less thought) So I backed out of doing this a few times, I though of posting a fan-fic called J-16 about a super-hero who had molecule editing powers and was forced to travel back in time three years to get help to control his powers after contracting(sp?) a horrible power-limiting disease. Anyway here's my fanfic.
Mighty Werewolf Chapter 1: The wolf is mightier than the sword
*Out of my head by Mobile plays (cool theme song, eh?)*
Joe: Well, this must be the place.
*Joe is standing outside a wonderful nice looking university*
Jeeves: Will you be need anything else Joe?
Joe: No that's quite alright Jeeves.
*An annoying kid runs up*
Kevin: Hey you must be new here? Let me guess, your Batman right?
Joe: Yep, i'm Batman.
Kevin: What no comeback? I thought rich kids were either pompous snobs, or rebellious heroes. I guess movies have taught me nothing.
*Kevin walks away*
Joe: I'm starting to get a bad feeling about that dude and this place. Oh well, it's probably nothing to be concerned about.
*Joe walks in and the gates close, the university starts to shift and transform*
Joe: What's happening?
*The ground starts moving and than Joe starts running, he runs into a huge crowd, he sees a mutant and and runs away, he runs into the middle of the football field and faints*
Kevin: Newbie. He's obviously never been to the "Academy of supernatural and the empowered" before.
*Joe wakes up in the hospital wing*
Melodia: You okay man?
Joe: Yeah I think so-- what the heck? Are you a boy or girl? Cuz you've got that hip thing going on but you've big bushy eyebrows like Rock Lee.
Melodia: Hey don't dis Rock Lee.
Joe: So where am I?
Melodia: Your at the academy of the supernatural and the empowered. Or as it also known Stomp-punch.
Joe: Wow, what a terribly explicit name.
Melodia: So what's your power?
Joe: I don't really have a power? But the strange thing is every night my parents would lock me in my room and i'd wake up, my bed was torn apart.
Melodia: Wait every night you say? Hm...
Joe: What?
Melodia: You could be a werewolf. But you can only transform into a werewolf when the moon is full, which happens once a month, so you may have some sort of advanced form of werewolf power I've never seen before.
Joe: So that means?
Melodia: We may be able to find a way for you to channel your powers and control them.
Joe: Sheesh, your like Izzy from beyblade.
*Speaker sound*
Mulligan: (On speaker) This is principle Mulligan, I would like to see student... Joe... Kiling... Killing... Killingspree?!
Joe: Woah how do you guys know my nickname?
*The principal appears as Joe turns around*
Mulligan: We know all Joe, we even know the results of CoV PVP events.
Joe: Can you tell me the results?
Mulligan: It depends what you're class and level?
Joe: I'm a level 15 dominator.
*Mulligan breaks into a laugh*
Joe: What?
Mulligan: Your only level 15? LOL UR A NOOB!
Joe *Whispering to Melodia*: This is the principal?
Mulligan: I can hear you, I have super sonic hearing. Plus super healing, I can freeze people yatta yatta yatta. So please Joe walk with me, talk with me.
*Joe and Mulligan are walking down the hall*
Mulligan: The academy is in desperate need of students ever since the wordiers have resurfaced.
Joe: The wordiers?
Mulligan: They are evil super powered soldiers that can use words as weapons. They can convert words into super powers to be more precise.
Joe: And there's a whole army of them? Excuse me principal Mulligan---
Mulligan: Please call me Frodo.
Joe: Okay... Principal Frodo... Why is there a whole army of super villains with the same power?
Mulligan: Well you see, the wordiers are an ancient clan of shinobi... er... I mean super villains! SUPER VILLAINS! And there goal is to destroy the academy.
Joe: Well are they the academy's only enemy?
Mulligan: Oh no we have lots of enemies, the Sith, the Symbiotes, and Shinobi.
Joe: Aren't those just things that start with S that you've stolen from other television shows and movies?
Mulligan: Why yes.
Joe: Let me guess, Frodo, you lived a very negative childhood.
Mulligan *Curled up in a ball on the floor*: My mother never loved me...
Joe: Okay...
Mulligan: Well I guess it's time you met your teammates.
Joe: Woah wait teammates?
Mulligan: Yes this academy involves teams going out on missions fighting evil forces.
Joe: That sounds an awful like Naruto.
Mulligan: Well it's not. It's called Shut Uppo! It's stars Samuel L. Jackson as "Who the heck put all these damn onions on my damn burger".
Joe: Dude your seriously need some help.
Mulligan *Curled up on the floor again*: We are fighting dreamers Takami no Mezashite...
Next Chapter: Team-ups and downs
Originally I wanted to have more of a magic plot to this fan-fic, like for example Mulligan was going to be a Centaur, i'm going to change it if i'm going to present it to a network someday. Major changes.

[/ QUOTE ]

At the risk of sounding like a jerk here...

Your formatting is very hard to follow, making reading this entire thing a chore. There are no descriptions in the sample save for a referance to "Rock Lee" from Naruto, which you cannot use without permission. The backstory isn't fleshed out enough for the reader/viewer to get a sense of the surroundings and/or the situations that the characters are in.

You mention a "magic school" ala Harry Potter but gave no visual clues or referances to it prior to the reveal. That strategy can work, though not often in an animated medium, especially a short one.

The sample that you show smacks of character referance and outside referance which would not be "gotten" by a non-nerd audience. This is evident by your mention of both City of Villains, Naruto, and a few other moments...

Basically this...

The sample is a good idea...

A kid who is a Werewolf is sent to an Academy to learn to control his powers.

However your execution is rather poor. You had a character (for example) say: "LOL UR A N00B!"

The problem is there is no way to a non-text audience to get that joke, there is also no way for a non-gamer to get that joke.

The only way we could get it is if the letters/numbers were actually displayed.

I guess my recommendation to you is this:
Go to college, take a few college level english composition and english literature classes. They can help a lot.

No, I am not being insulting. Before I went to college I thought I was a good writer myself, now that I have been through the gambit (prior to my game design degree I was an english major) I can see that I am much better for it.

[ QUOTE ]
Any chance of putting the Defence Buff back into Hasten?

Only thing I am worried about is making flight too fast. Yes, I said it. Do not make flight faster than what it is.

They had a simple concept in the begining with all the movement powers balanced based on speed of movement and the flexibility of the movement.

SS gives you little vert , as it does give you a bonus to your jump height, but gives you a stealth bonus and is great in a mission with tunnels. End cost is little to none.

SJ is a great movement power, but is un-usable in most missions. Has 2 great powers in it (Acrobatics and CJ) and cost little to no end.

TP is the fastest movement power in the game, but has limited short range use. It is also limited in most missions as a form of movement. It does have a high End usage.

Flight is the most useful movement power as it is the most flexible. You can go /anywhere/ with flight. You can use it inside any mission. You can just hit 'r' and walk away and travel a zone. You can attack with it as if you had hover. End cost is moderate to high.

Now people want it even faster? Get serious and think of balance. You make flight faster and you take away the only draw-back to it. Only reason why I think 85% of the game takes TP or SS is for concept or to save power slots after they took Hasten or TP Friend. Now with wings, even more people will be taking flight. I think the Devs need to look at the other movement powers and come up with ways to make them more desirerable to take over flight.

Besides the first question, the rest is my 2 cents.

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Empathik,

Coming from my personal knowledge of game design, your statement is somewhat flawed. Fly is *the* most useless power in the game at current, aside from the PvP aspects. Being the hands down slowest, it also is the only movement power that suffers from a massive ammount of -fly.

Being a tanker, I see that in PvP all the time, people with Speed and Jump run circles around me, normally in and out before I can retaliate. Others can just easily take my flight away as well.

As for Super Jump not being useful in missions, this is a lie. Yes, an outright untruth. I have SJ on a character and SJ is just about as useful as flight is in missions.

(note: Save for tam missions)

Right now the fact is this is the current state of fly:

Unlimited Vert. Movement
Slowest travel speed
2nd Highest Endurance Cost
Highest percentage of powers that can cancel flight


Flight should be faster than Super Jump, In exchange SJ gives access to defensive abilities. SJ is nearly free in endurance cost and gives many of the more practical flight abilities.

Flight speed needs to be increased. Simple as that. Going on a speed chart this is how they *should* be arranged:

Teleport
Super Speed
Flight
Super Jump

lowering the level of the ganker would be nice...

hehehe

Ganker: "Haha! I pwz0rz j00!"
*emote laugh*
*emote dance*

system: "You have attacked a person far outside your level range without provocation. You will now be reduced for one hour to that person's security level minus five. Furthermore your victime who is more powerful than you are now is about to be raised with full health and endurance.... Have a nice day."

Hrm...

I've done the TV trial twice... The first time we got wiped in the reactor... reactor go boom... we all died.

The SECOND time we wiped the floor with the reactor. We were all around I wanna say level 26... So pre-I3 I have no problem thinking that there was an 80% success rate.

The only thing people are forgetting is that each class has a role to fullfill... We didn't lose a single person in the reactor...

I was the Tanker, my job was to jump into spawns first and take the damage with a grin, after that it was to taunt the crap out of whatever my team-mates were attacking...

Scrappers and Blasters
They went SINGLE TARGET ONLY on enemies, and they assissted each other while I stood back and kept most of the attention on me.

Controllers: They controlled things.

Defenders: They healed, debuffed, and buffed

In the reactor it was a free for all, we split into attack teams...

Me and a Scrapper would hit one group, the controller would team with a defender and lock down another,

The other Scrapper and Blaster would tear through whatever was being locked down, our other Defender jumped from attack team to attack team healing

We had a 3rd scrapper who's job was to stand right next to the reactor and constantly heal it...

And I think we had one more Blaster who kind of flitted and picked off stragglers that the Controller had locked down...

We never had much of a problem with the mission...

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I wouldn't try the TV reactor with the current changes if my life depended on it. The Bosses take FOREVER for me to drop now it seems. They do seem like they are tougher than +1 sttaes.

good point, yeah people will always try to circumvent the system. The Sidekick thing is easy. The consequences don't work if the person was sidekicked to your level range in the last 5 minutes... that would be easy to code...

The hard part is you would need to have a veritable army of heroes to keep the criminal scum in jail. What I would do to help some would be to make a special spawn of guards right outside the door to the cell of the guy who you plan to bust out... These guys all can see right through invisible and would be lvl 5 + the level of the prisoner....

The spawn would consist of:
1 +5 Sapper Boss
2 +5 Healer Lts
1 +5 Dark Melee/Regen Scrapper (boss)
1 +5 Mind Controller (specializes in Stuns and Psionic Blasts) (Boss)
1 +5 Lt mob who specializes in things like halting regeneration, and halting endurance regeneration...

Set the room up so that its a small room, with a small L shaped hallway... If you round the corner of the L you are in range of their weaponry... so you can't watch them without reacting. To make things better, they don't move past that hallway nook so they can't be kited out...

Since it would be a TF situation it doesn't matter if they have 20 SG mates because the max you could bring would be 8. Have the mobs set to go after priority targets instead of normal aggro management...

Defender Types ---> Blaster Types ---> Controller Types ---> Scrapper Types ---> Tanker Types

So that Defenders get dropped first, followed by Blasters, then Controllers, Scrappers, and Tankers...

(this means a well balanced team could do it... it would be a nightmare to pull off though)

The other part would be also the wildcard of PC defenders...

Smart Defenders would hang back until that room got hit, then would pince the enemies off in the hallway forcing them to fight both a player group and the guards at the same time.

And if the rescuers fail, well... they go to the Gulag too.

oooh I feel all warm and tingly.

This is a post about PvP content.

Lord Recluse, in order to help stem the tide of the obviously forthcoming gankers that will appear the second PvP is initiated in this game have you guys thought about having REAL consequences for PvP combat?

REAL meaning, something that you REALLY don't want to have occur to you and would be a serious inconveniance? Right now Heroes recieve Debt when we are defeated. Its an annoyance, but not something that matters to a 50, or actually even a lot of people, but it burns the lowbies.

Mostly I am concerned with Lowbie Ganking, and I have an idea to help with that. If you were place a trigger to prevent lowbie ganking set so that if character X attacks unprovoked character Y and character Y is Z or more levels lower than character X then a police drone appears and zaps character X into jail, where character X is stuck for 15 minutes +5 minutes per level differential beyond Z...

so say I am the vile dark mistress Lakari lvl 45
and I see Hero Person, the lvl 15, I fly down and decimate Hero Person in one attack...

the trigger says 10 levels (meaning anyone within 10 levels of you is fine) so 35 is my current cut off point...

this person is level 15...

Which means a drone shows up and zaps me into a jail cell.

now I have 2 choices:

1: Stay there for my entire sentance:
15 minutes + 100 minutes (5 x 20) = 115 minutes, or 1 hr 55 minutes.

2: Have someone in my villain group fly to the Super Villain prison and break me out (kind of like a special Super Group mission thingy).

This would allow all kinds of cool things:

1) Once the mission is accepted by the team (it works like a TF) a zone-wide message in the prison zone could go off saying: "So-and-so Villain Group is planning a jail break"

2) Heroes could rush to defend the prison.

3) your VG can fight their way through to free you, if they lose then they have to finish out your sentance with you!

The same thing can be set up for heroes who gank bad guys! An evil police drone can show up and port the hero to an evil base with the message, "Ha ha! You took my bait and fell into my trap!" and their SG can come and bust them out, in their case its not a sentance but when the timer is up a police drone can port them out of the jail or something with a police captain or some such saying: "Thank god we finally found you!" it would be great!

Rune, if every class could work as well solo as any other class then there would have to be MAJOR and I mean *MAJOR* game changes to help out the specialists.

Because if a controller gets to be as effective solo as I do then I want to be as effective in a group as they are.

What this means is every tanker would need special abilities that are totally group oriented added to them that somehow didn't involve one of the following:

1) Massive AOE Damage (blaster territory)
2) Damage Mitigation through Buffing others (Defenders)
3) Healing (Defender/Controller)
4) Crowd Control (controller)
5) Endurance Regeneration buffs to the team (Defender)
6) Damage Buffs to the Team (Defender)
7) Debuffing (Controller/Defender)

Yeah thats the problem, if a Controller becomes as useful solo as a Tanker or a Scrapper then we have to become as useful teamed and that would DESTROY any semblance of balance this game has.

Tankers and Scrappers are good solo but we don't do jack squat for a team. In fact in order for us to be useful to a team there has to be a defender or a controller or a blaster there already. The same statement is not true of Blasters, Controllers, and Defenders, they don't NEED a tank to help a team, they don't NEED a scrapper to help their team. We DO need them.

Uhm... Relying? I think not.

Listen, do you understand the concept of game balance Concern?

Game balance is not always that every class can perform equally well solo, in groups each class brings something different to tha table.

That would make this game amazingly boring. Every AT can effectively perform when all considerations are taken into account equally means every AT can tank...

Be it through: Damage mitigation, killing the enemy fast, holding it in place so that it cannot attack... But that would mean everyone can do it... so there is never a need for a tank because since solo every AT is equal...

Every AT can deal extreme damage to opponants:
Be it through massive alpha strikes, excellent melee damage, or damage over time...

Would take away the need for scrappers and blasters...

Oh and of course every AT would need some form of self buffing and healing... That would only be fair...

Thats the thing about game balance its a tightrope. You make every class able to perform equally as well solo and suddenly there is no need for "Specialist Classes" why roll a Scrapper when every AT can solo well... I mean a Defender would be better because they also bring buffs and heals to a team after all... why roll a Tanker? All they do is take damage really... I mean a controller can tank as well through sleep and what not and brings something unique to the team...

You see how boring that would be?

Right now the game actually IS pretty well balanced...

Tankers - Our job is to take damage and deal out moderate damage in return. Thats all we do, thats what we bring to a team.

Scrappers - Their job is to deal out heavy damage in melee combat while bringing moderate tanking ability to the battles. Thats all they bring to a team.

----- Those are your primary solo characters, they are able to solo well simply because they have specific functions, they do what they do on or off teams because thats all they can do.

Blasters - A Blaster's role is to bring Extreme Ranged damage to the team. They don't solo as well as Scrappers or Tankers because they have low defense and resistances. Blasters bring massive Alpha Strikes to a team, one of the best uses for a Blaster is to use a huge AOE attack to wipe most of the enemies in a group out and allow the other team mates to handle the stragglers.

Controllers - Controllers are team-junkies, they hold enemies in place to make it easier on everyone else. Defenders have to heal less when controllers are around. Tankers and Scrappers have to take less damage. Blasters can unleash devistating single target damage without having to worry about retaliation. They can solo pretty well if built to do it, but tend to not be as good in teams when configured as such. I personally LOVE having a Controller Around.

Defenders - Decent ranged damage, they are capable of solo'ing if they are configured as an "Offender" (which IMO defeats the purpose of being a defender but thats just me) Defenders bring the following to a group: Moderate ranged damage, normally some type of healing or buffing ability as well. Again, like Controllers they make every AT not have to work as hard as they otherwise would.

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Those are the ATs and thats what they each do. If you want to be a good solo'er don't play an AT that brings good unique skills to a team. As a tanker all I bring to a team is the same thing I have when I solo, the ability to take a lot of damage and hold my own in a fight. Thats about it. Oh and I can taunt.

Level 27 Invuln/Super Strength Tanker

First:
I am not a fan of all the recent changes, I can't stand the ranged problem to Invincibility and my Endurance costs are out of control.

Second:
I did a mission today, Hard Boiled difficulty, Almost every enemy was at least +1, some were lower, some were higher than me, a good smattering. Mission against the Council. Named boss, I don't recall the level, but it was Red Con to me. I smacked it silly, at no time during the battle did I believe I was in any severe danger. I did have to swallow a handful of inspirations, a few CaB's, an Insight, 2 Enrages, and a Respite. The boss went down, and I was able to run out of the room to rest up before I came back and snapped his Lt. in half.

Would I have problem against a non-Council boss? Probably. If it was Psychic I know I'da eaten pavement in a heartbeat. If the thing used toxic damage it would have gotten hairy fast. But he used smashing, which I am either capped on or almost capped on.

(TI w/3 green SO's on Damage Resistance, + 4 green SO's in UYS, + RPD 1 green SO...)

I think bosses are ok, you just have to be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. Though Statesman, a note, I've seen a buncha missions where the contact didn't say anything about bosses but I saw an unnamed boss in a group.

Projection
I dunno about you but I have used startegy numerous times in missions. Sure these were grouped missions but I've used the bottleneck technique...

(Where 1-2 tankers/scrappers stand in a doorway while the other characters stand behind them, these 2 characters create an impassible barrier so that the enemies cannot charge through to reach melee range with the other characters, though they can use ranged attacks this offers further protection to the squishies who can step to the right or left and be out of LOS of enemies...)

I've also seen snipe-pulling...

We've done the "send in the tank to get their attention everyone assist nuke the boss first then stay on a cycle to minimize possible damage..." maneuver

I've seen "Let the tank draw a bunch of them off from the main group so that the rest of us can clear the stragglers..."



And let us not forget all the fun things you can do with teleport foe..

Just because nobody has done it yet...

Jingle bells Batman smells Robin layed an egg the Batmobile lost a wheel and Joker got away...

The Riddler qued, and Penguin spewed in TwoFace's cup, Catwoman used a litter box and Alfred cleaned it up...

I'm sure that you will be more than happy to braid his... er... her... its... hair.