Iannis

I find it amazing both DCUO and Rift are suddenly bringing back personal player housing.

The slew of WoW-clone MMOs never had it because Blizzard's devs were too lazy to bother with homes, despite them becoming a fairly standard staple of pre-WoW MMOs; DAoC, SW:G and EQ2 all had them.

I for one am pleased to see them returning. BUT I don't expect much from DCUO's--it's still a cross-platform game so a lot of stuff has to be gimped because of the ps3's limitations.

DCUO's devs are also supposed to have like 3 other DLCs in the works right now, too. Since thats how they make their money it makes sense.

I've become convinced Brainiac is, in fact, Lord Nemesis. Brainiac is behind EVERYTHING in DCUO.

DCUO's chat still pretty much sucks and the community is super duper hit-and-miss. There's some cool people and then some absolute creeps. I mean downright "uuuuuuuh are you an online predator" kind of creep.

City of Heroes was the little MMO that could.

First Jack tried to kill CoH to eliminate the competition for his next (far, far crummier) MMO, Champions Online. Remember how Cryptic went completely silent for like an entire year after CoV's launch?

Then NCSoft just goes out to kill CoH because they want more resources to their generic soulless korean pvp grinders. If Nexon gets involved, their pay2win generic soulless korean pvp grinders.

If they want to focus on those then more power to 'em. I'm supporting SOE (the horror) because DCUO > CO. And that Marvel MMO sure doesn't look all that good--I can already imagine the broadcasts. "glf Wolverine dps pst!" "group looking for Hulk to tank Magneto NO NO IRON MAN TANKS MAGNETO PWNS IRON MAN U NUBS HIS SUIT IS MADE OF METAL!"

I jus wanna make my own heroes--not play preexisting IPs. Working next to the big boys was the way to do it. Save "you are the big boy" for the single player games.

They probably just should've let Incarnate XP accrue and drops drop (or a currency type to let you do rolls/purchases) off any level when in Task Forces and Trials. Grinding BAF and LAM was meeeh. It's like it wasn't even hard; just tedious. But you had to do them or nothing. I know they had like 2 or 3 other trials, but no one ran them because they were longer. Or more difficult. Or something.

Basically I'd just mash CoX together with DCUO to make a CoX2. And it would be PC exclusive.

CoX's community was a thousand times better than DCUO's (no horny BRs trying to cyber you in broken english for one thing...man, what is up wiith that in DCUO? you'll get some of this totally unsolicitted junk when you're in an alert or raid and it's like...ugh, /ignore. I never once had those sort of tells in CoX)

CoX's interface was a thousand times better than that bad consolized for PS3 one DCUO uses. I for one like being able to use my mouse to point and click on a target.

CoX's costume creator will remain the king of costume creators. Too bad they never released a stand-alone version of it.

But DCUO combat is sleeker, quicker and more arcade game-like--and while CoH was a VERY fast-paced MMO back when it launched as time went on it turned into one of the slower playing MMOs (just remember how CoH was a pre-WoW MMO and it was SUPER fast paced compared to the competiton of that era, both in fights and in travel)

DCUO had those little travel power race minigames, which CoX only had in a rudimentary form when the Ski Chalet was unlocked and the ski slope was open.

but at least one of those DCUO devs needs beaten with a sack of potatoes and reminded that stupidly overpowered boss fights are incredibly aggravating at how you just spent all that time slogging through a whole map only to discover you can't beat the end-boss and the group falls apart...it reminds me of the feeling you got slogging through a Dr. Q only to have the team leader DC and the star devolve onto that one guy that would always end up going AFK and never come back and then the TF was wasted. Man, I hate Brother Eye, is what I'm saying.

From my understanding Marvel wants to make an MMO where you're forced to play as their IP characters instead of making your own, which utterly kills any potential interest I'd have in a Marvel-setting super MMO.

Playing City of Wolverines and Iron Men would be super lame--wolfereen DPS + Dr. Strange Healz0r looking for Colossus tank!!1eleventy. And the Spider-Man clones...the horror

I d/l'd DCUO and am playing that for the first time since the beta. Ooough, grinding solos and duos for currency tokens to buy iconic powerarmor suits since the community doesn't want to float n00bs with weak combat rating...blurgh. It makes me miss having a whole ton of varied costume and appearance options...and a chat interface that doesn't suck...

Champions was CoH 0.5--it was like a downgrade from CoX.

lol, I'm most worried NCSoft would decide to re-boot the IP (I think CoH needed CoH2 more than CoX:Freedom to try to attract a larger playerbase), but end up handing it over to Korean devs that turn CoH into a generic korean pay2win PvP grinder.

Between shutting down CoX and the GW2 permabanning players in the opening week NCSoft has earned a lot of bad will this week. They lost a Guild Wars 2 box purchase from me over this stuff; at least, for the time being, if I see if in the bargain bin beside EA's TORtanic I'll laugh and maybe give it a try.

I haven't played DCUO since it first came out so I suppose I'll see how much that game has changed in the 17 updates since then. Champions was an awful game, if the Cryptic rumor has any truth to it then Jack's hopes I would go play that as a CoX replacement were misguided.

Champions Online was and is beyond awful, and if I was going to play another superhero game I would switch to DCUO.

It's most likely that the fact is NCSoft has been losing money from their Korean games like Aion (all of them except for Lineage, which is their cash cow even though nobody outside Korea plays it) and with the much-vaunted Guild Wars 2 finally launching they decided to also kill off CoX to try to make their accounting books look good.

I had been playing with an AR/Dev character in anticipation of the upcoming blaster changes.

It looks like CoX goes out on a somewhat bookended way, since I recall the most fun sound EVER in CoX was listening to the BOOM of the AR buckshot power back when the game was shiny and new in beta and then being driven insane by the sound of targeting drone and devices getting nerfed into being the worst secondary...the game really did die before /Devices ever got fixed.

NCSoft is a Korean publisher; of course they aren't going to kill off their tepid korean-developed games even if all signs point to Aion and whatever other rehashed generic grinders they have in development being the significant money drains.

It's like Sqeenix not being able to wrap their heads around Deus Ex being more popular than whatever terribad game they decide to slap the Final Fantasy name on. Or EA trying to force every single game they publish into being a Call of Duty clone despite consistently losing money on mindlessly pursuing some illusory audience.

Wow, that was abrupt. I was under the impression Guild Wars franchise alone earns enough profit to run all of NCSoft's games (players claiming bandwidth and maintenance is really expensive were just repeating an old, outdated meme from the early days of MMORPGs), and especially an old one like CoX that has to have paid off the development cost ages ago.

NCSoft must want to shove all their money and hardware off onto Guild Wars 2.

I chuckled at Posi. Defenders must've been the very first archetype imagined? Or in the original alpha vision of the game (when the power selection was going to be more CO than CoH) there would have been that mechanic in place to prevent you from being too stupidly overpowered...

I guess the original dev really, really didn't like Clerics. Of course it's a perfectly valid criticism when a stupid cleric can self-buff themselves into being a better warrior than warriors--the D^D class which you only ever invested a maximum of say 4 levels in to in order to get a larger pool of HPs and then immediately Dual Classed into a class that DIDN'T SUCK if your campaign was higher than level 5.

and Kheldians are an AT that's simply too busy for most people to want to play. Warshades can be very very awesome when played hard but you're constantly hammering away on all your keybinds/macros to keep up that level of play.

VIPs have to shell out some of their stipend to buy 3/4 of the new powersets that aren't free VIP access, but the VIPs still get free access to the new signature story arcs , new zone story arcs (as a Premium atm I can jump around and admire how pretty the new zones are but that's it until I purchase the zone content off the store), turn Reward Merits into Attuned Enhancements and of course the Incarnate System which you have to be a subscriber to access.

Oh, and you're not locked outta character slots. Luckily I was a decently long-term veteran so I had a nice stack of them I could apply.

I think the Warriors could use a few amazoness females added in. Quarterstaves and bow users!

And give the bosses Roman helmets. Keep the street clothes, but wear Roman helmets! (I was always more under the assumption they ADMIRED ancient greeks and romans, but didn't believe they actually WERE those ancient greeks and romans...)

I could see the case made for juggling the level ranges so Outcasts are the bigger threat, but Talos Island and Warriors were made for each other.

Yeah, running it on min team size is also a speed trick since that seriously cuts down on the spawn sizes but most people that aren't speedgrinding for merits usually try to max fill the group.

I laughed at the unload Shivans idea. I'll try to remember to shake all the goo out of an asteroid fragment the the next time I run a Synapse.

That Pocket D hair looks hilarious on the Skulls.

I'M A NIHILISTIC DRUG DEALER WORKING THE ROW PEDDLING THE FAMILY'S JUNK, BUT I MAKE SURE TO TAKE THE TIME TO MAKE SURE MY HAIR LOOKS SMEXY AROUND ALL THESE NEW LADYSKULL MEMBERS

Hopkins has always been a big wimpy sack of meat in any era of the game. Hopkins seriously needs some back-up.

I think the original dev thinking was it was more 'epic' for your hero to face off against Countess Crey as the culmination of the Crey story arcs and you finally forced the manipulative psychic mastermind into a corner where she has to PERSONALLY face you instead of throwing wave after wave of Crey employees and Paragon Protectors at you (you already slugged you way THROUGH all of her waves of minions, lts and bosses)

Sounds like Praetoria was just designed in a way that totally stupidly didn't think about how non-functional it would be with Ouroborous.

Also, after trying it to muck through one of those all-contacts route guides to go through Praetoria without "missing anything" I realized any Praetorian character that went that route is even more of a schizo lunatic than Malaise is. Or maybe you just have multiple personality disorder where you're a destructive sociopath on some days and a caring human being on other days.

Does anyone besides already Res-based meatshields even turn Tough on?

Considering how BIG the +Res seems to be in those new IO set bonuses I doubt that you'd even need to turn Tough on if you bother to slot your meatshield to resistance cap. Maybe Tough should get boosted with a +5% to damage bonus like a personal Assault, or something. Thematically it could fit into a pool named "Fighting".

Ha, I'd trade Mercenaries in for a squad of Power Armors.

Minions with gatling guns, Boss with a high-powered Plasma Cannon/beam rifle with Lts designed around being the squad's melee protectors--maybe one with a vanguard energy broadsword and the other a vanguard energy katana just so they can look different. The player can whip out a gatling gun and do their own bursts, too.

Maybe give the set an Absorb Bunker Beacon as their bell and whistle power (ynkow, like Gang War or Smoke Flash or lolSerum). Or just let the pet Overheat--+damage in exchange self-damage ticks.

Draw some inspiration for their designs off the Brotherhood of Steel/Spees Murines/EYE Divine Cybermancy

Moonfire is a TF that you could almost see being designed for the sole purpose of helping mid-20s teams power through the Slayer and the Silver Bullet defeat badges for the Atlas Medallion.