JKPhage

Honestly I don't see why people are getting so bent out of shape over the fact that we don't have alot of information yet. Yeah it may have been to get the hype up, but at the same time all they did was say "Hey guys, we're doing a new expansion that'll let you change sides, it'll be coming later this year." They don't want to inundate us with all the information just yet when it will probably be a few months until this comes out. If they just dropped the whole kit n' kaboddle right now it'd drive people crazy waiting for specific features.

As is I'm already chomping at the bit for side-changing. I've made three toons specifically with the intent to change sides with them just so I'd have them ready. We've had hints that we'll have power customization and probably an overhauled costume editor but we don't know for sure nor do we have any details, and I'm alright with that. We also know there will be a new world to explore in Praetoria but don't know what to expect there as yet. That's some pretty big stuff in it's own right. If they were to release all the other info right now when it's still a while before the expansion then it'd simply suffer criticism.

Example: Let's say they give us all the info on the game and details on how the systems work. The description sounds somewhat sketchy and we have no hands-on experience in the game to confirm how it really works. People will start griping and complaining and whining about how they're RUINING the game and how they going to LEAVE THE GAME because they're so upset over it, people storm off in a hissy fit and then when the expansion comes out it's nothing like what the whiner's predicted and is actually fantastic. Guess what? They just lost subscribers and everyone else who stuck around had to listen to all the complaining until they packed up and left.

That's just one possible scenario. Frankly, I think they made a smart move. We've got plenty of info to keep my interest piqued and if they drop us a tidbit here or there I'll gladly take it and look forward to the expansion even more. I'm excited it's coming, that's enough for me. I'd hate to think how you people react to teaser trailers in the theatre.

/em rolleyes

Rial, it's not false advertisement. False advertising would have been if they said City of Villains would do something like give us fifty new AT's and allow you to use copywritten names and then when you bought it there was nothing like what was advertised. They told us we had to buy COV to play it even if we owned COH and we did. We got exactly what it said on the box. When it first came out that was how the system worked and it was planned to stay that way. A few years later that changed and they decided to be nice to the players and give us both for anyone that owned one. I bought both and I don't give a flying frog about it. Get over it.

If you're so upset about it go make a thread somewhere else. You're derailing the topic again.

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How is this going to work? Will we have Masterminds in Paragon?

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Exactly. Read the press release on it on the news page and it'll tell you everything that we know so far.

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Hello, I beta tested COV but have not tried any of the expansions before. I did not create a second copy of COH. before I started the test proceedings...I, know, have to d/l a new copy of COH to play the normal game...correct?

Cenobyte

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Completely wrong place. You want to try technical issues forum or player questions. I'd try to help myself but to be totally honest I have no idea what you're asking. Your phrasing throws me off. o.O

And back to the topic at hand:

Everyone who says Dual Pistol Scrapper makes me want to scream. Scrapper is melee, guns are ranged. Dual Pistols will be a ranged set barring the possibility of a pistol whip move in a connected secondary. Also, there is no "possibility" of it, we ARE getting Pistols and Demon Summoning, Posi said so himself during interviews on the Anniversary.

And since nobody can be totally precognitive I'll just put this out there: If for some reason we DO get a melee Dual Pistols set... then the devs are complete morons as it makes no sense, player request be damned.

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Love all three designs!

I did have one question about the winning design, though. Text is 'Which AT are you?' Images are (I believe): Manticore, SisterPsyche, Positron, War Witch and Back Alley Brawler.

Sister is a Controller, War Witch is (was) a Scrapper, and Babs is a Tanker.

But aren't both Manti (TA/Archery) and Posi (Rad/Rad) Defenders? Why no Blaster? *sniff*

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War Witch was a Fire/Ice blaster. At least that's what I've been led to believe. I also second the blaster love. Freem for all.

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Praetoria will be the catalyst for side-switching but once you've become villainous you can't just hop dimensions and go "Weee! I'm good again!" Doesn't work logically, technically or at all with the narrative.

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I agree with the first part of your post but this is not true. Redname already said you could switch back and forth.

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Read more carefully. I know you can switch back and forth. However, hopping across a dimensional barrier does NOT automatically make you a good guy. If you go to Praetoria and start kicking puppies and pushing old ladies into traffic you can't just waltz back to another dimension and go "Oh hey, I'm a good guy." It doesn't make sense at all. NOBODY would believe you story-wise, and gameplay-wise it would just be ridiculous. You're one or the other, not one when you're in one dimension and another when you're not. Yeah there's the possibility of a gray area alignment that would sit somewhere in the middle but that would logically just mean that you stick to one side or the other but you tend to lean towards the other. Anyway, like I said, I'm done. Just wanted to clarify what was mis-interpreted.

Okay, final two cents on why the people who think you're going to become the opposite alignment in Praetoria only are wrong in my opinion:

Tyrant is referred to as Emperor Cole, and it's implied as far as I understand that he rules the entire world. Stefan Richter is dead, Tyrant killed him, there should be no Arachnos equivalent to my understanding, and with the kind of power he has under his thumb with all the Freedom Phalanx and Vindicators evil equivalents at his beckon call I doubt that what heroes there are would be able to form any kind of a solid foothold against him. Hence, there is no Praetorian Paragon or Praetorian Rogue Isles, it's just Praetoria and it's completely ruled by Tyrant. Praetoria will be the catalyst for side-switching but once you've become villainous you can't just hop dimensions and go "Weee! I'm good again!" Doesn't work logically, technically or at all with the narrative.

I've said all I can say really, so I'm not gonna argue the point anymore, I'm just waiting to be able to say "I told you so."

I think all this talk that the side-switching is only going to be in Praetoria is ridiculous. If that was going to be the case then they wouldn't have said Paragon City and The Rogue Isles. They're no doubt called something different in Praetoria, plus with side-switching as the big hook of this expansion it's a little paranoid and "tinfoil hat" to assume that it's not going to take place in the prime world.

See, that's the attitude we should be seeing really. They went really big with the trailer and they announced a very big new feature, so obviously they're putting alot of work into it. When was the last time we got a CG trailer? The Korean release if I remember correctly. It's big stuff coming up so why not just be excited and ponder about how all this is going to work into the game instead of everyone flinging threats of leaving if such-and-such isn't implemented. We're here to have fun, so why not try it people?

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everyday that passes makes me feel like we're going to end up paying 50 bucks for two powersets and one zone...

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Then you're not too intelligent. The devs know better than to pull something like that, and they've already stated that it's a full expansion. They've only just dropped us the hook and they're waiting a little to reel us in with the rest of it. If you take things at face value from the info in a simple "Hey this is on the way but we're not gonna tell you any big details just yet" press release then you must be an awfully pesimistic person.

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Everyone allways complains about END on Scrappers and Brutes but I've never had that issue. The reason being toggles are what drains your end and I allways skip over them unless I'm a Tanker.

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Problem solved right there. No toggles = You WILL get owned. No questions.

Also, please learn to use spellcheck. I've seen too many long winded posts with painful mispellings repeated over and over for me to just keep quiet. Sorry if this makes me a jerk, but nobody else was gonna say it and I just can't take it anymore.

And now, if people are done comparing AT's to one another can we get back to Going Rogue? If you wanna make "Match the AT's" thread then go do it. You're derailing the topic.

I'll admit I've not read over all of this thread but I just wanna throw in my two cents worth.

I'd LOVE actual water to add to bases, having a little fountain/pool would be fantastic for alot fo bases, and for those who do nature-inspired rooms, being able to add water selectively for a little brook or river would be amazing.

I'm also seconding the option of adding windows that look out at different things. All it would take is a simple animation and we'd be thrilled. A space pattern that is slowly moving as if the base is rotating, or an underseascape with fish that slowly float past the window.

I'd also enjoy some customizable objects for bases ala plaques that you can enter your own text on, but much simple I'd also like a few color options on objects. For example, say you want to use a couch, but the green just doesn't do it for you, give us a few color options of black, red, blue, green, white, etc. Doesn't have to be seperate items, just click on the item and select color from a pop-out, or place the item and right click on it to select color.

Aaaand my last real wish as far as bases: More wall/floor/ceiling themes. I have a toon red-side that is more or less a ruthless CEO with a bit too much pilfered company technology and alot of street cred, and I'd love to give her base an office building look, or even just a luxurious apartment, but I don't have anything even remotely close to that and it makes me sad. A simple option for tintable carpet, a simple stucco wall (or just SOMETHING that looks residential as opposed to industrial) and perhaps an option for a balcony sliding glass door that you can't open, but you can see out to, i.e. two glass doors with a patio outside overlooking Paragon/The Rogue Isles with a little table and chair. Nothing really functional, but that simple detail would add so much to smaller bases and ones intended for personal use.

Who knows, with going rogue we may be getting a huge chunk of base love, or even personal apartments/bases of some sort. Time will tell, and I'll keep hoping.

Honestly, I think everyone threatening to leave is really jumping the gun. We're about to get the first true expansion in a few YEARS and the tidbit they give us is side-switching with implication of two long-desired powersets and the promise of a new world to explore. And this is just what they've told us so far. We all know that there will be more than just that, but just think for a second. This is just the first announcement to stir things up and get people talking, what all else do they have in store? They could have a veritable truck-load of very impressive content and features that they aren't disclosing just yet so they have something to keep us interested until it comes out. Who knows, next month they may drop us a few more morsels. "Oh hey, power customization is coming!" or "We finally gave you that moonbase!" or hell, maybe they'll even confirm/deny what that "survey" talked about as truth, meaning we'd get the 10 universal enhancement slots to raise our toons to a virtual level 60, and we'd have to work for those slots it seems based on what the survey said. And this is just what they talked about in the survey. They could have quite a bit more planned for going Rogue.

They just rebranded as Paragon Studios to show their devotion the COX, I'd say the switch over to NCSoft as the sole developer has been nothing but good, and it just seems like it'll keep getting better. Even if Going Rogue has all this new content and doesn't give you that one little thing you wanted, give it just a bit more time, you never know if it might be coming in an update shortly after. Remember COV? It dropped with all it's content and then if I remember correctly the next issue introduced the invention system, though I could be wrong as it's been a while and my details are fuzzy. They might drop Going Rogue with all this new stuff and then next issue we might get something else that people left over in a huff because "Well HUMPH! I want such and such NOW. I'm LEAVING!" Just calm down folks, and stop threatening to storm off immediately if Going Rogue doesn't raise the level cap. Enjoy the new content when it appears and give it time for the next issue or so to drop, you might get a pleasant surprise.

For those of us who follow Paragon wiki and were reading up on news during the anniversary event this was already known. Positron was doing a meet-and-greet apparently on the European servers and when asked if there were any nifty powersets upcoming he responded with Dual Pistols and Demon Summoning, then about five minutes later someone asked a similar question and he pointed them to that same response. Short of it, it WILL be dual pistols and yes we'll get to used them. I can't wait to get ahold of this set.

It's on the front page of the website dude. Third news story by now. It was at the top for like two days.

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What if Going Rogue is more like that; A new world, new dimension, whatever ... where you build a new toon and gain something other than influence or infamy ... and then choose your path. What if there is no red or blue door to go through to get to the other side? What if like in CoX, there are just new zones where you can use your new Rogue toons with Heroes and Villians?

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Existing characters will be able to side switch. That's the whole point of the expansion. If they were just going to add a 3rd side without allowing any crossovers, then crossing over would not be the entire focus of the hype.

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You're probably right, of course. But has any of the Dev postings made this specifically clear? Or am I right in noticing that there have been very few details given from official sources ... which makes everything we're saying speculation and little more?

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Did you not read the press release at all? It SPECIFICALLY states that Villains can change sides and go to Paragon City and Heroes can fall and go to the Rogue Isles. It's plain as day in black and white.

I swear it's like people are just looking at the title of the expansion and then posting based on that without reading a thing.

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Being able to lock your compass makes alignment-effecting missions meaningless.

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And your point? If it's going to take as much time as people seem to think it will to switch a character over and I go to that trouble then I want to keep that alignment until I darn well feel like going back, if ever. If I redeem a villain and I like playing him blue-side, but a bunch of my buddies are running mishes in Praetoria that might fall into that red area of the spectrum, I'd still like to be able to run mishes with them without endangering my characters alignment, same if I wanna keep my Hero blue-side and keep him a pure blue-sider, doesn't mean I might not wanna team with buddies on some missions that could jeopardize that.

I think it's only fair to offer the option really. That way any player can experience the new content without having to do anything they don't want to. Given, there should be some cases where locking the compass doesn't apply, say if you're running an arc whose plot SPECIFICALLY centers on your characters redemption/fall from grace, though in such cases you're likely aware of that fact and undertook it with the intention of changing sides. I just know that it would make sense to have a Hero who's very rigid about justice to be able to say "Nope, no matter what happens I'll keep fighting for justice." Even if he happens to encounter situations that might call for him to do less than respectable things. Kinda like Manticore, he walks the line so much it's ridiculous, but he's a Hero still and even when he takes the hard line and does the less than glamourous jobs, he's still a good heart under it all.

Either way, I'm just saying that I think it's something they should include for those of us who want to preserve the work we did redeeming our villains and making our heroes fall for those of us interested, and as a way for those players who aren't interested at all in side-switching to avoid having to mess with it at all.

Just a thought that's popped into my head while reading over the speculation about teams breaking up due to mission alignment/not wanting to fall/be redeemed or go back:

Will there possibly be a way to lock the moral compass ala locking experience so that you can, for example, take a villain to praetoria (or start them there if it's an option), and first priority shift the compass all the way to hero so he's aligned to blue-side, then lock the compass so that you CAN'T fall again? I'd much like that. It would allow friends to run missions together in Praetoria that might be of other alignments without endangering the alignment that you prefer, and it would still fall within reasonable explanation territory, after all, they DID say that Praetoria is supposed to explore the gray areas.

I'm also thinking that MA arcs as well as Co-op zones will offer a way to shift the compass, if not all the way over as far as MA is concerned. They list missions as Heroic and Villainous. Say you start a hero and play a bunch of villainous MA arcs, it'll take you to like... 40% maximum but no further (unless they work in some way for you to cross-over mid-mission and have you zone out in an equivalent red-side zone, but that could be awkward and if you changed sooner than expected could cause problems with loose ends and whatnot), but if you go to Cimerora and team with a bunch of villains to run Sister Airlia's arc a few times (given you'd have to drop and start over every time they had to leave Cimerora, but still, for sake of argument), it will eventually shift you all the way to red-side, or at least far enough to cross over, and then when you leave Cimerora you'll zone into the Rogue Isles instead of Paragon. If things like this are going to be the case then I really would appreciate the option to lock my compass as-is because some of my characters I'd rather never take other-side, and a few that I'd like to do so with, I'd like to keep that way.

I mentioned this a few pages earlier, but hearing other input it kinda nudged my thinking in the direction that your epic/patron power pools available will depend what alignment you are when you hit 41/respec. If you're a Dominator with a patron power pool, you switch to hero side and find you're not doing so hot, decide to respec, and find yourself with the choice of a few ancillaries tailored to your AT waiting for you at level 41. By the same token, you start a Scrapper in Praetoria, shift the compass to red-side, and go purely villain all the way up to level 40, and your told to go pick a patron and get some spiffy new powers that are re-balanced for your AT instead of the closest analog from red-side.

Now the real question everyone seems to be asking is whether you'll be forced to change these powers when you switch sides but I can't imagine them doing that, nor it making much sense story-wise. In the case of villains being redeemed I can possibly see the rest of Paragon telling them "Dude, you've gotta quit flashing that Arachnos mace around/summoning the souls of your murder victims, it's creeping people out." but at the same time, they started out in a dark place so their powers are going to mirror that. For heroes... it just doesn't make sense. They've already got an epic. If they wanna make them take a patron to prove their new alleigance then yeah, but I can't imagine "You've gotta drop that pansy epic power pool and get one of our HARDCORE BADASS ONES." I mean really?

As far as I can forsee, you get the pools from whatever alignment you happen to be when you ding 40. If you switch sides and respec, you get the others which could be played into the story as having a deep-seated soul searching and shucking off the dark powers from a patron pool and discovering a new power inside of yourself, or as learning a new gift from your patron that, to use, requires you to do something that suppresses your other powers.

As someone pointed out though, dual builds happened. A redeemed/fallen character could take themselves other-side and swap to build 2, respec into an epic power pool, then switch over to build 1 again if they felt like having a good, old-fashioned patron power pool. I can also see people using this to swap sides, respec a second build into an epic/patron pool, and then switching back so they'd have a traditional hero/villain to play with and a new epic to switch to if the situation called for it, or they just felt like shaking things up. Either way, it sounds like fun to me, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it's handled. I've always been a little eh at being forced to choose the same four themed power sets for villain epics that may or may not suit your character theme. How many villains out there REALLY make sense summoning ghost sharks? Fire/Fire dom with some fire shield toggles or power of the phoenix? Yes please.

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Seems like a bit of a cop out as far as side switching goes.

You can be a "villain" in the Praetorian universe (basically being a good guy in a planet where evil is the dominant norm is considered being "evil" there) or a "good guy" ala follow Tyrant...

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Ummm... did you not read all the info provided? It states very plainly that Heroes can become villains and visit the Rogue Isles and vice versa. Praetoria is just being used as a convenient plot tool to drive the moral issue forward. Given, I don't mind this one bit as I'd love to take a hero or two of mine to the dark side and have them work under Tyrant if he gets his own task/strike force (pretty likely I'd imagine).

Now that I think on it I'm very curious to see how they handle (if they do at all) the counterparts to the villains in Praetoria. A do-gooder Lord Recluse? A benevolent Ghost Widow? I would ADORE being able to do some missions for a Scirocco that didn't go all dark side too. That'll probably open up some nifty new possibilities. There's all kinds of awesome stuff possible here and I can't wait for it to hit. Considering it's going to be a new box that means we can expect LOADS of new content and with a whole new world becoming available there will probably be heaps of new zones to explore and have fun with. I don't see how people are complaining already other than for lack of info, though what little we have right now is surely sweet enough to appease most?

See, I'm stoked about everything here. I've always said I'd hold off making a real personal avatar character until I could have a mind/psi dom as a hero, and now I'll be able to. Score one. Power customization (possibly)? Two. Praetorian villains being one of my favorite things in the game, I've always wanted to be able to go to Praetoria and see what it's like, even align with some of the characters. We can. That's three.

And the other possibilities are really awesome as well. The graphical upgrade is gonna be needed to keep up with the newer super MMO's out there so I'm all for it, plus let's face it. We all like looking at pretty things. Dual Pistols and Demon Summoning are awesome sounding sets and I'm looking forward to trying them both. I just can't wait to see how this affects all we take for granted now, like the bases and teleporters and all that fun stuff.

My one real question more than anything is how this is going to affect ancillary/patron power pools. If a Brute goes blue-side at level 20 it wouldn't make much sense for them to get powers by aligning themselves with an Arachnos patron, so will they get a set of powers similar to Tanks to choose from at level 41? Or will they just hav the four patron power pools to pick from sans patron arc? Same with heroes going red-side. Will they still get the standard epic power pools or will they be forced to run a patron arc and pick from a newly tailored set of patron pools? And when switching back after the fact will we be able to change from a patron power pool to a standard epic pool or vice versa? That more than anything has me really curious because if characters gain access to new epic powers it opens up a whole world of new possible end-game play options and fun customization. Looking forward to seeing how they handle that.