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Quote:My rationale is thus:Because this is Johnny's scenario that he made up and it can go down however he wants it to. What with the Well being all "insane" and all, you can't even argue that it's out of character for it to drop Cole like a dirty shirt when the DE are trashing Nova Praetoria and he's running around going "ack, they're throwing bees at me! Get em off get em off get em off!" and we're pointing and laughing from some other dimension we conquered.
The load screen tip says that the Well doesn't care about morality. It responds only to power.
The way I see it, basically the Well rewards chutzpah and people who get stuff done and it really rewards those who use that power to go out and get more power.
The Well chose Tyrant as its champion because he went out and successfully took over the world. He basically cornered the market on power for his Earth. He 'won', so the Well took notice and boosted him in his big battle against Hami. Now, he's going after more power by taking over another Earth, and the Well is all 'oh yeah, that's how I like it'.
There's a lot of people who've tried to do the same. Recluse, for example, has been trying to take over the world for a long time, but he's never been able to make it happen. He also turned his back on the Well, so that didn't score him any points.
Statesman never sought out more power, as far as he says, so he's below the Well's notice as far as that goes.
So, to recap, for the Well to take notice:
-You have to have the ability gain power on a grand scale. Kind of a 'have money to make money' kind of situation.
-You have to be willing to accept more power from the Well; you have to play the Well's game. Recluse others weren't willing to.
Also, the Well is fickle. The whole point to Trials is that you're eroding Tyrant's power base and the Well is granting you more power as you do it. I presume it will keep backing him until you prove you're his better, likely by taking him down in the 'last' Trial.
But, I also presume that if you were to wipe out everyone in Praetoria, Tyrant would then be 'Emperor of Nothing', the Well would find him wanting for failing to secure his power and would drop him like a bad habit.
That's how I see it, anyways.
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Quote:What's one world out of a presumably infinite number? Yeah, Praetoria has been nothing but trouble, and it's infested with Hamidon. For sure I'd open the gates to the DE to finish off Cole's followers (thus putting him out of the Well's favor).If my villain blew up the reactor how should she take over.
Why limit conquest to one world?
Then I'd come back to it after I roll over 'Easily-conquered-advanced-scientists-with-no-concept-of-violence-Earth' and have a couple of star destroyers to clear out the DE.
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My villains are cool with that.
They're all for punching a hole in the Sonic Barrier and then destroying the Praetorian portal to Primal Earth, no matter what Papa Smurf says. Blowing up the Keyes reactors would do just that.
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Quote:Oh shush.Again, I want to stress how wrong I find it to have auras nerfed with Interface. Psuedo pets/rains/caltrops nerf make sense, auras do not.
Power sets like Regeneration, Shield Defense, Super Reflexes, Willpower and Invulnerability get screwed on Interface as a matter of course. If anything, this bug/nerf fixes a considerable disparity.
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SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY
It's got nothing to do with being a 'good guy' or a 'bad guy'. The whole of the Responsibility tract is about doing horrible things in the name of 'the greater good' of Praetoria and preserving the Empire.
Motivations for doing so vary from person to person as the various arcs demonstrate.
Quote:He might not be as outright villainous as some of the Praetors, but he's just as self-centered. For example,
(RESPONSIBILITY ARC SPOILERS)
in the climax of his arc, he finds out that an attack is planned on one of his reactors. The very first thing he thinks of is "will the other reactors be okay?" He assures you they will, then mentions that if one of them explodes it'll take out half of Praetoria. He's not even concerned about all the people that would kill.
He's also thinking in terms of 'acceptable losses'. 50% of Praetoria in the scenario that your character fails is better than 100%.
Also consider that in Keyes own mind, his 'greatness' is being kept from helping Praetoria as much as it could be. Him not being a Praetor and being kept busy with a lot of side projects while Berry runs wild is damaging to the Empire.
He's in a Catch 22. Would he hurt the Empire to help it more? Maybe. But he won't take a hit to his own ego. The whole point of his arc finale was that he defied orders given to let Arachnos to destroy his creation. I still don't think he'd risk his baby by letting Berry fail publicly if he thought there was any possibility that the Primals could succeed.
Protecting Praetoria is his ticket back to Praetorship. The question is, has he lost sight of that goal in redoubling his efforts to discredit Berry? That would be his shift to the Power tract.
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Quote:That seems like a very 'Power Loyalist' thing to do when Anti-Matter is the poster boy for the Responsibility tract. I don't think Keyes should be pulling a stunt like that. He's suffered Neuron for so long, but he doesn't jeopardize Praetoria for the sake of his own ego.I'm wondering if our attack on the reactors might be set up my Anti-matter in such a way as to draw Neuron into the fight to try and discredit him in some way.
Like Anti-matter could have deliberate weak security to lure us in to an attack, with the intention to bait Neuron into coming over to fight too, as he'd would know Neuron would want another chance to show up Anti-matter's incompetence - but then Anti-matter would sabotage Neuron's efforts to defeat us, and then turn up himself to save the day and discredit Neuron's ability to protect Neutropolis.
To impress Dominatrix however...
Still, I'd like Anti-Matter to get tossed a bone on this one. I'd like to see Neuron fail spectacularly only through fault of his own and see Keyes get some measure of praise for keeping the Sonic Barrier up (even though we know it was never the Primals' intent in the trials to take 100% of the power generation offline).
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I started my first character in Galaxy because I had heard it was quieter. I did some street sweeping, and around level 3 I decided I wanted a peak at another zone just to see what the world was like. So I went through the gate to Kings Row.
Immediately to the right, coming up the little hill was Paladin in all his giant purple glory.
'OK. Going back to the starter zone now.'
-When I first started slotting, I assumed you could only have one enhancement of a given type in a power. 1 accuracy, 1 damage, 1 recharge, etc.
-I spent an hour on a roof in Kings row watching the Clockwork 'build' a Prince because someone in Broadcast said that the Clockwork 'build' Paladin; I thought it was part of his foot or something. Then a Blaster came along and Fire Balled the whole group.
-Creating various character concepts only to find out the game already had NPCs that were essentially the same.
-Looking for landmarks and locations from the CoH Novels and Comics that just weren't in game.
-Avoiding cars and traffic because I thought it would do damage.
-Getting utterly lost in the sewers but having out-leveled the enemies and having to re-roll to escape.
-Looking up to anyone who was a Kheld because they must know what they're talking about if they had a 50.
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Quote:This because the faces lack the quality of subsurface scattering.This is the primary reason they stand out in the editor like a sore thumb. You're flipping through all the old faces, seeing a fairly smooth gradient shading and then BOOM! You get these pale faces with thick, dense black shading and that oily skin. Yikes!
http://www.mrbluesummers.com/3510/3d...tering-guide/2
When light shines on skin, most is reflected but some of it penetrates. The light takes on a red-ish hue due to the tissues underneath. If you've ever seen someone backlit by the sun and their ears 'glow' red, this is the effect.
On the old faces, and in the Organic armor faces, this effect, like all shading effects is faked and painted right on the texture map. As you can see, it generally looks good. It doesn't respond to the in game lighting, however. That's OK, because we don't have strong lighting in the game, and it normally doesn't move.
The idea being normal maps, the technique the Steampunk faces employ, is that it does respond to light and it can fake detail that isn't in the actual 3d model. If we could shine a flashlight on these faces, the light would accurately play off the wrinkles and creases and they would appear to have depth on the otherwise flat model.
The problem is with normal maps: they only cast black shadows and shading. Even when the devs paint on the red scattering and translucency, it's fighting against the normal map shading and just looks bad.
The two obvious ways to fix this is to tone down the level of normal mapping, or implement a subsurface scattering shading effect. The latter would be a lot of work/coding and would surely hurt performance and the former kind of kills the point of having normal mapped faces if you can barely notice the effect.
The OTHER problem is that normal maps take up video texture memory. The Organic armor faces can be one 512x512 color map for example and that's fine. But any face using normal mapping may have to be shrunk down to half and so you can have one 256x256 color map AND one 256x256 normal map. Seeing as how blurry and low resolution the Steampunk faces look compared to the Organic armor and Clockwork faces, this may be part of what happened.
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Quote:I should be the last person arguing this, but no, not always nowadays. Between Scrappers and Brutes slotting less damaging IO sets in their attacks in search of defense bonuses, and Tankers now having access to Bruising, Musculature and Reactive, I've seen a fair share of Tankers matching and out-damaging the Brutes and Scrappers around them on raids and trials.Tankers, do less 'personal' damage than scrappers/brutes, I believe we all agree on that, even with bruising.
Quote:Second, bruising doesn't help that much on a really debuff heavy team.
Quote:I am hoping this should settle it, but I am sure, some one or the other still believes that tanks are 'oh so useful' and will want to argue further.
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Quote:That is an incredibly freaking cool idea for several reasons.An alternate dimension where the entire Cole Gang took a drink from the Well of the Furies, becoming either the first modern super group or the first gang of super thieves.
The reason the other members of the gang never got a drink was because the cavern flooded/collapsed, I think because Recluse and Statesman opened the Box containing all the stored creative power of the human race. Doing that is what kicked off the modern age of superheroes.
If they all got to drink, that means there was no cave in, which means they didn't open the box.
So, we would have a world with significantly less supers in it, and one gang of now wealthy, nigh-immortal mercenaries with Incarnate level power.
I could see them becoming a shadowy cabal ruling the world post 1930. Think the comic Wanted, with them divvying up the continents, working to keep any super-powered opposition down, heroic or otherwise, and keeping out of the public eye.
Of course, they couldn't allow any technology be developed that posed a threat to them; no A-Bomb or battle suits. They cull any potential mutants. Kill off any magic users. They enforce the mundane, men in black style. Their world would look much like the real world, but these supermen are behind it it all pulling the strings.
And then Portal Corp explorers and supers from Primal Earth show up and shatter the masquerade.
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-An alternate timeline where Statesman lead Omega Team and Hero 1 was the one who stayed on Primal Earth.
The Freedom Phalanx would likely have broken up, with Positron maybe forming a new team.
Maybe Tyrant would have reacted differently if Hero 1 was who he encountered instead of a funhouse mirror version of himself.
Recluse, freed of his obsession, starts making some real gains toward his plans.
-Anime Earth.
Just because some players already treat Primal Earth as such. I swear there are more Japanese living in Paragon City than are in Japan if you go by people's bios alone.
-The world from the old Freedom Phalanx cartoon.
Statesman and the 1960's lineup of the Phalanx had their own cheesy animated series with a lot of camp and exaggeration. This is cannon. Positron grew up watching and idolizing that version of Statesman.
-The "classic" Praetoria. Pre-retcon.
Where instead of being Lawful Evil and having a pretty little city in the sunshine belt to lord over, the Phalanx were Chaotic Evil, Axe Crazy and ruling over the smashed ruins of Paragon City and the dregs that managed to survive there.
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Uncanny Valley
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph.../UncannyValley
That much being said however...
The current standard heads in CoX, including those released in the Steampunk pack, simply do not have the resolution for normal maps to look good. This means both texture map resolution and geometry resolution.
I have no idea what the high definition models you're pulling the normal information from look like, but you're not picking up or conveying much more detail than you were before.
Additionally, the lighting system in CoX simply isn't up to the task of showcasing the normal detail either. Aside from the warehouse maps with the bright lights right at the entrances, the lighting in the game simply lacks contrast to show anything off. Normal maps really need a character lighting rig with proper rim lights.
Lastly, any time you add this kind of detail to a CGI human face, it only highlights the fact it lacks Sub Surface Scattering. That's where people are getting the ' plastic sheen' and 'doll/mannequin' vibes from.
The TLDR bottom like is these faces are more lifeless and fake looking than some of the old painted/photosourced ones. Shy of creating new face geometry and complex shaders, you can't really do anything about it except go for a more stylized look.
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Quote:Any chance of making the animation pose for this power available for Fly and regular Super Jump at some point?Steam Jump Travel Power
Harness the furious power and speed of steam to rocket through the air. Steam Jump is a new travel power that is available at Level 4. Steam Jump cannot be slotted.
It's superior to /em Flypose2.
Also, with the 30 second recharge, it kicks GvE Jump Pack's butt.
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Quote:I've kept quiet on the issue despite the fact that obviously sets with damage auras get more from Interface than those that don't and until this change, sets with rains got even more.If one supposes they are balanced as is, then adding the Interface to just some of them does add some extra strength to the damage auras (IOs have long been this way, but Interface is different enough to consider it differently from IO procs in some ways). This is likely much less of an issue once the 10 second rule is place, however.
All in all, I can't see an issue if they were to let non-damage auras proc Interface, but at the same time, I don't see an issue if they choose to keep them not proccing Interface.
The reason I've not said anything is that I've had a strong suspicion that one of the future Incarnate slots would be an aura of some sort, and Interface would, well... interface with it. That would remove some of the disparity, especially with the 10 second rule now in place.
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Quote:You know what else is totally unfair?All I have to say is that I agree that 1 target limit on interface is taking it way overboard.
Sets like Dark Armor, Electric Armor, Fiery Aura, Ice Armor and Stone Armor get to have Interface work in their auras at all but Invulnerability, Shield Defense and Willpower do not.
So yeah, my Invuln thinks that one target Procing is just fine.
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Quote:There's not a thing the power could do for three minutes that would be worth the countdown to faceplant in my opinion.C: Hitting the Tier 9 doesn't improve survivability enough to put yourself on deathclock.
Unstoppable could flag you as 100% unkillable like Ajax for three minutes. It still wouldn't be worth it.
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Quote:That's no solution in my opinion.My solution:
Get the Archmage accolade for the Eye of the Magus and take the Rebirth destiny power. Grab the Herostats tool and use it to gauge your timer. When you hit the 10 second mark, hit Destiny and Eye of the Magus. Right after you crash, hit Dull Pain. Something would have to hit you very hard at that split second crash to kill you as Destiny almost guarantees you'll be around 500hp at the crash due to the Regen.
Eye of the Magus has a 25 minute recharge. That's way more work and set up just for Invul to use their Tier 9 versus a Willpower or Sheild who can use their T9 more freely whenever they're recharged and only have to worry about a one-pronged crash.
A Tier 9 should be the crowning jewel of a power set. Ideally, it shouldn't gather dust, or be highly skippable and it should never have such a strong stigma attached to it that people are too afraid to use it or bother with it because of rigamarole.
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I'm already starting to put the chairs up on the tables. Who's going to be here when they turn out the lights?
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If you own a gun or guns you must be fragile and you can't possibly know martial arts or have any kind of melee weapon skills to speak of.
Cause no one like that exists in comics or movies at all./sarcasm
Heaven help you if you're a hero who wants a suit of armor that has ranged attacks that isn't patterned after a spider.
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Quote:Can you really blame them?I think people are applying too much of the game mechanics to the concept of the characters abilities and the books seem to be as contradictory as DC at it's worst. I think in interpreting the individual abilities, one need look to a more general perception than specific comic or game references.
The game's mechanics tend to intrude rather than facilitate.
I happen to think a lot of the game's mechanics just aren't suited to to concept of super heroes period. The Phalanx in the novels and comics aren't what they are in game. When the game's flagship characters can't even be done justice by the game itself, that should be a red flag.
One can argue all day if that's a problem or not. I'm obviously of the opinion that mechanics should bend to the genre and not vice-versa. Don't make a soccer/football MMO and decide that it would be 'unbalanced' if the goalie and only the goalie can touch the ball with his hands so he lacks that ability.
Rather than being some kind of helpful construct assisting players in creating viable characters, the system has always been a straightjacket to me, one that constantly screams "%&@# your concept!".
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