Kong_Fuu

Before the list gets too long I figured I'd better start a review thread for the missions in there. Just because it's from Victory doesn't mean it's awesome (this was a surprise to me), and I figure now is as good of a time as any for my own reviews. I'm going to go down the list in order. Caveat: these are all my own opinions, if you don't like them you can put your complaints where the sun does not shine.

When I talk about the difficulty, I'm going to refer to the difficulty to solo with my relatively high power MA/SR scrapper. Your mileage may vary.

Arc 7780 "Nobody of Consequence"
Rating: 4/5
Notes: Well filled out, with a storyline. Problems: Slightly generic storyline and custom villians. Some annoying missions (HOW many glowies...?)
Overall: Worthwhile. I'd play it again, but nothing outstanding.

Anything is good really. Veats are really good on teams, which makes them natual Isos characters.

Arc Name:Go Go Chromatic Rangers
Arc ID:40686
Faction: Villianous
Creator Global/Forum Name: @Kong Fuu
Difficulty Level: Medium
Synopsis: Show a bunch of Sentai-style do-gooders how things are in the Rogue Isles
Estimated Time to Play: 30 minutes

This is a 3 mission arc with an AV fight at the end. Almost all of the mobs you fight are custom. I can blow through it pretty easily on my Scrapper, but I make no guarantees about other builds.

Use the in-game feedback if you have any comments or suggestions.

I feel that DB/WP made for an ok, but not spectacular Brute. The build was super tight but you were constantly putting out damage. The Fighting Pool is basically mandatory for WP though, and neither Boxing nor Kick work well with DB, so you end up with a completely wasted power in an already tight build.

I think something like MA/WP would make for a better combo. MA has a lot of optional powers, and it's dead simple to work boxing into the attack chain (Flyers may work in AS as well for even more power savings, at which point they may only have 3 powers from the primary!).

WP also gets a heck of a lot better once you start IOing up the character and getting those +HP Accolades.

I've had a Thugs/Pain MM gathering day job badges for weeks now already.

Hmm, will it be possible to set flags and conditionals in the MA?

Currently the devs use hidden badges as the flags, which would seem to work fine for this (just limit it to some number of badges).

Then you could do something like:

Click (Object) Text "you found blah blah" set flag "Blah Blah Found" 1

Later
If (Flag "Blah blah" == 1)
Text You found the hidden clue!
else
Text If feels like you missed something.
fi

Even better would be if you could use this to create branching missions, shame that branching missions have already been confirmed as not in the MA.

[ QUOTE ]
Theres one high level Hero side arc where they give you 5 minutes to disarm or destroy 3 or 4 items. Is that gonna lower the number of merits in in arc for giving a virtually impossible task?

[/ QUOTE ]

People actually fail that mission? It happens so late that you have access to at least 2 stealth powers (PvP zones) and 1 phase shift (also PvP), plus your travel powers. The mission only has robots in it, so unless you have a Kheld on the team nobody will have increased perception. Even if they do, it's still a pretty easy mission. On a team it's almost impossible to fail it since even if someone does flub something and get killed, the rest of the team can take over for them.

Wow, this is a lot of DOOOOOOM, even for the CoH boards. The strange thing is that it isn't nearly as crazy of a revamp as people are saying. Basically it's finer grained rewards on the TFs (make the reward more closely match the length/difficulty), and the option not to be beholden to the RNG if you want. Frankly, I've run a lot of level 50 TFs since the Auction system was created and have never ever gotten a Numina unique (Did get a LoTG 7.5 once). I have also gotten a ton of Executioner's contract (but not so many Trap of the Hunter).

But if you don't like it, there's always the "roll a random reward" option, assuming you did a TF that wasn't trivially easy.

This is going to cut off supply in the market to a degree (especially for something like a Miracle unique), but it's also going to cut the demand off for the more expensive recipes. In addition, it should raise the prices on the utter crap recipes as their supply dwindles. Crap recipes might even sell for more than you can vendor them for. I don't think the supply is going to completely stop like some people think, there will always be people who try their luck with "random" and get crap.

Also, on a final note: The entire playerbase does not play optimally as a gigantic block. If that were the case, then literally the only builds you would see are FoTM builds and every run would be a speed run. In the real game, people play at their own pace. Sure there will be speed runners, but they'll be some small fraction of the playerbase as always (the same that quickruns Edens and Katies constantly now). If you think the market supply with stop entirely, you're wrong. If you think that it will be impossible to get on a TF team now because you aren't the right build you're still wrong.

Oh, I do question some of the Dev's price points however:
[ QUOTE ]
Trap of the Hunter Accuracy/End: 150 Merits

[/ QUOTE ]
Really?

Thursdays are no good for me (Warmachine league nights), but I don't think my wife would be happy with another gaming night anyway.

I haven't read this thread, but let me add my voice to what I'm sure is the chorus of "that seems hilariously overpriced". Purchasable respecs should be $0.99/each. To avoid billing overhead they could just roll these into the next billing of the account (unless the player is using cards, then they'll have to pay right away). If they cancel before the next rebill, then charge the card then.

This is coming from someone who isn't exactly hurting for respecs though. Even my most tweaked character has at least a couple of vetspecs left, although I do tend to make good use of freespecs whenever they're given out.

I wonder how $10 compares with the cost of buying 50M inf (Respec recipes still cost somewhere in this range right?) from some gold farmer?

Spines/Invuln is really surprising since they were a big FoTM awhile back when scrapper Invuln was good and Wolf herding was the name of the game (before wolves got Hurl).

Most of the PLers from back then have probably quit by now though and have probably never used CGT (as it did not exist at the time).

There is a logical reason to choose it though (AoE heavy primary with a secondary that gets better as you're surrounded) which makes it a surprise that they're not more popular. It's a big surprise that it beats out Spines/DA.

Well, Cryptic went for the double up the geometry method. It used to be that people with teleport could occasionally find their way down there.

[ QUOTE ]
Has anyone noticed/mentioned that the floors in Atlas City Hall are so shiny they are reflective? A very cool detail.... dunno if it could be done on one of the decorative tiles......

[/ QUOTE ]

To be fair, that's actually an old rendering trick. The floors are actually not shiny at all, rather they are semi transparent and a mirror image of the Atlas lobby is underneath them. Actual reflection is too difficult for PC graphics cards to do in realtime.

That's also why the players don't reflect, because there isn't a mirror copy of you to put under the floor.

Frankly, in my SG we have eliminated most of the old Enhancement storage we used to have (separate bins for each origin) and just loaded them up with a bunch of IOs at various levels (15, 25, 35; 20 damage, 20 accuracy, 10 recharge at each level, plus whatever inventions people want to drop in them).

In their place we greatly expanded the insp storage which seems to be the most used of our bins anyway. Salvage bins can now hold so much salvage that you tend to have more than you need before they fill up, especially if you convert their contents to base salvage on a regular basis (3 to 1 space savings!). We have so much base salvage that we've actually been trying to get our members to use the buff station just so it doesn't go to waste.

One thing that would be cool to do with magic desks: Bleachers for the repel ball court.

As a Bots 'n Bubbles MM myself I don't find Force Bubble to be very good at drawing aggro. I typically leave it on all of the time and I rarely feel the need to bother even switching the bots into bodyguard mode, mobs tend to naturally shoot at my bots instead of me. I do have Scorpion's shield, but it's more of an insurance policy than anything else (the real gem of Scorpion's powers is the targeted AoE immobilize, which prevents mobs from escaping the burn patches (well, until my own bots knockback does so at least).

Force bubble is an insanely wonderful tool for the build however because it means my bots are almost never switched into melee mode and can keep pumping out their far more powerful (and AoE) ranged attacks instead. It does annoy some people when I'm teamed up (brutes/stalkers), but the near certainty of never having a mob melee you or any of your pets is an incredible defense buff.

Wait, Ghost Widow had two heads in real life?

I havn't read this entire thread yet because people just keep saying "OMG" without adding anything, but the article and the clue could point to an alternate reality version of Paragon City/Rogue Isles where player characters do not exist. Think about it, without player characters Jenkins would be captured and nobody would escape. The contaminated would be overrunning parts of the city. Nemesis would presumably have crushed everybody else except for Longbow and Arachnos (who he would have in an outright war).

To be sure, there isn't enough information to make more than just wild speculation, but I think the Paragon Times article clearly points to a world without Player Characters.

Frankly, a Titan-O/Hydra-O is almost completely worthless these days. There are recipes that are far better and take much less investment and you won't even outlevel them. Given the risk of the trial I wish the devs would bump Titan-Os and Hydra-Os up to Hammy-O level effectiveness. I'm not seeing where this would severely unbalance the game or anything (in fact given the recipes available to a level 40), but it would make the rewards not completely worthless.

I like the Eden trial. The Sewer trial got bumped up a little past what I think is reasonable (even the tentacles are tough these days), but that's ok because it's really designed for expert players. The thing I don't like is that there really is no proportionate reward for the risk. It's really hard to get a team together for an Eden or Sewer trial anymore because you know you're going to get a lot of debt and not much XP and not much else. Eden is easier because at least the Titan is still worth a lot of XP, but the Sewer trial is dead to most of the population.

I would like a second set of beacons that are freestanding (in much the same way you can get freestanding SG banners) instead of only having wall mounted beacons. I've found that wall mounted beacons force you to do ugly things like raise the teleporter up 2 levels from the floor or weirdly construct your base to always have open walls next to the teleporters (not easy to do).

I definitely wouldn't mind seeing an advanced teleporter either. It would need to hold 5 or more banners and take up no more than 4 times as much floorspace as the basic teleporter. On the hero side especially it gets kind of crazy how many teleporters you have to install just to get a full complement of beacons in the base.

Another option might be a "modular" teleporter, where you could attach "beacon computers" to it that would allow you to add another beacon. That way you don't have the logistical nightmare of trying to squeeze a ginormous raid teleporter sized device in your TP rooms, but you still have to make a lot of room for the extra beacons.

Also, a beacon that drops you back off where you died (if you died in the zone) or right next to the door for your door mission would be really nice. I think Positron has mentioned wanting to add this in the past, and I hope they get around to it soon. I would attach it to my base hospital and never look back.

As I see it, there are a lot of people who came to CoH (especially in the early days), and make one character. They played that character for awhile but got tired of the (hunt 10 CoT on the rooftops, now go and kill everybody in this cave map) missions and started playing around with the character designer before getting bored with it too and canceling their account. The problem is that person just canceled with 10 or 20 level 1 characters on their account and maybe even some good names if they took the time to really make a nice character. I think the level 5 and below policy is going to open up more names than people think.

Specifically, all blaster TFs clearly demonstrate the power of stacked AoE attacks on groups of mobs. Typically the blasters survive because the bad guys die so quick. Even AVs can't stand up to that kind of firepower.

The problem with all-defender teams is that you waste a few seconds applying debuffs (or reapplying buffs) instead of blasting. When mobs only last a few seconds anyway that can add up.

I do think all Defender teams are probably more forgiving than all Blaster teams (if your team splits in an all Blaster TF it can be bad news for your survivability, especially if both teams aggro two or three spawns like usual), but speed wise it's hard to say.

Trip mines are going to be of limited use against the repairman I think. They just spawn too fast. I have Dragons tail slotted with two recharges and have Quickness and it wasn't always up before the next spawn appeared. If I had to guess, I'd say it's somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds between spawns, with the lower range being more prevalent. Sometimes it felt like every other attack was going towards the repairmen. Still, they're deep grays and Dragons Tail was one-shotting them. Even if you have to dedicate one teammember to just clearing away the techs, that shouldn't be too hard. An AoE blaster or scrapper will be able to kill them without even breaking a sweat.

The towers do have a lot of HP, but they don't self regenerate (at least not very fast), so it's just a grind to take them down.

Oh, also, I guess I cheated a bit. I forgot the team had 3 stacked Tactics/Assault:

Lord Recluse Beaten. Mako was still obnoxious, but he wasn't unbeatable. I don't know about the other members of my team, but my build has Build-Up with 3 To-Hit/Recharge HOs, Focused Accuracy with 3 To-Hit/Endo HOs (and it's on all of the time), stacked with 3 Tactics and a Fortitude. This character was actually copied over to test before Croatoa existed (hence the old style mez resistance Insp in the tray), so I don't have the Gaes to stack on top of that. I did have a Shivan, but never bothered to pull it out.

I have to admit, my eyes glazed over a bit around page 8 of this thread, but one thing that helps a LOT when fighting Ghost Widow is to make sure each of your melee guys has 6-8 purples handy and keeps a couple of them up at all times. That will nerf her self heal and seriously improve your chances of clobbering her. The holds are pesky, but they appear to be on a reasonably long recharge so they're not insurmountable.

Mako is definatly annoying, but you only have to knock out that last 10% of his health through Elude. Yellow insps are great for that, not to mention the multitude of other +tohit powers.

I think the most important thing is to make sure your team is competent, decently built, and willing to stop and think about what is happening when they find they can't hurt something. If you're beating on an AV for more than 10 minutes and can't knock more than 10% off of their health, then it's time to stop and rethink your strategy.