Laevateinn

We can at least agree on that: It's not up to me what other people play. As I said, i'm not interested in telling people they're "doing it wrong", unlike those who try to tell me that the game is really about roleplaying and concept and I'm doing it wrong myself, or that I can't have fun because I use IOs and play FotM minmax builds.

At the same time, criticism of a powerset isn't criticism of a player, their characters, their playstyles, or their choices. That's what I'm trying to say.

Critiquing powersets is a lot different from critiquing players, although many thin-skinned people conflate the two.

I've always found this attitude strange. Costumes are the creation of the player. Powersets aren't. They're like tools or machines, their merits can be discussed separately from the characters wielding them. If people get annoyed hearing that one machine is better than another, they're too wound up for their own good.

If you were playing a paper plane blast character and someone told you "Hey, paper plane blast is really really good!", would you be pleased?

In-game, I usually don't go around commenting on people's characters unless they ask how sets compare to their peers in the first place.

[edit] Or game balance discussions come up.

P.S. Thanks to the efforts of players who believe in game balance over political correctness, stalkers and PBs are much better than they once were.

Correction: it's useless to you. It may not be useless to another player - I find this sort of advice useful, so I try to offer it. The way I see it, since you're not interested, you can easily ignore it anyway, and if it comes off as proclaiming superiority that's due to your personal assumptions which I can't do anything about.

Many people enjoy the game without getting involved in the character optimization side of things. I've no intention of trying to change their playstyle or proclaim that mine is superior, unlike those who look down on character optimization. However, I do believe in giving players what I consider accurate information so that they can make decisions for themselves.

Nothing wrong with that. There are still some pretty bad sets in the game, and I'm going to call a spade a spade.

The last part of your statement betrays some of your assumptions. See, when I say a set is bad, I'm not trying to discourage anyone from playing it. I'm just informing them it doesn't perform to the level possible with other powersets, and what they do with that knowledge is up to them.

You're right that it's not specifically a problem with KB (there are niche uses for powers like e.g. Gale, which you can use to move spawns around, or Bonfire, which you can use to block tunnels or keep terminals free of enemies), but adding 1 extra attack that comes after level 32 isn't going to fix the set, either. The set's problem is it has random unreliable (i.e. <90% proc chance) KB that kills your AoE damage and cannot be relied on for mitigation at the same time. So, just change everything in energy blast to KD, probably leaving 1 attack with 100% KB in it. Problem solved, no cottage rule broken.

When you consider the metagame where there are numerous ways to get high defense, and when you consider that there are support sets which offer high defense boosts while also bringing other powerful, valuable abilities to the table (Cold, Time, Dark etc) then there's a pretty serious problem.

With DoT interfaces, it could be. Just cage, hotfeet and imps (no APP attack) were enough for me to outkill a rad/rad blaster. Your cages isn't procced out though.

(edit) hotfeet is a 20ft radius.

Rikti spawn based on both the number of heroes in your immediate area and the number of rikti recently killed there, so splitting up like that actually makes things boringer. You kill 3 minions then stand by, tap your foot for 10 seconds, a bomb lands on you, then another 2 minions and a monkey port in, etc. Besides, we all know the Rikti teleport right to our doorsteps. There's no reason to specifically go fight them on a rooftop unless you liked the scenery there.

If a Rikti invasion were more like the movie you would have one squad fighting the dropships while another assists Siren's Call-style hotspots on the ground where the Army is battling Rikti. Then a Rikti commander ports in and you all gather to beat him up.

Speed ITF is the closest to the sort of thing I'm talking about. Mission 2 - everyone split up in 2's and 3's and each squad clears a branch of the map. Mission 4 - two brutes solo a tower each, the remainder kill Rommie.

As harsh as this sounds, I have to agree (full disclosure: I'm tier 7 VIP). This game needs more, not fewer, exclusive rewards that can't be attained by the average player.

I like this. I would play it. As a trial if not a zone event.

I want this power.

You punch them and they fly off the screen. A few seconds later their character stumbles back from off-screen looking woozy.

It can be used once a TF.

In a Rikti invasion, everyone huddles together and spams powers for five minutes nonstop and nobody can see what's going on. In the game as a whole, teamwork consists of holy trinity MMO nonsense where characters aren't allowed to be good at more than a few things because if they did, supposedly the forced grouping model of gameplay would fall apart and dooooom.

In the movie, combat is mobile and fluid. Teamwork is executed not by having 7 squishy guys hiding behind one big guy taking potshots at the enemy, but by splitting up and tackling various enemy threats. You can see from the way Cap splits up the team how the roles that characters fill are tactical rather than MMO holy trinity ones. While they vary considerably in the magnitude of power they wield, all of them are competent combatants alone and all the characters with ranged attacks get involved in extended melee combat at least once.

If you wanted to make Rikti invasions more like the movies, here's an idea - have a ground battle and an air battle. Rikti are teleporting in and heroes fight them off on the ground, but they're getting bombed all over the place and taking heavy damage. So a squad of flyers has to get up there and kill some dropships. The more dropships the flyers kill the fewer bombs fall on everyone else.

My aoe capped illusionist is /Time. I haven't found a way to reasonably cap aoe on anything but /Time, /Dark and /FF.

AoE def isn't as plentiful as ranged def, and critically for effective softcapped builds, it rarely comes in sets that also offer +Rech. I found that while softcapping range doesn't lower your recharge, softcapping aoe does, and that's not acceptable on an illusionist.

I suppose this kind of contradicts what I said about aoe def being valuable, but I guess what I'm really trying to say is... someone make me a perma-PA aoe softcapped Ill/cold, because I can't do it!

Guilty as charged. Rather than hanging around and making a miniscule contribution to the population count, it's frankly more effective to just hop over to where the action is, and get your friends to come too. That's not rocket science, either.

Here's the context of the scene in question (emphasis mine):

So to me this is much more than stating the fact that some things will forever be beyond the reach of human science (which I don't deny); to me it shows the condescending attitude that science can understand nothing of magic's superior ways. It's worth noting that the Nictus are, of course, horribly transformed by science and in the same comic Requiem is very specifically addressed as "Science-Lord".

This anti-science bias persists with amazing consistency throughout the CoH world. Everywhere science and technology are associated with mutation, perversion, destruction, pollution, corruption, greed and villainy. There are entire zones devoted to it. This is much more than just a case of comic-book runaway science; in comics you can still find positive examples of scientists and engineers. The Lex Luthors and Dr. Dooms of comic-book worlds have their Mr. Fantastics and Tony Starks to contend with. Not so in City of Heroes; there is scarcely a single positive example of a scientist and engineer as a counterpoint to Nemesis or Dr. Aeon. Science can understand nothing and technology do no good in this game's lore, unless it serves some villain or another, especially with weapons.

Magic isn't demonized in the same way. There are evil magicians and mystic organizations (the Carnival, Darrin Wade) as well as good ones (Numina, Dream Doctor, the Midnighters) - which is exactly what you'd expect. Why is it that magic can be treated neutrally and not science and technology? Where is the Victorian engineer-hero, the genius researcher fighting to get his miracle drug to market, the archeologist trying to save ancient ruins from being looted for their magical artifacts, the whistleblower trying to bring down Crey from within, and the crimefighter trying to make a difference with homemade rocket boots and a stun blaster? You'll be hard pressed to find them in this game, at least in the official lore.

The villains of Praetoria use their scientific and technological mastery to manipulate the populace and warp the human form while the poor oppressed magic users hide out in a swamp and plot rebellion while squads of sci-fi raygun soldiers try to hunt them down. It really doesn't get any more obvious than that.

Depictions of science and technology in this game are nearly universally negative. Both are presented as powerless in the face of the major supernatural threats confronting the city, which only mystical understanding can comprehend (and this one dates all the way back to War Witch's line in the original CoH comic, "There are things that science will never be able to understand."). There are no examples of research or engineering organizations using technology for the good of the public; all we have are Crey, Arachnos, Malta and the their ilk. Advanced technology, with exception of the medicom and possibly the war walls, is almost always depicted as having severe negative consequences (see Portal Corp) or being used for evil: witness Cole's nukes, Hamidon's genetic meddling, Enriche, etc. High-tech villains abound, from the Rikti to the Praetorians and Dr. Vahz.

And yes, people will cite Positron as a counterexample, but it's worth noting that Positron does very little with his technology, except for a line in the description of PPD hardsuits saying that Positron had a hand in designing them. He just flies around and blasts people with lasers; he could be a mutant in a clown suit and it would make no difference, really.