LostCreation

That's what I did, too, took me about 5 tries (used code ended in -T4BE).

So there are (were) still at least some codes available this morning at around 8:15 am Eastern time.

Actually haven't seen Praetorian Penny "in person" yet (too many alts, not enough 50s) but I really enjoyed her low level Praetorian arcs. Something about that girl seems to resonate with the writers at Paragon, and I'm glad we'll be seeing more of her.

I really want Penelope Yin as a pet power too... oh wait.

((But seriously, I was majorly impressed by little Miss Penny Yin in the WWD conclusion. Very well done, and I most definitely do hope we see some of those powers make there way into player powersets in the future.))

All I see here is a lack of imagination. I can easily come up with at least one Stalker concept that works with titan weapons:

"Hiding? I'm not hiding! I'm an interdimensional traveler who can pop in and out of a 'sidereal' dimension at will. Where do you think I get those big pancake weapons from anyway? Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go beat up that gravity controller who keeps stealing my lampposts...."

There, a perfectly valid concept for a "stalker" that can use giant weapons!

That's the beauty of this game: unless there's a distinct game mechanics reason, you should [1] be able to build anything you can imagine. This includes stalkers who light themselves on fire, brutes who encase themselves in blocks of ice, and defenders who poison you because they love you.

Powersets should never be proscribed based on concept reasons alone. If there are mechanics and balance concerns, that's one thing, but don't you dare tell me what my characters can and can't do!

Well said!

[1] Edit: eventually anyway. I know these proliferations can take time! And I'm also ok with them leaving the oddball proliferations (like Titan and Fire stalkers may, in fact, be) to last.

What people? People with romantic partners? People who have never played CoH, and would like to try the game with said partners? We've gotten "exactly zero percent" of those people huh? If I would have known everyone who played City of Heroes was single, I'd have made it a point to attend more meet-and-greets.

The ratio is actually closer to 5:1, male:female. The document I linked is pretty short, there's no need to make numbers up.

Personally, I would hope that CoH in 2011 has a more favorable ratio than whatever game he surveyed in 2003. And if CoH's actual ratio is better than 5:1, then we're talking about more than 25% of players (male + female) for whom being able to play with a partner is likely a significant factor in determining if they play. [1]

Of course, we don't know the numbers for CoH specifically, and I can only assume that survey I linked would be representative of perspective players as well as current players for our game today. That's not something I can categorically claim, but it seems likely to me.

That's not what I'm arguing. These aren't people "who would not be paying to play in any capacity for at least a significant amount of time if ever", these are people who:

1. have yet to make an initial assessment of the game, and
2. consider playing with a romantic partner or family member a significant factor in their decision to start playing.

For that population of people, I'm suggesting that the restrictions placed on teaming for free accounts may be too strict.

I'm not arguing that free players need to be able to send invites ("blind" or otherwise) to premium or vips. I am arguing that free players need, at the very least, the ability to form teams with each other. If there are ways to achieve this goal without disturbing VIPers, then I'm all for it. But even if it is all or nothing, I think that the population in question is valuable enough to justify some risk to subscribers and premium players if being able to team would make the difference between them playing (and paying) or not.

We can't make that conclusion based on the data I linked. Paragon may have their own reserach that leeds to that or a similar conclusion, but nothing I've seen is sufficient to support it.

The most I'm willing to infer from the sources I have is that being able to play with a partner or family member is likely to be very important to a significant number of people. If Paragon wants to attract new members from this population, then they should consider changing their teaming restrictions sooner rather than later.

Like I said, I'm not talking about freeloaders, I'm talking about people who have yet to make an initial assessment of the game. You do not want to require these people to get out their credit card before they can make that assessment.

Of course, once they've decided, the credit card's more of a triviality (particularly with the dollar amounts needed to make teaming easier). But players need to be able to get to that point, first, and I strongly suspect that being able to start a team is going to be a required prerequisite for many people.

The player wouldn't get very far. As in: if the game doesn't permit couples and families to evaluate the game as a team, then these players aren't going to give the game much of a chance.

Teaming is a core part of the experience for this game. If anything can convince a family or a guy and his girlfriend to start investing time and, yes, money in this game, it's going to be their experience playing CoH together. For myself, while I enjoy soloing, and spend most of my time playing alone with other people, I would not still be involved in this game if it wasn't for the fun times I've had while teaming.

So, yes, I would argue that potentially excluding a quarter of perspective players is foolish if you can include most of that quarter without risking the remaining 75%, or the players you already have. I think Paragon can do that, and that it would be worth doing... which I guess is the TL;DR version of my point.

[1] And that's just considering romantic partners. The survey also includes data for people who play with family members. Specifically, 16.4% of men play at least "sometimes" with a family member, and 29.5% of women. That can be compared to 12% of men, and 49.2% of woman who play at least "sometimes" with a romantic partner. (This is a narrowing of criteria from the numbers quoated earlier to exlude those who only play "seldom" with a partner/family member.)

I just don't see that happening, EvilRyu. What I hope they do, is that any new Task Forces (or revamped old ones) will be parallel stories (like the new story arcs they're adding with Freedom). Use the same basic narrative, many of the same locations, but tell the story from both sides. What does a hero do to save the day? What does a villain do to (at the very least) take advantage of the chaos, or (hopefully) cause the chaos to begin with?

One thing that I think would be very interesting, is if they used the clone tech to place villain players who recently played the twin Strike Force as NPC clone adversaries inside the hero Task Force (probably not the big bad, and maybe not even as a required encounter, but there to fight if the players are up for a challenge). If I run a SF on a villain, and turn around and run it's twin TF on a hero, I could (potentially) fight my other self. Or imagine sending a tell to villain "Heh I just beat you up!" and getting a reply back, "No, I just beat you up!" ... that sort of thing.

As far as difficulty of content? While there are individual examples of broken mob powers Villain side, I think for the most part its much more well balanced than hero side. The dev's seem to agree, because the difficulty curve has continued trending upwards with Praetoria. Praetoria is as much more difficult compared to Villains, as Villains is compared to Heroes.

Personally, I think that Praetoria is too difficult (at least when teamed), but I still think it would be better for the game as a whole to increase the average difficulty of hero side to mach villain content (and fix Praetorian mobs, so that big teams aren't so suicidal).

Hopefully with the revamp to Atlas, the lower level hero game will be rebalanced so that it's more comparable to the new content. They'd be well served, to increase the difficulty of most of the content hero side, not just Atlas Park, IMO. We'll see what happens.

The thing is, I agree with the parent that teaming should not be one of the things people need to buy. It's like offering a free-to-play Mario game, but making people buy something before they can jump. You're not going to get very far, and it doesn't matter how "cheap" those mushrooms are, getting your credit card out to pay for something so that you can enjoy your "free-to-play" game (before you've actually played it) is a huge hurdle.

Take a look at these numbers from the Daedalus project:

http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000430.php

Assuming similar numbers apply to CoH, that's 60% of your female demographic who will likely simply pass (while their SO goes on to play some more Call of Duty) simply because they, as a couple, cannot play this game together on a couple of free accounts without first breaking out the credit cards.

That's the demographic that needs to be able to team. No they can't send broadcasts, no they can't send tells, and yes for most players that would be a significant barrier to running a team, but not for these players. They already know each other, and as long as they can do a Team "Find Member", or start in the same zone within visual range of each other, they can and should be able to team up.

Edit: And to clarify, the price of the purchase does not matter. Teaming could cost one thin cent, it's the credit card that creates the barrier -- not the cost.

Put the macros in slots 1 through 4 on tray 9, and then click "G1" with your mouse to initially set things up.

Three things will then happen:

1. The "g" key will be re-bound so that it "clicks" whatever power or macro is in Slot 2 of Tray 9. (First number is the slot, second is the tray. This always seemed backwards to me, but it's the correct order .)
2. If any power is set to auto-cast the auto-cast power is cleared. (The empty quotes after powexe_auto are important!)
3. "Aim" is made to auto-cast.

You can have it cycle through as many click powers as you want by adding more macros. You just have to be careful to point each one to the next slot in the tray (or the first slot in the next tray, if you want to get crazy with it), and have the last macro "wrap" around to the first. Obviously, you can change the "g" key to any key or key combo that you want, and put them in any tray number simply by changing the 9 to what you want.

I don't know if this will make things easier for you, but it's a technique I use frequently with the more clicky powersets and find very helpful.

Like others have said, Deceive is very much worth it. What makes the power most useful, IMO, is its ability to turn enemy buffer/debuffers temporarily on your side. Nothing like getting an Accelerate Metabolism from a Rikti, or tricking a Tsoo Sorcerer into hurricane its allies (instead of your tank).

Other comments: If you're running tight on powers, I'd take Steamy Mist over Illusion's invisibility powers -- and certainly over Group Invisibility -- any day. Steamy Mist is, IMO, the best team stealth power in the game. It doesn't suppress from attacking, and it can be turned off (so you never need to wait for it to expire before escorting that idiot civilian to the exit). Mist isn't full invisibility, but even with that caveat I still think it's better than Illusions options. The resistance, while not huge, isn't anything to sneeze at, and it's easy to judge when you're getting too close -- as long as you keep mobs just outside of the VFX for the power, they generally won't see you.

The problem with Flash, or at least its problem last time I bothered taking it, was that it's animation time made it very dangerous to set off in the middle of a spawn. There's been some changes to the set in the interim, so I don't know if that's still the case (in particular, I don't know if Superior Invisibility makes Flash less of a suicide power, currently). Regardless, Ill/Storm has enough "soft" AoE controls that I've never missed it.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I think the answer to your question should be "all of us".

The best way, IMO, to do this would be to append a ".us" or ".eu" to all the global and account names -- conflict or not. So even if no one in the EU has the global name "@lostcreation", my global would still become "@lostcreation.us" -- and that would be fine as far as I'm concerned.

I like how this makes global names look "domainy", and I think fewer people would baulk at this then prepending EU to a name (which is a horrible, horrible idea*). It's also "unfair" to everyone equally, so there's no preferential treatment (however well justified, or not) going on.

If the dev's wanted to get fancy, they could go one step further and have the game assume anyone you message/etc is the same locale as you are, unless you explicitly append a locale suffix. E.g., being in the states if I /tell @American Friend, ... the game will know that I meant /tell @American Friend.us, ... (Of course, if I wanted to message my European friend, I'd always have to /tell @Euro Friend.eu, ...)

I can't recall what the legal characters for a global handle are, or if the include the "." character or not. If they do, that would mean anyone who has a global name ending with ".us" or ".eu" (or possibly any dot-two-character-country code) would need to change their handle, but that has to be a smaller population then what we're talking about with the current suggestion.

* Speaking simply from a humane perspective, prepending EU (or anything) to someone's identity is about the worst option you could pick. My identity is "lostcreation" in the game, not "ewwlostcreation" - which is how people are likely to read my name if I were effected by this change. "lostcreationeww" is still bad, but not as bad since my identity (rather than where I'm from) would still be the first thing people see. "lostcreation EU" would be even better (again from humane perspective) since the EU is even easier to ignore as a separate word.

Some mobs can see through stealth, and if a mob can see through stealth, what's the point of playing a stalker?

Having a single class of mob immune to your trick doesn't make your trick worthless, it just means you can't have one trick. It also means that you don't want that one class popping up everywhere in the game -- that's just annoying (and its also something I discussed near the bottom of the original post).

Outside of the really low-level game, I don't think that's been the balance point for a long time.

Again, you're assuming frequent. At the end of the post I clarify that this shouldn't be frequent just often enough that you'll be on the lookout for it.

Frequency again. But the minimum difficulty in today's game is not Heroic, it's -1x1. Knocking every mob down a level is a pretty serious decrease in difficulty, and I don't think it's out of line that certain ats/powersets/builds may need to drop their difficulty down a notch to solo comfortably (assuming most continue to play just fine at +0x1).

The more tricks they have, the less frequently you should see any one trick. Personally, I think going for once or twice a mission (assuming relatively short, radio-length missions) is about right. Some mob groups may do these things more often, others less, but that's about what I'm imagining.

If you have any sort of AoE, I'd highly -- highly -- recommend you lower the level to -1, and set the multiplier to whatever you can handle. I've been bouncing around on an Elec/Elec tank made post I16. I set my level adjustment to -1 early on and have simply increased the multiplier as I level up. L38 now, and, while I'm sturdy enough to increase my level settings, I just really like the pace I can keep while facing -1/+0 mobs. Not to mention that plowing through a lot of minions is fun -- I don't care what level they are.

I don't think it'll change the number of bosses you face, but a boss that's -1/+0 to your level is a lot easier than one that's +0/+1. That extra level bump means the boss has more HP, more damage, and hits more often, while you hit him less often and do less damage (as a % of the mobs HP). IMO, the difficulty increase between even con and +1 is too steep, and it's felt most of all with bosses and/or mobs that have resistance to your primary damage type.

That's an interesting conclusion, more important in games with shared public areas than in games like CoH that rely heavily on instancing, but still something to consider.

CoH's experimented with part of this in Safe Guard missions (i.e. greatly increased the "agro" radius of mobs). I remember complaints (or at least, "is this WAI?" queries) when these missions were originally added, what's the consensus on that change, assuming there is one? It seems like a non-issue from where I'm sitting, but I have no idea if I'm representative.

As far as the issue of line-of-sight, I think I like the way the dev's have handled this issue in CoH. Snipers are essentially mobs that agro using line of sight, which presents an interesting tactical challenge on missions (or in zones) that include mobs with that capability. There are a handful of other examples like this, of which I think the "interruptable summoners" are probably the best model to copy: fairly easy to neutralize if you're paying attention but can make spawns much more difficult if you're not.

While I don't think sweeping changes to CoH combat/agro system would be wise at this point, I do think the devs could add some very interesting tactical "puzzles" to the mix simply by increasing the number of tricks that mobs can use. Why can't we have mobs who break the agro rules, for example, and go after "priority" targets, the tank be damned? Or mobs who call for help if given a chance, radioing it in or literally breaking contact to bring in adds from nearby spawns? If you can defeat/interrupt these mobs before they can do their trick, you've just made a battle much easier.

There's a fine line between "challenging" and "annoying" (not to mention the one between "inconsequential" and "challenging"), which is probably delineated by quantity and magnitude (thinking clockwork, tsoo sorcerers and CoT ghosts, here; quantity on the first, magnitude on the second, and both on the third), but a handful of rare spawns that include these "trick cards" would do a lot of good in the game as far as challenge and depth is concerned.

If the devs can plan things out so some of the less-appreciated utility powers become trump cards for these tricks (thinking slow, immobilize, burst damage, -perception, etc) all the better.

In other words, BABs cannot be replaced by a small shell script...

What if you could block the change if the character has an active mission or is in a PvP zone? If you're in the middle of a mission (or PvPing) you can't switch builds, so whatever build you start with you finish with. You'd need to be able to make a mission "inactive", so that you can reset the mission and change builds if you mess something up (the normal reset procedure would keep a mission active at all times), and/or maintain the ability to switch builds by speaking with a trainer.

This and needing to visit a Field Analyst/Fateweaver to change difficulty settings are two things that I find vastly more irritating then they probably warrant. (The difficulty thing is particularly frustrating when on teams. At the very least, the team leader should be able to tweak the teams difficulty settings between missions directly, without visiting anyone or having any teammates visit anyone.)

In the mean time, this seems to happen less often if I attack something from behind. The AI seems to require that the mob turn before it fires off its attack, so if you literally backstab a mob, it won't be able to turn and attack you.

I've also noticed this being a bigger issue with ranged powers that have relatively slow moving projectiles compared to those with fast ones. Compare Fire Control's Char with Ice Control's Block of Ice; the first needs to travel to the target, the second hits instantly. I've noticed that "held" mobs get off an initial attack with the former a lot more often than the later. This may or may not be related to the changes... I never really played fire control prior to the dom changes.