LostHalo

This is one of the concepts that a lot of games disappointingly fail to pull off well (either for lack of trying or just plain doing it wrong) and, for all the seething dislike I have of the Halo series, the story does a damn good job of presenting Master Chief as the legendary juggernaut of destruction he actually is as the game goes on.

A lot of "Ace Pilot" games tend to screw it up, too, except maybe the old Tie Fighter games (Destroy the Rebel command ship on the very first mission with the crappy base Tie Fighter? Well, now you're a Master General) and the Armored Core series (which like to signify your growing eminence by making enemy assassination attempts more and more vicious, or in the latest games' branching endings, describing your character as being one of history's greatest monsters/heroes depending on the chosen path).
It gets kind of frustrating when you play through, racking up 1000s of kills, being the absolutely vital linchpin to your cause's success...and you're still getting scripted grief from some ******** who has one more star on his lapel than you do.

Unfortunately, the very nature of MMOs makes it pretty hard for your character to ever really be painted as an arbiter of legend, regardless of how powerful it is, since persistent worlds are a hell of a lot more complicated than static ones.

You know, this is amusing to read from you. I wish I could quote some of your statements from VU2009 regarding "team-based" and "challenge-oriented" arcs not immediately soloable as being badly designed (and I'm not talking about arcs that are obviously cheese and not challenge), regardless of any of their other merits. Anyway.

The game's most basic philosophy of design (whether or not it's intended, which I don't believe it initially was but now appears to be) is that the player is completely capable of tailoring the experience to whatever they want to get out of the game.

Do you want to /em pushup and /em sitbench1 with cat girls and vampires in Pocket D? Go for it.
Do you want to run 2.5 hour ITFs that clear every last inch of the map with a slow and steady or risky team? Go for it.
Do you want to run a 24 minute +4 steamroller of destruction ITF? Go for it.
Do you want your Statesman run to take 30 minutes or 2 hours? You can prepare for either way.
Maybe you might be more privy to a SILGTF 90-100 minute marathon? Have fun!
How about raiding the Rikti Mothership? Do you want to do it the traditional way with 30+ people or do you want to do it with just 5 people? Well, you can shoot for that too (and succeed in the latter).
Or maybe you just want to solo on the default, or highest, difficulty level. It's up to you.

The game is extremely malleable and allows each player to get exactly what they want out of their time.

Not really that hard to figure out.
The game engine is dated and relatively lacking in straight-up gameplay options (choose target, shoot, choose another target, shoot, etc.), communication and teaming in the game needs a serious rehash because anyone not in a global channel community is sorely limited in their options (and the game and playerbase both do a fairly poor job of outlining how global channels work and getting those unacquainted involved), it has very little advertising outside of people already interested in the MMO genre, the genre itself is highly over-saturated right now with other options, and on top of that, it has to compete with the 1,000,000 kg gorilla in the room, of which the stupidity of this piece being that everyone seems to consider said gorilla the "baseline" for MMO success. A steady 150,000, which I believe has been the average for CoH for a long time, is actually very successful for an MMO, if you ignore the outlier which actually plays funny games with statistics to help its notoriety.

But because that average subscription is not so nearly as outlandish and the game's advertising doesn't get very far beyond the MMO genre borders, it basically boils down to Oscar Wilde still getting it right, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

Anime is hardly to blame for how ninja are portrayed, bad Kung Fu flicks are (and in the actual history, probably the ninja themselves).

But sure, if you want to be silly about it, we could just take the realistic approach: People that would have posed as carpenters or other household employees that would have taken a hammer to the back of the target's skull at an opportune time and wouldn't have participated in the cloak&dagger mystical crap. But hey, in today's vernacular, the meaning of ninja just being "assassin" has changed to describe the black-suited mystic acrobats any schoolchild should recognize (hence why you can have that retarded movie titled "Ninja Assassin"...which still makes me cringe to hear/read).

You know what's amusing about this outside of the necromancy? Going Rogue has advertised this very set and it's specifically mentioned as going for Controllers.

I don't really care about people asking about powersets in regards to buff or debuff-centric needs, although I mock them if they demand specific sets. Of course, if I got a recruit tell asking about my slotting, I'd have my laughs for the week.

Group Fly is identical to other AoE buff toggles. You don't select a person, click the toggle, then select a second person and somehow click the toggle on for them, too.

And specifically, the "target" of AoE buffs like these is actually yourself.

Not that I support the idea, but I seem to recall there is a "does not affect caster" flag. Uh... I think maybe Supremacy has it.

As an example of this...make a habit of using Inertial Reduction at random points on maps trying to hit everybody at once. You'll probably get someone killed at some point if they aren't wise to your shenanigans.

I'm also not particularly interested in logging into a game where every newbie starts spamming "[x buff] IN 30 SECONDS, GATHER ON ME" "...20 SECONDS..." "5 SECONDS" "4 AND A HALF SECONDS", bad Radiation Emission players already burn me out on that notion. And what about late-comers or those that miss out because they're the one dingus out of range of the rest of the team? Suddenly your buffs that are click AoEs either cost prohibitive amounts of endurance to waste on a single person or have a recharge timer similar to AM, IR, or any other similar buffs. And if they're turned into clones of AM's functionality...are they going to suffer the same penalties to strength?

As for making them effectively into toggles...the game doesn't have a function like that, as far as I know. Toggles are always single target, whether that's on a foe, yourself, or an ally; that is, there is no "multiple lock on" function, at least in the existing system again, as far as I know. And I preface "existing" with the Standard Code Rant. Sure, you could make every buff into Maneuvers but I think that would fall pretty heavily into the Cottage Rule as well.

I'm not a big fan of legislating stupidity, which is what you're advocating here. And KB is not the problem in your hyperbolic hypothetical, a stupid player is. Assuming said player didn't outright kill the targets. Otherwise, the Scrappers are a waste of space if the Blaster can do it without them so easily.

There are far more wallflowers than there are leaders, this has always been the case. You don't really need to give the wallflowers more incentive to avoid teaming by giving arbitrary controls to some star that can change possession instantly.

Entirely different reason for it.

You're still legislating stupidity. It's a slippery slope argument but such a thing would lead to anti-immobilize flag demands. I know I would head such a cause because bad Controllers are significantly more annoying than bad sources of KB...because they at least actually kill their targets.

Continuing the tumble downhill...let's ban immobilize in general, it's less efficient than any other mez and it's much more capable of being abused and annoying in general!

Client-side animation glitch. You're still knocked over, lag or whatever didn't get the message to your machine to animate the "fall over and get up" motion. Next time it happens, try to notice that you're still unable to use your abilities.

That's actually Repel, which is a different effect. That said, it could possibly be used to do what Arcana is suggesting.

Yes and no. It depends entirely on the build and what you want to do with it.

Purples specialize in a very limited suite of bonuses. While they do said bonuses very well, they aren't the be-all, end-all of every build. That is, having Purples doesn't make a build great in and of itself, the Purples just happen to be a very effective method of attaining the bonuses they grant.

I will say this though, people that suggest Purples are what makes a build "powerful" or "the best" are extremely ignorant. There are some things Purples will not let you achieve if you rely on just them and the same can be said of other sets.

There are untold numbers of people unsatisfied with any subject you can conceive of. It doesn't mean they're right. It also doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong but subscribing to the notion of "squeaky wheel gets the oil" demeans the argument further.

But when people keep bringing up the same tired complaint over and over despite being given the same counterarguments each and every time, refusing to see that no, they haven't come up with the suggestion of the century, you're bound to start getting more and more flippant responses.

It's kind of like the "Merge the servers!" threads getting repeated on a predictable cycle (anti-KB is roughly 1 thread/month, sometimes more, sometimes less) and Memphis_Bill taking the time to build a summary canned response for them.

Rooted (and Granite's) movement penalty (and the -recharge on Granite) is unresistable. There was a big stink about it awhile back because RedTomax had it (and still does) listed wrong (including the -recharge on Granite). All Speed Boost does is add the base +runspeed (or +recharge), the resist effects don't apply to the penalties (if they do, then the numbers tab is bugged but I'm pretty confident that I'm not getting +82.5% recharge from a single SB while in Granite).

That's a title, not a description. But yes, if you want to be glib about it, go for it.

Anyway.

Because it's a valid usage as a comparison. You want a server with more people? Virtue is one example of that.

Get in the global channels and build some connections. Most people are available, just that in the couple hundred online at any moment...most aren't able to see a plain broadcast/request/whatever.

With just 3 people, KBSquad's base was large before the reduction in prices. With just 5 people, UoV on Virtue has the largest "insecure" base available...and could afford the absolute largest if we wanted to. Granted, that's more a commentary on our lack of any other hobby, not that I'm able to actually partake of it as of late. Damn Verizon.

I'd recommend going through Bill's canned response again.

Okay, you describe the Guardian community with no more than two words that would make sense to someone unacquainted. I couldn't.

You're coming into it with the wrong mindset. CoH doesn't really have "tiers". Some sets are better than some things in others but usually in a marginal manner or they trade something out for better performance in one area.

Then again, that is the general definition of what a "tier" is in MMO nomenclature so yeah...

I like it. I'm a fan of my Warmace/Willpower Brute and it really picks up in momentum once you get a hold of the various AoEs and master using them.

Based on your "AoE freak" condition, I'd recommend Warmace. It's got a share of AoE powers and they all have a nice..."crunch" associated with their usage. As for the secondary... Willpower should work out nicely for you.

That "moving around" is analogous to a moving combat stance. It just is their static animation that doesn't actually move their hit box.

As for moving the Mitos around... Well, back before the devs took their axe to the problem and removed Hamidon entities entirely from AE, you could get them to move around with enough Bubbles on their side. Granted, to get that, you had to do a lot of finagling with herding and position.

Just assume that they're only debuffed when actively in the patch.

3%, but it pulses extremely fast, so you're looking at 0.97^20 over say, 5 seconds (just an estimate, I can't figure out the pulse interval but I'm guessing it's every 0.25 seconds), meaning that it's not totally reliable but after that 5 seconds, the next pulse has a *46% chance of applying KD. Low chance but it fires a lot, so it works in your favor.

*Well, it doesn't have a 46% chance of being KD but the likelihood you'll get to that many failed KD procs gets to be in your favor. Gambler's fallacy and all that.

That hold is basically an alpha breaker and conveniently enough, it lasts about...5 seconds, meaning you're getting into the area that your pulses are more likely to KD than not. It may not seem like much but if you've ever played an Ice or Earth Controller, you can sometimes eat a painful alpha from Ice Patch or Earth Quake.

As I've described above, it's a powerful alpha breaker, meaning you want to use it before mobs are running about rather than placing it as a place mat like say, Quicksand.

Enhancement in order of necessity: ToHit debuff, Recharge, Defense Debuff, Accuracy. Lysosomes and franken-slotting are your friend here.