Lunar_Darkness

Oh, great, Zombie Man, now people are going to come to expect league leaders to be like professional football coaches, reviewing hours of footage each week for strategy.

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I keep seeing posts like this, and I guess a lot of people are still just uninformed. I have a personal SG base, just my nine alts on Virtue are members, and I've been working on it for several months. Great fun, actually.


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Now do this with a single *character*. Not all of us have spare alts to throw into it (most of my other alts are already committed to SG ... I want to have a private base for one, but not at the expense of my other characters' supergroups).

Reading through the thread, I see some of my concerns have been mentioned; but not all, so I'll give my views.

1) Documentation. I don't find the base editor intuitive at all, and I have never found really good documentation at it. When I wanted to add a teleporter, I had to search the forums for a basic recipe to get it working; and subsequently I made somebody else in my SG do the architecting. (And I *really* don't know what to do with salvage... it seems so complicated)

2) Piecemeal, not all or none. The above documentation is not helped by the requirement that the base be consistent at all times; with the costume creator, I can make a number of changes and see how they work and how expensive they are before I commit. And because I can earn multiple slots, I can always keep my original costume, and save changes to a scratch costume. (I also can try out costume changes even before I can afford them, since I pay only if I commit to it -- I wonder what I could do with a secure massive plot, but I have no way to know if it's worth grinding for it).

3) Commitment. But with bases I get only one base per SG, and they're a lot more complicated to write down and save for later. If I want to waste time at 3am editing the base, and then get opinions from my SG the next day... well, I have no idea I'd be able to restore it if they don't like the aesthetics. And thus I don't.

4) Cost. It's not so much the individual pieces' cost that disturbs me, but the upfront cost of expanding (which ties in to the piecemeal one edit at a time above). If I want to substantially rearrange the base (even just to swap some rooms), I have to either delete and re-create rooms, or upgrade to a much larger plot. Of course, my SG (while earning enough for decently functional base) cannot afford to get to a larger plot -- which also means we can't do the CoP, because we haven't the room for a vault. The limited plot sizes stink.

Tied in with that is the idea that prestige is tied in to the SG I belong to. I have a few characters who I might experiment with the base system in individual bases, where I'm not going to screw everything up for everyone else. But they don't have the prestige to do anything right away, so they're more valuable joining a friend's SG and letting -them- experiment, using the bonus prestige for new members. Inherently the system limits who will be able to experiment with a base.

The ambush will come even with the AV at full health?

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As an aside, every single bug I have ever reported since CoH beta has been fixed (or at least acknowledged as a known bug with a fix in the works). I have never used /bug for an issue I have found and had it result in nothing.


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Er, so you don't report textual bugs in the dialogue/mission text? Or maybe they've decided to just ignore the /bugs I send about typos, misspellings, etc.

It'd be sort of neat if there was a public bug log (bugzilla style) that people could point to, attach demos/testcases, etc. The forums and PMs feel a little haphazard as a bug reporting & discussing mechanism (and /bug is a joke, if only for its very limited text area). But given how hard it would be to set that up for a closed-source product, I can see why it could be a resource drain instead.

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He's in one of the later Portal Corp missions, in an alternate world conquered by the Thorns. This is the only place to defeat him in City of Heroes, and the only way to receive a badge.


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Not true. Baphomet appears in one of the later Shard TFs (I'm pretty sure it's the 4th one, from Faathim the Kind; you face two psi-using AVs (Mother Mayhem and Malaise?), Baphomet, and Nemesis?, before the end.

I think someone in my team earned the badge off of that version of Baphomet, too, so it counts.

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He's in one of the later Portal Corp missions, in an alternate world conquered by the Thorns. This is the only place to defeat him in City of Heroes, and the only way to receive a badge.


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Not true. Baphomet appears in one of the later Shard TFs (I'm pretty sure it's the 4th one, from Faathim the Kind; you face two psi-using AVs (Mother Mayhem and Malaise?), Baphomet, and Nemesis?, before the end.

I think someone in my team earned the badge off of that version of Baphomet, too, so it counts.

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Its precisely because force bolt does practically no damage that its hard to say it favors anyone on the basis of damage.


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I wanted to apologise for having made a mistake there; somehow I had gone through the entire thread and come away with the impression that knockback -was- better for controllers than it was for defenders. So I thought the claim of force bolt's arguable equality was especially ludicrous -- when I was the one being ludicrous.

I respect your arguments in many other areas, Arcanaville, but I honestly wonder if you know what you're talking about here. The clearest proof is this:
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FB: questionable, arguably equal


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Force bolt is *not* a damage power; and moreover, for any damage power in the defender primary, controllers will typically outdamage defenders with it. My /ff controller, when fulcrum shifted to the damage cap, does 12 damage or so with force bolt. (That's not a typo; I mean twelve points of damage). I'm assuming a defender would do 15 points of damage or so, then, or some similar multiple of 12. However, I use it after I blind them -- so I really do 12+12=24 points of damage, exceeding defenders. See how carefully _Castle_ had to phrase his statement to try to make it sound balanced?

Anybody who says that force bolt is better for defenders had better actually present that argument; it's a laughable claim otherwise. And others have pointed out your mistake re force bubble.

The argument that is being made is very straightforward. The proofs for each lemma may be a bit problematic, but the overall argument is clear (and the lemmata you quibble at are incredibly plausible -- you can quibble that back-of-the-envelope calculations aren't exact, but they're pretty darn good at getting the idea across).

As long as you're going through there, Castle, could you say something about dark servants not being permanent? It's mentioned at the end of the Defender Issues post, but it's never been adequately gone into, that I've seen.

Statesman's response on that was inaccurate or misleading (viz, it used to be possible to have multiple dark servants at once; this was made so a new servant replaced the old one at the same time that controllers' pets were so changed; statesman claimed that controllers received perma-pets because they couldn't have multiple out; but he didn't say why that argument didn't apply to dark defenders).

If controllers were compensated for a reduction in abilities like Statesman suggested, why shouldn't dark defenders? If the perma-pet was a quality of life issue, why can't dark defenders get the same behaviour? It's a pain to have to constantly remember to re-invoke a servant... they still last longer than any non-AV battle, and are perma without any slotting, so dark defenders have to be balanced around possibly having them up all the time anyway.

I don't expect you to go and change whatever decisions were made, but I would love to get an actual responsive answer about why servants were left in the chill of night, while the other pets got loving. Is it because of Masterminds?

I verified, last respec trial I was on, that the dance party bartender would talk to me and sell awakens.

Wow. Now I do feel silly... of *course* Gilgamesh would go undercover to seek out Jackton Turner!

But seriously, I enjoyed reading your articles; I thought some of them worked out really well, and some didn't, but they were always enlightening and a nice read. I hope your new digs are comfortable!

Thank you, Statesman. Between the resistance inspirations and this, I do feel that you guys are evaluating the defense-based sets. The actual numbers I'll have to go test, but qualitatively, this seems like a very helpful thing. (For those whining it won't affect PvE, I think it may very well; my /sr scrapper hasn't run into the stacked quicksands yet, but it seems like most villain gun attacks have a def debuff that can stack up pretty quickly).

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The major disparity?


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Your comparisons on fire vs ice is quite spot-on, but I disagree. I think one of the major disparities is inspirations. There are a few times in the game most dangerous for someone tanking -- the initial alpha strike, collecting the herd (if herding), and dealing with AVs. I've been paying attention on live to how other tankers play (my only significant tanker is a 26 ice tanker), and I notice they fairly routinely use purple inspirations at the most dangerous times.

If you're talking about a comparison of RES versus DEF, the devs have to face that every character in the game can carry around a "force field lite" in their inspiration tray. They'll run through it too fast for constant use, but for those dangerous moments, the ones where ice tankers fear to tread? They'll have defenses at least as good as all the ice armors combined.

If there were simply resistance inspirations available, then it'd be easier to balance the sets. But until then, ice needs something a little more.

Edit: I know my ice tanker isn't very high level. Right now on live, in fact, I feel pretty darn tough, even without using EA. But when I'm with other tankers, I see how they can layer their total defenses, and I'm forced to just do more of the same.

No, Statesman, just say NO to Stamina!