MarvelZombie

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Come on, noone sees the funny in making a character for his set of anti giant monster, but a character for your mom? Cause she is a giant monster.

[/ QUOTE ]
Sorry dude, I detect no funny here. I think if I knew what an "anti-GM" is, it might have registered... but appending "your mom" to things has not, nor ever will be funny.

[/ QUOTE ]

Your mom!

<qr>

Go outside?

/blashempyoff

Back atcha' BA. We had a great time and will definitely be down for more TF/STFs with you guys. Maybe next time I won't drop my connection and miss 90% of the Hami fight...

Hey guys...I'm "him" (i.e., NR's brother, Lord help me).

The above 7pm - 8pm (EST) start time looks good to me.

Any consensus on which one to run - ITF or LGTF?

Looking forward to it.

EDIT: My global is @MarvelZombie, natch.

<qr>

Steam, eh? You know you're old when....you get sold via Steam.

A few things:

First - I don't really like 3-slotting Hover (thus my original post), but I do it well aware of the 'wasted' 2 slots that could be used elsewhere in my build.

Second - With Hover's base 1.75% defense, 3 slotted it for defense is around 2.625% or so Defense. Uh...yay? On this character - a Grav/Energy Dominater with no other real source for defense - that might as well not exist. Sure, some builds trying to min/max for the defense cap might do this, but I personally think that for any others, it's just as much of a waste of slots as my use of Fly Speed enhancements is.

Third - I prefer Hover to be usable during combat. This includes keeping my Dom out of melee range, and being able to move in and out during combat (moving in for PBAOEs and short range attacks, move out before they close these distance or hit you with their own AOE). The MovementFriction factor for Fly just makes it too wild to control well in crazy, laggy combat senarios, Supression can get you clobbered by high-damage melee attacks, and base Hover is just too slow to navigat the battlefield effectively. Three-slotted +Fly Hover (with Swift) is an elegant, precise, unsuppressed thing of beauty And while we're at it, the current Hover animation is The Balls.

It won't win any 'Build of the Year' awards, but it has real tangible beneifts that, IMO, are much more valuable to my Dom that 2.625% defense.

Edit: Kitsuneknight beat me to it.

Really looking forward to this. I tend to 3 slot Hover and Swift just to get my flight characters up to a tolerable speed.

Any word on what the % buff is? Couldn't find it in the patch notes.....

Contest to create a CoH video....that will be featured in a TV advertisement!

Or not.

<QR>

I'm sure this has been mentioned, but if these are non-stacking team buffs....no worries

[ QUOTE ]
Making missions spawn for a static number of team members is just dumb, especially for the longer TFs. Do they really expect that teams won't ever drop below the number required to start?

[/ QUOTE ]

This is a great point.

I'm late to the party, but I'll say:

1. I'm unhappy about this. I'm certainly no farmer, but me and my very small SG (3 players) like to take small groups through TFs. You can't always get a team of 6, 7 or 8 together on a radom night to start the TF you'd like to play. This is artificially gating TF content. Hamfisted changes like these hurt casual players more than the farmers, who already have a better plan.

2. My faith in the new regime has been sorely shaken with this last patch. Subs are down with the lastest Q numbers, and this is starting to remind me of Issue 5 times where you were afraid of every patch....

Pure Awesome. Looks to be the best update since Issue 5 (er...ignoring the GDN, that is). And that was a looooooong time ago.

[ QUOTE ]
Why could it be happening?

* CoX staff reductions to concentrate efforts more on newer titles (ie, the Marvel game)
* Increased game complexity (that is, issues contain features for both Heroes and Villains; also may include bugs caused by enhancing engine features, such as PhysX support and advanced graphics)
* Larger issues. (Although I'd say the issues have gotten smaller, not larger, saving the villain content of I7)
* Less "precoded" - that is, I have the feeling a lot of features, and perhaps even areas, were half-baked into the game and cut from the release scheduled and rolled into areas. For example, I'd bet that the Hollows and possibly the Shadow Shard were being worked on at least in part pre-release. Obviously PI and the RCS were. Of course capes were a work in progress even pre-release


[/ QUOTE ]

My guess is that you're right on all counts. I've been kind of suspicous that the CoV release brought in far fewer new subscriptions than Cryptic/NCSoft wanted, and that due to low growth potential (and possibly due to having to recover CoV's development costs), this directly led to far fewer resources dedicated to the CoX suite of games. Just a pet theory of mine. You could also guess that early design work on the Marvel game began far before it was announced (say...right after CoV was released?) and that this was responsible for fewer dedicated CoX resources. Or...even both. Or neither.

Regardless....

My guess is that this is more or less what we can expect in the future. It's a little sad - it feels like the 'golden age' of CoH was a long time ago and will not be revisited.

But, hey, free content is free content, CoX is an alt-friendly game, and our dev's seem to have some very engaging stuff planned for the next 2 or 3 Issues. I'll be around awhile, and my expectations have been...adjusted....to be in line with the current trends.

Weird...I didn't see this coming. So post-level 50 advancement will require some form of crafting derivative?

Hmph. Not sure how I feel about that. Guess I'll have to be logical or something and wait for more information. Stupid logic.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Issue 10 is a ways out, but it will bring us an update to an old familiar villain group. This group will have their power center altered

[/ QUOTE ]

Right, let's list all the villains that have a power centre.

1) The Council
2) ...
3) Er
4) That's it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Banished Pantheon...Vahzilok...(shudders)...Rikti...5th Column

[/ QUOTE ]

I think most of you are missing Sadako's point: The leader (or is it former leader?) of the Council is The Center. Posi is making a clever little play on words and dropping us a hint. It's definitely the 5th Column coming back to deliver a little old school revenge....

Maybe.

[ QUOTE ]
Yeah, I'm not too keen on this "Safe guard" mission idea. I will hold my final judgement when it goes live.

I just don't see another war wall defender, time-capsule defense cape mission, or power generator respec tf type of mission anywhere near as much fun as mayhem missions are for villians.

[/ QUOTE ]

I've been harping this on this for quite awhile now, but was a bit surprised there hasn't been much forum-chat about it. I mean, based on the boards, there's a bit of general dislike for protection missions like these (and don't even mention the Stop Firbolgs mish), and yet the very phrase 'Safeguard Mission' sounds like it has to contain a lot of these elements.

I don't mind protection missions; I typically find them a refreshing change. But I'm hoping the dev's don't come up with something that misses what puts the fun into Mayhem Missions: makin' stuff 'splode, and the crazy frantic pace.

As always, I'll take a wait and see approach.

[ QUOTE ]
I will laugh in anybodies face if they say they dislike anything simply because it is no longer restricted to a small minority of people. Just because it is popular doesn't mean it instantly sucks.

[/ QUOTE ]
I whole-heartedly agree with this (and the inverse is obviously true too - massive popularity doesn't mean quality). Several of my friends that are really in to Indie rock invariabley declare that a band now sucks the moment they are signed to a major label (e.g., Deathcab for Cutie). Sometimes they're right...but most of the time they're just revealing some desparate need to be on the "other side" of popular culture no mater what (as this site demonstrates nicely).

Welcome to last month! And the month before!

But seriously, there was a lot of this sentiment during CoV beta as well - almost literally a new series of posts about the lack of new powers, same tilesets, etc...with each new beta wave. And I was one of them.

I'm still not happy about a lot of those things, but I've found enough enjoyment in the new ATs, new zones, storyarcs, etc...and have enough confidence that future updates will continue to round out this game that I've decided to continue past my free month.

But here's where you lose me:

[ QUOTE ]
I think with what we paid for, each AT deserves at least one new powerset in both primary and secondary (in coh, they were all new), at least 4 new zones, and base raids functioning correctly with IOP's enabled, 2 more hero groups, and this WITHIN THE NEXT 30 DAYS.

[/ QUOTE ]

While we may 'deserve' it, making demands of the dev's is in poor form, never works, and will indeed incurr the wrath of the "fanboi mafia".

The good news is that some of these things will come in the next update. We know there are at least 2 new zones and the 50-level cap coming in the next Issue. You can hope that this might be accompanied by a new hero group or two (as it was when CoH added the level 50 zones). A few dev posts have alluded to some new powersets on the design board (shield tankers, for example), so if we're really lucky, you might see those with the next Issue as well. I'd also hazard a prediction that raids and IOPs will be functioning correctly by the time the next issue comes out. So, demands or not, you might get most of what you want...."soon".

Yeah...I went EM/EA too...and I'm not sure about it yet. I've been fine soloing so far (only lvl 8), but I'm not sure I dig the disorient effects of EM over other options (suck as knockback, auras, or fears) - the effect visual is harder to see in a chaotic lagfest, and the fact that the mobs STILL wander away - sometimes up stairs or flying - is a real PITA.

Additionally, I'm not sure how I feel about the defense-based EA set. It does offer an early smashing/lethal resist power, so it seems to be fairly balanced, but it doesn't feel as 'good' as my /SR toons in CoH. I'm not sure how, down-the-line, this secondary set will hold out.

All-in-all, I'll probably re-roll with something else just to see...

This is good news...but I wonder: will this result in players 'running out of missions'? Over in CoV, my assumption has been that they have planned from the beginning to allow this feature, and thus know that they won't run into large mission gaps. For example, the newspaper missions will always be an option.

But in CoH, we already have known mission gaps (around 35-40, for example, depending on your difficulty rating and playstyle). Since we will no longer be running through Frostfire or Atta like 10 times per toon (and thus not getting the XP from those extra runs through the mission), will this create a mission shortage at other levels?

Or...are those newspapers making it over to CoH as well...?

States & company:

Rolled up a new blaster on TC last night and played up to 5. Also dusted off a level 10 blaster and did some street hunting on TC.

Get rid of defiance. Try again. From what I can tell, it didn't help me at all...and was actually an added diversion as I'd try to see when my 'defiance meter' was filling up. Pretty much every time I looked up, by the time I looked down, I was dead. It's a completely illogical solution for the problem at hand, considering our squishy-ness and the fact that we tend to get 1 or 2-shotted.

I appreciate the attempt at fixing our problems, but this isn't it. Even if you're leaning towards upping the defiance bonus or lowering the amount of damage it takes to 'kick-in'...well, I think I'd just rather you up damage across the board and not tie it to our our hit points.

Sorry, but any feature that encourages the squishiest AT in the game to not be healed and to take on aggro is flawed. Most of the previous posters seem to agree with this. Thanks for trying an interesting idea, but please scrap this one and go back to the drawing board, like you did with the inheret Tanker power. I know you can do better than this.

Thanks for listening.

[ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]

YOU DO NOT NEED STAMINA. The "requirement" of Stamina is simply in your head. The Necessity of Stamina has been greatly exagerated.

[/ QUOTE ]
Please remember this is YOUR opinion... please don't qualify it as a fact.


[/ QUOTE ]
I've gotta agree with LiquidX on this actually. Any build can make it to 50 without Stamina; that's a fact. It may be easier with Stamina than without, but it's possible. Thus it's not "required".

[ QUOTE ]
This automatically moves the game from "casual friendly" into SWG.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yikes..let's hope this is the overstatement of the year.

[ QUOTE ]
However, CoH has a great deal of mechanical complexity in how the combat turns wout. We as end users don't see the complexity since the software handles it for us, but for a tabletop game, I just don't see how anything but a d20 system or some proprietary equivalent can do the job. CoH is far more complex than most people would give it credit for.

[/ QUOTE ]

See...now this is the BAD side of nearly every freakin' game out there adopting a d20 system: nobody can even fathom anything else. D20 is great for certain genres, and it's great that once you know d20, you can almost insta-play any of dozens of different RPGs.

However, where is the creativity? Things like Champions, Marvel Superheroes (original), DC Heroes (original), etc... all had very creative, very different systems that were fun in their own right.

I love d20 for D&D and for Star Wars...it works well there. I found the system a bit forced on M&M, and thus welcome a different rule foundation for CoH.