Mokalus

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  1. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Inazuma View Post
    StJ has inspired two things I want to see:

    1.) Add combos to Martial Arts, as has been mentioned above.

    2.) Alter Dual Blades combo system to be more flexible like StJ.

    Don't sweat the idea that people are already used to how these powersets play, either. These sorts of improvements will make long time players of these sets happier, I believe.
    #2 so very, very much. Having played multiple DB characters to the mid 30s and mid 40s I think the chain system is a neat idea but bad implementation. One of my first thoughts when I got a few powers under my belt for StJ was "THIS is how DB should have been all along".

    The main problem I have with DB that StJ sidesteps is the 95% chance to hit. Even hit capped, using your chains is a bit of a crapshoot.
  2. I have nothing against Kinetic Melee but it doesn't strike me as being particularly noteworthy for tanks or brutes. Without the instant recharge on the Build Up, it doesn't seem to me like it's got anything to recommend it over the other options available, outside of concept. You'll do fine with it, but it doesn't really pull ahead in any area.
  3. For the most part I'm happy with Street Justice, but I 100% agree with the sentiment that there should be a way to preview powersets before buying them. Not play with them, but at the very least show the numbers and animations in-game without forcing the player to go and do research.
  4. The trouble I have with Desdemona on the Underground trial is that it's co-op, and I have villains who are genuinely antagonistic towards her. I don't mean we "don't get along", I mean I burned her house down, sent her to the hospital, and kicked her puppy. It's not the type of thing someone would ignore "for the greater good", y'know?

    I've also always disliked Desdemona for being the Rogue poster girl despite not having even slight rogue-like tendencies in her persona. She's not a rogue, she's a "hero with a past".
  5. The 12th so-called "costume piece" is indeed the pattern, since it shows up in the store separately, but as far as I can tell it can't be used on anything other than the CoT chest/legs, which doesn't sound right at all. If it can be bought separately, it should be usable separately.

    Also adding my disappointment to the pile, but I'm not sure it will make any difference. Haven't bought it yet, not sure I can think of many uses for the pieces I've seen in the costume creator so I'm not sure I will ever.
  6. Well here's another anomaly to add to the pile. I have two accounts, main one has 5 years worth of veteran badges, and the other is only 6 months old. I'm not sure how many tokens I was supposed to have coming in, but I'm assuming that was all correct.

    Both are/were due to renew in September, the new one on the 21st (paying per month at the moment) and the old one coming up on the 28th (paying in six month blocks). The 21st rolls around, I get billed as expected, but no token or points. Where it gets strange is that my main account isn't due for renewal for another few days, but logging in today I get a mystery token waiting for me. I haven't bought any points on this account in a week, and I correctly got all the tokens I was due for buying points immediately so I wasn't owed any there. I also didn't get any bonus points along with this mystery token. Furthermore, my second account is still awaiting the token and points it is due.

    So yeah, I'm completely confused...they're both on the same credit card, which I'm not sure makes a difference, but it still seems more than a little strange.
  7. I enjoy the Underground trial, it's challenging and fairly epic without being too annoying, and I want to give a thumbs up to the people behind its creation. That being said, there are a few things that bear mentioning in case they can be fixed, or at the very least learned from for future trial design.

    1. Level Shifted AVs
    For the most part, the level shift on AVs puts them at a reasonable challenge for the +2/+3s among us, which I'm guessing was the idea. This runs into problems when you consider that you can unlock Alpha inside the trial, and that it's generally an excellent source of incarnate exp for people without all slots unlocked. The problem is that plain 50s are really hamstrung by this and rendered just about useles in all the parts of the trial that actually count. See purple patch vs +5s, never mind the regen/self healing that these AVs have.

    So on the one hand, you have a trial which encourages bringing your fresh 50s and newbie Incarnates, while at the same time actively punishing your league for including too many of them. I'm not really sure which direction you were going for in terms of design, but it would make more sense to either abolish the level shift for AVs (ie. cater to the 50s) or refuse entry to people who aren't at the very least 50+1.

    My instinct says to go with the former, but I feel it's important to pick one or the other. At the moment, 50s are genuine leeches (and I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who has taken a 50 on the trial) and I don't think it would even be possible to complete with a league made entirely of non-level shifted characters.

    2. Confuse in the Avatar fight
    Confuse is a debuff that you really need to be careful with as designers, in my opinion. Status effects will all make fights harder and take longer, but Confuse is the only one that can actually push it in the other direction and help players speed along their own demise. Furthermore, the fact that the game switches to a suitable target automatically makes it difficult for the average player to keep track of who they're actually attacking while they're also trying to keep track of everything else going on.

    It also creates a huge disparity in PUG team creation, since some powersets will simply not have the tools to deal with it in a large scale. For instance, I've taken my Fortunata (my main) on the trial, who I think has mag 22 Confuse protection due to toggles, and half of that is team-wide from Leadership. This is on top of a fair amount of Confuse resistance, and a /Storm controller running Steamy Mist, so for my team the Confuse became pretty much a minimal nuisance. On the other hand when running with my Stone/Fire tanker, with a melee heavy team, the league spent well over 90% of the time either Confused or KOed/running back from hospital, and overall it was just a genuinely unpleasant experience.

    The general solution to this is stacked Clarion, but that leads us back to the first issue above, and also ties somewhat into the next issue below, so it's not always an option. In short, I think Confuse is just a little TOO punishing for a persistent aoe effect, and maybe it should be something like Fear instead, which is also a hugely frustrating debuff but at the very least doesn't mess with your targeting and doesn't enable you to actively grief your team.

    3. Rewards
    We all know the trial awards about twice the Empyrean/Astral merits of BAF or Lambda, which is necessary when considering the length of the trial. The problem is that the reward table at the end is still singular, and people who are in trials for the long haul are probably more interested in the reward table than the merits.

    Maybe this will seem greedy or overly entitled, but I believe it needs to give two rolls on the reward table as well in order to be genuinely comparable to the faster trials. Simply speaking, everyone will always go for the most efficient time vs rewards when working on incarnate trials, and if the new stuff isn't competitive with the old stuff it won't get run, except maybe by badgers and extremely persuasive bored people. I think that's kind of a shame considering how much effort clearly went into the creation of the trial.

    I think that covers most of the suggestions on my end, but maybe others have a few insights that I missed. Either way, once again I want to say good job on the trial to the designers and developers, and keep up the good work.
  8. My honest opinion is that these NPC costume powers should be in the same ballpark as individual costume pieces (ie. 40 points, give or take). Maybe slightly more for the rarer/exclusive ones like the convention codes, but not much more than that. Main reasoning is that it all comes as a single piece, there's no customisation involved, and customisation is the big draw to the appearance aspect of the game.

    600 points is far too much, and I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry that $7.50 is the discounted price. But I suppose some people are already buying them, for whatever reason, so maybe I should just say "no thank you" and leave it at that.
  9. All this sounds awesome, but something that bothers me a little bit is the Noxious/Venomous Gas part. I currently have a Thugs/Poison MM with tier 3 Incarnate stuff, squeezing out every single point of +recharge I can possibly manage, and Noxious Gas still isn't 100% uptime. To give the others a toggle version of it is fine and good, necessary even, but I hope the MM version gets the same treatment. Even if it stays as a pet-targetted power, it would be nice to have ours as a toggle as well.
  10. I tend to play it by ear too, I've got one MM of each primary but I think it's mainly your secondary/playstyle that determines whether your attacks are viable.

    My golden rule is this - any second that the MM him/herself stands around not casting a power (any power, even Brawl if nothing else is up/applicable) is wasted potential. There's nothing stopping you from directing minions while also animating a power. If you need practice doing this, pick up a decent RTS game and work on your micromanagement.
  11. Been a long time since I looked at my Mercs MM, but I was under the impression that Soldiers could take the Achilles' Heel proc too?

    But yes, Mercs need buffs. Not only Spec Ops IMO, but also Serum, Medic AI in general and LRM Rocket from the Commando stick out as being a fair way below par.
  12. Mokalus

    Frequent hanging

    After stepping back to 11.3 I haven't had any problems yet. I can't say for sure if it's fixed, but going by my previous rate I'm hopeful.
  13. Mokalus

    Frequent hanging

    Still seem to be getting the same issues with 11.4, I'll try 11.3 and see how that goes.
  14. Mokalus

    Frequent hanging

    Thanks, I'll give that a shot, see how things turn out.

    Something else I realised I should mention in case it's significant - I frequently run two accounts on the same computer, and it's possible for one of those to hang but the other to be completely unaffected.
  15. Mokalus

    Frequent hanging

    Just throwing this out there in case someone is able to help me with a problem I've been having. When playing CoH within the past week or so I've been getting a lot of hanging problems. I wasn't really paying attention to exactly when they started, around the same time as the most recent patch but that could be a coincidence.

    The game doesn't actually crash per se (no "City of Heroes has encountered an error and needs to close"), but it stops responding at random times. It seems more likely to happen when zoning, but it's happened plenty of times when I'm just running along a corridor doing nothing.

    Given enough time, a generic Windows error pops up saying the program has stopped responding, I copied the most recent one here:
    Quote:
    Description:
    A problem caused this program to stop interacting with Windows.

    Problem signature:
    Problem Event Name: AppHangB1
    Application Name: cityofheroes.exe
    Application Version: 1.0.0.1
    Application Timestamp: 4ddc473f
    Hang Signature: 99ad
    Hang Type: 0
    OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.768.3
    Locale ID: 3081
    Additional Hang Signature 1: 99ad460fdfb857d2ec3e5418085849dd
    Additional Hang Signature 2: e205
    Additional Hang Signature 3: e205a4cfde75564f4f5137a594455ba2
    Additional Hang Signature 4: 99ad
    Additional Hang Signature 5: 99ad460fdfb857d2ec3e5418085849dd
    Additional Hang Signature 6: e205
    Additional Hang Signature 7: e205a4cfde75564f4f5137a594455ba2
    I'm not the most tech savvy person, but I've done the most obvious things already. Repaired the game via NC Launcher, checked that my graphics drivers are up to date (Radeon 5670 running the most recent drivers from AMD.com), uninstalled stuff that was recently installed/updated in case it was causing problems, but no changes so far.

    CoH seems to be the only program affected so far, no other games I play have had any issues. Anyone got any ideas?
  16. Not sure if it's already on the cards to be fixed, or if it's already been mentioned elsewhere, but one thing that bothers me about a couple of the Victorian pieces for females is that the shader seems to be different in the outside world compared to the costume creator.

    Don't have screenshots but it's easy to replicate by making a female character with all the Victorian pieces and changing all colours to white. It'll look fine in the costume creator but when you get outside the skirt will appear dark grey, and the jacket will be a slightly lighter grey.

    This is all assuming it's a bug/oversight with the costume pieces and not a problem with my video card. I'm ok with it being not quite pure white if that's the intention, but it would be nice if the entire set at least matched colours/tones/shades with itself.
  17. I think I can deal with Interface being useless for a week, even if I disagree with pushing this patch to live so quickly, but if it's anything longer than a week it's pretty unprofessional IMO.
  18. Throwing in my opinion, I don't think there's anything inherently overpowered about Interface as a whole and fast-ticking powers. Narrowing it down further, I don't think think there's a problem with the Reactive -res in them either.

    Reactive DoT + rains/etc clearly does a lot of damage, but it seems to me that this is a rather heavy-handed change to Interface as a whole just because of one outlying case. I agree that Reactive DoT probably needs to be toned down, I just don't think they should gut Interface procs in general to achieve that.

    And for full disclosure, my main Incarnate is my Fortunata, who doesn't use Reactive at all, and the closest thing I have to a rain power is Psionic Tornado. If the change is per cast instead of per tick it doesn't affect me much, but I still object to this (hopefully proposed rather than final) change on principle.
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by tanstaafl View Post
    As long as you kept the emails of booster pack updates etc, its not as bad as this thread would lead you to believe.

    An email with those details will get it fixed within a day or two.

    Its still false happy feel good security, and damn annoying when you are on dynamic IP addresses.
    I'm not actually in the habit of keeping emails, but GM Dale sorted me out within 24 hours anyway, so someone at NC/Paragon/wherever he works buy that man a beverage of his choice for me, thanks.

    My post still stands for my reaction to the design and implementation though. At best it's going to create a massive unnecessary workload for Support with little to no upside.
  20. To be honest, I kind of ignored this thread when it first came up in the redname tracker, because the title sounded so innocent and uninteresting. "New Security Update" can only be a good thing, right? So I didn't even bother opening the thread and went along on my merry way.

    Fast forward to today, I thought I might try to activate my second account again, which I don't have on auto-renew. Username and password entered, and it throws up some random security questions at me, which I genuinely can't remember ever supplying to NCSoft, but ok, whatever. I try to answer them, it rejects my answers? Maybe it was a typo...but no, I try again a few times with no joy.

    Then I come here and I find out the details of the situation and just....wow. Really?

    ....wow. I'm genuinely at a loss for words.
  21. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison View Post
    Bots/Traps, lovely build that. I've got one myself.

    Alpha: Spiritual, no question. Recharge makes traps come up more often, and will also enhance the recharge time on your henchmen summons.
    With respect, I have to disagree on the "no question", the problem with Spiritual on MMs is that pets gain no benefit from the +recharge. While it's certainly valuable from a personal perspective, I think there's enough merit in the other choices to warrant consideration.

    Quote:
    Destiny: Rebirth MFing Core for max health. As a bots/traps, your defense is already pretty close to capped and you have 75% resistance through bodyguard mode, so +max HP is the only way to become tougher. You already have Triage Beacon so the +regen one is a bad idea. This also helps keep the little bots from being two shotted.
    Triage Beacon is somewhere in the +300% regen range when fully slotted before factoring in global buffs/Spiritual +heal. The regen cap is something like +2000% I think, which means that a Rebirth Radial + Triage Beacon still might not cap you on its own. Furthermore, the +max HP effect on Rebirth Core is actually quite unimpressive, around +360 HP at full strength, and full strength is only for 10 seconds. Math-ier people than me have concluded that Radial is actually better for survivability than Core, assuming you aren't wasting too much of the +regen due to hard caps (which is mostly impossible on Bots/Traps without additional outside buffs).
  22. Near as I can tell, the pets are delivering the debuff, but not the DoT. This also applies to my /Traps powers, specifically tested Acid Mortar and Caltrops, and I assume Seekers and Trip Mine follow the same rules.

    I'm not sure how the DoT is supposed to work when multiple players share the same debuff stack. If there's only one DoT on the target regardless of who applies it, I'd assume this was a bug. If everyone gets their own individual DoT stack in addition to the shared debuff stack, I would guess that this was an intentional balance decision, although some documentation about it would have been nice.
  23. Well I know there's a bug that I've experienced with self-rezzing mobs, primarily Freakshow, where pet AI will completely ignore commands to chase after someone who got back up. It's possible that a similar bug happens with Siege + Nightstar after they rez for the final phase.

    Trouble is I don't know what specifically triggers that bug, since it doesn't happen every time, and I'm not sure if there's anything you can do about it. Normally it's pretty harmless if it's just a couple of mobs getting back up, since you can smack them down again without much effort, but a full blown incarnate trial AV would be a different story.

    If it's that bug, maybe /releasepets and resummon would reset the AI (nb. not Dismiss, but actually /releasepets). If that doesn't help then politely request to be reassigned to the AVs I guess.
  24. I'm not really one to point fingers and throw blame around, but it definitely seems that whoever pitched the idea for the party pack is a bit out of touch with the community.
  25. I would also like to mention Ghost of Scrapyard, it's not an exaggeration to say that he spends more time running than fighting, seemingly regardless of who or what is attacking him.

    Now maybe it's by design, I'm not sure...maybe he's trying to "stick it to the man". But whatever the reasoning might be, I can't in good conscience call it good design, particularly when he spawns on the docks and is precariously close to either the Arbiter Drones or the black market. It's kind of pot luck whether he'll run towards them and insta-kill himself or run away from them, and missing credit for merits/badges that way is more than a little frustrating.