Monkey_King

I rarely, if ever crash, but I can confirm that the cape bug has wiped me out before. At least I assume that's the one crashing me, since it tends to take the whole team with me. The thing is, it's seemingly random what triggers it. One time I took out a team when my caped villain used the holiday rez to revive herself, when that same character had rezzed before with nary an issue.

I imagine that nothing actually changed in the cape code itself, which is what makes the bug so maddening - something changed elsewhere, which is interacting with the cape code in strange ways. Heck, maybe it's a bug that was always there, but up 'til now the graphics engine let it slide, so it was never detected. Computer science is disturbingly like magic that way, sometimes.

Thanks for the update, Positron! The framerate drop is really annoying, but at least you're acknowledging the problem. Hopefully you can get the code shored up soon. I have alts, I can stay out of Grandville for a while longer.

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and you'll get to run around in Marvel costumes

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I don't even understand what this means. Is this just another way of saying "Spider-man and Hulk clones for everyone", or does it mean "tights and Kirby discs"? Either way, I don't know if I'd count that as a point in MUO's favor.

It still seems disingenous to produce a product that is actively in competition with another of your own products, but I really don't see support for CoX drying up. As near as I can tell, the two games will have their own separate teams for the most part, so the important part - having people working on and updating CoX - is secured.

Well, at least he's going to look at it. I can respect "too busy with Inventions" as an answer, there's only so many hours in a day. I'm almost certain that datamining will definitively prove how awful Consume really is, so I say take all the time you need to. It's probably better to focus on making sure Inventions don't break the game right now anyway.

Well, in theory, if all blasters are seeming to underperform, then they'll likely take a look at Defiance as a global blaster buff. If it's just a small subset of blasters who are lagging (say, /Fire blasters), then they'll buff specific sets.

Arcanaville raised a really good point, though. Has anyone ever considered that Defiance isn't for us forum users? As a general rule of thumb, the forumites tend to be better players overall than the average population, with all the number crunching and strategy sharing and such. The stuff we complain about doesn't always get looked at because, frankly, we're the minority.

Given that the game is balanced with an eye towards casual gamers, it seems likely that Defiance is there as a crutch for the casual gamer, and not something advanced players are even expected to benefit from. It's an equalizer for the people who don't or can't go winging around the room, kiting bosses, Aid Selfing on the fly, and making a mockery of the Invincible setting.

That said, there's still an argument to be made that the Defiance mulligan doesn't help so much at the higher levels. Even casual players can eventually reach level 40+, since debt is just a speedbump, not an obstacle. The equalizer doesn't help so much when a blaster's life is considerably more binary at that range. Me, I can survive just fine, but I really do wonder about John Q. Average who might not know he needs to take his epic pool hold at 41 to deal with Sappers and Rikti Mentalists.

It would need to bake for a long while to make sure there's no stupidly abusive combinations, but letting us have custom signature powers in the same vein as the NPC heroes would be a great idea. Heck, I'd be happy if it was just a glorified way to rename/reskin the existing epic pools.

Hah, nothing like a kick in the pants from the community managers themselves to get me to finish my fragging guide. Most of it is written anyway, I've just been dragging my feet on writing out the more in-depth portions. Robots/Poison guide coming real soon, promise!

Getting Aim to apply to a Trip Mine or Time Bomb would be tricky anyway. You have to use Aim, THEN drop the bomb (pet entities only get the buffs you have at the time of casting), and get the enemy to trigger it within that 10 seconds minus the activation time. You could possibly pull it off while toe bombing, but I'd imagine Time Bomb is right out.

I and a lot of other people were under the impression that pool power attacks were only supposed to taunt the person you hit with them, as opposed to the AoE taunt from tanker secondary attacks. Is this to say that Boxing and the like were supposed to have full Gauntlet powers all along?

And Gauntlet seriously isn't working? My tanker was duoing with a Blaster With A Death Wish last night, and was keeping enemies off him pretty well just with lots of punching. He most definitely was outdamaging me, but as long as I kept tossing attacks around I held all the aggro.

Well, if they didn't know before, this is sure to make its way to the tanker global channel soon enough. I thought Invincibility was acting a little inconsistently given that it's supposed to be adjusted back to normal taunt levels, but I wasn't expecting that.

Auto-taunt powers I would assume include the taunting effect that comes from simply waving your taunt aura near enemies. Gauntlet and other forms of punchvoke seem to still be working.

No major performance issues apart from the usual lag when approaching a crowd of 30 characters (client briefly grinding to a halt as I approach Icon and such). However, I did teleport a character on Virtue to Pocket D and lost her for a couple hours, as my client would crash every time trying to load the zone, probably from the sheer volume of people piled in there.

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Actually, when the triangles go away is when a mez attack will actually do something. Purple triangles mean that they are completely immune to mez. No triangles means they are vulnerable to a certain amount of it, which is still fairly high and almost impossible to single-stack.

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Actually, when the triangles expire, they appear again except pointing downwards. Not that it matters, since the triangles are so unobtrusive you can't see them up or down. I dunno, would it really break immersion to have a big arrow over an AVs head?

And now I feel bad for not actually teaming up with my dominator to see if the boost actually worked. ._.

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Personally, I could care less. I have, like, 40 costume changes on my older characters. I'll never go through them all.

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Heck, I get 7 free costume changes for every new character I make now. Doesn't mean I'm going to say no to more, though. Especially since it looks like I'm going to have to do some involuntary head slider adjustments on all my characters using the Wedge hairstyle.

A lot of people (myself included) felt that Safeguard enemies had an unusually high perception, although I don't think any hard data came of it. Sure seemed like the Council could spot me from a lot farther off than they should have. It might not be Cloaking Device so much as the enemies in there being able to see farther than they should.

Jumping on board the unhappy hairstyle train, here. Wedge was my favorit hairstyle, and then you had to go and screw with it. Please note, I can see where lots of other hairstyles were also adjusted to show more forehead, like Glam and Gamine, and they look fine. It's the ones that were radically reshaped that are the problem.

It looks like I can recreate the old Wedge by turning the middle cranium slider way up, but should that really be necessary? Not everyone has enough free tokens on every character to do this, and scale adjustments are stupidly expensive.

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My guess would be because fire is mainly damage with only DoT as a effect. With others you get drains, kb, slows and that. I would think it would be much easier to tweak as a starting point before diving it to the others.

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Actually, that's a good point. Fire is the only "element" in the game that doesn't have some sort of secondary effect, since extra DoT isn't nearly as helpful as the devs initially thought. It's part of what makes /Fire suck so much, too.

Maybe they could stick a small damage debuff onto Fire attacks? I'm kind of at a loss how fire would make something less capable of hurting you, but it's the one kind of debuff no attack set inflicts yet, and Assault Rifle/Broadsword/Radiation Blast debuffing defense doesn't make a whole lot of sense either.

If I'm just picking one, I'd say the costumes first and foremost. CoX's vast range of personal customability beats the pants of everything else out there, and easily is the biggest selling point of the game. The best part is they haven't gotten complacent even despite being better than every other game, and keep adding to their mammoth costume selections.

It's a sign of just how spoiled the player base is that we actually dare to complain about clipping issues or tail availability on certain costume bit, compared to the competition.

My unofficial number 2 vote is for the storyline. There's a palpable sense of your character actually mattering in the game world, even in spite of the game needing to keep things fairly static. CoV has an excellent on-going storyline as MMOs go (even if a bit light on villainy overall), but CoH also does a good job of making you feel important.

You never really get a sense of being particularly important in most other MMOs, including that certain big one everyone plays, and I really appreciate how in CoH your high level hero starts to be mentioned in the same breath as the game's equivalent of the Justice League. There's a bit of a disconnect when it comes to the capabilities of PCs versus NPCs, but it's nice to be able to plausibly think that, were YOUR character an NPC, it'd take 8 people to bring him down as well.

Number three is the badges, since I'm a card carrying Badge Person-Of-Ill-Repute. It's all the fun of loot grinding, without the unpleasant elitism factor. It's the most useless past time ever, since even the sweet accolades you get for badge collecting are strictly optional, but on the other hand it's fun precisely because you don't need to. If you don't feel like grinding for Banisher today, don't. You won't fall behind for it (heck, the reverse is true).

Bases are kinda fun, but only because I'm the architect of a now mostly defunct SG. They need improvement, though, because even I only see them as communal banks and teleport hubs. I want to like PvP, but the known imbalances in the current system are too steep a hurdle for me to overcome. There's just too many overwhelmingly good tools that require no skill to use. PvP victory should go to the skilled, not the people who hit the Easy button at powerset selection.

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So... bases aren't fun, but they made it into the game anyhow. But isn't that the reason why the big skills system never made it into the game, being cut before any players had a chance to see and test it --not fun?

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Bases were supposed to be fun, and in theory they are. The implication is that no version of the skill system they could come up with would be anywhere near as 'fun', even on paper.

Lots of implementations that should work on paper fail to work out in reality. Take original Martial Arts, for example. Likewise with Trick Arrows, Regen, Gravity Control's Fold Space, dominators at launch, mayhem objects that scale to your level, and level 54 heroes in the Recluse Strike Force. Thousands of determined min-maxers can produce abuses a handful of developers would never dream of, which breaks the system in all sorts of unforseen ways.

It's a little silly to damn the devs every time something doesn't quite work out in practice, since perfection is impossible.
The important part is that the devs fully recognize that bases kinda suck, and are trying to do something about it. In lieu of perfection, refinement will do.



Even if you have to sometimes prod them repeatedly to actually get around to said refinement *coughfiremanipulationcough*

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In an upcoming patch, here are a few things you'll see:
Increased EDIT:Maximum ranges for attacks like Blaze.
Some improvements for */Fire (No, no powers were switched out. No Fiery Embrace, I'm afraid. )
Some improvements for Fire/*
A very minor improvement for Gadgets...I mean, Devices! (Yeah, it was a dumb mistake -- typing in haste and all of that.)

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Let Bitter Ice Blast be your guide in adjusting the high-damage attacks. Never made sense to me why BIB was so much longer than the other attacks in the first place.

I certainly will not complain about /Fire getting some love, although I'm honestly not sure what you could be doing for it if you're not swapping out any powers. Half the set is imported from Fiery Aura, so unless that set is also getting improvements (which would not be a bad thing) you'll have to make separate versions of all the powers for the blasters anyway.

A point of curiosity, Castle: how many blasters do take Blazing Aura, anyway? Would that many people be inconvenienced if it were gone?

Well, I guess we'll see. I'm keeping in mind that Cryptic's new policy is start small and increment, given the examples of Archery, Trick Arrows, and dominators. Hopefully they keep following these "small tweaks" with several more small tweaks as necessary, since I'm still of the mind that certain sets need some rather large tweaks.

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The Clockwork are not actual robots; they are hunks of metal animated by the mental power of the Clockwork King.

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What about all those Clockwork guarding what's-her-name's store in New Faultline? I haven't done that arc, but I'd wager the Clockwork King has nothing to do with those guys.

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It was needed because tanks removed the challenge of AVs. Just sit around holding its aggro via gauntlet and taunt auras and no one else had to worry about taking hits.

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Except that's not what happens. AVs have tons of area effect attacks, so the other guys are going to inevitibly take a few hits, especially if they're squishy types that have to stay in close proximity to their enemies. This is true of most blasters, on account of their heavy third attack, and many defenders. The tanker is there to soak up the brutal single target attacks that AVs throw out.

The only reason this change was made, apparently, was because 40 brutes managed to taunt-lock the player-controlled heroes in the CoV beta event such that they couldn't attack at all. This isn't really a limitation that AI opponents have, and I've never seen a giant monster in the past that had trouble picking targets with lots of tankers taunting it. Paladin will trash you just as badly, six tankers or not.

And the other thing to consider. If the tanker isn't hogging the aggro, where is it going to go? The blasters and controllers. The guys doing the most damage, and the guys stacking the most effects in each attack. I don't think I need to explain the problem there.

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Tanker: Not one bit. Designed that way, apparently. But no where in the power descriptions does it state this. So if I never read the tanker boards, I'd never know. I'd just think something was wrong with my taunt aura, and try to add more taunts to it, but then that wouldn't help, and I'd give up in disgust.

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That's the killer part right there. Even if a tanker has Taunt, there's normally no reason to throw it out against a single powerful foe, such as an AV. Going by the information the game gives us, a taunt aura and Gauntlet should be more than adequate to hold an AV's attention. In fact, first-hand experience says that I can hold a giant monster's attention with just punchvoke.

That's the biggest problem. Tankers don't know about this nerf. The existence of the nerf is plenty to get mad about, but stealth nerfing it is just going to get teams killed left and right. When the power description says that all you have to do is keep punching the AV, and then you secretly make that not true, blasters and controllers are going to die.

Considering how AoE-happy AVs and giant monsters are anyway, I fail to see how this was necessary in the first place. I've sure never seen giant monsters be unable to attack because of rapid taunting. Lusca's tentacles were beating on us just fine, in spite of having four tankers dividing their attention back and forth.

For the longest time I wrote off the super strength-using Capos as using some kind of hi-tech gear too, based on their enemy info. The Family outright drops Black Market Supergear as one of their salvage, so I imagine not all their gravity control and super strength comes from 'dine. Taking drugs doesn't make your tommy gun shoot harder, after all.

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Lord Recluse's orders for mandatory Halloween cheer among the populace.

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Heh - the floggings will continue until morale improves.

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I am going to amuse myself endlessly with imagery of Arachnos soldiers on every street corner, intimidating children with their maces into knocking on every single door in the neighborhood until their bags are full.

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

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

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Or the 5th Column. They said the 5th are returning, but "not this year". Well, I9 is next year...

That, or the 5th Column are outright taking the Council back over. That would be a heck of a turnaround, albeit not an unwelcome one. The Council is painfully lame.

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I have seen a couple people get into a fit over the use of the word "toon" and what I want to know is why it seems nearly exclusive to this term. I rarely see people making hate filled posts about the use of the term "mob" in games. It all seems to be directed at the word "toon".

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Besides the fact that "toon" isn't really at all descriptive of anything that we play in this game? It really shouldn't matter what you call the little man on your screen as long as everyone knows what you're talking about, but Everquest slang carries some baggage with it.

I don't think I'm alone in feeling that the less EQ speak we use, the better. Regardless of where the term originated, "toon" hearkens back to the early days of MMOs, which by no stretch of the imagination were a golden age. EQ wound up rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, and thus EQ terms rub people the wrong way.

CoX has a lot of trouble with old Everquest-style thinking, and even to this day you still have fiery debates about the viability of "healers". If you can control language, you can control people's thinking. Discouraging the use of EQ slang reinforces the idea that this is not EQ, and should not be played as such. We should be doing everything we can to get away from that game and improve on its mistakes, not embrace them.

The way CoX works, "mob" gets an out since we do tend to fight actual mobs of enemies - people miss the EQ reference entirely. I prefer the term "critter" myself, since mob makes no sense either, but I don't see the term often enough to care anyway. When people say "mob", they usually can very well be referring to the whole crowd of enemies as well as the single foe, so it's a moot point.