Montaugh

I think the queue in general will be more useful when its applied to average teaming rather then just the incarnate trials. We need to remember Freedom will have limited chat communication.. a queue will solve teaming issues and replace the LFG flags basically.

You will see the queue used more when the difficulty drops and players are just looking for a good time and they don't care who they team with. But as the difficulty rises you need those that have experienced the content to walk others through it the first few times so that they can start doing the same for others in turn.

During that first week or so that the I trials were opened.. I played on mostly Queue pugs and it was absolute hell. Very rarely did we finish and it was frustrating to continually fail. Now when running the same trials on a group that was established via broadcast or globals and ... breeezey peezy with slim chance of failure.

The Queue is a good feature.. just not a good feature for difficult content.

I'd have to go with the entire Vahzilok storyline. Its not just the singular arcs but the entire thing from the introduction, to some of the side missions that are not part of the arc, and to the ultimate conclusion of taking down Vahzilok.

This guy and group are utterly evil, the entire storyline is twisted and when you realilize that Dr. Vahzilok is wearing a meatmech suit that makes it all that much more disturbing. and which ever dev came up with that concept of a meatmech suit is just wrong in the head.

I had played a science based hero when I first started the game (grav/kin troller) and the Vahzilok were the first villian group I ran up against. Its technically not a storyarc.. but the overall starter mission for the initial science contact plays like one, and unlike the other starting contacts this arc is truely evil. The other starting missions deal with minor things like drugs, stolen artifacts, blackmail overall minor things.

The Vahzilok ...
You have reports of a kidnapping, you investigate it, head down into the sewers to save the guy. You then take all the data that SERAPH has on the Vahzilok to Hero Corp, and in return are given information leading to a lab. You rescue some people being held hostage. Find out about 'involuntary organ donations' in Kings Row. More people are disappearing, and you are once again sent to investigate it. Then you find out that all of the people taken are terminally ill and Vahzilok offers them a means to live forever.. so they pay him and he turns them into zombies. Then you find out a conference is happening and you go and break it up and find a medical report detailing what and how they are doing things in gruesome detail.

That's just wrong on so many levels and this is all for a starting character. Then the overall storyline keeps progressing with the Vahzilok kidnapping people in Kings Row for 'the involuntary orgain donation'. Your first meeting Digger that was abducting the people and flat out murdering them for their organs.

Then the first true arc happens they are trying to posion the water supply and in the first mission they are flat out killing people in an office building. If the plot had worked it would have been easier to transform people into zombies, but also had the side effect of making them more prone to illness as well. (Arc The Vahzilok Pollutant Plot)

On a side mission you rescue an ER Surgeon and find out from that Surgeon that the Vahzliok are using hero organs to make the Eldions. And a disturbing aspec is that the ER Surgeon admires Vahzilok's saying that if he could confine himself to legal research his brilliance could be a boon to man kind.

Then you have the conclusion with the Vahzilok Plague and you finally bring Vahzilok in for what he's done. That arc is just awesome.

Overall its my favorite group, and my favorite storyline.. it has a true begining, middle and an end. Its one of the only true storylines in the game where you have any sense of accomplishment. You feel like you have actually stopped the villian and group in question.. not just a plot of a nameless faceless boss of that group, but the leader of the entire faction is taken down. The story is over so they don't appear again throughout the hero side stuff. They don't crop up 10 or 15 levels later to rear their ugly heads even more powerful then before, and with more nameless faceless bosses. It doesn't dwindle rapidly and lead into another groups as many other groups do (hellion, skulls, tsoo, warriors for example). You beat them, you stopped them, and you saved the day. I'd love to see more villian groups designed like The Vahzilok were designed. Less faceless/nameless groups that you can't stop and more groups that you ultimately defeat as part of the overall storyline for your character.

Its always nice to see things like this happen. I remember Coyote (was spelled Kiyote or something like that) from beta and I'm glad that he's still about in some form. It was a surprise to see him in the tutorial when I finally joined the game about a year after release. Even more of a surprise when I found out what had happened to him.

hmm does bring up another thought.. I wonder how many others of the first 100 are still around... that and that I'm glad Dim Shaft didn't stick as a nickname for Dim shift ((that beta rant was not one of my finer moments ))

Reading the overview..

**Anti-Matter turns on his RFID system in response to the ID tag scrambling. Anti-Matter must now be near a terminal before a terminal accepts a Power Cell.**

That stands out as bad...

I'm betting that wormhole won't work against him to move him about and every other control power will be counter to the overall trial. You won't want him slowed down, immob, held, disoriented, confused, slept and certainly not phased. This pretty much is counter to what controllers and dominators do reducing their overall function. Its a potential concern.

Does the LFG Queue work on your server?
Yes it does, dependig on how long I wish to wait. Servers I play on are Virtue or Justice.

Are you able to use it?
I am able to use it but its faster to go to global channels or to go to locations and broadcast that I'm looking for a trial.

Do the average start times bear any resemblance to reality?
No, they do not. When the trials first started out they did but now they don't really resemble the time. I have had them take anywhere from 6 mintues to about 30 minutes when I finally gave up. One of the issues with the queue is if you get exactly 12 people or 8 people and someone declines...then it happens over and over again continually dropping the rest of the players back into the queue. My gut reaction is that people are intentionally decling invites so that everyone is continually waisting their time. Kind of like how in the past people have wiped out global channels by setting it to private then kicking everyone out of the channel, and endorsing their new channel as an alternative.

Do trial teams formed with the queue ever succeed?
They do succeed a lot more now then they did in the past, but people have learned the little tricks to each trial by now.

What's your experience with the LFG tool?
My overall experience is that I like to the tool and I can see its potential, but I think its going to play out in the long run as the overall looking for group settings have played out. Broadcasts, notes looking for trials all the while staying on the not seeking setting as they either don't care to switch status to looking for a team, or they don't really know how.

The devs can make all the tools in the world, but at the end of the day its up to the playerbase to use those tools and it doesn't seem like we are doing that as a whole.

Gravity control for the current incarnate trials in my opinion isn't all that great. But that extends to all control sets as well as they have been neutered during the trials.

Controlling during the BAF minion outbreak just comes down to spamming crushing field over and over again while siggy repels some enemies back unless it decides to charge them as it sometimes does. Other then that you are helpless to stop the lts and need higher damaging characters to deal with them (at least as a troller)

For the LT's and such.. all your other controls will not work. You can't even wormhole the LTs to relocate them and I've not tried phasing them but that is definately something you don't want to do on the Baf, even if it does work.

For the other trial.. again its meh. During the item gathering stage the last thing you want to do is draw attention to yourself while rushing to the various grenades and acids. And everything else is dying so fast that you don't even need to bother with aoe control powers.

During the boss fights I don't think I've ever seen any of the av's held at all.. ever. That could just be graphical issues on my part though as with all the visuals its hard to pick up some of the more subtle effects like gravity.

I like gravity control, I've been a fan of gravity control since I started playing in beta, but late game at the moment there is no real reason to play a controller or dominator at all. I'm just hoping that the later incarnate powers and trials makes them really fun to play again.

I was glad to see Zelda link to the past, Zaxxon, FF tatics (one of my favorite ever games)and the mario games. I used to have a table top arcade unit of Zaxxon, it may be kicking around in my barn somewhere still.

I was surprised Sega's 1991 time traveller wasn't listed though. While it wasn't a console game it really was a breakthrough game for its time.

Singularity, crushing field, crush, gravity displacement, propel and Dimensional Shift.

Handclap, lightning clap.

Kick

All of Energy ranged slotted for knockback.

Forcefields slotted for knockback.

Power Boost.

Transference and transfusion.

hmm lets see....

1. If no snow then rent snow machine
2. Have snowball fight.
3. Have hot chocolate after snowball fight.
4. Play games and veg.
5. Have a cook out for dinner. some nice chicken legs, a few steaks, baked potatoes, grilled corn, various salads.

*nods* That would be my day as boss of paragon. Just a day to kick back and relax.

hmm three things I would change about the game...

Dim Shift... have it summon 2-3 singularities similiar to illusion's phantom army. This improves gravity's control and provides a nice mixed control set that is inbetween the total control of mind/earth and the less control/more pet oriented illusion control.

New NPC villian groups that are not techy robots using guns, or magical in nature. Its funny but the low level groups that heroes fight FEEL more like super powered threats then the later groups. Outcasts a gang full of rogue mutants. Hellions that make pacts with demons and actually date women from hell. Vahzilok zombies.. ie zombies/reanimated heroes done freakin awesomely. I mean how freaking awesome are those groups and how quickly they die out. The low level game just moves so fast now that these guys are just gone far too quickly and the mid/late game mobs are just hanging around for far too long.

New AT.. either an armor/assault or assault/armor AT so that characters like ironman are fesible to create. Personally I would go armor/assault as the armor would be more about how the secondary is generated. Khledians don't really cut it though PB's do come fairly close.

I've a grav/kin/primal, Personally I like energy for the single target attack (for group play and propel for solo or harder targets), powerboost (to vastly improve controls), and conserve power for longer fights especially AV fights when I may not be able to move into range to make use of transference. The shield I find that I don't need all that often as your primary is designed to reduce/halt incoming damage and we cap farily low even at max resistances things hurt badly. The AOE attack isn't anything special. I'd only use a shield if my secondary was something like sonic or FF as it would be easier to get to the caps.

One thing to keep in mind that with a high recharge build powerboost will be up more often and will drastically effect your control as well as your healing. I know the group I was on yesterday were very surprised to get healed for 690 a pop by tranfusion and powerboosted transference is a thing of beauty I will say powerboosted speed boost is a definate downside (hi have max run speed). With a rad it won't just effect your controls but also your healing and end recovery as well as movement when you use AM. Another thing to keep in mind is that there are very few set bonus that improve control powers, none that improve recovery for your allies so its one of the only options that controller have to vastly improve their controls.

Personally I would love to see a Plant armor ala swamp thing and then port spines.

or

Goo armor. Just think the final power could turn you into Gloop or Gleep actually that would be the best final armor.. Division turns you into Gloop and you make a clone of yourself for Gleep.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that any sort of ally phase.. be it from an aura, or from placeable effect or whatever will never be. Back in the early days of beta we had to do greif testing and being able to phase in any manner any ally just opens up a huge can of worms to either unintentional, perceived, or actual greifing. I'm not saying that used right the power wasn't awesome back in the day but the potential for malicious use was staggering, I was one of the more disliked players during that phase of the testing. At least an immob power was added to dim shift cause that royally sucked to not have one and was pretty much a grant debt power.

Think about using the power as you had it for a moment.. blaster is getting shredded so you phase them out by moving them into the field. great you save the blaster, but now everything is rushing into melee range.. you can't attack outside of the field to control the mobs nor kill them as they rush in so you basically force a close range ranged attack or melee attack within the feild reducing any sort of range advantage you may otherwise have had. In many cases that is the last place we want to be as a grav as all of our powers work from range. Also, what happens if you wormhole the mobs outside of that little phase effect aura? Or, you move the mobs into the field and a blaster tries to nuke from ranged and is unable to do so. I don't think it would work all that well.

I don't think a knockback aura would be an issue as basically you are just summoning more sigularities. They are a purely ranged pet and very rarely does it uses its repulsion aura, most times its a passive effect of a mob trying to engage a singularity in melee that is knocked away. The siggy does charge on rare occasion though but overall they are one of the most well behaved pets in the game. It would be rather amusing to see 4 of them all charge at once though.

They can keep the intang aspect of Dim Shift by stealing a page out of Illusion. Alter Dim shift so that it summons 2 or 3 unkillable signularities similiar to Phantom Army. Back in the day of multiple pets, the 2 or 3 sigularities that you could summon went a long way to greatly improve your control.

Graphically they could look like storm elementals with a repulsion field/repel field around them. Attack wise they would have crush, propel/lift, and GD. Maybe crushing field.

Text: Your mastery of gravity allows you to manipulate dimensions, bringing multiple singularies into sync with our reality. These dimensonal shifts are intangible and are indestructible. Dimensional shifts are short lived and cannot be buffed or healed.

Granted it would make more sense to call them Rifts or Rips rather then shifts, but I think they would add a lot to gravity while still keeping the intang aspect of the power intact and such an alteration is useful to both dominators and controllers.

My first character was way back in the original beta a grav/kin troller.. when Dim shift was a phase ally power, wormhole was single target, brawl did more damage unslotted then slotted propel and fold space was the top power in the set.

Controller Grav is still played to this day. She was my first 50, my first incarnate, and my go to character when I don't know what else to play. I really miss my three sigs running around with me.

My tastes have changed a bit though. I've come to really enjoy defenders more then controllers as well as tankers/scrappers and brutes. I've tried making other controllers but they all get deleted after a while.

Its really fun as a gravity controller... it reminded of playing pre-wormhole. I did make heavy use of Dim Shift though. offensive stealthing I like to call it.

My Grav/kin Primal controller.. Named Controller Grav. Been playing her since I started the game and she is level 50.

Name: Controller Grav
Origin: Science
Level: 50

Fighting 10 (good)
Agility: 36 (fantastic)
Strength: 15 (good)
Endurance: 56 (amazing)
Reason: 51 (amazing)
Intuition: 20 (execellent)
Psyche: 25 (Excellent)

Not bad overall. Technially she can manipulate gravity to increase her effective str though by reducing the gravity of an object.
I used to love marvel RPG. I even wrote a program for my Ti-85 to generate random heroes.

Well.. I remember when the game was first announced way way WAY back in october of 2001. Well might have been a bit earlier but I remember joining the original boards back in october of 2001. I was playing another MMO at the time and people posted on those boards that a superhero MMO was being worked on. I loved comic books as a kid and I loved the idea of a superhero MMO so following a superhero game was a no brainer.

I joined the City of Heroes boards, talked with people and waited with baited breath for the game to be released. The years passed on, where I once had gone to the boards everyday I started going every week, then every month and once every other month to see what was happening. Finally they had a contest for the oldest players that still kept up with the game. I got into the first wave beta testing and since my first use of Crush on a Hellion the only time I have not played or followed CoH is when life has prevented me from doing such. I truely enjoy this game and luckily I have matured more then in the old days of beta.. I remember one venomous post about Dimension Shift in particular towards the end of beta which I regret posting, Not my more bright and shiney moments.

Ever since the game was first announced and powers were discussed I wanted to play a gravity based hero. There was just something so wickedly awesome about the idea of teleporting around and using my powers to crush, lift or otherwise manipulate my foes. Though I did envision the character as more of a tanker then a controller but there was no gravity/gravity tanker option so I made a grav/kin. One of my first characters was Controller Grav. Its sort of funny I chose that name because I wanted to reinforce within my own mind that I was there to test not to play in the early days of the betas but became known for playing the character, created a background for the character and decided to remake her in release.

Anyways I'm rambling on like an old man so I'll end this trip down memory lane with these final thoughts.. I am really thankful that we have this game to play, all these wicked awesome devs that continue to work on it and that I have been here to see the game grow up to become in my opinion one of the best games that I have ever played.

Hover is actually hard to use. You need to be outside of melee to really make use of hover that is impossible to do on some maps. Some powers (burn) do not work with hover. You have less manuverablity using hover then you do with sprint and CJ. It is hard to judge your Z access without a means to know how far away your target actually is.. this can cause PBAOE attacks to miss.

Flight is craftable, purchasable, gotten via mayham/storyarcs and via a day job. With it being so available (and cheap) why bother wasting two power choices on it?

The flight pool has 3 powers all dealing with flight and all of them unstackable with each other. Do people really need that much flight.. to get group fly you are going to be either hovering and using air sup or having two flight powers to travel around with. It does have a great melee attack but does that really offset the other three choices in the pool when you have sets like Super Jump which offer 4 powers all of which are useful.

Flight speeds scale rather then being static. It feels slow early on so you put slots into it but at 50 you need only swift and 1 SO/IO flight enhancer to cap the speed (not sure about swift) but I know with the buffs to flight over the years it used to cap at 3 SO's in flight and now caps at 1 SO.

The best advantage of flight is that its the second safest travel power (invis is the safest :P) and is very useful to those with slow machines allowing them to travel around more easily.

CJ and super jump end up being better picks because you have great manuverablity and a one of the best all around travel power to boot. Great speed, enough verticle movement for most areas, nice diverse pool overall a really good set.

Personally I like the hover/fly combination but if I was building a character to cap defenses I would go with CJ/weave over hover/weave just for the manuverablity on a mission maps.

All depends on the character, a lot of times I don't take either of the powers, cause I forget I can take them or just because I don't see the need to take them.

I've a fire/fire tanker that just hit level 20 last night that has neither sands nor any of the other vet powers. I have an inv/ss tank that uses the ghost slaying axe and I have a dark melee/Super Reflexes that uses sands of mu to get nearly a complete attack cycle consisting of sands, flurry and that other sands like power DM has which I can't recall the name of at the moment.

Protean... I have not seen any AV give a group of players as much hassle as that AV did. One person makes a mistake and you have a seemingly never ending fight. With a ranged character he's a cake walk but for melee characters he's an outright nightmare.

For mob groups.. I would have to go with Tsoo. They are just nasty at times especially massive groups of the yellow ink men.. the mind trollers. They have been the only mob group that has been able to stack enough mez to bring down my tank's mez protection. You rarely encounter a mix of them.. but rather get 4-5 yellows, or reds, or blues and the stacked buff/debuff/mez is a killer, mix that with a huge assortment of boss types and teleporting sorcerers they can be real killers.

My second group is... Devouring Earth.. if you miss that quartz one the ground you can go from easy peasey to face plant city in a matter of seconds. They are actually one of my favorite enemy groups as well though. I just love the concept of them and also their name... such a cool cool name.

speed boost no longer effects the recharge of pets, so the imps don't attack as fast as they once did for a fire/kin that boosted their pets. They still get the movement and end recovery just not the recharge boost anymore.