Nethergoat

ALL CAPS means either you're yelling or you're unbalanced, or you're being satirical...which in this case I've discounted as a possibility.

You can emphasize points without coming across like an aggressive panhandler with italics or bolded text.
Or even underlining!

What's with people insising on taking obviously overblown claims literally today?
This is like the tenth time I've had to explain the concept of exaggeration for effect.

Maybe I should just add the link to my sig.

Anyway, there's nobody there in comparison to its busy counterpart, Atlas. And an empty, redundant starting zone is superfluous and distracting for new players.
A game feature's lack of popularity is not a recommendation for any but a fringe minority of players.

My favorite zone in the game was always Dark Astoria.
Discovering it had been re-made filled me with trepidation, which ended up being baseless- the "new" DA is true to the spirit of the original AND has content besides street sweeping team sized spawns. And "old" DA is available via Oro, should my fire blaster wish to relive his glory days of bombing spawns in Mot Cemetery.

So, I wouldn't get too worried.

not sure why you're upset as you just re-stated the point I made with my post-

"I liked it because it was empty!" isn't good MMO logic.

That's my position in a nutshell.
Modern content is such a different thing from what we had at launch that it does amount to CoH 2. The stuff they added in the year I was away isn't even relatable to the stuff I remember playing back in the day.

Now I can see Sam's perspective, that he likes that old stuff and wants it around to revisit. That's fine, as long as new players have to dig around and discover it on their own.

What I'd really like, and have suggested in a half-joking way in other threads, is some sort of dislaimer/warning icon for the old 'legacy' contacts. So it's still there, but if a newer player stumbles across it they're informed that it's outmoded and does not reflect the current state of the game.

No need to disappear it entirely, just deemphasize it and slap on a warning label.

quick note: Blazing Bolt will become a nice single target attack when the snipe changes hit in I24.

MANT is an older character who spent most of his playtime in the period between the two big Dominator buffs- after they changed the Domination timer to make it more than 'once per session for tough boss fights' tool but before the big I15 changes.

I liked him fine back then- as noted, Plant is an early bloomer and in his pre-I15 incarnation I concentrated on his blasts getting domination up fast and not messing with the melee attacks much.

I don't see him playing much worse now, although I'd certainly make more use of the melee stuff.

But if the combo doesn't suit you conceptually, just go with something else- plant is just great all around and would still be terrific whatever you paired it with.

Sorry about that totally un-useful reply, the debbil made me do it. =P


Anyway, in a (likely futile) effort to be more helpful and less internet-y:

it's good because plant is generally terrific and blossoms super early w/ Seeds of Confusion & fire does buckets of damage. My plant/fire, MANT (half man, half ant, all criminal!) is my "best" dominator (at level 37) by performance measures. He can waltz through content that would be rough going for most of my other villains.

I'm sure someone else will give you specific reasons why the synergy is so good, but for me it boils down to confuse everything in sight then rain down massive AoE retribution on their heads.

O.o

I don't like being mis-quoted, and I don't like people making stuff up and pretending that's my position.

If you want me to play nice, stick to what I've said and stop making stuff up.

It's called exaggeration for effect.

And I'm not sure why you're replying to a post that quoted two other people, but I guess I'll roll with it.

IMO it's very strange to characterize my position as saying "the buff isn't that big" since that isn't my position and that's not what I've said.

I don't care about corruptors.
They don't need a buff, but if they get one great.

I don't care about defenders either, although they do need love more than corrupters.


Most players don't care one whit for the numerical structure underlying the game.

It will be percieved as a bonus and nobody's going to lose sleep and howl OMG WHY ISN'T IT ALWAYS ORANGE.....except the min-maxers, who can make it perma if they think that would improve the efficiency of their characters.

This is a very confused, poorly considered paragraph.
Single target attacks have a much smaller impact on game balance and time/reward than AoE attacks, yes. This doesn't mean they're useless, that they shouldn't be taken or if taken not slotted appropriately.

You seem to have a problem with gradations of meaning- "less useful" does not mean "useless".

So by your logic nobody takes a power unless they're going to six-slot it and pack it with max efficiency set IOs?

News flash- that isn't how most people play this game.

Again, I don't care about corrupters or defenders.
And more choices are more choices.
I'm sorry it fails an arbitrary 'elegance' test of your own devising, but I'm sure we'll all somehow manage to carry on.

Nothing for me this week, but I did enjoy their Charles Atlas homage.

=D

digging around all the various servers unlocking stuff after returning to the ranks of subscribed players, I came across a peacebringer- The Vulture Capitalist. I apparently never did anything with him, but he's got a TERRIFIC costume- I should ship him over to Virtue, hook him up with the 88's and figure out a scheme for him to work.

(or, since he's level 1, I can just save his costume, delete him, and resurrect him on Virtue... =P)

I made this point either earlier in this thread or in one of the others on the same topic, so it's unsurprising I'm in agreement here. =)

Single target damage, however terrifically high its numbers are, isn't likely to upset anybody's time/reward calculations. Which is why the carrying on over how EVERYBODY now has to drop everything and roll a /dev so they can leverage this UNBELIEVABLE SOURCE OF DAMAGE is a load of hooey- for instance this change doesn't make /dev MUST HAVE, it just makes it not suck.

It's a definite buff. I expect it to be great on my legacy AR/Dev (and boy does he deserve it after years of wallowing around at the bottom of the rankings). But it isn't transformative and I don't expect anyone outside our small population of min-maxers to tear their hair out rebuilding characters chasing Perma-Snipe.

So?
"it's never been done before so they shouldn't ever do it!" isn't a compelling argument.

It's a nice buff, but nothing most people are going to care about enough to chase. Min-maxers will leverage it, the way they do everything and 'Casual' players will be stoked to get an 'Orange Ring' every once in a while and won't care one whit that they haven't maximized their potential single target DPS- I call that win/win.

Well, the six people who started there because they didn't want anybody else in the zone with them (and yes, that is an actual defense of Galaxy from some long ago threads) can form up a support group, like these guys did.


Generally for the purposes of internet argument, "everyone" means "the vast majority of players" and "nobody" means "a statistically insignificant minority".

I'm not motivated enough to break out the legally binding contract language for a forum post, sorry.

No, I put in in quotes to indicate its general acclaim as "the" way to get past the early levels & its cruddy, painfully inefficient legacy content.

You liked them, great.
Along with Sam, that makes two people in the entire game.
=P *



* this emoticon indicates that I know there are actually more than two people in the entire game that liked it, but whatever the actual number is remains statistically insignificant.

I see no difference in the volume of chat spam between sewer team meet-ups in the old days and DFB now.


Which is terrific- one more area where the devs paid attention to what players want and responded.


This makes me question your understanding of AE.

So they were okay as long as you started in the zone where nobody ever started.

Noted!


The Hollows was its own kind of hell back in the day.
I mean I did it too, because that's what there was to do, but it also sucked- giant spawns, weird level changes that made sending some guy with Hover on a 10 minute trip across the map so he could TP everyone individually to the mission door a reasonable thing to do, etc etc.

I really don't get this sudden nostalgia for the "old" starting game.
I can do without a multiplicity of options when said options are boring, or irritating, or difficult, or tedious, or often all of the above.
In the words of Robert Graves, good-bye to all that.

8 players or however many become AoE by multiplication.

Plus, on a large team you're going to have a variety of powerful buffs and debuffs flying around- a big team will mulch pretty much whatever gets in its way regardless of how its damage is focused, although it will certainly benefit from AoEs.

But for normal mission content one highly optimized AoE character can quickly defeat a x8 mission by themselves- that's what I mean by efficiency.

again:

pre "gutting" 'everyone' still ran the sewers in preference to those terrible starter arcs.

There is no golden age of lowbie hero content.
Back when each origin had its own starter arc, they still sucked and people preferred grinding the sewers.