Nethergoat

Here's the 'attack rotation' of nearly everyone playing this game:

"Uh, what's up? *MASH* Now what's up? *MASH*"

repeat until the mission ends.

There was an amusing series of missions in the 800lb Gorilla mmo that played off the propensity of most gamers to ignore everything about a mission other than what you had to kill/gather to move on to the next stage.

You'd have hated it. =P

I'm not making an argument about the popularity of Twinshot compared to other methods of leveling, I'm saying that people love the characters from that storyline, Dillo in particular, and aren't shy about expressing their affection in chat.

If I'd know my comment about what seems a simple statement of fact would arouse such confused disagreement, I'd have taken screens- I'll grab a few next time if I remember.

The comments tend to arise from "what should I run after XXXX?". someone will mention Twinshot, followed by some shout outs to people's favorite bits. I've seen Dillo's dialog quoted more often than any other in-game reference I can recall.

When the "choice" is between something of modern vintage- anything of modern vintage, incorporating the past 8 years of institutional experience in what makes good content, or the sort of absolutely tedious, embarrassing garbage exemplified by the legacy early game....that's not really a choice.

Or rather, it's a choice in the same way as the freedom to watch Nolan's The Dark Knight or an industrial training film on the proper method of sharpening pencils.

Technically a choice, and there's probably someone out there who REALLY loves sharpening pencils and REALLY hates Batman, but let's be honest.

We're never going to reach any accord here- garbage is garbage, and the game is better off without it. It gives a bad account of itself and reflects badly on CoH. It would be a terrible thing for a brand new player to download the game, have a great time making a character, then log in and run ANY of the junk I ran way back in 2004.

I'd die of embarrassment from the false impression that poor newbie got running Paco Sanchez's ridiculous collection of fedex's, generic kill alls & street sweeps.

If it's a choice at all, it's a bad one- for the player and the game as a whole.

If you're tired of the mission content, hop on the DIB/DFB bullet train- that's what it's there for.

This I agree with- neither Twinshot nor Graves have high replayablity.
But again, DIB/DFB. Plus radios/newspapers, alignment missions, etc etc.
If there's a choice between story arcs you're tired of and something more generic, the game provides a wealth of infinitely repeatable modern content on tap, as it were.


You make my argument for me Sam- yes, the creatives have learned a TON over the years. That's why the old content doesn't reflect well on the game and should be either paved over or routed around.

As with the Skyway zone itself, I don't think anything needs to be eliminated as long as players are consciously steered onto the modern, fun expressway that soars over the disreputable shantytown of legacy content.

in this instance sam knows precisely what he's talking about.

Wow.

Now that's an interesting perspective...

Indeed!

One wonders if they'll meddle with the existing sets, or perhaps just add a new one aimed at the 'insta snipe' crowd.

What you just said is Greek to 99.9% of the people playing this game.

Which is why I don't think most of your objections are anything to worry about. Most players are going to look at this change as "oh, sometimes I can fire off an instant snipe? COOL!" and maybe now they take it instead of something else.

Again, not that many players care about maximum efficiency. I expect the number of players who feel compelled to chase perma-instasnipe because OMG IT IS JUST THAT GOOD to be modest. Min maxers, sure. People like me with an obviously underperforming ar/dev, yeah. But our friend the "casual gamer"? Not likely. Anything involving %'s of this or that leaves behind most of the playerbase.

not exactly in defense of Heightened Speed, but.......it is noticable on my stone brute.

=P

great point.

What a meaningless statement.

Is my ar/dev "perverse" because he sacrificed some powers I liked in order to soft cap his ranged defense? Is my fire/dark corrupter "perverse" because I ignored "smart" bonus choices in order to stack as much +damage as I could?

There are no "perverse" build choices in this game, only more or less efficient ones. And the number of players who spend even a second worrying over efficiency is much smaller than the majority of folk in this thread seem to think.

Going by that definition there are probably more non-viable than viable characters in the game.

I'll stick to the dictionary, where nonviable means "cannot work".

Just because you personally play a certain way doesn't mean anyone else is following your lead.

I hate dev and think it stinks because I've been playing it almost since launch and it has aged very poorly- that doesn't stop it from being a popular choice, because a lot of other people either don't care that it stinks or like it anyway.

The baseline game is forgiving enough that nobody *needs* anything, particularly. Which makes pretty much any build choice you can come up with viable.

Yet somehow all the non-melee ATs got along for years without the invention system.

Weird, since according to you that "isn't viable".

Everyone's free to sound off as loudly as they care to- that's what this place if for, after all.

I'm just genuinely bemused by some of the stuff they're choosing to freak out over. =P

Who cares if corrupters get a buff too?

That doesn't lessen the improvement for my ar/dev. It's not a zero sum game.

I have one corrupter at a meaningful level, the Goat who's fire/dark.
His build is pretty much locked in, doesn't include the snipe & I won't be respec'ing him to pick it up. He's an AoE monster & Blaze does fine to whittle down occasional hard targets.

He doesn't need a buff so I won't be taking advantage of it.

My ar/dev, on the other hand, does so I'll be messing around with his build to see if I can stuff Snipe back in even though he's got ranged defense capped.

Plus, let's recall that this is all VERY preliminary. It hasn't even gone to beta yet.
If there ends up being an imbalance between the various ATs with access to the snipe change I trust that they'll adjust things to iron it out.

I was doing the 'find contact' thing & Stephanie Peebles popped up. As I've been trying out a wide range of stuff since my return I thought "why not?"

I think I didn't remember how awful Striga is because one, there's that really fun task force (Hess?) with the giant robot map, and two, when it first came out it was actually an improvement on what we had. Striga was like the rough draft for CoV and as crummy as it seems now at the time it was a Great Leap Forward.

But yeah, it's just horrible.
I'll stick around for the wedding band since I'm already there, but then I'm GONE.

You can still blow up all the gray cons you want.

The game won't let you fill a map with them, is all.

It's basically saying "pick on someone your own size", which as a hero you should intuitively understand.

Some people like blasters.

Also there are a LOT of legacy /dev blasters out there- it's been a consistently popular secondary over the years in spite of its objectively terrible performance compared to most other secondaries.

Nope, I said what I meant.
The idea that generic 'go hunt kill skuls' gameplay is a better seller than a modern story arc is ridiculous.

I haven't spoken to them per se, that's just from auditing various chat channels.
Which while far from scientific, does provide a more diverse sample than my friends list.

Whatever your weird vendetta against Twinshot, as incentives to sub up go a story arc with an actual story & gameplay that goes beyond "go here, kill that" repeated ad nasuem is a major improvement over pretty much all the legacy content.

You are astoundingly wrong here.

Not simply that I enjoyed the arc (and the Graves mirror arc villain side), but anecdotally the Twinshot arc (& Dillo in particular) is the most often complimented bit of game content I see in chat, buy a large margin.

Last night I ran some stuff in Striga, just because. It was all "go to x, defeat y" style content, and it was complete garbage compared to what they've added over the past year or so. Even the streamlined, institutionalized PL'ing of DFB/DIB runs is more involving and fun.

Twinshot isn't something that holds up well to multiple plays, but the first time through it is a terrific hook for players who're new to the game.

Sam's one of my favorite forumgoers, but I think even he'd admit his very particular, specific attitudes about certain aspects of gameplay are way out on the fringes of general opinion.

I'll pop it open if the mission should be over but it isn't.
But I've played the maps in this game so many times I've developed a form of Objective Radar that leads me unerringly to my goal 90% of the time.

TW will definitely be the next powerset I pick up. It looks neat & I have an axe melee character I've always liked but never seem to play who'll be re-rolled as TW.

You can?

Is that a recent thing, or have I just never noticed because I've run fewer TFs in eight years than some people do in a week?

I will DEFINITELY keep that in mind in case of a repeat of last night.

We actually re-started the TF after that first mission because nobody knew we could mess with the difficulty.