Oedipus_Tex

I would find out what kind of character the person wants to play, then pick something of medium difficulty from there.

My younger brother wanted to play something Mage-y, so I set him up as a Earth/Fire Dominator, for example.

A decent and easy to understand support option would be something like Traps or Cold on a Corruptor. Use your powers when they are available, and shoot stuff the rest of the time. They really don't need to understand how or why these sets affect AVs, only that they "should use certain powers when they fight them."

Willpower is definitely way up there for easy to understand. So, actually, is Fiery Aura. Right about the period they might start dying a bit, Rise of the Phoenix shows up to remove that penalty more or less completely, and "heal myself when I need to, hurt enemies with Burn and fire aura" is IMO very easy to understand.

I paired it with Dark Miasma on a Corruptor and liked it a lot.

The two cones fit well together... Psi Blast's cone is really big. Stare >> Psi Scream >> Tornado is a fairly effective combo. I added the Psi APP so I could sleep the group before starting the assault.

What Energy Melee actually IMO shows is that DPA and DPS aren't as objective as people tend to make them out to be. Just having low animation times is an advantage in itself. The longer an animation gets, the more its damage and other effects would need to increase above standard DPA to justify it, because once the animation starts you're locked into that action longer--no using inspirations, no moving, no activating a heal or emergency power. Once you cross about a 3 second threshold a power needs to hit REALLY hard or else have other major advantages.

Count me among the people who think if a feature is delayed one day because of this I'll be more annoyed than having to occasionally read a typo. Way, way down the scale of importance for me.

In any case, some of these "errors" are direct quotes from a speaker. They are errors only in the sense that the speaker got it wrong. If the occasional Paragonian incorrectly uses terms like "myself" then that's a big shoulder shrug for me.

Unrelated aside: this reminds me of the time my co-worker tried to tell a guest at a party that color blindness was an inherited trait, and she ended up saying "Did you know color blindness is sexually transmitted?" Wrong, yes, but that's what she said.


PS this is also most definitely a topic where "standard code rant" applies. I don't know how CoX implements its text string lookup system. But just running it through a spell checker is unlikely to be as easy as it sounds, and it is highly likely at least some errors happen during cut-paste operations or after text scripts are moved into the xml/txt files with lookup codes, where it is much more difficult to scan and read them straight through and some characters are replaced with symbols. Depending on how CoX sets this up, changing values in the files themselves can be easy or hard. It is my assumption that at the very least color codes have to be embedded directly into the text lookup file. Those lookup files then have to be somehow deployed--to either the server or to the player's computer, depending on how the game is set up (power text, for example, probably resides player/client-side).

This is a hard question for me to answer directly. I'm not sure how much I'm "working against" the game as redefining segments of it. My characters often have silly names and concepts, based on the following assumptions:

1) To my audience (other players) I am usually just a figure running by in the background.
2) Given a sufficient population of super-powered people, some of them probably would be weird/cheesy/self-consciously pun-y.
3) It's possible for a scenario played mainly for comedy to still have some moments of seriousness or gravity.

My opinion and treatment of each individual character varies. For example, of the characters in my sig, Joan of Arkansas stands out for being more "weighty" than many of the others. For me she is like a personification of a heavy moment in an otherwise lighthearted screenplay. Specifically, I think of her like the song "Suddenly Seymour" from Little Shop of Horrors; a ridiculous situation that still possibly communicates real emotion and pathos. Other characters are played much less seriously, or even as background-t0-the-background characters.

In any case, I don't read mission text really ever. Missions where you have to make a decision or talk to some person I just click through without reading what is going on. I read lots of novels and such but I find the story element mostly irrelevant to this particular game.

What's sort of funny is that more people object to "alright" than "okay," which is a much more ridiculous and recent spelling of a term that that was odd to start with.

In other news, I've decided to start writing every sentence starting with a sentential adverb just to mock prescriptivists who continue to believe starting a sentence with the word "hopefully" is less correct than starting it with "really," "of course," or "clearly", like the Gettysburg address just happened last weekend.

Both, but...

...I am greedy and would like auras attached to projectiles too. Arrows that streak fire, lightning bolts that emit psi waves, etc. I'm not sure how well it would work but it would be most lovely.

I did Spines/Ice and colored the spines white like icicles. The splash is still green but the effect still more or less works.

I'm unsure how much I actually like the character at this point. I don't have the Stalker proc so maybe that changes things.

I've said elsewhere that the fix I would pursue for Tankers is to make them explicit force multipliers instead of implicit: make having them around has direct value for the team or league like having a Defender or maybe a VEAT does. Making them personally more survivable, better able to take aggro from ATs who don't the protection (Brutes), or adding damage IMO keeps them on the same train track they've been on forever and share with Brutes. The 2 ATs are too directly comparable and I think the best fix is to push one into being desirable for the same reason other lower damage ATs, like Defenders, often are.

Ideally, I'd like the force multiplication to be linked somehow to the Tanker's armor set. A few that provide AoE +Special would be very cool to me (i.e. as a Tanker you actually make your Defenders and Controllers shield and heal you and the team better!) Whatever is selected should stack with multiple Tankers like any other set would--the lack of stackability in general is my biggest beef with Tankers overall.

As for Scrappers: I don't see any need to change the AT.

It's definitely a finicky mechanic, and I wondered when I played it if it was working the way it was actually envisioned. I originally interpretted it as "make any attack chain with at least three attacks, get a for-sure critical when you use AS," but the way it works is actually much more meta-gamey (to me). One particular risk if you have too many powers with unusual animation times it can result in several stacks collapsing at once. I do personally think that it should be possible to have more than 3 stacks and those extra stacks just do nothing special (since you can't go over 100% chance to crit).

Especially annoying: getting hit with +Recharge (from say, a Kinetics teammate) can actually reduce your damage because it messes up the exact timing needed to score critical hits, or at least makes it more difficult to time.

The main disappointment of the Alphas to me is the ultra-specific nature of some of the buffed attributes. In particular, the various mezzes (Stun, Confuse, Hold, etc) and some of the debuffs (in particular -Defense and +ToHit).

I would prefer that they be regrouped with the mezzes sorted into a single category like they are with IOs: Mezz Duration, period.

In Vigor's case, Confuse, Sleep, and Fear duration are a total dice roll in terms of which sets will have them. I can see possibly singling Hold duration away from the other mezzes since it's a standard mezz across Control types, [EDIT: and maybe the same for Immobilize], but the rest are at best haphazardly distributed, and that tends to create situations like my Mind Controller getting zero mezz lift from any mezzes at all from Spiritual, but my Fire Dominator getting a 45% Stun boost for no particular reason from the same Alpha. My feeling is that an Alpha should either give a Mezz boost to all Mezzes or none at all. Singling them out individually rewards some very specific combinations and shortchanges others.

Yes.

If your cell phone has a Notes feature, I recommend saving them there wherever you are. This goes for any kind of writing idea, game related or not. Write it down.

Another option, if your phone can't store notes, is to send a text message to yourself.

The dog is too opaque for me. Had it been mostly translucent or done sort of like the revamped Shivans with hollow chest cavity but solid legs, teeth, and tail bits, it would have looked really nice. It's not just the "it's a dog" thing that bothers me about it, its that it looks so much like a recolored version of the German Shephard pet power with a cloud on it.

Blasters also get this power, and since its combine with Hot Feet which also makes enemies run, I'm not sure if enemies are running from me or not. Regardless, they rarely make it far...

Oh that's what I didn't understand then--chance to stack, not guaranteed. Is there it shows up on the buff bar to show how many you have?