Oedipus_Tex
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Posts
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By the standards of radical deconstruction, the hagiography of Joan of Arc qualifies as a WiR situation. IMO it's just a hopelessly broad classification. I can just feel Jacques Foucault wagging his intertextual finger, absorbed in the human-condition-ness of it all.
There are entire genres, including sub-sets of the superhero genre, where the primary purpose of most supporting characters is to turn up dead. This is the operating premise of horror movies, murder mysteries, and disaster movies, as well as some police procedurals, sci-fis, action movies, and dramas, as well as anything that is imitating (permanently or temporarily) these genres. Sometimes the characters in these stories are called "expendables," "must-dies," or just "plot fodder," but the intent is the same. Having characters in a story with the primary purpose of killing them is not necessarily a bad thing (not that I even think that is what turned out here).
Ms. Liberty barely even qualifies as a minor supporting character. Who cares if she is dead. Lots of other sub-minor characters have been killed before her. -
Liberty was marked from the get-go. She has basically the same name as another character, leading to them being easily confused (strike 1), is a member of a do-gooder family spanning multiple generations (strike 2), and is more of a supporting character than a main one (strike 3). She was straight-up walking death-bait. Especially due to issue #1. Literally the only thing I now know about this character is she is the younger Liberty's mom and now she is dead.
Personally I'm a bit skeptical of the WIR theory. The death of any supporting character occurs in order to give the main characters something to react to, whether that supporting character is a girlfriend, mentor, side kick, little brother, father figure, best friend, lover, or pet. That is why these are supporting characters and not main ones. They are there to support. Knocking off supporting characters to build drama and push the lead characters into deeper, inevitable, and constantly building conflict is an age-old technique. Just look at some of Shakespeare's plays for classical examples. -
In the past I've informally broken the primary control sets down into 3 rough categories, as follows:
Elemental Damage - Fire, Plant
Elemental Debuff - Earth, Ice, Electric
Psionic - Mind (and Illusion, but that's Controller-only)
Gravity is halfway between debuff and damage and not particularly great at either.
Anyway, the EDam sets are very straight forward, not particularly flexible, and contribute direct damage. The EDebuff sets are low damage on their own, contain high debuffs, are somewhat flexible, and in some cases are very dependent on strategy (less so with Earth versus the other two). All of the Elemental sets are very in-your-face with the enemies. The Psionic sets rely a lot on setting up the fight to your advantage ahead of time and/or getting the drop discretely. -
Quote:Originally Posted by DreadShinobi
Then please enlighten me? Psychic Blast was proliferated to blasters in i12 before the i13 pvp bust happened. Between i9 and i13 I played a rad/psy defender in pvp extensively so I know as well as you do that if blasters got defender psychic blast at that time it would break pvp (before they would break pvp a mere 1 issue later). The number of forum posts against blasters getting defender psy blast in its current state were rampant.
The only problem with this is that except for the shorter range, Blaster Psy Blast's significant drawback isn't it's single target burst damage. If they were worried about that, the introduction of an Aim clone and removal of an AoE power seems a very strange choice of edits to the set. If anything, Blaster Psy Blast seems specialized for PVP. The removal of Psychic Scream speaks to a motivation I can't name, possibly that they thought psychic damage would cut through PvE content much better than it actually does. Subsequent comments from developers indicates that even today it is generally believed by many developers that Psi has a significant PvE advantage. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Rush_Bolt
And the second portion of my response does not deal with snipes. The original point being made was that there are powers with longer than normal range. There are also powers with shorter than normal range.
The statement Milady's Knight made that you called "a moot one at best" was that Assault Rifle has standard attacks that exceed 80ft range. The precedent he was talking about are standard attacks, which are normally confined to 80ft base range max by convention, which is specifically exceeded as special features in Assault Rifle and 2 out of 3 versions of Psi Blast. Snipes have a completely different convention and have nothing to do with that conversation. Powers with less than 80ft range also have nothing to do with the topic.
Quote:Don't forget also 3 Damage/Range HOs. 220'
And you're saying having one power with a long range is equal to having 6 powers with a long range?
Likewise, don't forget that 3 Damage/Range HOs in a 80ft power + Boost Range is 175ft. 3 Damage/Range HOs is actually 215ft, not 220. Anything with Boost Range has long distance attacks. This is not, IMO, justification to nerf an entire power set. Especially not something as pre-nerfed as Blaster Psi Blast.
Also, Dark Blast keeps its long range snipe. It's 175ft range on all versions of Dark but only 2 out of 3 versions of Psi. Why? Well, if it's Boost Range, then Moonbeam really should have been nerfed. I actually have a Dark/En but I couldn't tell you what I would actually do with a 400ft snipe outside PVP. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Rush_Bolt
There was already precedent of having ranged attacks being longer than 80'. See Snipes. There was also precedent of having ranged attacks being shorter than 80'. See "heavy blasts" ala Power Burst, Shout, Blaze, etc.
Bringing up this point is a moot one at best.
The powers we're talking about are not snipes. IMO your point here is the moot one.
Quote:As for why the entire set was brought down to 80' instead of the original 100'? Boost Range. No other AT had access to this power. Being able to boost the range of your primary attacks to over 200' (nearing 400' for the snipe) was not an option.
The actual range would be approx 160 feet.
The exact distance of Slug, Assault Rifle's Tier 2 blast when boosted with Boost Range. How is that "not an option?"
PS Blaster Dark Blast also has the full 175 ft range snipe of the parent set, verus Psi's nerfed 150ft range. -
I'm not going to pretend that restoring the Range in Blaster Psi Blast would fix all of the set's issues, but I wish the developers would put this benefit back into this version of the set. It seems like an obvious partial fix, so I'm surprised it is not discussed more often on the boards. The Corruptor and Defender versions of Psi Blast both have 20ft more range in all attacks. As far as I can tell, the Blaster version is the only example of a proliferated set losing range in all of its powers from the conversion. Even the Controller APP versions of Psionic Tornado and Mental Blast have more range.
Psi Blast on all ATs is not an overpowered set. Taking away its one major advantage (huge range) really hurts it. It's been demonstrated elsewhere that the developer contention that psychic damage grants big advantages does not pan out against the actual enemies we are forced to fight.
[BTW just read the title. This is why you should never post after midnight.
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I'm someone who sometimes responds to review requests Controller and Dominator builds on other boards. These are the only two I feel qualified to credibly talk about. It's too much work to filter through the list here to find the small subset I might comment on. Any personal builds I might post are rarely locked down. I change my builds for my main characters every 6 months or so as the game evolves.
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I like /Energy with Dark/ because Power Boost affects both ToHit and Heals, and Boost Range makes the Dark cones longer. Then you are able to blap here and there because most things are rooted and less able to hit you if they try.
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DP is fine for what it is, which is a versatile set with a few debuffs. I view its primary benefit as being the only set able to use knockback on the occasions it is useful, and have higher damage the rest of the time. The Toxic and Ice bullets unfortunately are mostly worthless.
Regardless, redraw drives me insane. Especially redraw on a set with long animations.
YMMV. I think it can be fun to play, but having played it once to 50 I dont feel a big draw back to it. -
A bit late to the party IMO. You could do this with the old style sewer runs. It wasn't quite as lucrative, but very close. I hit 50 on my FF/Ice Defender by getting the last level in the sewers when I couldn't find teams in Peregrine. I got several levels on my Ice/Rad Controller this way too. The "trial" mainly just makes it more obvious that its possible.
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Quote:Originally Posted by Katie V
There's a simple thing you can do in this situation: back up. As far as I know, "Targeted" has a range of 30 feet; if you're further away than that, you'll never be selected.
As far as I could tell I was close to 40 ft back each time I was hit, possibly a bit further. It's really hard to estimate, but I definitely was getting the warning that my Tier 3 blast (base 40ft) was out of range a lot. I guess I could just use two attacks the entire fight.
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Quote:Originally Posted by MikeRobe
Ok oh wizard of the power set... what happens if you slot 2 kb enh in Footstomp?
You get called out for world-class crap slotting. I would probably quit that team just on principle. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
You're half right. You're off a few decades though.
Remember:
The 60's: The "Me" Generation
The 70's: The "Me Me" Generation
The 80's: The "Me Me Me" Generation (Incidentally Spider Ham is an 80's kinda guy)
The 90's: The "Me Me Me Me" Generation
The 00's: The "Me Me Me Me Me" Generation
The 10's: The "Me Me Me Me Me Me" Generation
Pretty sure the 10's should be the "Meme" Generation. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Lazarillo
Possibly a little bit of both. Were you on the UG I was leading yesterday evening, by any chance? Because your experiences are sounding...familiar, and the level of problems I had on that particular run were rather exceptional (I also ask, 'cause we had a permanently frustrated Blaster who I felt really sorry for).
Whether you were or not, I'll share the experience a bit, which may sort of help your situation either way, I hope. This particular run I ended up field-promoted on, and ended up - due to DCs and just luck-of-the-draw PuGing - with very few people who were experienced in the trial, as well as the majority of players not having any sort of level shift. This lead to quite a lot of death and shenanigans in general, compared to many runs, just because you had a bunch of 50s fighting a 55 War Walker. When that happens, Lethal Force or no Lethal Force, people tend to die. When people tend to die, they stop being valid targets for the Targets Acquired ability. So if you have a half-wiped league when it uses it...you can prolly do the math there. Even if one survives the War Walker's attacks, if there aren't many there to share the burden with afterwards, the survivors still get fragged. Hence, it can be pretty difficult to recover from a wipe in those fights.
Of course, luck does still factor into it, yeah. On my league yesterday, I was getting Targeted, oh, maybe around 1/3-1/2 the times I saw it come up. But there was one guy who, based on his chat claims at least, was literally getting hit every time. I wasn't doing anything "right" and he wasn't do anything "wrong" in this case, that's just the way it happened.
So yeah, like I said, luck and strategy (and level) apply in equal measure. On a good league that's got plenty of level shifts, he'll go down before he can use the powers more than three or four times max, and the target choices will be more spread out. But even then, it's possible to just be particularly hated by the big guy.
Quite possibly yes. To say I was a bit frustrated is an understatement. The leadership was fine actually, its just that I don't think its possible to explain these mechanics to a group of 24 people in a situation like that. Even after reading explanations of what is going on in that fight, I'm still not sure I totally understand what I'm supposed to be doing.
My general experience with the Underground is that either the bosses drop in around a minute or they turn into meat grinders that put characters on a death train. The trials have been particularly unkind to the Radiation/Fire Blaster in question; in that particular run, he died 22 times. Some of that I was sort of okay with (he has RoTP) but mostly it was due to getting one shotted by bosses, which, I hate to say, is pretty much the opposite of fun.
Anyway, thank you for leading, sorry for my whining. Maybe one day I will try the trial again. It is useful for unlocking incarnate slots if nothing else. But I think I will have to play it on a day when I'm detached enough from the game that I don't care about whether what I'm doing is fun, and I'm just doing it for the utility of getting the guaranteed Rare/Very Rare (assuming the team can complete the trial). -
Thanks guys.
Next question: when you are on a team as a Blaster and getting Targetted every 30 seconds or so and running a death train to the hospital, are you just on a badly strategized league? Looking at the situation I don't know what else I could have done. If I remember right we never even got the boss below 90% HP. Previous teams I was on had fewer problems, but I've never really understood what was going on in this (or any) of these fights.
I have to admit after this experience I am very close to giving up on Incarnate content completely and going premium. That's frustration talking, but man is dying over and over and over because you didn't follow the script infuriating. -
My take on Knockback is that it is cool looking and that I would hate to significantly remove it from the game because it is iconic to the super hero genre. However, I also believe Knockback is inherently flawed, often disruptive, rarely helpful in a team environment, and probably unfixable. I think we should be able to either turn it off or change it to Knockdown.
Personally I don't prefer the Null the Gull option. I'd rather a toggle in the vein of Dual Pistols. There are a few rare occasions when I really do want KB to possibly trigger.
In any case, even if we get a toggle/Null option/nothing, I think knockback still needs more reasons to use. One possibility is that any time someone suffers from an uncontrolled fall (a fall from knockback, versus deliberately jumping from a high point) they should take massive damage. At least give knockback users that much. Any utility tied to knockback should be connected to actually manuevering the enemy from one location to another; if it's just extra damage attached to the attacks, it will mean it will still be more ideal to just -kb the enemies and wail on them with the power. -
I'm hoping someone can enlighten me on this. I've played the Underground trial 3 times and have not figured this mechanic out.
On my most recent run of the Underground, it was explained to me if that if I get "Targetted" by a giant War Walker (identified by the word "Targetted" under my health bar) that I should back away from the rest of the team.
Well, I did that. The problem is, on the Blaster I was playing on the most recent instance, no matter where I stood in the room--close, far, behind a pillar, anywhere--this power killed me in one shot.
Is it possible to survive? Are the instructions just wrong? In 3 runs of this trial I have racked up an impressive (read: ridiculous) number of deaths due to these kind of mechanics and am unsure what to do about it. -
Whatever criticisms can be made of Death from Below, I still find it much more fun to play through than any of the "incarnate" level trials.
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Any MMO built with consoles in mind.
Especially if it limits you to three colors per character.
Especially if everyone has the same face. -
I don't think it does Containment either. It's not necessarily a psuedo-pet issue because Ice Storm does do Containment. Spring Attack just doesn't get any specials that I know of (crits, containment, scourge, etc).
It's mainly useful for the knockdown and getting into range quickly. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Santorican
The issue that I find with CoH is that it doesn't take a lot of skill to play even with SO's. Its a "point and shoot" MMO
I actually don't really agree. I think CoH has a lot more going on in it than most other MMOs.
IMO the thing about CoH is the original designers were creating Gauntlet when they thought they were making a Diku MUD. It turned out that the unintentional game was better than the intended one.
In most other MMOs, a fight goes like this: find a spot kind of where I'm only around a few enemies. Pull one guy using a standard opener. Cycle through attack chain until dead. Hope I don't pull anyone else; if I do, maybe die.
CoH fights are much more strategic in context. However, that doesn't really start to show until you get into fights with lots of enemies. In a way these large crowd fights can be thought of like a fairly complicated fight against one enemy, where each crowd is basically its own organism. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Trying to put Rogues in City of Heroes was a mistake from the word go, because the game system does not support stealthy gameplay with AI being as omniscient as it is. Building an AT to require hiding in order to function, therefore, is tantamount to building an AT that is inherently inferior. Castle understood this when he gave Stalkers better ability to scrap it out like actual fighters, but even he didn't go far enough to fix the actual bugs that plague the AT. It took a completely unrelated patch to fix corpse blasting and lend a hand by proxy.
I agree with you for the most part.
My take on Stalkers is that what really limits them is power selections. Their focus on single target attacks does not, IMO, make up for the loss of AoE, mainly because they are not particularly great in the main situation where you fight a single target enemy (AVs and Elite Bosses).
This is why I suggested Stalkers get access to -Regen in their attacks. I think that that one change would be enough to significantly alter the power of the AT. In my mind there should be absolutely no question about which AT has the best chances to down a single target. And the huge loss in AoE power needs to be made up for somewhere meaningful.
I really don't think support or control powers are really what is needed for Stalkers. I think that they need to be the go-to AT for downing difficult single targets. Everything about their design points in this direction except for a lack of -Regen. It's a little strange to me, to be honest, that Corruptors and Controllers make better single target assassins than the AT with "assassin" in its title does.
[As for the support idea, IMO that applies better to another (IMO) troubled AT: Tankers. I feel that the Tanker APPs should have included ally-castable powers from the buff sets and that Tankers should essentially fill a "Paladin" role. Example powers I'm refering to are the Cold Dom Ice shields, Force Fields, Speed Boost, AM, Thermal shields, Fortitude, etc. The bonuses would not be even up to Mastermind level. I think this would turn around the AT. For some reason the ally castable buff powers are the one type of power missing from APPs altogether, and IMO Tankers are really the AT that should have access to a version of them.] -
Interesting suggestion.
My take on Stalkers would be to give them -Regen in a couple of attacks. They specialize in single target damage. They should be able to deal the debuff that is primarily needed for single target fights.
I also think Stalkers should have a way to detoggle or prematurely cancel or hinder Purple Triangles. Not completely wipe it out, but make them less of a factor. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Snow Globe
Sorry, after being on several versions of this trial where the SRWW & LIWW were not timed, and with the broken Avatar timer, the fail conditions are needed to prevent people spending an hour on those sections fruitlessly.
As opposed to spending an hour and getting kicked out at the end? Sorry, can't agree on that one. The timers are my most hated "feature" of this content. It's not like you're trapped and unable to quit.
In any case they did make some major changes to the trial recently I didn't know about, including this one:
That final battle is still really going to suck though.Quote:The Underground Incarnate Trial will always award a Rare or Very Rare component after successful completion of the Avatar of Hamidon encounter for players who are present for the entire event's duration.