Oedipus_Tex

Earlier in the thread I talked a little about how, in an ideal world, if a nerf to Seeds ever did happen it would correspond with a general buff to the AoE Holds. I made a chart showing most of the major revisions I've suggested to make them easier to correlate. I did not include every single power available to every Control set as that makes the view more or less useless.

Values in Yellow boxes are the ones I suggest changes to, with the original value in parantheses.

Note that I didn't include Earth Control in the AoE Hold changed. That's because Earth Control got only half the nerf of the other holds during the changeover years ago. It could be debated, but IMO if Volcanic Gasses drops below 240s recharge, it should have to give up some of its currently very generous 60s duration.

The values listed are the Controller values since those are much easier to work with. Dominator values increase or decrease based on their modifiers.

PS I just noticed Ice Slick says 8% chance of knock 10 time per second. That should be 8%. There may be other small errors I didn't pick up on.

How about Dark Melee/Bio Armor Stalker, with the carapace animation overlays hidden? If your vampire is of the "shapeshifter" kind, you could tie the different adaptations to different forms (wolf, bat, etc). DNA Siphon works on defeated enemies as well as live ones.

The most bizarre thing about SoC is that it is an AOE Confuse with the same exact duration as Mind, Dark, and Illusion's single target Confusion power. The number wasn't pulled out of the air, just out of a very inappropriate place.

Mass Confusion draws from that number as well, but has an infamous recharge of 240 seconds to SoC's 60 seconds.


I lied though. That's actually not the most bizarre thing about it. The most bizarre thing would be when you start comparing its base duration to the slotted durations of other powers:

The base duration of Seeds of Confusion is better than any other AoE hard control power I can find in the game slotted with 2 lvl 50 IOs.** The exception is Synaptic Overload, which it is merely better than in general.

Seeds is also slightly longer in duration than any single target Hold power in the game slotted with 2 SOs. Unslotted, it is almost identical to most 2-slotted Controller single target holds. You could literally not slot Confuse duration in Seeds at all and get the same duration as the supposed standard slotting for a Controller's hold. On a power like this, that's not just problematic, it's [fill in the blank with whatever synonym you like that means "overpowered" since so many do not like that word].

There are only a handful of powers in this game I'm content to call [term above], and Seeds is one of them. Whether they actually fix it or not isn't my call, but I know where I'd stand if I were looking at this set in a beta and they asked whether it was working as it should. And that's something I'll be forced to point out with every control set and possible buff to Controllers and Dominators, because not doing so, and allowing any other set to use Plant as a template, would IMO be tantamount to lying by omission. The power is just that far out of line.


[**On a technical note, after writing this, I found a few exceptions. EM Pulse and EM Arrow are two. They are merely as good as SoC when slotted with 1 Hold SO. However, each has a 300 second recharge.]

The only thing I am thinking is "Holy crap, between this and the KB2KD proc, my Radiation/Fire/Fire Blaster just got the biggest buff of any character I've ever played."

Although I'm still waiting to see if he outperforms a Corruptor relative to the loss of support abilities.

I'm also operating on the assumption that the 22% ToHit to get permasnipe won't be the final plan, which may turn out to be too big a gamble.

But holy-nuking-Bonfire, this character will be putting out insane damage, and quite a bit more safely.

I don't know how many characters I incarnated. None got all the way to T4. One only has 1 T3 and the rest T2s even though he has every slot unlocked and has for some time. On that one I just gave up because the thought of spending any more time getting destroyed on trials only to get more Commons and Uncommons is depressing. That's the only character I've ever semi-retired simply because of bad gear rolls, something I didn't think was possible in CoX until trials came around.

All I can really say is that I don't really spend much time playing the trials. I'll be point blank here: when I think about the incarnate system, I really want to log off and play something else. The incarnate abilities and the way they are acquired remind of the kinds of things some players pay real life cash to acquire on the blackmarkets of action rpgs.

For me it's not so much about the trials themselves but about the strangehold they on advancement. As missions they are okay. As content that needs to be run over and over and over and over and over I really dislike them. So I just stopped.

I feel the same way about the "Summer Blockbuster" event FYI. I never did get the procs I needed. Rather than run those I just play an alt, or failing that, another game.

I wish the game would stop bribing us into content by putting a highly desired reward behind a very narrow band of content. It may get some players to play it, but it does the opposite to me. It just makes me wonder why I am wasting my time doing this when I could play something that is actually fun.

I don't mean to sound bitter, but IMO its threads like this one that delay releases. It's not like they are coding every bit of this game on Wednesday thru Friday, testing on Monday, and shipping Tuesday. The developers are having to code things way ahead of time, then put them in a queue for release, so that people don't get angry about not getting anything some weeks, even when they could have gotten it much faster.

If I had my way, Levitate would disappear entirely, and it would be a toggle power that gave you limited control over the enemy using the Mastermind panels.

If you wanted the enemy to stand somewhere, you would tell them to stand there.

If they're worried about the balance of it, it could require that the enemy currently be/remain confused to work.

IMO swapping out Short Circuit's animation (3s) for Irradiate (1.07s), Heart of Darkness (1.67s) or Power Sink (2.07s) would help Electric immensely.

I don't agree with turning SC into a single target blast. IMO the power is somewhat unique to Electric, just needs to be more effective, particularly in cast time. Someone will probably correct me for being wrong, but SC is one of the only 20ft radius AoE blast powers I can think of, Irradiate and Psionic Tornado being the other major examples. The "rain" powers have a radius of 25tho, so maybe it's feasible to have SC (and Irradiate too) bumped up slightly to 25ft, given their added risk.

I'm not sure I understand yet what's being described.

If what you mean is that one character slot could essentially host two characters with the same name and badges, but a different AT, powersets choices, IOs, and levels, then I probably would use it. That actually wouldn't be any more or less overpowered than having alts.

If the one character slot had identical levels, so that getting one of the two configs up to 50 automatically brought the other to 50, I would probably be against it.

There is absolutely no way to avoid nerfs in a game. This is a truism. Some people think that if you just never lower any values, ever, no matter how outrageous they are, that you've avoided nerfs. But this is not true. What you did in that situation is nerf everything but the set that got the overlarge advantage. Power is entirely relative.

You lower value sometimes because NOT lowering them unstabilizes the rest of the game. You have to be careful to go gun ho, but the absolute paranoia this game has about them is the source of a wide number of its problems.

There are some players who believe no power should be lowered in value under any circumstances, ever. That's fine to me, except that nearly always these are the same players who complain about this set and that set not performing to expectations. Quite frankly, my opinion is that anyone who is against nerfs to the point of absolution has no room to request buffs to any power whatsoever.

Here is another way to look at role playing.

Back in the dark ages that were the early late 1980s and early 1990s, we didn't have nice graphical games. One thing we did have were MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) that were basically like somewhat dialed back versions of the MMOs that would appear later.*

In a MUD, you didn't have a player avatar for people to watch perform actions, you had to type them yourself. So, to communicate, you would type a lot of things like "smile," "hug," "bow," "laugh," etc, that in City of Heroes would seem excessive. Some of these games let you write a short description of your character, but identifying characteristics were lacking. So to compensate, you would perform a lot of actions, give your character a distinctive speaking voice, and develop mannerisms to help establish the "feel" of the character.

When MMOs became popular, "talking" became much more difficult. The text pours into a small window (in most games). And despite being heavily based on MUDs initially, MMOs quickly gravitated to a game model that more closely resembles a single player game that happens to involve a lot of people. Interaction and (intentional) drama between players became significantly less important than interaction with the environment, so to speak. A player's central basis for interaction became "quests" or "missions," and no longer relationships and intrigue with other players.

Roleplayers in City of Heroes are basically harkening back to an earlier era (whether they were participants in it or not back then). Text games had a significant "pretend you're someone else in a chat room" type of feel to them, and that's basically what these people are doing.

As for the sexual overtones some players bring to their roleplay, just chalk that up to some people wanting a type of fiction that's more intense than others.


[*I say "somewhat dialed back" because there are many things that were accomplished in text games MMos have never duplicated. As early as the mid 1990s, a few games existed that included injuries like lopped off limbs, poked out eyes, destruction of nervous systems, along with the ability to apply "first aid" to stop bleeding, and systems for ultimately healing the wound (sometimes first resulting in a scar which might also need aid). Some of the text games that are still around are extremely complex compared to MMOs. Essentially, an MMO typically dials back personal relationships and complexity in order to focus on action. Neither approach is really "better" in the end, although I often wish MMOs would look back at their MUD roots and actually give Role Players tools that would facilitate more interaction, like better control over the camera or even an animation panel that serves ONLY to animate a conversation between multiple parties.]

"Requiem for a Stream" :P

I don't think any of these three would show up on the name of a comic book, but here is what I might have called them:



Brain in a jar with eyes guy: Peeping Dom



Snake guy: Slaughter Moccasin (I would water as a power set)



Card guy: SWAT Machine



All names are available on Virtue as of 7-15-12.

Even after the explanation, I still don't get it. Is going down a waterslide supposed to represent disengaging from the conversation, after admitting that he spent hours citing sources? Who is supposed to be talking in the second pane anyway, the guy with hair or the bald one? And what does this have to do with Water Blast and/or bankruptcy?

Not sure we're allowed to reference other video game examples, but THE signature example for me is shown in the link below. Hopefully the fact that the referenced game is over 10 years old means I'm in the clear. Interestingly, the second part of it looks somewhat similar to our Energy Blast in terms of the particles, but the intro and overall presentation are very different.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpzzeH94Cxg


The critical element for me is the coming out the sky part. If alt animations can handle that, that might be a step, but I'm under the impression they can't. Plus knockback from above/below would seem strange.

We actually don't even have to go to the SO level to see Seeds outperform other powers. Against same level enemies on a Controller, Seeds can achieve perma-Confuse with just two Recharge DOs and two Confuses.


Here are Stalagmites, Flashfire, and Wormhole (x2 rech, x2 stun): 67s recharge, 20 second duration

Here is Heart of Darkness, which gets a bonus to duration for being PBAoE (x2 rech, x2 stun): 67s recharge, 25 second duration

Here is Synaptic Overload. Aggro free but with a chance to critically fail and not work at all, plus very slow activating versus Seeds (and on Dominators, cannot Dominate): 44 recharge, 37 second duration.

And here is Seeds (x2 rech, x2 confuse): 44 second recharge, 49 second duration

On DOs, Seeds' duration is actually longer than its recharge. And of course all of these powers except Seeds and Synaptic have an Accuracy penalty (more than justified for Synaptic).


Naturally I wouldn't support nerfing the set into the ground. I actually play the set. I would recommend making Seeds more sensible and then doing the same for the AoE hold for ALL Control sets (my specific recommendation is changing the recharge of all of them from 240 to 180). That would cushion some of the blow, provide a mechanism to make up for some of it, and provide more reliable lockdown for a few sets that lean heavily on the hold. Plant would probably still have perma confuse all of the time, a more reliable hold when they need it, but not have the ability to just toss Seeds and fight what amounts to the confused version of statues all the time.

Somehow Fire Control has existed since forever with Cinders + Flashfire, so I do not buy for a second that Plant would be devastated by a more reasonable SoC.

I think I had them run from my Radiation Blaster, on a Blaster/Blaster/Brute team. I don't remember what sets the other players were using though so it may have been them. Luckily I had an immobilize in the Fire set to stop them.