Oedipus_Tex
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Posts
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Joined
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Not a super suit, but I see no reason why Mr Frost's fire needs to stay orange anymore...
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Quote:Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
To elaborate, I didn't just play the JLA: Act of God card lightly.I feel it's quite appropriate to what you always seemed to champion and part of what's wrong with the game: Blue Blue powered down, useless and ineffectual with his ideal **** upon. A gigantic swooning love letter to how 'awsum' Bat-Scrapper is while basically flipping off the Atom, Martian Manhunter, the Flash and other heroes. A massive mishandling of a cool idea that had potential.
Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things
I'm sorry, it looked like you needed that. -
Quote:It does. Actually what it has is IMO simultaneously the best and the worst of the confusion powers. It's the child of Mass Confusion and Seeds of Confusion. No aggro, ranged, extremely reasonable recharge. It just has that critical chance to miss. Solo, it's gold. It lets you operate in secret and makes enemies clump together, which is exactlly where Electric needs them. On a team, I find it more difficult to use (ESPECIALLY when there is a ton of knockback going on--Electric Control and knockback are 90% enemies).Originally Posted by seebs
And as I recall, elec has a particularly NICE confuse?
Static Field, though, is the most freaking ridiculous thing I've ever seen. It too varies between incredible solo and just ok on most teams. But the thing with Static Field is it requires almost no investment and has amazing uptime. Because it pulses, just about everything gets put to sleep. And if they don't, they're slowed. And you can cast it through walls by angling the camera.
Solo, an opener of Synaptic Overload followed by Static Field is probably the safest possible move available to a Controller primary, besides, arguably, Phantom Army. The only major risk to Electric is the stupidity of the gremlins.
On teams Electric is very much like Ice. It can make you kind of hate your teammates. Especially. Freaking. Storm. Masterminds. With. Durr-icane. Rampant knockback was always kind of a setback for me with other control sets, but with Electric it can make the whole act come down like a house of cards. But other times things go rather nicely. -
I think Speed Boost should have its duration halved and when you cast it at someone, pop up a dialog box that asks "Are you sure you want to do this? They're going to go really fast!" Because clearly, there is no threshold where buffing is tedious, and if you think it sucks, why play a buffer?
P.S. I don't want the Mastermind upgrades. I think Sonic, Force Field, and Cold shields should renew themselves if someone you placed them on enters the radius of your bubble or fog. You would only have to recast the shield completely if they spent 4 minutes outside your aura. Thermal and Kinetics would receive the same treatment for Warmth and Transfusion. That way you can't just leave the buffer at the door. This bonus would only apply to always-up shield powers, and not "rolling buff" powers like Fortitude or Forge. Specifically:
- Force Field shields
- Cold shields
- Sonic shields
- Speed Boost
- Thermal shields -
It's about time someone stood up and did something about these ridiculous characters ruining the game. They are interfering with the story of my telekinetic babe from Earth 2561.xxx.09 who came back to life after swallowing a star while possessed by the Phoenix Force that created a clone that flirted with a regenerating science experiment but married lazer beam guy whose kid went to another dimension and returned with big guns.
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I would default to "they" or "their." Those terms are lot more clear. Especially if you ever find yourself writing social software, because eventually you're going to get stuck with a wildcard name but a gender you don't know, and seeing your program output a ridiculous statement like "Jennifer just updated hir profile!" Facebook, for the record, uses "their" in this exact scenario. And Fergie uses "their" too ("And I'm gonna miss you, like a child misses their blanket.")
See various usage notes from online dictionaries about this issue. For example, here: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/pa...he-versus-they Copy-paste below.
[EDIT: Now contains the correct quote. Sorry about length.]- You can use the plural pronouns ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘their’ etc., despite the fact that, technically, they are referring back to a singular noun:
A researcher has to be completely objective in their findings.
Some people object to the use of plural pronouns in this type of situation on the grounds that it’s ungrammatical. In fact, the use of plural pronouns to refer back to a singular subject isn’t new: it represents a revival of a practice dating from the 16th century. It’s increasingly common in current English and is now widely accepted both in speech and in writing
As for comic books? I was maybe a fan a few decades ago, but we didnt have MMOs then.
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That is an interesting model. I do want to point out why its not quite as cut and dried as it may seem though.
Models tend to break when very high Defense gets involved. Particularly, very high Defense with low Resistance.
The crux of it is that most damage models treat a chance to take damage a percent of the time as the same as taking the same percent of that damage all the time. For example, treating a 5% chance for 1000 damage as the same as taking 5% of 1000 damage from every attack. If you jump into a pile of enemies, you can more or less average things this way. If you're fighting an AV or GM, you cannot. Roll snake eyes one time and you're dust. This is why a huge "it depends" needs to be attached to all of the models we make conflating Defense chances with flat survivability time.
Now, the problem of Regen with high Defense and low Resistance fighting an AV is particularly intriguing. In this situation, you may not end up taking any damage at all for several minutes into the fight, in which case Regen isn't actually contributing. Then, when you get popped, how much Regen contributes depends on whether the next hit happens before you fully heal. If you ever do fully heal, Regen stops contributing again.
Here's where it gets really weird. If you're soft capped but there's a chance the AV could possibly two-shot you, you've hit a point where Resistance becomes unhinged from its standard value. Increasing Resistance to the point where it now takes 3 or 4 back to back hits to kill you could become more important than it normally would, because it closes your vulnerability to hitting a critical fail point before Regen does its work. The duration between how long you get hit becomes critical to know. And unfortunately, its impossible to know, although you can guess at the chances. Most Tankers probably don't have to worry about this, but something like a /Psi Dominator definitely does. -
I don't know if it's sexism, but one character who annoys me greatly is Emma Frost. There's something very Pamela Anderson about her that makes me just twitch. It seems she can only do her scheming while spilling from a white leather cup suit.
But I'm also annoyed by Edward Cullen, the 100 year old vampire madly in love with a teenager. That's a character from "girl's literature." I don't think of it as sexism so much as a characterization that's not meant for me.
So the question is, are (straight) men allowed to have their own literature? Or is the issue that what is essentially literature for straight males is promoted by culture as having mass appeal that it actually lacks? Loaded questions for sure. I was gay, read these comics, eventually stopped reading them, but not because I felt unwelcome.
Comparing it to something like the WWF professional wrestling, it just was what it was. Perhaps the only semi-insulting thing about it--and this isn't a comics thing exclusively--is that these books frequently preach about diversity and overcoming personal trauma, while presenting heroes who dodge the social categories that would put them in that exact situation. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The burden of proof is with the proposal. Always.
I feel you are holding Squirrel to an impossible burden of proof while excusing your own argument from those standards. I usually respect your insight and I don't really want to slug it out over the issue because I'm neither pro or con, and certainly don't want to invest a lot board-cred into a slugfest over naming policies (I'm saving that for a discussion about knockback). However, I am skeptical of claims that one side has to provide incontrovertible proof of a statement while the other gets to use such persuasive arguments as "/thread" (which, admittedly, was not you).
Specifically, I feel you and others are side stepping a basic rule of argument: Maintaining the status quo is also a proposal. By claiming it is not, you are appealing to irrationality. I know how things get heated on the boards so I understand how the ebb and flow of... combat... can make us say things we don't mean. However, as someone standing on neither side of the issue, I have to admit I'm not impressed by the argument that only one side has to pony up details. In this case, neither side can ever or will ever have those details and the whole thing becomes a wash. A much more appropriate statement, IMO, is that Squirrel's opinions are based on what he wants, and so are yours. -
Keep in mind we're still talking about a sort of tanker mentality with the damage models. Regen has the weird property of rewarding you with nothing when you are at full health but handsomely for a string of dodges following a hit. This makes evaluating regen precarious.
With defense, your chance to dodge is (usually) not affected by how many of the previous attacks landed, or how long ago that occurred. With Regen, that is the biggest part that matters, since damage usually arrives in bursts rather than a steady stream. The reason this is critical to understand is that outside of models, it is rare to let enemies stand around and beat on you. A character with the power to halt or slow enemy attacks following a dangerous hit reaps more benefit from Regen than one who doesn't do that. And Regen also rewards you for running away, giving you rewards up to the point where you're fully healed, or at least healed enough to re-enter combat.
This isn't usually considered in Defense and Resistance models because its simply viewed as time added to the defeat line, which in those models is always eventually reached. With Regen, the line you're reaching toward could as easily be defeat as it is immortality.
That's the long winded way of saying "trust the model only so far." -
Anything works but the combination of the DoT in Storm and Cold, which is critical for the -Resistance debuff, conflicts rather spectacularly with the otherwise mostly amazing sleep in Static Field. It's not a huge deal on a team but when I tested those two powersets during the last beta it drove me crazy solo. On a team its not as big a deal since there are often DoTs flying around anyway. Static Field is just really, really good power solo and anything that shortchanges that IMO is a notable setback.
Storm Summoning specifically frustrated me greatly. The knockback conflicts terribly with the chain powers unless you exclusively herdicane enemies into corners. Throwing enemies out of the radius of Conductive Aura is also unproductive. I suppose there could be solutions to these problems, since I only played for an hour or so, but IMO of all the possibly combinations of Elec Control, Controller and Dominator, Storm is the "most difficult" if not necessarily "the worst."
Sets that I found to work particularly well with Electric are Force Field, Thermal, Radiation, and Trick Arrow. Each of those sets has its own pluses and minuses so take that for what you will. Elec/FF for example will probably never be a top favorite but the defense options, on a character taking the kind of risks where defense is needed, are ridiculous; capping to every position is a definite possibility if you just want the bragging rights, and capping to some and leaving others is another option. I found that on test a level 40 Elec/Trick Arrow could solo at +0x5 without an APP blast and even without slotting enhancements. Everything works well with Radiation, so no surprises there.
Empathy and Kinetics are in the performance middle ground for me, perfectly playable and with their own advantages. Sonic is not, just because I have a personal vendetta against it. Although at least of the three toggle-based Control sets Electric's toggle is endurance-neutral so it won't actively sink you the way it does Fire and Ice. I would personally much rather have the defense of FF (which carries over to your rather stupid pets) or the resistance + heals + buffs of Thermal than the unimpressive resistance of Sonic with its ok-ish debuffs. Your pets will work their hardest to make sure the Disruption Field isn't as useful as it could be but if you team a lot and just don't want to go Thermal + Psi APP I guess you could do it. -
Something like this?
Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.90
http://www.cohplanner.com/
Click this DataLink to open the build!
Level 48 Magic Controller
Primary Power Set: Gravity Control
Secondary Power Set: Storm Summoning
Power Pool: Flight
Power Pool: Presence
Power Pool: Speed
Power Pool: Teleportation
Ancillary Pool: Mace Mastery
Hero Profile:
Level 1: Lift -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Gale -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Gravity Distortion -- Empty(A)
Level 4: Snow Storm -- Empty(A)
Level 6: Propel -- Empty(A)
Level 8: Air Superiority -- Empty(A)
Level 10: Provoke -- Empty(A)
Level 12: Dimension Shift -- Empty(A)
Level 14: Hasten -- Empty(A)
Level 16: Teleport Foe -- Empty(A)
Level 18: Teleport -- Empty(A)
Level 20: Hurricane -- Empty(A)
Level 22: Super Speed -- Empty(A)
Level 24: Team Teleport -- Empty(A)
Level 26: Fly -- Empty(A)
Level 28: Wormhole -- Empty(A)
Level 30: Group Fly -- Empty(A)
Level 32: Singularity -- Empty(A)
Level 35: Tornado -- Empty(A)
Level 38: Lightning Storm -- Empty(A)
Level 41: Poisonous Ray -- Empty(A)
Level 44: Disruptor Blast -- Empty(A)
Level 47: Whirlwind -- Empty(A)
Level 49: Intimidate -- Empty(A)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Containment
Level 4: Ninja Run
Level 2: Swift -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Hurdle -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Health -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Stamina -- Empty(A)
------------
Set Bonus Totals:
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Quote:Not going to comment, except to comment that I'm surprised no one commented.Originally Posted by Rikis
Dominators have always been better than Controllers.
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Quote:Originally Posted by TrueGentleman
If NC Soft were to fund a CoH focus group of new players, I'd wager that it would discover the 7-year-old tutorial and starting zones present more of a stumbling block than choosing the right name among a dozen servers. (It's worth noting that although several servers have name exchange threads on their subforums, not all seem to need them.) That said, we can't discuss the assorted ways competitors approach the issue of character names because of the ill-advised new forum rules, which leaves that debate even more abstract than the name purge one underway.
This isn't a factor in whether a name purge is a good or bad idea, its just something that "is." (Except it "isn't," because the tutorial was redone for GR, but nevermind that). It would be like arguing that adding new powersets isn't a good idea because the new player might pick an old ugly one. Or that new arcs shouldn't be created because the player might end up experiencing one of the sucky ones.
While we can't provide specifics of how each individual MMO has handled this question, the fact is that this game is not the first to wrestle with this question. Various games have come to various conclusions and ultimately the most anyone can say about it is there are good and bad things about name wipe policies. The only thing about this game that might give it a slight bit of breathing room is that a name like Pizza Guy Doug is totally acceptable here but wouldn't be in most fantasy games, where the name-crush can be a lot more extreme. -
Quote:Originally Posted by JuliusSeizure
Can you name a powerset that's been released since issue 5 that doesn't have some unique mechanic attached to it?
Willpower and Pain Domination.
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To be honest I'm slightly skeptical of the refrigerators site. In part because of the list here, which purports to list female characters mistreated in the eyes of the author: http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/women.html
Now, I haven't read an X comic in at least 10 years, so it's possible things have transpired with the characters since I last picked one up. However, among the characters the author says represent the theme of injuring/maiming/killing/depowering females are Psylocke, Rogue, Storm, Wolfsbane and Wonder Woman. That seems like card stacking to me in a way that is somewhat counterproductive if the goal is to find meatier roles for women in a genre where characters are constantly subjected to melodramic tortures.
For example, Storm is listed because she has been "depowered, repowered, periodically crazy to one degree or another," which is a description that would befit any character in comic books who ever existed, including icon-tier heroes like Superman and Captain America. The only exceptions would be characters who get no play time at all, which is truly the worst curse for any of them.
Wolfsbane makes the list because she was "locked in wolf form for a while, needs major therapy." What this misses, IMO, is that locking this character out of human form also means she escaped sexualization. In fact, while Wolfsbane has often been treated as a tempestuous 16 year old girl, the nature of the characterization has tended to avoid casting her in a sexual light, and the "troubled mind" side links her with the portrayal male superheroes and their "angst is me" attitudes in general.
Invisible Woman is listed for having had a miscarriage. I don't really know what to make of that because I never saw how it was presented. Rogue meanwhile is just "generally messed up."
I don't deny that portrayal of females in comics skews out of their favor. However I think that criticisms of that status need to provide specifics on what could be done to correct that, and examples provided of where it has been done. I consider myself quasi-liberal on such issues but I also think that it is very easy to complain without offering meaningful solutions, particularly for people who aren't writers or artists.
A response from Christy Marx posted on the site hits many of the same points: http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/c-cmarx.html -
At the risk of overanalyzing it, I often feel with comics in general that male heroes are someone I am supposed to look through, and female someone I am supposed to look at. However, it's a very complicated issue, because all titles at all times do not exhibit the same attributes. It's even debatable which characters are truly considered by the authors to be "female." To pick names, Jean Grey, Storm, and Wolfsbane have all been treated very differently from each other in their 1980s-and-on portrayals.
A sexy costume is not in and of itself indicative of sexism to me. However, I question whether male heroes are actually drawn to attract female readers. I get the impression they are drawn for a mostly male audience to project themselves onto in a "this could be you" daydream sort of fashion. They are hyper-masculine, attractive, but not overtly sexual, and especially not threatening to the reader. Most of them are "misunderstood" in some way.
The female characters in turn seem more distant, NPCs with opaque motives. They are usually not misunderstood at all; what you see is what you get unless they are evil and actively trying to seduce. For the heroines, often the male characters seem concerned about letting her down in some way. She in contrast rarely seems to worry about this. At worst, she is in the position of having to pick between two guys. She may decide she's "had enough" of the guy, but most of this seems to be communicated by the male ("I'm hurting so bad because I failed in some way and she left me/died/got hurt") rather than from the females perspective.
For a contrast with comic books, I look at series like True Blood, Twilight, and other "chosen girl seduces a series of beautiful male monster" themed stories. The men there also have super powers, but they are written in a way that is explicitly threatening. They are only held at bay by obsession for the lead female. This trend in stories isn't new of course. It's basically the theme of every gothic romance written over the past 200 years, and probably longer than that.
So is all of this "sexism"? I really don't know. The term is kind of loaded. There are definitely differences in portrayals. I'm just not sure its present in ever work, all of the time. I think that there are individual works, and possibly some industry trends as a whole that reflect the tendency, and that writers and authors should constantly think about what it is they are creating. But overall I think it's a very complicated picture. -
Welcome back to the game.
Luckily flashy is something we do well around here. If you want something that grows pretty quickly and gets progressively more flashy, you might consider an Earth/Fire Dominator. The Earth powers are very loud and cause lots of screenshake, and the Fire powers do good damage. Later on you can pick up Rain of Fire and Fireball for even more damage and explosions. The Earth pet is also really good. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I've been here since practically release, and I've seen uncountable numbers of reactivation weekends bring back players, and players just plain come back. I know this number is non-trivial, especially because they are explicitly targeted by NCSoft.
Given that I know it is a problem, the only question for me is whether its worth it to create a problem just to mitigate an existing problem by likely just a few percent. And if I was in charge, the answer would be an unambiguous "no." That's the default position: to change my mind you would have to convince me that the problem being created is definitely lower in magnitude than the small part of the problem being mitigated. And I don't see how that is likely, given what's been said in the past about the numbers of names freed in previous purges.
Basically, I can prove purges create a problem, and I can prove purges don't solve a problem. So that's a bad thing by default without proof the trade is a good one for the game which I cannot prove, nor have I seen a valid proof of.
I'm not saying I'm opposed to a purge because I don't believe people are entitled to those names. I'm opposed to a purge because I believe it creates image problems. I believe the entitlement argument has no value as counter to that.
Lots of other games have had purges of various sizes. There are pros and cons and ultimately no one really wins this argument. Of the characters I've left behind on various surviving MMOs, some still have their names, some don't, and some were wiped out completely. It's hard to be upset that a business I haven't sent money to in over two years, in some cases longer, wants to maintain its current players. -
Quote:Originally Posted by TrueGentleman
Until NC Soft shells out for a proper focus group study that tells them they can expect a significant number of players leaving because of name issues, prudent business sense dictates that they shouldn't risk alienating potential returning customers - which, to reiterate, MMOs love - when they already have invested in the previously mentioned new features. It's a bottom line issue, nothing more or less.
How about "If I jump to that new MMO that just came out I can grab the name I want." I mean, I've done it.
Anyway you're leaving out party #3. Players who are totally new, who come here to find a nearly 7 year old game where many desirable names are unavailable, where they aren't on the competitors product. -
Quote:Originally Posted by ultrawatt
I really do agree with your post, 2R=1D is a bit to simplified and not really realistic, thus truely applicable to true gameplay... but i still laughed.
I could have said "empirical" but I figure clarity takes precedence.
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Confirmed it. The official flag on the power is Notify Mobs: Never, at least as reported on Red Tomax here. http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...sruption_Field
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Are Trip Mines affected by Repel? Looking at the Blaster player version on City of Data it looks immune to everything but that and knockback. Targetable powers like Oil Slick do have explicit Knockback and Repel protection. I wonder if Force Bubble would push all of the bombs away. Here are the stats on the player version of Trip Mine:
[EDIT: List is too long. Direct link is here: http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...?id=Pets_Mine] -
I was interested in the competitor until I looked up their costume creator and character designer on YouTube.
If what I saw there is indicative of the overall level of customization and character design, CoH just got a longer lease on life.
The biggest threat to CoH, IMO, is CoH2. The game has been unimagineably successful. While I can think of a lot of reasons for that to be the case, IMO the biggest thing that for some reason competitors (and even one of the old designers from this game!) don't seem to get is how the "pick two powersets with the option for a tertiary cross-class powerset later on" is VASTLY superior to skill trees, unlimited skill selection, point based systems, and all the other tricks people have triedto make character creation unique but balanced. Whoever designed this game's 2-powerset system was a genius who kept the game running far longer than it surely would have with another design. IMO.
