Oliin

Not completely useless no. Sure they have this odd tendency to lower your DPS if you try to use them as a part of a regular attack chain, and good luck trying to use them to one shot anything unless you have enough of a damage buff going on. My energy/dev blaster can't use a snipe to one-shot a sapper for instance. If you have enough damage buff though you can take out most LTs or get a head-start on them too I suppose. Oh, and you can get some nice IO set bonuses from the snipe sets.

In almost all cases though you'd be better off just walking up to the sapper and hitting it with Total Focus if you have it. It does better damage and animates faster.

So no, they're not completely useless, but if the devs decided to buff them I wouldn't be surprised either.

Oddly enough some people find that sort of thing hysterical. It always makes me sort of cringe uncomfortably instead of laugh, but to each their own right.

Not a big fan of the Dune series then are we?

I dunno. Do you remember the Dungeons and Dragons movie? Good lord it was horrible.

Or you could watch Kurosawa's Yojimbo. I mean Kurosawa won a plagarism suit against A Fistfull of Dollars for 15% of its royalties(I believe it was the royalties anyway). While not completely identical, as Leone does bring a nice chunk of his own style to the A Fistfull of Dollars, it's also an almost scene for scene remake of Yojimbo. Of course, if your students aren't really the type to watch subtitled films (which is fairly likely actually) Fistfull's a fantastic film, I just prefer Kurosawa's take on the film to Leone's.


That said, I do kind of like the idea of having them watch a bad film and then making them review it 'fairly'.

To continue the aside, after looking at the wiki article it seems that Nate Robinson won the last two years and earlier in 2006. He's slightly taller, but still is only 5'9" with shoes.

Apparently it helps to have a vertical leap of almost 44 inches.

As if khelds don't already have enough powers to put slots in now they're getting three more?

Yea I kid, but anyway....

As long as there was a new hover animation for the powers I don't see exactly what the problem would be as long as they were close enough to the ground. It'd still be a foot stomp onto the ground, it'd just be stomping down from hovering now.

That said, there's other things I'd rather see in the game first.

Snipe animations are generally around 4 seconds last I checked. Most of them take longer than that truthfully. Executioner's Shot is about 1.5 to 2 seconds faster animating than most snipes.

Sure that's not speedy and I'd happily take a faster animation, but it's also not 'snipe level' length either. Heck, the attack's faster than sonic blast's shout I believe. So at least that's something.

I'm never going to honestly go and say that any variant of 3e is bad truth be told. I might joke about it, but it isn't a bad game by any stretch. It's just a game I find decidedly unfun and and I don't like aspects of it but it's I can't point at anything and say it's specifically bad.

Which is kind of a shame since his movies are kind of fantastic.

It's something he seems to do in his 'The Amazing Atheist' videos too. Although some of the recent ones I saw seemed to be a lot better filmed and his incessant rocking kind of fits into the shots more.

He seems pretty popular as far as it goes. Can't say I like his stuff though. His 'schtick' seems to focus around being confrontational which isn't really my cup of tea even when I agree with him.

You know, I'm not actually terribly fond of the song, but that was one of my first thoughts on reading the thread title.

Oh thank you, I've been trying to remember the name of that character for ages now.

If only fun weren't subjective. It'd make these sorts of things less silly than giant, "NO U!!!" matches.

I know how you feel. I have a similar reaction to people saying 3/3.5e is any good.

We know it's the next expansion and we've been told it will be linked to more traditional 'end game' type content. One can then fairly safely assume they're at least trying to provide us with an end game, the lack of which is a key complaint you have towards the game.

While yes, it's not in now, a good review would at least acknowledge that they're at least trying. I'm not saying you have to be positive about it if you don't think you should be. I'm certainly not saying you need to change your review from critical to positive. I'm just saying that you could have a good critical review that acknowledges these sorts of things. It won't harm your point if done well and in fact could lend credence to your review because you come off as a more unbiased reviewer than as someone who just flat out doesn't like the game.

Also some self-buff temp powers that only last for an in-game week, and isn't that sort of what you're complaining that CoH doesn't have? Sure it's not as fancy as some of the triggers in other games, but it's a step up from what CoH has had in the past. You have a tight timing issue on taking down some objects, then you go and can only punch on said HP pinata at certain points when you've cleared out its defenses.


There are a couple zone events that might possibly have you fighting grey con enemies (troll rave, ghost ship, Steel Canyon fire). No matter what you're doing in CoH fighting grey cons won't actually give you XP though they will count for badges and if they weren't grey con they would have given you XP. All of the zone invasion type events will spawn 'level-less' enemies which give you XP regardless of your level. That's the rikti invasion, zombie apocalypse and deadly apocalypse. You were running that last one at one point in your video. All of those will give you XP.

We actually beta tested a chunk of the alpha slot functionality in beta, but it wasn't tied to any content at the time, which is what they've added for I19 (unless they've reworked the whole system which I doubt). Also I answered your question fairly nicely I thought. We don't have it now but unless you have GR you won't be able to get the endgame content they're adding in the future.

I take it you're assuming that you're assuming their version of endgame content is just giant bags of HP like the old-school AVs instead of looking at how they've been trying to give us more 'traditional' trick based AVs lately and thinking it's likely to be something like that?

But it's not all no. The mission design for the new content in GR is vastly improved over the old content, they added several boss fights in that new content that have previously unseen 'tricks' to them like Metronome and Vanessa DeVore and the general enemy difficulty's even higher than it was previously. Heck, one of your more notable complaints that I can recall was all the fed-ex quests which are almost nonexistant in GR.


No, not terribly. Vanguard merits do drop of regular rikti, but it's a fairly low chance in missions versus almost always during a raid. Also it's costume pieces as well as a variety of temp powers and the ability to increase your salvage inventory.

You might be thinking of the Rikti zone invasion, which incidentally does also give badges (and exp) which will give you psi-resistance accolade power.

Ok then, in order:

No
You yourself mentioned it wasn't a problem at low levels, but also no change later on.
No
Fixes it for 1-20
No
Future endgame content is supposedly only available if you've purchased GR
Somewhat, yes.
That's a fairly standard MMO mechanic, but no.
There's an extremely small number of fed-ex missions and they added in a couple new mission maps.

That reminds me. Have you ever done a mothership raid in the Rikti War Zone? It's one of the more 'standard raid' type things in the game. You take down the pylons to lower the ship's shields, then you fight off waves of Rikti on the ship while you break down doors into the ship and plant bombs which cause the GM sack of HPs to spawn. You have to do it all within a certain amount of time or the shields go back up teleporting away all the people on the ship. The GM isn't terribly interesting, but the raid itself is interesting and usually is one of the fastest ways in the game to get vanguard merits which you can use to buy some nifty stuff.

I'm not exactly saying I think you should have reviewed it because it would have made a difference, I'm just saying it's the sort of thing I think should be acknowledged in a review of a game is all. You know, "Game A has B, C, and D problems and did E right. They released a patch/DLC/expansion last week that I haven't had time to play but supposedly had F, and G as features which sadly would do little to address the game's problems. They've also recently announced patch/DLC/expansion X that they say will address issue D but we'll have to see about that."

The missions generally have some new skins that get reused a lot and I don't know that the new 'tricks' you'll see would qualify as the missions being any different than they currently are. They do have a couple interesting new twists in a couple of the bigger boss fights, but I don't remember exactly where they are or I'd point them out to you.

My understanding of it is that the MA system is actually an outgrowth of them improving their own internal mission creation tool. When they had the idea to improve theirs, they decided to give us a dummied down version of it ... or something along those lines. Theirs is supposedly a more robust tool. They have more events that can trigger ('It's a trap!') and more control over object placements for instance.

I'd be kind of disappointed if they made a sequel to Scott Pilgrim. Call me crazy, but it doesn't really need one.

Of course, sillier things have happened.

Honestly, there are a couple fairly widely accepted issues with CoH. PvP's kind of broken, fed-ex missions aren't terribly fun (all the go talk to XXX missions), and the game could use more missions maps. That our AVs are pretty much walking bags of HPs instead of a puzzle will get you debates on if it's a negative or not though I'd imagine.

Thankfully the devs seem to be intent on moving away from a lot of those things. Though I don't think we'll be quick to see lots of new mission maps sadly. There's been less and less inter-zone travel in missions as they've developed more content, and they've recently started giving us more interesting fights. The Khan TF and Barracuda SF both have 'tricks' to beat Reichsman though not terribly complex ones, and Protean from the Issue 17 story arcs has an attack with a 'tell' (big message telling you to move) that will massively drain your endurance and heal him and Vanessa DeVore in Praetoria disappearing and reappearing with a group of mirror doubles to fight. It's not perfect, but it's a start and indicates to me that our devs are trying to give us more dynamic boss fights.


That's not a common problem with tanks and scrappers (or brutes and stalkers either for that matter). Most defensive powersets have their own power that protects from status effects. Most of them have confuse and taunt holes I think, which isn't a common enemy effect. The only folks who should be getting knocked around once they've picked up that power are fire, dark and I think ninjitsu.

You can build for extra end reduction in your powers, but I think most people will agree with you that the fitness pool is somewhat of a given in most any builds. On the other hand, I mostly play ranged classes and I've never needed to take anything but stamina on any of them. Acrobatics is overrated, the hold resistance it provides is very minimal. It'd be useful if it provided some stun resistance since there's some very long duration higher level stuns out there, but it doesn't. Seriously, I've tried acrobatics on my squishies before and I saw next to no gain from it. And since they tend to have fairly proactive defenses in the form of either debuffs or control powers that allow them to deal with the enemies who deal status effects when solo, and on a team that's what the tanks/scrappers/brutes with their status resistances are there for I've never seen it as a big problem.

The fighting pool's another debatable one. You can take it if you want to min/max your character out, but you can make a very playable character without it. Saying you'll suck without it is a bit of a stretch and on some AT's it's really not something I'd suggest someone take unless they were going for a specific play style (blapper for instance, and even then I'm not sure it'd be worth it).

The problem with hard-core min/maxers is that they'll do it to get 1% more effectiveness out of something if they can. They get more out of it in this case, but I'm just saying.

Could you have thrown in a line about how you reviewed it a while back and that CoH has had a box expansion since then somewhere? You could have easily said that it didn't add anything to change any of your views on the game and the like. It's a simple add and acknowledging that you reviewed the game in a slightly different form than it is currently might have added to your review.

I'm honestly curious, since I've not tried Pathfinder myself, but is it demonstrably different from 3.5e D&D? I mostly ask because for some reason I've never quite been able to pin down, I just don't like 3e and 3.5e D&D.

4e isn't my favorite and it's a little MMOish, but it can be fairly solid fun nonetheless (for me anyway).