Pauper

Really looking forward to seeing how you react if you find you had (have) a Salvage Rack with 700+ pieces of old-style Salvage like Coins and Rikti Power Sources.

Don't want to spoil the surprise...

--
Pauper

Odd observation -- I had a toon hit lvl 30 this weekend and I swear that I saw a pop-up for the City Rep once I trained up.

Why it would pop for a lvl 30 but not for a lvl 20, I can't say.

--
Pauper

Really, everyone? Even people who have Ill/X controllers and are perfectly happy with them?

Well, you can use SI to get to that room, then use Phantom Army to defeat that single group or room, so sure, that seems like a viable use of the power.

In addition, the way some Day Jobs reward you based on mission completion means that if you can complete more missions in a given period of time, you get a bigger benefit from the Day Job, so using SI to churn through more missions lets you take better advantage of those Day Job benefits.

Not sure why you'd be getting aggro from extra groups anyway, so not sure how SI is preventing you from aggro-ing those groups. And again, if you've got groups that are really close together, you can PA to draw them all together and weaken them first, or Confuse them to weaken them down to the point where you can handle them.

There you have a reasonable argument, in that if you stealthed in to get an NPC and then realized you had to escort them back out, you've still got to fight all the mobs between the NPC and the exit anyway, but at that point you're switching to combat mode, where SI is admittedly not the best option.

Well...see your next statement.

I think they designed SI (and specifically SI + Confuse) for a City of Heroes in which XP debt is a much bigger factor, which it was in the early days. On a different character, a tougher-than-expected mission that resulted in a couple of defeats would put you in a serious XP deficit, and being able to SI/Confuse the toughest groups to avoid being defeated was a classic example of 'short-term loss for long-term gain'; you took less XP for that mission up-front to avoid the XP penalty for being defeated, which left you to the good on the whole.

These days, with XP debt less significant than it was (even if you manage to take on significant XP debt, given that Patrol XP cancels debt, there's an XP debt cap), there's less of a reason to use alternate tactics to finish missions that allows you to avoid XP debt.

In addition, there are players who do enjoy creating 'concept' characters and playing them according to their own concept of the character, regardless of whether or not that's the most efficient way of doing so. That the CoX devs allow builds that encourage that kind of play is, in my mind, a credit, not a reason to bash them for not being combat-oriented enough.

That sounds like a personal problem -- there's already plenty of ways to improve your accuracy that have nothing to do with slotting accuracy enhancements:

- Use inspirations. Not only do they drop regularly, but you can combine three of any inspiration to make an Insight inspiration to up your accuracy if you want to.
- Use auxiliary powers. The Leadership tree includes Tactics, which is a to-hit buff for both you and any allies (including your Illusion pets). Hard for me to imagine any Illusion controller not at least considering Leadership for that alone.
- Lower your difficulty level. There's nothing in the design of the game that says you're supposed to be able to solo to level 50 with all combat level-shifted +2 and with all end-bosses set to be arch-villains. If you're not hitting often enough at the difficulty level you're playing at, lower it. And if you're at level-1 and still not hitting often enough, then you've got more problems than the devs can fix.

I'm not even getting into Strikebreaker.

If that's what you enjoy playing, then why not play more of those and leave the Illusion controllers to those of us who enjoy playing them? Why does every powerset and archetype have to play exactly the same way in order for the game to be 'fun'?

Here's the thing -- some of us LIKE complex and risky missions. I'm glad the devs give us options to create characters that challenge us the way we want to be challenged. If you want to play an Illusion controller that just flat out show up and solos Babbage, then why not just play a brute or some other archetype that does that? Why do you feel the need to make every archetype and powerset into exactly the same experience?

In my mind, having an Illusion Controller that plays differently from a Superstrength Brute is a feature, not a bug.

--
Pauper

This.

I'm not opposed to min/maxing. I even do it myself in other games. (I generally don't in CoX because I play it more for the environment and the genre than for the mechanics.)

But after enough min/maxers whining when any change gets made that 'this will ruin my carefully-crafted build', I really lose sympathy.

If you enjoy the process of crafting meticulous builds to take advantage of the game mechanics, having the mechanics change should be a challenge to provide you more fun, shouldn't it?

--
Pauper

Keep in mind - your right to swing your staff ends if I can see it coming out of your pants.

--
Pauper

Because then there wouldn't be any weapons? Seriously, you'd be OK with a game that says 'no, you're not really using a pistol -- you're using a power that magically creates a pistol whenever you need one'?

This problem is really as much in the way players design their character builds as anything else. Best example: weapon redraw animations occur whether or not the power selected is actually able to be used. Try it sometime -- use a power that 'puts away' your weapon, then select a weapon power that hasn't recharged yet. You'll find that the 'draw' animation plays, then your toon waits until the selected power recharges before using it. If you change to a different ready power, the power will fire without re-doing the redraw animation, since the weapon is now drawn.

Of course, nobody with 'optimized' power construction will ever find themselves in this situation -- with Hasten and recharge enhancements, you should always be able to fire another power once your current power finishes firing. Which is, of course, a problem with how players optimize.

I look at redraw the same way I look at enhancement caps, only more subtle -- it's a way to discourage strict powergaming and enable a more varied stable of 'viable' character builds.

--
Pauper

I can do it with less than 20 characters:

"See attached pages."

Well, that and a stapler.

--
Pauper

Beast Mastery is awesome, because you get to ATTACK YOUR ENEMIES WITH BEES!

That is all.

--
Pauper

If that bugs you, then don't take a hero into First Ward, killer.

--
Pauper

With a bunch of arrows in one claw, and leaves in the other...

...which means it's a variant of the Great Seal of the United States.

--
Pauper

I think providing a link might violate the board's terms of service, but you should be able to search for 'Dragon Issue #294' to see the cover in question.

Then compare it to the cover for #340 or #298.

My vote is 'blatantly stupid'.

--
Pauper

Amazing how I think I'm the only one who does something until I see it written in a forum thread. Love hitting the button on the final note of the redside 'mission complete' tune.

--
Pauper

I don't see that -- after all, there's currently a discussion going on in the comics art community about male vs female imagery, and how fandom in general and even creators in specific seem much more comfortable with sexualized female poses than with male ones.

Let's add to that the fact that male fandom, and I'm not just talking comics fandom here, can get really upset by any image that might even be interpretable as a sexualized male. Case in point: Paizo Publishing, the makers of the Pathfinder Role-Playing Game, used to publish Dragon Magazine. If you've seen D&D/fantasy art, you know there's a lot of cheesecake there, including in some of the most iconic images that exist. Yet the editors noted that the single issue for which they received the most complaints about the cover art was the issue in which they decided to have a shirtless man in a loincloth on the cover, and not in a violent Conan-like 'seeing your enemies scattered before you' pose.

Now, there's a lot of good-natured humor here among the responses to the OP's question, and even the OP's original question can be seen as being made more out of bemusement than gender fear. So I'm not really sure what this observation is intended to do -- intimidation? Projection? Simple confusion?

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to kill skuls.

--
Pauper

"And Mr. Peace!"

"Yeah?"

"Regrettably, I have made boo-boo."

--
Pauper