RemusShepherd

I don't think aggro management itself is the problem. The problem is how it's been MMO-ized. Instead of giving a fighter a 'mark' power that allows them to block an enemy, why not just say that a fighter can put their body and their shield between the evil Lich and the party's cleric? If the Lich still wants to attack give it minuses based on a large obstable (the fighter) being in the way.

And if the 'mark' can be imagined as something as simple as combat tactics, then why limit the number of times the fighter can use it? The 'daily' and 'encounter' power limits are really what make 4th ed D&D like an MMO. In real life, fighting skills do not have recharge times. You should be able to use any of your skills at any time. Obviously this isn't true for magical abilities, but there is no excuse for not letting a fighter try a power attack, a charge, or a block only once per day. Such limits break immersion and make it feel like a computer game.

An archery instructor on Wired.com has done an analysis of the three big archery movies this year -- The Avengers, The Hunger Games, and Brave.

According to him, Hunger Games is getting it right and Brave is near-perfect, but the archery form shown by Hawkeye in The Avengers is god-awful. Maybe we should leave the archery to the womenfolk.

Snipes in the real world are useful because range is a defense, and because the targets can't always tell where the sniper is.

Range is not a very good defense in CoH, and that's not going to change.

Marking the sniper is the problem. Right now enemies immediately know where the sniper is and aggro on them. The only alternative is to have no aggro...but that's not a very realistic possibility.

The way to fix snipes is to fix the AI behavior so that NPCs have a third mode in-between aggroed and not-aggroed. Call it 'roaming' mode. In that mode they look around and fan out in all directions looking for players, but are not yet aggroed on a player. This lets a sniper sit back and snipe until the roamers get close to him and establish aggro. Not very useful in a team (unless the team waits while the sniper does his work) or during a firefight...but that's a realistic assessment of snipers anyway.

Of course that isn't going to happen either. AI behavior is server-intensive, and for years the devs have resisted improving it in any way.

As a long time ERB fan I loved the film. John Carter invented the 'F-Yeah' moment, and this film gave him plenty of them.

All I really wanted to see was John Carter alone against an army, hip deep in slain foes. I was worried that Disney would wimp out on that, but they gave me the scene I wanted. Really well done.

Yes, it's a whining thread. Skip if you choose.

Yesterday I ran across a 'feature' in CoH that looks a lot like a bug, and I think it illustrates the root problem the game has been having for a few years now. Speaking only from personal experience -- although I know there are others with the same opinion -- the game has been lackluster and boring, our characters no longer feel 'super', and in general the fantastic escape that CoH used to offer just isn't there anymore.

The bug was simple to find. I'm playing the Dark Astoria arcs. Got through the contact 'Max', skipping the personal mission for each contact, when I found that next contact won't speak to me. The cause appears to be that the personal missions are all marked as part of their contacts' plot arcs, instead of being free-standing missions. There's a limit on how many plot arcs you can have open at a time. In order to finish the DA content, we are forced to play the personal missions where we are not controlling our own character.

The purpose of a superhero game -- or, really, any interactive role-playing game -- is to make the player feel like the hero. Now we're being explicitly forced to play content as NPCs to whom we have no attachment.

We haven't been allowed to feel heroic for a long time. Incarnate content blurred the ATs together and required stupidly large teams to do anything, so that the player felt like just another cog in the machine and a weak one at that. The Signature Mission arcs allow our characters to punch a few enemies in the backdrop while the real story takes place with the real heroes -- we're supporting actors, at best, in a movie about the Freedom Force. I could stretch back as far as ED as the first time that some dev mandated 'thou shalt not feel heroic'.

But now it's blatant. They're not being subtle anymore. City of Heroes isn't about the players. The devs are telling stories and benevolently allowing us along on the ride.

Look, I'll be honest; sometimes I think that there's one and only one change to the game that would make me instantly re-subscribe my VIP status. If they only allowed us to make Supergroups out of our own characters I would be happy. Because it would allow me to build a home, and tell stories with a stable of characters of my own, even if only in my own head. As it is now, however, I have characters strewn through a dozen different abandoned SGs that are all ghost towns. I'm haunted by hundreds of abandoned characters who also thought that the game was about them. This is another symptom of the root dysfunction of this game: We cannot be allowed to inhabit SGs of our own, because it might make us think that the game is about us. It's not. It never will be again.

I like to play games where I am the hero. City of Heroes used to provide that. It's a shame, and a loss, that the game no longer respects that simple element of escapist play.