Samuel_Tow

OK, that makes sense and I'm not sure I can disagree with it. Not objectively, anyway. I loved all three Soul Reaver game's, for instance, but I'm not sure if they really count as three games since I was sticking with the same story through three different implementations. And while I liked the Sands of Time Prince of Persia game, Warrior Within proved to be a darker and edgier disappointment which I might not have touched again had The Two Thrones not actually framed it within a context where that mess having taken place built up to a decent conclusion.

Overall, though, I can't argue with you there.

I only ever played Tribes 2, and even then only on a Trial (this was a long time before I had my own income), but it struck me as an interesting game for its time. I think its closest comparison now is Section 8 and Prejudice. It seemed like a fast-paced yet strategic game with interesting vehicle control and jet packs. I never understood what "skiing" was supposed to mean, though. Then came Tribes 3, I played it and I facepalmed so hard my ears were ringing all day.

Funnily enough, the Ouro portal was probably the biggest thing that made me feel like an Incarnate when I ran Mender Ramiel's story arc. Sure, the subsequent Incarnate powers are cool, but being sent to talk to the Statesman was a bit special. I'm told to go there, I walk over to the Ouro exit and BOOM! I'm in Independence port, and not far from the Statesman's ship. I speak with him, he collapses, I toss down an Ouro portal besides him and walk away. BOOM! I'm back in Ouroboros within shouting distance or Ramiel. Now THAT'S cool!

The thing with heroes in most movies, games and stories in general is that they're limited in some way, and usually in fairly trivial ways. You need to get to a city, but it's across the sea, so you need a ship. You need to get inside a catacomb, but the door is locked and you need a key. You have to dive to the bottom of the ocean, but you can't breath, so you need a submarine. This goes on and on. It's actually not so much the big powers that make me feel "godlike" so much as the little ones. Like being immune from disease or being able to fly or being able to breathe underwater or not needing to eat and sleep and so forth.

This, really, is where most Peasant MMOs lose me. They work so hard to make my life as a medieval adventurer as **** as it would have been if I were actually living in medieval Europe during the dark ages, only there really were dragons and wizards and undead, that the end result is a thousand niggling little humiliations that just turn me off of the experience. Why do I have to walk everywhere? Why do I have to use someone else's smithy? Why do I have to wear a particular kind of armour? Why is my character always smaller than my enemies? Why must I waste my time "mining" when that's not a glamorous adventurer's job? It's like they're less about a life of high adventures and glorious combat and more about the life of a peasant getting through the day.

What's the point of having a story bible if you keep writing into it and never actually read from it, though? I get the feeling that Jack was referring to the body content that Rick Dakan and his team came up with in pre-production way back when when he talked about a "Story Bible," but I don't get the feeling that either Jack or Matt actually used much from it. As I said in my thread about stories that could be picked up on, it seems like there's almost never any callback to old content and to a greater persistent world such as might be described in a story bible. While such a thing may or may not exist, it doesn't seem like it's being used.

The look of their characters is problematic because their artists did a crap job, not because technology is evil and realism is ugly. Both Champions Online and DC Universe Onlie have male characters that look like walking wardrobes and female characters that look foxy. You can deviate, but I was never able to deviate by much since the more complex the body and face sliders get, the less I can use them and just end up making the same body and face all over again. And I HATE characters who stand with their knees bent. That's just goofy.

I have a lot of confidence in our art team, however. They've produced some amazing things recently, and I'm more than confident they can hit it out of the park in this regard, as well. I've never been a fan of bashing on anything that comes from another game just because it comes from another game like that game's developers have cooties, and "good graphics" is certainly not something to be taken lightly in this regard.

We can argue up and down as to what constitutes a better artistic style, but we really shouldn't be arguing that a better looking game is somehow inferior to an older, blockier game just because the older one is ours and we're used to it and the new one is different. We can make this work.

That seems a bit too absolute, Guy. A great many sequels to existing games are pretty much the same game all over again, but with a few new weapons. Almost all of UbiSoft's Prince of Persia games are the same game with more levels and a new gimmick, as are most Modern Warfare games. Need for Speed is coming on, what? It's 12th instalment or something? And they're still essentially remaking old Need for Speed games like Hot Pursuit and Underground. Unreal Tournament 3 is almost the exact same thing as UT2004, which is almost the exact same thing as the original Unreal Tournament, it's just that their graphics keep improving. Hell, even Portal 2 feels more like Portal: Again, Only With More Stuff.

I get what you're saying in general - you're talking about something like what happened to the Soul Reaver series between 1, 2 and Defiance, where not only did the basic gameplay change drastically (1 was like PSX-era Tomb Raider, 2 was more of a fighting game, 3 was like Devil May Cry), but their story was massively ret-conned between games and tied with the horribly archaic Blood Omen and terribly bad Blood Omen 2 in such a way that you're actually missing chunks of it. I get that, for instance, Half-Life 2 might seem like a stark departure from the original Half-Life in terms of general feel, one being about your classic "experiment gone bad" scenario and the other about "la resistance."

But still, look at something like L4D2, which is a carbon copy of L4D, but with new survivors, extra items and more maps. Look at Doom vs. Doom 2: Hell on Earth. Or those vs. Heretic, for that matter. Or Descent vs. Descent 2. Or all the NFL/NHL/Fifa games. Not every sequel has to be something completely different from the original.

This I do agree with, however. City of Heroes really did end up being such an awesome game as a great big happy accident born of an inexperience development team which produced a frankly broken game that players turned on its head. It's exactly BECAUSE our game is so broken and exactly because it's broken in such fundamental ways that it's impossible to fix without alienating most players that City of Heroes is so much fun to play. If ever we got a City of Heroes 2, I expect a lot of the coolest tricks will be closed up.

Maybe the power designers of the new age are smarter than to do that. After all, the way Synapse balanced Titan Weapons, I have to wonder if they haven't decided to embrace the players' power trip and empower us to be badass, "1 hero = 3 white minions be damned." But considering how strongly Jack Emmert fought for this, considering the lengths Matt Miller has gone to get us to team up (up to and including not wanting to let us invite our own characters to SGs because SGs are for many separate players) and the lengths to which Castle went to not let us fly too far ahead of the power curve, I really don't think City of Heroes can happen a second time now that the lesson has been learned.

Because there's no point. Why didn't Valve release Half-Life: Source as a completely remastered version of the original Half-Life in the Source engine instead of having us wait on the fan-driven Project: Black Mesa which has been going on for something like six years now and still has nothing concrete to show for it? Why did we not see a Tomb Raider: Anniversary remake of Tomb Raider 2, which I feel is the vastly superior game?

Because if a development studio sits down to make a new game - and that's essentially what City of Heroes 2 would be - then it makes sense to develop a brand new game, as opposed to trying to ape an existing one. Sequels only really work for single-player games because then you're making a sequel to the story. But making "another game in the same universe" is, like the UberGuy says, making a brand new game. Much as I like some of the way in which City of Heroes is broken to create a cool, awesome game, I despise many of the ways in which it's broken and pisses me off. I've posted about a fair number of those recently.

It would be nice if we could have "a new engine" for City of Heroes, but that's just wishful thinking.

I'm thinking forbidden entertainment, but that's just my wishful thinking talking

Ouch... I was not aware of this. I guess so much for Jack Emmert's "story bible," eh?

Last time this came up, Arcana insisted that the DOT cancels on a failed roll, therefore each subsequent DOT tick would have a smaller chance of occurring than the previous one, essentially, 132.63 + 14.08*0.8 + 14.08*0.8^2 + 14.08*0.8^3 + 14.08*0.8^4 + 14.08*0.8^5 = 170.4950624 by my calculator. In other words, that's not 80% chance for 5 ticks, that's 5 ticks of 80% chance, where one failed tick cancels the ones after it.

I don't have enough data to claim one way or the other, but that's last I heard on the subject.

He's a plot device, near as I can tell, as well as the owner of a very big chin.

And I'm not trying to be snarky here, that's quite literally all Prometheus is. Because iTrials form from the LFG Queue, they are designed without a contact and thus with no vessel to give context and specific story behind the Trials. By forming a Trial from the queue, you simply "show up" at the Trial grounds and begin doing with no concept of where you are or why you're there. That was one problem with the Hamidon way back when: In the Hive, there is a giant jelly cake. It doesn't matter what it is or why it's there, it can be attacked and it grants rewards. You could piece together who and what the Hamidon is if you REALLY wanted to (and didn't accidentally skip over that one arc or that one mission where it's explained), but that was never the point.

To avoid this problem, we have Prometheus. One day, out of nowhere, Giant Smurph shows up in Ouroboros (of all places) to give us exposition. At the very least he does mention why he's there in the first place (Longbow apparently raided his house for whatever undisclosed reason) and... I'm not sure how the story follows. I think he just decided to get off his blue *** and help out.

Technically, he's supposed to be a god, but "a god" was a nebulous proposition even before the Well of the Furies. Even before that, we were still making a clear distinction between magic and "the power of the divine." Before Tielekku apparently invented (or learned) magic, gods still had their own esoteric powers, thus they weren't technically magical, but now they're even less magical and sometimes alien, so I honestly don't know. If our religion is to be this messed up, then one would think it would be more prudent to simply not involve existing religious deities that just happen to have passed their expiration date in real life theology.

There's a very simple reason for this: Pretinting. Yes, seriously. The base skin texture for both men and women is brown-ish, which causes every colour you give it to be tinted slightly brown. That's why it's impossible to match, say, the Tee Tights With Skin shirt to Tights legs. That's also why white skin looks like it has brown blotches on it - because the base skin texture does, too, and while just doesn't colour the base texture much if at all.

Some say this was done in order to make it impossible to match skin to tights, but the way I see it, someone just thought that all or most characters in this game would be Caucasian, so the base skin texture is coloured like Caucasian skin tone. It's less problematic with darker skin colours just because dark colours tint the base skin colour much more aggressively and mask it, but brighter and non-human skin colours make this quite evident.

Having already gone ahead and swapped skin texture for tights texture (which for men is identical, just not brown), I find that the result is a lot more appealing. I still can't make "naked" characters because the skin colours we're given simply don't match any of the costume colours we have, but the skins actually look more natural to my eye, at least. That, and the disconnect between skin and face is actually LESS with non-tinted skin.

That's precisely my point. I'm not looking for anything any more photorealistic or "different" than the IDF pieces. In fact, I'm looking for something a lot like the IDF pieces, but in a different theme - the theme of the human body, not the clothes people wear. Our art team have proven quite capable. I'd love to see what they can do with the human physique if they're this good with everything else.

It's feasible. The last I heard on the subject, David Nakayama said something like this would happen eventually, but couldn't give any definite timeline. In the intervening two years, a new, rather more muscular skin showed up for females in the game's files, but it's not accessible anywhere from inside the game. I've gone ahead and pulled the skin out to test-drive it, and it's not half bad. It's what's in the background of the Barbarian bra upper body. Last I heard, David was talking about needing some "tech" to make this happen, which I believe just means more UI work to accommodate the change, because the City of Heroes development team approaches changes to the UI with the same enthusiasm as a vampire approaching a cross dipped in holy water set out in the midday sun.

Some of those are obviously less realistic than others. Fingers is pretty much right out given that ALL gloves would have to be touched up and David has pretty much killed any hope for a new model or for slider rescaling. Some, however, are more realistic than that. Having decent bare feet is a matter of giving us Zombie feet with a less speckled dirty texture that match the upper feet skin.

I would pay for a pack like this in a heartbeat. To be honest, a "human physique" pack would affect a good third to half of all my existing characters, and that's a HELL of a lot more than any other pack I can think of. I would pay for decent feet. I would pay for decent arms. I would pay for better skin textures. And I would pay for these things without a second thought at all.

This is more or less where I stand. There are a lot of body parts that are currently sub par that the City of Heroes of today can do a much better job or rendering and that the art team of today can do a much better job of presenting. There's more than enough material in there for a whole Costume Pack, if not more, and I don't believe it's any less warranted than medieval armour or wild west clothes.

Now you're giving me flashbacks to Sister Airlia's mission to save Ghost Widow, where no fewer than there ambushes - one containing a Ballista - spawn directly on top of your location the moment you free Ghost Widow.

And, yes, that's sort of the problem. Ambushes only display a speech bubble if they spawn within draw distance. If they spawn too far away, all you get is NPC dialogue, which for the most part gets drowned out by combat spam on my setup. But even if I were able to spot ambushes as soon as they appear, I'd appreciate having the time to tell where they're coming from and where I should lay a mine.

Even without AoE buffs, you can still bubble people in combat. But the whole AoE buffs thing is kind of the rub, isn't it? That sort of preparation is slowly being phased out, and I've really not heard anything negative about any of the changes which are causing it.

That's precisely what I don't like about these purchasable powers.

That right there is the heart of the problem. Blasters aren't "bad" as such. Hell, they're a million miles better than they were back at Launch when they had Controller hit points. Oh, yeah! Blasters aren't bad, the rest of the ATs just passed them by a long time ago. I think Inherent Stamina is the point where pretty much everything else I played essentially lapped Blasters and drove the point home. Brutes, who had previous been limited by the need for constant action hampered by insufficient endurance (I built without Stamina before) now became steamrollers. Scrappers who fought well but had to rest no longer had to keep stopping. And Masterminds are just... Cheaper buffs, cheaper upgrades, AoE buffs, AoE upgrades AND Stamina.

In the meantime, of all the problems my Blasters had, endurance wasn't even on the list. Stamina did jack squat for them, leaving me watching all of my other characters take off into awesomeness while my Blasters were stuck in the same old mire of making me terrified of even a single boss. A single boss, when my Brutes were taking on two or three at a time and not really concerning me all that much.

I'm sure in a more conservative interpretation, Blasters ARE balanced against the environment. They just aren't even remotely balanced against many of the other ATs.

That's a big part of the problem, yes. Even if we assumed that "situational" powers were amazingtastic at what they did, if their situations don't come up even remotely often, they still end up feeling like dead weight. If this game gave us a way to predict ambushes with enough time to set up a trap, THEN situational traps might be much more widely used. Hell, with as ambush-heavy as the game is these days, just spacing the ambushes out a bit so they don't stack with each other like they do in Praetoria could help make "traps" as a concept much more appealing. Really, at almost no point in the game can you tell that THIS is a good situation to lay traps and THIS is a good place to lay them until it's far, far too late to actually lay said traps.

I'm really not sure what the solution to this problem would be, such that it wouldn't be annoying for non-situational power use, but this is a big issue. You're never specifically given an opportunity to use these traps in response to your situation. You can only ever use them when the game is essentially paused and you have yet to start a fight. And, frankly, "pre-fight preparation" just isn't fun for me. I'm much rather be expected to think on my feet and react to circumstances, if given the chance. Traps can be made to do this even without "dumbing down" the powers if people are simply allowed to see ambushes coming with enough forewarning that they can lay at least SOME measure of a trap.

That's actually a pretty good way of putting it. Souls in fiction have generally been represented either as luminous entities, or otherwise glowing shapes, and ectoplasm is either glowing or at the very least bright-coloured. I get that "Dark" powersets have to do with darkness, but souls and the supernatural feature heavily in its inspiration, and all the Dark powersets are replete with skulls.

To a large extent, I feel this is a question of perception and psychology in a game design sense, but it's deceptively simple yet fiendishly clever psychology. In your typical "loot drops, everybody rolls" MMO, you can see what dropped, you can see it's exactly what you need... But someone else gets it. It's just about as close as you can get to feeling that someone took your stuff without someone literally taking stuff from your inventory. You fought for this, it dropped, you deserve it, yet someone took it from you. I've seen the amount of anger this has induced in a WoW-playing friend of mine, especially when he rolled 97, celebrated, and then someone else rolled 98. Ouch.

Our system is subtly but importantly different - stuff falls directly in people's inventories. You get what you get, and if you don't get the stuff you were shooting for, it's no-one's fault in particular. Sure, you might curse your luck, the RNG or the game's encounter design, but you don't feel contempt for your players. They didn't take anything from you. A lot of the time you don't even know what they got if they don't announce it. This fosters an atmosphere of camaraderie such that oftentimes if people get something you need that they don't, they'll outright offer to give it to you free of charge. I've had people hand me things they thought I could use and I've handed out things others needed that I would have simply sold on the Market.

I like how the whole collection of design decisions that make up City of Heroes conspire to create a game that gives you almost no sense of competition with any of your fellow players. No-one's taking anyone's stuff, no-one's beating anyone else and everyone's fighting for the same goal. When one player succeeds, it means success for all players involved. That's pretty much exactly the kind of atmosphere I really adore.

I don't think this is a bad idea in spirit, but I do have kind of a problem with it, especially within the context of a persistent sandbox game. MUD and PNP players are hardy fold that don't just endure adversity, they welcome it. Not all gamers are like this, however. Many (if not most) don't really appreciate discomfort and the atmosphere it builds. Many times in sandbox games we're out and out told to go somewhere and accomplish a specific task. Getting there once through high adventure and mortal danger is actually pretty fun. Getting there for the tenth time, however, becomes a drag. The adventure loses its lustre, the danger takes its toll and people simply run out of patience.

I feel the reality is that not that many people get into games to experience the same kind of hardship that defines real life. I don't really have a problem with it, personally. Hell, look up an old game called Deus (NOT Deus Ex), which starts with your character robbed of all his possessions and kicked down a slope into an alien wilderness where he has to survive ala Robinson Crusoe. It's a good game (OK, it's a crappy game, but I appreciate the idea) and all, but it's really not a genre that's very popular. Which you can probably tell because you've never heard of this game, nor any others like it.

What you have to remember with a persistent open-world sandbox is that the game cannot exist without the meta-game. You CANNOT keep players immersed for anywhere near the duration that players are expected to play them. Sooner or later, you have to account what happens when players get bored and burn out, what happens when players replay the game a dozen times, what happens when the game ages greatly and so forth. From a game perspective, forced hardship builds immersion. From a meta-game perspective, it represents one more reason to resent the game once the the stars in the eyes of a brand new player have faded away.

I like what I like. When I first started playing this game, I was 19 or 20, I forget, was just graduating from University and did not have a job, so I had practically unlimited free time, enough to toss away on things I had marginal interest in without a second thought. These days, I'm 27, I have a job, my mother has retired and depends on my income and I teach classes at that same university. My free time is no longer unlimited, and it's getting crowded with other games I like popping up. It just doesn't make sense for me to play an AT I don't like. Even if that's "mild dislike," I can't justify spending time on that when I could be spending it on something I like playing a great deal, like Brutes, Scrappers, Stalkers (tentatively) and Masterminds, as I recently remembered.

I have nothing against Tankers, in particular, nowhere near on the same level of problem I have with Blasters. They're just not an AT I enjoy. Unlike most people, I don't feel that Tankers are losing their reason to exist in City of Heroes. Sure, if we assume everyone's power-built to the max and sporting Incarnate powers, maybe. I wouldn't know. But in the basic game with basic, causal builds, Tankers still blow even the sturdiest of my Brutes out of the water and tank ten times as well as I could when I try the hardest. I can appreciate having that on a team, I just don't want to be the one doing it.

It seems like Premium accounts aren't allowed to send or receive PMs (that's a head-scratching decision), so I can't seem to send you any of my instructions, but if you can find a way to give me an e-mail address, like by in-game offline tell if you're allowed to do that, we can pick it up from there. My global is the same as my forum name - @Samuel Tow.

Something funny has been going on with City of Heroes since about City of Villains onward at least, and probably dating as far back as the Hollows and Striga - as the scale of the story grows larger, the scope of the word grows smaller. I'd liken it to trying to fly up high enough to see the entire city, but losing most of it to the draw distance until all you see are War Walls and darkness. You know it's "something big," but there really isn't much of a world to be seen for it to be in.

With the Well of the Furies and the Praetorian invasion and hints of an invasion by Rularuu or the Battalion, the scale of the story is greater than ever. The power of the gods, planet-destroying aliens, dimension-eating entities... Yet there is less and less of a consistent, persistent world to tie all of these set piece plot points together. Things just happen with very little context of the greater world around them, almost as if a world does not exist outside of the particular story we're dealing with.

I have a question for our writers - with Praetorians invading Earth and bringing vastly superior technology with them, what is the reaction of the Rikti, and more specifically the Lineage of War? Do they see the Praetorians as yet another threat? Do they see them as an opportunity to reopen the portal to their homeworld? And what of the Praetorians? Anti-Matter seemed impressed by the Rikti Bomb that Arachnos brought over, so clearly Rikti technology is of interest to Praetorian Earth scientist. So why is that never addressed?

I don't know if the team honestly no longer cares about keeping their persistent world consistent with itself or if they're just having trouble conveying this to us, but to be honest... The game is starting to feel like a series of levels in an arcade shooter much more so than the open-world sandbox with an overarching background that I found when I first joined in 2004. It's to the point that having an overworld at all seems pointless when it literally means nothing.

That's a problem, and it's a big one. If I could trace the "unconnected episodes" type of storytelling back to CoV and what I perceive to be a change of writers, then the dark and depressing storytelling we're seeing now seems to trace back to Going Rogue, which might have been a change of writers, as well. It was to be expected in Praetoria, this grey and grey morality dystopia, but this isn't just in Pretoria any more. It has since migrated to Atlas Park and Mercy Island, and the SSAs were being advertised via a death, as though we're expected to tune in for the carnage, popcorn in hand.

I don't mind saying that this darker and edgier writing has, for the first time in seven years, managed to turn me off caring about storylines with it in them entirely. The Origin of Powers was bad, but that was just a bad story. This style is not unique to any particular plot point or tale. It's pervasive in everything this depressing writer (or writers?) makes, turning me off storyline in general. Before, I had the particular stories I hated an wanted nothing to do with (Westin Phipps comes to mind), but those were specific stories. First Ward, Atlas Park, Mercy Island and the SSAs are on the verge of making me give up on story as a "thing" and just resolve to mash buttons and kill stuff, to hell with the explanation why. Because when I strongly suspect that I'll hate said explanation, why even bother?

You can tell a good story without trying to shock people, you can tell a good story without emotional blackmail, you can tell a good story without reenacting the dork age of comic books.

I'd have to run some numbers to tell if there's a point, but I think the larger issue is that, if given a chance, I'd prefer for Snipes to not suck, rather than to give them benefits so the pain is more rewarding. I get that they're situational, but honestly? I'd rather they did twice the damage at twice the recharge and twice the cost. At least then in their situations, they at least make a difference. Because right now, Snipes "help a little," but they cost a lot in terms of opportunity cost.

Nowhere. Tankers don't exist in my roster because I will never play the AT.

That's precisely my point. We've gotten improved versions of everything but the basic skin model. Think about it for a moment - look at how cool and detailed bits like the IDF and Celestial sets are. Isn't it time we looked this good when we take off the armour, too? I mean, surely our own bodies can use this level of detailing, too.

For the most direct example, look at ExoProto/Stealth/Zombie feet. They look like feet, not shoes painted to look like feet. The Zombie feet even come with a barefoot texture. Making better-looking bare feet out of them seems like a low-hanging fruit.

For a less direct example, look at what I did by swapping textures around. Giving us a more detailed texture which makes use of the new-tech shaders seems like a low-hanging fruit.

Once upon a time, David Nakayama offered to work on "updating" all of the ugly legacy pieces, by which he inferred that the old ones would disappear and new ones would replace them. While I was against removing the old pieces, I still want to see updated versions of them, even if I have to pay for them. The sad truth is that no matter what you add to the game, as long as the basic human model is seen as "sufficient," the heart of the matter - at least in my opinion - will never be addressed.

In the very simplest of terms, we're about due for a "human physique" Booster Pack or Costume Pack or whatever we're calling them these days.

I should hope not. With as many serious, fundamental problems as Blasters have, making Stalkers anything like them would be a severe demotion of the entire AT, when what Stalkers really need is an improvement of some fashion. I'd like to see how much the Assassin's Strike changes help, but they may well be enough to save the AT.

That's precisely where most of my problems come from, as well, especially for so-called "situational" powers - they don't actually offer the best reward rate even in their specific situations. I did my darnest to use Trip Mines as designed - lay down a field of them, pull a spawn into it. It worked, but I could never do enough damage with the mines to justify the time it took to lay them, the time it took to pull into them and the time it took to find a place to pull to. You'd think there's always a corner to pull to, but in a large open field, that's not always the case.

Same for Snipes - I realised I could do more damage in less time with regular attacks than I could with a snipe in quite a few Blast set, leaving range as its only benefit, which is not very helpful. So even in situations applicable for a snipe - beginning of battle, first attack - I was still better off using something else, and actually using the Snipe made me kill slower. Yes, it might kill a specific enemy faster, but over an entire spawn, especially a larger one, what with Blasters being good at AoE and all, it just didn't work out very well.

My response to this would be "Something that's non-zero, but far below the average expected reward rate." I've never had a problem with letting people cheat by trading time for success, because at the end of the day, they are only cheating themselves. If you're forced to go get a Shivan, forced to leave and level up, forced go buy better enhancements or, indeed, forced to corner-pull every enemy, you've already lost. "Success" in this game counts very little on its own, it's all a question of how fast you can succeed and how quickly you can amass rewards. When you're forced to adopt tactics that slow your speed of progression significantly, then you're already suffering. The game doesn't need to punish you any more than that.

The great irony about my hatred for Blasters is it was never focused around being unable to solo them. All of the ones I made were fully capable of completing all the missions I put them though. The problem was they took forever, they died a lot and everything was far harder than with all of my characters. As a result, my Blasters ended up levelling at a glacial pace compared to my Scrappers and Brutes. The Blasters were beating every mission, yet they still failed overall, because they levelled up so slowly I became physically uncomfortable with playing one right around when I rerolled all of mine.

As far as I'm concerned, giving "zero" reward for anything in this game is a mistake. Throw people a bone, make them feel like even in failure, their time hasn't been completely wasted. Sure, they may not have done much, but they did SOMETHING. They are NOT as far ahead as they would have been if they'd never logged on that day.

I actually have something of a problem with designing a powerset or an AT to have weaknesses built into it balanced by the intent that NPC enemies won't have the ability to exploit those weaknesses very often. On paper, this should work... And then another powers designer comes along, disregards or misinterprets the original AT designer's intention and makes a whole bunch of enemies with status effects and psi damage to the point where those "rare weaknesses" turn into common dangers and more or less tank an entire AT. Otherwise known as "welcome to Praetoria."

One of the reasons, I feel, that Scrappers and Brutes are so popular is that their strengths and weaknesses really don't hinge on their enemies all that much. Sure, some enemies are tougher for melee than others (Rogue Vanguard come to mind), but none of them are really quite so horrible. The thing is, Brutes and Scrappers have both the hit points and the defences to absorb a lot of that danger, and while their margin for error diminishes and their pace suffers, very few things are actual real roadblocks. Some things are just tougher than others. Even when power designers create NPCs with seemingly no regard for what characters in the specific level range are actually expected to be capable of, Scrappers and Brutes can usually make up the difference and brute-force their way through the opposition anyway, whereas Blasters - being explicitly designed to die occasionally as part of their AT balance - find themselves just devastated.

Maybe that's just me, but if I had a choice, I'd always pick a character build that's ready for almost anything and has a reasonable shot at dealing with things he isn't ready for over a character who can beat some missions and eat dirt repeatedly in others.