Samuel_Tow

Speaking of Caltrops, it IS a useful power, but it "confuses" the AI a little too much. I infer that the idea behind its Avoid effect is to cause enemies to try to run out of the patch, even though that's generally a mistake, and if that's all they did, that would be fine. However, this Avoid effect causes the AI to panic and run all over the place like a headless chicken, run away to the other end of the map, scatter to the four winds and just behave erratically. This I don't like very much, which has caused me to be wary of throwing out Caltrops willy-nilly. I know it's useful, but I also know it has a cost, and that cost is running enemies.

And running enemies make me more angry than they really should.

I bring it up because that's exactly what people said when Notices were first allowed to be made out of Shards. "See, now you can get all the way to T4 without ever joining a raid. Now stop complaining!" The trouble is that you can and you can't. Black Scorpion even said that this wasn't intended to be a "solo path" long after the fact, but it didn't stop people from trying to shut me up by saying it's theoretically plausible that I could reach T4 by myself. Yes, but how many years will that take?

What I'm saying is "You got your solo path." is not a safe argument to make until we actually see this solo path first hand. Because if I had a penny for every time people in I19 Beta told me "You're so impatient! They're working on a solo option right now, you'll see!" I'd be rich beyond my years. The argument you're making has been made before and disproved before. Yes, it's more likely this time, but it's still not a sure thing.

I re-read my post and I don't think I said what you claim I said. Weren't you talking about straw men just now? Come on, man!

I'm not saying it sucks. I can't know. What I AM saying, however, is that this development team has done nothing - NOTHING - to give me even the slightest shred of fate that they have even the smallest of intentions of letting people who like to solo into the Incarnate system. Yes, they say they will, but history has proven that development statements can be read many different ways ("no more major changes to powers," anyone?), especially when they come from Marketing. It's also been proven that developer concessions to player pressure in terms of system design have been met with at best begrudging half-committal changes that address the issues in only the most immediately necessary way.

I don't know what Dark Astoria will be like, and I do hope it will be great. But experience tells me that when it comes to the Incarnate system, one of its design goals is to ram people into Raids and keep people on an endless treadmill. To give us a meaningful solo path would break those design goals, so I'm fully expecting there to be a catch of some sort to where Dark Astoria can be called a solo path, but ends up not being very useful as one. I'm not doom-saying. I'm saying I have no more faith left in Matt Miller's team when it comes to Incarnate content and Incarnate design.

I am, of course, open to being surprised. I'd enjoy nothing more than eating my words when it turns out Dark Astoria is exactly the kind of solo content that I can run by myself AND make meaningful progress over. That would be my ultimate dream in this regard. But I'm not going to expect this or plan for it until I see it with my own eyes, until I see myself sporting more than a Common Alpha, until have empirical evidence and first-hand experience to suggest this.

I have high hopes but very low expectations.

I've always wondered what Trip Mines would have been like if they were made into Stick Bombs, i.e. something that you throw at the ground, it sticks to it and THEN becomes a Trip Mine. The functionality of the power remains, in the sense that you can set traps with it just as you could previously, and indeed might even be enhanced since you might be able to stick them to walls and ceilings, but it adds an extra functionality as a semi-direct attack. I do recognise that this might make the power overpowered, though.

Then again, I was also convinced that making Assassin's Strike not suck when used out of hide would make it overpowered and that's evidently happening, and I'm sure someone at some point made the argument that Elude would be overpowered if it didn't make you "only affecting self." But like I said, I doubt that would be an easy sell.

This is how I feel, as well. City of Heroes plays about as well as you can expect a game of this type to play, and it plays damn well better than most of its competitors. However, it's starting to skirt VERY close to the edge of becoming a pure arcade game. "Are you a bad enough dude to save the president?" is enough plot for a 1980s beat-em-up just because games of the time were physically incapable of being anything more, and it's something of the basis of inspiration for a story, but it is not, in itself, a story. And that's essentially what I'm seeing in City of Heroes right now. The story has BECOME the gameplay, in the sense that yes, spelling, grammar and writing style are improving, but I am continually left wanting for better ideas.

I bring up Rick Dakan a lot, but not because the original City of Heroes stories to which he set the stage are great. They're not. I bring him up because the man and his team had great ideas. Think about it for a moment, and remember who are the most prominent, most well-developed factions in this game with the most history, backstory and personality? The Rikti, the Nemesis Army, the 5th Column, the Circle of Thorns, the Freakshow, Crey Industries. These are all age-old creations that stem from a larger world and feed back into a larger world, their stories crossing over each other into the lattice of a persistent world.

The only - ONLY - other faction system that reaches anywhere near the same level of depth and complexity is Going Rogue era Praetorian Earth, and even then it still comes off shallow and simplistic. I don't say this to dis Praetoria, but I say this to express that on Praetorian Earth, there is only as much plot and depth as players can run across in-game and not a smidgen more. There is nothing to write Paragon Articles about, nothing to write character biographies about, nothing to really tell. There are a few diaries, yes, but again - those are still style over substance.

Look at the history of Paragon City. It goes as far back as the 1800s, it contains tons and tons of events that happened long before the game - the story behind Superadine, the foundation of Portal Corp, the history of Hero Corps (remember them?) and so many other different events that aren't part of the running story, but nevertheless serve as the backbone of a persistent world from which to draw inspiration and on which to build stories thereafter.

Once upon a time, I fell in love with City of Heroes because the game inspired me. It showed consistent, believable fictional world packed full of great and innovative ideas. It filled my mind with possibilities that I was compelled to explore. The alien race of invaders trapped on our world and really victims just as much as we are, the ancient race of evil sorcerers whom history has wronged so much that they have to ask: "...after all that has been done to us, is such evil not our right?" the timeless villainous genius for whom every defeat just works into another concurrent plot... Yes, some of these may have been ciche and some of them might have been done before, but they were still good ideas.

And I just don't see that now. I don't see the same kind of amazing ideas I could pull out of the narrative, point to and go "Yes! This is amazing! I want to write a story of my own about this!" I see complexity, I see plot twists, I see an engineered story to drive the action, but it has been a very long time since I saw a great idea which impressed me on its own merits. It's all ret-cons that twist existing stories to match ever more convoluted changes to game systems, I've seen plot Gordian knots where stories become so complex you need a graph to explain them, and I've seen writers trying so damn hard to make something so twisted and mangled that it's lost all sense of inspiration.

It doesn't have to be this hard. It doesn't have to be this complex. It doesn't have to be so elaborate and pre-planned and twisted and meandering. A good story can be very simple and straightforward. It doesn't even have to be told all that well, so long as there's a genuine good idea at the base of it. And yet the last good idea which impressed me greatly that I can recall was the notion of the Shadow Shard as the mind of a god, where Lanaru - the madness - literally broke the world. It really was just as simple as a single phrase: "the madness broke the world." That was all it took to impress me, because that is a good idea... And it's an idea I'm not sure is even official, and an idea which hasn't been followed up on in seven years.

That's exactly what people told me when the Notes of the Well came out, and we've all seen how well that's worked. Don't try to insult people's intelligence like this before we actually see what Dark Astoria is, because I'm pretty sure it's not going to be the solo Mecca with which to shut up people who don't like raids.

I neither said nor implied anything of the sort. Please quote me, instead of paraphrasing something I said into something I didn't say.

I did. Do I need to do it once ever post? This was never a question of playstyle and always a question of power balance. You can start by addressing that.

*edit*
And I find it more than a little uncomfortable that you, the one whose first post in this thread contained:

are now the one chastising me for being disrespectful of other people's opinions and playstyles and demand I publicly approve of yours. So it's OK for you to dismiss my entire thread without so much as putting in the effort to even get into what I'm talking about how many posts in and keep insisting on arguing over who said what, instead, but if I fail to explicitly state that, yes, there obviously are many different playstyles in this game, that anything else I say is null and void and not worthy of your time.

I take it back. DON'T quote me. If you're not interested in participating in the actual discussion, then I'm not interested in defending why the discussion has a right to exist in the first place with you. I am done derailing my own thread with this. If you want to argue for a viewpoint, then by all means - argue for it. I welcome it. But telling me I should be accepting of ALL viewpoints without even being arsed to make a point is meaningless.

-Doctor, it hurts when I lift my arm.
-Then don't lift your arm. Next!

I'm trying to open up a discussion, not force an agenda, and I'm more than convinced there's room for discussion here. Trying to ignore the problems and sweep them under the rug serves no-one, not the people who like these powers nor the people who hate them, not anyone in-between. The wide use of long-animation, highly-interruptible powers is a relic from a previous age before even the game's launch. I'm not convinced it's still relevant, but that's what I'm hoping we can work on figuring out.

The power has an 8 or 9 second cast and a 15-second timer before it explodes, which you can track by the antenna light flashes. That's a huge amount of time to wait and a very big window of opportunity for something to go wrong. Yes, the result is impressive - the explosion is strong and has a very long range - but the Machiavellian precision this requires and the astronomical amounts of luck that are involved just leave such a margin for error that it's just not worth investing in the power. And you DO need to invest in it, at least four slots, more if you want to get much of any use out of it, plus a power pick. I could throw darts at a board with a list of all powers available to a Devices Blaster and probably land on a power that's more useful for its investment cost.

I tried to make use of this power for years, and all it ever gave me was frustration and disappointment. Even when toe-bombing people, I was waiting so damn long for the thing to set down and go off that my Fire/Fire Blaster would have grilled the spawn and set down for lunch, and that's without touching Inferno. On top of it all, Devices is the set without Build Up, so the shock damage which is a Blaster's main form of self defence isn't really there.

Time Bomb, Trip Mine and Auto Turret were seen as such great powers that the rest of the set suffered for them, and suffered hard. And of the three, only Trip Mine is actually good, and not by that much.

That's my problem with it, as well. I could live with a situational power if its situation were at least somewhat common. For instance, I really like having self-rez powers even though "being dead" is a situation I try to avoid. But I know that, sooner or later, I WILL die, and in THAT situation, no power is superior to a self rez. Well, not counting Revive. An awaken is usually superior to that. But if you look at powers like Rise of the Phoenix or Soul Transfer, if you're dead, these powers are great. The situations for these situational powers are either so rare or such that these powers aren't meaningfully better than their non-situational counterparts, that you end up paying though cumbersome mechanics for a power that isn't worth its limitations.

To me, presenting these powers are great is kind of like praising a blind man. Oh, he lacks sight, but surely that must mean his hearing is nearly super-human, therefore we must do something to limit that hearing so he's on an even keel against sighted folks. Only it turns out that his hearing is about average, so you're just hampering a man who's already hampered. It's a reversal of the values, as these powers are seen as stronger than they are, because why else would they be so hard to use? Well... Because they're just not very good powers, for the most part.

I, personally, wouldn't have such a big problem with interruptibility if I felt it was worth it, but most interruptible powers really aren't. Snipes deal scale 2.6 damage, I believe, which your average Scrapper can exceed with much greater guarantee of success with just his basic powers, just as an example. The bigger problem is I feel interruptibility is SUCH an enormous hamstring that I have trouble imagining how strong these powers would have to be to justify it. I suppose if Blaster Nukes were interruptible instead of having a crash, THAT I might consider a fair trade of utility vs. raw performance, but most of what's interruptible now just doesn't feel like it's worth it in the slightest.

And yes, I do believe long-interrupt powers are a relic from an old age, back when Geko seemingly disregarded animation time as nothing more than cosmetic. To be honest, I wasn't a big fan of them then, either. I recall first getting my Sniper Rifle power and trying to figure out how I could use it more often, this being one of the three single-target attacks Assault Rifle got, and being frustrated to see it sit there recharged and ready, but being unable to use it because someone set me on fire or I stepped into the Chill of the Night. I don't remember the game's balancing from those days with great fondness, to be honest, and I wouldn't be very sad to see its last remnants expunge if the simplest solution is seen as the most prudent.

The real kicker is that as the game evolves and new powers are added with old lessons already learned, we're starting to see powers which outperform the old "situational" ones, yet without having to be hamstrung by being situational. Compare Omega Manoeuvre to Time Bomb: It's faster to call, it shows up at range and it taunts enemies to it... It's almost the complete opposite in terms of ease of use. Rather than having the user-hostile balancing mechanics of old, where patch powers caused (and still do) enemies to run away and escape your damage, where running your own toggles could flatline your entire endurance bar in seconds if you affected enough enemies with them, the newer powers seem to cater to the player and present themselves in a convenient, usable fashion. In fact, I hazard to remember a power that has come out in recent years which has had penalties and limitations designed into it. Some powers are good, some just aren't as good, but I can't remember a single one which was designed to be BAD under any circumstances.

Most of the balance issues we butt heads over these days still date back to seven years ago, if not longer, back to the dawn of the game from where they were spawned. PBAoE knockback, long interruptible powers, AoE enemy phasing, messed-up Blaster secondaries and so forth. Whatever we may complain about in regards to recent sets, at least those were well designed, if not always well balanced. They can be fixed by jiggling the numbers. It's the old relics that cause the biggest problems because those you really can't fix without admitting to having to rethink them from scratch. And I'm honestly not sure our developers have the stomach to mess with that legacy, when it's so much easier to just ignore it and keep making new sets that just make the older ones look worse and worse.

At least there are different stories being told by those settings, which in themselves have very different layouts each time. I'm far more interested in the stories than in the "warehouses." A good storyteller can tell a good story with the tools provided without having to throw in sinking ships and burning buildings. As a point of fact, the more loud explosions a story hurls at my face, the less interested I am in the overall narrative, and I'm here far more because of that than because the gameplay is so enthralling.

Like I said, one of my favourite arcs is still World Wide Red, and if you completely ignore the story of it, yes, it is just 20 missions of clearing out warehouses. It's the WHY of it, the story behind the warehouses, which makes it great. And it's the story behind the warehouses which seems to be in a tailspin right now.

*edit*
Also, I can't see anything Golden Girl is saying, nor do I wish to irrespective of its merit, thus I don't know what you're referring to.

And that's where I have a problem with the whole system - it doesn't give people more to do. Not by much - a handful of Trials you can finish in a day. It gives people more stuff to EARN while actually doing the same, now much smaller pool of content over and over again. That's why I feel this is a big misnomer. As far as I remember, people asked for more content, and Incarnate Powers are not content. Incarnate Trials are content, but they're nowhere near enough to provide something for people to do at 50. Before Incarnates, people replayed the ITF, the STF, the RSF, the Hamidon Raid and the Rikti Shuttle Raid. Now people play BAF, LAM, KEY, UGD, MOM and TPN. The pool of things to do has not increased dramatically, especially considering people mostly run BAF and LAM anyway, if what I hear over Global channels is anything to go by.

The Incarnate system is a progression system which came without content with I18, and was thus delayed for I19, where it came with almost no content anyway. And the way it's planned out, making content for it is a HELL of a lot more expensive and time-consuming than it's ever going to be worth, especially since people seem perfectly happy to keep replaying the same two raids they're familiar with. This is a boon to neither altoholics nor people with just one character. It's only a benefit to people who like clusterhug raids, and those don't have to be in either camp.

The problem is that these tools just don't work. I get the idea behind them - make these a pain to use so as to offset how awesome they are. Trip Mine is kind of awesome, I admit, but the others aren't. And that's the problem - they're only kinda' sorta' good, but you can do just as well, if not better, with non-situational tools. The cumbersome nature of these powers was intended to give them greater strengths, but it ended up being their crippling weakness.

I mentioned something about Titan Weapons, recently, and it seems relevant here: This is the first set that I recall where having a gimmick made the set STRONGER. In every set previously, a gimmick was valued far higher than it was worth, and the set was balanced low because of it. Titan Weapons is the first time I can recall where a set's gimmick did not hurt it, but rather allowed it to be stronger than if it were balanced conventionally.

This is precisely how I see "out of combat" power - they are valued at FAR higher than they're actually worth, and as a result, they are given far more severe limitations than they deserve, making a lot of these powers just not worth the bother and a few of these powers just basically useless. You cite these powers like their being situational is a perk to them, and I'm sure that's what was originally intended. The thing is, in this day and age, that's a massive liability, and VERY few powers can live up to that liability. As far as I'm concerned, "proper" nukes are about the only class of powers that even approaches that level on a consistent basis.

Again, I'm not saying I have a solution. What I'm saying is I feel this is a problem, and it's been a problem for a very long time. We've ignored it and lived with it for years, but I just want to bring it up and get people's opinions on the matter. Who knows, maybe something will come of it, or maybe we'll bring up some awareness?

That's how I approached these back in the day. Believe me, I really wanted this to be true, but it just isn't. Not only are these powers not very well balanced by their interrupt times, they're further hampered by the fact that you can't actually use them as often as recharge would allow you. Not in combat, anyway. Being situational powers, you need to wait for the right situation, and that's oftentimes three, four, five times their recharge or more.

Time Bomb is obviously the worst example, but the thing recharges in 360 seconds, and I've only ever been able to score a decent hit with the thing ONCE in a team environment. My AR/Dev Blaster had Time Bomb from something like 2006 to something like 2009 or 2010 when I axed all my Blasters, and I teamed a lot with him. Lots of teams, one decent hit. It came to the point where I out and out gave up.

Or how about Trip Mine? It recharges in 20 seconds unenhanced, which is something like Foot Stomp. I rarely get to use it ONCE in a fight, and I've never really been able to use it more than once. Not unless I sit by the sidelines and just put down mine after mine after mine. I've done this. Believe me, I've done this. Then I'll watch an EB walk over, say, 8 Trip Mines, take something like 15% damage to his hit points like the Shadowhunter did, then make me realise all this time spent sitting on my hands, watching TV and pressing one button every 20 seconds would have been better spent putting down ONE Poison Gas Trap, ONE Trip Mine then immediately pulling the EB through there to debuff him so he doesn't break all my bods with his god damn tree stumps.

In a game like Splinter Cell or Portal, I can see having to think ahead and prepare in advance, and even then that's mostly useful in a siege situation, which is damned rare in this game. Aside from the "Stop 30 Fir Bolg" mission, we almost never have to defend a location, and even when we do, it's almost never easy to tell where your enemies will come from. Hell, even in Left 4 Dead when I'm forced to defend myself until rescue arrives, I don't start by tossing gas cans and fireworks around, I store them in a pile to toss them at zombies as they come charging in.

I'm not against games that require setup to handle a fight. I just don't think City of Heroes has almost any situations where doing that is anything more than a very big waste of time. And this is coming from someone with one 50 Devices Blaster and one 50 Traps Mastermind. I wasted time to reach this conclusion.

FFS! Of course, how could I have forgotten that. OK, I think you just gave me the answer in a single sentence There is benefit to be had for overslotting beyond the soft cap, but it's not great. Probably not worth a slot.

On SOs for a Brute, the best I can hope to do is ~50% physical resistance and ~20% resistance to energies and elements without Unstoppable. With Unstoppable, all of these can shoo up to close to 90%. To me, that's enough of a point to take it. Yes, I suppose I could make that up with Tough or Inventions or buffs or Lord knows what else, but I don't have to. Unstoppable brings me to the cap, it gives me nearly infinite endurance and keeps me alive for three minutes. I've yet to fight a fight (which didn't include psi) that Unstoppable couldn't help me survive, at least for the three minutes it's up.

I actually trumped Marauder with it the other day. He hit his Unstoppable, I waited around 60 seconds, ran out of inspirations and hit mine. We spent about two minutes trading punches, unable to beat each other until his Unstoppable ran out, I beat his *** and still had around a minute left on my own Unstoppable, enough to take down the one spawn of IDF and War Works troops that I hadn't gotten around to.

Personally, I'll take Unstoppable over Strength of Will or One with the shield, which was a big reason why I chose to make my Brute Titan/Inv as opposed to Titan/Will.

I remember the Bonefire arc just fine, but I don't remember anyone ever mentioning leaders of Skulls or Hellions in it. The mechanics aren't the problem, the story of it is. Bonefire is essentially "Hellions stole a cloak, Hellions kidnapped a mystic, Hellions are moving in on the Skulls. Kill skuls. And Hellions. The end!" I don't recall the arc really elaborating on the gangs' methods, ideologies or identity. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can swap the Skulls and the Hellions in that arc and it'd make about as much sense.

Nothing in Bonefire seems to build up to anything, and I don't recall it having much of a finale, at least not one which appears to have resulted in from the actions you took in the arc prior to it. It's a lot like the Hollows arc. "Go do random stuff for a while. I have just discovered where Frostfire lives on my own, so your previous missions didn't really amount to anything." If it's a story arc, it needs to follow some kind of plot where all missions are at least relevant to it.

Here's the thing, though - they already have the tech to put things in bundles. That's what Costume Packs are. They're just bundles of separate items bound to the same purchase, it's just that all items happen to be costumes. In fact, that's what things like the Winter Pack are - some costumes, some powers, some emotes, some badges. Why not just launch a Titan Weapons power set and then a separate Titan Weapons++ Pack that included the Titan Weapons powerset AND the Titan Weapons Costume Pack at no additional charge. Then, don't include either the set alone or the pack alone in the store and just sell the Titan Weapons++ Pack for the duration of the promotion, then pull that and put the costume pack and the weapon pack in as separate purchases.

No, they did not. We solved the plot thread of the Second Invasion, but the Rikti storyline is still open. Now, you have to recognise that in an MMO, you can never really "end" a storyline because these enemies will keep showing up in the overworld, and you need to explain why that is. Thus, Hro runs back to the homeworld, tail between his legs, where he'll be fighting a political fight. But the Rikti here still have a large stockpile of weapons and troops, so they can keep on fighting for some time. In this way, the plot thread ends, but the faction's presence is still justified.

That said, I'd like to see a storyline where we travel to the Rikti homeworld and negotiate with their leaders directly, possibly expose, oppose and foil an attempted coup by Hro, possibly even getting caught in the midst of a civil war as news of the Batallion reach the people. We can then actually divorce the Lineage of War from the Rikti high command entirely and paint them as a separatist paramilitary group which split from the main Rikti society and now exist either as exiles on Earth or as clandestine operatives on the Rikti homeworld in a similar fashion to how the 5th Column exists on our Earth.

That could be an interesting story to follow, especially since it will feed on the underlying political situation on Rikti Earth, as well as feed off what history we know about them.

Pity they're one of the selling points of the VIP subscription, no? It's not like that's the only person who has a problem with them. Telling people to effectively shut up or put up is not constructive, and I hope the development team will prove they have recognised this basic fact of running a service with Dark Astoria. Because that WILL be the real test of mettle and pretty much the last shot.

As for "smaller Trials," I might be tempted to run them IF I had a reason to play my 50s to begin with, and that reason would be something I can do by myself. It'll be a cold day in hell before I will ever consider logging a character in with my only prospect being to sit on my hands and wait for a Something Team to form and pick me up, and over my dead body will I be forced to herd cats and form my own. I've only ever left this game once - back in September of 2004, and feeling an obligation to deal with teams on a constant basis is pretty much the reason for it.

Smaller Trials are a great aside from solo play, which can indeed become a grind and a chore at times. As long as I don't have to run Trials, all Trials and nothing but Trials - i.e. as long as I have an alternative - then sure, I'll run them. The smaller the better. It's not a question of speed. It's a question of people's attitude. About five people and over is a crowd, and people in a crowd turn into clowns. Four and below (ideally, three and below) really isn't so much of a crowd, and it allows people to regard each other as individuals, rather than as a faceless mob.

I really don't have a problem with a "straight-edged scythe," I'm just saying it's not really a scythe so much as a giant sickle or kama. The problem with asking for scythes a lot of the time is that calling them this makes a lot of people disagree on semantics over what a scythe is.

Personally, I love Maka's scythe/partner in Soul Eater and I love how she fights with it when the show doesn't crap out and present her as the incompetent loser underdog. I'd like to use it on one of my characters, as well. I'm not sure I can call it a scythe, though

I really don't fault Paragon Studios for trying something new in this case. Sure, I wish they'd had the tech to simply award the pack automatically to anyone who bought Titan Weapons, but you take what you can get. What bugs me is that they pulled the pack from the Market for Christmas, and they did so BEFORE they priced it and had a solid plan for returning it to be purchased. So now, people who spent the extra money as a Christmas present specifically to buy Titan Weapons, like the person I spoke about, can't get it. And by the time it comes out, they may well be done with Titan Weapons for some time like I am (I got my Brute from 1 to 46 and now she's resting) or they may end up disappointed because the base 6 weapons are not that inspirational.

I LOVE the concept of weapon packs. I'd love to see more of them. But the Titan Weapons pack really wasn't handled very well at all. I sincerely hope that new packs aren't mishandled as badly in the future.