Samuel_Tow

I have a question in regards to that, actually: Is it too much work to provide an alternate, non-tinted version to anything you guys end up having to pre-tint? I was a big opponent to the way Steampunk pieces were pre-coloured, but I actually do very much approve of the compromise on that front, in the sense that the tintable versions of these pieces were really good.

That reminds me - tech itself is as variable in theme as anything else, and I feel we can use clean, sleek, art deco tech and dirty, dinged-up square "ugly" tech in about equal measure. Recently (as in, just yesterday) I went through Portal 2, and I was reminded about the original inspiration behind my 13 (red robot girl from a few pages ago), which is to say smooth, shiny super-tech. However, looking back over what we have... We don't actually have much "square" tech, do we? About the only bulky, angular concept I can think of off-hand is Jay's old Enforcer set, and that's still sleek high-tech, it's just of a more angular design.

When I say lower tech and angular, think something like the Freakshow. These guys are essentially made of scrap metal, and I WANT THEIR CLAW ARMS!!!

... ahem ...

The Freakshow are a good example of the kind of tech I feel we can use a bit more of. Theirs is dirty, rusty, oddly-shaped and cobbled together. Not quite steampunk for lack of steam, not quite cyberpunk for lack of sophistication (even though they're cyborgs AND punks) but a little bit of both AND some high-tech in there, as well. Especially the "Rikto-freaks" that show up so rarely are a great idea.

In broader terms, I define "square tech" like what you see in Aliens or Avatar or other James Cameron movies. It's technology that's sophisticated and advanced, but looks more brutish and built to batter down walls than built with precise calibration and great sensitivity in mind. Take, for instance, the classic pulse rifle:



That's some pretty high-tech weaponry, but it still looks like someone grabbed it by the stock and used it as a club. It looks like you can drop this thing in the dust, run it over with an APC, dunk it in the ocean, shake it up and it'll still fire. It's not entirely square, but it has a very tough, utilitarian look, and that's the sort of tech I feel we can use more of. Come to think of it, the look of the Robotics Mastermind robots is more or less in that vein, but I'd say we can use more of that.

To turn this into a question: David, what's your stance on sleek vs. shiny tech and beautiful vs. rough tech? I know you've been a great proponent of shiny reflective metal in the past, but does this extend to a general aesthetic you enjoy or is it more just fascination with graphical effects? Feel free to reinterpret the questions if you wish

Not as far as I'm aware. The official canon content doesn't have a strong presence of shape-shifting characters, so there isn't much precedent for terminology or appearance, and you should never put too much stock on what the player base has "accepted" as the norm.

City of Heroes is a game about imagination and creativity. So long as you don't contradict established canon (any more than it contradicts itself...) the sky's the limit on what you can write.

Go wild with it

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Unintentional choice of words...

Wanna' bet?

In terms of the player base, yes it is. We're a pretty diverse bunch here and we have many who aren't shy about their own tastes, much as they may be mocked elsewhere.

No. If you're trying to create a shapeshifer, it is what you say it is. Kheldians aside, the most common shapeshifters you'll see are Council/Column War Wolves. What you'll see is a soldier who, when his health gets low, will burst into a full-blown War Wolf. What's happening, however, is the reverse - these are War Wolves who've learned to return to their human shapes. You'll learn this if you read the description of the transformed wolves.

So far as that concerns you - it doesn't. You can feel free to write whatever reason you can make sense of as to why your character is shapeshifting. In fact, I have a somewhat cliche vampire whose "thing" is being able to morph into a wolf, a bat and I forget what else. The reason? Eh, he's a vampire. He can just do that.

I have a couple more shapeshifters, as well, both of them from the same story. The reasoning behind them is they've both died and had their souls transformed into a fantasy other world where they were given new forms specific to that world. In time, they learned to return to Earth and shift back into their human forms.

Mechanically, this is simple to do via alternate costumes. Ensure that you have either the age-old Super Science Booster Pack or that you've bought the Super Tailor ability which allows you to swap between model types and alter height after creation. Then, create one costume that's your human or otherwise "original" form, and after that create another, I suppose "bigger" animal form. Bind a key or make a macro to swap between them with a cool animation and you're set. If you're making a werewolf, /cce # cchowl is a good one, I believe.

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And above all else, don't let anyone tell you what your character is "supposed" to be. It's YOUR character. It is whatever you say it is.

Actually, the binary nature of status effects in this game is a subject of frequent discussions here on the forums, at least that I've seen. And for what it's worth, I agree with you - this binary nature is a problem. Essentially, it means that either you have status effects or you don't. Either you have status protection or you don't. Because anything affected by practically any status effect is affected to its fullest potential.

Status effects have their own magnitudes, but these are themselves stuck to an integer between 2 and 4 and it's very rarely possible to stack them. Think of something like a Blaster or a Scrapper - this character's primary effect is "damage," and any damage dealt by any power "stacks" with any damage dealt by any other powers because all of them work together to deplete the same one health bar that the enemy has. Not so with status effects. You can't, for instance, stack a hold with a sleep or a stun and you can barely stack knockback with itself. Moreover, while comic books, movies and even D&D allows you to defeat an enemy purely through control effects, this game does not.

In one of his latest Countery Monkey episodes, the Spoony One tells of how a Lich used Prismatic Ray on his party, causing one party member to be turned to stone. Permanently. "I didn't have anything to return him with." In most any story, being turned to stone is the same as defeat, in the sense that unless someone else does something to turn you back, you won't get better on your own.

I feel that the biggest problem with status effects - and that's in most games, not just this one - is that they're treated as supplementary tools. You may be able to control people's minds, but the only thing that's good for is incapacitating them for a few seconds. But can you control someone's mind and essentially erase all of his memories so he becomes unable to do anything at all? No. You can control plants and envelop your enemies in plants, but can you encase someone inside a tree for all time? No. Fergully's Christa did this to Nexus, the evil spirit of pollution, but we can't. In fact... What game ever let you do that?

I've often heard people wonder how status effects could scale, but I have to wonder... Exactly what effect does damage have on an enemy before you defeat said enemy? We can't wound our foes, we can't make them limp, we can't knock them out, we can't cause them to be winded. Well, some powers come with debuffs attached, but damage itself does not cause these effects, because an enemy at 1% health is exactly as limber and dangerous as an enemy at 100% health.

I'm honestly not sure what could be done to make status effects less binary in THIS game. There are a few ideas, of course, but none that are trivial to implement and none that won't cause a massive uproar irrespective of which way they change things. There is, however, at least one thing that might be doable. Have all status effects able to stack their mag with new effects for around a minute after they expire. The actual "active" effects would expire as they do now, but their "mag" would linger for a long time so that it's easier to stack more holds thereafter. For instance, if I hit a boss with Total Focus, that boss won't be stunned and Total Focus' stun will expire in around 8 seconds. However, say 30 seconds later I use Stun. Though Total Focus' active component has expired, its passive component is still there and it WILL stack with Stun, stunning the boss. What this means is that enemies can be given much higher protection magnitude while still letting most people stack up to meet it.

Or, as I like it, just have "status" be another health bar that gets depleted by status effects and recovers over time. Deplete it below 50% and the enemy is held. Deplete it to 0% and the enemy is defeated. It won't happen, but it's how I'd like to see it work.

Nor did I suggest such a thing. Nor is such a thing even relevant.

But think about it - someone like Marvel's Thing is a big, heavy, tough brawler, but he's not particularly fast, and he's still just one guy. It should be fairly trivial for a fast enemy to simply run past him and punch Sue Richards in the face, or for a bunch of small guys to distract him while a big guy grabs Johnny Storm by his scrawny neck or, much more realistically, for an enemy with a rifle to shoot past him and hit Mr. Fantastic square in the chest.

In comic books, "bricks" don't end up taking most of the punishment because they grunt at their enemies and beckon. They get much of the punishment because they constitute much of the threat. Because if fast guy ran past the Thing and hit Sue Richards, he has just turned his back on the strongest guy in the group, who's going to grab him by the back of the head and smash his face on the ground. You don't turn your back on the Thing, that's why you want to fight him first - because he's the guy you can't ignore.

Classes notwithstanding, I'm talking about a means of giving critters actual logical motivation to attack the tank, as opposed to making them look like idiots for attacking what they can't kill and what can't kill them while ignoring the actually much more important targets. Again - why would you EVER attack a Granite Tanker? What reason could you possibly have to do that? You can walk faster than he runs! He'll never catch up to you, and even if he does, he'll never do all that much damage to you. And besides, you can't really kill him. Why would you attack him? Why would you not simply ignore him and simply walk around where he's rooted to the ground?

It's illogical and irrational and made possible solely through the deus ex machina mechanic that is taunt. We accept it because it makes the game work, but in terms of suspension of disbelief and even basic logic, it just makes no sense. Personally, I'd prefer if there were an actual compelling reason for enemies to attack the tank above and beyond "they just don't know any better."

You are quite correct that it's problematic, and that's one key reason why this has never been taken seriously by more than a few. I and a few others keep bringing it up occasionally, but it's not really a solution. It's just a concept.

Hmm... You know, I actually like this. If enemies aren't attacking a Tanker, then he can afford to drop his defences and simply wail on the guys. They are, therefore, given good reason to attack him and keep him pinned down. I like it!

First, here's what he said:

Second, in the past, David has proven to be a very cool cat and more than willing to discuss, generally speaking, "all things art" as they come up with. The "brightness" of costumes and its relation to an audience's ability to take said costume seriously is a subject he brought up, himself, as well as a subject he seemed interested in discussing.

Someone's obviously doing something to move the team/league along. However, pick almost any team or league not assembled from people who had to sign up ahead of time and I would bet you dollars to doughnuts it's a few people carrying the team, the great majority just tagging along and at least a few not contributing much of anything at all. That's just the nature of the beast.

Just for reference, I ran a Bastion TF earlier today, and they were happy to have a Brute on the team with the presumption I'd be tanking. Considering this is an Energy Aura Brute for whom I haven't had enough slots to emphasise defence OR offence, that wasn't going to happen, and the team didn't really need me anyway. I could have fallen asleep and they'd have run the TF just fine without me. As a point of fact, I had to leave for a few minutes mid-mission and they went ahead just fine without me and another person on the team who was AFK over something about a furnace.

As a point of fact, I can only recall ONE team where my presence was expressly, obviously necessary pretty much as far back as I can think, and that was a team where I was the only melee - an Axe/Shield Brute - with the other members either very low level or having not built for offence, to the point where I essentially HAD to be present for anything to get killed and often so that none of us bit the dust. Granted, my memory isn't as clear as it used to be, so at most I'm looking back two or three years, but even so - that's two or three years and all of ONE team where my presence was even relevant.

Let me rephrase a tad. I'm not sure that this isn't how things happened so much as I HOPE that's not how things happened, because it both speaks ill of the game's original design (and THAT has been spoken ill of more than enough otherwise) and it actually makes the source of so many Blaster problems very, very unfortunate. I know Geko was under a lot of pressure to put the game out in time, and I know he made a lot of questionable decisions just because... What could he do? But I sincerely hope he and his colleagues put more consideration into the Blaster AT's whole design, because if they didn't, then Blasters have been picking up their slack for the last seven years, and suffering for it.

I'm not sure how much of a fan I am of this because of how difficult it is to tell which enemy is attacking who, but the basic idea is solid. A while back, several people (myself among them) were suggesting something like this for Tankers, actually. I think it was in relation to one of Johnny Butane's old demands for Tanker damage, where we started wondering why "heavies" in comics and movies seem to always be the hardest hitters, yet in this game they can't be, and also what the devil "taunt" is supposed to represent in a more realistic scenario.

The running suggestion at the time was to make the tanking AT not so much an "aggro magnet" as a direct, immediate threat to anything not paying attention to it. How could you, for instance, make it so enemies can't just walk around the very slow Granite tank and attack the Defender behind him? By making the Tanker deal enormous amounts of damage to enemies who aren't fighting him. If enemies turn to fight the Tanker, they are ready to defend against his attacks. Sure, he's hard to kill, but by keeping him "pinned down," he can't kill you. If, by contrast, you chose to turn your back on that Granite tank, you'd take a Seismic Smash to the back of the head and drop right on the spot.

What you suggest for Stalkers as weakness exploiting I suggested for Tankers as a way to make them dangerous yet not overpowered, and to move the impetus to fight the Tanker away from enemies being forced to attack to enemies having motivation to attack. Sure, with as basic as our AI is, they'd still probably have to be coerced to attack mechanically, but at least a Tanker COULD pose a serious danger to the enemies attacking him.

Of course, that's besides the point, but I wanted to put it our there.

So I've heard, but this is still a very rare opportunity, not to mention a waste of Placate. When I say "double criticals from Hide," I mean to give Stalkers the ability to score their random criticals with and without Hide and without needing a power to set it up. Every Hidden critical would, therefore, roll a chance for an extra random critical on top of that.

You know what's even more fun? Technically, that means you can build up Assassin's Focus, hit Placate, hit Assassin's Strike and then score both a 7.0 Assassination critical AND a guaranteed 2.76 "Focus" critical on top of that for a total of 9.76. This doesn't even need any new tech. It just needs the status check taken out of Stalkers' out-of-hide criticals.

Now, that may be overpowered... But Leo wanted a reason to use Placate + Assassin's Strike, and this seems to be it.

City of Blasters was down primarily to the broken Smoke Grenade, actually, and to pre-I3 Tankers being able to handle all aggro with infinite aggro and target caps, at least as I remember it. That, and people hadn't figured out how to break Scrappers yet and make them overpowered. I was actually scoffed at by a number of people for playing a Scrapper way back in 2004 (the original Samual Tow was and is a Kat/SR Scrapper). I don't necessarily disagree with you, though - part of it was there weren't that many enemies who showed the "range = defence" for the fallacy it is.

I remember arguing this point with many people back then, possibly even with Jack Emmert himself at one point. The assertion was that critters pretty much universally had a higher melee damage mod than their ranged damage mod, thus you were safer at range. The argument that you sustain more attacks in melee was never made, as enemies of the time were prevented by their AI from mixing melee and ranged attacks. If they were stuck in their "ranged mentality," they'd only fire ranged attacks even if you fought them in melee (a variation on this made Gunslingers easy to kill as they wouldn't use any of their nastier powers if you were within about 10 feet of them) and if they were stuck in their "melee mentality," they'd ignore their ranged attacks and be completely incapable of affecting a hovering Blaster.

I saw this as a fallacy and still see it as a fallacy because it's not a strength of the character, it's a weakness of the enemies he faces, and the enemies he faces change and evolve. Blasters may have done well fighting Banished Pantheon and Warriors, but pretty soon after launch, they started fighting Rikti Mentalists, Malta Gunslingers and Tac Ops, Nemesis in general, Crey Tanks and Protectors and so on and so forth, and it's only gotten worse. If a primary strength of your AT is exploiting a weakness of your enemies, then what do you do when that weakness gets patched up? "Nor much" seems to be the answer.

Ironically enough, kiting enemies does far more for Scrappers than it does for Blasters, because a Scrapper has the tools to survive with and kiting just adds to that survival. Trying to kite as a Blaster just gets you held and slows you down in your search for killing enemies before they kill you. I've tried it. I went out of my way to explain why all my Blasters were fliers. It didn't work.

And that's really the crucial problem of the whole Blaster AT. They're designed around killing enemies before they kill you, but after a certain point, this simply becomes impossible. Shrewd Blaster players will tell you to instead rely on your status effects and power secondary effects, but as we've already established, that's sideways of a Blaster's specialisation. Having found his specialist tools worthless, a Blaster is then forced to rely on auxiliary tools for survival, and those tools are not always reliable and not always even there.

The greatest paradigm of the Blaster AT and the straw that broke the camel's back for me was a simple realisation: Blasters very much CAN deal the most damage of any AT in the game, but they very rarely live long enough to do so. Yes, if your team has all aggro handled and you're essentially shooting at things with zero danger... Yeah, you can pump out your full damage potential, but at this point your contribution has been reduced from crucial to a matter of convenience and expediency. Blasters have amazing potential, but they are almost never able to fulfil it, having to forego much of their damage output and trade it for second-hand survivability powers in a very uneven trade.

As cool as they are, I find Blaster nukes to be the greatest offender in this case, and used to be EVEN WORSE before. Many people have referred to nukes as the "skip spawn" button because that's essentially what Blasters use them for. You walk into a spawn, you click a button and once every six minutes, you can just opt to not fight that spawn. Sure, it's cool to watch, but once more, this is still an expediency power. I've seen it used in combat a few times, but rarely to turn the tide. Mostly, a Blaster will nuke and save us the trouble of fighting THIS spawn, so we can move on and fight the identical one further down the corridor.

The "all or nothing" design that Blasters seem to have been written after was never realistic. It never is in any game. No player at any point in a game can be allowed to achieve "all" as that simply breaks the game and renders it pointless. And once you realise you can never have "all," the "all or nothing" trade takes on a very unfortunate reality.

If I pick a weapon-wielding character, around half the time I spend playing.

As I said, I foresee giving hide, say, a 10-minute duration with a 10 second recharge, so worrying about it being active shouldn't be a problem. Once every 10 minutes ought to be enough to keep you invisible. The reason I want it as a click is so I can use it to attain hidden status more frequently. And I don't foresee giving it any animation, or if it has to have one, I don't foresee it being very long, so the 2s+ animation of Placate shouldn't be a problem with this.

I don't foresee losing Placate at all. I just want to leave that power with JUST the placate effect, which needs to recharge more slowly, so that we can move the Hidden effect to another power which will recharge much more quickly.

I mean for that to happen to ALL powers, not just Assassin's Strike. For instance, if you hit something with Energy Punch and you're hidden, you deal base damage, you deal another 100% base critical, and you have a chance to deal ANOTHER 100% damage critical, for a total of triple damage. So, out of hide, you always deal base damage but have a chance to do double that, while from Hide, you always deal double damage, but you have a chance to deal triple damage. It makes Hide a better guaranteed hit, but it still leaves room for EVAN MOAR damage.

This is actually why I maintain that the solo game is almost always harder than the team game in terms of straight-up difficulty - because in the team game, there's usually someone else to do your job for you.

To be fair, while easier, the team game is significantly more work, as it involves herding cats, much waiting for teams to assemble and dealing with the above-mentioned leechers. However, even though team tasks are designed to be harder, they end up being easier than many solo tasks where a solo player simply ends up not having an easy way out of a situation.

While you're right that Stalkers are one of the most gimmicky ATs out there, I have to say that most of their gimmicks are actually pretty convenient and straightforward, some even being entirely "behind the scenes," as it were. Mechanically, this may make them complex and hard to balance, but in terms of actual gameplay, they're one of the simplest ATs to play, short of Scrappers, of course. Even Brutes, who have all of ONE gimmick, are more demanding, as Fury is a very fickle mechanic that requires constant maintenance if you want to exploit it to its fullest.

Stalkers, by contrast, essentially start out Hidden, do something to break that hide and then just scrap. Oh, sure, they get better criticals on a team, but that's behind the scenes. Oh, sure, they have Placate, but as we've established, that's rarely very useful in an offensive capacity and pretty easy to use in a defensive capacity most of the time. And now they'll have Street Justice combos, which is probably their most complex mechanic, and even then it isn't all that hard because Assassin's Strike recharges too slowly to be used more often than once every three other attacks anyway.

The AT is complex to build and balance, but it's relatively simple to play, which is one thing I really like about Stalkers.

Every time "gate by time" comes up, I harken back to basic levelling speed in the 1-50 game. Granted, certain people seem able to 50 in a day, but I remember back in I1 when the eponymous Samuel Tow first got to level 50. Asking an M-name citizen revealed that I had taken right around 750 hours to get him there, and I honestly did not feel like my time had been wasted. It's faster these days, with my newer 50s typically scoring right around 200-300 hours, and I'm not exactly in a rush.

How this relates to solo Incarnate progress is I have no problem with said progress taking time if that's intended to be the gating mechanic. I'm a patient guy. The problem with solo Incarnates NOW, which is to say just defeating enemies and hoping for Shard drops, is that it's in no way realistic as a form of progress. In fact, Black Scorpion out-and-out said this, that shard drops from enemies were meant to supplement raiding, not replace it. As such, what I want out of a solo Incarnate game is a means to progress through it that's intended and which is not punitive. I don't expect raid-speed progression, and that's just fine. To compare to levelling up, I can get on an ITF in my upper 30s and gain about two levels in a couple of hours, a feat which would take me something like three to four days on my own. And yet I choose to do it on my own partly because I prefer the game that way and partly because I don't want to just fly through the levels to the level cap.

What I want out of the solo Incarnate content is enough of it that I have something to do and enough progress that I don't feel like I'm wasting my time. Furthermore, what I want is progression that I can SEE as it's happening. What this means is I don't want a chance for a very rare drop, I want lots of little drops that resemble filling up an experience bar. I want to see my progress creep along as I'm playing, because that's the best kind of positive reinforcement I can think of.

Speaking more broadly, I don't really ask the world of solo content. I want it to be fun and I want it to progress me in a meaningful way. That's about it. Well, and that I CAN PLAY IT! That's why I don't mind fairly easier Incarnate content that takes fairly longer to build stuff up through. If you're interested in harder, faster progression that's still not raid-centric, that's when I'd suggest incorporating the difficulty slider into the speed of progression, such that those who want to "level" faster can take on tougher enemies while I don't have to.

Trapdoor is an interesting example, because he's actually not that hard as a boss. He's more of a gimmick fight. Yes, occasionally he could be dangerous if he hit you with Total Focus, but for the most part, Trapdoor is only slightly tougher than, say, a Crey Power Tank boss or an energy Paragon Protector. In fact, with the tactic where you'd draw him into the hallway thus preventing him from spawning bifurcations (since patched to be impossible), Trapdoor became an easy fight.

Now that Trapdoor has to be fought with his bifurcations in place, the fight becomes less difficult and more annoying, as you're forced to look for his summons. What makes it annoying isn't killing them - they're about minion strength and don't attack, if I remember correctly - but rather finding them, since they could appear anywhere and you have no way of knowing how many there are or where they've appeared. Trapdoor himself is not that bad.

Speaking of fights, I've fought him... Let's see... I fought him with a Fire/Fire Blaster who essentially burst-damaged him to death within the span of around 10 seconds, I've fought him with a SS/Inv Brute who beat him down proper, I've fought him with an Axe/Shield Brute who beat him by "cheating" before the hallway tactic was closed down and I've fought him, I think, with a DB/Will Scrapper who beat him without much difficulty.

Personally, I find the most difficult fight in that arc to be the Honoree in the next mission over. As an enemy, he's much tougher to take down. I don't know if he has more hit points, but he's more resistant, he has status effects, he seems to hit harder and I believe he has Unstoppable, to boot. I've died to the Honoree almost every time I've fought him, having to resurrect at least once, whereas I don't recall dying to Trapdoor but once, if that.

That said, neither EB is impossible to take down solo, or at least hasn't been to my experience. They're tough, yes, but I beat them and I was using just Common Inventions. No sets, no set bonuses, no Hamidon enhancements, no temp powers. As I said back in I19 Beta - if that's how difficult Incarnate content is supposed to be, then I'm perfectly fine with it. Enemies were my level, they didn't cheat and the fights were mostly decent. Sure, I had to fight some of the game's tougher eneimes and, of course, there were EBs left and right, but that more or less comes with the territory. At no point, however, was I expected to be min/maxed and at no point were the odds truly stacked against me. I had to use a few tricks, use a few inspirations and take a few punches to the face, but that arc was actually very, very good. I'd run it again if I could.

Ideally, I want to see Incarnate content be about on the level of difficulty of Ramiel, with the Honoree as about the upper boundary of where difficulty should peak, at least in terms of starting out content before I'm expected to have Incarnate powers.

Honestly, I'd say let us pick our own difficulty and scale speed of progression to it. That way, as people gain more Incarnate powers and more level shifts, they'll be able to go up against harder foes and gain Incarnate progression faster, but there would still be a curve. If you're talking about fighting level 52 enemies, I'm sure a 50(+3) Incarnate would laugh at their adorable attempts at offence, but a level 50 character just starting out with no Incarnate powers is going to die and die a lot.

When we talk about Incarnate content, we're really not talking about one set difficulty or one set level, but we are (or should be) talking about progressive difficulty. For reference, look at level 45-50 content. You don't start off fighting level 50 enemies as soon as you hit up Unai Kemen, right? You start off fighting level 45 enemies who then turn 46 as you level up, then 47 and so on to 50. That's what I want out of the Incarnate system, ideally. Even if it's not automatic, it's something I'll aim to do with my own difficulty settings, provided there's a point.

If you set Incarnate content too low to cater to those who have no actual Incarnate powers and have that be ALL of it, you're making it way too easy even for those same people, because they WILL grow stronger. By contrast, if you set it too high, you make the barrier of entry almost impossible, negating the "solo" part and making people have to run Trials or non-Incarnate content in search of level shifts before they can compete... And you STILL end up making it too easy when they level past that. The truth of the matter is Incarnate content needs some way to scale to player power, either manually via difficulty settings or automatically based on what the player has slotted in their Incarnate abilities and how many level shifts the player has.

More specifically, the thing with higher-level enemies is you essentially just have to slot more accuracy. That, really, is what it comes down to. There are other problems with them, but that's essentially it - if your enemies are much higher level than you, you just need a host more accuracy, or to-hit buffs. What that means in turn is suddenly the Accuracy Alpha becomes damn near mandatory, when I honestly don't want it. I prefer the Recharge and Endurance Reduction ones.

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At the end of the day, the POINT of solo Incarnate content is that it's easier, hence why it doesn't require 20 people. I don't feel any particular need for Incarnate content to be gated by difficulty. Gating it by time is perfectly fine, provided progress is at least visible, which it isn't with Shards right now. With Shards, I may get one per day, or I may not. That's pretty much the polar opposite of visible. So long a I can see I'm making progress and I don't have to take weeks upon weeks for even the smallest thing... I'm fine with grinding missions. It's how I got to level 50. Difficulty isn't something I look for in my gameplay, simply put.

Actually, you have me right there with you. Pretty much since the beginning of time, I've seen Placate as a very good power in potential, but at the same time a power which is entirely too hamstrung by the... "Cautious" balancing of Stalkers circa I6. I realise how strong the actual placate effect is (that is to say, the one which makes enemies unable to target you), and I'm more than convinced that's why the power's use is so limited by time and animation. However, Placate has the strong potential to be a GREAT help with scoring Hidden criticals, but that's prevented by two factors:

1. Placate's recharge is very long. 60 seconds for all of ONE critical hit is beyond not worth it. Even if it offered a great DPA increase, it's still not worth much in terms of DPS because it's available so infrequently.

2. Its animation time is ***, especially in comparison to WHEN it applies its Hidden status. Let's be realistic - all Placate has you do is wave your hand. How does that merit a 2s+ animation time? Since it only gives you Hidden status for ONE hit, making it this long is just a detriment in terms of DPA. Not only that, but the power applies your Hidden status to you at or near the start of its animation, meaning you could have that Hidden status broken by enemies attacking you before you're even done animating. That's just bad.

Personally, I wonder if Placate shouldn't become two separate powers, with one being inherent. One would be JUST the "Don't attack me!" portion of Placate on a long recharge and one would be a means to regain your hide quickly. I've actually suggested changing Hide from a toggle to a click with a long duration (say 10 minutes) but a short recharge (say 20-30 seconds) that put you back into your Hidden status when you used it. That way, with slotting, you could drop a Hidden Critical on your enemies once every 10-15 seconds in combat without needing new powers for it.

I fully realise that Placate + Attack is rarely that much better than just attacking, which is why I primarily use Placate as a survivability supplement tool, but that's what I want to improve by finding a better way to regain your Hidden status than even Placate. It's slow and infrequent.

As for the Demoralisation aspect of Assassin's Strike... I'm thinking it could do more. At the very least, either have a longer Fear duration or a higher (absolute?) chance to inflict its fear component. The to-hit debuff is pretty handy for defence-based sets and it being unresistable is decent against AVs, but I've found the effect is too rare and lasts too short a time when I've used it.

And, no, I would not in the slightest be opposed to the Assassination Critical hit for scale 9.0 damage

I don't know what to say. I've seen Placate affect elite bosses, it just doesn't affect them for very long. And I'm really not trying to use it defensively so much as set up a Hidden Assassin's Strike, which tends to fail as often as it succeeds.

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Also: I know people have been talking about the changes being "too good" and talking about dialling them back, and while I disagree (at this point, I don't think anything can make Stalkers "too good"), I have to say that as long as I can use Assassin's Strike in combat without it being interrupted... I'm OK with anything else that happens to the power. NNNOOOOTHIIING in this game is so good as to be worth its interrupt time, with the possible exception of summons that I can do outside of combat, but even then that's just more trouble than it's worth. Out-of-combat powers like Mission Teleport, Rest and so forth I can see being interruptible, as that's actually a not all that a bad means of ensuring you're out of combat when you use them, but for actual combat powers? HELL NO!

My primary concern is that I be able to use Assassin's Strike in combat. Everything else is secondary to that. I'd love to have the Assassin's Focus criticals, too, and I'd love to have Assassin's Strike from Hide be uninterruptible and hit harder, but what I really, really want the most is uninterruptible Assassin's Strike out of Hide. First and foremost.

Second after that, I want a better way to regain my Hidden status. Exactly how this is achieved isn't important: Better Placate, different Hide, re-hiding on critical hit or enemy defeat, self-hiding every 8 seconds like I have POTD, whatever. The means, to me, isn't as important as the acknowledgement that we need better tools to help us hide.

Probably third after that, I want to mess with Build Up and criticals in general.

For Build Up, I honestly do want to see it ensure guaranteed criticals for 10 seconds, though I hear not all sets can benefit from that. At the very least, I want to see it provide a 100% damage buff, if not more. Or we can do it like Swap Ammo and have Build Up enable additional damage components in each power.

For criticals, there is so much we could do... We could make critical hits from Hide do more damage, such as 150-200% base damage in addition to being guaranteed. We could have Hidden criticals apply status effects or debuffs. Or - and this is my favourite - we could have Hidden criticals still allow non-Hidden criticals to occur still, meaning if you're lucky, you can score a double critical from Hide. What this means is that, if you're lucky with Assassin's Strike, you could score your Assassination Critical AND score an extra 2.76 scale damage on top of that from Assassin's Strikes regular critical hit for some impressive, if fairly rare damage.

Personally, I'd up Hidden criticals and increase the damage on the Assassination Critical to scale 9.0 as a first step to make Hide more relevant, then increase the damage of hidden criticals to 150% base, but leave the out-of-hide Criticals as they were officially suggested. Optionally, I'd allow Hidden attacks to score their Hidden critical AND score their unhidden critical on top of this if the random roll is favourable. But that's just me

No, I don't think we are. Scaling "solo" content to a level that none of my solo characters can fight at is not a solution to any problem. The problem, at least from my perspective, is that there isn't anything I can do by myself that can net me a realistic form of Incarnate progression. Scaling everything at 52 does nothing, because it still leaves me without anything THAT I CAN DO by myself that can net me a realistic form of Incarnate progression.

I'd rather this take longer than be harder.

That was actually a mistake on my part, and something I had to fight Zombra tooth and nail over. Unwittingly, I picked all the non-monochrome colours on the costume to be in the blue hue. You have blue, cyan and magenta, all of which are "blue-ish," giving the character a monotone look. That costume is right around four years old at this point and done without any real foresight into colour contrast or colour scheme.

Were I making this costume now, I would have picked primary colours which were less loud to offset the blue skin, or at the very least picked colours which contrast better against the blue. I would probably have picked either bright yellow tech similar to the 90s Fox cartoon X-Men communicators, and I would not have used black for a fabric colour. You can't believe how many times I've had to explain that that's not a two-toned suit, but rather leather over blue skin.

Inna is hardly my best example of artistic design largely because I goofed on her colours, but I maintain that the bright blue looks good on her. Obviously it's subjective, but again - she's hardly my weirdest design, or indeed my loudest. I think the disconnect between you and me is probably that I really, REALLY like the look of that blue against black on pretty much any costume. In fact, right around the time I made Inna, I also made Jack's original costume. It's not very good, so here's his current one:



I actually think I should have used him, instead, but he's actually even more blue. Jack is actually THE reason I like that colour scheme. When I was designing him, I picked his tech to be black, started tabbing through detail colours and saw that vibrant blue that the costume editor had randomly selected as my secondary colour and I hadn't changed, since I like to puck my details first and set their colour second. And since then, I was hooked.

The reason I like that blue on that black actually goes back to Need for Speed: Underground, where a specific perlescent paint with a certain vinyl coloured light when looked from a certain angle appeared to fluoresce in the darkness of the night. City of Heroes has some of the same properties, in the sense that our nights don't just turn dark, they also turn blue. While most other colours grow muted at night, blues only grow more vibrant. At night, black becomes even darker, almost solid, while blues grow darker, giving me this almost glowing look, which is why I used it.

Jack's design is actually even more straightforward - black/blue tech, red/green carapace. You will likely disagree with me that this is a good design (especially with his blue darkness ), but I actually feel it gives him a decent "technodemon" look, between the glowing Tron tech and the chaotic, almost decaying flesh. When I get around to playing him again, he'll probably swap for IDF gloves and boot so he's not as goofy (the Enforcer set has a LOOOT of camp value...), but that colour scheme is less "absurd" and more just weird.

More specifically to the argument at hand, while bright fluorescent blue on dark black may be well weird, possibly even bizarre (which is why I like it), it's not weird in a "childish" sense, in that I don't think it makes the characters look like they came from a kids' show, so much as that they came from someone who may or may not have been thinking straight when making them. Remember - BAD costumes aren't the problem here. Childish ones, such that make the source material appear to be aimed at kids, are what caused the problem. My designs are almost always bizarre, but I have fairly few that are actually cartoony.

The basic theory behind it (or at least what I have rigged in my spreadsheets) is that when building an attack chain, you first the pick attack with the highest DPA, then try to max its uptime, then add in the one with the next highest DPA and repeat until you exceed 100% total uptime. You then tally up the combined DPS of these attacks and you have your attack chain, plus what you can expect to get out of it.

I find this to be a fairly spacious calculation for myself as I lack the discipline to stick to a specific attack chain and prefer to have a range of tools, but that's why I brought up DPA.

Typically when I speak about DPA, I'm referring to a time window of around 10-15 seconds, which is around the standard "short duration buff" time. How this relates to Assassin's Strike is how it relates to Blaster Snipe powers - am I making good use of my buff, or can I do better? In the case of Fire Blast, Blaze + Fire Blast does more damage in less time than Blazing Bolt, so in that case the answer is "No, I'm actually wasting buff." You'll be unsurprised to learn - if you didn't know already - that a 7.0 scale Assassin's Strike isn't better DPA than a critical scale 2.76 Assassin's Strike.

I've no doubt, but the question is "by how much?" I haven't actually seen Siolfir's calculations, but are they enough to offset the Demoralisation effect? I happen to like that one quite a bit.

Wait, what? When did that happen? I checked the Dev Digest at the start of today and I thought I'd kept up to date on this thread. Did I miss something big?

Currently, I find Placate + Assassin's Strike to only ever be worth it in one-on-one fights, and even then only when done very carefully. I recall applying this against Infernal on multiple occasions, and many of those ending with him hitting me between when my Placate hit and when I could react, him setting me on fire and breaking my Hidden status that way, or him summoning demons and breaking my Hide AND my Assassin's Strike that way.

*edit*
Oh, another funny thing - elite bosses (at least Back Alley Brawler) also resist Placate effects, which have shorter durations on them. The fun part is that this means that your placate is sometimes SHORTER than the interrupt time of your Assassin's Strike from hide, meaning you out and out CAN'T do this against some EBs... And EBs are the biggest reason why you'd want to do this.

Personally, I would not be sad to see Assassin's Strike from Hide become uninterruptible just so it's less of a gamble, but I'm right there with you - it's rarely useful after a Placate unless you're completely in control of the situation, which a Stalker rarely is.

I think we're simply talking past each other in this case. At no point have I ever acknowledged "run and rehide" as a valid strategy since you managed to convince me it's garbage. Not even when Arcana informed me that actual developers have said this (what were they thinking?). When I say "first strike capability" (I think that's what I said), I'm referring to the period between using Build Up at or near the start of a fight and the time when Build Up expires. That's actually why I put relatively little value on Assassin's Strike itself - because while it accounts for a lot, it's not the whole story.

Personally, I do have a habit of firing up Build Up and using Assassin's Strike mostly out of instinct, but you are correct in one aspect: The longer I play Stalkers, the more my instincts tell me that I shouldn't be doing this. It "feels" wrong, in the sense that I'm wasting the buff. It "feels" like I should simply assassinate sans Build Up, fire up Build Up afterwards, hit Placate and then attack.

As to why I find Placate to be such a cornerstone, it's because this is the one tool a Stalker has which produces controlled, predictable criticals at a moment's notice. Hide in general does this, but you can only control your Hidden status once per battle, and that's it. Past the start, you're essentially permanently scrapping with your "Stalker stuff" never coming into play. You argue around Assassin's Strike, but the truth of the matter is that without Placate, you're only ever going to use it once, especially on something like Regeneration or Electric Armour.

In short, if we're talking about Stalker criticals, I'd like those to be easier to score, as opposed to bigger but more rare. If I had the chance to make Assassin's Strike insta-kill against anything I actually hit, but the rest of the AT's attacks meaningless, that might produce the AV killer of legend, but it would still be a boring AT. For a character to be fun to play, that character needs to have something to do constantly, and that something has to be to the character's special skills. As such, a Stalker's special skills need to be effective at all times, not just once per battle or once per 60 seconds. That's why I put so much weight on Placate.

Frankly, I don't see that as a problem. What you describe works more or less how I've always wanted Stalkers to work. It's not exact, of course - there's always wiggle room for the pedantic among us (i.e. me) to nit-pick, but... Yeah, I don't dislike what you describe. In fact, I like it a lot.

Years ago, someone (I believe it was Arcana), corrected me on the use of the terms. DPS stands for "Damage Per Second" in the sense of continued damage over time. DPA stands for "Damage Per (second of) Activation" and represents the damage you can pump out with this attack in the span of its activation, so as to pick which attack is best to pick for an attack chain. You need some way to differentiate between damage over time in general and damage over time of activation, because one depends solely on animation and one on animation AND recharge.

I'm not sure why you'd say that. Actually let me illustrate. If Assassin's Strike from Hide deals 7.0 scale damage and Assassin's Strike out of Hide deals 2.76 and both are slotted with, say, 100% damage enhancement, then hidden Assassin's Strike is still stronger than unhidden Assassin's Strike. From Hide, with 100% damage buff, you're hitting for 14.0 scale damage and demoralise. Outside of hide, even on a critical, you're still only hitting for 7.728 WITH Build Up. Yes, hidden Assassin's Strike takes longer to animate, but even without Build Up, it deals nearly twice the damage. I see no reason to not use that first without Build Up, THEN hit Build UP and THEN start attacking.

In fact, you quote AoE-strong sets like Electric Melee, but Electric Melee singularly lacks a decent attack to open with from Hide. It's all AoEs that I almost never "crit" with or pretty damn uninspiring single-target attacks. By foregoing Assassin's Strike from Hide, at best you're coming up to about about the same level of damage, but you do so with more attacks and over a longer period of time. I quite honestly see no reason to not use Assassin's Strike from Hide when it is simply better.

Now, I CAN see an argument that we don't want to use Build Up with Assassin's Strike from Hide, and that actually is a concern of mine - a big one, especially with Dual Blades where Build Up + Assassin's Strike sets up no less than two combos (two combos I won't need to hide for any more, by the way), but that's a question of Assassin's Strike's Hidden DPA and less so a question of gimmicks. I've long believed that an Assassination critical should hit for more damage. Someone mentioned 9.0, and I like it.

You're lobbying for improvements to the Hidden portion of Assassin's Strike at the expense of not lobbying for improvements to the Unhidden portion of the power, at least not to nearly the same extent as Synapse is suggesting. Frankly, if I had a choice, I'd pick a solution which fixes Assassin's Strike's inability to be used more than once per battle over making its Hidden status more appealing. I'd personally like to improve both sides of it, but if I had to only pick one, I'd pick the one that helps me scrap over the one that helps me hide.

Frankly, I've never found myself in a situation where I was hidden and standing next to an enemy and DIDN'T want to use Assassin's Strike from Hide. Not a single time. For me, what Assassin's Strike does now is more than enough to make me want to use it, and indeed enough to make me want to save it a lot of the time. I could see it doing more damage or applying a stronger debuff... Or being AoE, but this doesn't have to come at the expense of the changes proposed.

Frankly, I don't see it. The changes he proposes are hardly overpowered and they still leave many Stalkers dragging their feet for lack of AoE. If anything, Stalkers can use more than the changes, not less.

But even if all of the changes you cite happened, I'd still be perfectly happy to have them if it means I'm able to use Assassin's Strike outside of Hide without doing mental gymnastics. Your suggestion, regardless of anything else, maintains Assassin's Strike's interruptibility outside of combat, and I want that GONE. Dead and forgotten. Few things about this game's mechanics piss me off more than interruptible attacks, and considering my first character to 30 was an AR/Dev Blaster back in 2004, I've had a lot of time to build up ire for this. I do not want to see interruptibility used as a balancing mechanic for anything outside of Rest, and it kind of bugs me even there.

Well, a few have powers that may as well be snipes, but aren't quite. They still take as long as snipes, though. Bitter Ice Blast, Piercing Shot and whatever Sonic Blast had come to mind. Bitter Ice Blast especially. It's a power that does crappy damage, crappy control, costs a bundle and take ages to animate.

I wash my hands of Blasters. The AT is so messed up I don't think it'll ever be straightened up. At least half the original sets feel like they were assembled by some random algorithm that picked powers for a common theme. I don't think anything can ever happen to them to change my mind at this point, just because what it would take is not reasonable.

It's because first strike capability doesn't win fights, but rather makes fights easier. Sooner or later, Stalkers are going to have to scrap, and getting a decent scrapping power is - at least to me - far more valuable than improving their first strike capability, which I find to already be pretty damn good. And if that capability needs to be made more attractive, this should be done by improving said ability, not by making scrapping less attractive or, as you're currently suggestion, overturning a suggestion for making scrapping more attractive.

By your own admission, Stalkers need to scrap. The better they are at it, the happier I'll be. Stalkers also need first strike capability, but one does not have to come at the expense of the other.

I'm not sure how that's relevant, considering you typically use Assassin's Strike from hide all of once per combat. In fact, sometimes you don't even get to use that because enemies ambush you, see through your stealth and attack you faster than you can assassinate, which would still be true for a fast Assassin's Strike. If you're looking at it from the aspect of DPA, then no, Assassin's Strike doesn't have good DPA, but as that's typically not part of combat, the only thing that this means is you probably don't want to use Build Up with it.

So, how about this: Why not open with Assassin's Strike and THEN hit Build Up and continue your attack chain from there? You're not getting guaranteed Hidden criticals from AoEs anyway. And if Hidden Assassin's Strike doesn't do enough, why not improve that? Why does Assassin's Strike need to be useless in combat as it is now?

Frankly, if the game did not have a single interruptible attack ever again, I would die a happy man. I HATE getting interrupted. The point of making Assassin's Strike uninterruptible outside of combat was - I firmly believe - to give Stalkers an extra solid attack first and foremost, and this is something which they have sorely lacked for years. Doing anything to take a step back from that is, in my opinion, a crime against the AT. In fact, the gimmick as they are now is just fine in my eyes. It'd love to test it and use it. I DO NOT want to mess with unhidden Assassin's Strike.

If you feel that Hidden Assassin's Strike isn't rewarded enough or isn't good enough, I'd suggest messing with that. Make that uninterruptible, make that faster, make that hit harder, do stuff to that. Punishing Stalkers for fighting outside of Hide is not a good idea, because regaining and maintaining Hide is a pain in the ***, and the game actively seeks to prevent you from doing so. Yes, Placate helps. No, it doesn't help nearly enough. It's on a VERY slow recharge and I usually lose my Hidden status within the Placate animation itself.

IF the Hidden status were uninterruptible, or had a window of uninterruptibility after reapplication and IF I had a much faster means of regaining it than once every 60 seconds, then MAYBE I would consider moving hamstringing Stalkers when not Hidden, but this isn't the case. Moreover, I doubt it will ever be the case. The best I can say for the moment is we should go ahead and just make hidden Assassin's Strike faster and uninterruptible, too.

And while we're at it, we should save Blasters from their HORRIBLE Snipes and give them the Assassin's Strike treatment.

Years ago, at the dawn of CoV, people complained that Stalkers were one-trick ponies, because Assassin's Strike was seen as the one thing they're good for. If you want to improve their first strike capability without loading Assassin's Strike so much it becomes THE Stalker power and mandatory for absolutely every build, then mess with their ways of getting self-damage buffs. As I said - a Build Up which gave Stalkers a 10-second window of guaranteed criticals would do a HELL of a lot more for their burst damage than anything done to Assassin's Strike ever could in a million years.

Or that, why not? My reason for suggesting this being "on kill" is to make it controllable by the player, but still not make it trivial to achieve. And to "get the kill" could mean many different things depending on how it's handled. I just want to ensure that the Stalker didn't just tag ten enemies and then proceeded to get Hide after Hide on the one AV as his team slowly wipes out the rest of the tagged minions via AoE collateral damage. I wanted to reward the Stalker for his single-target damage by giving him benefits from taking down single targets, provided single-target damage is the point.

The "kill stealing equation" for deciding whether an outdoor kill counts to your kill count for street hunting missions is already in place. If you and someone not on your team attack the same enemy, you only get credit for it if you do a certain amount of damage. I don't know what amount this is, and I know for a fact that both people can get credit for the same kill despite being on different teams, so I'm thinking of something like that.

Now, this has the problem of detracting from the Stalker's ability to hide on a team which is very proficient damage-wise, so a Hide on a critical might not be a bad idea.

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Alternately, we could do a sliding scale thing. Every attack a Stalker does has some percent chance to Hide him, and the more attacks he throws out, the higher his chance to Hide becomes, until it reaches 100%. When he actually rehides in any way, this chance is once more reset. Mechanically, this would give the Stalker a chance to hide on every attack AND a "streakbreaker" sort of thing to ward against bad luck.

Conceptually, we're saying the following: A Stalker doesn't like a stand-up fight, so with every attack, he will attempt to deal damage AND distract his enemies so he could elude their sight and attack them from behind. The longer the fight goes on, the more the enemy plays into the Stalker's trap and the easier it becomes to confuse them.

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Alternately-alternately, do you know what would punch Stalker spike damage through the roof? Replacing Build Up with 10 seconds of completely uninterruptible Hide, kind of like how Titan Weapons has 10 seconds of Momentum instead of Build Up. Throw this on, and you get 10 seconds of 2.0 scale melee attacks, effectively. Want to talk about stupid damage? That's stupid damage. Those 10 seconds will turn a relatively middle-of-the-road damage dealer into a monster for the duration.

A damage buff (80% for a Stalker) is applied cumulatively with other damage buffs and enhancements. A well-slotted Stalker attack typically has 100% damage slotting for a total of 200% its base damage. 80% on top of that doesn't even add 1/2 more, so its benefit is relatively limited. A critical hit isn't a damage buff, it's a whole other damage component which benefits from enhancements and damage buffs on its own, so a 200% attack with a critical becomes a 400% damage attack.

Want to break the system even more? Up critical damage to 150% of the power's base damage, make Build Up let us score guaranteed criticals, then have it add a damage buff on top of that. Now we're talking sick burst damage. Right?