Samuel_Tow

Well, no, it's not scythe-specific because the way Death fights is more as a dual-weapons used with kama weapons that he uses pretty much like axes. He has only a few scythe-specific attacks, usually either in executions or his reaper form attacks. What I was saying, however, is he made a primary scythe user look good enough for me to want one.

Also, what do you envision of being specific to a scythe? An actual scythe has a blade that points sideways of the haft so that it can cut grass on the ground without making you bed over. A what you see passed off as a scythe in fantasy and anime has a curved blade that points down the haft and looks like a giant kama. To the best of my knowledge, such a weapon has never actually existed and thus no traditional means of using it has ever been developed.

I don't mean this to shoot you down, by the way - this is an honest question: How do you envision a scythe being used that's unique to it and can't be used for an axe just as easily? In Darksiders II, Death spears the Crowfather lying on the ground, then flips him up to stand the scythe on its end so the guy is hanging off the blade upright, but that's a very specific use for it that's not easily transferable to a genera situation. So seriously - what's specific to the scythe?

The thing with just "updating" textures is kind of the same problem with CSI style series getting a grainy video and saying "Enhance it!" to get a high-res version of it. The truth of the matter is that there's no information held in the low-res textures beyond what abstract interpretation we have of them based on what they sort of look like. Doing high-res version of those would require an artist to basically redesign the whole thing, since that artist would have to create details where before there were only a few pixels to suggest there's something there.

Put it this way - when Unreal Tournamet went from 99 to 2003, they tried to update one of the most famous CTF maps - Facing Worlds. They redesigned it to such an extent that not only was it a completely different map, it was actually complete crap, eliminating the biggest reason you played Facing Worlds - to snipe at each other from the tops of the facing towers. A more "faithful" recreation of the original was released with I think UT2004, but it took considerably backlash to get the artists to realise we didn't want a completely new map with just the same name, we wanted to old map to look better.

That's a BIG problem with doing "uprezzings" of old textures. The new Tech Sleek is garbage, for instance, and the new Armour Plate is now useless for the one thing it used to be useful for - the look of imperfect cast iron. Now it's shiny like it were polished metal, which it really ought to not be. That's why people were so adamant about retaining our original costume pieces. We already lost a bunch of stuff to the reflection monster. I'd rather no lose more.

I'm not actually against buying stuff individually. The game has so far done a pretty good job of prompting me about it. Find a costume piece I like but don't own? Click the "buy" button and I can have it. It's convenient for me, and making it convenient for me to spend my money means better business for the studio, so auto-paying for this stuff isn't as important to me personally as I feared it would be once upon a time.

BEING ABLE to buy stiff is the real issue, though. Certain things are held back for reasons of marketing - promotions, exclusives, gambling mini-games and more. It's standard marketing practice so I can't really blame the team for going with it. Sure, it's aggressive as all hell, but we did bust their balls for years about not doing anything. But here's the catch - I'm a VIP. Those marketing strategies should not be aimed at ME. Marketing shouldn't be trying to milk ME for more money. I've already pledge to pay money, and all the marketing schemes that keep arriving in my inbox pretty much tell me that I'm not paying enough. This is the complete opposite of VIP treatment.

I'm with Arcana on this one. I've seen reactions to "more power" suggestions take arguments to an extreme and suggest we're asking for all powers at level 1 and an insta-kill button when that's really not the case. Level progression, increasing in strength and going through the whole experience are a major part of this game. Losing all of this would not just be a mistake, but it would harm the game, as well. I, myself, don't really mind my characters not being godlike at the start, even when they're supposed to be literal gods. Explanations for why their power is being suppressed FOR NOW aren't that hard to come by.

However, I don't think that extends to class balance. To me, class balance isn't so much "part of the game" as it's a safety net to ensure greater replayability. We have to ensure there's a reason to play every AT, at the very least for the people who enjoy their respective playstyles, and we need to ensure people don't feel stupid for picking an AT they like which is somehow objectively inferior. But what that DOESN'T mean is that we need to stick to the old "rock-paper-scissors" approach of the holy trinity. I think we're well past trying to figure out what "role" each character is supposed to have on a team.

Once upon a team, I PMed an AT suggestion directly to Castle (on request by posters from the suggestion thread) and his reply was, in part, to ask what role this AT would serve on a team. At the time, his question made sense, this was years ago, but now? I really don't think this is relevant any more, because it kind of sort of assumes a system where characters are defined by what they NEED to do but CAN'T, for which role another on the team is needed. To me, the game as I see it now has only one major role - help kill stuff. Because this can be accomplished in so many different ways by so many different combinations of characters, I really don't think we should keep asking what this character's role is.

I can actually address this. You're running into a couple of problems here.

1. All of the Claws animations, both before and after BABs worked on them, assume that your claws are mounted on your hand, so where they point is controlled by the direction of the fist. This is true for all Claws, except two: Vanguard/Talsorian Claws and Rularuu's Talons. Both of those weapons are actually mounted on the forearm and actually follow the angle of your elbow.

If you're not afraid to draw on your own arms, here's what you can try to visualise is. Take your hand, and put it palm-first on your chest, then draw a line from your middle finger knuckle all the way down to your elbow. Make sure it's straight. Now twist your wrist in the basic Wolverine stance, with the knuckles down as though you'll be stabbing at someone from below. Note how that line twists, and the end which was by your elbow is now on the outside side of your arm. THAT end is where the laws are mounted so that's where they'll be pointing.

You CANNOT make forearm-mounted claws work well in this game because most animations for Claws rotate the fist away from the forearm and you end up slapping people with the side of the blade. You may not notice it, but that's what the set is doing.

2. Some of the Claws animations are bugged. See, Claws has its own stance, similar to one of the Cheer emotes emotes. This keeps the fists closed, the palms up and the claws aimed forward. This is what you're supposed to go into when you're done with a Claws attack, but the trouble is that not all the powers do that. One of the Claws animations is the same one used for Barrage, but because it's the same animation, it puts you into the same stance, which is the basic "left foot forward" stance. This has the hands open, usually causing them to clip with the claws. I'm pretty sure that's a bug, and I believe I've reported it. I'd advise you to also reporting via the in-game /bug function.

The sad truth is the game's animation sequencer is really wonky, and has been getting worse of late. A lot of times, what follows up a specific animation won't always come out right. Numerous times my Titan Weapons user will jump up using the basic jump animation and jam her sword through her head, and the "false combat mode" bug which makes it possible to override ALL animation rooting for some sets was still in the game last I checked. None of our animators have so far been able to fix that thing to not produce these kinds of weird behaviours... Likely because no-one has ever sat down to do that, as far as I can tell. The art team is always busy with other stuff, it seems.

Goat... Plot, story and good writing are a major part of the game. Maybe not to YOU, I'll grant you that much, but the people who care about this are not few and far in-between. Just because you don't care for it, and have made it a point to state and restate that every chance you get, doesn't mean slipping writing quality should be excusable.

I don't care about badges. If they disappeared from the game overnight, I would not bat an eye. Don't give a toss about the things. But if badges started getting bugged and not awarding, I wouldn't really see a problem with people getting upset about it. If Issues went by with no new ones being added and people were dissatisfied with that, I'd understand. I wouldn't really mind it since those things hold no value for me, but I recognise that this is a big thing for some in the community.

Couple of points:

1. That's not a binary choice. You don't either integrate all of your characters in the story completely or ignore the story with all your characters completely. I find it's best to work with canon and meet it half-way, to where your characters are still your own, and yet still make sense to exist in City of Heroes by its internal rules. You don't have to be a slave to canon, but you also don't have to ignore it completely.

2. Good stories are never wasted and never a bad thing. They serve to make the game more entertaining and immersive, as well as to inspire. Many of the characters I own now started life as inspiration to do with something I'd seen in the actual game - a cool story, an awesome character, an unusual take on a common theme. A game written with thought and imagination fosters an atmosphere of creativity because it helps people care. That's never a bad thing, even for people who adamantly refuse to care, because you can still always ignore it. But it's important that there's something there when we choose to NOT ignore it.

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The funny thing here is I'm one of the harshest critics of our writers, and I've probably insulted their intelligence quite badly on multiple occasion. But to me, insisting that the game's story doesn't matter and for all the care, attention and imagination our writers put into the game, they're just wasting their time and we'll mock them for even trying... To me, that's far more disheartening than calling them bad. Sure, being called a "hack" is hurtful, but at least it means you made someone care enough to be emotionally invested. Telling someone you don't value their effort in the slightest is, to me, considerably worse.

I disagree. You can always skip a useful power for a pool power, but you can never skip a pool power for a useless power because it's useless. All "skippable" powers contribute to is not asking you to make build choices about what to skip and what to keep, but you could make the exact same Empathy pool build if most of Empathy weren't useless solo as you can now by simply skipping the powers you're skipping now. You just might not be as satisfied when you find your pool build doesn't suck so much less to a team build in comparison as it does now.

Titan Weapons has problems - big ones. And the problems aren't weapon choices, those are fine. The problem is that nearly half the Titan Weapons animations were taken directly from sword-centric powersets, at least for their non-momentum animations. Rend Armour is Assassin's Blade, Follow-Up is half of Parry, Titan Sweep is Soaring Dragon and so forth. What this means is you have a set which acts like a sword set. So when you stick stuff in there that's not a sword and has no stabbing point, it looks weird. You don't stab with a hammer, it looks wrong. You don't use a hammer with an engine on the back to stab said engine in the ground. The list goes on.

I get this on a technical, labour-saving level, but it's weird to me that Broadsword - a SWORD set - has no sword-specific animations and looks just fine with an axe or a mace, but Titan Weapons - a NON-SPECIFIC weapon type set - expects a sword for most of its animations. To me, this really should have been focused on wide swings and length-wise ground pounds so as to accommodate all weapon models. Because as it stands, it just looks weird to me. And I LOVE the set, mind you. I just only use the sword weapons.

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On scythes: Darksiders II has a take on scythe combat so surprising it caught me completely off-guard. I never considered a scythe to be a weapon which could ever look good, at least not as a primary weapon, but that game goes all out. Death uses a pair of small twin scythes that work pretty much like large Kama style weapons, which can also join together at the hilts to form a single, long-bladed scythe to use two-handed. The game takes some liberty with proportions, as those scythes can fold in for transport and their blades grow larger and smaller as needed, but suffice it to say that both dual-wielded and two-handed look good.

In fact, a lot of the coolness of the two-handed scythe comes in the form of either long AoE sweeps or tossing the thing forward to spin in a froth, then catching it as it comes back. Knowing City of Heroes' insistence on keeping sets looking like something you can do without the use of telekinesis, this "boomerang scythe" is probably not workable, but it looks very good regardless. I've always found this weapon to work best when spun fast.

Finally, Death's "reaper form" uses a pretty giant scythe that it uses almost like an axe, only not so much to chop at things as to spear them then toss them around. It occurs to me that this kind of weapon would look great in-game, but it would need animations much more suited to a large two-handed axe, as opposed to the sword-centric animations we have now. Stabbing with a mace may feel wrong, but it still has some sense to it as you're effectively "punching" people with a heavy weight. Stabbing with the dull side of a scythe blade, on the other had, will never look good. Not to me. If Titan Weapons got a series of new animations that swap out Rend Armour and Wave of Destruction, this could work, but not with those two being the set's best.

Like I said - the only perk I want is to be treated as a person who's too important to dick around with marketing mini-games. Zwill says that people aren't buying the consumables, so Marketing are working on ways to trick us into buying them via gimmick ploys. That's fine - the game needs to make money to stay afloat. But I'd like to subscribe to the option that puts me above those marketing gimmicks and lets me buy what I want to buy when I want to buy it. Again, "moar points" is the last thing I want as a "perk" because "moar points" I can always buy. It'll cost me, but I can buy them at my terms.

What I want is to be able to buy things that are "unavailable" for made-up marketing reasons designed to enforce artificial scarcity as a means to trump up seasonal sales or promote another item that I don't want. I want to buy stuff that's out of season in case I suddenly decide I want it right now, I want to be able to buy stuff that's in the "Super Packs" without having to go through the nonsense of rolling on it. I want to be able to buy stuff that's on the market as it is, but is being blocked or obfuscated in some way. That, to me, would be the big perk, because that would make me feel important. Or, at least, important enough to not be treated like a freeloader that everything has to be sold to through a mind-game gimmick.

Is that a bad thing, though? I mean, I get that the point of confuse is to get you to attack your team-mates, but doesn't it make sense that you're so confused you hurt yourself?

Also, I suspect targeting yourself with come with a specific flag, such as the mypet/notmypet that might be useful for weeding these situations out. But even if it's not, shooting yourself with your own gun does strike me as something that a confused person might do. I had a school mate who struck a staple into his own finger because he apparently didn't know how a stapler worked. And because he was stupid, let's not mince words here.

No, because that's not what I said. In fact, you post as though you only read the last sentence of my post and skipped over this part:

What I'm saying is that it's not a simple matter of just giving Blasters Tanker powers with Tanker mods. That WOULD be stupid, especially since a Blaster's secondary is more a liability than a help, even now. However, as you can see from my power armour gatling gun guy thread, that's not what I'm suggesting, nor what I think anyone is even considering. The point isn't to make something better, it's to make something balanced that CAN use ranged attacks AND not be squishy across the AT. Unless you want to argue that range itself is somehow a massive advantage that cannot be offset in any other way, this should be possible. The right stats, the right gimmick and the right power reshuffling if necessary can make this possible.

This straw man that what's being suggested here is an AT with Blaster damage mods and Tanker survivability mods needs to go away. Yes, it's a bad idea. It's such a bad idea, in fact, that everyone knows it's bad and no-one is actually suggesting it. Please stop arguing against it. You've already won and that's not what I mean.

You ask me if people would still play Blasters if they could play Blasters with armour. I don't know, but let me ask you this - would people play Blasters with defence if they had a Defender damage mod? Because that question isn't as easy hand-wave away. That sort of comparing of uncomarables is what can make such an AT work.

Not to mention that both Kheldians and Soldiers of Arachnos already have ranged attacks and armour and yet people still play Blasters for some reason.

Game, set, match. That's what it comes down to. To elaborate, though, I solo for two reasons:

1. I just like to play by myself and not deal with other people's respective needs and desires. Not all the time, at least.

2. There aren't always people I want to team with available. That's not a value judgement on what makes a "good" team-mate so much as my own mood being incompatible with teamwork.

What this means is that, come hell or high water, I WILL solo at least sometimes on any character I make. In turn, this means that I need a character who's not just "able" to solo, but who solos well. I can't, therefore, play a "team-only" character for any stretch of time.

What that DOESN'T mean, though, is that I'll refuse to play a support role when I'm put in the position to fill one. That's exactly what I do with my Masterminds when I'm on a team - I switch my secondary from working on my pets to working on my team, and I have a lot of fun doing it. But that's usually on a Mastermind who got to the level he's at mostly through solo play.

Basically, allowing me to play traditionally team-centric AT by myself, and allowing me to do well at it, means I'm actually in a position to play support, which then makes me available to your team which needs support. But if that's ALL I can do, then I'll never be in this position because I will abandon the entire AT and go play one that solos better. As I have.

The trouble, as you point out, is that you don't WANT to give ultimate freedom to your writers unless you trust them implicitly to be both very skilled and very competent. And I mean no disrespect to our current writers, but they are neither. That's not to say they're bad writers, but it IS to say that they need direction, supervision and help. Imagine never having heard of MineCraft then being tossed into someone's over-built village and told to "Go ahead! Create! And don't worry about messing up my buildings." It doesn't work, because that's really not how creativity works.

Creativity is spawned from inspiration borne of a particular solid idea, and then tempered and fleshed out by restricting it with internal rules. Particularly experienced writers will be smart enough to plan the rules constraining their story and then proceed to tell it "how it wants to be told" based on its own internal consistency and its consistency with the pre-planned rules. This often means that certain story threads outright CANNOT be told, and no amount of juggling and explaining away will do it. Such a thread should simply never be started to begin with.

All I'm saying is that new writers need help and oversight until you're certain that they're experienced enough not just with writing in general, but your fictional universe's constraints in particular, to not get lost in the canon. Only once a writer has proven to be able to temper his own writing can you trust him enough to set him free. "Freedom" in writing is not benefit. It's a burden that's difficult to understand unless you've run afoul of it enough times to actually spot where things go wrong. The more constraint the environment is, the easier it actually is to write in it, just because much of the plot writes itself. The last thing you want a new and mostly inexperienced mission designer posing as a writer to do is have complete freedom, because it removes the training wheels which keep his writing going in a straight line, so to speak.

Jack Emmert, for all his other flaws, was a solid enough writer to make those stick. In general, there's no real problem with explaining meta-game concepts via in-game lore. Just look at hospital reclimators. The trick is that you can't just slap on a hand-wave which explains why the mechanic exists. You need an explanation that plans ahead and considers its own implications both on existing stories and characters and on the scope of characters that can be made in the future with this meta-game explanation as part of canon.

Example: Explaining powerset proliferation by saying Dr. Brainstorm invented technomagic and now all of a sudden Brutes can use swords is a stupid idea. That just makes no sense. But it also doesn't mean that a better idea can't have been given to explain this. For instance, a combination of super hero registration and advanced villain monitoring efforts have revealed that there are far, FAR more heroes and villains in the world than we suspected. Brutes using maces, Scrappers using electricity and so forth always existed. We just didn't know about them because we never ran into them. But now we know that not only do they exist, but they're actually quite common.

Yes, it's still silly and it does kind of sidestep the actual meta-game system, but that's the trick to an explanation. Meta-game will almost always make no sense from a narrative standpoint because it doesn't conform to narrative standards. It exists to make a game playable. That's why you need to take some liberty to explain the effect of the meta-game without trying to explain the mechanics of the meta-game. In this case, we aren't explaining why players can now pick more powersets for their ATs, we're explaining why these characters exist in the world when they didn't seem to exist previously. Those are two different concepts to explain.

If I had my guess, I'd lay this mistake right at Matt Miller's feet, because as far as I can see, this is the result of him giving his writers too much freedom and not enough oversight. This, then, resulted in a plot thread which attempted to explain ALL powers through the same bottleneck source. If you had an editor pass a glance through that, I'm almost certain it would have been sent back for corrections because its impact on the game's canon is staggering, but almost all of it involves retroactive continuity. Trying to alter the fundamental building blocks of a large, persistent world is a situation I wouldn't wish on the best of writers, and it fell to the hands of people who I don't think were hired for their professional writing credentials. It's just an unfair situation to put them in, and someone should have caught it before it made it into the game.

Trouble is, NOW it's in the game and you can never take it back. NOW the writers' hands are tied and they need to go down this plot, because that's the plot they've written for themselves without, as it seems, much foresight into what this whole thing implies. Now they're backpedalling and rolling author's saving throw checks, and it... Kind of works. As I've mentioned before, the concept of "ascension" is the one escape clause left in this plot before it turns into a complete dead end, because it offers an alternative. Once you break the "one and only" status of the Well, you free up nearly all of your concepts as potentially drawing power from an alternate source.

You don't even have to explain it. When the Well of the Furies is the ONLY source of power, then it becomes the source of power for everyone and everything by implication. You don't have to say that Tielekku's power comes from the Well, because it's implied. Now that there are paths to power OTHER than the well, this implication doesn't exist. Now, not explaining it DOESN'T infer the Well automatically and now your saving throw has succeeded. Not only has it succeeded, but it has branched off into inspiration, because now we can explore other avenues of power, as well. We know the Well isn't the only source, but do we know if "ascension" is the only alternative? What if the Well is only one of a number of power-granting, formless celestial creatures? What if they don't like each other and want to play champion against champion?

This is what I mean about constraining writing from before. When you're faced with a dead end with almost all avenues closed up, the free path is easy to spot and expand upon, until it blossoms into another node of possibilities, to misquote Maros. When writing under restrictions, the restrictions themselves become inspiration as you come up with ideas which fit all criteria, is what I'm saying. That's why oversight and direction for the writers is more important than freedom.

No, you're thinking of killing every named character in the game aside from the player. The game doesn't have the technology to perma-kill the player in a poignant fashion yet.

You just described Scrappers. I and a large number of other people really like how Scrappers play. You also completely ignored any form of design such an AT would have which would require the player to thing, merely assuming these characters would just have huge stats that allow them to "stand and shoot" without doing anything to achieve this status. I haven't read the entire thread, but I don't think what you're describing as impossible is what people are actually asking for.

I'm with Johnny on this one - I don't buy that a person who uses a rifle can't wear heavy armour and I don't buy that a person who uses a sword can use a bow. Yes, you can kind of sort of "cheat" with Epic powers, but there are no epic powers for rifles, bows, pistols and energy weapons.

No, it indicates patience. It says nothing at all about skill.

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Personally, I define "skill" as "the things you do in real time that aren't decided beforehand." Everything else is planning, and the trouble with City of Heroes is it almost always comes down to planning. Bring the right build with the right stats and you've won every battle before it has even begun. Sure, you can mess up and still die, but that's just the certainty of victory making the player complacent most of the time.

To me, skill is defined as the things you do, not the things you've already done. No, it's not just twitch reflex and mouse aiming. It's the ability to think on your feet, to tackle unfamiliar situations and to problem-solve, all of it based on knowledge and past experiences. Any situation which presents you with a problem that you haven't already solved in preparation comes down to your skill.

I know by far my most successful Blaster was Fire/Fire/Flame with both Blazing Aura and Hot Feet skipped, but that's because this was the only combo I could find that let me kill stuff before they killed me. I don't disagree with your assessment, though - robbing an AT of any utility and crowd control is a pretty big thing. The real trouble is I'm trying to think of something that will use existing sets, and a LOT of Blast sets have utility built into them. I have some glimmer of hope of this happening if we can just port a ton of sets over, but if brand new ones have to be made, that hope goes to nil.

That actually is something I could go with, strangely enough. I actually would be sold on a PAGGG that isn't instantly the most lethal thing on the battlefield, but who has staying power enough to deliver what damage he can. My big beef with Blasters, for instance, is that while they have a lot of damage in potential, they lack the survivability to actually deliver it, and that's a problem. I would, however, be willing to accept lower damage for greater survivability to where I can deliver all of it without needing a team, even if "all of it" isn't as much.

Why I say this needs a "gimmick" is I actually think Brutes were balanced quite well. On base stats, they're significantly weaker but slightly sturdier Scrappers. In actual practice, they're pretty potent combatants thanks to Fury. I suspect we can get away with something like this for the PAGGG, where the character is defensively relatively solid but offensively relatively below-average, with some kind of situationally-dependent gimmick allowing him to catch up on damage to some extent.

And you call me bitter.

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On MMOs "dying:" I told you so. Four or five years ago, in fact. When I started seeing games advertise themselves as "has auction house, has pvp, has loot, has gear, has raids," it was pretty clear we were in for a crash, and a hard one. Once upon a time, MMOs were new and fresh. Every new one you tried was different, bringing something of its own to the table. A brand new MMO could easily strip customers from the old ones by offering something truly revolutionary. For City of Heroes, it was massive characterisation. For WoW, it was the Warcraft mythos and a polished gaming experience. So on and so forth.

But now? Until VERY recently, pretty much ever "new" MMO that came out was a lazy reskin of all the other MMOs that were out at the time. They all looked, felt, played and worked exactly like WoW, and if not like WoW then like Lineage II. There was quite literally no reason to play a new MMO because it was a carbon copy of the one you were already playing. The MMO market is saturated right now. Beyond saturated, in fact. It's FINALLY starting to dawn on developers that they can't take WoW, toss a different fictional universe over it and call it a new game. As the market becomes more homogenised, everyone loses customers to everyone else and to general burnout as we become tired of the same old crap.

It took the bombing of Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa and the Matrix Online and the severe underperformance of Champions Online and DC Univers Online and Warhammer Online and Lord of the Rings Online and Uninspired Naming Online before MMO developers realised that you need to make an actual compelling and NEW game to stay afloat in the market. We're still seeing the waves from this. "Free" to Play is the future, it seems, but more than that, the future is creativity and imagination. Because either we need to start seeing MMOs that we've never seen before, or the whole market will cave in on itself.

That's pretty much where I am. They look enough like the old Skulls to be recognisable as such, but they're new enough to be worth the remake. That's pretty much all we can ask from a graphical update.

Yeah, that's one thing I'd love to get, myself - IDF gear that has the ENTIRE part in the primary colour and ONLY the glow in the secondary colour. I get that sometimes, you just have to bleed colour between item details to get around the two-colour limit, but in these cases, I'd just like to see a variant which isn't as bled-over. The IDF gear would be amazing if I could make it, say, all lack, but keep the lights a different colour without affecting the rest of the metal.