Samuel_Tow

You still make a very good point. The Champions tutorial, much as I hate the thing, still does a very good job of actually introducing you to the game. You learn what's attacking, you learn what's being done to fight back, you learn who the canon characters are, you get to a section of the city... You get to see a condensed version of what the game is about. If it's not going to be a proper tutorial, then at least it needs to be a proper introduction.

Judging by the new Tutorial, City of Heroes is a mindless button masher that you don't have to enable your brain to play, which has no story or plot or interesting characters. Moreover, it tells me this is a game in which nothing that's actually interesting happens. So I fought a giant monster that actually fought itself and I got kicked out into the real world. Did I achieve something? No. Well, I survived, if that counts, but... What of the blue Spectrum? What of the Shivans? Did I save anyone? Did I help anyone? Would anything have changed if I simply hadn't taken that day trip to Armageddon Central and stayed in Atlas Park, instead?

I leave the tutorial having learned very little about the game, even less about the story and practically nothing about the canon characters aside from the fact that they exist, I don't know what the Shivans are, I don't know what a "Galaxy City" is... I don't know anything.

Frankly, your idea for a tutorial sounds significantly more interesting, because it has an actual story to tell that makes the Shivan invasion both a plot point and a plot device, and it explored both the situation and the nature of the disaster. It's A STORY, as opposed to just a kludge to drop a colony on an existing zone and take it out of the game. Well done, I like it!

I don't mean this as a criticism, but that kind of blind spot is what causes so many people to miss clues and hostages in Oranbegan maps. Having run the "Rescue 21 Mystics from Oranbega" mission more times than I can count, I've developer a habit of looking at every corner of every room and making sure I've explored every pixel off the map. Yeah, it takes time, but at least it ensures nothing ever gets overlooked.

I heartily recommend this even for ordinary missions. Sometimes the most obvious things can be easy to miss.

Honestly, I think this is the biggest problem with the new Tutorial - its entire point is to discard almost all the information the old one used to teach us in exchange for being more exciting... And it just isn't. Yeah, buildings are falling, things are exploding, aliens are popping out of the ground, but it's all pretty lights with no substance. Who are these people? What's going on? Why should I care? And the simple answer is... I shouldn't. I have no reason to care. About anything.

It's saying something when you can make an alien invasion boring, but it is. I get that stories these days can't be written with any proper sense of pacing and HAVE to open in the middle of "the second act," but at least most other stories make the opening action interesting. Darksiders' tutorial is almost exactly the same thing - the apocalypse is happening and War has to... Fight stuff, basically. But at least that tutorial doesn't play itself, so the player is motivated to do SOMETHING. "Jump up to grab the wires." the game says, and the tutorial WILL NOT continue until you do just that. Hell, it even ends in the same fight with a giant dude waist-deep in a hole, but at least THAT battle doesn't fight itself, easy as it is.

Or, speaking of a movie: Yesterday, my national television channel aired Star Wars: A New Hope. Yeah, sure, that opens with an Imperial destroyer immobilizing and boarding a Rebel Alliance ship, storming it amid a hail of blaster fire, but even then, there's tension to be had. The droids are shown to be important and we care about getting them off the ship before they're captured. There's a sense of immediacy, a clear sense of imminent danger AND a clear goal. That's what makes for good suspense.

Instead, in City of Heroes, we wake up in Galaxy City and see a major disaster just kind of playing itself out. Aliens drop from the sky, but they seem too busy sparring with NPCs, and while the oh-so-frantic voice on the radio is urging us to hurry, the monotone, indifferent voice of the female narrator just calmly explains what we need to do to jump over a hole. Nothing we do in the Tutorial seems to matter, and when it does, it comes out of nowhere. "Go and help the Blue Spectrum!" says the game. Who's he? Is he a hero? What does he look like? What happened to him? Why should I care? Nothing seems to happen if I just stand around, the situation doesn't get any worse, the voice of the radio doesn't insist. "Oh, thank goodness you're alive! Quickly, jump over that chasm! Or, you know, take your time, no hurry. The Shivans aren't going anywhere."

I know a Tutorial is not supposed to rush us, but considering we don't learn anything, I kind of wish it would. At least then maybe it would actually feel exciting, because right now it feels like I'm not necessary in any way. In practice, the new tutorial is just as slow and boring as the old one, it just has more pretty colours and explosions. It looks better, yes, but it doesn't play any better. Maybe it's just me not being easily moved city-wide destruction after Champions Online basically botched pretty much the same concept, or maybe it's just too transparent that players aren't really required to do anything in this one, but the new Tutorial feels MORE boring than the old one. Sure, the old one was long, slow and text heavy, but the settings fit the mood. You show up on a street corner and start trying to figure out what to do next. The zone is relatively safe and you have to go looking for trouble. This is conducive to a slow tutorial. Even Breakout, with its blaring alarms, felt a peaceful because the riot doesn't look like it'll be winding down any time so, so there's no reason to hurry.

I honestly don't know what could be done to make the new tutorial more exciting, though having me fight Shivans AWAY from where BABs and Sis P are one-shotting them might help. Honestly? They don't feel like they need any help. They're in no danger whatsoever and a set of extra hands doesn't make the Shivans any less infinite, so it would make sense to send me off to another area where there are survivors but NOT signature NPCs so my intervention at least appears necessary might help. Having the dude on the radio remind me to hurry might help, as well.

And, finally, the Giant Shivan. I can sort of get why putting a giant monster in the tutorial seemed like a good idea at the time, but that's effectively a supposed-to-lose fight. I can barely hurt the thing, and even then I don't NEED to. If other players aren't around to kill it for me, it'll die on its own. Actually, I ran a friend of mine through the tutorial a week ago, we fought the Shivan, hit it a few times and it "was pushed back." My friend's question was along the lines of "Wait, how did we just push it back?" My answer was... I don't know. I think the Vanguard Jets pushed it back. "Vanguard jets?" he asked. Yeah, those arrows on the ground, remember those? Those were the targeting reticles for jets flying above. "Oh. Well, that's stupid." I'm serious, he actually said that. I had to more or less cover for the game by saying "Well, it's not very well designed, but that's not how it was supposed to happen, and I think they'll improve it in the future."

The point is that if it was trying to be exciting, the new Tutorial failed because there's no urgency to it. It's just a very chaotic backdrop that makes it harder to follow your instructions, but at the end of the day, it may as well be a green screen. Because, honestly, what does a player have to do?

1. Fight three Shivans. Any anywhere will do, your actions will have no impact on anything at all

2. Click on a guy we've never seen before and have no possible reason to care for and choose your alignment.

3. Fight a giant monster. Or don't, you advance either way.

Throughout the whole thing, I felt like I was on a carnival ride - there were lots of cool things to see, but at the end of the day, I don't get to participate in any of the action and I'm never in any real danger because it's just a carnival ride.

If it were in the RADAR, that would be fine, but mine told me to get out the whole time, never actually bothering to tell me HOW to do it. What told me how to leave was the caption boxes, which I couldn't read because they appeared while I was fighting and disappeared before I was done. I would have taken more time and been more methodical with my instructions, if I'd known that fighting the Minions of Igneous gave extra time, but as far as I'm aware, that's never mentioned anywhere.

Technically, there's plenty of information on where to find the Arachnos tunnels in Faultline. Technically, half the people who go looking for them have no idea where to look because that's never actually stated at any point. You can infer the answer from the various bits of background information provided, but no clear instructions are ever given. I found them on my own, and then had to subsequently show where they were to everyone I teamed with.

Also, do you have any idea how much I'd like for the developers to add more content that's "nothing new?" Very, very much. The more complex they make in-mission triggers, the more they take away from the core game and the more prone they are to unexpected behaviour.

Ugh, don't get me started on this. Whenever an alien race is involved, the males are always bigger and brawnier than the females, just to show that ones are male and the others female. Even if it makes no sense given the alien race's actual anatomy or heritage. It's tertiary sexual characteristics all over again, or at least as close as I could find within a two-minute TVtropes search.

I actually remember being pissed as all hell at Ben 10 doing the exact same thing. See, when Ben transforms into a big alien, like Fourarms or Diamondhead, it's... A big alien. But in that one "what if" episode when Gwen, his GIRL cousin ended up being the one to receive the Omnitrix, the aliens she transformed into, though they were the same species, were much smaller and more petite for no reason other than... Well, Gwen is a girl. Complete with hammy "female voice actor trying to make her voice sound deep and failing badly" voice acting, even. It's a good thing it was an all-around cool episode and Vilgax steals the show every time he's on-screen, so the episode is at least watchable, but damn it!

Or, something closer to home - do you remember how many times people have asked for a female version of Granite Armour? I'm sorry, let me say that again. Do you remember how many people have asked for a female version of AN AMORPHOUS PILE OF ROCK? Because I recall at least half a dozen instances of this. I never quite got what people's vision of a female version of igneous rock is, but I'm still blown away that such a notion even exists. It's a a walking collection of rock. It has no gender to begin with.

But, yes, I do get the problem you highlight. To go back to Ben 10, that actually had something of a subversion. You know how "Gwent 10" transformed into a small, skinny version of Fourarms? Well, a few episodes later (or is that earlier? It's been a while), "The Galactic Defenders" or such come to Earth, and they have with them an actual native aliens of the "Fourarms" species, and it's just as big, hulking and massive as Ben's version... And it speaks with a female voice! So the girl Fourarms is just as big as the guy Fourarms, bigger, in fact, and it's played for comedy that she has a slight crush on Ben's transformation. To the episode's credit, that's not played for parody or even comedy, but rather for minor humour, as she is otherwise depicted as a very competent fighter and easily the "heavy" of the team. Sadly, she has relatively little screen time.

I'm not surprised that your average audience seeing a female alien that's big and bulky and concluding she looks manly. That's really not the sort of thing you can't fix, and indeed probably don't want to anyway. Personally, I like to play on it as a subversion, and I've seen that done tastefully a few times, as I mentioned.

OK, I laughed my *** off at this video. Awesome, and the little girl is such a good actor, too. Thank you!

Actually, the disconnect is less between being big and being an ambush predator and more between being big and being a speed fighter. Even at the best of days, a Stalker's Assassin's Strike is only the beginning. Once that's expended, the Stalker is basically fighting head on, just because the game is so finicky about letting you regain your Hidden status, and while you COULD strike from the shadows, then run away to strike again, game reality simply makes this unproductive. As a result, even as a Stalker, you spend much of your tight fighting directly, and that's where problems start occurring.

Suppose for a second that I wanted to make a big guy Claws/SR Stalker, and I'm talking BIG big guy. Yeah, he'd strike from an ambush, but then what? He'll be doing back flips and spin jumps, and he'll be bobbing and weaving to avoid enemy fire. Odd, but OK, sure enough. But then what happens when he actually gets hit? What happens when he hits? He comes off as a fighter who's weaker, which he compensates for by being faster. Then you have a problem.

Sure, an alligator is an ambush predator, but the thing is DAMN strong. It has a bite force of I don't know how many tons and it's just a mountain of muscle. It has a fast strike, but it then uses strength to pull its pray underwater and drown it. Now suppose if the alligator had a weak jaw and couldn't pull very well, so it had to get out of the water and chase its pray on land. Awkward, weird and not very productive, right? That's my problem.

I can see a big guy being fast, if he is ALSO strong. What I can't really see is a big guy who ISN'T strong, because... Why is he big, then?

I meant that on a more analytical level - why does this work in the DBZ universe but not so well in the DC universe? Is there something I can learn from the difference that I can then transplant to my own stories? And I think that the thing to take away from this is "balance." Though full of Mary Sues and Marty Stus, American comic books are still at least somewhat balance - one hero excels at speed, another at strength, another still at regeneration and so forth. Sure, you get some with a wider range of abilities, such as Super Man, but again - most have AN ability that defines them and are balanced around that. Anime protagonists are much more often possessed less of specific unique abilities and more of the SKILL to use a theoretically unlimited source of power, so the one that's the strongest doesn't just have the most powerful ability, but rather is the most powerful in ALL abilities.

The difference here is that within the context of American comic books, and this game to a large extent, for a character to be fast or agile, he must expressly NOT be strong, and when a character is expressly NOT strong, then being big comes off as satirical. Not so in anime, where becoming stronger makes you better at what you're already strong at, as well as better at everything else. In fact, speaking of different cultures, Extra Credit had a good video on a similar topic, and it seems like Penny Arcade are hosting their videos after the Escapist controversy.

I'm getting WAAAY off topic here, though.

However, bringing up anime does offer me an out to get back on topic: While anime sometime does a very good job of presenting strong, respectable female leads (Ghost in the Shell, Armitage III, Gunsmith Cats, I think), it also all too often gives us quite the opposite to an almost alarming extent. While DBZ is VERY guilty of this, famously having a cast of fighters that's entirely male save for a female cyborg who doesn't do a lot and gets eaten whole, but the whole show just winds down into the kind of simplistic muscle-head shouting contest that you can't really fault for having a bad representation of women... Without faulting it for a zillion other things first.

But then there are shows like Naruto, which REALLY get on my nerves. I know this is sort of a cultural thing with Japan, but it still horrifies me that I managed to sit through, what... 450 episodes of that thing? And almost never at all did I see a single female character who was useful in the long run and didn't serve as the "weak link" in her respective team, or otherwise act as "the healer." This is twice as annoying when you consider that the show underwent a time skip of three years during which time everyone was supposed to have gotten much more competent... And the girls were quickly reduced right back to crying over the boys, whose angst defined the narrative.

Actually, let's rag on that for a little bit longer. When I talk about a horrible representation of women in fiction, Naruto's Sakura is probably the prime example. For those who don't like anime, let me summarise a basic problem that occurs in one particular instance. Sakura, our "heroine" has been given the informed ability of being incredibly strong, very fast, dauntless in the face of danger and otherwise highly competent. So when Naruto, our "hero" suffers... Let's call it possession, her response is to essentially shut down and break down crying. She subsequently gets knocked out by a bad guy who gets knocked into her and has to be rescued before she slides off a bridge. When she wakes up, her response is to try and hug the hero, now fully possessed, and comfort him, for which she gets a flaming tail in the face and starts crying, not to mention a nasty, lasting wound.

While I hate ineffectual females in stories, I can at least tolerate the ones who are built as victims that exist solely to be saved. I don't like it, but I get why the author needed such a character. But to present a character as strong, confident and capable and then have her act as THE BIGGEST LOSER of the whole cast for the span of six episodes (an entire action scene)... That's just wrong. And that's neither the first nor the last time I'd see this. In fact, when I finally decided to flip the show the birdie and stop wasting my life on it... It was pretty much over the exact same thing happening AGAIN. There are few things worse that presenting a female character as strong and then having her act weak and get beat up like a chump. That's degrading on a whole other level, and actually demonstrates a far, far greater insult to strong female characters everywhere.

As I said, I can tolerate shows that tell me women can't be strong. They're wrong, and I can just state this and be done with it. What I CANNOT tolerate is shows that tell me women can TRY to be strong, but they will fail and fail hard. I HATE that!

Hmm... I like it, that's a good point. Maybe we're just coached to see this, or maybe it's a general idealised notion (huge power in a small, convenient package), but a small size just doesn't seem to imply weakness these days, at least not within the realm of fiction. You have the tiny, scrawny old king fu master who can wipe the floor with ten huge men at the same time, you have the cute bruiser who looks like she's 12 but can benchpress two semis stacked on top of each other, you have the Grey Fox type machine-assisted small guy who can shoot the radar dishes off giant mechs, just to name a few. We're well accustomed to divorcing physical strength from physical size at the lower end of the spectrum.

I think part of the problem is we're not as used to divorcing strength from size in the UPPER spectrum. So while it's easy to believe that a small girl is strong, it's much harder to believe that a big guy is weak, at least without said guy taking a serious hit in the respect of his characterisation. Big dudes who aren't also strong dudes come off like all bite and no bark - they look big and probably suffer the drawbacks of being big, but they don't have any of the perks of strength to show for it.

And the drawbacks of being big is something that modern society is all too familiar with. In a culture obsessed with obesity the widely known negative side effects of the various drugs some men use to get big enough to be scary, there's an unwritten rule that one always has to pay some kind of price for being big. Even if one is possessed of superior health and so suffers no physiological drawback, there's still the question of mobility. Big guys are heavier, so more floors will collapse under their weight. Their bigger arm have less of an angle of rotation as their big biceps push against their big chests and restrict them. A heavy body takes more force to move and more force to stop, hampering mobility. A bigger body is harder to squeeze in tight spaces. There are numerous such examples that we can't seem to look past as easily as we can look past the fairly internal drawbacks that a small body has, which are much easier to explain away without having to account for it visually.

In short, if I see a big biceps, I expect to be seeing a strong arm, and if the arm isn't strong, then it's just pointlessly cumbersome. If, on the other hand, I see a small biceps, I can still buy that I'm seeing a supernaturally strong arm anyway, because you don't have to look strong to be strong.

I think the point is less about relatively big guys doing relatively athletic things - I'm sure they can. Hell, a lot of athletes are quite heavy built, especially those who excel at sports that require upper body strength. Where it gets weird for me is when you take an EXCESSIVELY big enemy, say something like a Greater Devoured, and then try to have that's primary strength be acrobatic flip jumps, wall running and fancy wire-fu martial arts.

Sure, the Incredible Hulk can jump good, but he jumps in a similar fashion as an artillery cannon fires a very heavy shell, in that it's raw strength. And though I've seen the Hulk wall-run on the exterior of buildings, when he puts his foot on your outer wall, his foot goes clean through it so he's stepping on the interior girder. Because he's big and heavy and very powerful. You wouldn't expect the Hulk to land quietly, sneak up on a tank and THEN attack it. Because he's big, he lands like a bomb, he runs like a road compactor and he's frikkin' 10 feet tall, if not more. You can't miss the guy.

That's kind of what I mean when I say big guys - the REALLY big ones. In comic books, they're the Hulks and the Juggernauts and the Doomsdays, and they are almost universally defined by their size and bulk. Now take a more anime concept - let's say Dragon Ball Z's Nappa. He's a man mountain, pretty much twice the size of everyone else, if not more, and yet because he's so powerful, he's also damn near the fastest and most agile of them all. And for him... It kind of makes sense, because DBZ's fictional universe is pretty heavily based around the notion that strength and speed are BOTH qualities that a strong warrior needs and you can't have one without the other. If you're JUST strong, you an never land a hit. If you're JUST fast, you can never deal any damage. That's why the biggest and strongest of the bad guys also end up being the fastest, as well.

The more I think about this, the more I feel there's a concept there that I need to explore. I'm just not sure of a good way to do that in-game, since the only truly "fast" defence set is Super Reflexes, and that intentionally shuns damage resistance. I guess what works for DBZ characters is they're big and fast, but they're also big AND STRONG, so they don't feel like they're missing a quality, so much as that they have an additional one. I don't think there's any good way to depict this in City of Heroes, though, since I don't think we have a set that's a decent enough combination of both defence AND resistance against the same elements. Energy and Will come close, but Willpower alternates defence and resistance between damage types and Energy is element-centric.

Still, food for though. I will need to do something about this.

That's pretty much what bugs me, as well. In the very basic terms of communication, the onus is on the person initiating said communication to deliver as much information with his initial call as is necessary for the proper interpretation of his communication. In simpler words, if you send me a tell, YOU are responsible for giving me context so I can understand what the hug you're talking about.

This is why I find myself quite literally offended by "terse" tells. The person clearly wants something from me, but he is putting the responsibility of decrypting his communication in MY lap. This is work I have to do before I even know what's being said to me, long before I have any way to know if this work is even worth doing. If the person telling me "team brute 36?" is asking me if I want to join him, then I might. If that person is asking if I want him to join him, then no, I don't. But I don't know and, frankly, if said person couldn't be arsed to help me figure it out, then I can't be arsed to bother my head with riddles.

The funny thing is, most people's self-defence when called out on poor communication skills is "Who cares as long as you know what I'm talking about?" Well, that's the rub, isn't it? I DON'T know what you're talking about, and you get uppity with me when I ask you to clarify.

Agreed. Looked at another way, a 6-foot targeted AoE accounts for almost everything in melee range of the enemy you hit, and that's not a small area. I'm not sure how it compares to... Actually, let's do a direct comparison.

A 6-foot AoE has a total land area of roughly 133 square feet. Let's compare this to a high-hitting cone like Golden Dragonfly. That has a 10 foot range with a 20 degree cone, which comes up to a whopping... 17 and a half square feet. Huh.

Granted, one power is a cone and another is an AoE, but Head Splitter/Golden Dragonfly are largely considered to be pretty good powers, and they ARE from my own experience, yet their AoE potential is, frankly, minimal, Oh, sure, you can fit four or five targets in said cone if you're really good and REALLY lucky, but on average you're going to hit two, at most three enemies. I'm pretty sure the power in question can replicate that, and I'm also fairly sure it's not exactly balanced as an AoE.

Good point, and that's somewhat reassuring to my philosophical dissonance

That really is a good question, though: Why do big guys look so "wrong" in athletic roles? Seeing them in supporting roles really isn't the same thing - it's perfectly fine if your doctor is a big fat man, or your engineer has big muscles. But seeing them as "fast?" Surely comic book logic could explain this as easily as it explains why a tiny little girl can stop a speeding train, yet it doesn't. So why doesn't it? Why am I willing to accept a small person being strong but not a large person being weak?

To some extent, this might be wish-fulfilment bias. In order for me to accept that someone's primary power is being fast, I have to first accept that his primary strength ISN'T being strong, because if you're strong and tough enough to not die, then isn't that always better? Or is that just my inner macho man telling me it's more impressive to take a punch and shrug it off than it is to dodge it? Because, thinking about it from an emotional standpoint, a punch that doesn't affect me means I'm so badass you can't hurt me. A punch that I HAVE to dodge is a punch which WOULD have hurt me.

See: Why does Super Man allow himself to get shot, but he has to dodge the gun when it's thrown at him?

Are fast, agile characters specifically NOT exhibiting some kind of desirable characteristic that makes them "feel" inferior on an instinctive level? Is there some characteristic that's so integral to being big that losing it feels like it removes the point for said character to BE big? Because, honestly - what benefit does a large size bring if you're not strong and tough enough to stand and take a hit? Being bigger "feels" like it would impact mobility and and flexibility, but could that lead to a big and fast character feeling like he's given up a useful power to gain a power he can't really utilise?

I don't know, truthfully speaking. Anime giant mecha have been doing flips and moving super-fast since time began and those don't feel awkward or out of place. And indeed, even in Dragon Ball Z, pure speed is often even more important than pure strength, and regardless of how big a guy is, if he's the strongest, he's also the fastest. And yet that still feel perfectly reasonable there, but not when I think about City of Heroes.

Why?

It is, but for me, it's more of a Stalker issue - I just can't wrap my head around a big, bulky, awkward dude being a "stalker," since it doesn't really feel like he'd be very stealthy. That, and Stalkers actually lack most of the "toughness" powersets like Invulnerability and Stone Armour, though I guess Willpower still counts.

Now that I know I'm discriminating against them, though, I'll have to make a big Stalker at some point. Fair's fair.

The forbidden fruit which is forbidden because someone forgot it at the back of the fridge for four months and now you're likely to catch a sentient kind of food poisoning if you decided to taste it, yes. It's "forbidden" in the same sense that "police line do not cross" make a crime scene forbidden - you probably don't want to go there anyway.

Interestingly enough, I don't find the female announcer at all bothersome. Whether or not it's the same actress, she's the same soulless disembodied voice that keeps following me around from Unreal to Star Craft to Team Fortress.

It's the MALE voice that I find infinitely grating. It's like the voice actor couldn't act to save his life, but BY GOD he's trying to emote, he's trying so hard! But rather than being adorable, it just makes his bad acting that much worse. There are people who can pull off the panicked, rushing voice. That guy ain't one of 'em.

The problem with voice overs is that unless you get GOOD voice actors, it's worse to have than not to have. Bad voice actors have the capacity to KILL an otherwise perfectly presentable game, and good voice actors just cost too much money to hire. I don't know whether EA found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or otherwise sold their souls to the devil... Again, but the amount of voice acting done by GOOD actors they're doing for their MMO must cost enough to pay my country's foreign debt.

There's no way in hell Paragon Studios can afford decent voice actors for even a fraction of the walls of text we have here, and I'm not sure they'd be able to justify such an expense even if they had the money. About the best I've seen them do is get a GOOD voice actor to act out a small scene, like Recluse's hammy video that loops over Grandville's monitors or whoever that awesome man was who voiced Mender Silos in the I11 trailer. That's pure gold, but then that's also shy over a minute of voice acting. And even that little voice acting was just BAAAD when they did it for Montague Castanella, though it's possible the writing for that trailer was also much worse. Heavens knows the I12 Midnighters writing was complete garbage, so I wouldn't be surprised.

My point is I've had more games ruined for me by shoddy voice acting than I have by NO voice acting. "That was too close! You were almost a Jill sandwich!"

That depends on what you want out of a mace. If all you want is conventional shapes, then yes, the Tech Mace fails. If what you want, however, is a long mace - that is to say, a long handle with the mace head far away from the hand - there are few weapons better at it. The Legacy War Mace comes close, but ALL other maces have the centre of gravity of their mace heads much closer to the arm.