Samuel_Tow

What I'm saying is that the game has its roots in a sort of different age of comic books. I can't say if it's good or bad, just that who the face of the game is should be picked a little more carefully than "let's kill Jack's creations because old stuff is old" as it was here. I'm not saying the 90s didn't happen or we should forget them or anything like that. I'm just not sure "exactly like the 90s" is a good face for the game. Sure, the Statesman wasn't ideal, either, with his overly-rustic goofy tights costume, but there ought to be a middle ground.

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Also, here's why I came to post. I watched yesterday's Linkara video on Catwoman: Guardian of Gotham and I was reminded about the primary reason I don't like Penny Yin's costume - it's made to resemble a much more revealing one without actually being as revealing. That version of Catwoman is such a great example of this I want to post it for comparison:

[img]http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/0/4/40763-6318-45985-1-catwoman-guardian-o_large.jpg[/quote]

Just have a quick glance at that and tell me what it looks like. What it IS is a woman in a horrible black-and-purple costume. What it LOOKS LIKE because of how the colours and details are arranged, is a dominatrix wearing a thong corset with her boobs plopped out. When you have a corset strapped to thigh-high high-heel boots via garter belts and leather sleeves belted to each other with a bare chest, it doesn't matter if you wear that over pink long johns - what it looks like is a woman wearing bondage gear one way or the other.

Why I bring this up is this is the primary reason I dislike Penny's costume on a principle level. Her pants look like thigh-high high-heel boots over panties and her top looks like a corset. I don't know who's so enamoured with corsets on the Dev team, but this is pretty much the cornerstone of the whole problem with Gunslinger and Steampunk and Barbarian, the costume sets.

To me, either Penny shouldn't have been made into such a high-profile character and used as promotional material, or she should have been given a better costume that got run through a few sets of eyes.

As far as I'm concerned, capping anything at all with just your character's powers alone shouldn't be happening, not outside of a very costly situational power. Isn't this kind of thing precisely why we had ED and the GDN? Because people were capping all their stats and Defenders became utterly pointless? I, personally, don't believe in defence-capping should be considered a legitimate strategy everyone should shoot for, so giving SR stable but non-capped defences is just fine by me. I know that sort of thing would be a major upset to how players play, but I feel it would be for the better.

Incidentally, can you remind me what elusivity actually is? Just "negative accuracy" or am I forgetting something? I keep wondering if we can't bring the accuracy mechanic more in-line with resistance mechanic, in the sense that the attacker's stats are in the attack itself and the defender's stats are in the actual defender, meaning you can't offset damage resistance with damage buffs.

And in either case, we need to stop mucking about with critter base to-hit.

Sure. That's why I always advocate for soloability. I can get this feeling right now by just choosing to run content solo, and most of the new stuff does a fair bit of work to make the player feel important to the story, rather than the incidental messenger boy between signature NPCs that most of ye olde CoV feels like.

Basically, I want stories that make the player feel like he or she matters, rather than being lost in a crowd. If you still want to bring a crowd, most arcs will still let you.

First of all, not all women wear skirts. Second of all, women benefit nothing from having four sitchair emotes that are all the same animation, and would nose nothing from having SOME of those replaced with different animations borrowed from men. You can always still use the old emote, but I can use one of the others for women who dress in power armour or carry around giant swords.

Because your vision of what women "stand like" does not correspond to everyone else's, and what you're suggesting is we lose the animations we like so you get the animation you like. That's not a convincing argument.

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That's not to say I'd mind base animation customization. Far from it, in fact. I've always wanted to customize my stances, running, jumping and flying animations, or at least have a wider selection of stance emotes. But that doesn't seem to be the question here. The question, as I read it, is why should our women not act like what other MMOs perceive women as acting like, i.e. "Why won't my hips unsway?" The answer is pretty simple - that's just one depiction which is no more or less justified than what we have here. In fact, it's actually a little LESS justified since that behaviour package assumes a photoshoot model more so than an actual combatant.

Basically, I'm all for more customization and all against outright replacing of stuff.

I'd say making Penny one of the "signature" heroes of the game and plastering her trollface on the login screen would have demanded at least some more scrutiny and aesthetics first. To paraphrase Yahtzee, deliberately bad is still bad, and that's been the "face" of the game since I23 launched. You don't put something that's intentionally bad - by David's own admission, no less - on the front cover of your game unless you're trying to be edgy, and a niche game about super heroes trying to be edgy is pretty much the height of poor judgement.

I wouldn't really mind Penny if she were just one of Twinshot's clowns - those guys are pretty much badly designed across the board, with Twinshot herself taking the prize for her horrible elbow-length sleeves - but you don't see people clamouring to judge them. Sure, they show up far more often than they should, but they're still second-stringers. Penny is the signature character that Sister Psyche had to die to make room for. She's on the loading screen and a lot of the promotional material. You can't just make her costume intentionally bad to depict a young woman's lack of experience and exceedingly poor judgement when you're using her as the face of the game.

Say what you will about the Statesman - he was corny, his costume was ugly and the character was underdeveloper - but he represented what the game stood for: Reimagining comic books in a more "contemporary" environment, but still retaining the roots of the genre. In a sense, having about the worst example of a "tights" super hero in a world where his kind is just about extinct works as the game's face, because it shows the clash of the old and the new. Penny's "I fell over backwards into my belts closet" costume doesn't say anything about the game.

Basically, if you're going to make a character important and signature, then you HAVE to put more care in their design and you HAVE to run this design through more people than just the one artist designing it. Not necessarily through the forums, obviously, but you have to run it through someone in the studio who isn't afraid to tell people their baby is ugly... Literally, in this case.

Because "range" in itself isn't really the point. There are several powersets that simply do not exist on anything that's not squishy and aren't replicable in any way, shape or form. I'm referring to Assault Rifle, Dual Pistols, Archery and Beam Rifle. You can kind of cheat Energy Blast with Energy Melee and Dark Blast with Dark Melee and so forth, but there's no "Rifle Melee," nor would it make sense if there were. Certain things just can't be used in melee and still retain the reason why they're cool in the first place.

What I'm trying to achieve with the PAGGG (damn that's a stupid acronym, sorry about that) isn't so much just a Scrapper with more range or a Blaster who doesn't die as much. I'm trying to achieve an AT that offers a whole host of ranged sets, firearms and hand-blasts alike, to a basic framework which isn't squishy. The trouble with most Blast/Defence hybrids as people suggest them is that they're basically the worst of both worlds - squishy AND not very damaging, which kind of misses the point. I know a Tanker with Blaster damage is ludicrous, I'll admit that right off the bat. I also realise that self-rooting is quite concept-limiting. But I still want to see an AT that is both able to not constantly worry about dying AND have the ability to use ranged powers and firearms.

Yes, this will need to be based around a gimmick, absolutely. I don't know if I want this to be the "slow/rooting" gimmick. I don't even know if I want this to be just one gimmick for the whole AT, or if we'll just have to design each set with its own quirks. I just know that I want someone who can take a hit AND fire a rifle without having to wait for level 50 and spend eleventy billion INF and a zillion hours grinding iTrials to achieve it. I don't know how that might be achieved, I just know that I want all Blast sets to be available to this AT. It's not just the PAGGG I'm talking about here. That's a big thing, but it's not the only one. I have a number of other characters who'd make sense to be like this.

The Girlfriends from Hell are why our content designers shouldn't try to be comedians - they're not good at it. I've been with this game for eight years now, and about the only times I've laughed with it have been unintentional situations.

That said, the Girlfriends from Hell are not a bad idea, they're just terribly executed. One of Twinshot's arcs - the one which introduces difficulty sliders - suggests that the Hellions don't realise that these women are demons. To them, the Girlfriends from Hell look and sound like any other woman, so when they start chanting arcane rituals and fighting, the Hellions are like "Err... Babe, what are you talking about? What blood sacrifice?" It's played as though these are succubus demons that the Hellions have summoned, who are now using and controlling he dim-witted thugs into doing a much more meaningful, much more sinister ritual of some sort. It's a very engaging plot thread that's simply never done anything with.



Old Chitin texture, old Large boots, comined with new Clockwork chest piece, Alpha shoulders and Olympian Guard gloves, but with the old Bonehead mask and 2004 head details. You can very much combine old and new costume pieces and do just fine, it's simply a matter of doing it right.

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Next post will be on topic.

Precisely!

Please go back to my post and read past where I say that. The rest of the post clarifies why it can't be rejected so much as it needs to be explained a little better, is all.

That's a pretty good idea, actually. Ghost characters tend to have the "Clones of Myself Mastermind" problem of their nature defining what they ARE but not what they DO. This line of thinking actually uses a person's living past to describe his afterlife, and it's a very clever way to avoid an otherwise difficulty question.

To me, it's more of a catchall in cases where nothing else applies. What origin should an alien from outer space who was born able to control energy and channel it be? She's not using machines so she's not tech, she's not using magic because that's not magic, she hasn't been mutated and isn't born different. She's just sort of able to do this and has become good at it. It just doesn't fit any of the other origins.

And no, an "alien" origin doesn't cut it, because then we have to make the distinction between alien tech and human tech such as Rikti vs Praetorians, we have to make the distinction about alien magic (say, Mumra, the ever living) vs. human magic and so forth. Origins are not races, is what I'm saying, and they shouldn't be tied to races lest they start folding in on themselves.

But you are correct - you can argue that magical beings and robots and ghosts are "natural" if there exists an entire race of the things, or at least such existed at one point. My personal breakdown is that anything which is unique or at least exceedingly rare, and was ALWAYS unique or rare, probably isn't "Natural." If, for instance, you're one of 15 super robots a single creator made before he died and now the other 14 have been destroyed, you're probably Tech. If, by contrast, you come from a whole society, a whole race of robots who have enough of a population to maintain their species, or did at some point, you could be Natural. You don't HAVE to be, but you could if you wanted.

As you say, all of it is academic, so no-one is ever "wrong" with the origins they pick. I just like to have some kind of logical reason to pick one origin over another without needing to close my eyes and go "eenie meenie miney mo." I don't really expect everyone to agree with mine, but I still feel people who care about concept really should have at least some kind of ruleset of their own about which origin means what to them.

Well of course. I'm not about to tell a person his character concept is wrong. That's the cool thing about origins not meaning anything - they can be anything you can explain them as being. There's no wrong way to go here.

However, by the same token, a question is asked and an answer must be given. And I don't know about you, but "do whatever" just doesn't seem like it would help someone asking for help picking an origin. I do my best to put logic and reason to my arguments. If you or the OP disagree with them, that's fine. It's all RP, at the end of the day. But again - the point of asking the question, I think, is to get a reasoned answer which can convince.

You're right that the game doesn't specify, but we've seen instances of restless ghosts in this game and their powers are not entirely consistent with each other, nor is what makes them ghosts. Ghost Widow is never explicitly given a reason for why she stayed behind, she just is. The Ghost Pirates of Port Oakes are, as far as I'm aware, cursed to be ghosts via some kind of magic. The Oranbegans, as I mentioned, never died at all, but instead had their bodies stolen. The angry spirits of the world your hero's alternate dimension self destroyed don't seem to have been enchanted at all, they just stuck around being angry. If you can make an argument for how these are consistent with each other and derive a "species" from them, then go right ahead. There's nothing wrong with it. I simply don't see it.

And I really don't see "unfinished business" as being a good "natural" explanation. It is in the Casper movie, I'll grant you that, but it just doesn't seem to be the case in City of Heroes. None of the ghosts we've seen have had this as a reason to linger, hence why I wouldn't call it a natural depiction of ghosts.

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Here's the thing - "Natural" as an origin for non-human characters typically works best if you define your own species that doesn't have a parallel in the actual game. Then you control all the variables and no-one can argue one way or the other. If Natural is to be the goal, then my suggestion is to explicitly define a special case of ghost for whom what you're designing IS natural. Ghosts as a "thing" in this game are far too diverse for anything to be natural among them, but defining your own fictional subset puts the power of claim in your hands and ends arguments like mine.

Usually when someone's arguing an RP point that gets in the way of your character, the best course of action isn't to lash out at them, but rather to define subsets of circumstances which you control directly and which canon cannot be used to contradict or even affect. Even if you manage to convince me that your ghost really is Natural, you'll never convince Venture or someone else that comes along. All you'll accomplish is get mired into endless arguments over it. The best solution is to control the circumstances, which gives you the power to define your own concept, as opposed to drawing on what the game has precedent for.

I'll give you an example, and it's a simple one. Saying that it's natural for people who die with unfinished business to come back as poltergeists is wrong. You're arguing against the game's precedent. Saying that SOMETIMES, people who die with unfinished business will come back as poltergeists and that's just how things work is entirely different. You can take precedent in the game which shows people with unfinished business dying and never coming back (say, Agent Arthur Bell killed in the middle of exposing Kelly Uqua as a Rikti spy who never becomes a ghost) and say that... Yes, those people with unfinished business didn't come back because not everyone with unfinished business comes back. We don't know what decides who comes back and who doesn't, but those are just examples of people who didn't. YOUR character, on the other hand, is an example of someone who does and there's really no precedent in the game to claim this DOESN'T happen.

All I'm saying is you need to work with other people rather than against them whenever possible. No-one ever benefits from "Well, that's just YOUR opinion!" argument. You won't change anyone's opinion by saying that, and if you believe it, then you solve nothing by saying it. But it's possible, in nearly ever instance, to simply work around someone else's opinion without needing to alter your concept one iota.

And "natural" ghosts in this game don't have powers, because natural ghosts don't linger in this world. For a ghost to linger, something unnatural has to have happened to empower the ghost with the ability to stay in the world of the living and interact with it. Those aren't powers the dead normally possess.

Peacebringers are. Warshades are not. The former operate as their species is designed, the latter used unnatural means to empower themselves, and thus they're Science.

And again - a ghost in this game doesn't have powers. A ghost passes on to the afterlife and leaves this world. The creation of a poltergeist is an unusual, unnatural event that can't be predicted, as evidenced by different ghosts coming up differently. Saying that's Natural is like saying Spider-Man is natural because he has the same powers anyone else who was bitten by a genetically-modified radio-active spider would.

The trick here is that "ghost" in the sense of "the soul of a dead person" doesn't have its own species or its own set of powers. Yes, there IS a society of ghosts - those of the Oranbegans - but they're a very specific type of ghosts who were cursed into being what they are by demonic magic. Both their reason for existing is magical and the powers they wield as sorcerers are magical as well. But that's not a "race," because these were human sorcerers who were cursed and as far as I know, they don't have the power to reproduce. Despite having MoT just consume them, I don't even think they're technically dead, because they had their bodies stolen, rather than being killed.

But it doesn't imply they stay in the world of the living, either, because the Patrolmen don't operate in the world of the living. All of the Drudges exist in the world of the dead, and the only reason we can interact with them is because the two worlds are mingling and the living and the dead are forced together. But if you want to use the Drudges as an example, then the souls of the dead have NO powers whatsoever. They never fight back, they never demonstrate sort of abnormal ability, or indeed any ability whatsoever. All they do is stand around and wait to be trained off. Basically, the souls of the dead in First Ward don't have any more powers than the souls used as currency in Darksiders or God of War.

In order for a character to be Natural, there must exist a species of creatures that is or at least has once been capable of reproduction, to which these powers were natural across a significant portion of the population. Ghosts both lack the ability to be called a species since they're the souls of many different species already, and they lack a singular unifying set of powers to say is natural to them. Some control minds, some use dark powers, some fight with swords. And no, "has powers" isn't a unifying super power. At best that's Mutation.

My point here is that each ghost that actually has powers is a unique creature which came into being in its own unique way. They can be grouped together by some of their characteristics, yes, but they aren't at all related to each other in any way that would call them a species.

I'm not trying to argue if it's a good or a bad system, so quoting user numbers doesn't really help. What I'm trying to do is understand it, because you quote this supposedly much easier to understand system and the numbers that come out of it don't mean anything to me and, worse, seem to contradict what I'm pretty sure is true in the way I see my own defences and resistances. I just think your mitigation metric is simply saying something very different from what I thought it was saying, and is used for something significantly different from what I'd assumed it was used for.

I'm glad other people are using it, but other people are using Facebook on their iPhones and I don't "get" either of those, either. What I'm saying is just because I don't get it, it doesn't mean it's bad, just that I probably can't make use of it.

I don't believe it's impossible to do, I just don't ever expect to see it, and the reason for this is the game industry is experiencing a "stupid spell" right now, and has for quote a few years now, MMOs especially. What you suggest, upon reflection, is a smart game, whereas what's likely to be made is a skin-swap for WoW or Lineage II. It's always one or the other. What's also likely to be made is more and more complex character-building with no thought as to player's own use.

I scoured WOWwiki for hours and for the life of me, I couldn't find what "attack rating" actually means. The reason I did this is a friend of mine was convinced he was missing too much after a recent patch and wanted to know roughly how much attack rating he would need to not miss as much, and it he would have to swap too much of his gear and skills to do it. If it wasn't much, he could do it. If it as too much, he'd pretty much walk away from the game. I looked, and I couldn't tell him. Best I could figure out was his attack rating should give him 95% accuracy, which we both new couldn't be right.

It just feels to me like MMOs and RPGs of recent times are built for the kind of people who'd make their own spreadsheets, because they're comprised of a zillion 0.67% buffs to a zillion different stats that you need to figure out how to balance. Honestly, if I can figure that out just by trying my hand at it, I should probably go work as an air traffic controller. The local airport control tower is badly understaffed.

You slot more endurance WHERE? Once upon a time, I made my best to slot my toggles for endurance reduction. When that didn't work, I double-slotted them for endurance reduction. Why? Well, obviously, that's where most of my endurance is going, right? They drain me constantly, surely that's what costs me the most... Only toggles are probably the cheapest part of a character's powers, and it took me sitting down and charting each power's cost over time to actually see that my regular attacks cost me between 0.8 and 1.1 end/s while most armour toggles were just, what? 0.26 end/s? I slotted Combat Jumping for endurance reduction, for crap's sake!

The game doesn't let me put five slots in five different powers, check what they do and then move them around if I don't like it. Respecs, even today, are limited and I'd rather not be put in a position of having to buy one. What this means is I'm left enhancing a little bit here and a little bit there and trying to spot a minute difference. I owned a number of cats once. I'd watch them grow up and to me, it was pretty much always the same cat year after year. Then an old friend would drop by and go "Woah! Your cat got big!" and I'd be like "Really? I never noticed." Small changes over a long period of time are hard to track, especially when you don't even know what you're tracking and the game varies so much.

The fact of the matter is it took me doing this:
To figure out which powers to slot for what and which powers did what. And I played with that set. Did you know Subdual - the immobilizing power - was good at doing damage? I didn't, because it's DoT and I just hadn't noticed. Did you also know it's crap for endurance? I didn't, because I just haven't noticed. Did you know that Psychic Tornao becomes more efficient than a single-target attack only if it hits four or more powers? I didn't know that, either. And it's not like I didn't HAVE to know this. I wasn't using Stamina, remember? Without that, I pretty much had to squeeze every ounce of performance out of every power or else I'd spend 3/4 of my time Alt-Tabbed to let my endurance recover to full.

You're probably just smarter and more observant than I am, but I am incapable of deducing numbers from observing behaviour.

I remember watching old Quake 3 Arena demos with bots on the highest difficulty. When moving about, they would constantly keep the player in their crosshairs, even through walls, even across the map, even when there's no way at all to actually see the player. When using the machinegun, the bot would swing its sights out of position with every shot because it knew where the next bullet would deflect to, thus ensuring perfect accuracy with an otherwise scatter-fire hit-scan machinegun.

And it's not a question of "shuffling memory positions." The game's software needs to know where everyone is at all times and what they're doing in order for the game to work. Bots, therefore, don't have to rely on actually perceiving and judging the world. They have access to the process with controls this world directly. It's be like you and me having a role-playing argument, only I'm the writer of the fictional universe we're arguing about and know all manner of unpublished little quirks that exist nowhere but inside my head. It would put you at a severe disadvantage simply because what I know is impossible for you to know as I haven't expressed it in any way. It's what makes people think I'm just being stubborn and picky when try to get help for my own character concepts.

And besides, while an aim bot might be more accurate than a player, "accuracy" isn't the only thing that matters in your basic FPS game. It's why people have been able to beat Nightmare bots in Quake 3 and so forth. These games are designed in such a way as to demand situational awareness, good judgement and unorthodox play. I, for instance, beat UT2003's Xan Kreigor by admitting he's better than me by a wide margin and learning his habits. After a while, I realised he liked using the rocket launcher at range, which has moving projectile that can be dodged. I then proceeded to repeatedly goad him into fighting me in a very long corridor where I could dodge his rockets while I peppered him with the "accurate" alt fire of the hit-scan chaingun. I beat a computer - an aim bot, essentially, who was significantly better than me basically by outsmarting him and findin an aspect of the game the AI simply wasn't programmed to capitalise on, and indeed which it later transpired not many people even realised was a thing.

There is more to a game for a player to do than balance a spreadsheet, and I personally feel more accomplished when it feels like my actions matter in the moment, rather than when it feels like I'm just tracing through steps.

That's not even remotely true, not for most action games. Many, as you'll note, intentionally put you on an even keel with your enemy. The oldest of the olds, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, had no such thing as preparation. You picked a character, your enemy who's likely some total stranger in the arcade picked a character and you go for it. Sure, you could see who he picked and pick accordingly, but most characters were well balanced against each other. Who won in the end was mostly based on who did the right things in the actual fight.

Yes, experience and knowledge of the game are a massive help. Of course they are. But all they do is better enable you to analyse each situation and find a proper course of action. What I'm saying is the game never came down to picking the right stats, then following a bullet list of what to do and then you're guaranteed to win. Decisions are made on a moment-by-moment basis. I've fought a number of people who tried to use "a mind of no mind" and they quickly become predictable and easy to trip up. An action game player who trusts expectations rather than immediate awareness will always be predictable and susceptible to unexpected event.

Sure, that's true in City of Heroes, as well, when a mission throws me a messed-up curveball. The trouble is that in a game where I need to have won my battle before it even started... There isn't terribly much I can do to respond to a changing situation short of running away and out of the instance to force enemies to lose aggro and then start planning all over again. Sure, if I have a God Mode power I could use that, but not all sets and indeed not all ATs do.

I didn't take it personally. I just didn't want to repeat the same thing as what I'd said before, so I replaced it with a Curse of Monkey Island reference.

Not entirely. What I imagine Arcana is imagining is a system of character building where the actual process of building a character is a meta-game drive in itself. People of this game have sometimes stated that they spend more time in Mids' Hero and Villain Designer and they enjoy number-crunching more than actually playing the game. Yes, I've seen people use those exact words, though not often. Why I bring up things other than the character-building meta-game is to illustrate that a game doesn't need to obfuscate its mechanics in order to give people meaningful character-building options. What it needs to do is not rely on numbers to such a large extent and instead rely on giving players actual gameplay choices. Let me explain.

Right now when it comes to personal defence sets, I have a choice between stats. Do I want defence numbers or resistance numbers or regeneration numbers or some combination of a little of all of the above? I don't know and, frankly, it doesn't really matter. All of those do the same thing - they keep me from dying for me doing nothing at all. There's nothing I can do to affect whether I dodge an attack or not, because whether I dodge an attack or not comes down to a roll of the dice. Sure, I can stack the odds in my favour, but that's still numbers. I don't actually DO anything to defend myself. People have left their character in the middle of a throng of enemies then walked off to take a dump and returned to find their character bobbing and weaving, seemingly completely unharmed. Well, of course it comes down to balancing the books, then.

Suppose I had a choice between dodging or blocking or interrupting enemies? Suppose I had to choose how high up the enemy attack chain I want to be able to block with no ill effect. Suppose I had to choose between blocking just forward or blocking in all directions? Yes, stats obviously come into those as any game is ultimately built on stats, but what I'm saying is you're not asking the player to try and balance those stats. To me, stats should serve gameplay, not the other way around. To me, "the game" should be what you do from when you see an enemy to when that enemy drops, with "stats" serving only to enable you to be in a position to make decisions in battle.

When people speak about customizability yet bring up many different stat combinations which cause characters to "behave" differently, I see a problem. To me, actual customizability comes when you're able to pick what you want to do without having to mess with the behind-the-scenes mechanics that make it work. Jack Emmert wanted City of Heroes to be a game like this, which is why he held out till he left that real power numbers weren't needed. The trouble is that the system Geck and the others made for him was in no way instinctively predictable and was, as well, based around a sum of small percentages that aren't obvious from actual play. This was a system where you needed to balance the numbers, hence why numbers are necessary here, but that doesn't have to be the case everywhere. In fact, I would seriously prefer a game where I never had to see a number at all.

Funny enough, other than the number of potion equvalents I'm carrying, Darksiders is a game that has nearly no numbers anywhere in its playtime.

Did you just call me a prologue? Well that's offensive. I've always fancied myself more an epilogue sort of person.

They don't, actually. They sell weapon skins and cosmetic armour sets, else I would have bought it if they sold actual weapons.

To point:

The idea of having, to boil it down, two modes for offence and defence isn't bad, not at all. I believe that's what Staff Fighting and Bio Armour do, at least partially, though in their case the differences are fairly minor. If we want to make this a "night and day" choice like, say, Granite Armour is seems... Problematic. Let me explain.

The power armour gatling gun guy is meant to be played offensively. He's the siege breaker, as it were - the slow, heavy tank who might take a while to get there, but you can't stop him easily. As such, he's meant to be aggressive and doing damage, thus, be in "offensive mode." Wouldn't that, then, turn "defensive mode" into essentially "waiting mode?" Killing the character's recovery and debuffing his damage for lower endurance levels to force him into switching on a recovery toggle and basically wait for his endurance to come out seems like it would just foster a type of "stop and go" playstyle that I know a lot of people frown on.

Now, granted, my idea for self-rooting is similarly "stop and go," but there you WANT to stop so you can shoot better and you want to go find more stuff to shoot. With this iteration, it seems like we want to go AND shoot and stopping just means we can't do either. Realistically speaking, I don't want the heavy weapon power armour guy to "tank," by which I mean I don't want this character to sit idle and do nothing while he gets punched instead of his squishier team-mates. That's not the character's point. That's why I don't want to put this character in a position where he can't attack and has to wait. Because, really, what WOULD such a character do in a "no offence" mode? A Tanker or a Brute could still taunt, a Mastermind can use his henchmen, a Defender could buff, but this guy? It'd be like giving a Blaster a "defensive mode" where he can't attack - he's left with nothing to actually do.

Now, if you want to work with routing power, how about a sort of "reverse Defiance system" or an "overheat system?" I'm just spitballing ideas off the top of my head, but here goes.

Charge-Up: For every second you do nothing, you receive one stack of a damage-buffing power, up to a total of 10. When an attack is used, it deals extra damage per active stack, consuming all the stacks it has "used." Each power would have a maximum number of stacks it can consume, with larger ones having higher potential. Along with a mechanic based around repositioning, this would permit the PAGGG to play slower and spend more time doing things OTHER than attacking and still come up about even on damage output while at the same time not overpowering him in a "stand and shoot" situation.

Overcharge: Every attack used grants a stack of Overcharge that lasts for 10 seconds and goes up to a maximum of 5 stacks. When 5 stacks are reached, the character can no longer attack and must wait for a stack to expire. Every set's Build Up power also serves as a charge dump, ridding the character of all built-up charges, but this is still bound by the power's own recharge. This would serve to limit the PAGGG to short bursts of serious damage before overcharging and needing to either wait to cool off or otherwise pace attacks.

Charged Shots/Reload: Instead of Build Up, the PAGGG has a power which boosts the very next attack significantly, but takes time to execute. For weapon sets this would be reload and for non-weapon sets it could be just charged shots. Basically, if you slow down and take the time to execute this animation before every attack, you deal better damage, but do so at a slower firing rate and a higher opportunity cost. If you prefer to just blast without reloading, you can do this, too, but at a lower damage output. I've suggested this before for another powerset.

I agree with you. One BIG reason I bought City of Heroes... Well, not so much a reason FOR buying as not a reason AGAINST it... Was that the game is click-and-kill. Back in 2004, I was running... Not quite dial-up, but something with horrible latency and terrible download, so I knew the only MMO I'd be able to play would one where latency wasn't an issue. I play this game with around 250-300 ping routinely, and I barely notice it.

That said, I HAVE actually seen games with VERY aggressive latency compensation. Space Marine, again, basically takes what's happening on my screen directly. If I see an enemy and shoot him in the face on my screen, he's shot in the face on the server side, as well... I just might need to wait a couple of seconds to actually see him keel over and die. I've seen straight beams curve, I've seen them shoot sideways out of guns and more, but what it means is that no matter how **** my connection may be, I don't have to worry about it, because I can play by what I see on MY screen and the server will accept it.

I assume this is much more open to cheating, yes, but I'm not well enough versed in networking to know either way.