Samuel_Tow

If push comes to shove, I will definitely use that, because it IS a good weapon. However, I wanted something a bit more sword-like with a bit more of a stabbing point for Xanta. Though, even if the Buster is the only Titanic Sword, that'll still do nicely.

I'm more concerned about what kind of sword I'll give to Stardiver, to be honest. I'll want something tech-looking, ideally something glowing like the Tech Sword or Vanguard Broadsword. I hope and pray something like that will exist.

Dispari makes a very good point in presenting an angle I never even thought of. The larger the costume editor becomes and the broader its range of costume items gets, the less room there is to add costume pieces that don't clip with pre-existing costumes. I realise that there's a threshold there as to how much a piece has to clip before it's discarded, but I can bet real money that sooner or later, even that threshold is going to become impossible to avoid.

Here's the thing - NOT putting a cool costume piece in the game because it won't work with SOME other costume pieces seems like a gigantic waste to me. Sure, it clips with some things, but if I paid for it, it falls to me to find things it DOESN'T clip with, no? If I like the piece enough, I'll find a way to use it without clipping, or I'll find a way to make clipping work in my favour. Simple as that.

And again, lots of things clip with lots of other things. The Clockwork boots clip with practically ever version of baggy pants, all the new thigh-high boots clip with a lot of the skirts, the high-collar cape clips with everything... And, seriously - if the high-collar cape from the Magic pack was allowed to exist, then I fail to see how "clipping" can ever be an argument for anything ever again. The high-collar cape clips with EVERYTHING!

OK, I guess that makes sense. Unfortunately, they still look like latex rubber. I can kind of see what they were going for, but they took a group of cloth-wearing mages and put them in shiny glossy tights that make the minions look like the Swamp Thing. Maybe I'm biassed in continually expecting these guys to wear cloth and not seeing it, I don't know. The point is, when I look at the CoT tights (and it still hurts my brain that I can say that phrase), to me they look like the Armoured Pads or the new Defence set or... I got it! You know what they look like most of all? The Stealth set. Stealth has a very similar glossy finish, a similar-looking hex pattern over its flat surfaces and you can slap the Sinister pattern on it to replicate a similar pattern to the Thorns gear. Or, as it turns out, you can just slap on the Thorns pattern wholesale

Now that you explain it, I get what they were going for... But I kind of wish they hadn't gone for that. When we were shown those "better pics" of the CoT to placate us, I was ecstatic, because they looked awesome. Turns out they were bosses and almost entirely made up of pieces we wouldn't get, and the rest of the CoT wouldn't be getting their pieces, either. So I'm left still enamoured by the CoT bosses, but disappointed in the minions and, by extension, in what I get because I'm getting the minions' gear.

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I have a big problem with getting "minion stuff," by the way. Minions are generally made to appear weaker, smaller and less visually impressive than lieutenants and bosses. For me to get JUST the minion stuff is more than a little disappointing. For instance, I get a pair of PPD shoulders with a yellow stripe down the middle. However, fighting the actual PPD and TEST, I start noticing that the lieutenants have shoulders with double stripes on them, presumably depicting their rank, and I think bosses have even more stripes. Yet the only thing I have access to is the minion shoulders. Why?

Considering how big a part costume design plays in City of Heroes, I'd have thought that the largest development effort would have been to make PLAYERS have the coolest costumes around. Instead, the opposite keeps happening - NPCs are always cooler than us, and the best we can hope to get is whatever scraps are left over after an NPC is made.

Here's the thing - if integrated shoulders like the IDF armour are not doable in the game (ignoring the fact that THAT is precisely what the high collar cape collar actually is), then work to make that happen for us. If it clips with too much stuff, then so be it. We'll pick the stuff it doesn't clip with. Remember - we want to look cool, so we're not going to pick the ugly option just because we're too dense to know better.

Call me crazy, but I don't play this game for the NPCs, I play it for my own creations.

This is one of the few things in this game that I never, ever appreciate, and it's very much true in this arc. Whenever it becomes painfully obvious that the writer was clearly going for comedy, it stops being funny and just becomes annoying. I'm one of those curmudgeons who HATE comedy as it exists in modern culture pretty much in its every incarnation. I appreciate humour, but humour only one aspect of a larger whole, whereas comedy IS the larger whole.

The harder you try to be funny, the less funny you are, basically.

And then there's this. I'm usually pretty good about following the plot and doing my homework and reading my briefing, but that arc still left me befuddled. Graves takes three missions just to explain the rules, and even then the rules are "Whatever I think of off the top of my head." It's BASEketball all over again. I have NO idea what the hell happened when I "won" the first time, what that PA system was which I could apparently control with my mind without moving my lips or why I had to say a magic phrase to activate it or why Crosscut knew about it or what the hell, writers? I never understood what I'm fighting for, because the way Graves pitches it to me is to say the word "power" in quotes and wait to see my reaction, presumably because I would erupt in ecstasy at the mere mention of the word, what with villains being widely known as brainwashed Pavlovian dogs who want "power" absent of any context. Haven't you run the villain tips?

You know what I think happened here? Someone came up with what I admit is a really cool idea of having a great ancient evil which needed a new body every so often set up a tournament to pick the most appropriate one, with said "tournament" being intended to be just a bunch of us killing each other. Then it was decided that THIS would be the running tutorial and it then had to be stretched to three whole arcs with what amounts to a metric ton of nonsense filler that makes the contest's rules more incomprehensible the longer it goes on. It's almost as if Graves is making them up on the spot.

"For the next round uh... You will, um... Play... Cops and robbers! Oh, that's a good one! You will play cops and robbers where, half of you... No, ONE of you will play the hero, and the others will play villains. The hero will be, let's see... You! No, wait, you! Because... You're the most heroic? No, that's not right... Because you won, that's it! You will be the hero because you won. Now go to each of your co-competitors and try to get yourself killed."

And then Crosscut wins by... Not killing me? Huh?

And this is different from every other hat added to the game in the last seven years how, exactly?

It's funny that the CoT were partially redesigned because players wanted their costumes but couldn't use them, so they were redesigned with costumes players still can't use. If that wasn't the point, then I'm not sure the redesign gained all that much.

I believe the point was that "break his arm" and "break his leg" are the same option repeated with different names. Seems like smart writing to me, actually.

Long story short - I don't think Titanic Weapons is going to suck

Even longer story short: I want to see the female model scale increased to match the max height of the male model, then I want the height scales on all three models increased to match Noble Savage, a Fake Nemesis or a Greater Devoured, whichever is most convenient.

I DO want weapons to scale with model HEIGHT, but I don't want weapons to scale with model GENDER, so I want my giant woman to have a bigger weapon than my tiny woman, but I don't want my giant man to have a bigger weapon than my giant woman.

Those really should be three separate threads, however.

Wait, are you talking about the high-heel boots or the flat ones? I don't think the flat boots for women have a fur trim, though they do look mire like your feet are wrapped up than like you're wearing boots. I'm not sure what works better for you, but they go well with the Tribal shield.

As for the Resistance boots, they do look like they're stitched together, but they have a VERY aggressive sole with a VERY obvious thread pattern, even from the side. I've used them on a few characters, and they always look like modern boots to me. They look good on your design, of course, but that's my excuse for not using them on tribal designs.

Well, OK, that and Brutticus kind of needs to have big hands and big feet. I mean, look at her:



That axe is HUGE, and the hilt is too wide to grasp with women's small hands, and most of the female boots are really small, too. If I want big hands and big feet, then Big/Banded boots and gloves are the ONLY real option for a barbarian look. Also, I don't think the CoT skirt or even the Barbarian skirt really goes well with those pants.

That's my problem more than it is a problem of the sets, though.

*edit*
By the way, I still like those abs better than what's on the Barbarian chest, but it's a start

Do I come off as speaking that strongly? Yikes, I need to read my own posts more often

Do you have any idea how much I'd love that?!? And I'm not saying this just because I have a mute character, I honestly feel that saying nothing should be a legitimate option much more often than it is.

Let me give you a bit of context: I'm a chatty person in real life. I talk a lot. Too much, as a point of fact. Knowing when NOT to say anything is a skill I've had to work at learning, so I can appreciate every time that a fictional character saying NOTHING is not just a legitimate, but also a beneficial course of action. There's so much yapping in the in-game texts already that having "don't talk" be an option will be a nice change of pace.

I haven't seen the set called Titan Weapons yet, but I could be wrong.

Either way, I recognised since the very inception that winding myself up for Titanic Weapons before I knew anything about the set but the name <insert joke here> would be unfair to the studio. It was easy for me to expect the world just because I'm excited and then when I get less than that, have my head explode in angry frustration. That's not going to happen, because I can't hold the studio to task on things they never promised and that I just imagined in my mind.

However, there are a few things that "the studio" in general and David Nakayama in particular have promised. One of those is that the weapons are big. Specifically in reply to my bringing up the Legacy Broadsword for women, he said the weren't just going to make these weapons slightly bigger, and that they were taking the idea seriously. Someone official also posted a pic of the only three weapons we know of - the Buster sword, the railroad crossing sign and "that other thing." I can, therefore, expect at least those three weapons, in at least a very large size, because that much has been officially promised. If that doesn't happen, I will be upset.

By contrast, a tech sword for Titanic Weapons has never been promised. If Titanic Weapons come out and we DON'T get a supersized version of the Tech Sword (like I hope it will) and it's all severed lamp posts and uprooted trees and giant elongated rocks and a drive shaft + transmission + V8 engine and so forth, then I'll be disappointed, but have just myself to blame for getting my hopes up. Then I'll have to scramble and find SOMETHING to do with Stardiver, because that would be catastrophic.

Secondly, the set isn't called Titanic "Swords," but Titanic Weapons, and we've actually only seen one sword out of three props. We also know (or at least have a pretty good guess) that the set will deal Smashing damage. I intend to use the set to swap out my current Sword/Inv Scrapper to a TW/Inv Brute with a giant sword... If there actually IS a giant proper sword in there. If there isn't, I'll be disappointed, but again - we were never promised a giant claymore or a giant scimitar or, really, "a sword" at all, therefore I have nothing to hold against the studio.

You seem to have gotten the impression that I'm somehow promising to become a level-headed person, and that's unlikely to happen if you ran my head through an angle grinder. What I AM promising is to be much more fair to the studio than I have been in the past. No personal attacks, no holding them to task for things they didn't promise because "that's what the game is about," no incessant whining I didn't get precisely the thing I wanted which was never even on the drawing board. Probably no drawing "large picture" conclusions based on minor details.

But at the end of the day, we're banking on the set bombing and... Honestly, I'm not actually worried about that. If I were, I wouldn't have planned three characters who will use it before I see a iota of a finished product I choose to be optimistic on this, and if my optimism fails, well, that's my own fault, isn't it. If their promises fail, on the other hand...

Here's the thing: I agree with you in general terms. I would always prefer choices presented to us to be phrased as impersonal descriptions of the actions we take as opposed to first person dialogue. It's much easier to justify doing something specific than it is to justify saying something specific simply because action is far more vague and less characteristic than speech.

However, I agree with Kitsune in this particular case, given what I presume to be a design goal of the mission - to use dialogue trees (or rather, "trees") to enact actual dialogues. IF we assume that a design goal is to make our characters speak, then in these cases I feel it should be MANDATORY that we choose what to say at EVERY instance where we're asked to speak, even if the actual practical difference is irrelevant. If I HAVE to speak, then I damn well better be given an choice of things to say.

In short, I'd rather not have to speak in first person dialogue ever at all in this game. If, for whatever reason, writers feel my character has to speak, then I want to be given a choice in selecting the manner in which I speak, including options to say nothing.

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On a very separate tangent, is it me, or has SILENCE been greatly devalued in this game? Every year, the Paragon City writers get more and more tools to write stories with and more and more text fields to fill, yet the decision of whether they actually SHOULD fill all those text fields or simply not have some characters speak in some situations never seems to come into consideration. It seems to me that the general driving mentality is that the more the text, the better. That's why First Ward has so far managed to throw four text boxes and two speech bubbles on-screen at the same time at me, and has had the tendency to give me a string of over six speech bubbles to read within the span of around four seconds.

Silence in City of Heroes seems to be considered a bad thing. If there isn't text on-screen, if someone isn't yelling in my ear, I'm not having fun. Remember back in the day when the Rikti never spoke? I personally feel that they were much more unsettling and scarier for it, and they came off as significantly more alien than now when they banter in colon-perforated English, going as far as to monologue. Much of their original mystique has been lost to that: cacophony of Rikti: talk.

Much in the same way, we ourselves were silent protagonists for many years. Suddenly, dialogue trees came out and we could finally speak. Yet did anyone wonder if we actually SHOULD speak? When Dean McArthur is being an annoying ****, did anyone consider that perhaps I would choose to say nothing to him until he shut up or got to the point? The only instance in the whole game where "say nothing" is an option is when you let Praetorian Aaron rant about... Something, I don't remember what it was. Penny Yin, I think.

There's so much text, so much dialogue, so much talking that sometimes - and this is going to get me mocked out of existence, but what is the ever - I wish I could just shut up. Well, if the game won't let me...

All a pack does is provide convenience. A lot of them don't really offer all that much of a discount, anyway. So whether this thing gets sold in three packs or in 30 packs, I'm thinking the overall price will be the same, it'll just mean I have to go hunting the pieces of it one by one. Which, in turn, I might not need to do because if Paragon Studios won't make their packs worth the 400 PP, then I'll just leave them ALL unbought and just buy whatever piece I happen to need at the time I happen to need it. Simple as that.

I wanted to buy all the packs as they come out, but they have to do better than that for me to start doing it again.

Honestly, I don't see it. It's more rubbery leather that shines when you walk at an angle to a light source. If anything, I like the stuff from the Barbarian set a lot more as that's more fur and rough leather than this finish. Plus the skirt is more than a bit too busy, just because the CoT pieces are intentionally busy by design. I'll think about it, but I ended up putting my barbarian girl in animal hide pants.

*edit*
Nice costume, though, but feed that girl some stronger food. She's wasting out!

That's one of the few things I can say I NEVER wanted to play and I NEVER want to play again. And, surprise surprise, I won't be playing it again. Which is a shame, because First Ward is awesome - the visuals, the enemies, the writing, the pacing - but it's all for naught if I don't end up enjoying the experience, and if I leave the game more depressed than happy, then I didn't enjoy the experience, all things considered.

And before anyone asks, yes, I don't have much of a stomach for "a world half empty" scenarios.

I imagine the hat might just thread through the halo ring

To the game's credit, you don't actually see the grave itself, as you just see a guy digging it next to a pile of corpses. But the mere fact that I'm talking about a "pile of corpses" and in no way alluding to zombies should speak for itself. Yes, that's evil. So are a whole bunch of things I'd rather not bring up for fear of being moderated YET AGAIN. Just because they're "evil" doesn't really make them the right choice for the game, or indeed make them in good taste.

And indeed, "good taste" is what I feel most of the evil in City of Villains is missing. It's intended to make me wretch, not make me feel I just made a cool villain.

Holy ****! I want that armoured glove so much! And there's an even better one? Dude! I can kind of see the cowl as being a problem with longer hair, but again - the Magic High Collar cape works just fine by being wide enough to make the hair appear to be tucked inside the collar. And the cape itself is pretty cool, too.

Now for the pope hat... I can kind of see where the confusion might be coming from. It seems like the pope hat is connected to the extreme cleavage robe, and that might be causing concerns of clipping. Well, so is the hood, and they apparently had no problem just clipping the hood off of the extreme cleavage and sticking it over our heads. If the ling is the problem, then just carve it out of the hat and run it like that.

What's that? It takes art time to do that? Well... Yeah, it does, doesn't it? Everything takes art time. Which is why I said I don't need to see a new half-finished rushed set every five days if I can an actually decent set, even if I have to wait two weeks or a month or three months for it. I LIKED the distribution of booster packs because they usually had lots of cool stuff in them. I'm not paying $5 for half of a costume set with all the best bits removed for "clipping."

That's more or less what I want out of it. People suggesting that the weapon shouldn't scale with size and that we should make bigger characters for it to be more in-scale concerns me. The point of making a big character with Titanic Weapons is so that he could use AN EVEN BIGGER sword!

So you'd think, but the Legacy Broadsword, at least for women, is still longer, broader, thicker and has both a bigger guard and greater apparent weight. That said, of all the swords I saw at creation, Barbarian was the only one that came even remotely close, so you do make a good point I'm using that to remake my possessed suit of armour from I2 into a Sword/Shield Brute, and so far I'm happy. I still want a thicker sword, though. Will probably swap to the Romulus sword if I don't give up and go for the Tron one from Celestial.

Your sig doesn't say what you seem to think it says. "I won't make a big fuss about it" isn't the same as "I'll shut up." If the Titanic Weapons are not big enough, I WILL say something about it, especially with David going to great lengths to reassure us. What I promised was that I won't make a big deal about it, and I intend to keep that promise. More or less, I just trust the art team to go whole hog on this one.

They have if you buy them, or so I assume. I don't plan to buy the CoT set and there isn't "costume set" for it in the dropdown that I've been able to find.

There's something about a PG rating in there, and also something about different kinds of evil, only one of which is "disgusting." And people reading this, please don't bring Rogues up. Those aren't available until level 20.

Mass graves and piles of corpses may be legitimate villainy in some people's books, but as far as I'm concerned, I prefer to avoid that sort of thing. I prefer to write villains less obsessed with... Being Crosscut and more with achieving grandstanding objectives ruling the world.

Wait, what? What armoured gloves? The CoT had gloves we don't have access to? Does anyone have a pic of that? I'd go looking at the actual CoT in the game, but telling their parts from one another is next to impossible.

Seriously, are we missing more than the hat and the belt?