Samuel_Tow

I so very rarely say that, but "this." The whole point of Titanic Weapons - and this is something I will hold David to task over as he more or less promised - is to have a HUGE weapon. Every other weapon set in the entire game ends up tiny for women because "it looks better" in their hands, according to BABs sense of Aesthetics, and frankly, I'm sick and tired of that nonsense. The whole point of Titanic Weapons is to have a weapon that's ridiculously huge for the character wielding it. One of the characters I plan to put that in the hands of is roughly a four-foot-tall small girlish robot, and I WANT the sword to be bigger than she is.

I recall making a specific "wish upon a star:" I want the SMALLEST Titanic Weapon, when put in the hands of a female character, to still be bigger than the BIGGEST broadsword weapon, which is the Legacy Broadsword. If that doesn't happen, Titanic Weapons aren't big enough. I want a weapon that, when stood up on its end, is longer than my character is tall. I want a weapon that is broader side-to-side lengthwise than a common NPCs are at the shoulders. I want a weapon that looks like it's as heavy as a car. That's the point of calling it a TITANIC weapon. If I wanted smaller weapons that are to-scale of the character using them, I'd use every other weapon set in the game.

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Now, all of that said... Sure, I'd love to see the maximum height for women bumped up by at least another foot, so a max-height woman can match a max-height man. Actually, female maximum height (or rather, scale) is already higher - 25 to the Huge Model to 34 to the Female.

In general, I'd like to see max height for all characters increased across the board. I want to make characters who are as tall as Noble Savage or a Fake Nemesis or a Greater Devoured. If these can move around indoor instances, so can we.

And, yes, I'd like to see a more muscular female model where the "muscle" slider actually affected the model's muscles, rather than breasts and butt, where I can have muscular arms and muscular legs and a more solid rib cage ("chest" slider my ***). Sadly, David more or less nuked that suggestion from orbit so it'll never happen.

What might happen, however, is what someone dubbed Titanic Arms Basically, it's using the Robotic Arms tech to give women bigger, more muscular HUMAN arms which would make more sense to carry such a heavy weapon. It's been long past due to add non-robotic options to Robotic Arms anyway. That I have some degree of hope about, even if no-one at Paragon Studios has ever elected to comment on the subject that I'm aware of.

That game makes us DO things all the time. Explaining why you did something is much easier than explaining why you said something. Actions are a pragmatic decision, which can be explained with pragmatic reasons, convoluted though they may be. Words are expressions of a specific personality that don't really have a direct explanation. What's more, it's not always clear by your words what action you're actually choosing and sometimes the action you want lies at the end of words that you don't.

And at the end of the day, if your character wouldn't pick a certain action, the solution is simple - don't pick that action when the choice is presented to you. It's much easier to blind-guess at a small selection of items that would make sense for nearly everyone than it is to blind-guess at a small selection of speech personalities, so your chances of finding the option to take an action your character WOULD take is much higher than your chance to find a line your character would say.

Putting words in our mouths is never a good idea. Giving us a choice of description reactions is far superior, even if the result is always the same.

The strongman helmet is an integrated chest, shoulders and head piece. I doubt we'd get that under any circumstances unless they expand the costume editor to handle that, which doesn't seem to be a priority.

See that? "The one item I actually wanted isn't in the set." is something I've been hearing a lot lately. And I can't disagree.

Let's see...

*Since I2, my long hair has been poking through my cape. The female Glam hair is completely and utterly unusable with any and all back items period, yet it still exists, and is not alone in this.

*Since I16, custom colour Forcefields have been misaligned and failed follow the character through animations. You always stand outside your own bubble and every animation you make sends you out of your bubble. I've bugged that multiple times.

*No body aura currently covers my winds or my weapons, so while my medieval armour may glow a brilliant white, my shield, sword and wings do not and cannot.

All of that's just fine, but pope hats that may slightly clip with a few animations is just crossing the line?

My question remains: What did the pope hat clip with so much that made it unusable when the High Collar cape clips with EVERY SINGLE SHOULDER PIECE and with a good half of the available hairs in the game?

While I agree with you - and I honestly do - downer drama by itself doesn't make for a good story. It makes for a downer story. The heavier, darker motifs do a lot to add weight to a story, but without the lighter, happier motifs, this just turns into an anchor for the whole fictional world. As I said - the old City of Heroes stories weren't all raibows and unicorns. There was a lot of darkness in them, but that darkness was counter-balanced by the lighthearted side of things. That's how you write a good story.

Here's the thing - dark motifs in a fictional world only work so long as you can keep the player engaged in the story DESPITE the darkness, always hoping for an eventual resolution, because when that resolution finally comes, victory is that much sweeter. However, unlike in real life, when the fictional reality gets TOO dark, the player always has the option to do reject that reality and either shut down the game or abandon the story. Unlike in real life, we can never be FORCED to sit through unpleasant storylines (which is why I never run with Peter Thermai, Westin Phipps, Darla Mavis, Angelo Vendetti, etc.) because the player is in control of the master switch. If it gets too dark, he can leave at any time.

I've written a few dark stories, myself, and I've tested a few audiences with them. Without fail, the people I've tested have refused to read to then when the story got too dark, and that's not just once or twice. What I took away from the experience is that writing a story to make your players retch is less important than writing a story to HOLD your players' attention until you can make the unpleasant parts feel justified. You don't do that with constant dark storytelling.

So do I. Without a happy ending, a dark story is nothing more than torture porn, and I happen to not enjoy that kind of story. A lot of Praetorian storytelling seems to revolve around taking the good, the kind and the innocent, stomping on their faces, kicking them in the gut, throwing them in the garbage and THE END! Hell, take over Fort Darwin for Arachnos and you'll see pretty much exactly what I'm describing. There's a man beating a woman with a baseball bat square in the face, there's a man kicking a woman in the gut as she's fallen on the ground, there's a man digging a shallow mass grave next to a pile of corpses and there are a bunch of Arachnos soldiers standing around corpses piled next to stinking garbage cans with flies buzzing about, chuckling about "Time to take out the trash!" This in a PG game.

I'm sorry, but that kind of unpleasantness isn't why I play games, and I'm getting a little tired of ticking new stuff as it comes out as "missions to avoid" just because I lost my stomach for Happy Tree Friends.

Ouch... That's sharp, even for my sensitivity, but damned if I don't agree. Half the people in both CoT threads were saying "Everything else aside, I want to pope hats," they spent all that time redesigning the CoT ostensibly so that their costumes would be applicable to players, and we still get a massively cut-down version of them.

Really, what was the point of spending so much time making their costumes player-usable if you didn't make them player-usable?

DO NOT bring a villain to the First Ward unless you're prepared to play an unambiguous good guy. The most you can hope for is to be a dick to people, but there is almost nothing villainous at all that you can actually do in the main storyline.

Honestly, it seems to me that the more the storyline background gets fractured into smaller substories, the harder it is for the game to keep ITS OWN continuity. Forget my delusions of being a time lord from another dimension and so having already been exposed to time travel. That's my writing and the game can't know that. But when the game's storyline starts dropping out of its own continuity, there's a problem.

What bugs me the most is that I've interacted with Vasilokos, Noble Savage and Kathie Douglass (I keep wanting to call her Kathie Hannon for some reason), and yet not only do they not remember me, but they treat me like garbage like I never saved their lives multiple times over. Hell, Kathie was thanking me profusely on my way out of Praetoria, and now she's acting a copy of Jane Temblor.

The good: Thank you for dispelling that embarrassing rumour. Maybe now people can stop insisting that some pieces are being held back to make NPCs more unique, and if they continue to do so, we can always quote you from here

The bad: The pope hat is pretty much a hat that goes straight up. What could it possibly clip with?

Her own arc in Imperial City, Warnden, 10-15, I think, final arc of the zone with a moral choice at the end - shut down the Seer Network or punch Kathie's face. First Ward assumes whoever worked with her chose to help her.

That's something which struck me, as well, and... I honestly don't like this direction. The farther the game moves ahead, the darker it becomes, and I see no reason for it. Sure, City of Heroes never shied away from dark plotlines, like the Paragon Protectors and especially the Shining Light, like Dr. Vahzilok offering the rich and famous eternal life as horrible zombies and so forth. It had its dark moments, sure, but that was still counter-balanced by all the brighter moments in the game, like rescuing Lou and reuniting him with his wife and daughter or rescuing Melvin and seeing that the experience hasn't crushed him but rather just fuelled his determination or finally saving Ken Kellerman from Crey's mind controllers and reuniting him with his wife.

First Ward, by contrast, is at best bitter-sweet. In the end, sure, Circe the Sorceress and her scary scheme of scowling scorn has ceded, but the Seers are still trapped in the Network, Kathie - for all the bile I have for her - has been used, abused, defiled and had her mind enslaved AGAIN and doesn't look like she'll be waking up any time soon, and Diabolique is essentially victorious and stronger for the experience. There's no happy ending. There's never a happy ending to anything in Praetoria.

Sometimes, when I go through newer content for Praetoria and ESPECIALLY villain-side and, hell, hero-side too, I start having to wonder if the writers want me to start dressing in black and cutting myself. Because the way the story is written, it seems to WANT me to feel bad about myself, bad about the world and embrace the depths of depression. Nothing we do matters, and even in our finest hour, the most we can achieve is a Pyrrhic victory whose only upside is that it could have been much worse. And that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is we make everything ten times worse and we have to read about innocent characters losing their innocence and turning into monsters.

Do you have any idea how long it's been since a piece of new content has made me smile after running through it? A long god damn time, I'll tell you that.

Luckily, we can skip the tutorials, so the villain-side villains being broken out of the zig was never a big problem. There's a total of one mention of it in the game when you first speak with Kalinda, telling you she's responsible for why you're not dining on Zig food right now, but that's it. There are a few paper missions that allude to you having spent time with the mission boss in question, but because paper missions opted to use jargon like "you didn't like him in the can," it's a bit more open to interpretation. I'm not sure how pervasive the Galaxy City tutorial is, but I haven't seen it mentioned much at all, so presumably skipping it frees you from that canon requirement.

And I agree with you. A world where all player villains were freed from the Zig is about as goofy as a world where all heroes and villains get their powers from "the Well of the Furies," even if their super powers are hard work or a fast wit. We've bred one bit of nonsense out of the game with the Galaxy City tutorial, maybe by the end of the Incarnate storyline we'll be able to breed the other out, as well, perhaps by finding out Sister Psyche was wrong all along.

"A Force Mage" is not a signature NPC any more than a Big Dog is a signature NPC. It's a nameless boss. None of his parts are "signature" and none of his parts should be "ultra-rare." The only instance where this ever applies is named canon NPCs with their own unique model and specific look. I'm talking people like Marauder, Vanessa DeVore, Dr. Vahzilok, Requiem and so on. "A Vortex Core Leonis Archon" is not a signature NPC, nor is "a Castrorum." Anything that can be defined as "a something" is not a signature NPC.

Then you weren't looking hard enough, or you're being intentionally obtuse. Then again, I know you have a history of discounting writing that suggests you're working for yourself when the system still requires contacts, so that's to be expected.

For those of us who CAN look past the basic game mechanics and stick to just the story the game tells, however, an arc which presents the actions as MY idea and MY plan and MY initiative, even if what that idea and plan and initiative is is still predetermined, are still a HELL of a lot better than missions which present me following someone else's orders.

But that's really all we've ever asked for - mask the underlying system in a better way and stroke our egos more. No-one here is asking for a revolution in computer game technology. Hell, what's being asked for here doesn't even need dialogue trees at all. It CAN be done with the very simple tools of the architect. And it can, as evidence exists to prove over and over again.

I don't know. I think it depends on the character you bring. I fought them with an Axe/Shield Scrapper, and while they were definitely nasty, I didn't really have that big of a problem with them, at least no more so than against any psi-heavy enemies like the basic Seers. Hit Build Up, kill as many minions as fast as you can so they don't slow you down into the stone age and go from there.

I have heard, however, that non-melee ATs have great problems with them. A friend of might spent quite a while dying to a squid-head lady with his Defender a few days ago and eventually gave up, declaring it impossible. Something about being constantly confused, I believe.

You know what just occurred to me? A better analogy. I've compared Kathie to Black Scorpion, but it's not an exact match. Kathie is smart, whereas Black Scorpion is an idiot and a coward. I've compared her to Mender Tesseract, but Tesseract is just plain evil, whereas Kathie still has a heart, even if she only has heard for her cardboard cutout motivation of "Stop the seer network AGAIN!" No, no, you know who she REALLY is like?

Jim Temblor, AKA Faultline. Actually, look at Kathie sometime and you'll notice she's essentially a bargain basement Faultline from when you first meet the guy. She has the pants, she has the jacket, and she has the "angry young man" description that Jim has when you meet him down pat. "What do you want? I don't like you! You think I need help? I don't need your help! I'm ACTING!" Of course, Jim actually has a believable character and faces the reality of needing help, and eventually becomes a the good guy he was meant to be, whereas Kathie is stuck in that comic parody jerk mode perpetually. I wonder how the other Seers put up with her.

Actually, no! She isn't like Jim Temblor. You know who she really IS like? JANE Temblor, the Praetorian Faultline. The same foul mouth, the same perpetual moody crap, the same unprovoked bickering, the same pants and the same jacket.

Kathie Douglas
IS
Faultline!

This doesn't actually work. As I described above, loading window colours doesn't actually move the window colour sliders. It swaps the colours for some but not all windows, and as soon as I hit Apply, my window colours reset to what they were before I loaded. This isn't actually a new bug, but before I could load window colours, close the Options menu without applying, then open it again, Apply and get the right window colours. No longer.

I'll have to toy around with the /window_color command, but I actually do want to keep my Window Opacity at 53% and the command uses values from 0 to 255. I'll have to figure out where 53% is on that scale.

Huh... I have a friend who's complained to me about the colours of his custom powers resetting to Original on at least three separate occasions, at least once after I pointed it out to him myself. This happened to him long, long, LONG before I21, something like around I17 last that I remember. He does use Secondary Mutation a lot and he turns into a monkey fairly frequently, so I could see him going monkey and dying. I'll have to ask him about that.

I haven't experienced the bug myself, however.

No, they don't, especially in the early game. For the longest time, enemies were limited in their attacks to a maximum scale damage of 2.0, even for attacks that, for us, exceeded that by quite a bit, such as Total Focus' 3.56 scale damage for us, which for NPCs is still 2.0. It wasn't until Architect critters got access to OUR powers directly that we actually realised just how nasty our own powers were, when we got hit with them, ourselves.

What enemies get, more often than not, is a mix of powers we can't have, like a combination of Invulnerability, Fire Blast and Fiery Melee on regular Behemoths, for instance. This I kind of get, since critters can be balanced individually by accounting for the precise powers they get and the precise potency of said powers, whereas what player characters will have is inherently unpredictable and dependent on what players take and how players slot.

Considering enemy defeats are the primary way to gain experience and obtain drops, telling me I don't have to fight them is, as mentioned below, akin to telling me I don't have to play the game, or more precisely that I don't have to play the mission. Why, then, would I want to enter the instance at all, if I'm not going to fight anything? Why would I not just mission-drop the thing and save myself the trouble? That's already what I do for PvP zone introductions and Security Chief hunts and needless contact introductions, the last thing I need is yet another mission that's going to waste my time in annoying activities without giving me any progress for it.

Sure, Praetoria has a bunch of those "Get in, get out in 120 seconds, don't fight anything!" missions but at least on them I can fail them intentionally and fight stuff anyway, and at worst they're short and not annoying. City of Heroes is a game about fighting stuff. Designing missions where you have to expressly NOT fight stuff (**** you, "Strange Case of Benjamin Decker!") is just baaad!

That's mostly true for "special" enemies, however, and Bobcat from the Tin Mage TF is to special enemies what special enemies are to regular critters. We're not talking about Trial bosses here. We're not even talking about bosses at all. We're talking about MINIONS with powers that are so out of proportion with not just what minions should have, but what players have, as well. I really don't mind an Overseer "chomping" me for 1000+ hit points. It's a pretty nasty boss, I get that. But a Resistance Fighter minion? Those guys should be dog meat, not boss type encounters.

Heh, that's more or less what I've been telling people since I9, but somehow I keep being labelled a Luddite over it. Maybe because I'm a lot more angry in my phrasing?

Funny, that's almost precisely what Master Midnight says at one point and one big reason why I cringe at most of his dialogue.

This is becoming a real concern now, if that's actually intentionally all that's in the set. Last time this happened - which was the IDF set losing its big gloves - David explained this as "we can only port so much in so much time." Honestly, this is becoming a problem. Street Justice is ready but it's being held back. If the CoT set needed more time to get more stuff, why did it have to come out before the powerset which was complete before Beta was half-way over?

True, I didn't replay the mission to check the other choice, but I don't see why I can't kill him. His only other role in the storyline is to show up to help me and - in my run - die anyway. I assume that if he's dead, he simply won't show up. I draw this conclusion from the Vincent Ross arc, where you get different allies at the end depending on who you work for, or NO ally at the end if you pick no-one to work for on the side. I see no reason why I can't kill this guy and just run the mission with no NPC ally or, worse, come into the mission to face an angry spirit or some such.

That explains why I never knew I had them. I had up to T9 veteran rewards as soon as I21 launched and I never checked what was in the lower Tiers, assuming it was all the same stuff I'd seen from my Veteran Badges before. I'll have to check out what else I'm missing.

The Path Auras are some amazing tech, though, but I'd really like to see more done with them, such as fly-only auras, ground-only auras, landing/jumping-only auras and so forth. At the risk of bloating the list, of course, and at the risk of having to pay for them extra. I would SO pay for an aura that makes a crater when I land, but doesn't do anything else at all. Believe it.

Hmm, I'll have to try that. But the thing is, even when I set them up right, the window colours don't keep. Every time I load a character whose window colours are actually saved correctly and return to my bugged one, I lose window colours and assume those of the proper character. I feel an example is in order to overcome my vague definitions.

I recently remade the Herald of Light as the Spirit of Light (name was free, go figure). The Spirit is a hero, and his UI keeps wanting to switch to blue, and I keep switching it to mid-slider grey. I ran out money on the spirit, however, so I logged in Samuel Tow to make a transfer. Sam hasn't been played since before the Architect was introduced, so his UI is still using my ancient settings and is therefore blue. I mail the money, log out to character select, log back into the Spirit and his window colours are blue. AGAIN. And now all of his maps are revealed, except for Boomtown, turns out exactly like Sam's were (my memory isn't perfect).

This is getting irritating, especially considering I get logged out of the forums every time I shut down my browser, regular as clockwork. I'm starting to lose track of my workarounds...

Or a custom Teleport effect?

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I just got a chance to play around with a few of the Path Auras. I have no idea why I have these... I think I bought them from the Paragon Store, maybe? Anyway, there is something wonky going on with at least the Seismic path aura.

First of all, the one that's tagged as "Movement Only" doesn't have the screen shake and earth crack when landing from a jump. The basic one that's always on has that, sure, but the Movement Only version doesn't. I make a pretty neat line crack in the ground as I move, but whenever I jump, I land without any ground effect. Was this intentionally left out or is it bugged somehow? Because I know that when I first select the Seismic - Movement Only aura, I DO get some screen shake and a large crack on the ground, but I never get this subsequently, or at least I don't know how to get the game to produce it.

Secondly... What is the path aura intended to represent? Dumb question, I know - it represents whatever it looks like to the player. My point is that I kind of wanted to use it to represent a very heavy character who cracks the ground as she walks, but she doesn't crack the ground like you'd think a heavy character would. Instead, she trails a single narrow crack like dragging a stylus across a soft surface. Now, I get that we can't have an aura which leaves foot steps since matching where our characters step isn't really workable, but just a tiny crack that goes between my characters' legs seems... Odd. Right now, the only use I can think of for this aura is to represent literal Earth powers, such as those of my Stone/Stone Brute (bout time I updated his crappy aura anyway), but it's still weird how this one seems to correspond less to a humanoid walking on two legs and more to some kind of sliding entity, like a Snake or a tracked robot.

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With all of the above said, and assuming this is all intentional and I'm just an unpleasable git, I actually do have a couple of constructive suggestions:

1. May we have a Path Aura that ONLY triggers when jumping or landing from a jump? The earth crater when landing from a Seismic Aura is amazingly cool, and I SO SO WANT IT, but I don't want the stylus crack that comes with the aura. We have an aura that's just movement, not landing, so can we have one that's just landing, no movement?

2. Is it possible to have a path aura which is JUST screen shake with absolutely no visual effects? When my heavy characters walk, I want the ground to shake under their heavy feet, but right now this doesn't seem to be an option even with the Seismic aura. Sure, constant screen shake might be a bit disorientating, if I picked it, then I'm responsible if it upsets my stomach, right? I just want a character who makes the ground shake just by walking.

3. Is it possible to have an aura with sound, or potentially an aura that's JUST sound? I would LOOOVE to pick an aura that makes my character's foot steps sound like deep, heavy impacts. Failing that, I'd like to see the Seismic Aura at least play a sound as it cracks the ground upon landing. The huge ground crack and screen shake accompanied by dead silence is a bit disconcerting.

That's all I have for now.