Samuel_Tow

Can you list the ones you have and see if we can't fill in the blanks, or are you talking about deducing what you have from your PlayNC account page?

Blasters and me have a spotty history, and right now I hate the things. I'm not going to bother spending actual money for Beam Rifle until I'm positive that I can use the weapon models for Mastermind Robotics Pulse Rifle.

Then again, I mostly play Scrappers and Brutes, so melee is what interests me the most

IDF represents only the second set of large boots in the game's entire history. I'm not counting PPD boots, since they're tiny for women, whereas the IDF ones ARE NOT. I need the IDF boots and gloves for StarDiver's tech, and I intent to match them against a basic fabric upper and lower body - Tights, Stealth or Defence, depending on what works best. I need something simple that's mostly one-piece.

For reference, this is what Stardiver looks at the moment:



I need better boots and gloves and, considering she's pretty smallish, I want them bigger and more obvious. I'd use Enforcer but, frankly, those aren't very good, and there are no big enough boots to match the Large Robotic gloves.

Of course, all of this is moot, since I need a Titanic Weapon for her, as well. I hope to hell there's a tech-looking one. Something complex and energy-looking.

Honestly, I feel that two things need to happen:

1. Make knockback always guaranteed on all targets affected. This would reduce scatter significantly and allow people to predict the behaviour of their powers.

2. KILL KILL KILL PBAoE knockback. Any power that's PBAoE and does knockback needs to become either knockdown or a cone. This would allow players to control their knockback without sacrificing effective area coverage.

The rest can, indeed, be put in the hands of the operator.

*edit*
Alternatively, how about this:

When enemies are knocked down, they take some time to get up above and beyond animation and flight time. The higher the knockback mag, the longer the time enemies spend on the ground. If you slam an enemy with mag 10 knockback, he could spend, say, 10-15 seconds on the ground, as opposed to hitting him with knockdown which doesn't delay him at all (anything below 1 doesn't have the delaying effect). That turns knockdown into soft control and knockback into hard control, giving it a stronger benefit to counteract its potential to scatter.

Actually, thinking about this... Why not just use regular ambushes. You knock over a bank, you get ambushed by PPD when you walk out. You release a sentient virus in the city, you get attacked by Longbow when you leave. It would be a good way to have villains in legitimate cities harassed for breaking the law while still allowing them to effectively get away scot free.

You may be surprised. I have this, after all. Oh, and this.

That, and I want those flying horrible harpy things' large cloven legs. Be nice to have at least one large thing on a female character that's not breasts or butt.

That's actually the one concept I feel is safe enough to assume just by default. I'm not questioning that there is a significant number of perfectly normal, good people who simply prefer playing villains, but saying "most people want to be heroes" is still something that holds true the majority of the time. No-one sees himself as evil, and most people need to identify with, sympathise with or at least LIKE the protagonist of the stories they experience, and heroes are simply easier to like as they are written to be liked most of the time.

Everything I've said up to this point consists of ways of altering red-side to help ease people who need to like the protagonist of a story, and have looked at ways to allow us to actually LIKE our own villains. To a large extent, the original writers of City of Villains seem to have expected us to hate the characters we create, so having a game which constantly humiliates and demeans them was the way to go. Clearly, we'd like to see bad things happen to the people we hate, right? Trouble is, not that many people like stories full of people they hate. As Spoony says, when heels fight, the audience has no-one to root for. Villain-side needs someone to root for.

So I hear, and it's incredibly encouraging. I hear it may be a bit... Unpleasant, though, but it depends on how gratuitous and malicious the evil is, as opposed to how self-serving it is to the villain. Truth be told, I need less opportunities for my villains to be evil and more opportunities for them to be badass

It's funny you should say this, because this aspect of City of Heroes AI is one I love so very much. I HATE games where my enemies scatter or run away. Easily the worst, dumbest, most infuriating gaming experience of my life has been the Succubus enemies in the original Diablo. These things would shoot at you from range and then run away when you went to chase them, running as fast as you did so you could never actually catch them unless their limited AI got backed into a corner. HIDEOUS!

I don't want smart AI. I'm perfectly happy fighting dumb enemies who bunch up and get blown up. If AoE is a problem, do the sensible thing and make ALL attacks AoE, like they are in most "Like Devil May Cry, But..." games. You've historically suggested AoEs that split their damage across as many enemies as they hit as opposed to duplicating it, so why not go with that? Have all powers in the game be AoE that drop in yield as they affect more enemies but increase in yield as they affect few or single targets. If focusing fire is an issue, give the character a "stance toggle" that switches between concentrated single-target attacks so as to be able to pick out priority targets in a crown or spread fire to attack all enemies at the same time.

Or design many of the game's factions to spawn single boss-level enemies that get stronger as more enemies attack them, instead of spawning more enemies. That way, you have instances where AoE is king because your enemies are many and weak, and you have instances where single-target is king because AoE is wasted on a single boss.

There are ways to make games fun and balanced without making the AI smarter. Not all of us want smart AI. And, yes, I do intend to invest a lot of money in City of Heroes, because it's the only game which features many of the things I like, even if many of those are considered to have been mistakes. I like my overpowered characters, I like fighting large hordes with AoE, I like being able to solo and so forth.

"Longbow" has always weighed down on City of Villains like a cancer, and it's the manifestation of what I feel is a profound misunderstanding on the part of the development team. That was the decision to equate Arachnos with "evil" and make all villains implicitly aligned with them while equating Longbow with "good" and having all heroes implicitly aligned with them. You can see this in most PvP zones, where the fight is supposed to be good vs. evil but is, in fact, Arachnos vs. Longbow with players simply taking sides. I call this "a profound misunderstanding" because not all heroes want to associate with Longbow and not all villains want to associate with Arachnos, and not just in instances of "greater threat" co-op content.

Hero factions like the Legacy Chain and Wyvern and even the PPD fall by the wayside, because every time good has to oppose evil, it's always Longbow vs. Arachnos. Even in instances when factions like the 5th Council or the Circle of Thorns or Malta may be more appropriate, Arachnos are still "the big bads." Good and evil only ever exist through their representatives, and good and evil are only ever expressed by loyalty to one of those representatives. Granted, recent content has done a lot to move us away from this horrible status quo, but that honestly is how the game was originally envisioned - less good and evil, more Arachnos and Longbow. That's why people were and are sick of fighting Longbow all the damn time - because the original writers seem to have honestly though fighting Longbow is the same as fighting "heroes" when it actual practice it's like fighting the same one hero over and over again.

Giving the Legacy Chain and Wyvern a greater presence in the Isles and extending their level range up to 50 would help. Inventing new hero groups who AREN'T morally ambiguous and part of co-op content would help, too.

I suggested the same a while ago. In fact, I suggested having most enemy faction that aren't outwardly aggressive use this tech. One of the reasons for the "Destined One" thing is that the game at Launch didn't support the ability to NOT make Arachnos soldiers attack us on sight, so they needed an excuse for them to attack us on sight while we're still technically allied to Arachnos. Enter Recluse's "Darwinian" government, where beat cops are ENCOURAGED to attack us so as to weed out the weak. This produced the unfortunate consequence of having us be officially sanctioned to go protect an Arachnos base, yet having to fight through a platoon of Arachnos soldiers just to GET to the base. This... Never really made sense, and excuses for it just make it more awkward, and furthermore make Arachnos come off as more incompetent, when its own agents keep its own bases from being saved.

I'd suggest making ALL Arachnos soldiers actually stationed at Forts have yellow reticles so that we can move about in their forts more freely. I'd further suggest making the bulk of Arachnos soldiers in the field use yellow reticles, outside of a few ******** who just don't like player characters and will attack us on sight despite their orders. You know those guys that contemplate "Hey, if we stand here, we can harass people as they come off the ferry. Wanna?" They're sufficient jerks to leave aggressive, but I'd suggest making most Arachnos soldiers neutral until provoked.

One big reason Arachnos often comes off as incompetent is that their soldiers are incompetent ********, more concerned with harassing people than being professional soldiers. So while the Council builds bases and works tirelessly towards an objective, Arachnos is always locked in internal strife. They lose bases all the time and no-one gives a crap. In fact, I'm often PRAISED for having taken out Arachnos bases because "they deserved it" or because, meh... Who cares about random Arachnos bases? The whole organisation comes off as being so crippled by internal strife as to be ineffectual, so when the story plays them up as the big bads, it comes off as hollow. The game just doesn't build them up as scary. It builds them up as bumbling and incompetent.

Having most of their soldiers be professionals and stick to their given tasks, rather than spazzing out and attacking villains would be a great way to achieve this. It makes them feel a lot more organised. I'd extend this to the RIP and Cage Consortium guards, as well. They have no reason to attack us, after all, unless we cause trouble of some sort. I'd go a far as to give yellow reticles to every faction that makes sense to not attack player characters on sight villain-side.

Like I said, that's not necessary. Not all of Paragon City is heavily policed. In fact, Hazard Zones are called this specifically because they're zones where the city overtly CANNOT and DOES NOT police. Perez Park, Eden, Crey's Folly, all of these places are out of control. So why not have a few bad sections of City of Heroes where authorities DO try to police, but just don't have the resources to do so? Street Spawns would be primarily PPD cops and Longbow soldiers, as well as the occasional costumed hero boss, but because sections are so lawless, the city can't afford to send kill squads at the drop of a hat. If you, say, rob a bank, bomb a few buildings, unleash a demon and antagonise the aliens and then duck back into the abandoned warehouse district, then yeah, you'll be hunted down - you'd be the most wanted. But for smaller crimes, like knocking over science labs, kidnapping people and so forth... The city just can't spare the resources from protecting the other zones and rebuilding. There is only so much manpower to go around.

HAVING legitimate law enforcement isn't the same as having an EFFECTIVE legitimate law enforcement.

While it's obviously true that some people just want to be heroes and some just like playing villains, there are also a certain subset of people who like to play both heroes and villains, but ONLY a certain type of heroes and ONLY a certain type of villains. Expanding villain-side to cater better to more types of villains - specifically those with a shred of dignity - would actually make the game more appealing to a broader audience.

In a broader sense, making City of Villains NOT be a cautionary tale about how evil is bad and you're a bad person for playing it would help, as well.

This is really only necessary if your City of Villains is a literal city made up entirely of villains, as the Rogue Isles are. This sort of construct brings up the question of why an obviously evil nation is allowed to persist, and the answer is "foreign politics." Heavens knows we have enough of that in real life, so it's believable enough.

However, villains didn't need to be stationed in an all-villain, obviously evil nation. They could have been stationed in a GOOD nation that just can't seem to get rid of them. If the East Coast is the city of heroes where law and order have secured a foothold, then have the West Coast be the crime-ridden part that the Rikti bombed to **** and now authorities just can't get the upper hand on crime. In such a construct, your villains could exist within a state that's still a good state and still supported as a government structure, but just one that is materially too weak to defeat crime entirely.

This would avoid the need for the Fantasy evil overlord that is Recluse and his veritable Blight as the state would be legitimate while still retaining both reason to have rules (go on a killing spree and you attract too much attention from authorities) while still giving villains free reign to be villains (authorities are too weak to go after anything but the most obvious crimes). What's more, by keeping both cities US-based, you give heroes and villains a better reason to mingle without turning Recluse into captain of the Statesman fanclub. Right now, Recluse's obsession with the Statesman seems almost petty because it's sideways of his real objectives. Have them both be US-based, however, and they'd have reason to cross paths that's greater than old rivalry. Moreover, heroes and villains will have more reason to clash other than that because Arachnos and Longbow are doing it.

Arachnos is the kludge solution to a problem which didn't need to exist, is my point. Every single failure of Arachnos as a theme can be laid at the feet of that one single decision to create a city of villains and villains.

I agree with your general premise here. This should be achievable by either making SG bases not suck, or alternatively by attaching a persistent instance unique to each villain starting at, say, level 25... And, hell, attach one to every hero, too. Villains would have one of several where they take over a space and make a hideout out of it, such cave -> base, apartment -> holdout, warehouse -> rave partym, etc. and heroes would take on downtrodden areas and clean them up and make them shiny. This doesn't need to be an empire-building game. Something that moves with a large step is sufficient. Think Mastermind Upgrades, but on an instance scale.

I'd settle for SG bases, personally, if the editor wasn't terribad and requiring hours upon hours of work for little benefit, and if there were any decent items to use in there. Personally, when it comes to base building, I'd pick something with less micromanagement and fine-tuning and more something general like costume creation. The less it resembles 3D editing programme, the better.

Trying to figure out what Arachnos stands for is to delve into some pretty interesting concept archaeology, and it would probably lead us to one of the root problems I've been talking about. Basically, the reason Arachnos exists on the Isles - practically speaking - is both as a limiting factor AND as an opportunity.

We being villains, it was natural that we'd be tempted to want game-breaking things, such as killing shopkeepers so other people couldn't purchase gear, killing contacts so that other people couldn't get missions, blowing up buildings, killing civilians, killing other players and so forth. To combat this, a single centralised power was needed, and one that was stronger than just regular police forces, which in comic books are deliberately kept weak so as to leave room for heroes to be needed. Enter Arachnos - the murderous, ruthless dictatorship of the Isles who put down the law of the land and served as a deus ex machina to explain why we can't do certain things we can't do. At the same time, we being villains, we were supposed to be able to make a mess of things, to want to screw people over, and basically to sew chaos. To accomplish this, Arachnos needed to be both a strict authority and a not-so-stric authority at the same time. To this end, they're a self-serving authority, enforcing the laws they care about and letting people break the ones they don't.

I criticise Arachnos greatly, but many of its failings stem from the purpose it needed to serve in the very existence of a city of villains. This, however, is not an inevitable purpose, and owes its need to the game's basic concept. "City of Villains" is a flawed idea right at inception. I get why it was called that - it's a counterpart to City of Heroes. But what I don't get is why the game seems to have taken its name seriously when City of Heroes never did. In fact, look at all the "evil counterparts" City of Villains received, and note that they're counterparts not to good things, but to neutral concepts. The most basic example of this is "Infamy" in place of money. In City of Heroes, this is called "Influence," but is this really a goody two-shoes term? No, not in the slightest. In fact, having influence over people is much more crucial and much more practical for a villain than being infamous. Infamy is fame, influence is power, yet in an attempt to make the game more eeevil, villains got a less useful name for their currency.

City of Heroes is not about a city of heroes, but rather about a fictional city of heroes, villains and civilians. The name stands out because most comic books at the time only really had a few heroes to a city, at most a few dozen. We had hundreds of thousands, probably even millions by the first month of gameplay. But this still wasn't a city MADE UP of heroes any more so than "city of lag" is a city literally made up of lag. It's simply a city with very many heroes in it. City of Villains could have followed a similar framework, putting is in another contemporary city, but with much fewer heroes and a much higher crime rate. However, this didn't happen. City of Villains kept all the villains, but replaced the heroes with even more villains. It's really telling if you look at things practically. City of Heroes is actually a city of heroes and villains, but City of Villains is a city of villains and villains.

And that's a problem. From the very inception of red-side, people complained that they spent all their time fighting other villains instead of fighting heroes like a villain should. Well of course! It's a City of Villains! That's all there is to fight in it! Obvious answer is obvious, but the obvious question isn't: Why did it have to be a city of villains and villains? And indeed, why? Villains need heroes as much as heroes need villains. Playing a villain in a city that's already been destroyed and taken over by villains is about as dull as playing a hero in a city where crime never happens - that's not what either concept is about.

Arachnos as a final product is the sum total of every single reason why the concept of a city of villains and villains was a mistake - because it's an ugly, chaotic, unpleasant place where villains fight villains. Villains are the most impressive and most frightening when they make a good situation into a bad one. Having them fight each other over scraps is just demeaning, and that's what the majority of City of Villains is.

I'm with BrandX on this one - I'd rather said Pistol pool be an Epic, because I'd rather it were solid, as opposed to sub-par as most pool attacks are. I realise that having guns may be central to a character, but you also have to realise that adding meaningful range to a Scrapper is a big thing, and something usually reserved for an Epic.

What's more, making this an Epic means you can fine-tune it to correspond to the AT that's using it, as opposed to having to be a one-size-fits-all pool. The last thing I want is my Scrapper's guns being crap because they had to account for Controllers using them or some such.

More like 6. CoV launched in September of 2005, I think, and it's September of 2011 now.

That's just it, I WANT to feel bad about him, because Sefu honestly is a good guy, but ye gads his powers! Whoever thought giving a companion NPC a knockback aura needs to spend a night in a tumble dryer full of cricket balls. Because that's what it feels like to have Sefu around.

To be fair, there are a few. The new ones, for sure, but some of the old ones work, as well. Aside from Ghost Widow, the Patron Betrayal missions are pretty cool AND pretty "win." Willy Wheeler, much as the guy is a weasel, is still a pretty big win since you beat the bad guy AND make Willy look like a complete stooge. Maros is pretty cool, too, as his story has you trounce some serious, ancient evil, and the guy is polite the whole time. Even Operative Vargas is very satisfying.

It's just that those few contacts are the exceptions in a sea of uninspired contacts like Operative Kirkland, Arbiter Leery, the Shadowy Figure, Lorenz Ansaldo and so forth. Most contacts in City of Villains have arcs that don't amount to anything other than getting fake-paid.

Once, yes. Maybe twice, if you count dean... Maybe three times if you count that, Dean and Vincent. But that's pretty much it. In, what... Six years now? In six years, we've gotten only three little victories, and the rest are either downer endings (see Westin Phipps), idiot ball endings (see Kelly Uqua) or "nothing" endings (see Shadowy Figure).

Time After Time in all of its incarnations is one of my favourite arcs in the whole game. I forget how many times I've run it now, but I've managed to solo Recluse every time bar the first, because my broken Stone/Stone Brute was broken.

Beyond that, Dean/Leonard is just a cool story, but that's been beaten to death. I enjoy Vincent Ross for a couple of specific instances. The first is the deal with the demon. He warned me of dire, horrible consequences if I betrayed him. I betrayed him (I was playing Mage-Killer Po at the time) and then cut his shiny blue *** into small ribbons. Take THAT, smack-talking demon thing! The other is, of course, the ending. Not just the giant blow-up fight, either, but the fact that the Well itself tries to double-cross me and absorb me into the Leviathan, but I manage to double-cross it and steal its power. It's temporary, but it's just temporary enough for me to kick some serious faces.

That's good stuff. We just need more of it.

I think the misunderstanding is I wasn't talking about one MAJOR win like you'd get at the end of a single player game, so much as about lots of small wins that don't necessarily end the game, but still keep it on a positive note. And "positive" is one quality City of Villains can use a lot more of.

Oh, I definitely expect the big-shots to be arrogant and dismissive. I wouldn't have it any other way. And I don't really expect to be able to shift them from their thrones, so to speak - they're signature characters. But low-lives like Angelo Vendetti and Kelly Uqua? Why NOT let us slap those guys across the mouth or, better yet, murder them like what happens to Cleopatra, spoiler alert? People have been asking for an option to off Willy Wheeler (though why you'd want that after ruining his life I don't know), so why not?

That's pretty much what I want to see more of. People like Dean McArthur, Vincent Ross and, yes, even Willy Wheeler are a good example of contacts that treat us with respect and admiration - awkward as those may be for Willy. We need more of these guys. Lots more. These are the guys that leave you feeling like you won, even though with all of them, you ultimately lose. But it's the kind of loss that was worth the experience nevertheless. It's the Nemesis kind of loss - sure, we failed, but we still made progress even in defeat.

For years, I've been suggesting this precise framework of contact and, to the writers' credit, that's more or less what Dean McArthut is, even if he's an incidental contact. It's not a question of inventing new game systems to give me a way to win, really, it's a question of writing the story in a way that makes me feel good about running it. Dean is a great example. Sure, he's annoying as all hell (even if I get a chuckle of him hitting on my black cicada alien bug queen ), but he's also the perfect supporting character - humble, small-time and always admirable of our characters. He's the perfect yes-man, and I think City of Villains need a few more yes-men, to be honest. It would do a lot to offset all the jerks.

Basically, writing is what I think needs the most repairs in City of Villains. Well, writing and setting, but writing is the one that ought to be cheaper and faster to make.

The trick to writing interesting villains without letting them just mess up your fictional universe is to let them win a lot of small fights and constantly let them move one step closer to their final goal, all the while never actually letting them succeed at it. City of Villains doesn't really let us do that, however, as almost everything we do is grunt work for someone else, usually some insufferable, insulting fool like Darla Mavis or "Psymon" Omega.

As I said, our villains can win all of their battles without necessarily having been given the opportunity to win the war. So long as they don't lose and they aren't being used, that still counts.