Samuel_Tow

Yes there is. You can make binds to handle that easily, and you don't need six/seven binds times six henchmen. You can easily get away with having only a few binds to do this with. Micromanagement of Mastermind henchmen isn't a problem, technically speaking. It's just not necessary very often.

It is, but it's also quite irresponsible because it causes massive pet aggro. There's a reason a lot of people hate teaming with Masterminds, and it's not door gridlock. A lot of Mastermind players are simply a liability precisely because they let their henchmen roam around uncontrolled, aggroing everything in sight and constituting more of a detriment than a benefit. I've teamed with Masterminds like this, and everything becomes harder to do.

Generally speaking, Mastermind sets have variety. They have more variety than any other AT's sets, actually. Sure, the formula is always the same, but variety comes less from the Mastermind's own sets and more from what powers his henchmen come with. Mercs are almost entirely ranged while ninja are almost entirely melee, while thugs are a mix of the two. For Mercs, the boss henchman is the damage dealer with the lieutenant henchmen providing support. For Necromancy, the boss henchman is a controller with the lieutenants providing most of the damage. For Thugs, the lieutenants are damage and buffs while the boss is pure damage. You get more variety within just Mastermind primaries than you get within most ATs.

I don't really think making Masterminds even more esoteric is a good idea. If a single henchman character is so popular, it deserves its own AT.

Why does that look like Space Thunder Kids?

I'm not really talking about a reliance on Placate so much as on capitalising on its benefits. Placate provides the ability to take a single enemy out of the fight for a considerably longer amount of time than Smoke Flash does, and it gives the opportunity for a free critical. Neither of the power's aspects requires the Stalker to run away to capitalise on, but both can be fouled up by poor timing. When you Placate, the Hidden status of your character is restored towards the beginning of the power, and it's very possible for you to be shot before even the end of the animation, causing the power to fail before you can make use of it. The only realistic way to guarantee you'll be able to make use of your Hidden critical is to somehow time your Placate in-between enemy attacks, but with four or five enemies shooting you out of sequence, that's a VERY tight reaction time. This also gives you very little time to change positioning between Placate and attack, for instance if you want to use Head Splitter to snag multiple enemies and go for multiple criticals.

Overall, the time frame of making use of Placate is VERY tight, which is why I've always suggested making the Placate Hidden status immune to being suppressed by outside damage for at least two or three seconds after you Placate, but still suppressible by your own attacks, just so that the player can get a longer window of opportunity without feeling such immediate pressure.

To be honest, I've always preferred action games, myself, though that's for reasons other than skill and reactions. In a stat-based RPG, the difficulty of an encounter depends primarily on the character build I brought. What this means is that "challenge" usually means less an actual challenge and more a build requirement, in the sense that "You must have this power and this many of that stat or you can go home and cry to your mommy." I've often been told that running bosses aren't annoying and difficult to stop because you can always hold them. What one does in the absence of holds is "get holds from somewhere anyway." I've always seen heavily stat-based RPGs are more like pokemon battles, in the sense that you prepare a character and then send it off on its own to lock swords with another's character, where your general input is largely confined to how you build.

I've played my fair share of action games before, and the reason I like them so much is that in them, success very often comes down to what I do and almost never to what I bring to the fight. In fact, one of the fastest ways to "ruin" the action of an action game for me is to tell me to just go level up and come back, and suddenly everything will be much easier. As much as I love Symphony of the Night, that aspect of it really ruined my experience with it. Of course, this doesn't mean I like twitch reflex games just because they're "action." I gave up on Devil May Cry 4 when I realised I had to try and time a "charge" function with the hit if I wanted to build up... Whatever that was called. I also just about gave up on Onimusha 3: Demon Siege when I realised that to counter-attack certain enemies, I had a window of opportunity of a single frame of animation. Action game is one thing, and it can very much have a wide, forgiving window of reaction time. A twitch game is quite another.

Of course, that doesn't mean I can't play RPGs just because fights are decided before they even begin or subject to the whims of the not so RNG. It just means that I don't play them for the challenge.

Gotcha, and thank you. I seem to have misunderstood before.

I was going to ask why you felt that was the average, but then I saw who's posting I'll take your word for the average, Arcana, but shouldn't we have that reaction time be the power's animation time plus at least some form of time window for reaction? If we go with JUST animation times, then these are waiting times and the actual time from when a person can start acting to when a person runs out of time becomes close to nil.

Then again, this raises the question of whether we should allocate time in which people can make decisions, or if we should expect people to always know what to do before they are required to do it. Should I decide my next attack right before I fire it based on how much health my enemy has, how many enemies are clustered, what enemies are in the area and so forth, or should I simply be expected to have a static attack chain?

Should we be expected to act or react, so to speak.

That's less higher level Stalkers and more Stalkers of a couple of powersets, most notably Super Reflexes and sometimes Ninjutsu. I suspect an argument could be made for Dark Armour and its to-hit debuffs, but I don't have a Dark Stalker to verify. However, sets like Regeneration, Electric Armour and even Willpower don't really have much defence to speak of if they have any at all. Defence certainly helps with reaction times in these situations, but not all Stalkers can rely on that, and the reaction time bottleneck lies in Placate's own design in activating the Hidden status before the Stalker is able to act or react, impeded by the power's own animation time.

That said, Stalkers in general are a somewhat fast AT that does require a lot of quick thinking and quick reactions to get a decent benefit of Inherent gimmick, which Stalkers really need to lest they fall behind in general performance. As such, they are probably an example of the "faster" ATs that require a much more precise reaction time than, say, a Brute, even a Brute of the same powersets (DB/SR, say).

That really doesn't change my preference, though - I like having time to think on my feet as opposed to being required to operate on instinct and muscle memory, so my own preference of 2-6 seconds of reaction time stands. Call it a comfort level.

At the same time, we've already seen comments that range in preference from sub-second reaction times to "infinite" reaction times, which makes it seem like the spread of opinions is even wider than I expected.

It costs too much money for too little benefit. Trial and low-status Premium accounts won't be able to invite others to SGs, and I'm not paying another $15 a month just to have what I feel should have been a basic functionality from the very beginning of SGs back in 2004.

Sadly, that won't help you, because if one contact offers you a Security Chief mission, they ALL will, at least the ones from the old contact chain. You can always bypass them by using post I6 contacts, but you're bypassing five to six characters at a time.

That's actually a pretty good way of putting it - I'd like to see more female costumes that aren't defined by being specifically and only "female."

It is for the above reason that I look forward to the IDF costume set. I honestly don't think I have much use for it on my guys, but the relatively bulky boots and gloves will be an EXCELLENT addition to my Stardiver:

Here's the thing - I want pistols on my Katana Scrapper. And not just any pistols, I want the Match Compensators without laser sight. What do you think my chances are of getting a dual pistol attack that uses this precise pairing of pistols?

Let's see what I said on the subject...

On exactly that menu option. A "skin" is nothing more than yet another texture option not in the slightest different from a Tights option. In fact, female skin options ARE tights options, but with a brown tint on their textures. As such, I would suggest cutting down the entire list of Tights with Skin option to the following:

*Smooth skin + all existing "pattern options"
*Muscular skin + all existing "pattern options"
*Angelic Plus, Hearts Plus, Metal, etc. with no pattern options (they don't have any)

This does not require new tech to do, just a reshuffling of existing costume items. Yes, it takes work to do, but I've still yet to see the mythical game addition which happens for no work and time investment whatsoever.

When David says they're waiting for new tech, what I think he means is he's trying to institute this in a better way than to just put in a new texture with more patterns on it. I actually suspect they're working on some kind of layering tech to avoid the "painted-on" effect altogether. I know this was brought up multiple times before - some kind of system which allowed multiple independent, non-planned textures to be laid overtop each other, allowing us to both lay solid colour patterns over detailed textures (such that it looks like fabric wrapped around armour, not armour painted a different colour) which would allow much more than just muscular skins with tights, but things like rock skin with tights, snake skin with tights, robotic skin with tights and more.

Originally, I thought this was already possible because I was convinced the Science Booster goggles straps were painted on the back of the head, but I've since seen that they are a separate detail. This is one of those BIG things for the costume creator which has the potential to open a TON of options.

Idle side note: I don't know when this started, but mine are almost entirely the reverse. Almost all of my strongest, heaviest fighters are women and most of my lighter characters are men. If I had to put a reason to this, it's because I find the "big strong man" concept more than a little boring, bland and done to death, and I'm sure the other thousands of players in the game will be making many thousands of these. I also find the "petite, fragile woman who only serves as kidnap material or moral support" to be equally as trite and more than a little irritating. Every ******* MMO trailer I see these days has the big strong warrior guy and the skinny little mage/archer girl who looks like she's snap in half like a dry cookie in a strong breeze.

You wanna' grab my attention, MMOs? Do something different. Oh, who am I kidding...

That's kind of my point, though - it's all fun and games, and I do actually have my fair share of women in stilettos (all of them perpetual fliers or shapeshifters), so it's not what's included that bothers me. Sexy santa, whatever. I'm sure I'll find a use for it. I'm disappointed I didn't get what I was hoping to get, though, because apparently being awesome is restricted to men only in this pack, at least judging from the pics we saw. Women only get to be cute and play with small versions of the men's weapons and walk around in ankle-breaking high heels. "Do something different," indeed.

*edit*
I ask this as a foreign speaker of English, but what does "T&A" stand for?

Um... Z, the are very portable. Look - I ported them over once:



These are my in-game model, they're perfectly playable in-game, they cause no errors, they show no distortion, they don't look out of place and nearly every time I post either of those pics I start getting PMs asking me how I did it and how the PM writer can have those pieces, too. There is nothing technically demanding in the slightest related to porting that exact texture to women. I did it by myself with no help and crappy software tools. I'm neither a developer of this game not a graphic artist. If I can do it, they can do it.

You wanna' know what's even more funny? A muscular texture for women with abs and all already exists in the game's files. It's been there for at least a year that I've known about it, but it's not usable from within the game. This is not a case of "this is not usable on player rigs" because even to this day, I have a Test client on my work PC that's modded to use exactly that texture on player rigs and it works perfectly.

You wanna' know what's even more funny? When I first showed these "doctored" mockups to David Nakayama, he agreed with me that this was something they wanted to do at some point, and he agreed that this was something they could do. This is well within the development team's capabilities. It's just not a priority.

About the only technical problem that exists is finding a way to hook this into the existing Tights With Skin options such that they'd give you a selection of textures, as opposed to assuming the use of the Female Skin texture. And even then, both skins can simply be treated like a Tights option with the paint-on clothes available as patterns exactly like they are on a skin-coloured Tights top, but without the "none" option.

Now, I'm a patient man and I'm not making a big deal out of it. I've already gotten a compliment from a red name on precisely this subject, as well as at least a few follow-up posts, all of which stating that this is still on the agenda, just not a high priority. This is not being held back for technical reasons. It's being held back because the art team have more important things to do. But its time will come, sooner or later. I'm sure of it.

*edit*
Also, I just noticed Anti_Proton got my name wrong in the thread title

Spare a thought for the Star Wars series (old or new, it doesn't matter) and think about it for a moment. That's not science fiction, it's fantasy fiction. Sure, the characters use technology to solve their problems, but the stories it tells are much more in line with classic fantasy than they are with even the softer science fiction. There's only a line between genres if you want to draw one.

I disagree. I've always seen City of Heroes as the one franchise where everything goes. We have pirates, zombies, ninja, wizards, catgirls, robots, aliens, mutants, ghosts, samurai, medieval knights, cavemen, catgirls, mobsters, walking plants, evil corporate goons, conspiracy theorist commandos, ancient Romans, goatee universe doubles, catgirls and so much more. To draw the line at dragons just seems frivolous to me. Somehow it's OK to have a 20-foot shambling zombie or a giant jack-o-lantern (to say nothing of a giant single-cell organism *snerk*) but a Dragon that I can give at least twelve different reasonable explanations for without pausing for breath is too much?

One of my biggest problems with City of Heroes from the original storyline is that we never really got any vampires or werewolves (and that's been a problem of mine long before Twilight or Underworld), and instead have to do with Vampyri and War Wolves. They're really not the same thing. This, to me, smacks of a Uwe Boll adaptation where a character or creature shows up that's called the same as it was in the source material, but isn't actually anything like that at all and is much less interesting. Kind of like how the monsters in Doom the horrible movie went from being monsters from hell into a bilogical disease ala Resident Evil Jr. Personally, I've always preferred having the real deal in a story, as this demonstrates some serious balls in attempting to take a story that's been done and still do something interesting with it.

To me, reserved, cautious stories aren't really all that interesting. The scant few times that I've seen a story so awesome it made me get off my chair, clutch my head and yell "Holy ****! Seriously? Ha!" have been when it dares to be stupid, takes its narrative seriously and crafts a great plot out of a shaky premise. That's what I find exciting.

Maybe I'm biased, in that I don't really like comic books... At all in the slightest. But to me, "man/woman in tights" is just a boring concept. I've seen it done a thousand times before, now in movies as well as in books. Give me something interesting and I might be inspired. And dragons - classic dragons especially - are interesting.

If you want a flying Mastermind, I'd suggest Robotics. Their foot jets light up when they fly. It's really quite pretty

...

Say, did I or did I not hear that Group Fly was losing its to-hit penalty with Freedom? Hmm...

You mean the revolver and the baseball bat? Weapon temps are not customizable, they're not slottable and there really aren't very many of them. Personally, I'd like to see proper pools/epics with proper customization. Honestly, aside from the cost of investment, I see no real downside to this. Power names, numbers and effects can be debated. I just want a pair of handguns for my Scrapper and a rifle for my Brute.

The game's first two Elite Bosses were FrostFire and Atta in the Hollows, both of whom appeared with the zone in Issue 2. Sally is a Monster in Croatoa, which appeared with Issue 5. Technically, she showed up after the Elite Boss class was instituted.

I know certain "objects" scale down in both hit points and reward given when boss spawns are disabled. I'm not sure if these are tagged as objects, but Behemoth Portals naturally have boss level stats and rewards, but become much easier to kill and much less rewarding when bosses are disabled. The Behemoths they spawn are not affected.

Also, Did You Know: Behemoth Portals used to have a large Stargate type stone ring around their blue vortex, which was positioned on top of a stone platform with a ramp leading up to the gate. These disappeared a couple of years ago, the actual portal effects began spawning on the floor instead of on their elevated platform and this is why now there is a displaced faint blue ring above the main portal vortex. The upper ring actually traces the inside diameter of the original stone Stargate, and once upon a time the portal vortex would have been inside that.

There is a special portal in one of Scirocco's Patron arcs which has a LOT more hit points and physically crumbles its stone structure as the portal takes damage. AS this no doubt uses a different rig altogether, this one should still be fine.

Also, an idle uninteresting fact: Spectral Demon Lords didn't always deal Psi/Dark damage. Once upon a time, they used the standard Dark Melee Smashing/Dark pairing of damage. I'm not sure why that changed.

Ah, this, yes. Though a critter says "Giant Monster" and has no level listed does not mean that said critter does not have an intrinsic level. Everything in this game that has combat stats has a level. The level of Rikti soldiers during a zone invasion, for instance, is 30, which you could see in their Info window once upon a time. This causes a couple of problems:

1. If you bring a very low level character to a level-scaled zone event like a Rikti invasion or a Banners event, your character will be very, very weak, at least speaking of damage dealers. This is because of how most combat attributes scale. At level 1, most ATs have very similar if not the same scales for almost everything and almost all enemies are scaled to be very weak. As you go up in levels, however, enemies start getting stronger as you're expected to be using enhancements and your damage decreases in relation to enemy hit points. When fighting a level 30 Rikti Chief, you will attack said chief as though you were a level 30 character. A level 30 character with one slot in each attack with nearly useless Training enhancements slotted.

2. The entire ridiculous powerlevelling craze over the Winter Lords of 2005 (was it?) happened because despite being "Giant Monsters," each Winter Lord had an intrinsic level appropriate to the zone it spawned in. What this meant what that a Winter Lord in Atlas Park would spawn around level 5 or 10 and have a scant 4000 - 5000 health while apparently the same Winter Lord spawning in Peregrine Island would have an intrinsic level of 50 and have upwards of 20 000 hit points. However, because these all conned the same to everyone, everyone got the same rewards, so level 50 characters could come to Atlas Park and kill the much easier Winter Lords there for the same amount of reward.

Of course, the reward itself didn't scale. It was always around 5000 XP, I think. To a level 49 character who needs several million experience to get to level 50, this is small change. To a level 1 character who needs 106 experience to reach level 2, that amount of experience all at once was enough to bring you up to about level 8 or so. This is when the developers first introduced the experience reward cap, stating that no single experience gain could ever give you more than half the experience you required for the next level.

Ah, those were "fun" times

That's pretty much as I see it, as well. I've seen this posted before and I've suggested it, myself. I agree with this idea and would support its implementation. It hurts no-one, takes nothing away from anyone and it gives an added functionality.

The way the Contact Finder works, as I understand it, is it only lists contacts who will speak with you, but does not list those who you need to be introduced to by other contacts, and that's at least half of hero-side and most of villain-side. Either the old contact introductions have to be scrapped altogether, or the new contacts need to start offering introductions to old contacts at some point in their arcs prior to the end.

Not only do Shards from solo play appear as a very bad path to Incarnate progression to a casual observer, we've been told that they are explicitly NOT intended to represent a meaningful form of progression and are merely there to supplement raiding by the actual developers in charge of this thing. Incarnate Shards from solo runs are not Incarnate content.

Furthermore, Shards aren't "content" any more so than experience counts as "content." Content is the things you do, or at most the actual practical rewards at the end of the rainbow. The currency with which you buy things is not content, least of all long before you can buy anything with it. When people ask for "solo Incarnate content," what they are asking for is something to do by themselves that is specific to the Incarnate storyline and power/difficulty bracket.