Samuel_Tow

The pool is called "speed." You make of it what you wish, that's why it has choices. Your first choice allows you to either attack faster, act faster or move faster. You're not locked into any of these. Same with leaping - you can either use leaping to attack, or you can use leaping to move. Not so with Fighting - your only option is to attack if you want to get into the pool, which isn't true for any other pool.

Yes, but having two nearly identical unpowered attacks IS reason enough to compress them into a better one and give a meaningful choice, instead.

You can say the same thing about any doubled-up attack. Allow people to take Air Superiority twice and you can make the same argument. Part of game design involves giving actual meaningful choices, and there is, as of right now, no real choice between Kick and Boxing. The minor secondary effect isn't enough.

But again, what I'm saying is it's not specifically Tough or Weave that makes me not like having to pick between Kick and Boxing, and I'd be happy with ANYTHING that's not an attack as an alternate choice. If it's Tough or Weave, that's just fine, too.

Which isn't actually what I'm saying. They are "common" because most anything we do in this game requires some degree of physical fitness (running for miles on end at the speed of an Olympic sprinter), physical toughness (taking hundreds of bullets in the span of a normal mission with no ill effect) and so on. Perhaps "common" isn't a very accurate term, but these are "mundane" and thus have no place in a game about superpowered beings.

To me, "Fitness" as a paid choice is no different from having to pick proficiency in the ability to tie your own shoes before you can use combat boots with shoelaces, or the ability to operate doors before you can open in-mission doors. Or putting points in the ability to walk upright without toppling over or tripping on your own feet. These are common, mundane character traits that don't contribute to the super hero game and shouldn't even come up, much less be build choices.

Simply put, "fitness" is irrelevant when you're a ghost, just to pull a random example out of a hat. Yes, you can go out of your way to fabricate an explanation how some ghosts that do ghostly things more often have higher levels of spectral energy, but you're essentially faking a solution to a problem that's fake to begin with. It's the same reason we don't have traditional gear - because not that many heroes use a +1 Sword of Slaying or a +10 Flack Jacket of Flackness. We shouldn't be applying basic human physiology to characters whose species is undefined by creation.

You can make powersets that have inherent speed and teleportation abilities, but unless you have a rough draft of nine powers, I can't really see making a full powerset that's JUST about Super Speed or Teleportation and not basically fighting while using these abilities. There's a reason "teleport punch" doesn't exist - because that's up to the player to decide what to attack with while teleporting, as based on his attack set.

This is not too dissimilar from "clones of myself" as a Mastermind Primary. Yes, the clones can be dopelgangers... But what powers would they use? Just sheer numbers and brawling? Weapons? Energy? Certain concepts imply a type of utility, but not much else, which is why it's best to keep the alone in their pools and let players combine them with existing powersets at their discression. To be honest, even the basic pool attacks kind of irk me, since if I have a sword AND the ability to attack really fast, I wouldn't punch. I'd slash really really fast because that has to be more damaging, right?

I guess I have a beef with pool attacks in general and their not meshing with set attacks, but at least most pools have the decency of allowing me to NOT take the attack if I don't want it. I've had pool attacks on a couple of characters - Zik had Air Superiority because with Stone Armour on, it still looked like he was using a version of Stone Fists or Seismic Smash with it. Xandra had Kick, just because Energy Melee involves only the hands and the pom-poms' "draw" is instant. But beyond that, pool attacks really never worked for me unless I had a "physical" attack set.

Epic attacks are significantly different, however, because they come in a wide variety of themes. You have energy attacks, elemental attacks, weapon attacks sometimes. It's much easier to pick an Epic with a theme that matches your attacks and use that, and again - you're not FORCED to have one.

It could have. It seems like their aim moving forward is to get away from basic concepts and include a series of more esoteric ideas pulled together by an unusual theme. I'm not a big fan of it, but at least that's not mundane.

Yes, but that set doesn't always make sense. Again, you can make a "Flash" set of really fast punches and kicks, but all you're doing is making fast brawling and missing the point of having super speed. You're also missing the opportunity to have really fast sword-swinging or really fast pistol-aiming.

Certain types of sets - say melee - are defined by power type, and neither speed nor teleportation are a power type. They're a delivery type, and you can use that delivery type to deliver a whole range of powers. IF Super Speed melee ever came to exist, I sincerely hope it weren't restricted to just punching and kicking very quickly.

I don't mean to be an ***, but what you're asking for isn't really possible in this game even as you've described it, not unless you level-lock the character to 20, at most. Because once you reach level 50, there are no "street level thugs" any more. You're already fighting aliens with energy weapons, you're already surviving rockets to the face, you're already fighting psychics and monsters and giant robots, and that's the mere MINIONS. Any one of the Praetorian War Works, even the BCU minion, is around 10-foot-tall and armed with an energy cannon, a personal shield, a flamethrower and energy gauntlets. Every IDF soldier is clad in full body plate armour, every Seer wields intense psychic energy.

Super Sentai series rely on having basic goons for the unpowered heroes to fight, but City of Heroes doesn't have that towards the end game. I should have known right from the start that you were trying to go for the "unpowered pure natural human" concept right from the start, I just didn't expect you'd want it half-and-half. Yes, you can fake it, but even then you're having to overlook A LOT what the game throws at you. Take on a basic Malta mission with your unpowered character, for instance - take a single shot in the chest and you die. You don't need a boss for this - every errant minion is armed with an assault rifle, and they tend to come in whole squads at once.

What you're arguing here isn't the Fighting pool, it's the place of non-super heroes in the game, and that boat simply sailed a long, long time ago. These days if you want a Casey Jones level hero, you really can't go much father than 15 or 20 at most. That's when you're fighting goons mostly armed with clubs and hatches and occasionally a pistol, with actual super powers being restricted to just the bosses. But even past level 10, you start fighting Outcasts with a full range of elemental attacks, Column and Council soldiers with automatic weapons and explosives and super-strong invulnerable trolls. Casey Jones was awesome, I don't deny it. But he also always trailed the pack, with the actual super-powered martial arts turtles leading the way.

I get what you're trying to do, honestly. Even if I think you're having to bend a LOT of rules and pretend a LOT of things aren't what they are... Why are both Kick and Boxing so crucial to this? They're hardly the only pool powers that look like basic attacks. Air Superiority works just as well, Jump Kick isn't super and even Flurry can pass for just fast punching. If you REALLY want a "sup-build" made of non-super attacks, you have more than just those two.

And again - you're playing a "blapper," which doesn't make me assume you're using pool attacks so much as it makes me assume you're ignoring your primary. If you want both melee attacks AND electric powers, I'd suggest going for Electric Blast/Martial Combat when that comes out and picking Force Mastery for the Temp Invulnerability shield for which I believe you can turn off the graphics. But that would imply having to use your Electrical Blast powers to depict electricity and your Martial Combat attacks to depict your melee.

I can see what the system does for you, but you're really stretching it here. This strikes me as people making "petless" Thugs Masterminds back in the day because they couldn't have Dual Pistols otherwise, or people taking Dual Pistols Blasters and building them like Scrappers with set bonuses. IF you can bend the system and manage it, more power to you, but you're playing a severely unsupported character and you can't really use that to insist that the system should support this. And I mean that - you're trying to play two distinct characters within the same build, and the game was simply never designed to do this.

In fact, what you're trying to achieve is a variant of the "secret identity" system people have been suggesting on-and-off, topped with characters played against their AT and the "pure natural human" character that still exists in the high-level game. That's a lot of deviation to insist that it be accounted for, especially when you have better ways to depict them and when what you're asking for is probably another AT entirely from what you're actually using. Why does this even need to be a Blaster to begin with? For the "roar" being a sonic attack? There are so many other powers you can depict this with, not least of which being Lightning Rod. Hell, it was even suggested to me to use a Void Judgement recoloured to approximate a battle cry back in the day.

But at the end of the day, you're asking for the Bruce Banner/Incredible Hulk duality, which City of Heroes has simply never supported.

Pretty much this. The choices given are too limiting, and they equate "design my own costume" with "create a right mess." I design my own costume all the time, but that doesn't mean I don't run them past people I know and ask "Say, is there anything obviously horrible about what I've done?" Creating your own costume does not preclude getting a second opinion. A creator is his own worst critic.

The face plate can actually work, it just needs to be MUCH simpler, and preferably have some visible means by which it's attached. Blu tack and double-sided tape just don't make for very convincing costumes, plus if this was intended to be some kind of psychic channelling device, it should have been around her brain, not supporting her jaw muscles. As well, it would have stood out much more if it were asymmetrical. My suggestion would be a single device attached at the right ear and extending over the right eye and part of the forehead, suggesting it's being hung on the ear and clamped across the skull, but that's just one option.

As for Penny's costume, I'd say going with a black base and a red secondary colour, with all straps, ribs, belts and details in white would be considerably more memorable, and also look considerably less like two costumes belted together at the waist. Leave the bulk of the boots and the entire arms black, have the chest, upper legs and "panties" stay red then just make all the detailing white so it pops out and you have a costume that's both simpler to perceive at a glance and at the same time more distinct. Again, it's not the only way to go about it, but it's the simplest way to give it some life, I think.

I don't even know what I was trying to say there "Protective paint," I think, but Lord knows why it came out like that.

I think that's just bad phrasing for what could be a very workable concept. To me, the mistake here is our writers seem to have used the word "Incarnate" so much it's lost its original meaning to them and turned into a buzzword they're using to convey a lot of information with just a single term. To me, the only correction that needs to be done is for us to stop using the word "Incarnate" like an eight-year-old learned to say profanities. It's good as a term, but it should also be restricted to only situations where that term is relevant, which is conversations specifically discussing subjects to do with the Well of the Furies.

For everything else, I'd say the world should "know my reputation." That's all you need to say, really, because even aside from you being an Incarnate, by level 50, you've already done a whole host of amazingly badass things that should be worth a lot of respect, both as a hero and a villain. If we want to express power, reputation or respect, I suggest we go to those directly, rather than defer to a term to say it for us, just because that term tends to warp its meaning if we use it too much, kind of like what happens if you repeat the name of the town of Scunthorpe too much.

Basically, almost every mention of "my Incarnate self" can be replaced by something that fails to mention Incarnates but still conveys the meaning in a more natural fashion.

*edit*
And for the Professor/Doctor thing - yes, that's all I'm saying. Proof-reading to make sure terms and names don't drift is all I'm asking. I'd rather not repeat Roy Cooling's "tech" that mutates from a circuit board to a microchip to blueprints every time it's addressed.

Personally, I'd like to avoid turning "pattern clothes" into textures for the time being, as this makes swapping skin textures impossible. Since everyone's spoiling Beta, I might as well - a new "Body Suit" set is coming out, and with it there is a "muscled" version that would make a perfect skin texture. For this to work, however, clothes must be patterns.

The other option is to dispense with "texture clothes" entirely and institute a series of tights options that use the same mesh layering tech as shirts and jackets, only without leaving any exposed edges to see under the fabric. One of Science Pack goggles sets demonstrates that meshes can be pretty close together without having render problems, so this should be doable with a reasonable level of quality.

My reason for suggesting the latter is if you can separate clothes and body as independent meshes, that eliminates the need for "pattern clothes" entirely and nullifies my whole argument.

I get that they're interchangeable, but I still have a hard time seeing how the same person can refer to a professor as a doctor and back intermittently. Does the story really gain anything from the titles being swapped around?

The thing is, I don't actually want to take Fighting, for pretty much the reasons I outlined. I always figure... Wait, isn't my character ALREADY good at fighting? Isn't that what the giant sword and the invulnerability to physical damage already constitute? Nope, must be good at bobbing and weaving, and being "Unyielding" doesn't teach you that. Again, same as Fitness - having to specifically be fit as a fighter just seems redundant.

But I don't foresee what happened to Fitness happening to Fighting, so in my mind it's just better to simply give an "entry" option that's not an underpowered attack. It doesn't have to be Tough or Weave specifically, just something else that's not an attack, like what happened with Presence. Don't like the choice between two taunts? OK, now it's a choice between a taunt and a placate. All of a sudden it IS a choice.

As far as I'm concerned, pool powers should never have been made out of "common" things to begin with. They should all have followed the example of the travel pools and modelled themselves around an aspect of super heroics that just doesn't make for a full set. Being "fit" or being able to kick doesn't strike me as one of those. For as much as I dislike the idea of a "sorcery" power pool... Maybe that's where we should have gone all along - esoteric stuff that doesn't fit inside powerset frameworks.

I'm aware, but the game's narrative switches between titles mid-way through the arc, and this is the disembodied narrator doing it. All I'm saying is that whatever his title is, it's better to pick on and stick with it.

That's a bad argument since "concept" is something Boxing and Kick don't deliver at all. Boxing is little more than a souped-up copy of Brawl, which every character has and kick isn't much better. Compare this to... Let's pick something less obvious than teleportation. Let's compare Kick and Boxing with something out of Leadership. Leadership powers give you something above and beyond what most powersets have as part of their concept - they allow you to help others by being a good leader.

Now compare this to Boxing and Kick. They enable the concept of a person who can kick and punch, and basically brawl well... Which pretty much every character in the game can already do, and which no less than four classes have multiple powersets expressly devoted to depicting. From Super Strength to Martial Arts, from Street Justice to Marital Combat, all of these sets revolve around being good at fighting. Moreover, many sets imply this without strictly saying it. Most weapon sets imply a certain degree of brawling prowess just because that's essential in melee combat with a weapon in general, and Shield Defence has this as part of its basic concept.

I'm not just arguing for taking Tough and Weave without having to pick Boxing and Kick. I honestly don't think Boxing and Kick add much of anything in terms of concept. They're just slightly bigger versions of what every hero already has. I feel the same way about Fitness, to be honest, and I feel the same way about most of Fighting. At this point, every player character can be seen as relatively decent at brawling. Not EXCEPTIONALLY good, obviously, but that's what actual powersets are for. Power pools just make you moderately good at something, and all of us can punch armoured trucks to pieces and take repeated shotgun blasts to the chest. The boat on "little" powers has sailed.

To me, the most conceptually rich of the power pools are things like Flight, Teleportation and so on, but even things like Stealth and Leadership have their uses. Sure, if you're playing Energy Aura, you kind of already have a superior copy of Stealth, but what's in the set can expand this via Grant Invisibility even for the stealthy ones. Even if your character is a Mastermind and this has supremacy, Leadership still makes sense because it depicts a Mastermind who focused on being a strong leader as opposed to arming his men with strong firepower. And even then, that's mostly an exception.

But punching and kicking? Basic attacks? I'm with Arcana here. Unless you happen to be playing a very specific build of Controller, "attacks" are the one thing everyone has more than enough of, and in-set ones are usually better, especially for certain ATs like Stalkers and Assassin's Focus or Corrupors and Scourge. Or Blasters and Defiance. Or Tankers and Gauntlet.

Doctor/Professor James Harvan. The story can't quite decide what his title is. And this sounds like something Fusionette says in the next mission over, though I believe Harvan expresses a similar sentiment in his dialogue when he talks over Positron.

Speaking of which, Fusionette has a weird characterisation here. It seems like she can never really decide if she wants to be her stupid/goofy self or if she wants to be tortured.

*edit*
Poor choice of words there...

They've been putting in a lot of effort to hide material around the PIGGs of late, yeah. It's getting increasingly hard to find where new content is, to the point I'm surprised they can still find their own stuff. When I saw the thread title, I thought it was referring to those old traces of a moon base that still rattle around the PIGGs like peas in a jar, but this one was rather more recent, it seems.

Actually, I wanted to say that attacks will never really be useful to my melee characters for reasons of gimmick, but you do make a good point. How useful ARE Aid Other and Injection for an AT whose entire powerset is support? I may be biassed here, but it just seems like there's more variety between Aid Other and Injection than there is between Kick and Boxing.

I guess if kicked was also usable on my team-mates I might take it...

I think the point of the mutual benefits the powers get are an attempt to do just that - strengthen the powers to where they're actually worth taking. I don't think it's working, but that's besides the point. Could it be that this synergy is what's supposed to get us to take them even though neither attack is decent by itself?

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!

And also skulls for the skull throne if you happen to have any. We're not picky.

Well, there's your problem - I don't. And the last thing I want to happen to my Stalkers is for them to be saddled with that gimmick. I play Brutes sometimes, and sometimes I enjoy the Fury mechanic, but a lot of times I want to play at my own pace. Fury gets in the way of that.

And you should. Brutes and Scrappers offer a very different playing experience precisely for those reasons. Scrappers start off high on offence and relatively low on defence, and they pretty much stay where they are. Brutes start low on offence and low on defence, but can extend both considerably, under special circumstances. The difference between an Invulnerabilty Scrapper and an Invulnerability is night and day, especially when it comes to Unstoppable. The Brute tends to not hit as hard, but when the chips are down, that Brute can hit impressive stats. A Scrapper works on a very different level.

And here's the other problem - the combination you propose takes the worst aspects of both systems and melds them into one. I like Scrapper criticals not because I want random dice roll chances but because they're a mechanic I don't have to worry about. They either happen or they don't, and I have no control over it, thus I have no reason to even think about it. I like Fury because it's a direct, reliable effect. If my bar is high, enemy health bars lose bigger chunks when I punch their faces. It's annoying to build up, but once it's up there, I know what I'm getting out of it.

You, on the other hand, propose easily my LEAST favourite mechanic in any MMO and RPG - variable critical chance. I hate boosting the percentage of something to happen when I'm pretty sure it still won't happen when I want it. Sure, Stalkers work on sort of the same logic, but I don't chance percentages on them, either - I don't use AoEs from Hide and I try to use Assassin's Strike with three levels of focus. What you propose is a percent point fluctuating bar, which is just anathema to me.

Except Brute caps are wrapped around their inherent and their class balance, with the expectation that, with outside buffs, they can perform close to where Tankers are, but without them, they can work more like Scrappers. Messing with the caps means you're essentially producing a Scrapper with Fury, which isn't terribly interesting, at least to me.

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I don't mean any of this to be offensive or dismissive. I just really don't see what you propose as being superior to what we have now. I furthermore don't see a point to removing choices from the players who want a different one than you. If you gravitate towards Brutes, then that's fine. The solution is to simply keep playing Brutes. But there are plenty of people who still play Scrappers and like how they're designed.

Which is just as crap, as far as I'm concerned, but Stone Armour is beyond the scope of the discussion.

I really wouldn't mind the Rage crash if it were smarter applied. A defence debuff is just one more jab at sets built around defence and needs to be looked at, and the ability to avoid it by stacking the power with itself just has to go. That, to me, has always been a bug and has no reason to exist.

I don't mind the end crash and the "only affecting self" bit, while annoying and damaging to any kind of flow, is manageable. But the defence buff is just a bad idea. If it's supposed to make us easier to kill, just put in a self-damage component or a max hit points debuff and be done with it.

Neither of those is of any real help. When Ward turned evil on me, it wiped out all the Midnighters, AND Percy and Montague within the span of 10 seconds as it spawned, by my count, at least 30 enemies right on top of me. Ward itself was around for the EB fight, but was of no use at all, getting two-shotted by the AoE of one of the EBs aiming at me. And all it does is provide a weak heal anyway.

The only saving grace is that when you take out the named EB, the other two go down, so it's possible to do on one bout of inspirations. But at the same time, the "difficulty" adds nothing to the experience and just turns the mission into another "Stop the army of Romulus" pain in the *** that's worth nothing more than a mission-drop. That's actually not meaningfully different from the Stop 30 Fir Bolg mission as far as I'm concerned. I've been mission-dropping that for seven years now.

And to the topic "Get help!" is an empty warning these days. It gets attached every time there's a single elite boss, and it's attached to the mission immediately preceding this one that has one of the Ravenwing EBs. That one's very doable, so there's no reason to suspect the second warning would be any different from the first. Furthermore, a Ravenwing witch shows up during a boss spam mission in the Eteran Prison and THAT mission has no "Get help!" warning on it. Inconsistent warning are worthless.

Super Reflexes asked me to pass on a message: "I know how that feels!" Not sure what he's on about.

P.S. Yes, I read all of your post.