Samuel_Tow

Here's something else that just occurred to me:

A while ago it was suggested that this is no different from the Healing pool not opening up Aid Self immediately, and how if it did, everyone would have it. Fair enough, fair enough. But the pool still isn't gating it behind two copies of the same thing. It's not like it was before, where your choices were "help another player" or "help another player differently" between Aid Other and Stimulant. Right now, we have Aid Other and Injection, which IS an ally buff, but also works as an enemy debuff, as well. I am, in fact, given an option. If I want to take options that benefit me and I want Aid Self, I'm no longer forced to take a team-only power.

To my eyes, Aid Other and Stimulant were no different from Kick and Boxing - the same power twice over. Yes, their effects were different, but their mechanics were the same - stuff I do to help other people which doesn't help me. Since I don't want powers that don't help me in any way, that pool was more or less closed to me. This has changed, because now I have the choice between "a power which helps others" and "a power which helps others sometimes and me all the time." Now, I have a choice and now, I AM going to take those powers.

I wouldn't mind it, myself, but I know it's a controversial subject. Really, I just felt bad about not giving proper respect to Liquid and NT for their generosity and I wanted to say something about it.

On the notion of building spacing, two factors work against Steel Canyon:

1. This is supposed to be a "steel canyon" and it doesn't feel like it. It feels more like a steel desert with those weird spires. I get that some American cities are more open and spaced-out, but this is supposed to resemble a canyon of steel, concrete and glass, so it should be more crammed and imposing with buildings on all sides. It should be as though we're walking through a canyon of buildings.

2. The buildings are not spaced-out because of streets, they're spaced out with plazas. The old city architecture was basically a grid structure, with streets going in straight lines and making 90 degree turns, defining rectangles for buildings to go it. The trouble is that those rectangles were considerably bigger than the buildings themselves, so there's a lot of empty tile between the end of the sidewalk and where the building begins, and it's space typically used for nothing at all. I get that you can't just jam tall buildings into each other, but if the white space were filled with smaller buildings, I could still see it. But the way Steel Canyon comes off, it feels like someone took giant building blocks and just arranged them on the floor. They feel placed more so than built.

For most zones, I'd go with realism, but Steel Canyon needs to be denser with buildings.

For some time, I've been banding around that I won a City of Heroes DVD collector's edition, and praising a number of people for giving it to me. I didn't buy it, it was a gift. I never quite remembered who it was that gave me the, and I know for a fact that I've misattributed it to a number of people over the years. Well, I took the time to look through my old PMs (and boy, was that a weird experience). For what it's worth, I want to give credit to the person who gave me the DVD edition just because I'd said I didn't want it:

LiquidX

I apologise for forgetting your kindness and generosity, and I'm sorry I didn't take the time to get my facts straight earlier. Specifically, what I still remember is the reasoning behind this gift, and it wasn't because I'm special:

Well, I don't necessarily expect these powers to have the same effects when used while alive. At the very least, Rise of the Phoenix's autohit damage won't fly very well. I imagine they'll be reworked to be more drastically different, in the same way the various versions of Assassin's Strike are - similar conceptual effects, wholly separate stats.

Here's something that just occurred to me. In all this talk of "cost," we seem to have lost sight of the purpose that "cost" is supposed to serve. See, this is a game and it's intended to be fun, therefore power "cost" isn't intended to suck, it's intended to inform build balance. Specifically, the point of locking some powers in a set behind others isn't to keep you from having what you want, it's to give incentive to take more of a set than just a single power. You know how THAT can happen in a way that doesn't revolve around penalties? Rewards.

Funny I should mention this, because "rewards" is exactly how Fighting is now balanced. For the first time ever, I have an actual reason to take more than just the select few powers out of it that I want - the power reinforce each other. That, to me, is a far superior balancing structure, and it has the potential to offer more meaningful choices: Do I want just this one power for the sake of versatility, or do I want to invest and have stronger powers but from fewer sources? That's what I want to achieve.

I don't mind pools that require me to invest in them. I just mind pools which require me to invest into powers I'm never going to use. Instead of giving me an empty power pick to make a power "cost" more, I'd much rather have incentive to take both because both are better together than each is on its own. Again - I wouldn't mind our current "combined" approach with mutually-enhancing powers mixed with tiered power picks, if any "mechanic" a pool offered existed in at least most of its tiers. That way, I can pick something I want moderately in order to get something I want a lot, as opposed to picking something I don't want at all to get something that I'm going to feel cheated for having sunk two power picks into. No power in this game is so strong as to be worth two whole power picks.

Actually, I'm pretty sure this update is a test-bed for just this sort of power, and the first place you'll see it used is with powers like Resurgence, Rise of the Phoenix and Resurrect, such that they gain some form of utility outside of having someone die, similar to how Howling Twilight can work as just a debuff with nobody dead. People have been asking for this for years, and though I never felt it strictly "necessary," that's where I foresee things going.

Personally, I'd like to see all powers in all powersets done such that they have a use even for a solo player. This doesn't have to be AS POWERFUL a use as in a team context, but just being able to get SOME benefit would be appreciated.

Chiefly, I want to see Mastermind Support set "resurrection" powers given some use. I'm not sure why pets are made to be impossible to resurrect considering how slow these powers are and how much they cost, but if that's not an option, then I'd like to see them offer buffs or debuffs on still-living targets.

I want to repeat an OOOLD suggestion of mine that never saw the light of day. Well, two suggestions, in fact:

1. Giant gauntlet as a "shield" option for shield defence. I'm talking something big enough to encompass most small gloves completely. Examples of this exist in spades, from War's left gauntlet that he blocks with to something as classic as Lion-O's magic gauntlet which holds the sword of omens and, crucially, which holds the Spirit Stone and generates a forcefield with which he blocks incoming attacks. I'm not well enough versed in comic books, but I'm sure there are plenty of examples of characters using metal gloves to block with. Say... Didn't Wonder Woman use metal vambraces for that?

This glove doesn't need to animate its fingers, and can be drawn in a perpetual static fist. That makes sense, considering that a character with a shield out right now has his or her left hand clenched in a perpetual fist, so no open-palm animations are relevant and thus the glove will never need to be animated, itself. I've seen the power system gain the ability to mess with our costumes before, via the ooold Freakshow Disguise that actually does attach a pair of giant metal gauntlets to our hands, so this should be possible. Speaking of which, the first glove I'll ask for is the Freak Swiper glove.

Now, a couple of things can be argued. Firstly, that we already have giant gloves in the costume editor. While that may be true, we can only have those asymmetrically only on the RIGHT hand, whereas it's the left that typically guards with a shield. Secondly, There's no way to guard with the glove itself, because Shield Defence mandates a shield out at all times. Lastly, I want this glove to show up only when the shield is drawn. All of these make a glove as a power prop plausible, and it's something we can customize via weapon customization as we customize shields already.

2. I want all of the same, but for both hands and as a weapon option for Claws. Once upon a time, BABs went through all Claws powers and ensured they used a closed fist animation, making "finger claws" impossible to do, aside from the fact that we lack fingers. To my eyes, a gauntlet big enough to cover at least an entire Tights/Bare glove, with claw-like fingers would do the job. As before, the "fingers" don't need to be animated, since we never interact with anything with Claws out and the claws disappear when we fire off other powers. As such, the glove's claws can always be stuck in a perpetual "clawing" gesture, with the hand open and the fingers pointing out and down.

---

In both cases, clipping becomes an issue, since we have absurdly large gloves in the editor already, and making one which would be bigger than those by enough to always cover them would make the gloves unwieldy big. I get that. There are two ways I'd suggest solving this. Either just... Ignore it and let us take care of clipping on our own, or simply make the gauntlet scape up in size with the size of the glove holding it. Either would work, since it would empower us to pick what looks good and avoid what looks bad without forcing you to throw away the baby with the bathwater. If at all possible, I might suggest simply replacing the entire glove option with that gauntlet, but I don't know how that would work.

I bring this up because Bio Armour already does this to a large extent by covering up our hands and our feet. It clips with some bigger gloves and boots and it is kind of bulky, but it still looks very good. If that was made, surely a few extra weapon models for Shield and Claws can be tossed in, as well.

Well, if we're not going to keep this restricted to the Beta forums, then I might as well post this: