Samuel_Tow

It was a tough choice between the two, believe me. I could make an argument for both. In the end, it came down to Energy Cloak - I wanted the power, but it didn't make sense for the character to cloak herself. That, and Energy Drain syphons energy from other people an objects, something which is inconsistent with the character's concept of infinite energy. Not only would she never need to syphon energy, this would actually be the complete opposite to the power she wields.

That, and Willpower is a good representation of "godlike being," in that it gives the user limitless survivability so long as that user has the will to keep using it. Given that the character possesses infinite power, she really is limited not by any physical factor, but by her will and ability to draw on the power she wields.

Like I said, it wasn't an easy choice. But Willpower is abstract enough to represent nothing specific at all, its auras are a a basic "glowing aura" design so they can easily represent auras, and the powerset's mechanical design emphasises regeneration (i.e. creation and recreation) and no downtime (i.e. tapping into an unlimited power source). It fits well enough, it has nothing that bugs me and even its lack of a proper god mode power isn't THAT bad.

True, true, and I appreciate that greatly. It's just the general consensus that women HAVE to be tiny delicate flowers that somewhat bugs me. I've had to argue that point with people quite often, even David Nakayama himself. Luckily, David proved (at least to me) that he's a visionary artist, so these days I expect to see a more... "Athletic" (as the system seem to call it) female skin texture anywhere within the next couple of years or so. It's already been a year, I think, but I'd be surprised if this were a high-priority item of any sort.

All of this doesn't change the fact that either the character creator ruler is wrong, or otherwise three quarters of the NPCs in the game are the wrong height. Even ignoring the absurdity that are the University tutors both hero-side and villain-side, common thugs like the Skulls, Hellions, Trolls, Outcasts, Family and so on are HUGE. 7 feet tall or thereabout, if the ruler is to be believed.

Once upon a time, I could simply tell people "Ignore the ruler, go by mid-slider." but then the developers started making NPCs who DO match the ruler, especially in Praetoria, where even the stock civilians are not super-giant. These days, I don't know what to say. I just keep my fingers crossed that the unique-model enemies will either get upgraded to new graphics and given more reasonable height or otherwise just rescaled.

Until such a time, though, I'd still advise looking at mid-slider as "average height" for tall men and mid slider for women as average height for short women.

Truth be told, this should be doable on a hero. I've already, um... "Cheated" one Rularuu's Bane for a level 1 character that way. Asked a friend of mine for a favour, he brought his 50, SKd my level 1 and took him to the Shard, where he proceeded to smack down 100 Overseers while I cheered from the sidelines like a cheer leader. A very pale, dead, vampiric-like male cheerleader who wanted his damn evil-looking sword On the upside, Artegor is a much cooler character for it.

I'd do the same for my evil duchess, but unfortunately that doesn't work on villain-side and I'm not sure if she's high-level enough to even visit hero-side. Plus her Victorian chest clips with her breasts now, so...

We NEED a bigger population because more people paying subscriptions and/or making Paragon Store purchases means more cash in Paragon Studios' kitty, which in turn means more goodies for us to spend our money on. When this system works, it's heaven on earth and everybody wins. We get what we want and the developers get paid for their work.

Negative reactions that continue to grow are an artefact of communal living, so to speak. The things that annoy me and that I complain about aren't first occurrences. As I've said before, I don't really complain about something until about the 20th time I run into it. Waking up to noisy neighbours in the middle of the night once? Eh, no big. Waking up to noisy neighbours a few times? Irritating, but still tolerable. Waking up to noisy neighbours every damn night, though? Yeah, I have to do something.

There's also the factor that I keep hoping that good stuff is just around the corner, that maybe some time soon things will be better, and they just aren't, time after time. I like "the game" just as much now as I did back in 2004, and I stick around for that still. But every time I get my hopes up that something cool is coming, BAM! Another Trial, a mile of patch notes about said trial, and a couple of HORRIBLE story arcs that makes me question whether the team still has a writer on board and whether they care about storytelling at all. Curse you, Roy Cooling!

Basically, I get angry because I like the game and feel... Or at least felt, that damage is being done to it. I have no illusions that I, personally, can change anything, and arguing with Internet tough guys is even LESS likely to change things. That's why I finally gave up on reason and stuck a bunch of people on ignore. Arguing with them is like wrestling a pig: win or lose, you end up dirty and the pig likes it anyway. Not incidentally, I've been a much happier man once I stopped reading certain people's posts. You may or may not have noticed me being a lot less angry of late, and not just over Titanic Weapons and the Proliferation announcements.

In short, I tend to get angry over ******** on the forums - a mistake I freely admit - far, FAR more so than over the actual game, which more or less can only disappoint me at worst. Putting said ******** on ignore has done wonders to my mental health, even if they keep replying to my posts.

I don't know... Danny Glover survived four Lethal Weapon movies with that exact line stuck on repeat

Hey, if you do happen to unlock the the things for yourself, snap a few pics of the combat stance and the first couple of attacks. That'd be awesome

But unlocking them via story arc doesn't quite work, though. The arc owner gets all the credit, and the team-mate doesn't get the unlcock.

No, no, the only thing that matters is for the name to be held by a character YOU own.

As for how you quick-load:

Start making a character. Pick an Archetype, a primary powerset, a secondary powerset and make a complete costume. After this, save the costume to a costume file (and remember what you call it). Then, go to the next step and customize this character's powersets. When this is done, save the custom powers to a file.

When you're done, back ALL the way up to character selection, then find and delete your placeholder character. When this is done, create a new one in his place. Pick your alignment, AT, powersets and character model (Male, Female or Huge) and go on to the costume editor. There, simply load your costume file and move on to power customization. There, load your custom powers again and move on to the final page with your name, bio and battlecry. Enter JUST the name and create said character. Voila, you have used your reserved name without leaving a long window of time for someone to potentially claim it while you fiddle with costume and powers.

Well, it IS based around comic books, and killing BABs for no reason would be consistent with books like Countdown or Cry for Justice, would it not?

Take this how you will, but in my opinion, if something's not worth being upset over, it's also not being happy about, and therefore not worth bothering with. I got City of Heroes and stuck with it for so long because I like the game enough to be excited about it. If I don't care about it enough to be upset when something bad happens to it, I sure as hell won't care about it enough to want to play it.

Considering the development team has historically regarded messing with the costume editor UI with about the same level of denied panic as a man walking into a cage of hungry tigers dressed in raw steaks and catnip, I would not at all be surprised if that were the case.

I liken this to removing the 5th Column way back in the day. Yeah, new players who came in after I3 didn't even know who the 5th Column were, but that didn't stop a lot of us who DID know from complaining about it for... Years, quite literally, until they put the Column back into the game.

I believe this refers to Repulsion Field from Forcefields for Defenders, Controllers, Corruptors and Masterminds, as well as Repulsion Field from the Foce Mastery Epic for Blasters. Quite honestly, I would not be in the slightest sad to see those powers go. They can take Cloak of Fear with them on the way out, too.

Indeed it does, but there's a catch While you can use all the game's costume pieces in the Architect's editor, that does not support power customization. My chief concern with the Rularuu Claws is if they would look right with Claws powers. The reason for this is they're mounted on the forearm instead of on the back of the hand like almost all other claws. The only other set of claws that are like this is the Vanguard Claws, which I only discovered when the Vanguard Pack came out. They look great in still shots... Not so great in practice.

That's because forearm-mounted claws follow the forearm, which is locked to the elbow and upper arm. Human forearms sort of twist along the entire length of the forearm from the elbow to the wrist. City of Heroes forearms are static and hands turn only at the wrist as though on a sliding joint. Because the basic Claws stance has the elbows slightly sideways, forearm-mounted claws tend to stick sort of on the sides of the arms. But the fists are rotated to point almost directly up and forward, and you end with claws on the sides of the fists where the thumbs are.

I hate how the Vanguard Claws work. I want to know if the Rularuu Claws work the same way, but I've never, EVER had those unlocked on any one single character at all. So, I have no way to test this. Chances are, I never will. Which is disappointing, in that I'm not about to commit any more time unlocking something I have high suspicions may look terribly off. The Rularuu Claws look GREAT in still shots, but until I can see them in actual animations, I don't intend to bother.

*edit*
On a completely unrelated note, I am AMAZED at how much better FRAPS' screenshots are when converted to JPG than what the game captures vie its internal screenshot tools.

I'm with Nuclear Toast on this one. This feels like a re-run of the Vanguard pieces, and I sincerely hope I can use my Paragon Points to unlock the non-Incarnate Incarnate costumes at character creation.

Something that often gets left behind in these arguments is that while people like me may not need, say, a Roman Gladius sword on every character who uses Broadsword, having that sword at character creation is still important. The character creator's stock at creation is all I can conceivably use for inspiration, because that's the only place where I can see my costume together and animating attacks before I make a character, and I need to see this before I go "Yes! Yes, this is the character I want! Make it so!"

Example: Once upon a time I made a big fuss about unlocking the Rularuu Claws on a character, to the point where I monopolised an entire day from a friend of mine trying to unlock it and failed to do so anyway, since both the Efficiency Expert Pyther act and the Technician Nylor arc only unlock costumes for mission owners. At the end of the day, I gave up on it, because I started suspecting that the claws just wouldn't look good as they were wrist-mounted. Call it sour grapes if you will, but the fact of the matter is at no place in the entire game could I see what my character would look like doing Claws attack with the Rularuu Claws. Since I don't know if it'll look good or not, I don't care.

"But Sam!" I can hear you saying "Aren't the Incarnate costume unlocks account-wide?" Yes, but they still don't show up at character creation, because you have to make a character, name it, claim them AND THEN visit a tailor to use them. About the only reason I stopped giving a flying rat about the Incarnate costumes stuff is just this - the claiming tech is just not good. So, yeah, I've basically chosen to leave those costume pieces alone. If I can buy them AT CREATION, swell. If I can't, then oh well.

From what we know about Titanic Weapons, we can assert a few things:

1. It will have more than just swords, so it will either do hybrid Smashing/Lethal damage, or pure Smashing damage, which means there's the potential for hammers, maces and other blunt weapons.

2. It will use a sword grip, which puts both hands relatively close together at the base of the weapon and constitutes a static grip, meaning the hands won't slide along the length of the weapon. This rules out spears and polearms and may make axes and hammers look a bit odd.

I, myself, am a fan of the stone hammers, as well, and have suggested a full two-handed hammer set in the past, so I'll be rooting for you either way

Yes, but the knowledge as a character just starting out is irrelevant, since BABs is in several places in the game, he's on posters, he's on the loading screens, but more than that: BABs is a famous character with the players. We like him, in part thanks to Christopher Bruce having made the name famous around the forums and in part because he's just a cool character. Removing him would be a mistake whether or not it makes sense within continuity.

You are. I'm pretty sure not many people use the Linked Colours option, so if you suddenly decide you want to flip the colours on your boots, gloves, chest and legs without changing your belt, shoulders, hair and glasses, then this becomes an exercise of busywork. It's much easier to go through all four options and click a button four times than it is to:

Click on Upper Body
Click on Gloves
Click on primary colour
Change to secondary colour (provided you're positive which colour that is)
Click on secondary colour
Change to primary colour
Click on Chest
Click on primary colour
Change to secondary colour
Click on secondary colour
Change to primary colour
Click on Lower Body
Click on Boots
Click on primary colour
Change to secondary colour
Click on secondary colour
Change to primary colour
Click on Upper Legs
Click on primary colour
Change to secondary colour
Click on secondary colour
Change to primary colour
Decide your character looked better before
Do it all over again.

It does, actually. The "height" slider is actually a scale slider, and when it starts off a small base, it ends up with a smaller maximum, as well. A max height female character is still a good foot shorter than a max height Male character, yet a max height Huge character is the exact same height as the Male. Even more amusing is the fact that the Male scale slider goes fro 0 (middle) to 25 (right end) while the female one goes from 0 to 34, I think, and max height women are still significantly shorter than max height men.

But that's not all. Weapon size scales to your model. Huge characters get huge weapons, naturally, while Male characters get pretty large ones. Female characters, however, get incredibly small weapons, especially for broadsword. BABs reasoning back in the day was to scale them to the model's hands, insisting that Males and Huge had hands that were out of proportion. "The Huge model hand is as big as the Female model head!" BABs famously said once, but what this means is that women end up with small dinky swords and axes.

You can see how greatly the Legacy Broadsword outsizes ALL other weapons women have access to, including Rularuu's Bane, the weapon which was supposed to be impractically huge. That's because women use the same Legacy Broadsword model (same size) as the Huge model, but all of their other weapons are dramatically scaled down. And we had to fight tooth and nail to retain even that. BABs scaled that down, too, when weapon customization was still in Beta. And now that I think ahead to Titanic Weapons, I am legitimately worried.

The City of Heroes "aesthetic" has always seen women as small, skinny, lightweight fighters to the point where the solitary few exceptions (of which I can only name a single - Doc Delilah), and the height slider is just one aspect of this. I intend to keep bugging David Nakayama about that muscular skin texture we talked about, and if that comes through, it will be a major step towards greater diversity. If women get actually LARGE Titanic Weapons, that will be another good step, but I fear that many of the Titanic Weapons options they get access to will still be smaller than the Legacy Broadsword.

*snerk*

I think the point behind the somewhat mishandled stress test on Freedom a while ago was exactly this - to verify that whatever changes they've made to either Freedom's hardware or to the server hardware in general will hold up when loads of new players (hopefully) flood the game and head straight for those servers. I wouldn't worry about server loads. Yes, Freedom and Virtue are usually high-load servers, and that's generally not a goo thing, but historically, the developers have managed to keep up with their hardware. Besides, if there are too many people for the server to handle, you'll end up with a server queue, and VIPs get priority access on server queues.

I see no reason to worry.

While I don't disagree with you on principle, I didn't get as bitter as I was overnight. For a full year I watched the game, and everything added to it just depressed me more and more. I think year is long enough for me to call it a "change of directions," considering the average non-stupid person (and I count myself among the stupid) would have quit after a few months. What made this worse was the departure of Castle and BABs and the fact that David Nakayama out and stopped posting. Once upon a time, these guys chatted with us and it reassured me that even if what I was seeing looked horrible, they were honestly trying to do their best.

I don't get that feeling even now that I've opted to stop complaining, honestly. I expect good things in the future largely because I feel it makes good business sense. But it will take quite a long time before I can actually trust that the development team is interested in making a GOOD game, rather than milking a business model.

But again - I don't want to talk about these things. Suffice it to say that I'm not at all unhappy right now, and most of the announcements I see in the future actually make me pretty happy. It's high time I focused on the positive stuff, like the ability to start most ATs on either side, as well as the prospect that I might be able to "buy away" some of the more irritating costume unlocks. As I said quite a while ago, I was willing to give the game a couple of years. Turns that was plenty of time for the development team to change my mind, and I'm happy to have been wrong. I do intend to write up a formal apology, but not until I actually see the launch of Freedom and play around with Titanic Weapons, first.

You mean like the people who were telling me that I was a greedy, spoiled brat or the people telling me that I'm an anti-social recluse? I tend to have a pretty good memory about people who insult me directly, Lemur, so I remember what was said, if not in exact quotes. There were more than enough people following me around, accusing me of trolling, telling me to go away and wishing that what I wanted for the game would NEVER happen because people who aren't happy should never be listened to. Again, I don't put people on ignore lightly. The ones who got there I didn't select because they disagreed with me, but more because I wasn't interested in bunnyhopping over insults just to get around the forums.

There are a few people I never want to hear from again. I don't care if they are offering to explain the meaning of life and how to turn lead into gold using an ordinary washing machine. I don't want to read anything they have to say ever again. I would, as a point of fact, be very happy of quotes from ignored people got ignored, as well. Just something like:

Sure, it might leave a few posts without context, but considering it always pisses me off when I accidentally read those quotes, it's a small price to pay.

Yes, that. I blame intra-cranial flatulence on my part for this mistake.

Yeah, I am, actually. To be honest, this Brute's concept is kind of... Abstract, in that it calls for "pure energy," which means something that doesn't look like anything. Electricity IS energy, but it's also electricity, so it looks like "something" already. Not abstract enough. Energy Melee, Energy Aura, Energy Blast, these are the things that don't look like anything at all. They're just glowing energy, and they're what I want. If I could customize Laser Beam Eyes to use the Power Bolt animation, instead, I'd do that in a heartbeat, especially if it came with the new right-handed custom animation for it. But I can't, so...

That, and Mu Lightning requires me to take my hero villain-side and do some evil, for which I'd need a HELL of a lot better reason than just a sideways conversion. Like... If villain patrons offered Scrappers a Dual Pistols Epic, then I might consider it. But there's nothing in the Patron pools which can justify defiling a concept over.

That said, I do agree with you - Energy Melee can use a LOT more AoE, which I believe Energy Torrent could help with. Energy Melee, furthermore, can't use much more single-target damage, so Laser Beam Eyes are even less desirable in terms of meta-game mechanics. I think the simplest thing to do is to skip Laser Beam Eyes and take everything else. And probably slot my toggles for endurance reduction, since I'm running out of things to do with the post-40 slots.

Make a character with that name and don't play it. Simple as that. When you need the name, then save the costume, save the custom powers, delete the name-squatting character and quick-load your new one, give him/her the same name and go from there.