Samuel_Tow

Do what I do - reroll. At one point, I had 12 level 50 characters. Not any more. Even fewer with Titanic Weapons.

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To bAss: This is an amazingly convincing pair of pictures you have there. When I first saw them, I thought I was looking at actual screenshots you'd gotten out of some press release I just haven't seen. You have the background colour, as well as the hilt and guard colour spot on. Hell, if I hadn't read the rest of your post, I'd have assumed this was already done!

Major props from me. I'd love to see that in-game.

*shh* Don't tell anybody, but I kind of sort of stole those stances and run animations from other games Stances 1 and 2 are Lineage II Orc females and males with two-handed swords, respectively, stance 3 is Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy 7, stance 4 is Lucas from Dungeon Siege 3 with a two-handed sword and stance 5 is the domestic CoH "one size fits all" combat stance that Broadsword currently uses.

The run animations are a little less so, though.

I honestly hope we get a stance and running animation that's geared towards making us look more badass to be running around with a cool big weapon than to make us look like wimps like we can barely lift our own weapons. I guess this is a big sticking point for me for the whole set - will it be designed such as to demonstrate that my weapon is very heavy but I'm more than strong enough to wield it, or will it make a point to demonstrate that the weapon is TOO heavy for me to use properly? The former would be very cool. The latter would be... Very disappointing, put it like that. I want to use Titanic Weapons on characters I designed to be big and strong, and I want the set to make them look even stronger.

Yup! And yet still my characters worked somehow Either way, though, between Stamina and Quick Recovery, I've never had a character hurt for endurance under those circumstances.

I guess I could take other Pool powers, like Tough, but eh. I don't want either Kick or Boxing, and none of the others thrill me any.

I did some more preliminary research and discovered that the most slots I could put into Superior Conditioning was 2, for a total of 3, since I want to put 4 for a total of 5 in Energy Torrent. Energy Torrent being a T4 pool power means I can't take it earlier than 47, and my only other choice, then, is to take Laser Beam Eyes either at 44 or at 49. 49 is not doable for a power that will take four more extra slots, so that's 41 "something," 44 Laser Beam Eyes, 47 Energy Torrent, 49 "something else."

What this means is if I take Superior Conditioning, I can only devote two extra slots for it, meaning either endurance + 2x heal or outright 3x heal, since I can always use more regeneration, not always more recovery. If I DO take Focused Accuracy, though, I can run that with a single basic slot, or two at most, and so spend the rest elsewhere, but seen as how I don't NEED slots anywhere else and how I can use healing more so than endurance... Well, you get the idea

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Though now that you mention it, I do wonder if I can't skip Laser Beam Eyes, since I hate eye attacks. I know, I know - I said I can't skip it, but... I don't know. We'll see.

Thanks for the advise, guys. I still have some thinking to do, but this helps tremendously.

Pardon me for hijacking your laugh, but you make a very good point (that others have made before, credit where credit is due), in asking the question of whether Titanic Weapons will have one-handed - presumably RIGHT-handed - animations. For the time being, I want to avoid discussing an entirely one-handed set which would work with shields. Suffice it to say I wouldn't be opposed to this FOR SHIELDS ONLY, as I would pretty much REQUIRE that Titanic Weapons have at least a fair few two-handed attacks.

The question inherent here is "are they justified?" Are one-handed attacks appropriate to a so-called Titanic Weapons set, or would they be unable to convey the full force, weight and impact of the set. This, then, then begs the question of what - speaking of the animations for wielding it - makes a weapon feel big, heavy and powerful? It's not just the weapon model, we can conclude that quite easily, if for no reason other than we're getting a whole new set, rather than new weapons for the old ones. Animation and visual effects clearly play a major role, but what? Well, I think I have at least the foundation of an idea to describe this.

What makes a weapon feel powerful is its sense of inertia and its sense of impact. Impact should be easy to figure out - force explosions on weapon contact, screen shake, loud noise. Not so much for inertia, however. This comes down to how each swing is animated. A weak swing with a light weapon is both fast and precise, meaning it starts close to the target, strikes and ends either on target or shortly thereafter. That's because a weapon user isn't fighting so much momentum to stop his own weapon, and is much more easily capable to halt it and become combat-ready once more without wasting time on weapon breaking distance.

A powerful swing, by contrast, starts far and wide, so that the heavy weapon has time to build up enough speed for a for a forceful impact, and once the weapon strikes, it either goes right through the target and keeps on going or otherwise bowls the target out of the way and keeps on going anyway. Stopping a heavy weapon mid-swing is difficult and takes time. After a certain critical mass and velocity, stopping it actually becomes a liability, and the user is much better served in maintaining weapon momentum while controlling swing direction and circling the weapon around to deliver another blow without needing to speed up and slow down constantly. Hence, the concept of momentum in Titanic Weapons.

But can this be done with one hand? In short, yes, but it depends on how how exaggerated you want that particular attack to be. Drawing on Darksiders' War, he mixes in a fair few one-handed strikes in with his heavier, slower, more powerful two-handed strikes. One-handed attacks are usually his openers - weak and light (within context), but still describing very wide-swinging arcs. Two-handed attacks tend to be his finishers, either a grand slam down on top of enemies or a spinning horizontal sliash, or a sort of top-down diagonal slash across multiple enemies. In fact, one of his stronger combos involves three consecutive hits, each of which includes a turn-around spinning step.

I suspect some imagine that Titanic Weapons could never look right unless you were to spin around with the giant weapon like a very furious dancing couple, and that this would look ugly, but there is leeway in making the set look strong AND varied, to say nothing of cool. The key, I think, is wide-swinging arcs, area effect attacks and animation blending which makes one animation look as though it's feeding into another. Even if the animations themselves are slow, this kind of flow is crucial. You very much CAN maintain a heavy, swinging weapon in perpetual motion without ever turning around, as any Conan fan will tell you. If there's one thing Arnie was good at in that movie (besides being big and muscular), it was swinging that sword from left to right, in an almost believable fashion.

To answer the question at the top of the post - can one-handed animations look as powerful as two-handed ones? Yes, they can, given a good animator. Can a set made up of ENTIRELY one-handed animations look powerful yet still be usable with a shield? Frankly, I don't know. One-handed attacks CAN look as powerful as two-handed ones... Up to a certain point. After that point, though, some of the ludicrously destructive powers I can envision I just don't see working one-handed without being goofy.

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Completely on a separate topic, it occurs to me that above and beyond the attack animations, two other factors will play a huge role in how many Titanic Weapons characters I make - how the characters stand combat-ready and how the characters walk/run/jog.

Combat stances have always been... Problematic, as ours are left-foot-forward, making a right-handed two-handed weapon a bit... Iffy to animate for. Furthermore, how would YOU envision your Titanic Weapon user standing in combat? Would he/she resemble one of the following:

1. "Sword too heavy!" Character hunched over, sword resting on the ground beside, character lifting only one end by the hilt.

2. "Sword on ma crotch!" Character holds sword with both hands extended down at arm's length, sword pointing up and forward.

3. "I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK!" Sword resting on shoulder, reverse-side down, one hand on the hilt, the other hand at the side only grabbing the hilt when attacking.

4. "I squat to parry!" Sword held horizontally at above head height as though to block with, both hands on the hilt, body crouching slightly, ready for action.

5. "I am a boring person!" Regular left foot forward combat stance, sword held in one hand, swapping to two-handed grip only when attacking.

More than the above, though, what I've found even more problematic is our running animations with weapons out. On Males, they're not too bad, as the "with weapon" run is pretty much the same as any other run, but Females always run as though they're in high heels, unless they take out a weapon, whereupon they begin running like brutish men. I, personally, actually find this appropriate for most of my weapon users, but I've seen others describe it as stiff and worse. As such, do you envision your character running in one of the following manners:

1. "Draggin' ma sword to keep it sharp!" Character runs with the sword held behind the body, dragging on the ground behind, as though it's too heavy to lift and carry.

2. "The kinda ninja run?" Character uses a Ninja Run style running animation (though lest hunched over) with the sword held back behind like a broadsword, but with both hands at the same time (so no running elbow jab).

3. "The Arnie log carry!" Character uses a common run animation with the sword resting on the shoulder, reverse-side down. Both hands on the grip to keep it from bouncing.

4. "Like I'm using a gun!" Character uses the existing Assault Rifle running animation, with the right hand on the hilt close to the blade and the left hand far up the blade, supporting its weight. These things aren't known for their sharp cutting edges.

5. "Running with scissors!" Character uses current run animation, just with a Titanic Weapon in the right hand. Sword swings wildly all over the place, threatening to disembowel passers-by, as well as unhook the character's arm from the shoulder.

I'd be interested to hear where you guys stand on the above choices.

I don't know why I keep forgetting that's an option, but it's a clever idea. I've never made any "mirrors" of my own so far, but we'll see... I just might now.

Wow. Spiteful.

The who of the what now? Who said Titanic Weapons was unbeatable? How can a melee powerset collide with an archetype? What am I missing?

I can see where you're coming from, and I can see now one of my biasses I wasn't aware I had: I design my characters as off-world, standalone stories first and then attempt to find them the best possible fit within City of Heroes. As such, no character is ever perfect or spot on, because I haven't designed them with the game in mind, and anything in the actual game is always the closest I could get. Any character I have, I can improve with new costume design possibilities, further power customization and more powerset proliferation, provided I get something that's a better fit, hence why I've never had any qualms about remaking characters - they're never "perfect" or "complete"

However - just to nip an off-topic tangent in the bud - that doesn't mean I'm willing to make a WRONG character and hope I can "fix" him in time. Yes, my characters are never perfect, but they still have to be pretty damn close and pretty damn awesome in order for them to even be made.

I've suggested this before: Allow a person to reuse his own names multiple times. There can never be any confusion from duplicate names, since any one player can only ever have one character logged in at a time, so even if a player had 32 characters with the same name on the server, there can only ever be one of them online at a time. Hence, no confusion. I'm guessing it's a database thing, though.

That's something we haven't touched on in a while - "super strength" isn't just a super power in itself, it's also the driving force behind numerous other super powers, as well. Huge giant weapons are an easy example of super strength used in better ways than just punching, and even certain types of super-powered martial arts count in there, as well. As a point of fact, I originally used Broadsword specifically so I could mimic super strength on a character with a weapon. Sure, most Broadswords aren't exactly large, but a few are, and the attack animations are well heavy and brutish enough

I sincerely hope Titanic Weapons has a feel of super strength to it. I recall BABs complaining that large weapons didn't look right without animations to show that they are heavy, so I hope his legacy lives on in Titanic Weapons and the set won't be just Cloud Strife swinging around a big sword like it's made of cotton candy, but rather more the kind of "BOOM! HEADHSOT!" design us brutish players have been asking for

Actually, that's how the game defines it, and it's a bit weird about it. See, the "team" is a concept completely separate from all of the players on it, and the game automatically disbands your team when you're the last person left in it, I assume so as not to require the last person to quit... Himself? However, whether you're on a team or not is pretty easy to tell - can you chat in the Team channel? If not, you are not on a team. If you can, you ARE on a team, even if you're the only person in it.

Whenever two people join up together or a single player uses the "Select Mission" function, the game assigns a team to the player(s) involved, in much the same way as a TF contact assigns a TF Name. Anything attached to this team remains attached to it even if the people who caused it left. That's why you can have a Khelidan join a team, play a mission and leave, but everyone else will be fighting Voids and Quantums for the rest of the nigh - because the TEAM got tagged to spawn them, and will not lose that tag unless it is disbanded.

Similarly, if a team selects an active mission, then the mission owner quits and goes to do it, so long as that mission hasn't despawned, the "Mission Complete!" message will still go to the TEAM and the owner will get no fanfare. That's because the team owns the mission. The actual mission owner player is just allowed to enter it because it's his own, but the mission still completes for the team.

I'm pretty sure TFs are simply tagged to disband when they go down to a single person the same way a regular team disbands. I don't think this is necessarily a precedent for enforcing any sort of minimum player requirement, just a precaution so as to not let a single player try to solo the thing if the rest of the players quit.

I actually want to explain something when it comes to "these weapons wouldn't work." You're right - most Broadsword custom weapons that BABs made wouldn't work for the Titanic Weapons set, because he specifically made them smaller, shorter and gave them one-handed hilts. When I talk about remaking a Broadsword character as a Titanic Weapons user, I mean changing the weapon to a bigger one, even if it's not all that similar to what you had before

Obviously, if your concept hinges around a specific custom weapon, you're bound to the set that uses that weapon, and I have no problem with that. However, when I talk about remaking characters, I'm more or less assuming a limited reimagining, as well. I'll give you an easy example:

Take a look at Hatarla. She's something of a fallen angel fighting to redeem her past sins, and her current incarnation uses a Katana. Why a Katana? Well, that was the only weapon I didn't have multiple copies of that Scrappers could use at the time, so Katana she is. Her concept is that of having a past of a mystic mercenary, and a Katana was her weapon of choice. I can take this character and reroll her to use an axe, a mace, a sword, or even a gun, and it would still make sense within the confines of the concept, since nothing about her implies speed, finesse or the Bushido tradition.

This is probably as good a time as any to explain what "concept" constitutes in my head. I've seen a lot of people talk about how "He used this axe to kill his father so I can't change it." and I respect that. However, my concepts are a lot more loose, and hinge on abstract attributes a lot of the time. For instance, Hatarla's concept was "fallen angel, broken wings, missing limbs replaced with tech, some kind of weapon." WHAT she actually looks like at the end of the day, though, I'm flexible with.

Here's another example: Xanta, again. Her concept is "Big green woman, heavy armour details, big slow heavy weapon." I used Broadsword because it was the closest I have to that idea, but I can use anything else "sword-like" just as easily.

A lot of my concepts are "next best thing" designs, to where they're never quite perfect, but are perfect enough for me to like them, so I'm always looking for ideas closer to my original vision to enhance them with. A lot of times, as well, I'll get a new idea and outright reimagine an old character into a new look and feel.

That, more or less, is what Titanic Weapons is causing me to do. Who can I make better with it?

Yeah, I know. In the back of my mind, I always fear that the set will be terribly underpowered or look horrible or that there will be SOMETHING to ruin it, as I've grown to expect, but... You know, I've ragged on the game so much, I feel like I owe it at least one vote of confidence. I expect the world out of this set, and if it doesn't end up delivering quite as much as I'd hoped, I promise I won't make a big fuss about it not being perfect

Of course, that assumes it's not total garbage, but come on, now. These guys make games for a living. Even in the worst of times (read: Shield Defence), they still produce stuff that's at least playable, even if not exactly how I'd want it. I choose to be optimistic about this one set.

That's actually a good point. The dividing line, I suppose, lies in whether this set will represent just a large two-handed weapon, or whether they'll go all the way and make this an absurdly heavy, brute-force-destruction weapon. Given how Dual Pistols came out, I suspect the latter, which means it might not be appropriate for all of my weapon users, just as you say. Still, that doesn't mean I won't swap a few of my swordsmen and swordswomen to it even if it's over-the-top. I don't really have many traditional sword users, more of them are... Eccentric.

That's exactly what I wanted to hear. Concepts like these are very difficult to define in objective terms, more so when I don't really know what I want, so seeing what everyone else makes of it helps build up my own mental picture of what my objectives should be moving forward. I find it very cool, to be honest, that I can go back to an old, fairly boring character, just think "Titanic Weapon" and see said character in a whole new way. That's exactly what I hoped to get out of this discussion

That's something I've considered, myself. I remember playing some sort of horizontal space shooter game once upon a time, only you weren't controlling a space ship, but instead a flying sword-wielding knight thing. This had a weak magic ranged attack and an awesome three-hit aerial combo. I've always wanted to have something like that, and I think I'll want a ground-based and an airborne Titanic Weaponeer

I don't think that was the point, actually. I didn't read the OP as saying that THESE particular people were somehow heartless, greedy or selfish, but more so that that's the kind of mental state the Trial is (intentionally or not) designed to induce. That's true for most high-stress environments, actually - when you can't afford to have any setbacks and you can't afford to baby all participants because the goal is too hard to achieve, you end up having to make a choice - do you slow down and accommodate everyone and pretty much certainly fail the Trial, or do you cut your losses, abandon the dead weight and finish the damn thing on schedule and on plan?

But if the "high stakes game" weren't dangerous enough, you have the grind adding to it. Sure, most people can shrug off a lost Trial here and there, but when they start doing those in large numbers and when each is a feat of organisation and cooperation, a failed Trial because of - as the Ice Road Truckers call it - "rookie ****" is twice as frustrating to people. And I've seen this time and time again even in lower-stress environments. A team is doing well, somebody makes a rookie mistake, everyone dies and occasionally there will be that one hot head who explodes, curses and quits the team. Debt doesn't matter, the team isn't slowed down by much, but because the person perceives to have failed because he was "cheated" by someone else's mistake, he's still pissed as all hell.

I've often found myself in the position of "that guy" who says things like "Calm down. We can do this. Let's just stop and try to figure out how." in the face of TFs which are going horribly badly or in cases where the team is falling apart. I rarely say this out of some position of moral superiority or extreme self-control. Most of the time, I say this because, to me, keeping the team together and fighting back is more important than accomplishing the task at hand. In fact, I'd sooner fail a TF, a Trial, a timed mission or anything else that's failable as long as we stuck together like a team and gave it our best shot. The game will more or less tell you when you're hopelessly outmatched, but I still consider it a victory if we fought our way to that point and admitted defeat, as opposed to yelling at each other and rage-quitting even just a room before.

I don't think Oz is accusing his team-mates of being bad players or bad people, but more accusing the iTrials system itself as putting victory and reward above and beyond the kind of team spirit which leaves people happy in victory and defeat. In a way, despite iTrials being team tasks, a lot of the time people join them for personal gain so that they can solo their way to rewards with the help of others. Sure, they'll follow instructions, but with about as much social investment as following the orders of your mission control NPC telling you where to go and what to do. Such an environment can leave a person teaming for the company and the interaction feeling cold, useless and unwanted. And I know that feeling all too well.

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Off-topic, if you ever see me talk about "small-team content," I'm talking two people, maybe three at most. That group size ensures a somewhat unique dynamic which more or less involves every player into the proceedings personally and actively by not providing enough critical mass of people for some players to blend with the crowd and just observe or worse: Follow the herd. I find that the more "personal" a team is, the more people are likely to get attached to that team above and beyond a means to an end.

In a sea of 24 people... Yeah, that's not gonna' happen, and it will leave the event feeling a lot more heartless, impersonal and unfriendly than the actual people taking place in it are. When you get tossed into a crowd, people's faces tend to blur, especially if you're stressed out to begin with.

By virtue of that being almost exclusively what we've gotten since Incarnates came to the scene. If Matt Miller's explanation had held water, we'd have seen at least a comparable amount of non-Incarnate content being developed, but this hasn't happened. Now, again, this may be a case of most of the studio working on Freedom content so there being few people left, but we were promised the game wouldn't focus on end game all of a sudden, and it has.

This isn't about patience or preference or accusations. It's about the simple fact that one of the developer-stated problems and reasons they didn't want to do end game content to begin with has happened exactly as Jack Emmert and Matt Miller predicted it back in 2004, and Matt Miller's promised solution to that problem hasn't worked.

Also, the mere fact that they delayed Going Rogue, then launched it without End Game and had to wait a whole other Issue to so much as add it, and then wait a half-issue to add to it tells me that there's a hell of a lot more work involved with Incarnate than anyone cares to admit and, quite possibly, than anyone expected. They've blown several soft deadlines already, and the first couple of months after Going Rogue release were spent with people demanding their end game that they paid money for.

I'm more than positive that Paragon Studios bit off more than they could chew, and the small amount of content that gives Incarnate rewards is proof positive of that.