Samuel_Tow

What BABs said was really just an explanation of why they felt comfortable to make the summoning process hint of magic so much. And I tend to agree with him in this case, as artistic inspiration tends to do a lot to make a powerset cool even if it ends up a LITTLE specific.

I actually keep running into those problems so often that I really DO want to see a dual origin, or a primary/secondary origin setup. I have an example in my own Majik - he's a scientist who, while researching technological means to protect soldiers from magical attacks, discovered a way to replicate magical spells with machines. Is he a Magic character? After all, he's using magical energy and effectively casting spells. Or is he a Technology character? After all, he's suited up in power armour and using science and technology to produce those effects. I ended up solving the problem by claiming he's using magic mostly as a power source, hence he's Technology, but I'd have gone MagiTek if that existed.

I completely agree with you on this subject. I see origins as a meta concept, an in-game mechanic that's meant to represent a much, much broader, abstract gameplay aspect by explicitly simplifying the complexities and abstractions of that concept down to five categories with the implicit agreement that what stands behind it is inherently impossible to standardise. In simpler terms, when you pick an origin, you are practically just picking a word, but you are theoretically putting your own complex, involved, unique story into the category it most closely resembles. It is inherently impossible to do anything with origins because to do that requires that you assume what players "meant" when they picked their origins. And with how broad a concept range origins cover, that is a physical impossibility, not without infringing on people's creative freedom... Which the Origin of Powers and its legacy - the Incarnate system - end up doing.

You can't base a storyline off an oversimplification of a concept for gameplay purposes. Origins have no explicit meaning. Their meaning is always implicit, requiring the context of description, costume, powerset selection and often further explanation of the thought process that made the character from the player himself/herself. This is like trying to define an in-game storyline and progression system based on a character's hair colour... When not all characters even have hair.

As far as metagame systems go, Jack Emmert's old team seemed to love to give in-story explanations for simple game changes. Unlocking capes was perhaps the first example of this, and while that was relatively positively received, I don't think it's a good idea in general. Some things should be left as meta-game elements without giving them contorted in-universe explanations. I feel the game's storyline would have been far superior if we hadn't tried to explain Powerset Proliferation by involving Dr. Brainstorm messing with the "Origins of Power."

You talk about contacts explaining why high-conning enemies' names are purple, but I have an even better example right out of the game: Contacts who talk about why a Brute who was never able to pick up an axe before is able to now because of a tear in the fabric of reality. That's almost literally the explanation we got. First of all, to ADMIT that your character are unable to pick up an axe and swing it is bad form. That's a gameplay limitation. We don't talk about it in-story. Secondly, to explain it with reality-altering experiments is just stupid and lazy.

The Origin of Powers has been a cancer on the City of Heroes storyline ever since it came out, to the point where I feel we should simply get rid of origins wholesale and just let people write whatever they want in an Origin text box.

Actually, it turns out I have a mistyped card name on the other big one, the 560. My benefactor pointed out to me today that while the name said GTX560, the catalogue number said "580" and looking that up through a Gygabit retailer revealed that this was, indeed, a 580 card, and the price even matched what I was given. So that's the model names and numbers sorted.

I also spoke with my supplier to clear out the confusion and pin down what they can even acquire to sell, and I what everyone seems to be suggesting the most heartily is a Gygabit 580 card. It's a little more expensive than I'd have hoped for and I have some concerns as to whether it will physically fit inside my machine, but my supplier has promised to handle that. And I'm pretty sure that this will more or less end my PC spending for at least a couple of years, and I mean ANYTHING large-scale. The odd mouse or keyboard doesn't really count if I don't need to buy any expensive high-tech hardware, which I probably won't.

So, yeah, thanks for the assist, guys. I really appreciate it

I believe it's been said by multiple developers that "origin" stands for the origin of your powers, not necessarily the origin of your character, nor necessarily the nature of his powers. The latest I hear was in regards to Demon Summoning, where I think it was BABs who explained that a character could have acquired the ability to summon demons through magical, technological, scientific or any other means and that would be perfectly acceptable, but what the actual demons are remains the same, at least in regards to powerset thematics. So a technological character who has scanned the Demon Prince dimension and developed a mental override projector which could control demons remotely would still be stuck using magical demons requiring summoning rituals, but his origin could still be Technology. Mostly, this was said to explain the summoning runes.

Less broadly, the reason I keep bringing my namesake Samuel Tow is because he's very relevant to the topic of weapons and the borders between origins. When someone asked "well, what if you're both," I instantly knew that that's my case in a nutshell. I made Samuel a Science character, because the source of his greatest power is genetic alteration too complicated to explain here. It allows him to act fast, think fast and perceive the world with inhuman clarity. However, how these powers actually enact with the world, as I have conceived the character, is through the use of a rather large collection of gadgets and weapons, not all of which I've put down in direct narrative. Among them, I have:

*A sword which could cut through any known substance. If I can't think of enough technobabble to explain a material blade, I always have the option of swapping to an energy blade.

*A pair of pistols capable of firing a variety of ammunition that they can swap in real time, including VERY high-calibre rapid-fire rounds. I recall a fictional pistol mentioned as firing ".90 calibre armour-piercing concussive rounds" which could fire in auto bursts. Ouch.

*A "hard light" cape which can be used as a shield against energy weapons and projectiles and directed beyond the physics of real materials.

*An inertial impulse device which allows him to both jump incredibly high and far and also switch directions mid-jump if necessary, as well as land without injury when falling from great heights.

Those, and a few others I may be forgetting. So while the character's most commonly-depicted power is his ability to dodge bullets and close in on enemies before they can react, his arsenal of technology makes him far, far, FAR more dangerous than just speed and reaction time would normally permit.

A few points:

1. It's already possible to match skin tone to costume colour for rather a few colour choices.

2. Skin doesn't only use unique colours, it's base texture is brown-tinted which means skin colours will never match costume colours even for the exact same colour selection.

3. There are no "naked" characters in this game any more so than a Ken doll is naked, because none of our character models have any primary sexual characteristics. None of the female chests have nipples and neither lower body has reproductive organs. The most you can do is a ken doll appearance that's more that of a genderless alien than a naked person.

4. It's very much possible to exclude a range of colour selection from costume items based on what skin colour the character has selected, though such would obviously require a tech solution to implement.

5. A broader colour selector with custom colour options would be a very good addition to both skin and costume colouring. The game already saves each costume piece with four 24-bit colours attached to it, yet out of those 2^24 colours, we only get to pick 110, and none of those are cream.

You're not the first one to say that, and you're not entirely unfounded

And then quickly get them to 50?

I intend to upgrade now and not touch it again any time soon. The last time I upgraded was I think either a year or a couple of years ago, and I wasn't planning on upgrading so soon anyway. Yeah, next-gen games are getting fatter and fatter, especially with the Unreal folks releasing ever more unnecessarily-detailed engines, but I feel that I shouldn't need much more processing power in the future if I get something decent now.

My GTX 285 runs like room heater on the back. I have my PC away from any walls, so it's essentially blasting hot air in the entire room. If I step on the gas, as it were, and run a taxing game, it can out-perform my air conditioner for heating

I seem to have gotten something of a small, cramped case, so I'll have to speak with the manufacturer to see what can be a good fit in there, but I'll shoot for something powerful, I think, and see if I can't spend the extra money now and save myself more shopping in the future. The rest of my system should be pretty solid for a while more.

Which is a problem why, exactly? "Cured" Lost give no rewards whatsoever and I'm pretty sure they don't count for Defeat badges. The Lost Curing Want arc shows up at level ten. Even at that point, a hero has the option of going to Kings Row and attacking -5 Lost for just as easy an encounter and just as much boredom.

The entire mission where you cure the lost is dumb and badly designed. It's a no-rewards mission, it's awkward, it's never, ever fun and it takes far too long. This would be far superior if it were an instance mission with several bosses that dropped to their knees when defeated and became invulnerable to anything but the Lost Curing Wand, providing a legitimate mission and mixing that in with the curing mechaninc. At least it would ensure fair fights.

Indeed. It takes all kinds. That's kind of the good thing about how customizable and versatile City of Heroes is. We can all play whatever it is that works for us without necessarily stepping in each other's toes. This isn't really true in almost any other MMO, specifically Fantasy ones, where the breadth of both your powers and your appearance is limited to the scope of the fictional genre, something which is often quite narrow. This is actually a problem with even our competitors, the other super hero MMOs, which focus so much on delivering a specifically pointedly COMIC BOOK experience that they hamper the option to explore other themes to much of an extent. If I don't like comic books as I don't, you can still explore sci-fi, film noir, anime themes, cartoon styles and more here in City of Heroes. In a comic-book-company-licensed MMO, you're kind of doing it wrong.

Not that I don't have some weird unimaginable concepts, myself, though. I've found I'm not a very "visual" person, so to speak, and most of my characters start as abstract ideas of fairly vague concepts until I sit down at the editor and use that to give physical form to those abstract ideas. I quite enjoy my de facto literal goddess character despite having no clear idea as to what her powers should be, beyond the general description of "energy." Again, it takes all kinds, and that's a good thing.

Hahaha! Yeah, that's kind of sort of like what I'd want for a "bare hands" Judgement And, yes, that's pretty muck kicking *** in its pure form, no energies or weapons involved. Just FALCON PUNCH!

That's another thing that people seem to ignore - it's much easier to feel super with something we can envision, imitate and imagine than it is with something as abstract as "fiery melee." I can describe what it is - melee that uses fiery attacks - but I can't "feel" what it is because it's too abstract of a concept.

By contrast, I have a small collection of toy guns that I've been putting together since I was a kid. They're the kinds of toys that shoot those small plastic pellets, and my prized possession is a Nerf Maverick Rev-6 which... Is a Nerf gun But even then, it's far easier to imagine using that in a visceral way than it is to imagine punching people with darkness, say.

That's kind of my problem with a lot of melee sets, especially Dark Melee - they do a lot of damage, but don't "feel" like they hit very hard, leaving me to assume that the element in question is somehow doing a lot of the damage. Midnight Grasp is probably the worst offender - one of the stronger melee attacks, and it's just a cast.

While I try to make weird character concepts, I prefer to stick to more grounded kinds of super powers, at least visually speaking. Guns, swords, fists, that sort of thing. Things that are easier to imagine.

See, I was like this, myself. I still firmly believe that the game is well playable without Fitness. However, the game is more fun with it, I discovered this VERY fast after it became inherent. Easier to build, easier to play, easier to kill stuff with.

This is also one reason I stopped playing Blasters. Before, my Scrappers and Brutes had to rest a lot because they ran out of endurance and I lost a whole lot of fights because I didn't have the energy to go on, while my Blasters rested a lot because they kept getting killed... Well, Stamina solved the Scrappers' and Brutes' problems but did jack squat for the Blaster, which just made them perform that much worse by comparison.

What inherent Fitness does is let us play more and work less when making a build.

I've never been entirely happy with Epics. For one, the final two power picks are scrunched together at 47 and 49, giving you just six slots between them, when for the previous 20-ish levels you've been getting a power and then a full six slots for it. What this means is that your final power pick, instead of being awesome cool, must be something unimportant, so that you can have the slots necessary to slot up your 47 power, which is the earliest you can take your final Epic power. And if that's something like Long Range Missile Rocket that really really benefits from having six slots, it means you want a 49 power that you don't need to slot almost at all.

Also, when Epics moved to 5 powers, that was a bit irritating since we still only have 4 power picks from when they open up. Opening them up earlier would rectify that, in my eyes, but it's too late in the game, metaphorically speaking, for that kind of change to happen.

I think I may consider going one generation older and shooting for a very high-end 400 card. I spotted a few 480 cards that seemed to perform exceptionally and didn't lag TOO far behind the 580 cards the sites had to compare with. Would that be a wise decision? I don't think I can afford the "latest greatest" at any rate, and I'd rather have yesterday's greatest than today's mid range

I'm with the clawed one in this case. The inability to strip an entire build of enhancements in a respec is something that's largely undesirable to the development team, now more than it ever was. The health of the Market depends on both supply and demand. Allowing people to hoard and reuse their own enhancements does colossal damage to that equilibrium.

Personally, I wish the respec process didn't allow us to keep ANY enhancements whatsoever, even the 10 we keep now. All allowing us to do this does is make people ask for more.

This is what I tend to refer to as the last big thing left in customization. It's probably a little bit more complex than adding extra animations to shared powers to account for different activation sequences and different weapons, but I agree with you - this would be big. Even if we don't get any extra weapons to choose from this would give us SO MANY new Blast sets at least in appearance that it may well double the blasting characters in the game. Ice Rifle powerset, Flamethrower powerset, Energy Rifle powerset, the sky's the limit. And the kicker is that these really wouldn't require all that many new animations. How many ways are there to shoot a rifle, really? Assault Rifle already has enough animations within it to handle most existing blast sets anyway, and it should be simple enough to have one animations where you raise the rifle above your head, collect an energy/fire/radiation/etc. ball at the end of the barrel, have it expand and explode and enact a nuke that way.

I would be hesitant to extend this to melee weapons, however, since that would be a LOOOT more work and be of much more dubious quality in the end, anyway. Though, I must admit, having a set that's all fire swords, ice swords or stone hammers might be fun.

That's kind of what I mean. I don't so much mind that Mids' condenses some things, like displaying healing in percentages rather than raw hit points, since I at least know how those work. However, let me refer you back to my previous example of World of Confusion. When viewed as a constant effect, World of Confusion seems to be doing a constant low-grade confuse. However, it doesn't. The power has a tick time of four seconds, but the fear only lasts 1.5 seconds, meaning that even with 100% Fear duration enhancement, it still wouldn't be a permanent effect. The game can't tell you this, I'm fairly confident that Mids' doesn't have the interface to tell you this, but this is a crucial element of the power's usage. The confuse effect isn't nearly as consistent as the numbers make it seem.

Or take Detonator, for instance. All Mids' can tell me about it is that it does "GrantPower Bomb to Target" and "GrantPower Time Bomb to Targer". The who of the what now? I don't really blame Mids' for this, though, as that particular power is so contorted I'm not sure what it would take to list it. It grants a temp power to a henchman, and which power it grants depends on the henchman type, and what damage it does depends on the henchman class. If it's a "non-thinking" henchman, he gets a self-destruct power, activates it and explodes. If it's a "thinking" henchman, he gets a SUMMON, which he activates, summoning ANOTHER entity with its own unique stats and powers, and what the damage THAT does depends on I cannot say.

But these are the kinds of powers where an interface like City of Data really helps. It's not trying to give me a reader's digest of only the relevant bits, it just gives me raw power stats so I know what the power is actually doing, rather than what the designers want me to think it's doing. I've personally never seen a problem with letting players know how the game works. I don't need to know how to min-max it and play the system, far from it, but I should at least know what my powers do and what my modifications to them accomplish.

Easy example: Why can I slot Resurgeance for endurance reduction? The power costs no endurance and is used when I'm dead and don't have endurance anyway. But I can slot it for endurance, and its cost goes from 0 to +42.4%. Huh? What did that accomplish?

I generally use Mids' Hero and Villain Designer when I want to make entire builds. But if I need to figure out what a power actually does, City of Data is the place to look. Mids' is the game, City of Data is the user manual. If you can put both of those together, then I may never need to access the Internet ever again

Personally, I feel that using only a single blade for Dual Blades (say, the right-handed one) would be a good compromise, but I'm not sure if would be necessary. Once a long time ago BABs told us that powers could be coded to play different animations based on the "stance" you are in, so normal Brawl is a punch, Brawl with a bow in hand is a kick, Brawl with a shield is a shield bash and so forth. As such, I can actually see such a "Slashing Judgement" have always the same effect - an extending character-centric shockwave, while at the same time playing an animation unique to the powerset with which it is used, or an empty hand animation if you want to go for a "cutting wind" sort of hand gesture magic.

And, yes, I'm including the possibility of cutting with a mace. Doesn't make sense to restrict Incarnate powers from certain powersets. This also allows Mace users and weapon users in general to put away their weapon prior to using their Judgement to get the default animation if, for instance, a Warhammer user doesn't want to cut with the flat of his hammer.

The animations themselves don't need to be very complex, either. In fact, something akin to Golden Dragonfly for an AoE, but slowed down a tad, would be sufficient. Axe, Mace, Sword and anything else right-handed can share the same animations, Katana can use its own Golden Dragonfly and Dual Blades can use that... Thing, the AoE in the set, I forget what it's called. The one for the Sweep combo. Of course, slowed down and with more camera shake.

Or if you want to go a different route, you can make it a much longer 90 degree cone that's some sort of forward horizontal slash, though even then Axe, Sword and Mace can use the Pendulum/Slice/Crowd Control animation, Katana can use the, um... Flashing Steel animation? And Dual Blades can use the Sweeping Strike one. With flashier effects and more camera shake, of course.

And in both instances, this would require something of a bare-hands casting animation, too, perhaps something akin to Whirlwind for the AoE and, um... Something from Kinetic Melee for the cone one.

Oh, I agree with you - I'd like to see an entire Energy Rifle powerset for Blasters, Defenders and Corruptors, and I really would like to see more weapons added to Mastermind Pulse Rifle customization. I mean, at least the Vanguard Redding Rail Rifle makes sense to be there, as do the Nemesis ones and a few others. Rifle customization in general is very lacking, comprised mostly of age-old props ripped right out of the game and never updated... Pretty much at all, sans this one Steampunk rifle.

That's kind of what I mean - it feels like cosmetic customizations is all but forgotten these days, especially for a few particular sets like Assault Rifle, Claws, War Mace, Archery and a few others I'm forgetting. About the only set that has enough options right now is Broadsword, with Dual Blades trailing shortly behind. Everything else can use more options.

I think the disconnect is that you draw a distinction between "guns" and "super powers" whereas I see guns AS a super power. When I mention "skilled with guns," I suspect you more picture someone like Solid Snake or Duke Nukem or Sin's Blade, who is more or less a guy with a gun. I, however, tend to imagine people more like Devil May Cry's Dante or Advent Rising's Gideon Wyatt, those whose use of guns is superhuman, supernatural and entirely unique to them. Their guns aren't always normal, and are sometimes even magical, such as Devil May Cry's Nero's Blue Rose (even if the pistol itself sucks). I could go one even further and bring up the absurdity that is Equilibrium for super-human nonsense.

My point is that "the gun" is only an equaliser if the sum total of a character's power is "has gun, will shoot." The scenario I described above, however, requires rather more than just that. It requires improbably aiming skills enough to hit a fast-moving target in a high-wind environment one-handed, upside-down and in free-fall. It also implicitly requires that you possess the ability to survive jumping out of a helicopter in flight and surviving the landing. If you treat the gun as "a gun," then I can see how that might be demeaning. But when I make a character with a gun, that's a super-human character whose super powers just happen to express themselves through a tool in the form of a gun.

Actually going back to Advent Rising, what that game taught me was that you very much CAN utterly obliterate an entire platoon of enemies with just a couple of the right handguns and the right aiming skills and the right bullet time. That game more than any other has taught me how cool dual-wielded pistols can be in the right hands. In fact, pistol play in Advent Rising is - I dare say - superior to what we get in City of Heroes simply because our pistols don't feel nearly as immediately lethal or nearly as fast.

To each his own, I suppose. I tend to subscribe to the "Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun!" view of firearms, in that they're less a tool for war and more an instrument of personal empowerment. If you have an unrealistically powerful gun, an unrealistic ability to use it and an unrealistic ability to obtain unlimited ammunition, it transcends the role as a mere infantry sidearm and becomes something else entirely. But again - to each his own.

I personally feel that Incarnate powers should have been made much more diverse to begin with, possibly as extra powers in your own powersets, or at most in the same vein as Epics. But then, this is a major source of disconnect between what I want and what Incarnates provide. I wanted a system which extends what I can already do, whereas what I got was a system of brand new unrelated abilities, "the power of the gods." However, because the power of the gods is so poorly defined that it could be anything, it bugs me that it can't be swinging a sword or shooting a gun. After all, I want to be an Incarnate of Bloodgun, the god of guns

More seriously, Incarnates are driven wholly and entirely by meta-game numbers, with visuals tacked on after the fact just to differentiate the gameplay effects. When it comes to Judgement powers, for instance, I'm not really looking for one that has an effect unique to swinging a sword, I just want one that much more easily makes sense for my sword user. Or my Axe user. Or my Dual Blades user. Or my Super Strength girl. Or my Rifle Mastermind.

I just want to see my Incarnate powers be more directly relevant to my character's powers. I want a more physical god, one who comes to Earth to throw down, to kick *** and chew bubble gum, as it were. Not all gods fight with fire and lightning from the sky. Some do prefer to punch things really, really hard.

Please don't read this as a criticism, but I have yet to see such a situation.