Samuel_Tow

That's what I was going to say, as well.

"One Issue Fixing Stuff" implies bug fixes, which will never end, especially considering one bug fix usually introduces a bug in something else. So one issue of bug fixes would be like one issue pent trying to shovel water out of a tank with a pitchfork.

On the flipside, one whole Issue of revamping old content? Hell yea! More content to older zones, more power customization, more power proliferation, redoing older missions to use newer instances, updating old low-res textures to higher-res one, especially in costumes? WANT!

The difference in texture size between old and new content is actually staggering once you look under the hood, and it's pretty obvious from just looking at the game, anyway. There's a lot of old junk that needs an HD touchup. It's what I'd have expected an expansion to do, but our expansion took a completely different path.

What missions do this? I've never seen a Radio, Paper or even Tip mission spawn an overworld ambush.

Lethal is not the most highly resisted damage type, or even the most highly resisted damage type. Psi has that distinction, as anything that's dead, undead or robotic (save the Primal Clockwork) is resistant to it, and resistant by a LOT, not to mention anything which is psychic in nature. And in the IDF, you have lots of robots and lots of psychics.

Psi Blast for Blasters has the benefit of fairly heavy damage to fight resistance by sheer brute force, as well as a select few attacks that deal physical damage, as well, but fighting a great many of the game's adversaries with Psi is a SORRY experience, far more so than using Katana or Broadsword, though probably on the same level as Assault Rifle.

I'm pretty sure all AI navigation in the game revolves around waypoints, though most NPCs set their own waypoints. You can see this if you ask a fast-running NPC to run down a steep slope. They'll keep running on air, dropping down, going up a bit more, walking on air and running back, over and over again. I interpret this as the NPC setting itself a waypoint down the slope a short distance away, but overshooting its own waypoint and then deciding to run back to it. I also interpret their problem with leaping over fences as them setting their next waypoint PAST the fence, rather than ON TOP of it, and so trying to run in a straight line, and occasionally doing very simplistic traversal approaches.

I remember reading up on machine navigation of unknown environments as a mathematical computation approach for my Applied Mathematics diploma defence, but that was a few years ago so I don't remember everything about it. I do remember that almost all know approaches can make for some quirky paths under specific circumstances.

It's possible that in this particular example, NPCs are following preset checkpoint waypoints, but waypoints aren't unique to them.

I see no reason why the game can't just dump the whole raid in a predetermined zone upon completion, if that were the problem. Or, even more sophisticatedly, dump people who were originally in missions in front of their now-reset missions the same way the Mission Teleporter does. Yes, it's more back-end technical work, but such work should have been done to begin with.

As it stands right now, the LFT tool is about as useful as the Launch Team Search. Anyone remember that?

And I agree - this seems far better designed around forming regular PuG teams where leadership and correct team composition is far less important. In fact, I was surprised to see a LFT window set separately. I'd have thought this would be an extension of the existing "Looking For" flags. Let me explain.

For instance, if I have myself set to "Looking for TF," then I could get an extra drop-down to specify the TF I'm looking for. If enough people show up with that same tag, we all get the option to join a TF team (kicking us out of our instance/team if we accept) and just go from there. What not many seem to understand is how much the logistics of putting together a team and keeping it current are a problem for so-called "solo players" and how much the unreliability of finding people to team with at all times is crippling.

If I could treat teaming like I treat my average team FPS game, I would team a lot more. You know what I'm talking about. I feel like playing with others, so I look at a list of servers, find the one playing what I want to play with the right number of people and join that. If finding teams started working like this, you can bet your red polkadot shorts I'd be teaming a HELL of a lot more.

Not everyone is cut out for public relations, obviously. It takes a certain personality to let vitriol slide off you, or otherwise to explode in rage in dignified ways. Having people follow you from thread to thread to question your intelligence does get old fast.

However, I don't feel having disconnected community reps is entirely the answer, because it's just not quite the same when most of what a community rep answers with is "I don't know, but I'll try to find out" or "I can't do anything about it, but I'll pass on the problem." It starts feeling like you're not communicating with the development, so much as with their bodyguards. Even if we approach this logically and accept that community reps do exactly as they say - which is part of their job - it still comes off as impersonal because you have no eye into what actually happens. So while it's reasonable to accept that your voice is being heard, it doesn't "feel" like it.

The reason I mention this is because there's a significant difference between a community rep saying "The team is aware of this issue and is working on it." and a developer saying "Yes, I fixed that yesterday. I'd missed that on my last pass, but it's in the queue and you'll see it with the next full build." The former feels like a form letter, whereas the latter feels like a fly-on-the-wall look directly into the inner workings.

I'm not sure what the solution is, other than finding thick-skinned developers who can mix it up with the worst of us, but that direct intervention really, really helps.

Personal example: I've spent essentially five years whining about wanting a muscular female texture, getting more and more bitter the more I had to bicker with homophobes about it. Then David Nakayama comes out and says "You know... That's not too bad! I'll see what I can do." Good enough for me. That was, what, six months ago? A year ago? I don't remember, and I don't really care, because that one post was good enough to keep me patient essentially indefinitely. Or at least for a few years.

The more levels of communication you have between developers and community, the more it feels like the people in charge are just being polite and giving you the "your call is important to us, please hold" treatment. And that's bad for morale.

That strikes me as good design, to be honest. I realise that some people are better at on-the-spot multitasking than I am and some just like the hectic chaos, but I can't imagine a development team wouldn't have spotted the potential mess that extending what was already terribly confusing as an 8-man and extending that over a potential four teams. Just the thought of sticking 24 players in the same place and throwing what would have to be an easy 100 enemies at them to compensate has the potential to kill me in real life.

Splitting leagues into smaller groups with their own objectives, therefore, would be a good approach. You still have a large-scale event with its own overall situation and dynamics, but you don't actually have to exist in a blender with everyone and everything else.

The ITF is actually a very good example of an effects soup. Most of it consists of tight quarters fighting tons of enemies with many people on your team. I have thus far never played an ITF in which I was in any way aware of what was happening around me or what was being done to me above and beyond my direct actions and the actions of what I currently have targeted. Most of the time, I'm not even aware of the position of my own mouse cursor.

I'm not sure how much this has to do with Fire in particular. For the longest time, enemy AI has been displaying odd behaviour when it comes to running away. I recall enemies running from my Masterminds for no easily discernable reason, and this is including perfectly untouched and otherwise terribly dangerous EBs. There are some weird logical elements to what causes enemies to run when under what circumstances, and just damage on its own can sometimes cause this.

My Fire Scrapper, for instance, always managed to cause enemies to scatter even without using Burn, and most of my Masterminds cause enemies to scatter through their sheer presence on the field.

Well, Samurai Jack killed a well in one episode, after fighting three blind archers guarding a tower to get to it. I guess if it's good enough for the Samurai, it's good enough for us.

I'm with Venture on this one, though. Incarnates have no "story" as such. They have a storyline theme with no plot progression, even between two Issues now.

As of right now, I'm not interested in pursuing anything beyond the Common Alpha slot, for various reasons that I don't want to get into. No sense starting another one of these. If and when the situation changes, I'll definitely look into this, however. In the meantime, the simplest and most immediate solution seems to the Endurance Alpha, and I can always pursue another one if times change. I wouldn't invest into a something that I would hate to repeat a year down the road, after all, so no decisions are terribly final.

Here's my stance on this: There was a time when the first thing I'd check every time I set foot in the forums was the Dev Digest. I'd follow Castle and BABs to threads even when I had no interest in the subject matter (like Defender balance) just because it was interesting to see their personal take on things and to glean a bit more background into the inner workings of both the game systems and the company. Everything I know about power customization comes solely from what BABs has told us over the years, and he said a lot on the subject.

I can't recall the last time I actually cared to look at the Dev Digest. Must have been weeks. I do check it occasionally, when my thoughts wander to "I wonder if there isn't anything new in there?" Sure enough, there isn't, or if there is, there's like, one post, and it's just support information about how to run the NCsoft Launcher or that certain bugs are known and so. We used to get several developer posts a day. These days we're lucky to get one a week.

When BABs or Castle sat down to explain why certain changes were made and why others weren't, I could see their side of it. Even if I didn't always agree with either of them, I could still see their side and respect it. Sometimes I'd argue with them, sometimes I'd shrug and move on, but in either case it was a lot better than "We don't HAVE to tell you what we're doing and why we're doing it, so we WON'T!" The so-called developer addresses are a good start, but they're publicity stunts more than anything else. BABs and Castle were the guys who felt like they were posting their personal thoughts, not PR spin.

To be honest, I was really looking forward to seeing David Nakayama post more. The guy had a way with words, and he was a master at keeping to a civil discussion even in a heated argument. I really enjoyed his posts, but I don't remember how long it's been now that we haven't seen a single one from him. And that's if we count that one instance where we bugged him to post more, so he posted about four times and went back into hiding.

The developers don't have to tell us anything, but I firmly believe that they SHOULD. Not because they owe us anything, and not because we demand it, but because I feel it's at the very least good business. And, to be honest, they simply haven't been doing that, lately. If you've seen me compare Paragon Studios with EA Games, that's why - they're starting to come off like a silent game studio that cannot be appealed to. Again - communication counts for a lot, and communication has been sad, sad, sad for several Issues now. And I'm getting a little tired of excusing them with "Well, they're probably busy." I know they are, but BABs and Castle were no less busy and they found time to post just the same.

Considering one of the things that set City of Heroes apart from other MMOs once upon a time was the level of developer communication and developer response, I find this position to be somewhat disingenuous. Do they HAVE to take feedback and communicate with the players? No, not really. It's their business run by their rules. They could choose to walk away and never touch the game again and there won't be anything we can do to change it.

However, any development studio is in this business to make money, and satisfied customers tend to be much looser with their purse strings. No, the developers don't HAVE to be communicative, but I still think they might want to. It helps more than most people think.

This I can agree with. While I'm not a fan of feeling like a fifth wheel, there are few things more frustrating in a game than getting to the end of a TF and suddenly realising you didn't have the AT you needed to complete it to begin with, for the simple fact that few things are as frustrating as a situation where you CANNOT win after you've already committed. The new-style Hamidon is pretty much the prime example of this, especially as seen in the Lady Grey TF. Easy if you have the right ATs, kind of impossible if you don't. In fact, the Honoree's immunity to physical damage that he can sustain with great uptime kind of sort of screws teams that are heavy on physical damage and not very on other types, such as if you bring lots of gun and sword users. So, to this effect, I agree - the more "necessary" any one piece of the puzzle you make, the more people who don't have it feel screwed out of their game, and the more ye olde "holy trinity" of tank, healer, damage dealer rears its ugly head.

On the flip side, there are more ways for someone to be "needed" than the simple mechanical requirement that you have X number of Ys on your team or you needn't apply. I'm speaking from the standpoint of all-Blaster teams, just as an esoteric example, where no one Blaster really brings anything relevant to the table that the other Blasters can't duplicate or at least replicate. However, you need a certain critical mass of them in order for the team to function well, where enemies go down too fast to be a credible threat even to an AT with no defences to speak of. It has always been my experience that one Blaster alone is seriously screwed, whereas even so much as two Blasters playing together make the AT as close to easy mode as I've seen in quite a while. You can't exactly play like an idiot, but having the extra help really turns things around in ways that I can't quite explain with numbers.

What I'm saying is a person can contribute even absent of "you-restricted plot continuation button" mechanic that makes your presence mandatory, as opposed to desirable. The easiest example of doing it wrong that I can think of is simu-click missions. Yes, a second player on a mission with two simultaneous glowies is indispensable, but not quite for the right reason.

However...

This is the meat of the problem - content balance. It's been true for some time in this game that a team of eight is several times more powerful than content scaled for eight people. However, this is not universally true for smaller-team content. Absent of min-maxed builds, solo content is actually pretty well balanced for a solo player, and it scales well for two, three and even four people. I'm not saying it isn't "easy," but I am saying it at least feels like it requires everyone's participation. Maybe it's just anecdotal bias on my part because I generally tend to play with people who don't spend much time optimising, but in a duo or trio, you can usually tell when a person has gone AFK because things get noticeably harder. Not impossible, no, but harder.

On the flip side, I actually do enjoy a team comprised of subsections that can handle themselves even without help. Take a team of two Scrappers, for instance. Even a casual built Scrapper can usually handle the workload of "1.5 people" without much difficulty, so a team of two Scrappers fighting content scaled for two people can usually afford to split up, put their backs into it and still be relatively fine. My friends and I do this all the time, usually unintentionally when either I or my team-mate fall behind or grow impatient. So there's definitely merit to that. Or would be, were standard content not designed around the expectation that an entire team would focus on one objective.

I remember suggesting using a fight against a group of EBs instead of an AV encounter in large-team settings, and was promptly told that people would just gang up on the EBs one at a time and gank them while the enemy AI would spread its efforts and lose like a chump. And that may well be true. But it doesn't diminish the merit of, as you said, splitting the team. In fact, I actually do enjoy tasks that require the team to split into smaller groups and coordinate between themselves. That way, one only has to account for one or two other people, in addition to his overall objectives, as opposed to an entire full team. I'd actually like to see more game objectives emphasise splitting the team, such as the generator phase of the Sewers Trial.

However, at the end of the day, I'm still biassed. Few things turn me off the game more than the phenomenon I like to call "a soup of effects." When you get a large team fighting a large group of enemies, your screen turns into what resembles a multicoloured soup swirling around in a bowl. It displays shapes and motions, but they have no meaning that I can distinguish, and the only way for me to get through it is to employ tunnel vision by auto-targeting whatever is close and cycling attacks. Not a very fun experience. As such, I'm always in favour of objectives that lower the scale of the skirmish I'm immediately involved in without necessarily lowering the scale of the overall campaign. Call it information overload if you must.

It's pretty obvious that Trials aren't for me, and that's fine. I'll sit this whole thing out and wait for content that's more for me, instead.

Wrong. Stop paraphrasing me. You're not good at it.

I mean no disrespect, but Dual Pistol animations ARE just that long. Aside from the first two Blasts which got standardised to 1.0s and 1.67s, the others are all ~2.0-2.5s long. Dual Pistols is easily one of the slowest Blast sets out there, if not THE slowest. This is a good third of the reason why I chose to stop playing Blasters - I didn't have the heart to play an AT which made me resent cinematic, showy attacks for being slow.

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More to point, the Incarnate Judgement powers have inspired me to consider what large-scale non-elemental melee powers might look like, and I'd like to discuss the possibilities without the baggage of having to retrofit them within the existing Incarnate system.

Celestial Slash: I've long since wanted to see something along the lines of Shaman King's Yoh Asakura's signature attack (from the English dub), which is essentially one fairly long-ranged slice that comes out in a wide arc, as performed with one or two blades. This, to my eyes, would be a good way to add some range to a melee weapon set, and it has the potential to look cool, especially in an "usually strong off-powerset attack" sense such as Incarnates.

Ground Shockwave: We have our foot stomps and hand claps and ground punches, but I've always wanted to see one of those over-the-top animations where a character punches the ground and sends a wave of exploding pavement in an arc fortward, ala the Incredible Hulk as he does in most of the VS fighting games(his Gamma Wave). Failing that, I'd like to see a more... Expressive version of Foot Stomp with actual props sticking out of the ground to symbolise a demolished surface, or at the very least a much longer-lasting ground cracks "splat" effect.

The Samurai Pass: You know how, in most animes that have to do with samurai swordplay (where magic isn't as prominent) you'll see two characters run past each other and then sort of stand there for a few seconds until one of them keels over dead? Samurai Jack made this into an art form. I'm looking for a sword power that works kind of like Shield Charge, in that you "rush" into a large spawn and sort of appear in the middle, while everyone around you suddenly discover they've had limbs hack off and take damage. It doesn't have to constitute knockdown, and it doesn't even have to show a sword swinging animation. Just a "shwing" sound effect like audible gleam or audible sharpness, an instant transition and BAM! Everyone has somehow taken damage, and it was so fast no-one saw it happen.

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And, just because I feel like saying it every time the subject comes up, I'd like to eventually see the ability to customize non-weapon powers into using melee weapons or being shot out of guns, as well as weapon powers to gain the ability to be used with bare hands, or even with other types of weapons. For instance:

Energy Blast effects are shot out of the hands, but why can't they be shot out of a rifle with a sufficiently wide barrel, or out of a large-ish pistol? Or even out of a magic wand? We wouldn't even have to swap the sprite effects, just the props and animations.

Super Strength attacks that can be converted into hammer attacks with a very large, Carnie Strongman style hammer. The power stats don't need to change, and they can even keep their screen shake and coloured shockwaves, but the animations and props would need to be altered.

Or how about this: Rifle powers shot out of pistopls, pistol powers shot out of rifles, both of those shot out of arm-mounted guns.

I realise that both the workload and the technical difficulties are significant, but I was kind of hoping that's where part of that NCsoft reinvestment would have gone.

Tangent incoming:

ED did not make "every single character" less powerful. As it was a decrease in the effectiveness of stacked enhancements, it only affected characters with stacked enhancements, which wasn't everybody. It may or may not have been most everybody, I don't know enough to say, but it did skip over a few people (myself among them) due to their "sub-standard slotting" by the standards of the time. This discrepancy in experiences was a large part of what created the direct clashes on the forums, if I remember correctly.

That said, I do agree with the general spirit of your post. ED is not comparable to Incarnates. Its impact on game philosophy may have been of an equal size, but ED was, at its heart, a balancing mechanic, and one rooted in fairly simple absolutes. The arguments for both ED and the GDN revolved around the the redundancy of certain ATs, namely buff-centric ones, as other characters were reaching their own caps before outside buffs became relevant. As such, it could be argued that the change was necessary.

In fact, I'm not sure anyone ever argued that ED was a GOOD change, in the sense that no-one specifically wanted to nerf other people. But even those of us who agreed with the NEED for the change still acknowledged that it was a necessary EVIL. I remember the old arguments that ED didn't open up more options, but instead eliminated options, but the fact of the matter was the primary driving force behind this change was accessibility of content, specifically said accessibility for "support" ATs. There has long been a game design practice to design some ATs with more self-sufficiency but less impact to a team and other ATs with less self-sufficiency but greater ability to act as force miltipliers. For this design to work, force multiplication needs to be relevant, and said ATs need to be desired on teams, which mandates that "other" ATs face situations where support is desirable.

In short, ED was a change targeted at accessibility, even if it was the closest we've come to a slash-n-burn approach to achieving it. I'm not sure I can make quite as strong an argument for Incarnates and their current balance, mostly because the upsides and downsides to the system eventually resolve to player preferences, rather than solutions to systemic problems. In simplistic terms, "support ATs are unnecessary" is a provable problem, whereas "we have no end game" is a subjective problem. They aren't quite comparable.

I recall a similar instance - the bugged Smoke Grenade of old. Remember that one? This time it was me actually using the broken character, though. I had an AR/Dev Blaster who could basically floor enemy to-hit and act like a defence-capped Scrapper with a Blast set and Trip Mines.

On several occasions, a friend of mine asked me if I could please stop using Smoke Grenade, because he felt like the Scrapper he kept bringing to our teams was being rendered pointless when I could do more damage than him AND have better protection. I don't remember his exact words, as that was quite a while ago, but his displeasure surprised me at the time. It doesn't surprise me any more, however, as he did a good job of explaining his side of the problem.

I've seen this happen before with other people, as I've mentioned. Some are more tolerant, but a fair few will only last about a single mission being SKd up, say, 30 levels and feeling like they can't kill ****, if you'll pardon my language. The solution is usually for them to swap characters to something higher-level, or for us to do their mission with me exemplaring 30 levels down. I've been in such a situation, myself, and it's surprising how alluring the prospect of doing household chores becomes when you stop having fun in-game. Why, I could be doing the dishes, or washing my hair, or rearranging the bookmark in my browser like I've been meaning to for some time. Yeah "I think I'll take a break for now, guys. Take care!"

I'm not really making an argument here. More so I'm providing a bit of anecdote as supplement.

Well, we already have the WTF. We might as well have Assmerits. I might actually go ahead and use that. Thanks, Doc!

In my experience, even con lieutenants tend to drop from an Aim + Build Up + Inferno combo, though some might survive if too many of the procs fail to trigger. On the other hand, trying to solo-nuke by leading with an opening attack is a BAD idea. A decent-size full spawn can eat you with its alpha by the time your nuke fires (none are very fast), especially if you had the misfortune of picking a set with a slow AoE, like Energy Blast, Radiation Blast or, heaven help you, Dual Pistols. I learned not to try to openly AoE spawns right quick.

To be a little more specific, Nukes deal a scale 6.0 damage, which is one of the highest damage scales in the game, possibly second only to Assassin's Strike at a total of 7.0 (within the context of powerset powers). And it's AoE. However, that 6.0 isn't guaranteed. You have a 3.0 scale damage mod that always triggers, which means that your nuke will always do slighly more damage than a snipe. You have another 1.5 scale damage component on a 75% chance proc and another 1.5 scale damage component on a 50% proc. Basically, your percentage chance to deal damage looks like this:

6.0 - 37.5%
4.5 - 50.0%
3.0 - 12.5%

In other words, your chance to deal just base guaranteed damage is small, but your chance to deal full damage is far from guaranteed. That's useful to keep in mind when talking about power damage.

*edit*
Wait, does Fiery Embrace proc on Judgement powers?

My current major worry is that I honestly and genuinely have not enough faith left to hope, but that doesn't mean I won't be patient. As I've said earlier in the thread, I still have other things to do, and disappointing as it may be to find an end-game system almost entirely devoid of things that motivate me, I'll just busy myself rerolling more Blasters.

You have no idea how much legowork I created for myself with this. Three 50s, two in their 40s and I forget how many more... I won't have a chance to make genuine new characters for some time. But that's OK. The old characters were and are great. It'd be nice to play them again.

So, when's that Vanguard pack coming out?

Wait, "A-Merits?" What are we talking about here? I thought A-Merits stood for Alignment Merits. Shouldn't we come up with non-conflicting terminology for the newer stuff?