Samuel_Tow

I'm not saying the choices presented are what I'd have picked for each AT, but it doesn't change the fact that I'd have preferred AT-specific Incarnate powers. Not just judgement, either. This blurring of the ATs is decidedly not something I enjoy, lest we give up on having ATs in general. And I don't even have a problem with ATs sharing powers, just not entire powersets, which is what we'll likely end up with by the time this is over.

I'd be happy with a power which sent "shadow clones" of me in all direction to slash at all opponents around. I can explain this away on characters who can't clone themselves as my character simply being so fast it seems like he's in all places at once.

This would go a long way towards SHATTERING my suspension of disbelief. The more you tie origins to the same source, the less I care overall, because it just starts to feel like one giant instance of developer godmodding. Let people decide their own origins. Don't try to tell them why they have super powers.

Additionally, this becomes a huge blow against those of us who do prefer "No funny business!" stories. I hate how cartoony, zany, Adam West Batman the game is becoming. Run some of the older content and look at the original interpretation of the Freakshow, for instance - they're not funny, they're not cute, they're not adorable. They're cold-blooded killers who like to torture their victims and have no respect for innocent people. They are a menace, not something to laugh at.

Even the Praetorians, goatee evil counterparts that they were, were still more serious back in the day. Now they spend their days being quirky and making Fusion/Faultline in-jokes that weren't funny to begin with.

It's like I'm watching the Batman movies: The first one was classic, the second one was pretty dark, the third one was pretty colourful and the fourth one was Batman and Robin. I'm still waiting for our own Dark Knight to give the game some more gravitas and grounding, and make it feel like a somewhat realistic world again, rather than a Saturday morning cartoon.

I want to comment on this. I often get painted as anti-social because I prefer to keep to myself, but the truth of the matter is what I mind the most is the "overhead" of a team, as it were. Yes, a team makes things faster, but a team comes with the need for organisation, with mandatory waiting times, with clashing playstyles and bossy leaders and so on. Especially when it comes to time, forming up for anything is a time sink worse than the game could ever hope to get away with. Nearly every TF I've run in recent years has included the mandatory 20 minute wait while I sit on my hands and watch TV.

This feeds back to an idiom I like a lot: "More speed, less haste." It may or may not quite apply here, but it means that I'd sooner progress slower while actually doing something then to divide my time 50/50 between the crushing boredom of waiting and the spastic chaos of the rush to make up for said waiting. Which leaves TFs, Trials and even just regular teams with a big question mark on them - yes, they're fun once they get going, but what do I do in the meantime? Because I'd rather not twiddle my thumbs hoping for something to happen.

This is where the LFT queue really fails - yes, it queues you for a raid, but it prevents you from doing pretty much any of the game's primary activities, because they're all instanced. If I could sign up for a team, then go run missions solo until one forms in much the same way life first formed on Earth, then I would gladly ditch my mission half-way through and join said team. Because I haven't gone out of my way to put it together and because I haven't grown a beard waiting for it, said team won't feel like such an imposition, and will instead feel no different from "your team" on any FPS server you care to join in any team-based FPS you care to name.

Teams are as much an imposition as they are fun. The larger the team, the larger the overhead. This is why I feel that both alternate options for smaller teams and even solo players need to exist, as well as tools to help remove some of that imposition by streamlining the building process for those of us singularly unconcerned about stern leadership or clockwork planning.

Level shifts are the perfect rat race, however. Instead of giving us actual powers that apply to core systems in general, they give us power modifiers, and they are then free to give NPCs power modifiers to negate ours. By restricting level shifts only to specific content which will assume said level shifts, you can tell people that they're progressing while at the same time exposing them to the same relative level of enemy power by having enemies counter their level shifts.

It's conceivable for the developers to give us 100 level shifts, making ups 50(+100), and they can still negate that absurd level difference by facing us against enemies who are themselves level 54(+100). Again, it's the perfect hamster wheel, because your rise in power can be directly countered with an enemy rise in power by a simple variable. Since level shifts don't alter hit points, damage levels and other power values, they don't introduce cascading power creep in much the same way.

And it's far easier than constantly giving people more resistance and defence, say, because both of those are hard-capped, and they start behaving erratically with high stat values. The example I like giving is that if player resistance went up by 90% to the Tanker cap, then enemy damage would have to go up by 900%, or NINE TIMES to compensate, and enemy damage nine times the normal would shred anyone without 90% damage resistance. That seems to be why WoW has gone to "ratings" for everything - because a player's final strength is the relative difference between his rating and his enemy's rating only THEN translated into percentages.

Again, I'd rather they'd just raised the level cap. They've failed to avoid any of the problems associated with raising it as it stands, so they might as well.

I definitely agree with this - AT-specific Incarnate powers should have been the way to go, in my opinion. However, it would also have meant more work, and... Well...

This isn't really the argument. Judgement powers are, in my eyes, Nukes done right, and it's not hard to imagine why people would feel that after using one for the first time.

I, personally, don't base my argument against nuke crashes on Judgement powers at all. I base my argument on the fact that that kind of crash sucks for what these powers do, and it means an otherwise cool power becomes dreck because I never "want" to use it. Truth be told, almost 90% of the times when I've used Nukes, it's been because I felt guilty for taking and slotting the power yet never using it, figuring it had to be good for SOMETHING. And it very rarely is.

I've never been a fan of balance by annoyance, and this is pretty much it. The idea that a power can be so good that using it must be made to suck is foreign to me, because it seems to ruin all the fun of said power. To the point, in fact, that I've far more fun with Full Auto - a power which does comparatively little damage - than I do with Inferno, simply because it isn't a pain to use.

Normally, I'd post some "Yeah, because the developers NEVER listen to their player base!" snark, but with both BABs and Castle gone and seeing what's being introduced recently... I don't feel up to it any more.

So, what you're saying is the Incarnate portion of the game should take as long as, if not longer than, the entire rest of the game combined? Is it any surprise why some of us have a revulsion towards classic end game models?

Also, it took ME a year to get my first 50, if that, from May of 2004 to January of 2005. No more than about four months of that was actually spent playing Samuel Tow, because I got various other characters to about 20 and one to 34 in the meantime.

Recently, I rerolled a level 50 MA/Inv Scrapper into a SS/Inv Brute, and it took me about two weeks to get her back up to 50 and soltted with a Common Alpha Boos (recharge), and most of that was done solo. I should check how long that took me in terms of hours, but it can't have been much more than 100. And, yes, I had quite a bit of time to sit down and play her. We had a good two weeks off from work over the Christmas holiday

I mean this when I say it: City of Heroes really shouldn't be the kind of game where progress is measured in years. It wasn't that even when experience gains sucked, and it's only gotten faster to progress in since then.

Where's the harm in asking for an alternative? I'm not looking for new friends, as I have more than enough as it is, and the Incarnate system did not bring back even a single old friend I used to have in the game. I should know, I still keep them in my global friends list.

Because not wanting to hang out with 23 complete strangers is the hallmark of the anti-social. Nice straw man there.

They did not. What BABs said way back when was that powers called an FX script when they activated, and power colours were hard-written into that script. Changing these scripts to read off a user-definable variable colour was always an option, but it would require recreating practically every sprite and 3D effect that existed in the entire game, at least for players, which constituted several Issues' worth of work for the entire team, during which time we would not get new NPCs, new costumes, new powers or new environments.

The argument against power customization wasn't one of impossibility, but one of cost of investment.

Which, honestly, is a bit of a disappointment to me. And that's coming from the guy who likes to play tank-mages, so that's saying something. When every character has a nuke, a large-scale support power and a pet, ATs start meaning less and less and less, and that's not necessarily a good thing. When all characters irrespective of AT have access to the same four powers, it's that much less interesting. Diversity and class balance are a big part of any self-respecting MMO.

Yes, I realise this saves them work. It could not have been more obvious that this saves them work if they'd put a "We did this because it cost less!" banner in your objectives screen on every Trial. But that's always been my argument against end game systems - they end up screwing players over exactly BECAUSE they can't be made with enough content, and you can usually see all the rounded edges where they cut corners.

Adding more Trials, but with conventional rewards, would not have bothered me in the slightest. I'd have treated them like the STF and the RSF - content for some people's tastes that I just don't like, and probably a faster way towards the same rewards I could reasonably get from elsewhere. Not a complaint in sight. It's when they tied exclusive progress in an entirely new game system to said content that I started to grumble.

I tend to take the third option: Not bother until there's something in there I care about enough to put myself through the process of acquisition. People keep beating me over the head with the "It's still a work in progress!" line, and I intend to take them up on it - I'll bother with it when it's done. Rather, IF it's ever done. I'm still waiting for powerset proliferation and power customization to be "done," and I'm starting to get a tad impatient about those.

Well... No and no. Origin has always been a mostly cosmetic element, and up to a certain point in time, was just about a purely cosmetic one. The only place it still matters these days is what buff you get for which veteran power, but you can still pick which you get. You don't get stronger powers for being Mutation and you don't get more powers for being Natural as you used to back in pre-Beta.

As far as Origin being a "lore" element? Only in the Origins of Power storyline, and I can say with absolute certainty that this is the most universally reviled piece of writing in the entire game. And I'm counting things like the Shadow Shard TFs, the old Positron TF, the Bastion TF, the To Save a Thousand Worlds arc, the old Hero's Hero arc. There's a lot of crappy writing to choose from, and yet this one is the one I've never, ever seen anyone actually like. The best praise I've seen for that storyline is that it's not HORRIBLE (it is) and that you can sort of ignore it if you squint really hard because it doesn't come into play anywhere.

So it hasn't "always" been like this. It's been getting like this for some time, and I've dreaded every step along the way, because this is hands-down bad writing, and a great shame on the game as a whole.

Didn't stop people from arguing that "Well, they often leave features off the features page. Remember those I19 story arcs? They weren't on the features page."

No, we don't know what I21 will be yet, but I saw what I19 was and what I19.5 was and what I20 was, so let's just say I'm sceptical. More so than usual.

This is really one of those "to each their own" subjects. Some people like bouncing off established lore and extending their own story from that, and there's nothing wrong with that. I respect it. I, however, am not among those people. To me, using someone else's established fiction both feels like plagiarism and feels like it demeans me as a writer for being unable to come up with fiction of my own that's just as good while being uniquely my own. I want characters that I can be proud of and that I can show off to people even if they aren't familiar with City of Heroes. Characters I came up with on my own.

This is, to a large extent, my own undoing. I've said it many times before, but I approach City of Heroes less like a player and more like a writer. I appreciate the open, accommodating setting and the "anything goes" attitude. This gives me a welcoming environment which fosters creativity without saddling it with backstory continuity. Yes, there are a few things one must still be aware of, such as what year it is and what things happened in the past (not a good idea to set up a football match in the middle of the first Rikti War, say), but most of those can still be sidestepped shuffling events around or, worse come to worst, by translocating your character off-world and only Initiating his City story from the moment he starts fighting crime in Paragon City, with all backstory taking place "somewhere else."

This is why I balk whenever the game's writing presumes to tell me what integral parts of my characters should be, and then mandates this presumption via hardwired story.

In fact, here's a good practical example: Do you remember that part in Automatic Villainy where it seems like your character is actually a Nemesis Automaton with fake memories and malfunctioning emotional chips while the real you is rotting in a Nemesis Army brig? For just one moment, I got a tad concerned when I ran this one, but immediately reassured myself that Cryptic (at the time) would not write such a personally invasive storyline. And, sure enough, it turns out that you were the real you all along and the whole thing was a Nemesis plot to draw you into an ambush with fake capture reports, doctored video files and lies from Nemesis soldiers.

Now imagine for a second that it had turned out the whole thing was true and your character from that point onward was a Nemesis automaton, and the entire story henceforth built off that assumption. Just imagine how colossal of an interference against concept and backstory this would be. Suddenly, none of what you wrote for your character mattered, because what you were playing was no longer your character.

This, to me, is what "Origin of Powers meets the Well of the Furies" is to me.

That's what I've done for Arachnos Patron pools so far, but it's been hard to make work, just because the Arachnos powers are so specific. Mu Lightning is fairly easy, granted - it's just red lightning. That can work. But Fish Mastery? That takes some work. Mace Mastery? Those are suspiciously Arachnos-looking maces. What about Ghost Widow's pastel "darkness?" Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Hence, the point of this thread, I assume - sometimes the Incarnate powers work for us to pretend they were really ours all along, sometimes they don't. So, it would be nice to either have more of them, or have more customization options for the ones we have. Bright darkness, better colour choices for ice, the ability to shoot them out of guns, a physical Judgement and so forth. There are options, and I honestly do hope they add to the list at some point.

A Lore expansion into ANYTHING else would be quite nice, yes, and that includes demons. Seriously, the Lore pets have to be the worst. It's Arachnos Patron summons all over again, and I know we all loved those.

It's not a question of looking at damage numbers, not for me anyway. I play a lot of this game by "feel." I tend to have a good sense of how strong a character is in general and about how easily he should be able to take down specific enemies. When enemies drop unexpectedly fast, this catches my attention and makes me wonder why. Why is that? Was it a critical hit? Was I under the effect of strong damage buffs? Did I hit someone who was damaged beforehand? Why is this happening? Similarly, when I keep hitting an enemy and said enemy isn't dropping, it makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong.

As for knowing who has what resistances - a lot of the time it's obvious. If someone is on fire or uses fire powers, he'll usually be resistant to fire and weak to cold. Ghosts of all varieties tend to resist the brand of negative energy that they wield, but are weak to "positive energy." The Freakshow are weak to energy attacks because it says so in their bios, but the Tanks are strong against cutting and stabbing attacks because they're made of metal. Walking trees and mushrooms are weak to cutting and burning attacks, but strong against blunt trauma, because they're plants with no internal organs. By contrast, rock monsters are resistant to cutting because they're made of rock, but are weak to blunt attacks because rock shatters.

None of these conclusions required me to do more than look at an enemy, or at most read said enemy's text description. And when I've actually fought an enemy for some time, I get a good sense of what works and what doesn't. For instance, I've fought enough Malta Auto Turrets to know that swords and bullets take ages to kill them, but fire works very, very well. I've also fought enough Mek Men to know that swords and bullets are not effective, but punches kill them fast.

I have a feel for how combat works, and I have a good sense for patterns and cause-effect relationships. That's why I've gone on the record as saying that I'll eventually grow to "like" my stronger powers, for the simple fact that my brain associates what works with pleasant memories and what doesn't work with unpleasant memories. Attacking ghosts with swords, fists, guns, cold and darkness powers brings back VERY unpleasant memories, indeed, as does attacking fire demons with fire attacks. It's not hard to tell that isn't working very well.

Truth be told, I've had a lot of fun coming up with fictional gods of traditionally ungodly concepts, like guns, siege artillery, micro circuitry, mass communication and so forth. Especially coming up with appropriate names

So, yeah, definitely not saying that such gods can't exist, more that we haven't really seen even a nod towards less conventional gods with powers other than "the power of the divine," as War Witch (the character) explains it, which usually manifests in forms "like magic."

It's a somewhat limiting concept when it comes to gods, actually, stuck with pre-medieval theology as we are. I mean, sure, I can understand some gods' powers being the ability to command lightning or volcanoes... But why can't we have a god whose power is "having a Death Star?" Hell, even ancient Roman smith Daedalus acts like he has high-tech gadgets but ends up just shooting radiation out of his hands. I know he's supposed to be a Roman Positron, but come on, now. Give us some more decent tech!

I've said it before and I will say it again - THAT is the one last big breakthrough we have left to implement into the character designer. Once we have the ability to fire weapon powers out of our hands or out of different classes of weapons, as well as fire non-weapon powers out of weapons, there will be not much left to add to the costume creator other than to expand sideways with more items and options.

That's kind of what I was hoping would happen with Incarnate powers, but I knew better than to expect it. But consider how cool it would be if I could snag, say, Ice Judgement, but instead of shooting forth a spray of icicles, I do a series of slashes with the sword I have already equpped. Or shoot the spray out of the barrel of my gun. Or project it from my shield.

Yes, I'm aware of the technical limitations, and yes, I'm aware of the workload, but you know what? I would take THAT tech and that content over Incarnates any day.

And then there's that. I almost cried when I read bAss' post on how the Well is the source of all power, because if I were to actually accept that (I'm still in stubborn denial), it would mean the utter defilement of every single character I have, and such a colossal destruction of anything even resembling story in this game that I would be forced to throw my hands in the air and just give up. On the spot.

This is an unbelievably bad idea and a horrible example of god-mode writing in an environment where player choice and design used to reign supreme. "Player choice" is why a lot of us are here. Hell, the one thing which convinced me to give City of Heroes a try was that among all the screenshots I saw of the game, I could never find two even similar characters. This rewriting of our characters needs to stop.

So, yeah, I'm more than willing to just ignore the "well was the source of my power to begin with" angle and just pretend the powers I'm getting from the Trials were mine to begin with. The problem isn't that I can't accept weird god with weird powers, but more so that the writers have written themselves into a corner that they appear either unable or unwilling to work themselves out of.