Samuel_Tow

You know what I found funny? When I20 was still in Beta, I complained that the Issue seemed to be nothing but forced team content. People called me names and insisted "But we don't know!" Come I20, it's all forced team content.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. "We don't know" no longer holds any meaning to me as an argument.

That's... Quite a lot. I'll keep an eye on my combat tab, but at least I know there's a point to taking the power now. Be nice if that were explained somewhere in-game, but oh, well. Why start now? It's not like Detonator has been without real numbers for six years. Well, at least that has a truthful text description.

Thank you. This helps a lot.

This is kind of why I'm growing more and more disillusioned to tying these now powers to the Well. It mandates that all these powers at least look like they're coming from the well. And it's hard to imagine that the well would give you an Orbital cannon. I mean, whose divine power is that? Schwerer Gustav, god of siege artillery? The only other explanation is that you were "inspired" to get a giant orbital laser and at that point... Did the Well really "give" it to you?

Yes, I agree with an Orbital Laser power and with an Artillery Support power and such. Would love to see them. Not sure what we'll have to re-explain to account for them, but I want them.

It's not just a silly limitation nowadays. It's always been a silly limitation, and it used to be even sillier when your own nukes would super-stun you for 5-10 seconds. Happy happy joy joy happy happy joy!

I've rarely argued for the removal of the crash from nukes, mostly because I didn't think anyone would agree with me, what with the strong status quo we have here, but I still firmly believe that these powers are unduly hamstrung by irritating limitations.

Here's what bugs me about nukes so much - they're good powers in some circumstances, but frikkin' let me use 'em! There's nothing quite as frustrating as having a good power on your roster and being unable to use it, even when it's right there, recharged and taunting you.

I'm all for removing the 100 end crash from nukes, yes. Can we kill the interruptibility on snipes while we're at it?

Not really. The reasons given were two-fold:

1. Any content they make for the new 10 levels will be played through within the week. That's content which will take them months if not a year to design. It's a battle that they cannot win.

2. Players already have too many powers. Giving them even more powers and, more than anything, more slots, makes the entire build system irrelevant, as it removes any semblance of choice when you can have everything and slot it to full.

Their solution to the former appears to he "Oh, well!" and their solution to the latter appears to be to give players more eccentric rewards than just new powers and new slots and more hit points..

What seems to be overlooked a lot here is that one can be superhuman WITHOUT spitting fire or conjuring lightning. Take a look at some of the more classical Greek heroes, like Heracles. The man was defined as being very, very strong and... That's about it. Or at least that's primarily it. Yet he is still capable of great feats.

What's missing here is the ability to be super human without flashing lights, essentially. Yes, exploding into a shower of rainbow fire is exciting, I make no contest, but so is punching the ground hard enough to send enemies into space. Granted, that power already exists in Super Strength, but this doesn't seem to have stopped the developers from making Pyronic Judgement into essentially a souped-up version of Fireball (toss fire at enemy, kill in AoE around).

What of those characters who prefer to use their hands... Or their fists?

And that's precisely why I'd have preferred a classic level cap raise over this. Because then you can't get away with two Trials and call it a day. You'd need new zones, new enemies, new missions and TFs and a lot more content. Too much to be worth the cost of investment? Most probably, but I feel a good game requires a certain minimum level of content at all places.

That, and going with extra levels would have stopped the pedantic arguments that "You are not level 51! You are level 50 + 1!"

The question was an explanation of Praetorian Duray's clones that start showing up after you defeat the original.

And as far as I know, the answer is in the Resistance Crusader arcs, where Duray comes back from the dead at the head of a corps of dead men who've all been brought back to live as sentient Ghouls.

I treat my characters' adventures in Paragon City as filler in-between their canon adventures, which happen when I get off my lazy *** and write them a story. That story may or may not take part in Paragon City (or a city that may as well be Paragon City in all but name), but it only happens when I tell it. Again - I tell my character's stories, not the game, which is precisely why I call them "my characters."

Maybe that's unreasonable, maybe it's inflexible, but that's what it takes for me to care. I care that Grimwall will get a bigass fireball, because it makes sense for her. I care that Inna will get the power of the gods, because she was always supposed to have that. I care that Emillia will get Vanguard Swords when that pack comes out, because they're closer to what I'd originally wanted to give her. I don't care that Sam will have to pick from four elements, or pick nothing at all. And it's when I don't care about what's happening in the game that I start to complain.

No, no, no! That's not what I mean When I say "physical," I don't mean "as opposed to metaphysical." I more mean "mechanical," if that makes sense. I mean attacks that don't attack with an element or an energy, but rather with direct kinetic force, and kinetic force not willed into existence, but kinetic force imparted by actions of the body. A punch is a physical attack. A stab is a physical attack. A toss is a physical attack. A flamethrower may be a "real" attack, but it's a fire attack, as it relies more on the heat and burning of fire than the direct impact of the fire jet.

When I say "physical" attack, I mean either direct contact from one body to another, or otherwise a shockwave created by direct contact from one body to its environment. Ground Punch, Foot Stomp, Hand Clap, a world-shattering elbow drop, an "I fell from low orbit" explosion of kinetic force, that sort of thing.

This is what we don't have - Incarnate abilities which let us use our bodies, rather than projecting things from them. I'm sure the City of Heroes mythos has plenty of gods of fire, gods of ice, gods of the netherworld and so forth, but surely we'll have at least a few gods of fisticuffs, and at least one god of guns and ammo. That's really what I'm trying to get across - even if it's possible to explain the current elemental powers away, the fact remains that non-elemental ones in addition to them would open up quite a few new doors.

Not quite. Elements in City of Heroes have a few fairly standard properties, and certain enemies are fairly obviously weak or resistent to some elements. For instance, if I see a flaming fiery demon, I know for a fact that he will be weak to cold. When I see an ice demon, I know for a fact that he will be fairly resistant to cold. So when I spray a fire demon and an ice demon with a cone of "daggers" and see the demon take far more damage than the ghost, my brain immediately asks "but why?" And the answer to that is simple - I attacked them with cold damage. It hurt the fire one more because he's fire and the ice one less because he's ice.

Personally, I don't have too much against enemy resistance to smashing and lethal damage. I liked the fact that robots and other hard targets resisted cutting and shooting but caved when pummeled on. I knew I could punch and shatter stone creatures, but not do so well against trees. I could, instead, cut trees, but just chip pebbles off stone creatures. That's where damage types come into play - they determine more than what shows up in my combat tab. They determine what's a soft target and what's a hard target.

That's what I mean.

Not necessarily. I don't have the habit of writing endless plodding epics about my characters. I tend to wrap their stories up in shorter one-off stories, and most of those I've written years ago. Just as a random example, my Tale of Two Hearts (which should still be somewhere in the RP forum) was wrapped up in 2007, and it defines two of my characters with great finality. I'm not interested in writing sequels for it, especially NOT editorially-driven sequels.

If Sam meets something which cannot be cut, then he will find a way to overcome this. If shooting it and punching it doesn't work, he will find some other way. Whatever that way may be, shooting fire out of his hands will not be it, because I'd sooner resign writing duties than do this to my namesake flagship character. This is not who and what he is, and it is not who and what I want him to be. Not when I can come up with far more interesting godlike powers for him... Which I've already done, as a point of fact. I came up with them before I even knew there would be Incarnates in the game. Indeed, before the game went up to level 50.

I can also assure you that the moment the game allows me to use Dual Pistols as a Scrapper epic, I will respec Sam on the spot and give him as many of those powers as I can. He has a crapton of unnecessary enhancement slots as it is.

I'm not asking for "Sam's Judgement." Far from it. I'm simply asking for a PHYSICAL judgement, i.e. a power which attacks with physical damage. Why is this so unthinkable? Not every character makes sense to have elemental powers. The Hulk doesn't have elemental powers, after all, and that doesn't stop him from punching buildings into bricks.

I want Incarnates to accommodate a broader spectrum of concepts so I can have more freedom to tell the story that I want to tell, rather than the story I HAVE to tell lest I give up entirely.

Which would work, if Airstrikes weren't occurring without a second of pause and if both Durays didn't constantly stand on an airstrike target. Those things have a longer range than they look like they might, so unless you have ranged attacks (and I don't), you spend most of the fight either dead or hanging back.

I suspect somehow locking down or killing Primal Duray quickly may make the encounter less painful, but I don't have a good head for team dynamics.

I disagree. Not based on the merit of multi-team raids, so much as on this "follow the leader" mentality. What "every MMO has" should never be in itself a convincing argument for adding or not adding something to one. In fact, there's nothing more depressing than an MMO which describes itself as "has loot, has market, has crafting, has pvp, has raiding, has customization." Um... Yeah, what is the MMO actually ABOUT?

A game broken down to a collection of game mechanics is a game without a soul, to wax poetic for a moment, and it is, more than anything else, a game with nothing particularly interesting in it to care about. If one is after markets, crafting or PvP, there are other games that have done it better and that have many times the player base, as well. What sets City of Heroes apart isn't the market or the raids or or the loot. It's the super heroes and the snazzy costumes. We need to keep this in mind at all times.

Use them on what? That's my question. A lot of games gate content based on character power. You can't enter the zone of eternal darkness because those shadow spiders will eat you alive. But, sure enough, find the glowing sword and the Armadura Del Sol and you can now take on the spiders and explore their realm. Earning new powers for the sole reason of earning more new powers off the same content strikes me as an exercise in spinning your wheels.

I'm a fan of levelling characters up, myself, and even I'll tell you that "new powers" make up a fairly small part of a character's overall progression. Much of this progression consists of seeing new locations open up to you, meeting newer and more powerful enemies who apply more advance tactics (or, usually, just cheaper powers) and taking on more grandiose tasks. I couldn't use Greater Fire Sword against Dr. Vahzilok because I genuinely didn't need it, but now that I'm fighting the real Nemesis, I'm going to need that and more.

This kind of approach bugs me a little. Not the "having fun" part... Not entirely. I mean the notion that the point of the Incarnate system is to get more powerful. I know that in itself can be fun, but I keep thinking that's missing the point of getting more powerful in the broader sense. Personally, I'd like to see getting powerful have an ultimate point somewhere down the line, above and beyond giving you the ability to become even more powerful.

It's the old "raid for gear, gear to raid with" conundrum. To what end? This reminds me of the mentality from the movie Other People's Money, where Danny DeVito explained why people got caught up in the vicious cycle of making money so they could invest and make more money over and over again: "You make as much money as you can, and whoever has the most when he dies wins." It strikes me as an exercise without a purpose, a story without an end, a perpetual cycle of power creep... But for what purpose?

I don't know, maybe I just don't get it.

I actually have to agree here... Partially. I've said it before that a game without rewards is pointless, and not many people like pointless games. Granted, MineCraft may beg to differ, but even in that, people stick for the long haul by giving themselves projects and aiming for milestones. If nothing gets achieved, then you have a pointless sand box, and those get old fast.

However, the opposite is also true - a game that is only about rewards is hollow, and not many people like hollow games, as well. OK, I admit, Masters of Orion III, the game bearing a striking resemblance to doing your taxes, might disagree, but last I heard, that tanked. Rewards exist to move a game along, but they exist within the context of that game. Rewards can only enhance a game, they cannot make it, which means you need a game that is, at least on some level, fun for rewards to matter. Without a decent game on the back end, you have a hollow grind that doesn't last very long, and becomes VERY damaging if it does.

Where exactly the right balance between game and reward is isn't really a straightforward question, but I personally believe that we're due for a little more game in the near future if we want to keep healthy.

Her cheeks look ballooned, is why. It's less to do with the actual face texture and more to do with how narrow her cheek bones are. I used to make characters with very narrow cheeks for the longest time, so I've seen this kind of look often.

And, yes, she has breasts, too. I have Sexy Beach Zero and Yuusha for that, however. Thank you, Illusion!

This reminds me of something I wanted to add here:

When I say "I don't intend to bother for the next couple of years," this often comes off as an underhanded insult to the system, and it really isn't... For the most part. It's more me saying that the system as it is right now really doesn't seem to have much of what I want, so I'll wait for it to gain more options and do other things in the mean time. Well, for it to gain more options, or for me to get more ideas that work with it.

Though having seen the Pyronic Judgement, I have a hard time seeing it as a grenade, as it looks more like you're tossing fire, and it doesn't look like it blows up so much so that it just... Burns. And don't get me wrong, fire can be deadly, but it still takes some time to cook. I've had a gas oven explode in my face and singe the clothes on my body, and I ain't dead because the flash was too fast to give me more than a really bad case of sunburn And, yes, I'm serious here.

I'm actually a little stumped, to be honest. Other than just plain vanilla fire and "tangible force of destruction which looks and acts like fire," I have a hard time seeing Pyronic Judgement, or indeed fire powers in this game as anything other than... Well, fire of different colours. And fire CAN be a whole range of different colours in real life.

The Ice Judgement... I'm not so sure about. I haven't seen this one in person, but I have some doubt I could call it a hail of daggers. It does cold damage, doesn't it?

This is something that I honestly don't get. If story was as unimportant as it certainly feels it was, then why bother with such an in-depth, one-sided story? Why not just say we "overcame our limitations" and earned brand new powers, then let us figure out exactly WHY we suddenly have these powers by ourselves. Certainly those who don't care about story won't care about story and those of us who do care will come up with some reason of our own. Right now I have the Well doing its best to contradict me, and that gets in the way.

Personally, I'm not a fan of this "devil may care" attitude when it comes to story, lore and concept. I've been ragging on the game's writing for, ooh... Five, six years now? But I've only been outright pissed off at it for the past year, if that. We certainly seem to be ignoring good storytelling in favour of more game systems for people who like game systems for the sake of game systems. And while there's nothing wrong with that - I still play MineSweeper quite regularly - I keep expecting Paragon Studios to hold themselves in higher regard than just producers of playable schlock.

That's really not what I wanted to focus on, though, even though I was getting at it. We've had enough threads bashing the new Issue, even from my perspective. I was more looking to see if we can't come up with alternate reinterpretations of the current Incarnate powers so that they can fit into a broader range of existing characters without necessitating wholesale re-write, and to possibly narrow down what we might want to see if we wanted to broaden their scope with the biggest possible step.

Personally, my easy favourite so far has been reinterpreting Ion as Nanomachines, and I like that for a couple of reasons. First of all, there's no reason why Nanomachines can't deal energy damage, as one could see them manipulating objects on the atomic level via tractor beams or magnetism or electricity. Secondly, a stream of nannites could indeed act like a chain induction type power by attacking one enemy, then spreading to surrounding enemies like a disease. So that's both the graphics and the effects of the power explained, and then some.

I also like reinterpreting Void as psychic energy. I have a psychic character inspired partly from FEAR's Alma, partly from a story I wrote on request a few years before I played that game and partly based on a Naruto filler arc, whose whole shtick is that she's an immensely powerful psychic who accidentally sealed a demon of darkness inside her soul. As such, I can easily re-interpret all of her psychic powers as dealing Negative Energy damage. I'm not sure how appropriate this would be for more conventional psychics, but I'm sure that psychic energy can be changed into negative energy with enough pain and anger applied.

Those two already give me two ready answers for two characters I was uncertain about. And not just that, but it gives me a good idea of what I want to pick as said characters' epics.

You're not, actually. That's how I read his original arc. And when all we knew of Incarnates was what was in the Alpha slot, it seemed plausible. After all, more enhancements just makes us better at what we do, because they enhance our existing powers.

But now that we're getting extra powers, the people who argue that we're borrowing powers and that we're all suddenly of the Magic origin have a lot more to back themselves up. After all, an Earth wielder has no Judgement option which could serve as an extension of his Earth powers, so he has to think sideways and find one which could be explained away as such, or otherwise just go with whatever has the best stats.

This is a problem with Epics as well, somewhat. When Scrappers got Fire for the first time, people wanted a Fire epic. We did get it, eventually, and I'm already using it on a few. However, when Scrappers got Electric powers, a corresponding Epic was not introduced. I'm still not sure what to do about that, to be honest. However, at least Scrappers still have access to Body Mastery, which is an easy out every time there isn't anything more appropriate available. I must have used Body/Energy for over half my Scrappers and Brutes, come to think of it.

Either way, I intend to interpret Incarnate powers are "my powers, only more strongerer"

I apologise for coming off as strong as I did. It's just a point I want to make as definitively as possible, because it's the cornerstone of why I got into City of Heroes to begin with, and why I'm still here - the ability to play characters who feel truly my own.

Over the years, I've relented and written my characters into the city's setting quite a bit more permanently, establishing lives, businesses, secret bases, ambitious plots and such. But even so, there's an absolute limit to how far I'm willing to stretch a concept, and redefining who and what a character is quite a fair way past that line.

When I play, say, Diablo, I don't really much care what my Barbarian's story is, what he's fighting for and where he comes from. He's a Barbarian, he kills things, and the extent of his personality that I care about is he can dual-wield two-handed weapons. But that's because the game forces me to choose one of five pre-made characters that I don't get much say in. Even something like Mass Effect isn't quite the same. I picked a male Shepard, but even so, he's Shepard. He has one of a select few pre-made backstories, he has his own personality and morality. He's Shepard. Whether Renegade Shepard or Paragon Shepard, he's still who he is, so I let him be who he is and fixate on the gameplay, instead.

The reason I've stayed in City of Heroes for this long is because I've been able to tell my stories with my characters, even if they exist in a pre-made world. Most of mine are removed from their original home, so they've had to learn to live in a City of Heroes. But they are still who they are, and they still do what they do. Over the years, I haven't stopped coming up with newer and newer stories. And every time I log one of my characters in, I keep thinking: "I can't believe I can actually play out my own story!" City of Heroes is the action figure I always wanted as a kid, because it's my imagination working to my rules.

I know that's not always true and I have indeed had to make quite a few concessions, but the fewer those are and the less extreme they are, the easier they are to swallow. Pretending black fire is a tangible force of destruction is a small price to pay for a cool cosmic horror. Rewriting my "is very tough" giant woman into having supernatural powers, by contrast, is too high a price to pay for performance.

So I look for excuses and explanations, and where such don't exist, I wait for new additions to enable them.