Samuel_Tow

You know, I never really checked to see if the upgrade itself was the culprit. I think what changes Henchmen powers is customizing the Henchmen summon power, like how you customize the explosion colour of your Trip Mines or the colours of your Poison Gas Trap's poison gas cloud... Well, it would, if Poison Gas Trap weren't bugged to not take custom colours and always display a light teal steam-like gas cloud, but I digress.

To the best of my knowledge, I know that Necromancy Henchmen powers are customizable to the colour of the summon, and as far as I know this applies to all henchmen including the Extracted Soul. I also know that Demon Summoning Hellfire powers are customizable to the summon colour. However, Hellfire powers constitute a total of two henchmen - the Hellfire Demonling and the Hellfire Gargoyle. The Fiery and Cold demonlings, the other Demon and the Demon Prince are not customizable and keep their elements of fire and ice to their default colours.

I have not checked to see if the Ninja Oni summon is customizable and if his fire can be retinted, though now that I know this, I probably should at least check. I know Mercenaries, Thugs and Robotics have nothing that's applicable to power customization.

I'm easy to please, yes. Throw me a costume piece, a customization option or a new toy of some sort and I am indeed content and quiet as I go play with it in the corner. This is why I say I'm getting concerned when I start feeling really bad about the game - because I'm not a hard guy to pacify. Hard to shut up, maybe, but I take pleasure in the little things

Wasn't Khan a Romulan? I wouldn't know either way, they almost never showed any Star Trek on TV here.

I don't mean this as a criticism, as you're free to play what you please, but note that almost all the activities you mentiond are hero-specific, and the ITF is quite high-level.

The reason I mention this is because I've been running low-level villains and low-level praetorians almost exclusively... Pretty much since I19.5 came out, and whenever I see a call for a non-WTF activity, it's always either out of level range by about 20 levels, or otherwise on the other side of the faction divide.

Come to think of it, it's been literal years since I've run a Virgil Duray SF, and I don't think I've EVER run the one with the sky raiders or the one from that guy in Sharkhead that I don't even remember his name.

Look, I'm a picky ******* who refuses to make easy billions by playing the Market, who refuses to do research on what sells for how much, who refuses to run the Architect for easy loot and so on... And even I'm telling you that you have far too low a threshold for "chores." A single extra click is not a chore. It does not require switching gears when what you are doing to begin with is clicking.

Yes, I'll admit that the EULA has been catching me by surprise every single time I've logged in since it was moved to the client, and it has required me to stop and figure out what I had to do to make it go away. I give it another week or two before I stop noticing it's there. This is not work. This is not a chore. It's an extra click. It's like having to double-click a shortcut instead of single-clicking it, and I know Windows can be set to single-click launch shortcuts.

This is like complaining you have to type in your password every time.

I18, I19 and I20 actually constitute three Issues, but that's besides the point.

The problem with Praetoria is less how LONG it's been used, or how MANY things it's been put into, so much as the impression that every single thing to do with Incarnates will pass through Praetoria. Few people would have a problem with Praetorian Earth if Emperor Jack Emmert hadn't completely monopolised the entirety of the Incarnate system.

I remind you - to this day there are many of us who still feel the same about Longbow and Arachnos. Focusing on one particular storyline is a good thing. Signling out only ONE faction to the exclusion of other, often more interesting factions is not.

Generally, I consider it a bad point when a features greatest selling point to me is "You don't have to use it."

BABs specifically explained that giving Ice vivid colours made it look like crystal. I recall agreeing with him at the time for some reason I could not reconstruct now on pain of death, but I no longer see this as a problem. Many powersets already step on each other's toes now that their effects are customizable. Rad Blast and Energy Blast are essentially the same thing when they're made the same colour. There are differences, yes, but they're academic. You blast enemies with different sprites of energy.

As such, I say enable all power colours. If ice ends up looking like crystal, then LET IT. In fact, I originally wanted to make my Slime Girl into an Ice/Ice character, the ice representing crystallised slime, but went with something else instead.

Let me put this another way - if the water in Cimeroran caves can be allowed to be a Nuka Cola Quantum shade of fluorescent blue, why can't my ice be allowed to be the same? Can't I just scoop up some of that inky blue water and freeze it for my ice?

*edit*
Oh, yeah, and Storm, too. What gives? That set may as well not have customization options.

Such is the nature of endgame, really. Like you, I stuck with City of Heroes as much for the things it didn't have as for the things it did, and its lack of gear and end game was a large part of it. Now that we have those, I find people's compulsion to focus on that to the exclusion of most else unsurprising. It's one reason why I was concerned about it in the first place. Like you, my concerns have not been put to rest in light of recent events.

Unlike you, however, I don't feel any express need to team. This was the cornerstone of why allowed me to play this game in the first place. If I always had people just waiting for me to log in and play with me, I might feel otherwise, but being that other people have lives too, I can't expect that. This means I can never and will never make a character that "requires" a team in any sense of the word. I don't play games to sit around and wait to be able to play games. If I have to log in and then start looking for a team, then I'm not having fun. And while I may be able to grin and bear it once, I'll be highly unmotivated to do it ever again. This is a large part of why I'm slowly getting rid of all my Blasters. I'm tired of feeling apprehensive to play what should be cool characters.

I don't foresee Incarnates ever being truly "done," as they're being billed as the game's next big cash cow, like what the Architect was supposed to be and completely failed at being. I also don't envision the mad dash to be over anywhere within the next calendar year, so I hope you're a patient man.

I disagree. Personally, I VASTLY prefer older content like the Vahzilok Plague, the Tsoo Shenanigans, World Wide Red, Division: Line, Oh Wretched Man, The Aeon Conspiracy, Time After Time and so on, and would pick those over the dreck that is contemporary game writing, such as Jenni Adair and Roy Cooling. I'm sure other people would disagree, but no matter which story arc you pick, story arc rewards are not up to the level of practically anything else.

Again.

I wonder if I should find it ironic that I find myself in practically the exact same situation now that I was seven years ago. Back before I1, all I ever wanted was to get missions from my contacts, do those missions, and in so doing progress through the levels. Back then, this made me a laughing stock because a level 33 mission reward consisted of 800 experience (a number that has been burned into my mind) and arc rewards were no more than double a standard mission's experience. We were expected, and indeed intended, to street-hunt large spawns and level up that way.

Some time later, instance debt was halved, mission rewards were increased significantly and mission difficulty settings made us all ecstatic to run missions like never before, and story arcs in particular for the AMAZING arc rewards, which I'm impressed with even to this day. And now we're right back to square one with missions and story arcs representing the very bottom of the barrel in terms of "point to do," with me left yelling about how much I want to run missions like a drunken hobo in a public park. I'm not sure if this is a case of cyclic history, but I hope that it is, because the cycle should eventually repeat and running missions and arc should eventually be made worth a crap once more.

I don't recall BABs ever talking about animations. He talked about FX - the coloured sprites our powers produce. The animations are identical, and indeed the same, but it's fairly evident that the sprites are entirely unique. In fact, in a lot of cases they're not even close. Original Energy Blast has a nice, grandient colour with gradient "power bubbles" waving around the effects. Bright Energy Blast, on the other hand, has sharp contrast and flat bubbles. It's a new effect made from scratch.

In either case, there aren't that many Pool powers in general, and I would bet dollars to doughnuts that Epic powers already have custom variant, as they're clones of powerset powers that were already customized.

That's not to say "You sods! Why didn't you do it!" so much as to say "Now that they found the motivation to work on it, I hope it will happen soon." It's shaping up so that my hopes are wavering between I21 and I22 for something that would blow me away. Pool/Epic customization would do just that.

So you would think, but I don't say these things in theory. I draw on precise experience, retelling events that have happened to me, personally, just without naming names. I was, in fact, told to my face by at least one poster that he would prefer the developers don't work on a solo path (from when I still wanted that) because he didn't need or want one and he wanted "developer resources" instead redirected to more things that he wanted to see. This poster was never called on what he said by anyone other than myself and the, like, two or three other people who were making arguments like what I was.

Most notably, this poster was never called on posting this by the people who had made it their mission to "refute" every post made to the detriment of the Incarnate system, at least none that I saw. I trust you can see how that could give me a more cynical outlook on your idealised situation.

I disagree, at least partially. I won't say "most," but "many" people that I've personally seen suggest adding more options tend to do so from the standpoint of running through the list of things they feel more options could break, and explaining them all away. Yes, I'm well aware that "It won't break anything!" is a poor argument for why something should be done, but that's the approach I've seen most serious suggestions take.

By contrast, many of the responses I've seen to these come down to /jranger, if you pop down over the the S&I forums. "Oh, it would take too long to make. I want the developers to work on something else." It's gotten to the point where I've had to invent a self-imposed rule to never bring developer resources up at all, and only discuss direct merit. In fact, it's more than a little ironic to see how many suggestions get shot down by people who just don't care about the suggestion and would like something else instead. Granted, I know for a fact it's not by the same people who praise Incarnates now, so I'm not accusing them, but it's the general principle that I find a little ironic.

This has always been a sore spot for me. Yes, I can look at established canon and see how bad writing could make sense within context. But far from accepting this as an excuse, this simply raises the follow-up question of why the developers chose to write themselves into a corner. Yes, I can appreciate the futility of clamouring for a change that "makes sense" in regards to nonsense canon, but at the same time I feel it must nevertheless be clamoured for, if just as a point of principle.

To be more specific, I don't feel an obligation to only ever raise a complaint if I feel something can be done to fix it. I'm not a developer, I don't know enough about the process, it's not my job to come up with solutions. I will when I think I can, but I am still determined to bring up problems when I see it, even if I have not the slightest idea of how that could be fixed. I want these problems to be in the developers' minds as they go about their business, so that THEY may eventually come up with a solution and do something about it. Or they may never do anything at all, which while not ideal, I can still deal with.

In fact, a frequent bone of contention is the fact that a lot of the time if one raises a complaint about a feature another likes, then the "well, there's nothing that can be done about it" card is played as a justification for not doing something. "I can't do it" is not a justification for not doing something, it's an explanation for why it isn't done. We've already seen additions and changes made to the game that took six or seven years to happen, and were dismissed out of hand many times, such as inherent Stamina. At this point I put nothing past the developers to change and readjust, given enough time and inclination.

Just like one does not need to be a film-maker to praise or complain about movies, so a player doesn't need to have a solution to a problem in order to complain about said problem.

Interestingly, that was another point of contention with Patron pools - everyone got an extra pet, except for Masterminds, presumably because they already had at least six.

However, I actually do support the mechanical proliferation that we've seen with Epics, at least. Their stated goal was not to give characters more of what they already have, but rather to give them things they normally wouldn't have access to, thereby broadening their range of abilities. Hence why Tankers got fireballs, Blasters got shield toggles and Scrappers got control power.

To my eyes, this broadening of ability and concept brings us tantalisingly close to having characters with a more diverse scope of abilities without necessarily walking into tankmage territory. For instance, if I want to have a character reminiscent of the Human Torch, this would require fire blasts, fire protection powers and fire melee attacks, all things that not a single AT has all of. NPCs have that combination, such as Behemoth Overlords, but we have no access to this as players.

Enter Pyre/Flame Mastery. A Fire/Fire/Flame Blaster has access to a wide assortment of Blasts and melee attacks, with some degree of fire protection from their Epic, while a Fire/Fire/Pyre Scrapper has many melee and protection fire powers, with some range and control in their Epic. Neither case is perfect, but both cases are broad enough to handwave, which is always a plus.

To be honest, I don't think it's as one-sided. Yes, people whose heads explode and come to post about how unsatisfied they are do indeed cause problems, but all too often dissatisfied people will post their dissatisfaction, only to be beset by people saying things like "You're wrong." or "You can't make that claim without evidence." and even things along the lines of "You're stupid! I've been waiting for this for years!" There this almost palpable compulsion from quite a few people to shut dissenters up, lest the developers put their brains on backwards and listen to the "vocal minority" and roll back this much-vaunted change.

Yes, dissenters are often idiots and asking for it, that much I'll agree. But it's unfair to put a higher emphasis on their responsibility, when I know for a fact that most wouldn't start an argument if they weren't belittled and put in a position to defend their opinion and explain how they dare have such opinion. The simple fact is that if I come in and state I completely and utterly hate a new addition that many people like and leave it precisely at that, I'll still pick up flack for it.

On the flip side, a lot of the time the side opposed is actually asking for more options and more additions, including the ones that already exist. In the case of the Lore pets, the request is for more pets that aren't tied to Praetoria (like how we asked for pets and powers that aren't tied to Arachnos), but not for the removal of the Praetorian pets as such. They're there, they're done, let the people who like them still have them. Removing them achieves nothing.

However, when responses to such suggestions come in to the tune of "Well, I got what I wanted, so now the developers should work on other things I want instead of expanding this into what you want." that being the equivalent of sticking your tongue out, pulling your eyelid down and going "Nuuuu!" it starts to seem like a lot of people have not the slightest wish to compromise.