Samuel_Tow

I don't think dumbing down the Freakshow is what has done the most harm to them as a faction. It's turning them into comic relief goofiness that has completely destroyed the faction, in my opinion. The Freaklimpis was interesting, because it shows how a violent, murderous gang could sew so much destruction just for kicks and giggles. But "them bombs gonna blow stuff up" and "Just weld a rocket to my back!" and the Freakshow holding a pawn shop and all the other borderline cartoony humour is really hurting them.

I completely agree with Eva - we need to return the Freakshow more to their roots - violent, dangerous murderers who should be feared, not adored like they're cute plushy toys. The Freakshow murder people. The Freakshow destroy lives. The Freakshow kidnap and torture people. They are monsters, as a point of fact. Yes, they're still human, but they are about as unrepentant bad guys as they come. We need to remember them.

I can see how much Hurdle, Swift and Stamina would have helped with that. Health I can kind of see making a SLIGHT dent, but if you went AFK in the middle of a mob, you were either fighting something really weak or you'd otherwise built your character really strong, because inherent Fitness helps you be proactive more than anything else.

Your example is terrible.

I'm in kind of the same boat. I actually like the older content, missions and storylines, and I worry that "revamping" them will just destroy those stories. I've seen the level of "quality" of the newer writing. I still have nightmares about Roy Cooling's arc, and that god damn Montague Castanella. Who wrote this stuff? And to this day, I find the old Faultline FAR more impressive than the new one. I liked the chasms, and I see no reason why they couldn't have added bridges and elevators without flooding three quarters of the zone's total height. They could have left the hazard part be down in the gulleys and left topside safe.

However, I DO want to see a focus on fixing what's broke in current content, and actually finishing a lot of what they started. This Neuron approach to design where you start up a feature, then leave it hanging half-way through in pursuit of the next new shiny has to stop. The whole game is becoming one giant collection of half-features, bugged missions and terrible writing, to the point where even previously GOOD stories are destroyed by newer ones that contradict them and previously working mechanics no longer work. Just as an idle example, my "double" in the last instance from Agent Keith Nancy doesn't present any dialogue. He/she just runs off as soon as he/she turns blue.

There are animation bugs (Build Up puts you in a "fake" combat stance that messes up animations), there are effects bugs (custom forcefields do not align to the character properly), there are contact bugs (Robert Flores' dialogue still spits out all in one window), there are text bugs (Maria Jenkins' "Ask about this contact" info is still rife with typos and bad grammar), there is horrible writing (Montague Castanella has the propensity to say "want to?" a lot), there are mission bugs (if you log out while protecting "The Ghoul King," when you return the mission will be uncompletable), there are half-finished systems (powerset proliferation, power customization, base building), there are half-finished storylines (so what about them Devouring Earth? Who is Tub Chi?), there are costume bugs (Scales skin not available for Monster glove on Robotic Arm 3, Organic Sword for dual blades misaligned with one hand), there's just so much to do, fix or finish... And yet we keep getting "new" stuff while the old stuff is left to dangle.

At one point one of the developers said that they'd rather make new zones, because revamping old zones took as much work. This was done at the time of the unnecessarily complete Faultline revamp. Later, War Witch said that with the War Zone revamp, they could redo the zone or redo the stories, and begrudgingly they chose to redo the story. My response to that was "Well, duh!" The Rikti Crash Site was good enough. Boomtown is good enough. Dark Astoria, Terra Volta, Eden, the Shadow Shard - ALL of these zones are good enough. You don't have to make new zones to replace the old, perfectly functional zones. What they need is more content put into them, and maybe a slight change to a SMALL part of each one. More Mole Points in the Shard, that small reconstruction area in Boomtown, something-something in Terra Volta and so on.

Years ago, a player posed the question: Wouldn't you rather have NEW powersets than to have proliferation/customization for the old sets? To this, my answer is "No, I would not." Will a new powerset for my Scrappers give them the ability to fight in melee with ice powers or protect themselves with armour made of ice? Of course not! Ice Melee and Ice Armour already exist. Only I can't use them for my Scrappers. Instead, I'm bound to get something specific an esoteric, like Gunblades or Rikti Melee or Ball and Chain. I want to use the existing sets on more characters. Furthermore, a new set won't give me a green Ring of Fire on a Scrapper, and it won't give him a red Dark Blast, at least I can't think of a set that will do that, especially one that can stack ON TOP of Dark Melee or Broadsword.

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I would never support an Issue which is entirely "bug fixes." That would be a colossal mistake. However, I do want and indeed expect bug fixes and the completion (or at least progression) of previous projects to be a large part of every Issue. I don't need completely new stuff coming out of left field, when the old stuff sits half-built and gathering cob webs and making friends with tumbleweeds.

I'm already using the Rabbit tail on a panda of my own, and it looks the part. I'd suggest trying that to see if it doesn't work for you.

It's staggering to me that this wasn't done before release. Why was the pack on Test to begin with if none of the feedback we gave was considered?

I'll say it again - Animal Fur needs to exist for Smooth, Flat, Flared, Folded, Spiked, Finned, Large and Banded boots/gloves.

It's not an illness, it's the next step of evolution. When you have too many great ideas to contain in one character, you have to let those ideas expand or fade away, or they'll cause your head to explode

Good god... Can we murder proper terminology any more horribly?

Hence why building an entire system without designing much of any volume of content to go with it is something I see as a mistake. It's a cheeky shortcut to making players feel like much has been added without occupying as much development resources as might be needed if a sufficient body of content were added to the game to go along with it.

Any time you give players fewer tasks to do than can be counted on the fingers of both hands, you incite speed runs, grinding and burnout through sheer boredom. Yes, "content" (by which I mean a "system") is cheaper to produce when it doesn't involve the art team all that much, but that cheapness is reflected in the final experience.

To me, the entire Incarnate system feels like a time sink. I thought it would be something more, but that was me foolishly expecting the system to come with much content alongside, which in retrospect was not a realistic expectation, given the cost of investment of such a thing. As such, it's just buffer stop at the end of the line. When you get to 50, you no longer hit a solid wall that stops you dead in your tracks, but instead hit a slow field that gently brings you to just as complete a stop, only more slowly and less noticeably.

The reason people call the Incarnate system raid grind, is because of the grind, and the grind happens because there's really not much else to do but grind TFs. And that - as pointed out above - doesn't last as long as one thinks it would. How much fun ARE those TFs going to be after the tenth, fifteenth, twentieth time? Not much, not from where I'm standing.

I prefer simpler systems. Simple systems are easier to build fiction on. Complex systems become very specific, and require specific fiction to "explain" them. I didn't need an explanation of why I'm a hero in a city of heroes, fighting crime and the forces of evil. I didn't need an explanation why I wanted to stop Ubelmann, bring Alexander Pavlidis in or uncover the secret behind the Revenant Hero project. I COULD apply a reason to it - namely my own - but that reason could be any number of things.

I'm given a reason for why I am a villain, and I'm given a reason why I do most of the villainous things. That reason does not always match up to the reason I had in mind, and I often find out about those reasons after it's too late to do anything about them. I'm then given a reason for why I can only be Resistance or only be a Loyalist, and why I can only destroy the Seer farm or only free the Seers, and why I can't do anything but those two choices. I'm not given an explanation for why I can't sell the Seers to the Syndicate, but it's implied that that's not an option because "because."

I'm never stuck wondering "Why did I just do that?" or "Why can't I do that?" running old Hero content, because the stories are loose enough. "Simple enough," as it were. Both CoV's and especially Praetoria's storylines are so specific and railroading that it feels like I'm playing someone else's character through someone else's story until I can get out of this horrible treadmill and actually be my own hero or my own villain, with my own hopes, dreams and aspirations that I designed, came up with and wrote up, as opposed to HAVING the share the same hopes, dreams and aspirations with factions I never wanted to join in the first place.

I DO NOT LIKE Praetorian politics. If I had a choice, I'd choose nether. Being in a position to want a choice where I can opt out of the storyline is a bad, bad sign, and not having that choice turns this into a tangible problem.

You can tell a linear story while still giving choices to the player as to how to get from point A to point B to point C. Warehouse X has artefact Y, guarded by Z. You can kill Z and take Y, which means a fight and which might strike some people as a pretty evil thing to do. Or, you ask Z nicely, and he gives you Y, at which point you're ambushed by Tau on your way out, still giving you the requisite fight, but feeling more like the nice guy option. Neither case comes out and says "This is good and this is evil." You're given options, those options lead to minor changes, but the main storyline rolls on. You have artefact Y, so you can advance the plot with it.

You can have a linear storyline that gives the illusion of choice, and I would rather have that than a branching storyline with no illusion of actual choice. I don't need consequences for my actions, so long as I get to choose what I want. Killing my clone at the end of Leonard's arc or letting it live is a meaningless choice, but I like it more than any Morality mission in Praetoria, because it's a choice I get to make based on my morality and my morality alone when consequences do not force my hand.

And this is a mistake. Controversial politics is not a good field for moral choices, for the simple fact that they require me to support at least one faction, even if I bounce around the available candidates. Controversial politics never has a place for a "neither" choice, because such a choice represents a third option that undermines the forced, artificial morality.

I'm not interested in "belonging" to an NPC faction. I'm not interested in sharing an NPC's beliefs. I'm not interested in the developers writing my characters for me, outside of instances where game design (that's game design, NOT plotline) absolutely demands it. I can't make a villain who's afraid to travel by boat, because that would be unplayable, but I CAN make a villain who may not necessarily care about Arachnos, and the game's settings provide for that. I can't make a Praetorian who's not aligned with either the Resistance or the Loyalists, because I'm not given that choice.

My characters are MINE, and this is one aspect of City of Heroes unique to it. It asks us to name them, build them, paint them, give them a backstory and by the end of it all, they feel like OUR creations. Not a developer construct that we can pick from a short list, not a nameless protagonist just like every other nameless protagonist. Easily City of Heroes' greatest strength is its ability to make my characters feel truly mine and nobody else's, which is why it infuriates me when it then plops those same characters in the world and starts writing their story for them.

When I'm given a choice, I don't want to pick between storylines written for me. I want to pick between between generic responses the combination of which together will define my character's personality. One generic choice is uninteresting, but when you go through 10 different ones, your character's personality begins to shape up.

I couldn't disagree more. Choices between good and evil, moral or immoral should not come down to what advantage they give, as that puts the metagame before the storyline. Choices between good and evil should come down to choices of preference, and be driven by the character's personality as written by the character's creator. "Who you are in the dark," as it were - people's true colours only show when they are forced to make a moral choice without consequences either way. Because that is the only time a person will choose what he WANTS, as opposed to what he feels he HAS to choose.

Moral choices such as those in Leonard's arc, Vincent Ross' arc and, to some extent, Roy Cooling's arc are where players show their true colours. Do I burn that Family goon in his warehouse or do I take him in? Either way, the story goes on, so which one do I WANT to choose? It depends on the character, at that point. As well it should.

"They" being ranged henchmen. Melee henchmen were just this bad, and far, far worse, in fact. Zombies and Grave Knights were almost impossible to get to use their melee attacks, even when you order them into melee range of other enemies, the Jounin would spam his stupid hand crossbow dart in melee range and the Bruiser would only do Hand Clap and Hurl. Melee henchmen were broken and unplayable. Ranged henchmen now are just somewhat difficult to manage.

Also, I'm not sure what's happening to make your bots misbehave, but when I played mine, they'd very rarely run into melee at all, and most of the time it would be just one errant drone. It's probably my fault for missing it, though, since if a few bots ran into melee, I'd usually run in with the whole group and keep them together.

That's not to say I don't want henchman AI to be fixed, though I don't know how that would be done. But that IS to say that the pet AI changes un-broke melee henchmen from almost complete suck.

I'm not a fan of this suggestion, for the simple fact that you're designing Bitter Freeze Ray. A power which does multiple things very badly is still not a very good power, especially when it's interruptible and thus very situational. I'd rather make snipes into powers that do one thing very well - that one thing being damage - and turn them into powers people WANT to use, not powers they use when they have nothing better to throw out at the time, as is the fate of Bitter Freeze Ray. Freeze Ray is better, Bitter Ice Blast is better, and both can be fired sequentially for less time than it takes BFR to animate.

Same with Fire Blast, actually - Fire Blast and Blaze in sequence take less time and do more damage as compared to Blazing Bolt, and Blazing Bolt is interruptible.

Personally, I feel the basic design for Snipes was flawed in inception, based round Jack Emmert's idea of "range = defence." Snipes bring only one thing to the table - damage at extreme range. The utility of this is questionable, and for this utility, the power pays with low damage, long animations, interruptibility and a general uselessness and inefficiency in direct combat. Fixing all of these would be overkill, but fixing at least one of them would be a start.

Damage: Snipes are currently damage scale 2.76, the same damage scale as Cleave from Battle Axe, and not really all that much higher than the 2.2 scale damage of your typical T3 blast, such as Power Burst or Cosmic Burst. Bringing them up to Dominator snipe levels and making them scale damage 3.56 - the same as Total Focus - would go a long way towards making a slow, interruptible power worth the bother.

Speed: Snipes generally take 4.33 seconds to animate, which is longer than even Total Focus. 3 seconds of that is interruptible. This makes the power very slow, to the point where it's almost useless in combat, even when it CAN be used, since its DPA efficiency is total crap. Speeding the attack up would help fix that, especially making the power more useful under the effects of Aim and/or Build Up.

Interruptibility: A snipe is mostly useful out of combat, or once per battle, in other words. Given the game's propensity for ambush spam, this can mean snipes get used as rarely as once per 5-6 minutes, or on the order of proper nukes. Snipes simply do not do enough to be worth that. Making them uninterruptible, by contrast would give the power other uses in-combat, for when a regular blast is unavailable, but melee is not an option for whatever reason. It takes nothing away from a snipe's original purposes as an out-of-combat opener, but gives the power more uses in-combat, making its value that little bit higher.

Any time a henchman is Aggressive, that henchman will disregard follow, goto and stay commands if that henchman's AI chooses to close in for an attack. That's how it's always been. Henchmen set to Defensive will act as though they are set to Aggressive once engaged, though they will disengage if the enemy goes too far away from where the henchmen want to be. Trying to recall henchmen set to Aggressive or Defensive will not work, as they'll accomplish the order, then return to what they were doing, chasing enemies if they must.

If you want to keep your henchmen in place, you need to use Passive and direct them via Attack My Target. Unlike when set to Aggressive or Defensive, henchmen will not remain in attack mode once that specific target is down, and will instead return to you or to where you ordered them to stay.

Generally speaking, however, I can deal with ranged henchmen going into melee if it means melee henchmen going into melee. Robotics, Thugs and Mercenaries may be a bit harder to handle, but at least Ninja and Necromancy are not completely worthless.

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As for the original post, yes, removing clipping from henchmen for all players, not just the Mastermind, is a good idea. It would keep henchmen from blocking hallways forevermore.

Not quite. The Hydra Trial was introduced with I1, which also bumped the game's level to 50. I don't know if it handed Hydra enhancements or not at the time, but it wasn't "end game" even when it was created, it was 38-41. The Eden Trial with the Crystal Titan was added somewhere past I2. I don't remember when, exactly, but it was quite a while after the game had been extended to 50. The fate of Hydra and Titan enhancements has been in question very much since they were put into the game.

"Most of the time," I take on Reclue's lackeys in their Patron arcs and him in Time After Time, both of which I not just "tend to," but always do solo. Paragon's finest, on the other hand, are all available in the Mender Silos TF, as well as in different bits and pieces from Grandville, again, all of that doable solo.

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On topic, I laughed my *** off at Yahtzee's review, and even considered posting it here, but decided against it. I love the praise he gives to City of Heroes as THE game to compare against, as well as praising it about its character creator in a roundabout way. However, much of the criticisms he levies against Dance Central Universe: Online also applies to City of Heroes: Online, and being the biassed hypocrite that I am, I chose to avoid bringing in an argument that could be turned around against me.

I always enjoy Yahtzee's videos, even when I disagree with him completely, because his blunt, unforgiving criticism often points out annoying problems in titles I like that even I can admit to and laugh at him for satirising. For instance, I liked Mass Effect 2, but the comment on the population of Titan Station being 75% under the age of 12 had me rolling in my chair. "I love mommy and being alive (my blood inside of me)" indeed

I only ever die with a full inspiration tray in two cases:

1. If I get shock-damaged so fast I'm unable to react to that by downing greens.

or

2. If I forget to keep an eye on my health bar and die without realising I was about to.