Samuel_Tow

True, but that then steps into "perfect team" territory with requiring not "just team-mates" but specific team-mates with specific powers. It's like back when AV regeneration was upped significantly and every team was asking for a Radiation Defender or Controller to debuff said regeneration. One thing I've heard City of Heroes players praise the game for was that you could just put a team together with any composition and it would work, allowing people to play what they wanted, instead what they were required to play.

When I say "this is clearly designed by a different development team," I say this because just about anything in relation to this system is something I can quote people for praising the opposite of in the past. It feels like Positron and his team are designing an entirely different, largely unrelated game to stick on top of the existing game, and I'm simply not a big fan of that.

"Levelled up with you" is a metagame concept, that's my basic point. What we're fighting is numbers, and not even clever numbers, at that, just bigger numbers. I said it before and I'll say it again. Make a simple Blood Brother slugger level 60 and THAT will be a challenge to a level 50 character (at that point, your powers are 3% effective and you have 5% chance to hit him), but exactly the WRONG kind of challenge.

I've griped about enemies like Malta, the Soldiers of Rularuu and even the War Works robots before for being cheap, but at least they're cheap while still respecting the rules, i.e. they're still my level or whichever level I set them to, it's just that their DESIGN makes them greater threats thanks to their nasty POWERS. Being level 54 does nothing but say that this enemy is out of my league, and I fail to see how that applies to a Malta TacOps.

Consider the Purple Patch and the arguments around that. Back at Launch before I1, people were fighting enemies 5, 6, 10 levels above them with quite a bit of success, simply because level scaling was far less severe. This made a complete mockery of the conning system - that being white con enemies, yellow con enemies, red con enemies and purple con enemies - requiring the invention of the bastardized term "deep purples" to denote enemies much higher level than the base. Normally, the conning system would handle that by giving you a base colour and swapping colours up from that. But when even the lowest minion you're fighting is purple, the conning system does not apply.

To quote Kids Next Door's spoof of DBZ: "His power level is off the charts! Must... Get... Bigger... Charts..." If we are indeed supposed to be suddenly rebalanced against +4 enemies, then one would expect the conning system to have been extended, at the very least with shades of purple or some other indicator. But it hasn't been, and I doubt it ever will be. Why? Because no matter what some players may insist, we are not balanced against and intended to fight enemies 4 levels above us. This is outside the scope of the system, and as such makes for a cheap way to add challenge which simply takes less time and effort to implement.

Simply throwing down high-conning enemies is a ham-fisted approach to adding challenge, because it's not interesting or unique, it's just the same enemies with higher stats. It also opens up teething problems, such as Mastermind henchmen conning -6 to enemies, at which point they may as well not even exist for all the good they do, as well as certain effects which are designed to be small but meaningful becoming irrelevant, such as low-level defence buffs from powers like Tough Hide or Cloak of Shadows.

Furthermore, this introduces the problem of accuracy, more specifically the problem of requiring to-hit buffs. "Slot for more accuracy," people say, ignoring the fact that the lower your to-hit is, the less accuracy actually means because it's a multiplicative effect. According to Arcana's guide, you have a 39% chance to hit an enemy 4 levels above you, necessitating around 140% accuracy slotting, which thanks to ED is not achievable via accuracy slotting unless you intend to slot not a whole lot else in your powers and grab the Accuracy Very Rare. And even then I'm not sure you'd get that high. This, then, necessitates to-hit buffs which not every powerset combo has, most notably including Dominators, if memory serves.

I have no problem with challenging enemies if it's done right. +4 enemies is not doing it right. It's a crutch which bastardises the entire system and throws power balance into a tumble dryer. Add to that the fact that the fiction behind this is badly uninspiring, notably lacking new enemies who could be a credible threat of such magnitude, and I see this as nothing more than developer godmodding. Yes, it can be beaten. Yes, one can prepare for it. It's still a cheap, lazy, cop-out way to provide higher-level challenges. We didn't need the Incarnate system to fight +4 enemies. The difficulty setting was fully capable of doing that beforehand.

*edit*
And something else to add, as well: character concept. There have been many arguments about "concept vs. performance," but even back in the old days, one could still always build for "enough" performance in part of his build and devote what's left of it to things that aren't necessarily optimal. Redundant travel powers if the character was envisioned to have them, Presence powers to denote a scary character even if he does not necessarily need more copies of Taunt and Confront, Darkness Mastery on a Dark/Dark Scrapper despite Body Mastery being what you need for higher accuracy and so on and so forth. Being prepared to fight level 54 enemies simply requires a more optimised build with a greater part of it being devoted to mechanics and a lesser part being devoted to concept, if anything remains at all. This is one of those things that has kept me out of most other MMOs - that my characters are meaningless abstract constructs existing as nothing more than tanks for their numbers. City of Heroes has generally been very good at making people invested into their own concepts and characters in the past, and I can only hope this continues.

But the reason I say this is I intentionally built my characters to fight enemies my level, as opposed to cranking the difficulty up, not because I couldn't build better but because I needed the excess performance to invest in concept-appropriate powers. I have no intention of changing that.

I mention Octavian because I forget the names of the others already involved in the arc. A few Syndicate heavies assist me in the missions to acquire the Neutron Bomb, then Wardog orders me to betray them. So why can't I betray HIM and side with the Syndicate? One of my former Syndicate allies even says "What are you doing here? We weren't even going to kill you!" implying that they had nothing against me, personally and would most probably have been open to my job application had I offered it. Furthermore, this would be a good opportunity to give me a chance to turn to the path of honour, as apparently the Syndicate soldiers I'm fighting are from Wu Yin and Tub Chi Tan's faction who still care about honour over business.

Please don't resort to semantic excuses when it comes to storyline possibilities. The only reason those semantic excuses - when they even exist, unlike in this case - is because the developers deliberately put them there to narrow the scope of choices, instead of simply providing a third option. I don't know why they decided to limit themselves to just two alignments the whole game over when clearly a "grey and grey" morality implies a THIRD, GREY morality, rather than "slightly less hero" and "slightly less villain."

This is like the excuses I've been given for years, that "You can't oppose Arachnos! They'll just turn off the mediport reclimators!" Well, yeah, maybe, but WHY was the game written so I rely on their reclimators? If even my double can steal a Mediporter from a Council base and use that, surely a crafty villain can find a way to save his own ***. I mean, we have bases with reclimators in them, don't we?

Writing your story so that it deliberately robs people of choice should not be used as the excuse for lack of choice. Because when it is used as that, I then turn to ask "Well, why was it written like this to begin with?" City of Villains I can excuse. The game was intended to be railroading and the illusion of choice was never a design goal. That's understandable. But they set out to build Praetoria on the basis of choice, and yet still wrote an intentionally railroading story with almost no choice in it. Why?

It seems like the Crusader arc does the same. The initial stages of it were relatively good, in the "I just want to smash stuff!" sense of heedless anarchy, but by the time I got to Nova and accomplished Wardog's arc, it was back to business as usual. Why do I say this? Well, I just got past Wardog's moral choice mission.

I knew from scene one that we were going to detonate a neutron bomb in Nova Praetoria, and the reason why is we couldn't get it topside, so "poor" Wardog had to "sacrifice" himself to wipe out a whole bunch of PPD and TEST Rangers. So what choices am I given?

A. With the Seers broadcasting this to everyone, now is the time for the Resistance to make a stand!

or

B. With the Seers broadcasting, now is the time to suck up to the Loyalists!

At least that's how I read the options. I don't know, this just seems odd to me. Why is it that my only alternative outside of the Resistance is Cole's administration? What about an option to take the detonators, walk back topside and hand them over to Octavian, letting Wardog and Vagabond get killed by the TEST in the sewers. After all, the Syndicate were trying to stop the bombing. Why can't I help them?

Though, I suppose, given the limitations of faction-on-faction warfare, this kind of works.

The thing, though, is I'm not asking for Mass Effect or Alpha Protocol here. I don't need to see my choices have a direct effect on the world or be presented with exactly the choice I have in mind. "About right" will do. The problem is that the game doesn't even bother to pretend it's giving us a broad spectrum of choices. It's like the game asks you "Will you save the kitty from the tree?" and gives you three answers:

A. Yes, it's the right thing to do.
B. Yes, but only if you pay me.
C. Yes, because I want to spite that guy over there who says I shouldn't.

How about "No, I won't, it can bloody well jump down on its own!"

---

That's really not the point, though, or not the main point, anyway. The main point that bothers me here is that we're always followers, the entire game through, and especially in Praetoria. It's always Vagabond's plan, Wardog's plan, Interrogator Kang's investigation, Dr. Steffard's task... It's always about faction identity.

About the only place this isn't as much the case is the Loyalists Power arc, but even that loses traction about half-way through and still throws us into the service of Praetor Sinclair or Marcus Cole or whever else that may be. And even when I swap over to City of Villains, the first thing I see is non other than Viridian, offering me to work under Arachnos, apparently in an attempt to explain why Arachnos mediporters will work on us.

And this doesn't have to be this way. It's not about technical limitations or the limitations of the genre. It's about a conscious decision to write all of your characters as somebody's lack because you don't know how to write a story where they aren't.

There are stories in the game (new stories, I mean) where we don't act like lackeys, but they are so few and far in-between it's like the developers don't want to put them in.

You could have gone with the Match Compensators Sure, you can't colour them, but they're probably the biggest handguns in the game in terms of bulk.

Speaking of which: I SO wish we had an AT that could use handguns and wasn't squishy...

*edit*
I also figure I should include an older character of mine I made some time ago - Akili, my reptile girl:



I know she's not exactly relevant to the Animal pack, seen as how she doesn't use any pieces from it, but I figured she was relevant to the thread in spirit, plus I wanted to show off

I didn't think you were serious

I have a problem with this in principle, in how you define who should have what effect against what. In various fiction, I've seen technology-based characters find themselves helpless before magic because... Well, it's magic, such as Darksiders, and I've seen technology-based characters suppress and overcome magic because it's "weak" to technology, such as in the world of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. I have, as a point of fact, a character called Mage-Killer Po, whose technological powers centre around tech shields to ward against magical effects and energy weapons designed to affect spirits and cut through magic barriers. By contrast, I have a technologist who wouldn't know magic from a parlour trick if you gave him a road map, yet owns his own R&D corporation.

The chief problem I've always had with making Origins mean more is WHAT they should actually mean. I have never, for the life of the game, seen people agree on what even a single Origin means or represents with any sort of majority.

Origins meant something in the game in pre-beta. It was decided to strip them of all meaning. You're arguing against an intentional, directed, specific decision the developers made on purpose, and as such you need to produce a convincing argument why their decision needs to be overturned, remembering that many of the developers who worked at the time are still with the game. You have so far failed to do so.

Adding friendly fire would also add a new wrinkle to the game, as well as adding a new wrinkle to the frown lines of every player who has the intention of teaming ever again. This is not a convincing argument.

You don't need to target yourself... Let me rephrase that - you CANNOT target yourself, so that's no impediment to using self-resurrect powers. This was one problem BABs mentioned when the power was being added, and which was never addressed.

All of that said, self-rez powers are deliberately vastly overpowered. Rise of the Phoenix and Soul Transfer are both autohit and have seriously nasty effects on them, and they have significant heals and endurance returns on them. These are not powers to let people use while not dead.

About the only thing that actually bothers me about dying to use a self-rez these days is debt. If a self-rez could remove the debt incurred in, say, the last 60 seconds, then I would have no problem with them whatsoever. You can do the same by dying and using the power? So die an use the power!

I will say one thing - if I have to choose between "free" to play but still playable and "gone to the dogs," I choose the former. I still like the game, despite everything.

One only hopes.

There are certain things which seem to "load" servers disproportionately. ITF "hill lag" and Khaan "second mission" lag are just a couple of examples, but any time you have many people gathering in one place, you produce disproportionate lag. Years ago, I was part of a Hami raid that crashed Victory twice.

I'm not saying that is or is not the cause of the higher server loads, but I do know people have been doing a LOT more ITFs lately, and a lot more Khaans as of this last week.

One can only dream. Even TechBot doesn't seem able to ignore that woman's influence.

---

I'd left of doing the Crusader missions indefinitely (and having done them now, for good reason), but running through them now has shown me ONE good thing: Vagabond. You know, the old grizzled military guy in camo pants and a huge beard? Yeah, he's a jerk and just as malicious as the rest of the Crusaders, but seeing him actually let me put into words what really bothers me so much about how morality in Praetoria is presented.

You know what's the most different about Vagabond? He isn't wearing a Resistance uniform. Oh, sure, Scott and the Trainers don't, but they don't really do much. But here is a contact for the Resistance - and a crusader, no less - who does things, gives missions, has goals... And yet doesn't feel like he's rubbing a resistance badge in my face the entire time. Vagabond, at least to me, feels like just some old bum who crashes with the Resistance, taps their resources for his own purposes and makes sure to help them out here and there, but he doesn't feel like he IS the resistance.

Every Resistance and every Loyalist contact out there feel like out-and-out propaganda for either side. It's always their faction that's to thank or to blame for everything that happens, it's always their faction's goals that they're fighting for, they always agree with their faction's ideology... It's faction-on-faction warfare, where people on both sides feel like they're completely brainwashed to see themselves as the resistance in the same way soccer fans will talk about how "we" beat "you" when describing the results of a match.

And while that may be appropriate for the single-minded goons that Praetoria seems to be made up of (seriously, talk about lacking character depth), it's not appropriate for my characters, because my characters are written and designed as able to think in more than binary choices. And I'm never given a third option. I'm never allowed to question my superiors. I'm never allowed to argue with my contacts, I'm never allowed to make a stand. Even if none of that matters in the long run, even if they're just meaningless fluff options, I still want to have them. Not letting Jack Hammer have his Fixadine because I don't like junkies, and instead giving it to the good doctor to work on his vaccine is what I mean. It doesn't matter to the game, but it matters TO ME.

And yet when I snag the whole Fixadine stash, what are my options? Let the Resistance have it and subjugate the Destroyers or hand it over to the Loyalists so I can suck up to them. How about "I don't like junkies, so I'll set bombs and blow this stash up so that NO-ONE can have it?" Not an option. Why? Because this endears me to neither the Resistance nor the Loyalists, and we all know that all Moral choices have to endear me to one those factions. Or, hell, why not be a dick and sell the Fixadine to the Suydicate and let THEM control the Destroyers? Make some money, get put in as the CEO of a random corporation. Why not? Well, because it doesn't suit either the Resistance or the Loyalists, and we know that's all that matters.

---

Call me crazy, but I have to say this: While the STORY of Praetoria is pretty well-written, none of the characters that take part in it have any depth to them. All of the characters we meet are two-dimensional stereotypes wholly and solely defined by their faction identity and never with any identity of their own. Cole is perhaps the only one who seems to have some semblance of depth, with the feel that he actually does want to be a good guy, but doesn't feel like he can afford it, but everyone else is just a basic single-sentence write-up. And I'm ashamed it took me this long to figure it out.

When we speak about depth, look at Crimson. He's generally a down-to-earth, all-business spy who doesn't seem to value human life or the law of the land, who is not above framing or even killing bad people, and who intentionally let Melvin be tortured and lose his life to Malta just to test him and Indigo. But on the other hand, he himself describes himself as "an old spy with too much blood on his hands," and from everything he says it's clear that he genuinely cares about Indigo. And even when it comes down to the wire, he'll still do the right thing instead of taking the law in his own hands and going out for revenge.

Or how about Pia Marino? Despite being a Seer of the Fortunata - one of the blandest, easiest, most uninteresting ways to write characters ever known to men (and the Seers of Praetoria are no different) - she still has so much character to them. On the one hand a professional with not just a reputation to guard, but years of training behind her, who nevertheless falls for an obvious conspiracy based on the vein hope of reuniting with her brother. She has very real desires that she tries to suppress, but ultimately fails, and when it's all over, Pia is left even more conflicted than before, but with a new-found resolve... Even if in melancholy... For her job.

About the only one with this level of depth in Praetoria is Investigator Kang, and only because he shows up in something like three other arcs after his own.

Resistance pants are only available under Tucked In pants legs for all body types and not as a regular Tights option, for some odd reason. And you are correct - the Resistance pants would brobably have cut it. I just about used the Warrior pants, but those were too ornate.

That's not a bad idea. Skulls with ribs shoulders are something I somehow always seemed to just tab over without noticing it, and the red body paint in the shape of a rib cage is a pretty cool idea. I think I mostly settled on an iron mace, however.

The problem with a savage/tribal look is that the game really only has one clothing textures for it, that being the rough patches you used. The problem is I've also already used that almost as-is on Brutticus, and I really don't want to make Brutticus again, but with a cow head.

Since I stopped at a mace for a powerset, I've started thinking if it may not be smarter to go with a different design, considering the game only has one tribal costume. Perhaps something more iron age, something more medieval. Now, of course, I've already used a semi-medieval design on Xanta so I can't go with JUST the Medieval pieces and call it a day... But I could probably get close, possibly using Armour Plate. Or Valkyrie. I'll see if I can't get a pic of what I have in mind.

*edit*
Here's a pic that... Didn't come out quite like how I expected it:



I like biker cow. A LOT! This is the one I'll be using, in fact