Samuel_Tow

That's the general feel I get out of them, myself, yes.

I agree with Bad here. I never understood the need to make the entire game, especially the LOW-LEVEL game so much harder as a general thing. Praetorian ambushes are absurd, and most Praetorian enemies feel like they were designed for the end game and just dropped in a much lower level range. Look at what low-level enemies had to use in the old game:

Hellion and Skull minions have one melee attack and that's it. They do have a ranged one, which they rarely use. Hellion and Skull lieutenants have all of one ranged attack and that's it. Sure, their bosses are nasty, but you don't actually start seeing bosses until around level 10 or more. And you almost never see debuffs of any kind. Well, the PPD have debuffs, at least three energy attacks per minion and they spawn bosses a lot. Resistance have two ranged and one VERY STRONG melee attack.

What the hell? What happened to the concept of "power curve?" It's gotten to the point where I can't wait to get out of Praetoria so the game will stop being so brutally punishing. And it's not like these harder enemies give greater rewards, of course not! The Vahzilok have two melee and one ranged attack and they give massive rewards, but when the PPD and the Resistance have the same, they're treated like ordinary enemies. And this should not be the level of difficulty in the lower levels. Should not.

I've gone on the record before as being sick and tired of ambushes, and that was last year. I said it in GR Beta and people told me "IT'S NOT DONE YET!!!" Well, it's done now, and I told you so - half the game is waves of ambushes. Ambushes are not the one-size-fits-all solution to every problem of difficulty. They are, in fact, a very BAD solution to the problem of difficulty, as all they do is just throw more numbers at you. Good difficulty is Protean. Good difficulty is the Hydra trial. Good difficulty is NOT the Dr. Steffard Ghoul mission which throws around 20 ambushes at you, multiple at a time, that grow in size as the team size increases.

And, really, why does "we want more challenging end game content" keep translating into "we'll give you more challenging LOW LEVEL content?" Did they not learn their lesson with the Hollows? It's painfully obvious that the Hollows was intended to be a much higher-level zone, likely 20-30 (hence why the leaders of the Outcasts and Trolls are there, and hence why the NPCs there had Fire Imps from the get go) that they dropped into a lower-level range, eventually having to redesign enemies, mission locations, outdoor spawns and amenities. So why do they keep making high-level content masquerading as low-level content? Or have the developers completely forgotten how to make low-level content at all?

And again, having specific more difficult challenges itself should not translate into raising the base difficulty of the game. Malta are hard, but you can still do things other than Malta. EVERYTHING in Praetoria is hard, and you have no option but to fight something hard. And like Malta, they don't give proportionate reward.

See, I don't actually mind paying too much money, provided I have that money to pay, and I usually have had it, at least recently. I don't see it as a waste. I see it as the price of impatience. I can pay less money if I want to do more work or wait a longer time, or I can pay extra and have the items right now. When given that choice and enough money to pay extra, then I will every time.

As I said before, the less I have to deal with the market, and indeed the less I have to deal with enhancing and training and build planning, the happier I will be. Ideally, when I hit 37, I want to get a round of enhancements all in one go and then not worry about them again until all the way up to level 47, when I'll snag a set of 50s. I don't bother with level 45 Commons simply because they do cost a lot, and my level 40 Commons don't expire anyway, so I can skip a level at no real downside.

What you're suggesting I do is sort of a "project," in that instead of getting a full round of enhancements NOW, I get them a little at a time over a longer period, presumably running around with SOs in the meantime. While that's certainly doable, I see no reason to do it if I have a better variant. You have to understand that I "grew up" in the age of SOs, when each "enhancement level" mean that I'd go to the market and buy a full set. If I COULDN'T buy a full set right away, then that meant I was doing something wrong, didn't have enough money and was generally something I didn't want to do. Times have changed, yes, but I have not.

About the only time I can at all foresee myself turning a character into a "project" is post-50 when I won't be getting any more enhancement slots anyway, but at that point I'll already have a full set commons anyway, and I'm still not convinced I want to get into Sets. I guess it doesn't hurt to try, but...

I'd say you can't take everything on face value. Beat-em-up games, which is what City of Heroes essentially is, simply require many, many faceless enemies just to provide gameplay, so you're bound to see thousands of them show up even from groups that shouldn't really have that many members (the Knives of Artemis description says there are 100 of them world-wide).

However, note also that our heroes never eat, sleep or poop, or indeed even sit down, that there are bus stations but no buses, that we heal from axe and gunshot wounds and grenade blasts by walking it off, that civilians are completely invulnerable and largely untouchable, and you'll soon realise that the in-game reality doesn't really have many pretentions to even fictional realism. The number of heroes and villains we meet is dictated by game necessity, but shouldn't be taken as canon in terms of storyline.

That's what I was saying, yes. They have a number of different powers divided into a number of different sets, but all of them are essentially the same one theme, and it's usually an exotic theme that doesn't fit a more generic concept.

The reason I prefer generic ATs to Epic ones is simple: Every time I suggest the creation of a generic AT that can do a combination of ranged and melee damage with lower-than-standard personal protection, people tell me to play a Kheldian. When I ask them how I can make that Kheldian have Fire powers, people just shrug and walk away.

Epic ATs tend to bring interesting mechanics to the table, sometimes interesting enough for me to want to play them. However, being concept-locked to one or two exotic themes makes them unusable for the most part. Even were I inclined to make, say, a Peacebringer, I can really only make one, because any other Peacebringer I make will just be the same character all over again. Yeah, I can make a slightly different build, but I can do that with multiple builds on the same character anyway. We have three now, after all.

I want a new Generic AT, because I want to use that AT with fire, cold, energy, radiation, dark and earth powers, which an Epic AT will not be able to achieve.

Honestly, I don't see any of those as being any less silly as having grapples shoot past the flight ceiling and grapple outer space.

Incidentally, I wouldn't be against an animation for holding onto a balloon as an alternative for Flight. Seriously.

However, the point of grappling is to swing from existing objects in the environment. That's what a grappling hook, as an example, does - it grapples onto a surface. The thing with swinging from birds or balloons that you create yourself is that once you have ability to make those, you can use them to fly directly, and as such would make at least halfway-decent flight powers.

As far as the pool you're suggesting, it's not too bad, but it seems to assume WEB swinging, which is not only problematic from an IP standpoint, but ignores the larger proportion methods for swinging that people who aren't Spider-Man tend to use, which is grappling hooks either fired from guns or thrown, linked to ropes, cables or chains. In fact, a lot of older-style cartoons will tend to have a character pull out a hook on a rope, swing it in his hand and toss it over a wall where it hooks onto the edge for him to climb up the rope.

Believe me - I have nothing against swinging as a power, not as a concept. Hell, that and climbing sheer surfaces are some of the things I'd really like to see in the game. The problem is mechanical, however - swinging requires things to swing from, otherwise it looks absurd.

Personally, I'd like to see a grappling hook like what they had in Tenchu, which is basically you point to a surface and if it's in range, your character throws a claw on a zip wire and zips to that surface, falling down if you zipped to a sheer wall. It's not exactly "swinging," but then even Spider Man cheats when he swings, because he can be standing on the ground, web to a street lamp and somehow "swing" himself 50 feet in the air from a standing start. Even the ninja rope in Worms couldn't do that.

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Come to think of it, Batman: Arkham Asylum had a fairly interesting system for swinging and zipping. You had a climbing grapple which could get you up to tall ledges by zipping to it, a swinging grapple which was only ever used to swing between Gargoyles ala Teleport, and a zip line which attached behind Batman and in front of him, carrying him along a plane, usually over a pit or electrified water or poison gas or some such.

You'll have a lot of fun if you ever study Russian, or any of the other Cyrillic languages, then

I don't have an answer for air control, other than "without it, the power would suck," but I do have an answer for things jumping out of the water. Great White Sharks can weigh several tons, yet they can jump clear out of the water a fair distance. Flying fish get their names because they can jump out of the water and glide around 50 metres through the air. Submarine-based ballistic missiles are shot from underwater, yet have no problem leaving the water's surface and flying through the air.

And that's just "real life." If you look at contemporary fiction, Soul Reaver's Raziel is able to leap quite a ways out of the water, about two storeys high, by diving down from the surface, then swimming up really really fast. I'm pretty sure Kevin Costner did somewhat the same thing in Water World.

Can you quote even one instance of a character swinging from point to point to point over open ocean? Because even Spider Man doesn't do that. He will occasionally swing from a hovering helicopter, yes, but a lot of the times when there are no buildings around, he'll start wondering what to do and usually whip up a web parachute so he doesn't pizza on the ground.

This is a question of pure visuals, and there is no way that the visuals for such a thing can be anything but god awful. Imagination is one thing, but we're not playing a text-based adventure here. Visualisation is a very important part of the game.

It is less biassed, because humans running on all fours don't HAVE to look silly. It's how a player uses the animation that determines whether it's silly or not.

There is NO WAY to make Swing Lines not look silly, and that's including using it near buildings. When the swing lines don't shoot at walls to attach them but instead shoot straight up in the air, there is no way to get around that fact. There is no instance of grappling air that looks non-silly.

The difference is running on all fours is only silly when the player goes out of his way to make it like that. Swinglines in the current engine are always silly regardless of what you do with them.

That's more or less what I do, really. And it gives me enough INF for Commons, but I don't think that's enough for Set Inventions. To quote my experience from yesterday: My SS/Inv Brute hit 37 and got a full round of level 40 Commons. She had somewhere between 50 and 60 million on her at the time, and when I was done with enhancing her powers, she had a little over 30 million. The whole ordeal took me a little over an hour, with Alchemical Silver constituting the bulk of my cost, with 8 needed for accuracy, 4 needed for defence and 4 needed for run speed enhancements (sigh...) for a total of 16 at a pretty steep price. I expect to get back to around 60 million by level 47, when I'll get another round of level 50 Commons this time.

However, people keep quoting single recipe costs in the hundreds of millions, and cheap or not, I simply cannot afford that.

Actually, I think this is a very pertinent question: Why do I want to frankenslot? To be perfectly honest, with the way Set Inventions are now, I really don't, but I wanted to know more about the system so I'm not operating on preconceptions and hearsay. If, however, I had the ability to use multi-aspect enhancements of any kind (that doesn't break any powers), then I would want to frankenslot for the simple fact that I like the math behind it. It makes the system ever so slightly more pliable and allows me to make more interesting slotting choices for an upward gain of enhancement values, and that's something I'd never refuse if it came without a catch.

For some characters I do indeed need to free up slots, that's true, but I very rarely look for more power than I get out of basic slotting. It's good enough for me and for most of the things I have to face. Granted, the Incarnate system seems to be purpose-designed to require higher stats (or a team) but I'm reserving my judgement on that one for at least another year before we see what the system actually constitutes.

Basically, my reason for looking at Set Inventions Enhancements was... Because they're there, and I try to make use of everything that's in a game if I can. In this case, though, I'm not sure the opportunity cost is enough to shift my lazy *** from the comfort spot that is Common Inventions.

Well, if that's where it originated, then I can see what you mean. I respect BABs as a developer, but I still prefer the "they just fade away" concept, as it allows each person to pick their own method of dealing with villains and it doesn't raise so many questions, precisely because it's undefined.

I don't think there's anything in-game to claim either way, so I'll stick with "what happens is what you want to think happens."

I'm a very touch, very angry person. If I expected people to psychically sense what upsets me and never do or say it, then I would expect no-one to ever say a word ever again. Because I understand how absurd that it, I make it a point to NEVER TAKE OFFENCE at people saying or doing anything that I have not specifically stated my distaste for.

If I don't want people calling me a certain thing or doing a certain thing on a team, I will say so. If they stop, it's all good. If they continue to do it anyway, then I take offence. But I don't expect them to know what my sensitivities are, and it actually bugs me greatly when people try to dance around a subject for fear of offending me when I don't care either way and all it does is make things awkward.

I'd say the root cause of the problem is that while City of Heroes may have started out as being about Comic Books specifically, it has grown into a much broader spectrum of themes over the years, including genres like sci-fi, fantasy, film noir and even anime. Even within comic book themes, you make fun of spiky shoulders and other "dark age" costume elements, when the fact of the matter is that some people still very much do like those themes. Dark age comics were popular for a reason, after all. It wasn't just because comic book readers lost their minds for a few years.

About the most damaging thing you can do in this game is criticise other people's concepts as being "inappropriate," because easily the game's greatest strength is the ability to create characters that at least feel like they are really and truly our own. And if we so choose to not make four-colour tights costumes, but instead walk around in jeans and a tank top and if we so choose to not call ourselves Something Man or, say, Samuel Tow just to bring up a random example, then so be it. The game's settings really don't discriminate against any of that, even if the actual signature heroes tend more towards tights and cape than anything else. However, we still have people like Foreshadow (Hollows trainer) and Back Alley Brawler (Galaxy City trainer) who don't really look like heroes at all.

Granted, there will always be people who care nothing for concept and call themselves something like iPwn, give no bio, use a random costume and just dive into min/max optimization head-first, looking for the best DPS to get the most XP or Shards per given unit of time. That's the nature of the beast in any online game. And, yes, I roll my eyes at those, too. But it just feels to me like you're throwing a LOT of legitimate concepts under the bus just because they don't fit in your vision of what the game's theme should be, and that's a really bad thing to do. Some of us are pretty defensive about our concepts

Really, when it comes to fiction, I would treat City of Heroes as the land of anything goes. If you can think of it and give reason why it exists, the game world will support it. And that's where the fun's at, really.

I disagree, in that I don't think that's all of it. Jack Emmert once said that if Superman existed in City of Heroes, he would be of the Natural origin, and Superman isn't human or "normal" under any definition of the word. A good example from our own universe is Kheldians, more specifically Peacebringers, who bring with them alien energy powers, yet are still considered and tagged Natural.

There's a lot of that. At the risk of offending practically everybody, it always amazes me how touchy Americans are when it comes to genders in language, considering English has almost no genders in the entire language, and yet they still find ways to be pissy about it.

I speak a language where every single noun has a gender, be it animate or inanimate. A chair is male, while a table is female, just as an idle point of fact. A knight is male, but a ninja is female. Oh, and bicycle is of a "middle" gender, which we use to refer children out of context and certain objects perceived to be "smaller" in any sense. It all comes down to what suffix a noun ends at, and it defines what suffixes adjectives referring to that noun have.

It's a bit clunky to learn, but it's actually easier to tell what an adjective is referring to most of the time.

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I refuse to use made-up gender-neutral pronouns which don't exist in the English language because I disrespect the imaginary sexism presented here. Men don't get called the wrong gender? I do in this game. All the time. For the last few years, I've played predominantly female characters, and I never correct people when they call me "she," because it is irrelevant. They don't know me, and they can't be expected to walk on eggshells just in case I'm not what I seem. In fact, it feels more awkward for people who don't know me at all to call my female characters "he." I refuse to live in a world where people have to constantly walk on eggshells for fear of insulting someone over such trivial information.

And, yes, gender is trivial in this context. In a general discussion about fiction and game systems, gender is irrelevant, unless we want to actually imply sexism, in that women are incapable of enjoying the same fiction as men, or are incapable of playing the same games. Where gender becomes relevant, such as how female characters are treated in-game and how the person behind the characters feels about it, then this can be addressed as it becomes important. But it does not matter out of context.

Simple example: I am not American. I live in Eastern Europe. Because I have a fairly good command of the English language, however, people who don't know me always assume I'm American anyway, and expect me to feel patriotic about the 4th of July, to be interested in presidential election debates or know what happened in Season 3 of Family Guy. I don't make a point of correcting them unless my ethnicity and nationality becomes relevant, such as when discussing which servers I can play on (East Coast, as West Coast ones lag too much) or why I don't know the meaning of certain words in English.

I know this whole thing will probably make me sound like a giant dick, but I refuse to foster a community and a world where people have to be afraid of accidentally using the wrong word.

That's the kind of fridge logic that I always seem to miss. Yikes! Yeah, if villains get teleported to the Zig upon defeat, then we are putting such a stress on the system just by running missions that someone would need to nuke a city to exceed. Holy hell!

That's really why I never got into Inventions. I looked at the whole system, and instantly a list of all the things about it that bugged me started forming in my head. "There's the thing, and that, and this here and UGH! Forget it!" Of course, this isn't objective, but nothing I've heard of Set Inventions has ever convinced me otherwise. Still, I figured I might as well ask and know what I'm missing if I'll be ignoring Inventions, and it just seems like I'm missing something I don't want to bother with anyway. Yeah, that deprives me of a lot of performance, but the whole thing's just liable to make me hate the game before it gives me any benefit.

Sometimes the toast lands butter side down, sometimes not. Imagine that.

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And just to post something on topic, if you have a point to make, then make a point. Coming here and effectively saying "You people stop what you're doing! You know who you are!" is pointless, and expecting anyone other than people as bittermuch as you to pat you on the back gets you... Well, what you've already gotten.

Or, to quote Spy Dogs: "The news today - things are happening in places all over the world."

My heart yearns for the former, but my gut tells me it'll most likely be the latter, based on how the development team is approaching the concept of "end game" lately.

Yeah, don't ever come to the forums! Just shut up and play the damn game! Word up, my homie, as it were.

I think this is really what it comes down to. The way the Incarnate system's basic design interacts with my distaste for teaming, it just means I'll spend ages and ages getting anywhere, replaying level 50 content, and actually making a pretty penny off it. That's something I noticed when fighting to get my Incarnate slot on Brutticus - 50s make a LOT of INF just killing stuff, which I hadn't really noticed before as I don't really play my 50s a lot.

So, yeah, if I can find a decent build that doesn't include oddball enhancements, I could see myself making this a long-term project along with Incarnate slots. We'll see how that goes.