Samuel_Tow

That's a pretty big understatement. I complain about team-only content, bad writing, bugs, developer direction and so forth, but the bother these present for me PALES IN COMPARISON to the sheer towering rage something a simple as "funny Freakshow" tends to inspire in me. Or "funny Nemesis," for that matter. This has the effect of yanking me out of the atmosphere so hard it pulls me out of my socks.

The funny Freakshow joke was funny once. They're idiots, and it's funny to see idiots hurt themselves, at least when they're unrepentant bad guys. It wasn't funny twice, when they were going to school, but at least it was endearing. It has been annoying and irritating every subsequent time it's used, and these days it's getting to the point it's becoming insulting. And that's just one example.

There is room for humour in a serious work. In fact, the original Lethal Weapon was a pretty good example of mixing in humour with an ostensibly serious story. However, once you insert comedy into a story, it becomes very difficult to take ANY part of it seriously, which ruins the dramatic effect. And once you start adding parody, you've pretty much guaranteed that not only will I never be able to see the work as anything even remotely seriously, but you've ensure I won't want to see it at all.

Parody and breaking the fourth wall has no place in City of Heroes. Yes, instances of that do exist, and they are very unwelcome and disruptive. The very last thing I want is to add more to the mix. If I ever got the point where I could go "Screw it, do whatever." then I'm not going to stick around to see what gets done, because at that point I will no longer care about the game. But as long as I care about this game and its lore, then I do not want to see City of Heroes make a complete fool of itself while yelling "Laugh! Laugh, damn you!" in my face.

Pretty much my impressions, as well. I lasted about the first minute of this before it started feeling like I was listening to some kind of large construction equipment working. Never was a fan of that kind of music.

Of course, if we're going to be talking about music in the game to begin with, we first need to make the whole thing worth unmuting my music volume, because what's in the game, between zone travel and ambient mood music is terrible. The few good tunes, such as that inside Yin's Market are not worth turning game music back on when most of the time the "music" is not worth listening to.

I'm going to have to disagree with this idea on the fundamental reason that it takes the piss out of what is ostensibly a serious game. Yes, there are (crappy) jokes all over the place, but by and large the game is not a self-referrential, self-aware comedy, and I wouldn't want it to become one. I HATE games, movies and generally stories that do that. This is a big reason why I can't play any of those cartoony PRGs that have hammers with 100T written on the side and where enemies fly up and crash into the screen.

I don't want joke powersets in this game. Ever.

So does Blaze.

*edit*
So does Char, come to think of it. Not kill outright, but equivalent nonetheless.

Define "need."

It's a question of feel for me. When I play my characters, ESPECIALLY my Blasters, I play them by gut more than anything else. If I stop to think what power I "should" be using or what power would fit the character, it means I'm dead, because I don't think fast enough. What this means is that I develop an almost instinctive sense of what I want to use and what I DON'T want to use. Every time I go to fire a power, I'll tend to fire the one I most "want" to use, and like it or not, that's the one which has proven to work the best and save my *** the most often. In Fire Blast, that's Blaze. Simple as that.

Now, there's something to be said about fanfare and flash when I have a spare minute to plan ahead, which is really the only time I think to use snipes - just for the hell of it. But they don't feel like powers I want to use, because they don't feel like powers that are very useful. And like it or not, the things which motivate me to want to use them the most are the ones that are the most useful, which is to say the things that get stuff dead and the things that keep me from getting dead. For Blasters, Snipes ain't it.

Really, I wish that the powers with the greatest fanfare and rule of cool effect were also the most useful ones. Snipes should be the kind of powers I want to use all the time, not the ones I use when "I might as well." But they're not, which is why I want to see them improved.

Oh, I don't measure DPA without reason, either. I still measure things by how much fun I'm having. But one day I stopped to think... Man, I HATE using my snipes. It's like I want to use them, but it feels like such a burden and so much trouble. Why is that? Maybe they're just not good attacks? Let's run some numbers. Oh, OK, I see! THAT'S why I didn't feel like using them. Because they're just not very good. OK, it makes sense now.

I don't go into characters to analyse them, but when I've actually gotten a feel for a character and something feels wrong, I try to figure out why and solve the problem. To this day, I've not been able to find a snipe I liked to use, and I've tried probably all of them aside from Moonbeam. They just feel like a waste and a liability, and that's on a "what is fun" to use level. Every time I think of what power I want to use in battle, snipes are just about dead last. I'll always pick Blaze, Power Burst, Bone Smasher, Cosmic Burst, Tazer or even Power Push over a snipe, and I pretty much the only time I'll actually WANT to use them is when the last enemy in a spawn takes off running or when Aim and Build Up aren't recharged yet. Or when I can afford to goof off, which on a Blaster is exceedingly rare.

They're more defined because they use the male skin textures. It's the only thing I had to work with

They have "above average" damage, at 2.7 scale. That's right around the scale damage of Bone Smasher, though it deals a little more thanks to AT mods, or almost on the nose of the 2.67 scale damage that Head Splitter does (in a cone) for Scrappers with an equal damage mod, half the animation time and no interruptibility.

Furthermore, the power simply animates far, FAR too slow for the above average damage it does. Your typical snipe has a 4.67 second animation time for 2.7 scale damage. Even ignoring Blaze, which is borderline cheating, Power Burst has a 2 second animation for 2.12 scale damage, which is very little less damage for under half the animation time. I don't want to get into DPA calculations, but I will say this:

When you hit Aim and Build Up, you have a little over 9 seconds' worth of 162.5% damage buff, in which time you want to pump out as much raw damage as possible. A snipe ain't it, because the damage it does is not even remotely worth the time it takes to pull one off, and that's if you don't get interrupted. The only worthwhile way to open with a snipe is to use it BEFORE Aim and Build Up, which then means you have to spend almost two seconds activating those, which is a bad thing to do when you just aggroad a spawn potentially containing multiple things that can chain-hold you.

I can understand that people enjoy having that one really big, really long-ranged, really slow attack. I'd personally love to have one, myself. Snipes ain't it. They're too weak, too slow and FAR too situational for what the powers bring to the table. Even Assault Rifle's Sniper Rifle being brought down to 3.67 seconds is still too long, and that lacks the benefit of Aim.

True, that's possible. There's this myth that when guys make female characters, they're always busty cheese cakes and when women do it, they're always conservative and stylish, so you can always tell who made what. I, personally, don't buy it, but it is out there, and I've seen many people discuss that over the years.

However, I have some doubt that this guy had the mental faculties to make that kind of predictive stylistic judgement Granted, quality of spelling on the Internet isn't a foolproof indicator of personal intelligence, as some very intelligent people are also lazy and type like complete idiots just the same. However, what really makes me think that is barging in on a total stranger, making demands and proceeding to pester and insult them is not the hallmark of a discriminating person who thinks this far ahead.

In my case, though, I don't think I tend to leave much room to speculate on what the gender of the player behind the character is when I team with people, as I just don't tend to ever be "in character" and "I'm not the kind of guy who" tends to be a big part of my regular expressions

More specifically, snipes take far too long to deal far too little damage (REALLY crappy DPA, in other words) making them a poor use of Aim and/or Build Up. They have the advantage of range, but to take advantage of that means to fire at a range from which you can't follow up, and their unbuffed damage is not all that remarkable. There really are very few situations where using a snipe is at all worth it (mostly when Aim and Build Up haven't recharged or if you have neither), and very few of them use it for damage.

You can't use Snipes in combat with any reliability, and even if you could they wouldn't be worth it. They're far, far too situational for the short recharge (and damage) they are given. Dominator snipes have the right idea, scaling up to 3.56 (from the 2.7 that Blasters have), but Dominators are an exception to practically every rule.

I take and use my snipes in a team setting, that much I'll admit, but I do so for lack of decent recharge to cycle my other attacks or, as is the case for Assault Rifle, for LACK of other attacks. Had I the option to just cycle my more normal blasts, as I do with Archery or Fire Blast, I would scarcely ever use my snipes, as I do with Blazing Bolt and Ranged Shot.

The reason I bring Snipes up is that I have a general gripe with Blaster power balance and all the oddities they are given that don't really seem to be all that great. Nukes on their own are fine. I could question them, but they're fine. But add snipes, questionable support powers, underpowered pets, absurd-cast bombs and so on and it's just one more thing on a pile of many others.

When multiple damage components hit and when you catch some AoE. But nukes don't always land all their damage components. In fact, you run a chance of only landing one. You only "win" if you use them to open a fight, and even then only if you actually kill everybody.

Blaster nukes are a weird thing. They're balanced by really long recharge, they're balanced by highly unpredictable damage, they're balanced by a total drain and they used to be balanced by STUNNING you when you used them way back when, so they've already gotten at least one straight upgrade. To my eyes, Nukes as they are now, along with Snipes as they are now, are all leftovers from a very... Odd idea of balance that used to linger around the time of Launch. I don't want to cripple the powers, but I honestly don't feel they deserve ALL of those drawbacks.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Probably gonna' have to re-save all my old files just to make sure. Really, though, if I can pin down the format, the costume files aren't all that complex to parse. They're downright simple, especially considering they're delimited with new line symbols. The files aren't big, either, so it shouldn't take much memory to work on them.

Yeah, I'll try to have something done at some point tomorrow, just to prove a point if nothing else.

I'll agree with "puffy," but if we consider that there's nothing we can do about the model at large, I feel that by FAR the largest problem with female models is the skinny arms. The only real way to make a female look like she has muscular arms is to crank the muscle slider all the way to the right, which does give her decent arms... But also gives her a continental butt.

The only solution that I can see to that is to just give women the ability to swap their hands. Now, I've been saying this for a while, but that's not as wild as it sounds. Foreshadow already does that. Seriously, go to the hollows and check him out. That's what those rings around his shoulders are for. The way he does it, it looks like, is to use the existing Robotic Arms tech, only his robotic arms aren't robotic. They're human. That's why he gets those big unique biceps. Yeah, I'll admit it would be weird to have the rings on women (they're what helps the arms join the torso in a non-ugly way), but it's better than nothing.

A proper muscular texture would help, because those tend to give definition to the muscles and make them look like they're bigger than they are, making women's sausage arms look like they have a bit more shape to them. This doesn't change the model, but it LOOKS better. Moreover, having actual arm swaps would help significantly, as well. It would let us keep a leaner body while still having bigger arms.

Suuure! Looks perfectly heroic Seriously, though, cool costume. Watch out for weirdos out there

That's actually an interesting topic. To my mind, weird characters seem to catch the eye of a particular type of person, because they tend to stand out a lot. Just the other day, for example, I saw someone say IN BROADCAST "Ew! Slime Girl smells funny!" I didn't catch that until after I was out of the D, though. Point is, Slime girl stands out. A lot. Even in her non-glowing version. Some people just walk around and don't care, but some do stop by to wonder why the hell this thing exists.

I can only speak for myself, but I know my eyes kind of skip over "ordinary" looking characters, by which I mean essentially people in clothes. I appreciate that that sounds awfully inclusive, but consider that over half of our skin tones are non-human, and over half of the human ones are black, yet I always seem to see people use the same 3x3 colours top right. I don't read into that, it just doesn't catch my eye. However, whenever I see, say, a blue woman or a green man, or even a full robot, I go and have a look, because it's interesting an unusual. I can only imagine my weirder designs catching the eyes of even weirder people. Considering the kind of... Things I've had to get past to even find material for some of these, I can kind of see how that could be problematic.

I don't, however, get many leeches on my female characters, even though not all of them are very conservative. Hell, I have one who goes around in chainmail bikini. I attribute that to the fact that the game has such a vast supply of cute girls, be they piloted by men or women, that the chances of attracting a lech are fairly remote. The game lacks, by contrast, a very large supply of weird and undefinable characters, so when you do take one out for a spin, you're essentially mopping up all the potential weirdos, since there isn't much else for them to see.

An unfortunate side effect, to be sure, but the costumes are worth it.

This kind of uncompromising "quid pro quo" approach to balancing is the one thing I don't think I ever agreed with Castle on, and for one simple reason: It assumes that things are balanced correctly, and we just need a different interpretation of that balance. This makes it incredibly difficult to pitch for an increase in ANYTHING, even in absurd cases like Cloaking Device or Voltaic Sentinel. It ensures that balance of all things is cosntantly attempting to remain static, often in the face of what people actually do in practice.

I don't feel Blaster nukes are balanced well as they are now. What I feel should happen is not a case of adding usability at the cost of damage or recharge. It's a case of making them better. I know this seems like a ludicrous statement considering how much damage they do, but the problem is that Blaster nukes more than almost any other power in the game are balanced by annoyance. As people have explained already, their drawbacks can be mitigated in one way or another. The biggest thing they do, at least to me, is make it so I don't want to bother. And that's not good.

And herein lies the problem. Almost always, nukes will leave "some mopping up..." WHICH YOU CAN'T DO, because you have no endurance, no recovery and no toggles. Now, granted, there are ways to... Kind of mitigate this, most popularly inspirations. But then inspirations can help you overcome a great many limitations, up to and including God Mode crashes.

Here's what I've been saying all along: I don't mind a big boom that costs A LOT and kills ALMOST everything, provided it still gives me at least SOME means to clean up after it. Like I said - having the power cost 40-60 points of endurance and be immune to endurance reduction slotting and buffs would still constitute a significant "dip." Hell, you can take that up to 80 or 90 now that everyone has Fitness. Even just a little is better than nothing at all.

What can just a little buy me? Well, it can buy me a single use of Blaze or possible Consume. It could allow me the ability to fly so I can get the hell out of there. It can buy me the chance to hit Frozen Aura, or even Hybernate. Or, at the very least, it can help me not drop all of my toggles.

I don't really ask or expect Inferno to act like Rain of Arrows (though a Blackheart style Heart of Darkness sort of pillar of flame into the sky would be cool), in that I don't want Inferno to be any weaker or recharge any faster. I don't want nukes to be more USEFUL as much as I want them to be LESS SITUATIONAL.

Feel free But you can thank the people at the costume redesign thread who came to my aid and helped me put it together. Even if it picks up weirdos, it's still worth it, I think

Mouse over tool tops, yes. And I also agree. They were very, very convenient when shopping. I have no idea why they disappeared, but the last I heard was this was a bug. I would very much like to see it fixed.

In both pictures, I've had to cheat a LOT with the sliders, and I've just about maxed out what's possible. Both women have their "muscle" (which for women translates into "butt" for some reason) slider, and the waists of both are almost as high as the waist slider will go. The green one has very narrow hips, just to make her butt look slightly less giant when she bends over for combat pose, as well. When you push the sliders as much as I have, the models start to behave in weird ways.

I have to agree with this. I have a general taste for aesthetics which favours longer legs and larger feet, and not just for women. The problem, especially with women with the sliders set high, is that they end with giant breasts and giant butts, but tiny little hands and feet. That's one of the reasons both of the characters I posted are wearing large boots and gloves. These are the only options in the game with a larger hand and foot size This is especially true for characters with digitigrade legs, hooves to be precise. I tend to want these to be big, but the game simply won't let me, as I can't control hand and foot size. This is especially noticeable on the Huge model where the chest balloons much faster than anything else.

Precisely. I often say I have to "cheat" to get that kind of muscular look, for the simple fact that I have to cover up the model's key points with bulky gear to make her look like she's bigger than she is. In both instances, I've used large shoulder pads to both elevate and extend the shoulders, larger gloves and boots to make the hands and feet bigger, and actually very small heads to make their bodies seem bigger than they actually are. My methods may be questionable, but one REALLY has to push the editor to produce anything even remotely like this, which I think speaks to a limitation in the editor, itself.

The body sliders are VERY limited, and this touches on something I've talked about before. The female waist is too thin at all slider settings, because the waist slider only works sideways. It can make the waist wider or narrower, but it cannot make it thicker or thinner front-to-back. The "chest" slider isn't worth mentioning, but widening the chest IS possible via the shoulders slider. Only that still works left-to-right only, and leaves the actual rib cage flat. You can, in effect, make a woman in City of Heroes wider or narrower, but you can't give her any real volume beyond the mislabelled "muscle" slider.

And then there's this. Yes, precisely. I originally made this to prove a point, which is that the game - as it is right now - can draw up a muscular female texture in a way that's at least passable. If I could do this with NO artistic skills and a piece of software that was outdated five years ago, an actual artist with access to development tools should be able to make something far, far better. What I did was nothing more complicated than replacing the female skin textures with the male tights textures (because the make skin textures have nipples O.o), and it's still been good enough that a fair few people have actually liked it enough to want to use THAT in the game.

I make no qualms about this: I suck. An actual professional can likely do much, much better than my hack job. And the mere fact that this always gets so much attention when I post it tells me that there's room in the game for a female muscular texture.

You know, I could probably write a programme to do that. It should be as simple as reading the first 19 rows off the "scales" file then reading the rest of the "costume" file and just writing that to something.costume. Hmm...

*edit*
There's something weird going on with costume files. It seems like some of them have a CostumeFilePrefix value right at the start, yet some of them don't. The values appear to be "huge," "fem" and "male." I think older costume files don't have that but newer costume files do. Furthermore, some costume files have a BodyType value right at the end of the header, yet some don't. The only BodyType values that I've seen so far have been 1 for Female costumes and 4 for Huge costumes, but Male costumes don't have that variable at all. It could be assume.

If I can pin down the exact format of these things, then copy-pasting slider values automatically should be easy. So easy, in fact, that I'm not sure why it hasn't been done already.