Samuel_Tow

Exactly. The problem stems from a few problems, all relating to what one must achieve for a nuke to have full effect:

1. A nuke needs Aim and/or Build Up to be truly effective, lest you're left with no endurance, no recovery and angry enemies you didn't do enough damage to kill.

2. Enemies need to be close together for all of them to be affected. Yes, nukes have a long range. It's not nearly as long as it might feel, however, and even an unaggroed spawn can often be too spread-out to affect. So when you blow up your endurance bar and are left with a bunch of enemies not dead, that's problematic.

3. You need to be capable of acting and not debuffed. If you fire this in the middle of a fight, those are not guaranteed. For instance, a good time to nuke would be when a Chielf Mentalist has held you and his lackeys are beating on you, but you CAN'T because you're held. Or when that Iron Strongman debffs your damage, a nuke is that much less useful.

4. You need to be lucky, because a nuke is a crapshot. Each nuke has three damage components: a 3.0 scale damage one guaranteed, a 1.5 scale damage one with a 75% chance to occur and another 1.5 scale one with a 50% chance to occur. A lucky nuke can wipe a spawn even with no damage buffs. An unlucky nuke can leave minions standing, with you out of end to respond.

I've tried using Nova and Inferno as last-resort solutions, usually when I'm just about to get my *** kicked. Most of the time I either die before the power animates, fire and miss half the spawn, or fire and don't kill everything. Nukes CAN be used as a last resort, in the same way that snipes CAN be used for pulling. They're just not very good for it. The best way to use a nuke is to head off a spawn before it scatters, activates shields and debuffs and before it attacks YOU, and, of course, when your self-buffs are still active.

That's why nukes are problematic - their huge cost means you have to save them and save them and save them because they're so dangerous to use, that they become largely impractical. Lowering their cost to something that's still high but not as complete would, in my opinion, solve almost all gripes people have with them.

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Just as a final note, I don't agree with powers designed so that you never want to use them. I don't care how good they are at that point.

Thunderous Blast deals -40 endurance points to the caster PER TARGET affected. With a typical nuke, you want to hit as many people as you can manage, which means it drains you to nothing anyway.

Personally, I don't mind nukes in terms of function so much, and I have nothing against them being recharge-bound, but I still feel the crash is excessive. It's God Mode crash levels, for Pete's Sake! I don't really expect a nuke to be part of my attack chain, but I really don't want to be afraid to use one.

Fun fact: The dragon form has a significantly smaller chest than the human form I really have no reason I can give for this, and neither is past middle (didn't look right on such a tiny human).

I didn't petition either of the two, mostly because I'm not sure there's sufficient ground to. One of them seemed like he was just a little slow, and the other guy was a dick, but not really THAT out of line. Maybe because I left for my missions pretty quickly.

That's actually a collage I put together for the costume redesign thread. Most of the time when I play this one, I'm using the dragon since that's what she fights in, and that's basically what the bulk of City of Heroes constitutes. I can see people approach a cute if (intentionally) weird girl, but I don't actually use that costume almost at all.

And the part I wonder is... I agree with you that the dragon form is weird. It weirds ME out, and I made it But that's kind of why I made it to begin with, so I wonder if that same weirdness that repulses some people isn't the kind of thing that draws a specific kind of person out. I mean, if I saw something like that running around, I'd definitely want to take a closer look, which is why I'm thinking the creep factor may be contributing here.

I'm not on a high-population server... Not VERY high - Victory here. And I haven't really noticed a large influx of brand new players, which is what these guys feel like they are (part of why I try to not be a dick to them as best I can). Maybe I'm just looking for reasons where none exists, but this girl has already attracted two weirdos in two days, and that's a new record for me.

The only reason I ask is because it seems some characters I make tend to gather a... Following, let's say. People will come over to have a look, and sometimes when I'm just standing around talking, people will come up and start circling around and getting in-between me and my team-mate and sometimes even try to chat me up... In that endearing barely-coherent broken English we're all familiar with.

That's SOME characters. Other characters people simply ignore like I don't exist. A lot of the time they're female characters, predictably, but seriously - does the "dragon form" in that pic actually look female?

He said what I quoted, but that's how I read it. Unless he was implying he wanted to ask me frequently asked questions, which... May not be out of the realm of possibilities.

Oh, yeah, and then there's that. I've seen that DB error a few times, but it's exceedingly rare. At first it looked like the standard "Page cannot be found" error I get from time to time, but this was different. I forget what the error said, but I'm pretty sure it was an internal error in the "site" itself somewhere.

Actually, now that you mention it, I WAS getting lost packets that day, and I know because I kept checking the City of Heroes /netgraph to find out what the stuttering was about. Whenever it's bad, it's always high levels of "Duplicate in" packets that seem to go missing, though I've never quite learned what the three types of lost packets on that mean.

I guess I may not have been seeing this on other sites because I they weren't as discriminating about the packets that got lost, which would explain the problem. Then I may have to modify my gripe in that these forums may be a little too sensitive to these things, but with secure authentications, I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about it.

I have a laptop, but that's hooked to the same router, and I can check from work, which hooked to an entirely different (but equally as crappy) provider. I do, however, know that I get slow loads and logouts from work, too. I'm not sure what that's about, however, as the internal network there is... Complicated. It goes through multiple routers and then across town to another building before even getting to the ISP.

It's rare that I've seen the forums as bad as on that day, however, but I HAVE seen them act like this before. It's just that when I usually do, I tend to ignore them and go do something else.

I think I'll use the "I'm not a native speaker of English" excuse here When I say there's "no reason," what I actually mean to say is that there is no GOOD reason, which is to say no reason I'm prepared to respect, for these things to have happened. Obviously, I didn't word this correctly, and for that I apologise, but that's what I meant. I can kind of infer that the reason was conservation of labour in some manner, but the result is not good. Not as good as it could have been, at any rate.

I "moved the goal posts" because the interplay between story and gameplay is what sinks the Incarnate system for me. I have no problem with TFs, hard TFs or hard end-game TFs. None at all. I simply choose not to do them. However, these TFs gate an entire storyline that I want to be involved in. My central problem is that the very framework of the TF system works against the core of the Incarnate system, which is more or less an ego stroke, the way it's written. In some cases, TFs can indeed work to that theme, if they were properly built up and presented, and my sincere apologies to the developers, but the ones we got in I19 ARE NOT.

My problem is actually akin to the divorce between costume items and stats. I want the storyline, but not the TFs. The easy solution to this is story arcs, but I'll believe that when I see it. The slightly less unbelievable solution is to make the TFs make sense, which they currently don't, especially within the context of the 45-50 game.

It seems like I keep changing the subject, but that's only because all of these subjects are intertwined, and I'm prepared to give on one to gain on another, so the point keeps shifting depending on where a particular poster pushes. Difficult content is not a problem for me, because I simply avoid it... When I have an option. When I do choose to engage in it, I prefer that to be within a context which makes me agree that this content should be as difficult as presented. Take the Statesman TF, for instance. I don't like the fact that Recluse is this strong as a general thing, but the TF explains that he's overpowered at the moment, so it makes sense he'd be as strong as he was. To that, I can only nod my head and say "OK, I can roll with that." Hell, it wouldn't make sense for him NOT to be extremely powerful, because him not requiring a full team would make the story and premise lame.

In two short sentences: I want Incarnate content to feature story arcs as well as TFs, and not just one token arc here and there. I want Incarnate TFs and Trials to respect the players who take part in them and give DAMN GOOD REASON why they're as hard as they are.

And this is where we differ. In every game I've ever played, the "mechanics" as a general term have been pretty much the last thing on my mind, and I have always seen them as a necessary evil. You can make a movie or write a story to do with super heroes and super villains and just wing it when it comes to fights. I know that's how I write. But when you make a game, it has to have rules, but the less these rules show and get in my way, the more I can enjoy the game. I got into this game for the cool suits, the flashy powers, the contemporary city and the ability to make a character that's truly MINE. I staid because, unlike all other MMOs I had and have tried, this one was the one that burdened me the least.

They called it the casual player's MMO, they called it MMO-lite, they called it the MMO for people who don't like MMOs (which is probably where I fall) and that's why I liked it. Not for the challenge, not for the numbers, not for the the minigames and metagames, not for the optimization, but simply because I could decide "Today I want a blue alien girl from space who can shoot energy out of her hands!" and just go out and do it without having to worry too much about HOW I should do that, or indeed IF I should do that. The more complex the game becomes, the more "the mechanics" get in my way.

Again, I'm not saying I want an I Win button or that I expect a game can work without any rules. Far from it. I've done my homework. But there comes a point where catering to optimization begins to cut into my actual enjoyment of the game the same way as how playing games professionaly isn't really something I'd call "playing." When I'm told to get Shivans, it bothers me, because this doesn't suit my character. Yes, I CAN explain it if I really wanted to... But I don't want to. Because this isn't the character I wanted to make. Again, I feel that the mechanics of a game should be there to make the game work, but should not be regarded as the POINT of the game. To me, the point of City of Heroes is and always has been to be the coolest MMO out there. But I don't find orange numbers, purple numbers, DPS averages, set lists and things like that to be fun. That's just how it goes.

*edit*
On the one hand, I agree with you, and I've said as much before. Letting something like the ITF just scale down will not make it soloable for very many people. However, I don't really think that's the entire point of it. Because you know what we're missing? Small-team content. The game seems to regard 8-man teams as the holy grail of what people want and anything below that means they failed to achieve that holy grail. But EBs in general weren't intended to be soloed, not strictly, so much as they were intended to let smaller teams have a shot where they may not have against an AV.

As a point of fact, a friend of mine and I tried soloing Terra before AVs scaled down, and we quickly realised we couldn't. Simply could not. But a Terra scaled down as an Elite Boss is much more doable. Granted, she's also soloable, but that's besides the point.

Yes, scaling down the ITF to spawn elite bosses would not make it possible for too many single players to do. But would it make it relatively doable for teams of two or three? I suspect it might. Letting TFs scale down would not necessarily make them soloable, but it would make them much smaller-scale, which will actually be far, FAR more doable for a great many who complain now. Take, for instance, the Ouro TFs. One day I decided... Hey, I want to run the Smoke and Mirrors TF. So I chatted up a global friend, and he said "Sure, why not?" So we headed off to do a TF. It took some time, I think around an hour, because we were dragging our feet, but it was easily doable.

I don't have a lot of friends, not many who are still with the game, anyway, but very often I can scrounge up at least ONE other person if I feel like doing something more adventurous. Having the ability to do so with TFs would actually be very welcome.

Well, one thing I can't deny is there were a lot of people coming down on the old forums, and the whole time I was like "Huh? What? Where? What are you guys talking about?" Yes, we all have different experiences. I'll concede to leaving it at that.

However, the forum issues still irritate me, and they really have seemed to be going downhill pretty much the whole time. In fact, it feels like they'll develop some new intermittent bug about every few months.

You know, I keep expecting to get timeout errors, myself, but I've clocked a page load taking over six minutes on a stopwatch. Practically the entirety of that time is spent "waiting for boards.cityofheroes.com" And the worst part is that once my browser "hooks on," the page loads just fine.

And I do not know why.

I've seen the time-outs. Hitting back on my browsert restored my post every time. Reloading the page would also restore my post. Every time.

Hey, if these boards can be made to STOP DESTROYING MY POSTS, I wouldn't complain. At work, I have a "back" button on my mouse. More often than not, I'll accidentally squeeze that with my thumb when I attempt to use the mouse. A lot of times I'll open a new tab to look at a dictionary or do a google search, only to accidentally do that in the same tab I'm posting in (I've set Firefox to not select new tabs as I open them). I've had a few instances when Firefox actually crashed on me, too. And recently, I've had instances where hitting Submit sends me in 6-minute page load, followed by a blank page, forcing me to hit "Back" and resubmit, only to find my post no longer exists when I back up.


You know, the old boards had a timer, too, like 24 hours or so. But my problem here isn't that posts I haven't read are marked as read. It's quite the opposite - posts I've read and, often, posts THAT I MADE are nevertheless tagged as unread, making the tags useless.

And again - how is this a problem with my ISP if this has been going on with this forum software from the day it was introduced, whereas I NEVER EVER had that with the old boards? I did not change ISPs overnight when the boards changed. Hell, I haven't changed my ISP in years. The difference between easy and reliable forums and difficult and unreliable once occurred when forum softwares were swapped over, not when anything on my end happened, unless you want to talk about unlikely coincidences.

Trust the developers? No... Not really. Not any more. Do I mistrust them enough to drop my subscription? No, not by a longshot. Where am I gonna' go? The only thing that'll make me cancel my subscription is if they REALLY mess things up, which I don't think they'll do, or unless a better game comes along, which looking at the lineup of things to come, ain't happening.

But you know what bugs me the most? It didn't use to be that way. I didn't use to want another game... But I guess this one is turning into another game under my feet whether I like it or not.

I've always had a problem with the "just ignore the man behind the curtain" argument because it bothers me. I've ignored a fair few things myself, of course, such as the WRETCHED "origin of powers" hogwash, but I reserve fan discontinuity only for especially grievous crimes against good storytelling. Like the Dr. Khan TF. For me to get to the point where I think "Screw it! I just want to kill stuff and forget this story ever happened!" that means I'm already several times past my level of tolerance for bad storytelling. I don't do this as a regular thing, and I find it to be a mark of exceptionally bad storytelling when stories require me to do so.

There is no reason why these stories should not have been handled better. NO. REASON. They clearly hire capable writers, based on some of the new stuff I've seen, so what are these writers doing? What happened to the story bible? What happened to decency and good taste? I refuse to judge the game and its story like some kind of quaint antique that I should be glad even still exists and should even dream to have the temerity to expect good quality writing. We've SEEN the developers produce amazing, well-written stories. We've seen them tie new events into old canon like they were always there. They can do better than this, and I'll be damned before I let them off the hook over something that shouldn't be this hard to keep straight.

Yes, I know that means I'll probably meet a lot of things that piss me off in the narrative. Why do you think I have such a sunny disposition?

I think you misunderstood me. I'm not against hard content having a good story. Quite on the contrary - a good story that puts hard content within a context that makes me understand WHY it's hard is something I feel is NECESSARY, not just a good thing to have. However, what I was talking about was something else completely.

We can go round and round in circles, but the bottom line remains the same - the Incarnate system constitutes a level cap increase. They're careful not to call it that so they don't have to make content for it like they would for a level range, but the fact of the matter is that they do. And two arcs per Issue ain't gonna' cut it. Now, I know that quality work takes time and effort, so two arcs plus two TFs is about the most the developers can do. I appreciate that.

So what I'm saying is I would like to see a LARGE body of simpler content, just so that there is SOMETHING to do in those level ranges. Even something as simple as the Incarnate version of paper missions. I'm perfectly willing to sacrifice quality to provide SOMETHING to pad out the level range and hold me over until they can afford to add more content to those levels.

To put it more in perspective, it's nice to have a luxurious, stylish, expensive bathroom, but I want to still have a loo while I'm waiting for that to be built, because I can't hold it in for six weeks. Incarnates lack content in the worst possible way, and calling this "end game" to mask this fact so people will be content on regrinding the same handful of TFs over and over again is not a good way to solve it. And I would sooner have mediocre content enough to carry me through than have one piece of good content and 90% dead air.

Your translation is incorrect. The old boards NEVER destroyed posts on me unless I accidentally closed the tabs in question or the entire browser. I've only ever lost posts on the old forums when using Internet Explorer, because IE7 wouldn't remember text fields between page loads. Ever since I started using Firefox, I never lost a post on the old forums, simply because navigating back to the "create a post" page caused the browser to refill my text field with what I had before.

This is not true on the new boards, because the new boards fill in the post text fields by default. Right now, my link to make this post is http://boards.cityofheroes.com/newre...eply&p=3398192, which essentially means "make a new reply and put post 3398192 in the text field." Firefox still remembers what I wrote in my text field, and would attempt to restore it for me, but the forums will wipe out what's in the text field and replace it with the quote. My only other recourse is to quote someone, copy the quoted text, back up, start a new unaffiliated reply, paste the copied text in that and work off that. Under these circumstances, even if I were to accidentally navigate away from the post I'm making, it will still be in the text field when I come back.

The old forums did not "default" any of my text fields to anything at all. I'm not sure how they worked exactly, but I know that if I quoted someone, wrote text and accidentally hit one of my Firefox quick links, then returning to my post would see the text box written to where I'd gotten it to. This includes even instances where I've lost power to the building, and upon restoring my tabs, Firefox will also restore what I've written in the text fields. Because of how the new forums are set up, this does not happen if I quote, which is what I do most of the time.

The new forums are, in fact, VASTLY inferior for retaining posts than the old ones were.

And they are completely incapable of tracking what I've read, whereas the old ones were almost always spot on. I have long since given up using the "take me to the latest post" function here because IT IS WORTHLESS. It has always been worthless, and it continues to be worthless now, to the point where I wonder why read posts are even tracked when that tracking is ALWAYS wrong. In fact, I can guarantee you that about half an hour after I make this post, the boards will insist it's a new post that I haven't read before, despite being MY OWN.

Ah, yes, the "chip." This arc has the uncanny tendency to not tell you what the bloody hell you're looking for. So someone stole this "tech" that the Portal Corps scientists came up with. What, is this some kind of machine? Is it data? I don't know, it's just "tech."

Then later on it gets revealed it's a circuit board, only maybe it's a chip, instead. You do know these two are not interchangeable, right? So why not just make a copy of it before it's stolen again? Well, apparently, there isn't enough time to replicate the the thing. I thought circuit boards were easy to make if you still have the blueprints, but apparently Portal Corps work on the no plans no prototype no backup principle. I guess, because there's no mention of a rare component that cannot be copied. It can, it just takes time.

So we can't copy the device and we'll have to give it to the Malta Raiders. Only we're not giving them the device, we're giving them the schematics and blueprints. How is that going to remove the device from our possession? I thought there wasn't enough time to copy it. Why is there enough time to copy it all of a sudden?

To put it more simply - why did Malta have the Sky Raiders have the protestors have the rogue PPD steal a physical chip-slash-circuit-board, only for Roy Cooling to end up chasing digital blueprints over the 'net? What was stopping them from just copying the plans for the device by putting it into that stupid computer of theirs and just bail? What did they need the physical device for? Is the computer anchored to the sea bed? Do they not have broadband?

This makes my head hurt.

What precedent are you referring to here?

I'm going off what I know about the Incarnate system, and the officially stated goal of the Incarnate system has been to provide large-scale "events" and more difficult encounters. This is the reason that myself and others met the announcement of Incarnates with "I hope they don't turn out to be Task Forces only" way back when this was first announced. Back then we were told we simply didn't know and that the developers hadn't announced anything. Two Issues later, we've seen what the system looks like, and we've heard the announcement for the next thing which will be coming, which is "trials."

Historically, the developers have held "end game" in special regard. It's never been much in terms of volume, consisting of essentially the Recluse Strike Force, Statesman Task Force, both versions of the Hamidon and potentially the Rikti mothership raid, but that has still always had its place in the game as the ultimate challenge. The problem is that now the entirety of the Incarnate system appears to have been designated an expansion to this kind of content.

I honestly do in fact see NO reason to expect that anything BUT more Trials and TFs. I seen no precedent for it, as the only content this is "like" has been TF-exclusive so far, and the fact that such content does not appear to be part of a THIRD Issue since Incarnates have been announced leaves me beyond cold. We had I18, and what Incarnate content was originally suggested for it had no "regular" content in it. We have I19, and the only thing which Incarnates got that was repeatable was two TFs. We have I20 next, and the only thing announced about it has been "Trials."

I could simply trust the developers and hope for the best, but I've learned that that simply doesn't work.

Which I would have believed, if the new forums had not turned into an EVEN BIGGER mess pretty much the day they went online. The new forum software has never, ever, EVER been able to track my unread posts, always bringing me back either to the start of threads or to posts I read days ago, tagged as read yet are still showing up as new, or otherwise marking all posts in all forums as read, even the ones I've never seen.

Furthermore, the old forums were far less likely to destroy my posts if my page failed to load, apparently because quoting doesn't so much put text in a text field as load a page that assumes text in a text field. I've lost far too many posts for stupid reasons here it's not even funny.

I mean, I don't know what the back end of the thing is, but I know that, as a user, my experience with the forums degraded SIGNIFICANTLY with the change, because both the features and the outlook of these forums simply don't work as well as those of the old forums. I don't know who or what is at fault here, but the reason I ask "why" is it seems the change has brought us nothing but trouble, with the possible exception embedding images now being allowed.

As a point of fact, allowing people to right-click on a buff and remove it like how we can delete temporary powers has no downside, excluding the development costs. I would very much like to see that. If "crash" debuffs are deemed problematic under this system, then I suggest only being allowed to drop buffs that don't have crashes associated with them, for which buffs can be tagged by hand. There really aren't that many which have crashes outside of resurrects and god mode powers.

A more specific system of actually BLOCKING certain buffs might be interesting, but I feel that simply allowing the dropping of a buff to be bindable to a macro or a key would solve the need for a specific predictive interface. Whenever you get hit with a buff you don't want, you just hit your bind and it disappears.

About the only ones I can see as being problematic that way are toggle buffs, but I've yet to see a toggle buff people really wanted to drop, with the possible exception of Group Fly, which nobody takes. And nobody should.

You know, I don't want to argue phpBB vs. vBulletin, but why was it ever necessary to switch forum software in the first place? I mean, the old forums had their problems, obviously, but so what? What did we gain that hasn't been disabled already?

In your defence, I didn't exactly "spot" that until I'd been impotently wailing on the guy for what felt like 10 minutes before it registered, and even then only because his health wasn't moving and I wondered why. AND EVEN THEN I didn't know what was going on until I asked and someone on the team explained it to me

Chances are if you've never been on a team where you just plain can't budge his hit points, it could have simply never occurred to you that there was anything to notice. Kind of like you don't notice you forgot your house keys at work right up until you need to unlock your front door

I meant the Lady Grey TF. I didn't catch that typo.

Yes. You get the same overhead floating text as you do when you attack the disabled drones in the Hero an Villain tutorial. As I understand it, his version of Unstoppable makes him immune to smashing and lethal damage, hence "immune to physical damage."

I don't know why that was ever considered a good idea, personally, but this came at around the time when the new Hamidon was still relatively fresh and the idea of required ATs was still popular, so the idea of knowing ahead of time to bring non-physical damage must have sounded much better than it does today.

I agree completely