Samuel_Tow

New animations, yes, but what's being asked for here is to turn a weapon powerset into a non-weapon powerset, which isn't possible. Or, at the very least, has absolutely no precedent even so much as alluded to.

Furthermore, if we do see new alternate animations for Claws, I want those to be NEW animations, not the old animations with the hand open.

No. No, it doesn't. And that's the cornerstone problem with your suggestion. If we could get people to join the game, we would have done so already. The truth of the matter is that most people can't. Convincing people to play a subscription-based game has proven completely and utterly impossible for me, outside of that one friend of mine who alternates between WoW and Aion.

Suggesting we simply go out and bring new people to the game is kind of like telling a person to go out and make friends. It doesn't work that way.

Which is, in order of appearance:

-one of many
-not really
-a plot device
-just like every run-of-the-mill boss
-for whatever reason
-so does Pyriss, so does 2K Kelvin, so does Duke Mordrogar.

Trapdoor has no reason to be in this arc other than because they needed a character there and they picked one out of a raffle. He isn't and shouldn't be such a centrepiece of the story. They could have picked someone far more interesting, like Max Action, Withershins, Wolfgang Ubelmann or, hell, 2K Kelvin. At least those guys are remarkable. Oh, hell, how about the Sea Witch? She's unusually strong at the time she shows up.

The only reason the reflection of the Minotaur gets a free pass is because it's the reflection of an enemy you're not likely to meet while solo, which gives it some degree of novelty, but I could still have seen it be the reflection of something more unique, like a Noble Brute or an Overseer.

Is that why I've not had any problems with it? I installed mine in \Games\Mids and set the shortcut to run as administrator. I know Windows protects Program Files, but not random folders I create.

You know, I actually like Atlas Park better that way. I've always had a problem with this huge central plaza in front of city hall, because all it does is it makes it feel fake, forced and needlessly grandstanding. We don't just have a city hall building, we have a city hall COMPLEX. It feels more like what you'd see in front of the king's palance in a Fantasy game.

Having City Hall be just one more building along a busy street seems a lot more natural to me.

You mean with the box buildings, the low-res textures and all the windows lit up at the same time?

"Extra shards?" I'm not sure such a thing exists. I sure as hell ain't seen it.

No, thank you. I vastly prefer Paragon City to Praetoria. Praetoria City is BORING in pretty much every zone aside from Neutropolis, and the only reason that's interesting is because of the zones OUTSIDE the city. I'd rather have repetitive buildings and unintuitive street design over the world of Mirror's Edge.

And enough with the god damn island! How many island chain worlds do we really need? It makes everything look small and clustered. Ironically, Paragon City looks and feels far bigger exactly BECAUSE it is so boxed up in War Walls. At least I can kind of see buildings on the other side and I assume there's a city sprawling for another ten miles past that wall. In Praetoria, I can actually see all three islands at the same if I find the right vantage point, and all together that whole city can't be too much bigger than Grandville plus the Fab. Maybe that's the point, but I'm really sick and tired of "cities" you can fit on the head of a pin.

I have fun playing the game, too. I have more fun playing the game AND EARNING REWARDS. It's not complicated. If I have a choice between a character I like and a character I like who can make progress, I'll pick the one who can make progress every time.

While I agree that more personality can only be a good thing, City of Villains shows us that there is indeed such a thing as TOO MUCH personality. In City of Villains, and especially on Sharkhead Island, every little are is a small self-contained world of something unique. One's a pit, one's a shanty town, one's a little regular town, one's a factory, one's a Freakshow fort and so on and so forth. It looks like the world of the Lemmings, where each continent consists of one single environment and they're all crammed together into a small planet.

Paragon City is indeed generic and indistinguishable, but this gives it a feeling of size that none of the new "island" zones have ever been able to replicate. And indeed, my prediction when Striga came out that new zones would be "Something Island" seems to have come through, with all of Praetoria City being islands. A city is not 5x5 large buildings. A city is miles and miles across, and this needs to come through in game design. You can't just take the design of a large city, reduce the number of buildings in each neighbourhood but keep the same number and diversity of neighbourhoods and present that as an actual city. It feels out of scale and caricature.

I do believe the different zones should have different feels to them, granted, but I don't actually see a specific need to cram what is ostensibly multiple zones in the same one open-world instance. This is why Sharkhead Island's Hell Forge so pales in comparison to Paragon City's Terra Volta.

This struck me the moment I saw it, because it reminded me of what we really lacked in City of Heroes: Suburbia. The whole city looks like downtown, or alternatively like an industrial district. But where are the sprawling streets and one-storey houses of the suburban zones? The little cul-de-sacs, the fenced in yards, the porches, the gas stations, the general stores, the schools, the parks... That's the sort of environment we really don't have anywhere outside that one little island in Neutropolis.

You know, when I went to that location, for just a split second I felt like I was playing Half-Life 2, and that's big praise considering that's a game with settings I always believed (it being modelled after my own country probably helps). Or, indeed, like I was playing Left 4 Dead 2, with that adventure that has you trapsing through a riverside town and a sugar mill (Hard Rain, for those who care).

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If I had to point out to a few things that City of Heroes is missing but claimed it had, it would be:

*Apartment building interiors. We have so many apartment buildings, yet on the inside they look either like office buildings or like warehouses.

*Museums. For all the times we go to save a museum, you'd think we'd have a museum tileset. OR, indeed, an actual museum building anywhere in any zone. But no, in Paragon City it's all apartment buildings, tower blocks or warehouses.

*Schools. Not only do we lack a school interior for all those missions where we go to save school children or school supplies, we actually lack both a school interior AND actual schools in the city.

*Fire departments. Apparently, Paragon City's fire department consists of one Fire Chief and a basement full of Positron's fire extinguishers. Where are the fire stations? Where are the fire trucks? Where are THE FIREMEN? Are you telling me they couldn't make a couple of Firemen models, give them fire axes and have them battle the Hellions from time to time?

*Mansions and villas. For all the rich people in the city, we never seem to see the kinds of large estates with secluded gardens and pools and garages stuffed with all forms of expensive cars.

*An airport. We know Paragon City has one, since at different times the Sky Raiders attack a private jet which took off from one and the Knights of Malta shoot down a jet coming in to land at one. So let us run around on the runways. And on something bigger than that dinky two-hangar nothing in Cap Au Diable that has about 50 feet of runway.

*Penthouses. You'd think someone as filthy rich as Countess Crey would own a few of those. You'd think at least the roofs of a few hotels would have that. Which brings me to:

*Hotels. There's nothing that looks like one in the game. There's that brownish office tileset in City of Villains which looks like it could be a hotel, but it has copiers and cubicles in it. Not even St. Martial has a decent-looking hotel, and you'd think that place would absolutely need one.

And that's just off the top of my head.

I've run a lot of it over and over again, is all

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I want to clear up something here that I seem to have left ambiguous in the original post. I plead no contest that new story arcs are being introduced in lower-level content. This much is true, and even if it weren't true, there are probably hundreds of story arcs already in the game. Outside of the Hollows, Striga and Croatoa examples, I have no qualms with that.

What I feel is suffering the "pay-per-view effect" is the Incarnates system. As it stands right now with our half an Incarnate slots, we're not that much more powerful than a standard 50 (I've tried it already). However, with the level shift in the other half and the rest of the slots coming down the line, there will come a point where regular content simply won't be up to our level.

And then what?

Right now, the simple answer to that is Tin Mage and Apex. But those are TFs. What ELSE? This is my question, and my fear is that the answer will be "more TFs." Yes, the Mender Ramiel arc is good. Great, even. But it can't be repeated, and it's not content FOR Incarnates, it's content to MAKE you an Incarnate. In essence, it's akin to Talshak the Mystic's arc where the plot is set up, and you are then directed to Karsis to actually take part in said plot. Which you can't do, because Karsis requires eight people to start you on the Caverns of Transcendence Trial.

In a way, what I fear will happen to the Incarnate system is it will turn into a newer version of the Shadow Shard - you have no meaningful way to engage in it outside of large-scale, difficult (as opposed to long) Task Forces. And I have a real problem with growing in power, and yet becoming less and less able to do the things designed for my power level by myself. In my opinion, the stronger a character becomes, the more independent that character should feel, outside those special instances when events conspire to put him in a very unfavourable situation.

To carry on the wrestling metaphor, good wrestling has faces and heels. Faces are the people who the audience likes, who play fair and who are always stronger. Players are the faces in a game. Heels are the people the audience boos, who win by cheating, by weaseling out of losses, by ganging up on their opponents and who are always weaker in a fair fight. A strong Incarnate SHOULD be strong enough to be a match for his enemies, unless those enemies cheat.

The Time After Time arc vs. the Statesman TF is a good example of this. One on one, a player character can defeat Lord Recluse even at the pinnacle of his power. However, Recluse is not one to play fair, so in the STF, he cheats by drawing power from his towers, thus requiring a whole team to beat. The story is good enough to show that Recluse ISN'T stronger than us intrinsically, but he still remains a challenge because he's a heel and he cheats.

I have no problem with the Tin Mage TF in principle. I missed most of the story the one time I did it, because... Well, you know how TFs go. But I understood that we're under some kind of curse or debuff or what have you, so we're not as strong as we could be, and our enemies are somehow super-charge. OK, I can live with that. Even Bobcat's stupid 7000+ damage hits I can live with. She's powered-up and angry.

But it would be nice if there were regular Incarnate arcs to contrast this hideous level of challenge, as well. I just got done playing The Force Unleased 2 yesterday, spending a full day in the shoes of Starkiller, the universe's most overpowered jedi who can't go a game without taking out a Star Destroyer with his bare hands. THAT is the sort of backdrop of super powers that gives gravity to the special TFs where everything is so difficult it's almost unfair. You can think to yourself "Holy ****! I was able to take a tank shell to the face without flinching and that guy just backhanded me through three buildings! His power level must be over 9000!!!"

Basically, team-only events with the difficulty cranked up to 11 need a context of more "regular" content to highlight their difficulty and their exclusivity. When everything is an end-game raid, nothing stands out, and all you do is shift the bottom line bar up to 11, instead of having that be exclusive and exciting.

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I want to reiterate: I have no problem with the TF-to-regular-content balance in the 1-50 game. There's more than enough content to go around, and more is constantly being added. What concerns me is the Incarnate system, because it comes with NO CONTENT AT ALL as a de-facto level cap usually does, and we'll only get what they add after the fact. So far what they've added for it has been two TFs. I HOPE they'll add more story arcs. Believe me, there's nothing that will satisfy me more than if I20 came out with a whole bunch of Incarnate arcs and made me eat crow. I prefer to be wrong about this.

With how secretive they're being about I20, you could argue that they're probably designing just that. But I can counter-argue that they could just be designing another raid proper, a counterpoint to the Hamidon and Rikti Shuttle raids. We'll see when that comes about, but if I20 comes out with no "regular" Incarnate content, I'll start panicking for real.

Having, in the sense of them being part of a story, sure. Playing, in the sense of taking control of said villain and ordering him to enact "truly villainous" deeds... Not so much.

Now, I'm not saying you're wrong to want or like this, far from it. But look at the villain-side population, and then look at what people complain about more than anything else - City of Villains is too dark and too depressing. We could use more glamour and less grit.

I have to laugh at this, and not in a mocking sense. But it's just so endearing to hear people talking about a "rush" and "fear" in a game this frikkin' slow-paced and glacial. I cut my teeth on action games, things like the later MegaMen, Oni and Kaan: Barbarian's Blade, to say nothing of Oniblade/X-Blades. These are games that give you near-instant dash moves, oftentimes require pixel-perfect positioning and split-second timing. And even in THESE games I rarely feel "a rush" once I'm actually comfortable with the controls and confident in my abilities.

Just as an example, fighting the Magma Dragoon (who looks like a dragon?!?) i MegaMan X4 is a rush. The guy has around three attacks that he spams, all requiring different actions to dodge, and he doesn't give even half a second's worth of warning when he's doing them. And hitting him in the head with a downward ice stab is lots of fun, too, since the ice stab doesn't extend more than a couple of pixels past Zero's feet.

The only sort of "rush" City of Heroes ever gives me is through sheer information overload. Complex encounters with complex power mechanics involving characters with many, many powers simply makes it hard to remember what I have to use and when I want to use it. I keep forgetting my Fire/Fire/Flame Blaster has Bonfire, just as an example, simply because she has something like 15 attacks of different colours.

Mind you, I like these mechanics in the new bosses. I think they're a far superior solution, as opposed to mountains of hit points and heavy damage. And while I may treat City of Heroes like an action game (i.e. flip out and kill stuff), it just doesn't have the speed or control responses to make it a true action game. Tactics like these present at best a puzzle to be solved.

*edit*
And it's always fun having a thread named after me that I didn't make myself

I disagree. More than 40 or 50 feet of range is wasted, in my opinion, as it requires a high roof to maintain, which most instances don't have, and it puts me out of range of my melee attacks, for which range increases do not work. I suppose a Devices Blaster with clever use of Clatrops and Web Grenade could manage to keep 50 feet or more at most times, but with so many corridors barely 10 feet wide and 10 high tall, to say nothing of caves, even Bonfire cannot keep me at that range.

And, by the way, enemies routinely run through Bonfire fast enough to deliver a punch to the Blaster in the middle, or to get past the patch and be expelled on the other side. It can keep enemies down and it can keep them around 20 feet away for, like, 2/3 of the time, but that's the extent of its range. About the only thing that can benefit from range in a way that I'll notice is Blaze, and for just that, I can drop a Range slot in the power.

All told, I will likely stick with Recharge, and indeed probably do so on all of my Blasters. My primary concern with Blasters is that, unlike all other focused damage dealers, Blasters don't have enough powers applicable to any one of their areas of ability to maintain a good enough attack chain, meaning they actually NEED recharge more than anyone else. This should be especially beneficial to my AR/Dev/Munitions dude.

As opposed to what? I didn't WANT to take Provoke, but I was out of options I couldn't think of any one power I could take that was both conceptually even permissible AND required only its base slot.

All I'm saying is I play games to get AWAY from real life. Yes, I know social interaction is part of real life, and indeed a part of the game. All I'm asking for is an option to NOT play the game like I'm forced to live my real life.

Like I've said before - I don't mind team-only content, as long as there's soloable content to go with it. If I can't run something without a team, I don't complain, I just don't run it. To this day I've never done an Eden trial, and despite what I keep hearing about it, I don't intend to.

The problem arises when you have a bottleneck, such as the Incanrate arc. The ONLY way to become an Incarnate is that one arc, and to make it not soloable means that there is suddenly no alternative. Now, if there were this arc to become an Incarnate and a TASK FORCE to become an Incarnate, I would not complain one bit about being unable to solo the TF. I'll simply pick between that and the (I assume) very soloable arc.

I'm asking for options, and it gets on my nerves when people come up to me insult me to my face and tell me that for some things, I SHOULDN'T have options, the anti-social punk that I am, and I should HAVE to team because, well, what the hell is wrong with me if I don't want to at least sometimes. Thing is, the times I feel like teaming never coincide with the times I'm FORCED to team.

Give me options, and I will not complain.

Fair enough. More Blaze should probably help more than a bit more damage, all told. Thanks

Last I checked, this game wasn't real life. Did something happen when I wasn't looking?

All right. I could see that, and it does sound like it makes sense. Why couldn't this have been explained? I could condense this down to two sentences and stuff it in the middle of Tina's debriefing. After all, she is so curt she can't even be scratching 500 symbols. Crimson says at least three times more in EVERY TEXT SCREEN.

A lot of my complaints actually stem from the quality of writing in Tina's arc. It just shows no characterisation or personality, nothing but just dry statement of fact, one fact after the next. In fact, it's on the same level as Montague's AWFUL writing. Tina doesn't sound like a human being, much less like a scientist. She sounds like an automated mission delivery system like you'd find in a mission terminal.

Part of that, I suppose, is because she wasn't supposed to know about any of this in her old arc. She acts now as she did back then, but before she didn't know. Now it seems like she just doesn't care. And that's not good writing. At least Maria Jenkins shows SOME personality.