Samuel_Tow

Basically, it's a point of semantics that was just flying over my head, which is why I cut the response down so much. I get what you're saying and I agree with you. You said "melee" and I read "punches and kicks" when what you meant were "close-range powers." That makes a world of difference, and is something I can agree with.

What bothers me the most is the story seems to assume my character was a regular Earth human up until magic dust mites from the future gave him or her powers and changed him. It's not the origin of the powers that bugs me, it's the implied backstory that is severely limiting. It's the same problem I hav with the Secret World and its magic bees that people seem to keep swallowing in their sleep.

Almost none of the characters I have in City of Heroes right now started out human for any length of time in their lives, and the ones that do didn't spend their lives before gaining powers in this timeline or on this planet. Force my hand in this and I simply walk away.

Really? With mission completion statements like

and

I have something of a hard time seeing how whoever wrote those didn't think comic books and the people who enjoy them were anything but worthy of contempt.

My first 50 was Sam Tow, obviously, but my second 50 hero was the Steel Rook, an AR/Dev/Mun Blaster. My third 50 hero was Inna, an Energy/Energy/Force Blaster. I believe either my third or fourth was Grimwall, a Fire/Fire/Flame Blaster. I tried. I really did. It took me five years and inherent Fitness to realise that... This just ain't workin'. I dreaded playing my Blasters more and more, to the point where I just didn't log them in any more, while my other characters felt more and more fun.

After a certain point, I deleted the three above and remade them. The Rook became a Bots/Traps Mastermind, Inna became an Energy/Will Brute and Grimwall a Fire/Fire Scrapper. I additionally deleted Kim, who used to be a level 42 Pistols/Electric/Electric Blaster and remade her as a DB/SR/Body Stalker (and who's now my second-highest Incarnate). Also gone is Morten, an old 42 Ice/Ice/Cold Blaster, who is now a Dark/Dark Stalker. I was in the process of rerolling Valeena, who is still a level 41 Bow/Dev Blaster, but I couldn't figure out what to reroll her as. I was thinking either Katana or DB, but couldn't settle on an AT.

Basically, I did everything I could to make Blasters work, and when I finally realised it ain't gonna', I did enough to burn all the bridges to the point where there ain't no comin' back.

That's not a "melee" set. It's a set of elemental powers usable in melee. At least that's how I'd define it. To me, any set tagged "melee" needs to revolve around physical contact hand-to-hand fighting, else it's not melee. What you're describing isn't so much "melee" as "very short ranged blast/support/control." OK, NOW I see what you're talking about, and now I can actually agree.

Let me see if I have this right - you're talking about, basically, breath powers, static discharge powers, poison powers and so on - things that aren't necessarily physical attacks with one of your limbs, but elemental or energy attacks that may or may not involve physical contact. Because if that's what you're saying, then THAT makes sense. It makes sense to be unique and it makes sense to have its own special set, or at least pool.

I kept thinking you were going to Avatar route and suggesting we should have some kind of "Way of the Fire" form of martial arts that's like regular martial arts but can only be used with fire, whereas what you're suggesting is more a collection of fire-specific attacks that just happen to be very short-ranged and occasionally use directed physical attacks as a carrier medium. That actually works. Put together a set that has one or two fire breath attacks, a couple of fire sword attacks, a few incendiary explosions, one ground ignite, one player-based constantly burning fire aura and a couple of enemy ignites and you have a set that makes sense to be fire and doesn't make sense to be anything else.

And if I also want to "punch and kick with fire," I can take unarmed martial arts attacks and use them with a Fiery Hands combat aura. That works, and I even like it.

To some extent, that kind of is how Champions works. Even elemental sets give you a couple of close-range attacks and I believe at least one melee one, but I'd have to look more specifically. I could still be wrong. Point is, I get what you're saying now.

It's all I got I like champions for letting me have stuff I can't get anywhere else, not even here, but BOY HOWDY am I paying for it in other ways. It's not a bad game, but it's like an endless list of parade of good idea bad idea.

Good idea: Being able to pick gloves boots and accessories for each side separately.
Bad idea: Being unable to COLOUR gloves boots and accessories for each side separately (bug, most likely)

Good idea: Having extensive face and body modification sliders.
Bad idea: Having one face that doesn't change all that much and a basic body frame that's hard to make look humanoid.

Good idea: Having extensive voice acting for signature characters.
Bad idea: Having extensive voice acting for signature characters that's also terrible and intentionally campy.

Good idea: Having a story about a crime syndicate that lost its leader and is being run by his upstart son.
Bad idea: Having a story about a crime syndicate hat dress in all purple and wear giant novelty cowboy hats.

Good idea: Having stories specifically balanced around being done on a team.
Bad idea: Having stories specifically balanced around being done on a team that don't let you know they're team-only until the final mission.

Good idea: Being able to customize the model of summoned entities.
Bad idea: Being unable to customize the COLOUR of summoned entities.

I'm sorry for the bad stand-up routine, but Champions has the potential to be a great game, if only every good idea it had weren't counterbalanced by bugs, terrible execution, stilted gameplay or just a plain bad idea. If you can play a game for its potential of awesomeness, few are as good as Champions given what's happening to City of Heroes. But it's a trying experience.

Can't speak for DC, but if you want to try Champions, I'd stock up on toilet paper. The amount of corporate structure ******** you'll have to go through with Perfect World will frustrate you to no end, especially if you have an old Cryptic Account that you want to link to a Perfect World account. Remember - PWE doesn't let you have spaces or capital letters in your account name and it will never let you change that name after you make it, not even how you show up on their forums.

I'd suggest doing all the account-linking hogwash from the Star Trek site, actually. Champions seems to have fallen by the wayside in favour of Star Trek so that's the site with the better interface that doesn't have scores of broken links.

As for pitches... About the only thing I can really praise Champions for is that's the place to go if you want to make a character with a wide variety of abilities traditional MMOs would never let you have on the same character. Guns and swords, blast and armour and so on. Well, and if you like complexity, because there's a HELL of a lot of complexity to the build system in Champions. And for extra fun, their Wiki is a few months and a MAJOR expansion out-of-date. Basically, go there if you always wanted to make a type of character other games won't let you have.

Oh, and if you hate comic books. Champions feels like it was made by someone who thought comic books were stupid and set out to make fun of them. At least, that's how it reads to me.

My headache is due to either a cold or some kind of bug, actually. Or possibly something chronic. Point is, it doesn't have to do with the Internet.

Dominators don't have armour sets nor dependable status protection nor high high hit points nor Granite Armour. That, and I made Zik back in I6 LOOONG before any of the Dom changes. Besides, his single most defining feature is he's practically unkillable.

Aha. That's a large source of our misunderstanding, if that's how you interpret "damage type." In City of Heroes, all damage is is a health modifier, which is typed for reasons of which modifiers are used to alter it. No damage type itself comes with secondary effects. Ice damage doesn't slow and fire damage doesn't burn. Those are additional special effects that are tied to the powers themselves, not the actual damage type. Multiple powers exist which deal Fire damage but don't apply any DoT, such as Consume. For the most parts, our developers have tried to keep secondary effects between powers with similar themes consistent, but they deviate as often as they are the same, and even similar effects aren't always the same. Fire Blast powers, for instance, all deal the same damage pet tick of DOT, but I believe Blaze or Blazing Bolt have more DOT ticks.

That's why I draw a distinction between power mechanics and damage types. Damage type by itself means nothing, it's just the type of damage for the purposes of damage resistance. All the effects you're describing are actual additional power effects, which comes down to power design more so than "numbers."

Basically, I had a Jack Emmert moment. Remember when he said "No more major changes to powers!" a few weeks before ED hit? His defence was... Well, that's not a change to powers, it's a change to enhancements. Nobody believed him but me, probably, and that's the exact same flub I fell to. You said "damage types" and I thought "attribmod" when what you were talking about was the additional power effects that define the esoteric behaviour of powers beyond base attributes common to every power. That's basically were we talked past each other - damage type the technical term is only ever relevant in the context of damage resistance, of which City of Heroes critters have a lot, but Champions critters very rarely have any.

This brings me back to a point you've already chastised me for twice, but I just don't see that, or at least don't really agree. You say it's like drawing a knife and shooting with it (and we'll ignore gunblades for the sake of expedience), but that's not exactly the case. "Knives" are a real thing that has a real use in combat, and that real use informs how the set is designed. You can't use a knife like you would use a hammer or a whip, because most people have a rough idea of how a knife is used. To quote Antonio Banderas: "pointy end goes into the other guy."

I can't say the same is true of elements and energies. First of all, most people don't really have a very solid grasp of how they work in reality, and the mythbusters have proven this time and time again. You'd THINK an explosion could send a bulldozer 100 feet into the air, but an explosion with enough energy to do that will also shred it into shrapnel. There's no way to say "THAT is how electricity would be used in hand-to-hand combat" simply because you're making it up from the word go. People can shoot electricity from their hands, so anything you come up with is based on fiction. Which isn't bad, but is also very "unspecific" and open to everyone's interpretation.

Your example is very good, actually, in that it depicts our two very different takes on what constitutes "electricity." The way you explain electricity sounds like you're banking on a steady stream of high-energy current, like what you'd get if you stuck a fork in a power socket. It's the cartoony effect where someone gets shocked for 10 seconds straight and you can see his skeleton and his hair goes all spiky. I'm approaching this from pretty much the other direction - that of an electric condenser. This doesn't rely on power flow, but rather on the build-up of a strong charge which, when it reaches critical state, will arc across an insulating medium, cover distance and deliver a large shock all at once. It's basically the difference between Electrical Blast for Blasters (which fizzes, buzzes and crackles) and My Striker electricity (which explodes with a thunderclap and a sudden jolt).

Neither is wrong, strictly speaking, but by creating a concept specific to one, you're more or less locking out the other. For instance, when BABs and Castle made Shield Defence, technical limitations forced them to make a lot of the powers passive and conceptual limitations forced them to make those passives about something OTHER than the shield, so they instead made the shield user very strong and tough. This was quite out of concept for a lot of my shield users, however, since the first one I made was a technologist using a tech shield with a forcefield attached to it. Moreover, Castle designed Shield Defence with a very strong slant towards Greek Phalanx warfare and the concept of a shield wall, hence Phalanx Phighting, Grant Cover and so forth. This, in turn, has been VERY inappropriate for my shield users because it's not something I even thought about when I first heard the idea.

Champions, actually, has this problem to a much bigger extent, as you've seen. Someone sat down and wondered "OK, so how does one use Earth powers?" Someone then came up with the idea that... Well, you cover yourself in rock and hit people with giant fists. Hence, Rock was put in the "brick" general category and is now a a tanking power. All because someone wanted to be very specific in how one used stone differently from fire and wind, but in so doing, he completely sidelined the set's usability as a control tool. You can still do it, but that's not what the set was designed around.

Basically, I'd be leery of designing sets that are too specific, because you tend to narrow the concepts of people who can use them SIGNIFICANTLY unless you create many redundant sets from the same element or energy to offer different fighting styles for the same general idea.

Blasters are conceptually very open and very appealing, but in actual practice they are ****. I'm sorry for being coarse in my language, but at this point it doesn't seem like balancing concerns will ever be resolved so I just can't keep up my air of politeness about an AT I simply cannot play. I tried to. I got multiple Blasters to 50 and it was never fun. Not for a minute. I kept telling myself it'll get better and it never did. Too little health, too little personal protection, jack **** for status protection... I got tired of living in constant fear for my life, so I rerolled as ATs that let me play badly and still succeed.

Dominators weren't as torturous to play, but they also weren't as entertaining. I HATE playing like a Controller, and it seemed like that was the only path to success as a Dominator. I'd have loved to be able to play all the ATs, it's just that their mechanical design made it impossible for me to enjoy doing so, hence why I stuck to the ATs I enjoyed.

And yeah, I know about the Blaster changes. It doesn't give them armours, it doesn't give them status protection, so it's not enough of a change. It makes it much more fun to play a Blaster if you wanted to play it LIKE a Blaster, but I, unfortunately, don't. I don't want to play carefully and tactically and fret every decision. I like being a powerhouse, hence why I stuck to the fiercely independent ATs.

I'd use different words, but that's where I am. Without the style and narrative of City of Heroes, there really isn't much to draw me in conceptually. I'm not interested in secret conspiracies and secret identities, I'm more after an open-ended world that lets me define my own concepts, and the Secret World basically takes that away from me from the very first moment of creation when it transpires that I got my "powers" by swallowing a magic fly.

Also, that whole "you were a regular before you got powers" angle just doesn't work for me. I'm tired of playing regular people, or those who were regular people once. Give me aliens or demons or robots or something weird like that.

Frankly, I'd rather play City of Heroes without some of the Market perks, specifically without Inventions. I like the game considerably more before them, and for a while that even gave me the excuse to argue that they shouldn't be required for content... Until Incarnates, which require a VIP subscription to play, thus guarantee you'll have access to inventions. There goes my excuse...

As for the Guild Wars model? Eh, if it works, why not? I get to pay less, generally speaking, so why would I refuse? I just have my doubts on how it even works.

Playing other games isn't the same as losing hope, though. I jumped around a lot before the announcement and paid money in a variety of other online games while remaining subscribed to this one. I continue to play a variety of games even now, though I do what I can to keep up with the forums and any initiatives posted.

I, on the other hand, HATED Diablo 2 for its convoluted build system and points system that ensured EVERY character I ever made in that game sucked and was gimped. Diablo 3 may have been brown, badly-written and hugely disappointing... And painful at 60 Euro, we can't forget that... But at least as a GAME, it didn't piss me off as much. It's still gear-driven, but at least I can't gimp myself as easily.

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And I if I want to play as Marvel heroes, I'll play Marvel vs. Campom, thank you very much. Not Marvel vs. Capcom 3, however, as I don't own a console.

Yes, you said "if you take away everything that's unique" about three times, but that doesn't mean anything. It's generic and aimed at exaggerating, not aimed at explaining, because it hinges on me getting what you feel "everything unique" constitutes. I don't, or at least didn't. And as you'll find, now that I DO, I don't necessarily agree with you on what a power needs in order to be unique.

Sam Tow was always supposed to have pistol attacks and sword attacks at the same time. City of Heroes never let me do that. Now that I tried Champions, that's not that much closer. Sam can now have pistol attacks, but they act like machine pistols, whereas what I had envisioned for Sam was more a pair of slow-firing, incredibly large-calibre pistols. The ".90 calibre concussion pistol with armour-piercing rounds" from Advent Rising, basically. Ripper? I forget what it's called. That, along with the Seeker pistol which has the ability to fire a shot which costs 5 ammo points but deals ridiculous damage and can bounce between up to four targets, doing damage to rach.

I write my characters from scratch in words and ideas long before I get to a game which is supposed to house them, so the game never represents what they do exactly. No game ever could, it's the nature of having very specific ideas. The best a game can ever hope to do is let my characters do the majority of what they're supposed to be able to do in a way at least roughly comparable to how they're supposed to be able to do it. Pretending my characters can do things they really can't do is par for the course for me. So long as they look like I could claim they can do these things, that's enough.

Actually, I have a better example. Ezikiel Bane, my flagship villain, is an "earth" user - Stone/Stone Brute in City of Villains. His powers in continuity, however, are nowhere near that limited. The man is supposed to be able to transmute elements into the various types of crystalline structures he can command basically telekinetically. This would enable him to do more or less everything all the ATs with access to Earth powers can, and more. He has entire buildings shaped out of granite that he has made himself and which he controls like Magneto in the first X-Men movie, he tends to prefer fighting at rage using levitated boulders, rock waves, dust storms, crystal spears, ground eruptions and more, but protects himself with a variety of stone- and crystal-based armours, as well as having immense strength in melee.

I designed Zik as a Mary Sue completely intentionally, because he's the type of overpowered antagonist who doesn't like to get his own hands dirty, but will always play the final boss. No game ever will let me do all the weird **** I've come up for Ezikiel to do (nor get me to spell his name right, I refuse!), so I'm perfectly fine with doing a small subsection of what I think I should if I at least get to look good doing it. And right now, I don't exactly have a world of choice.

Damage types are the least convincing argument to me, because they're the epitome of meta-game behind-the-scenes math. I differentiate between "numbers" and "mechanics," in the sense that numbers literally do not matter a lick beyond min/maxing, not to me. They don't look different unless you care about the combat spam. And damage types are just that - numbers.

You make a good point that the actual mechanics of how the powers behave do come into play. Believe me if you want, but this never crossed my mind. I was always looking at this from an RPG perspective of "power does damage, power kills foe." My blindspot for this comes from my extreme disinterest in control and support powers and preference for direct damage - end things rather than dance about the issue. When you look at things from that perspective, you miss the obvious aspect of power behaviour, as I did. Arcana did bring up secondary effects, I just didn't realise what that meant until now.

I just assumed you didn't' care for some odd reason because you didn't seem to express any concern about that idea in any meaningful way.

I didn't read it like that, however. I read you saying that you wanted one "generic melee" set that can also be made elemental and several element-specific melee sets that CAN'T be made non-elemental or to use another element. Thus, those who wanted just melee had that one melee set and those who wanted special melee could use the exotic ones. That ties into the question I kept asking, because you seemed to suggest that certain elements should only be used with certain fighting styles like they are in Avatar.

That's what I didn't get, by the way - are you suggesting that different elements should use different styles of hand-to-hand fighting? Are you saying that electricity only makes sense to be used for grappling and fire for quick incendiary attacks? Frankly, I'm still not sure about that. I know you say "these" are not "mutually exclusive" but I'm not convinced we mean the same thing when we say "they" and "mutually exclusive." It comes down to this:

Suppose I want to use one of those powersets that "explore the differences" in a non-elemental, non-energy, physical concept, where a character fights with the style of that set, but uses no element? Do you see a place for this?

The only thing that holds interest for me, realistically speaking, is the ability to combine ranged attacks, melee attacks and survivability in the same character. City of Heroes more or less forced my hand into only ever playing Scrappers, Brutes, Stalkers and Masterminds because these were the only ATs which weren't "squishy," and that in turn made a lot of my conceptually ranged characters into melee ones. You wanna' know about the game not letting me do something? Inna, my Energy/Energy Brute, was written in her own backstory as having the "Nova" power. But because I couldn't and can't stand Blasters, I made her into a Brute and had to give that up. I'm used to my characters not being able to do what they're supposed to.

Why do you think I flipped my **** when I heard about Titan Weapons and realised Xanta (see sig for pic) would finally, after six ******* years, would be getting the weapon she always should have had?

More a cautionary warning. We're used to doing all this weird and wonderful stuff in City of Heroes, but that won't last forever. Even if we manage to save it, by some cosmic collision of chance, it still won't last forever. Sooner or later we'll have to go play other games, and other games aren't as accommodating. We are both going to have to make some concessions and accept characters that aren't quite "right" eventually.

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Also - no hard feelings, and apologies for skipping parts of your post. As long as we can focus on being productive and discussing a topic, I'm happy. Exchanging ideas and concepts is always fulfilling so long as we're not trolling each other. Despite what it may seem like, I really am not interested in putting anyone down or being right. I just want to converse, and it seems like the conversation will flow smoother if we step over the mutual accusations. The post I deleted was full of me being a dick anyway. You're not missing much.

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Other than...

I did, actually, but that went with the rest of the post I dumped.

Actually, you know what? Forget it. I had a huge long post that took me a good two hours to type, but reading your last line just made me realise it's pointless to post it. You're not interested in explaining your side of the argument nor helping me understand. You're only interested in humiliating me and proving me "wrong" over something that's only and solely based in opinion.

You could have saved yourself a ton of typing if, instead of throwing insults in my face, you had simply said that what you feel is different between the various elemental attacks is the mechanics. If you'd stopped to actually comprehend my post instead of rushing to piece-quote it, you might have noticed that I ignored power mechanics and numbers entirely. I simply never considered that that might be relevant to you, because from where I'm sitting, this simply isn't relevant to character concept. But, of course, I can't simply have misunderstood, I must be wilfully obtuse and probably stupid.

I will say this much - I don't want electric grappling. I want grappling, but without the electricity. I want electricity, but without the grappling. I want options separated from each other so that I can pair them up in any combination I want. To me, having a choice from Electric/Dark/Fire/Physical Grappling/Tapping/Grasping/Hand-to-Hand in any combination (which is 16 options, by the way) is far more important than having the only four static pairs that you mentioned. Even if that comes at the expense of the options being mechanically similar, I'd still pick greater cosmetic variety over greater numerical specificity.

If you want a game where the natures of what powers constitute are represented well through power mechanics, don't go to Champions Online. Its power sets encompass far too many ideas for them to be specific to any one of them. If you can't live with repurposing attacks, then pick another game. But all things considered, I don't know how picky you can afford to be.

It's a very simple concept that you're making much more complex than it needs to be tripping over your own feet to insult me. Please, if you can, respond in uninterrupted text, rather than quipping at everything I said off-hand.

This is part of what informs my stance, actually - I love City of Heroes the idea, the editor, the story... But I don't like the actual game. I never really have. I don't like RPG combat in general, and it comes down to the fact that City of Heroes is the game that forces me to do the least amount of stuff I don't like. I don't enjoy any of the existing MMOs out there any more because I outright HATE their combat systems, which is where I with Champions - decent editor, disheartening combat.

Over the years, I've adapted to how City of Heroes plays, but at the same time, the stuff I DO hate has been piling on and on. Inventions, gimmick bosses, death patches, all-talk missions, escorts, simu-clicks and so on. I hate MMO combat, and back in 2004, I fell in love with City of Heroes because it WASN'T like those other MMOs. It was a game which let me play it without trying to "challenge" me or impose a certain type of gameplay on me. I got to play it as I wanted and basically ignore all the stuff I didn't like - and there was much of it.

But year after year I'd hear cries of "CoH is too easy!" "CoH has no depth!" and I'd see those acted on. And with each step, I honestly liked the game a little less. Inventions, for instance, are easily the WORST thing to happen to City of Heroes by FAR, and have been responsible for pretty much the majority of my frustrations with it from I9 till now. Nearly every problem I've had with the actual gameplay that isn't an outright bug, I can trace back to Inventions. We needed "loot," I guess. And when Incarnates came out and it was revealed that I'd have to raid for those, that was pretty much the other BIG thing that turned me into pretty much a troll on the forums for a good year or so. I'm still bitter about it, in fact, but we were FINALLY starting to see Incarnates made available without the annoying busywork when THIS happened.

My problems with other games aren't that they don't play like I want them to. City of Heroes didn't play like I wanted it to. My problem is that other games are far, FAR more adamant about forcing me to play their way, while City of Heroes was all too happy to shrug and go "Do whatever, I don't care." That's what I'll miss the most.

I don't see how that was even possible at any stage of development. The Secret World is far more restrictive with character origins, their races and their scope. If you're just looking for a non-fantasy MMO, then yes, it will work. But I used City of Heroes as a repository for my more ambitious ideas, and a game which expects me to be human (or at least resemble one) just doesn't work for me.

Fair point, and that's something I can work with. Please, just work with me here and let me ask you a few leading questions:

Let's say for the sake of argument that I agree with you that damage type is what defines an attack. How do you know what type of damage you're doing? It may seem like a dumb question, but take a moment to answer it.

The way I see it, there are two ways to know what type of damage you're doing. One is, obviously, to look at your power stats or your combat spam. Granted, that's always a source of information, but it's not a concept-specific source of information. Someone above mentioned how martial artsts can't grapple due to limitations of the game's combat system, and I agree with that complaint wholeheartedly. The truth of the matter is that we can't take the game's numbers and mechanics as direct character traits, in the sense that if you wanted to write a slash fic about the Statesman and Miss Liberty, you wouldn't focus on how much accuracy he had in two-decimal percentage and how many hit points her Dull Pain returned. That's meta-game stuff.

The only other way I can think of to tell what type of damage you're doing - and this one IS concept-specific - is to watch how easy which enemies are to take down. For instance, robots are armoured, thus billets deal less damage to them. If I'm pretending that my gun shoots energy pellets of dimensional force which would normally punch through armour, then having a hard time killing robots but an easy time killing plants ruins my immersion. It simply shows me that my damage is "lethal," because I know what the enemies are resistant to.

But the thing is... Champions enemies are almost never resistant to anything to any degree. They have hit points, some more than others, and when they have damage resistance, it's usually to everything. So what that means is you really can't tell what damage you're doing by sheer experience, at least for the most part.

Obviously, that's not a "solution." If you simply must have electric damage, then I concede that you need a special set of electric attacks or a system that's more versatile than I'm aware exists at the moment. Not MUCH more, but more. That's a problem I can respect and acknowledge.

All I'm saying is that, for those inclined to "make it work," there's at least enough ground for plausible deniability. I tend to care greatly for what my characters do and how they do it, yet still I gave into the temptation to have energy blasts AND melee attacks AND survivability on the same character. It's neither as pretty nor as comfortable in City of Heroes, but at least it exists, which is better than I can get from the gaming world when this game shuts down.

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Just for the record - I'm not dising anyone's characters. I'm just trying to look for ways to make powers work that don't look like they should.

Too much? No, but the market just doesn't seem to get it. MMOs these days are built to formula. There's stuff you need to have, there are ways the game needs to play, so before you even set down to work on the game, you already have most of it written for you by convention, so all you can do is look for wiggle room in there.

To me, that's the most depressing part about something like Guild Wars 2 - that an ostensibly good game with a creative development team willing to take chances still ends up adhering to MMO dogma pretty much to the letter.

Precisely. I don't like people being vilified and demonised for any reason aside from actual crimes. Live and let live. All you're doing by chastising people for their choices and beliefs is to turn them against you, and then it becomes an entrenched "us vs. them" slap-fight in which no-one wins. I'm as guilty as anyone for all too easily and all too willingly choosing to "play the bad guy" when one seems called for, so I can share part of the blame, but please understand that I do when I feel provoked, and the only times I feel provoked is when people skip addressing an argument and address ME personally.

Basically, shred my argument all you want. That's part of the point of having a discussion. Just keep behind the line of PERSONAL remarks, even indirectly made. That's really all my argument ever was - I'd spend money to spite a position I find unfair and aggressive, but I don't claim to know the person behind it. It's simply a cause I want nothing to do with.

I guess the biggest lesson I want to walk away with is to not draw global conclusions on a person's broader worth as a human being based on limited understanding of their actions without even considering the reasoning or thought process behind them. Because then ******** like me will take you up on it, act like what you're describing on purpose and turn it into a flamewar.