Samuel_Tow

Eh, just have Darryn set you up with false papers and write your name in their secret books or something. Basically, give villains a way to lie and trick their way into membership, like a villain should be allowed to do. Let us outsmart someone for a change.

I can also argue that there's almost no situation where Avoid effects are preferable to no Avoid effects.

Pity none of that has anything at all to do with what I actually talked about in my post, isn't it?

Ye gads! Enough with the Sky Raiders! When it comes to Tip missions, the Raiders have become the new Longbow. I seem to be fighting them every other mission, in place of Crey and almost everybody else. Eh!

Energy AURA lacks any customization options that actually look like forcefields. All of them look like static radiation artefacts. If we got customization options for it to mimic the Forcefields bubbles or the PPD beehive barriers, then I would concede to Energy Aura being enough.

As opposed to discussing what, exactly? The thread is a joke, and a pretty obvious one, at that. Animal models, be they good or bad for the game, have been shot down by the development team as completely undoable. Not much else to say about it, other than small talk.

Would it be cool? Probably. I can't see what it would hurt.

These days, the public at large is a bit jaded and always reading between the lines of game dialogue. Pretty early on, I learned that everything my contacts told me AT THE END of a story was always true, and the only false information I was given was mid-story when I would realise it's actually false. In fact, whenever false information popped up, it would always be denoted by phrasing such as "I know it to be true!" (courtesy of Pia Marino) or "they must have done whatever" or "it looks like this and that." The narrative never really told us lies with any certainty, but rather it gave us wrong conjecture that was obviously uncertain.

City of Heroes really just doesn't have any precedent in having the plot itself end on a lie or on falsehood. Even if the the conclusion is presented as mysterious or misleading TO THE CHARACTER, there's usually enough information that the player can figure out it wasn't actually true. The game won't out-and-out tell you what's true and what's false to your character's face, but it would leave you with enough of a hint to know.

The Origin of Powers contacts speak with the authority and phrasing of absolute truth, yet they are full of fluffy bunnies, to pick a less offensive descriptor. To question them is to question writing for the entire game in general, to the point where nothing is left ever certain, and to a lot of people - myself among them - that is not a step up.

I agree with the frostdrake here. I don't come to City of Heroes for the awesome gameplay that I couldn't get anywhere else, because... Well, I can. All over the place. I come to City of Heroes for the aswesomeness of making my own action figures, basically, and then continuously pinching myself to ensure I'm not dreaming. Why? Because what I see on the screen - my own characters of my own design and my own writing in an actual game - is exactly the kind of thing I've been dreaming about since I was a little kid.

This, in fact, is where most other MMOs fail me so hard. I don't want other people's characters, I don't want other people's settings, I don't want other people's corn. And, to backtrack on myself a bit here, I don't want their combat systems. While I will freely admit that City of Heroes is does not have GOOD gameplay, it does NOT have what I'd define as bad gameplay. Which is more than I can say for every other MMO I've ever played. MMOs in general suck as games, but City of Heroes sucks by FAR the least.

Crap! I knew I missed out when I didn't buy a PS2!

Having our heroes and villains be entirely homeless and existing as if "on top" of the game world, rather than IN it has always been a big beef of mine. Having personal apartments, paid for with personal funds and not subject to rent would be great.

Of course, the base building mechanic sucks harder than a Singularity next to a Hurricane, so I'm not sure how much that would help. Base building would first need to undergo a serious retooling to make it so that it doesn't take days of training and weeks of hard labour to crank out one lousy base that doesn't look like a level out of Doom II, in my opinion.

You always have the choice of walking out, abandoning the mission and dismissing the tip, then doing other-faction tips, instead. Unlike with normal contacts where the missions will just sit by and wait for you to take them again, dismissed tips are dismissed FOREVER. You can get them again, yes, but you can get a NEW tip. The old one is gone.

Personally, I don't want to see the morality choices inside the missions, themselves. In fact, I feel Praetoria made a huge mistake designing them like this, especially since all it really does is play a cutscene and present you with a morality choice anyway. I can do without the cutscene.

More importantly, Praetorian morality missions are solo-only because that's the only way the tech can work, and BECAUSE they're solo only, they have to be incredibly short. I'm pretty much as avid a soloist as you're likely to see, and even I don't want to see FORCED soloing. I'd sooner have the morality explained to me than be unable to team for my morality mission.

If you mean lit up specific unique armour pieces designed to light up (as that's basically the only way to work this) then you run into the same problem. If you mean just lighting up "power lines" on the body to show it's working... Sure, why not? I have no problem with this, provided they don't meld into bigger costume pieces or bulkier slider settings.

But again - wouldn't straight-up forcefields as a defence set be better? You can even include energy attacks in there that don't have to be tossable forcefields, themselves. If you can form a beehive barrier, you can probably shoot it at your enemy, right?

I've had many cats over the past 20 years, and I couldn't begin to tell a male from a female unless I check the trunk, as it were. And even then I'm never really sure.

So call up Holsten Armitage. He came here on a time machine. Or we can chat up Ubelmann before he dies of radiation poisoning and use his time machine. Or we can nick one of Silos' pillars of ice and flame. Everyone seems to have one in the base. Or we can reverse-engineer whatever mcguffin Arachnos are using to send their Destined One through time and space.

Time travel in City of Heroes is hardly an elusive technology, even Silos himself explains that the pillar of ice and flame is just one of many ways to travel through time, so why is the story so focused on just that means when others clearly and obviously exist?

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On topic, the Midnighters' Club unlock arc is beyond trite at this point, because I've run it over 20 times, and I'm on the lowball side of reruns. It doesn't help that the arc itself feels like someone put it together in 15 minutes such that the characters use "want to?" every other sentence and an eloquent man like Montague sounds like a street punk. The arc is... I won't say good, but quaint, and it's getting bastardised by turning it into pretty much the last content gate out there, meaning EVERYONE and their grandma is doing it and getting sick of it.

I wouldn't be opposed to just dropping the arc, but if we MUST have an alternative, I'd like that to be a single short mission, kind of like what the Cape mission used to be once upon a time. Go to an instance, kill a bunch of stuff and BAM! You can go to Cimerora. It would reduce burnout by reducing the unlock investment AND it would make it easier for people to unlock Cimerora once they hear about an ITF and realise they haven't unlocked the thing on this particular character.

I would actually argue that there is almost no situation in which knockback is preferable to knockdown, but that's neither here nor there.

Personally, I would ideally want to see knockback removed from some of the sillier places where it currently is, such as Hand Clap, Repulsing Torrent, Hurl Boulder and so on. I would vastly prefer this to having the ability to control knockback, because I'd sooner powers be done right than have the ability to fix them.

All of that said, if such an enhancement were viable, you bet your crab cakes I would slot that in Hand Clap and Shockwave in a heartbeat. I wouldn't really go out of my way to make ENTIRE POWERSETS knockback-less, specifically since powersets with all knockback powers tend to belong to ATs where knockback isn't such an issue, and moreover because it would take too much effort to remove, but for the errant few, I would definitely use that.

I'm not sure how the idea that increasing knockback strength works but decreasing it doesn't in the current system, as I really couldn't follow the logic behind that one. I would think that an enhancement can be tagged with a negative number to REDUCE the sum total of knockback enhancing effects, but again Standard Code Rant applies. The problem I've heard is that because the different knockback powers have different levels of knockback, it's hard to judge how far down you need to go. I assume putting a floor there and just going, say, -100 would work, but again - I don't know. I also assume that debuffing whatever hard cap there is on enhancement values to a very low level similar to how some slow powers kill your run speed cap should be viable but who knows?

The problem of "sneaking in" effects tends to be either when effects that the developers don't WANT to be enhanceable are enhanced, or effects that cause bugs are enhanced. As I hear it with damage buff enhancement, that enhancement would enhance itself and enter a loop, which is why we're not allowed to do that. I forget the exact reasoning, but it was along those lines. It's true that we don't have enhancements that DECREASE our stats, but I don't think that's out of impossibility, but more because of a game balance philosophy that dictates you don't balance by taking away, but rather by not giving.

In general, however, I will agree that at least SOME knockback needs to go, though whatever way is technically feasible to do.

The chances of that ever happening seem slim to none, Bill. We have no precedent or anything even close, and everything BABs said when he was here suggested that this may not even be possible.

That said, a Pulse Rifle set would be quite a different beast from other Blast sets, as it could use a variety of effects inconsistent with each other. Just look at Robotics Masterminds - they have two red beams and a blue ball of lightning. A Pulse Rifle set would be the best place to put a variety of energy-based attacks that don't conform to the same framework like most "arm blasts" do.

I'm afraid that's squarely in the "who cares" category of meta-game changes that don't really add much narratively. Fire sword, energy sword, lightning sword, laser sword... Those are all swords, and all of them are used the same way. With power and weapon customization in the game, different sets need to FEEL different from each other, and just a different damage type wouldn't cut it.

In fact, I'd accept only ever doing lethal damage with my swords if I could get elemental blades to use with the powersets.

As to the slew of shield block dodge animations. You don't really see those a lot since attacks override them, but they're there.

*edit*
That said, "power armour" isn't a costume item, it's an entire costume, or should be, anyway. That's more than I'm willing to take away from costume creation and add to power customization. There's a reason we have a costume editor.

What's more, the set looks more like a Forcefields set than a power armour one. Not that I wouldn't want a Forcefields set.

What you're describing is a running animation, not a stance.

As far as stances go, there's actually /em growl from the Mutant pack, which puts you on all fours, growling and clawing at the air. If it weren't as loud, it'd be perfect for a stance.

Well, I hope you're right, then. I'd really like to put all of this Origin of Powers nonsense behind us and move on with an actual storyline, rather than with author mandates trying to tell OUR backstories.