Samuel_Tow

Oh, I agree with you completely, if for no reason other than because some enhancement icon are so huge they obscure the circle colour. Simplifying the system and improving the shop interface (by getting the pop-up to work, say) is never something I'd be against.

However, it's a question of presentation, and it really gets my goat when people start beating their chests and citing statistics about how many new players left the game because they couldn't find the red enhancement with gears teeth on the outside. Yes, it's in need of improvement, but let's not exaggerate here. Pretty much everyone here who has a 2004 reg date learned how to use enhancements by doing, and we're still here.

Just to be clear, I want to see the shop interface improved. I don't necessarily want to see SOs and DOs renamed, but a column to show their "type" would be welcome. In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing their type replace their name when you're buying and selling.

While we're at it, I'd like to see the types cleared up a bit, because they're called a whole bunch of different things. Immobilize is also called Root and Snare in places, Recharge Reduction can be Attack Speed Increase and that's just off the top of my head. Do you know how long it took me to figure out that reducing my power's recharge and increasing my attack speed (attack speed NOT being a stat I'm aware of) was the same thing? YEARS!

That's not a bad idea, actually. I used to have a character called Elder Swordsman (old guy with a beard and a sword, but no story) whom I deleted for... Some reason, I don't remember. He wasn't blue, but he did have kind of a similar motif. Doesn't look like a Stalker, though. Your ancient is really cool (love the blue with the red face paint), but he looks like a stout fighter, the kind who would yell "But you cann'a take our freedom!"

Cool concept I should do a revisit of that at some point. Probably gonna' wait for new powersets, though, or more proliferation.

Unfortunately, we didn't have international TV when that show must have been on the air, so I missed out on it. The first American show I really saw was the old Johnny Bravo cartoon when it made the transition from Cartoon Cartoon to general broadcast, which must have been 1990-something.

Still, I've seen a lot ABOUT the thundercats, and it looked like a cool premise. It looks like one of the very few shows out there - and that includes shows even now - with an actual strong female lead, and that's always a plus. That, and I will always like shows with unusual characters. Humans are boring

Having played with the toggles for a while, I think I'll just kill power effects altogether. When it's JUST the sword in that pinkish purple (magenta, whatever), it looks cool. It looks like a lightsabre. When there's too much of that on the character, it just starts looking gaudy. I should keep the auras and visual effects to an absolute minimum, so as to let the costume shine on its own. It's already... Pretty garish with all those bright colours. More bright colours just make it loud.

That said, I'm having a LOT of fun with this Stalker I don't know what it is about her, but combat just FEELS awesome, as opposed to being a means to an end. I think it's the tech sword, personally.

This is my one shining hope of decent writing with this story - that one day it turns out that all of these characters were full of crap and were spouting off complete nonsense, and the truth isn't nearly as stupid as they made it out to be. Of course, that's a vein hope, considering this crap has been written into the novels...

I honestly feel that's splitting hairs, if you want to insist on this interpretation. There comes a point in the power curve where defining someone as human loses all of its meaning if you let that human just kind of train long enough and hard enough to fly and shoot kamehamehas around. Yes, there are certain concepts which can be used to explain things just like that, but most of those are really the same one concept repeated many times over, and that one concept is basically Dragonball Z: Redux.

Basically... I GUESS you could try to rename the Natural origin to a Human origin, but once you give these humans the same powers as aliens, why are we drawing a line to begin with? Is it really THAT important whether the character was born in Brooklyn or Zeta Reticuli? Does it really matter whether the character is white, black or hot purple? Once you allow humans to "just sort of have" powers that aren't in the slightest human, you essentially turn them into aliens in all but name. It just seems like splitting hairs at that point, especially in an origins system that's drawn up with a paint roller.

Well, unless you want to claim that Superman would never benefit from any training, discipline, technique or mastery and is instead a dumb brick who just hits things with nary a thought through his head. And I may not know much about comic books, but I don't think he is.

Consider me - a non-comic-book person. I see one guy in a goblin mask flying around on a glider and throwing around pumpkins. I see another guy in a goblin mask flying around on the same glider throwing around the same pumpkins. I would assume that if they're not the same guy, they are at least very much alike, when they really aren't.

I'm not playing word games at all. You've been on the forums long enough to have seen it. Every once in a while, someone will post their bios and origins and talk about how mutagen turned his character into mutants, hence the Mutation origin. They mutated, didn't they? Then we have to take turns to explain that the origin's name should not be taken literally, and that the mutation has to be innate for it to count, and that everything else is actually Science.

Then there are the people who grab your run-of-the-mill scientist who should obviously be of the Science origin, right? He's using science. Only Science actually applies to people who were exposed to chemicals, procedures and, yes, artificial mutations and somehow got changed. An MDK style scientist throwing around beakers of chemicals and wielding a nuclear toaster would not, much as language would suggest, be Science. He'd likely be Technology.

And I'm not making this up. These are arguments I've gotten into with people here on the forums. These are things people firmly believed.

Hence why these arguments tend to be fruitless. Origins are subject to personal opinion and interpretation, and have been since Launch. Unless we drop the pattern entirely, I don't think it's worth fiddling with.

I have no reason to believe those will come with their own origin. The "incarnate flag" will be set to people of all origins, such that you very much WILL end up with Technology Incarnate characters, regardless of how you parse that phrase.

On the one hand, I agree with you. The City of Heroes lore is a mess. Don't even get me started on the whole Council thing. But on the other hand, we have to base this off SOMETHING. Now, I have no problem with basing this off our own beliefs, opinions and preferences, but the problem with that is everyone's just going to pull in his own direction.

And where Lore contradicts itself, we can do as Kain suggested: It is the errant who are removed. Where a cool story is contradicted by a crappy story, we disregard the crappy story. Then we hope the developers give it the Maria Jenkins treatment.

There's always a hairstyle that will cover the ears, though. It's just a question of picking one that I haven't use before, and this one I really haven't. It looks silly on a human

Certainly!



Meet Mage-Killer Po. Po was just an ordinary house cat until evil wizards took her from her loving owner and used her for animal experimentation, attempting to create a magical army of were-people. Their experiment was a complete failure, as most of the animals they used either died or went insane, and Po fared little better. Surviving horrible cellular degeneration and spectral terrors, Po escaped and returned to her owner.

Randy Lipowitz - her owned - turned out to be a technological genius, unbeknownst to his pet cat. With the help of his futuristic technology and her own feline agility and strength, po has made it her mission to eradicate magic from the world.

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I liked the pink tech sword from a previous suggestion, and that list of concepts I was asked to make reminded me I didn't have a catgirl, yet. So, why not? Tech catgirl stalker It makes sense for a cat, at least one made from a house cat, to want to be stealthy and prefer precision strikes over brute force combat, and I'm pretty happy with the tiger stripe pattern I managed to work in.

The astute among you will have noticed that I used both a cape and a tail. They clip, yes, and a lot. However, the cape is intended to be more of an energy field - and that particular one looks the part - so clipping with the tail actually makes sense.

The one point I'm still not completely sold on is the hair. I like the pigtails, but they give me four sets of ears. There are other options, but I'm not sure which I want to go with. And, yes, I want to keep the hair the same colour as the fur. Wouldn't you?

If they read the manual and know about enhancement colours and enhancement borders, then there should be no "confusion" to speak of. You look at the border, you look at the colour and if you're unsure, you check the right-click info. It's what I did when I first joined City of Heroes, and I started with a Science origin character. I didn't make a mutation character for nearly two years, and I never had a problem with enhancement stores. And I'm pretty sure we can all agree I'm not some kind of genius. Not by a long shot.

If your nephews is 10 and playing a PG13 game, then you really don't get to complain about problems he may be having with the game. I'm not about to persecute you for letting a minor into a PG13 game, but by the same token, I don't want the game changed to accommodate people who are too young for it. If you bend the rules, you don't get to complain.

Balderdash. All us "vets" learned the game the hard way, back when there was no ParagonWiki, no global channels and when we didn't have friends lists worth a damn, as well as when the team seek feature only showed people in the same zone as you. And yet we didn't tie our brains in a knot.

The one that has electricity around its border. You know, like the City of Heroes manual said over six years ago. At no point are the names of enhancements even in the slightest important. Enhancement border tells you its origin and enhancement colour tells you its type. Unless you're colour blind or have incredibly poor vision, neither of those is all that hard.

And if you MUST have help, all the stores up to level 30 also sell Training enhancements, so you can pick the colour of the enhancement from those and search for it in the DO/SO pile.

Enhancement colours are very distinct between each other, with only a select few being close. Defence and resistance are almost the same, but in different parts of the list, the colour of slows looks like of like the colour of immobilizes, jump looks kind of like intangibility and run and fly kind of look the same. But even then, that's one choice between two colours. Even with the pop-up not functioning, it's hardly a titanic effort.

All of that said, I'm not saying the store interface can't or shouldn't be improved. But you're presenting new players as some kind of knuckle-dragging idiots, which most of them are not.

This is pretty much why I refuse to acknowledge the existence of that entire storyline, and will continue to do so until it disappears from canon. The whole thing puts all of our current origin under the banner of one super-origin which is described in detail and put under severe limitations. Yes, you are a very smart scientist while I am a god. We are very much not alike... Only we get our powers from the same place, or are "allowed to have" our powers by the same device. It's really not needed, and it trivialises our characters' achievements and actual prowess.

Yes, I read the explanations of Pandora's Box, and I still feel that it was hugely unnecessary to add this to the game. Let me ask the following question: What does the game benefit from having that storyline? Were people honestly sitting around and wondering "Golly-gosh! I wonder WHY my scientist is so smart!" or "Gee Willikers! Why is my new fighter able to use an axe? They weren't able to do that before!" I know the development team liked explaining in-game additions with storyline additions, such as the accursed cape mission, but honestly... That has never been anything but trouble. Only where before it was just mildly annoying, with the Origin of Powers arc, it became catastrophic.

I will take City of Villain's stupid Arachnos fanboy plot over this any day. At least with CoV's plot, I can still pretend I'm working with them for my own ends and still acknowledge the story. But with the Origin of Powers, I can't really get around the insulting notions of what Origins have become unless I just ignore the idea altogether.

Thank GOD that Dr. Brainstorm hasn't show up anywhere else but in that one off-beat community announcement. Maybe the development team wised up to the fact that you don't have to explain everything as something specific, and should instead let players define what these vague concepts mean for them. With Inventions, they are undefined. Rather than trying to present them as technomagic reality warpers, why not just present them as "fill in the blank" improvements that you have to explain for your own characters? For instance, having a Triumphant Insult slotted does not mean your character is somehow bulked up by magic nannites. It just means he's a ******** loudmouth.

Developers do the best work when they define the setting and let us define how our characters fit in it.

Hmm... A mage killer, huh? That's not unprecedented even in City of Heroes, with Zakhura having that in her name. I'm starting to get an idea here. There's always been something from Arcanum I've wanted to use, or reuse as the case may be - the notion that technological armour can protect from magic. So I'm starting to picture a character decked out in technological armour designed to dampen magical effects and suppress magical senses, transforming this guy... No, this GIRL, into a mage killer assassin.

I wonder if... Yeah, I can probably go with a sort of techno-ninja look, or... Maybe a Judge Dredd look. I've been meaning to use the PPD visor for some time. So, sleek tech, that honkin' tech sword, breasts... Yeah, that should cover all bases. OK, time to start working on a costume, then. Sweet!

It's never too late for more werewolves, really, just too late to save Nadir Once I rework this guy into something else, I'll be left with no werewolves once more, and in need of a new one, either a Brute or a Scrapper. Though I probably won't make as big a deal out of it as I do with this one, I'll keep all of those ideas in mind, believe me. And yours is pretty good, actually. It's a bit sideways of what I might have come up with, but it does a good job describing why he's evil and it's pretty elaborate. Definitely something to keep in mind.

Speaking of changing this guy, I don't think I went far enough in my original statement. When I said everything could changed, I did mean everything - including "his" gender. I have no problem with making a girl Stalker if it made sense. I probably won't make a girl werewolf because the beast heads on women are just UGLY!!! but I see no problem with the general premise.

It's less a completionist tendency and more a desire for variety, really. I want to retain my Stalker because I really only play four ATs: Scrappers, Brutes, Masterminds and Stalkers. Out of coming on 50 characters now, I have about four Masterminds and Three Stalkers, including this one, with the rest being Brutes and Scrappers. A LOT of Brutes and Scrappers. I'm running out of powerset combo and starting to repeat myself with these guys, so I more or less NEED to make more Stalkers and more Masterminds.

As far as concepts go, I don't really have a list of things I want to have (beyond the simplest things, like werewolf, dragon, catgirl, robot girl, etc.). Basically, I just want to repeat myself as little as possible. Still looking at your list... Let me think. I have a ghost possessing a suit of armour, I have a bunch of furries, I have a whole host of robots... Not really sure if I have any cyborgs. I think a couple would count. I don't have any pirates and do not want any pirates. I have one girl who might count as a ninja and I have a ninja wizard (anime style). I have one school girl... And I guess one other little girl which might count. That's kind of the problem I'm running into. I have a LOT of stuff

But actually, your list is not a bad idea. It made me think about what I had, and I appreciate that.

A long time. I'd give it at least a few more weeks, if not a month before I start anticipating. Then again, I haven't really paid attention past "longer than I'm willing to sit around and wait."

Hmm... Not a bad idea. It's right up my alley, actually. It has an interesting symmetry with my actual namesake character in the "battle for self control" aspect. However, that same symmetry also puts me at an impasse, as Samuel Tow is a Scrapper and tends to fight light one when it comes to that. I might be biassed and blinded on the subject, but it feels to me that someone fighting against blood lust would want to end fights quickly, rather than employing hit-and-run tactics that irritate more than anything else, and would have moreover found a way to employ that rage in his fight style to limited degrees.

Then again, that's just ONE approach that I've already used, to boot, and the fact I'm working so hard and still coming up with so little to argue against this idea makes it very powerful and convincing. I'll need to sleep on it to decide if I can actually "feel" it. Admittedly, my other Stalkers have even less excuse, so... I don't know.

Being an Eastern European, myself, names aren't hard to come by. The original name is Estonian, itself, though I don't know if it means anything. In general, though, I tend to not pick common words from non-English languages to use for names. To English speakers, naming people after things may be common practice (most English last names are actually names of professions), but I speak a language where names don't really have meanings, or if they do they stopped having them a thousand years ago (literally). I could easily pick Grey Wolf, translate it into Bulgarian, transcribe it into English and, being that I'm the only Bulgarian in City of Heroes, easily get it. But then it'll bug me every time I look at my character select screen. Kind of like his name bugs me now - it has no flow of sound.

As far as name goes, though, unless I pick an actual name name, I think we can tackle that when we settle on a concept. I'm still dubious on the werewolf concept.

This I like. A lot. Nice lightsabre look you have going there. I was eyeing up the Tech Sword, myself, but I would not have called hot pink as a good colour for it. Good idea there.

However, there is a problem. I think the primary reason I like this one is because of the combat aura visor, but that is an actual aura and not a hard costume part. It looks good from that direction, yes, but from the side it's offset from the head and it's not on all the time, Combat Auras famously only having Combat variants. If I could put visors and other details on the wolf head, I would in a heartbeat, but since those haven't been touched in the past five years, we just can't. They don't even respect face sliders.

Most crucially, though, I'm caught between your cool idea and the previous one. I like this idea for a tech werewolf Stalker. A LOT. However, I can really only make one werewolf total, so I have to pick my battles. And in this case, as cool as it seems to sound, I think a wolf Brute is more alluring than a wolf Stalker. It's true that I like to work against the grain, but in this case pure coolness factor just... Compels me.

I'll have to sleep on this and put my thoughts in order, as some of my reactions are starting to surprise me.

Or that. Let me make this clear - if one day the guys upstairs decided to remove all origins and replace them with a single text field that said "Origin" and let you type, say, 10-15 symbols in it, I would not complain one bit. It will be much easier to let everyone define his own origin in his own words (or rather, word) than to try and set specific definitions when there really is no meaningful game balance that hinges on them.

My beef is with adding things on top of what we have now. If you remove what we have now and start from scratch... Eh, why not? Or you know what? JUST scrapping Origins altogether would be fine by me. Especially if that took the Origin of Powers arc to hell with it.

You know... I know you said something in your post, but that pic won't let me actually see it. Allow me to condense my reaction to it in one single word:

WANT!!!

Seriously, that has got to be the coolest werewolf I've ever seen, and I've seen quite a few. You've made my mind up for me, though probably not in the way you intended. I want a character that's like this. I want one badly. However... Not this one. The werewolf you've shown me looks great, but this is a Brute or a Scrapper look. It really doesn't befit a Stalker as I interpret the AT. What this means is that I most definitely WILL have a werewolf character in the future... But it won't be this character.

OK, then, change of plans. The werewolf concept is out. It's reserved for another character if and when we see more melee proliferation. This means that I'll need a brand new concept for a Sword/SR Stalker. Since this makes the question much broader, I'm open to even the vaguest descriptions you guys have. "Spirit from the afterlife who wants revenge" or "robot who turns invisible" or anything of the sort is perfectly acceptable. I really need to salvage this Stalker, even if I have to turn him into something completely different. So long as I still have a Sword/SR Stalker after all is said and done, I'll be happy.

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To address to actual post (which I did read ), I actually agree with your assessment of a technological werewolf. I have something along those lines with a ghost possessing a suit of medieval armour. The armour itself is about as strong as you'd expect sheet metal to be, which is to say not very, but the ghost has the ability to repair it magically. One can go many ways about physical strength vs. high technology, but an argument for technology is easy to make believable.

As far as "the sword makes the man," that actually struck me as kind of the same reasoning the king's men had in Kull the Conquerer. "A sword is a nobleman's weapon." Basically, civilised men would use refined, elegant swords and those knuckle-dragging barbarians would use crude axes. It's actually funny how Kull spends the whole movie trying to fence with swords and losing badly, up until he grabs an axe and essentially one-shots the hitherto undefeatable bad guy

Originally, Incarnates were supposed to be a new AT. I don't know if that was ever official or just fan wank, but that's what was said at one point. Then Incarnates were an origin, the one crossed out on that tablet in that mission from that stupid arc. Now Incarnates are more levels on top of our existing ones, and I dare say we'll see plenty of Technology Incarnates and Natural Incarnates and so forth.

Come to think of it, though - and I do know that "incarnate" stands for "an incarnation of a deity" - but basic English actually plays out the new use of the term very well. When my Technology Blaster earns his Alpha Slot, he will become Technology Incarnate. I like the sound of that!

Back in 2004, Jack explained that we never saw cops fighting any villains because even the lowest, most common street thug was super powered. Civilians, villains, contacts and a few mission briefings cite how you can't round a corner in Paragon City without running into a super hero. And this is not a new phenomenon. In the Tsoo Shenanigans - a Launch arc - the named Tsoo boss Mr. Mann has the following conversation with his Troll companion:

Supers are an integral part of life in City of Heroes, to the point that City Hall is home to hero management agencies and Hero Corps has a reason to exist. Supers are not rare, nor - from everything I can see in the actual game - are they intended to be rare. In fact, their powers seem more measurable against each other than measurable against normal people. In fact, I'm not sure we can even claim that Primal Earth is a HUMAN world, considering how many non-humans there are all over the place.

But OK, let's grant you that much. Let's assume supers' powers really are measured by ordinary humans. Does it not strike you as obvious why that would be? Because Paragon City is a human city with human organisations in it. For immersion purposes, those would have to be human-centric. But even if character power is measured off what is human, there are still fine intricacies in how this power differs from hero to her. To lump all aliens of all origins into a single Alien origin reminds me of an old Sesamy Street skit, where that thing which lives in a garbage can was told to sort old toy cars. He had a pile for cars with missing wheels, a pile for cars with working horns and a pile for cars with broken windows. He eventually got a car which had a broken window, missed a wheel and had a working horn and was baffled as to which pile to put it in.

Let's ground this a little bit more. When people complained that Demon Summoning was too magic-centric, it was either Castle or BABs who explained the following: Yes, demons are magical. However, origins do not define the NATURE of the power but the ORIGIN of this power. So while your power may indeed be magical demons as defined by the powerset itself, nothing defines the origin of the control you have over the demons, themselves. You could be controlling these magical demons with mind control chips, with your strong will or because you have the mutant power to do so.

This is easy to extrapolate to an alien power. Yes, the power is alien, in that it comes from another world. But your origin does not define the nature of your powers, but rather defines how you GOT these powers. If a character did not get his powers to begin with, but was rather born with them, then that character matches the descriptions of both the Natural and Mutation origins, and it's up to the player to specify and explain which of the two fits better. All Origin describes is how one obtained his powers, or to be more precise, how one obtained the one power that truly defines him, for lack of multiple origins.

I suppose if you want to stick to semantics, we can say that characters are measured by an ordinary human in the most formal sense, in that that's how City Hall would measure them. But I still disagree that the game's actual lore treats them as such, because the entirety of the lore is written from the point of view of a super living in a society of supers of all races from all places. It's not written as thought told by or to an unpowered human spectating these weird creatures. More specifically, it's not told with an "us vs. them" mentality where "we" are humans and "they" are not. Obviously, most writers are human, but that doesn't mean stories can't be written with a non-human viewpoint.

As an abstract example, take something like Darksiders or Soul Reaver. They are written from the viewpoint of super creatures only and solely involved in their own stories with other super creature with humans either all dead, buried and forgotten or entirely inconsequential. In City of Heroes, we exist in a society of humans, but WE are not humans, and our stories are told from our perspective, not theirs.

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All of that said, I have no problem with you having options. My problem is that I don't like a job part-done. Yes, this was called an artificial slippery slope, but I find it to be no less slippery. The origins we have now are generic. An Alien origin, by contrast, is specific. If we're going to go down the road of specific origins, then there are a fair few I'd want to see added - namely robot and elemental, and possibly divine. The game itself makes a clear distinction between the power of the divine, that is to say the power which gods seem to have naturally, and the power of magic, which is what Tielekku either invented or discovered, and which consists, as close as I can tell, of spells and incantations. If I were making the avatar of a god, wouldn't it be natural that I'd want a Divine origin to put that character in?

Like I said before - I have no problem with an Alien origin in general. I have a problem with adding one to the current framework, because it'll be one specific origin to five generic ones, creating a highly lopsided system, and that just bugs me on a subconscious level.

Please understand I mean no offence when I say this, but this would make Natural the dumbest, most boring, least interesting of all the origins, particularly since that, in large part, equals dead meat in the high levels where you have to take high-explosive rocket swarms to the face and punch out giant robots. In fact, the only reason I started using the Natural origin AT ALL was because it was ret-conned to include "Or maybe you are not human."

First of all, an origin does not describe "what place" you get your powers from, but rather "what method" you get your powers by. "Training" covers both Karate Kid and Superboy, I dare say. Secondly, I would wager a fair few people would raise an eyebrow if you suggested that both the Punisher and Dr. Doom got their powers "from the same place," yet both of them would fir the Technology origin, at least from what I've seen of the Punisher. What's more, a lot of people (if they're like me) will raise an eyebrow if you told them that the Green Goblin and the Hobgoblin shouldn't have the same origin. The Hobgoblin is just a punk in a mask with cool tech, whereas the Green Goblin - at least in the stories I've seen - gets the bulk of his strength and wit from that serum he takes. Lastly, almost everybody will question you if you suggested that a person who was injected with a mutagen which gives super powers was not, in fact, a Mutant, but was instead of the same origin as the guy who MADE the serum. Weird, huh?

Comics are also full of examples of superhuman being who are superhuman solely because they are gods, such as Thor. One can ask for a God/Divine origin based on that. Comics are also full of examples of superhuman beings who are superhuman solely because they are robots, such as Ultron. The line you draw is not as clear as you present it.