Samuel_Tow

That right there is what I was missing. Double damage area vs. total area. That would explain it. I don't think you need to integrate over a shape this simple (it's basically a linear function and a constant function) and would be simpler to calculate them as a triangle and a rectangle. More specifically, a triangle that's (40x100)/2 = 2000 and a rectangle that's 10*100 = 1000, or 3000 all told. The whole field is 100*100 = 10 000, so the percentage of the blue is 3000/10 000 = 30/100, or 30%

OK, I can buy that. I was getting as far as calculating the area, but lacked anything to compare it to. Now I know.

You don't have the right kind of villain, then. From my perspective, the petty servitude our characters are forced into and all the kowtowing to Arachnos are horribly distasteful, especially when I have characters who are supposed to have dignity, style and vision. Almost all "leader" villains that I have would take the "Kill that tough guy just because" mission over everything else, for the simple reason that that's the easy way to assert your power to the people. This shows them that they can't and shouldn't be strong unless they're willing to serve you. Anyone who starts getting ideas dies, and publicly as a lesson to the others.

Obviously, it ain't pretty, but I'm not writing for nice guys here. I'm writing for people who have a clear vision of how thing should be and aren't interested in allowing anyone or anything to get in their way. Not only that, but they're not at all turned off from proactive violence and murder if it makes a point, especially if it's just some tough guy idiot who made the mistake of running his mouth.

I couldn't disagree more. Of all the stories ever told on all three sides, I will still take Paragon City's stories over all others, by and large. In City of Villains and Going Rogue, you're always displayed as a servant to someone else, and not just because you're doing as they say. You have pledged your allegiance to them, are indebted to them or really want to get tight with them. This I do not like, and it's why I'm so turned off by the whole "Resistance vs. Loyalists" struggle. What if I don't care about EITHER side? What if I only care about myself? Or what if I want to help protect Praetorian, but feel BOTH factions are idiots? I don't have that freedom of choice that I do in Paragon City.

City of Heroes doesn't have very in-depth stories, by and large, but what it does well is making me feel like "my own man." I swear no allegiances, I serve no factions, I have no moral code foisted on me, other than "do good," which is as broad as it gets. I'm not given motives from on high, that's the thing. With City of Villains, it's either "you're in it for the money" or "you're in it to be an Arachnos lackey" and in Going Rogue it's in the actual moral choices. But in City of Heroes? "You're in it for the... lulz? Sorry, I got nothin'." Why am I doing good? I dunno. Maybe I just feel like it, maybe I have honour, maybe I'm compelled to, maybe I want to protect people from the pain I felt, or maybe I'm ten thousand years old, bored and trying to see if being virtuous might not break the monotony. My motivations are not given to me by the narrative, and THAT I enjoy.

---

Back to the Power Arc in particular and Going Rogue in general, I disagree that adding more choices would ruin the atmosphere of Praetoria, unless the atmosphere is "You're either Nexus or against us!" which never really sat well with me. My ego is always just big enough to want to flip everyone the birdie and be against them all. If Metronome can pull it off, if Simon Omega can pull it off, if James Noble can pull it off... Why can't I? Am I, once again, second banana to the awesomeness that are the NPCs? Yes, making hard choices in a hopeless situation is good storytelling... For a survival horror, a war documentary or a slasher thriller. In a universe where we're supposed to be awesome, all it does is put me in situations where I keep thinking "I should be better than this. I should have the choice to be more adventurous. I should be allowed to NOT play it safe every time." And I never am. Well, almost never...

Enter the Power arc, the only piece of content in Praetoria that's NOT written like this. Yes, I'm still a loyalist, though in name only. I do not serve the loyalists, the serve me. They may not know it, but if they won't serve me by choice, I can always manipulate them, force them or kill them. Look at what happened to Reese, and let that be a lesson to all of you! Ahem... The Power arc IS the third choice. It's a choice which puts me in service to no-one at all. In fact, multiple moral choices say that in almost these exact words. "No-one controls you. Not the Resistance, not Sinclair, NOBODY!" This is what I want!

Only it's not quite what I get. When I made the thread, I was about mid-way through the story arc, and up to that point everything was good. Sinclair's arc was a bit... Underwhelming, as he TOLD me I achieved fame, but just off-hand. Then I moved to Neutropolis, and things began to go sideways. Somewhere along the line, I apparently gave up on wanting power, fame and independence and instead began wanting to be an Recluse's lackey... Wait, no, that doesn't sound right... I began wanting to be... Emperor Cole's lackey, that's right. You can see why I'd make that mistake, what with the storyline becoming a carbon copy of CoV's basic premise. And I don't quite get why. I was so cool and independent in Nova and Imperial, but in Neutropolis, the only thing I could think of is which high-level Praetorian I wanted to serve. Why?

In fact, you know what pissed me off? The culmination of my ambition, the climax of my rise to power... Was to address Emperor Cole as "My Lord?" The hell? Why?

The power arc, though, is a good example of why the duality of warring factions is so limiting. The Power arc has almost nothing to do with the Resistance, so when moral choices come up, my reaction "Huh?" Spoilers ahead, but my final moral choice was to either destroy the Olympian and burn down Neuron's lab for... No reason that I could determine and join the resistance. Wait, what? When did the resistance come into this? The entire arc, I saw them, like, once, and that was after duping them into a pointless attack and kicking their *****. What POSSIBLE reason would I have to want to join them? The entire arc, I've had almost no exposure to the resistance at all, and I would want to join them? Why? What sense does that make?

I know why it was done. The developers painted themselves into a corner by writing the Resistance and the Loyalists into the very core of the game, so every moral choice has to be between them. It doesn't matter if I'm picking between cake and pie, cake has to be illegal and eating it would make me part of the Resistance while pie is the status quo and would make me part of the Loyalists. This should not have happened. Morality should not have been reduced to just two factions. If it HAD to be reduced to factions, there should have been at least three, if not four. Because with just two, you either have to make EVERYTHING involve both factions, which brings us back to the Longbow problem, or your moral choices don't make sense, which brings us back to the Olympian problem.

I hope they introduce a third faction at SOME point in the future. It would make things at least feel less forced.

Simply restricting Peacebringers to Bright themes and Warshades to Dark themes would suffice, in my opinion.

They're still things we paid for (each one is three months' worth of cost) and still things that, going into the 60-month ones, a lot of people don't have and won't have.

And in the Rogue Isles, I'm delivering people to the Vahzilok, destroying a young heroine's life, helping a mad scientist experiment on people and helping a hateful, spiteful, bitter jerk enact his pointless vendetta. Cleopatra vs. Washington is small fires compared to that. Only difference is it pretends to present a choice, only it doesn't, really. Not even as much choice as capturing Miss Francine, or not, as the case may be.

That's nonsense. There's always a third option. For instance, why can't I kill BOTH Washington and Cleopatra and claim I came in after they'd killed each other? I get to stay a Loyalist because, eh, who'll know? And at the same time, I get to stick it to the man for forcing me to make a hard choice, because I'm just a dick like that.

Or how about this? I walk and let them fight each other. Then Cleopatra survives and turns out to not be a jerk. She recognises I helped her by not helping Washington and cuts me in on the deal. Everybody wins. Or I knock them both out, tie them up and appeal to their senses. Who knows, maybe I can turn Washington over to the resistance, or otherwise turn Cleo around to the Loyalist cause. How come Commander Shepard could always do that sort of thing, but I never get the chance to?

And even all that said, there IS a third side: The Syndicate. Cole's men have been trying to hunt them down for how long now and they've done a little damage to the organisation. Why bother with the Loyalists or the Resistance when the Syndicate have proven that they can take care of themselves, and both Tub Chi and Wu Yin offer to take care of me, too. Well, of course, deus ex machina says they have to work for the Resistance because the Syndicate don't exist as a faction, but if they did, this wouldn't be necessary. At all. The Syndicate wouldn't need to be working with the Resistance as a plot device to make their morality choices work if they actually had their own faction.

That this "can't" work is provably wrong and shortsighted, to boot. Once again - this works just fine with the Power arcs, as I've never been asked to make any hard choices so far. All of them were pretty straightforward. Furthermore, it very much "can" because it's a question of writing and storytelling. There are ways to talk around these limitations, provided Going Rogue's agenda doesn't get in the way.

So do I. Remember any OTHER time that happened?

This I have to agree with, and for a couple of reasons. While costumes are cosmetic and just improve your creative toolset, powers are practical and really divide people into haves and have nots. I, as the owner of every Booster Pack under the sun, should not have the strong advantage I have over new players. I can, as of the time of this post, teleport directly to my mission and base, run very fast and jump very high as early as level 4, wield three extra attacks with no power picks in them, take a travel power at level 6 instead of 14, summon a pet which buffs me and reveal the entire map at the push of a button.

None of those, when taken alone, are all that big of a deal, but they add up over time. If we keep adding Ninja Run style powers to Booster Packs - and they WILL keep making Booster Packs - then after a certain point, we're going to start getting into seriously dangerous territory with no way to stop. Look at people these days, and how they complain that their booster doesn't come with an awesome power. We expect this because they keep providing it, and they keep providing it because we expect it. This is bad for the game long-term. It's bad for the game even now, as a matter of fact.

Additionally, anything that comes as part of a Booster is practically guaranteed to be kicked out of the development queue and will never, EVER be expanded upon, upgraded or improved. Look at trenchcoats. They gave us ONE and nothing has been added to that entire category for the entire time it has existed. We don't even have the option for sleeveless trenchcoats (in the same way as sleeveless jackets that you can use big gloves with). And I don't think we'll ever get any more. Why would we, when it's a veteran reward? And what about the Bolero. Think we'll ever get other Bolero styles? Because I don't see it. Booster Packs never get item upgrades once they've been released and paid for.

The same goes for Ninja Run. It could have been a pretty decent travel power, it could have added more options to our builds, it could have come with an entire set. It could have been slottable. But no. Because it's a paid-for power, not only will it never be slottable, but it also guarantees that we'll never get a pool power like it, because, well... What about those who PAID for a lesser version of a power you're giving for free? Won't someone think of the children!?!

We need to stop adding unbalancing powers to Super Boosters and start working those into the general powers system, because that's where the bulk of the game's value is. And we need to start adding items to categories originally introduced by veteran and purchased packs. Keep the veteran trenchcoat unavailable (if you must), but add other trenchcoats to it. In a Booster Pack, if necessary.

Dean McArthur, yes. He's like a lost puppy - dumb, annoying and a constant source of trouble, but at the same time you can't help liking the guy D-Mac is a prime example of the kind of writing I want to see more of. Yes, his arc is no less presumptuous than the "You want to serve me!" ones (in particular, that you want a clone factory and that you'd trust Leonard to run it for you), but again - as long as I'm going to be railroaded into a story, I'd rather it were a story written as though I'm the protagonist.

The way D-Mac's arc is written is, in fact, a lot like my early Architect arc which I haven't updated in probably a year. It's exactly what I'd expect from a character-driven arc - it gives you a contact who is a source of information, with a disembodied narrator telling you what seems to make sense the most at the time. That way, no-one is expressly TELLING your character what to do, and it is as though your character himself or herself is the one with initiative.

One mission ends with you discovering someone cloned you. It's implied that you don't like this (who would?) and so Dean serves as an information dispenser to find out how this can be dealt with, which your character capitalises on as one would capitalise on good info. Job done. And bonus points for going back to Dean to check up on Leonard after the fact. That's called being proactive. Like a villain really should be.

So, yes - more of that, please

How do you figure?

I'm going to keep pretending this isn't taking place in the thread, but I will say only one thing on the matter: It's all a matter of perspective. If you feel that what you described is wrong, then you are free to, but don't try to present your choice as objectively good and other people's as objectively bad. They're choices for a reason.

That's been going on for as long as I can remember. It's just that my patience cutoff is somewhere between four and six years.

This I agree with. If it's team content, then it shouldn't really be doable by one person while the rest of the team sit on their hands. However, there's room here to include a caveat - doable QUICKLY and/or EASILY. Yes, team content can sometimes be soloed. It's not a question of can it be, it's a question of how quick, easy and accessible such content is. An AV fight can run you upwards of half an hour and reward you nothing at all like what half an hour's hard work should be worth. It's doable, but not practical.

A full team will typically reduce an AV fight to a regular encounter, from experience running it down to less than five minutes, which isn't out of scale of what AVs reward. It's a question of design philosophy. Do you want team content to be utterly impossible for solo players, or do you want team content to be possible to be soloed, but only ever really reasonable with a team? It's really more of a judgement call than anything else.

That said, I feel that AVs and EBs do not scale well enough with team size, in the sense that... They don't scale at all. They represent one, single very substantial leap in difficulty. It's like if your difficulty setting stopped at +1x2 and the next notch up was +3x4, or if a +0x1 spawns wouldn't begin increasing in size until all eight players were on the team, at which point they jump to +8.

I'm not sure what a superior system for scaling content would be that didn't involve making eight versions of every AV and EB or designing encounters that play different ways depending on the team size. Yes, Left 4 Dead's AI Director would be cool if we had it, but that's really out of the question. About the only other thing I can think of is putting AVs' and EBs' stats into some kind of passive buff that itself scales with people who are currently in the instance. That way, an AV would be easier if fought by four people than he or she would be if fought by eight people, thus providing scaling difficulty. I'm not sure if that's worth doing, however.

That's pretty much what sold me on them. I've had it up to HERE with City of Villains missions that have my contacts order me around, that when Dr. Hetzfield was monologuing and an option came up to basically go "Quiet you! I have a plan!" with him shrinking down and going "But... But... I also..." *stern look* "Let's hear your plan..." THAT was satisfying Sure, I had no idea I had a plan or what that plan was, and in a way that was a bit disconcerting as it panned out, but at the end of the day, I'd rather be railroaded into MY plans than be railroaded into other people's plans

There are a few moments of genuine compassion, as well, such as telling off Duncan, even if she shrugs it off. There are also a few moments of really powerful writing, such as Option A: Power is cool, but is it worth being controlled by the regime? or Option B: No-one controls you. Not the Resistance, not Cole, nobody! You're better than them all! It's moments like these that bring a tear to my eye

Beat me to it.

And, yeah, I too was taken aback by the costume. At first glance, I thought it was a hoax of some sort, posting a screenshot that's not even from City of Heroes. But I recognised the tail, then the ears, then the legs, then finally the Dagger pattern on the gloves.

It's a very well-made design, definitely, but I don't think it's something I'd want to copy. It involves using a breather as a snout, which a breather is not. The shot doesn't really highlight how out of place it looks from that angle, but nah. I might consider it if and when we get proper animal snouts.

In the meantime, I'm too busy making a quite literal cow girl.

Without giving out any spoilers, let me just say that I'd like that very much, myself

I disagree, in that the developers have said something very different in the past. I forget who it was who was tasked with answering lore questions, but one of his explanations dismissed the notion of Praetorian Earth as an "opposite" universe where good is bad and bad is good. The explanation, then, was that Praetorian Earth was instead a very exaggerated universe where people were very much like what they were on Primal Earth, but taken to an extreme. So on Primal Earth the Statesman is enforces the law, whereas on Praetorian Earth Tyrant goes above the law to define his own. On Primal Earth Back Alley Brawler is a hard man who fights street crime in an effort to educate and rescue people, whereas Praetorian Marauder seeks to empower people to fight fir themselves at the expense of quality of life.

We were expressly told that in Praetoria, good and evil do not apply in the same way they do in Primal Earth, therefore trying to base judgement off alignment is not a good call. You can't just say "Well, Cole is evil, so anyone on his side is Going Rogues' villains." because it's not true. Yes, his rule is questionable, but what isn't questionable is that without his help and his rule, there would be no Praetoria City and no mankind, and Praetorian Earth would be just one more world overrun by the Devouring Earth as we've seen in so many others. What makes Praetoria's writing is the fact that morality is so subjective. Yes, SOME actions are easily good or bad when out of context, but they're one small part of a much larger story.

Do you destroy people's water supply to save their minds and kill their bodies or do you let them remain brainwashed but alive and healthy? Do you let people know about the invasion and ensure panic and much needless death, or do you keep the secret and save them without needless bloodshed? There is no "right" answer to these questions, just as there really is no "wrong" answer to them. They're a question of ethics, morality and, at the end of the day, preference, which is naturally going to vary from person to person.

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Or, hell, maybe you're baiting Golden Girl. I don't know.

I write a lot of those at work during times of dead air. That, and actually talking about the game makes me enjoy the gameplay itself a lot more than if I just sat down to grind at it like your typical MMO.

Kind of, yeah. Based on Marchand's descriptions, I interpreted Responsibility to be the good guys of the Loyalists and Power to be the bad guys, whereas it's... Almost exactly the other way around.

Either way, I LOVE the writing on the Power arc, and I seriously wish we had more like that. Villain-side, especially, where content generally paints me as some kind of hired thug.

Oh, speaking of this, can we please please please get the ability to put hats on OUR full helmets? That'd be so sweet!

I know I can just use a regular hat and stick face plates to it, but most regular hats come with hair, and when I'm trying to rip off colonel Karl Kroenen, you can't really have hair, now can you?

I'll play around with Build Up (it's possible Power Siphon is doing this), but I know it's not as easy to solve on my end. Hitting Escape does not solve it for me, as it doesn't seem to do anything. I hit Escape more than a few times, go into battle and then my character proceeds to return to idle mode after every attack. It's only via weapon draw that I've found I can fix this. Luckily, I always have at least one vet power that draws a weapon.

*edit*
It looks like Vanden nailed it. Power Siphon causes my character to start doing this, and it's pretty easily replicable. I guess the mode it leaves the character in somehow overrides conventional combat mode. Seems like a bug to me.

More specifically, it looks like it's happening mostly if I use Power Syphon while running, which overrides its animation.

Well, let's do the math... By hand.

You mention having 62.1% accuracy from enhancements and 32% from sets, so this gives you an accuracy base of 1.921, excluding power-specific boosts. What were you attacking with?

Against a +2 enemy, your base to-hit is 56%. A Rikti Drone with 35% defence would bring this down to 21% to-hit. It's still above the 5% floor, so we'll leave it as is.

Your final chance to hit would be 1.921*21%, which is 40.341% by my calculations. Provided you're using Super Strength like I think you are, and Super Strength has no inherent accuracy bonuses (outside of Knockout Blow), then "around 40%" sounds about right for those numbers.

*note*
Accuracy is a very poor solution to high levels of defence, because its actual effect diminishes as your to-hit before accuracy drops. From a base of 21% as Rikti Drones leave you, you'd need to increase your accuracy over four and a half times if you want to cap, meaning over 350% accuracy to hit 95% final chance to hit, which I don't think is reasonable. Get yourself some to-hit buffs, attack them with AoE (Drones have no defence to that) or debuff them somehow. Or just do what I do and keep trying to get lucky.

*edit*
Defence buffs, defence debuffs, to-hit buffs and to-hit debuffs are all added to the base to-hit before accuracy. If you want to look into it, check out Arcana's guide on the subject, which is still accurate.