Samuel_Tow

Left 4 Dead is a pretty good example of this. Once you get barfed on and your screen goes all green with only vague, indistinguishable shapes shambling around, friendly fire is almost guaranteed. On the one hand, you're getting swarmed by zombies and you HAVE to defend yourself, on the other hand, you can't tell what's a zombie and what's an ally.

Thank you. With this information and comments from others, I inferred that the Statesman is somehow exceeding 100% damage resistance to certain elements (Smashing, Lethal and Energy, if I read right) and does so very often. That would be... In my opinion, that would actually be a bug. I know some Carnies can fight while untouchable, but I understood god mode (apparently literally...) powers to be "fight harder" scenarios, rather than "avoid and wait it out" ones. That, as I understood it, is why they recharged so quickly - so you had to fight the NPC under the effect of its god mode, rather than running around and waiting for it to time out.

I've not fought the Statesman in his AV form, so I don't know how his Unstoppable changes, but I have fought his EB form and I do know that he spams Unstoppable most of the time. I know that, even as an EB, I was unable to kill him between Unstoppables, and was forced to abuse inspiration overloading and kill him THROUGH it. If that becomes impossible, then the encounter is, in my opinion, broken.

I admit - Reichsman has a power which makes him unkillable. However, that power has a temp counter which is reliable. Unstoppable has no counter.

I suppose I'm probably alone in this, but "fitness" as a concept for super heroes (and villains) always seemed... Inapplicable to me. Yes, for HUMAN characters, fitness is essential, but for others... This is where it gets iffy for me. OK, maybe you trained your mutant ability a lot and so can use it without wearing yourself out. OK, tenuous, but it works. What about your magic wand which recharges on a static timer? What about the robot over there who simply doesn't get tired? What about the ghost who's dead to begin with?

"Well, just say you got better batteries," once told me a particularly inept powergamer, and I... Really don't see that. After a simple point, the idea of training your body just loses its meaning, especially when you don't HAVE a body, and as such Fitness itself becomes... I don't know what to say. Either implied or inapplicable.

To me, what inherent Fitness does is it gives us a few base stats where before we had none. We can now improve our recovery through the character itself, rather than by seeking a specific power. It's a lot like the Strength/Dexterity/Vitality/Magic of the original Diablo, in some regards.

I have a question:

Would it be unacceptable for me to run TFs solo as story arcs if I choose to void all rewards of any kind that they offer?

I must have missed that. I'm not sure what being indistinguishable in PvP has to do with anything, but my point was about power: What you're describing sounds like Phantom Army, and I'm not sure if it really counts as this being multiple selves if each of them comes with a random powerset.

I guess the problem I have with this is that I would be trying to accomplish something like Billy Numerous, which is to say many close with largely melee powers, but you seem to describe them being ranged, again like Phantom Army. The problem, as it were, is that such a Mastermind does not design what your henchmen ARE, only what they are LIKE, and what they are like is undefined in the extreme. Other primaries define their henchmen with powers representative of what they truly are - Thugs get guns and fisticuffs, Mercs get guns and explosives, zombies get black magic and cold steel and so forth. Multiple selves, by definition, ought to get whatever power you get, which... Really isn't doable.

I guess playing a Phantom Army Mastermind might be interesting, in terms of novelty if nothing else, but it's not something I'd really clamour for.

True, but they are also ugly, untintable, specific and almost impossible to unlock, at least in my experience. And again - we want more other weapons that look kind of like those

I though they made shields offset away from the hand with bigger gloves, didn't they? When was the last time you tried this? Maybe the bigger gloves still clip, I haven't done any tests yet.

But this reminds me of something I think Leo suggested a few times, which was a large bulky gauntlet used as a shield customization option. With a shield in (or rather, on) the left hand, the game will not allow you hold anything with it, so a large glove with a an actually large hand (again, like what War has) used as a Shield Defence power might not be out of the question. It would just need to be big enough to fit over most gloves, and I wouldn't mind it clipping with at least the LARGEST of them.

Yup. All of them. Just for you, I went back and checked them all - I have them saved. They are all this stupid. Well, except for the, like, five or six where I string sentences along based on the first thing that pops into my head and they come off like the ramblings of a sugar-rush child. Those are REALLY stupid. But, hey, I got to 28 thousand something posts writing drivel, so why change what works, right?

*edit*
And before I forget - your insult has been logged and appreciated. Than you for your time.

I didn't specifically mean "you" in person, Sensei. I don't remember who and what I was supposed to address, as I'm not good with names without avatars attached, but the last time it happened, that's exactly what I got told. In fact, why I don't I get a quote:

just because I said:

I don't intend to change my opinion the matter just because someone believe it's "crap" and I don't intend to stop bringing it up. If people can't resist smiting me for offhand comments, then I am fully prepared to accept responsibility for starting trouble and will freely admit that I am intentionally playing the bad guy. If that makes you respect me all the less, then that is unfortunate (I mean that), but it's better that you know who and what I am and disrespect me for it than for you to respect me for trying to put up an image that I don't live up to.

The comment itself is harmless and meaningless, because I don't make a point out of it these days. I am not, however, going to stop including it just because people have a pet peeve of making an argument out of it. If that makes me the bad guy, then I am prepared to live with being the bad guy.

Believe me - I get it and I care. This is a conscious choice made in full recognition of the consequences. It's not what I'd like to choose, but it's what I feel needs to be chosen regardless.

/thread

I'm not surprised it happened. I expected it to happen. But for people trying to "get me off my high horse," I'm just interested in seeing how many innocent people you're willing to step on to do so. With Fitness going Inherent, there will be a lot of threads like these, so expect me to bait you a lot. Let's see how determined you are to counter me at every step.

What you describe might work, but it begs the question of why you need to click on a car to do so. You don't need to click on a paved road to Hurl a paved road chunk. You can rip that out of soil, water, ice, metal, glass and suspended power cables. You can rip a piece of paved road out of the top of a flagpole. So why not just activate the power which tosses a car without needing that specific car to be nearby? That way the game doesn't have to sync up what kind of car you throw between different players, allowing for diversity.

Let me explain.

Babs once explained that power effects are hard-coded into the powers themselves. That was before power customization, but even power customization doesn't let you alternate effects without a visit to the tailor. What you are describing will let you hurl one type of car and one type of car only, because the hurled car, just like the hurled boulder, is an effect. By making Hurl just cycle through random objects, you get variety, and you no longer need to sync this over the net. You could throw a Camaro while the guy next to you sees you chuck a Capri, while the guy across the street sees you toss a Sideloader.

Again, I understand the desire to use environment objects as weapons. I just don't see the need for those objects to actually come from the environment, as long as they look like they did.

Aren't the engineers an objective?

Either way, based on what Castle has talked about in the past, it seems like the most processor-intensive powers are the ones with a lot of conditionals, such as the Phalanx Phighting and other constant ally buggs that ALL Cimerorans have. It seems like each Cimeroran will constantly run checks on all Cimerorans around him, meaning that for, say, eight people clumped together, you get something like 8x8 logical checks for just one power, and I suspect they have several like these. The Engineers undoubtedly contribute to this with their "aura rocking," but it's Cimerorans in general that produce lag, not specific soldiers. It's the fact that there are just so damn many of them on that hill that lags the server, as I understand it.

I don't think they can do much more to alleviate the lag without redesigning the encounter or redesigning Cimerorans in general. Personally, I would not be unsatisfied with the latter.

Last time I did an ITF, I left my netgraph running all the way through that mission. My connection did not budge at all. Ping remained constant and I lost no packets, at least no more than I usually do. My connection with the server was as solid as I've seen it, and it was the server that must have been chugging on its end.

Castle talked about them retooling things, so the lag is probably less than it was at ITF launch, but it still exists, and it still looks like it's server-side-only.

I honestly thought you'd been here longer Suffice it to say I've not been there too many more times than you have in six years. I've done a total of... Two TFs in there. I've seen Lanaru once and Ruladak once. OK, that would make them three TFs, since I did the Quaterfield once, too.

Point is, the zone is and always was an example of misunderstood design. The Shard and the Hollows were created when "If you build it, they will come!" was the running logic of the day. If you build large, sprawling zones with stuff to kill in them, people would go there to kill stuff. Story... Well, I guess you could have SOME story in there, but make no mistake - this is "end game," which means endless grinding of boring time sinks. What else would it be?

The developers didn't wake up to realise the game actually needed stories until post-Croatoa with the CoV expansionalone, and even that is partially episodic and grindy. It wasn't until the Faultline revamp that actual stories became the driving force of the game, and all the better for it.

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The Shard needs to be redone from the ground up. Fix all of the TFs so they don't have so much unnecessary crap. Don't have me raid four bases. Have me raid one to find all four items. Don't have me hunt crap for padding. Send me to the mission. Then when you're done, drop at least half of those to basic story arcs and make them runnable by solo players at a reduced reward like Ouro TFs. Then add more story arcs that have more story, less padding in them, to explain about Rularuu, the Dream Doctor, the survivors and so forth.

When you're done with that, fix the geysers. Either trace through EVERY one, geyser by geyser, and ensure it shoots straight and does so with Swift active (something we'll all have soon enough) and if that fails, replace them with teleports ala Xen. Then scrap the cop-out teleporters in FBZ and actually extend the Mole Points right up to the Storm Palace. Remember the Mole Points? I sure do. They're the chambers that didn't have internal geometry for two years straight.

Then we'll see how abandoned the zones are.

This is complete nonsense, not to put too fine a point on it. Your "natural" characters are able to survive a mile high drop, take repeated shotgun blasts to the back of the head, walk through fire, shrug off missile-rockets and jump higher than they are tall. All "Fitness" does is make them extra physically fit. In a world of super heroes, the very definition of a Natural SUPER Hero is that he or she would be more fit - or have better "fitness," if you will - than a regular human. Requesting that your characters are unfit in order to match the Natural concept is absurd, especially considering practically every Natural hero ever made used Fitness in place of more over super powers like flight and teleportation.