Samuel_Tow

Yeah, sooner or later it goes back to the "range as defence" argument. I caught a red name saying that enemies still hit harder in melee than at range because they had higher melee damage mods. I don't remember who it was or when it was said, but I remember disagreeing with him, because what's killing me isn't Freakshow swipes and Troll punches, but rather Freakshow blasts, machineguns and bombs and Troll BOULDERS. Oh, and Nemesis chainguns, as wielded by Dragoons who DO NOT HAVE MELEE ATTACKS. Speaking of which: Rikti Drones.

Range may or may not be good for defence some of the time against some of the enemies, but I dare say it's patently obvious it's not good enough overall, not on an AT that's running around butt naked in terms of self-protection/

I doubt that's going to happen without Controller players blowing a gasket, though I assume Dominator players might just roll their eyes.

But, yeah, that would work. THE biggest problem I always mention when it comes to Blaster self-support is that control is a double-edged sword - the more time you spend applying control effects, the more those control effects expire because you have very little free time left over to do other stuff, like kill things. The point of control effects is not and has never been to STOP damage. All they can do is delay damage, potentially until you can take out the source, usually until you're part-way there. As such, the more free time a Blaster gets in-between controlling, the more those control effects mean and the lest it sucks to try and use them.

Provided we keep their self-stacking window, I actually wouldn't mind seeing an increase in the recharge and duration of control powers. I was actually shocked to see Bitter Ice Blast lasting only 8 seconds when it takes something like a third of that just to animate. Of course, Bitter Ice Blast is a corner-case head-scratching power, but the point remains.

So, yeah - fix control to where it's viable, fix Blaster secondaries... SOME Blaster Secondaries. How would we help sets like Energy Manipulation and Fire Manipulation, however? They don't have duration-bound control to speak of. This is actually where an old question I keep bringing up comes into play - what are Blaster secondaries supposed to do? I've never been able to get a consistent answer to this, and I can't figure it out on my own.

Yeah, but I got shells full of crap that I don't need or want, but feel bad about throwing away. Old books my father left me that I wouldn't read even if I spoke russian, computer parts crap like old driver CDs for hardware that's long gone, boxes for games I haven't touched in years, like... I'm actually looking at Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger right now. I don't know if that would even RUN, or indeed if the CDs are still readable. And I'm not sentimental, so I'm sure people have even MORE crap on their shelves than I do.

Hell, every time people like the Spoony One or Linkara flip the camera around the room they're shooting in, they always come off as hoarders because they have boxes on the floor, piles of random crap, all manner of stuff on a zillion shelves... And James Rolfe's basement is just SCARY!

Yeah, sure, instead I have a PC full of crap. You would NOT want to see my Downloads folder, and I probably wouldn't want to show it to you. But I can always sort this out with a quick deltree (hardy-har-har) because most of that stuff I either have uploaded, burned to, like, one of ten DVDs ever, or I can redownload from the 'net, like this game or all the steam games I have. Boxes just take up stuff and don't really serve any purpose.

That could actually be calculated. A kneeling position is largely predictable, especially if we ignore the upright leg which shouldn't cause problems. My guess is that the Digitigrade knee won't actually touch the ground, if for no reason other than because the digitigrade shin is shorter in my calculation. I don't see why you can't make it the same length, but it would accordion the digitigrade legs far too much pretty much constantly.

It also occurs to me that we want the sum of the digitigrade thigh, shin and foot to be at least around 10-20% longer than the sum of the plantigrade thigh and shin, just to ensure the digitigrade leg can stand up without hyperextending. By my eyeball calculation, that would put one digitigrade bone being 4/5 of each plantigrade bone.

Actually, I don't think I need to run the numbers. In a kneeling position with plantigrade legs, the distance between the pelvis and the ground is the length of the plantigrade thigh (hip to knee), and the length of the digitigrade thigh is defined as shorter than that of the plantigrade thigh. As such, the knee will not sink into the ground.

The problem is that the plantigrade TOES might be up in the air

People aren't buying those for the look, they are buying them because jet packs don't cost a power pick. Fly does. If jet packs were identical to Fly (i.e. no graphics, call them levitation rings), people would still be buying them just as much.

I'd rather not vouch for a patchwork workaround because whenever one of these gets implemented, the case is then closed and isn't revisited for years. If they do decide to mess with jet packs, we really want them to go the extra mile if just because of that.

Damage auras for Blasters is a complete oxymoron. Blasters are designed from the get-go to be ranged damage dealers, and even what melee attacks they have can be used by rushing into melee, doing them and then rushing back out. The whole functionality of the AT revolves around avoiding melee as much as possible and when melee is necessary, minimising the time spent in it.

Then you take a power which is only functional if you stay in melee for long periods of time, and my head starts displaying a detonation countdown timer. Why? Why give a Blaster a power which requires him to play and act utterly contrary to how his AT is designed to play?

Damage auras on melee ATs, that I can see. They spend a lot of time in melee, so the damage it does really adds up over time, and for damage that comes at no opportunity cost, that's not bad. But they get a lot of mileage because their AT function requires them to act in such a way that they get maximum usage out of that power. Ranged ATs have no use for melee-range (and they are) damage auras which are only effective if you spend a lot of time in melee, which your AT, the manual, the player guides and the developers are telling you you SHOULD NOT BE DOING!

Seriously. Damage auras do nothing as self-protection in case an errant enemy runs in. They take a lot of time to do anything, and if you're determined to stand your ground and be punched in the face long enough for a damage aura to matter, then you're going to die. A lot. A Blaster's reaction to being bum-rushed in melee shouldn't be "Oh, goodie, now they'll get insignificant damage every two seconds!" A Blaster's reaction should be to run, hit and THEN run, or possibly control... And then run.

You can attack in melee, you just can't STAY in melee, and damage auras don't really work unless you stay in melee and stay there a lot. It's like handing the player a gun that shoots both ways every time you pull the trigger... Literally like that.

The problem with Blasters, as I see it, is a core design conundrum - you give them one singular distinct advantage - damage - yet build their entire AT in such a ways as to be UNABLE to leverage that damage, thus turning balance that is supposed to act in their favour into a weakness they need to contend with. The damage Blasters get acts as the "return" in their "cost vs. return" equation, and unfortunately the "cost" is everything else.

In this regard, Snipes are actually an apt allegory for Blasters in general. They pay with damage for recharge which is quicker than they the frequency they are designed to be used with, meaning they end up paying a cost for a benefit they can't use. A bum deal, as it were.

I keep suggesting shields for Blasters not because I want to turn them into Scrappers with passive defences, but because shields are what gives a Blaster that crucial extra bit of survivability which allows him to leverage his damage at a non-suicidal level of risk. For instance, if you hit Aim + Build Up + Cone + AoE, chances are you'll either be dead mid-way through the cone, or at least so hurt that you WILL be dead mid-way through the AoE. With a shield, you can be reasonably secure in the knowledge that you'll survive this, though with no guarantees you'll be able to survive much longer if that gamble didn't pay off.

Granted, debuffs and control effects kind of do the same thing... But not quite. Passive defences provide protection at no opportunity cost. You don't need to activate them in combat, they don't time out, they don't butt out your actual attacks. Ice Manipulation always gets lauded as the quintessential Blaster secondary, but if you actually try to leverage all of its control abilities, which is Freeze Ray, Bitter Freeze Ray, Shiver, Freezing Touch and Ice Patch (you know, half your powers), you actually end up spending SO MUCH TIME using them that the first ones you use start timing out. Active control always has an opportunity cost, and too much control can easily have such an opportunity cost that it simply overrides your actual attacks. And you can't control your enemies to death. They WILL wake up sooner or later. The point is killing them before they do, which you can't do if you spend most of your time throwing around control effects.

Again, I don't want defence sets for Blasters. But a single shield that most get anyway, and many feel is mandatory is hardly a defence set in and of itself. I honestly feel those shields, most of which only stop smashing and lethal anyway, are something that ought to be integral to Blasters, not esoteric as it is right now.

Look at it this way - I live in Europe and this is the time zone I have to work with. I log onto the servers I have access to in the time of day I can spare, and this is the number of people I see. You quote server population numbers that are HIGHER than what I'm seeing, yet still claim mine are greater. This isn't a question of how many people THERE ARE, it's a question of how many people I CAN PLAY WITH, and the only people I can play with are the people who are online when I'm online. That's either hypnophobic Americans, or other EU players anyway, and their numbers are not as high as you might think.

I very much can, and more over SHOULD compare EU prime time with US downtime, because due to time zones, EU prime time IS US downtime, and since EU prime time is all the time I can play when I have work in the morning, it makes sense to compare those numbers. Concurrent accounts as a printed stat doesn't do anything for me when those numbers only occur during times of day when I can't play. Well, can't play AND go to work the next morning.

[/quote]Insult away - it's perfectly understandable reaction and with the benefit of hindsight I agree it seems like a mad thing to do.[/QUOTE]

I don't WANT to insult you

Sounds like you were a victim of circumstances. When I bought the game back in May of 2004, there was no US version, so I actually had to have my brother in the US buy it for me as a birthday gift, and he put in a time card along with it. I don't remember why. So when the EU version came out, I was asked to SWITCH, at which point I got to thinking if I wanted to. And I could not think of a single reason why I would.

Maybe it's because we here are pretty much counter-nationalistic, but I've never EVER wanted localised software, myself. I tried playing online multiplayer before, and my connection was crap all around the world, EU or otherwise. The reason I picked City of Heroes was because you didn't NEED fast connection to play it, something I learned back in the days of Dungeon Siege. FPS games could suck if you didn't have broadband, but RPGs you could play even on dial-up. In fact, I did. Rather a lot.

It's a general policy of mine that if there is a local version of a global service that I'm redirected to, it's going to suck and I'll do my best to back out of it and go back to the international site. When I visit nVidia, I visit their American site, if for no reason other than spite, just as an example. As such, I would need SERIOUS reason to NOT play the original international release. And, to be honest, importing a copy is an acceptable cost. I firmly believe that localised versions of foreign software are never superior to the original, and it didn't take City of Heroes to teach me that.

Of course, it took PlayNC cramming localised sites down my throat that taught me to HATE!!! it, but that's besides the point.

By my definition, a "story bible" would be something used to make sure that different writers don't contradict each other. Our story bible does not seem to be very good at this.

There really isn't anything I can say (for a change) that Kellis hasn't already said here. The game "ends" when I hit 50. I can choose to stick around, but it won't make it any less "over."

We'll see if the Incarnate level cap raise will change things to "when I get all Incarnate points" or if it will bar me from getting any by myself, thus leaving 50 as the final reasonable goal.

Not only is that false on its face, such a mode of thinking is BORING because it stifles any potential for real mystery. If you assume the multiverse follows a tree structure, with all possible dimensions following a common origin but splitting off from each other at various different points, then one only needs to find a dimension's "parent," trace the point of divergence and work back along the timeline, discovering secrets which might otherwise have to be discovered by hand. This is actually one fictional theory behind time travel as a means for solving the multitude of time travel paragoxes (i.e. every time a paradox occurs, the dimension splits either both ways), but again, it's only ONE theory, and not one I either subscribe to or indeed instinctively assume.

In essence, you're discussing divergent history. I find the concept of convergent history to be much more interesting, and slightly harder to predict. Convergent history dictates that the different dimensions start off completely different (or at least random), but events that take part in them naturally bring them together to a common point of uniform timeline. For instance, every dimension will spawn an Earth, but if one dimension's Earth leaps ahead in technology by millions of years ahead of all others, then either the others will experience technological revolution, or the one outlier will suffer catastrophic self-destruction, bringing that Earth's mankind back in-line with the rest of the multiverse.

This is interesting because it's unpredictable. You know the timelines converge, but you don't know WHAT they are converging towards. You never know if your world will change to be more like the dimension you just visited, or if that dimension will change to be be more like your world. And even if you happened to know what will tend towards what, you still have the concept of predetermined fate and, by inclusion, the concept of defying fate, possibly forcing the multiverse to converge on a different point. You also have the question of whether there is one true reality that everything is converging towards in zin-zag steps, or whether the convergence point is just the average of all dimensions.

It also makes it easy to explain massive differences in past history. For instance, in Paragon City's history, gods were real, in our history gods probably weren't, but our worlds still look and act remarkably similarly. Or say one timeline had elves and dwarves and drows and enchanted woods and basically a few square yards dug out of JRR Tolkien's back garden. Another could have seen life on Earth created by Martians. Yet another could have started off in an Earth where animals were as sentient as humans. Nevertheless, all of those worlds could eventually converge into the same timeline.

Neither divergent nor convergent timelines are "right," and I dare say a mixture of the two, or indeed not knowing which, is is the most fun. Trying to backhand people because they won't accept your fanfiction explanation of concepts absent from canon over their own interpretations will not change that.

Not necessarily. You can just have Digitigrade legs simply do smaller steps and take narrower stances than you might expect, matching the heels of the plantigrade legs. Unlike plantigrade legs, you don't expect digitigrade legs to lock at the knees, and if you're always have them flexed somewhat, you can just have them flexed more or flexed less. Or you can simply shorten the length of all the bones, resulting in a shorter digitigrade leg that has to stay more extended, thus minimising the forced flex.

The equations I gave are actually a (VERY rudimentary) way of calculating how a digitigrade leg would look if it had the same footing as the corresponding plantigrade leg in any animation. This, obviously, does not account for the full range of motion of the digitigrade leg, but given the alternative, I'll take it.

I actually see it the other way around. Blasters were given one purpose - damage. In fact, I hear they were originally listed as Range/Melee, rather than Range/Support. As such, they had 18 powers to devote to attacks - too much to fill in with useful powers and not repeat them too much. So they were given "chaff," or as I like to call them CRAP powers. Things like damage auras, things like Burn, things like Smoke Grenade and on and on and on. Assault sets are kind of like what Blasters are, only one set, so there isn't any room for crap powers, hence why they have only the good ones.

What I'm continually amazed with when it comes to Blasters is how they managed to get not just useful, but ESSENTIAL powers staggered AAALL the way into their Epics. Like Epic shields. Yes, they're cool. But are they cool enough to exist for only the last 5 levels? Or the Epic control powers, so good you have to be 41 to get them. These are not things you should have to wait on esoteric pools to provide. These are things that should have been IN THEIR POWERSETS. Screw Burn. Give me Fire Shield. Keep your Lightning Field. I'll take Charged Armour, instead. Or how about Cryo Freeze Ray. Or Sleep Gas Grenade. Or Surveillance. Or, hell, Body Armour. I can think of, like, four things I'd drop from Devices in a heartbeat if I could get a power that isn't a wasted power pick.

And you know what the worst part is? This will NEVER be fixed. Ever. The Blaster secondaries are set in stone... Were set in stone six years ago. They're not changing. Ever. And I can keep requesting that Epics be opened earlier until I get carpal tunnel syndrome, but that won't happen, either. Can't let players take the awesomeness that is Torrent too early, can we?

Well, I have a hard time accepting a storyline that has two faceless, nameless, mysterious strangers clearly weaving grandstanding plans and manipulating people into it. The way the letter-writer uses villain players to get... What was the Invulnerable guy's name? That's the same way he's manipulating Protean. I actually don't remember the storyline minutia, but I left with the impression that Protean was set up so that the player villain could get the job.

Especially considering that the hero-side story arc has the mysterious stranger flatout admit that he's recruiting Protean, I don't really them as different people. It's possible, but doubtful.

Speaking of that, the Omega Clearance Rikti info is given out in a 40-45 arc, and only as an extreme exception. Or WAS. Right now the Dark Watcher is handing it out to anyone who walks by like he's giving out free dinner vouchers. "Just say you learned it elsewhere." This isn't quite the same level of BAD as how villains learn about it, of course - which is basically Timothy Raymond dropping an afterthought to the effect of "Oh, and by the way, the Rikti are altered humans. You know, just sayin'." Ugh... Who wrote that?!?

I guess if we ignore the fact that our characters know about it, the Midnight Squad is still pretty secretive. You don't see their agents in the streets, their actual representatives don't stand out and their clubhouse mansion (never thought I'd use THAT expression) is hidden in nevereverland. So, that kind of makes sense.

Speaking of clandestine secret organisations, what THE HELL are the Malta Group doing calling you out in broad daylight? No-one is supposed to know they even exist, much less be printing their manifestos. That's what the definition of hidden conspiracy is. The Malta are suppose to be the Illuminati, the Templars, the Freemasons, the guys who rule our lives without us knowing and have fun putting pyramids on dollar bills just to show how cool they are that we don't understand the symbolism. They don't go around the streets yelling threats at people on the news!

Grimalkin or GrimFalcon or whatever that guy is is just the tip of the iceberg of Malta mischaracterisation. The Malta area group that pretty much no-one aside from Crimson and Indigo even knows about. Their contacts know specific details, but they're not aware of the overarching conspiracy. OK, I can deal with Recluse knowing about them, and Daos through him, but they shouldn't be in the newspaper. Moreover, police scanners shouldn't be mentioning them by name!

Ugh...

I actually tried playing on Virtue once, but being that it's a West Coast server, and assumedly because it's so crowded, it just lag FAR too much. Is Freedom East Coast?

Yeah, another four hours will put it at 4 AM And I need to monitor an exam in... Less than eight hours, actually.

Wait wait wait... Protean, the in-game character, was working with the mysterious stranger who has been sending the Ouroboros letters and who directed him to Praetoria in the villain arc. Protean, the red name, says "Requiem sends his regards," and there is reason to believe Requiem might be the one sending the letters given the context of the letter in the Fall of the 5th Column Ouro TF, the only one that's actually the same for both sides.

Is this a subtle hint of the letter-sender's true nature, a slip-up of classified information or an unrelated comment that I'm reading too much in?

Oh, and welcome aboard, Mr. Protean. Sorry about your cloning lab.

*edit*
By the way, does anyone else find it suspicious that a shape-shifter is being introduced by the studio head, and then proceeds to say "Listen to this important person that I totally didn't just impersonate!"

Yikes! Man, now I kind of feel bad for the guy. But at the same time, that's a pretty serious gaff when you launch a story that contradicts your own lore and players have to keep pointing out the plot holes. Jack used to beat us over the head with this mythical story bible, which apparently was big enough for him to hide behind when the Council car wreck was dumped into the game, and boy were THOSE fun times! The Independence Port Security Chief briefing still has Atlas fighting an "alien armada" because game lore suddenly became phobic of the 5th Column and nazism, replacing them with the Council and fascism. I don't know why that was, but it ended up laying so many eggs we're STILL not done counting our chickens before they hatch, and I promise to stop saying stupid things!

But, yeah, the Khan TF is just... Awkward. I don't know if the actual writing for it is any good (I assume it is), since my team didn't exactly let me experience it, but the story as best I could piece it together seemed... Well, yeah, seemed like it was written by someone who didn't know the first thing about City of Heroes lore. And I'm not talking about getting character nuances wrong that we, the players, might have memorised after five years. I mean obvious mistakes that anyone who'd played the game from 1-50 ought to have at least seen mention of. My God! Akharist as the Citcle representative? Holy cow!

That's actually something that bugs me a lot about new content being added to the game when there's old content it references. When the Rikti War Zone was added, that basically invalidated Angus McQueen almost entirely. His story arc no longer makes sense. When the Statesman TF was added, this invalidated Maria Jenkins' story arc entirely, because it relies on the Statesman missing, which he clearly isn't. Adding the Midnight club didn't invalidate much, but the game is still filled with little references to people coping with the Midnight Club being gone, and it's not!

I dare say the best stories are those who introduce an entirely new zone with entirely unrelated plot points, like Coratoa or Faultline. And even THEN they managed to dump all over the Trolls and the Outcasts with the Hollows, putting their leaders 2-3 level ranged before the factions stop showing up, and don't even get me started on Striga and the Council/Column car wreck!

I'm actually reminded of Linkara's review of Donna Troy's backstory, from her accidental creation to the many revisions she's gone through, all for the sake of making sense and, according to him, all making less and less sense. That's kind of how I feel about the Khan TF. It sounds like it started out as just gigantic misunderstanding by an author who may have otherwise made a good story, but one which had nothing to do with the game, which was then crowbarred into in-game lore a little at a time until it at least stopped falling off, but it still bears the trace of "whatthehellary."

Seriously, I sincerely hope that the storyline in Going Rogue is more concise and the people writing it talk to each other more. Hopefully avoid goofs like this in the future.

No insult taken, but again - I'm checking RIGHT NOW and the server has gone down from 85 people blue-side to 84. Is now still too early?

I don't have it memorised, but here's how it goes.

I've suggested this a few times, and more than half of the responses are somewhere between "Snipes are just fine! Leave it alone!" which always baffled me, because they're not and "You can use it for pulling!" and the only pulling I seem to be doing with a snipe is pulling my hair out. Then there's the response that it may not be great DPA, but since you're not using it in an attack chain but rather as an opener, this shouldn't matter, which is untrue since you want to stuff as much DPA into the time you have with Build Up and/or Aim, hence why it really matters. Finally, there's the argument that it's RANGED damage, and so should never be allowed to reach the level of damage that, say, Head Splitter does, despite the fact that Head Splitter does the exact same scale damage but without interruptibility.

I honestly just end up giving up in these discussions, because people ascribe so much weight to Snipe powers' range that they cannot even consider them being better powers. But having ONE power you can fire from twice the range of your other blasts has very, very little use beyond pulling, because you can't FIGHT at the range at which a snipe fires. I guess that's what Geko was thinking when he was making snipes in the first place, but I dare say he was wrong at the time. It's a decent concept thematically, but in actual practice, it's just a terrible design for a power.

I'm not sure I'd call Dominator damage "better," partly because they lack Aim AND Build Up, partly because they lack AoE as a general rule and partly because their damage mods are kind of weaker, but I can go with "competitive," because it is. I tried playing Dominators, though, and it didn't work. They're not Blasters, that's what I learned.

More to point, however, the balancing decisions of Dominators are what I'd consider the right way to go. Decent damage, BETTER DPA and worthwhile snipes, even at 0.95 ranged damage mod. I actually hope that Going Rogue will have Blasters outclassed by Dominators and/or Corruptors because one hopes that would lead to a further retweak of the AT to tie up those last few loose ends like Snipes and possibly secondary power logic. The AT isn't bad, but compared to many others... It's not very good, either.

Then you resort to throwing rotten eggs at their houses and toilet-papering their cars.

Huh? The servers I play don't usually have this many, and you say this is "empty?" Either I REALLY don't have a good eye for population or there's something more going on here, because I don't recall seeing more than 50 people villain-side the last few times I've searched, and I tend to search Victory and Pinnacle.

Of course, being that I live in Europe (and Eastern Europe, at that), this puts me 7-10 hours behind the US, so it's likely I'm just hitting dead spots every time I search (say, 6 PM EET), but man... This much is empty? Yikes!

*edit*
Point of fact: There are 85 people on Victory hero-side. I just checked.