Samuel_Tow

I'm going to say we reduce Rest recharge to 0 seconds and call it a day. Anything beyond that, like a mobile Rest or an out-of-combat recovery buff is no going to fly, but Rest comes with its own cost and investment. It's dangerous, you can't activate it in certain locations and it still takes time to rest. Time, mind you, that the rest of your team will probably use to run ahead or aggro things on you, because people are like that.

I always thought Rest was its own cost without needing recharge to balance things further. If need be, make it more dangerous or make it take longer to activate. It makes no difference. The key point here is for Rest to eliminate the practice of sitting on your hands before you can go into the next battle.

I realise that what I'm suggesting is a pretty sever breaking of the cottage rule, and probably general redesign as well. However, it's probably the one solution I like the most, because it's a case of eating your cake and having it, too. It should allow Granite Armour to still be usable for any needed period of time and usable without its annoying penalties AT ALL, so in this case, it's actually getting better. However, it keeps the power balanced in the way I perceive it was originally intended to be, in that you need to turn the armour off in order to be mobile, and nothing says immobility like an immovable anchor that provides your armour only in a certain radius around it.

I'm more than positive people are going to cry foul because you're essentially FORCING them to fight outside of Granite Armour, or at least wait exuberant amounts of time between advancing to the next spawn. The problem is that pretty much any change you make to Granite Armour will have to come either with a serious slash at the power's effectiveness, which will piss people off, or with some kind of mandatory or heavily-enforced mechanic to get the power to shut off.

In essence, anything you do to Granite Armour WILL break current playstyles. I'm trying to devise a roundabout way to retain as much of them as I can, meaning the armour's full strength and it's ability to be kept up as long as necessary. If SOMETHING has to give, then I'd rather it were mobility issues, as that's the only thing that doesn't take away from the sheer unkillability of Granite Armour as it is right now.

I just hope I won't need to be overpowered or on a team of 25 in order to so much as sniff the Incarnate system. That would piss me off like you wouldn't believe.

Remember, a lot of people have said over the years that they're here because City of Heroes is not WoW and is not chock-full of mandatory grind-raids as the only sort of end game available. I sincerely hope the developers don't double-back on that aspect of it.

I try not to play the hoarder's game, myself, because I like to pretend this is not a resource-driven game to begin with. I find it makes the game a lot easier on the nerves. Of course, if you DO turn it into a resource-driven game by spending a lot of effort collecting large inspirations, I can definitely see how it would suck.

Me, I play with bosses turned off, which means I never get large inspirations. At all. Medium Inspirations drop frequently enough to stock up easily, so them I don't find worth hoarding. When they're needed, they're needed. It's what they're there for. In fact, every time I go through my whole inspirations tray and I STILL die, that's not a defeat I regret. I did my best. It's when I die with plenty of inspirations to spare that I feel like I screwed up big time.

And then there's the other side of this. I spend most of my time with barely one or two slots open for incoming inspirations. Just about everything that drops under those conditions is worthless, because the collection is almost complete. When I get through a tough fight that costs me everything I had, this turns things around. Every drop is valuable, because my inventory is EMPTY. Then I get to watch it steadily fill up again as I combine the things that never had enough room to build up and refill my stock. There's a certain level of satisfaction in that

Word to the wise: Inspirations are worthless to HAVE. They are only valuable to USE. You could have an infinite amount of the best the game has to offer, and they will do a fat lot of good to you if you don't use them. That's always useful to remember.

Green Girl: Huh... That's surprisingly close to what I had in mind. I still don't want to use Inventions, but there are other ways to get stealth... Like Stealth. And I can always explain it away using the Gish analogy of having the ability to harden the slime into a denser material, and at the same time probably gaining some mass.

Not sure I'm a fan of the hair, though. Hand-drawn slime girls have the benefit of being drawn with a hair-shaped slimy head by the eager artists, but in-game hair models just really stand out. I DO like the black-eyed face, though. It's a nice fit. I guess if I wanted to go that route, I could try some kind of Full Mask variant, or possibly a hat of some sort. There's really nothing saying that I can't have accessories to the costume as an alternate design, come to think of it. I still need a "pure slime" look, though, so one without accessories is important.

Metal Guy: A good effort, but he honestly looks more like an iron golem than a Metal Slime. Of course, I've no idea what a Metal Slime should look like, given it's a conundrum of terminology, but I keep thinking something akin to the T1000. That is to say, reflective like you have it, and also not necessarily geometrically simple, but sporting a featureless, textureless finish, like that of flowing metal. Metal doesn't do this, as the etched grooves give the surface a look of solid metal, one that you can carve long lines into.

It's well shiny enough, but it has far too much detail. I keep wondering if we shouldn't insist on a reflective tights texture in general. It'd certainly help with this, but I'm sure it'd have other uses, as well. I guess I could try the Shiny Tights texture, and I know that has versions for all body parts (I checked), but I'm not sure it'd look quite shiny enough to be a Metal Slime.

In general: Would anyone have any idea how to mesh the head with the rest of the body? Face textures are orange-tinted, whereas tights textures are grey-scale, so even if I put masks on the face, they still won't match. I could go with a textured face, kind of like the fabric-covered one, but I'm not sure that would match, either, especially if I go for Shiny Tights.

I'm also not sure if I should go with a male or a female. Technically, a slime shouldn't have gender, on account of it not having a body shape or any actual biology other than, you know, slime, and after playing around with this concept with a character who's essentially a pile of scar tissue hooked up to a helmet, I have no problem varying between models, but here's the thing: I generally tend to default to the Male model of gender is irrelevant, not because men are the default, but more because women without defining features just look awkward to me. I'll see if I can get a decent-looking female model on this, but if I can't... Well, we'll see.

Um... It took me a few seconds to get where you were quoting me from, but I think you put this in entirely the wrong thread. I think you want the CoH 2 thread.

*edit*

Though I will agree it's tangentially topical, in an off-topic sort of way. My response in the second post IS about as close as I come to blowing my top (and it comes from a completely different thread), as that tends to be my reaction the fifteenth time someone tries to tell me that all the stuff I like sucks and then doubles-back to call it opinion, yet still insists on representing it as fact. I like to think I've stated my opinion with as much subjectivity as text will allow in this thread, though obviously that's subject to debate.

I know, I know. This sounds positively stupid, but hear me out. There's method to this madness.

To preface, let me explain. Anyone who's watched Ben 10: Alien Force should be familiar with one of Ben's more creative aliens called Goop. Unlike most of his other aliens, this one is basically a large puddle of green snot given form by an "anti-gravity generator" that looks like a miniature flying saucer. This, in RPG terms, would be a Green Slime. Earlier than that still, we have Gish, whose main protagonist by the same name is described as "a 12-pound ball of tar." Literally, this is what he is - a ball of tar with eyes and a mouth occasionally found somewhere along its surface. In RPG terms, this might represent a Black Slime.

And, of course, all of this leads us into the concept which is a trope unto itself: the Metal Slime. Game mechanics aside, there's something indescribably alluring about a a supposed small, soft, jelly-like slime made out of metal, a substance not known for its jelly-like softness. This alone is worth at the very least looking into, but for a concept that is wholly and entirely defined by its appearance, this needs the correct costume, and I couldn't even BEGIN to imagine how to make this into a reality.

I wish I could give a better example picture, as there are plenty from a genre that's known as "slime girls," but unfortunately I can't find a single picture representing it that wouldn't get me permabanned from the forums.

To put the challenge into more concrete terms, would anyone know how to make a "slime character," i.e. a character who looks like he is entirely made out of slime. I titled this "metal slime," but to be honest, I'll be happy with any material slime, be it jelly, water, snot or some kind of metallic metally metal. I have NO idea how to go about this, primarily for the simple reason that a slime character would need to be transparent (or else look like a playdough character, if that), and we simply don't have costume pieces that do that. Maybe I just suck at this, though. I hope you guys have better ideas than me, because this is actually interesting.

Failing that, the backup variant is the abovementioned Metal Slime. Unlike the more... Organic slimes, a metal one would not need to be transparent, so this might be doable with current costume pieces. Like other slimes, however, a Metal Slime needs to be completely smooth and completely uniform, so the Metallic chest isn't going to cut it. It's relatively smooth, but it still has those deep grooves cut into it. That, and I couldn't begin to imagine what I could use for a head. In the absence of a "blank" face, I honestly don't know what I could use, instead.

I would appreciate any ideas on the subject. I've been investigating this for several months now, and for the life of me I just can't imagine how it would even be possible.

Ah, there we go, there's that specific offender: