Samuel_Tow

Such as?

Actually, you also advance from completing missions and story arcs, as well as Task Forces, as well as teaming with people who kill enemies. I realise you're like me, in that we both prefer to be hands-on and kick *** (believe me, I agree with you), but reducing the game to death toll accounting seems a bit... I don't know. Depressing? Yeah, killing stuff is important. It's the point of the game. But killing things in cool and interesting ways is, at least to me, much more important. City of Heroes is not such a hard game where JUST surviving and JUST defeating your enemies is any trouble at all for almost all the ATs. I guess you can go for speed and efficiency, but I personally prefer to go for style points. You can call it fluff if you want, but to my eyes, the whole game is fluff. And there's nothing wrong with it.

To give a different-game example, I see this a lot like Assassin's Creed. Many people have criticised the game for being too easy. Yes, you COULD just sit back and wait for enemies to attack so you can counter-attack them, but where's the fun in that? It looks bad and it's boring, just as reviewers the world over have pointed out. So what I did was seek out large groups of enemies and tried to be as aggressive in attacking them as I could be, counter-attacking only as a last resort. I gotta' say, I actually killed them FASTER that way, only because I didn't have to sit on my *** and wait, but I dare say it was a lot more fun.

I agree with you on a purely technical level - Stamina allows you to rest less, which allows you to act more, which allows you to kill more, which gives you more experience, which levels you up faster. If that is fun for you, then clearly Stamina is your way to go, and I can respect that. However, I don't agree with your approach just the same, and it would actually be pretty scary to me if the game assumed I DID. It was actually insulting to me back in the day when it was revealed Jack and his dudes were playtesting the game with characters that had Stamina and Tough and all the extra-min-maxed builds and balancing for that, if for no reason other than because it suggested that if I wasn't taking Stamina, I was doing it wrong.

I have nothing against helping things along so you folk who like more recovery can have an easier time 1-20, but I do NOT want to be forced into following you.

I can't say I actually agree with you here, if for one reason above all others - sets that have low-damage, low-recharge, low-cost low-tier powers are a LOT more fun to play in the lower levels. For instance, Blast sets like Fire Blast and Archery basically give you almost a complete attack chain at level 2, and more than that, almost a complete attack chain from out of a hold. By comparison, Blast sets like Electrical Blast or Assault Rifle basically have oodles of dead air that make me feel like I'm enacting a bad Final Fantasy VII fight. With Hellions having one attack and, like, 5-10 seconds of dead air and me having two attacks and a good long while of waiting and wobbling, it just looks bad. I can deal with it, sure, but it looks bad.

Of course, this becomes a question of whether high-level attacks can get better DPA than low-level attacks, and I'm sure you'd know more about that than I do, at least offhand. But the point is that even if those early attacks are fast and cheap, they SHOULD fall out of primary use in the later levels when higher DPA attacks become available, thus keeping the benefit to the lower levels based on power use, not specific overt level-dependent buff.

To be honest, I'm against any low-level buff that peters out as you progress. For one, it kills the actual sense of progress, and for another, it actually sucks to get WEAKER as you level up.

I slot both Trainings and DOs. Training enhancement costs are trivial - 500 to 1000 per enhancement. With the advent of the Market, this cost no longer has meaning at ANY level. Even if you don't play the market, uncommon Salvage sells for 1000 at the vendors. And even with just a token visit to the Market, you can sell ONE Luck Charm or other high-value piece of salvage for, say, 40 000, and that will buy you practically all the Trainings you're going to use until you grow into Dual Origins. DOs, themselves, aren't very expensive. Selling what sells on the Market will usually earn you just about about enough to buy a full set at level 12, possibly short one or two. At this point, my question is why NOT use them? Would you prefer to go around with nothing in your slots?

Additionally, you talk about a massive discrepancy in enhancement numbers, but if you look at it objectively, it's not nearly as massive. The basic rule of thumb is that DOs are twice as good as Trainings and SOs are twice as good as DOs. Well, ALMOST, because SOs run up against ED diminishing returns while neither Trainings nor DOs do. The difference is definitely meaningful, but it doesn't mean anything other than SOs sucks. Trainings suck, that much I'll admit, but they help. DOs most decidedly do NOT however. They're not very strong, but they're strong enough.

Well, maybe you should have read more than the title and the first sentence, because there's a legitimate question in there that went right over your head, as well as me explaining exactly what I'm not going to explain to you at least three times.

Ah, what the heck. Let me ask you a question, then. How do the title of my thread answer the question "Will people kick me out of a team if I don't have a resurrection power which I could have taken?" I'm curious to know.

Huh... You know, I never thought about that, if for no reason other than because that kind of negative is so grammatically forced in English. Good point, and good to know.

No offence taken. The goal of this was to understand how smart fiddling with that was, and you guys have pretty much unambiguously told me that it was not very smart, indeed. I don't pretend to be some kind of computer genius, and since I'm asking, I clearly don't know enough to just go do it, or even know if I want to so much as try, so I submit that, in that particular aspect, I am a newbie all the way.

My rant was directed towards a more general case. Something as simple as NOT hiding the extensions of known file types for me, because I'd rather know, myself, rather than just letting the system know and handle them would be a good example. Yeah, the system recognises it as a "Text Document," but it recognises *.txt, *.log and basically everything I have set up to open with Notepad. Or, say, setting up a system restore point. I still don't know where that is hidden in Windows 7, because it's not in the same play where rolling back to an earlier restore point is, so I have to search for it every time. And Lord help me once I start needing that disk management tool to alter my partitions, because I've no idea where to even look. It's in Computer Management in XP, I believe, but Windows 7 doesn't seem to follow any logic that I can deduce. At least the thing still allows me easy access to my TCP/IP settings, and Lord knows I need those with how often our work group here messes with the network settings for the building.

Basically, I was looking for one of two things:
1. An encouraging, positive answer to just go do it, in which case I would have.
2. Practically anything else, in which case I would do nothing. That's what I ended up getting, and that's fine. I can accept this.

You know, thing is I don't want to root around in my registry without a very good reason. I fancy myself a fairly advanced user, but I know when I'm out of my depth, and hand-editing registry files when I have no direct understanding of what they mean or how they operate is pretty much the deep end of the pool in this regard.

To be honest, what I was hoping to hear when I made this thread was something along the lines of "Yeah, that's right! Fix that bugger! Here's how to do it. Don't worry, it's safe. And it'll make a big difference." Anything short of that really isn't worth messing with things I don't understand. I don't want to turn into one of the people Memphis Bill fixes things for

If the general consensus is don't bother, it's better to leave it alone and it won't make a difference anyway, then I just don't want to fiddle with it. Let Windows do its thing for the moment.

24 - 9 - 9 is actually 6. That typically means two powers for a travel power and potentially four Epics.

Trying to figure out what you're giving up by not taking Stamina strikes me as an incredibly backwards way to look at it, because you should actually be looking at what you're not taking by going with Fitness. That's three power picks, and not every combo has powers that are easily and unambiguously "skippable." You mention skipping melee powers on Blasters, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a capital mistake, considering how much of their damage is in those melee powers. You CAN skip them, just like you can skip everything else, but that doesn't make it an easy decision.

Then you have things like Super Reflexes or Willpower. Then you have things like Kheldians.

You CAN skip powers to take Fitness, but it's not as simple as being a no-brainer to do. Your powersets are not filled with redundant, useless powers that you'd have to be confused to take. Every time you drop a powerset power, you give something potentially useful, potentially cool up for a straight-up stat boost. You can probably make that up with other forms of min/maxing, but then, I can make up for the lack of Stamina in just the same way.

Unless you want to explain what those mechanics actually are, I have to assume they're based off the same system which governs the Hide mechanic, which IS NOT a good way to determine in-combat/out-of-combat distinctions. For a minor temporary power buff, that really doesn't matter too much. For Rest, which has the potential to become central to certain playstyles, a little more care is needed.

And, yes, I was aware of the powers. I'm not convinced their implementation is better than how Rest is implemented.

Or both of those things could be said to contradict what developers who aren't even on the game (namely Jack and Gecko) may or may not have said six years ago, to go along the lines of such promises as never giving us real numbers, never giving us flashback missions or how silly it would be for heroes to have their own city and for villains to be off in their own, separate city (circa Rick Dakan).

Range as a form of defence has been discredited for a long time now, given that enemies were specifically given ranged attacks to counter exactly that, and the fact that all "jousting" approaches I've seen to date have reduced offence significantly.

THIS I would find to be a legitimate concern, even if a lieutenant + 6 minions isn't exactly stock. I face those on my chosen difficulty (-1x3, for the record) all the time, and I can agree that if these kill your end, there's a problem with the system.

There's where the disconnect between us occurs. I agree with you that performance BETWEEN spawns is crap. Utter crap. And I don't think this is what the endurance system should be managing.

However, the endurance system IN combat shouldn't be so bad. By and large, you SHOULD be able to finish any fight you started at full endurance without bottoming out, special circumstances (e.i. draining or resistant enemies) notwithstanding. If you can't, something is wrong WITH THE SYSTEM. If you can, but end up with too little to fight the next spawn, then this is actually "working as intended."

This part of "working as intended" is the one I feel needs the most fixing. If you are able to finish a fight without dying or winding yourself, then that's a victory for you. That should NOT prevent you from fighting your next battle. This is where instant-recharge Rest comes in. It means that any "subsequent fight" will be started at full bars, so that your only concern is surviving that one battle you are fighting with, not surviving it with enough left in your bars to fight another one right immediately thereafter.

In short: If you are running out of endurance from full to zero in a single fight, then we need to look at fixing the particular powerset combo that's doing this. If you can manage one fight but are left too drained to manage another, then we need to look at improving post-action recovery, either by "non combat" recovery buffs or by, again, speeding up rest. You shouldn't be running out of endurance in one single regular fight at any level, and if you are, you have a good argument to demand change, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm going to wax philosophical here for a bit, because I want to get to the root of the problem. The lower levels suck for endurance and leave you sitting on your hands unable to fight, which is a legitimate problem. However, the source of the problem is not recovery itself, but rather how how recovery is balanced between in-combat and out-of-combat situations. In-combat, you can't really expect to be able to gain your whole end bar back in five seconds, because that would be utterly overpowered. Out of combat when you're not actually USING your endurance bar, you are well within your right to ask that it come back in about 5-10 (or up to 20) seconds because waiting for it to come back is dead air and bad gameplay.

It's true that people use recovery to solve that problem, but the cost of that solution is high, balance-wise. Because recovery buffs apply at all times (including in combat), then their magnitude has to be low so as not to offset combat balance. However, this makes them poor for the kind of fast recovery one would expect out of action. People strive to get high recovery bonuses to recover more from battle to battle, but the cost for this is prohibitive, because those are VERY powerful buffs.

The only way to fix endurance woes without actually unbalancing the system is to completely and utterly divorce combat recovery from out-of-combat recovery, by the inclusion of an overt "in combat" mechanic, if need be, allowing us to define out-of-combat powers that are simply blocked with enemies around or enemies aggroed on you or your team-mates. The current tech for distinguishing between in-combat and out-of-combat is interruptibility and serious debuffs, which constitutes Rest. The problem with Rest is that its use is very limited by the recharge that it has. Speeding that recharge up, possibly making it instantaneous, would give us an instant toggle between in-combat and out-of-combat stances. While in combat, out stats are limited and our recovery slow. This is conducive to balanced, fair, exciting fighting. While out of combat, our stats are more lenient and our recovery is much greater to basically fast-forward us through the times when action ISN'T happening and prepare us for the next battle.

As long as combat recovery and out-of-combat recovery overlap, no-one will ever be happy.

Hey, I randomly ran across one that seems to be boosting maximum endurance. I sold it for 20 million, so I thought I'd have a look. Turns out the Decimation Ranged Damage set boosts maximum endurance by 2.5%. Not much, but it's there.

Wait, so you rested from the first fight and went into the mission at 100 endurance and you STILL ran out? That's... OK, I can believe you, but this is aberrant. What were you playing?

OK, that was an unintentionally hilarious typo on my part

Agreed. I've actually suggested this before in a similar fashion, and I still feel the idea has some merit to it. Let me see if I can remember what I had...

Randomly beating up thugs in the street has a certain chance of dropping you a "clue" in the form of a recipe that needs unique salvage to make. This recipe could either give you several missions to gather "evidence" from in the form of special salvage, or could possibly require evidence dropped by the same enemy faction. Once you have enough evidence, you can "act" on the clue by inventing it, generating a sort of showdown mission.

There are a few ways to go about this, but I don't mind being able to get the evidence before the clues. Actual detective work sees that a lot. A detective would get a new clue and suddenly realise it makes sense of several pieces of evidence he already had but didn't know the significance of.

Like, say, you're beating up the skulls and you get a Superadine sample with a crossed swords logo on it, you get a surveillance tape of some guy talking about a drug deal and a fairly expensive gold watch. Doesn't seem to make sense, until you get a clue which suggest a a rich businessman may be involved with the Skulls in some way. His stationary has a crossed swords insignia, the voice on the tape belongs to his lawyer and the gold watch belongs to the guy. Well, that makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?

This would add an extra element of depth, more than a little unpredictability and quite a bit of extra variety without actually browbeating people into going to outside sources to look for walkthroughs. Granted, some might suggest that that system would call for a walkthrough just as much, but since EVERYONE from a given faction would drop this stuff, all you'd need to know is which faction you want to strike out against. And the missions themselves don't need to be complicated. A simple paper mission bust is enough, at least in my eyes.

Energy Torrent for Blasters isn't the same as Energy Torrent for Scrappers, though. They are rather different powers which just happen to resemble each other visually. Scrapper Body Mastery Energy Torrent is actually more akin to Darkness Mastery Torrent than it is to Energy Blast Energy Torrent.

It's kind of like the difference between Energy Blast -> Power Push and Energy Assault -> Power Push.

While I agree that this is problematic, calling up Info on the enhancements has always worked and remains working today. It's how I originally learned what enhancements did what back in 2004 when the mouse-over feature didn't even exist. You can call up Info on practically everything, so it makes sense that you'd call it up on enhancements you want to know more about.

As to what enhancements you want, those are written into the powers, themselves. If you mouse-over a power in the Enhancements screen, the little field at the bottom right will tell you what enhancements you power will take. All you need to do is find the enhancements that have the same effect. Granted, without mouse-over help, it's cumbersome and fat, but it's far from impossible. Again, no-one ever told me about it. It just seemed natural at the time.

Again, I'm not opposed to an improvement to the system, but let's not try to claim it's impossible to find your way around it.

Epic ATs are landlocked to a single concept - Peacebringers and Warshades to the Kheldian concept, Arachnos Soldiers and Widows to Arachnos, both thematically and conceptually. Even if you ignore the concept of the ATs, you're still limited to what the ATs actually DO. You could, theoretically, recolour Kheldian energy to be yellow like fire, or blue-ish like ice, but you can't turn it into a gun, a bow or a sword. Similarly, a Bane Spider uses a mace and/or a gun. You CANNOT alter that into a fire sword, a bow, a dual pistols, earth powers or even Dark powers. You can't, not even with power customization.

And even if, by some miracle of weird ideas, were WERE given all of these options, you're still left with highly non-standard ATs that have access to a toolkit that really doesn't befit a normal one. Kheldians have more powers than they can ever take, and Soldiers of Arachnos have their various ranks and training skills. They are both very SPECIFIC frameworks of such a build. They are not JUST Range/Defence, they are an exotic build.

The point of having a Ranged/Defence or Assault/Defence AT is to build something akin to, say, Bastion, who has Energy Blast powers, Energy Melee powers and Energy Aura powers. Or something similar to your typical Behemoth, who has Fire Blast, Fiery Melee and Fiery Aura powers. Or to pick a Dual Pistols/Katana or Dual Pistols/Martial Arts combo and pair it up with Super Reflexes. Or to make the much-requested gunblade character. The options presented to a generic AT as VASTLY superior to the options presented to an Epic one. In fact, you may or may not see power customization on Epic ATs, because their power's actual appearance is part of their story. Eventually, we'll probably see that, but this WAS put on the table as a definite possibility.

Basically, if I want to play a Blasting AT but don't want to shoot fire, I can. If I want to play a Kheldian AT but not shoot energy... I pretty much can't.

Stupid Google image search. It opens for me... Anyway, I uploaded the pic to Photobucket, so it should open now. Gish is a game where you play a blob of goo with eyes and a mouth. That's pretty much the whole game.

While more explanation as to what you can do AFTER the Broker would be nice, you can really just go along with what he says and eventually he'll give you another contact. Before you get your "Paper" contact, Brokers add into your active contacts Tab. Once you head over to Port Oaks, either Drea the Hook or Mikey the Ear will be added to your contacts list. Follow that to the contact and he'll tell you about the Newspaper. With no other contacts to work for, do Paper missions and eventually the Paper will direct you back to your Broker, who will pop back into your Active contacts list. Go to him, take and either do or fail the Mayhem mission and you will get a new, non-broker contact. There ought to be no way to get it wrong, the way the system is set up.

Also in both tutorials it still tells you that Enhancements are an Optional thing. If they were so optional then I could hit something at lvl 20 with no Enhances when in fact I only have a 1 in 5 chance of actually hitting what I have in target without the Enhances. Thats what isn't really explained[/quote]

That's not correct, as well. Your base chance to hit against an even con (same level as you) enemy is 75%, which is 3 out of 4, not 1 out of 5. As well, plenty of people don't even bother with Trainings and DOs and slot pretty much nothing other than what drops until SOs become available. That said, you have a point - enhancements are not optional, and should not be described as such.

You have a point, and that's actually the consequence of an odd bug that never got fixed. Before, when buying enhancements, you could just mouse-over the enhancement and it would tell you what it does. Currently, you have to right-click on an enhancement in the store interface, click on Info and THEN it will tell you. It's unintuitive, I grant you, but you can save yourself a LOT of trouble if you try to look for the colour of enhancements and their place in the list (enhancement order is ALWAYS the same) than to go by name and picture. An easy rundown is as follows:

Red - damage
Blue - endurance reduction
Yellow - accuracy
Purple - defence/damage resistance
Orange - hold

There are others, but I don't want to list them here. In fact, you can have a look at this to get a better idea of what to look for.