Samuel_Tow

Oh... Well, ignore my inability to read text, then

Really, that's a big problem. In theory, swapping ammo to make use of resistances and weaknesses, until you realise that you're actually reducing your damage output by a not insignificant margin when switching away from Incendiary rounds. If we had four damage types, each with equal damage to where only SITUATION made one better than another, I could see that, but since we have one ammo type which clearly does more damage than another, swapping for damage DOES NOT WORK. Considering how few things resist Fire, why would you bother, anyway?

The comment, as I've seen it, was that changing could help avoid the problem of Lethal resistance by using elemental damage against lethal-resistant foes. The problem with that is that I'm not going to be using Kinetic ammo anyway, so that matters very little, and if I DO end up using them, it won't be for the damage type.

The support effects I can kind of see, but again - how much of a difference do they make? Outside of stacking your debuffs with someone else, how much of a difference do YOUR OWN secondary effects make? Ice Blast notwithstanding, can anyone honestly say a Blast set is "made" by its secondary effects? I know Energy Blast has a lot of knockback on it, bugger all that this does, but it's both still a solid set irrespective of that AND the knockback isn't actually all that strong of a mitigation factor in the long run. At least it wasn't on mine, but then I didn't slot knockback in my powers.

And if the argument is that Blast sets for Defenders and Corruptors are "made" by their secondary effects since that's what the ATs are supposed to want, then my question in response is "So why slap the same damn model onto Blasters, fully aware that a large part of the utility would do diddly squat for the Blaster in comparison?"

Yes, the secondary effects do have their uses on a Blaster, but at the point where you're reduced to playing mock Defender, I happen to feel you miss the point of what a Blaster is supposed to bring to the table.

The only UI the movie shows is the costume creator, and I'm not sure how you can call that jumbled mess "darn good looking."

But it works BETTER!

Well...

The animation for turning looks like a 180 flip similar to that turn-roll Lara Croft had up to the Angel of Darkness. It looks like the game may have been originally designed to work with keyboard steering primarily, so an instant turn would have been useful. Despite the lost souls who still use keyboard steer these days, mouse look has largely made that obsolete.

I did not notice, however, an animation for actual TURNING like some games do. Oni, for instance, with swivel your upper body with some leeway, but if you look too far to the side, it will shift your leg stance. Rune, by contrast, would just have you sort of waddle in place as you spun your characters. Ours, instead, just slide in place like they're on a shworoom turnstile. Some animation there would be groovy.

As far as dynamic shadows go, those are likely the same irritating technology that makes trees cast shadows inside tunnels and highway overpasses cast shadows while highway ramps do not. It looks good from a distance, but I have reason to believe Ultra Mode's shadow technology will be a lot more practical and probably less prone to killing your performance. Or showing up through fog.

Though, admittedly, when it DOES work, our raytrace shadows (and they are) look incredibly good in how they are cast over your character. They don't look entirely realistic, but they are VERY smooth.

That takeoff animation actually looks like an alternate animation for jumping. I ALWAYS jump before I fly in the current game, so I have some sense of how it looks in practice, and this, to me, looks like just a jump followed by turning on the Fly toggle. It may have been hard-coded into the power itself, which seems like a mistake to me, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is.

Also, here's something no-one ever seems to pick up on - the female stance. Right now, the actual stance females take is kind of the same as males, only slightly tweaked, and the only animation they have that's VISIBLY different is their run animation. In this movie, the female stance is VERY different, with the legs held together and the body generally much more straight. I'll see about getting a pic of the thing, as I think I spotted War Witch in there, too.

*edit*
Turns out I had a couple of pics saved on my hard drive. No, that is not War Witch, but the stance is still unique. And the male stance seems to be a lot wider than what we have now. It looks uncomfortable, too.

Female pic
Male pic

The only point to posting this is to hope that, if and when they get around to adding customizable stances, they'd consider those as possibly alternatives.

Interesting. The first video seems to have an effect for teleport where your camera races forward to where you will appear, rather than SNAPPING forward with disorienting speed.

You'll also note that +level spawns used to be smaller than even level spawns. Old Tenacious would produce one of the following:

*Five (or six) even con minions
*Four (or five) even con minions and an even con lieutenant
*One even con minion and two even con lieutenants
*Three +1 minions
*One +1 minion and one +1 lieutenant
*One +1 lieutenant alone

Tenacious was, basically, difficulty scaled to my level for a team of two. Setting the new settings to +0x2 +boss -AV would routinely produce a spawn of six +1 minions, as well as routinely gave me a spawn of a single even con lieutenant. Before, Tenacious gave me two-man spawns my level and one-man spawns +1. Now, spawn size is separate from spawn level, so I can get two man spawns my level, two-man spawns +1, one man spawns my level and one man spawns +1.

It's the two-man spawns +1 that kill me, and in this respect, the new difficulty options are harder at equivalent settings. I don't want my difficulty to be harder, but I can't make it easier because you're convinced "I don't need to." It's not +level enemies that bother me, it's that they show up in HUGE spawns. I can't reduce spawn sizes, because that makes them too easy when they spawn even level, and I can't keep them as big as they are because they're too hard when they spawn +1.

Mind-numbingly boring TO YOU. That's why I'm not advocating an option to change YOUR game, merely an option to change MY game without actually affecting your game in any way. Isn't that the ideal solution? You get to keep everything you have exactly as you set it up and I get my wishes without interfering with you. I'm not asking for the game to be made easier. I'm asking for more options to make the game how I want it to be without messing it up for other people.

When there are equivalent options the game actually supports?

Aren't those kind of coming? I mean, I downloaded a whopping 900MB patch to Test the other day (and got scolded for it ).

*edit*
A few things I forgot:

*More costume nodes. Specifically, upper thighs, upper arms, necks and backs. Straps, armour plates, spikes, necklaces... Really, a lot of what we get for shoulders, but on our arms and legs. And, of course, backpacks, rucksacks, jetpacks, fixed wing packs and hunchback humps.

*Buildings with interiors matching the exterior, possibly open to the outside in the same way Went's is. At the very least specific instances tied to specific locations. So that warehouse over on the butt end of King's Row is ALWAYS that specific layout, both so buildings don't morph between visits and so that people can get a better sense of "I know where I am!"

*Windows in instances, possibly with a fake city backgrop in the distance. If specific instances are married to specific doors, the backdrops can even be real (or realistic) like the ruined Cap backdrop in Aion's future lab. Similarly, more mixes of indoor and outdoor instances where you can move between buildings or come out into courtyards.

*Kit-generated outdoor instances, rather than the five or so uniques we have. Break the map down into a large grid and just swap what buildings show up in which grid square, or at the very least add in, like, 50 new ones or so. We have hundreds of outdoor missions that all take place in the same handful of maps.

*Stances would be good, too. Ninja Run already demonstrates that different stances can be made into the game, so now it's a question of instituting a few variants into the actual game. The Ninja Run one would be an obvious choice, an "always hovering even when I walk" animation would be cool, and some kind of less hip-swaying run for females and less fat run for huge would be cool, too.

Your "longstanding game mechanics" are a few months old. The older difficulty settings didn't have this problem. It was introduced with the new ones. Since it doesn't seem like it's going to be fixed so that +1 spawns are smaller to compensate, I suggest giving me the ability to just remove them.

And, really, what's with all the self-righteous "you suck" attitudes around here? The whole point of the new difficulty settings was to give us more control over our experience. Why is more control over my experience a bad thing? What, do I have to be at least "this" badass to ride or something?

I'm sure you probably know what you're talking about and I'm missing something big, but the numbers here don't add up. If final damage taken is damage*(1-resistance), where resistance is [0;0.9], then... Well, let's see.

Take an attack that deals 100 damage, cycles every second and needs to kill 1000 hit points. No resistance. Normally, you'd need:

1000/(100*(1-0.5)) = 1000/50 = 20s

That 0.5 is base to-hit for an NPC against a player. With a 10% damage debuff, we'll get:

1000/((100*(1-0.1))*(1-0.5)) = 1000/(90*0.5) = 1000/45 = 22.(2)

That's an increase in the time needed to kill you by around 11%. I'm really not sure how you're getting a 900% increase in survivability. I accept that I'm probably doing the numbers wrong and that I'm failing to account for something, but I just don't see it.

In fact, by my calculations, increasing your survivability by 900%, or 9 times, would require 90% damage debuff, or:

1000/((100*(1-0.9))*(1-0.5)) = 1000/(10*0.5) = 1000/5 = 200

That's 20 seconds plus nine times itself. That's also the functional equivalent to boosting your resistance up to 90%. Just 10% damage debuff is cute and it WILL help, but to me, at least, it doesn't look like it will add up to nine or ten times survivability.

This does a good job of describing different likes and approaches to gaming. As far as I'm concerned, NO game should ever be an investment, because an investment requires both that you do something you don't enjoy (i.e. give something up) and that you put work into the game. Call me childish, call me lazy, call me spoiled if you wish, but I don't believe games should be like this. I'm certainly not going to deny that some people can tolerate this, but as far as I'm concerned, I will not play games that force me through elements that are not specifically designed to be fun. I have no desire to stick it to the man, no desire to beat the system, and so no desire to put in work and invest in my game.

Suppose tomorrow I get a brainfart and decide I really want to play Star Wars: The Old Republic and don't want to see City of Heroes ever again. All of my investment goes down the drain. This both makes it less worthwhile AND it makes me less willing to abandon my investment. Maybe it's just me™, but I don't enjoy being tied down to responsibility. I don't want to have to plan days and months ahead, I don't want to worry about what I might need later, I don't want to worry about missed opportunities, I don't want to keep worrying about whether what I'm doing right this instance is worth the time investment. I get MORE than enough of that in real life, and I just don't want this in my escapist fantasy.

Ideally, I enjoy a game I can play from one day to the next. Worry about what I need RIGHT NOW, worry about killing what I'm killing right now, finding what I'm looking for RIGHT NOW, and live safe in the knowledge that when I need to kill or find something else, I'll be able to figure out how to do it when it comes to that. Speaking of self-sufficiency, this is what I see as that. I realise this is exactly what you're looking to achieve by investing, but I don't play my games to make grand-standing investments on the order of months.

Comparing this to getting a 50 is a good call, but it has one specific problem with it: I didn't get to 50 because I had to get to 50 in order to be able to do something else. I didn't do it for Kheldians, I didn't do it to get me a sugar daddy, I didn't do it to "beat" the game. I enjoyed playing my namesake character so much that I just kept playing him and playing him until one day I went "Huh? I levelled up? I'm 50 now? Cool, I guess. Time to play another character, I suppose." Seriously. I hit 50 fighting a Fake Nemesis near Maria Jenkins, levelled up at Luminary, bought a bunch of enhancements at Holsten and logged out of the game. No fanfare, no big achievement. It was just a fun character I'd played for a long time (19-50 straight). I certainly didn't go "Phew! That was hard, but it was worth it!" It wasn't. No, it was not worth getting to 50. If it wasn't so damn much fun actually doing it, then NO reward would have made me do it. I don't care if they PAID me to get to 50 on a character I don't enjoy playing. I wouldn't do it.

As soon as the game devolves into cost/work vs. reward/pay, I'm instantly turned off and I go looking for a more puppy-eyed, delusionally-romantic game that kind of gives me everything as part of the process of playing and enjoying the game, rather than as the cost of admission to actually enjoying it.

This highlights two problems:

1. The set is good on Defenders and possibly Corruptors who have strong support modifiers and a support secondary to stack with, but isn't nearly as good on Blasters. Why the sets need to be identical on all ATs that have access to them I do not know, given that precedent to the contrary already exists, but this is problematic for Blaster players outside of a few specific secondary combos. A Pistols/Electric Blaster, just to point out what I'm playing, is not going to get ANY stacking benefits and isn't going to get much debuffing with Blaster mods anyway.

But what confounds me is WHY this is. It's Pistols! Pistols shoot lumps of metal designed to punch though other people and really, really hurt. How does one translate a concept that boils down to hurling things at people and implement this as some kind of wildly-variable utility set. This isn't some kind of mystic super power that could heal with cosmic energy or hold with mystic might. It's GUNS! Guns shoot people! Yet, perplexingly, our guns don't seem to be designed with the primary purpose of shooting people. I mean... Wow!

2. The set does NOT solo very well. Yes, if you have 50 Blasters stacking the same debuff on an enemy, they could probably debuff it into nothingness, but the likelihood that I'm going to actually see more than... Well, one Blaster (myself) at a time is rather low. As such, my debuffs are worth precisely bugger all, and I can't even stack them very well between my own powers to begin with, what with Pistols lacking a decent secondary effect. When you play solo, debuff effects do very little, at least compared to the kind of damage hit you take in using them and ESPECIALLY since enemies will sometimes resist the damage type of your debuff ammo.

Any set that's designed with the assumption that it's going to stack with other instances of itself will fail in actual practice, as Shield Defence has shown us. Yes, a phalanx of Shield users is incredibly strong, but unless you design a super team around this concept, you end up with a bunch of people NOT playing in a phalanx for the majority of their playtime, so living with the expectation that they'll randomly run into one is just not something players will do. If part of the balancing of Dual Pistols involves the expectation that many Pistoleers will stack their effects and THAT is what makes it balanced, then this will bomb in actual practice as soon as people tire of their first wave of pistoleers and the novelty dies down. Soon as Demon Masterminds launch, the bubble WILL burst.

There are a couple of problems with that. First of all, even though the Voltaic Sentinel has an 80-foot attack, it will not shoot it at 80 feet. Since practically everything else worth shooting in Electrical Blast is in the 80-foot range, this means that the Voltaic Sentinel will spend a lot of time not shooting. And it does, as I can vouch from actual practice with the thing. Furthermore, because pets trail rather a few feet behind their owners, getting it into AI range requires you to get uncomfortable close to the enemy, close enough to take shotgun and flamethrower fire, which is not fun. When it shoots, the thing really does shoot well, but its recharge, cost and limited lifespan limit its utility. Taking it into account is a good idea, obviously, but you ARE making some assumptions here.

As far as Zapp goes, I sincerely hope you're not counting it with the same weight as Lightning Blast or Lightning Bolt. Yes, it's theoretically potentially possible to use it in combat, but I can guarantee one thing without a shadow of a doubt - you're not going to get any decent DPS or cycle out of it. WILL NOT. In certain instances, you won't ever be allowed to fire it even once. Behemoths and Spectrals leave long-lasting DoT on you, Council/Column/Longbow tend to have long-lasting rifle and machinegun attacks that end up overlapping for constant fire, and plenty of enemies can catch you in DoT fields that are just going to interrupt the power. Even if you go out of your way to slot the thing for interrupt reduction, all that does is deny you the ability to slot it for actual offence, so you really, REALLY can't give the thing the same weight as proper ranged attacks.

And again - I take and use all of my powerset powers, and in actual practice, Electrical Blast doesn't have nearly the kind of single-target damage that it may seem like on paper. Yes, I use the Voltaic Sentinel. Yes, I use Zapp as much as I can manage. And I still do barely anything unless I practically sit on Electricity Manipulation's melee attacks.

If you can supply me with tactics beyond this one that I can try, I will gladly come back to you on that and let you know how it goes. What I CAN say is that, even with this tactic, the set's performance is far from great. Maybe I'm fighting the wrong things, but against CoT and Crey, which is what I'm currently tackling, this doesn't do too much. Yes, the initial debuff makes the targets more vulnerable, but it only serves to weaken those particular targets. Three people out of a 10-man spawn isn't going to make too much of a difference, and that's IF they're kind enough to line up for me. Hitting both lieutenants obviously helps, but not by enough.

Furthermore, you can only do this ONCE, as every other instance of Piercing Rounds is going to be from the same ammo you are currently using. Remember, you can't drop into Lethal for one attack then jump back into Incendiary, as you're facing a 4 second ammo type recharge. Furthermore, this trick has a somewhat limited yield on enemies resistant to Lethal rounds, such as ghosts, guards, tanks and so on. Yes, you're going to debuff their resistance, but you're going to do rather very little damage to them, and Piercing Rounds as an opener damage dealer is actually VERY potent.

I'm currently doing what I can to maximise my performance, going as far as to swap between Incendiary and Cryo ammo between Ghosts and Behemoths in the same spawn, and I still don't see the set performing all that good. It still struggles and it still gets me killed animating over-long attacks. For the amount of work I put into it, it certainly doesn't feel like I'm getting much back. If it were a fire-and-forget set like Rad Blast, I could live with it, but since I have to be situationally aware, it ought to do something to reward my vigilance, and all it rewards my vigilance with is not sucking. I'd certainly never turn my nose up at not sucking, but I was kind of hoping for more.

Thanks, NT I love the US community, even if we have our fair share of arguments here, and the forum merge has only served to show our community can benefit from adding the EU players to it.

Well, as long as we're on the topic, I have a villain who's entire shtick is that he claims to fight evil. He dresses in sterile white, enforces complete obedience (to his own morality) and sees nothing less than the utter death and destruction anything so much as tainted by evil as nothing less than absolutely necessary. It's a fun concept to play around with, since I can easily write his speeches in such a way that other people (real, actual people I've shown them to) say "Well, he sounds like a good guy. A bit extreme, but still good." Which is cool, since at the same time he's an unashamed butcher who has no respect for the "innocents" he's trying to protect (somewhere between "guilt is just a matter of time" and "if we can't save them, they're already lost") and absolutely no tolerance for any other view of "good" but his own.

Ironically, he's one of my most unquestionably evil villains

Not quite. Two-handed animations would disqualify Shield Defence as a secondary, and that's not something customization should entail.

Hoi-hi-hoi-hi-ho!

Seriously, what purpose does having two incompatible versions of the same game that just split an already small player base even further serve? I didn't see a point in NOT being on the US servers when I was being coddled to switch over and I don't see it now.

Hence why I didn't move when that was offered, and hence why they made every effort to coerce me. It was a bad move, and to this day I still don't understand why they did it. Having different customer support branches and marketing branches and even different servers, that I can see. But why make the versions incompatible with each other? What business sense does that make?

I doubt you'll be forced to move or lose all of your stuff, however. As I understand it, when the US to EU transfers occurred, you got to keep your characters. With server transfers now an established service, at the very worst you'll be given unlimited transfers from EU to US servers, if the server lists are not out-and-out merged. Screwing over EU players would be a remarkably poor business decision, specifically since I'm already getting screwed over because the PlayNC store refuses to show me US versions of certain items. Stupid localisation!

Again, the US and EU segregation did not need to exist.