Samuel_Tow

Bees
My god

*I'm determined to keep saying it until someone gets the reference.

It did?

I'd be interested to see what description you'd give to a Brute.

Basically, the point of this AT is to deal damage by exploiting whatever Inherent mechanic works. Its primary consists of single-target damage for handling specific threats while its secondary provides supplement AoE damage and self-preservation.

If you're trying to balance this AT like "a cross between," you're not going to come up with a decent compromise, but what's supposed to make it work is its inherent, provided I can find a good way to implement it that won't Castle respond with "O snap!"

The original incarnation of the inherent was to have melee and ranged attacks buff each other, such that spending a long time in melee would buff your ranged attacks and spending too long at range would buff your melee attacks. The intention behind this was to cause the character to have to switch between melee combat and ranged combat in real time, rather than getting stuck permanently scrapping of blasting. A Scrapper with ranged attacks is liable to just chuck then into his melee chain, and the idea here is to have that discouraged. A Blaster with melee attacks will only spend as much time in melee as is absolutely necessary, then pull back to blast. The idea here is to give the character incentive to stand and fight.

Personally, I'm not sure what specific system would be good to accomplish this, but if the system's upkeep is high enough, you could potentially see the AT dealing some serious damage. After all, Brutes have ever so slightly (and not so slightly) more survivability than Scrappers, yet good Fury control can let them deal more damage, too. I don't see why this AT can't deal serious damage if it required the AT to move around a lot in combat.

No, they've never said this. And I've been keeping track.

If the problem is technical, then ask for a technical solution, not a cosmetic one. As others have pointed out, you can suppress player effects when close to the camera, as that's really the only time that creates a problem. I suppress my own, for instance.

He wasn't unyielding, but that doesn't mean he wasn't fully convinced of his own righteousness. Enough complaints from enough people did end up changing his mind, but just barely. He did end up listening to the community, but out of lack of options. If he'd listened to the community from the start, he'd have focused on a way to bring greater challenge to the game WITHOUT screwing over people who were happy with the existing level of challenge. And that's how he always operated. He envisioned changes with only his ideal target audience in mind, and the belief that the rest of us who didn't agree with him would either leave or undergo sudden inexplicable epiphany and realise he was right all along.

He designed THROUGH his own player base, not around it.

Elite Bosses were the right way to go. Unlike bosses, they are RARE, and they appear in special occasions that really DO demand greater challenge for narrative reasons. Bosses spawn frequently, at the end of practically every mission (which is why warning labels would have been more an insult than a "warning"), they spawn in regular spawns, they show up in the streets and hazard zones and very often spawn in pairs and more. Bosses are far too common for them to be made a really big threat. It's anti-climactic.

Difficulty settings were another good idea, both to make it harder and to make it easier. Designing special encounters with special enemies like the ITF was another good idea. There were and are plenty of good ideas, but Jack always defaulted to change the game for everybody first and only conceded to just add on to it when people complained. That's what bugged me about it, personally - he was too quick to change things to his own vision and too slow to think about what established habits he was trampling over.

I dislike the Inventions system for my own reasons, but dislike for the system does not inherently lead to the belief that the system shouldn't exist. I dislike eating, for example (long story), but recognise the need for some such system. I can't point to the Inventions system and say "See, this? This is bad for the game!" It isn't, and it brought a lot of new people into the game. I wish it weren't necessary, but apparently it is, so what am I gonna' do?

But just because that decision and, moreover, ED, ended up benefiting the game in a big way, it doesn't mean that there weren't times when Jack was not proven dead wrong. A lot of cases are ambiguous, granted, but I still firmly hold that the I4 boss buff was one instance where the mistake is not in question. He tried to do something with this that players quite simply refused to stand for. The fact that this was not only rolled back completely, but that the notion of unsoloable bosses was scrapped forever stands to clear evidence, at least in my eyes, that whoever came up with this idea was very, very wrong. I think it was Jack, because it was an extension of his "vision" for the game.

I have to agree with this. I've said it many times before - HOW you say things is often as important as WHAT you say, and jack had the tendency to say things in a very, very bad way. I'm not a public speaker, but what I feel Jack lacked was any sense of situational awareness when it came to the community. Whenever you post something on these forums, you HAVE to think about how people will react to it, and he spent enough time with us to have at least a vague idea what our reactions would be. This doesn't even have to mean spinning the truth, just being aware of potential problems and addressing them before people whip themselves up into a fenzy.

I'd liken Jack's participation on the forums to carpet-bombing. He'd come, drop comments indiscriminately and then leave without looking back, leaving his moderators to clean up after him. And then he'd wonder why the place is so shot up and full angry, bitter people. I don't know what Jack was one-on-one, but his public communication skills were TERRIBLE. Again, a sly developer can at least try and convince people that he's really sorry about nerfing his characters and he's really trying to take care of them. A foot-in-mouth developer simply makes people feel like they don't matter and no-one cares about them. Even if this is actually the truth, you DO NOT allow people to feel that way unless absolutely necessary.

I'm forbidden from seeing the thread in the link. If you know what it's about, I assume you can read it. And if you can, you're probably in Beta. That was the point of the link, I think.

Well, I start my villains in Mercy, but I can't really start my heroes there, so that IS kind of confusing.

As long as you can't get into them, does it really matter? At least this is a good litmus test as to whether you're in Beta or not. Now that I know the forums exist and I can check against them, I can be SURE I'm not in Beta and stop trying to log in.

It's not a question of how much is generally new in it, it's a question of the sheer size of the update. Even if most of it is replacements for old material, that just tells me there is a TON of material being replaced or updated. Whether we get new textures or better old textures, we're still getting a LOT.

Moreover, they've been working with a lot, and I appreciate the effort required for putting this huge pack of an Issue together.

Anyone who hasn't been in an Issue closed Beta before won't know what to look for, Lemur. I didn't know what to look for when I accidentally discovered I was in Dual Pistols Beta, and I don't know if I should be looking for the same thing now. Assuming people will just instinctively know where to look and what to look for is not a safe assumption.

It's a question of semantics. When I hear about someone whose powers are "survival," I don't think someone who helps other people survive. I think literally a survivor, someone who lives when everyone else dies. Dump him in a feral jungle full of poisonous plants and he'll walk out in a year with antidote, immunity and armour made of the hides of fierce beasts. Drop him in the middle of the scorching desert, come back in a year and he'll have dug up a well, built up some shade, planted a garden of various plants and built himself a snazzy shack. That sort of thing.

I understand what you're talking about, I just wouldn't call that survival, myself. It's actually the OPPOSITE of survival. It's support for others so that they can survive and then take care of you. I have no real problem with the concept, just the name.

I didn't post it because I didn't keep a copy and I forgot what I had in it. I don't see Personal Forcefield as a support power, myself, as all it does is protect YOU, ala Hybernation. And the rest of the bubbles came from lack of enough "energy" powers that weren't just rehashes of the same thing. Plus, I never had a problem with utility powers in a protection set, provided they aren't ally-only or ally-mostly. Think the kind of support Blasters have, the so-called self-support. And, in fact, all powers I mentioned were available to Blasters, some were just in the Force Mastery Epic.

Let's see if I can't recall my write-up off memory. I had the primary balanced like an assault set, but not quite. I think I had three ranged attacks, three melee attacks, Build Up, a utility power and something else I can't recall. Possibly a wildcard power. The secondary I had written up as one cone, one AoE, two shields, one exotic kind of status protection (I'll explain), two or three self-support powers and one wildcard. That would mean...

Let's see. Primary:

1. Power Bolt
2. Energy Punch
3. Power Blast
4. Barrage
5. Build Up
6. Power Push
7. Bone Smasher
8. Power Burst
9. Total Focus

Secondary:

1. Personal Deflection Shield
2. Force Bolt
3. Energy Torrent
4. Personal Insulation Shield
5. Status Protection (I'll explain)
6. Explosive Blast
7. Conserve Power
8. Power Boost
9. Personal Forcefield

When I say "exotic kind of status protection," I mean something akin to what a break free does. It's not a preventative form of status protection, in that you can't turn it on and just ignore status effects, but rather something you used to give you a momentary reprieve from status effects. VERY momentary. Say 10 seconds' worth. If you're permaheld and about to die, you pop this and either cross your fingers that you can kill everything in the next ten seconds, or run like hell before that expires. Give it a recharge time of at least 60 seconds, or even 90 like Build Up, and let the thing be a last resort.

And again, this is off memory. I don't remember how I had it set up originally.

It will cost more, but it will also give you more. The Complete Collection doesn't give you early access to Dual Pistols and Demon Summoning.

That doesn't work for those of us who play both sides, though.

Yeah, if it was, it means we're playing a game that has heartworm and has sold its soul to the devil for a packet of M&Ms and two sticks of Hubba Bubba.

It's ALMOST the same, but my "something is odd here" sense started tingling BIG TIME as soon as I saw the log in page. The background is the same, and it still stretches, the colours are all the same, even the text font is the same, but there's SOMETHING wrong there. It took a side-by-side comparison of the old and the new to pin down what it was.

Turns out, the interface borders have been altered. The corners, more specifically, are different and much more angular. The radius of the turn is much smaller, which leads me to believe that the entire UI has been retouched, probably redone from scratch but made to match the old one so we don't whine for an option to revert back to what we had.

The difference is subtle, but it gives the menus a very different "feel" that I can't adequately describe with words.

Probably so, but we still need to Beta test it, and it'll be interesting to see how that works between the I17 Beta participants and the rest of us with senior status that were given Going Rogue Beta access, but were not invited into the actual I17 Beta. Be odd to have two betas on at the same time.

If I had to make a guess, I'd say I17 will launch some time soon and we'll see a Demon Summoning Beta immediately once that's done.

I guess I can't see Beta forums, in case they're up above the forum tree like the Dual Pistols ones were. I did look, but then it was a while before I noticed the Dual Pistols ones, too. I don't see them, however, and I can't seem to log into the Test server, so I guess that means that I'm not in. Though, to be fair, before it used to tell me the server was closed for Beta. Now it just says my firewall is probably blocking it.

From what I was able to see, however, the login interface has changed, and that's a good sign. It means the engine overhaul is REALLY thorough.