Samuel_Tow

Yeah, sorry. Totally my fault. I was supposed to mail you an invitation, but I got the packages mixed up. If you've received a pound of bacon in the mail somewhere in the past two months, that was totally my bad. Sorry. But hey! You're in the clique! So welcome!

The worst part is that some of these faces are actually pretty good, but they don't match the rest of the skin on the body, so they are completely useless. Pity, really, and very unprofessional.

Thank you for reminding me the forums had a "Report" button. I'd forgotten that existed.

Bulgaria, Eastern Europe. I'm pretty sure even Euro retailers don't deliver here. A friend of mine got a purchase of his lost in the mail some time ago, but at least he got a refund.

I'll have to research the matter and probably look up someone who actually has a PayPal account

The problem comes from transferring money to said friend over the 'net, which I'm not too confident it. It also assumes I have friends in the US who are willing to do this for me, which I'm not sure I can call on at a moment's notice. Ideally, I'd rather see an online purchase for the thing. At the same cost, if it has to be. I don't need or want a box.

I also want the box and the preorder, so I'll go in my local corner to cry softly to myself for being a dang dirty foreigner...

Yes. If I'm not mistaken, that's the one that came with Prestige Power Slide, which I actually really need for a specific Scrapper of mine, but can't get. Money really isn't an issue with this one, at least unless it's something like $80, it's just the fact that I can't buy it anywhere that bothers me. If it were up in the PlayNC store, I'd buy it, but it isn't. I'm not sure whether that's because it was supposed to be a limited-time offer or whatever, but it kind of bugs me.

It's never too early to worry Besides, I still take grief over the City of Heroes Special Edition DVD, which only ever existed on DVD and has had its sale discontinued as far as I'm aware. A friend of mine offered to grab me one from a store or Ebay or whatever he had handy, send me over the key code and keep the goodies for himself. I'd have agreed, too, but I don't know how peer to peer money transfers work over the 'net, and I tend to be very cautious about what I do with my credit information.

Besides, it's either worry about this or speculate about a generic "more of everything."

Though, here's something else that has me worried - there's no talk of proliferation, and all we know about Going Rogue powerset-wise is Dual Pistols and Demon Summoning, which is all they keep discussing and all they'll be testing. Is that really all the new powerset-related additions we'll be getting with I17 and/or Going Rogue? What about another round of proliferation? What about more new sets? Obviously, it's too early in the game to comment on that, but I've not so much as seen a hint that anything else is even being worked on and all the info we've ever gotten has been concerning these two sets.

I'm not really that judgemental on new sets, to be honest. But I DO believe we're about due for another set of proliferation, and I'm eyeing up either Super Strength or the Axe/Mace combo jumping AT divides some time soonish.

*edit*
Oh, and hey - if we're unlocking Epic ATs earlier, can we possibly look into releasing unlockable contacts to the general population without the badge hassle?

If this edition is a boxed set, then I CANNOT BUY IT. It's physically impossible for me to do so, as American retailers won't deliver to the butt end of Eastern Europe and I won't get a version of the thing compatible with my US game, even if I could actually FIND a game box in any store whatsoever. This concerns me greatly, as I very much do want the in-game times.

I sincerely hope that either they will release an in-game item pack separate from the full package game, or will release the game package on their online store. Because if they do neither, then things will become incredibly complicated and uncomfortable for me. I don't care about physical goodies like disks, manuals, figurines or all the assorted crap that comes with a boxed set (I have my CoH and CoV stuff filed away in a box I never open), but I very much want the item pack.

And I'm continually disappointed about preorder googies, as I know for a fact I won't be able to preorder online. Does not happen, will not happen. I don't know why that is, but that has always been the fact. Which presents the same problem - I want to preorder and have a go at the early advent of the sets, but I can't, thanks to locality. At least in that respect I'm not completely boned. Even if I don't preorder, I'll still get "the stuff" eventually when the expansion launches. This is more of an inconvenience than a practical concern, as I'm a patient man.

I'm not really excited about the rest of the announcement, as it basically says "Yes, there are more things coming." I kind of already knew that. It's comforting to know I17 will launch before Going Rogue, but we kind of already knew that, too. So while the announcement is much appreciated and I hope it will keep the "Where's mah GR info!?!" threads down for a days, it doesn't really say much, does it?

I'm not a fan of Sabertooth, but aside from just not knowing much about him, I agree with that lineup.

However, I want to make a specific point - I'm not dising a character when I say he's "not as brutal." There are as many ways to inflict harm upon your fellow men, and sheer brutality is just one of them. I've nothing against Wolverine as a character or indeed as a fighter. I just find that his approach to killing is less brutish, less brutal and more just wild and violent. It's kind of like the difference between being mauled by wolves and being mauled by a bear.

In this regard, the Broadsword family of weapons (which is to say - Broadsword, Battle Axe and War Mace) are about as brutal as weapons get, trading elegance of approach and finesse of technique for straight-forward, direct swings for maximum impact. It's like the difference between Super Strength and Martial Arts. Beating people into a bloody mess is generally very unpleasant any way you look at it, but Super Strength does that via... Well, strength and brutality, whereas Martial Arts does that via technique and aggression.

And while I've gone on the record as insisting Brutes don't HAVE to be lumbering giants, I don't see why they CAN'T be that if they so choose. A lot of their powersets really do lend themselves to just that concept.

There's nothing brutal about Claws from where I'm standing. It's a fast-attack, weak-damage set that relies on repeated attacks. The Juggernaut is brutal. Wolverine is just violent. It's not the same thing.

That's kind of why I went into it, though. That's unquestionably more interesting than what we get, but it's in much the same vein - straight-line electricity that just sort of oscillates. It's more a MegaMan-style "hard energy" blast than actual electricity, though it's probably an easier call to make for altering current Electrical Blast into. It's too... Lazy at the moment.

That said, electricity may well be a different version of lasers - movie and comic book lasers don't in the slightest work like real life lasers do, but that's OK, because real life lasers aren't as cool when used as weapons. Much better to use a "blaster."

It's only old content if you don't count Faultline, which received the same stupid treatment.

Especially with how it's animated, if you pick a larger blade, you will have one BRUTAL Scrapper. In fact, of all the sets Scrappers get, Broadsword is the most visually and viscerally brutal.

That said, I will give my third peg leg for Axe and Mace Scrappers, and that's no joke!

As I said, I'm not against the mechanics of the idea. I just dislike the implementation as coming from a gym. I wouldn't be against some way to increase your endurance pool (but NOT by a trial), and would very much enjoy that. However, I fear what such a thing would do to power balance, since recovery buffs are percentage-based off your total amount of endurance.

If this were a couple of years ago, I'd fully agree with you. Back when we had to depend on just enhancement drops for our income, getting a full set of SOs was a pain and rarely affordable right as they became available. But these days, it's not the case, and it's not about you doing it wrong. You WILL get inventions drops whether you like it or not. You cannot turn them off. Granted, the chance to not get anything decent is still out there, but in my experience, it is not very high. I don't play the Market, I don't farm and I don't share resources between my characters, and I still manage to get enough Inf off a couple of lucky drops over the first 20 levels.

Basically, what you want to do is visit the market, dump your inventory in it and check what's going for a high price right now, then offer that for a low price. You'll get undercut from time to time, but a lot of the time you'll sell for upwards of 10 times what you listed, and on expensive drops you can get a 65 000 sale for a 250 list price. And what isn't going well just dump at the next vendor you meet. That, and try to sell enhancements to the "correct" stores for maximum revenue and you really shouldn't have BIG problems.

But suppose you have problems with getting SOs that I just can't foresee. I can accept that I don't know everything. How are you getting Inventions, which cost over ten times as much, when you can't get SOs?

Sleep is useful if you use it correctly, which is to say put one target to sleep and ignore it. Short-duration sleep is patently useless, which is what surprises me about it being present in some Electrical attacks, but a decently long-duration sleep is a powerful mitigation tool. Area effect sleep, especially, is highly useful.

As for the topic at hand, I think the real problem is with the lack of availability of -recovery effects. No matter how far you drain an enemy, they recover enough endurance for basic attacks pretty quickly. The only way to drain them effectively is to drain them and keep them drained. Granted, Electrical Melee and Electrical Armour both have that endurance drain aura which can do just that, but that's a feature of the secondary, which in itself doesn't have a lot of drain to its name. It's only when you combine Electric with Electric that this really works, and it shouldn't.

So, instead of applying a hold at these percentages, which would be quite problematic in terms of balance, why not have an increasing chance to apply a -recovery effect. If you've drained someone to nothingness, then your chance to kill his recovery is very high (I wouldn't make it 100%, but call it 90%), so you can basically KEEP him there without him recovering enough to attack while you're animating.

How specific sets are balanced is not relevant to whether such a balance should exist. You believe that the balance point should be at the cost of one toggle without ever having to really worry about the cost of that toggle and never having to worry about toggle juggling. On a purely "want" level, I agree with that, but this is not balanced. For one, sets with fewer toggles would suffer from this. For another, endurance management is an integral part of the game, and toggle cost vs. recovery rate is a central balancing mechanic limiting how many toggles you can have. Under your system, a character could easily run Rock Armour, Brimstone Armour, Crystal Armour, Minerals, Rooted, Mud Pots, Tough, Weave, Assault, Manoeuvres and Tactics all without too much of a worry and, crucially, without the need for Stamina or other pool powers, freeing up enough slots to run all that crap AND grab enough offensive powers to be a decent Brute.

I will freely admit that certain powersets need to have their endurance costs reviewed. Dark Armour and Stone Melee are the ones I'd single out specifically. Invulnerability is NOT a power I would point to, however. Stone Armour has at least five toggles that you're going to need all of in a lot of cases (say, fighting Arachnos) and Dark Armour has three defence shields, another shield to combat immobilize, a damage aura and two utility toggles, one of which has a crippling cost. There really isn't that much reshuffling you can do, other than "get Stamina," and even that doesn't always help. But Invulnerability? You have Temporary Invulnerability and Unyielding with a regular cost, and Invincibility which is actually cheaper. Outside of Regeneration, what defence set has a toggle cost that's lower than this? Serious question here.

As well, your suggestion has technical problem with it, as well. For one, we know for a fact that power stats cannot be altered by conditionals. The only things that can alter power stats is buffs and enhancements. Enhancement cannot be given from one power to another (or to itself) and buffs affect all powers. As such, you can't alter the cost of a toggle. You can't get away with a recovery buff, either, as that throws off the base for recovery buffs on top of that. You could probably give the power a flat endurance return per cycle, but that would be a pretty serious hack in the powers system that I, personally, would be uncomfortable writing in.

The only real way I see this working is if we gave everyone a single "Just Toggle" and had that inherit the the effects of all proper toggles taken as they are taken. As such, you would only ever have one toggle with a flat cost, and any other toggles would just add effects to it. To be honest, that's a much cleaner way to handle it, rather than having multiple toggles that basically do different parts of the same thing littering your tray, and in a brand new game, I'd have preferred this approach. But as it stands, it removes a serious balancing mechanic from the game, penalising sets with fewer or no toggles in the process. Toggles give a constant effect that requires no player action to maintain and persists while the player is animating other actions. As such, it requires a cost to balance it. It's unreasonable to expect to get more of a benefit from it without paying a higher cost, because that begs the question - why NOT grab all of the toggles you can carry if they won't cost much more?

I know it's a meaningful build choice for me. On my Dark Armour, I skipped Cloak of Fear because its cost was too high to sustain and its effect was not good enough to be worth it, but I kept Oppressive Gloom because it cost a resource I could replenish more easily (hit points, to be precise). On my Stone Armour, I found myself wanting to run all toggles at the same time, so I picked Stamina against my will. On my Energy Aura, I picked Tough because Conserve Energy and Energy Drain allowed me to afford the additional cost. On my Invulnerability Brute, I did not take Tough, because I couldn't afford it and I had to look for other options. It is how it is. That's part of the game. Removing it outright will require other balancing to be done, and that will manifest in power magnitude cuts, which I don't want to see.

Tell you what - wait until we see what the new systems entail and maybe one of them will help with endurance costs.

Reminds me of a friend of mine who completely honestly once exclaimed "Didn't you see the invisible guy?!?" Giving context on that would ruin the joke. On the flip side, I've shot invisible people without ever suspecting there was anyone there, which still makes me laugh to this day.

As for things we'll never see in this game:

*Another version of the Statesman from another dimension. Nope! Never! Not gonna' happen!
*A reply from a PM to BackAlleyBrawler.
*A healer. They don't exist and are just a myth.
*Glowing costume pieces, because Jay will keep forgetting to let us know we won't be getting the ones we see in screen shots.
*A MAGI vault.
*The REAL Nemesis.
*A full suit of Vanguard gear.
*A kilt used in a good costume.
*The Eden top with anything other than a Thong bottom.
*Decent bare feet.
*Fingers.
*Developer posts that aren't in a quasi-roleplay thread.
*Farming. We will never, ever see farming in this game. At all.
*Jack Emmert.

I think I just ran out of steam.