Samuel_Tow

Not to mention that the Wedding Pack gave us a bunch of their costume bits already. Sign me up.

Absolutely. I firmly believe that pistol Epics need to exist for at least all melee ATs, and I'd give one to all of them, as well. They don't even have to be all attacks, or indeed all pistol, just as long as it gives a couple of pistol attacks, I'd be fine with it. Be no weirder than Weapon Mastery already is.

As for a Ranged/Defence AT, I feel that could own, but won't, because it would be too overly balanced unless something extrodinary happens. For that reason, I'd settle for an Assault/Defence AT, even if it has to lose the massive Blaster AoEs. I've suggested this many times before, so I won't rehash it again, seen as it's almost 5 AM

But that's where the rubber hits the road, isn't it? This is the big one that, from my perspective, is probably the last thing we can conceivably ask from power customization that won't boil down to "just more of the same." The ability to turn non-weapon powersets into weapon powersets and weapon powersets into non-weapon ones, that's pretty much all that's left. And, from what little I know of the animations system, that would be somewhere between "major pain" and "impossible."

The questions here, as I see them in my ignorance, are can you make powers such that they have customizable activation sequences, such that they cause redraw when a weapon is chose, don't cause redraw when no weapon is chosen and don't cause redraw between the different powers (I suspect youc can force the same weapon for all and get away with it) and, most importantly, will the system even concede to play that kind of setup?

BABs, one important point I have to make here - I believe just adding a weapon prop to powers in the way that the Fire Sword or Stone Mallet are set up would be a mistake. If we're talking about transforming non-weapon powers into weapon ones, that HAS to go through weapon customization, and if it can't or won't, then better to not mess with it to begin with. In this case, the ideal solution would be idea, but the alternate solution would just not be good enough, if I understand things as well as I assume I do.

Yeah, that's something I noticed on the toy gun I mentioned. Since the barrel itself is somewhat below the top of the slider, shoving the gun into someone's back depresses the top of the slider and moves it ever so slightly backwards, exposing more of the barrel. I hadn't thought about it, but that might indeed block the action of the gun, which would be pretty... Counter-productive

But this cliché is silly on face value, coming from what I can only presume is a complete lack of knowhow in firearms. Like people who fire pistols from the hip for absolutely no reason. I mean, when I was a kid and had never so much as held a gun-shaped object, that seemed really cool, but when you actually try it out, you realise there is no way to aim the gun like this, even across a room. That turns accuracy into a total crapshot.

Doing a combination of the above two on James Bond is just asking for trouble.

That was actually in response to trying to figure out what an "armour-piercing, concussive round" might be, but Arcana proved right. Upon retrying the game, it was indeed revealed that it was "a concussion pistol firing .90 calibre armour piercing rounds," by which I assume they mean a pistol firing round by some futuristic sci-fi means, given that it's set in a space-faring future. I kind of suspected that explosive rounds can't be armour-piercing, and as it turns out, they don't have to be.

To be honest, from how the Faust sounds when it fires, I suspect it might be some sort of railgun, considering it has a 15-round magazine of .90 caibre rounds.

It's not really about good behaviour, though. It's common sense. A team that NEEDS an "IO-d out" Brute, much like a team that NEEDS a "healer," is one of two things: wilfully incompetent or interested in taking on things they have no business attempting. Far as I'm concerned, either is reason enough to quit and find a better team.

Unless you turn it off, in which case it doesn't matter.

No, you can't. Not any more, not after they hid rep comments. Now you never see the comments, so there's never anything to report. Which makes the feature EVEN MORE POINTLESS.

Same for me here. All the other MMOs suck, and I'm not saying that as a fanboy. I've tried a lot of them, and in almost every case quit within an hour of logging in. Lineage II held me a day, WoW I haven't actually tried but I've seen more of it than I want to and... Well, Champions Online I tried twice. Once lasted a day, the other time lasted two sessions of an hour each as I'd promised to give the game a chance and just couldn't. Combat there is TERRIBLE.

Hell, combat EVERYWHERE is terrible. I'm sick of auto-attacks, I'm sick of feeling as though I have no contact with the ground and fighting by, as Yhatzee put it "furiously waving my fists at the enemy until one of us falls down..." I hate every other MMO I've tried or so much as even seen. I've hated MMOs since I became aware of what the concept entailed, and City of Heroes is literally the ONLY one I can play, specifically because it's a lot NOT like the rest of them. Less not like them now than it used to be, regrettably, but still far and away not that kind of mess.

Offline games are still fare game, of course, if you'll pardon the pun, but fat lot of good they do me. Single-player games hold me for a day, at most two. Mass Effect lasted me three, I believe, but most other games... Nah. I got a lot out of Steam's sale, though most indie games. Braid I HATE WITH A PASSION and I beat it in a day, Trine I really like, but I've already beaten it before, so I beat it in a day, and Audiosurf I've played before, but I can't really play it for more than an hour a day, if that. I also got Advent Rising for sentimental reasons, but that's a day, as well. I could play through Half-Life: Source, 2, Episode One and Episode Two, and that'd take me three, probably four days, and I could play through the Sands of Time Trilogy, which, having memorised all three games, won't take me more than a couple of days, but even all that together isn't more than a couple of weeks, out of how many months?

I could probably play Dragon Age: Origins, as that's rumoured to take forever. But I won't. I HATE HATE HATE Baldur's Gate and everything it represents, I am DONE DONE DONE with Fantasy and I've honestly lost my taste for squad combat. I could deal with it if it were something as simple as Dungeon Siege, but Dungeon Siege 2 finally broke my back on the STUPID complexities of your typical Fantasy RPG. That, and I am beyond sick of sandbox games, and I am perfectly fine with a linear single-player game. Icewind Dale over Baldur's Gate, as it were. And besides, complex adventures are typically fun to play, but laborious to replay.

So I'm sticking to City of Heroes, even if I'm spending increasingly more time watching Linkara, Nostalgia Critic and Spoony reviews.

Honking big picture withheld from quote.

I'm not sure that much is possible, but you know what? I'd actually like to see the option for an exposed backbone like this as a back option. I would DEFINITELY use it on a few characters.

As "bragging rights," perhaps, but I cannot agree that active subscriptions is the most important aspect. PlayNC is a business, and as such revenue is the bottom line. If they have enough revenue, then that's all that matters. What keeps a game afloat and what gets it made in the first place is the fact that it makes money. As long as it makes money, that's all that counts. And despite all the doom and gloom, City of Heroes appears to nevertheless make money for them.

Wasn't labour day a holiday of some sort?

I can get behind this. It's not meant to be used in combat anyway, so this makes sense. And if it counts as quid pro quo, all the better.

I was going to bring up the same point. In the low levels, anything you get is pretty much ready to go out the gate, as everything else you have barely has a couple of slots and they're filled with barely meaningful enhancements, so the gulf isn't that big. By the 30s, though, you have a lot of your powers well-slotted, to the point of brand new ones being practically not worth the time and cost until you enhance them, which tends to take anywhere from next level to several levels down the line, circumstances depending. That really bugs me, because it gives me a cool new power... Except it doesn't. Ugh!

I could dig that, given a hypothetical new game system where this won't shift a carefully-selected balance point by a wide margin. If there's an aspect of classical computer RPGs that I always enjoyed, it was the ability to take what is essentially static powers that improved your performance. I realise that kind of comes down to "Strength/Dexterity/Magic/Vitality," but the problem with these is that one stat controls a bunch of things, not all of them well-documented, not all of them actually desired, and not all of them applying to a lot of your abilities. Having the ability to, instead, increase my own base damage via some kind of AT mod enhancement, to go back to City of Heroes, is both a directed, specific improvement only to something I want (and so, presumably, less costly than an improvement to something I want AND something I don't) and a good way to form specialisation.

Again, I kind of enjoy the game land-locking me into specialisations to some degree, because I don't trust myself enough as a player to sacrifice damage for defence, say, but the system sounds decent even despite that fact.

Considering there have been direct requests for this for the precise reason of allowing catgirls to wear more clothes, probably. I know that, speaking for myself, I am physically unable to dress my panda girl because of this, as a belt would hide her tail.

Well, there you. I knew I heard something about this, and thought it wasn't these exact numbers, it was in this general vein. That's kind of why it bugs me when people say "There's no reason this can't be done" when there very often is a reason around about like this one.

Out of curiosity, BABs, did you test that on current-game graphics or with the Going Rogue ultra mode? Because I suspect that might harm performance even more.

At this point I'm not sure if he learned diddly squat, learned exactly the wrong lessons, or learned the right lessons but stormed off to the Star Trek MMO and left someone else to handle Champions Online, but... Put it this way: what the game doesn't borrow from WoW, it largely implements via the wrong lessons learned from City of Heroes.

Easy example: people don't want to be constrained to just one city. They don't? Must'a missed something here, because I thought the relatively modern-day setting, set in a contemporary city, was exactly what set CITY of Heroes apart from World of EverQues II. So what does Champions Online do to distance itself? It sets you up in a forest to beat up forest animals and zombies.

Err...

Well, I did make that firearms thread that ended up being endlessly enlightening for the mechanically inclined But, yeah, the double and triple "Where's mah info!?!" threads are starting to bug me.

Consume tends to have a larger AoE radius, though. It's fairly easy to tag two or three enemies even in scattered spawns, whereas something like Energy Drain basically only drains what I'm already rubbing shoulders with, which is hard to pull off with enemies that like to shoot from range.

Does it not strike you as obvious just how BAD that argument is for the purpose of actually convincing anyone of anything? You're certainly going to find a few people who agree with this, and you are CERTAINLY going to find plenty of people who feel completely the opposite way. Replacing powers in this game, this late in its life, is somewhere between "out of the question" and "maybe if my job depended on it." It's not going to happen.

That said, I don't dislike the powers you are putting forward. In general, much as I like being able to "pick everything," I still feel we could do with more powers in powersets in general. Currently, we have 24 power picks total, which used to be enough for all primaries, all secondaries, two pool powers for travel and all four Epics. Some of us can make do with just one pool power for travel now, and Epics swelled to five powers, so that's no longer the case, but it's still the next best thing. Kheldians, on the other hand, have a good idea with their zillions of powers that you can never ever pick even if you took nothing but, so I don't disagree with adding a few extras.

So far, we've only seen Epics padded up, and only because they tried replacing powers and the player base spontaneously combusted, so they scrambled to put the old powers back in alongside the new ones, and eventually pad up the rest of the pools that didn't get replacements in them. We can, probably, look forward to a regular power pool padding in the same way, but I don't think things will ever go as far as to pad up the existing powersets.