Samuel_Tow

Except "that other game" also fails to offer any sort of teaming incentive, whereas ours offers a pretty fat experience and influence buff to those on a team. Granted, it's less than what you get solo, but a LOT more than 1/8 of what you get solo, which is how things tend to be divided elsewhere.

No-one teams because there's no incentive, not because there's no need. There's a difference.

Aha, I see. So SWAP portals and all will be well

Err... No, this is not even remotely true. Martial Arts is a MELEE set, and Blasters haven't been Range/Melee since pre-beta. Even Energy Manipulation, which is one of the most melee-heavy sets, only has four melee attacks and a control to four self-buffs. Martial Arts has six melee attacks to and Confront. Blaster secondaries are Support, and while no-one is really sure what it means, most people will agree it does NOT mean "just melee."

...

It's not a simple matter of "unlocking" costume pieces between models, as they both technically cannot be used and wouldn't fit the models even if they did. You can't take Female boot options and put them on a Huge leg because they would simply clip into the geometry. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can fir the thickest Female leg inside the skinniest Huge leg entirely. You can't put Female hairstyles on a Male head, because the female hairstyles expect a Female head geometry to fit onto. You'd need brand new, crafted-from-scratch costume pieces to make this work, and the chances of that happening are slightly lower than a flying pig armada invading a frozen hell during a blue moon.

Traps, not Devices. The two sets do share powers, but only tangentially. To be specific, Traps and Devices share Time Bomb, Trip Mine, Caltrops and Web Grenade, but Traps also brings a few new things to the table, namely Poison Gas Trap, Acid Mortar, Forcefield Generator, Seeker Drones and Triage Beacon. Then again, those are actually MORE technological than anything in Devices short of Auto Turret, and as such even less likely to mix with Martial Arts in a consistent way, at least in regards to theme. They'd likely be more easily combinable with some kind of more technological melee solution, like stun baton, power glove, vibroblade or Saotome Dynamite and I'm going to walk out of the thread before I make even more of a fool out of myself.

Would those wings be a cubist's nightmare or a cubist's wet dream?

Wait, I keep hearing about these "anti-material" rifles, but I don't know what that actually means. What are these rifles supposed to shoot at? Not tanks, obviously, but vehicles, maybe? What? Supply crates? I've seen supposed anti-material rifles in a lot of games, but they don't seem terribly effective against vehicles OR infantry, so either I'm missing something, or these games are very badly designed.

A couple of points to make here. One would be the one you alluded to, but avoided - damage modifiers only matter insomuch as they determine the strength of a melee attack relative to the strength of a "similar-size" ranged attack. That means that, all things being equal, things will hit harder in melee than they do at range. And this is true for a lot of things like Warriors, Trolls and even Rikti, to some extent. That is because they are, by and large, melee NPCs with a ranged attack. This fails utterly, however, when you are pitted against NPCs designed to be ranged damage dealers, whose ranged attacks are so strong they end up dealing MORE damage than their melee attacks. And some enemies don't even HAVE melee attacks at all. Nemesis Dragoons are a good example of this, as are Rikti Drones. And given how AI operates, you are unlikely to suffer melee AND ranged attacks if you go to melee, making some enemies actually safer in melee. A good example I can think of is Zeus Class Titans. If you force them into melee, they will only cycle their punch, never actually firing their much more damaging Plasma Beam, Plasma Beam Barrage, Explosive Missile Swarm, Incendiary Missile Swarm and Gas Missile Swarm attacks. They are LITERALLY safer in melee, because they are designed to be ranged enemies. Gunslingers are in the same boat, lacking a melee attack, as far as I've seen.

To add to this, the developers have continually acknowledged that while, yes, that's how things were designed to work, when things ACTUALLY work like this, they find themselves scrambling to fix it. When people were farming wolves by hovering out of their range, they got a ranged attack. When people kept doing that anyway, they got a ranged attack that STUNS, so as to knock fliers out of the air. It ought to have been working as intended. So why was it "fixed?" I mean, OK, give them a ranged attack, but why keep making it stronger?

The other thing is something you already mentioned - you can't out-damage bosses when it comes down to it. They do too much damage and are too much to kill. This is, from where I'm standing, a design requirement, so it isn't going to change, but that just makes it more of a problem. Realistically speaking, the only recourse is inspirations, and when bosses show up more frequently than inspiration drops, problems begin to occur. In fact, this was a huge culture shock to me when I played my Dominator - a Luddites Crusader was able to LITERALLY two-shot me with his crossbow. OK, one I can "cure" with Domination. But when three spawns on the deck of a ship map were all Crusaders, that creates a problem. Domination cures the first, and may help with the second, but the third is fought entirely as is. And with what enhancements I had at the time (read: Training) I couldn't permahold him before shot me full of crossbow bolts. It's doubly as fun when I met things with purple triangles of death. No status effects, not enough damage to take them down, not enough life to outlast them. I can't play this.

Here's the crucial point, though: they help sometimes, but they help exactly when you need them. Blaster "survivability-through-killing" works sometimes, but FAILS exactly when you need it most. Killing minions fast, eh... That's cool, and it works, though there are other ways around it, and minions aren't as dangerous. Killing bosses fast? Yeah, that HAS to happen, but it CAN'T happen, so defences fail right when they are most required. It's like a SR facing meeting bosses with autohit attacks or Invulnerability meeting bosses with unresistable damage. That's actually the BIGGEST thing. Most any Scrapper secondary has one final power which is, essentially, a battle-turner. When the chips are down, I'm about to die and my enemies are overwhelming, I can hit that and STILL win. Blaster secondaries offer no such thing. In fact... What the heck are they supposed to offer? Energy Manipulation offers Total Focus, which is cool, but not in the Elude sense of the word, and that's probably the best final.

But what do the others get? Devices gets Auto Turret, probably the MOST overbalanced power in the whole game. It takes ages to set down, costs more endurance than it has any place requiring, and it produces a pet that is, for all intents and purposes, highly underwhelming. And what of Fire Manipulation? Hot Feet is a fad. It turns off when you get held (and you WILL get held) does not a lot of damage, costs a bundle AND doesn't stop enemies from running in to punch your lights out anyway. And it works pretty badly with flying, as well. Electric Manipulation has Shocking Grasp, which you've already praised, but Ice Manipulation has Frozen Aura, a power that gets outstriped by an Epic equivalent. There really is no Blaster power that can get you out of a pinch, with the possible exception straight-up nukes, which both not everyone has, and also don't actually always kill everything, especially without Aim and Build Up.

As to defence vs. resistance, the notion that defence works "sometimes" is patently silly. It works all the time, and hits and misses because of it ought to average out over time. Yes, it can lead to unreasonable defeats, but it can also lead to unreasonable victories, and again over time, they average out. It's all down to how much you are willing to rely on it.

This reminds me of online games I've played with a group of friends that used to hang out a lot when we were kids. There were four of us who, before the advent of decent internet, all went to internet cafes to play LAN games, as all the city's cafes were linked together, and there were usually plenty of people playing. We were pretty much always the four, and we got pretty good at the time, with competition being FIERCE, to the point where one player dominating incited the others to want to get up from their chairs and go punch him at his PC. We never did, of course, as who got that upper hand always changed, and we all had fun by the end. Yeah, we all wanted to win, but by and large, we all wanted to just laugh our ***** off into our chairs and have a decent game.

I still have stupid stories from back in the day, from games like Wages of Sin and Half-Life, like jumping off a roof and into an open sewer, getting shot IN MID AIR by one guy's rocket redirected to another guy's laser sight, redirecting a "ball of death" nuke with essentially a melee shove gun (I still died because I redirected it into the ground at my feet), dropping on someone's head while shotgunning in mid air, getting "squished" by a very thin metal door for having the rotten luck to run under it JUST as the other guy hit the button, shooting a Gauss Gun into the ground to prevent it shocking me and killing two people through the floor I didn't even know were there, headshotting a person who was completely hidden while aiming for someone else and honest-to-god jumping over six volleys of rockets coming from BEHIND, inciting a friend of mine to first want to punch his team-mate, then want to punch ME. And it was all fun and games at the end of the day as we walked home together, laughing about the game like a bunch of idiots. And it was fun.

Then Counter-Strike came along, and everything changed. I guess a new wave of gamers hit the market, but that game simply allowed for a lot of cheap shots and really penalised the losers, so everything was Why... So... Serious? I we couldn't goof off, because that got us killed and turned into spectators for 10 minute out of a 12 minute round, and you couldn't rely on your enemies to be cool about it, since all they cared about was cheap-shotting you in such a way that you couldn't respond, racking up kills. That's also the first time I met honest-to-god cheating in multiplayer, and the whole thing was just not fun in the slightest.

Games can be competitive, that's all well and good. But games need to be FUN, and that fun CANNOT be had on the backs of other players, but sooner or later, YOU are one of the players who are chewed up and spat out so that someone else can have their fun. And I CAN blame the games, at times, for allowing such cheap tactics that... Well, what do you expect. But I mostly blame the players, because the desire to win is so fierce it makes games into a profession, when they really ought to be recreation. I play games to ESCAPE from the stress and hardship of work, not to get more of it. I don't mind a decent fight, but I don't want to elbow my way past someone else's ego every time I log on.

There's a Midnighter Store?

That, and War Witch in Pocket D being a trainer (which would be new) are the two things I didn't know, myself. Handy!

I should probably note that there's an easy way to get your Aura and third costume slot almost without hunting anything. The Aura requires that you hunt Freakshow, Rikti and Devouring Earth, and the costume slot requires that you hunt Crey. Hunt Freakshow any way you choose, but the rest are easy, and without needing to rely on unreliable scanner missions. Here's how it goes:

-Holsten Armitage, the Science contact, will give you a mission against the Rikti.
-Penny Peterson, the Mutation contact, will give you a mission against the Devouring Earth.
-Mark IV, the Technology contact, will give you a mission against Crey.

Job done

-Also, any hunt not given in a specific zone will count defeats anywhere, including inside missions.
-Allies defeating hunt enemies on their own only count towards your hunt mission if you are in the same zone as them. You don't have to do anything, just be in the zone.
-Hunt missions given in a specific area within a specific zone count enemies DEFEATED in the area, but not necessarily SPAWNED in the area, so it is possible to pull enemies normally outside the area into it and defeat them there for hunt mission credit. Handy if the enemies you need are rare or too high level.
-A lot of street spawns can have several possible groups that can spawn into them. If the one you're hunting doesn't show up in a spawn, move away, then return and something else will have spawned, potentially what you needed. Useful for hunting Carnies in PI.
-Sitting on your hands and watching a spawn WILL NOT make it change no matter how long you wait. It will only change if you move away from it a good distance.
-If you're dropping a Security Chief mission, make sure you talk to the Security Chief before you drop, or you will drop the FedEx and move on to the hunt, which I'm sure is what you actually wanted to drop.
-Entering an Ouroboros portal will interrupt people using Base Teleporters, Mission Teleporters and Assemble the Team powers nearby. Kindly wait for them to finish before you enter. Presumably, it will interrupt all interruptible powers.
-The Ouro portal cannot be activated while you are flying. Land first.

That's all I have for now

OK, I was too harsh. It sort of works, and it sometimes works, but that's part of the problem - it doesn't work all the time, or even anything close to that. Trust me, as someone who keeps a Blaster out of melee all the time, I can guarantee that this is STILL not enough. It helps, but it only helps kind of, it only helps sometimes and, crucially, it doesn't help in the situations where it really counts, which is boss and elite boss fights.

Must have missed it by about a month. I heard about the game too late, and it took me some times to buy it across the Atlantic. Seems like a lot happened in the time between late Beta and early Live, because I apparently missed the infamous purple patch, as well.

I'd avoid making these kinds of assumptions, but that's besides the point. Suppose I don't have enough and click the button. What happens then? What gets replaced and what gets left behind? Does the button just grey out if I don't have enough money? Suppose I have enough to replace all enhancements but one? Suppose I don't want to replace everything?

You're assuming everyone takes wasting money buying a bunch of enhancements only to buy new ones to replace them lightly. This is not the case, and a system that wastes this much just to be "convenient" is more dangerous than anything else.

Why not just let us buy enhancements straight into our power slots? That'd solve pretty much all problems. It won't be as lazy as a straight up "replace all," but it would have just enough speed with just enough control to be both safe and efficient.

Considering you're running to the store anyway, and that in the "early game" you have all of ten enhancements to replace, what are you really saving?

Huh? Did this happen in CoH Beta at some point? I first got into the game in the beginning of May 2004, and I distinctly remember reading AT descriptions, with Blasters being described as Range/Support. Man, I haven't looked at those definitions in over five years...

That's the big problem, really. Range as defence DOES NOT WORK. Short of constantly hovering (which I do), you're simply not going to get left alone on ground level. Unlike, say, a zombie shooter where you can back-pedal AND shoot, City of Heroes roots you while you attack, ensuring that ANYTHING which is chasing you is going to catch up and punch you, and even then you need a linear mile to kill anything meaningful. Yes, some sets have tools to combat that, but they don't work. Ice Slick is nice, and Ice Anything tends to work, but neither Hot Feet nor Burn nor Rain of Fire keep things away for crap. Things run away, yes, but they quickly turn around, return just in time for their attacks to have recharged, and punch you. Caltrops helps a little if you happen to spend the majority of your life in narrow corridors, but when enemies go around, you're forced into back-pedalling. And not all enemies even succumb to these things at all.

But even if you Hover, as we've already established, not all enemies are more dangerous in melee than they are at range. Sky Raiders, for instance, will rip you a new one like a firing squad on a cigarette-smoking man, and it just gets worse from there. Crey are a little better, but a full spawn of Rikti Drones will keep you spinning in the air like a floating tumbleweed. And kill you. Then we have Nemesis, Malta and, oh! The Soldiers of Rularuu, where everything BUT the Brutes can fly.

And the higher you go in the levels, the more your damage tanks in comparison to enemy hit points. In the low levels, a Blaster can one-shot minions with a crappy, slot-less moderate damage attack, but in the high levels, you'll need a fully-slotted extreme damage attack to do that, and even then you'll probably need Aim and/or Build Up. That's why pitting level 1 heroes against GM code Rikti in Rikti invasions is a death sentence. Level 1 damage DOES NOT SCALE WELL. All this means is that Blaster attacks are constantly getting weaker as Blasters level up, at least up to some point, so damage becomes progressively less of a decent form of protection with levels, which is kind of *** backwards, if you ask me. What's more, certain enemies are designed so that they CAN'T be dispatched the only way Blasters know how, which creates further problems.

Basically, I have a certain degree of doubt that the way Blasters are designed to work is actually very realistic within the confines of the game.

Actually, and I may be misreading your intent, but Fire Manipulation's Burn does have its immobilization protection intact. I was actually quite surprised about this, as the only other set that has that doesn't tend to use it much, as I believe Plasma Shield actually offers immobilization protection of its own. I've certainly had a lot of fun giving Malta the Finger as they Web-Grenade my Fire Blaster out of the air, I Burn as I land and get away anyway.

To be honest, that's actually how I would have made status protection work in the game if I were designing it. Yeah, yeah, passive status protection that simply makes status effects not fire is all fun and dandy, but it doesn't look cool, and it's... Well, passive. Knockback protection wouldn't simply make you ignore knockback effects, it'd just make you land on your feet or shove you back a bit, depending on how the power is supposed to deal with the effect. Holds, stuns, immobilization, all of those would always land and always affect, but you would still have a power with which to break OUT of them. And I would have prevented toggles of ANY kind from dropping while held from day one. If toggles must be dropped, institute another system specifically for that.

That's a actually pretty much 50% of the problem of melee vs. non-melee in terms of solo performance. When melee characters fight, they often face only a part of the danger, as melee oftentimes don't even KNOW status effects are being used against them. I didn't know Crey Security Guard clubs stunned or that Banished Pantheon... Well, clubs, knocked back when I was playing my first Scrapper. These effects just didn't play on me, so I didn't know they even occurred. It wasn't until I took my first Blaster through the game that I fully realised what the dangers were.

In fact, this is a large part of why I can play certain ATs, and why certain ATs I just "can't" play. The ATs I can are Scrappers, Blasters, Brutes, Stalkers and Masterminds. Scrappers, Stalkers and Brutes have status protection, Masterminds have several layers of protection keeping status effects away from them and they can still function even when held, and Blasters can fire out of their holds. The ATs I can't play, with the exception of Tankers which I dislike for other reasons, don't have that. Kheldians have status protection on Dwarf Form, but lack it anywhere else, Defenders and Controllers have no direct protection, Corrupters suffer like Defenders and Dominators DO have protection, but only sometimes. I've not even attempted to play Soldiers of Arachnos, so I don't know. Damage is, obviously, a problem, but later in the game, status effects take on the role of a BIG danger. In this respect, Fire Manipulation is actually better off than the rest of the Blaster secondaries.

---

To the general spirit of your post: I agree that, basically, secondaries are supposed to "help" Blasters do what they do, but since it's never really clear what it is that Blasters do, it's never clear, by extension, what the secondaries are supposed to help with. "They just help" does not work as a design goal, because implementation requires that you know what secondaries actually DO, and if you can't figure out what they need to help with, you end up with this - a mess of powers that's all over the place. I've played a lot of powersets in this game, and Blaster Manipulation sets are the only category that I have seen where I can cite terrible powers in every single set. They don't have to all be the same, but we really should have sat down to try and figure out what we want out of the secondaries and stuck with a more concise design.

I actually don't have a problem with Blaster primaries. I WOULD hold Assault Rifle to task for its non-existent single-target damage, but that's a specific, separate qualm I have with the powerset, itself. It's Blaster SECONDARIES that bug me to hell and back, largely because it seems like each different secondary belongs to a different AT. As a matter of fact, I dare say picking the same secondary and tabbing through all the primaries will produce vastly more similar Blasters than picking one primary and tabbing through the secondaries. Outside of Assault Rifle (and possible Electrical Blast), the Blaster primaries are already pretty much to code. Powers are jumbled and some things are replaced, but by and large the primaries are "similar enough.

Secondaries, though... These are all over the place, and I don't know about Castle (and possibly you), but I'll bet my left butt cheek that pretty much no-one, myself included, has any clear idea what they're supposed to do. They say "support," and then you see things like Fire Manipulation and Electrical Manipulation. OK, so Melee then. Except now you have things like Ice Manipulation and Devices, which are... Support? Kind of. What's Energy Manipulation, then? Melee? Support? Something else altogether?

When I look at Assault secondaries, I have a pretty clear idea what they're supposed to do, even though they're unique to Dominators. They're pure attack powersets mixing together ranged and melee attacks. Their purpose is to kill stuff dead. That's about as complicated as their purpose is. Mastery powersets, though? Some kill stuff, some buff you, some control and some do a little bit of everything. It's like if an AT could pick Fire Blast, Ice Control or Dark Miasma as a primary. What is that AT supposed to do?

You dislike AoE and what it does to Blaster balance, but if I had to lay blame anywhere, it would be on the secondary. A decent secondary can save a Blaster's hide. That's why I don't feel my Electric/Electric Blaster doesn't lack damage - his primary is has really low damage, but his secondary compensates. That's also why I feel my AR/Dev Blaster lacks damage, even though his primary does sizeably more than Electrical Blast.

I don't actually mind classes overlapping in the slightest. Scrappers and Brutes overlap almost completely in my eyes, and Stalkers overlap with both by a lot, but that doesn't bug me. When I say I want an AT to be defined, I don't mean defined as doing something no-one else does so much as simply defined in such a way that I can tell what the devil that AT was designed to actually do. Scrappers kill, that much is patently clear both from looking at their powers and from actually playing one. Brutes kill and go fast. Masterminds are a bit more complicated, but they basically turtle. Blasters, though? On paper, they kill. In practice, they die first. Some secondaries help keep them alive, others help get them killed faster, and still others seem to have dropped in from another AT altogether.

I want to look at a Blaster and say "Aha! This is what a Blaster is supposed to do! OK, how do I go about doing that?" I'm not terribly concerned if other ATs are doing some of the same things, since when I play an AT, I'm concerned with my own character and what that character can do. Unless it becomes a practical problem of being rejected from teams because the AT is gimped (which I don't believe is the case for any of ours), then overlapping abilities don't matter.

To put it in the simplest of ways, I care what an AT CAN do, not what an AT CANNOT do, and not what other ATs can do. I realise the latter two questions are important for AT balance, but I can deal with balance with a lot of overlap. Let's see if I can reuse your graphs to explain...

As far as I can see, more rigidly defined roles will only have a positive effect on performance. This doesn't have to come about through outright perfomance buffs so much as via eliminating aberrant outlier builds. Also, as Arcana points out, having a clear idea of what an AT is supposed to do makes it much easier to look at it and tell if it is or is not doing that. Right now, Blasters have a very nebulous definition of "just deals damage, kind of," which is very hard to point to and argue whether current performance is enough. In fact, I see Blaster design designation as somewhat akin to defining a character whose ability is to jump, but not really defining what body part he's intended to land on. Obviously, people who constantly land on their heads and die will cry foul, but when you look at it and notice that plenty of people land on their feet, and plenty also land on their hands and do fancy stunts, you can't really claim the AT suffers from wonky design.

Blasters are, basically, designed to dish out damage, but not a lot of care that I can see has been taken to account for what this damage actually does or, indeed, if they can survive dishing it out. Back in the day, they were designed as a team-mostly AT, so this kind of solo performance was strictly in the "don't know, don't care" category of design, where it's left up to the players to sort it out as that's not an intended and supported playstyle. These days, it ought to be, and fixes were made to somewhat help with that, but they still have one of the most abstract designs in the game, short of perhaps Masterminds. But where Masterminds generally don't have people complaining that this sucks or that's impossible, Blasters' tendency to spontaneously die under seemingly mundane circumstances HAVE seen more than a few complaints.

Now, such standardization will clean up the underperforming outliers, but it will no doubt burn the overpoerforming outliers, as well. I'm sure that if that particular hammer drops, Fire/Fire will be the first to scream, as they have the potential to... Frankly, break the game. Either that, or die quickly and horribly. It all depends on whether you're doing it right or doing it wrong. That sort of thing never goes over well with the player base, but Arcana has a point. The large-scale kill speed of Fire Blast, and especially Fire/Fire and Fire/Mental, can reach ludicrous levels, especially on teams, but at the same time, this is the only thing keeping them alive. It's a precarious balance that isn't solvable by just tweaking numbers here and there, as the system is inherently wobbly.

Finally, standardization will likely make characters play a lot more alike, and whether that is a good thing is a subject of debate. I, personally, happen to believe that the massive differences between Blaster types are best left as differences between the different ATs, rather than between powerset combos within the same AT. That doesn't mean they should play the SAME, but they ought to play similarly enough to where you can all hold them to the same rules. This is currently not even remotely the case.

I actually meant Diablo 2 and its spawn. I don't actually know enough about Champions Online to talk about it. I just know that I can take powers, I can take flat power upgrades (as in, Fireball II, though there may be a couple of versions to take) and I can take two kinds of stat boosts, for a grand total of four separate things. But being that I can't stand the game for more than about 10-15 levels (and I've tried several times), I just don't know enough about the system.

I do know enough about Diablo 2, though, which basically gives you a pool of points that you can either take powers with or retake powers with, as it were. Certain Diablo clones start increasing power take cost as you move on, of which Dragonica is a good example, and I believe Dungeon Siege 2 does the same. That sort of thing is both very easy to gimp yourself in for simply taking too many powers and upgrading too few to too low a level. It also draws the line of what a "good" character is to where the character has a very limited selection of powers which are very strong. WoW does go some way towards mitigating this by capping skills at a relatively low level. 1-5 if I've understood right, with most capped at around 3, so it's both easier to "max out" your powers AND easier to gave more varied skills. Diablo 2, by comparison, caps skills at level 20 and if I'm not mistaken, caps character levels in general at 99. So, not a lot of choice there.

City of Heroes, by comparison, has power number and power improvement segregated very sharply. You WILL take 24 powers and 67 slots and like it, mister! And I don't want to hear about trading powers for slots and slots for powers, you hear me! I'm your mother and you will listen to me, damn it!

Err...

Basically, what I want to say is that City of Heroes enforces a diversity of powers by basically forcing you to take 24 different powers, and it also ensures that everyone gets equal enhancement potential. It would be better for min-maxing if that selection were a little more free, but the net result best efficiency would come from builds that are a lot less fun than even the ones we have now. Granted, to a large extent the limited number of slots you have does dictate s little less variety than just power picks on their own. To 6-slot everything would require adding five slots to all 24 powers, which adds up to 120 slots, almost twice what we actually get. And that's not looking at Brawl, Sprint, Rest or any of the Kheldian inherents, INCLUDING the powers that come with their forms. So something has to give somewhere, which is why we more or less WANT to pick certain powers that can't use, don't need or can do with fewer slots, so that we have more slots to six-slot other things. As such, we can't really pick 24 powers of whatever we please, since slotting them all will run us dry half-way through, but to a large extent, that's still a better choice than taking NOTHING, instead.

I gotta' say it again, the sales pitch that I didn't have to take powers over and over again and that they just levelled up (scaled, as it turns out) with me is singlehandedly what got me to buy the game way back when. I HATE points buy systems just that much.

Well, I don't think competitive people want to keep weaker people down as a general rule. True, I've heard about all the monopoly stories from SWG where high-level crafters would sell low-level goods at prices that low-level crafters couldn't afford to sell at, thus preventing them from working up their skills, but that's more ruthless money-mongering than actual competitive gameplay for the sake of competitive sport.

I do believe, however, that a lot of competitive people get too preoccupied with competing and forget that, at the end of the day, we're all here to have fun, and that helping a weak player get stronger actually makes things more fun as you get someone that's actually interesting to compete against. There are different levels of "in it to win it" even within the circle of competitive games, because one has to ask if it's merely A victory that matters, or if it's only a GOOD victory that counts.

Back to Marvel vs. Capcom, I give no quarter and ask for none when I see my opponent is pushing back hard, but at the same time I don't consider it a good game if I won because he got hit with a glitch, suffered faulty hardware or just fumbled a billion times. In fact, if I spot an opponent continuously trying to pull off, say, a super and just fumbling his controls, I'll eventually just back off and let him pull it off anyway. I won't get hit with it deliberately, but I'll just let the other guy untangle his fingers just the same. It's good sport AND it's more fun when your opponent is on top of his game

This is something like what happened to me when I was still playing Marvel vs. Capcom to pretty hardcore with a friend of mine. We were both very much experts at the game, and we played REALLY fast and REALLY hard just to get a shot at that KO. When playing against other people who weren't such experts at the game, though, I realised I had to slow down my game A LOT, or there was simply no fun to be had. I wouldn't quite let people shoot me with ad-hoc supers, of course, but I wouldn't necessarily come down on every missed step and put constant pressure on them.

In fact, playing with someone who knew how to play, but not really at all what to do with the skills ended up as something of a tutorial where I'd constantly narrate what he was doing wrong and what he was doing right and occasionally laying some mild smackdown just to punctuate a point. He did end up getting a lot better in time, which let me speed up my game and actually try a fair bit, which was actually a lot of fun. To me, that shows that, even in a competitive game, cultivating a new player so that he stays and gets better is a wiser decision than simply crushing him and turning him off the game entirely. After all, at least for me, it's not whether you win or lose that matters, it's all about playing a good match.

On the other hand, I played with a nephew of mine who liked to just botton-spam a lot, which caused my attack attack attack to send me face-first into plenty of kicks and punches. Him I couldn't explain away, as he would not listen, so I had to get my game together, walk all over him by playing a little more defensively and exploiting the vulnerability after bigger attacks and, yes, eventually crush before it got through to him that his cheap approach was not, in fact, an "I Win" button. He got a lot better when he started fighting smart, though, so it was a net positive effect after all.

That exact picture is what I posted in BABs Dual Handguns thread, and that is indeed very accurate As well, the quote I keep giving is a direct quote from the game that the firing range instructor gives when you walk by the cabinet that holds probably two dozen of these. It's not the whole description, as I'm recalling this from memory of a game I haven't played in two years. Your description does sound interesting, though. I know what armour-piercing rounds are (which, by the way, would not just be longer to maintain ballistic stability, but be LONGER STILL to attain a piercing tip), and I guess I should be looking at what a concussion pistol is. That could very well be something to do with the firing mechanism much more so than the rounds, themselves. It IS seriously future technology, and it could explain why it doesn't break hands when it fires.

By the way, Advent Rising is just heaven for implausible pistols. There's the Faust described above, then there's the H.A.Z.E. Blaster, which has a fusion reactor inside and fires energy bolts, and can be upgraded to fire energy GRENADES, and the alien Talon pistol, which can fire rounds that can ricochet off targets and hit up to I three people per shot

The pic of the Faust doesn't look very impressive because it's a direct dump of the in-game model, but the design itself is sound, and I just love me a .90 cal pistol, no matter how silly that may be

That's kind of how I got interested into this, myself

Aha, so I should, instead, have asked why your text is so frikkin' tiny?

Well, I've just failed to explain it, but again, I still agree with you. Even in a class-segregated design, giving each class the ability to pick fighting skills at the expense of their specialisation would fulfil my wish. In an ideal world, I'd like everyone to be a fighter AND have a speciality in addition to that, but as a workable solution in a game that's more likely to be made at some point, just giving everyone the ability to satisfy basic solo needs in a non-roundabout way is a design that satisfies me.

Note, I don't mean a design that simply lets me pick from classes that can fight when solo and classes that can't. I mean a design that lets me pick ANY class, and still build it with at least some ability to fight solo, even if that has to come out of that class's speciality. And I'm fine with this closing some doors and opening others. Provided I can open the door to solo performance and pick which one to close, I do not mind this at all.

Also something of note: I hate "points buy" systems like those in Champions Online and Diablo 2 (not that they're alike in the slightest). Generally, such a points buy system lumps the points required for taking new skills into the same pool as the points required for upgrading old skills, often increasing the cost of upgrades as the level goes up. This creates choices I'd rather wish I didn't have, because their solutions are not fun. Choices like "do I want more powers or stronger powers?" or "Do I want three more powers or one more level in this one?"

If anything, how the villain Epic ATs do it is a good call, on top of how City of Heroes does it to begin with. You pick a power tree. Not half of one, half of the other, not cherrypicking from them all. One tree, with all of the powers that come with it. You have a static number of powers you can have. You can't have more, you can't have fewer, you have to make do with the number you are given. You then have a static number of enhancements slots to distribute between them. You can't increase or decrease that. It's limiting in a lot of ways, but it forces both variety and structure that, frankly, is what makes things fun.

In fact, if every AT could pick between specialization trees like this, maybe we could have what I meant, too. It's unlikely to happen, as that's the Soldiers of Arachnos "thing," but short of dual ATs, it's the closest I can think of that's actually doable.