Samuel_Tow

Slow, low damage on a power I won't be using for the damage anyway. Yeah, that pretty much seals it. I'm fine as I am

Actually if I were in charge, I'd have given them shields and protection of some sort, which is still rather more direct, but I think we can clearly see one of the many reasons why I am NOT in charge.

For what it's worth, I feel the solution to Blasters was pretty good. They upped their damage both directly and a little more subtly and they even added what has to be the most eccentric form of status effect resistance I've seen in any game. As you point out, surviving is still not a given, which still bugs me now as it did before, only it bugs me a LOT less.

If I have to be quite honest, there are still a few sore spots about Blaster balance that get my panties in a bunch, but those are unlikely to ever be resolved in a way I'm going to be happy with unless I suffer some kind of benevolent divine intervention and someone decides to make Snipes worth using for their damage or open up Epics a little sooner, which has a chance to occur so minuscule I tend to ignore it.

I like to say that Blasters are about the bare minimum of what I'd consider "decent" when it comes to self-sufficiency, performance and progress speed, and that's largely because they're undoubtedly fast. They're not at all easy to play and their not in the slightest safe, but it IS possible to play them reasonably well without compromising speed of progress or, indeed, style and dignity too much, so I can't complain. Going below that, however, is not something I'm willing to try again any time soon. I've tried and I've hated it.

That depends on what you prioritise as the general output of a mage. In my universe, a mage with the power of fire would generally focus on burning things first and foremost, and do fancy tricks like making cages out of fire on a distant, like, fifth. Which is why choice is a good thing.

I may have posted that at 5 AM *checks* "05:21 AM" Yeah, pretty late anyway. Pairs implies groups of two, but I'm still at a loss as to how to say it short of rephrasing it as "three at a time."

Sorry, I didn't mean to be a dick

The way you said it, it came off that, no, this isn't shouted down at all. Everyone just nods and it's a wonder it hasn't been implemented yet. It's suggested pretty often, and it tends to receive mixed responses and a variety of arguments. If it's coming, it's coming, and I won't exactly cry about it, but I'm still not a big fan of the idea. It slashes a lot of the character progress by basically starting us off with a lot of everything. It's cute, but I fear for the implications.

Um... Have you any idea what this means? MoG is on a 240 second recharge and provides a 15 second buff to both defence and resistance to everything but Psi enough to cap yourself on everything (but psi). Rise of the Phoenix, under your suggestion, would be a power on a 300 second recharge that heals you, restores your endurance, causes a lot of damage, a lot of knockback, enough stun to affect bosses AND gives you 15 seconds of complete untouchability AND that can also resurrect you if you happen to be dead. And this doesn't strike you as sickeningly overpowered?

Well, in a pinch, whatever works is what I'll use I call it cheap, though, because the Avoid effect in these powers is put in there for the express purpose to limit their usefulness (especially in Burn), yet I'm using just that to protect myself. It's clever, but it IS cheap, and I'd want to punch my PC if the AI ever did it to me. At least we're immune to Avoid effects in powers. Unlike my stupid henchmen! Damn you, zombies! Stay put and burn if you have to!

Perhaps I should have mentioned that my observations were very, very OLD, and apparently I need to update my game plan. I still live with the sense that Stalkers are 0.9 and Doms are in the crapper, when they actually are not. I still have damage-related grievances with Dominators, but those aren't based in fact so much as preference, so they are irrelevant. I do not have any damage-related grievances with Stalkers, not in practical terms, but I have a theme-related complaint regarding them. Stalkers are all fighters, and typically small-scale fighters, as well, with a lot of Scrapper-borrowed sets lacking an AoE to fit in Assassin's Strike. While this isn't a problem in actual practice if you approach them with the right mindset (and I do just fine), it's a problem conceptually.

Let me put it like this. If I have a concept for a very powerful... Mage, let's say, who's able to... Let's say lay waste to cities with fire. CoV-side, I can't pick a Stalker, for one because they're all smaller-scale fighters, and for another because they don't wield many of the direct elements (yet). I could pick a Dominator, but while their damage is decent, it's not quite decent enough for lack of Build Up, Aim and a decent selection of large-scale AoEs. They do have larger-scale control, but this isn't exactly what I have in mind. I CAN make a Blaster, and the concept is pretty much tailor-made for that, but I can't take that Blaster CoV-side... Yet. Once I am able to, I will have no complaint to make regarding AT balance.

Which is kind of while I hate the idea of unique powersets to an AT and unique ATs to a faction. Some concepts just fit elements and ATs that aren't native to the side I want to work with, so more freedom enables me to get exactly what I want. I envision Going Rogue solving a lot of AT-related grievances, in fact.

Here's the thing - I don't have one specifically designated. I think the closest I can give you is my Axe Brute, who typically goes like this:

Swoop -> Cleave -> Gash -> Pendulum -> Beheader -> Chop, redux. Possibly a Whirling axe appended at the end if I'm hit with a slow. It doesn't always go like this, but against a single target, it tends to. Against multiple targets, I tend to emphacise Pendulum over Cleave over Whirling Axe over everything else.

Basically, my approach is to hit Build Up and cycle attack from the strongest downwards so as to maximise my Build Up time. It's not as meaningful on a Brute as it is on most other ATs, but it still has merit to abuse it as much as I can. Energy Melee can take out two enemies with two attacks and no Fury if I abuse Build Up, for instance.

And, no. No Brawl. I don't tend to have time left over for it, anyway, though now that it doesn't cost, I don't see why I couldn't use it. It was costing me more than it was worth before, so I took it off auto.

I didn't see one, but that really would help. I'm not sure how easy it would be to tell identically-named people apart (and in a system with no name check, that happens more often than one would think), but it's a step in the right direction.

It still breaks my Catch 22, though - unambiguous everywhere, ugly nowhere. I don't feel there IS a good solution.

Yes, and that's a horrible cop out I'd rather not see in the actual game in such a way as to acknowledge its existence. It's a utility tool to keep the room quiet, and as such it does a good job, but as an in-game conceptual thing, it fails miserably.

You can SAY they did, but it won't make any sense a lot of the time. For instance, if you took away old Positron's powered suit, he'd fall apart and probably blow up. Or, I have a ghost inhabiting a suit of armour, whose power is merely to repair it when it breaks. Take away his ability to repair and you take away his ability to MOVE it, so he falls apart into plates of armour. I have a character whose ability to even EXIST is a manifestation of his powers and his control over a specific type of energy. Removing that energy from him or preventing him from using it would prevent him from existing altogether. Or what about the character whose super power is that he never actually leaves his base of operations but merely sends a "hard light" hologram out? Yes, you can take away his ability to project, but that just means he can't even exist.

And in a lot of cases, it just doesn't make sense. If a character is lighter than air, how do you take away his ability to float? Weigh him down with barbells? Or a character who has wings. How do you keep such a character from flying, specifically since wings flap when you jump? And it gets even better when you go into characters who were never human or even humanoid. Why would a sentient walking rock suddenly lose its strength and the durability of the rock, yet simultaneously not lose the ability to move?

I hate "power dampening fields" because, in actual fact, they are nothing more than "humanising" fields, in that they render any hero caught in them into having human abilities and human abilities only. Even if he didn't HAVE human abilities to begin with. You can only take away powers if they were separate from the character to begin with, with the character having basic human powers besides. Any other endeavour to remove powers faces so many custom situations it's impractical to try and implement it.

And that's before we even get into how being depowered is the lamest, cheapest, cheesiest plot device in comic book history, second only to being killed off-panel.

Howling Twilight is actually a pretty bad example. Its conditions for activation never change, nor does its composition of effects. It's always activated on a living hostile target, the only difference is that some effects only play on living allied targets near you, and if there aren't any, they have nothing to affect.

However, what we're talking about here is a power usable both when you are dead AND when you are alive, which I'm not sure is possible. Granted, checking out Rise of the Phoenix at Red Tomax's City of Data does not reveal any modes required or any modes disallowed (other than Disable All), so however that validity check is made, it's somewhere else. I do know there's an "alive" flag you can filter for in custom targeting binds, but I have no idea how this is rigged in the actual power. An ally rez is easy enough to guess - you need a power that is both "ally" and "notalive" for the power to activate, but a power activate on yourself (it's targeted at self/caster) may or may not actually work via target parameters. Specifically, since we can't target ourselves, there may be a different system for it altogether.

Even if we assume that we can just append "if alive" at every effect, there's still a bit of a problem. The power's self-affecting effects - heal, untouchable, endurance, self-immobilization and debt protection, are all written as effects to the power, but all of its offensive capability comes courtesy of a pet - Phoenix. Basically, it does damage, knockback and stun all in its one attack, which is autohit. I highly doubt trying to tweak the AI to play a different, non-autohit power from the same pet is a good idea, so we'll probably have to rid up two separate pets.

On the flip side, we have Mastermind Detonator, a power which actually does different things to different targets, and is actually set up, at least in City of Data, to check "f target is a non-human Mastermind pet" or "If target is a human Mastermind pet." If that works to make one power have different effects depending on what target you fire it off at (or at least play some of its effects only on specific targets) then this could be feasible. Of course, we still need to know how and even IF self-affecting powers actually check for your own status. And at the end of the day, the power may grow so fat in terms of setup, or bog the server down with so many validity checks that it may be unfeasible altogether.

And that's before we actually concede on whether such a move is actually balanced.

That hasn't been my experience. When there's only one elite boss left, my Fury drains faster than I can build it, which basically drains me to nothing in not too long a time, which is unpleasant and problematic.

It was a meaningless tangential argument that somehow got blown out of proportion into this big deal about how I hate the CoV ATs because they have Inherents or something. All I'm saying is that a lot of the CoV ATs' performance has, in comparison to CoH ATs, shifted to their inherents as opposed to on their stats. That's all. It's a pure observation. The only even remotely meaningful conclusion I drew on this was so as to make them strong, but not in a reliable way, as that tends to allow greater upper bounds of strength. Arcanaville disagrees on that tangent and it IS a big assumption, so I'm not really pressing it.

That one's fairly simple. I look at these changes, and see a slight shift of performance from the inherents and into the base stat mods, which I interpret as an acknowledgement that, in these cases at least, there was too much gimmick and not enough stability. Granted, Stalkers got a boost on their inherent, as well, which could actually be very meaningful on teams, but solo, what helped the most was the stat boosts. Fitting, given that the change was largely aimed at making them less hated on teams, not that it helped fix stupid Stalker players and stupid team leaders refusing to invite Stalkers, but that was the aim, and I'd say it succeeded in most reasonable instances. It's just something I see as an acknowledgement that stats ought to matter a little more.

I'm not saying gimmicks are bad, I'm saying they're omnipresent and the one-size-fits-all solution to new ATs and fixes of old ones, it seems. I'm not saying it's bad and everyone should hate it, but at the same time, I enjoy flat stat characters as well, and CoV plain doesn't have access to those. Or doesn't at the moment, at least. Taking Blasters villain-side will be one of the first things I do. Not because I think Blasters are cooler than villain ATs (they're actually last on my list of favourite ATs), but simply because CoV lacks a simple, straight-forward, no-frills outright damage dealer that doesn't have to jump through twelve hoops to even see his damage. Opening up both sides to both ATs (which isn't actually happening, as I hear, but we'll still get the next best thing) would probably solve a lot of my woes, as I'll be able to use both gimmicky and non-gimmicky characters on both sides, being limited not by what I can build where, but rather by what each character would really fit. I have Brutes that ought to be Scrappers, I have Scrappers that ought to be Brutes and so on and so forth.

I don't question the need for having Inherents. I agree with them, and they DO bring in a lot of variety. I actually enjoy a lot of them, even if I can't really justify my playing some. But, when it comes right down to it, I am the most a fan of flat stats and good stats, and would personally like to see a few more ATs that rely more on their stats than they do on a minigame around getting their stats higher. It's not a call for homogeny or yanking people's fun from under than, but rather a call for diversity by giving us an AT that acts more like ours did back in the old days. That, however, is highly improbably, as it would require Going Rogue to have new ATs, which I doubt it will, and it requires one of these ATs to be more basic, which I HIGHLY doubt will ever fly. Doesn't stop me from wishing for it, though.

I'm not dissatisfied with the CoV ATs at all. I just wish they had something more like a Blaster among them. And, no, Corruptors don't cut it.

See, that's not actually true. Blaster secondaries are not "about damage, albeit with a bit of mitigation." They are labelled Support for a good reason. Outside of Energy Manipulation, you don't actually see much melee in them at all. Ice Manipulation has two attacks, Electrical Manipulation has two or three, Fire has one direct one and two AoEs and Devices has no actual direct-damage powers. It does have mines and bombs, but these are far from direct-damage.

That said, Blaster secondaries are a frikkin' mess. I'm not sure why that is, but they are both all over the place and stuffed with often completely pointless powers. For one, damage auras that tick slowly and require a Blaster to stand and fight in melee are almost as suicidal as the old Defiance, which immediately makes Fire Manipulation guilty as charged. Not only that, but it also has Burn of all things. Devices is outright laughable, with the almost completely useless Smoke Grenade, the almost completely useless Cloaking Device, the horribly eccentric Time Bomb, the hard-to-use Trip Mine and the badly imbalanced Auto Turret, which costs an arm and a leg, lasts barely any and does, to quote Yhatzee: "bugger all." And that's just off the top of my head.

Basically, I'm not sure what the original design for Blaster secondaries was, but they ended up padded up with garbage that I'd be willing to break the cottage rule for, and ended up not doing enough of anything. Not a lot of them are good for self-defence, few are good for self-buffing and none are really consistent. That's kind of like why I'd like to see Epics become available sooner, as they hold the powers a Blaster REALLY needs.

You all may hope so, but We all hope they do not. And by We, I mean I.

Seriously, people, can we stop presuming to speak for a silent majority? It's disconcerting.