Samuel_Tow

Note that the sky is blue, the warehouse is yellow and cream, the buildings have a blue tinge, the air ducts are cyan and there are a lot of inexplicably yellow traffic lights, plus the blue phone booths. Yes, the buildings' roofs are all the same, I'll give you that.

You have yellow buildings, you have green buildings, you have brown buildings, you have bluish buildings, you have reddish buildings. Yes, the roofs are all the same, but you have that honking big bright blue shield wall in the background and despite you trying to hide the most obvious feature - the canals - I can still see a bit of clearly blue water down by the buildings. And even though you did a good job hiding the ground, I can still see a cyan sidewalk with a cream water wall.


You know what I see here? A blue roof, and then that's it. I did go back after reading your description, and I did spot the two yellow shipping containers, but the rest of the picture is depressing. You have black cement walls and black choimensy, grey-brown pavement, grey asphalt, grey walls, grey towers, grey fence on a grey building with white trim and grey windows. I see a garden that is mostly a greenish brown grass, that huge brown pipe in the backgroind and admittedly very dark green vegetation. The water in the two little ponds IS blue, but the water in the sea looks so petrol blue it's close to grey. And if this is Cap Au Diable near the Golden Roller as I suspect it is, then the sky will be grey, too.

Here's the thing - bright colours in City of Villains would have ruined the depressing mood of the place, so I can understand why they were reserved and rarely used, largely as a contrast to what the whole place WASN'T, but I don't see why the whole place had to be Lord Recluse's keep. Why not give the guy a couple of islands and give the rest out to other villains with less of a "let god sort 'em out" approach to city maintenance? An American who went to the Sovier Union back during the Cold War described the place as being all drab, grey, soulless and lifeless, with no colour, no vitality and no-one who tried to sell you anything, and I get that. Totalitarian states tend to do that, and living in a former Soviet state, I can see relics of the old times everywhere, the large pre-fab blocks of flats done in black and grey, so it's not as unrealistic. But it doesn't have to be like that in the WHOLE GAME. Even if Arachnos had to have an evilnessnessness colour scheme of black and red, could some of the islands not have been given out to someone else? Nerva is a good example, most of its colour coming from, most ironically, Longbow's colourful costumes.

City of Heroes is not a happy, colourful place everywhere. It has its happy zones, and it has its drab, grey zones where you feel like you're constantly about to get mugged. But even what "good" zones CoV has only serve to show that there IS nothing good on the Isles, and any happy colour you see is just a tourist trap waiting to steal your money and your soul. That's why I look forward to Going Rogue - because it looks like it'll let me be the bad guy in a GOOD world. Or at least one that looks like it's good, if they do their job well.

I should have read back and not relied on the broken forum software to show me the newest UNREAD post... Stupid forum upgrade always making things worse!

But yes, I do agree that, pretty much of any game I have ever played that still even HAD roles, City of Heroes (as a whole) probably has the most lenient system. And having seen it develop, I am petrified to realise just how random and accidental the biggest thing I like about the game was. Listening to Jack back in the days, and watching them scramble to patch overpowerdness as it occurred were clear signs that we were FAR stronger than they had ever intended us to be. I'm glad they did the smart thing and ran with what they had, rather than try to redesign the game from scratch to force us to obey the original intended balance. It still mortifies me each time the manual describes a boss as something should NOT be soloable unless you're really special. That would have been a really, really crappy game, but I'm glad to see unexpectedly positive instances of bad design be adopted and re-labelled as good design. So everyone bought enough SOs to kit out their characters completely and this wasn't intended? Well, since they can, now it is, and let's go from there. Work with what you have.

The CoV AT designers do deserve praise, but I don't think it's QUITE as much praise as most people believe. For one, with CoH covering the Holy Trinity well enough, CoV ATs could be different. The game still provides what people expect because other games provide it because other people expect it. It's there, so CoV doesn't need to provide it all over again. Secondly, while they did a very good job of the ATs, partly through over-cautious balance, partly through try to make CoH specialists shine, the CoV ATs came out mediocre in a lot of aspects. Most CoV ATs were combinations of CoH ATs, but they suffered severe penalties, and were given increasingly contrived inherents that they would depend on, giving them, essentially, enough performance to match swords with the CoH specialists, but at the cost of unreliability and fiddly, fiddly crap.

For the most part, the CoV ATs are decent (after their respective fixes), and even the ones I don't actually like STILL do well solo. Not well enough for my tastes, certainly, but solo play always proved possible and progress via solo play fast. The actual gameplay was harder, which is what turned me off, but levelling speed WAS decent, which is all I was really after.

To play off Arcana, Blasters are, indeed, the only ones which got shafted in any big way by the Holy Trinity, and they have never quite recovered. They're sort of caught between a rock and a hard place, relying on damage with no self-protection. You can't give them enough damage to be safe, as that would trivialise the game, and anything less than that forces them to stand toe-to-toe with enemies who WILL outlast them. An AT which has no real means of protecting itself aside from killing things is not well balanced when no sane developer will give it enough damage for self-protection to never matter. Not in a multiplayer game, not a chance. Their performance at 50 is also not terribly relevant, as unlike other ATs, they get tools vital to their survival in their Epics, and those come far too late. I have talked about lowering Epic unlock level to 30, to pre-empt the massive difficulty ramp-up in the 30s, but have so far had no response on it, but the jist of it is that Blasters need just a few extra things to make them truly hardass, and those things are in their Epics, when they really should have been in their powersets.

I haven't played all ATs, even five years in, but of the ones I've played, I have rarely seen powersets stuffed with unnecessary, redundant garbage as if someone ran out of things to put in there. Blasters suffer from this in the majority of their powersets, and the repeated suggestions to scrap this or that power from this or that secondary stand to evidence.

Basically, I'm happy with the execution of this game, albeit for a few exceptions, and my argument was more principle than it was practical.

Just look around the buildings. They aren't all grey. In fact, not a lot of them are. There are a lot of blues and yes, indeed, green cement if you look at the buildings. The skies are blue in a lot of places, the grass is green, unlike in a lot of CoV, where it's brown-ish. I make the distinction because a lot of buildings in CoV are primarily black or primarily brown, all of them. You decry Steey Canyon, for instance, but it has greens, blues, yellows, cream colours, and a lot of them are vibrant and bright. CoV looks like it was passed through a colour filter where even what colours there are are washed out, dark and almost monochromatic.

As well, all the bright city zones, including Atlas Park, Galaxy City, Steel Canyon, Talos Island and Peregrine Island are all cut from the same mould, so they're similar. But they are still contrasted by the darker zones like King's Row, Independence Port and Skyway City. Founders' Falls is a whole other animal entirely, with old-style buildings painted in a variety of colours, with a lot of blues and greens thrown in, whereas Brickstown is a different beast, itself, with architecture taken from Kings Row, but with a more big city feel, and it still manages to break monotony with the Seven Gates bridge and the flickering lights of the Zig. And then you have Croatoa, which is fugly but in a different way, the Hollows, Perez Park and Eden as a fairly colourful jungle-type environment, new Faultline which has an entirely unique colour scheme and zone design. And even Striga Island, which while it has plenty of other failings, has one of the more interesting terrains around.

Contrast this with CoV, which is 45% black buildings, 45% brown buildings, 5% forest and 5% Jackpot. As soon as you set foot into Mercy Island and make sure your monitor's contrast hasn't dropped when you weren't looking, you'll be looking at the same style of grey an brown buildings for the entire game. The St. Martial ones are still the same, they just have neon signs attached to them. And while, yes, it does look pretty, it's the exception. Take a look at Aeon City some time and you'll notice it's all pretty much black and white, the whole thing. Look at Sharkhead some time, and you'll notice it's pretty much black and black. Yeah, there are faded-colour containers here and there, but the warehouses are a rusty brown and everything else is a matte black volcanic ash. Mercy is much the same, with the lower part being black ash with brown buildings and the upper part being white cement with black buildings. Cap is the same, with a lower part that's black buildings and white asphalt and the upper part that's white buildings and white asphalt. And the sky is perpetually overcast everywhere.

Oh, and check out Grandville some time. It has an ambient lighting that actually washes our colour on top of its bleak colour scheme. I don't mind bleak, I don't mind depressing, I don't mind monochrome, but the whole bloody game is like that. Yes, St. Martial is a bit different, and Nerva is a BIT different, but even then it's still more black buildings and white asphalt. I feel like I'm playing frikkin' Mirror's Edge sometimes.

I don't know where you live, but around here my city is not all black, grey and brown. My house is brick, so it IS brown (a reddish brown) because it's brick, but my balcony is painted green, which we picked because we spotted another house painted that. There are plenty of cream and sky-blue houses, as well, and some are even going fancy and painting theirs reds, greens and vibrant blues. I don't have any skyscrapers here, but the few "glass towers" that I do see look, for the most part, blue, because they reflect a blue sky, rather than an inexplicably GREY sky. And the trees, grass and weeds there are a vibrant green, like real, living plants should be, not the brownish green that makes them look like straw, or like it's perpetual autumn. We have the classic Caterpillar yellow tower cranes, as well, rather than the drab grey and black husks that the who game seems to get, and I must admit the yellow bulldozers in Mercy (added after Beta, mind you, back then the plaza was empty) are a nice touch.

But my world is not colourless. It's night right now, but in the day, every time I look out the window or step outside, I see colours everywhere, to the point where my colour perception actually has a point. But going from CoV to CoH makes me feel like "Dude! I can see!" CoV is both FAR too dark and with colours FAR too washed out, when they even exist. And it wouldn't be so bad if there were some variety, but ALL of the zones are dark, bleak, colourless and depressing. And that's with me having cranked up the digital vibrance of my video card and my Gamma at 85% (which is brighter). Without that, I couldn't even SEE where I was going in Grandville.

Eh? Especially Fire/Fire will have a field day at -1x3, though I have bosses turned off in my missions, so I may be biassed. Frankly, by far the BIGGEST problem for Blasters are bosses. The typical Blaster strategy is to kill fast and kill before you are killed. You really can't do that with bosses, because they WILL outlast you in a fair fight, which makes things go from tricky to hard to hair-pullingly infuriating, to flatout not fun. Bosses excised and large spawns to wield Blaster AoEs against does make for a pretty good pace, but it also makes for a minefield, as large spawns are deadly if you can't bypass them fast.

I've always felt that a key problem with Blasters is their lack of any sort of protection beyond almost-Scrapper hit points. Epic pools do mitigate this, but the key problem with Epic pools is they come too frikkin' late, specifically far later than you actually need them. To remedy this without suggesting wide-scale rebalancing of any ATs, I recently came up with the not-all-original but quite simplistic idea to:

Make all Epic pools unlock at level 30 instead of level 40. We can then stagger each power tier one level down the line, say 32, 35 and 38. I know Epics were introduced to give people something new to take 40+ back during I2, to answer all the questions of I1, but I feel that making them available earlier would give us Epic utility before it becomes so late it's irrelevant, and allow us more flexibility in our builds. We get regular pools early on, and they unlock fully buy level 20, after which we are free to experiment. Why not do the same for Epics?

Most ATs have things in their epics that are nice, but not terribly vital to their survival, perks and eccentricities, if you will. But for all the ATs I've played, Blasters are the only AT that has powers in their Epics that feel like they should have been in their own powersets. So, rather than offering tweaks to the AT or shuffling of the secondaries, I offer that we open Epics sooner, so that we can enjoy their benefit for more of the game. It would help Blasters transition a little easier, and it would make the 30s a little more fun, as that's when power choice typically dries up as you run out of powerset powers you want.

How about it?

Well, resistance shields could be cube-shaped, I guess

More seriously, yes, it does bug me that Kheldian bubbles are resistance-based when they look so much like Forcefields, and you're right that a more consistent representation would be nice. For instance, if you see Dark attacks, you can expect them to debuff your accuracy, and if you get hit with ice powers, you can expect them to slow you down. It would be nice to have a bit more consistency in shields.

On the other hand, with power customization's possible future, quite the contrary may be prudent.

Fire/Toxic got me to thinking... You don't actually need a physical component to an attack for it to be typed, say, Smashing. Arcana has gone on at length about how an attack's type is not intrinsically linked to its damage type, with a lot of attacks doing damage types they are not typed to. Basically, what a power is typed as is decided manually, with no mechanical dependence on what its actual damage types are, so I don't see why Fire/Toxic can't work and still be typed as something physical.

I actually don't see a problem with damage types in PvE. I'm not aware of any that never face resistance, any that face too much weakness. For the most part, whatever damage type you pick, something will be laughably easy and something will be infuriatingly hard. Lethal sucks against robots but kills soft targets. Fire does well against most things, but fire-based enemies are a pain. Dark bypasses a lot of protections, but sucks against the dead and undead. Even psi, one of the most exotic damage types which sails right past the protection of some of the hardiest enemies, still suffers against robots, zombies and psychis, of which there are inordinate amounts. Toxic would be no different.

On the other hand, having two non-physical damage types for an entire powerset is... Iffy, to be honest. While I can't say the game is unfair towards physical damage, having fire and toxic sounds like a recipe for some serious damage. Which... I actually don't mind

I support this fully. Excising Security Chief missions from contact mission queues would mean one less type of mission I drop on sight, and it would mean giving me the ability to hunt WHAT I want, WHEN I want it by giving me a contact who offers these missions all the time.

It's best not to mess with difficulty settings this early in the game, especially for a new player. Back then, it's far too easy to make the game too hard for yourself without realising it, so it's best left for later in the game when you have a few more powers at your disposal.

"You" may have loved it. I hated it with a passion.

It's kin of depressing when every time this comes up, someone inevitably brings up Jackpot. Yes, there is ONE SINGLE AREA in all of CoV that has some colour. What about everything else? The post you replied to talked about "brightly-colored, well-lit environments," as in plural - more than one environment. And while Jackpot IS brightly coloured, it's brightly coloured only at night, and then it isn't well-lit. Black streets against black buildings against black walls in the black of night is not very easy to navigate, even if you have your gamma brightened up a lot.

Aside from the neon lights of Jackpot, where in CoV do you see a break from the black/grey/brown colour scheme, occasionally appended with red for the "evil" red and black scheme? All the buildings are some combination of black and grey, occasionally brown, where there is soil, it's either grey or black, and very rarely brown, Arachnos architecture is black, with red banners here and there, Arachnos soldiers are all black with red, and over half the time, the sky is grey. There is barely any vegetation anywhere, and where there is, it's usually an ashen, greyish green. Primeva DOES stand out as a colourful place, even though anything that's not green is still brown, but Thorn Island is still the same. An ashen grey thorn tree, mud brown bricks, rocks, stones and soil and that pale grass.

All of City of Villains is one gigantic slum. There are specific exceptions - pretty much Aeon City and Jackpot - but the bulk of it is just black/grey/brow slums strewn with trash, suffering neglect, destruction and poverty and overridden with crime. I look forward to Going Rogue, hoping to see a world where there is any point to being a villain and where someone didn't already beat me to messing the place up.

That's basically what I'm saying. I highly dislike balance done by crippling characters in one aspect so that they basically NEED other characters to fill in the void. Other characters, mind you, who will be crippled in some other ways, needing still other characters, until building a team becomes uncanniliy similar to fitting falling Tetris blocks together.

In a big way, I prefer the CoV ATs as a basic design. In City of Heroes, for probably three years, I could only play a single AT out of the 5 - Scrapper. Everything else was either not self-sufficient, took ages to level up or did not become "fun" until something like 32 levels in. CoV, on the other hand, gave me two ATs I could play and be proud of right from the start - Brutes and Masterminds. Brutes, I will admit, are fiddly and can be slow, but they ARE self-sufficient, they ARE fast enough and they kick *** from the moment I make them. Masterminds are the definition of fiddly, but they are probably the ultimate AT, bringing to the table all three of the primordial orders of tank, healer and damage dealer. A Mastermind brings his own vast survivability, a Mastermind brings his own impressive damage and a Mastermind brings his own heals, buffs, debuffs and control.

The Blaster changes gave me Blasters, though only somewhat, so I thought the games were equal at two ATs a piece, but then the Stalker changes gave me Stalkers, so CoV still leads even now. The Dominator changes, however, did not manage to give me Dominators, despite a valiant try on my part.

Basically, I'm not against teaming and I don't expect every character to be able to do everything, but I really, REALLY hate being crippled so as to create an artificial need for me to look for a team.

It's too late in the game for that, but how about something that's more plausible - what if Epics opened up at 30, as opposed to at 40? More choices, more options and no powers that HAVE to be left off for so late they barely matter. They don't even have to open up at the same time, the lot of them, just so long as we can start taking them from a bit earlier.

How does that sound?

*edit*
The point is, I agree with you completely, in that unlike most other ATs, what's in Blaster epics is VITAL to Blaster survival and performance, yet comes about only in the end game. Giving them (as well as everybody else) access to those a bit earlier might solve a lot of headaches.

Either you mix up effect and nature, or we'll just have to disagree on that point. To me, it's not a matter of WHAT you do, but rather HOW you do it. If you want to kill someone, you can shoot him, encase him in stone permanently, scare him so he runs away and never comes back, or convince him to give up, just to make up a list. Each of these methods has the same end effect - enemy is defeated. None of these is the same tool. Not from where I'm looking. And when you consider that this game in particular, as well as most in general, has only one desirable end effect - you are alive and the enemies are defeated - it really isn't fair to downplay the nature of the tools to such a degree.

If that's what it comes down to, but not necessarily.

I disagree with your definition of what it means to specialise. You seem to view specialization as one character being better than another with a particular power. That's one way to look at it, but I view it more as one character having a lot of one kind of power. No, my Electric Blaster will never be better than a Super Strength Fighter at using Gigabolt, but he will be better than a Super Strength Fighter by having more ranged powers and stronger ranged powers, because the Fighter will have spent his points on defences and his own melee. Or if he hasn't spent his points on just that, he'll have spent less points on ranged combat than my Blaster, because my Blaster has spent his points over fewer powers.

Specialization isn't about making you intrinsically better at using particular tools, it makes you better at a particular job by having more tools appropriate for it and having better tools for the job. A generalists has tools for more occasions, but for each occasion he has fewer tools to choose from, and while he has tools for many situations, none of them are very good. Specialization doesn't, and quite frankly SHOULDN'T come from picking a class, but rather from picking what you want to do. That's why I like the prospect (if not the execution) of the Champions system. It doesn't lock you into one role as soon as you pick your class, and while you can still lock yourself into just one role, you don't HAVE to.

You seem to have misunderstood me completely. Maybe I didn't explain well enough, so let's try and keep things simple. I'm against classes that, upon choosing them, prevent you from having decent/appropriate/enough/whatever ability to fight your own battles, alone and by yourself. I don't require that there be safeguards to FORCE people to be fighters, as long as the choice for them to be one no matter their class exists. I've heard a lot of arguments that Defenders solo just fine, and while that may be true, they are STILL at a severe disadvantage as a general AT when it comes to that. They can go some ways towards making up for this, but not powerset combos can and not all players are even capable of pulling it off. By comparison, any player who doesn't get bored playing Scrappers very much CAN pull it off, completely guaranteed.

I was looking at this from the aspect of new game design, offering ALL players significant combat skills if they choose to take them. Alternatively, it CAN be retrofitted into old game design by just giving players access to multiple classes which can be changed between with specific restrictions on when, where and how often. This will allow people to completely neglect their combat prowess, yet still have an out for when combat matters and nothing else does. It's a crude solution, but it's in the spirit of what I had in mind.

It does, and that's the whole point. Broadsword shares 8 out of 9 powers with War Mace and Battle axe, sharing the activation times of all Battle Axe powers it shares animations with. If Battle Axe can build Fury (and that's implied by it being available to Brutes), then so will Broadsword, as it's the same damn set.

No matter what you do, you WILL die. Having a power to use then is a benefit, not a loss, and if you can't see the logic behind that, then go to hell.

Might as well answer that, I guess. Yes, there is. It's called "No Pulse or Fade," and it is relevant for exactly two powers - Cloak of Fear, which makes it so it doesn't make you fade (AT ALL), and I believe Obsidian Shield, or whichever toggle normally makes you pulse and fade darker, causing it to stop doing that. The rest of the powers are either Original or Tintable, with Tintable using the Dark theme.

Such a change to Dark Astoria shouldn't be very hard to explain, come to think of it. The whole place is possessed by the Pantheon and, presumably, Lughebu, so it suddenly reverting back to what it was 100 years ago overnight wouldn't be out of place. Or even reverting to some kind of twisted gothic nightmare, someone's vision of a scary place.

In fact, why not borrow from Silent Hill for a moment? Have the zone remain as is during the day (rather, "day," since it's always night there), and have it transform into a hellish place at night, complete with boarded up windows, skulls painted on the walls (possibly in blood), spikes, rusted metal doors, decaying, peeling walls, a few streets replaced with grated bottomless pits. Kind of like the whole place hasn't been touched in 100 years and is falling apart, and also slowly turning into a crazy nightmare. Then, come "daytime," shift it back into what it normally is. This can either be an instant, "fog sirens or equivalent" transformation, or it could be a gradual fade from a desolate foggy city zone to a hell at dusk and back into a city zone at dawn.

Yeah, it'll be cheesy, but it'll also make the whole zone a lot more creepy, and it ought to be doable by just changing textures for the most part.

Here's the thing - in order for you to keep the weapon out and, crucially, have it persist between attacks with the same weapon, is to resort to activation sequences. We have no reason to believe and no precedent to suggest that such a thing is currently possible. We have no way to tell if a non-weapon power can be customised into a weapon power. And that's what's being asked here. If you don't make it a persistent weapon power, then each power will always draw the weapon at the start, even if you already had the weapon out.

In fact, and I may be recalling right, but in the past, BABs has explained that the way the game known not to redraw a weapon already drawn is if the next power has the exact same activation sequence as the previous one. The reason I linked to his post on the matter was to say that this system which ensures that works is also the system which MANDATES draw occur between activation sequences, in such a way that BABs has so far been unable to prevent it from doing so with the time he has to devote to it. It's clearly not a simple hack-n-slash fix.

Basically, in order for the set to not redraw, powers would all have to have the same activation sequence, very likely unique to the weapon. We have no evidence that activation sequences can be changed, and if they aren't changed, then redraw will occur. Since the game cannot already do that, it's not a safe bet to believe that it probably can.