Samuel_Tow

I don't remember them ever saying anything to this effect. In fact, a few years ago I believe it was either BABs or the unnamed developer Positron was posting for who explained that different running animations would not happen, but he could add idle, stationary "mood" or "stance" emotes for us to use.

Reading between the lines of BABs recent posts, the Ninja Run was a major pain to put together, get working and debug, so while it's possible, new running styles will probably be at a serious premium. I certainly want to see at least a few new ones, myself. Robot, animalistic, a Magneto-style constant hover and that's without thinking about it too much. It would definitely make the game feel a LOT more alive and a LOT more like a new game.

That said, well... The Ninja Run itself just doesn't do it for me. I use it for Teleporters who don't get to have decent close-quarters mobility from their travel power, but the animation itself it... Eh! It's clearly designed to be a cliché, campy ninja run, like those from older, shameless anime, and while it's cute, it's not something I can use seriously. Power customization had a MUCH greater effect on the game for me.

Everyone being the same IS a step back, but that isn't necessarily what it takes. What I'm talking about isn't the SAME tools, but merely tools with a similar end effect. To go back to D&D (or my limited understanding thereof), warriors had hit points and armour to pritect themselves, rogues had dexterity and skills to protect themselves, mages had spells and shield bubbles to protect themselves and clerics had blessings they could cast on themselves. Different classes, each with its own specialization, but if the player so chooses, each of which is equipped to save itself from death, in different ways and to different degrees, but the capability is still there.

Much as people detest the Champions Online system (as do I), the one thing I liked about it was that, from what I saw, each thematic speciality offered a selection of tools for a lot of situations. To the best of my experience, most have melee attacks, ranged attacks, self protection and team support. You can't take them all, but they're there to be taken if you wanted. From what I've seen, you can still specialise, and since there are never enough, err... "Points of different kinds" to take everything, you more or less have to, but you can pick what you specialise into SEPARATE from the team you have chosen. I don't know enough, so I'm probably wrong, but that's sort of what I'm looking at.

In essence, I'm not looking for a system that ENSURES everyone is always equally capable in combat regardless of how they build. That WOULD be homogenous. Rather, I'm looking for a system that ALLOWS everyone who wants to to be able to fight at some "sufficient" level if he so chooses. This really isn't true for a lot of MMOs where some specializations just don't let you fight very well, and even though it's much less true here, it's still in effect. Inversely, while such a system would allow you to be able to fight well no matter what you choose, it should also always allow you to do something BESIDES fight no matter what you choose.

Think of it as always being locked into multi-classing, with one class always being a fighter.

Alternately, we could go the route of stances or multiple classes. We already have multiple builds here, so just let people have TWO ATs to switch between with all limitations of build switching. That way, each class can over-specialise while still allowing the character to double as a fighter if the player so chooses. That way, you don't need to ensure fighters can do anything else and that everyone else can fight, as people can just switch between them depending on their mission, team status or flight of fancy.

What's more, this position doesn't (or at least shouldn't) actually produce too much of a balance issue and should be applicable to an existing game (say, this one) with the only limiting aspect being actual art and graphics. As long as you can ensure each "theme" has a version in all ATs, balance should be maintained. Themes are kind of hard to define once you step away from element, but it's still not an unsolvable problem.

Basically, I don't want everyone to BE the same, merely that everyone have ACCESS to the same (or at least similar) performance at a time AFTER character creation.

That's a very good point. Our game is a fighter, to be honest not that far removed from things like Streets of Rage or Final Fight. We come into a mission, and we go from beginning to end, beating up bad guys along the way until the hand points to the right and the narrator shouts "Go! Go!" It's a rather very basic game design principle, and it's interesting to note that old arcade fights do have characters with different roles, including those weak on defensive ability but strong on ranged offence, yet still manage to allow a single player to progress at a reasonably fair state of balance.

But ours is a fighter. In order for "other" approaches to become truly valid, the game needs to support them via mission design. The old MDK 2 actually did this very well. You have Max, the four-armed cyber super-dog whose approach was to basically quad-wield chainguns and blast everything head-on, and his stages reflected this. For the most part, they were a straight-line offence between killzones where you had to kill enough enemies so you could progress. The Doc, on the other hand, was completely powerless, having only a Nuclear Toster, his wits and whatever he could cobble together, so his stages were basically a series of either item puzzles, button puzzles or combat puzzles. Kurt, on the other hand, inherited his gameplay from the original MDK, having a mix of light combat, some stealth elements, a few jumping puzzles and plenty of sniping opportunities.

In fact, while everyone always had completely different stages, the final stage has all three attempting to beat it in different ways, with a final boss who is radically different. Kurt's stage has a lot of climbing and sniping, with the fight inside the final boss's body requiring you to snipe little orbs orbiting his brain really fast before he spat you out (long story), basically requiring an annoying degree of precision. Max's stage, on the other hand, was one long, long plough through hordes and hordes of enemies, with the fight inside the boss's body having lots of annoying enemies flying about and requiring you to shoot his brain dry of hit points while it constantly regenerated at a pretty disquieting pace. The Doctor's level, on the other hand, was mostly puzzles, with the fight inside the boss requiring... I don't remember. Finding a monster serum so you can jump up to his head and slash his non-regenerating brain, I think. I should really find that game again.

Basically, level design determines what works and what works well. Our levels (or missions, if you will) are, for the most part, just one long gauntlet from the entrance to the end, with their very POINT being to kill stuff and level up off it. You can miss some enemies, but at the end of the day, THAT is what you get experience from. A mission which emphasised stealth, on the other hand, would need a completely different design, possibly offering a reward for not getting into fights, giving you places to hide and avoid pursuers and giving you level design and game mechanics which both limit your mobility and reward you for mobility in some way that is completely out of the scope of the game. Puzzle gameplay is a third option, with skills that help with the puzzles in some way. And, yes, I know the commonly-held wisdom of "someone will just write a guide for it," but sufficiently random-state puzzles would still offer enough of a mental challenge. For instance, MDK gave us bombs tied to buttons via lots of tangled wires, forcing you to trace which wire goes where. A more complex variant of finding the WSPDR generators if you don't know where to look, as it were, as you can just follow the very simple cables. Randomise those, and you have a repeatable puzzle.

This game is really only built for combat. That's part of the reason it mystifies me every time people claim the game should be catering to everybody by adding more "depth." It's a glorified fighter, and as I'm sure we've all noticed, the more they tack onto it, the more cumbersome it gets. The most I can hope for is a lessening on the price of damage and self-defence when it comes to game balance.

This is where the balance breaks down. There are no enemies that kill Scrappers without them being able to do anything about it. Some are harder than others, but even the hardest ones are still not actually HARD. For a Scrapper, it tends to go from "Am I still awake?" to "Hey, my health is going down, time to use the other half of my powers." That was actually the cornerstone of the boss buff failure. The problem was that Scrappers (and some others) were soloing bosses left and right, several at a time, and those were deemed "team content." Bosses were made a lot stronger, Scrappers just shrugged and kept killing them about just as easily, but everyone else was completely boned. This isn't something that can be addressed by global changes, because the leaders will always be leaders. It requires sideways thought.

I've actually been in these discussions, myself, and they seem to keep coming down to "unique powersets will make people play an AT they otherwise wouldn't." Err... Not that I've seen, not outside of special exceptions. Speaking for myself, there are ATs I like and ATs I don't like. And I don't care if the ATs I don't like get an I Win button, complete with milk and cookies. I won't play them, and it'll only serve to make me pissed off I can't play powersets that have no reason to be restricted.

It's kind of like consoles vs. PC. I can't afford nor do I want a console, so I'm not going to buy one, but it will always piss me off when good games are console-exclusive.

I never said anything about boosting anything. I'm talking about a redesign and a mentality shift away from "fighting" as a perk that some have but others don't, and into "fighting" being a base skill set that everybody has. A design which starts everyone as a decent fighter and offers everyone the skills needed to become an even better one, if he should choose to go for them. Such a system wouldn't really allow for any pure fighters, as everyone can be a fighter AND something else, so a pure fighter would be inherently weaker all around.

Yes, they must. That is exactly what I'm saying. Right now, most MMOs hold "self sufficiency" as just one more skill which needs to be balanced against all other skills, with some classes having just that. What I'm describing is a game system where EVERYBODY has self-sufficiency, and where NOBODY has JUST self-sufficiency as a skill set. In a world where everyone is a fighter, no-one will be a PURE fighter, so to speak. Yes, everyone can fight, but everyone has to do something else besides fight, or he'd be worthless next to those who can fight AND help their teams.

That's why I keep accusing people of missing the point and suggesting we distance ourselves from contemporary design, because this just doesn't work as a redesign of current systems. I don't want to just give everyone more damage and more resistances, because those who cannot contribute are designed to have more damage and resistances to compensate. Their very presence is a cause for the problem as much as the presence of the opposite. In very simple terms, the existence of Scrappers (by far my favourite AT) and their being melee fighting specialists in itself precludes the possibility of such a design. Because, as it would give less self-sufficient ATs more self-sufficiency, it must give Scrappers something else, and that just muddies the waters far too much.

Think of it in terms of Dungeon Siege, for instance. While you could be a pure fighter (and I was) or a pure non-fighter there, nothing stopped everyone, even mages, from dabbling into fighting, and nothing stopped fighters from dabbling into magic. And even as an indestructible pure fight a lesser fighter and part made still outstripped me by a lot. That's sort of what I have in mind - fighting not as an ability that has to be balanced against, because it's IMPOSSIBLE to give it to everybody, but fighting as a baseline and a basic skillet, from which everybody starts.

People keep telling me what "decent" means is subjective, but it's not a question of what I find decent, it's a question of the vast fluctuation between even POTENTIAL ability between the ATs. No matter what I consider to be decent or appropriate, chances are some classes will be below or some classes will be above it, or possible both. What I want is a uniform baseline, possibly differing by approach, which gives everyone a certain degree of self-sufficiency regardless of their class, and then gives them class specializations on top of that.

If anything, the older D&D frameworks were a lot like this. Rangers were both adept fighters and adept with a bow, clerics wielded magic, but also wielded heavy armour and a decent weapon and even mages had a variety of bubbles, shields, magical armour spells, magical weapons and offensive capabilities which made them strong fighters. Warriors, frankly, were the only ones shafted, as all they could do was fight, while everyone could fight AND do something else. Well, axe pure warriors and leave everyone the same, and you're close to what I'm talking about.

Let me put it this way - I'm talking about a system that has no pure fighters and no pure non-fighters. Everyone is a fighter, and everyone has a specialization aside from that.

By original design, yes. In fact, the old Blaster description (I don't know if it's still that way in the game, but it's that way in the manual) had a weak apologetic to the effect that you COULD probably solo this AT if you REALLY wanted to, but why would you want to? Of course, that was in a day and age when they had Controller hit points, much worse offence, no Defiance of any kind and actually weak melee attacks. Things have changed dramatically since then, and I've long been lobbying to have them at least slightly re-labelled as less defenceless glass cannon and more a light-defence, all-purpose fighter, as that's what they practically are. For heaven's sake, they have just about Scrapper hit points and actually decent defences later on, so they're practically there.

Granted, Defiance's ability to shoot your highest-DPS attacks while held DOES help a great deal, but it doesn't prevent droppable toggles from dropping, which is the big thing which ruins damage auras for me. As well, they are not, nor will they ever be, stand-and-fight fighters, so something which requires them to stand in melee and fight in melee is always going to get less mileage than it should. If anything, I'd rather see these auras as fixed-duration clicks that you can perma (withotu self-stacking) such that you can get a little more bang for when they're on without suffering a constant draining cost and, crucially, without them dropping, or perhaps even suppressing.

Back to the original topic, World of Confusion is terrible. Having played around with it for a while, I can safely say that it is completely worthless on its own, and slotting might make it only slightly less so. The confuse doesn't trigger almost at all, and even when it does, it expires before the enemies take action, or at most saves me a single attack from SOME of them. I guess improving the accuracy and confuse duration might help, but the ticks are so infrequent I often back out of melee before the power ticks even once. Ugh...

You know, this "tick" mechanic has always felt clunky to me. Sure, powers that tick every, say, quarter second to half a second, for them it's reasonably unnoticeable. But for powers that tick every two to four seconds? They tick so slow they are practically "off" the majority of the time, with enemies passing through them like they own the place. Personally, I'd much prefer a mechanic that affects enemies AS SOON as they are in-range and applies a constant effect. If the effect needs to have periodic gaps, I'd much rather see it self-suppress than rely on the world's slowest ticks. Basically, as World of Confusion is right now, it's like those on/off electrical walls in platformers that you have to pass through. Imagine how easy it would be to pass through one if it stayed off for 1... 2... 3... 4... seconds. You can be in and out and still have time for a coffee. Which is what enemies do to be. They stroll in, rip me in half and still get time to pick their noses before the power gets around to sending out a tick.

Then I point and laugh.

That's actually something I've always wondered about. Our "stealth" missions are a joke, in that no mission ever is designed for stealth, even those that have a briefing which claims they are. Practically speaking, you get rewards for two things in a mission - objectives and enemies. However, by and large, objectives give pitiful rewards and the end-of-mission bonus, while nice, is very small. The bulk of the experience gained in a mission comes from enemy defeats, which makes stealthing missions actually PENALISE you with less experience.

I'm not sure how I'd make a stealth mission, myself, but it wouldn't be just something that rewards you for not fighting. Stealth, as we have it, is either on or off for the majority of the game. Just turning on, say, Greater Invisibility (or Hide) and running around an instance is not something I'm prepared to dole out big rewards for. There would have to be some kind of mechanic which made sneaking around actually involving, with raised alarms, too much killing and so forth penalising the final reward. I'm not sure the game is currently capable of anything decent in this vein, however.

Not by a long shot. For one, the inspirations tray is size-limited, with other things that I need there, as well, and leaving to refill it mid-mission on the back end of a hazard zone is not an option. For another, Break Frees are only good to break out of a status effect, not to prevent acquiring one, as they simply do not last long enough to be used preventatively in every situation that might end up dropping my toggles. The pain with damage auras is that they drop, and lacking the old Strength of Will inspirations that actually did exactly this, there is no good solution. You can't protect yourself from the effect, and you can't really count on not getting hit by it.

In general, I hate "just use inspirations" suggestions, for the simple fact that HAVING to rely on an inspiration crutch for every fight (yes, every fight in the upper levels has some kind of status effect) just isn't practical. And even if, by some miracle of luck, I manage to get just enough inspirations, other ATs are just fine without them. That, to me, is indicative of bad design, and I would very much like to see some form of limited status protecting in SOMETHING available to all Blasters. At the very least hold/sleep/stun.

You're still missing the point. What I am saying, at the core of it, is that encouraging teaming does NOT have to be done by discouraging solo play. Benefits for teaming, such as extra rewards, faster progress, team-only content and just an overall easier time are, in my opinion at least, a better incentive to team than not being able to team is. You'd think having no recourse would be the ultimate incentive, but to someone like me, it's incentive to drop the game, uninstall it and go play a game which lets me enjoy things my way.

Everyone is treating me like I'm trying to take away their team-mates, but I'm not. If anything, I'm trying to do quite the opposite - giving people the ability to take care of themselves AND have team viability actually gives you BETTER team dynamics, because the people who would normally never play a team character will anyway, because you're gonna' have a specialization other than killing stuff one way or the other. Put in the very simplest of terms, I am not going to team when I don't want to. Making it harder for me to solo will not make it more likely for me to team, it will make it less likely for me to play at all, thus LOSING one customer for the MMO.

I'll fall back on my stand-by: Just because I CAN team doesn't mean I HAVE to. Make me want to team, don't make me hate not teaming.

This is funny, since I didn't say anything about FPS games in the quote you quoted.

Which, conveniently, is pretty much what I'm saying, myself. I don't expect everyone to be a tank-mage, but I DO want everyone to be able to defend himself and win at least his own fights without feeling like a gimp. This is currently not the case, not comparatively, not in the slightest.

It's not about objective strength so much as comparative strength. Again, some ATs I can fall asleep at the wheel and still win, other ATs I can bust my chops, fight like a pro and still lose more than I win and/or take ages to accomplish anything. When the gameplay mechanics are constantly beating you over the head with suggestions you team, something is amiss.

That's kind of the problem as I see it, though. This "base" you just describe is, quite frankly, very terrible. It's a base insufficient in doing ANYTHING without having some kind of specialization on top of it. Just Defender damage, hit points and no range is a character gimped from the very onset, so those that don't get the ability to fight as a specialization plain cannot do that. Yes, sometimes you can fudge a fight under some circumstances kind of, and sometimes you can even break even, but the point remains that the basis is just far too frikkin' low.

I'm not going to use ATs to describe it, but suppose we all started from a base of being able to deliver a punch and take a punch and do reasonably well in a scrap, then we all went from there. We would still have specialists, but all of those specialists would come armed and ready, so to speak. The question, then, remains if everyone can take care of himself, what's the point of teaming? To this, I answer "scaling difficulty." Solo difficulty is easy enough for everyone to take care of his own tasks, but when you group, the difficulty (and associated rewards) ramps up significantly, to where people with a non-combat speciality find themselves using it a lot more often.

Well, isn't that what City of Heroes already does? No, not by a long shot. The core problem with City of Heroes is that not all ATs are even remotely on the same level when it comes to solo performance. With a Mastermind, I can fall asleep on the keyboard and when I wake up, I'll have levelled up twice. With a Scrapper, I can essentially march through mission like I own the place and only really need to concentrate if I happen to aggro the map. With a Blaster... "ZOMG It's a boss! Not good! Not good!" Yeah, it kind of goes like that. In fact, it's especially hard for me, because I want a uniform difficulty setting between all my characters, which means I've put it somewhere in the middle of their abilities. That shows me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, just how serious the gap between the solo experiences of the different ATs is.

Why do I want a uniform difficulty setting? For one, just so I can gauge relative strength, but more than that, so I can ensure a consistent experience, both literally and as "XP." I've been through this before, with a character who did really well, but took BLOODY AGES to level up to anything, which just ended up with me shelving it until his AT was tweaked, and even now I have to sort of exploit the system with him. The simple fact is that taking ages and ages to complete missions, growing a beard faster than you can put enemies down and taking months to level up (literally, I'm not joking) is just not fun. And the only alternative is to hop on a team and have someone level up for me. No, thanks.

So, what you're suggesting is a Diablo 2 style build choice, with the added situational awareness decisions that I didn't quote? I could go with that. Of course, I'm not a fan of the "branching trees" school of RPG levelling, as I tend to gimp myself A LOT, but that has a lot to do with having to take a power multiple times. Combine CoH's "one power, one pick" approach, and a tree structure could actually work quite well. In fact, I've played a lot of MMOs, and the one thing I really miss from City of Heroes is enhancements. Most other games just seem to offer me a single "better" version of a power by whatever arbitrary design decided what "better" is. Specifically, a "better" version of the power costs more, which actually makes it WORSE. By comparison, in City of Heroes, I can still make my powers better, but better in a way I choose. For instance, a lot of people tell me that decreasing power recharge so I can use them more often is the best way to go, but I personally opt for more damage, because BOOM! HEADSHOT!

I'm not sure I'd be capable of creating decent builds in such a system, myself, as I'm not good at making tradeoffs unless they are system-mandated, but that's my own personal failing and not something I would hold a system to task with. As long as what I make is DECENT, the imperative is on me to make my own variety. Or not, if I choose not to. The point is, I'm not actually opposed to the spirit of the Champions build system when I describe it as a "frikkin' mess," but rather to its execution. It's overly complicated, and nothing you do ever has a really noticeable effect, so it's very hard to gauge if I'm doing the right thing.

I'd still be in favour of a system that started everyone off a baseline of self-sufficiency, though.

And then some.

No-one is, so I don't. This isn't about my ability to solo, but rather a general design philosophy where balance is based not around denying certain characters even basic skills and performance in, frankly, the very basic of talents in any game about killing stuff, but rather around what ELSE they can do. And again, THIS game is a done deal. It's over. It's not getting rebalanced in any way, shape or form five years in. That doesn't mean I have to like its frankly olf-fashioned approach to in-team balance. It works, it's just not very exciting.

And again, this isn't a question of "is possible," but rather "is viable." You can scale a staircase with a grappling hook and a rope ladder, but it's not a viable alternative to just taking the stairs. All ATs can solo. Not all can do so well enough and, crucially, not all can do so at an even REMOTELY comparable basis. In my eyes, giving up the ability to solo for better teaming is a bum deal that shouldn't even be considered, much less put as one of the cornerstones of design principle.

By all means, let players help each other, let teams be stronger than just the sum of their parts, let content be built such that it requires multiple people. But don't design these dynamics at the cost of self-sustainability. It isn't necessary.

You know, that's actually an interesting point that's well worth looking into. There is something I've always enjoyed about teaming, and that almost no game, movie or indeed even story. It's exactly this self-sufficiency, which comes from team-mates being able to take care of themselves in all ways. I grew up on traditional Tank/Healer/Damage Dealer RPGs, where my biggest concern was never survival, but rather keeping my ranger and/or wizard alive. I also grew up on your typical story of "knight save princess" and plenty of escort missions protecting weak, helpless, worthless "allies." It has given me a sense of teaming not unlike a mother duck, in that I (or someone else, rarely) is tasked with protecting the rest of the team which, though made up of useful members, is still utterly dependent on being protected. Truth be told, it kind of used to be like that.

However, being that I'm a fan of all things novel and unusual, a different type of teaming experience caught my heart early on, participating in all-Scrapper teams. Those are the polar opposites of what I described above. They are teams of equals, where everyone is well capable of taking care of himself, well capable of surviving on his own, and where I don't dread leaving someone behind, leaving someone alone, or leaving someone to fend for himself. Because they'll be just fine, and probably beat me to the objective, anyway. Easily the most fun I have ever had was a Bastion TF comprised of 6 Scrappers (myself among them) and a Bubble Defender. Not only was it a frightening sight, but I neither cared about protecting, nor was indeed able to keep track of, my team-mates. We basically focused fire on the big threats, then scattered like cockroaches to mop up what's left. No stress about having to protect someone, no stress about needing someone to protect me. It was about as simple and pure of fun as it gets in this game, or indeed in any game whatsoever.

We can go around and about, but the fact is that, I guess, I'm biassed, in that I inherently dislike the kind of structured, themed, role-dependent teaming that a lot of RPGs are basically shoving down our throats. Teaming in most of these games tends to come down to what everyone IS, rather than what everyone DOES, which is part of why I loved teaming in things like Unreal Tournament so much, and why I enjoyed Battlefield 2142 over Battlefield 2. With fewer roles and more general purpose gear, it always came down to having team-mates who were on the ball, and on whom you could rely to do the right thing. There was a guy in UT2004 once upon a time, who was incredibly skilled and with a solid head on his shoulders, so I knew I could leave him alone at a control node, and it wasn't going anywhere any time soon, giving me plenty of time to mount an effective offence by myself.

Basically, I enjoy teaming done in such a way that I can rely on other people to do their thing without me necessarily constantly hovering over them like some spastic guardian angel. Not mere helpless artillery, best left at the side lines or back in the rear, but capable combatants who just all happen to bring their own skills aside from direct combat to the table.

I actually agree with this assessment. Whether it goes far enough is subject to debate, but I'd lie if I said I wasn't pleased with the direction of CoV ATs. They're still largely balanced by CoH standards, just more in the middle, however, which limits how far they can go, but the thought counts. This is partly why I would really like to see five more ATs with Going Rogue. We already have all the boring ATs covered, most of the more interesting covered, and I'd be very curious to see what exotic ATs a new expansion pack backed up by years of experience and perhaps a little daring would bring. I doubt we'll see any, but I'll let that hope go only when I sit down on character creation and see no new ATs.

Actually, I agree with you completely on this one, but I want to make a slight distinction here, between things that cannot be soloed and characters who cannot solo. Things that cannot be soloed, barring aberrantly powerful players, are generally fair to everyone. You need other people to do them. That's fine. In a game about multiplayer, it makes sense to have a few of those (even if I'm not a fan). Characters who cannot solo, on the other hand, are inherently disadvantaged, because they are incapable of taking part in activities other people can take part in solo based solely on class design, and sometimes build choices. By and large, there are few activities that work the other way around.

Basically, I'm not against teaming, teamwork, or even so much forced-teaming content (escape clauses withheld for irrelevance), but it irks me when class choice inherently either locks you out of a lot of content, or at least hampers your ability to play it. As I've been saying for years, there are better ways to encourage teaming than to just slash off people's ability to solo.

Ugh... Yeah, Dark Armour is a huge mess, especially in terms of endurance cost. Protection-wise, it sort of works, between the relatively low static protection, the nice heal and the control auras, but it costs so damn much it's often just not sustainable. Even just the shields by themselves are too expensive for what they are, especially Cloak of Darkness. Why is that power so gosh-dang expensive when it provide benefits which so rarely come into play?

And Cloak of Fear is just insulting. It costs a hideous amount, it does barely anything and it hits so inaccurately. This power is simply not worth its endurance cost for what it does.

Dark Armour really needs to be balanced with cost in mind. The set has seven toggles, four of which are shields that are necessary pretty much full-time. From then on, you just have to account for the fact that people may want to run a heavy toggle on top of that, seen as how they're what the set gets for lacking so much self-protection, but they're just so incredibly expensive and do so little.

Personally, I'd like to see Dark toggle costs lowered across the board and some small-scale knockback protection added in Cloak of Darkness. Enough to resist the simple things, like baseball bats and pistols, but not quite enough to resist boss knockback attacks and such. The set has more than enough utility. Making it a little easier to use that utility and at least nodding at a patch towards the biggest hole would go a long way, in my opinion.

You're asking for a persistent weapon that sticks around after you use it and is usable between the different "nunchack" powers. That's a weapon. It's also an unprecedented customization ability, which may or may not actually be possible.

You're probably right. I've seen what large groups of Defenders can do, and it is an amazing sight indeed. But then, large groups of any one AT can do amazing things, and large groups in general, regardless of team composition, are typically so strong that half the team can fall asleep and no-one will notice. That's part of the reason why people are afraid of Diminishing Returns in PvE - character strength scales VERY sharply with the size of the team, especially in the upper levels.

However, here's the other side of the equation - half the team can fall asleep and no-one will notice, which means that, on average, you basically have someone else to essentially fight for you. Even if you pull your weight, that just means you're giving someone else a free ride. It's just how the game is balanced. And while I don't see a problem with that (I enjoy taking lowbies along and fighting for them), it creates a rather significant difference when that team falls apart and its members have to fend for themselves. Some do just fine, others... Not so much.

Anything we can say about Defenders, and indeed Tankers, and how they have decent damage doesn't change the fact that they lag behind everybody else. Some combos can sometimes muster damage that kind of approaches that of a damage dealer, but at half the hit points and barely comparable damage, it is still slow and still underwhelming. And that's not a challenge or an insult. That's how the AT is designed from the ground up.

And this is what bugs me. Giving up combat prowess for the sake of other specialization just doesn't sit well with me, specifically since you can have combat prowess AND other specialization. It's kind of like supposedly realistic army games that send out engineers into combat armed with a wrench and a hard hat, when actual military engineers are armed like any other soldier, and just about as well-trained for combat. And I guess that's part of why everyone and their grandma seems to have some degree of super strength in comic books. It doesn't do them a lot of good, sure, but at least all of them are dangerous enough in a scrap.

This kind of over-specialization has always bothered me in RPGs, especially since it's never anything more than a player handicap. NPC adversaries never follow it. My mages are squishy and easily killed, but the enemy mages are all made of iron, encased in three forcefields and with a whole mountain range of hit points, and typically better at hand-to-hand than my fighters. And, to be quite honest, the way D&D mages are described, they ought to be, only mine never can, all for the sake of the stupid Tank/Healer/Damage Dealer formation.

Extreme example aside, there are few situations where killing things alone can't get you through the game. There are no situations that I can think of where only debuffing or only buffing or only control can get you through any situation whatsoever. Sooner or later, everything comes down to damage, which is why Controllers got Containment all those many years ago. Despite their being sold as team-centric characters, they still ended up needing to do damage. And from what I hear, they do well enough with that.

But it seems to me we're not on the same page here, everyone. Yes, all ATs can do damage, and some powerset combos from the "team" ATs can even do a lot, and some powerset combos can actually be survivable, and some powerset combos can actually be survivable AND deal damage. That's DESPITE their design, not BECAUSE of it. If anyone can look at Defenders, say, and claim they were, as a general AT, designed to be damage dealers or damage soakers, then I'll just laugh and laugh. But I highly doubt anyone would do that.

My point was never "can, under certain circumstances." My point was "is designed to, expressly." So far, I keep seeing the same point - some ATs pay for their teaming prowess with lack of direct combat capability (sometimes). Why? Here is my basic question. Why does this have to be like that? Why do we need dedicated fighters and dedicated NOT-fighters? What if the game were designed where everyone were a fighter AND something else. There would be no pure fighters. Everything would be fighter/something. Say, fighter/ranger, fighter/healer, fighter/mage and what have you.

I know I'll get told it's silly, but please, do take the time and explain why. And not just because that's how it is and it works fine. This is the reason I wanted to distance the question from the here and now, and make it more of a principle one, perhaps even a question for the distant future. How is a system where everyone is a proficient fighter AND something else bad? Does one's inability specifically and expressly in itself add to the game? You're still not doing everything. In fact, you may not be able to do much at all, but you mere do NOT miss the most crucial part. And yes, it all comes down to combat in the end, unless we institute permanent, defeating status effects or diplomatic solutions.

There is no "in combat" state in this game, which is a large reason why powers meant to be used out of combat employ secondary metrics to try and judge whether you're in combat or not. You can't rely on the animation stances, either, as there are a lot of them, and they don't always correspond to actual combat.

We already have a perfectly good means to aim our teleport - a mouse-controlled reticle. Binding it to the camera is a really big step DOWN from this, because you can generally always click where you can see, but you can't always LOOK at everything you can see. Easy example - look straight down, zoom the camera out and you can teleport to ledges that you can't see the floor of from below. Teleporting to enemy is a good idea, but teleporting to camera direction is most decidedly not.

Additionally, teleporting over a map is purely impractical, unless you want to use a Descent-style map. 2D maps of a 3D environment never work, as you will note trying to place map marker thumb tacks. They don't land on street level, they end up 200 feet in the air or 100 feet underground or by and large NOT where the surface would really have them be. And that's on a single-storey map. Trying to teleport around Grandville via an overhead map can not work. What's more, trying to teleport via an overhead map in general is restrictive, because it doesn't allow you to teleport up. The only alternate solution to a Descent-style map would be a Homeworld-style map, and all of these make the process far, far more complicated anyway.

That said, I WOULD love to see the animation time sped up. I have serious doubts this would be done for regular Teleport, as that would speed it up significantly, but I've always wanted to see a Combat Teleport power with, say, a 20-30 feet range, instant cast (as in, you click, you're there, no delay) and a recharge time of a few seconds, say 2-3. Mechanically speaking, it shouldn't be faster than Teleport, and should be a LOT more fiddly, but it would be cool to use for in-combat mobility. I completely agree that the huge long animation of Teleport really ruins the effect of instant travel.

BABs explains it's not that simple. You're also running against a bigger problem that is so far completely unprecedented - changing a power from a weapon-based one to a non-weapon one. And even within the same powerset, like Spines, picking different customized options causes in-set redraw.