Samuel_Tow

Learn to read, please.

Humans can get incredibly strong with good food and proper exercise. Strong enough to be shot with a cannonball to the chest, strong enough to pull trucks, strong enough to lift cars, strong enough to break concrete bricks. That is pretty unambiguously natural.

To move farther away from reality, humans have an innate energy called chi. If they learn to control it and train their bodies, they can use their chi to shield themselves and put more force in their strikes. And, apparently, if they train hard enough, they can fly, shoot beams of energy and turn their hair blond. That, as well, is very much natural.

SuperMan is very much natural because he is no different from any Kryptonian. His skill with his powers is his training and the yellow sunlight is his food and fuel. Unlike humans, he doesn't die without yellow sunlight, but like humans, he grows weaker and weaker without it. Just because a power source is Natural doesn't mean that power shouldn't require fuel to work. For humans it's food. For Kheldians that's a host and his own strength, which then depends on what fuels his own body. For SuperMan that's yellow sunlight.

If humans travelled to some distant planet where some weird gas gave them super strength WITHOUT harming their bodies or mutating their physiology, then yes, that would be very much normal. Just the same way as a man travelling to Mars would be super strong and able to lift giant heavy objects by virtue of nothing more than the environmental difference.

Unless a character is CHANGED in some way or has ITEMS giving him powers, it's Natural. SuperMan has neither been changed, nor ever required any sort of focusing item to give him his super powers.

He does have somewhat of a point, though. They did institute shields as two separate items - a shield model and an emblem overlay. I can only guess as to the mechanics behind how this is set up, and there is the matter that all shields with auras (as opposed to patterns) have the auras baked into the shields and disallow you from altering them. But shields are set up as capes - one shield with its own two colours and one shield ornament with its own colours as well. The Spiked shield works like this.

Whether this is applicable to weapons, I cannot say. Perhaps with enough time and effort, the subsystem for handling them could be altered into this. What I DO know, however, is that such a thing for weapons is without precedent, and may well require some significant changes to accommodate. It's definitely something to ask for in the future, but hardly something to say "they could just do it" about.

You shouldn't make the mistake of lumping costume pieces and powers in the same category. If a pack came out with the coolest new costumes in the game, some may grumble, but everyone would be happy, because costumes don't make you more powerful. If a pack came out with, say, 10 extra slot picks for your powers, then I guarantee a lot of people would complain about it. A lot of us are content with microtransations as long as they're only cosmetic, but when the amount of power our characters have becomes directly proportionate to our ability to stroke the check, it stops being a game.

You're still missing the point where it no longer as epidemic for new players to be sucked into some kind of spontaneous powerlevelling (I've played numerous lowbies and I haven't had offers to be powerlevelled since I16). That, and the fact that not everyone believes level 50 should be some kind of mythical end of the game. For some people, myself among them, it is merely a new beginning, that of another character. And for some people still, it is a beginning of the post-end-game where they can grind for "phat lewt."

I see no problem with the levelling speed as presented.

Or do what I do. I have no such thing on my desk, but I don't need to. Because I have a dictionary and a thesaurus... IN MY HEAD!!! Seriously, I kept asking my English teacher about what this or that word meant, and she kept telling me "Well, I'm not a walking dictionary!" Five years later, my classmates kept coming to me, asking what this or that word meant, and as I told them, I'd turn to my teacher and say "Well, I guess I've become a walking dictionary, huh?" She wasn't a very good teacher, I'm afraid.

People keep throwing that around, heedless of the fact that it is actually meaningless. Yeah, the majority of people wouldn't mind if they ran into someone with the same name. The majority of people wouldn't mind if money started raining out of the sky, but I guarantee you that they WOULD mind the ensuing inflation. That is to say, it's irresponsible to talk about unique names absent of a system designed to handle them, and no-one so far has been able to even conceive of such a system that would not be horribly UGLY.

Just letting people share names DOES NOT WORK. You need a system to ensure uniqueness for the simple utility of being able to tell who it is that you're speaking to. You can't just plop down 20 Wolverines and expect people to guess which one of the 20 is their friend, as well as figure out how to invite him absent direct proximity. And I've not heard of a system to do that which isn't obtrusive, ugly and unpleasant. Come up with one, then we'll talk.

But, really, sidestepping the issue of implementation and just restating an opinion does nothing at this point.

Oh, certainly, but outside of Super Strength, these are restricted to Earth/Stone powers. And in general, I meant to say that aerial combat is not unattainable for melee folk, it just requires Hover. I see this misconception a lot, actually. People keep asking "Yeah, but what's the point of taking Hover on a Scrapper?" Well, the point is greater mobility, the ability to catch flying enemies and, with a bit of practice, general ease of use.

The boundaries between origins are not at all well defined, yes. I suspect this is intentional. How much technology is Technology and not Natural? When does self-augmentation stop being Science and become Technology? Is technomagic Magic or Technology? They're ill-defined, and for the better. I'm glad they dropped the concept of meaningful origins in pre-beta.

That said, origins still have SOME definition given to them in their description texts, and outright contradicting them is not something I can accept. The easiest example is people insisting that being bitten by a radioactive woman, thus mutating you into Woman-Man would make you Mutation. That is false on its face. It would make you a "mutant" in the dictionary definition of the word, but it would make you a picture-perfect example of the Science origin as it is defined in-game. Mutation is very clearly described to be powers FROM BIRTH, which getting your powers of a mutated anything simply is not.

Origins overlap a lot in the game, but there are certain areas where they do NOT overlap in the slightest.

Is a misspelled contraction that disturbing for you? I mean, sure, it sends me into neurotic spasms, but I've been known to collapse over spelling and grammar mistakes.

Frankly, free costume pieces have ALWAYS been at a high premium in this game, perplexingly, before OR after the advent of micro transaction booster packs. Pretty much the largest influxes of new costumes have been CoV, veteran rewards and booster packs. Outside of that, it's more of a slow trickle. A set here, a pattern there and nothing truly big or spectacular. I've always been amazed at how new costume pieces get such a low priority. The way I see it, it's booster packs or nothing, which, again, is sort of a no-win situation. At least booster packs give SOMETHING.

Personally, I still wish they'd come up with an "Everything Pack" that combines all the previous boosters for whatever price that's deemed to be worth.

*edit*
To actually answer the question, we made it from Launch to I think I4 or such without any new costumes at all, getting only a few new "anime-inspired" costume pieces with the City of Hero launch. We did get capes and auras in I3, though. The next costume items influx was CoV, with the villain pieces not available to anyone who didn't own CoV. After that, I don't recall much of anything major until the GvE pack and then the Wedding Pack, and it went on from there. In fact, probably the most memorable new costume set we've gotten for free was Enforcer. Stealth, ExoProto and Ulterior get an honourable mention, of course, and Tech Crey made an appearance at some point as a direct (and in many instances bugged) rip of the Crey Protectors' suits.

But again, very little was done prior to booster packs, so it's not like they do LESS for free now than they did before.

People are using the Ninja Run to fill in for an actobatic style of running akin to what Champions has (which I've never seen) and find the running animation to be bad. While I'm not a fan of it, myself, all I'm saying is that it's not so much bad as it's very specific to a very narrow subset of what the image of "ninja" evokes. Which I guess was the point of the pack, seen as how we have the broad-spectrum ninja paraphernalia already freely available in the game.

You asked for a Talsorian axe, we showed you a Talsorian axe. Whether YOU like it or not is irrelevant to its existence.

"They could do" arguments always fail, because they are always trumped by Standard Code Rant or even common sense. If you're going to make demands and suggest how things should be added, it is considered good form to stick to what already exists in the game, and what already exists in the game is a linear list of weapons with no subcategories. Unless we see precedent saying otherwise, that is what it is.

Additionally, weapons with auras do not colour well, since you only have two colours per weapon, and one colour is required for the aura. Even if it's cloned over some details of the weapon, it's still restrictive, in the same way that all Rularuu weapons are predominantly black, with most colour going towards altering the eye. I realise shields can have emblems (some shields, those without effects), but I'm fairly confident in assuming shields are set up different from weapons.

I'm actually not designing it for travel, but any teleportation power WILL be useful for travel, and I wanted to ensure that it couldn't infringe on the utility of ACTUAL travel powers. Combat Jumping, for instance, isn't better than Super Jump because you can't travel faster with it, but you still CAN travel with it.

I'm not sure I follow. What's to stop melee folks from using the power? A Combat Teleport wouldn't require ranged powers to use. You could just as well Build Up, blink in the middle of a spawn, drop down a Whirling Sword and then blink back out. If you're talking about aerial combat, that's the domain of flight, and I really don't foresee Combat Teleport fixing that if you don't have Hover, anyway.

And, no, contrary to popular belief, Hover and Melee are not incompatible. I have several melee folk who Hover all the time and its utility actually gives them greater manoeuvrability than just running on the ground. I'm not looking for this power to be a substitute for Hover, I'm looking for it to be a form of instant transition over short distances.

What I meant is something I've actually seen in-game on a few occasions - having your reticle "snap" onto something. I've seen it snap onto enemies on occasion, and I've seen it snap onto my own back a lot of times. Essentially, from time to time it can treat enemies like solid objects for the purpose of teleport placement, allowing you to port right next to them. I suspect this is some kind of errant bug at this point, but that's what I meant.

Science is, very much implicitly, someone who is altered by a scientific experiment, be it intentional or unintentional. In SuperMan's case, this isn't the case. He has a natural reaction to our sun which doesn't give him powers, it merely unlocks his powers. An apt comparison would be if a human underwent meditation to unlock the "true potential" of a human and became able to fly. This wouldn't be magic just because meditation has a vague magical connotation to it, it would still be natural.

SuperMan's powers aren't given to him by anything. He is just unable to access them under certain conditions.

Actually, that's probably the only reason I like costume packs. At least then we get costume pieces at creation. If this were added as part of an Issue, we'd only earn the costumes by completing a Tsoo TF or by collecting all the Tsoo Badges or by amassing 1000 Tsoo Merits or some such. Oh, and only after level 35. I'd rather pay $10 than have to go through that.

It's sort of a no-win situation, really.

And need I remind you of the response the latest batch of paid-for new costumes got? Your point is moot. That reaction happens no matter what is introduced, ergo it is irrelevant to determining the merit of the actual content added.

Also:

Seems like you have a pretty bad case of "opinion for fact" there. The switch is almost seamless, which should be a sign for concern.

Unless they want to invent an origin specifically for him, he both fits the Natural origin and has been accepted to fit there very much ever time this is brought up. This is especially important for me, because I have a whole cartload of Natural characters, just no natural HUMANS.

Look, try asking a question and I guarantee you'll get an answer, and in a polite and expedient fashion. But please avoid making outrageously ridiculous claims like:

I know "because WoW did it" is the best argument of the 21st century, but do understand it's popular because of more than just one thing, and avoid using it as justification for your one thing.

Huh. I thought they looked new, but I thought I'd just missed a newer pair of bug eyes. Thanks

To be fair, Going Rogue info is NOT easy to come by. It's not posted anywhere officially and I can't even think of a good place to find out. Well, other than the Going Rogue entry on ParagonWiki, but that's not actually on the official site.

I always wondered why some powers were Afraid (the old Fear mechanic) while others were Avoid (an unresistable AI cue). I'm not sure how they compare, I just find it odd that they're set up that way.