Samuel_Tow

I was actually never against getting certain specific pieces, just reaffirming the notion that keeping NPC models unique is a good idea. By the way, we DO have access to the Circle of Thorns shoulder pieces. They're one of the oldest pieces in the game

I don't want to pilfer directly from NPCs for the various reasons outlined, but items like theirs I would very much like to see. A lot of those are actually backpack items, but even otherwise, a non-funky wizard hat would be nice.

Yeah, I know Tesla Coil just sounds better to me, so I have a habit of using that as a catch-all when I probably shouldn't.

Someone had a long list somewhere, but off the top of my head, things like custom weapons, power customization, a whole plethora of costume pieces, Dual Blades, Shields, Willpower, Inventions... Just about all the big things have been either asked for or suggested for years before they came into the game.

Let me put it this way - Dual Handguns seem like they're designed to shoot slowly and fire really big bullets. An arc of fire requires that the shoot really fast, which doesn't seem to be in the design of the set. Instead of an aimless, wide-area burst, they've chosen aimed single shots fired in all directions. I use the word "aimed" here pretty loosely. I'm not saying the character literally aims the shots so much as that each shot fired is intended to hit, whereas a burst of fire relies on volume and expects only a few to hit.

Slow fire vs. fast fire is what it comes down to, and Dual Handguns are slow.

Completely agreed See, the reason I liked the original Diablo was for its simplicity (you have ONE attack that loops, and that's it) which can lead to a certain state of flow in a game, as well as for it allowing me to be overpowered. With Griswold's Edge and a decent shield, I was having fights with Blood Lords that I've not seen matched in a game since.

Torchlight is a lot of the same, only it allows for even more of an overpowered mess. As you mentioned, infinite enchanting of items (there IS a chance you can strip ALL enchantments off an item, leaving it essentially white, but it seems pretty small) mean that you can super-charge even a crappy weapon or item piece, though trying to fiddle with unique pieces is... Expensive. Still, I managed to produce a rifle which is SO DAMN POWERFUL that I don't think any item in the game will ever match it. I got a bit bored after Ordrok and the drop in narrative quality of the lower-level crypts, but I have to agree with you on all counts:

Sometimes it's just fun to be overpowered. Certainly there are still fights that push your limits, but being a tough guy for the majority of the time is actually very satisfying. I don't know how an Alchemist would play, but between Bouncing Shot and Exploding shot, along with a spell that made me shoot faster, there was precious little my ranger couldn't kill without much trouble. Ordrok himself was problematic, due to a classic mountain of hit points, but otherwise I could knock stuff about at will. I'll need to look for a better rifle now, though. The lower crypts are nasty. Do they even end?

Here's one MAJOR disappointment I had with Torchlight - firing two handguns is NOT twice as fast as firing just one. The second doesn't fire in-between the first's firing speed, it fires INSTEAD of it, essentially limiting you to the performance of the WORST pistol. Why even use two, then?

On that note, I just discovered something interesting - lowering my difficulty from +0x2 to -1x3 has made things RIDICULOUS for my Brutes. I don't know how people manage to build Fury from their own attacks. I can't. Ever. And since +0x2 tends to produce a lot of spawns of anything from 1 to 3 enemies, there just aren't enough for them to build my Fury, either. Well, -1x3 tends to produce a LOT of enemies. I routinely see spawns of 8-9 enemies, and it takes them no more than a couple of slavos to shoot my Fury all the way up to 70-80. Afterwards, hideous smackdown ensues. And you know what? I LOVE IT! For the first time in a long while, my Brutes feel at least a little bit more like Scrappers. I could have done that before, sure, at the cost of massive stress and pressure. Now I get to have Fury handed to me on a silver platter. How could I but revel at the chance?

As someone who's been posting on these forums for a long time, I can tell you that this argument was funny back in 2004-2005, when the "fanboy" moniker was still in style and people who used it weren't just laughed out of discussions on face value. These days, it's more trite than anything else. It's a needlessly one-sided argument that reduces the validity of people with a positive outlook to nothing more than mindless worship of a game DESPITE its qualities, rather than BECAUSE of them. It was insulting to the people who try to have an actual discussion based in logic and reason when some self-professed "objective arbiter" drops by to dismiss arguments out of hand.

If you want to cherry-pick the posts you were addressing, then maybe you can fudge some semblance of an argument, but within the context of the thread, we are neither discussing our love of the game nor our loyalty to the development team. What we are arguing is the speculation on possible new content (or lack thereof) based largely on precedent, experience and extrapolation thereof. To reduce this discussion to an ego arm-wrestle does nothing but to further the problem you speak against.

*rollingfacedesk*

Am I losing my mind or did I accidentally step into the twilight zone? You don't think there will be more than the two new powerset in Going Rogue because... What? Because they weren't announced? Thing back to how much you knew about City of Villains 6 months before it was released. Did you have a printout of all "10" new powersets that you could point to and say "Here, that's what will be in it!" Because, you know what? I was in CoV Beta, and who had what changed TREMENDOUSLY over just the last few weeks. A couple of examples:

Up until one point, Brutes had access to Ice Melee and Ice Armour. I even had an Ice/Ice Brute back in Beta, but we were asked to delete all Ice Brutes and not play them any more, so I did. This happened no more than a month before release, and more like a couple of weeks. Two whole sets, gone. *poof*

Masterminds only had access to Ninja, Robots and Zombies for the majority of Beta. Mercenaries weren't in the game at all. Not as half a set, not as a placeholder set, not even in name only. They were plain not in the game in the slightest. A few weeks before Launch, *pop* We now have a new primary: Mercenaries! This was no more than a few weeks before the end of Beta. I was pretty active on the Beta forums, and I never saw even a hint that the new set was coming before I saw it in the actual game, though it's obviously possible I could have missed it. I know for a fact positive that NO-ONE outside of Beta had any idea that this set was coming at all, not up until Launch, unless a friend of a friend leaked it around.

Basically, that's why I find it so mind-bogglingly unreasonable to try and guesstimate what will be in Going Rogue. I'm not exactly a veteran of many Betas, but having seen how the CoV Beta went and how much we under the NDA knew vs how pretty much diddly squat regular players knew, I wouldn't even begin to try and ascertain what may or may not have been left unsaid.

I just don't get this "they didn't say it, so it won't be in" mentality. They WON'T tell you much of anything now OR later, and may only start dropping hints and disclosing "sneak peeks" when the expansion rolls around to Launch time. You will never ever get a full list of features half a year before the product is even finished.

I should hope so, but I don't like to have too high an opinion of myself because it leads me to fall into a sense of arrogance that is REALLY dangerous in the long run. I'd rather be clear of people's appraisals (which is why I read my rep comments even though I have rep turned off) than to assume they mean well because I'm so awesome. Hence, the question of clarification.

The problem is that what you quoted only really works with autofire machine pistols, not with single-action semi-automatic pistols which have neither the magazine capacity nor the rate of fire to make such wide, sweeping arc of fire viable or believable. Look at the video and note what the "nuke" actually does - a mere handful of shots in all directions, presumably aimed, not fired in unguided bursts. If I recall correctly, the whole "nuke" doesn't fire more than a dozen, maybe a couple dozen rounds.

Remember - the set is not Dual Uzis, it's Dual Handguns, which are assumed to be only semi-automatic and, from the looks of things, fairly high-calibre.

In a way, yeah. That's kind of what I like in a final fight. About the only thing wrong with it is the timing of the ambushes. They seem to be timed off a global counter, rather than off each other, so they're spaced far enough apart that they don't overlap. The result is a lot of sitting on our hands waiting for them. If they could be keyed off each other, so that the next wave came 30-60 seconds after the last one was beaten down, I'd have the idea final fight.

Interestingly, I did something like this in a Mayhem mission today. We were playing a full 8-man team when we ducked into a Smash n' Grab side mission. As the team went further into the store, I decided to play goalie on the entrance and intercept Longow ambushes as they came in, trying to keep them busy so they don't bother the rest of the team. LORDY that was a huge never-ending fight! I have no idea what the rest of the team were doing during this time ("triggering all the alarms for XP" was the last thing I heard), but it was just... Endless. Ambush after ambush after ambush of Longbow and PPD, replete with bosses. I missed a few stragglers here and there, largely when I overflowed my own aggro cap, but this is probably one of the most exciting battles I've ever fought.

This was on my Axe/Willpower Brute, by the way, at level 41. Battle Axe has a lot of very solid AoE and Willpower kept me alive well enough. I handled I think something on the order of a dozen ambushes, which must have been easily on the order of 70-80 people in a seamless stream of more reinforcements. It didn't just make me feel AWESOME (turns out that Brute was stronger than I thought), but it also made me feel like the big bad, holding off probably all the cops in Brickstown while the rest of my team lifted everything the shop that wasn't nailed down. That's certainly a lot more interesting than just being one more body diving into the dogpile and just pushing buttons. This was MY fight, and I came out of it victorious.

-Halt in the name of Longbow!
-Oh? Come and get me!

I'd honestly take a fight against the clock over a fight with a running enemy. The game just isn't designed to allow you to fight on the move. Travel powers suppress, attacks root you in place for long periods and bosses take a severe beating before going down. I wouldn't mind it if the boss took breaks to shoot back, or ran away to a checkpoint with reinforcements or some such, but just running a fleeing enemy is no fun. Not in any game I've tried that didn't let me snipe people in the back of the head for a one hit kill.

But, really, running bosses remind me of the WORST design for an enemy in ANY game I've seen ever - the Succubus women in the original Diablo. They would shoot at range with rather powerful attacks and then run away when you approached them. They ran at the exact same speed you did, so catching them in a straight race was impossible and you could only melee them if you tricked the AI into jamming itself into a corner. And as soon as you stopped chasing, they resumed shooting at you. That's what a boss chase feels like - unfair in the extreme.

I'm not sure how to read this. Are you saying I don't understand the notion of fair debate even with radically opposed views or that I do? This isn't sarcastic, by the way. I really don't know how to read this, and both ways would have rather different meanings and lessons to learn.

That's one of the problems when these things come up. People think "Bike!" and assume that forward run is all you'll ever do, but if it can't strafe and turn on a dime, it'd be a pretty crappy travel power, and if it CAN, it'd be a very SILLY travel power. Bikes and other vehicles need an entire new subsystem to handle them. You can't just plop down a bike and expect regular in-game running to handle that.

People can still +/-rep me, it just doesn't show. And anyone who gives me reputation gets logged in the rep sheet in my User CP where I can read their comments if I choose to, and share those I feel worth sharing. I tend to share only my negative comments, though. I'm grateful for the positive comments, but I keep them to myself for the same reason I keep rep to myself - I don't want to boast and I want to have my actions speak for me, rather than my credentials.

And for what it's worth, I haven't neg-repped you. We disagree, but I don't see that as grounds for vindictive action, and despite what it may look like, I actually DO want to engage in reasonable debate. It's actually interesting.

And that's why utopias fail. As long as people derive pleasure from causing pain to others, there can never be universal contentment, because for some people to be content, other people HAVE to suffer. A true utopia would assume true equality, such that no-one is discriminated against, but for certain people, discrimination is what brings them joy. They need to feel that they are better than others, superior to them in some way. You're never going to "fix" people to stop feeling that way, which is why it's unrealistic to try to build a utopia on personal enlightenment.

And that's not even getting into the matter of opportunists who would use this utopia to garner benefits but not contribute to society. A utopia built on personal enlightenment assumes everyone would be responsible, work together and contribute to society so that all may reap the benefits. Parasitic individuals that feed on society would simply avoid responsibility and only reap rewards. Without a system for enforcing this responsibility, it's unrealistic to expect people to mind themselves. But if you need law enforcement, or indeed laws to begin with, you're not in a utopia built on personal enlightenment. You're in a totalitarian state.

*edit*
As far as crime and justification in Tyrant's state. Regardless of their reasons for existing, Rebels exist, and their actions are criminal to Tyrant's state, ergo crime exists. Therefore, to claim he has eradicated crime is false on its face. Questions of justification, relativism and ethics may muddy the water, but the fact is that crime exists in his state that has supposedly eliminated crime, which points to a deeper problem than just rebels.

And, on the other hand, "just revolution" is only justified when it has actual, reasonable justification. The mere presence of revolution is not, in and of itself, justification for said revolution. We already have a perfect example of this - the Freakshow. Their revolution is based on nothing more than anarchistic destruction of the society which supports them with no actual overriding goal. Hm... Come to think of it, it DOES make sense that the Rebels could be the Praetorian Freakshow. Less crazy, more organised, smarter Freakshow would be an awe-inspiring sight indeed.

It's rare for me to see an idea where I just smack myself on the forehead and say to myself "Why didn't I think of that?!?" but this is one of them. This. Is. Brilliant! I love it! That takes all the guesswork and channel-monitoring out of trying to find out events you want to take part in. I have a tab devoted specifically to event messages, and even so I still miss them a lot of the time. Having a "dot on the map," as it were, about an event happening in a specific zone is a marvellous idea.

I love this!

As long as we're adding it to Super Strength, I don't see why we can't just chuck the larger debris from Propel (so no potted plants or fire extinguishers, but YES fork lifts and giant air compressors) and let it pick on its own? I mean certainly I would like it if it picked based on item proximity or at least based on tileset, but realistically speaking, I'd just be happy if we dumped that wimpy piece.

Makes no sense to pull and toss a junk car in a Council base? OK, I'll give you that. How much sense does it make to rip a chunk of asphalt out of a METAL GRATE CATWALK? Or out of the hood of a car, or out of a tangle of powerlines? Or out of open water? Hurl already fails to make sense on half the floor types in the game. It wouldn't make too much less sense throwing something cooler.

As I understood it, the problem was with creating a PhysX object that would inherit player colours. Power effects were already able to do so. There are several different things which come to play here - costume items, power effects on the player, power effects off the player, summoned pets and physics objects. Costume items we've always been able to edit, and weapons were turned into animated costume items. Power effects both on and off the player is something we've only been able to edit since I16, and since the thrown portion of spines is a power effect and not a weapon, that's why it had to wait until now. Physics objects we were never able to edit, but with I16, we seem to be able to tint them. You know those little flakes of fire that fly off after you smack something with Blaze or Fireball? Those are physics objects, and they inherit the colour of our fire, so we CAN edit them. Summoned pets we've never been able to affect, but again, with I16 we can affect those as well, as the many crystal and fire Stone pets testify.

Of course, the big thing here is whether these effects can include a full-scale player model with individually customizable features. Power effects don't always need to be sprites, but even when they're not, they're still monolithic blocks of information, such as a ready-made model that can only be tinted. I'm not sure if editing that model per-piece is possible at all.

That said, I knew this set was impossible, but I just enjoy the notion of it so very much

Yeah, I spotted the building over a tunnel recently. Not only is is silly to put a giant tower block over a tunnel, but because of how high the tunnel was, it didn't look like the building had ANY foundation. Seriously, who builds large buildings directly on the ground? Does that even work?

I believe the office buildings are supposed to represent only a small section of the actual building. Rather than being one long hallway from lift to lift, they are an actual large building, it's just that most of the doors are actually closed and locked and we only get to travel along the ridiculously spacious corridors. I assume if the doors are opened, the buildings would actually resemble real architecture. And while giant lobbies, column support elevated offices, elevated walkways and scenic open spaces might be unrealistic, they do add a sense of flair to an office that it might otherwise not have. Frankly, it'd be boring if all there was was cubicle farm after cubicle farm.

As far as real architecture goes, though, no game can ever compare to Oni and its level designs. Buildings in Oni actually looked like real buildings designed by real people, with interior an exterior space existing at at the same time and with interior space matching up to exterior space exactly. TCTF Headquarters and the Government Records Building are probably the coolest-looking levels I've seen in ANY game to date, and that's saying something.

As for new instances, I agree very much that we need new tilesets added. A Nemesis base, a museum, a school, an airport, an apartment building and a mansion are the easiest picks, and I'd like to see them both added to new content and retrofitted into old content. We save museums several times. Might as well have a tileset for it.

I completely agree. I love the old cave maps exactly because they actually feel like caves, rather than some cavernous excavation like I'm following in the wake of one of those worms from Dune. The game needs variety, and tight, narrow corridors are part of that variety. Let's not water down the whole game for the sake of minor convenience.

Frankly, even ONE simu-click in the whole game is one too many. This kind of enforced teaming for purely stupid reasons is anathema, in my book. Annoying mission types I can sort of tolerate, but I'll tell you one thing - I've never entered a running boss mission and thought anything other than "Man, I hate these missions!" It's a change of pace, true, but I'm not confident a change for the worse is a good thing. But as long as they're very rare, I can deal.

True, but their rifle design fits the "flintlock" look nevertheless. I actually wish we had a few rifles like theirs, but made specifically for the players. The Nemesis variants are kind of low-res.

And, yeah, the Banished Pantheon use the one flintlock pistol we have, and again, it suffers from the same problem - it's a low-res NPC borrow. I'd like to see a few new pistols like that, say a one of those with the funnel barrel and a steam punk gatling pistol like in Damnation

And on the other side are plenty of arguments from myself and others that the game is by no means too easy, that it's just right and actually still too hard in certain places. And then there is the fact that we were given what can only be described as "ludicrous difficulty" with the I16 difficulty changes. You look for precedent, so look at that precedent - we (not me specifically, but we as a community) asked for greater challenge, and instead of nerfing us or making the game harder, the developers picked the third option and gave us a higher difficulty, so that those who cried the game was too easy could have their greater challenge while those who whine the game was too hard could have our easy ride. Why mess with that? Is there seriously anyone who is dissatisfied with the level of difficulty now?

Here's the thing - you stated what you KNOW is coming with Going Rogue and you resist any argument made to the contrary. I'm not telling you you're wrong and that's not what's going to come. I find it highly unlikely, but that's besides the point. I'm telling you that you cannot, or at the very least should not be as solidly convinced that this is going to happen. I'm telling you that you don't really know and cannot really know. We can discuss possibilities, and I'm open to that, but it'd be a lot easier to do that if you had a more open mind than just "Show me proof positive to the contrary or I'll keep saying the same thing."

Do I know Diminishing Returns won't be introduced into the PvE game? Hell no! How would I? But judging from precedent, it doesn't seem likely. Your only precedent is I6 and ED. While the apparent intent of that at the time was to make us weaker, the eventual intent ended up being to allow for Inventions to exist, which is what the developers stated at the time, but no-one believed them. If I'm going to believe that Diminishing Returns will be introduced, I'll need to see a greater purpose for it than just nerfing for the sake of nerfing. I just don't see any outstanding balance issues right now.

Oh, and you'll be happy to know I got neg-repped for replying to you. More specifically:

Thank you, stranger. I'm glad to disagreeing with people is still grounds for negative rep.

Largely what bugs me with timed boss fights is that I feel cheated. Often these are bosses I'm perfectly capable of beating, but because I have so little time, I have to play like an idiot and just bumrush the thing for maximal damage, tactics be damned. And when I inevitably lose, I feel cheated. I could have taken this guy, but some yahoo decided to give me 90 seconds instead of, say, 5 minutes. So what could have been a cool battle is reduced to me chancing the odds and reloading until I get in a lucky shot.

Running bosses are a lot like that, actually. Doesn't matter if I'd be able to beat the boss in a stand-up fight. Once he takes off running, if I don't have any status effects that can affect a boss (like most Scrappers), I'm essentially reduced to running after him, landing a punch, running some more, landing another punch and hoping to chip-damage him into submission before he runs out the door. I feel like a little kid hanging on the guy's leg as he's shuffling towards the exit. And Crimson is the WORST. A running AV who can slow and immobilize and has Elude. Bleh!

On the other hand, a timed boss done right is the Hydra head. There it's not a question of just rushing in and hoping for the best, because you have just about enough time to do everything the RIGHT way if you know what you're doing. It becomes a question of efficiency and coordination, not "ZOMG! THERE'S NO TIME! HURRY!" It's a case of "less haste, more speed" and that is a rare thing indeed in video games. Usually it's just a question of cutting corners or just doing things faster.

In my opinion, the key to an exciting boss fight isn't difficulty at all. It's complexity. Having a walking Mt. Rushmore of hit points that comes down on you like a ton of bricks is difficult, but ultimately boring. On the other hand, a boss that goes through several stages, shifts his abilities, summons minions, requires terrain interaction and so forth is interesting to fight and at the end it feels like an accomplishment. Frankly, our bosses are boring, for the most part. They have a couple of attacks and lots of hit points and they just swing, swing, swing. I would take even the lamer MegaMan bosses over the ones we have here, because each of those was always scripted with special conditions and states. Ours rarely are.

Here are a few things I like - if you see an Embalmed Cadaver/Abomination preparing to take a dump and you can't interrupt it, RUN AWAY! It'll blow up, but if you're far enough away, it won't hurt you. No such luck with elite boss/AV nukes. In fact they come out so fast it usually takes me a few seconds to register that something happened at all, then several more to register that the team just wiped, and then several more to work it out backwards that the boss must have nuked by sheer induction. That's not how these things should be happening. The triangles, horrible as they are, are at least a step in the right direction - make the boss give cues as to its states and planned actions and give players a chance to respond to them. I'm not talking about dodging out of the way of projectiles, but at least give me a two-second warning before you shove Nuclear Blast down my throat, please!

And you know what astounds me? The Khaan TF, something that should have been the very pinnacle of modern-day City of Heroes design, has a final fight that is essentially a group hug punctuated by four AV ambushes. That's it. Nictus Romuls had more depth than that! Hell, the Hydra Head fight, something which dates back to I1 in 2004, has more depth than that. Maybe the Barakuda SF is more interesting than the Khaan TF, I don't know, but it just bugs me that this was the perfect opportunity to have something more elaborate than chipping down a mountain of hitpoints, and yet that's what it comes down to.

Big stats do not make for a cool boss, guys. It just makes the fight tedious and boring. A cool boss fight is something which involves something OTHER than punching the boss until its health drops. Have him retreat, have him become very vulnerable, have him start charging up a big attack that we can interrupt, have him run away and hide behind a door we have to tear down. Just something more than tank-n-spank.