Samuel_Tow

To note: nothing has ever been able to affect the width of a cone's arc in the history of the game. Even back when we had cone range enhancements, all those did was boost the cone range, leaving the arc as it was. But as you note, a higher cone range does mean more area, and it does mean a wider are of effect by virtue of the the arc widening the farther away it moves from the player.

It's kind of a problem that Boost Range doesn't affect PBAoE powers, though. That way, it seriously favours cone-heavy Blasters like Assault Rifle (like THAT needed more AoE).

See, now THAT actually gives the thread a point.

What's not good about Masterminds, in order of appearance:

*Micromanagement. While it's completely possible to just run around in Bodyguard and do nothing, an able Mastermind requires henchmen controls, for which a decent interface simply doesn't exist in the game. This requires Mastermind binds, which cross over into advanced player category. On the other hand, any yahoo can grab a Scrapper and kill things indiscriminately, just like I did when I first started playing.

*Damage multiplication. A Mastermind has a very large pool of total hit points, but because he's dragging around a whole mob with him, he can suffer damage much faster. This makes AoE attacks incredibly dangerous on a Mastermind (seven times more dangerous to a high-level one), making enemies with heavy AoE damage a significant threat.

*Reliance on AI. Mastermind performance relies on the performance of the AI-controlled henchmen, which even as good as it is now, is still notoriously bad. Even Controllers don't have as much to worry about in this regard, as they have fewer pets with fewer powers over which they have less control. Mastermind henchmen need to be controlled, and they don't always listen. Pet attack preferences are still problematic, pet aggro is unreliable and their refusal to respond when hit with Avoid effects can be lethal.

*Enemy strength multiplication. Some enemies draw power from players surrounding them. The more the players, the stronger the enemy. Bone Daddies use Soul Drain, Behemoths use Invincibility, and Nictus Romulus' healing Nictus heals off players in its (HUGE) range. A team of players is rarely big enough to make THAT much of a difference, but even a single Mastermind brings with him six extra targets for draining. A couple of Masterminds on a team can make a Behemoth unhittable and the healing Nictus unkillable.

And that's just off-hand.

That's probably because Equilibrium (and its sequel, but what is the ever) is the only movie which actually has characters do something with their pistols above just shooting them from a stationary or running position. The science behind the movie is total crap, of course, but so what? It's not about science, it's about people shooting each other dead and looking cool doing it

I did a little look at other games and movies which featured dual pistols, and I have to say that, yes, all of them focus mostly on just shooting the things Lara Croft style. Devil May Cry has a few interesting attacks with them, but for the most part, it' still just shooting guns. Oniblade has those super-awesome gublades which are a sort of double-barelled revolver with a huge blade in the middle, but the few pistol attacks are essentially shoot, shoot faster, shoot exploding bullets, shoot bullets in a cone, shoot bullets that ricochet, all done from the same standing pose. Advent Rising has some of gaming's most impressive guns which, combined with the game's system of acrobatics, end up being used on the move in a BIG way, yet still in what is essentially a point-and-shoot way. Still, shooting at your enemies while corkscrewing through the air is cooler than most other applications. Max Payne has his trusty dual Beretas, but this is probably the worst incarnation of dual handguns I've seen, because it doesn't look good and doesn't work with Max's style of dives and slow motion. On the other hand, the special reload mechanic in Max Payne 2's bullet mode makes them well worth it.

Giant paragraph over and to recap - most movies and games that have characters use dual pistols have them do, essentially, one thing with them - point and shoot. If you're going to make a full powerset with at least 7 attacks, you're going to need something more than just that. Enter Equilibrium, and whether or not the movie was good, the gunplay was creative.

In other words, about absolutely nothing. Masterminds are a good, strong AT that excels at something and falls behind in others.

Too early to complain, you say? Hmm...

Dual Pistols is a powerset that, from my perspective, fills in the role of a flashy gunslinger/gunkata artist. It's not there to represent a serious, reserved soldier or curt mercenary who just happens to be using two handguns instead of a rifle. As such, making it anything BUT flashy does a disservice to the kinds of concepts which most call for a set like this.

That's not a good analogy. If we go with a game as a novel, the cover is equal to the main menu screen. What graphics are equal to is style of writing, spelling and vocabulary. You can have the most amazing story in the world, rife with interesting plot twists, engaging moral questions and great creativity, but if it feels like it was written by an illiterate first-grader on a mobile phone in-between classes, all of that doesn't matter.

Simply put, if I can't stand to look at a game, it doesn't matter what the game is actually about. By comparison, I can play a game with exceptional graphics even if it's quite bad without batting an eye much. Why would I play any of the Need For Speed games, otherwise?

See, as I said before, it IS possible to fudge it by providing underwater alternatives to overland powers. The problem with that is that most, if not ALL powers, would need to have new graphics added to them. And not just new colours, I mean brand new sprite effects, models and, sometimes, even animations. A smoke grenade in air creates a rapidly-expanding, rising cloud of smoke. An ink-grenade in water creates a slower-moving blotch of ink which expands via omni-directional tendrils and tends to float in place, slowly sinking over time. Just slapping smoke as you see in air into an underwater environment is a GREAT way to make it feel like a suspiciously blue cave. You need new graphics, and those have been at a premium.

Again - if it can be made to look right, with powers having the proper animations, then I can't really argue against it since this is my problem. However, that's a big IF.

No effects kills the sounds of powers, as well. I wouldn't be opposed to a no-sound option for powers, but since they fade, why is that a problem?

And here I thought we were going to talk about character-specific sound customization, like the sound of footsteps. Though, the HeroCon video suggests that that might be rectified.

Hide has a different sort of balancing mechanic - it makes you invisible and makes it impossible to transport certain hostages, among other things. It's true that most Stalkers will keep Hide on almost all the time, but all of them will have reasons to turn it off at some point. If it weren't for that, I'd make it either part of the Inherent or make it a passive power granted at level 1.

You contradict yourself with these two statements. What you said is exactly what doom is made out of - the notion that it looks really bad when, as a point of fact, we know absolutely nothing. This is no different than walking into a custom car being built while the mechanics are showing off all the cool suspension bits and saying that from the looks of it, this car won't have any bodywork done at all. I mean look at it! It's just a chassis!

You are looking at a sneak peak of a badly unfinished product. You CANNOT make an estimate as to how much more will or will not be in it. Stop trying to.

I snipped up the original post down to the points I want to respond to.

I don't know if you're the ONLY person who wants a non-fancy handguns set, but I'd wager a bet you're in the minority. As you said yourself, plain animations are boring, and there are really only so many ways to shoot a gun before you start repeating the same animation over and over again. Trust me, I LOVE Broadsword as much as the next guy - it's my very most favourite set. But even I can tell you that it has redundant, boring attacks to a large extent. Unlike dual handguns, Broadsword sells on being direct and brutal, so simple, powerful strikes are its thing, but even then, there are only so many strikes you can make before you HAVE to improvise. We have 7 attack powers and only four primary directions we can attack in, so we end up repeating ourselves, such as Hack being the same thing as Head Splitter, only without a step forward.

Personally, I'd say the Mastermind handguns set is about the upper limit of what you can do with handguns before it becomes boring. Shoot one gun, shoot both guns, shoot both guns a lot. What else is there to add? Shoot one gun a lot? Shoot one gun very slowly? It becomes redundant and very, very uninteresting. Hell, look at Assault Rifle. It's about the most boring set we have in the game in terms of animations. Each attack is essentially "shoot the rifle." And even that isn't quite as boring as that, varying ammunitions a LOT between attacks. Personally, I'm glad dual handguns aren't made to be an Assault Rifle clone, with a few regular attacks and a bunch of custom ammo.

See, here's the thing - in almost any situation where open fighting is involved, handguns are always inferior to larger firearms in terms of power, but superior to them in terms of agility. There's no reason, thematically, to have a handgun set that's slow and uninteresting, because it's like a rifle set, only worse. The advantage of handguns is that it's easier to move around with them as one-handed weapons than it is to move around with a large two-handed omnigun. Hence, they are faster.

Personally, I find the new handgun set to be a LOT better than what I was expecting it to be. I expected, as you did, that they'd simply recycle the frankly not very impressive Mastermind attacks. Instead, they went with something a lot closer to how I played Advent Rising. Originally I started by relying on large weapons, like assault rifles and rocket launchers, but as the game progressed and I gained more and more supernatural powers (like slowing down time and jump flips to make Neo red with envy), I relied on weapons less and less, and the SLOOOOOWNESS with which larger weapons were drawn was becoming a problem. So, instead, I abandoned large weapons and instead went with pistols which were drawn almost instantly in any situation. And it was awesome!

Let me share one parting sentiment - I LOVE handguns more than any other weapon type exactly because they are so agile. But I like handguns not for their realism, but rather for the absurdity of what they can become in the hands of an imaginative artist. Advent Rising, again, has a few of note. Such as "90 calibre, armour-piercing concussive rounds" fired out of a handgun that can shoot about 9 rounds per SECOND and can be dual-wielded. Or a handgun powered by cold fusion which shoots raw energy and can shoot GRENADES and can, of course, be dual-wielded. Or the Seeker handgun, which can fire rounds that bounce between up to five targets each at the cost of five rounds per shot, shoot at about 4 rounds per second, hit like a train on each bounce AND be dual-wielded. I don't think I've seen a game where you could use nothing but handguns and sew so much carnage.

In fact, Advent Rising transformed my view of what dual handgun combat could be like. Before, my view of what it was like came from Devil May Cry and Oniblade (I should talk about gunblades at some point), which essentially had you shooting and shooting and shooting at an enemy until you brought it down, with damage inferior to your oversized sword. Essentially, it would be pop-pop-pop one down pop-pop-pop two down etc. In advent rising, it's more like bambambambambam 15 people down. I could literally squeeze the entire magazines of two handguns in less than a second and lay waste to an entire platoon. THAT is what I want my handgun fighter to be like. I loved Advent Rising for it, even if I had to save ammo a lot. Dive in via forward-flying corkscrew, unload two handguns into a platoon of aliens, land in a super-cool pose and reload both handguns by spinning them in your hands behind your back. It doesn't get more impressive than. It's like having an A10 Warthog strafe them, only it's one guy doing that.

THAT is what I want to see.

This is what it comes down to for me. There has to be a reason to turn off sprint (it doesn't suppress, after all), because if there isn't one, I'd suggest axing it out of the game and just giving everyone either a base run speed increase, or a constantly-running passive run speed buff at level 1. Toggles are powers that need to have a reason to be turned off, and for most toggles, that reason is cost. Without cost, they don't need to be toggles.

I somehow don't feel that "your vehicle will tumble in a weightless, endless void for all times" is a better alternative to the common parking metre.

The human mind's potential is only as infinite as the human mind's imagination, which isn't anything even remotely like infinite. It only feels infinite because people keep coming up with things we could never have conceived of, making it seem infinite because we feel we're close to infinite, ourselves. But that's humanity's bloated ego. We're great, and anything greater than us must be the greatest thing ever.

The human mind's potential is just great enough to outpace the human mind's rather limited imagination, and that's hardly unlimited.

Except we already HAVE those zones, and as long as they're made and in the game, I'd rather have them than not have them. They may not be a smart investment, but they're an investment that's made and irreversible. Instead of complaining about it, I choose to enjoy it, because I really DO prefer redundant zones. I know, practically speaking, we won't get any more of them, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy the concept of them, and where they already exist, I revel in it.

I actually think that might be more problem of communication. I suspect the faction-binding and "new stuff" will go up to around level 20, after which you settle into doing more missions in Praetoria the same way you do them in City of Heroes and City of Villains. Of course, it could also mean "We've made them up to level 20 so far." Or it could just mean "We realise the 1-20 game is pretty bad, so we're focusing on remaking that. The upper level game doesn't need this much innovation."

Either way, we're speculating over one single bullet point.

There are a few concept still left unattainable. Things like Summon/Melee, Assault/Defence and so forth. You could KIND OF fudge that with existing ATs, but never quite fully, and there are a few powerset designs we just don't have. I once had an idea about a range/melee single-target primary with a defence/AoE secondary that, obviously, never went anywhere, but there are still a few ATs that can be made and be brand new. I'm not sure we can think up a full five decent ones, but I'm sure we can get five such that at least a couple work for everyone.

Which is odd, because Hordelings have had that tongue attack since I6, which solves a lot of the most difficult problems with such a thing, which is distance and accuracy.

And, really, I don't recall BABs ever mentioning whips would be impossible. A lot of PLAYERS said that, but if BABs said anything at all (and I don't recall him commenting on it), it was more to the effect of "Won't happen. Too much work. Forget about it." Then again, I haven't seen a discussion about that since around I9-I10.

Well, yeah, but Carnies are weak to Lethal damage by 20%.