Samuel_Tow

The original notion was putting in clubs and bats and sticks for sword weapon options, which IS ridiculous. We have cubbing powersets, those go in them. If we don't have the right clubbing powerset, a new one can be considered. But a clubbing weapon does not go in a cutting powerset.

Tonfa, for instance, do not go in Dual Blades, unless you're looking at a tonfa like the one Stryder Hiryu wields, which is more like a sword with a perpendicular handle. Dual Blades are called that because the powerset revolves around blades. Ergo, non-bladed weapons have no place in a Dual Blades powerset. Furthermore, though the developers didn't want to call it that, the set is thematically written around swords, so axes, chakrims, pitckforks an whatever other weapons could have blades but don't conform to the sword shape also aren't appropriate.

I look at it this way - you can put ANY weapon in any of the sword sets as long as it's able to cut and/or pierce in the manner depicted by the set. As long as the weapon can do the set's damage type and perform the set's attacks without looking stupid, I don't care if it's a wooden sword, an energy sword or a fire sword.

Which brings us back to the original point - a club cannot cut (and if it can, it's not a club and defeats the purpose if it being non-lethal), therefore it shouldn't be in a set built around a cutting weapon. It should instead go in the set built around a bashing weapon.

See, this I like. We already have boss-affecting options and EB affecting options. Instead of being just ON or OFF, we could (in the future) maybe see a few more variants. For bosses, my "Only degrade non-named" bosses is one third option, and as per your idea, "Degrade ALL AVs" sounds like a good plan.

Let's say..

Bosses:
None when solo
Only named bosses
All bosses

AVs:
Scale down for all teams
Scale down for small teams
Do not scale down at all

Granted, the systematics behind these changes are probably far more complicated than just flipping a switch, but it's something to consider in the future.

Huh... I didn't know that. I thought I had negative rep entries without comments, but if there were any, they've scrolled off the list. Either way, it's anonymous communication, and I don't feel I'm bound to keep the confidentiality of the anonymous person commenting.

That, and why complain about negative rep comments when I have rep turned off? Easy. I don't have my reputation turned off, I have it hidden, and I still read the comments. I'm complaining about the comment, not the rep. I'd have complained about it if it came with positive rep just the same.

I CAN handle bosses. Some are harder than others, and Master Illusionists probably skirt the line of what I can handle, but I CAN handle them. Heck, they're even fun to fight, occasionally. Fighting them all the time, however, is not nearly as fun. It's tedious, it's immersion-breaking (what kind of an organisation has more bosses than subordinates?) and it takes a lot away from the confrontation with THE boss at the end.

Incidentally, the final problem isn't solved by turning bosses off. It degrades bosses in regular spawns, which is good, but it also degrades the final boss, which kind of defeats the purpose. EBs don't scale, granted, but EBs are the exception, not the rule.

As far as I know, that's the polite way to file a complaint and make a request for a fix/addition. The world doesn't need to revolve around me for me to have a point, and a point is all I made - it seems to me that boss spawns are far too excessive, so I would like to either see them reduced, to be given an option to reduce them for myself only, or to have a third option for solo bosses, which degrades only unnamed bosses. It's up to other people to see if they agree with me and up to the developers to determine whether this is an actual bug or a legitimate change, and if that's how it should be.

That's all any of us "white names" have here on the forums - opinions and desires, and the only way to communicate them is to post them.

This thread is producing some interesting results. See, I read my comments. Isn't the point of making a comment for me to read it? If you don't want me complaining about comments, wise guy, don't leave me any comments. You can down-rep me without any comment at all. If it's in my inbox, I get to do whatever I want with it

See, originally I thought the rep system was a bad idea. I still don't believe in the actual RATING of it, but I always enjoy seeing the comments.

Ridiculous? Actually, it is. It makes sense as the logical extension of an argument, but when it comes to physical damage, certain things just look silly. Weapons which are intended to cut and pierce need to LOOK like they can cut and pierce. While a wooden sword may sort of pass, a baseball bat would certainly NOT. Giving, say, a mallet or a frying pan to a sword set and letting you cut with that is no less ridiculous than giving a balloon animal sword to a sword set and letting you cut with THAT.

Some things you can ignore for the sake of the rule of cool, but they still need to make sense. I can see a weapon which sparks electricity not doing electrical damage, but because it's cool and because you can have electrical sparks that don't damage tissue, but I cannot see stabbing a person with a bowling ball, say.

Honestly, if we could get SCRIPTED bosses to remain boss-level, but all other bosses to scale, I'd choose that option and never look back. I'm not a fan of random boss spawns. One or two liven things up. A dozen or two just bog things down. But a boss at the end of the mission really OUGHT to be a boss.

I look at it this way. A Tank Swiper I can see scaling down to lieutenant. He's still more dangerous, but he isn't a bog boss. But Killdozer really SHOULD be a boss.

And I honestly didn't see this many bosses before I16. I saw bosses in spawns, that I did. I didn't see as many, not by a long shot. I could be wrong, but this is my impression.

More or less. I see a negative, unintended change, and I want it fixed. If it's not unintended (whether or not it's negative is, obviously, debatable), I'd like to know that. I'll add it to my list of things I dislike about the game and try to find some way to deal with it.

To answer the question of "why the game should be changed when [I] have so many options to solve the Carnie boss problem," let me explain how I see things. I played the game happy as punch. No complaints whatsoever, not in this regard, at least. Then suddenly, this improvement strikes, and I think GREAT! The game is evolving, we have more options, what could be better? Except it's not an improvement. Before and now, ONE difficulty option is all I need. One option that I can play at with all my characters. I had one option. I no longer have it. This, to me, is a change for the worse.

Furthermore, my ability to solve my problem comes with its own problems. I can disable bosses, yes. But, as I said before, I WANT to fight bosses. Missions ending in a boss fight aren't as exciting when that degrades into a lieutenant fight. But we don't have an option to keep end-of-mission bosses or scripted bosses while getting rid of all the other random boss spawns. If we did, I'd use it, but we don't. So my solution is either far too hard, or far too easy. For a change that was supposed to add more options, specifically more options in-between what we had, all that's done is take away from what options I used to have.

I've taken the step and gone to -1x3 with no bosses. It's cool, in that I'm facing huge spawns I can beat up at my leisure, and I can't deny that pwning all of those many Master Illusionists I'm meeting in a couple of sword swings isn't satisfying in a vindictive, malicious way. At the same time, though, now it's all one big minion fight. No end of mission boss, no final climax. It just... Peters out with a two-swing fight at the end. Hell, I one-shotted one lieutenant Dark Ring Mistress a while back before she could even get her Mask of Vitiation out. I guess I could still rely on elite bosses to provide boss fights, but those really aren't anywhere to be found in City of Heroes pre-40, and aren't actually in many places post-40, either, outside of Maria Jenkins and Tina Macintyre.

And again, I'm not saying the game should be changed. It WAS changed, and I wish it weren't, or at least I wish we had something resembling what we used to have. I lost an option I liked. Why is that so difficult to understand?

I'm sort of in the same camp as Perfect Pain on this one, though not quite as extremely. I don't mind fighting bosses. I grew up on the old arcades, and I'm used to fighting my way through a whole level of many baddies at a time, finally ending up at the level boss and then having a boss fight. I like fighting bosses in this way, because it really does present a nice ramp-up of power throughout each mission. Heck, I don't even mind fighting the occasional boss throughout the missions, themselves. Remember how Cadillacs and Dinosaurs would shove in the first boss as a regular enemy in later stages? Golden Axe did that a lot, too. So I don't mind that.

What I DO mind is playing City of Warcraft, where every fight is against one, single, tough enemy that takes a long time and is very dangerous. Not only do I HATE that framework (I'll pick many enemies over hard enemies even on characters that lack AoE), I also want to keep bosses being MEANINGFUL. Missions spawns are cannon fodder, just for the fact that we have to go through mountains of them anyway. Bosses in most mission spawns just makes bosses themselves cannon fodder. Rather tough, annoying cannon fodder, obviously, but cannon fodder nonetheless. And they shouldn't be.

Back once again to Jack's old vision of what a boss would be - a tough enemy which would provide a meaningful, gripping fight to culminate a mission. Back then bosses didn't actually spawn anywhere in solo spawns OR anywhere in the streets. Street bosses, at least in the lower levels (I didn't have high-level characters at the time) started showing up only around I1, when after a long time cruising Steel Canyon, I finally saw my first Oberst in the street. Back then, bosses were meaningful. You didn't see them often, sometimes you didn't see them at all. Occasionally they'd pop up and REALLY throw things for a loop with their raw power and with their unusual selection of powers. These days, this is no longer the case. Bosses are everywhere, and even more so since the difficulty changes.

About the only faction that still has these "interesting" bosses are Malta, and more from unintentionally one-sided spawn rules, I think, more than anything else. Almost every time a Malta mission calls for a boss, it'll be a Gunslinger. Almost never will it be anything else, but if it IS, it'll be a Zeus Class Titan. A few missions call for Zeus Titans specifically, so you're likely to see a few more of those. But... You know, there's one more kind of boss, the TacOps Commander or whatever he's called (they're so rare I don't even remember). These do not spawn. Ever. Since I made 50 back in January of 2005, I have only ever seen a hadful of these, maybe five or so, and most of them have been in spawns that SPECIFICALLY call for one. I've seen them random spawn I think twice in coming on five years. They're nasty, mind you, but I enjoy fighting them anyway, because they're such a change of pace from Gunslinger, Gunslinger, Gunslinger.

And again - I'm not trying to take away people's difficulty or make the game easier or what have you. We already have a difficulty setting that goes FAR higher than anything I even want to consider. I just want there to be something for everyone and I want to AVOID the old heroic, where it was either "everything easy" or "nothing really easy at all" with nothing in-between. But you know what? If bosses have become so common that the game will stuff them in half my spawns, then maybe I'll go with the system and just make them into common lieutenants and just deal with that problem by making the game EVEN EASIER. Even I think that going to to "no bosses when solo" would be cheating, but I'd rather cheat than play a game I don't enjoy.

I'm not even going to comment on "learn to play," but "leave my boss spawns alone?" Go to hell! You leave MY boss spawns alone! I quite enjoyed them, before they were changed to something I DON'T enjoy. For the umpteenth time, the POINT of more options for difficulty was to have more options for difficulty. Well, I don't have more options. In fact, I LACK the one option I liked. Right now, I have NO options.

So I hope I'll be forgiven if I don't appreciate having MY favourite difficulty setting ruined so someone else can have more fun with it while I rant and curse at my screen, specifically because there was NO NEED to mess it up and, from the looks of things, it wasn't even intended.

Trouble? You bet! When I have my eye on that EB who killed me and I want to rush back and have my revenge, the LAST thing I want to do is zone into Pocket D or cross the zone twice so I can get to the Architect before I get back into the fight. The hospital trip is punishment enough, to say nothing of the debt. I don't need the aggravation of wanting to settle the score and being sidetracked in doing so.

If I want inspirations for the sake of having inspirations (and I don't want to wait on drops for some reason), then sure. I'll go to wherever I need to go to get them. Since I don't want them RIGHT NOW HURRY I can invest the time needed to go to wherever I need to go.

However, any situation that sends me to the hospital (and mind you, I do my darnest to avoid going) also sends me there with an EMPTY inspirations tray. If I resorted to going there, that means I used up ALL of my other options and I still failed. Therefore, every time I am there, I need more inspirations to kill whatever it is that killed me. Going against the EB that killed me with an empty inspirations tray is akin to Diablo 2 making you go back to the boss that killed you NAKED so that you can pick your items back up. And when I'm hurt, angry and looking for payback, I do NOT want to run all over creation to search for an inspirations vendor.

And it's ten times worse when I'm on a TF. Seriously, if you lose you're inspirations in Cimerora, you're SOL. NO-ONE sells any. At all. Especially when you're doing the ITF.

You could put it in General Discussions. It's still CoH-related, because it can draw inspiration and it's rooted in game design, but it's not so much a suggestion as a topic for discussion. I've posted a few of those there, and I usually get good response, even if not always very populous. Just preface it with an explanation that this is not a suggestion and not a change to city of heroes, but a hypothetical design for a theoretical MMO.

I'm glad you enjoy it, but what am I supposed to do now? I used to enjoy Tenacious, and now it's GONE. I'm glad you're happy, but I'm not glad you're happy AT MY EXPENSE. Please, forgive my selfishness. It's not going away.

*edit*
Listen, let me clear something up. I thought the point of the new difficulty options was to give us... Well, more options. If I want my game to be easy, I can make it exactly as easy as I want, and if you want it to be hard, then you can make it harder. I was happy with how hard Tenacious was before, both in terms of levels and in terms of amount of enemies. Now that option is gone, because it spawns so many bosses it's not as easy as it used to be, and I have nothing between that and the uninteresting +0x1, which simply spawns far too few enemies for the game to look good. I like my hordes of 5-6 minions, I just don't like the hordes of bosses.

I couldn't dream of fighting +2x5 on ANY of my characters and have any hope of succeeding, not in more than one fight. I pick +0x2 specifically BECAUSE it's easy and I don't have to struggle for my life all the time. And, evidently, it's not easy enough given how many deaths I racked up today.

Maybe you're a better player than me, or maybe your characters are built better. Either way, the POINT of letting us choose our difficulty is so that we may all have fun. With this in mind, I don't think making my favourite pre-I16 difficulty setting significantly harder is conducive to that.

Actually, the "Does prefer fighting bosses when alone" option is what keeps bosses, ANY bosses, from scaling down into lieutenants when solo. I could up the team size (and even +3 produced groups of TWO bosses), but they will still scale down to lieutenants if I don't prefer fighting them, so to speak. At least that's how I'm led to believe the option works.

Bosses in every spawn are not "ok to fight," however. For one, they're a chore, boring, tedious fight that takes far too frikkin' long for it to occur every spawn and drag missions into hour-length (literally hour-length, I took pretty long clearing an outdoor instance jam-packed with Master Illusionists). For another, it's a step DOWN from what we had before. Before, people were complaining that they liked the Heroic difficulty, but still wanted to fight bosses because they could. The new difficulty settings were, among other things, supposed to let people play Heroic yet still have bosses. Not only does THAT not seem to be the case, but now MY difficulty setting is also messed up, making "sort-Tenacious" a lot harder than it used to be, and a lot harder than it has to be.

The game is not "easy enough." It never was, it never will be. I can choose to engage in the long, boring, tedious process of making overpowered characters via inventions and specific builds, and maybe then I'd find it too easy, but I enjoy the game because I can build how I LIKE and still manage just fine. It was never too easy for me, it was always just right - I'm stronger than they are, and I feel like it, too. I no longer feel that.

In fact, I'm one step away from telling off the entire system and going down to -1x3 no bosses no AVs. I'm sick and tired of fighting for my life, and I am SICK AND TIRED of getting killed by Master Illusionists. I must have gone down half a dozen times just since making this thread, and that's too much in my book. Especially since I don't have a self-rez.

*edit*
Scratch one more stupid death to a Dark Ring Mistress who managed to shock-damage me for 3/4 of my health. I've about had enough. This fights aren't impossible, but they're hard and they're tedious, and if they can't be rare, I'm going to make them disappear altogether. At least EBs don't random-spawn.

Of course, I can wait for a solution, and Arbiter Kim's involvement makes me feel really good about it. But I'm just saying that I am NOT happy with the situation as is, and I'm really looking forward to a fix or a change.

Well, at the moment, no, but I'd consider that a bug in need of fixing. As I've seen it rigged, the different-class critters we see aren't the same critter with a different class, they're actually completely separate critters in general. It should, therefore, be possible to make lieutenant-degraded-bosses shift into other lieutenant-degreased bosses just by altering what gets spawned.

Obviously, Standard Code Rant applies, so I can never know anything, only suspect. And, yes, I stole that line, sort of.

Yikes, I think I neglected mentioning that in the original post!

My difficulty settings are:

-- Capable of fighting enemies at your current security level.
-- Combat equivalent of 2 standard heroes.
-- Does prefer fighting bosses when alone.
-- Does not prefer to fight Arch-Villains.

That's off the Hero Corps Field Analyst, a direct copy/paste.

*edit*
Also, because I failed to say hi in your welcome thread, I want to take this opportunity to say: Thank you, Arbiter Kim, for taking the time to look into this. I appreciate this greatly, and this kind of thing is one of the BIG reasons why I love this game

DJ Zero is kind of the low-key reality warper of Paragon City. He has his own pocket dimension he apparently carved out of nothing (which seems to be a task of cosmic proportions) and who has enough power to punch through to maintain that dimension AND punch through to any section of the world he chooses. We tend to ignore him because, well... He's just a DJ and all he does with his power is run a night club. But the power he has, I suspect, is FAR greater than he's letting on. Look at how he does things. He needs Snaptooth dealt with, so he simply opens up a portal (to Villa Requin, for some reason) like he's flipping open his jacket.

Now, I could weave conspiracy theories about a possible link between the Dream Doctor and DJ Zero, either in terms of that "piece" he left of himself or as a hidden identity, but I won't do that. Idle speculation isn't interesting. Instead, let me say this - the powers DJ zero demonstrates could, at least theoretically, be used to trick an omniscient being into an alternate dimension created specifically to trap him in a dream. Even if Rularuu then proceeds to devour the dimension, he is still trapped in his own mind and unable to escape. A dimension bender, to borrow a term, would be ideal for fighting a dimension ravager. In fact...

This may well be why the Dream Doctor considers himself a counterpart to Rularuu. If they are both dimension benders, then it makes sense. Of course, Rularuu travels between dimensions, destroying them, whereas the Dream Doctor may well be able to create them. Let's think abstract for a second. I trust we've all seen the idea about the dream world at some time or another, as well as that idea expanded to suggest that each time a person dreams, he creates his own, unique, separate world where the dreams actually take place. It's easy to extend this logic, then, to a Dream Doctor who fancies himself a counterpart of a being whose primary occupation is destroying dimensions.

I'm obviously blindly guessing here, but it's an interesting prospect - what if it's possible to create entire alternate dimensions just by creating a dream. It's off-the-wall, obviously, but it would actually fit the circumstances. If he crafted an entirely new dimension to trap Rularuu inside his own dream in a dimension where his dimension bending wouldn't work, then that... Whole mess of random thoughts might actually string itself together into something that seems to make sense.

Of course, I'm certain that the story bible has a much simpler, much less abstract explanation, but I actually kind of like the notion of an entire dimension consisting of the mind of a god, trapped inside his own mind, watching it tear itself apart into madness and disarray, unable to do anything because his very mind is out of his hands.

*edit*
Man, I should really start writing more focused and less sappy stories again... I miss that freedom to make up utter nonsense and still retain logical flow.

Ah, this is the other thing. Before, you'd get larger spawns at the mission (plus difficulty) level, or smaller spawns at +1. This is no longer the case, and I'm seeing larger spawns at +1, which makes for some NASTY encounters.

For instance, before they only spawns, really, you could meet at +1 were either three +1 minions, a +1 minion and lieutenant, or just a +1 lieutenant. So often now I've met spawns of TWO +1 lieutenants and a minion, something which should have been EVEN CON, as well as a large spawn of SIX +1 minions, which has no business spawning at +0x2. When levels and spawn sizes were detached from each other, it seems like small spawns are appearing lower-level and large ones are appearing higher-level, when they ought to follow the old rules - many enemies OR strong enemies, never many AND strong, neither many NOR strong. Difficulty varies a lot more wildly now, even before bosses are taken into account.

With them... Let's just say that for the first time in five years I'm considering going with no bosses when solo. And not because I can't beat them (even though they're tough), but because it's DULL fighting boss after boss after boss. Missions take ages to clear, every fight is tooth and nail, inspirations run faster than they drop (imagine that - single-boss spawns drop fewer inspirations that 6-minions spawns) an everything just grinds to a halt. Before I could feel like an unstoppable juggernaut of power even with a casual build, because I could ram through hordes of enemies without stopping to take names. Now, I fight "big bads" every five feet, and I feel like a chump.

Huh... I checked out that thread, and that is a curious thing. Thinking back on it, aside from named mission bosses, I don't recall seeing Council bosses almost at all. Even back in the day, even before the Council takeover, I hardly ever saw an Oberst. Odd. Personally, I don't find this to be as bad as ALL BOSSES, ALL THE TIME, as at least you can move at a reasonable pace, but it seems to me there are still a few gremlins in the machine.

Most notably, it seems to me that none of the options for spawn point are weighted at all. You're just as likely to run across a boss as you are to run across a bunch of minions, and as far as I'm concerned, that shouldn't be the case. Bosses are nasty. Even the simpler bosses like Council Archons or Warriors Elites are nasty. Nastier than big groups of minions, at any rate. That's not to say they shouldn't spawn, but they shouldn't spawn as frequently as groups of minions. Far as I'm concerned, the two-lieutenant, plus one-minion spawns ought to be a bit more rare, as well.

Really, bosses ought to be... Well, bosses. The big, powerful enemies who head up the bad guys. They shouldn't be more populous than their lieutenants (and I STILL saw more Master Illusionists in this mission than I saw Illusionists!) and they certainly shouldn't be all over the place. I may not share Jack's vision that a boss should need a team, but I share his sentiment that boss should be a big, meaningful fight. Right now, it's status quo.

Interestingly, I had an argument sort of about that with Zombra a while ago, with me saying "I don't want every fight to be a boss fight." Back then I didn't mean bosses, as in the class of enemy, but rather I wanted to say that his choice to play on Invincible with each fight being a tough matter of life and death wasn't something I liked. I was much happier ploughing through hordes of faceless goons, only to reach a boss fight in the end. Ironic, really, that what I said I didn't want is exactly what I'm seeing now. Every fight is a boss fight, literally and figuratively.

I'm not sure if that's quite accurate, Cat. Last time I made a thread like this, Mod 8 said:

I remember how things were before the I16 difficulty changes. I remember the change that made bosses spawn in missions at all, and outside the occasional all-Protector mission (protector bosses, mind you, not the Paragon Protectors faction), I only rarely saw bosses at all. I'd see the named boss and maybe one or two more in an entire mission, and sometimes I wouldn't see any at all. Right now, every other to every third spawn is a boss, and most of those are +1 bosses (when the mission is set to +0). This is like that once-per-week all-Protector mission... EVERY TIME.

I also remember Lost and Rikti and how they spawned their bosses. Again, they spawned them, but boss spawns were rare. One or two, maybe three or four if the mission was large enough. But nothing like what I'm seeing now. It's Master Illusionist after Master Illusionist after Master Illusionist. Literally like that, at some points. I get to a T intersection and look around. To my left, a +1 Master Illusionist. To my right, a +0 Master Illusionist. Or I go down a hallway. First, there's a Dark Ring Mistress. Up next is a Dark Ring Mistress. Then there's a regular spawn, and then around the corner a +1 Master Illusionist.

These bosses are NASTY. Remeber back in the day when Jack wanted bosses to require a team? Not quite THAT nasty, but that's when the Carnival of Shadows and the Malta group were designed. Their bosses are MEAN, which is balanced by them being very rare unless have a team, in which case you have help. I shudder to think of fighting Malta now, if I'll be fighting Gunslinger boss after Gunslinger boss after Zeus Titan.

Amusingly, it's like Jack's dream finally came true - bosses are a ***** to solo now, if you'll pardon my English. And I somehow don't think that was the intent.

*edit*
That's just funny. I stopped to reply when I met a Master Illusionist. I went back into the game, beat her and what do I face next spawn? Dark Ring Mistress! Ugh...

And then a regular spawn next spawn, and then another Dark Ring Mistress. I can keep narrating like this all day, and it'll all sound the same. Boss, boss, boss!

To be fair, if the didn't COST SO DAMN MUCH, I'd be much more inclined to take repulse powers and use them more often. I'm a great believe not in raw power, but in final worth. A power must be not just strong, but also cheap enough to be worth it, and I just don't think repulsion powers are worth the cost.

Now, Force Bubble, that's another matter entirely. It's roughly in the same boat, but it isn't nearly as costly.