Samuel_Tow

Lacking a proper, grammatically correct and non-cumbersome way to say this, I would still choose to say "he" over "they" or "he/she." I've spent years trying to write around it, but I inevitably keep writing myself into corners and ending up having to reword entire sentences for no reason other than because enforced gender neutrality is unnatural and forced, purely from a language standpoint.

That, and I'm getting more than a little tired of this endless drive towards complete and utter correctness, in that every word I utter, regardless of context or intent, has to be mindful of everyone else's sensitivities. It doesn't have to be, nor would I WANT it to be. It's cumbersome, it's obstructive, it's restrictive, and it's downright unnecessary. Unless you, or anyone else, assumed I meant that I would show this courtesy to a team-mate if and only if he were a man, but would decidedly NOT show this same courtesy if he were a woman, I don't see why it has to be a problem. And, at least to me, that's not how my statement came off.

Seriously, this is getting to ridiculous levels, like people deciding not to wish each other Merry Christmas because not everyone celebrates Christmans and people who don't might feel "left out." Let's not reduce everything to absolutes, please. Not everything is a sign of segregation.

While I agree with you for the most part, I do like to post random, confusing stupidity from my comments either when I plain old don't get it and hope other people can explain it (which hasn't worked so far) or when I think people can get at least cheap laugh out of it (with mixed results). Either way, people's anonymity does not mean their correspondence won't be aired for all to see should I feel like it.

"His," as was recently pointed out, is actually the English language's gender-neutral pronoun when used in context which does not assume gender. Since the language lacks gender on nouns and adjectives, that's what's left. Either that, or the English language HAS no gender-neutral pronoun, and we have to resort to cumbersome addresses like "he/she" or the gramatically incorrect "their."

Unless gender matters, it's a "he."

But Claws, Dual Blades and Assault Rifle only have one attack that does -defence. That's like saying shields inherently lower enemy outgoing damage because Against All Odds has -damage in it, or that Willpower is based around regeneration because it has one power which grants extra regeneration. I don't see weapon sets as inherently doing -def. It doesn't make sense realistically speaking (because "defence" means two completely unrelated things in this game), and I don't really see it as being mechanically-dictated the same way as cold attacks are associated with slows. Really, Broadsword, Katana and Ninja Blade are the same powerset. You shouldn't count them as three separate powersets, as they're all clones of the same thing. Over the years they've been made more different from each other, but the basic structure of the powersets is the same.

I don't mind your selling the set as aggressive, brutal, fast or long-ranged. The fighting style inherent in the set really isn't something you can get around - each of the current weapon sets has its own fighting style. Broadsword is slow and brutish, Katana is fast and elegant, Dual Blades are smooth and flowing and so on. I don't see why a halberd powerset can't be sweeping and brutal. I don't mind you giving it a feel and a style that fits your idea, but again, I would stop just shy of making the weapon magical or alive. I literally CANNOT accept that. Put the power in the player, give the techniques to the player, let the player decide what this brutality and gore means. Do NOT decide for them. To my eyes, a "Blood Spear" would be on the same level as if we had a "Magic Broadsword" powerset or, even worse, a "Griswold's Edge" powerset. People keep asking for more "natural" powersets. Let's not take one of the few possible new sets with a potential for being natural by making it supernatural.

Well... We also live in a world where I can take a shotgun blast to the face and a rifle burst to the chest and just keep going, but getting hit with a billy club REALLY hurts and stuns me. I've seen plenty of games go the extra mile and explain why people still use swords when laser blasters are freely available. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic did this by the use of "shields" which blasters couldn't penetrate easily, but but conventional blades could slice right through. One would wonder why conventional kinetic rounds couldn't do the same, but maybe in the world of Star Wars people just haven't invented gunpowder.

Either way, the point is that in the world of City of Heroes, melee weapons and short-range powers are often significantly more deadly than ranged weapons and long-range powers. An unbreakable, super-sharp sword in the hands of someone super strong and super fast is deadlier than a gun in the hands of a common thug. In fact, that's a running problem I have with my namesake character - he can see and move faster than bullets, which makes enemy accuracy irrelevant, and there really isn't a good way to make bullets fly faster because they're limited by the gun. The hands and feet of a super martial artist, on the other hand, can move as fast as he can make them, thus lifting that particular restriction.

It's all technobabble in the end, of course, but in our world, swords beat guns. So, picking a spear instead of a run-of-the-mill gun is actually pretty smart, if using it is your super power. After all, the only way to beat a super spear is to have a super gun, and you can't really have a super gun unless you make it yourself, which then requires super intelligence to produce, which not every fighter has.

Personally, I prefer simpler names for powers. Far as I'm concerned, it's a matter of what the power does, not what every move is called. In fact, I once suggested letting us simply outright rename our powers locally. So, if I don't like, say, Hack, I can rename it to Brutal Laceration Yeah!!! and have that appear as a power name in my tray. The system would still treat it as Hack and it would probably come up as that in other people's combat tabs, but for me, it's whatever I named it. This is actually coming up again NOW, because the new alternate Martial Arts and Super Strength animations don't actually correspond to the power names. My Storm Kick is a jab punch and my Crippling Axe Kick is a haymaker punch. Granted, Cobra Strike and Eagle's Claw are ambiguous enough that they can be anything, but the point remains.

Realistically speaking, I hate fancy names. In the span of a couple of months, I was able to learn all the Broadsword names by heart such that I could quote them from memory. And yet five years after the update to Katana which gave it new, fancier names, I STILL don't remember them very well, and mind you my namesake character and first creation uses Katana to this day. I still don't remember if Gabler's Cut was the equivalent for Slash or Hack, and I don't remember what the other one was called. As well, quoting all of these STUPID names, like Divine Avalange or Golden Dragonfly, or Sting of the Wasp (right, THAT'S what the other one was called!) just makes me feel silly. Things like Hack, Slash, Slice and Parry may sound mundane, but they're pragmatic enough to be useful as tools.

I don't shout my attacks as I fight, and I never considered that a good approach. Nor is it actually a good idea in dynamic combat. To this day I still have an echo in my head which shouts "Striker... Slam!" "Devil Spin Kick!" "Cannoball!" "Nucler Tackle!" and so on and so forth. It's just silly in practice. And, lastly, I like to see City of Heroes' combat as a dynamic choreography, not as your typical anime combat with combatants standing around, talking, and occasionally throwing out a very specific, patented attack. I prefer to think of combat as that which can be seen as something like Avatar: The Last Airbender - fast, continuous combat with attacks and defences as the situation demands, and with no attack (other than possibly "lightning") given a specific name.

That's the big problem with them. Snipes have such a high opportunity cost, that they really ought to be powers you go "Man, I know it's hard to pull off, but I REALLY want to use a snipe!" Instead, outside my AR/Dev Blaster, it's usually, at least for me, "Man, I don't want to use a snipe, but I took the power. I gotta' use it!"

Look at something like a nuke. Oh, sure, the cost is absurd - your entire endurance bar and no recovery for a while. But you know what? There has never been a single time when I haven't seen a big, clumped-together spawn and NOT wished Inferno were recharged. And there hasn't been a time when I've used Nova (and didn't miss) that I haven't ended up giggling like a little girl afterwards. Yeah, nukes are costly and situational, but when the situation is right, the cost it WORTH IT.

For how problematic Snipes are, I really want to see them as the power you have to stop yourself from using, not scrape the bottom of the barrel for reasons not to respec out of it.

If only the animation actually matched its effect...

Sonic Attack, a blast damage primary, has resistance debuffs on a lot of its attacks. In fact, each Sonic attack, other than Shockwave (which does knockback) and Siren's Song (which does sleep) has a 13% resistance debuff for 10 seconds, ON TOP OF giving Defiance damage buffs. In fact, just off the list, Shout is a 17.6% damage buff with a 13% damage debuff, all on the same power. I haven't heard anyone complaining that Sonic Attack is badly overpowered, and I don't think that's because it lacks a snipe.

Really, why does everyone think resistance debuffs are so overpowered? The things against which resistance debuffs really matter (e.i. AVs) resist them, and for the rest, the effects aren't that profound. In fact, I don't see why this spear/halberd set can't be billed as armour-piercing as its special property, demolishing the resistance of enemies as you beat on them.

Selling City of Villains as an "expansionalone" was a capital mistake in Cryptic's game plan, as far as I've seen. First of all, despite what some may think, a game ONLY about playing a villain in a city of villains doesn't sell as well as a combo package. Secondly, City of Villains had, and indeed still has, only about as much content in it as a regular expansion pack, and nowhere NEAR enough content to be a standalone game. So when City of Villains didn't bring the expected number of players, NCsoft slashed funding and staff significantly, as per Jack's old interviews.

From everything we've seen, they HAVE learned from their mistakes. While making a full-fledged expansionalone is never a bad idea, it's obvious that Cryptic back in the day and Paragon Studios now just don't have the resources, and indeed the time needed to make a brand spankin' new game complete with all the bells and whistles of a title with five years of development behind it. They've learned they can't do that, and trying to pull it off will only really earn them a small, unpleasable fanbase and not enough return. That's why we're seeing Going Rogue marketed as a conventional expansion, offering not a new game alone and on its own, but an expansion of the current gameplay, mechanics and content. And that's a good thing, too.

As such, I expect the game to retain its original name - City of Heroes - despite any expansions we may get over it.

Well, I certainly don't feel anyone is wrong in saying they play City of Villains, or even City of Heroes and Villains, or even the much-reviled City of... But as far as a commercial name goes, I still feel the name of the game, not just the hero-side, but the WHOLE game, is City of Heroes. I don't believe it needs to change with Going Rogue.

I actually had "Run, Forest! Run!" bound to my Sniper Rifle back in the day. It made shooting down fleeing villains inexplicably much more satisfying when you yell that as you take aim.

Yikes! I should be more careful with those. After all, we all know that TV Tropes will ruin your life!

Well, speaking from personal experience, I've tried all Blaster primaries other than Sonic (which doesn't have a snipe anyway) and everything other than Psi I've played to the higher levels (30+). Now, that's not to claim I'm some kind of expert, or that I'm always right. It's just to explain why I'm talking about them. I've taken Snipes on all my Blasters (who could take any), though I don't use them on all of them. Here's why:

My AR/Dev/Munitions Blaster uses his snipe a lot. Very much as often as he can. The reason for this is simple - Assault Rifle has only two single-target attacks. Even if I could Buckshot, which is both costly and weak, that's still nowhere NEAR enough damage to down resistant bosses. What's more, Devices offers no direct attacks, and even the ridiculously costly Gun Drone doesn't help much with damage. So, I essentially HAVE to use Sniper Rifle as often as I can. What's more, because AR/Dev has neither Build Up nor Aim, I'm not wasting Aim/Build Up time by sniping AND I get a boost to my snipe damage naturally.

My Fire/Fire/Flame Blaster doesn't use her snipe almost at all. There's simply no point. Blaze + Fire Blast does more damage than Blazing Bolt and does so for less time. Given that Flares has such good DPA and DPS overall, and that I can open with Blaze -> Fire Blast -> Flares -> something else -> Flares and throw more damage during the Aim/Build Up window, I have no use for it. What's more, oftentimes I can just go Fireball -> Fire Breath -> Rain of Fire and still have time left to do stuff during my Aim/Build Up window, whereas Blazing Bolt eats up over HALF of that window just by itself, and does damage nowhere NEAR worth the cost.

My Energy/Energy/Force Blaster makes almost no use of her snipe. There just isn't any point. Between Power Burst and all the ludicrous damage output in Energy Manipulation, why would I? It takes bloody ages to snipe, I keep getting interrupted, and at the end of the day, Total Focus does MORE damage in LESS time. I hover all the time, and I have a series of Flight Speed boosting powers, so moving into melee range is easy. As well, Stun + Total Focus is a MUCH better opening on your average boss than Sniper Blast ever could be.

My Electric/Electric Blaster does make some use of Zapp. Occasionally. Electric's lack of a meaningful third single-target attack, however, is the leading cause. I can oftentimes make do with Thunder Strike and Havoc Punch, but when I'm fighting a tough enemy from range, I'll usually fit Zapp somewhere into my attacks. Nevertheless, something as simple as Tesla Cage is much more useful to me than Zapp. It just takes so long to animate, though given that Electric/Electric lacks strong single-target damage, it's kind of justified.

My Archery/Devices Blaster barely ever uses her snipe. I used to open with it back in the day, but ever since I got Rain of Arrows, it has been completely worthless. I'd much sooner open with Rain of Arrows -> Explosive Arrow -> Fistful of Arrows. Even when it comes to single-target damage, Ranged Shot is still worthless. Blazing Arrow deals almost as much damage (seriously), shoots over an 80 foot range, and with Snap Shot being as fast as it is and with such high DPS, it's usually smarter to just go Blazing Arrow -> Snap Shot -> Aimed Shot -> Snap Shot -> Fistful of Arrows -> Snap Shot -> etc. Specifically given how fast Snap Shot and Aimed Shot are and how fast they recharge, Ranged Shot becomes meaningless. That, and I DO have access to Aim, which means I have a time constraint and Ranged Shot wastes time for little return.

My Psychic/Mental Blaster isn't high enough level to comment on yet. I put her on hold a level or two after getting Psychic Lance.

I never said that. What I said was that I didn't find challenge to be integral to a good game, and I'm going to add that I don't find challenge to be all that important, either.

My not the only person who holds this opinion, I can assure you. I'm not going to quote numbers or percentages, but I WILL say that I'm far from alone in not glorifying challenge as the point of a game. In fact, I, personally prefer easy games. I play games for the same reason I watch movies, read games or write fiction - because I like being witness to something cool. "Cool" isn't the same thing as "hard." In fact, very often what "said people" view as truly hard and challenging is actually very much diametrically opposite to cool.

I don't view games as a sport, nor do I play them to be challenged or to win. I play games to have fun, and oftentimes that involves being overpowered and not meeting too much challenge most of the time. In fact, I enjoy replaying good games a second and third time a lot more than I enjoy the original playthrough, because I then know the game and know how to avoid or solve the most challenging problems.

Honestly, I tried changing my one Spines Scrapper's Thorns from what they were originally, and I couldn't bring myself to do it. The original Spines fit his concept too well, as well as fitting his appearance.

In other words, technobable. And I say this with the utmost respect

I still stand by my statement, though - I want to see elemental options for the regular weapons.

Would that it were. The men wear very much full outfits and the women wear those gaudy togas that are inexplicably hard to get. Now, if we could get the outfits of the Sybils in the ITF to use, that might make me feel different, only so much as even seeing them requires doing the TF. Sister I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Ghost-Widow is a good example outside of that, of course.

That alone would be enough for me.

Add to that new ATs and/or new powersets, a few new zones and the mandatory extra costume bits, and I'll have everything I want.

The problem with this is that they can lose MORE than that before they are able to respond by using conventional attacks, and that shouldn't be so. I am squarely against any attack which takes so long for so little damage that you can fire off two conventional attacks in LESS time and do MORE damage. That's just wrong.

As far as I've seen, and I've looked, believe me, snipes are one of CoH's examples of awesome but impractical power.

Saying "forget the grinds" in this context is a conundrum.

I've never found either realism or challenge to be integral to a good game. If it is a Bill suggested and this is reserved only for the higher difficulty settings, then I cannot argue against it, but I am most decidedly AGAINST making the core, base game any more challenging than it is right now.

I've been over this particular detail in other threads, specifically back when I made the "elements of CoH" thread which discussed just that. What I came out understanding that that there really is no one uniform descriptor of what a weapon does in terms of secondary effect. Yes, both Broadsword and Katana do -def, but that has a lot more to do with their being THE SAME SET TWICE OVER than with any sword-wise convention. Granted, Assault Rifle does -def as well, for reasons I cannot understand, but... That's about it. Battle Axe - a bladed weapon - does knockback, so just cutting isn't necessarily synonymous with -def. Heck, "weapon" isn't synonymous with -def, as War Mace does stun and Archery, to the best of my knowledge, does nothing at all. Granted, Archery's special thing isn't what it DOES so much as HOW it does it, as all Archery attacks have a 15.5% extra innate accuracy. That is a LOT.

Even sticking to just swords, though, not even all swords do -def. Dual Blades, for instance, do nothing at all as a secondary effect, other than set up combos. And while, yes, Dual Blades DO have the Weaken combo which does -def (and -tohit), it also has three other combos, one that does +damage, one that does extra damage, and one that does extra damage and knockback. Also, I checked Claws, and only ONE power in the set does -def from what I can tell, that power being Slash. Add to that Spines, which aren't exactly a weapon per se, but are still a slashing attack set. Their secondary effect is toxic DoT.

Really, just a small subset of weapon sets do -def in any consistent way, that being the Broadsword/Katana clones and Assault Rifle, and even those don't do -def on every attack. In fact, the only attack Assault Rifle does -def on is Burst. Slug and Buckshot are knockback, Sniper Rifle is a snipe, both Flamethrower and Ignite are fire attacks and Full Auto does critical hits. In light of all this, I don't see why you can't just slap a -res secondary effect on "just a spear" and go with it. After all, if a sword slash can make you easier to hit after the fact, why can't a halberd swipe make you more susceptible to harm for a short while? Given how abstract the concepts of defence and damage resistance are, I don't see why not. I might not make perfect sense, but then we can cause illusionary damage to DOORS and cause crates to bleed, so I wouldn't say it's THAT far put of left field to give general -res to a Spear set.

BABs once explained why he was apprehensive about giving "plain weapon" sets elemental custom weapons. As his argument went, and I can certainly see his point, players would naturally request that, as long as they're wielding around a fire sword, that they should be doing fire damage, which will not and cannot happen. And, on the other hand, that it would look silly to have a fire sword, but only deal lethal damage. Again, while I can certainly see his point on the matter, I think that ship sailed with the introduction of elemental shields. If we can have a fire shield that doesn't protect from fire or cold any better than from, say, slings and arrows, then why can't we have a fire sword that attacks like a physical blade. Furthermore, we already have pure energy weapons in the face of Vanguard's Talsorian arsenal, yet no-one ever complained that those deal only Lethal damage when they're clearly energy blades.

As far as I'm concerned, giving us an assortment of elemental weapons for the non-elemental sets, at the very least so we can match them to the elemental shields, would be a good move. So, I don't have an argument to counter your notion above. I agree with you.

Now, unless we want to make an argument about the merits of -def vs. the merits of -res, it's already very possible for Broadsword users to gut enemy defences quite seriously, and with NPCs lacking defence debuff resistance, that leads to a cascading defence failure in a lot of cases. This is especially true when fight hard targets with defence. It's hard to hit them once, but as soon as you get a hit through, you're pretty much guaranteed to slaughter them right through their defence. I've watched my Last Hit Chance go up from 50-something% all the way up to 80-something% just cycling my Broadsword attacks. And this affects everybody attacking that enemy at that moment. A Broadsword Scrapper getting a couple of even minor attacks through on a Rikti Drone means the rest of the team is just going to slaughter it.

With this in mind, I don't see why broad-range -res would be that unbalanced. Unless you're looking for -res to be incredibly high, which I actually wouldn't support just on its face, I would fully support it being -res to everything, not just Lethal. And, mind you, even if we were worried about balance, a LOT of attack sets in the game deal lethal damage or have a lethal damage component, so even just that isn't TOO much of a balancing factor. I'd go with broad-range -res just so that it teams a little better.

Just in closing: Only one family of sets, to the best of my knowledge, is actually conceptually loaded, that being the Dark family. Dark Melee, Dark Armour, Dark Blast and Dark Miasma are all very heavily implied to deal with energies from the Netherworld, which is quite strongly implied to be some sort of afterlife/hell/spirit realm, and as such has heavy magic implications. Beyond Dark, though, everything else is an element, and has only properties inherent in that element, not inherent in the style with which it is being applied. Fire is heat and burning, not hatred and destruction, cold is slowness and chill, not loneliness and desolation and energy is concussive force and "generic energy," not the power cosmic or arcane energies. As such, a set which has you "out for blood" is a little more specific than just a spear needs to be. There's nothing stopping you from making the set violent and aggressive, and as much as I dislike it, even bloody and gory, but I'd stop just shy of making it malicious, feeding on blood or lapsing into frenzies. In fact, I never saw Rage as natural power in Super Strength. Not everyone who is super strong takes after the Incredible Hulk.

In short, make it a bloodY spear, just not a blood spear.