Samuel_Tow

Welcome back. We missed you.

I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding here. If the Well of the Furies lore is my mother saying "You'll eat it and like it!" then my responses to it aren't "I'd rather starve!" so much as "I'll eat it, but I won't like it." I'm not refusing to touch any Incarnate content because it's "tainted." I'll be all over Dark Astoria when that comes out. What I'm saying is that while I WILL play the new Incarnate content, I'll enjoy it more if it's not presumptuous.

Obviously, I can't speak for everyone here, only for myself. However, at the same time, being willing to ignore part of the story shouldn't obligate me to never ask for it to be written better.

Good point. The way I'd go about it is I'd have Recluse undergo a crisis of conscience and a "What am I doing with my life?!?" phase, causing him to attempt to help the heroes take down Darryn Wade. However, as this new-found purpose gives him greater mental stability, the plotting mastermind within Recluse would rear its ugly head, and he's start getting ideas. If Darryn took the Statesman's power... Then maybe this power can be taken away from him? If only someone had the right kit for that, this would be a major coup. It would, wouldn't it...?

As I said, Recluse has the look, feel and style of a decent villain, but not the street cred. Turning him into a proper hero would be a waste, in a lot of ways, but having him get dangerously close to becoming a hero, but then succumbing back to his lust for power, thus falling over backwards into villainy would make for a very cool villain reaffirmation arc.

You know what's even better, though? This could be Recluse's big moment. Say he took off and left Arachnos headless, so Daos took over. Well, Daos is old and weak. As much authority as he has, he's still just one old guy trying to manage four immensely powerful, completely unscrupulous individuals who owe him nothing at all, and would have his head on a pike at the first possible opportunity. This is the perfect opportunity to show how Arachnos would descend into utter chaos without Recluse, almost break apart to infighting, lose control of its land and teeter on the brink of collapse.

Then Recluse shows up, armed with more power and bringing back the authority which kept Arachnos together. The moment he shows up, the Patrons recoil and retreat into their strongholds. His mere presence inspires respect among the soldiers present, who salute him as their one true leader. Arbiter Daos, realising his weakness, vacates the leadership position, and Recluse is Lord once again. He ends any real rebellions swiftly and with great brutality, then gathers the Patrons in the same room and hurts them for their betrayal. With Recluse back in command, and armed with new-found motivation and purpose, Arachnos once again becomes major player on the world scene.

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Obviously, you can sell this any number of ways, but a trip like this could put Recluse over REALLY strongly and put his name back on the map. And honestly, after acting like a small fish bully all these years, he needs it. A bit more humanity, a bit more authority and we have an awesome villain on our hands.

Honestly, though, having a former leader return and everyone immediately going "Oh, ****!" and backing down is one of the best ways to put a villain over

Like I said - there's nothing wrong with that. Your dime, your time. And I can see how the pack is disappointing. I would have loved to use some of the head gear on my male automaton from the beginning of time, but he doesn't get any, and wouldn't have gotten any since he's using a Full Helmet, and I'm convinced the art team is unaware that Full Helmets exist in this game.

The game doesn't need to encourage alts any more than it does already, especially at the cost of penalising people who don't want alts. It's already the most alt-friendly game I'm aware of, and a VIP gets a ridiculous number of slots to play around with.

If you're seriously suggesting that a Free player is going to decide to go Premium by buying a very expensive character slot for the sake of seeing another Origin's story, you are sorely mistaken. Either people will just reroll, or as has been my experience every time I try to explain the benefits of buying anything, simply not bother.

We have and we are. Kheldians have their own set of fairly interesting, well-written story arcs. However, I hate the AT from a mechanical standpoint, and the arcs weren't enough to get me to play it. Having to pay for it on top of that is going to be even less motivating.

I'm not against 1-50 story arcs that have a specific origin flavour. I'm against locking them behind an Origin restriction. City of Heroes is a game of choice. If people want to take their power armour dude into a long, winding arc against magic users because of the sense of dissonance, then why not?

I have a couple of points to add here. Elude in its original incarnation was more or less Personal Forcefield. It jacked your defences immesurably high and made you run fast, but prevented you from attacking. The point of the power was just what the name suggested - you used it to elude your pursuers. It was a "Run away! Run away!" power.

Moreover, once upon a time, critters of a higher level and rank got direct to-hit buffs, and not small ones, either. I read somewhere that an even con AV had a 105% base to-hit against you. Even at the much higher toggle defence numbers of the time, that simply took a LOT of defence to fight back.

Now enemies don't start to get to-hit buffs until they hit over +5, and actual for-real to-hit buffs aren't that common, aside from Devouring Earth. Yeah, Trial enemies have a base to-hit of I think 62% instead of the normal 50% (and a lot of them have bled into the non-Trial game, like the 45+ Devouring Earth), bit that's still an increase that's not as significant.

Yes, defence debuffs are fairly prominent, but here's the thing - you combat those much more with defence debuff resistance than with just piling more resistance on top. For the longest time, defence debuff resistance didn't exist in the game. If someone debuffed your defence, you had to just get more defence to compensate.

All of this means that... Yeah, Elude is not a great power right now. It's a 45% defence buff that soft-caps you just by itself, and SR can get up to 30% or thereabout even before it. Slotting this power for defence buff is, therefore, pointless, as most of it is just wasted anyway. Still, because I DON'T use Inventions and therefore can't softcap my Scrappers in general, I use Elude as it was intended (after we were allowed to attack with it) - as a high-survivability, limited-duration power.

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As for God Modes in general, I really don't think they need to be fiddled with too much. Unlike nukes, God Modes actually do bring enough performance to the table to be worth the crash. Elude is an exception, for the most part. These are powers that allow you to essentially not die come hell or high water. You survive for three minutes, you have enough endurance to not run out, and that's a huge benefit. If the three minutes run out and your enemies are still not dead AND you're still there when your God Mode drops... Well, you dun ****** up, as they say. If you die from a God Mode drop, it's your own fault. The blinking icons give PLENTY of warning, easily 15 seconds, if not more, and the power itself gives plenty of time to wrap up most fights.

I can see toggles dropping being a problem, but I don't consider it to be a major one. You're not supposed to be in combat when it happens, so retoggling shouldn't be that big of a problem. It might come off as a hassle, but for a power that's on a 1000 second recharge (that's roughly 17 minutes), it's not that common of one, even with recharge slotting.

Powers like Strength of Will and One With the Shield have their uses and I like them for the frequency of use, but they aren't "better" than conventional God Modes. They trade that short burst of time of being unkillable for a lower cost, so it balances out, but there's room for all of them here. Hell, I feel there's plenty of room for the self-resurrect T9 powers, too, like Soul Transfer and Rise of the Phoenix.

Tweaks here and there, I can see. Elude isn't very good and probably needs something else, Revive is garbage and so forth. But those are specific comments about specific powers. God Modes as a concept don't really need to be reimagined, I don't think

I'm not sure what you mean here. What it's "about" is the concept of specialisation that was inherent in the old Origins system that got tossed out. Those who specialise are stronger in their specialisation, and those who generalise have more tools, but they aren't as powerful. Dual-Origin enhancements are broad-application tools that many people can use, thus they are less powerful. Single-Origin enhancements are specialised exactly for the origin they enhance, and are thus more powerful.

In a sense, that's actually disappointing, as "dual origins" are a great way to mimic an overall dual origin. For instance, Xanta is of a Science origin as she gets her powers from scientific experimentation and an innate exposure to Superadine. That's a pretty clear origin, but when it came to DOs, I had a choice - Science/Technology or Science/Mutation. Conceptually speaking, that's not a meaningless choice. As she doesn't use technology of any kind, Science/Mutation made sense.

Again, that's game systems limiting conceptual interpretation, but it's not limited by much in this case.

You're comparing apples to oranges. Origins don't matter because, Origin of Power notwithstanding, the storyline never brings them up. You're never discriminated against based on origin, you're never granted specific access based on your origin. Only a very few instances exist where your origin COULD play a role in Praetorian dialogue trees. When disarming a bomb, a tech character can notice the hidden wire, a Natural character is fast enough to yank both wires fast enough and so forth. But even then, that's optional, as you could simply pick the other option and fail to defuse the bomb properly.

The Well of the Furies is different. It is the gateway and plot thread to the whole Incarnate system. There is no way to skip references to the Well, no way to sidestep its influence. The Well of the Furies IS the story. The only way to ignore it is to claim what's written on the screen isn't true, and that's head and shoulders above Origins. If I don't like the Origin of Powers arc, I can simply not do it. If I manage to get to 35 without having ever spoken with Ashley McKnight, the first thing she'll offer me is the arc to enter the Midnight Club, and it turns out I may not even need that if Beta is any indication.

If I want to ignore origins, I can avoid references to them. If I want to ignore the Well of the Furies, then I have to either not do any Incarnate content or otherwise plug my eyes and ears sing. Your example is not equivalent. As long as the Well is written as the ONLY source of power, this problem will persist. It will only go away if I'm given an alternative which lets me bypass references to the Well, or otherwise if the Well's omni-presence as an all-power source is demoted to A-power source.

I feel the same way. I find the problem comes when people go the "Myself with super powers!" route, meaning the character they create has to feel like something they want to be. There's nothing wrong with it, practically speaking, but it is limiting. I find it's much more liberating to make characters you'd like to watch in a movie, as opposed to ones you want to BE.

Looking at my own roster, I have a lot of female characters, but I don't necessarily want to be a woman. I make a lot of robots, but I wouldn't necessarily want to be a robot. Maybe just some cybernetics, that I wouldn't refuse. I make a lot of monsters and aliens and I definitely wouldn't want to be a monster, even a cute one. I wouldn't mind knowing one, though, especially a cute one. I make a lot of villains, too, and I don't necessarily want to be evil. Not THAT evil, anyway. And I certainly wouldn't want to know evil people.

Don't bother. You can't win, and you'll just leave dirty.

The "new" difficulty options do indeed seem to have a much larger range of spawn sizes for the same difficulty settings than the old ones. You can get anything from seemingly-unreasonably large spawns at +1 to the mission one time and then quite small spawns at +0. The old settings seemed to offer much more consistent difficulty and were much easier to figure out what to set them at.

I appear to have misread your post (or possibly not read what you were responding to), so no, not at all. I'm talking purely texture work here, so that we can get the Tights with Skin look without ostensibly tinting parts of a nipple-less skin texture. If this happened, there would be quite literally no reason to keep the current way of doing things.

This did make sense, but you're actually saying the same thing I am. At this point, the only good story about the Well is a story we can sidestep entirely. Realistically, speaking, though, that's kinda' sorta' what choice is all about.

Prior to the Origin of Powers, I could integrate my character in City of Heroes' canon as much or as little as I wanted. I could, in a sense, create a character who exists in a bubble of his own story, and who interacts with the City of Heroes universe only as a visitor, to where his backstory, source of power and personality are defined by events completely unrelated to City of Heroes at all. I could, if I were so inclined, take an existing character and put him through City of Heroes to see how he reacts, in a sort of Megazord vs. Mechagodzilla crossing or unrelated storylines. I could, and no-one would care, because the story did not assume I wanted to follow it. That's part of what made it so good for me - I could pick and choose which storylines I wanted my characters to be involved and which I wanted nothing to do with.

I agree with you that - if at all possible - I will ignore the Well's angle of granting me powers. But that's kind of my point. The best the Well's story right now can hope for is to be ignored, and that's a cryin' shame, because it had the potential to be something really good.

Ouch... Good example, and very spot on. And I agree with you as a general thing. Certain things simply don't need to be explained. More specifically, things that relate to our characters are often best left unexplained. How did I get my powers? While I may write that down in my character info, the game can't know, so the writers can't write stories that rely on that. What's my species? The game can't know, so it can't be made to need to know.

What the game CAN know is things that are rigidly-defined. Is my character male or female? Is my character a hero or a villain or somewhere in-between? Has my character done a certain bit of content? What is my character's rough power level? Have I been to a particular location? All of these things are either rigidly defined or highly specific. And even they are sometimes problematic. What, for instance, is a Vigilante supposed to be? A jerk who kills people? A hero who breaks the law in the pursuit of justice? An insane killer who just happens to violently murder mostly evil people? There's a whole spectrum here that isn't easily covered by a single notation, especially since a Vigilante can go to the Rogue Isles and do Newspaper missions there.

Generally speaking, when it comes to our characters, I feel it's best to leave as much as possible undefined, and thus open for us to define on our own. The more of our characters we can tailor to our own stories, the closer a connection we'll have with those characters.

That's the biggest irony here, I think. The Well itself is not a bad idea. When I first did Ramiel's arc, I left pumped up, eagerly anticipating the future developments of this story. Sure, I was getting power from the Well, but it didn't feel like the original source of my original power, and it also felt like I was cheating a bad guy out of his power. It was still mine, I just got it by taking it from someone else as opposed to punching people in the face. Scarlet Shocker already showed us how cool the Well could have been...

But then the ret-cons started, and those were ret-cons about MY characters and MY stories, and those were ret-cons that really didn't contribute anything to either the game or my enjoyment of it. Forcing every player through the same hole in the writing is never a good idea for the simple fact that you end up having to hammer a LOT of square pegs into that round hole. And again, what does this accomplish, but to stifle freedom of interpretation?

Now, I get that we needed SOMETHING to signify our transcendence into godhood, a sort of milestone entry into the "end game," and that got rolled into one with the plot device to essentially demote the Statesman. I get that. But I'd still have gone with an actual milestone, instead - some kind of activity that was taught impossible to do by anyone except for the Statesman (and possibly Recluse) that we do, which then starts a series of questions to learn how we were able to do it, which ultimately boils down to "We don't know. You're probably just awesome."

Mind you, we could still have had the Well of the Furies and Tyrant and the Batallion and so forth, but WE didn't have to be linked to it. Have Ramiel suggest it, then have it become apparent that we can't use it or it'll control us, then we go off looking for other ways, and then it turns out "the answer was inside you all along." Problem solved. You get your crossover storyline, I get to participate in it only if I specifically write myself into it.

In other words, "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." I'm sorry, Guy, but that's simply not something I can agree with. Sure, no game system can be perfect, but if you're gonna' make a game system out of a previously-undefined pure story concept, then it has to pass at least some fairly stringent level of scrutiny. Because if it can't... Why mess with it at all? Why create such a specific, elaborate game system if you don't expect it to be scrutinised with at least as much specificity? Any time you create a system that writes players' characters for them, it WILL be scrutinised, and not even pedantically. Every time a player wonders "I wonder if I can make..." said player will scrutinise the system to see if that's possible, and the holes will show up.

As far as I'm concerned, the smarter storytelling approach would have been to simply not make the system as specific and as elaborate. Origins are a great example of this. Speaking of which...

You exaggerate. The concept of Dual Origins has been suggested for as long as I remember, and if it weren't for Origin-specific enhancements, that might have happened. Hell, I've suggested we be allowed to type in our origin by hand as plain text, and I don't recall that many people disagreeing, just most taking little interest. Furthermore, origins overlap in a lot of places, so oftentimes it's possible to pick just one origin based on which of the two is more pronounced and stick with that. It's not idea, but it's the best we have, because, really, it just doesn't matter.

And this is where Origins differ from the Well of the Furies, or used to, at least. No matter what Origin you picked, what that Origin actually meant was up to you to write out in full. The Origin definition gives some examples and ideas, but is otherwise fairly open to interpretation. And if you chose an unorthodox interpretation, then the game really wouldn't tell you otherwise. Sure, your technodemon might need to implant around 11 cybernetic eyes into his head, but at no point in the storyline did anyone ever ask you why you have 13 eyes in the front of your face.

If gameplay and story segregation is to be embraced, then this is gameplay pure and simple. So long as the story doesn't bring it up, we won't bring it up as players. The trouble with the Well is that the story DOES bring it up, and repeatedly. I can ignore Origins because no-one ever talks about them, aside from the exceedingly bad Origin of Powers arc, which I can also ignore. But the Well? It's all over Incarnate lore. It's quite literally impossible to ignore it without simultaneously ignoring story as a "thing." It's like trying to play the game while ignoring the fact that people have legs. Short of sticking black masking tape on your screen where the legs are, it's a pretty damn hard thing to ignore.

I couldn't think of a good part of this to quote, so here it is in its entirety. This contemplation is a good depiction of why trying to introduce species in a game where players have been defining their own for so long is a bad idea - there's far too much ground to cover. What if you're a demon? What if you're a technodemon? What if you're machine intelligence? What if you're sentient bacteria? What if you're somebody's dream come to life? What if you're a god to begin with? Species, race and so forth are far too divergent to try and write rules for. NOT having rules to govern them is one of the reasons why City of Heroes is so nice to write in.

And that's really the crucial problem I feel the game's writers are forgetting: City of Heroes is a very nice environment to write in. It has much context already established to serve as inspiration, but it has a setting which befits a great number of possible concepts, thus providing us with creative freedom. The beauty of the City of Heroes fictional universe is that it inspires without limiting, and THAT is its one key aspect that I feel is becoming more and more forgotten of late. I didn't come here to experience other people's stories. I came here to forge my own, with other people's stories as stepping stones. That's why I'm still here seven years later - because the inspiration AND OPPORTUNITY to write that City of Heroes provides remains unrivalled. But for how much longer?

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On the broader subject of the Well, the whole concept bugs me on a somewhat unrelated level. Ret-conning the well into something that's not inherently sentient and is being controlled would be a nice saving throw, but it would still retain the fundamental problem of forcing all of my characters' stories through the same hole, even in cases where these stories should be wildly divergent, of which my Stardiver is a good example.

The way I designed her, Star is an automaton from the beginning of time, one higher creature's attempt to prove that life is not special, and that a living, thinking, self-aware creature could be created out of nothing more than the basic laws of the universe. No "power of creation," no soul, no lineage. Just a very specific construct which makes use of the laws of existence in such a manner as only one who created them could comprehend. Her power is, superficially, the ability to dive into the hearts of living stars and use the pressure and heat there to both manufacutre exotic materials and charge herself up, with her power taking the form of heat and pressure releases. But on a more fundamental level, her powers are those of technology, as personified by application of natural phenomenon in a controlled fashion.

Star is awesome because of her basic design, not because something gives her power, and believe me - I have plenty of reasons why she's not all-powerful. Convincing such, as well. I COULD force her story through the well, but the truth of the matter is... I don't want to. Like my past attempt to explain all my heroes as members of the same super group failed and failed hard, so any attempts to explain all my heroes as having drawn Incarnate power from the same source will fail, leaving me with the only recourse of simply ignoring the plot and forging ahead. And the Well plot is hard to ignore, since it's present in Incarnate content pretty heavily.

Reason One I would prefer a non-sentient, "avatar of inspiration" Well is only partly because that makes for a better story. In much larger part, it's because this kind of story is easier to write around. What makes it a "better" story is that I can take it and make it into MY story. And I hope you understand what I mean when I say this, but my story will always be better than anyone else's story, at least to me. It's not a question of quality. My story is better because it's mine, and there's really no way to compete with this.

That, to me, is why City of Heroes is so near and dear to our hearts - because we took it and made it our own. And now that its original authors are pulling to take it back, it's very hard to let it go.

That's why we need some form of texture blending, where two textures can be laid overtop each other on the same 3D mesh. I'm not sure what the City of Heroes graphical engine has to say about this, but I've seen it done in other games. Half-Life's spray-on logo was pretty much this, if I recall correctly. Hell, isn't this more or less exactly what "splats" are?

Think of it this way - if we can have one texture that's, say, repitle scales, and we then apply another texture over it, say basic tights, then you have tights over scales without the tights being just paint over the scales texture like it ends up being now. In other words, it's not patterns tinting the base texture, it's an honest-to-god texture mask on top of the base one.

If this happens, then I will no longer need ANY of the "painted-on clothes" patterns for Tights With Skin. If I can slap on any Tights with Skin texture over any base texture, then that would be monumentally superior.

Oi! The artwork! It's like Wagner's day off!