Sgt_Liberty

If you hop in Justice United or Justice For All you'll have plenty of volunteers. I'd offer a hand (leveling my Staff/SR Scrapper, just hit 31) but I'm normally in bed by 11 PM EST. If you're on before then though, I'm bludgeoning my way through Red Caps in Croatoa

Your story makes the departure seem even crueler. It's awesome that Synapse just kind of plucked you out of the crowd, and it makes me intensely interested in which Mission Architect entries are yours, so that I can peruse the "Making Of" so to speak before the opportunity is no longer available.

It's been my longstanding opinion that what you've all produced has gotten consistently better and more engaging. Some folks might not always like the presentation, but I'm perfectly willing to be a "reader". Just opening the book and seeing it through to the end is an enjoyable exercise to me.

I said so on twitter, but you've got both my respect and gratitude. This game really does have the best community. I'd like to think that I speak for everyone when I say that you have our support in any future endeavor.

It's been a pleasure having you as a GM.

I heard the loading music in a McDonalds commercial.

You could always use the ffmpeg command line. I don't know how "ready" the latest Xuggler (java wrapper for ffmpeg) version is, that MIGHT be simpler depending on how comfortable you are with using command line utilities.

I'm willing to help support this effort both monetarily and technically if it's feasible to do. I know I haven't done any Titan Network development, but if I can help stop the ship from sinking, I will absolutely grab a bucket.

It was good to see everyone again and share our memories. I've uploaded my album of the event, hopefully the player tags remain in the photos after uploading them:
https://plus.google.com/photos/10469...00790893846497

Also late to the party. Take care Arwen!

My condolences to his friends and family. Lucas was always a riot, and undoubtedly one of my strongest memories of being here on Justice. He'll be missed.

I spaced on VIPing yesterday... I don't suppose I can sneak in on this since I subbed this morning? Was really intrigued by the States/Recluse masks

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You people are such predictable softies =P

If B.S. has any cajones, he'll man up to his mistakes on a daily basis by using this avatar:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...ele/BSIcon.jpg

^_^

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That's hilarious.

I almost never play Villain-Side, but I seriously hope that the upcoming issue is almost entirely Villain focused, if only so these posts will go away.

CoV has a higher percentage of polished missions than does CoH, but it has less variety too (even if the variety portion in CoH tends to be the earlier more generic missions given by standard city contacts).

So here's hoping that there'll be another bought of wacky island hijinks available for all you red side focused folks.

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Other things such as class/power balance, combat mechanics, etc are really low points in my opinion and something I really hope the devs take some hard looks at for major overhauls if they ever do a CoX 2.


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Really? Not that I'm knocking it, but I'm curious what games you're referring to for Class/Power Balance and Combat Mechanics? I haven't run into any I felt were better, but I haven't played everything either, so I might end up with more things on my plate to try.

Not that I think CoX is the best balanced game ever (it's not) but as far as MMO's I've played go, it seems in the upper 50% to me.

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Hey States you want a flail play WoW.

We heroes here man give us grOWTH

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What you've never heard of The Wrecking Crew or one of their members, Thunderball ?

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All I read here was 'You addressed and responded to the post idea with positive encouragement and a logical answer but Im still going to complain because this game is DOOOOOOOM'd and youre a sell out cause youre making MUO and DOOOOOOOOOOM!'


That sums it up, right?

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Wrong.

What I did was respond to Positron's post. I mentioned that I don't think it'd be as manpower intensive as Positron states. And I suggested a possible time frame for work to begin on this project. How exactly is this dOOOOm?

I realize of course that my statements are just my opinion, and Positron is certainly in a better position to know just how manpower intensive a project would be than I am. That combined with my low post count and my lack of a level 50 character will certainly lead a number of people to discount my posts no matter how sensible they are. This isn't going to stop me from stating my opinion.

It is my belief that the forum is here for all of us to state our opinions, not for all of us to simply agree with yours.

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Probably because the manpower required to just make the mission is not as intensive as reviewing, testing, and then importing it into the game. Generally speaking, with as long as it takes things to get from their internal server to live, for even small patches, I'd tend to think that this would be at least semi-obvious.

They can't just toss aside all their procedures because players created a map instead of someone on the Mission Design team.

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The explanation that the devs gave us as to why power customization was not possible was that the auras and power effects could not be changes, they were 'baked into' the animations themselves.
Of course, redoing the animation without them and adding a way to select which power effects you want and their color and stuff (basically power customizaiton) was possible, technically. But was not realist in term of work load for them.
Now, if there is a way for the player base to give them these animations already done... then, I guess, power customization become doable.
It is one of the most desired feature for the game, from what I read...

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No, the colors for a lot of particles are 'baked in' to the particle's texture. The FX scripts themselves are completely separate from animations. In fact there's a lot of animations that are shared between different powers with entirely different FX.

Power customization has some pretty big hurdles to overcome.

1) Powers currently point to one animation and one set of FX scripts. There's no way in the our engine at this time to have them reference a different animation or different FX without just changing it in the power definition (which changes it for everyone). This isn't a small or insignificant change and without it we literally can't even begin to do costumized FX or animation.

2) Colors in FX are often baked into the particle textures. Most of the time they're not, they use a greyscale texture and tint the color with an RGB value, but there's enough that do use a colored texture that it would require quite a bit of work to overhaul and set everything up for customization. We did test a more global system that could just shift the hue of the entire FX script around the color wheel, but it's not a complete solution to the problem. Namely that FX aren't normalized to a common color, there's no way to dynamically change this 'shift' value, and there's still issues with blend modes.

3) Particle FX most often use an additive blend mode. Additive means that the closer a color is to white (in RBG values), the more opaque it becomes. Secondaries like yellow (255, 255, 0) are more opaque than primaries like red (255, 0, 0). Black (0, 0 ,0) ends up being completely transparent. So to take the Energy Melee FX for example and make a black version or even a dark purple (64, 0, 64) or dark blue (0, 0, 64), we'd have to do more than just shift the RGB values around.

4) Even if the system could accept more than one animation or more than one FX script for a power, we don't have an in game system for allowing the player to choose this themselves. We could make one (probably based off of the costume editor in some way) but it's still another chunk of time to devote to this.

Those are the major issues that I can think of right now, there's other minor little issues here and there but it all adds up to a tremendous amount of dedicated work from multiple departments to pull it off.

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It's REALLY awesome to get such a solid peek at some of your architecture.

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This is rather ridiculous. I agree that it is a put off to casual or even non-hardcore players. Loot shouldn't be this confusing or game changing.

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I don't see how it's all that confusing?

Slot more of the same set into a power, you get bonuses.

How many people do you realistically think will have more than 5 of the same bonus from set bonuses without learning about it? I expect that the initial reaction will be much like prior to discovering 1 Acc / 5 Dmg slotting, and then after that 1 Acc, 1 End, 1 Rchg, 3 Dmg slotting.

It will be a matter of personal preference, experimentation, talking to group members, etc... People will see set bonuses, either because they dropped or because they got curious and went to Wentworths. They'll look at the inventions for higher levels and see the values go up and decide whether or not they might want to make one of those at some point.

Inventions are really not super complex. It's a decent amount to digest all at once, and it's got a TON of options, but for the most part, people don't really need to know all about all of the options to function, or even to function well. I mean, a character who slots SOs is not going to be significantly weaker than someone who only slots single aspect IOs. Only a character who has a many set bonuses will have advantages, but most of them are not going to be game changing (The recovery bonuses in some special enhancements are the exception) simply because of the values attached to the bonuses.

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I agree this is a magnificient investigation in the nest way to approach IO's.

However, it is also a telling discussion on why I feel that City of Heroes has become, very unfortunately, City of Mathemeticians. When all the trappings of superheroedom is stripped away, we see that they aren't all that super anymore. Unless you've got your scientific calculator and/or a slide rule you just aren't going to be that effective anymore.

Trading in my spandex for a lab coat, methinks.

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Are you dissing my TI-92+ ???

That is entirely uncalled for.

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I've run the STF about a dozen times now, the first five failed at the last mission (Mako and GW specifically, once at LR); all the rest have been successful.

I've been trying to watch for what allows us to defeat GW and Mako, but I can't exactly say. Teams usually have 2-3 damagers; two being the minimum I'd go with, and three being optimal in my eyes (1 tank and 4 support rounding out the team).
...

Something or somethings is allowing my teams to stay a tiny bit ahead of the curve on these two toughest AV's. Maybe it's scrappers getting through with their epics, maybe it's a combination of a threshold of buffs/debuffs, maybe it's keeping up holds whenever they can be held through PTOD's...I simply cannot tell which it is. I will say fights with them take too long relatively for them compared to the others.
-Sandolphan

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I ran the STF 2x, once unsuccessfully, the next (with Sandolphan) successfully.

The first time, I had specced Focused Accuracy out of my build, we failed at Mako.
The second time, I specced Focused Accuracy back into my build, and that, combined with Fortitude (from Sandolphan), and the Radiation Emission's Defense Debuff, I almost never recieved a "Deflected/Avoided/Eluded" etc message while fighting Mako. The Dark Melee guy in our group had a hell of a time hitting him when it was up though. I also had the +5% ToHit Set bonus from the Red Fortune IO set. I had 2 Nucleouses in each attack (Acc/Dmg).

For both, I had 3 Membranes (+ToHit, +Def, +Rchg) in Focus Chi (Build Up).

Neither of the teams had Leadership toggles active.

Basically, in order to keep hitting Mako, you're probably looking at needing to eliminate something akin to 60-80% +Def. Which, for an unprepared team, is going to be rough.

For this reason, if you have a Radiation Emission person along, hope that they have Enzymes (Def Debuff, ToHitDebuff, EndRdx) slotted into Radiation Emission, and that there are at least 2 people with ToHitBuffs. Tactics will improve the whole team by some margin, or that they have something like Focused Accuracy or Targetting Drone.

There are non-Radiation Emission defense debuffs:
Sonic Resonance - Liquefy (functionally identical to Earthquake, longer timer)
Storm Summoning - Freezing Rain (can be an issue with Mako)
Storm Summoning - Tornado (needs slotted for this)
Earth Control - Quicksand
Earth Control - Earthquake (minor)
Trick Arrow - Acid Arrow (needs to hit, this guy probably ought to have Tactics to make use of this)

So basically, it's Tactics, or the above if you want your whole team to be able to hit Mako. That or a hell of a lot of Insights.

The OTHER option, and this is something I haven't tried, is that the entire team is going to need Geas of the Kind Ones, and a LOT of Rchg buffs, basically everyone Speed Boosted 2x, and then a little more. If you wait until he starts using Elude, and then EVERYONE uses Geas at the same time, you might be able to front enough damage to put him down.

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Has anyone checked to see if it's only IDENTICAL bonuses from sets that stack up to 5x, or if it's any bonus of that type (i.e. you could have 5x +0.75% AND 5x 1.25% HP bonuses simultaneously, or you could have 5 bonuses of +%HP).

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Checked? Heck no: I'm nowhere near being in a position to do that. But that's specifically how Castle said its supposed to work: you can only have a maximum of 5 +1.5% Health buffs, say, but you could have 5 +1.5% Health set buffs, and another 5 +1.0% Health set buffs, because those two set buffs are considered different.

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Well considering his incredibly confusing post on when exemplaring is supposed to make Set Bonuses go poof, I wanted to double check.

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OK so I have a n00b question.

Many of the IO's used in the examples say that these bonuses last for 120 seconds. I am assuming that is not the case if they are slotted in a passive power like Health but that the effect is then always on? Is that correct?

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Yes, the duration is listed for when they are placed in Click powers.

Passives are persistent, Toggles and Clicks have a duration. For Toggles, the duration is (theoretically) infinite, assuming your toggle is always on.

Which means (and this is pretty funny) that Integration, slotted with an EndRdx, a Miracle, and a Numina's Convalescence is actually an endurance GAINING toggle. As long as it's on anyway.