Shikamaru_NA

Fury should go up to 110%. It shouldn't have any significant effect past 100%, but there should be some buffer so that when you're at the point where you'd currently be hovering around 90-95%, you'd instead be hovering around 100%.

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I hate being pushed around, too, but I don't believe it will change any time soon. (NOTE: I could be wrong!)

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Then there are two practically no-brainer solutions to this problem. Either A: have it so that NPCs simply don't collide with players, and go about their merry, crazy little ways, or B: whenever they encounter a player, their first instinct is to run as fast as they can to the level exit, and leave, never to return.

Seriously, why are these people running around the bank vaults like chickens with their head's cut off? It's just not rational behavior.

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Well, its true that rescue/hostage missions are tougher for stalkers than any other AT. However, (and I hope this isn't supposed to be kept a secret) in most other types of missions, namely thefts, destroy glowies, etc, stalkers have it easier to an "unfair" amount that makes up for having rescue missions skewed the other way. Walk in, skip mobs, one shot a boss, get glowie, click out.

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Yeah, and that'd be great if there was a reward for completing as many missions as possible, but my goal is more often to get as much XP and infamy as possible, and mission barreling is not it. for Stalkers it is the best option, but when other classes can actually get the XP from killing all the enemies in the mission on top of the modest mission completion bonus, they tend to make more XP per hour (especially since every forth mission is a vault mission, sometimes none of the missions are optimal, sometimes the missions require more killing/searching than one might expect when selecting it, etc.).

Beating 4 missions in an hour, only killing a halfdozen enemies in each, or completing 2.5 missions in an hour, slaughtering everything inside along the way, the latter advances you much better.

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Of course, if you didn't clear a path on the way in, then it's different. But if going in you know you have to lead a hostage out, then why wouldn't you clear a path knowing it's easier to do on the way in than on the way out with a hostage in tow? If you can't think that far ahead, then you have no one to blame but yourself for the added inconvenience.

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I'm not saying that you shouldn't, but doing so DOES take a lot more time for a Stalker than for a Brute or Mastermind, and is a lot more annoying.

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It was incredibly easy in beta for stalkers to farm XP really fast by picking kidnap missions from the newspaper, stealthing through to the back, killing the few guards around the NPC, then stealthing back to the entrance. I doubt you're going to get that exploit back ever.

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I agree with Starfox, I don't see the difference between this and being able to sneak in on item or assassination missions. Also, I don't consider any of that to be an "exploit", since we're intended to be thieves and assassins, so prescision jobs SHOULD be our goal, quickly in, quickly out. It's not unfair because in the process we're passing up the majority of the XP for the mission (from killing everything along the way).

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Stalkers already have it way to easy in many missions. They can survive having to clear a path to the door for the kidnap victim like everybody else.

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Yeah, except that it takes everybody else half as long to do it. Having to clear the path for a hostage with a Stalker is an agony that should be avoided at all costs.

Plus, of course, the ambush squads who you can't possibly clear in advance. Most missions I find it makes more sense to just bum-rush through the enemies un-hidden and just hope that the hostage keeps up.

They really do need to fix this for kidnapped NPCs too. We're Stalkers, we hide, there's no reason for the mission to penalize us for not being another AT. It's bad enough that we're constantly forced to go on vault missions in which the enemies can see us through Hide, and we aren't even allowed to scamper out of there when we're done.

Ok, sure, maybe the kidnappee can't see us when we're hidden, but can't we at least pretend that we're dragging her along by the arm?

The problem was in a bad design assumption. When the devs designed the missions (and I realize it might be hypocritical of me to be "assuming" this, but I thin it's fairly clear), they designed them under the assumption that players would be willing to play for 2-3 hours at a time, minimum, and would never be irresponsible enough to accept missions unless they had that much time to burn.

Further, they assumed that players would want realism (as in missions with limited advanced intel that require you to complete them within a reasonable amount of time), rather than pure convenience (as in a generous amount of advanced warning to possible negative features, and the option to complete a mission days, weeks, or even months after accepting it, or discarding it if you choose to, regardless of how irresponsible it would be if Spiderman abandoned a task that was beneath him).

Players aren't like that. Well, many roleplayers are, but they can roleplay those constraints themselves without any gameplay systems to enforce their compliance. The non-roleplayers (or loose roleplayers, would prefer a system that is more open and fun oriented.

If you hate Perez park, then you should never have to take a mission into Perez Park, and yet you should always have plenty of other mission available. If you love Perez Park then you should be able to take missions almost exclusively in Perez Park (within its level range). If you hate timed missions, for whatever reason, then you should never have to accept one.

If you don't feel like ping-ponging all over town from contact to to mission to contact then you should be able to collect numerous missions at the begining of a session, and go from mission to mission for the rest of the night. If you want the "realism" of returning to your contacts after each mission then you can easilly do that on your own.

The real trick here is assumptions. When designing the mission system, they should make these assumptions:

1. A player has only 30 minutes to play, 60 minutes at the most. Make no assumptions about them having more. If they have more, great, they can obviously do more with it, but you can't assume that.

2. A Player is playing the game solo. He does not want, and should not need, other players to group with him at any time to accomplish missions HE is assigned. If he wants missions that are too challenging to solo, then he can do so through TF missions and through the natural scaling of solo missions, but no mission accepted from a normal contact should place the player in a zone too dangerous for him to travel through, or give him objectives that he cannot reasonably complete alone.

3. A Player wants to be on door missions for his entire career, from level 1 to level 50, without any "outdoors" leveling (this is obviously not true for all players, but by working with this assumption you catch those players as well, since they will always have plenty to do, or choose not to do).

4. A Player wants to spend as little time traveling between contacts and missions as possible. Design the system to eliminate as much of this wasted time as possible, and leave it up to the player to take advantage of those features or to avoid them.

5. A Player has a most favorite zone, and a least favorite zone. Allow them to guide their progress towards and away from them respectively.

6. A Player has a most favorite enemy type, and a least favorite enemy type. Allow them to guide their progress towards and away from them respectively.

Remember, the players are not JUST the heroes they're piloting, they are also the writers of their character's destinies (that's the reasoning behind the Inspirations at least), so give them as much creative control as is feasible.

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Those wouldnt be so bad if you could could have more than 3 missions, but when you see your numbers of possible missions slot one by 1 drop because there is an AV in them it becomes painful.

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This is one of the things I LOVED in the WoW stress test. In that game, you can pick up any quests you want, dozens of them (sorted by zone for convenience), and then you can drop them if you feel like it, and even pick them back up again if you feel like it. There's no penalty for accepting quests. Any time I saw one I'd just snag it up, because who knows, it might be convenient to do at a later date.

That's how you make a game that's designed to be fun, rather than a responsibility.

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Essentially, each hit (if successful) will give you a short term damage buff. Different powers would have different buffs; but if you could string enough hits together you can "peak" your damage.

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Well on that note, would Tankers using this still hit their normal "+400%" damage caps? Because many are already there (depending on the group situation), so a damage buff would ONLY be beneficial if it raised the damage cap they could attain.

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2. As a Tanker lands more and more blows, he'll start doing more and more damage. The longer the fight, the more powerful the Tanker becomes.

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What's the mechanic for this?

I mean, does your damage build for each successive attack on the same enemy, or does it build over the course of a single battle? If I fight and kill three enemies, and then run over to another group ten feet away, do I lose all my accumulated power? None of it? What?

This reminds me of WoW's Warriors. Their attacks are all based on "rage", which is a meter that starts at zero, and goes up as you give and take damage, and is then spent to use special attacks, and decreases over time. The more consecutive battles you fight, the more fuel to have to play with, so the more powerful attacks you have at your disposal.

WoW's Rogues, on the other hand, use "combo points", which add up with each special attack you land on an enemy, increasing the effect of your "finisher" moves, but which go away if you change targets.

Which is this?

Statesman, you've said a lot about "this is how the game was designed to be played, but THIS is how players are actually doing it."

So why don't you take into account that players DON'T play the game how it's intended, and rework the game to be better how people actually play it? For example, you said that you want people to travel in packs to a contact, select a mission, get ambushed as a pack (if there's an ambush), and then travel as a group to the mission door, fighting anything that blinks at them along the way.

That's an unrealistic expectation.

Instead, players split up after leaving a mission, hit their contacts, and then reconvene at the misison door, ready to enter it and have fun inside.

Why not build the game so that THAT is the epxected playstyle?

Build ambushes so that they accept that a player might be in a group, and yet not be anywhere near his groupmates.

Build mission objectives and rewards so that they either reward the player under the assumption that he's done nothing other than enter the mission door and clear it, or that requires that they kill X number of enemies outside the mission as well.

I don't know, maybe the WoW stress test has spoiled me, but in that game you get a fraction of your XP from defeating enemies, the vast majority of your XP comes from actually compleing your mission objectives. I think that would do wonders for CoH. Decrease the XP gained per enemy, but multiply the end of mission rewards by a factor of ten or more.


Missions are fun. Random "street sweeping", no matter how you gussy it up, is just drudgery.

Sooooo, basically, we can probably mod our clients to our heart's contents (so long as it's not blatently cheating), we just have to DISCUSS those mods anywhere but on the official boards. Got it (not that I ever have or will mod my own client, I'm just curious about this discussion).

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There are plenty of people who keep on saying that Hasten can be useful situationally. Hasten does not absolutely have to be on all the time for it to be of any use. That's ludicrous. If you feel that absolute rule, is true in case of your character, that's fine. But when you speak on a macro level like this, you have to look past your own nose.

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But it applies to my own nose. This is how the change has effected my character. So they either need to reduce how this effects Dark Melee scrappers, or change it back but nerf those ATs that WERE capable of abusing the power in other ways.

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What other drawback could their possibly be fore Hasten that would make it balanced? The ONLY thing Hasten does is increase the recharge rate of EVERY power you have. Thus, the recharge time of EVERY power is reduced. To make use of this reduced recharge time, one has to have enough endurance to use the powers which are now ready to use quicker. If this power were to be on ALL THE TIME with little enhancement, this would be mean that you would have to have enough endurance to activate it all the time. Combined with the need to have enough endurance to use the now very quickly recharging powers, what you are demanding is infinite endurance so you can use Hasten and these powers infinitely.
This is totally UNREASONABLE and TOTALLY UNBALANCING.

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At what point did I even HINT at increasing endurance? That'd be insane. In beta, with Quickness, Hasten, and Focused Fighting running, I still rarely ran out of endurance in a fight, due to endurance SOs and Stamina. I had endurance to spare. I wouldn't mind if Hasten worked like it used to, in exchange it would begin eting away at that spare endurance such that it was once again as tight, or tighter, than it was at lower levels, with lesser enhancements and no Stamina.

THAT is balance, because it allows me to keep the power running properly, but it's up to me to decide how to deal with the costs. Do I NEED Stamina? Could I use more Endurance SOs? Could I just ration out the uses of my attacks so that I don't burn out too quickly? Do I just burn myself out in less than a minute and spend the next minute recovering endurance? It's up to me, but whatever I choose, it's balanced out.

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As for Hasten, sorry if this sounds blunt, but if it's vital enough that you need it all the time, then obviously it should be worth 6 slots to you.

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I have numerous powers that are vital enough to use all the time but that I don't see reason to put six slots in. In fact, I don't really have ANY powers that I use less than "most of the time". For example, Quickness I only had it's default slot, Practiced Brawlers only had three (and could have gotten away with less), Focused Fighting only had three, TP Foe only had 2, Invisibility only had its default one, and in none of those powers, powers which I used constantly and doubt I could have gotten by with the loss of any of them, would I find it a rational use of slots to put more slots onto them than I did.

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I think this is the core of the issue. I think we purposefully don't get enough enhancement slots to 6-slot everything. This way, we're forced to choose which powers are our best, our mainstays. Even beyond which powers you did or did not choose, which powers you put your slots in define your character.

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Well obviously, since there are less than 100 given slots. But the point is that spending 6 slots on hasten is not some trival thing. There are plenty of other powers you'd be weakening by adding those slots to Hasten, powers that are MUCH more important. And since Hasten now NEEDS 6 SOs to function properly, this makes the power not worth having, since with no slots spent the power is relatively worthless, and with 6 slots spent, you've just taken slots from powers that could have been made MUCH more efficient by adding them.

I had to make choices when allocating slots, and plenty of them. At no time did I feel that it was a "no brainer" to decide where to place my next slot. At no time did I truly wish that more of my moves were hopelessly gimped withough six-sloting them.

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And one more comment on Hasten. Not trying to flame here, or anything like that. But, if you used to be able to get the absolute maximum benefit from Hasten with only 2 slots (since the effect never increased, and at 2 slots/SOs you could always have it on) what's the point of having an option to put 6 slots in it? What other power in the entire game doesn't gain something (maybe not much, but something) by adding those last 4 slots? I can't think of one. Why should Hasten be any different?

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Super Speed. You can max it out in two, three if you don't have Swift or Quickness.

Also, Geko said that Flight and Super Leap were artificially capped at sub-Super Speed speeds, so that leads one to assume that they max out short of 6 SOs.

And as I said, you should be able to slot in endurance enhancements (since the move costs endurance) if you REALLY feel like 6 slotting it. The move is just NOT worth 6 slots, and 6 slots are NECESSARY to get the move to be of ANY value. I cannot understand why so many people cannot understand that.

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For those that haven't read the EULA of this or any other online game, it does state that content is subject to change. An online game is not Static! It is Dynamic! It can and will change as needed.

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Change is good, and fine, but when things are made worse, brought below par, in some areas, they must also be raised in other areas, so that the characters are still at par. This was a change that reduced too many builds toworthlessness, without providing any remedy to that.

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Umm.. put down the crack pipe and seek professional help guy. Just because scrappers "are fast" like you said and attack fast, that DOES NOT mean that you should be able to constantly without any pause at all keep attacking that fast and with that much damage without any drawbacks at all.

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When did I say no drawbacks at all? I have a whole thread about possible drawbacks they could add to Hasten. I have no trouble with Hasten having drawbacks, my only problem is that "downtime" is the ONE totally unacceptible drawback. The powers must work all the time, and with few enhancement slots. EVERYTHING else is up for debate.

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What I said was that the bored L40s (mostly Blasters) are playing Scrappers because Scrappers are actually hard to play/underpowered, which is a total switch for them compared to their mains...

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Ah, my bad. I thought you were implying the opposite was true.

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I think this game would be kinda silly, if you did not need 6 slots to max out a power. What would be the use of having 6 slots?

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They give you 49 slots between 20 powers. You can only max out 9 of them, which leaves one more with 5 slots, and the rest with none, UNLESS you short change some of them. Primary attacks deserve 6 slots. Primary defenses deserve six slots, some travel powers and support abilities deserve maybe 4 slots, but Hasten has never been strong enough to justify allocating 5 of your free slots to it.

Now, if you REALLY want to allocate 6 slots to it, you always could. Slot them with endurance enhancements and you can get the costs REALLY low. (not positive it can take endurance enhancements, but it should, since ti costs endurance).


PS, Geko, if you're still reading this thread, please tell us what, exactly, the regen is on Quickness, there's been a lot of debate on this, and its relative worth vs. Hasten for recharge buffing. I suspect based on anecdotal evidence from having and using both powers that it's fairly high, but others have claimed that it's negligable and therefore would be unbalanced vs. an always on Hasten.

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Now, scrappers are the class of choice for the bored L40s who are waiting for the rest of us, and want to play something that isn't like turning on God mode when they log in. Defenders, well... apparently no one is *that* bored yet.

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Lol, it's possible that some Scrapper builds are overpowered, I have no idea about that, but most Scrapper builds are hardly overpowered, including most of those that included Hasten in some form. Are there scrappers at 40? Probably some MA/Invlunerabilty Scrappers or something, but I doubt there are more Scrappers up there than Blasters.

Don't go spreading unfounded rumors like that, it just even further throws off the AT balancing efforts.

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Soon after launch, it quickly became clear that it was still too good. We neglected to consider that Hasten Hated itself, which was allowing players to keep it on all the time.

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This was not unknown during beta (or at least not unknown to your co-workers). I know I brought it up on an almost constant basis oin the balance boards (although I did not see this as a problem in the least). The comment people are reffering to came at the very tail end of beta, no more than half a week before launch, and was either by you, or perhaps Poz. Not sure which, but the content of it was clear, that even though we had detailed how easy it was to get Hasten running all the toime, in dirrect response to that the developer in questions said that the power was functioning as intended, and would not be changed.

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These are all very poweful, yet even w/o Hasten, the longest recharge is 3 minutes. I dont see how you couldnt use each of these pretty much every battle.

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No offense, but do you play this game?

The average battle solo takes perhaps a minute solo, often much less, and I can reach the next spawn in twenty-some seconds. That's without Hasten active mind you. There's a lot of variance there, but they generally go pretty fast. Group battles vary much more wildly, but here's what I do know:

In beta, at level 35, I had Soul Drain slotted with one SO recharge (due to the screwy slots during beta, I'll have more now), I also had Quickness active, and Hasten active. With all of that, my average was the Soul Drain was ONLY available halfway through the fight after using it at the begining of a fight. That is, I'd run in, use SD, finish off that spawn, move to the next, and SD wouldn't be ready again until halfway through that fight, when several of the enemies had already been killed.

Scrappers move fast. Their abilitis have to keep up with them.

Dark Consumption I can understand the Hastened timer on, it doesn't need to be ready as often as Soul Drain.

Practiced Brawler needs to be on ALL the time. With the above configuration and like three SOs I could get it so that it would recharge right before it went off, so I could keep it going constantly, but without Hasten there will be uncomfortable gaps, especailly at lower levels.

Also bear in mind that not all powers can have 6 SOs in them, you don't give us that many slots to go around, and also that not every slot can go into recharge SOs, ACC SOs are almost a necessity, since we need to hit at least six enemies with SD to get a bonus as large as something like Build Up (at +12% per enemy hit).

Hasten needs to be on ALL the time, and it must do so with few enhancements. If you do not feel it's balanced as is, I have a thread going that lists possible compromises, but Hasten MUST be constantly active, regardless of the performance costs. The power is not useless, nbut it is simply not worth it as it is.

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There is not present plan to modify Stamina. It takes 14 levels, and 2 powers to unlock stamina.

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PLEASE make this the balance on Hasten then. I can deal with that. Make it the last Super Speed power so that you can leave it as is.

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Many rants about Hasten hit the boards before most people even tried out the changes. Also, many of the upgrades and improvements to other powers were not even considered. So, for now, I am simply asking you to try things out for a while, and we will do the same. I promise things will ebb and flow until we hit a sweet spot. My guess is Hasten will not be reverted, but the pendulum will probably swing back the other way a little bit. The same may hold true for Accelerate Metabolism.

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Look, I admit that I haven't gotten all the way back up to level 36 since the nerf or anything, but that's not necessary here. Yes, you did make things better too, but NONE of those sthings had any impact whatsoever on how Hasten was nerfed. For example, the patch notes did not say:

* The timers on Dark Melee:Soul Drain, Dark Meleeark Consumption, and Super Reflexes:Practiced Brawler have been reduced so that by default they can be activated at least once per fight, given average fight durations.

Had you also made that vital change, I wouldn't have batted an eye over the Hasten change, but as NO changes weere made that in any way positively effected either the Dark Melee powerset, or the Super Reflexes powerset, and the Hasten changes DID in no uncertain terms negatively effect both those sets (not as much as some, but plenty), I feel fully justified in trying to come up with a more mutually agreeable solution than the one that you came up with.

I really want to hear what, exactly, you guys intend todo about this. This is not a change that should stay for wekks or months. A basic, if not permanent solution should be worked out within the next week or so, something that willl at least make Hasten an always on ability for a more reasonable cost, without making it as unbalacing as some think it was before the change.