Sorciere

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So, I have this friend, and he posts on these forums, and he's just kinda curious.

Are you hot?

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Be careful of marrying a woman smarter than you. As Lord Byron opined:

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I daresay that the actual reasons why Byron's marriage to his princess of parallelograms didn't work out were quite different -- by all accounts, the two were an exceedingly poor match for one another.

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This is true. Although I think the more important concern is whether or not they even get a chance to look at it - I haven't seen Castle on these forums since the Invulnerability buffs a while back.

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Posting on the forums (or reading them) is not part of the developers' job description. From what we know, Castle and BAB do read them even if they don't post, but don't have the time to read every single post made here. (Probably even less so with the work for Going Rogue.)

Thus, if you want something to be seen, the best way to ensure that is to post it on the Suggestions and Ideas forum, not buried in the middle of a longish thread on an AT forum.

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The devs are loath to give tanks any debuffing ability at all.

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All the recently developed and proliferated tanker primaries and secondaries have debuffing abilities, actually. Generally minor ones, but debuffs none the less. Ice Armor and Ice Melee had them even before. Taunt explicitly got a -range debuff added to improve its functionality.

In any event, I don't think that history is a good predictor here. More important is whether Castle & Co. think that providing something like that to tankers actually improves the game.

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The only Regen Debuff I could see Tanks getting is if they added Rad Armor/Melee.

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I actually think that a -regen debuff (even unresistable) is fairly unproblematic in the whole scheme of things. Unlike other debuffs, it's essentially a virtual fixed DPS increase; it doesn't increase the damage of other players, and other debuffs do not increase the benefit you derive from it. In short, it does not raise most of the usual problems you get from debuff stacking.

It also makes sense conceptually in that it would essentially mean that tanker hits are harder to recover from naturally; this is a different, grittier style of "hard hitting" that does not step on scrapper toes and is perfectly in line with an AT characterized by toughness and persistence.

What I wonder about, though, is whether it is actually worth it. Against critters below EB/AV status, it isn't going to buy you a whole lot. It could be marginally useful against Elite Bosses solo (making, say, soloing Nightstar a bit less painful with Ice Melee). But essentially it'd primarily be a niche debuff vs. archvillains. That's not without merit -- AV fights are the one use case on teams where two tankers don't stack well -- but may still be a bit too much of a niche thing for Castle & Co. having to add it to every single tanker secondary attack.

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Oh really? That's interesting... that means the math in my above post is pretty much all wrong for +4 AVs.

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Yes, debuff oriented sets lose a lot of their luster against +4 AVs. Darkest Night, normally an extremely powerful debuff, is at less than half strength for the -DMG part (even worse if the AV has resistances against the damage type the AV is dealing, such as Ghost Widow or Lord Recluse), and the to-hit debuff portion becomes all but inconsequential.

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You lost me here, how can an unresistible resistiance debuff still get resisted by resistance? Wouldn't that make it a plain old resistible resistance debuff? Can you give an example of this?

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Actually, sorry, I mixed something up there -- I remembered having tested Disruption Arrow, but now I see that it's flagged as "ignores buffs and enhancements", not as "unresistable". Nevermind that part.

The purple patch, though, still fully affects otherwise unresistable powers.

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The catch? Unresistible debuffs are very dangerous because they ignore everything that causes them to scale down (resistance, purple patch, etc).

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That is not entirely true. The purple patch will affect even unresistable debuffs (this is because the purple patch effects are combat modifiers, not actually resistances). There are also some additional special cases, such as unresistable resistance debuffs still being resisted by resistance (hey, say that three times fast?).

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If your goal is that end-game content is all that's meant to be played, and early content is just filler, then using any kind of leveling mechanic is bad design. If the goal is to play and have fun with level 50 content, then you remove the levels, start everyone out with all of their abilities, and then let them play that content immediately. It's not an MMORPG though, it's just another action games.

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I don't quite understand how you come to the conclusion that a game without levels is not an (MMO)RPG. There are tons of RPGs that have no levels whatsoever; that most MMORPGs do have levels is an artifact of their EverQuest/MUD heritage, not because it's a necessary ingredient.

It is also important here to distinguish between level as a character development mechanic (you gain more and new abilities as you gain experience vs. levels as a challenge aspect (if something's higher/lower level than you, then it gets bonuses/penalties fighting you, has more/less hit points, etc.). You can have the first and not the second: You could in principle redesign all of CoH around Giant Monster mechanics, unify player health point pools and damage scale across levels and make the second aspect almost disappear, while still technically having levels.

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I wouldnt' go Sonic/Sonic or FF/Dark because you're introducing some redundancy there. FF provides as much not being hit as you need, so works better with Sonic Blast as an offensive secondary.

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I wouldn't quite agree with that.

First of all, the -res cap is quite high; Sonic/Sonic is an exceptional offensive debuffer. It may be more specialized than a Sonic/(not Sonic) combination, but it is very effective in that particular niche.

Second, FF does not necessarily provide as much +defense as you need. There are defense debuffs/to-hit buffs, and Dispersion Bubble + Shield + Maneuvers puts you just at around the soft cap, and that's assuming that it is actually safe to stay close enough to cover everybody with Dispersion Bubble (which is not always true). Also, you yourself will not be anywhere near the softcap (since you can't shield yourself): Dark Blast gives you better protection and also provides you with a self-heal when you do get hit.

Both powerset combinations are very specialized and generally stack poorly with other specialists of the same kind; but they are not necessarily redundant with themselves.

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Of those that are pled i would of never grinded up because until certain levels they would be super boring. If you level a Mind/Ta controller or a FF/Dark defender up with out PLing i salute you.

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Outside of powerleveling, the fastest way to level a character is to team a lot; this is largely independent of power set choices, but it's not as though playing a defender or controller hurts your chance to find a team (that's not counting that if you start teams yourself, you can be guaranteed a spot). So I'm not sure where you are trying to go with this.

On top of that, Mind/TA is actually a pretty good powerset combination for soloing: extremely safe with more than reasonable damage output. Only psi-resistent critters are annoying, and Acid Arrow, Disruption Arrow, Confuse, and Levitate can ameliorate that quite a bit.

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I disagree. My expeience with World of Warcraft's content was very much the sam as my expeience iwth tehc onten here. it was fun, and interesting, and reasonably well written, and I enjoyed it. And once i'd done it once or twice, I never, ever wanted to see it again. A difficult and complex raid, however, took a looooot longer to get old.

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I have a slightly different take on this.

First of all, you will notice in WoW that the level 1-70 (and these days, even the 70+ zones) are all but ghost towns. You may be able to quest through it, but the game is so endgame-slanted that finding groups for instanced stuff along the way is very, very hard. 90% of the game's population and activity are taking place at level 80 now, quite different from City of Heroes.

Second, raiding can get old very fast. Been there, done that, both me and my husband stopped doing it eventually (after we had been doing it for quite a while only because we didn't want to leave the rest of the guild in a lurch).

Difficult raids are indeed a very different beast, but not necessarily in a good way. You don't mention the extensive grind that goes along with hardcore raiding, because you need the consumables, the enchantments, and the gear (and because you're on the bleeding edge of progression, only the best stuff will do). You don't mention the rigid raiding schedule imposed by most guilds to make a speedy progression possible despite all those challenging fights, usually requiring several evenings a week where you are expected to show up and schedule your RL around that. You don't mention that once you've overcome a challenging boss fight, you will farm it for weeks and weeks and weeks to come in order to get the necessary upgrades for the next tier of raid content. In short, those challenging raids are usually something like 10% actually overcoming the challenges and 90% farming activity.

Another point is that this kind of content is very expensive to create. We can safely assume that Ulduar (the latest WoW raid instance) cost millions to make. And people eat through content fast: Every raid instance that Blizzard has brought out since their first expansion was conquered in a few weeks, if not days, unless they took steps to artificially prolong its life. No game company can possibly keep up with the hunger hardcore gamers have for new content.

And yes, I understand that once you had done Katie Hannon a few times, you didn't get much more out of doing the taskforce again. On the other hand, once you had done Black Temple a few times, you were heartily sick of it, too.

I know that this is a troll thread, but one thing that piqued my curiosity was when I came to the boilerplate "I don't actually mean any harm, even if I sound like it" disclaimer:

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This isn't a request to keep farming in the game or to nerf RP.

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How the heck does one nerf roleplaying even if one wanted to? It just doesn't make any sense conceptually. Has the meaning of the term changed completely with me being unaware of it?

And on a more general note, you will find that a lot of groups have different preconceptions as to how "best" play the game. That can go both for and against certain ATs. Some people like tankers, some don't. Others go all nuts over scrankers. Some players adore FF defenders, others consider them a waste of a team slot. Some people think Stormies are the best thing since sliced bread, others hate them with a fiery passion. And so forth. In the end, of course, it's largely prejudice.

Ideally, you want to play with those folks who understand that more often than not it's the player behind the character who matters and not the AT or powerset of the character. Even if you're thinking purely in terms of potential XP/hour, the extra time you need to get a minmaxed team together is likely costing you more than you can gain once you've got your perfect team together.

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Cool, I'll try and keep away from the MA.

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Just be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I've been playing quite a few MA story arcs (both solo and with friends), and there is some truly exceptional stuff in there, as well as a lot of very good story arcs.

In short, while you may want to stay away from MA farm teams, you also don't want to deprive yourself of the opportunity of mining the MA for a lot of good alternate content.

I am currently quite fond of Invulnerability/Ice, but I would be lying if I said that I actually favor this particular powerset combination strongly -- I belong to the "variety is the spice of life" school of thought. I like to play different ATs and powersets, and do not just stick to one.

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They can build however they like, however build decisions and play decisions do carry consequences. Good players are remembered, poor players are as well and I try to maximize the good to bad ratio of players I team with. A Kin who doesn't have or use SB probably won't get booted from my team, it takes more than that for me to kick someone. However, they also won't be picked for the team next time.

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Well, different strokes for different folks.

One of the reasons I'm currently playing City of Heroes and am not, say, raiding hardmode Ulduar bosses was that my husband and I decided a couple of years ago that compulsory minmaxing was having a deleterious effect on our gaming experience. Not necessarily because it was too tedious for us (though some of the extremes were), but because it had a bad effect on how the people we played with approached the game, doing something that had to be done, and not something they wanted to do.

I'm still generally playing to the best of my abilities (old habits die hard), but I honestly couldn't care less if a team's effectiveness is not quite maximized because of some non-minmaxed choices somebody makes. I'm fine with just about anything as long as we are successful. I.e., our enemies go down and we don't (at least in general, I like an element of challenge, and you don't have a challenge if you can't possibly lose). But minmaxing to a degree where the only difference is that we may be steamrolling a mission x% faster strikes me as inconsequential. Unlike succeeding vs. failing, this is a difference in degree, not in kind. And because of previous experiences in other MMORPGs, I am very conscious of the fun/benefit tradeoff. Some benefits simply may not be worth the reduction in fun they bring with them, and I have no problem with that.

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a full set of mako's level 40-50 on infinity blue side will run you 15-25 million for one set of 6. so i call bollux to the 100m to soft cap scrapper bs.

it's even MORE expensive red side on infinity.

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I think what Sailboat is getting at is that the markets of all the servers are linked (EU and US). There are no separate markets per server, just separate markets depending on which side you play.

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But the true (albeit invisible) 900 pound gorilla in the room in my opinion is the free to play games. Advertising pays for all their costs and generates nobody knows what kind of cash. My soon to be stepdaughter can pull up and navigate the games at nick jr. by herself without being able to read. Thats an amazing new market and a new way to establish a presence with customers. And let's not talk about all the games on social networking sites like Mafia Wars.

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The recent Nielsen study seems to indicate something similar; that a lot of people play games that are, well, outside the retail-in-a-box model.

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And if you do switch and the mac client has issues for you, you can always use Boot Camp to dual boot a copy of windows along side OS X and run the native windows client.

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Exactly. I use both the Windows and Mac version of CoH on the same machine (a Macbook Pro).

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Some people seem to be forgetting the difference between kins that sometime SB and those who NEVER. If you don't wanna SB anyone then just don't take the power.

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Even then -- a Kin who never uses Speed Boost ranks pretty darn low on my list of possible problem players. It is nothing that has ever bothered me or is likely to bother me.

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I've had a lvl 45 emp a lvl 36 corr (Pain) and a lvl 50 troller. All buffs and heals included. I never had a problem rebuffing teams when needed. The "buff icon area" is quite helpful to me, as Kin powers are easily distinguishable from the rest. I don't know how buffing is hard when you even get the "blink" warning when they are about to wear off.

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I'm not saying that it is hard, I just mentioned that the standard UI doesn't exactly help. The bigger point, anyway, is that the major problem in my opinion is tedium, not difficulty.

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You also have to keep in mind that most people suck at buffing teams. Which is pretty sad considering the extreme ease there is in clicking a button.

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The problem, I believe, is not that it's hard buffing a team (though the UI doesn't exactly help you a whole lot in pointing out when buffs need to be refreshed, so you either have to run HeroStats or watch out for your specific buff icon in a sea of other little buff icons, or run a kitchen timer, or use some other external aid).

The problem is more that constant and frequent rebuffing is tedious. It's exactly THAT buffing is so easy (but still needs to be done every couple of minutes for seven other team members) that makes it feel like an assembly line job for many, and not a fun part of playing the game. In short, it's tedium, not difficulty, that is the obstacle here.

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If you don't like reapplying SB then don't play a kinetic or atleast don't take the power. This is my approach, I don't play any sets that needs to reapply buffs because I find it too annoying. Doing anything less than your best on a team is just rude, in my opinion.

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It isn't rude if the mechanic in question decreases a player's enjoyment of the game significantly, because, in the end, the objective of the game is to have fun. Rebuffing SB is a fairly tedious task, and if it isn't critical for the success of the task at hand, then it is -- in my opinion -- the personal decision of the Kin whether to apply it or not. There are plenty of other ways in which a Kin can contribute to a team, and I don't care if he or she doesn't want to go through the rebuffing treadmill every couple of minutes.

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And exiting a mission door from an office I just cleared of CoT, and then immediately getting another mission at that same door, but now it leads to a cave full of Devouring Earth, isn't immersion breaking?


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And you may want to consider that the door itself isn't instanced, only the inside is (that some cave entrances lead to office maps is a bug, not an inherent issue with instancing). So, what's your point?

Of course there are limits to making everything consistent if you want to get indefinite replay potential out of finite content and map space, but you can minimize the impact with the right tools.

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instancing is still relatively new. city of heroes was a pioneer in many ways.

how many of us remember waiting 'in line' to kill that one gnoll? or that one mob with a 4 hour respawn rate for his drop and hoping you could 'tag' or outdmg everyone else in the area enough to get said drop this time.

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Problems with non-instanced content really only occur when people have to compete for a scarce resource, especially if you need it to attain an important goal. For an example of where non-instanced content works, Rikti invasions aren't instanced, yet there isn't a problem, because they allow players to collaborate rather than compete. Warhammer zone quests (or whatever they are called) are another example of where non-instanced content works perfectly fine, because it allows everybody to work together towards a common goal.

The benefit of good non-instanced content is that it facilitates immersion in the world and gets you to meet other players along the way. Poor non-instanced content hurts immersion (I just defeated that named mob and it's already back?) and creates hostility between players (well, in a PvP game, the latter may actually be a feature, not a bug).