Strikeshadow

I'm working toward slotting up my Interface slot on my Fire/Dark, and I was originally thinking about Diamagnetic. I love the fact that I can debuff regen, and was thinking that, with stacking Diamagnetic attacks on top of HT and TG, I could put a real dent in the regen of notoriously "healthy" AVs...

I was recently speaking to a friend, though, who was of the opinion that TG and HT already do about as much -Regen as you're gonna get, and that I would be better served by taking something not already covered by /Dark. This seemed like sound advice, but I'm not one with a head for numbers. If it's really a negligible difference, I'll probably go with something else... but even if I'm not getting the max benefit of the extra debuff, if it makes a notable difference in how fast an AV goes down, I'll stick with it.

Would you go Diamagnetic on a Fire/Dark?

I think an extra week would work. Four weekends would give us, oh... precisely -two- weekends that aren't holiday weekends. For students, this timing is fortuitous enough, but for those of us players who work a full schedule to pay for our $15 a month, the three weekends are the last weekend to shop/party before Christmas, Christmas weekend, and New Year's weekend. That seems an impossibly busy time to do much of anything. And then, once things slow down again, it's over? Winter -does- go thru February, you know. An extra week isn't asking much.

This appears to be geared to favor the younger set and their high-school/college winter break. And those of the younger set who -aren't- going out of town at that. That can exclude a lot of people.

If you're going to limit this to two weeks, why the two busiest weeks of the year? I'm chiming in with the "this event is unobtrusive and unique enough that it could easily go on quite a bit longer" crowd.

...And server transfers. Yes.

...And snow.

I would almost think the cringe-worthy part of his existence would be mostly related to the fact that people feel the overwhelming need to farm his missions, and I mean more than just the five times it takes to get the badge.

Anything can be boring when done to death.

He honestly seems to be the best fit for the story I want to tell. The fact that it centers around Croatoa and the Hallowe'en event is just a spiffy coincidence! Besides, making a Hallowe'en Snaptooth arc sorta completes the set. Though since he does the whole respawn-three-times thing in spring, but not winter, I suppose it's possible he could be even lower-powered in autumn... I can make him a Fiend.

The nice part about this arc is, with the inability to get badge credit, there's no need to fight him more than once.

Forgive me, but I have rotten luck searching for anything here, so if this has been asked and answered before, forgive me, but I didn't find anything...

I'm trying to build a story arc in AE, and on the final mission, I want to include a boss fight with Snaptooth. However, I can't seem to -find- him. I can't think of any logical or game-breaking reason he'd have been left out, so I'm assuming I'm just not looking in the right place.

If worse comes to worse, I can just -name- a fiend Snaptooth, but I'm not sure the powers are comparable, so if the actual character exists in AE I'd like to find him. Does anybody know if he is available for AE, and under what group? (Didn't see him in Red Caps...)

Running an alt version of a character with a complicated background who hails from the Shadow Shard... He's a DS/DM. The demons are explained as beings from his own mind made manifest, and named accordingly as best I could:

Firey Demonling: Fury
Cold Demonling: Sorrow
Hellfire Demonling: Envy
Ember Demon: Passion
Hellfire Gargoyle: Hatred
Demon Prince: Terror

I have given this a lot of thought, and just from what I have seen (buildings and such not really taken into account, this is just the people) there is a decent amount of consistency. Council, generally, are taller than NPCs, Skulls and Hellions tend to be more average, Rikti are huge. Gotcha.

The one single thing that would make the biggest difference is changing the height scale in the creator to read a bit differently. I can think of three examples where that alone would have been a perfect fix for me.

1) My first 50 was a 'troller who, by concept, was short, because not only was he young (19-20-ish), but was much more of a mind over matter type. He was always short for a guy, standing about 5'5" to 5'6". Only after the ability to edit the height slider came out was I able to make him look like an adult. He's now "6 feet" according to the game, and still on the short side... shorter than most of the gangs.

2)When trying to make a scrapper of mine "average", since he was sort of a Longbow knockoff, I set things to somewhere between 5'10" and 6'... I then noticed that when he was fighting Hellions in Atlas Park, they were ALL taller and "beefier" than he was.... he didn't look like a child, more like he looked like he'd been photoshopped in at the wrong proportion.

3) Most recently, I made a Rikti. Knowing how tall they were, I decided to make him 7 feet tall... the instant I got him to Galaxy, a civilian walked by who WAS TALLER THAN HIM! (City of Giants, I tell you!) I huffed, deleted and rerolled him, and maxed out my height slider.

When comparing people to a host of other things, sure, proportion in the game is a bit off. I can live with that. It seems to me that, for the most part, the size of the people is decently proportioned enough that they relate well to each other. What I would love to see is to have the character creator recalibrated so that, by default, we don't make "normal size" heroes that are dwarfed by everybody else, including the pedestrians.

As a final note, I am also in the boat of "if it's a supers game don't make the females automatically a foot shorter than the men"... but there are enough unbelievably ridiculous gender biases in the character creator that I'm not even considering that one worth the fight. I don't have time for an hourlong rant.

Second half of duo here, and thanks for all the insightful replies...

It's interesting to see Brutes and Scrappers get so much love, and yet see so little mention of Controllers in response. One combination that, up to now, has proven repeatedly successful when I've duoed with Raven has been Scrapper/Controller. Our initial pair is his MA/WP and my Mind/Emp, and this is part of what gives us the desire to try and find the "uber" duo for us.

What's funny, is that, in other combinations we've played, it hasn't mattered which of us was the scrapper and which was the controller. He's run a Grav/Kin with my DM/Regen to much the same effect. It pretty much boils down to one of us holding them all still while the other beats the %$#@! out of them. So that may lend some insight into our playstyle.

Now, not everything we play is Scrap/Troll... we've both played many of the ATs in varied combinations, and depending on what we're fighting, there have been varying degrees of awesome involved... in some cases very little.

As for power types, I'm very familiar with Mind Control, Empathy, Psi, Martial Arts, Dark Blast, Dark Miasma, and Fire Blast. Dual Blades, Dual Pistols, Willpower and various Sonic are also cool sets, and I've played them to some degree. If I had to pick something I really am not fond of, I'd have to say Assault Rifle (mainly due to playstyle) and Traps. The visuals behind FF also grate on my nerves, because it looks like soap bubbles.

For me, though, what it boils down to is concept. If I'm playing a character I really like, with powers that fit concept and yet have the capability for awesome synergy with another character, I would really be hard-pressed not to have a whole lot of fun with it. I just have to wrap my head around the reason the character has said powers. So, combos that don't necessarily lend themselves conceptually to each other are hard for me to get into. (That said, there are lots of ways to make an argument for logistics when it comes to power sets...)

Oh, and by the way... I, too, have seen the awesomeness that is a well-played dual-corruptor pair! It's one of many I was considering.

But...

...Why is the rum gone?!




*lol* Happy Holidays to you too, man.

Flashrains...

I LOVE Sideshow Suzy! I have a toon called Bladedancer who is basically the opposite take... for reasons not yet disclosed (working on the MA arc). He's one of only a handful of men who were recruited not as strongmen but for a much more sinister purpose. I had never thought of flipping the role and making a female Strongman though... I love it! And with the costume parts you chose you pulled it off brilliantly!

This is a fantastic thread! I love seeing what everybody else has done to make canon concepts! It's one of the things I enjoy working on in the game... seeing how close I can get to making characters that can be part of the backstory!

I have so many canon-based concepts it's ridiculous. I'll put up a few now that are either loners or those I don't play much, then see if I can upload screenies of some of the others by faction.

First is Anomaly (Electric/Electric blaster)... he's a clockwork that wasn't built quite right or connected completely because of the interference of a passing hero. Having stayed unconnected to the Clockwork King's influence, he decided to upgrade himself to look a bit more like the people he saw, although he remains curious about his more mindless Clockwork brethren.



Fellwalker (Dark/Dark stalker) is my newest canon toon, inspired this past Hallowe'en. He's an Unseelie who has managed to escape the odd fluctuations of that season to fully manifest, and physically affect the material world. I plan to have him take Soul Mastery when that becomes an option.



Mender Vortex (peacebringer) was pretty much my CoX-canon version of a Time Lord, and the other costumes he has are fairly motley Dr. Who homages, not copying any particular Doctor's look, but just the feel of that character in general. Naturally I had to get him involved with Ouroboros.



Captain Ravenwood (Dual Blades/Dark stalker) is the spectral pirate in red... the one in black is an actual Spectral Pirate. I loved this picture. I play him in constant Hover, and have the stealth IO in Hover as well, so even when he comes out of Hide, he's still transparent. I recolored the Dark auras to resemble that greenish glow the ghosts have.



I have quite a few others, but a lot of them I can group by faction once I get decent screenshots of them.

Alright... I came on here looking to see if anybody felt as I did about the actual look of the walk animations, and it seemed people were quick to jump in and shoot down the opinions that the Walk styles might be tuned up a bit much. Hopefully I might make a suggestion and not be similarly shot down...

I -like- the animations, for what they are, and I realize a lot of work goes into animating, and redoing an animation would be a lot more work. I also realize that you cannot please everybody every time. However, I would like to add my voice to those that occasionally mention that, even though it is somewhat typical of the super hero genre, sometimes the gender differences in this game seem to be overly exaggerated. I agree that, for a female toon that is not wearing heels, the walk animation -is- a bit overdone. I -like- the look of it, but it doesn't fit most of my female toons. (I could mention here that while male PCs and NPCs walk similarly, the female NPCs don't swing their hips like that.)

I have a different suggestion to offer, though, that might make everybody happier... instead of assigning the walks to the character frame, make them three distinct powers. I wouldn't mind my Crab spider, built on the Male model, to walk around like a Huge character while in his Arachnos armor, and I think the Female model walk would look amazing on my Incubus character, given his personality and powers... and my Female claw scrapper could walk around Vanguard in her fatigues without the saunter. Given that I heard there was a bug that caused characters who gender-swapped costumes with the Walk toggle on to continue walking the way their previous frame did, this seems like a viable thing. And we have several different Sprint options which are identical powers, so it doesn't seem as though it would conflict.

It would let players, and especially RPers, get even more mileage out of a well-designed set of animations. Again, I'm not a dev, so I don't know how feasible this would be, but it seems like a sensible fix if it's possible, and would make me very happy.

I have a Mu... Elec/Rad built as a Mu Guardian concept, and I like the way Mu Mastery plays into the entire build. Again, it's a concept toon and and I'm not min/maxing for any type of solo or PvP play, but for duoing and team play he works just fine.

Very nice to hear tell of a few more Elec/Rad toons out there, btw... Elec/ has been panned a lot as a Corruptor set. I don't know... I like mine just fine.

I'm working my way up on an Energy/Pain Corruptor, and came looking for a little advice, but I found only one guide for Energy, and apparently none at all for Pain. If I missed something somewhere, then by all means point me in the right direction.

If there really are no guides for either of these, though, has anybody played either Energy/ or /Pain, or the combination, and have any advice to offer?

I don't mean to sound overly frustrated, but for the record I -did- already say that what would make the reinstatement fair was for the other character to have to "catch up" so that the characters would be of the same level. Nowhere in my previous posts did I imply that a level 5 would or should EVER be able to pact to a 45. I'm not even sure where anybody got that implication.

I don't see how it would involve an immediate balancing of levels. If a level 5 character pacts now with a level one there is no such immediate leveling. Paired XP after that point goes to the lower toon until balance is restored, but there is no "insta-leveling" involved.

Aside from that, if it is concern over level disparity, I already mentioned that for toons over level 5 they could have a requirement that both characters already be the same level... thus if the active person leveled while the other was inactive, the inactive character would have to be leveled up to the same point before the pact could be reinstated. I have no desire to suddenly receive a mass of XP I did not earn.

Again, it was not my intention to allow my account to lapse and not pay, while reaping the benefits of existing level pacts... as I stated, for most of the characters in question, neither character had been played since the lapse. My main concern is the dual problem of there being NO grace period and there also being NO way to reinstate the pact afterward... along with the added frustration of having no warning that this was going to be the case.

I know that it's probably not a fun thing for a good MMO to think about/discuss things that happen if an account subscription should lapse. As it is, my own account lapsed recently due to major and rather sudden financial hardship. We were without internet, and without our game subscriptions, for about two weeks, but as soon as we could manage it, we paid our dues and got back to the game we've played and loved for a long time now. Two weeks, because real life interfered. That's all.

When I returned to several of my characters that I had level-pacted with a friend of mine, I found the pacts were broken. My friend contacted support about this, and was told quite simply that this was "how the feature was designed to work". It was stated rather bluntly and coldly, with very little understanding of the situation. She was rather irate about the whole experience... myself, I was just very disappointed.

I can understand that Level Pacts are meant to be between two characters with active accounts, and given all the recent anti-hype about PLing due to MA and such exploits, that there would be concern about people getting benefits from being pacted while their accounts are not being paid for. That's fair. My main concern, which is probably obvious by this point, is that, due to the way level pacts were designed, if either or both characters is over level 5, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to reinstate the pact once the game account is renewed.

The limit for account "downtime" is actually shorter than two weeks. Somebody else reported their pacts being broken when their account went down due to a billing error, and was inaccessible for less than 24 hours before the situation was fixed. That seems a pretty darn unforgivable window for a game feature that CANNOT be renewed.

If the level pacting system was available for any two characters under level 5, and also for any characters between 6 and 49 who were both the same level when the pact was initiated, that would be a different matter. Even if the account lapse was longer than a few weeks, and the other character was being played, all that would be necessary was for the inactive toon to "catch up" before re-pacting... either way it would still be a possibility. But since it's not at all an option for any character above level 5, regardless if they are still the same level and previously pacted, this just feels badly broken to me. I had pacts broken between characters that neither my friend or I had even logged IN to during my downtime... it's not as if any illegitimate experience had been earned.

Worst of all, I think, was the fact that precedence for account-lapse-related issues of other kinds (character names, etc) has always been around 90 days, or even a month at the very least. I had no idea, warning, or even a suspicion that I would lose access to most of my level pacts for a downtime of as little as two weeks. I am very, very disappointed that a new and very enjoyable game feature that is impossible to repair once broken, can be broken for things as simple as a temporary lack of money, or even a simple clerical error.

I'm not trying to flame or anger anybody, but it seems only fair that people be made aware that this is a consequence of account lapse, and it is -immediate-, with no grace period, which is, according to Support, "how it was designed to be". I would also hope for a re-think on how pacting can be initiated, for future reference. Would it break game balance so horribly to allow a pact to be made between two characters of the same higher level? It just feels like a game feature that can be broken so easily needs SOME way of being fixed again.

Status Reports
Star Strider Force
Name: Agent Joelle Wright
Global Contact: @Trystan Laryssa
Reporting on Assignment: Vanguard Front Lines
Star Strider Force Unit: Justice Server
Time/Date Location: The week following the recent attacks...
Level of Alien Threat [low]:

Report Details:
The Rikti War Zone is still a war zone, make no mistake. The alien threat continues to make itself known... but at the moment things are eerily quiet at the Vanguard base. I have gotten tangled up in some pretty decent firefights near the base, and have worked with the Vanguard and Corps operatives there to ensure the safety of our resources here.

My associate Sorina Tavarisch has been hard at work dealing with the threat, and I have heard that the other members of Star Patrol have been kept busy by the constant city invasions. I can only hope the reason for the silence here is that the Rikti are beginning to find themselves spread too thin...

The stillness between frontline attacks is unnerving... it's the bad kind of quiet. It's the kind of quiet that makes me worry what the alien scum are up to elsewhere in the city, and how many lives are at stake.


Analysis of Current Situation:
The Rikti, from what data we have begun to compile in the last few hours, seem to be attempting to choose their battles. Perhaps they are beginning to dwindle in number...


Suggestion of Action:
If the Rikti are at a weak point in their development, it may be the ideal time to strike, take out every warrior we can in this fight. As the Vanguard base seems to be holding its own, I'm planning to rendezvous with others in Star Patrol and head out to the city to try and assess the numbers that are actively attacking. Hopefully we can put this madness to an end.

Star Strider Forces Registry
Name: Agent Wright
Global Contact: @Trystan Laryssa
Level of Classification: 35
Origin: Technology
Super Rank & Super Group: Leader, Star Patrol

Since I had a concept in mind that would fit the criteria, I finally made my first CoH machinima for the contest, and a good friend of mine told me I should put it up here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaKrCTHAL8w

I've been wanting to make one for a while, and this seemed like the chance to do it.

I will say that I would also prefer that characters' stats all be set by default to the hidden status... Not necessarily for myself, as I don't mind showing off my build a bit... but because it seems more courteous to those who DO wish to remain hidden.

Being automatically viewable will upset some people... no harm will be done if these options are by default keyed to "off", or "hidden"... that way the only people who will have their characters visible are those who know of the feature.

Easy fix.