Thunderspark

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You can proclame anything you want, how kiddies rule wow etc.. the fact is WoW is ahead over 9.5million players. At the end of the line, its numbers, nothing more... nothing less. Somewhere at those numbers, NC failed at CoH on it.

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Blizzard had the advantage of being a well known software company, as well as the monetary muscle to push WoW sales worldwide. I think it's more down to brute force sales tactics rather than winning players over with gameplay that it continues to retain it's crown. It's also seen now as "The" MMO to play, meaning a lot of people are playing it just to be aboard the bandwagon.

I've played it. It's awful (well, in my humble opinion). And it's not just the graphics, the heavy PvP aspect or the annoyingly testosterone-charged teens. How it still manages to keep those 9 million players is a question I doubt anyone could answer.

My powerset:

TREE HUGGER!
Astound your foes with the incredible power of peace, love and empathy. Who needs a destructive force when all your enemy really needs is a good hug? Show your fellow men and women you care, hug a tree today!

BLOW KISS
You blow a kiss to your opponent, causing them to stare at you in a rather confused way. Damage: Minor, Reharge: Very Fast

ROSE TOSS
What better way to show you care than to throw them a rose? Be careful though, or someone could lose an eye. Damage: Moderate, Recharge: Fast

PETAL DANCE
Toss rose petals around you in a small radius in a wonderful gesture which is sure baffle your opponents as they try to figure out what you're up to. Confusion (PBAoE), Recharge: Long

PUCKER UP
Prep those lips for planting a gorgeous kiss on your opponent. This is sure to make them recoil in disgust. Knockback, Recharge: Moderate

SONNET
A little poetry to soothe the soul. This act is sure to leave you with a captivated audience. Well, those who can stay awake at least. Target AoE Sleep, Recharge: Long

WATER PIPE
Place this tubular device on the floor and enjoy the vapours it releases, guaranteed to soothe even the most tortured of souls. This will cause disorientation in a wide area. Disorient (AoE), Recharge: Very Long

TIE-DYED SHIRT
This power, granted by the masters of free love, will magically transform your opponents top into a Tie-dyed T-shirt. This is guaranteed to get them into the mood to help you out! Target Confusion, Recharge: Long

HUG
What better way to calm anger than a good hug. This is sure to placate even your worst foe! Target Placate, Recharge: Moderate

SUMMON HIPPIE
Call forth the masters of free love and adoration. Complete with tie-dyed t-shirt and headbands, these hippies are sure to help you in your quest to spread the word of peace throughout Paragon City. Recharge: Very Long

I wholeheartedly support this suggestion. Logo's would presumably be easier on the dev's to implement (like the emblems we have currently), but either way I would definetly donate towards this knowing my money is being well spent.

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I take it you haven't met "The Radio" as an opponent yet then? It uses sonics, strangely enough, when I came up against it with my MM, it wiped out all my pets and half killed my toon with just two blasts. Weak it ain't...not when used by an EB anyway

[/ QUOTE ]I know well how strong it can be when used against you. I fought the radio on my robotics/forcefield mastermind and it did a lot of damage to say the least. And wailers are equally difficult to defeat for the same reason. Eating those attacks from several opponents really stacks on the resistance reductions and takes you out quick.

For a lone corruptor though, it feels like lil ol' me versus the world. Hopefully I'll find it better with Fulcrum Shift to hand.

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Its not a bug.Is the way stealth works.

[/ QUOTE ]Hide gives a 500ft radius invisibility, which matches perception radius (regardless of character). In short, without any form of perception bonus, that stalker is completely invisible. That's also not factoring in things like Stealth/Invisibility or IO's. Some AT's have perception built into their powers, such as SR (Focused Senses) or Devices (Targeting Drone).

RE the whole PvP thing:

To be honest, I quite enjoy PvP occasionally. The real problem is ganking and overpoweredness can kill the enjoyment factor completely. When coupled with player attitudes of "It's a PvP zone, deal with it" it can be incredibly frustrating, especially when they're singling the more vocal players out just to be an annoyance.

Unfortunately for some, PvP is seen as some sort of badge of honor. It doesn't matter what circumstances or what insane buffs you were given, as long as you've killed your target. This leads to some terribly one-sided battles as you struggle against two or more players, possibly buffed to the eyeballs. There's no enjoyment in losing every single battle without being able to put up a half-decent defense.

Oh, and don't get me started on the uselessness of "Defense" powers against the insane accuracy available to most PvP players...

Television's missions.

Everything about them is brilliant. From the descriptions in the mission briefs to the mission itself, but there are more than a few comic moments in both and as such TV is my all-time favourite contact.

I'm a big supporter of breast cancer awareness and I like pink as a colour anyway. My characters are already dressed for the occasion

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Man, how wrong can you be... You're calling arguably the best Defender/Corruptor blast set weak? You do realise how ridiculously powerful the stacking -res is, don't you?
And difficult to solo? Did you actually take the awesome cone Sleep power?

[/ QUOTE ]Yes, im well aware theres a sleep power, and it's useful when it actually lands, but for some reason I have trouble actually doing anything with it. It also wakes them the instant they take damage, making sleep one of the least useful holding abilities available.

As for the -resistance. It'd be nice if it actually showed signs of working occasionally. I filled enemies full of sonic attacks only to have them eviscerate me moments later with 75% HP or more. Even the weakest opponents can be a challenge, and oddly enough my slotting is at 94% acc and damage.

Believe me, I had the same conceptions you do but for some reason it just doesn't work for me. Go figure.

Auto-sidekicking is a bad idea. End of story. And it's for the simple reason that it lacks the flexibility of the current system. And what about teams with widely-varied levels? Does everyone get automatically sidekicked to just beneath the highest member? Is that really a good thing?

Maybe it'd be nice as an option, but a lot of players enjoy the extra experience gained by being a few levels below the missions lead character, and I don't think I would like to give that up anytime soon.

Right now the character I have the hardest time using is my Sonic/Kinetics Corruptor. Sonic seems like a weak power, though this is probably due to my defender-like attack power and makes it very difficult to solo even the weakest of foes. My kinetics side, while much better by comparison, still seems lacking due to recharge restrictions and the sheer endurance drain.

I spam siphon's like they're going out of fashion, but can only seem to stack power 3 times at best with Hasten. Siphon Speed is the same. While that 60% recharge sounds amazing at first glance, realise that unless I'm able to hit them every time it can quickly drop since I only have a duration of about 5 seconds in triple-stack.

It's fun to team with masterminds, and I really hope I can get her high enough to use Fulcrum Shift (as I believe that's about the only time I'll see any real benefits of being /kin) so I plan to stick with her. But yes, a very challenging character to play indeed.

Now where better to find such thought-provoking posts on the morality of being a hero than a forum dedicated to a game where you can burn enemies alive or riddle them with holes from your assault rifles. I won't even get started on the Broadsword or Katana scrappers, and im leaving the topic of suffocating your foes in a rock prison or laying explosive trip mines to blow up wary passers-by, well alone.

Let's gloss over the hordes of Longbow soldiers eager to nail the first villain they see against the wall with a spray of heavy machine gune fire, and the gigantic mecha robots which can spew out plasma beams and grenades. It's good to be a hero.

Ooo... cute. I so want a halo right now. It'll make my Little Jenny seem all the more angelic...

I'm frankly stunned that anyone could actually dislike this idea. It's the same game, only now there's infinite mission possibilities. Don't like your current mission arc? Make a new one!

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I do enjoy the game but yes the shine has started to wear off a little, so I was hopng for something a little more from i13. If GR is saying there is more and apprenetly the new chim stuff is cool I can still hold out some hope that the enjoyment I got when I first started will come back.

[/ QUOTE ]Nothing will ever give you the same enjoyment as when it's first experienced. Simple as that. People grow wiser and learn the tricks, they learn where to go etcetera. When I first began my heroic deeds in Atlas Park, everything was new and exciting. I had no idea where I was going as I walked bravely along the monorail lines in Steel Canyon as a lowbie level six, only that it was as far away from those nasty Hellions as possible (Thank you Hover!).

The one thing that keeps games like this fresh is the same thing that keeps me and countless other's playing im sure. The people. It's an online game, and as such there's a fantastic community you can be a part of. Now that same community is being given their own powers to create real game content for their friends to enjoy. I honestly don't understand how this could be anything less than perfection.

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Personally, I hope players names cannot be used unless its by them.

I have taken the time to create my characters, outfit them as I wish etc and it would hack me off no end to find that one of them had been created as a fat blue elf, wearing a bikini in somebody elses mission arc.

[/ QUOTE ]While I sympathise with your concern, it would fulfil a long-running wish of mine to pit my two characters (Villain and Hero alike) against each other in a mission, whether villainous or heroic. If they disallowed player names, it would render this impossible and im sure I can't be the only one who would desire something like that.

In my humble opinion, lower level IO's are often far superior to higher level ones (purples exempt from this rule) simply because any special abilities or set bonuses are applied at reduced-levels, such as in areas like Siren's Call or Warburg for PvP'ers.

If you only equip level 50 invention enhancements, you will lose every single bonus when you exemp down, making those expensive IO's little more than window dressing. Your stats won't suffer too much by using lower level versions, thanks largely to ED, and I generally find that losing 2-3% or so accuracy is worth it when im getting a 9% accuracy bonus overall

If this editor allows us to add our own custom Archvillains the devs will earn a big kiss from me! I read with great enthusiasm about the archvillain system they had considered some time ago (over a year and a half since I head about it, in fact) and this would be an excellent time for a workaround method of adding just that.

With our own storylines and our own villains, Architect could be one of the greatest features ever, and easily one of the best roleplay features of any MMO to date!

We all know that PvP renders defense practically useless, but whats the solution? Making defense more powerful unbalances the PvE aspects and likewise the same goes for nerfing accuracy bonuses.

Elude means almost nothing to the accuracy available on players these days. Even before epics many players can land consistently good blows on Eluders (with 80% or higher hit rate logged) and blasters could shoot the needle in a haystack three miles away while blindfolded.

So, my solution is a simple PvP only buff to all defense powers. Simply add a FIXED percent chance for an attack to automatically miss. Yes, I realise that accuracy is capped to 95%, but this would be a separate counter. Much like the 'streakbreaker' often seen in the hit rolls, this would be a separate calculation which gives the player a chance to dodge an attack giving an automatic miss if it fires.

This would mean that even with 95% accuracy you would find accuracy more like 85% or so, making defense based powers a bit more effective. Obviously the actual proc rate would need to be balanced to prevent defense becoming overly powerful, but as it stands defense is completely useless in PvP against most targets.

The ability would apply only to defense based powersets (Super Reflexes, Ninjutsu, Stone Armor, Ice Armour, Forcefields etc) and the effect would NOT stack with multiple powers to prevent it being abused.

I think you're missing the point slightly. My point is that EVERYONE is capped to the SAME value when they're hit by slows, regardless of the fact that Player A normally runs faster than Player B.

As an example, my character has pretty impressive running speed, but its all completely wasted the instant she hits Caltrops or is hit by blizzard. Sort of defeats the purpose to all the movement enhancements if they can't EVER be put to any real use.

You make it sound like I suggested an immunity to slows, which isn't what I said at all. Currently slow movement abilities reduce your MAXIMUM speed limit and I just think that that limit should be more attuned to the player's statistics rather than a static value for everyone.

While im sure there are countless reasons for not increasing the speed cap on running, there are fewer reasons for not allowing super speed to have a greater impact in the game.

When players are hit by slow movement abilities (such as Caltrops or Snow Storms) the effect is applied to reduce their MAXIMUM speed rather than a percentage reduction on their actual speed. In other words, if you're hit by a slow ability of any kind you're reduced to the same max speed as anyone else hit by that same power.

With all the countless speed bonuses on IO sets and even IO's themselves (Gift of the Ancients: Run Speed, for example) they seem rather redundant if you can't make proper use out of them. It just seems odd that a super-hero thats faster than others doesn't get that speed benefit against slow-movement skills.

My suggestion, then, is to perhaps give speed a sort of "resist" effect against slow movement abilities. Reduce the cap, by all means do, but scale it better towards how much faster the player is over normal running speed. Allow us to put that additional speed to some use when caught in a blizzard or stung by caltrops.

One thing I would suggest, however is to use the uncapped speed for the calculations since everyone who puts in even a weak SO into Super Speed will be running at the maximum speed cap anyway.

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my tactic is drop ice rain.. then run into the mob and pop thunderclap to sleep the minions.. then my zombies go to town on em.. sure youll lose 1 or 2.

[/ QUOTE ]I guess im too used to playing Robotics / Forcefields. I rarely lose my bots unless there's a tough boss or archvillain in their midst, and even then there's usually a heavy miss-spree before my minion drops.

Slowly getting more used to playing the AT though, but Storm is heavily endurance draining. O2 Boost gives a very poor cure and is only really useful for the bonus to disorient protection or perception (For players), so it seems I'll be heavily reliant on Aid Other for my pet cures.

As an afterthought, isn't running into a mob rather suicidal for a mastermind with no personal defense save for his (rather brittle) zombies?

I wasn't referring to the Ice Patch power, just an ice patch in general using Freezing Rain.

So, bad choice of powersets then? If im not mistaken, every single pet is melee intensive with the exception of robotics (largely ranged), so does that make Storm Summoning a weak choice for masterminds in general?

I've seen it countless times before. The undead hordes charge into battle screaming for brains and the only eating they get to do is feast off their brethren as they eat machine gun.

Hi, Zombie mastermind here and my pets are constantly dead at the best of times, yet I seem to have trouble keeping them reanimated. With my storm secondary I have no real means of protecting them from damage save for Steamy Mist, which is incredibly weak in terms of defense (3%) and only offers resistance against Fire, Cold and Energy damage. Nice if you're battling Circle of Thorns, but not so great against machine gun toting Longbow or Arachnos.

I can toss down an ice patch, but a good number of enemies have resistance to knockdown and still manage to shotgun my zombies quite happily. And as anyone will tell you, zombies have a weakness to shotguns.

So, survival tips are basically what im looking for. Storm Summoning is greatly reduced in effectiveness from the Defender and Controller versions in terms of duration, slows, and damage so slotting tips or power choice recommendations would be nice too.

My Mastermind is level 21, for those who need that info.

New power -- Kinetics for masterminds!

A full team of fulcrum shifted bots running around the Isles blasting seven shades of poo out of everything which even so much as looks at you funny? Tell me that wouldn't be incredibly fun!

Could also use an empath-style power which focuses more on healing. Being able to keep your pets alive is of crucial importance to a mastermind, and it also allows them to play a superior support role in teams. Besides, powering up your finest robots with Fortitude, Recovery Aura and Adrenaline Boost is reason enough to have this power, right?

Some base enhancements would go a long way though. New decor would be nice. Perhaps some beds sans-straps so I can go to sleep without being restrained in the morning by a cruel practical joker. I've tried the straw mat, but it just gets itchy after a few minutes. Windows would be nice too. I can't remember the last time my base ever saw the sunlight, and that's probably because it never has.

On the shields thing though, how is it going to work is the question I keep screaming at. I mean visually it'll be fine, since its just like weapons, but as an AT concept I'm curious as to how they'll get 9 powers out of it. Either way it sounds like it could be quite fun to run around with a giant great slice of metal attached to your arm, and doubly so if they allow it to work with Single-handed weapons like Katana or Broadsword.

Here's my own top-five ratings for PvP. I've not included the epics since I've not had a real chance to see them perform.

1. Blasters: Sorry, but these guys are the undisputed kings of the PvP world. They have ridiculous accuracy making any defensive powers completely useless (and, I should add, acc debuffs are far less useful if not resisted completely) and have the ability to blast multiple targets quickly and effectively -- and from a DISTANCE. Should they happen to close in though, they have plenty of melee attacks to choose from, some of them extremely devastating. Oh, they're also able to shoot while mezzed and gain a damage bonus for every successive hit.

2. Stalkers: Okay, this one is probably biased since whenever im slain its invariably by an energy melee stalker, but hear me out anyway. First of all they're the only class which can guarantee a critical hit (using Hide or Placate), and yet also are given some incredibly strong attacks such as Energy Transfer or Total Focus. And this is without even paying lip service to their insanely strong Assassin's Strike which reduces pretty much anyone except for DP users or tankers to a single hitpoint, allowing them to effectively 2-hit kill most players. Their only downside is if they're spotted beforehand.

3. Dominators: A good dominator is an impossible target except for skilled blasters or those with their own personal empath. Their holds land accurately and quickly and worse still they can use Domination to render you helpless while they chip away at your life. Its the worst way to go in my opinion, since you rarely get a chance to fight back. I much prefer battles with some give and take.

4. Masterminds: When you battle a mastermind, you fight seven opponents (or more!) at once. Thats tricky in itself, but given that masterminds also have a plethora of weakening or self-buffing abilities at their disposal as well they're also a force to be reckoned without companions. A blaster can pretty much render a mastermind useless by vaporising their pets, but most other AT's can and often do struggle to defeat a good MM. Besides being enfeebled beyond hope, you're constantly assaulted by targets, and every attack dealt to the MM is distributed amongst them.

5. Tankers: Okay, perhaps this one is an odd choice, but its here just because they're so difficult to bring down. An ice tanker, for example, can merely use Hibernate to bring themselves back to full hitpoints and stamina in a matter of seconds. And you can bet it will be fully recharged when he drops to lower hitpoints again. They also don't lose out too much in the melee stakes either, with some very powerful blows depending on your attack type. And Super Strength gets the very useful Rage allowing them to wail on enemies with far stronger blows than normal.

Like I said, probably biased due to my own experiences in PvP areas, but those are the most troublesome AT's I've encountered in combat.

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You can take leadership toggles on top of everything. But the stamina drain will be considerable, and you have to drop some good "native" powers.

[/ QUOTE ]I was thinking more about taking Assault on top of the default Widow version to give myself an additional 10% damage. A permanent 20% damage is little cause for scoff, and endurance IO's take care of the energy drain problem rather well.

As for losing a power, its a small price to pay considering it will directly enhance most of your skills. Perhaps not something for the Fortunata's, but I can imagine its usefulness as a Night Widow.

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When I'm sure I'm not the only one who would have appreciated something like that instead of yet another cheesy time travel themed area

[/ QUOTE ]I'm sure while you may not be the only one, you're in a minority. Cimerora is a beautiful area and well worth the wait for Issue 12 alone in my opinion. Epic Villain AT's are just the cherry on this cake

Anyway, I think I understand (maybe) what they mean by a seperate VEAT costume editor. I presume its the same system that is used to create the arachnos armies we enjoy crushing so much. Obviously there have been some additions, since female bane spiders were unheard of just as much as male fortunata's were previously, but I can see how merging the two would be a mammoth task and result in a rather lumpy system.

I can only assume, of course, but they'd probably have to recreate most if not all of the items effectively in order to accomodate them with the new armours such as the spider backpacks. From a designing perspective, it would be a nightmare.

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So I'm the only one that finds it funny that we're not allowing [X] due to 'clipping' of [Y], but the default un-helmed Widows' default Shado hair clips oh so obviously into the collar? And that is not 'unprofessional'?

[/ QUOTE ]There are certain acceptable levels of clipping though. For example, a long skirt and a trenchcoat clip through each other at times, as does the long lab coat with a skirt. Something which becomes very obscured due to clipping problems, though, is something which just looks ugly in the end. I'd rather have a nice looking game than an ugly one for the sake of choice.