UberGuy

The forums are here for people to post things on them. Some of thpse posts are seen as misinformation that others want to correct. Some of them are opinions but ones that others feel it's important to offer counterpoint to. They are kept pretty civil by moderators, but you're going to see arguments.

Long story short, if you don't want to see people debating or arguing, I recommend you avoid the forums altogether.

I'm as old guard as anyone can be, and I'm pretty damn happy with what they're doing in terms of Paragon Market stuff. I don't like everything there, and I think some of things have had laughable prices, but it's had lots of stuff I have liked, and they still seem to be feeling out their prices for various things.

Here's a significant area of disconnect between folks. Even level 50 stuff hasn't been a challenge for folks who partook heavily of the IO system for a very long time. I think it unlikely that everyone who built an IO'd-out character still was running at max difficulty, but most everyone was at least turning it up a few notches. Now, with Incarnate powers, people with zero IOs at all can turn difficulty up a few notches. People with IOs and Incarnate stuff can turn difficultly up nearly all the way. (A few characters could already turn it up all the way with just one or the other, but certainly not everyone.)

For those who didn't want to play at those power levels, heavily IO'd characters may have been easier to avoid than Incarnates are now. There's an implication there - the IO system was either harder or less enjoyable for more people to get into than the Incarnate system. For the people who appreciated and/or enjoyed the kind of play IO'd characters provided, that's a great improvement - Incarnates are apparently more accessible. For other folks, perhaps not so much.

I had a longer post debating some of your other points, but I pared it down, because ultimately I agree with the above. Perhaps not specifically about the degree to which it will keep Incarnates out of "nostalgic" content, but that I believe it's the right solution to this and several other areas of contention the Incarnate system has introduced.

By and large, no Incarnate abilities are going to let a team hit much better. (It's rare to see people take Nerve outside the occasional defense-based or control-based character.) Solo with no outside buffs, my 50s were at the toHit cap against unbuffed +3s long before I19 came along. So if the folks you're running with are hitting +3 or +4 foes, it's probably got nothing to do with Incarnate powers.

By and large, no Incarnate abilities make you debuff foes better. There's one branch of Clarion with +special, but it only strengthens buffs and not debuffs. So I'm not sure why you think you can't debuff as much as anyone else, since their Incarnate powers aren't boosting their debuffs.

When you end up on a team with Incarnates on it, how many of them are there? Are you finding you can't find a team that's not composed mostly of Incarnates? One Judgement will not level a +3 or +4 spawn. Two will level most of the minions. Are you finding yourself on a team of four or more Incarnates? I can't say that's not happening, but it surprises me, because I don't run into that full time even playing with people who have been otherwise working hard on Incarnate progress. They still level up new characters. I went on an ITF with them the other day where I was the only Incarnate, and only of only two level 50s.

This is hardly a new problem, just a spin on an old one. Contrary to popular opinion, level 45+ is no more the whole game than level 50 was before Incarnates came along. What the introduction of Incarnates did was shift a debate between two sets of people: those who liked playing the pre-50 game and retiring 50s and those who like to play only at 50. That debate has new life in the form of a debate between people who like to play at 50 and people who like to play at 50 with Incarnate powers. As you say, it has a lot of parallels to raising the level cap. However, unless it provided no mechanical advantages at all to play "past 50", this conflict would exist. It might not exist in this degree, but so long as Incarnate powers were non-trivial, this same debate would have come up.

I have no objection to that, and have been unhappy with the limited amount of Incarnate content (for progress purposes or otherwise) since it was released. I understand that the devs can only put out so much content at one time, but the system dove over a cliff in terms of implied expectation for repetition as soon as it came out, when it was impossible for the devs to produce enough content to keep it from being perceived not just as a grind, but a more repetitious one than anything to date.

While that might be true, I have, personally, never perceived them to be so ungood that I would disable them as a class. Even though I too can find myself bouncing off cave walls, and that's not ideal, I don't find it unmanageable. I realize others might not find it manageable.

I'm not sure if this was directed at me, but in case it was (at least in part), that wasn't what I was trying to portray. Perhaps you're just being hyperbolic here. You earlier suggested that you thought people who do take travel powers might be a significant minority. I posted an anecdote that I think provides evidence to the contrary. The natural extension of that evidence is not that you are the only one who does so.

Yep. I started to include a sub-rant about that in my post, and it just got too long, so I chopped it out.

Wait, what? Even if there was a server limitation, that response to you makes no sense!

You're one of the examples I was just posting about. As I recall, that character was a KM/SR Stalker.

That's what I always said when we were told that. It never made sense to me. I'm pretty sure I originally heard it before Castle's time, meaning it was likely Geko or possibly Statesman that posted it.

I hang out in channels stocked with people who are concerned with performance. I have only ever known any of them to skip travel powers occasionally, usually only when playing powersets which offer travel speed boosts such as Super Reflexes, and usually only then building in ways that maximize speed set bonuses from IOs.

In my own experience, I find "concept" players more likely to skip them than min/maxers. Getting around fast happens to be a very popular thing people like to maximize, and honest-to-goodness travel powers are the most effective, least conditional, least fidgety way to do so.

Honestly, I don't understand this. I really don't.

It's simply a ludicrous claim that ATs are obsolete at this point. Yes, Incarnate powers are very powerful. You won't hear me claim that they don't change the game. As someone with 10 characters who mostly have all five currently available Incarnate slots equipped at tier 4 (Very Rare), I still don't understand this notion that this makes ATs no longer matter.

Do Incarnate powers blur the lines? Yes, there's no question. But losing the benefit of AT distinctions completely can only seem to happen if you are playing at difficulty where the need for support is so limited that this blurring can erase it. The blurring is not infinite, and I promise you, it is within the available difficulty settings of the game to make those ATs valuable - to move the need for support outside that blurring zone.

What I will agree is that you don't need to be cautious and have support and have Incarnates. I've never wanted CoH to be some sort of game of chess. So I haven't played this game cautiously for a very long time, and all Incarnates let me do was crank up the difficulty I can manage for the same degree of heedlessness. But I still appreciate how much a buffer/debuffer, or in the right situations even a good Tanker can let me be more reckless. I say this as someone who min/maxes pretty significantly. If I can see the value in the ATs and what they bring, I think that means anyone should be able to. If they can't, they just aren't looking for it.

Personally, I doubt that. I believe that a majority of people who have already earned those powers would consider that a major dickmove by the Devs, somewhat akin to turning off IO set bonuses in a majority of content.

That said, I will be surprised if many, if any future Incarnate powers (as in ones that go in slots not yet made available) operate outside of incarnate content.

Let me give you an example.

I have a Stone Melee/Fiery Aura Brute. Regen and FA don't play a lot alike, but I believe they share some broad survival characteristics. Compared to a lot of their peer powersets, both are comparatively fragile, especially when talking about heavily IO equipped characters. Where FA has resists, Regen gets more click mitigation. Despite my labeling it on the fragile side, mine is a very survivable character, though against most foes that is in no small part due to Fault and FA's offensive strength. I can solo it against a lot of critter factions on +4/x8. That means that, when I am on a team, I can often be completely oblivious to how much aggro I am taking, because I could probably survive the aggro of the whole team.

However, not all content is that forgiving. If I find myself the primary aggro soak against the kinds of foes I cannot readily solo on max difficulty, such as foes with lots of Psi damage, foes who can strip my defense, or foes who deal lots of pure energy damage from out of melee range (my defense to Energy is only moderate), I can get into a lot of trouble fast. Foes like the IDF in the iTrials can be particularly hairy, because they exhibit all the dangerous traits listed above. I know what kinds if things are bad for my brute, and were I solo, I would avoid piling a ton of their aggro on myself. But on a team or a league, I don't always have that luxury.

Yes, if I am on a good team, they can keep that from happening. Of course it's not safe to assume that your typical PuG team is a good team, and for trials gated behind the Team Up Teleporter, PuGs are the primary thing most of us play. Not all sets need to apply this level of caution to as many foes. The more durable your build, the less affected you are by how well your team supports you.

Based on how I play my Regen Scrappers, I find the level of caution required in terms of what I aggro similar to that required for my Brute, but only my Brute pulls aggro from nearby foes just by using AoEs. The Scrappers (and Stalker) get to shed aggro relatively easily if anyone else damages their targets. It's not as easy when you've been slathering them with Gauntlet or, in Brute Regen's case, a taunt aura.

The effect I am describing is not the end of the world. It is simply something I have perceived in literally thousands of hours of play with the characters in question that I think is worth mentioning.

No word-putting involved, that's definitely how I feel.

I believe there is.

It's actually very simple. This game has goals. It has rules about how we can achieve those goals. Our powers allow our characters to achieve those goals.

Neither I nor people I know or are in my SG or even here on the forums have some special monopoly on understanding the goals, rules or how our powers achieve them. Many, many people are going to be able to come to the same conclusions we do. They don't have to be min/maxers. They just have to give some thought to being useful.

Certainly, there are people out there who chose to eschew pursuit of the game's explicit goals and build unusual things. Petless Masterminds for example. Barring statistical data none of us have access to, you're just not going to convince me that such players represent a significant enough portion of the player base upon which to make sweeping statements about build diversity.

For this discussion, I disagree. There are far more factors that go into "functional equivalence" than just player power choice. You came into this discussion with a very specific, much more narrow thesis than "functional equivalence."

To reinforce this, it should be noted that in almost no case did what I did with any character modify their existing function. The only counter examples of that are the various cases of my picking Leadership, because my melee characters became very minor team buffers - an expansion of their functional role that did not previously exist. But by explicit design, Leadership powers are weaker on things like Scrappers and Brutes compared to how they function on Defenders and Corruptors. And my Defenders and Corruptors (and Widow) are far more effective overall as buffers than my Scrappers/Brutes with Leadership powers.

So net, there very little change in functional role. In the most literal, technical sense, there was some functional diversity lost, but in practice is was negligible, because no one is ever going to invite my Scrappers or Brutes to a team for their buffs.

Except for the way it's not. You still have powers that most other Plant/TAs don't have. On top of that, you seem to be blissfully ignoring that your prior build choices did not represent the existing diversity in practice. Very, very few people seem likely to build a Plant/TA the way you did. What good is technical diversity if, in practice, it is not what most people choose to do, because it's not as effective as the alternatives? There will always be people who do things in games like this because they find it interesting, performance be damned, but there's pretty strong evidence that most people will try to at least strike a balance between performing and interesting builds. That cuts down immensely on the amount of diversity that actually happens, as opposed to that which is actually possible.

I do all of those things, and I zerg rush too. I find that whole paragraph mystifying.

Nothing new has changed there. Good abilities, the ones that make characters effective, have never been rare. There are not lots of people running around who were skipping good, valuable powers because they had to take Fitness. That's a false premise on which to base the notion of diversity, even at a functional role level. People by and large always took all the best powers they could, and what they skipped to make room for Fitness was stuff they could take or leave.

I'm going to pick out the KB artist there as an example of your playstyle being an outlier. Setting aside all arguments that we could devolve into about the merits of KB, very few people would care if the unique ability of their character was to solo AVs that aren't KB-immune, because that is such an edge case capability that it's not a useful distinguishing feature for most of the game's content.

You can't extrapolate uniqueness of appearance to uniqueness of function. I care not at all if my function on a team is redundant. Not one tiny little bit. Every time I play a damage dealer, which is, in fact, a significant functional role in this game, I am the very height of functionally redundant. My character could be replaced dozens of different ways and no one would notice, except that it might not be me the player there at the controls.

For reasons already given, I think you are overly weighting degrees of functional uniqueness. There are only so many things you can to do mobs or teammates in the game, and your teammates may already provide one of them. No matter how oddly you build your character, you're not going to be functionally unique, because someone else can always choose the same function you have. All you can do is build characters who aren't specifically dev designed to carry out a particular function and mutate their build to have that function. What's so functionally special about having a fear Tanker, when a Dark Miasmist or an Illusionist can largely shame the volume terrorized mobs you can put out? All you've done is build an unusual Tanker. Worse, you may not have built as effective a Tanker as you could have - if your "interesting" Tanker was highly effective, more people would play it. So you're not functionally diverse because other ATs can do your self-assigned role, and people who share your AT and powersets are not likely to diversify as you have because other options are more effective.

You're taking my example to extremes which, as I mentioned, favor your argument. When I wrote the example, I imagined that every powerset combo got their own set of 20 powers to pick from, not that there was one set of 20 powers for everyone, ever.

In the limit. You have specifically claimed that it has done so already. And that very specific claim is the one I reject. You claimed, specifically, that making Fitness inherent decreased build diversity. That is what I am debating.

That's fine, but in most stories, that's not something that's really handwaved. Finding that ward or whatever would itself be part of the adventure. When the character starts doing that sort of thing regularly, they're not really fully relying on their martial arts skill (or bow, or whatever) any more. They're supplementing it regularly with other sources of power.

Then, ultimately, why worry about whether it's a Pistols Blaster or a Rad/Mental Blaster? People who have concerns about concept are inherently likely concerned with the presentation of what that character is doing in the game world. The question is how deeply they get concerned with it, and what they're willing to accept. I think limiting ones definition of "natural" to something like Olympic-grade athlete levels of "power" is overly limiting. CoH's presentation allows for "natural" to be way more far out than that.

Oh, I very much do. I simply assume that "natural" here encompasses all those far out capabilities we see in the sources I mentioned in my first post here. Those all explain why I can have a "natural" character who can punch <insert-ridiculous-thing-here>, and maybe fly, and maybe hurl fireballs.

You might want to mention that to the chap that used it first. All I was doing was turning it around.

Have you ever punched a car? Have you ever tried to disable a car with your bare hands, from the outside? Now how about a moving car? Now how about a moving car that's armored and none of the usually access points (like the hood latch) easily opened? Now how about a moving, armored car that's shooting at you.

I'm open to the idea that the animation engine isn't showing all the neat things we can imagine our Martial Arts character doing to disable this moving, armed and armored car, which I am hopefully clearly using as a proxy for a robot. But the fact is that no matter what he's doing, in the case of the armored, shooting and moving car, it's going to be pretty damn impressive stuff.

A "normal" human being would only achieve that sort of thing with a weapon capable of damaging an armored car, or with suitable Hollywood treatement. And beyond a certain point, that's a level of skill that's no longer "natural".

Except we have other powersets in the game, operating alongside the "natural" ones. How is our Martial Arts character doing roughly the same degree of damage as the guy who's ripping up and hurling blocks of concrete or bolts of lightning at our example God? (Or even our example robot?) That is where the concept breaks down, in my opinion. If you're part of a team that's attacking a foe with fire, hurled statuary, rockets and platoons of laser-wielding robots, what is our Martial Arts character doing that puts him on par with that. Again, I don't have a problem answering that question. I have a problem with any answer being in the realm of the Olympic athlete version of "natural".

While possible, that seems unlikely, since everyone and their brother was testing the Rocket Board on beta, which is not scaled to the capacity of the live servers, and that wasn't apparently an issue.