firespray

I'm not sure I agree with that part. Valve is far more capable of evaluating the possible profitability and costs associated with owning City of Heroes than we are. I doubt that we're going to convince them to buy it by telling them it could make them money. They'll make that decision on their own.

What we should be trying to convince them is that City of Heroes has a passionate and dedicated fanbase who are willing to fight to see the game survive rather than simply lie down and let it die. It's a huge long shot, but what isn't at this point.

The letter I sent is below, if anyone wants to use it for inspiration.

Mr Newell,

On Friday, it was announced, very abruptly, that the Comic-book MMORPG City of heroes was being shut down for good. As a dedicated player of the game for years, I was shocked and very disappointed. Though it's getting a bit old, the game seems to have really hit its stride lately, especially since it went free to play late last year. With a wonderful open world, excellent stories, the best character creator ever seen in an MMO, and one of the friendliest, most dedicated communities that I've ever met online, city of heroes is truly a unique and wonderful game. And it would be a shame to simply let it die.

I'm writing to you because I think that Valve is also a great company that makes awesome games, and that Valve and City of Heroes could be a good fit for each other. I fully realize that it's a huge long shot, but would Valve have any interest in trying to buy City of Heroes and continue to maintain and develop the game? I know it's a lot to ask, and it's probably silly to expect anything to come of it, but it would feel like giving up not to try. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Jordan Hughes-Buckley

Okay, I have a fantastic idea now. Since there are plans to put a Kickstarter (or some other crowd funding option) together to try to save the game in some way or another, getting to play a D&D game with you and Posi should be one of the reward levels. I'd do it in a heartbeat, even if it meant flying to California.

I agree. Go the opposite way with it. In the final week of the game, make it so things we defeat stay defeated. A successful hami raid means hami is dead and gone for good, never to come back. Dead mobs don't respawn. Let us spend our last week winning. And shut the game down because we finally cleared up Paragon City and the Rogue Isles, and there's nothing left to fight.

While it's great to see that so many people are trying to think of ways to save the game, this just isn't realistic (unless we have some seriously wealthy people playing this game). Nexon just bought a 14.7% stake in NCSoft for $687 million. That means the company as a whole is worth over $4.5 billion. I don't think we can pull together anything close to that kind of money.

I saw the video of Werner's 6 hour fight. I might have been able to do the same, but I don't have that sort of patience.

Agreed. I tried soloing nemesis. I quit after about 45 minutes when it was clear I wasn't making any significant progress once he started phasing regularly.

I have no doubt of that. I simply wasn't playing then. I took a long break from I6 to I12, so I didn't do much playing in the days of ED and no inventions.

Oh it's definitely doable. It's not even that difficult now that we have incarnate powers. If you're interested, my sig shows videos of my fire/sr scrapper soloing a bunch of AVs back before incarnate abilities came out, and using no inspirations or temp powers.

There are plenty of reasons to play a scrapper or a tank. Tanks are noticeably tougher than brutes, though they do less damage.

Scrappers and brutes are very close to on-par with each other in the vast majority of content. Scrappers do a little more damage, brutes are a little tougher.

The only place where brutes have a clear edge is when playing with a large group and lots of buffs. A damage-capped brute does slightly more damage than a damage-capped scrapper (though the difference is only 2-3%). They also benefit from higher hit-point caps and higher resistance caps. Outside of league play, it's uncommon for either a scrapper or a brute to be capped to much.

Personally, I like scrappers more than I like brutes. I like the simplicity of a scrapper, rather than playing a brute and feeling like I can never pause for a breath or stop to think if I want to keep my damage up.

My favorite combos for being a badass and doing stupid melee tricks are Fire/SR, Dark/Shield, and WM/EA. I've played them all personally, and can vouch for them all being extremely tough, and able to dish out serious pain to enemies. Fire/shield would also be extremely good, though I haven't played it personally.

Yeah, I really don't get those people myself. I'll spend maybe 10 minutes looking for a team for something before I go ahead and start one myself.

I've run into this as well. I generally take 1-2 ticks of damage when I jump back into melee range after the flow lightning visual goes away. It's not nearly as high-priority as the light of the well bug, but it would still be a nice thing to have fixed eventually.

Thank you very much for the information. It's good to put some of the rumors to rest, and it's nice to know that it wasn't intended to be quite as impossible as it is currently. I'm kind of burnt out on it at the moment, but I definitely intend to try it again once the light of the well bug is fixed.

I've never noticed it increasing myself. It does ticks of 184 damage consistently to my scrapper.

I realize it's not all that scientific, but it seems to me like it's not buffing 16 random people on the league. If that was the case, it seems like on a full league, each person should have it, on average, 2/3 of the time, if all the lights are out every time.

I've run it 4 or 5 times now since I started monitoring the level shift I was getting, and I'm getting the level shift quite a bit less than 2/3 of the time, even when the lights are being taken out quite quickly by a dedicated group.

That's kind of odd isn't it? Why would it apply a 5% energy resistance debuff when it is irresistible damage? I guess maybe to make you more susceptible to his other attacks?

I've seen it go up to 8 or 9 occasionally as well (very rarely any other numbers), but not consistently. The amount of level shift I get seems to bear little relationship to the number of lights alive or how quickly they are killed. Which makes me think that either I'm missing something about how they work, or they're bugged. If it's the former, it's irritating because the devs should have explained it better. If the latter, it needs fixed soon.

Personally, I'm about done trying the magisterium trial for awhile. I've run the full thing 7 or 8 times now, with some good teams, and failed every single time. I'd love to be able to say I've completed all the trials, but it's more frustrating than fun at this point.

Tried that. It doesn't work. I moved the quills of jocas power from the Magisterium trial to a free slot in one of my other trays and the temp power tray still didn't go away.

This isn't really true though. I get killed by tyrant's personal attacks at least a couple times on every run. He hits for over 3000 damage, and between the massive level difference, and the praetorian's higher base to-hit numbers, the softcap is less useful than it normally is.

This may be true of blasters, but isn't really true of many defenders or corruptors, especially the kind that commonly run incarnate trials.

Exactly. We have proof that the devs are able to come up with other ideas to make fights interesting. Which makes it all the more annoying that they keep using the stale insta-death patch mechanic.