firespray
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:Just like heroes fight longbow and arachnos.Originally Posted by DMystic
Except that Villains fight those groups in addition to Malta and Carnies(and the rare Rularuu as well).
Some groups are tougher than others, true, but overall villainside is not harder than heroside.Quote:Originally Posted by DMystic
Overall Villains have to deal with harder mobs more often and sooner than Heroes. -
Quote:As they should. The team wants to play a certain way and you aren't working with them. I'd kick you for that kind of behavior.Originally Posted by OmnipotentMerlin
Wow this thread makes me all fuzzy inside. As a player who loves redside more and tries to steam roll blue side I see this stuff alot. Been with people I know that are playing with a tank and trying to herd and getting mad when I won't let them.
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Honestly, neither blueside or redside is better/worse or harder/easier than the other. They are simply designed differently.
In general Blueside ATs are designed to do one thing very well, but they aren't all that broadly talented. Due to this a bad blueside team can become pigeonholed and not be able to react well to things that challenge them, this is often seen in game by people feeling that they always need a tank or a healer, or like they have to wait for the tank to herd before they can do anything. A good blueside team on the other hand works like a well oiled machine. Every AT fits neatly into place and the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts, steamrolling over anything that comes along.
In general Redside ATs are designed more broadly and solo better (for the most part), but don't have as clearly defined roles in a team as blueside ATs do, and aren't as good at a single particular thing as blueside ATs are. A bad redside team can act more like a mob of individuals who just happen to be on the same map than they can an actual team, with people running all over the place and no one really working together. A good redside team on the other hand is a fast, deadly, adaptive group that rides the knife edge between awesomeness and disaster, and usually comes out ahead.
As far as enemy groups go, sure longbow and arachnos are hard, but heroes have plenty of difficult enemy groups too. Things can go wrong real fast when fighting malta or carnies, and anyone who's fought soldiers of Rularuu knows what a nightmare they can be. -
Just make sure to avoid bots and you'll be fine. The KB from the bots will drive your scrapper buddy nuts.
As far as secondaries go, it kind of depends on what secondary the scrapper uses. If he's playing /sr or /shield, and you play forcefield, your powers will be a bit of a waste to him. Try and pick a secondary that meshes well with his secondary, and covers a hole that he has. For example /pain and /sr go well together. Or /FF and /regen. -
Quote:Does demon summoning even have a melee pet to put this on? I couldn't tell from the descriptions.Originally Posted by Seldom
Last of all is poison's final power, noxious gas. This is a 20 second duration debuff that takes 5 minutes to recharge and has to (a) be on a pet at close range, and (b) will die if that pet dies.
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I'm rolling up a new demon summoning mastermind. I was originally going to go demon/pain, but I tried that for a few levels tonight, and it was already getting on my nerves, so I think I'll go with something else. Thematically, /poison and /dark seem to fit best, but I've never played either one, so I'm looking for suggestions as to which is better.
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Quote:You clearly haven't played on many decent blueside teams then. Most teams I'm on (even PuGs) steamroll through stuff quite handily.Originally Posted by Emberly
I too have noticed that blueside isn't ready for the high-stakes, fast-paced play that redside has enjoyed for years
I'm not sure where this perception comes from that people who play villainside are better players than those who play mostly heroside. I've run into about the same number of bad players and bad teams on both sides. -
Quote:This is exactly what I'm talking about. In many hero teams, it's common to let the tank head in first to take the alpha or herd. Most villains don't do this, so there's a lot of misunderstanding as to what's going to happen. It's not that either side is wrong, they just have different ways of doing things. It'll take some time for everyone to get used to the new team dynamics. When they do, I expect things will improve significantly.Originally Posted by Carnifax_NA
"Wait for Tank to herd please"
"Sorry, my Fort can't hear you because she's too busy pulling with Psi Tornado" -
Quote:It hasn't been an issue strictly with MMs, but I've noticed a lot more teamwipes in the last few days than I ever saw before. I suspect most of it is due to people playing ATs that they aren't familiar with. This one's getting me too, I'm playing a dominator for the first time, and I'm starting to learn that I need to play more like a blaster and less like a controller. The other thing is that team dynamics are changing. This especially affects people who mostly played heroside before GR came out, since hero team roles are much more defined than those of villains. Now, with all the ATs mixed up, no one is quite sure what their team role is. I expect this to get better over the next few months.Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
I have nothing to say really, except that Masterminds on Blue-side PUGs are really making my Controllers, Defenders, and Dominators feel useful these past few days. I know well played Masterminds are a powerful AT, but the number of wipes and near-wipes I've experienced on blue side teams due to out of control aggro over the course of this week is hilarious.
Of course Super Stunners are making no small contribution either. Drop 3 or 4 of those on a "steam roller" team in the level 30 range and it becomes a real show.
There's also the "first time a group of hero players encounters Longbow" comedy hour that plays regularly on Vigilante tip teams. This is also known as the "disappearing Tanker" trick.
While it could be annoying, I'm actually finding it all kind of fun. The difficulty level has definitely shot up for me on the team front, some of it to due to harder missions, and some due to inexperienced teammates on a mission to aggro entire instances at once. Is anyone else finding this happening to them too or am I just lucky?
(P.S. If you are a member of the Church of He Who Casts Rain of Fire In a My Neighbor's Sleep Patch and Follows It Up With Nothing, I must admit I hold some prejudice against your faith. Freedom of religion is sacred to me but your method of worship leaves me perplexed. Perhaps someone can school me in the mysteries of that faith?) -
I have no hard data to support it, but something seems off to me as well. When playing my new KM scrapper, I feel like I'm missing more than I should. Checking the to hit numbers in the combat tab I see my to-hit values are generally in the mid 80s. I don't seem to be hitting that often, and that number seems pretty high since I'm only level 10 and don't have any enhancements slotted. Again, I have no data to back this up with, only my perception.
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The last couple days I've been getting an annoying graphics bug in CoH. Every few seconds parts of the screen will flicker to black for a fraction of a second. I just recently upgraded my video drivers from ATI Catalyst 10.7 to 10.8 and I'm wondering if that might be causing it. Before I roll them back, has anyone else experienced this or got any other ideas on how to fix it?
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I ended up going with KM/Invuln. My wife decided to make a fire/pain corruptor, and I thought that meshed better with invuln than regen.
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I'm very interested in rolling up a kinetic melee scrapper, but I'm having trouble deciding what secondary to go with. So I'm looking for someone to convince me of a good reason to play something in particular. I've already played super reflexes, willpower, and shield defense toons up to 50, so I'm not interested in doing another of those. I'm looking with the most interest at invulnerability (I've never played the set, literally at all), and regen (never played past 20), but if someone can make /fire, /dark, or /electric sound really good, I'll consider it.
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Quote:I might have to get a bubbler up to dispersion bubble level quickly and play around with this with my wife a bit.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Considering how badly the entire engine handles verticality, I have no reason to suspect it would respect verticality for AoEs. furthermore, having actually played with PBAoEs of various ranges as used from the air to try and catch enemies with them while staying out of melee, I'm all but convinced that this is how it works.
Mathematically, a pill shape isn't that hard to define depending on what kind of coordinates you're using. Spherical coordinates would make such a definition needlessly difficult, true, but cylindrical coordinates would make it actually very easy. Considering that the game appears to define 3D space as an extrapolation of 2D space, I have much reason to believe that's exactly what it uses, in effect if not in definition.
Cylindrical coordinates can reduce a pill shape to a 2D elliptical shape, or actually a half-ellipse, which is then rotated around the centre vertical. Or it would be if that were expressed analytically. As far as I can tell, 3D range is calculated by measuring the distance of an object's projection on the 2d horizontal plane that the character is on, then measuring the distance that object is above or below the plane and "increasing" its distance by some formula. I doubt it's even an ellipse, to be honest. It's probably something much simpler, like a parabola, if it's not even linear.
I've no doubt that the pill shape of Dispersion Bubble and Force Bubble aren't EXACT descriptions of their respective powers' areas of effect, nor do I feel that they are actually defined to follow that shape. However, they are a good example of how AoE range doesn't extend as far vertically as it does horizontally. Because City of Heroes is, for the most part, a planar game, we rarely experience this, but it's there, and it's an important fact to keep in mind. Especially if you, like me, try to catch things with Combustion while staying above the 7 foot melee range of the things you're trying to hit. You'll hit a LOT fewer things than it looks like you should with a 15' AoE. -
Quote:Yeah, this is exactly what I meant. Sorry if it wasn't very clear.Originally Posted by Lycanus
I think he's referring to the individual stories within an arch, which for a couple of archs *cough*Striga*cough* come in Random order making it so that people on the same arch ending up having to redo missions so other party members who did not get the right mission can end up getting it taken care of.
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Quote:I didn't realize they had done this. I didn't play a lot between I17 and GR. Glad to hear it though.Originally Posted by Quinch
No, they don't actually. Some of the arcs give certain missions out in a random order. The contact in The Hollows that gives the Frostfire Mission (can't think of his name right now) does this (and I'm sure there are others too). When my wife and I are running missions, it's a pain when he gives her a different mission than I got, since then we have to go through parts of the arc multiple times.Quote:Originally Posted by Quinch
To my knowledge, story arcs always run missions from A->B->C etc. Not doing so would result in narrative confusion. -
Quote:I'm not sure that the visual effect defines the limits of the power effect though. It makes no logical sense to design them that way, it seems like it would actually be MORE difficult to make them pill-shaped than it would for them to be strictly spherical (the pill-shape is more difficult to define mathematically).Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Spherical AoEs here are not spherical in the slightest. They are pill-shaped, in that their horizontal radius is far greater than their vertical radius. Fire up Dispersion Bubble or Force Bubble and you'll see what I mean.
The only explanation I could see for it, is if the horizontal radius was measured from the outside of the space defined by our avatar (which if I remember correctly is a cylinder) and the vertical radius was measured from some point inside it. I see no reason why anyone would purposely design the powers that way, since it would add considerable difficulty for no real reason.
It seems more likely to me that the visual effects for dispersion bubble simply looked better if they weren't strictly spherical. -
Quote:I've long been an advocate of doing something about the endurance problems inherent in low-level play. This doesn't go far enough in my opinion, but it's a start, so /signed.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
The subject is the suggestion. My argument is as follows:
1) Rest is a utility power that lowers downtime. Downtime in an action oriented game like City of Heroes should only be justified if there is a strong balance reason for including it.
2) Because Rest comes with significant debuffs while active (only affect self, -100% Resistance/Defense) any balance concerns are mitigated IMO.
3) Rest is a utility that provides its greatest benefit prior to characters reaching the ability to slot SOs or higher. Characters have weak endurance efficiency options and even characters with healing powers are limited by endurance (outliers like Regen notwithstanding).
4) Allowing more frequent use of Rest provide a space for more interesting and difficult encounters pre-20 because characters ever only need to survive the current encounter.
5) There is no five.
6) Or six.
7) I really should stop now huh?
8) OK, I'm done!
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I was closing out one last arc in Praetoria tonight before I went to blueside, when I ran into an extremely odd bug. When I entered the mission, there was an EB attacking us, so we all started fighting back. I noticed shortly thereafter that I wasn't actually attacking the EB, I was attacking my teammates. I was able to attack about half of them, and it seemed to be split along loyalist/resistance lines. Anyone else run into this?
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Quote:You can't really do this now though. Most of them, it's just a couple missions that they give out of order. As far as I know there aren't any arcs that you can completely pick and choose what order you run them in.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
3. /unsigned. I like having the freedom to work on story-arcs in the order I want to do them.
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Quote:I hadn't thought about that really. They already give you choices of two different missions a lot of the time, so maybe instead of getting rid of the random missions, they could just give you a choice of either a random mission or the first/next mission in their story arc. That way the people who want to do some of the random missions they give out can, and the people who want to get straight to the story arc can do that as well.Originally Posted by IanTheM1
No thanks. There are quite a number of standalone missions that are either legitimately good, or expand on the lore of the game.
Could be, I don't know. The XP thing is part of it for me (if you factor in travel time, random runner missions that aren't very good xp, but waste time, the missions to talk to security chiefs and PVP liasons, and all the other crap that they give you on a regular basis, the story arcs are FAR less xp/time than radio missions). However, it's more the fact that although the story arc missions are usually more entertaining than radio missions, the random crap I have to go through to get them is so irritating that it's just not worth it.Quote:Originally Posted by IanTheM1
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of folks who refuse to run story arcs are the same people who endlessly run newspaper missions. It's pretty obvious that particular group doesn't care about story or clever mission design, just convenient XP. See also: The AE debacle. -
It's obvious that there have been some major changes in the way story arcs are written over the years. Many of the oldest blueside arcs are extremely dated and, to be quite honest, not all that fun to play due to the way they're set up. Redside has a bit of this, but not nearly as much, due to it being newer. I think it's time to do something about this. The problems stem mostly from the fact that you get a ton of random missions that don't relate to the story arc at all, and many of the story arc missions send you all over the city, leading to you spending more time running around than you do actually running the story arc missions. There's several simple things that could be done to fix this.
1. Remove the random missions that contacts give out. Instead, make it so that they only give out their story arc missions, the way the new contacts in Praetoria do. I understand why they were set up that way originally, but they just aren't needed anymore, and frankly, they detract from the story arcs.
2. Change the contacts so that they give you their cell phone numbers much earlier, ideally after doing a single mission for them. This makes any running between zones that you need to do much less painless.
3. Make sure that contacts give out the missions in their story arcs in the same order to everyone. This makes it much easier to run a story arc in tandem with someone else.
4. Fix the story arc missions so that unless there is a good, story-related reason for it to be otherwise, all of the missions are in the zone that the contact is in. I understand that there are reasons that certain missions should be in certain zones, and I'm fine with that. But if you're just doing 3 different 'defeat all' missions to gather information, there's no need whatsoever for those 3 missions to be in 3 different zones (none of which is the zone that the contact is in).
Number 4 would obviously be the most work, but even making the other 3 changes would make people far more likely to run the story arcs I think. And standard code rant applies of course, but on the surface, it seems like it would be a LOT less work to make those changes than to create an equivalent number of new story arcs. -
Play an energy/energy blaster that doesn't irritate the crap out of every team you join, that's a seriously rare combo right there.
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Quote:Actually, they're not immune to mez, they just have high mag resistance.Originally Posted by IanTheM1
b) Mad Dogs are immune to mez and knockdown/back. Really? Really...? An all-melee boss that's immune to control. Yeah. Sorry, but no.
My wife and I are both playing doms atm, and if we both focus on one with ST holds, we can lock one down for short periods of time. With domination up, I've controlled one myself by triple stacking my ST hold on him.
I'm not disagreeing that their mez resistance needs turned down a bit, but they aren't immune.
On the original topic, another thing I've noticed in Praetoria is that at least the increased difficulty seems to come with greater xp rewards. I don't remember ever leveling that fast outside of farm missions in either CoH or CoV.