khorak_EU

Have you ever tried being just a little bit less....you?

You're on the wrong internet, this is supposed to be a lonely sausagefest. :P

We killed all the elves in Britain. Along with the bears and the wolves. Sometimes they made it easy for us; the elves were riding bears and wolves. The only poisonous snakes got away in the confusion, but we'll get them. We'll get them.

Britain has four countries and hundreds of accents. Which one were you referring to?

Because that bonus at the end of the mission is utter peanuts. A single Boss gives more XP, and since at around level 15 I'll set the difficulty to 0/+2 with bosses I'll be taking out a lot of them. Only an end of arc bonus is meaningful, and that will also be basically nothing compared to the amount of XP you'll have picked up from crushing every enemy on the way there.

You're not levelling fast entirely because you're not bothering to fight those goons. An AT effective for solo play, the best being a Brute, practically powerlevels itself just by unstoppably crushing everything very quickly.

The point Samuel has made, which is entirely valid, is that the difficulty slider doesn't work. And it doesn't work because the people making the missions are not holding themselves to a consistent standard. The difficulty slider is a wonderful idea, and it should solve all problems....if everything it was attached to was in any way playing ball. You should be able to use it to precisely fine tune the level of challenge you are presented with. It breaks down, however, when someone decides to put excessive numbers of things in a mission which are unaffected by the difficulty slider (Elite Bosses despite choosing 'no bosses'), or change spawning sizes in a fashion that makes the difficulty slider no longer work properly, such as the example he also provided where Dark Astoria content won't level correctly even just from 0/+1 to 0/+2.

Of course, it is also rendered meaningless when factions are no longer being held to any consistent standard either, which can be seen in Praetorian content. The difficulty slider is clearly not working if you have to fiddle around with it every time you run into factions, usually new, modern ones, which don't appear to be balanced to the same level as others.

The difficulty slider should work. Samuel should be happy, PRAF should be happy, everyone should be happy. But it doesn't work, because no-one at Paragon Studios appears to be making sure the game stays properly balanced with itself. The impression they're giving is that their entire design process is decentralised to the point of not existing beyond some vague group work to put together the concepts and then let the teams just do their thing. This isn't beta-tester stuff, this is enormously boring, team of interns and wage slaves poring labouriously over numbers stuff. It should be internal. There should be at least a couple of people bleeding from their eyes as they hand over the mind numbing results of their latest test on the new faction and missions and the number tweaks that should happen so they're not out of whack with other things in their level range.

These people are going to be making CoX2, or something like it. I want it to be good. I don't want it to be a cobbled together mess that gets more and more filled with amateurish problems as time goes on because no-one thinks that enforcing distinct standards from the very beginning, with a stick if necessary, isn't worth doing. When it gets down to it this is just another kind of engineering, and someone has to do the crap job of making sure the nuts and bolts are the right damn size, that all the girders are measured out right, and that the workmen are following the blueprint to the letter.

No, it's what a lot of the mobs do, regardless of AT. I find Freaks to be 'best' for it, but also deal with Council doing it, gangers of all stripes, Cabal are great because they can go so fast they'll go to the other side of the map, etc. The AI is broken and Paragon can't be bothered to fix it because going through their own old undocumented work and figuring out what they've done and rebuilding....anything on it, would be time consuming and tedious. The simple response would be to instead remove running mobs entirely, because it's a pointless mechanic that ultimately lowers enemy DPS, making them less dangerous, but adding needless tedium. In all, it ends up being a net negative for gameplay. It's also a very definable change or broken AI, because this behaviour was NOT present when I stopped playing a few years ago; the running mechanic existed, but very, very few mobs actually indulged in it. When I came back I noticed this new predilection of mobs almost immediately.

You don't notice it on Brutes and Tanks because taunt stops them running. Scrappers tend to slaughter enemies too quickly to notice (I noticed it a great deal on low level Titan Weapons though, because it operates in bursts). Blasters will also kill quickly and frankly would be quite happy to see something not shooting their squishy face off. Defenders and Controllers have a plethora of status effects going on (some Defenders will end up murdering rather quickly, others slow or immobilise). You get the idea.

Masterminds without a controlling secondary just get the shaft. Pre-level 24, your pets don't kill anywhere near fast enough to make it a non-issue, and they'll follow a target. So every other mob will attempt to pull your pets across the whole map. I play the Mercedes Sheldon arc a lot so the Freaks there are the bane of my Masterminding life if I do it at level 20. They have Dull Pain you see, so your pets slowly beat them down to "broken run mechanics range", then they pop Dull Pain and run away. The entire mission devolves into a masterclass of pet control as you order a target attacked, wait for signs it's about to run, switch your attack to another target, reprioritise the runners who came back...once you hit 24, most MM primaries start chewing through enemies too quickly for them to try and run away anymore and you don't notice.

It's a big solo problem at lower levels, basically. So obviously some goon will spout 'learn to play' nonsense defending this 'mechanic' and offer a ridiculous solution like power levelling with DFB teams until you're out of the level zone of concern.

I don't complain about Elite Bosses. I'll complain about ambush spawns though, because they're garbage. It has become the favourite little addition of whoever is writing the missions these days, and it exemplifies the piss poor lack of care taken in a lot of new content.

I would refer immediately to Mercedes Sheldon. Oh it's great fun there. In a game that was designed and balanced around +0/+0 spawning, someone thought that 'challenge' should amount to 'just spawn a pile more enemies when an already powerful target gets hurt'. Happening once, especially in an end-of-arc showdown, this would work. What doesn't work is adding it to a Freak Tank in a standard mission, adding it to the Dirge of Chaos, adding it to a standard Family mission Boss (that spawn is even bigger than usual as well), making it required to spawn the Boss at all in a Warriors mission, adding it to a couple of Warrior Bosses in the most gruellingly grindy and poorly conceived mission I have played in years, then making it happen twice in the end-of-arc.

I would rather fight the Elite Boss. It is not a 'tactical challenge' to just drop more spawns on your face. It degenerates into sheer maths. As has been made clear by the laughable arguments you've been levelling at Samuel, you don't seem to care about well polished, consistent gameplay. No. You seem to be perfectly happy with a juddering, spiky mess that stops and starts with no clear curve or planning. Poor design is, in your largely blind eyes, a challenge to be overcome instead of just being outright poor design. Thankfully you do not make games because such consistency is a pillar of good design, which has fallen by the wayside in favour of 'everything and the kitchen sink' philosophy in CoX.

And, as usual, the ambushes are an extra special 'screw you' to Masterminds, because they are tagged onto the Mastermind, in defiance of every gameplay design element of Masterminds. And when they realised this PANCAKE they didn't bother trying to solve it by allowing ambush mobs to be affected by standard aggro, maybe by doing something incredibly complicated like making their spawn command an attack move that would see them assault any valid target whilst following you, instead of being an non-overridable 'attack the player' command. No. No. They just knocked up 'bodyguard mode', and presumably watched fools like you shout stuff like 'learn to play!' if someone pointed out that this was a badly done solution to a problem that should have been fixed and still exists. In conjunction with the above, it means a Mastermind will suddenly be personally, doggedly assaulted halfway through a boss fight. Which they can't take. At all. So they have to use bodyguard mode, which has a big lag time for your pets attacking again so FREE HITS, but it's a sheer maths game now and you, being an easily hit squishy, will slaughter all your pets unless you just plain die first.

Oh but they should be using a vast pile of inspirations which is always perfectly tailored to this specific situation...you know, learn to play. Real players are psychic*, not average people playing a game ostensibly for fun who won't be impressed by 'run back and forth gaming the pull mechanics' mission design. When loopholes have to be exploited for players to beat your content, you have failed. If Samuel has to leave the mission and get smashed on Luck inspirations like purple drugs constantly, you have failed.

In short, your 'learn to play' nonsense is exactly that. It is the statement of a fool using it to brush over a more legitimate complaint of 'learn to design'.

*and also chest thumping, loudmouth forum apologists.

Masterminds don't exist as far as 'balancing' goes.

Your base origin doesn't change, but that also doesn't change the fact that being Incarnated means being fed power by a massive, basically magical entity. There may be some Greek Gods who were essentially really big, really strong humans, but they also weren't being fed power from a vastly more powerful external source that allows them to manifest fire or lightning from their hands.

If you wanted to stay 'all Natural', then you don't get Incarnated. It's that simple. It's the path to Godhood. Anything you do as an Incarnate is implicitly because "the Well is pumping me with power". It is inherently not Natural. Neither is any origin to begin with of course, but Incarnation is going beyond your unassisted limitations by getting power from the Well. Remember all that story stuff about how at some point after Cimerora the last Origin seemed to have died out? How there used to be another Origin? Remember what that was? Oh right, yeah, it was Incarnate. Which is what you are now.

You're asking for a 'have my cake and eat it too' situation where you want all the gameplay benefits of being an Incarnate, but stubbornly refuse to allow your own story to fit into the setting in which it lives. Your base origin may affect how your characters Incarnate powers manifest, such as Natural characters perhaps having a preference for Vorpal as an expression of their natural speed, strength and skill, but they can still only do that because they poked the Well in the face and it lent them power. You don't get to rewrite CoX to service your story, you write your story to fit into CoX. Hell, you've kind of completely missed the point, since it's in-universe supposed to be a difficult decision due to Incarnation inherently being lent power by a completely inexplicable external force of mind boggling power that would seek to control you.

'City of Heroes Judgement Vorpal'. Seriously, you're not bothering to make the slightest effort and want to complain when what you need is clearly right there for you. When it gets down to it, you don't see much in a showcase of the Vorpal animation because there isn't actually all that much to see.

I dislike my dialogue being filled in for me. I have run Twinshots arc only once and never again because of this. I don't even RP, but it still irks me that no matter who or what my character is, they're basically a total boob.

"I am one of the first Incarnates. I battled across the fields of Cimerora in my youth, alongside the heroes you will all one day become. Cast into the sea and buried in my last battle, I have slept for an age until I awoke again, ready to reclaim my power and stand with you in battle once m-OMG TWINSHOT Y U FOOL ME LMAO!"

Obviously Twinshot is the tutorial arc (which pops up when you don't really need one anymore), but it's the same with Habashy; you end up with a lot of dialogue that's just nothing like you and you don't have a choice.

They don't get time to flee in terror on most toons. Masterminds though...well on a fair few primaries and even on the better ones at the low points, there isn't any power to flee in terror from. They just decide to do some cardio, and off they go. Fine on my Demons MM, since she's high enough that the Prince keeps slowing everything so it's impossible to get away. My Thugs/FF? Hahahaha! It's not reasonable to play. It's that simple. One single issue breaks the game. Why would you spend a few orders of magnitude more time doing the same thing as other toons because everything turns into a clusterf*** as everything goes for a jog halfway across the map for no reason? Or on a scrapper with no or poor taunt aura? Byeeeeeeee, enjoy the ruuuuuun!

Your example would be result C)

Your Hercules is based entirely upon the historical mythology and his appearance is, you say, based upon statues and paintings of the historical conception of Hercules.

You can't claim any of that at all. Marvel can make a character that is technically exactly the same because you wouldn't be able to trademark any part of your character at all. You even remembered that he uses a big wooden club. This is why Marvel Hercules looks so different from a 'proper' version of him; so he can be trademarked (and HE uses a big metal mace). Same reason the DC Hercules also looks....nothing like he 'should'. Marvel can try trademarking their version of Zeus (the beardy, white robed kinda thing anyway)....it ain't gonna work. He looks exactly the same as Zeus as depicted in centuries of art, which is based upon the mythology itself.

As for the rest of us....well yeah, it would be a case. NCSoft do own all our characters. If Marvel or DC tried running with a significant character obviously lifted from here, they could be slapped with it. If it's a small infringement....eeeeh, no point really; being pissy about something small enough to be a fun little cameo or homage would be Very Bad Form because....everyone likes having fun little cameos/homages because they're fun for everyone. Don't mess that up. Plus, if it's a small, irrelevant character there's the defense of ignorance. We throw out a hell of a lot of heroes on our servers and it's entirely unreasonable to expect an artist adding in some background filler to know about all of them and never, ever accidentally create something shockingly similar.