khorak_EU

People need to stop saying things are stupid, when they're so stupid that they keep just making up things people haven't said.

Go find where I said 'look at Brutes first'. You can't. But you wrote a whole post on that. That is stupid, and makes no logical sense. Even more stupid than entirely ruling out looking at broader Archetype balances on an issue built entirely on a foundation of Archetype imbalances.

What is frankly stupid is pretending the problem is not a result of previously systemically seperated powersets now being able to directly compete with each other. The problem is precisely that these archetypes are not balanced in relation to each other, which requires taking stock of the entire picture and restoring broader balance instead of throwing random s*** at merely one aspect.

Without touching Brutes you are, at this point, left with no other option than lamely throwing mechanics at the Tank which will ultimately make it do more damage, which addresses the issue only by turning the three melee classes into a homogenous damage/defense slider, with Scrappers at one end, Tanks at the other and Brutes in the middle.

I in no way expected my musing to be a definitive solution, but the real stupidity is a position that entirely rules out balancing changes across the Archetypes, despite the problem being entirely one of a lack of balance across the Archetypes. A solution that rebalances the melee Archetypes and clears up their particular roles is vastly more preferable than "d00d needz moar dmg".

I don't think I've seen anything so hilariously bad in my life. I experienced genuine LOL from watching that. There's no level upon which it doesn't fail. :P

That you think brainwashing or medical study of captives doesn't reduce them to the same level as simply using a flamethrower, marks you as being intensely morally disturbed.

I'm not at all joking. It's people like you who worry me. A flamethrower is evil, but brainwashing, an act which adds obscene violation on top of what is ultimately personality death regardless, is fine, is what should be done instead of the flamethrower. That's not right. That's not right at all. I'll take the flamethrower rather than personality death leading to programmed servitude in battle until I die thanks. Pretty sure all those Germans who got cleaned out of bunkers on D-Day would have agreed too.

"You can be subjected to a process of brainwashing, basically destroying who you are and turning you into a weapon suiting our needs to fight the people you previously stood with, or we burn out the bunker."
"Can I get a cigarette out first?"
"Sure, takes a moment to prep this thing."

I'm sure the US 1st Brainwashed Brigade would have been a big hit in the land of freedom. Well, maybe today, but not back when they still had an understanding of what that word meant.

You're reminding me of the people who argued entirely seriously that heroic Zombies masterminds are totally ok. Not people who figured that the zombie was a construct of pure magic or something, or some sort of summoned ghost or spirit that didn't claim an existing physical body, they thought it was perfectly fine for heroes to be reanimating the bodies of anyone to use as expendable cannon fodder in the name of heroism. The relativism is disturbing, where obviously wretched acts are kinda ok because they're not visceral enough for you to give a damn (like brainwashing), or you just don't care what other people think (like raising them and their friends and their family from the dead as disposable toxin spewing horrors).

Basic fact of the matter is that in CoX you can take a battleaxe to a Hellions face and the guy is tough enough, if you pull your punch so to speak if you also happen to be superstrong, to take it and just be subdued. Heroes hack, slash, burn, freeze, blast and irradiate their foes with what turns out to be a completely acceptable degree of non-lethality. To take that context and toss it away when defining the use of a flamethrower doesn't make sense in the slightest. It's like complaining that using a WMD is universally the act of a bad guy, just as Reed Richards is shooting Galactus in the face with one to stop him eating the planet. And Galactus won't even actually be very hurt by it.

Let's get some damn perspective here people; Longbow use Flamethrowers in the name of heroism.

They do not use swords, axes, warhammers, all three in titan sizes, claws, disintegrating beam rifles, ravage with nightmarish dark energy, or freeze victims solid. On top of, of course, setting absolutely everything on fire with projected balls of flame, armour made of flame, and walls of flame.

The 'Longbow use flamethrowers' argument is even more stupid than the idea that the sovereignty of the Rogue Isles should be sacrosanct. The things we do to villains go so far beyond what Longbow does by utilising 'a flamethrower' it isn't even funny.

I mean seriously, do people even think these things through at all? Yeah, it's totally nasty for Longbow to break out a flamethrower. They should leave it to me, a flame shrouded, flame spewing, flame sword wielding ENTITY OF LIVING FIRE. It's totally ok that I use fire for....uh....absolutely everything, including as my own personal flamethrower, but Longbow baaaaaad.

EDIT: Oh, and PPD Swat teams will set up a mortar that drenches you in ACID.

Yeah, quite obvious if you completely distort an out of context statement and then lie about the rest.

Statesmans Strike was the 'event' at the end of the CoV beta, using it to claim 'the heroes struck first' is....utterly absurd. At this point Arachnos is already a terrorist organisation that invaded and occupied the 'sovereign nation' people keep talking about, and villains started the game having been broken out of the Zig. His statement is basically that they should attack Arachnos instead of just defending themselves when Arachnos attacks, which has already happened. It's that age-old problem that heroes are always having to be reactive to villains instead of proactive. Now, the initial Longbow presence....

....was out of the territory of the openly aggressive supervillain President anyway, but since then Arachnos has made a bid for world domination by assaulting every single superpowered individual on the entire planet with The Web, and recently openly invaded Atlas Park...the real one, not just the attempt to change time itself. After, of course, he'd already openly invaded Faultline. Maybe people forgot that actually means he invaded the United States of America. You know, like he already had by sending his men to break all those villains out the Zig? That little thing? Arachnos are the army of that 'sovereign nation' and they invaded the United States first.

In-universe one could probably make the argument that the governments of the world are pussies after the Rikti War in the same way Britain and France bent over backwards, to their detriment, to try and avoid another war after WWI. They let Longbow have funding to balls up whatever Arachnos is doing, so NATO doesn't have to cash in political influence (domestic and international) and give opportunities to other nations to interfere if they do the right thing, declare war, and f****** flatten Arachnos directly. Throwing money at what amounts to being a local paramilitary group is WAY more in the style of modern nations than justifying to your war weary civilians why you're stamping all over stuff. If Statesman wants to tear that place down...well get the popcorn and hope he does the job properly.

Out of universe it makes no sense at all. Arachnos would be in a political situation so crap they'd get the entirety of NATO shoved straight up their anus about four seconds after the whole thing with The Web got resolved. They certainly wouldn't be operating the way they always have been. That Longbow base would be a US military base, nothing at all would go in and out of the Rogue Isles (because embargoing rogue nations is how the world works), and if Lord Recluse so much as farted at the mainland he'd be playing tag with thousands of volunteer heroes at the head of the invasion.

Any attempt to make Longbow look like bad guys because they're in a 'sovereign nation' is flawed to the point that it's such a stupid argument it detracts from anyone arguing on a studier platform of....Longbow just kinda being pretty unpleasant. And they are. They're well into the 'vigilante' part of the alignment system. It's got absolutely nothing to do with them invading the Rogue Isles though. At this point, if it were a real world, the US could probably launch a nuclear strike on the Rogue Isles and get away with it. Arachnos have launched multiple overt invasions of US territory, and Longbow are bad guys because they're assaulting the Rogue Isles? Uh....no. Longbow are kinda bad because they're starting to think they should be allowed to do what they want....which, again, has nothing to do with their presence on the Rogue Isles, and everything to do with how they'll wilfully interfere with Vanguard (the actual government and UN-backed military force with total authority) and operate completely outside of their parameters as 'those guys NATO are throwing black ops money at to destabilise Arachnos'. They're becoming self righteous thugs. A giant, well funded gang.

If you think those things add up to 'doing much', I would dearly recommend you never break out something like, say, /Storm Summoning or /Poison. And pretend that /Traps just doesn't exist.

My password.

And you're assuming that what you think of my comments is what's happening. I do not care in the slightest that my being forthright with my views is too threateningly much for you to handle, and you have to pass it off with a poor ad hominem attack upon my motivations. I'm not ladening my posts down with an endless pile of indefinite articles and reaffirmations that this post about my opinion is, in fact, about my opinion, because someone wishes to feel offended when I assume they're adults who don't need telling.

"IMO, we should try fixing the current Mercs instead of rebuilding them" is the actual content of your entire paragraph. And in all that, I've actually bothered to have a coherent 'vision' of what the set should be; what we have now doesn't, and that's one of the big reasons why it's a pointless mess. We've got Soldiers who want to be direct ST ranged damage with a medic squeezed in who's also a grenadier (what!?), who are trying to fit in with Spec Ops who want to be stealthed (of all bloody things) sniper/controller things, who all have to fit in with some ripped action hero who wants to cone enemies he just AoE knockbacked into the rafters. Screw theme for a moment, none of these ideas work with each other. The fact we're trying to squeeze Saving Private Ryan in with NAVY Seals, led by John Matrix, is problem numero uno why Mercenaries has turned out so badly. So carve out the crap and stick to what the set should be doing; just a bunch of soldiers.

And if you'd done less weird complaining, I'm also suggesting how I'd fix mercenaries. By stripping the whole thing out and rebuilding it. As far as I see it, trying to 'fix' mercenaries is trying to build on a swamp. The foundation is inherently unstable, so the fix job will end up making the end result unrecognisable anyway. Unless it's a half hearted patch-up which will just leave the thing looking like a Frankenstein monster; they'll just throw a load of damage at it so people will shut up because bad guys be lying down now. They might as well go the whole hog and relaunch the set for 2012.

Oh I'd definitely stab someone in the gizzards for a Longbow or Vanguard set. Preferably Vanguard. Love the glowy stuff. I'd also +1 the Romans.....as long as they give us a proper Roman shield on them.

Rifles are single target weapons, that's the reality of it. There's a reason untrained idiots attempting to go full auto on their AK-47's fare so badly. And if you want to go into the reality of it, that's why modern military fireteams have an LMG; to put down the heavy automatic fire.

Game-wise, any fear of the set already being overpowered will be realised in extreme fashion if the Tier 1 guys also start kicking out any sort of AoE attack on top of the Tier 2 men. It's far better for the Tier 1 guys, gameplay-wise and thematically, to just be sturdy, no-frills ST damage dealers. Solid, reliable. Just like the average infantryman.

I don't want Commandoes because I don't want Commandoes. Which is moot because the Commando isn't a Commando. This is a set revolving around soldiers (irrespective of them being national, private, or mercenary), so I wanted a set that remained themed as a squad of soldiers. That theme is ruined by randomly tossing Rambo in there because someone lost sight of what they were making and start dumping various military tropes where there just isn't room. Not to mention that the men remaining relatively nondescript stops them clashing with any background or RP.

Less is more, keeping themes and designs tight and unified is always better. Look at Bots, Thugs, Demons, Beasts....they're all effectively themed sets and they're better for it. Ninjas are doing well, then suddenly go to crazytown by just hurling in a full-on demon at the end....I wanted Ninjas for my natural Mastermind, and now I have this magical fire spirit? THANKS. Though arguably Beasts also does this, just not to the same level, with the Dire Wolf. It's the same with Mercenaries, the set loses proper cohesion by having three normal soldiers (or hobos), then suddenly dropping in two modern day, black-clad ninja analogues, and then Rambo. 'Plundered the TVTropes military section' isn't quite enough of a link. Makes them all a commando, or all special forces, don't just do the military equivalent of making a politically correct superteam with one black person, one white person, one asian person, etc....

Who the hell would still use Mercenaries if they built a Soldiers set that wasn't crap and didn't look so dated and rubbish?

I didn't bother wondering how they'd go about doing it; pull a 'Fitness' and let people keep their current powers until they respec it, remove Mercenaries and 'replace' it with the new set so it can't be accessed anymore but people who still have Mercenaries can respec it and so on....whatever. I'm looking at how they can approach rebuilding a soldier set for modern CoX because in case no-one noticed, Mercenaries is seven years old and it sucked even when it was introduced. Now we've got Thugs which looks more like a soldier set than mercenaries does (squad leaders with command auras? Uh, hello? Soldier much?) powerwise, without even getting into all the games newer, better designed sets having new mechanics.

Soldiers are the most basic, expected staple you'd think of for masterminds in this game, and we basically don't have them. None of us can have a paramilitary or be some sort of military hero leading troops, which frankly sucks. You can command animals, gangs, demons, zombies, ninjas, robots....but any sort of trained infantry? Pffft. You can try the seven year old sucktastic Mercenaries set which....isn't really very soldierly or mercenary.