konshu

I think what *should* make a baddy worthy of lvl 50 is their EPICNESS.

If you were to bring the Hellions or Skulls up to 50, I think you might have to do a Lost/Rikti type replacement, because street gangs just aren't that epic.

However, as mentioned before, there are examples of non-epic higher level NPCs, so the rule isn't strict.

In terms of the OP - which asked what it is that makes a toon appropriate for a particular level range - in my opinion any Damned or Bone Daddy already has the raw power to qualify as a level 50. They just need to be scaled up.

I think you'd have to make several fundamental changes with the Hellions and Skulls if you wanted to expand them up to level 50.

For one thing, they are presented to us as street gangs. I'm not sure how many level 50s would continue peddling dope on the corner and breaking into cars and shops.

However, I could see Hellions and Skulls going possibly as high as 30, and maybe certain individuals even higher. And I can even imagine Hellion/Skull related AVs and GMs.

Once you get to 30 and beyond, with the exception of The Family, I think we mostly have paramilitary groups, cyborgs, monsters, and mages.

Actually, I think it's just good design to make your content usable over a greater range of levels.

Also, it doesn't have to greatly increase production time to produce a NPC profile that covers a large span of levels. Unless you're also changing the appearance of the NPC at several points, it takes practically the same amount of time.

Yup, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

With my current play style (which is heavy on TFs, scanners, and AE) I don't run into this problem much any more. However, I remember how annoyed I was back in 2005 when I was running missions my contact just gave me in Steel Canyon and the foes were all grey in mission after mission for the whole arc.

Now we have a mechanism in the game that can ensure you and your foes are at the same level. Let's get it implemented so players don't end up having to drop otherwise playable arcs just because the NPC levels were too low.

I play some of my bubbling toons with the bubs and some without, according to the whims of my concepts / designs. Sometimes I like certain powers in a bubbling set, but I don't want the toon to be a buffbot, so I skip the ally shields.

I feel like I'm free to explore my options on toons, to see if I can get something to work. I've tried the tauntless tank, and I've tried the henchmanless MM, in addition to the bubless bubbler. Not everything works to my satisfaction, but I like to give it a try.

One of the things I really resent in the game, though, is when someone looks up my power selections and tells me that since I don't have X power I don't know how to play. Invariably, that's my cue to move on, as I've never enjoyed spending my time with disrespectful, closedminded people.

LOL ... though I have to say, as a veteran with veteran powers ... I would love to be able to take Taunt at the start if I was not allowed to take the pool powers.

I like this idea too. It's no wonder I'm an altaholic.

Well, it doesn't have to be an "it's either one or the other" type situation. For years now I've been proposing that the devs make a small group - or take even just one new person - and give them the assignment of revamping and renewing old content. I think one person could make a significant amount of improvement in a year's time.

Actually, I never did really like the new Faultline. However, I *have* spent a zillion more hours in it than I spent in the old Faultline. True story!

Also, speaking of marketing, remember that not all of the game's efforts should be spent on acquiring new players. Some need to be spent on retention, which should be an easier and more efficient strategy.

I probably have this wrong, but I thought War Witch said she did the mini-revamp of The Hollows on her own time.

I think what The Hollows needed was a leveler, a store, and a field hospital. It would probably take a couple of hours to add those things; certainly it could be done within a day. Yet The Hollows went for years without these things, which could be so easily added. It is hard not to be completely frustrated with the devs, in my opinion.

At some point, when the devs have actually committed to revamping, all the content for the zone should be redone. However, I would leave the artwork there the same, so all that would change would be about a half dozen arcs. That's not a big deal, really. One person could fix it up nicely in just a couple of months, probably leading to tens of thousands of hours of subscriber playtime.

Again, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. The main dev team can work on new projects while a much smaller team revamps the older material.

Also, to revamp a zone you don't have to actually change the zone. Just the player activities in it.

I think a very small team of revampers could have a significant impact on improving game play in a very short period of time. There just has to be a decision from on high to allow it to happen.

This one sounds like the scenario for a typical a comic book cover. I love it!

You said the problem was that you were outleveling content.

In a game where we have auto-exemplaring, why can't we have it implemented in the older content so we never outlevel it?

I think that's a reasonable question, and an area that the devs should address.

However, if your real problem is finding a way of providing post-50 progression, I have nothing of particular value to say about that.

I agree. Arachnos is the best example of a well-planned enemy group.

It's just a consequence of development proceeding through time without revising older work. The Hordelings, Hoarfrost Demons, and Succubi were introduced with CoV. They were never backported to CoH, though it could be done.

Basically, the Circle enemy group blueside does not have Hordelings, etc. in the spawn list. It's about that simple. Once they are added, any canon missions that are republished will contain the new NPCs. If you ask me, I'd estimate it would take a person about a day to fix this - assuming it has to be done manually and cannot be automated in any way.

If you're doing an AE arc, you can make your own Circle enemy group. Include all the mobs you want; exclude all the mobs you don't want. The player's level will indicate what out of the list actually shows up. So you CAN have Hordelings on blueside - in AE - and you CAN avoid the ghosts, you just have to manually enable it.

However we won't ever have them in regular blueside missions till devs essentially "recompile" the older work to include them, which they are disinclined to do.

Yeah, I was very disappointed when I started playing this game back in 2005 and found that the only way to understand what was going on was to carefully read all the contact information and clues. I typically was not the team leader, and we were always hustling, so there wasn't much opportunity to read the contact information. I was too busy trying to Sprint past boulder-hurling Trolls in The Hollows, dammit!

So for most of 2005 I was completely in the dark about what was going on and VERY bored with it all. I focused on character creation and using my own imagination.

Then in 2006, I think, I started looking into the various online resources that had sprung up. I read all the contact information and clues for each arc and started to pick up on things that were delivered poorly early on.

Like in the Flux arc, I think, in a clue we stumble across a strange skull which now I understand must have been a Coralax skull. Prior to CoV there were no Coralax, so it was hard to understand what this clue was without the context. And I still don't know why it was a "clue." A clue to what? lol

Obviously the devs intended to insert something about the Coralax into The Hollows - probably something full of Lovecraftian influences - but never got around to it.

I also suspect that the devs created all the different origins and the different contacts with the idea of having unique content for each contact which reflected the contact's origin. But at some point they decided "My God this is taking forever, let's consolidate!" and so we have multiple contacts every few levels that give us the exact same missions.

My first week in the game I went to Laurence Mansfield, the coroner, expecting to get some sort of mission that had an advanced plot about someone's death, or maybe something about the zombie-like minions of Dr. Vahzilok, which I had encountered in Galaxy. Instead he directs me to a cave where the Circle of Thorns have taken the stolen Jewel of Hera.

That thoroughly cracked my sense of disbelief or immersion and similarly cracked my confidence in the devs. What in blazes was a coroner doing with this kind of information? If he's just a regular citizen, why doesn't he tell the police, and then I get the call from the police? It was just too unbelievable.

And that was when I realized I was basically in an overblown arcade game, and not really in an adventure role-playing game, despite all the in-game text and claims on the cover of the game's box. It could have been an adventure RPG, but they never finished coding it properly.

Anyway, that's my own perception / opinion. I've reconciled myself to it, but I still wish I was getting the game I originally thought I was getting.

Well ... I suppose there are a variety of ways to approach this. But you could decide that your hero has the ability to create enchantments and glamors. By virtue of his enchanting ability, he is able to take objects, inscribe them with runes, and thereby imbue them with magical powers. A way of making this useful for battle is to make a quiver full of arrows of various types. As each arrow is shot the rune is spoken, activating the power where the arrow lands.

The other type of magic, the glamor, is cast upon people. It primarily affects the way they see the world, or how they believe the world to be. So one type of glamor creates an illusory sense of being injured: Spectral Wounds. Another creates a belief that one cannot see: Blind. Another creates a mass hysteria that an army is attacking: Phantom Army. Another creates a sense of paranoia or misidentification: Deceive.

And so on.

Or you could go for a scientific / technological explanation, saying that all the effects are created by holographic and force projections, gadgets duct-taped to arrows, etc.

While I don't know the official canon answer for why the Cimerorans are so tough, I imagine it is like that of the Warriors. IIRC, Odysseus Hill, the founder of the Warriors, was given a magic jar that would refill itself with something like the water of the Well of Furies, thereby imbuing all the Warriors who drink from the jar with exceptional powers.

So could the Cimerorans exist as a low level group? Sure. But it would be best if their powers were pared down a bit to better match with heroes / villains who are running around on training enhancements.

Why don't we have the Cimerorans as a group that is available from 1-50? Because of the way the game is presently designed, the devs make an enemy group as a resource for content with a specified level range, hence the critters emerge with limitations that were artificially imposed.

Yes, I'd agree that Crey look like they should parallel the Council in their level ranges, with the Riot minions, Agents, and Scientists at lower levels and the tanks and PPs probably at higher levels. But when the devs wrote the Crey stories they were filling in content for play at a certain range. Hence the levels and limitations.

For that matter, what are those Slammers doing at level 50? They have a sledgehammer melee attack and a shotgun ranged attack. Frankly, that sounds like a low level Hellion, Troll, or Skull minion or lieut.

Well, if you created profiles for Circle critters that went from 1-50, you could have Madness Mages and Force Mages appearing at level 50 (with more powers, of course), and you could have Earth Thorn Casters appearing at level 1, if you want (with fewer powers).

So, as you say, if you wanted it you could have a wide variety of Circle critters popping up in any given mission, and if you pursue total randomness across the whole set of critters only a small percentage would be of a particular type.

However, a good spawning system would give you better control over what would appear and where. For instance, maybe you only want to have Circle ghosts spawning. (eek!)

The way CoH/MA handles it is by having one master spawn list provided by each map, which is then divided into sublists in much the same way you can take a string in a computer language and divide it into substrings. This master list of spawn points is automatically filled with the default foe group. When we define a mission objective that creates a spawn or a series spawns (or an object or series of objects, like cardboard box glowies), we're taking up some of the mob (or object) spawn points from the master list, overwriting the default spawns.

(This is a fine system, but I think it would be great if we were allowed the ability to modify the spawn coordinates. It shouldn't be difficult to do. The map's spawn points could be the default, and if you want to override those points then your MA text would contain the new list of spawning coordinates. This would allow us to correct spawning errors in the maps without having to plead our case to the devs.)

We also have in MA a basic ability to list the critters that should appear in each spawn. For each spawning list (like a series of patrols, battles, or rescues) we have the ability to specify an enemy group (or two in the case of battles) that will appear at those points. Each critter in these enemy groups is given equal chance to appear within the rules for spawn size (number of minions, lts., bosses).

What I had in my NWN2 spawning function was the ability to go with even chances for each critter, or to specify the percentage chance of a critter's appearance. And I could do this for each spawning list.

I could also specify a maximum or minimum number for each critter. So if I wanted no more than one of a particular critter type to show up (say a Madness Mage lt.) I could arrange it. Or if I wanted 30% of the lts. to be Madness Mages, I could do that. Or if I wanted both conditions - 30% of the lts. to be Madness Mages, but never more than 1 per spawn - I could do that.

Anyway, the gist of it is you could use this type of NPC profile to better tailor foe powers across the levels, and at the same time fixing it so there are no level gaps in which foes cannot appear. (Unless, for some reason, you insist on having a level gap, which is a choice you could make.)

You could also have a NPC profile that would transition from one type of critter to another as the levels increase, as we see with the Circle, Tsoo, and Lost/Rikti.

Also, with a modification of the spawning rules, you could juggle the percentage chance for appearance, so you could favor the likelihood of one critter spawning versus another. You could also set maximums and minimums for each critter to be spawned (within the spawning limits), further controlling the composition of the spawns.

Oh? I was assuming it was the Rob Pardo interview which I suspect is in the "exclusive content for subscribers" area.

The quote I gave above is from the Jeff Kaplan interview.

I agree with this general sentiment, though I often love to have Gale as a mitigation power or as a tool to push foes into a pile for pseudo-herding.

Also, since I have veteran powers in addition to Brawl and an origin power, I have no problem with taking Hover instead of a lame Tier1. Chances are I will *never use* the lame Tier1.

I agree that I don't want Jab, Entangling Arrow, etc. clogging up my power slots. I'll take Air Superiority over Jab any day, for example, especially if I'm aiming to take Flight.

I think the main point here is that a few of the Tier 1 powers have a very limited use that may not fit into a player's legitimate concept for their toon. I don't think you can truly say that it is a mistake to choose a pool power in place of an unused primary or secondary power.

Granted, you probably don't want to be a Stalker who picks, say, Challenge instead of Hide (unless that's your thing), but what kind of player would make that mistake, especially if they have been warned (as I suggested in my previous post)?

In general, I like the notion of having the option to acquire one or more "assistant" toons that could help us from time to time in specially crafted missions. It could be yet another thing in the game that we could do missions to unlock.

We already have a similar mechanic. This would be an adaptation of the typical canon/AE mission trick of having you rescue a pet who then fights with you for the rest of the mission. Or the Amy Jonsson pet temp power from KHTF.

It also resembles the time-honored AD&D game tradition of running content to acquire NPC adventuring buddies.

If we wanted to do it, we'd first create an arc (like the Fusionette arc in Faultline) where you could be introduced to a NPC. Then, in later missions, you might be given a "$NPC" - a variable pet - as an aide or optional aide, probably in missions featuring an EB where you are solo. If you had done the Fusionette arc, Fusionette might be the NPC aide selected for you. Or if you'd done the Eden Trial, then maybe Slate (one of the heroes you rescue) would pop up.

Additionally, if we wanted we could do something similar with foes. Let's say you defeat a named hero/villain in a mayhem/safeguard mission. Well, that same NPC could return in future content to settle the score.

Of course, we wouldn't want to keep running into the same specific foes over and over, or constantly reduce our challenge level by having a helper all the time, but if these ideas were implemented it would give us a tool for partial customization of a player character's storyline.