The new ranged attacks

The new ranged attacks for custom melee sets seem more than a bit overpowered. I'd expect to see them in line with normal ranged attacks on primarily-melee mobs, but these seem to be considerably more vicious.

I was testing one of my missions, which is designed for "soloable by a defender", which means all minions standard/standard. I was more than a little surprised to find that opening with Fire Cages meant that I was almost instantly brought down to red health. This was on Tenacious, all white-con minions (four or five of them, I think).

That seems a bit much -- I have not yet tested on my other toons, but I suspect my defenders will be pwnzed.

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Ugh, that's not good.

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yet for a tanker; brute or scrapper it is a non issue

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yet for a tanker; brute or scrapper it is a non issue

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-facepalm-

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Save City of Heroes!

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yet for a tanker; brute or scrapper it is a non issue

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-facepalm-

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I understand they want to squelch the powerlevelers and exploiters and whatknot, but really, whats the point of choosing certain powers from sets in i15 (so they say) if theres always going to be that mandatory ranged attack?

Not to mention it breaks theme on alot of characters. I want my skeleton warriors to use their swords, and if they can't reach that hovering defender in the air, they should not be lazy and jump =/

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Not to mention it breaks theme on alot of characters. I want my skeleton warriors to use their swords, and if they can't reach that hovering defender in the air, they should not be lazy and jump =/

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There is presumably no way to make an enemy "jump stab" a hovering character. That's just not how the AI works.

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I understand they want to squelch the powerlevelers and exploiters and whatknot, but really, whats the point of choosing certain powers from sets in i15 (so they say) if theres always going to be that mandatory ranged attack?

Not to mention it breaks theme on alot of characters. I want my skeleton warriors to use their swords, and if they can't reach that hovering defender in the air, they should not be lazy and jump =/

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Yeah I made an actual mission where I specifically wanted some enemies to not have ranged attacks. An example of where I used it was having an AV with melee-only attacks, but having a mob around him with ranged. So you would want to kill the mob first so that the fliers can easily take out the AV. I wanted this enemy to have the health of an AV but not be as hard as an AV.

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I am highly supportive of giving melee sets a ranged attack, insofar as I recognize that there's a legitimate interest in preventing players from hover-blasting helpless mobs into oblivion.

However, I want those ranged attacks to be comparable to the ranged attacks given to other melee mobs in the game. For that matter, I'm not even sure that the ranged attacks are comparable with the ranged powersets.

Brutes, scrappers, and tanks are going to power through practically anything; I'm frankly not worried about balancing my missions for them. However, story-focused, text-heavy arcs are best seen solo, and I want my arc to be soloable by as many characters as possible. Prior to the change, a mid-teens defender could solo my arc on Heroic, playing normally (i.e., no hover-blasting or the like). That's no longer the case.

And no, I don't want to use the same old enemies that people fight in regular missions. A custom look to the critters, along with custom descriptions, are vital to me.

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I understand devs probably want to prevent certain DB farming but if this "throwing knives" or w/e NPCs get hit for 400 and slotted corr got maybe like 1400 HP it it is not fun anymore

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Not to mention it breaks theme on alot of characters.

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Yes, this is a major issue for me and something I care a lot about. I'm in MAJOR support of the option for us to PICK which ranged attack our units get. Of course, some of them wouldn't be available due to redraw, and the game should force you to pick SOMETHING, but I want to be the one who decides what type of ranged attack my Martial Arts guys have and not be stuck with throwing stars.

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They just need to nerf the damage on them is what they need to do.

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So what ranged attacks do Broadsword, Katana, and Dual Blades have?

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They all have Throwing Knives as their ranged attack. And boy do they hurt.

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Losing faith in humanity, one person at a time.

Yeah, as I posted in the patch discussion thread, Martial Arts Shuriken is actually it's strongest attack. A shuriken should not be doing more damage than all melee attacks on a melee-centric mob, especially moreso than their tier 9, three second animating, slow-motion kick to the head move ( I forgot the name... ).

Being able to choose which ranged attack would also be nice.

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The issue is serious for melee toons, as well, as unless they're stealthed / superspeeded, the ranged attacks will hit them as they close. It's not a big deal on higher-level characters with slotted-out defenses and mitigation capabilities, but at lower levels, they're very nearly as vulnerable as ranged squishies.

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Not to mention it breaks theme on alot of characters. I want my skeleton warriors to use their swords, and if they can't reach that hovering defender in the air, they should not be lazy and jump =/

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There is presumably no way to make an enemy "jump stab" a hovering character. That's just not how the AI works.

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I've had Arachnos spiders do this in missions. Seems to only be combat jumping height. So I would assume there is some existing code for mobs to do this?

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Yeah, as I posted in the patch discussion thread, Martial Arts Shuriken is actually it's strongest attack. A shuriken should not be doing more damage than all melee attacks on a melee-centric mob, especially moreso than their tier 9, three second animating, slow-motion kick to the head move ( I forgot the name... ).

Being able to choose which ranged attack would also be nice.

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Considering most "adjustments" in this game seem to be done with a barrage of sledgehammers when the fine tuning of a single screwdriver would actually make sense, is anyone surprised by any of this? I mean, seriously, did you think they wouldn't go total overkill on some of this stuff?

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The ranged attacks should NOT equal epic powers for these enemies. Seriously.

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ATs to 50 - TA/A Def, Nrg/Nrg Blaster, EM/EA Brute, WS,ELM/ELA Stalker

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Yeah, as I posted in the patch discussion thread, Martial Arts Shuriken is actually it's strongest attack. A shuriken should not be doing more damage than all melee attacks on a melee-centric mob, especially moreso than their tier 9, three second animating, slow-motion kick to the head move ( I forgot the name... ).

Being able to choose which ranged attack would also be nice.

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Considering most "adjustments" in this game seem to be done with a barrage of sledgehammers when the fine tuning of a single screwdriver would actually make sense, is anyone surprised by any of this? I mean, seriously, did you think they wouldn't go total overkill on some of this stuff?

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Yep. Sure did. Saw it a mile away.

Just get used to expecting "nerfs" to be almost as game-breaking as the supposed "exploit" they're trying to solve.

"The One"

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Yeah, as I posted in the patch discussion thread, Martial Arts Shuriken is actually it's strongest attack. A shuriken should not be doing more damage than all melee attacks on a melee-centric mob, especially moreso than their tier 9, three second animating, slow-motion kick to the head move ( I forgot the name... ).

Being able to choose which ranged attack would also be nice.

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Considering most "adjustments" in this game seem to be done with a barrage of sledgehammers when the fine tuning of a single screwdriver would actually make sense, is anyone surprised by any of this? I mean, seriously, did you think they wouldn't go total overkill on some of this stuff?

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The ranged attacks doing major damage was probably done to prevent what the Devs considered an exploit (and I'm just talking normal MA missions); where if the MOB was melee with no ranged or just a very minor ranged attack; Ranged ATs could get XP for little to no risk.

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We know the reason they did it mate thats is not the point. The issue is the attacks are WAY overpowered, some even higher than the tier powers. Since the custom critters were "already" tougher than PvE critters due to their use of the players damage scale, the ranged attack is WAY overpowered for a critter power.

They need to lower the damage or change the damage scale.

In addition someone mentioned I15 and being able to "pick" powers. As proposed you would be able to "ADD" more powers after the standard powers. We will never be able to pick the powers from the ground up which totally blows.

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The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.

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In addition someone mentioned I15 and being able to "pick" powers. As proposed you would be able to "ADD" more powers after the standard powers. We will never be able to pick the powers from the ground up which totally blows.

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Especially when trying to make low level arcs with custom minions or lt.'s. Very frustrating how overpowered they currently are now.

Wish the damage and status effects could at least scale way down when fighting custom critters below level 15.

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Also I tried a /ninjitsu ambush (it is punishment for answering a riddle wrong) - the mobs stealthed up to range, threw daggers, then moved into melee.

It totally blew the whole stealth attack feel

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No one here is arguing that there shouldn't be ranged attacks of sufficient power to stop exploitation. (Such attacks don't really need to be all that powerful, given that anything that is going to be doing a ranged blast is also going to be squishy.) We're just saying that the ranged attacks should be in line with similar critter ranged attacks, as opposed to actually doing vastly more damage than their melee attacks, including, as has already been pointed out, their tier 9s.

I'd expect that, in a melee power set, the ranged attacks would be in line with melee mobs of the same level.

In the pre-15 game, I'd expect a ranged attack would be equivalent to the Revolver power that melee Hellions get.

In the 15-40 game, I'd expect a ranged attack would be equivalent to the ranged attacks of the melee mobs within the Family (a Button Man Muscle's Automatic Pistol), CoT (a Guide's Hand Crossbow), etc.

In the 40+ range, I'd expect a ranged attack would be equivalent to the Carnies (a Harlequin Fencer's Throwing Knife), Crey (Riot Guard's Automatic Pistol) ,and so on.

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