I16- Your Thoughts

Terrible Terrible Terrible. They ruined not only AE whether you used it for leveling or for stories, but they also seemed to have nerfed developer content xp and made it harder. I was comforted by the idea of going back to old school missions but now it seems that its going to be harder to level than it was before AE came around. It was hard enough as it was back then!

Enemies seem to have too much range and are too easy to aggro. Not sure what they did with the numbers but it seems that they really have messed up a lot of stuff.

Stuff is about to get really hard to buy. Prepare to take forever to level up toons and be able to buy things for your toons. I understand nerfing AE, but they should have left the developer content as it was.

Soulsteel, my lvl 50 bots/dark/Soul Mastery MM was my difficulty guinea pig.

+0 diff/8-man team... Soulsteel 1, Circle of Thorns 0
+1 diff/8-man team... Malta 5, Soulsteel 1
+0 diff/8-man team... Malta 2, Soulsteel 1
+1 diff/8-man team... Arachnos 4, Soulsteel 1

This has the definite possibility of going for that more epic feel, where my heroes and villains go, "Ha... you guys have numbers, but this is ME!"

And my powers now look pretty.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

In a word; fair. Lot of good changes but not feeling any different than yesterday.

The changes made to the AE are understandable but I've got a workaround for the boss farm nerfs already. They took out all the Quantumns as well.

Lot of QoL changes which are mostly good. Persistent pets are a godsend to MMs and others alike.

Superteaming has its good and bad points. A good point would be that it is easier to make a team since level requirements are no longer an issue for PvE content but at the same time; having that pop-up ask after EVERY zoning is particularly irritating. If I've accepted the term once then it should persist while I'm still teamed. I know the level-range option is there but shouldn't it be the maximum range by default instead of the minimum?

Colour customisation: it's okay but not worth being the centre of attention for an entire issue. Not in the incomplete form it is anyway. I messed with a couple of powersets on my toons but the rest I'm not bothering to change. Once the rest of the powers are filed in (Pool, Ancillary, Patron and Epic ATs) then it'll be worth it.


So for some; this issue is the greatest one yet. For me; it was Tuesday

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I only had about an hour to poke around before I had to go to work, but one thing I did was recolor the powers for my Ice/Dark Corr. Wow, now I wish I had made her a Fire/Dark!

Her costume colors tend towards beige-y yellows, oranges and browns because of her connection the the fall season ("Amber September" is her name), so I used those colors to replace the Dark Miasma powers. When you do that, those powers really start to look like flames a lot of the time, so it would mix well for a Fire/Dark it seems to me.

So far, I haven't had a chance to try it out. I've been too busy torturing myself.

Here's the paradox, though - I specifically picked a character to play who WOULDN'T need customisation before I16, because it bugged me to play someone who should be customised, but couldn't be. Except, now I like playing that character so much I'm not sure I'll be able to get much out of the Issue for some time still

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

had limited time, but since power customization, and more importantly animation customization, was number 1 on my wanted list, i think we know where i'm going to stand here. I did get to pull on some guys for badges, the cascade of badges is nice, I am glad they lowered the disparity between the hero slayer badge and the hero equivalent, and the illusionist badge now taking the other summons will speed things along nicely, i did not enjoy getting that badge the old way, but the archmagus accolade was too thematically important, glad nobody will go through that again. I am thrilled that my main brute who is a lightning secondary can now have a self heal, didnt want to sacrifice powers to get aid self. I was happy that they added that new dark cone attack for the scrapper epic set, it looked a bit more "dragony" than dark blast, and worked well with rian(was kind of hoping maybe pyre mastery would have fire breath, but no biggie there) so that respec got called upon. Honestly, on this pass, the new martial arts anims didnt particularly thrill me, they were the street fighting animations, and im fine with that, because that did address a need players felt. hopefully the next pass is not far off and adds more of a chinese kung-fu feel, or get me some more crisp kick animations for a Korean martial arts feel, but since the tech is in place, i feel far better.

Overall, while i do hope we start seeing some more story content soon, this was a very important issue for me, maybe the most. it significantly changed a number of my characters for the better, both in their thematic feel and their actual gameplay, so i do feel invigorated, moreso than i have for a very long time. And it proved that a 5 year old game still has the development team skill and willingness to expand in meaningful ways in the face of fresh competition, in many ways surpassing them in the area of power customization. In my opinion, this was exactly what this game needed at this time. now bring on going rogue i guess. I am hoping that that is where all the story and costume work has been going and that it will kick me on my butt again.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Some very nice ghanges-Power customization,Difficulty options and the new Power Sets for some classes.Looking forward for GR expansion.

well i did have alot of things to say but i misclicked and lost it all so im trying to remember what i said

Arch/ta corr
lots of fun, i had a 50 arch blaster so now its on villaisn i can finally play a corr im dont find boring. shame they didnt customize the arrows but with ta its just as fun

broad sword stalker
this still feels wierd to me, but with nrg its so much fun as well and with the new colours of nrg it makes it more sexy as a stalker...from out of no where- hack, down comes a killer sword to slice open ur head.
plus the new AS is omg lol.. around the world and pokie pokie

havent yet played a claws elec brute to comment
and not gonna be making any heroes.

the new sking system is awesome. just sort out the leader and the teams ready to fight.
guess there could be a draw bk but i cant think of one just yet.
im not sure how itll play out on tfs/sfs as well but we shall see

minus a few bugs i.e. text bugs this is a high rated issue.

dont know the changes to AE and dont care i dont farm there and once i sort out my stories for AE i'll worry about the changes then, but nothig i cant handle

also i love the new chanegs to the badges- sweet move lowerring some of them, my dom now has all main accolades and only a few left thts non important. i think over 5 6 toons ive gained about 30 new badges overall.
look forard to also trying the MOitf

i said it last night but ill say it here.....

Welcome to Issue 16: Life outside the AE

on another note:

[rant]

who ever sent me this:

I've given one of my blaster's costumes white ice, but this is the only significant tweak I've made to my existing toons. I did create a new defender that fires green lightning and has gold empathy. I'm enjoying it a lot.

For me, the Color Customization was a bit half-finished. The stuff I wanted to change (prestige sprints, Epics, MM pets) I couldn't. Devices was a bit of a let-down. I had planned on making blue drones, but they're still the ugly grey boxes they always were.
Sure, it's fun to fiddle with the main power pool colors, but that's just a part of stuff I would've wanted to change.
I hope this is just the part one of Color Customization.

Having MM pets zone with you is a wonderful addition - if it wasn't so buggy. You're better off dismissing all pets before exiting or entering a mission or zoning. Just to be sure they don't go rogue

The best thing for me is the Super-Sidekicking. Now I can choose whichever alt I feel like, and not bother about level restrictions for zones or SK spots. And recently our SG was joined by a WoW-refugee friend of ours, with a lvl 15 character. Now we can take him with us to Peregrine Island to beat up some archvillains!

(As a side note, he was really excited about the game. We played a couple of high-level missions, and he kept saying "wow, this really feels like a comic book!" and he was super-excited about how cool flying was. It was refreshing to play with someone with such excitement and appreciation of the game, and it made me look at the game with fresh eyes. We veterans tend to moan about every little thing, and forget how wonderful this game really is.)

The Difficulty settings were nice and all. But I would've wanted more difficulty!
We tried a mission with maxed out difficulty with 3 Masterminds. We just sailed thru, with no real challenge to us. +4 lvl enemies, 8-man team.
Maybe put a setting for "boost all enemies", which would grant enemies more hit points, more damage output, more defences? Just to make things more interesting.

And I'm qurious - Let's say you have a 4 man team, and you set the team size to match that. Then you get another player in your team. So now you'd have to revisit Field Analyst to put team size to five?
A setting for "match team size" would've been nice and cut down on the hassle.

All and all, a nice little issue with a lot room to improve.

Kinda sweet to log on and get pummelled with new badges on every toon. Email was turned off immediately. Cool.

First I changed my Spines/Dark Scrapper. Then I logged on a bunch of other toons to change colors. Pretty much stuck with the same color across the powersets for now...I was in a hurry. I'll revisit this one later and take my time.

Then I tried out the new difficulty options. This game is now fully customizable! Not sure how anyone can complain. I did forget to turn down my setting (+0 team size 6) when I went to test my AE arc. My critters don't mess around and I got pwned. I did manage to kill enough of them to see that only one of my critters got hit by the xp nerf...and he still gives out like 80% or so...so I can live with it.

Made a Ice/Cold Controller but not sure I'll stick with it. Hard to imagine it could be more fun than my Ice/Storm.

Noticed some going for the new "master of" badges but didn't have the time to join them. I hear there are bugs there so I'm glad of that.

So far, I've mostly been playing with my new lowbies; another round of Power Proliferation was a big thing for me. Rad/MM, Necro/Therm, Fire/Cold, Claws/Elec...so far. Customizing power colors really adds a lot of flavor to the game.

I was able to make a few new lowbies: Electrosaurus, Iron Puma and another version of Clouded.

I would have had a real good time if I was able to zone into a mission without crashing.

So, I just did some street sweeping on each character until level 5 and then headed them to their radio/paper contact. Hopefully, this mission zoning bug will be fixed soon.

Set up my new fire/rad corruptor just to get her name reserved, since her concept required green fire.

... and then started smashing things. I was trying to find the sweet spot for my characters on the difficulty slider. Findings:

Earth/Fire/Mace Dominator: Haven't quite figured out where she should be yet. She can handle x5/+1/bosses of most enemy groups fairly easily, but Arachnos on that setting kills her about every other mob. I blame Fortunatas and their stupid mezz resistance. The one problem I've run into on other enemy groups is getting Domination up for the first time. It can be a bit touch and go against huge spawns. I expect I'll be going x6-x8 on her for most groups and something half as hard against Arachnos.

Dark/Elec/Mu Brute: ... is actually far more powerful than I thought. I did a few test runs with her versus x4/+0/bosses missions to see how the attack chain I planned for her to use after getting Energize would work, and she was tearing the place up. Her respec just took it to a whole new level (although ironically, her new attack chain helped more than Energize did.) I turned it up to x5/+1/bosses and still didn't run into any problems except a mission of nothing but Bane Spiders, and even that didn't trouble me much once I started tagging the lieutenants with Touch of Fear and remembered to use purple inspirations versus the bosses lest I end up as a toxin-filled red paste. I ended up just sort of smashing things for a few hours straight while cackling. I'll probably crank her difficulty a bit tonight to see just what she can handle.

Dual Blade/Fire Scrapper: Is the opposite. She can't really handle as much as I thought, as a mission of x4/+0/bosses Rikti showed me very quickly. I suspect that just turning off bosses would help a ton, so more testing is called for.

Tonight will be my Rad/Rad Defender, Ice/Psi Dominator, and Thugs/Poison MM.

Once I've adjusted to everything, I might just slaughter repeatable Rikti missions on my brute for a few days at x8 or something. I do enjoy smashing giant mobs of things.