I16- Your Thoughts

I didnt have much time to play when it first came out. However through all the effort ive been hearing that the game was initially not meant for heroes and villians to custom color their powers. Yeah I know there wasnt any new content, but I think it took alot of effort and time for the devs to pull this off. So im gratefull, and think this will help refresh this ol game a bit.

Anyways, the first thing I did was roll up an Fire/TA corrupter. I told a friend once that the TA set wouldnt reach its full potential untill the defender can light his own oil slick. Defenders still cant, but corrupters can! Had some fun with that.

I like the new power customization. However I was sad to see that you couldnt customize a stone tanks granite form. I changed around the colors of my illusion kins powers after my stone tank. I love how you can recolor the illusion pets. I noticed alot of fire/kins were customizing their imps to various colors of white,purple and red.

Might have to blow the dust off my I-4 days lvl 50 invul/axe tank and see if this game can revitalize him.

Just had a great time soloing on scrapper (+0 lvl, 6 team size). 40 minutes later I had gained 3 bars at lvl 49.

The best thing was how much fun it was. Before these difficulty options soloing was a chore but no more!

Lots of QoL upgrades, pet zoning/email control/having my toons level displayed....win!

Amazingly good first hack at power customization, and much more to follow...win!

Lots of teaming improvements with the auto SK/exempt, difficulty slider controls...win!


Two thumbs up from me.....buuuut (there is always a but).

One thing I really really REALLY dislike...the mission holder is now the name that goes on top of the team list?!?!?!

Why..... what is the benefit????

This is driving my partners that do lots of buffing and keybinding NUTS...and I can honestly see no benefit to re-order the names on the team list. Please please get rid of this name re-ordering thing.

Is there an option to stop this silly feature... someone tell me there is an option I missed.

I"m loving my new characters:
rad/fire blaster
mind/earth (crystal) dom
the fire/ta corruptor that I've wanted since cov came out <3
elec/regen & spines/elec scrappers
They're all fantastic and I enjoyed playing around with their power colors ^___^


I haven't done too much on my existing characters yet, but I logged a few in and was happy to see the badges that they got thanks to the lowering of requrements
Oh, I also respeced my fire/sr/dark scrapper in the fire/sr/fire that she should have been, and am loving it!



I16 is huge win for me!

This is how I spent my first day of Issue 16.

Turned email settings to friends/SG on characters. The joke is on the RMTers... ha ha ha.

Adjusted sliders in menu>options to accept auto exemp/SK of up to 50 levels difference on characters.

I customized the following characters on Liberty:

Cassandra Seer (Kin/Elec Def 50)
colors: purple kinetics, purple/yellow electric
The color theme matches her Grant Invisibility and Psychic Mastery epic

Roxxtar (Earth/Kin Cont 15)
colors: magenta and purple for both sets
I used a crystal theme for Earth and the 'gems' look beautiful! This long neglected character will probably become my favorite to play solo or in PUGs.

Cornucopia (Emp/Energy Def 50)
colors: brown/green emp, green energy
Thank you BABs for adding earth tones to the template!

Gunpowder and Lead (FF/AR Def 6)
colors: bright aqua and pink FF
The forcefields are so pretty!

2020 Vision (MA/Regen Scr 50)
colors: bright red and burnt orange for both
Finally a punch I like - haymaker! The colors match Hasten and Air Superiority.

Heart of Valor (Dark/Psi Def 47)
colors: dark purple and red for both
It's suitably creepy for her story.

Dear Ophelia (Rad/Fire Blaster 9)
colors: white and lavendar for both
Simpy amazing.

I even saw illusionist decoys that didn't look awful.

I teamed with a low level PUG and the colors looked fabulous. Every character's powers were a surprise and I liked it, yet a close look would tell you what they were. It was a continual visual treat.

I did the Positron TF with five other players. Three of them were above 15, the rest of us ranged from 11-14 when we started. With the additional powers of our higher level characters the TF was a challenge but not the dragging chore that it used to be. It was actually fun.

Supersidekicking meant no mentor tetris. This was so useful I can't even begin to adequately describe its positive effects on the pace of play and facilitation of teaming. WIN!

New difficulty levels and solo options - WIN!

Badge changes - Finally my empath defender is an Empath. So is the rad defender I've been playing for 4 1/2 years. My long played tank finally got the mez badge. So many good badge changes. WIN!

New badges - new "Master of" challenges. WIN!

Pets zone - WIN!

QoL changes and options, especially the email settings, WIN!

AE changes - WIN and LOSE. The custom xp was nerfed too hard, but the need was there. This needs further work. The farmers won't be the ultimate losers here.

Thank you Devs for the best issue since you gave us Rikti invasions and Vanguard. You have reinvigorated the game. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

PS: On the downside of it I am dreading the MS Raid I'm leading tomorrow... lowbies... *shudder*

Since this issue doesn't have any new "content" I didn't want to like it, but I just can't help it.

Power customization
Zoning MM pets
Lower requirements for som SG badges
eliminating zone lvl restrictions

each time I log in or look at the patch notes I find something else I like.

Sure today is the first day of the rest of your life. But so was yesterday. And look how that turned out.

Great issue. NOT the best to date, but great issue.

Colors: Great. Waiting for the rest of the options (Granite, Khelds, etc)
Difficulty options: Best addition of the issue. Color Cust is secondary as far as I'm concerned.
Super Sidekicking: I hear it's great, but haven't had a chance to test it out yet.
Pets zoning: Too damn good!

Great issue. Looking forward to GR (finally some story content) and whatever surprises come in issue 17 now.

<QR>

Got online last night for the first time in a while (base editing aside). Didn't get much of a chance to play with the CC because I was asked to team. It did however give me a chance to check out the new SuperSK system, which worked great Even on a small group of three (or especially, given it was an odd-numbered team), the SuperSK system worked fabulously, allowing my two friends to SK up to my level so we could take on some Lost and Rikti in my lowbie's Midnighter arc. No more worrying about even-number groups for SK or doing the SK Tetris

The only thing I'm miffed about so far is that there's no pure black option for Stone Armor. The closest one can get is very dark brown... but it still looks like Burnt Umber, not black. I might be able to come up with a reasonable facsimile, but I wish I could just go with good old #000000

Didn't get on until 10 or 11 last night. Busy day and tired but wanted to check I16 out still so I went to make a new char to fool around with and check things out. Well, it used to take me1-3 hrs to make a char before.... I fear I will never be able to make a fully customized character from scratch again....LoL. I had to give up cause I was falling asleep at the keyboard. I thinks I will customize already existing characters powers for now and then maybe delve into something entirely new when I have time. I can always save now too, I keep forgetting. Anyway I16 ROCKS!

Now that I've had time to sleep on it, here are my thoughts:

1: Greed

The first thing I did was log in to my badge and snag 5 new badges that tool me up to 595. I'll be in the 600 club before too long!

2: Excitement

Created my new spines/elec scrapper, Severe Tire Damage, with metallic spines and blue electricity. He's going to be fun.

3: Confusion

Grabbed my defender and joined a large team of friends, and realized I had no idea what powersets people had because they were all recolored. Accelerate Metabolism is light blue? World of Confusion is purple? I feel like I'm back in my first week of playing when I had no idea what any of the powers did.

4: Contentment

Before bed, logged onto my tank, messed with the difficulty settings and went to town. Life is good.

@SpaceNut - My 50s, AE arcs and current projects at ParagonWiki

I checked it out as soon as I got home (almost got a speeding ticket on the way, but that's another story). My verdict is that this issue is full of win.

First thing I did was the power customization on my 22 SS/WP. I used dark colors and some of the alternate animations. Changed the difficulty to +0/x3 for more fury and ran a mission to see if he could handle it. Check.

The next thing I did was pull out my 50 bots/traps, crank the difficulty to +0/x8 to see how well he can farm and jumped into a paper mission of carnies. Walk in the park, soon as they fix the drop rates this is all I'll be doing.

Then I played around with the character creator, just admiring all the new themes, colors, and animations. No more bananas of doom. Ooooh these crystal themes are nice. I like white lightning. Pink pom-poms are gone!

After that, I made a new character I've been wanting to make for some time. He's a fire/dark corruptor in a tuxedo and tophat and shoulder cape. Every power has a different combination of colors. Green and blue fireblast, pink and yellow fire ball, purple and turquoise twilight grasp, red and white fire breath, the list goes on... I have brought to the world of Virtue, a very fancy, elitist attitude, stage magician gone bad named Abrakaboom!

I must say great issue!
Power diversification - excellent!
Color costumization - wonderful!
Finally felt my /ela brute without any build gap. Thumbs up for energize!
My new /earth dom promise a lot of fun.

Here my "rant":

Recipe drops is AWFUL. I run 4 complete mish with 2 of my brutes, solo spawn x 8 and the recipe reward was just 5 regular IOs. Not even a rare or uncommon. This would bring more imbalance to the market due lack of recipes and over pricing more than what we already had.

Please someone needs to review this issue

Set difficulty on Shield/Stone Melee Tank to +1, x8.

Enter a Paragon Protector mission alone.

Step into room with 5 spawns of 11 PP each, all within aggro range of door.

Five Shield Charges later I'm standing alone.


OMG I LOVE IT!!!!!

Wahoooo! The game is challenging again! Hooray for the new challenge levels!

+0/+8 teamsize when soloing = maniacal laughter! Bodies piled at my feet! Muahahahahahaha!

And power customization is awesome. I've almost got too many choices now! The new Crystal set for stone sets makes me want to make a stone brute or dominator... I have too many alts as it is! Arrrgh!

Quote:

Originally Posted by eltonio This is over the top mental slavery.

My thoughts (as someone who knew nothing about the beta; most of this is brand-new to me):

LOVE the new super-sidekicking. One of the biggest irritants to getting a team going was setting up the levels acceptably -- completely a non-issue now, just throw out the invites (after asking nicely!) and you're rolling. And no frustrations about some low level pubbie refusing the SK offer and soaking you for exp.

Expanded difficulty looks great too. I didn't see any reference to the old confusing setting names, Invincible, Tenacious, Villainous, etc. Did they remove those terms entirely and just replace them with "enemies are +1 to your level," etc.? So no more "wait -- is Tenacious harder or easier than Rugged?" discussions in chat? Cool!

Power Customization: Surprisingly, I am getting less use of this for existing toons than I expected, because a lot of my concepts were built to accommodate the pre-existing colors and animations. For instance, I have a Sixties/Seventies Blaxploitation homage Martial Arts character built around her infamous "lead-filled platform boots." She's not going to be turning any of her kicks into punches using the new MA animations. Similarly, I have a character using the Rad set to represent chlorophyll, plant pheromones, pollen, and "green forest energy." She won't need to recolor Rad.

So on existing toons, I am mostly using Power Customization to turn off or tone down effects; taking the flashes of light out of Martial Arts kicks (as much as the options allow, anyway) and finally turning off that weird circling curtain of light associated with Invulnerability's Unyielding power.

I'm sure NEW toon concepts 3will be born which will be better suited to exploiting the customization features. As a matter of fact...<runs back to the drawing board>

My thoughts are that I feel excluded.

There isn't anything exciting among proliferated powersets that I haven't already played many times on other archetypes.

Also since VEATs are within my interest, I feel disappointed that the power customization doesn't apply to them.

Oh yeah, I also noticed that servers haven't seen huge peak times lately, not even after i16 went live (atleast so far.)
Is this due to that other game?

To the no less than 5 people who downrepped me for posting that I miss the AE:

Grow up.

I have never said anything against how anyone else wants to play the game (Well, against PvPers once or twice I suppose), and I think it's quite immature to want to dictate to others how they should play. "Farmers are lame ROFL!" is not an argument. Me farming does not impact you, but you want to take it away.

The sad thing is I could still farm just as efficiently as ever. It's just not fun anymore because I'd have to do it by myself, dual boxing. Or at most, with a 4 person team to really make money fast. Please be aware that the RMT spammers you hate so passionately are not even slightly inconvenienced by this change. The AE can still be used to farm, quite easily. In fact, this makes it easier for them as they can simply set their difficulty to x8 spawns and not have to worry about getting teammates.

And calling me an AE baby is rather pathetic, considering I have been playing since the game was released (I was a CoH preorder customer), and had a 50 and a slew of 30s and 40s before the AE went in.

I've done literally everything in the game at least once. But the thing is that in the past I've never really played for more than a month or so at a stretch before it got old. The AE didn't get old for me at all. There was no frustration in it, no hassle forming or finding teams, no stress about muling inf to new toons so that they could afford SOs (Tickets pay for a complete SO enhancement by the time you hit 22 and you never ever have a problem keeping up). I didn't have to think about selling salvage and recipe drops at the market even.

I have had my post-i16 AE farm missions authored and ready for publishing for weeks. And they work. I have the toons I set up for it, and they can easily make as much inf now farming as they did before.

But there's no joy in it.

And yeah, I could still run 8 man teams in the AE if I wanted to, for less rewards. And I would, actually, quite happily, because I played the AE for fun, which a lot of you seem unable to wrap your heads around... But just try to find 7 people who want to run AE missions right now. Try, I'll wait.

So congratulations, to those who rejoice in the misery of others: You have not hurt the serious farmers in the slightest. The people you hate are not even mildly inconvenienced by the change you're rejoicing in. But you have managed to steal all the joy I got from the game, and unless the AE scene picks up again, I'll probably not bother to play again for a very long time.