More heroic heroes, please

I think I would feel worse if half the enemies I were fighting weren't robots, magic powered humans with venomous swords, drug addicted trolls throwing boulders at me, and clowns with half their bodies replaced with metal.

These aren't fragile purse snatchers.

I have a Fire / Psi Blaster and the way I reason her use of Fire Powers is that the Fire is a Psychic Manifestation of her ability. The Thugs only think they are being set on Fire. They Drop unconcious because they They Believe they are being set on fire and pass out from the mental Shock.

Mind control is your friend

Maybe when they roll out power customization more, there could be an option to replace any power animation at all with /e slap? Then you could do things like Nova or Assassin Strike, but it'd look like you just had a very strong arm.

It's easy, really. The whole combat system is a big, pretty abstraction, well removed from what actually happens. Look at Super Reflexes characters. When an attack misses they get a little 'dodged' message. But what really happened is they leaped aside at the last minute, and did a backflip off a wall, and came up into some awesome attack move. The engine can't handle that, so we get an abstraction.

Hitpoints are an abstraction for most characters (possibly excepting Invincibility characters and other supernatually tough bruisers). In the game, your blaster takes a triple round of bullets, and loses some health. What actually happened was that those bullets came a little closer than was comfortable, chipping away some of your cover. Soon your luck may run out...

So what you see on the screen is thugs getting blasted with fire, shot and cut up by swords. What actually happened is the stuff in the comics, with clever disarming, non-lethal, disabling wounds, and forcing the bad guys to surrender before they really get hurt.

Unless you're playing red-side.

Edit: Stupid double post.

Only the white meat.

--NT

"Rubber bullets. Honest."

I imagine it this way, to be effective in Paragon city, any gang-mob-evil organization is going to outfit it's people with some sort of base-defense/resistance to all forms of attack. What we do is overcome that defense/resistance until our power overwhelms them and they collapse. This is why the bad guys tend to run when those levels get too low, our attacks are starting to hurt...alot. What idiot is going to try to snatch a purse in a city where every third person has heat-vision?

I have to have a concept I can embrace to overcome my altitis.
I don't actively RP, but the concept helps me form the character in my head.
I've avoided Assault Rifle on blasters for that very reason, I could just never get behind a Hero using a gun. Always seemed more... vigilante like.
Even with rubber bullets and the like.

I rolled up an Archery/Mental few months back and found the combo very enjoyable. But, I was having a hard time rationalizing using Arrows to defeat the mobs.
Then I realized, he's a superhuman with uncanny accuracy, his arrows never actually penetrate flesh. Instead he simply pins them to crates, walls, floor, what have you. Rendering them motionless.
Blazing Arrow isn't actually on fire, it's an Illusion he creates.
Mental Marksman has become one of my all time favorites now!

My Fire/Ice blaster wasn't as easy to explain. I ended up asking myself what it'd really feel like to be hit in the chest with a ball of fire.
I tried to visualize how I could do it in real life.
From what I could imagine, it wouldn't really hurt all that much. Even more so if you were clothed. The fire would splash about, maybe cinging them.
So it was okay to see him hurl a fireball at the mob and not expect it to do much, just overcome them with smoke.
Sure, he could walk up to someone and just hold his hands out and flashfry them. But he's a Hero so he tones it down. Besides, he has Ice powers to cool them down afterwards.
Coming up with these little 'insider secrets' is actually part of the fun for me when creating new toons.


As far as the alternate skins options go, I'm all for it. Though, if I recall correctly. The Dev's said they wouldn't give alternate weapons to a set unless they matched the damage type. I.E. if your set had alot of stabbing attacks the weapon had to have a point. If the set was slashing based, weapons had to have an edge.
Otherwise you could pick Katana for you WarMace tanker and it just wouldn't 'feel' right.
That said, they do seem to be going the way of more cusumization/ less restrictions. So we'll see.