Wait, why Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer?

Pretty sure it's the "but I wanna be heroic!" argument combined with superior player numbers.

Adding to that, there's a key advantage heroes get that villains don't. Heroes are allowed to save the world but villains aren't allowed to take over the world. In fact, villains aren't even allowed to take over a city which is disappointing since CoH maps show that the Rogue Isles DOES have uncharted islands. The one true advantage is getting Mayhem missions since it allows you to go to a city and wreak havoc.

My Arcs
-----
Mission Architect Handyman

Nail on the head. A hero can say: 'Ha! Ha! I saved the world!'

A villain can at best say: 'Ha! Ha! I was a lackey to someone who thought they could take over the world but ultimately made them fail to do so while not grabbing the power for myself in the process!!!'

What villains could use is a tactical element to the game that divides zones up into sections that they can take over. Maybe gaining power and dominance as they complete missions/story arcs.

So that even if we play the lackey in an arc...it's all contributing to our overall power accumulation. Maybe even throw personal story arcs in there based on your take over of zones as you spread your influence.

In the end, there is lot's of stuff that could be done to make redside great but I'm losing hope that anything will ever get done.

What would they call such a setup? "Recluse's Victory"?

No...I'm not talking about something like that.

I'm thinking of something like the Global Domination setup from a game like Universe at War or Dawn of War. Where you can tangibly measure your dominance as a villain by taking over areas in the Rogue Isles.

I'm thinking that zones would be divided up into sub sections just like how we have different districts already. You would bring up a map and see how much influence you have over a certain area. Maybe you could spend points you gain from villainous pursuits to increase your hold over a desired district.

Like maybe you could put points into gaining influence in the police force, thereby increasing your combat effectiveness versus the various law enforcement groups in the Rogue Isles because you have inside info on their weaknesses. That kind of thing.

I'd even like to see villains all get personal strongholds. These wouldn't be like SG bases, but would something you'd have to defend against hero incursions(PVE not PVP) and would grow and expand as you gain power and dominance as a villain.

A better working environment. City of Heroes (or at least those zones where players spend their time) tends towards brightly-colored, well-lit environments that permit easy navigation. City of Villains, on the other hand, comes from the "Real is Brown" school of game design, with city layouts straight out of the middle ages.

I haven't gotten very far in City of Villains, but the sorts of available missions I've encountered don't help matters. The first mission arc has you grinding rats (excuse me, tunnel snakes) as a second-rate hero in a third-world slum. The other missions I've done don't help things -- unless you spend all your time in the AE building, CoV would be better titled "City of Lackeys".

You don't say?

Champions is even worse.

Since anyone can take any power, no one needs anyone else. Even when you get a group, no one bothers to work together.

Does Champions content even scale for teams like CoX? I thought most of it was non-instanced. If that's the case, then teaming would tend to be more trivial.

In any case, while I don't fully support the OP in his viewpoint, I do take offense at the weird mentality of MMO gamers that fun can only be had on teams when everyone is crippled in one way or another.

Teaming in COV is just as much fun for me as teaming in COH. The difference is that your team tactics can be a bit less rigid. My bots/ff mastermind can just as easily apply his bubbles to teammates as to his minions and my thugs/poison mastermind doesn't just debuff the enemy for the sake of his pets...the whole team benefits from his efforts. Corruptors still perform a similar function to defenders and dominators can still effectively control groups.

Age of Conan is a troubled game period and suffered from the ever-popular 'WoW killer syndrome'. I wouldn't use it as a good example of team dynamics...since that's where a lot of people feel it doesn't do well in any case apparently.

I don't know about scaling, but I know there's no bonus exp (like there is in CoH) benefit to teaming. And there's only really one support set (and guess what, it's pretty much all heals). And the support set doubles as an attack set so even if you take it you can still solo just fine. So there's no exp reason, or need-help reason, or character build reason to team.

I think CoV has better archetypes. They are all built with damage in mind, while most of the CoH ones have specific roles and only do damage as an afterthought. However, we have 10 basic ATs and not all of them can be built that way before you start to see a lot of overlap. And some of the concepts just don't work out to very good practical classes.

I don't think it's so much that the CoV classes are damage-oriented. I think it's more that they can adapt to team roles better. A Tanker really only tanks. Can do damage, but not enough that you'd want to go out of your way to recruit a Tanker if you need a damage dealer. But the "other thing" you do doesn't have to be damage. Controllers for instance can do a lot of team-oriented and helpful things, but aren't that great on damage, but are still powerful and useful ATs that are very useful to a team.

So really, I think ATs that have a broader role and can do two things or more are the best ones.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

That's basically what I'm saying. I highly dislike balance done by crippling characters in one aspect so that they basically NEED other characters to fill in the void. Other characters, mind you, who will be crippled in some other ways, needing still other characters, until building a team becomes uncanniliy similar to fitting falling Tetris blocks together.

In a big way, I prefer the CoV ATs as a basic design. In City of Heroes, for probably three years, I could only play a single AT out of the 5 - Scrapper. Everything else was either not self-sufficient, took ages to level up or did not become "fun" until something like 32 levels in. CoV, on the other hand, gave me two ATs I could play and be proud of right from the start - Brutes and Masterminds. Brutes, I will admit, are fiddly and can be slow, but they ARE self-sufficient, they ARE fast enough and they kick *** from the moment I make them. Masterminds are the definition of fiddly, but they are probably the ultimate AT, bringing to the table all three of the primordial orders of tank, healer and damage dealer. A Mastermind brings his own vast survivability, a Mastermind brings his own impressive damage and a Mastermind brings his own heals, buffs, debuffs and control.

The Blaster changes gave me Blasters, though only somewhat, so I thought the games were equal at two ATs a piece, but then the Stalker changes gave me Stalkers, so CoV still leads even now. The Dominator changes, however, did not manage to give me Dominators, despite a valiant try on my part.

Basically, I'm not against teaming and I don't expect every character to be able to do everything, but I really, REALLY hate being crippled so as to create an artificial need for me to look for a team.

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.

It's kin of depressing when every time this comes up, someone inevitably brings up Jackpot. Yes, there is ONE SINGLE AREA in all of CoV that has some colour. What about everything else? The post you replied to talked about "brightly-colored, well-lit environments," as in plural - more than one environment. And while Jackpot IS brightly coloured, it's brightly coloured only at night, and then it isn't well-lit. Black streets against black buildings against black walls in the black of night is not very easy to navigate, even if you have your gamma brightened up a lot.

Aside from the neon lights of Jackpot, where in CoV do you see a break from the black/grey/brown colour scheme, occasionally appended with red for the "evil" red and black scheme? All the buildings are some combination of black and grey, occasionally brown, where there is soil, it's either grey or black, and very rarely brown, Arachnos architecture is black, with red banners here and there, Arachnos soldiers are all black with red, and over half the time, the sky is grey. There is barely any vegetation anywhere, and where there is, it's usually an ashen, greyish green. Primeva DOES stand out as a colourful place, even though anything that's not green is still brown, but Thorn Island is still the same. An ashen grey thorn tree, mud brown bricks, rocks, stones and soil and that pale grass.

All of City of Villains is one gigantic slum. There are specific exceptions - pretty much Aeon City and Jackpot - but the bulk of it is just black/grey/brow slums strewn with trash, suffering neglect, destruction and poverty and overridden with crime. I look forward to Going Rogue, hoping to see a world where there is any point to being a villain and where someone didn't already beat me to messing the place up.

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.

What, seriously? First off:

Jackpot has a lot of color. So do Fortune's Wheel and the Golden Giza. Wheel has all the colorful tents, and has a small forest nearby. Giza is brightly colored and the place is built as a giant golden pyramid. Inside there are a lot of lights and slot machines. There's a large green forest in the Primeva in Nerva. Speaking of Nerva, drop by Crimson Cove sometime to see green, yellow, and purple buildings. Sharkhead is a big industrial sector, but swing by the docks to see a lot of colorful things being loaded/unloaded onto boats. Cap's university has a cheerful courtyard, and the inside is undoubtedly vibrant. Go behind the university for a large green forest and yellow bulldozers. Aeon city is attractive, being more white than gray. Mercy has a casino, and billboards, and some bright buildings.

Secondly, where are you getting that CoH is so much more colorful and creative than CoV? You want to tell me where I can go in Atlas, Galaxy, King's Row, Skyway City, Steel Canyon, Talos Island, Independence Port, Brickstown, and Peregrene Island that isn't just gray or brown? Where should I go in Boomtown, Dark Astoria, Crey's Folly, Terra Volta, Croatoa, or the Hollows that's any less gloomy and monochrome than CoV? In fact, because CoV has the black/red sections of Arachnos bases, it probably has more color than CoH which is almost purely gray in all zones, with some brown in a few places.

Real life is black, gray, and brown. I don't know what you're expecting. Green cement? Pink dirt? The designers can get creative with it sometimes, but you can't push the envelope too far too often. Cimerora adds a lot of green and gold, but it's not something you can do all the time. In fact, the most colorful zones are the ones that both factions share; Cimerora, Ouroboros, and to a lesser extent the Warzone.

The only genuine complaint I have with CoV is that it's always night or overcast and can be hard to get a screenshot in as a result. If CoV zones weren't always dark, you could put them in CoH and nobody would blink.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Just look around the buildings. They aren't all grey. In fact, not a lot of them are. There are a lot of blues and yes, indeed, green cement if you look at the buildings. The skies are blue in a lot of places, the grass is green, unlike in a lot of CoV, where it's brown-ish. I make the distinction because a lot of buildings in CoV are primarily black or primarily brown, all of them. You decry Steey Canyon, for instance, but it has greens, blues, yellows, cream colours, and a lot of them are vibrant and bright. CoV looks like it was passed through a colour filter where even what colours there are are washed out, dark and almost monochromatic.

As well, all the bright city zones, including Atlas Park, Galaxy City, Steel Canyon, Talos Island and Peregrine Island are all cut from the same mould, so they're similar. But they are still contrasted by the darker zones like King's Row, Independence Port and Skyway City. Founders' Falls is a whole other animal entirely, with old-style buildings painted in a variety of colours, with a lot of blues and greens thrown in, whereas Brickstown is a different beast, itself, with architecture taken from Kings Row, but with a more big city feel, and it still manages to break monotony with the Seven Gates bridge and the flickering lights of the Zig. And then you have Croatoa, which is fugly but in a different way, the Hollows, Perez Park and Eden as a fairly colourful jungle-type environment, new Faultline which has an entirely unique colour scheme and zone design. And even Striga Island, which while it has plenty of other failings, has one of the more interesting terrains around.

Contrast this with CoV, which is 45% black buildings, 45% brown buildings, 5% forest and 5% Jackpot. As soon as you set foot into Mercy Island and make sure your monitor's contrast hasn't dropped when you weren't looking, you'll be looking at the same style of grey an brown buildings for the entire game. The St. Martial ones are still the same, they just have neon signs attached to them. And while, yes, it does look pretty, it's the exception. Take a look at Aeon City some time and you'll notice it's all pretty much black and white, the whole thing. Look at Sharkhead some time, and you'll notice it's pretty much black and black. Yeah, there are faded-colour containers here and there, but the warehouses are a rusty brown and everything else is a matte black volcanic ash. Mercy is much the same, with the lower part being black ash with brown buildings and the upper part being white cement with black buildings. Cap is the same, with a lower part that's black buildings and white asphalt and the upper part that's white buildings and white asphalt. And the sky is perpetually overcast everywhere.

Oh, and check out Grandville some time. It has an ambient lighting that actually washes our colour on top of its bleak colour scheme. I don't mind bleak, I don't mind depressing, I don't mind monochrome, but the whole bloody game is like that. Yes, St. Martial is a bit different, and Nerva is a BIT different, but even then it's still more black buildings and white asphalt. I feel like I'm playing frikkin' Mirror's Edge sometimes.

I don't know where you live, but around here my city is not all black, grey and brown. My house is brick, so it IS brown (a reddish brown) because it's brick, but my balcony is painted green, which we picked because we spotted another house painted that. There are plenty of cream and sky-blue houses, as well, and some are even going fancy and painting theirs reds, greens and vibrant blues. I don't have any skyscrapers here, but the few "glass towers" that I do see look, for the most part, blue, because they reflect a blue sky, rather than an inexplicably GREY sky. And the trees, grass and weeds there are a vibrant green, like real, living plants should be, not the brownish green that makes them look like straw, or like it's perpetual autumn. We have the classic Caterpillar yellow tower cranes, as well, rather than the drab grey and black husks that the who game seems to get, and I must admit the yellow bulldozers in Mercy (added after Beta, mind you, back then the plaza was empty) are a nice touch.

But my world is not colourless. It's night right now, but in the day, every time I look out the window or step outside, I see colours everywhere, to the point where my colour perception actually has a point. But going from CoV to CoH makes me feel like "Dude! I can see!" CoV is both FAR too dark and with colours FAR too washed out, when they even exist. And it wouldn't be so bad if there were some variety, but ALL of the zones are dark, bleak, colourless and depressing. And that's with me having cranked up the digital vibrance of my video card and my Gamma at 85% (which is brighter). Without that, I couldn't even SEE where I was going in Grandville.

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.

You mean City of Heroes? Sure, let's take a look at something other than grey and brown for some demonstrative contrast...


First, let's look at Peregrine Island with its lush, green trees and inspired architecture:




And then Founders' Falls, the vibrant, easy-to-navigate part of the game:




All over the place, actually. Like this one, with green, blue AND yellow all within the same three-mile radius!




Let's take a brief look at some of the more attractive tourist destinations in Paragon City:

• Faultline
• Dark Astoria
• Crey's Folly
• Kings Row
• Eden
• Boomtown

Clearly, City of Heroes is much more clean-cut and free of poverty and destruction than City of Villains. While on the other hand, I can think of like three places in Villains with trash, poverty or slums in general: The lower half of Mercy Island, the Scrapyarders' housings in Sharkhead, and the South Ward in Grandville.

I should have read back and not relied on the broken forum software to show me the newest UNREAD post... Stupid forum upgrade always making things worse!

But yes, I do agree that, pretty much of any game I have ever played that still even HAD roles, City of Heroes (as a whole) probably has the most lenient system. And having seen it develop, I am petrified to realise just how random and accidental the biggest thing I like about the game was. Listening to Jack back in the days, and watching them scramble to patch overpowerdness as it occurred were clear signs that we were FAR stronger than they had ever intended us to be. I'm glad they did the smart thing and ran with what they had, rather than try to redesign the game from scratch to force us to obey the original intended balance. It still mortifies me each time the manual describes a boss as something should NOT be soloable unless you're really special. That would have been a really, really crappy game, but I'm glad to see unexpectedly positive instances of bad design be adopted and re-labelled as good design. So everyone bought enough SOs to kit out their characters completely and this wasn't intended? Well, since they can, now it is, and let's go from there. Work with what you have.

The CoV AT designers do deserve praise, but I don't think it's QUITE as much praise as most people believe. For one, with CoH covering the Holy Trinity well enough, CoV ATs could be different. The game still provides what people expect because other games provide it because other people expect it. It's there, so CoV doesn't need to provide it all over again. Secondly, while they did a very good job of the ATs, partly through over-cautious balance, partly through try to make CoH specialists shine, the CoV ATs came out mediocre in a lot of aspects. Most CoV ATs were combinations of CoH ATs, but they suffered severe penalties, and were given increasingly contrived inherents that they would depend on, giving them, essentially, enough performance to match swords with the CoH specialists, but at the cost of unreliability and fiddly, fiddly crap.

For the most part, the CoV ATs are decent (after their respective fixes), and even the ones I don't actually like STILL do well solo. Not well enough for my tastes, certainly, but solo play always proved possible and progress via solo play fast. The actual gameplay was harder, which is what turned me off, but levelling speed WAS decent, which is all I was really after.

To play off Arcana, Blasters are, indeed, the only ones which got shafted in any big way by the Holy Trinity, and they have never quite recovered. They're sort of caught between a rock and a hard place, relying on damage with no self-protection. You can't give them enough damage to be safe, as that would trivialise the game, and anything less than that forces them to stand toe-to-toe with enemies who WILL outlast them. An AT which has no real means of protecting itself aside from killing things is not well balanced when no sane developer will give it enough damage for self-protection to never matter. Not in a multiplayer game, not a chance. Their performance at 50 is also not terribly relevant, as unlike other ATs, they get tools vital to their survival in their Epics, and those come far too late. I have talked about lowering Epic unlock level to 30, to pre-empt the massive difficulty ramp-up in the 30s, but have so far had no response on it, but the jist of it is that Blasters need just a few extra things to make them truly hardass, and those things are in their Epics, when they really should have been in their powersets.

I haven't played all ATs, even five years in, but of the ones I've played, I have rarely seen powersets stuffed with unnecessary, redundant garbage as if someone ran out of things to put in there. Blasters suffer from this in the majority of their powersets, and the repeated suggestions to scrap this or that power from this or that secondary stand to evidence.

Basically, I'm happy with the execution of this game, albeit for a few exceptions, and my argument was more principle than it was practical.

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.

Note that the sky is blue, the warehouse is yellow and cream, the buildings have a blue tinge, the air ducts are cyan and there are a lot of inexplicably yellow traffic lights, plus the blue phone booths. Yes, the buildings' roofs are all the same, I'll give you that.

You have yellow buildings, you have green buildings, you have brown buildings, you have bluish buildings, you have reddish buildings. Yes, the roofs are all the same, but you have that honking big bright blue shield wall in the background and despite you trying to hide the most obvious feature - the canals - I can still see a bit of clearly blue water down by the buildings. And even though you did a good job hiding the ground, I can still see a cyan sidewalk with a cream water wall.


You know what I see here? A blue roof, and then that's it. I did go back after reading your description, and I did spot the two yellow shipping containers, but the rest of the picture is depressing. You have black cement walls and black choimensy, grey-brown pavement, grey asphalt, grey walls, grey towers, grey fence on a grey building with white trim and grey windows. I see a garden that is mostly a greenish brown grass, that huge brown pipe in the backgroind and admittedly very dark green vegetation. The water in the two little ponds IS blue, but the water in the sea looks so petrol blue it's close to grey. And if this is Cap Au Diable near the Golden Roller as I suspect it is, then the sky will be grey, too.

Here's the thing - bright colours in City of Villains would have ruined the depressing mood of the place, so I can understand why they were reserved and rarely used, largely as a contrast to what the whole place WASN'T, but I don't see why the whole place had to be Lord Recluse's keep. Why not give the guy a couple of islands and give the rest out to other villains with less of a "let god sort 'em out" approach to city maintenance? An American who went to the Sovier Union back during the Cold War described the place as being all drab, grey, soulless and lifeless, with no colour, no vitality and no-one who tried to sell you anything, and I get that. Totalitarian states tend to do that, and living in a former Soviet state, I can see relics of the old times everywhere, the large pre-fab blocks of flats done in black and grey, so it's not as unrealistic. But it doesn't have to be like that in the WHOLE GAME. Even if Arachnos had to have an evilnessnessness colour scheme of black and red, could some of the islands not have been given out to someone else? Nerva is a good example, most of its colour coming from, most ironically, Longbow's colourful costumes.

City of Heroes is not a happy, colourful place everywhere. It has its happy zones, and it has its drab, grey zones where you feel like you're constantly about to get mugged. But even what "good" zones CoV has only serve to show that there IS nothing good on the Isles, and any happy colour you see is just a tourist trap waiting to steal your money and your soul. That's why I look forward to Going Rogue - because it looks like it'll let me be the bad guy in a GOOD world. Or at least one that looks like it's good, if they do their job well.

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.

If you had to have me tell you that there was yellow in the picture, then you're obviously only looking for things that support your argument and are ignoring everything else. Even reckless protesters do that, as do lawyers. You're nitpicking at hues, though color-wise the three images are nearly identical. There's nothing about the first two that's remarkably different from the third.

When I look at the third image, I see artistic architecture that's leaps and bounds above the rectangular prisms from the first two. There's a decorative lawn in front--notably green in color--with maze-like hedges and fountains of--get this--blue water. In the background, you can see the rusty orange pipe from Aeon's PTS, which immerses the area in the game lore; much in contrast of the woefully-repetitive copy/paste city layouts that came before it.

It is also well-lit and easy to navigate.

This thread has become a veritable showcase of Samuel Tow's opinion and how one must not contest Samuel Tow's opinion. I share this perspective not as an insult, but as a courtesy that these discussions might go more smoothly in the future. On the topic of game classes that specialize in non-combat roles to the point of being inadequate in combat by themselves, know that a commercial setup like this needs to make certain considerations so that everyone--including those with differing preferences from yourself--will be able to enjoy what it has to offer.

Seriously? It looks like a standard mansion which I could only see as being depressing if you are on the other end of the income scale.

The majority of the problem with CoV's visuals is not the buildings themselves but rather the skyline. If daylight was just a little bit brighter the zones would look quite different. I also wonder if Mercy Island would be regarded differently if we started in the Mercy neighborhood where things are noticibly brighter than the rest of the island. Nerva and Warburg both have multicolored buildings like those in the Jackpot neighborhood of St Martial but they don't light up in the dark.



Trying to get back to the original topic, a lot of the problem with the mmo trinity, and I'll bluntly argue that this favors Scrapper soloability, boils down to two simple problems--enemy stupidity and lack of enemy variance. If an enemy can fly and has a ranged attack but it spends most of its time in melee even if you never taunted them then of course it's easy for a Scrapper. Longbow Eagles are one of the few enemies that actually attempt some form of "stick and move" which makes them noticibly different to fight but they are generally too squishy for it to matter.

Enemy variance is another big issue. Stalkers, Controllers, and Dominators generally have a higher amount of worth if there's one or two unique targets that need to be addressed as opposed to just wading into a spawn with Footstomp on auto. However, we've got a few too many enemy groups where you don't have to actually pay attention. Also, enemies could stand to have just a few more tricks up their sleeves.

My Arcs
-----
Mission Architect Handyman

Enemy 'intelligence' is a bit of a problem. As I understand it, in MMOs, good AI is apparently very resource intensive. I recall that Tabula Rasa had servers dedicated simply to enemy AI...probably one of the reasons for its huge costs to run.

In any case, I have posted in the past that we could probably use some more variance in terms of enemy abilities. One of the things I'd be interested in seeing is enemies that use abilities targeted at specific ATs. Specifically those ATs who shrug off everything like tanks, scrappers and brutes.

You mask this as courtesy, but use it as a cudgel to beat me over the head in an attempt to claim the moral high ground while simultaneously still dismissing my point as "just opinion," neatly forgetting that that's all anyone whose name isn't red has on these forums, specifically on issues not numerically representable in any practical format.

You want the moral high ground? You can have it. Opinion is all I have to offer, and if all you're interested in discussing is explaining how my opinion is wrong and I should be ashamed to have it, share it and defend it, then by all means continue. I won't stop you since, quite frankly, I'm tired of defending my right to hold an opinion and not instantly "agree to disagree" whenever an opposing opinion is stated, like we're on some kind of show and tell. Even though I am put into a position where I have to defend my opinion every frikkin' time AND pegged as intolerant and egocentric just because I refuse to drop it.

Showing me carefully selected screenshots of the zones changes nothing in what I see when I log into the game, and I am quite frankly not prepared to accept spin and re-interpretations of what I can plainly see. Feel free to paint me as an ungrateful jerk if you want. I'll survive. But do take my benevolent advice in term. Next time you try to offer perspective, try to do it in a less cynical, condescending way, and you might end up eliciting a better response.

Have it your way. You don't want to hear my opinion but to use it as ammon against my other opinion, then fine. You won't hear it.

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.

The problem with City of Villains is style and presentation, though in four years I've never met anyone who cared to discuss it but state their own facts. You are presented with a slum from the get go and taken through slums from then on, with plenty of instances focusing on that, specifically. St. Martial may be a beautiful peace of heaven, but when Hardcase continually sends me to that one ghetto section, that's what I'll remember. The town of Mercy is a decent, upscale if a bit rustic place to live, though intentionally made to look and feel hostile to preserve the feel. The rest of the zones follow suit, with, really, Nerva being the only place that isn't painted as a hell hole, and that's not under overt Arachnos control. Why couldn't we have had more islands like it? And they still had to jam Arachnos operatives in it, anyway. That's like sticking Longbow in Grandville, which I'm surprised they didn't do.

The whole style of CoV is designed to beat you over the head with the doom and gloom of a tyrannical dictatorship, a crime-ridden craphole, a cesspool of scum and villainy. A city of villains, if you will, where every man, woman and child is a villain and there are no heroes. True to its name, it was a city, sort of, that was made up entirely of villains. And then people complained that other villains were all their villains fought. Well I am shocked and amazed! In making City of Villains a literal city of villains, the developers stepped on the very point of being a villain, which was to mess up a NICE work. Pretty much every game about being an irredeemable bad guy from Stubbs the Zombie to Prototype to what have you puts you in an idyllic world that you get to watch burn around you as you progress, providing a cathartic sense of perverse achievement. City of Villains lacks that, as there is no way things could get any worse in any way that anyone would notice. Fat load of good it does you to be a villain when someone beat you to it. It's as good as showing up to the bank when the vault is already empty. You can have a pointless shootout with the cops, but the point is already long gone.

You have a point, but you shouldn't confuse "frustration" with "challenge." A lot of games do that, with game developers believing that as long as players CAN'T do something, it's automatically hard. And not, you know, a cheating, cheesy insult to the player's intelligence. Back to the old standby - Succubi in the original Diablo would shoot Blood Arrows at you from range, then back up as soon as you approached and ran at the same speed as you, which meant a melee fighter could NEVER catch them short of forcing them into a corner the limited AI couldn't get out of. This is, in fact, the thing I'm trying to AVOID by stating my opinion here - instances where a player is faced with a situation that is either flatout impossible, or at the very least so cheap it costs you years off your life every time you have to get through it. Self-sufficiency is key here, in that you should, ultimately, never face anything that you can't handle, mechanically speaking.

Now, granted, variety is good, and I do vouch for it, but it won't solve this particular problem I have. For one, instituting Scrapper-killers, or more aptly Scrapper-annoyers, is exactly the wrong way to go about levelling the playing field. The ideal here is not a game where EVERYONE faces something that they cannot handle, but rather where no-one does. I have nothing against enemies more dangerous to Scrappers than they are to, say, Blasters (the opposite of 99% of the rest of the game), and the Rogue Vanguard actually do a pretty good job of that... Kind of. Their melee is DEADLY and their ranged attacks, while dangerous, are not nearly on the same level. Of course, Blasters possessing melee attacks as they do and not always possessing ways to keep out of melee unless they fly (which not all Blasters do) still do get shafted by the same, but it is what it is. That's not such a bad thing, since the Rogue Vanguard are still killable by Scrappers and they aren't so much cheap as just damn strong, but you're getting dangerously close to the Void Hunter effect, where a cheap enemy acts as a crutch to keep an otherwise decent AT down. That is NOT good design.

Well, that's generally what difficulty settings are for, as you can pick between few but tough enemies, or lots of cannon fodder, but Purple Patch level scaling being what it is, I don't consider it a viable option, personally. That aside, enemies do indeed have PLENTY of tricks up their sleeve, but the nastiest ones are reserved for the highest of levels. Malta have control out the wazoon as well as a LOT of serious outgoing damage, Carnies have end drain enough to break infinity and loop back to start, plus psi damage AND nasty control, and then you have the Rogue vanguard, who eat melee for breakfast. They have plenty of tricks, but as long as self-sufficiency is so cosmically different between the ATs, just more tricks won't work, unless they're tricks that harm Scrappers but avoid Blasters, say. As a general rule of thumb, anything that can threaten your typical Scrapper has already eaten your typical Blaster for breakfast, e.i. the I3 boss buff redux.

Here's how Malta go, for instance. Your typical Blaster faces terrible, dangerous status effects that can easily keep him permaheld, a lot of outgoing damage, and even endurance drain, all coming from a variety of targets. Your typical Scrapper, on the other hand, can simply and passively resist status effects because he has status effect resistance, absorb most if not all the incoming damage thanks to an entire powerset devoted to self-defence, and using his serious offence, take out the ONE AND ONLY ONE Sapper before any meaningful draining can occur. The only time a Scrapper really gets in the thick of it is from over-aggro or careless play. Giving Malta even more toys could potentially inconvenience Scrappers enough to make them unwilling, but by that point you'll have written out everyone else but Tanks. The point to having more tricks is to bring diversity such that some are better against some things than others. With the possible exception of Tsoo Sorcerers (annoyance factor up to 11), harder enemies just means harder for everybody, and not everybody expressly needs to face harder enemies.

Game design to account of and encourage teaming is fine, but yet again, this doesn't have to be done at the cost of discouraging solo play. And while it's entirely true that any encouragement for one thing can be seen as a discouragement for another, there is still a world of difference between lack of encouragement and actual denial of access. Difficulty can scale with team size, enemy numbers can scale with team size, rewards can scale with team size, and even content can be locked behind a mandatory minimum team. All of those are methods for encouraging teaming by encouraging teaming and NOT by discouraging solo play, and all present within City of Heroes right now. Granted, a lot of those were added after the fact, whereas AT composition has been pretty much force-locked since Launch, and for clearly obvious reasons, but it is a point worth considering nonetheless - solo play and group play are not mutually-exclusive in a game, and encouraging one doesn't have to come at the cost of penalising the other. Options exist, as the many people quoting other game systems that do exactly that have already attested.

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.

I assure you that I am no weasel, and that I'm never one to use seemingly-polite language to deliver some auxiliary put-down. You question my motive, which is curious and, for all intents and purposes, unfounded. I generally avoid petty bickering on forums in favor of more productive things, but in this situation, something of the sort seems strangely appropriate. I won't hesitate to draw the attention of those whose names are red, if you catch my drift, so let's get this train wreck rolling...


Opinion is rarely the issue, as subjectivity is not something that can be quantified. Rather, my concern is your general attitude: one that traps itself behind a wall of its own self-righteousness and one that victimizes itself in light of criticism.

Perhaps I just never paid that much attention, but lately, you seem to be someone who expresses disappointment when the world you find yourself in lacks congruity with the idyllic one inside your head. You write up ellaborate and somewhat poetic posts about the way the world ought to work, then react with shock and bewilderment should someone make an observation to the contrary. If this puts you in a position where you are forced to defend your views, then you have only yourself to blame for that.

"Why must a Defender specialize in a non-combat role and be unable to solo at an acceptable rate?" you ask... "Defenders can solo just fine," someone replies, then you reiterate your initial point as though the person who replied simply didn't know what he was talking about. And here we are on page 7 with your most recent post doing the exact same thing:

At face value, this looks like a point, but when questioned about it referring to City of Heroes, you suggest that this is either a nebulous concept of game design or that your personal perception of "solo play" dictates--and indeed, even attempts to quantify--why or why not the question is even applicable. I suppose in City of Samuel, where the baseline measurement of acceptable solo play is that of the Brute, the Defender underperforms and is therefore not suitable for a player class.

Is it appropriate to belittle the perceptions of others based on your own preferences or observations? Are Defenders truly bad for soloing? Are the Rogue Isles truly void of life and color? Does Guy Perfect truly find joy in antagonizing people?

You may find that adjusting the way you regard your observations will yield a much better harvest of constructive responses than what you're doing now.


That's what I do for those whom I expect to make an attempt to understand my argument and are open to the idea that their own considerations may have room for improvement. For the rest, I generally state something profound and wait for them to figure out what it means.