A New Take on Fitness

And that right there, Sam, is all anyone has been stating all along:

Is stamina necessary? Nope. Not for ANY character, EVER.

Does that mean all of us can or will have fun without stamina? HELL no.

I still HATE the 1-22 range. Even with as quickly as it goes by these days. Characters just don't feel right without 3 slotted stamina and/or QR.

Someone above me stated it.. this is not a new issue and players have been wailing for inherent stamina for years. Others will tell you it's completely unnecessary and properly slotted they have a good point as well. At one point, before clarification arrived, many 60 month Vets were foaming at the mouth over the possibility of being able to skip Swift, Health and just take Stamina ... then of course they were informed it ONLY applied to travel powers

I don't really see it as a HUGE issue. It does come at a very bad time. You finally make level 14 and get you permanent travel power and NOW... time to sit through 6 levels (8 actually) before you can add another attack or defense/buff/bebuff/whatever while you pick up Swift or Hurtle at 16. Health at 18 and finally Stamina at 20. Unless, for whatever reason, you decide you need to enhance any of those aside from Stamina itself it does allow you several levels to increase the accuracy, damage, etc of the attacks you already have. At 15, 17, and 19 you will get 2 more enhancement slots that can boosts the potential of the what you already possess. I left out 21 because I personally like to triple slot Stamina for End Mod so at 21 the two slots I get are going there.

Yeah its annoying but at 22 I can start taking powers again and at the same time switch from Dual Origins/some IOs to Single Origin/some IOs. I don't think you'll ever see what you're asking for but anything is possible. Personally I could see it as a future Vet reward just like they did with the Travel Powers. I'm closing in on 54 months myself so soon I'll have 3 of the 4 temp powers available and then at 60 Months I can respec SOME of my characters and add another powers someplace that I had to waste to get the Travel Power itself. I have so many free respec and costumes it's rediculous and I'll never use them all up so it would BE NICE if they gave a 6 year vet, or higher, something a little more special.

I still don't get why Rest has such a long recharge time considering it makes you immobile and extremely squishy while active. Similarly, it would be nice if it could actually slot Healing and Endurance Modification sets instead of just commons.

For the main topic at hand, it varies greatly on whether a toon "needs" Stamina or not. Some are utter endurance hogs that make things nigh unbearable while others can get away with a lot and are completely comfortable.

Rest used to have a MUCH longer recharge time, back in the day. We're talking back when you could get debt at level 5. It took about an hour or so for rest to recharge.

Personally, I feel that there is a problem that needs to be addressed in some sets. In a lot of cases, I feel I can function acceptably on a single end reduction DO in all of my attacks. In just as many, I'm stuck sucking bad wind after each spawn with 1 SO. I find Tanks and brutes in particular are bad, though there are outliers to both ends on the spectrum in every AT. Bringing everything more into line would probably help this perception a lot.

On the other hand, what I think is the bigger problem is Rest. Rest is about as fun as a lap dance from an elephant. Made of acid. And not the kind that would explain why you're getting a lap dance from an elephant, the "OH GOD, WHY IS MY FLESH GONE?" kind. Rest takes you out of the game, and forces you to not play for however long. To me, that is a bad quality for a game to have. And then, if you happen to run out of health or endurance before your timer is back, you can't rest again, which makes an much sense as the lapdancing elephant.

"Oh, god... I'm so tired, but I can't rest again yet. That last bout nearly exhausted me."

Huh?

I would propose first that they kill the timer on rest. Make cooldown 0. Then, I would suggest that they boost out-of-combat regeneration and recovery significantly. The game obviously can tell the difference, since there are a number of day job powers which only boost out-of-combat abilities (Pain Specialist/Caregiver, Clubber). Heck, maybe even play with the idea of dropping Rest altogether and folding it into the out-of-combat regen/recovery, like a number of other MMOs do.

This way, endurance management is still an issue. If you're uncautious with your powers, you'll end up running dry in the middle of a fight. But once you're out of the fight, you'll recover much more quickly, allowing you to continue on the mission without having to pause and do nothing while your stats recover.

Axing the rechargfe on rest would be a great way, imo, to making all low level stuff a bit more bareable. It makes 0% sense how you have to wait to rest again, whatever way you cut it. And its no get out of jail free card, either; if you get snuck up on while Resting, you're taking a trip out-side via mediport, unless you're rather fast on the detoggle. The massive def and res debuffs while using it make it something you need to use carefully as is.

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

There are two problems clashing here that always seem to get lumped together, and both have to do with the literal interpretation of the word "recovery."

On the one hand, you have the old pre-EQ idea of action recovery, where after a hearty fight, a party of adventurers would have to find an inn or set up a camp, rest, patch up, eat, and heal themselves. In a P&P RPG, this is done through roleplaying. In a computer RPG, this is done by simply being too weak to continue and needing help to recover. This could be in the form of limited-use items, help from allies or just waiting around long enough, and several of the early MMOs' abilities, and as far as I know ENTIRE CLASSES revolved around recovering the team's strength AFTER battle. Such classes you could do without if you were fighting right next to a Trauma Inn, but once you ventured out into the wilderness, you NEEDED them if you wanted to get anything done.

This translates poorly into City of Heroes for a couple of reasons. Firstly, City of Heroes doesn't shoot for realism. Not even the quasi-realism of your typical Fantasy setting. In a Fantasy game, you get dead, you can be healed. In City of Heroes, you get dead, you just get petter on your own. Gunshot wounds heal by themselves, kneeling down fixes broken limbs and a person feeling empathy for you can bring you back to life. The old mentality that after-combat recovery should be a large part of game balancing is, in my opinion, out of place. It suggests that balance should take into account all spawns of an entire mission, such that merely winning is not victory enough, but winning with enough strength left to continue fighting is all that counts. This is problematic in a game with such a strong sense of solo play, especially considering that NOT finishing a battle at full health and endurance basically means you sit on your hands. This is NOT good game design.

On the other hand, you have the RUSHRUSHRUSH idea of action recovery, in that there shouldn't be any. As soon as you're done with one spawn, you should instantly be ready for the next, ideally without having to move too much. This reduces the game to a sort of a sequence of arena matches, or something akin to survival mode, and it assumes that one shouldn't never have to worry about his stats outside of being killed directly and overtly. This is a culture bred out of oddities in our game balance. Originally, City of Heroes was (perplexingly) designed to follow the EverQuest model, down to the importance of after-action recovery. That's why Rest had a 10 minute recharge (it was never an hour), and why having a "healer" was so important - you needed someone to top you off between fights. This didn't work out, as Health, Stamina and decent builds circumvented that need, allowing players to just move from spawn to spawn.

I do not believe this mentality is appropriate for City of Heroes, either, because it assumes to ignore certain game balance aspects in ways that aren't healthy for the game. In their search for faster endurance recovery, players end up boosting their recovery IN COMBAT so much that it trivialises endurance management. Endurance, as I see it designed, is intended to be something of an absolute limit of resources, forming a cap on your abilities, forcing you to pick WHICH abilities to use, rather than using them all indiscriminately. Running out of endurance mid-combat is intended to be a sign of YOUR failure, not the game cheating you out of a win. You can't run all the toggles you can take. You can't use all the powers you can get. You can't slot and use everything you can learn. That's the point.

In my eyes, the proper solution to the problem is somewhere in-between the two mentalities. I don't want to see the EQ after-action suck where you basically sit on your hands, but I want to see SOME recovery, if for no reason other than to acknowledge that you just got hurt. As such, I look at trivial recovery - after-action recovery exists, but it is not severely limiting. Rest is probably the perfect tool for this. Resting takes, on average, about 10-15 seconds. That's not long (nowhere near as long as it takes for health to regenerate), but it IS long enough to make a point. It isn't something that basically prevents you from playing, but it prevents you from moving and fighting, so it's the perfect balance. I've already seen people complain about resting, but honestly - if you're complaining about having to wait for TEN SECONDS, you have no sympathy from me.

The problem with Rest is its three-minute timer. As others have pointed out, I feel this is a mistake. It makes no sense logically, and it sucks practically, because all too often you'll be left without enough "bars" to fight on, but also without Rest to rest, so you end up waiting for upwards of 60 seconds, basically wasting your time. If rest had instant recharge, that would solve two problems: First of all, no-one would ever have to tap his foot and wait, even when out of breath and out of health. Second, it will make the outcome of a battle still matter. If you exit at full bars, you go on. If you don't, you rest and THEN go on. I've seen it said that it would cause a different problem by eliminating after-action recovery times as they are seen in older MMOs, but I think that's both incorrect and a good thing. It's a good thing because those recovery times sucked and we have no ATs solely designed to deal with them, and it's incorrect because, as others have pointed out before, waiting to rest up is still waiting, it's just waiting a lot LESS. The spazzes among us will still despise Resting and will do what they can to avoid it, while those who can put up with a bit of recovery time will have an easier time NOT waiting around for bars to fill up.

In short, make Rest instant-recharge.

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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.

See I would be inclined to agree with you IF we did have long multi-AV fights.

Those fights actively discourage buggering off elsewhere and resting, especially Reichsman or the final eight in the Lord Recluse Strike Force which means the squishiness of rest causes you to be deaded in mere second (if you even get the chance for it to toggle on), you're discouraged from using rest yet the fights go on long enough that you'd obviously need to use it, even detoggling certain toggles isn't going to help you in the long run if the fight goes on for 10 minutes.

Unlike WoW EVERY class here runs on 'mana' whereas in WoW only the casting classes run on Mana and they get an ingame 'emergency recover mana' spell they can use midfight or someone in the raid group has 'team mana recovery' spell. Not every powerset has 'emergency end recovery' and not every support powerset has a 'boost team recovery'.

Sorry Sam but I also see you in the minority, those who are willing to slot endredux in attacks and wait every couple of fights using rest are definitely a smaller group to those who will just put up with taking Stamina and being able to rock on through. Player perception is distinctly against you Sam.

Plus having to 'have a break and a kitkat' is distinctly unheroic especially when it's just after a large group of thugs...sure natural based heroes might need a bit of a breather but the superhuman ones would just blow through the thugs without so much as a second thought. Resting after a long battle with an Archvillain, sure, that takes a lot out of heroes but just smacking around a group of thugs shouldn't be enough cause to suck wind.