The type of mission that CoH lacks.

We have tons upon tons of missions where we battle villains. Nemesis, Skulls, Hellions, Praetorians, Malta, Outcasts, Circle of Thorns, etc. etc. etc. But fighting evil is only part of what we all know that heroes do.

Read any comic book, watch any movie, read any superhero book and it always starts out the same. X superhero starts his day by saving a life, or stopping a burning building. Or helping someone who's car's broken down get to day care to pick up their child on time. If you dont know what I mean read "The Death and Life of Superman by Roger Stern can set you hip to what I'm talking about.

Link here....http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Dea...fe+of+superman

Otherwise of the burning building event in Steel Canyon we have nothing like that in game.

We have blasters, and controllers, and scrappers, and tanks. Each of those have unique abilities that can be useful in a different type of mission.

Imagine this. You get a tip that a building is on fire in Steel Canyon. You, a fire blaster respond to the call. You enter the mission and hear someone screaming for help. Your in a timed mission now. One without a clock. You rush thru the building using your fire blaster attacks to knock thru debris to get to the trapped person. Then carry that person to safty (You can make the person a clicky then just carry them out, or even lead them out)

Now the same mission as a gravity controller. Instead of just using that same mission to blow your way through debris, use it to smother the flames and affect a rescue that way. As a tanker you battle your way thru that misison then use your taunt to give them the courage to make it to you and escape.

More can be done then just the sterotypical rescue someone trapped in a burning building mission. Have a mission where you have to navigate your way through the sewers to find gas leaks to stop.

You can make some of the missions with twists towards the end that turn it into a partial combat mission. Or even set up a combat mission and have it end up being mostly a rescue.

All missions in CoH dont have to be the same general length. I wouldnt mind a quick 5 minute mission where I save someones life from time to time. Creativity is the key and I know you guys have some of the best writers on the planet. Just give it a thought.

Good point

There's plenty of comicbook rescue missions where the protagonist puts themself at risk to save someone vulnerable, often at a huge cost to themselves (Bruce Banner is a perfect example) but often babes in arms are saved by heroes when nobody else can do the job.

Trouble is there's nobody under 21 in this game :d

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

We definitely need more 'cat stuck up a tree' type missions.

Gravity/ would be a useful powerset for that. Flight of course. Fire... not so much...

I always thought a Plane crash in the water would be a good mission of this type. Heroes would have to somehow get people off the the wreck before it sinks. My guess is a concern the Devs have is what happens if the event is ignored? Do civilians just sink and die? It may effect the rating of the game. Also what would be the equivalent Villain mission?

But yes, saving people from disasters is almost as common in comics as beating up villains. it's shame it is hard to translate into a game mechanic.

I think the only problem would be animations. Carrying an injured victim, lifting up fallen debris, so on and so forth would need other animations.

That said, I always thought that our 'skills' as characters should be separate from our 'powers'. Our ability to lift heavy objects to help a civilian shouldn't require super strength (although SS would help) or just because we lack empathy powers that instantly bring the dead back to life doesn't mean you don't have first-aide skills or minor healing powers to recover the sprained foot of the injured to escape (but empathy would help too).

IMO, I think it'd be a fun addition to the game if a 'skill set/tree' you develop alongside your powers were added to the game. This skill set would have no direct link to combat and should affect your ability to do other stuff like rescue civilians, aid the injured, stop escalating accidents and maybe even other 'stuff' that would expand the customization of your characters.

Rather than lifting debris to rescue someone, which would need a whole new mechanic to make it work, I think it'd be easier if they flagged the injured people as hostages, only using the dead/unconscious emote instead of the scared one, and then made the "guards" be destructable debris/rubble - "defeating" it would release the injured person.

we get close to this with the one mission in the hero mediporter storyline where your rescue the cops. but yeah, these would be great, the only difficulty i can see is making them fun without making them require certain at's or fail, and making them reward the variety of powersets that we have. but hey, if they can suss it out, then by all means this would make the "hero" part of city of heroes better. I'm guessing there should be villain "plots" too where they do non-combat(or at least not wholley combat oriented) villainy. so signed if they can pull it off.

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

We need more zone events, big and small, that help us feel like heroes. With zone glowies, we could easily randomly see trees glowing with cats stuck up them and a civilian under it calling for help. Walk up to the tree, click it, bam. Civilian holds their cat, thanks you, maybe you even get credit towards a badge. A little thing that not only promotes zone activity, but also helps characters feel heroic. Don't even need to stop there. Could have an extra mechanic to stopping fires involving running into an instance in the burning building where you save civilians like in that new hero arc.

Conversely, villains could maybe get, say, zone events where they have to raid a building Longbow might be using as a base. Run in, fight through Longbow waves, then when you get to key areas you plant a bomb. Plant so many bombs, fight a Warden or something, then leave and watch as the building is set ablaze just like in Steel Canyon with their buildings. Something small for them to do is see a particular civilian on the street. Click on them and you mug them for a small amount of inf. Next animation could show the person fall over, then shout things like "I'm being mugged!"

So many things could be done to improve this game and give zones more use than "that big area you go to the mission through." Zone events in Praetoria was an amazing start, as was yellow targeting boxes and outdoor glowies. Now we just need to implement those ideas to blue and redside. The mechanics are already there, barely any new animations would need to be made, this would allow players something fun to do and boost activity, which would boost the game's reputation while getting more people to actually play in the zones. All in all, it's a win situation for everyone.

I think that the easiest way to add these kinds of missions to the game would be to make them special tip missions. Some of them could lead to mission maps, other would activate zone glowies, other could be the old dreaded "hunt" mission.

The reward for these special tip missions could be to clear out one of your filled up alignment bubbles to allow you to earn another alignment point within the same 20 hour period. Rescue 5 kittens from trees and you can do another 5 alignment missions, getting to your morality mission quicker.

I made a suggestion months or maybe even years ago about more zone events. It included robbing a value transport and clearing up a massive traffic accident pileup, among other things. Back then we didn't have zone glowies but now those events would work even better:

A 12 car pileup on the highways in Skyway. Click on cars to release the trapped citizens. Clockwork trying to steal the scrap metal pose a threat. Leaving a car for too long lets the clockwork build more of their kind, spawning more enemies.

An armored transport in Cap Au Diable surrounded by Rippers - clicking it might be difficult with cops shooting at you so get some friends to clear out the guards or keep them taunted long enough for someone to click the transport.

Rescuing a kitten from a tree might earn you a new tip mission automatically from the thankful citizen. Or it could give you an inspiration. Or the nearby citizens could turn into Nemesis Automatons/Rikti Spies/Warwolves and attack the hero who fell into their trap!

The villainous version of rescuing kittens could be to rob a civilian in a dark alley. Sometimes it would trigger an ambush by a random rogue gallery Hero who drops a tip or inspiration when defeated.

I wouldn't be against non-combat missions, myself, if people stopped insisting to make them timed. There are few things I have such abject hatred for as I do for timed missions, especially "5 minute" timed missions. HATEEEE!!! The mere fact that the Steel Canyon fires can time out and KILL me often causes me to ignore them, when I would naturally attend far more if I didn't have to worry about failing them so spectacularly.

In general, I don't need artificial pressure threatened by a timer.

With all of that said, I would like to see non-combat missions, but not if they required what amounts to a brand new game inside our old game to achieve. Not if they rely on the introduction of completely new skills and abilities that aren't useful in the rest of the game.

To my eyes, "crutch" temporary powers like the Steel Canyon fires extinguisher are the solution to the discrepancy between ATs. Say you have a mission to make your way through a ruined building and save people, busting through collapsed walls to get to them. If you can bunch, explode or burn your way through them, GREAT! If you happen to have no personal offense, sell, have this Jackhammer temporary power to take down walls with. It won't work on enemies, and the collapsed walls are kind of resistant to all other kinds of damage, so even if you have explosives you may want to use the Jackhammer anyway.

Or how about this: A sci-fi power plant is about to go into core meltdown and all staff have been evacuated. You need to make your way inside and activate a series of suppressor mechanism. No special powers required, but you don't have a map and the inside is kind of a maze.

There are options to introduce non-combat missions using our combat powers without making them hugely complicated, which I feel is a wrong design choice in general.

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.

Dynamic Content (tm)branching, non-combat missions where you can earn points toward toward certain skills, like hacker, scientist, investigator, etc by doing certain tasks often enough. You could also get bonuses like faster glowie dowloads in missions, or the need for fewer clues and such. This, as it has been said, could be built on top of the combat mission to take some of the focus away from just getting to 50.

These are all great ideas, but something's missing in all of them: a new form of in-game currency. We just don't have enough of those.