What would you change for CoH2?
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2011-04-30 17:51 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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The devs have explicitly stated that datamining proved blasters solo slower, and likely have always soloed slower, than all other archetypes. Prior to the Defiance 2.0 changes Castle stated in no uncertain terms that datamining showed that *all* blaster powerset combinations soloed slower than the overall average by a significant margin, and this was true at all level ranges and whether solo, small teamed, or large teamed. It was also the only archetype that could make that assertion.|
Originally Posted by Mirai
??
No, I don't get that. There must be some build I'm overlooking. My blasters have always soloed significantly faster than my controllers, and I've been soloing the vast majority of the time in this game for seven years. My Ill/Rad Controller is better at fighting elite bosses and certain other tricky situations, but is still generally slower. |
What you and probably most people are overlooking is that the average City of Heroes player is self-selected to be a person that finds the game somewhat challenging, but not extremely so. Most people who think the game is too trivially easy have likely moved on, as well as the people who think the game is too difficult. The average player probably finds the game to have moderate difficulty.
For players who find the game very easy, blasters are not hard to play. If they are not hard to play, their good damage output makes them good soloers, to a point. However, for a player that finds the game somewhat challenging, blasters are not necessarily easy to play. They do not have very good passive damage mitigation and their offensive mitigation largely vanishes if they are mezzed. Essentially, and the devs datamined this as well, blasters die often: more often than other archetypes. Forumites tend to be better than average players, and don't often see this layer of difficulty. But the average player does, and it acts as a constant penalty on their performance. That's how blasters can level slower than everyone else even when teamed: that shouldn't be possible since all players (of equal level) on the same team earn XP at the same rate. It would be possible, however, if the blasters tended to carry more debt.
For many of us, the difference between soloing a blaster and soloing a scrapper is that the blaster has range. But for most of this game's playerbase, the difference is that blasters die and scrappers are immortal at standard difficulty. Ditto controllers: there isn't a controller build seriously threatened by anything in standard difficulty content besides certain tough bosses: the amount of mez a controller can bring to bear on standard difficulty spawns is overwhelming, and a sizeable fraction of them have self mitigation buffs or self heals or both.
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Hmm. I thought that datamining was showing blasters got killed more often, not that the were slower. But you would know. And of course getting killed a lot will slow you down a lot.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The devs have explicitly stated that datamining proved blasters solo slower, and likely have always soloed slower, than all other archetypes. Prior to the Defiance 2.0 changes Castle stated in no uncertain terms that datamining showed that *all* blaster powerset combinations soloed slower than the overall average by a significant margin, and this was true at all level ranges and whether solo, small teamed, or large teamed. It was also the only archetype that could make that assertion.
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Hmmph. I'm a casual player, but I admit my play style isn't very conventional, what with the single target damage approach and standard difficulty settings. It's really hard for me to imagine blasters soloing slower than defenders or controllers. My only characters who can go as fast or faster than my blasters are scrappers and brutes.
(Although... my Mind/Energy Dominator has been right up there ever since Domination got changed.)
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Many defender builds have sufficient damage to kill things and enough mitigation to be able to survive long enough to apply that damage. Either through self buffs, self heals, or debuffs (or in some cases, mez), a defender has many tools that are less available to blasters.|
Originally Posted by Mirai
Hmm. I thought that datamining was showing blasters got killed more often, not that the were slower. But you would know. And of course getting killed a lot will slow you down a lot.
Hmmph. I'm a casual player, but I admit my play style isn't very conventional, what with the single target damage approach and standard difficulty settings. It's really hard for me to imagine blasters soloing slower than defenders or controllers. My only characters who can go as fast or faster than my blasters are scrappers and brutes. (Although... my Mind/Energy Dominator has been right up there ever since Domination got changed.) |
The increased damage blasters have is for some cases not enough to balance their decreased mitigation options.
It's possible to work past these limitations through playstyle, advanced build options, and threat selection, but when you look at what the base ATs offer, defenders just don't hit the floor nearly as often, so they can keep going at the same steady pace. It's not like what controllers or scrappers can do, but it is steady.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.
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Funny, I always saw it as the other way around. My defenders needed the build tweaking and threat selection to solo at a reasonable pace. Plus a lower (-1) difficulty setting is helping my defenders now. I suppose play style has a great deal to do with it, as my blasters didn't get killed any more than my other characters on average.|
Originally Posted by Void_Huntress
It's possible to work past these limitations through playstyle, advanced build options, and threat selection, but when you look at what the base ATs offer, defenders just don't hit the floor nearly as often, so they can keep going at the same steady pace. It's not like what controllers or scrappers can do, but it is steady.
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And more hero groups for villains to fight. For CoH 2, I mean. There just aren't enough hero groups for villains to fight in the current game.
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Well the thing with dying more often than anyone else is that it means you also have more debt than anyone else. It never happened to me, but I knew rather a few people who played blasters who played permanently in xp debt back in the day and even with debt reductions over time that sort of playing would drastically reduce a character's leveling speed I would expect.|
Originally Posted by Mirai
Hmm. I thought that datamining was showing blasters got killed more often, not that the were slower. But you would know. And of course getting killed a lot will slow you down a lot.
Hmmph. I'm a casual player, but I admit my play style isn't very conventional, what with the single target damage approach and standard difficulty settings. It's really hard for me to imagine blasters soloing slower than defenders or controllers. My only characters who can go as fast or faster than my blasters are scrappers and brutes. (Although... my Mind/Energy Dominator has been right up there ever since Domination got changed.) |
That was really the biggest problem with the old defiance. It's not so much that it didn't provide a boost, but unless the player was either very skilled or very lucky ( ... or just both) its use actually increased the blaster's likelihood of picking up XP debt.
Admittedly my blasters never really die all that more often than any of my other characters (and actually less than some of my more 'hardy' characters ... but I get overconfident on them sometimes), but then when I play with PUG TFs I see a LOT of poorly played ones too. I was on an ITF the last time it was the WST and there was a blaster on the team who died pretty much every other encounter.
You may think I'm exaggerating that one, but I'm seriously not. Never seen someone die so often before on that TF. Pretty much every time a rez power was recharged he was needing it ... and the team had an emp defender, a rad controller and a pain MM on the thing. The guy would run into spawns and then die before heals even be used half the time.
MA Arcs: Yarmouth 1509 and 58812
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No kidding.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Specific portions of the theoretical design of that editor are decent, but the editor itself is some of the worst, least intuitive things I've seen in a while, and it's stocked with about 90% garbage. Also, because of how many of the things are rigged, it's next to impossible to make anything that isn't butt ugly unless you stick to a small selection of predefined body and face shapes anyway. As a thought experiment, that editor works. As an actual tool to use, it's horrible.
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But I'm mocking the absolute refusal to even think about such a system due to fanboy tunnel vision.
Don't blame the concept when it should be pointed towards developer ineptitude.
I would like to issue a plea on behalf of Paragon's diminutive protectors, please watch where you step. We're four feet tall in a six foot tall world, we've been cast adrift in a sea of butts. -Pillbug
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Personally, I wouldn't dismiss the system without trying an improved version of it.|
Originally Posted by Magpie_Mouse
But I'm mocking the absolute refusal to even think about such a system due to fanboy tunnel vision.
Don't blame the concept when it should be pointed towards developer ineptitude. |
The main problem I have with their system is that whoever set the default proportions must be thoroughly demented! It takes me a lot of tweaking to make the proportions look reasonable... or even somewhat human. Sure, it's easy to create something bizarre looking, but it's hard to make a good looking human character. That makes it hard for me to judge the system. (Well, plus I don't like the graphics style.)
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I feel that CoH has aged fairly well (although mostly it's the animations and power FX that are holding up), but yeah I agree. A new engine would be a must, and ditch the zone loading.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
The one thing that sinks City of Heroes more than any other game is the graphics infrastructure and engine. This game looks worse and runs worse than almost any contemporary game that I can think of, and not just Unreal engine and Source engine games. The in-house Crytpic engine was old even back in 2004 when the game launched, some two years after it was originally intended, and it has fallen progressively behind despite all the graphics tweaks.
If we're looking at a City of Heroes 2, this would need to be remade from scratch in something far more solid, possibly the amazingly stable and smooth Unreal 3 engine, while simultaneously carrying over all costume items and at least the majority of locations, if not at Launch, then soon thereafter. I have a headache, so I'll cut my post short and avoid stepping into controversial territory. |
I would also like to see more work put into designing interesting (and not annoying) mission map environments, -varied- encounters and -varied- rewards. I've always disliked how CoH gives the same XP/Inf reward for each mission, regardless of how long, short, frustrating, easy, entertaining, loathsome the mission is. The same goes for enemy mobs, with a few exceptions. If I was actually rewarded properly for hunting down 10 easy-to-miss glowies in a lengthy Orenbega map, I'd be more likely to go through it instead of abandoning/auto-completing out of sheer disgust.
"There's villainy ... and then there's supervillainy. The difference is performance."
-Doc_Reverend
A lot of things I've wanted to see have been mentioned already, so I'll only suggest this.
One poster touched upon stealing customization from SWG. I would steal the TEF (temporary enemy flag) system and incorporate that into the morality system.
TEF allowed for dynamic pvp, basically when a Jedi flashed his....saber, making him a target for anyone to attack. Something similar, a pvp flag that players can opt into and out of, I think could be incorporated into CoH to expand pvp outside of the dedicated zones.
@Texarkana
@Thexder
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...and a kite.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Everything.
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The Alt Alphabet ~ OPC: Other People's Characters ~ Terrific Screenshots of Cool ~ Superhero Fiction
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The best Blaster combos in my experience (and based on what other people claim to achieve, I must be a decidedly below-average player) -- which are Fire/Fire and Ice/Ice in that order -- are my fastest levelers. Certain Brutes would be second and certain Scrappers would be neck-and-neck. My Dual Blades/Willpower Scrapper is easily the most fun character I've ever played, and he levels as quickly as my Electric/Electric Brute did. Maybe more. They both feel near-immortal below the upper 40s, like chipper-shredders through a hedgerow. When my Brute got in the 47-50 range, he slowed down.|
Originally Posted by Mirai
Hmm. I thought that datamining was showing blasters got killed more often, not that the were slower. But you would know. And of course getting killed a lot will slow you down a lot.
Hmmph. I'm a casual player, but I admit my play style isn't very conventional, what with the single target damage approach and standard difficulty settings. It's really hard for me to imagine blasters soloing slower than defenders or controllers. My only characters who can go as fast or faster than my blasters are scrappers and brutes. (Although... my Mind/Energy Dominator has been right up there ever since Domination got changed.) |
Controllers are truly wretched soloers below 32, but once they start getting pets and slotting up their abilities, their power seems to increase tremendously. Generally speaking, the last 5 levels take a lot longer to finish than the first 25, which may account for the discrepancy there. Speeding up the last 5 levels significantly would really throw the comparison out of whack. A Defender, though? I dunno. Maybe there are some powerset combos that are amazing, but so far none of mine have been in any way as impressive as a Blaster. Maybe compared against the worst Blaster powers... hard to say. I don't really pay attention to speed much. I know my Fire/Fire Blaster roared to 50 like a skyrocket.
The Alt Alphabet ~ OPC: Other People's Characters ~ Terrific Screenshots of Cool ~ Superhero Fiction
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I didn't ding the CO character creator out of "fanboy tunnel vision" -- I dinged it because it sucks. It is a truly terrible design that is clunky and unintuitive. That has nothing to do with the genuinely crappy look of the characters themselves; I'm merely talking about how one navigates through it. It's just awful on a number of levels.|
Originally Posted by Magpie_Mouse
No kidding.
But I'm mocking the absolute refusal to even think about such a system due to fanboy tunnel vision. Don't blame the concept when it should be pointed towards developer ineptitude. |
I think the CoH editor can be greatly improved, but others touched on that already.
The Alt Alphabet ~ OPC: Other People's Characters ~ Terrific Screenshots of Cool ~ Superhero Fiction
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I like the idea of varied rewards, although the designers would have to pay attention to mission arcs to make sure people don't just drop the same one each time because it gives a larger finishing reward. I haven't expanded any brainpower on how that might work.
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Originally Posted by _Toxa_
I would also like to see more work put into designing interesting (and not annoying) mission map environments, -varied- encounters and -varied- rewards. I've always disliked how CoH gives the same XP/Inf reward for each mission, regardless of how long, short, frustrating, easy, entertaining, loathsome the mission is. The same goes for enemy mobs, with a few exceptions. If I was actually rewarded properly for hunting down 10 easy-to-miss glowies in a lengthy Orenbega map, I'd be more likely to go through it instead of abandoning/auto-completing out of sheer disgust.
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The Alt Alphabet ~ OPC: Other People's Characters ~ Terrific Screenshots of Cool ~ Superhero Fiction
A small flare of goodness I'd be sure to include:
The ability to occasionally crash through a skylight (either while wrestling with a foe or simply to crash in on and terrify your enemies below)!
I ditto much of what's been said already.
New engine is a must. Animated hair. Seperate fingers, real looking bare feet. A way to seperate costume parts for each major part of the body, and from left and right sides. So, one could customize a neck option, left shoulder from right shoulder, two different gloves, etc...
I would break the body type into male and female then have a scale that could take either into the Huge model proportions, as well give both a muscle tone slider. Customizable tatoos and scars. Customizable skin types, for example normal skin, metallic skin, earth skin, reptile, and so one. These skins would be the base skin for the rest of the character to which other costume parts could be chosen.
No more experience points as a levelling metric. Instead, points (whether you want to call it experience or improvement points) are earned based upon completed objectives. These are then spent however the player chooses. Like Arcana outlined earlier, powers could be broadened, or deepened. However, I would also make sure their is a weighted system were as one increases their defensive capabilities such as hit points, resistance, etc... their damage would be more difficult to increase. Raise damage higher, it becomes more difficult to increase other abilities.
Character levels vs. npc enemy levels would be determined via a new character trait called Reputation. A new hero would have no reputation, as they took out small local gang thugs their low rep would earn them improvement points. But as they gained improvement points, their repuation would increase and more would be expected of the hero to the point where eventually, taking out the same gang wouldn't garner much for the hero, but taking on the Crey Corporation would.
Remove most of the contacts in the game. Missions should be gained like tips but set for each faction. Stop a Skull from breaking into a car and you get him to blab about a group of Skulls about to rob a jewerly store. Stop them and find a clue that they managed to get some superdyne from someone else. Follow that lead and the story continues.
Another thing I would change is Inf. I would change it to a new system called Resource. Resource is earned by spending improvement points. The more Resource you have the better base you can have, weapons you can make, etc... Of course these things tend to use up your Resource statistic as well.
I would remove all in game references to the origins of a character's powers, as well as archetypes.
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I want to see where he said that please. I do believe he said that Blasters died more often and part of that was due to the way that origina Defiance encouraged Blasters to take damage to get a damage buff, IE promoting a reckless and dangerous play style.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The devs have explicitly stated that datamining proved blasters solo slower, and likely have always soloed slower, than all other archetypes. Prior to the Defiance 2.0 changes Castle stated in no uncertain terms that datamining showed that *all* blaster powerset combinations soloed slower than the overall average by a significant margin, and this was true at all level ranges and whether solo, small teamed, or large teamed. It was also the only archetype that could make that assertion.
What you and probably most people are overlooking is that the average City of Heroes player is self-selected to be a person that finds the game somewhat challenging, but not extremely so. Most people who think the game is too trivially easy have likely moved on, as well as the people who think the game is too difficult. The average player probably finds the game to have moderate difficulty. For players who find the game very easy, blasters are not hard to play. If they are not hard to play, their good damage output makes them good soloers, to a point. However, for a player that finds the game somewhat challenging, blasters are not necessarily easy to play. They do not have very good passive damage mitigation and their offensive mitigation largely vanishes if they are mezzed. Essentially, and the devs datamined this as well, blasters die often: more often than other archetypes. Forumites tend to be better than average players, and don't often see this layer of difficulty. But the average player does, and it acts as a constant penalty on their performance. That's how blasters can level slower than everyone else even when teamed: that shouldn't be possible since all players (of equal level) on the same team earn XP at the same rate. It would be possible, however, if the blasters tended to carry more debt. For many of us, the difference between soloing a blaster and soloing a scrapper is that the blaster has range. But for most of this game's playerbase, the difference is that blasters die and scrappers are immortal at standard difficulty. Ditto controllers: there isn't a controller build seriously threatened by anything in standard difficulty content besides certain tough bosses: the amount of mez a controller can bring to bear on standard difficulty spawns is overwhelming, and a sizeable fraction of them have self mitigation buffs or self heals or both. |
Defenders do have more mitigation, but they damage so much slower than blasters, and a good blaster can pace it so they can blow through mobs quickly without constantly getting in over their head, where as defenders just don't blow through things nearly as fast.
Also Blasters aren't the only damage AT and I really have a hard time believing support ATs ,designed to function best in team environments by helping their teams, out level Brutes or scrappers solo. I've played all the ATs thoroughly and the support classes have taken me the longest in solo situations. And yes, I do know how to play them.
"Where does he get those wonderful toys?" - The Joker
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"The concept" of that editor, interpreted very broadly, is indeed a good idea, in that it gives you a broader selection of costume categories with a more intricate system of item mutual exclusion, as well as a wider array of sliders having a greater effect on the character. But that's a very vague description of that editor.|
Originally Posted by Magpie_Mouse
I'm mocking the absolute refusal to even think about such a system due to fanboy tunnel vision. Don't blame the concept when it should be pointed towards developer ineptitude.
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What sinks that editor is intrinsically connected to what makes it work. The wide selection of texture materials and shader surfaces brings with it the flaw of lacking texture detail. This ends giving characters an embossed look which makes them look like clay figurines, rather than the more realistic look that high-resolution static textures provide. It also limits the the correlation between its own options, as few shaders work with many textures and many colour patterns. And even then, the editor is reduced to pattern over shader over mesh.
The slider customizability of body and face brings with it its own limitations. For customizable faces to really work, you need to rig a face much more precisely, which in turn means you can only ever rig a small number of faces. Or ONE face, as the case may be. And while sufficient options could indeed turn that face into a variety of others, this is very difficult to achieve, requires unjustifiable levels of artistic skill from the player and often ends up producing people who fell off the top of the ugly tree and hit their face on every branch on the way down, anyway. City of Heroes, by contrast, gives a much wider selection of prefabricated faces, sometimes such that a reasonable complexity editor really can't produce.
And even just in terms of body structures, City of Heroes may have you convinced that it's hard to make a human being that isn't at least reasonable, but that's because the editor here restricts us greatly. Once you are given full control of body shapes and NOT guideline as to what makes a good body shape or, indeed, what any of the sliders do, you end up with ugly things more often than not. As Mirai says, it's very easy to make a bizarrely ugly character, not so much to make a good-looking one. This isn't helped when slider values are redundant and poorly-rigged.
Of course, there are still things to take away. Using variable-strength shaders for skin is a very good way to puck your own level of muscle definition, and giving us the ability to customize eyes specifically and separately from each other has the capability to give a unique look to recycled faces. David has talked about adding a muscular female texture to the game - for which I'm very grateful - but even if/when that happens, it'll still be just a texture swap for skin without the ability for me to make it even MORE ripped if I found it lacking and for another person to make it less ripped but still muscular if he were afraid of brawny women.
As I said - the theory of it is interesting, and NC Soft's own Aion proves what can be done with a solid face editor even if it only has one face. But it does the argument more harm than good to mention Champions Online when speaking about their editor. It's much more productive to distil it down to its usable parts and argue for those without invoking the stigma of butt-ugly character design, hideously unintuitive implementation, poor artwork and baffling selection.
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Originally Posted by _Toxa_
I feel that CoH has aged fairly well (although mostly it's the animations and power FX that are holding up), but yeah I agree. A new engine would be a must, and ditch the zone loading.
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However, what sinks City of Heroes' graphics is that you need frankly unjustifiable levels of hardware power to run what is ostensibly an old, ugly game. I can play Oni these days and never really bat an eye at the segmented character models because I know it's an old game, and because I can crank it to whatever ridiculous resolution I want, slap it with anti-alising, anisotropic filtering and so on from the nVidia Control Panel and it will still run at a framerathe that's twice my monitor refresh. Not so for City of Heroes.
Because of bad hardware support that still fails to use more than two cores and slap-dash environment design that leaves areas of unreasonable framerate, you end up with a bad-looking game that nevertheless runs SLOWER than games of vastly superior visual quality. I know for a fact that the Unreal 3 engine at max settings runs faster than City of Heroes at even moderate settings, and Unreal engine games unquestionably look better. This is what's so irritating - I'm paying a high cost of performance for not a whole lot of return.
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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.
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I don't think the posts exist anymore, however, I can tell you that I discussed the matter with Castle at the time thoroughly to the best extent he was able to reveal information about what they datamined. He specifically told me that blasters were performing in the manner I describe above and gave me permission to repeat that level of information on the forums, which I did at the time. So even if posts still existed, the person I would be quoting would be me. I do still have the PMs, though, and this is not something I'm likely to misremember, since I've been saying the above consistently and repeatedly since the time Defiance was changed.|
Originally Posted by Ice_Wall
I want to see where he said that please. I do believe he said that Blasters died more often and part of that was due to the way that origina Defiance encouraged Blasters to take damage to get a damage buff, IE promoting a reckless and dangerous play style.
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What he did say publicly separate from that was that one specific datamined source of blaster deaths was mez: its specifically why Defiance 2.0 allows blasters to shoot while mezzed.
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| Defenders do have more mitigation, but they damage so much slower than blasters, and a good blaster can pace it so they can blow through mobs quickly without constantly getting in over their head, where as defenders just don't blow through things nearly as fast. |
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| Also Blasters aren't the only damage AT and I really have a hard time believing support ATs ,designed to function best in team environments by helping their teams, out level Brutes or scrappers solo. I've played all the ATs thoroughly and the support classes have taken me the longest in solo situations. And yes, I do know how to play them. |
The point, though, was that it wasn't "damage classes" that had a huge advantage over the other classes. The "damage classes" include some of the fastest levelers, and the slowest.
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And you folks are still hyper-focusing on CO's implementation of it and screaming DO NOT WANT.
| Ironik and Sam_Tow say words. |
I would like to issue a plea on behalf of Paragon's diminutive protectors, please watch where you step. We're four feet tall in a six foot tall world, we've been cast adrift in a sea of butts. -Pillbug
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Exactly.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
However, what sinks City of Heroes' graphics is that you need frankly unjustifiable levels of hardware power to run what is ostensibly an old, ugly game. I can play Oni these days and never really bat an eye at the segmented character models because I know it's an old game, and because I can crank it to whatever ridiculous resolution I want, slap it with anti-alising, anisotropic filtering and so on from the nVidia Control Panel and it will still run at a framerathe that's twice my monitor refresh. Not so for City of Heroes.
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I knew with absolute certainty the moment Ultra mode was announced I was about to start seeing performance issues even though my current system greatly outstrips the minimum for CoH. And sure enough, as soon as Ultra Mode hit I had to tweak a few options down because all of a sudden my system couldn't handle them even with the optional Ultra Mode turned completely off. The same exact thing happened with CoV launch and the small graphical update it gave us too.
I can run a new game released in March at 50 fps. CoH? 30 if I'm lucky. Fortunately, I have a new system coming tomorrow (yay!) and it will most likely make Ultra Mode look amazing. But to Sam's point, it shouldn't take a beefy system to run CoH.
I would focus on core mechanics. Graphics are usually correctable over the long run (even though few MMOs have been willing to be spend the millions to redo them). Data issues are much more difficult to correct.
Main things I'd consider:
- Change the Defense and Resistance formulas so they are no longer multiplicative.
- Allow the possibility of "partial misses" to take the edge off of full hit/full miss mechanics.
- Scale back the power of "alpha breaking" AoE control powers.
- Change Confusion powers to give enemy chance to attack players or allies (not just swap sides).
- Eliminate toggle dropping from mezzes. (IMO the mechanic is much too brutal, and forces the developers hands in just making most melee characters completely immune to the effects to compensate.)
- Combine the Defender and Corruptor ATs.
- Eliminate the Hasten power. Reduce the effect of Recharge reduction enhancers. In turn, reduce the base recharge of most powers to a more reasonable level.
- Remove aggro cap. Replace with following rule: every enemy after the 16th reduces your defense and resistance by 1%.
- Change AI for enemies inside instances to always chase players they see rather than allowing them to run by.
- Super Speed grants invisibility only while moving.
- Reorganize all Controller sets so that the pet comes no later than level 12. Level 32 power becomes a flavor power (Bonfire, etc). Wherever possible, no set would need to power level up to a "crutch" power located late in the set's lifespan.
- Stalkers gain single target debuff powers (no reason this can't work in game as is).
- Tankers gain an inherent ability that reduces the max number of targets a power can hit by 5. Two Tankers in a normal cone or three in a standard AoE essentially neutralize it. This provides an incentive to bring more Tankers and also allows developers to ratchet up AoE damage while providing an out.
Things I would keep:
- No "power trees." Maybe it's just personal taste, but I despise having to pick up "prerequisite" powers to unlock stuff further down the tree. The pool powers are tolerable, but a whole game based around trees isn't attractive to me.
- Super sidekicking. In fact, every MMO should have this.
- Continue to focus gameplay around fighting huge, Gauntlet-like groups rather than difficult individual mobs.
Updating my list after seeing others' comments:
*Better hands/feet/fingers/toes
*More costume pieces that are not part of a set
*Customisable stances and voices (no more deep male "hup!" when my teen female jumps)
*Breast slider that goes to 0% (for the teen female above)
*Remove the war Walls
*Buildable powers: Choose "Blast" then buy the effects (freeze, extra damage, DoT, whatever) and choose the appearance of the power itself and how it activates (fires from hands, eyes, whatever)
*Built-in Morality: Decisions made in regular missions affect morality instead of specific, designated morality missions.
*Arch Enemy system
*Personal bases/ living space
*Greater variety of ethnic faces
*Control powers that can lock down a foe and defeat them (as opposed to defeating them only through Hit Point reduction)
*Ragdoll effects to be applied to PCs and the ability to smash opponents through walls, crates, etc
*Ability to use powers for miscellaneous effects (fly up and get a cat out of a tree, lift a car off of a pedestrian that has been run over, catch someone who-- in an attemt to escape some CoT-- leaps from a rooftop...)
Est sularis oth Mithas
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Actually, there was a better way to deal with this. Toggle dropping actually would have been not just a nuisance, but a good thing if toggles were just balanced correctly (speaking about personal protection toggles).|
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
Eliminate toggle dropping from mezzes. (IMO the mechanic is much too brutal, and forces the developers hands in just making most melee characters completely immune to the effects to compensate.)
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Toggles are balanced based on the principle that if it burns endurance, it should be stronger than passives which don't. But although that sounds like a reasonable rule, its actually a completely meaningless one in terms of individual primary and secondary powersets. When you choose a powerset, you have the option to take any or all of the powers in that set (eventually). All other powers in the other competing sets become impossible to take. So, for example, there is no specific reason why temporary invulnerability's strength from Invulnerability has to have any specific relationship to Agile from Super Reflexes. You never have the option to pick from those two.
You *do* have the option to pick RPD or TI. So of course TI, which burns endurance, has to be stronger, right? Because... because what, exactly?
1. Because if RPD was stronger and burned less endurance, players would take it instead of TI.
If they only wanted part of the s/l strength of the set, yes. If they want the full strength, they would need to take both either way. They would certainly take RPD first. Which is exactly what you want lower level players to do: take options that don't burn endurance, when they have less endurance management ability anyway.
2. Because if RPD was stronger and burned less endurance, TI would be nonsensical: you'd be paying for less benefit than RPD.
That's true if you look at the powers in isolation. But we've established that if RPD was stronger than TI, no one would take TI first. There would be only two possibilities: the player takes RPD, or the player takes RPD and TI. In the first case you get performance A for cost zero. In the second case you get performance B for some non-zero cost. If you want the baseline, its free. If you want more, its going to cost you. That actually makes perfect sense.
Its actually the reverse that's nonsensical. Take TI first, and you pay endurance for performance X. Then you add RPD and you get higher performance for no additional endurance cost. In terms of making endurance make sense, it actually makes less sense the way the game does it now. The baseline costs endurance. The higher performance level costs no more endurance. That's actually backwards when seen holistically rather than discretely.
Lets simplify. Suppose I want to give a powerset 60% resistance. I could make a 40% toggle and a 20% passive, which basically mimics what the game does now. Or I could make a 50% passive and a 10% toggle. Why would the latter be better than the former?
1. Lower level characters take the passive and don't have to pay the endurance of the toggle. Higher level characters take both when they can afford to pay for the toggle.
2. Detoggling reduces you from 60% resistance to 50% resistance, which makes detoggling hurt, but not kill. Doing it the "normal" way, detoggling reduces you from 60% resistance to 20% resistance - stripping nearly all your protection away. That's what makes detoggling so dangerous, and then by extension something the devs had to prevent, making detoggling itself practically worthless as a combat event.
3. The conceptual choice to go all passive is valid. You can get most of the benefit of the set without any toggles, eliminating the endurance drain and the toggle management. But players willing to manage toggles and perform endurance management will still get the advantage of having better performance.
4. Combat rez works better. You don't get insta-killed while trying to bring up your toggles.
What's the downside?
1. Nothing. Seriously: I haven't been able to think of one in six years. Except, of course, retrofitting the current game around this principle is an overhaul the devs would never undertake, because it rewrites the rulebook of how powers work in a potentially very disruptive way for the existing players.
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Since we've given specific reasons why it's bad and you just keep saying, "Nuh-uh, you guys are doodyheads," I'm going to consider this a win on the anti-CO-character-editor side. Thanks for playing.
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Originally Posted by Magpie_Mouse
And you folks are still hyper-focusing on CO's implementation of it and screaming DO NOT WANT.
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No, I don't get that. There must be some build I'm overlooking. My blasters have always soloed significantly faster than my controllers, and I've been soloing the vast majority of the time in this game for seven years. My Ill/Rad Controller is better at fighting elite bosses and certain other tricky situations, but is still generally slower.
But personally I don't think all classes should be expected to solo at the same rate. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind a classless system.
A big thing I'd change for CoH 2 is how the elite bosses are handled. I'd make sure they were generally used in a climactic fashion, rather than sprinkling them in often for no good reason. I'd also make sure they don't present roadblocks for solo players. (For example, make an NPC helper available when facing a particularly tough EB.)