Will you be swapping to Titanic Weapons and why?

i got ya, its just that for me i tend to write my character's personalities into their swords. heck, i am specifically holding back costumes for lady b until she unlocks the rularu sword and rommy's blade, to me the swords are important, as is their background. yeah anyone can use a specific sword, but its a superhero game, so i'm going to try and make the weapon match the character. a scimitar user is going to be middle eastern, a gladius will be linked to a roman character, et cetera. thats why im so excited for the titan weapons, its a different set of weapons for me to theme the character with.

I'm with you, rian. It's rare for me not to justify practically every part of a character down to their backstory, powers, affiliations and personality. I kind of held back on my beast tamer carnie MM because there just wasn't a good enough costume that screamed 'carnie'. I need a loincloth to give her a beastmaster feel tho...but the steampunk belt/sash thingy kinda works. And everything, right down to the Ghostslaying Axe she uses, is part of her character.

Granted, I do have some characters that are less tied to their weapon (like the DB/Fire brute) but it's more likely that I just imagine the character with wider capabilities than the system will allow a character. If I could make 1 character with a Stone Melee/Shield Defense on build one, Fire Melee/SD/Levi on build two and Titan Weapons/'Bone Armor'/Soul on build three, that would basically be the capability of 1 character...but I can suffice with just making 3 versions...Wish you could keep the name, though...

...hmm, could that be a suggestion? Link multiple characters/badges/builds to one character name? You'd still have to start over at lvl 1 with the different build, but you'd basically be under the same name on the same server...that'd be nice.

Pretty much the same. I might try a -new- character with the set but I have no characters I'd expect to re-roll using it.

Frankly I've always thought the idea of anime-styled "titanic" weapons to be a bit silly logistics-wise. Sure characters can be super strong but the idea of trying to swing around swords the size of swimming pool diving boards just strikes me as a bit of a stretch, especially within the limited confines of most any place indoors. But I have faith in how this game might handle them and thus willing to keep an open mind about it.

I can see where you're coming from, and I can see now one of my biasses I wasn't aware I had: I design my characters as off-world, standalone stories first and then attempt to find them the best possible fit within City of Heroes. As such, no character is ever perfect or spot on, because I haven't designed them with the game in mind, and anything in the actual game is always the closest I could get. Any character I have, I can improve with new costume design possibilities, further power customization and more powerset proliferation, provided I get something that's a better fit, hence why I've never had any qualms about remaking characters - they're never "perfect" or "complete"

However - just to nip an off-topic tangent in the bud - that doesn't mean I'm willing to make a WRONG character and hope I can "fix" him in time. Yes, my characters are never perfect, but they still have to be pretty damn close and pretty damn awesome in order for them to even be made.

I've suggested this before: Allow a person to reuse his own names multiple times. There can never be any confusion from duplicate names, since any one player can only ever have one character logged in at a time, so even if a player had 32 characters with the same name on the server, there can only ever be one of them online at a time. Hence, no confusion. I'm guessing it's a database thing, though.

That's something we haven't touched on in a while - "super strength" isn't just a super power in itself, it's also the driving force behind numerous other super powers, as well. Huge giant weapons are an easy example of super strength used in better ways than just punching, and even certain types of super-powered martial arts count in there, as well. As a point of fact, I originally used Broadsword specifically so I could mimic super strength on a character with a weapon. Sure, most Broadswords aren't exactly large, but a few are, and the attack animations are well heavy and brutish enough

I sincerely hope Titanic Weapons has a feel of super strength to it. I recall BABs complaining that large weapons didn't look right without animations to show that they are heavy, so I hope his legacy lives on in Titanic Weapons and the set won't be just Cloud Strife swinging around a big sword like it's made of cotton candy, but rather more the kind of "BOOM! HEADHSOT!" design us brutish players have been asking for

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 who of the what now? Who said Titanic Weapons was unbeatable? How can a melee powerset collide with an archetype? What am I missing?

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 don't know why I keep forgetting that's an option, but it's a clever idea. I've never made any "mirrors" of my own so far, but we'll see... I just might now.

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.

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.

Years ago, in a tabletop superhero roleplaying game, our characters were actually swatted WITH RMS TITANIC, which had been lifted from the sea floor by some sort of stupendous water elemental, iirc.

One of us made a "luck" roll, so one of the smokestacks lined up with the team and instead of all dying, we found ourselves scooped into the bowels of the ship.

I would totally make a character who could wield the Titanic as a weapon.

Depends I only have 1 concept that might get switched to TW/SR but I doubt it, I could just as easily reroll that concept to Kat/WP instead

lmao

lmfao

hehe

lol

I needed a good laugh

I need to add something of worth or else this may just be spam, but I'd love it if any of the slower attacks were of the 1 arm variety

Pardon me for hijacking your laugh, but you make a very good point (that others have made before, credit where credit is due), in asking the question of whether Titanic Weapons will have one-handed - presumably RIGHT-handed - animations. For the time being, I want to avoid discussing an entirely one-handed set which would work with shields. Suffice it to say I wouldn't be opposed to this FOR SHIELDS ONLY, as I would pretty much REQUIRE that Titanic Weapons have at least a fair few two-handed attacks.

The question inherent here is "are they justified?" Are one-handed attacks appropriate to a so-called Titanic Weapons set, or would they be unable to convey the full force, weight and impact of the set. This, then, then begs the question of what - speaking of the animations for wielding it - makes a weapon feel big, heavy and powerful? It's not just the weapon model, we can conclude that quite easily, if for no reason other than we're getting a whole new set, rather than new weapons for the old ones. Animation and visual effects clearly play a major role, but what? Well, I think I have at least the foundation of an idea to describe this.

What makes a weapon feel powerful is its sense of inertia and its sense of impact. Impact should be easy to figure out - force explosions on weapon contact, screen shake, loud noise. Not so much for inertia, however. This comes down to how each swing is animated. A weak swing with a light weapon is both fast and precise, meaning it starts close to the target, strikes and ends either on target or shortly thereafter. That's because a weapon user isn't fighting so much momentum to stop his own weapon, and is much more easily capable to halt it and become combat-ready once more without wasting time on weapon breaking distance.

A powerful swing, by contrast, starts far and wide, so that the heavy weapon has time to build up enough speed for a for a forceful impact, and once the weapon strikes, it either goes right through the target and keeps on going or otherwise bowls the target out of the way and keeps on going anyway. Stopping a heavy weapon mid-swing is difficult and takes time. After a certain critical mass and velocity, stopping it actually becomes a liability, and the user is much better served in maintaining weapon momentum while controlling swing direction and circling the weapon around to deliver another blow without needing to speed up and slow down constantly. Hence, the concept of momentum in Titanic Weapons.

But can this be done with one hand? In short, yes, but it depends on how how exaggerated you want that particular attack to be. Drawing on Darksiders' War, he mixes in a fair few one-handed strikes in with his heavier, slower, more powerful two-handed strikes. One-handed attacks are usually his openers - weak and light (within context), but still describing very wide-swinging arcs. Two-handed attacks tend to be his finishers, either a grand slam down on top of enemies or a spinning horizontal sliash, or a sort of top-down diagonal slash across multiple enemies. In fact, one of his stronger combos involves three consecutive hits, each of which includes a turn-around spinning step.

I suspect some imagine that Titanic Weapons could never look right unless you were to spin around with the giant weapon like a very furious dancing couple, and that this would look ugly, but there is leeway in making the set look strong AND varied, to say nothing of cool. The key, I think, is wide-swinging arcs, area effect attacks and animation blending which makes one animation look as though it's feeding into another. Even if the animations themselves are slow, this kind of flow is crucial. You very much CAN maintain a heavy, swinging weapon in perpetual motion without ever turning around, as any Conan fan will tell you. If there's one thing Arnie was good at in that movie (besides being big and muscular), it was swinging that sword from left to right, in an almost believable fashion.

To answer the question at the top of the post - can one-handed animations look as powerful as two-handed ones? Yes, they can, given a good animator. Can a set made up of ENTIRELY one-handed animations look powerful yet still be usable with a shield? Frankly, I don't know. One-handed attacks CAN look as powerful as two-handed ones... Up to a certain point. After that point, though, some of the ludicrously destructive powers I can envision I just don't see working one-handed without being goofy.

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Completely on a separate topic, it occurs to me that above and beyond the attack animations, two other factors will play a huge role in how many Titanic Weapons characters I make - how the characters stand combat-ready and how the characters walk/run/jog.

Combat stances have always been... Problematic, as ours are left-foot-forward, making a right-handed two-handed weapon a bit... Iffy to animate for. Furthermore, how would YOU envision your Titanic Weapon user standing in combat? Would he/she resemble one of the following:

1. "Sword too heavy!" Character hunched over, sword resting on the ground beside, character lifting only one end by the hilt.

2. "Sword on ma crotch!" Character holds sword with both hands extended down at arm's length, sword pointing up and forward.

3. "I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK!" Sword resting on shoulder, reverse-side down, one hand on the hilt, the other hand at the side only grabbing the hilt when attacking.

4. "I squat to parry!" Sword held horizontally at above head height as though to block with, both hands on the hilt, body crouching slightly, ready for action.

5. "I am a boring person!" Regular left foot forward combat stance, sword held in one hand, swapping to two-handed grip only when attacking.

More than the above, though, what I've found even more problematic is our running animations with weapons out. On Males, they're not too bad, as the "with weapon" run is pretty much the same as any other run, but Females always run as though they're in high heels, unless they take out a weapon, whereupon they begin running like brutish men. I, personally, actually find this appropriate for most of my weapon users, but I've seen others describe it as stiff and worse. As such, do you envision your character running in one of the following manners:

1. "Draggin' ma sword to keep it sharp!" Character runs with the sword held behind the body, dragging on the ground behind, as though it's too heavy to lift and carry.

2. "The kinda ninja run?" Character uses a Ninja Run style running animation (though lest hunched over) with the sword held back behind like a broadsword, but with both hands at the same time (so no running elbow jab).

3. "The Arnie log carry!" Character uses a common run animation with the sword resting on the shoulder, reverse-side down. Both hands on the grip to keep it from bouncing.

4. "Like I'm using a gun!" Character uses the existing Assault Rifle running animation, with the right hand on the hilt close to the blade and the left hand far up the blade, supporting its weight. These things aren't known for their sharp cutting edges.

5. "Running with scissors!" Character uses current run animation, just with a Titanic Weapon in the right hand. Sword swings wildly all over the place, threatening to disembowel passers-by, as well as unhook the character's arm from the shoulder.

I'd be interested to hear where you guys stand on the above choices.

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.