End of Cottage Rule? Please?

I'm not going to say I prefer it, but this is how I kinda look at it.

Most holds are Mag 3, and can instantly hold minions and lieutenants. One application w/o a fortuitous overpower will not hold a boss.

An intangible power WILL hold bosses, on one application. So it's like a superhold. But we can't have a superhold which is just increased mag over a regular hold, because it would overshadow the regular hold. So there's a tradeoff -- for the certainty (outside of tohit checks) of locking down a boss, you trade the ability to hurt the foe.

I think that's actually pretty reasonable. No, it's not really the most useful thing under most circumstances, including most of team play. I personally find it really handy when my Elec/Sonic encounters two bosses at once. Does that happen often? No, not really. But when it does I'm glad it's available and works as it does.

There are things with hold protection but not intangible protection.

You'd be stealing time away from making new powersets. Assembling a powerset is not just a matter of pulling powers from different places together into a list of nine. Even if you completely eliminate the time it takes to construct the individual powers and animations, you're left with significant design, balance and testing reviews of the sets which would significantly reduce the number of new powersets we'd get over time. Not just player powersets, but also critter powersets which is tantamount to saying we'd get less new critter types as well.

Once you open the floodgates to making optional powers in existing powersets, you'd probably be losing a lot of new powersets and new critters goodbye or at least delaying them by a lot. Its trivially easy to do in the sense that the work is very straight forward. But you'd be kissing lots of other stuff goodbye when you did it.

I would say I'm not suggesting every AT all at once. But I would be willing to concede to seeing 1 AT updated every so many "X" times per year so as not to kill the Devs new critter creation time. Further wouldn't they be creating new powersets in the a sense ?

To be honest I really do feel that we will be seeing something like this coming out with the store. I think that the new animation thread was there to give them ideas for packs they can sell. EG new sword pack, Mace Pack, Weapons Pack.

I would be willing to pay in the line of a micro transaction for the ability to buy alternate powers for certain powers within a set. Again using Trip mine hand grenade concept. I would pay money to buy a small set of alt powers just flesh out my toon a bit differently from other AR Device toons. Again I'm not looking for an advantage just a different power. I would take less damage for quicker recharge or whatever they figure the math would be.

Further I am not saying every power in a set. I think it would be great if they just picked one power from each set. I'm pretty sure they compiled enough data between AT used and powers picked from ATs which powers are weak or used for mules or not picked at all from a set. Add in player complaints or at least the valid ones and I think you would have a decent number of powers, again at least one from each set that you could provide an alternate power for.

She / He / It ... combine to get how I refer to most people

Originally Posted by VoodooGirl [*]Watching out for the Spinning Disco Portal of D00M!*

Real life speech, what people really use in general, is what determines what is correct. There is no standards body for the language.

Using singular they may be less PRECISE, and in academic papers, precision is important, but that doesn't make it incorrect.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

In one sense yes, but in the more important sense that most players would see that as a tweak to old sets rather than a genuinely new powerset, no.


Cosmetic changes don't require significant powers team time.

Ignoring the facts that the repaired powersets would be new powersets, and the time to make the changes could actually be considerably less than the 1/9th first glance. They don't need entirely new animations or mechanics like titan weapons after all and can borrow from existing powers. By example the game has a grenade throw animation that can be ported directly into devices. There is the simple concept of fixing what is broken, instead of trying to push something new.

If you just want to convey that we won't be likely to get major fixes to existing powersets in the future you are likely right. I would hazard it's more from the fact, that new powersets can be sold, while maintenance would expected to be included in the sub.

Show me a hard control that works on a +4 AV with one application, and I might agree with you.. Otherwise, nope.

I was just conveying the fact that I actually know what's involved in either creating or altering the design of a powerset, so I can say with certainty that non-cosmetic changes to powersets are usually more expensive in resources than players tend to guess.

Historically the margin for error seems immense.

Last I checked, the devs felt that changing foe intangibles would negatively affect the segment of the player population that leverages those effects specifically because those effects are unique and less well defended as opposed to other mezzes. The very fact that they are situational and unique makes the devs loathe to arbitrarily tamper with them because the players that like them would then have nowhere to go: they would be eliminating essentially an entire unique effect in the game. So they are reserving the right to take another look at those when they have the time to spend a lot of time thinking about the ramifications of altering them.

Whether that is an example of the cottage rule in effect or not is mostly a matter of semantics.

Historically speaking my time estimates have never to my knowledge been materially wrong. Even when I've publicly disagreed with the red names my record is still intact on that one. So I'm going to go with that for now.

I was talking about the margins in design or change of powers. I am completely unfamiliar with your record on estimating development time. Unless you are acting as a project manager for Paragon studios, it really doesn't matter to me, except as possibly a proposition bet question