A premium feature I'm surprised no one has asked for yet with the new F2P system

I hated this argument in old D&D. It's okay to be puny Wizard at low levels because it's balanced when you get to high levels; cuz then you'll be so powerful you'll be 5 times more powerful than all the other classes combined!!! Bleh... That's not balance - that's a problem that needs fixing.

And in DnD that problem did exist, but does it really exist in CoH?

Why is, say, switching to Stone from Willpower at lvl 35 so so HIGHLY exploitable? Is Willpower 10 times easier to get to lvl 35 than Stone? Is a lvl 45 Stoner that much more awesome than an equal level Willpower? I don't see it.

Even were the above true, when you can get *any* AT to lvl 35 in a few weeks (days for some hardcorers) I just don't see the how comparing early level glaring powerset disparities (if they even exist) as a good argument to not allow this idea. If anything, it's a big ol' red flag telling us the powerset disparities need addressing.

Now, not allowing total respecs so as to encourage Alting is a decent argument. I will be rolling a Titans Weapon AT when that set comes out, but if this idea was implemented by then I'd probably just switch my IOd and Badged-out SS/WP Brute to the new set. Is that good or bad; I dunno, but I can at least see it as an argument.

I have never met a player in-game that thought they had nothing left to learn, that didn't have an awful lot to learn. Certainly you could drop me into a random build of a random archetype and drop me into a random team and I would make a decent go of it immediately. I've been playing the game for years, and my experience across archetypes is extremely wide. But I would be a lot better in a year than when I started, and anyone who says otherwise is saying more about their ability to learn the game than about the actual game.


On the general subject of powerset respecs, Positron's statement is far more damning than I think some people really fully appreciate. "I see no point to it" is not a weak statement. For something of that magnitude to happen, there must be lots of good reasons for doing it, and no good reasons not to. I'm pretty sure Positron is aware of all of the arguments for doing it that are kicked around the forums. Knowing all of that, saying there's no point to it is saying every single one of those reasons given for wanting it have no positive value. That's far worse than Positron saying "I think its highly unlikely" or even "it would be game-breaking." He's saying none of the reasons given for doing it generate a positive result in his opinion. That's a "No" with a capital N, and a caveat that anyone who wants to argue in favor of it should come up with something original, because all the previous arguments are failures before they leave the gate.


As to why there's no point to allowing powerset respec, its really no more complex than this game is designed around the premise that archetype and powersets are individually designed with different playstyle variations and flavors of play, and they are intended to be experienced as a progression as the powerset levels up. Can you bypass that in theory? Of course: no matter what the devs do they cannot stop you from paying some dude in China to level your character to 50 and hand it to you. So all MMOs without biometric scanners upon login are vulnerable to some variation of a pay-to-level exploit. But just because that exploit, and many others exist, that doesn't mean the devs have to throw up their hands and allow everything. They balance the effort behind enforcing the game's design intent and hoping the majority of the playerbase follows that design intent reasonably well. That design intent includes the rule that characters have singular identities, and they cannot be trivially replicated or shuffled.


And as to why the devs have that goal at all, that gets into complex psychological aspects of game design. But its something you tamper with at your own risk, and the risks are very very high.

As you are about to find out, yes.

Yes.

And here you've gone off the deep-end.

Timing how long something takes in City of Heroes is pretty much impossible as every player plays at their own level, and some players can affect teams more than others.

Some teams can rock out a Citadel Task Force in under an hour. Other teams will struggle to finish Citadel in 3 hours. How long does a Citadel take to complete? It takes as long as your team takes.

Saying that any given avatar takes any given amount of time to reach any given objective requires massive assumptions about the capabilities of that avatar, massive assumptions about the capabilities of the player, and massive assumptions about the capabilities of any team-mate that player may interact with.

In what manner? Single Origin Enhancements? Crafted origin enhancements? Invention Set Enhancements?

A level 45 stone tank can be built radically different from an equal level Willpower just based on IO sets alone, never-minding the player themselves. A few years back a group of people I played with always knew when I would start (real) Dual-Boxing (two computers) to cover for a friend who had crashed out of the game. Although I'd be using the exact same avatar as my friend with the exact same power-sets with the exact same IO slotting, my play-style would be completely different.

That's the problem. You don't see the vast difference possible between a player's avatar.

Since you didn't read a point I made in earlier in this thread, I'm going to repeat it and bold it so hopefully it sinks in.

Whether or not the argument is any good is an immaterial observation.

The argument of "comparing early level glaring powerset disparities (if they even exist)" is, to quote the Borg, Irrelevant.

The reality of the game is that not all power-sets within archtypes are created equally. Not all archtypes are created equally.

The game is roughly balanced around the idea that each class compliments another class. This means that some classes have intentional weakness, which means that some power-sets have intentional weaknesses. This also means that some classes have intentional strengths, which results in some powersets having intentional strengths.

No.

It is not.

Let me put it this another way. What you are suggesting here is that every single character needs to be equal to another character.

You are stating that somebody who uses a Mace should have the exact same single target, pbaoe, ranged, and ranged targeted aoe damage, as somebody who uses a different weapon.

Even if that is not what you meant, that is the logical extension of the argument you are not making here. It's also as ludicrous as it sounds.

To put this in another context. Imagine the first Doom Multiplayer. Imagine everybody starting out with just a pistol. Now lock the game to just pistols.

What happens now? What separates one player from another player? What makes each player different? What happens if somebody is really good with a pistol, but another player was really good with the shotgun they no longer have?

Is that really the uniform experience you want this game to deliver?

Wow, you typed something that is not worthy of an Epic Facepalm picture.

What. Part. Of. No. Do. You. Not. UnderStand? The. N. or. the. O?

Okay Socorro, I'll be a little blunt than I probably should be here.

I really could just replace all the text I just wrote with that infinity picture of Picard and Riker doing facepalms and it would be just as effective.

The whole point of the game is the experience of playing an avatar.

A Dual Pistols blaster should NOT play like a Dual Pistols Defender or Corruptor.

A Mace Tank should NOT play like a Mace Brute.

One of the aspects of the game that power-set / archetype respecs completely ignore is that experience.

All power-set / archetype respecs do is basically render 95% of the game completely invalid. So you got to level 50 and now you want a Katana instead of a broadsword? What the hey, you'll just ignore the game completely and make one.

If that's really what you want... if you really just want to skip the game entirely?

You need to go find a different game to play.

I personally don't care either way if powerset respecs are ever added in. But if they are, conditions C and E are horrible, horrible ideas. Two of the worst I have seen in a long time.

I disagree many people have multiple characters they want to play or like playing chances are your not going to PS respec those characters into something else unless it was te same concept but different AT and I don't see a lot of people rerolling a high lvl Fire/Invul into a Invul/Fire or Arch/KiN for a Kin/Arch for most if it's high level enough your probably just going to leave it and the concept behind it alone like my NRG/DEV

Didn't realize someone already brought up this idea with freedom in mind

Thanks. It's nice to see I've hit rock bottom with those.

Originally Posted by PapaSlade Rangle's right....this is fun.

And the devs don't want us switching out existing characters into new powersets. It goes against the basic design of the game which is to be alt friendly and all the work that went along with it.

So no it is not a valid argument.

Then you are delusional. What will actually happen is that the power gamers (and we have thousands of power gamers) will use those respecs to change their second and third builds to different archetypes/powersets so one character can have a farming AT/build, a PvP AT/build, and an incarnate AT/build.

Respecs only apply to the active build so changing one doesn't change the others.

And since builds are directly linked to the characters level they need only level one build up to 50 and the other two are auto-leveled to instant 50's.

I'm not sure how any of that follows from what I said. Particularly the "have to give them" part.

When did I make demands? All I'm saying is, if the Devs are thinking about possible additions to the store or to Paragon Rewards, I would just like to note my interest in giving some of the newer powersets to characters who were made before those powersets were available.

I am aware of the technical difficulties involved. I don't expect it to happen next month. Or ever, really. But I'd still *like* for it to happen.

They had a similar "we looked into the crystal ball and didn't like what we saw" reaction to merging the markets. They had a similar "we'd rather not" reaction to "can you make Epic badges not completely ridiculous".

Granted, powerset respecs are more game-impacting then Epic badge requirements, and it's unlikely that there ever comes up a situation where making powerset respecs possible becomes much less time and effort consuming than trying not to allow them. Still, it shows that circumstances can change, and when they do, it helps that there is a history of players wishing for a certain thing.

Then let me apologize for misunderstanding. Being a pessimist I came to the erroneous conclusion that you felt you were entitled to more because you didn't think what we were getting was enough. And since that type of attitude has been expressed by others in the past on many occasions I wrongly jumped to that conclusion. Again Sorry.

Totally disagree.

I actually did re-roll a SR/fire tank to kin/energy brute. That's the beauty of fiery fists combat-only aura. Got the fiery looking hands for attacks and got to look more kung-fu in the process.

Actually, no in both cases. In the first case, the devs said basically that they didn't want to, and that it would take more resources than available to ensure it happened smoothly. In the second case, they barely said anything at all except that they didn't want them to become too low.

The markets in particular I'm specifically aware of the exact moment they decided to merge them, and the exact rationale for why at the time. Basically, the magnitude of the effort involved in keeping them separate was becoming competitive with the effort involved in merging them. We came very close to having three independent currencies and markets before the decision was made to merge.

While I totally agree with you, would love to see this implemented and would be more than willing to shell out the money to get one it won't happen. The developers of the game would prefer you just create an alt. Of course you can PL said alt in 2 hours in AE.

If I recall the reason they said they were postponing the market merge as long as possible was because they felt that the available wealth redside couldn't compete with the amount of wealth blueside.

The redside/blueside situation was a moving target. Three years ago I said I was opposed to a merge because it eliminated an opportunity for the red side to create their own independent market. Two years ago I said I had mostly withdrawn that objection because there wasn't enough liquidity on the redside to legitimately call it a "market" in that sense.

The devs had other reasons to be concerned in the past, some good and some not so good. But the ultimate reason we have merged markets now is because they were looking down the barrel of Going Rogue introducing "information" and having to decide if that was going to be a third independent currency, and if as a consequence Praetoria was eventually going to have its own markets. And separate from that, how would the influence/information/infamy currency flows possibly be controlled regardless; would we be able to take currency across factions when side-switching for example.

GR beta testers may recall the devs were looking at this problem right up to a particular moment, then ceased discussion. That would be the moment when they decided the pros of a merge outweighed the potential cons. The merge isn't just the matter of a cross faction market. There are more fundamental changes that happened people don't always realize, like the fact that at that moment influence/infamy/information became synonyms of a universal currency, rather than three separate currencies with an interchange mechanism. That's not a trivial or semantic distinction.

I need to do as I damn well please. I'm not sure why you give a flying flip how I want to play the game, incidently, I'm more interested in how powersets themselves play in the late game (you know, fully IOd out, with Accolades and such) than leveling one Alt after another from 1 to 50. I've done plenty of that already. So, yes, I'd take full avantage of a system that let me do otherwise.

For the record, though, just so we can be totally clear. I'm fine that CoH doesn't have Total Respecs (get that thru your cranium) and that we (likely) never will. The game, as is, is still quite enjoyable to me. I simple would be equally fine if we also had something similiar to what the OP is suggesting.

What an utterly asinine thing to say. What are you even thinking when you type something like this? Since you know I really do play, this is really just to get reactions I guess. There's a word for that and it start with a 'T'.

No one is seriously suggesting changing ATs so that last sentence was totally unneeded.

Wow, you claim I missed some of your post, but obviously you didn't read mine either. I've said NO CHANGING OF ATs!

As for within at AT, well, Powersets within an AT *should* be close to the same in effectiveness. They don't have to be exactly equal, but they should be close. Are you really okay with them not being so?

I'm well aware that some are not(*ahem* Robots/Thugs MMs vs Ninjas), but unlike you, I say that AT powerset balance should be a striving goal of the Devs, not something that we all should just accept as unchanging.

And I'm not alone - we have new threads almost every day discussing how a Powerset needs adjusting, and by far most of these are posted because people are comparing that powersets effectiveness to other powersets in the same AT and *gasp* see disparities.

je_saist, using powerset disparities within at AT as an argument against Powerset Respecs instead of seeing that maybe the disparities themselves should be fixed just isn't sound thinking. There are other arguments (I provided one myself in my last post)- use those instead

Tell that to the player's whining about the new Launcher not working under an unsupported OS like Linux.













Oh wait.

Sorta like the people complaining that the new Launcher doesn't work on an unsupported OS like Linux.









Oh wait.

The last word I heard from a dev about powerset repsecs is that it would invalidate all the work the company has done to make this game alt-friendly.

Angel Red
"We're heroes. Fighting injustice is the thing we do." ~Rebel Scum

The OP did.

I disagree. I have a Kat/Regen. What if I want to make him Kat/WP? I'd definitely be willing to pay "real life money" for it. What if I also want an Elec/SD? Would I move that new Kat/WP to Elec/SD and pay again? No. I'd make an alt.

As of now, I'll probably still roll the Elec/SD, but wouldn't reroll the Kat/WP. In my eyes, the devs are sitting on an untapped gold mine. My Kat/Regen would just gather dust, as I rather dislike /Regen now. Am I going to stop playing because I "have what I want"? Hardly..I will play more because I do have what I want. There's lots of end game content now; it's not all about just "getting to 50 and rerolling something else".

Other ideas that could make this feasible:
-Account cooldown: can only perform one "powerset respec" once per month (or 20 days, or 30 days or whatever). The cooldown just needs to be long enough to prevent throwing money at an account to make it not an exploit
-Perhaps allow a "power learning period": from Tier 1-9 of the new set, you only get a new power available to you (to slot and use) every week or so. This, in terms of comics, would allow a character to be "learning" their powers to use
-"Power learning period" option 2: blackout the character completely for 2 weeks. This character is totally unusable while they are "changing" into the new powerset, and once unlocked all powers are immediately available (lore could see it as training, metamorphosis, a further mutation, whatever; this could vary by origin)
-"Power learning period" option 3: all powers are given to the character and slots are assigned (e.g. you say you want a powerset respec, and you immediately jump into a respec-style window, pick new powers/slots/etc). You are sent to a mandatory "training style/flashback-ish arc" (think Outbreak meets Flashback), where you complete a series of 1-man task forces (like the ones in Ouro, or the alpha arc or something) where you have ONLY level appropriate powers. You do one at level 2 (with only your first few powers, thus learning the first "new" power). You do the next mission at level 4, etc. 9 missions to get 9 powers. Then you are "released" back into the normal game. Hero/Villain rehab, if you will!
-Allow only one set to be changed at a time, and do not allow it to cross over ATs. Changing from a Blaster to a Tanker is a huge switch and is probably unwise in this area.

Now if the devs don't want to do this because they only have limited resources and want to keep bringing new content, then by all means. I don't think that that makes this a "bad" idea. Plus..it could make them money, for sure.

Best,
MT

You disagree that the devs said that? Sorry to burst your bubble but that's exactly what they said.

We all have characters we'd use this on if it was something the devs wanted to allow, however they don't and their constant refusal to allow it is a great example that they aren't solely motivated by profit. In their eyes some things aren't worth doing regardless of how much money they could make on it.