Dev Chat Highlights, October 5: Record Low 1.5 Tangents and Street Justice with Synapse

Zwill apparently bought the magazine and this week is wearing a plaid Killer Exclusive.



The whiteboard reads Street Justice.

TANGENT: Zwill complains about his coffee.

We have some things to talk about before Synapse arrives, with the Intrepid Informer article on StJ going up now.

They're working on writing up an article on the Paragon Points/Tokens issue. There was a bug in the system database.

They'll be awarding the points on the 11th or 12th, and working their way back to the 1st over the next seven months until it gets back to your proper billing date if it's before the 13th.

Paragon Reward tokens were meant to reward on your billing date, but instead they're awarding on the date you would've received your veteran badges, as there is a huge, complex formula involved with that. They will still be going out on a monthly basis.

They'll be trying to get a post clarifying this later today.

Zwill: "Oh my, that's an interesting e-mail. No, it's not pron!"

Yes, he said pron.

CoH is getting involved with a charity called Extra Life. Paragon Studios will be playing games in shifts and they're going to Ustream it.



Starting 8 am on October 15.

http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?...01&teamID=5927

That's the link to Paragon Studios.

They'll be playing CoH and Rock Band.

Zwill wants Posi to do Def Leppard on Rock Band.

Posi in chat says he'll do Dance Central.

I will NOT be transcribing that Ustream.

They will be playing of the Children's Hospital of Oakland. This is through the Children's Miracle Network.

Posi's high school license plate was DEPH LEP.

Chat thinks Rock Band: Van Canto would be awesome. Van Canto is an acapella metal cover band.

A Wild Synapse has appeared in a Space Invaders t-shirt



Synapse made a Fire/StJ tank, Zwill has made an EnergyStJ or SyJ/Energy something that's a little girl, and an SR/StJ or StJ/SR something. Sorry, I was putting the photos in the post. :-P

Zwill notes he only makes ironic characters.

In the office discussion is StJ has been inspired in part from the long fight scene with Rowdy Roddy Piper in the film They Live.

Syn says it was inspired by being Batman-esque, more of the Arkham Asylum batman, with bonecurshing blows. He thought it could be done with alternate animations, but Second Mesaure thought there was space thematically for StJ to exist. Syn thought that room would be made for it with the combo system.

It's a revision of Dual Blades' combo system, made more flexible due to the complaints that you have limited attack chains and are essentially forced into get all the attack powers.

Zwill loves the gritty, fast paced feel of StJ.

StJ has a bit of animation blending so that the return to idle stance gets interrupted and chained into the next attack.

http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/n...r_issue_13.php

We go into the article.

There's two kind of attack powers, combo builders and combo finishers.

Zwill: "No c-c-c-combo breakers!"

Combo levels 1 and 2 just increase damage, combo level 3 has an alternate affect.

Zwill calls the Tier 9 a Shoryuken. Well, he calls it a Hadoken and has Synapse correct him.

Zwill says he'll never get to level 50 again and that he had to "Far... er... run tips."

Initial Strike, Tier 1

Syn: "The bread and butter attack, builds levels quickly, has a chance to stun."

Heavy Blow, Tier 2

Chance to knockdown. The first two chain together in early levels.

Sweeping Cross, Tier 3

The first finisher, though you don't need combo levels to use it. It can almost get into Superior damage range at Combo 3.

The narrowness of the cone is due to the reach of the animation as well as it being a pretty good damage and recharge. The cone is small to keep it quick.

Combat Readiness, this sets Build Up power
Automatic 3 combo levels, plus some damage and tohit. Not as much as Build Up.

Discussion that it's good for an emergency to get the 3 combo points and fire off a hold or fear effect.

Rib Cracker

Primarily a debuff power, changed a lot in beta. Used to have a big debuff and didn't do much damage. But the stacking nature with several people made it ridiculous.

Zwill: "Also known as the knee to the junk power."

Syn: "It's kind of a got to have power."

Also a combo builder.

Taunt/Confront/Placate

Syn: "It's taunt, moving on."

Spinning Strike
It's smaller than the Whirling xxxx type powers on purpose to give it more damage. It's also a Targetted AoE rather than a PBAoE.

Shin Breaker
Does Superior damage and is a combo builder, slows and reduces defense. Stalkers get this instead of Rib Cracker. Syn thought it was better to have a big, solid hit to use after Assassin Strike than the debuff.

Crushing Uppercut

Syn: "Kind of a Knock Out Blow clone."

Does a ton of damage, at Combo 3 does more damage than KO blow. It does Scale 4 damage. It's one of the heaviest hitting attacks in the game.

The Freedom focus group was all "Meh." About StJ, but in Beta people played it to the detriment of other sets.

Zwill: "There is no better time to be a defender. Lots of meat shields. I was on a Sewer Trial, and the defender was just following around this glob of melee."

Assassin Strike has 2 different kinds of uppercuts. The animator made two of them and asked which one they wanted, so art lead said "Both!" It's not customizeable, I don't think.

Know which finisher to use.

Syn: "You have a tight knit group, target the guy in the middle, use spinning strike. Since it comes from him and not you. Big solid guy, Crushing Uppercut. A handful of guys together, use Sweeping Strike."

Zwill: "This feels like a rather endurance light set, even with Hasten."

Chat mentions this Ustream has had surprisingly few tangents. Zwill says it's because he and everyone else are so exciting.


Combos

Syn: "There is no wrong way to build a combo except using a finisher in the middle of building a combo. An effective combo is Build Up, Assassin Strike, Placate, Shing Breaker, Crushing Uppercut. Or saving Build up and hitting Crushing Uppercut to just about kill a boss."

The stalker set has both AoE powers, unlike some others.


Do not underestimate the secondary effects

StJ has a lot of AoE crowd control, Zwill thinks it might be more than other melee sets.

Good damage mitigation with soft and hard controls.


Focus on the big guy

Syn: "If you have Spinning Strike and Sweeping Cross you'll be able to drop this hail of closely packed AoEs. If you focus on a boss your splash damage will take out minions and LT's."

Zwill: "Don't do all single target damage, but use the big guy as an anchor."


Chaining Finishers

Syn: "Stalkers can't change finishers quite as elegantly."

Use Sweeping Cross and then fire Combat Readiness into Spinning Strike to fire off two AoE's with the damage bonus.

Comabt Readiness allows you to essentially chain finishers.


Zwill mentions a StJ thread of Street Justice character names by Zombie Man. It seems to be a mix of Chuck Norris movies and meat cuts.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=274086

Zwill: "Crunch Buttsteak."

Syn: "Big McLargeHuge."

Zwill: "I don't know if I can say this."

"To streamline the Paragon Market interface, can it be improved to filter out content they already have access to? Or better, can that be available via browser, so I can shop while I'm at work?"

They have some stuff in place to prevent you from buying stuff you already have and they're working on the filters for it.

They are looking into an out of game Paragon Market.


Street Justice is the powerset Syn has had the most fun with in designing. Mentioning how everyone refers to the set as "Nate's abuse of power powerset."

Steelclaw: "So, Synapse, after all the work on Street Justice, how does it feel to be Second Measure's [PANCAKE]?"

The question makes both laugh, but they don't read it out on air.


"Any chance to use Street Justice's combo system going forward?"

Syn: "Yes! There's a set coming up that kind of combines StJ's combo mechanic with another mechanic you've seen in game already."


They think the next powerset they're releasing is really amazing and they wish the could talk about it.


"What decides if a powerset is free for VIP or purchasable?"

It's not Synapse's call and is up to business development and marketing.

When you see the name of the next set you'll be thinking "Oh, that's going to be like this." But it will turn out to be completely different. Both think the set is really cool.


The Praetorian enemies are going to be adjusted to have their difficulty toned down, as they have too many attacks compared to other mobs of a similar level in the game.


Synapse has idea for new mechanics for old sets, but due to people playing them for so long he doesn't think it would be a good idea to do so. So he'll be making news sets with those ideas, as CoH is very alt friendly.

Talk of alt-itis and how CoH is the one that most encourages alts.


"If you were tasked with creating an aT, what sort of options would you like to implement?"

Syn: "I want it to fill a role not being filled, or filling a roll in a new way. Like Melee Support. We have VEAT's, but they're more passive support, not active with like healing and buffing away. A more active roll with lots of powers to click. Not just fire and forget toggles."

Zwill: "More active and reactive stuff with player participation."

Syn: "Yeah."


They took the MA license out of the store due to performance concerns. They'll add it back in eventually, but for right now MA is quite a bit of resources, a lot of map servers since people use the heck out of it. Thus they've made it a VIP perk.

Zwill: "We are hitting huge numbers for our peak concurrent player count. We'll be seeing even more in since our new ad compaign starts today."

Syn: "It's huge. Like bigger than launch."

There servers are performing pretty well thus far.


They've talked with ATI and gotten the crashing bug fixed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by reiella Until I see something that states to the contrary, going to assume VK is right .

Thanks.

They stated that they already made changes a while back.

Thanks again

Edit:

Can't wait to see the Staff powerset in action....I've been one of the ones waiting for it.

Edit:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zamuel They stated that they already made changes a while back.

Yeah? Well how come Praetorian lowbies are STILL whole leagues nastier than Primal mobs? Until about First Ward level where you finally get SOs to compensate?

If they did made changes, they need to make more. Praets at low levels are simply bloody annoying.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Synapse wasn't sure if the Praetorian changes went through or not.

"Really, what goes into it is, if we see players struggling in a certain area, or just a lot of player concerns about, say, I'll use Praetorian enemies for example, that were really hard. They just had more powers than they should have, they were doing more damage than they should have, and some other system designers got together and calculated damage per second, and they're making adjustments, or they have made adjustments, I'm not exactly sure, but, yeah, so that is being monitored, and if enemies are just too hard, or too easy, they'll get adjusted. Eventually."

(Bolding mine.)

StJ has inspired two things I want to see:

1.) Add combos to Martial Arts, as has been mentioned above.

2.) Alter Dual Blades combo system to be more flexible like StJ.

Don't sweat the idea that people are already used to how these powersets play, either. These sorts of improvements will make long time players of these sets happier, I believe.

Or they could sell the updated power sets in the market as upgrades - like if someone was happy with the current power sets, they could keep them as they were - but if they wanted to have more advanced mechanics, they could buy the advanced upgrade in the market.

A melee/support AT would be kind of cool. Like monk or paladin classes in other games.

EDIT: I still can't get this idea out of my head. It's the first "New AT" idea that I can actually get behind. It's weird that Synapse accomplished this in about a minute where as 7 years of player suggestions have not.