City of Heroes is the World Wrestling Federation of Superhero MMOs

Nemesis and DE will be your end if all you're doing is zerging them...

Nemesis - too much stacked Vengeance can overwhelm any team
Devouring Earth - Quarts > your defense

Perhaps this should be tested. Someone should pop purples, zerg rush different types of enemies, and record all the results. Then post the numbers here!

But that someone is not me. I don't really care enough, lol.

This is pretty much were I stand. City of Heroes is the game I fell in love with because it made me feel powerful by virtue of allowing me to take on 20 guys and still win.

I bash recent content (specifically, the AMBUSHES in recent content) because they increase the game's difficulty by too much at too early a level. Sure, ambush waves at level 50 when I have all my toys, bring them on. Ambush waves at level 5 that see through my Stalker's stealth? Pass. That, and the developer's storytelling tools are becoming more and more obtrusive, shoving story in my face at the expense of gameplay, instead of doing like they'd always done and leave the story to the contacts and the clues so that I can follow it if AND WHEN I want to.

My biggest gripe with the thread is I never saw City of Heroes as the tactical, skill-based game it's being presented as. I read all the tactics provided upstream, and I recall using pretty much none of them and still being just fine. Take status protection so you can ignore status effects, then attack whatever has the most hit points and rely on your defences to absorb the damage. I imagine things might have been more complex on a team, but since there was never any mandatory imperative to find one larger than about two or three people, I could never tell.

Word to the wise: A team of two people plays exactly like a "team" of one person, at least for those built to solo.

*edit*
I'm also disappointed we didn't discuss wrestling more.

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.

It wasn't always 50%. Base critter to-hit was 75% until the GDN. When the development team slashed character defence-boosting powers by a great deal, they also reduced critter to-hit down to 50%, giving a big boost of survivability to all "squishies" by proxy.

*edit*
Also, the Devouring Earth quartz eminator has a 100% to-hit buff on it, which is pretty hard to overcome, and is a big detriment to resistance-based sets, as well. Luckily, it's easy to kill. There are a small handful of "tricks" one needs to know even to this day (like Sappers), but most of them pre-date most of our start dates.

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.

To make it a properly scientific test, there also needs to be a control group. They'd have to be given purples that don't actually do anything, but otherwise operate under exactly the same conditions. We can explore the efficacy of the placebo effect in MMO combat at the same time!

Hell, I never even bothered killing the Nem LTs last. I just fought through the stacks of vengeance...this game just isn't that difficult.

Umm... That's not what archived patchnotes say. (http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Issue_5) At leasst not if "Base Accuracy" and TH are the same thing (which is implied elsewhere in the same patch notes).

No mention at all of base critter to-hit being anything different from 50% and the whole thing make no sense if it was anything else.

When I was a kid, my dad took me to the Providence Civic Center for a house show. The Main Event was set as The Ultimate Warrior and The Legion of Doom vs. all three memebers of Demolition.

It was a Sunday afternoon show and we needed batteries for the camera, so we walked a few blocks to find a place that was open.

We started walking past a bar and a small car pulled up and Luke and Butch of the Bushwhackers and Kerry Von Erich got out and ran into the bar. We just stood there, outside, watching and wondering why these 3 guys ran in.

About a minute later they came out dragging the Ultimate Warrior and yes, he reaked of alcohol. They packed him into the car and Butch looked at me and gave me a thumbs up and smiled a toothless goofy smile.

We got our batteries and headed back to the Civic Center. The opened the doors and everyone piled in. As the card was about to start, the ring announcer said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, due to an unfortunate medical emergency, the Ultimate Warrior will not be on the card tonight. But we do have a suitable replacement. There will be no refunds given as the card is always subject to change."

My dad grabbed me, walked up to an usher and told him he needed to speak to someone in management. We were walked to a back room and my dad let some guy have it about no refunds and that we watched them take a drunk Ultimate Warrior out of a bar. I guess the guy realized that we did see that happen so he comped us our tickets and gave us backstage passes. I got to see Kerry Von Erich backstage and I got to hold the Intercontinental belt. I enjoyed holding the belt more than I would have liked watching the main event. I hated the Ultimate Warrior anyway.

It is the same thing, actually. What went down to 50% was minion accuracy, and everything else had to-hit buffs beyond that, essentially the higher to-hit base that you see. The idea was that lieutenants, bosses and so forth are more accurate. Arcana and a few others argued that this essentially killed defence builds, and kept doing so until I7 or I8, when all critter to-hit was standardised to 50%, with lieutenants, bosses and so forth getting accuracy buffs, instead. These accuracy buffs, however, are not given in percentages, but rather in decimal fractions. Each +level adds an extra 0.1 on top of critter accuracy, and I believe each rank adds another 0.1. That a +1 lieutenant would have a 1.2 accuracy value, or 20% accuracy slotting in everything.

Arcana has the exact numbers in the Defence guide.

I apologise for the misunderstanding. I have the tendency to quote base to-hit and accuracy for +0 minions. +more +rank have always been higher, just higher in different ways.

*edit*
@Commander

Ouch! I was lucky to only ever see wrestling on television, where presumably such gaffs are edited out On the other hand, I have seen The Self Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior, so I can sympathise with your experience.

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.

That's not correct. Only players had 75% base toHit. The problem was that only even-level minions had 50% base toHit. If they were higher-rank than minion or higher level than even-level, they had +toHit bonuses. Critters over level and over minion rank had bonuses from both. This was changed in I7, not I4.

Edit: Scooped.

When there's only one or two LTs and you have some +toHit, that works fine. When there are four or more of them, it doesn't work really at all. Even if you have enough +toHit to hit them, if there are any bosses left you're looking at intense pain, because they're not just benefitting from stacked toHit against you, but also stacked damage buffs.

Hmm... Ambushes... I won't comment on this one, because I'm really in two minds about them. Part of me actually enjoys them, and no, it's not too-kinky-to-torture part, it's "And then they all died anyway, cheating gankers" part. But I can see how they are just irritating if you aren't in that particular mode. (And yes, I completed all the Resistance and Responsibility arcs on a nin/nin stalker in beta. And liked it.)

As for your other complaint... Well, just let us agree to disagree here. I don't find them at all intrusive, and in fact a great thing precisely for reasons you dislike them. New gimmicks like in-mission talks reduce "chore/game" ratio for me, not increase it.
Old missions were like this:
1) http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/action_movies.png
2) 30 mins searching for the last stupid glowie. When you find it, you're so relieved, you press "exit" before you remember to read clue text.
3) ZOOOOOOOONING OUUUUUTTTTTT.
4) Wall of Text.
5) Wall of Text.
6) ZOOOONING INNNNNN.
7) Back to 1.

New ones (in a perfect world):
1) http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/action_movies.png
2) dialog tree, you're led to by a nav window.
3) http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/action_movies.png
4) Bite-sized texts in NPC chat.
5) http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/action_movies.png
6) ZOOOOOOOONING OUUUUUTTTTTT.
7) Some text.
8) Some text.
9) ZOOOONING INNNNNN.
10) Back to 1.

Or, in other words, less chores, less loading screens, more action. Even when the entire mission is a FedEx chore (like that undercover journalist one in one of the new arcs) new bells and whistles allow to make it look more than "Read WoT, go 10 miles to read another WoT and then report back for yet third one," you feel much more like doing some meaningful stuff.

Those tools aren't yet used to their full potential, but devs are learning.

I could hear Howard Finkle saying that as I read it.

There's a psychological concept called flow, which is in essence the state of mind of a person who is fully immersed and engrossed in an activity, such that he excludes most outside stimuli and becomes focused on the activity as though it is a natural thing. This, ultimately, is what I want out of this game, and this is something it's very good at sustaining in a good, smooth run through a mission with no disruptions.

The newer game mechanics are deliberately designed to disrupt this state of mind, seeing it as detrimental to the game. While I can see the potential benefit in staving off boredom, they only serve to yank me out of the experience, kicking and screaming, force me to do something completely different, and then plunk me back in to kill some more stuff. Thing is, like having been woken up from a pleasant sleep, it's not that easy to go back into this state. And by the time I'm once more settling into that state of flow, BAM! Another long talky scene, mind-mission.

I can speak only purely for myself, but I prefer my "distractions" to be clumped together at the beginning and end of missions. When I have to do "other stuff," I'd rather do all of it at once, so that I can open up a larger window of time when I won't be disturbed. I want to sell, buy, trade and prepare so that none of these things come up during gameplay, so that I can settle into the experience. But when a dialogue, a gimmick boss or an unusually difficult encounter yanks me out of the experience, this causes me to have to work around an unpleasant obstacle. Obstacles are not pleasant. They are an irritant, something that my psyche regards as unwanted, an object to be removed. As long as I have to deal with them, I'm not at ease.

Maybe some play City of Heroes for this mythic adrenaline rush or as a puzzle to be solved, or maybe as some fight with the unknown. More power to them, but to me the game's greatest strength is that unlike almost any other MMO I've played, this is one where I actually CAN feel as though I'm "one with the game," pretentious as that may sound. When I can use my character without thinking about button presses, cursor position and power recharge (at least not consciously) is when I have the most fun. Anything which disrupts this disrupts my fun as a result.

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.

So a game that relies on being able to hold the attention of players well enough to get them to pay money for it is also trying to discourage immersion in the game?

CoX just never worked that way for me... In fact If it did, I'd probably never return, f2p or no. I never did to another game (since you are somewhat of a f2p games connoisseur, it's one with an exclamation mark in the middle of its almost alliterative name and servers named after various colours) which was so full of this "flow" I could never relax playing it. It is entertaining, but I really feel like I'm working in it... (That's why I never watch TV either. No pause button, no rewind No way to muse about some particularly interesting scene the way you can about an interesting paragraph in a book, no way to put the thing on hold to make coffee... You're slaved to the stupid box for the duration of a show. )

Team content is inherently like this, but fortunately, teams nowadays make it work exactly the way I like it, - Maps are steamrolled in matter of minutes, then a short break, then steamroll. And solo I often take long breaks inside mission, and wish there was something but mobs there, not something as grand as a "puzzle," and definitely not something requiring to throughly search every nook and cranny of the layer-cake cave* just a little thing like a chatty NPC to further distract me.

In other words, our opinions on what constitutes "entertaining gameplay" are, well, as far apart as they can get. And, although, again, I can't speak for anyone else, I personally want more "un-flow" in the game. And poor dev team should somehow make both playstyles viable.


*Although I might try to explore it anyway, to admire the textures the next day.

I'm fine with disagreeing, actually

What you describe as team play is pretty much the reason I don't team much, though. A large team "steam-rolling" over hordes of enemies both makes me feel superfluous to the accomplishment and tosses me into a maelstrom of confusing visuals with no clear "global" idea of what I'm trying to achieve. To me, this is counter-productive to reaching a state of flow because I'm not actually immersed in the game, i.e. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just pushing buttons with no knowledge or understanding, completely convinced that the end result will not change by much irrespective of which button I press. To avoid this, I prefer to solo, and on a difficulty not much higher than x2. That's just enough enemies to be a crowd, but not so many enemies that I lose reason to target individuals, and everything which happens is a direct result of something I did, thus I receive direct feeback from my actions, learning in the process.

When it comes to breaks, I don't actually disagree with you. I've been known to walk away from a half-finished mission to have dinner, watch TV, chat with friends or just take a nap, and many times I'll Alt-Tab out of the game to browse the 'net, searching for an answer to a question that popped into my head. However, when I take a break, I want this to be a break of MY choosing. IF I want it, WHEN I want it, HOW I want it. Having the game try to institute breaks for me when I really didn't want one at the time and making me read through a long, boring conversation that I've already read through five times before and then run five errands before I can kill stuff again just makes me want to get off the PC and go do something else. It kills the mood, essentially.

As for "searching" for the last glowie, that's never been a problem for me, but I might be a special case. I treat EVERY mission like a kill-all and like a scavenger hunt. I will always fill in the map in its entirety, walk into every little out-of-the-way nook, check behind every pillar, inside every room, inside every hole. As a result, I almost never miss any enemies nor any clickies, and so the times I've had to backtrack and search for things I've missed number less than a dozen in seven years. I actually really enjoy the "Rescue 21 Mystics from Oranbega" mission because it combines the two things I like to do best in this game - wipe out a large map of enemies and look in every hidden spot

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 think the average player knows these tactics anymore. They're just dumb button mashers, relying on how easy the game is and how little death matters to brute force their way through everything.

I gave some quick and trivial examples, but let me give two that are more complicated.

On one Manticore TF, I noticed that Paragon Protector fights were taking forever. I peeked at all my teammate's powersets and noticed that we had two */Psi defenders. I watched them and noticed that the one wasn't throwing attacks at all, and the other avoided the PPs. They were scared of drawing aggro. I had to explain to them that when PP went Unstoppable, psi attacks were the only thing that could damage them, and could the defenders please help clean up? Things went much more smoothly after that.

Another, very recent example: I logged on not expecting to do much of anything, but someone whose reputation I respect was running the new UG trial so I signed on. We got to the regenerating war walker and the leader's instructions were 'Attack it! Overwhelm it! If you die, go to the hospital and get back in the fight.' Or in other words, zerg rush. We failed, of course.

I wanted to scream at him. That fight needs three teams -- one of tanks and support to pull the walker to a safe corner, one of ranged support and damage to lay into the thing, and one sweeper team to kill all the additional mobs so the squishies could do their thing without getting killed every five seconds. The sweepers and spikers should both be getting and using the fungus power-ups. A little tactical thought would have won that battle.

Nothing I could have done about it. I didn't know the leader personally, and I'm not a leader -- I have no interest in trying to corral 23 strangers. The incarnate trials require some tactics, but they're a middle manager challenge that I can't take part in.

Do I want the nostalgia of not knowing what to do? Darn tooting that's what I want. I want new content that challenges me. That's what developers of an ongoing game should be providing. I don't pay a subscription fee to play the same old way over and over again, and I'm not paying for the privilege of having them tell me a story. I could care less about their story. I play a role-playing game in order to experience a story of my own. 'New content' doesn't just mean a few new strings of text describing the in-game world. It should mean new gameplay experiences that give the player challenges to overcome.

Most of the innovation of the past few years has been in technology that increases Paragon studio's ability to tell their stories. Alert flashing, cutscene improvements, phasing, signature arcs (*their* signature characters, note), and a pigeonholed alignment system. There have been almost no innovations in character creation or simple gameplay. Some new costume creature UIs, and some questionable changes like inherent stamina, that's it.

Going back again to the OP, it's as if we're getting gimmicks, not substance. Some players are okay with that. Others will only retain interest as long as they are given content with substance.

Yes, and I've been saying that since inherent stamina was announced. Giving us more slots with no more options results in fewer choices. We need more options.

See, I like alts. I don't "grind" any character. I play them as I want to. The only grind I've found came with Sets and the need to farm to afford a real build, and then the Grind came back with a capital G with the incarnate (post alpha) slots. I just don't bother anymore. I play my alts, I slot them with basic IO's at level 27 and when they 50 I might, maybe, slim chance, bother to grind out the cash to set them out. Normally I don't.

The end-game is the grind. The road there is loads of fun.

IMHO, YMMV.

Can you give an example of how they could do that, but without them including anything that could be described as a gimmick?

1. Until around I5ish, the number of people who actually knew exactly how tohit worked outside the devs was probably less than a handful.

2. Prior to I7, most players didn't know how strong lucks were.

The rule back then was actually "pop three lucks and you should be fine" thinking that was +75% defense, but also that "pop two lucks and you should be fine" didn't seem to always work, even in situations where +50% defense should have been more than enough. By habit, I used to pop *four* lucks on my blaster entering tough fights, knowing it seemed to work but not knowing exactly why until I got around to testing them.

Ok. Mea culpa. I was wrong. Very wrong.

Which still doesn't quite make up for a fact that eating lots of Lucks and/or getting a lots of +def in any other way always has been relatively simple way to beat a majority of encounters (and that there were nasties designed specifically to discourage this.) I tried to calculate what a FF defender could do pre-ED, pre-GDN... It's ...impressive. Almost makes me wish I had been there.

FWIW, that's much more complicated than what the ones I've been on do. We do pull the WW to the corner, but we basically pull it right to where the DE spawn, so we can blast them with AoEs while we fight the WW. We usually have just one Tanker or very sturdy Brute hold aggro, and everyone else beats on the AV and spams the copious temp powers we had ample opportunity to collect long before we got to the room for that fight. For the Lichen we tell people to watch for the 2-3 nearest fungus glowies and either take them out or call for help if they can't DPS them fast enough.

Sometimes that's too free form for PuGs, but usually it's fine.

I've run a couple different builds, some of them embarrassingly weird just to experiment. In fact, prior to I9 I made it a point to respec every time a freespec came out just so I could take a different epic pool and try it out.

Most of the blapper builds did not have power bolt or explosive blast. Some had power push, some did not. Some had aid self, some did not. Some had fighting, some did not. None of them had both.

I'm not sure what "all" the other characters take, but I suspect my builds were nominally different from them, mostly because they were different from each other.


Just because my SR scrapper got scrappier and my Invuln scrapper got scrappier and my regen scrapper got scrappier and my DA scrapper got scrappier doesn't mean they did so in the same ways. They all still play significantly different from each other. They still have radically different strengths and weaknesses.


Because they can't, not in all areas. My MA/SR plays a whole lot differently than my Claws/Regen in something like the ITF, say. My Ill/Rad plays nothing like my Earth/Storm, and I doubt any amount of inventions and build crafting would make that remotely similar.


I just don't have that problem. My current MA/SR build sacrifices Elude in order to get all the numbers I want, including soft capping but also high regen and recovery. I wish I didn't have to sacrifice Elude: Elude's a power I've had from I2 to I19, and it would still help in high tohit buff situations. I agonized over that one for weeks before deciding it wasn't possible to fit in. But I did put a lot of thought into it. And as it turns out, I'm also not perfect when it comes to Mids: Iggy posted a build that stuck in Elude and still replicated virtually everything I wanted, which means I still have tricks to learn. When that stops happening, I'll start considering building high end builds boring.

Perhaps the biggest difference between me and you might be in how we build. I don't know how you do it, but I don't look at Mids when I first roll a character. I play it totally by ear and pick powers and slots as I go along. I think that's the best way to get a feel for what the strengths and weaknesses of a powerset combination are. When I hit 50, I respec into a different build based on what I think that powerset combination's strengths are, and then and only then do I consult Mids. Because I've seen 50 levels of an unoptimized version of that powerset combination, how I think it should be built isn't based on reproducing something I've seen elsewhere, but based on amplifying what I believe the most interesting aspects of the combination are from playing it. I'm predisposed to look for differences and then *amplify* them in building, rather than trying to make each thing look like what I played last.

That's probably also why I don't think the game has gotten substantially easier. You can *make* it easier if you want: you can play at -1 with bosses off all the time if you want, and you can optimize your build at every level of play. But the standard difficulty mission hasn't gotten all that much easier or harder, and even with inherent fitness players haven't gotten all that much stronger prior to slotting inventions. They've only gotten moderately faster, not stronger.