The Natural Secondary Blues

The Scarlet Witch doesn't use any magic whatsoever.

I'm with LastLeprechaun on this. I would love more non-godlike tech and natural compatible powersets. Specifically, I'd like another support powerset, blaster secondary, dominator secondary, and control set. The melee sets offer quite a few options already. Banes, night widows, and huntsmen offer good, low-key natural options as well.

I know folks have proposed martial arts/street justice-y blaster secondaries. It would be really nice to see something like this. Or an assault rifle/pistol dominator secondary with a mix of ranged and melee attacks like the arachnos soldier primary.

Probably the most explicitly (I use the word reservedly) "god-like" power we're given, in the context of tapping supposedly cosmic power in the Incarnate sense, are the Lore Pets. It's not "god-like" in the sense that they show up and level the city, but "god-like" in the sense of willing things into existence. Based on their descriptions (as in /info), we appear to be calling them into being from memory from having faced them in the past.

Of course I find it not too hard to hand wave at that and decide that my characters are summoning them some other way, and they aren't manifestations of my character's will given form. The wispy, translucent appearance makes that harder for some of them, and for some explanations, but in general I prefer my version to the in-game one.

Yeah there tends to not be a lot of love for the "batman" sets because of the "but you punched a giant robot!" silliness, which is a stupid argument to make. One that goes out the window the minute you see a homing boulder thrown by a troll follow you all the way across Skyway City and up an elevator. The visuals are at best an abstraction of what's presumed to be going on, used only as a basis to help everyone taking part to have a better idea of the concepts at work. i'd hope my SS Brute has more than six punches performed the exact same way over and over again in his repertoire. Surely he might throw soembody somewhere or crush something in his hands at some point. The suspension of disbelief shouldn't stop at if the powers work and/or why they shouldn't. I often see this argument and it just seems like seriously specific denial at work.

The equivalent would if there was no fire, Electricity, ice, Darkness, radiation, just one "blast/melee/armor/buff/control" set with one visual that players encouraged each other to pretend was all manner of things it wasn't.

There really should be enough of them across the board. The value of such sets is vastly misunderstood. Simply put, any set that, by it's visuals, doesn't require explanation, can be used in any way, by anybody. I don't have to explain Broadsword, Martial arts, devices, trick arrow, Assault Rifle, Traps, Shield Defense, e.t.c. what they are is right in the name and the visuals.

I can be a mutant/Magician/Science experiment/Cyborg that shoots lightning because of his Mutation/ spells/sciency stuff/ tesla coil arms and also has a gun/can punch dudes/has a bow/has a sword. If he shoots lightning and uses mind control. I'm going to need to have a reason for that*, because those are two different things sure, coming up with those kinds of things is very fun, but sometimes you just want the one power or you want to go with a mixture of power and skill, or you want a lower scale of power represented, or a very specific, and maybe esoteric power set. You just want to shoot fire from your hands, not shoot it and be covered in it or shoot fire and regenerate, or shoot fire and also ice. The game makes us pick two powers, and rightfully so, but both sets don't have to be "power" sets

To fill the gaps we currently have for non-Powered sets we'd need
1 a Control set based in Gadgetry,(or maybe ventriloquism?)
2: an Assault set based in weaponry

After that, anything else is just expanding on what's there.Control and assault are the only Set types that have nothing close. An MA set would be nice, but it's loosest concept, "unpowered secondary for a blaster", Already exists in devices, like it or love it(and I'd love an MA Secondary) Melee ATs as a whole are all sewed up in regards to having that gap filled by something as are buff/debuff which have two options available to them. Control and assault are the odd men out in this situation.

*In so much as concept matters to me, the people I'm with, whatever, if you don't care about concept....... why do you care about this discussion?

First of all, I don't get the impression that the OP was looking for explanations on how to hand wave some powers. He either feels they fit, or he doesn't. I got the impression that he's been doing hand-waving,and is tired of it.

If so, I totally get where you're coming from. I much to add to that other than..

1) I agree with someone who posted before. A Soldier with a Huntsman build is a very nice fit. Training and Tactics, or Training and Weapons, whatever it's called (I can't recall exactly) makes a wonderful secondary for a natural origin.

2) I agree with pretty much everything Premonitions said until he gets to 'filling in of gaps'.. I'm not saying I agree or disagree after than point. I haven't made up my mind there.

Well, other than that, all I can say to the OP is, I get where you are coming from. I have felt similarly many times.

I've run a few characters as Super-Naturals. This isn't supernatural, but rather is the effect of having a person with no "powers" with an incredible amount of natural ability. For instance, I have a Super Strength/Super Reflexes brute named Old Wippernapper that is an elderly boxer whose body simply doesn't age, allowing him to continue developing his speed and strength to amazing levels. Another brute, a SS/SD has a similar backstory. He was just a farmer working his field during the Roman times when his was forced into the army by legionnaires (I don't care about actual world history, so I'm free to invent). He wasn't given a sword or shield, and was basically sentenced to death. Thinking on his feet, he grabbed a manhole cover and used it as a shield. And after he survived the war, he kept the "shield" as a memento. However, instead of dying at the age of 30 like most people those days, he continued to live as a poor farmer for nearly two thousand years. Centuries of manual labor has crafted him into a nearly superpowerful being.

Neither of these characters uses high-tech gadgets, magic, mutations, etc. They are just very healthy. Imagine what would happen if an olympic athlete's body never broke down, never aged, and just kept getting better. Now, you could argue that this is mutation, but in my mind it is just the peak of natural potential. This concept works well for melee characters using weapons, martial arts, superstrength, or street justice as damage sets and willpower, super reflexes, or shield as secondaries, possibly even invulnerability if you hand-wave the flashes away.

"Stupid" might be going a little far there. When you say "punching a demigod" it of course sounds silly yet look at any mythological tradition you care to. That's the kind of stuff normal people can do if they exceed the requisite minimum badass threshold, or simply if their place in the parable calls for that to happen. Why shouldn't an Olympic athlete be able to hit a robot so hard that it breaks, or beat up a really giant legless dude in a skirt? It seems like one of the things people take for granted about comic book type stuff these days is that absolutely everything that isn't commonplace in the real world must be made of a special metal that's impervious to all damage, or have skin stronger than diamond. In my opinion that's just a product of the sloppy one-upmanship of crappy '90s comics. Traditionally when a god takes a corporeal form they expose themselves to the weaknesses of living creatures as well. One of those weaknesses tends to be getting kicked in the jaw.

I'm not entirely clear on whether this has been covered in the thread already as some of the references I think went over my head, but my answer to all that is just look at that bat fellow. He's just a strong dude with some technological assistance yet nobody seems to find it implausible for him to kick the head off of a robot because the writer will have made clear that he knew exactly the right angle to kick from because he did some industrial espionage at the robot factory before the fight. Or maybe prior to the fight with a demigod your martial artist would learn some minor ward of vulnerability, or dig up a long forgotten technique from his school that doesn't get a lot of use since you ostensibly don't fight one specific god every day. There's a million ways to explain this stuff in a universe that's full of magic and science and all these crazy things. I'd definitely say you can have a guy who is mainly getting by on his natural skill who makes it through the weirder circumstances by resorting to one form of trickery or another.

Oh yeah, I should also point out that in playing this game we're suspending our belief in a more subtle way as well. In general, in comic books, not every character is exposed to every type of enemy. Matter Eater Lad doesn't tend to go on a lot of pan-galactic crusades, as far as I am aware. He tends to find himself in situations where he's hungry and he's surrounded by matter. So, from that perspective, maybe a natural martial artist simply wouldn't really be going on the shadow shard TFs. The fact that you can easily do so is a testament to the level of freedom the game has always given to players to define their own concepts their own ways. But really, take any character you have. Does it make sense for them to run all of the content in the game as they can, and perhaps have? Should the same woman be thwarting every single plot that the council cooks up while finding time to also work every day job and keep every other villain group under control as well? That seems objectively silly to me, yet it's just the nature of a game that doesn't railroad you very much. I don't really put a ton of thought into the specifics of how my pistol blaster manages to take down robots hundreds of times her size when it's pretty insane in the first place for her to be "arresting" hundreds of guys in a gigantic laboratory to save one kidnapped scientist.

It's all silly, just roll with it.

Not to cramp the OPs style, but I also think youre defining "natural" much too narrowly. It's a super-hero game, have a little fun and break the rules.

It irritates me immensely that there's no non-energy/elemental/whatever secondary for Blasters besides Devices (which sucks and is rather limited concept-wise). What I wouldn't give for a Knife Manipulation set or some sort of Ninjitsu/Street Justice/Katana hodgepodge set.

IMO what we need is a MA or street fighting secondary for blasters, a trick shooting debuff pistol set for defenders and corrupters and an all around gadget based set for all the ranged AT's.

Because its not about not being able to justify a powerset, its not having the desire to do so again and again and again. I want to make a character that the game simply does not yet support. There is nothing wrong with that. After all, thats how we got staff fighting, street fighting, Dual Pistols, electric control, etc. We just have to let the devs know that there is alot of desire for a more natural style powerset, and morever, natural style powersets for both primary and secondary.

Who cares if a normal human cant compete with a demigod? It never seemed to matter if the AT was a melee AT, why should it matter if I want a ranged character?

Looks like I missed that people were still responding to this. Since it's been resurrected already...

Quote:

Originally Posted by GavinRuneblade You need to go read the Illiad. One of my favorite bits is when Ares shows up on the battlefield against Zeus' orders and helping his side win. Diomedes shot him from behind while he was in a duel with another of the greeks (pure cheating that but he had Zeus's explicit permission relayed via Athena) and that normal, non-magical arrow, hurt Ares enough that he fled the field humiliated at having been injured by a mortal. Diomedes has the honor of being one of very, very few greek heroes in that war with no divine blood. And yet he is ranked as the most moral (only greek to never fall prey to hubris) and the third best fighter (behind Achilles and Ajax, but he did almost beat Ajax once).

Really, no, I don't need to go read the Illiad. I should point out that the interpretation you are providing is not the only version of the story. For example, check out the Wikipedia page on Diomedes. In the version of the story presented there, the weapon that wounds Ares is Ares' own spear. The spear was thrown at Diomedes, caught by Athena, thrown back at Ares by Diomedes, but guided to its target by Athena. Given Athena's double intervention, that's a far less impressive account of Diomedes' feat. (There are other versions as well, such as Ares actually being injured in a collision between the two warriors' chariots, which certainly doesn't make Ares sound that impressive. Then again, he wasn't a very popular god among the Greeks.)

But lets focus on the version of the myth you started with. I think it still takes some explaining, and explaining requires us to get back to simple questions. Is Ares really just not all that much tougher than a human? If so, then anyone could theoreticaly have hurt him with an arrow, really. Is Ares instead really pretty tough, but has some vulnerable spot that Diomedes hit, a-la Achilles? Or is Ares nigh-invulnerable in mortal terms, but Diomedes is just ridiculously bad-*** with a bow, and able to do things with it few other mortals ever could hope to?

Casting the "weak Ares" example in CoH terms, if your, say, Archery character is fighting alongside, say, Beam Rifle and a Fire Blast character, and they're fighting an aspect of Rularuu, and that aspect of Rularuu isn't actually all that much tougher than a human, why isn't the aspect being clobbered by the energy beams and sheets of fire? Do we assume that this phaser-like beam rifle is actually no better at zapping people than an arrow is at stabbing them? Something in this example has to be setting the three powersets on approximate par. Either that or we have to ignore the numbers and assume they really aren't on par.

So maybe instead the aspect has some vulnerable spot that only the archer is hitting. Why is only the archer hitting it, and not the beam or fire blast user? Is it that only the archer can hit it? Doesn't that start to sound like the archer is preternaturally good at that they are doing?

Ultimately, I think it's a bit of a distraction to go after examples in myth and legend where "gods" weren't that much beyond peak humans. That's kind of cherry picking, in my opinion, because honestly, we can find stories that are all over the map in terms of the capabilities of their mortal heroes and the gods themselves. And ultimately, it's easy to conclude that this is just because they were just stories. People retold them over the ages and embellished here and there, tweaking the hero up and the antagonists down to suit the narrative.

There's at least one one tale which has Beowulf claiming he did things that no ordinary human could possibly do - fighting sea monsters in full arms and armor while dragged to the bottom of the sea. Despite this, he supposedly wins a swimming race, ultimately pulling his contestant behind him (while in full armor). So was Beowulf a nigh-supernatural bad-***? Or was he just spinning a grand tale? The truth is someone else was spinning the tale of Beowulf relating all this, and what he said and did fit the narrative the teller needed it to.

Everyone playing CoH is free to take that narrative role - the spinner of the tale, reinterpreting what's happening on screen into their character doing something that ignores all the numbers, effects and sometimes even the in-game lore, and just doing whatever makes sense to the player to explain how their character is achieving what we all see on the screen. It's a bit like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes imagining his classroom as an alien landscape. But then translating those intensely personalized interpretations of the game into an argument for something on the forums is always going to be ... lively, because by definition it's incredibly subjective.

My own subjective spin is to take the presentation on screen as less abstract and more actually representative. A level 50 Martial Artist really is doing as much damage to that for in powered armor as the teammate with the katana, the mastermind pets with the machine guns, and the girl in back hurling blasts of radiation. In my game-view, that calls for a degree of bad-a<Samuel-L-Jackson>-er that other people just don't have ... even if you're completely natural.

I think its time for me to resurrect this post and maybe get it more on track and more black and white.

They released a Gunslinger costume set. PLEASE NOTE: Yes, they dropped the ball and its riddled with problems and I'm involved in a dozen discussions on that and that's not what I wanna chat up here. What i want to focus on is that they took invaluable time and resources to develop a costume set to one type of hero.

That type of hero undeniably uses guns, it's in the sets namesake. Assault rifle doesn't have anything even remotely Winchester rifle so we naturally gravitate towards Dual pistols. Let's at least say, for the purposes of this discussion, it is the most obvious fit. The perceived (if not intended) popular majority "go to" powerset for the costume if you will.

Now... this dusty gunslinger will be gloriously fulfilling hundreds of players dreams of a heroic gunslinger type, perhaps one they played in the backyard as a kid, wielding his pistols... and... using his devices and setting his traps? Huh?

This would be the point of my OP. We need something here as a secondary. I can think of many more character concepts that could use it - but now we've got a very specifically themed look and feel for a character type being handed (well sold) to us by the devs themselves... and there is undeniably not a comfortably proper way to "empower" the toon to match the theme and truly flesh out it's concept as intended.

We need something for this void and my hope is that it's now obvious to the Dev's.

There is no way they took the time to bang out a Gunslinger costume set and didn't think... wow the secondaries all feel a little weird on this guy. My fingers are crossed.

Again I'm not saying people cant make up lore about a zombie alien fire breathing gunslinger from here to high noon... I'm just saying I don't want to "have to do that" in this particular case - just like I don't have to do that with my Barbarian or Magic User themed toons.

I think there is an awfully big void left for what the masses would like to equip a Gunslinger with after they strap on their six-shooters.