Melee, Money, and Costume Equality

Melee, Money, and Costume Equality

I don't get the excitement that the newer melee sets have generated. People were so excited when Street Justice and Titan Weapons came out that it seemed odd to me.

I much prefer ranged damage and 'blast' attacks to melee attacks. That's a personal preference. I wish there were more ranged sets in game.

Currently, if you count the number of ranged damage sets in game, not including control sets, pet sets, EATs or VEATs, there are 12 distinct powersets. If you count the number of melee damage sets in the game, there are 16 distinct powersets, not counting Katana and Ninja Blade twice. Brutes have access to 15 damage sets whle Tankers and Scrappers both have access to 14. Blasters, Defenders, and Corrupters each have access to 12.

Melee-types have another power set on the way in Staff melee, which will bring the total up to 17 sets. Ranged types are going to have to wait a while, and our power proliferation is petering out. Blasters might get a 'Body Mastery' type secondary, but that about cleans it up for easy ports. Frankly, the Control-types are well overdue for their new Darkness Control set that will bring them up to 9 total control sets.

Poor Masterminds!

Even though I wish the developers would spend more time working on ranged sets, I understand why melee sets tend to get more priority. It's good business. More players want to get up close and personal with their enemies and deliver either Justice or Evil with their own two hands. Fewer players want to hurl Justice or Evil across the room at their enemies. If you're going to make what sells, and NCSoft is CERTAINLY in the business of selling things to players, they have to cater to player WANTS. They get more money by prioritizing melee development.


Now let's talk about costume sets. There's been a lot of argument lately over what's FAIR for the NCSoft developers to deliver in the way of costume sets. Some players get irritated if male characters don't get the same number of options as female characters. Other players get irritated if female characters don't get exact duplicates of the male-oriented costume sets. I personally don't think either of those are good options. I much prefer female characters to have a wide array of attractive, feminine costume options.

But does that make good financial sense?

I can't personally attest to the ratio of female characters to male characters in the game. However, I believe Noble Savage has indicated that Paragon Studios receives something like an order of magnitude more costume piece requests for females than males. I can't immediately find the post mentioning this.

He's also stated that there's been a lot of grief given to developers over this.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=279252

Well, I think part of the issue is that Melee Sets are one of the easier sets to make.

Mastermind Sets, especially Demon Summoning and Beast Mastery, require a lot more work than something like Street Justice.

I do think some newer blasty sets are in order though. Or newer armors, even!

In Defense of the lack of MM primaries, they are the only AT to get them and take *alot* of work to do.

Melee sets get made more because they get played more. ATs with little or no mez protection get dropped in the 30s at a much higher rate than those with strong mez protection. The end result i s that the melee sets look to be what the player base wants, so that is what gets made. The truth though, is that there is an extreme lack of balance between survivability and damage...melee ATs do FAR too much damage compared to their survivability.

I really can't get behind giving females more costume parts in a 2:1 ratio. I don't even think that thew sould get more costume parts. They should definitely get different parts.

If a hypothetical pack were to get 20 pieces, I'd say that the ideal distribution would be 10 gender-neutral pieces, like jackets, boots, gloves and weapons, 5 female specific pieces like dresses, corsets, and such, and 5 male only pieces. I understand that there are very few pieces that can be made for males that couldn't reasonably be used on females, but some artificial limitations would be reasonable.

For example, in the Arcane Booster, I would have divided things up as follows:

Neutral/Both:
Baron Jacket and Sleeves (all variants)
Baron Boots
High Collar Cape

Female:
Witch Hat, top, gloves, skirt, boots (all variants)
Bolero

Male:
Baron Hat
Renegade Hat
Skull Mask
Wizard Beard

Once Dink is done with the set, the only difference between my list and the official one is that females won't have the Baron Boots, IIRC.
There's no reason a woman couldn't wear the hats or mask that I assigned to males only, but you'll notice that even with a handful of arbitrarily assigned male-only pieces, females end up ahead.
Ultimately, I don't agree that females should get more pieces than males just because in reality it's socially acceptable for women to wear men's clothes, but not vice-versa. This game is all about giving the maximum amount of choices, and giving all the costume parts to one model and only half of them to the others is only going to accomplish two things: It will make some players always roll characters using the model with lots of choices, and it will make others resent not getting the choices they want (see the "Men get jackets, women get lingere" debates). Giving most stuff to both sides, and a handful of exclusives to each keeps both sides (mostly) happy, and minimizes disappointment in disparities.

On the subject of powersets, I think they're running out of things to shoot enemies with. You have all the traditional superhero blast powers - fire, ice, lightning, psionics, darkness, etc - as well as generic "energy" blasts and three different types of guns. There's just more melee weapons to work with once you get past all the traditional powers (though I think they're starting to run low on those, too).

Other than that, I agree with Tenzhi. I like Melee sets mostly not for the actual melee, but for the nice defenses in the other powerset. When playing, say, a Dominator or Blaster I feel vulnerable (especially the lack of status protection), and that's not how I want to feel when playing a superhero/supervillain. Because of that, my interest in playing those ATs usually wither and die by 20th level, even though I love those ATs in theory (especially Dominator).

If the other power pools ever get upgraded to have 5 powers in each pool maybe they could give Fighting a mez defense toggle. Leave a KB hole so that it doesn't step on Acrobatics' toes.

Personally i think this whole "equality" business that is currently sweeping the forums these last month or two is way out of control. [Sorry just had to say that ]

I do agree though that the secondary powerset pools for many of the ATs are vastly inferior in numbers to that of the primary. Blasters/scrappers are the ones that come to my mind in that if you do have more than a few of these ATs [and they are some of the most popular ATs] then you will be making duplicates of X powerset.

I've said for a very long time now that we are in great need of some armour sets for tanks/brutes/scrappers, new secondary for blasters and even one new epic pool for each AT.

Blasters started in issue 0 with 5 secondary sets. They now have seven. It's time for some new ones. (And if they can be modified to serve dominators as well, hey, all the better.)

Would love to see some new defensive sets for the melee types too.

I think blasters will get a review soon, with T9 nukes end crash removed and snipers revamped.
Also, I think they should get a rune VFX magic blast set soon, with a magic staff as a ranged weapon. That would be cool.
And a martial arts secondary would make me damn happy.

I only play melee. But I agree, animation wise, I think is much easier to create a blaster set like beam riffle than staff fighting melee set.
Maybe is the mechanics and the balance and numbers what is difficult.IDK...

I don't think it's melee sets in general. My impression is that while Street Justice is a solid set with an interesting mechanic, it wasn't greeted with the same kind of anticipation as Titan Weapons and Staff Fighting. The interest in it was very much "Oh hey, this is neat, so what else is coming out?"

What gets interest is weapons. Beam Rifle got more overall interest than Street Justice, at least from what I saw, and it's because of weapons. (Admittedly, the interest wasn't THAT much more, since Beam Rifle got pretty shorted on weapon models.)

There's only so many ways you can project energy or attack something unarmed. While they have made an effort in making two animations available where possible, it's just not as big a part of character customization as weapons can be.

One's weapon is a huge part of one's identity. Your hand is your hand, but if you use a gun or a sword or a polearm there are loads and loads of different models available. One Titan Weapons character can use the Plasma Sword while another can use the Purgatory Sword, and though they have the same fighting style the concepts are already very different, even without going into the actual character. Weapons are a very neat and fun way of integrating character identity into the actual combat.

TL;DR: People like weapon sets.

For what it's worth, making the same number of pieces for the male and female genders means spending about twice as much time on males since they have two models.

I'd buy an all male set. But I do make more women characters, so I'm always in favour of more girl pieces and that's what I vote for with my wallet.

I'm just addressing the power sets discussion, since the costume discrepancy never bothered me any. Rather than try and provide any data, or attempting to convince anyone of anything, the following is just my not-so-concise opinion on the subject.

Melee sets are more popular. I base that statement on two observations: the total number of melee types I see outnumbers the total number of any other type, and that I typically observe a majority of people rolling a melee character as their "default" for anything in particular (first ever character, first character on a new server, first character in a themed SG, etc.). Whether those observations are the results of melee desirability or defense desirability is irrelevant since melee ATs are the only standard ATs that have access to defense power sets. As such, a melee power set will most likely result in the greatest number of characters created, and consequentially the greatest percentage actually being played through, versus a non-melee power set.

Melee power sets provide a win/win on both sides of the business model. The above addresses the mindset of the provider. In the mind of the consumer, paying for a melee power set offers him/her the most for their money since it opens up a power set for 4 archetypes that are offered standard. While a buff/debuff set does the same, two of the archetypes using "Buff/Debuff" (Controllers and Masterminds) may not be accessible to some of the free/premium players, and thus purchasing a power set for that archetype gains them nothing.

Finally, the number of available options has depleted. When designing a power set, it should be unique in terms of both graphical appearance and secondary effects. Graphics are more flexible: there are obviously tons of possible unique animation effects that have not made an appearance in the game. However, what a power does is harder to make unique, as most power sets in any given category cover the multiple secondary effects in the game (Dark's -To Hit, Ice's Slow & -Rech, Rad's -DEF, etc.).


Personally, I would be fine in getting a brand new, completely graphically unique power set that also does -To Hit, same as Dark. However, from a design stand point, I understand not wanting to take the risk at making one of your older power sets obsolete.

All in all, once Staff, Darkness Control, and BM are out, I sincerely hope a ranged power set is in the queue.

I'd love to see ideas for more ranged sets that aren't just recolored existing sets. We have:
Shoot energy
Shoot darkness
Shoot radiation
Shoot pychic
Shoot pistols
Shoot rifle
Shoot laser gun
Shoot fire
Shoot ice
Shoot lightning
Shoot arrows
Shoot sound

They could possibly start mixing it up with Shoot Bunchastuff and include some powers from all of the above. But otherwise, what's left? Honestly. I'd like to know what people want to shoot at other people that we can't already.