"Minimal FX" option for all "armor" powersets

I find it kind of odd that some "armor" power sets, like Invulnerability, have a "Minimal FX" option in the power customization menu at the tailor, but others, like Energy Aura, don't. I really think this ought to be an option for all of them.

Aside from the fact that some of these armor PSs tend to almost completely hide my character (Dark Armor, I'm looking at you), they also introduce a bunch of unwanted lag. On some of my brutes and scrappers I'm forced to drop the "Graphics Quality" slider all the way down to "Minimum" just to avoid having to play at an annoyingly low FPS. I already play most of the time with the slider set to "Performance" (one step above Minimum).

Then there's the "aesthetics" issue. As mentioned, some of these FX effectively hide my character from me. This is especially bad on my main villain, who has dark skin, wears a dark costume, and has the Dark Armor power set ... in the Rogue Isles where it seems to be night or severely overcast all the time. I can't enjoy this character's appearance at all. While this is improved, along with performance, by setting the Graphics Quality slider to "Minimum", the "Minimum" setting also uglifies and ruinates the appearance of my characters' costumes, something I put a lot of time and thought into designing. I realize it's probably asking something that would require a complete engine rewrite, but it would be awesome if the Graphics Quality slider would simply affect everything except the character model and the costume attached to it. Maybe have a completely separate slider for "Model/Character Quality". When I'm in a mission I personally don't care at all about how detailed my surroundings are, since I'm just running past it most of the time. But I'm looking at my character all of the time, and I'd like him/her to look good. So the ability to "turn down" the environmental, terrain, and power set effects, while leaving my character and costume "turned up" would be awesome.

But in the meantime, I'd settle for that "Minimal FX" option at the tailor.

The minimal FX option in power customisation isn't a performance thing. You can't really have fire armor with no fire or dark armor with no darkness, they don't work conceptually without it. You can however be invulnerable without glowing. There's no inherent link between the two, hence the option to not glow.

That said however, something you might find useful. And I say might because I've never tried it myself - if you enable the option to suppress effects when the camera is close to the player, there's a slash command to set the distance the game considers as 'close'. If you set it to something huge then poof, no effects. Type /suppressCloseFxDist in chat followed by a number to set the distance. Just keep doing it with bigger and bigger numbers until the effects disappear.

I get what you're saying about "they don't work conceptually without it" (though in the case of Energy Aura, you could argue that "energy" can easily be invisible) — I'm not so much looking to turn the FX off; rather, I'd like to just tone them down a bit. I've had some luck in that regard by going into the advanced settings and lowering the Particle Count to a very low value, but that has some unpredictable effects. A low number will get a melee character's defensive auras down to a nice performance/aesthetics balance, but it also has a direct, negative effect on my blasters' powers, i.e. rendering them very "wimpy" looking, and making powers like Fire Sword or Ice Sword disappear entirely. I end up having to readjust the setting on a character-by-character basis.

I'll try out the slash command you suggested, though. Seems I tried that once before and it didn't work, but I don't know if maybe the person who suggested it gave me the wrong command, or maybe there's a glitch in the Mac version (which I have) that makes it work incorrectly. Can't hurt to try again, though.

Just because I'm infused with the essence of the Netherworld doesn't mean that I'm oozing darkity-darkness all over the place.
Just because my body is so hot that I'm resistant to heat and even burn those that get close doesn't mean that I'm on fire.
Just because my body stores a high electrical charge doesn't mean that I'm arcing all over the place.
If my Stone tank is already made out of rock, why do I need to stick more rocks to myself to be protected?

If I do want to have one of those effects, I may want to only run one or two of the graphical effects - when a dark or fire armor character turns on all their auras, you can't see any of them clearly, let alone the character underneath.

And, honestly, a lot of the VFX on the old powersets look like crap. Instead of asking them to waste artist time on redoing all the auras, why not have them just add a "No FX" option and let me use Omega or Bio-Plasma, instead of being awash in 8-year-old graphics that don't even look like fire?

I agree with the OP's suggestion 100%. There's no reason to be forced into the graphics on most of the toggles in the elemenntal sets (Icicles from Ice armor being the only one I can think of that should be kept), and several reasons to allow us to turn them off if we want to.

I'm not arguing against this idea, but can't you tone down most of these by using darker/lighter colors? I minimized how EnAura looks by using either the darkest or lightest colors on two characters already.

I'm of a mixed opinion on this. On the one hand, conceptually, it just seems like certain armors need certain visuals. It's "fire" armor, after all, not "heat" armor. On the other, I can certainly see the lack of desire to have a massive cluster of different effects covering the body, which a lot of the elemental looks have.

The "right" thing to do in my mind would be to require at least one mandatory FX power from the elemental armor sets, but to let all the rest be turned off, though I'm not sure that's technically feasible anyway.

I can agree with the OP, and I do see some of the counterpoint, but honestly, since this would open up MORE concepts, I'm all for it.
The on thing I do think might be considered is that the DAMAGE auras remain visible, since this is supposed to be a case of your character releasing these energies in a damaging way to people close enough to you (but not touching you).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Fire Armor without Fire or heat could still make sense.

You're fairly tough, can heal yourself, damage people around you, can extract energy from those around you and tend to explosively revive yourself.

Could be radiation-based, generic magic, or a nano-tech effect or whatever you want it to be.

(Apart from the fact you're visually on fire)

another reason I would like to support this is because I know some friends with sensitive vision, visual effects from fiery aura tend to cause them problems unless they're zoomed out as far as possible, and that is not always useful in more confined maps.
So we have health reasons to implement this too.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.