Was there going to be an announcement about power pools?

You know I not really speaking up on a lot of issues but this is one I feel very highly about.

Devs who reading this please not nerf hasten it not changed since beta going to live when game start. It is crucial tool for many user and those who dislike it are entitled not to taking it. I always use hasten because I enjoy its quickness and in Incarnate Trials sometimes when heals are necessary if hasten is not there to be clicked certain catastrophes might happen. I ask for this power not to being touched. Thank you!

No one is touching hasten

We don't know what the plans are for power pools but they hinted at customization for the graphics and adding 5th powers (to which, we don't know, possibly all remaining pools). That's all that's been said, there hasn't been so much as a hint about anything happening with hasten.

Sometime during my first couple of months in City of Heroes, I came to the realization that, creatively speaking, this isn't just a game about super heroes. It is also a game about super powers. Now, before you confuse me with Captain Obvious, I would like to remind you that some players, in practice, do not feel this way. They completely differentiate their heroes from their powers, almost as if one was made without any prior conceptual knowledge of the other.

I'm not talking about about players who seem to have pressed the random button in the costume creator. I'm talking about the natural dual pistols blaster standing next to you at Wentworth's who looks like he put a lot of effort into his character, who possesses no fire powers and whose bio says he's just a regular Joe--and yet...he's standing there with his hands on fire, completely nonchalant about it. That is nothing short of a complete creative separation of one's character from one's powers. And it's not good enough for me. So a couple of years ago, I respecified all of my characters to remove hasten, except for one who actually does have fiery fists. I waited too long for a game world like this to make such creative compromises.

Hehe, Dr Harmony, just for the record, I avoid using inspirations other than greens and blues due to the visual effects, I do not use the Leadership Pool for the same reason and I also do not take Hasten unless it calls for it conceptually (visually and possibly power-concept-wise).

Just my preferences.

Frankly... I hate the visuals on inspirations and the Leadership Pools.
I started a thread about them and the suggestion to make them hidden per user option... and I was really surprised how many people felt the same way!
Especially for screenshots... how many great shots are ruined by purple shield sprites and such spinning around the character??

Bah... we hateses them... take them away!!

Fair enough, Cap, and thanks for taking the time to explain your point of view.

I play the game pretty much for the same reasons as you, and have often avoided taking mechanically sound powers because they look wrong.

Fire Swords, Ice and Earth Armor, and so on, are way too visually intrusive for me to take without a very good in character reason to do so.

I even skipped mez protection on my non-powered MA/SR stalker just to get that sense of real danger that she should have.

For Dr Harmony herself (think Firestorm from JLA), I did take Hasten. It allowed me to pursue both recharge and defence bonuses and achieve perma-Domination, all of which were quite important to my character concept. She's invulenrable, and this feeds back into her overconfident personality. The additional flashes of light around her hands weren't a deal breaker, and I'd hate to think that someone saw this as "nothing short of a complete creative separation of one's character from one's powers".

Roll on the day we get to choose what our powers look like more, and can turn off inspiration effects. Till then, lets not look down our noses at each other for where we each draw the line.

On my AR/Sonic Corruptor I don't always use hasten on the SO build, because the crash, and the end usage is too much. I only use Hasten when I need to use it.

Hasten I think is useful even with the crash, but those saying that Hasten is a must have may be looking at the point of view of it without the end crash.

Hasten with enough recharge to avoid the crash is good, but not the norm.

Now as for Stealth and Invisibility...

I would prefer Invisibility to become the combat stealth and stealth replaced with another power.

Hasten is a very good power and sometimes a cornerstone of a build *if* that build is designed to run and utilize Hasten well. However, blind application of the power is not only not always beneficial, but often has a negative effect on your overall performance.

The most basic and obvious example is the mid-level melee combatant who has Hasten on Auto-Cast and blows through his attack chain so quickly that he's too winded to fight the next. Sure he go through 1 or 2 spawns very quickly, but the time he spends resting is going to give the other non-hasten melee time to catch up. Worse, Hasten catches you low on endurance, shuts down all your toggles, and gives the boss a nice opportunity to remind you what the hospital looks like.

That said, I'm definitely not promoting the idea that Hasten is always *bad* either, even if it's going to bottom out your endurance. For example, Controllers and similar AT's that have very powerful, long recast powers will greatly benefit from popping Hasten after their use to bring them back faster. A melee combatant in a desperate situation may prefer to pop Hasten and quickly down an opponent to running back from the hospital with a fresh tray of inspirations.

The point I'm trying to make is that Hasten is not a lightning bolt sticker that you put on the side of your toy car and that makes it go faster. It is not always better to have Hasten regardless of the situation. Hasten is a tool, like any other power in the game, and not using it responsibly is going to get you killed.

On the subject of DPS, which I only bring up because someone mentioned using Hasten to drop less powerful attacks, I just want to point out that there is a "flaw" in the way we think damage works in this game that is largely a result of our reducing damage to an average based around second long intervals. There is, in this game, a large amount of what I like to call "overkill" that occurs.

You see, when "you" first started playing "you" used to do this thing where you would start off with your most powerful attack, and then finish off the enemy with brawl or some other light attack. The logic behind this was simple; You didn't want to waste your heavy hitting attacks on an enemy with barely any HP left. It was endurance management, it was damage management, it was smart.

The problem is, we stop doing this at high levels when endurance stops being a problem. We'll just cycle through our attack chain as quickly as possible because we believe this is how we're going to achieve the most damage, and it really isn't. Attack Chains are somewhat inefficient for things without a great amount of hit-points such as arch-villians or giant monsters because the amount of damage that they deal is greatly excessive to the amount of damage your average boss requires to put down.

In an even MORE nit-picky and top-performance-oriented world we would do things like figure out how much HP the boss has, and then figure out what attacks are needed to take him down in the smallest amount of time possible.

For example, I once did some analysis between Corruptor and Defender in an attempt to figure out which one did more damage, and while the results where, for the most part, predictable with the Corruptor coming out on top, the damage difference during normal play is still not really significant. What was basically happening (and these arent' the numbers I was using, but I'm just trying to make a point real quick) is that you'd have a case where the Enemy has roughly 300 HP, your Corruptor does an average of 120 damage per attack, and your Defender does an average of 100 damage per attack. While the Corruptor does a total of 360 damage after using 3 attacks, the Defender is still killing the enemy in the same amount of time because you only NEEDED 300 damage to defeat the enemy. The only time where a Corruptor noticeably pulls ahead are during Arch-Villain fights where the extra damage they are doing is actually being used.

All of this said, It's not really a big, game-altering deal, and I think most people are content to throw bosses into the pool of "dies so quick I don't care about doing this efficiently." Still, I think it's useful to be aware of it when you're agonizing over squeezing out 10 more damage per second how much you are actually gaining for your efforts to do that.

If they fix APP Melt Armor I will do a little happy dance.
*continues concentrating on APP Melt Armor*