Amusing GW2 review - light profanity

Nevermind IO sets, plain ol' regular boring IOs were no doubt the single biggest quality of life improvement in CoH's history.

It's true. I'd far rather see an ice drake drop 2 coppers than a 2-copper grey scale. Yes, beasts shouldn't have money, yadda yadda. Why does the vendor want this scale anyway? :P

Especially since they very nearly negate the bag space issue with the "deposit all collectibles" option and the AH being accessible from anywhere. Why do we NEED a bunch of junk in our bags as well?

Seriously, if there'd been a checkbox to say "stop dropping vendor enhancements on me! Period!" I'd have checked that BAMF in a hot second. After I started IO'ing, I never looked back.

I remember asking for exactly a checkbox like that back in the day. We got the reduced enhancement drop-rate instead.

That was one of the things that undermined WoW for me. One of my CoH SGmates kept blathering on about how he could roleplay better in WoW, and then I killed one of those giant chickens and got a glass of ice cold milk as a drop. I have no idea how one roleplays THAT nonsense.

This sort of thing just points out the limitations of Real Life Emulators when they have simplified economies which cause more frustration than anything else.

And that's the problem. Far too many games are designed like glorified D&D campaigns, and far too many developers are all too happy to do nothing more than recreate that. I wouldn't blame Tolkein for the large number of Fantasy RPGs and MMOs. I would blame D&D for setting such a strong RPG framework that even... What? 30? 40 years later? Even decades later, we can't look past it.

And the real kicker is... I don't like D&D. I never have. I don't want my RPGs to be like it. If anything, I want my RPGs to be more like Soul Reaver or Darksiders or, let's face it, the Legend of Zelda that both games take inspiration from. Basically, I'm tired of medieval life simulations with dragons thrown in, or alternatively medieval life simulations hosted in a sci-fi setting. And there are almost no games that do this. Eve might, but that's for people with a stronger constitution than me.

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'm actually a little surprised it wasn't in at launch (given the somewhat similar feature in TOR) but really, that's just the Developers going "Yeah, we know it's kinda dumb. No, we're not sure why we implemented this, but here's an easy fix for it."

Which I could totally understand.

I would do anything for an MMO based on the Dragonstar D&D setting (anything, that is, short of starting my own software company and go look for funding. Obviously. I'm not crazy).

I'd be surprised if they ever added it, since some of the crafting collectibles (gems) are immediately useable.

I'm just happy they're working on a preview function for the TP already, yay!

I was really shocked that DDO didn't use the Dragonlance setting. That was the one I'd have killed to play in.

Eberron was a strange choice. Placing the game in Stormreach, as far from the core Eberron setting was stranger still. I like the Eberron setting, but it doesn't have the brand recognition of Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms.

And it's saying something that the latest update to DDO actually takes your character on an expedition to Forgotten Realms. o.O

Also, I'd reeeeally have liked an entirely urban game set in Sharn. That would have turned the cliché fantasy trope on its' head if anything can.

Well they probably did it so they'd have more room to maneuver. I mean, setting it in Dragonlance would probably have ended up like the more tedious parts of the GW2 cutscene stories, when you've got the heroes of the novels dragging you around/you drag them around stuff. A lesser-known part of the IP certainly gives them more freedom, but I think it hurt them.

Well, that's also why they placed it in Stormreach. So they wouldn't have to coordinate with the developers of the the rest of the setting too much. Xen'drik is the "unexplored" contient, so they had a lot of freedom.

But if you're going out of your way to pick as remote, and as undeveloped, a setting as possible, you could just have made your own, instead of making it not-Eberron.

Exactly! I generally feel that way anytime someone buys the IP to something (like a book) and makes something (like a movie :P) that's so totally unrelated that I wonder why they spent the money on the IP in the first place :P

In Terraria you can not only loot everything you come across, you can loot the dungeon itself. As in, take apart the walls and use it to build your own house.

The ultimate in looting.

OT, but you just got flagged as a VIP on the forum, Feycat -- or at least on my screen you did. Good sign, sunset-of-the-game-wise?

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Not necessarily, i have been flicking from premium to VIP on the forums for the past few months... it seems to stay for a few hours and then forgets that you were actually premium.

Ah ha. And now you and Feycat are white names again. NVM, false alarm!

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

In fairness, in CoH SOs and IOs don't drop into the same inventory, and you will never need to open each individual enemy's inventory and sort through the SOs/DOs/TOs to find the recipes.

Inventory tetris is a core element of the Diablo series, and limited bag space a core element of WoW, that it really isn't in CoH.

The fact that everything goes into the same bags means that in those games the player needs to spend time sorting through the drops after each individual kill that procs items (which is frequently), which in turn puts a limitation on how fast the player can mow through the crowds. It CAN slow you down some in CoH, but you will never be in a situation where you miss out on a Purple recipe because you have too much Salvage. Keeping your inventory cleared can sometimes be annoying, of course.

At least with the games with an inventory, even if your bags *are* full, you are not denied from getting "the uber weapon of pwnage". Yes, you have to mess around, choose what to drop, but you are not *denied* the drop.

In City of Heroes, you just never know what you missed out on due to full bags (which i suppose is a bonus).

Plus side to WoW recently... AoE looting (yeah I know, small things small minds... but it is a QOL improvement)

I agree. That's currently my only complaint about the crafting system.

Good! Experimentation is where I spend most of my time. I'm a level 130 chef and my entire guild gave me all their cooking materials. Even though I have 8-slot bags in all slots I simply don't have the room to hold all these things when I cook.

I think people are are overstating the necessity of these so-called "jumping puzzles." They're only required to reach a few vistas (vistas are just a map-completion type thing) and that's it. They're basically badges in the sense you could ignore them for your entire life and it never matter. You don't have to solve a complicated jumping puzzle to beat the last boss. In fact you don't have to "solve" a "complicated" jumping "puzzle" ever. You just figure out where to fall and do 2-3 jumps and there you are. Honestly, even with the help of a website telling me what to do, I've spent more time per zone collecting badges than getting vistas in any GW2 zone. And that's with flight powers (a lot of badges are annoying to get without flight).

Honestly I just run up to everything and push the "collect all items" button and go about my way. The fact that CoH has multiple inventories is just a formality. If I fill up on recipes I still can't get more recipes. I don't care that I can still get SOs and salvage, I can't get more recipes.

And the vast majority of drops you get are trash in CoH. 100% of all enhancement drops at level 50, and 99% of all recipes and all salvage. Even if I did want to hang onto those things for later, there's no good bank or place to store them. So even if you want to hang onto level 50 salvage there's no practical way to do that in bulk.

And really, my level 15 GW2 character has 52 item slots. And most of those items can be remotely thrown into a collectibles bin at any time. If my inventory in GW2 fills up I just put all collectibles away. If it fills up in CoH I have to go visit a black market (well technically I have /ah but most people do not) or just start deleting things.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

That's true, and believe me when I say that I've gotten annoyed in CoH deleting a bajillion temp-power recipes every time I get near full up.

But inventory tetris is a whole new level of annoyance, subjectively speaking. At least in CoH, loot is pre-sorted for you in a somewhat orderly way. So although you may occasionally wonder whether that spawn you killed with a full recipe tray might've dropped that elusive Apocalypse you were looking for, you don't have to spend a lot of time sorting through your inventory to sell/delete the garbage.

To be clear, I have no direct experience with GW2, so this is only tenuously on-topic, but Sam's comment (I think it was Sam) about inventory tetris struck me because I've been dealing with that very thing in Champions lately. Mousing over a bajillion ambiguous item icons to see what the items do, and not even knowing exactly which items are worth keeping, is like an obnoxious and mandatory mini-game. (An obnoxious mini-game made worse in Champions, for me, because they revamped the whole gear system while I was gone, so I have purple items from two years ago with half the stat budget of current greens ... and I have craptons of both old and new in my bank. Took like two hours the other night to sort through it all, and even now I have a bunch of stuff I'm hording because I'm not sure whether to ditch it or not. Man, can I just play the game?)

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build