Primantis

I played CoX for years (and stopped mainly because of serious issues with the parent company, NCSoft). When CO came out, I was super-excited. Giddy, even. I pre-orderedit, bought a brand-new PC _just_ to be able to play it, and ....... I bought a Lifetime Membership. Before the game even launched. ... Then the Day One patch happened. I don't know if you were able to play during the Headstart, but believe me when I say the game was different. Night-and-day different. That Day One patch cut player power by about 30%, while increasing NPC power by at least 50%. I went from being able to solo spawns of 1-2 LTs and 3-4 mooks .... to faceplanting if there were more than 3 enemies of ANY power level. Same character. Same enemy faction/group. Same bloody block in the city, even. ... But I did my best, and stuck with it for as long as I could stomach it. Even when, disaster of disasters, CO went "free to play". Hell, I was the guy who first championed the idea of giving the "set in stone" Archetypes one or two "pick from this short list" power options, in order to give free players a taste of Freeform's possibilities. Yeah, I went through a similar experience, except no lifetime subscription. I still was pretty angry that we got Emmerted on day one. Also, a specific detail about the day one nerfs was that the defensive passives were nerfed harder than everything else. I remember ultimately playing a powered armor/munitions character and killing everything with proximity mines just to hit 40 before they nerfed that too. Yup, I was there as well and went thru similar things. Hell I even abused Proximity Mines to get to 40 as well! I knew they were going to be nerfed because they were just too damned good. Sure enough they were (and it was probably a good call, there was little reason to use any other attack ). Although I don't remember if they were nerfed just enough or if they over did it.. I am assuming they sledge hammered them harder than they should have. Also to be fair to the day-one patch. Defensive passives were over performing. There was very little reason to take an offensive passive at all. One made you nearly unkillable, the other made you do 10% more damage. Now they did not go about doing it in the correct fashion, but some balance in the passives was sorely needed iirc. And as mentioned, juicing up all the mobs just added insult to injury. Which leads me to another problem I had with the game's design. Attacks, or lack of recharge on most attacks. It seemed to me that having more than 2-3 attacks was a waste. Most of them had no CD so unless they had some extra effect you were better off choosing a heavy hitter or two then just swamping the rest of your power choices with buffs and stuff. It'd be like if Ice Blast had no recharge on any of its powers. What would you do? Probably level high enough to grab BiB, then respec out all the other single target attack powers because why would you do anything other than spam BiB? Might keep Freeze Ray around though cuz its pretty boss too. (Exemping not-inclusive, as there was no exemping in CO XD) I remember watching heroes spam that game's version of KO:Blow, and it was the goofiest looking shit I've ever seen in my life.

Taking, slotting, and using my secondary powers as a Defender!

Wow...just Wow...If Champions can still be online with that little support, it's still hard to believe that NCSoft ever pulled the plug on this... The secret is in the details! Those 127 people are the 127 people who spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month in the cash shop! This patch hit like GDN and ED combined. On day one! It was a death kneel and imo it spelled doom for the game right out of the gate. It was so bad that people with lifetime subs demanded refunds (and in some cases were granted them). We all felt like we were bait-and-switched. After that it was still nerf after nerf and change after change. No one was safe! It turns out a totally free-for-all power system just leads to tons of cherry picking and is a balance nightmare. CoH really dodged that bullet.

Wow...just Wow...If Champions can still be online with that little support, it's still hard to believe that NCSoft ever pulled the plug on this... The secret is in the details! Those 127 people are the 127 people who spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month in the cash shop!

Aye the precedent that it sets is more profound than the actual nerf/bug fix. However they have been shown to listen to and consider feedback on the Beta server forums. At least in regards to the snipe changes. Doing a lot of back pedaling after much public outcry. So I am hopeful that this was an oversight or an outlier, and that they might still change it back in the future. So they might not be as "blindly nerfing" as people seem to think.. When was this change put into place anyway? Was it put into place on the private SCORE servers or sometime after HC's launch? -Edit I just saw the GM response above me. Seems the 'fix' isn't leaving but they are open to tweaking SS in other ways to make up for it! So give em that feedback.

This was exactly my experience. I'm baffled as to why he thinks more classes were solo friendly than that. Even the solo friendly ones took a lot more care than anything in CoH. Or any modern MMO. One small slip could turn a quad kiting druid into a dead druid FAST. A fear kiting necromancer whose victim ran in the wrong direction could equal a nasty train fast. Another MMO of the era, FFXI was very similar. The only class that could solo even-level mobs worth a darn was the Beast Master. And that was only because you could tame other mobs and pit them against each other. So it was just you watching two mobs duke it out for 1-3 minutes a battle. It was risky, (imo boring) and tedious. If you died, generally no one was around to raise you (raising refunded half of your XP loss), so you had to carry counter measures for that. And even then, their xp generally paled to what a good team got, and teams generally did *not* want a Beast Master on their roster. There were some other combos that could take out lower level mobs that still gave XP (Rdm/Nin comes to mind). But much like in EQ it was slow, tedious, full of risk and not really worth the payoff. You're just better of farming for gil or something while you LFG. Also if you died you lost xp and could de-level, losing hours worth of XP. I recall EQ having a pretty steep death toll too? CoH's death toll (even old school debt) is a walk in the park compared to other MMOs around the same era. This all of course was back during its "prime" in the mid-late 2000s. I think it's all changed up now. Wow...just Wow...If Champions can still be online with that little support, it's still hard to believe that NCSoft ever pulled the plug on this... I still believe that NCsoft didn't understand the attraction of the game to its players, and the way that the game was structured, there was no way for them to turn the Paragon Store into the sort of microtransaction-driven cash machine that their own MMOs were -- most of the unlocks were account-wide, and the ones that weren't were not locked to individual characters, allowing them to be traded for in-game currency. And the play style doesn't fit well for the standard Asian MMO structure -- you could log into the game and play solo or with teams put together on the fly with almost any combination of characters, while Asian MMOs have, virtually from inception, been heavily group-centric, where you would go down to the bang (internet cafe) with your friends and all log in and play together sitting right next to each other. Look at how badly "City of Hero" flopped in Korea despite all of the regionalization and art intended to appeal to the Korean market. And then there were the attempts by Paragon Studios to buy themselves out from under NCsoft, instead of recognizing how much better off they were under NCsoft's enlightened management (and all of the 'defer to authority' baked into Korean management practices). I am convinced that CoH could have, at the very least, gotten by in Maintenance mode and still made a tidy profit.

I don't remember when it was introduced.. But I believe the general idea was to let players push NPCs *cough* Mastermind Minions *cough* out of the way. It sadly had a double-edged effect. IIRC, before the change minions could totally body block you from going through small passageways and doors.. At least now you can try to nudge them aside and get through. Next time you're with a MM try to walk through their herd of minions. You'll notice they fan out and clear way for you. That didn't used to happen before the collision change, as far as I can remember. But now of course they can push us back and we push each other around too xD

I remember being impressed the first time I saw CoT in their caves. "Wow this is the best! I wish we could fight these things in caves all the time!" How times have changed...

To be fair, i still get this. I got it the other night on my Cold Domination defender. "Hey, do you heal?" "Nope" *Everyone standing by the mission door gets a big yellow exclamation point above their head, turns your direction and makes that MGS alert sound effect* Later on the Pure Emp whines that she's bored cuz no one is dying <.< -Or further back, when I was playing a *Time Defender* "You have a heal, but we need another Defender with more heals.. and less attacks.. Let me see who else I can invite" Strangely enough both teams ended up pretty decent xD

You never know. Take away Fury and see if Brutes are still as beloved. On the flip side, lets say we give Sentinels their own tweaked version of Fury, or even Domination. Inherent can go a long way.

Which is exactly why everyone is against it. You're handing us magic beans and telling us it will make the game better! But first you need to apparently nerf the heck out of defense. We need to see them fully grown and functional! Then you use "diversify builds" as your reasoning. It sounds like ED 2.0! Also keep in mind the effects this would have on various debuffs and mezzes. Defense is gonna be even more easily debuffed now since we're dodging less. And my Defense-based squishies are going to be mezzed even more now. Both are things that a universal damage-nerf to Mobs wouldn't quite compensate for. While I am very opposed to this suggestion, I am still intrigued with what kind of numbers you come up with and what you're complete plan would be.

For Bean Bag you could have a Stunning version and a version that applies a hold instead. Heck I wouldn't be against giving all KB powers a KD alternative either. Same exact power, just lower mag KB so its all KD. Makes those IO's a bit redundant though xD

A SS/Inv Brute must have [Footstomped] their dog at some point in their childhood.

Honestly I thought it looked worse. From a technical aspect it was superior. The models were higher poly, better textures and they had basic face expressions (and fingers!) I just did not like the overall art design of the game. Everyone looked too goofy. I also found the animations a step back from CoH's. In CoH animations have a lot of weight and windup, with nice payoffs. CO was just spastic and awkward feeling in the animations department. And that likely is due to the fact that each one needs to be able to be chained with any other animation. Sword swing to calling a robot? Sure! Firing a machine gun then immediately using a chainsaw mounted on your wrist? Go for it. Every combat ability has to be usable with no delays with every other combat ability. And they all need to be interruptible so you can block. This is a very good point! CoH devs had at least some idea of what possible animations would be chained from what, so they could prepare for it. CoH animations were also "all or nothing", as in the entire body animated specifically for each animation. IIRC CO had their top and bottom halves independent of one another animation wise. Thats why you could run around while you shot etc. Which worked great in gameplay, but once again proved to look goofy at times.

Any build you don't enjoy is the worst build.

Are the debuffs resisted at all? If so, that makes them even more pitiful when you figure they might get slashed by 10-50% depending on Mob level and debuff resistances (Resistance resists Resistance debuffs, etc)

This argument always rang hollow for me. It is incredibly rare for enemies to stack enough mezzes on you to overcome toggle mez protection from a primary or secondary set, so click mez protection being stackable just doesn’t seem like a real advantage. And it’s still useless against powers like Ghost Widow’s Soul Storm, because those mezzes are intentionally overpowered to make them nearly impossible to resist. On top of that, click mezzes use up your only auto-exec power, they can go off unexpectedly and root you when you’re trying to escape, and if you get real bad Scrapperlock you can queue up too many attacks, preventing it from going off and leaving you mezzable. So what, practically, are we getting out of click mez protections to justify those downsides and extra slots they need to achieve parity with their toggle counterparts? Don't they let you stack up Defense Debuff Resistance though?

I'd love this. That was easily my favorite sub forum back on Live.. Especially before they "nerfed" it (By disallowing all talk of video games not owned/operated by NCSoft)

Honestly I thought it looked worse. From a technical aspect it was superior. The models were higher poly, better textures and they had basic face expressions (and fingers!) I just did not like the overall art design of the game. Everyone looked too goofy. I also found the animations a step back from CoH's. In CoH animations have a lot of weight and windup, with nice payoffs. CO was just spastic and awkward feeling in the animations department.

It's also seen in SoA You can take the basic Venom Grenade, or the Crab Spider Venom grenade. But not both. Granted it is an Epic AT so it might be coded differently, I dunno. - I do like this idea! It could be used in all sorts of ways too. Maybe give different versions of BUs (Vanilla and one that lasts longer but gives a smaller buff?) or different damage types to sets etc. "Do you want your Cosmic Burst to do Fire damage? Then get Cosmic Scorch!"

CC can be a pain in the butt at times for sure, but there are ways to mitigate its impact. First and foremost, learn what mobs are doing the CC and either CC them as your opener (assuming the sets you're playing with have such an option), or see if you can overwhelm the offending mob with raw damage such as with a snipe power (if available). Failing either of those, you can simply keep Break Free inspirations handy and pop them before engaging those foes that like to CC you. Those insps will render you immune to CC for a short while. Next, if you are a Blaster and can manage the inf necessary or have the merits available, there is a Blaster specific enhancement set called Defiant Barrage. One of the enhancements in this set is very valuable. It basically makes the attack you slot it in stack a status protection buff on you. You could slot this enhancement into one of your tier one or tier 2 attacks (the ones you can still activate when you get cc'd) and stack some status protection on yourself. Ideally you'd get a stack or two up before any of the enemies reacted with CC so you'd be protected. Another available option is the Rune of Protection power from the Sorcery pool. This power gives you status protection and some resistance to all damage. It has a very long recharge time but can be used preemptively to render yourself immune to CC and resistant to damage when engaging those CC happy enemies. Hopefully some of this info helps. Or if a person is rolling in Inf, they can purchase the Defense Booster at the P2W vendor. Giving you mez protection and some spare defense points! It ain't cheap though xD

I agree with this! I'd also like to chime in (since it would serve as a partial fix) that the mob "Run away!" mechanic is, imo, one of the single most annoying things in this game. I would love for it to be severely reduced/restricted or just gotten rid of. Maybe keep it in only very specific situations (Grey cons, you're out-of-range and they can't reach you, etc) But that's just my 2 cents.

Also, a word for the wise.. When someone in-game is whining about how much they hate ED, and how it causes them to under perform... It's not what you think! https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Enhancement_Diversification

Much Hype!!! Much Sad :CCC I am glad to see you reverse the snipe range change; that will make things more palatable imo!

That's definitely a valid point, but I don't think it'd be that terrible. Wouldn't it be fun to kill level 50 skulls sometime? ;D Or maybe a simpler change would be to make it so that when you complete the Ouro arc you keep the relationship level with the contact. At least then it'd make it feel somewhat more integrated into the game, as you'd have a permanent change in the zone after you're done in Ouro. Alternatively they could still give you level-appropriate factions. So if you're level 50 running Scanner missions in Steel you'd still get Carnies and Malta etc.