MTeague

Humans are *really* good at cognitive dissonence. Steering FIRMLY clear of any remotely current events, I'll just drop back to literature "I'm just one hundred and one, five months and a day." "I can't believe that!" said Alice. "Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes." Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." as with much satire, there's a fair amount of truth behind it.

I mean, CORE game play? I'll always look at that as "doing Story Arcs". Because if we didn't have Story Arcs, if it was just random street sweeping and badging, I would never have stuck around. The combat is great, the costumes amazing, the feeling of being your character is fantastic. But it really does begin / end with the story for me. Take away the missions, I'd log off and do a lot more single player games, or even check out this wierd game I've heard of called Real Life. Real Life has incredibly good graphics and the best interface ever, but man, it's full of bugs and griefers and you can never get in touch with support staff. And seriously Real Life is long overdue for having a Save/Reload option...

https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Staff_Fighting

My own view? Goldside is better than Redside is better than Blueside. But I do play all three, and I do enjoy all three. I do not care if I solo or team, but I do vastly prefer teams in the 1-44 range (no incarnates).

Even then watch your maps. Some hit harder than others.

I don't care what kind of numbers or performance you can produce by spamming Mind Probe and a Proc-Bomb-Dominate. I simply won't do it. My Fire/Fire/Fire sentinel, uses FIRE to kill things. My Ice/Dark/Dark sentinel, uses the chill of the netherworld to do it. I can still kill things just fine. As fast? Maybe not. Don't care. I do hear you though: That, I agree with wholeheartedly. I do think it's definitely time for procs in general to be reviewed verrrrry carefully, and asked if their current state of use is what they want in the game. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not but the devs realize just what kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth quick-and-dirty changes would make, so they're keeping everything 100% on the QT until they think they have something extremely polished and balanced. I don't know. I don't get to know. I'm not a dev. But there's times I really wonder at the proc-bombing frenzies and hyperfocus on max recharge to feed the proc-bombs, and wonder if that's really a desireable thing.

Actually, considering Flash Freeze does slight PBAE damage and can thusly taken Melee AoE sets, I could see people Proc-Bombing with Flash Freeze. If the damage procs all fire just a hair before the sleep kicks in (sleep IS on a very slight delay), you'd potentially get in free damage and slept mobs. orrrrrrr mobs that are really pissed off at you when someone else wakes them up, lol. Probably proc-bombed more as an Ice/Ice/Ice blaster epic power than as an Ice Controller power, though.

Fair enough. I misunderstood your position / assumed what it was I see in General chat all-too-often. My apologies

I have both the Single-Target and AE Sleeps on my Mind/Kin controller. They are quite useful to me. I acknowledge the more vocal players I find on the forums believe very firmly in a Damage-Is-King, Roving Murderball of eight Soft-Capped Incarnates decked out with expensive IO builds as what you should want for a team. I vehemently disagree with this, find such teams BORING AS HELL. So I rarely team. Most often, I solo. When I do team, it's for particularly challenging content, like First Ward / Night Ward / Number Six arcs, or squads of Rularuu, or a Malta-Extravaganza like World Wide Red. Usually with only 4-6 players on x8 settings, so having an unexpected large group or wave of scripted ambushes come at you can make having controls or a second tank important to keep from being overrun. Mass Hypnosis allows me to indefinitely park TWO extra groups, all by itself, because it recharges so much faster than it's duration. Very little is going to resist sleeps, and if something does, I can still Terrify them to leave them trembling and not attacking while the team beats up the main group of IDF or Arachnos or Animus Arcana or what-have-we. Sleeps are also, along with Immob's, a form of control that Purple Triangles offer ZERO extra protection against. Need to park an AV? (MLTF, etc) Sleep them. Sleeps also detoggle enemies, erasing Force Field Bubbles or Tsoo Hurricanes etc. Do I expect the roving murderball crews to ever appreciate sleeps? No. Do I care? No. I would not want these powers yanked away from me to supply yet another Damage Uber Alles power.

I would love to see an underwater zone done well, and for there to be actual depth to the water around the world in CoX. At the same time, I cringe a little, because .... there's VERY few games that did underwater well. Cinematically, physics of moving around, making it look like an actual part of a biosphere, etc. Subnautica and Bioshock immediately leap to mind, but those are both very tall orders.

People already handwave in Jedi's, Anime characters from mythical kingdom's not mentioned in lore, Space travellers who crash-landed and are stuck in Paragon (saw a Tiger-head character with a backstory naming them a Master of Orion Mrrshan), etc. Not to mention squads of Cowfolk. Go Nuts. No one has to take your backstory seriously who doesn't want to. No one should care if yours and there's disconnect.

The +ToHit from combat teleport can be nice. While I have yet to use it, my understanding is it's possible to setup a keybind so that Combat Teleport will BAMPH you straight to your current target in one keystroke, no need to muddle with the ground-targetting-circle-thingy. I can definitely see tha being useful on melee to cut down time to get to your target and just slice / stab / punch / whack. If you wanted to go completely nuts with the idea, there's also Speed of Sound / Jaunt. Jaunt is only available while Speed of Sound is toggled ON, but depending on builds, you may be ale to sustain that much extra endurance/sec cost. Jaunt + Combat Teleport = I can be anywhere, anytime. Probably overkill to have both? But hey, sometimes Overkill is fun.

Declining an Epic / Patron pool entirely, and taking a 5th pool in it's place is entirely reasonable to me. (for awhile I thought that was in fact already possible....) That's not something I think most people would do lightly. Most of the Epic / Patron pools are pretty darn good. At least on the squishies, I'd have to realllly think about it to decline the armor toggles, and extra goodies that come with it. Caltrops has saved my scrapper any number of times by making them slowly run and say "ouch ouch ouch" instead of attacking me, and i've used it to save teammates in trouble as well, and Exploding Shuriken makes a nice Proc-Bomb. For a tanker, OK, you don't need Conserve Power often, but when you need it you NEED IT. (pesky sappers....), and who doesn't love Laser Beam Eyes? Stalkers chance to grab a Snipe? Dunno about anyone else, but I'd have to think long and hard about about refusing some of these, just to pick up.... Provoke/Intimidate/Unyielding. Or Combat Teleport + Fold Space, etc.

I'm probably being an optimist, but I don't think it would degenerate into that. I think, if it were implemented at all ideally it would be opt-in, or if it was opt-out, have a radio button with choices of "Accept", "Decline", "Opt Out This Character", "Opt Out This Account." people who wanted to duel would likely ingather at some central location. if you're just going about your business and playing the game, you're probably not hanging out at that location for extended periods of time. although, now that I type that, I'm realizing I'm looking at it via story-focused / arc-grinding lenses. if you did more RP and hung out in central location to do RP, maybe you'd find bored duelers trying to get people to duel them if they didn't have anyone else to fight. I don't see anything a dueler would hope to gain by repeatedly sending someone tells. The kind of complete jerk super-griefer who enjoys trying to bait people, I would hope, probably isn't a CoH player in the first place. There's MOBA's and CoD and Fortnite and the like for that. That said, sometimes people are really good at making me question my faith in humanity. Those are days when I take the afternoon to throw the ball for the puppy (and by puppy I mean 2.5 year old dog)

But the important issue is, what kind of cookies are we talking? Toll House? Oreo? Oatmeal Raisin? Peanut Butter cookies? This could make or break people's decision to join.

Right there with you. Every time I say this in chat, I'm always flooded with "there's a minimal FX" option, with people completely ignoring the fact that Ablative Carapace still horks up the full shell around you with ZERO options to decline it. So I could either roll a bio and skip arguably a set defining power.... or put up with a power that I just cannot stand the look of... or I can choose a different armor set. And yea, I know Ablative Carapace is up and gone fast. But I'd still have to see it, All the Darn Time, Every time I use it. That's a deal-breaker. Now, admittedly, there is nothing that says I personally have to approve the looks of all powers. It is not the end of the world if I just .... never create a Bio Armor character.... ever. But I have always wondered why that one power got no Minimal FX when the rest of the set did.

Both of my Sentinels use their T9 secondaries. Fire/FireFire because Rise of the Phoenix is part of my Damage Rotation Baby! Plus concept requires him to be immortal, so having this power is important to me. Cold/Dark/Dark because Soul Transfer, and agian, I like having Self-Rezzes. Is it a wise powergaming choice? Probably not. Are there more meta things I could take. Sure probably. Do I care? No. Now that said, I'm willing to talk turkey on various Self-Rez powers. Giving them an effect that you can use while still alive, makes them more varied and more appealling for players to choose. But don't be taking away my self-rezzes that come with X time of untouchable to retoggle my toggles. I doubt I'm the only person who cares about these.

Snarky never said "nobody should ever run this at +4". or that people who run it at +4 are morally bad people. He said: Which is always a good idea. I don't care if person setting up the group wants an easy-peasy speed run, or a World-On-Molasses Kill All Max Difficulty run with challenge settings that disable enhancements. It's always a good idea to be as specific as you can be when recruiting. What is the team for? What difficulty settings will be in place? Challenge Settings / Badge Goals if any (Master Of, or the like). It avoids so many headaches, both for the recruitees, and for the recruiter. Anyone who's not up for it, just doesn't respond. People who DO join, knowing fully sure what they're up against, are vastly less likely to quit out halfway through.

My poor old-man's eyes wail in agony at black-on-blue, and Dark-Blue-on-Medium-Blue text.

I like that some sets just don't have snipes at all. Period. There should be some variance in toolkits.

I enjoy both my Ice Ice Tanker and my Ice Ice Blaster. I do have an Ice Controller, but I was using Cold on two other characters, so I made him Ice/Poison and named him Venomice (to be pronouced Venomous)

I'm never going to like PvP as a general rule. Too many early scarring experiences with it in Diablo 2 Hardcore. In that game, someone could declare hostility and attack you unexpectedly, and in hardcore mode for Diablo 2, if your character died, even once, for any reason, even internet lag, they STAYED DEAD. Forever. Permadeath. No getting back up. Your Deeds of Valor will be Long Remembered on your gravestone, that's all. D2 had a pack of folks who got their jollies running around being Player-Killers and TRYING to murder the characters you'd invested so much effort in. You very rapidly learned to ONLY play password-protected games, ONLY with people you knew well, and it was a round table discussion among the group if we wanted to admit someone new / hand out the passwords we used. That left a lifetimes worth of "F That" in my reaction to any PvP. That said. A consensual duel? Both parties choosing to accept duel invites, both parties choosing to accept the fight? Sure. Go nuts. I don't care if you duke it out in the Arena, or under the Atlas Statue, or in a Hazard Zone, or the Top of the Talos Hill, or some wierd remote nook in Eden. I But it probably DOES make sense to restrict it to "Not within X many yards of a Trainer or other NPC Contact". Gotta let folks who are entirely uninterested level up, adjust costumes, get their next missions, etc.

Super espectially ones name Stark or Rogers.

I mean is this just while you're trying to debug something? Or would you want this going Alllll the darn time, months on end, long after you got your binds and macros the way you want them?

Perhaps. The cure might be worse than than the poison though.