MTeague

You are not wrong lol. I went on a wild "pretend I had infinite time, what could we do with this?" brainstorming session. I still like my idea better (shocker, 🙂), but I would probably fall out of my chair if anything remotely like it were implemented. It's just... But my favorite power is Confuse.... most people wouldn't even call that an "attack" at all. That's why I'd rather a roll-your-own point-based system. But.... like i said, I would have zero expectations to ever REALLY see that produced and useable. I wasn't kidding on the "nobody will ever get this right on the first try, and how do you handle powers that already exist?" Cause I could see that kind of "we have to change something about the point system, everybody has to redo their powers now" really really would piss a lot of people off. And there's probably something to be said for keeping it more controlled and limited choice menu (if in fact, the devs ever chose to provide any kind of player-created-power to ANY degree... which they might not....). 25 years of gaming has shown me players will always always always ALWAYS find a way to exploit any new lever they are given in ways the developers never planned on. And my idea would give them a bazillion levers to fiddle with 😱

Now I'm curious. Which of these corresponds to Khalisti Wharf?

I agree that I would not expect action on this in the foreseeable future. and I do mean, potentially not for years. That said, this is the kind of idea that would take an awful lot of kicking around to make it work, so I see no harm in a theorectical "how would we make this work"? sense We'd just have to understand this is right up there with sitting around a table drinking beers and brainstorming, but not really getting up expectations for a deliverable. I do think any player-created signature power would need to be slottable. I also like the idea of having X many "Points" to add effects to your power with, and no more. And I think slotting could be reasonably controlled either by having the types of IO's it can take be an extra point cost to your power. Say for example, we start with a custom attack. I choose to name it, "KLONK!". Possibly some naming filters in place so no one goes into offensive territory, but either way, for purposes of this discussion, assume "KLONK!" was an acceptable display name. I spend 1 point to make it a Melee attack. I choose a War Mace animation with an overhead whack. (no points for animation selection) I choose to spend 1 point making it do Smashing damage I choose to spend 1 point making it do KnockDOWN I choose to spend 1 point giving a Stun effect. (whether it was only a chance of stun, and what the exact magnitude would be, would be a balance issue. Guaranteed stuns cost more points, higher magnitude stuns cost more points. Maybe make it not even possible to have too high of a magntitude no matter HOW many points I spend if there's concerns of it trivializing a fight.) Because I made it a melee attack, I could CHOOSE to spend another point to let it take Melee sets. But I'd have to spend a point on it. And that's a point I DON'T get to spend making it hit harder, or being more accurate, or being a cone attack, or having faster recharge, etc. Because I gave it a Knock effect, I could CHOOSE to spend another point to let it take Knockback sets. Because I gave it a Stun effect, I could CHOOSE to spend another point to let it take Stun effects. Now if I want it to hit extra hard, maybe I omit the KnockDown effect, don't let it take Stun sets, and accept a higher recharge and weaker accuracy. And yes, this means an attack that can take lots of sets would have a lower base damage. Given... the way procs work.... developers would need to consider if they'd want to let you make a custom Proc Monster power this way, or if they'd want to give such custom powers a hardcoded extra-low chance for procs to function. I hold no opinion on what that answer should be. But if I was a developer for it, it would be the first thing I'd raise as a potential issue if we let people create tehir own custom 16 second recharging attack that can take six different damage procs. If the designers said that was acceptable, hey cool. But I'd feel obligated to air it and make sure it was discussed and it didn't catch anyone by surprise later. How many points available per power? Would take some trial and error to get a result that most people agree with (gonna say off the bat 100% satisfaction is a pipe dream...) How many points should various selections cost? Same. Should some selections cost more vs less? maybe To-Hit debuffs should cost more points than Knockback? Again, whoooole lots of trial and error. Should selections cost MORE points for an AE power vs a single target power? I'd say yes, but again, design question for how much power do you want to be achievable here. Now another thing they'd have to wrestle with.... how do you rebalance these powers once they're "In the Wild"? Because the odds of getting this right on teh first go is right up tehre with me winning Powerball. Say we magically got this tomorrow, AND, every bit as magically, there were no bugs. But, after seeing it in action the developers decided, jeez, this is really too much. Everyone is using a particular combo effects that's just completely OP. We need to trim it down some. If you decide the points costs need to be adjusted, or if you decide to reduce the total number of points available to create a power with.... what about powers that were already created? Do you take them away in a patch and force players to redesign them, refunding any slotted enhancements to inventory or email? Even if you don't plan on that coming up anytime soon, there should be an agreed upon plan for "This is how we'd have to handle it if it ever comes up." Because there would be all kinds of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Also maybe have your Archtype influence point costs: Holds, etc only available to Controllers and Doms? or serious markup for anyone else? Raw damage cheaper for blasters and scrappers and stalkers? secondary effects cheaper for support classes? might keep it from degenerating into everyone choosing same power and help keep AT based flavors

Hm... "Self Control".... is that a new powerset for Controllers and Dominators?

Honestly I'm not sure how much if any the Hard Shells would even need to change. A bit around the jawline, perhaps. Once you're armored up enough, there's very little left to visually indicate if the person inside the armor is male or female. Even on the most.... endowed... female, practical armor wouldn't have gender-specific curves. (Despite a vast array of fantasy games that add them anyway....) Agreed 100% on PsiCops and PPD Awakened and the like.

If merits were to be changed to a pool across the account (not per character), I would want the max allowed merits raised. (unless it's already in the millions...)

As have been pointed out, there are female cops who are hostages you rescue. And there are female cops who are contacts (at least 1 in Skyway City for sure). Now, whether that model is compatible with the existing animations, so that you could face them in Mayhem Missions and have them shoot at you, or toss flashbangs at you, I don't know. It's certainly not a problem for female longbow. However, by all accounts, the internal code for City of Heroes is.... charitably speaking... a mess. I give the Homecoming Devs many props for trying to actually go in an refactor the guts of it to make it more supportable for the long haul.

a) thank you for being willing to change your mind instead of stubbornly holding onto your original opinion in the face of any and all arguments to the contrary. b) it IS true that sometimes you can post stuff for a very low price so that it moves NOW, and it gets snapped up by a lowball bit that annoys the heck out of you as you say to yourself "Really? all 12,000 bidders were bidding 1000 or less?? grumblegrumblegrumble". Be under no illusions. That WILL happen. But it's relatively rare, and if you're posting lots of stuff for sale, it's generally a very acceptable price of doing business to move more stuff faster.

I am a map-clearing-fool on my stalkers. I almost never ghost to the target and surgically take them out. I lay waste to almost the entire map. It's very possible, you open with an alpha-gank and cutting down the remaining minions is not difficult. Once you get some decent AE's you may prefer to open with the AE's instead of AS, and just use AS when it gets the wonderful lovely orange circle. @ranster44: you said your secondaries are /Nin and /SR. Like any defense-based sets, you'll have taken some hard punches along the way to get to the teens. You will find some aggravation because you probably just can't amass enough defense to have things reliably miss you as much as you'd like. For /Nin, I would definitely take Caltrops, because it makes everything in melee stop attacking you and slowly run out ,and you get Free Hits in the meantime. Definitely handy to have caltrops keybound for a quick release to buy yourself some time. Most importantly, keep a few purple inspirations stocked. popping a couple Luck's will take you from "dang this guy hurts" to "bwhahahaha, nothing of this world can touch me!" When you get being able to slot multiple lvl 25+ SO's or IO's into your defense powers, that's when you really feel the strength of your respective sets. But for first 20 odd levels, for both my stalkers and scrappers, I usually leave my secondary powers with only the default slot, and just get my first few attacks like 4 slots each, so I can give them a good mix of acc and dam and endurance reduction.

A non-infinite quantity in the billions or trillions is ... mighty close to effectively infinite when you're dealing with a player base in the thousands. I have zero fear that anything would actually become unavailable. I do think player-stocked inventory might become unavailable, but that's a different beast.

I doubt GM's did it by hand the first time or an ongoing basis. I'm sure they have a Loop or SQL Query they run to identify salvage with seeded inventory less than X, X-Actual = Z, add Z much more stock at seeded price to bring it back up to their preferred levels. Whether they truly do this every 24 hours or 1xWeek or even 1xMonth is irrelevant. They can do it, and if salvage levels dropped to a level they considered to be threatening the stablity of the game, thye would act. Doesn't necessarily mean they'd act to preserve what player-posted pricing has been... maybe every so often I'd need to pay 10,000 for a piece of common salvage. Would I blink a few times in disbelief at first? Sure. Would it really be anything even remotely approaching a problem as long as there is still some available? No.

I don't object to a refusal option existing. I'd never use it, but really, what is the difference between an annoyed player right now every so often taking time to look at their salvage and delete stacks of white salvage vs a happier player having an auto-refuse option?

Yep. A year ago I watched The Princess Bride with someone who had never see it before. I thought they'd love it, and they did, but she was also "OMG, Buttercup is completely USELESS! She's pathetic, why is Wesley even trying to save her??" And well, she wasn't wrong lol. But that was the norm of the times when the movie was made. Doesn't mean we should keep it going forward, but we do all need to keep in mind, "When was this produced?"

Warriors I could see going either way. I could definitely see X percent of them sticking with Sparta and historical facts of ancient Greece. OTOH, toss in a Diana like amazon, and they would absolutely respect their strength and prowess. I do think warriors would probably make sense for it be a less-than-50/50 ratio for reasons like this. Maybe 1 in 4 female or something. The Outcasts though absolutely. Mutant powers are all genetics and would presumably manifest in approximately equal numbers. Not just that. There was likely also a factor of discomfort at portraying women as criminals.

I also get very nostalgic for it. Back in EverQuest, crossing from Freeport to Qeynos to Erudin on a lvl 14 Enchanter was ... daunting. Less so because I had Bind and Gate and Invisibility, but it was gonna take me at least an hour, probably more, and I might end up doing a few corpse runs on the way. It really made the world FEEL more epic in size. And I definitely remember hanging out with people at the docks waiting for Boats and chatting with them on the boat travel, because what else were you gonna do? Was that all cynically put in place to keep us logged in longer? Probably, though lets face it, most MMO players log CRAZY amounts of hours anyway, and did even after they had friends who could teleport them across the world. I definitely remember the MMO worlds feeling more vast, feeling more worthy of being explored, and taking joy in finding nooks and crannies I discovered for the first time before instant ports and bamph-there-now became the norm. You could argue some of it was also that I was a more naive gamer fresh into MMO's for the first time, and there is a kind of "you can never go home again" effect in play. But I don't think so. Because I still enjoy travelling around single player games, like Fallout series, or the Elder Scrolls series, and finding new things off the beaten path, and I still enjoy leaping around paragon city and spotting plaques I don't remember seeing and reading the lore as I go. Teams have no patience for that, but solo it's all still there, if you take the time to smell the roses.

Hm. Well I've spent less time in Dark Astoria. They only had males in the classic Steel Canyon, etc zones

Groups that hire exactly one sex: PPD Outcasts Tsoo Family Knives of Artemis Council 5th Column probably lots more

A heall.... that ... chains.... oh god... the flashbacks... I can't stop.... (we were not by any means a top-ranking guild, not even close, but I still remember this fight for how narrow the margin of victory was.... glad Kas still has the video up)

Clearly what we need is a giant Bioshock style underwater city and sprawling complex of underwater tunnels connecting Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. And underwater 3D zones and combat and *is roundly pummelled into submission by players who have seen underwater zones cause all kinds of rage in other games*

We'll just handwave and say you used Ouroborous to get there only 2 days after he gave you the mission. 😉

Soloing most content, I'm quite happy several characters. Most recently, I've focused on my Plant / Psi Dominator, my Spines / Regen Stalker. Now, I *did* trick them out quite well with enhancements. You say you have two farmers up and running so I'm assuming you won't have any issues decking them out. But caveat emptor for the next guy who may read this. Both also worked quite well for me for Group DPS role. For Just Plain Fun and Group DPS, consider a Anything/Martial Kombat Blaster. It is VERY blappy, so if you prefer your blasters never get anywhere near melee, it may not do it for you. But I think it makes a great run-and-gun-and-boot-to-the-head set. I also run Speed of Sound with it, and the super-fast animation teleport in Jaunt every 10 seconds gives me tons of manuverabilty even if Burst of Speed happens to be on cooldown. Group support, you can never go wrong with a Defender. Though lately, I've taken a second and third look at MM's and like what I see, particularly since pets no longer block other players.

Except for the "living" and the "breathing" parts 🙂

This would explain why they run so much from my Storm Defender whenever I solo. Hurricane is one HELL of a to-hit debuff Happily, on the Stormie, I can also generally catch most of them in Snow Storm and savage their running speed. Or, you know, toss down Freezing Rain and make them flop like fish out of water, or throw out a KB-to-KD Gale to drop them in place while I activate something else.

I personally refuse to use base teleport codes, but I'm pretty good at navigating all other available options, roads between adjacent zones, tram, pocket D, midnighters club, paragon dance party, vanguard, normal base port entrances, etc. Blueside will deifnitely send you far more often. Redside will do it some.... a Grandville mission sending you to St Martial, etc. It happens. But FAR rarer on redside. also for this reason, I'm much less likely to delay picking up a travel power when I'm blueside.

These do not bother me, but I am a Map-Clearing Fool anyway when I solo. Even if it's a Malta map or a giant Oranbega map. Very rarely, I'll let some mobs go when it's a giant Portal Corp map. Still. I know teams do NOT generally work that way, and it would be nice if there were some verbage to give you a heads up. Even if it was a generic line like "There might be more to this one. Keep an eye out for more instructions if the situation changes" or something like that. That wouldn't have to "spoil" anything specific, but the player could still know up front, the starting instructions are not all there is to it. (and maybe in a colored text like that, so it stands out in the description)