PaxArcana

If NCSoft makes the HC servers legit, via a low- or no-cost license ... then NCSoft, as the issuer of that license, could conceivably be held liable. And Disney/Marvel is a very, very, very big shark indeed.

And there was much rejoicing .... well, from one side of the crowd; there was mostly a great gnashing of teeth from the other.

Epic Rap Battles of History's "Goku vs Superman" bit is hilarious for referencing this. Goku's opening lines: Hoooow many times are they gonna rewrite your story? Your poooowers have been boring since the nineteen-f__king forties! ... and, oh good lords, his LAST line at the very end of it .... I am slain. I hate DB, but I have to give the win to Goku on that one. HAVE to.

I'd actually see that last bit as a reasonable fix. If behavior can't be corrected, then, make it so that the sets have one guy who definitely goes into melee and has the tools to survive it.

Nah, it's just build dependent, Shou. Also, speed-of-play dependent.

Actually, yes it was. The cinematic "Mark 1" suit was a nod to the way Iron Man looked in the Silver Age of comics. Don't believe me? Cast your eyes on THIS ... the first appearance of Iron Man:

False equivalency. You have forgotten that Comics and Games operate differently. Look at, say, Spider Man. After his Origin story, his actual power doesn't really grow. (Yes, there've been arcs where his powers changed in some way ... but that always gets reset, back to the same powers he had as a recently-spider-munched highschool student). His personality, his life-experience, his confidence, those things grew. But games can't really model that kind of growth. What they can model, is a growth in power. So, we all start off just a little bit better than "generic gang thug with a baseball bat and a pistol", not in possession of our full array of powers. That power grows, over time - and getting (or not) a travel power is part of that growth. Because CoX is structured a certain way. Champions Online did as you ask - you get a travel power from the moment of creation. But it is limited in application, and not terribly much better than Sprint+CJ is in CoX. It only gets better as you gain levels (and spend upgrade resources - I forget the name of the points used - to buy those powers up to Tier 2 or Tier 3). And, nonetheless, that is not the way City of X is designed to operate.

Exactly the same as an ordinary, not-superspeed-ing kid on a bicycle doing ~20mph. Speed = Distance / Time He didn't alter the Distance part of that equation ... he altered the Time side of it; he could alter his personal interaction with Time itself. To him, it was like the rest of the universe got put on Slo-Mo; he didn't experience anything differently than an ordinary 14 or 15 year old, reasonably fit boy ... except that slo-mo effect. And the way momentum (either his own, or something he interacted with) was preserved if he "let go" of the time dilation. But while he was "pushing" time that way, physics for him worked like they did for any other boy. It was the entire rest of the universe that worked differently. As I say, not something CoX could model. 😄

By design, Masterminds were never meant to be tankers. Bodyguard was not part of the Archetype when CoV launched - it took a couple Issues before that happened. (The Bad Old Days when an ambush mean you WERE going to be waking up in the hospital when playing an MM...)

I had a character in a Mutants and Masterminds game. A speedster, 14 or 15 year old kid .... and that's all he really was; no energy blasts, no armor. Slight bit of rapid healing - mostly his own hyper-accelerated metabolism at work. Couple of those telescoping baton things for fighting, and ... a bicycle for getting around. (Figure a bicycle lets you roughly triple your speed ... if your superpower lets you "jog" at ~80mph, you're going to be cycling at 240+mph ...! :D)

The parallels I would draw are: Brutes ... Tankers Stalkers ... Scrappers Corruptors ... Defenders/Blasters Dominators ... Controllers/Blasters Masterminds .... no direct parallel. 🙂

I didn't save the build - it was only looking at the secondary, mostly. But I slotted sets, which definitely added to the totals. And I 5-slotted most of the secondary powers, not 3-slotted them as you have. So I tried to recreate it. Didn't come out the same, must have stacked different sets this time. :shrug: It still comes out pretty good, WITHOUT Tough. 60.4% S/L resist without popping Unstoppable, most defenses in the teens (and I forgot to turn on both Maneuvers and CJ, so the Defenses should all be almost 6% higher) without Weave. By the by, Dull Pain is very nearly perma (if you can eke out enough global recharge for Hasten to go perma - it's at 138.2s recharge - Dull Pain will be, too). And it gives +630 maxHP (on top of 1723 normally), while healing for 1,213hp. W/O Hasten, it's at 157s recharge ... who needs hard-capped resistance or defense, when you've got a super-heal like that? 😄 ) To be fair, Tough and Weave are still very useful on that build; S/L resist goes to 76.3% with Tough. Weave, with CJ and Maneuvers on, oops) brings most defenses into the 20's. Psi, ranged, and AoE linger int he mid-teens. Here's a data chunk to import and see for yourself: | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1115;505;1010;HEX;| |78DA6593D96ED3401486C75BD36C647192566DA9DAA08204524868B8465D2842D4A| |8120F10B9E9905AB2D2C876517BC9DBC00D8FC00EEF82D87AC17A658EE7FC149419| |C9F932FF9973CE3FE3B177B25D7A76E7F12D6114B7423F8E079BD171221DCF1F054| |34BD0C8D1D352E2C093A1949D4D3F494239D838911759DE960FE538969DBBE347C7| |E15846FE7E1006C9A928EC1D1D859D0713290FCAEAEF4E303A4C82F1A8A466BBD29| |FD0A4F2777220A3F83098B8B727C1B0B3110D936038F0FC3891D1E93C7958A327CD| |C6F3CC9591FDA4A6F8491E7BB630BF31E7BF335F644B788D6320662236F383398BD| |CD95FC8FDCD6CD38E2DE45AD784D2EC29CE8085299A94EB08952B9CCCAC68E5F808| |33B7B9AAA156951A6093F98AA279EC280FB70B70BB0097352A52E43A4611792DD4B| |32856468F729FB50B5DF026F335452BDCC3AEA047153DAA38913A7AD5712236D5AD| |A16E0D3D1BF0DE40EF371475E1DD45FE0AEAAFA0BE4B759AF0DE7C6AB2F727CC97A| |4CE71CC99FB80BC8FCCD54FE03DEEB5EA312FDD67AAEBF0965217D5BB4E9D45985A| |AA8175E6B20BC2FC72F3BF026ABCA3FC366F43B4117D8F5B97555EEBB195CB7D701| |DEC32AF5C076F585395FF8D255B60A47C95C5554DE96A4A4F53D635A5AF293BF6F9| |4792EE6AD13D1B41520CA5E4AB74E959493F17CE3F1E44BF6ACA174D39D3943FC4F| |6EF3E| |-------------------------------------------------------------------|

Also, Brutes are sort of anti-Tankers, and Dominators are kind of anti-Controllers. Not exactly, but they were each designed to somewhat turn their Heroic parallels on their heads.

Sounds to me, like maybe Castle's "fix" was to add a routine that prompts some (but not all...!!) pets to run up to melee range no matter what they're doing, nor what they're able to do. If that's true, and we can find it ... maybe there's a way to focus it only on pets that actually WANT to be in melee ...!

Corruptors were born from the epic success Defenders had, playing against type and focussing on their Secondary (blast) powers instead of their primary (buff/debuff/recovery) powers: Offenders, the original against-Archetype builds.

Yup. Perfectly valid approach to building a character, but yu're right, they're not going to care if they have Fly, or SJ, or just get by with Hurdle, Swift, Sprint, Combat Jumping ... and buying Jetpacks from the P2W vendor, in order to not "waste" a power on getting around from Mission to Mission. 🙂

... on a Brute, I'm seeing 63.7% S/L resist in the latest version of Mids' Reborn, before Tough. And defenses averaging around 20%, without Weave. Weave, with three LotG (Def/End, Def, and Def/Global Recharge - trying to get Hasten as close to Perma as I could on an /invul Brute) adds 4.95% defense; Tough, with two Aegis (I stacked Unbreakable Guard up five times in /Invul powers), the Def and Def/End ones, adds 15.9% S/L resistance. So ... Weave is a negligible bonus (you can get better with just two 3-slot Aegis sets). And Tough ... it's nice, but not supremely needed; going from 63.7% S/L resist to 79.6% is useful, but not game-changing, IMO. EDIT TO ADD: I didn't even bother looking at Epics, Accolades, or Incarnate abilities. Resilient Core Paragon in the Alpha slot bumps their pre-Tough S/L Resistance to 71.6%; with Tough, they wind up hard-capped (actual value 91.07%).

Sure, any ONE of them is probably desireable. My point was, though,t hat surely one of those pools could be sacrificed in the name of "I gotta be able to fly".

The exact example given was SS/Invul, yes.

... I remember SPRINTING across the Hollows to do that. And to get all the badges. The Hollows is where I learned to manage aggro via distance and breaking LOS - CoH was my first-ever MMO.

Why not? Hover/Fly would give you the Flying travel power that the "flying brick" concept needs. Assuming you were unsatisfied with just buying Jetpacks to get the Flying part of it. 10.5% (base) resistance to Smashing and Lethal (from tough) doesn't sound like "a lot", to me. 🤷‍♂️ Neither does the negligible 3.5% defense (all) from Weave. Neither of which are particularly central to "flying brick" as a concept. TBH, overall it sounds like "optimized" is far more important to that character's build than "flying brick" ever was. Nothing wrong with that, but nonetheless. Besides which, you could go with all the pools you listed, be completely optimised to your heart's content ... and either go with Super Jump or Super Speed. Poof, you have a travel power, without needing to access a 5th pool or whatever. After all, the quintessential, archetypal "flying brick", Superman? His original concept did not include flight, after all - "faster than a speeding bullet" (Superspeed), "able to leap tall buildings in a single bound" (Superjump) ... ... Honestly, CoX never billed itself as being able to make every possible heroic concept, and especially, it never claimed you could do that and be optimized for sheer power. I have tabletop, paper-and-pencil concepts that would never be feasible in CoX. Like the national landmark stealing (for ransom) Teleporter ... whose sole power is Teleportation. (Just, he can carry a whole freakin' LOT of matter with him when he 'ports, and his range is godawful long; he parks things on Mars until the ransom is paid ... have fun recovering the Eiffel Tower intact from there before the 10-day time limit runs out and he "returns" it to a point two miles above the middle of the Atlantic ocean!)

... you think the two are not one and the same place ...? HA!!!

"Some people, Master Bruce, just want to watch the world burn."

To make a "classic flying brick" you need neither Combat Jumping nor Hasten. Arguably, you don't need the Fighting Pool either - SS should have all the melee-punch-em-up powers you need. You could dump just one of those, and pick up Flight. So I'm still not seeing it.

It used to be pandemic back on Live ... and with slightly more justification, especially before the Incarnate system, and double so before Invention Origin enhancements were a thing. Also, before the Architect Edition happened, and so, PLing required using a few exploits to keep a particularly enemy-laden mission incompleted. At 95% done, everyone would be told to leave, so the mission could be reset and done all over. Back then, people would (as other MMOs trained them to do) race for the level cap ASAP, and only then look around to find out "so where's the game I'm supposed to play?" And we would, most of us, answer: "the game is all the stuff you skipped, getting powerlevelled". Those people would whine and complain that there was "no endgame" so teh whole game was just a waste of time and money; eventually they would quit, and badmouth the game elsewhere .... hurting the financial future of it all. ... But now? None of that matters. There IS post-level-cap content. And there's no financial future to harm. So if someone wants to get PLed? Bully for them, it's no sweat off my back.