DrPippy

I think this is why I'd leave the magnitude system in place. Essentially you'd have two separate debuff channels: the normal corruptor/defender debuffs, which would be resisted by Resistance, and the debuffs from partial status effects, which would be resisted by status protection. (This is kind of analogous to Accuracy and ToHit, which are two different things that have the same effect of making you land hits more often.) This is a bit of a kludge, and probably not how I'd design things if I were starting from scratch. But it would probably be the most natural way (or at least a natural way) to add non-binary status effects on top of the current system. It definitely would be quite an undertaking to add to the current system, and would require lots of rebalancing under the most optimistic scenarios. So fingers crossed for CoX 2. Or who knows what they're thinking for all of the CoX spinoffs that are still in development...

This is a really interesting idea; I was thinking this morning that it would be nice to see something like this if we were so fortunate as to get a CoX 2. I think you raise some good points about potential pitfalls, but I also think that there are ways around them. Just as a thought experiment, how do you think this would work? Essentially, mez protection, rather than being the on/off switch that it currently is, would act to decrease the effectiveness of status effects. At full effectiveness, you'd have something like this: Hold = -100% recharge, -100% movement; Stun = -100% recharge, -80% movement; Immob = -100% movement. But the total effectiveness would be scaled down by a factor MAG/PROTECTION. For example, Char is a MAG 3 hold with a base duration of 10 seconds (I think). If I recall correctly, the protection that scrappers get from their protection power ends up being 10. So if you hit a scrapper with Char, the hold would operate at an effectiveness of 3/10=30%. Instead of being completely incapacitated, or completely shrugging everything off, he'd suffer a debuff of -30% recharge, -30% movement until the hold wore off. Now, if NPCS had a base protection of 2, 3, and 4 for minions, lieuts, and bosses (which I believe is the current system), a controller would still be able to one-shot mez a minion or a lieut, but would require two applications to incapacitate a boss. However, instead of being completely unaffected by a single MAG 3 hold, the boss would suffer -75% debuffs to recharge and movement. This would also open up a lot more options for AV fights. This would probably require way too much rebalancing (and coding) to be anything but a pipe dream for CoH as it currently stands. But if I were going to make my own superhero game, I'd try something like this.

Especially if your "offensive" toggle—let's say it's, oh, Hurricane, for example—is one of your most effective defensive powers.

You're absolutely right; it's really good to have different groups that are more or less challenging for different builds. Part of the problem here is how prevalent mobs with status effects are. If you have an occasional bad guy with an autohit attack, that's a fun and engaging challenge for defense-based builds. If half of them have autohit attacks, that's completely different. Also, blasters are unique in having attacks that can fire through mez. (I guess masterminds are in a similar situation since their pets can keep attacking.) If you're, say, a corruptor, though, a Hold is completely incapacitating. This would be a fun way to keep you on your toes if it came up once in a while. When it's almost every group in the majority of 40-50 content, it's just frustrating. (At least for me, hence the post! YMMV.)

One of the aspects of CoH that I've never appreciated is the prevalence of mez-dealing enemies. As a general, if you have mez protection rule, you can simply ignore this. If you're playing one of the squishy classes, it's much harder to deal with: after you run out of Break Frees, you're pretty likely to be incapacitated for significant chunks of a fight (speaking of which, who thought that a 30-60 second duration for the KoA stun grenades was a good idea?!?). While I know that there are ways of dealing with this, it's always struck me as a poor game-design decision (particularly the susceptibility to chain mez). I think there are a few relatively simple options to mitigate the issue: Bring back the old Discipline inspirations. 3 minutes of mez protection rather than 30 seconds makes using inspirations to deal with mezzes a lot more viable. Make Break Free an inherent power with a significant endurance cost; reduce the duration of subsequent mez protection to 10 seconds. Getting mezzed is still dangerous in that it drops your toggles and getting out of it would be hard on the blue bar, but it'd be a little easier to deal with, and maybe gives a little more flexibility with the inspiration loadout. Increase the base mez protection to 4.0 for all classes. Essentially this means that you'd have to get hit twice before you get mezzed. I'm not sure if bosses have a chance to do a critical mez like controllers do; if so it would be an interesting twist as you could still get one-shot mezzed if a boss landed a critical mez. Reduce mez durations across the board. Most other games I've played will have status effects lasting between 1 and 5 seconds; the 10+ second controls seem to be pretty unique to CoH. They're also a bad idea: it's simply not fun being a sitting duck for long periods of time. The sheer prevalence of enemies with control abilities means that this might be too big a project to be worthwhile. Even so, some of the really long effects (I'm looking at you, KoA stun grenade. And maybe Malta's Operation Officer has one as well?) should be looked at. Increase inherent mez resistance for all classes. If everybody started off with, say, 100% mez resistance, status effects would last half as long. This might be a quicker way to do #4, but it has the downside of diluting the effect of mez resistance granted by other sources (e.g. IO sets, etc.). I haven't looked at the code, so I have no idea how feasible it would be to implement any of these. My hunch is that #1 should be pretty doable, and that by itself would make a significant difference. Ideally, I'd love to see some combination of 1 and 2: using discipline inspirations gives you a way to plan ahead for status effects, but if you don't do this (either because you ran out, or because planning ahead is lame), then #2 would give you a more expensive way to deal with status effects after the fact. I'm less enthusiastic about 3-5, but they might bring up some interesting possibilities. Thoughts?

I'll put in a word here for Storm Summoning. Lightning Storm by itself is one of the most viscerally impressive powers I've used: you get a massive bolt of lightning which flings your enemies halfway across the room. The sound FX are great as well: you get a big bassy thunder crash, not the weak "bzzzt" that most of the electrical powers have. Get lots of recharge, pop a couple Lightning Storms, a couple tornados, use your hurricane to push the bad guys back into the kill zone when they try to run away... You really get a sense of raw elemental power. Pair with Bots for absolute chaos...

Wow, I wish we'd gotten to see all that. Maybe in CoX 2...

So a couple weeks ago I hit level 50 for the first time since Live, and so I had several new contacts blowing up my phone. One of them was this random detective in Peregrine who wanted some help with what seemed like a pretty pedestrian case involving suspicious suicides and the like, but I figured what the heck, let's see how this goes. Pretty soon I'm embroiled in a twilight struggle against ancient death cults (more than one), arcane assassins with modern tech, evil space Romans from an earlier millennium, and of course, an eldritch cosmic horror. I just finished the story arcs last night and... holy wow, the whole thing was one of the best video gaming experiences I've had! On the off chance that any of the original CoH devs are on this board and happen across this message—thank you thank you thank you! After 10+ years away from the game, I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed flying around Paragon City doing battle with the forces of evil. And the Astoria arc is just about the best storyline I've gotten to play; the writers really outdid themselves with that one! And to the Homecoming developers: so much gratitude for you all as well. Thanks for bringing CoH back, and for all the little and not-so-little tweaks you've made to improve the game. And while I'm in Oscar-speech-mode... I'm also pretty darn grateful for the folks I've gotten to team up with over the past couple months on here. I remember pick-up groups on Live were kind of a gamble, with the usual outcome being moderately amusing awfulness. But since coming back on here, I've yet to be part of a team that was anything less than pure awesome. So to the original developers, the new developers who've so ably picked up the torch, and to the community here... Thanks for everything, you guys rock.