gameboy1234

Obviously the implementation would have to be good. The devil is always in the details. I'd like to see cut scenes on entering a mission. Tell me why I'm doing this, and set the background info for the activity. Tell me before I do the activity so I know what's going on as I do it. It would help a lot of missions make sense, and there's normally a pause when entering a mission (hot doors excepted, but those should be considered a bug with a cut scene on entry). Cut scenes in the middle of a mission obviously require some finesse. Locked doors could be used to implement a cut scene. Require a defeat-all up to that point, then the door can open, and a cut scene is triggered. This way no one is in combat. Alternately only players in an area (like the spot just in front of the final door) receive the cut scene, so you have to be in an already "clear" room for it to trigger. I've seen stuff like this implemented in other games and it works really well and can be seamless with game play if the devs are good at it. The basic problem right now for CoH is the engine on the client and server are a little clunky, and don't seem to support any operation other than "you will watch a cut scene right now and you will like it." Some thought and effort would be required here, but if we're talking about a sequel game, not the current engine, then this is definitely something I'd like to see.

I think the main thing I'd add is more cut scenes to explain the plot. Much of the writing is quite decent, but a lot of the time missions just turn into random shooting galleries because nobody has read the wall of text that explains what the mission is doing. I'd also like to see more cut scenes in-missions to explain plot development as it occurs (kind of like Frostfire has of him towards the end). Just having speech bubbles during a mission doesn't work as well, they're easy to miss and often bad guys go down too fast. This would also I think help people feel part of the story, actually explain the story, and would add a cool factor that the game sort of lacks right now.

My point was that Swift makes things much worse. The bots and some other minions were always kinda slow, but the difference was increased by quite a bit late in the game, making the problem much more pronounced, and pets were never updated. They all do kinda need an "activate the same travel power as the MM" power. Including Swift in that list of powers to add to pets would help a lot, I think.

Yeah, just two issues before FTP. I'm guessing they were already well into planning FTP by then, so I think they were getting ready by making parts of the game easier. Issue 19 looks like mainly the introduction of the Alpha slot and incarnate system. I wonder if that had anything to do with making Fitness inherent. (Seriously thanks for looking that up since I couldn't be arsed to do it.)

I think Fitness pool became inherent along with Free To Play, which was basically the last year the game was live. Basically they were trying to make the game easier to play rather than new players needing to know that this obscure looking tertiary power is *SO* important to game play. This is well after both Inventions and VEATs, iirc. I should look this up but I think that's the gist of it.

This is due to Swift, which not everyone had by default back on live, and also most of us "run" now at the speed of Athletic Run or Ninja Run or whatever. We're all much faster than we used to be.

Yes, including Swift, which would at least help pets keep up on the ground. I'd be concerned that it would break the pathing AI (Bot's pathing is completely daft) but it would at least be worth a shot I think. Since everybody has Swift now, it could just be added to the Pet's movement. The next trick would be to get the Pets to copy your slotting...

A lot of times on hard content I just don't summon the pets. They're too hard to control, to hard to move around (especially their movement abilities are lacking, Group Fly doesn't fix this, they need speed), and the damage usually isn't quite enough to justify the difficulty dealing with them (the rest of your team will be doing far more damage). The pets get left behind, get stuck on small objects and in corners, they fall off ledges and aggro the wrong groups, etc. On a fast moving team you don't have time to manage that. It's easier (and better overall) to just not summon and follow the team around yourself. So basically on hard content I use my secondary only. I think the goal of MMs at high levels on hard content should be to make sure the secondaries bring enough to the team that it's worth it. Most of the secondaries are worth it, I think, a few may be questionable. Traps is hard to use on a fast moving team, FF can be nice for squishes but probably doesn't contribute much overall to a strong team. Some thought on those sets by the devs might help out. There's always special cases where you can summon during a relatively long static fight, but much of a time the pets will just kind of be a hindrance.

This was actually my idea also just from reading the thread title. Red, Gold and Blue can all get to Pocket D so it's a good starting choice. First idea: add a bunch of little "snow cabins" to the ski area, enabling ToT. Downside is there's no real "zone level" for Pocket D? Second idea: Talk to a special contact in Pocket D who will, during Halloween, transport you to a "mystical" zone where you can ToT. Might be able to exemplar everyone to level 50 this way, just let them all join a "shared instance" where they can just do stuff, including ToT. I'd vote for using the Croatoa map, it's got a Halloween vibe already. Maybe some extra "doors" could just be added to the sides of building too to make a "hotel" like spot, the University might be a good area for this.

I think I once back on live described Necro/Poison as a slog through waist deep mud while dragging my minions behind me. Whatever they did to these sets it's nothing like that now. Might be a bit over-tuned frankly, but it's probably on par with a good performing Brute or Scrapper toon of the same level. Lots of fun to play. Plus insane team debuffs.

I'd actually like to see something like a "Defense" power pool. It should have different values for each AT, but Tanks, Brutes, Scrappers, etc. should be able to get a little extra Def/Res, and squishies should be able to get a larger bonus. Basically everyone (well all squishies) should be able to get defense like Sentinels, just by taking a few powers. This would obviously require moving some other defensive powers around (like Tough and Weave) to prevent stacking too much defense, but I think it would be better for the game overall players are able to just get powers they want.

I actually agree with this a lot, though it would obviously take a lot more work on the devs' part. Making the first and second power picks "worth it" would obviate some of the "good" powers later on. It was just a way of stretching out play time and content back in the day. But nowadays I think the design is showing its age. Given the current design I'm not sure what could be done, except for maybe to slow down choices at later levels. This might require introducing some other sort of reward or "power" that could be taken at some levels. I'm not sure what that would be though.

Thing is, it's called Traps, not Floaty Robot Bits. It's kind of the theme that each power is static and stays where you place it. I find traps hard to use on fast moving teams, it's hard to feel like you're contributing. This makes the whole set situational on a lot of teams. But it's still a fun set, and I'm not sure I'd change it. As said not every power needs to be an world beater in every situation. Floaty Robot Bits? Would go great in some kind of Gadgets power pool...

Another idea: the temp powers wear off, which might be an issue if someone is trying to level slowly permanently. Change the "Earn XP" button in the Options so that it takes more than one value: Earn XP, No XP, -25% XP, -50% XP, -75% XP. Each click moves the option to the next value, the last one cycles back to the first. Permanent, and you don't have to make a trip back to P2W when a temp power wears off.

I was literally going to add the exact same suggestion. I'll assume that final two are a 75% reduction in XP and a 90% reduction. I think the last one is unnecessary, maybe a 25% reduction (earn 0.75 XP) would be a better choice.

The main thing I used Force Bolt for on Live was to knock Gold Bricks and Longbow out of the sky, and it was nearly 100% with that as I recall. I could be wrong about that, but I'm also sure of it. It was a nice quick "stun" that would get them to skip a power or two in their attack chain.

I'm sure the Mastermind version of Force Bolt had -Fly on live, because I used it often just for that purpose. Dunno when that got changed.

I did some quick testing this morning on Live. Eochai was up in Atlas Park so I used him as a test with my Bots/Time and I grabbed a Power Analyzer from P2W. Short summary was that -Regen had about a 75% uptime over four minutes of testing, but most of that was one -Regen only, and I never saw the powers triple stacked. Unless one is trying to solo GMs, I think 4 minutes is a pretty long fight, most things with a team will drop before then. So I had some trouble with the bots getting wiped out early, so I actually started testing about 3 minutes into my stopwatch test when I got everything stabilized. I tried to use no debuffs from Time on Eochia so it wouldn't interfere with testing. I did use Farsight and Chrono Shift on the bots to help keep them upright. Of course I also used Temporal Mending, the Leadership pool and Equip and Upgrade Robot. From 2 min 48 second until 7 minutes exactly (when the assault bot died again) here's what I got: 1 minute 5 seconds no debuffs, about 35 seconds double stacked (one -Regen was -2.5 hp/sec, two of them were -5 hp/sec), and the remainder of the time 2 minutes 30 seconds roughly Eochai had only one debuff on him. That's slightly more than a 50% uptime with just one buff. At no point did I see a triple debuff (-5 hp/sec from Plasma Burn plus the second power, -2.5 hp/sec from I think it was called Double Plasma Burst) Because my timing started in progress, Eochai already had one -Regen on him, which might skew the numbers to look like -Regen has a higher uptime than it otherwise might.

Right, so the next question is what would be the expected uptime? Would the -Regen last long enough that we'd expect it to double up? Or would the -Regen wear off before the next 30% chance happened? Are we expecting to see -1500% regen or would it not trigger often enough and we'd only see an average of (for example) -250% regen? I'm just trying to figure out whether a constant -600% is worth three attacks, and if it's equivalent to what is on live right now. I guess I should grab a power analyzer and try it myself.

If the devs want to keep DF as is, then this is definitely the change I'd ask for. Maybe the total time could be messed with. Like make it a toggle that costs 2 end/s, with no time limit. So you're effectively limited at low levels by its high cost, but at higher levels as you slot more and get more global EndRedux, you're able to run it for much longer.

If you're referring to the Lore pet re-uses the Targeting Drone SFX, yeah I took that back on Live and I was *so* disappointed.

I'm on the fence about this. I think before the Bots had a chance of -Regen. Now it's 100% of the time? That might actually be an improvement. We should now be able to reliably stack -600% Regen on a foe and keep it there, before status resistances. But I didn't have the time to test whether the current implementation is actually better.

Honestly I hope they don't change it. It looks better than many of the other "floating robot" type powers in the game. (My personal bugaboo "it looks bad" is the Targeting Drone, which is literally just a cube with an SFX slapped on it. Man that thing looks cheap.)

In that case, sure if we got this power at level 10 it would be pretty cool. As a Tier 9 it feels really weak. Adding some direct buffs and debuffs would certainly help it.

I remember that the power was +Res for players (to status resistances) but it said -Str for foes, which seemed like it would be the powers themselves. But yeah reading the power info is kinda confusing, I'm not 100% sure I was reading it right either.