gameboy1234

I play MMs a lot and I think they're perfect for this. You can buff the team, buff your pets, and set the pets on auto half way through the fight so "clean up" doesn't take a lot of clicking on your part. Want the spawn to follow you up to the next spawn? Just have all your pets follow you (which you have hot-keyed, right?) and head out, easy peasy. Only problem with MMs is if we're talking incarnate or very fast moving content the pets can be hard to manage.

I'd like to see both Synapse and Cit get the Posi treatment. Break them into two parts, and add some more interesting maps and gameplay elements. (The comment about Synapse being "CoH at its finest" isn't wrong. A couple of large warehouse maps which are absolutely chock full of -1 clockwork would work for "wade into a sea of enemies" -- the early factory maps would be great for this). Replacing the street sweeping entirely would be my preference, maybe replace it with a double map, fight some Council above ground and then enter a base on the same map and fight some more, kind of like a safeguard map.

Montague Castanella (Steel Canyon) has greeting text without (I assume) a dollar symbol in the text. He literally says: Hello there, PlayerName.

On the melee minions, I'd consider giving them a shield also. Just a weapon floating in the air might feel a little insubstantial. Also perhaps a graphics options to give them "bodies", just one of the spell effects, so that they're easier to see on screen. I can see players getting confused about where the weapon minions are, which might make it harder to control them.

I'd like to see some MMs from Preatoria too. I'm kind of surprised the original devs never did this. Preatorian Clockworks for Robotics, Resistance for Mercenaries, maybe the Syndicate for Thugs or Ninjas. Seems like an obvious palette swap. Not true MM customization, just some additional power sets for MMs.

To be not with-it for a sec here, looks like some kind of universal or unified AT thingy. Perhaps something with the Enhancement system that allows for easier upgrading?

Totally agree here. Some actual teasers would be nice, without a deadline. Even a hint that "working on new feature X, about 45% complete" where "X" is literally just the letter "X," to let us know that things are happening. And communicating "feature X had an attack of life, delayed at least two months" I think would be good communication. But if the folks in charge don't want the hassle, that's fine too, I can wait it out.

I gotta agree with this. Right now too many enhancements are just vendor trash at best. I'd actually like to see Enh drops done away with entirely. Either replace them with some other reward that drops infrequently (like merits at the end of a mission arc) or drop the cost of generic IOs so people just use those instead. Hmm, if one merit bought 5 generic IOs, would that work? So 1 merit = 5 acc, or 5 damage, or 5 holds, etc. could that replace all enhancements up to IO Sets? I think it would work OK for most of my own characters. With a little effort, a menu could be created at the merit vendor that let's you pick 5 generic IOs of any type you like. This would allow merits to replace all Enhancements up to IO Sets, and your tray would stop plugging up with trash too. Maybe add a couple of quick tutorials for how to use the Merit vendor for true newbies, and make Death From Below reward 2 or 3 merits the first time a character completes it. Next, get rid of salvage, or at least white salvage. It costs like < 100 inf at the market most of the time, it's basically an annoyance at best. Again replace this with something different, or just remove the requirements for white salvage from all recipes.

This first mission I got from Allison King in Brickstown was a bit of a fiasco. The main thing was I think it was set up like a boss style mission where you must defeat a boss and all their guards (clear the room they're in). But there is no boss and the mission objectives don't mention one. There's objectives to find: one clue, and rescue three hostages (only two, actually, are mentioned as objectives; Jan Wyatt herself needs rescuing but the mission objectives don't mention that, just the mission text). But after all that there's still no mission complete. So I ended up killing at random and I think the mission ended when either I cleared the second room, or the guards who might have been near the clue (a CoT altar you need to click on). Still not sure which one did it, but if the objectives could be updated it would help out what is admittedly an ancient mission from the dark days of CoH.

I hope that image on the right is something made up to look as bad as possible. Almost anyone could come up with a better PRNG than that. Check out the Wikipedia article on PRNGs. Well, it looks like they changed the article a bit, the XOR-SHIFT algorithm is easy and works well. (There used to be a list of popular PRNG algorithms on that page.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xorshift Honestly if CoX is using some terrible ancient PRNG, they should just copy paste some code from Wikipedia and fix it.

Same for my, whatsit, the Dark Umbra Beast from Dark Control, I think. The thing has a collision box the size of all outdoors and is unfortunately in the way far too often. I'd like to see either a much much smaller collision box on all of these pets, at least. Or just allow everyone to walk through the pets without collision, like MM pets are right now. The latter would be the best option imo, but there might be roleplay or graphical or technical issues that make smaller collision boxes a better idea. (Aside: sometimes a collision system will use more than one collision hit box. One larger box for "any possible collision" and then a tighter collision shape for a more detailed check if the larger box is found to be colliding. It feels a bit like the Umbra Beast has the larger shape for its "detailed collision" box. But that's a minor issue, the larger issue is that many pets still could use some sort of mechanism for players to push past it.) Hmm, ok I'll add one more. Sometimes pets get stuck. Maybe add a /stuck_target command to allow us to target a pet and then run the "/stuck" command on it just like a player can run it for themselves. Actually this would work well for stuck NPCs, if it's possible to add it for any NPC at all in the game, not just pets.

Voted! Thanks for posting this, it's a cool poll overall. Lot's of cool stuff going on.

I think a lot of folks would object, but it's a great role-play idea, and I think if it had been like this from the beginning it would have been fine. If the devs ever do change this, a countdown meter that allows a couple of seconds before stealth in SS stops working would be good, because folks get stuck on weird angles in the game and sometimes stop when they don't mean too. Having the meter be on-screen, right next to your character, would help folks monitor this.

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.