oedipustex

This is a short suggestion for a developer who feels comfortable meddling with GUI and serialization. I'd love to see City of Heroes get a text-only inventory system. The idea is simple on its face, but possibly difficult to execute. A text-only inventory is a list of items that exist only as text. They don't have icons, they can't be dropped on the ground in the "real" world, they exist purely as items in a container. However, these items have the following characteristics: Players can trade them The items can respond to certain player verbs (in text games this is determined by the item) There might be some way to "examine" or "look" at the item to see more text (Potentially) The ability for a text object to be a container for another text object So, why add this? My answer is that text-based RPG games just naturally have this. They don't think about it as something extra because the game is already text-based. So, a glass rose, a stale cigar, a bucket of mackerel can all exist as text objects to add immersion in those games. Why not include them in a visual game as well? The argument against this of course is that players can already "fake" having items with text. However, this is true in text based games as well. Players can usually "fake" whatever they want. The idea isn't that the items replace being able to emote. It's bringing an extra layer to the storytelling. Now you don't just go to the donut shop; there are actually donuts there, and you can share them with your team. There are ways to take this further. You could have different "colors" of text based items. Perhaps blue items are "real" in the sense of being generated by the game world, "yellow" items are generated spontaneously by players, and "purple" items can only be generated by GMs during special events. But I won't go into all that. I'd love for some talented developer to take a crack at this. I think with the RPG community CoX has it would turn a corner and bring a lot of the advantages text games enjoy, with relatively low level investment in assets other than code time and (if the team desired) world building.

Leviathan is a great choice. Psi is also really good for a more defensive build and has a tornado-like power that can reasonably be made to look like sand, although the sound effects may be off putting. Ice, Psi, and Leviathan are my three favorite Dom epics.

I agree with you. More specifically I'd like a revisit of how randomized dungeons are generated. Right now the formula tends to create homogenized maps, especially when generating x8 enemies. What team content should be doing IMO is generating maps more like this (numbers made up): 60% of packs as now 20% chance of a pack made entirely of 1 to 4 randomly selected enemies 5% chance of a pack made entirely of bosses 5% chance of a pack made entirely of a specifically troublesome minion (Sappers etc) 1% chance of an exotic enemy pack (whatever that means) etc Something else kinda subtle I think should happen is that some enemy Auto powers that represent "armors" should suppress the way player powers do. The tech is there to do it, an Auto power behaves just like a Toggle, the check just needs to be added. That would bring Dominators and Controllers further into the role they are supposed to be playing and allow us to ease off the raw upper echelon damage restrictions. I particularly feel this way about enemies in iTrials where Dominators and Controllers tend to contribute less.

Keep in mind that +4 enemies resist all debuffs by about 50%, so the real picture as you approach higher levels is that Shiver puts enemies at about halfway debuffed. It is true that -Recharge works like Defense in that as you approach reducing it more and more, each of Recharge point matters more, up to the cap. -75 = 4 times as long to recharge -50 = 2 times as long to recharge 0 = same time to recharge In other words, if you hit something already at -50% recharge with an additional -25% recharge, you double the effect from x2 recharge time to x4. But if you apply -25% and nothing else, the effect registers as not even a x2 increase. This is why players get destroyed in any content where enemies can pile on -Recharge, and why you can go from doing ok to totally screwed in just a hit or two. The practical application of this is that if you care about -Recharge as an effect, you should slam enemies with as much of as you can for it to really matter. Shiver + Arctic Air will do that, but only for the duration of Shiver, which is embaressingly short. If Shiver lasted a full minute, it might be worth it. (The other practical application of this is Hasten is the single best power in the game for resisting -Recharge. Since Hasten gives you +70% Recharge, if you get hit with -75% Recharge that will quadruple the recharge time of another player, your -Recharge is still close to breaking even.)