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Yoru-hime

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Everything posted by Yoru-hime

  1. Yoru-hime

    SR or WP

    I wouldn't say /SR's endurance problems are easily fixed, but they are manageable. I certainly wouldn't scrap a character I like over them. You're about to hit the worst of it as you take your last defense toggle, but it certainly can get better from there. SR's endurance issues can be addressed with IO enhancements (Vanden has a fantastic guide on this in the Guides sub-forum linked below), Cardiac Alpha (though you're giving up Musculature damage to get this) and/or with the Body Mastery Epic pool. I went with options A and C and basically never have trouble with Endurance on my Kat/SR with the Fighting pool toggles running as well. The procs get a little pricey, but they're very worth it. WP basically gives you a second copy of Stamina (slightly better than the original). You might end up with brief End issues in those early-mid levels if you grab too many toggles too fast, but you should be fine by the end. In my less-than-expert opinion, SR works better on a tight budget, but WP has the higher ceiling if you're willing to spend big. For SR, the End/Recovery procs are the most expensive "needs". You can soft-cap with room to spare without needing to dive into purples, Winter or ATOs. You can get better with them, of course, but soloing big groups without them works just fine.
  2. I'm still generally going for some +to-hit, both for the extra snipe damage and some buffer against -to-hit, but I'm not going crazy aiming for 22% solo anymore. I definitely like that there's no longer a binary "Good enough"/"Not helpful at all" line to aim for. How much I aim for depends on how tight the build is and whether I think the character is going to be solo a lot or usually on a team stacking buffs.
  3. Now every time I see a bots MM go by, I'm going to picture a gang of 2 year olds with energy weapons and swarm missiles. The Assault Bot is definitely the know-it-all oldest sibling daring the others to do dumb things. 🙂
  4. I started to fake being insulted by this for laughs, but I couldn't come up with any way to make it overblown and out of proportion enough that it didn't look like a real post we get in this sub-forum. That's kinda sad to think about. Personally, I love CoH for a lot of reasons, but the sounds are not one of them. The only time I turn audio on is when I'm looking for a contrary blinkie that isn't on my map. I could spend hours tweaking sound files and there'd still be something that would grate on my nerves after a while. It's really hard to make sound effects that don't get repetitive and annoying for someone by the end of a long play session. Some are just far worse than others.
  5. There was something to completing this arc as one of the capstones of your career. You were not only standing on even footing with the signature character of the game, you were hauling his tail out of the fire and giving Tyrant a good solid thrashing for messing around with your turf. You could take a team if you wanted or you could handle him one-on-one. None of this "you and 15-20 of your closest acquaintances" business. Nowadays, given how much you're already helping out the Phalanx in SSAs, rescuing Positron from a generic Tyrant-o-matic just doesn't carry that same sense of crowning achievement.
  6. It's a neat idea, and I like it in general. It basically creates a bypass to the Cottage Rule for some powers, without forcing that change on those who love them the way they are. A few thoughts: I'm a bit concerned about how specialized all the powers are and how that interacts with the pool power requirements. Telling someone with no Knock powers that they have to take a power that literally does nothing for them to get the sleep mod power they want just doesn't sit very well. Kick is bad enough, but it at least always serves a function and one that the original devs were trying to make somewhat appealing all the way up to the end. The pool power requirements have been proven to be fungible in the past with travel powers, perhaps they should be tinkered with here as well. I'd also ideally want to keep the "KB tax" to one power pick, if we can. The less we punish someone's build for having knockback powers, the better, in my opinion. I do think that steps would need to be taken to keep modified sleeps from completely overshadowing actual stun powers, even if they're only intermittently available. I think those durations just weren't intended for mez powers that aren't broken by damage. A simple "cut duration by N%" would probably cover it. I also wonder at the need for three Knock related powers. Being able to choose between KU and KD is nice, but might we give poor forgotten Intangibility a way to come in out of the cold instead? Not sure how just off the top of my head, but if I'm thinking of powers that we never use while teamed (or at all, in most cases), Intangibles come in pretty high on the list. Overall, a very interesting idea. Thanks for posting it up.
  7. Thank you for posting this. This is very helpful to have. You might consider adding Physical Perfection from the Scrapper Epic Pool as well.
  8. Wait, so I haven't been getting reward merits for beating up hapless newbies all this time? 😛
  9. Can you imagine the bid wars that would start over disputed changes? One group raises $2,000 to change Rage and their opponents raise $2,500 to change it right back.
  10. I've always used ParagonWiki. That said, it's basically frozen at where the game was when it shut down. I24 material (which we have on live) is listed as beta, and various tweaks made by the score dev team aren't there at all. Looks like the same is true for City of Heroes Wiki. There was talk of getting a Homecoming wiki going, but all that is kinda on hold as we wait to see how the licensing negotiations pan out. It's been strongly suggested that if Homecoming becomes official, ParagonWiki would allow updates to reflect the game as it is today. I'm not sure if there's a solid "This is what's currently different from Live at Shutdown" document being maintained out there.
  11. It's the bus stops that get me. Whoever won the contract to build bus stops in a City with no buses can sell anything to anyone. When I'm on a Mayhem mission, I wonder whether smashing these things is an act of villainy or just doing the place a favor. At some point Penny Preston is going to murder Penelope Yin in hopes of learning the secret to finally growing up. Does anyone even remember Penny Preston and the other unlockable SO stores anymore? I wonder whether they've been run on HC, even once.
  12. Usually what I'll do is take the Prestige Sprints from the P2W store and slot the stealth into one of those. The Stealth will kick on when you use that particular sprint. It will add the translucent effect, which I think goes best with the Surge effect. Regular sprint gets a run speed booster for when you don't care about (or want) stealth. The stealth will only apply when that specific sprint is running. You generally don't want to spend the slots on a run power just to use the rest of the set. The bonuses just aren't worth what you're giving up elsewhere.
  13. Likewise, I just don't think I can get behind the idea that Joker's handgun wielding minions are somehow "equal" to Darkseid's armies at level 45 just "because the author willed it so". It just creates a logical dissonance to me that makes level seem very empty and meaningless. Yes, it's all just spreadsheets and arbitrary in the end, but at some point, if level doesn't at least somewhat consistently imply "X > Y", then what is it communicating to the player? "Narrative intent" doesn't feel like a very satisfying answer to that question. So I suppose, do you need enemy levels? Seriously, would your ideas work in a game without standard levels? If story-wise you've reached the Joker and the Joker scales to be strong enough to give you a challenge (that you can tweak to taste) the numbers next to the name just don't matter much anyway, so do we need set levels? We were most of the way there with super-sidekicking anyway in CoH. There would still have to be advancement to keep the game engaging, but if level numbers are the hang-up, perhaps there are alternatives to pursue. Just tossing ideas around.
  14. Let me give it a try and see if we can find a little common ground amidst the shouting: To keep it in COH terms, I could see a leveling tree with a main path growing ever bigger, faster, stronger like we have today, but branches off every ten levels or so. It won't perfectly cover what everyone wants (nothing ever will), but at least it creates some degree of tiers. You spend most of your first levels getting your feet under you and doing local work leading up to about level 20 and your first big victories. At that point, you're given an option. You can keep going on to level 21 if you want to start increasing your scope to city-level threats, but if you want to spend your time being a neighborhood hero/villain like Spider-Man, at level 20 you're joining the neighborhood track. Your powers are thematically going to stay about where they are, which is appropriate to the enemies you're fighting. You still make regular gains (new technique, better fitness or new gadget) that fit with a neighborhood hero, becoming level 20+1, 20+2 and so on, but you're never going to reach cosmic power levels fighting street punks in your hometown, nor should you ever need to. Now the developers can design a reasonable neighborhood level villain encounter like the Vulture to fight say, level 20+7 heroes who have spent plenty of time on the streets. That same hero can choose to switch tracks and keep leveling higher on the main track gaining national or planetary level fame and power, but when they go back to their old haunts, they naturally dial it down to prevent incidental damage. The high-powered suit you earned at level 45 stays in the closet for these missions. Meanwhile, the hero that blitzed to 50 but never spent any time on the mean streets after they had the option to move on is still just level 20+0 on this track and isn't ready for the above encounter because he just isn't savvy enough to deal with 20+7 Vulture's tricks when he can't break out the big guns and start leveling entire buildings. Same thing happens at 30 for city level heroes (Batman and Daredevil class villains would usually be waiting here) and at level 40 for national champions (Red Skull and Ultron come to mind here), each with their own side track letting them play on at that thematic level and making steady yet appropriate gains for that track. Global and cosmic level characters go on to 50 and beyond. They can step over to other smaller-scope tracks whenever they want, but in story terms, they're holding back on their powers for the safety of the locals and without practice, they may not be too skillful when doing that. To be clear, a level 30+20 hero is still basically a very strong level 30, not level 50. No matter how good Daredevil is at fighting corporate toughs, he loses in a straight-up fight with Thanos every single time, as common sense tells us he should. If he wants to seriously fight at that level, he's going to have to go beyond the concept of a city-level hero. If the player doesn't want that for their character, they can keep working toward 30+21 and the next city-level encounter that does suit their favored style of story. There are parts of the content they've chosen not to use, but that doesn't mean that they've completely given up having a way to make progress. This all still carries a real world consequence in that creating separate tracks splits your content and powers development teams' focus so everyone is going to be getting less game at their preferred level. Though really that's already the case when devs implement new content at various levels. It does create multiple progression tracks to go with it, though, adding complexity to managing game balance. There would be a main trunk to naturally blend the world together and work off of, with the option to hop about and play on all the tracks once you reach them if you so choose, be it a local hero briefly tasting the larger limelight or a grand champion getting back to basics and revisiting the old stomping grounds, so nothing should really feel like you're visiting someone else's version of game. Level both has objective meaning, but at the same time isn't everything. You can be more or less powerful in general, but at the same time more experience as a less-powered hero has its own irreplaceable value. What do you think? Hey, if nothing else, you can both tear apart my ideas for a bit instead of each other... 😉
  15. *grumble*grumble* it's always Scrappers that get enough damage enough to require scientific notation... *grumble*grumble* 😉
  16. After all the discussion, I think the original suggestion seems reasonable. As a quick way to get there, what about this? We have filters for inspirations and other drops in the P2W shop. Would it be possible to filter out threads and shards as well?
  17. I think the issue I see is that you're basically trying to get around the limits to the world's writing by throwing more writers at it and assuming one of them will give you what you want. That answer doesn't scale very well compared to the expanse of our imagination in creating characters. We could list off power levels and specific heroic idioms all day and never have to touch the villain side doing it. All these paths sound great, but the raw man-hours it'd take to design, implement and test all this content for quality, interweaving it all into a coherent world in the process are going to be extraordinary. CoH tried to address this problem with AE, basically open-sourcing writing of story arcs (with really remarkable amounts of flexibility for the time), though the results of that are open to interpretation. Again, I hope I'm not coming across as disrespectful. I'm very interested in talking about how we can address the content gap.
  18. I always thought CoH was actually pretty good about keeping things open to character concepts up to a point. Crey's corporate skulduggery, Malta's conspiracies and the Carnies' chaotic mischief are all still in the wheelhouse of a street level hero. Better organized and stronger than Sky Raiders or the Family, sure, but that's what you'd expect. You're past the flunkies and working your way up the food chain to the core threats to your city. CoV isn't so good about it, kinda ramming Arachnos and Project Destiny down your throat, but I've got issues with the early City of Minions writing there. Incarnate content does leave street heroes and their villainous counterparts behind though, both in terms of power and story. Both in game through Prometheus and in the AMAs, the pathway toward "City of Demigods" was being laid out for us. I agree, the farther down the road that goes, the less there's really a place for Spiderman or Daredevil in the story (without some gratuitous plot device usage). So I guess my question is, what does "street level end-game" look like? What would keep you feeling like you're moving forward past 50 without getting too far away from your character concepts? Or is one needed? Are these characters, like Megajoule originally suggested, fine just stopping at 50 and ignoring the Incarnate content altogether? As long as there's new content regularly coming out across the level spectrum that is aimed at the non-Incarnate populace and they don't feel pushed into becoming something they're not just to participate, do we need a separate "City of Mortals" track beyond 50? Honestly, I'm not arguing yes or no as the answer to any of these questions. I'm genuinely curious how people feel about it and what they want going forward.
  19. Wow, the former devs must have pretty much planned on never using KB again if even THIS set didn't have any. A little knock-up and knockdown is all. I get that KB creates controversy and we're all tired of that particular argument, but I'm not sure a Wind Control set that CAN'T blow things across the room feels quite right to me. That said, I'd probably use it anyway.
  20. It's an interesting idea and kinda fun to think about but I don't think it would port very well to CoH. There are buffs, debuffs, control, etc and unless you're completely rewriting the way powers work, a lot of them just aren't a good idea if we're no longer differentiating friend from foe. For example: This really breaks down when you start looking at debuff toggles and melee. Under this system, the only way I can affect an enemy with my Rad or Dark debuffs is to also wreck any melee getting close enough to fight it. I'm doing as much harm as good and there's no real strategy to fix that short of just not using my key powers whenever one of several ATs joins the team. It logically makes sense that standing next to someone triggering a nuke should hurt, but I don't see how you could get there without creating an environment that makes anyone who heavily relies on any sort of AoE feel unwelcome.
  21. Quoted for truth. I used to feel this way on iTrials with melee a lot. Everything just melted so fast I felt like I rarely actually got an attack off before the AV came out to play.
  22. Here's the basic argument: "TOs are stale content. We don't buy them. They barely seem to do anything, so half the time, we barely even bother to slot them and when we try, it feels like every time we open our enhancements screen, half of them are burned out. DOs are a little better, but not much." A lot of this discussion had revolved around the bigger question of problems with the low-level game, but I'm going to take it in a slightly different direction. I'll take things a step further by adding this claim: "ALL the random enhancement drops are stale and need to be revisited. SOs are also largely stale content. By the time they start showing up as random drops (not AV or trial related), many characters are already leaving them behind for IOs. Unless an SO is usable by someone under level 20, it's pretty much vendor trash." By the time I'm in my mid-20s, every SO drop I get is sold at the store. There's literally nothing in that reward pool that I would ever want or need after I have my level 25 IOs. The minor boost from an on-level or over-leveled SO isn't worth the trouble of keeping track of it to replace later. Now, I freely admit that I'm generalizing my own experience and I don't know what EVERY player does, but based on what I'm reading, I don't think that I'm part of a small minority here. I wonder if data-mining could show how many level 30+ SOs are actually slotted compared to IOs? If we're revisiting TO and DO enhancements, should we also try to make SO enhancements at least somewhat enticing for enhancing powers, if not at 50, then at least through the 30s and low 40s? Right now, outside of those who are looking for a challenge or who just really don't like IOs and crafting, I don't think many people have a use for them.
  23. To paraphrase Edison, we have not failed, we have simply discovered one method that does not work. 😉
  24. Simply put, CoH is a casual MMO, not just in population but in fundamental design. The carefully tuned balance needed to power the sort of cutting edge challenges you're asking about just isn't there. There is no Extreme or Savage version of content to push people to their limits, in large part because CoH is so bad at limits in general. It's really, really hard to generate content that is finely tuned to be very challenging when character and group power levels are all over the place the way they are here. An encounter that will push a generic team to the very edge is going to get stomped into the ground by 8 interlocking characters with builds designed to work well together (who will then promptly resume complaining that the game is too easy). Design something to really test that group and you've started excluding players not running specific ATs or powersets (who will complain that they can never get the shiny for doing the Extreme content). Short of reworking just about everything about CoH or designing gimmick "challenges" that ignore character builds completely, there's no real fix for that. In the end, the Live Devs decided that it was a no-win proposition that wasn't worth pursuing. The closest they really came was the "Master of ..." challenge badges.
  25. I suddenly understand! It all makes purrfect sense now.
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