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I posted this suggestion in the Beta feedback forum regarding the proposed Rage changes to Super Strength, but I think it will inevitably get lost in the 25 page thread, so I am putting it here where it actually belongs. Please consider an EAT called "Olympian", a human imbued with Tyrant's power of Zeus. In game, we meet one in the Dark Astoria arc and fight them in the Maria Jenkins arcs and the Magisterium trial. They're likely clones, but we could easily have Neuron or Antimatter (or even perhaps praetorian versions of Arachnos mad scientists) create a new range of Olympians having the power infused into volunteers. The idea is a Super Strength style AT not tied to the Rage mechanic, that can also get the cool eyebeams Olympian 29 uses (they're Beam Weapon graphics coming from eyes). Like all EATs, Olympians should cross the AT roles, being offtanks (no punchvoke), have melee and range attacks, and damage mitigation toggles (invuln-style). Their level 32 attack should be the Hammer of Zeus, Statesman's iconic nuke. Perhaps their secondary could get Fly as a native (not inherent) power and possibly leadership toggles like VEATs. Why this archetype? Many players don't concern themselves with cute mechanics like Rage. I think lots of people would be happy to play a punchy superman-type with heat vision, having naturally high damage attacks without the Rage mechanic - Olympians should get Build Up instead. It would also be an opportunity to use newer punch animations instead of the really old ones that go back all the way to I0, which would be hard to propagate to SS tankers/brute. Lore-wise, it is clear that Paragon Studios focused a lot on the Power of Zeus in the Signature Story Arcs, possibly building up some future story content - content that we are unlikely to ever experience now that the old writers are gone. But Homecoming can use the lore introduced - Olympians can be made possible (or reach new heights of power, or perhaps have gained self-awareness instead of being mindless slaves) from the Power of Zeus released in Signature Story Arcs 1 & 2. This feels like an alternative to the difficult Rage/Super Strength changes, or serve as a possibility for those of us who don't want to be tied to the Tanker/Brute ATs, or who want to use Eyebeams as a primary attack mechanism. At the same time it can enrich the lore and make use of the loose ends from the Signature Story Arcs. Please consider! Edit: I should clarify that part of the reason I suggested this is because changes to Super Strength and Rage are currently undergoing some controversy, because 1) they're at odds with i24 purity, 2) lots of people hate the Rage crash and lots of others want to keep it for balance, 3) Some want to keep doublestacking Rage and others want it gone, 4) Super Strength gains a disproportionately large benefit from recharge bonuses from IO sets. This is in fact how we got Willpower: People wanted Regen to work, while other wanted it to be unchanged. Paragon Studios solved this by making a very very similar set. This way those of us who want to SMASH! can do so without silly crashes or Rage, while those who want to jump through the i23 hoops to squeeze out extra performance from SS can do so.

I sympathise with your view, because one of the main issues of Rage is how it interacts with non-SS powers, which are not balanced around it. Considering that Gloom (Ghost Widow PPP) for instance is a better attack in every single way that matters than Hurl, as well as the increased damage from the likes of Burning Aura and Burn (Fiery Aura secondary), the way Rage - specifically, double stacked Rage - interacts with secondaries and epic powers is highly anomalous. But I personally am not particularly in a hurry to nerf. Balance (specifically, overpowered-ness) in CoH is honestly overrated, and so I don't object to the idea that someone out there is doing slightly less than TW numbers while risking death and doing nothing for 10 seconds every minute. What I am concerned with is getting something that is fun for me and I imagine most other people. Edit: I admit that I selfishly would like to see some of the newer animations used for the new set, like Uppercut. This wouldn't likely be doable with a legacy set. Regardless, I am not fussy. I would take either a revamp or a new set as long as I got some version of a high damage crashless punchy power set.

This honestly is the main issue for SS; that Rage is integral to the balance of the set. If you skip Rage, your damage is amongst the lowest in the class. And taking and using rage means that you have to deal with crashes. Double stacking rage pushes you into the other end of the spectrum, turning you into an outlier again. This in an of itself is usually not a problem, since mechanic gimmicks are part of CoH's powerset diversity, but it is when Super Strength happens to be a core, integral powerset for the superhero mythos. Most of us want to play Super Strength just for the aesthetics. And this would not be a problem if other powersets could adequately represent what we want, but none of them do! Currently the best contenders are Radiation Melee and Energy Melee which have their own separate issues, not the least of which is unnecessary glowy hands. If Megajoule's suggestion is not palatable to the Homecoming devs because it would disrupt those who like SS as-is, PLEASE consider creating an alternate powerset that can represent the aesthetics and damage we would want without the crash - with the understanding that double-stacking rage will not be an option in that set. To have high (but not to high) damage and punchy aesthetics with no crash is something I imagine would be very very popular, and we are all aching to make some version of Superman or Shazam or the Hulk! A re-use of some of the newer punchy animations would also be viable in this case. Devs, please, please consider this!

As I mentioned, this was never said by a dev. It should be obvious that there are several MM sets without human henchmen and none of them got any kind of customisation, even alternate models. The limitation was purely development time, not a design choice. As a programmer I do believe you can appreciate this reason.

This was never the case. It was purely conjecture by players on the original CoH forums as to the reasons, the usual "no, nothing needs to be changed" argument made every time someone wants something new. The reason we never got customisable henches was entirely technical - it was hard, it was something they wanted but was low priority, and it would possibly kill frame rates as each MM could potentially have a half dozen costumes to load at once. Years later the rumour has taken a life of its own and people are blaming SJWs for ruining their fun, which is just ridiculous since Cryptic was nowhere near resembling anything enthusiastically woke. Straightforwardly the devs simply didn't make very many female NPCs. In issue 0 there were in fact NO female enemies. The first time we got them was in I1 with Carnies and Knives. No female default henchmen was just an extension of that attitude, that it was just easier to make male NPCs.

With respect I do believe his comment was on creating dual mutual lockout powers. That is, a choice of two powers on which you can only pick one. I am instead suggesting a stance, where you get both the toggle and clickie when you pick Rage, exactly like how stances are acquired.

Here, let me make a suggestion that would actually enrich the game lore. Please consider a Praetorian EAT called "Olympian". Perhaps Praetor Berry was on the verge of improving a new range of Olympians for Tyrant. You get Super Strength style offence with high recharge and damage. Your hand clap does damage. You can footstomp. You get Build Up instead of Rage. You have a range of eyebeam options that look a lot like Beam Weapon attacks. In your secondary pool you can get some Invuln-style and flight powers, and possibly pets like VEATs. This would let people play both Cyclops and Superman depending on the powers they pick, and both if need be. Let me be frank here. I do not care about cute mechanics. What I want is high performance and aesthetics and minimal annoyances. I want to punch a bad guy and make him crumple like paper very quickly. I do not want stupid crash mechanics and never take any if the God modes except as a mule. In fact, I never played a blaster type that had a nuke with a crash.

OK, if this is such a huge problem, can we get a duplicate set please? This is exactly how Willpower came to be. The die hard "never change this set" crowd conflicted with the "let's make this more fun and balanced" crowd. And to satisfy both, the devs just duplicated most of the powers, changed some around, and recoloured the base effects. We got a new set, and you can henceforth tell everyone who wants to buff the old set to shove off and get the new one.

As an addendum, since there is some problem with the proposed rage changes, is it difficult to add a second power to a power choice, the way stance powers do? Because it seems to me it would be easier for players if Rage had an extra "stance" power. Let's call it "I'm Always Angry" (IAA). You get IAA when you pick Rage, kind of like how you get 3 stances when you pick some stance powers. IAA is a toggle, cannot be slotted and costs no endurance. It only serves as a "flag" to a direct the Rage power into one of two effects. When you do not have IAA turned on, Rage functions exactly as it does on live. It crashes, and perhaps if you want to diversify the crash effect into resist you can. When you do have IAA turned on, Rage will no longer stack and have no crash. This seems to be a much more elegant solution than making players watch their bars like hawks to reactivate Rage to avoid a crash.

Out of curiosity, since I do not have the endurance or time to read a 24 page thread, is there some reason against say, - Increasing the recharge on all SS single target attacks to equal or exceed other sets, along with damage (4-8s recharge on jab, for instance), - increasing the recharge and damage of foot stomp to a much smaller degree - decrease the + damage effect of the Rage to about 50%, remove the crash and make it not stack This would - normalise SS (or make it a high performer) outside Rage - make SS perform very well but not overpowering with Rage - eliminate problems associated with the rage mechanic - allow people to actually feel like superman without overpowering the set Please consider, in lieu of raising foot stomp damage as mentioned above, giving hand clap some nice damage. This would break the cottage rule and so I include it as optional. My interest in this is purely that I want a "super strength" style set that actually does good damage without annoyances. I would in fact be perfectly happy with a brand new set called "Might" that does this, or even completely removing Rage and replacing it with Build Up and normalising the set damage to say, War Mace numbers.

Did the Rogue arc. With respect, your writing is significantly better than your sense of game balance. I don't feel it is very reasonable to expect a lvl 25-29 character to solo a roomful of Legacy Chain (including a boss) all at once, especially since it wasn't actually the climatic fight - to clarify, I had set my difficulty at +0/x1. Now, I ran the arc with my only rogue toon, which happened to be an exemplar'ed lvl 50 TW/Bio scrapper with a billion inf IO build, so I just AoE'ed them all to bits while their rocks whiffed (Because of this, I may have missed how difficult it might have been to defeat the actual final boss, or the large number of PPD mobs in the earlier mission). However, if I had gone in with a squishy defender I suspect I would be cursing at you right now. Please do consider allowing the spawn system to handle mob balance, flawed as it may be. On the other hand, I liked the writing very much. Conversations were extremely amusing, especially regarding the Warrior boss's "family vacation" and the entire thing with the Family boss. The moral dilemma is a little cliche, but as with most CoX arcs the story is really all about the NPCs (in this case the final boss), not the player. From that perspective, it's significantly more interesting. I do however approve of the "in-between" moral options at the end, where you get something for your "mercy" - too often, moral choices in video games are binary, lack nuance, and ridiculous - the most egregious example of which I can recall is "Cure the little girl vs Murder the little girl" in Bioshock. I am very happy that my greedy rogue can try to weasel her way into a payoff while sating her conscience. Incidentally, I did the arc twice, taking the same end choice, because it was clear that an action I chose in an earlier mission changed the response of the final boss. This is fantastic, in my opinion, because it is a very good use of branching options that can convey a sense of consequence for earlier actions, something that gives me a lot of hope for future stories. Lastly, and this is a little off topic, but I do hope that future arcs that involve actual Villains won't solely be driven by a mere profit motive - this is perfectly fine for Rogues (in this case), but it annoyed me to no end that the vanilla CoV arcs were almost entirely about scoring some cash. CoX in general also suffers from having most stories feel rather impersonal for the player - we stumble into someone else's tragedy/stuggle/story and go in to meddle, and none of the stories are really about us. The signature story arcs started to go against this trend (at least redside), and I would like to see more of that sort of story.

I do believe that before the shutdown, Paragon Studio was in the process of adding in new travel powers that were a combination of the four mainstays. The only one that was complete, graphically and technically, was Sorcery, which is why the pool is enabled on Homecoming. The remaining pools however, were not enabled because there are some powers that lack graphic data, etc. Please consider enabling just the travel powers for those pools. Being that the travel power is always among the first pickable, it would not cause particular problems if the travel powers alone were made available in incomplete pools for those of us who want them, and the remaining pool powers can be added when they are completed. The most important of these, I feel, is the Utility Belt power Freerunning, which I believe was meant to be a slottable Ninja Run. I ask this because it may be a very long time before the Homecoming dev team is able to finish those pools, and in the meantime we will be limited to the few travel powers available at shutdown. Alternatively, please consider creating new travel power variants that are slottable versions of the existing temporary/prestige travel powers, perhaps in a universal travel power pool.