PeregrineFalcon

Oh, but I doooo own your weekend! *dangles shiny object* "You are feeling sleeeepy. You want to test this weekend. When you wake you will feel refreshed and filled with a renewed desire to prove Billz wrong. Wake!" Well, how you spend your weekend is up to you, of course. Hopefully you'll find the time to run the test. I'd like to see the results myself. 😁

Make it on the test server, where it'll only be temporary no matter what you want. Unless this is really just an excuse to not prove your point...

Maybe a series of tests with MA/everything else, and then post results then? I suggest MA specifically because it doesn't have much AoE or debuffs that might favor a particular powerset.

As a test why don't you and Arcane both run an SO only Scrapper through the Trapdoor test? Let's say... MA/SR for Bill and MA/Regen for Arcane. First test on 0/x4, second on +1/x4, etc. Then post times AND deaths. If that doesn't prove that Regen has less mitigation than other Scrapper powersets I don't know what will.

Short answer: No. If you read the text of Alpha Musculature it says something like "Adds 45% damage to all attacks 2/3s of which is not affected by Enhancement Diversification." Having the entire team running Tactics will apply 8 stacks of ToHit to you that are NOT affected by ED. According to the Wiki, Prestige powers are affected by Recharge and ToHit buffs and nothing else.

Correct. Most games address this by first making PvP fun and balanced. Then by offering PvP dailies or special loot that only drops in PvP or minigames that only happen in PvP zones. CoH does the last 2 of the 4. SWTOR does all 4 and even now people PvP. Heck, I used to PvP in SWTOR. GW2 does all 4 and I will often get the WvW dailies when I'm playing GW2. But for some reason the retail devs could never crack #1, making PvP fun and balanced. And now most of the people who play CoH are just not PvPers. Unless the current dev team is willing and able to completely rewrite the game mechanics in PvP zones that's just not going to change. But you know what's even worse than that? At this late stage even if they did that and made CoH PvP the most balanced and enjoyable PvP in the entire MMO industry, it probably wouldn't matter.

Yeah. We're basically repeating the same ideas that we posted on the retail forums back in 2007 & 2008. They didn't care enough to do anything about it then, probably because Jack had already cut the CoH dev team down to a skeleton crew and had started work on Champions. And the current dev team probably just doesn't have the resources to do something like this. Especially since they'd have probably have to completely rebalance PvP in order to get more than 10 people to play these missions.

First of all, I'm not really a PvPer. I used to play head-to-head FPS games until cheating became commonplace. And while I normally dislike PvP in MMOs, and I hate PvP in CoH, I actually enjoyed PvP on certain classes in SWTOR and Guild Wars 2. I really think the Cryptic developers blew a great chance to make PvP an important part of this game. And an experience that even people who wouldn't normally play PvP might get into. The idea of the head-to-head bank missions is a great idea and, not to detract from OP, but something that's been brought up repeatedly since CoV first launched. If things had been properly balanced so that TTK on all AT's was reasonable, and mezzes could not be of long duration on players no matter how they are stacked, PvP would be slow-paced enough that most people could get into it. Other MMOs accomplish this, CoH could have as well. Instead, Cryptic first chose to go the route of making everything ridiculously unbalanced. Fast paced in some cases while frustratingly slow in others. Most AT's could be two-shot by some AT's and/or perma-held by others, while other AT's were nearly useless in PvP. Then, because it was too late to fix that, they decided to split how powers function and stack in PvP. This only made things worse because now your character functions completely differently in PvP than it does in the world that you're used to. So you put hundreds of hours into a playing a character, learning how to play it well, and then all of that experience is completely useless the moment you step into a PvP zone. And don't even get me started on how Cryptic f****d over bases and base builders. PvP is it's own thing now. Base raids are never going to happen, as Zag said, and if the devs want to create PvP bank missions for the PvPers that's great. But please don't think that non-PvPers are going to even consider playing them at this late date.

This is why we post on the forums. It's the only way we have to communicate with the developers. Discord too I suppose, but I haven't seen any of the developers in voice and there's no way they could possibly read through all of the unorganized text in those channels.

Oh yeah. You didn't know about this one? It was first announced two or three years ago. And for awhile it seemed like the one most likely to launch. I even played in one of the open betas. The character creator was ok and I was able to run around their version of Atlas Park. They have a YouTube channel with some videos of in game play. You should check it out. I just realized that I didn't answer your question. So Ship of Heroes is set in the far future. There a people on a giant city-starship and some of them are superheroes. The giant city-starship has various factions, some of whom like to cause trouble for the citizens and/or crew. This is where the superheroes come in. Also, the ship stops by various planets from time to time. IIRC, this will be an in game explanation for various places the characters can go to. Dinosaur world, Old west world, Medieval world, etc. Like I said, if it ever launches I'll check it out. .

Yeah, I saw the article yesterday. The game's not supposed to launch until end of 2022. Of course this upcoming open beta was supposed to happen a couple of months ago, so who knows when it'll actually launch. Of the three CoH spiritual successors this was the one that I was most excited for. I've become incredibly less excited as the years have drug on, and now not at all that CoH itself is back. If it ever launches I'll check it out. *shrug*

I'm talking about making the Shadow Shards fun and challenging. You're talking about making them annoying. Not the same thing. 🤪

I understand your point of view, and I don't entirely disagree with you. I do think that fixing the power creep will require a little more in depth and complexity than what you've proposed, but I don't think that your solution is inherently wrong. However, I think that the developers have chosen to solve the exact same problem as you, just from the other side of the equation. By raising the inherent ToHit of critters in the Challenge Mode content, they're doing exactly what you recommend. Raising NPC's ToHit lowers PC's softcap, it just does it from the other end of the equation. So it appears to me that the developers are already doing what you want. Lowering the softcap. They're just doing it in a way that's less obvious to the players and only in end game Challenge Mode content.

Part of the problem is that some people think that killing is always morally wrong. This is clearly not true no matter which deity or moral code you subscribe to. (Yes, there's always an exception to every rule. Blah, blah, blah.) The real question is: "When is it justified?" That's where a lot of people disagree. For some people their line is closer to Superman's (Christopher Reeve version), mine's closer to Rorschach's. "God doesn't make the world this way. We do."

A recent thread made me start thinking about the Shadow Shards again. What if they were made into the zone(s) that were truly a challenge for Incarnate teams? +5 bosses with special powers. EBs leading an outdoor ambush after a completed mission. Maybe even some unique and weird GMs wandering around certain floating islands. Zone invasion events, but with Battalion or something new. Basically like the revamped Dark Astoria, but an actual challenge. And definitely co-op so that villains can get their Incarnate drops/threads too. (Sorry Warpact. Not trying to steal your thunder, but your thread seems to have devolved into a PvP discussion thread.)

An aura like a glowie aura around a character? Or like a mishappen ball of chiton glued the side of my character's head? See, that's why I've never played Bio Armor.

What I want to know is... Can I play Bio Armor without the horrible FX?

Correct. Protecting people's rights is one thing. But once you start passing laws protecting people from the consequences of their actions you get chaos and the downfall of society. So you'd prefer a situation in which the police can take me (or you) to jail simply because I look like an "obvious threat"? There have been places in the world like that. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, The United Kingdom under King George (which we rebelled against, you may recall). Our Constitution and legal system are designed to protect us against that kind of horrible authoritarianism. So you'd prefer a world in which every upset and/or scorned woman can have you arrested by simply claiming that you're a threat? Yeah. That ability would never get abused, no sir! Wow. I'd hate to live in your world.

Yeah, but those are infrequent and usually portrayed as risky maneuvers. They can be explained by the usual technobabble. Matter in a warp bubble doesn't move. The warp bubble moves space around it. So the warp bubble takes that bit of space and warps space until that bit of space (the air and the away team) is on the planet. You can't move the away team faster than light anymore than you can move a ship faster than light. The ship doesn't move. The space around it does, much like the universe expanding does. This is why ships "accelerating" at warp speed don't squish the crew. The ship isn't actually accelerating in the Newtonian sense.

What they could have done is say that the Transporter creates a warp bubble around the away team and quickly moves them to the surface of the planet, matches velocity, and then dissipates, leaving the away team on the ground. This would give the transporters the same basic parameters shown in the show, make them more reliable, and would require like .001% of the energy that dematerialization/rematerialization requires. And it would have the added benefit of not killing tranportees, it would simply move them.

While not entirely wrong, the actually situation is far more complicated than this simple statement implies.

We actually have "Challenge Zones" in the game right now, but rather than use them people prefer to come to the forums and whine that "Game too easy, bruh!" New Dark Astoria. There are level 54s on the street and repeatable missions (like scanner/newspaper missions) there as well. I often play there and that zone is deserted. Monster Island. Just north of My Island. It's covered with GM's. A couple of those should be a challenge for an 8 man team. The Hive. Like Monster Island, but it's an entire zone. Incarnate Trials. "But Peregrine, that'd require me to talk to an actual living person. I'm a dedicated soloist, a lone wolf." Yeah, whatever.

Yes. On TNG they introduced Replicators. These are essentially small transporters that use a pattern in memory to materialize small things like plates of food or cups of Earl Grey tea. They don't technically create matter from nothing, they create it from energy drawn from the ship's power plant. So there's no reason that they couldn't take a snapshot of you when you're beamed down and then use that information to repair you when you're beamed back up to the ship. Don't bother doing the math though. The amount of energy needed to convert it into a cup of tea, with that kind of detail and accuracy, would be something on the order of several seconds of the full output of the sun. A society with the level of technology to do that would also allow you to travel to other star systems without a space ship.

Like I said, "Men get arrested. Skulls get put down!"