SaintD

By 'all quite masculine' he means 'women simply don't exist in MM primaries'. Masterminds are a hardcoded sausagefest unless you have a death wish and wanna try it on with a lioness.

My tier list is based on nothing more than just how much fun I have with a set, which bumps up some sets that are average to competitive by the numbers but are hilariously satisfying to use, and pushes down other sets (one in particular) where the numbers don't lie but it's just wretchedly boring to play with. Sooo..... STUFF I LOVE Savage and Claws are basically the absolute top-shelf set for the real psychology of Brutin', which is a willful descent into single-minded Scrapperlock clicking. They're just relentless. They're also the earliest of early bloomers - they get piles of fast recharging, endurance friendly, ludicrously fast animating powers absolutely immediately that let you go off on insane rampages literally right from level 1. Finding, waiting for, and running a DFB might possibly be slower than just going on a blood rampage on fast respawning Skulls in Atlas Park to level up to Kings Row with these sets. It helps that these sets also have such visceral feedback, they're very satisfying to watch and listen to. They can lose a bit of steam later because they're getting heavily resisted. Fiery Melee is barely below those two on the Fun Scale. It's let down a little at low levels by having to rely on Scorch as your Brawlplacement, because Scorch is boring, but later on it fills out with powers for better chaining and dear God practically every single one hits like the scythe of Death himself. It cannot be understated how much absolute death Fiery Melee hands out. This set is a little bit the opposite of Savage and Claws in that while they come out of the gate hilariously fast and slow down a little later, Fiery Melee comes out a little slower than them but somehow just keeps getting more and more terrifying because enemies that keep loading out on Lethal Res usually forget to pack their Fire Res. Psionic Melee. I recently discovered this set and had no idea it was so good. It's a little slower on the start because Mental Strike looks absolutely terrible and no-one in their right mind should countenance using it, but once you're rolling Psi Blade, TK Blow, and Psi Blade Sweep you kinda feel like you don't even need anything else anymore. Boggle is probably a useful skill to someone but again, what is up with that animation, I'm a Brute, not the Riddler presenting a conundrum to Adam West's Batman. STUFF THAT NEEDS YOU TO CARE ABOUT THE CONCEPT A BIT MORE There's piles of stuff in the average bracket. Super Strength and Street Justice have good, often great animations and great visual/aural feedback. They're just a little ho hum mechanically. Broadsword, War Mace and Battle Axe should be thematically perfect for Brutes, but their mechanics and animations are more ponderous than one might have thematically wanted from the idea of a Brute hacking and slashing his way furiously through enemies. Get over that though, and they're great to play if you like the concept. Katana is a little more swift and busy but results in the same kinda thematic trap as Martial Arts, Staff, and Kinetic Melee in that they look too clean and professional for being a Brute. Dark Melee is one of the most useful attack sets in the game with just how versatile it is....but your enthusiasm for the usefulness and potentials of it gets blunted somewhat by the uninspiring actual use of it. I HATE YOU As a Brute, Titan Weapons can eat my ass. Really get all up in there. It is so disgustingly slow in every way, so late blooming, that it offends me. Titan Weapons is masochism. Titan Weapons is a reverse pinata where you have to smash yourself in the balls with a claw hammer until you get the candy. Every other set just gives you the damn candy from the start, and more as you go on. Titan Weapons stands over you like a dominatrix and demands you lick it's feet, every day, and you're not into feet, or licking stuff, so that one day you might be allowed to do something everyone else has been doing all along. Spines is Marmite/Vegemite/Weird Furry Monstergirl Porn. You either love it or hate it. It's a hideously ugly themetic s***show, the animations are from when the game was released, it eats endurance, and it doesn't do anything genuinely interesting. If you hate it, that's probably why. If you love it, it's probably because OH MY GOD EVERYTHING JUST DIES WHAT IS THIS I THINK I'M CHEATING GUYS IS THIS CHEATING I THINK IT'S CHEATING.

Ok so it is true. *LOL* I didn't notice because it's basically Skyrim Night out there, so there's no reduced visibility for me to notice, and also because I have crushing altitis and spend all my time on low level toons. Since those low level toons are usually grinding radio missions, they're always jumping into Safeguard missions which are fully lit, which is probably enough for my mind to figure there's a day/night cycle and nothing untoward to notice.

.....I didn't notice. Like, to the extent I'll need to actually check if this is true the next time I play.

Also, coming back, I feel like I have to defend modern software developers. It's simply disgusting to call them lazy and sloppy. They're overworked and underpaid....which is only the beginning because there's a whole freaking rainbow spectrum of modern mismanagement techniques present in the software industry now explicitly intended to squeeze out code at the highest rate for the lowest price like fast food pushes out hamburgers. Like....apparently even people actually doing the basic coding for the Information Era don't grasp the utterly, terrifyingly vast scale of it. The Gutenberg Press allowed for enough of a creation of information and data transfer to basically completely obliterate the entire standard of human civilization that had stood for probably way longer than the 10000BC date we so far manage to archaeologically confirm......and now we're at a point where 90% of all the data we currently have was created in the last two years, and one minute of activity on the internet is a data transfer so large I'd feel pretty good betting that it's probably greater than the amount of data put out by every single printing press put together ever. Modern software developers are building the station you got on the train, the town it was in, the railroad, rebuilding the train, the destination station, the destination town it's in, all at the same time, and then get dumped on for it by old-ass monks bitching that they aren't matching the artisanal quality of the one book they farted out while the programmers were pressing out twelve different batch orders of ten thousand to possibly not be on the poverty line.

Every time I open costume customization my alternate costume slots briefly remind me of their existence by forcing me to click on my main costume slot to modify it depending on my whim for that day or week. What I personally do, is ignore them.

Yeah this is basically almost every game ever. Every one of the greatest, most legendary games are almost certainly a horrifying mess under the hood. I've seen hours and hours of speedrunners and some deliberate analysis videos of Final Fantasy 7. That game is a hilarious mass of thrown together ways to just...get...something...to work.... 🤣

The backstory for City of Heroes is almost post apocalyptic. The Rikti Invasion was world wide, and they slaughtered the absolute hell out of us for six months. Money wasn't particularly the issue when the War Walls were built.

How to scare away new players.... *laughs in Vahzilok* Start a new Science archetype and go to your origin contact, bitch. DO IT. Thread Title: Am I supposed to be effortlessly killed like a paraplegic child by these zombie doctor things

Random Musings: They need to be built around single shot powers and reserve bursts for their best, most damaging attacks. This is practical insofar as reducing their animation times, and stops driving us all absolutely insane listening to the entire British Machine Gun Corps expend their entire ammo load every time I engage three homeless men wielding lead pipes. The current situation also has an extreme psychological effect insofar as people are going to think their pets suck when they fire all these bullets and do sod all. I bet, I BET that people would just plain feel like their set wasn't so suck if all those bursts did their damage in a single hit instead of millions of minuscule ticks. The Spec Ops can use as many grenades as they want as long as they use a grenade launcher, instead of spending an entire ice age taking out a pineapple and winding up to throw it. If these idiots are going to have a melee attack, it had better be pummel and it had better have the same ability to disorient. Just....just make the tier 1 soldiers not look like crap. Please. PLEASE. As far as rebuilding the set entirely, I'd make it more military and stand out from Thugs by making the Mercenaries actually use a variety of military weapons. I'd have the tier 1 as basic riflemen (and medic) using an actual rifle and not the SMG models. At tier 2 the Spec Ops would be out. Bye bye Spec Ops, this is a coherent military squad, not a mashup of tropes. Either the whole squad is Spec Ops or it isn't. They would be replaced by the heavy weapons troops. These guys are intended to diversify the damage types and go freaking mental on AoE damage. They could be grenadiers or rocket launcher guys using heavy explosives with fire damage, or venom munitions, cryo munitions, whatever. This is a squad of military mercenaries and this is how the military deals with problems....judicious and aggressive use of explosives. This is what really sets them apart from Thugs. Maximum firepower at a level of expense that gangbangers simply can't dream of. The tier 3 is the squad leader. For the sake of gameplay he retains similarity to the Commando insofar as he's carrying the machine gun and is a grizzled murder machine. As we all know, Authority Equals Asskicking, so of course the squad leader isn't just another rifleman. He ONLY uses his machine gun, unlike the Commando, but there are two ways for this to not be a problem: the first is he simply does such high damage that lethal resist just isn't going to slow him down much. Not particularly my favourite solution but it's easy to implement, understand, and play. The second is that his attacks inflict useful debuffs, and because they're all burst fire cones he can apply them to lots of enemies and thus helps out the whole squad. -Def Debuff is easy for 'suppressing fire' themed attacks, but you could even put a -Res debuff on a power due to armour piercing ammunition or something. It doesn't even have to be -Res to everything, it could be a heavy -Res to lethal damage so suddenly this guy makes your tier 1 riflemen get more done (and Assault Rifle blasters hug him like a brother before Full Autoing everything). The squad leader would also be a heavy team buffer. I don't really care about the specifics. If he can't use leadership skills, which is reasonable because Thugs already took them, he can continually throw down powerful individual or AoE group buffs themed around....shouting at the men. I'm totally serious. It would be hilarious if this guy was buffing men to do more damage by just shouting mangled military nonsense at them, "FULL ATTACK! GO GO GO!", clearing status effects by just screaming, "GET YOUR HEAD TOGETHER SOLDIER!" at them, and if you really want it to get silly (hilariously), he can literally be healing soldiers by just shouting at them. EDIT: I just remembered the Starship Troopers movie. The squad leader can buff the recharge of the whole squad with, "HOLD WHAT YOU GOT!" I've been laughing about that for a couple of minutes now as the movie's theme wafts through my head. 😂

Honestly, I think the game has aged very surprisingly well. CoX has this very clean and clear look to it, and it has always relied more on decent design as opposed to sheer graphical greebles; this is really stark when you compare the updated parts of Atlas Park to Kings Row or Steel Canyon. CoX wasn't graphically LAZY, but it never tried to just go completely nuts. They kept things simple, clean, clear, so now we're playing it in 2019 and although it looks dated.....it's simple, clean and clear so it still looks nice enough. Compare this to the contemporary competition from Cryptic Studios; Star Trek Online in 2019 is a disaster of blooms and effects brawling with low-res textures all over the place. The design is often a bit wonky and so the whole thing looks more and more dated by the minute. Champions Online......oh my God. This is the weirdest situation where I loved how CO looked when it came out, and at that time I found the graphics much nicer than CoX, but now the march of time has ground CO's stylized looks into low-res mush that now look WAY worse than CoX because CoX......continues to be fairly clean and clear. The whole low-res graphics situation really stands out for me because I got a 32 inch curved gaming monitor and play at 2560x1440, so I really, really appreciate how City of Heroes doesn't just turn to mashed banana when I scale it up to that size. But there's one other REALLY important part of why CoX still looks good - this is a game, and games are in motion. Although the oldest stuff in CoX does indeed look jank and dated, the majority of the animation work in CoX, and especially the stuff added in the latter part of the game's lifetime, was brilliant. It's a masterclass. I genuinely feel that the X-Factor that draws people back to CoX that they don't realise is the animation. It's smooth, it's fluid, it feels properly weighty. Compare this to Champions Online, a badly designed soup of just basically boring and bad animations that cheerfully interrupt and cut into each other between auto attacks, and a feeling of weightless lack of impact from bad effects, and the result is a hilariously dated, disgustingly ugly mess where combat devolves into moronic flailing that has no feeling of impact or effect....which is epitomised by the numbers that just float serenely out of the top of the enemy until they lay down, which can often happen with no intervening animation, they just snap to the floor.

Okaaaay, just gonna....roll some scrappers and see how it goes. 🤔

*gets to the end of Mass Effect 3* "Choose red, green, or blue." "Ok. Um....red?" ... ... ... "What did that d-" "Sentinel inherent." "GOD DAMN IT!"

Back in the day I almost exclusively played scrappers, and considered psychotic Scrapperlock to be the most evolved and ideal state of mind. ....then Brutes came out. Alas, my poor scrappers, it was like they all died almost instantly. Tragic. As fun as Brutes are though, I wouldn't mind possibly getting back to some Scrappers so now and then I can be free of the Rage bar and hit big whenever I want, instead of only after I've done some stretches and a few reps on a couple of minions to warm up. I want to jump into some enemies and ALPHA STRIKE! Not jump into some enemies and ALPHA STRIKE! Anyway, enough of that. Like the title says, what primaries do you think are currently better suited for Scrappers than Brutes? I figure high damage but high recharge stuff like battle axe. For bonus points, you can probably give an opinion about secondaries too.

A China server just for me so I'd stop getting mauled by lag thanks to political shenanigans on my internet connection. 😭

No you bloody couldn't. Although names can have a great degree of nuance because they're names and we've been using them for much of human history so they're hard to nail down as a unique, protected trademark or copyright, sheer likeness is definitely the strongest part of trademarks and copyrights like this. Dr Strange has an EXTREMELY distinctive appearance you couldn't possibly argue is generic enough to copy and use like that. Parody characters always have a studiously altered appearance for a reason. You CANNOT simply use the distinctive appearance of a character and argue "But I named him something else!" You can make a bald dude in a suit with mental powers because 'bald and wearing a suit' is so generic that Marvel's attempt to claim it would last as long as it took the judge to finish laughing. You can't make anything like Dr Strange's outfit because.....look at it! He's the only person who ever wore something like that! Yeah, big yellow shovellin' gloves with blue robes and red capes was THE THING.....uh.....never.

Yeah, Marvel own THAT RENDITION of Thor. If your Thor looks (since sounds and acts aren't much relevant here) anything like Marvels version of the character, it's illegal. They don't own the name of Thor, it's the real world name of a mythological figure (and an actually used name for people), so anyone can have a Thor. They don't own the many other potential appearances Thor may take, and in fact Marvel's Thor having blonde hair instead of the red he SHOULD have is probably a great way for them to have a strong and maintainable ownership of THEIR Thor. You just can't have Marvel's Thor. People always act as if this is somehow difficult to understand. It isn't. The problem is they actually want to make Marvel's Thor and refuse to accept that reality, then start doublethinking themselves.

By that level you really need to have played the Auction House for enhancement recipes. There's a lot of potential for insane min/max lunacy with all the set bonuses, but honestly, you'll usually be perfectly playable, to the point that your ability to play the game matters more than your expensively optimized enhancement setup, by just frankenslotting piles of mismatched IO set enhancements that best maximize your basic acc/dam/end/rech/def/res attributes as much as possible. Remember that all the builds and enhancement advice and conversations and stuff often involve at least a couple of people who have been involved with the game for literally a decade and a half at this point, and are basically Olympic athletes when it comes to game knowledge and experience. They min/max not because they're lunatic minmaxers, but simply because they've been doing this so long that absolutely everything is second nature and it's a big deal for someone to work out a way to squeeze out another 0.5% somewhere. You just need to take the next step along and start looking on the Auction House at all those sexy, sexy IO sets with stuff like acc/dam/end enhancements you can mash together to end up with big percentages to a much wider array of your basic attributes than you can get with just SO and basic IO enhancements. When you're a Brute and you realise for the first time you can get like 80% on acc/dam/end/rech or something all at the same time on your attacks, you just start cackling like a psychopath. Frankenslotting like this is the gateway drug before you become an End Stage CoX Player who spends as much time on the character builder as in the game. It's actually even easier as a Brute because you can just shrug and not give a damn if you don't quite cap out /dam while boosting everything else....because who the hell cares, I'm a Brute, I have attack bonus out the ass and hit like a truck anyway, and now I'm attacking even faster and barely spend endurance to do it. RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE!

Did anyone else do this? Come back after almost a decade, get given Twinshot as a contact, and start doing her missions without remembering that it's the absolute worst thing imaginable? You got me, you little b****. You got me. It took so long for the memory to fade, but you got me once again. I finally rolled a new toon that clicked for me, started playing for the first time in forever, relived the magic, couldn't believe it wasn't nostalgia and the game is actually awesome andohnowaitit'sTwinshot'smissions. Turn off the servers. We're done. Twinshot is still here. We'll boot it all back up in another five, see if she goes away or something. Note: I played up to 'rescue Manticore', one of the doors glitched out and refused to open, then started banging my head on the desk and cursing the memory of Twinshot all over again. Note note: Dillo is cool though. We can keep Dillo.

All true. There are really broadly two kinds of players, which is where the thought disconnect comes from. People like me play for the journey. Once I hit that tricked out toon.....I kinda don't care anymore. Other people consider everything until reaching that tricked out toon to be foreplay before the endgame they want to play. Sentinels will probably appeal heavily to people who care more about that journey, because they're not so arduous to play without all the bells and whistles. Blasters will appeal to endgamers, because they'll pile through the 1-50 levelling as if someone put it there to irritate them before real gameplay, trick out their toon, and be a walking nuclear bomb with not really any appreciable drawbacks anymore.

I haven't really gotten to play yet, since I live in China and the lag this weekend has been entirely unplayable the moment the seven-hours-behind-me Europeans wake up and pile into Reunion. However, my poking at the creation and other research has made one thing clear: Sentinels are Blasters for people who play a lot of solo or play with a lot of PuGs they can't trust. DocRadio completely nailed it. It's CC protection. As a dedicated solo player I always would have handed in pretty much my entire Blaster secondary for nothing more than the CC protection toggles from defensive secondaries. Having the entire rest of a defensive secondary as well isn't so much sauce for the goose as another entire goose for my goose. Blasters are the Oldest of Old School glass cannon classes, which is unsurprising considering how old the game is. They were built in the dark, obscured ages of fifteen freaking years ago to be played basically only with a team, back when MMOs hadn't worked out that a lot of people actually like MMO gameplay loops without wanting or being able to team all the time. The same goes for Defenders and Controllers. Yes, you can solo them (usually more easily than a Blaster because they use a lot of CC which works as active damage mitigation), but it is utterly DISMAL. The Sentinel is basically just 'updated modern Blaster'. It's a hybrid class with more independence (which is usually preferred even in multiplayer games now), as opposed to the Blaster which is Old School Glass Cannon that fireballs everything like an unstoppable demigod right up until a lucky goblin finds itself outside the AoE and instantly kills them with a bonk to the knee with a rotten stick. If someone made City of Heroes now, the Blaster wouldn't exist, it would be the Sentinel.