Blackfeather

Going to start off by saying that for me, I personally have fun across the entire spectrum of the CoH level range for different reasons, which I can see why that could be a potential turn off for some, hence the introduction of additional difficulty options to help cater for that, regardless of level. This does sound quite interesting - it sounds almost like the ability to exemplar down regardless of location/content. While I'm not sure how that'd translate in-game, it might be a fun discussion to look into.

That's right - I used the proc enhancements from Stalker's Guile and Assassin's Mark as examples of things that'd continue working under this new setting in my original post. Though that being said, I think Command of the Mastermind and the other pet defense/resistance aura IOs function as globals rather than as procs, so they might also be disabled under this new Notoriety option...not sure though.

Happy to clear things up a bit! And yup, hence the whole framing as "no set bonuses" - given this constraint, I visualise enhancements such as Sudden Acceleration: Knockback to Knockdown working as normal under this Notoriety option too.

...this may be very slightly off topic, but I have to say, I really like your signature! 🥰

No worries! The terminology I'm using is from the Enhancement Sets wiki article. More precisely, this part: Basically, any enhancement that falls under and not would function as normal under this new Notoriety option. For example: Panacea: Chance for +Hit Points/Endurance would work as normal Shield Wall: Teleportation Protection, +Res(All) would be suppressed Generally, enhancements don't really contribute to shifting a player's survivability that much, and are often relied upon in the Health and Stamina pools of most IO builds (Numina's/Miracle/Shifter/etc.) - if they were disabled, it'd put such players at a large disadvantage, being easily sapped of their endurance. That's not something that I'd be a fan of, especially given that I'm an avid creator of IO builds myself. There's challenge in this Notoriety option, but only to the level up to where the game is balanced around (or the closest approximation thereof), that is to say, SO values, which I think proc enhancements generally fall under or close enough around. Thanks for asking for some clarification! If you've got any thoughts on this now that it's hopefully cleared up, please feel free to sound them out. 😄

Might I have a few links to some of those posts/users? I'd be glad to direct them to this suggestion, if they're interested in more of a challenge - they might like it, and I'd be happy to hear their thoughts on this proposal.

Hey there, Tyrannical! I think one thing that's really neat about this game is how much choice it has, and IOs are a part of that. Frankly, enhancement slotting without them would be extremely boring! The huge amount of flexibility that it provides with character builds makes for a ton of fun. I'll actually go further than that - the game was and is currently balanced around SOs, as mentioned in @Captain Powerhouse's post here. One example of that being put into practice now is in @Piecemeal's story arcs, which have been carefully tuned down as time has gone by. Per this post, they've been testing it using SOs. In fact, I'd even say that this proposed notoriety option might even be a great boon for testing out such story arcs in the future, to see whether or not they're too difficult, while also letting players who enjoy IO builds (like me) still stick with them! At the very least, I don't see why this option wouldn't be something to provide for players regardless of the content they want to try out: it'd likely provide them with another kind of challenge if they so wish it, so I wouldn't want to see it being arbitrarily restricted depending on the things they want to run. And finally, I'm glad to hear you like the sound of it! This Notoriety option was meant to try and help players who want an extra bit of challenge not need to actively seek it out to do so (and there's definitely some very difficult content out there) - a few clicks, and they'll be off!

Going to give @Solarverse a ping - hey there! I saw your post about finding the game a bit too easy for your liking here. Would definitely be interested in hearing your thoughts on this proposal, along with any ideas of your own about game balance, and so on. Hope you like it! If not, well, apologies for the ping in advance. 😅

Definitely going to request a Minimal FX option for Speed Phase again - it'd be neat to have that alongside the currently existing Minimal FX for Super Speed. Thanks again for the hard work, devs! 😄

Hello all, and thanks for visiting this thread! Before I dive into how this proposal might be implemented, I'd like to go over a few points about why I think it's something that might be desirable to have in the first place, by looking at some assumptions about the game's design, along with some conclusions drawn from them. If you're already sold on the idea, skip right to the bottom where I highlight the details about this! Core Assumptions 1. CoX is Balanced Around SOs I don't think this is a controversial statement - indeed, @Galaxy Brain's excellent thread on game balance takes this for granted, and @Captain Powerhouse outright says so here. By limiting the ways a player's powers can be enhanced via enhancement diversification, the game sets in numerous constraints to their capabilities. Under this balance, it's impossible for any one player to permanently maximise their defenses or resistances - naturally, there are some team compositions that can reach such values trivially, but collective effort is still required to do so. Breach this balance, and the game generally becomes much easier (some exceptions notwithstanding). 2. As Survivability Increases, Utility Powers Lose Purpose This is fairly self explanatory - if there is a lower need to focus on not being defeated, then powers that help assist with that - whether that comes in the form of locking enemies down, drawing aggro, debuffing enemies, or healing damage - will naturally decrease in value. As a corollary to this, a player's ability to deal (or indirectly facilitate) damage becomes more valuable as survivability goes up; all other gameplay goals are achieved. Of course, if one could hypothetically deal enough damage to outright defeat enemies before facing any retaliation, one's survivability also skyrockets, but that's usually not the case, and it's easily changed if one wishes it: higher notoriety levels means tougher enemies, making them less susceptible to being immediately mowed down. 3. IO Set Bonuses Dramatically Increase Survivability This is tied into the way in which the game is balanced - many IOs provide enhancement set bonuses that increase a player's defenses or resistances, upping their baseline survivability by sometimes enormous amounts when correctly built. As a result, a player with the right IO enhancements is dramatically more survivable than a player just using SO enhancements. Note that I'm excluding proc enhancements from this assumption - their effect on game balance is comparatively small: Includes things like Numina's Convalescence: Regeneration/Recovery and Celerity: Stealth Does not include things like Steadfast Protection: Resistance/Defense I make the assumption that the largest benefit that set bonuses provide to players is increased survivability (and to a lesser extent for some archetypes/builds, recharge). As such, procs don't really factor into this. 4. IOs Are Accessible and Fun! And I say this as somebody who's made a great deal of builds - constructing an unkillable machine of a character, or some off the wall concept build that works past the inherent limitations of a powerset feels great. Even with all these previous assumptions, I'd never want to go back. At least permanently - and this is where my proposal comes in. Notoriety Option: No Set Bonuses Given these above points, I'm proposing a new Notoriety setting that provides players with a method of playing CoX within the constraints it was balanced around. This would come in the form of suppressing player set bonuses while inside a mission, leaving enhancement values and procs intact. I expand upon what this entails in this post. Check it out if you want some clarification! The reason for preserving proc enhancements as they are is twofold: As mentioned before, they negligibly affect game balance compared to set bonuses Some procs are essential to a player's playstyle, e.g. Stalker's Guile and Assassin's Mark This option is meant to provide players with additional challenge on top of what the Notoriety system currently has, while minimally bothering others who are satisfied with the game's current difficulty. This way, regardless of the kinds of mobs one decides to face, players can always decide whether or not they wish to feel somewhat challenged - even enemy groups with fairly mundane powers can be a problem if enough of them manage to land them. As an added benefit, such a Notoriety option would be a great way of testing out story arcs on characters with IO builds, to make sure that they're not too difficult (i.e. achievable with SO slotting), as expanded upon in this post. Higher levels and larger mobs can only go so far, and doesn't really scale well to players whose survivability is far higher than SOs allow for. There isn't much difference to fighting a +0 enemy and a +4 enemy if they both have a very low likelihood of hitting one's character, outside of the time it takes to defeat them. Currently, Task Forces do have an option to make enhancements have no effect at all, but this is inadequate for a few reasons: This significantly pushes the game balance away from players, and in a frustrating way - missing is not fun This does not apply to regular contact/door missions, meaning that this is an option that is not always available to players So now I'm sounding off to the forums - what do you all think about introducing a new notoriety option to disable IO set bonuses? Is this something that would appeal to you? Would you implement the proposal differently? Have something radical or off the wall? As always, I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts. Thanks for reading through this, and I'll see you all in the comments thread!

This is very, very late, but I'm back-ish on this! I personally don't think the lack of Domination-benefiting powers in different Control sets constitutes a reason to make them different to the one that Controllers get. To me, that sounds more like a reason to add Domination to the other powers that lack it (making sure not to overbalance of course - Static Field as a pulsing Mag 6 Sleep would mean constant AV lockdown, I believe). I'd argue that Gravity Control's damage powers constitute a form of soft control in knockup/knockdown - while the damage is certainly nice, I can't exactly say that it is extremely significant, even on a Controller; single target damage especially falls off in usefulness somewhat at the higher levels (unless you're a Stalker that can chunky salsa bosses of course). That being said, if damage is indeed a feature of the powerset, I wouldn't be against having Domination benefit it to some degree - maybe increased knockup magnitude in Lift, or a higher chance to knock down in Propel.

I'd like this: Mostly to be able to go for a different travel power for flavour's sake - especially now that the regular travel powers are more specialised/better than their origin counterparts, looking at the i27p2 beta patch notes.

Testing out the changes to Super Speed on Beta's been a fun experience - being able to build up to a bigger jump's neat, and really useful for vertical traversal for sure. It also feels kind of thematic, having to run some distance (or go in circles) to build up to that point too! Speed Phase works as advertised, and further helps with traversing across long distances without having to worry about jumping over obstacles as much to avoid being interrupted. That being said, it'd be nice if there were a Minimal FX option for it (super low priority, I know!), for similar reasons to how I like Super Speed without its flashy particle effects.

👀

Doesn't Fly (and by extension Mystic Flight) have its speed reduced down to Hover levels in combat?

Aaaaaaah, thank you so much, devs! My patch powers and teleports thank you! 🥳

Omigod, you guys! Thank you so much for taking up this suggestion in the i27p2 beta patch notes, devs. Keep up the great work! 🥰

It's also possible to use Shift + Click to teleport to a specific location, if you don't mind the whole clicking aspect, not sure if that's something you'd like though: /bind LSHIFT+LBUTTON powexec_name Teleport Of course, if you're looking for something completely click free, /powexec_location is definitely your best choice at the moment.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to activate patch powers without having to click to do so - so with /powexec_location cursor Tar Patch for instance, said patch power would immediately go off at the cursor's location if it were in a valid position, as opposed to using a regular keybind which merely summons a placement reticle. Alternatively, a way to activate said patch power using a keypress instead of clicking would work well too.

Oh, a double tap is treated as a double click, yes. But indeed, for powersets with multiple location based powers, that doesn't quite work - plus it also means that I'm still using the touchpad to click on something, as opposed to activating it with a keybind. Currently I can use /powexec_loc target to approximate that, so it's not too big of a deal...but being able to specify locations with more granularity would be nice.

I see...that's unfortunately not quite what I'd like - ideally, I'd like to be able to properly activate a location-based power without actually clicking, e.g. activating a patch power by pressing the key, instead of having the location indicator pop up. This is mostly due to not really having a mouse that I can click with: my setup is pretty much just keyboard and touchpad, so I try to minimise clicks where I can. Thanks for the suggestion though!

Currently, the /powexec_location [loc] [power] command allows for location-based powers to be activated without the use of an actual click in a variety of ways: Activated on one's self Activated on one's target Activated on a set distance It'd be nice if it was possible to use one's mouse cursor as an additional way of determining where said power could be activated as well. This would be useful for powers that benefit from a more varied positioning than the current parameters allow for, such as: Using Teleport to move in any direction instead of a separate bind for each Placing down patch powers more optimally Granted, this is pretty low priority: the main reason that I'm proposing this is because I mainly use a touchpad, and clicks are a little inconvenient - if it were possible to activate a location based power by pressing its relevant bind twice (instead of causing it to deactivate its location reticle), it'd have much the same desired effect as this proposal.

https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Buddy_Badge

I see control-type powers at their best when they help increase safety for the team...but of course that use begins to trail off when such safety isn't necessary, such as in the higher levels, or in highly optimised teams. To that end, I'd personally go about incorporating things that address this by way of this question: "in what situations would control-type powers be uniquely helpful to a dangerous fight?" After some quick thoughts, I came up with some ideas: Enemies that deal percentage-based damage to a character (ignores high resistances/high HP) Enemies that have auto-hitting attacks or high base accuracy ones, such as many existing DoT patch powers (ignores high defences) Enemies that resurrect or spawn more of themselves after being defeated (mitigates high damage, slow recharge attacks) E.g. Devouring Earth, Apparitions Enemies that call for reinforcements/ambush teams at specific intervals (mitigates high damage, slow recharge attacks) Enemies with pulsing absorb powers that are shut down when controlled (mitigates low damage, fast recharge attacks) Enemies that are damaged for a percentage of their health per attack (mitigates high damage, slow recharge attacks) I tried to keep in mind the survivability of relatively 'squishier' characters, and to not disproportionately affect them in the process, while still increasing their overall difficulty. Of course, I wouldn't expect every mob to have enemies like this...but incorporating them here and there would probably give control powers room to shine here and there, by providing scenarios where their excellent safety mitigates damage in a way unique to them.

Building on some of my previous thoughts on the power, what if Detention Field could also target allies, with the caveat of still allowing them to move around? Basically it'd act as a "can't touch you, can't touch me" button to help save an ally's skin if they're at low health, or even a fun way of letting a team member take an alpha strike here and there. Kind of like Personal Force Field, but for allies, and even more absolute. The main issue I'm seeing here would be its duration...but if there were a way to cancel it early, I'm sure it wouldn't be too bad. Maybe if they activate an offensive power after a few seconds of Detention Field being up, it automatically drops?