Chris24601

One of my favorite things about Tac Arrow was that it had no Location-based powers at all... target, fire and forget. Oil Slick is worthless to me... on Test I ended up replacing it with Stealth and feel I got the better end of that deal. As someone else said... its another t9 to skip. But THIS is my main complaint about the changes. The range change utterly disrupted my attacks as well. Reduce the damage, reduce the immobilize duration, just don't kill the range. This is a "shelve my Archery/TA blaster" level change for me as well. How bad is it for me? I'd take an Endurance-hog toggle power that bumps the range of Electrical Net and Ice Arrow back to the live distance IF you slot it to the ED soft cap and be happier with that then where I currently sit. As to "encourage to get into melee"... why must every blaster be the same? The fun of Tactical Arrow was precisely that it WASN'T just a carbon copy and encouraged a very different playstyle from the upclose "Blapper." This sort of hegemony of design is what destroyed my interest in SWTOR. Sure, its easier to balance if everyone gets exactly the same stuff, but it sucks the soul out of playing them.

So here’s a general conversation starter... Was texture wrapping on the female model always so shoddy? I literally cannot use a two-color option on the Widow costumes because the pattern on the inside thighs and upper calves doesn’t line up. Yesterday my longstanding love of the Vanguard costume pieces was tarnished when I noticed that the texture wrapping clipped just slightly into the bottom inside of the thigh plates. Countless other female costume options have bits like that which don’t quite align and the crazy part is that I don’t remember that being a problem on Live. Was something done to the female model in the i24 or a later build that changed how the textures wrapped? And a related problem; the Blend pattern actually includes part of the upper color all the way down to the waist, creating a visible line at the waist even on costumes where the underlying texture is seemless (ex. The Vanguard costume or Organic Armor or the Circle of Thorns). While fixing the wrapping would fix everything at once, that may be beyond the ability of our devs to fix (it’d need to have its UV coordinates tweaked in something like Blender or Deep Paint). The other alternative would be to tweak the offending texture maps (though one needs to be careful that said tweaks don’t lead to misaligned maps on the male and huge figures) which requires only a photoshop type program and could even be implemented via the Data folder rather than messing with the actual piggs.

They also give up some key secondary powers too for their hide; almost always an Endurance management tool. They also tend to lose any sort of taunty goodness. My main is a claws/willpower scrapper and there’s no way a stalker version of the same would measure up. They’d not only lose some easy Endurance management, they also drop the scaling Regen (and enemy to-hit debuff which auto-interrupts all those summoners like raider engineers) of Rise to the Challenge Throw in losing the amazing AoE in Spin and Eviscerate and getting bog standard Build-Up in place of Follow-Up (a.k.a. you don’t stop to build up... you achieve perma build-up by stabbing things in the face) and you go from a virtually unstoppable engine of AoE death that never stops attacking to a sad pathetic being who has to skulk around hitting enemies one at a time. No wonder Claws/Willpower Stalkers get Hide as a required power; I’d hide my face in shame too after watching my cousin’s spin attack drop half a spawn in one attack. Some things are just better as Scrappers.

Regarding “Issue 48”... I believe the Live devs basically admitted that the incarnate grind/powers and need to create escalating enemies would have eventually led to breaking the game engine and them having to reboot into a CoH2 after whatever was after the Dimensionless. With that in mind, I suspect instead we’d have seen a sunset (on new content anyway) about issue 36-ish c. 2016 and then a beta launch of CoH2 (probably CoH: Insert meaningful subtle here) in 2017 and live release in 2018, which due to Covid slow downs, would probably be stalled on Issue 7 or 8 with everyone awaiting the issue 9 open beta “Soon^TM.” CoH2 would have been built with endgame grind and RMT in mind from the start (because NCSoft) with far less focus on the ride to get there and so would have been a disappointment to many longtime fans. Honestly, things happen for a reason and getting this almost time capsule of how great gaming used to be right at a time where life has given more time than we’d really like with not much in the way of genuinely new entertainment feels like a Godsend, as does that pause meaning it’s ethos wasn’t warped by the near decade of monetizing games into the soulless shells many feel like today. I mean, we had barely a year of Incarnate content and it was already straining things. How much of our fondness for CoH would still remain today if over half the game’s life cycle had been incarnate grind focused? (i.e. 2004-2020 with incarnate content starting in late 2010 w. Alpha Strike and fully implemented in early 2011). Instead development on that branch pretty much died with the Snap and there’s now not the capacity to really push that further under the current development paradigm so now we’re getting some smaller stories and powers for the 1-50 ride that has always been this game’s heart and soul. Honestly? I think that what actually happened may have ended up being for the best in the long run.

All this means is that we clearly need a Praetorian Hami Raid in the ruins of the Magisterium to keep the Praetorian and Primal Hamidon from merging into a pandimensional Ultimate-Hamidon. Make it so.

During the dark times after the Snap I tried out several MMOs seeking a replacement and one thing that really strikes me about CoH by comparison to them is the degree to which abilities can be enhanced at all. I mean, sure, gear in those other games makes a massive difference in performance, but they also just give you the gear that puts you a couple ranks behind the current top end every time there’s an expansion so everyone is at least in the ballpark. Similarly, the enhancement equivalents are TINY by comparison; reduce a 15s recharge power (that lasts 2s) to 12s, buff the damage of one ability by 5%; and set bonuses are similarly weak; 2% here, special effect every 90s there; and you might get 2-4 of them from having ALL your gear be part of the same set to get those tiny bumps. By contrast, CoH enhancement slotting is improves power attributes by 20-40% EACH with six available per power and set bonuses are providing up to 5 small bonuses per power. Then throw in that basic slotting expires so someone unfamiliar could easily end up effectively unslotted because they don’t yet understand that a red enhancement isn’t providing any bonuses. By contrast, gear in other MMOs may end up being woefully underperforming for your level, but it never actually expires and “put on this better armor/use this better weapon” is way more intuitive than “put this, this and this into each of your attack powers.” Basically, there is a MUCH larger spread between the floor and ceiling of performance in CoH than in a lot of other similar games and a much less intuitive learning curve. In terms of a radical overhaul in this area, my idea would be this; empty/expired slots instead of being truly empty instead provide a small enhancement buff to the power that raises the floor on performance. I’m not the greatest numbers guy, but say each empty slot provided 1/6th of an even level IO to each enhanceable stat; i.e. six-slot an attack and even empty it performs as if it had one Acc, one Damage, one EndRdx and one Recharge IO in it. That’s still less than properly slotting even basic IOs, but it’s a higher floor to start from for people still learning the ins and outs of the system. I’ll let someone else figure out how to adjust the ceiling. **** Another semi-radical overhaul I’d like to see is to make the t1 attack powers have no endurance cost and little to no recharge (some sets are nearly there, Rad blasts t1s for example). The idea here is to smooth out the early game where even with the prestige enhancements you’ve got about a 3s recharge and are regularly left with an empty endurance bar. Having a basic attack from your actual power set you can always rely on would make those low levels a LOT smoother. For a more radical suggestion than even that, make the t1 unslottable, but with sufficient base accuracy and damage (along with no END and recharge) that it functions as a fully slotted power (appropriately scaled for its tier/new stats). Now starting characters not only have an attack appropriate to their power sets for the early levels, but it also frees them up to put their early slots into something other than their starting attack so there’s more variety. It also means there’s more incentive to pick up non-attack powers earlier since the t1 can chain with itself for attacks (I’ve seen more than a few melee builds ignore their armor set powers until they start faceplanting regularly because they’re trying to build a reasonable attack chain). Coinciding with this, open up the t2 on the secondary set so that players can choose to skip these t1s entirely if they wish (I know many players who respec out of the t1 attacks at higher levels once they’ve got enough powers/recharge/endurance for a full attack chain without it... opening up the t2s would allow this build strategy to be an option for tankers, defenders, etc. Short version: The lower levels would really benefit from players having a “basic attack” power that isn’t brawl or the origin attack.* * side-bar: Not a radical suggestion, but I’d love to see a “origin attacks” power pool so I could get slottable versions of the taser, throwing knives, dart, etc.

I think the main reason it was never ported is because its technically the skin texture for the entities from the Pandora's Box SSA that was still on Test when everything got shut down. The entities only used the male (and had golden skin and a glow effect as I recall). Because it was only developed for the NPC mobs, its possible that some of the mapping isn't the greatest when transferred to the others (look at the sides of the female torso with a unisex texture and you'll see how badly things can align).

This. So much this. Outside of the revamped Atlas Park and Kallisti Wharf, Paragon City is ugly with little variety in style from zone to zone. I’m pretty sure the exact same skyscrapers in Steel Canyon also line the edge of Perez Park, are on Talos Island and show up in Brickstown, PI and Dark Astoria. Hell, the same skyscraper model is repeated multiple times in Steel making it look like some dystopian housing projects instead of the financial heart of Paragon City it’s supposed to be. The same with the endlessly repeating brownstones of Kings Row that show up on the edges of Steel, in Brickstown and Founders Falls and Peregrine Island. Then you go into a hazard zone and look at the “skyscrapers” that are clearly just solid towers with pits blown out of them (versus First Ward’s ruins where you can see the interiors of different floors). Then you go and look at the many different skyscrapers of Imperial City, the upscale apartments in Nova, the rundown projects on the west end of Neutropolis, the variety of run down, but still intact, buildings on the Northern half of First Ward. You also see it in the props like the advanced holographic and touch displays that look more advanced than what we have even in 2020... much less the cathode ray tube monitors of Paragon City. Frankly, I want to take all the beautiful buildings and improved atmospherics of Praetoria and put them into Paragon City. Re-establish the notion that Paragon and Praetoria are mirrors of each other to justify it. Steel Canyon needs to look as gorgeous and upscale as Imperial City. Brickstown and King’s Row needs the run down First Ward buildings interspersed to add variety. Founders Falls needs the lighter and airier housing of Nova Praetoria to match its bridges instead of those heavy brownstones. Talos has several missions involving radio/tv stations, so tear down some of the ugly towers and add a pallet swapped “Total Paragon News” campus. Also, I don’t care if was where the Rikti were held off in 2002; by 2012 (much less 2020) that ugly bare mound of dirt in the heart of Talos should be a proper memorial park, not an eyesore. By the same token, I’d like to see the lava lake and sky colorization from the first “Who Will Die?” SSA incorporated permanently into the Hollows map. That would seriously pump up the uniqueness of that zone’s appearance. * * * * All the above said; the single biggest aesthetic change I’d make to Paragon City would be to remove the monorails and add a proper subway line. The Trams are definitely not a design element that has aged well (seriously, the Epcot Center monorail from the 1980s looks more modern) and those tracks seriously clutter the skyline. The subway access could be a fraction of the size (just put the clicky at the top of a staircase down and add an animation of walking down the stairs when it’s triggered and walking up when you arrive) making it much easier to incorporate one or more into existing zones without disrupting them much (ex. Faultline).

I’d agree with that sentiment. Honestly, given the number of newer missions where you end up with an allied NPC or five (a number of First/Night Ward and Dark Astoria most notably) I think something that would let you get the equivalent of a sidekick (akin to the companions in SWTOR) would be an interesting way to expand character concepts a bit. To distinguish it from and keep it from overshadowing MM’s however I’d also lean towards some type of “you can only have one “sidekick” summoned at a time from said pool. Perhaps a setup that’s more like; t1 - basic summon (on par with the current patron summons) t2 - extended summon (passive that increases duration to effectively infinite) t3 - equip summon t4 - upgrade summon

I’m wondering if some of the disparity couldn’t be solved by going a step further on the idea the devs were testing of moving SO access all the way down to start (and having an “upgrade all” button for bumping them up to current maximum you could slot). The step further would be make generic IO’s the default enhancement type for drops/basic vendors with the “upgrade all” button for taking those 10’s to 15’s, etc. Difficulty could then be set around the IO enhancement levels (where two 50 IO’s puts you at close to where ED diminishing returns really start to kick in) because that’s essentially the new floor for performance. Ex. you can now balance player to-hit chance on a pre-clamped floor value (0.75 x 1.424 accuracy for a single generic 50 IO)... meaning you need a 9+% defense buff on a level 50+ mob before it will have any effect on even the most basically slotted player’s hit chance (75 - 8% defense buff = 67% to-hit x 1.424 accuracy = 95.4% hit chance). With that floor in place you can look at mobs who have +defense or -to-hit effects and scale them to at least 10-15% since anything less won’t even be noticeable. Once you’ve got a firm floor, you can then start looking at what, if any, changes to the ceilings are needed.

I’ve got a really easy way to up the difficulty; even with IO’s. Step 0) Set diff to +4/x8 w. Bosses and AVs. Step 1) Start in Praetoria. Step 2) at 20 go directly to First Ward. Step 3) when First Ward is done go directly to Night Ward. Step 4) go to Primal Earth and run the Praetorian Portal Corps arcs. Step 5) run the New Praetorians arcs. Step 6) run Dark Astoria and Agent Six (Last Bastion in Praetoria). Do NOT take assistance when it’s offered... Solo them. There is a rather sizable difference in difficulty between Praetorian content/mobs and hitting the Council again and again. The easiest fix for 50+ content is to rebuild the level 50-54 mobs to run like the Talons of Vengeance, Awakened, IDF, etc. If you followed through on the fallout of the New Praetorians arc and gave the level 50+ Council the capabilities of equivalent IDF mobs (infantry with the abilities of IDF rangers, mek-men with those of clockwork/warworks, hover bots with the abilities of the IDF orbs) there’d be a very different perception of difficulty.

I’m generally against it as well, which is why I tried to make them non-onerous as possible. That’s why my example for the requirement for the PPD patron was “completed one safeguard/mayhem mission”, the Midnighter requirement was “be able to enter the Midnighter Club” (so going to Night Ward and getting the badge that way is sufficient) and the Vanguard patron is “ability to earn Vanguard merits.” All of those are things virtually anyone who’s reached level 35 outside of AE will have done anyway. Basically, just enough to display a token connection to said group. I could even be easily persuaded to drop the PPD patron to “must be able to do radio missions” (i.e. spent a literal minute or less going and clicking on a detective in one of the zones). I could be persuaded that doing the one minute (if you skip the quest dialogue) Senator Aquilla mission chain as sufficient to unlock the Cimeroran patron pool. It’s less about the difficulty of the requirement as it is establishing WHY you have X as your patron... so at least talking to someone associated with the group seems like a bare minimum. Anything less and they shouldn’t even be called “patron” pools because if you aren’t interacting with a patron in some capacity they’re just themed ancillary pools and not patron pools. Which is fine if your preference would be to see more ancillary pools added. But the topic here is patron pools, so I figured “let’s have actual patrons.”

Rather than an individual patron, I’d like to see some group themed patron pools. For example (note that which specific powers available would depend on the AT; those with armor sets wouldn’t get the armor option, MMs wouldn’t get pets, etc.); Vanguard Membership - Impervium Armor (passive resistance) - Rail Gun Burst/Snipe (for those needing ranged attacks) - Strike/Slash (melee attacks from Vanguard Ranger) - Flashbang - Willie Pete Round - Curse of Weariness - Summon Vanguard Troops Midnighter Membership - Defensive Wards - Ward Blast/Snipe (use the Croatoa Temp power animations) - Magic Staff (various Midnighter Mobs have -damage, -to-hit, and hold effects) - Melee Staff (taking a cue from the Dream Doctor for those needing melee attacks) - Summoning (animated armor, ghosts, perhaps animus arcana). PPD Membership (PPD Trophies as a villain variant) - Body Armor - Acid Mortar (debuff) - Glue Grenade (debuff, immobilize) - Flashbang (debuff) - SMG/Snipe (ranged attacks) - Billy Club (melee attacks) - Police Raid (summon power) Praetorian Refugee/Ally - Power Gauntlets (various ranged, melee and debuffs from PPD) - Personal Force Field (toggle with the grid body field animation) - Summon Clockwork Honorary Cimeroran - Pilum (ranged attacks) - Legionnaires’ Armor (or maybe Shield as a toggle) - Gladius (melee attacks) - Engineer’s fire bomb - Surgeon’s healing - Summon Cimerorans I’d tie qualifying for each to certain badges/accomplishments... not difficult, but just to connect you to them in some way. Ex. Vanguard Membership would require you to have unlocked the ability to earn Vanguard Merits (like I said, not difficult). Midnight Squad would require having the badge to enter the club. PPD would require completing a Safeguard mission (Mayhem Mission for PPD trophies). Praetorian would require either being a Praetorian or completing a Praetorian story arc (ex. an arc in First Ward, New Praetorians or Mr. G’s). Cimeroran would be completing one of the repeatable missions in Cimerora.

Update: A hearty thanks to Michiyo on the Discord who got me straightened out. For those who ever experience a similar issue, they said to delete the Shaders folder from %localappdata%\NCSoft\CoX\Shaders. Since the folder is hidden by default, use the Window button + R and copy/paste the location into it will get you there. Again, a big tip of the hat to Michiyo, a true hero (for me at least).

So, something weird happened with my Window 10 laptop and a bad mouse causing 81 instances of CoH opening (I base this on the number of error reports it generated in the 1 minute period before I had to just shut the thing down) and error messages saying the video card wasn't compatible and I had to actually shut down the machine because it was clogged to the point of not being able to do anything. Previously I ran CoH with no issues. Now everything else runs fine, but when I bring up Tequila and attempt to launch City of Heroes (64 or 32 bit) it just hangs on the blue "Loading" mini-screen. When I close it after a minute it just moves CoH.exe to the "Background Processes" eating up 14% processor power and 125 MB. Trying again and closing it dumps ANOTHER copy into the Background Processes. I remove those by ending process on them. I've tried deleting the whole City of Heroes directory and re-downloading it and that hasn't helped. Any help and suggestions would be appreciated.

Grab the “Reveal” power from P2W/T4V for 10k inf and tunnels will never be a problem again. Also, the Warden mission chains (unlike the Crusader ones) are entirely above ground (except the brief section of Dr. Arvin where you exit, talk to a homeless man and then take a short jog to another mission door). The only underground sections being mission doors where the maps are no worse than the Paragon Sewer maps.

Most of the "running through the tunnels" are instanced maps and you'll get plenty of those with the Responsibility Loyalists as well. If you wanna come through with your soul mostly intact I highly recommend start as Resistance (so you can suborn some of the Responsibility Loyalists missions where you have murder someone for the "greater good") and then run Responsibility Nova, Warden Nova, Warden Imperial, Responsibility Imperial, Warden Neutropolis (pick Loyalist at the end) and close with Responsibility Neutropolis (pick Resistance at the end). If you then go on to do First/Night Ward and the New Praetorian arcs you'll find a lot of the people you helped make a comeback so there's some nice continuity. Staying in Praetoria until Night Ward is done and then going to Paragon from from the Resistance leaves you with a pretty good feeling too regarding various characters who'd otherwise be left up in the air. Just my 0.02 inf.

Whatever happened to Praetorian Belladonna? Would losing Ghost Widow, but gaining Praetorian Belladonna (perhaps with a sleeker more GW-inspired costume) maybe taking over the forces allied by the now deceased Calvin Scott (the United something something) work as an alternative? * * * * As an alternative to just wiping Arachnos out completely, what if instead time travel shenanigans were used so that Recluse and each of the patrons became a separate Rogue Isles faction. So Recluse keeps the Bane/Wolf Spiders and basically becomes another AV vying with the 5th Column/Nemesis for world domination. Black Scorpion becomes his own faction of tech thieves with “Scorpions” in place of the Crab Spiders and Scorp-bots in place of the Arachnobots (sorta high end Gold Brickers). Mako becomes a Corallax AV along with Barracuda. Scirocco, Ice Mistral and the Mu Mystics are something like a darker version of the Midnight Squad or Legacy Chain (stealing mystic artifacts for use in a secret war against the Circle of Thorns) Ghost Widow and the Widows are merged into a general Knives of Artemis revamp with the idea that they’re not exclusively tied to Malta but freelancers. Frankly, given the mystical undertones of the Knives, having the elites develop psi powers as part of their training/conditioning would make sense; and the integrated blade/flechette weaponry of the widows would make sense for more elite Knives as well. Then you could even keep them as patrons, but then add patrons for Nemesis, the Carnies, Council, Crey, etc. as additional patron options.

So, tiny update on my "replace all the old ugly Paragon City buildings with ones from Praetoria" idea. I took some in game measurements of zone sizes using the maps and the handy thumbtack and then grabbing the footprints of various areas in Paragon City and overlaying them on Imperial City and there is EASILY enough buildings just in Imperial City to replace the entire core of Steel Canyon and everything on the central island of Talos (excepting the docks which don't need updating) and only duplicate a building if Imperial City did. Throw in the extra buildings in Nova, Neutropolis and the non-destroyed (just rundown looking) buildings from First Ward (which despite my previous comments would add some spice to Kings row if some were interspersed there) and I think there's enough there to do Kings Row, Steel Canyon, Talos Island, Founders Falls and Peregrine Island (Brickstown getting more rundown buildings from First Ward might even put it on the table too). An extreme stretch goal would be to update some of the really fake looking ruined skyscrapers in Boomtown, Eden and the RWZ to those from First Ward's core with their much more realistic look (including torn off sections where you can see the individual floors instead of it being clear its just a solid skyscraper shaped block with holes put in it as the old hazard zone ruined skyscrapers are). Sadly (or not... I've advocated for it getting the Galaxy City treatment for a while now) Skyway City would have to be skipped... perhaps blown up entirely (with the zone events moved to Steel Canyon) and a new tram station added to Faultline to keep it connected. A related upgrade I'd actually like to see because it would make the zone MUCH more distinctive, is to take the lava-crater map from the SSA and use it to replace the huge pit in the Hollows. Many of the missions got relocated in its revamp to be closer to the Atlas gate, but the few that would be in the lava could be relocated to the lava lake's perimeter. Having a lava lake (complete with the way it lit up the sky) would really push what a disaster area/crisis zone the Hollows are and why the War Walls are actually still a good idea in that they can keep such a disaster contained even though Atlas Park is basically next door to it.

And, to be frank, all that innovations dies the moment Windows 11 comes out and follows Apple's lead of dropping the ability to run archaic 32-bit clients on it. Then all those "rush the shinies" servers are stuck with a limited playerbase of people who maintain older operating systems because they were more interested in bling than in shoring up the system's foundations. It's not as obviously new bling, but in terms of importance to maintaining the game for years to come, the development of a 64-bit client for City of Heroes is Homecoming's greatest legacy (HC's 64-bit client is also currently the ONLY way to play on an Apple machine running the latest OS... new shinies on 32-bit client systems are worthless to them). Another important part of that 64-bit client is that Homecoming can run at maximum graphic settings even on mediocre systems because 64-bit processing is exponentially faster than 32-bit and the old client could only use the 32-bit limits; fewer threads, less RAM, etc. regardless of the power of the processor and graphics cards used. As a practical example, I'm running Homecoming (64-bit) on the same machine I used to play on Live (32-bit). On live I could only handle limited Ultra settings without slowing my frame rate to a crawl because of the limits of the 32-bit architecture in relation to my system specs. Homecoming runs smooth as butter at the maximum graphics settings on the exact same system. That's the power of taking the time to fix the underlying architecture instead of just focusing on bling. I may be imagining it, but I seem to recall another BTS project being actually untangling the spaghetti code into something much easier to work with and update. THAT too is something that will pay dividends for years down the line as with the code cleaned up and/or at least documented adding future updates, theoretically including actual new graphics and models, gets a LOT easier to do.

In line with the geography changes mentioned above, I’d like to see a graphical zone revamp to bring Steel, Talos, PI and either Bricks or FF up the the standards of Praetoria, revamped Atlas and Kallisti Wharf (King’s Row is supposed to be run down so it’s fine as is). It’s hard for me to think of Steel Canyon as the financial heart of Paragon City when the core of it is a bunch of virtually identical in height and design Brutalist-style skyscrapers that went out fashion in the late 70s/early 80s... particularly when compared to the varied skyline of Imperial City that demonstrates a variety of architectural styles from different eras (not to mention differing heights and footprints). The fact that a LOT of the buildings in Steel are just copy-pastes (and not even unique ones, the same skyscrapers show up on Talos, Bricks and PI... the brownstones are just endless repeats of the ones that also turn up in Kings Row and Bricks, etc.) just does NOT do the zone any favors and rob a LOT of blue-side of areas that feel distinct. If anything, Steel Canyon as it exists presently feels like it should be the heart of Cole’s efficient but soulless dystopia (where it was all built as directed by the Cole administration) while Imperial looks like the sort of thriving finacial district that grew up organically like you see in New York, Tokyo, Dubai, etc. So my radical proposal is this... starting with Steel Canyon, replace the old buildings with models from Praetoria. I stopped counting at a hundred distinct skyscrapers just in Imperial. Swap out the billboard/banner propaganda art and you’ve got a ton of models to choose from to actually give Steel Canyon some character. Then move on to Talos Island and do it again. Given the Dirge of Chaos arc establishes a radio station there, I’d take a not-so-reskinned TPN (Total Paragon News) campus and place it on the island. Snag the shorter residential buildings from Nova Praetoria and outdoor cafes from Imperial to replace those monolithic brownstones in Founder’s Falls and make it look more like an upscale residential/boutique shopping district. Pick a theme for Peregrine Island instead of the confused mess it is now... like super-science... and replace those same old buildings with the most modern/sci-fi looking Praetorian buildings so the Portal Corps campus fits right in. The difference between playing in revamped Atlas, in Praetoria and while flying around Kallisti Wharf compared to the rest of Paragon City is almost painful and, since so much of that beauty is either quickly outleveled (Atlas), has nothing going on there (Kallisti) or is skipped because of the greater difficulty (Praetoria), I’d like to see that beauty spread to where more players will actually see it.

To expand on my previous point about PvP being generally unpopular across ALL MMO's (i.e. fewer than 5% seem to willingly engage with it) is that part of this is that ANY level/gear-based game is generally horrible for PvP. When you look at the popular PvP platforms they consistently involve player-controlled avatars of roughly equal ability (some systems have options with strengths/weaknesses, i.e. fragile speedster/mighty glacier/jack of all stats) and, if there are power-ups they are things gained inside the PvP environment via the skill of the player. This is PvP as sport where your actual skill matters and that IS immensely popular as a genre. MMO PvP is who can get to max level and put together the best PvP-gear ... then going after people who are not so equipped as the tab-based RNG combat system does the work. There's no skill at all beyond your ability to grind content to get the best gear to let you dominate others. THAT'S why its never been popular in any traditional (i.e. level/gear-based progression with tab-targeting RNG combat) MMO.

1) They're NOT different. That's the point. The mistake you make is thinking we play ANY PvP based games. 2) The mistake you make here is presuming that PvP is popular in ANY MMO-based game when all evidence I've every seen is that its NOT popular on any of them; its just required by some of them. Ex. Back before the un-Snap when I was playing SWTOR, I remember the devs saying that less than 5% of the player population ever engaged in PvP regardless of all the tweaking they did. The largest WoW PvP population on any server per their stats had 1400 PvPers... the next largest 600. The largest server populations are in the 25,000 range... so again, about 5% of the total population. * * * * * Now, translate that to a population of a few thousand like here and you get 50-100 people who engage in PvP in CoH across all the servers. The PROBLEM with PvP isn't specific to CoH... its specific to PvP.

Another, more mechanics side overhaul I would like to see is a tweak to procs. Right now thanks to how Procs per Minute work you’re somewhat penalized for slotting the full set they’re part of into a power because that set will almost certainly include recharge reduction. The current “best” approach is to frankenslot a power with multiple procs, no recharge and then build for global recharge. Instead of killing the theory-crafter’s fun, my suggestion is this; make same set recharge bonuses NOT count against you for determining PPM. The net intent is that a single proc slotted ‘with the rest of its set’ (vs. just slotted for recharge by other means) should go off as often as it would via frankenslotting with no recharge slotted in the power itself. Standard code rant applies; but perhaps working it into the set bonuses somehow would be a means of accomplishing it (I have no idea if proc rate is something you can even tweak or if it would have to be a kludge like adding a 0.2 PPM proc to every IO with a recharge component which might cause more problems than it would solve).

Dang it... now I need to roll up a Willpower Tanker named "Old Habit" who's whole shtick is being hard to break.