nzer
-
Posts
284 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Store
Articles
Patch Notes
Posts posted by nzer
-
-
1 minute ago, Super Atom said:
To be clear, the name has nothing to do with how you make a character. You can use it sure but the name has no bearing. My willpower is a power armor fueled by thermal energy. It has nothing to do with willpower. I'm not telling you that you cant dislike affinity I'm just disagreeing with your reasons as to why it's bad.
I can't really tell whether you're arguing that power set names should be purely literal or that they don't matter at all. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former, but the fact that you don't see a difference between Electrical Support and Electrical Affinity makes me think it's the latter. And since you've made convention a meaningful part of your argument, I'll point out that with support sets the convention is for names that are evocative, not literal. Both Electric Affinity and Electric Support would stick out like a sore thumb among the support sets, as they're all very uniquely named.
-
1 minute ago, Super Atom said:
Which again brings us to the problem of randomly naming things and it getting weird. "Man, I can't wait to make a boom boom pow melee". If you like the more generic names that you feel suit it better then cool but naming it something flashy for the sake of it being flashy is equally as dumb as naming it Electrical Buffs.
"Completely generic to the point of not communicating what the set does" and "so specific I can't pick it without feeling like I have to build my entire character concept around it" are not the only options here. Quite the contrary, many of the game's best names manage to capture the best of both worlds, evoking surprisingly specific imagery while remaining generic enough that they aren't prescriptive toward your character concept.
Titan Weapons. Big weapons. Weapons used by titans, which could mean big strong fighters, or ancient mythological figures, or just important figures in general. Captain America's shield could be a titan weapon, as could his devotion to justice. Evokes pantheonic themes - heroes of ancient times, great powers working in far away places, pillars of things beyond our immediate reach. Or maybe it just means big weapons. Generic, but exciting.
Storm Summoning. Using storms to destroy things. Controlling forces ordinarily beyond our reach. Awesome destructive power. Duality; sometimes wrathful, sometimes indifferent; sometimes terrifyingly sudden, sometimes slow but inexorable; sometimes serene, sometimes catastrophic. Evokes images of power, reverence, humility. And the mechanical design of the set reflects all these concepts: a high damage set with strong soft control that ramps up over time, for which all the offensive capability is directed only broadly.
Willpower. Fortifying oneself through sheer force of will. Shrugging off pain, defying unfavorable odds and coming out on top, not through luck or anger but through sheer determination. Evokes a very clear character profile, but isn't prescriptive about the details; maybe the character is exceptionally disciplined; maybe they're ideologically driven; maybe they're too stupid to recognize when things don't go how they expected.
These are all excellent names that manage to be both generic and evocative at the same time, and I'm sorry, but Electrical Affinity doesn't stand next to them. Neither do Electric Melee and Electric Control, but at least those convey the literal function of the power set, and while I don't think they're good names for a super hero game I can at least respect that they adhere to a coherent naming philosophy. But Electrical Affinity? All you can really pull from that is "something doing things with electricity." I assume it's supposed to be inspired by Nature Affinity since they're both support sets, but Nature Affinity stands on its own conceptually by virtue of affinity with nature already being a thing. Electrical Affinity not so much; I don't think I've ever heard anything described as having an affinity with electricity.
None of this is meant to disparage whoever though of the name Electrical Affinity - names are very, very hard. I trust the team to come up with something good, I just don't think it's there yet.
-
1 minute ago, Super Atom said:
The concept of this power set is no more exciting than Electric Control or Electric Melee and both of those are have super generic names.
Let's be honest though, both of those names are terrible. Naming an electricity-based set Electric Category is as low effort as you can get without actually failing to communicate the purpose of the set, and they're both still better Electric Affinity, which fails to even clear that bar.
7 minutes ago, Super Atom said:The only real power set names have been things like Electrical Conduction or Electric Support and spoilers those are as generic as affinity.
Electrical Conduction is way better than Electrical Affinity IMO, as it plays into both the theme of electricity and the set's focus on arcing powers. Electrical Support is conceptually just as generic, but it at least communicates the purpose of the set, and it fits better with Electric Control and Electric Melee in that it's fundamentally Electric Category (not that fitting in with the other bad names should be a goal).
-
31 minutes ago, Super Atom said:
Why does everyone think power set names need to be exciting? I mean, i guess they could be but at that rate we have a tremendous amount of things to rename.
Why shouldn't they be exciting? A name doesn't have to be overly specific to the point of obstructing otherwise viable character concepts in order to be exciting.
In this particular case I think the problem is that the concept of the set evokes a lot of really interesting ideas and themes, but the name is generic enough that without context you wouldn't really have any idea what kind of set it was describing. Electric healing is novel idea, and people don't feel the name lives up to it.
-
If the purples you're referring to are the ATO sets (Command of the Mastermind and Mark of Supremacy), there are non-purple versions you can use before 50.
-
I play at 240hz and don't remember having to do anything besides pick the right refresh rate from the resolution drop down, but FYI, this game is so poorly optimized you'll rarely be much above 60 fps anyway.
-
You can do this by sending yourself an email
-
1 hour ago, Rumahu said:
What do you guys think about making attack my target require aggressive stance/automatically switching them over, and potentially giving a reason to have your pets not be in defensive stance all the time?
This isn't giving players a reason to not use defensive stance all the time, it's forcing them to use aggressive stance when they don't want to. Defensive attack my target already doesn't benefit from bodyguard mode, there's no reason to make this change.(Edit: I think I misread you on this part. If you're suggesting some kind of bonus for being in the other stances, that's an interesting idea that I think could have some merit. Defensive stance has bodyguard mode, so the other stances should have some benefit too. Though personally, I would prefer bodyguard be toned down and made to work in every stance, and maybe the stances be given some new bonuses. I still don't think attack my target should require aggressive stance, as it means you'd have to manually put them in defensive after the target dies if you want to replicate the current behavior.)And I disagree with the suggestion that there's never any use for aggressive stance. In a team with a good tanker leaving your pets in defensive means they won't be doing anything upwards of half the time because nothing is attacking you.
Ultimately, bodyguard mode just needs to be completely reworked. I shouldn't have to open myself up to massive damage spikes to get my pets to stop ignoring the mob right next to me because it's attacking the tanker rather than me. I get the potential for abuse, but the way it works right now is just... dumb.
-
Buffing underperforming primaries and auto upgrades are things I would love to see here, but I don't want to see hacky compromises in the game just for the sake of getting the feature out. If they can't figure out a proper way to make pets customizable, they shouldn't make them customizable. The HC team has been absolutely right so far to focus on doing things correctly rather than quickly.
-
14
-
2
-
-
12 minutes ago, VileTerror said:
Thing is, @nzer; if this option gets added, then your suggestion could also get added. Just have the initial call for a Respec on a character also hit the save command for the Tray layout, and then when the Respec finishes, it automatically applies the load command. Bim. Bam. Sploosh!
Yup, absolutely. Just wanted to call out that it should be automatic for respecs.
-
1
-
1
-
-
I like this idea. I do think that for respecs the ideal solution is for the respec to try to put powers back in the same spot on its own rather than for the player to save their trays then reload them.
-
1
-
-
2 hours ago, Number Six said:
The one thing that changed from my initial post is that the final version doesn’t have a different radius for Defensive and Aggressive Goto.
Both allow pets to move around within a 30’ radius of the Goto point, and both prioritize targets closer to that point.
Any thoughts on allowing leash radius to be passed as an argument to /petcom so we can set it to whatever we want?
-
Maybe this is just a quirk of how you worded it and you're not actually suggesting this, but changing the fundamental focus of an existing AT is a complete non-starter. Add a new AT that behaves this way if you want, but don't touch MM.
-
1 hour ago, ScarySai said:
I took issue with him phrasing it in such a way that it 'crippled' demons/thugs.
They didn't phrase it that way...
-
1 minute ago, macskull said:
Does the +special from one boost the +special of the other? Given the recent nerf to +special boosting -special, I'd say that interaction is definitely a bug. On the topic at hand, I don't care at all about Farsight benefiting from PB but Fade benefiting from it is obviously a bug and I'm surprised it's gone this long without getting fixed.
I'm not 100% sure of the mechanism, and I haven't verified it myself, but my understanding is that using Clarion Radial before using Power Boost results in a much larger +special than the other way around, so I'm assuming there's some unintended interaction there.
-
The arguments here about Farsight's defense when paired with Power Boost ring really hollow given Force Field gets just as much defense from Deflection Shield, Insulation Shield, and Power Boost, then gets 15% more and mez protection on top of it from Dispersion Bubble. No one seems to have a problem with Force Field being able to nearly incarnate soft cap and mez protect an entire team without incarnates, but Time reaching the non-incarnate soft cap with Clarion Radial is apparently too much. And yeah, Time has benefits outside of that, but people have been complaining for years that Force Field needs offensive bonuses in order to be competitive with the rest of the support power sets. If it gets them, are people gonna suddenly start having problems with the defense it provides? I sure hope so, based on this thread.
To say nothing of the fact that almost every properly built end-game team has enough def buffs to softcap everyone anyway. My thugs/storm MM only sits around 28% defense to positionals with all her toggles going, but I can't remember the last team I was on where I didn't have 50+% after buffs. Time is, frankly, not much of a standout once the team no longer wants for survivability, and that's a fairly low bar.
I'd like to see the interaction between Clarion Radial and Power Boost fixed, and I could see toning down Farsight a bit for defenders specifically, but I don't personally have a problem with Time defenders being able to provide 35-40% defense with Power Boost and Clarion Radial, and I definitely don't have a problem with /Time Corruptors and MMs being able to provide ~25%.
-
1
-
-
4 minutes ago, Crysis said:
May I ask how you slot it?
I use usually 6-slot the power with 4 Dark Watcher's Despair including the -Recharge proc, a Pacing of Turtle -Recharge Proc and an Impeded Swiftness +Chance of Smashing Damage proc.
I may as well be the only light in the moth house with this power.
Ah, yeah I don't slot it for procs, as I've been told it doesn't take them well. That probably makes the difference.
-
7 hours ago, Crysis said:
I’ve found that totally unnecessary on a /Time MM with Times Juncture.
This hasn't been the case for me, personally. TJ attracts aggro for the alpha for sure, but as soon as a pet hits something it takes aggro in my experience.
-
1
-
-
50 minutes ago, Leogunner said:
You can't just whack some stuff down to equalize them... You just make a perpetual game of whack a mole as the value of your inf plummets.
I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting we lower the price of ATO recipes to 30 merits, or whatever, then call it a day, I'm just suggesting there's an imbalance that ought to be corrected.
-
5 minutes ago, Obus Form said:
How did we discover it?
Something isn't not a trap because you can discover it and avoid it. The argument you're making is dangerously close to "ATO recipe prices are a trap deliberately, and that's okay because traps incentivize people to seek out knowledge," and I don't think you realize that.
-
Just now, Obus Form said:
It;'s not a trap.
There's a choice. /AH and asking /help being the biggest ones. Even a quick google search for COH and money making gives results.
What's the choice? To spend three times as much to get the ATO now rather than half an hour from now? Do you think most of the people buying ATOs with merits understand that's what they're doing? Because I'd bet they actually just don't know any better, in which case it's not a choice at all, they're inadvertently wasting merits because they don't know any better. That's a trap, by definition.
-
9 minutes ago, Obus Form said:
And it ends being a philosophical idea because the solution to your problem is...based on the idea that bad (whatever you define "bad" as) merit sinks should be removed.
But that's not what it's based on... I really don't mean to be rude, but I just explained that; I'm saying we shouldn't be tackling the problem of varying efficiency by adding or removing merit sinks, we should be tackling it by equalizing the existing merit sinks so that players aren't punished for picking the less efficient ones.
To put it more directly, it shouldn't be significantly more efficient to convert merits to boosters, sell them on the AH, then buy the ATO on the AH than it is to buy the ATO outright. A bit more efficient perhaps, because buying them outright is faster, but not three times as efficient.
The problem isn't that players are "doing it wrong," it's that a reasonable looking way to spend merits is actually a trap.
-
15 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:
I thought I was perfectly clear, but since you reiterated, so will I.
You were, and that's my fault for reading too quickly; I edited my comment to better respond to yours, but not in time apparently.
17 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:I continue to disagree, marginally less respectfully this time.
I too will be marginally less respectful: I don't find "people should be allowed to waste merits if they want to" to be a compelling argument in the slightest, and I don't think the people you're arguing on behalf of would appreciate such an argument if they knew you were making it for them. The idea that someone would argue against "people should be able to spend merits however they want without inadvertently throwing them away" is, to me, completely absurd.
-
21 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:
But that still reinforces the notion embodied in the first sentence, that there's a "right way"
I'm not really interested in having this kind of philosophical debate. I'm suggesting players should be able to take advantage of all the merit sinks available to them without inadvertently throwing merits away in the process.
21 minutes ago, tidge said:You literally wrote three sentences, all of which were quoted
Allow me to quote them again:
15 hours ago, nzer said:The problem is that the proper way to use reward merits isn't something players will naturally discover or intuitively grasp, so many players end up spending them inefficiently and flushing lots of potential inf down the drain. The proposed solution is to allow merits to be sold for inf, which is both easy to direct players toward and simple for them to do.
It's really fairly straightforward, but IMO it would be better to adjust the costs of existing merit sinks so they're all roughly equal. If the problem is newbies falling into traps, the solution should be removing the traps.
The problem isn't that there are many different ways for people to spend their merits, it's that they all vary wildly in terms of efficiency. The solution to that isn't to remove or add merit sinks, it's to equalize the efficiency of the available sinks so that, for example, buying an ATO outright doesn't cost three times as many merits as buying boosters, selling them on the AH, then buying the ATO off the AH with the profits.
Focused Feedback: Electrical Affinity - Name
in [Open Beta] Focused Feedback
Posted · Edited by nzer
Okay, well lots of people do think they matter to character design. And when I say "literal," I'm referring to names like Electric Melee, for which the underlying concept is just "this is a melee set that uses electricity." Force Field, Traps, Poison, Storm Summoning, and Trick Arrow don't fit that mold.
I'm honestly shocked you put Storm Summoning in there given that I just explained its thematic underpinnings. Like... did you even bother to read that?
Force Field sounds a lot like a power to me, as does Dark Miasma. But they're not, they're support sets. Convention dictates that support sets be given unique, evocative names. Neither Electrical Affinity nor Electrical Support would fit; the former because it's too similar to Nature Affinity and the latter because it's too literal.
Edit: To elaborate a bit more directly (in case any of the HC folks see this), Electrical Affinity actually breaks the naming convention of the support sets because of its similarity with (or rather derivation from) Nature Affinity. Support set names aren't derivative like control sets (Fire Control, Electric Control, Plant Control, etc.), they're unique, though several are named with the convention of Element Noun, where the noun is related to the element.
Affinity for nature -> Nature Affinity
Heat radiates -> Thermal Radiation
Sound resonates -> Sonic Resonance
If following convention is the goal, the new set should be named:
Electricity conducts -> Electrical Conduction
Or something similar. But not Electrical Affinity.