kingsmidgens

I'm getting the impression that some on the dev team here want to create a game that is much different to the original game, one that's harder and more "balanced" which okay, some people are all for. Some of these negative changes remind me of another game on the market, Path of Exile. Just look at how players enjoyed their recent changes. For those of you who don't know, the bulk of the playerbase in Path of Exile plays what are known as "Challenge Leagues" which appear once every 3 months or so, and run for most of those 3 months. Running concurrently with this "League" is "Standard" which is the accumulation of everyone's prior Leagues. The system, as they've set it up, is used to test out new features for the game. There are things that are exclusive, initially, to these leagues. I think that it's actually a great system - what's NOT great, is their mentality that the game always has to be: Slower. Less rewarding. More dangerous. It's a slippery slope to follow that path and the antithesis of what was set up on Live for City of Heroes, a game where over time we've gotten more and more power by design. It feels cool to be a super hero, and if you were around for the old days where you were equal to 2 minions, or whatever the old theory was, it's extra cool to see how far we've come. I'm not saying we're at the point of a completely unrewarding and practically impossible game - yet - but that changes are a slippery slope, if you make a change here and it's "not that big of a deal" you can do something similar, later, and it's "not that big of a deal" if you're comparing A to B and then B to C... but A to C, well, that may be. Over the years, think about the little-by-little comparison of A to G, at that rate. This game has a fanbase that's endured and we endured because we, I guess, like the game, idk. Well, here is my proposal: Add a new, temporary server. - Make this server as hard as you like, tweak it to your heart's content. Those that want a challenge can play there. I'd honestly recommend nerfing a lot of rewards. For instance: No Vet level rewards. - Have this server, like Test, be in it's own separate little area. No shared market, no shared characters - everything is brand new. It's up to you if you stock the market. I suppose you'd have to with superpacks. - Have exclusive content to this server. Throw together a Trial that rewards a 3rd ATO set for instance, which you can only acquire on this server. Have early access to a new Incarnate slot. Just throwing that out there, gotta have some carrot. - After some amount of time, say 6 months, roll the characters from this server onto the live servers, which remain the same. Put the new content in at that time. Pros, as I see them: - You can treat this a bit like a beta. Players will be making their characters from scratch, so there's no insta-50s with a perfect build annihilating content from day 1 thinking: yeah this is easy. You'll get more honest feedback from the original balance standpoint of "what will people without perfect builds think of this content?" - Experiencing a fresh economy is actually great from my perspective. New players who are coming to HC at this point in time are inundated with farms and humbled by the price of things - which, I honestly think are fairly cheap currently. But, newer players haven't had time to farm like I have. Speaking of New players, if the challenge isn't to extreme, this could be a good opportunity for them to be interacting with the game at it's best. Lots of people in varying level ranges and strengths all buzzing about - and by rolling their characters into existing servers, they'd have a fun experience and a leg up. - This can be a way for you to do things like disable AE. If people want that, they can still play on the existing servers. I feel like everyone's happy. If you want to play with the cutting edge stuff "you need to get it how I want you to get it" - The "New" will keep some players on the hook for longer, and may bring back players who've fallen by the wayside. Everyone, together, can experience making new characters and if AE is disabled for instance, 95% of the first characters probably won't be Spines/Fire Brutes. Cons I can think of: - Population might be split a bit. I don't think these servers will end up being super popular, though the population would undoubtedly rival Indomitable for instance. - Yeah, this would be a fair amount of work to put together. The "Rewards" i.e. exclusive things don't have to be very extensive, though, and could just include a couple of new IO sets, which is something that I feel you can't ever go wrong adding. - You PROBABLY can't go too overboard with the challenge, but it'd be fun to see what happens. So here's an example: Fresh economy, new characters only No EXP in AE, Tickets only P2W limited - no boosters, no freebies Vet levels don't give rewards All enemies have +10% Accuracy Characters have a 10% Resistance debuff (resistable) Several new IO sets are available in the general drop pool After 6 months, the characters are migrated and the IO sets are made available on the current live servers Just off the bat, with little investment, enemies are going to be hitting 10% more often for 10% more damage. They'll always do 10% more damage, but I'm not sure what impact the Accuracy buff would have, long-term. It SHOULD scale and mean that they're going to also hit you 10% more often, but if they have existing accuracy buffs or get debuffed that exact value might change. I do think scaling Accuracy is less punishing than ToHit, although even if you're Softcapped it will mean you're getting hit more often. Ideally a squishy would want a tank and a tank would want support - win/win - though I think a "Tanker" could probably shrug off the change easily enough. Again, with the Path of Exile example, they started by testing out a lot of gameplay additions - like Shrines, if you're familiar with ARPGs, they spawned randomly and you click them for a short-term buff. That was an early "League" in that game, which they then rolled into the entire game afterwards. I'm not imaginative enough to think of anything like that to add to CoH as a whole - I suppose things like Super Stunners and Cryogenists count - so I gave the example of introducing new IO sets or Incarnate slots to this theoretical server, first. You could also forego the player stat debuffs/mob buffs entirely and stick exclusively with no AE and P2W limits but keep the carrots and use it as an extended, level-by-level, testing grounds for new powersets. Anyway that's it. I feel like the servers as they are should only ever receive buffs and anything that "nerfs" the game would best be left to a server that people can choose to play on, and I think the aforementioned "League" system would give people an incentive to play there, how you want them to play, while preserving the game for those who like it how it is.

Well, since the reward merit change went live, I guess it's time for a suggestion thread: It's pretty silly to me that after 3 years of the server this ability is now gone. This is something that was added for this server specifically, and left in for.. well, the entire time up until now. You can argue if it was too beneficial but you can't argue that people have already taken advantage of it if they were going to. Not everyone is going to play in the same cookie-cutter way, and removing avenues that ALL players could take is harmful, regardless of your own opinion on how ideal play should be. The economy isn't a vacuum, this process isn't just generating influence from nothing - they were, in theory, providing value to other players, or they wouldn't have been profiting. Many people I've heard from were not even engaging in the market, they were using extra Emps to get enhancements for their own personal use. If there was in fact some problem with people being able to do it in some edge cases then apply a cooldown to the conversion process. I'd recommend 10 Merits per level 50 per 20 hrs for 100 reward merits, the same ratio it was before, at a reasonable pace: it'd require over a month of logging in regularly for a player to cash out on a "theoretical" farmed char but still provide a good amount of value to a newer player, who may be struggling when they first reach 50. I would metaphorically eat my hat if under the proposed system there would end up being an individual with 500+ new (since the update) characters in the process of cashing out merits which is what was alleged by some in the beta thread, that individual people are capable of going through dozens of 50+48s per day and they were doing so with the purpose of getting reward merits. The mechanics of potentially, at that point, using existing 50s to send merits over so you can log into hundreds of characters per day makes my skin crawl and I'd go so far as to say if somebody is willing to do that they should absolutely be rewarded for it - that's an awful lot of farming they're not doing simply because they're alting for hours on end, every day. My personal experience here: I turned off Common Recipes because it was taking away too much time from actual farming for too little relative reward - I actually did the math on that - and people think I'm nuts for it. For the record I have never actually done this, but I would strongly argue against doing anything that nerfs reward structures in a game that's been running for so long. Participating in the in-game chat, I mostly see newer players tout the ability to breakdown emps into Reward Merits, as they're newly 50 and may be gathering components from play outside of the Veteran system, and are sorely lacking in funds and enhancements for their first chars. I would recommend that you buff what you feel is underperforming, what you'd like more people to do, and just accept that you added perhaps too generous of rewards to the veteran system. Disclaimer: I am saying "if" this is a problem. I don't believe it ever was. But assuming it is, change the system but do not remove it. "if" it was a problem, people are going to get a lot more upset than they did with uncommon salvage being 10k inf when 90% of the converter supply disappears, because somebody was supposedly earning something like 15 billion inf per day via converters. The system as currently designed I feel unfairly punishes non-farmers.

I also think this is the best solution. If a "change" can't be beneficial because "power creep" in a minority of cases, I feel like that change shouldn't be made at all. Most powersets with an applicable toggle have one (useful) toggle and waiting longer than that to reach your strength is bad, even if it means needing to miss an offensive attack or two so to me you're making a lot of characters worse, which is changing the game for the worse. I tend to play in a group so individual damage is not as important to me as getting that taunt or debuff activated ASAP. When I'm not in a group I -really, really- want that survival back ASAP. There was no consideration like this made, as far as I know, when toggle suppression was first introduced. Just: All your survival toggles have no effect when CC'd but they come right back afterwards. Prior to that you had to manually activate each and every one, and a lot had longer animations than they do now too. Talk about power creep when a Defender suddenly didn't have to sit there for 10s reactivating Leadership when they got grazed by a sleep - This current change is a 180 in terms of design from what improved the game over the years.

Originally enemies had 75% ToHit so Defense had to work a little differently but for many, many issues, Defense had been worked out and the devs and playerbase were happy with it. IOs came out. I'm not sure why this change had to wait 3 years because I, and everyone I know, already had the memo on live. It's too big of a change and not in the right direction. Here's an example character, my new Nature Defender: Positional defense so the Typed change has a minimal impact. 75% (106.83%) S/L and 40.03% Energy Resistances. Example hit from Energy Melee of 100 damage, which I should point out is a good value because it's a nice and easy number to work with but a little bit low in terms of a "real" example hit. Old: 60 Smashing, 40 Energy or: 15 Smashing, 24 Energy 39 damage New: 40 Smashing, 60 Energy or: 10 Smashing, 36 Energy 46 damage That's almost a 20% increase in damage taken, without even including the defense type changes which is the perceived goal: get people away from S/L stacking. Non-armor set ATs are going to have the most extreme examples of taking increased damage simply because of the shift in damage types. This also may be one of the least drastic practical examples, as Nature has +RES all but my char is even already capped on S/L without it - without Wild Growth, I'm at 75 (83%) S/L and 16.25% Energy which makes the difference even greater. Not needed, do not want.

I have tested it and I don't like it and I feel like in my posts I've made it clear why: This is a fundamental part of the game, it's been balanced to take this into account from day one. If this isn't sacred then what is? It's a slippery slope, and why? What does it accomplish? It seems it's specifically targeting a few powers and will have far-reaching implications, perhaps a "slight" bump in difficulty but again, why? People will always do what's most efficient, it doesn't matter if it's stacking S/L or probably now changing to Positional. Something is going to give you the best bang for your buck or what's right given the circumstances of a certain build. I feel like if this goes through, what's going to be next? It also feels like it's antagonistic towards the player-base specifically. Increase non-S/L damage to justify the removal of the S/L tag... attacks that were previously primarily S/L, the most common damage type in the game, that's too common apparently - converted to something else entirely because the opposite and more sensible change in this vein would have been to remove the non-S/L tag to an attack that did primarily S/L damage. Add new content, make it as hard as you want, leave existing content alone, that will always be my opinion when it comes to nerfs. This change is likely going to prompt a buff to more armor sets (look at what they're doing to Invuln) and it'll ripple to everything else, too, because Invuln is now almost as good as Willpower which is .. not right. tl;dr If it's not broken, don't fix it.

I think that there are some incorrect assumptions being made here, chiefly that it "doesn't impact players" who aren't extremely invested in S/L defense in particular. The only player/character this does not impact in any way is a character with both either positional/no typed and equal Resistances across the board. VERY RARELY will this be "a buff" under certain circumstances, which would end up being a nerf in pretty much every other circumstance for that same character. S/L Defense and S/L Resistance are the most common forms in their respective category, that's why it works to build for them while not leaving you 100% protected, which I believe is a fair balance. Most enemies already have an attack that ignores S/L Defense and deals generally that non-S/L type of damage, even if they have several that ARE S/L+ typed. Let's assume a character built out in SOs. It's been said it has no impact on these characters at all. This is assuming that they don't have an armor set or one of several Epic/pool Defense powers, which are either all or generally typed. Frozen Armor and Scorpion Shield are both very popular. While true that Weave grants Defense to all - unless you skipped Tough, this combination even without considering IOs will mean that your character is taking more damage than they were before. The justification for removing S/L tags came with shifting the damage on the individual powers, so to make another assumption here, we're saying the character does not have IOs and all defense is equal. Well, the overarching change will still impact them, because they're likely to have S/L Resistance as their highest resistance. To use Energy Melee as an example, these attacks used to deal 60% S/L and 40% Energy. They're now doing 40% S/L and 60% Energy. S/L is the more resisted type by characters with resistance in most cases. Just looking at the Armor sets, there are only two sets that have Energy higher than S/L, and these are the only two that have S/L equal to or lower than Energy when you consider in Tough (which, let's be honest, you're taking Tough on those characters) - this also applies to all shifted damage types because these sets, while they have a primary focus, tend to have S/L equal to or higher than their other Resistances, and they almost always have it as a fallback. And again, taking Tough and Weave will almost guarantee it. For every bit of one you may be resisting more of because it's your specialty, the flipside is you're now taking more from what your hole is. Elec Brutes who don't have 90% S/L are now taking less from S/L/Energy split attacks and more from.. every other S/L+ split attack. So you're going from taking a majority of damage as more commonly resisted damage to the majority of damage as a less resisted damage instead. In the case of more Support-oriented ATs, you may not have very much Resistance at all to fall back on, it's mostly going to be S/L from Tough and a +RES Epic power, if you didn't go Defense. If you went Defense, you're going to take A WHOLE lot more damage after this change. Cold/Dark/Storm may be exceptions but still pushed to Primarily S/L if you took an Epic Resist toggle besides Charged Armor. If this legitimately has no impact on you at all I would argue that you and the vast majority of the playerbase are playing completely different games from one another. If you're telling me that it may not have that much of an effect on you - I would say that it's plausible but I still have to question why this change to a fundamental aspect of the game is even necessary, especially if it doesn't have that much of an effect, and what's going to come next. I trust the game that was built over time and the head for numbers that the OG devs had over many of the quite honestly mind-boggling decisions that have either been attempted or actually implemented and really think it's going to lead down a slippery slope if a line isn't drawn. When people are suggesting that harder content be created, it's different than just across the board "making everything harder" - leave the existing game content as it is, think of new challenges for players to optionally tackle if they would like to do so and ideally some reason to push their characters through these challenges.

People really want Taunt/Acc/Rech D-Syncs and you can't get those in AE but if you want the inf needed for them... yeah AE is your best bet. People are going to want Aether particles and people can't get those in AE. You can trade them so AE again is going to be the best bet. These two things are good and not acquired via AE. Add new things, especially some that can't be traded to other players or broken down into inf in any way shape or form and problem solved. It's too late to change existing rewards as people have been farming for 3+ years and the solution is to add more inf sinks and more currency which is not tied to AE directly or indirectly.

We don't know the reason for the change but if it's to reduce rewards for farmers to reduce prices... think about how farmers get inf from merits, in theory. They're doing it by stocking the market. They may be using inf to buy stuff too, sure, but if they're unloading their merits into converters for said inf, they're helping to reduce the prices on what it is they're buying by increasing supply since converters are more than likely being used to produce those enhancements to begin with. IMO stuff is SUPER cheap right now. I craft/convert enhancements essentially just to stock the market but it's not really "worth" the effort that I put into it compared to the raw inf I earn for farming, in or out of AE. Making this change will cause prices to increase if it is in fact "problematic" that farmers are getting too many reward merits. I use inf as inf, I use merits for what they're "supposed" to be used for - if I actually use any - but I have to reiterate that I feel this change will directly and in a roundabout way further impact newer players and those that aren't established to the degree that others may be since it is one less avenue they can utilize to build out characters. It's been 3 years of a generous system, I feel it's a bit late to squeeze this genie back in the box. If the idea is to coax people out of AE, which is the feeling I'm getting, a better way would be to introduce new content and leave existing systems alone.

An important consideration is that not all offensive toggles kick off at the end of the animation. You're standing there for 1, 2, 3 seconds - however long - but the buff/debuff may have been applied before that. This means that currently: you may be able to get your first debuff on the mobs almost IMMEDIATELY after the stun ends, and the animation is what you're waiting on now for the second.

Just like with the originally proposed AE changes, why even bother? It's been 3 years. People have exchanged their merits, made their money, etc. Add new currencies - Aether particles are good - don't change existing rewards. This really only impacts newer players and non-farmers. Here's why, IMO, it's not even a big deal to be able to earn Emps from AE and also break them down: It's a small portion of what you generate during the process of leveling up. It decreases over time. It's capped at level 99 and effectively softcapped by the time you're earning 5 per 3 levels - you really aren't getting much value at that point. Farmers would have to make new characters fairly regularly in order to cash in on this, the 99 cap is already limiting - and people have thousands of vet levels on a single character, so this is obviously not a concern for farmers. -- I will say that I feel like the system is incredibly generous, and has been. The server just sort of came up and there wasn't much of a discussion period: Here's how things are. This is probably why the server is so popular. Changing it now will just slow growth at best or even cause players to quit. Add inf sinks, more stuff on P2W would help, add new currency, but leave existing rewards alone.

Thought: Make defensive portions of toggles unsuppress immediately. The DoT/Debuff on the Blaster or Tanker Sustains can be suppressed longer but I think the defensive portions should reactivate sooner. "Longer" I think should be 4s at most. I'm not entirely sure why the timer is set to the absolute maximum which is a super edge case - can we not just get something that's on the border of a buff?

Okay just ran tests with an existing Sonic character. Some caveats: Character is built for stacking -RES before beta, but not fully optimized. Characters I had on Live would have been MUCH better at dropping Resistance. I was going to respec the character but since a nerf is coming I probably won't bother. Each attack I don't have on beta would only be an additional -6.4% effective resistance (given the 20% resistance already on the pylon) Current performance: Note: This could get quite a bit higher. Beta performance: Note: This can't get much higher. Cap would be -15.2% Couldn't find a mob that I could treat as a punching bag without the pesky -20% getting in the way, by the time you're doing double damage to something even "bad" damage is pretty good. My conclusion: You're severely nerfing the debuff potential of the set just to give it damage that's still mediocre. This is coming from somebody who's played and enjoyed the set many times since the early days. Buff, don't nerf. I'm not a fan of anything that requires me to respec my character because what my powers can do has been reduced - add to the set if that'll make people happy but don't remove anything from it. Personally I am happy to play it as a debuffer because in a group you're going to have DPS characters who can mow down spawns on their own and what slows you down are the EB/AV class enemies, where you currently shine and raise everyone to a higher level. Sure, you technically still debuff, but it's a pale comparison to what you could achieve before.

For the record this doesn't personally impact me in any way shape or form. I've got a ton of E Merits, most of which I didn't even get from AE to begin with. I tend to play characters in Incarnate content to gather their parts as I feel it's more efficient that way. It's content I enjoy, I get parts for doing it that I don't have to use merits on. But I do recognize that I'm a bit of a special case. I'm actually glad to see new players in the game, if they're attracted by the idea they can easily "skip" the "boring" leveling content, that's perfectly fine by me. If they weren't going to make it without AE, they weren't going to be there anyway and I'm not one to get mad if somebody jumps in on content only to find themselves in over their head. Contrary to what seems to be at least a prevalent belief, not everybody who's apparently new just came fresh at whatever level they are from an AE run. I really don't like the idea of nerfing things now because it might get better Later™. I feel like this leads down a slippery slope where.. who knows what's next? Gotta vote for a revert until we get a complete proposal to mull over. AE was firmly entrenched on Live and while the obviously broken stuff was fixed and I feel like I need to reiterate that while there's new stuff that made it much more rewarding here specifically, possibly too rewarding, even... I'd argue vet levels were never necessary in or out of AE... it's been much more rewarding for 3 years now. Changing that at this point would be punishing to new players and adding/buffing something that isn't AE would go much further to coax people out than. well. simply nerfing what people seem to like.

I'm not sure why but the early damage feels pretty good, be it that most of the powers are direct damage as opposed to having several DoTs mixed in or if it's the Psionic damage type. Outside of Ill/Mind, every T1 is an Immobilize DoT and your most reliable damage dealer at a low level, needing to wait around 9s for the full amount of damage to tick down, whereas with Symphony you get it all immediately - which would result in a use of the ability that would "eventually" defeat the foe, doing so up front instead. It's possible that the DoT allows the enemy just enough regen to actually need a further application. Can't figure out why, just tried out a few low-level chars and Symphony felt much, much better on damage. At higher levels the Reverberant seems quite strong and I feel like long-term that's the draw to the powerset. The CC doesn't stack for each of the the Reverberant's activations but it's still basically +2 mag on your initial application, which is nice. How it repeats your powers feels a bit weird, it sometimes seems to queue them up for ages, other times it'll chain them pretty quickly. I definitely feel the need to have the ability to control where the pet goes because it sort of just drifts where it wants and targets something at random, meaning the cones will only hit a couple of things when yours just tagged the whole group.

In practice this feels really bad and I'd rather have the old system back. I've had a lot of experience playing Support characters and I'd rather click and animate a -ToHit toggle for 2/3 seconds than wait 8 after a stun. Either reduce the timer greatly across the board or revert the change entirely IMO, this is a nerf to basically every character I play *with an offensive toggle.