GastlyGibus

Don't the Knives of Artemis kind of fill in that role? Sure, they're not explicit, true ninjas from Japanese history, but they still fit the niche pretty well. Focus on stealth and subterfuge, throwing stars, caltrops, katanas, masks, the whole deal. I do wish they got more screentime and story arcs, though. Right now they're just "those assassins that Malta hires sometimes."

I don't mind Council/5th from a lore perspective. I really like the idea that they're an ever-present threat from level 1 all the way to 50, a para-military organization that has a foothold in nearly every city in Paragon, built on nothing but their own tenacity and force of will (with maybe a dash of mind control sprinkled in). That being said, though, there are a few things I think are odd about them that could stand to be changed or altered. First and foremost, from a lore perspective, the Council doesn't really seem to have any major distinctions like most other enemy groups. Virtually every other villain group in the game has a niche, a hook, something that makes them distinct from all the other villain groups. Hellions are fire-wielding demon worshippers, Outcasts are elemental mutants, Circle of Thorns are evil wizards with spooky ghosts, Malta are tactical secret agents trained to neutralize supers, you get the idea. Council, on the other hand, are all over the place in terms of theme. I know that technically their theme is forbidden science, but it doesn't really show, and it doesn't make a lot of sense. The warwolves and vampyri are supposed to be scientifically created, but I never understood that. Werewolves and vampires bring to mind magic and mystical forces, not genetic experimentation. The Nictus angle works really well for this, but it's not really utilized as effectively as it should be. Galaxy soldiers all look exactly the same, and they never really grow and evolve into anything more than "soldiers in tights with shadow blasts." If I were in charge of rewriting them, I'd probably ditch the warwolf/vampyri angle and lean heavily into the Nictus and science angle. Instead of werewolves, give us genetically altered soldiers bolstered by cybernetics and super serums. The description of some Council soldiers already mentions that they're scientifically enhanced to be incredibly powerful, so show us the absolute pinnacle of that. Imagine a Council soldier, hopped up on some unholy super serum, shrugging off bullets and grenades like they were nerf darts, and running in to punch some poor hero right in the face. Imagine if the Galaxy soldiers behaved more like the PPD Awakened, and utilized far more powerful Nictus powers, like transforming and crowd control. Imagine the Ascendants being far more present instead of the extremely rare, scripted encounters they are, leading their soldiers into battle and bolstering them with powerful force fields and military acumen. Right now, they don't really give off that vibe. In the later game they're just very random and disorganized. Soldiers with guns, mixed with some werewolves, some vampires, some killer robots, and some alien people. It's too eclectic to me and it kind of makes the Council a bit disappointing, especially considering that they're heavily present in the end-game, plotting for world domination and total control. The second issue, and one that others have already mentioned, is that they're... just too easy. They don't pack any real punch that most villain groups have at the 40-50 range. The Carnival has their illusionists and endurance sapping; Nemesis has their leadership buffs and force fields; Malta has their crowd control; Circle of Thorns has their elemental magic and debuffs. The Council are just kind of... guys with guns. And werewolves, sometimes. I'd love to see the Council buffed with the things I mentioned above. Give me super soldiers! Deadly aliens controlling the powers of darkness! Leadership buffs and tactics! Make them interesting and threatening. Give them a niche, because they desperately need one. Finally, to put an end to this long-winded rant of mine, can the 5th Column and Council stop killing each other in the streets? It makes the "Defeat XX Council" missions damn-near impossible to complete because the Council troops are usually dead before I even get a chance to fire a shot.

Ran the Eden trial again today for the WST, and I realized just how much has changed from the old days. I started playing this game right around the time Inventions were added, so I'm not a veteran, I wasn't around from the beginning, and I don't know exactly what the game was like when it was first released. So, anybody here who was around during those days, tell me about it. Was it good? Bad? Neutral? What do you miss? What are you glad was changed?

This one is absolutely brilliant. Well done! I have more to share here. Needed some inspiration, so I went and asked the costume request thread for help. I was provided a wonderful costume by the generous @biostem and they delivered! So, we had this guy, Vraxxes, an Invul/DB Tanker. A warlord and world-ruling emperor who was banished from his home dimension and sent to primal Earth, where he now seeks to build a new empire and regain his lost power. This was his original costume: Then Biostem provided a lovely source of inspiration in the costume request thread and made this. Only changes I made the color and the belt/gloves: Then I took that inspiration and ran with it, creating two new additional costumes for our inter-dimensional warlord:

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! It's awesome!

Coming here yet again. Got a new villain I'm having fun with. A Tanker, natural origin, Inv/DB. His backstory is that he was a powerful warlord from another dimension who couldn't be defeated, but was instead banished from his home dimension to primal earth. Now he's here with us, robbed of his empire and his resources, but still with his power, trying to rebuild a new empire in our dimension. I've got a good general costume going (gee, I wonder what he was inspired by?) but I'm at a loss for alternate costume ideas. I'm thinking of a a villainous, but regal and powerful kind of look. A look that says "I'm the lord of darkness, bow before me, peasant!" Just so you know kind of what I'm going for, here's his current costume. Any ideas or inspiration would be much appreciated!

They're organized by level. And it's not so much discipline, that list would be a lot longer if it kept all the alts I deleted for not liking the concept or it just not working. You should see the crustacean's costume. 😛

Don't know why I'm posting this, but I am anyways. Finally, after about two years, I have done it. A whole character page of level 50 characters. To some, unimpressive. To me, an achievement with my bad case of altoholism. Took me forever to get just one 50 on live. Haven't used any double exp boosters for any of these guys. No farming, just playing the game the old fashioned way.

You seem to have problems with every PUG you join. I'm starting to think the problem isn't the PUGs.

Villains need some love too. Blighted Bile, an Elec/Rad Brute. A mutant turned into a savage monster wreaking chaos and destruction in his wake.

Not exactly the most original costume (if you know the reference you're a geek just like me) but this is a costume I was particularly happy with. Shining Scarab, my MA/SD Scrapper.

Just going to offer my $0.02 on the general topic of this thread. I understand the OPs concerns. I even agree, to an extent. It's a little disheartening to see the game made so easy and trivialized the way it has been. Seeing a Blaster, ostensibly the "weak" AT, soloing the ITF at +4/x8 seems really broken to me. I do miss the days when teams for that kind of content were required. So I get it, I really do. That being said, though, the biggest thing to understand is that, as some have already said, this game is not a commercial product anymore. Notice how we call the folks who run the show here "GMs" and not "developers." That's because they're not paid staff. They aren't paid to do this, they aren't clocking in to work on this game like regular developers, getting paid money to tweak and balance and maximize profits for the game. They're unpaid volunteers, working on the game in their free time, on top of everything else they have going on in their lives. It really is a marvel that we get even half the stuff we do in updates. The second thing, and arguably more important point, is that the playerbase here is significantly different from typical, commercial MMOs making money. Most folks here are older, typically around 35+ years old. Statistically speaking, that means most folks here are married, they have kids, some even have grandkids, they have jobs, they have family and responsibilities to take care of, and this game is something from their younger days that they like to play in their spare time, even though they don't have the free time they used to. We're not all kids on summer break with endless free time and no responsibilities. The reason why other commercial MMOs make their games long and difficult is because they make more money the longer you play the game, and the folks that play those games typically are younger people who aren't married and have no kids to feed and duties to uphold. This game is not like that. It's not making money, and most of us are simply older and don't have the time to spend grinding for maxed out gear and incarnates like the old days. I'd bet that if you did hit the reset button here and made it as hard as it was before, you'd lose significantly more players, as most folks would say "I don't have time for this" and leave. Now, does that mean we should just do nothing and never attempt to fix anything? Of course not. Obviously there are balance issues that should be addressed (such as Masterminds being left in the dust, as the OP mentioned), and I do think maybe things shouldn't be quite so easy. But at the same time, you have to consider the unique challenges that come with addressing those issues combined with the facts I stated before with the playerbase and the lack of profit and paid staff.

The most painful solo experience I ever had, and really just the most underwhelming character in general, was a FF/AR Defender. No debuffs, no secondary effects from AR besides a tiny -def from Burst, pathetic damage... it was an exceptionally painful experience, even on teams, and eventually I just deleted the character and rerolled as a AR/Rad Corruptor.

I suggested this a few months ago, but one thing I'd really like to see is contacts selling enhancements again. That could be a great tie-in with origin, especially if contacts offered certain enhancements or salvage at a discount. Have a magic origin contact, do some missions, and they go "hey, check out my stock of magical items," and have every contact offer SO's based on that origin. That way, it's not a distinct advantage, since every contact and origin gets the same thing, but it still adds a bit more flavor and reason to your choices. You could even expand this a little by having contacts sell things that normally aren't sold. I know salvage is categorized as arcane or tech, so that could be neat. As other have suggested as well, you could have origin-based tip missions that could give special rewards like rare recipe drops or salvage. I'd honestly just like to have a system in place so players aren't so heavily reliant on the auction house to buy stuff they need.

I'm a little worried because this kind of talk sounds like the rantings of a person with schizophrenia. I've seen it before, this is eerily similar.

Pretty self explanatory. The Starless Step power from Umbral Blast for Warshades loses all sound and visual effects when it's color customization is changed from "Original" to "Dark." When using the "original" colors, it plays sound and visual effects normally, but when customized, your character just... appears wherever you click, with no sounds or visual effects whatsoever. Pictures: With customization option set to "original." With option set to "dark."

Funnily enough, I have a character named "Pacifist Unit," an Illusion/Sonic controller, who does use the concept. "It's all illusory, I'm not doing anything at all to them!" If we were to use the strictest interpretation of pacifism, though, it just cannot work. The definition of pacifism is "the belief that war and violence are unjustifiable," and most people who claim to be pacifists adhere to this rule, regardless of context. They will never fight back, even in self-defense, nor will they aid anybody participating in violence. So even if you rolled something like an Empathy defender and took no offensive powers whatsoever, only aiding allies, it still wouldn't be pacifism, because you're aiding the violence of your allies.

When you work for Hero Corps but still want to be dark, brooding, and mysterious. HeroCorpsTrenchcoat.costume

It was a very windy day in Paragon City, as evidenced by these women trying to keep their purses from flying away from them. It was so windy that these other two women were absolutely terrified. Or maybe they were just scared of me? I'm not that scary, am I?

This is like those little haunted walks you see in cornfields during Halloween in small towns, except in City of Heroes. As others have stated, this is above and beyond anything I could have ever imagined possible with the SG base builder. It's really damn impressive, definitely worth a look for anybody reading this.

I do enjoy these kinds of threads. I hope my answers prove helpful to your project. When did you started playing CoX? Was it before or after the game shut down? Tell me a little about how you met the game. I started playing sometime around the release of City of Villains. I was only in high-school then, and a friend of mine told me about this "really cool" superhero game where you could make your own super hero and beat up bad guys. I was only around 16 at the time, I didn't have a job or my own money, so I had to beg my parents to buy me a subscription, which they did. I fell in love instantly. Even though I wasn't yet familiar with the "holy trinity" style of MMO gameplay, I loved the freedom in choices I could make and the flexibility in character creation. Have you played the game before the shut down in 2012? If the answer is yes, tell me about how you feel about the game’s “Death”. What was that experience like? I played for quite a while during high-school, but sometime afterwards, around the time the game became free to play, I suddenly lost interest. I had a short hiatus for about a year, and when I finally decided to come back, I pulled up the forums and saw the shutdown announcement. I was, understandably, upset by that greatly. Even though I had taken a long break, there was still a fondness for the game, and hearing about it going away forever was just incredibly sad. You never know what you have until it's gone, and ever since that time, I would long for the creative freedom that City of Heroes gave me that, as far as I searched, no other game offered. I still talked about CoH to my friends, pining for the game to come back, wishing more developers would have the same "player first" mentality that Paragon Studios did. I didn't log on for the final "sunset" goodbye, but I did watch from the sidelines, watching the game I grew up with die right in front of me. And when the game returned in 2019? What did you felt? Was it like a “Homecoming”? Truthfully, I tried to forget about the game since it shutdown. I never followed the Titan forums or any other groups, as I just wanted to move on and not miss something I knew was never coming back. I didn't hear about Homecoming or anything about private servers until just recently. One day, just out of pure nostalgia, I decided on a whim to search "City of Heroes" and see if people were still talking about it. That's when I saw an article about "private servers" and Homecoming. I was reading this on my phone, in my bed, at around 6 in the morning, and I immediately jumped out of bed and ran to my computer. Was this true? Could it possibly be true?! I downloaded the program, got it installed, and I immediately went to work making a character. I logged on and, still in a state of disbelief, went to the global chat and asked "Is this real? Is my favorite game really back?" Within seconds, someone replied "Yes, this is real. Welcome home!" What was the first thing you did after playing the game for the first time in years? Rolled up a villain (as villainside was always my favorite) and began to terrorize Mercy Isle just like the good old days. I rolled up an AR/Kin Corruptor and blasted away merrily, cackling like a madman the whole while, partially because I was happy my favorite MMO was back, and also because it felt like the appropriate "villain" thing to do. What are your thoughts on the return of the servers? Did you brought something with you from the original server? (Avatars, builds, things like that) Considering I played the game when I was a teen, and it just now comes back as I'm an adult, I decided to make it a fresh new start. In my mind (and in my "lore" if you want to call it that) all of my old characters are old and retired, and the ones I make now are the new guard here to take up the mantle in their place. Admittedly, there are some things Homecoming did that I do not approve of, but all in all, the game is still as I remember it, and I'm just happy to be back and enjoy the same game I did years ago. Do you like to play with a specific character? (can be more than one) If yes, what makes it so special to you? I do have one "main" character that has the most badges/accomplishments out of the rest of my roster, but in general, I like to switch it up and play something new every now and again. I tend to go in phases, where I'll roll up a new character, and play that character almost-exclusively for a good while, before deciding I want to try something different, and then a new phase begins. I don't abandon those character permanently (unless the concept/powers just aren't working for me) and eventually I'll return to finish them, but this does mean I have a lot of sub-50 characters and crippling altitis.

On to the actual topic, I'm afraid the answer isn't quite so interesting or lore based, but rather mechanic based. The game just picks enemies at random to fill roles. If the mission is level 24, and you're fighting the Council, and the objective is a boss named, say, Archon Fancypants, the game just says "Okay, pick a random Council boss-class enemy for level 24." Sometimes that enemy will correctly be a Council Archon, but since it's random, it could also be a Mk II Zenith Warcry robot. Sometimes the missions are hard-coded to have a specific boss, but in the case of radios and certain stock contact missions that aren't part of a story arc, it just picks enemies at random. This is how you sometimes end up with robots having dialogue that is peculiar and very un-robotic. I recall a mission dealing with Council Vampyri, and a Zenith Hoverbot patrolling the mission said something along the lines of "The new Vampyri are impressive. I hope to someday join their ranks." So, sadly, it's usually not anything lore-related or intentional. It's just the game picking enemies at random and giving them a name. Spawn a random Council boss, or Sky Raider, give them a name like Captain Cornholio, and slap them in a mission.

Can you elaborate on this point? I've searched through Ouroboros and the HC wiki and cannot find any arc by this name. I'd love to know more about Malta, but as far as I'm aware, this arc doesn't exist, at least under that name.

Ask and ye shall receive. He's named "The Caped Crustacean." 😆

Greycat covered the whole subjectivity of "fun" already, so I don't need to get into that. For me, fun is from the powersets, the concept, and the gameplay. I have two candidates for my "most fun" characters. The first is my Bio/Claws Tanker. He's one of my very few "joke" characters that ended up sticking because the concept was fun and the powersets work fantastically together. He's a lobster who was created to be an unstoppable beast for a mad scientist, but it turned out he was too nice and friendly to be evil, so he ran away to Paragon and became a hero. All of his costumes are crustacean themed, and as mentioned before, claws and bio-armor have good synergy. Claws attacks are fast and endurance light, and bio-armor has lots of offensive options for making even the most wet-noodlest of Tankers feel like Scrappers. My second, more "serious" character is my Merc/Poison Mastermind. I love his playstyle because it's more "in-depth" than most of my characters who just hit things until they die. Tell my mercs to hide around a corner, set a poison trap right at the bend, go grab a large mob of enemies and herd them around the corner. Poison trap activates, hit them with my debuffs, and then they're all held and grouped up nicely together for my mercs to just open fire and lay waste to all of them. I generally enjoy all of my characters, but those two are my favorites for just laid-back, good old fun.