Sakura Tenshi

Adding to this with some other posts made made on the forums since last posts: Outdoor maps using the islands off the coasts of Talos and Peregrine Outdoor maps set in the Rogue Isles (so far there only seems to be the PTS, Aeon City which I'm not 100% sure on, grandville, and part of Nerva Archipelago's forests)

Pretty much what the title says: have you ever come across things in other games and thought "man, I wish we had that in City?" Whether an interesting mechanic, a fighting style as a power, or even something cosmetic like outfits or animations. Tell me what stuff you've come across that you'd love to steal from other games to frankenstein into City of through the magic of wishing. While there's a lot of stuff I could go into myself, I've lately been following Iron Harvest 1920+ and thought that several aesthetic choices and even units in the game would make for excellent Nemesis mob spawns, especially the faction of Saxony. Just bling them out some golden trim, ornate engravings, and plating and you gave a good look for an updated Nemesis. Helps one of the Polanian mechs basically is basically a bigger War Hulk without a clear glass pod.

Too many things, and honestly I don't know what would actually be useful. I'd kind of like to overhaul control sets and powers with two changes: Control powers no longer require line of sight. Minions and Lieutenants locked in a sleep, hold, stun, or fear that will have a total duration longer than 30 seconds are instantly defeated. The former is meant to let Doms and Controllers feel like masters of the environment, controller-like powers in media give their wielders a feeling of omnipresence by not even needing to be in the same room as their targets. The instant defeat conditions for low-rank enemies is similarly because in media, while major enemies are rarely held down for long, if you use a sleep spell on a mook, they're down for the count, game playwise it's meant to make controllers and dominators have a bit of an easier time, though I fear this could make things too easy.

there's honestly not much I can throw into this thread that isn't covered in the tyrannical thread linked. My only slight objection to their take on my idea of SoAs getting APPs is them drawing from separate pools, but ultimately that's a bit of me wanting to let soldiers explore their own latent psychic potential from their arachnos training while letting fortunata pick up a pistol and blast someone in the face. I started an idea for Kheldian APPs similarly, but I think in hindsight a good Kheldian APP set would basically be options to help one specialize in their forms further, perhaps?

@Tyrannical Suggestion for the tactical gear powerset's Emergency teleporter: It's a bit elaborate, but what if it was a two-stag power. In the first stage to 'designate a location' which becomes where you'll teleport to, good for about maybe 120-180 seconds and you receive a pop-up power bar. When you click that, you teleport to your designated location and restores HP, endurance to 100% (one time) and gives you 10 seconds of +5000% recharge. You're basically falling back to refresh your options in otherwords. And if we want to get really crazy, we could make it so that if you're targetting an ally when you hit the pop-up button, they're the ones who get sent back to the designated location. Also optional: it could be a res power. Now, there's a lot of annoying griefing potential here, I admit. But there's also a lot of cool tactical potential as well.

what about just turning it into a snipe attack? Lotta damage, especially when used as an opening move, long range (befitting an eyebeam attack), slower recharge but still respectable. Plus, Patron pools get snipes, so why not?

Actually had a thread for this myself if you'd like to add this to it. It's not comprehensive, admittedly.

I'm gonna be honest, I think SR is mostly fine as it is. It lacks clickies that can help it change the tide of battle outside of the tier 9? Yes, but so does Willpower and that's held as a well regarded set (well, unless you count a self rez which not many do) as well as Shield Defense. Now given that that's three out of fourteen armor sets in the whole game, but not every armor set needs to be or should necessarily be the same. Secondly, Defense Debuff Resistance on Super Reflexes can actually prove incredibly useful in various circumstances, chief of which is against things like Mask of Vitiation (Carnie Ring Mistresses), Mental Scramble (Arachnos Tarantula Mistresses), Analyze Weakness (IDF/UPA Seers), and no double others which have some strong defense debuffing which you can feel painfully on many of the other defense sets without such generous DDR, trying to get rid of a massive portion of it to roll the passives into a single power would be a mistake. That said, I do concede that for having only THREE toggles, SR feels strangely endurance hungry compared to other armorsets. Rather than throwing in a recovery bonus, I might propose just lowering the toggle costs down to as low as .15 endurance per-second, and it would potentially make sense with dodging attacks being the sort of thing that would be less exhausting than trying to tough it out. SR does suffer from getting it's AoE defenses too late outside of on brute and tanker, and stalkers lose out on Lucky which is substituted by Hide, which gives softcapped Defense against AoEs while hidden and a small (about 1.88%) defense to all when out of hide, which is far less than what Lucky offers and gives no DDR (though they do have a much stronger version of Evasion to make up for it). My solution for this would be to simply distribute defenses a bit across the toggles (so Focused Fighting and Focused senses lose out on a small bit of their primary positional defense but gain AoE and one other positional defense and Evasion naturally also gaining some melee and ranged defense for a small reduction of AoE defense) and switch Lucky into an earlier slot for scrappers and possibly push agile or dodge back to mitigate this issue. As mentioned in the previous thread, I do agree that outside of Ninjutsu (which grants a stacking psionic resistance), click-based mez protection does not seem worthwhile these days, and some compensation should be given to make it worthwhile for the potential of stacking applications beyond mez protection. My own idea was for SR's offensive output to possibly benefit by having Practiced Brawler grand a small boost to recharge and tohit that could be stacked to give a sense of your honed reflexes and speed allowing you to make more accurate attacks more frequently, even stacking this bonus up with sufficient recharge reductions. (and/or possibly throw on taunt/placate protection but not sure that would benefit from stacking) anyway, I've said what I wanted to. The "short" version of it is that SR does suffer a bit due to being cripplingly specialized as defense sets go, and in the defense game, it can't really be beat, but the strongest powers offer more than just one thing but a combination. Outside of mez protection holes Willpower has +max HP mixed with regeneration, resistances, and some modest defenses to top it all off, Ninjitsu gives stealth, a self-heal, and honestly on scrappers and sentinels even can give some respectable resistances, Shield has +max HP, balanced Resistance and Defense and offers some team support and an AoE knockdown, even invulnerability, fiery aura, ice armor, and stone armor give more than just one thing. But I am not sure that SR should just follow the path of these others, maybe it could use a bit more resistance, but otherwise I think maybe SR might benefit from adding to its user's offensive abilities to shore up it's gaps combined with efficient elegance in form. (again, SR has three toggles and a click mez protection. most other sets are four toggles or more, and yet again, it's strangely end draining.)

@Vanden I mean, honestly, that's a majority of what villains do anyway? Most missions are still set in the Rogue Isles, and not all of them involve you playing nice with Arachnos even in CoV launch content, and more than a bit of stuff can involve laying waste to parts of the isles unnecessarily. Plus, you've see St. Martial and Mercy look? half of those islands are trashed. And then there's Grandville's lower city area.

I think a good solution around slot starvation for Kheldians would be to consider power synergies like with the fighting pool. Take certain umbral/luminous aura powers and your crab form gains benefits while crab form grants benefits back to human form, take certain umbral/luminous blast powers and squid form gets stronger while having squid form can add some ouch to human form.

It's been a little bit, but since I completed pretty much all the Atlas contacts and @Aberrant did his really cool Talshak the Mystic revamp, I decided to do a short one and go over the Hollows contacts. First up is David Wincott, I figured even if we went with an idea of his son's kidnapping having been only a few months prior, I pictured David as getting a bit of an adrenaline/stressed out dad makeover. The Warzone that is the Hollows have hardened him a bit and he now wears partial SWAT gear (sadly not even available in the NPC icon) and his mustache is a grown out beard from a lack of care and started to go gray from the stress. Poor Wincott. For Flux, I kept things largely simple and tried to make him look more like the outcasts we see. It's a little tricky when other outcasts use incredibly low poly models we just don't have (kind of amazing Paragon Studios didn't just use a random outcast minion for him, actually) and in some ways you could see his look as being indicative of how an updated outcasts in general could look. Sadly, no Outcast charger lightning emblem. But I also removed the bared teeth snarl and just gave him a wary, scowling face. With Julius I kind of went hogwild, once more it'd be a bit indicative of a Troll Revamp in general, but my idea for Julius was that he's a runt among the Trolls. Specifically The Trolls, and by normal standards still would stand a respectable 5'10 or so, not to mention he's still head to toe muscles, but being the runt in a gang of brutes like the Trolls isn't easy even when said runt is still able to bend steel with his bare hands. They've taken his shirt, they've taken his shoes, and in a bit fit of insecurity, Julius takes to hording things he feels might be helpful against his bullying brothers, even intending to one day give them a taste of their own dynamite. Literally.

There is a praetorian refugee camp there it seems. New Destroyers and Syndicate could be looked at, Carnival of Light remnants (perhaps others went to join the Midnight Squad and don't want to dedicate themselves to curing PraetPenelope) could be there along with UPA. However, I also think that in general, instead of new groups, Kallisti Wharf could be a way to revisit some older groups like Hellions (and skulls*), Outcasts, Legacy Chain, Wyvern, Sky Raiders, etc. *I like the appearance revamp for the Skulls, but I didn't quite like the new enemy additions, personally. I didn't like a brand new Lt that's the Gunner but with more attacks, throwing in gunners and dual pistol skulls as minions, and all that. Death Walkers and Death dolls are okay I guess.

Another mild annoyance is that concentrated strike’s recharge crit doesn’t work with the scrapper ATOs or scrapper ninjitsu Shinobi-iri. Though one could argue this is working as intended, but I personally feel like it kind of cheats kin melee further (especially if stalkers are allowed benefit from augmented crit rate) on scrappers and the set is forced to deal with slow animations and damage numbers that are unspectacular even when power siphon has a full five stack.

I'm a little on the fence myself, especially if we look at it from a difficulty standpoint. One one hand, a removed aggro cap would mean a tank (or any other AT for that matter) must be more mindful of their pulls as the lack of an aggro cap means it's now possible to be overwhelmed ever beyond what their defenses and support might be able to manage, forcing them to stop and think about how they want to deal with a clustered mob in a room with crappy mob spacing. (Like Tech lab death halls) On the otherhand, an aggro cap also serves as a difficulty aspect because it means the beefier teammates need to be a bit more mindful about how much they can hold the attention of the mobs they get (especially brutes and scrappers for their lower AoE caps) or else the aggro is going to spill over the teammates who might not be able to handle the inevitable overflow of a super big pull.

@Razor Cure You're probably thinking of sentinel and scrapper versions of /nin, as well, since the stalker version of SR does still have KB protection.

I admit, I've long thought about how a longbow revamp should look but it would involve outright retconning a lot of the lore. My ideal longbow would have them appear as yellow non-aggressive mobs of volunteers in t-shirts with the longbow emblem helping out the people suffering in the Rogue Isles, in otherwords: hurting them is entirely your prerogative, even in missions where you're sent to fight them they will not actively attack and dialogue has them try to reason to you first. As you progress as a villain, they get more and more militarized with the implication of your actions push a relief organization into a full paramilitary that's doing stuff like making their own versions of malta titans by cramming the brains of your past victims in them. That said though, keeping with just a 'not so spandex clad' longbow, I threw these together as two possible examples. A normal flackjacket with straps, looser pants, and boots. And here's something a little more of a Fantastic operations group. Kind of hard to make it all look good when it's mostly red and white.

so even basic mechanics like how defenses and attacks are tagged are different? I'm not disbelieving you so much as just how absurdly different the live devs made the game function between players and NPCs.

Slightly straying from the topic, but my own thoughts to improve SR (including practice brawler) outside of the tier 9 would look like: Reduce the endurance cost of the toggles to .21 endurance per-second (some dark armors toggles have this value actually, hard to notice the benefit with so damn many) possibly as low as .18 (unprecedentedly low endurance consumption for an armor toggle) Practice Brawler needs something to make it's stacking ability worthwhile, possible ideas could include taunt/placate resistance (works thematically, circumstantial but can matter) an 'infinite' absorb shield that can be self-stacked (could potentially get OP with an SR scrapper just sitting for a bit to build up absorb shield, also could cause issue via rather than making PB something you'd want up permanently with overlap, 'holding out' to get the absorb if it's not a long lasting shield), another idea includes giving PB a stacking +15-30% recharge and/or ToHit buff, and something that could be done on it's own or in conjunction with about any of these (though probably first two), shorten the recharge timer so it's perma out of the box and can be stacked with even a single SO. (120 recharge to 120 duration) Possibly idea: Agile, Dodge, and Lucky now each have a baseline resistance bonus (of, say 3.75% to even 7.5%) to Smash/Lethal, Cold/Fire, and Energy/Negative respectively on top of their scaling resistances with the bonus being enhance-able. Edit: I recind this point as it appears to have been made in error, only reserved for posterity. I am not going to suggest moving AoE defenses earlier because something I found out through studying Nemesis Vengeance Procs, which I believe can be backed by Galaxy Brain is that very few attacks are purely AoE position, AoE is usually an augmenting factor and an attack is flagged as ranged or melee on top of being AoE, and if your melee and ranged defenses are high enough you still dodge AoEs all the same as it checks your highest defense. (the study was that Nemesis Vengeance actually only gives them defense against ranged and melee attacks, yet my titan weapons brute still whiffed quite a bit, leading to the realization that even though most of his attacks were AoE, they were still considered 'melee')

Time for another round of updated contacts! Starting out with Paco Sanchez, I couldn't quite get a 'thrill seeker' aspect into the character, but I did give him an outfit that made him look less like a janitor. Now it's more common for EMTs to wear black or navy colors from what I could see, but I opted for the less common green coloration to keep him distinct from Paragon Police, also used the mercenary pouch belt for the sake of him having medical gear on hand. Might have panicked a bit on the face choice though. Next up we have Detective Jose Brogan, whom I opted to aim for a slightly more pulpy, hard boiled detective look, Downside though is that he looks more like Indiana Jones than I meant to, also the pistol holster looks good in front but has some clipping in the back. I remember being fond of taking missions from Rachel back when Galaxy was around, mostly since a lot of my characters were natural origin. That aside, I opted to put Rachel in full uniform when she's serving as a contact within City Hall than keeping her in plain clothes since her first week on the force ended with her partner dying and her nearly getting killed, I could see her as wanting to keep her gun close by and wearing something with a ballistic weave than a normal t-shirt. Also, a stress induced smoking habit. Now we have Tony Kord, a mixed expy of Iron Man and the original Blue Beetle, while I mostly updated his look, I also gave him some cybertech shades and a cybernetic glove (or hand) to show him maaaybe enjoying his own tech a little. Lastly for this set we have Kip Cantorum, who I went in a radically different direction than his base. The idea of a guy who rewires villain tech into harmless kid toys makes me think of a guy who is still a bit of a kid himself and maybe not too caring about his appearance so I made him look like a garage-tech genius version of The Dude. The post apocalypse belt was essential for this look. that's all for now, I didn't quite get all of them, specifically Henry Peter Wong who is in a Hero Corps uniform and didn't seem to need an update (just maybe a tan because that guy looks like he's never seen the sun in his life) and Laurence Mansfield and Maurice Feldon, both of whom are generic cientist NPC outfit and it would feel repetitive and even almost a down grade to just slap the lab coats on them and the shirt and tie chest. Maybe I'll figure out something later. Until next time.

I love those redesigns @Aberrant, I am admittedly on the fence with the CoT ones, but mostly because I sort of miss the old CoT look, but it seems the live devs had already made a 'revamped Akarist' and yours is definitely better. (given how Akarist originally was an AV Reichsman captured and fights heroes, gives the impression the live devs didn't remember who he was until the playerbase reminded them). I think my favorite is the Talshak the Mystic, he actually looks like a legit magus now and not someone in magus themed running outfit on a jog through the park. As for Infernal, I almost got the impression the live devs wanted us to forget about him because he clashed with the rest of Praetoria so harshly, even though he would have complimented Diabolique quite well.

Basic idea of this thread is to suggest new looks for old NPCs, but no reason we can't also talk about new powers for mob NPCs to make fights more interesting. Starting things off, I was playing around in the Dev/NPC costume editor to revamp the Five Origin contacts of Atlas with some new looks. Some more extreme than others. Starting off with Azuria, I actually came up with two separate looks, one was to largely embrace Azuria as we pretty much know her, just made using player assets (and a ToV belt yet available to us) With the second one there's not too much of a difference, though I also gave her a CoL belt dyed red to break up the line between her top and bottom as well as a bit of quasi-Gypsy inspired look with a 'jewelry' on her arms and a purple bandana around her head. To further emphasize Next up is Dr. St. John Smythe of SERAPH, an apparent inventor and long-time liaison for SERAPH, I didn't want to change too much in his design, but the limits of the costume creator forced my hand a bit, gave him the breakneck fat bellied turtleneck because turtlenecks are cool and as a nerd he might not take the best physical care of himself. Next up is Prince Kiros Nandelu, I didn't change his overall look too much besides giving him white eyes to signify his mutation (able to see ultra-violate and infrared spectrum) and fancied up his suit to make him look more princely. Also gave him black pants since I don't know how many men these days wear navy blue pants. And now we turn to Rick Davies who probably had the most extensive changes as a side effect of there being no flannel shirt option (could have sworn there was), I went with a very geeky look since he's a forcibly-retired-due-to-war injury nerd and gave him a look to compare and contrast with his sister. (a beard and green sweater, clear prescription glasses, and somewhat formal attire) And finally Susan Davies, who I largely tried to not change too much besides giving her a shirt instead a blouse and throwing on dark sunglasses. Once more she's kind of meant to compare and contrast to her brother with dark, unnecessary sunglasses, a more casual look, and not being bald. There's my initial crack at updating the five starting contacts, feel free to pitch and discuss your own I'll probably add more in the future.

Well not the same, stacking the ninjutsu mez protection is useful since that includes a bonus psi damage resistance. Two clicks and you can end up with 66% psi resist. edit: to clarify, I think what we might consider is that click next protections should actually apply an additional buff to make them worth a bit more than their “one-time” endurance cost. Otherwise their only virtue is that you can keep your mez protection up even during end crashes.

As I explained earlier the broadsword lunging charge isn’t a “magical” teleportation anymore than shield charge is. It’s supposed to be a rapid charge rush attack that uses teleport due to limits of the game’s engine. Your other counter arguments are valid but not that particular one. I will admit that the katana example I gave was directly supernatural, but in the end all three ideas were only examples. My issue with APP attacks is that they too can often be theme breaking due to a lack of variety, and as mentioned these need not all be actual ranged attacks but can incorporate foe pulls and gap closers as well.

I kind of get what you mean, but since this wasn't a teleport pool revamp suggestion, I sort of left it out, plus I could see an argument made that since a scrapper is a melee class, you'd want enemies right in your face, since teleport foe can be grabby by anyone, even non-melee fighters like controllers and so forth, it might be a good idea to give the option to choose a bit where you dump a foe, like say on top of a tar patch or a bunch of caltrops. I do agree teleporting foes needs to work on bosses and higher level foes as well, but the concept of such a change isn't supposed to be 'magical teleportation', it's only teleportation within the game mechanics, the idea was more electric melee using electro magnetism to pull an enemy in.

Well, back on live, I had proposed the idea of using a similar 'branching power pick' solution as a means of expanding powersets without raising the level cap, violating the cottage rule, and so forth, with the primary example being 9 alternate powers for Assault Rifle meant to allow Assault Rifle to focus down on four themes (Shotgun, automatic rifle, sniper, and demolitions). Unfortunately, my grasp on balance was bad then as it is now and there wasn't much interest for it. I think that could have been a 'more elegant' solution from the player side but probably a bigger headache coding side. So at this point I'd be happy to leave Assault rifle to burn in the trashfire that it is and create a bunch of different powersets that let you focus on type of ranged weapon and stick with it instead of running around with a hideous franken-gun that makes zero sense.