Sakura Tenshi

I do agree that Croatoa as a whole is a nice break, but the missions and so forth do need some massive revamping, and on a personal level I feel like all the mobs need tweaking and the zone and mission maps could use some updates. Off the top of my head, I'd say if I were to remake that last mission, I would have three mages already at the stone circle and the ritual started, counting down from 15 minutes (sorry), enemy mobs are already ambushing in earnest, but throughout the town you (or preferably a splinter of your team) can split off and find hostage mages, they don't need to be escorted, they will teleport to the hedge, but each time you free one the ambush size scales up, but with this the timer drops down. With all six mages (who are, by the way, unkillable) the ritual will only be 90 seconds and the three will cast a tripled stacked HoT on the Stone Hedge objects. The downside is that with all six mages an EB snaptooth and Jack-in-irons spawns in. Now, I imagine the initial wave of ambushes would be pretty manageable and spaced out, maybe even leaving the exploit where you could leave one alive and the next ambush wouldn't spawn, this is meant to give the player a chance to grab the first two mages (who shorten the time down by five minutes each) while activating two independent ambush spawns that will spawn enemies at a timed interval in contrast to the first one needing mob completion. Another idea for the 'Stop 30 Fir Bolg' mission is pretty simple: instead of necessarily waiting for each group to spawn one by one, the whole army starts spawned in on the map, in formation and 'protected' by a trio of bosses. So you can take the more preemptive and aggressive approach to smash the army before they start sending squads in (and also if you listen into some dialogue and explanation why only so many are going in at a time) and face a whole army, or you can wait by the gates as the come in squad by squad. Or try something in between where you wait for the army to weaken to a certain point before diving in. Would you like to know more?

One thing to also remember is that even if the servers were on good terms with one another, the fact is each one has a different vision of how the game should be developed, cake does not equal thunderspy does not equal homecoming, and it probably would reflect poorly between playerbases if one were to blatantly copy the other without some express permissions, even the perception of it can mar the image to both communities and foster further bad blood. This is, sadly, a prime example of politics not even confined to games like this. All I will say also is that I personally disagree with various choices Cake and Thunderspy make for their servers with ATs and powersets, a lot of it feeling very rushed. Some of the things I personally do like that they've done are not related to player powersets so much as making it possible for all mobs to scale up to fifty and opening up some of the NPC costume options. (and maybe Empathy could use something to help is stand out further from others)

@Vanden Well, that's sort of what I'm talking about: it makes sense to not be able to freely buff so many stats with set bonuses, but if you build and really focus down on +damage, you're not gonna have much +recharge, or even +defense. And silly as it might sound to say +damage only is going to benefit the damage powers, but +recharge basically benefits everything, especially survival tools.

I wouldn't complain too much, though I haven't had much end trouble once a character is kitted out, I often do begin with sets with some end management means usually, so my case is probably unique, and something like this could free up from having to always pick out physical perfection for melee characters. Personally, I think that +damage is in much greater trouble, I once tried to make a hypothetical blaster build with as much +damage as I could cram into them and only managed +35%, which, while not trivial, still seems quite laughable compared to how much +recharge you can get and how +recharge can double your damage output. Alternatively, if we are so concerned about end management, maybe a buff to +max end? That's kind of a rare bonus.

Another idea occurred to me a few days ago, a map idea I’m amazed was never a mainstay on live given this game is built around cape comic book tropes. we need some proper construction site mission maps. They would probably need to basically be outdoor maps revolving around a single building framework with floors in varying states of completion. Could even have multiple building projects. The tricky part is of course the spaces surrounding the buildings which would need to be generic low res cityscape, or possibly take an existing outdoor city map, wipe a building or three from it, and then shrink the boundaries a bit. Alternatively or in addition to this we could have under construction interiors using the office map geometries with best assets to make it look like it’s under construction or renovation.

My lala exists to PUNCH.

Funny thing is that if you look close enough, you realize Paragon city's major buildingers are supposed to be Art Deco, but the graphical limitations made it impossible to properly render. I understand this feeling, it's kind of straining to imagine such a flagrant terrorist organizations running a whole country and not get nuked to the stone age, not to mention as well put together as Arachnos is in terms of unit tactics, they're still a lot of the same 'big, giant, even army' we see with The Council, Nemesis, and Malta. Their style is also kind of ugly and painful to look at, which I guess is the point since they're EVIL and it distinguishes them visually from the more conventionally military looks of the three mentioned. And lastly there's the fact that from the start of your villain career until Incarnate, everything you do will swing around Arachnos. But I am willing to play a devil's advocate and say I'd personally like to just have Arachnos' presence massively reduced. Make them a little more 'the man behind the man' in the Isles. There's a legit government in place, but Recluse pulls the strings, though sometimes said government is fully capable of pulling back. Make them feel like a mysterious benefactor who intervened on the villain player's behalf to get you the isles, then backed off, lets you build up your career, but leaving bread crumbs for you to follow. Not hard to figure out who they are, they're a big name, but working out the why and learning the depth becomes the interesting part.

Actually, after having thought of it, if I could do a major overhaul of one thing, technically two because they'd be tied, probably: the cities themselves and possibly the graphics engines. I wouldn't try to make the cities look next gen or anything (except MAYBE the forestry stuff?), in general a new engine would more to let it handle more of the present stuff and allow for bigger zones. And now here's where my idea would become really unpopular: A lot of hero zones would get mashed together and the geography of Paragon would be overhauled to look like it's part of Rhode Island instead of some weird Massachusetts, lore would be altered to accommodate and while technically the neighborhood zones would exist individually, the idea would be that the warwall layout wasn't as clean as we see now. A rough overview would be like: Paragon onna grid Crey's Folly/Boomtown/Eden (merged together for a 'Nature Takes over vs. industrial neglect' theme with a shattered cityscape caught between) (unused space, could have Boomtown here instead) Faultline/Hollows (the nice neighborhoods destroyed) Terra Volta (Isolated from most of the city for safety reasons, but now caught between villain haven wasteland and the rest of the city) Atlas Park/Perez Park Founders' Falls/Brickstown (Old town Paragon basically) Skyway City/Steel Canyon (now with actual, city-spanning freeways!) Skyway City/Steel Canyon Skyway City/Steel Canyon (fills multiple cells with it's scale, also visual representation) Independence Port/Kings Row Kallisti Wharf/Talos/Peregrine Galaxy City (gets to stay it's own place) Additional Paragon changes that would go beyond just the city include: Croatoa and Dark Astoria merged and now set in Maine. Really, I'm just robbing Solomon Island zones from The Secret World The Zig is moved out to the US Southwest as the centerpiece of it's own zone, and yes this is stealing from Champions while I'm at it. Rikti War Zone is now moved out the US entirely and the Vanguard HQ proper (heroes and villains get there through a Vanguard outpost that involves a 'super jet' transport) is set in Puerto Williams in Chilie, the Southernmost city in the world with the actual warzone being set in the Antarctic Peninsula Changes for the Rogue Isles would be a lot less extreme, a majority of it runs along the lines of: Make the 'main islands' of each zone bigger so it's a bit more believable as an independent nation rather than just city state. Also lets zones have more details Make the cities a bit cleaner and better maintained looking. Tourism is an industry. Inter-island highway or even submarine transport tunnel. Because Recluse, The Family, and plenty of other major villain groups still give a damn about logistics. (plus, toll money) Relatedly: make it so you can go from Port Oakes to Cap Au by crossing the mountain or going through the damn traffic tunnel. And fix their orientations so the maps are properly angled as shown on the Rogue Isles map. Probably move the starting position on Mercy Island to have you get dumped in the water (it's Arachnos, literal sink or swim) just outside of an impoverished-but-functional fishing ghetto. More Kingsrow than outright ruined wasteland the rest of Darwin's landing is. Point is to let you have a functional starting point but still feel accomplished when you get up to Mercy city proper. Some Misc,. details I'd change to the overworld of the game: Hospitals and Tram buildings now each have unique building models (though remain clearly labeled) no more copy and past stuff. Ships will be realistically sized and no longer laughable tiny More car models! We need pick-up trucks, RVs, Minivans, full-sized vans, and vehicles that don't look like they're from Circa 1977! oh, and one more thing: Single Family houses and other such residential buildings. We see (poorly made) Farm Houses in Croatoa and Row Houses in Praetoria, so maybe we could get some Ranch, Tudor, and New England Colonial houses? Oh, also Victorian styles since we do have the Midnight/Dr. Kane mansion.

Honestly, I'm all for adding more strike forces redside, especially because about all the present ones with the exception of Mortimer Kal and Tarikoss involve you working for Arachnos in some capacity. I think an alternate chain of SFs should focus around villain players doing things to gather resources, influence, and people for later schemes. Like doing the ultimate bank heist where you take on a Swiss Bank vault and loot tens of millions of dollars to start up an evil empire, then you gather people by subverting the armies of unstable countries and gather things to get them from ragtag formerly state officialized terrorists into a legitimate minion force. That sort of stuff.

I mean, all the radio detectives are police show references though plenty of liberties are taken in terms of looks (presumably to avoid copyright issue), for example there's a Detective Murphy in Brickstown or Founders, though rather than being a cyborg, he's just a PPD in a hardsuit shell.

Edit: wow, forgot my own thread and was thinking of AE maps. I mean, I'd love to see these map ideas in AE too, but I just remembered part of this was hoping to see such maps also being used in main stories or even to spice up radios/newspapers and tip mission maps. Or really really old TFs.

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.