Mr. Wallet

I just converted into a a level 11 air burst and thought "sweet, sleep to damage? Now that's a category!" and now I can't convert and stay in-category. Interesting to know that there's no others at level 11 but it's still odd. This thing isn't attuned.

Sorry to necro but I was searching for threads about taunt and this one came up. Sadly I don't have access to the code, but I can share my own experiences with what amounts to a long and strange experiment in taunting: I have been playing a no-damage invuln tanker for a while (Invincibility giving a taunt aura, spamming Taunt/Provoke with absolutely zero damage, not even from required secondary or procs) and I can say that he's very effective at taking and holding aggro. As srmalloy wrote, "Taunt gives you a measure of aggro on its own". Sometimes when I am really outclassed I will be unable to hold an AV's attention - this almost never happens. The other player(s) need to have a lot of set bonuses and/or incarnate shifts over me in order for this to happen. Besides extremely rare cases like that, no one ever seems to beat me in an aggro fight, unless they also use Taunt. (...in which case, they beat me fairly consistently, presumably because they're dealing damage, and also because my taunts are empty-slot and therefore less than half the duration of anyone who's 6-slotted a set.) The upshot here is that damage is really not important unless there is a severe power differential or both players are operating under a taunt multiplier. In practical terms, the idea of "you also need to deal damage" is generally not true, since anyone who is capable of pulling aggro away from your Taunt/Provoke (by itself) is going to be an AT (or at a power level) which is extremely qualified to survive the aggro. No blaster has ever broken my taunt, even on targets that remained outside my Invincibility aura. (And a good thing too, since that seems to be kind of the point of Taunt.) That formula that can be written as "Threat = Damage * (other terms)" is nonsense, but we already knew that because Taunt, mez, and debuff can also draw aggro. I think that myth that you need to deal damage to hold aggro as a tank persists because no one but me is crazy enough to try playing 20 hours just taunting people and not attacking. And also I can absolutely confirm that stacking taunt effects has never made a damn bit of difference in any situation, and I must target carefully to try and sweep two different sets of enemies with Taunt and Provoke. So those conclusions about the limited number of taunt effects tracks my experience perfectly. Separate note: Tiffany Seville was musing about aggro resets. I have been a huge fan of mid-combat revives since Issue 0, and I can confirm her memory as true both then and now: You keep alll that aggro when you first get knocked out. It was a much bigger deal before you could easily get your hands on full-health self-revives as any character, but I still do the Awaken -> Break Free -> Respite -> Respite combo quite a bit on all ATs, and mobs will switch right back to you instantly if nothing's overpowered your aggro yet, even if they've already started shooting at someone else (who is closer than you).

Just wanted to say thanks for putting the kibosh on the slash command, it was my #1 wishlist item for the whole game. The biggest piece of gameplay removed from old school CoH was... well it was endurance management with inherent fitness, but the second biggest one was traversal. It's still way too easy to get around but now I actually feel like I get something when I clock day job time for a teleporter. And I no longer have to be treated like the weird vegetarian when I go the long way and get to the mission 10 seconds after everyone else. Now my biggest travel wish is for Arcane Flight, Mighty Leap, and Speed of Sound not to be strictly better versions of other powers in pools dedicated to those modes of travel.

Well, someone's got to be the party pooper, so I guess it'll be me. I've been disappointed with the power creep in travel powers. Even before that, following the principle that a good game design presents players with interesting choices, I was already disappointed that base Flight and Super Speed don't even give me a meaningful choice of whether or not to put slots on them (except as set mules). If this were the olden days where you couldn't get your travel power until 14 and you needed one of the first 2 powers, we could debate at length if a better travel power was offset by the need to take some inferior or unthematic requirement, but we live in a world where, for a price of one power selection, you can either get a speed-cap flight, or you can get a speed-cap flight with an optional teleport. Arguments for the preferability of the former are mostly based on something as petty and patchable as the particle effects, or on hypotheticals about running out of pool selections in order to get all the types of powers one wants, which, in a world with epic pools, incarnate powers, inherent Fitness, and P2W temporary powers, doesn't seem applicable on nearly as many characters as some people make it out to be. I agree that the vanilla travel powers are a tiny bit questionable compared to the origin set powers. My solution is: nerf the origin set powers. It doesn't really matter how. Maybe reduce the base jump height on Mighty Leap to Ninja Run level so it can't get over stuff quite as easily. Maybe have Mystic Flight cost enough endurance just on the flight portion that at base numbers you can't make it across a medium-size zone purely on chain teleportation. I'm all for fixing/replacing powers that very few people want in any form (e.g. Group Flight is not neglected because of a superior version in a different set), but that's a separate topic. And yes, this game has never been big on balance, but that's why I don't rant on these forums until I see a thread of half a dozen people debating how best to add even more power creep in a game that's already plenty convenient and easy.

Deputy Assistant of Information in Nova Praetoria, "Check out the Clockwork Disturbance". I'm staring down a Lieutenant called Dismantler whose description is BOSS_DISPLAYINFO. I've never done Praetoria before so I don't know if this is just a regular Lieutenant or mission-specific.

I think Power Acquisition Levels has a typo; it has Crippling Axe Kick at 34.

It's funny, I really liked most of the changes you mentioned. For example, the only things ED really threatened was direct effects like resist, defense, and damage, (almost no one was actually doing interesting things like 6-slotting -acc to shut enemies down, althought it did exist) and I had been thinking for a while that there really was a rich system of buffs and debuffs that was being completely thrown in the garbage by min/maxers who were slotting pure damage on their fire blasters and deleting everything, to the point that I often considered not even inviting blasters into my team. Cheat codes to instantly kill everything and never die are fun diversions, but they're not what most people actually play games for, which is why most games don't act that way by default. Telling players, "OK, damage, but if you HAD to pick ONE OTHER THING ALSO on that power, what would it be?" greatly increased the diversity of the blasters and scrappers I played with, and made them interesting to play with. OK, continuing that train of thought into a more piecewise era-by-era perspective on how much the game sucked, my personal experience follows: The launch of the game did have its problems, and each Issue went a long way to make the game better. Issue 6 was the City of Villains release issue, which included Enhancement Diversification, and then 3/4 of the staff got laid off. However the remaining staff did manage to coast on momentum for a while, and the game got clearly better all the way through 8. Issue 9 added inventions, and this to me was the first big change that merits some ambivalence. It's interesting, but it introduces salvage as a form of loot, and if City of Heroes had just one unique gameplay feature, it wasn't the super-hero theme, it was the near-nonexistence of loot, and the determination to design a satisfying MMO experience under those constraints. It was refreshing to play an MMO where you were leveling up but also not looking for that one drop that was going to give you a proc or boost your Wisdom or whatever. Before inventions, literally any gear you wanted before level 50 could be bought from a vendor if you weren't lucky enough to find it in combat - but the expiring nature of the enhancements meant that you couldn't afford to keep yourself decked-out constantly and still cared about finding enhancements off enemies. If anyone newer to the game has ever wondered why the inventory system for salvage and recipes is so inexcusably awkward, it's because the game at its core was simply never designed for them. Then came issue 11 which added Ouroboros and to me that was the first thing that added to the complication and weirdness that is now endemic to the game, the complication and weirdness that makes it kind of awkward and unplayable without band-aids like portals that take you anywhere and level 4 travel powers. 2 years after most of the company got laid off, they just kind of ran out of steam. 2 months after issue 11 released, they announced that NCSoft bought the remainder of Cryptic Studios, renaming it to Paragon Studios. From here the game went consistently downhill for me, with issue 14 being the worst, introducing Architect Entertainment and relegating most of the game to either waiting 5 times as long to find a team or giving up and instantly joining one of the multitude teams grinding AE XP farms all day every day. Speaking even as someone who absolutely adores both creating and consuming user-generated content, that was a total abdication of game design on Paragon's part, and the single best feature of Homecoming is probably that they put some reasonable limitations into it that should really have been there to begin with. I quit around issue 16, and looking back it was probably mostly over the fact that there just weren't enough people playing non-architect-farm content below level 50 and it was too hard to fill a group. So, did it suck? Well I would never say it sucked, but if you played in issues 6 through 10, it was absolutely great. Pre-6 there were a number of stumbling blocks that even nostalgia can't totally erase, and I think a lot of people, myself included, just bore with those problems on the sheer high of having a genuinely fresh gaming experience the likes of which few companies have ever risked dumping so much investment into before it was proven. Nowadays that kind of experimentation on a well-funded project is far less rare because platforms like Steam Early Access and Kickstarter allow end-users to bear more of the financial risk that would normally be on the publishers, but in the mid-2000s those things simply weren't around. You will tolerate a lot if you want something badly enough and only one company is doing it. But Issue 8, for example, definitely did not suck.

Same thing just happened to my TF. Same door (about 770, -125). Babbage was a big no-show after I declared it twice in LFG and everything.

You kind of answered your own question - power choice (and being a heroic character, if you care about such things) is more than raw combat, and that was even more relevant in the earlier days of the game. The content levels 4-14 (both missions and zones) was designed in the mindset of not having a travel power, and they didn't go back and rework any of the old content when they increased access to travel powers. This has to do with travelling in general - like, does anyone think having 2 ferries in Port Oakes makes any sense now? It barely made sense when they first set them up next to each other, but now that "lines" are merged into a single transit system, it's completely silly. I was pointing out that this game carries serious scars from its transition away from a game that "must have sucked". I would have liked to respond to the rest of your post, but it's mostly incoherent to me.

Clockwork Efficiency is one of the 5 unique damage enhancements from the P2W vendor. It states that it enhances damage by -500%. It seems to increase damage like it's supposed to, so I think just the tooltip is broken.

Yeah, I suppose it's small enough that it makes no real difference; there's way bigger balance problems in the game right now, and only 3 or 4 "draw" sets are even a little popular. I wouldn't even bother to reply but I do feel I have to point out that "don't accidentally buff some sets" is extremely well-traveled logic in terms of game design. In general, one always balances to make sure there's no degenerate cases at the extremes. You wouldn't balance a set based on people who deliberately slow down their attacks for immersion; you would be worried about Fire/Dev blasters that are soloing mobs of over a dozen purples with a single fireball. That's the type of player who can degenerate gameplay experiences, especially PvP. It really wasn't clear to me that this had been considered at all from a balance perspective in addition to the quality-of-life perspective, so I thought it deserved a mention.

My point was that it's not fair to your team to play something like posi 1 without at least Ninja Run. You're supposed to be at the mission, helping. This is why in classic CoH even if you could tolerate not having a travel power at 14, you should really pick it up then anyway. The devs kept all new primary/secondary power picks out of level 14 specifically so this would be less frustrating to do. But there is a new secondary at 4, when you now get your travel powers. Another "the game wasn't designed for that". It's not just the faster and easier pace I dislike, it's that the overall game design kind of spiraled out of control and nothing seemed to have really deliberate reasons behind it anymore, and that's a great example.

No, again, you can't just go play your own game the old way, unless you never want to team with anybody until 14, or just grind Death From Below to 14 absolutely every time you roll a character. I mostly played controllers, tankers, and defenders, so soloing was boring as hell at those levels. I already tried to pre-empt this point about the "you don't have to do it personally" sentiment in my first post. In a lot of cases you absolutely do have to do it personally, because this is a multiplayer game. When everybody had to do it the old way, you could find pick-up groups in King's Row or the Hollows or wherever. But when you are the only asshole who didn't even take Ninja Run by level 11, and you can't find any groups in south Steel Canyon using Broadcast or the searching for team feature because most people are not looking at those for teams on Homecoming, it is entirely reasonable for the team leader to kick you because you used the LFG channel to get picked up from 2 zones away and it's going to take you over 3 minutes just to get to the mission. That dynamic is broken. If you want to play with other people and not be disruptive, you must have Ninja Run or better when you want to stop running Death From Below. Please don't pretend that the old game is still around for me to enjoy and everyone gets it exactly how they want. And to the 2nd point: you can't properly accuse someone of seeing things through a lens of nostalgia if they already literally told you that their reason for quitting, at the time, was because the game stopped being that way. Unless you're saying I played with inherent fitness for a month or two and then in November was blinded by my nostalgia for September? Dodging purples made me feel special when I had a hero in the 20s with invisibility and recall friend. A lot of those now-useless powers like Team Teleport were utility pick-ups that were rarely used, but felt really good when they were. That was gameplay, in a very literal sense, because like all other gameplay, they were problems that could be dealt with to varying degrees of success and expediency. Maybe it's not the gameplay most people wanted, but it's gameplay I wanted, and gameplay that we had, and I loved it. It was fun as hell. You're totally entitled to your opinion, and I've already made it clear that I know that lots of people thought Stamina was mandatory. I thought I also made it clear that I didn't feel that way because, like I said, I rarely took it. The offensive ATs that I didn't play as often, particularly blasters, did struggle with endurance, and I certainly took it on a few characters when it was clear I was going to have to slot End Reduction on a large number of powers to keep up. But it's not like the designers never tried to play their own game, and never saw how much endurance there was. They knew what game they were making, and I "got" it, even if most people didn't. If you're running out of endurance, just... don't use the less-efficient powers, as decided by the situation, until you recover some? Maybe I'm expecting too-hardcore gameplay out of an MMO. Or maybe I'm the only one who actually expects the game to have been designed for people to fight white minions more often than purple ones. It's wonderful, and I mean truly moving, that I get to play any City of Heroes at all. But Issues 8 through 13 were absolutely the pinnacle for me, and that's not nostalgia; I was bitching my unpopular opinions about this on the forums all the way back in the day.

"No redraw" is an animation option when customizing your power in the character editor. By default you still redraw, but you can choose that option on all your powers and the weapon appears instantly in your hand, skipping the draw animation. I just opened a thread a few days ago about removing the +acc inherent to weapons since Cryptic (Geko, I think?) said those were only there to balance against the redraws, but it hasn't gained any traction. Which I guess is fine, most of the drawn weapon sets aren't especially popular anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ As for what to do about regen, I never played it above the late 20s back before IOs, but have also thought it would be appropriate to the set's playstyle to give them a click, perhaps one that can only be used out of combat and gives them preposterous absorbtion for 5-10 seconds, so they can handle alphas. If they had a tool like that you could probably nerf the healing in the set quite a lot, widening the knife edge between full HP and death and giving the set a little more thrill and danger in the middle of the fight.

I played from launch and I cancelled my subscription and stopped playing around issue 20. The only reason was because they kept spoon-feeding an easier and easier game and it was getting harder and harder to really appreciate the content. Endurance reduction TOs go completely out the window if you get Stamina at level 2. I took Fitness on maybe 20% of my characters before level 30 because I either used my attacks judiciously or I actually slotted endurance reduction where I needed it. I felt smart when I could have more tools (powers) at my disposal and use them well, rather than just take Hasten to spam things and then complain that Fitness was "required" because of the problem that Hasten created. Giving everyone Fitness broke a few things, mostly by not making Rest a penalty for playing badly but also by eliminating some of the early-game jump height puzzles that made you want to work for that travel power. Stamina made -recovery attacks and debuffs stop working as effectively as they're supposed to; they should have reduced endurance costs and buffs across the board instead (even save players 2 extra enhancement slots), but I guess that would have been too much work. A similar "it wasn't designed that way" applies to content levels 4-14. People can explode through it with a travel power, not least of which because they can trivially tag along with any high-level group that will take them. The non-stop double XP doesn't help - that's basically a "skip the early game" button, and if you're not building a capable soloer then the "you don't have to use it if you don't like it" argument doesn't work, because you're not getting a lot of pickup teams so it's going to be even more of a slog than when you actually played that way, even with your veteran powers, if you had them. When only a few people had those powers, you could actually find those people who didn't and team with them, if you wanted. City of Heroes was absolutely freaking great, and if I were a super-villain my first dastardly plan would be to force my minority opinion on everyone else by rolling Homecoming back on all that crap that funneled you to the endgame at the expense of the experience getting there. I barely played WoW but I've heard the same complaints from people who were hyped about WoW classic, things like actually working to get your mount so the world feels bigger. Most people play Minecraft in survival, not creative. People like to struggle against things, to push back and overcome. The right amount and type of challenge is different for each person, but for me things went south vaguely around Going Rogue, 10 months before I quit and about 2 years before the game shut down, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I think they started chucking darts at the wall to see what might improve the game's numbers and keep NCSoft from pulling the plug. They pivoted away from principled game design, and toward handing the players absolutely everything they wanted even if it turned the game into a bland mess. The problem with this strategy is that dedicated game players are barely better at game design than the general population. If you're a doctor, the patient is only good at knowing what their symptoms are, you do not let them tell you what is wrong and how to fix it. The most disappointing part about Homecoming specifically is that I don't get to grind prestige. I liked the feeling that I was sacrificing personal gain for the sake of the supergroup. I liked going from one dinky little room to two dinky little rooms and us being like, "We did that. We earned that." Now we don't get to earn anything. Minecraft creative mode. (Edit: upkeep was kind of stupid though. Just add 6 or 12 times the upkeep cost to the original price of things and let us keep whatever we bought without that punishing drag that only lets big, active supergroups ever ever get anything of note.) Don't get me wrong, I am deeply, deeply overjoyed that I get to play this game again. But it took stepping away from it for 4 years or so before I started to miss it badly enough that I wished I could go back, even if it was this new, less challenging experience.