Hardboiled Hero

"Gold Note". Just about every AT has sound powers now! There's a Gold Brickers costume now! Come on folks! The name is practically made for you! lol.

Ughh.. @Sunsette buddy, I love you, but I think we need to talk about your addiction to charts and graphs...

So I recall hero a long time ago (probably shortly after CoV released) that the missions for CoH and CoV were designed slightly differently. Specifically I recall some mention that the numbers and levels of mobs were typically different. I don't remember which way it went, but for example the discussion would have been that CoH typically has more mobs in each mission, while CoV typically has high level mobs. Of course there was also the thing where CoV missions got a slight change to turn most of the "defeat archvillian" missions into "defeat archvillian and guards" in order to deal with the stalker. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Are the missions on each side still different (not just liking the story of one side better or worse)? were they ever?

sorry why? If a set stinks mechanically, then it stinks mechanically. I'm literally asking about what sets and pairings of sets are mechanically good or bad at 50+. Why would kinetic stink at level 54 though?

Primary choices include: Invulnerability, Super Reflexes, Willpower, Bio Armor. Secondaries are: Street Justice, Martial Arts, Kinetic Melee, Energy Melee. Basically, I have a character concept, but it's still malleable and so I figured it's time to make sure I don't get something that can't tank the end-game content that people are likely to be doing, But I don't really know the end-game at this point, and I also barely play any melee characters, so I'm not sure what would be "good enough". I've played with most of these powers up to level 25 or so and they seem fun enough, although I haven't necessarily paired them with any other powers on this list while doing that. I've gone through the costume designer and made sure all of the powersets I mention here can fit my concept's image. My goal, other than fitting my concept, is to be the best tank possible for doing the random content that people tend to do at level 50+. Knocking stuff out would be nice, but I really want to focus on getting and holding aggro and not dying in the process. Do you think those combos would be better or worse mechanically than the SR/Elec tanker I already have.. but which kinda stretches my concept? Thank you for taking the time to read this, and even if you choose not to reply, have a wonderful day!

I made my first character on homecoming 4 years ago . I still have no idea where she's going.

you probably got this from the others said, but to be direct about it, sentinels are a mid-range AT, they are NOT an AT that moves between long range and melee range. I'm just coming back from a long break and haven't really tested this too in depth, but when I left sentinels actually had reduced ranges on their attacks. Furthermore, due to their defense and not being limited to melee attacks, a sentinel in theory has less reason to move during a fight than any other AT. Despite their name and being listed as a ranged damage class, Blasters actually have a ranged set and a melee set, so they are designed to fight at both long-range and melee-range. Might I also suggest Dominators for a similar playstyle w/ less damage, but some added control.

I still don't really understand why anyone cares. I mean, I can't imagine that I level much faster by doing papers/radios than people do leveling through TF's (except that one has to wait so long for TF's), and I certainly don't get jealous about people who leveled through AE. If it took me a month or more to get my character to 50 and it only took them two days, I could understand, but it only takes me about 2 or 3 days to get to 50 (when I actually work on that), so it doesn't bother me so much that someone can get to 50 much faster, because I already feel like I'm leveling super-fast. They aren't ruining the game for me; if anything, they're ruining it for themselves, but that's their problem. I don't think the O.P.'s suggestion would be game breaking. People would still be getting PL'ed after only having played the game for 12 hours or so. I just don't understand why I (or anyone else) should care how someone else is playing the game, when their play doesn't effect me (or anyone but themselves). I could more easily understand if the complaint were about people joining a "speed run" TF when they haven't done the TF before. However, we're apparently talking about normal TF's.. which should definitely be done by, and be open to, people who haven't done TF's before. I'm not saying you should try to stop caring about people getting PL'ed. To quote one of the greatest minds from a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away "Do or Do not. There is no try."

I'm not a great player. Yes, I know where the positron TF starts. No, I don't know where literally any other TF starts. Not one of my characters has been leveled 1-50 in AE. Most of my characters do DFB (a few times, but I never start DFB myself) and then try to get to level 20ish as fast as possible. (Which is why I know positron pretty well.) After that, I normally just do papers/radios until level 20 because I find those groups tend to be the most chill and most fun. The point here is, doing papers STILL did nothing to prepare me for the few TF's I've done.. or tried to do. So if the complaint is that people don't know TF's well enough, I'd say "Blame the TF's for requiring too much specific knowledge." Case in point, even though I know DFB and Positron, that doesn't help me with Ms. Liberty or whatever, Secondly, What's wrong with PL'ing in this game? You're not getting cheated outed of the months of time that it took you to "earn level 50 the ol' fasion way" like you may be in some games. At most these people are getting like a week's "advantage" on other players. If the people who are getting PL'd are new, awesome! That means there are new players getting into the game. I mean over-all, just stop worrying about how other people play the game.

level 50 boost is unnecessary, but respecs should be more available. I can't really explain why, but remaking a character with different powers or whatever annoys me. It's not even like these characters are all level 50's or whatever. Sometimes I get to like level 10 and I'm like, "you know.. maybe (insert power) would be more appropriate to this character.", then a few hours later I'm like "nope. I was wrong". Moreover, I have a couple toons that I have 4 or 5 different versions of, and I have to settle for using names that I really don't like for some of them.

People definitely get annoyed by detention field. The toggle idea isn't bad.. or just have some way to click it off.

I agree with most of what you've said, but you seem to be under the impression that I've never played a sentinel and used hover-blasting. I've literally made and leveled dozens of sentinels and most of them have Hover. My experience is not that I can "hover above the masses and blast them into dust with complete impunity". My experience is that hover makes things generally easier while I'm leveling, but most of the time there are ceilings and whatnot keeping me from rising too far above the fray. even without ceilings, I've still had enemies jump at me. That's my experience and there's really nothing you can say that will change it. Sentinels may not die much when on teams, but I'm willing to bet we've all seen them die once or twice. If they could really be immortal when solo, they should be unstoppable on a team, right? But that's just not the truth. For the sake of continuing the over-all discussion: One thing I remembered I wanted to mention is that it seems like some characters are more designed for breadth of content (In my experience, people who want teams often want the teams to be able to do any content), while other people are more concerned about depth of content (from what I've seen, people who like to solo often build their characters to fight certain AV's or enemy groups). When discussing what sentinels can do or how easily they can do it, I think it's also important to think about those things in terms of both the variety of things they can do, and also the depth of things they can do.

Nope. a sentinel Hover-blasting is less effective than any other ranged AT hover-blasting. The sentinel has to stay closer to the fight anyway (I've noticed mobs jumping up to me on a regular basis) and the defense bonus isn't as helpful for the sentinel at later levels.

Okay.. so.. Much has been said, but I think there's also much that hasn't been said, or even ignored. For 1: Playing a sentinel in 50- content isn't the same experience as playing a sentinel in 50+ content. In my experience, sentinels are fine and fun while leveling, but at 50+ sentinels don't really seem to get much. Like-wise, optimized enhancements on sentinels don't seem to do as much for them as for other AT's. All in all, I would argue that sentinels have a high floor and low ceiling. I feel like at 50+, everyone else gets candy and I don't.. well.. maybe not EVERYONE else... 2: The Roles are kinda messed up right now anyway. Playing a Force Field defender or corruptor can be fun, but the team rarely needs you. In order to be useful on a team at 50+, you would basically need to design the team around the Bubbler. I complain about that with FF rather often, but the truth is it's a problem for all support powersets. An empathy defender isn't needed much more than a Bubbler. It's even worse with control powersets, wherein people actually get upset when you control mobs! I don't feel it really does much good to define the sentinel's role until we make it so that rules are useful again. 3: Opportunity.. *sigh* oh opportunity.. I mean there's enough with opportunity to spawn multiple threads by itself. Limiting offensive opportunity and defensive opportunity to a single "bad" attack each DOES actually force some decision making, but it also feels like bad design. More to the point though.. how many people actually use defensive opportunity? I think defensive opportunity was meant to be used far more often than it is. I think sentinels weren't meant to have multiple toggles running, even while they're spamming their attacks, and so the devs thought they were gonna need powers and abilities that would help recover endurance. In practice though, I rarely use defensive opportunity. Personally, I feel like defensive opportunity could be the mechanism for giving sentinels taunts and/or controls. I could write a whole thread, by myself, on possible ways to change opportunity. 4: I can testify to the fact that sentinels take damage. often this is AoE damage, or damage from the one mob i'm trying to focus down. I really don't know where these stories of immortal sentinels come from. The reality is that sentinels will have a harder time pulling single mobs than other ranged AT's do. Maybe people just forgot how to play the other ranged AT's carefully? I mean you could argue that this means that sentinels don't need to play careful, but the counter is that sentinels don't have the tools to play careful.. well.. whatever.. what I know is that in solo play my sents die as much as my doms (the two AT's I play most). In group play my doms die more, but this is largely because I play much more wrecklessly with my dom in groups. 5: I generally feel like sentinels are better at carrying pool powers than most other AT's. One advantage to sitting at mid-range and being among the last on a team to drop is that your leadership powers can effect more people longer. Another advantage is that you're better able to escape from a fight to rez someone (especially if you have Ninjitsu!) Sentinels also seem to be able to skip more main powerset powers than other AT's, which I think means they tend to get more pool powers anyway.. or is that just me? 6: Okay.. as you may have been able to tell from the last point, I kinda lost my train of thought while writing this, but hopefully I've given everyone enough to think about while I try to remember what else I was going to say.

I've thought of these things (briefly) too. On the first one, I think it would be cool if there was an AT that uses assault primary. Too many AT's are competing for blasting powers. Still, I feel like that should be a separate AT. Also, we need more assault powers before I think that could really take off. As for the second point, I feel like that would have been a way to go, instead of forcing sentinels to move closer, incentivize them to move closer. While that idea seems sentinel appropriate though, I don't really see it as helping sents have a role in a party. edit: and now to continue reading the rest of the thread.. just wanted to comment on those things since they had sprung to my mind recently as well.

Coldbrew edit: nvm Already taken.. as any good name will be

Maybe they just banned you before they left so they wouldn't have to log in to do it later?

Pfft! It was an easy spot. The language and grammer were far too clear for anyone who is actually trying to communicate with Americans or Brits.

I understand corporate shenanigans. What I don't understand is why NCsoft would be sitting on the property. Clearly they know they could sell it, but they choose not to. The only product they've used the CoX IP with other than CoX was a flop (and i'm not even sure they cared). They even had to refile to retain the IP. There has to be more to this than some simple arguments with their employees. I mean one could argue that NCsoft is violating corporate law by holding the property and not doing anything with it. (although I think that argument would have to be made by a shareholder)

That second part had me a little confused. The article clearly states that Embracer bought the shares of Perfect World North America and Perfect World Publishing from Perfect World Europe.. it also says that Perfect World North America and Perfect World Publishing make up Perfect World Entertainment. Apparently PWE IS Perfect World North America Corporation and Perfect World Publishing, while Perfect World Europe is simply called "Perfect World" and I guess the Chinese company isn't really involved with any of that. PWE includes all the titles that we really care about in the west including Star Trek, Neverwinter and D&D, and Torchlight. PWE was apparently sold for cheap because the only thing they've been able to produce over the past 2 years was the botched Magic: The Gathering game. It was actually losing money. In related news, Embracer has been doing alot of buying over the past week. They bought Asmodee (Which itself owns many other board/card/miniature game companies), they bought PWE, Dark Horse, Shiver Games (which produces PC/tablet/phone games), a german streaming company, DIGIC (an animation company that has worked on game animations and Netflix series) In other words, they're poised to take over the world. They could probably put their heads together and make a decent game that CoH players would appreciate, but they wouldn't be able to use any CoH characters.

Remember though, they didn't flat out buy Perfect World Entertainment. They bought enough shares in Perfect World Entertainment from a third party (Perfect World Europe) to become the controlling interest in Perfect World Entertainment. It's completely possible that they only actually bought 5 or 10% of the shares with this one deal. Edit: The article says that Embracer bought 100% of PWeurope's shares in PWNA and PWpublishing.. but it doesn't say how many shares or what percentage of those companies that actually was.

I don't think anyone outside of NCsoft and maybe cryptic or paragon really knows why CoH isn't re-released.. or even why it was shut-down in the first place. I kinda suspect that there's some kind of bad blood or power struggling going on (because the reasoning clearly makes no economic sense.) Therefor having some of the agencies involved in that struggle removed COULD free things up some. With that said, I think the problem is more between NCsoft and Paragon, rather than Cryptic. I also think that getting into it much deeper is probably an economic/political discussion that we shouldn't have on a game forum.

The thing is, if the game is good than people will want to talk about the game instead of talking about those things (and I'd add real world economics), at least on the game forums. I wonder if people know there are forums specifically for politics, economics and the like.

There is the point though, that if a channel is being billed as "The RP Channel" then telling people not to go there would be bad for RP in general. Rather, using the channel to direct others to channels that are more tailored to their tastes would be more approriate, imo. In essence, the more inclusive a channel is, the fewer rules it should have. So all sorts of role-players should be invited into the RP channel, then if people notice that someone is doing more Golden Age RP.. or maybe someone else doing ERP, then those people should be given certain other channels to go to. I would also point out that the guidelines given don't foster a "golden age" atmosphere, as the "golden age" predates the comics code authority. Most golden age titles didn't really have rules other than those they placed on themselves. What the O.P. is suggesting is more similar to the "industry regulation" of the CCA, and thus the start of the "silver age". With that said, the creator of a channel should certainly have some say as to the behavior that channel allows.

I don't actually RP much in game, because that requires other people.. but my "heroic" Arachnos soldier (Wargame) definitely uses different costumes to help tell his story. He still has the old Arachnos costume, Then he's got his costume that's basically just jeans, a t-shirt, and a trench coat.. and finally he has a "hero" costume, in which he wears a helmet and some bright colored clothing with heroic designs under a black trenchcoat. This kinda represents his growth from Arachnos soldier to somebody who's just hanging out with heroes and into someone who's starting to do some heroing on their own.