CrusaderDroid

Ooh. Toyed with a similar idea myself. I'm definitely in support of the concept, since you can field a different set of pets if you're in melee and can take a hit instead of being ranged. My own personal idea was to combine melee sets with armor sets instead of combining armor with pet sets. I think this might work too, but I'm not entirely sure. I guess the two big things to watch out for are how MM's pets are balanced around the MM playing support from afar and not fighting in melee, and that you don't end up dealing absurd damage since you have a full attack set on top of at least 6 other bodies taking shots at the enemy. I think if you're going to be going into melee, you probably want entirely new pet sets for this instead of swapping out powers on existing sets, so you can rebalance the new pets around your melee combat.

So while any power set can be magic, none of them really quite feel like magic. Specifically: Look at Doctor Strange, Merlin, or that annoying Wizard in your D&D sessions. The fireball they throw is the least creative thing they can do. Their actual powerset is well beyond any accurate representation in City of Heroes right now. You can say Sorcery works, and to an extent it does, but at the end of the day you're still sitting on Fire Blast and either having to pick a rainbow of colors for your powers or accepting that this particular mage of yours is just really fire-happy. Hence: Sorcerous Blast. Sorcerous Blast is an attempt to capture the versatility of the big name wizards of lore, bringing a diverse arsenal of effects to bear on enemies. The hope is that players that use this set feel like flashy archmages throwing around lots of power. Mechanically, I wanted an incentive to take all of the powers, and I didn't want to lose a power to Aim or an equivalent. The rune system thus wants you to use all of your powers frequently, which means you get to show off your fancy particle effects on top of building up power with each use. This kind of gradual buildup, and especially the unlocking of new capabilities, isn't found anywhere else currently. All listed numbers are open to change. Any missing numbers aren't as important to me as the underlying idea, and can be filled in later if this ever gets to beta testing. Let me know what you think and what you like or don't like. I'm still learning the intricacies of CoH power design, so I'm open to feedback. Shout out to @Drow2100for giving me the inspiration. EDIT: Thanks to @Rudra's feedback, renamed the set to Primal Forces to move away from a magic-inferring origin. — Primal Forces Weave together many different elements to empower yourself and overwhelm your enemies’ defenses. All Primal Forces powers grant you a rune that increases your stats for 1 minute. Each rune stacks with runes from other powers, but not itself. All runes increase your damage by 5%, with each individual rune granting its own additional bonus. Rune buffs are unenhanceable. (Alternative animations would allow the runes to instead be visually represented by binary code, sparks of power or outright excised for minimal FX.) Tier 1: Bolt of Barathus - A single, swift bolt of fire that deals moderate fire damage, with a chance to inflict damage over time. Low recharge time. Rune grants a chance to deal very minor fire damage on hit, triggering about 4 times a minute. Tier 2: Waters of Wiolathe - A burst of water underneath a target with a chance to knock down, dealing moderate smashing and cold damage. Moderate recharge time. Rune grants +10% recharge speed and +5% endurance cost reduction. Tier 3: Storm of Ssrinath - Strike a target with lightning, shocking all enemies around them for heavy electric damage, draining endurance, and applying a penalty to endurance recovery. Very long recharge for its tier. Rune grants +5% to hit and a chance to deal light electric damage on hit, triggering 3 times a minute. Tier 4: Rumblings of Rorg - Target area becomes the epicenter of an earthquake, continually dealing smashing damage and slowing enemies inside for a duration and attempting to knock them down every 3 seconds. Very long recharge. Rune grants +5% resist to all damage. Tier 5: Cloak of Corrocan - Sweep darkness around you, dealing negative energy damage in an area around you and lowering the accuracy and perception of enemies hit. Rune grants +50% regeneration and recovery and stealth. Tier 6: Ice of Illae - Chilling cold winds strike a cone for light cold damage, applying a long-lasting slow and cold resist debuff. Very short recharge, but the damage is lower than most tier 1 powers. Rune grants +5% endurance cost reduction and +2.5% defense to all attacks as well as 50% increased run and fly speed. Tier 7: Hurricane of Haloreth - Intense winds hurl an enemy hilariously high into the air, dealing smashing damage and grounding the target. Long recharge. Rune grants +10% recharge speed and the ability to hover. Tier 8: Light of Linila - Piercing beam of light briefly debuffs the target's energy resist by about 15% before dealing high energy damage. Moderately long recharge, resist debuff expires almost immediately after dealing damage. Rune grants +50% regeneration and recovery and +5% recharge speed and a chance to deal bonus energy damage on hit, triggering about 2 times per minute. Tier 9: Gate - Tear open a localized portal at your location and cause spirits to flood out and strike at all enemies in an unfairly wide range around you, dealing high negative energy damage and attempting to terrorize all targets hit. The base recharge speed exceeds 3 minutes. Rune grants +5% resist and +2.5% defense against all, and if you are defeated, revives you with 50% of your health and 25% of your endurance and grants invulnerability for 5 seconds.

Hi there! As an aspiring game designer, I've got quite a few ideas for powersets that could be added to the game. I don't want to spam the forum with them, though, so I figure it would be easier to keep them all contained in one thread. I'm open to feedback about anything I post. I'm still learning the game and its design, so I might make some mistakes in the importance or power of certain mechanics. I'm also open to requests to make up rough drafts of powersets! Pitch me an idea and I'll try and spin it into a complete powerset for you. If you have a cool idea but don't know exactly what it would look like, I can help with that. I'll keep this post updated with links to all of the other powersets posted in this thread. My Powersets: Primal Forces Trick Shot Venom Blast Powered Weaponry Requested Sets:

I mean, if you've got like a list of 9 powers for a powerset, I'd love to see it. Don't need exact numbers or anything, just brief two or three sentence summaries on what things do. When it's this nebulous "behold, A THING!" kind of post, it's much harder to engage. You've clearly got some ideas for some of those powers, so seeing the total set would be interesting and help head off some of the confusing bits like "do you need to shoot your own pets or just one click tame" that I got tripped up on.

Regardless of anything else, this is a complete non-starter. The pain points of both inexperienced players and dedicated trolls using their powersets to wipe their team are an insurmountable obstacle. It's especially bad in a game where the only other possible trolling power is Teleport Target, and it is otherwise bereft of powers that can even injure your own team, let alone inconvenience them. Just for fun though, let's assume that somehow the basic premise of "my pets can hurt my own team" isn't a dealbreaker. It's still not a functional set. You need at least two powers from your own primary - one to summon your wild pet, and one to tame the pet. Since you can only take one power at character creation, you don't really function at 1st level. Yes, you can Brawl your way to 2nd solo, but... You're now stuck with a very heavy set that requires you to be spending time targeting your own pets just to get them to work properly. Most other Masterminds don't have to opt into their damage powers, so they can freely drop those for secondary or pool powers. Since you're targeting your own pets to tame them, every time you summon them you stop being useful for however long it takes to wrangle them. Until they're tamed, at best you are only progressing the end of a fight by accident, and at worst you are damaging your own team. Since you need to tame them every time, losing any pet puts you at a severe disadvantage when it comes to replacing them. Other Masterminds can quickly replenish their pets if they fall. The logistical headache from the above points means that there's no good balance number for their stats. If they're normal MM tier, this is a waste of time, but if they're too strong, the confusion can take out an ally before you can wrangle them. Taming has no good answers. Either you deal damage to your own pet, which makes them much more susceptible to getting taken out by the enemy, or you don't deal damage to your own pet, which means you added a second step to summoning a pet for no real gain. This isn't going to work as an idea. The mechanics aren't fun and slow you down to the point of being bottom tier. No, sometimes ideas just happen to be bad for a game because they contradict the design philosophy of that game, and there is no possible way to implement it. Not every game needs or can benefit from every possible idea or mechanic.

I'll try and hunt this down and run it with my friends tonight, if that helps.

I don't know what mechanical purpose this would serve. It looks inferior to pretty much every other choice since you don't have full control, and since confused enemies can deduct earned exp, there's a serious reason not to use this. About the best you can do with this idea is a Mastermind whose powers recruit enemies permanently, but the coding behind that might break when switching zones, and you're at a huge disadvantage each time you get wiped, so the added possible versatility isn't really offset by the painful hospital visits and having to pick up and escort favored minions. Roleplay and flavor are all well and good, but City of Heroes is still a game. If you can't nail the mechanics well enough to make it stand out as a proper set, it's likely to critically underperform even in roleplay and flavor.

This looks like a solution in search of a problem. Getting defeated in this game is barely a punishment - you level a little slower for a little bit and have to walk back to your previous point. This isn't a consequence that requires a three day pause to avoid. Sudden entrances especially are as simple as posting in LFG "need help with mission, lfm". There's no problem either of these mechanics are addressing. That's one hell of an accusation to level at the playerbase. Don't do this - it's rude.

@RudraI'm confused as to what your goal is here. Do you want @Drow2100to make better contributions to the forums, or do you just want them to stop posting, period? If it's the former, I tried to outline some of the stuff that I thought was a pain point with you in my own post, so that the next time Drow2100 has an idea, they're better equipped to pitch it. It might help to de-escalate if you explain what exactly you're trying to do here. Actually, no! That's why the mechanics matter. Assault Rifle, Dual Pistols, and Beam Rifle could have all been reskins of each other, but instead they've all got different mechanics behind them that make them stand out - Dual Pistols' ammo switching and Beam Rifle's Disintegrating mechanics being particular standouts. Even if they all looked like a generic gun, the powers would have been meaningfully different enough that we could have decisions made based on how they play. That's a good thing. Flavor is great. It can't carry a powerset though. Since they're basically the equivalent of classes or talent trees or specs or what have you in other MMOs, they need to be meaningfully distinct from all other sets so there's a good reason to pick them and not relegate them to a particle of some other powerset. I don't think people are opposed to, say, Teleport Melee, but you'd need to pitch a really cool hook to get people to seriously think about it instead of rightfully saying "just use Combat Teleport". Without that pitch, there's nothing to get anyone invested in it, even if it can be a really cool idea. The good news is you don't need that much to stand out. Ammo switching and Disintegrating were good enough to carry those powersets. Come up with a sweet core mechanic and you're already halfway there.

Hi there! I like the whole magic thing myself, and I'm pondering making my own spin on the thing to try and avoid some of what's happened in this thread and in the prior Arcane Blast thread. Specifically, what was being asked of you there was "what does this do, mechanically speaking"? Mechanics are good! They're the best way to set powersets apart from each other - not visuals. Mechanics also get some people excited for what kind of builds they can put together with it. Without the mechanics, it gets really easy to slip into "well, Fire Blast can just be a Wizard's fireball" - which is also true, so you kinda brick there. I think if I were to do this, I'd probably have all the powers do some sort of different element, and then have each power grant their own buff for maybe 1 minute or 2x their normal recharge timer that increases damage by a small amount and some other stat by a small amount. That way, as you keep cycling through different powers, you get progressively more powerful, and that in turn translates to showing all of your pretty particle effects frequently. Which looks cool! If you can pin down some mechanical starting point, you're already well ahead of the Arcane Blast thread. Give it a try - what kind of thing would this powerset revolve around?

Money can buy an orbital satellite armed with a death laser and set in geosynchronous orbit, primed to fire at anyone foolish enough not to accept your buyout offer. Just some food for thought. It doesn't all have to be bribes. The original pitch is kinda doomed, but there could be some fun(ny) ideas left past the idea of "well, see, I was going to summon dead gods to destroy the world, but your benefits package and work from home looks too good to pass up".

Aww. See, I thought you were going to suggest something like combining melee powers with armor powers in one powerset to make room for a melee support or control archetype. Instead, it's just a video of Seismic Blast with the Lava FX.

This looks pretty neat! I really like the theming of the set and how it moves away from "throw another rock" to the more esoteric properties of earth and the contents therein. There's a lot of fun potential with that concept, and I'd love to see more along those lines. My main concern is that the current set isn't very strong or practical for the most part. It's overly focused on resists to the detriment of everything else. In order... Mudball: Not super exciting, but I appreciate the practicality. You can very easily have this ground fliers. Stone Plating: This is bigger than you might think since it boosts both resist and defense simultaneously, when most buffs pick one. It makes me a bit worried about room for numbers. Still, it works and is pretty typical of the usual powers in the set. Mineral Infusion: Here's where things start to get weird, since you're now able to double stack your own resist buffs on allies, on top of the max health boost. I think if you only had this or Stone Plating, it would be fine, but together may be too much for one person to give - or worse, you need both to match just one cast from another power in a different set. Scouring Sands: Curiously, this doesn't lower smashing resist. Trying to do Seismic Blast with this set for the traditional mono-element would leave you with a resist drop you can't actually use yourself. This is very bad for a Corruptor. You might just want to make this a universal resist drop, but honestly it doesn't seem particularly novel to me. Definitely high on the list to cut. Plume of Dust: This looks fine to me. It's a good suite of debuffs and CC. Loam Layering: This is your third +resist power. I think you're giving up too much utility in this set by focusing so hard on resist. Would definitely cut for a better option. Wall of Stone: Innovation! I love the idea of a wall, except...it's just a wall. In a game where enemies can fly, a bunch of rocks in a row is a woefully inadequate defense. Not just that, it doesn't do anything - it just sits there and can't even draw aggro to itself. This is not a good choice even before the logistical issues of blocking your own teammates with your creation. There's totally room for "big rock creation", but it's probably in the form of an obelisk or pillar with an aura or active effect, not a wall. Mega Mudball: It's Mudball++. Not entirely sure this is what your kit needs - this is a support set, not a control set. I'd look for other ideas, or move things around so you have a different power instead of Mudball at tier 1. Cleansing Clay: I like it for the most part. Debuff resistance reduction is a nice thing I've thought about before. I don't believe there's a difference between normal damage and DoT damage, so you might want to sub in a small damage absorption effect instead to get similar results. Mineral Orb: I'm not super experienced with endgame stuff, but I don't think anyone is so desperate for Psionic resistance that they'll take this power, when that's its only function and it can be destroyed. Floating orb is cool, but this needs an entirely new effect. Fossils: Love the theme. Very tired of +resist at this stage. I think it's got a weird identity crisis here - I think you want this to be more ally support instead of enemy control. An immobilize at this point isn't as valuable when control sets have had similar powers much earlier, and the resist you're granting is rather narrow. Pave the Way: Yeah, see, this one? Give me more of this. This is a genuinely neat trick. I don't know if it's top tier (although it's +defense so probably), but it's innovative and cool and thematic. That's the kind of stuff to go for. Move Mountains: Oh come on. Look, even Stone Armor isn't as obsessed about resists as this set. Whether or not you keep this depends on how much of the other +resist stuff you keep. Boulder of Doom: This is hilarious. I love it. My only concern is that pets have generally been the domain of the Controller and Dominator primary sets, and this feels like it should be there instead of on a support set. --- In short: Great theme, some creative stuff at play here. It's both too focused on resists and suffering a bit of an identity crisis on whether it's support or control. My suggestions would be to strip away some of the +resist buffs and make up for it with damage absorption instead, which is a rare mechanic that works well with +resist. I'd also suggest maybe granting an ally a damage boost combined with a knockdown aura - knocked down enemies can't do damage, which is better than resists while they're floored. Would definitely love to see more. Keep up the good work!

You know, honestly, as goofy as this sounds, this does look like a pretty interesting starting point for a control set. Maybe I should play around with the idea a little more. I'm not sure you want to spend your valuable power choices on pacifies or reduced threat, but I might not have the experience to know if that's really a critical thing to have. Seems like if you're going with this set, you probably want to go more on extra pets instead of pacify and confuse - mostly out of practicality, mainly because you're rich and you show off being rich by deploying the best mooks and gadgets money can buy. On the other hand, I think I just described Mercenaries/Traps Mastermind, so this might be harder to do than expected.

That would make powers that drain endurance incredibly good for their ability to defeat enemies much faster than any other manner. Try playing some of the Electric sets - Elec Controller was my intro to endurance drain - and you'll pretty quickly see that you can bottom out enemy endurance well in advance of their health, especially with Elec Controllers. Also, while any endurance lets enemies fight back, totally drained enemies can't make any attacks and are fairly harmless to you. That's a pretty big bonus. Give some of the Elec sets a try! You might like being able to interact with your enemies' endurance.