thunderforce

Do not write in white text on a yellow background, it is hard to read? 🙂

I've just written a document about cross-alignment teaming, especially why one gets kicked sometimes, and invite comments or corrections. However, if you have a correction and you are not _absolutely sure_ of it, please if possible test it (perhaps using the beta server) first. I found some of the things I "knew for sure" weren't true in the course of writing this.

Fortunately, that's not the important bit, and a bit off-topic - the important bit is "relatively low server population means MM pet customisation is more feasible".

I went to the meet-and-greet in London last year. Now, my memory of the occasion is a little blurry - there may have been beer - but I think what was said is that it would cause performance problems in highly populated zones because of the huge number of different costumes visible. That might explain why it can be done on a server populated only by people who don't loathe 4chan.

This is not true. As soon as you respec (all your builds, if using multiple builds) the Crab backpack disappears. This is very easy to test on the beta server. Note that the bug where it turns up in the costume editor is still present, but you can add a cape to it and when you return to the game it's not there.

When I hit level 10, the trainer will tell me I have "attained the Security level where you can found a Super Group". This restriction is gone. When I hit level 12, they will suggesting playing in Super Group mode. This serves no purpose, short of oddball costume stunts that would be more use if we didn't have umpteen slots, and of course will be actively damaging at higher levels. At level 25, they will tell me that Super Group mode is costing me influence - a warning that could be kept, but revised to avoid the mention of Prestige, just telling us that on Homecoming, SG mode is basically redundant. At levels divisible by 10, the trainer could tell me I have earned a respec which I can use with the "/respec" command. (Also, if I do /respec with no respecs, the message that appears tells me about Jack Wolfe or the redside equivalent, because on live one had to visit them to use trial respecs. This message is misleading on Homecoming and a regular source of "Where is Jack Wolfe?" in the Help channel. The message that pops up saying "You can now respec your character! Visit Arbiter Sawyer in Port Oakes or Arbiter Lupin in Nerva Archipelago to respec your character." should also be changed.) At level 50, they tell me that I need to gain more experience for "Security Level 51". This should presumably read "Veteran Level 1". At level 50, they could tell me that the Incarnate system is unlocked. (I checked this carefully blueside, but the same issues seem to exist redside.)

No reasonable person could possibly disagree with that. 🙂 (re the OP, I think Hasten does need a pretty serious nerf and hence I wish they'd decided to argue for the other side, because "anyone who argues to do so is merely arguing to keep their current *build* as is" is a perfect example of poisoning the well and an excellent way to make people dig their heels in.)

For some of us, it's been well over a decade (off and on) and we're not bored. We didn't get bored when getting to 50 was the end in terms of character improvement; we went back to Outbreak, because the game offers an extremely wide variety of meaningfully distinct powerset combinations. How quickly is "quickly"? Paid for games are forced to artificially extend longevity by putting speedbumps in the way. A completely free game can just let people play as much as they want to.

I completely agree that this is a problem that needs to be fixed and, while there might be a better solution out there, the solution you outline is not obviously flawed. (However, I feel that - while this is one of the bigger ones - there are a number of extremely cheesy things one can do with builds, and seriously starting to fix them all would open a giant can of worms. For example, I would agree with the statement upthread that global recharge is basically a bad thing, and favour giving it sharply diminishing returns - but I can't see that being popular, either.)

Missing Melvin and the Mysterious Malta Group contains a clue that tells us that Melvin was "pouring through old documents". This should be "poring".

I think I'm enough of a descriptivist to say it is widely used enough to no longer be an error. Levantera, Rescue Arnold Decker; you get a clue at the end ("Robotic Remains") which says "It must have falsified it's orders ..." - its/it's again.

Fair point; I did some EBs like that back in the day on defenders - Frosty and that one on Striga come to mind. Unfortunately, I suspect with some ATs (in the early days) "several" is so many that this is of limited use - every time you do it you've got a story arc slot tied up for a long time, and hence it won't actually do for more than a fraction of the AVs out there. It gets us the bailey of "technically soloable" but not the motte of "always about the solo option" - that it's technically possible sometimes doesn't change the way the early game was designed around effectively forced teaming and this was bad. ... which, briefly reapproaching the suggestion itself, is still why I think an AT so focused on teaming would be bad.

You certainly can do it _now_, but I think I can promise you with complete confidence you couldn't in the early years of the game. (More seriously, the CoV ATs are, as said, much more solo-friendly on average - and invention slotting means even if arch-villains did turn up automatically solo, you could just fight them...)

(Bolding mine). This is turning into a classic motte-and-bailey defence; when the expansive (and untrue) statement that the game "has always been about the option to solo" is challenged, you retreat into the much less dramatic business of pointing out it wasn't literally compulsory to be on a team any time you earned XP - which is true, but so what? It's true of any MMO, as far as I know, and it doesn't actually justify the expansive statement. Let's look at the pre-Containment Controller. Most of your secondary doesn't even work on you, and if you happened to take Fire primary, until level 32 you have a slight advantage over most Controller primaries in that you merely kill monsters extremely slowly. However, before the great Controller nerf, one thing you do excel at is control - you can lock down considerably more than solo-size spawns, and do it for a long time. Your secondary wants team-mates, your primary wants team-mates to do the damage, and your primary provides control capacity for team-size spawns. Everything about this says this AT is designed to team, not to solo. It only has the option to solo, design-wise, in that you aren't actually prohibited from doing it. It is not in any sense "about the option to solo". Don't let nostalgia blind you to reality. The City was ahead of the game for MMOs with one very solo-friendly AT and a great deal of content that could be soloed, but that didn't make it perfect, and the contrast between the blueside ATs and the redside ones drives home how it was flawed. I think I'm done, so by all means write another rambling screed, make up another obviously-wrong number, and proclaim victory. Or take off the rose-tinted glasses.

99% is just wrong, not even close. There are plenty of archvillains in the original arcs; Dr Vahz is just the first. (Some of the original ATs will even struggle with EBs, short of outlevelling them twice and going back). In 35-40, the original level cap, 2 of the 5 origin contacts have you fight an arch-villain. When issue 1 comes out, 3 of the 4 contacts in 45-50 have you fight one. It wouldn't be anywhere near 99% even if we ignore Task Forces and Trials which all force you to team up. The one piece of endgame content is... Hami raids. Good luck doing those solo. This isn't just semantics. You said "City has always been about the option to solo" and the original design just doesn't bear that out, short of the option being "be a scrapper". Listing the proportion (quite a bit less than 99%) of the game that you can solo if you don't mind it being somewhere from ghastly to dull on three of the original ATs doesn't in any way support the idea that "City has always been about the option to solo". The original design suggests that heroes were not expected to solo all the time, some of the ATs were not really intended to solo much if at all, and it was felt to be entirely fine for lots of the content in the game to explicitly force or effectively demand a team. To pick an extreme example, what about the Cavern of Transcendence says to you "we always have the option to solo in mind"?

I think that's a bit of a rose-tinted view, I'm afraid. In the early years of the game, what do you do when Dr Vahzilok turns up, an archvillain, at level 20? If you are lucky or have a rich alt you are fully slotted with DOs, and just under half your power picks have gone on Fitness and a travel power and its pre-requisite. For bonus points, imagine a) you're a controller b) you don't have a rich alt and c) your power picks didn't go on that because your build is bad because you are new, and there is absolutely no way to get a respec until level 24 at the very earliest. Damage him? You might as well lick your monitor in the hope he will drown. I think much of the original design is as close to enforced teaming as you can get without actually making it literally compulsory (the bits where it is compulsory aside); and in particular three out of the five original ATs are somewhere between terrible and dull solo depending on powersets and level.

Out of interest, is it the clunky writing in general, the specific tendency to insert as many cyclopean adjectives into a sentence as possible, or the thinly-disguised racism? (This is not entirely correct; some of Lovecraft's racism wasn't disguised at all.) Obviously if I use a term that originated in Holmes fandom I must be a Sherlockian. That makes sense, because words never spread outside the groups that originally used them. Perhaps we can drop the lit crit now and talk about whether the Nemesis invasions in multiple zones are a good game mechanic.

Sorry, I forget the terms (which are not from this century) are not universally recognised. "Watsonian" is an in-universe explanation; "Sherlock took this client's case because he sympathised with her plight and found it intriguing". Doylist is an out-of-universe explanation; "Sherlock took this client's case because Conan Doyle had thought of a new kind of locked-room mystery which demanded that the client be a vicar's daughter."

I rather like the original request; Kameron's struggles to get to 50 as a goldsider have provided some interest in server chat. Also, suggest a goldside mission in 40-50 where Black Swan requests your assistance in dealing with Positron's incursion into her domain, which ends with you capturing him. 🙂

I suspect this will be a bit of a Marmite idea, and it's certainly half-formed, but: the pet summon and upgrade powers could gain toggles (all the time? configurably? as a result of taking an autopower you have to squeeze in?) in addition to the manual cast power. Rather than locking you into a cast time, your time spent not moving and not using any other active power would accrue, with the pet power taking effect and charging you the endurance after enough time. (If more than one power is needed, what order do they happen in?) For example, suppose I'm a Beast Mastery MM. One of my wolves dies. If I stand still and use no powers for 1.97 seconds - either all at once, or in dribs and drabs as I tap the movement keys for my own reasons - one of my wolves pops back into being and it eats some endurance (the full amount? Then these toggles can be horrible. 1/3 of the full amount, assuming I have 3 pets? Then we made MM easier, not just involve less busywork). 1.67 seconds of inactivity later and Train Beasts goes off. I think my inclination would be to pro-rate endurance costs by the number of pets affected. This is, yes, a net buff to MM over and above taking away busywork, but I think the alternative could render this useless. I don't think this renders MM brainless, just turn on all the toggles and stand around. It's still a lot of endurance going out uncontrolled, and I don't think you should be able to control the priority of operations other than by turning toggles on and off. The skilled MM would want to think about which to use as toggles and which to control manually.

Scientific Law salvage claims to be a "proven scientific principal". Typo for "principle".

Nemesis turns up in several zones at once during the event. I appreciate there's a Watsonian explanation for this ("He would attack all of Paragon City, spreading their defenses so thin that even the combined might of the city's Heroes would be unable to stop his automaton army"), but from a Doylist point of view it's undesirable. It's harder to organise teams/leagues for it, especially for redsiders. Rikti or zombies turn up in one zone at once; everyone knows where they have to be. The odds of being annoyed by it if you're in a zone and doing something else are higher. Worst case, you're trying to hunt 50 of something that isn't grey to you in a taskforce. It produces a large number of messages in whatever chat tab you have it in, potentially causing you to miss other messages you cared about. This is exacerbated by how chatty Nemesis is for each zone he attacks. None of these is a major gripe, but they're all irritating and it's not clear the event would be damaged in any way if it happened in one zone at once like every other zone event.

I think this would be a mistake. Something that is very noticeable is that the City of Villains archetypes are all solo-friendly whereas the City of Heroes archetypes are mostly not, part of the way that at launch City of Heroes believed in enforced teaming (arch-villains turning up even when solo, go and kill stuff in Perez at level 7, etc) but this idea was rightly backed away from. This was even more true at release; tankers could easily be practically immortal solo but had to tickle everything to death, controllers could lock everything down with ease but had to tickle everything to death, defenders... yep, tickling time, especially since if you ever do team you want to get all the good powers from your primary in along with, probably, Stamina and your travel power pre-requisite. We raise an eyebrow now at a defender with one attack, but at launch, a defender whose primary has no bad powers and who takes them all gets their second attack at level 24. Blasters, of course, were in a different boat - no tickling, but no self-sustain and any time you get mezzed, comedy ensues. Even warshades and peacebringers got bonuses from teammates and special enemies they found it (very, originally) hard to beat themselves; VEATs get pseudo-Leadership that works for them. Hence, I think a support-only AT like this would be a large retrograde step; a newbie trap akin to "I'll be a healer".

For completeness, I've added a list of things only incarnates can do (well, sort of, it starts with Mender Ramiel who now also ends the CoH/CoV lists). I've not done this stuff so I even more invite corrections.

It happens all the time with ordinary SO drops. The TF/trial completion drops are guaranteed to match your origin, but the rest are random. You maybe haven't noticed because by the time SOs start dropping from normal mob defeats, they're also vendor trash.