BasiliskXVIII

Currently there's one way to resolve the problem: damage. In almost all cases, it's the only way to resolve the problem and it's boringly easy. If you have enough of it, all problems in the game are trivial. The Hamidon is actually a decent example of what I'd like to see more of. There's two main ways I've seen to handle Hami. Have a full league? Then you go around, taking out the various coloured mitos, and then attack the core once his defences are down. Control is on one, ranged damage on another, and melee on another still. If you don't have that, though, you can take the riskier road and just zerg rush the core. Let's face it, if instead of total immunity to mez, the BAF Mindwashed were given something more like Mag -30 to mez with very high resistance, it would probably still be more effective to be focusing on killing them outright. But if you had a few controllers/dominators focusing fire because they're in the fray throwing controls around anyways, they could still accomplish locking them down briefly and buying the group a bit of time. You'd be able to get controllers on the field going "Ok, well, I contributed" rather than "I did less damage than anyone and had no ability to hold them." Right now, support and control in these parts of the game aren’t weak; they’re irrelevant. And that’s not balance, it’s neglect. Letting those roles matter a little more wouldn’t break the game. It’d make more people feel like they were actually playing it.

There’s a concept in D&D called “shoot your monks.” Monks have a cool ability to catch projectiles and, if they succeed on a high enough roll, throw them back. It’s flashy, it’s fun, and it often tempts DMs to avoid ranged attackers so the monk doesn’t dominate the encounter. But the advice goes: shoot your monks anyway. Let them shine. Let them feel awesome, even if just for a moment. Because the player who took the class wants to be able to make use of that ability, and doing so in a way that lets them show off a little, even if it makes a hard fight easy is what makes them feel special But there’s a balance. That monk can’t shut down everything. They have limited resources. One monk catching arrows won’t trivialise an entire encounter full of archers. They’ll contribute. They’ll maybe even dominate a moment. But they won’t make the rest of the party irrelevant. That’s what makes the issue here tricky. If a single Storm character (or a Force Field defender, or anyone with a strong repel aura) can completely block prisoner escapes in the BAF, it doesn’t just let them shine... it erases the mechanic. One person solving a 24-player problem might feel great for the one, but it leaves the rest of the team spectators. That’s not fun, either. That’s not challenge; that’s a bypass. Now, with that said, I do think the “solution” of just flipping switches and disabling entire categories of abilities is lazy, and it does contribute to the idea that only damage really matters. When holds, roots, taunts, or knockback are all quietly invalidated in later content, it undercuts what makes support and control fun in the first place. There’s something broken about a superhero game where you can’t web a villain to a telephone pole and call it a win. But we also have to acknowledge the backend: City of Heroes was, and still is, a complete and utter catastrophe of spaghetti code. The Praetorian arcs were built on a short timeline with limited dev resources, and that shows. They had to ship content that looked like it challenged players, and flipping immunity flags was a quick fix. It’s not elegant design. But it’s also not always malicious. What I’d like to see is more trust in players’ creativity: more content that lets the Stormie block the door, if they work with the team. Or lets the Controller hold a key target if they time it well. Or lets the Tank’s taunt make a difference. Because when those things land, it’s unforgettable. And when they’re shut out by default, we all feel a little less relevant.

It's the superhero that AI art was made for!

I mean, I don't know your character. Maybe you were drawn by Rob Liefield.

In practice, the economy of CoH makes absolutely no sense. You ever taken a look at your SOs? "Yeah, I want to trade off my ninja training and those last three times I got exposed to Xenon and Boron. In return, I'd also like you to mutate me a bit more. Oh, and here's three bits of regenerating flesh to go with it, I don't need that anymore. I used one of those earlier to become blessed by wind to move faster." Better to think of it all as a really weird abstraction and assume it makes more sense in universe than in the real world.

The symbol is definitely the "defence increased" symbol, but why it's there I can't say. It does show up on some of my characters too, and all I can guess it that there's a display error with the emanator.

I kind of feel like Crey and Nemesis Snipers belong here, not out of a "oh, this is so hard," perspective, but simply "what are they accomplishing?" They make sense from the early game concept, where you were expected to do a lot of street sweeping, but in the modern game, they're just kind of a sad relic of old game design, only there to punish you if you're in a team in FF or PI and your team leader disconnects. It upsets me because I feel like there should be something that they could do to make them legitimately interesting, but as it stands their primary purpose is to make the word "Miss!" appear over my head periodically while I'm running through FF, CF and PI. But since anything that forces you to stop when you're going from mission to mission is mostly just going to be an annoyance, I can't think of what might function as an improvement.

Isn't this basically a short description of ALL of Nemesis' tech?

I feel like the changes to the Crey Paragon Protectors, where they lock out their ult when controlled, was a good first step for this, and a model for how the game could make a niche for controls to be useful. I don't know if it would make much of a change to steamrolling teams, but certainly some annoying enemies with abilities that can't practically be stopped otherwise, such as rez effects, or Illusionists' phase shift could be a contender for that same "if controlled, this ability is locked out" effect to give Controllers and Doms a substantive role.

I totally forgot about Vorpal Judgement. Maybe just "I wonder if we could make a Melee cone without a target and still have it work?" I dunno. Even if it's not literally a test of a concept, it feels like it is one. I kind of wish they would change it to a targeted cone because I agree- I've had far more misfires and wasted uses of the power than I've been able to find use cases where the untargeted version justifies itself, which is why I was curious if there was a reason for it.

It's a bit of weird bird, if you're not familiar with it. Spinning Kick is a cone that doesn't require a target, simply hitting any targets in front of your character. It kind of feels like the devs were like "hey, I wonder if this will work?", and the result, while unique, feels to me like something that causes me to use the ability ineffectively more often than it provides benefits. Am I completely off the mark? It's kind of nice in Synapse, being able to kick gears before they're targetable, but is there some other great functionality that I'm missing, or is this just uniqueness for the sake of uniqueness?

I think it's not very well explained, like many of the features in the game. I tend to use it more as a quick way to check global names than for its actual purpose of keeping notes, because while it's all well and good knowing that some guy is a dick, it doesn't really make a practical barrier when you sign up for a PUG and see them on the team. I do have some people I play with regularly 5-starred just so I can spot them on an alt.

I wouldn't be opposed to a new MSR added in, but Victory only barely manages to get the population together to run it as it is, and I'd hate to see that taken away in favour of content that will need a larger team. as it's currently one of the only pieces of mid-range league content that regularly fires.

I've run a few Manticores over the last few days, and with a lot of new controllers and doms in the game trying out Pyro control, it's not uncommon ot have 2-3 on a team at a time. One thing that I've noticed, though, is that despite the control players working to shut down the PP, it would happen where some would get through because everyone missed that one or more of the PPs didn't get zapped. I am now running the Revenant Hero Project, and with the 7th Gen protectors this is happening at a whole other scale just by myself. The yellow lightning is brief and easy to miss, especially if you're looking a different direction or the PP is obscured by something when it goes off. I'd love to see an effect applied to the PPs after they've been zapped, whether that's a yellow "Electricity" or "Sparks" aura (as in the costume creator) which indicates the power is disabled to anyone who wasn't able to immediately see the initial zap for whatever reason.

I think the intent for the "flattened" bubble effect was so that you can see more of the effect while you're on an indoor mission, making it more visually apparent.