temnix

Holding the jump button makes the character take off in a very slow vertical jump, or rather, rise, for a while. How high does a character rise? About treetop level. The jump doesn't begin yet. On the peak you push the forward button, and the character starts to vault down and forward. You keep the button down. Looking at distance meters, leaping forward at 45 degrees or so with this power instead of running along the ground burns distance almost twice as fast. And what is all this nonsense in this thread? Of course I know what I'm talking about. Of course I've seen Superjump and Superspeed. Maybe Superjump can put you on top of skyscrapers enhanced, I don't know, but by itself it is just at the level of five-storey buildings or so, and Ninja Run can do that, or almost. I have seen Superspeed too. It's faster than Ninja Run for running, but I doubt it's faster than its run-jump combination. And how effective is it? Well, I can leap on the monorail where it comes a little closer to the ground. And you know King Garment Works in Kings Row, the huge long factory on a terrace in the western part of the area? I can jump up to that level from the ground. In fact, if I'm not careful, I easily leap over it and the fence behind the street there and end up in a courtyard - from one leap. There is also a trick to make wall tops help the jump. When you jump up against a high wall and reach the top, before you drop down again, lean forward on the wall, and it sort of propels you like a slingshot. This doesn't always work, and Ninja Run requires some finesse, but it's plenty enough for all my imaginable travel needs. (I have Hover for a little flying when push comes to shove.) As for jumping from the air, here you have to control it differently: instead of throwing yourself forward at 45 degree angles like a grenade, you skip along - let go of the jump button earlier, then you hit it again just before the character touches the ground, and away he skips again. But this is tiring to do consistently and not a substitute for a real double jump.

I wanted to slot Ninja Run to leap even higher, and this power is supposed to take Enhancements. But I don't see it anywhere on the Manage screen. Why? I ended up putting the Jump Enhancement into Hurdle in hopes that the bonus would carry over to Ninja Run, but if the highest bonus takes precedence, it won't. Second question: statistics for my Fire Melee powers list numbers that apply "only with Fiery Embrace." What is Fiery Embrace? It's not on the set.

When a contact sends you to a warehouse and the mission takes place in a warehouse, the only thing standing between the two is the gabled porch of a nice manor house... There is no shortage of industrial buildings on the maps, missions should be placed at intelligent locations. And how about an interior set for a private house, for that manner? If it turns out to be an immense mansion with stairways and floors and hallways, I won't be surprised. After all, endless depots can hide inside modest buildings and miles-long sand warrens and crystal caves sprawl below city sidewalks. I'm actually quite fed up with warehouses. It's like I'm some kind of industrial facilities inspector.

This is all being very theoretical, but I think the feature that can make the Commander stand out is a different relationship with minions. It is not interesting enough to have a power that simply heals them or something like that. And this type needs distinct minion groups, intentionally less impressive. Militia, makeshift robots etc. are all possibilities. There could be more summonable minions to control at once, for example (it's disappointing that Masterminds only get three goons - not exactly Shredder and robot ninjas... quite some time later they get another, but it's never an impressive presence). Commanders' minions could be much weaker, but the starting power could summon four of them. And if the idea that their maximum percentile hit points are the same as the Commander's at all times is in, that would make them even more fragile and put the pressure on the Commander to stay alive and command instead of wading into fighting as I have seen Masterminds do. Combine this with Inspirations passing on, at least in part, and you have the beginning of an original Archetype. On the other hand, there is a remaining noun in the English tongue still unused: Interceptor. This could be a version of Redeemer for villains.

Right. Now who is being ridiculous? The 5th Column was possessed by Kheldians and turned into Council. You can still see both 5th Column and Council troops on the streets. There is even a "Krieg" soldier in Boomtown who is explicitly described as being a leftover of the Column after their takeover, for those who didn't know it already. I don't pretend to know everything or even very much about the villain groups, only what I have been told by quest-givers and texts, but I do know that piece of history. And this is my one and only time of replying to you, Mr. 4000-odd-forum-posts-and-counting.

I like the first two. I would rename Cannon to Monitor, though. Monitors were enormous floating batteries in the early days of steamships. They usually had one huge artillery tower or many small fixed cannons around, and they had the sailing qualities of a brick. They would not be allowed into open sea for fear of capsizing. Unlike your Cannon, though, they were excellently armored. My concern when it comes to balance is that teams know to keep Blasters in the back, out of harm's way, already (Blasters themselves know it). Adding another strong if vulnerable shooter to the back lines would not make fights more difficult for them, especially if the character slots Range Enhancements. He could bombard the enemy from the entrance door. But if you change Shattered Glass (too particular) to Collateral Damage and make it so that this damage is AoE but indiscriminate, i.e. allies can suffer too, then it would be a question of whether the team wants to be subjected to friendly fire. In other words, then it would be interesting. Give the Monitor the best shooting distance of all Archetypes, but correlate Collateral Damage with it. Monitors could specialize in acting the howitzer with bosses, for instance, while everyone else keeps out to the sides, fighting the rank-and-file and distracting the boss when he rushes towards the Monitor. For the second concept I insist on new minion choices. It should be some people obviously less proficient than demons and ninjas: Militia, for example (badly and ridiculously armed civilians of today), Peasants (sickles, pitchforks, clubs... rags), Apparitions (nearly immaterial phantoms and poltergeists), Snewts (goblin-like runts), Gizmen (glue-chicken-and-duck-tape robots), Vermin (big cockroaches, caterpillars, gnats), Footballers (quarterbacks, halfbacks etc.) or Ceremonial Guard (slow, stiff and lumbering). But the principle connecting them to the Commander should be that their effectiveness and hit points correlate to his. They can never have more percentile hp than he currently has, and if he is incapacitated or defeated, they run about in panic (by the way giving him a unique chance to recover or resurrect himself and slink back). On the other hand, his Inspirations pass a small boost onto them. And for the third: why not speed up recharge of support powers all the while the character is attacking in melee? I would use Redeemer for the name. He rushes in and turns the situation around for the benefit of his friends.

The title says it all. I know there are many interesting missions... well, there are often interesting twists in hack-and-slash... but lots of missions, especially smaller ones, look hastily slapped together. Being told that a person by such a name is held by such a group, with the entrance message reading "Time to rescue a hapless Citizen (yes, with a capital) from the clutches of evil," and the mission itself being a warehouse with twos-threes of baddies standing around and that innocent somewhere in the back, does not make my toes tingle. Some missions remind me of "We know you like Dog, so we put some Dog in the Cat, so you can do Dog while..." A few examples. A jewelry store is being robbed by - what villain group, do you think? The Vahzilok! Hacksaw-wielding surgeons in bloody aprons and shambling, bomb-strapped corpses stand - and snooze! - around that store. Poor sods, they must be desperate for money. No display windows have been smashed, however, and only one little holding cell is open in the vault. The mission message adds to the confusion: "The Vahzilok are trying to poison Faultline!" (or something like that). Here is another: a villain by the name of R-something has been appearing in Clockwork raids. "It is time to show R that crime doesn't pay!" Excuse me? Clockwork? The word "crime" is not even applicable to them. There was another quest in which my character supposedly stopped "a war" between the Skulls and the Clockwork in a warehouse that belonged to the Skulls, but one which the Clockwork were "moving in." This could make some sense if it was Skulls vs. Hellions or something, but the robots? These villain groups are treated interchangeably. There is no attempt to set them apart or give a meaning to their schemes. I can't tell if this frequent sloppy quest-writing is something new that the staff of Homecoming has slapped together or they have been around before the shutdown. But villains' activities out in the open have always been pointless and unexplained too. Cultists of the Circle of Thorns suspend victims in green light in parks. What is that about? What is the Circle itself about, besides fuming green from the eyes themselves? Thorn daggers, on the other hand, are red. That's all there is to them, isn't it? Green light and red daggers. At least they could mutter something informative for the hero - if only there were, in fact, a story behind the group. There are also cases of poor introductions to quests and groups. Some are bugs: my character, not a Praetorian and therefore excluded from that dimension's quests, traveled to Imperial City via TUNNEL, and near Pocket D, behind one of the skyscrapers, suddenly got a quest to fight the Syndicate with police's support. I killed 40 of those trenchcoat-wearing, sunglasses-blinded, circle-kicking Neo wannabes in a row! And I got to continue to the next stage, if I wanted to. In that case there was simply a missing condition in the code. But here is a different situation: I was traveling around Steel Canyon and saw on the sidewalk under a twirling arrow a red-headed girl who did not look like anything like a United Nations trooper but was one. She told me about a skirmish between the Fifth Column and the Council. I had not been given an introduction to either group by anyone, and out of character last I remembered was that the Council was the Fifth Column after its takeover by Kheldians. How come the Column returned, the Council stayed and, evidently, they lived apart and indifferent to each other most of the time? But the conversation and the mission-giving ended before they began: I agreed to look into the conflict, I was given an ego-pleasing rank of sargeant by the U. N., and then, after I clicked "Let's get to work," the girl told me "I have no work for you." I guess my level count was not high enough, or too high, or I was not supposed to have spoken with this NPC in the first place. And now that I think about it, the Council here is inserted again as just any villain group to go VS the Column. Other contacts turned out to have no missions for me the very first time I met them. Was I again too high-level? Well, give me those low-level missions, I don't care! Let the auto-leveler do its job. This combination of careless plotting, bugs and disheartening design choices does not help maintain my interest in the game. But hey! I was invited to work for the Midnight Squad - the very original "we are mystical mystics, we like libraries with lampshades" band that reminds me of that lame Voldemort-fighting cabal in "Harry Potter" movies... what were they called? Here is an idea for the writers: instead of trying to pull together every cliche why not actually write your own stories for the villain groups and create real characters with personalities and motivations, whether villainous, heroic, antiheroic or none of the above? There isn't a single NPC in this game I have met so far who is a believable person. Who is given enough screen time to show himself as a believable person, to begin with! Or is that because... a terrible thought! ...is that because believeable people are those passerby on the streets - the students, the slouching bald guys, the construction workers carrying logs, "the hapless Citizens," and we supers are the paper dolls?

I have suggested something similar. My idea is to make the powers center on damage, however. There are already many sets and parts of sets that incapacitate or trap, even the entire Traps set. I would like to see that go boom and hurt. A power to attach bombs to enemies out of invisibility would be welcome. And they should be timed - every one set bomb with a timer, but there should also be a power for detonating all bombs. Without outstanding bombs this detonator (which could look like a bid red pushdown lever or a high-tech remote activator instead, choose that in Costume options) would change the damage type the same way Switch Ammo does in Dual Pistols.

I took this Prestige power, and it increased my running speed wonderfully and jumping height considerably, I thought. But it turns out that if I hold down the jump button with this power on, even without running, I rise and RISE into the air until I can dive into truly gigantic leaps. If I time it right, I can even jump again from the air just before touching the ground without taking any other power for double-jumping. I can even land with forward rolls. Control is very good, I always see where I'll be landing. And hopping along instead of simply running burns up distance. I could cross the biggest area in one, two minutes of non-stop vaulting. Together it is like Superjump and Superspeed combined, perhaps a little milder than either. It requires a bit of direction when descending, I kind of float down in the end of the jump, but that's fun.

I would like to know more about the villain groups in this game, but is there more to know? For example, I am particularly curious about the Lost, but it is told right upon meeting them, in their ID cards, that they are mutants, and before long I get into simple quests about them where they drag the homeless down into the sewers and apparently subject them to a deluge of sewage with promises that "soon you will be like us." Is there any more of a story behind them? Will I ever find out where they are getting Rikti weapons or what the inspiration is behind their changes, their point of view, or is it just some quasi-Lovecraftian sideshow? There is a quest, promising on the surface, to defeat 10 of them and get samples of their blood, but that leads to nowhere. Or take the Skulls: I have done half of their story act, learned a little about their leaders, but all I know about the organization is still what I read in their descriptions in the beginning - that they are a death cult (yet somehow also dedicated drug pushers). Well, have they had any success in overcoming death? Or take the Vahzilok: from the first ID cards I knew they were creations of someone called Dr. Vahzilok, and by the end of his story arc I knew just a little more about his motivation. Is this all the depth there is to the groups? How about digging deeper, then, developers? I am not interested in reading up on these groups in some wiki, I'm interested in encounters that have something to tell me. I'm not going to stick around until level 50 otherwise.

As far as I know, a base must be either magical or technological. Unless there is some insurmountable technical obstacle, it would be better to let players mix and match.

The first is that "Return to contact" missions don't produce a navigation marker that would show where the contact is. Instead the player has to click on the completed mission description and expand it to learn who gave it, then find that character in Contacts to train the bead on him. Even if the contact can already be called, this is still inconvenient. Two other things have been around for 20 years or so: the bio editor is mutant and does wicked things to words and characters, throwing them about, pushing them out of the paragraph and God knows what else, especially when the text gets long, AND the distances to map markers in yards and feet are way off. 10 feet is not 18 feet. They still decrease and increase in the right degree to give the correct measure of approach, but it's skewed.

I don't exactly know, and unless I'm flying and looking at the situation from above it is difficult to judge, how far my ranged powers reach. Make it so that when an icon is clicked and no target is selected the player sees the maximum range.

Interrupt Enhancements are useful only in the few powers that can be interrupted. Make them also, or instead, in the case of all other powers, speed up the execution of the power - its animation and delivery of effects. Testing will show by how much, and it will all need to be tested for balance and so on, but getting powers out quicker would be very welcome. I got that desire while waiting for my character to lean back, slowly blow and release Breath of Fire. This would also put a little play in considerations of recharging, because powers wouldn't recharge any faster on account of going off faster, and characters might find themselves with no ready buttons in a fight. Having to devote some slots then to recharge that would otherwise be dedicated to other bonuses should by itself balance out the impact.

Developers, please think about a way to disconnect players automatically in the event of a client crash. This can happen for many reasons, one of them, and not the most respectable, is that the machine on which the game is being played, has too little operating memory. Then error windows appear, and the player is kicked out into the operating system while the character is left standing helplessly. This is my case, and recently it happened just like this: I had only come across a group of Skulls, white to me, and was noticed, when the program became unresponsive and the character simply stood there. I exited with the Task Manager and logged back in, but I knew where I would find myself: at the hospital. While it is my fault that I try to play the game on such a low-end computer, this sort of thing can happen for various reasons, and it would be very good to have a mechanism that makes the character disappear after the player. It might be done by pinging the server every few seconds, when the client is working normally. There is probably already a stream of uploading data between the two. If the server doesn't receive the request, it waits for the next within a few more seconds and then disconnects, preferably with a message in the local channel declaring the fact.

1) Wings that only sprout and remain as long as a flight power is used; 2) Something to decorate the character's back with. For my current character I would like a row of spikes down her spine; 3) "Monstrous" (clawed) gloves with more sleeve options, e.g. Spiked; 4) Spikes etc. for thighs; 5) Roman Sybils sans the belt; 6) Accents for the lower legs. Anklets, perhaps. Also monster leg choices permit too few variations. Some anklets even for them, perhaps, and tintable claws in any event. This character is sheer black except for a tinge of her horns, but her leg claws are white like an angel's toenails. As a general point, the designers in charge of costumes should think about the choice of details from the angle of the final look rather than realism, as the original developers did. Often players draw from many different styles and tint, hide or recombine parts to bring about the appearance they want, irrespective of what those parts were supposed to represent. And here it would be better to forget realism and pool options. For instance, in Heads we have Standard as one choice, Full Masks as another. They share many of the available accessories under Detail, but Standard gets Hair and details like Back of Head Tattoo, while Full Masks has Crystal Crown inter alia. Strangely enough, both have Horns. My current character is constructed with Full Mask and clothes all over her body because the available skin colors are too limited, but I aim to make this clothing look like skin. I would like that "tattoo" (just call it a pattern instead) above her collar, but it is incompatible with Full Masks; I might like something from Hair, too, but I definitely want the Crystal Crown, not to be had without a mask. There are also some facial details that only helmets provide (e. g. Wolverine-style zigzag sideburns). I say, forget what makes sense here and give players three, four full menus of details everywhere. Let players worry about whether hair grows on a helmet.

I confess: I don't know how to play this game. I would think it should be self-obvious: I learn the basics, I fight, level up and that's it. But apparently there is some deep secret way that I am supposed to learn. Here is the thing: I never have enough Influence for all my power slots. I earn experience much faster than they drop Enhancements I could sell for enough to cover my own Enhancement needs. Single-origin Enhancements are very expensive, and all of them jump in price every five levels. I get two new slots every other level, and no money to fill them with. It may be objected that single-origin ones are the best kind and that I can't expect to have them everywhere without turning some special tricks, and in truth I could better afford dual-origin Enhancements. But by and large they would not be powerful enough against enemies, whose power scales noticeably with level. Note also that I am using every free Praetorian Enhancement from the Prestige vendors (and those are somewhat cheat-like), that I sell all my salvage, even larger Inspirations, and even all that does not amount to keeping even. Without Enhancements in the slots at all enemies kick my bubble butt. A few whites together are already a big problem. With single-origins and Praetorians everywhere I am still challenged by an orange and a few yellows, but that is all right, they are supposed to be powerful. I like danger. But this can't go on. Every time I level up, the single-origins age by a few percentile points. Recently I turned off XP accumulation and ground around King's Row, looking for blues and greens, being careful with whites. It took two evenings to hassle up the money I needed, though I did devote some time to discovering the area, looking at the scenes and so on, without which I would have vomited. After two evenings, when I could not look at another Skull's baseball bat without feeling nauseous, I had finally filled my slots with single-origins and Praetorians. Then I switched XP accumulation back on and got on with the game's stories. The Enhancements are lasting me for now, but I don't have anything to replace them with in a couple of levels. Will I have to repeat that maneuver? I don't care to, and it wouldn't be enough at the rate they are climbing in price and quantity. The selling price of Enhancements is several times lower than the buying price, and I can almost never use the ones enemies drop. Eight times out of ten they are of an incompatible origin, the rest of the time irrelevant or too weak. As it happens, my scrapper only has use for Accuracy, Damage, Defense Buff, a little Recharge and Heal; as it happens, they are the most expensive kind. Nor have I made any original, fun, irrational choices in distributing slots. No, I dutifully slotted my attack powers and defense, with only one slot put in Health, for slightly faster healing. I think I should be able to play this or any other game like this: I fight, complete quests, develop powers and with a little selling of what I don't need, buying what I do, a tiny bit of saving, maybe, continue on my merry way. But development here is not inherent, it hinges on filling power slots. If I am being herded into consignments or some weird and time-consuming economic shenanigans, then... I am not interested enough even to make a joke.

I can say that I'm in exactly the same position - an old, very old computer, the same one on which I played CoH twenty years ago. And I also get those "Out of memory" windows and crashes. The worst is when there are many heroes with special effects around. But even though I also complained about them, I've never suggested separating away details that are not strictly power-oriented, because that's impossible and because they are much more important than the powers, in fact. They and a game world modeled on real life are CoH's greatest strengths. All other online games have powers, spells to cast and so on, but their worlds are abstract. And I realize that it's my fault that I can't buy even a computer of moderate strength. Even of weak strength - that would be sufficient to run CoH. Why am I using the same computer 20 years later, and why shouldn't others enjoy their auras and special graphics-intensive features? As it happens, I have a second computer, also a laptop, with a better processor, videocard and memory, though it has serious problems of its own. By today's standards even that notebook is a weak machine. I had it for ten years, if not more. But it lets me play CoH without any stuttering at all, perfectly smoothly even in a crowd of heroes, at default graphics settings. Increasing the quality of shadows and the level of detail started to strain the machine, and its problems came up much sooner, but the point is that requirement-wise it takes getting very little above the absolute baseline to enjoy the game. By the way, for others who may be reading: there is no graphics option to increase the maximum view distance, is there?

Characters can already swim (and those that deign to instead of flying and teleporting over the landscape do), but only on the surface. The basic physics are already in place, I'm sure. The developers would have to think about breathing and other aspects, but they are all quite within the scope of an early 2000s game. Morrowind had them. With underwater exploration many great opportunities would open up.

I agree completely. "Faculty," though, not "facility."

The current limit of 1025 characters, I think, is enough for a gist of who the character is, but anything longer or deeper is out of the question. My last character arrived to Paragon City via a story, and I at least wanted to summarize what happened, but my last few syllables are hanging over the invisible cliff. Should I replace "through" with "in"? And if there is one place where balance or consequences are not a consideration, it is here.

Those orgianizations are supposed to be very important, but all they do is give a few simple, early quests. Later there are a few reasons to come back to them, true, but by and large they are irrelevant. Well, I would rather use my powers for Uncle Sam in some intelligent and interesting work, like what those artifacts around MAGI tell about, than run around rescuing babies from the fire for the neighborhoods, figuratively speaking. Or smashing countless thugs. Where IS the police in Paragon City, anyway? Or special forces? Why does the world need me to disarm a bomb? To fly through the air, swim through acid or see into the ultraviolet when no goggles are around, to contact spirits, move at superspeed - that's a different story. Besides just more work from those people I would like to see quests that require specific powers or powers from specific sets to solve. For example, I might need fire to melt down a block of ice or stop time to freeze the countdown on a bomb. Players would need to find allies for this kind of work. Or there could be events happening high in the air. Right up in the clouds jetpack packing Nazis are conspiring, or witches are having a sabbath, and only flying heroes can break their partying. Or there could be a portal to close up there. Or to open, or to repair, for that matter.

The first point is simple, and the problem will be easy to correct. I wrote about it a little before. There is too much weight given when generating costumes to monster and beast heads, exposed brains and all that creepiness, and for that matter, to full helmets and everything else that obscures the face. Faceless characters should be uncommon, freak heads - rare. When you take away the face, even with the limited choices we've got, you erase the whole social front. But more than this, there is too much weight given to tails, wings, backpacks (I had five characters in a row appear with the same jet pack on the back last evening, like they were handing it down), and far too many people get auras. Auras are garish and should be used sparingly, especially full-body auras. I know I can adjust what I don't like in a random result, and I do, of course, but too many concepts are simply unworkable. What is the point of this abundance of costume options? To roll up the most outlandish mutants or to give players a foundation from which players they can develop a story? Or even something more or less human and likeable. Let those who want total freaks put in the effort, don't make it the default. By the way, there should be an option to keep the colors unlinked while generating. Most of the time this will produce clowns, but sometimes the combinations will be suggestive, and colors are not as obviously off-putting as shapes. But PC and NPC in this game also need more color choices. The ones in place are primitive. The skin tone line-up is right limited, and the gammas for clothes go from very dark and saturated on the left to bright and saturated, almost the basic RGB angles, followed by a light but pale color and then a couple of unsaturated dim ones. The result is that if the generator has fortunately given me a very variegated, very asymmetric and interesting costume and I want to multiply the colors even more and turn the big boot on the right leg blue, I have to choose between practically a 0,0,255 azure, a famished cerulean and a half-grey that looks like it's leaving the room. It's possible that the original developers wanted characters to wear these toneless basics, like comic-book superheroes (they thought), but this doesn't work for anyone who isn't imitating Superman. Or World of Warcraft. There has long been lots of talk about what a community-inculcating place City of Heroes is, but I'm not seeing it. I didn't see it when I played it in the old days either. I see crowds of people who run past each other, sometimes giving a little glance, who get a nice warm feeling from a big crowd around arbiters, but otherwise lead parallel lives. If they go to Pocket-D, they dance with people they know or just by themselves, they associate within supergroups or over missions. That is what this game does: it creates an illusion of being in a common world of exciting superheroes, while in reality we are stand-ins. The way the costume generator encourages mindless, alienating randomness in crude colors may not be the top reason for this. There are bigger reasons and others not so big too, for example, origin still doesn't matter. But this treatment of looks kills attempts at sophistication, and without sophistication there is no communication, because you can't even point out to someone that his costume doesn't make sense, or ask what sense it might make. I would be prepared to accept a joke, but there isn't even a joke. Half of the time those costumes are rolled off the conveyor belt and have no concept at all.

I couldn't find it in Options. Is it even there?

There is nothing more out-of-character and distracting than the exact count of seconds over power icons. I hate this change.