PhotriusPyrelus

I just don't really have any interest in being a villain. Some games, okey (GTA for example), but City of Heroes? I didn't grow up wanting to be Lex Luthor. I wanted to be Superman. The only reason I had any interest in villain side in live was because I was already invested in and enjoyed the gameplay, and villains had exclusive access to certain ATs (Corruptor and Master Mind specifically). Now they do not. There is no reason to play a Villain for me now. And frankly, those two ATs no longer really hold much interest for me any more. Let me put it this way: if City of Villains launched first over City of Heroes, I would have ignored the game entirely. EDIT (of course I only remember this *after* hitting "Post"): Also, as someone pointed out in chat a few days ago: Villains are just leg-breakers. They're not actually villains, they're just henchmen, because you *can't* be a real villain in an MMO. Villains are active, not reactive. They initiate schemes and plans, they don't do other peoples' bidding (read: missions/quests); minions, mooks, flunkies, lackeys, they do the bidding, not the villain. So right from go, it fails the fantasy of being an actual villain. You're not a villain, you're a super-powered toady to an actual villain. The closest to this gameplay you can find AFAIK is in Payday and GTA5/O, but even there, there's very limited input from the player himself, because there can't be much, because it's a video game and it's extremely hard to make actual free-form content. Take something as simple as "rob the Paragon Bank". How are you going to do it? Walk in the front door and rob the front? Blow a hole in the vault wall after hours and steal straight from it? Dig under the bank and through the vault floor? Steal the armored truck and impersonate it while it makes a pick up from the vault to transfer the money to a more secure location? And that's just off the top of my head. There's so many ways to do it, but how do you program for all those possibilities?! And then what about reward? GTA5/O has this same problem. There's millions of dollars in a bank. You steal it all and now you can buy whatever you want. GTA tackles this by making most things comically over-priced, which robs the job of most of its value. That's the second problem: villains have to lose. Why? Because the stakes are too high, even for "simple" villainy like "rob the bank". It gets even worse when you get into the higher-end comic-book villainy. You can't have an MMO where a player can execute a scheme to blow up Atlas Park (or break California off into the ocean so all the Nevada desert property you bought for pennies per acre becomes beach-front and the value increases by orders of magnitude). You'd wind up with the 2B2T. Villains must lose because their whole point is to change the status quo, and an MMO can't operate with a constantly-shifting status quo. On the other hand, Heroes are by their very nature reactive. Something happens, hero responds. The Vazhilok are kidnapping people, go rescue them. The Hellions stole a magical mcguffin, go get it back. The Clockwork are breaking things, go stop them. They are agents of the status quo, keeping the peace so the citizenry can go about their daily lives.

Personally, I think it should be a settings option, not something you have to spend an enhancement slot for, but an enhancement set would be better than nothing. Orrrr... What if when you pick the power it actually gives you two powers, the quick and the slow snipe. Kind of like how Fly also gives you Afterburner now. But obviously this wouldn't be a contextual button like Afterburner. Just more spitballing. EDIT: Two powers probably wouldn't work. You certainly can't let them be independently enhancable, but how do you have enhancements to one affect the other? That seems like it would be very complicated Hrm. An option seems to be the best approach to me now. 3 modes: Always Slow, Always Fast, Fast when in-combat.

No thanks. Go back to WoW. If you have such a hard-on for punishing people for perceived slights, then *you* "punish" them by never grouping with them again. Frankly, I would consider such punishment a blessing.

I can't test it right now, but can't you modify the animation to get rid of the weapon? I know stone melee has that option. EDIT: I *can* test it right now and no, no it does not. Wow, what a bummer...

Wait, Panacea's endurance works outside PvP? Man, that tooltip needs a good rephrasing, because as stated it sure sounds like the endurance infusion only works in PvP...

Why wouldn't you use performance shifter in stamina? According to my calculations (which I fully admit could be in error, but I don't want to write a thesis on it at the moment), it out-performs a level 50 IO at 100 max end and the gap widens as max endurance increases. Of course, if that IO is boosted to +5, the difference becomes much smaller, but PS is still winning by a nose. Is it because the IO is consistent and reliable where as the proc is...well, a proc?

It's called "hyperbole", champ. What reward? When you're already capped out, there are no rewards left. Seems to me a case of no-risk, no reward. I, too, am not a fan of not getting to actually play the game, so if I found myself in such a group, I would probably politely excuse myself from it. In general, you can't just keep making everything harder, because harder content means the content need to be rewarding, means the content becomes easier, means you have to make the content harder, and so forth so forth so on. See the problem? At some point you either have to stop giving rewards, which means the content will never be played (because no one actually plays games for fun any more, they play for rewards) or you have to be satisfied that the final (and obviously all previous) content in the game is going to be made easy by the rewards it gives.

Is it? Or is it too easy when you've spent 5 billion influence in Enhancements to reach the absolute pinnacle of power? I thought the whole point of reaching that peak was to make the game easier and be a walking nuclear bomb... EDIT: To expand, it's very strange to me the answer to complaints about difficulty being too high is *always* "turn down the difficulty", but the answer to things being too easy is never "turn down your character's power."

I don't really know about the council specifically, all I know is I rolled the same character as I had on live which I remember basically face-rolling content with dummy-me back in 2004 or 2005 (most of my play was before CoV). I'm not even saying it was something HC did, it was probably balancing done by Cryptic or Paragon. ::shrug::

One thing you might think about is turning off your XP at a level below the cap. I mean, you can say that all you like, but this isn't a turn-based game, it still requires a certain level of reaction time and clicking precision which fails with age. Also most of those "Nintendo hard" games you mentioned before were hard because of terrible game design, bad balancing, crappy controls, or poor performance. *Especially* the ports of arcade games. Arcade games were deliberately unfair to suck your quarters. Compare Metroid or Super Metroid to Hollow Knight. Hollow Knight is in a completely different world of difficulty. Imagine if someone played Metroid and loved it, and then someone came along and decided to release a non-optional patch that made it Hollow Knight. Isn't that person entitled to be miffed? That's the situation we're talking about here. Dude liked CoH as it was when he played it (which I remember, it was a lot easier, and I was a *moron* back then with very shallow understanding of the game's systems), and now it's different and a lot harder.

Oh look, Exhibit #1 on why we need CharacterName@GlobalName...

Didn't Omega Team sever the Rikti Mothership from their "homeworld"? EDIT: Rikti of Heroes. Doesn't make sense, but sounds better. =P

Maybe I *want* to kill them twice for double the XP!

That's what I was thinking, but I *don't* know a thing or two about SQLs and DBs. Seems to me the actual hard work would be in adjusting all the systems in the game that deal with CharacterName to deal with the new CharacterName@GlobalName format. And *I* would rather see 100 people completely cloning my characters than not be able to use the name I want for the character concept I have, or seeing more and more ridiculous names with intentional misspellings or numbers-as-letters or bracketing Xes and _s. There *is* only one you. And there would still *be* only one you. You are not your character.

Seems like this is a process that should be able to be automated: using the old DB to create a new one. But I'm not a programmer, I just took a few low-end classes in college. Times like this make me wish I'd stuck with it. As I said, though, the problem of names is only going to get worse. A moment of excruciating agony to avoid a chronic, increasing discomfort seems like a good trade-off to me if it's possible. And this seems to me the only solution that doesn't rob of their names old players who may return, while not keeping good names in the dustbin of disuse from players who would like to use them. As altoholic as this game tends to be, it's only a matter of time before numbers-as-letters and terrible misspellings become increasingly common even in non-robotic heroes.

I probably wouldn't invite a newly returning player to a farm run. He's probably looking for some more relaxed at-level mission running with people around his level, not tagging along as a leech while minmaxed toons demolish entire groups in seconds, blitzing from group to group just to get XP as fast as possible. That said, if he wasn't enjoying how the team was playing, he should've politely excused himself from the team. But I don't know, I wasn't there, and your description of events is pretty vague.

I know this is probably impossible because it's probably very fundamental to the way the game is designed, but it sure would be nice if the game was more like Star Trek Online, where the character and account names are conjoined so while one account cannot have two characters named "Steve", every account could have a character named "Steve", because the character's actual name is "Steve@<AccountNameHere>". That would alleviate this whole situation, which is only going to get worse and worse as the game goes on.

Doesn't seem to spawn ambushes when ambushes trigger. I don't know how to get coordinates, but the location is in the small park due north of the center of The Zig in Brickstown. Coords: [-2413.8 2.7 -392.8]

I didn't realize that. I guess that explains why Mids wasn't showing a lower cooldown time on that ability. And here I thought it was a bug. @_@ My mistake. Unless fighting only a single target, I spend a lot of time making sure my debuffs are actually effective. With sufficient recharge reduction, Neutrino Bolt alone becomes its own 'attack chain'. I mean in the two builds Linea shared on the other thread, it had a mere half-second CD. Eh. I really...really don't like procs... But yeah, I guess that makes sense.

So I was respeccing and forgot I had fly turned on. I respecced out of fly, but when I was done respeccing...I was still flying. And I don't have the power any more so I can't turn it off. It's kind of funny, really. I'm slow as mud, and I have almost no "friction", so I drift badly. It's quite funny, but probably not intended.

And I kind of mean "help" in the same way a child does when he asks for "help" with his homework. >.< A very kind person showed me a build in a different thread, but there's a lot that confuses me and that I just don't like about it. Two chief issues rooted in theming preferences are are A) I don't want to mess with non-heroic alignments, so I can't use Mace Mastery and 2) I don't want to use the sorcery tree - as an aside, is it just me, or is Rune of Protection *obnoxiously* overpowered? 25% res all, and practical CC immunity for a full minute on only a 3 minute CD (low enough to pretty easily get 100% up-time)? I've been working on just picking powers and I'm kind of stumped. So far: 1. Radiation Infection 1. Neutrino Bolt 2. Accelerate Metabolism 4. Fly 6. Enervating Field 8. Mutation 10. Irradiate 12. Lingering Radiation 14. Hover 16. Evasive Maneuvers 18. Choking Cloud 20. Boxing 22. Fallout 24. Tough 26. EM Pulse 28. Neutron Bomb 30. Atomic Blast 33. Weave 35. Maneuvers 38. Tactics 41. ??? 44. ??? 47. ??? 49. ??? I skip Radiant Aura because it clashes with my character concept (radiation doesn't heal, what kind of fantasy nonsense is that?! ~_^), and if I'm doing my job right, people shouldn't need healing anyway, right? Yes, I do have Fallout and Mutation, mostly for the luls, but also because sometimes people make mistakes, and as someone I used to know was fond of saying: "it's easier to res than heal". Though from my experience in PUGs, both are kind of dead slots; people usually either awaken or release before I can use their defeated self as a nuke and then revive them. I'm not sure if I should get Neutrino Bolt (NB) or X-Ray Beam (XRB); XRB has a much stronger defense debuff, but there's gotta be a good reason the build Linea linked used NB instead. Also less thumb-twiddling with NB at very low exemplaring. I pick up Fly at level 4 mostly for exemplaring. I pick up Hover and Evasive Maneuvers for more speed when traveling, and because in missions fly is usually *too fast*, so I like to have hover for the slower speed and higher friction. It gives me 4 different options for velocity (H, H+EM, F, F+EM). Everything else should more or less speak for itself. I'm not sure if I really need Proton Volley or Cosmic Burst. I have nothing against them, but I don't see much need for them. I'm more interested in doing debuffing than in DPSing. I thought about getting combat jumping for extra defense. I skipped Aim because I'd probably always forget to use it. --- As for enhancements and slotting, I really just don't know. I don't even know where to begin I miss pre-sets CoH, when enhancing was so much simpler for my smooth brain. x_x Related question: how do enhancement slots work with exemplaring? Respeccing doesn't really make it clear there is actually a level attached to the enhancement slots and in fact, you can 6-slot your level 49 power with a respec, when you can only get 4 in it via natural level-up. But on the other hand, I did a very low-level exemplar the other day and even though I have 6 slots with 5 rechargers in Accelerate Metabolism, it had its full 7 minute cooldown. A few parameters I would like for enhancement: Choking Cloud with lots of hold duration so it gets off many pulses during its duration to keep Minions and Lts locked-down once they're in it. Mids says it activates every 5 seconds, City of Data seems to suggest it's every 2 seconds. Either way, about 10 seconds of hold duration should work. I would like Accelerated Metabolism to be at or near 100% uptime if possible. I know I don't have Hasten and that makes it a tall order, but I really *really* do not like Hasten. Aside from the aesthetics and that *awful* sound effect, it's easier on my afore-mentioned smooth brain if I can just set AM to auto-cast and forget about it than having to remember to hit AM *and* Hasten every 2 minutes. I guess it might help to know the exact opportunity cost to make a more-informed decision, but not knowing that, I'd really just rather not take Hasten. Unless it's a stupid idea*, I'd like Irradiate and Neutron Bomb to be slotted for defense debuff to make large mobs all the more easy to hit for the team (and for EM Pulse and Atomic Blast). *- I half-think it is; the defense debuff on Rad Blast seems one of the worst secondary effects, because DPSers should want to be hit-capped without it and Radiation Infection already does -31.25% def. I almost rerolled to a different blast, but I just can't give up the matching aesthetics (yes, I do know about customizing power colours, but I still doubt it would look right). ANYWAY, this is really long so I'll stop word vomiting now. If you made it this far, thank you for reading, even if you don't have the time or energy to help. ❤️

What is that? I don't know all the jargon yet, sorry. >.<

Stupid double-post...

That...really doesn't make any sense to me. The advantage of missions is the higher density of mobs and the control over their level. Even street-sweeping in a danger zone like the Hollows with larger groups should fall well behind missions *without* end-of-mission rewards, because the mob-density and level can be so much higher. I mean have you looked at how low it is? It's like one extra group of mobs. Maybe street-sweeping was better when you didn't get a real travel power 'til 14, but we get them at level *4* now. And why not street-sweep on the way to the mission if travel is so slow and cuts into efficiency?

...I mean.... he's not wrong? Look at literally any FromSoft Game... Fascinating.