legendaryjman

This is the thought experiment that we all have fallen into at one point in time. I know someone out there has done the math of how many different powerset combinations there are. Some people probably made all the characters, some other might even have leveled them all. Me, I just got bit by the bug and decided to figure out how many characters would it take to make one character of each powerset, with as minimal overlapping as possible. Short answer: 69. To start lets go to the Melee ATs: Tanker, Scrapper, Brute, and Stalker. There are 14 different armor sets and 23 different melee sets. One thing I found interesting is that all of the ATs share the armors except for Ninjitsu, that is only on Scrappers and Stalkers. They almost share all of the melee sets except for Super Strength, that is only on Tankers and Brutes. Stalkers are the only ones that get Ninja Blade, but the trade off is that they are missing 5 different melee sets. Lets get the easy sets out of the way, the elemental pairings. All 4 ATs get access to these. Dark Melee/Dark Armor, Electrical Melee/Electric Armor, Energy Melee/Energy Aura, Fiery Melee/Fiery Aura, Ice Melee/Ice Aura, Psionic Melee/Psionic Armor, Radiation Melee/Radiation Armor, Stone Melee, Stone Armor. That leaves us with the 7 “natural” armors and a lot of weapon/martial arts sets. First we have 3 one handed weapons that pair perfectly with Shield Defense: Battle Axe, Broad Sword and War Mace. Tankers, Scrappers and Brutes get access to all three. The obvious answer for Regeneration is Claws, Katana can go with Ninjitsu, Super Strength and Invulnerability is the classic combo, Martial Arts gets Super Reflexes, which leaves us just Bio Armor and Willpower and 8 melee sets. This is where overlapping has to happen. You can mix anything with anything but this is what I am going with: Dual Blades/Super Reflexes, Kinetic Melee/Willpower, Savage Melee/Regeneration, Staff Fighting/Super Reflexes, Street Justice/Willpower, Titan Weapons/Invulnerability. Which leaves us with Bio Armor. There is no symbiotic melee, or even elasticity melee. The only “weird” powerset left is Spines, which I guess can fit ... maybe? Also we have Sonic Melee being worked on. There is no Sonic Armor (yet). At this time the only thing that seems to fit is Psionic Armor (you can't spell Psionic without Sonic, amirite?). This is how I would break down what you would make for minimal overlapping: Tanker: Dark/Dark, Elec/Elec, NRG/NRG, Ice/Ice, Psi/Psi, Rad/Rad, Stone/Stone, Inv/SS, Shield/Mace, Will/Street Scrapper: Sword/Shield, MA/SR, Spines/Bio, Claws/Regen, Katana/Nin, Titan/Inv Brute: Fire/Fire, Kinetic/Will, Savage/Regen, Axe/Shield, Blades/SR, Sonic/Psi Stalker: Ninja/Ninja, Staff/SR That is a total of 24 different characters but covers every powerset at least once, and you don't do the same powerset on an AT twice. Obviously you can make the elementals on any AT but I like Tankers. Now we have to get into the rest of the mess. It was fun to try and spread out the support powersets because those can go into Defender, Controller, Corrupter or Mastermind. Another interesting thing is that all of the ranged damage powersets are shared with all of the ranged damage ATs: Blaster, Defender, Corrupter and Sentinel. The real problem that kinda brought my whole thought experiment to a halt was Blasters and Dominators. Their secondaries are not shared with any other AT. They both have 15 secondary powersets, which means one has to make 15 Blasters and 15 Dominators. There are 15 ranged damage sets, sure, but only 12 control sets. The easy stuff for Blasters: Radiation Blast/Atomic Manipulation, Dark Blast/Darkness Manipulation, Seismic Blast/Earth Manipulation, Electrical Blast/Electricity Manipulation, Energy Blast/Energy Manipulation, Fire Blast/Fire Manipulation, Ice Blast/Ice Manipulation, Psychic Blast/Mental Manipulation, Sonic Attack/Sonic Manipulation, Archery/Tactical Arrow. This leaves one with 5 damage sets: Assault Rife, Beam Rifle, Dual Pistols, Storm Blast, Water Blast and 5 secondaries: Devices, Martial Combat, Ninja Training, Plant Manipulation, Temporal Manipulation. We can do the natural stuff with the natural stuff: Beam Rifle/Devices, Dual Pistols/Martial Combat. But what do we do with Assault Rifle, Storm Blast, Water Blast, Plant Manipulation, Temporal Manipulation and Ninja Training? None of those go together. Still, we gotta make it work so Water Blast/Plant Manipulation, Storm Blast/Temporal Manipulation, and finally Assault Rifle/Ninja Training. It doesn't feel good, but we did it. Dominators are just as bad. Arsenal Control/Arsenal Assault, Darkness Control/Darkness Assault, Earth Control/Earth Assault, Electric Control/Electricity Assault, Fire Control/Fiery Assault, Ice Control/Icy Assault, Mind Control/Psionic Assault, Plant Control/Savage Assault, Symphony Control/Sonic Assault. This leaves us with 3 control powersets: Gravity, Illusions, and Pyrotechnic, which would be fine because we still gotta make some controllers, but we also got 4 secondaries: Energy Assault, Martial Assault, Radioactive Assault, and Thorny Assault. None of this stuff fits nicely so we, once again, gotta hand wave away some characters: Gravity Control/Energy Assault, Arsenal Control/Martial Assault, Pyrotechnic Control/Radioactive Assault, Plant Control/Thorny Assault. ew. With that out of the way we can go back to the fun part where we gotta spread out the support sets. We got 18 sets to spread out over 4 ATs. Cold Domination/Icy Blast, Electrical Affinity/Electric Blast, Marine Affinity/Water Blast, Radiation Emission/Radiation Blast, Sonic Resonance/Sonic Attack, Storm Summoning/Storm Blast. Those can be Defenders or Corrupters. Lets throw in some Masterminds: Beast Mastery/Nature Affinity, Ninjas/Trick Arrow, Necromancy/Dark Miasma, Demonic Summoning/Thermal Radiation, and Mercenaries/Traps. Those are the easy ones. The two hard ones are Robotics and Thugs. We could go Robotics/Traps as well, but then what would we do with Mercenaries? Instead we are going to go Robotics/Force Field. For Thugs I thought about Poison to represent what they are selling, but I decided to go with more enforced loyalty with Thugs/Pain Domination. Controllers have one specific support set in Darkness Affinity so we can easily pair that with Darkness Control/Darkness Affinity. This leaves us with 4 support sets: Empathy, Kinetics, Poison, and Time Manipulation. We also have one control set left to use in Illusions. Sadly Illusions does not really pair with anything. I would want some kind of Psychic Affinity. Instead we are going to go Illusions/Time Manipulation to stick with the mental aspect. Empathy, Kinetics, and Poison. Why is there no Empathy Blast? Poison/Radiation Blast, Empathy/Psychic Blast, and finally we end on Kinetics. Kinetics, the powerset that pairs with everything, and nothing at the same time. I had no idea what to do with kinetics so I just went with something to finish this thought experiment and free myself from having to agonize over spreadsheets and go with Kinetics/Electric Blast. With that, it was finished. Here is how I would spread them out: Blaster: Rad/Atom, Dark/Dark, Earth/Earth, Elec/Elec, NRG/NRG, Fire/Fire, Ice/Ice, Psy/Psy, Sonic/Sonic, Archery/Arrow, Beam Rifle/Devices, Dual Pistol/Martial, AR/Nin, Storm/Time, Water/Plant Defender: Emp/Psy, Poison/Rad, Kin/Elec Controller: Dark/Dark, Ill/Time Corrupter: Ice/Cold, Elec/Elec, Water/Marine, Rad/Rad, Sonic/Sonic, Storm/Storm Mastermind: Beast/Nature, Demon/Therm, Ninja/TA, Robot/FF, Merc/Traps, Thugs/Pain Dominator: Arsenal/Arsenal, Dark/Dark, Earth/Earth, Elec/Elec, Fire/Fire, Ice/Ice, Symphony/Sonic, Plant/Savage, Mind/Psy, Grav/NRG, Mind/Martial, Pyro/Rad, Plant/Thorn That is 45 characters, with not one Sentinel in sight. Now I leave it up to the streets. How would you do it?

Oh, I had no idea. That's great. The last time I played MM it was not like that (in the before times). I figured with them removing the recharge timer it was to make equipping all of them faster. If it is already an AoE then removing that seem redundant. But hey, it doesn't hurt anything so im all for it.

I understand the idea of making the upgrade powers have no cool down. Makes upgrading all the pets less tedious. Why not just make the upgrade an AoE that upgrades all pets with one activation? I assume its because of something built into the code, but i figure if MMs are getting looked at now is the time to ask the question.

I think you are confusing negative opinion with being a jerk. People didnt get banned when they didnt like ED. People didnt get banned because they didnt like pvp changes. People didnt get banned because of the regen changes. There was a lot of times there were strong negative opinions in the game and the devs just took the feedback. People did get banned for being jerks, being insulting sure, but not for having an opinion.

Turns out making an MMO is hard. If CoH didnt exist Ship of Heroes might be something, but it does so SoH isn't necessary any more. Also their reactions makes one appreciate the professionalism of the original CoH dev team. Castle, Statesman and Positron and to deal with just as much vitriol yet they kept on working. No one got banned because they had a negative opinion.

Its been a while since I worked on my mission. I finally went back and this was the issue. The map i was on didnt allow my objectives, even though it said it did. I switched to a bigger map and everything worked.

I have been wanting CoH to make a sand debuffing set forever. Something that would use Sirocco's powers as a base and extrapolate. When I saw homecoming has Seismic Blast I got kinda excited that maybe sand debuff exists, but alas, not yet. So what would you suggest? What secondary do you think i could make into a sand debuff using the color editor? I'm thinking dark but in looking at it its a little too fuzzy. That is when I figured i should go to the corruptor forums for their expert opinions.

My main character on live was J-Man an inv/ss tanker. First character I made because I read that Super Strength lets you rip up a chunk of the ground and throw it at people. In the sweet name of pie did it ever. Inv/SS was pretty awful. My friend who I played the whole game with was an Ill/Kin controller. Can you imagine playing the game when you can't move while Unyielding Stance is active and your only support is a guy who can use Spectral Wounds and Flash? In thinking back on it it was the worst experience, but there was nothing like City of Heroes so we had a ton of fun. We slowing built up our Supergroup the J-Force on Freedom. I probably had more fun on the forums than I did actually in game. I made other characters but I always went back J-Man. For Task Forces, for missions, or anything we were doing it was J-Man. I even made screenshot comics about J-Man and the various characters in our SG. Instagram didn't exist back then so it was always a challenge to find a way to upload the comics to the internet so i could post them on the forums. Sadly, I took too long to get on Homecoming. I didn't want to touch it as long as it was just a fan server. So when it got made official I jumped on and the name J-Man was taken on all servers. My RP is that he did not survive when the universe was turned back on after being destroyed. I have a new character named J-Man Prime that is someone taking up the mantel to be J-Man in a world without him, but I secretly hope to get the name J-Man again.

Cairn - Devouring Earth They making killing anything around them impossible. So frustrating.

I am partial to the Winter Lord. They may not be the coolest but I have a very distinct memory of being amazed the first time I saw Sky Raiders on live. I was shocked that there was more enemy types than just Skulls and Hellions. For some reason I just didn't think there would be new enemy types introduced as one leveled up. The first time I saw a Porter just zip away I thought, "Ok, this game is legit."

Inv/SS tanker, but once you get Unyielding you are not allow to move while it is active. You have to toggle it on and off to move until you get to level 14 where you then are allowed to take teleport to finally move yourself around.

In thinking about this, I disagree. When you are a made into a vampire the rules start for you. When you had permission before, you were not a vampire. Now that you are a vampire you have to be given permission to enter a home, except your home. Does a vampire have to give themselves permission to enter their own home?

City of Titans taught me to never Kickstart things. Until then everything i had Kickstarted came out. Then City of Titans happened and I learned that people can simply not make the thing they said they would make and there is nothing I can do about it. Never again. I will buy a product but I wont pay someone for an idea.

You got it, its called Champions Online and we all know how that worked out. No matter what, CoH2 would come out with 1/3 of the content CoH has and flop. That is why there is no World of Warcraft 2 there is no way an MMO can compete with itself.

Red Dead Redemption 2. RDR1 is a great game but RDR2 is an impossibly big game. I think it should be criminal for a game to have as much content in it as RDR2. I 100%ed it on the Xbox. Every time I thought I was close to completing it more game kept showing up. And then I had to get all the achievements in Red Dead Online! I also think Minecraft is a perfect game. You get out of it what you put in. I don't even like building stuff. I just fight zombies and I still put hundreds of hours into it.

I am having an issue with the AE not letting me test a mission. Right now I am just trying to build it out so all test boxes are just "test" and all characters are named "A, B, C, D" etc. I have no errors. I already had a bunch of errors with level ranges that I had to resolve. When I click test it gives me the pop up of "you are about to test your mission" but the contact does not pop up and I can not go into the mission. I've made missions before. This is a new issue I have not experienced. I tried searching for a solution but there are so many variables in making a mission I am not sure what to look for. Has anyone ran into the issue where you don't get any errors but the arc still wont load up for you to test?

As a sentinal player (BR/INV), I can safely say that I had no idea the inherent even existed. I played 30 levels of my character not knowing I had Vulnerabiility. I was getting pretty frustrated because the Sentinal didn't feel necessary. I wasn't tough enough to tank, I wasn't doing damage compared to blasters. So what was the purpose? It wasn't until I respected out of some powers I didn't like that I noticed I had a power I never used. When I finally started using it it changed my whole world. Finally Sentinals made sense. I wouldn't want to give up the power the way it is because it's too good to use (in my humble opinion). I do agree that it doesn't do a whole lot in groups. Granted you are supposed to be putting it on the boss. A minions and LTs don't need a debuff. What I would like to see is the ability for the vulnerability to spread. As a BR I have Desintigration. A DoT that when I hit the enemy with my T1 or T2 power it has a chance to spread to other mobs. I would want that for Vulnerability. When it's active every team mate's attack has a chance to proc a Vulnerability spread to other enemies. That doesn't make any sense with the theme of the power, but it would make the utility of the power better.

Something I would like to see in the same vein of "get ride of this because its not necessary any more" is make the whole game level less. Make every mob use the giant monster code where you fight it at your level and remove all of the level gating. After playing ESO I realized I don't like outleveling zones. I don't want to miss content. Sure I got ouroborus, and its nice, but you lose the enjoyment of running around the zone while doing the story arcs. I know I can turn of xp so I don't miss anything, but then I gotta make sure I am on the wiki checking what is the level range of the contact so I don't out level them. Its doable, but I want to just not outlevel anything. No more running through zones, everything is a threat all the time. You can go back and do Atlas Park contacts at level 50. I still want the xp and leveling up to earn powers, but when it comes to story arcs and enemies just make it all your level. Now, will that actually work in CoH? I donno. We have 100 character slots for a reason. We are supposed to make a bunch of characters to play all the content differently. I am not supposed to just do the Pretorian story arcs through ouroboros. i am supposed to make 4 Pretorian characters to run through it all. So would making the game level less ruin the core aspect of the game which is making alts?

When I initially read this I thought "yeah, make all of it free, let me just go tot a menu and pick out all the IOs I want." But then the more I thought about it, the more I realized, if I did that, what then? Why play the game? I think CoH is the greatest MMO on the planet, but its not like running through the same generic warehouses is that great. The boss fights are not that interesting. I don't do a ITF because its "fun" to fight Romulus. Its actually quite frustrating, I do it because its fun to hang out with my friends in CoH and when I win I get a reward. If there was no reward at the end, and the only reason to play was for the gameplay, that is not much of a reward. There needs to be a reason to play the game. Sure its the greatest character creator ever game, but these graphics ain't that great and they sure aren't as good as my nostalgia tells me they were. That being said, I do like the idea that SOs are free. On Live there was the excitement of going from generic enhancements to DOs and then when I first got to 25 and was able to slot SOs you better believe my world changed. But that was Live and Inventions are now a thing. SOs are not the end goal anymore. I think it would be cool to just axe generic enhancements and DOs all together and make SOs free. Everyone SO themselves out. I almost want to say let generic IOs be free as well, but at that point you might as well get ride of SOs and just have IOs be the only enhancement. In typing this all out I realized there can be a pretty good argument made for just getting ride of generic, DOs and SOs all together. Just take them and the stores out of the game. Increase salvage drops and make generic IOs free at crafting stations. It streamlines there being only one upgrade system. I'm not sure if that would make the game better but its an idea.

Do Dominators get to control their pets too or is it only a Controller thing?

The downside with that idea, and I wanted that idea too. Where you can pick and choose whatever powers you want, does not work in practice, because we have already seen it. Champions Online. It came out and let you do pick any power you want to make your own character. Turns out what you can do anything you can do nothing. It lost the feeling of having a role and being a tank or a blaster. Even CO eventually implemented ATs because they realized it didn't work. That is when I realized I still want the free form of picking whatever primary and secondary I wanted but we still need it to be specific power sets for there to be cohesion.

I always wanted them to open it all the way up and let us pick whatever primary and secondary we want. Control / Armor - Battle Mage Armor / Control - Warden Control / Control - Trickster Let us make whatever we want. Nothing needs to be balanced. This game came back from the dead, it is no longer beholden to the Night's Watch. Let me make an Armor / Armor character. Call it The Tower. Let me only take pool powers like Provoke and be at 90% resitence to everything.

Sadly we didn't. We tried, oh pie, did we try. But sadly the think the J-Force had in common was CoH. Witout CoH we found we was all inta different things and nothin' grabbed is the same way. We all stayed friends on Facebook (except Customs who unfriended me, but you know what, I respect his convictions). I would make the J-Force in all the different games I would play, but ta tell ya the truff, i didn't have it in me ta dos it again. During CoH I lived, breathed, and slept CoH. If I wasn't at work i was in the game. That is how the J-Force got so strong. Me an' Mr. Trix where in there every night of every day. And when we wasn't in game we was on the forums. Which was the best part anyway. Remember, smart phones didn't exist. I worked retail and at one location I figured out one of tha work computers was connected to the internet and I used that ta post on the forums at work. Even with CoH back now I don't gots the gumption ta do it again. But, I still tell stories about CoH and how I was once e-famous. Like that time the J-Force showed up ta a Hami raid and people was so freaked out that I was gonna ruin it that I got mass reported. A mod showed up because they had ta. Saw me just standin around, asked me some questions, then left cus I wasn't doin nothin. It's like ya hold one costume contest in the Hive an' yer branded fer life. Also, when I finally downloaded Homecoming someone else gots the name J-Man. That was my character from beta, but it's my fault for not getting on the server sooner.

I agree that Kinetics is the best defender set in the game, but on live Force Fields made me a believer. The J-Force and I ran a contest to see which of the known defenders on Freedom could keep us alive. We would run a task force and compare the deaths in the end. We had a rad, an empath, an kinetics. We would frustrate them to no end by running off and getting them killed. it was a great time. Then a force field stepped up. No one in the J-Force played a FF. We lawled and lawled at the n00b thinking they could keep us alive. Then the mission started ... and we couldn't die. I had no idea the bubbles were so powerful. We tried. I TRIED everything I could to get killed and I couldn't. The force field defender won the contest handily. I became a believer that day. While Force Fields isn't the most sexy of the defender powers I think it is the strongest defender primary in the game.

I am sad. First, it is a cool thing that you have a link to the old forums. There is a lot of good on there. I am sad because I went to the Freedom Forums to find the old J-Force thread, and its only 1 page. I don't remember how many pages that thread was, but there was more than one. JFS -The Legendary J-Man