megaericzero

No problem. Let's run the tape forward a little in the context of this suggestion. It's free to make accounts, so people can just make infinite alt accounts, each locking in its "namesake." The name-release policy is now effectively null.

According to the Paragon devs, Null was - for whatever reason - the only way they could code it in, along with anything else he offers. He's the MacGuyver fix to whatever the menus need to do but can't.

Personally, I whole-heartedly agree with this sentiment. I'm sure it'll get hand-waived as free badge progress.

The open beta forum says otherwise. There's been some harsh criticism but also genuine improvements to ideas specifically because of feedback.

Unrelated but I'm gonna shout it into the void again: can we please fix power effect short-listings to distinguish protection when it's protection? (Not quoting to respond to you, Rudra; just to show the tangential relation.)

I'd imagine it's on purpose, as others have touched on. Fiery Aura is fantastic at heat resistance; not so much cold. Vice-versa for Ice Armor. Invulnerability caps smashing/lethal easy but has a big psi hole. Willpower has great psionic mitigation and scaling regeneration but middling raw resist/defense numbers otherwise. And some sets have mez protection that others don't. The only catch-all for melee mez protection is disorient, hold, sleep, immobilize. It's important to keep in mind the whole armor set, as the ones that have less protections probably have higher raw numbers or some other tools that the sets with fear/KB/confuse protection don't. EDIT: If it's renewed mobs that this is coming up with, it could be the endless cat-and-mouse/arms-race of game development. One day, game devs wake up and go "hey, maybe some classes shouldn't be able to shrug off mez completely. Add more of the ones they don't always have protection to!" Then the meta shifts to incorporate fear protection and they go "okay make the knockback so high it's effectively unresistible." Then the community builds around capped defenses and the devs go "make auto-hit attacks." And we go in circles. (I don't know that that's necessarily the case here but figured it was worth bringing up.)

I think you missed my point. I was saying we still have an available niche in having a defensive arsenal which could be made into a thematically-generic armor set that covers both that type of power armor as well as other, non-tech concepts. Other [power] armors could create/use fire, ice, energy, darkness, etc. or even just be durable while this hypothetical would be a swiss army knife of gadgets. To assert that we'd have to cover all conceivable gadgets is like saying we'd have to cover all conceivable uses for a given element. We would never have any power sets to begin with if that were the case. The number of uses for fire, or ice, or electricity, or darkness that aren't explored in existing sets are just as numerous.

To purposely undersell it, the HEV suit is an armor-plated hazmat suit with a built-in fitbit that's allowed to administer morphine. It gets its own health bar but I don't think the games ever explain why since it doesn't appear to have an energy barrier yet it recharges its protection. (Black Mesa has a suit-up sequence that mentions barriers but that game's a fan remake so it may not be canon.) Funny enough, Half-Life 2's anniversary is in two days so the internet is abuzz with chatter about the game right now. Not to sound like a broken record but I think we could focus on the fact that power armor usually has built-in tools and contingencies (separate from their actual weapons). Mechanically, it would look like the original Stalker version of Ninjitsu - some base protections and the rest being active defenses. Thematically, of course, we'd make it more generic where it could also be used for things like an artificer with enchanted equipment, a wizard with self-protection spells, a soldier who brought the whole arsenal, etc. Basically the armor-cousin to Traps and Devices.

I had posted my take on it here, if you're interested. What I went with for a taunt aura was a renamed version of Reaction Time from Martial Combat.

As an EAT, you could pigeonhole everyone's power armor into a specific version that they have to adhere to because story reasons. As a regular AT powerset, it's probably better to abstract power armor into "tactical armor" so it can be conceptualized as an Iron Man suit, enchanted armor, being armed to the teeth with military gear, etc. and having the VFX be just the particles (runes, HUDs, munitions) rather than any actual armor plating.

City of Heroes is very old. It's purportedly written in C and the code is a mess of spaghetti. The amount of oddities that spring up in direct opposition to modern design sensibilities are plentiful and pop up where you least expect them. Null the Gull's very existence is to address things the Paragon devs couldn't do properly in the game's menus. To speak nothing of balance concerns, Titan Weapons achieves its fast-slow dichotomy by having three versions of every attack that is useable without momentum: - the base power (the one you click on) which redirects to either - the slow version or - the fast version We also know from Back Alley Brawler of the Paragon dev team that the engine does not support animation blending. I'd hazard a guess it also doesn't support any other real-time modifications but that's conjecture on my part. IIRC a Homecoming dev mentioned - someone please correct me - that mismatching animation times to activation times causes egregious animation bugs as well. So yeah, it sucks when we crash into game code limitations. Especially when something is easy to conceptualize. (As for the original suggestion of it affecting both animation and activation times, I can't see that being added to Hasten. It's already a very, very potent effect and probably the most-picked power in the game, second only to Stamina before Fitness became inherent. Adding activation time redux to Hasten would only serve to make it even more broken or require nerfs in other areas. Heck, even making it its own power would probably just put that new power right next to Hasten on the list of must-have meta picks. I know you said nix the activation time part, Vitamin; I just wanted to add my two-cents about it.)

Erm, trying to put the thread back on topic: Yeah Dark Miasma becoming Dark Affinity for Controllers was weird. Along the same lines as Sonic Attack not being called Sonic Blast for no discernable reason. There was no name conflict and there was already a very strong precedence to keep the same name while changing a few powers in a set. See: Blasters' Dark Blast and Psychic Blast, the entirety of the Stalker and Sentinel primaries.

Uniformity has utility. Mileage may vary but there is a practical upside to it. (Before you tear me apart, I'm not saying make everything absolutely the same. I did mention a few posts up that there's only one set I think actively needs renaming, with a few minor annoyances I can live with.)

On the whole, the only one I think is actively problematic and needs change is Time Manipulation to Time Affinity (Temporal Affinity, or whatever else) because Manipulation is explicitly the Blaster secondary nomenclature. The rest are whatever. [Thing] Domination is weird but it's not like Dominators are using it for their sets. Sonic actively avoiding Blast for no good reason is annoying. I would prefer Super Strength to stay as it is, though; it's a very common super power - like the most common - with a specific name in pop culture.

To be fair, only some people will get any reference. I'm not even trying to be a smart-aleck pointing that out; it's just the nature of things. We could put a dry cleaners into the game labeled Tony Starch and there will still be people whose heads it goes over.

They're kind of not, though? They just don't chime in every time the thread is cloned or resurrected. It's been mentioned by devs in the past (can't remember whether Paragon and/or Homecoming) that Null is a workaround because the options UI can't do his functions. The Homecoming team has also mentioned on other topics that they're not keen on MacGuyver solutions.

I know this phrase gets thrown around a lot but: as a menu option then? I actually would like to see when others are using it, especially if their character concept is a fourth-wall-breaker.

Don't want to get caught-up in the discourse but... IIRC, the /enterbasefrompasscode or whichever command was stated to be a GM/dev command that players shouldn't have access to but were given until the solution of summoning a base portal with a power was properly implemented. Is it not feasible to make a new command whose only purpose is to grant/revoke oneself the Group Fly token - only that single, very specific token - and purposely open it for general use?

As with Uun, I'm all for spreading draw-in to fitting powers. Emphasis on fitting, though. Spreading it for parity's sake and dismissing the powers' themes isn't something I would like. And, Rudra already beat me to the punch, powers like Ring of Fire / Fire Cages already do have reasons they'd immobilize someone. They were designed with that in mind, even if some reasons are flimsier than others; they were not designed with any explanation on how someone would get pulled-in.

Yeah. I'm more of the mentality, personally, that we should use power customization rather than separate sets for these. For those that want the elemental damage on the weapon sets, the interface slot exists. It does suck that you can't use it until level 50, so the character concept will feel hollow until then, but it's there.

Limiting any badges to specific level ranges probably won't go over well unless that's via the missions themselves and not actually the character levels, allowing people to reattempt. It'd be a shame to accidentally hit 21 and go "whoops - forgot to get the badge for that level range; time to remake," much less 30 or 40. That or any of the gazillion new and refurbished set gimmicks accidentally doing AOE damage and harming a civilian unintentionally.

Forgive me if I'm reading into this wrong but this seems like a thinly-veiled request to make it easier to harass people for character names. I can't imagine it's a pressing need to check name availability while logged-in because you'd still have to log out to create a character to lock it in if it was available.

A bit of a stretch but there's some manga/anime characters that can flex their muscles to take on a bulkier form. We're not just talking bodybuilder posing vs resting but technically shapeshifting from skinny to Mr. Universe. It's a conscious effort, so they revert any time they're not actively maintaining it. The two that come to mind are All Might (My Hero Academia) and Galatea Undine (Claymore). I don't think it's a far cry from conceptualizing a character doing the same for height.

Man. Delivering a smackdown so intense that the TVA prunes your whole league for it? I feel for you.