Crysis

Bored a bit today, I ran Number Six's Arc in RWZ. I mean I usually don't even read the storyline, but this one was really well done. Your reward...the thankful citizens erect a FREAKIN' STATUE of your character and cheer it on. Then, you get to play as Positron Anti-Matter for the epitaph mission where he...well, I won't spoil that for anyone. But seriously, well done on this one! I actually felt "heroic" for a bit!

You can somewhat expect Demons/Dark and Thugs/Time to play similarly in that both /Dark and /Time offer heals and -TOHIT. Beyond that, Demons are definitely more about +RES whereas Thugs are +DEF thanks to stacked leadership buffs. For Thugs, you add on Farsight (particularly Powerboosted Farsight) and you’ll find it really easy to softcap +DEF yourself and your henchmen too with Thugs. I find Demon attacks to be more effective at higher levels than Thugs, particularly with the -RES to provide effectively higher damage, plus less resisted damage types from Demons. But honestly, by 50 and after, especially with Incarnates, they don’t play that much differently. Playstyle, it’s a bit easier to MM the Demons from range, whereas with Thugs/Time, you may as well jump into the spawn with the Brute because your Times Juncture is your -TOHIT debuffer. I take Cross Punch from fighting pool for all my Thugs MM’s specifically for this reason.

I have to admit…using ChatGPT to create 1023 character bio’s is stupidly easy now. Really, there’s zero reason for someone to not have a decent bio. I’ve been having fun feeding it my own ‘homebrew’ bios and asking it to generate similar ones. Some are actually -much- better than what I originally intended. I’m also enjoying using it for creating appropriate superhero names by feeding it my powers and a little bit of the bio.

I can't imagine buffing Demons or Thugs any further. I -can- expect them to not be nerfed, but rather, watch powers that turn them into OP get nerfed instead. Gang War, Hell on Earth....yeah, gonna get their timers 'addressed' I'm betting. Or the number of pseudo-pets they spawn diminished. But honestly, I suspect Farsight's +DEF won't last beyond PowerBoosts' duration. /Time has always been really good with just about any henchmen sets. But PB+Farsight, with both being perma'd (or near it) pretty much is just asking for a nerf bat. Take that away and you'll effectively nerf a bunch of henchmen +DEF.

I read an article recently (I'll like it if I can find it) that showed that the average, as in NOT top-10 mobile game STILL brings in anywhere from 15-20X the revenue of the top selling console games AND almost all of the top 10 PC games -COMBINED-. I don't enjoy most mobile games. I don't play most mobile games. But they sure do seem to dominate the gaming industry now.

At lower levels...heck, sometimes at higher levels if you are soloing....you really have to learn how to pull so you can keep your henchmen in a tight little ball and just lure the numbers of opponents they can handle around a corner to ambush them. This is where the various MM keybinds become really helpful. Put your pets on Stay/Passive around a corner, you run in and aggro some baddies, then come back to the henchmen murder ball and flip them to Defensive or Aggressive. You'll seldom lose any pets doing this, although it can be tedious. But on some maps where the spawns are so close together you otherwise have a difficult time because you+pets pull too much aggro. Honestly, having played dozens of MM's to 50, I consider the keybinds to be -the secret- to playing the class effectively and keeping everything alive. It's critical and too few players understand that aspect of the AT.

There was a time when I believed that state of the art really prevented superhero movies from being a “thing” since all the sfx would look campy. MCU and others have proven we have the ability now to pretty much put anything on the screen we would like to see. So that’s no longer a limitation in film or in games. So if the capabilities are all there to do it, but nobody does it, has to be some product marketing guru running around killing superhero games with tons of market demographics stating that the genre just won’t make money. It’s the only obvious reason. For me, I’ve come to the realization that MMO’s in general have “moved on” from PC gaming to consoles and, perhaps even moreso, to mobile gaming devices. Free-to-play was a reaction to micro-transactions and those were all pushed by explosive growth in mobile gaming. So, we are re-living “the good old days” simply because there are no other options.

You probably have the right of it. But I just saw the work effort produced by Cryptic with ST Online and thought “Hmmm, y’all were -capable- of much more with CO than you actually produced,” and always wondered if there were some restrictions holding back the CO design and dev teams because of their prior work with/exposure to IP now owned by others (NCSoft, Microsoft for the ill-fated MU Xbox game, etc). There’s a lot of IP that never gets fully exploited in the marketplace but not for lack of interest, more for lack of legal right to exploit it.

Sorry but by “players” I meant the development teams behind both COH and CO were the same. Im referring to Cryptic Studios. 1) Develop and launch COH at a time when the entire MMO landscape was all fantasy based except for some scifi one-offs. 2) Signed on with Microsoft to take on a Marvel version of their game. That got scrapped. 3) Go out on their own to build CO. But since it was many of same team at Cryptic behind all three efforts, they likely had non-competed, non-solicitation and confidentiality clauses from prior efforts. Their best ideas were already owned assets by other parties by this time. Thus CO got watered down due to legal constraints. I might be wrong but always felt that played a role in CO’s limitations. The Cryptic dev team was limited and their new game reflected that.

I’ve no formal knowledge but often wondered if part of CO’s “apathy” was in fact legal challenges trying to ensure they didn’t exactly clone COH and/or run afoul of Marvel/DC litigation threats? The reason many startups are so successful at innovation is that they have almost nothing to lose and everything to win. But the second startup often faces challenges because the founder -now- has something to lose…..mainly the wealth created by their first success. So they don’t swing for the fences quite as hard and often fail to achieve successive wins due to lack of courage to risk it all like they did the first time. Just conjecture…..but many of the players were the same between COH and CO yes?

Eh, not really. I’m speed running 4-star Aeons almost daily now. Once you get it down, it’s actually easier than MLTF let alone a 4-star ITF and can be run in 30-40 mins tops. The typical D-syncs don’t run at this price. It just seems that its this one (Provocation/Threat). And it’s luck of the draw if you get one of those. I’ve gotten one, slotted it into a Taunt aura to save some slots. I’m sure there’s better uses for it or maybe it can even be exploited somehow…I’m too dumb to figure that out. But reward vs. risk isn’t there for the Aeon 4-star at least. *Edit* Someone PM’d me the “exploit” for D-Sync Provocations in Benumb to save a slot. I’m not that slot starved to pop 700MM on it to buy a slot for elsewhere on any of my toons. But, I get it….if you’ve got the funds to blow, what else are you gonna blow it on?

Y'all are why we can't have nice things.

The D-Sync Threats are going for ridonkulous prices right now. Last 5 sales are betwee 400MM and 700MM. Don't think I've seen something priced like that since Live marketplace.

I have a Thugs/Time with the MM at softcapped +DEF and the entire fighting pool, including Cross Punch. Thanks to Times Juncture, which is massive -TOHIT for enemies, I just put myself on Follow for the Bruiser and the two of us just give the beatdowns together. It’s a lot of fun and gets a ton of laughs from PUG teams when they see me playing “tanker.” Note that your damage output is pretty anemic, even fully procc’d out, but the Cross Punch knockdown mechanic is pretty good mitigation regardless and makes you look tougher than you really are.

Respecs to me are a HUGE time sink. I do about one per character, even if I do start with a full, complete build. There’s the leveling build pre-50, and then the post-50 build accounting for Incarnates. Sometimes there’s a third for the 40-50 game but I usually just hold out for 50 not because I want to but because I realize a respec is going to take me almost an hour minimum of scarce playtime. Thus when changes are made to the game, I typically just leave my mothballed stable of old toons out of play. Sometimes, if the change is big enough to leave them totally gimped, I’ll pull them out and do the respec but they have to be -really- gimped to force that. When they’ve reached retirement I’ve typically eeked out every single possible min/max model I can think of and typically am quite satisfied with them by that point. For the few I’ve not been, I melt them down via a respec that strips out all their IO’s and I delete them…..or re-use their name to build a better alt. But it’s unusual for me to do that post incarnates. Almost any toon can be made highly effective after incarnates are obtained. Respecs are just awkwardly hard for me for some reason. Doing a bunch of ‘trial respecs’ via Mids and test server have become my playstyle now more now. I have even skipped leveling builds and just powerfarm alts to 38 to avoid needing to do that since it takes less time to powerfarm an alt than it does to do the respec.

Ill/Savage just feels so good together, especially if you take the TP pool and throw in some macros for TP’ing straight back 30 feet and then Savage Leaping right back for max damage. All that zipping about the battlefield is frenetic and fun and the PA’s just create these “mirror images” of you to confuse and confound the chaos even more. Very fun set, very Nightcrawler-esque as a TP’ing melee character with your illusions being added DPS but primarily distractions to the enemy.

Boy would it be game-changing if we actually had control over henchmen’s targets/application of their powers. You can direct them to attack a particular target , to follow you and/or to attack anything or just something that is attacking you or them. But that’s it. Beyond targeting selective enemies, you can’t target yourself for their buffs. But sadly…..nope. They do what they do when they do it and to whomever they choose.

Thugs/Time and Thugs/Storm are both high +Rech builds, with /Time also giving you high +DEF, but /Storm giving you some -TOHIT which can effectively produce similar results. But of the two, Thugs/Storm puts out OMGWTFBBQ levels of DPS plus GangWar is perma and PLUS PLUS you can get Double Gangwar about every third spawn with Burnout. Storm is just -RES and additional Damage, plus a lot of FF +RECH procs. Personally, I prefer Thugs/Storm, but /Time is no slouch either. Thugs/Traps is a bunch of fun too, although I find in later game you seldom have the chance to use all your fun toys so its more of a solo build. /Dark, /Kin and /Elec have some good utility value for teaming but none of those match /Time or /Storm for DPS and in the end, the best debuff is a dead critter due to higher DPS. If the goal is to RP “Beverly Hills Cop” via renaming the Thugs to match in-movie characters, I’d suggest that the Beverly Hills setting for much of the movie /Nature might be a good secondary (greenery, stuff growing around the battlefield, etc). But admittedly, that’s a bit of a stretch. Then again, I have a Thugs/Time that’s built around Anchorman (Ron Burgandy and his news crew, plus Octagon, Dr. Kenneth Noisewater and James Westfall for the t1 pets) and /Time was selected partially for the opening line of the movie (“There was a TIME, a time before cable, when the local newsman reigned supreme….”), but honestly more for overall build effectiveness instead. My Thugs/Storm is built around Sons of Anarchy with the leader being Gemma Teller and all the henchmen being her primary “sons” of the gang. /Storm just seemed to fit her personality. If you really want theme, look into key catchphrases, settings, easily-identified scenes, etc when choosing powers to match a theme. You don’t have to gimp yourself by force-fitting a powerset you don’t want. Lots of stuff in all the BHC movie franchise to choose from! One of my fave lines from the movie would fit into the superhero world nicely: “Before I go, I just want you two to know something. The -SUPERCOP STORY- was working…okay?”

But effort = reward tends to be the nature of pretty much any gaming platform built around the concept of rarity of a particular reward. I recall when the FPS Battlefield 1 came out playing for literally weeks to figure out the secret to obtaining a particular pistol. There were no guides yet, no way to 'speed run' it. You had to follow a rather obtuse set of steps and figure it out for yourself. There are already speed runs for the 'hard way' trials. I participate in about one per week already. There will be shortcuts shared/guides created for obtaining these badges and/or costumes over time. The best way to not let grind-to-obtain mechanics bother you is to not worry about the "obtain" part in the first place. I've no desire for the costumes. I admire people who have them and have built entire characters around them and somewhat even rp them that way. I was one of the early acquirers who sold everything I got knowing I'd be able to buy as many as I wanted at 1/4 the price later on. I actually have enough on my various alts right now to outfit two with all badges -and- the minifig costumes. But I don't do that because I just don't care about those rewards. Hopefully, something will come along to make me want to spend/invest these PA's but until then, it's like all my influence....there's just nothing of interest for me to spend them on. So I just hoard and wait. And if nothing ever comes along, I just enjoy the time I spend playing the game and don't do it for the rewards beyond my enjoyment factor. Obviously....YMMV and I respect that.

Sounds like a cover story for a vampire killing spree to me…..

I did a minor respect to the original but other than throwing an extra slot or two into the upgrades it really didn’t surpass the original all they much….but then again, with all T4 incarnates, not much improvement was needed.

I was originally a player on a number of “Hami superteams” that tried all sorts of crazy things to attempt to beat Hamidon -before- it was a widely-beatable zone event. Some that I recall: 1) All blasters with six-slotted snipes for Range. 2) All Regen-scrappers with a backup cadre of Empathy defenders flying around to juice up any Regen players who were taking too much aggro. It may have actually been this model that, while it failed, ended up being one of the unlocks to defeating Hami as a Regen Scrapper with Taunt would just hover-taunt Hami while the rest of the league took it out. 3) At one point I was part of a hybrid tanker/defender/blaster league where the Defenders would use Group Fly for all but the Blasters, who remained at range. It’s sort of comical looking back on it today, but speed-TF’s and speed-Hami’s weren’t really a thing at one point. The common “how-to” guides weren’t really known and in fact the few SG’s that had claimed to defeat Hami kept it pretty secret for awhile and the Dev team was making active changes to anything that they felt ‘cheesed’ their precious end-game raid content.

Gotta upgrade your PUG-o-friends…..

Good luck with that. Usually im kicked off the TF mid typing how to address. Dont use Group Fly while teaming unless you ask and all are ok with losing their preferred movement and playstyle to cater to yours. Its selfish to impose yourself on others. I understand why they might not like it. Just dont use Group Fly while teamed. Its a solo only power other than maybe some rare missions in the Shard.

just know you will be despised by many when using Group Fly. Yes it can be ignored by a knowlegeable player. No, most dont know this. if you solo, dont worry about this. If you team, dont use Group Fly.