Blastit

Pretty much just pick a secondary that will give you high-DPA attacks and a primary that doesn't rely too much on cones or similar powers that are iffy to use point-blank. Fireball works as well at 5 range as it does as 50, after all. Then live by the edge of your seat until you get a lot of defence from IOs, APPs and pools.

Blasters are just nude scrappers.

No.

Only so long as you are intentionally aggressive and rude towards other people. Otherwise there's no problem. It's not really that hard to define toxic behaviour. Value judgements can be difficult but they can also be easy. Additionally, the concept of "guidelines" does exist. Further additionally, you have personally admitted to knowing that you sometimes choose to be aggressive and rude so the question of how to actually define a "jerk" is evidently not one that is far from your grasp. Plus you say you've run into jerks, so... Anyway, in a very real sense the people who get to define "jerk" are the people who can put you on a posting vacation for a week if they judge that you're being a jerk. In order for someone to be a moral authority they do first need to be an authority. If the process of what is done and why is transparent other people can see if the judgement exercised is good or if it is bad. Then they can talk it out. After that it depends on everyone involved. Exercising maturity and wisdom is fully possible. They just aren't reducible to mere mechanical principles that one can rules-lawyer their way around. I'm not torturing anyone, tho. I'm not inflicting grievous bodily harm while insisting that the dying victim smile about it. I did, however, see someone pass off knowing rudeness as simply being blunt. Talking about a disparity in resource access depending on how people spend their game time (according to choice or awareness) is not toxic. The OP wants to articulate what they consider to be a problem and even claimed to not know of a good solution. That seems like a fair starting point for a discussion. People were free to disagree with the premises, too, which some in fact did. Arguments being made and challenged all around. Plenty of discussion. Not toxic at all. I mean, I don't know if this person has been doing this twice a week the past half a year or something and consistently ignored any actual points raised. It didn't seem like it from the posts that were made when I saw the thread. That would be bad behaviour. But I haven't actually seen that yet and thus can't comment on it as such. Then jubakumbi floated the idea of everyone just getting everything because levelling up and slowly unlocking new things wasn't what mattered to them. Fair enough, the beta/test server is like that (although mainly for practical reasons) and there's an argument to be made that CoH might as well become a digital toy. There's also an argument to be made that levelling is the game as designed and as originally enjoyed by many here and that without the progression there wouldn't be the same atmosphere or emotional journey. Nothing on either side of the pearl clutching particularly interested me anyway and there was much that I ignored but as it went on I began to wish that people would post in some other way. The artlessness of it got to me.

Diversity does not mean allowing toxic behaviour. Anyone trying to build a community absolutely can't allow people to be aggressive towards each other. A rule against simply not being a jerk is necessary. If not you're going to end up driving away 1) those the aggressive people target, 2) those that fear becoming the next targets, 3) those that don't want to deal with aggressive people everywhere, 4) those that now miss the people they knew and liked who belonged to the previous three categories and 5) those that have now lost faith in the leaders of the community. This is why it's called "toxic" behaviour. It spreads, hurts and makes the community sick. Kicking out people who display toxic behaviour is not about creating a homogeneous community, it's about creating a community at all.

This question indeed isn't really about radio missions but about what a designer can or should do when people play the game poorly or "wrongly". We know there's a disparity in possible resource income levels depending on what you do exactly, and we know that the IO system is both highly impactful as well as gated behind resources. So that means that some players are going to have less access to fully realised characters than other players. Is this good? Is this bad? What actually is the real problem? What can even be done? What means do the HC team have access to in order to make sure that more people understand the reward systems and the IO system? Should they post links to forum guides in more places? Write up information windows in the actual game? Code proper tutorials on not only how to craft but what to craft and why? Would those be accessed sufficiently to make a difference? If some players are still left behind despite everything done and they come to the forums to talk about it, what should they be told? Ultimatley I think that you can really only aim for degrees. You can put a lot of work in to make a game more accessible on multiple levels and these efforts can be very successful as well but 100% isn't possible. Some people just don't want to understand a game's mechanics outside of how to move and maybe aim. No amount of tutorials will help with that. Getting absolutely everyone to play the AH the same way would probably have some weird results. Plus the general question of what this whole endeavour is about and who it's for. So probably questions that are less about math and more about judgement and decisions.

So you don't believe that you are talking to other humans. You believe you're only barfing words into the meaningless void. The problem with believing this is 1) that you are wrong and 2) that it's an unhealthy attitude in an online community because it's counterproductive to building a community. None of those things cropped up in this thread and nobody in this thread began targetting you out of the blue. That other people have been unpleasant to you elsewhere does not justify being proactively unpleasant to yet other people. Additionally you portray yourself as a very conflicted person because in the same post as where you claim to believe that nothing said on a forum means anything you also say that words on a forum hurt you deeply. Shouldn't you then be aware that how others communicate really does mean something? Even online, in an anynomous place? You appear to be acting based on two conflicting beliefs which is very human and all but is worth introspection.

If you are knowingly aggressive and rude then I'm not sure you're going to be here for the long haul, since that's toxic behaviour and any prudent forums moderating team will work to get rid of it.

How you communicate with others is something that you do have a measure of control over. There's not much you can necessarily do about language/culture barriers, different levels of literacy or how people feel in the moment they happen to read whatever you wrote and there certainly isn't anything you can or should do about bad faith actors. But you can do something about the level of abrasiveness you choose to adopt. Communication must mean that you care about how others perceive your message or else you have no business partaking in it. You won't be able to connect with others. Being if not nice or strictly polite then professional can make all the difference. It can make people read an opinion that is entirely incompatible with their own desires and just shrug at it because they know that it's just what this other person wants, no judgement intended. But if someone presents that opinion while being intentionally abrasive about it, more who simply disagree are going to think they're dealing with a real jerk who doesn't belong. The opinion, the presentation and the person become inseparable and eventually people end up banned.

You don't "simply mention and explore ideas". You intentionally use provocative language. To claim that you're playing the game better in a snide way and finish with "Ya'll have fun now..." is not merely blunt and to the point. It's unpleasant. This is what I mean by nobody respecting you. Any pushback you receive to any ideas you put forth can't be neatly separated from the pushback you receive for your unpleasant presentation, despite what you appear to believe here. I've seen people simply explore ideas and it doesn't look like this. Sure, sometimes other people don't get it and take it personally but if other people respect you then they'll correct those who don't get it.

I think this, on its face, is a reasonable enough summary of the issue. If you've got the brain energy to want to play the AH or whatever then you'll get a lot of resources and can kit your characters out in crazy ways, thus unlocking the game's systems in full. If you think that doing so is terminally boring and takes away from the whole superpunchy thing then you won't participate and will always be missing out on something. Certainly a proper issue to talk about. However You go on to say stuff like: but then you use intentionally belittling language like: so nobody is going to respect you. People who spend a lot of time and energy on videogames are not morally superior. You aren't morally superior because you have the "brain chemistry" to want to access so-and-so system before getting to the real goodies. You aren't morally inferior for it, either, it's just a neutral thing. It's an issue of game design where it probably isn't possible to please everyone so whoever is in charge will have to make choices depending on what group or groups they want their game to be for.

I don't mean tactical niches, I mean playstyle. I think it's fine if tankers and brutes are pretty interchangeable on a team and I think it's fine if scrappers and brutes are pretty interchangeable on a team, as long as each of them feels different to play and they're all kept fairly even in power. The IO system is a huge design problem and "should" be massively overhauled but that's likely currently outside the scope of what HC can and should do. City of Heroes 2 would be necessary to deal with all the problems this game legitimately has but that's a bit of a dream.

I think that Brutes are pretty successful from a design perspective. The Fury mechanic is effective and flavourful. I also like that it changed the typical SO slotting to focus on recharge and cost reduction for Fury-building attacks and then a few heavy-hitting finishers. I'm not sure if I want Brutes per se to be changed. It's mostly a matter of creating a solid playstyle for Scrappers and Tankers as well and then keeping them all on a relatively even level of power. Which is probably harder than just tweaking damage and resistance values, I guess.

Their awful powers curse you. Or maybe exposure to them cause you to act a bit weird for a while afterwards. Or maybe people just suspect that you could've been possessed.

The HC team no longer condones streaming per NCSoft's wishes, so possibly it was a function of this guy making videos that earn him revenue somehow.

Youtube's algorithms are more likely to show people videos if the thumbnail contains a human face with a strong expression. He's just doing his job on a platform with horrible conditions.

I think it's fair to say that a power kind of, or outright, sucks if the best that can be mustered in its defence is an obscure situation. Understanding why the most generally useful powers are the most generally useful is a much better first step towards mastery than going in-depth on the most unusual builds.

I personally like smaller teams because there's more room for you to use all of your powers. Crowd control becomes more important, people with big AoE attacks get to feel more important, and healing/buffing an individual is more important because each loss is felt more sorely. Of course, differences between sets are also felt more strongly so depending on your combination it may be a bit of a double-edged sword if one out of the three other team members just does more and better than you could. But overall I like smaller teams.

Radiation Emission stands as strong on its own as any set can claim to do, I suppose. I think I'll give it a whirl. It matures decently early so it's not as much investment as Storm to figure out if I like the combo.Thanks for the tip.

There are of course the concerns about the rest of the game being left emptier, because running AE generates more rewards per time spent, so there are fewer people hanging out naturally at any given spot. It's like DFB muscling out a lot of pre-20 content.

I was thinking of making a character to play old-fashioned Psychic Blast on, because I never got around to experiencing the ups and downs of the set. Corruptors seem to be the best match for it due to skipping its worst attack and because Blasters get their own, more streamlined version bleh. Is there any support set that it somehow synergises with? I'm not looking to make a new main nor do I have a solid concept that I need to adapt. I skimmed the lvl50 character data and the most common combo was Kinetics, and I can see why. If you're going to play something for its psi damage you might as well maximise it, y'know? I was initially thinking Dark Miasma because it's another set I haven't experienced. Storm Summoning is always fun and it does provide AoE to round out PB's single-target attacks. Then I thought about Traps, because it's an unusual set. Or maybe there's no particular synergy anywhere and it's just a matter of picking an individually good secondary. Hm. So does anyone here have any strongly held opinions or personal musings they would like to share?

What if Voltaic Sentinel was just a real pet? Give it an electric damage aura, good resistances and let it plink away with some charged bolts. Not enough of a pet that it could fit in a control set but enough of a pet that it could make electric blast a decent set. Barring an elegant replacement of endurance drain and/or a redesign of game systems such that endurance drain becomes good, it's a brute force style improvement. It's a weird thing to put in a blast set, certainly, but so's regularly existing Voltaic Sentinel. Give it a 4-minute duration like Dark Servant if that's an issue.

The ban on smoking in public places where I live was recently increased to outside store entrances and such. The one responsible for upholding the ban and the one who eats the fine is the store itself. Additonally, just because I said it was reasonable for a government to be able to do a thing it doesn't mean that I said that the exact thing has happened in full.

Governments do in fact do things about health crises that affect their population. Shutting down a company because it has more of a negative effect than it has a positive effect is perfectly reasonable for a government to do. What things people are incentivised to do within a game and the environment this creates is something that game developers do have to consider. It's a sensible concern. I don't have an opinion either way because I don't have whatever demographical, economic and playtime data the HC crew likely have access to.

I mean conceptually, because the Fury mechanic is great for representing savagery. If you wanted a melee set that feels like clawing like a mad beast then Fury would be perfect.