ForeverLaxx

I never got into these, either. I was that weird kid in gaming who (still) clicked all the abilities and was still able to maneuver like I wasn't doing exactly that. In WoW specifically, I could dismount and be in Stealth on my rogue nearly instantly despite each ability being in opposite corners of my screen. Of course, Blizzard undermined my skill by making Stealth auto-dismount in a later update, but whatever. Point is, I don't like change and just learned to make my ancient mouse with 3 buttons work miracles.

No one was disputing this. In fact, people were reminding you that players still do it today, 17 years after the game first released. The issue was your claim that it was designed to be a "trinity game" when it never was. I was in the CoV beta and I don't recall them "walking back" the idea that MMs were meant to be the one doing the tanking. The belief was, since Brutes were stuck with Scrapper defense/resist values despite having the Tank cap potential and MMs had an army of "disposable" HP sacks, that it was the MM's job to send in their pets to absorb the alpha attack, which is generally the most dangerous moment for anyone meant to take a hit. My main in the beta was a Stalker, but my main after the beta was a MM and I definitely built mine to be able to tank. The bodyguard introduction just reinforced the notion and that the playstyle shifted from "send in your long recharge, squishy pets to absorb hits" into "pull aggro yourself and split the damage". My only problem with being a Tankermind on a team is that I'm forced into the Presence Pool to make it functional, but then, that power pool needs a reason to exist and honestly it's pretty fitting thematically for a Mastermind anyway. Oh, and I hate how AoEs utterly wreck a MM in BG mode. Despite how intricate the game can be under the hood, what helps the "casual-friendly" nature of the game shine through is that none of what you said actually matters to a casual player. To clear 99% of the game's content, you don't need to know how anything works. You don't need to min/max. You don't need to eek out that last 5%. Slot accuracy until you think you're hitting enough, slot damage until you think you're hitting hard enough, slot recharge so you have things up more often, slot defense/resist in the powers that are meant for it, etc. They don't care if they're "overcapped" on accuracy for the content they're running or might have "wasted" a few slots on Defense in Stealth when they're still making it through missions. The fact that you can dig into the meat and potatoes and completely run circles around most content is unrelated. I do find a bit of humor in the notion that the game stops being "casual friendly" when the "casual player" does something entirely un-casual and starts digging to begin their quest towards min/maxing, or at least, figuring out how best to leverage their standard SO build. Casual and Hardcore is a mindset, not some kind of arbitrary time commitment. Once you start caring about maximizing performance towards a specific goal, and take steps to achieve that, you're not really a "casual player" anymore.

I don't normally like to play the "I've been here a long time" card, but I first picked up this game in its release year. I played it practically every day until it was shut down. The moment I heard that the source code was leaked and the game was about to be public again, I got back on the train that very day (unfortunately I was not "invited" to the super-secret cool-kids-only-club original private servers). I say this not out of any misguided sense of seniority, but rather, to tell you that this thing you say the game was built around? It wasn't. It never was. I was soloing content on my Blaster back in 2004, hovering over the chasm in Hollows to avoid hazard spawns on my way to Frostfire and stocking up on purples and break frees to survive. I was invited to teams, and invited many others, who understood the game was deliberately designed as a "take who you can get, it'll probably work" mindset. The people who insisted on the old standard team composition still existed. Hell, they exist to this day and I don't think it's ever going away. That was always a player-imposed limitation and was never part of the original design. Just because you agreed with, and tended to see newer players trying to build "trinity" teams, does not mean that's how CoH was designed to be played. Our IO-laden future is just an extreme version of what players were already doing. You're pining both for a version of the game that never existed, and a version of the game that exists today if you want it to.

One of these days, I'm going to actually use my artistic ability and design sense to finally get around to building my personal base, then stew as I know it's great but refuse to show it to anyone. Right after I get past my crippling procrastination.

Like BillZ, I've literally only used the old two-button mice and only graduated to the three-button/scroll mouse from Logitech and never use anything else. I make sure it's on a wire connection, too, which is getting more and more difficult these days. I play/played many different MMOs, FPSs, RTSs, all competitively and never had any issue "keeping up" with the so-called Serious Gamer Equipment. Never fall for the branding/marketing. You're buying a slogan, not a product that will last.

It's a sad time when a normally executed Synapse, experienced "as intended", is considered a bad thing.

Aye. I just received an email saying my False Positive report had been reviewed and they've cleared the URL.

Huh. I thought for sure I was going to be alone with this problem. Setting the site to the exceptions list didn't help, turning off the "shields" temporarily also did not help. Updating Avast directly did not help. The only thing that let me connect was removing Avast's extension in Firefox that rated pages as "safe" or not. I did report the problem to Avast directly as a False Positive, but I have a feeling that's going to amount to nothing. I don't really need Avast telling me what pages are or are not safe anyway, but when the site works perfectly fine in the morning but gets blocked in the evening arbitrarily, then I really don't need Avast trying to hold my hand.

It's entirely possible that you just missed the relevant targets every time you used Flash Freeze since the bubbles do provide +Defense and many of the earth powers (Earthquake, most notably) have -ToHit.

The only Sleep I feel good taking just for the sleep effect is Static Field from Elec Control. Since it reapplies itself over the duration of the zone, it's one of the more useful sleeps for standard teams and has a wide enough area to use it as an emergency way to prevent the next spawn from potentially aggroing by mistake.

I addressed your flimsy "point" regarding the so-called options. It had nothing to do with my point, but I addressed it anyway because you can't seem to help yourself when it comes to defending developer decisions. I'm ending this here. I've said my piece, and running around in circles with you on yet another topic you refuse to understand due to being overcome with defender zeal just isn't worth my time at this point. Yes, that's what I said. Thank you for agreeing with me. I'll just leave this thread repeating what I said earlier: declining to add connection options to Talos because it would turn the zone into more of a hub than it already is, but adding connections to Atlas and turning it into a hub are contradictory actions. I don't care that people can get around easier, but I'd like some consistency in application of these changes at some point. If the devs don't want a hub zone, but then create a hub zone for newbies, I feel like they're going backwards.

Not really the point. It's inconsistent with stated past grievances regarding a centralized zone "hub" that I'm noticing. Being able to teleport to any zone through LRT first requires you to have actually visited the zone at least once. Bases used to be limited on power and connections so you couldn't use a base to go to every zone in the game at once (this was obviously removed for our version of the game and I'm not sad to see it go as a creative person), the dev command was let out of the box and players got so used to being able to just jump into a hub base that the removal of said command demanded a compromise that didn't need to be made. Trams used to be restricted so you had to travel to a zone with both sometimes and TUNNEL is just another tram system. PvP helicopters used to be limited so you had to go to the appropriate linked zone first. "Quick Travel" restrictions have been lifted across the board already. And now, travel powers have increased in speed, cutting travel time even further. I'm not inherently against making it easier for players to get from Point A to Point B. I'm just against changes that run contrary to previously stated issues of turning a single zone into a "everything you need is right here" affair. With how quick players can get around, even before this change, the city felt more like a small town. Now it's just going to be the size of a city block. You've got AE, the Tram System, TUNNEL System, Base Hub access, Pocket D Access. and the auction house (via another command) all without ever leaving Atlas Park. The "best of both worlds" line is cute, though. When faced with 3 loading screens vs 1 loading screen, players are going to take the 1 loading screen. Expecting players to intentionally avoid quick travel as a counterpoint to adding even more quick travel is silly. It's the same as saying you can use as much hate speech as you want because people can use /ignore or turn on their profanity filter if they don't like it. It's really a non-argument. Again, I'm not against methods to get around the city quicker. I'm just perplexed with changes that turn a zone into a catch-all hub when the major criticism against adding connections to Talos was to avoid enforcing the view that it's a catch-all hub.

Not really a fan of that change, either. I remember reading somewhere that they didn't like how Talos had become the "connects to everywhere hub" because it discouraged visiting other zones, but Atlas is becoming that very thing slowly over time. I understand the desire to put common areas close to new players so they can find it easier, but it just makes the whole city feel that much smaller when everything is attached to a centralized hub.

Bear in mind that even though HC is now allowing streaming/recording/sharing of game content, many streaming sites (Twitch included) have rules against streaming pirated/private servers of games. Whether Twitch does anything about it is another story, but it's a facet to be aware of.

Well sure, when you arbitrarily decide the plethora of other options aren't "good enough" or "worth your time", then of course the one you don't want to change is going to be the only one standing that you care about. It should go without saying that "ignore all these other examples of content" is not really an argument. As to the bit in earlier posts about level-gating being archaic, you'd have a point only if player powers and power slots weren't locked behind specific levels. A level 1 MA/SR Scrapper with only an unslotted Storm Kick and Focused Fighting to his name isn't going to be doing anything even if sk'd up to 49. That character lacks powers you expect players to have at higher level ranges; powers that higher level spawns are built to challenge. The character also lacks any slots, so even with the scaling they hit like a wet noodle once every 6 seconds and only has about 14% melee defense. While higher levels don't guarantee that the player has any of their slots filled, they at least have more powers. It's not perfect, but it's the only way the game can approximate that a player will be able to both survive the TF and contribute to it.

I've always preferred the previous version and it made more sense to me as a player in a hero game to take preventative action against the Paladin rather than letting the Clockwork do whatever they want out in the open and deal with the fallout later. Count me for "revert to old version". It being "random" fits with most, if not all, of the other giant monster/events in the game also (though I am aware that even those random triggers tend to fall in a wide time window rather than just whenever).

As your question on whether you having Cel Shading on or not matters (it doesn't: the person doing the judging has the only visual setting that matters) has been answered, I'd just like to say that I've got a ton of costumes I love with small details and themed designs that many people compliment the few times I team but I've never placed, let alone won, a CC on Homecoming. Why? Because it's subjective. In my experience, the people who seem to win the most are people who used 90-100% of a developer-made costume set (think Celestial Armor) or they're some kind of skimpy catgirl. The others that win/place are almost always joke characters. There's no accounting for taste, I'm afraid. Just enjoy your own look because your opinion on your costume is the only one that really matters.

Well, the in-game shorthand for it is called "Dyne", so I usually just go with Sue-Per-uh-Dyne so it remains consistent with game lore.

Honestly, I'm finding a bit of humor in certain people throwing around the "we're the real hardcore" moniker because they chug skittles and only build their character to account for what skittles don't provide (recharge/damage procs). But I'm one of those "weird people" who will min/max a character concept in a no-outside-buffs state because shoving a bunch of buffs down my character's throat is effectively just giving Mario a permaStar powerup and pretending I'm good at the game because I'm invincible and one-shot every enemy without trying at the fastest possible speed. The "real" hardcore are the people doing no-hit, no gear, lowest possible level, full DLC Dark Souls runs with just their fists. The "really real" hardcore are doing that with a Guitar Hero controller (yes, people do this). To me, chugging what amounts to a bunch of overpowered potions in other-game-terms to trivialize encounters is the opposite of being "hardcore". It's gaming the system in another way, and it's not particularly impressive either. When someone says they solo'd a raid boss, and they tell me they had a full raid buff them first while they downed "ignore the mechanics" potions, I just roll my eyes.

Of course not. You don't know what you're talking about, so that's not surprising. Not responding to you further after this. You're a lost cause.

No, that's not "classic MMO stuff." Have you played any other MMOs before? Groups form because either the boss requires enough DPS that one person can't do it alone, or the dungeon requires a group to even begin. Hell, most groups form because of the enforced "holy trinity" where one guy is meant to hold aggro, another is supposed to heal everyone, and three dudes are poking the boss in its ankles until it falls over. If your sole reason to team is to "kill faster", then you're just plain doing it wrong, friendo. You don't need a team to kill things fast in this game. The fact you're whining that being in a team means you have to use more than two attack buttons is just laughable to me.

This is the advice you've been given. Don't try to turn it around and use it as a defense against people telling you that your panties are in a wad for no reason.

No, it isn't. I don't team because I want to blitz through content. I can do that solo just fine. Teams are for the socialization and watching all the powers explode. If all you want to do is burn down everything as fast as you can, then play solo. Bonus: you won't have teammates to make inane complaints about.

How sad. You couldn't burn the whole spawn by yourself and actually had to let your teammates deal some of the damage. I'll let you know when that's a problem.

You can generally get a single pull with any ranged attack. The problems occur when you're not far enough away before using it, don't break LoS during the animation of said attack, the guy you're pulling is in the "vision cone" of his buddies, the attack is a moderate to fast DoT, or that attack triggers its secondary effect (most often only relevant to those that have control as a secondary effect, think stun or knockback/knockdown). That said, TP Foe (now Teleport Target) and Single Target Taunts usually have the most success over long periods of comparison.