PoptartsNinja

But again. Hitstop does not represent a weapon getting stuck in its target. Hitstop is a dramatic pause... which emphasizes the power of the strike.

But that isn't what hitstop represents.

These statements are opposites, which is where you're getting hung up. Hitstop isn't about adding realism, it's a tool for adding drama. Like a pro wrestler flopping for 30 seconds to sell a suplex; an OBJECTION!; or an actor pausing in the middle of their dramatic speech to make their next line more memorable. The shortest possible version is: bigger hits and bigger weapons pause more on impact to sell that it's a bigger hit or a bigger weapon. Please watch the video I posted, it's only 7 minutes and some change.

You're misunderstanding what hitstop represents. It is not your weapon pausing because it's getting stuck in the target. There are plenty of videos on the subject, I'd encourage checking out this one if you have any interest in learning more: But, TLDR, hitstop adds rhythm to provide sensory feedback to the player. It's about making the hits more tactile, to sell the impact. That's why Monster Hunter typically adds more hitstop to stronger hits from the same weapon. The same hits, without hitstop, lack weight. They lose out on drama. It's entirely about adding feel to the weapon, like replacing a period with an exclamation mark. Edit: Titan Weapons is a set that really wants to have an exclamation mark or two, but feels like it lacks punctuation entirely.

And that's fine, you're welcome to do so. But it's true that hitstop is a psychology thing. By putting extra emphasis on the moment of impact, it makes the moment of impact stick in the memory a little more. Ideally the other melee sets would have it too--but a lot of the post-damage cooldown animations serve the same purpose. The way Titan Weapons front loads many of its animations makes it feel more like Server Lag Melee. Case in point: If the animation finishes and you're back to neutral before the "the target gets hit" goes off, some of that 'forced reset, wait at neutral' animation at the end could be replaced with a little hitstop and a nice meaty 'crunch' when the weapon actually hits.

1) Because hitstop is about feel. In fighting games, an attack with a longer hitstop feels stronger than an attack with almost none. Because the game is putting that extra emphasis on the hit, the hit feels more impactful. It's the difference between a quick jab and an uppercut, the extra pause when the uppercut hits makes it feel stronger to the user in that moment. 2) For the cones, it'd apply to the primary target of the cone. For Whirling Sword, it would be excluded since that's explicitly the "quick space-making AoE."

Not if they were compensated by removing some of the atrocious start-up / cooldown delays the set already has baked in. The goal is for it to be less noticable when momentum is up, and more noticable when it isn't to smooth out the feel of the set when it's momentumless. So basically if it takes an attack .8 seconds to wind up, .3 seconds to animate, and 1 second to do damage; it would instead basically do .5 seconds to wind up, .5 seconds to animate with .2 seconds of hitstop replacing .2 seconds of wind-up time (or whatever feels most natural), leaving an attack that still takes 1 second to animate. That should, and I admit I'm making assumptions, be a matter of adjusting animation timing / speed of existing animations rather than creating new ones. Which should be doable, given how much time has been shaved off attacks like Total Focus. The end result is a set that hides its built-in delays a little better while also making it feel more impactful rather than its current weightless incarnation. Edit: And some better impact sounds. Those always help. Energy Melee could use some too, but there's a mod for that at least.

Titan Weapons has always felt kinda wrong to me, and after some chatting with the SG I realized the issue: it doesn't have hitstop. For those not up on fighting games or (more appropriately), Monster Hunter: Hitstop is basically a state where your attack animation pauses for a brief period at the moment of impact to make the attack feel more impactful. Monster Hunter, notable big weapon game that Titan Weapons was patterned off of, has always been the master of using hitstop to make an impact feel really powerful. In practice, this is what this looks like in Monster Hunter: Titan Weapons lacks hitstop, so its attacks feel swooshy and anemic. It feels like you're swinging around a foam sword rather than a weapon. Worse, several of the animation effects associated with the hit are delayed which makes the set feel even weaker. Compared to Titan Weapons: My suggestion is to change the wind-up delay on momentumless Titan weapons into hitstop for everything but Whirling Smash, and add some minor hitstop (0.05 seconds?) to most of the Titan Weapons attacks when momentum is up. What this change would entail: Animation timing changes for Titan Weapon swings. Since CoH doesn't track the moment of actual impact, adding an animation pause to the weapon swing at the moment it would hit a human-sized target (or human-sized primary target) would be sufficient. Some animations with awful lead-up animations (like Crushing Blow or Titan Sweep) could be sped up, and the awkward pause at the beginning/end of Titan Weapons attacks could be incorporated into the attack itself to make the set flow better even when momentum is down. As an added bonus? Remove hitstop from Titan Weapons on misses entirely, so TW can "preserve the momentum" of a miss to chain it into the next attack. Since there's roughly a 1/20 miss chance, adding 1/20th of a second to each of TW's attacks via hitstop should even out with misses and make the set feel more responsive even when momentum isn't up. I can't really change the animations, but I can change gif frame timing, so TW with Hitstop would look a bit more like this: And, while we're at it, please add a nice meaty 'pow' sound effect at the moment of impact. Titan Weapons' sound design is really weak. It feels like you're trying to fight with air pressure rather than actually hitting them with a big heavy object.

The costume window sometimes picks up particle effects. If you're in a base running a lot of them, you'll sometimes see them pop up in the background of the costume window too.

This is true on a Scrapper because of crits, but only on a Scrapper. Tanks don't lose much by using CS in their rotation, but it's outright bad for Brute fury (when you're down to that last target) and Stalker AS is just superior in every way. I'd argue that the top half of Kinetic Melee is genuinely good, it just needs a little something in the bottom half. An improvement to CS's animation times is what I see asked for most commonly, but I do think a boost to KM's AoEs might be warranted. Since the set is generally lacking in AoE power, maybe firing off Focused Burst before Burst could turn Burst into a small AoE; or firing off Focused Burst before Repulsing Torrent could change it from a 45* 40ft cone to a 120* 20ft cone so it's more likely to strike more than 2-3 mobs. KM wouldn't need much to bring it up. It just needs a little extra polish in the top half.

Probably a good thing I mentioned "giving that mission a fixed location" then.

IIRC the mission doors are randomly chosen from the zone list and there's no way to lock doors without giving that mission a fixed location. That said? Maybe the doors under that tram aren't really vital to the zone and could just be boarded up and removed from the zone list. Or move them farther away from the tram, there's probably a parking garage nearby they could be crammed into.

KM's biggest problem is that Concentrated Strike is worse DPS than nearly any combination of Quick Strike, Body Blow, or Smashing Blow you can fire off in the same amount of time. You can pop Smashing Blow, Quick Strike, and then get 80% of the way through Body Blow before Concentrated Strike finishes animating. With scrapper damage values, that's 101.9 + 57.81 + (79.83 * 0.8) = 223.574 combined damage vs. Concentrated Strike's 222.7. A small difference, except by splitting the damage into 3 attacks, the Smashing Blow -> Quick Strike -> Body Blow chain is less punished by misses. And since it's pretty trivial to have enough recharge to Smashing Blow -> Quick Strike -> Body Blow -> Quick Strike -> Repeat there's just no reason to ever use the back half of the set (with the exception of maybe Focused Burst for AoE). And if you've got enough recharge to drop Quick Strike from the rotation and just Smashing Blow -> Body Blow -> Smashing Blow -> Body Blow on repeat forever, Concentrated Strike loses outright (101.9 + 79.83 + (101.9 * 0.5) = 232.68) Concentrated Strike really needs its animation cut to 2.53 like Total Focus/Thunderstrike, if that happened KM would probably be in pretty decent shape. ... Although it'd also be funny to add a tiny duration Mag 4-6 single target fear that starts the instant CS's animation starts and has like a 3-4 second duration, so you lock down the target for as long as you're animating. Edit: That said, KM is probably secretly really good on Stalkers since they trade Power Syphon for Build Up and Repulsing Torrent for Assassin's Strike. It wouldn't be the first time a mediocre powerset is secretly really good on Stalkers (Dual Blades and Staff Fighting say 'hello').

IIRC knockback mag has a soft cap of 15 or so, so anything above that value doesn't really add extra distance. Having higher KB values just means you'll knock higher level or knockback resistant foes back farther.

IIRC minion speeds were set to be slightly faster than a player without swift who wasn't running sprint, so they'd be able to catch up with their summoner. Now that swift is inherent, they're basically permanently slower than summoner. I really wish they'd just inherit the movement speed (+5 mph so they'll always be able to catch up if they snag, maybe +15 for dogs and ninjas) and movement modes of their owner (so if you pick up fly, they can fly. If you pick up teleport, their teleport tether range is reduced to something that'll fire more frequently like 150 feet rather than the 300+ it is now). That would make them uniquely vulnerable to slows, so it might be worth looking at proliferating slow resistance in the MM Epics, but I think "always slightly faster than their summoner" was the original design intent, they just never got re-evaluated once the fitness pool became inherent. The snag to adding movement modes is, of course, super jump. I'm sure there's some way to get out-of-combat minions to register if their owner has held the jump button down for longer than 1 server tic and trigger them to jump for the duration the jump button is held (+1 server tic). I just don't know if making mastermind pets less irritating will ever be a priority. Honestly, I'd rank pet movement a lower priority than figuring out a way to give mastermind pets 50% positional AoE resistance.

The wording is confusing. It doesn't self rez you if you die while it's active, if you die and then use it, it rezzes you.

Stop immediately in front of the portal in MoM. Don't try to go through it, try to stop "inside" it with it still in front of you. Works every time for me.

If we ignore the Brute Fury proc, which is still bugged, the Defender heal proc is probably the worst ATO proc in the game. So that honestly seems reasonable. Getting to proc an end refund on a big power is nice.

I can't see a decent reason not to expand radios (and tips) to more enemy groups. Variety is the spice of life. Imagine bumping into a Rularuu radio, or Snakes, Praetorians, Incarnate Tsoo... sounds fun to me. They could even be put in pools based on difficulty, with an easy and a challenging enemy group guaranteed and then a third option that pulls from both pools. That way people who enjoy challenge could still get their challenge while people who just want to chill for a half hour while still feeling productive can beat up Freakshow or whoever.

At levels where you fight wolves, any non-wolf boss or LT could turn into a wolf of equivalent type. IIRC some story missions this won't happen because the Wolves are locked out for plot reasons; and to my knowledge the Council Ascendants can never wolf out. At level 40+, Galaxies get Nictus powers and can self rez.

Just tested this: Looks like people are going to need to be very careful about build switching.

Forgive me if this has been answered: Does the name release count the level of your currently active build? So if you accidentally swap from a level 50 to a level 1 Build 2, it'll still treat you like a 50 right?

IIRC this was done because the live devs thought blasters would complain about the loss of EXP due to confuse damage, so they figured there'd be less annoyance if they debuffed the confused mob's damage and ToHit. Since Damage and ToHit debuffs don't scale with enhancements the way confuse does, they made the debuff long enough to cover a super-overcapped confuse duration.

I'm pretty sure the ampersand also duplicates; but it's been long enough since I bumped into it I've kind-of forgotten.

That's been around forever, IIRC it's not the only special character that duplicates itself.