Andreah

I'd like origin to give you visual options for how your powers animate or appear. Or scrap origin, but give me a handful of variations on each power that look more natural, more mutant, more magical, more sciency, more technological, etc., and I'll pick and choose.

I'm pretty sure it still worked this way when I first started playing in spring 2008.

It would not be unreasonable or even unprecedented for new incarnate powers to have their main, most potent effect in actual incarnate content. I'm happy with things as they are however. And if an incarnate power just gave me a bonus seventh slot in any one of my existing primary of secondary set powers, I'd take that too.

When I'm on my tank, I like to see if I can drag four or more groups together on top of my team. Sometimes they really like that! ... and sometimes we discover quantity has a quality all its own.

People running council radios in PI want simple basic fun, with decent leveling and drops. They aren't hard, the maps are never caves, and even a sucky team can usually get by okay. It's for people who would farm, but don't have the build for it or don't feel right door sitting. While the incarnates are wrecking the map, there's usually some straggler in a council uniform even your crappy level 1 can slug in the face!

There are enough tools in CoH, even a poor build can be made viable in some way. You can do crazy for slotting, or use the right temp powers, or use the incarnate boosts to shore up a weakness. In worst case, you buddy up with someone whose poor build complements your won, and together you slap faces and kick butts. Does this mean it's balanced? I don't know, but it does leave room for creativity without being crippled. Are some build way over the top? Yes, and in more than one way. Over the top survivable? Over the top dps? Over the top support? Over the top tactical coolness? Sure, and even in more than one category. It's fun and leaves room for creativity unlike other games, since there's not one obvious best build each for a handful of narrow roles.

I would presume that the Etoille Islands itself would be a conventional nuclear power, and at that level, there is a sort of mutual deterrence with the rest of the world. Of course, nukes would no longer be the "The Last Argument of Kings" in the game world, that being the role of each nations loyal and on-call super powered people, but surely they would still be pretty dang important.

These sorts of things, such as difficulty in public speaking or leading teams in games, are certainly ones people can learn to overcome, but even in those circumstances, they will often remain unpleasant experiences. I am a research scientist, and I do occasionally present before large audiences, and it something I would not do except for it being a professional responsibility. In games, I feel no such responsibility to lead teams despite it being unpleasant, so I don't.

Blunt, but accurate. It reminds me of pubic speaking to an extent. There are somewhat shy and quiet people who can stand up in front of a crowd of a thousand and do just fine. And there's people who can talk your ear off one on one, but who'd literally pass out trying to stand in front of a crowd.

I don't lead teams either. I doubt I ever will. I have the ability, and even the desire at times. But the moment I have the star, the game is no longer fun and I want to log out. Almost desperately, at times. I don't want to be in a position of having to ask people to join me, even my friends. I don't enjoy deciding what we're doing next, even if it's just the next mission of a linear task force. I don't want to have to babysit people who should supposedly be well-behaved adults. These are things I would have to be paid to do, and I don't consider them to be elements of a game I am willing to play for enjoyment. And most importantly, if the gaming mood strikes me, or leaves me, I want to be able to just drop out. When you are a follower, that's a low cost to the team. It sucks when the leader needs to drop, and if I'm fairly likely to be that dropper, I'm not going to do that to my team. I even get this feeling on task forces and trials; but fortunately I pick and choose when I join them so that I'm prepared to stay no matter what. Finally, when, as a person, I refuse to lead, I take on the responsibility of being a good follower. I'm not going to cause trouble. I'm going to be patient. I'm not going to complain about or sass at my teammates. I'm going to follow instructions as best I can. And I'm either going to support the team leader's decisions, or politely drop myself off the team.

Another big radical overhaul would be the city environment. I don't mean graphically, but graphical improvements would have to follow I suppose, but with my GigaDollar lottery win, I'd develop a city simulator (like cities:skylines) engine and put it behind the city. It would generate and snarl traffic, produce pedestrians on actual trips, crowds of commuting/rioting/fleeing citizens, street crime, gang wars, building construction, fires, robberies, mass transit, traffic accidents, police chases, various local disasters, and so on. It would produce and have post-reactions to zone events, and generally make the city feel consistently alive.

I would make all cutscenes skippable.

I doubt there are many fence-sitters who might be persuaded to try pvp in this game. I know I never will. I am continually surprised there are any people in this game who really care about pvp. And especially since there's a group trying to stir up interest in a tournament on my server right now. I think they'd have better luck on the pvp server. In fact, my preference would be to totally disable it -- in my experience it brings out the worst in people.

Whip and/or lasso and variants of a rapier, for making swashbuckling pirate/Zorro style heroes and villains.

I am against Whip Mastery being an EPP.... it should be a full-fledged primary/secondary powerset for corruptors, defenders, dominators, and controllers. (And ofc, you'll have to ban most of the people who take it. )

I'd leave the game alone too. But if I had to pick one thing, it would be the attack to-hit/accuracy/defense mechanics. Nothing should ever be an automatic hit or miss, and we should not ever need hard caps or soft caps. I can imagine the resulting Forums Fury already! If I had to pick a second thing, I'd use my Giga-Lottery win to fund a costumes modernization effort. I'd have my team of amazing artists and developers go through and make variants of all the old costume pieces to give them subtle textures and details. My team would always leave an original costume piece in as an option, of course.

I made a new SR/SJ tanker, and really like it. Without too much expense, I was able to get a few points over the incarnate soft cap, and get S/L resistances to 74%, which makes the character feel very survivable. It does leave holes, but most are at least covered by the high positional defenses. The character also has 145% global recharge (not enough to perma Hasten, but still imo, very good) and excellent mobility -- i's easy to jump around to manage the battlespace. A draw back is that when thing go bad, they can go bad pretty fast. Anything that can drop my health bar down noticeably can probably kill me if I'm not careful. It does run end-heavy, especially when using melee powers in rapid succession. I have macros set up to use any available end insp, or even a Recovery Serum if out of insps, and similar for health to use insps or a Med Kit. Med Kits and Recovery Serums are cheap, and I always top them off when I can. A big advantage, is that I skipped Elude, and thus have no powers with crashes. Much as I love my Inv/SS tanker, I detest Rage crashes with passion. The SR/SJ tanker feels equivalently tough, overall, but a bit differently so in the details.

I would rework the scaling resist formula generally across the game, and have the scaling integrate as the damage was applied. I'm sure either a closed form algebraic solution could be derived, or a fast approximate algorithm be put together. Imagine that your health is at 100%, and then a hit come in that should take you down to 10%, but you have scaling resistances. Instead of applying the scaling resistance from the start point at 100 to the entire block of damage, you integrate it down point by point (or in the limit, as differentials). The first point is not resisted. The second point is resisted a tiny bit. The third point is resisted a little more, and so on, until all the damage is applied -- the 90th percentile of damage would be almost maximally resisted.

With the intent to buff the the scaling resistances in the powers? 😮

I had a SR/SJ Tanker back on live up to low incarnate, and I remember it being reasonably fun. I didn't feel unkillable though, nor really able as a main tank in high end content, such as incarnate raids. I may not have built it as well as I could have though.

It would be very useful in RP to be able to use the animations and VFX's from our powers on otherwise friendly players. Maybe limited to inside AE's, or inside a base, or something. Not unlimited use in public.

Too big and messy a can of worms to open. Leave it be.

One thing that would be really nice would be to be able to set my personal radius of hearing to local to be closer. SO I would be able to use a command or a setting to only hear chat in /local from say, half the normal distance, or even 1/3 or 1/4 the distance. Trying to have small RP discussions with others close to me is often drowned out by the clutter of chat from other people in areas that are busy -- for example, tonight's SG Faire on Everlasting. it's very hard to pick out what the people who're asking questions about our group are saying with a lot of other groups also trying to conduct their talk at the same time. It would be nice to be able to set my listening distance to close or very close at times like this.

I would like to see a way to synchronize dance moves between some number players and everyone else in their respective latency affected points of view. It would also be cool to have some dance animations that are for two characters together, or even for a circle or long line of people.

On other people, yes. But I want to add notes for myself.