Andreah

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.

One more suggestion. Could we have a way to add a note to ourselves, so we can take down notes in-game? Ideally, tied to the character, but if the note taking window had two tabs, one specific the the character, and one global to the account, it would be great. It would be fine if these were only stored locally on the player's computer, but better if they were stored server-side. Bonus points if we could link map points into a note. Bring up a clipboard animation while this window is being edited. 🙂

Another idea. Radio/Newspaper missions have been a staple for years, and many people like them, and we often roleplay through them. However, they could use some sprucing up. Some simple things might be easy to do. For example, add more boss names to the lists for each foe group. Add some new "McGuffins" to the lists of those. Add some new call-outs for the enemy groups to say when the players get close. There might be some additional tweaks which could be made to them as well, perhaps inspired by things we can do in AE missions. For instance, more than one objective inside a Radio mission. Or a radio mission where two groups are fighting. Another change might be to extend some of the enemy groups to levels they're not usually found it. For example, have a low-level Arachnos themed radio mission pop up in King' Row. Or let the Family try to muscle their way into Peregrine now and then.

I brought this up in /help yesterday, so I suppose I should flesh it out a little. I doubt it's possible, but who knows! Maybe some dev will latch onto it and make it a pet project for the long term. So, it would go like this. When you start a bank mission, you would be able to choose whether it's open to PvP, or not -- need to preserve the current way, since most people would probably prefer that. Other people would be able to enter a waiting queue for bank adversaries, either as heroes to stop them, or as villains to get in on the mayhem. This would be through the LFG queuing system. So when a bank Safeguard or Mayhem mission needs adversaries, it would draw a few people out of the appropriate queue and add them to the map, with pvp enabled and levels normalized to the mission level. At this point, it is now a capture and secure/escape with the money bag mission. Being defeated takes you out of the mission if you don't get a friendly rez in, say, some modest number of seconds. Regular rez insps don't work, but there are one-use rez powers which can be found in the map in various spots. Carrying the bag of money turns off all your travel powers, and reduces stealth radius a lot. When everyone on one side or the other are defeated, a hero gets the money bag to the police van, or a villain gets it to the arachnos flier, the mission completes. The victor side gets bonus xp, inf, and a few merits.

I have rage on my SS tanker, and I hate using it. Turning it into a build-up would be an improvement, as would various ideas for removing the crash. My favorite of those would be to eliminate the crash completely, but make the power not stack with itself at all. But some of the other powers in SS need some work too. it ends up too dependent on its AoE hits, and the ST powers are just gap fillers. How would I address those? I'd make them all AoEs! Give the other power small AoE splash damage zones, and maybe chance for splash side-effects. (Then rebalance the total DPS of the set -- I think it's fine on the average, and does not need a buff).

I like this idea as a game design concept, but it's a terrible fit as the game stands today. It would take widespread changes to other parts of the game to make it fit in and be balanced. What might Vet levels offer that don't make character more powerful directly? Or how else would the game change to preserve power balance? How far would Vet level boots go? What do you get for your 2,561st vet level? Are base level 50s too powerful, should they be nerfed (e.g., global to-hit/def/res nerfs) and would Vet levels bring us back to level? Offer some ideas on how the game would need to change to stay balanced, and I think in that context the better choice would be not to do it.