XaoGarrent

You know I'm right, you just don't like it.

I'm not wrong about you, because I said you sound *like,* not that you were. This isn't me guessing, this is me directly observing your language and simply telling you where it came from and that it was wrong then, and it's still wrong now. Most players ran the same sorts of theme and concept builds you did, and those builds included many types of hybrids and "tankmages" of WILDLY varying effectiveness and purpose. No one character could actually do everything on equal footing, and you are, as everyone did back then, conflating effectiveness with build choices as if they are completely equivalent in this discussion. (even in the game's early lifetime this wasn't true, the incredibly dominant frakenbuilds of that time were mostly born out of the fact that most power choices sucked wholesale, regardless of "tankmage," theme character, or trinity specialist. Early on, defensive passives being nerfed into the ground was actually the talk of the town, because originally the majority of healing powers were so incredibly trash that it didn't matter that you could self target. You either don't remember things correctly, or you never actually learned the game in any significant capacity.) I don't know *why* you're doing this, I'm not going to pretend I understand exactly why you believe these things. All that matters is that it's abundantly clear that you share the same talking points that many of the forums cliques constantly displayed and repeated as a dogma inside, what was effectively after the first few months, a complete echo chamber dominated by a couple loud minorities. They were wrong. They were heard. The game crashed on launch. This was, in the long run, ultimately disastrous, because in its earliest moments, when it needed to make its best impression, the game was dominated by a constant stream of nerfs to any sort of hybrid build that was seen being successful in the wild, because nobody knew the difference between a "tankmage" and the frankenbuilds people were playing. Different types of "tankmages" are all over CoX, the EATs are basically all DESIGNED as them. People just don't care here. But in that game people like you had a MYOPIC and religious obsession with them. What's really, really important to note here is that all this was happening while the devs TRIED to "fix" exactly what you were complaining about, and the game hemorrhaged players. This really is just me telling history at this point. It's incredibly sad to me that even after this kind of thinking virtually killed a game when it was listened to, people CONTINUE denying their mistakes.

You sound like you spent way, way too much time listening to people from the forums. Because you're just vomiting the stale memes from the forums, and forum vet CO wasn't the game everyone else played. This is an oft repeatedly, grossly exaggerated meme that only ever had at best a hint of truth to it. ...And it was becoming even LESS true around the time I quit. Around the time G. Crush was brought on, there began the growth of a Trinity meta that was directly due to the devs inflating numbers on newer content such that nothing but pure builds could perform their roles on teams correctly. At this time they also hit the lynchpin that hybrids were using, while largely leaving the foundation of "Supertanks" as they were called alone. People complained endlessly about Supertanks, too... ...And they weren't particularly high damage, they were like Tankers in CoH in practice. This made it VERY clear that they intended the future of the game to be exactly what you're asking for: Trinity based. The almighty tanker is and always has been the foundation of the trinity, which is why they're always first in and usually last out- including in the design sense. I, and I imagine many of the people I knew who quit before I did, would still be playing CO if the devs didn't make this INCREDIBLY clear with their ill advised design and balance decisions. CO always tried to push players into the trinity in any sort of team content, because they were absolutely dead set on not fixing the massive flaws in the teaming systems. Honestly, most of the friends I had made over the life of the game left long, long before I did, and all of them had these same complaints (well that and the loot boxes).

You couldn't have missed the point any harder if you tried. That was one of the best features of Champions Online. In fact, most of what's being discussed here are mistakes that CoH made that were fixed in Champions... And then later on broken again when they started designing content that pigeonholed player builds into trinity roles- But that's actually the entire point here, it's clear that you want trinity style gameplay, which never did and never will make sense as a standard in a superhero game. The vast majority of heroes, especially the mainline ones I. E. not side characters or sidekicks, are to some degree or another self sufficient in their day to day activities. This was supposed to be one of the big promises of Champions Online that they never full delivered, though before G. Crush got in there it looked like the game was slowly trying to get there: The ability to build your character the way you wanted. The selling point was that if you wanted to be a glass cannon that relied on raw damage and outside support, you could. You could also be a all rounder that was self sufficient, using the same exact attacks no less.... But they never quite got the formula right, and believe it or not, most of the problem wasn't the powers: It was the content and teaming systems. To reiterate the roundabout point he's trying to get at, I believe, is that you're myopically focusing on specific points and tiny details to the detriment of the greater picture in order to justify game design that really just doesn't belong in this genre. Honestly, most people have gotten sick of trinity in fantasy MMOs, at this point, Guild Wars for instance started leaning in the direction of Co-Op style play years ago, I. E. Everyone does a little of everything style class design. I believe GW2 actually allows people to res each other without a special power like Payday and Warframe. This is all a pointless discussion anyway... The game design of City of Heroes is an artifact of its time, outdated standards and limitations of the time more or less dictate what this game will be and there's really no changing it at this point. Especially when you factor in the cottage rule. Most of the sets that rely super heavily on melee attacks probably should be adjusted to have more utility powers, but they wont be, because it would mean completely scrapping powers in many cases, powers that in some cases have been around since launch.

You are aware that game designers design games, correct? That isn't to say they always get it right, but I'd at least give the live developers the benefit of the doubt that they weren't just sniffing glue and eating crayons when designing these powers. Yes, I think there was some intelligence behind all that. Sorry, but there's simply too much against the idea that thought didn't go into, at the very least, interset balance and design, or the environment in a game that is primarily player versus environment in nature. Then again, the Assault Rifle set exists, so maybe there were a few crayola dinners, at least from time to time.

Your first statement could be very easily backed through a factual argument. You are, maybe not 100% factually correct, but incredibly close. That statement actually has a very high degree of truth to it. A slight adjustment away from an absolute, and some reasoning based off easily observed and understood human behavior, as well as a decent grasp on the scope of possible human experience, and you could easily have an airtight argument for why the game could benefit from some changes. I'd say this is already close enough, really. People who aren't arguing in bad faith should be able to "get the point" and see the inherent truth implicit in what you've said. Of course, you'd then have to make airtight arguments for those changes, and you'd likely have to put them to test against competing ideas on how to solve the same problem, but y'know, one step at a time. Instead, you decide to drop the ball completely, intentionally, and you end your post with a statement that literally renders having an argument at all pointless for all involved parties, as it frankly places the entire discussion of *anything* in an unfalsifiable state. You could have stated something of value... Instead, you did this.

Making everyone run around to do chores is really horrid. Especially forcing everyone who's trying to IO out their character to run back and forth between the university and AH in steel. And it's even worse redside, so that would be ANOTHER bad mark on redside's track record. So a big fat no on ideas 1 2 and 4. Idea 5 is actually the least questionable thing you've posted here, but at the same time the most pointless. How often do you actually respec. And how often do you fraternize with people during a respec? I mean, seriously? As much as I hate the low level energy, downtime and constantly missing, I have to admit... I really miss running around Kings Row, the Hollows and Steel Canyon with a big team and just running through arcs and door missions. Well, I don't miss the ridiculous size of the hollows pre-travel power, but that's really not a problem with all the early travel options we now have. I actually have a partial fix for this problem, that would also improve the content progression and encourage alting, but they'd never do it: Remaster the old low level mission arcs, and restructure them so their length and XP fills out an entire level range with the XP booster active. Have each arc end in an over the top climatic mission that you queue for as a trial. Fast XP and interesting sights.

An appeal to authority fallacy, a complete dodge, and some blather about your father, who frankly nobody here knows anything about? You have some funny metrics regarding what constitutes quality, but that's fine. You can hold that loss.

This really tells you how seriously you should be taking this notion. EA and Elec Armor (which really should have been mentioned beside it) are both sets that were buffed to be more competitive with the likes of Willpower. In fact, they both got the same buff: A self heal. That should tell you a bit about what this person is actually asking for: "Nerf everything back to flawed launch design, the same design the devs eventually backed away from for good reason." And before they protest: I'm fully aware that you may not realize that's what you're asking for, but that's the reality of what you would get if you go and start swinging the nerf hammer like that. It should also be noted that one of the most important things Bio and Rad have in common that make them even a slight tier above Elec Armor and EA is a T9 that doesn't have a crash that makes it suicidal to use, a piece of design that stopped being used with Willpower. A piece of design that was actually REMOVED from Regen. This isn't a simple matter of "nerf this thing." They're actually arguing to begin regressing back to old, bad design standards. Really, even the defense and resistance holes are that, while the live devs never stopped doing it, Willpower was, again, the point at which they first reeled it in, with it only being a partial hole and of an even more rare damage type than normal. We've also seen many sets get at least one type of exotic mezz resistance since then, and all sets have proper knock resists.

You need to stop arguing against a strawman. It makes you look really, really bad.

I remember back before a lot of these shortcuts, QoL improvements and new features were added. I remember what the game's market was like, how grindy it was, and frankly how low the population was. This isn't 2004 anymore. Even by the middle of the 2000s the kind of grind and downtime the game had back then was looked down upon in MMOs. You say it's not a game for everyone, but what you're asking for is going to make it a game for no one.

The value and performance of every damage dealing power is implicitly, factually, unavoidably tied to resistances. A more resisted set is just inherently less valuable. It's just a pure numbers game at this stage, and incredibly simple one. So that set needs to make it up in another way. If your smash/lethal set happens to have some crowd control, or maybe a useful debuff or two, or higher base DPS, and it starts seeing less resistances, but fire inversely starts seeing more, there's going to be an abrupt balance shift, and not for the better. This is the sort of reason why balancing a game is such a pain. I often question initiatives like completely rebalancing enemy resistances, even if in theory it should improve the game, because it's just so much difficult work for so little reward. Unless the imbalance is breaking game design wide open (Hello Warframe armor scaling, I'm looking at you), it's low reward because all most players want is for their weapons, tools, characters, etc, to not suck. And making everything at least perform at an acceptable level is much, much easier than making everything balanced. The reason I say all this is that, sure, enemy resistances are all over the place in terms of balance, but aside from Psionic being too deep and smash/lethal being too prolific, how often do you find resistances negatively impacting your experience? Personally, I'd just cut back on those two and maybe do a quick pass to see if maybe a few groups couldn't use a few thematic resistances they don't already have.

Everything prior to 22 is a complete slog for most sets, even with inherent fitness, and most builds don't really feel like they're coming together in a fully coherent functional manner until at least the late 20s or early 30s. There's a meme that regularly does the rounds that goes along the lines of "the real game starts at 50" and there's a good reason for that. The game regularly gives me the impression that what it really wants me to do regarding existing content is to burn my way all the way to cap and then SK down or use Oro for story content. It's way, way more fun to do it that way than the "proper" or "normal" way. Champions Online actually managed to mostly fix this problem, it's just a shame about... Almost everything else. I really long for the day someone releases a superhero MMO with the kind of story and style City of Heroes has, the character creation depth of Champions Online, and a new initiative: Be less MMO and more Superhero.

People still farm portal corp missions. Door stomping in PI is also super common. None of the old metas really died because, frankly, they still work well enough.

It's been years, so I'm just going on something I remember being talked back when the game is live (around the time they removed weapon redraw time from successive attacks with sets like Katana and Broadsword). I could be off about this, and I don't know if it was strictly damage or maybe DPS. I do know for a fact that Fire sets are balanced like this, though, as it's really apparent when you use the sets. They tend to have extra AoE and do more damage through the DoTs in sacrifice of having little to no extra utility.

That is a massive can of worms, please be careful. Many of the sets in the game have strengths and weaknesses predicated off existing resistance. While life really sucks for Psi in the late game, there are others that could have it way, way worse... Or even swing the other way around, I seem to remember at least some of the Smash/Lethal sets get higher base damage to at least help with the extremely frequent resistances. Really, enemy damage resistance seems like something that probably should just get a trimming around the edges, rather than a complete rework.

I have one of these. It's fun, but I wouldn't call it the most powerful combo, and Gravity kinda carries it. The upshot of this combo is, like many Gravity/ combos, it's completely and totally an option of if you want to sit back and chuck random objects and blasts from range, or run in and go to town in melee. Gravity gives you access to some nice, damaging single target powers so you don't have to go into melee if you don't want to, unless you *absolutely* need to do some AoE damage... Which Wormhole helps with.

Arachnos doesn't actually want more control in the strictest sense. Knowing the ideology he follows, Recluse mostly cares about keeping control over his own organization, and having just enough of a grip on the rogue isles to force people into a life of bitter, brutal competition. Recluse's vision is that of social darwinism. The best way to look at the ideology of Arachnos is that they're Anarcho Capitalists with realpolitik. Which is to say Anarcho Capitalist without the non-aggression principle. Which in itself is to say untarnished, uncompromised capitalist ideology, capitalism in its truest most basic form: Dog eat dog, survival of the fittest. Think of how the Patriots think and operate in Metal Gear Solid. Recluse would probably get along with them really well, actually.

I wouldn't, the last 15 years was a mistake. Okay, maybe we can have flatscreens.

My interest in this returning game is rapidly dwindling for so, so many reasons and this just added another one to the list.

We're not talking about solutions to build problems, you are punching a strawman, please stop doing this.

I don't understand why people respond if they're going repeat a canned talking point that doesn't actually address what's being said. Listen, if set bonuses, epics, incarnates and consumables were an answer to anything I just said I wouldn't have said it. "Muh endurance management" likewise is a complete non statement, you could use this meme response to try and justify removing Quick Recovery from regen because "endurance management is part of the game" but you don't because you normally know better. If you're going to do this sort of thing, just don't.

They really should just do what they did for Sentinel Super Reflexes any time they're making a change to something really old and bad that people irrationally cling to. Give Ice Armor both options, but you can only pick one... Oh, and rework hibernate and remove the phase debuff.

While everyone is still ranting and raving about the wildly unpopular nerf to brutes, I'd like to just bring this back to the original point of the thread and say that... This is actually the most disappointing change in this patch to me. The maximum endurance increase not only was one of the most thematic changes I could imagine for tanks, but it opened up new high energy build possibilities that really only would have been comfortable on tanks. I kinda wanted to try a DA/TW Tanker, because the idea of a massive intimidating reaper dude covered in shadows and a suit of armor seemed like a lot of fun... But man that endurance is going to be terrible. Oh well, the changes should make something like Ice/Spines fun, even if it's not as cool a concept.

You do realize that Brutes already have the third lowest base damage out of all the archetypes, right? Defenders are the only class with an attack set that has a lower scalar, and the only AT lower than Defenders is Controllers... Which still have some options for doing crazy damage and farming like a boss, Fire/Kin being the one everyone knows and loves. Even if you were to actually drop even more nerfs on Brutes, the way you want to go about it is kinda tilting at windmills. Honestly, the size of the base damage difference between Tankers and Brutes is now large enough that in party play I can legitimately see Tankers being prioritized over brutes when building a team. Tankers have always been a bedrock choice due to Gauntlet just being so damn good at its job, but now they can do respectable damage too? I really do think the "design space" between Tankers and Brutes has widened considerably now.