Llewellyn Blackwell

I guess these are things that just so do not matter to me, that they exist only to be things for me to argue against. Making things too easy to understand is bad. Making things too balanced is bad. There should be build choices that favor build styles. Anything less leads to generic watered down build options. Procs like everything will need to be BIS for some builds and meh for others, otherwise they may as well just be removed from the game and their bonuses integrated in as standard effects everyone has at all times.

I will just point out this thread and attitudes in it have had an impact, they have made me choose to remove all utility and support aspects from all of my builds. From now on even my support ATs will be played and built entirely with solo play in mind, and even when teaming will basically just treat every other team member in pugs as no more or less then my summoned pets. If this was the kind of social change the OP and those who support trying to push Defenders and trollers back into a box of stay in the back shut up and support had been hoping to have, than mission accomplished. If your goal was to see more people offering support to others via build choices rather than focus on their own immediate needs for leveling and enjoying their own game play loop in their way, than I would have to say you have failed greatly at least where I am concerned. Sometimes folks can be their own worst enemy, and trust me on this as I know that lesson well from personal experience.

I just have to ask the forum admin how a post like this is even allowed? It is clearly denigrating a huge portion of the player population.

I kind of am of both sides minds. I rather love many of the building designs in the red side. It often far better suits the mood of my batman homage who ends up doing more time red side street sweeping solo then many other things just because it suits his concept best. I would love to see the city scapes of paragon reimagined with more diverse building designs sprinkled in among the less skyscraper filled regions. And the sad thing is we cant even begin to know how the city may have grown to look as we know the Live Devs had planned on doing to all of Paragon what was done to Atlas Park. We know they wanted to start making use of the assets in red and gold side in blue side, simply because blue side was the only side really worth investing dev time in due to player base almost entirely choosing to play in it. Its why i think for HC the best choice would be to due away with sides entirely and let players go and play and do missions for who ever they want freely. Put the alignment powers in P2W so we dont lose them entirely for those who may care about them, and let us actually wander the larger game world we have as easily as possible.

I will just point out that on live, and in every official MMO, the rules players are to conduct themselves by actually make doing things like telling a player you will boot them if they do not conform to your demands simply because you are the team leader considered an act of harassment. On live you could quite literally get a ban for booting someone from a TF for not submitting to your commands( this to my chagrin happened to me more then a few times during my early control freak phase of TF leading on live, and did in fact help shape me into a better team leader) The default rule on just about any and every single MMO is if you for any reason do not like how another player is playing, is its on you to remove yourself from the team, not try to force the other to leave the team. The leaders ability to boot a team member is supposed to be used only for when you have someone actively violating the rules of player conduct themselves, and you do not want to wait around for a GM to resolve the issue. At least that is my experience with MMO and how they treat this topic in general. HC is obviously not required to abide by the same strict standards real MMO tend to adhere to. Considering how tolerant they seem to be on people talking in very graphic and intimate detail in public chat exposing anyone and everyone to peoples ERP, it seems rather clear HC is not exactly trying to uphold much in the way of social standards.

So all those people who died during the blip with no idea of the fate of their loved ones and their suffering is less then nothing next to Tony's need to keep his daughter in existence? I come from a very different view of magic and morality from decades of D&D playing. The King Priest the lawful good ruler of a lawful good empire committed the greatest act of evil in his world by invoking the power of the gods to try and banish all evil from the world, and thus his soul faced the greatest torment ever reserved for a mortal. The greatest hero in all of such fantasy was a man who ritually tortured and killed his entire family whom he truly loved heart and soul, because only such a terrible act and sacrifice could secure him the aid of dark powers strong enough to save his world from an invading force that would consume all life in its entirety. A man who puts keeping his little girl above preventing the suffering of an entire universe, is not ever gonna make HERO in my book. He actually rates as worse than Thanos himself, who actually did make terrible sacrifice for the cause he truly believed was right and just as stupid as it actually was. Just being the one who died does not make Tony a hero, The fact he specifically demanded that the rest submit to his command his daughter and the 5 years of cosmic wide catastrophe must remain because his daughter was a price he would not ever pay, is by the standard of good and evil I adhere to in all things sci fi and fantasy an act of evil so truly vile it is beyond the written language to convey.

I can say I have met more then a few in my time on live that played with one hand and a gamer mouse with enough buttons they could have most keys used by their left hand mapped to their thumb pad. I do that myself when I am feeling more casual on teams or during a MSR etc. It is one of those things that certainly is part of the varied way players play that I suspect leads to disconnects at times in this discussions.

Once upon a time find a glowy missions could be beaten without ever fighting a mob if you could find a way to distract mobs from seeing you, they removed that long before stalkers got made. I guess being able to just get the base mish xp without fighting and getting all the sweet mob xp was just too rewarding for those playing stealth centric types and did not need the gratification of mass murdering pixels.

A hero must never waver in their commitment to stand between the innocent and the wicked. A hero must always be of the most serious of minds, never failing to take into account every single thing around them. Batman does not get called a hero because he is not taking it seriously, and lets a thug fire off a shot that kills some bystander. Superman is not a hero if he does not prevent 100% of all collateral damage caused during his fights, because if he fails to, he literally has failed to be superman. If the most noble of men attempts to invoke great power in the name of good, but it unleashes a great cataclysm that he failed to foresee he is no less the hand that wrought all that pain and violence. A mortal man like Baron Zemo within the context of the MCU is entirely justified and empowered by the right of blood debt to invoke all that he must use to defend the mortals of Earth from the would be gawds that now walk his world. In the eyes of every human, every META in MCU has because of the events of Ultron alone become justified and empowered to carry out genocide upon any and all META beings as an act of premeditated self defense. This is one of the things long established in the nerd circles of Marvel. There is a reason they retconned Jean Grey not being the actual physical being the dark pheonix during her world killing. There is a reason they end up killing off Prof X, who was always inherently wrong. Both humans and Magneto are right. For humans mutant kind can only be a threat, and for mutants humans only ever be lesser beings unfit to be seen as peers and potentially a threat if gathered in mass. Never forget Magneto was a holocaust survivor. He has seen loved ones marched to oblivion by humans no better than the most rabid animal. Nature gave him his place on the food chain, the world gave him the right to fight against any he deems a threat to him and his own kind, human kind is so stained with blood it has no right to challenge nor condemn a being like him. Yet he was often demonized while Prof X literally unleashed child soldiers to fight in his name. The House of M, was about as close to utopia as a universe was ever imagined by comic writers, and it was because the actual living gods given to the world by nature took control, embraced their birthright, and everyone else took a knee to those they had no right to question nor challenge. The final lesson Batman ever gave to superman in the Dark Knight Strikes Again, was making him finally understand he never was, never could be, and never should have tried to be as a human upon this Earth. To do what he really could do for humanity he would need to step away from it and become entirely the superman. Spider Man is the joke he is because he is always joking.

Do you have a scrapper build/video soloing 12 AVs at once? I would love to see it if you do as such are always truly a great bit of fun to watch. That is the literal standard of Dark/SR 12 AVs at once. And that was with SOs, no set bonuses just the raw power of those 2 sets combined and a player who had his rotations down like a pro. Anyone trying to act like soft defense from sources that lack debuff resistance somehow obsolete as a set like SR are exactly the kind of barmy cutters who help get things they dont really understand or use or at least use well nerfed.

Again did I say it was always inherently top DPS? No, however virtually any honest player knows that in general energy based damage sets perform better globally then physical ones simply due to the nature of mob resistances. Likewise I made specific mention of a famous META combo, Claws also has its own famous meta combo partner, the very obvious one REGEN. Regen and claws both excel when the set focus is on global recharge, Its damage buff ability for example is best when used every other attack in an attack chain to keep its buff stacked as high as possible. Much like BS and Katana might with the parry attack for defense. Regen thrives on recharge due to being heavy click based spot healing, having those ready when you need them is always a good thing. I would never expect a Dark/ Regen for example to compete with either a Dark SR, or Claw Regen at top end performance and frankly dont want that to really be the way the game works. I want bad build paths, newb traps, non meta and meta combo options. I want there to be -1x1 builds and +4 x8 solo builds.

Did I say that? No I said that in a discussion of META and scrapper builds then DM/SR a scrapper combo that was made legend on live being shown to be able to basically fight every melee AV in the game at once and between the to hit debuff and mac defense mobs get to about as close toa 0% miss chance as exist within the game would be the canidate for top end scrappers I would be using to compare a top end tank meta combo to. SR on its own is not META DM on its own is not META, together on a scrapper specifically they become a META combo, that is to builders like me a good thing. We want combos that excel to exist for our gawd mode outlet, just as we want builds we can make weak enough they need to be run on -1 X1 just to be able to play the game. If we are not going to allow builds on both extreme ends of the spectrum to exist, by buffing and nerfing everything into some mid range performance for the sake of global balance then most of our dif setting can just be thrown out.

No SIR! No they are very clearly all not bloody heroes. In fact the one who gets billed as the biggest hero in the end, Tony Stark is literally beyond redemption and should have been imprisoned or executed for every single action committed by Ultron. In the MCU Ultron is 100% the fault of Tony and Bruce, and the fact he is not only allowed to remain free, but his wealth not stripped from him to pay restoration to any and every single person who lost something due to Ultron's attack is the kind of glossing over his actions that make the movies basically get watched as pure mindless action flicks by me, because the story and writing does not portray heroic icons imo. Hell even the Blip only remains because Tony was so selfish he had to have the 5 years and his little girl exist be put above removing all the horror the blip must surely have caused to so many all over the world. Keeping that Blip was such a selfish act on Starks part it is beyond any atrocity committed by any other in all of the MCU.

I mean snarky you do know that next to offenders it was trollers who first set records for solo killing GMs on live right? It is not the trollers being able to now solo every AV and GM that have been propped up. Tankers, scrappers, brutes, and stalkers rarely were Gm or even AV solo killers on live with a few exceptional builds shining out. The Dark/SR solo taking on 12 AVs for example come to mind, but they were all melee AVs cherry picked to show off such a scene even then. The real issue is gamers and game devs in general tend to not like lock down cc powers. Across MMOdom complaints about actual lock down control powers is very common. Ironically the kinds of CC debuff effects that dont actually shut down mobs, are among the kinds of powers most hated by players here in coh, slow and sapping our power piss off many, as do powers like blind that force players to slow down, or phased mobs. Yet it is exactly these kinds of things when used against us that force our play loop pace to change which is the actual definition of challenge in game design. Any thing that forces a player to alter their play loop in an unexpected way. Even fake nemmy bubbling up and running around and making us stand around like sonic shaking in frustration at holding still is actually more a challenge then many other things we encounter in this game from a design pov.

There is a reason back on live my character who was meant to be a mere mortal man, never respecced after fitness became inherent. Frankly i wish we had that as an option in this version purely for self challenge/rp limitations. I myself do not make a Superman to find challenge, I make one to negate it. Batman has to be smart and cunning and work his arse off for his victories, Superman sneezes and wipes away lethal pollution from a city. When I want the batman feeling I play my batman concepts, when I want to feel like superman I play my superman concepts. What is so hard about doing that, that others can not seem to switch gears or characters or play styles to suit a given mood? Changes that make my mortal men more godly or my gods more mortal are not going to make this game worth playing just make my characters more generic.

I am in agreement with Snarky, this whole thread reeks of stirring the pot. And if I and Snarky are in anything remotely the same camp, that is practically the equivalent of statesman and recluse setting aside their inherently conflicting personal points of view to recognize a threat to all life as it is known.

But it is not significant imbalance, nor does it take into account that what they enjoy kills enjoyment for others. The very poster you respond to there is a perfect example of someone who clearly would be far happier on their own private server because they clearly think we are all just terribly stupid for enjoying the game design that does not favor his claw scrapper being king of the kill list by some inherent default position of divine right. Because if they get their way they ruin the game for others, when they could just go take their ball and play by themselves if they dont want to get along with those who hey we just make terrible decisions because we found builds we like that are built in a manner they oppose and are just too inferior because we do not agree a claw scrapper should be better dps by some default they imagine must rule the very movement of the sun and stars in the heavens above. Frankly ayone even building a Claw/SR loses any semblance of cred from me ina discussion about builds power balance meta and all taht. A Dark SR scrapper would be the obvious scrapper entry into any challenge between ATs to prove top end DPS/survival/sustain debate between the DPS ATs. That would be like trying to use a DP blaster instead of a fire blaster to talk their real kill power. Balance between ATs should not ever be between power sets. Some power sets should work better for some play styles, and combo better with some 2ndary choice better then others. There should be top teir meta combos for those who want them, as long as the dif scale exists to allow even sub par builds to find a path to slowly level if the player just really wants to play it, than its all fine. After all if there is no such thing as a build that needs to run at x1-1 then why even have that dif setting at all?

My SS/Regen Brute will keep standing around healing and killing forever while most tanks end up eating sand. A skilled tank player is almost as rare as a skilled blaster player. Like maybe 5% of the total player base on HC are either.

Like right? How can anyone post as this guy you responded to be taken seriously. Like since the dawning of the age of villains, the Brute was well understood to be an AT that did not need a lot of its enhancement slots devoted to raw dmg% boosts. The rage bar alone covers a huge chunk of their total damage buff cap. Hell one of the things I love about Brute is you can easily just put a couple franken slot set IOs for acc/recharge,and end cost reduction on each attack for leveling, and never suffer blue bar issues even at the levels most others all do just because they do not need to devote their slots to raw dmg.

I am going to say some things and hope they maybe make a shift in some folks point of view. So I think its safe to hazard the assumption most who post here are fairly active CoH players, dare I say many might even consider CoH their main or only game they really actively play. However there are also other breeds of gamer. There is the wider MMO gamer, often called the content locusts who leaps from MMO to MMO with each new update toenjoy new content in a constant cycle of fresh new virtual adventure. Then there is the Gamer, one who has a game library physical or digital that would rival the library of congress in size( J/K...maybe;)) And for them gaming is something they do based on whim and mood, They go from world to world in their games like a Planes Walker in MTG wanders the realms of reality. They keep many games on hand just to step into an old city or wander through an old mystical forest they know well once more. And for them it is not at all uncommon for years to go by between their stepping into a game. And most MMO companies know this, and know that only a very small percentage of their population is even logging in on an annual basis. The longer an MMO goes the more recent returnee threads become a thing as players who have taken 2 3 or 4 year breaks become ever more common. And most usually return to fanfare if they were even modestly well known in the smaller communities most MMO have. DDO aka Dungeons&Dragons online is a perfect example of this. It is an MMO with more turbulence in its history then most, and as such has seen large exodus's of players no few times, and thus in turn it often sees the long gone player become a returnee with no few years between them. And the subject of name purging does come up there on the forums from time to time, but the company has made it clear they will never purge names, even of purely FTP characters, because they understand how an in game reputation can become attached to a character. Let me put it this way while no great player on DDO just about every time I return to Ghallandia server there my elf characters who all have names starting with Leaf like Leafon and Leafel tend to have some players go yeah I am pretty sure I recall your name from way back, And my bard half elf Spruce Springstream never fails to get some level of recognition there. And it has now been at least 2+ years since my last log on to the game maybe 3 or more. And I am a nobody there basically, If someone like the famous barbarian player Axer who has been gone from that game more then a decade was to return, even those who had not played back then would be made aware of how big a deal it was, and sure as shit no one else ever deserves to have that name on a character just because he has been gone and likely never to return. Or take the case of a friend of mine who died in 06. He was pretty top shit in his raiding guild in wow as a shadow priest, most said he was top shadow priest on his server from what I gather as I never was a wow player meself. Still every year his little brother logs onto his account on the day of his death and the guild gathers to spend an hour or two talking about the exploits of the silent phantom that visits them. Would you truly say such a thing should ever risk having the name lost because for whatever reason that annual log in does not happen? While it is true we have globals, not all of us use them or recall them as much as specific characters, and a character name being handed around could lead to some real social confusion in game, the kind that could lead to some real negative feelings for someone if they feel taken advantage of by some stranger they mistook for an old friend. Even in games that have subs and real money being spent like DDO they are not even considering taking names from pure FTP accounts more then a decade old. That is how much of a non issue a money making company sees this as. So I frankly cant even see why the HC team would consider catering to a vocal minority on the forum over a topic no professional company of even modest size considers worth time or thought on. I am just trying to stress that perhaps the players here thinking even an annual log on is a lot of time are not considering the span of time MMO go, the nature of persistence that makes players return to them even with years between, and that unless we are going to adopt a champions style name system I think names need to remain unique and on the characters they were claimed by to avoid needless drama and confusion.

You know after going through it all, I really dont care about most of your changes one way or another. But I have to ask who thought taking away the actual power pool long range teleport and replacing it with a shit tp foe power was a good idea? My teleport pool LRT had a nice low CD making it actually useful and on the toons who sued it preffered even over the old base macro shit. And I dont mind you giving everyone a generic version, thats fine too. But why take away the best top tier aspect of the teleport pool, and all we get in turn is combat tp which is honestly meh at best because really its not that useful in combat still lol? I mean sorry but for those of use who used the actual old TP LRT power, and used it to liberally travel around the game world quickly, this feels like a pretty big nerf to an actual legit power. Could you of not just given the teleport pool lrt the new fast cast time and leave it in, so those who willingly invested in the power had some way to be a better long range teleporter then those using a generic power?

A fun little modern MMO adventure quest 3d uses a very player friendly travel/drop down menu allowing fast travel to virtually every part of the game, as well as the ability to teleport to anyone in your part,friends list, or guild no matter what content they are doing even if you are locked out of the zone because you have yet to do the story content to unlock it yourself. And that is a game that every single zone has unique cosmetic gear one might want, so there is always a reason even when you out level a region you may want to wander through on your way to pick up a few material bits to casually work toward some set of boots or a cloak or armor you want to wear just for the looks.

I mean I am always happy to help save an ally in trouble, but if I knew them to be thinking like you Id likely use them as veng bait and only rez them after fights got cleared. Basic build tips and tricks are not min maxing meta stuff. I mean absolutely worst case you should have your in game email loaded with useful inspirations that you can access inside mishes. It has been a common thing since emailing ourselves got added to the game. The Devs even said they saw it as a loophole but not an exploit when it came to having access to extra inspirations inside mishes. It is so sop in the coh community, that you acting like its too much hassle to be bothered by, and that others should be eager and happy to help cover your lack of effort is the kind of thing that some might consider an aspect of a weak link team member.

Orcourse it is still up for debate, after all what is understood about human psychology today amounts to about what the average ant knows and understands about the same subject. After all the last few years ever increasing evidence suggests we as a species have been pretty big on eating our own species, as even about half of the human population has a genetic resistance to Prion related issues. Something studies suggest could only come from thousands of years of actively eating our own as a regular part of our diet. Something we also do not see in any primate species, as it far more closely resemble the behavior of something atypical like the King Cobra, which I imagine you know is unique in the snake kingdom for being exclusively a snake eater up to and often including their own kind. Now I am not saying we dont see things like chimps and baboons eat monkeys etc, but what increasing evidence suggest is we just did it as a way to turn rivals into food stores, and seem to mainly have been the children of rival groups. Things also seem to be increasing the idea that we ate and raped into oblivion our closest rivals and kindred humans. Are you familiar with the accounts of William Buckley? He was a convict that escaped the penal colony into the outback and lived for a time with the aboriginal people. His accounts are some of the very few of the behavior of the people pre genocide by the colonization. As I imagine you know since its in your wheel house, stone age tribal peoples offer a unique window into how more then likely our early pre history stone age ancestors lived and interacted. If his accounts are remotely accurate, the groups were little more then single family units rarely ever growing beyond 3 or 4 adult men in the majority of groups, with sudden violence between the different family groups being often, sudden, very difficult for Buckley to discern the motivation and cause of beyond simply encountering each other, and almost always going until 1 or 2 of a groups adult men got killed, and one or two of the younger females on the losing side being taken away by the victors. He also claimed that they routinely ate the dead of their own group or those they killed in battle, and was in fact the only real reason beyond taking girls he could determine as a cause for the violence. He claimed he never partook in that, though most imagine he simply didnt want to admit to such in his accounts. Keep in mind for basically all of human history our species has been subject to what literally amounts to brainwashing via religious indoctrination going back basically as far as we can find in known history. With such a factor known, it makes it very easy to doubt we will any time soon really see what humans really are like in a natural state.

Not quite the same thing as PB, Khelds in general and PB especially have an actual active group of haters that seem to feel it is their duty to try and get everyone playing one to forsake the AT entirely, as for my energy blaster, he is named Mr. Energy, so thats abit more in the open then a bio and build that is not readily obvious to random passing folks unless they are taking the time to examine your bio and build page. So hey I am glad you dont get the hate directed at you, try having a PB as one of your main stable, lets just say its good I almost only lead teams cept when I join a friend or someone I am familiar with to play hired gun for. But my PB Skylord on everlasting, lets say he isnt the lowest profile either, and when you get noticed its not always from those that like being on tanks and brutes who face plant trying to gather up rikti on a MSR and I swoop down to revive them, heal them, and cover them while dragging the mobs they couldnt and then some without fear. There are those that will trash talk a PB all day long, and then when you show them how unstoppable they can be, they switch gears to calling them brokenly OP and a crutch and clearly need to be nerfed etc. Let me put it this way I frequently join MSR on my PB because vanguard, Shout out to Helen a handbasket who I never miss a chance to fly with. And guess how many PB I see on them typically, most of the time 1, mine, now and then as many as 3 PB at once, And especially when I am the only one there will usually be a mixture of arent I special and boy PB must really suck with no one ever playing them jabs in chat. Not really mean spirited but certainly not meant to make you feel like your character is valued by them either.