Llewellyn Blackwell

Most of the actual wealth that is stolen annually in the U.S. is done by white collar criminals, a classification for crime that inherently exists to treat the wealthy who break the law better then the poor. Likewise Serial Killers and mass murderers often come from wealthier families, and it is well documented that Sociopaths and Psychopaths are mainly found in the fields of Corporate management, law enforcement, the medical fields, the clergy, and upper education. From pyramid scheme scum fleecing thousands for their retirement funds, to a doctor overseeing and abusing scores of young women gymnasts, these actions by singular individuals outweigh entire poor communities worth of crime. Anyone who denigrates and demonizes the poor would certainly not be a person who lived in Paragon that is for sure, sounds like the kind of thinking that belongs in Praetoria.

There is a common misconception among players that the world in which we play is largely like ours, and do not tend to dwell on what the Rikti Invasion did to the rest of the world. Paragon was far from the only city attacked, and in fact likely was far less hard hit then most, as most did not have beings on par with SM and the rest of games core iconic characters. Basically i am saying that one of the reasons Recluse and his isle even exist is because it is likely in better shape then much of the world. It really is not hard to imagine that in the wake of Coles death Stephan being largely unrivaled in power could take control of a vast swatch of the globe largely unchallenged.

This actually is something that matters to actual game devs quite a lot. For example over in Path of Exile, they have a setting for solo self found only. Doing this actually makes it so a player can not trade with others, and is entirely dependent on their own loot drops. It increases their chance for good loot to drop by a very large % but RNG being RNG still means getting the uniques they may need for certain builds much less likely. It exists however to help balance the game for those who do not want to engage in player trade. In DDO they have struggled for years to find a way to not let guilds who raid together and happily share raid loot to quickly get entire top tier BIS gear kits have an overwhelming advantage over those who run as pugs with each man for themselves. From a dev pov loot sharing like that in such a guild borders on exploiting the system, and for sure see it as a real balance issue. Because when a small % of players can reliably always get BIS gear kits quickly and then over power the current content, how does a dev design for them to be challenged while not punishing the players with average gear? In pen and paper dungeons and dragons its sop for a DM to regularly have such super loot stolen from characters to depower them if they are too out of sync with the group. CoH has a pretty flexible dif system, but we still are all aware of how a perfected toon basically breaks the game these days. Anti farming mechanics are a real need, and honestly at this point I think it should be something as simple as make inf earned from the AH go into its own storage and put a cap on how much can be withdrawn each day. It does not have to be anything too low, but keeping it to like 500 million a day would at least discourage that kind of behavior a bit. And yes it is behavior we should want to see discouraged. The goldilockes zone for loot rewards should always be aimed at pug groups doing actual social group content.

Honestly why not just several new channels with varying degrees of range? To be honest one reason I rarely bother with the D anymore is how chaotic it is, you have a small group talking actively and it can drown out and overwhelm anything else. Which would be fine if they were actually interested in others joining the conversation but it is far more common these days for it to be a clique of friends with no interest in random pug RP. Nor do they grasp they should keep it in a group chat as no one not in their RP group wants to have the local channel overwhelmed by private social drama RP none of us have any desire to hear about. Honestly it gets a lot of RPers on ignore these days as I see it as a sign of inherently uncivil RP to keep what is private RP in public. For example channels with a real close range akin to a typical pbaoe attack, so only those right up next to you can see the text would be great for those of us wanting to be seen, and approached while having our personal chit chat without it impacting anyone around us.

Sorry but taking a break does not ever fix the need for new shiny shiny. Looter motivation is a core motivation in the RPG genre going back to the earliest days of P&P table top gaming. You literally invalidate yourself even suggesting taking a break by the way as that is a well established non point in gaming forum debates. I enjoy the game play loop of COX very much and always will but new loot and new ways to create a build with that loot is a core mechanic of the genre that if ignored kills player interest like nothing else will. To even try to deflect or argue against this suggest to me you actually want to keep HC from ever growing beyond our modest little community of extremely fragmented players. Not surprising considering some of the stuff you have posted before, makes me think you dont even play anymore and seek to drive others away.

Elude on its own is all the def you need. What you want is to layer it with other things. I usually go with rebirth for the heavy healing to back up my near perma elude. I use phase shift to cover the down time (if I use agless I have perma elude but lack the handy healing, and phase shift is actually the best oh shit button anyone can have. Yes we have to waste powers on the stealth powers that dont do much else for an SR, but hey I hover in a fight to so it does add a touch to the total def. Finally its really about the primary with SR. a Dark Melee/ SR utterly laughs at AVs, especially melee ones. Claws lol, that is for regen users man. Claw on SR is about as gimp a pairing as you could take, and should not expect to push into the realm of meta builds reliably with it. You certainly should not expect to be a match for cosmic foes like Rul with finger nails and agility;)

I can agree with the OP that well as a looter the games loot is very stale. New IO sets, and other shiny shiny to motivate. I wont lie it is a large part of what keeps me on games like Warframe and Path of Exile. Warframes riven system makes it so you have an endless form of RNG based boosts to every weapon in the game, allowing players to take even low teir starter weapons and get them worthy of high end content with time,luck, and mat sinking to change the effects RNG wise on the things. Path of exile every league brings new Uniques, including what are called buil enabling uniques that have special effects found on no other item and allow a player to create entire new never before seen builds when utilized. They also have passive skill jewels with RNG aspects that can further allow a character to specialize in truly unique ways beyon the already massive fleixible tree, and make a character literally unique and 1 of a kind that no one can likely replicate without insane RNG luck getting the exact same effects on the jewel which is highly unlikely. Stale rewards are a sadly very sure fire way to get tired of the endless battle. Hell at this point I would take a single charge and no cap on max charges special summons for each AV we beat down, and get another charge each time we beat them down. At least that would be useful and amusing for a while. Heck it would even be a reason to go red side to collect hero AVs on my hero character for allies and vice versa .

Well for me there are quite a few in the form of the many comments this thread has gotten;). Say what you want imo it proved an atypically informative thread as the GM post was truly useful to help wade through the cesspool of those at the D who try to use the guise of RP to harass and abuse.

You have much to learn about the art of civil discourse and debate. A statement like the above would get you removed from a formal debate and likely kicked from a debate team for life. It quite literally invalidates anything you have or could further argue to make such a statement as you have here. And no I do not think the idea remotely adds something better to the game and would not agree with nor endorse it. However you need to learn to construct actual arguments rather then insults and denigrating language to try and push your pov. In other words if this was a formal debate, your post actually gets the other side points. Was that your goal to help the OP get their wish? Because that is what your post is basically doing.

Ive pondered an idea on this issue off and on. Along the lines of what if when a power only has a single slot giving it an inherent boost to all %s equal to what a DO gives. This bonus would vanish the moment a 2nd slot is given to a power. This would at least make a new power pick feel like it has a touch of oomph to it before you can invest slots into it. Down side is it is technically power creep to any power we tend to use as a single slot special IO mule would get a bit of a boost. However i dont think powers that get used as an lotg mule like vengeance would be that game break if when it did get used now and then it had those modest % increases I suggest.

Ok gotcha. That makes sense to me then. Back on live towards the end I did actually have a single toon that one day it struck me we had costume slots roughly equal to years the game had been active, and so took one of my 1st year toons and tried to assign a costume slot to represent each of the years by doing my best to recall what the main costume I had worn for that character around then had been. Kind of a costume slide show of year one year two etc. Obviously he did not look much different in face or body size as he was an adult already, but I could see someone doing a penny yin type growing up through the years approach to costume and character concept.

You uhm do notice he did say to keep the 6 slot limit per power right?

There was a short lived bug on live for just kheldians I recall, before the coming of ED, that allowed them to put as many slots as they wanted in a single power. It was a glorious few days of hilarity as many a PB flitted through the sky with a super fast combat flight and just used eye beams to one shot hamidon. Yeah it didnt last long sadly. But wont like it was some of the craziest amusement I had in this park.

If you dont have at least 80% acc into an attack it should feel pretty whiffy imo, especially against def based mobs. You should be having to run additional to hit buffs to hit them reliably. Otherwise they may as remove mob def entirely and just go with heavy amounts of DR on all mobs.

This would pair well with the idea I had a few years ago for a cox version of the nemesis system, where instead of making something custom we could exploit, instead make it so as we build a rogues gallery from the in game villains they become regular ambushes on the streets and can pop up in missions the way Qs do for khelds.

So my approach is perhaps atypical. I already have the entirety of a characters life mapped out at creation. And most of them only exist within the years the game was on live. Only a couple treat it as ever becoming as recent as the 2020s. When i am on a character I can be at any point in their lifespan. My costumes often depict my characters at different ages for this reason. When I flashback I tend to make my characters into their younger selves and treat it as jumping back into my younger body kind of like quantum leap but your own body only, I tend to feel that jives well enough with the whole O zone time travel thing. In other words I do not RP on some linear line of progression. I do not even RP characters until they are 50s because I do not RP young up and coming heroes, all my characters are around my own RL age or older with a few rare exceptions. Even when I am flashbacked it is my characters "Present" mind in his past body. I have to ask did you like actually plan to spend months or more in game playing your toon and slowly progressing their personal timeline? And why? Who would care if you kept it that linear unless you had a static group? I have a pair of friends who are in game married, and have a 3rd player RPing their baby now grown into a teen. All of that time happened in the last year or so RL. My characters did not age that many years but I still RP with them. I just dont bother to be more then a passing casual supporting actor in their RP, and they could log off and never come back and it would not impact my rp in any way. I try to never in any way shape or form bind my characters RP to anothers and certainly dont adapt my ideas to please or create something for others. I tend to DM in table top games and when I RP in an MMO I am also the DM of that session. Others are free to interact or not as they choose but my story is just that my story.

Truth, at least Homelander is a human born of Earth. He is actually entitled to use his powers given him by the minds of other humans to do whatever he may will by the right of being at the top of the food chain of earth based life forms. Superman is a literal alien invader seeking to impose his alien perfection on a world of flawed man animals.

So Statesman is a literal gods avatar and a family man. Zero the master of Pocket D a being with power quite beyond any player's scope. Recluse another literal avatar of a god seems content to rule over a very minor area of the globe most days. Bentley Berkeley the one actual Immortal in coh lore is basically a classic in over his head npc hostage. The D is a club that exist outside of space and time, and really its the mere mortals there that are the odd ones imo. Lucky now days a lot of in city sg base clubs exist for those mortals so they do not have to dirty up the realm of the divine for the true Powers;) This may shock you but most people wont care about your character or the story of it. Expecting some random to want to play 20 q about your toon is asking a lot of a strangers time actually. Most I know who RP at the D are looking for casual chatter while being in character, not trying to share a life story or learn someone elses. Hell a lot seem to be there just to RP taking offense to some random statement so they can argue and insult IC and seem to think that is good RP. I am really curious what exactly is your idea of an ideal random pug RP encounter that is not during actual content running? I myself am not really looking for much beyond momentary amusement in random RP. The only deeper RP story I care about is my toons, and those of friends toons associated with my toons. I am not looking to blend your story with mine unless you have really made a lasting and good impression on me while playing content normally. Then again i also have 0 qualm about putting people I consider bad at RP on ignore rather then suffer their inane babble.

That post is actually a truly useful bit of info that I for one appreciate and feel made this thread that was meant to be mainly abit of fun actually very worthwhile.

I just want to say that even though as I fully admitted this was largely just a joke suggestion for a bit of humorous back and forth, this right here was legit worthwhile information. In fact only a few days after you made this reply I was in the D and saw a player I rp with now and then have someone approach them and start doing /e emotes of a very hands on their character style, I PMd my friend saying they may want to keep that in a private local and they told me it was a stranger who was not wanted, passed on your reply from this post and they felt comfortable chastising the other player and sending a report after I informed them. They had not thought a pirate server would care about such behavior and figured it was something they had to suffer. So thanks for this post right here and helping to help inform and arm us against abusive behavior in game.

Existed before time/A Bajillion years old.(( abit on the overkill side of things perhaps but ona well decked out 50 with a ton of vet levels I would not think it out of bounds) - Can punch a healthy star hard enough to make it collapse into a black hole.( I would think that on the over board side of things, but top end SS builds I would certainly tolerate hulk lifting a mountain range stuff)) - Automatically knows the thoughts/emotions of everyone within a 10 mile radius.( If they are playing a real psi build, its max level and well kitted then I would allow it with the caveat any power set with mez and CC protection negates said ability just as it does in actual game play)) - Knows every spell/get out of jail or problem card on a whim.( Not really sure what you mean by this, I guess in pure RP context, well I tend to RP based on actual builds and powers so it would need to be reflected in such for me to really roll with such things smoothly)) - Their super power was literally, to be better than everyone else in every way.(( actually a very common power in comics these days, especially for G.E.L.Fs and androids etc. The old Khan better at everything/kryptonian is always popular. Keep in mind that is the core of what superman is, and by extension every player with a superman homage is going for)) - Utter immortality/immunity to everything.(( Well immortality is actually a very logical concept to RP in MMO as its the easiest way to explain never actually getting killed. As for immunity, as above better be reflected in the actual build. I consider anyone with an inherent res of 30% or higher to be immune to mundane sources of such damage types but require it capped to RP being immune or near immune to a super powered source of such a type., that is my rule of thumb ofcourse you are free to do you) - Can warp reality at a whim.(( Again a very common concept in MMO, infact many even RP a form of something like Neo from the Matrix, They actively rp this is what it is a game but with the idea they are actually in the game world in some way) - Multi-dimensional/immune to any negative/hampering effect in "this" reality.(( phase shift literally is all it takes to RP this viably)) - Questionable "Bloodlines" that seem way over the top or that don't make sense - Half Dragon, Demon, Angel, Vampire, Star-born, Werewolf, all rolled into one. Isn't that just a bit... much?( Its called a genetic chimera and in a setting like this with groups like Crey it actually is not remotely that weird to be a many creature blend) - Related to/knows X famous NPC/Monster/Group (( Not just common but was highly praised on live by the devs. I rolled around on live since year one as T'Keron Valmaz based on names drawn from the lore of the NPC Infernal, met the dev Infernal as that character at an official CC, greeted him with a hail friend K'Varr, and ended up on his friends list and chatted with him off and on for a while. Nice guy, though I got along better with Ghost Falcon being that I had a character named Invisible Falcon based on the lore. Fun fact he ran GF as a ill/kin troller because that was his main and favored play style, but that was not GFs official power sets. Yes GF was a fellow playing this game long before he got hired on the dev team. So the whole being tied to in game factions and NPCs is actually something we tend to call lore based RP, and obviously while some do not like it, and sometimes concepts can even conflict, the goal of it is to use the world and lore to make it easier to pug rp with others of a like mind. For example I have a toon who is in vanguard, and in theory that should make it easy to random pug rp with others who rep as vanguard. Honestly my own biggest pet peeve in RP with strangers is this need to basically act like your a nameless nobody who wouldnt be known. If one is on a 50, that alone should be enough for any and all to be RPing they are at least aware of their existence. And non 50s should be treating 50s the way we would expect them to treat Statesman himself. I always scan bio pages looking for RP hooks especially things like you may know this character for this event type of things. Example I have a character who was born and raised in Paragon Heights aka galaxy city. He was a young hero there the day of the rikti invasion and I rep he was part of the group of "young Heroes" Trapped with alexis cole duncan who was leading an evacuation effort there when they got trapped. If by chance I encounter someone else on that character who used that same bit of lore we can easily RP as having been fighting alongside each other that fateful and tragic day so long ago. This also leads to the content being more meaningful. I ran above character on live for most of it, and when the first sig story arc landed, and I ran the part with ACD well lets just say it meant something to that character of mine in a very personal way. So really man you do you, find those you get along with, and try to get along best you can with those you pug rp with. improving can go well if one is flexible enough. For example I made a friend out of an alien GELF a while back IC and our entire interaction was doing improv off of each other about alien worlds, space federations and galactic trading corporations we likely drew out of our sci fi mental database. The point is it was all just fun random sci fi babble that lead to a now semi regular bit of rp with a cool alien character who likes to visit my space ship.

Well part of it might have to do simply with the rules of conduct. Unless its wanted, players trying to stir up RP conflict and drama actually amounts to harassment. We keep in our circles because those are the players who we can RP with without being having to deal with negative time. The only places heroes and villains can encounter each other in non pvp environs are a few co op zones. In the D by the very lore of the game our very ability and perhaps even will to think of doing violence or stirring conflict is being pacified by a force beyond any a player character can muster. Basically the only random RP that is allowed is that of a friendly nature. Insults even IC can be reported. In fact any form of unwanted RP can be. Someone goes up and does a /e runs their hand down your back, and if they are not a friend that knows they are welcome to, you can report them for sexual misconduct. Basically RP is for friends, and basic random civil pug RP. Most of us ime who RP are not RPing because we are after some kind of conflict or drama, and those who do usually dont last long.

See this is were you and a few others are in fact not only in the wrong but in fact clearly seeking to cause conflict and denigrate those who oppose you. No one here gets to say what is or is not the right use of time for volunteers. Not even those who donate have one right to act as if we are a customer base trying to push our personal agenda down a companies throat because they take our money. As was pointed out by one of the HC team over in the PVP threads, you not liking something personally is not a valid position nor something of any interest to the HC devs. When folks talk about what they want to see in PvP, folks saying no dont spend time on pvp because they do not do pvp are not offering anything of validity nor interest to the HC team. Unless it is a priority they are doing an all hands on deck situation for, basically everything done is a personal whim they want to do, and we here of sane and civil mind understand that. What you and I think is trivial or consequential quite literally has no validity in these kinds of discussion. The only ones who get to deem that are the HC team. They made it clear they felt the change worth their time, and you demean them by saying otherwise. That is not else but rude and an attack on the HC team imo.

So I fully admit this is something of a joke suggestion but it does base itself on a bit of history. So as we all know some of the most asked for and yet often vocally opposed costume bits to be shared across the gender divide are those that let male figures be bare chested. For some this may be a bit of juvenile amusement, but I doubt that for most, who ime are just serious costume makers and role players who want their female war wolf to be female looking yet savage and bestial and that sort of thing. The fix for that btw, would be to go with 6 sets of more wolf looking teets rather then leaning more toward fur covered human ones. However for those wanting such on more human figures there has always been one way that seems to time and time again have let even nude figures in public remain, often defended by a faction most would think be on the other side. To what do i speak? Well back in the era of the rise of amusement parks and carnivals, one to capture the more old midway worlds fair vibe constructed some roman looking pillars at the entry way and standing between them in all her female figure glory a lovely angel spreading her wings to the heavens. And when some prudish types complained and wanted to tear it down, it was the local church community that rallied to protect it saying it was made in the image of the divine and was not pornography as its detractors called it. So what we need is some skins that while nude have clearly angelic aspects. like a chest skin that always comes with feathered wings, maybe some divine symbology and boom good to go, no harm no foul. In fact based on the arguments made by local church leaders at that time in defense of said statue, its actually an insult to the glory of such beings to clothe them in earthly garb;) Oh and as for the bottoms, how about a saints row style blur effect? I mean I think for most its more about conveying the concept for actual design purposes and not to show actual nude bits. Or honestly for my male angel toon rather then a loin cloth I would love to just like glow so bright in that front area that no one could see a thing because he is just too damn glorious a sight;)

Yeah have to say I dont like the idea of all tanker/scrapper type survival sets having built in immunity to being debuffed. SR is a special case because its pure defense, and when defense fails due to a debuff spiral its a certain death sentence with no real time to recover. I myself did not exactly like that fix and as I see SR as the "Flash" defense set, I felt it should of actually had a passive regen system that would actually at its full power rival Regen itself, but then again I also felt regen should have had a passive that worked a lot like a brutes fury bar before we got brutes, and still think regen itself should have a more I am beat up meaner I get passive aspect to it. I think that is where I differ with a lot of other regen users, I find it just about right sustain wise, I just think it doesnt do anything else but heal enough, and a lot of other sets do things to buff damage in some way while offering equal if not better survival power.