Llewellyn Blackwell

I due to this thread threw together a ILL/Time, just to test out the power boost/far sight thing first hand. Cant say I see any big deal. I mean just having to take a pool with power boost often misses out on far more fun choices just for some def. and the power boost/ far sight combo while nice strong buff, considering the level it comes together at is around the time you start meeting exemped 50s with incarnate powers well, its just a non issue. I mean if we could get power boost/farsight in the low levels that could be way too much. But my build only gets power boost at lvl 44. Incarnate toons exemping down keep their powers as low as 45. Then come the barriers and more so I just cant see any need for HC volunteer devs to waste a second on this.

I just looked at that list for the first time... would that mean I was the 1 50 psi blaster in that list? Just curious lol

Without trying to come across as attacking the OP Ive crossed paths with them a couple times and my insight into their approach to play is the following. On a leveling brute, they tended to bite off more then they could handle and were little better then veng bait to the team. They came across as someone who really seems to rush for cap play, fully kit a build, and then engage with content. Second time, They were on a tricked out cap brute, and were a teams main frontline meat shield and DPS alongside a blaster on a control heavy team, and left the team to go try to solo an AV ignoring the plan of the team to go glory hound. Again they did not come across as someone that really plays the game, or engages with their team. But more as someone here to tick boxes off of an imagined achievement section like a Steam game. Hence they made my ignore list, as rule number 1 on any TF I lead is to if there is a strategy in play for it to be adhered to for the greater goal of the team. They seem to only care about numbers, and the meta. And really seems to need strong solo builds because I suspect they have made no few ignore lists playing like that on the RP server.

*Cough* warshade*Cough*

Got to say I feel in the case of your batman parody... homage? Not sure which was really your goal with the above names you tried. Here is my batman homage born in praetoria. The Black Flying Fox! Along with his sidekick The Bumblebee Bat, they fought the violent and merciless who harmed innocent people, no matter their station or faction. I originally made BFF back on Live and had no issue getting his name again. On one hand I have zero issue with how CoH does it, and on the other had fun with COs global handle system as well. If they changed it for CoH it wouldnt break my heart but would def change things.

On the subject of what would of been with Tyrant. Well my own personal twist would of been for him to after getting the entire worlds worship, steadily move towards what I call the Tyrant State era. I see him as doing the same thing that happened in cimorea, and fusing with the nictus for even more power and helping the Path of the Dark spread. At this point we would get a true redemption arc for Recluse, now the worlds one hope to match the doppleganger of his dead frenemy. This would of been an era of the city being ruined, to help pave the way for zone by zone upgrades like AP got. Or something along those lines anyways.

Statesman an Icon? Maybe for some, but not many in my experience. I myself am certainly an ardent detractor of Statesman, tend to see Sister Psyche in a pretty negative light as well. Manticore im mostly just kinda bleh about. Positron and Synapse well they are not exactly without their moments that bordered more on mad scientist then super hero. Funny enough its the young heroes so many in game mock I am a bigger fan of. Fusionette and Temblor, The sisters we save during the LGTF. what encounters we do have with them in game are ones that I enjoy and make them feel like characters mine would actually be friends with and hang with at the D. Bad enough how many alternate marcus coles I see running around these days. There is Statesboy, Empire Statesmans, Statesmans., Marcus cole, marcus cole with an i for the L, God King Marcus Cole, and so many more. I miss Alexis, her father can burn in the 9 hells for infinity and beyond!

The issue with doing a standard generic rider, is well we also have huge size characters. There really is no reason to create a alter form travel power that simply ignores a meaningful portion of characters. About the only vehicle transformations that frankly imo warrant attention are those that are more universal due to hiding the operator. Something like a skyskiff imo would be a good start. While we would have to bend our imaginations for huge guys using them, they conceal the pilot, and are basically a normal mob size flying vehicle. They might even be able to have it be the first alt form power with attacks,

alternate language spellings are a classic way to reuse names so to speak. I mean if having a variation of the name for the concept is a must, its about the best I can offer.

Seeing as how canada includes french canada what about Bouclier? It might make your character by using one englisha nd one frnech word come across as more all of canada rather then just the british half?;) Now I could edit out these spelling errors, but this right here folks is what typing at 5 am fresh out of bed with barely a sip of coffee in you looks like in text form;)

I first played on a friends pc and account and a few months later couldnt resist the call and became an active MMO gamer. My first characters oddly enough were drawn from my years of D&D mainly, but that lasted all of a month. I got way into learning the lore of this game. I had a thing for learning about villain groups and finding ways to play them as heroic. For example one of my characters Demetrios Vasilikos was meant to be a Paragon Protector using a DNA memory core made from Doc Vahz. Kind of a what if you plucked Dr.Jekyll from Hyde and gave him a super powered body kinda thing. Then years later in a certain quest set in Praetoria who do I cross paths with right after its release while in a pug? Yep and suddenly people are asking wait whats going on, and I am lik read my bio page and you will understand who this guy we met is in our prime world. Then someone was like wait so this guy is doc vahz, and your like a clone of doc vahz? And I was like yeah more or less. Then someone was like wont they generic you? I was like pretty unlikely as the guy was just a hostage npc and Id made a few characters doing exactly that over the years with no issue. Even my forum namesake, which was a name I actually did a paid name change for originally on a capped toon I leveled witha generic name, as was a habit I developed to help justify throwing more money at the game via name changes. I asked for the name Bentley Berkeley even mentioned exactly were in game it was to be found with the request and it was approved with a nice little side comment from the admin who did, giving me props for wanting to use a name from the games lore like that. Which was similar to why the Dev Infernal and the Dev Ghost falcon would when i crossed their paths as certain characters end up becoming in game associates of mine Id play and chat with now and then till the game shut down. Both real nice guys btw, and like us just loved playing this game and role players to!

That is just a myth though. Even in this very thread its explained how a sapper build works. And just like when we players get sapped, if your a strong end recovery build its a minor issue. My regen and will powers, my drain psyche blaster etc, do not even bat an eye at malta sappers, super stunners etc. Plenty of builds players can make do not consider sapping foes so much as a blip on the map of possible threats. To make a sapper build, it takes synergy and investment just like any powerful build. And Ive seen single handed sapper builds flatline GMs long before they can be burned down by the team. Now yes the issue with elecs 2ndary aspect is that it demands that synergy to really do well. But since the pay off for that synergy is being able to render the biggest and baddest mobs impotent at a speed well beyond any teams kill speed, I say its justified. Now it might be nice if other sets had a power in the box to help make the 2ndary less of a need for the build, maybe in a epic/patron pool to really open up diversity. But in general sapping builds are not worthless, nor too slow, to bring value to a party even one able to just burn down missions. People really need to have created a fully decked out sapper and played it at high end play to understand what it is and can do. Its not one of those builds you can take to 32 or 38 and say ok I understand this builds potential.

Except as keeps getting said whatever change occurs should be for both player and mob elec powers. Do you really want a direct dmg debuff equal to whatever amount down your end bar is? End isnt about being tired. We dont enter the sleep cc state when we flatline on blue. Comparing it to some kind of winded/exhausted concept is more how your own internal rp logic is coloring the mechanic. We after all have sleep, and exhaustion status effects in the game. Now it might indeed be interesting to add so that if we do flatline, or the mob does it triggers a sleep state and when awoken has the exhaustion effect. But then what about Red? Why would not being lower on red also produce 2ndary effects? Basically what your asking for is a reverse of old blaster defiance, applied to our end bar.

Uhm unless the EB is specifically tanky to one of my stalkers dmg types, my experience with EBs on my stalkers is 4 hits to kill on avg. So uhm I dont think in general an EB will add much dif for most teams. And while the boss mechanic you suggest is cool. Ive seen duray at least so quickly killed it never got to be used. Battle Maiden is incarnate class after all so she does tend to take a good beating.

Ive actually been pondering my response to this for a few days so I hope it comes across as well as I hope it will. Your first part frankly Im not quite sure what to make of it. I mean static thematic groups are certainly a thing, pretty common among the RP community in fact. But the way you describe its goal, well yeah that sounds terribly boring. Most such groups are about running story arcs and TFs together, hell even having friends outside the team make custom AE arcs for their static groups are all part of the RP community and its strength going back into the early years of Virtue. If you want to try a team that works together, and also earns merits do the early arcs together, do the hollows together( great merits there especially if you do all the parts and get the zone bonus) and I have every bit of hope youd enjoy such a way of developing a character and static team, and really shouldnt be too terribly hard to make some friends on everlasting open to such a thing, just need to find those with a similar play schedule. This next part may come across as abit arrogant or elitist but I truly am just trying to be honest about my own knack with coh. I have never needed to use a character planner, nor read a build guide or even ask for build tips to develop my characters to reach the level of potential I envision for each based on their RP concept. Sometimes when for example my first toon using the new bio set I will need to respec a time or two to fine tune. Back on live I had the pattern of each time my character reached the min level to do one of the respec trials he would and then do a respec to fin tune the toon. Dropping powers I found unfun or rarely used, and trying others that felt fitting of the theme and seeing how they worked. Some pools became cornerstones of my average concept, since my characters are all leader types if the sets have enough end recovery to handle the leadership toggles I take leadership on them. If my characters are stealthy I try to justify recall friend in the build if I can fit it in early to help with teams staying together etc. I had no trouble understanding how to build and slot from my first character on. I genuinely cant really understand how someone would assume that one could only use one of each type of enhancement. Like such a limitation never crossed my mind when I began in year one. When i came to the forums on live around year 3, I came specifically because I grew curious between the disconnect I had mostly with fellow blaster mainers who seemed to accept eating dir often as part and package of a blaster. Ever blaster i built I built ever growing in tricks to keep them alive, but was never content with their squishiness. When Mental 2ndary was added to blasters it was a dream come true and I finally had the main blaster I wanted and then from then on, on the forums championed to see other blaster sets gain increased self sustaining tricks akin to mentals drain psyche. And here we are today with blasters finally being able to be played aggressively on the front line where they belong thanks to most 2ndaries now having some. I dont focus on the Maths, the META nor number crunch. I have concept toons who perform very well who do not have more then a 60% or so enhancement to any given aspect of their powers, to better convey them being normal humans. I have builds that ignore some of the strongest powers in their sets for the same reason and who again perform very at a satisfying degree. One suggestion for a static team Ill leave you with is Praetoria. Most who play there agree its so lonely many avoid it for that reason, but even a static duo can make playing through those arcs much more fun. By the time you reach primal earth you tend to have a nice nest egg of merits to turn into converters for inf.

The thing is, the HC team has made it clear they want to see merits more about the time investment aspect. So unless the teams are taking meaningfully longer to complete TFs under the challenge settings, asking for more rewards is throwing off the merit per minute ratio that among other things was used to justify the 30-1 ratio change to the vanguard merit conversion. Which has had a very real effect on reducing interest in MSRs at least on everlasting from what Ive seen. The idea of risk vs reward sounds logical but has actually been being left by the way side even in PnP RPGs for years. The most popular variajnt rule found in an issue of dragon mag that my pbp group adopted years ago was rather then xp being awarded for encounters, leveling is based on the amount of time played at a session. Either 4 two hour sessions, 2 four hour sessions, or 1 eight hour session equals a level up. This was so roundly favored by those Ive PnPed with player and GM alike that when the odd person suggest the old days of individual xp awards, bonus xp for individual actions etc, they get very soundly told to shut up or find a new table top group. In a way we see that system very much in CoH were its time in content that determined the merit rewards for arcs and TFs more then anything else. With those TFs able to be reliably speed run usually having some of the worst merit rewards and making them less popular. Same with certain story arcs. Some arcs are favored because of how easy they are to stealth through and some avoided because a glowie hunt or kill all in a nasty map theme like orengeba can take tons of time to clear. Humans gonna human, and being human is all about using our brain to reduce work loads. Why did we dig wells? So we didnt have to keep walking down to the rivers for water.

Considering one of the best things the HC team has done is take pvp IOs and make them drop like ordinary ones, I rather doubt the HC team or most players are going to be in favor of any rewards no matter how trivial being connected with PvP if they are even remotely wanted by players who do not want to pvp at all. I personally think the answer at least to pvp balance is not to be using our characters at all. They could instead create story driven pvp events were we use the same tech in those story arcs where we become other characters, to have players take on specific abilities and roles that will be logical in the context of the stories and hopefully well balanced between the sides. Kind of like Champions online tried with its halloween werewolves vs hunters pvp event I have a vague memory of. It should be just purely for the funsies though. If those into pvp cant find 8 or 16 bodies to fill such an activity it will just show how little real pvp interest in this community there is.

Nope, but I find for example when i only want to send a few emp merits to a fresh incarnate to speed up their inc powers its not really that bad to quickly send 10 in rapid succession. I mean def takes less then a minute. Sure it would be handy stream lined but I wouldnt call it a priority of any degree to add. It is why I do council liquidated of every thing found below the tier or purple recipes or the like. I just turn everything into inf and buy as needed from the ah. I keep a coolection of hand me down attuned IO sets in base storage for future alts as I upgrade them to purple sets once I cap a toon. Really after the first 50, everything comes pretty easy for even a casual. Sure when i am trading between toons not in the same sg with the hand me downs all the mailing of sets can be a bit more time consuming. so I usually just pop a newb toon in my sg for quick access to the storage even if they are not really part of the concept/theme of the midnight club

A very simple trick to help speed up the process of mass mailing to oneself that many dont seem to practice when I have talked about the issue is to send yourself a quick mail first and then use the reply button to quickly make fresh mails. Many apparently take the time to re enter the @name etc every time which adds a fair bit to the hassle for sure. If they could make mass mail that would be cool but something tells me if the team that has had this game to play on all these years never did it, it may be nigh impossible.

No worries your baby brute was very useful to the team as veng bait;)

Your not alone in this, in general in gaming the old concept of taunting and aggro have really moved on. Better AI does what we do, target dps and support/cc. low dps meat shields get ignored and such builds are more about personal survival rather then protecting others. Most people say they want better challenge, and talk about improving AI, but that is what that looks like, tanking phased out, and everyone having to cope with aggro especially when what they do is the actual threat to enemies.

Im of mixxed minds on this, because as a big fan of dark melee and its siphon life attack, and mental 2ndary and its drain psyche I know the struggle of trying to make a power be both a good attack and a good heal or end recovery ability at the same time. This is keenly true with the dark melee life drain attack as its also one of its hardest hitting attacks. Yes franken setting does work to some extent and is in general our only real option. But when you ponder who pure dps sets like fire dont really ever have to make such a harsh choice and is able to make use of full dps sets with no issue it does grate abit. I mean in general power sets with 2ndary effects like dark, elec, etc are already a touch lower dps( not a lot but a touch) then pure dps sets like good ol fire, then on top of that they have to give up set bonuses to come even close to making well rounded use of their abilities. ED was to encourage using more aspects of a powers enhancement options. They added IO sets to further expand and reward that concept by creating sets that for more simple power sets equals a easy direct power boost, while for others it forces far more struggle trying to enhance several desired aspects of a power at once, only because they didnt create sets that play to such powers. We have accurate to hit debuff sets, acccurate heal sets, but not a set that lets one enhance to hit, dmg, and healing, or end all at once. Why can sets be allowed to round out all the basics dmg,acc,end red, rech but not the utility aspects at the same time? It feels like it unfairly caters more to the raw power sets and not the more complex ones. That is where my mind is on it, really in a hm maybe it wouldnt be wrong to add sets that do such, but maybe it would be just straight power creep.

Enemies dont run from stalkers because they are dead or stuck terrified in place after I one shot their boss. Also caltrops for the win which is why ninja will always be the best stalker;)

Because its not too easy, we who want it easy choose to do so by investing a very high degree into a character and its build to negate the challenge, That is not an accident, it is by design and beloved by likely the majority of the coh playerbase. Because challenge is easy to find, the idea that their should be challenge for the very top end builds when their power factor is many times greater then a baseline build is the height of absurd selfishness as there is no reason to make content for an extreme minority. When games make the mistake of doing that it bleeds players. A good example is DDO aka Dungeons and Dragons Online. even though on average only about 5% of their player base every partook of raiding, they kept adding raids, and putting the best loot in them. Creating a huge power divide between raiders and non raiders, and then kept balancing content around the power of those top end raid builds. So now days the game is a ghost town, supported by P2W whales and hard core raid guilds, and if your not into those things expect to play the normal content solo and struggle like no tomorrow if you dont drop the cash. CoH has always been mainly the game of choice for the casual, the fun time gamer, and amazing enough the RPer, as no other MMO Ive ever played had an active degree of RP to compare with virtue and now everlasting. If people want to play at a level that stressed their builds and tests their gamer reflexes then there are places they can go to do that. I know very few who solo +4X8 council mishes who also willingly go out to the shadow shard to face ruls/wisps/ and storm els in even smaller groups lightly. Any mechanic that actually causes a challenge gets labeled an annoyance by such players and they call to have it nerfed because challenge is fine, for others, just not for their superman.

Which server did you play on back on live? I mained Virtue but also had toons on Freedom the main meta game server. while its true on freedom many did play wowtard style that was very much not the case on Virtue. And if you want to say you fall under the category of liar ok fine by me I didnt say you were specifically but well if the way I phrased that bothered you and made you feel like it was applicable well I cant control how you feel. And maybe you missed that I was there,? That I played every single possible blaster combo to cap or near cap in the old lvl 40 cap days, and as a bloody 1 month newb I and another newb blaster duoed clamor on a sister psyche after the rest of the team had given up. Wasnt easy, a couple newbs but we took down an AV, Before year one was up plenty had put out guides on solo av and gm killer builds, and almost all of them were for offenders. Tank monsters like that didnt need to ask teams because they advertised for teams to do just that, or were doing it at the direction of their SG. Same with the fire kin trollers. And being able to break the game in a controlled enviroment is exactly what lead to numerous changes in the game including the heavy nerfing of AE rewards because humans going to human and exploit for any advantage they can. My blasters reliably soloed their way to cap often, rarely in Debt after my first blaster. Long before stalkers I learned the art of the stealth blaster who could snipe or nuke mobs to ash with impunity and had phase shift to gtfo of trouble if something nasty just refused to go down quick. BTW what you call hilarious is actually under the mantle of griefing. A player choosing to create a situation that kills another player off only qualifies as that. Tanks tanking do not get to choose not to tank suddenly and not be called out as bad gamers, bad players, and unworthy of a slot on a team. That is of course part of wowtardism though the idea a tank is always in charge and gets to control how the rest of the team plays by not doing their job, same as healers in wow and similar games will with hold heals to dictate how others play. Both reasons why we in CoH have pretty much always loathed the trinity even yes back in year one at least on Virtue were RP and concept along with just having fun together was the priority. And ope every time I lead a TF I never once asked for specific ATs, nor did I see many that did on TFs back then even in year one. Sure SGs often had static teams, but puggers we always have beena work with what we can get type of approach and we still always managed to get every TF done and usually in a timely manner. BTW just an FYI but the only herd follower I see here is you following the trinity herd. Go play WoW or one of the many EQ clones for that kind of play if you crave it so very badly. Because right now your acting far more berkish then this silly ol berk and that is just not a good thing.