Steampunkette

So I've got this character to 38, so far... I love her to pieces. She's not as badass a fighter as a Scrapper would be (Less damage output). And she doesn't throw as comprehensive of controls as your average Dominator (Less options). But she -feels- fantastic. Playing her is a different style of movement and butt-kicking. I've got my Gremlins on hand to help make up some of the damage difference, I've got defenses to shore up my survivability. And the Sapping effect means the longer I'm in a fight the less fight my enemies have. So far it's working great. And I do more damage than the average Dom not by value but by volume. Rather than spending 3-4 animations on non-damaging powers, or powers with only the most insignificant amount of damage tacked onto them, I'm putting out damage with almost every press of the keys. It feels stronger than I think it actually is... but I appreciate it. And yeah. The low HP means she can drop like a stone out of nowhere. But the risk is a LOT of fun!

I wound up playing the Shoxx build. Same concept, but centered around Electric. Ultimately I feel like it's much more effective (I'm 38 at this point) because I sap the enemy so very hard -while- I'm kicking their butts. It's a much more fulfilling design, so far.

Adding Cobwebs or making broken windows would require changing the map, which is a large pile of pieces stuffed together, like the world's largest SG Base. It would be prohibitively resource intensive to swap maps on the fly and either require everyone get kicked out of the zone or go through a loading screen. That's why the mapsets change during Maintenance Windows. That said, the Skybox -can- change on the fly. And invasion spawning logic exists. So it might be reasonable to change the skybox to the Dense Fog version, resulting in any zone suddenly becoming murky, cloudy, and harder to see through... And I think that'd be a great thing to do during, say, a Spectral Invasion where a bunch of Ghostly NPCs appear. From Ghostly Citizens like in Crotoa to Spectral Pirates like in Port Oakes... could even spawn in some EBs by putting the AE "Ghost Filter" on them. In Talos and Indy Port you could even force the Ghost-Ship to spawn during any Spectral Invasion just to add some spice to those -specific- invasions.

It would be increased time and increased risk for increased reward. I feel like that's valid.

Designed in the same vein as Fastbreak but with a bit more panache thanks to end drain being a reasonable option on the path to victory. Absolutely taking Agility for Incarnate on this babe for the very slight defense increase and the very massive End Drain increase. 32% Defenses, except for a moderate psi-hole (27% Ranged Def, though!) 75% S/L Resist and 50% Nrg. Has a Panic Button in Surge which caps all Resistances but Neg/Tox/Psi. This character cannot, and will not, ever run out of endurance. Ion for the Judgement, obviously, and either Assault or Melee for the Hybrid. Melee would softcap common defenses, nearly softcap uncommons, and provide Mag 20 protection at full saturation. While Assault would just let me do scads more damage. Hard choice!

During Link Minds (Around 60% Uptime) S/L Res: 83.36 (Capped at 75) Psi Res: 41.3% Psi Def: 62.5% (Softcapped against Incarnates) M Def: 35.3% R Def: 32.8%

So I had this neat idea, right? A flashy fighting fairly survivable street-hero with a little bit of psychic power. She can put people to sleep, she can confuse them, she can make them terrified, but mostly she just beats them around the head and neck or flings shuriken around. THIS IS A NONSTANDARD BUILD. I've long wanted an Assault/Defense character and I figure this might be an interesting way to try and implement it. This is not a Permadom Build. Or a Permahasten build. It's not about being the best Dominator in the game, but about being a well rounded fighter type character with both Melee and Ranged attacks. The character winds up with 6 melee and 4 ranged attacks. Boxing and Kick are there mostly as filler material if I get recharge-slowed or need to fight a single target for an extended period. Crosspunch is just more AoE. Whatchya think? Interesting concept? Ninja Run as main travel mode, hoverboard for long distance flight (Yeah, I know. Detoggling sucks!), and eventually the Vorpal Judgement.

... I actually REALLY LIKE THIS IDEA. I would NEVER USE IT ON NEMESIS. You'd need to have a switch in the spawning logic that caused LTs to spawn for every minion in a group, and possibly to have bosses spawn in the normal LT spot... but damn it if I wouldn't eat that up. Don't get me wrong, I love the feeling of POWER when I drop a Nuke or Judgement on a group of enemies and watch the minions melt away like wax under a blowtorch, just as much as the next player! But having the option to increase the difficulty by THAT DEGREE?! Sign me up.

I know you've worked on it, and it's something you're fairly happy with in it's design... but could you implement it in the next patch? Like November 1st, please? If there was a "Requests" forum I'd put this, there, but... Yeah. I would deeply appreciate the activation 'cause I know some people sitting on choice names for characters that don't actually exist, yet, and may never be realized.

Personally I don't like the second build up being a thing. Build Up-Distracting Dagger-Fan/Exe/Twist. Bit much. I feel like adding in a second layer gimmick would work really well at that point. Like Poisoning your weapons as an option to change damage types or add status effects. Nothing fancy or huge. Nothing to make the set dish out significantly more damage... just different Blade Coatings you could play with. 1) Flame Blades. You literally add a viscous burning material to your blades that makes them do 50% fire damage, 40% Lethal, reduces enemy accuracy by 2-4% per strike. Add a Minor Fire DoT to make up the 10% loss. 2) Poisoned Blades. Changes 30% of the attack's damage to Toxic, adds chance to Hold. 3) Shocking Knives. Changes it to 60/40 Energy/Lethal adds chance to Stun. The Coatings are a fun little way to play with enemy resistances, and depending on your team could help you stack controls or set off oil-slicks and such. And then you can play with different Weapon Customizations and Alternate Animations for players who want to use things like Tonfa or Flaming Fists. Same general animation, but the wrist straight instead of bent.... could be fun!

Your snarky passive aggressive and sarcastic bullshit, aside, Omega, the entire -suggestion forum- is made up of pipe dreams and "Wouldn't it be nice?" As to the future it's going to go one of three ways: 1) CoH HC shuts down when NCSoft isn't appeased. 2) CoH HC expands it's current staff when NCSoft is appeased but refuses to allow the HC staff to monetize the game to support development. Development picks up as more people are on hand to do work. 3) CoH HC expands it's current staff when NCSoft is appeased and allows the HC staff to monetize the game to support development. Development picks up rapidly as more people are on hand to do work and are able to quit their day jobs and get paid to do it. I'm hoping for Option 3, but Option 2 is far more likely. Grind. Unlock. Whatever. Different people will call it different things. Content and/or Reward gating is most accurate.

No one is suggesting taking away what already exists. We're suggesting that some of the future stuff be put behind gameplay walls or challenges that have to be overcome. Not all of it. Not even most of it. Just some.

... god I hate Longbow... They're a privately owned Paramilitary Organization created by Miss Liberty expressly to overthrow Lord Recluse. They run around Mercy Island armed with Flamethrowers (Banned by the Geneva Convention) firing willy nilly in the world's largest Fire Hazard slash Civilian Area. They're a terrorist organization that gets lauded for being heroes. It's so sickening. No thank you. I'd rather have something superheroic than another way to fire a gun. We've got, what, 5 ways as it stands? Assault Rifle, Beam Rifle, Thugs MM, Dual Pistols, Arachnos Soldier, and Robot MM. 6 different ways. That's more than enough. We don't need yet another Run and Gun AT. We need something superheroic... though the Olympian is probably not the best way to go about that, either.

Ehhh... The EAT is a hero who nearly died and gets saved by an Alien that bonds with them to create a new Hybrid character. The closest to that in Praetoria would be a Devoured Seer or something. Personally I'd rather see something new than another soldier character archetype and another psychic character archetype.

Flip it around. "Everything must be freely available to me at all times because I'm selfish and entitled and refuse to spend time to earn my goodies and anyone who isn't good with that should kneecap themselves to create a false sense of challenge so I don't have to be bothered by it!" is what I'm getting from you, here. Now we could dance around that Ad Hominem circuit or debate the finer points of where the goalposts should be, but I'm not interested in that kind of circumlocution. I'd like some rewards gated behind content because it gives me a goal to achieve. It's how CoH was run for years on end. It's how MMOs and Games in General typically work. You have a goal, you have a reward for completing that goal, go get it. It isn't unreasonable to ask that the system that worked so well for so long be continued in a slightly less restrictive manner, I.E. that any locked rewards become unlocked on an account-wide basis. And presenting it as some selfish and unreasonable position is not arguing in good faith on a level field.

... yeah. No one is ever going to do that. It's a ridiculous idea on it's face. People will create goals for themselves, forever. 'Cause that's what people do. There's people out there making "Hardcore" characters who don't use IOs and reroll if they drop even once. There's people out there making Power Pool Builds where the bulk of their powers come from a series of power pools... I'm certain there's someone out there whose goal is to do every mission in the game on a single character, earn every badge, do everything once, except the stuff you -can't- (Like Praetoria and the Tutorial on one character) But there's no reward for it. And saying "Well you can just not let yourself do X and pretend it's a reward for doing all that hard work!" is just flatly insulting. I'd infinitely prefer to have goals to achieve to get some kind of reward (On an account basis) than every single thing just handed to me, forever.

I can largely agree with your points but here's a couple things that we have to remember: We keep reinventing the same stories. The Outsider who becomes powerful, like Tarzan or John Carter, is the same story as the Demigods of Greco Roman Myths. And shit like The Last Samurai or Iron Fist where the white guy winds up in a foreign culture and masters it (In the case of Iron Fist style stories, becoming better at it than the people for whom it is their native culture in perhaps the clearest example of racist cultural appropriation) is Tarzan and Perseus, too. And for a young nerd in the early 1900s, libraries had tons of options for reading the Greek and Roman myths, particularly ones often referenced in Literature and History classes, like Hercules and Sisyphus. These kinds of stories are so ingrained in Western culture that we use their names as words. Herculean, Sisyphean, Narcissist. We look at an Atlas fore directions 'cause he's holding up the world. We Hypnotize each other for fun or emotional wellness. And we turn to our Muses for inspiration. When a Cop Car needs people on the side of the road they hit their Siren. You don't have to study Greek Mythology in college to have an understanding of the big stories, or see how those stories interact with each other and plant seeds for new ones. The other thing is: Lovecraft's characters never stomp out evil. They barely survive it, if they do. And rarely with their sanity intact! His whole thing was that there were concepts and beings that were too big to understand, too world-shattering to grasp. If modern sci-fi owes anything to Lovecraft it's the idea of what is alien and unusual... which for him largely boiled down to "Too many eyes and 1 or more tentacles which is too many tentacles!" Fantasy honestly owes more to Lovecraft, all things considered, with his ancient monsters rising from slumber, casting humanity back to the stone age, and falling back asleep countless times throughout history (And he kind of owes that to Robert Howard and his ages of the world that make Africa the home of everything from Rome to Afghanistan, England to the US).

The powers themselves are fine. The damage scale is fine. The smaller target cap is okay (Personally I would've gone to 75% instead of 50% because it's neither a blaster or a scrapper but somewhere in between, but that's just me!). The problem is that it's built around an inherent that in regular play largely goes unnoticed unless someone is fighting AVs. Like a -LOT- of AVs. And even then it's mostly viewed as a team-benefit rather than a personal benefit. They're slightly weaker than scrappers and blasters, baseline. That's fine. That's 100% acceptable, go team good shit. But Blasters -get- Aim and Build Up to make their stuff hit harder. They get Defiance to make it hit harder than -that-. And Scrappers get to hit harder because Crits which through ATOs (not baseline, I know, but still!) can be partially controlled. All this stuff makes -their- damage stronger. The Sentinel gets a 5% res debuff on their enemies to make everyone's damage better. And a 20% res debuff on a single enemy to make everyone's damage better. Yeah, they get to feast, too, but someone who drops from 300ft popping aim and build up on the way down to land near the boss and drop to 1hp before popping their nuke followed by an instant cast snipe is going to benefit from that 20% debuff a lot MORE. I'm not saying the idea of debuffing as an inherent (especially unresistably) is a bad idea. They just also need something for -themselves- to feel good about.

Equal to Scrappers would be equal to Blasters. Both have a 1.125. The target count would help to separate them a bit, the lower range. But it would hit as hard as a blaster on the baseline and the things that make Blaster different would be a flimsier secondary that makes them run in to land big melee hits where they have no defense. Oh, they wouldn't have the burst potential of Blasters, obviously. No aim+bu. But trading half the target cap (Or less for some powers) in exchange for near scrapper-levels of survival? Kiiiiinda on the power creepy side. As it stands they're at .95, the Dominator Scalar. The intent of the 5% Res debuff on their ST attacks was to bring them up to the equivalent of a 1.0, and then the 20% resist debuff target-marking after that takes them to 1.20 (or it's equivalent). Feast and Famine back and forth but only on a single target... Which is really only useful against Bosses (But not much) and EBs/AVs. So they wind up in Famine for most of their careers and feast once in a while against harder targets.

The difference between grind and content is a person's perspective. Grind is what happens when you get tired of the content. People don't do radio missions for the content. most people no longer do the ITF or LGTF for content. And certainly not the Freedom Phalanx task forces. People have already experienced all that content has to offer. People have basically experienced everything that the game has to offer. At this point it's pretty much just grind. But because they don't care about the grind its content! So go get your accolades, run that task force you've played a dozen times before. I'd like some new content with some new rewards at the end please. And maybe some new goals to reach on the content we already have for new rewards 'cause if we honestly minded the grind we would be playing other games, right now...

The Nazi reinterpretation was literally Forster-Nietzsche rewriting his works. Like. MASSIVELY. She forged letters after his mental breakdown. Not like 1 or 2, either. In one year Nietzsche sent out 500 letters, and only around 80 of them were actually his. And of those 80 she altered like 60. The rest? She made up whole-cloth and mailed to his friends and to Nazis presenting Nietzche as a raging anti-semite. The Nazi Party didn't reinterpret his work, Zepp. The Nazi Party was handed an interpretation of his work by his sister who was such a raging anti-semite she and her hubby set up an "Aryan Colony" that collapsed on itself (her husband died in the colony) 'cause they couldn't take care of themselves. They didn't read his ideas on fitness and make it about Eugenics: His sister the raging anti-semite Nazi Wannabe put in references to Eugenics in his letters and her rewrites of his books to court the Nazis. That said: The philosophy of a character and the narrative structure don't have to be the same. Not by a long shot. Hell, Conan was an exploration of Existential Philosophy, much like Kull before him, but it's not like any novel exploring an Existential Character has to have them be a loincloth clad Barbarian-King. Certainly Lovecraft's explorations of the topic didn't. I think we're going at cross-purposes, here. You're focusing on the philosophical underpinnings of the character's personality and identity while I'm referring to Narrative Tropes and Story Framing. I.E. that of the Modern Mythological figure. Though I'd also probably argue that Clark Kent and Superman are an exploration of Kant's Moral Absolutism crashing headlong into a world that does not accept such forceful binaries resulting in a sort of Moral Relativism centered around Kant's Maxim.

So let's start with Nietzsche. He hated the Nazis. He wanted his unfinished works destroyed so that after his death no one could take his final, incomplete, thoughts and try to "Finish" them by guesswork. His Sister refused his wishes, finished his books with a HEAVY Nazi Slant, and destroyed Ubermensch as a term. Nietzsche's Ubermensch was an empowered person. Not in any magnificent way or genetic superiority. But philosophically empowered with an understanding of himself, of the world around him, and of the endless question mark that is the afterlife. Someone who understands their brief stint on the planet must be entirely under their own mandate, and no one else's, lest it be wasted. That they must live the life they -choose- to live, rather than the life other men might force upon them. And then the Nazis dug into Nordic Folklore because of Wagner (Who loved Nazism and Nietzsche's writing, but whom Nietzsche famously disliked) to try and explain why their German blood made them the "Best People" Yeah. Siegel and Schuster were men of jewish faith creating a hero inspired by the father and dressed in a strongman's suit as a direct opposite to the 'German Ubermensch" mentality. But they did so by leaning hard into Greco Roman Myth because the Germans were leaning hard into Nordic Myth. Take Superman's story. Banished from his homeland because his people were dying, he comes to Earth to be raised by loving parents who make him into a good person, independent of his phenomenal powers. He grows up to later learn about his Birth Family, and is given their mandate to protect Earth. (Okay, so that last part depends on Continuity) Now trade "Superman" for literally any Greek or Roman sounding name and call Krypton Olympus. Now Superman's a Demigod sent to Earth, raised by a human family, who rises up to protect people. It's the same story as half of Zeus's spawn with a Sci-Fi twist. It might be closest to the story of Perseus, in fact. Who was cast into an unforgiving sea in a chest with his mother only to wash up on a distant shore. We tell the same stories in new ways, over and over.

Eh. It's a power they have. But due to recharge time, ranges, and scripting it's gonna come up more often than others. Statesman was, after all, a Superman Clone with the numbers filed off. And Superman, himself, is just an attempt at Modern Greco-Roman Myth. Swap Krypton with Olympus and Supes becomes your general Demigod fighting monsters and evil kings like Darkseid and Lex Luthor. Personally I feel like Laser Eyes was the -least- fitting power they could've given Statesman, but Emmert is nothing if not a geek like the rest of us.

Grind doesn't equal fun. Goals equals fun. Grind is how you reach your goal. You don't walk into a mission in CoH, then throw up your hands that you've got to "Grind" through the enemies to reach the end, even though -that- is a Skinner box, too.

I actually like the idea of an Olympian Archetype. However, it shouldn't have Laser Beam Eyes. Go with the Lightning and the big hits. But don't make it the Superstrength Powerset. Use some of those animations, sure, but it needs to be it's -own- powerset. How about we mingle the Melee and Ranged without straight up Lightning? Do things like a "Handclap Cone" where you slam your hands together to send out a shockwave of force. Ditch the idea of a straight up Footstomp clone, and make it a ground-punch that sends broken-ground toward enemies before flinging them up in the air. Then make the Lightning Powers a -visual option-. A Power Customization thing where instead of cracks heading across the ground you're sending lightning cracking forward. Or instead of Hand-clapping out a shockwave of air, you do a big hand-clap cone of lightning that sparks between you and your targets, briefly. Maybe we could even make it play like Dual Pistols and change the damage type between Smashing (Which gets a bonus to the total damage done), Lightning (which changes the damage type and adds a -end component), and maybe Fire or Darkness to play into different TYPES of Olympians (Mars, Pluto, Jupiter, Etc)