Steampunkette

1) It's an OPTION? No. It's an option for people who use KB to KD IOs to free up some measure of build space. And it's a capitulation to the KB to KD crowd. One more step towards "Should we just get rid of KB? Everyone uses the IOs, anyhow" outcome. One more "You should just use the IO! Now you don't even have to mess up your overall slotting strategy!" 2) Buffing it is both useless to the core problem (People will still rant about KD being the right way to play) and power creepy (Increased Survivability/DPS for some powersets, none for most others) Because the underlying problem is there and cannot -be- resolved: Some people hate KB with the fiery passion of a thousand dying stars and that's not going to change any time soon.

It causes division because there are people who like to play the game, and people who like to game the game. The latter group wants everything to be fast, simple, and clean. They're the people who want to maximize their time to reward ratio. They play the game to win the meta. And that's fine there's always going to be those people. There's nothing wrong with wanting to win the game. But the other group just wants to play. How long it takes is not as important as the zany fun that happens during that time. No matter what changes happen to knock back, like increasing its damage or adding stuns or something else, the actual knocking back is still going to be a problem for the second group of players. There is no way to fix it. There is no way to reconcile it. If I'm on a team with a group of people who want to game the game they will be upset with knock-back. Unless I manage to make it perfectly perfect so that it doesn't affect any patches or debuffs or area of effects for anybody else. Because whether it's pushing one person back or three people back someone's going to be pissed when their inferno doesn't hit the whole group.

You've got options. They come at a meager cost. But you've got options. And while you, personally, aren't calling for KB to just get removed from the game it's something that's been floated more than a few times. At least once or twice on -these- boards that I know of, much less the Official Forums. Every "We should have a global KD IO!" and "What about a KD Toggle?" will just result in more basis for people to try and force me to kill my KB for their enjoyment. I like my KB. If you don't like it that's fine, but as soon as a new "Easier" KD option comes along the onus on me for using KB instead of KD becomes bigger. "You don't even have to mess up a set bonus, now! Just throw it in Rest! Why are you being so selfish?!" I hate that. Just let me play the game without helping people demand I play it their way.

Rather than turn every single fight into another cookie cutter "Tank rounds them up, everyone AoEs, next group"? I much prefer the scatter. Even when I'm -playing- the tank or the person with patches and targeted aura debuffs. I'd rather have scatter than a rousing game of chartered accountancy where everyone ticks off their DPS Boxes at the appropriate times to rubber stamp a given group before moving on to the next form. FIGHT. Fight. I meant to say fight. I want fights where the enemies run around and take up different positions to fight. I want fights where enemies aren't trapped in one place in a permanent knockdown loop 'cause someone dropped Bonfire with a KD enhancement. I want fights that aren't "Herd it up, knock it down, move on" Give me danger, excitement, frustration, delight! Give me groups scattered to the four winds! Give me the Rad's anchor bouncing into a distant group and bringing his now angry friends to the fight. Give me the scrapper panic-taunting to keep the Defender from dying before the Blaster throws another AoE on the additional group to send them ass over teakettle before the Dominator locks down the adds. Anything but another 8-man steamrolling team where the only conversation is about how other people don't know how to play the game right. When I'm not playing my Brute (Who uses extensive KM KB for moar fun) I typically run with a 4-man team of a Scrapper, two Widows, and a Sentinel. No taunts. No aggro management. We just brain and water blast enemies while one Scrapper shield-charges and one Widow sneaky-stabs the boss. It's -delightful- chaos! Particularly against Carnies. But when I decide to join a random group, or mix things up and do a TF, I haaaaaaaaaate the "No KB!" calls or the "Why aren't you using the KD IO?" tells. How about "For Options" we add a Universal Damage IO set with a Proc IO that has a 50% chance to proc a mag 10 KB? S'only fair. Then I can complain when the Fire Blaster isn't knocking enemies through the air with ever Fireball. "Why aren't you using the KB IO?" tells would at least be fun turnabout.

The second this gets implemented, people will demand I slot it on any character I use knockback on. As it -stands- there's people who complain 'til they're as blue as these forums when people don't have the KD IOs slotted into all their KB Powers. And 6 months later, people will say "Why not just get rid of Knockback altogether? No one uses it, anyway." I'm not against "Options", here. Y'all have an option. It's an option that comes with a cost, but it's a option. And that option can -really- pay off for powers like Bonfire... But I'm against further maligning of knockback in the game. Every step we take closer to "No Knockback" is a step we'll never be able to take back. Knockback is a part of the genre, of what makes Superheroes -feel- powerful. Take it away? And City of Heroes loses one of the elements that separates it from all other games.

I can't speak to Wind Control... but I made a Wind Brute. Kinetic Melee/Bio Armor. Just skip the "Suck Life/Grow Cancer" powers and you can do a pretty good wind-manipulating brute. Surrounded by air, you even get a "Tornado" in the DoT Aura that picks up leaves, casings, and garbage in a spinning disk of air (If colored right)

I wouldn't mind seeing the speed cap on flight raised, but that would make afterburner either largely useless or ridiculously powerful. The only reasons I know of not to increase it are to have SS people feel superior (People flying at SS speeds would cause a whining cascade) and the slide. If you put flight at SS levels and left the sloppy handling air-slide on a stop, you'd be a block away from where you intended to be when you let go of the W key.

People already do Black on Black. Or White on White. Or Red on Green just to screw over colorblind people for a giggle. That said, I'm not suggesting font size changes. Just font changes. Comic Sans for Clowns and Young characters. Verdana for those who are slightly louder than others. Times New Roman for scientists and people who are precise. Georgia, for those who wish to be marginally fancy. Lucida sans Unicode for those Robots. You get the idea. And yeah. We don't -need- it. But we could have it. Maybe. If it's even possible. Which, y'know, I hope.

The generic font -is- fine. And I don't know of any game that allows you to change fonts. And it might be difficult to read if they're typing in a heated combat. But. The point is that comics use different fonts to present different "Voices" in text. Not just speech bubble color (Which we can already do and makes reading them in combat difficult). Here's an example: Thor tends to speak in a more stylized font to show the difference in his voice compared to Captain America. It's not -needed-, obviously. You could just make him use fancier words or different colors. And it's not needed in City of Heroes, either. I'm not aware of how effort-intensive this would be. I can say that because Windows and Mac both come with a massive selection of fonts, the diversity of customization increase could be pretty massive even if we stick to the shared general list of fonts without letting people download and use special fonts. Plus it'd be great to be able to make an Alien Character who sometimes swaps into Wingdings to communicate. And since CoH allows Click-Drag selection you can copy-paste those Wingdings into Word and translate them into Times New Roman! It'd mostly be something roleplayers use, obviously.

Bonus points if the different fonts show up under different characters in the chat window like individual name colors.

That's it. That's the whole suggestion. Allow us to have a drop-down on a character by character basis that allows us to choose the font for our specific speech bubbles and chat window. Someone wants to be all fancy? Give 'em a Cursive font. Someone wants to show their character is robotic? Let 'em choose a chunky hard-edged font. That's it.

Flight is great. It's slower, but it's more direct. So in zones like Indy, SS is King 'cause there's lots of straightaways. But places like Perez Park, Crotoa, Faultline, you kinda need the vertical of Superjump, TP, or the king of those zones: Fly. Don't get me STARTED on trying to do a Speedster in freaking GRANDVILLE. And St. Martial or Mercy are only marginally better.

Yeah... again, the SAME ENEMY would need to Miss 100 times in a row to trigger Streakbreaker. Not "A crowd misses you a total of 100 times". Each one, individually, must miss 100 times in a row in order for Streakbreaker to kick in for each of them. The odds of Streakbreaker ever kicking in? Of someone swinging 100 times and missing every time? 0.59% Don't believe me? Check a Probability Calculator or yourself. https://www.omnicalculator.com/statistics/probability This one is my -favorite-! 😄 P(A) is 5% (Chance to hit) P(B) is 95% (Chance to miss) Set it to "When Trying" 100 times (Default is 3 on this calculator) Voila!

The key to playing Dark Armor is to never have toggles on that you don't need. Fighting only S/L? Kill Murky. Lots of Bosses or Fear Resistance? Kill the ScaryCloak. Honestly, with a 27% Defense? Don't toggle Tough on. Anything that gets feared can only attack once every 3-5 seconds, and has a 77% chance of not hitting you at all. With Dark Regeneration coming back every 8 seconds and recovering 60% of your HP with even 1 target... Just go with Shroud, Fear, Darkness, Weave, and Maneuvers for most content and you shouldn't have much problem. For AVs don't bother with the Fear or Gloom and I think you'll be fine! If you're running exclusively on big teams you probably won't even notice the 'squishiness' because y'all'll be killing things too fast for them to get off more than 1 or 2 attacks. Now if you're -soloing- at +4x8..? You're probably gonna have some problems, but between Ageless and Dark Regen I think you'll be good.

It's shocking ain't it?

In response to "Counterpoint 1": 45% defense with 100% debuff/control throughput is the same thing as 90% resistance with significant debuff/control resistance. 100 attacks aim at Defense Dude and each deal 100 damage. If there is, through some random happenstance, a complete spread (each subsequent attack rolls exactly 1 higher than the previous roll and the first roll is a 1): about 95% will miss and 5 will hit. Without resistances, Defense Dude takes 500 damage 100 attacks aim at Resistanceman and each deal 100 damage. If If there is, through some random happenstance, a complete spread: about half will miss (Because anything under 50% is a miss when you have no defense) and about 50 will hit. With resistances, Resistanceman takes 500 damage. An "Autohit that ignores resistances" wouldn't be equivalent to the two because the baseline function of the protection in question is a radically different approach to reach the same overall outcome. To address the broader point: Streakbreaker exists in the game for NPCs because it's a function of the ToHit System. It cannot exist "Only for Players". The variable on how many misses triggers a Streakbreaker can be modified on an entity by entity basis with stuff like character level added on to that. But to remove it from NPCs means removing it from the entire game. A massive effort which makes content harder in a broad swath of the game to make it infinitesimally easier for your very specific, and very strange, niche situation In more true to Game Experience terms: Streakbreaker on NPC attacks requires the NPC to miss you 100 times. That -specific- NPC has to miss 100 times. In a Row. No Hits. 100 times in a row without hitting you. If that NPC gets to swing at you 100 times without landing a hit, you're AFK and should be more worried about Autologging than Streakbreaker.

The Patron Powers aren't significantly more powerful than the Epic Powers, are they? I've always thought that gating them was neat narratively, but flat out functionally unfair. That said, I wouldn't -hate- gating them, per se... The -functional- problem is that some of the Unique Enemies in the Patron Arcs (Super Arachnoids come to mind) can't spawn at level 24.

In the latest build (Mostly tweaks) I've swapped out 2 pieces of Performance Shifter for Efficacy Adapter. So I'm no longer sitting at 6 "7.5% Speed boost" bonuses, and instead get a tiny amount of additional HP! I did take the advice to drop the PsiRes IO, and replaced it with MaxHP from Unbreakable Guard. But yes. Gotta Go Fast 'cause no Travel Power. MUAHAHAHAHAA! With Accolades (I'll need to farm them) she'll have 4.03 end/sec recovery and 139.5% Max HP!

There's a lot of AT suggestions that are mostly "Give me X primary and Y secondary powerset!" I know. I've made a few. This could be a stopgap or stepping stone until such an at can be built and tested, was the thought.

Remove the level bounding limits on APPs and PPPs. Grant every character at level 1 the 4 PPP badges. That way if someone wants to make a "Paladin" character with Melee/Support they can just take a Tanker, Scrapper, or Brute and give them an EPP at level 4 to select the buff/debuff/control powers out of that power pool as well as the standard power pools, like Force of Will or Sorcery's buffs/debuffs. While it might change the balance slightly at lower levels (For example Blasters having early access to 1 or 2 defensive toggles outside of Tough/Weave) those same lower level characters will be using fewer attacks, and will still be fairly slot-starved until near to the current APP/PPP levels. It isn't a perfect solution, by far, as most APP/PPP for Scrappers, Tankers, and Brutes have only 1 support power and some ranged attacks or controls. But it could be a nice interim benefit. And one that increases low to mid-game build variety.

There are two main reasons to keep them separate, in my mind. 1) Just because I want to hang out with one of your characters, perhaps for RP Purposes, does not mean I want to join your random 8 person Peregrine Island team when I log onto a different character, nor get random pressures to do so. 2) If I want to check if a given name is taken while in game and talking to friends, I can add that name to my local friend's list to see if it's available without logging out, entering the character creator, and trying to make a character with that name. If you don't like local friends lists, just GFriend everyone you'd otherwise add. There's no good reason to spend hours or days recoding the game to get rid of the "Friends" List.

I eagerly await the chance to play an Energy/Robot/Energy character. She will be an Android with a Partner Bot. She's smaller and energy-blasty, he's huge and missile-filled!

Here's the latest update to the build. I dropped the -res from Psychic Scream, swapped out two sets of LotG for GotA (4-pieces, at least) for extra Endurance (But not a ton) and added a little resistance to Foresight (Which grants more recovery, but not a ton) Taking care of her own defenses and such without worrying about anyone else, she's at 50%+ for all vectors, 85% Psionic Resistance. 30% extra damage and end recovery of 3.7/sec and a cost of .79/sec. If she's actively helping others to defend themselves, It's 56% for herself, and 1.02/sec. On all cylinders her end drain is 1.41/sec, but unless we're getting hammered by Night Widow Smoke Bombs I'll probably never use it to that degree. She now runs 70.4mph with Ninja Run and Sprint toggled on at a total end cost (Supporting herself only) of 1.51/sec. ... yeah. She's gonna be a beaaaast when I get her fully slotted!

Mag 6 Toggled Hold AoE... What more could you -want-?! Throw that sucker on while you're in Domination and throw ranged attacks instead of bothering with control powers.

I got creative. And the person holding the name no longer plays. At this point there's just a level 1 abandoned character with the name I hope to get. All I can do now is wait for the name release system.