Steampunkette

We never get to see Nightcrawler, Hawkgirl, Cyborg, Shazam, Supergirl, Thor, Red Tornado, Vision, Atom, Silver Surfer The Human Torch, or the Green Lanterns at level 1. Hell, Captain Marvel was Powerleveled directly to 50 by the wizard Shazam. He spends half the time of his Origin Stories learning how to use all his high end powers 'cause the wizard didn't give him an instruction manual. Storm? We see her at level 1. She is a thief. Stealing to survive as a kid. And she doesn't get to fly 'til she makes the awesome cape that allows her to fly (Later stories retconned it, but that's why she had the big billowy cape in the first place) You keep looking at 'Level 20' characters in comics and conflating them with level 1 characters, is the problem, here. It's the big reason I tend to PL or DFB my characters to 22 before I even get in-character on them the first time unless they're meant to be street-level heroes who have to grow into their powers narratively. That said, you're definitely right about Dash Parr and Nightcrawler. Their -defining- powers are Superspeed and Teleportation. Which is why over the past decade I've repeatedly pushed for Primary and Secondary Powersets based on the idea of travel powers. Dash is not a 'Street Justice Scrapper' with Superspeed. Dash is a Speedster. That's his one-trick-pony self. Same thing with Nightcrawler's teleporting, or Angel's Flight. Every attack those characters use involves absolutely using their one power in different ways. It would be much better to create an archetype -built- around using those powers and grant that archetype inherent travel power functions than modify the game's balance for niche character concepts. As to the "Justifying the Dev's Choice" that's not on us. That's the status quo. It's how things are. You're the one making waves, here, Jeraud. The burden of proof toward change is on you. You're supposed to convince us to change our position.

You presented an extreme example, Hajinx. One which refused to compromise absolute min-max ideology to have Flight be a part of the build. I imagine there are people out there who are that diehard about build perfection... but those players aren't building characters for concept, just bigger numbers

I have very little sympathy for imaginary people who are designed to be sympathetic punching bags.

Combat Jumping. Pick up Hover, instead. It fits the concept, more, and you can still slot whatever into Hover instead of CJ. "Oh it's not as easy for me!" Meh. You have to sacrifice for concept, sometimes. Like... I earnestly just do not fucking get it. "Let me give you the most extreme example I can in order to force you to admit that it's a problem for this one min-maxed character who I also want to crowbar concept into!" It's a niche case in which you're already ignoring concept for most of the pools you're picking at that point.

Then it's going to need Blaster-Level damage values (Or very close to them) in order to have any kind of chance at surviving in melee long enough to fire off it's melee attack chain. A Blapper can do it with IOs, or zip into melee to throw off one or two big hits, but they'll die, otherwise, if facing more than a few opponents, particularly early on. It's why all the blapper first tier powers are either immobilizes or knockback-based melee attacks.

I hover around melee all the time. I did it with Hardcastle, back on live, and I do it with Cyclone, now. Combat jumping has nothing on Hover's maneuverability. And pretty much everything that applies -fly also applies -jump, so the whole "Web Grenade" canard can die in a grave, unmourned. 'I don't like how it looks' has nothing to do with Min-maxing. No one likes how Spines/Fire looks... Yet that's the Minmaxiest Farmer!

Why aren't you going to fight with Hover on? There's no reason -not- to do so. So long as you travel along the ground you can still Foot Stomp.

So the secondary is 'Manipulation without the Melee/AoE attacks, just replace them with some armors'? Sounds a lot like my previously proposed hybrid Armor/Control pairing... Which is a good solid basis for any Assault-Primary class. By using Passive and Active Mitigation combined with Absolute and Partial Mitigation you're going to wind up with a very interesting, boss-centric, playstyle. ... That said. If you're going to make them Stealth Based with Hide as the first power in their secondary and only 1-2 additional defensive powers you're going to need to make all three of those powers provide the same sort of mitigation. That is to say Defense or Damage Resistance, but not both. Put simply, short of IO Set Bonuses splitting the difference will result in a character who doesn't gain enough defensive ability to survive. Even with Manipulation's Sustain. Perhaps consider giving the 'Super Reflexes' or 'Ninjitsu' version AoE and Ranged defenses but no melee to speak of? Could be an interesting juggle, that way. No melee defense to speak of means they can't hang out undefended and melee everything to death, but they can if it's controlled...

Sure. But it can also work as an Influence Sink to get money out of the economy.

"Just keep the original pools like they are and add this at level 1!" As to the P2W versions: I don't mean 'Jetpack'. I mean 'Actual Flight Travel Power' and Superspeed, Superjump, All of them. 4 hour timer, 15 million influence. Absolute purchasing cap of level 20. It'll bridge you through the first 3 levels 'til you can get the actual power without allowingminmaxers to use all the travel powers without sacrificing for their builds

And Religion is a form of Philosophy. That doesn't make Sartre the Existentialist Pope. It's just not the same thing if you pull out the linchpin. Linchpower? Whatever. I think it's way more trouble than it's worth to do it as the OP suggests. To get around that while still giving them what they want: P2W options.

That's not Flight. That's the "Hover" pool. The signature power, the -defining- power of the pool is gone. Instead it's just 'Here's some other variations on your flight power' 'Variations of Flight' Power Pool. Perfect. Nah. Slap a different version on the P2W vendor and it'll avoid not only that problem, but also the UI design, power pool rebalance, new power creation, etc.

If they set all travel powers to 'Free at level 1' they'd need to redesign the actual travel power pools themselves. They're all built around the idea of having the travel power be the central 'Thing' that they are. Cutting that out to give it to everyone at level 1 doesn't just require 'adding' to them, it means you need a reason to have them exist at all. I get the whole "Let's just replace the one removed power!" push, but it's no longer the "Flight" pool if "Flight" isn't a part of it, y'know? It also means you wouldn't be able to combine SS and SJ, since they'd both be torn out so you can get 1 of the 2 at level 1. Meanwhile Mystic Flight (And all the other Origin Pools) would either need to get removed or get seriously revamped to avoid being a 'wasted' power pick.

So.... I'm against it. Having a travel power at level 1 would be 'nice' and all, but it's really not pressing enough to destroy 4 power pools, gut 1 power pool, and either redesign them or simply remove them. But allow me to offer an alternative suggestion: P2W vendor purchaseable version of Teleport, Fly, Superspeed, and Super Jump for, say, 20 million influence that lasts for 4 hours of real time and does not function after level 20. That way people who really want a travel power at level 1 can mail their character some cash and go for it, but it won't allow high end built out characters to just snag a free travel power, or make Minmaxers feel like they need to respec out of the one travel power they did buy.

... You're not entirely wrong on the last point! In the beginning, the developers of CoH didn't have the specific coding experience to build an MMORPG game engine from scratch, so they bought the commercial license of a game engine that, at the time, was a bit... let's say 'Out of Date'. CoH was released in 2004, but the engine they were using was purchased back in 2000 when Dakan and Lewis founded Cryptic. And it had been built far enough before 2000 that the company that owned it was interested in selling... So you've got 3 former Atari employees working on an engine bought off an older company trying to build a game unlike anything they've ever worked on with Emmert telling them what to do/how to do it. Things were not... smooth. But in 2002 they convinced NCSoft to bankroll the venture and started hiring a bigger employee pool to work on expanding the Production Demo (what you show to production companies and investors) into a full game. So you've got an old-ass game engine, some Atari Pros doing it 'The Atari Way', and a bunch of new people joining the project after some of the work to kludge the game together has been done on an engine that was not -built- for what it was being asked to do... And Emmert asking the newblets to create a massive array of new functions for the game with a 2 year deadline for release. And those Newblets? Not trained in 'The Atari Way'. Some of them trained in the 'Blizzard way' or the 'Activision way' or the aforementioned 'Interplay way'. All trying to do their best to make the already old engine get up and go in new directions. Things were hectic. 2 years is not a lot of time to develop an MMORPG, regardless of what anyone claims. Wherever deadlines loomed, shortcuts were taken. Pseudopets became the main method of doing basically anything that wasn't as simple as "This player hits that NPC" and holy forking shirtballs is there a -lot- of that... And that's not even getting into any understanding of Outsourcing work, which basically every developer does to some degree or another. So yeah... Spaghetti Code. Each developer doing code that their experience informed them was 'The Right Way' while everyone else did it the wrong ways. There was some attempt to get things uniform from the directors and such, but with deadlines... you know how it is. TLDR: They weren't working in isolation from each other, but they were each working on the game with their own 'Language' and trying to get each one to work together.

It would mean every map in the arc would have to ask "If X, goto Y, if Y=Yes go to Z, If Y=No, go to X1" for -every- member of the generic villain list. That would probably be a fairly large resource cost increase.

What is the result of the effort, exactly? Opening up both sides to heroes and villains to what end? For hypothetical future content that only Heroes can do in the Rogue Isles (Rather than Vigilantes, Rogues, or Villains)? That's a big boulder to push based on what I've seen, for a potential future gain, but nothing in the interim. And yeah. I'm ot part of the Dev Team. Which means I'm just as likely to be lowballing the endeavor as highballing it. Except for one curveball neither of us have mentioned: The code is a plate of Spaghetti. So on top of all the stuff I've pointed out (Designing and implementing the systems, repairing the aggro issues, changing the way Contacts work, which is a -very- basic part of the game's engine might I add...) you've also got to dig through 7 years of layered code strung together and held together with hope and bailing wire. Even without being certain of the amount of time-investment required (Maybe I am overestimating the work involved) I'd -still- ask you to show me the expected rewards of changing the system before I engaged in changing anything. Heroes can already go Redside, as it is. There's already a revolving door. Tell me why we should tear down the wall around it... especially if that wall has any chance of being Load-Bearing.

The suggestion would be a kludge to create in the first place. And you could simply make the badges mutually exclusive. Get one and you're stuck with it, forever. With this suggestion there would be no way to get rid of or choose your nemesis. You'd be stuck with them, forever. But only within the context of the storyarcs that are designed for it.

Maybe. *shrugs* We'd have to ask the current Devs if it'll work.

Connecting the doors? Easy! But in Hero Zones, the PPD Drones one-shot Villains. They won't shoot Rogues or Vigilantes. But Villains? Ganked. So there's tagging issues to take into consideration for the players themselves. Those Tags have also been tied to a Reward Scheme in the form of Tip Missions and the four Alignment Powers. You could flip someone's flag the second they jumped on the Port Oakes Ferry and stepped out into Skyway City... But that means they lose their power or progress towards that power or any tips toward alignment change. They also can't contact any of their Redside Contacts 'cause they're tagged as Heroes, so progress on those arcs would be paused and all. And they wouldn't be able to abandon those missions 'cause they couldn't speak to their contact about it. Also they'd show to everyone else as "Heroes" when highlighted, even in contested zones or co-op zones, and would need to transition back to redside -then- go to the co-op/contested zones to be flagged as a Villain, again. Either a secondary contextual tag would need to be made for "Gray" alignments, or else everyone would be H/V no exceptions the second they passed through the tram/boat. Alternatively you could rewrite all the "Hero/Villain" barriers to transport, inside NPC AI, and then change the settings for them as regards to PvP and Targeting in different zones, and then hem and haw over whether you want to lock them out of missions 'cause they're Heroes who shouldn't be working for Arachnos or Villains who shouldn't be protecting Faultline Dam from Vahzilok. Point is, you're misrepresenting a lot of work as something really simple and small.

At this point I play with my CoH Volume at 8 while the rest of my computer is at 100. Though part of that is CoH is -shockingly- loud. Like... I'm -stunned- at how loud it is in relation to other programs. This suggestion isn't a bad idea, on it's face, but it might be easier just to flatly reduce the volume of some of the louder sounds in the game... Particularly Shotguns and Teleport. Also most of Gravity is surprisingly up there.

Not... exactly. The Ranged/Melee preference was implemented, but it still 'Broke' when people slotted their pets for recharge and Brawl would cycle faster than any other power, forcing ranged pets right into melee and a 'Brawl Centric' low-damage attack cycle. To offset that, he changed the recharge time of the Pet Brawl to 16 seconds and made the pets immune to recharge rate modifiers so that you couldn't get them into a Brawl Recharge Loop even if you wanted to try and break it. He tried to remove Brawl altogether, but it broke the AI for Moon Logic reasons (The AI was ridiculously complex and spaghettified so he couldn't remove Brawl and find all the interdependencies it had to truly fix it). As it is, after they Brawl once you can move them away, and 16 seconds later (plus the animation times of any recharged higher priority attack) he'll run back over to do it, again. ... Wow. That's amazing! Nice to know!

I don't think I can properly convey the amount of 'Meh' I hold in my heart for your position... The melee pets who wouldn't get into melee were so broken that those pet sets were basically nonfunctional. Most of their damage was tied up in the melee-damage that wasn't getting done. Meanwhile "Suicidal Pets" still survive in melee, if you take care of them. And still dish out their respective damage at appropriate levels. Castle created an annoyance in other pets to fix something so broken it made certain powersets nearly unplayable. The Rob Bird analogy is still off. Try to imagine it this way: You have 7 total planes including Rob Bird. For a specific mission, you -absolutely- need to get all seven planes up in the air, including Rob Bird. They don't have to be perfect, but they need to function. So you take parts from each of the other 6 planes to make all the planes fly. Not perfectly, but well enough for the mission to be completed. That's what Castle did. Of course, the fact of the matter is he was working with 7 Rob Birds and trying to get them all to fly with half the pages in the repair manual burned out of the book. Each bird having it's own foibles so that "Removing Brawl breaks everything" So, y'know... Shit happens.

They do, currently, so should if you immobilized them rather than the enemy.

I've been around, JB! Still on Skype and Discord. The reason I say it could be difficult is because Villains exist in Paragon as hostile entities. That's why the people who during the alpha/beta went to AP by glitch got zapped by the drones. That sort of divide is coded into the basics of the character, something Cryptic felt strongly enough about to make a real 'Thing' rather than just letting all player characters be 'Player Characters' and the Villain/Hero tag only determine where they started, which doors they could open, and what hospital they rezzed to in cross-faction and PvP zones. Honestly, that would've been -way- easier than building in the faction mechanics they eventually developed! It kind of makes me wonder whether or not the Devs initially intended for open world PvP to just be a thing that happened, where heroes and villains ran the same streets and killed each other pell-mell unless there was a security drone on hand to end the fight instantly.