Steampunkette
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Posts posted by Steampunkette
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14 minutes ago, Psyonico said:
Currently you can leave praetoria at level 20, what would happen to that?
I don't necessarily think the mobs are over tuned, it's more that there are a bunch of other factors (high-speed ambushes for one).
Seeing as Praetorians can access pocket D, I think it would just cause faster/more power leveling, meaning more players at 50 that don't know how to play their character.
No thanks.
Instead of leaving at 20 you'd leave when you complete the arcs and choose to leave? *shrug*
And yeah. People are going to continue powerleveling to 50 and not bothering to slot a single enhancement 'til they get there because that's the game some people like to play. Do I think it's fun or healthy? Not really. But whether or not Praetorians start at level 1 or level 20 they're still going to do it so what impact does that actually mean?
That some people might make a Praetorian to skip the fastest 20 levels of PLing to 50? Oh no!
If people are going to play that game they're going to play that game. And short of making PLing impossible, which the Devs have shown no inclination towards, nothing is going to change that. This line of thought is just fearmongering and pearlclutching.
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Attuned IOs make everything post level 27 a cakewalk except iTrials...
Mainly because you have to rely on other players in iTrials who may or may not have issues with latency or knowing what they're doing.
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Just now, Lunar Ronin said:
No thank you. I enjoy playing the Praetorian content at level because it isn't so easy that I can roll my face on my keyboard and still win like blue side. Fix the various bugs gold side? Sure. Smooth out the leveling? Great. Be unable to start characters in Praetoria and play the content at the levels it was designed for? No way.
In addition, leveless doesn't really work in City of Heroes as everything has an internal level. Making the Wards leveless would be meaningless as it would be a cakewalk at level 50.
From what you're saying it's a cakewalk at level 30 so what's the difference? 😛
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Wow that'd be a lot of work... but I suggest it for several reasons.
1) Praetoria's enemy groups were designed with IO Set bonuses in mind to handle players in Incarnate Trials, so even the "Low Level" threats in the Going Rogue starting areas are painfully overtuned since they were just scaled down by level. Yes, it allows for some players to enjoy "Hardmode" runs, but I don't think this change would severely impact that. Giving players access to more powers (particularly more controls/defense for the majority of ATs) would make things a bit more fair.
2) Praetorian characters are presented as stronger/tougher/more resilient because of the dystopian world they were forced to grow up in. Starting them at level 20, or even just level 15, would help to reinforce that idea.
3) It would give new and returning players a good and solid reason to do the Praetorian content since they'd be able to start out at a higher level than characters in CoH. And let's face it: The zones look amazing and the storylines are written with a more focused narrative voice than the older CoH and even CoV content.
4) Making First Ward and Night Ward levelless would allow the higher level Praetorian characters to leave the initial Going Rogue content and move on to the First Ward without having to boost First and Night Ward content up separately. Though I would suggest having the "Auto Grant" of First Ward/Night Ward contacts still happen at or after level 20 for Primals and after leaving Praetoria for Praetorians.
Alternatively, you could make all of Praetoria "Levelless Content" which scales with the player and then set it to grant level 20 to characters that leave the Praetorian Tutorial or make a new character in Praetoria.
That would also allow Primal characters to "Infiltrate" Praetoria at any level and do the Praetorian content, as well. Making that expansion far more accessible to the playerbase. It could also be a lot of fun as a CoH character to get up into the 45 range and do the Portal Corps arcs before transitioning to Praetoria to help the Resistance... THEN move on to Incarnate Trials.
You know... I had one intention at the start, but now I just think Levelless Praetoria and Praeto characters starting at 20 is a better idea by far.
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As you can see I'm not in an AE Arc. That's just a regular radio mish directing to the pillar.
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On 6/22/2023 at 6:11 PM, Rudra said:
The point was an electric whip. Whether that whip be a physical whip with electricity arcing along its entire length or one made of lightning itself. (The one made of lightning itself is the preferred form.) You proposed changing the colors, and I tried it. It did not look like the goal of an electric whip. It looked like a whip made of plasma. A visually distinct effect not in line with the stated request. Plasma being super-heated matter that has its electrons ripped away. It visually looks like a gas or a flame. As opposed to the desire for a whip that looks like lightning.
Ohhhhhhhhh
Yeah. That's never going to happen.
The whip isn't a prop object like a sword or axe, where you can specifically replace it with something else, it's specifically an effect, like the blast from fire blast. S'why it always looks exactly the same every time it comes out even though you'd think the flames would be "Random"
Creating the whip powers took as much effort for the original game developers as animating 8 separate powersets. Like all 9 powers in 8 sets for 4 powers in 1 set. Colin Brown, one of Paragon's animators, did a whole dev diary post about it for MMORPG.com, though it's since been lost to time. In it, he discussed how incredibly intensive the efforts were and how it was kind of ridiculous the amount of effort that was put into getting one set -just- right. But the Going Rogue brass wanted Desdemona to be the coolest character they could manage soooo....
Even if using the physical animations of the character moving could shave off 3/4 of the time of creating an electric whip alternative you're still looking at 4 powers for the cost of the animation development time of 18 powers.
Maybe if the dev team, here, got paid a lot of money and were able to get some more artists and animators on staff they could do that. But it'd cost 2 potential full powersets to just move over the 4 current animations. And if you wanted a full attack set (with build up or aim taking a 0-effort time) you're back to looking at 8 full sets of animation effort for 4 more powers, -plus- the 2 sets time for the 4 powers that exist.
10 powersets worth of effort for 1 powerset. I just don't see anyone involved thinking that's a reasonable use of time and resources. It's why I suggested the plasma whip instead. It'd be a new damage setup and give the designers some options while just recycling the 4 powers animations we currently have.
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4 minutes ago, Rudra said:
https://www.psfc.mit.edu/vision/what_is_plasma
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/lightning
https://www.britannica.com/science/electricity
Plasma is not electricity. Plasma is not lightning.
Edit: Changing the colors as you said makes the fire look like plasma, not like lightning. There is a very distinct visual difference.
At what point did I say that plasma was electricity?
I said "Energy Damage" which is right there with Radiation which works fine with Plasma.
You're the one who said it winds up looking like the plasma from a star and not electricity. I'm confused by the goal, here.
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On 6/10/2023 at 5:16 PM, Rudra said:
In this case, a re-color doesn't work. Because the effect is fire, the re-color makes it look like plasma as in from a star or a nebula, not like electricity.
Edit: That was a good idea, it just doesn't work. It does look amazing like that though.
Plasma that is in the sun and plasma that we make on Earth is the same thing. It's a higher state of molecular and atomic excitement than Gas. Nothing more, nothing less.
The Plasma-ball (electro-orb) from Spencer's Gifts doesn't -actually- contain plasma, just low amp high voltage electricity passing through a noble gas (Usually argon or neon, but krypton and xeon are also options)
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6 hours ago, Herotu said:
Omg... imagine the possibilities ... electric whip... ooh.. naaastyyy!
Keep it like it is, color it blue-purple, and call it Plasma.
Fire/Energy damage with a -Def function.
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Sentinels are Stalkers who trade Crits and Assassin's Strike for larger AoE range/shaped but not bigger target counts.
When well built they're incredibly durable and do decent damage. They're particularly good at taking out one enemy through using their Opportunity button to weaken their target. Especially bosses which melt when the team is all also hitting the same target.
Their big "Claim to Fame" is throwing off their T9 blast power every 30 seconds or so once thoroughly slotted for recharge. For DP that means doing the gundance every pack.
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20 minutes ago, Rudra said:
Well, like @Ghost said, the building interiors on the zone maps are below the map itself. So the event triggers on the zone map, but not in the buildings. Spawns generate on the map floor and the building interiors are well below that level. (Think of SG bases with different levels. You can set up NPCs off the main map, on the areas you build up above or below the base, but nothing can reach those areas unless you provide a teleporter to it. Buildings like Icon and AE use their doors as set teleporters with no special effects. So you transition to the below zone map building interior when using the zone door and back to the zone map when using the interior door. Event spawns are generated on the zone map, so they can't spawn inside buildings since those maps are well below the zone map and the legal spawn points.) No auto-suppression needed.
Fair. Though the tech for auto-power suppression also exists: In the AE buildings.
All powers, including autopowers, cease to function there. You'd just need whatever object is there copied and tweaked to only disable one autopower.
But it still doesn't fix the bridge problem. And with places like Skyway in the game... well.
Then again. You've got Snow in the tunnels of Atlas Park so is it -really- that big a deal? Not my place to judge. Just brainstorming a way to have 'weather' in the game.
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2 hours ago, @Ghost said:
iirc this suggestion came up a lot back on retail servers and the explanation given was that there wasn't an easy way to signal when rain shouldn't be on screen.
Building interiors are usually below the map and could be outside of whatever volume applies a camera-effect, but stuff like overpasses, parking garages, tram interiors, etc. would likely have to be all made exceptions by hand. Even then, having the effect go away under a bridge and suddenly reappear when you move out isn't a great solution.
That is a -very- good reason, yeah.
You'd have to put in some kind of auto-power suppressor within buildings. Like they do with the Zombie Apocalypse Spawning while you're inside an Icon.
Wouldn't help with Bridges, though.
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12 hours ago, Saiyajinzoningen said:
while i dont think this is impossible And will help immersion it will also likely put an unnecessary strain on the servers.
In what way would this put unneeded strain on the servers?
It would be an autopower and a skybox change triggered by a zone event. The tech for both already exists. Any "Strain" would be just as "straining" as any other zone-event.
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... in Atlas Park, we can have snow thanks to an overlay setup that basically makes the snow tied to your camera. It's not an actual thing moving around the zone, which would probably cause just -so- much lag, but a graphical effect...
Can we do the same thing with Rain?
On a separate note, the skybox and lighting can be set to various options during events. Can we set up an 'Event' where the skybox turns grey and stormy and the light becomes notably dimmer?
... and can we combine the two? Have the event trigger a zone-wide 'Debuff' which shows rain in your vision and makes the skybox and environment darker?
Could we then make "Weather Events" a random thing that hits EVER ZONE with rain as the main Weather Event replaced by Snow in winter?
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On 5/1/2023 at 4:07 AM, Wavicle said:
Superman is a Science hero. Exposure to an alien sun is Science.
Ehhh... It affects -every- member of his species the same way.
Science is something specific to you based on whatever experiment or accident happened. Natural is a function of what you are.
Also "Alien Sun" doesn't mean anything. Stars are stars. Dude just wasn't getting all the solar power he could've out of a Red Dwarf instead of a Yellow Main Sequence star because red dwarves literally put out less light/heat/energy.
GASP.
Kryptonians are Photosynthetic.
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On 4/29/2023 at 10:48 AM, Techwright said:
It's an interesting thought, but how might that work with our five origins concept, specifically the Natural heroes? Anything beyond your definitions for Street Hero would seem to exclude the Natural origin.
Full disclosure: although I have a few Natural heroes, I never really saw it as a viable origin. In comics, natural heroes eventually use tech, either a little or a lot, which means, to my way of thinking, they're automatically tech heroes. Maybe not Iron Man, but even the Green Hornet comes armed with a gas gun, a Stinger taser, and a tricked out ride. Despite my misgivings at this origin, I'm still interested to see how it would be interpreted in any hypothetically future work.
Same as we have now.
Natural doesn't have to mean "Human", after all. Superman is a Natural hero.
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7 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:
Why not have four different iterations your character goes through - each 50 levels; so you start at street, then world, then cosmic and finally ... well I'm not completely sure I understand what you mean by "imaginaut" but it would give your character 200 levels to go through before meeting the end game which could be a real challenge. Especially if the Architect Entertainment didn't give XP 😄
The point is to have different ways to play the game. Not one even longer path which progresses through everything.
To have characters who spend their whole career in Kings Row, becoming the guardian of the downtrodden that live there. To make a character who punches out aliens at level 1. To have -variety- of character scale.
Rather than every single character progressing from Hellions to Praetorians. More stories, not one that is 4 times longer to achieve the same goal as CoH 1.
And the Fantastic Four are Imaginauts. Different dimensions, planets, dangers. Very much more on the "Star Trek" side of superheroics where you introduce wild alternate realities and crazy alien species that later plague the comic book universe.
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1-50 for four different scales.
Street Hero
World Hero
Cosmic Hero
Imaginaut
Not Street Hero 'til you hit 30, then World Hero 'til 45, then Cosmic Hero at 50.
Lemme make a Street Hero and keep fighting Hellions, Skulls, Sky Raiders, the Family and stuff all the way from 1 to 50.
Lemme make a character who exists on a Cosmic Scale, fighting Aliens and Space Pirates from level 1 onward.
Lemme make a World Class Hero who stops runaway trains at level 1 and maxes out on Global Threats without touching Space.
Lemme do a Dimenion Hopping Space Faring character who jumps between realities at level 1 and engages with the Quantum realm.
Also Also: Disaster Missions. I've defused a lot of bombs, sure. But let me stop a runaway train. Let me lift rubble off of civilians. Let me throw a gasoline-carrying tanker truck away from the emergency room it crashed into so it blows up somewhere safe instead of endangering the hospital. Give me missions where I have to break the Earthquake Machine or catch part of a building to save people and be a hero in that way. How about Search and Rescue missions where NPCs spawn at various locations and I have to get them to safety from the plane crash or shipwreck or whatever.
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On 3/28/2023 at 3:27 PM, Wavicle said:
Nah, that wouldn't be one of the options. Assault is a secondary. But you could have Armor/Assault.
Doesn't that imply you could do Tank Armor/Stalker Armor?
I think it's gotta be more flexible than that. And, honestly, if they hope to balance it at -all- the defense needs to be a secondary, control and pets to be a primary, and everything else can be primary or secondary.
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On 3/25/2023 at 3:04 PM, Wavicle said:
Dual classing, you can take a primary from one AT and secondary from another, but you get the lower stat of everything and no inherent.
I'd want an Assault Primary and a Defense Secondary.
Or the ultimate blapper: Assault/Manipulation. O.O
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18 hours ago, smnolimits43 said:
what about wind melee (Rasengan) 🙂
Kinetic Melee. Color it Grey/Pale Blue.
Pair with Minimum Effects Bio Armor in the same colors for a storm effect that moves with you.
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The animation customization of CoH is a bit limited.
You'd be more likely to wind up with multiple identical and mutually exclusive "Fighting" pools, each themed after a specific weapon.
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Narrative "tags" have been a thing since the game launched, not just the AE. It was just our first chance to explore it.
When you hit f5 and your character shouts out your level and archetype those are the same tags. It's just a variable that does a quickie lookup in your character's game file to find information. It also does Origin, though never in a text conversation, it's how the game knew which starting origin contact to give you. Heck, it could even check whether you started in Galaxy City or Atlas Park, way back when!
It also uses Badge Text as tags so that NPCs on the streets can talk about how you recently beat up the Council or the Family or whomever else while they're walking past.
There's a plethora of stuff about characters that we -could- use as tags for mission text... But.
The more of them you put into the mission tag, the more it becomes a Mad Libs of different issues and trying to account for players being Robots or Zombies or Normal People or Immune to Toxic Gas just makes all the writing for the game that much more complex.
So while it's cool stuff, it's largely remained "In the Box" so to speak.
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Downsides of creating the additional Uniform Slot:
You have 2 costume slots that you cannot edit after earning them. You already have one.
Development time to give two Epic Archetypes extra costume slots instead of providing stuff that a larger portion of the playerbase will use.
Benefits:
A small portion of a tiny fragment of the playerbase will enjoy having two Uniform slots.
Essentially impossible.
A modest proposal, and an immodest request.
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I'm earnestly curious where Gen Z and Gen Alpha are getting $120 to blow on a game they don't even want to play but feel like they "Have to" in order to not be a loser.
As a Millennial staring down a $60 price tag on a game I -want- is rough enough... The disposable income the aforementioned people have is impressive!