Steampunkette

The idea of the Control/Defense split is that they're both forms of directly defensive powers that are functionally different. Defense is a form of Partial Mitigation while Control is Absolute Mitigation. A Defense and Support set would be Partial/Partial. Essentially this kind of class would play like an EAT without being Theme-Locked. Also I wasn't trying to get on you, Justice and I'm sorry it came across that way!

It's just one example set. Might be what the OP meant...but he said "Custom Set" and provided the stats on one set...I saw no use of the plural... That being said, I'm sure other folks could create some additional sets modeled after his one custom set... Example Custom Set - Earth Warden Is what it says in the OP.

It's just one example set.

+1 inf I want an assault primary AT soooooo bad. But you cannot have that inherent. There's just no way in the current set up to have it work. What you could do is give them extra damage versus controlled opponents or increased aggro generation against controlled opponents? What about setting up a "Resonance" power where are your assault attacks against controlled targets have the ability to proc an area control effect determined by the power? We could put mostly single-target controls in the secondary powerset, and then how the primary assault powers spread short-duration controls. Hit a Target that is held with a basic attack? A 10% chance that you will create a MAG 2 hold in a 7 ft radius with a maximum of three targets for 6 seconds. Hit them with one of your high end attacks? Mag 3 7ft radius 5 targets.

I'd rather see the whip powers treated as melee powers and the set given some REAL ranged attacks. Just drop Corruption's range to the same as lash and call it long reaching melee... While it's all technically not melee, in range, the difference is so small that enemies will close the distance while you're animating. Swap the Fire Sword Stuff for the Demon fire Blasts and call it a set!

I'm suggesting two main thrusts, but you offer a third! 1) Undercover heroes. 2) Out and Out heroes of the Isles 3) Villainous Redemption arcs All three could be ways to help boost the Redside population while still being heroes!

Your Assault set has 1 ranged attack. The suggestion in the other thread was to port over the demon summoning minion ranged fire/toxic blasts to fill out the ranged aspect of the assault set. Assault sets typically wave 3 to 4 ranged attacks with at least one being AoE. This is almost a melee set.

So. Back on Virtue I had a character named Hardcastle. She was a Brute. SS/Inv and -amazing-. I had her slotted to the 9s with high defenses, high damage, and high resistance to everything. She could not be killed outside of ridiculously overmatched Incarnate Content. This character had a supergroup. SPEAR. She had friends and allies and we kicked butt from Mercy Island to Grandville. This supergroup was created well before Going Rogue was ever even -announced- and it centered on the idea of a group of heroes fighting crime in the Rogue Isles. Supers Protecting the Etoille Against Ruin. We'd run villain content as heroic characters. Our heroes were pretending to be villains in public, but only ever attacked criminal groups like the Goldbrickers or the Circle of Thorns. We saved the Isles (and possibly the world) by fighting the Leviathan and other big threats. Whenever we ran across quest text that didn't support us being heroes, we ignored it or rewrote it. After all, only the team-leader gets to see what the Quest Text is from the contact. Take Lorenz Ansaldo's arc for example. The first quest? You bust up a Dockworker's Strike. Anyone who supports Labor over the Mafia would hiss and boo. We rewrote the story as the heroes going in and "Fighting" the strikers with kitten punches and warnings that the Family were coming to gun them down. The cash we got paid to do this little beat 'em up? Handed over to the Dockworkers to support themselves as the strike continued by displaced labor (Workers hiding from killers) This is something that ANYONE can do, if they're not really that comfortable playing a Supervillain but still want to see the Redside Content. It also -doubles- the amount of Zones your typical "Goodie Two Shoes" RP Hero gets to go to 'cause you just go to the Isles to beat up criminals and retreat to Paragon when you're done! So get your supergroups together, folks, and join the Purpleside Initiative. Because there's poor Schmucks who were born in the Rogue Isles that are entirely innocent civilians and they don't have heroes around to rescue them! Be the REAL HERO. Go Red and save the people who need it most!

Is there any chance that we could simplify this concept a bit? Like... An Instigator Archetype based on an Assault Primary and the Sentinel Defense secondaries, and then kill the idea of the "Ranged/Melee" dichotomy bounce and out of melee idea. While that should be a valid playstyle, it's a little self-limiting. How about, instead, a pair of "Stance" toggles at level 1. The "Offensive Stance" toggle makes your attacks proc additional damage on a hit (type determined by the attack) or gain other benefits based on the power itself but gives you a small Defense and Resistance penalty. The "Defensive Stance" toggle activates some additional benefits from your defensive powers (Like Bio Armor's Defensive and Efficient toggles) but gives you a global Damage penalty. That way if you're on a team with a lot of defensive characters you can toggle on your Offensive Stance Toggle to add more overall DPS, but if you're on a team without a tank/brute/scrapper you can put on your Defensive Stance toggle to help control aggro and increase your survivability... Or you can leave your toggles off to enjoy the basic functions of your powers and feel balanced, but always have the option (based on how a fight is going) to change your Stance to Offensive or Defensive. Or. Y'know. Give us the Manipulation/Defense secondary sets if you wanna spend -that- much time on it! I'd love to have a melee and ranged primary and a secondary that combines controls and defenses.

Belladonna Vertrano's EVERYTHING.

Change your camera angle. You're actually clicking on a 2 dimensional invisible panel floating a short way ahead of the guard. If you look at it from a steep angle, the area you can click is smaller based on perspective. I typically click their heads.

Allow me to offer street justice/shield defense. They look great together because StJ is the "Mean" superstrength. With a shield on it looks like you're using it as a weapon on a few attacks. You get the good positional and some resistance and bonus hp, plus two fairly early AoEs, one of which is a rare shape for melee characters! Alternatively, go Staff/Ninja. The stacking melee defense is great and you'll get +15% damage pretty much perpetually without spending a power pick thanks to the inherent perfect body buff. Caltrops don't break stealth, either, though the redraw can get frustrating.

My perfect CoH2 would not have a redside in the way that City of Heroes does. I would make one large city where both heroes and villains exist in different phases. A blue PVE phase, a red PVE phase, and a PVP phase both sides could use. All of the hero and villain contacts would be in the same zones, but out and out super villain or out and out superhero contacts would be hostile or doing things of their own and not present in the quote unquote wrong side's phase. And then I would add in more cities instead of zones... Some of them would be more crime-riddled others would be more urban or rural. There would be at least one seaside City. All of them accessible in each phase. The Rogue Isles? Heroes would go there and have missions in which they are sneaking around the big bad's place trying to fight crime without getting destroyed by Arachnos. Paragon City? It's the place villains hang out and try to keep a low profile to avoid getting attacked by the Freedom Phalanx while committing wonderful crimes. Each city plays into that sort of thing. And maybe have zones change based on crime and heroism there. Lots of leveless content. Oh and character scales! You want to play a street-level hero? well then you do all these storylines that take you from 1 to 50 fighting street gangs and low tier super villains that are appropriate to these Street hero concept but you're not limited to doing only that content. Oh hey you want to be a cosmic superhero? Have some level 1 content that involves fighting freaking aliens or some other high-concept cosmic threat and keep doing that all the way to level 50. Origins? Screw that. Write your bio, grab the sorcery power pool or whatever. Scale is way more important to the narrative. Fight the magic Street level story arc content and play yourself a John Constantine or fighta whole bunch of science experiments and stuff and be the Spider-Man or maybe you want to fight a bunch of mutants or whatever. Makes that the content you choose to reinforce concept... Much more effective.

No. I didn't. I threw around numbers to say "You're right that I was wrong. But also look at this! We could try to recruit these people!" See, it's this thing where in searching for myself to learn that Toast was right I also found something interesting and decided to share it. But I can see how it might be misconstrued as trying to bolster a position I'd abandoned.

I'd like to add a tiny bit to this? There's also the issue that not all Villains are motivated by Greed. Take Mr. Freeze, for example. He wants to save his wife. Or the Joker who has the primary motivation of causing hilarious mayhem. Poison Ivy wants to stop people from screwing up the planet and destroying plantlife. Meanwhile Thanos wants to "Save the Universe" in the most inane manner imaginable, Vulture is sticking it to the people who stole his ideas, and Magneto wants to protect all Mutants from the Humans. Heroes typically have one or two motivations: "Do Good to Do Good" or "Do Good for Money". Villains? It's bananas how many individual motivations they have. Some are greedy, some just want to exercise their power, others cause harm because they enjoy it (either sadistically for killers or cathartically for characters who want to smash buildings and ideas) and plenty do it out of some perverse sense of Justice that either they were denied or feel must be upheld thanks to twisted morality. 90% of the Redside content is "Okay, $name, I've got a deal for you where I tell you where to go and you smash shit up and bring me the $objective!" Instead of "Origins" for villains they should have approached it as "Motivations". Then there'd have been a plethora of narrative choices...

Nah. The lesson here is that there's some people who will go out of their way to be condescending and rude, without even having the grace to accept someone else acknowledging they were wrong. That they'll berate someone needlessly for no apparent reason. I tried to give you a chance, Toast, to interact in a reasonable manner. I'm sad you didn't take it. Bye!

It seems to me like Everlasting would make a great "Unofficial Villains" server? There's plenty of heroes to play and fight against, lots of roleplay for the villains that go into that... Just need to drastically increase the power to that one server...

... Who exactly are you trying to impress, at this point, Toast? I acknowledged I was wrong about the subscriber count. I haven't tried to "Prove" anything using Third Party facts or websites. I also never claimed Homecoming has 3 times the number of users that CoH did. I pointed to the website to indicate that there's a lot more buzz -out- there about CoH than 200,000 people scattered across the globe. That website? Their algorithm is based on unique hits to the CoH Subreddit and the CoH Subreddit Subscribers. SHITLOADS more people have checked it out since April than have ever been on the CoH Subreddit before. As to HC going from 38,000 accounts to however high: Check the bottom of the forums. There's 118,526 users with forum accounts. Checking my post yesterday there were 118,317. That's 209 new subscribers since 9pm yesterday. HC is getting more and more users by the day. I eagerly hope to see them in-game.

See the thread pith a poll up top that's labeled "For those who don't play redside - why not?". Right now that is indeed the number one answer. 48/118,317 Your sample size is WAY too small to draw meaningful conclusions. Way to small to draw any statistically significant conclusions. But it’s still data. And changes have been made on less feedback. But i’m still not hearing a reason that doing so will cause a negative experience. And look Steampunkette, I’m not looking for fight or to win an argument here. I really want to see us help more people have more fun on the servers. Do you have some alternate suggestions that are doable in the short term? Let’s solve this together before we lose even more people and even small differences won’t help... There are two big reasons I have: 1) The Admins/Staff/Developers have limited time and resources. VERY limited. I'd rather they spend it on something more impactful than a couple of weeks of "Moar XP for Villains!" 2) This course of action sets a precedence in which redside can create another thread 2 months from now and get another big XP Buff Event or some other incentive that, AGAIN, takes up the limited time mentioned previously. Yeah. The "Real" solutions are big as fuck. It would take a lot of effort and time to get them implemented. But I'd rather the devs spend 6 months on -that- than 9 months on that with random interspersed breaks where they set up ANOTHER Incentive Drive every 3-5 weeks. Development in this time and place is very much a Zero Sum Game. And there ain't a lot of it to go around. Asking for a big chunk of it to go to maybe getting a dozen more long-time Redside players seems like such a waste.

Yes, but as pointed out, it wasn't this anemic before shut-down. Something 's changed here and we should react to that, much like reacting to people doing nothing but AE farming required a nerfing of that system. This whole -game- wasn't this anemic before shut-down. There were still around 2 million players when the lights went out, Clave. Now there's 100,000. There's not enough people to fully populate the game to a literal 1/10th of the degree that it was populated before the shutdown. There were more players on -Virtue- than there are players, today. Consider that whackiness. If we should "Incentivize" anything it's getting another 900,000 players to come back to the game. That would largely "Fix" the Redside population 'cause if even 1/10th of them were to go Redside that'd be the whole population of all the Homecoming Servers. You're right. Though I had earnestly thought the number was 2 million it was 200k. My mistake! But even though that's the case... https://mmo-population.com/r/Cityofheroes There's 685,000 players out there who claim to be playing it in the last few months. Maybe there's a bunch of other servers out there I don't know about, or maybe there's 500+ thousand people who are nostalgic.

See the thread pith a poll up top that's labeled "For those who don't play redside - why not?". Right now that is indeed the number one answer. 48/118,317 Your sample size is WAY too small to draw meaningful conclusions.

"The Biggest Reason"? Citation needed. Yeah, a lot of people dislike that there's not many people redside, but there's also a ton of people who: A) Don't wanna be a Villain B) Don't wanna be a Lackey C) Hate the Atmosphere/Environment and D) Hate the Enemy Groups Most people have 2-3 of these gripes rather than just one. And 'Fixing' 1 for 2 weeks with a "Villains get MOAR XP!" event just 'Fixes' it for that one week. I don't deny that a handful of people will probably stay redside at the end of those two weeks, but is it really worthwhile? And Legree, I disagree. (Hey, that Rhymes!) There's a few dozen people who would HAPPILY rewrite all the Redside Content to being you beating people up for information or getting tips and suggestions from various NPC Contacts rather than working on their behalf. That would go a LONG way to changing the way Redside feels.

That doesn't -fix- anything. That's why I mentioned another of these threads. Because the underlying problems will continue to exist. Coupons might get you into the door of a restaurant that barely passes health inspections, but at what cost!? For a real fix to Redside we'd need to fix the underlying causes. That means at the very least a MASSIVE content rewrite.

That seems like an awesome, but highly untenable solution. We should probably focus on possibilities that are more realistic. I think a week or two of XP could work. If we get 500 players to switch for a week or two, and only 10% keep their alts their, that's a 10% increase in the current population. What do we have to lose? So let's go over it: Sidelocking characters would require a bunch of work to set up thanks to the current alignment system. We'd have to develop a way to lock them out of receiving tip missions or benefitting from them, then add a Null the Gull "Do not interact" flag. The XP Boost would mean these players wind up skipping scads of content to create a character that does... what? Trials? Why do Trials with a double XP character when you can just do Trials with your main? "Oh, we could give them double trial rewards!" Oof the big bad of -that-. Though with the way Vet Levels work, you'd already be doing that! And in a month when those 450 leave redside 'cause of a plethora of OTHER REASONS That this 'Fix' doesn't touch: we get another one of these threads. Holding a carrot in front of a horse only works until the horse eats the carrot. And then you're right back where you started. Incentives don't work long-term. For that you need ACTUAL fixes.

Yes, but as pointed out, it wasn't this anemic before shut-down. Something 's changed here and we should react to that, much like reacting to people doing nothing but AE farming required a nerfing of that system. This whole -game- wasn't this anemic before shut-down. There were still around 2 million players when the lights went out, Clave. Now there's 100,000. There's not enough people to fully populate the game to a literal 1/10th of the degree that it was populated before the shutdown. There were more players on -Virtue- than there are players, today. Consider that whackiness. If we should "Incentivize" anything it's getting another 900,000 players to come back to the game. That would largely "Fix" the Redside population 'cause if even 1/10th of them were to go Redside that'd be the whole population of all the Homecoming Servers.