Steampunkette

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.

Throw a foe-targeting toggle on the runner and he'll bring you -lots- of friends! Just ask any Rad or Dark Controller, Corruptor, or Defender!

Or you could let people just play what they enjoy playing. Redside has always been anemic. People by and large prefer to play the hero rather than the lackey, and thanks to the game's writing you will -always- be a Lackey when you're Redside. Add in the supergroups, friends, teams, and relationships people have Blueside, since it was out for a -while- before Redside launched, and top it off with the fond memories people have, there..? Plus we can't forget the atmosphere which is happy and positive and welcoming in the Blue and hostile, dirty, and dark in the Isles... Yeah... No amount of "Incentivizing" is going to change much of anything. You'll get people who use Null to run over to redside to Farm a bit, then they'll head right back through the D to chill in Atlas Park. You'll just be shifting around where people go to grind from the AE to whatever Redside Content offers big shinies before they default back to their comfort zone.

I think you mean Morale rather than Morality... That said: Morale has been part of the game for as long as I can remember. And I started playing in Issue 2. It makes the game far more interesting to have weaker enemies try to run away. Just grab yourself a couple of ranged attacks and thwack 'em in the back as they try to escape!

I decided I wanted to try and remake a design I created, before, and aim for the cheapest build possible to try and make her work well. This build hits softcap to all positions, hits pretty fast (I didn't take Hasten), and gets some modest resistances that my partner (A Sonic/Sonic Defender) will make even bigger. What do y'all think? Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.962 http://www.cohplanner.com/ Click this DataLink to open the build! Gallant Gal: Level 50 Technology Brute Primary Power Set: Street Justice Secondary Power Set: Shield Defense Power Pool: Leaping Power Pool: Leadership Power Pool: Fighting Ancillary Pool: Energy Mastery Hero Profile: Level 1: Initial Strike -- UnrFur-Acc/Dmg(A), UnrFur-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(21), UnrFur-Dmg/Rchg(23), UnrFur-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(23), UnrFur-Rchg/+Regen/+End(25) Level 1: Deflection -- Srn-Def/EndRdx(A), Srn-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(3), Srn-EndRdx(3), Srn-Def(5), Srn-Def/Rchg(5) Level 2: Heavy Blow -- BrtFur-Acc/Dmg(A), BrtFur-Dmg/Rchg(13), BrtFur-Rchg/Fury(19), BrtFur-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(19), BrtFur-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(21) Level 4: Sweeping Cross -- ScrDrv-Acc/Dmg(A), ScrDrv-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(11), ScrDrv-Dmg/EndRdx(25), ScrDrv-Dmg/Rchg(27), ScrDrv-Acc/Rchg(27) Level 6: Battle Agility -- Srn-Def/EndRdx(A), Srn-Def/Rchg(7), Srn-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(7), Srn-EndRdx(9), Srn-Def(11) Level 8: Rib Cracker -- KntCmb-Knock%(A), KntCmb-Dmg/EndRdx(9), KntCmb-Dmg/Rchg(29), KntCmb-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(29), KntCmb-Acc/Dmg(31) Level 10: True Grit -- ImpSki-ResDam/EndRdx(A), ImpSki-ResDam/Rchg(15), ImpSki-EndRdx/Rchg(15), ImpSki-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(17), ImpSki-Status(17), StdPrt-ResDam/Def+(31) Level 12: Active Defense -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(13) Level 14: Combat Readiness -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(31) Level 16: Taunt -- RechRdx-I(A) Level 18: Spinning Strike -- Dtn-Dmg/EndRdx(A), Dtn-Acc/Dmg(33), Dtn-Dmg/Rchg(33), Dtn-Dmg/EndRdx/Rng(33), Dtn-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(34) Level 20: Against All Odds -- EndRdx-I(A), EndRdx-I(34) Level 22: Phalanx Fighting -- DefBuff-I(A), DefBuff-I(48) Level 24: Combat Jumping -- DefBuff-I(A) Level 26: Shin Breaker -- KntCmb-Knock%(A), KntCmb-Dmg/EndRdx(37), KntCmb-Dmg/Rchg(37), KntCmb-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(37), KntCmb-Acc/Dmg(39) Level 28: Grant Cover -- DefBuff-I(A) Level 30: Maneuvers -- Srn-EndRdx/Rchg(A), Srn-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(34), Srn-Def/Rchg(36), Srn-Def/EndRdx(36), Srn-EndRdx(36) Level 32: Crushing Uppercut -- Mk'Bit-Dmg/Rchg(A), Mk'Bit-Dmg/EndRdx(39), Mk'Bit-Dam%(39), Mk'Bit-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(40), Mk'Bit-Acc/Dmg(40), Mk'Bit-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg(48) Level 35: Shield Charge -- Obl-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(A), ClvBlo-Acc/Rchg(40), ClvBlo-Dmg/Rchg(43), ClvBlo-Dmg/EndRdx(46), ClvBlo-Acc/Dmg(46) Level 38: Boxing -- Empty(A) Level 41: Tough -- GldArm-3defTpProc(A), RctArm-ResDam(42), RctArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(42), RctArm-ResDam/Rchg(42), RctArm-ResDam/EndRdx(43), RctArm-EndRdx(43) Level 44: Weave -- Srn-EndRdx/Rchg(A), Srn-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(45), Srn-EndRdx(45), Srn-Def(45), Srn-Def/EndRdx(46) Level 47: Superior Conditioning -- EndMod-I(A), EndMod-I(50) Level 49: Physical Perfection -- EndMod-I(A), EndMod-I(50) Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Dash -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Slide -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Quick -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Rush -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Surge -- Empty(A) Level 1: Fury Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A) Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A) Level 4: Ninja Run Level 2: Swift -- Run-I(A), Run-I(48) Level 2: Health -- Heal-I(A) Level 2: Hurdle -- Jump-I(A) Level 2: Stamina -- EndMod-I(A), EndMod-I(50) Level 1: Combo Level 1 Level 1: Combo Level 2 Level 1: Combo Level 3 ------------ Also, for some reason, Hero Designer doesn't have combo levels interact with powers. Not sure why.

Honestly... I'd like to see a blast set built around having as much AoE as Titan Weapons does... But built for narrower high-damage AoE. Or lower target count AoE. And I think a Plasma Projection set might be a great place to do it! What if we added a small "Splash" to 2-3 nearby enemies for all of the powers as it's secondary effect, rather than debuffing the enemy? Even the AoEs would get this splash around each target hit (But very small splashing). You wouldn't be adding increasing damage to your team size, but you would be adding damage overall. It would be the master of AoE by a mile, but in ST fights it would hit with a lower overall damage output. Gives them a definite niche!

The best way to use your stacks is to drop them at 3 or 4 with rending flurry and hemmorage. You shouldn't hold them until you've got 5 to drop them. One big thing I would do to "Fix" the set? Turn Savage Leap into Burst of Speed. Reduce the damage and area slightly and give it the ability to be used 3 times in a 6 second window before it goes onto cooldown. Teleport, strike, teleport, strike, teleport feels a hell of a lot more "Savage" to me than 'Teleport, fight fight fight" It would also help offset the 15 second exhaustion window (Or 10 second one if it gets reduced) by giving you a reusable high end attack to fill in during the exhausted period.

Thanks to Arcanatime and the slow movement of the Psi Blast effects, plus the relatively high psionic resistance in most end game content, Fortunatas who use their psychic powers to throw damage out do so at a significantly lower rate than a Fortunata who uses claw powers, instead. Yes, there is something to be said for ranged instead of melee attacks and the perceived safety therein. However the most basic Widow defensive power (Which all Fortunatas -must- take with no choice in the matter) increases their defense to melee. By default, a Fortunata will always have a higher melee defense than ranged or AoE. If there were some way to increase their mind-blast animation speeds by 15% or so, it would be enough to at least narrow the gap a bit. Alternatively, increasing the damage of their psi blasts by 16% would make a big difference, particularly against end-game targets that typically have 60% resistance.

I earnestly do not know how difficult that would be. Particularly since it would also require a sound change and likely have different animation timings. Besides: Making it into a new powerset gives us the chance to create new effects like Combos or Contamination. Ohhh... How about -Control- Combos? Attack with these three abilities in order, get a Mag 3 single-target hold on the final hit. Attack with a different three to do an AoE Immobilize/Slow! Get this -dangerous- combo off that requires you to be close to the enemy? Turns your Force Net single target low damage sleep power into a high damage AoE sleep that kicks in -after- the damage is dealt. It would be a way different way to play!