Williwaw

They didn't make a shovel set, but the shovel is a customization option for both War Mace and Battle Axe. It's not facetious to point out there are characters in comics (and "comics" doesn't just include superheroes) who use maces and axes. (There are, perhaps, more villains that use axes and maces than heroes, but there's also no longer any melee ATs that are limited to heroes or villains)

My proposal: Each power instead calls a random power of equivalent level from any other blast set when used. I think it'd work better if it had its own set of random powers, rather than calling other sets' powers (especially since not all sets have equivalent powers) but... I dunno, "random" suggests a wizard who can't quite control their magic. Basically... yes and yes. And shovels, too. Are you suggesting it can be done with existing sets? Because what I'm talking about can't be done with existing sets. I'm talking about a powerset where, say, the T1 is an energy attack ("Magic Missile"), and T2 is a Fireball, and the T3 is a Lightning Bolt and the T4 is a Cone of Cold, and so on and so forth, with the T9 being a giant blast of energy that hits in all six (non-physical) elements. That, or a set where you have toggles to switch between Fire/Ice/Lightning/Darkness/etc variants of the attacs (like Dual Pistols but, you know, not crap), though I still think the T9 should be all six elements.

Captain Powerhouse basically said that he's not going to list exactly what's being worked on, because much of what he's tinkering with will never make it to the game for one reason or another.

I was honestly looking forward to Gadgetry as it was written, jetpack and all. Sure, anyone can buy a jetpack, but you can't buy a jetpack with enhanceable slots and an Afterburner-like click power built in. For example, I wanted the set for my mad scientist who uses high-tech inventions but doesn't actually have any "cybernetic enhancements". The characters I'd use "Gadgetry" on are not the same characters I'd use "Cybernetic Enhancements" on. And I don't see why Gadgetry is somehow redundant due to Utility Belt. UB's attacks are distinctly low-tech - bolas, a dagger, and a running punch, with only Life Support System being possibly high-tech - compared to Gadgetry's drones, nanotech, and forcefields. Those are very different conceptually. I do wonder what Paragon Studios originally had in mind for the "drone" attacks, though. Were they intended to visually summon a drone to shoot the target and then disappear? (That's a rhetorical question, of course)

I think it would be nice to have a multi-elemental blast set for "generic wizard" characters, but I'm not entirely sure what that would look like. Both approaches I can think of offhand (a different element in each power, a toggle that lets you switch elements on the fly) have issues.

In theory, I really like this idea. Kingdom of Loathing also does something like it - when you beat the main quest, you can then start over at level 1 as a new class, keeping one skill from the previous class (or one of the non-class skills you can pick up), repeat until you have every skill from every class and then some at level 1 if you so choose. (Considering there's 215 common skills you can "perm", not even counting event or other limited-time skills, that would take a while, even if you're one of those speedster madmen who could ascend every day) However, on CoH, this would be a nightmare in terms of game balance (let's face it, thanks to Invention Sets and Incarnate abilities, our characters are overpowered as it is, though I honestly think that's one of the game's strengths) and mechanics (the powers system code is mainly held together with dental floss, spit, and wishes, and I don't think something as complex as this could be shoehorned in there), so i don't think it would be in any way feasible. (Edited for grammar)

Of course, like most NPCs, the actual Freedom Phalanx "cheats", using signature powers and combinations of powersets that the player could never have, even with APPs. (Back Alley Brawler mixes in Energy Melee with his SS, including his trademark Back Alley Brawler Punch; Citadel and Postron have a few Energy Aura powers, because "Overload" is thematic for both of them; Manticore has Teleport Arrow, an attack that doesn't require line of sight, plus Maneuvers and Stealth; Numina mixes Mind Control, Psi Blast, and Empathy, and is constantly stealthy due to being a ghost; Sister Psyche is mainly Mind Control/Energy Blast with two powers from Force Fields and one from Psi Blast; Synapse has the Synaptic Strike, a special electric version of Flurry, and Whirlwind from the Speed pool in addition to Elec Blast/Elec Manip; and that's not even counting individual "Resistance" powers and the good ol' Purple Triangles) So if the actual Freedom Phalanx, with their "canon" powers, took on the STF, even if scaled down to player AT damage scales, they'd still have more options than actual characters of those ATs and powersets would have, but they might still struggle due to being very light on team buffs and heals (Numina just took single-target buffs and heals from Empathy).

The first one in the upper-left is costume slot 0, the one to the right of it is slot 1, and so on.

I solo'd most of the way to my first 50 back on the live servers, and things are easier here thanks to the free Double XP, so I solo a lot here too. I definitely recommend you don't power-level your first character. It's far, far easier to figure out the ins and outs of picking powers and placing Enhancement Slots in them if you don't have to choose a dozen at once. Take it slow. Incidentally, DFB (Death From Below) is technically a Trial, not a Task Force. The main difference between Trials and Task Forces is that Trials tend to be one long instanced mission, while Task Forces are broken up into a chain of smaller missions (but generally take longer than a single Trials to complete), and they're found in different tabs of the Looking For Group window. BAF is the Behavioral Adjustment Facility Incarnate Trial, which is endgame content. The Incarnate Trials are the closest thing the game has to Raids. (I think. I've actually never done a Raid in other games to compare) I enjoy them a lot, and BAF is my favorite due to the Tower Defense sequence in the middle, but YMMV, of course. And, also, welcome! Welcome to my favorite game of all time - not my favorite MMO, not favorite video game, favorite game. :D

On this front, I'd like the two Blaster PPPs that are just wholesale copied from Mastermind sets (Soul Mastery and Leviathan Mastery) to be looked at, too. Being copied from Mastermind sets, it means they're the only non-MM PPPs that lack pets. (And the pets are the main reason I go for PPPs instead of APPs) On the main topic, though... yes. I'd love to see all elemental themes available for all ATs. (So every AT should have Fire, Ice, Electricity, Energy, Dark, Psychic, Earth, Sonic, and "natural" APPs, the latter being like Weapon Mastery or Munition Mastery) That's a lot of work, I realize, but at least there's no reason to create new powers or new animations. I know they started this process - "Flame Mastery" for Corruptors and Defenders is new for I25.

Your phrasing is confusing, because there is no "Vet Level +1". There's "Veteran Level: 1" and a level shift of "50 (+1)". When you look at your Personal Info window, it said "Veteran Level: 1" before you leveled, and it still says "Veteran Level: 1" now?

WHY should I think of it as a single target attack when it is by definition narrow cone with a max of three targets? How would it open a can of worms on what people call an underpowered power set? If the 3 target limit remains, what's the issue? It still can't hit more than 3 people, which is what the developers intended a decade ago. Because its damage formula is that of a single-target attack. As noted in the very post you quoted, "fixing" it to be a proper AoE also means cutting its damage in half. You don't get both. If you want a weak wide-angle cone, you already have Empty Clips. The concept of the power is, again, that you're shooting one bullet so hard that the it goes through the first enemy to hit a target or two behind them. The concept is not shooting one bullet so hard that it somehow hits enemies to the side in a huge area.

I was planning on putting it in Mass Confusion, so... yeah, that sounds like exactly what I was hoping it'd do. Thank you!

Did you check again after finishing the DD trial? You get the popup when you succeed in the challenge, but you don't get the badge itself until the trial succeeds.

When I had a Stone/Stone Tanker back on Live, I tended to mainly use individual powers rather than run Granite constantly. I'd run the S/L and Mez toggle all the time, and turn on the F/C, E/N, and Psi toggles as necessary. Then again, I never ran +4/x8, and I never had much money so I wasn't completely IO'd out. (Still, these days, I'd rather remake him as a WP/Stone Tanker, just because he was an endurance hog up all the way up to 50)

So, in the vein of this topic, I have a question about exactly how this works. Is it actually "contagious", affecting enemies around the target, or just a chance for additional magnitude on the main target?

Just a note - Bobcat is the name of a canon character (she's the Praetorian counterpart to Mynx), so you might need to change her name. (Cool costume, though)

The Rebirth I24 server reportedly had Force of Will working, but they disabled it (along with Psi Melee) to work on the VFX. So it's probably the closest to "done". (I'm really not 100% sure Sorcery is completely done; there was at least another few weeks of beta-testing they wanted to do on it when the game shut down)

The thing about psi resist is that it tends to be all or nothing for mobs. So you'll run into one mob with 0% Psionic resist and steamroll them, and then the next will have 60% and they'll go down slower than molasses. (Smash or Lethal resist, in contrast, tends to be more evenly distributed) You can generally tell which ones have the high Psi resists, though: psionic enemies (Fortunatas, Seers, many Carnies, Rikti Mentalists, etc.) and machines (Warmechs, Rikti and Council Drones, Warworks, Praetorean Clockwork, etc). (Edit: Right, regular Clockwork are psi-weak, not psi-resistant) You'll just learn to hate them, and find other ways around them (via Epic Pools and Incarnate powers).

There's also no way to put in "realistic" drowning damage considering all the possible character concepts. Why would a robot or undead drown? Why can't my power armor that lets me breathe in space have an underwater option? In actual comics, Pre-Crisis Superman was literally unable to drown, Green Lantern can create an air-filled forcefield, even mostly-normal-human Batman has scuba gear in his costume, etc. For those reasons and many more, "fall in water" = "automatically start drowning" would be the opposite of immersion for most players.

I realize I've said things could be "easily" implemented in some of my posts. I'd like to clarify that (as a programmer myself) I mean "easily" in the sense that "this mechanic already exists in the game, so it can hopefully be adapted" (as opposed to reinventing the wheel for a new mechanic entirely). For example, making a new proc that affects all your damage powers would be "easy" in the sense that Interface Incarnate and one of the VEAT ATE pieces already do that. (It's clear that's relatively new tech, because Fiery Embrace does it the hard way) Changing the aggro caps for just Tankers would not be "easy" because that's a hard-coded number, not AT-dependent.

48 Before MMOs, there were MUDs, particularly one called Tsunami. I played that sometime in the mid-1990s. It's somehow still running, and it still has the best selection of classes in any online game, MMOs included. My first MMO was a small French game called Dofus (well, small in the US, pretty big in France). It's also still running, after fourteen years (it officially opened in September 2005, though it was in beta for about a year before that). I'm good at choosing long-runners, it appears. I then tried World of Warcraft, but I never subscribed. I don't think I need to describe or link to this one. Does Kingdom of Loathing count? Another long-runner (it opened in 2003), I played that for quite a while. (I still do an ascension every now and then, but I don't like the Standard restrictions or all the changes that made quests slower and longer, so I don't play much anymore) It has a pretty good, if extremely sarcastic, community, much better than the toxic forums of WoW and Dofus (and the PvP-centric crowd of Tsunami). I joined City of Heroes in 2010, near the end of Issue 16. I vaguely remember joining it just to prove to someone on a message board how terrible it was. Boy, was I ever wrong. I was hooked, and I played it until close. After City of Heroes closed, I played Champions online for a few months (it never felt right to me), and drifted back to Dofus and Kingdom of Loathing for a while. Also played Toontown Online for a while, mainly because it didn't feel or play anything like CoH (and so didn't remind me of it and trigger more sadness). If Marvel Avengers Alliance counts, I was heavily into that until it likewise closed. I didn't expect to, but I still miss it. (It has its own ongoing project trying to bring it back as an offline single-player game, but it's not very far along) I got really into Star Trek Online, but then they discontinued the Mac version, and then I started playing the PS4 version, and I still like it a lot (but not as much as CoH). I played Marvel Heroes for about a year, and really really liked it until the Biggest Update Ever ruined everything, and then it closed. The gameplay was entirely different from CoH, but it actually had a pretty nice community, comparable to CoH's. I played FF14 for a month, but I couldn't figure out how to resubscribe. The first month I subscribed through PSN, but after that I had to make an account on the Square-Enix website, and buy the game? So I never went back, despite enjoying it. I played Neverwinter for a few months (I liked it, but it got repetitive), played TERA for a few days (it was okay, but it didn't really grab me), played DC Universe Online for a few minutes (hated it). I think that's all of the major ones.

There's no "No Redraw" option for Staff or Titan Weapons. (I just double-checked in-game)

Energy Melee is a single-target damage and stun monster... but the game these days is built mostly around AoE damage, and Stun is one of the more annoying mezzes (since stunned enemies tend to wander off even when Taunted, and stunned enemies also reduce Brutes' Fury generation somewhat) However, I don't think ET's original animation is fitting for the game's most powerful single-target attack and one of the most powerful attacks overall, with 4.56 scale damage. Compare with Earth Melee's Seismic Smash, which does 3.56 scale damage (tied with KO Blow, Concentrated Strike, and Total Focus) and is well-known to be an overperformer because of its short animation (1.5 seconds). Reducing ET's animation to its old cast time while keeping its current damage would make it ridiculously overpowered. Sped up? Maybe, but not to its old 1-second palm strike animation. (That said, Energy Transfer's 2.67s animation time is actually shorter than Total Focus despite doing a lot more damage, so TF probably needs its 3.3 second animation time looked at as well. At least the other attacks that use TF's animation - Thunder Strike and Tremor - are AoE attacks) And then Devastating Blow in Radiation needs a look. At the very least, they need to have their Incarnate level shifts all the time rather than just within Supremacy distance of the MM.

Just choose "Minimal FX" for the overall theme, or MinimalFXPowerTheme for individual powers. Ablative Carapace and Parasitic Aura have no Minimal FX option, but they're click powers where the carapace appears only briefly and then disappears. Edit: Adding images