OEM61

Three complimentary reasons. First, most AoE powers have a fairly small target limit. So you can only nuke so many targets at once, and you want un-nuked targets hanging around and not switching aggro over to support or w/e. Second, for powers with much higher target limits -- like Judgements -- you want to have as many targets in range as possible to maximize their use. Third, while not everyone here is talking about truly large aggro caps, I am. I'm fully in favor of somewhere between triple and unlimited aggro for Tankers. Herding the map is an incredible tool for 'overwhelming' things as well as, imho, incredibly fun. Herding the map is the biggest reason, as I understand things, for reducing the aggro cap to begin with. And, if in a group, the target cap only matters so much as this ranged DPSer is going to hit this guy, that ranged DPSer is going to hit that guy, and the other ranged DPSer is going to hit the other guy. Their targets won't all be the same. And this is still only really an issue if the enemy has been herded. If you are just hitting one or two groups at a time then the cap doesn't much matter. Even if something survives then what is it going to do? Charge a character that can easily withstand an attack or three and probably not even make it since the DPSers and controllers will have other powers to use? And a brute can still do any gathering that you want for your first two reasons. The third reason is irrelevant since it's just wishful thinking on your part. And since that was a big part of why the aggro cap exists, I doubt that it will return and, personally, hope it doesn't. "Everyone stay here while I gather the map" is not fun for me, and if allowed will become the type of thing that most people will want/expect so if you don't make the "right" type of tanker then too bad for you. And after all of that there would still be the possibility of brutes doing the job, so I still don't see how this helps tankers.

"Welcome to the team, Captain (.Y.) ! I'm sure they will make a valuable addition. YOU!. I mean, I am sure that you will make a valuable addition".

Argue against KB if you want to, but it is a +defense set (enemies on their backs are not attacking you, and enemies with powerful close attacks aren't able to land those if you have knocked them away) and if you actually move around the battlefield it is not that big a deal. If moving is not an option then you can always switch targets, slot some +range, or wait for that enemy to get back within range. In groups it can be an issue, but you can always slot overwhelming force and "solve the problem" either way. In the meantime, as was stated earlier, comparing a damage + DoT set to a damage + KB set when comparing DPS isn't exactly fair in comparing the overall value of two different sets.

Oftentimes when I am travelling through AP, my game freezes for a moment as I approach the plaza to load all of the people that are there, and as you get closer to the population mass, say to talk to Ms. Liberty, I am sure that some people's computers are straining to run everything. The power suppression bubble around Ms. Liberty seems like a good idea to me. A simple bubble, 40-50 feet in every direction. That would still give people plenty of space to fly or jump to the top of Atlas' globe and City Hall while shutting down the minions and auras and whatever other FX that would hinder people trying to get to Ms. Liberty for training or whatever else. I would also have zero problem with them taking the tailor option away from Ms. Liberty. Icon is across the park/grass area behind City Hall. Fix your costumes there.

Just want to add that this weekend I saw someone in the LFG channel trying to put together a TF, but tanks need not apply. I have a sneaking suspicion that they really meant tankers, and that if a brute asked to come along they would have been welcomed. So nothing has changed for me. Tankers are tasked with a job that many think is no longer necessary. It is the one thing they are built to excel at. Brutes may not be able to tank quite as well for whatever reasons, but so what? They can deal a lot more damage and in a game that needs tanks less and less, a class that is a tank first, last, and everything in-between is going to struggle more and more to justify it's existence. So I don't want more and better tanking out of tankers, I want something else. "I can aggro more mobs at once" just doesn't matter if no one cares about "classic" tanking. If they are going to overwhelm the mobs with controls or just nuke them outright then who cares if the tanker can grab aggro on more mobs? I went back-and-forth for a while with my tanker, deciding that that AT felt more appropriate from an RP standpoint and that I would maybe roll a brute later with some different powers, but now? Tanker just seems like a brute on hardmode, and I think that a lot of players see the tanker as an impediment to their earning max XP in minimal time. I do not enjoy that sort of play, but the game is the game and the community the community. If the majority of players would prefer anything other than a tanker then tankers are going to feel that. As long as the game makes anything more than one tanker redundant then the tankers are going to feel that. Once upon a time the idea was that if you enjoyed grouping in MMOs that you needed to make a tank or healer class because more others would be DPS, so there would always be room in groups. In many MMOs this may still be true. Here it has become the opposite as far as tankers are concerned. If you must play something with taunts and old-fashioned aggro management then roll a brute, because their extra DPS is more important than whatever tankers might be better at.

If smashing and lethal sets deal more damage overall because S/L is the most resisted damage type, then changing that damage type would make those powers just plain better, not merely different. It could also make certain extras a little strange. Negative energy causing knockdown? Rad causing bleeding? Cold causing fear? Not really what those types do, you know?

Did you not read the responses? If you think that you are missing something then go ahead and PL a character up to 50 and see. Or read what people are saying, understand that they are saying "because some people just want to be 50 as quickly as possible" and decide if you are one of those people. You have the same access to the LFG channel as everyone else. Are you seeing people calling for Hami raids? Are people here on the forums posting threads about scheduling or trying to schedule Hami raids?

It's a different game. There are so many differences that it isn't a question of what either game did better, it's just a matter of how each company presented what they had. WoW did fantasy MMO better than CoH. CoH did superhero MMO better than WoW. I don't know if the WoW UI or the CoH UI are really interchangeable and it's been too long since I have played WoW to really compare the two, but a UI has to be really horrible for it to be a negative factor, and really, really great to be a positive factor. In other words, that generally doesn't matter to me. The leveling system is totally different. Some people will prefer one over the other, but that doesn't make either one necessarily "better" than the other. In the end more people liked WoW, so I guess the one thing it did better was get people to like it.

As everyone else has said, very solo-friendly, though the AT you choose will determine how things work. Some ATs can solo just fine at a pretty brisk pace. Other ATs can solo just fine, but may take things more slowly. And finally, there may be an AT or two that just do not mesh with your style. Whether some people can solo with them or not doesn't much matter if you do not enjoy playing them. Powers also matter. I have seen some people advise against a /force field controller as a solo character, for example, and I would expect that /empathy controllers would be in the same boat. Those secondaries might help you stay in the fight longer, but they will not be really helpful in helping you finish off the enemies. There are other secondaries much better for that. Those secondaries are fine for teaming, but solo they may not be so great.

I have touched on different things mentioned here in another discussion... So while I understand the reference to "hero" and "villain" ATs, they don't really exist any more. It's difficult to compare ATs like the dominator and controller. Sure, they both have control powers as their primaries, but the controller backs that up with buffs/debuffs and the dominator backs it up with offense. It may be that more people are playing the dominator, but are they doing so because the dominator is "better", or just because they like the offensive secondary more than the buff/debuff secondary? Same idea with the defender and corruptor; The corruptor doesn't have to be "better", there just have to be more people that like the offense first option rather than the buff/debuff first option. But I think that comparing brutes to tankers and scrappers to stalkers is a little easier. They fill the same basic space, or at least they should, so if either side of those pairs is being played in great number over it's counterpart then there may be identifiable mechanical reasons for that. But it is all "fixable" to whatever extent it is broken. I seem to recall seeing something about the devs looking at gauntlet, as in possibly looking at ways to make the tanker AT more attractive. And that is what it all comes down to. Is the brute that much more attractive than the tanker? Okay, then is it because the brute is overperforming or the tanker is underperforming? Once you figure that out then you have a place to start working. But they also can't just turn the tanker into the brute or vice-versa. Even if they add to the damage that a tanker can deal as part of their effort to make it more attractive, they need to do so in a way that makes it different from the brute.

Even if the code isn't spaghetti, the devs are unpaid volunteers. Things that would not be a big deal to a paid development team become a bigger deal here as a result. So dream away. Dreaming is free. But changes need to jump through some hoops before they become "reasonable" here, and I doubt that this meets the standard.

I think that blaster might offer the most diversity. You have three basic options: 1) Blaster - Range all day 2) Blapper - Emphasis on the close combat abilities that your secondary offers. 3) Balanced - A little of this, a little of that. There are other options, of course. You just have to find ATs with sets that you are comfortable going all-in on for the first and second options.

Save Alec Parson. Part of Provost Marchand's "A New Dimension, A New Team" arc. I'm trying to deal with a purple elite boss and it's just been too much. Aurora Pena, Grant Creston, and Pendragon are all well and good for helping with the regular enemies, but when we get to the final fight she has been making short work of us. New plan, team; I am going to gain another level or two and we will see how things look at that time.

I very much remember the original full customization plan. I might still have an old magazine article I saved somewhere that talked about this. I remember a power called "stone hammer" being mentioned in the article. I can't say that I don't think that the AT system was probably better, though. CO's freeform has certainly created it's share of problems. As far as movement power suppression, there may be no direct evidence linking it to PvP but the timing is too coincidental for me not to think that it was a part, and probably no small part. Jousting in PvE was a thing from word go but little to nothing was done about it. Jousting starts happening in PvP and the "fix" suddenly shows up. Could be, but I recall another statement Jack Emmert made regarding the game and a mistake the he thought that he had made. That was something about the game being what the game is at launch and how much harder it was to sell people on things after the fact. But he was talking about crafting if memory serves. That there were people that wanted crafting but since there had been no crafting at launch that many of those players had moved on and it was harder to bring them back than it would have been to keep them if they had had crafting to begin with. There may have been some mention of PvP, but it's been too long for me to be sure.

You may not know that "they" are on "your" run until everyone decides not to defend the hostage. The game has stories. TFs have stories. If you are rescuing a bunch of random office workers that get taken hostage and have to escort them out? A death or two or ten wouldn't necessarily impact the larger mission. I would, on hero side especially, advocate for a reduced reward if the hostages die*, though. Influence is a representation of our character's reputation and if you are the guy that was responsible for what has become known as the "Paragon Legal Services Slaughter" then that reputation won't be worth much. If the hostage(s) are important, on the other hand, then yeah, a botched rescue should require more. "You have to save Dr. Smartgirl! She told us that she had made a major breakthrough before she was kidnapped!". Okay, so you save her you get the benefit of her knowledge. She dies? You have to go to another map and search for clues so that you can hope to discover the breakthrough yourself. It makes sense in terms of the story. * Redside could just flip it. It all ends up in the same place. The hero is expected to save lives and so they lose standing for failing. The villain is not expected to save lives, necessarily, but if they do so then it would give them a bit of a boost with at least some people. Story still takes precedent, though. Let the office workers die? Whatever. You trade speed for influence/infamy. Let Dr. Smartguy die? You need to put together what he knew during the course of another mission.

Giving characters a 60% damage boost and increased recharge is special. Do they walk around all the time with that damage and recharge boost? No? Then it's special.

This. If they want to make rescue the priority then they can penalize letting the hostages die in some way, but not by causing the TF to fail. That opens things up to trolls with nothing better to do, and the one thing worse than my hero having to work with people that will happily let a hostage die when they could be saved at the cost of only a minute or two of time is some jerk causing everyone to have to re-start the TF because their life sucks and they want some company in miseryville.

Morality in a walk. I might, at some point, make a villain just to re-familiarize myself with things on that side, but after CoV launched I played villains a little to see what it was about and then moved right back over to blueside. I can't say that there is no appeal, but the appeal is pretty much limited to "that side has different missions and maps", offset by "but I don't want to play a bad guy".

Exactly like that. It's not on the wiki and that was what I was using for a quick reference. I'll edit my post to reflect that. Doesn't change anything, really, just reinforces it.

So your alternative to the headache of balancing specific powers within small sets is to have to take into account any power from any set? I think I'd be happier with more APPs, and I think that those would be easier to balance. In some cases, the core powers are already in the game. Radiation, for example. Blasters, corruptors, tankers, brutes, scrappers, stalkers, and defenders all have access to radiation based primaries and secondaries. So it seems that making a radiation APP for all of them would allow for more themey APPs for some of those toons. It's just a matter of finding the mix of powers to put into the pool and possibly tweaking their strength. The APPs would vary by AT, of course, with scrappers, strikers, tankers, and brutes getting a mix of radiation blast and radiation emission powers, while the defender and corruptor would be getting some radiation melee and armor powers, and the blaster would get a mix of radiation armor and emission, and all would possibly have some utility thrown in like a radiation version of conserve power or something. The animations are done. The effects are done. And it would have to be easier than trying to balance every individual power in relation to every possible combination of powers on every AT.

I guess, if it doesn't take too much work. I don't remember a lot of the badges that I have, so this would only be so useful to me and, I suspect, many others, especially as their badge total grows. I get that most recent would be chronological order, starting with the most recent and working backwards as you go down the list. And "nearest completion" should start with the one closest to completion and work down to whatever is furthest away. But I would prefer they just alphabetize the badge order in each category to make searching for a specific badge (or something starting with a specific letter) easier.

I like these. If I open the city map and click on a zone, then yeah, go to that zone map and let me see what's what, including mission markers and where the fire or whatever is. Hiding the "full" zones would cut down on at least a little scrolling and seems like the sort of thing that should have been thought of by the devs. Makes me wonder if there isn't some difficulty there. And while I am not so enthusiastic about a character picture, I would like to be able to get a full body image of other players when I click info. The headshot and background/origin if they typed one is all well and good, but if I want to see someone else's costume I have to hope that they stand still for a while.

1 or 2, and 5. One problem with #5, though, would be that it would have to be tied into the salvage permissions. If a player can not take a thing from a salvage rack directly then they shouldn't be allowed to remove those items through a recipe, either. That may be too much work.

If I was picking two? Level and last played. Those two seem to be the most all-around useful. Creation date and time played seem mostly useless to me. I mean, it tells you who is oldest or youngest or wherever in-between in those terms, but for what reason would someone be seeking out the character with the least time logged on to play? Isn't any level 2 the same as any other in that regard, even if one of them might have a few more minutes in-game? Who cares if this level 50 was created on May 3rd and that one on May 6th? What affect does that have on which one you would like to play?

It's not me saying that they are denying access to a whole zone, but I think that snipers shouldn't be taking potshots at people in the hospital area. The first thing to happen to you after you respawn shouldn't be "get shot by the sniper". Crey is fine. Snipers are fine, and they need an aggro range to match their attack range to really work as snipers at all. Zero problem with any of that. But I am not a fan of snipers spawning to where they can, and do, shoot into the hospitals in the hazard zones. I don't know how much work is involved here, but either creating a "no sniper spawn bubble" just larger then sniper range around the entry area or stacking the sandbags higher so they can't draw a line of fire or something to prevent this would be nice.