Sunsette

There is little quite so frustrating as when you have an enemy you have a 95% chance to hit and you trigger multiple streakbreakers in like, a minute. It's like running an unlucky D&D session at high speed.

As far as translucency I'd just kill for a Null the Gull setting that disables translucency on your character. I track my toggles to know if my stealth power is active or not and the transparency just looks awful because there's no self-occlusion so you see all the little polygony bits inside.

I just made a new ice character, they used the old aim animation by default. My existing characters still have their old animations as well. I don't think this is ordinary behavior and may be a bug.

The one thing I'd want to keep in mind with your tests is that part of building an AT is scalars, and also that powerset varies performance a lot -- I don't know about for enemies, but with players a lot of the weapon melee sets offer passive riders that can up survivability dramatically. Force Fields is definitely number one on my list of concerns as an outlier, though, and it'd be something I'd probably want to tweak or avoid implementing for such a support AT.

It seems pretty obvious that was the goal, yes But I already find the Freakshow to be extremely boring (slow to kill, non threatening) to fight. When I look at the missions that HC added to Cimerora, too, I feel like they're leaning too much on making way too frequent random HP sponges that lack tactical counterplay to slow things down. I don't love warwalker enemies but at least the pop up messages and big targeting graphic give me some spice to make me keep moving. New council teleport you against your will I guess, but that was also used by the HC incarnate versions of Minotaurs and Cyclops. I appreciate that they are trying to solve a difficult problem wrt grouping incentives for several ATs and I don't have a better suggestion at the moment, but I'm starting to get a little bit worried at the commonality of this design. I like some of these mechanics in general but I don't enjoy how they feel with the rhythm of trash encounters currently for most casually built teams. Again, all of this is fine to me (good, in fact) so far in Task Force content, where there's more active team building than "Yeah, sure, whatever can come" Also, tangentially: the people who are hoping that this will lead to players who know how to play better, it won't. Maybe a tiny bit but it won't be significant. The barriers to good play in this game rest primarily upon how much information (much of it obscured) must be processed. Any impedence to leveling rate will add slightly more time to process that information before 50, but not more incentive or facility to do so. I've seen very good new players who got farmed to 50 because they like ingesting that stuff about whatever game they play. Also seen players who turn off general immediately, don't know what a farm or ouro are, level to 50 multiple times and are pretty clueless.

Seems to only afflict Numpad+, primarily tested with the Auto-Run feature. I'll change it and save the bind, then change zones and it no longer works. Even using /bind_save_file and /bind_load_file doesn't seem to preserve the numpad+ key.

I'm just kind of skeptical of an all-damage no defense in general. That was the original concept for the blaster and it was extremely hard to play in most contexts, leading to the multiple revisions and buffs blasters got. A melee-heavy version of that, subject to way more casual fire, just seems like frustration bait. And then if you make them survivable, you open up new cans of worms -- blasters are extremely high-performing now at the top end of play because of those changes and buffs, while still notoriously squishy for most players -- they have the widest and most even spreads in performance quality of all ATs now, I'd guess. Still like the other two though! 😄 With further consideration, I'd want to adjust triage to provide some sort of controllable benefit to others. Making target ally powers target self might be difficult since there's no way to target yourself in this game, so you're dealing with every power at best having a redirect based on whether you have a friendly targeted or not. It also leads to potential monster builds with some solo sets, and the only way to balance this would be to tank the melee damage output dramatically, which is not always fun. Uncontrollable and random inherents are kind of boring, honestly; see scrapper. Not immediately sure on a replacement suggestion though.

I feel it risks further trivializing the already downplayed benefits of: control powers movement speed bonuses (from support sets, IOs, and Alpha slots) spending power or enhancement slots for movement I wouldn't really complain as to my personal benefit since I'd get a few build slots back on melee characters who got the speed solely for chasing. But I don't know that it'd be a good change overall.

This is not correct. I literally just tested this. Kicked someone in the face with Fly while Fly + Afterburner + Evasive Maneuvers was active. 52 MPH (down from 102 MPH). Kicked someone in the face with Hover + EM. Retained a constant 58 MPH. I'm not going to do extra testing with CJ or Sprint though I don't expect them to get any special callouts. Kins used to abuse this all the time in live with Speed Boost, though. Should players be affected by suppression while enemies are not? Unless enemies are going significantly above 60 MPH I'm not sure this is really a fairness issue, though I don't feel strongly about it.

Most of the time I'm on a group that goes bad vs one that doesn't, I mostly notice that the groups which go bad don't have like two+ veteran, overbuilt characters who can sufficiently compensate for the worst possible things anyone else does. The game is very easy if you know what you're doing, but the freedom granted by build and play also allows you to screw yourself and others over phenomenally. An overbuilt party can compensate for these to an extent, but most veteran players don't overbuild.

If you all are referring to Travel Power Suppression Slotted Sprint, Slotted Combat Jumping, and Evasive Maneuvers + Hover all make you quite swift at in-combat movement and I usually incorporate one of these options or a teleport into a build specifically for these reasons. There's also a number of ways to get running or general movement speed boosts from IOs if you don't want to spend a precious slot on these things. Most of my characters can move at approximately 50-55 MPH in combat, versus a base speed of 30-ish MPH. At live launch, Fly outside of combat capped at 58 MPH, so this is more than enough to outrun most enemies.

My opinion on Council currently is that it's a mixed bag. My fully-kitted-out characters don't have any more difficulty soloing them than before other than that they take longer to kill (which isn't interesting when that's not attached to real danger or tactical responses -- and with the transformations, revives, etc. they can take a long time to kill). The flipside is that while I barely noticed any changes to my survivability on a kitted-out character, it's been a bloodbath on several teams for sidekicks when the teams lacked strong controls and tanks roles. For high-level radios, this is mostly disincentive -- and while I don't love how integral farming is to the game's community, it also evolved for reasons here. The 35-49 portion of the game is the weakest portion of the game content-wise. Gold is wrapped up, there's not a lot great Blue here outside of RWZ and the New Praetorians. I hope this is followed with stuff to make the 35-49 range much more interesting than it currently is, as I think that's a huge chunk of why people rush to Council Radio at this range. Leveling is slow and the content is unexciting, Council Radio cuts out half of that problem. However, I think these changes are excellent improvements for high-level Council task forces. There's a lot more incentive to get single-target debuff, area controls, and strong single-target killers versus just AoE damage + Tank for such task forces now, and the packs will have much more texture.

My general default is +0x4 with bosses on. Allows packs to have some variety and reward priority targeting solo but nothing turns into an irritating HP wall that just takes forever to kill. This moves to +2x4 around the 30s with more offensive characters or the 50s with defensive, and +4x4 by the 50s with the offensive characters. I do +4x4 or +4x8 with L50+ Going Rogue or later content that already has better monster design, usually.

I like the Commander and Redeemer. Blaster and Sentinel already have major identity overlap that's not completely resolved (if much better than it used to be) and I think Cannon would exacerbate the problem without adding much though. I might suggest Redeemer gets assault sets instead of pure melee sets because the Stalker/Scrapper/Brute field is also congested. Power-Up pairs neatly with support sets.

When having anywhere from 5 to 12 toggles active is entirely common for a 50th level character, the toggle effects are largely ugly, excessive, and do not inform. I may not love my allies covering me in green fire that turns me translucent but it at least serves the purpose there that I know I am clearly in their area of effect and receiving benefit. I don't get any useful information or visual appeal from color barf caused by toggles I can just look at my tray for.

So, I just finished bingeing all of the tutorial arcs and zones back-to-back. Done all of them before, but having them next to each other like that presented some interesting things I hadn't really considered when I just did them individually every once in a while. The Existing Tutorials Are Bad None of this is controversial, I think, but for the sake of background: it is often noted that Twinshot and Graves are bad arcs and worse tutorials. The thing I've seen most consistently cited in this regard is that they are very easily skippable with their level bands; if you miss one step, you're locked out of all the others, and the level band staggering means that you don't get instructed on some things, like hospitals and enhancements, as early as you probably should -- especially now that TOs have been banished from the game. There's also a lot they simply don't cover in a game that is both less transparent than the standard and has less comprehensive fan support. So the case for moving tutorial parts in Habashy and Kuzmin is already clear I think -- but what about the other half of my title suggestion, 'distill Graves and Twinshot'? Why spend the effort to touch them instead of binning them? Well... Twinshot and Graves Are Good Stories Ruined By Doing Too Much, Too Fast The casts of both arcs often catch stray shots when these missions are being criticized. I do think characters like Flambeaux1, Dillo2, and Crosscut3 could be tightened up, but I don't think they're terrible or really what's weighing those arcs down. They are simply the most understandable faces of the poor writing. It's not their actual character concepts, dialogues, actions, or your interactions with them that really hurt the stories most.4 Nah, the big problems with these arcs are that they have relatively huge casts meant to be supported with relatively little writing, and significant portions of the writing are spent shoving you into some of the worst, most confusing attempts at immersive tutorials for a game that I've ever seen. It took me two consecutive runs of the Graves arc to realize that Zephyr's mission where you fight a bunch of Goldbrickers he's powered up was meant to teach players to use enhancements. Dean Yu's interaction with you is good for a laugh a bit, but also kind of frustrating when you can transparently see you're being played for a fool and also you have to go beat up a bunch of higher-level enemies (depending on level you do the arc) for no reason at all. It doesn't feel immersive at all, either. The Shooting Stars don't have as wildly convoluted of excuses for why you're sent places, but instead they have Maelstrom -- increasing the cast size further. Maelstrom appears in the Shooting Stars arc both times we have a huge spike in cameo appearances: he appears right after you've faced the Hearts of Darkness and before you meet Manticore, and again with several companions from Powers Division's Top Dogs at the end of the arc. That is a lot to ask a newbie to take in! Maelstrom is just generally a problem, honestly. Eddie Polstra is woven through three different storylines that occur nearly concurrently: Resistance Wardens, Loyalist Power, and Heroes. He is most important to the last, but he never answers any questions about who he is and never matters to the blue-side experience again unless you count one boss appearance in one incarnate trial where he is not very chatty. That's very weird for a newbie starting on blue side, and I think it's safe to say that's the most popular starting experience. I don't think you can remove him, but you can give the character more closure. Similar could possibly be done in tying up the Dollface Entity with the truncated Snakes plot and giving Redside players a more complete glance at Scirocco, though more would have to be woven wholecloth here. I think you can efficiently5 tighten up the above stuff. If you cut the tutorial parts out of these stories and replace it with more character interaction and some writing polish passes, while still encouraging players to meet these characters early in their careers, you can give new players a great introduction to both Paragon and the Rogue Isles and more investment when they see Shining Stars in tip missions. It would also be a great move to involve them and the Hearts of Darkness in more content going forward. ------------ 1 Bio suggests she's got a scientific background, dialogue writing has her directly reject science in multiple avenues. I think scientist ditz is an interesting combination, as proven by Neuron, and it could be leaned into more. 2 I enjoy this character type a lot, I think the dialogue could be cleaned up a bit, but if I'm being honest it's probably not worth the effort and any changes here would likely get more backlash than positive attention. 3 I literally do not understand what the character is even doing at major points, like how he is reasoned to have beaten you in his contest, or anything that was going on with the PA system. I did the arc twice in a row and I still didn't. 4 There's an ongoing thread about Redside that has some excellent suggestions from @Chris24601 on how extra dialogue choices could improve interacting with characters in that arc, and I won't rehash those excellent points. 5 I have absolutely no idea how technically difficult it would be to alter these missions, mind.

I don't think I ever came close to having an overstuffed enhancement bar in my completionist gold runs. Never tried completionist red or blue, though. But yeah, not hard pushing for it for the general reasons you list.

As long as it doesn't work at 50 or with XP shut off (to avoid L49 farm abuse) having it increase inf gains might be a good idea too -- give the newbies more ability to afford enhancements for themselves and make mistakes before they've figured out how to game an AH with salvage and insps as a newbie. Though it's not a hill I'd die on, I don't think it's critical -- just an idle thought.

I think these two things are technically different but nearly synonymous in a large majority of cases. A LOT of people on this forum and in-game have referenced Joker's refusal to work with Red Skull given recent content controversy, and while I do not find the actual cited comic to be a piece of good writing, the fact is that people have wavy and individualized comfort lines about what types of evil they'd never do IRL but can fantasize about vs. those they can't find exciting in any form. I don't have strong opinions about how this divide breaks out overall, I think you, Chris, and some other people have brought up fantastic points that are getting to the heart of an issue that is easy to sum up in a line but also bears close and nuanced examination well.

I will probably adopt ATC's macro (thanks!) and I already keep my minimap on screen fairly enlarged and zoomed out at all times (which has helped immensely now that I have a large screen that can support it -- on the 13" screen I last played, not so much). But my suggestion stands in that I am generally of the opinion that this sort of QoL is best made standard rather than left to stopgap player solutions, at least where technically feasible by our volunteer team.

I think the idea that this game gathers any legitimacy or interest in play from having nearly featureless maps for its procedurally-generated escheresque dungeons is... kinda weird and I don't know where it comes from. I could see it if we were playing a rogue-like, but CoH is decidedly not. Newer mission design tries to avoid this problem of confusing, near-featureless levels in numerous ways, but a marker like this would improve a lot of older content.

So first of all, loving the cooldown timers on powers. Took some getting used to for old toons where my brain was used to reading the shrinking power timers but especially on new characters it's eliminated a lot of the guessing game on whether or not I'll have a short duration power up in time to be used next. I have an idea to exploit the cooldown timers -- it's kind of a hacky implementation, but anything not hacky might require too much of an overhaul to the buff display frames. I was thinking that with certain powersets that deeply rely on short-duration buffs like Titan Weapons, a null power gained at level 1 that has no activation time and does nothing but go on cooldown when the buff is active -- in the specific case of Titan Weapons, Momentum -- could be used as a hacky workaround to track the duration of the remaining time by putting it in the power bar and then just not activating it. This might only be easily doable in Titan Weapons if it's doable at all because the set is already designed to have powers that read the presence of a specific buff on your character, but if it can be done -- I think it'd be a great QoL touch for the set. Thanks.

Ever entered a cave and gotten twisted around which path is the way forward? Ever been afraid to use reveal in case there are three elevators and you don't remember which one you entered through? Have the game give you a marker each time you enter a map that says where you entered the map from. This might be doable via an invisible pet of some kind that is named ENTRANCE or something, idk. I am very bad at spatial orientation and I would love to reduce the liminal space effect I get in this game's office buildings and caves at times. Thanks.

I'm not saying Dean's not a good arc (and I include Leonard since it's all one story) -- but that's my point. One of the most positively cited Red-side arcs really doesn't have much to do with being evil! You're practically on the defensive against Ajax in that plot -- his pathological recklessness due to survivor's guilt and a desire not to face the music for his crimes in Paragon make him a very interesting character, but also one that you can easily justify fighting with no guilt regardless of why your rogue or villain is in the Rogue Isles. Ajax is practically an anti-villain with you having the possibility of playing the anti-hero role. Dean's story *does* exemplify the agency which people expect from being able to play a villain, though, and which CoV rarely offers.

If he's less obvious now, cripes. Yes, you are a petty, noob villain with a bit of edgelord syndrome, a mind like a brick, and some squeamishness who nonetheless shows surprising wit in a number of instances. The character is at once not very fleshed out but also constrains you to a very small range of possible personalities, which I think might be the worst possible combination for this kind of fantasy. It took me a few missions to figure out what the personality was rather than it being at all compatible with my preconceived notion of my character -- and I didn't get any immersive insight into a character as a result, I just finally figured out how I was supposed to read the story at all. That doesn't facilitate most of the things that people look for in villain experiences, which is the point here.