Sunsette

No, I am very directly saying that the -Res would stay in Distract. I chose the wording of 'enhance' specifically; I am sorry that my initial wording was not sufficiently clear for you, but my follow-ups have been clear that I have no interest in putting -Res in a travel power, and no interest in removing it from Misdirection. -Res is the current lynchpin of that power. I do not personally find your argument against a Confuse power having -Res to be compelling. Stealth runs are not concerned with the idea of experience lost, and this would be a deep power in the concealment tree. I do not think it is an unreasonable argument, and it is something that anyone who reads this suggestion should consider, but I don't think it is a strong one. Point of clarification: pop-up travel powers are not slottable. As it currently stands, and I already agreed, this proposal would result in the loss of the ability to use placate sets. I'm not going to repeat myself on other points further. I do concede that the out-of-combat defense portion for Stealth is larger than I recalled, and I'm not married to changes to the Stealth power at this time.

Well, it is a good thing then that I have made a topic in which I would like to explore how the concealment pool can be changed to increase the depth of non-combat stealth play! 🙂 Minor is not the same as non-existent, and Hide was used as a comparative that has a much better version of the stealth bonus. And Stealth is the topic at hand. I am not here dumping on the Hide power as being weak. What you have described is a minor benefit. One that I enjoy. And one that Stealth is not comparable with. Last post on this from me.

Let me ask you something, Rudra: How often do you, on your stalkers, encounter situations where there is AoE damage on your way to something you want to maintain the hidden state for and the only or best way for you to bypass it is to take a direct line through the AoE damage where you have, at minimum, a 5% chance of getting struck and losing that state. Because I think that's happened to me maybe twice? I usually have a better option for it. It's nice to have, but yes, it is minor. I get more (yet still not tons!) of value from the Hide state appearing mid-combat for whatever reason, like getting held or something and then porting back to catch up with the fight. And yet (to return to topicality) it is still far more significant than a value a tenth of that.

When that huge number is only active when you are not currently in combat... yes, it is only a minor convenience. I'm confused what you're objecting to here, honestly; within context, I wasn't saying "Hide is weak", I was pointing out that an out of combat defense buff is not much consideration in most purposes, especially as small of one as Stealth's or Infiltration's. Those extra values only matter for the very small scenario in which you are still in the hidden state but someone is attacking you, a situation which usually lasts a few seconds tops. It can be nice (but still quite risky and situational) on Stalkers for running through area damage on your way to something else.

I did not say: give the travel power version -res. I am saying: give a travel power a placate similar to misdirection, with a lower cooldown as it cannot be enhanced, and turn misdirection from a placate to a targeted confuse, but with identical radius and cooldown currently. I did not even directly reference misdirection when discussing the travel power tray in the original suggestion for a reason, precisely because I am aware the -res component is the significant purpose of the misdirection power as it presently exists, outside of muling. Yes, placate sets in there would be lost and placate sets are pretty strong as mules, so that would get lost. Sure, I can concede that. I'm also aware that my suggestion is on the strong side and likely needs whittling; the loss of being able to slot a full placate set isn't meaningfully going to amount to a net nerf, though it would certainly nerf some builds. Toss the confuse? Yeah, I can see that being reasonable, though I'd want more time to think through the ideas at the brainstorming stage. Regardless of confuse staying or going, I'm not really interested in hashing out specific numbers in the course of this thread, which is why I was vague about whatever more would need to be given to Stealth within this context. (And doubling a minor level of defense when you're out of combat is not a meaningful amount of value. The very large AoE defense granted by Stalker Hide is considered a minor convenience.) Added depth requires both player systems and level design, yes. This is not a point of disagreement. The devs are already frequently and actively engaging with player unintentional skips in the new content they've added and which I have given feedback on separately. There's a negotiation present in what's good emergent gameplay and what's not and it'll be a while before we see full development, but I have every confidence that if nothing else, they do look to see how players can use existing tools in more meaningful ways.

Then read it again, please. I *like* stealth. I want there to be more mechanical depth and reward to stealth. I want to feel a sharper difference between my characters which invest in stealth and those that do not, the way that I feel sharp differences between those that invest in the other travel pool powers. And I want the benefits for going deep into concealment to pertain primarily to acting in a concealed way. I want to be able to specialize beyond "Stalker has the Hide power." City of Heroes is the only MMO in which one of my mains has never been a stealthy character (although I play and enjoy Stalker) because there's not much to the stealth component. If I'm determined, fast, and durable enough I can brute-force a skip on a non-stealthy character with just a single IO. Have you ever experienced the joy of sneaking through a dungeon designed for 5 max level characters with a buddy and using everything in your arsenal to make it to all the treasure chests and a few key minibosses? Cuz that was *fun*. I don't think we can bring that into City, but I think we can borrow a few elements towards it.

Right now, Stealth is a boring and overpowered condition that allows huge portions of content skips because it is effectively a binary state for the majority of content: you either get seen before you can run past the group and walloped, or you don't. It is a design headache for the devs because they have limited ability to craft maps which can deal with this. If you give the stealth pool more depth, you can also create a more in-depth counterplay to stealth -- you can reliably bring in auto-sight enemies and enemies with higher detection ranges at points (not advocating using them in every single pull, by far) and expect people who want to engage in skipping to have heavy mechanical depth invested into it. Right now, there is zero purpose to going deeper than one stealth power if that for the purposes of Stealth. Its most compelling uses are as a LotG mule and a long cooldown res ability.

It is technically faster, yes. it is not meaningfully faster without heavy slotting, though there are a few builds which can benefit from use of the universal travel sets as sets rather than as partials. Specifically did not say anything about losing the -Res. Infiltrate's tray pop-up would keep the Placate utility. There would be very flatly nothing lost. But it's not Tough or Weave. True, it's a Tier 1 pool power and those are Tier 2/3, but it's much more end expensive than Combat Jumping or Hover. I do not think it unreasonable for it to have an in-combat benefit besides minor defense at that cost.

I don't know much about VEATs, but seems reasonable to me. Stacking scenarios, along with the fact that Stalker Placate is target-driven and primarily about an opportunity to deal more damage or reset against specific opponents, not a global 'reset combat' button. Placates are largely not seen as very useful (which is the same reason I give such a high mag/radius to these idea powers). Stalker placate powers became useful for reasons not terribly related to the actual status. Giving an ability that can interact with auto-sight enemies means you can conceivably place more of them in missions to make skipping a bit less trivial and require investment. I like stealthing in other games, in this one it's very basic and kind of boring. I'd like to enhance the stealth minigame and counters to it.

That's why Greycat gives the suggestions they do, to emulate the restrictions embodied by the fast path. I don't think I'd ever take it and it seems like a lot of work for a path that is heavily ignorable for anyone who planned their build out while frustrating for those who try to experiment. It might also be difficult to work with ouro. Interesting idea though.

I agree with this suggestion, but as a stopgap measure you can open up costume files in a plaintext editor like notepad and then copy the scales from one file to the other.

Do note that the undo button often loses the colors, but I find the button handy nevertheless.

The following changes would hopefully make the concealment pool more interesting to take, including for characters that already get significant StealthRadius values from their primary/secondary powersets. Improve Stealth and Infiltration These two powers are too close to each other in effect. Infiltration offering comparable stealth to Super Speed and comparable movement to Athletic Run given the free distribution of Athletic Run and commonality of the +stealth proc120 IOs feels bad and makes it uncompelling. Give it 55 StealthRadius, as well as a travel tray pop-up power with a very wide-area (60 ft.) Mag 4 placate, fast animation (under 1 second) and a 120 second cooldown. For Stalkers only, this placate should also activate the Hide state. Use the Smoke Bomb animation for this (with alternates in the combat teleport animations). Being a very wide area placate would make it function like a vanish button in other MMOs and give a reason to run Infiltration in combat like the other travel powers (except for Super Jump, which has Combat Jumping) already do. At high magnitude, it can stack with existing placates for those characters which already use them against difficult individual characters. Stealth should probably offer a much higher StealthRadius value or an additional benefit to be worth its high endurance cost. It might be interesting to give it a minor amount of Defense Debuff Resistance. What makes the most sense to me, though, is for it to offer a minor degree of Energy and Negative Energy resistance -- fitting with its description of bending light around itself. This would obviously have an effect of directing some pressure off of characters going for the fighting pool purely to slot resistance unique IOs, though it might also be too powerful in that context -- allowing resistance sets here might not be wise. Enhance Misdirection into Distract Distract would be a targeted AoE rather than a PBAoE and replaces the Mag 4 placate with a Mag 2 confusion without turning the enemies hostile to you. It also lowers their perception radius significantly, to cover enemies unaffected by the confusion. This would make going deep into Concealment for a dedicated infiltration character provide a real benefit when dealing with enemy groups that have auto-sight enemies and be worth the long cooldown. At Mag 2, this would become a possibly interesting power pick for Dominators since Domination would double it, it would also stack with existing confuses for Controllers, and it would offer a potential stack for Rogue alignment characters, providing a variety of interesting synergies on more neglected elements. Finally, at such a long cooldown, it should also activate the Hide state for stalkers if they are not already in that state.

Yup, this hits me a lot as someone who likes light colors and plays a lot of dark-skinned characters.

I think the current balance of the economy depends somewhat on the fact that a boosted enhancement becomes somewhat less liquid.

Yes, every time I've led a tinpex and several times I've been a secondary on one. People feel pressure to not be the last one in and get embarrassed easily. Occasionally other players are straight up jerks about it, too. And it's hard to get people to keep from going ahead on Tinpex, so have ended up with newbies or recently-returned who show up to a map just in time for everything else to be done. These changes are never about some grave injustice or harm, they're about acknowledgment of likely outcomes and mitigating them.

Yeah, I agree with this. We've had to use Assemble the Team, Teleport Target, or Team Transporter a few times because people -- including newbies who don't have any prior rote memories of the task force that are conflicting -- get thrown by the nav points and the narrow parallel halls due to the strange base layout. I got lost badly my first time, but I committed the pathway to memory because I have a compulsive need to try and outspeed Team Transporter with my travel powers; most people are not as obsessed with such a stupid, meaningless feat as I am. 😅 Along with the confusing nav point, it's the second Tin Mage door that's the big problem, imo. If it was where it used to be, people wouldn't get as disoriented heading to it and going back out the main portally entrance. It's neat that we have a proper physical exit to the base without a teleporter, but I was expecting the physical entrance to be where the teleporter was rather than off to the side entirely.

Something like that, yeah. Hence the idea. In WoW, some classes have longer than normal range at melee despite not having any magical powers and this is attributed to them just being very fast and acrobatic enough to move back into position. If WoW makes it another twenty years I could see the animations even keeping up with this idea. (Genuinely, positively surprised this got so much positive response!)

It's less comic book logic and more the inevitable reality of compromises made to support melee and range design within a reasonable budget (extremely frugal budget in the case of CoH). Range attacks in all video games are much shorter than make sense.

With long bios, certain window heights do not seem to generate a scroll bar even when text has scrolled off the box. There is a range; at minimum height it is guaranteed with the longer bios I have checked, but there is a good range of sizes between 'shows everything no scroll' and 'minimum' where the scroll bar no longer exists. Window width does not seem to alter this behavior. Checking the weird new "hide first appearance date" button does not seem to alter this behavior either. This is in addition to the (I assume intended) behavior that a character with no bio filled out does not description tab at all now and that first appearance date defaults to not being shown.

I can safely say that even in council caves full of MMs, I've never really had an issue with not being able to see or target enemies. (Reaching them as melee, yes). But by the time it's that full, they're probably pretty dead anyway. There is a lot of room to adjust camera angles. I am sympathetic to the fact that other people have different eyesight/situations than me, but I really don't see how that adds up to teammates using powers in their ordinary, intended fashion being "selfish".

...ok, so yes, it's unlikely you're softcapping def on Posi 2 with Hover (though not willing to rule out the possibility altogether)... ...and this game has too much color and light vomit for my tastes, which I wish I could turn down... ...but it's part of the game to the point that I think it makes more sense for you to adjust your gamma/brightness/contrast than to get mad at people for playing in a very ordinary way. It would be nice if they had changed how they played to accommodate you, and I don't think asking was unreasonable. I am sorry they screamed in response to your request. But your expectation of compliance with that request does seem unreasonable to me, sorry. I recently finished an Adv. LGTF with my head trapped between someone else's thighs during the entire final boss fight, aerial collision/blocking is a really common annoyance intrinsic to the game's engine.

would think the best way to handle this is to make the "Only Affecting Self" prestige toggle from START also make it so that you are not affected by friendly buffs.

Everyone will become a hero and the only thing left villain-side will be dedicated solo characters and people temporarily flipping sides to get their patron arcs in. Remove null's ability to alignment flip and red will die even harder. Mutual exclusivity mechanics never benefit the less populated group in anything subject to network effects. Period. Companies that are jockeying for marketshare will always push for openness and connection when they're behind in the market and for mutual exclusivity when they're on top. Redside only has as much life as it does right now because the exclusivity is nearly meaningless atm. I'm willing to join Strike Forces on occasion with my heroes to help red-siders, and my villains can do group content easily if I want. They make any change like this, my entire red roster goes blue permanently and all my blues will never touch the vig/rogue mechanic ever again. Not even for that really cool John Houston story arc in Independence Port.

It has a unique map too, one that I enjoy flying through. It'd be a great testing ground for content to completely redo with more static/tailored spawns that could provide more interesting encounters.