Sunsette

March 10

Right guys, let's keep it complementary.

March 10

imx Christian Gamer groups aren't especially likely to have angel or demon themed characters. I like my angel theming myself and I have the religious and spiritual depth of a slightly fractured rock. I just really like the aesthetic.

March 9

Don't think Alexander has much to do with it -- my redsider was able to access John Houston's arc despite no past history with Alexander (who's part of blue-side arcs). And his path in the story suggests he's not anywhere near the good guy he immediately appeared to be.

the IC justification to me seems pretty clear: if you're a true-blue hero or a crusading vigilante, John Houston would never work with you in the first place. He's kind of a scumbag. If you're a full-out villain, you wouldn't be able to get to paragon in the first place.

It would have been nice for the best neighborhood heroic content we've gotten ... ever(?) in this game to be accessible for heroes so I get where you're coming from, OP, but I can only assume they intend to make similar content for vigilantes in the Rogue Isles as part of a project to increase cross-population of factions.

March 9

9 minutes ago, Major_Decoy said:

It has a different name. All 10% recharge bonuses are Ultimate Improved Recharge Time Bonus, and that power will stack up to 5 times.

The 7.5% recharge bonus from Basilisk's Gaze is named Huge Improved Recharge Time Bonus and that power will stack up to 5 times.

The 7.5% recharge bonus from Luck of the Gambler is named Luck of the Gambler: Recharge Speed and that power will stack up to 5 times.

Thunderstrike has a six piece bonus +2.5% Ranged Defense named Moderate Increased Ranged/Energy/Negative Energy Def Bonus.

Superior Winter's Bite has a five piece set bonus +2.5% Ranged Defense named Ultimate Increased Energy/Negative Energy/Ranged Def Bonus.

Despite the fact that they both give +2.5 Ranged Defense, you can stack 5 Thunderstrike with the Superior Winter's Bite bonus because they have different names and are thusly treated as different powers.

This one's actually fine -- they're two different set bonuses and only part of their functions overlap. One is +5 En/N D, +2.5 R D, the other is +2.5 R D, +1.25 En/N. By CoX standards, that's actually very clear and distinguishable. While the different name thing is correct, outside of the combat attributes window it's hard to learn the name of any buff, so I don't use that point when trying to explain the system to newbies very much -- many people are not even aware the combat attributes window exists.

March 9

OK. I think I misunderstood your language earlier on dismissing other axes of comparison.

I still think this aspect doesn't work as a dimension at all as opposed to simply traits, because ludonarrative synergy -- the intersection between gameplay and mechanics, the terminals of this axis -- isn't addressed whatsoever, and I think it should be central to any discussion of the opposition of gameplay and immersion. While the two can be at odds at their most extreme ends, I think the majority of good game design does not treat them as fundamental opposites which must be mediated as opposed to complementary ingredients which must harmonize.

March 8

9 minutes ago, Shenanigunner said:

It just answers — or helps sort out — some of the fairly incomprehensible arguments about how various players choose to set up their UI. There are always some that make me wonder if they even look past all the trays, to be honest, and while my analysis might be pure cabbage, it answers some of those questions, to me.

While I *have* met people who really don't care at all for anything about a game beyond its mechanics, I think you're underestimating the power of imagination -- City of Heroes is not exactly the pinnacle of mechanical stimulation in MMO gaming, after all. Its concept, its freedom of expression, and its community are all significant draws. Some people are willing to sacrifice the in-the-moment immersion for the satisfaction that their character works as conceived of, both separate to or alongside the reward of the gameplay loop itself.

When I was struggling financially for a few years, I spent a while with only a sole 13" screen and that was definitely a compromise I made in some games, especially team-focused games where I wasn't willing to let my teammates down just so I could have a slightly nicer look at a tiny, eye-straining screen. But now that I have a big screen, I use every inch of my real estate to balance useful information and an immersive view of the field.

March 8

26 minutes ago, Riverdusk said:

I've definitely gotten some big time flack in help channel before on this same question when I respond that the LoTG +recharge works as a set bonus and people yelling at me "it isn't a set bonus, it's a global!"

Hate when people do that, you have my sympathies. I occasionally get yelled at similarly when I'm distinguishing what I call on-use vs. procs even when the point of discussion is someone confused about the two.

I definitely see your logic in using 'set bonus' to describe LotG. I'm not picky about terminology except as it provides clarification, and City of Heroes built its lexicon in fairly myopic and confusing ways so there aren't any good choices really, lol. I'm happy to bow to whatever's dominant wording.

March 8

5 minutes ago, SuperPlyx said:

I have wondered if there was another bonus that worked like this. Like the Impervium Skin Psi resist, anybody ever slot 5 of those and Had a IO set with 6%Psi resist.

Yes I just slotted a Invul tank, 😛

From looking on City of Data, I think that should be fine and stack. The easiest way to test would be to check combat attributes; if the effects have different names under the breakdown of your psi resistance, you're good.

March 8

8 hours ago, Marshal_General said:

Does anyone else try for their Signature Character to the point you are creating characters over and over hoping to find that one for that AT?

Since 2004.

I only finally settled on a representation of the very first thing I tried to make in City of Heroes last month. That's been my all-consuming quest and until it was solved, I could not settle on any additional characters to play. (As of today, for the first time ever, I have two 50s that I am willing to play at the same time; I've had many 50s, but most were retired or deleted.)

March 8

3 hours ago, skoryy said:

My S/L/E capped blasters get toasted against nuCouncil but I can breeze through them with my elec/elec stalker with his capped resists and Power Sink.

I've done well on one character backing off of the S/L/E cap a little and raising Ranged to 32.5%, though I can't make that a general recommendation for council in specific; I probably have more leeway on the relevant character due to some other soft control quirks of the powersets.

March 8

3 hours ago, Latex said:

4,400 concurrent players is actually an insane number

This is Guild Wars 2; https://steamcharts.com/app/1284210
And SWTOR; https://steamcharts.com/app/1286830

It's Steam only so take it with a grain of salt seems both these MMO's have launchers off-Steam, it's insane to even come close to that number of concurrent players.

Not just launchers off steam, but only migrated to steam later -- legacy diehards are often going to avoid integration.

I agree with your evaluation though, that's a lot of players.

17 hours ago, ZamuelNow said:

Generally curious, what makes Brutes more new player friendly than Scrappers?

At casual play (no ATOs) it outputs more and more predictable damage. Ramping momentum is an easy way of keeping enjoyment.

I kinda consider Scrapper to be one of the worst designed ATs, not in terms of ability to fulfill its mission but in terms of not having a fun gameplay loop. Its central feature is a very low amount of RNG.

March 8

4 hours ago, Wolfboy1 said:

I am quite sure this has been answered before somewhere but is most likely buried after years, my question is this:

If I put a, hypothetically, Luck of the Gambler (Defense/Global Recharge Speed) on a power that I never plan to use directly...will it still confer the bonus even if I never actually click on said power?

Your question has been answered, but let me go into things a little more in detail. There are two or three categories of special enhancements: globals, procs, and on-use.

A global is always active under any circumstance as long as you have not exemplared below the level at which the enhancement which grants it could be nominally slotted. For example, if your enhancements are level 50, the globals on those enhancements will function as long as you are level 47 or higher. IO set bonuses are globals. Most globals are passive and consistent benefits, though the Preventative Medicine +Absorb effect is reactive. You can only benefit from up to 5 of the same global, even if it comes from different sets. Luck of the Gambler's +7.5% recharge bonus is considered a separate global from IO sets that provide +7.5% recharge time, but that's the only psuedo-exception I can think of to the rule of five.

The next two types can be considered as one being a special case of the other if you think taxonomically, but their reliability is wildly different. Both check for a trigger when a power is activated, or if an auto-power or toggle, every 10 seconds. Both always work regardless of what level you have exemplared to or what level the enhancement is.

A proc triggers under extremely complex percent chance calculations that max at 90%, based on your slotted recharge (including from the alpha slot) and the power's natural animation and recharge times, among many other factors. Procs have a wide variety of effects, but will always have a tooltip description that says they will trigger "roughly X times per minute". If a proc buffs the user, the buff generally does not stack from multiple activations.

An on-use special enhancement always triggers when a power is used. These are usually passive benefits that have a duration of 120 seconds from the last time they were triggered.

March 8

I mean.

This seems like a valid perspective on individual items, I don't know how I feel about it as a grand theory of interaction with the game. I'm glad you don't see this as a binary category because it's not, but I can't agree with it as a spectrum either because it doesn't address the concept of ludonarrative synergy at all.

In some respects I am strongly game-focused, but I use custom binds to smooth some things out. I appreciate engagement of brain and feeling like I've worked something out and triumphed. I don't consider myself a heavy roleplayer in the context of an MMO, even though I certainly am at a TTRPG table. But there's also quite a lot of seemingly small, idiosyncratic things that I do for immersion that generally makes me seem 'fluffy' compared to most really hard devotees of gameplay, and I can be extremely particular about them to the point of my gameplay experience being ruined if they are not followed.

I think one of the things that really bothers me here, for example, is that I really enjoy navigating grandville on a character with no travel power more advanced than Athletic Run because I find the process immersively satisfying. There is ludonarrative synergy between my character being highly athletic and having to work to scale those peaks. I wouldn't enjoy it nearly as much or be as immersed if I could press a button and watch the character scale those heights for me. But I'm not addicted to the jumping per se, I would not say

Quote

the screen is just a sort of feedback device and score counter, like the back wall of a pinball machine. Nothing going on there is really important,

for me, or I wouldn't also enjoy so much the feeling of flight. Flight is extremely easy in most circumstances, point, click and go. That smoothness in its own way immerses me and makes my fliers feel untethered and graceful soarers. I usually specialize in flight on characters that have combat mechanics with heavy positional importance so I can get my OOC need for tactical consideration since flight itself has no such loop in this game. But I do find myself simply flying in a straight line as fast as I can from time to time to appreciate being unbound from gravity.

March 8

I've seen weird graphical errors like this occur frequently enough that I don't really pay them any mind, especially when I'm in the middle of selling or switching characters.

March 8

Small QoL request in the title. Would like to be able to tab out of the game in full screen while I'm waiting for it to log me out.

Thanks!

March 7

I doubt not at all that you run into those people. I do too. But more of the people I run into that have no clue what they're doing despite being/having 50s have never seen the inside of a farm than ones that have.

March 7

For a sentinel in particular I think that reduces the value of -res. Not only do they come with their own source of unresistable single target -res that is a huge force multiplier on hard targets, but the most important thing that ranged characters do in difficult content is handle adds -- which resist less and have lower HP. This mechanic is at play in starred ITF, Sutter, and several incarnate trials.

I would pursue -res most on single target melee specialists, personally.

March 7

1 hour ago, temnix said:

First let me tell you about an incident I had a week ago. I'm a Prime Earth scrapper, and I went to Praetoria by TUNNEL. There it turned out that the local missions are limited to Praetorian natives. Bummer. Still, I explored in the Imperial City, fought a few Syndicate troops along the way. Somewhere near their Studio 55 something unexpected happened: I was thrown into a quest I hadn't taken. I was suddenly told to lure the Syndicate out of a building I had never seen in my life by fighting them, and some police arrived on the scene to help me, after which the spot was flooded with Syndicate mobsters. They kept running out of nowhere in droves and hurling themselves at me, making circle kicks, sunglasses shining, trenchcoat tails flying. It was hectic. I felt like agent Smith fighting all those Neos in "Matrix Reloaded." Finally, after a few close shaves, I beat them all. I could have continued to the next stage of that quest, but it wasn't my fight, so I quietly floated away, smiling to myself. Now this was a bug, of course, some global was missing, but I have that experience notched in my memory, no, decorated with a beautiful bowtie, as an Adventure.

Just FYI, this wasn't a mission, but a zone event. Paragon and Rogue Isles have a few. Three of the eight Praetorian zones have them and they're generally more interesting than the primal versions.

More zone events would be neat.

I think the quality and content variance as well as the likely bugs involved in random AE mishes sinks this idea, I am afraid, though I like the general notion of random doors taking you to something rather than forbidding you. The game could use more exploration.

March 7

A few praetorian chains end up in actually removing a contact from an opposite chain in the world. Ouro would have to negate that change while it is active, which it already does, but i could see it getting more complicated and finicky if it also has to change the world state outside of ouro.

More of an "I am trying to be cautious about requests" than a "this will not work" thought.

March 7

1 hour ago, Vic Raiden said:

The most problematic part of Ouroboros, to me, is the complex physics pertaining to Schrödinger's arc completion flags. If you do an entire arc via flashback, you'll receive the reward, get a completion star and see some changes to the overworld if phasing is involved... but the contact's relationship level won't be saved, they won't be moved to inactive, and they'll respond to you with their "not introduced" dialogue instead of the "no more missions" one. It's as if I have simultaneously done and not done the arc, which is an extreme pet peeve of mine.

That's very frustrating, yes — though also difficult to figure in the case of mutually exclusive arcs, which are rare but do happen.

Though my big concern is how unfriendly ouro is to difficulty spikes in content. If you encounter a boss of some kind that you absolutely can't clear and weren't expecting, you can't just call for help mid-ouro.

Not needing to depend on ouro so much to see content would reduce this.

March 7

I can certainly confirm I used the Rogue alignment power to better effect with the council than I have with any other group my Rogue has experienced before. 3 minute cooldown but was enjoyable to see.

March 7

1 hour ago, Marshal_General said:

I wonder if most of the bad PUGs is from people sitting in a farm until 50 with no idea how to play their character, run missions or actually do things with a group?

My experience is that 1 to 50 doorsit players are bad for the game because they are most likely to result in players who are bored and unattached to the game but there's not a meaningful attachment to being good at it.

The leveling process is only good at teaching players how to game if they are the sorts that seek out how to be good at a game already. Games with much less obscured mechanics also experience this.

2 hours ago, tidge said:

I do often see people offer to switch to a different AT, unprompted. This is a sort of self-selection that I'm not crazy about (play what you want, we'll be ok!) but I can sort of understand.

I will definitely self-select out for group composition if I see a major skew and it's not content I'm confident can be steamrolled that way. But for average TFs and mission arcs, I agree.

March 7

1 hour ago, StarkWhite said:

This would be a nonissue if people didn't react to the suggestion "if it's too hard/slow/whatever, turn your difficulty down" as if you'd suggested they eat their firstborn child.

This does not reflect the majority of the negative feedback in this thread.

I've never had an issue dropping my difficulty and in fact, prefer not to run most of my characters at +4x8 by default outside of stress tests. I readily drop my difficulty against Talons of Vengeance on almost all characters. But the Talons of Vengeance are relatively interesting difficulty. nuCouncil are not.

I really like that HC is taking steps to try and make old groups more interesting. I can safely say if nothing else that nuCouncil are more visually interesting, which counts for a lot. I just don't like the mechanics. They're slow and boring.

Today I completed the HC John Houston Rogue arc, and I have so many good things to say about it. It's some of the best writing in the game on multiple fronts, and there's so much lovely attention to detail in environments and ambient chatter. And in many ways, it truly was a story that justified its very narrow and unique alignment band, which I didn't expect. I have so much good I can say about it...

And then there's the fighting. I leveled into nuCouncil range and I was at +0x3 for much of it with a character that can comfortably handle more, in large part because I didn't want to deal with the resurrections. That didn't honestly help a lot. It was still irritating that I had to keep dealing with a handful of rezzing stragglers that pose no threat to me but do annoy me. There's no counterplay to the auto-rez.

There's also boss fights that end two of the missions in this arc which follow the design pattern I'm getting a little worried about. I got an HP sponge of an Elite Boss thrown at me, and it looked for a little bit like he was supposed to have associated mechanics since I got a notice once about his shoulder armor (? I think?) and then not again. And it was hard. My still-leveling tanker is capable of handling +2x4 comfortably (haven't tried to go way higher) and was actually at 0x3 for the mission, but got slowly ground down while being unable to overcome its regeneration. When I got help from two brutes, we still almost wiped -- they both went down and I was down to yellow health before they rezzed and came back to bring down the boss from the last 10%. All of this was a very mechanic-free fight from what I could tell, just bearing down and smacking things that hit hard. And I don't get it. I had AVs off, this thing seemed pretty comparable to an AV for a level 40 Arc!

I don't, in and of itself, have a big problem with the boss' difficulty either (although, the mission badly needs map markers for its three or four doors to different maps to recover from a wipe). Narratively it made sense that it was tough, and it was just a single enemy each time, so it wasn't a repetitive experience. However, I keep seeing HP Sponge design in HC enemies and I don't know why that seems to be a big part of the toolkit for every situation. Part of it is surely to benefit single-target specialists like stalkers, scrappers, and -res debuffers, but I can't escape a feeling of overuse. I'd like to compare vs. the final fight that ends the Wards story in Praetoria, which is a painful double elite boss fight with a lot of allies and (when the allies aren't glitching...) gives room for play by having you juggle two mobile hostile targets that I want to say can potentially invoke adds though it's been a little bit and I am usually mid-panic in that fight. I am a lot of things during that fight -- screaming, panicking, running for dear life -- but bored isn't ever one on any at-level character taking it on. 🙂

As a bonus point of comparison, there were actual basic mechanics on the quirky miniboss squad of Hero Corps in the last mission -- that was enjoyable. I was drowsy and starting to fall asleep from clearing trash encounters and that woke me up! So I know they're capable of doing more than the HP Sponge thing, but they seem to keep going back to it.

March 7

5 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

I've usually got all that figured out - even the "do I bother keeping this character?" - by the time I've leveled to 50, which is why I prefer leveling normally. Whatever works for you though works, yeah.

I prefer to level normally as well! I have not seen the inside of a farm map in ages, I barely do radios, etc. I make all my money through regular gameplay. I just can understand the perspective presented.

I usually have figured out most of a character by the time I hit 50 but I've still had four semi-major build revisions on my latest only about a month after capping. The margins of change become smaller and smaller, but I do make adjustments and sometimes even the very small adjustments are satisfying.

March 7

Forgive me if I'm overlooking something obvious...? but I feel like this would mostly end up as a build trap for mastermind players. I'm all for giving MMs help, this just seems like it'd be a distraction.

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