Shazbotacus

Well, the M1897 Trench Gun can take a bayonet. Shotgun blast followed with stock and bayonet thrashings sounds delightful.

Actually, if Mercs were just given better melee in the absence of making them stop running in for it, I'd like to see that WW2 rifle the Banished Pantheon use taken, have a bayonet put on it, give it to the Soldiers, and have them use an aimed shot power with Brawl but it's actually good followed by Bayonet on the first upgrade and Rifle Butt on the second, all raw damage. Give them another ranged attack? How about a rifle grenade? Not like long-range cone attacks are any good in melee anyhow. But that's kinda off topic.

I'm really hoping for some kind of rifle assault, possibly in the future. Regular assault rifle with regular bayonet, or a beam rifle with a Vanguard-esque energy one, and blasting the bad guys down with another soldier type at my side would have me make a character for this AT so fast. Given that there's so few gun models with a physical bayonet as part of the model, maybe an energy bayonet would be ideal for both, perhaps as a power customization if possible. There's few melee attacks to work with like this though, just bayonet and rifle butt. If you go the Beam Rifle route you could probably rationalize a third melee attack as a short range lightsaber-esque "plasma cutter," emitting a very short but very deadly magnetically-contained super-heated plasma jet held into the target with the "Heavy Burst" animation. Probably goes through multiple targets in a line like Headsplitter. Typing that down, I must say I've become somewhat attached to that idea. Admittedly, though, my biggest reasoning for hoping for a "beam rifle assault" is because those animations involve actually putting the weapon to the shoulder and aiming at least semi properly.

Yeah, I would be all over rifle-based assault. There’s only two melee attack animations that’d go with it, though, and one of which would need more weapons with bayonet models. That, or beam rifle with an energy bayonet.

If I could have a Duo with some kinda rifle and a soldier of some kind for a pet, I'd be all over that for sure.

I don’t think that has to be so. The only pets that seem to share the same “Brawl” are all of Mercs and T1 and T2 of Thugs. Battle Drones and Assault Bot have different “brawl” powers, and almost all melee henchmen don’t have a “brawl” at all, it’s just Zombies that do and even then “Zombie Brawl” is a unique power as well. Of course the AI might still direct ranged pets to go to melee range, but what I’m saying is there won’t be any “spill over” since it seems possible to only change whatever “brawl” powers are used by ranged henchmen and leave melee henchmen alone.

Agreed, can we please get some testing going? I'm probably too stupid to figure out how to do all this, but I'm still dying to see something happen to move us forward. It's been nothing but speculation and "what if" for years.

Castle’s fix for melee pets using ranged attacks too much was to make pets immune to recharge modifiers, right? Would it have gone better if he just took melee pets’ ranged attacks and lengthened their recharge times by a lot, maybe with more damage to compensate? Eh, too late for that I guess.

Finally home, friggin' jeez. So the source code for City of Heroes is notoriously unstructured. That would explain many, many things. Good logic and design was drilled into my skull going through my programming courses for my Associates in Computer Science degree. Through Logic & Design, Intro and Advanced C++, our professor absolutely forbade us from using Go To statements and insisted we comment our code thoroughly. I guess this is yet another real world example of why this is so important. I haven't yet taken a look at it myself, but I guess I know what to look forward to if I get time to get my hands on it and try to figure out what's going on. I'd love to understand what Valence is telling us about better.

The case of the Lich is what makes me most hopeful, being that from my observation it never approaches closer than 40 feet and just goes through its attacks on its way to and at its target range. I would also be very interested in knowing if that route could possibly bring any progress.

I am dying to see and understand this myself. Where/how can I get started?

If it’s true that Castle didn’t trust the players with just telling us why this was so unfixable, that’s really a shame. And a bit insulting. A lot of headaches could have been avoided for us. Why couldn’t it have been done here, but it was done plenty elsewhere? AE mobs, some regular mobs, two henchmen types... why? Guess we’ll never know.

Eh, I'd rather see methods of safely removing their brawl explored first. I'm very tempted to say that copy-pasting the Lich's AI to Battle Drones, Assault Bot, Punks, Arsonist, and Soldiers and copy-pasting Protector Bot's AI to Medic would be a viable solution.

I’ve had some observations of Pet AI that might help understanding it. The Lich and Protector Bots routinely approach their targets to about 40 feet or so. At first, paying attention to the Lich, I thought it ran up to the range of its Tenebrous Tentacles until I tried again without any upgrades. The Lich still ran up to 40 feet or so despite having no need from its power range to do so. Protector Bots close to a seemingly similar range. This makes me think that pet AI tells the pet to run up to targets and stop at a given range, at least that’s how it is for Lich and Protector Bots. I presume 40 feet was chosen for the Lich because of the short range of Tenebrous Tentacles, but don’t know why Protector Bots get this close also.

It is off-putting. I may still love the AT myself, but that makes it more frustrating. I hope the Homecoming team can do what Paragon would not.

Oh shoot, that’s right I forgot about that. Got me there. Sorry guys I did a silly. Ranged pet AI still needs a fix tho. Gimme Lich and Prot Bot AI pls.

This, so much this. It makes absolutely no sense that this somehow "can't be fixed," and even less sense that it's a thing in the first place. Lich AI is phenomenal compared to the rest of the ranged henchmen; literally all it does is run to 40 feet while cycling its ranged attacks. I've never seen it get closer than that, and I presume it's because of the range of its Tenebrous Tentacles. Protector Bots behave similarly but with the addition of using their shield and healing power on other henchmen. But most of all, thank you so much for observing this as well. I thought I was alone in knowing this and losing my friggin' mind. It's also possible the original devs had some really questionable logic behind insisting that ranged henchmen should be wasting their advantage of range to use one terrible attack power. They did mostly good with City of Heroes don't get me wrong, but everyone makes mistakes or holds on to some flawed reasoning like the "cottage rule" which they could never drop long enough to hand out an overhaul or two for the powers and sets that desperately needed it *cough Mercs cough*. [REDACTED; FALSEHOOD] That's just harsh speculation though, and also another problem; we'll never know for sure because, quite frustratingly, they never said anything on the matter. Not a single thing, no acknowledgement at all, so now all we have is speculation.

Yeah, I've got some AE baddies with no melee attacks at all who plant their feet and fire their beam rifles with no problems at all, and I've already mentioned the Protector Bots and Lich who get along fine without any melee attacks or running into melee either though they do approach to within 40 feet as seemingly part of their AI. From my end user observations, I see absolutely no reason why the rest of the ranged henchmen couldn't have been made to act like this in the beginning. It just doesn't make sense to me. I really wish the original devs would have said something about this, anything. Also, fix Mercenaries pls and credit my smartness 👍like comment subscribe 💯

It removes the animation and time normally taken to draw a weapon if activating a given power uses it. If I put "No Redraw" on all my Beam Rifle attacks, my weapon just appears in my hands as I fire instead of taking the half or full second or so to go through the character animation of unholstering it. It's really nice to have. Staff Fighting and Titan Weapons both don't have it for some reason, and some others probably don't as well.

I think I got an idea. Increase the radius of Group Fly, not sure by how much exactly, and have it emit a flight speed boost to everyone except the character maintaining the power so others can catch up easier.

Yeah, I thought about saying that. Seeing it, it's far, far more accurate.

Yeah, those numbers are telling. Mercs has been needing a fix since live.

Yeah, I mentioned the long activation times. It says in their power details. That's still a thing, but only for Burst; Heavy Burst and Auto Fire has the same activation time as Heavy Burst from SoA and Full Auto from Assault Rifle. Those animations only make sense with long activation times. It's one reason I'd like to see the Mercs change to using Single Shot -> Burst -> Heavy Burst like the SoA does. The other reason is less ticks of damage would mean more damage per tick, so each bullet ends up doing more damage. It kinda bothers me seeing six guys furiously mag dumping on each minion to kill them, like their guns are shooting nerf darts. There'll still be a lot of shots per kill, but less so.

Actually, I'd be interested in keeping Stimulant but adding an AoE on target component to it. Like what Protector Bots should have with their shield. Possibly in addition to a regeneration buff as well. As for an AoE heal, I'd replace frag grenade with that.

STYLISH Basically, yeah, NPC costume pieces would be quite welcome indeed.