aethereal

I can't tell if you're proposing this as a change or just don't know how the current system works, but current sentinel resist debuffs are not unresistable.

I think global -recharge should also be cut in half, just like global +recharge.

I'd really like to see less discussion of radical changes to Hasten. Those are just too disruptive. My initial proposal certainly does propose nerfing Hasten, but I think it does so in a way that avoids completely invalidating thousands of builds and people really need to think clearly about how likely it is that we're going to make changes that completely invalidate thousands of builds.

FWIW, I think a Hasten that was an auto-power that gave +25-30% global recharge would be pretty mandatory as well. Like, certainly not as strong for high-end builds as the current thing is, but still it's hard to imagine people giving that up, especially since it wouldn't require the kind of extensive slotting support that current Hasten does.

I mean, that maybe would have been a good idea from the outset, but it'd be incredibly disruptive now. Whereas my suggestion -- while not at all the solution I'd pursue if I were designing a CoH-like game from scratch -- I think could plausibly be implemented without completely breaking thousands of character's builds.

Yeah, I agree that that's the most worrying aspect of it. On the other hand, chasing defense past 45% doesn't do much, and below about 30% doesn't do much, so this arguably just makes more builds competitive with the tip-top of the old meta, which had perma-hasten and a bunch of defense right at 45% anyway (ie, they benefit less, other builds benefit more).

The Status Quo If a power has a 30 second recharge base, an optimized level 50 build will have permahasten (+180% global recharge) and (at least if you aren't chasing procability) will probably get +75% or so local recharge from a set, call it +250% recharge, for a total cooldown of (30 / 3.5) = 8.57 seconds. Even in non-endgame, a reasonably slotted, low-priced build will have the +75% recharge and let's say +20% global recharge for a total cooldown of (30 / 1.95) = 15.38 seconds. But haha, did you just pick up that power or are you super low level? Well, enjoy the 30 second recharge time. This is what we have to balance around. The assumption that a large percentage of players will be dealing with 1/3rd of the listed recharge times, or less, for essentially every power without trying. That means that any time you DON'T have that, the game kinda just... doesn't work. If we try to make a power good when its recharge is 20 seconds, then it's too good when it's recharge is 8.5 seconds. If we make it good when its recharge is <10 seconds, then it's bad when its recharge is >20 seconds. This is a pretty serious design constraint in CoH and it has led to the nearly universal chasing of large levels of global recharge in all endgame characters. The Proposed Change Every power in the game gets its recharge cut down by 1/3rd (without changing damage or other values). Recharge enhancements go from schedule A to schedule B. All sources of global recharge get their values reduced by 50%. Reduce the recharge cap from 500% to 350% (this should have little effect on anything, both are pretty unattainable) (note that you can express recharge cap as 500% or +400%, and 350% or +250%. I know that the recharge cap isn't +500%). So what does that mean? The 30 second recharge power is now a 20 second recharge power at base. If you had +180% global recharge before, you now have +90% global recharge. If you had +75% local recharge before, now you have +45% local recharge. So your modified recharge for an end-game build is now (20 / 2.35) = 8.51 seconds (functionally the same as before, very slightly better). The non-endgame, reasonably slotted build now has +45% local recharge and +10% global recharge for a total cooldown of (20 / 1.55) = 12.9 seconds (considerably better than before). And the just-picked-up the power lowbie character has a 20 second recharge time (much better than before). So basically this buffs low-end recharges substantially, gives a significant buff to mid-end recharges, and leaves top-end recharges roughly the same. What about Hasten? You may have noticed some sleight of hand there. We had permahasten for the top build prior to this, hence the 180% global recharge, and I then reduced it to 90% in the proposal. Does that actually give us permahasten in the modified build? Hasten has a base recharge time of 450 seconds, and a buff duration of 120 seconds. That means that it needs 275% recharge to get to perma. We usually get it there with 95% local recharge and 180% global recharge. It supplies 70% of the global recharge itself, so you need 110% global recharge (or so) without it. In the modified world, Hasten would have 300 seconds base recharge time, still with a buff duration of 120 seconds (but the buff would only be +35% global recharge). That means we need 150% recharge to get it to perma. 95% local recharge would be about 55% local recharge after the schedule change of enhancement slots, so we'd need about 95% global recharge. Hasten would supply 35% of that 95% for itself, so you'd need 60% global recharge build from set bonuses and other powers. That's a little harder than it used to be -- it'd be the equivalent of building 120% global recharge instead of 110%. If we liked we could reduce the recharge of hasten a little more, or we could make it a little harder to get permahasten -- both seem fine. Okay, what about Domination? Domination is as far as I can think of unique among major, important powers that people seek perma status for in that it can't take local recharge. It has a 90 second buff duration and a 200 second cooldown. Under the proposed change, its cooldown would drop to 133 seconds. It would need 48% global recharge to become perma -- the equivalent of 96% global recharge in the old world. This seems fine to me. Why? This change is designed to have little effect on level 50 existing builds while making it somewhat easier to forgo chasing very high levels of recharge -- making builds that do not chase those very high levels of recharge be less disadvantaged than other builds. It would presumably change the meta of level 50 in a few ways, probably making it easier for people to focus more on defense than on recharge. It would probably make Hasten somewhat less of a must-have power -- but still a pretty useful one. It would buff lower-level play significantly (which seems fine to me -- there's lots of headroom in low-level play, nobody is soloing at +4/x8 at level 12. (Yes, yes, I'm sure someone is. You're very good at this game). If we're worried that this constitutes too much of a buff, we could cut base cooldowns by 25% instead of 33%. Then this would still be a buff to low-power builds, but a significant nerf to high level builds. I doubt people would go for it.

Parry is useful for a electric armor, with no native defense, in a way it won't be for energy aura, which can softcap all non-psi defenses without using parry. Tough/Weave are useful powers for almost every build out there; it is normal to take them; please don't listen to people who have an inexplicable distaste for them.

Thanks for playing with it!

We've got very credible Carnival of Light costume pieces, but the Carnival of Shadows is different in a number of ways, not just colors. It'd be great to be able to get the multicolored boots that they wear, or the bandeau-like chestpiece. I don't know if the two-sticks backpack or the collars are possible, but they'd be nice. And of course a Carnival of Shadows mask would be great, they're significantly different from the Carnival of Light/War/Vengeance masks.

I would like to make a macro that would execute a series of, I don't know, three or so short backwards jumps -- minimal height, like you just tapped the spacebar with s held down a few times. Is this at all possible? /up 1 appears to give a big old jump, and it doesn't seem to accept less-than-1 parameters.

It's certainly easy enough to make it irrelevant solo, especially if your difficulty settings are anything less than x7 or x8. But there are potentially ambushes, and there are places where it's genuinely difficult not to aggro two different spawns. You could make it more of a strict increase in difficulty if you said, "enemies beyond 17 will aggro you if they have literally no other options, but you are the very last priority on their threat table once you have 17 main opponents." That would mean you could attract more hate, but could not keep it, so it would presumably prevent it from being usefully possible for a tank to gather up several spawns. That would still increase the efficiency of farming, though.

Increased aggro caps are by and large a difficulty increase for solo play and a difficulty decrease for group play. They would also increase the efficiency of farming.

How do Brain Storms even work? Is there a source for them in the modern game besides this day job? How many Brain Storm Ideas to you get per mission completion?

Just hear me out: Ragnarok: Chance to Summon A Giant Fuckin' Wolf

At least originally, it was impossible to have chest/pants patterns that weren't symmetric around the vertical bisection of the character, because literally they just had one half the pattern and then mirrored it. That was initially true of a lot of things, and they eventually broke them, so it may now be possible for shirts/pants. Certainly, with enough work, it could be done -- but just be aware that despite it seeming like a simple pattern, it may need new code.

Yep! It still fires on them, they just resist it. Like hitting a boss with a hypothetical damageless mag 2 hold -- it works on them, it just gets eaten up by their resistance to no effect that you can immediately see.

Since you mentioned you were having trouble with the slash commands for those, they are: /e stancehero1 /e stancehero2 /e stancevillain1 /e stancevillain2 So if you want to create a bind to make the h key put you in villain stance 2, it's: /bind h "e stancevillain2" Or a macro: /macro idle "e stancevillain2"

There is nothing you aren't seeing, and I thought it was weird to introduce sonic manipulation when its most obvious pairing is perhaps the most underperforming blaster primary. Seems like a recipe for convincing players to try something they won't like.

Good thing I didn't suggest complex categorizations or formula to address a problem! I suggested that categorizing the names in this way would help people understand a few things: 1. Why you might find that the name stuff is relevant to HC even if HC has 1/20th the population of live. 2. Why finding an example or two of "good" names does not mean that "good" names are not mostly mined out. Everyone who cares has read your proposal, dude. If there are people who are persuadable but not yet persuaded, repeating it ten more times is not going to persuade them. But helping them conceptualize what's going on with names, you know, might.

You really need to let go of your assumption that everyone is commenting on the fairness of taking names from people. I'm not (and I wasn't the last time you replied to me, either). And repeating your point for the fiftieth time on this thread probably isn't changing a lot of people's minds. (For whatever it's worth (nothing), I'm fine with essentially any of the definitions of inactivity proposed in this thread and also agree that taking names from people who are inactive is fine).

Nobody's asking you to rate someone's name. But if anyone suggests that the overwhelming majority of CoH players would be just as happy with HawtIce7631 as they are with Hot Ice (or whatever), that person is flat out lying.

So I think this is important and while probably most people have the general idea in their heads already, we should maybe make it explicit. Let's categorize names into three buckets, with the acknowledgement that this is a simplification and tastes will vary. Good names are pithy, well-themed, do not substitute letters for numbers or l's for I's unless that's part of the theme, and generall "cool." Okay names are a little long-winded or esoteric (not in a well-themed way), obviously a bit of a stand-in for a simpler name, or smack of trying too hard, or use various hacks to try to duplicate good names Bad names are just stupid, not well themed, incomprehensible, or just straight up dumb like CoolGuy4723 So insight one: There are many fewer good names than okay names -- for example, a small minority of English words are well-themed to superhero stuff, while a much larger number of English words are sort of "meh, fine." Hacker symbols allow a single good name to be duplicated into several different okay names, etc. So there are probably something like 10x-100x as many okay names as good names. And there are effectively infinite numbers of Bad names -- you can generate billions of versions easily. As the Good names pool gets more taken, more and more players will switch to okay names -- before the good names pool is entirely mined out! For example, Unlawful (which I would agree is a good name) won't be taken by some players whose characters aren't, you know, unlawful, or who want ice-themed names or whatever. And of course even someone who might be perfectly fine with the name Unlawful simply won't think of it. In general, when a pool is relatively filled, it will be slower and slower for people to stumble upon the last few names in it. Similarly, though much more slowly, people will get shunted from okay names to bad names before the pool is mined out. One upshot of this is that the comparison between HC and Live in terms of good names may be much less lopsided than you might imagine, even if live had 20x or 30x as many characters made as HC. For example, you might've found that on live 98% of the pool of good names was mined out (or 99%, or 99.9%), while on HC 95% of it is mined out. Where you see the difference might be much more in okay names, where in live it might've been 80% mined out and in HC it's only 10% mined out (because it's much much larger than the good name spool). WoW, I'm given to understand, basically only has bad names left, I don't think that HC is realistically ever in much danger of coming close to mining out okay names.

Building new powersets is primarily about: Conceptual work about what the powerset is even supposed to be, man. Finding animations for the powers. Inputting data into the binaries. Balancing them. With #2 being a huge blocker to any really new powersets, and #4 being extremely slow and costly of time. None of those things are writing code. The coders on the HC team are not needed for any of those tasks. If a powerset involves an entirely new mechanic, it is possible that some coding will be involved in the creation of the powerset. However, almost certainly, writing code is the smallest component of creating a new powerset (and similarly, it is not a large component to creating new story arcs). The people who could write up a small check for name creation are not likely to be the long pole in the tent of content creation, and thus it is a mostly false dilemma to ask whether we would prioritize a slightly nicer renaming system vs adding new content.

It's extremely unlikely that those two things meaningfully compete for resources.