Black Zot

So I'm leveling up a toon goldside (oy vey), and some Resistance nitwit tells me "You ain't so rocky." I proceeded to demonstrate why you don't say that to an Earth/Earth dominator.

This right here is the main reason Repair is crap. Anything that poses enough of a threat that a big heal looks attractive, won't give you a chance to cast said heal. The assault bot is the only one that even has enough effective HP to MAYBE survive the first swing from a big hitter.

Interesting note: The short-lived comic book series "U.N.D.E.R.S.E.A. Agent" had, as one of its established villain groups, a faction called THEM - The Hosts of Evil Motives.

Oy vey, I hope not. Marvel and DC have tried their hands at the whole MMO thing before, and every offering has been a miserable failure. Like I really want to pay more money to Di$ney to try out another half-baked joke of a product that'll either die or become microtransaction hell within a year.

You'll forgive me for saying that ethics, much like the laws and customs of war, only applies if both sides are willing to play nice. Any company that has the nerve to claim they're selling a complete game, then demand my entire paycheck to buy all the parts they left out, has no business expecting one single penny from me - or anyone.

Presently, every problematic power in your build costs one slot to make it not hose your team, up to a max of 6 (1 OF proc plus 5 SA procs being the max available). That's up to 6 powers that are going to be flatly weaker than their counterparts in other sets because they're down an enhancement slot. Your Alpha idea instead fixes the powers in question at the cost of denying EVERY power an Alpha enhancement they would otherwise have. So instead of short-slotting half a dozen powers, you're now short-slotting twenty-plus powers. That is almost petless-Mastermind-tier build-gimping. I dunno how much more plainly I can spell this out.

Note that the OF proc affecting the whole character is presently being tested on Justin; that's what got this thread started. That wouldn't happen if the devs thought KB->KD should cost slots from every single affected power. Facts are facts. KB is the worst secondary effect for an offensive set bar none, and sets that "feature" it offer nothing to make up for disrupting the entire team every time the player pushes a button. Your suggested alternative to taxing every knockback power a slot to make it usable in a team environment is to essentially tax EVERY POWER IN THE PLAYER'S BUILD.

How does it NOT gimp a build to expend a third of your most powerful enhancement option on something that even the HC team acknowledges shouldn't cost more than one slot?

It does buff both the MM and the pets. MMs will love you for taking it.

So you want people to gimp their entire build worse than any slot investment could ever do, to free up some slots? Do you not realize how bass-ackwards that is?

I think part of it was, it broke certain powersets clean in half. Anything with massive mitigation (coughGranitecough) or bonuses for nearby targets could just pull the entire map and lay waste, which sucked for anyone who couldn't keep up or didn't have a badass graphics card. It also ran directly counter to the vehement anti-farming stance the devteam had for most of the Live run.

Agreed. Minions are fragile to begin with; anything that cons higher than yellow will squash them easily while laughing off their offense. Collectively, they do a character's worth of damage baseline, but most of that gets whisked away by the underlevel penalty. Everyone is hurt by this to some degree, but for MMs the effect is basically multiplied by the number of pets, then magnified again by most of those pets being even lower level. I ran a Thugs MM in a group a couple months ago and we ran into an AV that, for some reason, spawned as +4 even though we were running at +0. Re-summoning my pets was a complete waste of time and end; poor guys never even got a swing in before a Footstomp deleted them. The Live devs sorta half-acknowledged this problem by level-shifting minions for Incarnate content only, but that's a bandaid on a massive laceration.

Unlikely. Korean corporate culture would rather see an IP die than see anyone but themselves benefit from it. It makes the company look bad if someone else takes your stuff and makes it work where you couldn't. And you don't keep a job at ANY company, from ANY country, by making your employer look bad.

Because there's still a city within minimum safe distance?

The sticking point is that the entire Super Strength set is balanced around the assumption that players have Rage active basically at all times, often multi-stacked to negate the crash. The raw numbers on SS attacks are almost universally garbage without Rage, especially since everybody and his dog is smash-resistant to some degree. HC devs fixed the bug that allowed for the crash-skipping without changing the set's numbers otherwise, basically taking a mid-tier set down to trash-tier in one go. (SS's reputation as a high-damage set comes entirely from one gimmick farming build that revolves around getting the recharge on the set's one genuinely strong power (Foot Stomp) down to "spammable", stacking Rage as high as it would go, and bolstering that with the buffs from Fire Armor. With the Rage change, that build is now dead as disco.) A lower-grade, no-crash Rage would still leave SS in a bad way, unless the set's baseline numbers get buffed significantly in the bargain. So it's not a case of SS players wanting it all so much as wanting to be viable. EDIT: Rage-dependency isn't even SS's only problem; knockback is pretty much the worst secondary effect you can saddle a melee set with. For me to consider making a SS character would require removing the knockback (or at least making it knockDOWN), and fixing the set's borked numbers somehow.

The problem is, for negotiations to end well BOTH sides have to approach the table in good faith, and NCSoft has an established history of not doing that. It doesn't matter if we trust the HC team or not - NCSoft still has the power to take their ball and go home anytime they please, and the tendency to do just that.

If we're going to add "bald under the hat" options, we should cover the other end as well. Why the hell does EVERYONE with any sort of headgear have a buzzcut? Does Paragon City require you to go through boot camp before donning a hat?

You mean the buff that's utterly trivial, goes away if you do any sort of vertical movement, and has a stupidly-long cooldown for what it ultimately doesn't do? THAT buff? In their present state, those little buff pets are a waste of a click - there's nothing to make up for. 1% defense and 0.1 end/sec on a 1hp aggro magnet is worthless.

Great, thanks to this thread I gotta make a ninja rabbit toon.

T9s in general on enemies is just a bad idea - see Foot Stomp rendering anything without a dedicated armor powerset moot. But MoG takes the cake: that's not enemy design, that's a creator trolling the playerbase.

/JRanger. I've seen too many games ruined by friendly fire to give that so-called feature any more chances.

Cheating a bit - this is my mother's cat, not mine.

Now who's projecting? There's no glee at all in what I'm saying. Only disgust that so many people are willing to take the snake at its word that it won't bite.

I'm familiar enough to know that 10% ROI is pie-in-the-sky territory for most ventures.

CoH and its studio were turning a solid profit over its last year, even with another project going on in the background that was leeching some of its revenue. It was in NCSoft's best interest to leave well enough alone. They didn't. "Best interest" isn't part of the decision-making tree here. Same way they almost wiped the game out 7 years ago: use the "legit" server to concentrate everything in one place so they can kill the thing with one bullet instead of half a dozen.