Black Zot

Worst enemies: Anything that spams mezzes, drains end, or otherwise shuts your character down. There are lots of ways to make a fun fight in a video game; "you don't get to play" is NOT one of them. And neither is "you can play, but nothing you do will have any effect". Whoever designed Kadabra Kill, get the hell out of game design before you poison another product with your stupidity! Worst map: The layer-cake cave. UGH. Another instance of design so bad you'd think it came from a low-end fanfic. At least half the enemies on any cave map that features the layer-cake room will be hiding in various crannies of this 5-story mess, and you have to take out EVERY SINGLE ONE to clear any mission that sends you in here.

Conditioning claims to boost health regen and endurance recovery. But nothing shows up under combat attributes to indicate that, and the power itself lists no mechanical bonus. Is there an invisible buff happening to these stats, or is this just a fluff marker because they needed to show something?

The Crey faction pretty much runs on having cheap powers that ignore stuff and overtuned mobs in general - it's an entire enemy group made of fake difficulty. But poor design choices made by the OG devs shouldn't deny people access to a whole zone. At the very least, aggro ranges need some sort of hardcap so you're not getting randomly pasted with nothing visible onscreen.

There you go with the arrogant assumptions again. In what part of the world is it possible to get a 40-hour job with a significant disability? Not mine, I was lucky to get thirty. So you can recheck your math and then slap yourself upside the head for being that stupid. My motor-control issues were pointed out in my first post, you just didn't bother reading it. You were more interested in skimming for words you could nitpick. And this is that part where you recognize that other people have a better grasp of their personal limitations than you ever will, and when someone says something is beyond their capabilities, you DO NOT contradict them. EVER. Bullshit. Every single mastermind-related thread you get involved with has included some variant on your "keybinds are the only right way to play" spiel. Including this one.

Now you're just intentionally insulting me. Yes, I can manage shift+whatever, if I focus my eyes on the keyboard and take my hand off WASD while I'm doing it. You ignored my entire post, why shouldn't I ignore part of yours? Do you have any idea what it's like to try to hold up your end of an online conversation when you don't have the fine motor control necessary to touch-type? I had to correct dozens of typos to make this post. And then some arrogant jerk assumes that on minimum wage I can go out and frivolously throw money at a fancy gaming mouse just so I can have more buttons I can misclick with? You and your little "my way is inherently better and you're a bad person if you don't use it" attitude can just fuck right off.

Seriously? Did I not just get done explaining that adding a bunch of extra keyboard buttons to my interface is physically impossible for me? If you're not going to read my post, why respond to it?

You don't need fancy binds - but the quality of life change is pretty strong. I could play without the Hover/Fly swap bind, or the mouse button Teleport bind, or the simple trio of Mastermind orders I use. But it'd be a lot clunkier, and since they make things a lot easier, why not use them? They make things easier FOR YOU. But for someone like me with manual dexterity issues, managing WASD is already a full-time job for my left hand. Asking me to try and hunt down a bunch of esoteric keyboard commands during the time crunch of combat (when everything I need to do is better handled by my dominant hand on the mouse interfacing with command buttons I can actually see on-screen) is a bit like asking me to walk the long way round to get to work when I have a car and a short, direct route. A lot of wasted time and effort for an ultimately inferior result when I already have a working system in place? No thank you.

Sonic/Sonic defender with bagpipes. ;D +1

Make everyone deal with the Kheldian problem of randomly adding massively-overtuned enemies to otherwise-normal missions, even when there's no valid reason for said enemies to be there? Hell NO. Thanks for stating what you DON'T want to see. It does seem as though you're making a pretty big leap from my suggestion to your idea of how it might be implemented, however. "Big leap"? More like "logical first step". The ONLY time you see a superhero's weakness mentioned in a comic book is when he's about to be screwed over by said weakness. And as mentioned upthread, the only functional way to implement this mechanically is the Kheldian approach of arbitrarily granting enemies a "screw you" power - be it an attack that slices through your defenses (hello invuln psi hole), or being all-but-immune to your offense (stupidly-high smashing, lethal, or psi resist in lategame enemies). Works great for a comic book where the writers can BS their way past the problem somehow, but player characters in a video game don't have plot armor to deal with this RNG-you-lose system. You want to see PC weaknesses implemented beyond what's already enforced by the game? Come up with something that doesn't hose the players and we'll talk. Oh wait, that eliminates EVERY possible implementation of a weakness system.

Well then why give them a buff aura or make them target-able at all, other than to taunt players?

Make everyone deal with the Kheldian problem of randomly adding massively-overtuned enemies to otherwise-normal missions, even when there's no valid reason for said enemies to be there? Hell NO.

This. I remember Diablo 2's hardcore characters. Your ability to reach endgame had far more to do with connection quality (and dumb luck versus instagib mechanics) than any sort of skill. No thank you to any rehash of that nonsense.

If he violated the ToS by paying hard cash to a third party for ingame goodies, he totally deserved that.

You mean downgrading.

I actually enjoyed WoW for several years. And I remember the advent of Recount and GearScore, and their assorted knockoffs. And I remember the ruinous effect these addons had on the game's community. People were ostracized over just a couple hundred points of damage, or a few GS points. Things never really recovered from there. I also remember what DPS parsers did to the STO community. Less of a mess because fewer people adopted the mods but those who did Would. Not. Shut. Up. about how awful a person you were if your pretend numbers weren't as high as they "should" be. Damage meters and those who defend them can die in a fire. Period.

So if the Nictus have been on earth for many decades before the Warshades and Peacebringers came. And if the PB's are their mortal enemies. And supposing they prepared for the eventuality that their arch-enemies would come...couldn't they have been preparing weapons this whole time that could defeat their enemies when they finally arrived? Wouldn't they want to propagate that technology to any faction that would a.) use it to attack their foes, and b.) their foes would likely encounter? I mean, let's face, this game isn't about winning Eisner awards here, but it's not so ludicrous to me in a world where I can never die, and always be teleported to the hospital at just the last possible second, no matter how much force is used against me. Nictus, being kheldians themselves, are every bit as vulnerable (in the fluff at least) to quantum weapons as their good-guy counterparts. Propagating a technology liable to slaughter your own troops to groups who have no reason not to turn them on you is spectacularly stupid, even for a comic book villain.

I hear your point, but in counter-argument, I present . but i mean if we're talking about supply-chain problems i honestly don't even know how they keep up with daily requirements of regular bullets in Paragon City. Please. This is an American city. Between legal channels and the black market, mundane guns and ammo are effectively in a post-scarcity state. The only challenge would be making sure your supply guy didn't send you the wrong caliber by accident.

"Roll the dice to see whether you get to play your character this mission" is NOT, and NEVER WILL BE, good game design. Ubiquitous samples of an allegedly hard-to-come-by substance or technology is likewise mutually exclusive with good writing. Your examples are all but meaningless because they assume quantum weapons (explicitly black box tech even to most of the people you would normally go to for super-science stuff) can be feasibly manufactured on Earth in sufficient quantity to meet the demand displayed ingame. This is an absolutely ludicrous assumption, on par with assuming the allies could spontaneously come up with force fields to counter nazis suddenly getting their hands on 22nd century technology (and for that matter, assuming the nazis would have the means to mass-produce the wonder-weapons in question).

Bad writing is bad writing, and bad game design is bad game design. The grandfather clause does not excuse either one.

No, no, nononononononononoNO. DPS meters are good for one thing and one thing only, and that is wrecking game communities. Number parsers breed bullying and elitism. We've already got people in the forums and game chat dumping on people for playing suboptimal powerset combos. This would simultaneously multiply their numbers and give them a weapon. We just got this game back, and you want to turn it into another Asshole Central?

Not just only for males, only for the standard male body. The "bruiser" build doesn't have it. More costume options is always good. As for the "clipping" thing, even on live a lot of stuff clipped. Getting helmet pieces to clip with each other in a way that looked cool was (and is) part of the challenge of making a power-armored toon.

The lore defense for this ill-begotten "feature" is simply bad writing. There's no logical reason for half the factions in the game to even have access to (and know how to use) pieces of alien hardware specifically intended for one race of alien symbiotes, AND just happen to have them on-hand on the offchance that one of those symbiotes shows up alongside a party of other supers to thwart an otherwise-normal operation. Even for tech-focused enemy groups, that level of coincidence strains suspension of disbelief. For magic-oriented groups or just plain street-thug gangs, it's outright BS. From a game design perspective, this is akin to checking if there's a tanker on the team, and if so, spawning a bunch of enemies with abilities that ignore defense/resistance toggles. Or treating a group with a mastermind to an enemy that does more damage per target for each target his AoE hits. "Hey, we're going to put this cool character option in the game, but if you take it, you'll have to spend your entire hero career getting randomly hard-countered by enemies spawned specifically for you. What do you mean we've made you a detriment to your team in a team-focused game? It's LORE!"

This. I minimize the leg slider on every female character I make because anything else looks ludicrous. Hell, even Barbie can't match the max leg setting.

Caves are badly designed in general and could use a complete overhaul.

Now I wanna see video of someone seeing how wacky a control scheme they can play CoH with. Somebody break open the Rockband box!