Crasical

Name: C'ao Status: Active Location: Hyades Cluster Physical Description: Humanlike. with horns, tail, and floppy ears. Usually taller than humans. Enhanced strength and Stamina. C'ao are remarkably mentally and physically stable, bordering on inert. Mutation, psionics, magic, chi powers, and other esoterica are essentially nonexistant among the race. Note: The black-and-white spots are, despite initial confusion, NOT skin or fur: but merely the traditional patterning of the empire's spacesuits. Affiliation: Hegemonic Dominion of C'ao Idiosyncracies and way of life: C'ao are a highly social species, congregating in vast herds in advanced cities. A resource-rich homeworld lead to a heavily socialized welfare system ensuring that all C'ao citizens receive adequate food, shelter, and medical care from the empire. With basic needs met, ambition became a measuring stick for social worth, the strongest, fastest, and cleverest C'ao being rewarded with positions of power in the meritocratic government. C'ao are quite confident, often crossing into arrogant, about the superiority of their way of life. Since leaving their homeworld, the continued expansion of the C'ao sphere of influence is the most popular way of demonstrating one's prowess, either military, diplomatic, or scientific. While the vast majority of C'ao vessels belong to the Imperial Armada, captains have the authority to break away from the main fleet to investigate promising planets as candidates for membership off the empire. Most remarkable tech hallmark: "C'ao technology is the most advanced in the galaxy!" is a common phrase among the C'ao. In truth, while they have a wide array of advanced technologies (energy weapons, force fields, warp drives, and more), C'ao equipment is generally simple, durable workhorse equipment that is practical but not exemplary. The only two standout technologies are their aggressive adoption of jetpacks (95% off C'ao own a jetpack and know how to use it, compared to 89% of adults in america having a drivers licence), and the C'ao anal probe; a medical device capable of analysis that can detect a broad spectrum of medical ailments, as well as treating diseases, poisons, and simple traumatic injury via targeted energy pulses designed to cause rapid cellular regeneration. The probe can also tap into the subject's nervous system to read their mental and emotional state, as well as allowing them to influence their mental state; letting it help calm panicking patients and prevent them from going into shock. It has also had some efficiency in alleviating the symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other such disorders. The nervous-system link also makes being probed an intensely pleasurable, euphoric experience; enough so that C'ao often use the device recreationally. More ominously, rumors persist that the technicians can retrieve specific memories from the subject, or implant subliminal or even overt brainwashing, or that the euphoric pleasure is somehow addictive, turning the probed into obedient servants to the Empire. C'ao are quite proud of their probing tech, and perplexed by why the devices seem to repel humans so thoroughly. Cultural Progress Level: Stellar Empire History: C'ao evolved from skirmishing tribes on the rolling plains of their homeworld, operating under simple principles of might making right. When tribes battled, the losers were often integrated into the winner's tribe, swelling its ranks. A transition to feudalism, with a single C'ao King overseeing many vassals, to Empire, with one great leader managing multiple kings, was a simple but gradual affair. The first C'ao to unite the known world because known as the First Immortal God-Emperor, who is still venerated in the empire to this day. The rituals and traditions of rulership passed down encouraged benevolence, law, duty, honor, and meritocratic excellence, with the God-Emperor's advisors being open for challenge at any time to prove their competency. Benefitted by good stewardship and the luck to have evolved on a planet with multiple anomalous materials (The purple metals and green glow distinctive to C'ao equipment are the result of these specific metals); C'ao quickly achieved spaceflight and colonized their own star system before continuing to expand into the unknown cosmos. Current Agenda: The C'ao are often seen as reckless, barbaric idiots by the rest of the galaxy; who characterize them as an aggressive expansionist force, powerful but stupid. This is not entirely unfounded, as the C'ao are fairly disorganized on the galactic stage at the moment, and heavily preocupied with expansion and conquest, adding occupied planets as 'vassal' or 'client' states to their hegemonic dominion. A small crew of C'ao has converted Asteroid Chariklo 10199 into an asteroid base known as 'The Milk Bucket' from which they launch scouting missions to earth, variously attempting to learn more about the strange earthling concept of superpowers, sway earthlings to supporting the eventual C'ao takeover, or sabotaging factions that would resist their goals.

I was also against the change, yeah. It's especially annoying if you were using an IO to increase the stealth value of Shinobi-iri, because if you move it to the click you can no longer detoggle it for escort objectives. Psyonico is right, though, you can re-add the ninja animation via power customimzation.

You have a nice day, sir.

Sorry if my point did not come across. When you post something like "Everyone is galactic levels of power, everyone is 15 year olds power tripping", it comes across as kind of a rude generalization, you know? When you post something like "I don't roleplay in City of Heroes, because everyone is power tripping. But I don't know if people are power tripping, because I don't roleplay", it's kind of circular reasoning, and flawed. It makes me ask 'Why are you here? Just to complain?' You can post where you like, you can say what you like. But I feel like I can point these things out to you as well.

No, what you said was "I'm interested in actual roleplaying, not just a bunch of 15 year olds power tripping, so [...] I don't roleplay in City of Heroes." I asked why you post in the roleplay subforums if you don't roleplay.

Behind the upstairs blueside bar, the one with no barstools and no bartender. There's no polishglass emote so I need some way to let other people know I'm ready to roleplay serving up cocktails. The only other beverage based badge I could find, 'Don't drink it' sends rather the wrong message.

I've kind of wanted a killsat Judgement, stealing the big orbital laser from the Keyes trial.

Buff LRM Missile.

The little shipping-container boltholes that the Goldbrickers use with a teevee, couch and stash of candy bars always looked kinda cozy to me.

Did you know that the heavies actually spawn rarely in the backside of the Rikti War Zone? I do actually kind of wish they'd grant the badge for defeating them.

Cosmic Cow. Beam Rifle/Energy Blaster. She's a dumb idea I had around shutdown, just a mess of B-movie alien tropes of flying saucers and jetpacks and ray-guns and aliens abducting cows and probing humans. I never actually rolled her, I didn't have my own bank account or credit card back then, and I didn't want to spend money on the powerset or the retro-scifi costume set. So, when the Secret Server got revealed, and they did a stress test.... time for cow. She was my first Everlasting 50, and in a way she's really symbolic of City of Heroes getting a second lease on life: For me, she's something that *could* have happened but didn't, turned into something that almost didn't happen but did in the end. She's just a hover-blaster, nothing fancy, but she's fun to play, fun to roleplay. I'm just really fond of her in particular, and I always feel grateful that the game is back again.

That's not a boss, that's a Ballista. EB. I know the mission you're talking about, and same thing happens to me: You rescue, the Ballista appears, you get detention fielded. The thing is, I haven't ever seen Ghost Widow go down during that sequence, so I don't know what you're doing differently. She's got some big controls and a self-heal, she normally can take care of herself.

How is Steam Spray treating you? I respecced out of it because of the lack of synergy with Venomous Gas, didn't want to wrangle a cone. Also I'm surprised to see people so few people taking the Dark Epic pool, layering on Oppressive Gloom with Venomous Gas really made getting in close more survivable for me.

Recluse is a technocrat; despite there only being one university in the isles (and them being portrayed as comically inept and negligent) I've gotta assume that there's a big push towards bettering yourself with science and technology; and having public schools for that is an obvious angle.

We really do live in an era of builds rather than guides, so it can be hard to know exactly what your powers are and how to leverage them. I ran /time as a secondary for my controller, so here's my short list of advice: TIME CRAWL: Single target -speed -rech -regen The power also tags the target for greater debuff potency from your other powers. A single slot of accuracy is probably fine here. As a single target debuff you mostly will just use it on bosses and the like. TEMPORAL MENDING: PBAoE healing, and it's a pretty good one. Somewhat overshined later but who doesn't love a pbaoe heal? TIME'S JUNCTURE: Big 'ole -acc and -dam debuff aura that also slows. Some people don't use this, I used it a ton. Does about -20% accuracy. VERY END THIRSTYY TEMPORAL SELECTION: +Damage, +rech, +regen. Everybody loves those! Put that on a melee archetype where the big health pool will do the most good with the regen boost. It also lets your heals heal more. DISTORTION FIELD: I don't have this one on my controller. I had so much control already. It's probably really good, but I don't know how it works. Sorry. TIME STOP: It's a single target hold. I took it to stack with my controller hold. If fyou stack it with distortion field it's also probably pretty good for locking bosses down. You can make it briefly hold bosses by putting Time Crawl on the boss first but it's probably better to just stack two holds if you have thhem. FARSIGHT: a HUGE chunk of why time is so good. It's perma-able pretty easily? and the controller version gives 15% defense and 10% tohit slotted. if you combine the 15% defense and the -20% accuracy debuff from Time's Juncture you're at functionally 35% defense, near softcap. Cool. SLOWED RESPONSE: I just got this on my 'troller and I don't know what it does yet. Sorry again. CHRONO SHIFT: Oh yeah this one's nice. It's a big heal with a small hot attached to it, a small end refund, and a 50% recharge boost for you and all your friends. People love recharge. so yeah you have heals, controls, debuffsf and buffs. You can do a little bit of everything, time is real strong. building you kind of need to decide if you wannt to run Time's Juncture or not, because it's got a big end drain, causes a lot of aggro, andn you have to get in melee. In general: buff alies with Farsight and Chrono Shift when they're up, keep temporal selection up on meaty allies, drop D-field, slowed response, andn time stops on grouups to lock down bosses and annoying enemies, heal with mending when you gotta, and otherwise just blast. apologies, typinng this on very janky laptop keyboard. it probably looks real bad. sorry.

What if we divorced the buff and the debuff portions here? So that when you fill the bar, you *automatically* get both offensive and defensive options and the bar empties? You could move the debuff portion to it's own clicky that only functions while you have the Opportunity buff and gives the big targeting reticle and resistance debuff. alternatively, instead of having the clicky, you could just bake it into the Opportunity buff, where the resistance debuff that sentinels normally employ gets bigger while Opportunity is up.

'Zen and the art of profile bonsai: Cutting your concept down to the essentials, and making the most use out of your 1024 characters.'

People say 'Don't, it's bad' when they talk about mayo on french fries too, and I love them that way. They're entitled to their opinion, you're fully free to just... roll that character. You don't gotta go on the forums and ask permission first.

I know some people feel that way, but until we get a consensus on 'Knockback in any form is Griefing', I don't feel like anyone has any right to go around telling other people how to play or build their characters. Going to Null and say 'hey don't let people use Mystic Fortune on me' does not inhibit their ability to use and enjoy Mystic Fortune. Putting a -KB option in Null is so you can tell *other people* to go change their settings. There's a difference.

Is there a way to have an enemy 'Escape', with that teleport effect some mobs (like Professor Echo) do, or to turn untargetable and run away? Or am I limited to having them ragdoll and say 'Mediporter, one to teleport' on defeat?

The problem I feel is that the other Null toggles are saying 'You can do this but I don't want it to effect me'. Which is more than fair! Curate your experience. But there's not really a way to implement a "You can use knockback but I don't want it to effect me" flag; this suggestion would just lead to a lot of "Hey go change how YOU play because it annoys ME", which is more intrusive than I think a Null flag should be.

This is the most nitpicky thing and I apologize but shouldn't that be 'waifu'

So you don't roleplay in City of Heroes.... but you DID come to the roleplay section of the forums, to tell us you don't roleplay, because everyone is 15 year olds power tripping... but you're not sure they're actually doing that, because you don't roleplay. Okay. Anyway those power-tripping 15 year olds are 25 years old now, post-shutdown.

After reading An Overly Long Post Talking About Lore, Canon, and Headcanon (TM), particularly Chapter 7. This is a Video Game, I decided to come back here to talk about the grinding gears between Chapters 3 and it's neighbors, and how you can get your sleeve caught in them if you're not careful. Prelude: Roleplaying with Strangers: I'm going to right off the bat say that a lot of this can be worked around if you have a supergroup or a small group of friends you consistently roleplay with. If you're not, though? You're going to be telling stories with randoms. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's a great way to meet people and have fun and the Everlasting community is pretty chill, but it means that not everyone is going to be up-to-date on how you've written around things. The gap between Chapter 2 and Chapter 3: Are you a friendly neighborhood Spiderman? A street level protector of Kings Row? Great! Turn off exp at level 25, you're done with leveling on that character! What, does that sound unreasonable? It is. Their roleplay power level shouldn't influence their game level. But Try it the other way: If what your character can achieve in game has *no* bearing on their roleplay power level, you can just make a character and leave them at level 1. I, personally, have a lot of trouble taking people who do this seriously. So how do you solve this? I... unfortunately, don't have a really good answer for this one. Saying that your IC and mechanical power levels never touch is one, but it's weird and uncomfortable when your level 1 godling gets face-planted by a hellion with a sledgehammer, or your street-level-saves-cats hero obliterates a whole fireteam of highly-trained anti-metahuman soldiers (Take your pick from Council, Malta, and Nemesis). You can just declare the actual missions you do non-canon, and never do any mission RP with anyone, but it can be limiting if you ever want to do anything other than nightclub roleplay if you can't even do any AE missions. The simplest explanation may be to acknowledge that your character CAN punch above their weight class if they need to, but for whatever reason prefer not to; because it's dangerous, expensive, exhausting, or just unpleasant for them. Or just give up on City of Heroes as a game and just use it as a costume creator/slash-chatroom with lore. The gap between Chapter 3 and Chapter 4: Let me call in my friend Bane Spider Ruben for this next bit: Put it another way: You make a Super Fighting Robot. He's immune to bullets (made of metal), he's immune to psychic attacks, and he's immune to poisons, diseases, knockout gasses and the like, being a robot and all. The game is, repeatedly and at times emphatically, going to tell you "No he's not!". Stuff down your pride and listen to the game. Not just so people on your team don't ask awkward questions when you get tear-gassed and gunned down by Malta, but so that you're not stepping on the toes of the mind controller, poison defender, and dual pistols blaster. Nobody likes "I'm immune to your powers and I'm going to be a dick about it" guy. Even if they're not Double Cosmic and talking about how they're so far above your mortal concerns, and how could a mere human with a gun possilby touch them, or they're not rubbing it in everyone's faces, It's a game about superpowers. Let people have their superpowers and let them have some effect, you're not too cool for it and the game mechanics don't back you up on this. Now, this one has two corollaries : Corollary A: But you can get real chonk in this game: I'm aware. And if someone came in and started lording their Veteran Level 1000 or how they can solo those 800-whatever AE arcs over me as proof of their divine transcendance and using the game to support my impotence against them, that'd suck. That hasn't happened to me, personally, though, so I think that the advice in general holds true. Be humble, say 'Yes' to what other roleplayers say they can do and what the game itself is telling you. Corollary B: I hate being mind controlled: Y'know what fair enough, you've got me there. I don't think anyone should ever push you unwillingly into roleplay that you find uncomfortable. If you never-ever want to be mind control because the lack of agency is boring or triggering or the person doing the mind control is being weird, cool! Just try and communicate that. Anyway, in summary, City of Heroes is just a game, but I think that WITH allowances for stuff that is 'just game mechanics', you still should use the game to inform your view of the in-game universe. I mean, you're playing it.

Buff LRM Missile