Gulbasaur

* flails menacingly *

Okay, but I'm in England so someone is going to have to pay for shipping him over.

This is Carmilla erasure. Everyone knows real vampires are languid lesbians who languish languidly.

I hand out ATOs and start-up funds to lowbies and put everything on the auction house at 111 inf like some sort of Arachno-communist. For every person trying to control the market and make a killing, there's a lackadaisical halfwit like me, blithely ruining everyone's plans with financially illiterate chaos.

I... don't mind it. It's unique. There aren't any others like it. Synapse, on the other hand, makes the Shadow Shard look varied and nuanced.

I was too busy checking the news to see who else has resigned from the Government. Politics are gettin' spicy here in England. I'll have a little flail now. Best to keep up appearances. Wouldn't want to seem unreliable. * flails around perfomatively *

One last flail before I go to bed. * flails despairingly *

I actually quite like slow levelling and taking my time on task forces (although some like the Shadow Shard ones push it a bit), and there's nothing that annoys me more than when someone doesn't say anything in chat for several missions and then stealth teleports the team to the end boss on one of the unique maps. Just let me enjoy things! I, as one may assume from my forum output, like to talk incessantly in missions and have helped several newbies get started on their IO journey, throwing a Performance Shifter or an ATO out here and there to help them on their way. The IO system is something I found completely impenetrable going back into the game as I think I stopped playing in around Issue 9, so I take care to help people with that aspect of buildcrafting.

* flails around impatiently *

I can sort of appreciate that one. Not the yelling, but half-understanding the mechanics and freaking out when someone breaks a "rule". If you're flying, it can cause the blue circle to spawn in mid-air, but the damage still hits you underneath it in a certain radius. If you're flying, stay high. If you're in mid-level, the circle can appear above the players, but still high enough to be hard to see but low enough to do damage. The warning is easy to see, but not if it spawns in mid-air.

Yeah, it can be done well, but I don't think it would be a good fit for CoX. Titan Weapons has this mechanic as its gimmick and that had to be reined in as it was overperforming. Personally, I'm not in favour of flat damage increases, which this would be by proxy unless it had a significan payoff (lower accuracy?, higher endurance cost?), and part of why CoX combat is so fun for me is the fact that crowd control is both meaningful and impactful. CoX has a lot of underlying mechanics that one could realistically call ripe for abuse - recharge is the most obvious, but the IO system's easy defence stacking is another. Something that gave a build-up like "quick animation" proc could be good (which is kinda how Momentum works) but hard to make meaningful. A flat animation speed increase would be overpowered. It's a tough one to balance, but City of Heroes was never a particuarly balanced game, especially once you factor in buffing and debuffing interactions. It's an interesting idea.

It would be too meta-defining as it would effectively raise DPS (and actions per second). Recharge is broken enough as it is! In Guild Wars 2, there is a buff that does just that and the whole support meta starts with that one buff.

I did enjoy the extra challenges and badges available. I thought that was really neat and I'd like to see more like that. Extra numerical challenge, +5 enemy mode etc? Nah.

Resistance debuff and damage buff and debuff. I'm aware that resistance debuffs risk being overpowered on a couple of support sets and they're something of a coding oddity due to how resistance and damage debuffs interact with other stats, but some Resist Debuff IO sets with proc effects would be really nice. I'm a fan of the somewhat unique Contagious Confusion proc and wish there were more like it (Spreading Fear? etc) so maybe something similar a chance for a second AoE resist debuff would work out well. It would also give Sonic a bit of breathing space in the modern meta; one of the reasons it's hard to work as a damage set is that it has very few proc options. It's fine on Defenders in teams, but fairly anaemic otherwise. -DMG is a rare mechanic but it interacts with resistance debuffs in a strange and wonderful way. Being able to turn it from a side-effect of a power to something meaningful would be excellent. Thinking about it, a +special proc effect would be really handy. We've got a couple of mini Build Up enhancements, so a mini Power Boost would be great.

Elec is OP in teams but it's a busy old set so you spend half your time supporting yourself. The support sets I've mostly played: Kinetics - a team player that doesn't have much solo capacity. Like warshades, it loses steam when faced with one tough boss. Kinetics favours a very aggressive team and has the healing chops to carry reasonably well Storm - as long as you can keep your recharge high and don't bottom out of endurance, you're pumping out a lot of damage and AoE soft control. Dark - solos fine, quite safe, you get a smoky man to help with debuffing that occasionally throws you a heal. It's good it solos so well because you can out-aggro some tanks. Rad - you can solo anything, given enough time. Radiation was the old skool "do anything hard" power set. If you thought Dark picked up a lot of aggro, Radiation is on another level. Traps - you can solo anything, provided you kite it to where you need it to be. A very powerful set, provided enemies don't move.

It's a niche power, but it's a good one. I couldn't necessarily use it on a fortunata, but it seems to create a patch under an enemy... and the enemy tries to run away from the patch... which follows it. Solid AI-breaker power for when you get overwhelmed. Otherwise, you can just splat it on your tank and do some mid-tier damage

I take offence to that last part...

I've never found much need for more resistance, personally. Between the capped defence and ~40% resist from IO sets, you're sitting at early game Tanker levels. It's just not a problem I've ever felt needed to be fixed. I do agree Sorcery is a good set, though. It has variety and caters to a number of playstyles, plus Enflame is a bit of an AI-breaker, which I have made good use of in solo play.

The knife is pointing to South East. SE in numerology is 3+5, totalling 8. The eighth level power on Regeneration if it were a Tanker set would be Integration, clearly suggesting that Regen is being integrated into, meaning proliferated to, Tankers. Due to their high hit points and the fact that it would be at a higher value in a Primary powerset, the +Regen boost would be much too high, so the whole powerset would have to be brought down proportionately to avoid significant differences between archetypes. Regen nerfs confirmed.

You can definitely see how the various devs built on the system over the years. A lot of early (in developmemt terms) blueside content is, frankly, filler. The Freakalympics and the PI Praetorian arcs are probably the only really standout story arcs from the early game. Even the Kheldian story arcs are basically time-filling exercises, and the Shadow Shard is a grind of near-indentical missions. Striga and Croatoa, last couple of maps before CoV released really do mark a transition between old and new gameplay, with a clearer zone narrative, although some of the Croatoan mission maps are much too large and much too sparcely filled to be revisited as much as they are. I don't even think grindy missions are bad; it's an important "it's the weekend, I'm tired and I don't want to engage a single braincell" style of gameplay that *sigh* I completely appreciate having the option to do. But it's not all the game. Redside content is grindy but good. There was experimentation there, and the narratives start to build up on top of each other, with call-backs and crossovers that aren't really picked up blueside until much later. The enemies get harder faster and it feels like foreshadowing was actually taken into account. Early Goldside is good, although suffers a bit from only really using two map designs outside of the end-of-arc narrative-focused missions. First Ward, Night Ward, Faultline (that I think people overlook because of the skip-to-the-end levelling approach that many people take) are probably the most interesting and varied zones in terms of mission types and gimmicks blueside. Dark Astoria has some solid missions, too. And yet, here we are again, bashing fascists in Peregrine Island in a towerblock facade that leads to a sewer entrance. My advice is to roll up some tip missions: they're a lot more varied than radio missions (though you'll see them repeating soon enough) and invite lowbies into those. Malta and Knives of Artemis are less of a mob grinder.

I like how unique the Numina task force is. The hunt missions are part of it! Get yer mits off!

VEATs get absurdly high value out of the Leadership toggles... what other pool powers do you rate? The Provoke AoE taunt had a lot of value when I was running my fortunado as a tank. The teleport ones are fun and Fold Space is a fantastic trick to have up your sleeve. I refuse to take Hasten on principle and Fighting doesn't solve a problem I actually have. I have no love for any of the Patron Pools, and that's partly because having the pools shared with melee archetypes leaves little to play with on a fortunata build.

You do have to wait, but they sell quickly. I normally shove mine on slightly below the average and they sell pretty much immediately. Failing that, next time I log on it's there. It's a brisk trade. I find the delay is actually in buying the ATOs, but it rarely takes more than a day.

I had a couple of friends who were doing an incredibly competitive apprenticeship for the NCSoft UK offices in Brighton and they were both let go on the same day, as well as around 70 other employees. I know one now still works in the same field of game development, but it was a bit of a bump in his career development. NCSoft, back in the late noughties, were brutal.

Marches were marched People looked fabulous. Reminders were there that Pride events have their roots in protest. But also, there's usually a lot of dancing. And remembering the fallen.