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It might be fun to make a Regular Supers SG full of characters that use no sets or incarnates. Some stuff like Apex and Tin Mage would be interesting since they give you a -4 level malus if you don't have an Alpha, so a group of Regulars would effectively run it at +8 and need some good ol' fashioned buff stacking and stuff
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May 18, 2023 15:46
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deep dish peat moss posted:It might be fun to make a Regular Supers SG full of characters that use no sets or incarnates. Some stuff like Apex and Tin Mage would be interesting since they give you a -4 level malus if you don't have an Alpha, so a group of Regulars would effectively run it at +8 and need some good ol' fashioned buff stacking and stuff I have an old backburnered concept for a supergroup called the Neighborhood Watch that's made up of all the various random oddball locals that are living in the Kings Row tenements sick of the Skulls' poo poo and ready to bust some heads. Only problem is that the game painfully lacks more grounded weapon options. Like it goes without saying such a group needs a granny with a frying pan, right? I toyed with a Thugs MM that would be a one-man version of the idea, but it just didn't feel right without the ability to turn all the tatted up gangsters and random bodies from Gang War into regular folk. It's still doable with a bit more creativity applied, but man, what could be... ApeMage has you pushing Praetoria out of Kings Row so it would be a very apropos climax. Never did understand why the -4 thing existed in the first place tho.
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May 18, 2023 17:17
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I wonder how hard it would be for HC to setup and maintain a server with no Incarnate stuff on it...
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May 18, 2023 17:51
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The -4 debuff was super buggy and hit alpha slotted players all the time anyway, so it got removed a few years ago on HC
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May 18, 2023 18:05
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Super not a fan of the whole Purple Patch mechanic anyway so yeah I hope they never lean further into it. e: I'd be interested in a no-incarnate mode, I don't mean that
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May 18, 2023 18:28
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Is there a way to lock your level/not receive xp anymore?
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May 18, 2023 18:35
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yes, it used to be you'd have to buy something from Pay2Win vendor but it's now just an option you can set per character at any time, look in options (I think it's on the first tab) e: yeah 
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May 18, 2023 18:36
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Also you can obviously manually unslot any incarnate stuff, but there's also just an option to enforce it in any TF you run A "no set bonuses" option would be interesting but I don't think that many people would buy into it.
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May 18, 2023 19:03
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Isn't that also a TF option already, I thought it was E: oh no enhancement effect PERIOD right lmao Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 19:15 on May 18, 2023 |
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May 18, 2023 19:13
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I'm one of those antisocial weirdos that mostly plays solo with the difficulty cranked up, so I don't mind the Incarnate stuff, it makes +1x8 stuff more manageable, and I still die a lot. Having teammates does push a lot of stuff into 'no challenge' mode, though, I've been doing some duo-ing lately and it's night and day different with even one extra person. anyway, the power of friendship is OP, please nerf.
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May 18, 2023 20:42
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Abroham Lincoln posted:The -4 debuff was super buggy and hit alpha slotted players all the time anyway, so it got removed a few years ago on HC Did they? Goes to show how often I do those. I know back when I was super cranking my first HC main it was still a problem. Never ran afoul of it myself, but every single A/TM had the leader blasting out a boilerplate "hey if these enemies are hard purple to you we need to stop and restart ASAP" all the same.
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May 18, 2023 21:31
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I like that pair of TFs quite a lot, aside from it being a really quick 80 merits (usually around 25 minutes for both) it's just a fun, diverse little chunk of full-power content with some cool gimmicks and actual tactical considerations required (e.g. the sewer phase with the pylons).
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May 18, 2023 21:58
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Elec/Shield Stalker hasn't been nerfed yet, right? I've always wanted to try one.
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May 20, 2023 03:30
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nope it's still amazing
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May 20, 2023 04:04
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Elec is pretty tough to beat, always good no matter the situation.
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May 20, 2023 08:11
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What makes that combo so good on a stalker?
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May 20, 2023 09:01
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shield charge and lightning rod can both be fired from hide and can crit. they won't crit on all targets but it's still pretty dramatic. all the damage is at stalker scale too, so very high.
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May 20, 2023 09:49
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Tabletops posted:What makes that combo so good on a stalker? It's a number of things; Stalker sets traditionally when ported have bad AOE, Elec Melee on other ATs has bad single target, Stalker secondaries (pre-HC) lost offensive tools frequently, and Elec/Shield is an extremely fun combo in general with two teleport AOE attacks. On a Stalker, the combo avoids all those pitfalls. Elec keeps all of its AOE damage and replaces a total skip power with Assassin's Strike, propping up its single target. Shield keeps Shield Charge. Someone can double check me on this but afaik the teleports don't break hidden, so you jump in with a nuke and immediately follow it up with Thunderstrike or Ball Lightning or some such for high crit chances. It's less that it's a top contender and more that it breaks a lot of design "rules" for the better, and winds up feeling really cool.
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May 20, 2023 10:46
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Yeah it's not like it's going to outdo pretty much any blaster damage wise but it's super satisfying and feels great.
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May 20, 2023 11:29
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John Murdoch posted:Literally the only thing I can think of as being ranked at all was Prestige, so that really just translates to #3 on the no-lifer list. seems like a universal MMO constant then
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May 20, 2023 17:05
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Mr. Maggy posted:seems like a universal MMO constant then Here's the SG rankings about 2 months before close: 
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May 20, 2023 17:48
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Abroham Lincoln posted:It's a number of things; Stalker sets traditionally when ported have bad AOE, Elec Melee on other ATs has bad single target, Stalker secondaries (pre-HC) lost offensive tools frequently, and Elec/Shield is an extremely fun combo in general with two teleport AOE attacks. Yeah the reason the teleports don't break hide is it's a weird quirk in how the attacks are set up to work, where instead of teleporting to the target location and doing a regular PBAoE attack, it spawns a pseudopet at the target location and has it do the attack. It's one of those things that is probably technically a bug but became so core to the appeal of the powersets that nobody has ever wanted to touch it.
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May 20, 2023 19:37
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Flesh Forge posted:Yeah it's not like it's going to outdo pretty much any blaster damage wise but it's super satisfying and feels great. What niche do stalkers fill if they’re not beating blasters for damage but are still relegated to melee?
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May 20, 2023 20:46
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they excel at single target damage (probably optimal), and are generally very safe in melee once you finish gearing. a better AT to ask this question for would be the Sentinel although they are weirdly a lot more popular than Stalker 
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May 20, 2023 21:16
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The thing about CoH's ATs is that niches are very fluid and the game doesn't really require optimal team compositions since every AT is fairly self sufficient to begin with and when you group up it's just a huge force multiplier. People play Sents because they're blasters that trade DPS for survivability, which makes them easier to solo with. Only the most tryhard teams are going to kick someone for not being the "correct" AT.
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May 20, 2023 23:38
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Yeah I don't mean to pick on Sentinels (although I do think they need some heavy buffs), every TF I ever run is always completely random in composition and the only reason any have ever had issues is because of social stuff (and even this is very rare), not because of some numbers bullshit.
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May 21, 2023 00:06
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Sents for the most part have some really cool ideas implemented. Mez powers that aren't rear end, stuff like Master Brawler in /SR, so on. The stuff that kills it for me are the reduced target caps in a game about fighting a billion enemies at a time, and the redesigned inherent. It's super busy in a way that nothing else in the game is, which is maybe excusable, but the reward for the effort is small and it doesn't work with other Sents. The previous inherent specifically called out how it encouraged teamwork and literally nothing else in the game behaves the way the new one does. "Whoops, sorry, someone on your team used their power so now you can't use yours on this enemy" and it's just like. Why? For what reason?? Is this AT literally meant to be a soloist??? 
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May 21, 2023 00:20
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yeah it's weirdly conservative to not permit that effect to stack in a game filled with bonkers poo poo like team wide stackable defense/resist buffs were they really worried people would make all-sentinel teams or something?
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May 21, 2023 00:47
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I finished making my character for Excelsior, but I'm getting an error message saying "Map failed to start. Server is busy, please try again later." The server is at medium capacity right now, so that shouldn't be the case. Any way to solve this? E: nvm, had to toggle my VPN. E2: Only level 4 right now, but holy poo poo is this game a nostalgia bomb for me.  E3: not sure if this is accurate, but I feel like the Incarnate origin was planned to be introduced to the game similar to OG Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies ie a super-rare overpowered class only obtainable by jumping through dozens of hoops and hurdles requiring insane amounts of grinding. It never got fully implemented, however, and the incarnate salvage system is what was left. Can anyone confirm/deny this? Teriyaki Koinku fucked around with this message at 13:08 on May 28, 2023 |
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May 27, 2023 11:44
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Flesh Forge posted:black and white proof that a lot of the OG dev ideas were legitimately really bad lol I’m on the other end of the spectrum. I look at their stated plans for Even More Incarnate stuff and nod and say “yeah that’s probably the right call”. City of Heroes was already basically Warframe-esque in terms of appealing to the player to break the game their PREFERRED way. Why not lean into that? It’s worked before (in the future as of the game’s shutdown though). Pure power fantasy dynasty warriors can indeed work.
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May 29, 2023 09:21
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The Cheshire Cat posted:The thing about CoH's ATs is that niches are very fluid and the game doesn't really require optimal team compositions since every AT is fairly self sufficient to begin with and when you group up it's just a huge force multiplier. People play Sents because they're blasters that trade DPS for survivability, which makes them easier to solo with. Only the most tryhard teams are going to kick someone for not being the "correct" AT. 4* HMs are the only acceptable venue for fussing about compositin. Everywhere else: Lol lmao
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May 29, 2023 09:23
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Captain Oblivious posted:I’m on the other end of the spectrum. I look at their stated plans for Even More Incarnate stuff and nod and say “yeah that’s probably the right call”. City of Heroes was already basically Warframe-esque in terms of appealing to the player to break the game their PREFERRED way. Why not lean into that? It’s worked before (in the future as of the game’s shutdown though). I don't mean the power creep (although the stuff that makes a lot of core AT features obsolete was a huge mistake) - I mean what Cryptic did with their other titles especially Neverwinter, making the content an immensely tedious grind with much less replay value than COH and essentially selling the right to skip steps in the mandatory content path. Neverwinter is "Free to Play" in the strictest possible sense, but so much of it is gated behind absolute time sinks (daily caps on every goddamn thing, non-negotiable gear score thresholds gating each content chunk, etc)
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May 29, 2023 10:29
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I'm still bewildered that alignment switching, the most unambiguous roleplayingest thing ever put into the game (well okay Praetoria stuff was a little more fleshed out), nonetheless had to be rigidly time gated because it also had to serve as a delivery method for yet another reward currency. But only for heroes and villains. For some reason.
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May 29, 2023 21:40
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Captain Oblivious posted:I’m on the other end of the spectrum. I look at their stated plans for Even More Incarnate stuff and nod and say “yeah that’s probably the right call”. City of Heroes was already basically Warframe-esque in terms of appealing to the player to break the game their PREFERRED way. Why not lean into that? It’s worked before (in the future as of the game’s shutdown though). A lot of the trouble was the numerical scaling and general balance. Incarnates stopped where they did and already threaten to rip the balance to shreds with the Destiny slot alone; the prevalent HM meta is rotating Barriers to the point where you just res and def cap your tank of choice. And then... that's it. There's nowhere else for the balance to go re:personal survivability because you've just hit the numerical limits. There's possibly some amount of interplay with increasing caps and making the numbers an ever-increasing arms race, but the game was never designed to do that on a fundamental level; adding the capacity for more resistance would take a total rework of how the math is calculated, and frankly given some of the other questionable math choices at Paragon? I don't think they'd pull it off, tbh. All of that's assuming it doesn't completely invalidate every previous bit of content. It's safe to say the old devs were flying by the seats of their pants and had no idea what they were doing or how to nail balance. The same powers designer that made Kinetic Melee made pre-nerf Titan Weapons. The HC crew may have their biases too (8 new sets for blaster, 0 for melee, lol) but they're at least more conscious of power creep.
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May 29, 2023 21:53
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A big reason for the ranged vs. melee tilt is probably that they are just not able to import or create new character animations.
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May 29, 2023 22:09
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Possibly, but they've done great VFX work with stuff like Storm Blast and that's 90% of what you need for armors. There's also plenty of melee animations to pull from to attach vfx to; a majority of the existing sets just pull from the same few animations as-is, and it's only later stuff like KM or StJ that got whole new animation sets done. And now you can steal from those, too!
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May 29, 2023 22:13
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Oh armor sets, for sure they could add more sets easily enough, I don't see any good reason not to there. Things like Storm and Sonic could have their own semi unique thematic gimmick too, e.g. an armor set that has a pull-to-center vortex aura or a disruption style -resist aura (currently only Bio has -resist)
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May 29, 2023 22:26
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Everyone remember to check out my Pride Month AE, "The LGT BBQ", #28172.
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Jun 9, 2023 17:15
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So I've taken a bunch of characters to 50 now and here are some min/maxing tips I've picked up for anyone who cares, though of course you don't need to min/max in CoH 1) Resistance-based defenses should only be taken on Brutes and Tanks. They are the only classes with resistance caps above 75%, other ATs with resistance-based defenses (like a Dark Armor Sentinel or Scrapper) will always be fairly squishy, even with their resists capped. That being said they're very strong on Brutes and Tanks (which get 90% caps, Tanks might even get 95%) especially when combined with a few Defense buffs from your team. side note: Mathematically Tankers are pretty much just worse brutes in every case except for farming, where it's really up in the air because that's the only place you'll constantly be taking advantage of a Tanker's increased aoe caps, and a lot of your damage as a farmer comes from procs on aoe aura toggles which are weird about PPM rates and essentially more targets means more procs per minute. They have the advantage in survivability, but Brutes become effectively invincible anyway so it's moot. 2) For defense-based defenses there are two kinds: Positional (Melee/Ranged/AOE) and Typed (specific damage types). Defensive sets offer one or the other: Ninjutsu, Super Reflexes, and Shield Defense provide Positional defenses, and all other (I think?) defense sets provide Typed defenses. Positional sets are straight up better because they provide defenses that work against all damage types. Typed defense sets will always run up against some enemies who punch right through their defenses. The TL;DR so far is that if you are playing an AT that chooses an armor set and you are not a brute/tank, shield/ninjutsu/super reflexes are your only min-maxed powergaming choices, but the other defense sets are fine too (and much better than Resist). 3) When an attack is made, only the highest applicable Defense is applied and the others are thrown out (e.g. if you have 45% melee defense and 50% negative defense, a dark melee attack will roll against your 50% negative defense). So don't mix and match positional and typed defense. Don't chase positional set bonuses on a character with typed defenses or vice versa. 4) Some people will tell you that there's a 45% softcap for defense and you should ignore these people. The 45% 'softcap' is the point where even-level minions only have a 5% chance to hit you. You will most likely never fight even-level enemies at 50, and most of your time will be spent fighting non-minions. The only true "cap" to defense is 95%, and the higher your defense is the more valuable each point becomes. Adding 1% Melee Defense when you already have 90% reduces the damage you take by 10% overall and this is especially potent because Defense does not have diminishing returns, a flat 1% from a set bonus is always a flat 1%. 5) So this is part of what makes some winter sets so valuable: they have a lot of defense on them - some of them have typed defense and some of them have positional defense. You can either make up for gaps in coverage on your Typed defense set or you can push your Positional defenses much higher. The only number I know off the top of my head is that the Ranged AoE winter set's purple version gives 7.5% fire defense at 6pieces, which is an enormous increase given point #4. These sets are primarily why positional defense is so much better than typed: you only need to chase 3 positional defenses in sets. edit: Worth noting that there are some attacks that have weird tags which positional defenses will not work against because they don't have any positional tags, but they're very rare and usually the kind of thing you're meant to avoid anyway (like Battle Maiden's blue lightning patch) e2: And for the record I think Dark/Shield scrapper is the strongest thing I've played. Dark Melee is a very strong set where every single skill is an attack (and can therefore crit), including your build up, which is also unique for dark melee because you get one stack of it for each enemy it hits (and it's a pbaoe), meaning it can give you larger damage buffs than any other scrapper set's build up and the interplay between that and Crit leads to some enormous 1500+ damage punches. And it applies lots of -tohit debuffs to enemies (every single attack!) which combined with your general-purpose positional defenses from shield means you can tank pretty much anything in the game, and Shield gives you a nice damage buff that also plays well with crits. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Jun 9, 2023 |
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Jun 9, 2023 18:30
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deep dish peat moss posted:side note: Mathematically Tankers are pretty much just worse brutes in every case except for farming, where it's really up in the air because that's the only place you'll constantly be taking advantage of a Tanker's increased aoe caps, and a lot of your damage as a farmer comes from procs on aoe aura toggles which are weird about PPM rates and essentially more targets means more procs per minute. They have the advantage in survivability, but Brutes become effectively invincible anyway so it's moot. in teams this is emphatically not true at all, you are essentially always able to be hitting 16 targets and almost all sets have a 16 target large radius AOE with a cooldown of below 5 seconds. they also lowered the level req for power picks so this will be available at 28 at the latest.
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Jun 9, 2023 20:01
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