|
It felt like they put everything they could think of into this game. At some point you have to filter that or you wind up with two pages of dense help text describing a one-off gimmick.
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2017 03:43
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 09:53 |
|
|
I like the preview of coming attractions! Good luck putting everything together.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2017 04:44
|
|
|
Lobsterman posted:So, I can't find a lot of actual info on the fucker anymore, so this is mostly gonna go from memory. I apologize for any errors/bullshit that I inadvertently pass along. So, for those of you who never had the fortune to play CoH, Hamidon was this enigmatic megaboss. It was the only raid content in the game and far and away the most powerful thing the game had to throw at you. And for a long time, nobody could figure out how to kill the blobby bastard. To my recollection, there were a number of strategies attempted, and there was a similar to AV process of 'every time something seems to work, Cryptic goes NO NO YOU CAN'T DO THAT and changes the fight'. Now, the guy in charge was Jack Emmert, a manchild who inserted his super special better than everyone character from the Champions tabletop RPG into the game as the mascot. He also had I can't speak for the super-early days, but by the time I was old enough to punch Hamidon, which was about the time of the first or second expansion, it was down to a somewhat boring science. Hamidon was a big cell with several organelles. Yellows shot area blasts and needed to be punched, teals shot single blasts and needed to be shot, and greens healed other things and took almost no damage until they were CC'd, and to those of you with experience with other MMOs, City of Heroes had Hold and Stun, which were both disabling CCs and neither broke on damage, so it was pretty easy to crack greens open. The Hamidon nucleus dealt mostly a special damage type that couldn't be resisted. So basically how it worked was you'd get a couple of illusion controllers to drop some decoys to absorb the initial volley of pain, a tank or two with strong maximum HP buffs, usually a stone tank, and enough healers to keep them topped up to hang around and get blasted by the nucleus, and then everybody else would assist-target one organelle at a time. When they were all dead, then everybody moved in out of the blast radius of the tank to pound on Hamidon. The thing about Original Hamidon was that he started with like 6 of each organelle but at 50% and 25% life he'd create one yellow one directly on top of everyone who was in there fighting him. I suppose it was intended that nearly everybody got clear of the place aside from a few people delivering the taps to get him there, but in practice if that happened you were basically doomed. Couldn't possibly get in to punch the yellows without eating a brazillion area shots. So what you did was you put a Hold on Hamidon. Now, Hamidon was coded to be resistant to Holds, but basically how resistance works is it's a number and every simultaneous Hold adds its power together. If it gets over the number the Hold applies, and I think in order for Holds to actually be registered at all that number was limited. So if enough people stacked them up he was Held all the same, and by the time I got there, everybody got access to another pool of powers between 40 and 50 that included a Hold if it wasn't in their power set already. So once all the organelles went down it was more or less a matter of time until Hami dropped, as long as you didn't lag out badly enough that people couldn't queue up more holds fast enough. And after he popped, he spawned a tiny bud for everybody who was in there fighting him, with a handful of hit points and no meaningful damage capacity. Hitting those buds got you in on the chance of getting a Hamidon enhancement, which was basically two enhancements stuck together. Enhancements (in brief) were things you put into a power to increase one of its effects (recharge, damage, accuracy, cost reduction) by about a third, and each power could hold six, though you only had a certain number of total slots to spread across your character. So instead of having one bit of a power at 200% you could have two bits, or whatever. Several things happened after that to change the fight. First (chronologically), enhancements were soft-capped at a 100% boost, so tanks and healers with crazy high health and restoration were a bit of a thing of the past, as were controllers with extremely long single-target CCs. In the Hamidon game this changed things for the worse. In the non-Hamidon game this was kind of welcomed, as it came alongside a downgrade in enemy power and boost in enemy rewards. So basically instead of maxing out your tank/damage/heals and pushing the edge of the math envelope against enemies as blood-red as you could find, you could actually have appreciable attacks and defenses at the same time and fight content closer to on-level for the same payout. Second, the raid itself was drastically overhauled. Hamidon got the same randomly pulsing CC immunity that other big targets got, meaning it was pretty much a guarantee that he'd get his 50% and 25% spawns off, but the spawns themselves were nerfed down to just respawning his initial complement in their proper spaces. It was almost guaranteed you'd be able to get enough people out in order to regroup and start again, though it also meant you basically had to do the same exact fight about three times. Everybody who participated in the raid got exactly one Hamidon Enhancement and then went on a lockout timer for 20 hours. Third, but really simultaneously, the game introduced craftable enhancements which could come in a variety of double or triple buffs. Hamidon Enhancements were still more powerful than anything you could make, but the enhancements you could make also had set bonuses. After that it was just a matter of game creep until Hamidon was obsoleted, especially when Incarnate Trials dropped and you could get together less people to do more fun stuff for better rewards. Even before then there was a task force with a weakened Hamidon mid-boss fight that was pretty much a 1x (as opposed to 3x) Hamidon fight tuned for a team of 8. And that's how, at the end of the game's lifespan, pretty much everybody was fighting Hamidon maybe once for the cheevo. Glazius fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Jul 7, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2017 03:49
|
|
|
alcharagia posted:Glazius has played a video game?! It was a different age, my friend. An age before Let's Play. EclecticTastes posted:I don't know who you spoke to, but "Enhancement Diversification" (yes, the puerile ED jokes were on full display with that name) was initially met on the official forums with a fury I had not seen since the massive Regeneration nerf around, I think, Issue 3. That it was paired with massive nerfs to both Controllers and Tankers didn't help. And the enemy adjustments didn't drop until months after Issue 5 (where said nerfs and ED were introduced), possibly Issue 6 or even the launch of City of Villains, and weren't publicized nearly as much as they should have been. That's the story of pretty much every major nerf up until Jack Emmert left. The nerf was more-or-less justified, but they presented them in the absolute worst possible light. Mark Miller taking over was the best thing that happened to the game, even though it eventually died. Complaining about ED did start a long time before Issue 6, yes. A decent proportion of the people who were big enough maniacs to post on the official game forums were also big enough maniacs to jump on the public test server, where the changes were released. But the boost to enemy rewards showed up at the same time, before they both went live. It's just that, y'know, absolute worst possible light, right? They got pretty much no promotion or explanation next to all the maths they had to drop on people so ED didn't blindside them. (white is the new orange, orange is the new purple, putting a team together to do regular ol' instanced content is the new putting a team together to jump on purples in hazard zones)
|
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2017 13:46
|
|
|
The Golux posted:Another factor in people remembering Blue as a jerk is them as kids not being prepared for when he challenges you near the end of a dungeon/in a town where a kid might not have gone to a pokemon center yet. Oh lord, Captain Swag is probably going to disable a pokemon center when we go to use it or something, isn't he?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2017 19:14
|
|