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PoptartsNinja posted:
The devs claimed way back in the day that even if the AVs' end bar didn't move all that much, depleting it below a certain level would still deny them certain moves that required (but did not use) a certain minimum amount of endurance. Personally I couldn't ever detect much of a difference, usually because I was nearly always on a team with other options for mitigation. That said, one of my all-time favorite characters since launch was a kin/elec defender. Power Build Up (from the Energy epic pool) + slotted Power Sink was definitely effective right off the bat in locking down a mob in absence of any AoE crowd control. Of course, if you had any sort of dedicated AoE damage on your team, Fulcrum Shift was often even better as an opening move (since instant death is the best mitigation of all), but the situational flexibility was a huge attraction for me. And of course, there's always Speed Boost. usenet celeb 1992 fucked around with this message at 04:33 on May 30, 2019 |
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May 30, 2019 04:30
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Tin Can Hit Man posted:You can actually make a pretty decent Gorilla/Monkey Hero with creative use of the Alien Face, beards and some of the face makeup stuff. I personally prefer the Clockwork 5 face with the Spikey beard option and a hat/hair option of choice. There's still some cyborg stuff visible around the sides and back of the neck but it's not really noticeable under most situations.
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May 31, 2019 04:39
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Tabletops posted:I made a street justice brute on the indomitable server. You'll be fine with basically any melee set for soloing. Street Justice is definitely one of the better sets, but in the end the one and only rule of CoX is: is it fun to play? If yes, punch away. If no, reroll (but keep all your characters because why not).
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Jul 1, 2019 03:55
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I mean, there seems to be no short supply of thugs willing to staff baby jails in the desert. Some people will eat a mountain of poo poo if it means they get to pick on someone weaker in turn
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Jul 2, 2019 03:46
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John Murdoch posted:I still have no loving clue why they thought the game was going to be so busy and huge that they needed these crazy out-of-scale zones to support the population Because, around launch and for maybe 6 months after, it was. Server populations were at their absolute peak, zones were busy, and street sweeping in hazard zones remained the favored method of fast leveling for quite a while until missions got beefed up and more interesting zone-based arcs like Striga were implemented. It was a valid approach given the state of the game at the time but that population didn't last, and it's likely a consequence, at least in part, of so much dev time and effort needing to be spread across so many zones, leading to the perception that things were static and stagnating. The devs knew they needed to scale back to focus on really fleshing out zones and making them more dynamic, but perhaps it was an error to do it (at first) by adding even more zones rather than revamping the unused old zones as they eventually did.
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Jul 2, 2019 14:30
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John Murdoch posted:But wouldn't multiple zone instances handle most of that? A lot of those massive hazard zones have overlapping level ranges, too. I can understand some of those places existing, but all of them taken together is a bit much. Even before you hit the saturation point where another zone instance would trigger, you'd still hit a point where mobs were being cleared faster than they could respawn and there would be killstealing, hurt feelings, etc. Given their self-imposed restraints (their views on how popular street sweeping would be vs. instanced missions, as has been pointed out), it made a certain amount of sense to expand the game zones laterally. quote:I remember this coming up time and again, and one of the last times it did Matt Miller specifically said that revamping zones "didn't make the game bigger" Well, they eventually did revamp a number of zones (Hollows, Faultline, RWZ, Boomtown next) as well as adding zone events to existing ones. It's good to remind ourselves that in so many ways, despite their own inherent predispositions, the devs were willing to listen to the playerbase in a lot of ways and improve the game in ways that haven't been replicated since. On the other hand, First Ward, Night Ward, and arguably the entire existence of Praetoria (firmly separated from both the existing hero and villain worlds) indicates that they backslid a bit on that revelation. Whatever the merits of the Praetorian content (and don't get me wrong, they were significant), it was a fundamental mistake to take a player population that had already dwindled, and not only divide it up into a third faction, but also have forced single-player content.
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Jul 3, 2019 05:30
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feh, quote is not edit
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Jul 3, 2019 05:31
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spectralent posted:It might interest you to know that's actually the best Shadow Shard TF. What's bonkers about that is that the story bible goes into great detail about who Rularuu is, all of his Aspects (we never even see half of them) what happened in the Shard, etc., but almost none of that ever comes out in the game. In fact, if I recall correctly, even the initial Shard content couldn't get its story straight about the origins of the refugees/denizens. In a way, the half-assed perfunctory conclusion to Rularuu that they had planned was the perfect tribute to that.
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Jul 3, 2019 15:51
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Cythereal posted:Debuff powers in general. I get that they're very powerful late in the game, but early on they feel nigh useless. They don't seem to do much (probably more a result of the enemy not having much to debuff in the first place), and they whiff as often as any other power. The frequency of misses is probably my single biggest issue with the combat in this game. Almost every single time I've died, it's because my hero could not for the life of her consistently hit an enemy her level or one above her. These, I totally understand, especially if you solo more often than not. In terms of return vs. endurance cost, especially at lower levels, investing in more attacks is the more efficient reward, since killing an enemy more quickly has the more immediate and expedient effect. As pointed out, though, you can see these effects really shine on teams. quote:Character customization is pants on head insane, especially with Homecoming having unlocked every visual option out of the box. I think I've spent as much time or more in the character designer than I have playing the actual game. This, for a lot of people, is the entire game. Having a character concept that makes me laugh and is able to be completely and satisfyingly executed within the character creator has carried me through a lot of characters with subpar abilities. quote:And a personal bugaboo, but I tend to play video games mainly for story, and I don't feel like I'm getting much of one so far. I can't tell whether most or all or none of these contact missions are randomly generated filler or not - the only one I've done that I'm certain was not was a arc about a hero named Twinshot and raiding Manticore's mansion. I seemed to be on a story arc about fighting the Hellions, until it suddenly turned into hunting the Circle of Thorns. Was that Bahamut guy I stomped in an office building the Hellion leader or something? Absolutely no argument here. When the game launched, the devs assumed that people would primarily level via street sweeping (yes, really), and mission rewards were weak. Indoor missions were an afterthought, and while most (but not all!) contacts had story arcs that had interesting nuggets that would advance the game lore, the actual missions available to you were randomly selected. Which meant that you would often have to go through several rounds of either "Kill X enemies in Y zone" or "Complete generic fluff indoor mission Z" before getting to an arc that was actually interesting that shed light on some game lore. Even then, most of the genuinely interesting plot twists didn't happen until 30-40. They made efforts over the years to boost the attractiveness of low-level content -- usually tied to zone-specific arcs like The Hollows and Faultline -- but they kept it alongside the creaky old content. As you've noticed, then, a lot of it seems completely discontinuous, with a lot of whipsawing between disparate plotlines. While it may have satisfied longtime players who were bored with repeating old content, there was little in the way of explicit plot threads that would help a new player who understandably wasn't willing to dig through the fan wikis. If you want a more guided and cohesive plot experience, I might suggest (for heroside) doing the Atlas Park arcs through Aaron Thiery, maybe also doing all the Twinshot arcs if you need some basic tutorials on game locations and resources, but moving on to the Hollows after level 5 (there are 2 sets of 2 contacts at roughly 5-10 and 10-15), Faultline at level 15 (2x2 contacts at 15-20 and 20-25), and the Midnighter Club arcs starting at level 10. That should give you a relatively focused set of plot arcs to give you an idea of how things progress, without having to rely on the randomness of the really old legacy plotlines. The other option is just teaming a lot, going with the flow, and seeing if the absolutely batshit chaos of particle effects and random selection of teammates of varying degrees of competence offer you the gameplay experience you're looking for. usenet celeb 1992 fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 04:19
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usenet celeb 1992 posted:a lot of it seems completely discontinuous, with a lot of whipsawing between disparate plotlines. Just as one example of this: Very early on (late 2004), the first free content expansion of CoH (that raised the level cap from 40 to 50) introduced a couple of story arcs taking place in a dimension (Praetoria) that was basically the Star Trek "beard universe," where all the heroes were villains and vice versa. There were story arcs where you fought evil versions of the canonical heroes; you rescued Statesman; good fun, the end. Much later on, the second paid expansion (after City of Villains) was Going Rogue, which offered an entirely new starting experience for players -- they could start out in Praetoria, as Praetorians, only this time it wasn't so much a mirror universe as a total grey area, where mirror-Statesman had established a utopia that was more sinister than it seemed, but at the same time, the Resistance wasn't always fully heroic either. Players were able to choose a more fluid path that was almost never fully heroic or villainous, involving various moral tradeoffs and the constant potential foe side-switching; good fun, but then at level 20 you had to go to the main "Prime" universe and decide to be a straight-up Hero or Villain. At the same time, the game introduced post-level 50 content ("Incarnate" trials) revolving around a war between Praetorian Earth and Prime Earth. Later, they introduced a level 20-25 Praetorian zone taking place prior to that war. Later than that, a level 25-30 Praetorian zone. Then, as one of the last content updates, a series of level 35-50 arcs taking place after the level 50+ war trials. As a result, a first-time player could hit level 35 and be instantly introduced to a contact that assumed at least some familiarity with the level 50+ contact or the 100% optional level 25-30 Praetorian content. With all the emphasis on filling out new content for low level players, there was a surprisingly little amount of attention paid to how overwhelming and intimidating it could all be to the complete, rank newbie. quote:That's not the kind of experience I'm looking for. No offense, but City's graphics are too dated to hold a candle compared to a FF14 alliance raid or trial. No offense taken! The last non-CoX MMO I played was Warhammer for like, a month, so my perspective on that is obviously limited. CoX's graphics are very dated, no doubt (but I highly second Hefty Leftist's recommendation for using reshading), but the appeal is, to me, in the chaos of gameplay rather than graphical quality. The gameplay experience can conceivably be extremely different based on whether you're solo or in an 8-person team; how well your team clicks (even a bad team can be fun in some situations); the relative difficulty of the missions; mission structure (like constant ambushes); etc. usenet celeb 1992 fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 04:43
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i would like my character to have a big big pregnant tummy and for other characters to be able to get into the tummy
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Sep 7, 2019 18:50
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Nonexistence posted:I need to quit being a punk and give in and make a mace guy. Dark armor actually sounds pretty fun if I just slot whacky procs in all my auras? Shield charge > whirling mace sounds fun but shield is boring besides that. Should I just be a bane spider for the fun toxic animations and be a magic scepter guy with all the mace blasts? WM/Bio scrapper is balls-out crazy damage once it gets going.
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Sep 18, 2019 20:07
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Crasical posted:I should refresh myself on Nerva's arcs. Darla Mavis' arcs are...okay, even though she's just an unpleasant woman. Psimon Omega's are boring/bad. Having just subjected myself to them recently, I can tell you that the hateful, hateful people who created the Nerva arcs thought it was a fantastic idea to use that very long, uphill Shadow Shard map for kidnap/rescue missions. For some reason, on this map in particular, the NPCs are particularly bad at pathing such that you have to move at a snail's pace because they're constantly briefly backtracking every couple of seconds. One of these missions was bad enough. But the number of these missions is not one. Nor is it two. I think it may be less than four but I may have missed one and I am always willing to be surprised and appalled.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:25
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The weed of deceit
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Oct 9, 2019 03:45
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Judgement posted:A Game of Thorns. Absolutely phenomenal. The pinnacle of this art.
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Oct 20, 2019 16:00
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Only the mission holder can get the end-of-arc XP/inf and merit rewards. However, if you visit the same contact as the mission holder, you can get the same missions. Then at the end of each mission, you will get a pop-up prompt asking if you would like the credit for completing the mission. That way you can both advance through the contact/mission arc together, and you will end up with the end-of-arc rewards. That's probably what the other players were doing. It was rather bad form for them not to let you know that's what they were doing; you could have picked up the first mission, auto-completed it, and then you would have been caught up with everyone else without slowing the team down at all.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:04
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He was such a useless dick that even Hamidon didn't want him in the hivemind.
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Jan 7, 2020 21:01
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Nonexistence posted:Special mention to Phantom Army now being able to summon copies of your character. Dear god. I've been wanting this ever since launch. Tragic oversight that they haven't also done the same for Phantasm and the Phantom Lore pets, though. Maybe next patch.
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Jan 24, 2020 04:35
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Aster0ids posted:Any pvp at all going on? Ive never actually tried it on live, would probably try to mess around with it. I wandered into Recluse's Victory the other day (the only PvP zone with any appreciable PvP) and it sucked just as much as ever. Take SS, SJ, and Stealth and spend all your time jousting/sniping/enduring the same two or three Broadcast macros like "[NAME] your pooper hole just got excavated by *** xX mR pANTZ Xx ***" Can't say if there's any appreciable Arena scene but if you can find a group of people you can tolerate I can't see why it can't be fun to mess around with as a change of pace.
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Jan 30, 2020 03:30
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Cosmetically, Mace's moves look a lot like the other two, with some differences in mechanics (defense bonus for BS/Parry, etc., KD for some of WM's moves, etc.), so the usual "play whatever gives you the most aesthetic pleasure" caveats apply, but War Mace really does completely outshine the other two in terms of damage. I slotted both scrapper ATO sets in my WM/Bio as soon as I could and it was just astonishing. Still have so many good feelings for my old BS/Shield from the live servers just because of how the powers felt and the costume options (particularly had fun with that one), but there's no comparison.
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Apr 23, 2020 21:25
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hemanoncrack posted:I just learned about this today, I am so happy. I played this game on launch day (Hunks) and while all my other GoonSquad teammates (only names I remember are Dreamcaster, PUSHER BOT, and OrphanSparrow) hit 50 in like a month it took me a year. I remember you! Welcome back!
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Jul 5, 2020 19:22
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For those who (like me) don't venture out to GBS or FYAD (I originally heard via Twitter), it seems like it's been confirmed by people who knew him in RL that OG CoX goon Barnacle Jim (Miracle Midget) has passed away: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3942972&pagenumber=1 Condolences to all of his loved ones. He was a swell person and great fun to play alongside.
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Oct 6, 2020 01:01
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Whatever else you can say about the jankiness of any proposed solutions, the instant-base-teleport command did break things a little, even if it was just 1) MY IMMERSION and 2) the experience of the dozen or so grognards who do zone PvP. Would have been best if they could have removed it at the same time as they rolled out a simple, more integrated solution with some nice extra bells and whistles. Like build on the Longbow Chaser/Arachnos Transport power to allow players a single power that offers a wide choice of vehicles to teleport to bases, mission entrances, and select zones, with an appropriate cast time but maybe a 5 or 10 minute cooldown. I'd love to have one of those regular hoopties you see driving around all the time, complete with music blasting, and drive it right the gently caress to a mission in the Shadow Shard.
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Nov 5, 2020 23:59
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I just want a beat up '76 Chevy as my travel power
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Nov 6, 2020 02:04
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Crasical posted:Ice could be good, if I changed the costume up from pink to blue. With Minimal FX and color customization you can make the armor powers minimally obtrusive. Experiment with making either the primary or secondary color a very dark/neutral color while making the other color your desired colors. One of the purplish/blue colors might play well off the pink costume.
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Dec 13, 2020 03:31
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Freakazoid_ posted:CoH judges only like three things: edgelords, big titties, and edgelords with big titties. Bear Patrol's costume contests were the best. I won one with a dumb throwaway demonically-possessed moose (Moosifer) that I stopped playing two days later when I got bored with the powerset. BP didn't give a poo poo as long as you used the Huge model. Gotta admire that clarity of vision
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Mar 20, 2021 19:14
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John Murdoch posted:I do feel like there's a degree of presumptuousness to the whole thing. Like, you don't hear about random people saying something like "EA hasn't made a Command & Conquer game in years, I'm gonna demand they sell me the IP!" followed by "wow WTF EA refuse to sell, they must be crazy!!". Like it or not it just doesn't seem to work that way. Pretty much the only time you hear about IPs changing hands like that is if the original company gets dissolved. NCS probably took a look at the time and monetary cost of the lawyering that would have to be involved, weighed it against what they could stand to make from selling the IP, and decided their legal department had better ways to use their time. Sucks, but understandable.
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May 15, 2021 14:02
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War Mace/Bio is a really fun and crunchy combo for a scrapper, good amount of PBAoE/arc damage.
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Jun 16, 2021 04:08
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Diephoon posted:I'd like to reiterate that the most important thing in this game imo is being invested in your character. The one and only ironclad rule of CoX. Teams smooth out every supposed "weakness" of any individual power set. Even middling/mediocre teams. If you have a character concept that satisfies/amuses/entertains you and makes you look forward to logging in, that's what will carry you through this game in the long haul.
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Jun 20, 2021 04:47
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Yeah, Frostfire is a character that the devs built up a little in Going Rogue, he became a hero and showed up in higher-level alignment-change missions. Can't remember offhand if there was more than that.
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Jan 21, 2024 14:41
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Mind Control is OP as gently caress, I'm just level 1 and I have hypnotized so many sub demonkin-dragon girlfriends in my RP supergroup. Just imagine how broken it could be if we could log in at the same time
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Jan 22, 2024 23:33
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Gimmick characters can be such a grab bag but that's part of the fun, I loved running with permateams or theme groups back in the day, and some of them even had staying power after 50/IOs/incarnate powers. Like, my kin/elec defender (Short Bus) would never win awards for damage but I took him all the way from Issue 1 to endstage Incarnate content because there was always something useful to a team in just about any context. Once they finally introduced semi-decent EndMod IO sets it became a fun challenge to see just how far you could push endurance drain to actually see some effect on AVs and the like. It was the furthest thing from overpowered but it genuinely worked to have some little effect! And, as proof of concept, that was enough. Some of my favorite builds have just been fun little detours or proofs of concept like that,.with utility in a variety of situations, even if the places where they could truly shine are relatively rare (Plant/Storm controller was another combo I loved, with the ability to solo +4/x8 doors on BAF trials or ITF ambush waves what with all the pets/pseudopets/DoT and control patches).
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Jan 29, 2024 03:28
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I think that was very recent, yeah, and I've been meaning to check it out. My main/favorite for a long time was illusion/FF but once Time Manipulation was added I switched and never looked back, until now. Could be some fun here. Sadly, some of the best times with repel-type powers are long gone, from before they implemented physics changes. I loved sending Short Bus barreling through Perez Park, bowling through Hellions and whatnot, especially if people were street sweeping.
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Jan 29, 2024 15:59
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That's really making me want to recreate Jumbo Lump, I loved the buffs, pets, and being able to poo poo out huge amounts of AoE damage, I just remember the cast times wearing at me a bit after a while.
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Feb 16, 2024 16:30
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Redside content was just massively hobbled by the tension between the central conceit of high-level villainy (having the power to shape a world to your will) and the stasis of a shared MMO world. Not sure if anyone has a really satisfying solution to that. The fluid status of the PVP zones probably presented the best starting point for a solution, but PVP is fundamentally broken in the base game. The other major problem with it was how it split up the player base, and so it's all the more baffling how they somehow managed to do an even worse version of that split with an even smaller player base by introducing the Praetorian content.
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Mar 20, 2024 03:09
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The Praetorian missions are really pretty great! Some of the best writing and design in the game. The reason I called the splitting "even worse" though is not just because of the segregated 1-20 content, but also the fact that the capstone missions for each arc forced you to split up the party if you wanted to play through them. Just an absolutely crazypants design decision in a game where one of the best feelings is getting a good groove with a good team and just blowing through arc after arc.
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Mar 20, 2024 13:28
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Yeah, should have specified that it's specifically the 1-20 Praetorian content that I liked so much. The later First Ward/Night Ward stuff just totally lost me with its plotting (and how long it dragged on), and the character writing was often pretty amateurish. I think CoV never really could figure out if it was treating it as a new game for new players or an expansion of experienced players who knew the role, and it never really separated the two, which is why you see both the rehashing of original content as well as the shoehorning of "for the fans" story bible scraps, as you put it. Still a good number of good arcs and good moments, but all throughout the game's lifecycle I think its philosophy of "letting the creators go wherever" was both a strength (some really good ideas) and a weakness (metaplots that never get resolved, endlessly introducing new ones [that also never get resolved]).
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Mar 20, 2024 13:44
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John Murdoch posted:
Ha ha. Yeah. I wondered if it was the brainchild of someone who really really wanted instead to be working on their Big Idea for a dark urban fantasy MMO and just shoehorned their ideas haphazardly into the Praetorian storyline. Just a complete departure tonally and plotwise from where everything else had been going with that plotline. What were their scrapped Rift Enclosure plans?
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Mar 21, 2024 21:33
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Even aside from the impressive graphical upgrade, the environments in GR were truly incredible and showed a lot of thought and care toward environmental worldbuilding. I'm still salty that they ignored the results of the poll (where "outer space" won and I was looking forward to it), but drat if they didn't validate the choice to go with Praetoria right out of the gate. Maybe they just weren't confident that they could pull off an equally rich and varied set of space zones, but I can't stop imagining what could have been if they had taken a more Cosmic (not necessarily Incarnate) turn with the talent they had working on Going Rogue/1-20 Praetoria.
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Mar 22, 2024 13:57
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John Murdoch posted:Odder still they had plans to do space poo poo all the way back around I8 with the Faultline dam fracture being caused by "gravitational disturbances on the moon" and the space ship launch pad construction. Though it never really sounded like they had a strong idea of what they wanted to actually DO up there. It was basically just "moon nazis" and "even more Rikti" written on a cocktail napkin from what I remember. To be fair I have some faith that they'd have been able to swing something. Hell, the Imperious TF could translate pretty easily into a moon-Nazi setting, and might actually have integrated better with the overall setting than all the extended Greco-Roman stuff they tried to do later and didn't really work. quote:And then of course they pushed Praetoria so hard and so unilaterally and had it so shackled to their obnoxious raid system that everyone got sick of it so they decided to completely 180 pivot away from it in the messiest and least satisfying way possible. To be honest, the ultimate encounter with Praetorian Hamidon was actually more or less what I was hoping to see. The bigger problem, at least for me, was the convoluted and non-contiguous mix of arcs/TFs/optional content required to put it in context, as well as that fact that it wasn't resolved before shutdown. Problems with execution, too, I guess; the devs had previously made an extremely strong case that Hamidon could be the key to turning back the Battalion, rather than an unconvincing face turn by Evil Statesman.
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Mar 24, 2024 04:21
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Nothing like building up to Praetorian Hamidon for a solid 2-3 years and then going "nah we're done with that now".