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DangerDan posted:Speaking of this, I had some weird pubbie give dumb advice about how 90% vs 75% resist "didn't matter for real content" or some inane garbage like that when I was giving build/archetype advice to pubbies. The man genuinely seemed to just ignore the fact that each % of defense/resist you get is worth more than the last because of what I presume is Scrapper-brain A lot of people really have a hard time understanding percentages and how they interact with "time to live" and so on. They just see it as like "Oh it's only 15%, that's barely any difference", rather than like, a person at 90% resist will live more than twice as long as someone at 75%. clone on the phone posted:I want to take better advantage of the swap ammo mechanic with dual pistols, is there an easy cheat sheet for which factions are weak to what attacks? https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Enemies_with_Vulnerabilities_to_Specific_Damage_Types The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 04:46 on May 30, 2019 |
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May 30, 2019 04:43
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Ironslave posted:This has been my biggest complaint about blueside since the game came out. They set up finding story arcs as a reward you'd accidentally stumble across but could make it to then-40 level cap missing all except one or two. It's one of the few things redside is better at, as all contacts have an arc or four and your broker can introduce you to all of them. It's one of those things where it got worse as time went on because the focus of the design shifted more to story arcs but all that old content was still in there and unless you knew ahead of time who gave out what missions, there wasn't really any way to tell whether your next contact was going to give you a big important storyline or just a bunch of rando "go clear out this warehouse" missions.
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Jul 20, 2019 05:17
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Yeah the best approach to sappers is the proactive one. Even with end drain resist they take a big bite. They're only minions and there tends to only be one or two per group, just whack them before they can do too much.
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Mar 20, 2021 17:55
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Danger - Octopus! posted:I was fighting a mission boss in one of the signature story arc missions and he used a really cool looking power that was like a whip made of energy. Is this in any of the powersets players can take? Yes, Demon Summoning. It's the animation for the attack powers from that set.
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Apr 23, 2021 18:27
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Nonexistence posted:Honestly if people just made noise about wanting viable whips to the homecoming team they would probably do something similar to feral assault (which ported the animal summoning attack animations to an AT that could make better use of them). Demonic with all 3 whips and then 6 ??? other powers as a blaster or dom 2ndary seems not so crazy, probably remixes of other fire and thermal moves with the demonic fire/toxic damage type combo. Whip dom would definitely be thematically appropriate if nothing else.
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Apr 25, 2021 21:28
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Gynovore posted:Invul has a PSI hole and it's a bit hard on your END bar, but overall it's a good set. As for Regen, the problem is twofold: 1) It's too clicky, and 2) Willpower gives you heal/regen that's approx 60% of what Regen gives you, and on top of that it has defense and resist and tohit debuff, and it's less clicky. One thing I've wondered for a while - a lot of sets have deliberate holes against psi, but what is the set that is the best against psi? Willpower gets both defense and resist against it, but not really high amounts of either. Dark only gets resist, but it gets a lot of it (higher than it gets against energy!). Positional defenses will cover some psi attacks, but not others, so sets like ninjitsu or SR can be good against some psi attacks but not all of them since some psi attacks don't have positional tags at all. Which is the defensive set that is overall the most protected against psi?
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Jun 22, 2021 21:46
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One note about Dark Melee is that (on non-stalkers) it has an unusual version of build up that lasts for 30 seconds instead of 10, and can potentially give you a much higher buff (120% if you hit the maximum number of targets - you get 40% just for hitting anything and another 8% per target up to a cap of 10). This can synergize pretty well with some other sets that bring their own damage and kind of make up for Dark's lack of AoE (Dark Melee/Fire Armor is an interesting combo). The trick is of course that you will get a lot less out of it if you aren't fighting big groups, but even then, the fact that it lasts 3 times as long but the recharge time is only 33% longer (2 mins base instead of 1:30) means that it's still generally better than build up for sustained damage. Dual Blades is a weird one because the DPS is actually really high if you entirely ignore the combo system and only use your fastest animating attacks. It was the first "gimmick" set they designed and you can really tell; the fact that you are better off straight up ignoring the gimmick makes it extremely counter-intuitive. Kin melee is generally not great, although it does have one big exception for stalkers because for whatever reason the AoE attack has a 100% crit chance from hide, unlike literally every other AoE which only gets 50%. I think it was an oversight that just never got fixed before the game shut down and as far as I know it's still like that on HC.
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Dec 19, 2021 01:55
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Abroham Lincoln posted:I'll never get over Super Strength, the bread and butter of common normal basic rear end superpowers, the plain vanilla, the superhero equivalent of looking at Mario Party's lineup of quirky weirdos and just picking Mario, THE quintessential powerset The problem is both Superman and The Hulk have super strength and CoH needed to try to design a powerset that could represent both.
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Dec 19, 2021 07:01
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The thing about Rage and crashes is that it's a problem where it's not really an easy fix because the problem is more that it's annoying, not that it's underpowered. Which is why there is so much argument about how to address it, because it's hard to come up with a solution that doesn't end up making it overpowered. It's a fundamental design issue rather than one where like, the numbers are just bad.
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Dec 20, 2021 00:46
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The big problems on Live were rare salvage being ridiculously expensive, and specific common salvage being even more ridiculously expensive. Stuff like luck charms and a few others that get used in a lot of recipes could go for 50k+ inf, sometimes up into six digits. Uncommon salvage, meanwhile, would barely ever sell for more than what you'd get if you just trashed it at a vendor.
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Feb 8, 2022 23:39
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Inzombiac posted:I don't think so but they really should. Yeah I'd hate to lose some of the names I've had for 600+ days but honestly, if I'm not using them, I should release them. I think the original plan was that names would be released based on what level the character was - so higher level characters would get a longer grace period before their names were up for grabs again (with 50s never losing their name). I'm wondering if it just worked out to be harder to actually accomplish than they anticipated; I think the way it was intended to work wasn't that going beyond the limit just immediately got you genericed, but rather the name would be considered "available" by the game, but only generic the character if someone else actually went and took that name. I don't think the original live game had anything like that so maybe it's just difficult for them to hack it in.
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Feb 9, 2022 00:51
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Seventh Arrow posted:Oh also I started Episode 1 of the "Who Will Die?" arc on one of my characters, but even though the NPC talked as though it was a task force it still let me do it single-player. A bit weird, but it was definitely a cool (though brief) bit of content. The signature arcs are kind of pseudo-TFs, in that like a TF, once you're on one, you can't do anything else until you finish it or drop it, but they act like regular missions for the purpose of scaling (so no acting like you have a full team even while solo, unless you've got your difficulty set that high). They are all designed to be soloable, although a bit tougher than the average story arc.
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Feb 23, 2022 07:38
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Absorb is definitely a mechanic that would make a lot of sense for regen and probably make it a lot more competitive with newer defensive sets. Although absorb was added to the game very late, like right before the shutdown, so they didn't really have a chance to go back and do a revamp of regen to make use of it. The issue regen tends to have is that it really just does one thing, and while it does that one thing very well, it's a very binary sort of defense. Either you have way more healing than you need and you're functionally immortal, or you don't have enough and you just die because there's nothing to fall back on.
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Mar 1, 2022 19:14
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I'm definitely on team "you don't always have to take hasten", but it is definitely a power where it just ends up being too good for too many things. Recharge is really the fundamental driver of DPS in the game - stamina was always more of a "comfort" pick, since it's pretty rare to actually go from full end to zero end in a single fight (unless there's sappers involved, anyway), but having it meant that you didn't have to keep waiting for it all to come back between groups. Hasten, meanwhile, just flat out makes you more effective at everything because you don't have any downtime during a fight waiting for your attacks to come back. It's the reason why animation length became such an important balancing factor when it came to a set's damage output, because between hasten, recharge buffs from team members with support sets, and all the recharge you can get from IO set bonuses, the amount of time you spent rooted doing a single attack's animation became a more significant limiter on how quickly you could attack than actually waiting for your cooldowns to finish. Not to mention how huge of a difference recharge buffs make to longer cooldown powers and the impact that has on ratio of uptime/downtime on buffs. I don't know if there really is any way to "fix" it though, recharge being extremely good is kind of fundamental to the way the game works, and simply removing (or even just nerfing) hasten would break a lot of builds and be a bigger shakeup to the game balance than making the fitness pool inherent was (since all that ultimately did was just give you three extra free power selections, game-changing for some but for most builds it just let you pick up a few more "nice to have" powers). The fact that it has that much impact is a pretty good indicator that it's way too powerful but it's also the sort of thing where it's so baked into the game at this point that if the Homecoming team did decide to change it, it could legitimately fork the community.
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Mar 3, 2022 00:49
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Honestly the reasoning for the change is confusing to me because my understanding was that all powers are just manually tagged for what defense types they target anyway. Hence how Mind Control is able to simply not have a positional component, because they deliberately never picked one for it.
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Jul 9, 2022 03:33
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Gynovore posted:Keep in mind, when CoH launched in '04, the 'Holy Trinity' was gospel. The very idea that an MMO player could solo was heresy. Honestly it's still kind of amazing to me that CoH seems to still have been the only major MMO to successfully break away from that model. Hell even a lot of single player RPGs these days have you more or less requiring a party composition of tank/healer/DPS.
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Jul 10, 2022 00:27
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Yeah as far as I'm aware toxic defense is kind of an oddball in that it literally does not exist - not just that powers don't have it but there's not even a definition for it in the game's data so they couldn't even give it to powers if they wanted to. So anything that was split toxic/something else before basically just becomes a "positional defense only" attack, which is going to be a big problem for about half the defense sets in the game.
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Jul 11, 2022 21:23
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Flesh Forge posted:getting rid of toggle dropping when CC'd entirely, good loving riddance to that insulting nuisance mag 1 sleep bullshit Yeah it was always odd to me that like, they'd addressed this with defensive toggles by just having them suppress while mezzed instead of detoggling, but for whatever reason decided that exact same solution couldn't be used on offensive toggles.
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Jul 12, 2022 23:25
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I am kind of hoping some of the older sets get touch-ups as well, it's a thing that probably would have happened in live had the game not been shut down, since they'd already done a few sets where they went and tweaked animation times and other elements that were just poorly thought out in their initial version (like flares' old animation that was almost as long as the recharge time on the power). I've got a rad/poison corr that I really like the concept of but rad blast is just such a weird uncomfortable set to actually play. It's very clear how it was designed as a Defender secondary and not really adjusted when it was ported to ATs that would be doing more blasting.
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Jul 27, 2022 23:00
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Something that occurred to me while I was messing around with builds in Mids - I've only played on Homecoming, have any of the other private servers ever tried to remove ED? HC seems to be focused mostly on maintaining the idea of the game as it was at shutdown and not deviating too far from what the devs might have done with it in live, but I am curious if anyone has just gone "gently caress it, let's break the game as hard as we can".
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Aug 2, 2022 22:34
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Flesh Forge posted:I wouldn't say the HC people are too tied to what the OG Vision(TM) was at all, in particular the tremendous buffs to Blaster end/health sustain and Tanker damage. They're also about to give all the armor sets some psionic/toxic resistance. Yeah but these are all things that could reasonably have been expected to happen on live, I was asking about ED, something where removing it would 100% annihilate the balance of the game given that so much of the already pretty game-breaking stuff like IO set bonuses was balanced with it already being a thing.
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Aug 3, 2022 06:42
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Flesh Forge posted:Radiation Blast is one of the better sets, I don't know why it isn't more popular I think it's a case of "feels bad to use". Electron Haze and Neutron Bomb both animate so slowly and do so little damage, and the best move is to just not take them, but nobody wants to be a blaster and not AoE.
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Aug 6, 2022 22:31
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Flesh Forge posted:45% is the soft cap for +0 enemies but this is offset by (I think) 5% per level if the NPC is higher level than you Just a quick correction here - enemy chance to hit you is not affected by them being higher level than you (until they are +6 or higher, but you shouldn't ever be fighting anything that far above you). Only players get a bonus chance to hit for being higher level than their target. They do get an accuracy bonus for being higher level than you, but raising your defense doesn't do anything to counter that since accuracy bonuses are calculated after the tohit - defense is clamped between 5% and 95%. So 45% is the softcap for everything, but as you mention there are enemies that do have buffs that give them extra +tohit which will bump that up (this is especially common in incarnate content).
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Aug 17, 2022 22:23
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CO had some interesting ideas but it never quite felt as nice to actually play as CoX did to me. It felt a lot more WoW-like. I think that's the reason why when CoX died, CO didn't see that big of a bump in its own popularity. It's not just that CoX is a superhero MMO, it's that it always had a very unique feel to it that went against the grain of all the other big MMOs of the time by virtue of having come out just before WoW and thus not being influenced by all the design trends it set,
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Sep 9, 2022 23:16
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I feel like the fundamental problem with regen is that it only does one thing, healing, and the way healing works in CoH it's a thing where you either don't have enough of it or have way, way too much. So it swings wildly between "basically instantly dead" and "totally immortal" and the middle ground of "enough healing to reduce enemy DPS a noticeable amount but not enough to completely negate it" requires such specific circumstances as to pretty much never come up.
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Apr 19, 2023 04:48
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a cartoon duck posted:cox is designed with the base assumption that it's actually cool and good to run out of endurance and that you should take a five minute break every two minutes. because it's so core to the design the problem can only ever be mitigated unless you go full hardcore build, in which case it's also the number one thing to build around, because it turns out people prefer pressing buttons over not pressing buttons. if you're a casual who only occasionally dips your toes into this whole io business you'll spend more time waiting for your blue bar to go back up then actually playing. At least they did eventually make it so that missing your AS as a stalker doesn't break hide (not that this helps if you habitually queue up a follow up like I do). John Murdoch posted:The confounding thing is that I don't remember ever having this much trouble keeping topped up before. Sure it varied a bit from set to set or if I was up against a mismatch (lethal vs. robots) but generally 3x end mod in Stamina and end redux in toggles was usually enough to put it out of my mind entirely. The thing about end management is that a lot of people think it's toggles that are eating all their end, but it's not; it's the regular attacks. Putting end redux in them as well helps but the big killer is having a lot of +recharge, which IO-heavy builds tend to have. There's a bit of a tipping point when doing your final build where your end situation gets a lot worse before it gets better, because it tends to be easier to get global recharge buffs than global end redux buffs. Once you get purples in things it's less of a problem because slotting a full set gives a huge amount of end redux for that power, but how many purple sets you can slot varies depending on your AT/powersets. Really the best option is to just make friends with someone who can give you +recovery buffs.
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May 14, 2023 12:39
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Yeah I think Incarnate content is where they were really starting to rub up against the limits of the system. IO sets already started to break things and incarnate buffs just throw more gasoline on that fire. For most of CoH's development the design seemed to be heavily focused on the mid-level content and making the process of going through the levelling curve interesting, and that seems to be where the base mechanics are the strongest. Once you hit the top end you end up just layering more and more buffs on and starting to hit caps on everything and the basic combat mechanics just can't really keep up.
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May 16, 2023 18:55
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The thing is I can understand why the devs were going in that direction, because players want endgame stuff. People get attached to their characters and for a lot of CoH's lifetime, there just wasn't really much reason to keep playing a character once they hit 50.
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May 16, 2023 20:31
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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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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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deep dish peat moss posted:I don't definitively know how it works so I'm not saying you're wrong, but there has to be more to it than a -range debuff on taunt auras. I think the way the aggro cap works is that enemies shooting at you aren't actually "aggroed" on you but are essentially making attacks of opportunity since they can see you, but aren't allowed to aggro on you and don't have any other targets available. They won't follow you if you run away and if there were other players around they'd attack them instead. Once you take out the guys in the group surrounding you, you're freeing up space in your aggro cap and that allows the distant targets to aggro on you "for real" and engage their full AI.
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Jun 10, 2023 00:06
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Yeah Praetoria has always had that issue because of how disconnected it is from the rest of the game. The storylines are neat to go through once but after you've done them there's not a lot of reason to do it again.
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Dec 17, 2023 02:21
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Frostfire is well known because he dates back to very early CoH and I think was the first "Elite Boss" (the tier between "Boss" and "Archvillain") rank enemy? Running his arc in the Hollows used to be the standard trip you made in the early levels. He was originally designed to be done as a team although the general power creep over the years means that he is soloable depending on your AT/powersets.
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Jan 21, 2024 14:57
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MechaCrash posted:I think it's the whole "pivot away from it just as it was about to hit the big payoff" bit that sticks the most. Yeah the big issue for me with Praetoria and why I don't tend to replay it unless I really want to run with a Praetorian character concept is that the enemies are ridiculously overtuned. The main problem I think is that they overloaded them with attacks; low level enemies in normal blue/redside tend to have like one, maybe two moves they can use, so they just hit you and then wait for a while until it comes off cooldown. It seems like all the Praetorian enemies have enough attacks for a full rotation, so even if they don't hit any harder per-hit than other enemies at the same level, their DPS is much higher.
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Mar 23, 2024 06:17
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Ultimately part of the problem with trying to write content for villains is that in your typical story structure, the villain acts and the hero reacts. For blueside content this fits great with the general MMO structure of "getting jobs from random NPCs" but villains need to be able to pursue their own plans, which the game isn't really set up to support. The newspaper was meant to kind of represent this, where rather than doing the bidding of someone else you're out there doing things on your own initiative, but the paper jobs were all one-offs so they never built up to anything.
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Mar 28, 2024 21:24
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The Awesomesaurus posted:I honestly would’ve been satisfied if, instead of a whole villain side, they just implemented the ability to customize your own rogue’s gallery that would show up in random missions and story arcs. Champions Online has this and it was pretty fun. The rest of the game wasn't as good as CoH though.
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Mar 29, 2024 11:38
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:40 |
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Yeah one thing to bear in mind about redside is the context of the game at the time it released. Blueside content was a lot of filler. The missions weren't randomly generated but they might as well have been, and even the story arcs were full of generic defeat alls. Redside was kind of the proving ground for the storytelling format the game would use going forward and a lot of blueside as you'd play it now now was built afterwards, using that template.
The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Mar 29, 2024 |
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Mar 29, 2024 20:59
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