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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I see I inspired someone! You got the shoes better! It was definitely lurking around in the back of my head. Once the name popped into my head I knew I had to act on it, so I started tinkering around with costume ideas and that seemed like the obvious choice. Once I realized I could use the chest piece to have both the metal skin and the "shirt" I was locked in. Dunno about yours, but it's important to note that mine's Kinetic Melee so he really will be confidently flailing his arms around at all times.  PUPPY PUZZLE posted:very extremely highly unlikely. same with wind control and the origin pools. I'd say Wind Control and the origin pools are more likely because AFAIK we have power data available for both, so it's just down to getting animation work done on them. I'm pretty sure the missing Incarnate stuff was still on the drawing board. Aside from the names I don't think anyone outside the dev team had any info on what they were actually supposed to do, and possibly not even them when it came to stuff like Omega. (Plus it'd be a bit silly to put all that work in without any additional content to use them in.) John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 14:00 on May 29, 2019 |
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May 29, 2019 13:57
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Oh poo poo, that's the hair.
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May 29, 2019 14:37
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Oh poo poo I'm a few days late.
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May 29, 2019 17:20
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Crasical posted:Did 'gone to the americans' ever become graffiti or a badge or something in-game? It seems like one of those community memes that would have. Don't think so. As far as I can remember the only thing that really got immortalized like that was the Kill Skuls thing. Also new thread means a thread that needs to be graced by Connorman. 
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May 29, 2019 17:54
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Yeah but Recluse is way more competent. Also I forgot to mention but I was digging through my archives. So also, this: 
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May 29, 2019 18:01
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Tsurupettan posted:If we end up with tools to modify powers, I'd love to un-nerf Rage, Energy Melee and give a bit of a buff to Trick Arrow. I'd say Regen too but I'm not sure how you'd fix Regen in the current state of the game beyond just un-doing the nerf and hoping for the best. Changing Instant Healing to a timed toggle would be a step in the right direction IMO. Maybe strip out the dumb "half of Integration's regen is unenhanceable" thing. Maybe get crazy and toss in some kind of low %-based regen tick to Resilience. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 01:12 on May 30, 2019 |
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May 30, 2019 01:01
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kumba posted:I hope they tweak some of the other stuff, like DiB, upwards to actually encourage it since I see almost no one running it. Everyone just runs Posi 1 at that point but I'd like some variety! DiB's biggest problem is how bland it is, IMO. It somehow has less going on than DFB or Posi and the final double AV encounter feels slightly overtuned. (Would probably be fine if the two shivans spawned with 50% max HP rather than just 50% HP, so struggling teams aren't hosed over when they regen back up to full.) Mesadoram posted:Dual Swords - Bio stalker is super fun. Am I missing something, or do you take basically all of the Bio moves? They all seem super useful. I'm possibly unaware of some secret optimization tricks, but generally speaking the newest powersets have zero skippable (or at least out and out bad) powers for better or worse. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 17:01 on May 30, 2019 |
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May 30, 2019 16:57
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 Help I keep making high concept computer characters.
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May 31, 2019 00:17
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spectralent posted:Someone else beat me to it but you're good with time! The issue with FF is most of it's really good powers are passive buffs you toggle or apply once every four minutes, and the powers that actually involve clicking on mans are all very bad and some of them straight up don't work on the enemies you'd want to use them on (because they're too powerful for the effect). And the really good powers are very good to the point where your bots will have enough defence to put most enemies at the accuracy floor, further rendering them unnecessary, because they'll never hit them. Lies! Force Bolt might very well be the most low-key potent power in the game because it's on a hilariously tiny cooldown and has a high magnitude which means you can spam it to blow anything and everything into ragdoll at will. Everything else though... Detention Field, like all "remove this rear end in a top hat from the fight completely" abilities, is slightly underrated but I get why it's not popular. Repulsion Bomb isn't terrible but it's pretty blah. Repulsion Field is also underrated (it and Repel got buffed so they don't devour your endurance anymore) but is also kinda redundant with Force Bubble. And that works in the opposite direction as well; sometimes one will work where the other would screw everything up. Force Bubble in general is a bit finicky and hard to use. The occasional times where it works, it works wonders. That's really the issue, the four main enemy-affecting powers are all just slightly different flavors of "I would like this bad guy to be over there instead of over here". Plus you've got Personal Force Field stinking up the set far worse than any of them. Bloodly posted:You can make a lot of mage-like characters, really. Though sometimes you'll have to go around the houses a bit. I'm trying to make Balrogs. It's harder than you think. Fire and shadow. But they're also known weapon users(Sword, Axes, Titan Weapon), which means the other half must be fire(A Balrog without flame isn't much of a Balrog), and there's precious little access to shadow after your primary and secondary outside of Soul Mastery, and the only whip is Mastermind(Which is not exactly bad, your Balrog has his followers...). You know? Sometimes you compromise, and sometimes you go with weird or extrapolations. Why not Fire Melee? That has three fire sword powers. Alternately, I don't remember if it was all sets, but those same fire sword (and ice sword) models got ported to other sets. clone on the phone posted:e: Actually while I'm asking, how are sword / mace / axe? I need some kind of martial weapon for the theme i'm going with. Axe < Sword < Mace, IMO. (Less raw numbers more just general utility/fun factor.) Axe is so painfully in need of love. It's the most generic of the bunch and even has the smallest number of weapon customization options. 
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May 31, 2019 18:27
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LordSaturn posted:What are the mechanics of enemies running away? I don't know if that black box has ever been fully cracked, but to my understanding a good way to think of it is every enemy has a "panic check" that's based on whether or not their attacks are successfully landing or if they have any attacks actually off-cooldown. I think it can also be triggered if their allies are dying super quickly. This is why Giant Monsters and AVs have a bad habit of flipping the gently caress out because they'll be debuffed to hell and probably only have a small handful of attacks to attempt to cycle through. I wouldn't be surprised if it was originally intended to facilitate the whole "Superman lands in front of some street punks, they realize he's bulletproof and run like hell" fantasy, since it's naturally way more likely to kick in on grey-con mobs. Taunt doesn't actually override this completely, IIRC. They added a -Range debuff to taunt powers to compensate for it (and help melee characters not need to chase down enemies with only ranged attacks or poo poo like Longbow Eagles that are scripted to maintain distance) but if an enemy is completely demoralized even that won't work since the debuff only affects their actual powers - once they're done flailing around and decide to make an attack check, then they'll be forced to come back in a bit closer than they might normally. There's also a lot of noise and lag when it comes to processing AI stuff which might be partly to blame. (This is why sometimes when you stun an enemy they'll still move around at normal speed. Their AI/the server has already decided they're moving from point A to point B and will ignore the slowdown component of stun until that movement is resolved.) HPanda posted:Was the Hickman story actually any good in the comic? Cause it was crappy in-game. Maybe it was just a bad translation of a comic book into the game, but anyone who read it have an opinion? Hickman's arc was the only good one in the entire run, which is why they tried to adapt it. You hit the nail on the head that it doesn't really work in game; the story in the comics was less about the raw plot and more about the character interactions. Having the Cyrus statue and community center in Kings Row is awesome, at least. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 21:00 on May 31, 2019 |
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May 31, 2019 20:52
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spectralent posted:There's DEFINITELY a hard-coded effect where things inside most damage auras freak out and make a break for it, though. Correct. Some patch powers had their hard-coded panic effect removed or adjusted at one point or another, I think. Impossible for me to remember exactly which ones though.
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May 31, 2019 21:36
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Thundarr posted:For the most part, three slot Stamina with endurance mod IOs, and maybe an end reduction IO in attacks and a couple per toggle depending on which exact power sets you're using. Sometimes you might want to leave toggles turned off if you don't expect to need them, also. Admittedly I'm not an expert when it comes to the numbers side of things, but I've always worked under the assumption that end reduction in attacks is far more important than in toggles and even when you do slot for it in toggles they really only need a single one (with damage auras being a key exception, along with some other outliers). Stalker Dual Blades combos are a little different due to the usual Stalker set differences and as a result are a bit strange. Two of them require Build Up -> Assassin's Strike. Sweep ends on a ST attack so enemies around you just randomly fall over. Weaken needs both cones and ends on 1k Cuts making it horribly cumbersome to use. The only one I remember using with any amount of regularity back in the day was the bleed because it's the only one that's usually accessible. By comparison I remember stringing together sweeps and bleeds all over the place on my DB/WP Scrapper and having a good time of it.
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Jun 1, 2019 01:35
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^^Normal defensive toggles cost way less end than that. Damage auras are 0.52/s which is why I singled them out. A bunch of various powerful debuff toggles cost the same, though I suppose you're not necessarily keeping them on at all times. Actually, since we're on the subject and it's been gnawing at me for the last couple of days: What are ya'll's preferred way to slot out stuff while leveling? I know the endpoint most powers should be at and obviously endgame builds are their own thing, but what do you prioritize from let's say 1-30? Do you get your defenses kitted out ASAP? Do you go straight through 1 ACC -> 3 DMG -> whatever else on attacks? I always find myself in odd places in the 20s where most of my slots are spent slowly filling out my damage because I've spent them on other stuff first and I never quite figured out if that's fine or I'm actually hurting myself because the extra DPS I'd get out of going damage first would negate any losses on survivability thanks to killing faster (and similarly save endurance because of the higher efficiency per point spent). Thoughts? John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Jun 1, 2019 |
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Jun 1, 2019 01:50
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I just started discovering that myself. I'm so incredibly happy that getting going with a set of 25s is easy as pie and relatively cheap. I remember it being hell on earth on live because of how wonky salvage supply/demand could get and of course you had to keep shuffling back and forth between Wentworth's and the university unless you had a perfectly planned shopping list. No joke, if I ever sound cranky about IOs that's a non-zero portion of why.Nonexistence posted:On the note of staff chat I really wish there were alternate animations where you're just like... hitting dudes with a staff and not doing whacky waving inflatable kung fu man stuff. Just like a pole arm equivalent of how other melee weapon sets animate. I like most of the animations well enough, it's really just the PBAoE where you go full breakdance that ruins it for me. Looks super bad if you're using any kind of complicated costume. I think if you use it while hovering you get a slightly nicer looking alternate animation. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Jun 1, 2019 |
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Jun 1, 2019 07:17
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ded posted:It costs more than that. There is the cost for the recipe, the cost for materials, and cost for actually making it. Even with those costs factored in 75k is nuts.
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Jun 1, 2019 08:20
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Captain Oblivious posted:Tyrannical despot? This just means people don’t have to pussy foot around six slotting tactics and putting a kismet in something in order for snipes to be worth using. That and narrowing the use case for snipes for anyone else to be after you pop Aim/BU. Insta-snipes were part of I24's pile of Blaster buffs and thus was never properly tested or thought all the way out. I always hated the mechanic because "be at this arbitrary amount of To-Hit" is a dumb, stat-based solution that the average player will have trouble understanding. Even moreso in team situations where you might arbitrarily gain or lose To-Hit. The new version is far more elegant and mimics how Assassin's Strike operates which is far easier to grok. Also it was yet another bullshit gap between baseline power and IOs. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jun 1, 2019 |
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Jun 1, 2019 21:03
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Dosvidanya posted:not to mention it helps out leandro's pet class The Sentinel Ah yes, his pet class that everyone agrees is underwhelming and doesn't actually get snipes.
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Jun 1, 2019 21:08
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Crasical posted:A lot of the people who are complaining are just going "I've INVESTED to get insta-snipe, and this is punishing ME by changing how it works", which, yeah, I can see their complaints, but on the other hand, I am hearing a lot of unspoken "I've INVESTED, and these other people didn't, so they don't DESERVE IT" between the lines. It's not like having a bunch of To-Hit baked into your build is worthless outside of accessing insta-snipes, either. Also those same people can go ahead and invest in the new Sniper IO set to get their insta-snipe back if they care that much about it. LOL @ people still having meltdowns over nerfs (actually not even nerfs in this case, they're largely lateral changes). Roach Warehouse posted:I don't know if it's latency from terrible Australian internet or just how the game works, but every time I try to play an archery or TA character, all their animations are them holding the arrow for a second, before awkwardly hucking it at the target. Archery animations (I think the No Redraw ones especially) are a bit borked. I think they were supposed to be fixed in a recent patch but at this point I can't remember what's live vs. beta. Section Z posted:That said, I'm pretty sure I used one of the like, only three or so fancy IO's I ever touched. Cramming a stealth unique into super speed so I had bootleg PvE stealth strong enough to place landmines on the feet of enemies (to cheap out on skipping cloaking device). Technically wasn't necessary since Smoke Grenade + the weak stealth in SS by itself would do the job. Harrow posted:So, Brute vs. Scrapper: which do you prefer and why? At this point I try to go full method with it and the choice boils down to whether or not the character would have the highs and lows of Fury, would otherwise be fueled by anger, or are meant to be generally "tanky but can rip your arms off" Hulk-y. Forex, one of my characters is a train, so going Brute is extremely thematic (Titan Weapons too, natch). Meanwhile my Scrappers tend to be more generic fighters. None of this is at all relevant if you're not a roleplayer though. 
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Jun 2, 2019 22:34
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That's exactly it. The only downside is you have to suffer through a pointless "watch out, you're moving over to hero/villain side!!!  " pop-up before it'll let you move along. Also a lot of the connections for moving between sides are laid out annoyingly.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:06
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The idea that anyone can stand to blow up the same exact scripted spawns over and over with half of their fun powers turned off instead of doing literally anything else boggles the mind. I know I've bitched about DFB a lot for various reasons but even newspaper missions at least have randomized spawns instead of the exact same enemies standing in the exact same spots every single time. They're not even randomized within the ranks, it's always Lost swordsmen, never gunners, etc. Jazerus posted:i'd love to see an overall redesign of some of the oldest content along the same lines as the posi tf revamp I mean, the whole point of Posi was always that the three groups were each making a play on the Faultline dam just like the whole point of Synapse was finally dealing with the Clockwork King. I'm sure there are ways to sneak some enemy group variety in, but it's never not going to be punching Clockwork for an hour+. The problem is that Clockwork are one of the earliest enemy groups designed and have never been tweaked at all to my recollection. Beyond a few minor wrinkles (Tesla Cage, summoned minions, flying units) they don't really do anything interesting. Each unit is just some variation of ranged elec blast/elec punch/one of the aforementioned gimmicks. Frankly the whole electricity thing doesn't even fit their design (y'know, clockwork machines?) or their actual origins (psychic stuff). Synapse then makes it worse by employing a common trick - padding out the runtime by having you check multiple of the same type of thing. Originally you had to check four electrical substations, which was graciously cut down to only three at one point. Yeah. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Jun 3, 2019 |
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Jun 3, 2019 00:11
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mastajake posted:Early game sucks other than Praetoria. And even that stuff can get repetitive or else defeats the purpose of certain ATs (ambushes gunning straight for your hidden Stalker). DFB is a great way to level up a character to more interesting content in a fraction of the time. I don't really have a dog in this fight as I play on the goon server, but gutting DFB is akin to what they did with Rage. Just removing functionality for some users because others didn't like it. Except they didn't gut it at all. It's slowly but increasingly less lucrative from 10-20, ending at 50% XP at 20. That's the gentlest possible way to nudge people towards doing literally anything other than DFB. People mindlessly grinding DFB are people not filling up TF teams, DiB teams, regular ole mission teams, or even AE teams. Most people running it aren't doing so to skip to level 20 as fast as possible (and if you really want to that badly I'm sure there's AE farms that can do it faster even with the XP penalty), they're doing it because they want to push buttons and have XP come out. The problem is once they finally do get tired of it they're running around at level 20+ and have no idea how the entire rest of the game works. Or even their own drat powers since most of them will be turned off throughout the trial. And even with the nerf in place, nothing's even changed, because people don't read the patch notes or don't care; the majority of groups advertising in the LFG channel are still for DFB. Which I think speaks to how pervasive it is and why they nerfed it in the first place. Edit: Also in terms of low-level content, I obviously can't speak for what anyone else has seen or done 100 times already, but there's a shitload of it available. And with double XP you're not likely to need to exhaust every last contact in a zone before being able to move on, so you can do one with character A, another with character B, etc. You even have alternatives to the tedious Atlas/Mercy revamp content. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 07:37 on Jun 3, 2019 |
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Jun 3, 2019 07:28
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It took a bit of digging to find a post about it but apparently XP boosters aren't playing nice with the new XP curve. It's a known issue to be fixed next patch.
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Jun 3, 2019 08:33
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mastajake posted:It doesn't matter that it's all people were doing. People were enjoying it and it was taken away because other people didn't like that they were enjoying it. The gentlest nudge would have been to increase TF or regular non-DFB grouping xp. Bullshit. Same exact argument comes up every single time with stuff like this. "But people were having fun, why take that away, why do you hate fun?  " Well guess what, if you love DFB that much you can still run it 1-50, it's still in the game, nothing's changed!Oh, you mean there was some other mysterious reason DFB was so "enjoyable"?  Like holy poo poo what a time warp, I was having this exact same argument with people when they nerfed Kraken farming. (And at least in that case people were desperate to go from 35~ to 40 because Cryptic hosed up the XP curve when they slapped 41-50 on top of the original progression.) MechaCrash posted:I think that the "blow poo poo up for bonus time" thing only works before you rob the bank. Nah, you can still rack up time bonuses after the bank. I don't dislike Safeguards, and Mayhems are plainly better, but I think both could be improved. Both of them have a weird focus on generic destructible props. Maybe your villain is the kind of rear end in a top hat who just wants to blow poo poo up, so okay sure that can be fun. Lightning Rod-ing into a pack of cars which then all explode is the tits. But after a certain point it's kinda weird to be an unstoppable death god who still takes time out of their schedule to travel to another country to go punch their dumpsters. Meanwhile heroes have to work to put a stop to the mean ole villains who are trying to destroy Paragon City's cardboard box supply. 
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Jun 3, 2019 23:27
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HPanda posted:I wish more people used the LFG tool just on its own. Red side, so far I’ve only seen it used by premade groups to get into things like DFB. Not so much individuals all queueing up. Nobody knows how to use the queue (and to be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if newer players didn't even know how to find it due to the UI being a bit of a mess) and even if they did it has a bunch of quirks and flaws that mean it's not very useful for most things you'd want to do. The solo TF change means it's worthless for those (and I think that also apples to older trials like the respec ones as well) and anything with a proper minimum team size will default to that, seemingly check once if anyone else happens to be looking for that specific thing, and then just go. So you'd get a lot of people being auto-connected into a 4 person team and then instantly leave because they have a pathological need to always have 8 in a group. The only thing that kinda sorta works is the ability to join in-progress events but I have no idea if that works with TFs at all and with trials there's a risk you get in too late to get proper rewards out of it.
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Jun 4, 2019 03:20
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It's Terminator.
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Jun 4, 2019 07:16
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S.D. posted:
That mission just makes me laugh now but I have to wonder how many support tickets it generated. That also looks like a very easy layout for it.
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Jun 5, 2019 05:23
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S.D. posted:It looks easier than it is - that middle room is a mesa connected by bridges, with a whole lower level on the ground floor. There's also a lot of corners in that middle-south room that can hide a hostage. By the time I got to the last room, there were still 2 hostages I had missed and that was after finding 4 of them in that last room alone. Admittedly I've internalized the map tiles in this game so thoroughly that I could read the map and know exactly what rooms those were...so maybe I'm also not a good judge of what's easy or not. That said, I'm remembering the real doozy rooms in Oranbega like the one where you have to take a teleporter in order to navigate to a tiny out of the way library room that often has objectives tucked away in it.
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Jun 5, 2019 23:59
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HPanda posted:Wish I could change the damage type to lethal, though. I’m swinging around a giant fuckoff axe. I should at least have a lethal component. It's not obvious but a few of the attacks do have a lethal component. You wouldn't really want to switch over to all lethal damage anyway.
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Jun 7, 2019 09:36
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DangerDan posted:I think it's because the rage change was a bugfix technically, but at this point avoiding the Def crash was a feature. And honestly for as much as the blame can be laid on the private server for fixing the bug, I'm still mad at Castle for specifically saying he would finally address Rage once and for all only to never do so. Once he left I don't think I ever even heard anything about Rage from the devs ever again. -Def is the dumbest possible crash condition and feels like a throwback to the bad old days of power design like when Unyielding carried a -5% defense penalty because it was originally Unyielding Stance (you literally immobilized yourself to do the Superman arms-on-hips stance and let bullets bounce off you) and it was like pulling teeth to get it removed even after numbers were crunched and it was apparent that under certain circumstances turning on Unyielding would actually make you take MORE damage.
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Jun 8, 2019 01:10
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Freakazoid_ posted:The funny part was, back then, I had already 3 slot acc/dam because there wasn't a wiki I could look up. Just figured well I really really hate missing and this is working out even against those circle of thorns bosses with super reflexes. The change had only a minor effect on me and I merrily continued amongst the incessant whining. Yeah, this was me as well. I went "wait...I'm the only one who slots 1 acc/3 dmg/1 end/1 rech into their attacks??? ". Even beyond the fact that it paved the way for IOs, it just made sense to get people to slot more than the same 5~ or so important stats and nothing else.This was also back in the day when Hasten could be six-slotted with recharge to make it perma (so why even bother with slotting recharge when you could spend those slots on MORE DAMAGE) and it was probably one of the key reasons why Regen was so overpowered and subsequently nerfed over and over. Oh, and how about holds with durations so long you could just keep every single mob locked down forever to the point where you didn't even need to worry that badly about support or defense powers? Glagha posted:I run 2 acc on like every power I use that can miss. Is that overkill? Not necessarily. I used to do that a lot back in the day. It's one of those things that's not totally intuitive though because it'll mostly help when fighting +level enemies, but if you're regularly teaming the likelihood of the team having some combination of -Def and +ToHit is increasingly high. Also, once you're at the point where IOs are better than SOs you can increasingly get away with just one. Also it's always a good idea to check the base accuracy on powers, because it's not always 1.00x. Forex, AoE holds are usually 0.80x and thus really want at least 2 accuracy by default. Some big smackdown powers like Total Focus actually have a nice fat accuracy bonus on them to the point where extra accuracy is probably overkill. And then others frustratingly list an accuracy check without actually using it/using it only in PVP and just confuse the hell out of everyone (or maybe just me). My personal rule of thumb is: Basic stuff that gets spammed can safely be left at 1 accuracy since if I miss my tier 1 attack or whatever a few times who cares. Anything that absolutely must hit or everyone dies (ie, Controller holds, Twilight Grasp, etc.) gets 2, as well as the aforementioned powers that aren't 1.00x to start with in general. LordSaturn posted:are damage auras more effective at aggroing mobs than non-damage negative auras? One of Willpower's intended  weaknesses is that Rise to the Challenge has a weaker taunt effect than other powers, I think even compared to other non-damaging auras. In general AoE aggro control is less of a big deal on Tankers because their inherent splashes taunt on every single attack and the actual Taunt power exists.
John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 10:25 on Jun 11, 2019 |
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Jun 11, 2019 10:05
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Also since the thread got around to talking about ED at length (hahahah get it?) I think it's finally time for the post I promised would come after my Miller manifesto: Hey John Murdoch, why does everyone hate Jack Emmert so much? (Bear in mind, I showed up to the game right in the middle of Jack's "reign of terror" so my knowledge isn't as thorough.) City of Heroes was loving wild in its early forms. Like, completely and utterly alien in comparison to what we have now. A short summary: Origins, instead of being a largely meaningless choice, determined how many powers you could obtain. There were also seven of them - Tech and Magic were originally split across "I am literally a robot/I am literally a god" and "I just use tech/magic devices to punch bad guys". Origins that got fewer powers got proportionally stronger powers. Archetypes, the whole foundation of kind of every fuckin' thing in the game? Did not exist. Power selection was completely free-form! There was also a targeting system for attacking different parts of an enemy. Contacts didn't even exist, you just got vague missions (probably zone hunts) out of a terminal in City Hall. Take a look at this poo poo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3kW2Le9TJk A lot of things ya'll take for granted didn't exist, even after the game launched. Missions giving completion XP? That was added in after the fact. (To try and get people away from mindlessly farming outdoor spawns.) Mission objectives more complicated than kill boss/kill all/static hostage rescue/click glowie? Nada. Travel powers were an investment, you weren't meant to run more than one defensive toggle at a time (imagine every set is Bio Armor and is predicated around toggling between 3 different protections dynamically, yes this meant choosing between actual damage resistance versus mez protection and while we're at it, have fun with your toggles actually shutting off completely when mezzed), and Controllers were designed to not be able to solo under any circumstance. Oh, also the game was supposed to be Champions Online. (The whole concept being, broadly, what if Champions + Everquest??) They tried to get the license, failed, and thus Paragon City was born. Jack Emmert clearly loves two things: Greek mythology and pen and paper roleplaying games. Realizing that a lot of what he did was coming from a tabletop RPG background is crucial to understanding the man, I think. To whit, he worked on George Vasilakos' "All Flesh Must Be Eaten". Get it? Unsurprisingly, George's company was the one tapped to make the City of Heroes tabletop game. (And another cool bit of history that I only just dug up for myself: Another credit on AFMBE is one Richard Dakan, who would go on to be the original writer for CoH's story bible!) However, there's another critical element to his character: Dude was born with an incurable condition where his foot is permanently lodged in his mouth. And so we begin the recap of the many incidents whereupon his name was cursed... The Purple Patch This was an early one and pretty simple. You know how fighting purple con enemies is a bit of a bastard without proper buffs/builds? You know how fighting deep purples (+5 or greater) is nearly an impossibility? That's the purple patch. Originally, the scaling on higher level enemies was minimal if not non-existent with the end result being you could roll up on +10s and not really give a poo poo if you had a good team. Obviously this did weird poo poo to progression and difficulty so the current paradigm was put in place. This was well before my time so I don't know how much of a meltdown this one caused or how badly it was pinned on Jack specifically, but I figured it was worth noting. "1 Hero = 3 Minions!" That was the guiding principle Jack declared to be basing balance on forever more. (I believe the unspoken assumption was also that 1 Hero = 2 Lts. or 1 Boss but I could be wrong.) Obviously this freaked everyone the hell out because it sounds preposterous. Even in the early days, 3 minions was not a big deal (assuming you were one of the two ATs that could actually fight worth a drat  ) and the exponential power curve for teams was already in place. It immediately came off like Jack did not play his own game. All that said...when you look at that sort of metric on paper, like, literally on paper...it sounds like the kind of unified design you would see in a tabletop game. Hmm."Bosses = Archvillains!" (AKA The Dark Souls of Super Hero MMOs) This one was genuinely absurd. Jack came back from a trip where he spent time on the plane playing a Gameboy game. He recounted how he would reach the end of a stage, hit a difficult end boss, and then have to struggle to win. Sometimes he would lose and have to come back and try again. But once he did succeed it felt good to overcome the challenge. So, he abruptly decided that Boss-class enemies should be monstrously more powerful, in order to capture that same "end level boss" magic he had discovered in his Gameboy game. This change was pushed through with basically zero testing.  Like the previous incident, it spoke to a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of the game. For one, you don't have lives or checkpoints in City of Heroes, instead you get slapped with XP debt when you die (also useful to point out that originally you could get debt after level 5 instead of after level 10, oh! also you probably don't realize this but dying in a mission only actually gives you half the normal amount of debt, this was another later innovation). Also there's the fact that Bosses can freely spawn whenever they drat well want to (though since this was pre-difficulty slider enemy spawns were slightly more constrained than they are now). And finally, how about the fact that end of mission bosses spawn throughout the entire game, 1 to 50? Imagine being forced to fight an AV at the end of every single mission, from the word go, when all you have is like, two attacks and Brawl. I don't think -Regen was even really a thing yet either. (Also: Rest had a 3 minute cooldown. Origin temp powers did not exist. Veteran attacks? Total pipe dream.) Stories rolled in of people fighting these uber-Bosses to a standstill and subsequently becoming stuck. I should also mention this was right around the peak of the devs struggling to understand this whole "soloing" thing that had come about, probably due to how loving good Scrappers were compared to anyone else. Suffice to say, this change was very quickly pulled because it was really loving stupid. While this sort of thing is why people would grouch about Jack's ~Vision~ for years to come (because obviously lead designers shouldn't have an outsized influence on a game's based on their own opinions ), I think the more terrifying question to ask is how the hell a huge change like that got pushed out with minimal testing? Especially from a studio that didn't usually push out lots of quick updates.The Devs HATE Fun <  > See, City of Heroes launched with levels 1-40 and Issue 1 added Peregrine Island and the final ten levels. (This is why primary/secondary powersets, the core Freedom Phalanx TFs, all of the old trial content, and so on peter out at level 40. The only thing that was shifted up was Hamidon.) Since 40 was the original level cap, they made the final levels from roughly 37 onward a pain in the rear end to get (this was also obviously before XP boosts, a smoothed, faster curve, and the majority of alternate content was available). This was baked into the raw XP tables. So what happened when they plopped 41-50 on top? Nothing, they didn't bother to update the XP tables at all - you'd suffer your way up to 40 then suddenly jump to about 45 with far less effort.Naturally, players will find the path of least resistance when presented with such an obstacle. A quirk was discovered that the Abandoned Sewer Trial spawned 4-5 Hatched Krakens (an AV version of the Giant Monster...or maybe that's a GM version of them, whichever) that, thanks to tweaks made elsewhere over time, gave a plentiful bounty of XP per kill and were also nowhere near as strong as other AVs. And since the trial was infinitely repeatable and could be quickly reset because old-style trials are just glorified task forces you could jump in, kill the krakens, exit, repeat. This became a popular way to climb out of the late 30s. Unsurprisingly, the devs nerfed the poo poo out of it because regardless of how borked the XP curve was players defaulting to one boring, repetitive task in search of an easy reward is never not bad. And just like with the DFB nerf, people flipped out and started throwing out nonsensical arguments about how kraken farming was actually great fun, so why do the devs hate fun? Kraken farming was a social experience (unlike...literally any other form of teaming??) so why did the devs want them to lose all their cool friends they made? And so on, and so on. This wasn't the only such incident. Wolf farming had slowly started to eat away at the endgame. The simple matter is that while Portal Corp missions are a lot of fun because you get to see weird stuff like "What if the If you've ever wondered why Column/Council warwolves are such a huge pain in the rear end, that was thanks to farmers. In order to try and chase farmers away they gave werewolves of all kinds insane resistances (including to psychic!), near-immunity to immobilize and slow (to prevent you from locking them down in burn patches, natch), and their attacks were ramped up to bonkers levels with lots of damage and mez alike. The reason why aggro caps and target caps are even a thing? Because Tanks could originally aggro an entire map, concentrate them into a single spot, and then Blasters would nuke the whole pile from orbit. Why does mob collision act weird? Because it used to be possible trick the AI into all jumping onto the same spot, merging them all together. (This still happens with MM henchmen, btw. It may still be very, very rarely possible in other instances but it's not something you can do willy nilly anymore.) And after all that, people still didn't give a poo poo so they just slapped timers onto those missions. Now you have 2 hours to have your werewolf fun and then you're locked out of the missions forever. Eat poo poo, farmers.  Also, now you casual players can have fun fighting overbuffed werewolves against a time limit.  So everyone said gently caress that and just moved onto Dreck. There's another very blunt simple portal mission: Dreck has an army of Freaks amassed in a giant outdoor map. Go kill 'im. Unlike some of the wolf maps that could be accidentally completed, nobody's gonna just accidentally kill an AV. So, naturally, that got a timer added to it as well. Farming went a bit dormant at that point...until later on people realized that there was an alternate dimension entirely populated by Family goons.  At the very least by that point they were smart enough to just nerf their XP in that mission specifically and move on. No inexplicable Super-but-half-XP Family terrorizing Independence Port.There's also one last land mine lurking in portal missions. There's also a number of missions involving the Hydra dimension. They also give jack and poo poo for XP. Why? Because when the game first came out, missions were not worth doing because, as previously stated, they had no completion bonus. They were also more likely to have bosses lurking in them, whereas street sweeping was usually a game of nuking minions. The favored way to play became hovering over the lake in Perez Park and sniping the Hydra. The Hydra had no ranged attacks so they were easy pickings. Well, bam, suddenly the Hydra gave half as much XP and also gained a toxic spit attack with -Fly attached. (Consider wolves also got their boulder throw with, you guessed it, -Fly attached.) Once missions were actually a thing, nobody gave a poo poo about the Hydra ever again...well...at least until Kraken Farming was discovered. And then never again. At least until DFB farming was discovered. Uh. Hrm. Regen. Just Regen. Regen was nerfed in every single major patch prior to City of Villains - I1 through I5. (I think the aforementioned -Regen was added in I4, the Arena/PVP update, just so it was remotely possible to win against a /Regen Scrapper.) It was considered the whipping boy of the game and it contributed to the image of Jack as wielding the infamous Nerf Bat* and swinging it with wild abandon. In truth, Regen was pretty loving broken. Of course, so was drat near everything else. The real secret is, as my little history of alpha City of Heroes hopefully shows, is that the game we got was a cobbled-together chimera of ideas transplanted from a markedly different game with a markedly different focus made by a goofus with a markedly different line of thinking to literally anyone else. Also, the powers guy, Geko (ie, the dude actually in charge of most of this stuff), was...uh, just kinda poo poo at his job? That's the impression I got anyway. It almost seemed like not only were they hiding hard numbers from players, but also the devs themselves considering some of the insanity going on under the hood. *Matt Miller stuck some fake April Fools Day event content into the PIGG files once to gently caress with people who liked to snoop around in there. (Like me.) This included a temp power that was a reskinned baseball bat that was in fact a literal nerf bat. There's even a texture for it and everything. I'm still pissed it never came to fruition. So Regen has finally been nerfed into the ground. Now what about all that other broken poo poo? Welcome to the Global Defense Nerf baby! To put it into perspective, imagine mean ole Leandro came in and said "I'm removing all +Def effects from IOs, softcapped bitches get hosed" and now imagine the megaton nuclear force generated by the ensuing outrage. That was more or less GDN. In reality, it was a pretty necessary overhaul because the math was such a goddamn mess. But when you're already known for nerfs and now you're nerfing tons of defensive sets left and right, people are gonna lose their poo poo over how their powerset is called Invulnerability but they can actually sometimes die now.  If you ever wondered why pool powers like Combat Jumping or pretty much any stealth power gives a piddly 3-5% defense, that was GDN's doing.Don't worry though, Jack insisted. They were finally done majorly changing powers. No more huge, sweeping nerfs to the game. Now how about some Enhancement Diversification. Oops. In short, diminishing returns on enhancements. More than 3 SOs and you're wasting your time. See, Jack was being very, very specific when he said they were done with nerfs. He said they weren't going to change powers any more and in his understanding the upcoming overhaul of the enhancement system (y'know, the things that directly alter the effectiveness of your powers) was a nerf to enhancements. He didn't lie, he just said something demonstrably stupid and misleading. Again. This was made all the worse because ED was, as said before, foisted upon the City of Villains closed beta testers one weekend with Miller trying to clamp down on word of it getting out. That, of course, horribly failed because nobody was going to put up with that being kept secret when it was such a huge bombshell. (Honestly, given Miller's involvement, the fact that if I'm remembering it right Skills were originally slated for I5, and of course ED makes IOs a workable addition to the game I would guess it was more his project than Jack's; Jack wasn't even lead on CoV and as we'll get into in a moment he had bigger fish to fry.) This was the big breaking point for a lot of people. Up until now people were happy to slot 1 acc/5 dmg in all their attacks, have perma-Hasten running at all times, and other nonsense. Jack had, intentionally or not, lied by omission (given how much of a dumbass he was, I'm willing to believe it was unintentional...not that it changes how lovely it was). All the devs could offer up was the thin promise that at some future point you might be able to circumvent the soft cap on enhancement effectiveness or otherwise play within its boundaries in more interesting ways (in other words, IOs and Incarnates). Frankly, much like GDN, it was another fundamental math overhaul that was a necessary evil. With City of Villains in the works they probably began to realize anew that designing content without a more concrete baseline effectiveness wasn't going to work. Cryptic was also never a particularly large operation* and this was back in '05-'06, so while they did have some means of data tracking and some general sense of what they wanted the game to be...this wasn't like nowadays where big studios hoover up tons and tons of data to sift through with salaried mathematicians and can turn on a dime to quickly and efficiently tweak balance. It did take a long while to get to IOs, but honestly ED by itself wasn't the worst thing, IMO. Being forced to think about slotting for "utility" over raw power meant players had to actually interact with the system, at least a little. Ultimately I think the real reason for the anguish during that period is that the nerfs just kept slowly trickling in over time. If the dev team had the deftness and acumen to put together a single unified "we're gonna fix up this jalopy of a super hero game once and for all" patch that band aid could've been ripped off in a single pull. Instead it was slooooooooooooowly pulled back, ripping out every single hair along the way. All while Jack acted like a ditz and kept declaring that THIS time he had figured out the Secret to making the game work properly. I've seen this pattern with Jack play out elsewhere, too. A lead designer says "this is what my game is" and then when players push back against that it turns into a race between the designer and the players to see who can be pointlessly hostile about it first. Combined with the fact that Jack was the face of the game, any change big or small got credited to his capricious whims instead of say, Geko not carrying the 1 on his spreadsheets. Said lead designer then goes down in history as "That Guy Who Ruined <Game>" regardless of if the next hapless dev shits the bed just as hard (not intended as a snipe at Miller, btw, I'm actually alluding to my experience with Payday 2 of all things). *After City of Villains got out the door (and possibly I7, since that was always considered "baked in" to CoV), the dev team was slashed down to what were dubbed the "Freem 15". As in, there were literally 15 core team members doing all of the design work at one point; from roughly I8 to I11, which was a bit of a golden age for the game despite that. In particular, it's honestly pretty mindblowing that I10, one of best overall issue updates period, was created under such circumstances. Marvel Universe Online Why was the CoX team gutted down to 15 freaking people? Because Jack had scored the big one: Marvel, doing a 180 from that whole "suing Cryptic and NCsoft because you could make xXteh Wolferine69Xx in City of" thing, wanted to make their own MMO. Except this was also back when Marvel was a flighty, mismanaged mess that didn't know what the gently caress it was doing. So halfway into development, Marvel got cold feet and pulled out of the deal. Now what? Champions Online Now, this is probably more of an Atari-borne trashfire and I know there's better qualified people out there to get into the grand clusterfuck that is Champions, but here's what happened to my understanding: They hastily scrubbed any Marvel stuff off the content that had already created. Then bought the entire Champions IP outright.  (Then re-licensed it back to the tabletop game.) Champions Online was born!  Finally we've reached the reason why I personally hate Jack. See, Jack stepped up to be the hype man for Champions since clearly this was something he was passionate about from the very beginning considering City of Heroes' origins. And while the City of Heroes community was naturally a bit leery at this brand new game, I think the general attitude was that everyone was at least interested to see what came of it. But then Jack opened his mouth. Again. Jack decided the best way to hype up Champions was to lay into City of Heroes, saying the combat sucked and pretty much straight-up said that if you liked City over Champions then you must have brain problems/Stockholm Syndrome or something. Why would you prefer the inferior product (that I helped make/allegedly ruined) to my new product (that I'm making now)? Any interest I personally had in Champions plummeted to zero. What kind of dumbshit insults his own potential customer base? Jack Emmert, that's who. Frankly one wonders if he was actually trying to actively play up the animosity people had for the game around that time...except he was considered responsible for that animosity soooooo.... I remember this blowing over surprisingly easily too. I don't think I was the only one pissed off about it, but considering that Jack was still considered a boogey man on the forums people let him off the hook pretty easily.The other Champions-related thing, not directly tied to Emmert but still really goddamn shady, was that ~mysteriously~ a number of leaders of CoH's larger SGs began receiving beta invites to Champions. Okay, so they were trying to pull people over. Fair enough, I guess. Except said invites were sent via PMs on the official City of Heroes forums.  A final note: As I said, I never played CO (I briefly checked in once it went F2P on Steam and immediately hated it), but as I understand it the drama magnet that was its infamous underwater expansion...existed to plug an XP/content gap across levels....35-40. I can't say much more about any Jack shenanigans because obviously at that point I stopped caring, but AFAIK he hopped from each new Cryptic project to the next only to recently end up behind the wheel at DCUO as CEO. Also feel free to correct me/fill in any gaps. I mostly kept my head down in those days so the really huge forum meltdowns mostly passed me by (or as said above, I was confused that ED was even necessary because I'd been doing it Bad Wrong the entire time like a fool). John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Jun 11, 2019 |
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Jun 11, 2019 14:12
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Thundarr posted:3/4 minions or two LTs or one boss is a fairly good baseline for standard player challenge. Obviously a lot of people can do way better than that given experience and builds, but pretty much anybody should be able to tackle that level of challenge on their own (excepting some over-tuned boss types at low level). The problem is that it was a rubric seemingly pasted onto the game after the fact and never represented reality very well at all. There's too many moving parts involved from inconsistency within enemy groups, inconsistency within level ranges (ie, why nobody likes to fight Circle for a solid 20 level block), the mostly-randomized nature of spawns, a shitload of balance problems (enemy -Def is entirely too common and/or too potent, particularly at lower levels), additional edge cases like how early on Toxic damage wasn't even actually a thing yet, on top of the very obvious fact that the ATs were not created equal, nor were powersets. Oh, and that whole exponential team power thing. It was also just kind of declared to the playerbase without much context. Obviously there needs to be some kind of assumed baseline, but telling an army of Scrappers that, actually, they should be about as strong as 3 minions sounds like "I'm about to nerf the poo poo out of your AT" because Scrappers were more than happy to jump into mobs of minions 3x that size and eat them for lunch. Same thing for Tankers to an extent. Meanwhile Controllers and Defenders were ailing and Blasters were a coin flip. Nowadays between power creep and AT improvements like the damage component of Vigilance it's even more up in the air. (This is also not to be confused with the promise made alongside the introduction of Inventions that SOs were considered the baseline for combat balance. That seems to have remained mostly true.) MechaCrash posted:One of the big problems with the "bosses are now tougher" thing is that the intent was to slow down scrappers mulching everything. Not only did it not slow down scrappers, it put already struggling blasters even further into the weeds, because blasters had to kill everything in two volleys or die to the return fire. I actually seem to remember some Scrappers even reporting problems, which may have been why people flipped out extra hard. Though this also reminds me of more innovations that made the whole process of dying to a suped-up boss even worse - no ability to combine inspirations and the only place to buy them was from contacts, and even then you needed to have their relationship progressed enough to unlock their full inventory. Oh, sorry, is your contact a mile away in a totally different zone? Get moving, idiot. I think the one positive to come out of it was that it helped usher in the difficulty slider, which pointedly had the -1 option to help accommodate struggling players while real pros could choose to crank it way up. Much better than a hamhanded kludge of brick wall bosses. Actually, on the subject of Blasters and Defiance: - The original argument for how Blasters were supposed to work was that range = defense. Now, in very, very broad strokes there are design rules in play that ranged attacks are supposed to be weaker than melee attacks. However, in practice, this doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot when you're made of tissue paper and alleged "weak" ranged attacks are being multiplied by the number of enemies in a mob. (And if you're being shot with a gun, you will be continue to be shot with guns because all guns do -Def for whatever reason.) Also, most hard mez powers? Ranged attacks. Oops. There's also the fact that enemies can close into melee pretty effortlessly unless you're literally floating in mid-air, and even then tight indoor maps help prevent that from working 100% of the time. Plus Blasters have this whole crazy secondary powerset instead of just ranged damage, and said powersets are stuffed with....melee attacks. - One of the ideas for Defiance that got tossed out the window quickly was for Blasters to gain an increasing damage buff the longer they stood still. Castle rightfully pointed out that such a conditional buff could also be thought of as a functional damage penalty for wanting to move around (in a game where you kinda always want to be moving around at least a little bit), which blew Miller's mind. Fury-lite is incredibly boring but it's better than needing to plant your feet in order to get anything done. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Jun 11, 2019 |
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Jun 11, 2019 19:12
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Crasical posted:Only burst-fire weapons. The cheapo revolvers and shotguns that the hellions have don't seem to have that component, nor do the sniper rifles some council members do. SMGs and Chainguns and the like have the -def component, theoretically because they're sending a lot of lead flying and it's hard to dodge (Even though the mechanics don't really bear that out in a way that makes sense, since they have to actually tag you for the -def to do anything, but you can kinda see the line of thought involved. I'm reasonably certain low level Longbow that use pistols inflict -Def. Also if the new Skulls are using Dual Pistols attacks, those probably have it too. Council Marksmen (the normal minion type, not the rare sniper classed ones) don't inflict -Def but they are one of my top examples of a minion type that can be absolutely horrifying to encounter in numbers, especially as a squishy. The thing is -Def gets attached as a rider on kind everything and anything, so it's hard to pin down what it's meant to represent. Could be supposed to be a suppressive fire kind of thing, but oops now here's a Tsoo hitting you with a sword, and here's a Vahzilok hitting you with radiation, and so on and so on. There's also the fact that -Res debuffs from enemies were just Not a thing in the early days for whatever reason, and stayed extremely low key even when they did first appear via the Council takeover.
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Jun 11, 2019 21:44
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Also handy tip if you want things to look sleek: Don't forget by loving with room clipping you can just stick all your beacons somewhere dumb (inside a wall, outside the room, in the floor, whatever) and they'll still be attached. I believe as I've heard it told, very occasionally an item still requires power/control (probably the old base raid turrets and junk if I had to guess, needs those resources to look powered up), but otherwise you don't need them anymore. Also, any item that gives one just gives a hundred of both or w/e so you don't have to gently caress with it too much even then. That said...a lot of those old power and control devices look pretty dope.
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Jun 11, 2019 21:57
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The key thing to remember with IO fuckery is that Attuned IOs will scale to your level and let you keep your set bonuses, but they can't be Boosted. So if you really want to go all out, what you want is one build using Attuned ones so you can exemplar down and have all the fun you want and a second build that's cranked to max with Boosted +5 IOs so you can tear poo poo up at level 50. Also never manually Attune Purples or PVP IOs, since they're functionally Attuned by default. Something something you can't Attune a fish.Crasical posted:It's totally possible that the Paragon Wiki has things wrong but the only pistol-wielding Longbow agent listed doesn't have -def as a rider. Nor do the player equivalent dual pistols attacks for either thugs MMs or the actual Dual Pistols blast set, so it'd be... unusual, if the skulls had that added specifically for their NPC equivalents. You are correct in that they use -def as the default rider for a number of things (Bladed Weapons, saturation bullet attacks, radiation), and admittedly the first and last are a bit odd. I have to assume the thing with bladed weapons is supposed to be a sunder-armor thing but that would be better as -res, which I (again) assume they were scared to give to players, and it being the Radiation rider is just confusing. It might be just not really being sure what to give each 'flavor' of attack to give it its own identity. Don't trust the short power descriptions on Paragon Wiki. For DP in particular, if you scroll down to the expanding power listings, it's clear that Pistols, Empty Clips, and Executioner's Shot all inflict -Def. (Obviously enemies don't get that last one, but y'know.) I'd have to go double check the Longbow example but I remember getting pissed off playing a defense-based character when a simple pack of 3 Guardians tore me a new one because they all stacked their -5% plinky pistol attacks on me at once, which at that level is a complete and total defense negation. Old_Screwtape posted:I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the early devs were trying to create differentiation between attacks/powersets, so they decided on flavor to them and then tried to use existing mechanics to match the flavor without really thinking of the balance of it all. Based on the flavor text for the powers, I agree that -Def was supposed to represent a sort of armor piercing aspect of an attack, with bullets penetrating armor, swords being able to precisely sticking at the weak parts of armor, or radiation bypassing armor all together. The problem is that the early powers dev(s) really didn't appreciate what having -Def in attacks would mean for players (or, cynically, how Defense worked at all). Sure, the occasional Skulls minion hitting with a fire-axe might not mean much, but an army of assault rifle Nazis (or Radiation spewing Shivians) definitely do. Also, another aspect is that -Def was not much of an issue because everyone could potentially have a ton of it, but that certainly became not the case when the devs slashed or remove defense powers in Issue 5 (the previously mentioned GDN). Yeah, this. I don't think it's a stretch to say they didn't understand the ramifications of -Def given the Unyielding example I keep bringing up. Also I'm pretty sure defense debuff resistance was added after the fact, mostly to SR so it wouldn't instantly explode the second a single bullet grazed it.
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Jun 13, 2019 14:53
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Thundarr posted:I created the Control power for my hybrid slot since I couldn't really decide which to use and eventually settled on adding even more ways to keep enemies still while boosting my own mez resistance by a large amount. This slot gives me a power that looks like a toggle, acts like a toggle, and says it's a toggle, but it turns itself off after a few minutes with a two minute cooldown. That was kind of disappointing. Hybrid is the result of a compromise that left nobody all that happy with it. I don't remember the full details, but I believe when it was in beta players were basically given a choice between it being actually good OR being able to have it running 100% of the time. Obviously players wanted both so, at an impasse, they just averaged it out into the weird timed toggle thing. I25 made Incarnate stuff sooooooooo much simpler, and faster, and all around more pleasant to deal with. spectralent posted:So, the game sure does imply Master Midnight's just a goofy old lad whose heart's in the right place even when he openly betrays the good guys for a shot at mystically enslaving the woman he's stalking huh. There's a reason I named Master Midnight the second worst character in the game. OgNar posted:You CANNOT walk on the roof of the base without having something to walk on like the water or the grass, and I just made to portals with Aleph points to move from inside to outside. If you fill in room tiles with pure wall, they'll have collision on top. Obviously that won't help you make a dual-layered set-up by itself, but it's a lot easier to do that first, lay down flooring objects that stick to the "ground" then proceed to dig the room below back out. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Jun 14, 2019 |
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Jun 14, 2019 02:49
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Ghost of Starman posted:...goddammit I wish contacts' storylines (Souvenir arcs, I think they're called?) didn't just abruptly stop if you outlevel them mid-arc. Is this Ouroboros thing I've heard so much about accessible at any level? Do I have to wait 'til I'm lvl 50 before I can access the zone where I can do lvl 15 quests again? This shouldn't be the case. Which contact? Actual factual story arcs are supposed to be permanently locked in until you complete them. Some contacts have a task set that acts like a story arc, but isn't actually considered one, and so you can level out of them like anything else. I'm gonna take a wild stab and say it was something in the Hollows that broke?
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Jun 14, 2019 18:00
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Ghost of Starman posted:...yeah, it was the Hollows. I could swear it happened to me elsewhere, too, but that's the only instance I can actually remember. I think I've just been worried about it happening so much, that when it finally did the one time I assumed that's how it always worked. Yeah according to the wiki all of the Hollows arcs are considered mini-arcs (but doesn't explain if by default you can level past mini-arcs in general). Regardless, The Hollows and Striga Isle are in a weird spot because they existed before they had nailed down how arcs should work, and it shows. The souvenirs for both are really quickly slapped together because before a certain point they didn't exist at all, AFAIK. This is even more apparent with how some of the mission strings in The Hollows have randomized A/B ordering; that's more of a task set thing than a story arc thing. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Jun 14, 2019 |
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Jun 14, 2019 19:37
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Yeah ironically Repel is not a repel power. Force Field only gets two such powers, and one is just a Repel clone (including its ability to take KB enhancements). The other is Force Bubble which does have a knockdown proc already, but outside of that you can't really sensibly convert repel to knockdown because repel inflicts physics forces on enemies in a totally different way. Also unlike Hurricane, Force Bubble really only has that one job.spectralent posted:IMO the issue with Repel is Kin wants you to be stuck in so you're benefitting from all your fantastic enemy targetted heals and buffs, and Repel is pushing everything away from you all the time. It's a massive end hog, as well, but the major issue is it fucks up the benefit you get from Fulcrum, Transference, and so on. The secret to Repel (and similar powers) is that you should toggle it on to get something nasty out of your face (because Transfusion or not, a Freak Tank in melee is lethal to a squishy) or to ragdoll a boss into a convenient corner and then turn it off. Do not leave it running at all times, do not wade into entire mobs with it turned on. It's definitely still a skippable power to be sure, but when used properly knockback is such a killer mez that it can absolutely be worth using if you do it right. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jun 17, 2019 |
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Jun 17, 2019 18:43
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Crasical posted:The secret is to play blaster and then use that higher damage to delete enemies so you actually DON'T die. Also actually use your free immobilize power (or the hilarity that is Power Thrust) to keep stuff away from your face. You also don't actually know Blasters if you haven't leveled one up to their shiny new defensive power. If all you know of Blasters is their pre-I24 (and frankly over-exaggerated) tendency to die horribly, then you're behind the curve. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Jun 17, 2019 |
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Jun 17, 2019 18:57
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