Apollinaris

I would just like to say that like the wedding pack, I'm very impressed and pleased with the cyborg booster. Since I play a lot tech and robotic characters a wide range of my characters are enjoying the costume options greatly. My only comment is that the floating hud aura. (No, I can't remember that acronym. XD ) didn't seem to color the same as in the costume creator. Wasn't sure if maybe that changed when launching attacks or something, but good to note.

Oh, and yes, I can blow myself up. Woot.

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Would this be a good place to post the highlight video for my character I posted around i4 or so, or would that not fit within the sort of content that's being put into this thread?

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I think you're more than welcome to put character-specific videos here - there are a few like that on the list already.

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Ok then, here's my submission to the list. It's the youtube version of the higher-quality one I posted on the boards a while ago. If anyone wants the higher-quality one I can post it, but I imagine the youtube's enough.

Apollinaris Goes to 50

Video features things such as Babbage, the Hydra, several pretorians. During filming some interesting thigns to the game were introduced, such as arenas and the body-sliders. My first arena match is featured in there.

PS. Make sure to click watch in high quality.

Would this be a good place to post the highlight video for my character I posted around i4 or so, or would that not fit within the sort of content that's being put into this thread?

Wow. Just wow. I'm not sure what to say. What you're offering is simply so wonderful. The price points just come at such a good price. I've seem things like this elsewhere and it seems more like punishment then purchase. The veteran rewards are perfect for this, and the gift is quite simply generous and well appreciated.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

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Actually, if a PB can get up to almost light speed, they could theoretically travel tremendous differences if they obey relativity. Even though a photon may take 4.2 years to get from Alpha Centuri to Sol, the photon is the exact same age it left. The same rule could apply to an energy entity as well.

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Ok... I get to exchange one necrothread token a year, right? And this /is/ good stuff, and where else am I going to mention this. And well the above isn't /entirely/ true, but it gets at the point of things. When you approach the speed of light time dialates and length contracts. So, if a Kheldian traveled at just below the speed of light, say 0.99C, they would not only be traveling at 0.99C, but that 4.2 light year distance would also become shorter for them, to the tune of contracting to 0.592 light years in distance. Also, something that would be 5 years in our time frame would only be 0.705 to the Kheldian.

It's similar to how the Rossi-Hall experimen worked, where a particular kind of meson with a very small half life which travels at the speed of light were measured at the top and bottom of Mt. Washington. Given the half-lifes of the materials, not factoring in relativity many less of the particles should have been present at the bottom of the mountain as there were at the top of the mountain. However the particles at the top and bottom of the mountain are almost identical, due to the time dialation and length contraction the particles experience.

Anyway, a similar effect would happen for a Kheldian's life when when traveling long distances at relavistic speeds. n.n;

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I somehow missed this argument earlier. If I understand correctly, you are arguing that
A) The STF must *require* all ATs
or inevitably
B) Most players will deliberately exclude some ATs from their teams (like the RSF).

I was all set to disagree with you, but after thinking it through I believe you are right. Mind you, I stand by my argument that creating contrived circumstances that require specific ATs would not be fun. The problem is, if you create a TF that is so insanely difficult to complete, players will use extreme min/maxing in order to succeed. This will lead to excluding ATs/powersets. Logically, there are only two ways I see to prevent this kind of AT exclusion:

(1) Create contrived mission goals that require specific ATs so that teams must have X AT to succeed. This option would not (imo) be fun, and ultimately will fail (see below).
(2) Make the damn TF easier so less min/maxed teams have a reasonable chance of success. This option the devs aren't likely to do.

About (1) failing: Even with created situations that require specific ATs there will still be exclusions occuring. For example: I have a 50 brute that has trouble finding RSF teams. Why? I'm the right AT... but I'm not /Stone. There will be specific powersets that are more favored, and some powersets will still face exclusions.

The Devs have really dug themselves into a hole here. Hamidon is a similarly difficult encounter, but there is no limit to the number of people that can attack him, so there is no reason to exclude people. By creating a small scale encounter (max 8 people) that is Hamidon level difficult they have created a situation that will, by design, need min/max teams to have a reasonable chance of success, and thus, AT/powerset exclusion is inevitable.

No one likes this. The devs are against min/maxing, and the players have made it clear that the RSF final encounter is universally hated. The only remaining solution is (2), make the damn things easy enough that a less min/maxed team has a reasonable chance of success in a reasonable length of time. Bring some fun back to the endgame. I'll wait on pronouncing total doOo0oOmage until we see how it turns out, but I'm not really looking forward to the STF now.

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You're right in what you say. I myself was hoping that the mission would be easy enough so certain power sets in an AT aren't favored enough to the point that the other sets can't get teams. Kind of a cost/benefit analysis of how long you want to wait to find that perfect team vs. how long it's going to take you to find those specific ATs.

I don't think creating situations where certain AT's are needed is contrived though. Situations where you need certain skills to pass by something in an RPG is very normal. If for example, you were attacked by a cadre of high-flying enemies you'd encourage your flying and ranged attack characters. In any good RPG running up into melee with something and beating it into the ground isn't /always/ the answer.

Thinking on it, I think the Terra Volta trial is an example of a mission that has good alternate goals in the mission that encourage some different sets than usual to be helpful. (But notice it's not tarring up the other sets either.)

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And there WILL be an optimised hero team for this mission. It may be 3 ATs instead of 2, but there will be ATs and builds that are disadvantaged by this TF. That's just the way it goes when there is so much flexibilty in CoH/V.

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Fuzon and Unsub need to read this, since they obviously don't understand this point. I think you two are just too used to soloing your missions and not needing entire at's because everyone does the same bloody thing. Like some kind of crazy "World of Heroes" madness.

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The fact remains that you are advocating a TF design that requires cookie-cutter teams, and cookie-cutter = blah boring. They would be more balanced than the current cookie-cutter brute+corr RSF teams, but still cookie-cutter. That's not a good thing. Design the STF so all ATs have a very useful role, such that having the AT present makes the TF much easier, sure that's a good thing. But design the STF so that all AT's are required? (or so difficult w/out them that it is insanely frustrating) not a good thing.

Some flexability is needed to keep it from becoming what the RSF has: min/max team = boring, non-ideal = severely frustrating. That's too polarized, and just not fun.

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Requiring all the at's isn't boring at all. It's simply a fact that you need different skill sets to complete the mission. It encourages teamwork and it makes things very good over all.

Secondly, there are five basic AT's. There's some overlap in powers, and Kheldians have some of the abilities that other classes do. A full team is 8 players. If you need the abilities of one of the five AT's to succeed, you've still got three free slots to play with.

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This I disagree with. Having different parts of the TF be much easier if you have at least 1 of all the ATs is a good thing - it will be incentive for people to build balanced teams. Having X AT be required for success isn't cool. I *like* that TF's can be accomplished by varied groups, and the variety of playstyles/tactics that evolve from that make this game continually different, even if I've done the TF already.

What you are advocating is just the same kind of cookie cutter teams we have on the RSF now, just on a larger scale.

In case you haven't noticed, most of the lag issues in this game are due to inefficient coding/graphics. I don't object to newer, nicer graphics, but when they are proveably coded in a highly inefficient manner, the problem isn't the client systems.

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I'm sorry you like not having classes being required to finish a TF (And really, it's not required so much as things get /much/ harder that you'd be foolish not to bring said class, because you always gravitate toward setting up a team for easy mission completion.), but when you don't go this route you end up with the problem with the LRSF. You can't have it both ways. Needing an AT to get past a section of the TF is preferable to that AT not being able to do the TF at all because no one wants to invite them.

And, yes, the game is coded in efficently. The game spents lots of resources on pretty things, like costumes, for one. That said, with hardware near what I have specified, I run this game at 1920x1440 resoultion with all the graphics turned up to their maximums. I don't have problems with Grandville.

Wether or not the coding isn't optimal is a non-issue. Updates are coming, more will be added. Hardware will become obselete. If you want to keep playing this game you /will/ have to upgrade. It's just a fact of life. You can complain about it but it /will/ happen.

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I don't quite see how they can say they learned something and then say this. Having a certain AT be required, which is basically what this says, is no better than having one or more be marginalized.

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No, having certain abilities be /required/ to beat something is /good/. We /need/ more of this. In old school RPG's you had to have all your bases covered with classes. Every class has specific roles that had to accomplish that only they could accomplish. Now everything is really homogenized because, "Oh no we don't want them to be stuck if they can't find /blank/." Well dammit, this is a big [censored] mission. I say put stuff in the missions at are /impossible/ to say, hit with melee. Or things that need to be controlled to advance, make things that you /need/ a tank there to taunt away otherwise they'll waste everyone. And of course you'll need defenders to keep the party going and scrappers to deal with the hordes of things that /are/ in melee range. Do it, I want teams to die and team wipe because they thought they could run it without X AT because "dey are squishy". I want people to cry and wail in misery and gnash their teeth for building unbalanced teams and neglecting ATs. Maybe it's a bit harsh, but /not/ doing this is what leads to people running teams through LRSF with only certain classes. Because if you don't /need/ an AT for the job and another AT is /easier/ to run it with, then people are going to go with the AT that is /easier/. No question.

Oh yes, and thank you for putting mayhem mission action into this. I agree with others when I say that I don't think anyone wanted to bust up civie things, but we certainly wanted to put a hurting on recluse's engine of destruction. Now you've done it and put it into the kind of epic TF that's going to make it cool and makes more sense. (Because really, how often do the heros bust into the evil lair to cause some havoc?)

And for those of you who worry about lag... it's time to upgrade. I'm sorry. It's only going to get worse from here on in. 7900GT cards running on PCI-E will run this game quite well on a 2.2GHZ processor.

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Now I hear you guys... you all seem to dislike the Story Arc aspect of this system. I've had some discussions with the team yesterday about what we could do instead, and still keep the flavor of the four pool system, because having the extra three pools allows us to not only reward risk/reward, but time/reward as well. Takes longer to do a Task Force? Here's a nice bonus you can't get anywhere else. Finish the Respec trial, but already have all your Respecs? Here's a nice reward that carries with it some good inherent value.

Now again, I must stress, the majority of sets, including entire complete sets come from simply defeating enemies. All the costume piece and temp power recipes come from defeating enemies. There are Rare recipes (ones that have a worse chance to drop than others) in Pool A (the defeating enemies pool) as well.

We also will be actively monitoring datamining on every aspect of this system through all of Training Room and into Live.

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The problem with having drops that are exclusive to completing story arcs is that story arcs can be outleveled and cannot be repeated. If I've already done a trial or a task force previously, after inventions I can decide to go and do that trial or task force another time for the recipe. If I've completed a story arc already that opportunity is now closed off to me and I'm SOL.

Being that a lot of us are going to look at inventions as something to do with our level 50, having to create /another/ similarly leveled character to do a few arcs to get a few of a certain drop that are only available once ever in that character's career is not acceptable.

If you allow someone who has completed a story arc to start it over again from the beginning you will eliminate almost all of the complaints in this regard. Perhaps you decided to do this story arc thing to prevent "farming" the item, however having access to certain enhancements once ever in a character's career is incredibly annoying. (Expect RMT to love trafficing in the material as well.)

Addendum: Have Mayhem/Safeguard missions provide rewards from the Story Arc pool sounds like an easy, efficent, and acceptible solution to the current problem. Perhaps it could be made so the recipe reward is something that can be recieved if the temp power in the mahem/safeguard has already been granted before. (So you'd have to have done the mayhem/safeguard once already before you can get invention pieces from it.) Alternatively for /extra bonus points/...

Apollinaris has activated the temporary power: PIPE DREAM.

Create a new mini mission in safeguards/mayhem missions where you earn an invention piece.

More work, yes, but it follows in with keeping the invention piece a bit harder to get, and more cool missions in mayhem/safeguards is always a plus. The mission could have something to do with a lab of some sort.

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I'm extremely disappointed that an image of Statesman would be used in such a way. I know that we designed City of Heroes to appeal to "children of all ages." My proudest accomplishment with the game is that many parents (including my brother) play with their children...sharing, I hope, the same joy for the comic book world that I've had ever since I was 8. I cannot express the shock that I felt seeing that a character created by Cryptic would be used in the same sentence as Columbine.

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The people who want to bad video games are the same group of people who are grumpy that they didn't manage to ban all comic books and movies. Looks like States came around just in time for "comics code version 2.0"

PS. Apparently you can pass anything by scream, "It's for the children!" I can see it now, "Curfew is at 8PM, citizens will not be allowed out with proper passes, and remember to report to your local over magistrate for your regular screening and communications review and adjustment. Remember, it's for the Children."

As an energy/devices blaster of 50, it's nice to see some some of this up here. Especially power burst. Don't suppose there might be a little more coming our way, especially for the /dev portion? Even something small like an endurance reduction for Targetting Drone would be lovely.

Sad to see the damage for first attack for cloaking device go out the window though. Doing stealth strikes like those mobs in Mayhem Missions really would have made us shine.

PS. If the Taser animation isn't applicable anymore you might consider changing it to the same animation as the taser dart inherent that tech characters get. But I bet you knew that already.

Only one thing could explain how I feel right now. It's a YTMND, so you might want to use Internet Explorer on this one.

Hi Jay, no screencap for you, but in case it hasn't been mentioned, the shorts for females, usually have the hips clipping through through them on the default hip slider.

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We've got a nice tweak to the Domination ability coming down the pipe (it will crank up your Mez resistance while it is active), and are currently data-mining PvP to see what effect our last set of tweaks to the AT have had.

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<Blatent Abject Crippling Bitterness> In other news, defiance still sucks. </Blatent Abject Crippling Bitterness>

Personally, if the bar filled up based on damage don and then dropped off over time similar to fury, that would actually be somewhat useful. It won't happen though, but it's nice to imagine someone in development might think we deserve a nice inherent, but given their reaction when it was on test in the first place, I doubt that is the case.

And so begins the "Make them reroll their characters as villains so they can change their face to the CoV one that looks almost identical but the expression is slightly different so they can go through a redemtion TF later on to be a hero again" campaign.

Somehow I don't think my character will suddenly turn evil if she's slightly frowning instead of looking like she's posing for a swimsuit magazine or something.

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Statesman says its a tiered resistance that starts at 60% health, and "dramatically" increases at 40% and 20%.

At the moment, the resistance kicks in at about 55%-60% health (remaining) and then *steadily* increases from zero to about 22% resistance as your health drops to zero. I don't see any sort of quantum jumps in the resistance level...

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Considering how craptacular defiance is, I doubt you're that far off with you're guestimate is. I sure would like to know who the hell told Jack that all his players would just love having abilities that give a tiny little boost when they're almost dead.

Alright, I'm sure the devs are tired of hearing the same response over and over again.. I gave the long version of my views on Defiance a while back, so here's the short summary.

First of all, I have a level 50 Energy/Devices blaster.

I benefit next to nothing from defiance. If you insist on keeping defiance around it shouldn't factor into any kind of balancing what-so-ever. By the time Defiance kicks in I should be leaving, and will most likely serve to be a cute bar to distract me from running away at full speed, or as a tiny benefit right before I faceplant. That's assuming I get a chance to fire while it's active.

In short, if you were to remove the buff and leave the bar in there for a while on test, next to no one would notice the difference. This should tell you something about if it's the right thing to do or not.

I'd also much rather have the unresistable damage rather than this defiance. Why can't we have that? I mean look at the abilties, takers get inherent taunts with every attack, scrappers get to /utterly decimate/ things every few attacks and we get... defiance, a damage buff we'd be stupid to use.. I'm sure you can see why this is so un-appealing.

But I'm afraid you're going to pawn this off onto us no matter what we say. I sure do hope the secondary changes happen in I5.. as is I'm ending up in a bit of trouble with my tough, weave, cloaking device, and epic shield being nerfed. :/

Here is my entry of my character Faydreal, the Peacebringer, from the Virtue server.

Faydreal Entry

Alas, I doubt you'll read this.. But I'll do my best.

I'd like to have one of the classic anime beautiful female villain laugh. This consist of with an errect, proud posture, raising the face a bit so one looks down the nose at someone, covering the mouth with the hand and letting out a loud, high piercing laugh that comes out something like this, "OOOOOOOO-ho ho ho ho ho ho!"

Snorts of fire, flame, icy vapor, sparks flying from the body, or other small absent minded traits that reveal an usual character's nature.

Evil entrance poses, lots of them.

That's all I can think of right now. It's too bad we can't have facial expressions. That's what I really want.

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I'd love to get Guildwars but my wife is comes from a relgious background and frankly its annoying that every fantasy games degenerates into involving demons and undead which she is very much against. It would be nice to have an fantasy MMO that just stuck to dragons, monsters and goblins.

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While you might possibly be able to get your wish with demons, skeletons and undead are extremly common in any fantasy genre and are must likely aren't going to go away. If you want that then you need to pick up a D&D book and then never use anything she finds objectonable...

Though one wonders why she find's it ok to go around hacking things to bits with a sword, for pay, using "magic" and "powers" which are also forbidden by many denominations, and entering a fantasy setting with false deities is completely beyond me. If you let her really study the different caveats of her particular faith I can assure you it'll be nearly impossible to find anything to please her.

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Tater Tots are overpowered. Hash Browns have less flavor and cost just as many calories. NERF TATER TOTS!!!


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No my friend, you must not nerf the tater tots.

You must.. Nerf the Tomato

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How often do you lie dead for longer than a minute? That almost never happens with me. Is this a common occurance among the majority of the playerbase?

If the answer is no then your complaint is moot.

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Actually I'm leveling up one of my alts, She was level 11 during one mission we were doing and actually it happened quite a bit. Someone would bite off more then they could chew, the mob would rush at us, and we'd be running down the elevators. Meanwhile the fallen would lie there dead because there were no awakens and no one had awakening powers. We would often have to fight the mobs again just to get to them, a lot of the time they'd still be at the elevators when we came up. I made it a point to let those fallen know, "If this was I4 you wouldn't be getting any XP right now." Mention that at that moment and people get grumpy really fast.