Dispari

While the infamy isn't pointless, and great inf + great drops is better than okay inf + great drops, I wouldn't turn down fighting Freaks just because their bonus exp is gone now. As long as you kill fast and are getting good drops, you're doing good. When I run through things, the inf I get from kills is a drop in the bucket to the overall money I make from drops.

My current hope/speculation is that the PBAoE effect used there is a mini-nuke. It's far too long of an animation to use in regular play. It looks to be somewhere near Total Focus cast time of over three seconds. It looks cool, surely, but if I'm supposed to execute a power like that as my normal attack chain, that'll kinda suck...

Also note, that in the video, he didn't use Aim. The powers used are apparently Build Up (from secondary), Power Boost (secondary), Conserve Power (secondary; good odds he was using Energy Manip), and the red glow is apparently Ammo Change. From that, we have a few possible solutions:

A) The set has no Aim at all, like Assault Rifle. I hope this isn't the case, since it would mean pairing Pistols/Devices would create another damage boost-less combo, and I don't think people want that. AR and Devices already get a lot of flack for that, and I hope the devs are wise enough to avoid extending the problem, especially with a new set that tons of people are looking forward to.

B) There's no Aim per se, but there is a new Aimlike power that we didn't get to notice. Melee sets have a lot of variety in damage boost powers. Build Up, Rage, Soul Drain, and Follow Up. Personally, I'm hoping for a Follow Up type power where we can get rewarded for rapid-fire DPSing with a steady damage boost. It'd be a unique thing to give the ranged ATs.

C) There's some sort of damage boost like mentioned in A or B, but Posi simply didn't use it for some reason, or he did but we didn't get any good visual cues to signify it.

D) Some fourth option we can't yet fathom. Like maybe we get crits or something.

So, we'll just have to wait and see!

You MAY be right, for the very limited amount of content you specified. LRSF, STF, and ITF are pretty much the only times when incoming damage is going to be so significantly high that the bonus health and numbers from a Tank would really be "necessary," depending on your team makeup. When I do those things, I tend to have at least 4 of the team be support such as Corruptors or VEATs, and we have no issues keeping Brutes alive. So me and my friends won't be dropping everything to take a Stone Tank.

Now, there more than likely WILL be SOME people who are calling for Tanks, specifically Stone, for LRSF, STF, and ITF. But the amount of content those things represent is rather tiny. I don't see any people shouting that they have to have a Stone Brute to run newspapers, or to do Ghost Widow's arc, or to run a respec trial. And I seriously doubt that's going to change for the vast majority of people.

Yeah, there will always be people who think it's physically impossible for a team to function without a Stone + Kin, and if they fail it's because they didn't have enough Kin. Or delay starting an ITF for 30 minutes looking for a Stone Tank and ignoring the perfectly capable WP Brute over there. But you can hardly consider those people to be the norm.

Membrane goes great in Mind Link as well. With 3 slots you can max out all 3 attributes of the power, including one that's not slottable with standard SOs/IOs.

Throw 3 Endoplasm Exposures in Lich and giggle madly. You just increased his accuracy, hold duration, immobilize duration, and fear duration. 4 attributes maxed with 3 slots.

The badge he's trying to earn is a requirement for HPT.

If we're talking about level 50 farming, the exp/infamy income isn't that important. It's more about the speed and ease of kills so that you can get drops.

This sounds like B_I's previous complaint that because we've had pay packs, we'll never ever ever get free costume parts again, and the evil dev overlords will FORCE us to buy packs to get costume pieces. When pointed toward all the free costume parts we've gotten since pay packs came out, B_I noted how none of those count.

Right now, lots of people are busy on GR. It's going to be a big expansion, and if it's going to be anywhere near as good as CoV was, all the mission and art people are very busy working on GR-related things. Considering the beta is probably about two months off at this point, it's crunch time for those folks. Maybe sometime in July we can start seeing the actual levels of free costume parts and arcs/TFs come back and start to make such claims.

Don't forget Tanks!

CE are kind of easy, I'll admit to that, but is it really an exploit? It's no easier than anything that already exists in the game. Heck the actual CE mission I remember is a big outdoor map.

But you don't understand. See, he deleted a toon with cyborg pieces, and now he doesn't have them!

The fun part is trying to sit in chair and stools that are physically impossible to sit in.

Actually, this seems like another one of those traps to me.

Back in Jack's day they made a lot of promises they never kept. These days, they're quiet on things up until the last possible moment.

As a programmer I know it's easy to claim you'll do something, and then in the thick of things see that it's going to be way harder than you thought, maybe even impossible to deliver. Especially when working with a system that's 5.5 years old that you weren't around for the conception of so just have notes and theories to go off of.

If they did start saying things like "Hey we're adding Walking," and then it turns out it's way more trouble than it's worth and they come back and say "Nevermind," guess what kind of people would be making threads yelling about betrayal and lying devs? The same ones that are here saying they should tell us more.

Actually, I believe this is a two-layer trap.

Ryu claims that content is easy to make because of AE. I mean, all you do is slap some enemies into a mission, add some text, and it's content right?

He also claims that 99% of AE missions are garbage.

So what's to stop dev content from being garbage if it's just created with AE stuff? Sure they have great writers, but there are plenty of great writers amongst our player base. Even if it comes out with a compelling story, it's still just the same defeat and glowie missions with the same gangs.

The only way for the devs to create new content that's fun and interesting is to come up with new ideas and, as a dev (Positron?) actually put it, do things we can't do yet. That's what happened with the new TFs. They implemented new ideas, new powers, and new enemies.

So on one hand, Ryu claims it should be a cinch to just throw some stuff together and release it as dev content. On the other hand, if they did that, Ryu would be here complaining that the new dev content is crap. To make new stuff, the devs need time. Time Ryu doesn't want to give them, because this stuff should be "easy." They can't win, no matter what route they take.

That would be cool.

There's a lot of "all over the place" stuff from back in "the day" like that really. A lot of powers and animations seem to have been done entirely by ear, without ever taking the cast times into consideration. We've had tweaks on down the line like when the Blaster powers got standardized, but there are still a bunch of wacky inconsistencies. Would be a nice start to begin ironing out those bumps.

As long as it doesn't cut into normal development time, anyway. I know you and Castle have to get back to fixing bases and animating PvP.

To be fair, neither of you were right. It's not 1.2, and it's not "about 5 seconds," but it is pretty long. It's practically Total Focus every time you buff someone, and that's just silly.

As a side note, it'd be funny to replace CM's cast animation with Total Focus just so we can feel how long it is.

The resistance was vanquished.

If it's so worthless, ignore it instead of talking about it all the time.

I can help.

The first paragraph is about telling BABs he's wrong and that there's a ton riding on GR, because all the stuff we got in the last six issues (you know, Ouroboros, Cimerora, AE, dominator buff, leveling pacts, merits, power customization, and 2x proliferation) has sucked. It also goes on to tell them (the devs) that their job is easy, and also that they should spend their time fixing the gobs of nonspecific issues with the game.

There's a big difference between an expansion to a game that's already doing well, and launch of a game that doesn't turn a profit.

We've been told before that CoH is in no risk of being shut down. We never have and never will pull WoW numbers, but that doesn't mean we're anywhere near in danger of being cut off. I believe at some point a dev said that even if we lost half our subscribers that we'd still be fine. This was somewhere in response to a doom post about sub numbers or a conspiracy theory about the pay packs.

We've also been told that pay packs aren't being used to keep the game supported. We've been told, by Posi I believe, that they help hire new people and pay for extra hours so we can get things faster.

In order for GR to be a risk to the game and some people's jobs, not only would it have to be so bad that nobody buys it to start out with (which, let me tell you, isn't happening), but it would also somehow have to cause more than half of the current subscriber base to drop.

The only reason they'd make a tough business decision and shut games down or let people go would be if the company is losing money. It's not "We had hoped GR would sell X copies, but it sold 200 less than that, so you're all fired." For CoH to start hemorrhaging money, GR would have to do something pretty drastic.

Clear Mind: 3.1s cast
Enforced Morale: 3.1s cast
O2 Boost: 2.27s cast
Increase Density: 2.07s cast
Antidote: 1.53s cast
Clarity: 1.5s cast

It IS agonizingly long, for no real reason. But there's no uniformity between these powers as you can see.


Should in theory. That's what I suggested in my post to BABs. Hopefully he'll pass it along to Castle. And double-hopefully, that's the only source of the problem.