Dr_Mechano

Aye, if you use Fly/Super Jump then you usually maintain enough forward momentum to be able to travel past a target. If you're just using normal running on the ground, the rooting takes full effect and stops you from moving.

Louis Watson is actually an amalgamation of Louis Lane (Supermans love interest) and Mary Jane Watson (one of Spidermans love interests).

Jack also said something along the lines of "people roleplay in this game?!" and other such idiotic statements (heh Statesman's Statements...sounds like a CoH Fan Newsletter). No...he generally wasn't very perceptive of the playerbase, I'm thankful he created the game, I'm also thankful that he stepped down and then left when he did. Personally feel the game is in much better hands at NCsoft than at Cryptic...but that my friends is another thread for another time...

I'm also incredibly glad that the devs did see the light as it were and now make the modern TFs/SFs about 2 hours long at most considering that TFs/SFs = WoW 5 man dungeon and Hami/Mothership = WoW raid (even then you can complete them in less time it takes to learn and beat a WoW raid boss).

It varies greatly. Some can be epic four hour+ affairs, like say running the entire Scarlet Monastry (which itself is split into 3 dungeons) or Karahazan or Naxxramas (both truly massive raid dungeon with many, many bosses). However most of the modern 5 mans are actually pretty quick on the time scale, very few will take longer than 45 minutes.

Most Raids are actually designed how Taskforces were originally designed. They don't reset for a full week and once you defeat a boss you're given a specific Raid ID number which means you're locked to that particular instance. Since there's more to learn about WoW Raid bosses than there is about any boss in CoH it usually takes a day or so (most guilds raid for four hours a night, 3 nights a week at a minimum) worths of tries to defeat them before moving on.

So a raid will rarely be completed in a night unless you're either completely overpowered for it (level 80's doing a level 60 raid) it's a one boss/small number of bosses raid encounter (Onyxia, Gruul) or the guild has perfected the instance so much that the instance is now on 'farm' status and they usually bring one or two undergeared people along to get them loot.

Of course the way things are handled differently is gear, WoW is very much the old school hardcore gear treadmill (you have to get the gear to defeat all the bosses in dungeon X but you also need the gear from Dungeon X to take on instance Y) whereas City of Heroes is a case of fighting lots of non-AVs is actually a better way of getting the 'phat lewtz'.

Bah all you need to do is monitor...tough it out, go the full 24 hour period awake running on nothing but coffee so thick you can stand a spoon in it aka my 'WoW expansion release pickmeup' and yes it was like syrup but it kept me awake for three days solid while I burned through and levelled my character...

Actually don't drink it like that...I actually use to drink coffee like that as normal and I dread to think what the five years of drinking it did to my body...

Hmm right now, if I remember my US times correctly it's between 1pm and 2pm, so people are still at work/school so yeah little early, give it another 4 hours and you'll be hitting 5pm/6pm which is when people have gotten home from work/school and are just starting to play.

Fully agree with you there Sam, as I said I threw out the 'Requiem in a bubble' idea in the time it took me to write it.

Sadly I actually think the experience put off Horatio aka Bruce Harlick (the man that wrote the mission briefings and dialogue) because he was lambasted at every point and people just generally weren't hugely impressed with what I kind of percieve as 'his baby' and that while he had worked on the development team...he kind of hadn't read the story bible..if you get what I mean.

The Khan TF went through three of four rewrites in beta thanks to the players point out plot holes, general flaws and mismatching against the already ingame lore. The Barracuda SF went through atleast two because people did the "oh...so I'm Lord Recluses Lackey again...great...fine...another taskforce where I'm the [censored] of Arachnos, like we're not totally sick of that /sarcasm."

So it was kind of like dear old Bruce hadn't A) heard the complaints of the playerbase and B) didn't know the lore well enough. After the tepid reception of his baby...he seemed to have left Paragon Studios quietly not long after...

The two 5th Column taskforces are STILL not that great even after all that and they're also horrible imbalanced between the two sides (the hero version is a complete freaking joke with even 1 debuffer, the villainside version has the horrible, horrible AT based temp powers gimmick and ambushes so huge they take half an hour of constant fighting to clear out if you wipe).

There's only one ingame archvillain that does that, which is the Center duing an unlockable only villainside arc. He has no combat mutations and sicks the entire Council heirarchy on you one at at a time, you only have to beat the first AV to complete the mission but he will send others after and mentions that even if you impress him enough to take the invite, if you don't beat all of them he'll have no respect for you (so you go through Requiem, Nosferatu, Maestro, Burkeholder and Arkhan).

Further Edit:

They Hydra head is about as close to a WoW Dungeon boss as we get, it has a gimmick (as most WoW bosses do) and it requires good team coordination (as 50% of the WoW bosses do).

Yeah...someone being surprised that there is 100 players on Blueside during their primetime is definitely 'empty'.

You're playing on the US servers 'downtime' as it were, when people are asleep in the early hours of the morning on one of the quieter servers and Victory or Pinnacle manage to match the French server at what should be its highest.

That shows that there is pretty much a problem with atleast the French server and according to said Beber the German server is actually even worse of. So even if there's not a problem for the English Speaking ones (usually Union can just about match the quieter US servers primetime for primetime (200-300 players blueside, 60-100 players Redside and Union is apparently the busy server).

So yes Sam, no insult meant but I'd honestly say you don't have a good eye for population.

If you predominatly a Solo player...then you really can't speak up about it, as you said the servers could be barren of anyone but you and you wouldn't really care. Since it doesn't really affect you then what's the point in you speaking out against it because you could be the only person playing this and that would be fine.

Sorry got a bit ranty there.

ANYWAY...yes the EU servers aren't what they were when I joined some three years ago unfortunately there's this big old thing called Going Rogue (1 month left til release) standing in the way, there's sweet FA that the devs can do since everything is focused on Going Rogue AND Issue 19 (which is essentially Going Rogue: Stuff we couldn't finish in time for release ala Issue 1 or Issue 7).

Once all this hooha is out the way then they'll be able to do something about the EU servers. Plus could you imagine what a dampener the news "Going Rogue release for City of Heroes" and just under it, "City of Heroes merges servers!" (which is how most gaming websites will abbreviate 'server list merger' because they like to get people clicking on their news) so while GR would be a big success, that success would have been tainted by 'bad news' as non-City of Heroes players would see it.

World of Warcraft EU edition makes sense not only are their staff support offices still located in mainland Europe but they all had a number of GMs who speak various European languages, yes you could get someone who had trained to answer in different languages in the USA but it's more cost effective to hire someone who speaks the lingo and put them in your support team in Europe.

The other thing that has peeved people off has been the variation in support. For example if you wanted a character you deleted back on the US servers the support staff were more than happy to reinstate said character as long as it was within a couple of days of deletion...the EU support staff would tell you to basically 'go [censored] yourself' and claim it was impossible, despite people routinely pointing to post on the US forums where people had their characters reinstated.

This along with other things kind of created a bit of illwill and when the Brighton offices closed down most people saw it as a sign that NCsoft cared little for the EU side of things in ANY of their games and once again more illwill was created.

I honestly have no idea how the French and German forum users feel because even though we English speaking part complain they got dumped on the most, the French and German went without a community moderator on their section of the forums for well over a year and a half infact I think they STILL don't have a forum moderator who speaks their language so any game announcements they're going to have to translate themselves or tough luck.

As I said I don't check in (because I don't speak the language) with the German or French, it's a shame we don't see any of their players here to see what they think of the current situation of their servers.

Actually GreyFalcon is a 'stand in replacement' AV for the original Circle of Thorns AV, unfortunately whoever wrote the Taskforce didn't know the lore well enough that Akarist (who was the AV at the time *said in Grampa Simpson voice*) wasn't actually an evil member of the Circle of Thorns but a traitor to the Circle and got called on the fact it made no sense for Akarist to be fighting the heroes.

The AV dialogue in Beta was a HELL of a lot worse and the Khan TF actually went through about three different version, again because players mentioned that the four AVs had absolutely NO reason to be helping Reichsman.

Atleast currently they have the pretense of trying to beat up the heroes for other reasons.

Countess Crey: Bad publicity to be seen 'affiliating' with a Super-Nazi and trying to defeat the heroes to stop it getting out.
Nemesis: It's only a robot so he might as well beat up some meddlesome heroes before departing.
Vanessa De Vore: Always needs new mindslaves.

Now that's all well and good, admittedly most of those a poor reason but they're semi-justifiable none the less...unfortunately it all falls apart when we get to our next AV...

GreyFalcon: Malta would NEVER parley with Reichsman, they wouldn't even bother sending a represenative (which is what GreyFalcon is in my mind, he's not the boss but a cell leader, someone they could afford to lose). To them a Super-powered Nazi represents actually the kind of thing Malta hates personified into an evil gloaty form. Basically when Akarist got remove I think dear Bruce kind of panicked and just pulled a 40+ group name out of a hat and went with it.

What would make more sense would be someone like Requiem, held in a cell for 'failing' to defeat the Council and Reichsman holding him there 'to be judged' while he deals with other matters. When release have Requiem laugh and say that he'll defeat the heroes, that way the 5th Column will see who their true master is and not this upstart from another dimension.

I threw that together in the time it took to write it...yeah it's not great but I personally believe Requiem would make a better AV than GreyFalcon.

Notice I highlighted in bold European Combat arts, what you call 'Martial Arts' and what could be lumped under said title appear to be quite different. Like mentioned above Krav Maga is a martial art but it's not really Oriental in origin.

First off the Martial Artists in CoH ARE fighting gods...I'm sorry but no real world martial artist could take on the Kronos Titan and expect to do any damage since that thing is basically a walking battle fortress with inches thick armour. To a lesser extent a real world martial artist wouldn't be able to touch Council/5th Column Mekmen or the lesser Malta Titans. Yet in CoH Martial Artists can take on and damage these things.

Secondly the Tai-Chi kung-fu is ACTUALLY the inspiration for the new Kinetic melee set coming with Going Rogue which does use a few Tai-Chi moves if 'fancified' by the devs since, you know, this is in a world of superpowers.

Having literally JUST watched the movie (wow...first movie...actually not bad!) the reason he's called Pumpkin head is because his demonic corpse is buried out in an old graveyard that's now overgrown with pumpkins. It has nothing to do with the shape of his head.