Dr_Mechano

I do wish they'd look at the 'sort of' competition once in a while...

Lets look at WoW Cataclysm..the expansion pack isn't probably going to come out until the very end of the current year (november releases for Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King tend to suggest that Cataclysm will follow the same pattern).

Yet every other week or so they release tidbits of information, a hint here, an annoucement there to keep people excited until open beta comes along and the real news gets out.

Here we get a big info dump during one month and then that's it, it's quiet for a long period of time before we hear anything else...

I will also agree that the recent Issues have lacked any decent form of story content a TF and a Strikeforce does not story content make.

I predict 'The Coming Storm' is now going to languish in an unforgotten realm of backstory the same place the Avians and the Blood of the Black Stream (which have ingame hints to by the way) now languish. It's going to suffer from 'Duke Nukem Forever' syndrome where even if the Coming Storm is eventually released people are going to go "we waited 3/4/5 years for that? Well that wasn't worth the big build up..."

The different morale values between the US and the rest of the world can be pretty much summed up by what was censored in Age of Conan.

US: Any bare chested or naked females were covered up or the nipples removed but the over the top gory fatalities remained.

Germany: The naked women were fine but the gory fatalities were toned down or removed (in the case of the curb stomp fatality).

UK: Naked women and gore remain intact.

so...the servers that have been scanned...can anyone confirm something actually going on on those servers?

Total Annihilation soundtrack provides 95% of my Rikti fighting music

Roll me another J could mean (I don't know the song) Roll me another Joint.

Says in the EULA that names including drug references aren't allowed thus you got generic'd.

8 merits each...you said 5 a moment ago..you sir have done yourself out of deal, I shall find my tin foil hats elsewhere!

Hmm standard procedure I believe, Red alert, shields up, and ready the Proton Volley...

Surprised nobody has posted a link to this yet....

Soldiers of Arachnos have status protection. The Widow path has Indomitable will which is pretty much a carbon copy of Willpowers version. Soldiers get decent (but not Melee AT) level status protection from level 1 as it's your very first secondary ability, if you really went you can stack it with your 'branch' level 1 secondary ability to achieve proper status protection.

VEATs are very weird even if you build them 'traditionally' (discounting things like melee based Fortunatas or ranged Night Widows). A Night Widow is an Claws/SR Stalker who is better at scrapping and provides a good team buff. A Fortunata is a Psi blast/Psi control Dominator but with a good level of protection. Crabs are a Mastermind and a Blasters love child, personally tough with lots of pets but can dish out high levels of AoE damage themselves. Banes are the love child of a Stalker and a Blaster, the survivablity of a Stalker along with it's melee damage potential but combined with a few ranged blasts and immobilizing powers from the Blaster side of the family.

Oh and if you go Huntsman build (remaining wolf spider with only a few picks from the Bane power pool) you become a tam buffing defender with blaster level damage.

All this AND they buff the team as well, it's why a team of 8 VEATs is just down right deadly...

The guy is pretty much the definition of the trope 'stop having fun guys' and that playing to win is the only way to play, he comes across as someone who would pummel his friends into the grounds at Street Fighter IV to the point they nolonger want to play with him.

I learnt this lesson the hard way with Super Smash Bros Brawl where thanks to many hours put into SSBM and at the time having a mate who had put as many hours into it as I had, I could thrash all my current friends at the game which completely turned them off it and thus...nobody else to play with and we went back to Mario Kart where the randomness of it all is both a bonus and a curse!

Hmm also think there's a key difference between WoW and CoH.

In WoW you team because you have to if you want the best gear or to get the quests done that lead into the 5-man dungeons, to accomplish anything at level cap that isn't marketeering or rep grinding (aka daily quests) you simply have to team.

In City of Heroes there's the TFs which you don't HAVE to run if you want the best gear, you could simply earn it solo through merits or have a level 50 get lucky with a purple recipe drop and buy most of your sets. People tend to be more easy going and friendly because they're not relying on you to get a chance at netting their next piece of loot. Infact the best loot in the game drops off regular mobs...

So in WoW if people don't know you they tend to be more suspiscious and probably a few bad PuG runs of a dungeon they've been running 10 times for the one piece of loot they need is going to make them a little hostile to newcomers because they simply don't want to bother to teach them anything, they just want the dungeon done so they can get their piece of loot and move on to raiding.

Plus the larger the subscriber base the larger the number of idiots. I remember WoW being described as 'an MMO for the counterstrike kiddies' because like counterstrike it was (and still is) THE MMO to play, who cares about making a good first impression on someone on a trial account because ten other people will replace them whereas here making that first impression good really does count.

Compared to pretty much...well...any MMO forum the CoH forum is the friendliest MMO forum I've ever had the pleasure to be on.

WoW official forum is notorious for being a practically unmoderated mess, people are not usually very helpful. AoC, CO, WAR all seemed to attract the same kind of people sadly. You know what I found odd to be a very helpful forum (and ingame)...

Eve, you wouldn't think it with it's PvP focus but the forums and people ingame were very helpful to the point of being escorted out of 0.0 sec by a friendly player when I ended up there by complete mistake, they could have quite easily blown the carp out of me but they realised I was in waaay over my head.

I second the 'there's a HUGE sale going on Steam!' and 'it was New Years Eve'.

Seriously Steam has got so many good games at great discount prices I'm working my way through them.

Done Fallout 3 now...hmm Torchlight or Saints Row 2 (both 7.99)?

Ok...people having a go at my points.

So the STF Heroes are 54 and not 53, there's still only 4 of them. Unless you go the mass hypnosis route on the STF or are exceptionally good at pulling you're going to be fighting 2-3 heroes at once whereas you can quite easily single pull the LRSF AVs.

None of the STF AVs have debuffs like Radiation infection and lingering radiation or have buffs like Fortitude or +def shield buffs. Mako and Black Scorpion are almost all Smashing/Lethal damage, something most tanks can laugh off. Scirocco has rather large ranged PBAoEs which make him tougher and he deals a mixture of Energy and Lethal. Ghost Widow is the difficult one out of the group with her large self heal, mag 100 hold.

So you can't say that the Heroes/AVs are in any way equal even with a 1 level difference.

Saying that I've succeeded the LRSF more times than I've succeeded the STF. My first LRSF was a complete PuG but then we had 3 MMs (Thugs/Dark, Thugs/Poison and Bots/FF), 2 Corruptors (one a Fire/Thermal and one A Ice/Cold) an Elec/Elec Brute for tanking duty, a Stalker and a Dominator. That combination could make pretty much anything a walk in the park even with the 'buff up and run in stratergy' enabling us to take out 4 of the 8 heroes before getting our backsides kicked and then finished them off with ease the second go around.

I would like to point out something that...well it looks like everyone is kind of forgetting, Alpha asked "How is the the LRSF balanced?"

Compare the two endgame TF/SF Statesman and Lord Recluse respectively, I'll go through each one to show they're not remotely balanced with each other.
__________________________________________________ ________________________
Recluse SF:
8 level 53 hero who...well they don't like being seperated, not in the slightests.

Statesman TF:
4 level 53 Archvillains who can quite easily be seperated, two of which tend to hit like a wet blanket (Mako and Black Scorpion) if you're a tank.
__________________________________________________ ________________________
Recluse SF:
End encounter is all 8 of the damn heroes at once, thanks to the combined efforts of buffing/debuffing and hard hitting powers that the heroes have access to, popping insps doesn't really help at all.

Statesman TF:
It's a super powered Recluse who has no debuffs on his own....pop about 10 small purple insps and you've got enough defense to avoid being hit while the rest of the team takes out the red tower.
__________________________________________________ ________________________
Recluse SF:
Statesman has that god awful perma-unstoppable that the devs seem to just LOVE giving to heroes and an PBAoE with a HUGE range on it.

Statesman TF:
Recluse....doesn't have anything like that at all but he does summon lots of minions, which just tend to be fodder.
__________________________________________________ ________________________
Recluse SF:
Gives less merits despite having an end encounter which is about twice as hard as it's hero counterpart.

Statesman TF:
Is the complete opposite of the above, more merits, easier end encounter.
__________________________________________________ ________________________

Sorry to mildly threadjack this for my own purposes but...

looking for a new graphics card to be ready to run 'ultra-mode' when GR comes out, currently have the rather aging ATI Raedon X1950 pro so need a bit of a spruce up for GR.

Looking in the price range of £150.

You know those Combine Gunships in Half-Life 2.

In Praetoria, Sally is just like that..she's got missiles and machines guns, she floats around the sky hunting down resistance members...

hmm so it seems that after superbooster II that they've been released in a 2-3 month schedule so Febuary/March looks like time for another Superbooster.

Ohh a quick question for people.

What release dates did all the booster packs have, so we can (sort of) correlate (or guestimate) when the next one would be coming along?

Edit: My bad, different idiot this time.

Hmm the key thing here is...are the EU servers profitable to maintain?

They did simply shut down the Korean City of Hero (yes Hero not Heroes) servers when the game sank like a lead brick tied to a torpedoed battleship and offered to transfer account and character info over to the US servers.

However recently NCsoft stopped publishing subscription figures in their quarterly reports so we can't see how many people are subscribed in the EU. The other thing is that NCsoft pretty much gutted their EU offices except marketting so the EU probably isn't going to be a worthy focus in the future.

I do agree on the whole 'server list merge' front though however I don't think it'll be until after GR that they'll make any moves, they don't want the bad press that could follow a server list merger to sully the golden light that is meant to GR.

That is one key point that people are forgetting.

Some people are acting like the RPers are demanding that people stop using the Chalet or stop using broadcast to advertise for 'beating up ugly midget' teams (as one person in broadcast called it...which did illict many responses of "oh...if only you could...damn freakeh baby!").

Pretty much keeping just letting people get on with the business of doing the normal thing for being in the Chalet.

It's not like they sit right at the entrance to the ski slope blocking it all of...yet some people are acting as if they were.

Yeesh people...