Fernandes

The difference is higher than 15 once youf actor in a 95-99% boost from slotting, plus the boost from domination. Still your point is well taken. Ive never been much for melee, as a general thing.

The main advantage that keeps me coming back to /Electric is the added damage of Voltaic Sentinal. I wonder if thsoe who ahve actually ahd a chance to use ti in PvP could comment on how effective it is, because it seems like it would add a great deal of damage.

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if the power itself has 68% recharge, how much global recharge is require for perma PA on a ill/kin illusion troller? this means while using siphon speed as well...

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You need a total of about 300% recharge affectign the power (you can get away with a little less, but I recommend aiming for 300). If you only have 68% recharge in the power (I cant imagine why you dont have 95-100%, but whatever), then by means of basic arithmatic we find that you need tog et 232% from SOMEWHERE else. Subtract a further 100% from AM/Hasten (which you should have), and get 132% global recharge from set bonusses. If (for reasons passing understanding) your secondary is not radiation, then its 162% instead, since you dont have Accelerate Metabolism. This is doable - my own global recharge is in the 130% neighborhood - but it will require a steep investment of cash in purple sets, rare sets, and LotG specials. Also, some of the new PvP IO sets seem like they will be very useful for this sort of build. I havent calculated it precisly, but at current market prices I estiamte my own build woudl be worth somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion influence.

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not really - all of your good fire atks are single target and you get fiery embrece for 85%% dmg on fire attacks and 68% on your other attacks - doms are getting a dmg buff too and the confuse buff should make mind/ a good primary (the placate proc in mes being an awesome addition.

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Fire clearly has better ranged damage, granted, but Havoc Punch and Charged brawl (and thunder Strike, for that matter) do much more damage than anything fire can manage, plus it has Voltaic Sentinel. Of course, that does have the notable disadvantage of requiring you to be in melee range with much more survivable architypes.

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Mind/Fire

AKA Lulz/Damage

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/Fire WOULD probably fit the character theme better, but doesn't /Electric deliver higher single-target damage, while /fire is a better AoE monster?

There is no such thing as legitimate anecdotal evidence, Zekiran. Mostly I am interested in knowing the actual truth. From your statement it seemed as if you had seen objective, reliable data somewhere, and I wanted to know where. Obviously you haven't, and I thank you for answerign my question.

It is possible to find teams yes. Or at least /I/ and my friends are able to fidn a team, though as noted above I am forced toa dmit the possibility that my experience and that of my friends is a statistical anomaly. As to the more important issue of whether the game is expanding or contracting (IE whether it will become easier or harder to get teams as time goes by), there appears, as Mr. Spock might say, to be insuficient evidence to form a conclusion.

That having been said, I must add my voice to the general overwhelming consensus that regardless of the increasing or decreasing nature of the game's population, and issues over icnreasingly diverse content leading to increasingly isolated players, Freedom is still a relatively easy place to find teams, and certainly PvP teams. If you have beens incerley trying adn completly unable to find team-mates then I can only conclcude that either something has drastically changed in the last few weeks since I visited, or else you are, at the risk of being glib and dismissive, doing something wrong.

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The population of the game has *increased* measurably and visibly in the time since I13+ has been out.

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Could you cite your source?

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*facepalm*

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This is waaaay back in teh thread, but I saw as I was starting a read-through and I would like to know that as well. Im sorry if it offends you but it is a legitimate question. if you are going to cite cold hard facts to support your argument, then thats wonderful (and more than most people can be bothered to do), but you ahve tob e willing to prove that its actually true.

My understand had been that the game reached its peek number of active subscriptions in 2006, with over 200-thousand and that despite brief surges during new issue releases or special events, it has been consistantly tending downwards since then to an 2008 finish of somewher between 100 and 150 thousand subscribers. If issue 13 has created a LONG TERM increase in the number of subscribers, as you claim, then I would be interested to know that and would like to know where you ahve obtained this data so that I may consult them both now and in the future for my personal benifit.

Thank you.

Fire/Elec it is! I would ahve thoguht there'd be some use for /psi for Drain Psyche and telekinetic Thrust. Shows what I know.

Makes sense to me. Of course, with blasters, secondary effects used to matter too (god old ice blasters), but I take it that the nerfs to debuffs have more or less killed that as well.

Due to... sheer damage numbers, I presume?

I am tempted to say either Mind/ or Fire/, and either /psi for or /elec, but I really have comparatively little experince building dominators, and Im curious to know what the curretn flavour of the month is for PvP.

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In your estimation, when will I be able to choose powers from any powerset in the game regardless of architype and without restriction as to the number I can dip into

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5+ years in the past. This was the way CoH worked in alpha. It didn't mesh too well with an MMO community because players could both make unbeatable characters as well as completely gimp themselves into total frustration. This is why the AT system was introduced.

I am however very interested in how CO plans to overcome this.

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I know. And despit the original poster's admonishments, the fact that they tried to implement such a system anda bandoned it leads me to suspect that they will never do so again - that for better or worse (and I tend to feel worse, but thats a personal opinion) City of Heroes is now and forever a class-based game.

Also that levle of versatility has never technicaly been possible. During beta, the abilityt o chooe any combination of 2 powersets was tried, but the CO model fo being able to mix and match powers from different branches has never been done, to my knowledge, in City of Heroes.

Although I have no sympathy for thsoe so incompetant as to gimp themselves through inatention, I too am anxious and curious to see how succesfully they will prevent the other end of the scale from becoming unbalancingly extreme. It should be noted, however, that there have been (and still are) other games with very open character creation systems, generally skill based, though some with 'power trees' more similar to waht CO is attempting, that have managed to do quite well in terms of balance and playability.

At any rate, we are somewhat digressing from the point that as much as we cna sometimes be too quick to dismiss, the fact is that when a newcomer arrives and posts "they should totally do X" and all the veterans shake their heads and sigh, there's ussually (not always, but ussualy) a good reason for it.

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Add side-switching to the long list of things that were "never going to happen". I love this game....there is simply no such thing as "never going to happen".

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In your estimation, when will I be able to choose powers from any powerset in the game regardless of architype and without restriction as to the number I can dip into (a la Champions Online)? For an example less related to a rival franchise, when do you imagine the developers will cave in and admist that stamina is a requirement for 99% of player-characters and not an "option" and simply give it to us for free? Or on another tangent, when do you expect they will open a full, open-world PvP server?

Your point IS well taken - its good not to be too abruptly dismissive of anything out fo the ordinary. But there are still a great many features people (or at least a subset of people) might want that are, if not impossible, then catastrophically unlikely for a variety of reasons both good and bad.

I am not a programming expert, Inokis, but I woudl think that would put a significantly increased strain on the server, the user's PC, their bandwidth, or more than one of the above.

Yes... yes it does.

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I think another person hit it on the head, we need contacts that give zone type missions. Something simple like "I lost my watch in the caves, can you go get them?" Just to add flavor to the different areas and promote exploration.

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Quoted for Truth. Too much of that sort of thing can get old in a hurry (harkens back to the good old Ultima Online days of endless insigificant fetch quests), but a couple of such things would be nice.

To an extent there is content that does that already - specifically the Kill X of Y type of missions, but most of them are very static.

All in all, I agree, Paragon city could use a bit more action in it.

I really think there's only so much you can do with a static world, though.

Most succesful open world type MMOs have had a more dynamic world, where player actions can alter the common landscape. Not incidently, most such succesful games have been more PvP oriented. The grandaddy of all MMOs, Ultima Online, was a good example of this - it had open PvP, player housing, and even player-run cities, and as a result there were sweeping player-driven plotlines, and massive, in-character, conflicts that altered the shape of the world (and yes, there was griefing too - and how - but we dealt with it). To this day, there are player-characters who are as well known on their home servers as major NPCs despite having given up the game half a decade ago because of their role in such player-driven, open-world activities.

Even games with more restricted, less sandboxy feals to them generally succeed at open world content with some level of dynamism in the environment. Warhammer Online would be a good example of this. The basic paramters of the world are very much set in stone, but nonetheless player actions (notably, success in inter-factional conflict) can have a real, meaningful effect on game-play and even on the physical environment for everyone. The entire game is set up to ensure that out-doors, in the same common area as everyone else, is where the action is.

Personally I would KILL for someone to make Ultima Online: the Superhero Edition, now with updated graphics. But that game is not City of Heroes. City of Heroes is a different kind of game; one designed to appeal to a differnt kind of mind-set, and one with its own particular advantages and limitations.

If Champions is shaping up to be that game, then thats magnificant, though from what Ive seen so far Im skeptical.

Definately a bug. Some guildmates of mine were runnning a farm mission racking up thousands of tickets a shot (much as they always have - I suspect they would have mentioned any noticeable reduction... loudly).

You might have had a point there once, ZeroNorway, but through the magic of flashback missions there is no longer any such thing as outleveling content. You can (and I have, personally) race your way to 50 in under a week, then go back, whenever you have a spare hour and no team to play with, and run through those story arcs that interest you/you havent done for a while. Its marvelous!

Of course, there are some people who dont CARE about the city's background or major heroes and villains and once again I am moved to wonder why that is inherently evil, and they should be forced to play the game the way you think is right.

As for removing experience, that would be an interesting idea, but the constant harping on how 90% of all people are powerleveling not withstanding (and incidently, I swear to high heaven I will pay cash money to anyone who can provide actual data to support these spurious claims) the developers (who DO have access to the hard data) have stated many times that the majority of City of Heroes players do not have any level 50 characters. It doesnt make sense to me to punish the majority of the playerbase for playing a new set of content - especially such a large and interesting one.

As for your three "solutions".

I should be alowed to spend 12 horus straight in MA scenarios too. as previously harped I ahve the right to play whatever parts of the game interest me. Preventing me from doing things that are fun will not make me do things that I do not find un, it will just make me play less (and also hate you). After more than 4 years it is not an exageration to say that I ahve ltierally seen it all. I have palyed every single mission in the game at least once, and ussually more than 2-dozen times. In the case of all the content for level 50 characters, Ive probably played it 2-dozen times in the last month or two. But now there's the mission architect. There are thousands (literally, thousands - or so Im told) of mission that Ive never seen before, with whole new factions, and whole new NPCs and whole new plots, and whole new tactical scenarios (well, the choices are still a bit limited on that last point). Why would I want to spend even a single moment, all things being equal (I might join a taskforce or other team if my guild is doing it or if I really need the merits/drops for something), when there are all these things Ive never seen before waiting for me to play them? I dont wnat to join you damn radio team. Get over it. Forbidding peole from experiencing the content they want to because its not how you want them to have fun is the path to fail, commercially and also in general.

Two is impractical. Even assuming we were to accept powerleveling/farming missions as somehow against the cosmic moral code of the gaming universe, I do not see how you could create any automated system of controls or limits to prevent that would not also do tremendous damage to the Mission Architect in general (and ironicly make it staler and more cookie-cutter-esque).

Three is actually not a bad idea. It has never been clear to me why you are not auto-logged out while inside NORMAL missions like you are when on the streat. I assume there must be a reason for it, but for the life of me I cant see one.

Lycaeus speaks words fo wisdom. There are people who enjoy farms to. They pay their monthly ees and thy ahv a right to enjoy the gamehowever they choose. Also, I have to tell you,oce yuove run every missionin the game 20 times, you get to aq place where you dont need to run it the 21st. youre testing out a new character build (there are people who enjoy the game for teh strategic excercise of character building too, to say nothing of the th justwant to use cool/neet looking powers they havent played with before) and wan to see what it can do you want to arrive at a levle wher eit can actually do anything in a matter of days, rather than weeks.

People powerleveling doesnt prevent you from playing your way. And even if it did, forcing them to stop wouldnt work - more of them than not would simply leave and go play oneof the six-thousand other games on the marcket that will let them play by their prefered method.

Does farming appeal to me personally? Not really - I never found leveling to be hard in this game anyway (my longest from 1 to 50 is less than a month). I actually enjoy the oposite aspect of the character creator - rediculously ahrd mobs, archvillains and scenarios that make the game actually challenging again. But not everyone likes the same things I like and unlike some people, apparenlty, Im OK with that.

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In keeping with the fun and not to miss any great stories
this is the thread you can list
Mission name
Description
Length
and also give positive feedback
please keep negative feedback to minimum unless critical thinking.

Arc Name:
Arc ID:
Faction:
Creator Global/Forum Name:
Difficulty Level:
Synopsis:
Estimated Time to Play:
Link to More Details or Feedback:

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Arc Name: To Save a Single Life
Arc ID: #98156
Faction: Soldiers of Rularuu; Storm Elementals; Cultof Rularuu (custom faction)
Creator Global/Forum Name: @Alphatia/Fernandes
Difficulty Level: Extreme
Synopsis: A mysterious mystic from another world contacts you and asks you to look into the the dissapearence of a friend of hers - a midnighter mage named Sir Johnathan Phoenix. Your investigation leads you on an epic quest across the cosmos, cultimating in a battle with Rularuu, the Ravager of Worlds.
Estimated Time to Play: 1-2 hours.

DISCLAIMER 1: This arc features 2 of my own player characters (one as the contact, the other as the missing person). The story isn't really about them so much as Rularuu and his minions, but if that just pisses you off on principal, look elsewhere.

DISCLAIMER 2: When I say extreme difficulty, I mean it. The cult of Rularuu, and the Rularuu boss encounte rin the final (timered) mission have been designed to challenge the best builds and players in the game. You have been warned.

Alas, if it only it were so. Unfortunately I dont see how its feasible.

It increses with reputation difficuklty setting (heroic-invincible) if thst what you meen. Harder missions (mobs, archvillains, objectives, ECT that are dificult to defeat/complete compared to dev-created content) are NOT worth any more tickets than really gimpy enemies. This is extremely unforutnate in my (unashamedly elitist) opinion, but from a realistic perspective I am not sure how you could program any sort of automatic system to give a truly fair evaluation of custom mob difficulty.

Mmm, a cut scene generator would be /awesome/ no matter how bad its interface is.

If its the one in your signature your lack of play be because its from levels 10-14! Not everyone loathes the exemplar system like I do, but thats a biiiig hit even for more laid back gamers. Also, people dont tend to stay naturally in that range for very long - the levels just come to fast at that point. Perhaps if you bumped the level up to the 20-30 range you'd see more action.