IanTheM1

If the solo option is slow and restrictive enough to not even be worth it, then why have it? That's just faulty design, plain and simple. If your goal is to strong arm players into team content, just lock them out instead of hiding that intention behind a pitiful solo option.

All we're looking for is a solo option that is viable. I don't see why people who aren't interested in raids (or screwing around in Praetoria in general) need to be treated like second class citizens. The solo option does not need to be just as fast as raiding, it does not need to be supremely easier than raiding. The gap in raid versus solo time investment just needs to be tightened so that one player isn't hitting Omega level by the time another is just finishing up their Interface.

I feel bad to call it out like this, but this exact same flawed design was previously seen with Vanguard Merits. And someone even compared this to the Contaminated in Recluse's Victory. The guy behind those as well as the Incarnate system? Positron. I don't mean this as a slight against the man, I just want to know why exactly the solo player needs to marginalized so harshly in every new system.

Side-stepping the worrying and rather mind boggling poor design concerns, is anyone else disappointed in the plot they're pushing forward? I could maybe buy into the whole "The Well's gone mad is empowering Cole" idea...but turning Cole into a conqueror of the multiverse? We kind of already have one of those...he's called Rularuu.

Only thing is that villain side needs its own terminals of some kind (and Praetoria while we're at it, for consistency's sake). Otherwise, I fully agree.

Things break down to some degree because Tar Patch was originally a terrible and borderline worthless tier 2 power that was solely a slow patch which was then given its resistance debuff later without much regard to how early it came in the set.

And then Trick Arrow was designed...poorly, let's say.

Snipes are a weird situation because I think they were designed before it became clear that teamed combat post-level 25 moves too quickly to generally make use of them. I really don't mind a situational power, but I will say they lose a lot of their punch when you're constantly damage-capped and fighting things that die lightning fast thanks to stacked buffs/debuffs.

But they do have their uses on smaller teams and while solo. A theoretically risk-less alpha-strike that gets the ball rolling both on dealing damage and building up Defiance for Blasters is not bad. And Praetoria has shown that pulling is still the tactic of choice when the game decides to spawn 60+ enemies in one room.

That said, I don't see the point in getting rid of the interrupt. Not only is it a sensible drawback, I don't really see why they need to be 100% reliable mid-combat...that's not what they're meant for and you're basically introducing a 150 foot range Tier 4 blast otherwise. An interrupt is also much more preferable to being locked down in a long, rooted animation - that can get a Blaster killed. I am not entirely unopposed to slightly upping their damage and slightly reducing the animation time, though.

As for the AoE effects...meh. I've always been highly resistant to the "single target sucks" crowd, and I don't see TAoE snipes being all that popular when they slow you down due to being a snipe and otherwise being half as good as just using your existing AoEs. Plus they add another AoE to sets that don't necessarily need it.

I'm more generally concerned with the fact that snipe debuff numbers are off in a number of places. Dark and Psy snipes only do base debuff values instead of having a bonus and apparently there's no difference in endurance drain between Blaster and Defender Zapp...except in PVP?

I was about to say I didn't see the point, since if you got a particular recipe from, say, a mission complete...you'd kind of know.

But I also agree that the IO system is a bit of a user-unfriendly mess due to lack of full documentation of things like drop pools...

At least one of the arcs explicitly states that there are still a few Syndicate-controlled cities out there.

Also, all evidence points to Mother of Mercy being what's at the end of the "Road to Nowhere" in the south of Imperial City.

And there's two versions of the heat-seeking kind, I believe. One spawns and targets one specific person on the team no matter what. Who gets picked feels like it may be attached to who triggers the ambush. IE, the Blaster getting the killing blow on the boss will get him the ambush aggro. Or the Stalker scouting ahead trips the invisible line that spawns an ambush. But I'm not 100% sure on that.

The other is the kind seen in Mayhem missions. The Longbow ambushes there will split evenly between the team. This obviously has its own problems since they'll still go after Stalkers with no problem, but it's better than a death squad coming out of nowhere to smack down a random squishy.

I also played it at Origins way back when. It was a fun little romp, though our group wasn't entirely playing the real thing. The GM had us ignoring endurance entirely, for example.

I've also fussed around with the quickplay kit, and what they actually had there was rather...lacking. Even really basic explanations of what certain numbers/listings/stuff was were missing, to my dismay. And while the core D10 ruleset was actually pretty nice, I didn't like how they got into the same finicky minutiae that other RPGs get into - things like X points of strength = able to lift Y pounds of weight.

But it is quite timely that there's some interest in City of Heroes PnP RPG stuff. And that's all I'll say for now.

And nearly forgot this from the story on the GR site...