Iannis

Patron Pools were just a bad idea that were rikti monkied into the game. I think their thinking was that the Epic pools had been TOO good, so they wanted to NOT overpower Villains as they had done for Heroes, and then tying the unlock into getting handcuffed to serving a Patron since you were using their 'Signature' abilities. Even with the betrayal and surpassing your Patron in each arc it still just further threw your villain's essential lack of self-determination and power compared to the developer's Characters in your face, which everybody complained level 1-40 was too full of...rrr.

Honestly I doubt they considered the possibility of future a Going Rogue side-swapping system making that into the game so they probably never considered unlocking the pools via a story arc completion Badge to be an issue, to be fair.

And that Grandville update took forever to get published, too, I think it was almost a year after City of Villains launched just to put in the level 40+ content--compared to when City of Heroes launched and they patching in levels 40-50 consisting of Peregrine Island and later the immense (if unused) beautfil Shadow Shard relatively quickly.

I think Jack was just trying to preemptively kill CoX off so he wouldn't have to compete for subscriptions while Cryptic was developing the next superhero-themed MMORPG.

Scirroco isn't really a rogue type. He was all for conducting a magic ritual to forcibly alter the nature of man. It's still pretty much evil to use magic to make everybody 'become good', since he's robbing everyone of free will in the process.

swap ammo would be pretty easy

either give using a special ammo a to-hit buff for the instasnipe threshold (cryo or toxic providing more than fire, since fire is so much better than the other ammos and their negligible debuffs), or invert the lethal/elemental damage components so the other two ammos might actually matter. I think cold and toxic are a lot less resisted compared to fire (lethal goes without saying), but the % of elemental damage compared to the lethal damage just ends up making fire the best ammo even against fire-resistant stuff...DoT > useless debuff

I'd think the easiest way to make Munition's Body Armor more useful would be to make it into a clone of Wolf Spider Armor. Rename it to Combat Armor Suit, if we must rename things...

A minor passive S/L resist is rather silly on a blaster, but a minor mag threshold against everything but KB...golly, that's almost OP.

Sleep grenade is just silly because Sleep is so darn ineffective due to AOE splashing around everywhere. Heck, can't the grenade even break ITSELF due to having a damage component? I think Trick Arrow has a sleep secondary affect on an arrow that breaks its own sleep, too, lol. A place to put a really cheap, unused IO set I guess.

Grandfather Rule means Devices can't be overhauled too extremely.

Being able to manually trigger Time Bomb would make it immensely more useful.

Trip Mine is a touchy one. I remember the hilarious old days of letting a device blaster lay enough C4 to level the building and then everyone standing back and watching the enemy get blown to smithereens by the trip mines, but I haven't seen any groups moving that slowly (or willing to move that slowly) in years...if Trip Mine could become an Insta-cast, maybe give it a bit more recharge or endurance cost to compensate, I think that would be nifty. Get rid of that mechanic of hunching over and fiddling around with setting it up on the ground for ~6 second or whatever the interrupt activation time is.

And Smoke Nades were a rollercoaster. One of the most OP powers in the game originally when it utterly floored enemy's to-hit so everybody was Defense capped, then it got nerfed 3 ways to sunday. Would be funny if they added a minion-tier mag confuse and all the weak idgits began punching each other...

I foresee blasters begging to be grouped with VEAT Huntsmen and Widows running double Tactics. Amusing, since Tactics was the one I tended to toggle off when my blue bar was going down too fast since generally most people (sans AE babies) WEREN'T running completely Accuracy-unslotted, so 2x Tactics was such overkill.

If Dual Pistols dropped to the bottom of the barrel from the middle of the ground then I'd bet Swap Ammo is going to get a small +ToHit buff added to it for switching ammo types (unless they actually go and tweak numbers to give you any reason to NOT always use be using flaming rounds) I mean, you have to pay money for DP (assuming you never bought GR before Freedom launched), so having one of those fancy sets you want people to give you money for be an underperforming set is a self-faceplant from a sales point of view. What if Titan Weapons or Staves had been low-performing melee sets? Bet they wouldn't have sold so good. (StJ had the meaty face-pulping action people had been asking for since CoH beta as an alternative to MA instead of being omgoverpowered :P)

now whats that about Blasters getting kung-fu as a secondary? oh baby. Give me some body armor, some punches+kicks and some pistol-whipping action.

Only thing I never liked about blasters was vulnerability to being CC'd.

Soldiers of Arachnos with their slight built-in thresholds in their spider armors were just wonderful for that. I loved playing me a blasty-offenderish Huntsman build where I had my gun and didn't have to worry about being mezzed so much.

Aren't they just taking a long overdue reworking of the old-style full drain, long recharge Nuke attacks, and maybe overhauling gimpy old /Devices?

Females, in general. Female not-She-Hulk trolls that street fight. Female Family wearing dangerous dresses (or even just the usual mook suits) with dual pistols. Goth girl Skulls that darkness control. Warrior amazons emulating Xena: Warrior Princess with staves (wait--that was Gabby, her little sidekick). Tsoo tea house girls that do...uh, what other powers are new-ish and basically unrepresented? Time Control (oh man combined with Ink Men kinetics...owch, my speed!) The list goes on.

It's a subject that the devs don't want to do out of fear of causing a feminist tantrum about promoting violence against women, though, so it's never happening. Not entirely sure how the Hellion's Girlfriend got through.

AND NEMESIS NEEDS A BRASS PONY!

Dr. Q in under 3 hours? What a crazy world COH has become. Designed as a multi-day TF, slogged through in a single 8-9 hour session in practice and promptly forgotten by everybody except the most dedicated TF runners.

It hurt so much one Dr. Q run I did where the TF leader lost his connection and the star devolved onto a guy who had gone AFK an hour beforehand (presumably he fell asleep) and showed no signs of returning, with a GM that couldn't do anything about it because the rules.

Malaise shows back up...

and Sister Psyche is now one of the voices in his head!

Posi's merits did get nerfed somewhat when it transitioned into Ouro. I think it used to be 10 or 20 reward merits more when it was a real TF and not a flashback TF.

The recommended rewards that their data mined information spits out are iffy. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few blueside flashback arcs seriously out of wonk with merit/minute formula since nobody runs all that ancient content much due to SO MUCH FILLER PADDING and the data mining program either only looks at people ghosting through or people drudging through at insanely slow paces.

Because Peacebringers are terrible and Warshades, while awesome, require a lot more work to play. Hitting keys bound to all the shapeshifting antics you have to do and keeping those fluffies out full force and all that jazz up, foosh it takes some work.

That's supposed to be Penelope Yin?

I thought it was Mirror Spirit with a new outfit, or something.

Maybe they'll restore Tanker RES cap back to 99%, pre-Statesman nerfage. Brutes are muddy since they have Tanker resist caps but scrapper damage--best of both worlds!

Remember when they could pull 1/3 of Brickstown onto themselves and then stand there whistling while the whole zone Mapserver'd due to that many mobs being defeated at once by their blaster teammates all nova'ing together? lol, the good old days.

That or give tanker Taunts -RES or -DEF in addition to that 1st secondary attack swing debuffing a single target?

They had been infected with a nasty virus before. Some of those areas are still down since they're not restored from the clean-up effort yet.

Hopefully they haven't gotten infected again. But I don't see anything getting blocked from popping up by NoScript or Adblock on the paragonwiki site though. Might've just typed out the wikia and gotten led to a sleazy site designed to look like the titan network or something.

I had a Ninja/Storm and while all the chaos you unleash is fun (tornados and thunderstorms flying all over) it was too much of a hassle running around with Hurricane keeping things packed in to benefit from the massive tohit debuff (obnoxious Repel mechanic) and the pets being too squishy eventually got that MM permanently shelved. I pretty much refused to play the buff-oriented MMs before the casts became AoE for the same reason I hated Kinetics--I hate having to spend most of my time individually reapplying short-duration buffs. Since the quality of life improvement I tried out a Ninja/FF which is quite enjoyable. Pets are defensive enough to not be splattered constantly, and I can focus on Smoke Flashing to beef up the Oni's widespread damage or Jounin's nice single target choppy-choppy, and occasionally popping off cones of arrows.

I did try out a Demon/Trick Arrow once (just because TA is so lame on Corruptors or Defenders) and thought the lit up oil slicks blazing with demon fire sure were neat. Guess being able to insta-hold bosses when focusing Ice Arrow with the Prince was okay. Demons were pretty neat--might need to give them a second shake. A real shame TA is otherwise just so...one-trick arrow. Such a mediocre set that others outshine. Mercs are rather meh damage without slotting in Achilles' Heel procs (Thugs >), Bots are just kind of boring and blehcros have that terrible Lich and his wonderful uncontrollable knockback cone. Dunno about beasts since I didn't buy them.

I wish MMs had a really Advanced pet controls screen where you could check on and off what powers you want them to use so you could have more control over their behaviors. Nothing like having to tell a dumb-butt ninja to stop shooting his dinky little arrow and get into melee range to go to it with his ninja blade. Alternately, tell the range-oriented pets to not run into melee range to use their awesome Brawl attack.

One thing I do hate is you still occasionally have maps where the pets simply disappear, stuck in an elevator limbo loop. I wish Team Teleport would summon them out of that. (oh, and MM is the only AT I've ever seen Team TP useful on )

Praetoria flopped because it was anti-social. You had those forced to be solo loyalty missions at the end of short story arcs, you had villain groups that got real tough as they began spawning in larger numbers and then of course Praetoria only covering the quickest leveling range in the game was a terrible idea since you could easily miss huge swathes of the content and get shunted off into Primal Earth at 20.

GR was a demo of City of Heroes 2, if NCSoft was willing to invest in it. Apparently they're more interested in keeping the original afloat though.

And, worst of all, (still) no Ouroborous integration meaning people that didn't WANNA make a stable of new alts just to read the story lines were denied the ability to just Flashback and use their favored character.

Sounds like they just realized if Statesman is dead, then why is he standing in IP offering the STF still?

It was probably a Nemesis automaton. Fight Lord Recluse for Lord Nemesis!

there is an invention diversification, being a cap on the number of times a set bonus applies.

otherwise you'd probably see some really wacky builds (like actually applying slots to Brawl) designed to reach S/L defense cap on every AT just using IO bonuses. Probably already possible, actually, with the right amount of cash.

Woah, a new power pool instead of a new prim/secondary pool.

Think that's a first.

So, what, maybe ground-targeted powers like 1) Rune of Defense for some protection (CC protection for squishies gimmie), 2) Sigil of Warding as a lightning bolt trap, 3) Symbol of Fear for debuffing, 4) Barrier of Repulsion for repel that whip out a magic wizard staff to animate creating?

Mercs have needed help for a pretty long time. A group of street thugs apply leadership to themselves, but PROFESSIONAL MERCS don't? THAT STUFF IS BANANAS!

Mercs need to have some SWAT or Arachnos gadgetry added in to make them more dangerous. Just imagine if the Medic threw an Acid Grenade to eat RES and reduce the penalty of mercs being so Lethal-based. The grandfather rule means they wouldn't remove a terrible power like Serum (although making it an real Build-Up type power would make it more impressive--Smoke Flash is super nifty giving your pet that window of automatic critical hits), although it might be funny if somehow they remade it to make the henchman it was applied disappear and get replaced by a HULKED OUT Supatroll (totally NOT the Hulk) temporary minion that either dies FREEEMing or reverts back to normal/dies at the end of the buff.

Oh, and don't forget about Blaster Devices. That set has aged awfully. Targeting Drone could stand to have a bit of +DMG added (not as much as a build up since it's constant, of course) and one of those wish list things was re-making Time Bomb to be something you could lay and then get a TRIGGER button to detonate on your command. Heck, why make it completely lethal? Have it open up a Cryo/Incendiary/Chemical bomb on a trigger using Dual Pistol code! Devices has Caltrops and the toe trip mine and that's all it has going for it, really. That giving the blaster's Cloaking Device a crit when Hidden never panned out.

The Battalion, starting in the ruined Galaxy City where the Shivan vanguard are really starting to gel up into some nasty business. And then into space to fight their spaceships!

Following the Battalion move up to Rularuu, that crazy dimension-eating god. Lughebu is smalltime compared to a god that's so strong he busted down into numerous different colossal incarnates in the shadow shard which then created huge swarming armies--what if he was actually united again?

soloing a rikti pylon isn't really that much of a test

a good test would be to go to DA and do incarnate stuff on x8, and see who moves through that faster

Scrappers are more efficient AOE. Stalkers might kill a pylon faster, but that's just single target...and being the best single target takedown is supposed to be a stalkers' job.