Liquid

I agree with everything said in this post, and want to add to this last paragraph. I feel that Vanguard armor is a good example of appropriately thematic costume unlocks (I don't include the Weapons only because they are currently the only way to get "laser weapons". We need some basic laser swords and such available at level 1, like how we have energy shields at creation that serve the same thematic concepts but aren't as fancy as Vanguard shields) because Vanguard is presented as an actual group. They wear that armor. If you want to wear armor, you have many armor options at creation, so needing to unlock Vanguard armor only restricts you if your concept is specifically to be Vanguard (which I have sympathy for, but isn't something I feel I've addressed plenty of times and don't want to get into in this post). Incarnates, to date, are just "more powerful superheroes/supervillains" and as such, have never had a uniform. I doubt that now that these pieces are out, that they'll put them on Statesman, Lord Recluse, Tyrant, Trapdoor, Reichsman, or Hamidon (I'd love to see them try that one).

Tell me if you feel that I'm being unfair here, Arcana, but I feel like the way this game has handled unlockable costume items wasn't really designed at all. Overall it feels like there is no set of design rules for costume unlocks, and that they are arbitrarily chosen (sometimes well, sometimes poorly). For some pieces, it's as if the developers said "hey, we need some more earnable rewards, what have you got/can you come up with, art team?", and it has been that way since the day they chose to gate capes at level 20 instead of giving out basic capes at level 1 and gating "fancy capes" at level 20. Prior to Incarnate-system gated music-themed chest emblems, the most obvious example of the arbitrary nature of unlockable costume items was the TF Commander epaulettes costume piece. In fact, it's pretty bizarre that spiked epaulettes are available at creation, but normal epaulettes are not.


I agree with this as well. It's obviously going to be different for different people, but I get no sense of achievement from unlocking costume parts. I just think "now this character finally looks how she/he was supposed to look at level 1". I don't mind it when it's just a fancier version of what I had at level 1, but going from 1 to 35 with a normal blade on my Katana Scrapper whose very concept was that she'd found an extremely high tech laser weapon from the future was pretty lame (this was years before the Vanguard Pack).

My sense of achievement comes from getting a tell that says "Awesome costume/character concept!" I got one from a GM the other day. It made me feel pretty good.

"Gone to the americans" is a reference to a post made long, long ago by a poster named UniqueDragon whose first (and for years, only) post was widely regarded as a humorous example of overreaction. See the ParagonWiki article here. The post was loaded with spelling and grammatical errors, and I believe his original intention was to say that CoH might as well not be available to Americans (which is just as offensive, but the opposite of how it reads).

Anyway, usually people use it as a hyperbolic stand-in for complaint posts.

This is REALLY nice to hear.

Edit: and it's nice to see you posting on topics like this!

It's client side lag, so you probably don't get it with your uber machine. Some textures in that Warehouse map are too high res. I think I remember a dev (probably David Nakayama) saying that they were aware, and were going to fix it.

I also discovered last night that opening the Incarnate Tree interfaces (the "Create" tab with the power trees) take me from 35 FPS to 12 FPS in Grandville. I can open and close it and it goes up and down accordingly.

I'm having the same issue with my arc "Legacy of a Rogue", and Kai's suggestion to click the mission tabs didn't help, unfortunately.

Since I doubt that they want to go through and remove all the AE buildings from the game, I'd expect that it would be in addition to the AE, and not replacing it, as you describe.

That being said, were this the design phase for Issue 14, I'd have opposed the whole storyline behind Architect Entertainment entirely. But I'm not going to push for its removal now that people have written stories assuming its existence (myself included). I know I wouldn't get anywhere with a proposal like that, anyway.

Yes that was what I was thinking, too. The current "hologram" contacts could be scattered about the world (allowing MA authors to choose location as well as the contact itself), but hidden until an arc is taken. Or they could even have a phone-only one like some Praetorian contacts.

I think it's a big stretch too, but that's the only connection I can infer from the context in the article.

It feels similar to the rumor that they thought further Powerset Proliferation was unnecessary because of side-switching. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but it's not the craziest thing I've heard from a dev.

My interpretation was that the devs view the Mission Architect as "content on demand" because you can just stand in one room, pick a mission, and keep running content all day long. The fact that all missions are in the same location was a feature that I thought was very odd to promote when the AE went live (since it's something farmers would love), but they did do it.

Meanwhile, the LFG tool is content on demand because you click it and it (eventually, though I think they expected more people to use it, which would make it much faster) puts you into a trial, with no other effort on your part.

Agreed. The one thing we really needed, the thing we asked for at HeroCon and in many other opportunities to request features, was a way to mark an existing team as "looking for more". Basically, a reverse of the existing search/status tools. This feature could list the members in the group, their AT, and a line of text explaining what they were doing and looking for ("level 35 story arc missions", "Sewer team", "Newspapers in Grandville", or "MoLRSF looking for x,y, and z"), and they could set their team to allow auto-joining. Team seekers could search this list, and contact the leaders to see if they could join, or if a team was set to allow auto-join, they could click a "join" button and immediately be placed on the team.

I was surprised at what we got, as multi-team events work a lot better when organized, and I don't know anyone that has used the LFG tool since after the first couple of days I20 was live.

It says to me that they view the AE as "content on demand". They think the fact that you can stand in one building all day long and play missions is a major feature of the system (and they've said that from the beginning). Which I think is kind of sad; I think it's a massive drawback, because it makes AE missions not feel "real", and it makes farming even easier. Yet, for some reason, they say "They're just not interested in supporting it as a tool for farming." It was born as a much better farming tool than story creation tool, due to many of the design decisions, and forcing all missions to the exact same location is one of them.

The first thing they could do to increase the story-telling emphasis and decrease the farming emphasis would be to demolish the AE buildings and move the missions out into the "real world".

Thanks, the feeling is mutual.

You're right, there is a sign of that. But I don't think we're going to get it for free on Unstoppable, and I'd rather not pay the price to get it. If I'm wrong about that, then I'd love to see a 99% endurance drop instead of a 100% drop.

That's actually what I'm trying to avoid, though I can see how my wording sounds like the opposite. This whole thread started by comparing Unstoppable to SoW, and I'm saying that if you look at the set as a whole, and remove Unstoppable, you wouldn't remove SoW to make a comparable set out of Willpower, so I don't think it's appropriate to think that we can trade Unstoppable for something like SoW. It would make the average performance of the Invulnerability set higher than I think is intended, because SoW is less situational than Unstoppable, and I think Unstoppable is supposed to be very situational, not something you use as often as SoW.

I agree with your description of the trap that you get in when you compare powers, so I'm trying to compare the entire set in the absence of those powers, and I'm saying "removing SoW from Willpower has a closer effect on the set as a whole to removing Dull Pain from Invulnerability, not Unstoppable, and removing Unstoppable from Invulnerability has a closer effect on the set as a whole to removing Resurgence from Willpower, not SoW". I believe removing Unstoppable from Invulnerability, just like the proponents of a SoW replacement, has a minimal impact on its overall performance. I also believe that adding a SoW equivalent, just like the proponents of this, would increase the set's overall performance.

The difference in opinion here is that I think that this increase in overall performance would be unbalancingly large, while at the same time removing that edge-case where you can survive something that pumps out insane Energy/Negative/Fire/Cold along with either high def debuffs, high +tohit, or extra auto-hit damage, which only has a small impact on overall performance due to how situational it is. There are only a couple of things in the game like this currently, but it sounds like we're about to get another one, one nastier than we've ever seen, and we're probably going to have to face it over, and over, and over again to get whatever new Incarnate slots come out.

Someone may be able to prove me wrong mathematically (and I'd be interested to see it), but my experience with the two sets tells me that Invulnerability and Willpower are currently close enough to each other, performance-wise, that neither needs a boost relative to the other one. This obviously varies depending upon what you are facing-- Cimerorans are no threat to my Invuln Tanker, but can take down a WP Tanker while SoW is recharging, while WP Tankers perform much better against groups with lots of non-S/L damage, especially Psi. If you added a SoW like power to Invuln, I believe that it would hold every advantage over WP but Psi in the vast majority of the content.

That last bit was actually aimed at everyone advocating for a change. I hate it when a bunch of people agree that they'd prefer some change and one guy comes in and fights to the death against it just to defend the status quo no matter what it is. I just wanted to be clear that I'm not the type that defends the status quo regardless of logical arguments against it. I campaigned long and hard along with several others to get Invuln to its current state, but now I'm happy with it (short of a radical redesign that made it a completely Res, status/debuff-res, and +MaxHp based set, but that's never going to happen).

Anything that can be obtained easier or sooner via the event, but never exclusively during the event.

I must have missed where they said that. Was that in the original thread that was moved (I never saw that thread)? I don't see it on the news page.

I do see where Zwillinger says it below your post, though, so I believe you. The idea posted by MunkiLord about making the badge available later is a fine solution to the badge issue, then. I'd still attempt to get on to help with the server test on Freedom.

I'll wait until that one is fixed. Will you be notifying us when it is?