Nethergoat

don't hold your breath expecting drop rate changes for anything mere days after the issue goes live.

Scrap, you are a king among men for your excellent work explaining set IO's to cement-heads like me who're interested but not smart enough to figure out the best way to use them.

My hat is off to you sir!

late to the party comments:

I've played a couple of other mm's and never really hit it off with any of them. I'd usually delete them in the early to late 20's due primarily to the maniacal thirst of ambushes for mm blood & their complete immunity to distracting pet aggro.

My ninja/dark MM got deleted. my thugs/poison got deleted. my bots/bubbles got deleted (even as my buddy has taken his to the high 30s and loves him to death).

But I wanted to check out traps, and I've already had my fill of corrupters....so mercs/traps it was.

And so far so good. Traps takes care of the thing that annoyed me most about mm's, the insane pursuit of various ambushes. The combination of caltrops, bubble & acid mortar has proven effective against even the most overwhelming and agressive ambush...even multiple ambushes.

I'm in the high 20's now, and have some informed comments to make-

Skipping triage beacon for the medicine pool, at least early on, seems blindingly obvious to me.

With slotting the interruptibility of the heals is basically a non-factor, they're up pretty quick with a couple of recharges & the ability to restore most of a pet's health and keep them in the fight is hard to overrate.
The same goes for the self heal, only more so....avoiding otherwise certain debt is better than eating an ice cream cone while riding a unicorn through a field of candycanes.

The medic's heal nice when he uses it, and handy between fights, but it's desperately unreliable and he's usually the first to face-plant thanks to his short range (another benefit of Heal Other- keeping the medic alive with your heal means he gets more heals off).

The triage beacon is a cool, very thematic power and I'll probably pick it up later on, when 'must have' powers get thin- I always liked Regen Aura on my empath, and I can see the beacon being very beneficial in prolonged static battles.

But the Beacon is situationally useful while Aid Other is globally useful.

I don't have Poison Trap yet, but I've teamed with enough who do to consider it an absolute Must Have power. It does amazing things, and I'm salivating at the thought of the devestation I'll be able to spread by combining it with my acid mortar.

Just a couple of quibbles with an otherwise excellent guide.
Cheers!

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It was interesting to see how people approached a genuine direct question. Some insist on having to complicate the issue, others just answer.

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Nobody has to "complicate" the issue, some just insist on oversimplifying. =)

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Do you like PvP?


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I like PvP quite a bit.

Unfortunately I dislike the way it's handled in this game quite a bit.

safeguards are mind-numbingly boring.
the only reason I do 'em is to get a temp power.

mayhems on the other hand are very fun and engaging (solo, anyway).

Taking your villain into those familiar Paragon City zones has novelty value. And there are some fresh enemies you haven't already seen a billion times. And you get to trash the place, earning you more time to find some side missions and earn more time so you can trash MORE of the place.

All in all, a fun diversion from 'regular' missions. I do feel the ambushes on team mayhems are borked, but solo or with a small, well organized team it's a neat way to spend some time.

Safeguards on the other hand are just 'more of the same', fighting stuff you always fight in zones you've spent too many hours in. You can do side missions to get extra time...for what? To 'arrest' more hellions, or whatever?

Lacking the novelty of setting and gameplay the villain Mayhems offer there's no reason to do a safeguard other than the temp power.

And they're painfully, boringly easy.
I feel the Mayhems are way too tough in certain circumstances, but I actually prefer that to the tedium of a Safeguard.

summary-
safeguards need a new setting and they need an equivalent mechanism to the fun of blowing up cars, boxes and parking meters for kicks. And they need to be harder. And some unique enemies wouldn't hurt.

=D

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The information is available with a five second Google search.

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And thus useless to the vast majority of players.

defending a broken system because you can find the answer somewhere else is silly.

it's not like the game is swimming in content to the point it can afford to hide big chunks of it from 99% of the playerbase.

The problem with the unlockable contacts it their arbitrary nature. I've done missions for an unlockable not even knowing it was unlockable, let *alone* how I unlocked it.

The idea is fine, provided everyone knows where to find them and the requirements for unlocking them are clearly explained. Then it becomes a challenge, and a fun addition to the game.

Players shouldn't have to buy a guide or access google to access the unlockable contact content.

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I am putting the requirements for Contacts - and their location - in the Prima Guide...

but here was our intent with these Contacts - reward Exploration. Reward people who poke around to find new things. Now, the down side is that once found, these Contacts don't inform the player about what it takes to unlock them.

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Rewarding exploration is great...if you found a contact and the let you know *how* to unlock them, that would be rewarding exploration, and it would be fun.

Having contacts scattered around with no means to determine what they want isn't rewarding anything....and putting the answers in the Prima guide seems to be rewarding the people who buy the guide at the expense of your other customers.

Unlockable contacts would be fine if there was some in-game method for discovering and accessing them.

As things stand they're just a wasted opportunity to add depth to the game.

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*mumbles about CoH barely getting anything, again*

*and also mumbles about how the patron powers appear to be a bit of a letdown*

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- CoV has a lot of catching up to do.

- and whadda ya mean 'letdown', you can shoot SPIRIT SHARKS!!!11111


=P

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AND now...we're changing the way Archvillains spawn. A ton of forum goers disliked adding so many AV's into missions a while back...so we've come up with a solution. If the team size and mission difficulty are ABOVE a certain level, an Archvillain spawns. Below that, players will face only an Elite Boss. If the mission is set on the first two levels of difficulty, it takes 4 heroes or more to spawn an Arch Villain. On the third level, 3 heroes or more. On the fourth level, 2 heroes. On the highest (Invincible), a solo hero will spawn an AV. Note this works in BOTH City of Heroes and Villains.

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Excellent.

It's still troubling that the AV swap and the stealth nerf weren't flagged as problematic in whatever Cyrptic meeting spawned them, but better late than never.

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All these reasons are why they are worth more XP than normal.

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sez Positron

Nobody likes going to the dentist regardless of how many lollipops they get afterward.

Man, Cryptic comes up with some of the most bass-akward justifications for bad game design I've ever heard....

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However, if I had been a subscriber to coh, I would not have shelled out 50 bucks for CoV. I was gone for a while, and so to me it was just like buying the game all over again. Not only that, but I think most people were under the impression that the content of CoV and the amount of programming involved in that content would match CoH when it launched.

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I have a similar background (left CoH, came back for CoV) and I'm far from being a huge supporter of the devs, but I don't agree with your conclusions here.

The game has more content than CoH did at launch...WAY more. Missions are a thousand times better, and there are more varieties of them (even if some are misguided, like the invisible bomb ones). The AI is still nothing to write home about, but it's quite a bit better than it used to be. The variety of opponents is likewise substantially greater.

There may be fewer zones, but they're more alive- CoH has great swaths of completely empty territory (faultline, the Negative Zone or whatever they call it, etc). I have issues with the look of the CoV zones (remixed King's Row, top to bottom), but they're thick with action, more like Striga Isle than Skyway City. All to the good.

As for the powers and ATs...so they're not entirely new....big deal, they play entirely differently from their CoH counterparts. And I'm more interested in gameplay than in how something looks or what name you call it by.

Nobody familiar with the immense amount of work that goes into a game expected CoV to be entirely new, not if they had a prayer of making their release date.

I for one am entirely happy with the mix of old and new represented by CoV. I get a nostalgic charge from the parts that remind me of CoH, but there's enough that's new and different to make CoV feel fresh in spite of the hundreds of hours I spent playing its predecessor.

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Wait a tick....so you are hoping that the cancelations will hurt the devs, but you can't wait til Statesman's next post...does this mean that you are going to keep your CoH account even thought you don't like the changes?

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I cancelled for a good long while and it didn't prevent me periodically auditing the forums to make sure things went as badly as I expected them to.

Your posting Q.A. is on par with Cryptic's game Q.A.

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Bug… In an upcoming patch, flying entities that are disorient will no longer behave oddly.

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Huh.

This has been a bug since, around launch I wanna say.

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And I wanna agree with you. =D

so far the early game in CoV "feels" about the same to me as the early game in CoH did, before you could get a ton of influence from your high level friends.

the dribs and draps from rescuing people are a difference, and there should be some CoV equivalent (mugging people, getting to keep "a taste" of our bank heists, whatever).

But overall, it seems pretty similar to me.

Regarding debt starting at 10th level, I'm happy to trade whatever debt-based infamy I'd have gotten under the old system for getting to 14th faster. You can never get your travel power too soon, IMHO.

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Oh yeah pets do not do the amazing damage people think they do. IF they did you would see controllers constantly killing tanks and scrappers. Most of the time you see controllers killing controllers, blasters and defenders.


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sure.....but most of the time you see scrappers and tanks killing controllers, blasters and defenders too. =P

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I don't mean to be negative or stir up controversy, but I'm curious why the change is happening at all.

It's obvious these changes are directed at Powerleveling. Since PLing happens primarily in instanced missions, yet these changes aren't going to have any effect in these missions... then why implement them at all?

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one, it's a drag on team xp.
two, it's a cosmetic fix that will make it LOOK like fewer people are being PL'ed since they'll be sitting somewhere else instead of on the train station roof.

IMHO it will just lead to team friction and disharmony in a game that is trying to encourage grouping- I hope it never makes live.

here's an idea for dealing with the inevitable xp loss that this ridiculous Exp Leash will cost you:

keep a rough mental estimate of what you're losing as you go about your usual gaming regimen and then make up the difference on a wolf mission or acting as a bridge for somebody.

And those of you who feel your game experience is cheapened unless you drag every single exp kicking and screaming from the clawed hands of the devs:
Feel free take your Exp Leash losses in stride and use the extra time it will take you to hit 50 doing the same missions over and over and over.

I still support your right to play the game however you want, even though you don't return the favor. =D

still a kludgy PITA, still won't do much to deter those dread "pl'er" boogiemen, but less of a stab in the back for regular gamers.

it's still crap, but at least now it's got half the calories of regular crap.

as a promotional throw-in, the comic was fine. But that's not all it was intended to be- they sell the thing in stores, after all.

Measured on an objective scale of comic quality, it was semi-pro. The writing was superficial, the characters were profoundly boring (Horus was the only one with any pizazz) and the art wouldn't have cut it on a 'real' comic.

Waid is an experienced comic author and can't help but improve the product the same way replacing your pal Josh with a professional chef in the kitchen of your resturant would.

Kudos to the community for generating the contest and the avatar, and kudos to Statesman for making it his own.

regarding safety:
SS has *never* gotten my speedster character killed over his 33 level lifespan (well, minus the 13 levels he didn't have it).

That's pretty safe, IMHO.

I can't speak about flight from firsthand experience, because it's *so painfully slow* for my friend that has it I would never consider taking it as my primary means of travel.

I have it on one character because I wanted to check it out, a level 16 controller, and it's really neat and fun to use, but man alive is it SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW.
It's "safe" in the same way an 93 year old woman driving to the corner market is safe.....and in my experience, the fastest travel power is every bit as safe anyway, so that's not a selling point.

I think it could use a speed bump, for selfish reasons- I'd like to take it, but I never will as long as every other travel power in the game makes it look like fliers are towing a ball-and-chain along with them everywhere they go.

There needs to be a way for non-combat ATs to solo the majority of their missions, period.

Grouping should be an option, not a necessity.

I appreciate the logic behind the boss changes, and I like the fact that they're being looked at, but there needs to be some alternative for soloers looking to do their own missions. Either a way to get around the bosses (as in blinkie missions), or an alternative mission track for those ATs who simply can't kill a boss on their own.


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and while I'm here-

my regen scrapper still tears through bosses like wet toilet paper.
Should I expect a "balance change" to reflect the recent statements that no single character should be able to lay the smackdown on a boss minus luck and a bunch of inspirations?

originally I pictured the Shard being a little more dense, so you could leap around from rock to rock JUST using superleap...which sounded cool.

I really don't mind the gysers, except for a couple that seem to consistently land you off-target, and a couple that are a bit tricky to get to.

handing out jetpacks that let you fly at the door would be kinda sucky for people who do have fly....they suffer for their slowness in other zones, I don't begrudge them their superiority in the Shard.

letting people buy jetpacks with hover capability, otoh, would be useful and handy without stepping on the toes of flyers. If you missed your rock, you could flip it on and hover back up- a minor annoyance in place of the major one of getting bumped back to the start.