PleaseRecycle

Excellent news. Been looking forward to them since their announcement. Perhaps with a little trepidation, but it's been a while since something really shook up the market.

There was some ambiguity about whether you could slot three pieces of the superior set in two different powers or if you had to have all six slots in the same power but only three upgraded to superior if you wanted to double up on s/l defense - anyone know definitively?

In fairness it is the upper half of most players that does the heavy lifting in terms of completing CoH content. Now if you meant a player split vertically, that would be more problematic.

The scrapper AT set is being changed to function how I initially thought it did, i.e. such that it modifies the specific crit rates of powers as opposed to applying a flat buff to the basic 5% rate. There's your scrapper buff right there. I wouldn't have made that change myself but I'm not going to complain about it!

It doesn't really bother me on my EA scrapper. I view the stealth as nothing more than a bonus since energy cloak would be a fantastic power even if it gave no stealth at all. It also makes stealthing glowies much more challenging, which I like, to the extent that it is possible for a defense set to be challenged by that. One thing it does do is let you fight in relatively close proximity to other spawns, in my experience: it feels like it doesn't suppress all the way in combat. That could be totally psychosomatic though.

Entropic aura definitely taunts things even while you're stealthed. I'd be surprised if the devs had even tried to prevent that behavior from occurring but stranger things have happened.

Techbot, I totally agree that the mutant pack faces are phenomenal and they should produce more things like that. I also see the value in the normal mapped faces, however: they're almost audaciously nondescript, but that means you can tog them up any way you like. An issue I have with bioluminescent, for example, is that the eyes look a lot better with some colors of skin and glow than with others. Obviously a problem that one can easily work around but it is a trade-off.

The other thing I'd say about the normal mapped parts is give em a chance. The steampunk faces were, as far as I'm aware, the first generation of that tech's application to player pieces. As one would expect, they're not perfect. But consider the piece that's the topic of this thread: ignoring the toes thing, the strapped heels are definitely still not a perfect costume piece, yet thanks to normal mapping they are the first time that a city of heroes character can have non-mechanical ankles. Kind of. I would agree that a lingering issue is the fact there aren't many other options you can use that blend seamlessly with the normal mapped pieces. This may be a case where the devs don't consider it as annoying as some players do - look at the spring fling banner in the launcher, biolum-woman has sleeves that go exactly up to her forearms and then bare skin that isn't even from the bioluminescent set just so she can have those gloves! Wouldn't that be annoying?

Fair point. Talk of how that was the golden age of CoX faces strikes me as slightly odd though, as that does more than just slightly imply that they should go back to doing those. The thing is, all of CoV's faces look the same to me because they're all gruff and grumpy and weird. I doubt the devs would consider those faces suitable to be ported to players given the wonky nose issue alone, but more generally the fact that they are complete packages not designed to be customizable with masks, beard options, and so on.

Given that a solid half of the characters that I see running around the city either look like or explicitly state in their description that they are some kind of robot, demigod, demon, alien, apparition, homunculus, et cetera, it seems like any serious consideration of the super hero license as anything but an attempt to tie character creation together back when the vast majority of existing costume parts were pretty standard superhero stuff will fall apart when the de jure roleplay ideas slam into the de facto reality of the game as it's played, i.e. by a wide variety of character concepts that would have no use for a secret identity in the first place. Exhale.

If you think all or even most of the player base would agree that adding nothing but grizzled lumberjack faces with wicked witch noses from here on out would be awesome, well, I suppose my diction so far in this sentence makes my thoughts on that clear enough. It's worth considering that those "great, realistic" faces were all added for CoV and are all clearly designed to give CoV a drearier tone than CoH had already established.

Well, as one Mr. Robert Liefeld, esq. has demonstrated time and time again, drawing feet is so difficult that half the time you might as well not even bother. This could be a case of unrealistic expectations.

Basically the main problem with titan weapons is that every single power in titan weapons apart from build momentum and taunt is exemplary in some way. It has amazing aoe, amazing single target attacks, fantastic speed, colossal range and stupid mitigation. To put it another way, it is a set full of long-recharge, endurance-expensive powers. You're going to want to counter that in some way, and by want to I mean have to.

As an example, one of the most popular pairings I've seen is TW/Elec brutes. Why is that? Because people wrongly think brutes are best and rightly think that electric armor is great for endurance management and bonus recharge.

Every attack in the set is good. The most skippable one, oddly, is defensive sweep, a tier 1 cone power that costs less endurance than it should and grants you a large melee/smashing defense bonus if it makes contact. The reason it's skippable is that you can build for enough defense that it's redundant and the rest of the set is so incredible for DPA that defensive sweep's relatively modest numbers don't compare.

It's hard to think of what else to say without knowing what secondaries you're interested in. Titan weapons: It's stellar, it's complex. Its strengths are contingent on the rest of what you want to do. Oh, and yep, travel powers at level 4. Nice eh?

Or perhaps the tone of his posts has something to do with the half dozen people dogpiling him with patronizing dreck like, "Man up, accept that you're wrong, and move on." Maybe you guys should try coming to terms with the fact that being an introvert, to quote the title of the thread, does not entitle you to be the King of Games, reigning monarch of the land of Paragon. Sometimes you have to just deal with the sadly imperfect realities of life. I wish you luck.

Or you guys could stop trying to shout him down for suggesting that having some team-required content is reasonable and fine in a MMORPG. I know what the likelihood of that is, though!

Guess what, the devs side with him. You can snipe about it until your fingers turn blue, won't change a thing.

Unless, of course, you add that defense yourself as one easily can between things like weave and maneuvers and set bonuses. Since when is WP on SOs one of the stronger defensive sets? It gets low resists, very low defense, moderate +HP and quite good regen. What's good about it is that you can build on all of these things together and come up with something very diversely protected. At this point it feels like we're comparing IOed WP to SOed regen, and that's hardly fair. Under the same IOing conditions, regen is going to perform just about as well. For high end builds, the tradeoff is confuse and fear protection and a little DDR versus weakness to those things in exchange for extremely fine control over your own defensive performance.

You can get an entire set of level 50 crushing impacts and the salvage to craft it for less than a million influence easily. To get an idea of how good they are, consider the resulting values you get: 99% damage, and 70% each of accuracy, recharge and end reduction. That blows SO slotting out of the water, and that's ignoring that you also get 5% global recharge and 7% global accuracy.

Crushing impact is fine to buy at 50 but in some cases the price curve for a set peaks at its minimum level, drops far lower in the high 30s and low 40s, and spikes upward again at 50. If you can live with seeing numbers other than 50 on your enhancement screen, the practical difference between 50s and 35+ enhancements tends to be on the order of 1% of each enhancement value they cover. To put it another way, the difference between slotting level 40 and level 50 versions of the same set is minuscule compared to the difference between slotting the level 40 set versus slotting common IOs or SOs.

All you actually have to do is pass a multiple choice heroism exam and pay a $86 renewal fee each year. A sample question:

You're in a burning building. Do you:
A) Run to the farthest room on the top floor, beat up the suspicious looking gentleman therein, and teleport away.
B) Look for trapped citizens, defeat their captors and allow them to show themselves out through the billowing smoke and flames.
C) Immediately find the fuse box and shut down all of the elevators for safety.
D) Assist trained PCFD firefighters in handling the situation.

Some people think the test is too easy but the consignment house lobby steadfastly opposes any and all efforts to reform hero licensing.

The "cure my melee addiction" thread got me thinking about VEATs for the first time in a long time. After reviewing city of data's numbers the first thing that came to mind was, "Holy crap, are you serious?" I'd totally forgotten how crazy fortunatas can get. Favorite part: You don't even need mind link to easily softcap all positions, but mind link takes you from that to easily incarnate softcapping all positions. Pretty crazy for an AT that gets totally comprehensive status protection, invisibility, and as Jibikao demonstrated the ability to have full and impressive st and aoe chains at ~100 foot range with cardiac. Maybe I've been playing too much melee lately myself...