Quinch
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Posts
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Joined
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That they are {far as I know}, but it still expands your eligible teammate pool to "everyone dammit" instead of "people within one-tenth of the available range and the odd occasional weirdo willing to exemplar for a non-task force
task force". -
Also, if you're willing to wait a bit, I16 should allow you to sidekick people to a flashback {rather than having all of them need to be in the arc range}.
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Quote:You also get a badge - in fact, badges were the only reward for defeating GMs until the merits were introduced and there was no shortage of players taking them down before then.Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
How is it fair to get more for selling a recipe that the majority of the playerbase finds useless, than for defeating one of the toughest monsters in the game outside of Hamidon?
Edit mine. Keep in mind that almost all the recipes, and the ones in high demand especially, have a cost in hundreds of merits. You have also done something to get those recipes - I doubt they spontaneously materialized in your inventory while you weren't looking. In turn, you get an opportunity to exchange something you don't want for a fraction of something you do want.Quote:After a long while I would get a huge amount of merits on that character to either buy expensive stuff outright, or make a huge number of random rolls. Even with a limit in place, it's only a matter of time to get whatever I want. No TFs, no story arcs, no fighting anything at all. -
Recipes. But since you can only cash in a limited number of recipes at the vendor, and that limit applies to the account, it's irrelevant how many characters you have.
Let's say you can cash in five recipes per day - you do so on character X. Because you've reached your limit, none of your other characters can cash in any more recipes until the next day either. You cash in two recipes on character X, two on character Y - the character Z would only be able to cash in one, and after that, any other characters wouldn't be able to do so until the next day. -
Errr, Kitsune, tickets don't come into it.
What I'm proposing is simply being able to sell recipes to merit vendors, rather than just buying them, although at a vastly unfavorable rate. -
Since rarity wouldn't matter (you'd get at least one) you could build up a huge amount of merits in a relatively short period of time.
That's why you could only cash in a set number of recipes per day - and to prevent doing so on a horde of different characters, the limit would apply to the entire account, not a single character. -
Just throwing this out for discussion - what would be the good and bad sides to being able to trade a recipe to the merit vendor in exchange for a couple of merits - between one and three, depending on the rarity of the recipe? To prevent farming, there would be also a limit to how many recipes can be traded back per account per day.
Opinions? Clauses? Catches? Possible exploits? -
Plowing Through Stuff
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We can't go talk to the contact because there's ducks falling from the sky.
Mallardaise Task Force? New GM, Dra'Kes?
Time will tell. -
By the way, for those who don't know yet - I16 has gone open.
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I think there's a badge that mentions Nemesis has a weather machine somewhere around the place.
It's a badge from the Nemesis Weather Control mission group. -
Because there's still a place you can throw a brick in without hitting a merit vendor.
As for the hospital, it's been suggested {yet again} not three days ago. -
Also, the line I was referring to was...
Drumroll, please...
It's raining hen! -
Quote:Nope. Try again.Originally Posted by Zekiran_Immortal
Turkeys.
"I didn't know they couldn't fly!!" -
If we do get weather effects, I demand an event that replaces the falling rain with chickens.
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Step 2: Don't search for things while I'm in the middle of typing! Wait for me to hit enter, or the search button
Step 3: Make the damned buttons bigger. Pixel hunting wasn't fun in the eighties, it's not fun now either! -
Quote:It sounds better than it is, considering that doesn't give you a direct conversion into endurance cost reduction.Originally Posted by Rodion
Even-con DOs provide 16.7% enhancement.
The reduction formula, for endurance and recharge, for example, is 1/(1+(enhancements))
Plugging those numbers into the formula {and ignoring ED}, we get this;
DOs Cost Difference
0 100,00% N/A
1 85,69% -14,31%
2 74,96% -10,73%
3 66,62% -8,34%
4 59,95% -6,67%
5 54,50% -5,46%
6 49,95% -4,55%
Total -50,05%
As you can see, with each enhancement you add, the benefit from it decreases - in its own way, reduction enhancements come with its own ED system. So, I'm going to have to disagree with your point and state that, while enhancements can be useful for knocking off a percent or ten from the power cost, they're not nearly as effective as endurance management tools as they sound.
Edit: By the way, back on topic, has there been any word on whether the SSK system will affect flashback requirements, or whether there'll be any changes to the flashback system at all? -
Here's one of Memphis Bill's copypastas, by the way... just to avoid rehashing the old points and counterpoints.
Quote:Why raising the level cap is not a good idea for COH
It's me, your friendly (?!?) neighborhood (close the blinds!) cut-and-paste answer. Why a cut and paste answer?
Because this is one of those suggestions that comes up a good bit, and I'm a lazy bum who doesn't want to type this each and every time.
I want more levels!
This game has had two level cap increases. Both times for the exact same levels. Both City of Heroes and City of Villains started out with content for 1-40, putting in the last ten levels the following issue.
So why not another? 50-60?
Well, sit back and let's take a look at it.
But World of Conanhammer has....! We should too!
Many other games have periodic level cap increases. New areas are introduced, new gear and new foes are introduced. CO* has been at level 50 since issue 1. Why is there no cap increase?
If you look at those other games, they have gear. Gear that gets replaced. If you want to get more powerful, you get new gear. They're heavily "loot" based. How many of them can you use your first Small Sword of Bat-killing and Armor of Somewhat Rumpled Paper in past the first few levels?
OK, you CAN use them. How suicidal would it be to do so? Old equipment doesn't scale well. It gets replaced. Old skills ("Nasty carpet shock") get replaced ("Nasty carpet shock +1" to "Ow, that hurts" to "ZOMG! Lightning!")
City of Heroes doesn't use gear. We don't have Swords of Swordly Slaying or Sniper Rifles of Moderately Good Accuracy to replace. They don't wear out. We have powers - powers you can use from 1-50. OK, yes, we have enhancements, and enhancements get replaced and change a power - but they make the powers themselves more powerful. You don't typically replace Tier 1 blast with Tier Eleventy - you use them both to create an attack chain. You don't replace your Healing Aura with Healing Aura Level 30, you add slots into it and make it more powerful. Are you a tank? Your armors overlap and complement each other - one giving Smashing protection, the next Elemental, the next Energy, and don't forget your Mez protection.
Right now, that system is designed around 1-50. The first 40 levels deal with getting YOUR powers selected and strengthened, as well as a few anciliary powers (travel powers, end management and utilities.) Level 41-50 has a few, select powers as you work through the high level content, powers that are meant to look at your archetype and cover a few of their "holes." Tanks, for instance, get a ranged attack to pick off runners, or start grabbing aggro with a bang (or a whoosh.) Defenders, after spending 41 levels buffing everyone else, get to self buff. And in public, too. Controllers get some damage, and so forth. Even the Patron powers do this, yes, adding shields, ranged attacks, immobilizes and the like.
All this, and the slots you're given, are designed around levels 1-50.
The top end "Gear" (top set Enhancements, including Purples, and Hamidon enhancements) are designed around level 50. So are rewards - such as unlocking Epic Archetypes. If you want to look at what another few levels would do to this stuff, I suggest looking for a Titan Calcite Shard.
What's that?
That's similar to a Hamidon origin enhancement, but dropped by the Crystal Titan. People don't use them - and didn't, before IOs - because they *wear out* in the early 40s. Why? Because the cap was raised from 40-50, so what, for one issue, was top end... no longer is. You'll notice there's no similar item villainside.
Other games have forced obsolecense of gear - and, the flipside of it, a minimum level of "acceptable" gear to do top end content (raids, PVP and the like.) This is part of what's meant by "The game begins at X level" in those games. COH... the game begins at level 1. Getting the "gear" is part of the whole grind built into those games, something that is decidedly missing in COH. Yes, you have to work at getting XP. But you'll get that regardless (unless you enable "no XP.") Even the "Purple recipes" don't need to be farmed for - they have a chance to drop from every mob. Not just a special raid, and even a sidekicked level 1 could have them drop.
Sidekicking!
Yeah, let's look at that. It reinforces the point I made about gear. What happens if you take a level, say, five in another game and bring them to the level 40 zone? They're useless, and quickly dead, generally. At least, if they can get IN those levels.
In COH, you can take that level five to the level 50 area, sidekick them, and - while they generally won't be able to do *much,* their attacks, debuffs and the like will scale. A sidekicked Level 5 Controller's hold will still stack. It won't last as long and they won't have accuracy as good as a level 50, but it will still hold its target or stack with other holds on tougher ones to get something held. Heals scale - an aura that heals 50 damage natively is now doing 400 while sidekicked. (making up numbers, but the concept is the same.)
There's no "useless gear." Powers scale as you get a full set.
I want to progress!
One of the (valid) complaints about CO* is that there's not much to do when you get to the end. Part of this is the design of the game, the "Journey vs Destination" mindset. And part of this is due to alts - you have a bunch of slots, and between debt reduction, patrol XP, double XP weekends and the like, you can miss a chunk of it by blinking.
What you want, in that case, is not "More levels." It's "More content." The reason people think "More levels" when they bring this up is what's already been pointed at several times - *other games.* You want more to do, and - there, at least - better gear to do it with.
Well... again, we don't have "gear." More content, though, is perfectly doable within the 1-50 framework, *without* an artificial level bump that breaks nearly (at time of writing) five years of foundation. We can have tougher foes - in fact, the same group (say, Circle of Thorns) will have different abilities as you go up in level, if they're a level 1-50 group. They get tougher. They're designed to be more of a challenge.
But I want a bigger number!
Here's the thing. COH is really built around being able to reach 50. It's an attainable goal, you end up with a varied suite of powers that really let you tackle almost anything. City of Heroes is far more favourable to growth *outward* (more content in the existing ranges, more zones, etc.) than *upward* (level 60, 70, 80, 9000.) Again, this is most strongly indicated by the lack of "planned obsolecense" of powers, and that you don't use "Gear." If you're a Broadsword scrapper, to use the most obvious example, you don't need to get the Uber Broadsword of Slicey-Slice at level 20, the SuperSlicer 9000 at 30, etc. to progress. You can change the look without changing effectiveness. And you can change your effectiveness by changing your slotting and/or IO sets - or build, given dual builds.
Without "Gear" to force into upgrades, moving upward (bigger numbers) is really more of a detriment.
Not only do you now have to figure out what will happen with powers and slots (especially with the large number of 50s out there - do you change the 41-45-47-49 to 45-48-51? What do you do with the 50s who have them already?) but you have to change epics (awarded at 50,) rebalance around a whole new set of powers, deal with PVP, and come up with a whole new set of rewards - like Hamidon origin enhancements, which would then be pointless, and purple recipes, which would no longer be "top gear" - to work towards at 60.
The population gets spread out more, and the 50-60 content gets burned through rapidly... and then we hear the call for another level bump, to 70. Which starts the whole thing over again. 50 is an attainable goal, you know you'll get there and be at your pinnacle, even if you don't drink. You'll be able to "catch up." Your character won't be obsolete.
In short... we can expand the game, add more to it, and give you far more to do without the artificial chase of "the next highest level after 50." -
Won't happen, as CoX is balanced around the Lv50 cap. With WoW it's basically expected, as it revolves around grinding to higher levels and accumulating better equipment, so raising the level cap simply pushes back the limit of gear hoarding, while ignoring the actual content in between. It can easily be likened to chasing a carrot on a stick, because WoW's gameplay style has no repeatability so the best way to prevent the playerbase from growing tired of the "top level content" is simply to buy time via changing what top level is, thus forcing the old top-level players to grind their way to the new benchmark.
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Actually, of my current characters, only two have it, my AR/Dev and tank. Bow/mm, grav/kin, mind/emp and glittersquid all manage without.
That said, the problems with your argument is
a} not all powersets have identical endurance consumption
b} what constitutes as a necessary toggle? Do you run useful toggles?
c} inspiration supply is erratic, and at low levels, there isn't much storage space for them either, often forcing inefficient consumption
d} endurance cost can only be reduced by half - to do so with SOs would require investing three slots for that purpose only into each power. Doing so with DOs {which is what you have available before Lv22} requires no less than five slots, which you don't have available at all but one or two powers at this point to begin with.
I don't advocate reducing the effects of endurance management during combat. What I do advocate is reducing the amount of downtime between fights when there is no difference in danger between recovering endurance using Rest and wasting time waiting for it to return naturally. -
Why don't you just ask for a "Lvl to 20" button, maybe that would be easier for you?
I take it you missed the part right before it where I object to the XP boost? Unless you now gain XP from resting... I dunno, maybe I missed the memo? -
As for low level characters missing out on accelerated leveling speeds, we are increasing the rewards they earn from level 1 to 20 (about 20% across the board) so that every player can get through the lower levels faster, not just those that know the tricks.
I've thought about this, and... I have to say I oppose it. Thing is, with each XP boost, the challenge decreases, and with it, the accomplishment as well as the new player's grasp of those basic powers.
I'm assuming the boost expires at Lv20 because that's where Stamina comes into play {heck, it's been mentioned 24 times in this thread so far}, but that's really a case of driving a hammer with a wrecking ball. The prevalence of Stamina is a symptom of lack of endurance, or rather the ability to regain it quickly enough. On the other hand, we already have a power that regains endurance as quickly as it gets, i.e. Rest. The problem is that it takes an unreasonable amount of time to recharge and activate, so why not simply make that power more viable as a recovery tool instead? Dropping the recharge and activation to a few seconds and throw in a strong taunt aura to prevent people using it in the middle of a fight, and there's a strong chance the endurance complaints will evaporate. -
I hate being a perma-statue during raids.
Hang close to the bubbler? -
In the meantime, enjoy the sight of your character frantically humping empty air.
Sweet dreams. -
Had some initial problems running CoH with Windows 7, but support solved that quickly enough. Vista... I dunno.