Sailboat

While I don't share the rage, I did find the excited, upbeat tone of the server event announcements a bit out of place.

I was on Guardian as a refugee from a scheduled player event we couldn't have on Justice, because Justice was kaput. When the server event messages came up on Guardian, I had time to comment to my teammate, then we were both hurled into oblivion, and had to restart our mission from scratch.

Not a biggie, but worth a sigh.

Oooh, can I be M61 Vulcan?

Well, this is a discussion we've had before, and there's a LOT of strong opinion on the subject. For your reading pleasure:

In you personal opinion (Toughest w/o Tier 9)

How Good is Willpower?

Toughest possible combination for hardcore play?

Selecting a primary

Willpower vs Invulnerability

My general sense of the consensus, such as it is, about the primary sets has traditionally been:

1. Stone
2. Invulnerability
3. Willpower

...with the caveat that Inv and WP are very close despite a slight edge to Inv in typical play...

and then the field degenerates into arguments over Shield-with-HOs, Electric-with-IOs, Dark-with-IOs, and Ice-with-Hibernate.

There is a more solid consensus, however, that WP has a harder time holding aggro than most sets. It's doable, but it might be tougher for someone who's rusty, like yourself.

I ought to mention that a lot of this discussion is theoretical. ALL Tankers can get the job done, and there are some sets that are absolute monsters with the right build, without suffering any of the penalties for Granite or Rooted. For most circumstances, sets like Invulnerability, Willpower, Shield, Electric, and Dark are more than enough tank.

Stone is sturdier, but for most content that sturdiness will not make much difference -- a live Stone Tanker is not defensively better off than any other live Tanker -- but a Granite Tanker will always be enduring Granite's penalties.

It's only for theory, edge cases, and deliberately seeking out hard challenges that Stone's extreme durability really comes into play.

If they really want to make money from Freedom, they'll have an (expensive) option to remove the security chief missions. They'll make a mint.

Ah, I see. Forgot about the "proc 120" thing.

Nerf healing.

All of it. Regen, self-heals, team heals, inspirations, set bonuses, everything.

I've felt this way for years, but never really said it.

It could be done proportionally, I think, in such a way that it wouldn't really hurt any one character proportionally more than the others -- in a world of rare, weak healing, even a lesser empath would still be a godsend.

Damage, of course, would be nerfed commensurately, according to some kind of carefully-worked-out formula.

Why? Several reasons.

Healing is un-dramatic and antithetical to the idea of struggle and sacrifice. In the movies and comic books, the heroes always, as far as I can recall, always get beaten down and hurt/damaged/weakened, then struggle on despite their wounds and pain. They don't go ZING and fix everything every 15 seconds. We don't love Wolverine because he's instantly better after getting hurt -- we love him because he drags himself over to the big bad guy, bleeding and gritting his teeth in agony, and still gets the job done.

Healing makes it hard to defeat/kill players -- SO hard that the eventual solution in every game I've seen is to make damage so freaking huge and fast that the characters go down before the players can react -- because if they can react, they can fix almost anything. This is, again, totally counter to our dramatic stories, in which the heroes press on, injured or weakened, and are slowly driven to take more and more desperate risks. In what stories does the hero instantly fall so fast the reader sits there, stunned, and the tale is over?

Real life, maybe. But these are larger-than-life characters...this is a comic book, not the Battle of the Somme* or Cold Harbor**.

* Almost 20,000 killed and 40,000 wounded in the first 20 minutes or so of the attack

** 10,000 killed and wounded -- one historian estimates 7,000 fell in the first 8 minutes

Like any other player, I'm used to making sure my life and other resources are topped off at each pause in the action. But that occurs pretty much only in games -- not in fiction, fantasy, or real life.

It's much more interesting to have to decide whether to press on when injured, at partial capacity, or understrength. It's more dramatic AND more realistic.

I'm not sure the numbers I would use, but I would want the game to have less healing available less often, and I would threaten players with more gradual defeat, where they had more choice over how much to press their luck, where they had time to worry -- to turn back or to reject the safe course and press on in the face of difficulty and increasing danger.

There would still be Regeneration and Willpower and Empathy and all the rest; they'd still be the kings of healing...compared to other sets. They just wouldn't fix everything almost immediately and keep everyone topped off all the time.

Less one-shotting. If I can gradually wear down any player, any powerset, there's not so much need for gigantic attacks that will shred squishies, in an effort to even try to threaten the Tankers. Tankers will still outlast the others, even still ignore some threats, but it won't be quite so stark a difference.

It's more interesting when the players have to weigh the risk and have time to decide, even time to sweat, to dread, instead of instantly falling over and saying, "Dammit! I couldn't even react." It's more heroic (or more impressive villainy) to persist despite wounds and pain and win in the end, than to always be at absolute peak strength, freshly rebooted, every few moments.

Nerf healing!

Well, if it makes any difference, I was definitely able to switch to a character on a different server, claim the e-mail attachments, and slot them.

I JUST e-mailed a bunch of items to myself...and there was NO 15-second delay. I did 8 in a row as fast as I could send them.

Was this changed in a recent patch? It makes sense to have the anti-spam delay, but not for items you mail to yourself (you can't harass yourself), so this would be a welcome change.

I have a friend who insists the Controllers are "the highest-damage AT" when they get to the epic/ancillary levels.

I don't know that I agree, but I haven't really examined the issue. But with the containment bonus (which, frankly, is not especially a strong point for Illusion) high-level Controllers can do quite a bit of hurt. It's possible to have the bad guys holding their head s AND falling over.