Samuel_Tow

I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate on that. As far as I'm aware, the final defence value of a critter before accuracy is "base - defence," to simplify it. So whether we're looking at 0.64 - 0.3 = 0.34 chance to hit, or at 0.5 - 0.14 = 0.34 chance to hit, it's still the same final chance to hit. Yes, I'm aware that other powersets are also hit by the Incarnate to-hit numbers, but that calculation shouldn't take into consideration other powersets, when what I asserted was that 30% against Incarnate to-hit produces the same chance to be hit as 14% would against normal enemies, which having played with that level, isn't enough by a wide margin. Again, please clarify.

Additionally, yes, other powersets not entirely focused on defence also suffer from the higher to-hit, but not in the same way. It's the difference between +cons getting accuracy vs. getting higher to-hit. As to-hit and defence are a direct sum, any increase in to-hit are equivalent to an equal decrease in defence, and since defence numbers in general don't swing wildly, it doesn't take much of a change to make a difference. Comparatively, resistance-based characters don't lose a direct chunk of their total resistance value.

The difference in perspective is due to the fact that 64% tohit doesn't just make things more difficult for SR, it also makes things more difficult for everyone with or without defense. We normally gauge defensive mitigation relative to having no defense. We don't consider the fact that non-defense sets take (64/50=1.28) 28% more damage than normal against incarnate critters "a problem to solve" that's just a measure of the increase in difficulty for incarnate content. We then gauge defensive strength relative to that.

On the flip side, I CAN see the hightened to-hit being incredibly lethal to regeneration-based characters, considering those tend to exist within a relatively narrow band of performance where the difference between a constantly full health bar and a shockingly fast and irreversible defeat can come down to just one extra critter at times. A significantly higher enemy base to-hit is liable to produce significantly higher incoming DPS and possibly exceed their regeneration threshold. I've yet to take a Regen anything to 50 (and that doesn't seem in the cards any time soon) so I can't really say, but this does have me concerned.

Could you be a bit more specific? What non-defensive debuffing are you referring to? Esoteric debuffs like to-hit, recharge speed, regeneration and so forth? I don't disagree that avoiding debuffs in general is a good thing about SR and defence in general, but I don't think the solution is to remove it. And, furthermore, remove it in the face of no real resistance debuffs in the game aside from Nullifier Sonic Grenades and... Vanguard claws, right? And even then, a high level of resistance is itself a high level of resistance debuff resistance, something that not very many defence-based sets can boast, especially with Shield Defence and Grant Cover "holding DDR hostage," as Venture put it, I believe. It seems to me that despite taking debuffs to the face, resistance-based sets still don't suffer as harshly in terms of their direct survivability.

Honestly, if the point of this whole thing is to combat high levels of defence as used by people who really shouldn't have as much (i.e. everyone that's NOT using a defence-based set) then why not apply this as a defence debuff? Paradoxically, low-level critters are already sporting absurd levels of defence debuffing, with a simple Hellion minion chopping off 8% with a mere fire axe swing, if my memory serves. If you want to combat defence outside of defence-based sets, then target the one thing only defence-based sets have - Dance Dance Revolution... Wait, no... I mean Defence Debuff Resistance. That way, you take a bite out of people's excessive defence... And indeed out of the excessive defence SR and Shield Defence and Energy Aura can gather, to an extent, but you don't actually screw the people who "don't get with the programme."

Because really, all this does - and that's been my complaint all along - is make certain powers and certain build options "no-brainers." Not only are they evidently better, but now if you don't do it, you fall behind. To me, this is the opposite of choice, and that's not a good thing.

They don't, actually, which I think is mandated by a huge pool of old sets with random animation speeds being impossible to "standardise" to a specific level without cutting certain sets in half (I'm thinking Stone Melee will get hurt bad). Why I say sets aren't balanced around activation times is Synapse himself has commented to as much, though his full comment does go on to state that, even so, animation times are still taken into consideration. What this means, though, is that there's no standard "DPA" formula that every power must conform to.

There is a formula about the relationship between power damage, power recharge and power cost for almost all attacks, however. Divide the damage of any attack by the endurance it costs and you'll a number of around 0.192 scale damage, or around 12.something for Scrappers unenhanced. For the life of me I can't remember the AoE formula, but it does say that a power with a given damage and with a given AoE area will cost an additional amount of endurance and take an additional amount of time to recharge above what a single-target attack would have.

There is no such thing for animation times, and it doesn't take anything more complicated than Excel (or Notepad and a calculator, in a pinch) to figure this out. While DPE and DPS numbers are very orderly and consistent across the board, DPA and EPA numbers are all over the place, with some of the best DPA coming from some of the strangest places. If you're trying to figure out the best attack chain, say for single-target damage, you typically start with the highest-DPA attack, then the next one after that and so forth, adding up their overall projected DPS. What this means is that unusual attacks can end up taking priority, such as Energy Punch taking precedence over everything in Energy Melee.

When Synapse says that attack animations are taken into account, I don't think what he means is he gives the artists an animation time and tells them "Make it this long to the fourth decimal!" so much as they see what they have when the set's animations and stats are married together and tweak accordingly. I don't expect another Dual Pistols will happen any time soon, but if you think animation times are in any way standardised outside of maybe the Defiance powers, that's just not true.

This may just be me, but I didn't read anything into the title. Maybe it's just my own bias talking, but to me, titles are intended to draw attention to the thread itself, and I'm as guilty of anyone when I make titles like "I hate Katie Douglass!" when the rest of the thread isn't intended to be a rant so much as a deconstruction.

That's kind of where the metagame takes precedence, though. Yes, I could use Hover and Afterburner... Probably, but even at its fastest, Hover is still slow and it takes a lot out of my build to make it faster. Taking Fly is a simple way to gain basic convenience.

That actually brings up a related question: Do you always take a travel power?

Because I always do. SOMETHING will always make sense for the character. Basically, if the character can't teleport or fly, he gets Super Jump because... Well, he's good at jumping. Now, Sam Tow - my namesake - is supposed to be by FAR the best at jumping of them all. Through a variety of technological and scientific means, he's able to perform ridiculous leaps from a standstill, such as reaching high-altitude aircraft from the ground without actually having the ability to fly. He's supposed to be a lot better than all my other characters combined... But the game doesn't really make that much difference, so all he used to do was take and slot Hurdle. Now that everyone has it... Meh. I'll stick to pretending. I'll never team two characters on my account together anyway.

It's almost never Super Speed, too, because the slow running animation just looks goofy with the high movement speed, but Prestige Power Surge fixes that almost entirely. Woah... Sidetrack!

And that's kind of been my beef with pools, to be honest. There are almost none of them that DON'T make sense for nearly all characters to have them. Fighting, Fitness... I wouldn't go as far as to say "leadership," though. Remember the Mass Effect 2 final level? At one point, you're asked to pick a leader for a "second team," and if you DON'T pick one whose history is that of strong leadership, you lose a crew-mate. Shockingly, I neglected that Samara had spent the last few hundred years working alone and so wouldn't make a great leader.

But let's say Teleportation. To me, it simply doesn't make sense for, say, my namesake - Samuel Tow - to be able to teleport. That ability is nothing like anything I've ever written for him. Similarly, Leadership isn't something I'd give him, for the simple fact that he's your typical emo loner, to make a grand concept embarrassingly simple. I could probably reshuffle some of his background to account for it, yeah, but I wouldn't want to. It just doesn't make sense for the guy.

What I'm saying is... There are pools that don't just make sense to be present in every character, not conceptually anyway. But for some... Yeah, I can't come up with a character for whom "fighting" wouldn't make sense. Yes, even the Steel Rook. Power armour and all that.

Flashfire IS on Beta, but if he's showed up on live, that would be a leak of some sort. I'd suggest anyone who's interested in knowing more about it to head over to the Beta server and check it out.

Because I'm not saying that. My question should read more as asking what you foresee as being in this set that you can't achieve right now. Because, yes, I get that you want feathers, but if it's just a feather texture you're after, then the basic fur texture is a decent enough substitute. You have to look at it very closely to tell to tell it's not actually feathers, and we simply don't see our characters close enough often enough for this to be noticeable.

Additionally, a bird - let's say this one:



Doesn't really display what I'd define as "feathers" when you look at them as they sit on the bird. Yes, I know what a feather looks like and I know what fur looks like, and yes, I realise they're not the same. But to be honest? They could just as easily use the same texture for anything up to plucking feathers off the bird to examine it.

That's not to say more bird bits are a mistake - far from it. But until such a time, I seriously suggest using the fur texture. It just works.

Personally, I find it incredibly poor taste to comment on something you haven't read, irrespective of circumstances. And I know because I've done so, myself, and realise what a colossal *** I was when I did it. There's a reason the Evil Geko has me on ignore, or at least said he'd do it, and it IS my fault.

And if you take Martial Arts, you get an Illegal Exception. Basically, the reason we're restricted to human legs is because every animation available to a player has to work with every character model, and it has to make sense. As per BABs from a long time ago, the game has no means of barring costume pieces based on the powerset you pick, or else he'd have removed the hook left hand with Katana.

That one's also better suited to Dink's All Things Art thread.

Technically, we already have "power armour" in Invulnerability with the right costume picks and we already have a "kinda' sorta'" gatling gun in Assault Rifle. We just need an AT to marry them together, along with some kind of AT gimmick to ensure that the sets don't have to be "balanced" into the ground and they still retain their potency. I'd buy that, myself, and I don't think it has to be overpowered if done right.

Generally, I want to use firearms on characters who aren't squishy without having to wait till the end game and resorting to very specific builds.

That's kind of what I mean, on all counts, as that's more or less the balance I'd shoot for. I actually just came out of a game of World of Tanks where a seriously large, well-armoured heavy tank can still get punked by a light tank which can drive faster than the large tank's turret rotates, which can be something like 10 degrees a second. Add to that the fact that a heavy tank is slow, so crossing open terrain, especially uphill, gets your *** shot off by everyone and their grandma. At the same time, though, these ARE still heavy machines with lots of armour and hit points and the heaviest guns in the game short of an artillery piece.

And that's part of the problem. Personally, I feel our game lacks "slow but big" characters aside from Granite Armour, and that's "big" in only half the stats that matter (protection) and actually quite small in the other half (offence). I'd honestly hate to see a "power armour" type character being drawn up as some kind of spastically running and gunning character like most people here seem to want to play them. Maybe outright rooting is a bad idea, but bringing people down to walking speed with the ability to do base height jumps might be a tad less irritating.

My point with this is that, yes, when just wiping out spawn after spawn, it's not much of a drawback, but it's still a significant opportunity cost which WILL be taxing on missions that require you to move around a lot. Case in point - the "nagging wife" design of iTrials. "Go here! No, not here, there! Kill these guys! Now kill these guys! Hurry! Move out of the way! Now go here! Now go back! Now kill these guys! Don't kill those guys! Now go here!" etc. That sort of thing - as Masterminds tend to learn right quick - doesn't really work if your mobility is hamstrung.

Far from self-rooting/slowdown being annoying, my biggest concern is that it might make such an AT outright unplayable on iTrials with how much running around is necessary. Think Devices and their "set-up time" for reference. In a way, I'm actually re-suggesting the same thing which... I will admit just doesn't work in the current game. But again - to me, just making a hybrid that WILL be played for kiting seems to be missing the point... Even if I'll take any excuse to play Assault Rifle on an AT I actually enjoy...

Well, the game I quoted - Space Marine - doesn't have any points system balancing. Anyone is free to bring any class to any game. You'd think a team of all heavy weapons guys would be the greatest since they're the toughest AND have the strongest weapons, but that rarely works out. They simply get overwhelmed, and quite easily, unless you have a team of VERY good players, and even then it's a toss-up. That almost never happens, however, because these really ARE the hardest to play right so most people gravitate towards the seemingly "easier" jet pack guys and then proceed to keep dying over and over again.

If anything, a character prone to being overwhelmed by sheer numbers would be a really bad fit for City of Heroes where everything you face is sheer numbers, and all too often alone. My point with the "power armour gatling gun guy" isn't to create a "better" class that's good at everything, so much as to combine heavy weapons with heavy armour, and by extension heavy defence with heavy offence - in a way which isn't too overpowered.

I still have the feeling that the best we'll ever see - if we see anything at all - is a hybrid class that's sort-of Assault/sort-of Defence. I just have a very serious degree of doubt that'll feature either Assault Rifle, Beam Rifle, Dual Pistols or Archery... Which are kind of the point, since every other element I can already get in melee form.

What do you foresee these looking as that isn't doable in-game right now?

*edit*
Also, I suggest taking this to Dink's All Things Art thread.

I remember a colourful character I used to team with back in the day. He was pretty eager to power-game, so when he figured out Stamina is good, he tried to get me to take it. Me, being famously stubborn, argued that the Steel Rook is just a guy in power armour who doesn't need to be fit since the suit does all the physical activity. In fact, the Rook's original bio had the man crippled and paralysed. My acquaintance then argued that "Just say it's better batteries or something!" Logical, yes, but this brings up one of the major stumbling blocks I have with justifying "even better at X" powers:

Better than what? Let's sidetrack a bit and go with the concept of a paralysed man inside a suit of powered armour, who has better batteries. What am I comparing them against? What he had before? That's arbitrary, since I can say he has better batteries even without Stamina just by claiming his previous ones only had a life span of around an hour. Now that he has Stamina by virtue of everyone having it, has anything changed? Are all of my characters in-character more fit than they were? Does the Rook have better batteries? Because honestly... It's just an RP excuse to explain why I took a power.

Mind you, I don't mean to argue with you. What you say is completely valid and I'm seeing people comment in a similar fashion, so there's that. It's just that... To me, that sort of RP argument has simply never held any weight. "Even better at X" implies a sort of ordering of my characters based on who's how good at what, and the game will simply never bear that out. Without Inventions against Incarnate critters, my SR Scrapper will never perform better than my Invulnerability Scrapper even though the former is supposed to be stronger. Unless I intentionally gimp my characters, how good they are at what kind of comes down to what AT and powersets I picked more so than what I picked from them, so I can just as well claim one is a better fighter than the other without needing to have a power that, essentially, serves only to say that.

The Steel Rook from above tool Fly because I couldn't "pretend" he was able to fly if he had to walk everywhere anyway. That's not a question of how good he is at it, so much as it's a question that I see him able to fly on-screen. That's what that power is for. But the Rook's flight has always been problematic just because his power armour is quite heavy. By contrast, Inna, my blue alien girl possessed of the Power of Creation, is capable of flight just naturally to her species, and is supposed to be considerably better. There's no real way to express this, especially now that unenhanced Fly caps flight speed, but even before... What was I supposed to do? Enhance Inna's flight more? Or, more appropriately, enhance the Rook's flight less? Why. They can both fly, and "how well" is a matter of percentages, and a good story isn't built on percentages.

Basically, I don't disagree with you and I'm definitely not telling you you're wrong to take Fighting as a depiction of a character being even better at brawling than... Others in your roster? Other people's characters? I don't have a problem with that. It just doesn't seem meaningful to me, and to illustrate, let me ask the following question:

If Fighting became inherent and all of your characters just magically had it, would any of your concepts (concepts, NOT builds) suffer? Honest question.

Yeah, I have. I think bAss Ackwards had a Blaster with 50% ranged defence or some such. I know it's amazing, but that's kind of breaking the bounds of the AT to make it into something else and it takes kind of a specific and quite expensive build. Personally, I'd prefer an AT that's designed to work like this, status protection and all.

That's not a bad idea, actually, though I suspect "absorption" might be more apt to the concept of ablative armour without actually specifying armour as the source of your protection. See, the thing is that while I, too, want a power armour type character, I don't want to see a whole AT revolving around using power armour. Again - power armour should be just one aspect of this AT, and it should, theoretically, also work with concepts like Negative Energy, Fire, Energy and so forth - things that can't create floating armour bits to take damage for me. Moreover, having the armour bits act like pets and actually fire is already very specific to technological War Machine type power armour and much harder to explain for non-technoloical sets like, say, Invulnerability. It also strikes me as something that'll need whole new powersets made from scratch, both in terms of artwork and in terms of mechanics.

All of that said, my point remains - that's not a bad idea. It's certainly the most original use of a pet class I've seen in some time. I'd still defer to having the pets actually offer passive defensive buffs to the caster sort of the the Wisp and other buff vet pets. It'd make the caster a hard target against directed assault, but it would still give him an Achilles heel for having his buff pets destroyed and stripping him of all his protection and probably offensive buffs. It also has the benefit of containing the armour just within one set so we can reuse existing ranged sets which are already very cool. What I wouldn't give to be able to run an Assault Rifle or Beam Rifle character that WASN'T constantly dying without Inventions, but that's a story for another time.

Well, of course not, but Dominator Assault with Scrapper defence and Stalker hit points, while probably balanced, isn't really an "power armour gatling gun guy." It would be awesome to have, make no mistake - I've always wanted an AT like that, too. But it would be more a hybrid, a jack of all trades. What I'm asking for is something that's more obviously "heavy," in nature, and much more strongly balanced around some kind of meaningful inherent. That's kind of what I wanted to achieve by the "self rooting" of my original post. Just imagine how much of a drawback that would be in today's game, especially if suppressed teleportation. I only worry it may be a bit TOO much of a drawback.

Basically what I'm saying is a "mid-range" fighter between a Blaster and a Scrapper isn't exactly power armour, because a power armour character has to be tough, not just a more survivable squishy as I'm sure the balance point will tilt. Simply put - to me - those are just two different concepts that deserve two different ATs. If anything, a "hybrid" can kind of sort of already be achieved by melee characters via Epic pools, if epic pools had three attacks as opposed to two. And if Epic pools actually included firearms.

My guess is too much fun. I, myself, don't hold the opinion that tank-mages are bad and postulate that we already have quite a few in the existing ATs, but I also know how discussions of high-defence, high-offence ranged characters goes. As I don't agree, I can never remember all the arguments, but the one that sticks out in my mind is "kiting" as something very dangerous, since a high-defence character with ranged attacks could theoretically shoot from out of range of melee attackers and only suffer lesser damage. I know this has never worked out for my Blasters, but I'm probably doing it wrong.

Frankly, the "power armour gatling gun guy" doesn't need to wear power armour or use a gatling gun or even be a guy. That's just the most iconic representation, dating back to - at least in my memory - the Brotherhood of Steel soldiers in the original Fallout. To me, this is the character who can play the role of emplace artillery, or the role of a slowly-advancing hard target that isn't hamstrung into actually CHASING enemies at its slow pace. I know "slow" in City of Heroes is sort of anathema, but I wouldn't have minded Rooted so much if I weren't stunned the moment I turn it off. The general archetype I'm after is someone who can wield heavy firearms or otherwise heavy blast powers without having to be quick and nimble and fragile.

I may, obviously, be looking at the bad example, but I still love how the Warhammer 40 000: Space Marine classes are balanced, with the toughest and heaviest being also the ones with the biggest weapons, whose chief weakness is they're not very good at close range, needing the instead nimble and kind of squishy melee and jack-of-all-trades ones to keep them free. It's exactly the reverse of the dynamics we have here, with our melee folk being the sturdiest and slowest and our rangers forced to be FAST.

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As to the meat of your post, I'm really not a fan of origin-specific classes. One of the great things about City of Heroes is its basic character creation structure is so very separate from the character's actual concept, where classes defined not WHO you are or even WHAT you do, but rather HOW you go about doing it. Champions Online, for instance, offer ice powers, but Ice is a "tanking" power. Here, you can have ice in melee, blast, armour, control and buff forms, as well as a number of hybrids such as Manipulation and Assault, and including a number of Epics. I'd rather not tie that to a character's nature. Leaving Origins "meaningless" was the smart move, as far as I'm concerned.

And you're right, both Kheldians and Soldiers of Arachnos can kind of fill that role, but they suffer from the above weakness - they're very specific in terms of concept. Even if I didn't actually dislike Kheldians (personal preference - I hate their playstyle, hit points pool and reliance on transformations), I kind of don't want to tell that type of story of an alien bonding with a human. I want a character who uses guns and swords, fire and fire, or a type of energy other than bright cyan or dark purple.

Basically, I don't want my class to define my concept or my origin. I don't disagree with the technical side of your ATs, just that they come with themes I don't believe they should have. If ever we get new ATs, I want them to be able to share as many of the existing powers as possible, just used in different configurations. Anything else would be just another Epic AT I'll find myself not clicking with.

Normally, my "baggage" with other people wouldn't matter. In the seven years before it went Inheremt, I took Stamina all of once and never let people's criticisms get to me. It made asking for advise functionally impossible, but that's still not a problem. The problem THIS time is that the people who are implicitly telling me this are the developers themselves, and how they're telling me this is via Incarnate to-hit percentages. Let me explain:

A SR Scrapper just through his own powers can achieve right around 30% defence from everything positional. That's by far not bad, but it's also by far not amazing. Under normal circumstances, it's playable to a very comfortable degree. However, Incarnate critters have a base to-hit value of 14% higher, which effectively reduces my defence down to 16^, and that IS bad. And the thing is... There is no solution to this that SR can offer. There is, however, the solution of taking Weave that just about everyone I've spoken to has given me, and this seems to be literally the only way to salvage SR outside of strong Inventions builds, which even to this day are too expensive for me. I have built a few, but mostly through donated parts.

My problem isn't with what people say. "I'm rubber you're glue" or "sticks and stones." Take a pick. It's what the people in charge do that starts to concern me, and that's not as easily brushed off unless I simply admit that I won't be making my SR characters into Incarnates. My problem is that the old game was much, much easier, meaning that I could mostly succeed on mediocre builds that don't bank on pool powers too much, but with every addition to it, this gets less and less true. "Hard" spawns peppered throughout content are becoming increasingly common, such as in Night Ward and the Incarnate game is harder than that still. As the pressure on my build increases, those "no-brainer" power picks start becoming a problem since they start becoming less of a choice.

I have a problem with Fighting because it's rarely taken with the means of implying fighting and much more commonly taken as a meta-game extra defence and resistance buff. That's not what Pools should represent, at least not in my opinion. And honestly, the concept of "a good fighter" is more something to go into an Epic for ATs that don't have entire powersets devoted to this. That's where "stuff your AT doesn't have" is best suited for. As for pools, I've always seen those as the place to get esoteric powers. It is for this reason I'm getting less and less critical of "sorcery" as a power pool despite it implying an origin to a set of powers. It really is something that has no other place to go, it isn't AT-breaking yet it applies to concept before it applies to AT, so that's the perfect fit for a Pool. Fighting... Not so much.

Basically, Fighting has become Fitness, is the thing.

That's the crux of my problem with Fighting. It's essentially designed such that it offers defensive buffs I've already been insulted numerous times for not taking on my melee characters, locked behind a prerequisite that even the people delivering the insults admit to not wanting. As far as offering meta-game items that aren't part of your AT, I'd honestly rather restrict this to Epics, just because those are AT-specific and can be tailored to what the AT doesn't have a lot of already.

I guess a large part of my problem lies with Tough and Weave, themselves, since they're essentially becoming the thing everyone takes regardless of overall build, much like how Stamina was, and I'm yet again caught in a situation where I'm "supposed" to take them. They are, when you get right down to it, pretty much Epic pool shields. Consider yourself a Blaster and being offered an Epic shield. What possible reason would you have to NOT take it? That's kind of why it seems to me that those two powers have become "the no-brainers." You don't see everyone raving about "You HAVE to take Whirlwind!" or "So just take Group Fly. Problem solved." At least, I hope you don't...

Why I levvy complaints against fighting is partly because I don't see it adding a meaningful concept to the game and partly because I really dislike the nature of the pool itself. I hope that as we get more esoteric "origin" pools and gain a larger pool selection in general, that this drive will lessen, but to be told to build every one of my SR characters with Weave is just... Weird.

Total waste. Masterminds have by FAR the worst damage mod in the game and also the lowest hit points, as far as I'm aware. If you're interested in running a full whip attack character, I'd suggest lobbying for flaming whips to be added as a conventional attack set for... I don't know, really. Does that count as range or melee?

But petless Mastermind is gonna' suck, and I don't mean this as an insult. It just probably won't be a lot of fun.

Q: How did the hipster get burned?
A: He was eating soup before it was cool.

No, it's not. It's a specific term used to refer to a person who has transcended the Well of the Furies, hitherto believed the be the source of ultimate power, and has become a Well himself. It's what Mot is attempting to do and what Diabolique brings up during the Large Breasts iTrial. This unlocks an extra lore conversation line with Prometheus who explains this and lists Rularuu the Ravager as an example of this in the flesh, using him as the reason for why it's a bad idea to let people have this much power.

I'm kind of in the same boat, myself. Something I've noticed about a LOT of the old CoH zones is they look too artificial, like an artist's rendition of a city, rather than something that's been lived in and evolved around how people use it.

Also, yes, the rubber spine "dat ***" pose always draws comments. I wouldn't mind seeing it as an optional flight pose (for women AND men), but I'm glad it's gone as a mandatory option. Female characters are already saddled with that horrible butt-swaying run.

The concept does indeed look considerably better. I'm still not a fan, but here's what it has going for it:

1. The black isn't as black and the white isn't as white. They both look like two shades of grey. This leaves the actually black detail pieces to stand out more.

2. The costume is considerably simpler, marking the first piece of concept art I've ever seen that's simpler than its in-game depiction. Most details are only single-colour and there's considerably less white clutter

3. Her breasts are lower and feel more natural than the effectively "push-up bra" look of her in-game model. I know that's a problem with the female model in general, but it detracts.

4. The face clutter is moved farther back and out-of-the way, so it's not so prominent.

This is one of my biggest problems with her. I'm pretty sick and tired of female super heroes in high heels. I could see it for the ones for whom "fashion" or "sexy" is a big part of their concept, but not all women in comic books are like that. Again, I'd honestly like to see penny wear some more practical shoes. She doesn't even fly that I've seen.

Honestly, fixing the face clutter, giving her practical boots and fixing the colour scheme is probably enough to solve most of the problems.

It doesn't change the fact that seeing Penny in tights, thigh-highs and boob support, considering she was running around in baggy pants and a baseball cap is just weird, though.

It wasn't the weekend when I posted it, nor was it late in the day.

Doesn't that still make it a sixth power? Or is it OK because that's how Sorcery does it?