Samuel_Tow

When people talk about City of Heroes 2, they're usually referring to a brand new game built from scratch. It doesn't matter how much you modify City of Heroes, unless you rip the game open and replace major components - and that won't happen to an existing game - it'll remain an old game. You can extend its life, possibly indefinitely, but there will always be things you simply cannot do.

A City of Heroes 2 would, presumably, be a brand new game with a brand new combat system using current generation graphics and with all the old lessons learned implemented from the get-go. And it would very likely tank so hard we'll MC Hammer would go green with envy. A new game means a new start which an established playerbase will very likely be unwilling to do, and it means a shockingly smaller amount of content. If it's a new game, there's no porting over - you make everything from scratch, and you're trying to replicate eight years... Ten years of hard work. Hell, we're probably close to 12 years now, considering a game-footage trailer for the game was released in early 2001.

Personally, I hope this version of City of Heroes will be around for a good while longer, but a brand new release that tries to replace it cannot work.

My e-mail can hold, at most, 20 inspirations since it's limited to 20 e-mails (if I'm not storing anything at the time) and I can only mail one inspiration per message. That's only as large as my inspiration inventory, so the increase isn't by much. Additionally, sending things to e-mail is such a massive pain in the *** I almost never bother with it, with each e-mail needing a recipient that can be mistyped, and then needing text in the body, and then making me wait 15 seconds. Let's say I work at the speed of light and I'm able to send an inspiration as soon as the timer has expired. For 20 inspirations, I will need to wait for the timer 19 times, or in other words wait nearly five minutes of just sending things. This bloats significantly when we accept that I don't work at the speed of light.

When inspirations start going, they don't go only slightly faster than I can replenish them. When I need a Break Free every fight like I did on my Blasters, they go down the drain something like ten times as fast as I can cover the loss. Yes, combining inspirations is an option... If we could combine across Tier, which we can't.

And at the end of the day, if we can make them permanent, then they stop being consumables and thus are not working as intended.

Pretty much, yes. I've often cited reasons as "this is a big reason why I don't play Blasters," but this here is THE reason why I don't - they force me to work twice as hard in order to be half as good. Every time I play one, I can't shake the feeling that if I were playing one of my other ATs, I could do this content I'm struggling with blindfolded without using inspirations at all.

Just because a problem can be worked around doesn't make it any less irritating. If anything, it makes it more so since not only am I suffering from the problem sometimes anyway, but I have to expend a lot of work and be a lot more skittish all the time.

I couldn't begin to tell you. Incoming damage simply outstrips my ability to resist it. Sure, in the 40s and up I can generally handle large spawns without too much trouble, but not in prolonged fights, and certainly not multiple 8-man spawns by myself, not without chugging all my large inspirations or using Unstoppable or some such.

I probably don't build for "turtling" as you do, but this never used to be a problem back in I7 and I8. I don't build for a zillion pool powers, but again - this was never a problem in the old days. It is a problem now with enemies using more exotic damage types, stronger debuffs and coming in larger numbers. Even at the best of times, a couple of Rikti spawns will put me in the red unless I'm playing Electric Armour.

And don't even get me started on the 64% base to-hit of Incarnate enemies. It's the exact same reason I stopped playing Diablo 2, which is to say the game expects me to have a specific build and balances accordingly, putting me in the position of having to build a lot better just to break even.

*edit*
I should also point out that I build for damage before I build for defence. Not exclusively, but mostly. This is one of the primary reasons why I stopped playing Dominators - I had to build them like Controllers in order to be effective. Faced with the choice of not building for damage or playing an AT and building for damage, I pick the latter.

I think that, for as long as the thread has gone, this really sums up my position quite well. I don't buy people who "want to be evil" because that reduces them to Saturday Morning Cartoons, which is where Westin Phipps is, though perhaps less Evil Con Carne and more Ren and Stimpy. Nobody "wants" to be evil, some people simply are because of how they choose to go about achieving what they want to achieve.

Sure, you can quite serial killers and whack-jobs like the Joker, but I've never found those kinds of villains compelling. Oh, shock and horror, I don't like the Joker. Woe is me. I prefer villains who have a real motivation that "evil" is just a means to, rather than villains for whom evil IS the motivation.

What, really? I was just coming here to complain about how the changes to Fighting didn't make me any more willing to burn a power pick on an attack I don't want just to get a toggle I want, but... If that's true, then can I pick Tough without having to pick Kick or Punch?

Oh... OK, that explains why my recent meetings with low-level Praetorian Clockwork haven't ripped apart my SR characters nearly as much as I remember them. I was utterly dreading fighting these guys, but when I actually did it... It wasn't all that bad. At the time, I figured I just remembered wrong, but it's good to hear they've been brought back to line. Fighting them is actually enjoyable now

Specifically, that they're intentionally designed to be consumed faster than they're replenished, meaning that they're not something you can rely on for baseline performance but rather for performance spikes in unusual circumstances. If this weren't true, then they wouldn't be consumables in the first place.

Well, that figures. It's in the one Strike Force I haven't done...

That's kind of my point. It's an end-heavy set that goes thematically with one of the most end-heavy secondaries in the game. Even Dark/Dark isn't as bad because Dark Melee has Dark Consumption to help with the end drain somewhat.

I agree about Bitter Freeze Ray. This is one of those powers that just confounds me. It costs a lot of endurance and doesn't really do all that much. It's right in the middle of a hold and an attack and, consequently, isn't good as either while paying for being both. The overlong animation is just icing on the cake. Again, it's the Dual Pistols problem of putting pretty, long animations on powers that really aren't worth being so slow.

I don't mind its best attacks being slow, really. Sure, Energy Punch has some of the best DPA of 1.20, but Energy Transfer still has a better DPA of 1.71. Even accounting for recharge time, Energy Punch has a DPS of 0.21 rounded up while Energy Transfer has 0.20 rounded down. It doesn't matter if the power is slow, it still has the stats to give it a solid contribution. In fact, this is precisely how I feel attack progression should go - small attacks should bring higher DPS to form a base (an "autoattack" chain, if you will) with big attacks bringing higher DPA and lower DPS to form damage spikes. I haven't had the time to run DPS vs. DPA calculations for the whole set, but at the very least Energy Transfer looks pretty damn good.

Also, all of my calculations use scale damage for powers, with Energy Punch being a scale 1.0 damage attack (0.7 smashing, 0.3 energy) and Energy Transfer being a 4.56 scale damage attack (1.57 smashing, 3.0 energy).

That's ONE big slow set to how many fast ones? Martial Arts, Street Justice, Claws, Dual Blades, Katana... One slow set isn't enough. In fact, Stone Melee should have been a slow set, itself. Instead, it's a surprisingly fast set with surprisingly high endurance costs, which is what makes it so hard to sustain. Once upon a time, Geko designed "slow" powers to just have a longer recharge but cared nothing for how fast their animation time was. As a result, we have plenty of "slow" sets with attack animations that are far too fast, and I honestly don't like it. Titan Weapons was probably the first set in the game purpose-designed to be slow, and I LOVE the result. I want to see more slow ones like it, and I'd hate to lose the slow ones we have now to the attackattackattack monster. I prefer my battles being solved in one big hit as opposed to a hundred small ones.

Huh, so it does... I stand by my assessment - this shouldn't be, and I wouldn't be sad or even surprised to see that go, as well. Stone Melee can probably do with a look in general.

You're not going to get the old animation back. Ever. You may get a faster animation for it, but it won't be the old one. And I, for one, DON'T want the old animation back. Yeah, the attack was cheap, I admit, but even then I still hated the animation. You can't have by far the strongest attack in the set be a simple no-effect tap on the shoulder. I feel the same way about Clobber, for reference. That power needs a better animation, or at least a visually stronger effect. It just makes Shatter feel anaemic when it takes almost twice as long but hits nowhere near as hard. Sure, it's AoE, but that doesn't stop Cleave and Head Splitter from being AoE AND feeling awesome as their respective sets' heaviest hitters.

So? Yes, they're slow. Not all sets can be fast. In fact, I don't WANT all sets to be fast. Since my very fist days playing this game, I've wanted to see your typical "big guy" sets that are very slow, but hit very hard. Your Juggernaut vs. Spider-Man, if you will. If anything, I really dislike people's continual insistence that every Brute set should comprise of small, fast attacks. I get that this builds Fury, but if that's the case, then I'd rather see slow attacks build more fury than just make all attacks fast.

I gave up on Blasters in large part because I could not reconcile with myself how I could hate a set which was so pretty just because it was slow. I refuse to support any game balance suggestion which offers animation speed-up as the only positive change. You're not going to get the old animation for this power back any more so than you'll get ED reversed. If Energy Transfer is bad (and I'm not convinced that it is), then I'd rather see the power made better within its current animation.

They don't have to have a backstory. One can be made on the fly if a writer cared enough about actually giving the gang depth and meaning. Hell, I could do it if I had any control over the actual canon.

I remember a recent discussion I had with Nuclear Toast where I broke concepts down into the categories of "character" and "construct." A character would behave like a real person would, given the circumstances, even if this makes for a less complicated plot. A construct would be the facsimile of a real person, but whose actions and reactions would be based on an explanation of how the person should behave regardless of whether it makes sense or whether an actual person who lived to adulthood would live this way. The trouble with the Warriors is that aside from Alexander Pavlidis (and even then JUUUST barely), the Warriors act like constructs. They are defined as people who recreate Greek myths and thus their reactions are based around the actions of the mythical people they take their names from. For instance, when going to recover the Geometric Solids, the person who holds them turns out to have the nickname Archimedes. Convenient coincidence?

Honestly, giving the Warriors some depth could be as simple as giving all of the named ones real names, with the Greek name in quotes, exactly like Alexander "The Great" Pavlidis. It suggests that these are real people with real lives and real backstories who simply took on the identities of ancient Greek heroes, but whose "real person" personalities still exist behind the name. That's pretty much the definition of depth - a person who is more than he first appears. Giving these guys more to their faction and more to their individual stories than JUST a Greek myth name would be a good first step.

I don't think the question is whether a game should be based in maths or not so much as it's the question of how big of a role do we want the precise math to play. For instance, games built heavily around skill can, to a large extent, be balanced by gut feeling and by actually playing them, then handing them over to people to play and going from there. Sure, the numbers in these games matter, but they matter in the ways people use them, thus what the game is balanced around is less how then umbers work out and more how people tend to play it.

Very simply put, you can have a "thing" that's very overpowered and still have it balanced if it's enough of a pain in the *** that most people couldn't do it or wouldn't want to bother. Basically, the "rocket jump" of a lot of 90s FPS games. It could be very useful when done by very good players, but hell if I ever found a use for it.

This also strikes me as a balancing system centred around negative reinforcement, and negative reinforcement as the sole motivating factor is why Diablo 2 is one of my most hated games of all times. "You feel strong, eh? That's OK, in a little bit you won't be." Having the game keep yanking my toys out of my hands is the fastest way to pull me out of the experience, and when I get pulled out of the experience I tend to stop thinking like a player and start thinking like a customer. It's less about "Is this game fun?" and more "Is this past time worth the time and money I'm investing in it?" I have yet to find an instance where I've asked the latter question and answered "Yes." with the possible exception of this very game.

Thank you, Bill. I don't think I've had such a laughing out loud "it's funny because it's true" moment in probably years. Because honestly, that really is how the system feels to me more often than not.

You're kind of sweeping the problem under the rug by stating that it will always exist. Crime will always exist, but we don't stop trying to fight it, just to pull a random example out of a hat. You can never have complete consistency and so no-one should expect it, but that doesn't mean we should give up on trying to have a consistent story or a consistent tone. Even if it doesn't work all the time, it should still work at least some of the time.

The fact of the matter is a good story isn't good because every part in it is good. In fact, it isn't good even because most or half or even some of it is good. A good story is good because it makes us care about it enough that we're able to overlook the bad parts of it, and indeed accept them as part of what makes the story good. For instance, I HATED cave levels in old games, which means I pretty much hated the original Tomb Raider. I liked Tomb Raider 2, but hated the two Tibet levels initially. However, the game was so good that I ended up not minding Tibet so much, and eventually learned to appreciate the thematic I disliked as simply part of a good game, whether the part itself was good or bad.

This is why people like me can flip-flop about the entire game so easily, from really really liking it to wondering why I'm still subscribed. City of Heroes is not a game without its flaws, and the story is really on of the most flawed aspects of it. But the story is also made up of extraordinarily good ideas, even as part of newer content despite how much I've bashed it. Even if those ideas aren't exactly told very well, having them is still good enough for me to overlook the poor execution. The real problem with "consistency" arises when you create a new story which is not only bad, but actually ruins a story which was previously good. The Dr. Khan TF is a good example. It's a bad TF, it's one of the game's WORST stories by far, and it serves to utterly castrate any potential coolness Reichsman might have had when he was still just a concept. Before, when the 5th Column was still "gone," we had fun times imagining what it would be like if Reichsman woke up and took control of it. Seeing it in action ruined that plot, any potential future plots on the subject may have had and pretty much buried the 5th Column entirely since its one remaining named character isn't interesting.

Contrast this against the concept of Ascension as seen in Dark Astoria and explained by Papa Smurf. I HATE Prometheus both as a character and as a plot device, and I REALLY dislike the Well of the Furies as a concept, but Ascendants are such a powerful idea, such a strong story seed, that I'm really perfectly fine with the Well serving as the catalyst and Prometheus serving as the contact. Not only has the good idea that is Ascendants made me accept the bad ideas that were Prometheus and the Well, but it has made me actually see them in a positive light. As concepts, they're bad. As means to a much better end... They're actually pretty good. Not only that, but the concept of Ascendants also serve to humanize both of the others. The Well goes from an god-modding all-powerful entity that is the end-all be-all of power into just one source of power, thus putting its drive to empower and control into perspective. Prometheus goes from an always-right overpowered smug god into a very powerful being caught in a situation that's becoming bigger than he is. It's putting an arrogant person used to bossing people around in a situation where he's out of his depth, forcing him to balance between playing big dog and dealing with the reality of being in over his head. And I LOVE it!

Paragon Studios writers have historically had a tendency to write in a vacuum, considering only the context that's directly relevant to the story they're writing and rarely the way it impacts the broader world in general. I mean no disrespect when I say that that's tantamount to writing fanfiction, in the crucial aspect that fans don't control the fictional universe and their stories can't impact canon. Fans don't have to worry about continuity, and our writers are writing like fans by disregarding continuity and only focusing on the here and now. This is what tanked Reichsman and this is what's turned Praetoria into bipolar land. Is it a deep and complex latticework of interwoven grey moralities or a grotesque black-and-white goatee evil universe? It depends on which story you run, and that really ends up making neither angle work very well. In fact, at times I wonder if our writers even have the pedantic knowledge of lore some of our players enjoy and that they simply don't know they're trodding over established canon when they have the Malta Group try for "minimal involvement" in a situation best suited for a commando squad, just as an example.

Consistency can't be absolute, but it should still be a main objective.

I agree, no minion or lieutenant - singular - is usually a problem. One on one, even bosses aren't that bad. The trouble is those almost never come alone. A +0x2 spawn, which is what I play, tends to spawn one or two lieutenants with between two and five minions. For some factions this isn't a problem, but for a lot of the newer ones - DUST, IDF, etc. - this can be quite deadly. And if it were just that, I wouldn't have a problem, but recent game design likes to toss multiple spawns on me at the same time. Stacking ambushes, "large" spawns (that end up x+2 to what I'm set to), multiple boss fights...

I once whined about Dark Astoria being too hard because it throws huge spawns at me, things that feel like +0x4 when I'm set to +0x2. I excused them because... Well, it's end game and it's supposed to be harder. Heavens knows why, but let's roll with the premise that it should be harder. Except I replayed First Ward recently and I started running into the exact same +0x4 spawns at +0x2, consisting of Apparitions, Awakened and Dust. I honestly lost count of the number of times I got jumped by a tentacle head Seer with two lieutenants and four minions, the EXACT spawn size that Mot throws at me seven times when I get pulled into the guts from the bank. And just earlier today I was escorting Leon out when no less than three spawns of ambushes showed up ON TOP OF ME as soon as the previous one was defeated, and because Leon won't disengage from a fight in progress, I had to fight 'em all.

What I'm saying is that when the game plays like it should and gives me spawns that correspond to my difficulty, one spawn at a time, then no - lieutenants and minions aren't that much of a threat. As it should be. I should be able to trounce a mastermind's minions until I make my way to him, whereupon the real fight should start. Trouble is, the game does this less and less often as new content is developed. Pretty much the only place you'll see regular fights is in pre-I8 content.

It isn't, on either count. Giving a Brute access to a hold stronger than that of a Controller should never have happened in the first place. Additionally, old Energy Transfer was badly overpowered even with its self-damage component. Asking that it become better than it used to be won't happen.

Besides, I like its current animation considerably more than its original. Ye gads that looked weak, the shoulder tap of doom. I get that the new one may not be "good DPS," but it certainly looks powerful. Whatever happens to the power, I want to keep this animation.

I actually worked on a model for the stacking resistances that produced consistent results, but it occurs to me the forum I posted it on is currently in "archive" mode and I can't access it. Basically, I chose to represent "resistance x -health" as a 2D graph, with the area that's "below" curve of the health-dependent resistance constituting average resistance across the interval. It's easy enough to calculate with a straight-line curve, but this model also gives you the ability to calculate it for an actual curve via definite integral. That's basically what a definite integral itself models.

That aside, what I'm saying is I don't think balancing a game around math in the first place is a good idea. You just put the onus on planning and winning fights before they even start. Sure, you can make it complex and obscure enough to where most people won't get it, but at that point you're just hiding the right way from your players while still HAVING a right way built into your game. It's why I've been more and more disappointed with stat-driven RPGs of late.

Again, every time I play an actual action game where new abilities actually give me the ability to do new things as opposed to just modify some numbers, this is reaffirmed to me. A new ability with a different function changes how I play in an action game. In an RPG, it typically just changes my stats for doing more or less what I was before, just by clicking different-looking icons. Look at something like League of Legends. For as much as I don't like that game, there really is a difference in how all of its characters play, not just what stats they bring to the table. And that's not just the math talking.

I actually feel that the Warhammer 40 000: Space Marine game does almost exactly this, though in a somewhat simpler and more obscure way. It does have classes, yes, but within each class, you are allowed to pick two perks from two sets of 8. You can take any two, and almost all of them have a MASSIVE effect. For instance, when the game says "Markedly increases armour strength." it means it, because armour (shields, really) gain something like three or four times the capacity. When the game says "Grenades deal significantly more damage." it means that, too. Grenades have a larger radius and about three times the damage. Things like that.

This is, in practice, an "advantage/disadvantage" system, but there are SO MANY advantages you're never really in a position to think of it in terms of what you're not taking, because you're not taking the great majority of the perks. Instead, you're put in a position of picking a role for a specific loadout, picking the weapons you're most comfortable with serving that role, and then picking the perks that best fit the resulting playstyle. I can't say that it's ever an obvious choice (OK, almost), and it is kind of hard to pick, but at the end of the day, it's still a surprisingly versatile system with what amounts to a very limited class selection.

---

Sidways of that, it's becoming more and more obvious to me that the more "action-oriented" a game is, the easier it is to introduce diversity to it, because the actual gameplay of it involves so many more variables, so many more unique situations and so much variety, most of which really comes down to muscle memory. The difference between a slow hammer and a fast sword becomes much greater, as does the difference between an AoE cannon and a sniper rifle and an autocannon.

In a traditional click-n-kill RPG, the numbers may vary, but what you do does not - you click on enemies and click on skills. The order changes, but the the basic gameplay is so limited there's very little you can do to shake it up. Sure, you can jumble the numbers around, but what you're changing is the math, and math can be figured out. And not necessarily by the player using it, either. The more you try to obfuscate the math, the more you just put artificial obstacles in the player's way.

Why I find action games have more variety is because, to a very large extent, they don't come down to what you know or how well you plan. They can't be "figured out" because no matter everything else, it all comes down to what you actually do when it comes time to do it, and if you make the game tricky enough, then there's always the "challenge" of whether you'll succeed or you'll fail. A math-driven game, even as random and obfuscated as it may be, is still predictable because nearly every fight is decided long before you enter it. If you have the numbers on your side, the only way to win is essentially by means of random chance, and that just doesn't add anything to the experience.