Sardan

It's all a plot by Jack Emmert, who as we all know hates players and has a Svengali-like ability to convince others to spend millions on projects whose ultimate goal is to be un-fun.

Not a bad idea!

The main benefit to going over the softcap is if you run into defense debuffs. If you're over the cap, you can take a couple of hits from swords in the ITF and still be safely above the cap. In practice with my Ice tank, that never really mattered, probably due to strong debuff resists. I wouldn't make it a priority to go over the softcap.

Same here. I was in the habit for a while of getting a lot of tickets then doing a ton of bronze recipe rolls. If I clicked fast on the button to get a bronze roll, about half the time the game would crash.

To a person of a certain age (i.e. me), that was friggin' hilarious!

I could get behind that. Give tankers a damage bonus against Bosses/EBs/AVs/Monsters/GMs.

That's true. Anything truly different can't be done purely via Castle's spreadsheets. But there's precedent. Before Dual Blades' combos there was Domination. That too had to have required new coding. So while this suggestion requires programming resources, it's not unprecedented. Short of cloning Domination (which I don't like because I think different AT's should have unique flavors) this is the only balanced mechanism I could think of that would satisfy that desire to say "I'm done holding back!"

This is normal for them. I'm reasonably sure they've been working longer than a year on Going Rogue. They're working on new end game stuff and ways to make level 50 characters more powerful (per video from Comicon) that they can't talk about either. I believe one of the devs mentioned that the AE system took "only" 8 months, and he was totally impressed at how fast that was. There's always new stuff in the pipeline they can't talk about.

Same here. But since you reminded, me, I'm going to go post the pic in Jay's thread.

(Gawd I hate the smileys in the new forums)

My mistake.

I would guess that's the primary reason it probably won't happen. They don't want to seem like they're directly copying CO, even though it's a mechanic that's been used to death in fighting games for over a decade. In no way did CO invent it.

How is it any more a departure in playstyle than Dual Blades' combos are? That was a radical new mechanism unlike anything that was in the game before and it got incorporated just fine.

My understanding from the thread above was that you wanted to be able to do more damage on demand, to stop "holding back." I was looking for a new mechanism that wasn't a direct port of an existing one like Fury or Domination. The concept of a per-power charge-up meter is seems perfect to me (of course since it's my suggestion of course it'd seem perfect to me! ).

Still, given that it's a central part of CO's attack mechanics, debating its merits probably falls into the "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" category, which I think is a shame.

I think I win the contest as "most neutral" or maybe "most invisible." Despite regularly posting on the forums, I have no rep at all yet.

Obviously I need to make my posts more like P_Ps..... QQ

I regularly team with a few SS/Shield Brutes on the ITF and none of us bothered to take One With the Shield. It's not useless but once you have capped defenses, usually judicious insp management can take its place.

Sure, Aid Self is always handy for powersets with no heal. It's especially good on a high defense character because you're more likely to be able to fire it off. Again though, I had no room for it in my build.

That guy is a real life superhero. His top speed is almost 190 MPH. Here's some video of him zooming around, looking for evildoers.

Oh, and with regard to my requests not being new, that reminds me: it's just about time for my regular request for improvements to the Search window!

I agree that had Brutes not been created, the Fury mechanic would've been perfect for Tankers. But they have been, and it'd be good to keep their particular flavor unique to them.

In a thread in the Suggestions forum I proposed a new mechanic that uses the concept of a "charge up" meter that has been used in fighting games for years. The idea is you could just click an attack and it would fire normally or you could hold down your mouse button or keyboard key for a couple of seconds so that a meter on screen would fully "charge up". At that point the attack would do significantly more damage, at the cost of the longer activation time and more End. I was surprised that the suggestion got no comments at all. But this would be a nice fit for Tankers. It'd allow you to switch to "heavy hitter" mode on demand (like the Superman example above), without penalizing you in normal fights by saddling you with a set comprised entirely of long recharge, high End cost attacks.

The mechanism could be available on all attacks in a powerset or only to select attacks. The charge meter would be immune to +Recharge buffs, so a few stacked Speed Boosts wouldn't turn a tank into the new farming FotM. The point is it would allow change on demand from a fast fluid medium damage attack chain to a series of slower but devastating attacks. It would have a different feel entirely from Fury, just as Fury's extra damage has a totally different feel from Scrapper crits.

Heh. I didn't have the site bookmarked and was trying to get the link quickly. So I did the Google search and just copied the URL in Google's result list rather than actually clicking the link and copying the site's real URL. I'll try to remember to do it right it in the future.

EDIT: my first answer was "No" but to elaborate, if CO's free-form power selection is successful obviously it does prove the viability of the concept. If it's unsuccessful, it doesn't invalidate the concept. A common mistake is to assume that the failure of a product is due to a bad product concept but in reality it can be a bad implementation, or bad price point, or bad market timing, or poor marketing, etc.

Look at portable MP3 players. There were portable devices before the iPod. There was a la carte music purchasing before iTunes. But none of these were a commercial success before Apple got involved. Or to look at another Apple product, remember the Newton? Did its failure mean that handheld computing was a bad idea?

BTW, not to derail the conversation too much, but my own take on CO is this: they have correctly realized that in terms sheer dollars spent, the PC is now just a rounding error in electronic gaming. Consoles are where it's at. CO could get trounced by COH in the PC market and yet potentially succeed wildly due to console sales.

EDIT TWO: when I say "consoles are where it's at" I mean that's where the big consumer spending is, not that I'm a personal proponent of console gaming.

Why do foes in this game stand 10 feet away fighting back with guns that are obviously harming us little while we roast them alive? Why do enemies not immediately flee when they see us coming, then round up every comrade in their base and come at us with overwhelming force? Why don't they ever lock the doors to their bases?

Or to use an example from what is undeniably one of the classic games ever invented: is the King the most threatening piece on the board in a game of chess? Why does the entire game revolve around capturing that piece when it's trivially easy to prove that with the exception of pawns, every other piece is more of a threat?

In games you can't appeal to things "from a purely practical standpoint." Games choose a structure and build within that structure. This game chose ATs and it necessitates tradeoffs. Certainly if the devs ever do COH2 they can start with a clean slate and make a different framework; but they're still likely to build a framework would force you to make hard choices and not allow you to build a character that was excellent at everything.

It's true that in the right environment with lots of outside buffs a Brute can have Tanker mitigation and above-Scrapper damage. But that's hardly the norm. Scrappers put out a lot more damage than Brutes from a standstill. Without outside buffs it can be quite challenging for my Brutes to match the sustained damage output of my Scrappers. It's certainly doable, but it's hardly automatic. That's part of what makes playing Brutes so fun, IMO. Keeping that Fury bar up is like a minigame in itself. It's a brilliantly designed mechanic. And my Shields Brute required a gigantic investment in IOs to get close to (but not surpass) the survivability that a Shields Tank can get with a much more modest investment.

With Going Rogue coming, rather than buff Tank damage, the devs should just continue to proliferate powersets. That way for a given primary and secondary you can make the choice about whether they'd be a better personal fit in a Tank, Brute, Scrapper or Stalker (and if you squint a bit, Widows too).

When one has a favorite AT, it's natural to want to push the boundaries and want to make it more capable. But like it or not, ATs are all designed with inherent tradeoffs. To fundamentally alter tanks such that they did more damage, they'd have to have a commensurate reduction in survivability at which point they'd likely end up looking a lot like Brutes.

Zombie_Man is being extremely understated. When he mentions his forum skins, he needs more "!!!!" and "OMG!" and . If you already use Firefox, it's not hard to use the skins he developed. You add an add-in that enables overriding the forum's styles and use either his hero or villain skin. They recreate the old red or blue color themes and make the forums more readable and more usable in about a dozen ways.

EDIT: I was actually put off by the name "Zombie Skin" initially. Didn't want background images of rotting corpses. But that's just a reference to his forum handle. The color themes are basically improved versions of what we had in the old forums.

Exactly. To see how comical this is, find a walking NPC civilian and hit "Follow". You'll go at their speed, but using the running animation. Funny, but not what the RP-ers want.

Mids will not pop up any obvious warnings either. You have to go to a separate window called Sets and Bonuses (I think), and any bonuses over the limit of 5 will be shown in red.

I highly recommend using Mids to plan out any build. Note that Mids can't currently do builds with some of the most recent IOs that have been added to the game, but the new developer is working hard to get those incorporated.