Sardan

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I don't see it as a bug. Men at war should stay on guard.

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NPCs don't role play. If the devs want their non-combat animations to change, that's fine. The point I was making upthread is that all NPCs are designed in a particular fashion. Some are inherently mezz resistant. Others have toggles they put up, and it adds a tactical element to combat to be able to mezz them before they raise their toggles. This sounds like a bug.

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And this sounds like someone who wishes for the good ol' days when the Cimerorans were easy pickins. Hurrah for more interesting behaviour from mobs.

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Wrong. I never farm the walls and my favorite character for ITF runs is a Kin corruptor who couldn't care less whether they have their shields up or not.

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What is the heroside temp power supposed to do? When should it be used?

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Reichsman is supposed to have a phase power that makes him untouchable. The hero temp power is supposed to turn that off. The time I tried the TF on the test server, either his phase power was never being activated or the temp powers have a LONG duration. Several of us zapped him with the temp power when we first started battling him (very cool visuals!), but after a while we didn't bother. I regularly saw our damage drop to lots of "1s" in the combat f/x above his head, but that must've been him toggling on Unstoppable, because we should've seen "Unaffected" messages if his phase power was on.

Has anyone doing the Hero TF see him use his phase power?

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After dealing with ambushes, it took 12 minutes to defeat Reichsman.
Whole SF will be done much faster as soon as people become familiar with routine.

1 MM
4 Brutes
2 Corruptors
1 Bane

These TF and SF do not require any specific AT on team, the same as rest of TFs/SFs in the game

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Can someone connect the dots for me? I'm quite in the dark as to how some teams like the one above knock over Reichsman like he was made of Kleenex, and others pound on him and eventually give up in frustration. This team had a MM, but people are asserting the MM temp power is borked, so that shouldn't have made the diff. Did this team have a huge amount of debuffs? Did you simply have enough damage and -Res to pound Reichsman before he could phase or hit Unstoppable?

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I don't see it as a bug. Men at war should stay on guard.

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NPCs don't role play. If the devs want their non-combat animations to change, that's fine. The point I was making upthread is that all NPCs are designed in a particular fashion. Some are inherently mezz resistant. Others have toggles they put up, and it adds a tactical element to combat to be able to mezz them before they raise their toggles. This sounds like a bug.

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If the Devs were happy with the level of rarity before MA, that can only mean they are too rare now. I don't think "Ultra Rare" was meant to mean "no amount of rarity is too much".

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Then the devs should address that? Oh wait. they did in the opposite direction by villainizing farming, the single largest source of purples.

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The devs came down hard on AE farmers, but the AE doesn't generate purples (except for Devs choice, which weren't farmed), so their ham-fisted anti-farm measures had nothing to do with the purple supply either way.

The devs have taken no action in years with regard to non-AE farming, which IS a source of purples. The last anti-farm moves I can recall was putting Dreck on a timer and reducing Family XP, and both of those were a long time ago.

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I played WoW for 4 years, Everquest for 3 before that. Its only fun on the surface, once you realize you can't get any further without doing raids/pvp its pretty pointless to continue playing. Warhammer Online adopted an even more rigorous pvp philosophy. You can't get any of the high end sets through anything other than pvp. These games all have a set path to glory and anyone who doesn't wish to follow that path is just doomed.

I really hope that COH doesn't adopt this content philosophy.

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CoH *can't* adopt that philosophy. You can't replace your Fulcrum Shift with Fulcrum Shift +2. You can't replace Inferno with Uber Inferno. We're not gear based.

But that point aside, this notion of "it's only fun on the surface" applies to pretty much any PvE MMO, doesn't it? In our game you fight baddies so you can fight tougher baddies. Having your character get more powerful is a fun feeling. In WoW you raid so you can do tougher raids. People get their kicks from making their characters more powerful, and it probably all looks pretty silly and pointless to a non-MMO playing observer.

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Indeed, I never really saw the appeal of Hamidon raids. They seem difficult, boring and like herding cats.

Mothership raids on the other hand, have you as a part of a rampaging horde of heroes all kicking epic amounts of alien tail in their own style.

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Hami raids aren't my cup of tea. Mothership raids are fun but generally lag-fests. I'd love to see a new type of encounter designed for (let's say) 10-16 players and instanced. Ideally you'd have some type of team invite mechanism, unlike the Hive. Obviously this wouldn't appeal to everyone but it'd open the door to encounters that are more epic than are possible with 8 players yet potentially require more teamwork, and would hopefully not have the lag problems of mothership raids.

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The doors, heroside, for the midnight club *now say which zone they go to.*

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Wow, FINALLY!

Is this just an animation change or are they really starting their buffs before being aggroed? If it's the former, that's nifty. If it's the latter, it's a bug. The faction was designed to not have things like leadership buffs and mez resistance up from the get-go. Can someone with a Power Analyzer power double-check?

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Why does redside become forced to have very specialized teams, while blueside can bring whatever, have a costume contest in middle of the fight, while half team is dancing, still win this? Makes no sense(yes bit over top, but folks are calling this the new Katie, gotta be a reason for it)

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They wanted to make the AV fight more interesting, a "gadget fight". They also wanted to make the villain version different than the hero version. I believe Castle and Posi think that the villain version is actually better and more interesting than the hero version. My guess is they were trying to do something that'd finally get people to stop chanting "the devs hate villains." Ironic, ain't it.

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If this all broken, why was it even released? If folks pointed this out to Devs, bemoaned about it in the Beta, still pile of poo, then why was it released again?

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I wish it had been polished more too. There were tons of suggestions in the forums for how to deal with troublesome and confusing story elements, some of which would've been pretty easy to implement. We just don't know what other competing priorities they have to deal with. They're never just working on one release and many of them have to split their time between multiple releases that are at different stages of the pipeline. Heck, they could have improvements on the way, but their build and release process (except for dire emergencies) can be pretty lengthy--it's commonplace for Castle to say "a fix is on the way" and have it show up several days to weeks later. We know that the MM power was working at one point, so there should be a patch pretty soon that at least fixes that.

But again, please keep things in perspective. Your team was unable to complete the SF, but lots of other teams were. So it's not unbeatable, even in its current form. People will get a feel for what's needed to make it easier. Remember when the LRSF and STF were first released? Heck, I remember running early ITFs and they were very very different from what is commonly done today--very common to have 2 hour runs at first.

Rejolt, did you /bug it in game?

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It is strongly rumored that the arena no longer gives PVP drops due to people farming themselves.

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No rewards are happening in zones either, according to posts in the PVP forums. This "it's happening to curb player behavior" is jumping to conclusions. Remember when you couldn't invite people in another zone to join your team? Plenty of people on the forums loudly proclaimed that it was obviously a nerf to farmers so they couldn't invite fillers, until the devs clarified that it was simply a bug.

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Nothing is dropping in BB, or RV no inf, prestige, inspirations. not even for the first kill

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smells like a bug then.

I can't imagine they'd be stupid enough to just TURN OFF REWARDS for PvP after all the hits the community has taken lately.

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Agreed. If they did do it intentionally without so much as a patch note... well, I don't want to go down that road because I'm reluctant to believe that they're that stupid.

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Those are great suggestions for additions to the team search window, but wouldn't the idea of removing players already on teams contradict the "team LFM" function? Perhaps only the team leader would show up in the search window, with the other members hidden.

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The "search for unteamed players" function is what we have now. You run this when you are building a team. It's aggravating and pointless for that window to include people already on teams so that's what I'm saying needs to be changed.

The "team LFM" function would be brand new, and it would be executed by an individual looking to join an existing team. It could work a couple of different ways but the basic idea is that it's the inverse of what we have now. A team lead flags his team as "LFM" and unteamed folks could browse that list and opt to join or request to join.

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If you look at raiding like raid/gear/raid/gear then you fail to see the point. You can look at anything that way if you desire. farm/alt/farm/alt/farm etc

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Thanks, InfamousNrez. You'll probably get your share of dismissive replies because there seem to be a fair number of forumites here that don't like to admit that WoW might actually be fun to play, but as CoH is the only MMO I play I appreciate hearing what people like about the WoW endgame model.

FYI, Rejolt reported no rewards in Warburg PvP--presumably he meant no inf/prestige, he didn't specify. But if that's the case, I think that would indicate this is a bug rather than an intentional stealth change.

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And to repeat: I got nothing in OPEN, warburg pvp.

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This changes things. This has got to be a flat-out bug, no? FWIW, I did PM Synapse.

AE search got improved with today's release. You can now search on level range and keywords and the system also automatically warns you if certain features are present, such as custom groups or EB/AVs. Hopefully they'll continue to improve it with every release.

I emphatically agree that the current search window is LONG overdue for an overhaul. Here's a list of search window enhancement sugestions I've been keeping:

* Searches should never include players already on teams and solo players in TF mode (e.g. Ouroboros flashbacks).
* Level range increments should be by 5's, not 10's.
* Player ratings (stars) should show up in the search window.
* GIgnored players should not show up in searches.
* The Origin filter should be removed.
* The window should be resizable.
* The list should never be truncated.
* When in a co-op zone, allow me to search for characters of the opposite faction.
* When searching by name, match against any part of the name, not just the start of the name.
* Remember my settings from my last search. If someone drops from the team, it'd be convenient to do a new /search and have the options already set for me from last time. It doesn't have to persist after I log off, but make it persist during a game session.
* Make comments searchable. About to do the Nightstar Praetorian AV? Search for people needing her for the Portal Jockey accolade.
* Add a "Looking for AE missons" flag.


And here's the most radical request: a "team looking for more" capability. Several games already have something like this, for example WAR's "open party" system. I see so many people who don't want to own the star to build a team themselves, but they
aggressively try to get onto existing teams. Those folks are the ones broadcasting "lvl 30 scrapper lft" and even sending tells asking to join teams. With a Team LFM function, they could browse teams that had openings.

The team lead would use radio buttons like the normal search window to set allowable opt-inparameters; anyone outside the limits he set wouldn't see his team listed when they searched for teams. For example, if the team lead was OK with anyone joining he'd click the "All" radio button under AT, but perhaps he wants more support, he could click "Tank, Controller, Defender". If he did that, only those 3 ATs would see his team listed when they searched. Similarly he could set an acceptable level range; if the team had mentors he might pick a wide range but more often he'd want to filter to a narrow level range.

Lastly the team lead could type in a short comment so folks looking for teams could see that the team was doing; some people would like to avoid teams just grinding scanner missions so the comments would avoid unpleasant surprises. And just like some people reject blind invites, people would learn to be wary of teams that filled in nothing in that comment field!

A related suggestion: add $Difficulty and $Zone variables to compliment the existing $Level variable, to enable invite macros like this:
/macro Inv, "t $target, Want to join us running a level $Level $Difficulty mission in $Zone?"

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Therefore I believe that the lead developers should give us a true vision of where they are leading the game. Ideas on future content and meaning to the game, not just information on the next issue, but REAL VISION. That has really been lost I believe and now what we get from the Developers is snippets here and there but not with a broad vision for the future.

If CoX's current Ceaser got up and said "In the next 3 years we plan to increase the content by 50% and create 4 new ATs and expand to a real PvP servers." and then on a regular basis give the CoX community an update on the progress toward those long term goals, that would be meat we players could sink our teeth into.

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That kind of specificity just won't happen. First, plans change. If you look back at the August marketing survey you'll see it included hints of several items that have been or are in the process of being implemented. So it was obviously a snapshot of the coolest ideas they had at that point. Yet Babs has stated that several items on that survey have been abandoned or dramatically reworked. And that's from less than a year ago. If they gave a 3 year vision with specifics, players would constantly gripe about it not being done, not being done fast enough, or that a bait-and-switch was pulled because the vision changed, because the vision absolutely would evolve over time, that happens with all software projects.

The other problem is that the competition is watching. Don't you think that at least a part of why we're getting power customization is because Champions touted it as a key advantage? If our own devs were to lay out bold specifics years in advance, the devs for Champions and DCUO would say "Hey, thanks for the tips!"

Another problem is that sometimes the boldest software projects flat-out fail. The web site they developed to be able to show characters and their enhancements was scuttled; they had it working well enough to demo, but found out it not only didn't scale up but couldn't scale up. They had a revamped base editor mostly done but had to scuttle it too. A dev posted they've tried and abandoned several new travel powers over the years. My point is that sometimes you get excited enough about something to swing for the fences, but when you do that, sometimes you fail. If they announced "within the next 3 years we're giving you destructible environments and wall crawling" and then later said "sorry, we worked really hard on those but just couldn't get them to work" can you imagine the massive nerdrage?

The final reason is that 3 years is an eternity for a 5 year old MMO. While I'm very excited about Going Rogue and the currently large staff of the game, who's to say that in 18 months we won't see a gutting of the dev team as the bulk of them shift to developing a new MMO, as happened at Cryptic?

If they do implement this (which is a good idea) it'd also be good to include global handles with the exported data.

If the devs perceive the purple drop rate to be a problem the most straightforward solution is to bump up the drop rate. Having purples as a guaranteed reward from a TF is not the right solution given that they're supposed to be extremely rare. Going from the current drop rate to generating 8 per TF run is too big a change.

Is Elec/SD the best AoE brute?

You can also look under the Powers menu. If you got the magic booster pack, in the Inherent powers section you should see a power called Mystic Fortune. This is only usable on teammates but provides some pretty nice buffs. Use it frequently!

You will also have access to fun emotes like /e jugglemagic and /e cardtrick. They are just eyecandy, but pretty nifty looking.

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If you didn't like it, you could certainly quit the game. But a more logical option would be to simply not partake, and instead play other new "you can do it with just SOs" content that would most assuredly continue to be added.

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You either misunderstood or misread something. I said, if they start implementing content that was required to play to advance further then others like myself would find it is no longer a game they wish to play.

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My understanding of Posi's comments was that they do intend to implement content that will allow level 50 characters to advance beyond what's possible now. We don't know the mechanism, although we can say for certain it isn't a change of level cap, and it's certainly not just new IO sets because they wouldn't characterize them that way. As I've said previously, I'm guessing it's going to be universal enhancement slots. I don't know if that qualifies under your definition as being "content that was required to play to advance further". The content would be entirely optional but it'd certainly be required IF you wanted to undertake the as-yet-undefined progression to uber-50.

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this issue is terrible besides the Super Booster

i don't get why they are putting it up at all

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Posi commented on this in his recent Boomtown.net interview. They wanted to have an issue that released around the time of the game's 5 year anniversary. But MA took them longer than expected, so rather than skip the release entirely the pulled some features that were planned for this one and it ended up being pretty thin.

Given that it's happening so soon after the last issue, I don't really see any reason to complain.