UberGuy

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After the Difficulty Slider, a new ruleset was put in place. The Devs recognized that Bosses were soloable by most players and powersets, but, in a concession to newbs who didn't have the right builds, the Difficulty Slider suppressed Bosses for soloists on DifLevel 1. Also, the AV to EB rules were put into place.

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Just a clarification, the slider vastly predates the change that allowed AVs to downgrade to EBs. Looking at how you said it, I don't actually think you were saying they were coincident, but it can easily be read that way.

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Where is this lunacy coming from because I have been seeing it alot since AE dropped.. can these all bew brand new players that just have no idea how to build an effective character ??

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I think so, yes. This sort of thing was very, very common when the game was new.

We didn't know nearly as much about the game as we do now, but even back then, I was part of a well-informed SG made up of folks who were in CoH's beta. They knew what the powers did about as well as anyone back then, and they made builds we'd still recognize today as largely reasonable once you corrected for the changes (particularly ED).

And even back then, we sort of looked down our noses at builds like what you guys are describing. We did try to help people, but we also got a fair bit of flack from people who were sure they knew better.

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Supposedly, it was changed because the heal ticks were causing a hideous amount of lag when MMs were healing all their pets. I'm not so sure this is really the case since the corruptor version will still heal pets.

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Yeah, not sure I buy that one. I mean, sure, maybe it causes people on some people's systems, but it gets run at things like Hami raids and I didn't see people complaining.

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The correlation is simple: Their original vision of bosses being un-soloable doesn't mean that they weren't supposed to spawn normally in missions to begin with since AVs which were definitely meant to be unsoloable spawned in missions.

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It does when taken in context of the discussions about how missions were constructed. You got bosses on large teams or when the mission authors explicitly placed one. That was explicit in the discussions of how people who couldn't/didn't want to solo bosses were able to solo any missions.

I also agree with Sam.

I knew about the ranged hold, and would strive not to set it off. Now, all I can do to prevent it is beat the foes down faster or mez them. I find that less interesting, not more.

Did the old cutoff range make sense? Probably not, it seemed much too far. But I actually thought it was cool that they behaved that way in general. I consider this a step backwards.

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Hey, remember, AVs used to spawn in missions while solo before difficulty settings. Now that only happens at the max diff.

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I was responding to the possibility that bosses were supposed to work this way all along. AV spawning behavior has been explicitly changed several times, so we know for a fact that how it works now isn't how it was all along.

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Actually, what we know is that how AV spawning behavior works now isn't how it was originally supposed to work. We don't know that how bosses spawn now isn't how it was originally supposed to work, though. The original AV spawning rules I would think hints that it's not impossible that it -is- how it was supposed to work all along.

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I can see absolutely no correlation between AVs spawning, which through all versions of AV spawning change have only ever happened as part of an explicit foe placement, and bosses spawning willy-nilly as part of normal mission spawns (regardless of whether the mission contains a placed boss).

This is in the context of early discussions about how every mission did not contain a boss by design, because the expectation at the time was that not everyone could solo a boss, and the notion that everyone should be able to solo some of the time. (This itself doesn't seem to have been t a founding assumption, but the devs came around to it pretty early. Thus: Containment for Controllers.)

The change that allowed bosses to downgrade to LTs on Heroic was essentially a concession to the fact that you often could not complete a sequence of missions (usually a story arc) without meeting one or more bosses, so the utility of bossless missions to allow for weak soloers wasn't really a useful concession. The change that allowed for AVs to downgrade to EBs was provided later (I7, if I recall correctly), in response to player dissatisfaction with the number of AVs present in CoV's missions post level-30.

During the start of beta, when those reports I mention were coming in, there wasn't yet any heal decay.

I'm sure knowing it was coming factored in to how things worked in PvP, but I think the hard time players were having with killing the pets could have factored into what the devs decided to do in PvE as well.

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Really? That's crazy. I never knew that. Has it always been mag 100 since CoVs inception?

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It has. She was doing that in RV pretty much since it came along. (I know the RV entity is different, but the mag of the hold is nuts there and in missions/TFs.)

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Is this correct then:
6x45(270), 1x50(50) = 320 = 320/7 = 45.71 or 46.
So you could bring a 41 onto the team without an sk since they are within 5 of the average.

And how does mob level factor into all that?

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I'm sadly not the right person to check the exact details with, which is why I didn't provide any. As best I recall, the last we were told, the rule was "within two levels of the team average" (not 5 levels).

The five levels rule I think is the one that was with respect to mob levels. How this works is far less clear to me, but it does seem to relate in some way to team average level, or something like it. This was the foundation of the old level 44 bridge trick.

Edit: way unclear sentence cleaned up.

That's what happens.

Edit: It's not 5 levels of the leader, but 5 a certain number of levels from the mobs and from the team's average level.

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Or Ancient Cimerora... still trying to figure that out...

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As soon as I can figure out why I can still call Viridian or Unai from there, or access the MA, or zone into our super-group base, I'll get right on finding out why we have time-traveling orbital payloads.

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I'm still kind of confused why heroes are launching the missile though. Unless it's assumed that we are launching an payload-less missle into the sea where it will only cause a small ecological disaster instead of the huge catastrophe it would cause if the villains launched it into Paragon City with its payload intact.

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If you read the color text that pops up, you're putting a payload into orbit from where you can call it down on your enemies later.

I think one of the most fun things I ever did with a WB temp was call down a Nuke (the actual explosion one) on a Zombie invasion in GV that was getting the better of the assembled players. It looked cool, turned the tide, and had a very Return of the Living Dead feel to it.

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Particularly the +regen aura if you're a mastermind, but periodic heal if you're a corruptor. Is there a good reason for this difference?

Is one supposed to be more powerful/useful than the other?

I'd imagine it has to do with the pets somehow. Is +regen more beneficial to pets, thus the change? Or is it a case of periodic heal would be too powerful, thus the change?

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Healing was more beneficial to the pets.

Healing is based on a fixed table for the caster, the Mastermind in this case. No matter who he heals, with the healing pulse, he heals the same amount.

Now think about the pets, and how their HP are distributed. There are three "ranks" of pet, and the lower ranks not only have less base HP but are also lower level (reducing HP more).

Healing a fixed amount across all the pets was extremely beneficial to the minions. I know that during beta people were reporting them incredibly hard to kill in PvP.

Going for regen causes the "healing" effect to be proportional to the pet's HP, which makes their durability scale more with their own base durability rather than with the healing strength of the MM's heal pulse.

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D3 = Dark/Dark Defender
D4 = Dark/Dark/Dark Defender

A Dark/Dark Defender was called a D3 before the Epic pools even existed.

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This.

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i14, is when it started for me. Had no problems until then.

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It's nice that it's not been something you've experienced or noticed, but I've been experiencing the situation where a power set on auto stops firing and you have to click it to get it going again since before we had CoV. I can't say exactly when, but since I6 release was simultaneous with CoV's, I called it I5.

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Hey, remember, AVs used to spawn in missions while solo before difficulty settings. Now that only happens at the max diff.

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I was responding to the possibility that bosses were supposed to work this way all along. AV spawning behavior has been explicitly changed several times, so we know for a fact that how it works now isn't how it was all along.

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b) this is actually how boss spawns were supposed to work in the first place, and it's actually been broken all this time.

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This one seems incredibly unlikely given the original stance on bosses not being intended to be soloable (lol). However, anything seems possible.

It's the only thing I could imagine him meaning, since nothing else about ticket rewards changed in I15.

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Wait, what? As far as I know you can't choose regular drops from non-DC/HoF AE missions. Am I missing something?

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You can't choose regular drops, but you can choose to spend tickets on regular random salvage.

A lot of people seem to think you couldn't do this before, apparently because the option to do so was placed down in the "reward rolls" section of the tree menu instead of in the "invention salvage" section.

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When it stops going auto, I find I have to manually trigger it, then it will go auto once more. Granted, thats until it the next time I'm idle and not in combat. I've bugged this, but I suspect it's a feature to prevent auto-spamming powers at the market.

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This behavior long predates the market. It's been going on at least since I5.

There was one. I've used it. I just can't find either it or a link to it.

It does seem that keeping it up to date with ongoing changes would be a huge pain. When I used it was right after I14 went live, so an awful lot has changed and (obviously) I have no idea if it was kept up to date.

Edit: Found it. It's called "cohoma.exe", with a title bar of "City of Heroes - Mission Planner" followed buy a version and build number. Using that to dig around yielded its home page here

I think the devs probably have given us the store you mention in the form of merits. It's true it's not an inf-based store, but honestly, I think that's probably intentional. They created a system that gives people incentive to run their primary content. Basing the store in inf is an incentive to just grind out a ton of cash, which you can do while wholly ignoring their content.

We may not all like it, but it makes an awful lot of sense from a dev perspective.

The main things we see missing from the merit "store" are purples and things like Hamidon and other special enhancers. (Sadly, I consider the non-HO specials basically worthless because they are not available at level 50 and they "expire".)

Dislike
I dislike anything that players would frequently characterize as "runs away a lot". Some examples would be Longbow Eagles, CoT Thorn Casters (any type), but the crowned masters would be things like the Ghost of Scrapyard or Deathsurge.

Having foes do tactically interesting things isn't bad, and if foes just fall back out of melee range to pelt you with ranged attacks, that's fine. Indeed, this is what Eagles are meant to do, and they do it reasonably well. Entities like Scrapyard, however, just run. And run and run and run. And leap on top of things 100' up, and run and jump off them again. And run and run and run.

That's not tactically interesting. That's tedious. It never helps when they run so much they get themselves droned or run into the Black Market kill zone.

Another fun example is when fast-moving mobs like Warwolves decide they're losing a fight and they run away ... to the next county. I have had such foes run from the end-room of a large warehouse map all the way to the entrance. It's relatively common for foes who run this vigorously to return to their spawn point no longer aggressive, because they ran so far away they decided the fight was over.

So, yeah, I am less frequently annoyed by foes' powers or abilities, as by their AI.

Like
I like mobs with variety in their strengths and weaknesses. Arachnos are very interesting because they present a wide variety here. For the level ranges they exist in, I also like Tsoo. Early Crey are like this, but they become very monochromatic in higher levels, especially 45+.

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With this though I wouldn't expect any measure of thanks no matter how it was made known. Fixing it likely involved much extra work, and when is the last time anyone thanked you for dumping a problem in their lap ?

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It happens about once a week, when I point out something that someone's overlooked or done wrong. They're usually most thankful when I spot the problem before it hits production and becomes an outage, since being the root cause in an outage lowers our end-of-year "bonus".

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I will happily delete a Hecatomb: Chance for Negative Energy Damage IO, just as easily as I once tore apart a Mox Ruby and an Ancestral Recall in front of a group of other Magic players.

It's only influence!

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You could sell a Mox or AR for a lot more real-world money than you could sell a purple for, unless you hoodwinked someone on the real-world trade value of the purple or found someone who treats real-world money like a lot of us do influence.

I'm not a magic player any more, but I'd be aghast at someone wasting that much potential income.