Veazey

Small Issue, Which I Have Already /Bugged:
The animation for Aim in the blaster Electric Blast set uses the same animation as the blaster Energy Blast version of Aim. That is, it has the blue and white sphere thingies instead of electricity like the Build Up animation has.

I can't quantify this at all, but things seem laggier than they were under I7. This may be because I was playing a Trick Arrow defender (with Glue Arrow) in a trench coat on a team of 8 (several of which were using the veteran reward goodies, including wings) running police band missions and a safeguard mission. But, everything seemed significantly laggier, to the point that my computer would pause for several seconds at a time and my frame rate felt like it was in the single digits.
Of course, like I said, I can't quantify this yet. But I will be keeping an eye on it.

The storyline is the thing that really involves me, but I at least like everything about this game. Personal favorites not mentioned in the poll itself include:
PvE combat (try WoW, pull hair out)
Solo-friendly dynamic
The community
Ease of movement in the world
It's a game about freakin' superheroes!

The last one is what drew me in. The everything else is what kept me here.

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AYE

Oh, and yeah, Electrical Blast could use a tweaking here and there, but mostly to its 8th tier power, Voltaic Sentinel. Give it a second attack and a PBAoE Lightning Field-esque power (y'know, like the description implies) and we'll be satisfied.

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That would be spiffy, but the real reason I'm here is to say "Aye" to re-naming Devices "McGyver."

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[Sneak Preview - In Issue 9, look for a Green Monorail to appear in Skyway City just steps from the Underpass]

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Oh really? The construction of new metro stops. I wonder if there might be any other new stops....

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C'mon, Arctic! Use your pull as a temporary secretary for the Phalanx to influence city policy and get us a Green Line stop in Founders Falls.

Also, I liked the "Oh yes. There are Easter eggs." line. A little sense of humor goes a long way in this community.

Well, happy birthday!
As my gift to you, I promise not to sing any sort of birthday song. Instead, I hired Geddy Lee and Zak Wylde to do it for me!

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forget the fury bug... its nice to know the Gecko is still around!

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I was thinking the same thing. Having not seen a Regen or accuracy nerf in a while, I was wondering where he'd gotten to....

Ba-dum-bum.

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I've thought this exact same thing, except that it doesn't seem as if Nemmy ever actually took any advantage of the invasion situation, either as it was hapening or in the years since.

...which, of course, doesn't mean that isn't exactly what he WANTS us to think, so as to distance himself from the evernt and stay unnoticed as he works upon his other machiavelian schemes...

...but then again, he probably KNEW that some of us would come up with that hypothesis, which is exactly what he wants us to believe, when in truth he's actually just did it to give himself a few months to it back and sip tea without being barged in on by heroes while they fought off the rikti...

...unless THAT is what he wants us to think!!

...I hate Nemesis.

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That's actually the reason I love Nemesis so much. You never really know what's going on. Plus, all the steam-powered super-technology and shiny brass epaulets.

PS
If you're reading this, mission-design people, I wanna go to a parallel dimension ruled by Nemesis. Elite Boss-class tanks roaming the streets, snipers on the roofs, troops drilling in public squares, clouds of smoke in the sky...basically read William Gibson & Bruce Sterling's "The Difference Engine" and add a military edge to it.
Please?

Weeeeeee-oooooo! Weeeeeee-oooooo!
Grammar Police!


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However, a dark shadow has fallen over this year's festivities. Word has spread from the shadowed town of Croatoa (Town of Salamanca in the zone known as Croatoa) that strange things are headed south to spoil the holiday with their own evil celebrations. With the location of the Malleus Mundi still a mystery following it's disappearance last year, it's feared that new creatures might appear on the city streets. There have already been rumors that the Unseelie court may be sending fiends to paragon City to join the Vampires and werewolves that stalk the night on All Hallows Eve. Now there have even been sightings that the fearsome giant Jack-in-Irons has been seen heading south to join the Pumpkin King.

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Small capitalization inconsistencies and a mis-use of the old its/it's thing. Nothing terrible, but I was picking nits anyway.

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I remember carefully making my first character, after going through ALL the ATs and powersets, and ALL the options in the character creator, only to enter Outbreak and be amazed by all these other new heroes. And I could shoot fire from my hands. I COULD SHOOT FIRE! It was awesome with raisins.

--NT

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That sounds like me, except with electricity. I grinned like an idiot for two solid days. Then my upstairs neighbor complained that it sounded like a thunder storm in my apartment. I grinned for another week.

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What - you should charge for stealing ideas from ELO?

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Nah. But he should charge for stealing from REO.
C'mon, Bruce. Don't bring me down.

As to actually being on-topic, I forced myself to use proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation when chatting via programs like ICQ, IRC, AOL IM, and etc. so typing speed isn't much of an issue for me. Hence, I tend to use longer words in conversation (and say a whole lot more than most of my teammates) simply because I've got scary-fast fingers. Plus, it's easier to make snarky comments mid-battle.

If we vote you as Governor of Rhode Island, you have to stay.
...right?

Right?

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I got tired of switching out beacons among just 2 telepads, so I ended up adding enough telepads to support all the currently available beacons. If they add beacons for all the other CoH zones, I'd probably start switching them out again, but I'd rather they just upped the beacon limit to 4 per telepad or something.

Either way, it's not a dealbreaker. It'd be nice to have beacons to zones we actually want and need to go to more often than Faultline or Boomtown.

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Or let us craft a better one. It is called the "Basic Telepad" after all....

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Although Energy Transfer + Sapper = incredible satisfaction too.

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Energy Transfer + Anything = incredible satisfaction.
It's the sort of attack that makes you giggle like a maniac when you use it. 'least, that's what it does for me.

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You're really creepy.

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You have no idea. Remember, he's probably wearing a kilt right now.
.....
Let that picture sit in your head for awhile...

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As the proud owner of two kilts, I feel I should add that not everyone who wears a kilt is a creepy fanboy.

Personally, I think that the politics are inherent in the situation. One person with that much power would automatically be viewed as a danger by some people, no matter how many puppies (s)he saved from burning buildings. Even with the FBSA in place to deal with super-powered vigilantes, I'm sure there are still elements of the government and military that don't trust them.
I'd like to see some echoes of this controversy make its way into the game in ways other than just the Malta and their anti-supers agenda. But, that's just me and I liked the Justice League's run-ins with Project Cadmus and their shadowy military backers.

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Huh. There's a switch. A scandal about a pro athlete NOT taking drugs.

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That was my favorite part, actually.

And I think some flavor like this would add some needed depth to the world. So many people wielding the powers of gods and the cosmos for vigilante justice have to affect the culture in bejillions of little ways. Just like Alan Moore's Watchmen series. Now, granted, there was only one superman in that book, but he caused enough repercussions on his own. I think supplemental stuff like this being added into the comic book and the game world (more store front signs, additional NPC dialog, different billboards, etc.) would really help add character to this universe.
I don't really want to call it the "City of..." universe or anything because it stretches beyond just Paragon City and Lord Recluse's little island playground. A universe where there are super-humans couldn't keep the differences confined to just two little dots on a speck of dust hurtling through one galaxy. It ripples much, much further than that.

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What small SGs need is a non-stackable, worthwhile buff for a simple, low Salvage cost. They won't abuse that, because they don't have the resources to.

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Exactly.
If these are indeed designed for small SGs, the buffs should be designed to be non-stackable, but powerful and expensive in terms of salvage. Otherwise, it's just something else to waste money and salvage on, and there's already plenty of that, from the perspective of a group struggling to have enough prestige to keep a base with a single workroom open.

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Oil SLick arrow was targetable as a pet Is that right?! It even had a heading over it.

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That's how you set it on fire. Hit it with a fire or energy power (or have one of your minions do it), and it goes boom!

As to the way-too-lengthy animation times, I'm really hoping we can get these shortened. I mean, look what it did for Twilight Grasp. It went from "t3h suck" to "one of the best heals in the game" and all it took was shaving 2 seconds off the animation time.
I know the art people are way too over-worked since every change in the game basically requires the art people to do something, but we (the Trick Arrow fan-people) would love you forever if you'd shave our animation times for us.

...ew, that sounds kinda gross.

I'm not disparaging Acid at all. I just don't see why we have to employ two debuff powers to get a better debuff effect than other sets get with one. It's that kind of logic that has caused so many problems with the set.
"Oh, they can out-debuff if they apply Acid arrow, too."
"Yes, but we shouldn't have to. Acid should be icing on the Disruption cake. If all we do is debuff, we should do it better."

I do realize that there are also several soft and hard control powers, but other defenders have access to the same types of powers. Ice Arrow is like Petrifying Gaze (both single-target hold), EMP Arrow is EMP on a stick, Oil Slick is surprisingly like Freezing Rain (knockdown, slow, DoT), and since a single-target immobilize is available to the majority of blasters at level 1, I don't think we need bother with comparison.
The point I keep reiterating is that Trick Arrow is currently being out-debuffed by mixed-bag sets, and that stinks.

I think adding an interrupt tick to Disruption would be a good secondary effect. It'd make it extremely useful against any foes with interruptible powers: Raider Engineers, self-destruct mages, several others I can't think of. Plus, it would make stalkers hate us even more. And that's become a personal goal.

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actually people should stop looking at only disruption arrow as the -res in TA, disruption + acid arrow have a much higher -res then any other defender set and with the changes in i7 you can keep the higher -res constant.

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So, we can hit one (maybe two) people with a bigger -RES debuff than other sets, but those same sets can affect more foes with a single power that lowers resistance more than one component of the Trick Arrow one-two?
That don't make no sense, boss. If we're all-debuff, then all our debuffs should be better than the debuffs in mixed sets.
All of them.
Individually.

I think the first round of testing was somewhat inconclusive because we had Kheldians onboard, which meant the possibility of Shadow Cyst crystals and the automatic team wipe those entail. Now, I'm not disparaging those of the energy-symbiote persuasion; I just think that a more balanced way to crunch the numbers would be with 4 archetypes: blaster, scrapper, defender, and tanker. Controllers can be back-up defenders, as the Parrot already mentioned, so they should be excluded to get a true feel for the feasability of the Trick Arrow set as a whole.

With that said, however, it's pretty obvious to me that Trick Arrow needs to be buffed into line. Let's just look at Dark/ as an example.
Tar Patch: Locational -RES, -SPD, -RECH. Its -RES value is higher than that of Disruption Arrow and it does other stuff.
Darkest Night: Anchored AoE -DAM, -ACC. Its -ACC value is higher than that of Flash Arrow and it does other stuff.

I needn't go on any further. Dark/ has more powerful base debuffs than those in the Trick Arrow set, in addition to a very powerful (if hit-based) AoE heal and an AoE rez that doubles as a powerful debuff in its own right.
I don't think we're asking too much to see Disruption's -RES component brought up to 125% of Tar Patch and for Flash Arrow to be made useful. Adding -REGEN to Acid Arrow wouldn't come remotely close to overbalancing the set, in my opinion, because Dark/ does a better job of debuffing than an all-debuff-all-the-time set. This seems off.
Plus, the ol' animation issue that everyone brings up truly is a valid point: it doesn't all have to be Snap Shot fast, just faster than what we have. We don't need to make doubly sure the Disruption arrow did, in fact, hit the wall ten feet in front of us before firing off a second shot.

I'm glad that the devs actually listen to their players, and I sincerely hope that our suggestions are taken into account.

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Some of the animations are still buggy. Pauses after Acid, Ice, and Entangling, for example, the same type of pause that was removed from the ends of Fistful, Ranged, and Rain of Arrows.

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I don't think it's that the animations are "buggy" so much as they are "overly-long." Those pauses are apparently part of the animation, to give the set a more realistic feel, when all it really does is lower the player's functionality in a team. I'd like to see how the set played without those pauses built in and see if it increased my usefulness and/or made me look stupid.
This is a tricky situation, though, because Hawkeye and Green Arrow never had to actually fire the arrows. They just had to be drawn standing there with their arm pulled back every so often for dramatic effect. So, the realism of a trick archer does become a little wonky, but this is a city full of cigar-smoking androids with capes and anarchy symbols on their chests. I don't think realism should be our absolute benchmark.

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If there were AT modifiers at work on that 0.5 (50%), then a defender, the buff/debuff AT, would have a higher value, not lower. Certainly not 70% lower.

Wrong is wrong, and _Castle_ is wrong. Flash Arrow is most definitely not, unless there was a stealth buff in a recent patch or he's quoting I7 numbers that weren't mentioned in the patch notes, debuffing accuracy by 50%. As I stated, it was tested and very solidly proven to be 15%.

Oh, and on topic, I throw my lot in with the pro-Night Widow crowd. They're a lot more fun to fight than the typical stuff we get. At least they do something more interesting and challenging than resist status effects or damage.

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I'm going to agree with my fellow Trick Arrow fan here. Flash Arrow, two-slotted with debuff SOs, doesn't have a 0.5 accuracy modifier on it on live. I am intimately aware of this.

And I also like Night Widows, where "like" is shorthand for "find incredibly challenging in a refreshing way."

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Also, if everyone has TeamSpeak I'd prefer to use that over typing (old and lazy me); but if this isn't doable, I guess I'll let you primitives drag me back to the stone age and use the keyboard.

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Like Luminara, I won't be able to talk if we do TeamSpeak. I'm having mic issues that stubbornly refuse to be resolved.
Also, I think using text for communication would probably be a good idea, in that it keeps the data more in line with what "average players" would be doing.

I have a 30 TA/archery and a 30 rad/rad in the defender market.
Also available are a 50 elec/elec blaster, 39 AR/devices blaster, 37 claws/SR scrapper, and a piddly 15 warshade.