rian_frostdrake

if you have someone on liberty, im in.

while i agree with most of your post, i thought i would add a bit to this, because part of the battle on the forum seems to involve an idea that there are only 2 sides to the issue, pro and anti endgame. and really i find myself being described by your point but still enjoying the endgame(well, the alpha, due to time constraints i wont get to play till saturday.and looking at the current issues, that seems like it works out really) but i have played a lot of mmos, endgame usually is a bad thing for me, 5-8 hour raids with large groups of people, just to get random drops of gear that just allows you access to the next level of raiding to do it all over again, that sounds like dental surgery. the endgame here so far has worked for me, and given that these raids give progress even if you fail and that they themselves are sub an hour (one unverified source said they last 35 mins) that is exactly the time commitment that i can go for, and the reward scheme is accommodating, and better still, unlike games where gear goes obsolete, these are powers that will simply become another tool in your toolkit for the duration of your character's career. So basically its not the dreaded endgame that many of us have come to fear from other games, instead its integrated in a manner that sidesteps a lot of the pitfalls of those games, and that becomes something quite workable.

So i suspect a few of us are in the appended category of. "didnt want endgame, but now that its out, its not that bad"

so you are uninformed AND a procrastinator, gotcha.

who pronounces it like that? tie-rant has always been how i have heard the word pronounced. now there is tyranny that goes for the soft e sound, but never heard tyrant pronounced in that way.

work night-shift. i wont get to play anything till the weekend, but my afternoons are free.

no, thats how id see it too. the idea as i see it is you start crossing the line bits by bits for the greater good, but the more you use over the top force, the more you enjoy it till it, not justice, becomes the prime motivator. ultimately its always up to your interpretation, is the rogue just a hardcore mercenary or someone gradually coming to their morality? nothing is going to fit every concept, but it does work.

ditto, i blame other games i have played where health/magic items fall less frequently, in coh they pretty much fall like rain, still getting used to it

one correction, if we are counting power customization, and i do, technically, then issue 19 did have sets of new animations for ranged powers. so wile not new costume pieces, and i am a bit testy that we ddint get anything for issue 20, then those do count for issue 19's count. and while you counted tails, id consider their added functionality of being used with a lot of previously exclusive costume parts to have had a pretty big effect on some costumes, some looks i had been angrily denied since issue 4 with the robes.

but yeah, some new non boosters stuff would do a lot to tamp down the rising tide of cynicism thats even starting to get to me. boosters are good, i understand the fiscal reality of them and have purchased the ones that were relevant to me(all but the dance one) and am particularly happy with the beast one given how much it directly answered requests from the players, but only having new costume parts in boosters for such a significant time, it looks bad.

you are using an incomplete definition. the relative "con" of an enemy also considers how much inherent damage resistance to your attachs they have, how many points of hold magnitude actually count and the severity of debuffs, as well as their ability to hit you(not sure exactly if its to hit or accuracy) so on one mechanical side, the level shift does make you slightly stronger in regard to previously purple conning enemies, or deep purple conning enemies. it has already made rikti raids easier, and magi slightly less sadistic, so by your measure, yeah you are 50, but by another real measure, you are 51.

i dunno, i find that for a large amount of movie reviewers, some genres such as action, horror and sci fi are not genres that ever review well. so thats why i tend to gravitate to certain reviewers opinions over others when it comes to movies of specific genres, like, say a heavily anime influenced over-the-top action film. for some the barriers of cultural awareness are just too high for older or less nerd culture friendly reviewers to enjoy, even if the nerd stuff turns out to be a mask of deeper and more compelling stories and characters, see again scott pilgrim, which did a bit better with critics but still wasnt a universal hit with them.

thematically, for a character themed after a mma fighter, it kind of looks like a hard overhand punch i have seen thrown. that said, while i have it on one of rian's costumes, i prefer the kick by a longshot.

whyiotta...

actually that was part of my point. the ma animations could be a great deal better, really i have only seen one mmo that had really "good" representations of martial arts techniques, and that was because swg was so heavily motion captured, but my point was that the power at launch(technically 2 months after launch) was really anemic, recent buffs have helped considerably, but given the reuse of animations in ss and the elemental melees, i really couldn't go with anything but ma for my main character, it was flawed but at least distinct. even the original crane kick, which had the weird hand thing before the kick, still was a blast to play because it was distinct, while i watched all the stoners, ss's and energy melee guys use 31 flavors of an overhead axe handle slam.

that said, and as others have mentioned, there are limits to both, if a power is so weak that it makes fighting against even con minions tedious, then that degree of performance just isnt going to support a fun experience. but the power is just not a top tier power, but still is playable ,such as dual pistols, then i'll sacrifice some efficiency for something that looks good. the original thunder kick was like this, the look was undoubtedly cool, but its damage was just pathetic for the time of the animation and as often as not, got you killed by taking so long to execute. still wished we could get a newer faster version of it as an alt animation.

for me and gek, i think it boils down to my old problem that mmos are bad games, there are people that think mmos have gameplay, and i envy their ability to find it, but compared to a moderate level of quality single player game, they quickly get overtaken. If i am playing an mmo, and i try not to, its because of elements like amazing art or customization, that sadly dont tend to show up in single player games, so i play for that and that alone. if i wanted gameplay, its never, ever going to be a mmo that i turn to. off farming purples for their 30th 50 with a costume and name generated entirely by random and no bio