Author Topic: And the mask comes off.  (Read 1712710 times)

Remaugen

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3280 on: October 01, 2014, 02:22:52 AM »
Wow. . . Windows 10 announced already. . .

And thanks for the link to PC parts Picker, cool site!
We're almost there!  ;D

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Arcana

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3281 on: October 01, 2014, 02:28:58 AM »
Hehehe, my main was constantly being re-imagined, but eventually settled on Regen.

I squealed like a little girl when I found out Regen got ported to Brutes :D

Energy Melle // Regen // Energy Mastery

All attacks except Total Focus and Energy Transfer was slotted for Stun.

Everything else was slotted for recharge. 3 end procs + 3 end IOs had me at stupid end/sec so I didn't bother slotting much for that either :P

I had pretty much no defenses, but enough recharge that with Spiritual, my Dull pain was on 12 sec overlap i seem to recall.

This meant that I had days when I would die repeatedly just versus trash mobs ( 2+sec activation ftw!! )

However, I had days where I just seemed Immortal. I even managed to nearly perma-stun Noctis pre-Incarnates 8)

( proceded to get mushed by mobs cause the team was all 'lol you wanted to solo, gl :P )

If I got a say in additions or modifications to the game?

Regen 4 Tankers

That is all.

Edit: spilling

You might get a kick out of this: I call it "selling out to regen"

http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/download.php?uc=1496&c=667&a=1334&f=HEX&dc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

Its something I played around with for Brutes, focusing on recharge, heal, regen, and +maxhealth (although it has some other stuff in there).

Key features:

More than perma Dull Pain (cycle time ~92 seconds: remember DP has a heal)
Reconstruction cycles in about 15 seconds and heals for about 2/3rds of full (base) health.
Close to the Brute health cap.
IH is up more than half the time.
IH down: 93 h/s.  IH up: 228 h/s.
MoG can be up almost 25% of the time.

Its looney tunes, but might have been a blast to play.

Teikiatsu

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3282 on: October 01, 2014, 02:33:33 AM »
I liked leveling my alts.  I also had my power-mad days.  Enjoying the end-game power pursuit grind-fest wasn't mutually exclusive from enjoying the more conventional levels of play.

On the day they announced shutdown, my lowest active alt (meaning, an alt I was playing several times a week minimum) was in the teens (a water blaster) and my highest was my main that was running tons of incarnate trials, already had multiple tier 4s in every incarnate slot, and was still trying to make more Lore pets.

I actually believe there were a lot of players that were generalists in that regard; willing and able to enjoy almost any mode of gameplay in the game.

Pretty much this.  I had a stable of 50's that I was dabbling in the incarnate trials and I also had a group of toons ranging from teens to high 40s.  I'd log in a new toon every day and mess around.  Maybe I'd run a Terra Volta and respec, maybe try my luck in a PvP zone, maybe work on alignment swapping, maybe try out a randome AE, maybe mess around with internal Build 1 & 2, maybe I'd badge hunt, maybe I'd run an Oroborous mission, maybe a TF if I had time, maybe a few scanner missions or even (gasp) story content.  Maybe I'd solo, maybe I'd team.  Maybe I'd just sit back and talk on the global channels.

There was no right way to play the game, and the options were awesome.

My only concern was that it seemed like the incarnate trials were starting to pull the veterans away from L1-L50 content and into the post-50s, to the detriment of the younger section of community.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2014, 02:46:01 AM by Teikiatsu »
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Arcana

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3283 on: October 01, 2014, 02:47:34 AM »
I think the worst enemies anyone could make in the AE though, were storm summoners.

You didn't explore the evil side of the AE deeply enough.  I spent a lot of time looking at the custom critter system and tested a lot of combos.  Its hard to say what the worst possible combination was, but there were a lot of hidden nasties in there for people to run into that make storm summoning look like a squib.

Consider: Mind Control/Dark Armor.  Its a ranged mezzer with confuse.  Few non-melee can handle that very well.  As for the melee?  Dark Armor has Soul Transfer as a rez.  Do you have mag 30 stun protection?  How about mag 60 if you accidentally kill two a the same time?  How about mag 90?  And that's only after you get past a bunch of overlapping PBAoE toggles.

I had a list of combos to avoid when making real missions, and this was very high on the list.  Its just too evil.

Along the lines of storm summoning, a combo that only scored 9.8 on the evil-o-meter that was similar but nastier was Earth Control/Cold Domination.  Two autohitting patches - quicksand and earthquake - plus a rain, plus two really awful debuffs (benumb, heat loss).

Lupur

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3284 on: October 01, 2014, 03:18:07 AM »
You might get a kick out of this: I call it "selling out to regen"

/snip

Its looney tunes, but might have been a blast to play.

Ah, I see what you did there.. shame it breaks my 1 cardinal rule.. NEVAH TAKE HASTEN!!

I just punched this in quickly, so skills are out of order, but this is roughly what I remember having.

This happy little fellow and my SoA grenadier ( double full leadership & trying to perma bots), were the only toons I had purples on; the rest were fodder to feed the masses ( alts )

It's madness but it works.. sometimes :P
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Nightmarer

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3285 on: October 01, 2014, 03:25:14 AM »
Could you fill me in on how Rift's character progression worked?  You describe it like the character starts at the top or something(which would mean a sore lack of character development is allowed).

Basically, on Rift you have 4 classes, Rogue, mage, Cleric and Warrior. By default, on every class you can have 4 diferent builds and you can swap between builds whenever you wish. For each of said builds, you can use a combination of 3 different talent trees (talent trees are called "souls" in the game) and every class has DPS souls, healing souls, support souls and tanking souls hence you can build, let's say a rogue with a melee dps build, a ranged dps build, a healer build and a tanking build, that's many people you don't need alts in Rift.

Also, you can purchase more builds (I think it is a total of 6 builds) so you could add to your rogue, let's say a PvP build and a melee DPS hiding build (like a stalker) besides all the abovementioned builds.

Also, character progression was exactly the same so it was exactly same content for every alt you were willing to roll hence not really much point in making alts. Having said that, I personally used to have alts for many reasons, first would be playstyle because it is way different tanking with a rogue than with a cleric, or dealing ranged dps with a warrior (yes, warriors had ranged dps souls) than with a mage. Another reason I had alts for was crafting, although I could purchase extra crafting slots so 1 character could have all crafting skills, I preferred doing it for free. Besides, of course, not all souls were available on F2P mode so, instead of purchasing a healing soul for my warrior or my rogue, I preferred to roll a cleric when I could be bothered to do the exactly same content.

Some people mentioned that alting was a complete waste of time because, besides having to go through same content over and over again, you also had to take into consideration all the endgame raiding you had to do if you wanted to gear up 2, 3 or 4 alts however, I always found that argument a bit silly since it was probably petty much same time you would spend raiding to gear up the same character for 2 or 3 different roles. Of course, if you wanted 4 walts fullye geared up for every possible role, well, that was a totally different scenario akin to what Arcana defined as wide-completionists.

Arcana

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3286 on: October 01, 2014, 03:25:27 AM »
Ah, I see what you did there.. shame it breaks my 1 cardinal rule.. NEVAH TAKE HASTEN!!

You could yank hasten and burnout, replace with grant vis and taunt (or whatever), and slot GI with Lotg +rech and Lotg anything, and its still pretty zippy.  DP is still plenty perma in particular, and you get back a little bit of the recharge you lost from hasten with the additional Lotg.

Nightmarer

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3287 on: October 01, 2014, 03:27:50 AM »
You didn't explore the evil side of the AE deeply enough.  I spent a lot of time looking at the custom critter system and tested a lot of combos.  Its hard to say what the worst possible combination was, but there were a lot of hidden nasties in there for people to run into that make storm summoning look like a squib.

Consider: Mind Control/Dark Armor.  Its a ranged mezzer with confuse.  Few non-melee can handle that very well.  As for the melee?  Dark Armor has Soul Transfer as a rez.  Do you have mag 30 stun protection?  How about mag 60 if you accidentally kill two a the same time?  How about mag 90?  And that's only after you get past a bunch of overlapping PBAoE toggles.

I had a list of combos to avoid when making real missions, and this was very high on the list.  Its just too evil.

Along the lines of storm summoning, a combo that only scored 9.8 on the evil-o-meter that was similar but nastier was Earth Control/Cold Domination.  Two autohitting patches - quicksand and earthquake - plus a rain, plus two really awful debuffs (benumb, heat loss).

My worst was testing a mission where minions were darkness manipulators, my ToHit was floored at -300 and the army of fluffies tore me apart in almost no time while I kept swinging at thin air.

FelixMWM

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3288 on: October 01, 2014, 03:39:14 AM »
My worst was testing a mission where minions were darkness manipulators, my ToHit was floored at -300 and the army of fluffies tore me apart in almost no time while I kept swinging at thin air.

That sucked and getting hammered by a group of praetorian clockwork nuked my dark regeneration recharge, if you can't kill me in 11 sec... 20 sec... three minutes, you can't kill me. Oh wait, you can.

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Power Gamer

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3289 on: October 01, 2014, 04:36:25 AM »
Pretty much this.  I had a stable of 50's that I was dabbling in the incarnate trials and I also had a group of toons ranging from teens to high 40s.  I'd log in a new toon every day and mess around.  Maybe I'd run a Terra Volta and respec, maybe try my luck in a PvP zone, maybe work on alignment swapping, maybe try out a randome AE, maybe mess around with internal Build 1 & 2, maybe I'd badge hunt, maybe I'd run an Oroborous mission, maybe a TF if I had time, maybe a few scanner missions or even (gasp) story content.  Maybe I'd solo, maybe I'd team.  Maybe I'd just sit back and talk on the global channels.

There was no right way to play the game, and the options were awesome.

My only concern was that it seemed like the incarnate trials were starting to pull the veterans away from L1-L50 content and into the post-50s, to the detriment of the younger section of community.

So true.
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LaughingAlex

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3290 on: October 01, 2014, 04:36:57 AM »
You didn't explore the evil side of the AE deeply enough.  I spent a lot of time looking at the custom critter system and tested a lot of combos.  Its hard to say what the worst possible combination was, but there were a lot of hidden nasties in there for people to run into that make storm summoning look like a squib.

Consider: Mind Control/Dark Armor.  Its a ranged mezzer with confuse.  Few non-melee can handle that very well.  As for the melee?  Dark Armor has Soul Transfer as a rez.  Do you have mag 30 stun protection?  How about mag 60 if you accidentally kill two a the same time?  How about mag 90?  And that's only after you get past a bunch of overlapping PBAoE toggles.

I had a list of combos to avoid when making real missions, and this was very high on the list.  Its just too evil.

Along the lines of storm summoning, a combo that only scored 9.8 on the evil-o-meter that was similar but nastier was Earth Control/Cold Domination.  Two autohitting patches - quicksand and earthquake - plus a rain, plus two really awful debuffs (benumb, heat loss).

Pretty nasty but I wouldn't have touched darkness with a 100 fool pole with the mobs I was designing, well, some of them, it was against the theme to an extreme.  Honestly alot of powersets, the buff/debuff ones especially were especially bad when en-massed.  The thing is the numbers that could be stacked in the debuff range, or the cc range, was unimaginably unforgiving, actually you could say it wasn't much different then dealing with a pvp 1.0 multiplier stacking team.

The reason I mentioned storm summoning was due to the fact that 8 tornados was pretty much death to anything and melee couldn't hit anything in 8 hurricanes, let alone with the -recharge stacking from 8 snow storms and -movement from that.  Getting torn down to negative numbers by anything that can was generally bad.

Actually any CC stacked from everything on the map could probably over-run people pretty easily.

Combo's I used that killed fast; kin/sonic blast(fulcrum shift on all mobs).  It had to be killed in moments, because the -resistance stacked a little harshly with the fulcrum shift damage buff.  Set it as an ambush and leave the message off(and if your really evil, set the ambushes to minions).  Said mobs also used /radiation blast alongside kin.

Any mastermind in an ambush; the mobs instantly bring out the henchmen.  But thugs was especially bad, super laggy and stupid fun about it, bring lots and lots of attackers as they'd instantly fire gang war off even before getting in range.  No, I am not kidding about that.  Once I tried spawning an AV to help another, unfortunately the stupid thing spawned 8 of them(and I THINK I gave these mind control).  And they all had gang war fired off.  Considering the AV I was fighting was an enemy with FS(and the full kinetics set)......:S.

Those were just a few things I did in the early missions, let alone later missions.  I was honestly waiting for time manipulation to come along for those.  But then I didn't want to go to brutal on players.

Wished I explored it more, just I had to keep in the theme of the characters.  Darkness powers were universally only good for magic themed characters and mobs, mine were all technological/science based with only a few exceptions.  I did however have other things to keep the difficulty rising for the archs, just needed the right sets to come out.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2014, 04:44:05 AM by LaughingAlex »
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LaughingAlex

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3291 on: October 01, 2014, 04:39:36 AM »
That sucked and getting hammered by a group of praetorian clockwork nuked my dark regeneration recharge, if you can't kill me in 11 sec... 20 sec... three minutes, you can't kill me. Oh wait, you can.

Felix

8 rad emission guys on soloists.....that'd be very cruel and unforgiving fun :).
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Felderburg

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3292 on: October 01, 2014, 05:27:09 AM »
It didn't take an excessive amount of grinding to get a character to the +3 incarnate shift in the incarnate trials though.

That's arguable. For a casual player like me, it became too much. Because I'm more of what Arcana calls a "deep completionist" I wanted to have my "main" get to the top tier of power levels. That was just impractical with the playing time I had, and even if I had had lots of time, I don't think I would have enjoyed playing the same limited set of Incarnate Trials ad infinitum. I left around Issue 20 because of that.

Even though I had a single "main", I did have many alts. And while I long ago had given up on all of them being "complete", it would have been nice to have more than one Incarnate level character. I ended up with 2 at +1 or something like that, but it was just too monotonous for me.

Like I said before, the "Posi hates alts" was a bit of hyperbole on my part a few hundred posts ago. But all the same, reading through his blog, I really get the very distinct feeling that his philosophy and the way I wanted / liked to play were at odds, so it might not be a coincidence I left when I did - I don't know the exact timeline of his becoming boss, but it seems reasonable in my head that the grand plan he had in mind was taking effect at the time I left.

I can appreciate that he has a vision and that it's important to have one, but if I don't like the vision, I'm not sure where that leaves me.
Living in the real world I suppose.

To be fair, I started playing CoH the summer before college, so most of the time I played it I was not living in the real world.

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Burnt Toast

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3293 on: October 01, 2014, 06:13:04 AM »

He became Lead Designer when City of Villains came out....



That's arguable. For a casual player like me, it became too much. Because I'm more of what Arcana calls a "deep completionist" I wanted to have my "main" get to the top tier of power levels. That was just impractical with the playing time I had, and even if I had had lots of time, I don't think I would have enjoyed playing the same limited set of Incarnate Trials ad infinitum. I left around Issue 20 because of that.

Even though I had a single "main", I did have many alts. And while I long ago had given up on all of them being "complete", it would have been nice to have more than one Incarnate level character. I ended up with 2 at +1 or something like that, but it was just too monotonous for me.

Like I said before, the "Posi hates alts" was a bit of hyperbole on my part a few hundred posts ago. But all the same, reading through his blog, I really get the very distinct feeling that his philosophy and the way I wanted / liked to play were at odds, so it might not be a coincidence I left when I did - I don't know the exact timeline of his becoming boss, but it seems reasonable in my head that the grand plan he had in mind was taking effect at the time I left.
Living in the real world I suppose.


To be fair, I started playing CoH the summer before college, so most of the time I played it I was not living in the real world.

But those are crepes!

Arcana

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3294 on: October 01, 2014, 07:43:07 AM »
My worst was testing a mission where minions were darkness manipulators, my ToHit was floored at -300 and the army of fluffies tore me apart in almost no time while I kept swinging at thin air.

True story: when the AE was first being tested, "custom critters" were not really customizable to the degree they eventually became - I had a bit of a hand in trying/forcing/begging/ramming the notion that they ought to be.  One reason was that originally, all custom critters basically had every power from both sets, which meant that in a sense, all custom critters were set to "extreme."

This became interesting when you made your minions custom critters, and the very first thing that happened when the player stepped into the room was that every single ranged critter simultaneously fired off *AIM* and then obliterated you through your defenses from long range.

But the most awesome example of needing to tone down powers was gang war.  Imagine a room full of minions.  Now imagine every single one of them possesses gang war.  Now imagine all of them wants to spam it immediately upon you entering the room.  Instant mosh pit, just add player.  Missions could get literally wall to wall with gang war members standing on the heads of other gang war members because there was literally nowhere else for them to stand.

LaughingAlex

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3295 on: October 01, 2014, 07:52:16 AM »
True story: when the AE was first being tested, "custom critters" were not really customizable to the degree they eventually became - I had a bit of a hand in trying/forcing/begging/ramming the notion that they ought to be.  One reason was that originally, all custom critters basically had every power from both sets, which meant that in a sense, all custom critters were set to "extreme."

This became interesting when you made your minions custom critters, and the very first thing that happened when the player stepped into the room was that every single ranged critter simultaneously fired off *AIM* and then obliterated you through your defenses from long range.

But the most awesome example of needing to tone down powers was gang war.  Imagine a room full of minions.  Now imagine every single one of them possesses gang war.  Now imagine all of them wants to spam it immediately upon you entering the room.  Instant mosh pit, just add player.  Missions could get literally wall to wall with gang war members standing on the heads of other gang war members because there was literally nowhere else for them to stand.

I know from experience how big those crowds can get.....on an open map, let alone a small space like that.  It was on accident by making 8 archvillains spawn in an ambush and they all cast gang war.  About 120 guys in one crowd...insanity.
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Arcana

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3296 on: October 01, 2014, 08:03:31 AM »
Like I said before, the "Posi hates alts" was a bit of hyperbole on my part a few hundred posts ago. But all the same, reading through his blog, I really get the very distinct feeling that his philosophy and the way I wanted / liked to play were at odds, so it might not be a coincidence I left when I did - I don't know the exact timeline of his becoming boss, but it seems reasonable in my head that the grand plan he had in mind was taking effect at the time I left.

This is just my opinion, but I think Matt's game design philosophy was "let the devs have some space."  He didn't strike me as someone that wanted to impress his own explicit singular roadmap on everyone else.  In fact, ironically my biggest gripe with Matt is that he didn't always reign in other devs like I think a lead ought to, particularly in terms of storylines.  While others are faulting Matt for the implied sins he never admitted to, one thing he did admit to was believing that prior canon and established backstory should not be considered absolute relative to allowing developers to create what he and they perceived to be good ideas.  He seemed to be of the philosophy that if the team wanted to do something that sounded good, their job was to come up with a reasonably good excuse to comport with canon, not actually follow canon if it interfered.  That's a philosophy I can understand, and I can even support if necessary, but one I would never instantiate on my own.  It clashes with what I consider to be best practice design.

Its hard to reconcile the guy that says if a dev has a good idea that conflicts with prior plans you should usually go for it with the idea that he was simultaneously trying to shove his own personal gameplay preferences onto everyone else.  And under Matt the game implemented a ton of number of quality of life improvements for "unconventional" gameplay, like leveling pacts and day jobs. 

And even though many complained about some of the details of it, the Alpha slot and the shard system was *explicitly* designed to offer a way for players that did not want to run incarnate trials and trial-like tasks a way to get some benefit from the incarnate system - and in many ways the Alpha slot was the most general purpose incarnate power that existed (considering the others couldn't be used outside of trials anyway, at least originally).  The shard system was not originally a pre-planned part of the Incarnate system: it was created in response to feedback. 

There are a lot of compromises in the Incarnate system to address issues with solo players and time-limited players.  Many players didn't think it was enough for them, but they are there nonetheless.  Judged based on whether they made non-participants happy, you could say it was an insubstantial effort.  But judged based on the fact they created such cut-outs at all, when its not generally considered a good idea for end game implementations, it suggests the devs cared more than they were given credit for.

Again: its not supposed to make players who didn't like the system happy, its just meant to convey the sense that making them happy wasn't a trivial thing for the devs to accomplish, on top of everything else they wanted to do.  They didn't deliberately target you, and they didn't have an easy way out, in spite of what many players suggested at the time.

Yoru-hime

  • Minion
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  • Posts: 43
Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3297 on: October 01, 2014, 01:01:15 PM »
True story: when the AE was first being tested, "custom critters" were not really customizable to the degree they eventually became - I had a bit of a hand in trying/forcing/begging/ramming the notion that they ought to be.  One reason was that originally, all custom critters basically had every power from both sets, which meant that in a sense, all custom critters were set to "extreme."

This became interesting when you made your minions custom critters, and the very first thing that happened when the player stepped into the room was that every single ranged critter simultaneously fired off *AIM* and then obliterated you through your defenses from long range.

But the most awesome example of needing to tone down powers was gang war.  Imagine a room full of minions.  Now imagine every single one of them possesses gang war.  Now imagine all of them wants to spam it immediately upon you entering the room.  Instant mosh pit, just add player.  Missions could get literally wall to wall with gang war members standing on the heads of other gang war members because there was literally nowhere else for them to stand.

I'm having trouble thinking of a set that doesn't end up being broken when you give the full thing to an x8 spawn worth of minions. All the synergies that can make "All <insert powerset here>" teams incredible would be thrown back in your face with every single spawn. Unless there were sets that the AI was just uniquely unsuited to making full use of.

Ironwolf

  • Stubborn as a
  • Elite Boss
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  • Posts: 1,503
Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3298 on: October 01, 2014, 01:42:03 PM »
You didn't explore the evil side of the AE deeply enough.  I spent a lot of time looking at the custom critter system and tested a lot of combos.  Its hard to say what the worst possible combination was, but there were a lot of hidden nasties in there for people to run into that make storm summoning look like a squib.

Consider: Mind Control/Dark Armor.  Its a ranged mezzer with confuse.  Few non-melee can handle that very well.  As for the melee?  Dark Armor has Soul Transfer as a rez.  Do you have mag 30 stun protection?  How about mag 60 if you accidentally kill two a the same time?  How about mag 90?  And that's only after you get past a bunch of overlapping PBAoE toggles.

I had a list of combos to avoid when making real missions, and this was very high on the list.  Its just too evil.

Along the lines of storm summoning, a combo that only scored 9.8 on the evil-o-meter that was similar but nastier was Earth Control/Cold Domination.  Two autohitting patches - quicksand and earthquake - plus a rain, plus two really awful debuffs (benumb, heat loss).

I made several custom characters specifically for different uses as a demonstration that mezzing was NEVER necessary to balance the game. I added resistance to all of the bad guys. I then varied the weapons the assorted evil doers used to absolutely stop herding. I added 2 broadsword/katana users to each group and using this model with only at most one debuffing character per group - it made every group exciting and a challenge - I recall having people run it and warning them this is NOT a farm - proceed with caution and seeing them faceplant immediately.

It was not overly hard just an exercise in balance. I made the groups interesting to fight with mixed powers and weapons. Blasters however, could not be held by any of the foes. They could use range - the tanks and scrappers needed the blasters to kill off the melee or in a short time the tanks would be dead. The groups were made to play to the power of having a diversely built team. Not a holy trinity - just rewards in defeat speed for having a varied team.

ArchPilgrim

  • Underling
  • *
  • Posts: 7
Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #3299 on: October 01, 2014, 01:56:48 PM »
Pretty much this.  I had a stable of 50's that I was dabbling in the incarnate trials and I also had a group of toons ranging from teens to high 40s.  I'd log in a new toon every day and mess around.  Maybe I'd run a Terra Volta and respec, maybe try my luck in a PvP zone, maybe work on alignment swapping, maybe try out a randome AE, maybe mess around with internal Build 1 & 2, maybe I'd badge hunt, maybe I'd run an Oroborous mission, maybe a TF if I had time, maybe a few scanner missions or even (gasp) story content.  Maybe I'd solo, maybe I'd team.  Maybe I'd just sit back and talk on the global channels.

There was no right way to play the game, and the options were awesome.

My only concern was that it seemed like the incarnate trials were starting to pull the veterans away from L1-L50 content and into the post-50s, to the detriment of the younger section of community.

Absolute dittos.

I've been playing Beyond the Dead on my iPad for about a year.  Every time, something in it reminds me of CoX to the point where I wake up in the morning wanting to log in, run to King's Row for a few Radio Missions, then run to Wenty's to check on my listings and bids.  I want to run to our base, make a few IOs, then maybe use the base editor to make a few design tweaks.  I loved designing and maintaining bases.  Oooo... Then I'd get the urge to run over to Faultline to visit Doc Delilah, et. al.

I had a half-dozen 50's and dozens of alts.  My first 50 was a Fire/Ice Blaster.  She was awesome.  She was a master crafter, guild master, and did all the badge exploration for the teleporters in-base.  I miss running to the Tailor for a costume tweak.  I miss sewer runs with new alts in Atlas Park, and miss beating on Frostfire.  The list goes on.  I absolutely loved being able to pick up any toon and going out for a new adventure.  And I cared not one whit about endgame.  It was about gameplay.

The ugly truth is that endgame, whether in CoX or WoW or wherever, is a Haven for those dwelling in the realm of Ego.  Biggest, Baddest, Best.  Pfffft.  Whatever.  The real treasure here is that CoX handles everyone.  It provided a unifying environment where everyone had the playground of their dreams.  And I miss it.
Why am I doomed to love that which is gone... Roswell, Jericho, Firefly, and City of Heroes?