Alt-itis flare-up

Been doing a lot with sub-10 characters of late, playing with power sets I’ve never used (or not used for a long time).

Managed to create what looked like a completely naked girl (except for her cowboy hat) by going with white outfits and white skin.  Yeah, that shouldn’t work (and, of course, it was missing little anatomical details, like toes, that would have made her look “real”).  I decided not to do anything with her, since I really didn’t feel like (a) attracting the attention that I would have, and (b) getting a petition slammed on my head.

I did end up pulling out a Lvl 2 character I created probably my first week in CoH and never went back to — a stone golem (Stone/Stone Tank) with an Egyptian head-dress named Mr. Thebes (“They call me MISTER Thebes!”).  Margie and I had fun PUGging around, but I don’t see doing much with him in the future — Stone Armor, like Dark Armor, seems to be a huge management bother (“Hmmm, Left-Handed Mutants with Red Electrical Attacks — I’d better pull out my Slate/Amethyst Armor, Jeeves”).  Visually, though, a lot of fun.

You say po-tay-to …

It’s pronounced … Tay-los?  Yikes.

Evidently in the new I9 Inventions Tutorial video, the narrator pronounces Talos (as in the hero and, more importantly, the island named after him) as “Tay-los” — as opposed to “Tah-los” (like in “talon”) or even, for the Hungarians among you, “Tah-losh.”

After folks giggled over that on the boards … quoth Positron:

The video pronounces it right. I had to have Statesman (Jack) confirm it himself specifically for this vid.

And it don’t get much more definitive than Posi quoting States.

“Tay-los” — like “Pay-most.”  Weird.

On the other hand, I did like this comment from SuperSean:

Well I don’t know who did the voice, but it was close enough to sounding like it shoulda started with “Hi…I’m Troy McClure! You might remember me from other City of Heroes training videos such as ‘Go. Hunt. KillSkulz!’ and ‘How did I get in this blue cavern when I went in an office building?'”

The problem with customized power effects …

Quoth Back-Alley Brawler:

No, the colors for a lot of particles are ‘baked in’ to the particle’s texture. The FX scripts themselves are completely separate from animations. In fact there’s a lot of animations that are shared between different powers with entirely different FX.

Power customization has some pretty big hurdles to overcome.

1) Powers currently point to one animation and one set of FX scripts. There’s no way in the our engine at this time to have them reference a different animation or different FX without just changing it in the power definition (which changes it for everyone). This isn’t a small or insignificant change and without it we literally can’t even begin to do costumized FX or animation.

2) Colors in FX are often baked into the particle textures. Most of the time they’re not, they use a greyscale texture and tint the color with an RGB value, but there’s enough that do use a colored texture that it would require quite a bit of work to overhaul and set everything up for customization. We did test a more global system that could just shift the hue of the entire FX script around the color wheel, but it’s not a complete solution to the problem. Namely that FX aren’t normalized to a common color, there’s no way to dynamically change this ‘shift’ value, and there’s still issues with blend modes.

3) Particle FX most often use an additive blend mode. Additive means that the closer a color is to white (in RBG values), the more opaque it becomes. Secondaries like yellow (255, 255, 0) are more opaque than primaries like red (255, 0, 0). Black (0, 0 ,0) ends up being completely transparent. So to take the Energy Melee FX for example and make a black version or even a dark purple (64, 0, 64) or dark blue (0, 0, 64), we’d have to do more than just shift the RGB values around.

4) Even if the system could accept more than one animation or more than one FX script for a power, we don’t have an in game system for allowing the player to choose this themselves. We could make one (probably based off of the costume editor in some way) but it’s still another chunk of time to devote to this.

Those are the major issues that I can think of right now, there’s other minor little issues here and there but it all adds up to a tremendous amount of dedicated work from multiple departments to pull it off.

As opposed to, say, the Invention System.

Which do you think people would appreciate and use more?

Weekend Play

A little of this, a little of that.

Most of the play time with Margie (when she wasn’t lying on the couch trying to recover from a nasty head cold) was with Torchy and Hildy, who are now at 49.8 and on a roll.  Those big Portal Corp outdoor maps are, if you clear them, worth pretty close to a full pip at Unyielding at 49.

I did do some good bits on Friday night with Lady Zebra, rolling a whole series of Faultline content until we ran into one mish that TPKed us three times in a row.  Mercifully, I had other things I had to run off and do.  Debt is my friend.

The rest of the time I was goofing off with some low-level types — a bit more with Miss Crackle, created The Unexpected Ally (a huge demonic fire tank who draws the strangest looks …) and got him up to 7, and a little of this/that with other sundry characters.

I have four or five lowbies that have gotten into the 6-7 range.  That’s a tough transition, as you go from the pretty-regular “Sewer Mish 2-7 PST” environment to casting about the Hollows or Kings for pretty much anything.  That’s one of the PUG Player problems, of course — the higher you go, the tougher to find folks to team with.

Considering the Invention System

So over the past week-plus, I’ve been playing with the whole Invention thang.  I’ve hung out at Wentworths, I’ve juggled salvage and recipes and so forth.  I’ve done it at with my 49 and with my 15 and in-between.

Some conclusions:

  1. If it’s not the sort of thing you care for, then, Costume Bits aside, you can pretty much ignore it.  Skip all the crafting and just sell the recipes and salvage to your contacts.  Think of it as quick money.  Are you getting the faboo prices you might otherwise?  No (though simple recipes tend to sell for higher prices at contacts than on the market), but you can at least get some “free money” and use it to buy DOs and SOs early.
  2. If you’re interested in gaming the system a bit more, you can also just play in Wentworths selling stuff.  Only non-Invention recipes seem to be worthwhile, and rare salvage.  Everything else is easier (and often more profitable) to sell at contacts.  That said, you can easily score some Very Big Bucks very quickly, albeit with a bit of thumbing through the auction history.  (It’s best in this sitch to end and begin your sessions in Wentworths so you can put the swag up for bid and then see if any sold when you come back on).
  3. Part of the savings, though, are an offset for the changes of your not getting any DOs or TOs “after your time.”  That’s actually a nice convenience, but it does (for those who compulsively try to sell everything they get their mitts on) mean a few less bucks in the influence bin.
  4. Note that Inventions (outside of Sets) are basically TOs and DOs and SOs that never age.  That means that, effectively, they’re good for about 10-15 levels, which is nothing to sneeze at.  You will, eventually, want to trade up to the next “drop” style enhancement.
  5. If you decide go whole hog and buy sets and all that kinda stuff — well, you can.  If you play the market, you can actually earn enough shekels over time to get the stuff you want — even, I suppose, costume stuff, eventually.  Having now played with it, I find all the dueling IO stuff (“do I go with this Set or that Set on this power”) to be a Character Customization Too Far, but different strokes an all that.
  6. Note that, at some point, ED does kick in.  Getting a Lvl 50 Damage IO when you already have three Lvl 50 Damage SOs on a power really doesn’t buy you much.
  7. Note that the Sets you get are visible in your Personal Info window.  In case you’re afraid that the name is not properly evocative of your character’s origin or MO.
  8. An oddity of the new system is that the Devs are providing more (gasp!) numbers.  As in precise percentages.  We’d had that previously on the boards, but we can now see exactly what different TOs, DOs, SOs, and IOs are doing as percentage boosts.
  9. While I’ve bitched long and hard over the whole IO process and how it plays out in RP terms, it’s not that much different (aside from the labor involved) than the silliness that is the Enhancement system itself.  I mean — when’s the last time your favorite science-based hero (let’s say, Spider-Man) went and got himself a Boron Injection so he could hit harder?

Possible improvements (aside from stuff I’ve already bitched about):

  1. Tracking salvage is, at this point, way too freaking difficult.  Either personal salvage display needs to also indicate what one has in the Vault and/or in Consignment, or something needs to be able to call that up.  Trying to remember (without running around all over the place) whether I have a Rosicrucian Thingummie is a serious pain.  Better yet, screw the whole encumbrance routine and just give folks an unlimited salvage and recipe capability (and enhancements, too, whilst at it) — I mean, what real-life thing is all that supposed to realistically represent?
  2. The artificial separation of Vault, Consignment Houses, and Universities (and the dearth of them being all in one place except, in CoH, in Steel Canyon) is another serious pain.  Really.  Even in Steel I end up doing excessive flitting about.  I want workbenches in Wentworths, vault access at the school, etc.
  3. I want an overall integrated screen system, not unlike (though with more detail) the Manage window for powers.  I want to see recipes, salvage, and all that spiffy inventory windows that aren’t part of the craptacular window UI of CoX, where the scroll buttons are difficult to grab and paging up/down is a PitA.

I still think this was all an unnecessary complication and a huge, massive time sink for the dev team that could have gone into developing more zones, more ATs, more power sets, rather than catering to a minority population within the game (cf. PvP).    Since it’s there, there’s no point in not making some use of it, at least to earn money, but I remain irked by what might have been rather than this.

 

The Most Annoying Interface Glitch in CoX …

… is, without a doubt, the fact that the servers are never shown in the same order twice. 

The most recently picked server shows up at the top of the server list, but everything else is, as far as I can tell, randomly shuffled.  If you are an alt-maniac (or even of you’re not, if you have folks on more than one server), it’s a real PitA.

So my QoL suggestion would be:

  1. Keep the servers in a consistent order.
  2. Have highlighted the server most recently used.
  3. Allow some sort of mouse-over on a server to show a quick list of the toons currently kept there.

Trivial to do, I’d think.  And it would make things a lot nicer.

Then we can work on having to re-login after exiting with a hero …

A SciFi Original Character …

Well, not really.  I mean, sure, he’s a wizard, and he throws fireballs, and has a big, magical, knock-you-back-through-the-air punch attack,  And he dresses in a long black leather coat and hat, and black jeans and a t-shirt.  But his name’s Hal, not Harry.  The Wizard Hal, who I ran up to 7 in the Sewers last night (and had a jolly time of it, too).

Hmmm … should’ve snapped a picture of him.

Patch Notes du Jour

As of this morning.  Notihng spectacular.

Powers

  • Player AT’s damage resistance was not ‘capped’ vs. the Hamidon’s special damage type. As a result, players could completely eliminate incoming damage from Hamidon via Essence of the Earth inspirations, which is not the intended behavior. Resistance to this damage type now has the standard maximum values as determined by archetype.
  • “Chance to _____” Invention Enhancements will now work with Area of Effect powers.
  • The animation for Dominate (shared by many other powers as well) while flying will now play all the way through and not be interrupted by the flying combat ready animation.

Invention

  • Characters have a Recipe inventory of 8 at level 10 now, instead of 4.
  • Fixed mismatches between IO names and description text.
  • Invention: Defense Buff (Lvl 30-40) used Silver. Silver was too high, now uses Alchemical Silver.
  • Kismet.+6% Acc (Lvl 26-40) used Psionicly Charged Brass. Psionicly Charged Brass was too low, now uses Black Blood of the Earth.
  • Added Defense modifier to Gift of the Ancients: Increased Run Speed
  • Added Defense modifier to Luck of the Gambler: Increased Recharge Rate
  • Modified Accuracy Set Bonuses — They now modify the Accuracy of all of a player’s powers, instead of modifying the player’s base To Hit value.
  • Slightly increased the Set Bonus values given to the Red Fortune set.
  • Red Fortune no longer offers a Confuse Duration increase as a Set Bonus. It has been replaces with Fire/Cold damage resistance.
  • Luck of the Gambler: +7.5% Recharge set enhancement was giving a double bonus the first time it was slotted. Now fixed.
  • Induced Coma and Pacing of the Turtle chance to reduce attack rate IO enhancements should now work more reliably.
  • Energy Transfer no longer says it accepts Stun IO sets — it never could accept them, this is cleaning up a text error.
  • Added recipe information to salvage info window [[That could be helpful.]]

Rewards

  • Fixed Bosses and Archvillains so they drop Large Inspirations once again.  [[Yay!]]
  • Task Forces now give you a choice table at the end allowing you to choose an SO Enhancement if you do not qualify for the Recipe reward.

Badges

  • Fixed typo in Committed badge title.
  • Swapped names of the Invention badges: Colonel and Lt. Colonel (they were transposed).

City Zones

  • Fixed a hole in Siren’s Call that allowed players to teleport under the zone.

Game

  • /emote howl has been silenced.  [[Awwwwww … Runt will be disappointed!]]
  • Trainers now display any changes to a player’s inventory sizes when they level up.  [[Nice.]]

Consignment Markets

  • if getting a stack from the auction house would fill your inventory, items will be added to your inventory until it is filled up and whatever is left will remain in the stack. Previously, such transfers simply failed.

CITY of VILLAINS

City Zones

  • Added ‘The Abyss’ to Rogue Isles City Map
  • Fixed a hole in Mercy Isle that caused players to get stuck.

All your desired costume parts are belong to us

Costume items, to date, have been to date of six sorts:

  1. Stuff that’s there in the costume builder from the get-go.
  2. Stuff that requires a specific, mission (e.g., the cape mission) to unlock.  (Arguably, this applies to recostumiing missions for Icon et al.) 
  3. As #2, but event-related (Winter and Valentires costume pieces).
  4. Feature items with box sets (e.g., helmets via buying the CoV box set).
  5. Vet Rewards.

One of CoX’s greatest strengths has been its character creator and costuming.  It’s constantly under expansion, and many folks are drawn to the game just for it.  Requests for a stand-alone costumer are regularly received by the devs, and a lot of people roll up alts just to try out a new visual concept.

Note that most of the above items are available to anyone in the game, at least after a certain period of play. Options 3-4 aren’t, but the number of pieces involved, and their “hotness,” is pretty liimited.  Having the toga is nice if you want a togaed character, but I haven’t heard too much wailing over that.

I9 introduces a new class of costume item:

6.  Costume inventions.

Now, we’ll leave alone the idea of “inventions” for developing costume pieces.  (“You mean I can get all this spiffy power armor stuff just for free, but if I want fairy wings vs bat wings I need to ‘invent’ something?”)  The changed dynamic here is that in order to get the stuff, you need …

a.  To find an invention recipe.
b.  To buy an invention recipe.
c.  To find or buy the underlying ingredients for the recipe.

Simply playing the game isn’t enough.  Especially when these costume pieces — and I’m talking wing types here — are considered premium bits, by design.  Quoth Positron:

I looked at the dataminer today at the costume drop rate and it IS lower than we anticipated.

We are looking into making some changes, but do not expect anything radical or quick.

We DO want costume recipes to be “commodities” that players actively seek and pay top inf. for, but we do not want them to be so rare that players can’t get them, ever, in the course of their play.

If you don’t have “top influence” or aren’t a high enough level to get it, you are SOL.  If you don’t want to be a day-trader at Wentworths (“Where CoX meets eBay with 1985-style computer interfaces!”), you are SOL.  If you want to play a fairy character or a draconic character or a winged robot or whatever, and you’re not a “playah,” you’re SOL.

That just strikes me as a horrible strategic decision on the devs’ part.  If costuming is such a big part of the game, then leveraging that to taunt folks into the invention system is manipulative at best, and for those who don’t want to dive into its clutches, a shut-out at worst.  It’s like going to Disneyland, getting your entrance pass, but being told that some rides can only be ridden if you pay a lot extra, or find a random FastPass ticket for them.  It stops being about fun and starts being about commerce.

Bad idea.

CoX Trivia

Trivia questions from the 3rd Anniversary Trivia Contest:

  1. Ms. Liberty is what relation to Statesman?
  2. What is the name of the FIRST Anniversary badge for City of Heroes?
  3. What is the name for the ORIGINAL contact at the end of the Heroes tutorial, which has since been replaced with Coyotee?
  4. What Issue introduced Badges?
  5. What is Lord Recluse’s real name?
  6. What badge is available for defeating the ghost of Scrapyard?
  7. What temporary power does Mr. Bocor give you?
  8. Who is the leader of the Sky Raiders?
  9. What is the true source of all the power in the Rogue Isles?

Answers below the fold.

Continue reading “CoX Trivia”

Hmmm … a tricky one this BADGUY_NAME is …

When we got on as Torchy and Hildy on Sunday, Margie saw she had a police mission — “Stop BADGUY_NAME and his men!”

We entered, chortling about the Dreaded BADGUY_NAME. 

First corridor.  Nothing.

First floor.  Nothing.

Entire map.  Nothing.  Deserted.  Either everyone was hiding behind those unopenable doors, or BADGUY_NAME had given us the slip.  Though we did get the Mission Over and credit once I set foot in the final room.

(Yes, we bugged it.)

Weekend play

Despite my steady whining about Invention stuff, we did play a fair amount over the weekend, both solo and teamed. 

On the solo side, Fr. Frank (Emp/Sonic Def) got up to 14-15 (travel power! huzzah!) and got invited onto an SG.  Some stray low-level toons — Miss Crackle (Elec/Energy Blaster) and Old Saucy Jack (BS/Regen Scrapper) — sewered their way up to 6.  Woe Nellie is getting there, and now that I’ve gotten him through Outbreak, The Wizard Hal (Fire/Energy Blaster) needs some play time.

As a team, Margie and I got Hildy and Torchy both up to 49 — most of the time being Teh Uber against everything we encountered, until the PI Police Mission sent us headlong into a passel of Dark Ring Mistresses who fed us our lunch.  Yikes.  We also ran Idzune and Unchained Path — I’m not happy with the latter, as I’m sure I’m plenty effective but in a very subtle (slow, debuff, slow some more, hold, slow even further) fashion that doesn’t leave me with a feeling of having rock-em-sock-emed the baddies.

We tried another experimental duo, Winter’s Darts and Winterbound, two fay from the Winter Court here for [backstory pending].  WD’s an Archery/Ice Blaster; Winterbound’s an Ice/something Controller.

Y’know, Archery looks good on paper, and the characters look simply faboo, but the play-feel is just way too wimply. “Twonk” “Twonk” “Twonk” … the damage may be fine, but the sound and visuals are feeble.

Problem is, even though archers are a staple character in comics, they are noteworthy either for clever trick arrows (sorry, that’s the secondary) or for trick shooting — knocking the gun out the guy’s hand (or pinning the guy’s hand to the wall), etc.  A simple “twonk” and an arrow sticking through a guy is kind of lame.  It would be like creating “box cutter” as a Scrapper set — sure, you could make all the big numbers roll up you want, but a tiny little “snickt-snickt” is not going to be an award-winning play experience.  That’s the problems with Archery (and, actually, with Sonic).

Live and learn.

The Winters were the first lowbies Margie had run through the Sewer — she’s a “blast through all the low-level missions” type of gal.  She’s curious as to which approach actually levels faster.  Sewers provide somewhat uninterrupted melee experience — but there’s the delay for the team to form, the comparative of fragility of some teams, and the lack of mission credit.  Missoins give mission credit, but require running all over Atlas/Galaxy and back.

For soloists, I think the Sewers may still be a bit better, but it’s also a matter of play style and interest.  If you have a duo, doing Missions whilst taking out groups along the way combines the best of both worlds.

 

Influence Peddlers

As things presently stand in the game, the new Invention system is the most “fun” (and profit) for those folks who are starting off with Gobs of Cash, er, Influence (explain to me how the concept of “Influence” translates into Auction Houses again?). 

One writer to the boards commented:

I’m puzzled how the whole business is being considered a good, functioning thing. How are players at lower level supposed to participate when everything on the market is selling for millions of influence (sometimes HUNDREDS of millions)? If I combined the total influence earned by all my characters since I began playing, I wouldn’t have that much.

Yes, I could post stuff and earn millions in a moment, but that seems broken in itself. Should a L1 character have millions of influence? Further, a casual player is going to be severely handicapped even GETTING the drops. In other words, the hardcore and the rich will get rich. The casual and the new will languish in mediocrity.

Castle answered, unhelpfully, that it’s easy to play that game — if you win the lotto.

Heh, going to chime in on this one just for a bit of reference on how quickly you can acquire influence.

I was lucky on one of my play characters to get the burned wings recipe within the first 36 hours of the game going live. I scraped up as much influence as I had which was roughly 65 k and put that item up for sale for the max that I could which was 18mil.

It sold instantly… I be rich, I do be rich indeed. Not really compared to a lot of folks out there willing to pay higher prices for items so they don’t have to be bothered getting the drops.

This is a blind auction system so honestly just because you see an item sell for a high price doesn’t mean that same item isn’t also listed for 200 influence.

With a market like this there are always ways to make a bit of influence if you are clever you will find a way.

Which is all fine and well, if you want to take the time to play the market the market that way.  In a sense it feels a lot like those folks who spend a lot of time online at stock sites — they claim to be able to make big money with a bit of cleverness and attention, but if you can’t or won’t invest that time (so to speak), it’s not an option open to you.  Similarly, it seems to me that you can make a fair amount of money simply actioning the rare and unusual recipes and salvage you pick up at Wentworths, and simply selling the rest — which is not what the system is intended to do, but which is a lot more simple and straightforward than figuring out how to get the four ingredients for a recipe to give you a perpetual DO on a particular power, and maybe let you build additional sets that will add other little power bits.

Margie’s comment, as I chatted with her about this, is that this is all a part of reducing the Influence excess for the long-time Level 50s who have kept playing their characters and getting filthy rich.  Those are the people you hear on Broadcast chortling about how they just bought a Wings recipe for 16MM Influence.

In theory, if that’s so, then once they’ve spent all their loose change (or passed it onto their lower friends and alts to spend), then prices should go down.  Unlike a “real” economy, the demand is consistent but the supply is inexhaustible.  That should mean things reaching a more reasonable equilibrium in a few weeks … assuming anyone’s still doing anything with IOs by then.

Oh my sweet Lord …

Inventions and Recipes and Salvage …

… so not my bag, baby.

So we went through the tutorial with Rita and Runt last night.  And then we hopped over to the convenient Wentworths …

… and …

… and …

… I felt like I needed a freaking college course to find what I wanted.  The very worst aspects of the insane “We’re not going to call a Science SO for Accuracy an ‘Accuracy SO’ but a ‘Boron Accelerator Module SO’ system have been brought over and magnified a hundredfold the Invention system.  Eleventy-zillion little bits of Invention Salvage (not to be confused with, but convertable to, Base Salvage), which can be put up for bid (maybe, and you can perhaps find the price of what it’s going for if you spend fifteen minutes rooting through the Wentworths interface) or, maybe, sold to contacts.  I think. 

And if you want to do something with this, then maybe you’ve found a recipe for a device of some sort.  Or maybe you bought one at Wentworths, or something like that (if you are fabulously wealthy — the recipe for Dragon Wings is going for 6-25 million influence).  And perhaps you have the salvage you need.  And maybe, just maybe, you have the influence (influence?) you need.

At which point you can build something that’s pretty cool.  But the whole process is sort of like balancing your checkbook, in spades.

Those who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.  The rest of us will shun it like the freaking plague.  My prediction is that the Unis and Wentworths will be, within a few weeks, only slightly more populated than the Arenas.

What I want, if we’re going to have something like this, is to be able to walk into the Wentworths, dump what I have in front of the man, have him say, “Oh, you can exchange this for this, this, or this,” and be done with it.  Anything more than that is …

… well, hell, tell me how this resembles any comic book you’ve ever heard of?

Yeesh.

<small>And, yes, I realize that if I really applied myself, and really tried it out, I could learn how to do all of this like a second nature.  But I don’t want to, and don’t see why I should.  As far as I can tell, the only real advantage to the game is that it slows down people going through content while they dick around with salvage and recipes and inventions.</small>

<small>And, yes, I realize I don’t actually have to do it.  And I may very well end up just turning off the freaking “You got Salvage” and “Salvage is Full” messages and completely ignore it for the rest of my stay on CoX.  Yeesh.</small>

 

I9 fo the wandered-off masses

Quoth Lighthouse:

 As part of the marketing promotion behind the launch of Issue 9, inactive accounts over so old (90 days I think, but don’t hold me to that) will be reactivated through this weekend. E-mails and announcements about this will be going out shortly.

So if you still have it on your machine (and want to invest in the download), come on back and play.

I9 Sneak Peak

Beta release of Patch Notes for I9.  I’m going to ignore all the stuff that’s already been publicized — the Invention System, plus the Hammy revamp.  Some other cool bits:

Statesman’s Task Force

Marcus Cole (Statesman) himself now stands aboard a Freedom Corps ship in Independence Port. If you have 8 level 45 to 50 Heroes, you can start the Statesman Task Force and undertake a mission that is of vital importance to the fate of the entire planet. 

  • Your reward for this can be either a Synthetic Hamidon Enhancement (courtesy of Positron) or a random rare Recipe for use in the Invention system.
  •  Each of these rewards can be given out only once every 24 hours.

Looking forward to trying this, assuming we can wrassle up 8 players still …

Enhancement drop rates have changed and been decreased as you level up. Players at higher levels will no longer receive enhancements that are of no use to a character at that level. Following is the composition of Enhancement drops by level:

o 1 to 12 100% Training Origin Enhancements
o 13 to 21 50% Training, 50% Dual Origin
o 22 to 31 50% Dual Origin, 50% Single Origin
o 32 to 40 25% Dual Origin, 75% Single Origin
o 41 to 50 100% Single Origin

• You should still receive optimal enhancement drops at near, or sometimes faster than the rate you received them in previously.

o For example, if, at level 45, you previously got an SO 25% of the time you got an enhancement drop, you now should receive enhancements 75% less often, but they will be an SO 100% of the time.

Cool.  Less deletion of TOs and DOs.

When the game gives you a reward it will check your free inventory slots and not allow you to choose something if that inventory is full. For example, if you wanted an Enhancement, but your 10 enhancement inventory slots were already full, you would be notified that that inventory is full, and you can not select that reward. Deleting something to free up space will immediately refresh the reward window and allow you to make the choice.

Also a good thing.

• King’s Row :
o King’s Row now has Superpowered Field Trainers (NPC Stores)

• Green Line Tram :
o The Green line now runs to Skyway City and Founders’ Falls

• Peregrine Island
o The zone now has a Trainer: Castle.

When Margie pointed out the trainer in KR during the closed Beta, I made little happy noises.

Extending the Green Line to FF and Skyway (down by Faultline) is a nice add.

And adding a trainer to PI just makes freaking sense.

New emotes are always good:

Emote Binoculars
Emote Camera
Emote Cellphone
Emote Clipboard
Emote Crouch
Emote Drum
Emote DrumLow
Emote Fishing
Emote FlippingCoin
Emote FloatBooks
Emote Howl
Emote Talk
Emote Waiting
Emote Wounded

Custom Flying Animation Emotes. (These will only interrupt the flying forward animations)
Emote FlyPose1
Emote FlyPose2
Emote FlyPose3
Emote FlyPose4

And, last but not least (and not least overdue):

The Trade Interface now allows for much larger amounts.

It’s the little things that count.

Re(ho-hum)spec

New respec a-coming with the 3rd Anniversary of CoH.

We wanted to let players know that, as part of our celebration of the 3rd year anniversary of City of Heroes, we will be applying a free respec to all characters. So, if you have been wanting to change your powers around a little bit, switch up your power slotting or make other changes, this will be a good time to do it!

[…] The actual timing of when the respec is applied is likely to be shortly after the actual Anniversary on April 28th. We will post here with specific dates when they are available.

To be honest, I’ve been at it long enough that I have so many Vet Award respecs that … well … not terribly meaningful.

But it beats the heck out of not having a respec when desired.

Now with wings!

Interview with Jay Doherty, CoX costume/character artist, on the new wing sets.  Okay, that is in fact one thing I want — dragon wings for Torchielle.  🙂

It’s safe to say that wings are one of the most difficult player costume pieces to make for the game. There are two basic “rigs” for the wings which we call internally “Bat” and “Eagle.” Depending on the wing; the proper rig will be used. When designing our new wings, I had to make sure that every wing looks good both in its flying state and resting state (You will not understand the giant pain in the butt it is to do that). The hardest wing to make was the Angel, just because it was the first one I made (we introduced Angel and Demon wings first as part of our Veteran Rewards program). One of the coolest things about being a character artist is making sure everything looks tight and I wanted to make sure that every wing looked different from far away and close up; so to achieve that I tried giving every wing a distinctive Silhouette.

So as I mentioned already, the first two wings that I designed were the Angel and Demon wings. The higher-ups really liked how I and the animation team implemented them so they beat me until they got some more. So to date we have created ten wing sets: Angel, Demon, Dragon, Burned, Bone, Bat, Cherub, Insect, Tech, and Fairy.