Blog of Heroes

The devs have been trying to standardize what powers root you — cause you to stop, stand in place, animate, and generally not keep traveling and/or fighting — and what powers don’t. Eventually, it will all make sense, but at the moment it’s still (as it has been) a scosh higgledy-piggledy.

Latest installment:

Hey everyone. The changes to toggle power animations and the standardization of what does and doesn’t root you should now be up on live. I just wanted to clear up any confusion about some other changes to click powers that also happened at this time. The only intended changes to rooting were supposed to be for toggle powers at this time. We’re in the process of standardizing click powers to follow their own set of rules, but they’re not going to be slightly different than the rules for toggles.

Right now, our intent is to use these rules for click powers:
1. AOE Heals will not root
2. Self Buffs will not root
3. Self Heals will not root
4. Everything else will.

You may have noticed some click powers that used to root you and now don’t. These powers snuck their way into the wrong build (see what happens when we don’t root them), and most of these will change back in the next build that makes it to live. Consider this an official head’s up.

Again, sorry for the confusion this has caused. We’ll get it all sorted out shortly and we thank you for your patience and understanding.

… and the holidays taketh away.

Folks are all a-twitter that the temp powers from the Holiday Event (in particular the Rez and the Five Gold Rings), which were evidently always intended to be real-time duration, but were rolled out as game-time duration, have been changed to real-time (and poof!).

Ah, well. Having the (very short) hold was kinda handy, and the rez was okay, but, jeez, to read some posts, you’d think the Devs had pissed in their corn flakes.

There is, to be sure, some minor justification for all those folks who ground their dozen alts through all the Holiday mishes to get the powers, but, as someone noted, “12 days of game time” is 288 hours, which is enough for some folks to get to 50. Which is hardly a “temp” power.

This one (since I declined to invest all that time) get a big “Meh!” from me.

Test stuff as of 22 Jan:

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COMBINED NOTES

Powers

• Consignment House Teleporter power will no longer be issued to players upon login

• Stone Armor/Earth’s Embrace will no longer root the player while activating

• Super Reflexes/Practiced Brawler will no longer root the player while activating

• Regeneration/Instant Healing will no longer root the player while activating

• Radiation Emission/Accelerate Metabolism will no longer root the player while activating

Game

• Players will no longer be notified of Enhancement drops received by teammates.

Incorrect animations

• Some animations were flawed in the last version that went to the Training Room on 1/12/07. They have been repaired.

• Jumping straight up should play the correct animation again.

• Super Reflex/Practiced Brawler should play the correct animation again.

• Invulnerability/Unstoppable should only play the soundFX one time

• The animation for Tough should play again

• The animation for Integration should play again

• Various powers had an additional ‘hop’ animation that played afterwards. This has been fixed. (please continue to report specific powers if you still see this occurring)

CITY OF HEROES

Powers

• Chilling Embrace animation changed to better suit the power

• Ice Armor/Energy Absorption will now briefly root the player while activating

• Scrapper/Dark Armor/Cloak of Darkness will no longer root the player while activating

• Temporary Power/Wedding Band will no longer root the player while activating

CITY OF VILLAINS

Powers

• Ninjitsu/Kuji-In Rin will no longer root the player while activating

• Cold Domination/Arctic Fog will no longer root the player while activating

Via Warcry:

Scheduled for release sometime during Spring 2007, Issue 9 “Breakthough” will introduce new depth and gameplay to the City of game setting. Players will be able to acquire and invent new toys through use of the Invention System in form of Salavage and Invention Recipes. Resulting items may be enhancements, costume pieces, powers, gadgets, and much more.

Unless this is really interesting in-and-of itself, I don’t expect to do much with it. If it turns out to be a sine qua non for real advancement (which the Devs have promised it won’t be, though they said that PvP wouldn’t affect PvE, either), then it would be a serious blow to my interest.

In addition, Wentworth’s Fine Consignments will open up in Paragon City. Serving as auction houses, players will be able to buy and sell all manner of items. In the Rogue Isles, the placement of black market trucks will serve the same purpose, allowing villains to fence and buy their ill gotten goods.

Whatever.

Heroes will receive a new Task Force titled Statesman’s Task Force. A high level mission set, this charges up to eight heroes to face and defeat some of Paragon’s greatest foes. The reward will be some of the games greatest in return for this monumental achievement.

Well, that might encourage me to break Psi-clone out for a run.

Both villain and hero alike will also find that the Hamidon has grown ever more powerful. Villains will find a new raid encounter against the gigantic leader of the Devouring Earth while heroes will see the need to change how they have kept the menace in check.

Heh. While I’m sure the Hami Raiders will soon figure out the new play book, I’m pleased that things on that end of the world will be disrupted a bit. Ideal for me, with Hami, would be something that required both strategy and tactics. There have been hints that the Hami raid might become a cooperative zone effort (i.e., something that allows and requires both Heroes and Villains). That would be nice.

As with all Issue expansions, Issue 9 will be free to all subscribers.

As always, nice.

Official word here.

Which is keen and fine and looking forward to it and all — but Doyce writes of something that they do double-XP-wise on that other game which sounds pretty keen, too.

Someone noticed a change in the training room patch:

• Added team member info messages for enhancement drops.

Which, it turns out, means you’ll get to see what drops other folks on the team get. The idea being, apparently, that with the Invention System people will want to know about these things and trade them with their friends.

Um …

1. Who really wants more info scrolling down their chat windows?
2. Who expects a bunch of in-mission trading. “Hey, I see you got a magic range SO — wanna trade for my nat endred SO?”
3. Who thinks this is a realistic simulation of heroic (or even villainous) behavior?
4. Who really has memorized all the screwball names of the TO, or even SO enhancements in various origin flavors, so that the freaking thing is actually meaningful. “Hey, I see you got a magic SO Nectanebo’s Carbuncle Polish … um, what the heck does that do?”

At present (though that’s not set in stone), there’s no option to turn it off (separate from all the Rewards text). Hopefully Lighthouse (who commented in the thread) can do something about that, as it sounds wildly annoying.

I think I understand what they’re driving at with the Invention System, but, like PvP, I’m afraid we’re all going to go through a lot of gyrations for a limited number of folks who want to take advantage of it.

Spiffy post (even Castle thinks so) on how Defiance (the Blaster Damage boost when HP drop low) works — hard numbers and (proven) equations from the devs.

An interesting table the writer generates:

Current   Damage
Health:   Bonus:   Notes:
100.00%    0.55%   Full health
57.00%   10.88%   Assault (10.5%)
45.00%   25.00%   Small rage
42.00%   30.78%   Circa one-shot death from average boss
41.00%   32.99%   Fortitude (31.25%)
35.00%   50.00%   Large Rage (50%)
31.00%   65.98%   Aim (62.5%)
28.00%   81.23%   Perma Rage (80%)
25.00%  100.00%   Build Up (100%)
15.00%  200.00%   Circa one-shot death from average LT
9.00%  303.14%   Damage Cap (assuming 3-slot damage)
8.00%  324.90%   Circa one-shot death from average minion

The notes show either equivalents (at 35% health it’s the same as having a Large Rage) as well as some danger points (yeah, you get a 200% bonus when you’re at 15% — but average LTs at that level can one-shot you … numbers based on Level 50s).

And I thought this was interesting, too:

The interesting stuff, as you might expect, happens at or below half health. But you don’t need to be at a sliver of health to get a significant benefit. Also, in spite of conjecture to the contrary, my own testing indicates that the defiance bar lags, but defiance itself doesn’t: if you have X% health when you fire a shot, you’ll get that much defiance boost, period. If you are there when you hit the activation button, you’ll get the boost (at least as far as my testing so far indicates).

I’ve never had a good sense of Defiance on the blasters I run — if I’m around 25% health I’m a bit too busy to see what sort of damage I’m doing or where the Defiance bar is, I’m just either fleeing, popping greens, or trying to Blast Him Before He Blasts Me.

Defiance also adds a (tiny) TH bonus, but nothing to write home about.

Woot! Double Experience weekend is coming up soon(ish).

We will be testing the double experience event on the Training Room this weekend, January 13th and 14th. And yes, if everything goes well with this test then you will be seeing a Double Experience event weekend again soon on the Live servers! Of course, we want to be sure our test of the event is good before announcing the Live event times, but you know it is coming!

No doubt it will happen during the World’s Worst Weekend for it, but still looking forward to it. Now, to consider who to run through it. My first thought is our higher characters (Hildy/Torchy), just because of the XP needs at higher levels.

Got Rita to a level a few days ago that she actually had a legit travel power …

… but, to be honest, she’d been swooping around just fine prior to that for the past week with a Jingle Jet. And she had a Raptor Pack in reserve before that for special trips across hostile terrain. Both of which had made Skyway (and the Hollows before that) a lot less menacing.

And, of course, with GvE, and Superjump (said travel power), she’s got uber-jumping ability for 30 seconds at a time (good enough to cross most zones).

I find it interesting that temp travel powers (in which I’d include Pocket D (and the GvE VIP pass) and SG bases and coalition SG bases) have so significantly changed the game, albeit in an odd, incremental fashion. Back in the day, we were foot-bound until 14, and even after that were at the mercy of the Paragon Transit System. Now there are generally two or three ways to get fairly quickly from A to B. Is that a good thing? I think so — which makes me wonder whether the whole travel
power thing ought to be just recognized in some fashion outside of temp powers and SG stuff.

It’s nice that QA responded so quickly to the bug report I filed, but should I worry that the response had headings … in French?

Réponse suggérée
Thread de discussion

Unless NCSoft QA is located in Montreal, or something. 🙂

New backgrounder on the Sky Raiders is up on the official site.

I like these backgrounders, and the take the CoX setting beyond what little glimpses one gets in the game (where one tends to focus as much on combat tactics as backstory) — but I wish there was even more integration between the info in them and the dialog, actions, and missions concerning these groups.