Potpourri for 2000 Prestige, Alex …

I7 will have some sort of magical fix for SR and Ice Tanks that lets Defense scale appropriately against higher level mobs. Yay.
I don’t actually have anyone that fits that at the moment, mind you, but …
Actually, it goes further than that, affecting all Defensive powers (inspirations, buffs), and ToHit Debuffs. Interesting.

Basically, Level advantage in PvE, Lts, Bosses, AV’s, and Monsters had To Hit bonuses. This made Defense not scale properly. We changed them so that instead of To Hit bonuses, they have Accuracy bonuses. What that means is, Defense is applied before their bonus, rather than after. Since Accuracy is a multiplier, it is multiplying a small base value than before.

For instance, an AV had a base To Hit of 75%. If a player had 25% Defense, the AV would have had a 50% chance to hit. Under the new system, the AV’s has a base 50% chance to hit. The Defense is applied, reducing his To Hit to 25%. The Accuracy is then applied, giving a final To Hit of 37.5% — a 12.5% improvement over the old system.
And, interestingly, it seems some powers are actually, behind the scenes, pets. E.g., Caltrops or Blizzards. New tech will let the devs pass on buffs that are on the caster to those kind of powers, too, if it seems appropriate (e.g., doing a Build-Up and having it affect the damage of Blizzard). More info here.
And server transfer is still coming … slowly …

More changes (good ones, on balance)

Quoth Statesman:

First…I confirm that we’re working on right now (as in pohsyb in the next room) to add CoV costume parts into CoH if you own both games….
Huzzah! And … nice touch (a la bases) to encourage both games. (There’s a further thought there I need to write more about soon.)
I’ve been holding off doing more costume stuff with some characters (PC, VJ) who are eligible, just waiting for this. (Yes, wait until you see Psi-clone in his new barbed-wire-encrusted skull armor!)

Then we repeal the hated stealth nerf. The reason why: many well reasoned posts. It’s that simple. You guys pointed out the problems.
Though the basic motivation behind it still seems to be something that sticks in States’ craw.

AND now…we’re changing the way Archvillains spawn. A ton of forum goers disliked adding so many AV’s into missions a while back…so we’ve come up with a solution. If the team size and mission difficulty are ABOVE a certain level, an Archvillain spawns. Below that, players will face only an Elite Boss. If the mission is set on the first two levels of difficulty, it takes 4 heroes or more to spawn an Arch Villain. On the third level, 3 heroes or more. On the fourth level, 2 heroes. On the highest (Invincible), a solo hero will spawn an AV. Note this works in BOTH City of Heroes and Villains.

In order to incentivize larger teams, Positron is going to add a bonus to AV rewards!
Interesting. And, on first glance, a fine idea. Won’t change life for PC/A (since we’re on Invincible), but it will make life easier for some of our other folks.

Throughput

It’s always interesting when I play CoH with Margie while on a business trip. We lose the “bandwidth” of immediate verbal communication, but we’ve done this stuff with these character for so long, we know the drill, and a few quick keybinds (“Gather for Invis …” + “Ready!” + “Hey, look at that &target!”) fill in a lot of the gaps. We know our tactics, we know each other’s powers and so forth, so easy-peasy. Sure, it’s more difficult to type “HELP!” than to shout it across the room when something goes south, but the team status bar shows that, too.
Nevertheless, it’s still a lot more fun with Margie in the same room.

I7 plans

CuppaJo on I7:

Issue 7 – Tentative plan for releasing the “Feature Update” to the website is mid February – so you might as well settle in for about a month of waiting unless a dev decides to drop some hints.

Of course you already know I7 includes 40-50 content for CoV, and as with every update more art updates, missions, and quality of life features. The other items in I7 will be revealed when we get the Feature Update.

Not quite a task force

2006-01-08_crey.jpgFor “Phalanx Prestige Day,” Velvet and P-Siren joined a half-dozen others to do the final story arc for Croatoa. Which was a lot of fun — no horrific risk/danger (vs, say, fighting a god), but still a goodly chunck of XP and influence and prestige.
(Velvet really needs to do her level — she’s halfway through 30 and hasn’t done the formal level-up from 29. Since it’s just Resist Elements on the docket, it’s not critical, but it’s getting personally irksome.)
In the evening, Psi-clone and Amorpha wrapped the Countess Crey story arc (quote of the evening, “Oh! She’s an AV”), which was quite satisfying.
Off on business again for three nights, so CoH-play may be a bit limited, damn the luck.

Rula – Rullero – Rullad – er, Sara Moore Task Force

Nice get-together — 5:30p to 1:00a or so — for the Sara Moore TF. It was my introduction to the Shadow Shards and all the wackiness there.
Solid group — Psi-clone, Amorpha, Hyperthermian, Kinetica, Zepher-Storm, Puck Bunny, Shock.Therapy, and Li Nakamura. Had run with all of them previously except Li, and everyone was on their game. It was a Controller/Defender-heavy group (and a couple of the Controllers were Empathy secondary), so lots of buffs and heals, which worked out well. Indeed, only one Scrapper and one Tank.
Died twice, I think, and narrowly dodged the bullet (so to speak) several other times. Most folks took at least one face plant — Amorpha had three or four, I think — just due to the heavy firepower of Nemesis and Rularuishy things. But no chronic problems or intrinsic flaws in the group. Like I said, solid.
For myself, I thought I was able to serve quite well as a healer (including a number of Rezzes), while also getting my holds and pets into play. Plenty of excitement for everyone; we were all contributing members of the team.
And, for the record, the final mish was a lot spookier than I would have thought, and actually ended a lot more quickly than I’d expected once the AV was engaged.

Now on Test Server …

Wow. Just in time for my birthday …

  1. Added new temporary attack powers to all low level characters. Which attack a character receives varies according to the Origin of the character. Once a character reaches level 10, the power is used up. An interesting thought (esp. for the origin side of things), but … hrm, I’d rather have travel powers appear at 10 rather than 14. I’ve gotten used to the whole back pack thing.
    Also, while it’s a nice gimme, fact is that most folks don’t have a lot of problems getting up through level 10 right now.
    Now, a string of temp powers tied to origin that evolves over each decade of SLs … that would be interesting.

  2. “Glowies” that gave XP and Inf. in missions no longer give XP. The amount of Inf. they give has been doubled. Odd. Especially given the stealth nerf (below). It does mean no more arguing over who gets to click on the glowie, though.
  3. You are no longer allowed to interact with mission objectives while you are stealthed or untouchable. Hmmm. Disliked it that Invis didn’t work alongside hostages one was rescuing (makes no sense, folks — team members can see each other in Invis, why not a hostage also in Invis? Why don’t hostages go Invis, anyway?). Adding it to glowies? Hrm.
  4. Added new Contact for new villains. When talking to the Arachnos Pilot in Breakout, villains may choose to be sent to talk to Kalinda or a mercenary contact. Well, it adds a bit of variety to the CoV beginning game. Aside from that, shrug.

And so it goes.

Stealth nerf?

Word has it that the next patch set will include a nerf such that glowies cannot be clicked on while stealthed or phased.
Hrm.
From a gameplay standpoint, that really screws up a lot of strategies (which seems to be the point, of course, making unfair to (everyone say it together) “get XP without risk.” (Never mind the number of higher level villains that see right through stealth.)
From a “reality” standpoint, it makes limited sense. The “I’m going to stand in the middle of all these guys and rifle this file cabinet and they don’t bat an eyelash” sort of scenario never made sense …
Though it also can depend on how one envisions the power sets as working. Is Stealth actually some sort of visual obscuring power (e.g., Steaming Cloud — though why at least the bad guys wouldn’t say, “Hey, what’s that cloud doing in the middle of the hallway?” is beyond me), or is it an abstraction of “I’m really sneaky/ninja-like”? Or, heck, “I’m actually a master of disguise and have made myself up to look like these bad guys so that they don’t notice me unless I get too close”? Something to make up for the fact that there’s no game mechanism to throw a rock over to the other side of the room and get everyone’s attention focused over there.
E.g. Honeygun didn’t really have a stealth cloak. She was just really good at sneaking around, like a trained sniper. Her ability to sneak up should be a bit different and have different parameters than other interpretations of the power.
From a “reality” standpoint, each of those different interpretatoins of Stealth should play differently.
On the other hand, since we can’t actually play those differences, the abstraction seems to work. And, really, the ability to Stealth through a mission only helps so much. It’s often more of a convenience (turning a given TF from 8 hours to 6 hours or something like that) than a must-have.
As for Phasing — well, that makes a measure of sense (though often there’s a sort of “I make my hands solid enough to be able to pick the safe” out in the comics).
I also haven’t heard how this is going to impact Invis. Given that, unlike Stealth, Group Invis is not a toggle, if I’m using GI does that means I have to wait until it wears off to click the glowie?
As with most nerfs, it’s workable around, with a bit of effort and a bit of (yes) extra risk. People get through missions without stealth powers all the time. But it’s another case of fixing a “problem” that I don’t agree exists. Unless the only way one can have a legitimate super-hero adventure is to duke things out all the time, being part of the (e.g.) Legion Espionage Squad should be as good a way to adventure in Paragon as any other. And I say that as someone whose Main uses Group Invis extensively, but who has a whole series of other heroes who wouldn’t dream of it.

Signs of a good PUG

  1. When inviting, the leader does a tell first, and describes the situation when asked, before sending the invite.
  2. The group hangs together, both in exploration and melee.
  3. When Psi-clone says, “Gather for Invisibility,” they do.
  4. Nobody has an egregious misspellings of their names, or l33tspeak, or CoV-refugee monikers.
  5. People talk, strategize, consider, before they charge into certain doom …

And, as an early birthday gift, PC hit 43. Yay!

Bits and pieces

2005-12-26_envoy.jpgSince we’re actual houseguests this time of year, our CoX play is pretty constrained due to social graces — and the business and otherworldliness of the schedule out in Faerie is such that we don’t reliably get onto the system at normal times or for normal durations.
Add to that Margie’s use of the family laptop, whose graphics capability is, um, a bit limited (pretty much out of play for CoV, and marginal for CoH), and our heroics are more than a bit hampered.
That said, we managed to get on briefly over the past few days. Margie more than me, doing stuff with Blue Point, while I did some here-and-there activities with Lynne. We managed some teaming with Fazenda and Araware, which was fun, some Al McGordo and Christmas Present (taking advantage of the travel powers), and actually did some arc work with Psi-clone and Amorpha last night, finishing off (literally as well as figuratively) the Envoy of Shadows (and with the least pain to date).
After which we discovered that the suggestion we bring along a friend or two to deal with a Carnie bomb-planting plot was well-advised, as different bombs required simultaneous deactivation. Fortunately, Captain Atomyc was at loose ends and could (literally) lend a hand.

The end of the world as they know it

We’ve had a slight taste of this in CoH, since CoV came on — especially in the weeks immediately afterwards, when Paragon felt like a freaking ghost town. I mean — arriving at the Talos tram station, or the Steel Canyon Yellow Line, and having them empty? Yeesh. Things seem to have picked back up a bit, of late. Mercifully.

“Anybody out there?” I type, but I already know it’s pointless. There’s nobody anywhere near me. For almost an hour, I’ve been wandering around a desolate plain: Gray clouds scud slowly over rough quartz mountains, while a few birds wheel in the air near mushroom-shaped trees. I never see another living soul. It feels like the end of the world.

And in fact, it is. I’m inside Asheron’s Call 2, an online game that is scheduled to die in two weeks. It never acquired enough players to make it self-sufficient, so the game’s owner — Turbine — is going to do something that only happens rarely in the world of online play: On Dec. 30, it’ll flip the power off on the remaining servers, and an entire world will blink out of existence.
Interesting. And disturbing.
(via Collision Detection)

Back in the saddle again

Finally brought Velvet and P-Siren back online for a lengthy bit — Saturday’s Phalanx Prestige Day (something it might be fun to look at for the Consortia).
Overall? Pretty happy. It’s the first time I’ve done much of anything with VJ post-I5, let alone I6 (and ED), and even with all my resistances down to 3 actual Resist SOs, I was pleased with how resistant to most baddies she was.
Indeed, the only real problem I had was with — hell, I forget his name, big Praetorian running with Freaks. I ended up going toe-to-toe with him whilst the others were cleaning up Freaks, and ended up going down too quickly — and then, insanely, hit the “Go back to Base” button, which meant that the mission finished just as I was back at the Portal … Rrg.
Outside of that, and a bit of creakiness remembering the particulars of Taunting and how to draw folks’ attention and good stuff like that, it all went smooth as silk. Fun times.

On eagle’s wings

So, having a Fly power with various lowbie characters has certainly been —
— fun.
Enough so, that it makes me think that the big “Travel Power at 14” is a mistake. Sure, maybe don’t make it automatic from Level 1 (though it was fun hovering around Breakout), but …
… well, heck, super-heroes fly. They leap. They run really fast. Being forced to jog through the world for over a quarter of your career (level-wise) is, frankly, mundane, not fantastic.
I seriously think the devs ought to think about travel powers at a much lower level, by 10 at the latest, and without prerequisites (at least for the first one).
Meantime, enjoying the flight …

Marvel-ous

Marvel and NCSoft have settled the lawsuit by the former against the latter. Huzzah. Quoth CuppaJo:

Marvel Entertainment, Inc., NCsoft® Corporation, NC Interactive, Inc. and Cryptic Studios™, Inc. are pleased to announce today that they have amicably settled all claims brought by Marvel and all claims brought by NCsoft, NC Interactive, Inc. and Cryptic Studios, Inc.

The parties’ settlement allows them all to continue to develop and sell exciting and innovative products, but does not reduce the players’ ability to express their creativity in making and playing original and exciting characters.
In other words, no nerfs to the costume designer (or, for that matter, the Claws primary).

Therefore, no changes to City of Heroes® or City of Villains’™ character creation engine are part of the settlement. The parties have agreed that protecting intellectual property rights is critically important and each will continue aggressively to protect such rights in accordance with all applicable laws.
In other words, the devs will still turn your green giant brute “Bruce Purplepants” into “GenericHero470,” and “Wylvoreen” the Claws Scrapper will suffer a similar fate.

While the terms of the settlement were not disclosed, all parties agree that this case was never about monetary issues and that the fans of their respective products and characters are the winners in this settlement.
Regardless of the ludicrousness of the first half of that “agreement,” the second half is certainly true.