Blog of Heroes

Per CuppaJo this afternoon (with my comments):

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New Zones
As they become available to the players of City of Villains, the following PvP Zones will also open up for player of City of Heroes: Bloody Bay (This is a PvP Zone for Villains and Heroes with a minimum level to entry set at 15.), Siren’s Call (This is a PvP Zone for Villains and Heroes with a minimum level to entry set at 20.), Warburg (This is a Free-For-All Battle Zone for Villains and Heroes with a minimum level to entry set at 30).
Ho-hum. Not so much into PvP. Maybe. Probably. Okay, in a “real” setting, vs. the Arena, and as Heroes vs Villains … maybe. At least worth trying. It will be intersting to see if CoH/CoV PvP is more popular than the Arenas are.
Arena – New Gladiator Battles! Collect all new Gladiator Badges to create a host of new pets you can battle in any of the Paragon City Arenas!
Ho-hum-squared. Not really sure what this means, but Arena = Boring.
Names: The number of characters allowed in the name will be increased to 20!
To match CoV. Still too short, but better than nothing (or the previous 15).
Super Groups: There will be all new SG Badges and an upgrade to the SG permissions system.
Um … okay. The SG permissions are to match CoV, again (or, rather, are inherited from the CoV upgrade), and provides finer granularity of permissions. That said, ho-hum. Though I’m curious about the SG badges. Are those for time served in SG? Or for members of an SG that hits certainly milestones (membership, lifespan, whatever).
Tech Changes: City of Heroes will now support 3D Sound, have added Visual FX Upgrades and Dual CPU Performance Enhancement.
Ho-hum.
Costume Creator: Drop down menus are just a part of the UI upgrades for the costume creator.
I think this refers to the menu enhancements from the CoV costume creator, which is quite nice.
Pets: We’ve added an all new Pet Window for managing your pets.
Similar, one assumes, to the Mastermind pet windows. Hmmm. Wonder if we’ll get the same functionality (attack! defend! follow!). Oh. Reading on, evidently on the CoV side it’s been estalblished by the Devs that won’t happen (since MMs are supposed to be inherently different than Controllers or Dominators).
Trade Window Upgrades: Trading with your teammates will be quicker and easier with the new UI in place.
That will be nice. As it stands, it’s annoying. Hopefully trading Infl. will be faster.
Beyond that, there are tons of little tweaks and visual changes all around – so come check them out soon on the test server.
Unlikely, but I look forward to hearing about them.

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That doesn’t include ED, which is still confirmed will be in I6.
Overall, the biggest “bang” in I6 is the presence of CoV. I6 should be considered an incremental release (I5.5, perhaps), bringing CoH into sync with CoV. IMO.

Had a chat with Doyce on Sunday regarding claws. He mentioned he’d heard that they “looked better” in CoV than CoH, and I mentioned I thought they did, that the “pad” they extruded from in CoH was gone in CoV. He disagreed that such a “pad” existed.
Well, I was both right and wrong.

You can see the “pad” I’m talking about on the CoH claws (left/bug) . Unlike, say, Wolverine, the claws do not actually extend from the skeleton, but can be either seen as a separate external (semi-)device or as ninja-style “tiger claws.” The visibility of the pad varies by character (which may be part of the confusion here). I believe claws scale (my old Selene character had very large ones), and on some characters I’ve played with the power the pad has been much more visible.
My initial impression of the CoV claws (right/cat) was that they extruded more cleanly from the hand, but the picture here of Very Bad Kitty belies that, Instead, they are more … um … spikey. They do look better — more pointy and claw-like than the blades in CoH (note that Marvel has never been consistent with Wolvie’s claws, either), but they’re not internal, nor do they look like “real” claws.
Anyway, there you go. I will say that, as a Stalker, claws are a great weapon.

1. Mission Complete Sharing will make its way to CoH. (Not specified if it will be in I6, though no reason why it shouldn’t.) This is the feature in CoV that if two people share the mission being run, then when it’s completed everyone is given the opportunity to get the mission credit and consider the mission completed. Similar to shared “hunt” missions now.
So, for example, if you have three people with FrostFire who run the mission, not only is it complete for the person who’s mission it is, but the other two get to (if they want) consider it completed to, letting them move onto the next mission in their arc or from their contact.
Of course, everyone love running Frostfire multiple times, so that may not be the best example. But I can think of any number of times I’d like to have done that with various duos I was running. Nice.
2. I6 goes to Test as early as tomorrow.

At the moment, it appears that bases are only for CoV owners.
Quoth Statesman:

You cannot enter or build bases without CoV. You cannot participate in Base raids without CoV. CoH players will gain prestige and Salvage (I think) that they can contribute to the Super Group…
I think this will be a mistake. The base stuff sounds pretty keen, and restricting not only construction to CoV folks but use of bases (even once it’s all available in CoH) is a sales mistake.
Fortunately, we have CoV … 🙂
Or perhaps this is just tied to the I6 pre-announcement:

Bases are NOT in I6. Bases are a CoV feature… We’ll be posting the features list for I6 “soon.”

Per Statesman (et al.), ED is scheduled to go onto Test next week sometime. It’s not thought to be likely that it will be ready to go Live in time for the CoV roll-out on 31 October, but …

Several people have noted that ED will “inevitably” cause a slowdown in leveling. That’s why we’re putting this up on test; internally, we didn’t notice a change. There’s a variety of reasons for this (less Endurance cost, slotting of different powers that reduced downtime, etc.), but I wanted to see the effect on the Training Room. I’m more than happy to increase XP should ED slow stuff down too much…
Okay. If, indeed, the intent is that levelling will continue at the same rate, I reserve more commentary until I see better how it works. Though the implementation in CoV isn’t nearly as informative as I’d hope for.

Stateman posts — repeatedly — on the subject of Enhancement Diversity (ED):
Some reasons:

3.1) Players focused on just a few types of Enhancements alone; the usefulness of secondary effects was overlooked.

3.2) We wanted to be able to vary the % of Enhancements moving into the future. With ED, we now can have a single Enhancement that boosts Damage by 50%. Players can’t horde many, many copies of said Enhancement, because there is still an ultimate cap.

3.3) We wanted to curtail the constant [internal] powers analysis more; we wanted to set a balance standard and move towards it.
On the announcement itself:

As I’ve already said, there’s little use calculating ED into ANYTHING until it goes to the Training Room. It could have easily ended up on the scrap heap (see Skills). Until something is on the Training Room, I don’t like avoiding it (Skills being the classic example).
… and …

I apologize if people thought I was misleading them by saying “no more big power changes.” In my mind, powers and Enhancements are two different systems (they really are in terms of data). It certainly wasn’t my intent.

Secondly, we didn’t put out info about Enhancement Diversification out earlier because 1) we hadn’t nailed down the exact system and 2) we didn’t want to announce changes until they were on the Training Room. Until something can be tested, it isn’t “real” yet – I’d hate to say something is coming when it isn’t. Skills is a good example of this; we designed it. It seemed ready, but it ended up not being ready.

Thirdly, I CAN say unequivocally that we have NO other major changes planned. A few posts have asked that specifically.
… and …

As I said, we did do internal testing with simulated ED results – but we didn’t have the UI and final numbers. I learned after Skills never, never, never mention a system until it’s really “in” the pipeline. We hope to get ED up on Training Room later this week.

And to those who think I’m couching my apologies a little too much – I’ll be straightforward. I’m sorry. I should have tried to understand how things would be perceived. That’s an oversight/error on my part. I thought Enhancements and Powers were two different things, but many players don’t see it as such. While I may have been *technically* correct, clearly players thought I was expressing a different spirit: no more nerfs. I should have known that.
In other news, SR scrappers will get a “Defiance”-like DR boost as they drop in HP.

Margie wanted me to post a couple of ideas:

1. At such time as CoV goes live, given the, um, large number of alts we have on Champion, and the shared-server nature of same (after all, I’ve only pre-ordered CoV so I can get four more Champion slots for hero alts, right?), would our local audience here be interested in focusing villains on a different server?
   Biggest dis-ad to that, of course, is that it limits any same-server PvP action against Alliance heroes.
   Not, of course, that I’m that interested in PvP. Or CoV. Really.

2. Consortium of Injustice, anyone?
3. In the interest of cross-communication during the testing period, any of the readers who want to post their CoV global handles in the comments, feel free to do so.

Margie and I both got beta invites to CoV today, as “long-term subscribers” (defined as “6 months or more”).
Oh, the temptation.
Not like I don’t have enough heroes to play with. But … damn. Tempting …

This is probably a Good Thing, but I’m sure some folks aren’t in a mood for anything that smacks of further “restrictions.”

Starting 10/24/2005 the City of Heroes and City of Villains character name policy will change. Names for characters under level 35 on game accounts that have been inactive for over 90 days will be changed to unreserved status. This means that those names will become available for new character names if picked by an active player. This policy is being enacted in order to free up character names based on player feedback.
That actually seems pretty reasonable — more than reasonable, in fact. If your game account is inactive for over three months, your character’s name might get recycled (if someone chooses to try to take it). And if the character is level 35 or higher, the name is still safe. I have no idea how many names this affects, but it seems pretty straightforward to me. At worst, it’s not like your character is being deleted (which is pretty remarkable), but that you might have to rename Miss Mystery to Lady Mystery or something like that.

Hrm.
Okay, I support the goals of (a) diversitying what paths folks take in developing their powers, and (b) how different folks tune up their powers to do different things. So I’ve long been vaguely sorry that too many builds end up looking very similar, and that though many powers are open to a variety of enhancements, the enhancements actually taken by most folks tend to be fairly limited.
The answer to this would seem to be to increase the number of powers and increase what different, less-used enhancements do in order to make them more valuable.
The Devs, it seems, have a different idea: Enhancement Diversification. Which sounds like the right name, but is more of an “affirmative action” than a reduction of barriers to taking a variety of enhancements.

This is a new system being implemented into City of Villains and City of Heroes (when City of Villains launches) to promote the use of more different types of Enhancements in powers. Using a system of diminishing returns, when slotting the same type of Enhancement into a power, you will begin to see less effect of that Enhancement when the bonus reaches a certain threshold. The effectiveness of Enhancements you are slotting in can now be seen in the Enhancement Slotting screen.

What does this mean? Simply, if you are slotting Enhancements and your bonus to a single attribute reaches 70% through Enhancements, you will begin to see a drop in the amount each Enhancement should be giving you. If you exceed 100% bonus, then the drop will be more severe. We have added to the Enhancement Slotting screen a display of how much bonus you are getting from your Enhancements. When you are adding in Enhancements that will be reduced in effectiveness you will be able to tell.

Note that this only affects Enhancements of the same bonus. So you can have a Damage bonus of 66.66%, and an Accuracy bonus of 66.66% (from 2 SO Damage and 2 SO Accuracy Enhancements) and you will not be affected in any way. Adding in another SO Damage Enhancement will not give you a 99% bonus, but a 94% bonus, because the damage bonus now exceeds 70%.

A good rule of thumb is “2 Single Origins Enhancements = No Reduction. 3 SO’s = Slight Reduction. 4 SO’s = Moderate Reduction. 5 or 6 SO’s = Major Reduction”
Maxing DOs will give you 95% increase (rather than 100%) for 6 DOs.
So an initial read of this makes it sound like the “Perma-Hasten” of 6 SOs to Hasten … will no longer be possible? Or “Perma-DullPain”? And, of couse, it’s nice that I’ll be encouraged to use those extra slots on Stamina to improve my other powers, but it’s a shame that I’ll run short of breath sooner.
Unless, of course, base effectiveness of all these powers is increased. Of which there’s no word, but that would certainly make this feel better (i.e., less room for improvement, but a higher foundation to build on).
Apparently all internal QA and playtesting has been using this system since 3/2005, so they’re pretty convinced that this is nothing “new.” Which may explain why some of the complained-of I4/I5 changes were not seen the same way by them as by “us.”
Will a new free respec be given for this? Given that it may encourage folks to seriously want to redo either their powers or, more likely, their slotting …
There will be a modification to the Enhancement screen that shows the percentage effectiveness being attained at any given level, so folks will get a better feel for this. (Note that this seems to be an exception, albeit a critical one, to the Devs resistance of making this “City of Numbers.”). And, to that end:

Schedule A Enhancements (33.33%, 16.66%, 8.35%) are:
Accuracy, Confuse, Damage, Defense DeBuff, Drain Endurance, Endurance Discount, Fear, Fly, Heal, Hold, Immobilize, Intangible, Jump, Recharge, Recovery, Run, Sleep, Snare, Stun, Taunt, To Hit Debuff
These bonus types start to see reduction when the bonus is 70% or more, and a severe reduction at 100% bonus or greater.

Schedule B Enhancements (20%, 10%, 5%) are:
Range, Defense Buff, Resist Damage, To Hit Buff
These bonus types start to see reduction when the bonus is 40% or more, and a severe reduction at 60% bonus or greater.

Schedule C Enhancements (40%, 20%, 10%) are:
Interrupt
This bonus type starts to see reduction when the bonus is 80% or more, and a severe reduction at 120% bonus or greater.

Schedule D Enhancements (60%, 30%, 15%) are:
Knockback
This bonus type starts to see reduction when the bonus is 120% or more, and a severe reduction at 180% bonus or greater
I don’t necessarily think this is a bad idea per se — the goal (more diverse heroes) is a good one. But the means — restricting (effectively) what you can do with your hero, as well as reducing the overall value of enhancements (“nerfing”) — strikes me as … not productive. As someone noted, this sort of diversity is possible today, it’s just not incented. So what you should be doing is incenting this, as opposed to disincenting the opposite. The ends may work out the same, but the feel turns out very different, nefty badness aside.