The Famous Mr. ED

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.

City of LAAAAAGGGGGGG

Fired up City of Villains (Beta – Training Room) this evening.
Along with every other beta tester in the world. The words that best describe the experience? “LOST CONNECTION TO MAPSERVER.”
No, really, Margie and I were singing, “I’ll be laggin’ my way back to you, babe!”
To be fair, it’s the test server. And the game really is much fun. Lots of imaginative character names, some fun-looking characters, and much villainy afoot.
I would post a fun picture of my character, Mister Ravenous — but that would violate the NDA. No screenshots.
That said, damn, there’s a ton of costume accessories that are perfect for CoH, too. I hope they are brought over.
‘Nuff said.

It’s not just a server, it’s an eeeevil server

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.

Clothes horse

For all that CoH has a (deserved) reputation for character design/costuming, I remain amazed by the things one cannot do.
So, for example, Torchielle went in last night to get her lvl 20 costume from Serge at Icon. What I wanted was jeans and a t-shirt. Basic, simple mufti.
Nuh-uh.
The jeans part is no problem. But for the top, I can
(a) get a form-fitting “top with skin” t-shirt form that looks like I’m in a wet t-shirt competition. Not very Torchy.
(b) get a loose sweat-shirty kind of thing that’s the same “baggy” as her uniform. Not very distinctive.
(c) get an actual “shirt” that has a cropped midriff (of various styles). I went with that … but, again, it’s not the best fit for Torchy.
A t-shirt. Simple, one would think.
Ah, well.

Villainous

So Margie downloaded all the CoV beta stuff, and created a Brute named “Brimstone Released,” doing the basic Breakout bits (once the test server was workikng properly). Her screen name on the forums is “Slightly_Evil.”
I didn’t get a chance to get everything downloaded before the daily beta period (5-8 MDT) was over (I’ll be firing all that off tonight), but I already have a character concept in mind. My forum name (and, likely, first character name, sans underscore) is “Mister_Ravenous.”
More as I can NDA-tell you.

Reserve names

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.

Late Knights

Due to an endless series of phonecons today (the last one letting out around 6:30p), we were beyond late for the Storm Knights Meet-n-Beat with Fazenda and Araware. Rats.
On the other hand, we dinged to 15 with little trouble, handing missions of mostly-oranges with little trouble. So, no worries.
For the ED Record, Fazenda was planned to be 6-slotted in Hover (Fly), Recovery Aura (Recharge), Stamina (Recovery), Adrenaline Boost (Recharge), and Power Buildup (Recharge) — which means I probably would have set up with Hasten instead. She was 4+-slotted in Healing Aura (Heal), Heal Other (Heal), and Nova (Damage). Oh, well.

Enhancement Diversification

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.

Running silent

Sunday was kind of quiet for us. We cleared up some old business with Psi-clone and Amorpha — duoed saving the War Walls (no problem), cleared out some old mishes, tried to figure out how to get into some story arcs we want to get involved in, etc.
Accelerated our Rikti Monkey hunting.
Then over to the Azures, who we played with most of the afternoon. Uncharacteristically, we were quiet on the comms. I wasn’t feeling particularly sociable, at any rate. We did punch through some very nasty missions, including a sewer-full of orange abominations. The Mrs. died twice, I managed to just squeak away without debt, which is odd given that I’m the scrapper. That aside, I was still pleased by Mr. A’s performance — he seemed very effective at kicking the snot out of pretty much anything we ran up against, even without always my full attention (Kitten was watching our Superman animated DVD, and there was at least one ep I hadn’t seen before).
In the evening — I decided to watch a movie instead. So there.

Prelude

All I want to know is why we spent all that time Friday night hunting down Paragon Protectors in Crey’s Folly, in order to get the Infiltrator badge (thus the Conspiracy Theorist accolade) when …
… well, last night, we ended up slogging against endless PPs on various missions against the Crey. Except these were all purples. Psi-clone and Amorpha, joined by Dubh Bas and Toy Maker. We did pretty well — no TPKs, but close, and everyone died at least once (DB and A managed multiple times) — and still everyone managed to level, a tribute both to the huge amount of XP we were getting plus the new “half debt in mission” rules.
So PC/A both hit 37. Hurrah! Now to figure out how to deal with all those yellow SOs without outright replacing all them with 40s. (Yes, I know how to do it, it’s just annoying.)

Accoladia

Ran around last night trying to finish up the Conspiracy Theorist accolade for Psi-clone and Amorpha — ran the mission (The Doctor’s Ally badge) and took about two hours to get our Infiltrator badges (take down 100 Paragon Protectors — not Crey Protectors, mind you, but Paragon Protectors).
Only nearly died twice, both times because the Invis dropped before we were ready for alpha strike.
The rest is just a bunch of search badges, most of which we have. Crey Pistol, here we come …
UPDATE: Wrapped it up for both of us this afternoon. Not something to frequently use, to be sure, but against Bosses, etc., it should come in handy.

PUG-not-so-ugly

Rather than any number of useful errands I could have been running, I played with Amethyst Crown. Now that she has Parry, she has a pretty decent attack chain without Brawl (Parry – Hack – Parry – Slash …).
So I ran a mish on my own, which was okay, then decided to head over to the Hollows. Level 8 should be just right, right? And I was confident enough of her survivability to be willing to risk a bad PUG.
Well, it actually worked out okay — I was at 8 and a large group of mostly lvl 10 or so pulled me in for what turned into two consecutive Frostfire mishes. During which time I dinged up three times, ending up at 11. Yay. Only died once (after I hit 10, of course), and felt pretty good about her performance.
Good times.
Have decided against Hasten at this point (since there’s not a lot I’m dropping recharges into, and, as I said, she has an attack chain that’s good and will only get better). That freed me up to take Swift as her one power on the even level, which, with Sprint, is almost as good as a travel power until 14.

The Great Leap Forward

Huzzah and hey-nonny-nonny — Fazenda and Araware both dinged up to 14, which means …
Travel Power!
There’s something fabulously liberating about a Travel Power. The worst part of the early levels is, frankly, trotting from one end of one zone to another. Even if you avoid awfuls like the Hollows, just jogging around Kings Row gets to be a boring PitA — and maneuvering around new zones like Steel and Skyway become seriously risky.
Travel Powers suddenly let you treat zones much more point-to-point, with minimal time going from A to B. Nice.
For Aware it was Super Jump, a very fine power that I use on most of my characters (PC being the obvious exception). For Fazenda, though, it’s something different — Teleport. C’mon, she’s a stage magician — what else would she take?
Already seeing/experiencing the various problems — high endurance cost, vulnerability where you arrive, etc. I need to do some fancy macro work to make the whole process easier (and add a “tag line” to the effort).
I dunno. SJ is probably my favorite so far, just for general utility. Fly is great for PC because he can chat while he does so. TP is going to be good “color” — let’s see how effective it actually is.
Still working on her voice — doing the Irish thing without either overdoing it or crossing over into Scottish — and on her “busines” — card tricks, coin tricks, pulling a lit cigarette out of places, etc.
Interestingly, even as Fazenda works on her voice, Araware is turning out to be quite the chatterbox on the comms, relatively speaking. Margie tends to play quieter characters, so hearing Araware waxing lyrical on metaphysics is pretty fun.
Ran last night with another Storm Knight for an adventure, which gave a little variation. He complemented us on how good of a team we were, which we are (all of our current duos are pretty kick-ass, with the possible exception of Velvet/P-Siren, who are good but not great, at least in terms of DPS).
In between mishes, we managed to get hooked up with a Troll Rave in Skyway, a good first test of our travel powers. Which was fine, except (a) we got teamed up with Sword of Asgard, (b) we didn’t SK, so (c) we were both very squishy (and both died at least once) and got hardly any XP. Still, worth it for the exposure. Fazenda’s definitely about the publicity.
We have a Storm Knights Meet-n-Beat on Monday, so we’ll see how the characters stack up at that point. At the very least, we’ll see if I can avoid addressing them as “Consortium” like I did on the SG comms last night.

Doing the social thang

Went out with Velvet and P-Siren to Capt. Atomyc’s weekly Freedom Phalanx exercise meeting. Took for-evah to actually get going, between PS being delayed in joining and then uncertainty as to where we were going and then (most especially) delays in how to actually make a team of 9 work.
In the end, had a group of 7 up against Infernal. Velvet was the point person, natch, as the only tank on the team. Mostly consisted of going through portals, finding a group of a dozen or so demons, standing in the middle and taunting them, then letting the controllers lock them down and the blasters take them down. I was SKed to the highest person in the group, I think, so between that and bubbles (Margie’s mostly, though Puck was tossing them off, too), I was immune to pretty much anything thrown at me.
In the final battle — no prob. I locked down Infernal, the others took out the portal and the peripherals, and then we took him down proper. One death only (and I don’t think that was from Infernal). A kinetic on the team kept my endurance up, and it was just a matter of hitting him enough times.
Got some decent XP for Infernal and the mish, but my high SK kept the overall XP-per-demon pretty low. A fair trade-off for immunity, I suppose.
(As a complete side note — Margie has sometimes joked about replacing the FF on P-Siren with Sonics — and it just occured to me that, with a name like that, Sonics would make a lot more sense now. Not that I’m suggesting she reroll a level 29 character!)
After that, we switched over to Fazenda and Araware. We have a Storm Knights meet-n-beat on Monday we want to attend, and it would be nice if we had our travel powers by then. We’re 13, so it’s just, oh, several pips away. Should be more than doable.
One thing I’ve noticed the last few times out is that the SG channels on other groups tend to be a lot more chattery than the CoJ. Sometimes there’s more SG chat going on than CC (and, to be honest, I tend to swing that way when on those channels, too). F/A had a nice, lengthy, IC/RP chat with someone last night, all on SG. Earlier in the evening, we were using the FP channel for all our organizational discussion around the mission.
As to the difference from the CoJ? Well, four of the several regular players in the group are in duos (Margie/me in our various CoJ instances, mostly PC and A; and, of course, Hype and Syn). Duos tend to talk mostly to each other. There are other individuals in the CoJ, certainly, and they do pipe up, but it tends to mostly be in CC.
Interesting. Question is, is that a problem?

Heroes and Villains

New NCSoft licensing stuff re CoH and CoV:
First off, there will be just a single $15/mo. subscription fee. Whether you buy CoH, CoV, or both, the ongoing subscription cost will be the same.
More interestingly (bolding mine):

Along with the value of being able to play the two games for $14.99, players will receive four additional character slots per game server, and access to crossover areas from both games such as player-versus-player zones in City of Villains. Additionally, City of Heroes’ players who subscribe to both games will have access to the base building and base raids featured in City of Villains.
Okay, would I pay the whatever-X dollars to buy the CoV discs and install them, just so that I could have four additional character slots on Champion?
Little ol’ alt-o-holic me?
Hell, yeah.
PvP zones? Not so much interested (any more than I’ve ever entered an arena match). What the “access to the base building” means is a bit more intriguing. Does this mean hero bases will be available? Or that raids on villain bases will be allowed? Stay tuned.
(via Mal)