I've been working on a project collecting all the data I can on City of Heroes on launch day. Most of the data is right there on the piggs from the original installation CDs, but one key thing that's missing is the list of effects for each power. Mr. Emmert strictly intended for power numbers to be invisible to players, and as far as I know, it's the only data that was excluded from those launch-day piggs.
Most other information has been scrounged up thanks to some endeavoring data collectors, including the original XP rewards and debt numbers by level. But those power effects are lost to the ages, so they need to be reproduced as accurately as possible. As I started playing in Issue 6, I've got a few questions.
Knockout BlowI hear this power once sucked. How badly did it suck? My usual approach is to refer to NPC powers of the same name and steal the numbers from there, but Knockout Blow has me a little confused. No NPCs had any version of Knockout Blow at launch. It wound up being owned by a few signature characters, redside Ancestor Spirits and apparently there was a power for it for use by Capo Muscle, but the oldest one I was able to find is Totem's
Forceful Slash.
Here's the thing. Forceful Slash has a damage of scale 1.4. I was able to find the "brawl index" of Knockout Blow
as far back as December of 2004, and doing the math I found that the damage scale was 3.56, which it still was when they shut down the game. If Forceful Slash used the same damage scale as Knockout Blow, then KO Blow did absolutely miserable damage.
Was that the case, though? Did Knockout Blow's damage get boosted by more than 250% in Issue 2?
Toxic DamageToxic damage wasn't in the game at launch. I hear stories of Cadavers dealing Fire damage or what-not, but I'd like to keep a nice running list of everything if anyone can help scrounge up the details.
The following powers were present at launch and were since updated to deal Toxic damage:
We do have one hint, though.
Paragon Protectors / Ripper seems to have slipped under the radar, and all the way up to the end still dealt damage of type Special, which was ye olde "untyped" damage back in the day. It was the same damage type dealt by
Quantum Array Gun, and later was supposed to only be used by Hamidon's attacks because
Essence of the Earth provided immunity to it.
I can't help but notice that Special damage is not Fire damage. You guys happen to have enough really old chat logs or whatever that we can use to build a good full list of what types these attacks
really dealt?
