New efforts!

[Fable]

Just making that up, eh? "You'd think" it will be that way? Based on what?

Certainly not true for me. On my main character I had every badge it was possible for the game to award (saving only "Arbitrary & Capricious" and "Not a Real Badge"). Having to start over from zero is absolutely NOT something that I would "relish." If I want to start from zero, I can always make an alt.

And if _you_ want a clean slate, you can have it. Just delete your characters, and there you go.

Easy there killer. Note the words "a lot of" and "most". Obviously it won't pertain to everyone. Based on what? Nothing but pure guess work and intuition. Which all anyone has ATM, so...

I stated my opinion and you didn't agree with it. Cool, welcome to the Internet brother.

[Fanta]

On the opposite side of this scale, I'll clarify further why the idea of a clean slate is kind of depressing for others. But keep in mind, not liking the idea of something and not being grateful for the return of the game aren't mutually exclusive things.

See, I don't have anything to regret. My form of altitis was less extreme than most. But my process for creating a character was, from other peoples accounts, more extreme. I didn't just roll up characters. I started at the beginning, with their life and the circumstances that led to their origin as a hero or villain. This may have involved taking out a notepad or sketchpad, bouncing ideas off a friend, watching gameplay for certain powers on YouTube, lots of daydreaming, whatever. With my characters I sought to carve out my own diverse comic book roster in a corner of the game universe. So there was a bit of an editorial board style process going on in my head. A lot of ideas got scrapped or changed before going straight into the character creator.

But the other side of that was, I never, ever felt the need to delete a character. Not even once. Maybe I got lucky, but I never put a character into the game that I later found boring. Sure, I enjoyed some more than most. But even some of the less powerful or efficient ones had other qualities that engaged me. Their themes or personas or whatever. I didn't want to delete personas who felt more substantial to me, who I had some investment in even before entering the tutorial. For me that would have been like Marvel simply deleting Spider-Man or Wolverine simply because some of the writers or artists got bored one day.

Many of us don't need or want a clean slate. We might not have a choice in the matter. I'm sure we'll take whatever they give us, of course. But since we're making small talk about it, it may help some of you to realize why, for some of us, we feel the way that we do. This is all about different views and preferences. Many of you kept logging into City of Heroes for the gameplay, and names and costumes didn't so much matter. But for many others, our characters and their amazing, fictional lives and friends were the reason we kept coming back. Saying to us, "Oh, you can just start over!"--while true and I suspect will be accurate--may come from a luxury that you have not to appreciate what that will mean for us.

Yep, some people equate getting the game back with not "rocking the boat" to get it done. I beg to differ. If the people trying to bring the game back are among us, they know what the base wants, and by that I mean the people that are willing to pay and stay! I've said it before, and I'll say it again, this game will only exist with vets to support it! Maybe when it gets ported to a new engine we'll see a resurgence, but again, this isn't the new shinny.

[ivanhedgehog]

Well way I saw it, I figured anyone who couldn't deal with someone who had knockback at all, was actually very bad at AoE damage anyways(and almost ALWAYS proved to be bad at it).  When I lead a team I didn't kick on knockback.  I kicked because the person did nothing but heal, never buffed, nore attacked.  Thing was all of the best teams I had didn't pay so much excessive attention to knockback in that way, they didn't care as much.  They still mopped the floor with everything very fast.  If your among those who only cares about maximum exp per second you were a stop having fun guy or a scrub.  In the former, you were so obsessed with that .5% exp increase that was often negated by the bits of debt you'd pick up for not using the tools to mitigate damage.  In the later case, you were very bad at AoE.  I saw both kinds of players.

I saw bad blasters who cried about AoE affecting their knockback when they:

Launched fireballs on lone bosses when blaze or fireblast was available.

Skipped flairs so they had inferior single target damage so they tried to substitute with fireball, often needed someone to speed boost them because they were wasteful with endurance.

Wasted firebreath on single target enemies.

....Actually often skipped both firebreath and rain of fire so fireball was their sole AoE, making them completely inadequete for AoE damage to begin with.

I also saw lots of mistakes from other knockback phobics to who often misused powers wasting endurance so much as to always be empty.  I on the other hand always outdamaged them even when someone was knocking things around.  I'd often have things dead so fast even if there was a good chance of scatter cause i'd have my heavy hits in before the mobs got scattered.

Thing is.....

IF YOU CANNOT ADJUST FOR THE CHANGING SITUATION AND ADJUST WHERE YOUR PLACING YOUR AOE'S DON'T BLAME THE KNOCKBACK USER

The only person who's doing crap damage is you if your only hitting one or two guys.  If there is knockback in the air, hit earlier, don't be so hesitant.  You can smash/blast/hit entire groups as the tanker hits them, if your waiting 2-3 seconds your waiting 2-3 seconds to long and giving your enemy mobs plenty of time to inflict 2-3 seconds worth of damage anyways.

why do you have this fixation on ranged aoe's. the biggest problem with excessive kb was the melee having to chase everything down. If you kb'd on a mob and pulled aggro, I would not taunt it off of you, especially if I was on my stone tank. it is possible to use kb with finesse instead of just blowing things around. knock things into walls etc...a GOOD kb character was an asset. a bull in a china shop was more trouble than he is worth. If you couldnt be bothered to learn how to use your abilities properly I dont need you on my team. I once had a storm controller that would start hurricane and stand next to the tank. and refused to stop. we asked him and were told "stop telling me how to play my character" so we kicked him and no one bothered to tell him anything after that. Again, skilled KB= asset...bad KB=liability. If the rest of the team wants to continue to watch you blow mobs into the next group, that is their priviledge... but dont expect me to help you

[MM3squints]

they nerfed it to satisfy pvp but never did anything to really fix the set to work properly. as for KB. My first 50 was an energy/fire blaster. I know how kb can be worked to mesh with a team. but the people that wouldnt make an attempt to use kb in a team friendly way, got 1 warning. after that if they were not making an attempt, they got removed from the team. PB were great additions to a team, just like storm controllers. there were any number of people more than willing to show you the neat tricks that would make them not only acceptable, but very useful for a team. There were always some that would not listen and were destined to a life of soloing.

I would love to see them open up the loyalty rewards across the board and unlock the costumes they gave out at meet and greets, that sort of thing..a "thank you for coming back' and keeping the faith.

You have to admit, AS+EF+TF=dead if not placate hide and repeat was pretty funny (unless the opponent was a mind/ troller or dom then they will TK you and laugh) On your last comment if they do just keep CoX up while they make CoX 2 (Super speculation because we don't even know if we will get CoX) it would be nice they do what you said (also water blast, staff, etc powers unlocked)

[SomeIceTank]

I've heard some chatter about CoX 2. Is this all guesswork or has there been a tiny bit of something that has hinted towards a possible CoX 2? (Sorry, new to the forum.)

[LaughingAlex]

why do you have this fixation on ranged aoe's. the biggest problem with excessive kb was the melee having to chase everything down. If you kb'd on a mob and pulled aggro, I would not taunt it off of you, especially if I was on my stone tank. it is possible to use kb with finesse instead of just blowing things around. knock things into walls etc...a GOOD kb character was an asset. a bull in a china shop was more trouble than he is worth. If you couldnt be bothered to learn how to use your abilities properly I dont need you on my team. I once had a storm controller that would start hurricane and stand next to the tank. and refused to stop. we asked him and were told "stop telling me how to play my character" so we kicked him and no one bothered to tell him anything after that. Again, skilled KB= asset...bad KB=liability. If the rest of the team wants to continue to watch you blow mobs into the next group, that is their priviledge... but dont expect me to help you

Firstly, a bull in a china shop is actually a very graceful display, watch mythbusters.  In fact the animals try to avoid everything while moving fast enough that it's almost like watching a bovine ballet dancer in action.

Secondly, your post is to obsessed with the holy trinity.  I always had buffs in place to detrinity the team, and

Now to the real thing.  Yeah extreme knockback was a problem in really really bad hands but from what I was seeing in the post before yours, I got this case of "ok this person didn't specify useful knockback scenarios".  In the bad stormer case I could see that, but I often see people thinking just knockback is bad in general.  As for melee chasing things, I ponder if they also got the "brick foot" problem, or perhaps they don't have good force multipliers.  If a team cannot fight more then one mob, they are a holy trinity team, cause they got all their damage mitigation placed on the tanker.  Thats the kind of team I never had on my main characters.....because...

I often capped everyones defenses and then locked everything down or debuffed their damage so much, if anyone died with that, it was because they were a whiney regen scrapper who'd try to solo every cimeroran on the map without buffs and complain the team didn't follow him to the very end of the map for him to try and solo the end archvillains surrounded by dozens of cimerorans.

And how'd you assume I suck with knockback?  Your talking to someone who'd regularly bunch enemies up into little balls and perma lock-down em.  Herdicaning for the win. Gale Herdicaning + tornado corner and thunderstorm corner pinning = nothing gets back up and is bunched into a single space.  And I did that with SHALLOW corners regularly with high success.  I wasn't someone who did nothing but freezing rain groups, your talking to someone who was able to use everything at almost all times without problems.  Because I knew how to spot a terrain advantage anywhere and use it well.

As for my favorite knockback traps......with a storm summoner(not my main).

USeful knockback traps(if you want to give me anything interesting i'll state one rule; no flight allowed.  Thats easy mode for gale use):

The valley slam(best spot is a shallow valley):  Place a thunderstorm on high ground, position on the other side of the valley and gale them towards the low ground on the slope.  No flight needed.  Place a freezing rain at the bottom, enemies get stuck.  Hit them with strong heavy attacks, ST any stragglers who do get out of the pinch.  The simple fact that if you knock from high grownd, your still knocking towards the ground, the thunderstorm helps knock them back towards you.

90 Degree Bowling Strike:  If the mobs are near a 90 degree corner, hit them with gale to launch them into it, shove them in with hurricane, freezing rain, thunderstorm, then place a tornado down BEHIND yourself(you do not want to place it on them).  Simple and basic.

The shallow corner pin(looking at a "corner" thats more of a convex corner, but not 90 degrees, more like 120 or so):  Thunderstorm on one side, make sure it's placed to knock them not only into the corner, but keep them from flying out from that side, hurricane pin the other side, hit them with a tornado from down the center.  Think of it like lining up a ton of pins for a bowling strike, the tornado is the bowling ball.  Smash them with AoEs quickly when doing this.

Defending stairs near a doorway: Simple, freezing rain on the doorway, tornado and thunderstorm the area.  This is an anti-ambush tactic.

It's all in positioning and thinking in terms of zoning.  You want them to go to a certain place.

[LaughingAlex]

If your wondering why i'm so specific about that scrapper, it's because I saw an idiot doing that before who died about 10 times because he thought he was invincible and tried to speed run against the teams will in an ITF.

[AnElfCalledMack]

Well way I saw it, I figured anyone who couldn't deal with someone who had knockback at all, was actually very bad at AoE damage anyways(and almost ALWAYS proved to be bad at it).  When I lead a team I didn't kick on knockback.  I kicked because the person did nothing but heal, never buffed, nore attacked.  Thing was all of the best teams I had didn't pay so much excessive attention to knockback in that way, they didn't care as much.  They still mopped the floor with everything very fast.  If your among those who only cares about maximum exp per second you were a stop having fun guy or a scrub.  In the former, you were so obsessed with that .5% exp increase that was often negated by the bits of debt you'd pick up for not using the tools to mitigate damage.  In the later case, you were very bad at AoE.  I saw both kinds of players.

I saw bad blasters who cried about knockback affecting their aoe when they:

Launched fireballs on lone bosses when blaze or fireblast was available.

Skipped flairs so they had inferior single target damage so they tried to substitute with fireball, often needed someone to speed boost them because they were wasteful with endurance.

Wasted firebreath on single target enemies.

....Actually often skipped both firebreath and rain of fire so fireball was their sole AoE, making them completely inadequete for AoE damage to begin with.

I also saw lots of mistakes from other knockback phobics to who often misused powers wasting endurance so much as to always be empty.  I on the other hand always outdamaged them even when someone was knocking things around.  I'd often have things dead so fast even if there was a good chance of scatter cause i'd have my heavy hits in before the mobs got scattered.

Thing is.....

IF YOU CANNOT ADJUST FOR THE CHANGING SITUATION AND ADJUST WHERE YOUR PLACING YOUR AOE'S DON'T BLAME THE KNOCKBACK USER

The only person who's doing crap damage is you if your only hitting one or two guys and you only have yourself to blame.  If there is knockback in the air, hit earlier, don't be so hesitant.  You can smash/blast/hit entire groups as the tanker hits them, if your waiting 2-3 seconds your waiting 2-3 seconds to long and giving your enemy mobs plenty of time to inflict 2-3 seconds worth of damage anyways.

Edit: Corrected some lines.

Speaking as a (Fire) tanker, there were plenty of people who used knockbacks badly. This made it unnecessarily difficult to hold aggro as I chased individual mobs around, and also made Burn and FSC significantly less effective at their main jobs - melting all the sub-boss-level enemies fast enough that I could move to my ST rotation. They could also spread the fight over a bigger area than the buffs and debuffs of various support sets could handle. And don't even get me started on what happens when they decide to scatter the pack before the Dom or Troller gets their AoE CCs down. A *good* Stormie was a wonderful thing to have on a team, and could actually help clump up a fight while also mitigating damage via careful use of Hurricane, but some of them were just more trouble than they were worth, especially when they scattered mobs out of their own Freezing Rain.

[Zubenelgenubi]

See, now THIS is a bit of a negative response--something I was trying to avoid. I guess I'm being negative about your negative respYO DAWG, I HERD YOU LIKE NEGATIVE RESP--sorry I'll be serious. Serious face.

People have a tendency to sound like they're speaking for everyone when they're really just speaking for themselves and likeminded souls. It's just the inadequacies of text tripping us up.

Yeah, fair enough. Guess I was also reacting to some folks (many pages ago) who were saying that everyone _should_ have to start from zero, because that'd be "fair" to those who hadn't played from the start, or some such weird logic.

Zube will try to be less confrontational in the future.  :-\

[LaughingAlex]

Speaking as a (Fire) tanker, there were plenty of people who used knockbacks badly. This made it unnecessarily difficult to hold aggro as I chased individual mobs around, and also made Burn and FSC significantly less effective at their main jobs - melting all the sub-boss-level enemies fast enough that I could move to my ST rotation. They could also spread the fight over a bigger area than the buffs and debuffs of various support sets could handle. And don't even get me started on what happens when they decide to scatter the pack before the Dom or Troller gets their AoE CCs down. A *good* Stormie was a wonderful thing to have on a team, and could actually help clump up a fight while also mitigating damage via careful use of Hurricane, but some of them were just more trouble than they were worth, especially when they scattered mobs out of their own Freezing Rain.

As I said in a previous post, i'm refering to people who seem to think all knocks are bad.  The original request to take knockback away from peacebringers left me facepalming as its not like they were stormers.  Just seemed like knockback phobics were complaining about what I consider to be minor knockback.  Yes, I consider energy blast to be the same way.  Besides it is possible to knock without scattering to.  Its just if a team is so inflexible to me that they cannot take on more then one mob, it's due to bad force multipliers.  And by that logic anytime mobs are knocked towards another mob...., like that energy blast user shouldn't be attacking at all.

I mean had you guys mentioned energy blasters?  Nope.  Should they never attack at all so you don't have to chase the mobs?  Funniest thing is i'd never see that happen even with energy blasters around unless they knocked the mob down a downwards slope.  If your having problems due to another mob likewise, as I said, it meant to me your team had very poor buffs/debuffs in it and wasn't using them fully.

Edit: I also should have been clearer about how I adapted to KB, I had initiative.  One should always be ready to have it.

[amrobinson]

Not necessarily, as some have stated there is a certain fun factor in starting over despite the massive loss of characters they may have suffered.

On the other hand, I'd hate to see all my 100 50's be gone.... although my rad rad corr wouldn't be missed.

So I am on the fence on the matter as I see both sides.

Of course, it also would depend on any incentives, bonuses, special offers that they will have at relaunch. 

Example: all bases and group data are wiped, so for the first month of relaunch have a special where when you register a group and activate a base you start with 5 million prestige and maybe one of the base badges. To really make it sweet, make it the fusion generator badge.

The first month of relaunch could be DXP.....

The celebrant anniversary badge is available in the first month as we are celebrating the return of CoH

For the first month all character slots on all servers are available, after the first month unused slots are locked and you need to purchase slot unlocks

For the first week or two a character can make a Kheld or Epic villain even if they haven't reached the level to unlock them, after that lock them down.

Just some ideas......also here's a couple more:

1. Revert energy melee to how it was prior to ish 13, I think that was when energy transfer was given its unpopular change to the charge up fist attack....

2. Yank knockback from Peacebringer powers, this would for the most part be a popular thing for the PB players.

3. Granite armor: many clamored for a cosmetic change to granite, add an alternate granite armor to be chosen in the tailor shop....

4. to give players a nice incentive: all player powers do double damage for the first two weeks then damage is restored to prior levels.  Let the players go forth and seriously trash their enemies for awhile, if nothing else they can burn out their frustration over the shutdown ;)

5. crank up events like the nemesis invasion and rikti invasions

I will be happy to play whether I get my characters back or not.

That said, I'd be happier if we did get them back. I doubt I can remember all of the characters, backgrounds and costumes I made over the years, and I failed to adequately preserve all of their data offline.

I'm sure that either the character data is there, or not. If it's there, very likely they will put it in. If not, well...

Those of you who want to start with a clean slate will of course always have that option. Just delete your characters.

As far as what changes to make to CoH upon restart, I don't think this is the time to start a HUGE flap over what to keep and what not to keep.

The Devs will put the game in with or without the old characters, and I hope, add in the next release-to-be that was just a couple of weeks away, and then devote all of their energy to CoH 2.

It would be a real waste of their time to shift through thousands of pages of forum posts to decide on what to keep and what to change and what to restore to some previous state.

If you're thinking thousands of pages is an exaggeration, just have them announce the coming start of the game and ask for player opinions what changes to make...should take about a week or so, before the Titan forums grind to a halt!

[LaughingAlex]

Now i'm left thinking to the worst teams that I had.  I remember one that couldn't fight more then one minion at a time....yeah, that bad.  They were insisting on fighting on +4 with no tohit buffs or any kind of +def/resist ect, and it was a low level team.  They'd spend 5-10 minutes trying to sleep the whole mobs before finally fighting.  I got bored in no time.

Edit: I wonder how many teams would should the game come back spend 30-40 minutes looking only for empathy defenders, fire blasters and earth tankers....

Another Edit: And I wonder how many of them will try the AE arch I hope to make that'll utterly slaughter holy trinity teams in seconds.  And how many even strong teams suffer when they get later down the line and start fighting the military-themed factions.

[Felderburg]

That sucks to hear.  It seems modern movie writers don't seem to get it anymore :(.

Most action/fantasy movies are made today for an audience with an ever-shrinking attention span. They have to have cheesy CG and explosions every 5 minutes or their ADD kicks in. Storytelling is almost dead at this point. Not to mention there are so many young actors now that are just so completely nondescript and unremarkable. The acting is just as accountable as the writing.

According to the article I'm about to link, it actually has more to do with movies needing to do well overseas: http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/how-one-terrible-movie-ruined-hollywood/

[Codewalker]

If you kb'd on a mob and pulled aggro, I would not taunt it off of you, especially if I was on my stone tank.

'kay.

If I KB'd a mob on my energy blaster and it aggroed on me, and there was a tanker on the team who didn't taunt it, no big deal. I'll either kill it before it gets up, or if it has a lot of HP and might be a threat, just KB it again and render it harmless.

Tankers aren't the only AT capable of handling aggro. In my experience they can be useful in certain situations, but most teams are fine without one so long as people know how to play their characters well, or have control/buffs/debuffs.

Nothing more annoying than a tanker who thinks they should be the center of the universe.

[LaughingAlex]

Most action/fantasy movies are made today for an audience with an ever-shrinking attention span. They have to have cheesy CG and explosions every 5 minutes or their ADD kicks in. Storytelling is almost dead at this point. Not to mention there are so many young actors now that are just so completely nondescript and unremarkable. The acting is just as accountable as the writing.


According to the article I'm about to link, it actually has more to do with movies needing to do well overseas: http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/how-one-terrible-movie-ruined-hollywood/

I honestly suspect it's a kind of wide acceptance with regards to movie audiences the mary sue.  It's like they want every protagonist to be a chosen one thats somehow better then everyone else as the individual hero.  They want an extreme individualist who always gets his/her(remember there is the marty stu) way inspite the social/political environment around them through some kind of brute force when that realistically never works.

It ends up making for bad story telling every time because you know the protagonist will win rather easily.  OR the villain will make a mistake that conveniently lines up with the heroes abilities to win easily, like for example ghost rider.  In that movie I was left thinking "Ok he's having it way to easy, he's just curb stomping them every step of the way!".  In the end the villain consuming souls left him conveniently vulnerable to ghost riders penence stair, I was left, "ok this movie sucks, it's like there was no struggle, anywhere".  Because he was a marty stu in the movie.  He just wasn't challenged and every badguy was made to just make him look like a genious because I felt they were so stupid in the movie.

[LaughingAlex]

'kay.

If I KB'd a mob on my energy blaster and it aggroed on me, and there was a tanker on the team who didn't taunt it, no big deal. I'll either kill it before it gets up, or if it has a lot of HP and might be a threat, just KB it again and render it harmless.

Tankers aren't the only AT capable of handling aggro. In my experience they can be useful in certain situations, but most teams are fine without one so long as people know how to play their characters well, or have control/buffs/debuffs.

Nothing more annoying than a tanker who thinks they should be the center of the universe.

^ ^ This, so bloody true.

[Ironwolf]

I've heard some chatter about CoX 2. Is this all guesswork or has there been a tiny bit of something that has hinted towards a possible CoX 2? (Sorry, new to the forum.)

The folks trying to buy the game do want to develop CoH2, no mystery there.

[Ironwolf]

'kay.

If I KB'd a mob on my energy blaster and it aggroed on me, and there was a tanker on the team who didn't taunt it, no big deal. I'll either kill it before it gets up, or if it has a lot of HP and might be a threat, just KB it again and render it harmless.

Tankers aren't the only AT capable of handling aggro. In my experience they can be useful in certain situations, but most teams are fine without one so long as people know how to play their characters well, or have control/buffs/debuffs.

Nothing more annoying than a tanker who thinks they should be the center of the universe.

I had a rule when I played on my Eng/Eng blaster - I f I knock it back I will kill it.

[Taceus Jiwede]

'kay.

If I KB'd a mob on my energy blaster and it aggroed on me, and there was a tanker on the team who didn't taunt it, no big deal. I'll either kill it before it gets up, or if it has a lot of HP and might be a threat, just KB it again and render it harmless.

Tankers aren't the only AT capable of handling aggro. In my experience they can be useful in certain situations, but most teams are fine without one so long as people know how to play their characters well, or have control/buffs/debuffs.

Nothing more annoying than a tanker who thinks they should be the center of the universe.

Yes I agree completely.  My blaster was more then capable of handling a little bit of aggro from time to time.  Plus most of the time if I got aggro it just made me more motivated to blast it into pieces.

If the rest of the team wants to continue to watch you blow mobs into the next group, that is their priviledge... but dont expect me to help you

Good, more things to shoot!

[LaughingAlex]

I had a rule when I played on my Eng/Eng blaster - I f I knock it back I will kill it.

I did that to on my energy blast corruptor and on any other energy blast users, including my kin/energy defender.  I actually had a few rules I went by:

1: If someone is a trinity lubber(someone who thinks the trinity is the only way) and I'm on the same team as them, I'll make them feel as useless as possible every time.(especially attackless, buffless empaths, i'd even switch to my own empathy/dark def and then start slaughtering everything on the map while buffing the teammates I saw could do the most damage already).

2: If someone thinks tankers are the center of the universe I'd start going rambo on everything by myself on one of my own tough characters that wasn't a tanker.

3:If the team needed buffs/debuffs and I was on a diff char I often switched to a time manip or my fortunata.

I rarely had to do number 1 or 2.

Edit:  Number 4: And always, always, ALWAYS nova a mob solo on my kin/energy defender when I had enough stacks of fulcrum shift to get damage cap in any team!  I also did that on my fire/kin corruptor and my energy/kin corruptors!