New efforts!

[Illusionss]

No news is good news.

Yes I keep telling myself that.

Wouldn't it be a wonderful Christmas present to finally get news that negotiations have succeeded, this December! Just that, would make me so happy.

[MM3squints]

Yes I keep telling myself that.

Wouldn't it be a wonderful Christmas present to finally get news that negotiations have succeeded, this December! Just that, would make me so happy.

On the plus side Borderlands the Pre-Squeal comes out tomorrow so that will keep my mind off of CoX for awhile.

[MWRuger]

I wonder if anyone will notice if I don't get any work on Revival done that week...

As long as you do not mind your loyal minions doing the same, it should not be a problem. Once they sign the deal, I and many others hope to help you. But when I23 opens we will be AWOL.

[Arcana]

Same reason Titan Weapons was allowed to deal such a ridiculous amount of damage -- it was a pay-for set.

That presumes two things to be true: first it presumes Titan Weapons damage really was a massive outlier, and second it presumes the devs intended for it to be to encourage people to buy it.

The first one is questionable because it presumes the average player, or even a reasonable subset, can maintain momentum during normal play.  I don't think that is true, and my testing suggested that you could only achieve that with an enemy density that was high enough that it would only work with a player that already was capable of significant build optimization.  That's separate from the endurance burn rate required.  Without sustained momentum, Titan Weapons' main advantage is that its a higher than average AoE set, but in that there are peer sets such as Claws.

The second one is also iffy to me because the devs had a habit of allowing marginal performance at extremes, if they thought those extremes were themselves marginal.  For example, Rain of Arrows is a mediocre tier 9 ranged attack unless you use it against the target cap consistently at extremely high recharge.  Then it becomes a ludicrously high output attack even with its cast time.  Also, Claws has a known bug in the way it balances its AoE powers relative to its single target attacks that makes it far stronger than intended, but the devs let it go because they felt the net effect was low enough unless you min/maxed for sustainable AoE output which the average player didn't do.

I believe being a pay for set, the limits were a bit relaxed for the set, but not to the degree of rewriting what was allowable.  I think it was less "its a pay set, make it stronger" and more "its a pay set, lets experiment" with things that would eventually appear more widely, like Absorption, like non-crashing tier 9s, like defensive stances.

[Cailyn Alaynn]

I was playing one of my CO toons, and realized that something that I'll miss, in going back to CoH, is some of the costume-piece differences. After getting to make a Western toon (cowboy/cowgirl) with belt holsters in CO, I don't look forward to having to do without them in CoH. :/ (Even the Gunslinger belt didn't have holsters!) Without the holsters, my cowboy is just a plain toon in a vest and a cowboy hat. Other pieces that I've wanted, and will miss, include a hardhat for my former-construction-worker earth dom (some NPCs had hardhats, but we didn't get them?), and a non-leather trenchcoat for my dual-pistols private eye. Overall, CoH is my favorite by far, and I'll be very happy to be "home" again, but there ARE things that CO did better.

One thing I'd like to do in Revival is have more per-piece options for costume pieces. Kind of like how some objects had optional spikes.
Holsters, no holsters.

I'd also like to see about making it so that if you have a holster, or sheathe, you have the option to use it for your weapon. (With certain power sets obviously.) Having a Broad Sword scrapper as my main for the longest time made me wish I could pull my sword out of something besides oblivion.

[LaughingAlex]

Same reason Titan Weapons was allowed to deal such a ridiculous amount of damage -- it was a pay-for set.

You are aware that it was a burst set, right?  That it had rather lengthy cooldowns in it's attacks AND had a long animation time for every first attack?  I recall most every set that was "pay for" was actually balanced.  To call titan weapons imbalanced says alot to me, as I didn't think it was OP at all, just, bursty.

[Power Gamer]

Titan weapons, yet another set I didn't explore too much.

CITY OF HEROES, Y U NO HERE YET! :gonk:

[LaughingAlex]

That presumes two things to be true: first it presumes Titan Weapons damage really was a massive outlier, and second it presumes the devs intended for it to be to encourage people to buy it.

The first one is questionable because it presumes the average player, or even a reasonable subset, can maintain momentum during normal play.  I don't think that is true, and my testing suggested that you could only achieve that with an enemy density that was high enough that it would only work with a player that already was capable of significant build optimization.  That's separate from the endurance burn rate required.  Without sustained momentum, Titan Weapons' main advantage is that its a higher than average AoE set, but in that there are peer sets such as Claws.

The second one is also iffy to me because the devs had a habit of allowing marginal performance at extremes, if they thought those extremes were themselves marginal.  For example, Rain of Arrows is a mediocre tier 9 ranged attack unless you use it against the target cap consistently at extremely high recharge.  Then it becomes a ludicrously high output attack even with its cast time.  Also, Claws has a known bug in the way it balances its AoE powers relative to its single target attacks that makes it far stronger than intended, but the devs let it go because they felt the net effect was low enough unless you min/maxed for sustainable AoE output which the average player didn't do.

I believe being a pay for set, the limits were a bit relaxed for the set, but not to the degree of rewriting what was allowable.  I think it was less "its a pay set, make it stronger" and more "its a pay set, lets experiment" with things that would eventually appear more widely, like Absorption, like non-crashing tier 9s, like defensive stances.

Every powerset had it's quirks.  Titan weapons was unusually slow and was an extreme burst set, but its dps, I'm not so sure it was all that high.  Archery and claws likewise were just nothing but damage, so they had to do more to compensate for the lack of any -defense/-tohit/-recharge ect.  Fire was the same way.  Titan weapons had knockdown, but there was often enough time in between knocks for enemies to retaliate, you couldn't lock them down all that well unless you had extreme recharge and then you were dumping endurance insanely fast, in a way titan weapons had a "negative quirk" in that it was an extremely end-heavy set.  Some sets were that way to, pound for pound more than others, but you payed seriously in endurance.  The debuff set storm summoning was a full blown example of extreme endurance cost for extreme effects to.

Titan weapons was an extreme set, but it was extremely costly on endurance :/.  It was made to dish out damage all at once, rather than over time like saw, claws.  Or even fire melee.

[Angel Phoenix77]

One thing I'd like to do in Revival is have more per-piece options for costume pieces. Kind of like how some objects had optional spikes.
Holsters, no holsters.

I'd also like to see about making it so that if you have a holster, or sheathe, you have the option to use it for your weapon. (With certain power sets obviously.) Having a Broad Sword scrapper as my main for the longest time made me wish I could pull my sword out of something besides oblivion.

may I suggest something, could you work on the movement powers animations, in CO that is 1 thing I think set CO from Cox, the movement powers in CO felt a lot more fluid when compared Cox.

[Codewalker]

You are aware that it was a burst set, right?  That it had rather lengthy cooldowns in it's attacks AND had a long animation time for every first attack?  I recall most every set that was "pay for" was actually balanced.  To call titan weapons imbalanced says alot to me, as I didn't think it was OP at all, just, bursty.

Quite aware, except that the burst could be maintained almost continuously. The recharge on the heavy hitters was not much higher than other sets (and almost completely irrelevant with Hasten). As for the momentum mechanic, I think a lot of people bought into the marketing hype as evidenced by them calling TW a "slow" set, when it's actually one of the fastest, with most attacks being 1s activation, with only a few 1.3. If you're chaining attacks, the majority of powers activated when playing TW happen with Momentum up.

If you don't have momentum, you'd use either Crushing Blow, or Defensive Sweep if CB is recharging. That's either 2s or 2.2s. While not exactly fast, it's not as devastatingly slow as you'd think. Compare to War Mace/Jawbreaker or Battle Axe/Swoop at 1.83s. That buys you access to several incredibly high-DPA attacks in fast Rend Armor and Follow Through, not to mention the crazy amount of high-damage AoE you have available.

So while TW has great burst, it comes constantly in the form of warmup-burstburstburst, warmup-burstburstburst, warmup-burstburstburst. The only time TW would not average higher than any other melee set is if it were quite badly played, like standing around between attacks or consistently opening with slow Arc of Destruction or something.

The first one is questionable because it presumes the average player, or even a reasonable subset, can maintain momentum during normal play.

I admit I might be a slightly above average when it comes to player skill, but I found it quite easy to keep momentum up and consistently get 3 fast attacks per slow. On SOs, without an uber build.

Endurance consumption might be a valid point, but that's something that mostly affects solo players. It tends to disappear very quickly on teams with any kind of buffing ability. That's probably why no other sets were designed with an extremely high potential balanced by extremely high endurance cost. The only thing I can think of that comes close was the initial design for Hybrid, which was changed before it got out of beta.

I believe being a pay for set, the limits were a bit relaxed for the set, but not to the degree of rewriting what was allowable.  I think it was less "its a pay set, make it stronger" and more "its a pay set, lets experiment" with things that would eventually appear more widely, like Absorption, like non-crashing tier 9s, like defensive stances.

That was the point I was trying to make. Not that the sets were explicitly designed to be more powerful because they were paid powersets, but rather that the restrictions were relaxed and they were not as stringently balanced, based on the assumption that less players would have access to them.

[Sinistar]

may I suggest something, could you work on the movement powers animations, in CO that is 1 thing I think set CO from Cox, the movement powers in CO felt a lot more fluid when compared Cox.

If any movement power gets change it should be adding vertical motion capability to super speed.
It is kind of funny yet irritating that potholes, walls, buildings all block a super speedster when they should be able to cruise over them.

Hope, always hope!

[Mistress Urd]

Yes I keep telling myself that.

Wouldn't it be a wonderful Christmas present to finally get news that negotiations have succeeded, this December! Just that, would make me so happy.

it would be quite wonderful! While "no news is good news" it eventually becomes "swept under the rug"

[LaughingAlex]

Quite aware, except that the burst could be maintained almost continuously. The recharge on the heavy hitters was not much higher than other sets (and almost completely irrelevant with Hasten). As for the momentum mechanic, I think a lot of people bought into the marketing hype as evidenced by them calling TW a "slow" set, when it's actually one of the fastest, with most attacks being 1s activation, with only a few 1.3. If you're chaining attacks, the majority of powers activated when playing TW happen with Momentum up.

If you don't have momentum, you'd use either Crushing Blow, or Defensive Sweep if CB is recharging. That's either 2s or 2.2s. While not exactly fast, it's not as devastatingly slow as you'd think. Compare to War Mace/Jawbreaker or Battle Axe/Swoop at 1.83s. That buys you access to several incredibly high-DPA attacks in fast Rend Armor and Follow Through, not to mention the crazy amount of high-damage AoE you have available.

So while TW has great burst, it comes constantly in the form of warmup-burstburstburst, warmup-burstburstburst, warmup-burstburstburst. The only time TW would not average higher than any other melee set is if it were quite badly played, like standing around between attacks or consistently opening with slow Arc of Destruction or something.

I admit I might be a slightly above average when it comes to player skill, but I found it quite easy to keep momentum up and consistently get 3 fast attacks per slow. On SOs, without an uber build.

Endurance consumption might be a valid point, but that's something that mostly affects solo players. It tends to disappear very quickly on teams with any kind of buffing ability. That's probably why no other sets were designed with an extremely high potential balanced by extremely high endurance cost. The only thing I can think of that comes close was the initial design for Hybrid, which was changed before it got out of beta.

That was the point I was trying to make. Not that the sets were explicitly designed to be more powerful because they were paid powersets, but rather that the restrictions were relaxed and they were not as stringently balanced, based on the assumption that less players would have access to them.

Well thats the thing though I mean, if anyone did feel a need to nerf, i'd probably just lower the knock chance a bunch or something.  It's still an expensive powerset in terms of end, it was kind of dependant on buffs.  Honestly though the feel also matters, not everyone liked the slow initial attack followed by fast fast fast.  Of the powersets, I still prefered kinetic melee over titan weapons on most characters, or staff fighting.  All the same, I hated katana and didn't like broadsword much.

Edit: I'll be, very, very clear about my feelings on nerfing, however.  To me, it often displays some kind of bias from the developers part when they get to aggressive on it.  I know what happened to CO, make no mistake, I don't want that to happen to a revived CoX.  I cannot count how many things were nerfed in that game, it got to a point of excess, once one or two things got nerfed after it was requested by some scrub, the scrubs kept demanding other things they felt were "cheap" to nerf and the idiot developers would nerf it to.  Often it was a pure-healer who hated that others weren't waiting around for them(and a few idiots even were at least honest about that, brought up they wanted the nerfs without my even asking because they hated being "unneeded in teams").  It starts a slippery slope.  There was a reason the paragon studio devs were careful about nerfing or adjusting things, they didn't want to nerf something just because it was a popular demand to nerf it, they nerfed it because it actually needed it.  Not so sure titan weapons needed it much when you consider it's only knockdown it has as a nuance besides the momentum factor.

[Twisted Toon]

I was playing one of my CO toons, and realized that something that I'll miss, in going back to CoH, is some of the costume-piece differences. After getting to make a Western toon (cowboy/cowgirl) with belt holsters in CO, I don't look forward to having to do without them in CoH. :/ (Even the Gunslinger belt didn't have holsters!) Without the holsters, my cowboy is just a plain toon in a vest and a cowboy hat. Other pieces that I've wanted, and will miss, include a hardhat for my former-construction-worker earth dom (some NPCs had hardhats, but we didn't get them?),...

Cowboy, construction worker, where are the rest of the Village People? :-)

[Rejolt]

may I suggest something, could you work on the movement powers animations, in CO that is 1 thing I think set CO from Cox, the movement powers in CO felt a lot more fluid when compared Cox.

CO's problem is travel powers are meaningless in combat. Even with COX's travel surpression I'd never turn mine off.

CO = Really slow ramp up to speed when you attack and go slow if you do or are hit by ANYTHING.
COX = Go slow for 4 seconds from the start of an animation then NOTHING else slows you outside of, I don't know... ACTUAL SLOWING POWERS.

[LaughingAlex]

CO's problem is travel powers are meaningless in combat. Even with COX's travel surpression I'd never turn mine off.

CO = Really slow ramp up to speed when you attack and go slow if you do or are hit by ANYTHING.
COX = Go slow for 4 seconds from the start of an animation then NOTHING else slows you outside of, I don't know... ACTUAL SLOWING POWERS.

CO travel powers in general were slower than travel powers in CoX.  Flight was slower than flight in CoX, super jumping didn't move any faster than CO flight, super speed and acrobatics were both barely faster than flight in CO as well.  All travel powers were slow.  Only if you had a travel power to rank 2 or 3 did you even have close to a reasonable amount of speed, even then I still never saw speeds comparable to CoX super speed, it was I felt more comparable to max flight speed w/o afterburner.  Travel powers were slowed down, originally, because CO's rendering sucked, it couldn't keep up with CoX speeds.  Even after that was fixed though vehicles were around the corner and they couldn't make travels faster because then it'd make most crappier vehicles useless.

[Angel Phoenix77]

CO's problem is travel powers are meaningless in combat. Even with COX's travel surpression I'd never turn mine off.

CO = Really slow ramp up to speed when you attack and go slow if you do or are hit by ANYTHING.
COX = Go slow for 4 seconds from the start of an animation then NOTHING else slows you outside of, I don't know... ACTUAL SLOWING POWERS.

this is very true :), however, the way that the movement powers moved was what I was talking about, just as if you had fly and moved left the character would actually moved left. :)

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

CO travel powers in general were slower than travel powers in CoX.  Flight was slower than flight in CoX, super jumping didn't move any faster than CO flight, super speed and acrobatics were both barely faster than flight in CO as well.  All travel powers were slow.  Only if you had a travel power to rank 2 or 3 did you even have close to a reasonable amount of speed, even then I still never saw speeds comparable to CoX super speed, it was I felt more comparable to max flight speed w/o afterburner.  Travel powers were slowed down, originally, because CO's rendering sucked, it couldn't keep up with CoX speeds.  Even after that was fixed though vehicles were around the corner and they couldn't make travels faster because then it'd make most crappier vehicles useless.

i found CoH's Hover and Combat Jumping extremely useful in combat for added mobility. Teleport as well, depending on the alt. Several of my alts had Hover speeds that i would say exceeded CO's flight speed, and that's not including my Kineticists with Siphon Speed.

[Harpospoke]

If any movement power gets change it should be adding vertical motion capability to super speed.
It is kind of funny yet irritating that potholes, walls, buildings all block a super speedster when they should be able to cruise over them.

Hope, always hope!

If that happens, I would also hope for the elimination of the downsides to teleport.   ;D

[Jorge Firebomb]

I just recently found out about the effort to buy/license/whatever the CoH IP and setup a legacy server for the Issue 23 release. I admit I stopped playing for a while because none of my buddies were playing any longer, but I was just getting back to the game in F2P mode when they announced the shutdown. I then kind of avoided news of the game for a while because I was sure nothing good would be announced.

I am so happy to hear there is even a possibility of reviving this wonderful game. I have never had as much fun in an MMO as when I was fighting wall-to-wall 5th Column with five of my good friends next to me. We were never all that powerful as a Super Group, but the Super Heroes in Training had a lot of fun.

Now excuse me while I go play around with Mids' Hero Builder for the umpteenth time. There's probably a reason I never quite got to max level, despite how much fun I had with the game. Just too many different powersets and archetypes to really focus, but if the game does come back I am definitely updating my first post-Beta character, this time with Willpower and Energy Melee, instead of Invulnerability and Energy Melee.