New efforts!

[Todogut]

I was perfectly content after mastering a high-knockback blapping playstyle on my en/en blaster. I didn't feel like it needed any love. Not that I'd turn it down...

Sometimes DEVs kowtow to player whining to the point where anybody can play anything without developing any tactics. Then it's just yawn-inducing button mashing where it's fairly random whether you win or lose with a given build, no matter what tactics you use. Either that, or it's the exact same tactics for all situations, and equally yawn-inducing.

Excellent points. I agree. The existing limitations of blasters forced creative play strategies. This video shows my energy blast/energy manipulation/force mastery blaster getting off two nukes while fighting continuously. Yeah, he had to regain endurance and restart all toggles... but doing so quickly in the heat of combat was a fun challenge.

Still, if I had played the blaster changes in issue 24, I'm sure I would have viewed them as welcome improvements. Paragon Studios developers played the game and loved it, so I imagine the I24 blaster changes were changes they wanted to see--not just reacting to a vocal minority of players.

In general, I don't like changes to MMOs that I play. I work with what I'm given, make the best of it, and get used to it. When the devs change things--often due to a loud, complaining few--sometimes it messes things up for me.

For example, after one update in CoH, I entered my base and found storage items no longer worked the way they always had; now, all salvage items stored in a storage item were sorted by alphabetical order. Argh! This destroyed my elegant ordering system, which I had developed for the limitations/quirks of the old system. I didn't want items sorted alphabetically by name. But, it was foisted upon me. Why? Because some players on the forums had requested it. Maybe they used Microsoft Excel at work and wanted base items to be sorted alphabetically like a spreadsheet? They got what they wanted. For me, it destroyed a part of bases that I enjoyed.

[Shibboleth]

Speaking of Tanks, how many others participated in Tanker Tuesdays?

Always left me a bit of a problem which Tank to bring. Great fun regardless doing all Tank groups.

[Arcana]

Still, if I had played the blaster changes in issue 24, I'm sure I would have viewed them as welcome improvements. Paragon Studios developers played the game and loved it, so I imagine the I24 blaster changes were changes they wanted to see--not just reacting to a vocal minority of players.

Those changes were being spearheaded, as far as I'm aware, by Arbiter Hawk.  I think he, and Black Scorpion who I presume had to sign off on anything he did, were more aggressive minded in what changes they were willing to make to blasters than others were in the past.  I think that's a combination of the fact that they were intrinsically more inclined to be, and the fact that the overall trend at Paragon was to push the envelope slightly further over time with each passing year.

Incidentally, my own opinions on what blasters should have evolved into (as every other original archetype and even some CoV archetypes evolved over time far more than blasters did) were significantly more aggressive than even what I24 was going to do.  I know it was far more than Castle would probably have thought was a good idea, and maybe even more than Black Scorpion would have thought was the center of the bullseye.  I'm not sure who was the more aggressive overall: myself or Arbiter Hawk.  He was understandably conservative in terms of what he wanted to implement quickly, but whether he had the more far-reaching ideas than I did in the long run is something I honestly don't know.  And that's saying something.

[Noyjitat]

Don't be ridiculous. There's no such thing as aliens. It's the Illuminati.

I'm a alien.

[Sinistar]

Speaking of Tanks, how many others participated in Tanker Tuesdays?

Always left me a bit of a problem which Tank to bring. Great fun regardless doing all Tank groups.

Now those were a blast.

[hurple]

Now those were a blast.

No, Blaster, um... Saturdays were a blast.  Tanker Tuesdays was, um... a tan.  Yeah, that's the ticket.   :roll:

[brothermutant]

So few people appreciated Electric Armor.

I lucked into it combined with Dark Melee...what a combo!

Dark Spark (my Dark Melee/Elec Armor Brute) was one of my favorite toons to play. He really had a lot of work on him as he was always "tanking" or "scrapping" with the teams I was on. He could hold his own if needs be but could dish it out too. Fun times. Loved that I had two different ways to heal myself plus crippled baddies on PBAoE stuff.

[Surelle]

Dark Spark (my Dark Melee/Elec Armor Brute) was one of my favorite toons to play. He really had a lot of work on him as he was always "tanking" or "scrapping" with the teams I was on. He could hold his own if needs be but could dish it out too. Fun times. Loved that I had two different ways to heal myself plus crippled baddies on PBAoE stuff.

Great name!  Cool concept.   :D

[Shibboleth]

Dark Spark (my Dark Melee/Elec Armor Brute) was one of my favorite toons to play. He really had a lot of work on him as he was always "tanking" or "scrapping" with the teams I was on. He could hold his own if needs be but could dish it out too. Fun times. Loved that I had two different ways to heal myself plus crippled baddies on PBAoE stuff.

Nice name. Mine was Ebonbolt.

[Arcana]

So few people appreciated Electric Armor.

True story: Electric Armor was buffed in part because I made the case that Electric Armor's intrinsic numbers were so low, in some situations you'd actually have lived longer if you just Rested in front of the enemies, even though that debuffed all your defense and resistance away (but it did cause you to recover health fairly quickly).  I actually had both calculations *and* in-game testing to prove it.

You could argue whether a defensive power set was good, bad, or ugly, but when I can prove its worse than Rest** it seems the devs were generally of the opinion that was probably a bit too low.  Once it was buffed with among other things Energize, the set became competitive with other melee defensive sets.



** Back in the day I kept a big defensive spreadsheet that could compare different defensive sets for different archetypes across a range of attack and damage types, and in different circumstances (like under the effects of the purple patch).  One of the sheet's features was a "normalization" feature where you could pick one set, like Invuln, and all other sets would be scored relative to its strength.  For giggles, I added the ability to score a set verses what I thought was a crazy baseline: the survivability of a character that just activated Rest and tried to tank with that.  To my dismay, some sets in some circumstances - against certain attack types - ended up with scores less than 1.0, meaning they were weaker than rest.  I actually spent two months investigating whether that was a misleading statistic in my spreadsheet or an actual feature of the powersets in real world game situations.  When I discovered I could set up those circumstances in-game, that was surprising to say the least.

[HEATSTROKE]

So few people appreciated Electric Armor.

I have a Elec/SS Tank with Perma Hasten/Perma Energize.. Loved it

[HEATSTROKE]

Speaking of Tanks, how many others participated in Tanker Tuesdays?

Always left me a bit of a problem which Tank to bring. Great fun regardless doing all Tank groups.

I did a few when they rolled around on Virtue.. People seemed to like my Shield/Ice tank.. wasnt a combo you see very much..

[Sinistar]

I did a few when they rolled around on Virtue.. People seemed to like my Shield/Ice tank.. wasnt a combo you see very much..

I remember seeing someone with that combo. Seemed rather effective as I recall.

I had a brute and scrapper that were both elec/shield,  tried shield on a tank....didn't like it much on a tank.  Mileage varies though.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

So few people appreciated Electric Armor.

I lucked into it combined with Dark Melee...what a combo!

Thunder Locust was my DM/Elec Brute that was born with a hatred for the Rikti and the means to act on it. Spent a fair bit of time in the RWZ running missions and LGTFs against them. Basic concept was that she was the unexpected result of a fatal mishap while a team was reverse engineering Rikti technology. After the incident the project was shut down and Thunder Locust emerged rather explosively several years afterwards from a Rikti fabricator that had been in storage. Deliberately ambiguous was whether she was the deceased researcher resurrected as a gynoid or a wholly new entity that incorporated some of her neural patterns as part of the template. Thunder locust didn't know herself (in both senses, really). Against enemies that used a lot of energy and psi attacks she was an unstoppable murder machine. Very fun to play against all enemy types, really.

[Shibboleth]

I remember seeing someone with that combo. Seemed rather effective as I recall.

I had a brute and scrapper that were both elec/shield,  tried shield on a tank....didn't like it much on a tank.  Mileage varies though.

Interesting combo. One of my tanks was Ice Armor/Stone Melee, the other Dark Armor/Fire Melee.

[Shibboleth]

Thunder Locust was my DM/Elec Brute that was born with a hatred for the Rikti and the means to act on it. Spent a fair bit of time in the RWZ running missions and LGTFs against them. Basic concept was that she was the unexpected result of a fatal mishap while a team was reverse engineering Rikti technology. After the incident the project was shut down and Thunder Locust emerged rather explosively several years afterwards from a Rikti fabricator that had been in storage. Deliberately ambiguous was whether she was the deceased researcher resurrected as a gynoid or a wholly new entity that incorporated some of her neural patterns as part of the template. Thunder locust didn't know herself (in both senses, really). Against enemies that used a lot of energy and psi attacks she was an unstoppable murder machine. Very fun to play against all enemy types, really.

One of the great things with DM/Electric was the ability to own Sappers. Oh how I loved that.

[Ankhammon]

I did a few when they rolled around on Virtue.. People seemed to like my Shield/Ice tank.. wasnt a combo you see very much..

That was my test combo when shield was first coming out. Very fun combo.

[Thunder Glove]

I was just thinking "These character ideas sound like fun!  Lemme log in and make one right now and I'll... oh.  Right."

Even after three years - three years - I still keep forgetting.

[MegaWatt]

i got that last night was like 'why are we playing this Trio in CO...CoX has a sonic set lets go....BLAAAAH'

[adarict]

True story: Electric Armor was buffed in part because I made the case that Electric Armor's intrinsic numbers were so low, in some situations you'd actually have lived longer if you just Rested in front of the enemies, even though that debuffed all your defense and resistance away (but it did cause you to recover health fairly quickly).  I actually had both calculations *and* in-game testing to prove it.

You could argue whether a defensive power set was good, bad, or ugly, but when I can prove its worse than Rest** it seems the devs were generally of the opinion that was probably a bit too low.  Once it was buffed with among other things Energize, the set became competitive with other melee defensive sets.



** Back in the day I kept a big defensive spreadsheet that could compare different defensive sets for different archetypes across a range of attack and damage types, and in different circumstances (like under the effects of the purple patch).  One of the sheet's features was a "normalization" feature where you could pick one set, like Invuln, and all other sets would be scored relative to its strength.  For giggles, I added the ability to score a set verses what I thought was a crazy baseline: the survivability of a character that just activated Rest and tried to tank with that.  To my dismay, some sets in some circumstances - against certain attack types - ended up with scores less than 1.0, meaning they were weaker than rest.  I actually spent two months investigating whether that was a misleading statistic in my spreadsheet or an actual feature of the powersets in real world game situations.  When I discovered I could set up those circumstances in-game, that was surprising to say the least.

You are an  example of one of the things that always kept me interested in CoX.  Your experiments and hard data (well, as hard as it could be given the game constraints) for a wide variety of scenarios.  With you personally, I enjoyed reading the well-reasoned explanations, and the fact that you essentially never used anecdotal information for your conclusions.  I don't believe I ever saw you get rattled by the numerous arguments from people who insisted the game worked in a way contrary to your own observations.  I never saw you resort to name calling or things like that.  You just crushed people with facts.  :)  I never felt like you were out to prove superiority, or "showing off". 

That works into another part of the game that interested me.  The fact that you were ABLE to come up with these bizarre scenarios, and DO them.  The game just did not force you into any kind of playstyle.  If someone wanted to try wacky experiments, you could easily spend as much time as you liked, and the game was still fun.  Such a wide variety of playstyles was available.  Reading many of your treatises over the years while the game was running, prompted me to try my own weird setups, or to invent my own minigames, for want of a better phrase. 

The fact that you continue to share so much information is one of the major reasons I still frequent this board.  of course I am looking for information on some miraculous return of the game, but it is the community itself that keeps me coming back.