New efforts!

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

as a student of SnipeFu.. this was set to make me very very very very happy.. that and no crash nukes ??? ?? My Blasters were already good.. they were going to get ridiculous..

Back a ways i'd had an Elec/Elec Blaster with Hover and Teleport. Back before they changed how the game handled power queuing and Teleport i used to do telesniping in Brickstown: 1) Target an enemy 2) Move to maximum sniping range 3) Teleport directly away from enemy (usually straight up) 4) Queue Snipe while Teleport is animating 5) Snipe enemy that is now much too far away to even see or target.
Not very efficient, but quite amusing and it frequently made mob AI do interesting things.

i was one of the relatively few fans of the Teleport pool and spent many hours experimenting with how teleport interacted with other powers. Like how queuing a power during a teleport would activate the power at your original location after teleporting, which allowed for a variety of effectively risk-free attacks. That was eventually changed so that queued attacks initiated at your destination when teleporting. (i don't know if the bug reports i submitted asking if the behavior was working as intended had anything to do with it being fixed, but i still don't regret submitting them.)

Or the issue over a year before the queuing fix that broke Teleport because the endpoint was apparently always being set and checked at the power's maximum range instead of where the reticle was painted, so teleporting anywhere that had geometry before your teleport's maximum range was impossible. (That was a particularly annoying bug since i spent weeks testing, documenting, and posting about the bug on the test forums and it still went live.)

But i digress. Making all nukes non-crashing would've been very nice as well. i usually played support characters running Leadership and other buff/debuff toggles, so crashing nukes were a thing i almost always skipped taking. The only blast set tier nines i ever took were the already non-crashing nukes.

[steveharp]

Keep up the good work, I will be waiting with a stack of cash to throw at this if it comes around  ;D Miss COH so much  :'(

[Lucretia MacEvil]

as a student of SnipeFu.. this was set to make me very very very very happy.. that and no crash nukes ????? My Blasters were already good.. they were going to get ridiculous..

I had a Kin/Elec defender that was WAITING for these improvements; she was already fun to play, but insta-snipe and no-crash nuke would've been absolutely wonderful.  In fact, for me one of the most crushing aspects of the shutdown was that I never got to try those with her.  But, if this effort works, I just might!  Thank you, whichever company/group is behind this, and thank you, Ironwolf, for keeping us updated!  I eagerly await more news!

[Azrael]

I think 'Teleport' in Champions is one of the few things in CO that did it better.  Not that I found TP in Coh dislikable...but in a combat and as a travel power, I think the C.O version is more graceful.

Which is kind of ironic.  Because if there's one thing C.O, for me, isn't...and that's 'graceful.'

Coh was graceful.

Having said that...stone tankers used to TP into the middle of a mob because of the 'slow big rooted' feet of stone armour.  Great until the Devouring cut me to ribbons.  Very slow and (even with TP) clumsy to get out of.  Treacle.

Though I was fond of the Stone/Stone power sets...

"... insta-snipe and no-crash nuke would've been absolutely wonderful."  I had a Water Blaster...with the much reduced Nova down time and it was a revelation.  Coupled with a 'water worm' heal it was fun to bits to play.  Ah, yes...the 'Whirl Pool' swirling goon mobs for bug munch DoT...  Like playing throw water balloons in real life...but much more fun.

Needless to say, I was waiting for issue 24 to see how the 'insta-snipe' would revitalise the blaster.

All I ever wanted was a Defender who could apply deflection and insulation shields to themselves...(maybe as part of their epic power sets?  Or even sooner as some of the force field set had their critics...) and they wouldn't have been useless to solo! :)

So, I guess it was Dominators for me...Elec/Elec with Pets.  Lots of pets.  Yes....

How does this relate to the 'new' efforts to acquire the CoH franchise?  Well, it shows (from mine and others...) simple ideas to improve CoH relatively simply.  Damage mitigation for blasters.  Forcefields that Defenders could apply to themselves...  More power diversification.  Yes, the planned '5th' power to the tertiary power sets which had been left dusty for far too long.  Insta-snipe...to make it fit in better with the 'snappier' blaster sets.  If they ever wanted to speed up the entire game for a new generation of players (not saying I'd prefer this...) but make Speed Boost on combat an inherent.  Tanks would become less 'piston' like.  Lots more pool sets of e.g. weapons (the ones that would be picked up in mission arcs in e.g. Croatoa...) for tertiary choices.  Many more epic sets could be thrown together as part of power diversification that could offer plenty of new epic choices.  One nice animation I've seen is the energy transform emote where a character grabs the ground with their hands.  That would make a great 'heal/stamina' renewal for the energy/energy set in the way that the 'water worm' heals the water blaster...

...and no reason they couldn't attempt get Matt Miller on a consultative basis to sort out the development on Battalion(?) and the Moon zone stuff they had coming up.  What WILL be exciting is all the nearly/half/quarter/drawing board plans/IP Paragon had before sinking under the executioner's axe.  That development work will still be there (hopefully...) and how many issues would it take to get to that?  Another four-ish judging from Matt Miller's parting interview on CoH intended direction.  If the new developers only did one issue per year over four years...we could still get to the 'end' game that Positron was talking of.  That would just about take us up to the time scale of a CoH 2 development schedule give or take a year maybe.

All hypotheticals.  But yes, 'we' have to get our hands on the property first.  I say 'we' because I hope the 'would be' heir apparents see the return of CoH as a 'we' thing.  ie. a partnership.

Azrael.

[LaughingAlex]

I think 'Teleport' in Champions is one of the few things in CO that did it better.  Not that I found TP in Coh dislikable...but in a combat and as a travel power, I think the C.O version is more graceful.

Which is kind of ironic.  Because if there's one thing C.O, for me, isn't...and that's 'graceful.'

Coh was graceful.

Having said that...stone tankers used to TP into the middle of a mob because of the 'slow big rooted' feet of stone armour.  Great until the Devouring cut me to ribbons.  Very slow and (even with TP) clumsy to get out of.  Treacle.

Though I was fond of the Stone/Stone power sets...

"... insta-snipe and no-crash nuke would've been absolutely wonderful."  I had a Water Blaster...with the much reduced Nova down time and it was a revelation.  Coupled with a 'water worm' heal it was fun to bits to play.  Ah, yes...the 'Whirl Pool' swirling goon mobs for bug munch DoT...  Like playing throw water balloons in real life...but much more fun.

Needless to say, I was waiting for issue 24 to see how the 'insta-snipe' would revitalise the blaster.

All I ever wanted was a Defender who could apply deflection and insulation shields to themselves...(maybe as part of their epic power sets?  Or even sooner as some of the force field set had their critics...) and they wouldn't have been useless to solo! :)

So, I guess it was Dominators for me...Elec/Elec with Pets.  Lots of pets.  Yes....

How does this relate to the 'new' efforts to acquire the CoH franchise?  Well, it shows (from mine and others...) simple ideas to improve CoH relatively simply.  Damage mitigation for blasters.  Forcefields that Defenders could apply to themselves...  More power diversification.  Yes, the planned '5th' power to the tertiary power sets which had been left dusty for far too long.  Insta-snipe...to make it fit in better with the 'snappier' blaster sets.  If they ever wanted to speed up the entire game for a new generation of players (not saying I'd prefer this...) but make Speed Boost on combat an inherent.  Tanks would become less 'piston' like.  Lots more pool sets of e.g. weapons (the ones that would be picked up in mission arcs in e.g. Croatoa...) for tertiary choices.  Many more epic sets could be thrown together as part of power diversification that could offer plenty of new epic choices.  One nice animation I've seen is the energy transform emote where a character grabs the ground with their hands.  That would make a great 'heal/stamina' renewal for the energy/energy set in the way that the 'water worm' heals the water blaster...

...and no reason they couldn't attempt get Matt Miller on a consultative basis to sort out the development on Battalion(?) and the Moon zone stuff they had coming up.  What WILL be exciting is all the nearly/half/quarter/drawing board plans/IP Paragon had before sinking under the executioner's axe.  That development work will still be there (hopefully...) and how many issues would it take to get to that?  Another four-ish judging from Matt Miller's parting interview on CoH intended direction.  If the new developers only did one issue per year over four years...we could still get to the 'end' game that Positron was talking of.  That would just about take us up to the time scale of a CoH 2 development schedule give or take a year maybe.

All hypotheticals.  But yes, 'we' have to get our hands on the property first.  I say 'we' because I hope the 'would be' heir apparents see the return of CoH as a 'we' thing.  ie. a partnership.

Azrael.

Agree with you on alot of points, though I felt personally CoX teleport was better done then CO, in that CO's teleport was generally just a very hard stealth flight power to beat, mechanically, that got nerfed into oblivion(only good if you want the theme, but is very annoying to use in general and even more-so if you get attacked even once, due to the extreme short duration).  I think if they made city of heroes teleport, when taken, bind a shift/control + left click by default and documented that in game for when someone took it, teleport would have been much better.

Champions online lack of grace comes from it's tendency in story writing to not take itself seriously enough, treat the character like a mary sue(npcs running out of there way to praise you even if your not nore haven't done anything, enemy mobs generally being to weak both offensively and defensively due to being toned down specifically so a badly built character could still beat them a few at a time like other mmorpgs, really drives the mary sue nail into CO's coffin).  Combined with a long trend of changes to make it even more generic as an mmorpg (even forcing the holy trinity in the fire and ice rampage) really kills any gracefulness CO did have.  Heck, I think city of heroes being shut down is more the reason why CO is still around, which is tbh one of the wrongest reasons for a game to be around(it's a crappy game anymore).

On the other points I wholly agree with you though.  I agree that alot of the changes coming forward were perhaps going to be some of the best city of heroes had.  New snipes, crashless nukes, more powersets on top of that to boot.  Someone even mentioned Lua scripting, that'd have been so big as to dwarf anything the competition had.  If city of heroes came back in even a few months or even late 2014/early 2015 it'd certainly spell doom for some of it's competition but for the right reasons of just being way better at pulling off the things it pulls off.

City of heroes grace was that, besides just being the first super hero mmorpg, it was also an mmorpg that moved FORWARD, and kept up with the times.  In fact I realised many coh players were not normal mmorpg players, because many mmorpg players just expect same, same, more same and even ask for more same, and then show the double standard of "this is the same, back to wow".  They don't know how to have fun, coh players however did.  We knew to try new things and we knew that fun is best in variety, and at the same time I noticed that even min/maxers tended to understand that(save a very small amount).  Everyone experimented with some build or another at some time or another pretty much, something that the above game I mentioned earlier in this reply now more then before discourages.

City of heroes kept getting changes to keep it fresh and yet it had so much even before those changes.  Which further helps it's grace, in that it had a very strong foundation that the above game never had.  This game had a lot of content, enough to keep you going for more then a year, champions online had barely a month worth of content and then never got much more then that.  And the powersets all played differently enough to further multiply that replayability through the roof.  Champions online may have had a freeform system, it had no balance or standards and enemies were ridiculously easy and deliberately toned down to make it easy for even a badly built character, again, killing it's replayability.

City of heroes was a game that, knew, much like minecraft, that if you just give the player everything on a silver platter then the satisfaction ends up severely limited.  Champions online on the other hand, gave everything on a silver platter, and wondered why people were not satisfied.

[HEATSTROKE]

 btw all you needed was a 22% to hit buff to have an instant snipe..

[PSI-on]

btw all you needed was a 22% to hit buff to have an instant snipe..

Sorry, but when I hear "instant snipe" I think "fires instantly." To Hit only effected actually hitting something, so what does that have to do with "instant snipe?" To Hit didn't have anything to do with the animation and interupt time, so even if it passed the hit check, you'd still have to stand still and wait for it to finish firing, otherwise interupt it and cancel it, which was what bothered most people about them. At least so I've seen.

[Reiraku]

Sorry, but when I hear "instant snipe" I think "fires instantly." To Hit only effected actually hitting something, so what does that have to do with "instant snipe?" To Hit didn't have anything to do with the animation and interupt time, so even if it passed the hit check, you'd still have to stand still and wait for it to finish firing, otherwise interupt it and cancel it, which was what bothered most people about them. At least so I've seen.

The changes they were making had it so that when you're to-hit went above a certain point, your snipes would cast instantly.

[Scendera]

Do want!

[Taceus Jiwede]

Missing out on the instant snipe and crashless nukes is a huge bummer.  My main was a Energy/Device blaster that I spent billions and billions and billions inf on to make him into the character he was, and he was about to get even better!  But nooooo.  They had to close the game.  My nuke 1 hit entire groups minus the bosses but I only saved it as a "Oh shit" button or a REALLY big group of enemies.  And snipe was a power that I used on bosses I guess when I was just DPS spamming in a group but even then I didn't use it often.  I remember some endurance changes were being made too which would have been awesome.  I hope that if the game comes back all the character data is saved (not that its a deal breaker if not) because I don't think I could re-create that old Blaster.

[saipaman]

The changes they were making had it so that when you're to-hit went above a certain point, your snipes would cast instantly.

And it was so AMAZING!

[Harpospoke]

as a student of SnipeFu.. this was set to make me very very very very happy.. that and no crash nukes ????? My Blasters were already good.. they were going to get ridiculous..

Isn't there a Blaster rule that goes something like:  "Never admit your Blaster is good in public"?   ;)

[Harpospoke]

i was one of the relatively few fans of the Teleport pool and spent many hours experimenting with how teleport interacted with other powers. Like how queuing a power during a teleport would activate the power at your original location after teleporting, which allowed for a variety of effectively risk-free attacks. That was eventually changed so that queued attacks initiated at your destination when teleporting. (i don't know if the bug reports i submitted asking if the behavior was working as intended had anything to do with it being fixed, but i still don't regret submitting them.)

I was a big fan of TP but I didn't try the things you did.   I just liked it.   The keybind made it easy to use and I got around faster than anyone else could.   I did usually have another travel power for indoors though.   You didn't want to only have TP in one of those caves...yikes.    Jetpacks were handy too.

[HEATSTROKE]

Isn't there a Blaster rule that goes something like:  "Never admit your Blaster is good in public"?   ;)

nope.. I admitted it constantly... every blaster I built was good... and some were ridiculously good.. but then I started out playing blasters..

[HEATSTROKE]

Sorry, but when I hear "instant snipe" I think "fires instantly." To Hit only effected actually hitting something, so what does that have to do with "instant snipe?" To Hit didn't have anything to do with the animation and interupt time, so even if it passed the hit check, you'd still have to stand still and wait for it to finish firing, otherwise interupt it and cancel it, which was what bothered most people about them. At least so I've seen.

Instant Snipe didnt have the animation and interrupt time. It would fire in about one second. The condition for "instant snipe" being available was having a " to hit buff" above 22%.. which basically meant if you hit AIM it you could instant snipe..

[LaughingAlex]

Instant Snipe didnt have the animation and interrupt time. It would fire in about one second. The condition for "instant snipe" being available was having a " to hit buff" above 22%.. which basically meant if you hit AIM it you could instant snipe..

A time manipulation DEFENDER(not a corruptor, lower magnitudes from what I remember came short, barely, including power build ups magnitudes) could also very easily get the 22% to-hit buff as well.  Though I think leadership: Tactics also needed some help if you were trying to use that to get your to hit high enough consistently.  Thing was I didn't like to use aim on defenders/corruptors due to not also having build up, usually.  But I almost always had tactics on my characters if I didn't have any built in way to buff my to hit ratings(it was my answer to the rng, the random number god was often at war with me).

[Taceus Jiwede]

A time manipulation DEFENDER(not a corruptor, lower magnitudes from what I remember came short, barely, including power build ups magnitudes) could also very easily get the 22% to-hit buff as well.  Though I think leadership: Tactics also needed some help if you were trying to use that to get your to hit high enough consistently.  Thing was I didn't like to use aim on defenders/corruptors due to not also having build up, usually.  But I almost always had tactics on my characters if I didn't have any built in way to buff my to hit ratings(it was my answer to the rng, the random number god was often at war with me).

Targeting Drone and a few set bonus's was enough to get you above 22% at all times too if I remember correctly.

[Reiraku]

Yeah, I had a laugh at that, since I had a /Dev blaster. An Ice/Dev blaster  :(

[Microcosm]

Yeah, I had a laugh at that, since I had a /Dev blaster. An Ice/Dev blaster  :(

I was considering Moonbeam on some stalkers, since without the 7 + second activation time, it could actually do some mean damage..

[Azrael]

I was considering Moonbeam on some stalkers, since without the 7 + second activation time, it could actually do some mean damage..

I had an elec/elec Stalker.  I got into Stalkers very late on.  Half a year before closure.  I found them cowardly...yet vicious fun.  The way they fight reminds me of how Palpatine takes out 3 Jedis before running out of steam vs Windu. :P

'I'm dead...'  and 'Urk...now I'm...uh...dead...' and...'I'm nearly dead...now I am dead...' was usually how the mobs went down.  The 1st one dropped like a sack of spuds from a mystery strike.  And the other two, slow to react soon follow.  Heh.  I always called it the 'waltz of death' in my mind...1, 2 3 (dead...)  Rinse, Repeat.  It never got old...

Azrael.