Game Feature: City of Heroes Beta Thoughts

[schild]

Hm, sounds to me you should be playing a blaster with better team dynamics.

That is all.

[kaid]

If you like melee but don't like runners take Spines. Spines has a few range attacks impale one of them actually has pretty decent range, good damage, and can ROOT.


The runner thing is kind of a bane and a blessing for scrappers. If you do enough damage fast enough when swarmed you can usually juggle enough mobs to stay alive. The downside is it is kinda annoying to run them down. One power that is VERY handy for tanks is teleport foe.  If a mob takes off tp it  and in general your auto attack will fire the instant it lands infront of you.


As for animation times yes on some powers they are long but in most cases the long animation time is on long powerful or multi hit attacks. The animation time is part of the built in draw back of the power which is usually harder hitting or has other strong special effects.

The flurry kick for martial arts and dark maul both have very long animations but they are offset by the massive damage the powers do when they land.

Some folks don't like playing scrappers much but I will tell you even the previously "gimp" power spines back before its boost was REALLY NASTY  even at  level 34. Scrappers are all about damage and I have seen level 34 scrappers outdamage everybody including the blasters in the group consistantly. The shock damage that broadsword scrappers can do is really scary. I highly recommend though that any scrapper picks up hasten.


kaid

[Alluvian]

As I have a level 15 fire/fire blaster and a level 11 broadsword/regen scrapper I would like to refute some of this.

Sorry for the huge sir bruce here.  There were so many points I didn't know how else to counter them all.

- Attack animations freezing you in place while you execute them.
   I understand this is sometimes required to make the animation look correct, but some of these animations take a long time to execute.  A few that come to mind are flurry, jump kick, and any of the hack/slash attacks if you dont have your sword drawn before executing them.  So if you execute flurry, hack, jump kick, slash...you have to draw the sword two times which adds more time to the animation delays.  But flurry bothers me because the punches need to be sped up, half the time Im hitting the guy and he's about half a block away when I finish.

- Not being able to hit NPCs while they run.
  The only solution I've found to this is to run ahead of them and wait for them to run into you.  It really doesn't make sense, and I haven't read too many comics where the hero chases the enemy two blocks down the street on his tail and is unable to take any sort of action on him.

You mention the solution right in your statement of the problem.  The freezing in place is not a big deal as you still hit if you can trigger the attack.  It is like complaining that blaster shots go through the wall when you trigger and THEN the enemy runs behind a wall.  Unless you want it to check before and after the animation for LOS then this will happen.   And checking twice for LOS would suck.  I had enough of that in EQ with shitty a shitty LOS system.

Regarding the sword draw, yes.  You have to draw it twice with that.  LOOK at what you are doing with jumpkick.  Do you really think it would make sense to do that with a 6 foot broadsword drawn?  In live, avoid the power pool attacks if you have a weapons scrapper/tank.  First your base powers will be far stronger, and second the power pool powers don't use your weapon by design.

Since my first day of playing a scrapper I have no problem hitting a fleeing target.  Just run in front as you say.  Piece of cake.

- Accuracy of attacks.
   I've seen people complain about this on the forums for COH, and it's all really speculation as no one can say that something is right/wrong without hours of running numbers on like level NPCs, etc etc.  But it bothers me for a few reasons:  Meleers are standing right next to the npc they are trying to hit and I miss 1/3 of the time I swing at most things my level.  As a scrapper I don't seem to do as much damage as most blasters my level, but I take a greater risk since Im standing within melee range of many NPCs just to execute my attacks (and the constant missing doesn't help this).   And as for blasters, I tried one..when I got to level 5 and was running a partnered mission with a friend of mine...I missed attacks nearly half the time I fired..  It got to the point where I tried to kill a fleeing thing and missed three times in a row.  And when you're blaster is standing toe to toe with an npc and he extends his hands over the npcs head and blasts the ceiling twice...it starts to piss you off.

Um... socket up some accuracy enhancers man.  My fire blaster needed two accuracy enhancements on fireblast to make me happy.  Now vs mobs my level I hit about 90% of the time and vs mobs two levels higher I hit about 60-70%.  I am okay with that.  I could hit more if I stuck more accuracy on it.  They are choices you make.  Some attacks don't need the accuracy.  My fireball is pretty darn accurate, but I slotted it with one accuracy anyway just cause I hate missing.

My broadsword guy has one accuracy on hack because it is SUCH a strong attack I don't want it to miss, but even with one accuracy I think I missed ONCE all day yesterday with that attack.  And I probably slammed down hundreds of hacks (gotta love hasten).  I didn't bother putting accuracy on slice or whatever the other one is called.  They hit about 80% vs even mobs.  If I started grouping more with my scrapper I would probably socket up some accuracy on them all.  But I have only soloed or gone in pairs and have yet to die with him up to level 11.

- Area of effect attacks (mainly slice)
   Slice is a broadsword attack that swings in an arc in front of the scrapper damaging all npcs within melee range.  Except in my case usually I'll be getting hit by multiple NPCs and when I use slice it only attempts to hit the one Im directly fighting.  I don't see "miss" or anything over the other things heads, the attack simply doesn't seem to be reaching them even though they are reaching me just fine.

Again, I don't really understand your problem.  I don't have a single accuracy on slice and I hit 2-3 targets a lot with it.  remember that your selected target is in the middle of the cone.  It is not a terribly wide cone, but you can widen the cone with enhancements if you like.  I always selece the best slice target and switch to him JUST before hitting slice to make sure I get multiple in the cone.  Sometimes they are too evenly spread out though.  My biggest problem is a mental one, where if there are three targets all in the cone my brain attacks the center one.  Good for the first slice, hit three, but then the hack kills him and without the guy in the middle I can no longer cover the gap on slice.  Best to slice on the central guy and then switch to a guy on an edge to hack dead, so when your slice comes back you can still get two in the cone if they have not moved.

- Missions (especially teamed)
  The missions I usually get with teams are front-loaded.  Meaning the hardest things in the mission are the first things you encounter in the mission.  This has caused missions to completely obliterate teams I've had....and often times these msisions would put NPCs 2 levels above the quest receivers level in it.  While this is fine if the whole team were the quest receivers level or higher, it's not a good thing when the mission doesn't scale the average level of the npcs to the average level of the team.  So if you got one guys whose level 16 and the rest of your team are 13-14..and you average out to about 14 as a team.  The level 16s mission will contain npcs in the 17-18 range in huge packs often with bosses due to your team containing over X many people.  All it does is add more npcs for the bigger teams, instead of putting the levels at some sort of average level in comparison to teams ability.  What usually ends up happening is the team has to take the lower level guys missions just so we don't rack up huge exp debts trying to do the higher level team members missions.

I have probably done about 200 missions or so, and this frontloading has only happened to me about 3-4 times.  And those times it was just a coincidence as those missions got harder and easier throughout with level changes all around.  The bulk of the missions I have played are pretty stable levelwise with only a +/-1 level difference.  The 3-4 I list above swung +/-2.  Something to do with real large groups.  They fluctuate a lot.

- Task force missions

I tried one, we ran into a lot of "untouchable" npcs who were stuck in doors/walls.  Had many other issues with the missions, and the missions were very long....which is OK in some cases but disconnects and other things lead to the mission being too hard for the remaining team to handle and we ended up with a lot of exp debt trying to finish.  Not really going to elaborate, but all I can say is if these are as buggy in retail as they are now...the game masters/whatever they are called will have their hands full dealing with the little issues that keep the missioners from completing the missions.

Finally something I agree with you on.  Many aoe powers can still hit them though in walls.  We finished the positron task force in about 15 missions or so and this happened twice, both with those COT little ghosties.  Rain of fire still hit them fine though.  Just a slow recycle so it took abit to kill them.  Certainly possible for groups to not have any aoe's like that though.  It is a real problem.

- Power selection

I would like to see better descriptions for powers....  I ended up with a lot of power choices that were better that I had thought they would be and others that were very disappointing.  When you get stuck with the disappointing ones (like hover *cause it's much slower than walking*) it becomes irritating to continue with the character.  I wouldn't mind seeing the option to trade up powers on the following odd level.  Or even some way of "trying powers" in some sort of battle room or non-exp gaining environment...similar to planetsides VR area especially since you can't currently drop powers for others.  I don't even care if you can't try them out till you can get them, but at least it would be some sort of "see if this fits my play style" period before taking a new power.  And for the record, hover needs to be at least as fast as walk baseline....it's ridiculously slow.

I like the idea of trying out powers.  Maybe oneshot three use temporary items from a trainer when you have enough exp to level for instance.  Would not be overbalancing to give you three shots of something you are the right level to use anyway, they already have temp powers coded, and you could test them vs mobs you are really fighting.

That said... its called HOVER.  Not something I associate with fast lateral movement.  Especially when one power lower is a skill called 'flight'.  Does not take much to put two and two together.

Trial power is still a good idea though.

Like me at level 14, I had combat jumping and hasten.  Was a DARN hard choice between super jump and super speed.  Would have loved to try them both out so see which I liked the most.  In the end I am very happy with superspeed and will pick up super jump maybe at 18 or something.  But I will be wiped before I get there of course.

Suggestions:

- Make some melee attacks have some sort of "slow opponent down" effect to them, so they are easier to run down.

Some melee types CAN do this.  Some primary some secondary.  Read the skill descriptions at char generation.  They are not as bad as you seem to think.

- Extend the melee "range" out a few feet so running things can be struck without having to run past them and wait..or hope they stop.

- Balance missions to a teams average level.

Don't they already do this?  I have completed very challenging missions solo all the way up to 8 in a group.  Many of both.  The 8 man missions are INSANE but incredibly fun.  Don't forget your AOE blaster, muhaahahaha.

- Allow trying out of powers, or trade-in on powers besides maybe the starting ones (since it's easy to try them).

- Speed up animations, especially for melee.  It really doesn't make sense to have the bad guy running away while you're still "flurrying" on him.

I just feel bad recommending this game to anyone without telling them what is making my gaming experience less than fun.  Im sure most of my listed concerns will be seen by other melees, especially scrappers.

Yeah, I see them, but I just don't see them as real problems.  Just speeding up the animations for instance would make them look really stupid and you would still have the badguy being hit while running he would just get only half as far this time.  Not much of an improvement.  As a visual problem only and not a gameplay problem at all it does not bother me.

Testing out powers is a good idea though.  Let the trainers hand out temp powers once per level for each skill you qualify for. 3 use sounds good to me.  Can't imagine it would be that hard to code.  Just need a flag that says you already got it, reset the flag on level up, and add in a 3 use temp power item for all the ingame powers.  Not imbalancing I don't think.  Especially since auras shut off when zoning in/out of missions.

[HaemishM]

The melee powers with slow animations are that way for a reason. They are usually more powerful than the normal "faster" animations.

I haven't really seen much of a problem with "front-loaded" difficult missions. Most of the time, I'm 3/4 of the way in before I see a real tough Lieutenant or Boss.

The tryout powers would be a good idea; or they may just have to add "respecing" in. Having to "reboot" a character because you picked a power that doesn't fit your style could get annoying.

[Soukyan]

I thought I saw mention somewhere that they were putting in a mission where the reward would allow a "respec". Not sure where I remember seeing that. I'll try to find it again.

[Alrindel]

The lead dev, Statesman, said that on the beta boards.

Who knows when it'll be implemented, though.

[Murgos]

I really liked City of Heroes at first.  Despite the lag, disconnects, and over-crowding, I had a lot of fun playing a broadsword/reflexes scrapper to 15, a dark/dark defender to almost 11, and a few smaller guys into the 5-7 range.

My preface to this post is that I disagree almost entirely with evertyhing you've written here.  I have played a Blaster to 15 and a number of other classes up to around 10 including various scrappers and tankers and I have to say I think you are off base.  Sir Brucing for teh win!!!

The complaints I have about the game center mainly on what I've experienced while playing my scrapper.   Some of these things include:

- Attack animations freezing you in place while you execute them.
   I understand this is sometimes required to make the animation look correct, but some of these animations take a long time to execute.  A few that come to mind are flurry, jump kick, and any of the hack/slash attacks if you dont have your sword drawn before executing them.  So if you execute flurry, hack, jump kick, slash...you have to draw the sword two times which adds more time to the animation delays.  But flurry bothers me because the punches need to be sped up, half the time Im hitting the guy and he's about half a block away when I finish.

This is a legitimate gripe but really minor.  Your upset because sometimes you have a few extra frames of animation to run through...  The alternatives are animations that end abruptly or animations that dont match their effects.  Would you rather that the attack ended as soon as the opponent was out of melee range?  I bet your be even more pissed if your attacks only did 1/4th damage if the opponent was running, wouldn't you?  How about if the victim of the attack was stunlocked during the animation?  Well then everyone would play scrappers and the game would fall apart rapidly.  How about if instead of a flurry of attacks your all attacks were just a basic jab?  BORING.  I'm sure Cryptic is sorry that you have to watch a few frames of animation every now and then but it's probably the best solution.

- Not being able to hit NPCs while they run.
  The only solution I've found to this is to run ahead of them and wait for them to run into you.  It really doesn't make sense, and I haven't read too many comics where the hero chases the enemy two blocks down the street on his tail and is unable to take any sort of action on him.

Yea you ever tried to hit someone running away from you?  It doesn't work my friend unless you can get in a tackle, maybe they could put in an 'Open Field Tackle' power.  Anyway's, I've played enough meleers to know that it's simplicity itself to get ahead of the criminal and launch your attack, it's not that hard and it's one of the penalties of playing a close in fighter.

- Accuracy of attacks.

One word.  Enhancers.  Live em, love em, use em.  You can literally ensure that you NEVER EVER miss.

- Area of effect attacks (mainly slice)

Different attacks have different arcs of effect, play a different scrapper with different attacks if that one is inadequate to your play style.  

- Missions (especially teamed)

I will give you the front end loadedness of missions, I've /feedbacked this myself.  It's disappointing when the last half of your mission has you fighting greys which are trivial to beat and net you no experience.  Group missions also can vary wildy in difficulty dependent on the average levels in your groups.  One player a level above the mobs and the mission becomes very easy (Particuarly if that character is an effective controller) but if most of the team is below the level of the team leader (which is often the case) then a mission can become extremely difficult.  Note that this problem goes away if some of the team members are 5+ levels below the creator as they can be SideKicked to within 1 level, so the problem really on exists for characters that are 3 or 4 levels below the leader and can be overcome anyway with a good group that worls well together, running battles = megafun.  All that said, missions in a good group are by far one of the most fun things I have ever done in any MMOG to date and I've played retail or beta tested almost all of them since UO.

- Task force missions

The only problem we had was finding the enterance to a mission that was mostly due to us bieng to tired and two mobs stuck in floors.  The mobs in floors thing needs to be fixed but it's one of those tweeking things that just need to be fiddled with by the programmers.  I am absolutely sure it wont be left like that for an extended period of time, especially if enough guide time has to be used to fix it.  In cryptics favor a guide type showed up within 10 minutes of the petition.

- Power selection

I would like to see better descriptions for powers....  I ended up with a lot of power choices that were better that I had thought they would be and others that were very disappointing.  When you get stuck with the disappointing ones (like hover *cause it's much slower than walking*)

I totally utterly could not disagree more, I would be willing to bet that 98% of the people playing with hover think it is in close running for "Greatest Powah evar!!!" I know it's one of my favorites.  Hover is not fly, hover is hover.  Interestingly enough it allows you to hover.  It does exactly what it says it does, it allows you to hover and while hovering it grants you a defense bonus (A sizable one at that).  Also interesting is that fly allows you to fly at quite a respectible speed much faster than run with even a well enhanced sprint, it's odd that because fly lets you fly and hover lets you hover isn't it?  And that brings us back to enhancements, if you really wanted to you can get hover upto a reasonable speed, about that of running I hear if you actually, you know, use the game mechanics as they are implemented rather than as you dreamed they might be.  I find the rest of the descriptions equally accurate literal and extremely helpful.

I'll list what pops into my mind as a suggestions below.  But I'll stress again that I haven't played every combo in this game, nor have i played past level 15.  I have however spent a lot of times getting very irritated by the problems that seem to have roots in the basic gameplay and not in bugs/beta testing/lag caused areas.

Most of your irratation to me seemed to be problems of your own creation.  As I said before I mostly do not agree.

Suggestions:

- Make some melee attacks have some sort of "slow opponent down" effect to them, so they are easier to run down.

They exist, go see a doctor about your extreme case of myopia, if you want them you will have to trade off some of the high end damage of a blade scrapper.

- Extend the melee "range" out a few feet so running things can be struck without having to run past them and wait..or hope they stop.

Again they exist, try to realize that all the classes are not cookie cutters of each other in the same tree.

- Balance missions to a teams average level.

They are but you probably mean sidekicked median level and though I agree its only to a point I still think even though toughest missions are doable even when most of the team is underpowered.

- Allow trying out of powers, or trade-in on powers besides maybe the starting ones (since it's easy to try them).

It was stated that respeccing would be added as a mission reward.  Nuff said.

- Speed up animations, especially for melee.  It really doesn't make sense to have the bad guy running away while you're still "flurrying" on him.

Don't agree see ablove.



I just feel bad recommending this game to anyone without telling them what is making my gaming experience less than fun.[/quote]
I don't agree, I recommend this game whole-heartedly across the board.  The game play is phenominal.

</fanbois>

[geldonyetich]

I see I'm not the only one whose fished in by this game.   We're down to the wire, 2 days of beta left (servers go down sometime tommorow, Thursday).   Then on Sunday, the Pre-order 3 day head start begins.

Chronic class picking disability has always been a problem for me.   I've worked it down to three archetypes.  Here's what I've worked out:

I like a Scrapper with Claws/Regeneration because of the low downtime, excellent offensive, and relatively good defensive capabilities. Already quite soloable, he's a lot of wiggle room to put in power pool selections for versitility as well. However, I dislike this choice because (even with power pool dabbling) it's not at all subtle, and as such a game connoisseur I like to think I can be more clever than that.  Chasing down mobs that run is also an annoyance as a Scrapper, but one I've learned to deal with.

I like the idea of a Controller with (Mind Control or Illusions)/Kinetics because this is an extremely subtle yet powerful character, fitting my clever fix nicely. There's very little you cannot do with this Controller, and his power to sway combat in favor of the group is astronomical. Plus, he can get Siphon Speed at lvl 10 which is a built-in travel power. I dislike this choice because Controllers are lousy to solo with - not due to safety concerns but because their damage output is abysmal. Also, I suspect it won't be a very original choice because everybody and their dog is going to take Kinetics.

I've found a Defender with (Anything but force field)/Energy Blasting is also a fun character. The buff/debuff primary power set gives the Defender considerable subtle ability to sway power. Energy Blasting is sure ego mass joy, tossing out Energy Torrent and watching scores of foes bowl over from it is bliss. However, the Defender is nearly as group-focused as the Controller is (and thus, not very solo friendly), and lacks a certain level of versitility.

Ultimately it comes down to the number one law of good MMORPG class picking: You can't do everything, and this is by design. So just pick one and stick with it, and learn to accept the down sides as something you're not made to do and probably will need to get from others.

[Murgos]

Just cause I thought this was a cool screenie:



edited because html is friendlier for images than bbcode and to point out the cool tats on the Tsoo's arms.

[zyxwv88]

Ok, for those people that are griping about the endgame, you are forgetting a few things.

Everquest did *NOT* have an endgame when it first came out.  The cap was level 50, there were no AA points, and about the only thing you could really do when you hit 50 and maxed out your exp was to fight Vox or Naggy (although I'm not entirely sure that they were even in when the game started.  Can't remember that part)

The Planes were really the first of the "endgame" for EQ, and they came out about 6 months after EQs release.  I remember that Fear came out on Halloween.

With most games that really have an "endgame", the endgame was created when a number of characters had maxed their advancement and didn't really have anything to do.  They started adding content until they found what it was that worked.

The reason that EQ's endgame is all revolving around raids is because that's what worked and kept people interested in the game.  At level 50, the thing that people enjoyed the most was raiding in Fear and Hate, and because it was the raids that people enjoyed, there was more raid-style content added in kunark, and then each expansion became more and more geared towards large raids and the uber-loot that was required to give incentive to go through all the work.

I'm sure that if this game becomes popular enough that they will find and endgame that works for people.  The fact that it doesn't really have an endgame right now doesn't matter in the least because it will be created when the need comes, JUST LIKE EQ DID!!

It's easy to find a flaw in a game when you compare a new game to one that has been developped for 5 years.  Personally I feel that CoH has every bit as entertaining a game as EQ did when it first came out.  I started eq about a month after it came out.  CoH I started 2 months after release, which is pretty comparible overall.  I think that CoH has the potential that EQ did when it came out.

[WayAbvPar]

Holy mother of necro-posts, Batman!

[Rasix]

braaaaiiinnnnsssssss....

[HaemishM]

Actually, it was the Plane of HATE that was added on Halloween, with a special event in Kithicor Forest that had some dark elven chick sacrificing shit to Innoruuk. It was also the event that changed Kithicor from an unused n00b zone to a level 35-45 death trap. Fear came earlier, maybe 2-3 months after release. Vox and Naggy were I think in at release, but I couldn't tell you if they worked right or not. On the first night, Fear wasn't level-restricted; you could go in it with any level character, though you'd probably die toot suite if you weren't 46+. My fiancee made a level 1 Ogre and ran through the gauntlet of spectre death and into the portal just to see what the zone looked like. Apparently the ubers bitched and moaned because they were afraid the planar armor would get ninjalooted, so days later, McQuaid had the group add a hardcoded level restriction to the zone. I imagine that's part of why all the planes after that until Velious not only had a level restriction, but required a teleport spell to get there instead of walking into a portal.

Kunark embraced the raid mentality because the most vocal assholes bitched about the ease of the challenge in the game once the planes and dragons were conquered. Unfortunately, they listened to the vocal minority and catered everything to that set of people.

Insert sucking noise here.