[City of Villains] I have mentioned several times my fondness for the City of Villains archetypes, all hybrid damage dealers structured so that you can do fine without a tank and/or healer. It is funny that the end-game content, Lord Recluse’s Strike Force, is exactly a tanker and healer party. Well, tanker and buffer.
The hard part is the last mission, where you fight the entire Freedom Phalanx at once. For that fight, the ideal team is one */Stone Armor Brute and seven Corruptors of various kinds, with Kinetics and Radiation Emission being in the most demand. As many people as possible should have Vengeance. The other archetypes offer burst damage (not useful against 8 Heroes), control (not very useful against Heroes), and pets (which die in a hit or two against Heroes).
Conveniently and sadly, your temporary powers are more important than your character in that fight. Everyone must have a Shivan Shard from Bloody Bay. Several people should have missiles from Warburg. The Shivan Shard pets do far more damage than anyone on your team. The Warburg buffs and debuffs are far more powerful than your own. Your exploiting stacked Vengeance lets you survive while your cracked-out Shivans take out the entire Freedom Phalanx in under a minute.
In a sense, that feels right for villainy. We are using freakish alien/corpse monsters, backed with a missile assault, to take out the heroes of the city while we skulk about and try to stay safe.
: Zubon
Why unusable raid items were added:
I’m sure it’s easier to pass that judgement from your well-informed, armchair designing position. Because of the way in the whole expansion is being pushed out, the gap that we are currently in was expected to cause a number of issues. With so much content that is being pre-released, we are going to see a number of inconsistencies that will be resolved on release of the expansion. Plain fact is that this is about production schedules and not about you. This is needed for smooth production of the game, because when expansion hits and people are actually patching the rest of the content, we will have more pressing issues than going back to check some loot tables. This is about putting in order as much as we can as soon as we can, so when serious matters come down the road, we have as many resources available to address them quickly. Issues that, I assure you, will be more important than this. This isn’t about you. It’s about the game. Find something more worthwhile to complain about. This issue will not change until the expansion is released, so railing against me or anyone else on the boards is a categorical waste of your time.
Emphasis added. The thread linked with this has been deleted. If anyone can add some ameliorating context or demonstrate this was a fabricated quote, I will feel better and update.
: Zubon
Hat tip: This is Not A Community via n3rfed
Wired brings great news, Firefly is being made into an MMO. Could Kwip get what he wants? I hear the heavens rejoicing with good tidings.
But wait, what is that deep booming thunder? Is it a sign of impending doom? Alas poor me, my hopes of a good game are once again likely to be dashed against the rocks of despair.
I think the setting of Firefly is tremendous, but I really don’t see anything that impressive at Multiverse. Now if someone told me Joss Whedon was going to be involved, I would have hope.
- Ethic
[WoW] I have been reading a bit about the latest WoW patch. It makes CoH’s recent patches sting less. This is not schadenfreude, just a reminder that even the market leader is not doing any better. Introducing new bugs while rushing to implement nerfs and ignoring test server feedback is one thing (two things). Intentionally switching raid drops to items that no one could even theoretically use? Priceless.
: Zubon
I’ve been reading a couple of articles about a student named Wang Yue Si. It seems he was busted after earning 1.3 million dollars by selling World of Warcraft items.
The suggestion in these articles is that he could have used a virus (W32/HLLP.Philis.bq) that installs a trojan which would allow him to grab MMORPG passwords in order to steal characters, money and items. Even if it is not true in this case, it will happen sooner or later - mark my words. We had one machine here at work get this virus, so it is making it’s way around.
Be careful out there…
- Ethic
[City of Heroes] That nerf I was not sure about? It must be a good thing, because it is now live. The developers have commented recently (and repeatedly) about how they use data-mining to determine where problems are and whether changes will have good effects. That process must take exactly one week with the population active on the test server, since that is how long the changes were on test. If there are problems with it, I imagine the developers will know in less than a day’s worth of normal play, given live server populations.
Meanwhile the winter event is still on test, salvage racks still crash your client if you try to move the same piece of salvage twice, and the Known Issues page still thinks the test server and live servers are running exactly the same thing. But, you know, priorities.
: Zubon
PS: As is usually the case around new Issues, the old content remains fun! So long as you work around the various bugs and crashes that were introduced, the quality of life improvements are always nice. Except for making all the mission decorations invisible, that’s annoying.
[City of Heroes] In City of Heroes, the developers are confronting a problem, specifically the solo power of Fire/Kinetics/Fire Controllers. With the addition of Ancillary Power Pools and Containment, this class gets increasingly powerful and capable of destruction as the number of enemies increases. Loosely, the pattern is: any AE control (they have at least 3 forms), rush in, Fulcrum Shift (hit damage cap), and Fireball to one-shot almost everything. Whatever is left will be cleaned up by the damage-capped Fire Imps that followed the controller in. Under ideal conditions, which should not be too hard to create consistently in PvE, the Controller out-blasts the Blaster while still being a great controller.
The problem is the combination of Containment (double damage vs. controlled enemies), Kinetics (damage cap yourself), pets (three Fire Imps all the time), and AE damage (Fireball). This is only a problem in the late-game, since you must be almost near the level-cap to have all those pieces, but you can then powerlevel others to shoot them through some levels.
Continue reading ‘How Shall I Nerf Thee? Let Me Count the Ways’
[City of Heroes] A while back, I discussed Known Issues pages. Since City of Heroes/Villains has one, I thought I would give them a hand. Because we care. You see, there is a vast array of bugs missing from the Known Issues list, so I assume that Cryptic simply has not noticed them. Or maybe they are ignoring them or lying about whether the game has bugs, but I’ll assume ignore rather than malice.
I would first note that the Known Issues list only covers new bugs introduced in Issue 8, rather than long-standing problems like hostages who do not follow rescuers/kidnappers, base raids still not existing despite being an advertised feature for over a year, or any balance issues. Let us set those aside and just think about what has been broken recently.
Continue reading ‘In Which Zubon Lends Cryptic A Hand’