Category: City of Heroes/Villains

[City of Heroes] With Rudy Giuliani running for president, expect to see an occasional mention of innovative police efforts in New York City, notable the broken windows theory of enforcement. The idea is that when you enforce minor laws, people never break the big ones.

We have been testing it continuously in Paragon City. When we see a suspected gang member engaged in petty larceny, purse-snatching, or (especially) loitering, we open fire with automatic weapons or perhaps drain their souls with powers from the netherworld. More creative heroes might gut them with claws or simply set fire to the area. So far, we have not seen a reduction in crime. In fact, over the course of a hero’s career, he sees fewer petty criminals only because they are being replaced by werewolves, killer robots, and the free-roaming souls of our enemies’ ancestors.

Maybe if we electrocuted them…

: Zubon

[City of Villains] For villains level 30-35, the Talos Island mayhem mission is bugged. At least for my character it was; maybe it is Mastermind-related, I have no idea. I ran it three times, and the hero failed to spawn each time. For the non-CoVers, mayhem missions are timed missions where you rob a bank and defeat a hero, with side missions and various objects to blow up along the way. Mayhem missions are required to get your contacts in a new zone.

I put in two support calls, since I was still waiting on a call from the second when the third Mayhem failed, too. Keep in mind that you need to block one of your three mission slots with the failed mission while waiting if you want them to be able to help you, and if you are offline or on a different character when the support call comes, you get an e-mail encouraging you to try again later.

Petition: 01/14/2007 02:22 PM
Response: 01/14/2007 03:58 PM (96 minutes)

Petition: 01/14/2007 06:35 PM
Response: 01/14/2007 10:11 PM (216 minutes)

: Zubon

Beware of merchandizing, even the breakfast cereal of champions:

Ascendant: Because, Saul, I’m not putting on a lead suit every time I have to go to the cereal aisle in the grocery store.
Ascendant: I don’t care if you have already have a lot of pre-orders for it.
Ascendant: Really? How much?
Ascendant: From who?
Ascendant: Ok… Right… Yeah… Uh huh… Him, too? Really?
Ascendant: Yeah, well the problem here is that all those guys you just mentioned are supervillains, Saul.
Ascendant: Yes, even him. I just beat him up like an hour ago for trying to poison the city’s water supply.
Ascendant: I don’t care if his check cleared, Saul. That’s not the point…

: Zubon

[City of Heroes] As I type this, my wife is enjoying the winter event in City of Heroes. You get your own little instance of a snow-covered forest. Evil snowmen abound, with bear-like monsters outside and vicious gnomes in a cave (they abducted Baby New Year).

It is soothing to watch Prettyponylady skating across an icy pond to slice the Winter Lord in twain. She does her slashes and spins that carry her half-way across the ice before turning for another pass at the enemy. It is like Ice Capades, as performed by pink samurai.

: Zubon

[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

[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

I have a large list of whines from tonight’s attempt to run a Lord Recluse’s Strike Force, so I am just putting them all after the break. Tonight is for venting.
Continue reading Tonight’s Bug List