Does completing perks give you anything? I remember getting some arbitrary points for it, but I never found a use for them.
They have removed that stupid points system. You get the perk, you get the item it unlocks. No idea why they didn't do that in the first place, since you could get like 10k more points than you needed. And you couldn't buy things you hadn't 'unlocked' anyways.
Also titles titles titles. And most of the unlocks are costume pieces and the like.
Also the spartan lion helmet is awsome, if a bit cheesy.
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Madpandasuburbs west of chicagoRegistered Userregular
Unfortunately, I've created a bunch of characters, so right now I'm just going back and forth trying to decide which I like best.
I've got 3 out of the tutorial, and, um, 5 still in it.
You know.....I believe you can skip the tutorial after character creation once you've completed it on at least one character.
Yea you can skip the tutorial, still means you have to do early desert or canada. It's not too horrible as you gain a level every 10 mins or something.
I need to figure out a main also, I have 2 chars in high 20's 1 in mid teens and a 10. I've been playing for like 2 weeks.
I have been playing off and on since Beta and I still don't have a main!
I have I think 3 mid to high 20s, one low 30, and 3 mid to high teens and I enjoy all of them so much that I can't pick a favorite, though my TK Blades, PA, Munitions, and Archery characters are in a 4way tie currently.
But now since I am not playing any other MMOs (APB has gotten boring/frustrating, I gave up on AoC when the XPac came out, and nothing else interests me) until TERA comes out in Q1 11, looks like I will be spending a lot more time in CO.
So we get stiff once in a while. So we have a little fun. What’s wrong with that? This is a free country, isn’t it? I can take my panda any place I want to. And if I wanna buy it a drink, that’s my business.
That is a very good point. However, this game has a terrible problem. I log on and create an alt and just can't push through the crisis zones again. So I hop on my main...and I just can't make myself push through the quests I have. At level 23 things were...sparse. Maybe that's changed? I don't know, either way, its enough to mess around with in the downtime, right?
Well, I'm not sure what's changed, but I can say that I've only recently run into issues with having enough quests to keep on trucking, and I'm sitting at 31. As for pushing through the crisis zones, I tend to find the Desert much more tolerable than Canada's crisis zone. It seems to do a better job of pushing you along, making you feel like you're making progress.
Edit: And worst case scenario, you screw around with the character creator for a couple of hours and have your fun there.
That is a very good point. However, this game has a terrible problem. I log on and create an alt and just can't push through the crisis zones again. So I hop on my main...and I just can't make myself push through the quests I have. At level 23 things were...sparse. Maybe that's changed? I don't know, either way, its enough to mess around with in the downtime, right?
There's a website where you plug in your toon and it tells you where all the available quests are. I'm sure someone bookmarked it.
That is a very good point. However, this game has a terrible problem. I log on and create an alt and just can't push through the crisis zones again. So I hop on my main...and I just can't make myself push through the quests I have. At level 23 things were...sparse. Maybe that's changed? I don't know, either way, its enough to mess around with in the downtime, right?
There's a website where you plug in your toon and it tells you where all the available quests are. I'm sure someone bookmarked it.
Really playing into a character concept makes this game so much more fun. Take the one I just made, Haephes, a Scourge from White Wolf's Demon. So I took the celestial energy builder, since they heal, probably grab some infernal powers, since they can spread disease and toxic damage is close enough, then force powers, closest thing to controlling the wind.
I got to level 28 and never had any trouble at all finding quests, but I quit because I didn't seem to be going to any new areas (most of the quests were repetitive, but they were still fun so far as MMOs go)
This game seems like it would have made a super awesome single/limited multiplayer game, but they kinda spread the content thin for an MMO
Is there anything other than Millennium City, the Desert, Canada, and the Serpent Lantern stuff?
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Just_Bri_ThanksSeething with ragefrom a handbasket.Registered User, ClubPAregular
edited July 2010
Lemuria and monster island.
Just_Bri_Thanks on
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
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MrVyngaardLive From New EtoileStraight Outta SosariaRegistered Userregular
edited July 2010
And Vibora Bay.
MrVyngaard on
"now I've got this mental image of caucuses as cafeteria tables in prison, and new congressmen having to beat someone up on inauguration day." - Raiden333
There's been some new information on the upcoming pet review released, courtesy of Balseraph. So far things are looking really good. All items taken from here.
Main post:
Pets!
Pets have undergone a major overhaul. We've tightened up their design, made their control and systems more uniform, given them some new universal abilities, and tried to make them just overall more interactive, more balanced, more useful, and generally more fun.
On the UI side, the pet controls now offer vastly better control for players with multiple pets. The new pet control bar now offers the ability to “pop out” a separate button bar for each controllable pet, allowing you to have some pets on passive, some on assist, and some on attack (for example). In addition, many pets now have special custom abilities that can be activated by unique icons that appear on their individual control bar. Finally, many pets that weren't controllable (without an advantage or being at max rank) now are, including all of the sorcery Ritual summons and the Telepathic Nightmare.
Mechanically, pets now have more hit points (generally about 1/2 what a player has) than before, take dramatically reduced damage from area of effect attacks, and automatically heal out of combat. In addition, all pets can now fly, with the exception of the wolves summoned by “Command Animals” (who instead get a travel power killing lunge).
First, the big downside - pets are no longer “free” damage. Pets now have energy pools, and will display an energy bar, and their attacks cost energy. Most pets lack any way to generate their own energy, or an equilibrium score. Instead, they get their energy from their controllers. There is a new power called “Transfer Energy” that is automatically granted (for no cost) to any player that purchases a power from the new category “Controllable Pets”.
The “Transfer Energy” power costs an amount of energy equal to your Equilibrium, reduced (as usual) by your Intelligence. Each active pet you control gains an equal portion of this energy. If you have only one pet active, it will gain an amount of energy equal to the unreduced cost (i.e. your Equilibrium). The more pets you have active, the less energy each pet receives, but the more total energy they will be granted. For example, with an Equilibrium of 50, if you have one pet, it will get 50 energy. If you have two pets, they will both get 37. Three pets will each get 29, and four pets will each get 24.
Pet attacks are very efficient per point of energy; each attack only “costs” about 2 - 6 points of energy, and pets attack once per second. Assuming you transfer 50 at a time, that means you only have to transfer power roughly once every 15 - 20 seconds. The idea is that you should think of the “Transfer Energy” button as just another attack button to be worked into your rotation.
On the upside, pets now have more attacks and powers that do more damage per attack. They no longer automatically transfer a majority of their aggro to their owner, and some pets, such as the redesigned Arcane Constructs, are built and equipped for tanking. Caveat: all pets transfer ALL their accumulated aggro to their owner when they die! Each pet now gains new attacks and new powers when you rank them up, in additional to doing more damage with their existing attacks, rewarding you for your investment. Finally, many pets have had some cosmetic and costume upgrades, making the higher rank versions stand out better and properly show off the grandeur of your mighty companions.
Changes for the individual pets are too long and too exhaustive to go into here; we encourage you to check out their in game descriptions and try them out in the powerhouse.
This will be going onto the PTS... soon? I'm sure sure Poz will make an announcement about that soon.
As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated!
Calculation for Pet Energy:
The actual cost is MIN( <your equilibrium>, ( <your max energy> * .9) )
Effect of stats (Int/Pres) on pets, Pet HP, Misc info:
RE: Stats -
Int helps automatically, by making the energy transfer more efficient. Recovery doesn't really have much impact on the efficiency, but it has a huge change in the timing of how often you press the button. Also, all pets have a max energy pool of 100. So, if your pool is higher than than, you'll be wasting energy unless you have several pets out. Int also increases pet HP.
Presence directly increases pet damage. Think of it in terms of "giving more effective leadership".
As to my comment about pets having HP.. let me clarify that a bit. What I should have said was more *PVE survivability*; this comes from two primary sources - huge reduction in damage from any AoE source, out of combat healing, and if they're out of energy to spend on attacks, they'll block. The flip side of that is that they have fewer hps against direct aggro, direct damage... that's a nod to PvP concerns.
Here's the goal for you guys to test against: a pure "mastermind" build SHOULD be viable, since that means a mix of healing and dps and tanking pets, if you do it right. However, a player with just one or two pet selections probably won't be able to sit back, watch, and drink pina coladas while they go running in and do all the work.
Oh, one more big thing... each power now only summons ONE pet. Frankly, this is a good thing - it means it's easier to resummon in case its defeated, it means that one pet can do more ~stuff~, and it makes the overall balancing easier.
New pets - sorta. The Sorcery pets are player controllable out of the box, as is the telepathic Nightmare. However, there are no entirely wholly new pet powers. Will there be? Sure, if this revision is successful, and people like this re tuned direction! If you don't, however, we'll keep working to make what we have right, rather than making more of what you don't like.
Upgrades to Ritual Pets:
they each have a limited energy generation mechanic.
Arcane Constructs get energy whenever they're damaged (and is a tanking pet that has Stone Skin, a form of Invulnerability, at Rank 3...)
Demons gain energy whenever a target they have damaged is defeated (and has a lot of AoE...)
Primal Incarnations (formerly 'Wild') can convert their health to energy (and at rank 3, automatically go into a frenzy when their health is low, gaining bonus damage...)
Seraphim grant an effect called "Guardian's Grace" to anyone they heal, which lasts for 16 seconds.; if someone with that effect is damaged, the Seraph automatically gets some energy (and at Rank 3, they have an always on AoE heal aura...)
In general, they WON'T be self sufficient. The energy they get back is calculated to be about 1/2 the energy they expend to defeat an enemy in a normal combat. That being said, it should be a big help in keeping them topped off and in the fight.
Upgrade to Nightmare Pet:
Not time limited; permanent and controllable.
Well... mostly. It the build that's going up to PTS will be permanent, but I'm actually still tweaking that one; what I'm working on won't make it to the first pts build, but it should be in the first patch. It'll give the Nightmare the ability to self detonate for aoe damage at rank 1. At rank 2, the detonation will sit around as an AoE damage effect (Nightmare Cascade) for as long as you feed it energy (max of 16 seconds) and at rank 3, if you keep it going the whole time, it reforms into a nightmare creature (oh, and healed a bit for every target it damaged while in cascade form.)
Upgrades to Munition Bots/Heal bots:
Munitions bot is 2 forms, and I think you should find the mobile form much more useful now, since at higher ranks it adds grenades and other toys to its arsenal.
The turret does a LOT of damage now, and at rank 3 it has a range of 100 feet, which is kind of crazy, tbh. HOWEVER, it has the drawback of being very fragile.. it takes increased damage from all attacks when in that form.
Support drones now also have two "forms"; a healing form and a weapons platform form (but all energy beams and such... very distinct flavor and mechanics). Since the heals are no longer free, yup, they're stronger.
Which pets are changed with this patch?
Ack, sorry, should have made it clear...
The zombies are EXACTLY THE SAME.
So are the guys summoned by the Collective Will power, and Ego Sprites.
Those aren't "pets"; they're fire and forget missiles that are wearing pants.
Attack Toys
Munitions Bots
Support Drones
the 4 sorcery Ritual summons
Summoned Nightmare
Command Animals
Sorcery Familiar
Those are the ones that are affected by this update.
Do we have any specific grievances with them re: CO or is this just "Emmeret's handling of CoX was shit, so I hate him, Hellgate London was shit, so I hate Roper"?
So we get stiff once in a while. So we have a little fun. What’s wrong with that? This is a free country, isn’t it? I can take my panda any place I want to. And if I wanna buy it a drink, that’s my business.
Do we have any specific grievances with them re: CO or is this just "Emmeret's handling of CoX was shit, so I hate him, Hellgate London was shit, so I hate Roper"?
| Zinnar on most things | Avatar by Blameless Cleric
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ArchonexNo hard feelings, right?Registered Userregular
edited August 2010
They need to start pumping out more interesting content.
A game like this lives and dies off of it's content. It isn't a complete sandbox like Fallen Earth, where you can tool around for hours (Unless you like testing out all the attacks, or beating the shit out of enemies in hilarious ways. Which is a viable way to play, but yeah.). and still be entertained.
I mean, Serpent Lantern was over a month ago, wasn't it? Have we received any news on what's to come?
They need to start pumping out more interesting content.
A game like this lives and dies off of it's content. It isn't a complete sandbox like Fallen Earth, where you can tool around for hours (Unless you like testing out all the attacks, or beating the shit out of enemies in hilarious ways. Which is a viable way to play, but yeah.). and still be entertained.
I mean, Serpent Lantern was over a month ago, wasn't it? Have we received any news on what's to come?
Seconded. The lack of content, as well as the incredibly linear progression path, are two of my biggest complaints about this game (well, that and the campiness). Having every single character go through an almost identical string of missions is mind-numbing. I played City of Heroes for more than 2 years and I was still discovering new mission strings and storylines with my alts. Heck, there were zones I'd barely ever entered in that game even after all that time.
The other mistake, IMO, was the reliance on instancing. That just ensured that you'd never end up with a social hub like the Atlas statue in CoH. CO turned out to be a single player game where you occasionally see other people.
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
I know some of the shit that's gone over there and some of the decisions that Roper and Emmert have been making, mostly Emmert.
Cryptic's constant bleating promotion of Roper was actually a really stupid idea for them. Hellgate: London gave the dude a bad rep and their constant website updates of A NEW INTERVIEW WITH BILL ROPER instead of game news really soured a lot of people, me included
at any rate, fuck this game for now. I'm abandoning it for City of Heroes for the time being. I'll probably come back later, if things change a bit, since I'm a lifer and I'll never "really" leave.
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Just_Bri_ThanksSeething with ragefrom a handbasket.Registered User, ClubPAregular
edited August 2010
I haven't seriously played for a long time either, and I am not really going to give it any of my time until several more zones have been added.
Just_Bri_Thanks on
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
What would be the point of adding new zones now? Vibora Bay was great and go look at it now, you're lucky to see more than five people out there. Lemuria is a ghost town at all hours, and Monster Island only barely fluctuates up into two zones on occasion. Why?
Because the only place worth doing more than once right now is Serpent Lantern. Best gear in the game, by a huuuuuge margin. Supposedly they're going to start adding better gear to the lairs, purple drops, but if the numbers I've been seeing from the min/maxers checking it out are right, they've just added another problem for PvP: Gear inflation has gotten to the point that an ungeared 40 can't even dent it's exact doppleganger geared. And that's not even considering that we've hit the 'it's been too long since a rebalancing and everyone is using the fotm spec that breaks everything again' point. My main, which isn't even close to being the worst out there, can solo every lair but Therakiel's, which I could care less about because it's long and generally unrewarding if you want to farm it, and these days nobody is running it anyways. And the only reason I can't solo it is because of the mechanic that requires multiple people to bypass it.
And as I said, not even the worst spec out there by FAR. Just a good one in uber gear which is about to get even more uber.
Let's be honest here, Cryptic is pretty awful when it comes to balancing and mechanics, it's like they have absolutely no forethought or long term planning when it comes to patching powers or introducing new gear, new zones, new abilities, new mechanics. Then, when obvious issues arise, they are completely unwilling to drop a hotpatch to fix even gamebreaking bugs or imbalances. So if they just dropped a patch that, say, completely disables two lairs in the game, or makes one power do quadruple damage in pvp, or removes several options from the tailor, guess what? You get to wait a month. At least. Two or three if it happens to be 'low priority' and a LOT of things fall under that. A bug has to pretty much shut down the game outright for them to hotfix it, which is damn pathetic.
If it sounds like I hate CO, I really don't. I like CO.*
It's Cryptic I hate. Screw Roper too, though I don't even know what his job was, screw em. I swear even SOE couldn't mess up MMOs this bad.
Though to be fair APB managed to die a horrible death in a few months (well, the company, who knows what is going to happen to the game) and Cryptic is somehow plodding along despite all the disgusted people. I don't know if it's all the lifetimes and whatnot they sold, or if some idiots are still giving them money, but they're still doing it somehow.
*Some of the time. Now is not that time.
Oh oh oh, I forgot the BEST PART. That pet pass? The one they've been working on the last couple months? Well turns out everyone hates it and they don't have a clue what they are doing so they are just flat out removing all the changes and making them part of some future patch. After having tried out the changes myself on the pts I can tell you that you shouldn't be disappointed about them removing the changes, because they were indeed awful, though you can still be disappointed about the fact their patch was so bad that I couldn't find a single person who liked what they did.
(basically they nerfed the few pets that could be used at all, then buffed the pathetic pets to only be slightly less pathetic damage/defense wise while adding byzantine energy-generation mechanics to all of them that lowered the DPS down to even less than their original levels, in order to prevent afk farming (which is a valid concern, but this isn't the solution); the pet pass was, rather than making pets useful, going to chase off the few people left that try to use pets period)
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Doctor DetroitNot a doctorTree townRegistered Userregular
edited August 2010
Why do I have the feeling that I bought the "wrong" super-hero MMO?
And Doctor, I'm basically bitching about their inability to manage the endgame (I throw balance under this as pvp is endgame for a chunk of people). They keep trying but there is just a lack of any central planning it seems. It's a great game for a few months, just not for a year or so.
That's and odd thing to say when complaining about new zones outshining the old ones. Every time a new expansion adds new parallel zones to Everquest 2 the old ones are abandoned by the playerbase due to their level equivalent rewards suddenly being shit and the developers have never gone back to fix that.
Only with the latest expansion have they put in some effort into making the two capital cities important again, and even that was pretty much wiping the board and starting anew, rather than fixing gear disparities.
Personally, it doesn't really bother me, just means I take my main through the latest and greatest and my alts through the old stuff.
That's and odd thing to say when complaining about new zones outshining the old ones. Every time a new expansion adds new parallel zones to Everquest 2 the old ones are abandoned by the playerbase due to their level equivalent rewards suddenly being shit and the developers have never gone back to fix that.
Only with the latest expansion have they put in some effort into making the two capital cities important again, and even that was pretty much wiping the board and starting anew, rather than fixing gear disparities.
Personally, it doesn't really bother me, just means I take my main through the latest and greatest and my alts through the old stuff.
No no, it's the OPPOSITE. New stuff gets abandoned so fast because they don't manage the rewards properly. People go see everything once, then go 'why am I still here?'. Serpent Lantern isn't a zone, just a 'mission pack', and they aren't even farming the whole thing. Due to stupid design you can fight the first boss in there every five minutes for literally the best loot table in the game.
Supposedly next patch is going to try and fix this but a guildie has informed me they already have a workaround for this 'fix'. Cryptic is just not good at all at this, the playerbase outsmarts them in minutes.
Example: VB only really had one type of reward worth mentioning, as Nem gear (easily obtainable in a week or so, maybe two) vastly outclassed any of the gear rewards, and that was costume pieces. Now, everyone loved the costume pieces (myself included) but the drop rates were beyond horrible, and they actually made some drops rarer than others meaning people could do weeks upon weeks of nothing but farming mobs and not get the costume pieces. Many just gave up, and the few that got the ones they wanted left VB never to come back as they were sick of it (I fit in here). Either way, the zone became known as an annoying grindfest, despite being aside from that very well designed.
It's like Cryptic did everything right then shot themselves in the foot at the last second. They do that ALOT.
Honestly, that sounds like pretty much every developer out there, including Blizzard. Every WoW expansion is "great, except this one issue, which is killing PVP/arenas/PVE class balance/gear visuals". WAR was the most PVP fun I'd ever had, but (endgame is boring), EQ2 is fun and has shitloads of content, but (performance is shit), LoTRO is polished and competent, but (feels like WoW Mark II), etc.
I think people just take things too personally because they spend so much time in the games.
The thing that killed CO for me in the end was that I ran out of exciting ice powers. I built this character that I really enjoyed playing, but I couldn't find powers from the other sets that really complemented them in ways I liked.
I ended up with:
Ice Shield
Ice form
Ice Blast
Snowstorm
Shatter
Ice Wall
I grabbed drain life or whatever that power was called just to have a heal, but none of the other powers really "fit" with my image of the character. Once I got to that point, gaining levels ceased to be fun. I think I tapped out around level 35. Even if there were powers that were just there for flavor instead of combat, I would have liked it more. The character creator is great. It would have been nice if the individual power sets were a bit more robust to match.
Posts
No
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
They have removed that stupid points system. You get the perk, you get the item it unlocks. No idea why they didn't do that in the first place, since you could get like 10k more points than you needed. And you couldn't buy things you hadn't 'unlocked' anyways.
Also titles titles titles. And most of the unlocks are costume pieces and the like.
Also the spartan lion helmet is awsome, if a bit cheesy.
Yea you can skip the tutorial, still means you have to do early desert or canada. It's not too horrible as you gain a level every 10 mins or something.
I need to figure out a main also, I have 2 chars in high 20's 1 in mid teens and a 10. I've been playing for like 2 weeks.
Steam/PSN/XBL/Minecraft / LoL / - Benevicious | WoW - Duckwood - Rajhek
I have I think 3 mid to high 20s, one low 30, and 3 mid to high teens and I enjoy all of them so much that I can't pick a favorite, though my TK Blades, PA, Munitions, and Archery characters are in a 4way tie currently.
But now since I am not playing any other MMOs (APB has gotten boring/frustrating, I gave up on AoC when the XPac came out, and nothing else interests me) until TERA comes out in Q1 11, looks like I will be spending a lot more time in CO.
Edit: And worst case scenario, you screw around with the character creator for a couple of hours and have your fun there.
Crime Computer 2.0
I maintain that it's bullshit that we have to use a third party program to easily find non-repeatable quests.
This game seems like it would have made a super awesome single/limited multiplayer game, but they kinda spread the content thin for an MMO
Is there anything other than Millennium City, the Desert, Canada, and the Serpent Lantern stuff?
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Main post:
Pets have undergone a major overhaul. We've tightened up their design, made their control and systems more uniform, given them some new universal abilities, and tried to make them just overall more interactive, more balanced, more useful, and generally more fun.
On the UI side, the pet controls now offer vastly better control for players with multiple pets. The new pet control bar now offers the ability to “pop out” a separate button bar for each controllable pet, allowing you to have some pets on passive, some on assist, and some on attack (for example). In addition, many pets now have special custom abilities that can be activated by unique icons that appear on their individual control bar. Finally, many pets that weren't controllable (without an advantage or being at max rank) now are, including all of the sorcery Ritual summons and the Telepathic Nightmare.
Mechanically, pets now have more hit points (generally about 1/2 what a player has) than before, take dramatically reduced damage from area of effect attacks, and automatically heal out of combat. In addition, all pets can now fly, with the exception of the wolves summoned by “Command Animals” (who instead get a travel power killing lunge).
First, the big downside - pets are no longer “free” damage. Pets now have energy pools, and will display an energy bar, and their attacks cost energy. Most pets lack any way to generate their own energy, or an equilibrium score. Instead, they get their energy from their controllers. There is a new power called “Transfer Energy” that is automatically granted (for no cost) to any player that purchases a power from the new category “Controllable Pets”.
The “Transfer Energy” power costs an amount of energy equal to your Equilibrium, reduced (as usual) by your Intelligence. Each active pet you control gains an equal portion of this energy. If you have only one pet active, it will gain an amount of energy equal to the unreduced cost (i.e. your Equilibrium). The more pets you have active, the less energy each pet receives, but the more total energy they will be granted. For example, with an Equilibrium of 50, if you have one pet, it will get 50 energy. If you have two pets, they will both get 37. Three pets will each get 29, and four pets will each get 24.
Pet attacks are very efficient per point of energy; each attack only “costs” about 2 - 6 points of energy, and pets attack once per second. Assuming you transfer 50 at a time, that means you only have to transfer power roughly once every 15 - 20 seconds. The idea is that you should think of the “Transfer Energy” button as just another attack button to be worked into your rotation.
On the upside, pets now have more attacks and powers that do more damage per attack. They no longer automatically transfer a majority of their aggro to their owner, and some pets, such as the redesigned Arcane Constructs, are built and equipped for tanking. Caveat: all pets transfer ALL their accumulated aggro to their owner when they die! Each pet now gains new attacks and new powers when you rank them up, in additional to doing more damage with their existing attacks, rewarding you for your investment. Finally, many pets have had some cosmetic and costume upgrades, making the higher rank versions stand out better and properly show off the grandeur of your mighty companions.
Changes for the individual pets are too long and too exhaustive to go into here; we encourage you to check out their in game descriptions and try them out in the powerhouse.
This will be going onto the PTS... soon? I'm sure sure Poz will make an announcement about that soon.
As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated!
Calculation for Pet Energy:
Effect of stats (Int/Pres) on pets, Pet HP, Misc info:
Int helps automatically, by making the energy transfer more efficient. Recovery doesn't really have much impact on the efficiency, but it has a huge change in the timing of how often you press the button. Also, all pets have a max energy pool of 100. So, if your pool is higher than than, you'll be wasting energy unless you have several pets out. Int also increases pet HP.
Presence directly increases pet damage. Think of it in terms of "giving more effective leadership".
As to my comment about pets having HP.. let me clarify that a bit. What I should have said was more *PVE survivability*; this comes from two primary sources - huge reduction in damage from any AoE source, out of combat healing, and if they're out of energy to spend on attacks, they'll block. The flip side of that is that they have fewer hps against direct aggro, direct damage... that's a nod to PvP concerns.
Here's the goal for you guys to test against: a pure "mastermind" build SHOULD be viable, since that means a mix of healing and dps and tanking pets, if you do it right. However, a player with just one or two pet selections probably won't be able to sit back, watch, and drink pina coladas while they go running in and do all the work.
Oh, one more big thing... each power now only summons ONE pet. Frankly, this is a good thing - it means it's easier to resummon in case its defeated, it means that one pet can do more ~stuff~, and it makes the overall balancing easier.
New pets - sorta. The Sorcery pets are player controllable out of the box, as is the telepathic Nightmare. However, there are no entirely wholly new pet powers. Will there be? Sure, if this revision is successful, and people like this re tuned direction! If you don't, however, we'll keep working to make what we have right, rather than making more of what you don't like.
Upgrades to Ritual Pets:
Arcane Constructs get energy whenever they're damaged (and is a tanking pet that has Stone Skin, a form of Invulnerability, at Rank 3...)
Demons gain energy whenever a target they have damaged is defeated (and has a lot of AoE...)
Primal Incarnations (formerly 'Wild') can convert their health to energy (and at rank 3, automatically go into a frenzy when their health is low, gaining bonus damage...)
Seraphim grant an effect called "Guardian's Grace" to anyone they heal, which lasts for 16 seconds.; if someone with that effect is damaged, the Seraph automatically gets some energy (and at Rank 3, they have an always on AoE heal aura...)
In general, they WON'T be self sufficient. The energy they get back is calculated to be about 1/2 the energy they expend to defeat an enemy in a normal combat. That being said, it should be a big help in keeping them topped off and in the fight.
Upgrade to Nightmare Pet:
Well... mostly. It the build that's going up to PTS will be permanent, but I'm actually still tweaking that one; what I'm working on won't make it to the first pts build, but it should be in the first patch. It'll give the Nightmare the ability to self detonate for aoe damage at rank 1. At rank 2, the detonation will sit around as an AoE damage effect (Nightmare Cascade) for as long as you feed it energy (max of 16 seconds) and at rank 3, if you keep it going the whole time, it reforms into a nightmare creature (oh, and healed a bit for every target it damaged while in cascade form.)
Upgrades to Munition Bots/Heal bots:
The turret does a LOT of damage now, and at rank 3 it has a range of 100 feet, which is kind of crazy, tbh. HOWEVER, it has the drawback of being very fragile.. it takes increased damage from all attacks when in that form.
Support drones now also have two "forms"; a healing form and a weapons platform form (but all energy beams and such... very distinct flavor and mechanics). Since the heals are no longer free, yup, they're stronger.
Which pets are changed with this patch?
The zombies are EXACTLY THE SAME.
So are the guys summoned by the Collective Will power, and Ego Sprites.
Those aren't "pets"; they're fire and forget missiles that are wearing pants.
Attack Toys
Munitions Bots
Support Drones
the 4 sorcery Ritual summons
Summoned Nightmare
Command Animals
Sorcery Familiar
Those are the ones that are affected by this update.
This should be a fun update!
3DS FC: 2148-8300-8608 WiiU: AgahnimD
But goddamn, it is so much lonelier than I remember.
him and jack emmert are the poison killing champions
jack emmert needs to be not allowed to design games
like the rules about how registered sex offenders aren't allowed to live near daycare centers
I liked Hellgate: London......
I believe that sums it up.
A game like this lives and dies off of it's content. It isn't a complete sandbox like Fallen Earth, where you can tool around for hours (Unless you like testing out all the attacks, or beating the shit out of enemies in hilarious ways. Which is a viable way to play, but yeah.). and still be entertained.
I mean, Serpent Lantern was over a month ago, wasn't it? Have we received any news on what's to come?
The other mistake, IMO, was the reliance on instancing. That just ensured that you'd never end up with a social hub like the Atlas statue in CoH. CO turned out to be a single player game where you occasionally see other people.
Rigorous Scholarship
I can't speak for others but I'm fucking not.
I know some of the shit that's gone over there and some of the decisions that Roper and Emmert have been making, mostly Emmert.
Cryptic's constant bleating promotion of Roper was actually a really stupid idea for them. Hellgate: London gave the dude a bad rep and their constant website updates of A NEW INTERVIEW WITH BILL ROPER instead of game news really soured a lot of people, me included
at any rate, fuck this game for now. I'm abandoning it for City of Heroes for the time being. I'll probably come back later, if things change a bit, since I'm a lifer and I'll never "really" leave.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Because the only place worth doing more than once right now is Serpent Lantern. Best gear in the game, by a huuuuuge margin. Supposedly they're going to start adding better gear to the lairs, purple drops, but if the numbers I've been seeing from the min/maxers checking it out are right, they've just added another problem for PvP: Gear inflation has gotten to the point that an ungeared 40 can't even dent it's exact doppleganger geared. And that's not even considering that we've hit the 'it's been too long since a rebalancing and everyone is using the fotm spec that breaks everything again' point. My main, which isn't even close to being the worst out there, can solo every lair but Therakiel's, which I could care less about because it's long and generally unrewarding if you want to farm it, and these days nobody is running it anyways. And the only reason I can't solo it is because of the mechanic that requires multiple people to bypass it.
And as I said, not even the worst spec out there by FAR. Just a good one in uber gear which is about to get even more uber.
Let's be honest here, Cryptic is pretty awful when it comes to balancing and mechanics, it's like they have absolutely no forethought or long term planning when it comes to patching powers or introducing new gear, new zones, new abilities, new mechanics. Then, when obvious issues arise, they are completely unwilling to drop a hotpatch to fix even gamebreaking bugs or imbalances. So if they just dropped a patch that, say, completely disables two lairs in the game, or makes one power do quadruple damage in pvp, or removes several options from the tailor, guess what? You get to wait a month. At least. Two or three if it happens to be 'low priority' and a LOT of things fall under that. A bug has to pretty much shut down the game outright for them to hotfix it, which is damn pathetic.
If it sounds like I hate CO, I really don't. I like CO.*
It's Cryptic I hate. Screw Roper too, though I don't even know what his job was, screw em. I swear even SOE couldn't mess up MMOs this bad.
Though to be fair APB managed to die a horrible death in a few months (well, the company, who knows what is going to happen to the game) and Cryptic is somehow plodding along despite all the disgusted people. I don't know if it's all the lifetimes and whatnot they sold, or if some idiots are still giving them money, but they're still doing it somehow.
*Some of the time. Now is not that time.
Oh oh oh, I forgot the BEST PART. That pet pass? The one they've been working on the last couple months? Well turns out everyone hates it and they don't have a clue what they are doing so they are just flat out removing all the changes and making them part of some future patch. After having tried out the changes myself on the pts I can tell you that you shouldn't be disappointed about them removing the changes, because they were indeed awful, though you can still be disappointed about the fact their patch was so bad that I couldn't find a single person who liked what they did.
(basically they nerfed the few pets that could be used at all, then buffed the pathetic pets to only be slightly less pathetic damage/defense wise while adding byzantine energy-generation mechanics to all of them that lowered the DPS down to even less than their original levels, in order to prevent afk farming (which is a valid concern, but this isn't the solution); the pet pass was, rather than making pets useful, going to chase off the few people left that try to use pets period)
anx, bri isn't talking about more zones for endgame, i think he's talking about more zones for alt leveling up.
And Doctor, I'm basically bitching about their inability to manage the endgame (I throw balance under this as pvp is endgame for a chunk of people). They keep trying but there is just a lack of any central planning it seems. It's a great game for a few months, just not for a year or so.
Only with the latest expansion have they put in some effort into making the two capital cities important again, and even that was pretty much wiping the board and starting anew, rather than fixing gear disparities.
Personally, it doesn't really bother me, just means I take my main through the latest and greatest and my alts through the old stuff.
No no, it's the OPPOSITE. New stuff gets abandoned so fast because they don't manage the rewards properly. People go see everything once, then go 'why am I still here?'. Serpent Lantern isn't a zone, just a 'mission pack', and they aren't even farming the whole thing. Due to stupid design you can fight the first boss in there every five minutes for literally the best loot table in the game.
Supposedly next patch is going to try and fix this but a guildie has informed me they already have a workaround for this 'fix'. Cryptic is just not good at all at this, the playerbase outsmarts them in minutes.
Example: VB only really had one type of reward worth mentioning, as Nem gear (easily obtainable in a week or so, maybe two) vastly outclassed any of the gear rewards, and that was costume pieces. Now, everyone loved the costume pieces (myself included) but the drop rates were beyond horrible, and they actually made some drops rarer than others meaning people could do weeks upon weeks of nothing but farming mobs and not get the costume pieces. Many just gave up, and the few that got the ones they wanted left VB never to come back as they were sick of it (I fit in here). Either way, the zone became known as an annoying grindfest, despite being aside from that very well designed.
It's like Cryptic did everything right then shot themselves in the foot at the last second. They do that ALOT.
I think people just take things too personally because they spend so much time in the games.
I ended up with:
Ice Shield
Ice form
Ice Blast
Snowstorm
Shatter
Ice Wall
I grabbed drain life or whatever that power was called just to have a heal, but none of the other powers really "fit" with my image of the character. Once I got to that point, gaining levels ceased to be fun. I think I tapped out around level 35. Even if there were powers that were just there for flavor instead of combat, I would have liked it more. The character creator is great. It would have been nice if the individual power sets were a bit more robust to match.