Wanted! City of Heroes Players!

The Game Room
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I went to the CoH Comic Con panel and I wanted to let you know what they talked about. Coming in Issue 19 (some of this is old news):

The Alpha Slot: a special enhancement slot for level 50s that begins you path to being an Incarnate. A new Mender contact is being added to Ouros to lead you on the Journey.

2 new Task Forces designed for Incarnate characters. Apex where you fight off the Praetorian invasion and Tin Mage where you bring the fight back to Praetoria.

The old Calvin Scott TF is being added to Ouros

New arcs for Praetorians that have entered Paragon City or the Rogue Isles.

A new Hero arc regarding the Medi porter and why they aren’t used for civilians and a new Villain arc regarding the origin of Leviathan. Both will include moral choices.

A new GM for Praetoria (a huge Warwalker)

New zone events in Praetoria: For Nova a protest, Imperial City and syndicate attack and in Neutropolis a Failed Experiment invasion. For each event you will have a choice on how to deal with it and rewards will be base on how much you participate. That includes healing and buffing/debuffing not just dealing damage.

A new NPC group introduced in GR called the Imperial Defense Force will be getting their finalized look (the current look they have was meant to be temporary) and the costume parts will be available to players.

Ferrys and Trains will take you to any station (the old lines are designated as North and South for zones with two stations) and they will display the level ranges of each zone. Train missions will appear at the top with a star.

Inherent Fitness. Fully slotable just like the current powers but you get them for free. They made it clear to an angry questioner that there would be no extra enhancement slots. That is fine by me but apparently some players are upset over that.

Every Hazard and Trial zone is getting a medical tent like the Hollows has and every hospital is getting an inspiration selling nurse like Praetoria has.

The ability to log back to character selection screen.

Alternate animations for every (?) blast set and the power Integration.

I am sure I am forgetting some stuff.

Some non news info:

In the month after GRs launch, over 750,000 characters logged into the game (IIRC 200,000 of them were Praetorians). The ratio of Resistance to Loyalist was basically even 50.5% to 49.5 percent respectively.

When asked about revamping existing zones, they said no current plans but mentioned they know we want Boomtown revamped (that was the only one mentioned by name–possibly because it was the one the questioner mentioned by name).

They confirmed Praetoria will take part in Halloween events.

They mentioned that the programmers created a tool that lets the developers create zone events (rather than the programmers having to hard code them) which implies we will be getting more of them. It wasn’t mentioned on the panel but the other day there was an event where Arachnos invaded Faultline and Longbow invaded Nerva which I believe is a taste of things to come with this new technology.

The handout was a Rikti costume code which is awesome. I had fun hanging out under Atlas announcing “Peace: that which I arrived in.” and waving while people milling about fired off powers at me.

1102

Oh I forgot t add they confirmed that closed beta for I19 starts next week.

1103

That sounds like a lot of stuff coming, most of which is pretty cool. Hope I can actually try it if I make the closed beta this time. :stuck_out_tongue:

Can’t play as much as I would like, but I did enjoy starting out a Praetorian JB this weekend. He is of course, extremely loyal to the forces of Law & Order. :smiley:

1104

The trailer for the new Alpha Strike task force is up on YouTube. Looks very cool–we love (smashing) giant robots!

1105

Need to post a few corrections:
The new Praetorian arcs and the new hero and villain arc are one and the same. Praetorians will get differing text for these arcs.

The Imperial Defense Force costume parts will eventually be made available to players but not when the issue is released.

1106

I can’t imagine what goes through some people’s minds. I’ve seen posts about this and it’s just bizarre. At an absolute worst case scenario, you take three additional powers, don’t slot them or even use them at all and are right where you were pre-I19 with no harm done to you. More likely, you get four new powers (unless you already took both Swift AND Hurdle) and can either spare them some slots or use them for IO mules or whatever.

Personally, I think it’s great. I’ll take a few marginal powers I skipped from my primary and grab Stealth just for the utility. Won’t bother slotting any of them and I’ll be coming out ahead.

1107

If the game spit out dollar bills, some people would complain that they weren’t numbered sequentially.

Personally, I think that not making Fitness inherent from the beginning was a design error. It not being inherent makes the pre-20 game a lot less fun which has probably hurt the game significantly over the years.

1108

Primarily the complaints are because the few people who don’t perceive Stamina as automatically mandatory are unhappy at losing the fight. I was one, although I haven’t been active on the forums. But after seeing how it works in practice, I don’t really care so much now.

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New Booster coming soon based on Origins. For a Booster (as compared to a Super Booster), it looks pretty good. Details here.

1110

The Halloween event is live.

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The new map for the Halloween tip mission is very cool. I love the darkened sections of the tunnels where all you can see (briefly) are eyes and the flames from the demons. The timer mechanism is cool, but the base time is long enough that I mostly ignore it–the elite boss at the end is kind of a pushover.

The reward selection is pretty nifty as well; I’m always up for more badges, of course, but I particularly like the fact that the (villain) option to sell the McGuffin actually gets you an infamy reward. For once, you get money for something you steal. It makes a little less sense with the heroside option; you get the influence bonus for turning it over to MAGI–I suppose they have a bounty on potentially world-ending artifacts.

A more meta aspect of the Halloween tip is that it shows that tips don’t have to be linked to the alignment system. That means it’s open to far more uses, like getting tips from civilians you rescue or from glowies. I don’t know that they’re planning to do that, but they appear to have made the system flexible enough for it. That would be really nice.

1112

Guess I’ll be splitting my time between the Mojave Wasteland and Paragon City/Rogue Isles/Praetoria this weekend.

1113

I like that they upped the spawn rate for Jack in Irons, finally. Getting the Halloween version has always been so tedious.

I also find the NPC comments in the mission amusing and interesting.

1114

It’s still a gain for everyone. Even if you didn’t take fitness, now you can replace some of your EndRx enhancements with Damage or Range or Accuracy or whatever. No one is actually losing from this but some people are acting as though this is a great burden being imposed upon them.

“Super Booster” is a pretty meaningless term since this costs the same amount the previous boosters (excepting the Party & Wedding packs) did. I’m personally not excited by it because I’d rather have “real” costume pieces that I can use in multiple ways but I don’t begrudge anyone their excitement at the new capes and auras. The Party Pack broke my habit of buying everything that comes down the pipe so I’m content to sit this one out and wait for the next traditional booster.

1115

Yeah, when I posted that, it was before they announced the price and I had assumed it would be $7.99 or something. I am a bit disappointed it costs as much as the Super Boosters which seem to give you more but I like a lot of the pieces so I will probably be getting it.

1116

Looks like Issue 19 will be after the holiday due to the Kheldian and Dominator bugs.

1117

It’s just as well for me–it gives me more time to respec out the Fitness pool on existing characters, so I can use the Issue freespecs for other things. On the other hand, I’m really looking forward to the Incarnate system going live. I love the Incarnate intro arc and the new task forces.

1118

I’ve pretty much been off CoH, waiting for I 19. This means another 2 weeks or so of playing something else. Oh well.

1119

You’ve been “missing out” on two or three solid weeks of AE exploit grinding (Rikti monkeys giving boss level xp and tickets) and a bajillion lvl 50’s with only a “Thrill Seeker” exploration badge to their name.

Oh, and the market’s crazy from all the AE ticket purchases. Much like a year or so ago, recipes are cheap and common salvage is 300,000 inf for an Alchemical silver.

After a couple weeks without a fix, it’s extremely tempting to just say the hell with it and stop caring. If NCSoft doesn’t give enough of a shit to fix it after three weeks, who am I to care about it in their stead?

1120

The latest patch fixes (or at least claims to fix) the Rikti monkey exploit. Given that they need to code the fix and test it, and that they’re trying to get out I19 at the same time, I think 2-3 weeks is understandable, if not commendable.

Architect exploits don’t bother me much, since other people’s play experience is theirs, not mine. If people choose a play experience that minimizes challenge and maximizes power, that’s okay. I find changes like Enhancement Diversification to be more of an imposition of a developer vision of The Right Way To Play My Game than an attempt at play balance.

If players want to grind to 50 in AE missions and miss out on all the content, why should I care? It’s not like it affects me.