by Danny Gourley on Oct 06, 2008
style="font-style: italic;">City of Heroes
was one of the first massively-multiplayer online games to venture away
from the
standard fantasy path. Instead of sword and shield,
style="font-style: italic;">City of
Heroes focused on super heroes and heroines, their powers,
and what a
city full of super beings would be like.
Now developer NCsoft is ready with the game's thirteenth
update, Issue 13. Among the
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/45139">many
enhancements to the game, Issue 13 focuses on balancing the
powers players wield in player-vs-environment settings. Ten Ton Hammer
has details for power changes straight from
style="font-style: italic;">City of Heroes
Senior Designer, Floyd "Castle" Grubb.
Introduction
For Issue 13, we have a rather wide selection of PvE (Player vs.
Environment) related powers changes. These changes focus on either
Quality of Life concerns or on powers which were not quite in Balance
with others. Below is a breakdown of what we are doing, with the aim to
provide insight into the thought process behind it.
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/30802">
style="border: 0px solid ; width: 200px; height: 113px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/30802/preview">
You and
your friends may notice some changes to your powers.
Energy Aura
Let's start with Energy Aura for Brutes and Stalkers. Energy Aura has
had a poor reputation from the start, and while it is "balanced" with
the other protective powersets using the original metrics, it has been
shown that those metrics did not take certain key factors into
consideration - namely Regeneration and Healing effects. Energy Aura
lacked any sort of mechanic which could increase the Health or
Regeneration Rate of the character, and did it have any active method
of restoring Health to the character using these powers. Additionally,
the set had more protection holes than others. To address these issues,
the following changes are being made:
Invulnerability
Invulnerability has a few issues, mainly stemming from lack of special
resistances and "weak" power choices. Here are the changes that are
being made:
Kheldians
Peacebringers and Warshades, as Archetypes, have an interesting history
and reputation among players. It seems as if no one is neutral about
them they are either loved or hated. This isn't much of a surprise;
they were always meant to require more player decision making and
compromise than the base Archetypes. However, certain technological
restrictions combined with the "facts" of high level play ultimately
proved that the Kheldians were even harder than originally expected.
With Issue 12's introduction of the Villain Epic Archetypes, we took
some time to re-evaluate where the Kheldians were and what we wanted to
do with them. Here is what we are planning:
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/30788">
style="border: 0px solid ; width: 200px; height: 113px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/30788/preview">
The changes
are designed to make the player-vs-environment experience more balanced.
Toggle Powers
One important additional piece of development to mention, that is
especially relevant to Kheldians and their toggle powers is: in Issue
13, Toggles are no longer shut off due to Hold, Sleep or Disorient
effects. This is a major gameplay change, and it is not
restricted to Kheldians, but instead applies to all non-offensive
player toggles. As part of changes in Issue 13, when a
player is affected by a hold, sleep or stun, any toggle power they are
running will continue and will still draw endurance from the character.
However, some or all of its effects may be suppressed until such time
as the hold, sleep or stun is removed. For example, if you are held
while in Black Dwarf form, all of your Damage Resistance values, your
recovery bonus and knockback protection are suppressed, while your
hold, stun, sleep, immobilize and confuse protections remain in effect.
Monitoring your stats with the "Real Numbers" tool is a good way to
check which aspects of a toggle are suppressed and which are not.
War Mace
An ongoing project over the last several issues has been bringing War
Mace up to performance par with other powersets. The last set of
changes got us close, but still not to where we want to be. Here are
the changes:
Misc
There are numerous smaller changes going into Issue 13. While you all
will get to see the final product in what makes it into the patch
notes, there are a few other changes I want to let you know about.
These are the highlights, and there are several other changes
which are still in a state of flux (stalkers Claws, for instance.) I
hope you all like the changes. We are really looking forward for this
all to hit the Training Room so you folks can bang on them and tell us
how the changes feel! Your feedback is critical for these and other
changes that we make to the game.