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A Glimpse Into Darkness

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Shattered Amethyst
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A Glimpse Into Darkness

This ended up longer than I thought it would... so apologies in advance.

tl;dr - I like versatile power sets.

What is Darkness? In City of Heroes, it was a suite of power sets that, by the end, all archetypes could make use of. Its default flavortext involved drawing energy from the netherworld, though some characters described manifesting it as shadows that attacked their enemies, or an ability to affect life energy, among others.

Dark sets had some commonalities. Most of these commonalities boil down to doing the standard things for their Archetype in non-standard ways. Most attack sets, or defense sets, or blast sets, or support sets had themes, and things they would do. Some attack sets would reduce enemy defense. Some would knock enemies down. Dark, at the cost (in the case of its attack set) of dealing raw damage, had multiple side effects.

It is easy to categorize most of the sets in City of Heroes. Melee +Debuff (like Broadsword), or Melee +Control (like Mace), or Melee +MoreDamage (like Fire). Dark was Melee -Damage +Support +Control. In short, it was unique in its ability to provide variable effects which reduced the raw power of its attacks relative to more damage-focused sets in exchange for granting other abilities.

Having attack sets that do damage, more damage, and even more damage appeals to some players. And there's nothing wrong with that. Some people prefer a particular feel, or a particular look, or a particular single side-effect (like using Icy blasts to make all enemies appear to be moving in slow motion, or Fiery blasts to give everyone that 'On Fire' look that makes you think of marshmallows and chocolate bars.

My personal likes are... not any of those things. A friend of mine summed it up very nicely at one point. "Shattered, some people like fire. Some people like swords, or blasting, or control. You like... Nonsense."

And he was absolutely right. I like a paradigm that isn't like the others. Even if they were "bad" or "underpowered" in the eyes of the majority of players, I found that making use of sets that have a variety of effects that follow a thematic idea rather than a power train (melee damage/more melee damage/even more melee damage) was satisfying in ways that more direct power sets were not. Maybe it was just me.

My favorite tank (that had the tank Archetype) was Dark Armor, Ice Melee. I created this character, like many others, by going into one of the global chats I was on and asking people "What is the worst armor set for a tank?" and "What is the worst melee set for a tank?" and making it as an exercise to see whether I could make it good... And then in this case I completely failed to understand why they were terrible. A Dark Armor tank had three taunt auras (damage, fear and stun), and adding Ice Melee added what amounted to a fourth (creating an ice patch which not only had enemies falling over time and time again, but which also seemed to serve as a fourth taunt aura for maintaining the hate of the mobs). A PBAoE heal gave remarkable longevity to a set that was, admittedly, too busy scaring and stunning people to have high resistance numbers like, say, a Granite tank. When teaming with others, it was remarkable how little difficulty I had controlling aggro, even against spawns set for eight players.

Then I tried some soloing. It was at this point that I realized that my character, while able to maintain the hate of an entire zone even when those enemies were being actively taunted by other players, was patently ineffective. I wasn't about to hurt anybody, and it wasn't just because I was too busy laughing about minions and lieutenants falling over and slowly having their health bars shrink away to nothing. There were maps where I could probably have sent a letter snail mail to the boss at the end and it would have arrived before I waded through all of his henchmen. And yet I was having tons of fun doing it. I ran through my checklist.

Was It Fast?
No, it moved about as fast as your typical glacier (I had chosen to spend most of my time in Hover, and could have legitimately lost a race against some Granite tanks).

Was It Deadly?
No; some of my enemies may have legitimately died of old age, and most had gray hair by the time I killed them.

Did It Have Awesome Animations?
No. I was a cloud of inky blackness that froze the ground, and that was about all I had the endurance to maintain.

Did It Feel Epic?
It felt like a molasses tsunami. A wave of slow-moving death that the minions, had they been more interestingly programmed, could simply have sauntered away from, leaving me no alternative but to yell "Come baaack!"

I looked over the checklist again. Same answers. I pondered what I had been told about my love of Nonsense, and added a new question.

Was It Full of Nonsense?
Hell yeeeah! WOOOOO!

Okay, so that was why I liked it. I then had to revisit every other character I had ever made with this in mind. And came to a startling revelation as I listed my favorite characters.

Martial Arts/Dark Armor Scrapper
Dark/Ice Defender
Dark Melee/Willpower Scrapper
Thugs/Traps Mastermind
Mind Control/Psionic Blast Dominator
Kinetics/Ice Blast Defender
Ice Blast/Kinetics Corrupter

The list went on. In most cases, the answers to at least one of the first four questions changed. In all cases, the answer to the new, fifth question was "Hell yeeeah! WOOOOO!"

My hope is that for those of us who preferred the versatility of a Dark set, that we will see some sets, even from the day of release, that will feed our desire for a character whose powers have synergy, but do not simply add onto one another.

/Shattered

Foradain
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Shattered Amethyst wrote:
Shattered Amethyst wrote:

Did It Feel Epic?
It felt like a molasses tsunami. A wave of slow-moving death that the minions, had they been more interestingly programmed, could simply have sauntered away from, leaving me no alternative but to yell "Come baaack!"

If it had been as fast as molasses, it would have to have been a very quick saunter. In the Boston Molasses Disaster, molasses flowed at an estimated 35 mph ^_^

Still, that would be embarrassing to the minions. "You couldn't get away? You're really slower than molasses in January?!?"

But I digress. I second your motion for a potential for nonsense!

Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
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Klaw10
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Well to be fair the devs did

Well to be fair the devs did say that dark was the easiest set to port and they had plans to eventually port every set (they specifically confirmed they were going to port kin and emp to mm's even).

"Darkness, imprisoning me, all that I see, absolute horror.."

__

Don't know what you don't know. Only know what you know.
-The wiseman.

GhostHack
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One of my favorite characters

One of my favorite characters was a dark(miasma)/arch defender... and pretty much all my builds were quirky in some way....

So, heck yeah, lets have some sets that make us scratch our heads if we think about them rationally.... but we love all the same, playing them.

___________________________________
....Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars...