Pounding. Scratching. The shrieks of a thousand alien voices. Every murderous sound in the piercing chorus of endless torment drove my mind to the brink of annihilation.

My mortal instincts begged me to turn away from the grim bastion of insanity that loomed in the stormy sky above. Surely no man who entered could possibly withstand the wrath of a god who once smashed this world asunder. There could be no hope within those walls; only death...destruction...Rularuu.

My body trembled as I summoned the last of my resolve to carry me forward. The ripples of an otherworldly wind grew stronger. One step into the gravitational geyser would send me to the outer rim of The Storm Palace from which I feared there would be no return.

I miss The Shadow Shard very much. I loved to explore it alone in character and imagine that I was beating back the madness and uncovering the secrets of Rularuu. I spent countless hours in that shattered world.

Aside from that, I miss teaming up with random players and being part of the best player community of any game I have ever played. I miss bringing my characters to life and seeing a fantastic world through their eyes. I miss dynamic combat that truly felt heroic.

So many memories. I try not to dwell on the loss, but sometimes it hurts. The hole in my heart never healed. I need City of Titans!

I miss being able to cause terror constantly and it NOT be against game mechanics.

Also threatening the protesters on Mercy Island.

Probably the trivially easy grouping. No idiot designers mandating enormous chains of prerequisite missions. (This means you, Tera! And almost everyone else.)

Just join and go.

Even though I was a major alt-o-holic, with literally over 100 alts, I just had one main I kept topped off with the best stuff and latest incarnate.

With no need whatsoever, I would join coalition task forces every evening, or help a lowbie or midbie in running missions, with that character.

This was fun in and of itself. It is the only game where playing it is the fun, and not some grind to get to 50 "where the real game begins", AKA asinine grinding.

Incarnate was somewhat grindy, but even there it felt more like the above than sickening, boring grinding of other games.

I looked foward to that, or my coalition daily ancient Rome TF (forget the name, sniff).

Gorgon wrote:

I looked foward to that, or my coalition daily ancient Rome TF (forget the name, sniff).

Imperius Task Force.

Plexius wrote:

Redlynne wrote:
Plexius wrote:
I miss The Shadow Shard very much. I loved to explore it alone in character and imagine that I was beating back the madness and uncovering the secrets of Rularuu. I spent countless hours in that shattered world.

Shop.
Save.
Rularuu.

I laughed way more than I should have at that! XD

I have my moments ... {roll eyes}

Although in this case, I cannot take credit for this one. The true source of this joke was a meme that cropped up amongst Hero Dawn SG members during a series of Shadow Shard TFs that we did together. One of Hero Dawn's leaders (Goat) dropped the immortal [i]Shop. Save. Rularuu.[/i] into chat while we were all doing [i]Word. Word. Rularuu.[/i] jokes ... and I spent the rest of the night trying to stay upright in my chair.

But, as you can imagine, the [i]Shop. Save. Rularuu.[/i] was an instant classic, and something of an in-joke among the people who were on that particular Shadow Shard Task Force. Even days later we were still saying it to each other in SG chat.

I miss soloing the ITF with my Dual Blades/Willpower Main, just because I was told it couldn't be done. :p Dual Blades weak because of Lethal Damage? Pffft :p

I miss all the costume pieces that I loved!

I miss CoH's raids (or whatever we call them) because it was so many people and in CoH no expected team speak.

Brand X wrote:

Dual Blades weak because of Lethal Damage? Pffft :p

I can't vouch for Dual Blades, but I did love my Broad Sword Scrapper. Yeah, it was all lethal damage, and it was strictly inferior to Katana in terms of DPS, but the blade's audible [b]*CRUNCH*[/b] as it ripped through enemies was so satisfying! He was also rockin' one of those Achilles' Heel procs along with a +24% global damage buff from IO's, so you can only imagine the kind of Headsplitter crits I could deliver.

Nonetheless, I had heard that Dual Blades was a beast in the right hands. It never tickled my fancy though.

I miss not knowing or caring what most of those abbreviations meant
Man the game was fun back then

One goal I've always kept in mind in creating my game is to avoid jargon as much as possible.
I don't use abbreviations, in my game, at all.
That means a bit more typing but it's really worth it to me.

The main thing that made me start hating the Abbreviations was people using them when they speak.
That's something that really got big in the 90s
Before then, almost no one did it, unless they worked for the government, or referred to government agencies like the FBI
I still say Kentucky Fried Chicken.

syntaxerror37 wrote:

I had a friend once who said something along the lines of "taking forever to chip away at enemies," to which I replied "chipping away? I'm a god damn blender of death!"

Oh that's a good one!

I remember being on a TF with Redlynne (MA/SR Scrapper) and there being another Scrapper on the team using a Katana. I was watching the damage numbers smoking off of targets the two of us were ganging up on and noticed something decidedly odd. I was doing more damage using Martial Arts on these Crey than the other Scrapper was doing with their attacks.

At one point I paused my attack chain to say in chat ...

"My sneakers are doing more damage than your sword!"

Needless to say, my fellow Scrapper didn't ... appreciate ... my observation all that much ...
/rolleyes

I thought the Martial arts animations were pretty bad at first but later when they introduced alternate animations for every power it was a big improvement.
One thing I'd like to see is the option alternate between the 2 animations so there'd be more variety in the onscreen activity.
But the Jump kick animation was just awful
May I suggest a Jump kick that works more like the shield charge.You know moving us a good distance toward the target.
This probably isn't the right place to make such a suggestion but I was just responding to what Brand X said
I'll post the same thing somewhere else

Actually I looked it up on my offline character creator and what I was thinking of was the Eagle's Claw.
The animation showed a jump kick
It might be the same as the pool power I don't remember
and can't check because the character creator doesn't show animations for pool powers.

What I didn't like about it, was the way it didn't look like any real jumpick.
The pose the toon assumes in the air should be used for a forward moving kick, a charge into battle kind of thing
A stationary jump kick should be either a snapping front kick (like the Karate Kid) or some sort of spinning thing. Either a turn around (like Jean Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport) or backflip kind of thing (like Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon)

By the way did you ever notice that the Karate Kid cheats?
An announcer says several times that no points will be given for blows to the face
But he wins the match by kicking his opponent in the face.

What I miss most is working with PUGs. Finding the team chemistry. The best way to tell if the team was filled with good players was encountering a Nictus Cyst. If it went down quickly, the team was golden. I knew the group could handle anything for as long as it hung together.

When the team leader asked: "Should I turn it up to maximum?" That was when the fun REALLY started!

I miss the CoV Prison Break Tutorial. I've played a lot of games and run through a lot of tutorials, but CoV's Prison Break was in a class by itself.

I miss building long story arcs in Mission Architect, spending days getting all the dialog and feedback strings to display right, Creating custom enemy groups with my own brand of minions, lieutenants, bosses, and elite bosses. Adding my own main character as a helper in the beginning who betrays the player character and turns against them in the end, or vice versa, staring out an enemy and becoming an ally! I had a story arc with nothing but minions in the first mission, all hinting at who the boss might be, then the second mission had teams of a lieutenant and three or five minions with lots of patrols just wandering around looking for trouble, and in the final mission an Arch Villain surrounded by five Elite Bosses, all six with the names of Sumerian deities. Good times!

I made a five mission story with nothing but Mastermind enemies in it. It garnered a dozen or so reviews with a final rating of only three and a half stars, but I enjoyed running through it whenever a new character hit level 30. It proved to be an excellent test bed for survivability when experimenting with oddball builds or when new powers were introduced.

Greyhawk wrote:

I made a five mission story with nothing but Mastermind enemies in it.

I did something similar, creating a story arc with nothing but Ninja/* Mastermind NPCs. Did a lot of variations on the secondary powersets, but set up their costumes to all look as close as possible to the Ninja Pets for maximum Faceless Minion factor. I called the arc [b]Inverse Ninja Law[/b] and set up the contact for it to be a Tsoo Sorcerer named [b]Midnight Sun[/b] who was ... of course ... a Lawyer.

Strangely enough, I could "balance" it just fine for my MA/SR Scrapper to solo the missions without too much trouble, although I'd be "pressured" in each encounter so it wasn't a cakewalk. Brought in a team of SG mates to try it and they promptly all got slaughtered because the Ninjas overwhelmed them ... which was something of an eye opener for me (but then, they brought Squishies to the party).

After that I withdrew the story from circulation and somehow it got a fatal flaw in the file from something or other and I just never bothered to fix it.

ArticulateT wrote:

And, in a small way, I miss Peacebringers.
I wasn't a shape-shifting one, as at the time, i was using the class for its mechanics rather than its context (and yes, I did get yelled at a lot for being a non-PB PB.) but I started to find it amusing how bizarre the class was. It could solo, it could tank, it could do so much, but the dynamic was... odd. It seemed almost mediocre by itself, but when teamed, the character was buffed so much that the rest of the team seemed almost superfluous. I remember a saying that was passed around "The Peacebringer needs a team, and the team needs the Warshade." But after a while, that's really what I came to love about the AT. It might not have seen much usage towards the end, but damn it was fun to play.

I had the same - a Humanform PB and yeah he was really fun to play - especially once I had him properly "frankenslotted". Takes a bit of getting used to - lower DPS than a blaster but has some nice melee attacks and defenses, some heals, some stealth, a self Rez, and your max capabilities can change on the fly depending on who is on your team at any given moment so you need to stay on your toes. Oh - and your own personal "kryptonite" mobs heh heh. Those damn Seekers were pretty stupid at first though.

A human Peanut Butter?

Seriously, what does the PB stand for?

Greyhawk wrote:

OMG.... I remember the lawyer. I might have run that mission. I seem to remember giving it five stars and a good review.

It's entirely possible that you did. I used the original Paragon Dance Party location for the first map and a Hostage Escort for the trip back out. There were a couple more missions in the chain after that. Anyway, nice to know that someone appreciated it in the brief time it was out there. ^_^

Greyhawk wrote:

Something in Issue 19/20 broke the existing MA storylines.

That sounds right. I just remember going in to edit something and being told I had an unrecoverable error that no amount of editing could fix, so I just deleted the arc and walked away ... mainly because I'd "wasted" enough time building up the custom characters the first time around and wasn't relishing the thought of doing it all over again.

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

Seriously, what does the PB stand for?

This excellent reference site, www.paragonwiki.com, might come in useful when you see folks use popular abbreviations from City of Heroes.

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

I was skeptical but I went to the site and entered pb into it's search window, it took me right to peace bringers. so I added that site to my bookmarks bar.
thanks

No problem. I wouldn't steer you wrong.

(I checked for PB before sending you the link. AoE is in there also.)