Lot of stuff going around on the main boards

[coldcut]

Statesman describes what he means by balance. Several posters threaten self-mutilation:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Dev&Number=2636037&bodyprev=#Post2636037

Some neat I5 stuff:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Dev&Number=2636338&bodyprev=#Post2636338
1) Instead of the first five levels being debt free, the first TEN levels will be debt free.

2) XP debt will be halved on mission maps (that includes outdoor mission maps, too).

Some follow up going on in Dev Digest.

[Esbat]

HOLY CRAP!

Was about to make a post about this myself... :bhump

[Remianen]

bah!

This won't help me none. I've hit the debt cap on Flameshrike twice now (once at 12 and once at 14) and I'm trying to do it again (at 15, to buy time to find a team for Positron's TF). Nice change though :)

[Quakester]

bah!

This won't help me none. I've hit the debt cap on Flameshrike twice now (once at 12 and once at 14) and I'm trying to do it again (at 15, to buy time to find a team for Positron's TF). Nice change though :)

Bah! Wait til you start hitting the debt cap in he late 40's! :p

[Tarberetta]

Yea I posted my thoughts on it. Hope he reads it and takes it to heart.

[Poison]

Debt thing is okay, we'll see.

I just have my doubts about the balance issue.

[WingedAvenger]

I fail to see the necessity for the first change.

The second change is alright. A little clunky, but if it encourages doing missions then why not?

[Jade_Dragon]

Well, as I have said about the balance issue before, "the genie is out of the bottle, and it will be hard to put it back in." How do you keep them down on the farm, once they've seen Paris? :D

Of course, overpowered is overpowered, but there are a lot of otherwise ordinary builds which are able to take on much more than three even Minions. (Blue Diamond, for instance, although I'm not sure how to compare how LONG it takes him to take on a crowd to how long someone else would take to go from group of three to group of three) So I think that if the heroes are "nerfed" in such a way as to reverse that, there will be a lot of complaints. People have simply gotten used to it.

I'm afraid that at this point, the only thing that is fair is to find a middle ground between being able to solo AVs, and 20+ groups of purples, and the rule of thumb of "3 Minions = 1 hero". (Well, maybe not "middle", but you know what I mean)

[coldcut]

Goldstar's overpowered at the moment. I actually gain XP slower when grouped. I just about can't be killed by anything within 4-5 levels of me. Something needs to change. It's kinda boring this way.

[Remianen]

I fail to see the necessity for the first change.

I agree and disagree at the same time.

While it’s never a bad thing to make an MMO more friendly to new players, in CoH (in my experience, at least), debt is meaningless (at least at low levels). My highest is 15 and I can go from the debt cap to 16 inside of a few hours (solo or grouped). In fact, I use debt now to make more influence so I can more easily afford my next set of enhancements.

I am by no means a veteran (at least not in CoH) so I can’t think that I’m special in some way. But, by the same token, like Statesman said in the first thread, there are many people who were introduced to MMOs with this game. Having no real frame of reference (i.e. no experience with balancing, encounter design, design goals, etc), having their xp rate slowed (even by the tiniest of margins) can be very discouraging. Honestly, removing debt pre-11 wouldn’t do anything but make Perez Park and the like more palatable at their intended levels IMO.

Won’t affect me any since I’m crazy as hell already. Once I got out of my EQ mindset (where dying at low levels is baaaaaaaaad, without a cleric bot with a water sprinkler), I was able to fully explore my various characters’ abilities (and yeah, get faceplanted lots) and the game became a ton more fun for me.