Voidstar: Kahl Fight Good

[Part of the Voidstar: Warframe-128 story]

Explosions continued across the battlefield as more demolishers did their suicidal work. The Jackal survived its encounter with the bursa demolisher with heavy damage as did Grustag-3 member Shik Tal who barely scraped by against the machinist demolisher thanks to his rockets and giant shield. His brother Leekter was exploded by the hyena demolisher - a fate shared by the Valkyr specter whose talons took her too close and her paralysis skill too ineffective against the satyr demolyst. The Stalker was also obliterated when trying to melee the anti-MOA demolisher, but afterwards he just reconstituted himself to become the Shadow Stalker!

Elsewhere the sniper Ven'kra Tel was torn apart by Amaryn and her ancients, the Bonewidow defeated Misery who was self limited with only his scythe, Raptor RX had no chance against the Profit-Taker, Executioner Zura burned the Paris wielding Trinity specter to death with his Ignis, Executioner Gorth's Ogris rocketed the students of Cephalon Suda, the Sergeant [how did this guy even survive the landing] was easily handled by Parvos' time altering Protea, Zenith Galactical Tia Mayn was sniped by Executioner Harkonar, and the duel between specters Excalibur with dual skanas versus the Volt with a heat sword ended with victory for the latter.

Up on the ridge Kahl-175 faced off against Tyl Regor. "Would you look at you?" Tyl asked. "So fascinating. Tell me, why would you fight someone of your blood? Someone that loves you?" Kahl grunted, "You not like Kahl. Only Kahl like Kahl." Regor just laughed. "Foolish tube man, I AM YOUR FATHER!".  "Kahl has no father!" Kahl growled as he opened fire with his Grakata, but couldn't land a hit against the fast teleporting, hammer wielding scientist who thwacked him right in the chest plate. Kahl quickly rolled aside to evade Regor's follow up flying fist and in a smooth motion hacked through him with his Slaytra machete before sheathing it again.

"Kahl protect brothers."

"I'm not... done with you," the injured Regor coughed, suddenly unable to stand. "You done," Kahl answered. "Bleed to death. Kahl no need waste time on you." Grimacing, Tyl finally collapsed dead as Kahl walked away.

Warframe: Saryn and Trinity

The double-locked frames. Not only do you have to RNG the bosses that drop their parts, you need to first farm keys to fight said bosses! To be fair, Mesa falls into this category too. :P

Saryn

Collected from Kela De Thaym on Sedna (after you've done enough of her arenas) Saryn is all about spreading her toxic spores which is her first ability. Shooting said spores or killing the spore carrier spreads the disease to other nearby enemies and so forth. She can also shed her skin and make it explode with toxin, toxify her melee strikes to always hit spores and lastly basically fart which infects enemies with a viral status (HP takes more damage) plus high direct damage to enemies affected by spores.

While she shines in endless type missions where you have big rooms full of respawning bad guys, her contagion is less useful in missions that aren't that type as often victims will die without being able to pass on their spores forcing her to start the disease from scratch. She's also less effective if grouped with a competent team as they'll probably kill the disease chain before it can propagate too far. Decent frame, but situational.

Trinity

Collected from the Ambulas boss facility on Pluto (that you can only get to by killing other Ambulases on Pluto, aim for the legs!) Trinity is designed as the healer frame, and her number four power is arguably the best at it: an on demand shield and health recharge to allies in range provided you have energy for it. This does mean to be effective you'll be watching the team stat bars more than any other player.

Alas her other powers are lack luster: immobilize a single enemy and make them immune to damage but anyone that attacks it heals themselves, mark an enemy to pulse renewal energy to nearby allies, and link to an enemy so that any damage done to Trinity goes to them instead. Ideally you'd want to use these on tough eximus enemies but due to their over shield mechanics, you can't until you hurt them severely. This means the link and energy pulse are near useless as foes should be getting killed, not left wandering about for a temporary buff.

The healing thing is also self defeating for as you shoot that single target whom you can't kill, everything else will out damage your healing - meaning you should focus on killing? Now that more and more frames have self healing (thank you Archon shards) Trinity is really becoming more and more irrelevant.

Warframe: Trinity's "Secret" Combo

Despite being a "healer" Warframe with all four powers geared to restoring the Health and Shields of her allies, the Trinity has one nasty combo that makes her a very efficient boss hunting machine (against some bosses anyway). It all has to do with the math of her first and second of her abilities, which is conveniently the sequence you need to remember to use her secret "attack".

Step 1: Cast Well of Life on Target.
Effect: Target will GAIN a health multiplier (x10).
Effect: Anyone that hits it will regain health.

Step 2: Wait for Well of Life timer to reach near 1 second.

Step 3: Cast Energy Vampire on same Target (that should still have Well of Life)
Effect: Deals pulse damage based on enemy's remaining amount of health and shields.
Effect: Anyone that hits it will regain Energy.

Step 4: Well of Life expires.
Effect: Target will lose the health multiplier, returning to original values.
Effect: Energy Vampire will still do damage based on the original, boosted values.

Result: Target very owned.

Using this I soloed Ambulas, the Corpus MOA boss on Pluto to farm up some Excaliber parts even though my Trinity was still under leveled. Alas, the bosses that require soft spots to be shot will probably be immune to this and on the many normal mobs it's generally faster to kill them with your weapons.

On a side note, that's an interesting design decision Digital Extremes made there. If you didn't pick Excaliber as your "starting" frame the only way to get it later on is to fight your way from Mercury outwards, beating all the bosses to unlock more planets and satellites until you reach Pluto which is home to some pretty high level Corpus.

I can't think of any other game off hand where something you are offered right at the start can be so difficult to get later on. :P

NBI: Talkback Mixed Bag 2014

While Doone seeds the proper topics I thought I'd try my hand at answering some the suggestions that weren't picked up, rolling most of them into this post! He did invite people to just go ahead and post about them anyway so I invite you all to do the same! :)

What pen-&-paper RPG (D&D and the like) deserves to be adapted into an MMORPG, why, and by which development house?

Vampire the Masquerade and the rest of its cousins, all rolled into one (or if that's too hard, just the Masquerade). I think it has the best chance to succeed over my other choices here (the others being Gamma World and Lovecraft based stuff) as there are enough fans and enough lore to work with in terms of plot, factions, abilities and the like there already. CCP Games had the same idea and tried this with World of Darkness but had to cancel development. I think I'd like to see Cryptic take a shot at it because I like their model (f2p), and that they'd probably have a foundry (mission creator), and because while they don't really have standout games the ones I've tried are rather enjoyable.

Will any MMORPG ever overtake WoW as the leader of the genre? If so, what game will it be, and why?

That's a pretty open ended question. "Ever" as in - till the end of time? Then yes. Something will definitely overtake WoW. The "Why" is easy: new technologies and new IPs will emerge. Will your great, great grandkids be playing WoW? Maybe. But more likely they'll be playing something else... WoW 2, or maybe Starcraft Online? I'm sticking to Blizzard themed IPs since they have  the best resources at the moment (funding and players) to make a game to rival WoW. It would be much harder for a small unknown company to oust them but hey... maybe an Attack on Titan MMO would bleed the WoW base enough to take over. Who knows?

What 'failed' video game deserves to be remade or brought back under new management?

Wizardry Online. SOE failed big time there, leading me and many other disgruntled Wizardry players to avoid any further SOE games. It should also be remade to be more violent, with a higher risk of character permadeath balanced off by slightly easier content. As it is you literally had to suicide your spirit against reapers if you wanted to lose your character or be extremely unlucky/unprepared in dice rolls. Even then, the "Soul" system that your characters shared meant that losing one guy didn't remove all your work anyway, just giving you a minor-moderate set back.

Click the image too see the consistency of SOE!

What game series would you like to see remade (updated graphics, but stays to the original story/gameplay) or rebooted (completely re-imagined with familiar bits)?

I'd like to see id-software's Doom series remade into an MMO. Maybe a survival MMO.

If the NBI formed a guild, would you join it? Where would you want the guild to play?

Unlikely, and if I did it would probably not as a regular member. A number of the NBI folk are people who are always sitting on the cutting edge games, new releases, betas and the like. Another bunch enjoy games that have a pay wall. I prefer sticking to free games that I can enjoy whenever I feel like. I'm also not sure how many of you are in my time zone to play with anyway! ;P

Is the 'holy trinity' really holy? (Coming from the removal of a healer in GW2)

I've spoken about this before but I don't mind repeating the important part: To me, the MMO Holy Trinity is a piece of shit. If you can't do everything yourself, you aren't much of a hero to begin with. I don't mind playing with other people or grouping to do content out of choice. It's when grouping becomes a necessity that I take issue, because it means the game is not letting my character evolve the way I want him to. Especially in games which tout "be whatever you want to be", or "the world depends on you" I generally lose interest when I realize it actually means "be what we catered for" and "the world depends on you... and all those other guys because individually you all just suck. Now check out this cool, unfair, boss whom you cannot solo!".

When you're deciding if you like a game or not, which aspect weighs the heaviest and why? 

Fun! That's a no brainer. There is no point in spending time doing things you don't like. If a game is fun right off the bat or I can see will be fun when I get better at it I'll stick with it. If it's just tedious or of a genre I dislike I'll leave it alone.

MMOs: Level Restriction and Threat

[Part of my MMO Design Folder]

Have you ever heard of the tale where a great knight ventured to the entrance of an evil lair then began screaming out to the world for a healer and a wizard or rogue to join him? This happens a lot in MMO's, and is in fact referred to as "the holy trinity" where one person plays the role of "tank" keeping the monster's attention while absorbing the monster's damage, the "healer" uses their skills primarily to keep the "tank" alive, and everyone else being "DPS" (damage per second) either on said monster or crowd control ("CC" used to be "DPS"). Personally I only ran into the "holy trinity" term when I began Guildwars 2, because people were either angry or happy that it wasn't there. I actually had to ask what it was, and now that I know I find it rather stupid.

I can see how it came about though, simply by how some games handle "threat" or "aggro" (as in, which of you the monster most wants to eat) and more so by the definition of specific classes to play "roles". Neverwinter Online's five classes are a good example of this:

Thief - highest single target DPS, quite squishy (killable)
Wizard - highest area effect DPS, but not as high on single target as thief. Very squishy.
Great Weapon Fighter - less squishy than the above and out performs them on their weaker side but is not as good as their specialty.
Cleric - provides healing and buffs and some decent area damage
Guardian Fighter - Tank. Only class with a shield, and only class that "blocks" instead of evades.

While most MMO's tout that you can be "whatever you want", other people will look down upon a wizard who tries to be the "tank", or a cleric focused on attacking instead of healing, or a tank who chooses not to wear armor (and be squishy) - especially is said people are more interested in being "efficient", the type that sit down and actually number crunch for the best build for their specific role and more often than not the first requirement of which is to max out your level to the highest it can be.

I feel this is the first problem. Skills and abilities can have levels, sure. You get good at doing "stuff" by doing said "stuff". Maybe Bob the sniper is more accurate than Hank, while Hank the messanger can outrun Bob. However, Bob shouldn't be able to magically become a fantastic swordsman  by baking cake. As humurous as that sounds, that is actually possible in GW2 which only has one overall level track, and not many little tracks for skills. In comparison Ultima Online offered incredible freedom. No overall levels, just skills which meant you can be a spell sword, a fisher knight, or whatever. It's a similar case in Mabinogi where skill ranks are more important than your overall level. I'm over level 2000 there but I can still lose to a bear if I don't fight perfectly.

Swordsmanship has increased by 0.1%!

The second problem is monster aggro or threat. Tank classes generally get skills to make monsters pay more attention to them instead of all the other people damaging it. Some games use strange maths to then calculate stuff like if player A did 100 damage to me, but player B healed player A for 200 HP, I should kill player B (Rappelz). For me it should be simple. Just like in real, predators (especially in a pack) should always go after the thing they can kill fastest first.