City Of Heroes: Ask Statesman - Issue #6

Does the new XP 200 ft limit count towards badges and defeat all missions? How will you address the "click three glowies at the same time" missions with reguards to this change?

The limit does not count towards badges and defeat all missions.

Blasters are listed as the damage kings yet their damage is capped BELOW that of scrappers. Why?

The max damage of a Blaster is 400%...a Scrapper is 500%. We did this because the Scrapper is involved in melee and thus in a riskier situation far more often. Blasters, on the other hand, can pick and choose their targets from a distance.

We know that you're working on a 'flashback' system to allow heroes to go back to lower level missions, story arcs and task forces they have out-levelled, but wouldn't it be simpler to just remove the level caps on missions and task forces? Why are there maximum levels for these anyway?

Because certain villain groups exist in only certain level ranges. If a hero had passed beyond that level range, he'd go into a mission and find nothing by grey colored spawns that would yield little or no reward.

Will we ever see missions with more non-combat options, such as puzzles to be solved? Or even entirely non-combat missions - saving people from a burning building, stopping the monorail before it hits the broken piece of track, and that kind of 'heroic' stuff?

As a general rule, puzzles don't work well in MMP's. Why? Because it requires people to sit down and analyze something - perhaps a riddle. Sometimes, people can't solve it - and a particular mission is failed because of the inability to recognize, say, a pun. Secondly, when someone does solve a puzzle, it's posted on the forums and quickly spreads out to the community. Whatever interesting challenge might have been posed now disappears.

Non-combat missions - like saving people from fires - coming up!

I'd love to be able to choose a special 'weakness' for my heroes at character generation. I know Kheldians have something similar with their weakness to Voids, but is there any chance of adding something similar for all ATs, as an option?

A basic rule of City of Heroes: never let players make an uninformed decision. Beginning players don't necessarily know the game - which villains use which weapons, how common certain attacks are, etc. - and if we put weaknesses into the game, people would end up making choices that would have a serious impact on their gameplay. For instance, a player could choose weakness to fire...only to find out that the first ten levels are rife with Hellions and their fire abilities. They feel gimped compared to other players and simply stop playing...

Will Supergroup bases have a 'vault' of some kind, allowing members of the group to store and share enhancements and inspirations?

Yes.

Will City of Villains add new badges, and will they be for heroes, villains, or both?

City of Villains introduces a slew of new badges for the bad guys. Heroes are getting a few new ones in I5.

That's a wrap.