City Of Heroes: Thank you - and SS and SJ news!

Statesman stopped by the Official City of Heroes boards with some new info about SuperSpeed and SuperJump. Here's what he had to say:

First of all, thank you for everyone who got on the Training Room server and gave us feedback. It was always appreciated.

Secondly, I've got some news for the Superspeed and Super Jump crowd. The Accuracy debuff, though only equal to Flight, has negatively impacted players' gameplay. I challenged myself and our team to come up with a possible alternative to a flat out debuff - and yet still address the PvE and PvP issues with both powers.

Our solution: suppression. When someone attacks, they temporarily suppress their speed or leaping - making them temporarily vulnerable to attack (and we've removed the accuracy debuff). We're playtesting it internally now and we hope to get it up to the Training Room server for your input ASAP.

Inevitably: so why did we push the update live? Basically, some problems are "showstoppers" and others aren't. Yes, the Accuracy debuff is unpopular (as most power tweaks or nerfs are perceived), but it doesn't cripple the game. I didn't think that this single problem should derail our publishing process.

Now - Scrappers and defensive sets. Yes, there are discrepancies overall in some of the capabilties of the defensive sets. That's pretty obvious from our posting of internal test results. And yes, some of the already disadvantaged sets received balance changes. Basically, we are now looking at all the defensive sets and trying to bring balance to them all. In short, I understand that there are imbalances and we are working on them.

Lastly, let me talk about balance and fun. Balance for the sake of balance is useless - there needs to be a goal. In this case, the goal is fun. Right now, certain Archetypes and builds laugh at missions set on the HIGHEST difficulty levels. So, they eschew missions. Just don't do them. They completely bypass that content and instead hit the streets in order to find a worthwhile challenge. And missions are some of the best parts of the game! Now, you can say that this isn't true - and I'm sure that it's a subjective thing. But missions offer the same variety as street spawns, but new art, new objectives, etc. When people seek challenges on the street only, they're missing some of the best fun.

The obvious comeback - "make missions harder" - we did. Players can ramp a mission up to +4 levels. And there some hard caps on what else can be done on that level. "Make mobs harder" - we tried that with bosses in I3 and the forums didn't like it much.

So are we nerf happy? Are we dooooommmmmeeedd? I've always said that risk = reward. What does that mean? Well, once we do some more internal testing and put stuff up on the Training Room server, I'll be able to explain that better.

Here's the Thread