City of Villains: Patron Power Q&A: Scirocco

Dana

In Q&A three of five, we look at what the followers of Scirocco can expect in Issue Seven. Scirocco joins Ghost Widow, Captain Mako and Black Scorpion to provide his villains with a host of unique powers. Lead Designer Matt Miller answers our questions.

MMORPG.com: What is Scirocco’s back story? How did he come to be in service of Arachnos? Matt Miller: Imad Malak was traveling in the deep desert near the Baka Valley deep in the Middle East, fleeing mercenary death squads when he discovered an ancient tomb and stumbled inside. The tomb was that of a long-dead desert hero, and within Malak found the hero's scimitar, an ancient weapon that granted the wielder incredible powers. Malak took the sword and donned the mantle of Scirocco, the Desert Wind. He intended to use the power to free his people, but unfortunately, in taking the items he fell under a curse. Everything he did was now tainted, and only brought greater evil to the world. Once a hero of the people, he became a dark stain on their proud heritage, and was cast out. Scirocco continued fighting, earning a grim reputation both for his phenomenal powers, and for retaining some vestige of Imad's old principles. He soon came to the attention of Arachnos, and accepted the invitation to join Lord Recluse's inner circle.

You can read the Q&A here.

damian7

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Originally posted by Lepidus


In Q&A three of five, we look at what the followers of Scirocco can expect in Issue Seven. Scirocco joins Ghost Widow, Captain Mako and Black Scorpion to provide his villains with a host of unique powers. Lead Designer Matt Miller answers our questions.






MMORPG.com: What is Scirocco’s back story? How did he come to be in service of Arachnos?


Matt Miller: Imad Malak was traveling in the deep desert near the Baka Valley deep in the Middle East, fleeing mercenary death squads when he discovered an ancient tomb and stumbled inside. The tomb was that of a long-dead desert hero, and within Malak found the hero's scimitar, an ancient weapon that granted the wielder incredible powers. Malak took the sword and donned the mantle of Scirocco, the Desert Wind. He intended to use the power to free his people, but unfortunately, in taking the items he fell under a curse. Everything he did was now tainted, and only brought greater evil to the world. Once a hero of the people, he became a dark stain on their proud heritage, and was cast out. Scirocco continued fighting, earning a grim reputation both for his phenomenal powers, and for retaining some vestige of Imad's old principles. He soon came to the attention of Arachnos, and accepted the invitation to join Lord Recluse's inner circle.
You can read the Q&A here.

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ya know, we could probably save you guys a lot of time.  each of these patrons pretty much gives the same powers to the different arch types, the only differences are they are based on a different powerset (dark, electric, et cetera) and look differently because of that.

pretty much just like the patron descriptions on the cox page below.

http://www.cityofvillains.com/feature_update_issue_7f.html

origins for ghost widow, black scorpion and mako are below.

http://www.cityofvillains.com/gameinfo/ghost_widow.html

cox people haven't bothered to finish putting origins up for the big bads.  too busy giving canned interviews.  do they pass out a list of 20 questions and say *choose from these to ask* ?  reason i ask, 95% of every interview for i7 is um, well, the same no matter where you go to read it.


maybe someone could ask questions we WANT answers to?  like for masterminds, why do masterminds get saddled with gimped blast attacks and personal armor?  if an MM is getting attacked, then that mm kinda messed up and is doing something wrong.  they have the least life of anyone ingame.  a TOGGLE armor does you no good whatsoever.  how about asking why MM was given a single person toggle armor?  why a mastermind, who's definition is he's the guy behind the army, pulling the strings, buffing his buds and debuffing his enemies, gets NOTHING to enhance any of his REAL powers, while all the other ATs get patron powers that DO enhance things they already do WELL. 

notice i said do WELL, not just things they do.  MMs do NOT blast well, they have a 55% power blast, so it's something they do POORLY, and normally you take an mm blast for 1 fun 2 character concept 3 you took a gimped secondary like trick arrow and your other choice is flash arrow (which is broken, no notes about it getting fixed and is a complete waste of a power. 


why is stalker's hide effectively being nerfed to near-uselessness with the heroes getting a HUGE perception bonus?


there's a ton of nerfs coming with i7, just like every issue.  maybe someone doing an interview could ask why every issue has a ton of documented nerfs and a bunch of undocumented nerfs.  why this game's developers always nerf powers instead of buffing up other things?   why 80%+ of the builds from issue 3/4 are fairly useless now (hence all the free respecs that get passed out with every new issue). 

in wow, when they put out new issues/patches, they work on a single class each time.  this class will be redone.  say the latest patch, it was for priests.  holy was the tree you took if you wanted to be a *healer* and it was pretty gimped for everything else.  well, they redid it so that you can do things other than just heal a lot better if you put a lot of points into it.  thusly, they gave priests a free respec so if they wanted to take advantage of the changes, they could.   they didn't gimp the priest class and go "oops, here's you a do over".  nor did they gimp so much that they gave free respecs to everyone.


the interview is good because it answers a question about an origin story that isn't answered on the official site.  said origin should've been on their site ooooooooo before retail or shortly thereafter.  but here again, we see how much this gaming company REALLY cares about keeping their playerbase informed, or giving new content, fleshing out the stories behind the pixels.  et cetera.

i'm sorry if they do give interviewers a list of questions they'll answer.  that honestly wouldn't surprise me at all.  if they don't, then i feel sorry for all you folks out there that have interviewers who ask fluff questions, 75% of which are already answered on the official site.

anyone that plays this game and expects it to be a GOOD game and an industry leader, would not give them good reviews because of things i've listed in my posts and blog about this game and because they are as bad as sony about ignoring the players and just nerfing/changing things in a way that no one cares for.


fanbois will have a different view.   keep in mind, that's what defines a fanboi.  fanbois loved every change (and still do) in swg.  fanbois and people really new to MMOs are the only ones left playing swg.  everything that made it different and special is now gone.  you can have just as much fun playing a random 360 game at this point.

again thanks for the origin story, and ask questions we don't already know the answers to and questions we WANT to know the answers to.


play a game for at least 2-3 months and familiarize yourself with the game's forums and playerbase.  then you'll have interviews where people are like "wow, i've always wanted to know that" and "wow, the devs give the same non answers to interviewers as they give to us".

Dark_Lord_13

Damian,

While I understand exactly what you are saying, and agree with you to some degree.  I don't think I'd go as far as to compare them to sony.  It would almost be impossible to duplicate sony's debocle.  However I have complained before about the "nerfs" and about how WoW seems to be one of the only and few MMO companies who have it right, as far as nerfs actually being buffs not nerfs.  I don't quite see where that comes into play on this particular issue.  I think, the complaint is more about how the CoH dev team and public relations are operating. 

I agree, the information should have been up long ago.  I agree, the answers to the questions about I7 seem to be carbon copied handouts.  I'll give them these two things however. 

1. there's only so much they can include about the patch.  And still keep it somewhat surprising when they release it.

2. you know they are also throwing around ideas for I8 etc.  so you don't want one of your team going out on a limb and saying like, "yea, we plan on making Ice shields uber."  and then they change their mind about the uberization before the acutal issue.  Since most fans only read about half of the article anyway, or less.  They'll be expecting Ice shields to be uber in I7 (just watch Broadcast for confermation on that.)  when in fact they were only planning on making them uber in I8 or maybe even I9.  AND they decided to can the idea after the release of I7 for some other idea which maybe better maybe not.  But then they loose player base for the EXACT same reason Sony does, and that's broken promises.

So although I understand, and to some degree agree with you.  I also am patient and feel the complaints, although not completely unfounded, are a little brash.

Just my $0.02

Dana

damian,

The theme of the interviews is the patron powers. I'm sorry this is upsetting, but when we set a theme, it is nice to stick to it. Nonetheless, we'll keep your other issues in mind for future interviews where they might fall under the topic.

aaronmanzero

i really think MM's should get extra pets in all this i know its tough but seems unfair. I am still loyal to game just think MM should get the extra pet to.