Monkeyking

True, but this is happening to all enemy types, like Council and Warriors.

It's actually an old bug but I just now remembered it while running Striga missions. Council Zenith Mech Men have the audio channels reversed on their energy blasts. When firing to the right of the camera, the sound comes from the left channel, and vice versa. Probably the 5th Column robots too, since it's the same enemy?

Arsenal Assault's Trip Mine is only supposed to knock enemies down instead of back. It's listed as 0.75 knock in-game and on City of Data; a power is only supposed to knock down at 0.75 and lower. Instead, it consistently hurls +0 enemies away when it goes off. It's extremely annoying when trying to use the one-two combo of an area CC then toebombing them, only to scatter the whole crowd.

According to the data at https://cod.uberguy.net, the knockback protection is tied to confusion status, which in turn is tied to the enemies having received damage. So enemies don't get any protection until they're confused and attacking one another. Kind of takes the wind out of the knockback protection, but that's how they did it.

Slotting Sleep Grenade for damage is a sucker's game regardless of AT. If you really want to do a bunch of damage with Sleep Grenade, the power is clearly designed around sticking a bunch of procs in there. The pro strat is 4 or 5 procs with a 60-80% activation rate. The damage component is separate from the cloud's pseudopet specifically for this reason. Likewise, Liquid Nitrogen functionally does zero damage no matter what you do with it; it only inflicts damage when an enemy is knocked down, and only a couple ticks at most (the standing back up animation does not count as knockdown). Really, it ends up looking like Arsenal Control is much better in the hands of Dominators than Controllers. Normally, Dominators take a hit to control duration in exchange for having a secondary that does damage. Arsenal mostly uses pseudopets though, and a Dom's clouds last just as long as a Controller's. Tear Gas loses no strength in a Dom's hands. This is probably why Tri-Cannon got Containment. The Tri-Cannon already vomits out a silly amount of damage. It's probably one of the deadliest control pets in the game right now, thanks to a really short recharge time on its gun, and Controllers get to double that. I don't know if that really evens the playing field, but it's kind of funny that it's the Controller version of the power that does big damage instead of the Dominator's.

I'm pretty sure the main thing holding those pools back is art. HC doesn't have full-time artists working for them, and it takes time to model and animate FX, then import those assets into a very old game engine. Gadgetry sounds like it has a lot of fairly unique power animations like drone swarm attacks. You can't just conjure that up instantly.

The only really surprising numbers here are Controllers. That AT was rather unpopular on live, back in the day, or so I remember. Guess people have turned around on it.

Flamethrower/Ignite FX are misaligned on all of the rifles previously exclusive to Beam Rifle and Robotics Pulse Rifle. This includes: Resistance Rifle Rune Soldier Rifle DUST Cannon Devastator Shock Rifle Shard Rifle The Retro Rifle works by chance because it's got a low hanging grenade barrel (even though Photon Grenade ironically fires from the main barrel) but the fire still looks misaligned. Also, the Remarkable Reliable Rifle is misaligned in a different way, and has the fire a little too high. I took the screen shots in the costume editor, where the power previews are sometimes a little wonky, but this behavior is identical in the real game. Powerset doesn't matter, all the flame-emitting powers appear to use the same flamethrower FX.

I would argue that Super Strength isn't as pick-up-and-go as it should be for such an iconic super hero power, but it's hardly bad at all. People dissing SS likely just don't want to deal with managing Rage crashes, which is fair. I do wonder why they focused on "Hulk smash" and didn't have a more generic "Superman" melee set, though. The alt animations help a bit but Rage is still an odd duck.

The Foundry was made of spaghetti code and literally every patch broke it in some way. The dev who built it is long gone from the company so there's no way they can fix it either. Eventually they just couldn't keep up with trying to fix it every patch. Part of this is because Homecoming may very well have more active devs than Star Trek Online at this point...

Some feedback on the new head options 1. Floating Head/Human Skull matches the animation on normal heads so it will continue facing forwards in the combat stance. You might want to rig up something similar for the Eyeballs options, because they just stare down at the floor while in combat. I'm assuming these are copy/pasted from Globe, where it doesn't matter which way the model is pointing, but you kind of expect a giant floating eyeball to be staring at things! 2. Similar problems for the Think Tank skull and eyeballs. I know you're a little more constrained there so nothing clips through the tank, but it looks like there's plenty of space to make the models move a little. 3. Also, the Think Tank skull and eyeballs are way too small. They could be normal size and still fit in there just fine. 4. I just noticed that head/eyes aura options are locked out for Floating Head. Why is this? You can still get those auras onto Floating Head with shenanigans, and they all look fine. All of the eye auras line up with the floating skull, and it looks appropriately spooky with no head at all. It doesn't look great with the globe and eyeball options, but it's hardly the ugliest thing you can do with the costume editor.

With the long period of silence on the matter, I'd assumed these discussions had stalled out, and Homecoming was just going to sit in its weird state of legal limbo forever. This is astounding and amazing news. Major congrats on re-aliving this game!

I haven't seen this confirmed one way or the other, does mini-mode scale your weapons down as well? Are you a tiny person with a hilariously oversize sword or does the sword shrink to match?

Storm Blast felt weird to play at first because of the non-traditional blast animations, but eventually I got to a pretty decent flow with the set. The basic bread and butter works fine. Blasters would probably like it if Cloudburst did more of its damage up front, with less damage as the DoT portion. That's a personal quibble, though. I feel like Storm Blast needs a blank auto-power that sticks to you, so you can check the info and get a full rundown of the set's mechanics. It was difficult keeping track of how everything interacts. It's hard enough for me to remember what the adaptations in Bio Armor do to every single power. Here, we have to remember what powers do inside the Storm Cell, the lightning interaction with Category Five, and I had to go to City of Data to figure out what the "high winds" do. It's also extremely unclear how Storm Cell should be slotted. Does that power emit the bonus lightning damage, or does that come from powers I shoot into it? Do I want to treat it as a slow or an AoE attack? Testing the power for more than an afternoon would probably make this more obvious, but man this is not a set for newbies. The "correct" usage of the current version of Storm Cell seems to be to ignore the movement and just drop one every fight, since the fully-slotted power is up more or less whenever I need to refresh it. I notice it doesn't alert enemies, which is very welcome. But as others are noting, the big issue is the 15.6 endurance cost. That is a hefty cost for a power I have to throw out every fight. If you're expected to "juice up" your powers every single time with Storm Cell for flavor, that's fine, but it amounts to an endurance tax on the set. Blasters can get away with it depending on how they slot their sustain power, but it's going to be a problem for most defenders and corruptors. I wasn't impressed by Category Five, and it's another case of not really being sure how I'm intended to use it. It takes so long to ramp up, and didn't seem to be doing as much damage at full strength as something like Nova or even Full Auto. My impression was that it's a supercharged Storm Cell, and it was a lot more effective when I treated it like that. And I'm okay with a novel set that leans on two powers making the other basic attacks way more powerful than normal. But it should be signposted somewhere if that's how the set is intended to operate, because this is a way different experience from the other fourteen different blast powers we have.

The copy tool has been down every time I tried to send my Assault Rifle blaster over, so I only recently got to try out the changes. My trip report is pretty positive. Ignite works way better than I was expecting it to. The old burn patch was only really useful for dropping on yourself to scare enemies out of melee range (and trolling your AFK friends). With some tactical target choices, I found I was still able to use to keep enemies away. I'm sure it's going to be controversial, but as a defensive measure the fear is really useful. I see a lot of people complaining when this goes live, though. As the new heavy hitter of the set, you can't really ignore Ignite anymore, and the burn patches are really going to change how the set plays for most people. I'm not a fan of the 2 second cast time, though. AR is a slow set in general, and I'm used to single-target attacks being snappier than this. The visuals also feel off. It's a 60 ft blast but the fire doesn't stretch very far. It looks odd, roasting someone from clear across the room. Numbers wise, the range is also inconsistent with other sets. The third, meatier ST blast in all other sets got bumped to 80 feet a while back. Maybe go back to the incendiary bullet, since it looks weird at range anyway? The faster execution on the other attacks helps the set flow a lot better. Flamethrower and Sniper Rifle are much more usable, though the 0.2s reduction to Slug was barely noticeable. Adding damage to Beanbag is whatever. I'm still slotting it as a mez power, but it's a viable replacement for Burst. The bigger news is dropping the recharge. You can almost lock down a boss with Beanbag alone now. It's probably still an open question whether Aim should replace it, but blasters who actually use control in their toolbox (like me) are going to love this.