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.

Besides using Beanbag for some CC against certain mobs, blasters can pair it up with another stun power from their secondary, like Stun or Fracture. Being able to shut down a boss is a huge boost to survivability. Assault Rifle really needed Aim, but losing the disorient power is going to hurt a lot. The question is: where to squeeze it back in? Turning Slug into the Sentinel's Disorienting Shot would be a little much. The new Incinerator still comes out a bit weaker than other tier 3 blasts. It doesn't really make sense for it to stun but you could tack it on there.

Man, here's a weird one. An old-style Rikti Chief Soldier will randomly spawn on Lost missions. This was spotted on a +0/x2 level 28 mission. It was in the Ouroborus arc but probably can happen anywhere. I don't know if this always happens with the Lost or just specifically on x2 spawns. There were several boss spawns, and most of them were Pariah Anchorites in the combat idle stance. I suspect that instead of the alternate bosses being Pariah Prelates like normal, they were appearing as the old Chief Soldiers instead. I saw two of them on this mission, and both times they were standing around doing the "FlashlightUp" emote. Just to confuse things, there was a third spawn of a Chief Soldier with the modern armor as well. This guy was in the combat idle stance like the other Lost bosses. Naturally, he shouldn't have been here either since Lost don't turn into Rikti until level 30.

Thank you for removing the constant hum from Infiltration, but could we do the same for Field Operative in Devices? It's one of the Blaster "sustain" powers so you pretty much have to run it full time... kind of annoying.

Instant Healing is functionally the godmode click of the set, with Moment of Glory being changed to more of a Build-Up for defense. If you stop thinking about the set as it was at launch, and focus on how it performs right now, it's fine. Instant Healing kicks your regen up +1000% which is more than enough to heal away incoming damage unless you're doing something you shouldn't be. My experience on my Savage/Regen scrapper is that is performs about as well as any other protection set. Having said that, Regen is hot garbage on the way up. Regen just does not DO anything for you unless you have everything fully slotted out, and that's the real problem with the set. There's a big difference between 25% and 50% healing from Reconstruction, especially if you're also short on enhancement slots and can't crank up the recharge. Resilience isn't much, but it really should be available earlier. Ditto for Moment of Glory. Push back Quick Recovery to the 20s, which is about where scrapper endurance problems kick in anyway, and shift Instant Healing to tier 9 like it should be.

I figured it out. The Capo Heavy is a lazy copy/paste of the Resistance Heavy Barrel Elite, since they're both using the same gun. He's using an exact copy of Devices/Targeting Drone, so he's rocking a +18.5% tohit bonus. However, his attacks also have the wrong type. The Resistance Heavy Barrel's gun does smashing/lethal damage. The Capo Heavy changes the damage type to energy, but accidentally kept the old damage type. Straight from the horse's mouth: Note the Attack Types line. It's marked AoE and lethal, so it never looks at your energy defense. Whoopsie-doodle.

Did something change with the way the game handles saved power customization files? Old costumes and power customizations that I brought over from the original City of Heroes work fine. However, several power customizations that I saved back in 2019 now load in with "invalid" colors and default everything to a dark red color. When you edit these in Notepad, the saved color values don't match the old/current color values that are normally used. Was the game saving power colors in a different format for a while there? Is there a way to get the game to go back to "rounding" these color values up to the closest valid color so I don't have to redo all of these again?

Shiver is only going to pay off in an extended fight. It could have some utility while trying to solo EBs, but pretty much everything else is going to get the Freeze Ray combo. I suspect that any situation where slowing the enemy would be useful, your main blasts will be sufficient, and where it won't work, Shiver isn't going to help. Might be good for other blasters, but not Ice/Ice.

A couple other bits of advice: Lean hard on Caltrops. Most enemies want to run up to engage in melee. When they hit your caltrops field, they'll change their minds and try to get out of the ouchie instead. While they're doing this, their AI is focused on escaping instead of attacking, making it very effective soft control (especially if their ranged attacks are on a slow recharge). This pretty critical versus bosses, with all their burst damage power. Penetrating Ray looks like an AoE attack, but the extra targets are just a nice knock-on bonus. You're mostly using it as a single target attack versus disintegrated targets. You already know that you get some bonus damage when zapping disintegrating targets, but Penetrating Ray doesn't advertise that THIS attack does 33% more damage to a disintegrating enemy. It's also a good opener because of the -res. Don't skip this one. You may find Gun Drone more useful than I have, but I'm about to drop it from my build. It doesn't like to engage at the ranges I prefer, and half the time it's facing the wrong way and literally can't see the enemies, instead floating there and doing nothing. You could toss it into a build as a stat stick for IO set bonuses, but I'm not getting much utility out of it. Here's one of those "unlimited budget" builds I put together for myself as my blaster approaches 50, to give you some idea of how other people have been setting up their builds: Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.962 http://www.cohplanner.com/ Click this DataLink to open the build! Alpha Facto: Level 50 Technology Blaster Primary Power Set: Beam Rifle Secondary Power Set: Devices Power Pool: Flight Power Pool: Teleportation Ancillary Pool: Munitions Mastery Hero Profile: Level 1: Single Shot -- Thn-Acc/Dmg(A), Thn-Dmg/EndRdx(3), Thn-Dmg/Rchg(9), Thn-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(50) Level 1: Web Grenade -- Acc(A) Level 2: Charged Shot -- Dvs-Acc/Dmg(A), Dvs-Dmg/EndRdx(3), Dvs-Dmg/Rchg(5), Dvs-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(17), Dvs-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(37) Level 4: Cutting Beam -- Ann-Acc/Dmg(A), Ann-Dmg/Rchg(5), Ann-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(9), Ann-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(23), Ann-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(36), Ann-ResDeb%(46) Level 6: Disintegrate -- Dcm-Acc/Dmg(A), Dcm-Dmg/EndRdx(7), Dcm-Dmg/Rchg(7), Dcm-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg(11), Dcm-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(34), Dcm-Build%(40) Level 8: Fly -- Flight(A) Level 10: Targeting Drone -- AdjTrg-ToHit/EndRdx/Rchg(A), AdjTrg-ToHit/EndRdx(11) Level 12: Lancer Shot -- Thn-Dmg/Rchg(A), Thn-Dmg/EndRdx(13), Thn-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(13), Thn-Acc/Dmg(17), Thn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(31), Thn-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(37) Level 14: Aim -- GssSynFr--ToHit(A), GssSynFr--ToHit/Rchg(15), GssSynFr--ToHit/Rchg/EndRdx(15), GssSynFr--Rchg/EndRdx(25), GssSynFr--ToHit/EndRdx(48), GssSynFr--Build%(50) Level 16: Smoke Grenade -- ToHitDeb-I(A) Level 18: Penetrating Ray -- ExcCnt-Acc/Dmg(A), ExcCnt-Dmg/EndRdx(19), ExcCnt-Dmg/ActRdx(19), ExcCnt-Dmg/Rng(23), ExcCnt-Dmg/Rchg(37), ExcCnt-Stun%(40) Level 20: Field Operative -- ShlWal-ResDam/Re TP(A), Prv-Absorb%(21), Prv-Heal(21), Prv-Heal/EndRdx(25), Prv-Heal/Rchg(36) Level 22: Caltrops -- RechRdx(A) Level 24: Hover -- Krm-ResKB(A) Level 26: Piercing Beam -- BlsWrt-Acc/Dmg(A), BlsWrt-Dmg/Rchg(27), BlsWrt-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(27), BlsWrt-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(29), BlsWrt-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(36), BlsWrt-Rchg/Dam%(40) Level 28: Taser -- Thn-Acc/Dmg(A), Thn-Dmg/EndRdx(29), Thn-Dmg/Rchg(31), Thn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(31) Level 30: Afterburner -- Flight-I(A) Level 32: Overcharge -- PstBls-Acc/Dmg(A), PstBls-Dmg/EndRdx(33), PstBls-Dmg/Rchg(33), PstBls-Dmg/Rng(33), PstBls-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(34), PstBls-Dam%(34) Level 35: Cryo Freeze Ray -- EssofCrr-Acc/Rchg(A), EssofCrr-EndRdx/Hold(42), EssofCrr-Acc/EndRdx(43), EssofCrr-Acc/Hold/Rchg(43) Level 38: Time Bomb -- ScrDrv-Acc/Dmg(A), ScrDrv-Dmg/EndRdx(39), ScrDrv-Dmg/Rchg(39), ScrDrv-Acc/Rchg(39), ScrDrv-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(50) Level 41: Body Armor -- GldArm-ResDam(A), GldArm-Res/Rech/End(42), GldArm-End/Res(42), GldArm-3defTpProc(43), GldArm-RechEnd(48), GldArm-RechRes(48) Level 44: LRM Rocket -- Ann-Acc/Dmg(A), Ann-Dmg/Rchg(45), Ann-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(45), Ann-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(45), Ann-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(46), Ann-ResDeb%(46) Level 47: Recall Friend -- EndRdx(A) Level 49: Surveillance -- RechRdx-I(A) Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A) Level 1: Defiance Level 1: Prestige Power Dash -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Slide -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Quick -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Rush -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Surge -- Empty(A) Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A) Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A) Level 4: Ninja Run Level 2: Swift -- Flight(A) Level 2: Health -- Pnc-Heal/+End(A) Level 2: Hurdle -- Jump(A) Level 2: Stamina -- EndMod(A) ------------

/Devices doesn't get Build-Up. At some point, the idea was that Targetting Drones would give Devices a bump in overall damage output, by letting those blasters use a quick snipe as part of their attack rotation all the time, while everyone else had only limited access to a quick snipe. That hasn't worked out in practice, and every blaster can get 22% tohit via Tactics and other bonuses if they try really hard. Plus, if we're giving quick snipes to everyone, Devices is back to having nothing in compensation. All that bonus accuracy is extremely helpful while levelling up, but the power creep of IOs makes it a useless benefit at high levels. Again, Trip Mine is of questionable utility, Time Bomb is straight up useless, and Taser is inferior to options granted by every other secondary. Basically, the sniper changes made the flaws of Devices more and more obvious, so might as well fix things up while we're in there. I'd still rather have Energy Punch and Total Focus, but death taser and a suitcase nuke will suffice.

In sufficiently large groups, the tanker might not be able to grab the entire crowd at once. The enemies will be focused on him, but not actually taunted. Then you drop a big AoE, and things get interesting. For that matter, the teams you've joined may just be playing it safe. A lot of teams will run at a much lower difficulty level than they're capable of handling, and bluntly, that's super boring. As a Beam Rifle blaster, if you don't actually need me to delete a couple bosses for you, you don't have it cranked up high enough. I'm just along for the ride at that point.