MTeague

+1 for Monk reference. also, I thought Get Smart was KAOS agents. But I'll hear what the Chief has to say (under the Cone of Silence, of course...) Water Blast, I've seen several with it colored dull red for a Blood Mage approach if that works for you. Someone earlier mentioned other coloring for Water Blast / Time Manip to make the water look more like Temporal Distorions. (which i supposed makes Hydro Blast, for them, a Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey.... Ball.) But I can totally respect the OCD. It owns me in other arenas, if not CoH.

Given that we can switch between builds for characters, that seems perfectly reasonable to me. My only quibble is the obligatory "FF Defenders can solo right fine!" and the obligatory mention of people doing TF's on solo Empaths, etc. But choices are good, and I'll take as many as I can get. I like the idea of a "solo path" and a "team path" for misc support sets as that no doubt would make things significantly easier to balance than letting players swap out individual powers on a pick-and-choose basis. Not every support set would need it. Poison does right fine solo, as does Trick Arrow. Still. Anything the devs feel like a) it's a direction they want to go in, and b) they feel they can do a professional job on, I'll roll with. Another vote for the virtues of Creative Power Re-coloring, too. I have a Dark / Rad where I wanted inky darkness for the dark blast, not feathery-nethery. So Rad blasts colored Pitch Black, with a secondary color only a shade or two more blue than black. Worked quite well. True, it has no to-hit debuff, but can't have everything.

Minimally, if you gave alternate power selections so you could have *everything* at signifcant range, no cones, not PBAE's, just all range and targetted AE's, I would expect those alternate powers to be either single target or scaled down quite a bit in damage. You may not like Fire Sword Circle, but if there was a ranged alternative (Fire Knife Barrage?), it would be unfair for it to hit just as many targets, just as hard, with no risk to you, etc.

I am once again reminded that dogs are better people than a sizeable chunk of my own species. I mean, dogs aren't exactly great conversationalists, and I'm sure if I was squirrel, I'd have a very dim view of dogs, too. But man. Kinda stinks that everyone who runs a server just has to assume there will be literally nonstop hacking attemps 24/7/365 by automated code.

Like wrist cannons for blast sets! Or hockey sticks for staff fighting! Or giving "Kick" from Fighting power pool a Storm Kick animation! The Really Important Stuff 😁

Homecoming also went and refactored a lot of code under the hood for long term performance, stablity, and supportability. The third party code from other CoH servers that doesn't have that would probably be relying on functions that no longer exist, with arguments that are no longer valid. Definitely would not be a cut-n-paste job.

I only ever used ignore for the influence sellers back in the day. Anything else, be it forums on chats, I'm too firmly fixed on the "disagree with what you say, defend to the death your right to say it". Though I've certainly seen a fair share of folks who I've decided are far too obnoxious to ever consider teaming with for anything.

This, I would support. I don't have many characters I'd use option on... but I do have a few. And really, skipping Jab but taking ... what? Flurry? Jump Kick? Boxing? I'm not feeling anything wildly OP here.

I would be shocked if Permadom can be achieved while levelling (ie, in the 30's) without Hasten. But at 50's, with Purples and Winter-O's and ATO's? Wouldn't surprise me. I do take the long slow road deliberately when levelling my characters though. I'm like the exact opposite of powerleveller. I disable XP the moment I join a group to preserve my story arcs upon levelling, and I flashback a lot after lvl 50 to get more that I missed while on the way up.

This I can work with. If the real issue is "how can I squeeze in more recharge / without hasten on a character with X powersets", I'm sure we can come up with many answers. Or if really the core problem is "survivability while X cooldowns are down", that can be addressed too. Hasten is still a good min/max choice, don't get me wrong. But there's options. /Ice scrapper should have loads of Defense already, so certainly your slotting can focus much more on +Recharge. Adrenal Boost and Unleash Potential are both excellent., though of course you can only have one. I tend to think of Defensiive characters in terms of my /SR scrapper. That's not always a fair comparison, but it's what I reach for. SR's scaling resist is excellent. /Ice won't have that. But slotting for +Resist to go with existing high +Defense doesn't hurt. And don't overlook Medicine. /SR and /Ice can both use that *very* safely in combat. There's no guarantees on RNG of course, but it'll go off a LOT of the time. Certainly grab some of the procs that give you passive +healing, Panacea, Power Shifter, if you don't already have them. Maintence heals that just happen are nice.

Hasten is very useful. It is not mandatory. It is entirely possible to build a viable character without it. If you are incapable of setting aside the siren song of Min/Max to just experiment and have fun with other choices, that's on you. This isn't exactly Super High End Progression Raiding where if even one character out of an entire guild has anything less than optimal, it's a guaranteed wipe. Have fun with other choices. Or don't. Personally, if any changes were made with regard to hasten at all, I'd prefer it be nerfed into the stone age, on par with every other regular pool power. That will never happen, of course. But I also firmly oppose baselining it.

I sort of feel like every player kind of imagines their entire squad of heroes being one faction, and any redsiders they have being another faction, and somewhere in the back of their head, is a plan drifting for a Final Showdown. I certainly do, anyway. I'd love to have missions where you're solo, but the game looks through YOUR CHARACTER ROSTER, and picks 2-3 allies to be NPC controlled during the mission., and be facing some a lineup of either standard NPC villians, OR, an option to have the game look through YOUR CHARACTER ROSTER, and pick 3-4 opponents of a different faction. (Heroes fighting Heroes could be done I suppose, but seems more logical for Heroes vs Villains or Praetorians). It wouldn't be able to do the banter / trashtalking right though, since the game can never know the personality that my headcanon has for each character.

I'd love wrist mounted cannons liked the PPD hard suits have, though I get that any animation needs to be able to work on any costume picks.

Some folks don't do incarnates and don't rush-level to 50. First Ward and Night Ward, at lvl 27, solo, you have to be careful when running +2/x3 with bosses. The Shepherds and the Awakened are no jokes.

Serious sad day for Sci-Fi fans everywhere. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-55763658

Wait.... people do Petless MM's that *AREN'T* Whip-Based? (or Thugs, for the old days before Dual Pistols....)

Really, if I was going to do a "Pool Boy" character, I'd try to run with an Empath or other support class to keep Clear Mind on him. Even if a lot of posted builds are designed to be able to solo anything, there's no shame in having a weakness that a Support character can...well.... SUPPORT....you by covering that gap with a buff.

I've had a couple characters get to 50 without being Entrusted, just to get the badge by some Recluse's Victory action.

If you enjoy Patron powers, that's great. I virtually NEVER take them, ever, not even on my villains. I do not care how handy Scorpion Shield can be. I do not want someone ELSE's powers on my character. I want powers that thematically fit my character. And I would never ever take an Arachnos pet summon power unless I was going ot STAY redside, and even then, not unless I was a Widow/Soldier. I'd far rather see expanded selection of Epic Pools to fill the gaps (Electrical Epic sets for AT's with no electric option, Psychic Epic sets for AT's with no Psychic option, etc)

Watch out! That Hellion's got a vicious streak a mile wide! Look at the BONES, man!!!

It's kind of a pity HC isn't allowed to have subscription fees. One thing about the old subscription model. When people were DONE, they'd tell NCSoft to halt billing and forget their credit card number. THAT, is a pretty straightforward definition of an inactive account. Since we do not / cannot have that here, then I'm fine with "haven't logged in X days", though I do feel it should be by Account, not by Character. 50's....eh. I admit some of that because I deliberately level slowly and immediately disable XP on joining a team. It'll be a long time before I have many 50's. If any exemptions were to be added, I'd much rather see it in terms of "hours played" rather than "XP earned".

You have absolute freedom to rate the name as Crap-tastic, as long as you remember it's only your own personal rating. Would I get the in the person's face about it and tell them "Your name IS BAD and should FEEL BAD!"? No. Well, not unless it's someone I know in real life. And there's like, two CoH players I can say that about. One of whom is my RL brother. I'm allowed to give him grief. Hell, brothers are practically REQUIRED to give each other a little bit of grief 🙂 But for everyone else, no. II have no idea if the player is a kid or not. I have no idea if the player gives two bleeps about theme, or just typed in something becuase they wanted to get in and play the game NOW. Maybe they simply don't care, and maybe then just needed to blow off steam and punch baddies, and plan to deal with the rename screen to struggle for a better name later in the week. None-a-my-business. But I do reserve the right to judge names, and facepalm at the screen, even if I do so in silence. 🙂

How I responded would depend greatly on the name in question. I have 40 characters total. 15 or so names I have that I'm "meh" on, and if it was a big deal to someone, I'd probably relinquish one of those 15. The other 25 are mine until the sun explodes, or until the devs change their policies such that the name can be taken out from under me. I'd be polite on that first refusal, saying "Nope, sorry, I'm very attached to that name, and I got it first. That's the way it goes." Followup questions asking if I had the name on live and if so for how long, or offering me influence (or anything else) to relinquish the name, would be met with /gignore. For those 25 names it is not a matter of barter. It matters to me to have them. I will not willingly relinquish them. Ever. That said, I do only take names on one server, even for names I'm very attached to. As long as I have the name on the server where I play, it's no skin off my nose if someone else has that same name on a different server.

I think this is quite reasonable. But I also think this would fail to make the issue go away. Because when people don't get the names they want, they'll automatically assume beyond anyone's power to convince them otherwise, that the name exists on a defunct account on a character who was powerlevelled to 50 in a single weekend, and still complain that it's "unjust for them to keep that name". I'll happily be proven wrong. But that's my honest prediction of the outcome. We'd still see threads about this every other week.

I've already got 40 names that I'm happy with, and honestly, given that I deliberately level slowly, and disable XP whenever I join a team, I would prefer limits based on Account activity far more than anything based on Character level. It will be a very long time before I get all 40 characters up to lvl 50. That said, I really do think there's a TON of projection going on on this topic. I'll be very surprised if lots of "choice names" suddenly become freed up. I think it's very much human nature to assume the name you want but can't get is just inches away behind an unlock policy. It could very easily be the holder of the name is an active player, doesn't play when you play, maybe only logs on a few times a month, and simply doesn't respond to any in-game emails asking for them to rename their character. I'll trust whatever decision the GM's come up with. I'm also gratified to know they're approaching it *very* cautiously.