MTeague

I do not like Incarnates. At all. Period. Full stop. I accept that they are not going away. But so long as they remain, I oppose any kind of "let everything scale up to lvl 50", because if that ever happens, I'll basically never find another team I actually want to join, ever again. Because EVERYONE will be lvl 50 and incarnated out the wazoo trivializing everything even during flashbacks. And I really hope for at least 1/3 to 1/2 of all new content be designed for levels 1-44.

Philosophically, for game balance, the characters with the strongest offensive powers should have the weakest defense. The characters who can basically never die should have the lowest damage output. That is the source of why I dislike the idea of handing out toggle mez protection to squishies. Honestly, if it were up to me, I would remove all P2W amplifiers from the game, forevermore, putting nothing in their place, starting tomorrow. They're an INF sink sure, but they're unbalancing and just lead to more people speeding to 50 and then being bored after they've sped lots of characters to 50. I'd make a lot of other changes that many posters would really hate if it were up to me as well. There's still enough of what I think the game should be that I still enjoy it. But every bit of power creep, even reading theorectical proposals like "why can't I have access to my Alpha even when I'm exemplared", eats away at this. Maybe I'm hitting a burnout phase after playing nonstop since Jun 2019 and need to pause it for a bit. These things happen. But my kneejerk reaction was "sure we can do this, as long as that same toggle that gives you mez protection, drops your damage output by 50% and disables all damage procs", in a very spiteful way to offer a deal I'm sure NO ONE would ever accept.

I do not leave the Tutorial without at least a 900 character bio, and most are within 5 characters of the limit. I obsess over deleting spaces between words, and then re-adding a single space between them, to reclaim characters falsely consumed by the wacky editor. Sometimes I recover 200 characters because of that. I do sometimes wish there was 1024 characters for your origin story, and 1024 characters for "what have you been up to lately?". Because by the time I'm lvl 39 or so, that maxed out bio I had leaving the tutorial feels like it's missing a lot of significant events that have happened since they arrived, but I'm FAR too attached to the existing bio to even consider slashing it down or replacing it.

I'm aware I'm in the VERY distinct minority, but I actually like Regen *exactly as it is* and I don't even think it needs to be 'fixed'. For an armor set that provides Resistance/Defense via Clicks..... Conceptually, I immediately think of Shields. How in a lot of other games you have to actively manage use of your shield in combat. Of course, in CoH, "Shield Defense" already exists, and it's unlikely to undergo a wholesale change. But maybe some kind of "Deflection" set? With several powers that provide a Parry-like bonus for X seconds upon use, vs a variety of types? I agree that actual Damage Reflection for some kind of "Critical Deflect" would be wonderful. But extremely hard to balance if it actually did the attack's incoming damage to the attacker. It would probably be both easier to implement, and easier to balance, if it did a FIXED amount of damage to the attacker.

This. I remember seeing a similar idea floated for expanding on "Winter-O's." That is, add Spring-O', Summer-O's, Autumn-O's. BUT, you could never have more than one "Season" slotted at a time. If you slot any Spring-O's, you could not slot ANY Winter-O's, and vice versa. A scheme like that, I could support. Even some variation on that, but which still limited you to the same number of grand total "Superior" sets that any one character could slot.

I have yet to make a single Stone Armor character specifically because I want to see my shiny costumes that I spent so much work on, and just always seeing a slab of granite run around, no matter how impressive it looks, would bother me to be visibly indistinguishable from any other granite tank from that point onward. Some day I may make a Stone Armor character that just doesn't take Granite armor at all. ONLY uses the lower level toggles, even at lvl 50. But my heart just isn't in it sufficiently, not with my other backlog to chew through.

Them's fightin' words. 🤬

I do have my difficulty set so that AV's will become EB's if they are permitted to. But if you're talking the Mender Silos Task Force, yes, I "Solo'd" it on a Mind/Kin controller, along with spending 4 charges of Shivan Shard, speed boosting my Shivan, spam-casting Transfusion AND Transference, Fulcrum Shift, and Siphon Speed, and whichever heroes remainder around longest. I think Mynx lasted the most. I still went through a TON of large inspirations even so. I won. But honestly? It wasn't worth it. Better to team for it. I'll definitely team it for any other characters I want the win for.

Kinetics/Repel is highly situational, but I've never once considered skipping it. Back in the Old Days, I'd have groups break up while some of us were DEEP in the sewers, or in the middle of the Perez maze. I'd activate Repel and freight-train my way out. It was surprisingly effective as long as you could round a corner before they could shoot you. And in some very low level groups I'd use it to play Goalie in between using Mind Control's Hold + Sleep, keeping stray mobs away from other squishies. Knockback is practically a bad word in some circles nowadays, of course. But man, it used to save the day for folks time and again.

Exactly. Whatever effect it gains, it has to be true for both friendly sleeps that you place on others, and it has to be true for incoming sleeps that enemies place on you. Whatever is done, it has to be applicable every time Tsoo Yellow Ink Men hit players with it, too.

I will say upfront I vastly prefer 1-44 content for exactly this reason. I generally prefer the game before incarnates to after. That said, be aware that in theory you can do what you want today. All you have to do is manually unslot your incarnate powers, and only group with people who are willing to do the same. Would it be easier if there was a checkbox that auto-suppressed them for your group, kind of like the varied Ouroborous challenge mods? You betcha. Would I enjoy it if the devs supplied such a checkbox? You betcha. Is it worth developer time to have them add this, and prioritize it over other items, when a perfectly good workaround exists? I can't say yes, not with a straight face. I would HOPE that code is written in a logically supportable and modular way such that it's just a matter of adding a checkbox and having the code look at that field before enabling incarnates. Intercept at exactly the point where the game says "What incarnate power do you have in your Alpha slot?" and if checkbox is checked, force it to nil / empty. If it could be that simple, it might be worth it as a quick easy extra along with whatever else they have in the pipeline already. But I've read enough horror stories about the City of Heroes source code to know it's probably nowhere NEAR that simple. And the code is probably not modular enough for the devs to really feel good about sneaking that in and being confident there would be an extremely low chance of breaking anything else. (Of course, I'm not a dev, so this is supposition on my part. Who knows? Maybe I'm wrong and it is easy.)

Giant Monsters promoted to new "Kaiju" rank? I'd approve, as long as we're careful about which ones. Ones that spawn via story arcs or TF's /eye Babbage, /eye Kronos, should probably at least have the story-arc versions unchanged.

In today's lesson, you have the opportunity to learn about social inertia, and how difficult it is to change terminology that is already firmly established. Not gonna say it's flat impossible. But probability of success .... slight.

My concern would be, if the procs are changed to +Dmg that ignores Enhancement Diversification, then for those powers where you can slot 5 or so procs, are you basically tossing enhancement diversification out the window entirely? Is that a road the devs really want to go down? And what would the proposed new IO's do for powers that HAVE no base damage at all? (like Cold Domination / Infrigidate ?)

This I would love. I wouldn't really even call it "Gated" content. I'd call it content that grants players some degree of agency, making their choices matter more. I'd hold the idea up as a gold standard of how new content should be designed. But if people are distressed and unsatisified with the current content, I don't see this as a solution per se. Because I'd be shocked if we could get more than 1-2 such branching arcs per year. (though I'd be delighted to be wrong)

Every player has the ability to contribute new content, by means of AE. I say that a bit tongue in cheek because I have yet to really sit down and wrestle with the mission editors seriously. But the reality is, we have a small team of volunteer devs. Count the number of new story arcs and zones that have been implemented since Homecoming went live. I do not expect that pace to increase in the foreseeable future. Homecoming has made clear they want to have a very high professional-grade bar for anything they introduce. I very much respect that. But it takes TIME. And you're dealing with a small all-volunteer dev team, who are contributing their free time after their day jobs, after spending time with their families, to gradually produce something that is up to snuff. I humbly submit to you that is is entirely unrealistic to hope the devs will ever crank out enough new content to keep a player base hungry for new shines happy for very long. Hell, games that have a legion of paid developers and testers usually can't manage that. I really think if you have a hunger for new content, the best thing to do is try to gather like minded people to crowdsource that content and build Story Focused Mission Arcs in AE.

For some people, self imposed limits only go so far. For other people, developer imposed limits become a grindy treadmill that is boring-as-F, for no other reason than to BE grindy. I gave up the treadmills forevermore when I hung up the gloves after eight years of WoW. I will never, ever, EVER, play another game where I *need* several groups of people to accomplish anything I care about. (and no, I do not care about incarnate trials, those have zero appeal to me, I put in my time in Hell during WoW progression raiding). I could quite contentedly play CoH on Homecoming as-is, with zero additional content, for at least three more years, possiblly four, because I'm taking each of my characters through their own storyline. It's not about dinging 50. It's not about incarnates. It's not about badges. It's not about getting drops. It's not about progression. It's roleplay-vs-game for my own internal headcanon for each character. I can milk that for years. I enjoy teaming on a casual basis. I don't mind helping other people out when someone puts a call into LFG chat or General Chat or Help Chat. But I don't ever want to be in any kind of "Guild" ever again, for any purpose, in any game. I prefer to game when I want, for as long as I want, until I feel like what I'm done for that day or maybe that week. I do not want to worry about whether other people are counting on me to log in at particular times or to join them for particular events, ever again.

subtitled, "We are ALL Kosh".

Part of me wants to say that SHOULD be super easy to implement. A new On/Off option somewhere, and just gray out the arrows if off. But I am a programmer by trade, and I have seen spaghetti code that's not just difficult but downright dangerous to try to unravel and "make better". Specfically, the code I'm talking about was code that did drug-drug interaction checking for actual human patients. And GOD HELP YOU, if you touched that code and did something wrong. People could literally die IRL from that. It was eventually burned to ash and replaced by something vastly better that was designed from the ground up to be maintainable / supportable. But several programming teams were stuck like deer in headlights for a couple years at the thought of modifying the old code before it got replaced.

That's a question of perspective. I have seen a few people say, "I got this name on server X, and immediately grabbed the same name on servers, A, B, and C, so I can server transfer without fear of losing the name, and so that this name can be MINE across every server." Now, if you actually PLAY different characters of the same name across each server, I have no bones with that. If you have a lvl 1 name-squatting on servers you generally don't play on just to be name "mules" so you can rename, server transfer, rename back, etc.... hey, okay. It's allowed by the current rules. I can't stay it's wrong as such. But it does strike me as kinda greedily hogging things instead of being content you have that name on one server. But you know, that's just like, my opinion, man.

Account sharing, IMO, would be if the other person actually played your characters for longer than just to login / logout, or if they had other characters on the same account designated "theirs" vs "yours". I would not count it account sharing if it was just "hey, I'm going to be gone for a 18 months, just do me a favor, here's my account info, log in my characters for 2 seconds each on the first of each month while I'm gone.". Perhaps the devs would see it differently though.

https://xkcd.com/386/

I just defeat all enemies and find him between 75% and 99% completion, then go back and defeat any remaining enemies anyway.

Honestly, I don't expect very many names to be freed up even if the Name Release Policy is coded and activated. I think a lot of people are HOPING that many names will be freed up. But I suspect many names will be held by a lvl 50, and not freed. Or it will turn out that the name holder DOES still play, and just plays at wierd hours when you don't see them and chooses not to respond to any email entreaties asking them to consider a name change. That said, I'd still like to see the Name Release Policy put in place so I can stop seeing a thread on it every couple of weeks 🙂

I get what you're saying. They'll be away from home / unable to log in for long periods of time, and if they risked their necks to try to keep the world safe, it would feel pretty raw to have a character their very emotionally invested into just ripped away from them upon return. But honestly, there's no way Homecoming devs are going to know or be able to check which accounts are held by military personnel. Who was deployed on what date, who returned on what date. And if it's turned into an honor system "check this box if you affirm that you are being deployed" somewhere in the account profile, I guarantee you, it won't just be checkboxed by people who are actually military personnel. No matter how much it might offend. Some people would see it in purely transactional "if I check this box, my names are mine forever, even if I log out for a year to play <game name here> and come back later. if I don't check it, I could lose my names." and choose to check it. There isn't going to be any feasible way to do what you're asking and to restrict it to only one group of people in a given real life profession. EDIT: The only solution i can really see, and it's not reliable, is if you're going to be deployed, give your account info to a civilian friend or relative you trust unconditionally and have them log in your characters once every two months or something.