MTeague

I strongly suspect it's an issue with your internet. I don't think I've experienced rubberbanding, ever, since ... Oct 2019? Or so? and I've played it a lot this past year. I get that it's GOT to be frustrating as hell. I remember dealing with Rubberbanding issue in EverQuest, Diablo2, and WoW, and man o man, it SUCKED. I do not mean to pooh-pooh the issue. But I don't see how it can be an issue on the Homecoming side of things.

I've been a programmer for 25 years. I have ABSOLUTELY no fear of a Skynet situation. Experience has shown me, time and time again, that All Code Is Bad <--- not mine, but a HILAROUSLY TRUE rant If an AI does begin to emerge, it will die, choking on bugs, it's last thoughts being "Why? Why does bad code happen to good people!?" as the uncaring sky fades to black.

Scrapperlock Haiku!

Absolutely, right there with you. Once upon a time, I saw this mission wipe teams. We're talking before IO's. SO's only. No inherent fitness. And probably wasn't the best config'd team. The first few waves? Easy Peasy. Next few? Easy Peasy. Then people starting running out of END. And kill speed plummetted. And Red Caps were diving into the earth and promoting themselves to Lieutenants and Bosses, because we couldn't kill them fast enough while scrapping the bottom of the barrel in need of END. It hit a point of no return when there were over 8 bosses at once, throwing gnomes on our heads to blind us and dogpiling on. Later on, with a team that was actually prepped for that mission, and which had sufficient boosts to END recovery (Empath + Rad defenders), that team stomped the bejeezus out of it. Now, today? With IO's? Panacea Procs and Perf Shifter Proc's being almost standard? Not so much. Now, it's largely a joke. You're not going to hit a point where you start hemmoraging END and suddenly everyone's DPS hits the floor. But once upon a time? It was possible.

the chosen one who will bring balance to the equation?

I should. I'm not going to use any of the P2W amplifiers though. Logical or not, it's a thing.

I'm mostly okay soloing my Blasters, but am stuck on one particular First Ward mission at the moment. (the one were Katie teleports you into the Asylum and there's endless waves of laser guided seers). Admittedly, it really doesn't help that I've got it set at +1x2 with Bosses, and I'm being a Stubborn Idjit who refuses to consider lowering that. But I was able to manage every prior mission in First Ward that way, so realllly reluctant to accept reality now.

Most of my Sentinel's live in melee range anyway, so the existing toggles are fine by me. It may vary a bit depending on your primary.

If you have a character that is a shapeshifter (concept wise, of course...) Use Assymetrical Gloves Then use the Cosmic Corsair Hook for both right AND left hands. Then use Savage Melee. It looks significantly more brutal.

Uncomfortable animations. Knocking down a male enemy with Eye of the Storm (staff fighting) and then using Innocuous Strikes, jabbing him....well... someplace you don't want to be jabbed... with a BLADED spear. Astonishingly, he got up after that and kept fighting! THAT's some serious hardcore training for the D.U.S.T. Soldiers.

So, May is the "Anniversary Event", like October having Halloween, or December having the Winter event. I can work with that.

If it affected combat, I would have to tell them. If it doesn't affect combat in any way shape or form..... it becomes much easier to rationlize

"Sprocket Man" (and I think it's gonna be a long, long time...)

I .... like.... these missions.... most of that though, I guess is really nostalgia from doing them before IO's ever existed. At SO's, on a medium ("Rugged") difficulty setting, I saw them give a few teams trouble. Never again, after all the changes that have happened since then though.

There's already a stone-like look. The texture isn't 100% the same, but it's not bad.

Female boots with non-high-heel options, and that didn't SOUND like heels when moving. I mean, if she's wearing COMBAT BOOTS, or Sneakers, why it gotta sound like heels?

This is a huuuuge part of why I use the option to disable XP so much. It's not the only reason; as much as I know I *can* go back later to do Safeguards and Mayhems I missed levelling up, I do like them, and I don't want to miss any as I level. but it's so easy to completely outlevel phase 2 of a long story arc (croatoa, striga) while you're still only doing phase 1. and I like doing several story arcs in each level range on the way up.

Now I have an urge to see if Mitten Man is taken.

I'd create Traffic Jams. No. Literally. I mean exactly that. It's a CITY. There's no morning / evening commute? What's up with that? We have a sunrise sunset. It ought to be possible to have certain streets have backed up traffic at certain times of day. Also, I'd fix NPC Civilian Distribution in Independance Port. There's a complete HUMAN WALL of civilians marching north / south along the eastern sidewalk by the zone to Brickstown and north a bit frokm there, because they apparrently have NO IDEA where else they can go. I mean, I guess they're not going to go hang out in Perez Park. But that one stretch of sidewalk just can't be THAT happening of a neighborhood. I'd figure how to distribute civlians around the rest of the zone, or I'd slash their numbers by at least 75%.

Yea. As much a I would have liked to have had the game for all those seven years? I totally get why it was treated as Double Top Secret Classified. They're fairly little fish in a great big sea, and who needs an army of lawyers going up places you really don't want armies of lawyers going? Were the worries unfounded? People can armchair quarterback that back and forth for years (and will, I have no doubt) but without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight? I might have made the exact same choices if I'd been in their shoes. And that's even assuming HC = SCORE, which I've never even been sure is true. All I care about is I have the game NOW. And Homecoming is doing their level best to get an above-board agreement hammered out with the legal owners of the IP. And I've seen nothing but professional and reasonable behavior from them since I found this place. I don't see any benefit in obsessing over coulda/shoulda/woulda for what might have been during the Snap.

I get the impulse to ask. But I would never assume that everything other servers have will (or even should!) end up on homecoming. One giant hurdle is that unless the other servers have made similar efforts as the HC devs to unravel the original spagettti code, and are using an identical organizational structure to maintain all of the refactored code, then no, the heavy lifting has NOT been done. Because everything would need to be translated over from "slapped together in 32 bit spagetti code" to work in HC's 64 bit code. Shinies are shiny, yes. We likes the shinies, yes. But I strongly suspect the codebase between Thunderspy and Homecoming are essentially incompatible at this point. Doesn't mean ideas for new things can never be added to Homecoming. But I'd bet taking anything to put in here would very likely be "rebuild the shiny thing 100% from scratch".

It's possible you may go Wild and Crazy with recharge far beyond what I do then. I don't mind using an atttack chain with 5-6 different powers in it, whereas others focus on having Insane amounts of recharge to continually pump out their very best (and usually semi-expensive) AE attacks pretty much nonstop. I could certainly see something like that causing you to burn through END at a far faster rate than I do. I'm also typically doing story arcs, not farming maps, if that might also factor into it. I have some travel time between mob pack #1 and mob pack #2.

Just, if you name yourself "Gourdian Not", watch out for anyone named Alexander.

I think the game TRIES to to this, in some of the AI. I can't tell you how many times I've had runners flee down the hall and stand right in the center of the next group of mobs. I've seen this with Family, Malta, Arachnos, Outcasts, Sky Raiders, and Longbow for sure. But as long as you don't follow them in? And as long as you don't attack them while they're standing next to their buddies? Nothing aggros. It makes me a bit sad. The AI is clearly trying to chain aggro, but must be forbidden to, at a code level. I suppose it's for the best. Not everyone has an Immob or a Slow, and some things like Slag Golems and War Wolves just can't BE Slowed or Immob'd. I'm sure it would destroy many characters if aggro did chain like I keep expecting it to from the EverQuest days.

I've never had a character at lvl 30+ who had ongoing endurance problems. Never mind Incarnates. But I do slot IO sets as I level Would stronger set bonuses be nice? Perhaps. Do I think they're needed? No. But I will say the VAST majority of my characters are using a Panacea Proc, and a Perf Shifter Proc, and usually one Perf Shifter:End Mod to go with that proc. And I do slot for the "end discount to all powers" set bonuses, from Unbreakable Guard, Reactive Defenses, Annihilation, and Preventative Medcine, whenever I can work them into a build.