DR_Mechano

Oh I see...well did a test run with my Spines/Fire brute and the difference was...incredibly minor to say the least...I assume people were using Scrappers for faster clear speed or something because those fire attacks basically tickled and wasn't anything the occasional green insp couldn't fix. I'm guessing they've turned off the double XP booster in AE, noticed a drop in the amount of levels a test run gave.

As someone who has been away from the game for some time...what are all these changes that have reduced fire farming effectivity, I'm kind of out of the loop here but if push came to shove, My War Mace/Bio brute can smash through the old S/L farms in pretty quick order...not nearly as quick as my Spines/Fire brute but I'm guessing something has changed which makes Fire Sword bypass fire resistance or now deal S/L damage + Fire damage instead of pure Fire?

Holy heck, only just discovered this but...the canadian City of Heroes homepage is still up and running...somehow...so yeah if you fancy reading some old news or looking through old patch notes, knock yourself out. Take a look peeps!

This was waaay back when the servers were 'live'. I remember a wave of Chinese bot farmer accounts appearing both EU and NA trying to peddle their inf selling services... ...only to get laughed out of the place when people pointed out making inf via either farming or simple market play far outstripped the time = money cost the Chinese bot farmer accounts could do. I distinctly remember one of them spamming chat where it was like 100 million inf for $50 and the chat responding "I can literally make that in about 30 to 60 minutes...that's not even cost effective on an hourly wage front.." Then the prices started dropping, it became $30 for 100 million, then $20....then they just seemed to give up and leave... To this day I think this is the only game I've seen break Chinese bot farmers by players just being more efficient and better game knowledge along with ease of access to IOs.

Yeah one of the main reasons I take Super Jump over Force of Will is because on a lot of my builds they're power pools are already full and I want to work Combat Jumping in without taking an extra pool, it adds an extra 3.5-5% defense.

Currently got an Nrg/Nrg scrapper fully IO'd out, the build wasn't made specifically to be 'the best' in terms of DPM (running Zap instead of Moonbeam and adding in Ball Lightning for more AoE). but she's running 177% recharge without Ageless, softcapped defenses to all but Psi and she hits like a truck I've noticed, I've not done my standard 'marauder test' (putting them up against Marauder as an AV that I've done for my TW/Bio and Psi/Bio) yet as she's not fully incarnated out.

Firstly, fair enough, yes I have made an AR/Invuln Sentinel but AR/Invuln are pretty much the two easiest sets to build, you want everything from Invuln. From AR you want all your cones and the tier 3 (IIRC) that says it does low damage, high stun, when in fact it does high damage and basically out DPAs every other single target attack. I will also point out that I have stated several times that AR/Invuln was so miserable to play and left such a terrible first impression that I'd effectively sworn off playing Sentinels and this Water/SR one was going to be my return to the fold to see how it worked.

Well not really, you're building for Typed defenses on Energy and Positional on SR plus Energy gets its own heal, SR does not.

No I haven't played it yet, keep in mind I have NO idea what I'm doing on sentinels. Water Jet and Steam Spray are usually skipped on Water Blasters so I was going on that. Why do you think I was asking people to take a look at the build...there's no need to give off that kind of attitude just because someone is asking for help, let alone not explain those choices (WHY is Water Jet and Steam Spray good on Sentinels but Steam Spray is usually skipped on Blasters for example). I mean I was just going to give on advice since the topic had literally sat there for five days unanswered.

AH I knew saying anything about sentinels would get attention :D. But yeah my opinion and the opinion of most in the discussion was that Sentinels don't suck...they're perfectly well balanced...a little TOO well balanced (I get the feeling the HC devs erred on the side of caution when making them), the Target caps, the shorter range, the lower damage, it's not really a good enough trade off for the secondary armour effects in my opinion. However, it's just that, my opinion and people are free to disagree with it and, like I said, 90% of the time it's REALLY not going to matter, it's only when you're going for speed taskforces and the like are people ever going to care about optimal and not just invite whatever or whoever comes first.

Honestly surprised I got the name Venomtide on Everlast today. Also managed to snag the name (this is a long time ago mind you) of Invulnerabelle.

I will say we got in to a discussion on Sentinels on Everlasting with various people chiming in and it never really got hostile. Most people understand where others were coming from (why Assault Rifle/Invuln sentinels make just the WORST first impression because Assault Rifle is F tier bad on Sentinels with only Sonic below it), why Sentinels are in a kind of funky spot right now (they don't really do anything better than any other AT, IMO they're balanced so well that they're bland...especially in a game with extremes outshining them AND being able to be survivable enough that secondaries aren't an major benefit). Heck me saying that "Sentinels are in need of a major rework and probably a niche to fill" is bound to get people riled up but...most people just shrugged and went "eh yeah, if you're looking for top end builds, 90% of the time if you're just on a regular TF run, it's not going to matter."

As someone who, back in the day, had an EU account and an NA account and use to play on Virtue and Union. plus RP'd in WoW. I have this to say, RP groups in general is very cliquey. The thing I found interesting between Union and Virtue was that Virtue had 'group canon' that whatever was happening to that group was what was going on and any other groups largely did not interfere with it, which leads to a conflict if there is cross group roleplay, after all whose group canon is the correct canon? On Union, because of the smaller playerbase, you had 'server canon'. That was things that were firmly established on the server and generally recognized by everyone. For example Dr Mechano opened a business selling walky talky toasters (for toast on the go!)...they begun cropping up in other peoples fiction and it slowly became server canon that it was his ONE successful business venture transitioning him into less a 'invent it in a shed' mad scientist to 'actually owning a factory in Sharkshead' and that was accepted by the people on the server. However the problem arose on Union if you tried to go against server canon and do something the majority had not agreed on, it largely got retconned and could lead to people feeling disillusioned etc. ] With Argent Dawn EU, if you weren't part of one of the 'big guilds' then you largely didn't matter, it also meant that if you tried to form your own guild, people wouldn't be interested because they'd want to be part of the big guilds in order to maybe get a place in server canon (like the war between Forsaken and Stormwind which raged on that server...which was annoying because the horde side were all RP-PvP guilds whilst 95% of the Alliance guilds were all RP-PvE guilds and very few characters were running top of the line gear. My Fury warrior was one of the exceptions because I PuG'd Heroic raids which meant I could stand toe to toe with PvPers for the most part, yes humble brag I know).

Hi guys just wondering what you more knowledgeable people thought about a test run build I came up with for water/SR.

Sadly no. It also really changed the vibe of Astoria. Original DA was very much Silent Hill inspired, with the thick fog and the ghosts vanishing the moment you got too close to them, the fact we only sort of knew what was going on. Modern DA is kind of more end times Cthulhu inspired what with cultists in the street, the red sky, the fog being removed etc. I kind of preferred the original look if I;m honest.

Rather annoyed my fun discussion with people about how 'content' is a nebulous term got deleted, seems like all my posts after the first one got removed...I mean you could have just edited or removed the offending post since it was literally just TWO posts that needed to be removed (even then it was friendly enough and we'd all moved on), the rest were harmless discussion. Anyway, griping aside it has been pretty obvious that the lack of content over the past 6-8 months is probably the major contributing factor as to why numbers have gone down. The content drought is understandable, we've been hit by a world wide pandemic that hasn't been a thing for several generations (My grandma can remember Tuberculosis sweeping through streets and cities here in the UK, taking out large chunks of the neighborhood so she was really the last generation to deal with something on this scale). The HC devs have been busy dealing with their own lives. The other ourodev servers have used their time to add things like costume pieces, new (kind of janky IMO) powersets, Mastermind Pet Customization BUT the problem they have is that it's effectively building a house of cards on a wobbly table. Without the backened work that the HC devs have put in, eventually they're going to have to worry about when 32 bit is nolonger viable as support for it stops and essentially rejig their servers to 64 bit BUT with all the addons ontop and who knows how that will interact with upgrading to 64 bit. However, as I stated in a deleted post, my own worry is that the 'balancing' work is seemingly never-ending, there's SOOOO much stuff that needs rebalancing or reworking (Rage, various underperforming powersets like Assault Rifle on...well...everyone that gets it, Bio Armor needs a retweek, Regen needs to be looked at and rebuffed so it's not a joke, Sentinels need (as said by the devs themselves) a major overhaul because currently they're largely ignored due to the entire AT underperforming and as such not being very popular) that if the devs constantly focus on rebalancing and powerset tweaks, we're never going to see the 'fun' stuff focused on.

I mean the tech is already there...You'd just do the model swap trick and combine it with the various flight forms that don't allow combat. HOWEVER it would have to be a separate power like the P2W vendor ones purely because fly, as a power, already has all the animations in it for variants to powers off the ground whilst I have no idea how you'd 'Rib Cracker' someone whilst as a swarm of bats unless it had its own generic melee attack and ranged attack animation that played for each and... ...ok we're getting well past the stuff you're able to do on those half dead batteries.

Yup. With Certain mods installed they're also used for boss mechanics where it's "X player has a bomb effect on them" and you either move or don't move depending on what type of mechanic it is (like for flame wreathe you stood still but for others you'd move it to the edge of the boss arena and drop the effect there).

Here's the thing though, you've got to remember this game was live for a while time. A lot of returning players, like myself, have already DONE all the content that's currently on offer, we did it back on live, it's not new and it's not engaging the same way it would be to a new player. We've done all the story arcs (and a LOT of the story arcs are just bland AF, especially the 10-30 bracket with a few good standouts). So players like myself are more likely to engage with content additions like new power sets, new costumes etc. So far Homecoming has been really, really slow on adding in that sort of stuff. Sure it's nice focusing on balancing changes and the like but...balance changes don't exactly draw a big crowd the way something 'new' does. There was a lot of backend work to get the 64bit client running and we accept that as to why development of anything more substantial got delayed. Now the focus is on rebalancing everything with minor additions to mid-level content (the new storyarcs for example are something you'll play through a few times and then get bored of) and proliferation of powersets to new ATs (like Energy Melee being updated and given to Scrappers in the Issue 27 beta). Now proliferation WILL get people back because it gives more excuse to make more alts. Meanwhile other servers, which haven't done backend changes (which they'll have to do in the future in order to keep the servers running on modern hardware admittedly) HAVE added craptons of new stuff. Pet Customization, whole swathes of costume pieces, new powersets (admittedly a LOT of them are kind of janky with basic reused assets).

The problem I have is you called it an Analysis...implying you had some hard data and figures to back it up...this is an opinion piece with a clickbaity title. It's the equivalent of a Buzzfeed article which sounds interesting only to be some randos opinion piece on actual science stuff.

Oh look it's Solarverse blaming powerleveling again...things really haven't changed that much around here... OR it could have been the fact that Homecoming went AGES without any real new content...people just got bored. Why do you think that EVERY World of Warcraft expansion loses roughly 70% of it's playerbase once it's been out for like 2 months and people are done with the content. For me there just wasn't anything new that I wanted to play, keep in mind I had played on live from City of Villains release so I've done all sorts of powerset combos over the years so just playing a new combo is hardly freshening things up for me. So why'd I come back...new Update with new content. I mean it's still not the massive costume pieces update I was hoping for but it's something and with the new Enhancement system (removing TOs and DOs and just having SOs along with the whole ++ system being removed) means I don't have to wait until level 25 to get a character who doesn't whiff half the time.

I mean the dude who did those arcs had a serious hateboner for old States. Also Sister P isn't in the LRSF still, she's replaced by Penny IIRC.

Keep in mind, not everyone is an IO'd out tanker. If, for example, my Invuln tanker who isn't IO'd out (running on SOs) is going up against Arachnos or Carnies, they're probably not going to leap in due to the heavy Psi damage which can AND WILL spike her down, especially if a mob has a Tarantula mistress Boss, a Fortunata Boss and a regular Fortunata in it. Also the reason people put more spam out for DFB is because you'll often get people just having created new characters who won't have seen the previous messages. The people complaining about 'gather for buffs', it's just considered polite ok, Jesus H Christ, I want to make sure everyone gets the buff, I'm sorry if a little courtesy upsets you >.>

As others have mentioned, if you're going AR, go Blaster. Assault Rifle is freaking AWFUL on Sentinels and widely considered one of, if not THE, worst sets on sentinels. It's why if you check the Sentinel section almost nobody is posting AR builds. The Narrowing of the cones, the lower target cap and the lower damage turn an already struggling set on Blaster into a weaksauce set on Sentinel. My first Sentinel was an AR/Invuln and it made me hate sentinels...that's how bad it is...

This stems mainly from NCsoft being Korean. As a Korean company if someone buys your failed IP and then goes on to have a success with it, no matter how mild, it's considered a failing of the company that original owned the IP (which it is, lets be honest) and a black mark against it. so most Korean companies will make a token gesture at selling the IP with the understanding nobody will actually buy it. NCsoft were clearly worried someone WOULD buy the IP so they asked for an outrageous asking price then when it turned out people were more than willing to pay it (especially western companies who could see the Marvel revival on the horizon and probably there was word about the buyout from Disney floating around at that time) they panicked and shut down all negotiation.