Legree

The only thing that may bring Homecoming to an end is action by NCSoft. Since they've done nothing so far I like our chances. Aside from that, while I do think that we're at peak population now I don't see any decline going so far as to make funding an issue. If the community as it is now can raise 5K in 20 minutes then I'm sure that even if we ended up consolidated onto one server we'd be able to meet the lower running costs required. Sure people will come and go, but five years from now there's still going to be new level 1s running around Atlas (or Mercy) fighting Hellions (or Snakes) because as we all know there's no such thing as a final character, there's just the next character.

HP BR376AA. It's a fairly basic 5 button mouse, but being left handed I prefer having the 4th and 5th buttons on either side rather than both being on one side. It's such a good fit for me that when my first one stopped working I went to eBay to find another of the same model.

Except then that same AV would be impossible to defeat with a team that isn't fully IO'd and Incarnate'd. AV soloing has always been a thing - all that's changed is that Incarnates allow a wider range of ATs and powerset combinations to brute force it rather than it being mostly the speciality of certain high end builds. There's only one solution to this particular balance question, and almost noone would be happy if it were implemented. Make Incarnate Powers unusable in any non-Incarnate content. Level 50 door missions in PI or Grandville? Nope. ITF? Nope. STF and LRSF? Nope. None of that content was designed with Incarnates in mind, and so of course Incarnates will trivialise it.

Make it part of the character. Rework the costume to thicken the waist and thin (and grey) the hair. Use an older face. Start every tactics discussion with the words "Well in my day..." and refer to your teammates as "You kids" :)

WoW has long regarded basically everything prior to the most recent expansion as an obstacle to be overcome before getting to the 'real game', and that feeling of being rushed is the end result of multiple attempts to smooth the levelling experience - essentially speeding it up and dumbing it down until you're spending three hours or less in a new zone before being hurried along to the next one. It's a trap CoH never quite fell into. Even once the Incarnate system went live I love that the devs still spent time on lower level content. If someone at Blizzard proposed revamping an enemy group that only appeared in the first 20 levels of the game I imagine they'd be laughed out of the room, but here we got a revamp for the Skulls and some good story arcs to go with it, to give just one example. But we're being nice about WoW so... it has a very consistent and strong art style which I feel has aged remarkably well, and mechanically - in terms of the minute to minute gameplay - it's incredibly smooth and responsive. A few years ago I did some perma-death runs (following an agreed upon set of self imposed restrictions like no gear better than white, no potions, no specialisation) and WoW's pitch-perfect controls meant I felt that anytime I died it was my error (or bad luck) rather than the game not responding fast or fluidly enough.

They are still there. All the origin contacts (Azuria etc) are in City Hall and hand out their missions, and intros to other contacts. Out of curiousity I've recently skipped all of the newer stuff on one alt, even radio missions, and that alt is cheerfully meandering around Perez Park and doing hunt missions in KR and Steel Canyon.

Just don't use it. One of the best things HC did was make double xp opt-in via the P2W boosts rather than forcing it on everyone. I haven't used it once since that went live. I admit I do wonder about the long-term population. What happens to all those 50+ Incarnates when they realise there is no new endgame content on the horizon? (and let's be honest that kind of content is not going to be added any time soon - if ever.) I think where we are now is peak population, but I also think this game has always been better than many MMOs at adjusting to smaller pops - as anyone who played on a server other than Freedom or Virtue on live can confirm.

/Poison for Corruptors. A lot of the support/debuff sets are heavily team focused and that's fine, but this is the only one I can think of where the very first power in the secondary is useless solo. Even /Empathy and /Thermal get an AoE heal that benefits you as well, but Alkaloid is purely single target and not usable on self, and if you're a Corruptor you have to take it right away.

You would be right... and I'm discovering I like Perez Park more than I expected to.

I've seen the same messages. Warshades do knockback. That's why they're being singled out in LFG. "Tank and herd and AoE" seems to have become a popular tactic since the game came back and its fans do not like anything that scatters mobs. "No Warshades" is coming from a similar mindset as "Need Heals" or "Need Tank or Brute", when you don't 'need' any such thing for 99% of the content in the game. This.

In the Isles it would have to be Arachnos. Yes, there's a lot of internal competition and active service, but against that Arachnos is the official power of the Rogue Isles, and every other faction that operates there is - to one extent or another - doing so only because Arachnos allows it. Indeed, I'd imagine that joining Arachnos is one of the better career paths available in the Isles - good prospects for advancement, the power by association that comes from being part of a big organisation, and the uniforms are cool. In Paragon City on the other hand - Malta. They seem more focused and less reckless with their agents than many other factions, and besides that you'd get drawn into less fights, since given the choice between fighting Malta and someone else most Heroes will take the easy option and go beat up the Council instead.

just walk away while hes down bro In the time it takes to do that I can be queuing up my next attack while my target is still in the air. If I'm fighting only one enemy I can reliably get a slow snipe off in the time it takes an enemy to be knocked back, land and stand up again. If I'm fighting multiple opponents then knocking one out of melee takes him out of the fight completely for several seconds longer than a kockdown, so I can focus on any other enemy who is still in melee range. There's also the fact that a knocked back enemy will frequently waste even more time using a weaker ranged attack before charging back into melee - reducing the incoming damage I'm taking and giving me time to queue up another knockback attack for when they do get close again. Knockback - used correctly - is an invaluable tool.

No it doesn't compare. It's better. Smite does one hit of damage. Shadow Maul does four. I just tested this on a couple of random mobs and one activation of Smite was doing 2/3 of the damage of one activation of Shadow Maul against a single enemy. Also for what it's worth I also managed to hit two targets more than once when fighting a group. You asked for facts. There's your facts. Shadow Maul does more damage than Smite, and if you make the effort to line up your attacks you can double that damage (or more) by hitting multiple targets.

I don't think that is their job though. Most melee sets only have one true AoE - invariably the one that the single target specialist Stalkers don't get. Anything beyond that is a bonus. I've done that often enough myself and what I take from that is it's a hard hitter and I shouldn't waste it on enemies with only a sliver of health left. As a couple of other people have commented the cone powers are essentially single target attacks which - with positioning, timing and/or luck - sometimes hit multiple targets. To widen the cone so that they effortlessly hit multiple targets every time, while not changing anything else about the power - yes, I'd call that power creep.

I'll say upfront I've no idea how hard this would be to implement, so if it is hard or would break things then I'll /jranger it myself. It's a small thing really, but just something that occurred to me. Disclaimer aside, would it be possible to expand the number of doors allocated to radio and newspaper missions? In some zones it feels like I'm always running back and forth between one of half a dozen or less locations - e.g. half the papers in Port Oakes seem to take place within that one cluster of single storey warehouses in Dockside - something that's particularly noticeable if you run a lot of alts. I like it when a mission sends me off to somewhere off the beaten track and it would be nice to change things up a bit and in doing so open up more of the map than is reguarly visited at present. Same applies to regular/story arc missions, though they (the newer ones in particular) seem to follow a slightly more intentional placement.

It wouldn't, but it would make those melee attacks a lot more powerful. Yes, it is hard to hit multiple targets with Shadow Maul/Flurry/Sands of Mu (the only way I reliably hit multiple targets unless I'm knee deep in enemies is if there's a mob standing more or less directly behind my target) but I'd as soon not see a wider cone balanced by a decrease in their damage or an increase in recharge time or end cost, and to widen it without doing one or more of those things is just power creep for the sake of it. Now Empty Clips in Dual Pistols on the other hand - that I do think needs a wider cone, though really I think I find that one underwhelming due to the disconnect between the animation of the attack (which does look like a 180) and what it actually does.

The Dance Gun! :D (I still want a Dance Gun set for Controllers/Dominators)

It really doesn't. I don't doubt there was a golden age of the Hollows, with easy teaming and taxibots and such. I also don't doubt that this was over before I started playing in Aug '08, from first hand experience of the zone at that time and afterward. Now I never played before the revamp, which came with Issue 12 - May '08, a few months before I started the game. So I don't know when that golden age ended, because I wasn't there, but I can certainly take an educated guess, and it has nothing to do with AE (Issue 14 - April '09) or DFB (Issue 21 - Sep '11.) It has everything to do with Issue 0 (April '04) and Issue 8 (Nov '06.) Issue 0 - launch. On a whim I've been running my most recent blueside alt through only Issue 0 content, because I've never done that before and I thought it'd be fun. It is, but if you pass on the newer contacts and radio missions it becomes blindingly apparent that Issue 0 levelling was clunky as all hell. It sends you to Kings Row at level 5 to hunt level 10 CoT and Vahzilok. It sends you to Perez Park to take on five times your weight in Hellions just to get to the equally large number of CoT you're supposed to be fighting. It throws contact after contact at you and they're all interchangeable non-entities who bounce you back and forth, back and forth from zone to zone, hunt mission to hunt mission, until it's a refreshing change to get a door mission in the zone you're already in. A door mission, not even a story arc. As I said it's fun, but it's as oldschool MMOing as it gets and I imagine when the Hollows came along and provided a more focused levelling experience for those early levels players flocked to it. Then Issue 8 came along, with radio missions, and suddenly you don't have to do the Hollows anymore. It's a great zone, but with no travel power it's easier to run radio missions and safeguards than it is to fight your way across the Hollows for the umpteenth time. That's my read of it - the Hollows was popular because the Issue 0 content was clunky, and the Hollows became less popular once radio missions offered an alternative to fighting Frostfire and Atta yet again... and none of this has anything to do with AE or DFB, and I know this because I ran the Hollows months before AE, and years before DFB, and I couldn't get a team together to run the Caverns of Transcendance until that character had levelled (the regular way) to 50. The Hollows had already had its day, before AE. For whatever it's worth I'm not defending AE or DFB. I've ran DFB once on Homecoming - to see what all the fuss was about, and on a character I haven't played since. As for AE, I doubt I spent more than 2 hours tops in an AE building on live, and the only time I've entered one here was when a story arc sent me there for 30 seconds. I've long since made my peace with AE and so long as it doesn't bother me I'll try not to bother it. The game moves on. Players move on to new things. For all I've said some unkind things about the Issue 0 content I'm glad it's still there to experience, so I can find the hidden gems in among the hunt missions and the hazard zones... and I'm glad the Hollows is still there too, for those who want to experience that.

I saw the message in-game and managed to get on in time to donate this time (just!) Thank you.

Kings Row, where level 5 heroes, fresh from completing their initial City Hall contact's missions, are asked to fight level 10 Vahzilok or Circle of Thorns. All I can say to that is "Frostfire arc team LFM!"

No objection to this, though I'd never use it. I need that visual reminder that I'm actually Hidden. The first time I ran a new Stalker through Atlas Park I forgot for three levels that I wasn't on a Scrapper. Not to mention running up to the Boss to get into the perfect position to strike... only Hide hasn't actually kicked in after I finished off the last group and I don't realise that until they aggro. We've all done that, right?

I started playing City of Heroes just after the revamp, back when every contact would send you there at level 5 or 6 ("Have you heard about The Hollows?") That intro is long gone, so I'd imagine the only people doing that zone now are those who like it for what it is - which if you ask me is the best reason to do any content. Even so, just about every day I've seen people in LFG forming teams for Frostfire, and there's always plenty of interest. The last time I joined one the team lead put a message in LFG to fill the last spot and got 15 (!) replies. I don't think that's entirely fair. Even before DFB it was far faster/smoother to do the initial City Hall contact (or street sweep) then head to Kings Row and start doing radio missions at level 5 or 6. I love the Hollows - it's one of my favourite zones and you can be sure I ran my first new hero there as soon as I could - but even I wouldn't run it on every character.

I like this idea. I sometimes feel a bit cheated when I bounce a mob off a wall and don't get any extra damage from doing so. However I don't feel that a bit of extra damage would silence its detractors. Except they are now out of melee range and by the time they get back into melee range my Power Thrust has recharged... and off they go again. This is my main objection to the idea that "KD = KB so slot the IO" because they're really not the same thing. A melee heavy Boss can wreck a squishy Blaster in seconds, and KB is a superb way of keeping that Boss out of melee range, which KD does not do. I think the hate for KB has blinded people to just how good a control it is. I've been running an Energy/Energy Blaster through the 1-20 Praetoria story - with Bosses enabled - and it's been a walk so far. Three Boss fights in a row with no downtime between them? No problem, I'll just play pinball with them all over the map while blasting their health bar to bits as they tumble through the air and bounce off of things in an amusing manner. Maybe once or twice per fight they'll be on their feet long enough to get an attack off. Maybe. As I said, I like this idea - I really do. But then I like Knockback already.

I'd leave them in Atlas Park and Mercy Island. True, the combination of AE traffic and costume contests makes AP the laggiest zone in the game (in my experience) but I spend less time on a new character there than I will in Kings Row or wherever else the AE traffic would migrate to if there wasn't one in Atlas. As for Mercy... well high traffic isn't really an issue in the Isles. I'd remove them all, for the reason you give - except for Atlas and Mercy (as I said above) and Cap au Diable and maybe Talos or Steel Canyon for higher levels. I have to wonder how many people - if any - regularly use the ones in say Port Oakes or even moreso St. Martial.

QFT. I've got nothing against small adjustments to balance out powersets, but if half the suggestions in this forum were implemented the game we're all playing wouldn't be the game I missed for 7 years, and it wouldn't be nearly as interesting. Also this. I'd only add that a lot of this seems to be driven by the perception that "herd everything then AoE it down" is the only way to play - which it really isn't. If a team has to do that for every group or face defeat then I suspect that team is biting off more than it can chew.