Lich

I feel like your experience is both typical of the average player (because yes, the system is not integrated with the other parts of your character at all, and that makes it hard to even find in the UI) and a strong indicator that the system as a whole needs to change.

Oh, I see what you mean. Well, in that case, poof, tutorial no longer mandatory 😉 I'll edit the OP!

Do you think that the redesign is complicated? I find it personally a lot easier to untangle than the current system. Get to level 50, earn some XP, get salvage and recipes from Incarnate content or buy them on the AH, craft things (or buy the crafted enhancement on the AH), slot them in the new slots - all of the flow is building off of the same flow that players are at this point used to well before level 50 🙂 Compared to what we have it feels like a far more streamlined flow - at least to me 🙂 but if you think otherwise that's good feedback to have!

Yes, that's why in both the opening preamble and closing thoughts I added lengthy caveats saying exactly as such. It's about the theorycrafting and design work, not about the feasibility therein 🙂 If you have any feedback on the design itself let me know! I'd be thrilled to hear your thoughts.

I am saying it's the right place to put a tutorial, not that it currently is a tutorial 🙂 hope that clears things up a bit more!

Ah, to be clear, this wasn't an assumption, it was a direction towards the new flow. So not "everyone does this already" but, within the above context, "by making sure that every post-50 MUST do this mission arc, we can put necessary in-universe tutorials within its dialogue and mission text, therefore making it a much more streamlined informational flow." It's important to funnel players towards information that they might need in a way that can engage them, yanno? I don't want any system within the game relegated to a wiki and only a wiki. In any case, you aren't the only one who gleaned the wrong info from the OP, so I've edited it for clarity to prevent further misinterpretation 🙂

I appreciate the kind words! I assume a lot of the backlash is because the average players see "big overhaul that deletes everything" and rightfully think "but what about my effort!!" and then that's kind of where the feedback stops. And not for nothing - the big picture changes I long for would probably only work in some fabled City of Heroes 2 where everyone by definition starts at ground 0. But building sequels to MMOs is not really for the current MMO audience (aka the people reading these forums) its for the people who bounced off the first game or did a slow fade due to mechanical friction. So although the current player base wants the current system because the current system represents effort they don't want to have to let go of, it's still a system that I see as a flawed one, so here we are! 😛 I truly hate pulling cards like this as I think they're pretty irrelevant to the caliber of an idea but if it really does matter, I played the game diligently from the release of COV until shutdown. So yes, I've played with the original incarnates post-alpha pre-everything else (although that shouldn't really matter since I am proposing deleting the CURRENT system :P), and I wish more than anything that the old system never shines its light upon the game again. I think the shard stuff is pretty much the worst - its the old-old system just hanging out like a ghoul behind the current one, and its not like the current one is doing us any favors. Anyway, in conclusion, I am glad that someone else views the system as it stands in a comparable light. If you have any additional thoughts about my proposed new version feel free to let me know!

Howdy folks. This is part 2 of a series of very high level reworks and revamps and refreshes to the game's core ideas. Caveat: These ideas are big picture, the biggest possible picture available. Therefore, I have no real expectation that these are picked up and implemented by the Homecoming Team. This is a thought experiment, not a list of demands. With that in mind, please try to keep an open mind. These threads will be full of radical ideas and I'd love for you to go down the rabbit hole about them with me. Other (future) Drawing Board Threads: Power Pools Previous Drawing Board Threads: Enhancement System With that out of the way, on with the show! The Incarnate System A lot of ink has been spilled on the efficacy and fun of the current Incarnate System and if you'll indulge me I'd love to throw my own several cents into the ring. In my opinion, the current Incarnate System is quite clunky. There are a multitude of UI problems (being unable to see what recipes require while you're grabbing their ingredients, the progress bars being offcenter and then they just kinda extend outwards into nothingness, a lack of good information displayed in a constructive way) but what I want to focus on moreso is the actual play experience. My biggest gripe with the system is that it's not really a challenge to completely finish out. Compared to the amount of gameplay hours doing missions and fighting enemies to get influence and build the enhancements and build of your character, completing a character's incarnate abilities takes a very short amount of time and contains very little interesting and compelling choice. I've seen people go back and forth over mids builds, arguing sets vs procs vs power choices vs level order, and there doesn't seem to be any of that for the current Incarnate system. If you need damage, take the damage Alpha, if you need defense, take Defense. Pick whichever Judgement seems cool to you. Choose the Lore pets that have the best debuffs or the best flavor that matches your costume. As we get further into the system we get further removed from active choice based on flavor and even more into just raw stats. Hybrid choices are the most linear out of all of them - compared to the breadth and depth of the choices available while leveling, the entire system sticks out considerably to me. That isn't to say there is no choice within the system, but its a far cry from the freeform nature of the 1-50 experience. Another big chunk of why I feel like the system needs improvement is that your choices in the incarnate system have very little to do with the choices made before arriving at level 50. The system has to appeal to every single build, which means that the building blocks are quite generic compared to how unique and specific some of the previous systems offer you choice. Getting more damage, more accuracy, more defense - these are compelling choices to make on a systemic level. But they are choices that have little to do with what your character does from an aesthetic perspective. It feels quite hard to build a character who can make use of the Incarnate system in a flavorful way compared to the absolute delight that the 1-50 game can offer you. And again, not to say that there is no flavor at all, but compared to the abilities and customizations available beforehand, its quite shallow. There are other minor usability and UX complains beyond the UI as well - I dislike that everything you earn in the Incarnate system can't really be taken out of it, so once you've done a few BAFs and have earned pretty much everything you need you'll end up with materials that don't really do anything for you. And not to mention the obtrusive nature in which they are earned. I know saying this out loud to you all might be a mistake, but I genuinely do appreciate the fun cutscenes in our awesome game, and I find that the incarnate ones tend to be interrupted consistently with Incarnate Thread Bonded! Astral Merit Obtained! The system itself feels obtrusive and separate from the previous sections and not in a way that makes it feel special. Even leveling up to gain Incarnate XP adds 1-2 extra lines of text to your Rewards chat panel until you've earned the relatively small amount of XP necessary to unlock your slots. And don't even get me started on the now completely redundant Incarnate Shard portion of the system. Speaking of relatively small amount of XP necessary, I did math it out, and it takes exactly 11.875 million incarnate XP to finish unlocking the current system. That may seem like a lot at first blush, but it's actually only a bit over 2 Veteran Levels (which are about 5 million xp each). And I know that advocating for a longer tail on the system seems like a losing battle (no one likes more meaningless grind, not even me!) but I find there's a lot of room for improvement on how long it should take to finish a character and how satisfying it should be to do so. A final huge piece of the puzzle is actually back to the UI discussion a bit - and it has to do with how players view their own builds. I love how City of Heroes does its builds - I love that the building blocks look like DNA twined together. I love looking at a finished build in my own enhancement screen, or a planned build in Mids. But Incarnates aren't viewable in-game in the same place that the rest of your build is. To me this is another reason why the Incarnate system as it currently stands feels very separate from the progress and power of your character. You have to go to a specific place to see what it's doing, a different place, and that to me feels very bad. So, with those thoughts in mind, let's get into it. Part 1: The Clean-Out: Any good Drawing Board idea starts with the clean out. This is where we get rid of things we no longer need. So, here's what's on the cutting room floor: Pretty much everything Hmm, off to a strong start! Now, you might be wondering, "everything? like, the whole thing?" And to that the answer is pretty much just "yep. the whole thing." Later on we might grab a few things out of the old Incarnate System (for example, Astral Merits will still be a part of the new flow), but their usage will be so different that I think putting them up here would just be really confusing. As an aside, this blank slate isn't to say that the current system is completely worthless or terrible, of course. I'm definitely not here just to dunk on the hard work of people I admire. And plenty of people like the system as-is. It just means that the new system I've put together can glean very little systemically from the old. So just picture a blank slate. An empty whiteboard. Full of possibilities. Going forward we're going to uncharted waters, far far away from the Incarnate system we all know today. Part 2: The Name Game: This section is similarly brief, but similarly important. Its where we clean up what things are named in this new flow. Names are important, they set expectations, they compare and contrast. The goal with these changes is to clean up some of the name cruft that's been building up. Veteran Levels are now called Incarnate Levels Now, I might have tipped my hand here a bit, but structure is structure and rules are rules. From now on in this post, I'm going to be calling Veteran Levels by their new name, Incarnate Levels. Part 3: The Big Changes: Here's where we start making moves that significantly change the flow of the system. Don't worry, I'll explain my reasonings later, but for right now, we've just got to get them up here so things later on can make sense: Once you reach level 50, earning XP on your character earns you progress towards Incarnate Levels. These levels on their own do not do anything statistically (same as right now). Every 3 Incarnate levels will grant you a badge (just as they do right now). Just like right now, every bit of XP counts - so even if you are exemplared down, you'll still be earning progress towards your Incarnate levels. You just need to be earning XP! You may talk to any Trainer to level up with those Incarnate Levels after reaching level 50. Reaching level 50 will also prompt you to speak to Mender Ramiel and complete his story-arc. This is a perfect place to house an in-lore tutorial so that players have an in-game place to go if they need help understanding the incarnate system. An Incarnate Level-Up adds a special, "7th Slot" called an Incarnate Slot to your eligible powers. This slot doesn't have to be the actual 7th slot - one can be added to any power, even if you have 0 slots in it at all. But if you have a power with 6 slots, it functions as the 7th. This slot glows teal so you know it's got something to do with the Incarnate System. Eligible powers are anything in your primary, secondary, tertiary, or pool powers that can take slots themselves. This excludes the block of powers with Rest, Sprint, etc. but not the Inherent Fitness pool. Each power may only have one Incarnate Slot added to it. These Incarnate Slots hold special new Enhancements with a minimum level of 50 called Incarnate Enhancements. These Enhancements are powerful and unique and can do significant things to change how your character is played. In addition to their main effects, just slotting an Incarnate Enhancement provides a boost to every enhanceable aspect of the power it is slotted into. These bonuses are unaffected by diminishing returns. These Enhancements' effects and their slotting bonus are only active while you are at level 50. Exemplaring down will disable them temporarily. The big goal of these enhancements is to break the rules of the 1-50 game. This means we want to mess with how the powers work, what they do, and what they feel like. Examples of potential Incarnate Enhancements: (note that this is not an exhaustive list by any means, but more a starting point for new ideas) Anti-Matter's Reactive Beam: Adds a high amount of Energy damage to this attack, as well as a -DEF proc. All other attacks gain a lesser version of these procs with a lower magnitude and activation rate. Fits into any Attack power. Desdemona's Enlightenment: This power no longer has an activation or upkeep cost. Fits into any power that costs HP or END to activate or keep activated. Sight Beyond Sight: This power may now be activated even if you are under the effects of CC. This also grants you a moderate increase to your perception. Fits into any Attack power. Siege's Bulwark: You gain mag-1 CC resistance. Fits into any Resistance power. Jade Spider Swarm: Your attacks each have a small chance of summoning a miniature Arachnos Toxic Tarantula to aid you for a few minutes. These Toxic Tarantulas don't do a lot of damage but have access to a variety of powerful debuffs, and a swarm would be deadly. They gain bonuses from the enhancements of the power they are slotted into. Fits into any Pet summoning power. Schism Slice: This power now hits everything in front of you in a 180 degree cone and applies a moderate amount of extra Negative Energy damage. Fits into any power with a cone below 180 degrees. Reach beyond Reality: This power now has a moderate range and deals a large amount of additional Psi damage. Fits into any melee single-target attack. Incarnate Enhancements are crafted from Incarnate Recipes. These recipes are found rarely within Incarnate Trials or by doing endgame incarnate mission arcs. You can also purchase the recipe you want for Astral Merits from Luna, the Incarnate Trader in Ouroboros. Astral Merits are earned similarly to how they are now - by completing Incarnate-tier content. They are one of the few things that survived the Cutting Room Floor. These recipes are also tradable on the Auction House. (provides an Influence drain) These recipes require a large amount of both Invention Salvage and Influence to create. (provides an Influence drain) These recipes also require rare Incarnate Salvage (found rarely while defeating Incarnate level foes) that is also now tradable on the Auction House. (provides an Influence drain) There is a maximum to the amount of Incarnate Level-Ups, but not to Incarnate levels. This means that you can keep earning incarnate levels forever just for fun and badges, but will only get a moderate amount of incarnate slots. It also means that builds with more enhancable powers (aka Kheldians) aren't at an automatic major advantage to builds with less (such as Dual Pistols, as Swap Ammo doesn't allow slotting it also won't allow for Incarnate Slotting) And that's about it for the bullet points! Part 4: Why? This section is fun because its where we talk about the reasons behind these changes. And for this set of Drawing Board ideas, the big reasons are twofold: Simplicity and Diversity. Now, avid followers of my previous thread might have perked their ears up at this section already, since those are the same two reasons I gave before. The reason these two are here again is pretty simple - they're the two major pillars of systems design for games. You want choice to matter, you want effort to feel worthwhile, you want players to feel rewarded and challenged, and you want the system to be easy to understand but hard to master. So where does the Incarnate System fit into those goals? As far as simplicity goes, this method is a lot closer to the regular enhancement system in usability. Rather than its own separate UI, players can take a look at what's there and what's potentially earnable in the same places they do for the 1-50 experience. The entire system fits within the enhancement window's full screen view - meaning a player can get their build at a glance without having to go to multiple places for it. The recipes fit in their existing recipes window, the salvage fits in their existing salvage window, and the XP earned comes from the same place that other XP is earned from. And they level up with the same UI at the same trainers that they did before. That being said, the system is so different that there's almost an infinite amount to talk about for the other half - diversity. The current system's fatal flaw is that while there are variations within the separate abilities, the abilities themselves offer only relatively superficial choices. No matter what, each character gets a summon, a big attack, a support ability, a proc. It doesn't matter if they're ranged or melee, support or tank - they get the same basic building block tools as everyone else and are only afforded the option to choose which flavor from amongst those pools. Which means that characters as they age into the old system get closer and closer together to one another in terms of usability. Every character gets to buff others, every character gets a huge AOE attack, every character gets to bring summons to difficult boss fights or wave battles. As a contrast, the new system's building blocks depend quite literally on your choices in powers from 1-50. If you do not have defensive powers, you can not slot defensive incarnate abilities. If you do not have enough attacks to support all of the procs you want to slot in from the incarnate system, you must choose from the ones that are the most important. And because the system is tied to your power choices, you might even change your build 1-50 to support a different incarnate layout in the same way that a player would currently change their build to make sure they have a better time exemplaring down to the lower levels. The new system can also support significantly more options compared to what's available right now - especially given that pretty much every current incarnate ability can be relatively easily condensed into an incarnate enhancement. Since each enhancement by default applies some portion of what an Alpha slot grants you, and transferring the bonuses from Interface and Hybrid are relatively straightforward as they are passives, our starting pool of options is quite wide before we even have to flex our creativity muscles. And when those muscles are being flexed, the possibilities are endless. The new abilities are also much more grounded within the lore expectations of a player as they set foot in higher level content. Why does being an Incarnate maybe give you force fields? Who knows. But understanding that training hard even beyond level 50 allows you to elevate your existing powers beyond their current abilities? That's a much easier to follow narrative thread. Finally, this new flow adds additional drain on the salvage system and your influence totals. The goal here is for things to be priced such that an enterprising player can purchase their incarnate materials outright for a high upfront cost, versus a more frugal or first-timer approach that involves simply playing post-50 content and stockpiling rewards. Either way, we want players to view the Incarnate system as a part of the larger whole and not as its own separate piece of the puzzle. Part 5: Finishing Touches I'll be the first to admit there's a lot missing here - even some pretty basic stuff, like "what's the maximum functional incarnate level?" But I wanted to get it all down on paper because that's an important step in getting designs ironed out. Just like the previous thread, I'd like to reiterate that this thread (and the others I have cooking up) are more about the theory than the feasibility or realism. I am offering them more as a hypothetical discussion topic instead of a serious suggestion that I genuinely expect to be implemented. Although I certainly prefer this streamlined system, you may not, and that's totally okay. Well, hopefully that was a fun read! I certainly had fun writing this up and noodling on the details. And if you have any feedback at all on this kind of overhaul or have additional questions or suggestions, feel free to let me know down below. And with that, it's time for me to get back to playing! Happy New Year, Paragon City!

In my head players would just use Origin Enhancements for this purpose, as at level 50 they'd be identical in usage and values to current level 50 IOs (but with the added benefit of being much more in-flavor, requiring no crafting, able to be bought outright from NPCs and sold to vendors, etc etc).

Hmmm, this is certainly something I indeed have not accounted for in the new flow - boosting is quite starkly missing! Ack! Back to the drawing board! As a first pass idea for how Boosting fits into this flow, I'm wondering if Boosters could become the non-invention version of Catalysts. Maybe they could exist as a way to help the special enhancements (and I suppose the base Origin enhancements) keep up to par with the new age of all-superiors. I have to wonder if removing the Combining mechanic entirely and just switching everything over to Boosters might be even easier - use a booster to bring a Hami-O up to +3, use a booster to bring an invention enhancement to its superior form, etc etc. I do like that single +Attribute enhancements get strong enough to build around, and I don't want to lose that.

To clarify, Single Origins are not what's being removed - the generic IOs are. That being said, there are a lot of changes that I think would really improve them. Right now SOs do funky stuff that relates their level to your level so that you want to stay within the optimum range, and IOs just give an amount of stats that increases as the IO level increases. I want SOs to work like IOs do (except remain available from NPC stores, remain sellable to vendors, and remain purchaseable from NPCs without requiring crafting first) and to dump the level scaling part entirely. The reason SOs need a formula to exemplar down non-linearly is because their values are based on schedules (something not really explained to the player in-game adequately) and grant stats based on their level relative to yours. So no matter what level you and your SOs are, you're starting from the same numerical place as you approach 50 which is pretty strange from a game design perspective. Whereas IOs just have a flat amount that scales intuitively up or down based on their level. Having all Enhancements base their power on solely their level, and then scaling those values up or down based on your level is the cleaner and easier to explain method of handling this kind of numerical ephemeral mechanic, in my opinion. It makes more sense to me for higher level enhancements to give more of a bonus than lower level ones.

Ah, as a reminder, this is a theorycrafting series for big overhauls and not a serious set of expectations for the game. So if you're getting stressed about change, I get it! Change is scary! So don't feel worried as if any of this is happening because it's just for fun 🙂 As far as feedback responses go, let's get into it! Thanks in advance for reading! So as far as switching IOs and SOs it's completely different - players can buy SOs outright from NPC vendors and find them in drops outright. So it's completely different and drastically preferable to have players aim for new and improved Origin Enhancements instead of IOs which only come every 5 levels, can't be sold or bought to a store directly, and require salvage and influence to craft. As far as exemplaring goes, right now the system is confusing and clunky. Yes, I know exemplaring sorta works, sorta. But in order to figure out what happens numerically there's actually a chart - a whole chart! - that players have to reference to figure out what's happening. That's the sign of a system that needs improving. Restrictions breed creativity. Adding restrictions to the existing suite of sets and boosting those sets who need help would absolutely make things more diverse, not less. If more sets are viable and players are forced to diversify their sets then things will be much less cookie cutter. Imagine that new world! I think it'd be awesome. As to your closing thoughts, the fun part of theorycrafting is that we can do these fun redesigns in our heads without expecting someone to toil away to prove some nebulous point. I don't have to do this work by hand to know that knowing exactly what your enhancements are doing is the better system. Like, come on, no one likes SOs falling off and having to re-up them. It isn't fun to have hundreds of recipes across their level bands that are not used or useful because they're intentionally set at lower values than their rarer counterparts. There's cruft here in this beautiful game, cruft I love tinkering with and crafting ways to design around. So there's no need to promise to quit over what's merely a fun discussion 🙂 Thanks for the feedback!

Forgot to reply to this earlier but you are correct - this was part of the original idea set but wasn't made clear in the OP. I've edited things to make it clearer that this is part of the plan, nice catch!

That's why part of this involves a lot of numbers work to make sure the unused sets are up to par. There are a LOT of sets that could change for the better to easily let even pretty narrow builds fill out defenses or offenses without stacking the same IO set 5x 🙂

It does something similar, yes, but in a way that requires players to reference a chart and do math. Not ideal! For Reference: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Exemplar_Effects_on_Enhancements

In order: 1: since all enhancement generic values would be normalized and SOs would stop falling off, there would be no difference between an IO and a SO in this situation. They are on the cutting room floor because they would become identical to the appropriate SO for your origin. 2: probably! Always a safe bet, frankly 🙂 3: Purples in this overhaul are the "superior" version of their backfilled non-superior version - check out Part 3's point 6's 2nd bullet point for where that lies in the writeup. 4: The Purple sets would still be significantly better because their numbers are higher. See Superior ATOs vs regular ATOs. 5: You are correct that making things unique means you can't use the same set repeatedly to aim for a juicy set bonus. However, as a lot of the set bonuses would need to change (since they would otherwise be identical sets) it's entirely feasible for a mix of different IO sets to provide totally comparable bonuses. The benefit here is that rather than Makos being the way to go, you'd aim for a mix of Makos plus others - it helps pull spiky IO prices towards the norm and increases demand for other sets. Remember, all of the set bonus values are being boosted if they're on the lower-tier track, so it wouldn't be hard to find a mix of different sets that give you what you're looking for. 6: fair! this sorta stuff is very subjective. I appreciate the feedback! 🙂

Howdy folks. This is part 1 of a series of very high level reworks and revamps and refreshes to the game's core ideas. Caveat: These ideas are big picture, the biggest possible picture available. Therefore, I have no real expectation that these are picked up and implemented by the Homecoming Team. This is a thought experiment, not a list of demands. With that in mind, please try to keep an open mind. These threads will be full of radical ideas and I'd love for you to go down the rabbit hole about them with me. Other (future) Drawing Board Threads: Power Pools Other Current Drawing Board Threads: Incarnate System With that out of the way, on with the show! Enhancements The Enhancement system is, in a word, fantastic. The idea that rather than acquiring gear which boosts you directly, you acquire enhancements which boost your power and sometimes indirectly boost you - its genius. But that doesn't mean the system isn't in dire need of a Drawing Board overhaul! Part 1: The Clean-Out: Any good Drawing Board idea starts with the clean out. This is where we get rid of things we no longer need. So, here's what's on the cutting room floor: Dual-Origin Enhancements Training-Origin Enhancements Generic IO Enhancements (such as Invention: Damage and all that) The reasoning here is that with the following changes, these enhancement types will become redundant - and we hate redundancy. So let's get 'em out of here! Part 2: The Name Game: This section is similarly brief, but similarly important. Its where we clean up what things are named in this new flow. Names are important, they set expectations, they compare and contrast. The goal with these changes is to clean up some of the name cruft that's been building up. Single-Origin Enhancements are now just called Origin Enhancements. Invention-Origin Enhancements (the set bonus ones, since generic IOs no longer exist) are now called Invention Enhancements. Part 3: The Big Changes: Here's where we start making moves that significantly change the flow of the system. Don't worry, I'll explain my reasonings later, but for right now, we've just got to get them up here so things later on can make sense: Origin Enhancements no longer deprecate when you level past them. This means that a level 10 +Damage Origin Enhancement will still give you its Damage bonus even at level 50, although obviously that bonus is much lower in magnitude than a level 50 +Damage Origin Enhancement. All Enhancements no longer have their base bonuses stop working when Exemplared below their minimum level. Instead, they automatically lower their values as if they were enhancements of the level you are Exemplared to. For example, a level 50 +Damage Origin Enhancement would behave like a level 10 +Damage enhancement if you were playing in level 10 content. If a power is disabled due to exemplaring, its set bonuses and global procs also stop working. Note that the Set Bonuses of an Invention set do indeed stop working when below level 10 even if the power remains available. Terminology Clarification: base bonuses = what enhancements directly modify, compare to set bonuses which are their bonus set effects. Base bonuses do include procs and added global benefits, as long as they are part of the top part of the enhancement. All Enhancements now follow the same numerical scale across levels. This means that a level 15 Origin Enhancement that increases damage matches numerically to an Attuned Enhancement's Damage value at that level. Note that these values are lower when an Invention Enhancement has its base values split between two or more attributes. For example, a +Damage +Accuracy Invention Enhancement would grant half as much +Damage and +Accuracy as a single Origin Enhancement would grant to either of those stats. These values are lowered less for D-Sync or Hami-O or other "Special" enhancements, ensuring that they remain a more numerically attractive but much rarer choice than Origin Enhancements or Invention Enhancements. All Invention Enhancements are now Attuned Enhancements with a standardized level range. All of them. This means that all Invention Enhancements have a minimum level of 10 and will level up with you from there until 50. Fun fact: this changed coupled with the removal of generic IOs in Part 1 means that the entire AH category for "crafted enhancements" can now be removed. All Invention Enhancements now have their set bonuses normalized to moderate tier values. In some cases where this would mean that two sets exist in the exact same space (Example: the two Leaping sets, one of which is currently a strictly worse version of the other) those bonuses are instead changed to benefit something else. All Invention Enhancements now have a Superior version that can be obtained via an Enhancement Catalyst. This Superior version is purple in rarity and has increased base and set bonus values. They act just like Purples do right now and have similar magnitudes for their attributes. Existing Purples then become Superior versions of new and back-filled non-Superior Versions. This means that it's now possible to find a recipe for Apocalypse: Damage, craft that attuned enhancement with its normal, non-superior values, then catalyze it to get the current Apocalypse: Damage that you are familiar with in the game right now. All Invention Enhancements are now Unique. This means that no two identical Invention Enhancements can be placed in your slots across all of your powers. And just like the ATO vs Superior ATO enhancements, this uniqueness is shared across regular vs superior versions. Now, using my fantastical mind powers, I know exactly what you're thinking - what about Luck of the Gambler's Global Recharge bonus? And to that I would like to first gently remind you that the purpose of these theorycrafting threads is to provide a meaningful set of significant changes. Things can be different without being worse. It's likely - probable, even - that the superior-ized versions of your enhancements' base values and set bonuses will more than make up for the loss of global recharge. And if they don't, that's okay too, since the goal here is for things to be different. Right now a huge chunk of powers design and build design hinges on that proc - its why all of the power pools people take are full of defense powers they don't use. And that's something that I think should change, and I think making it unique like the rest of the global procs in the game is a very good way of doing that. But enough about this - onwards, to Part 4... Part 4: Why? This section is fun because its where we talk about the reasons behind these changes. And for this set of Drawing Board ideas, the big reasons are twofold: Simplicity and Diversity. Simplicity is a hugely important part of design and its something that City of Heroes does very well. The game is, by and large, easy to pick up and fun to learn. You find enhancements that increase the power of your powers, you find salvage and recipes to craft fun and unique enhancements, and later on you can find super rare enhancements that can really radically boost your powers to the next level. Where this simplicity is lost is in the current very strange and hard to explain rules around enhancements and exemplaring. There are pages and pages of guides about this topic, its an oft-repeated question in the Help channel, and its something that unless you know where to look is hard to answer in game. The fact is, right now, if you asked a random person playing a random piece of exemplared content the question "do you know which of your enhancements are working?" you'd probably get the answer "I don't know." That isn't to say this information is completely opaque and that no one knows anything, but compared to other rock-solid parts of the game, its certainly an outlier. You know for a fact which powers stop working as you exemplar down, they become unusable which is noticeable and easy to understand. You should ideally also know for a fact which aspects of those powers have stopped working as well. Simplifying the leveling process going up or down is important because its a place where the game's complexity feels like an outlier. It doesn't really get us anywhere to keep SOs expiring every few levels. Nor does it feel fun to feel unusually weak in low or high level content without ever really understanding why. Diversity is the other major pillar of this revamp - specifically, providing means and incentive for players to diversify which enhancement sets they prioritize over others. Right now at level 50 a startlingly few amount of sets get used. Lotg, purples, ATOs, performance shifter and miracle procs... compared to the breadth and depth of the total number of IOs in the game, we've collapsed over time to a very shallow pool of available options. By elevating other Invention Enhancement sets to purple-power-level, we've opened the floodgates for a much broader suite of available options that players can feel good about choosing from. Furthermore, it doesn't feel good when comparing sets and realizing that a surprising selection of them are meant to be strictly worse versions of contemporary choices. Ideally each recipe you find, each enhancement you craft - someone should want them. And that is indeed an impossible goal to reach, as there will always be winners and losers, but its an ideal for a reason. The currently biggest outlier in the build meta is the aforementioned Luck of the Gambler proc. Its prevalent in nearly all optimized builds and for good reason - it's strong AND easy to fit in the corners of your power pools. And that is not, in and of itself, a problem per se. It does, however, create other problems by virtue of its existence, the biggest one in my opinion being that Lotg's proc causes players to pick powers they don't use to house it. And I know I'm guilty of this myself, my builds dutifully find 5 spaces so I can slot them just like a lot of other people do, but that doesn't mean that things shouldn't change so that players don't feel obligated to do that. I'd rather see a City of Heroes where players pick powers they feel excited about using, instead of one where they feel obligated to pick powers they don't use so that their existing rotation can be just that much better. Finally, what I like most about this entire Drawing Board overhaul is that walking a hypothetical character through their leveling process gets much easier and much more fun. Starting out and grabbing early Origin Enhancements to give you that edge in low level content, then finding early recipes that you can craft some starting Invention enhancements that you know remain strong as you level, and then finally finishing your build at level 50 when you can start using Catalysts to bring those Invention Enhancements to the next level. There's no part of this new flow where your character would lose power - unlike now where you can level past your SOs and not realize until you figure things out mid-combat. And since leveling enhancements are all on the same numerical track, you don't feel punished for leveling with exclusively SOs as you mess around with your combat rotation, experimenting with what abilities feel best to use. Part 5: Finishing Touches By way of a conclusion I'd like to reiterate that this thread (and the others I have cooking up) are more about the theory than the feasibility or realism. I am offering them more as a hypothetical discussion topic instead of a serious suggestion that I genuinely expect to be implemented. Although I certainly prefer this streamlined system, you may not, and that's totally okay. Well, hopefully that was a fun read! I certainly had fun writing this up and noodling on the details. And if you have any feedback at all on this kind of overhaul or have additional questions or suggestions, feel free to let me know down below. And with that, it's time for me to get back to playing! Happy New Year, Paragon City!

The Ninja Blade animations are all two-handed. Also the Romulus swords are wielded currently in one-handed animations (Broad Sword).

The Romulus Nictus broadsword looks awesome (and I suppose the non-glowy version looks cool too). It'd be nice to be able to use it on Ninja Blade/Ninjutsu/Katana characters, as well as with Dual Blades.

In character select, I would prefer to see a large icon depicting each character's Archetype instead of the large icon that currently denotes that character's alignment. I feel like it would make it easier to remember which character is which. I know that this info is written out underneath the entries, and is also available if you select them, but I feel the visual icon association is really important to the at a glance info that is available, considerably moreso than hero vs villain.

I want to make a mastermind that only has wolves - I don't like that 4/6 of my pets get to be wolves but 2 have to be stuck as Lions. I think thematically it would be a lot more fun to have a wolf-only version. Furthermore, the attacks themselves could be replaced with alternates that better fit the wolf theme - such as maybe Sonic attacks for Howls. Or maybe even melee attacks using Savage Melee for a melee-focused mastermind primary.