Uruare

Because I don't make a thing unless I actually want to play a thing, and I generally enjoy active farming. I could do that. I have done that with things I was very sketchy on. I can still do that, and take 2x as long to actually build it on live servers now if I want more than a demo. Feels like nonsense to me. It adds nothing to my enjoyment and actively detracts from it. I'm not one of the developers, so I neither know or care about birds-eye view metrics. What I know is how this affects me, and I don't like it. Why should I be happy about it? What am I supposed to like about it? I'm not condemning them. I'm sure they know what they're doing. It's probably the most amazeballs of changes; purity incarnate, a renaissance of elegance. Tastes like ice cream, now with 50% less flavor to me. You don't have to agree.

Well, this is a boring and peculiar change. I generally enjoy active farming, and that won't be changing, but knowing that the GM's are delighted to have me waste 2x the amount of time doing it in order to fund my character building projects kinda makes me want to not do it. Or anything, really. It'll make me, as an avid farmer, take twice as long to farm for inf to fund my builds. It looks like a solution in search of a problem. It feels like one of those pointless changes made by someone that basically hates inf farming as a playstyle and slapped a thin excuse about exploits onto it to make it sound authoritative and legitimate. Doesn't mean a thing if that wasn't the goal or the intention. You peculiar sods might've thought you were aiming at something else entirely, but you've pretty well killed at least my own interest in farming up inf to fund new builds, which means I won't bother coming up with new builds or even playing as much. Most of my fun was in coming up with builds, then farming up the inf to put them together and burn testing them. It's a lot more fun to actually put a thing together and feel how it plays than to build it in mids and guess. Won't be doing that anymore. Funding new builds just became a monumentally increased time investment. I was happy to spend the time on it that I was spending. I don't think I'll spend any time on it now though. This change offers me nothing, but promises to make me take twice as long to fund my adventures. You've put the time cost out of the budget I was willing to allocate on it. And now you get nothing.

No. I can play any and every other MMO in existence to get the experience of feeling mediocre and dependent on a group to feel like I'm playing something that's legitimately epic. Judgments are one more tool in the toolbox of options for building something out of a comic book about super-powered beings. You don't have to use them. You don't have to use Incarnate powers at all. You can lock your level at 10 and never leave Atlas or Mercy Isle if you like. I know people that do all of those, including one that locked her level at 10 and never leaves Mercy Isle for much. You won't be able to keep up with the people that build finely tuned min-maxed murderhobos if you do any of that. At no point in this game's history could you slap some concept character together, stick slots wherever they looked good and take theme powers that didn't actually help you kill/not die better and keep up with the murderhobos. There were always murderhobos. This isn't any of those other MMO's in which you have no real options and your class guarantees that you can just show up, push your DPS or Tank or Heal buttons and fulfill your obligations to your teammates. It never actually was. If you want to be valuable on random teams, you'd better be on a solid build that's actually good at something useful at all times. You'd better be able to kill fast/kill lots, debuff the important stuff, buff the important stuff and/or know how to taunt and herd mobs. You have the freedom here to build utter garbage. You might come up with a concept you adore that doesn't lend well to being reflected in builds that are actually useful at all times, or sometimes at all. Even before incarnate powers existed at all, it was easy to put together various builds for soloing AV's, soloing GM's and soloing +4/x8 missions. Judgments didn't make anything possible that was't possible before. Might've made killing large groups of trash faster, but not by so much as that it's all that different from how it was in the first place on a team of well built characters. We were running Family and Freak farms before there were aggro caps or IO's or even diminishing returns on SO stats. If you build something that thematically pleases you but mechanically sucks, that's on you. You don't get to nerf everyone else because you want to build a trashfire but somehow also expect it to keep up with finely tuned murderhobos. Judgment powers didn't make murderhobos happen. Murderhobos have been around since the very beginning. The recipe has changed over the years as nerfs and buffs and varietal changes came down the pipe, but there were always the builds that were rockstars of murdering the entire screen. Heck. Judgment powers aren't even something I consider anything but flavor on my own murderhobo builds. They're perks I literally wouldn't miss if they were gone because nobody sane builds a build around a power with a fixed 2m cooldown. It's token damage that hits a big area in the grand scheme of things. It's a cherry on top of something. Whether that something is a finely tuned murderhobo build or some 'concept character' that can barely function is up to you. If you find that you're not able to keep up with the teams you join, chances are really good that the problem is you, not them. You don't have to build a tuned murderhobo to build something that's rock solid and perfectly good. And if judgment powers are somehow making you feel like you're purposeless, I'd have a lot of questions I don't care to ask about how you've painted yourself into a bizarre niche like that. The moral of this story is this; here, you have freedom. You can build for how the game actually plays and what's actually valuable to how the game actually plays, or you can build whatever you like without a care and accept that your theme character won't always be very good for how the game actually plays.

Uru created a demiplane and meshed it with a neighborhood on the east side in Kallisti Wharf. It appears to just be part of a normal street frontage featuring a brownstone townhouse next to a Rikti War memorial. Not immediately or obviously weird in the slightest, until you look for it on a map and find that it doesn't exist on the map, GPS can't locate it and how nobody Uru doesn't want to find it can locate it even on foot. Go inside and there's an elevator that goes nowhere but Floor 5. The lobby is drab, largely empty except for a couple of chairs and a coffee table strewn with magazines from the 1920's-1990's. All of the magazines feature articles discussing gardening. They are all gardening magazines. Tea, tea sets and dolls evoking a sense of 'uncanny valley' are also often to be found upon the magazine's pages, though this tendency ceases completely in magazines dated after 1981. Floor 5 is Uru's flat. It is spacious, comfortably appointed and modestly luxurious, though by no means opulent. The warm fragrance of baked goods, pastries and cooked meats or vegetables always lingers in the air, and everything looks pretty much normal until you look closely at certain things. There is an inconspicuous crack in the wall near the entrance door. A fern has been tastefully arranged in front of it. Should you find yourself in Uru's house, and should you therein espy the crack in the wall behind the tastefully arranged fern, you should pay it no heed. Under no circumstances should you go look through the crack. You definitely should not go into the crack, even if you hear phantasmal music and almost-voices that seem to be beckoning you. There's no telling where you'll wind up, skulking around in strange fissures, and the proprietess extends no promises that, should you fail to heed these admonitions, that you will like what you find or ever be seen again. She has very little to say about what condition you might be seen in, in the event that you go through the crack and are, later, seen again. You should definitely have a seat in the nicely appointed dining or sitting area, help yourself to a pastry and a beverage from the conveniently self-replenishing snack bar and ignore the crack in reality behind the tastefully arranged fern. The fern is trying to protect you. Unfortunately, ferns are not very good at protecting things and it will do nothing to prevent you from crawling curiously into whatever split seams in existence there may or may not happen to be hidden (badly) behind it's slender, fronded body. It only wants what's best for you. Wouldn't you enjoy a nice apple fritter and a cup of cocoa instead of ill-advised explorations of structural anomalies in the fabric of reality? Could you not perchance be persuaded to enjoy a beer and a blintz if apple fritters and cocoa just aren't to your liking? The fern knows what awaits you. It pleads in silent, ancient fern languages for you to understand that it is your curiosity that is your worst enemy, and that there cannot possibly be anything you will want or could ever need behind the badly hidden crack in the wall. The fern understands, but it cannot prevent you from doing what you will. It cannot stand in the way of free will, of hubris, of madness or of small animals that are captivated by phantasmal sounds only they can hear emitting from the fissure. The weather is always non-existent outside of Uru's House. It never rains. It is never cloudy. It is never daytime. The uncaring sun sees nothing that happens here, though while within Uru's home, cheerful sunlight is always filtering through the massive windows. It is always Sunny in Kallisti Wharf when looking from the inside out. It is never sunny when standing outside of Uru's home. The stars never blink. They never move. They are not your stars, and their passive vibrations sing a haunting song written in alien starlight. They sing of times that cannot happen, of Never Was and of strange, vaguely humanoid entities that evoke an overwhelming sense of 'uncanny valley'; of silence that has never been broken and of broken silences that can never, ever, not -ever- be mended again. Ignore the 1984 red Caddilac convertible crashed into the fence dividing Uru's driveway from the Rikti War Memorial. If you do not look it in the eye, it will not feel threatened, and will almost certainly do you no harm.

I think Mind on a controller would be spruced up nicely by reducing the cooldown on Mass Dom and Mass Confusion, and making Cofusion effects initiate Containment. Also, Sleep may be the most perfectly useless status effect in the game while teaming. On my min/kin troller, Mass Sleep has two uses for me; muling an IO set and proc'ing Containment. The status effect itself could be removed from the power completely and, frankly, it'd probably take me forever to even notice because its virtually useless and negated immediately anyway, and because I'm not a masochist, I never solo on the min/kin so I'd never notice that way either. Being able to throw out Mass Domination and Mass Confusions is great for turning packs of mobs into helpless cannon fodder for teams, but that's pretty much the end of Mind Control's usefulness in any real or practical sense. Containment from Mesmerize/Mass Sleep will only be of use to yourself, and you're going to be doing very little useful damage even with it. I love the ideas demonstrated in Mind Control. I mained a min/kin on live for many years and recreated her on here for nostalgia's sake, which is all of why I say, with completely comfortable familiarity, that Mind Control, as it is, is one of those sets you play because you like the idea. Don't ever expect it to do anything anyone needs. You will never have a necessary role. You won't even be better at Mind Controlling things than various other sets. And don't expect that to change. Play it because you like the idea of it as it is. When you're tired of being a novelty item, rip out an ill/rad, ill/kin, fire/kin or plant/anything and go actually be useful.

I don't find it offensive. Frankly, it doesn't matter a lick to me. I credit my indifference to knowing that some people deal with scary things through comedy, some through defiant behavior, yet others through avoidance or even abject denial, i.e not dealing with them/acknowledging them at all. Which is 'right' or more 'correct'? The ones that work for you. Which are 'wrong'? The ones that don't work for you. This declaration of it being 'in bad taste' is really just you saying that you don't like it and trying to frame your preference as the objective truth. I'm more offended by your pretention than the people that aren't being sensitive enough for the avoiders and the deniers' preferences.

Apparently, farming up one's own inf was too hard for some. Man, that's a degree of lazy you just don't see every day. Or at least I don't.

The snipe changes are pretty solid. No nerf at all to those that already had their +ToHit built up, and it opens up fast snipe at all levels of play instead of gating it behind tight-tweaked IO'ing.

From my position of knowing exactly nothing about the state of relations with NCSoft or what NCSoft's disposition towards Homecoming is, all I can do is hope for the best and prepare for the worst. I came into this knowing that it might be a very temporary visitation to the only MMO that I ever truly loved, and even if it all disappeared tomorrow, at least I got a chance to see it all again after all these years. Won't lie; I've spent most of my time here saying goodbye and taking the opportunity for closure for what it is, and it's been a fun and enjoyable process. If an axe doesn't fall, that'd be great. But if it does, this time, I'll be better able to walk away without feeling like there was so much left undone and unfinished. So no matter how these negotiations turn out, I'm grateful to the Homecoming team for the opportunity to have done this. And I'll look forward to seeing what comes next.