Yoru-hime

Getting away from the "NCSoft is the devil" mindset, there's a group of people on their end trying to figure out what to do about all this and probably feeling like they're in a no-win situation. Whether it's lost intellectual property or a public relations hit, most of the potential outcomes of this scenario aren't actually positive for NCSoft. They're trying to find a solution that doesn't hurt their company somehow or at least minimizes the damage, but that's really hard to define in this scenario. I think what's probably going on over on the other side of the fence is a lot of trying to assign value to things that don't have a clear price tag and looking for the best outcome of an undesirable situation. Since we're all speculating, here's what I think they're trying to figure out on the NCSoft side: How much real value is left in the property in question? What are they really fighting over here? Ancient code sitting on a shelf somewhere and character images they were never going to use again anyway? Or something with tangible value that could cause losses if they didn't try to regain control of it? How much harm will the negative publicity of bringing down the hammer on HC do to existing NCSoft publicity efforts in the US? The Homecoming release news reached a lot of MMO gamers. It's safe to assume that news reading "NCSoft is a big corporate bully who still hates players and killed their server" would reach an equally large audience. On the other hand, news of a deal with HC might incline those same readers to think that NCSoft is being kinda cool about this. If there has been meaningful turnover at the company, there may be a desire to shed the reputation as a company that frequently abandons games and their communities and repaint themselves as more pro-players. That might entice them to hand over the keys to an otherwise worthless IP. Is there a way to leverage a deal into future revenue? Homecoming has proved that there's still demand for this game (albeit at a zero price point). In business, demand generally equates to potential opportunity, so understanding it is very valuable. Can they gather information here that could be used to better craft future games to succeed in the US market? Does NCSoft want to legitimize this effort and possibly encourage future acts of piracy? Let's be honest, someone stole code from NCSoft and these people have been knowingly using that to power their efforts. Does NCSoft risk creating copycats if they treat HC like a respectable partner? What potential legal liability is there in partnering with the HC group? What if this group of hobbyists and volunteers makes a major mistake? Would NCSoft somehow be on the hook for that? As has been noted, from NCSoft's perspective, there's got to be a strong self-defensive impulse to just slap a C&D letter on this whole thing and be done with it (and, like it or not, they already have the absolute right to do this), so there's SOMETHING altering the math in their heads to the point where they're at least talking about a deal. Personally, I'm cautiously optimistic.

Watching with hope. Though we'll hold off on scheduling the ticker-tape parade through the streets of Steel Canyon until the ink is dry. 😉

How about we boost TOs to DO level and remove DOs? Have SOs start dropping sometime between when DOs would have before and when SOs show up now. TOs are still training wheel enhancements that don't care about origin. I'd also make it so any mission reward enhancement is always an SO, so running lowbie missions seems a little bit less like "the slow and painful way to start the game".

I'm going to disagree with this sentiment. By this reasoning, the HC devs shouldn't be changing anything at all, ever, because after all, "the smallest thing can make it all go BOOM". If they've said something specific about enhancements being a difficult think to tweak, then that's one thing, but a blanket statement like this doesn't really work. The HC devs can change things, they have changed things, they are still changing things, and we're doing OK. If something is too complex or risky to implement for reasons we can't see, I trust the coders to just not do it. That doesn't mean we can't make suggestions and discuss their potential merit. That's why this sub-forum is here. My impulse is that this is over the top, but given the way that lowbie SOs are handed out like candy in DFB, I'm not sure it's as over the top as it seems. I definitely felt the difference in power between the character that I ran a DFB with and the ones I didn't for those several levels when I could use those SOs. As far as I know, no one is snarking about those being an "I Win" button.

Force Fields simply redefines where melee can take place as "somewhere else". 😄

There's nothing in the Trick Arrow/Archery combo that requires you to be in melee range and quite a bit of it offers -SPD to keep enemies from reaching you even if they try. If you absolutely didn't want to get close enough to smell the baddies, it'd be a way to go.

"Some people might say that the attached case for our new portable computer is a little bulky at 4 meters to a side and 7000 kilograms, but we've found that our users actually love the feeling of security it provides and just consider it part of the iParagon experience."

I benefited from one of these last weekend. Someone paid 100M for one of my Enhancement Converters. I both feel bad and am quite grateful. It's a huge leg up for someone still just getting restarted and fitting out that first build, but I really hope the person who did it is so wealthy that they could laugh off the mistake.

This was already starting to break down during live. More damage and bigger HP pools only go so far. That's why there were so many mechanics/gimmicks to the Incarnate Trials, to try to keep it interesting and challenging. Personally, I've read the AMA and while I don't think it was answered in bad faith, I don't see how Omega in that form possibly would have made it into the game. It would have driven the Devs absolutely insane going forward. If the shutdown had never happened, I think it would have almost had to get revised into something manageable at some point. Part of the problem with the suggested Omega slot is the raw power, but the other part is the huge variety to the options. While all the Lore pets are a little different, they all do about the same thing and can be accounted for in trial development as though they're about the same. Same thing with Judgment. Be it Fire, Ice or Void, big boom is big boom. Later iTrials assume that you've got one and for the devs' side of thing, it doesn't really matter which one you picked. The ideas for Omega, though, are all over the place. Instant Recharge, Absolute Invincibility, Mass Confuse/Destruction, Level Shifts.... Trying to design an encounter that can seriously challenge a group that has some or all of these available, and yet may be short-handed or outright lacking any specific one, is going to be a real headache for developers.

"Everlasting TF" THE chat channel for all Dr. Quarterfield fans.

Best is going to be very subjective and depends on your playstyle. What do you see your Dark themed character doing? Are they in the middle of the horde of baddies pummeling away while their foes are trying in vain to find them in the swirling shadows? Are they using the powers of the void to reduce their once-powerful foes to a quivering wreck or freeze them in their tracks? Are they simply tearing their enemies apart with raw blasts of pure darkness? I'm partial to the D3 defender, but to be fair that's the character I have the most experience with by far. A bit slow getting started, but good mix of debuff and control for almost any situation. Much easier to level with Inherent Stamina than back in the day. I haven't tried all the rest, so I certainly can't say anything about the "best". All those Dark characters are going to play differently. And as noted above, you can recolor other sets to be "Dark". I've played around with the idea of a "dark" fire Corruptor in the past and I thought she looked awesome, though she hasn't made it out of the costume creator yet.

I hate to say it, but if we're adding effectiveness to the T9 for the defensive sets, particularly as a secondary, we probably need to be asking where else in those sets effectiveness is removed in return. Scrappers are supposed to be tough, not indestructible. On the other hand, as noted elsewhere, a buff to the Tanker version only is something I could get easily behind. As the defenses of the other melee sets have gone up and up, their distinctive role feels less and less desirable. They need something to either set them apart defensively or close the gap offensively. It's also the T9 of their primary set, so it feels like that should be a defining power they should always want to have.

Thank you for posting this, it's really, really helpful as I'm trying to decide what secondary I want to use next. FYI, It looks like Regen out of Hide is a copy of Rad in the overview image. The resistances look off.

If you don't have a travel power, it's always gotta be the cave on top of the giant rock pillar.

You're moving your target, Random User. You started with "runaway inflation", then when it was pointed out that inflation was actually quite effectively capped, you started demanding something else entirely. With all respect, do you really have a suggestion in mind or are you just angry that people profiteer on the Auction House? Unless I've missed something, there's nothing in this game that outright requires you to use the Auction House to get. As a recent returner, I'm still a little startled at how easy it is to gather resources for a build through casual play. A measly hundred merits for a VR? I just about fell out of my chair when that first PvP recipe dropped in Faultline.

I'd take Elude on my Scrapper if the crash were removed, but I'd be taking it for recovery and speed, not for defense, which sounds completely silly. Unless there were some sort of major rework of the set (which I am NOT advocating for by the way), I'm already covered on defense. Resist or absorb or something would certainly be a functional improvement, but in addition to being out of theme, it's not one I can really claim to NEED. When my SR scrapper was fully leveled on Legacy, I ran +4/x8 with little trouble unless something was exploiting a weakness and I'm not some sort of master build maker. It is a little sad that the Tier 9 feels so unneeded, but that's a side effect of the raw power of IO sets and the diminishing returns of protective powers. I always want more damage, but once I have enough protection to hit the AT cap or fight what I want safely, adding more on top of it provides very little value, so the T9 tends to seem extraneous. A buff to Primary T9s as a way to help out Tankers would make sense to me, though. Give them a way to either create more of a meaningful gap defensively or bridge some of the gap offensively with the other Melee classes.

Never go against the Freakshow when DEATH is on the line! ...they have that stupid self-rez that takes all the fun out of it.

I really appreciate your efforts to keep the knockback problem front and center. It DOES keep me from rolling up certain characters, not so much that I think others are going to be nasty (our community is generally awesome), but I don't want to have to deal with fighting the side effects of my own powers as well as the enemies in front of me. Putting this into IOs would give someone the option of multiple builds if they wanted one for teams that aren't really well suited to KB and one for soloing or teams that embrace the chaos. Null could have the same effect of a KD/KB switch, but at the cost of being able to fine tune how each one works.

It'd be a nice option to have. I haven't seen anything here to make me go looking for it, but I have on other sites and platforms. Some of those GIFs can get nauseating for me.

That sort of behavior keeps me from playing healer types even in games actually that have them. I never had to put with the levels of micromanagement and abuse that players tried to dish out to my FFXIV White Mage on anything else I've ever played.

I had no trouble building a Traps/ defender that worked fine in melee as long as I didn't get too far away from the Force Field Generator. I paired it with DP for the joy of letting loose with Hail of Bullets in the middle of the madness.

This is a neat idea. It's a permanent sidekick, really. Thematically, I'd love to be able to uncouple the master and pupil powers. It's the same problem I have with Mastermind where if I want the Whip, I HAVE to have demons, and vice versa. And I'll add my voice to the chorus where this would really, REALLY benefit from pet customization to make both members of the team distinctive and unique. Neither of these are easy or exclusive to your suggested AT, of course. One question that I'm not sure you've addressed is Partner survivability and death. What are the thoughts on how squishy a Partner should be when the going gets tough? In a bind, losing half your functional power is going to turn a bad situation worse in a hurry. MMs are somewhat protected from this by the sheer volume of pets, but the Duo is going to be faced with whatever killed the Partner coming after them, leaving them forced to choose between trying to fight it off alone or trying to get the Partner recast in a hurry. A squishy partner means that there's a high chance that the Duo is going to be spending time fighting solo when things get rough. On the other hand, if the Partner is tougher than the Master to kill, it encourages the Master to hang back instead of fighting alongside it. A suggestion could be that the death of the Partner triggers an ST Vengeance-like effect for a short time. Filled with rage at the abuse their pupil has taken, the master rises to occasion to punish the transgressor. Care would have to be taken to avoid intentional abuse of the power (and the Partner), but it might prevent any Partner death from turning into an immediate character death.

<Insert GIF of Boromir here> This game has no Healer, this game needs no Healer. This isn't QOL, it's reinforcing needless exclusion of others. This isn't WoW or FFXIV. The tank, healer, damage trinity just doesn't apply. You DON'T need a "healer" on a team. If a leader is holding out for a "healer", they're probably wasting everyone's time and turning away perfectly good teammates while they do it. Support is always nice (and can get stupidly powerful when stacked), but there is very, VERY little in this game that requires any specific Archetype, much less specific sets. Some leaders are just going to do this anyway because they can't help it, but putting anything into the team-building structure that normalizes or worse encourages this behavior gets a firm "No, thank you." from me as well.

The sign was spray-painted by hoodlums who love listening to the poor warehouse manager's pain as heroes keep kicking and flinging bowling balls at his precious commodities. The bowling pin-shaped packaging was already a failure in terms of efficiency, but this was just insult on top of injury. On the positive side, the warehouse workers already had plenty of alcohol on hand to sell and the shoe rental sidelight is covering most of the losses.

I'd never really thought about it before, but I almost always take 4.