Lockely

Back in the day, I almost exclusively played redside. I had picked up CoH and had a scrapper I enjoyed but I could never get into leveling blueside because of how absolutely grindy it was from the get-go. Redside, out the gate, had so much more story focus, so it was there I crested my first 50, my Claws/Dark Stalker (I had a habit, still do, of picking underpowered or thematically fun but mechanically not great combos). I almost exclusively played with a small handful of friends, and frequently dabbled into the PvP zones. I didn't worry too much about builds, I just played for fun and if that meant I didn't have the perfect SO set (IOs weren't a thing), then so be it. These days I am much more focused on features like the Mission Architect and ensuring my builds are, if not optimal, at least functional in both solo and a team context, with at the very least standard IOs if not proper sets. Love my Bots/FF MM, love my War Mace/Shields Brute, and while I'm probably still never going to play a Blaster, I have really enjoyed my Sentinel instead. I might even get a Crab Spider after all these years, one of my long term goals back then that fell off when my friends stopped playing around i14. I have loved the incredibly storylines they began to add to both blueside, and later with goldside, and that's sincerely helped me get more characters leveled up. Still don't super love grinding though.

Thank you for playing. Mission 4 is a nightmare and I might just convert the escorts back to Allies, because their pathing in that map is *very bad* and if you don't take them where they need to go *exactly* it won't spawn the next step. I will just have to live with the fact that it's a needle in a haystack kinda thing. Good note on the bios, I made them so long ago I forgot to write stuff up. Everyone up to Mission 4 should now have a Bio, and I'll try and get the Red Court written tonight. Edit: I've added bios to all mob types and refactored Mission 4 to change the Escorts back to Allies. I hope it's solvable now, if a bit harder to find everything once more.

Will we see the rusted clockwork pattern be added to the Clockwork Upper Arms for the Robotic Arms 1/2 options, as well as the Clockwork Robotic Arms 3 option? Additionally, same question for the hidden blaster variant for Robotic Arms 3?

Primal Earth, a nexus for superpowered beings, has the unfortunate effect of intersecting with countless other universes. Sometimes, a being slips the veil between worlds and finds themselves on the other side of the looking glass... The Rook's Gambit is my first real foray into the Mission Architect, and I've been crafting it (and recrafting it, and re-recrafting it) over the course of a few years on and off. It's a love letter to both CoH and an RP setting I share with my friends. Please, let me know what you think, I'd love to improve it more. I know Mission 4 is kinda wonky (kinda is being kind) but I'm not sure how I can exactly fix it while trying to 'do' what I'm trying to 'do. Mission 4 Spoilers below for if you're stuck on it, or want to help refine it once complete: Updates/Patch Notes Thank you everyone for taking the time to play it!

Oh, I 100% agree she has an important role. Probably one of the most important early-late game contacts, storywise! It's just a shame they wasted that on filler content. Also, I feel the Hydra thing is a bug? You don't see the NPC that imprints their thoughts on you until the second mission, but you get the clue in the first mission. If I reworked that one, I'd move the 'Aue'io voice' clue to after the second mission, and add a new clue after the first that simply says "Gooped! ~ After battling the hydra, you are thoroughly drenched in their goop. Maybe someone will want to study it?", this clue would direct you to part 2 of the mission and back in at part 3. It would also solve the incongruity of the voice clue asking you to leave them alone but you deciding 'nah' and coming back to kick their asses for no reason a second time.

Encouraging team diversity and the playing of various other ATs is not a bad thing in the slightest. Using a carrot that's fundamentally not impactful to gameplay is a good way to do that. What might be a good solution is to give a 20% chance *per* unique AT in a team, versus all this role nonsense. That way, you still have to have 5 unique ATs to qualify for the 100% bonus, but at the same time, no one is faffing about with various roles.

I am not opposed to this, but was simply copying down what was actually listed on the selection screen so we didn't have an incongruent mismatch from it to a later implementation in-game. Trying to make the best of both worlds work together.

This feels like the crux of the issue, right here. If it isn't matching the info provided to players on character creation, and it's in fact shoehorning ATs into roles arbitrarily, while unintentionally promoting EATs as a method to more easily fill the diversity bonuses, then maybe this system needs to go back to the drawing board. I love it in concept. FFXIV has something similar that encourages an 8-man party to at least have a tank, a healer, a melee dps, a ranged phys dps, and a magic dps for a minor stat bonus during the mission and faster LB generation. Nothing make or break, but it *feels* better to have. This should be similar, while catering to the niches that CoH uniquely provides. Edit: Maybe a better implementation is to instead be an "At least 5 unique archetypes of the following" i.e. If your team brings unique Archetypes that fulfills at least five of the following roles, you will be granted the bonus. Tank - Brute, Tanker, Peacebringer, Warshade Melee - Brute, Scrapper, Stalker, Tanker, Soldier, Widow Ranged - Blaster, Corruptor, Defender, Sentinel, Soldier, Widow, Peacebringer, Warshade Crowd Control - Controller, Dominator Support - Controller, Corrupter, Defender, Mastermind, Soldier, Widow Pets - Controller, Dominator, Mastermind, Soldier To prevent the prevalence of EATs eating everyone else's lunch, you could in theory pull them from that list above and add a new option in character creation for Advanced Classes that feature just Peacebringer, Warshade, Soldier, and Widow and have them count towards two of the options rather than three to ensure they're not destroying everyone else's chances to get into a team just to tick some boxes.

Stretching those enemy groups would also give us more flexibility in AE. I really dislike that my WIP Praetorian story is capped off at 24 unless I directly recreate all the enemy groups I want to use, and even then I can't use groups like the Ghouls in it.

It apparently broke the servers back in the day. I wonder if the devs could repurpose the /command to simply print out a message advising that the feature is not currently available.

I had a friend of mine (@AelithEarfalas on Twitter) draw my character quite a while back and I combined the image and his in-game bio together for a quick 'this is who I am' deal. Best I can get with the ingame options currently, but I hope to one day fully realize his looks!

Maybe even an inherent power that gets added upon reaching 30-35ish, to show you're growing at your skills as an MM by being able to summon them all? Call it Mass Replenishment or something similar.

That's-- not what I'm asking for? I merely pointed out that one of her randoms was made entirely irrelevant and is incongruent with her Arc missions (and seeing that she has 13 non-arc missions, can likely be trimmed entirely at no loss). The rest of her random missions just need a glow-up. They need to capitalize on the concept they are provided. Filler doesn't have to stay filler forever.

Right, but we should want the filler to eventually be reworked into enjoyable content, no? Especially when said filler has as much potential as the missions and locations involved in this contact and with Portal Corps as a whole. Just because it's always been this way doesn't mean it should stay this way if it's agreed to be the definition of unfun, right?

So, I just recently played through basically all of Tina Macintyre's updated post-GR missions (Peregrine Island/Portal Corps) and found the map and objective choices in many of them to be incredibly redundant and in need of a little bit of TLC. Not to mention she has a *lot* of missions with missed potential. And I mean, like, a *lot* of missions: Arc missions Part 2, Part 7, and the non-arc mission "Rescue the Freedom Fighters all use the same overly-large outdoor Paragon map with almost no way to find the objectives other than combing the map grid-by-grid and destroying every single enemy until you can find the tiny corner where the captive NPCs or glowies are tucked away. There isn't any unique dialogue tied to approaching them to let the player know they're close either. Most of her random missions suffer from being in a massive open-world map with one tiny glowy to find, one-to-five NPCs to fnd, or one-to-five NPCs to kill, many with time limits. They're all mostly an exercise in patience than anything else. Additionally, one of her randoms, "Disrupt Anti-Matter's Plans" is basically incongruent with the plot of her story arc, as it's dealing with the same thing, but worse, and if you do it post-story arc, it feels like Anti-Matter, Tina, *and* the player have all suffered a bout of amnesia and forget everything about it. In the end, the non-arc missions end up feeling like (or outright being) filler, and while the arc itself contains a bit of filler as a treat, it kinda feels like a huge missed opportunity? For a lot of players, these will be their first looks into the alternate universes that make up the CoH setting (Praetoria notwithstanding). Nearly all of the visits to the other universes are superficial at most, and it's similar to looking out onto a vast lake, only to find that it's ankle deep and you're expected to find 5 shiny rocks and a white crab somewhere under the surface of it without a hint as to where. The Hydra mission, despite its 'kill all' condition, is the best use of these worlds without a full accompanying story arc. We pop in, get some lore, pop back, report it and take it for analysis, then pop back over for some follow-up lore and the mission map isn't 30 square miles wide. I can't help but wonder if it might even be useful to move a few of these over to Talos Island with the Rift Enclosure and a new contact who is doing a little bit of *off the books* research to fill in some lower level story content. There's so much potential here and it's being wasted on filler missions that serve to let you glance at these lore rich areas but not really touch them.

Maybe a neutered/toned down P2W vendor that just has stuff you're going to want to snag on any new character, i.e. three prestige attacks, alternate sprints, and Inner Inspiration/Mystic Fortune/Secondary Mutagen? Instead of calling it a P2W vendor it could be like, the New Deployment Provisioner.

I second this. It would be outstanding to bring it back as a hazard zone dealing with post-meteor strike, Neo-Shivan cleanup! After visiting during Dr. Graves' arc, I headed straight over there on my hero wondering if they had opened it up at some point, and was disappointed to see the doors shut and the door NPC saying the meteor strike was still in progress. Considering it's a legacy zone that some long term players have a ton of love and nostalgia for (esp if they got it as their starting city), it really does feel disappointing we never got to take it back in some form.

I think this happens with most alternate animation toggles and Shield Defense, actually. I noticed the same for my alternate stance/run animations when I have my shield toggles on.

Oh good, reading the original made it sound like they were blue-coding Resistance and red-coding Loyalist, when its very much shades of grey across the board for both sides in their story. Adding Resistance Blue and Loyalist Gold is definitely the better way of handling it. Only change I would add to this screen is also making Resistance the correct shade of blue, as well as highlighting the "Not recommended for new players" in another color to make it stand out.

Oh yeah, I mentioned it above that most outdoor maps don't have the door functions programmed into them, but that's more of a feature request. As a stop-gap, I suppose reassigning the mission entrance as the nearest door would probably work for the same purposes. I'm more concerned with Follow and Wander not doing anything, as both could have impactful storyline use for AE designers.

Apologies if this is a known issue, but I did not see this posted anywhere upon a search. In Architect Entertainment, the Arrival Behavior function doesn't seem to work properly based on my testing. Out of the functions above, the only three that appear to work are "Do Nothing", "Wander", and "Run to Nearest Door", with the last two only working on mostly indoor maps as most outdoor maps seem to not have that function set up properly on them, and the first being the default state that it fails to when the others do not function. What happens more often than not, regardless of how you have them programmed, is they simply stand at their escort location once they've arrived. I know we can get around the lack of a proper static follow by setting them as allies instead, but for big outdoor maps they *should* be able to dual function as both a combat ally and as a waypoint for tricky to find objectives.

I hope you don't mind, I've taken the original document and changed it to a shareable Google Sheet for folks to make their own copies instead of having to import an xlsx file. I've also created tabs for each of the 'pages' in the Mission Architect with the universal stuff pre-loaded so people can more easily keep track. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZLLuLOt_W_afJuvQ731PjxlaUlNu-JQUHY8zU3z4C2s/edit?usp=sharing I'm happy to pull it down if you prefer, just let me know!

This continues to be the thing I want the most, as having to recreate janky versions of existing groups so my missions scale for everyone is incredibly time consuming and takes up so many custom enemy slots.

Looks like this one has been covered in the Focused Feedback thread for costume parts!

I was testing out some of the new parts on a copied character, and I noticed all my costumes were flagged as having invalid parts. Upon loading up the costume creator, it automatically flagged the Pulse Rifle as invalid and defaulted it to the Legacy Assault Rifle. On Live, the character is using the Celestial Rifle.