Lockely

It's difficult to position when you can't determine which of the melee are fighting for aggro/taunting and where the initial point of the cone (or the width/radius of it is) without a telegraph of some sort. Many GM parties I've been in just say "stay away from the boss entirely if you aren't tanky or you're going to get smashed" to new players asking for tips. My preference to avoid a lot of this is flight/group fly, but as stated here and in another thread, that often gets us yelled at/booted from the group if we don't disable it on anything not named Hamidon. I'm sure the water makes it difficult to even add a ground tell to give a second or so advanced notice of where the tentacle is actually aimed. Maybe a small bubbling effect would be doable?

Team play. I never solo GMs, I just join groups when they pop. Brute/Tanker runs in and grabs the tentacle. I send in bots. Two to five seconds later my bots implode.

If you're taking a look at MM/pet difficulties in this case, can you also take a look at Lusca's tentacles? Nearly every time I fight her, even with my ranged bots, they just routinely all explode into a shower of parts several seconds after engaging. I spend more time re-summoning and re-buffing than I do fighting against Lusca.

I get the anger a bit as an MM main. We're probably the most solo-friendly AT, but when it comes to team content our pets are made of newspaper and a prayer. We've asked for buffs to their survivability and had the non-MM community tell us we don't need it. We've asked for improvements to resummon and rebuff our pets and been (reportedly) told by the devs1 it is absolutely off the table. We're being left out of advanced mode content because the perception of the hardcore players (who are permeating it through the community) is that we bring nothing to the table and our pets are dead too often to even contribute proper DPS. We need a little TLC and it's coming out as lashing out because constructive feedback has been shot down. If the AT won't be changed, then the encounters need to be. I think both could use a little bit of a touch-up, tbh. 1. I have not personally seen this response, but I have gotten enough people to say it that I believe it's out there somewhere.

Yeah, I second this experience. If I'm not playing my Brute I get imploded as quickly as I notice the patch going around. I just jetpack on everyone now and fly high enough to be above the sphere.

I highly disagree. World bosses should be a challenge, and even with the additional mechanics I've not once seen a wipe on them. Should those mechanics be telegraphed? Yes. Should there be counterplay? Also yes. Should the bosses be a simple steamroll? God no. World Bosses/GMs have a significant reward to downing them. They shouldn't be loot piñatas.

I wouldn't say it's stupid or lazy, the devs are volunteers and not professionals getting paid. It sucks when these things aren't fully considered for things like GM updates, but it's better than the bosses being a 30s punching bag like they used to. But feedback like this is important and they'll get better at this through iteration and updates.

You need to remember OP is coming at this from the perspective of an MM player. We're classified as 'support' as well, though most of our support comes through both our pets and our secondaries, and aren't as strong as a full blown support class in many cases. Things like Pumpkin Patch just outright delete our pets, and often delete us as we need to be in supremacy range to keep our pets even useful. If my pets get nuked, I have to spend a good 1/3 of the boss's HP bar resummoning and rebuffing, and if I'm not on one of my incarnates with Ageless, a significant portion of my END too. I also lose out on Bodyguard Mode and a significant amount of my own defense as a result. I won't even play my melee henchmen MMs in anything more than just mobbing or AE anymore. I stick to my Bots and use Group Fly (until I get inevitably yelled at by someone who hasn't disabled it at Null) and try to hang back. Something like that should have, at a bare minimum, a telegraph for counterplay purposes. Both to allow people in animation lock to have a moment to GTFO, but to also allow those of us with Pets the chance to move them before they're killed by the very first tick.

I think if there's specific ATs being left out of the content, it's less about the content itself and more about AT balance. Granted, auto-hit really shouldn't be a thing and you should always have some form of counterplay (like for MMs, having to manually move your minions out of telegraphs/wind up strikes/ect as long as there's the ability to do so), but that's something that can be worked on and improved. Removing it entirely? Nah.

Ideally for something like Pumpkin Patch there should be a telegraph on the ground *before* the spell goes off. They could do it with the same Psuedopet they use for Liquid Nitrogen, but recolor it orange or whatever. Have it go down and as it *dies* the Patch goes down in its place.

Especially contacts like Dr. Weber that have to just going along with pretty heinous testing on *mostly* innocent people.

We've had this discussion ad nauseum at this point. Please refer to the most recent thread before we re-litigate all this again... and again... and again.

Especially with the affordability of a basic jetpack at 5,000 Inf per hour, this would be wonderful. Technically, pets *do* resummon themselves if they're too far away already, but in practice they're fully content with just running along the ground aggroing everything and getting imploded in level 50 zones or outdoor i-Trials and Raids.

I finally respec'd into Group Fly on my Bots MM just because it's basically required to move those things around, especially in things like Hamidon or when GM hunting, and now know the frustration of OP. I've had it for less than a week and have gotten yelled at to turn it off no less than six times already. My pets literally cannot keep up with SJ or normal Fly on their own, so I don't really have a choice in the matter unless I want to resummon them every time I get to a destination, and then when I get there I get yelled at for having my 'pet travel' skill enabled. I'd be happy with any solution to it at this point.

You know they get different badge names for all the default level up, debt, and other badges right? Just like how they're different on redside/blueside, many are unique per goldside. On top of that, many RPers would love a way to be 50 and still goldside alignment for Praetorian characters. It's currently *doable* but only through AE exclusive Pocket D farming. I want to circle back to this statement: Would love your data on this. I went to City of Data and looked up the reward scale of the enemy groups you face in the standard Praetorian 1-20 zones, (Syndicate, Praetorian PD, Ghouls, Destroyers, Resistance) and all have a reward scale of 1, meaning they do not have boosted XP at all.

You've seen the movie already many times over the last twenty years and want a character with access to their badges without having to play the first twenty levels entirely alone.

So, anyone who's played CoH for longer than 10mins will tell you that DFB is one of the most sought-after trials in the game. They're constantly running Blueside, and it takes only a few minutes to start one up Redside, but you know who gets left out? Goldside. Praetorian characters are left out of supremely fast level-ups until they hit 20 and can swap over. There's no trials, no TF/SFs, nothing until you swap sides. So, what if we added a DFB to Goldside? Group 1: The Destroyers (Hellion replacement) Group 2: Ghouls (Vaz replacement) Group 3: Infested (Lost replacement) - These will need to be re-created with low-level mobs, a small hint of the Hamidon infestation growing in the underground. Final Boss: Hydra Heads - The Hydra appear all over the multiverse it seems like. Considering the cross-universe incursions done by Anti-Matter and Neuron during the PI mission arcs for Tina Mac and Maria Jenkins, it's very possible a small cross-contamination occurred at some point. This alone could drastically increase the number of new veteran Goldside players, and folks wanting to pop over to Nova Praetoria and run it for the shiny new badges at the very least.

The issue remains that Echos don't have contacts or missions. They're almost empty shells made for when they make major physical zone design changes. You get nostalgia and a few more badges.

To be fair, that would all be valid Redside behavior. You basically just described a Mayhem Mission but indoors instead out outdoors.

The issue initially cropped up as part of data gathering for the issue of enhancement slotting in the New Player Experience. @Super Atom did some combat testing and determined that Inf rates were not sustainable for the cost of slotting and maintaining vendor enhancements into a character as they leveled. (At levels 24->25 you can afford exactly 2 SOs on minion drop budget) In that same test, we saw what looked like a discrepancy with XP rates and what the wiki showed. Is a whole table necessary? Well, yes, for analytical purposes to determine if other things need adjusted. It'd be nice to know the Inf drop calculation too.

I'm happy to be wrong if the data proves otherwise, It's weird that it doesn't match up to the (albeit limited) testing done earlier, nor our collective experiences leveling on Live versus leveling via HC. Even without 2x XP, you regularly out-level contacts on HC in nearly every single zone and back on Live it would often require a significant amount of Paper/Radio missions between contacts because you would finish them and not gain enough levels for the next set. Leveling on Live required significant grinding that isn't really present on HC. @Rudra also said it was "already known" that SCORE had increased XP and Inf rates back when the server was private to let people get up to where they were on Live a bit faster. *Something* is different, seems like we need to do some testing to figure out where the incongruence is.

Good idea asking for a dev to just dump the table. @Super Atom did a test earlier in another topic and found the minions and lieuts granting higher XP than normal.

The amount of Inf a player makes pre-50 is a pittance. You earn more Inf in a single level 50 MSR than you do leveling from 1-50. It's not going to have any noticeable impact as long as level 50 rates are unaffected, and absolutely no one is asking for level 50 rates to be touched.

Ideally, I'd actually prefer OG Mercy to be restored but with the updated mission arcs. Just change re-taking Fort Darwin to kicking Longbow out of Fort Cerberus. The entire flow of the zone was ruined with i21 and it's definitely made new players turned off from Redside.

It's happened to both myself and several others on the Beta and on Live. You can read the threads. I made two of them you're more than welcome to go look at where they are documented. It also is defaulting out of those rifles every time you open the costume up and trying to force you to change it for 200k Inf each time. It also refuses to load those costumes when you load them in, even if you saved them on this specific Page. I have it happening on two different characters, one a bots MM made long ago, and the other a Beam Corrupter made this week. Edit: Three actually, because it's affecting my Arsenal Control Dom as well.