Neiska

My most memorable moment was when I was finishing my first accolade power. I was in a swamp area (forget were) and was hunting those little baby clockworks down, the ones that spawn from the princes upon death. So there I was, just zooming around, pew-pew-pewing away, looking at the ground. I wasn't paying attention to where I was going or what was around me. Well, All of a sudden I "bump" into something, and look up. And what do I see? Something big. Something purple. Something with the name "Hydra". I look at its target information, and what do I see? "Giant Monster" ACK! Holy jebus's knitting kitty nickers! I flung my hands up, sending my keyboard cartweeling off into the distance, leaned so far back in my chair it feel backward with my legs flying up to the heavens. Now, I know people out there who solo GM's on their lunch break. I am "not" one of those people. Heck I had never seen a Giant Monster before, except that giant floating thing whose name escapes me. So to me, it was like turning the corner and finding Nessie and Bigfoot playing Uno on a Davenport and a Mahogany coffee table. So I get up, run to retrieve my keyboard, dash back to my computer and start click click clicking. Now in hindsight, I didn't have a prayer. I was playing my Crabbermind. Click-click-click-clickclickclick! "What? No! GET EM SPIDEYS! ACK! Spiders you have failed me! Its coming this way! Oh No!...... SPLAT!" I slumped back in my chair, defeated, watching on while Hydra absently picked its teeth with the remains of my Spider Drones. And my first thought... "That was pretty awesome." And thus here ends my tale of the day I met my very first Giant Monster.

Can +1, One of my favorite teaming buddies with my MM is a friend who plays a Crabbermind, and it works out great - my heals and buffs keep his pets going (they are squishy compaired to mine), but his pets do more damage than mine do, so they are a good help. Not to mention those yum yum improved leadership toggles. I do agree that MMs and nearly all pet classes (except mabye controllers) kind of fall behind in late game though, which sucks for pet class lovers. Its fun, but I have yet to see any of my fully kitted out pet builds of any kind do half as well as any other AT on max difficulty. That's not to say they don't have a place, or aren't fun, but do have to agree with @Ralathar44 that they are weak, and what support etc they can bring, others can do the same or better.

learn something new every day. and here im sitting on like 7k threads across multiple characters.

My two cents - 1. My biggest pet peeve, is how all the recharge pets from Crabber mind, Controller, etc etc do not benifit from Supports "double bonus for pets", making it expressly unique to masterminds. Wish this feature worked on all pets. Honestly, I wish there were more pet focused incarnate abilites in general, as nearly all pet classes start to fall behind in incarnate content. And your choices of helping them are barrier OR healing. Sort of a rock and a hard place situation. And on top of that, thats assuming you are willing to give up ageless, which many builds require to have a flowing playstyle. 2. Some choices feel obligatory, which makes an illusion that there is any real choice. I can bet that 95% of people use either Agility, Cardio, or Musculature, regardless of build/at. Similar with the degenerative and reactive interface choices. 3. How threads were bound. I have several characters staring at 1000+ threads and no use for them whatsoever. I cant even burn them for things like unslotters. I am not expecting them to be turned into merits, but "some" use for them would be nice. Suggested fixes - 1. Make Support apply to all pet types, or even have more incarnates apply to pets wholesale. 2. Either streamline the "best picks" in each incarnate slot, or make them all more equal. Because to me there are many "junk" incarnates. 3. For threads, make them either account bound, or make a merchant with uses for them. Even buying like, nukes or IOs with them would be welcome. Having no use for them whatsoever #feelsbadman. Just my two cents!

My humble opinion on the topic. Not everyone is going to enjoy the same activities. You could say that about any game. Some people will enjoy story missions. Some will enjoy radio/newspaper. Some enjoy playing the markets. Some enjoy base building. Some enjoy trying multiple builds. Some enjoy farming. Some enjoying roleplay and dont level at all. Some peoples passion is PVP. And you know what? That's normal. I would argue, to be expected. I don't begrudge anyone who enjoys those activities, or other activities that have not been mentioned. I do my thing, and other people do theirs, and we meet in the middle. What I do not support though, is making X activity "required", or what I like to call, "false timesinks", meaning activities with no real purpose aside from making you put time into the game. An example of this would be time-gated reputations on another popular MMO. It should be "optional", not required. As far as what I personally enjoy, well, that is largely a question of investment/risk vs reward. If the gain isn't worth what I value as my personal hobby time, well then I won't do it. If it is, then I will consider it. But I will largely give anything a chance, as long as it has the option for me to go "You know what? This isn't for me. I don't enjoy this. I am going to go do something else ingame." Another thing I don't support, is games forcing/artificially encouraging players into the X, Y, or Z activities, or other players trying to get systems to co-hearse other players into doing what they themselves enjoy. Lets take PVP for example. (full disclosure for clarity, I am not a pvper, as I don't enjoy it. But I have no ill wishes for those that do enjoy it, nor do I make any claim here that they have made any claims. I only use PVP as an activity example.) For argument's sake, lets say that all zones on all servers were suddenly open PVP areas. For those that enjoy PVP, it might be fantastic. But for those people who hate and loathe PVP, it would be hell. And personally rather than put up with any other players imposing grief/playstyle, I would never leave the pocket D, or I would uninstall the game. I dislike PVP that much, and it would be enforced upon me. And I suspect many would feel the same. (again, no one to my knowledge has argued FOR this, or mentioned anywhere. I am only using it as an example.) Just as you enjoy one activity, and dislike say, farming. It would be just as wrong to force farming upon you, when I myself do enjoy farming time to time. It's convenient. I can do it at my own pace. I can help my friends, or help myself get more equipment. But I wouldn't support a system that assumes that everyone is a die hard farmer, far as setting prices/builds/power tweaks and so on. TLDR - I guess to summarize, I just think more OPTIONS are good, so long as they are that, Optional. I would not support or like anything that's "forced" or required, even if it had a carrot on a stick. Just my thoughts on it. I do my thing, you do yours, and we will meet in the middle somewhere. More people doing things that they enjoy is good for everyone. Forcing people to do things they don't want to is bad for everyone. Best wishes to everyone, Heroes and Villians. Stay healthy!

Just wanted to wish all the Men out there well on their day today! 💖

Funny. Between some posts here and what is said ingame, it doesn't feel particularly welcoming. Personally, I go by live and let live. If some rp is going on you aren't into, fine. No one says you have to be a part of it. Long as its not illegal, who cares. It doesn't affect you. But from where I sit there are far too many "Karens" trying to "police" what's going on. For pete sake its a game people. Let people have their escapism and fun in peace.

100% agree. They haven't even posted the actual numbers for the changes they are thinking about, they only posted the idea of change. I mean, if they had posted data with actual numbers for people to browse, fair point. People might have a leg to stand on when saying the change is bad. But there is a silly amount of "REEEEE" here over what is a mere mention of a change. People haven't played it yet, haven't tested it yet, there is no numbers posted yet for the smarty people to run numbers and see how it ends up. Who knows, the change might end up being great for everyone. But this feels more like some are against the idea of change at all, regardless of what that change might be. That or some like being super OP, regardless of the wider impact of having OP sets in games. I would bet if the change was making it stronger, or even more OP, they would be 100% supportive of it. As far as the point of "raising everything to TW's level", I would point to @parabola's last post which I agree with. Moreover, lets play hypothetical and say that everything was raised to TW's level. I suspect the following would occur - 1. Posts saying the game being too easy now, and requests for harder, more difficult content. 2. With "every" damage set being TW's level, there would be very little need to play CC, debuffers, or healers. Why bother if everyone could make brutes or scrappers and just steamroll the content. Even on max difficulty things would be dead very quickly. As it stands even now there are some people saying that's what it feels like to be on a team with Support characters. IE - too much damage, and you don't "need" support on a team. 3. It could turn into an absurd loop of buffs. Another game I wont name did just that. And its quite common to see skills with 15,000% damage or higher, with people capable of dealing billions or trillions of damage. Its a snowball effect where everyone just bats and eye and does such absurd amounts of damage they had to ramp up difficulty just to pose a challenge, and I shudder to think what effect such a thing might have on the PVP here. I'm not saying that's 100% for SURE what would happen here. Only what HAS happened before, on other platforms and in other games. And I would hope that many people would see that as a bad thing. Best wishes

Kay, first off, don't put words in my mouth. I never said that input from players are a bad thing. If you actually take the effort to read the entire discussion, I was reacting to the idea of leaving the development of the game up to the small population that actually use the forums. Which I still say, is a bad idea, for the reasons listed. Secondly, you seem to act like they don't take feedback at all, which would be untrue. All "you" have access to, is the forums. "They" have access to logs, tickets, developer tools, the forums, PMs, discord, and more. In fact it might be argued that there are more "Nerf TW, buff regen" posts than others. (except possibly buff merc posts in the discord.) Rose tinted glasses, the data you see is in fact only a small part of it.

You're right. I don't know what it is. (If I had to guess, I would say that it was Psi Melee.) And that doesn't somehow void my point. That in other games that balanced PVE abilities for PVP reasons, well, it didn't go well for them, and I would like to avoid a similar outcome here. But lets play hypothetical here. Lets say for a moment, the power sets were balanced, updated, and designed around PVP in mind. How do you think that would go? Here's my guess - 1. Dot damage would take a nosedive, burst damage would be king. 2. Tanks/Brutes/Defensive minded characters would also take a dip, just like another game who wont be mentioned where there are 45+ minute cue times to wait for tanks. Keep in mind, that's with a much larger population than ours. I suspect finding tankers for teams/missions here would be much worse. 3. The entire math and values behind CC and Debuffs might have to be redone. 4. Some quality of live changes that the PVE crowd loves, might have to be reverted. An example would be the Mastermind pets. In PVP blocking/hiding behind the pet was a valid strategy, but that also means the Masterminds could block doorways and tunnels all the time. With that change, its a huge boost in play for all masterminds everywhere, but the PVP crowd didn't seem to like it. 5. Some classes are not well built for PVP. Which means they might have to get an entire overhaul to make them "competitive" in the PVP area. And in my experience, retooling a class from PVE to PVP, usually changes its role PVE as well, usually not in a good way. 6. Its likely that healing and buffs would have to be rebalanced as well. All of these changes would greatly affect PVE. Just a few examples off the top of my head. This isn't a PVP game with PVE as bonus content, I would argue its a PVE one with PVP as bonus content. And this is in no way meant to be hating on the PVPers. You guys do what you love. But balancing things around PVP, would break a lot of things PVE, and not in a good way.

Its also broken things before as well. Other games come to mind. Balancing PVE tools around PVP, when PVP is a small part of the game is kind of ridiculous.

To go back on topic, I am fine with TW getting changed, particularly with the unwieldy momentum mechanic that plays like a bathtub on a slip n slide. I just hope they don't overnerf it, with regards to the other ATs that use it (Brutes and Tankers), instead of the bio/TW scrapper combo that seems to be the main issue with it. I have noticed no one has commented yet on Energy Melee, Trick Arrow, or the Blaster changes. The post says there will be more buffs than nerfs, so there is that. And my interest is peaked with the incarnate crafting system changes. (Hoping we might get to do something with excess threads) If we were allowed to wish for other things, personally I would throw recharge pets up for consideration, but that's just me.

Oh, they are using data they didn't create, no arguement there. But it was openly published data, used by others as well. Which in the data world isn't protected data anymore, correct? It would be similar to like, going after wikipedia for something they posted at this point, wouldn't it? Not sure how the legal stuff works there. Its very convoluted .

-Negotiations to become legitimized, according to rumor. I don't follow the latest news in that arena, but last I heard it was a thing. As far as "Stolen" goes, well, the code went public IIRC a bit over a year ago? Not 100% sure on the details that one either, but what I think happened is someone (no idea who) published the code for the game online, and from that sprung homecoming. (Might be 100% wrong here! So if someone knows the skinny feel free post a link or explanation)

1. ...Wow. Stolen? You are aware Homecoming is in discussions with the host company, right? 2. Id say they are the ones being flexible, and its you who isn't? @JayboH - -I would submit SoA for consideration to be put top of the list too please. (hugs crabberpack).