Rigged

Speedsters need more cohesive options. Speedsters are a mainstay of the superhero genre. The big three publishers (Marvel, DC, Image) all have separate speedsters in their main lineup (Quicksilver, Flash, and Velocity). COH acknowledges this with Synapse/Neuron. But in COH Synapse is a blaster, despite the fact that just about every other speedster in fiction is a melee'er. The side effect of this is that in COH speedsters do not get their own powerset, being relegated to a power pool. This sucks. This is compounded by the fact that the way COH balances power pools means that Flurry, the iconic speedster attack, is pretty crazy underpowered. It has a long animation time and does very little damage. Then we have Whirlwind, which is basically a weaker Hurricane with less debuffs and an END cost so high it is impractical to run for long even with END reduction. To make things worse, the most commonly-taken pool power in the entire game, Hasten, is in the Speed pool, diluting the uniqueness of Speedsters because a huge chunk of people will pick Super Speed as their travel power to save a pool pick. When the HC devs started adding a fifth power to pools, I was hopeful that this might change. But the power they added was Burnout, which - let us be honest here - is really niche at best. It resets your cooldowns once every 30 minutes. 30 minutes! With a massive investment in +rechange you can press this down to around 7 minutes or so, but it also comes with a whopping huge END cost and reduces your max END by 25 for 60 seconds. Just to understand how painful this can get, this is half the power of the Curse of Weakness debuff from Vanguard. The game, by the way, is supposed to be balanced around SO, not IOs sets, which means the power is supposed to be balanced against the SO-enhanced recharge of 15 minutes. I do not comprehend the logic of a power you can use only around once in the average length of a mission clear. In short, the Speed pool is kind of a mess. It has two powers that have no speed aesthetics and solely affect recharge/penalizes END, it has an attack that massages your enemy, and Whirlwind is literally the most expensive toggle in the game yet all it does is annoy your teammates by scattering mobs. It really needs a revamp. You know what a speed pool power should look like? In the Blaster Secondary Martial Combat, there is a completely unique power called "Burst of Speed", which honestly does not really belong in a powerset that is otherwise about martial arts. It is perfect for a speedster. That the HC devs did not choose Burst of Speed instead of Burnout as the 5th power is... honestly I don't even know what they were thinking. ------------------------------- Proposed changes Proposal 1) Revamp the Speed Pool Please put Burst of Speed in the Speed pool. You can add this to the powerset or replace on of the existing powers. Give it a longer cooldown than the blaster version and 80% of the damage. If you choose to replace a power, perhaps move Hasten and/or Burnout to a different power pool. Call it Temporal or something. Put in a slow, a Hold, and maybe a Teleport variant, presto, new pool set. Note: I am not advocating a Hasten nerf, at least not in this thread. Hasten being a problematic power is another discussion that always sidetracks discussions on the usefulness of the Speed pool powers, so let's just... not. Change Whirlwind into a click AOE knockup. You play the whirlwind animation for 1 second, enemies fly upwards. Consider extending the radius from 7 ft to 10ft so it might actually fulfil the function of KB/KD/KU, which is to mitigate damage. Consider giving this a very small amount of damage so we can put melee AOE procs in it to make it a little more useful. Consider a cast time of 1 second, cooldown of 24 seconds, deals 10 damage at lvl 50. Before anyone says this is too useful, please consider it is the capstone Speed pool power, the equivalent of Cross Punch. Make Flurry suck less. Please consider reducing the cast time to 2.35s, the same as Shadow Maul. Please consider raising the damage to at least 70% of Shadow Maul's. Balance this damage increase with longer recharge. Keep it a single target power - this is thematic. Speedsters in comics hammering a foe generally do not AOE it. Consider giving the three click attacks (Burst of Speed, Whirlwind, and Flurry) the Fighting pool treatment. Taking all three might (for instance) reduce the base cooldown of Burst of Speed to match the Blaster version (still less damage), increase the radius of Whirlwind from 7 to 10ft, and increase the damage of Flurry to that of Shadow Maul (Flurry still being single target). This will make taking all 3 powers turn them into reasonably functional powers that are still less powerful than the powerset equivalents, similar to Fighting. Proposal 2) New Melee set called Speedster Melee If you don't want to revamp the Speed pool, please consider a full-fledged melee powerset. Before anyone complains that powersets should not replicate pools, this is EXACTLY what Fighting, Medicine, Concealment and Prescence do (and at one time, Fitness too). Consider quick punch animations from Street Justice, Martial Arts, and Dark Melee. There should also be a non-dark analogue of Shadow Maul using the Flurry animation shortened to match Shadow Maul's Add Burst of Speed and the click version of Whirlwind (above). Since these are now Powerset attacks, they should do full damage. Whirlwind should get damage comparable to Dragon's Tail. I get that these days HC devs have a psychological condition preventing them from releasing a powerset without some kind of stupid mechanical gimmick. Perhaps a buff (let's call it Velocity) that reduces animation time (clipping the windups) from the heavier single target attacks (spenders) when 3 stacks are gained from weaker attacks (builders). It doesn't matter anyway because 90% of players are just going to ignore it. Consider adding an unsuppressed 100% (same as Sprint) runspeed buff to the set's Build Up with a separate, longer duration than the damage/tohit bonus. It would also be nice to be able to slot the Thrust set proc in it (allowing a speedster to have a much higher unsuppressed runspeed than other sets). I suppose you can also add stacks of the stupid gimmick mechanic buff. For the T9 I propose a power called Mass Driver, where the speedster circumnavigates the globe to gather momentum and hit the target at close to lightspeed. Use the Burst of Speed animations but vastly increase damage, stretch out the "zoom" effect, take a second longer to land after the teleport out and maybe make it a wide AOE like Savage Leap/Lightning Rod/Shield charge. If the Punch animation is used for this then consider using a kick animation for the lower-level Burst of Speed power so as to give the set a larger variety of animations.

Currently running it with a Savage/Bio stalker and it rocks. If you're after the story specifically, Stalker will let you skip a lot of boring killing which you are getting no XP for since you disable it for goldside.

Doesn't this depend on your goals? Powergaming is more about specializing to the extreme in a playstyle. The best AT for hardmodes is not the best for farming, nor for doing non-hardmode content. Play whatever you like, that is more important. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA Oh man, I can hardly keep a straight face. Obviously the answer is Tanker.

The OP gave examples of what they had in mind, and did not mention deliberately skipping useful powers. I suspect this is not what they are looking for.

Search your feelings, you know it to be Troo!

Sort of. Sentinel regen gives a very high absorb toggle. This is in fact a modified form of the original Instant Healing, which was also a toggle (it just gave a ton of regen). But the original Instant Healing was considered overpowered and got turned into a clickie. Here's the thing, though. No one will complain overmuch about a Sentinel toggle because Sentinels have a relatively low HP cap compared to all the melee ATs, which means your regen is naturally weaker. I suspect also that the massive AOE knockdowns from water/ also give your regen time to work. But let's say we revert scrapper (and by extension, brute) regen back to the i1 version. I can't recall the exact numbers, but the issue then is that if regen could heal more damage than a x8 spawn of enemies can deal, it is basically invincible when facing x1 spawns and hence needs to be nerfed. This is the oldest, most annoying problem about regen to the devs: It is a never-ending yo-yo of buff and nerf, buff and nerf, which the Live devs did for 11 issues before they said "No more of this stupid crap, we are never touching this set again except to nerf it." And of course it is paired with the second most annoying thing for them, which is that every time they did try something different, a group of die-hard fanatics would say they are caving to easy-mode noobs who cannot handle clicking heals to save themselves and just want faceroll toggles. What regen needs is some non-regen/healing form of mitigation, to stabilize it. The devs could add it to Regen, but then it would start to encroach on the territory of Willpower (and now Bio). You see why I say it likely cannot be fixed? The presence of the other two sets prevents Regen from getting too much of their goodies lest one or the other is made obsolete. And the Live devs decided, if one set has to be obsolete, it will be the set that the (at the time) die-hard fanatics demanded never be changed. Now, if the Live devs never created Willpower, the HC devs could have made Regen today like Willpower since the old crazy die-hards are probably gone. Of course, the player can add mitigation to regen using IOs and pools. But the problem is 1) this uses set bonuses that could go towards offense and 2) will work better on Willpower or Bio (or just about any other set) because of how mitigation stacking works in COH.

This is absolutely correct. This is why it is a good idea to take it as a set mule even if you don't plan on using it much. IIRC the crash can be mitigated with Ageless.

Not at all. It's just that @Snarky asked for advice specific to these two powersets and I thought that "Get 75% extra resist to everything from Tough, IO set bonuses and cycling godmodes" was just a tad generic, considering we give similar advice (albeit with lower power values) to blasters who inexplicably want to tank. But then again, jumping through the same hoops for survivability as blasters is actually very appropriate for Regen. However, if you do consider this specific enough advice for Regen, then I suppose out of diligence I ought to also add that the same tactics will work very well to make Energy Aura nearly unkillable.

Energy Armor is arguably the best armor set in the game. It is very easy to softcap, gives some resists, comes with stealth, two END management powers, free +recharge, has a self heal. Resists END drain and slows. Lots of defense powers to stick LOTGs in. It is great out of the box, not much extra work needed. With Tough you can get your sm/let resist to about 45% or so depending on build. Your weakness will be Psi and the fact that your defense debuff resist is not as comprehensive as SR's, so you can suffer cascade failure. You must take every power except the last two Energy Drain and Overload (EDIT: sorry, got confused with the scrapper power order). It is entirely feasible to skip them. Energize will reduce your END issues significantly unless you are using a very END-heavy set like Axe or TW, and it is completely possible to softcap defenses without Energy Drain. Overload can still be taken as a resist set mule - It doesn't actually massively increase your survivability once you softcap, except that it raises your HP and also gives you some defense debuff resist. And of course you can always grab Ageless in endgame to solve all END issues. Keep in mind though that EnA is very shiny and pretty. The main issue with EnA for brutes is that... you don't really make the most of a brute's increased resist cap and it is not practical to try to reach it. EnA is still primarily a defense set and it's great at this. It also has no particularly strong regen bonuses, so your increased HP is not taken advantage of either. This does not change the fact that EnA is still an amazing set with solid mitigation and tons of QoL utility. I have written a guide for Regen separately here.

I would really love this too. We have all these Dark powersets and Necromancy but no plague doctor mask? What a waste of an opportunity. BTW I am ambivalent about the addition of the GW hair myself (although I always support giving people whatever happens to be relatively easy to port), but unless I am mistaken, the hair also points away from the character model. If you go to Grandville you can see it yourself. GW's actual (the non-physics bit) hair model already flows backwards and the "cape" potion of the hair is attached pretty far back, almost at the point where a regular cape would be. I am just guessing there is an invisible wall around player bodies that the normal cape is designed to flow around and the hair relies on that as well. GW was a very common GM avatar and I suspect they put in the effort to make her hair work around normal animations so they would not look ridiculous while hosting events. It is also used for the Praetorian Belladonna Vetrano, who has to use the very energetic Dual Pistols animations. I do not think that hair would work well with a normal cape or wings, though GW has a buttcape that is probably far low enough that that would be fine (that is, it would probably work okay with trench coats, etc). IIRC it is possible to get two capes right now using the CoThorns4 shoulders, which have a mini-cape built in (IIRC this is only available on the non-huge male model). The CoT4 shoulders were designed to be used with the massive COT spikes backpiece, which isn't a cape, but the point is that back pieces, capes included, are not locked by picking the shoulders. The mini-cape drastically clips with a normal back piece cape, with neither interacting so the capes just flow in and out of each other as if the other wasn't there. I suspect the GW hair would do the same.

I seem to recall that there is already a head-attached cape in the game. Don't have the game open, but isn't there a wedding veil? I think it's super long, too. If that veil can avoid clipping on normal animations, surely a much shorter hairstyle can do the same. I do not know if that veil is usable with wings or back capes - but even if it cannot, can't the devs just give us the hair and disable access to capes when you pick it, in whatever the manner the veil uses?

I mean I don't object to that at all, but like I said, it's a possible compromise. What I do think is that maybe HC should create a "Implement this AE arc officially" thread, where community members can suggest the really well-written arcs to be put in game. Not every new HC arc has to have unique maps. It would encourage people to create real AE story content rather than farms. And HC can review the suggested arcs, decide if there are any balance issues, and put the mission givers in the open world. I am sure people will ask, "What is the point of putting it in the world when you can just highlight them in AE?" Several reasons: 1) AE's implementation by the Live devs creates the illusion of a VR game and degrades the "realism" of the arc. For people who care about their character's story this matters. The AE building itself also loses something in the organic contact recommendation system. 2) AE has poor xp rewards except when exploited for farming, discouraging people from trying the content. Yes I know you don't mind. But people do. Obviously HC will check the balance equation of the story to make sure the arc is not filled with farm-abusable enemies, and can implement balance changes of their own before publishing. 3) AE has poor uptake outside of farming, partly because of farming. This makes discovery of good arcs relatively hard for newbies. 4) Currently the main way good new arcs are discovered is through community recommendation, but many players do not read the forums/discord to see them. This lets the best AE arcs reach more people. 5) It allows especially talented writers to make their mark on our server world. With HC's permission, they may even be allowed to expand the now-dead metaplot. HC can recruit writers that are really good for their own metaplot. With respect, nothing is truly official anymore, and the best this server can have is "HC official". 6) More story content in each Page will very likely improve player retention. 7) We can finally add more stuff to Kallisti Wharf. The intentions of the Live devs for that zone may never be realized, but the prettiest zone in Paragon City is sadly underused.

Does the HC team even have a 3D modeler? I ask this without judgement on the dev team, am just wondering. Most of the new content added by HC has no new 3D model, even the new healing done in MM robots is a hacked up robot torso. I'm struggling to recall any new 3D model added since HC launch, unless I am mistaken about the origins of the HC launch costume pieces which I assumed were created by the live devs and implemented by HC. Adding a bunch of new head options might simply not be in the dev's power for now. Please correct me if I am mistaken. Personally I would love to see more head and face options with higher-res textures.

@Starhammer, I know this is not what you asked for, but if you want to transfer prismatic aether in bulk, one workaround is to use an SG base salvage rack. It still would be nice to get a way to mail tons to our alts, but this is an option in the meantime.

I have encountered this on this forum before and I find it helps to quote at least part of the post I am replying to, so that it is easier to follow. This also helps when someone else posts while you are typing your response, which as I mentioned is what happened to me yesterday. Yes, it would. I am serious. Like I said, you will never be able to satisfy the conspiracy-theorist-persecution-fetish types who are going to hate you no matter what. This is unavoidable. Fortunately, most of them seem to have gravitated towards a different server. But lots of the people in the Storm Call thread and this one are not so insistent. This language: "slightest bit of difference", "would it change anything at all" - these insinuate that all the detractors are the same and would never accept efforts to better manage community expectations, and that perspective is quite frankly reductive. If you are expecting that measures must reduce toxicity to zero before consideration, then yes you will be disappointed. Consider that there are lots of MMO communities with varying levels of toxicity. I would point out that community management goes a very long way towards determining which end of the scale that community falls on. I have played a lot of MMOs and have been active on forums every time (I like reading rather than listening). It is very clear that communication and managing expectations is what makes the difference. In this very thread the dev response has helped immensely towards the concerns of detractors.

People are not keen on new overpowered sets. This is a misconception. Powergamers do not actually want a new, game-breaking set that forces them to reroll in order to become king again. What they want is for their specific main that they have become attached to to have no nerfs ever and forever be the best. This is not possible because every Powergamer compromises just a little on "best" for their specific playstyle and theme, so every min-maxer has different ideas on which set should get all the goodies. They want to generously support the "buffing of weaker sets to match" when in reality this comes with the silent caveat of "but not better than my main". When a new, game-breaking set arrives, they all have to reroll and then deal with how the new set differs on their preferred playstyle, which they do not like. Powergamers are not actually that interested in power creep. Power creep threatens the dominance of their main. Similarly, people who are interested in builds (min-maxers) are also not interested in unlimited game-breaking new sets. This ruins build variety and forces builds towards very limited selections. There is only so much fun you can get from what is essentially the same build. Unlike powergamers, min-maxers do want there to be better parity between the powersets, because that encourages build diversity. I happen to be in this category, and honestly it annoyed me to no end the degree that Titan Weapons dominated the DPS charts for ages, because EVERY build I made had to compete with it. I was glad that TW was nerfed by HC so that the disparity was no longer insurmountable. However, we generally don't object to power creep as long as that power creep is relatively even or reduces disparity. This is, for instance, why min-maxers love the proc meta - it is power creep that has relatively even effects and vastly improves build diversity. All of a sudden, DPS is no longer limited to three or so specific ATs! Lots of old underperforming powersets suddenly became viable! Very few people actually want a new gamebreaking set that kicks all the older ones to the curb. Sure, they will roll it and play it, but that's just FOMO and keeping up with the Joneses. You might say "People should not think so much about performance", but the fact is that performance affects your game experience. If you play one set and you feel you are contributing much less than your teammates, that affects your fun. The important thing about balance is that it should provide at least the deniability of roughly equal performance, so that players don't get buyer's remorse. This means nerfs, and I get that the community is much more adverse to this than I am. From what I can tell about the Storm Call issues (I have not tested or played it myself, having little interest), the reason it is so controversial is because the set appeals to a much narrower list of playstyles. The issue is one of market appeal, not simply power. Storm Call is noticeably weaker, and also cumbersome, in the context of mobile, fast clearing that so many groups end up being, which many players end up being pushed into simply because that's how (honestly here) the most active, common group members like it. And this does not change that meta, it just isn't particularly effective at it. From what I can see, this set looks pretty good for a solo corruptor where the dots from the t9 interact nicely with the inherent and there is enough time for it to ramp up. But that's pretty niche, and Ice kind of does this already so people in that niche already have a thematically similar set for their playstyle.

With respect, don't you want additional information from the community that you can statistically measure? I am not a game developer but in my line of work I love polling and analytics. Polls provide much clearer, less emotionally charged feedback unmarred by the petty bickering of a forum. This suggestion was mostly to reduce or dampen the negative response when you decide not to follow the polling. I think this is what Puma was trying to address - say A and C are very similar but the vote is split and hence lose the poll - you as devs can use your judgement to apply what you feel is the majority opinion, or forget it altogether for what you think would work best. A poll with hidden results is not a bad idea. The point is to prevent people from pointing at the results itself and claiming "The devs defied the will of the players". I think, in the very least, a disclaimer at the start of the poll explaining that you will use your judgement to decide which options are best to implement and not blindly follow results would put it in a better perspective. You will not be able to avoid criticism from the die-hard-hate-everything-you-do types, but it really feels like a whole bunch of the less prickly posters on the feedback thread might be mollified. So yes, I honestly do think it would "change anything at all." Another consideration: I was thrilled when I saw Aim being added to AR in the beta and was disappointed when that was removed. I am more than willing to accept this and am not too concerned with the reasons, but please do consider that part of the reason people get so attached to releases on the open beta is because of how it is currently being handled - most of the time, when something hits the open beta it feels like it is on the verge of release. If the open beta has a history of rapid-fire testing that gets walked back or changed, people would be so much more likely to understand it is not set in stone. A lot about this is managing people's expectations, which - I promise I mean no offence here - could be improved at least a little. I myself have no stake in the Storm Call balance (apologies, but I have low interest in blast sets that do not involve a weapon), but part of the negative reaction so far seems to be that people have very different expectations on what feedback you wanted compared to what you intended.

Hot damn. I admit I wasn't actually interested in the Storm Call debate, but this guy just brought out the receipts.

The devs responded while I was typing a post and I did not see them before I posted it. Once I did, I stopped pursuing that because even though I did not agree with them I do not want to argue with people who are contributing their time for free for a private server I am playing on.

This is plainly not the case because they proceed to do balance changes in the next Page, many of which are not the variety that requires complex coding. But I do very much appreciate the clarification that there are more people than assumed working on powers. At 6, I can imagine that a larger team would start having their work conflict with each other. ----------------- Now, I don't want to interject into your conversation with the other guy, but you did reply to both of us in the same post: There's also the Earth Mastery APP. The earth theme is now very well-represented across the powersets and ATs. As I did say earlier, I am quite fine with the pace of powerset addition. I admit I am not entirely objective in this because I don't actually care much for new powerset concepts (which tend to be for more niche character concepts and have annoying mechanics) and am instead much more interested in older sets being made viable (because the older sets tend to be for more popular concepts - like the AR buffs letting me create more viable Natural Origin characters) as well as the new story arcs. I am still a bit sore that the Vahz story hook will remain unresolved eternally. This is odd to me because I group at 50 a lot on Everlasting and I have honestly never seen anyone play Symphony Control or Sonic Manipulation. I actually had to look up the visuals in the creator to see if they would fit a concept I had. (BTW If any dev reads this: I have no idea how to effectively slot Reverberant. Please consider letting us put ATOs in it, because it's not viable to slot it for 6 different controls). I am pretty sure, however, I have seen at least one Seismic Blast and Electrical Affinity. But like you said, all this is anecdotal and hence not admissible as any kind of evidence. For that matter, whether a new powerset is popular is not important, because the only person to whom it should really matter is the responsible dev, who decides if the uptake justifies the time they spent on it. If they are satisfied, that's good enough even if the rest of us don't care for it. I imagine that powerset development does not affect any other part of development anyway, since they are different things.

No, I asked this because it is in fact not how it's worked. There have been many balance changes in patches between pages until I27 Page 5. We usually get a bunch of balance patches in between issues. This recent gap made me wonder if we lost a bunch of devs, especially since I recently found out the new Vahz arc will never be resolved due to the dev leaving. Guess I was mistaken. See, this isn't exactly encouraging when you consider that Page 6 took six months, and Page 5 was stated to be unusually short and light on content because Faultline was projected to be unavailable. OK, I accept this as the reason why we have had an unusually long drought of balance changes. I am now just guessing you are wrong (no offense) about the attachment to Pages and this is the real reason there were no balance changes for six months. However, this feels very worrying. In any project such a single point of failure would be considered a major breach of business continuity. Also, is Faultline losing a laptop capable of blocking all patch work from being done, no emergency backup person? Like, what if his laptop gets stolen again? These two statements are incompatible. If, like most people, we lack credentials, we have not a hope of even starting to learn and are effectively barred from joining. As I said, lots of top modders are amateurs. The Venn diagram of game development credentials and COH fans has low intersect and every day the numbers dwindle further. If they want to sustain a dev team, they will have to grow it from the existing COH community, because video game professionals are not going to join the dev team for a game they have no interest in. Seriously here, the player community may dwindle slower due to new players, but the number of those who have game development credentials and are willing to work on the game is going to be miniscule. The best way forward would be to encourage modding the client and then recruiting modders. Because honestly, that's what a HC dev is. A modder. They are modding COH. Every HC addition is a mod.

Is the Homecoming team really, really committed to this? The reason I ask is because it feels like it would be a LOT easier to test and implement balance changes than create new content (which is what the Pages are really for, right?). I am not asking for new mechanics: I am asking for tweaking numbers on underperforming sets, especially those with very large discrepancies. Entire ATs have languished neglected while balance changes, though lovely, come out at a snails pace. We have multiple months in between pages where we could be testing out balance changes. Consider what we could have done from Oct 2022 until earlier this month when the Page 6 content arrived on the beta server. That was five months! A whole page's worth of balance changes could have been tested and made. Just to clarify here: I am fine with the release pace of new powersets. I don't expect much in that direction because that requires professional skills to implement, specifically a team of people who can create art, animation, and code. I have no problem with the new HC-exclusive powersets, even if I never play them because they are available only to ATs I have little interest in playing (Controls/Buff/Ranged) and I already have concepts in mind for the rare characters I make in those ATs. What I am concerned about is the pace of balance changes. If indeed this set underperforms (even if I personally am not invested in Storm Blast either way), it would be better not to make people wait months for tweaks. -------------------------- But if we want to discuss new content: If this is indeed true, then no one should rightly say, "The Homecoming devs are a small team doing this in their free time and cannot be compared to a paid dev team". But we do. We say this literally all the time, and rightly so. This is absolutely a manpower issue. If the devs want to maintain quality of content, they can pick and choose what is officially added from the morass of unofficial mods produced by Sturgeon's Law. But we, the community, needs to be taught how to try. I cannot imagine it is easy to add a new armor model into COH, compared to the relative ease of say, Skyrim (a game so easy to mod even *I* could rig and import a public domain armor model into my game). Please show us how. At the same time I am sure there is a ton of tedious, boring, but simple things that we could do (for example, editing weapon textures for color customization, porting alternate animations to identical powers, adding a No-FX option to every armor power) which would be a complete waste of a skilled dev's time. A paid dev team cannot crowdsource labor because of community reaction against spec work, but a private server preserving a fan-favorite game can. Teach the community to edit and mod the game, and then filter what meets the standards to publish. Then find the ones that persistently meet those standards, and recruit them. Look, let me elaborate here: I am pretty damn sure that, even though most of us have not a single clue how to add or import an armor model into the game, if there was a tutorial, we would do it for the one model or thing we care about. For instance, I am pretty sure that someone would work out how to add/edit the Sybil outfit in a way that actually works if only so they can have their character even less-dressed than currently possible. Someone is going to add in a whole bunch of animal heads solely they can play their furry species of choice. In many mods, it starts with one person making a barely functioning but popular mod that another person "fixes" so that it works better. Some of those people would continue making or porting more things. That's how modding communities grow. Consider also that a single person losing their laptop essentially put everything on hold for months. Doesn't it feel like there could be a bit more open contribution rather than strictly restricting contribution to people who have professional experience? A whole chunk of top (and I mean TOP) game modders are amateurs, because quite frankly video game professionals do not have much time to work on a game for free. Look, I am not discounting the immense contribution the HC devs make to our community. But this is why I am asking whether we can help. The content release process is so long that devs have come and gone in between issues. It really feels like the community needs to be allowed to join in and replace them.

Wait, seriously? Only three? Can we please get a tutorial or something so that the rest of us can join in and help? Lots of us are very invested in this game. That we have to wait months in between balance changes due to manpower issues is ridiculous. The issue isn't a lack of enthusiasm, it's a lack of know-how. A few weeks ago I begged for an explanation or tutorial on how to edit the textures and models and put them in the game. Is there really no one in the loop willing to educate the rest of us so that we can open the gates of modding?

If you can stand the idea of your character constantly vomiting, consider Leviathan Mastery for KO Blow and Arctic Breath. Both are incredible for straight slotting or procs. Arctic breath will also lower enemy resist. The main problem with LM is theme compatibility.

Devs please add hand cast animations for these two powers. They already exist for Frost Breath and Breath of Fire. I imagine that porting these would not be too difficult and it would make leviathan mastery more popular. Also not all of us want to shoot poison from our faces when we can squirt it from our hands. Look, it's my favorite epic set ok? Please let me do less vomiting.