Rigged

This is actually a really good idea. There is consistent whining all over demanding buffs to an AT in the form of higher damage, but that only creates an arms race where the new lowest complains endlessly for the same buff ad nauseum. Why not instead raise the brute's base defense and resist scaling so it actually is between a tanker and scrapper? This is a move that would entice me into play a brute, because right now they are far too similar build-wise to scrappers.

Which follows: Since this t9 nuke is weaker on zerg teams and better while solo or in normal teams, does the set overall lend effectiveness to the latter situation? I have not tested myself, but from discussion it looks like yes, it does. The Storm Cell mechanic seems designed for a somewhat slower clearing team or solo. Storm Blast looks like it is very good for soloing or small teams.

Uh, no? A second runspeed IO in LR gives around 1-2 mph of unsuppressed movespeed. You can indeed take it out to lose that, but you are actually better off dropping one of the Gift of the Ancients procs, ideally from Grant Invis. The goal of this build is to sqeeze out as much unsuppressed runspeed as we can, though.

TL;DR Play Willpower instead. Regen is a journey of suffering and disappointment. There is no good ending for Regen, because it does not work and is not intended to work. Yes, you heard that right, the Live devs ruined regen on purpose and did it in a way that will likely make it impossible for the Homecoming devs to fix it. A bit of history: Regen was one of the launch powersets, as a scrapper-only secondary. At the time, its main attraction was that it provided very good survivability with little attention: it was mostly toggles, a self-heal, and a t9. This was actually considered pretty overpowered at the time, since it was the pre-ED era and the amount of regen so exceeded the incoming damage you were pretty much unkillable. But then came the first nerf. And the second. Then a rework. And another rework. The set became a meme for how often the devs would ruin it. The problem: Regen is a powerset with very little mitigation besides regeneration: the only exception is an auto power resist. This means that either you are regenerating enough health (plus your clickies) to survive, in which case you are basically invincible, or you are not, and you are dead. This binary balance could be tipped by as simple as a single extra enemy aggroing on you, and if you’re already at your limit you died really quickly. What this means is that Regen is not very scalable, a big problem when the game involves fighting up to 16 enemies at once. Conversely, defense and resist sets were very scalable because you mitigated a percent of incoming damage. So why not fix it? On Live, the set got reworked twice. Each time, the players who had gotten used to the previous version complained about the changes to their playstyle. They argued relentlessly with others who pointed out the set really needed another kind of mitigation, like defense or resist. In the end, the Live devs decided: We will make a new set, and call it Willpower, and we will put the changes we wanted into that. Willpower got scaling regen, resistances, and defense. It is almost entirely toggles. It also uses a lot of the same power FX, just recolored to yellow. It is Regen reworked into a form that actually works very well. The Live devs retained Regen as a legacy of the old set, not to be reworked again. They warned us of this. Those who liked old Regen can play it with the understanding that it does not work. Those who wanted regen that works should play Willpower. In fact, the last time they made a major rework to Regen, the Moment of Glory revamp, was in Issue 11, the same issue they introduced Willpower. As you can guess, this did nothing to dampen the complaints. People wanted Regen to be like Willpower, and they wanted the buffs on the set called Regen, because for some reason they just had to play the set called Regen, even though there is a perfectly serviceable set that does exactly what they want. Because they did not like that the working set was called Willpower. Here's the thing though: for a while, Regen actually managed to work out. The IO system allows you to reach the defense softcap on Smash/Lethal damage, and because of the way the to-hit system worked, this used to softcap you against around 90% of the attacks in the game. This was widely considered to be overpowered for everyone, so Homecoming nerfed the system and now Smash/Lethal defense only applies to like 60% or so of attacks. This nerf caused Regen's survivability to drop dramatically (along with that of blasters), so the complaints are reviving again. Ok but that was Live, why can’t Homecoming fix it? Because of Willpower. Regen still has the same problems as it always did, and they can bump up the regen only to nerf it later. It’s a never-ending battle. The only way to fix regen would be to make it like Willpower, but then we already have Willpower. So for heaven's sake, just play Willpower. So stop asking for Regen buffs. It will not work out. The problems are much more fundamental than adding more healing. As a matter of fact, the Live devs planned to add another Regen variant, Bio armor, which the Homecoming devs implemented. This is a Regen alternative with more flexibility. That's another option. But I wanna be Wooooooolveriiiiiiine! Lame and uncreative, but ok. Here’s the main thing you should know: Wolverine is not a regen scrapper. He is not. Wolverine has “Healing Factor” which is Marvel's stupid name for his regenerative abilities. But that is not the sum of his damage mitigation. Wolverine also has peak human agility and toughness. Which set is this? Willpower. Wolverine is a Claws/Willpower scrapper, and players really should stop getting so attached to the name “Regeneration”. Although I suppose we should expect a lack of creativity from someone who wants to play Wolverine. But I muuuuuust be Regen! Wolverine muuuuuust be regen! Okay. Then please be prepared to die as often as Wolverine. As we all know, the only person who dies more often than Wolverine is Jean Grey. Wolverine dies a lot, and he gets up a lot, so please slot out Revive with recharge so that you can emulate your hero in your inflexible way. Please stop asking for the devs to fix Regen also, because it already has been. Here's my advice: Play a Brute, since Regen is better when you have a higher base HP, and slot IOs for defense, especially Smash/Lethal defense. Although both would be significantly more effective on Willpower because of how stacking works in COH.

See, this is why I asked about the difficulty of modelling and texturing for this game. Since NPC outfits are already created, it would theoretically be much faster to edit the models to fill in the various holes etc than to create new ones. In the very least it might be possible to rig some costumes that people really want. But it really feels like there might be something much more complicated than just firing up blender and moving some polygons!

I was inspired by this thread to try to create a speedster with as much unsuppressed movement speed as possible while keeping the build functional for normal play (that is, Incarnate content and the MLTF/LRSF at least). I have personally tanked the LRSF with this, though I had to pop insps while tanking Recluse. I thought I would post it in this forum too. TL;DR: 81mph perma unsuppressed runspeed. This can be increased with the Supergroup Base Runspeed buff (1hr) and Clarion Radial Destiny (75% uptime). Screenshot is in combat. Here's what I came up with. I've tested it over the weekend, and it is surprisingly fun, and effective! May I present Zippy-Zap, a time traveling speedster who can inflict entropic damage by vibrating really fast. The build is linked below. Note that for some reason, MIDS Reborn displays runspeed wrong for me, starting with a base 21mph rather than the actual 14mph, which screws the display in the editor. 1) Electric Armor. I know a resist set does not scream "Super Speed", but COH does not exactly animate defense vs resist all that well, so it's not really interfering with the aesthetic so much. The main thing is that for our mitigation set, we need one of Elec Armor, Bio Armor, or Super Reflexes, because these are the sets with a Swift analogue built-in. Elec Armor has one advantage: with this many resist armors we have no problem filling them with the 2-set bonus from Aegis, which gives +7.5% runspeed. I did actually seriously consider going Super Reflexes instead, but I very much dislike clickie mez protection since I tend to forget it. 2) Dark Melee. Because of Shadow Maul. One neat thing I discovered while making this character: If you color Soul Noir with pure yellow, it looks like energy melee. Note: Because I am planning to use Shadow Maul a lot, and because I am picking a resist set, I have decided to make her a Tanker, which gives higher resist caps and dramatically increases the cone radius and target cap of Shadow Maul. This isn't as contrary to a Speedster's concept as it sounds: A speedster has no special offensive power and they serve as very good distractions for enemies. It amuses me because a part of Zippy's character concept is to be constantly taunting opponents, like Spider-Man, so being a Tanker will let her do that a lot. I also picked Soul Mastery, but that's not essential, it just does more damage than Mu Mastery (cones proc more often, and Obliteration gets an extra damage proc from -tohit) and I am planning to have incredible mobility to position the cone anyway. 3) Concealment pool This gives 3 defense powers to mule LOTG and the Gift of the Ancients proc, which is not unique. I admit I tend to like this pool for characters with no defense powers in their primary/secondary sets to mule LOTG. But you know, it does give us a second travel power in the form of Infiltrate, which this build gets up to a permanent 97mph (the runspeed cap without Super Speed/Speed of Sound). This lets you jump over the occasional building without having to build up speed first. Also, it lets Zippy vibrate her teammates into invisibility, which I always found useful for helping a lowbie. 4) Super Speed pool If we could get more than 4 pool powers, I would totally pick Speed of Sound instead, but we cannot. Zippy gets hasten and Super Speed. Now, Whirlwind is a very cool super speed power, but it's not very useful so I decided to skip it. We need Super Speed to get the +30% runspeed cap boost, and also so we can slot the Thrust proc, which gives an unsuppressed, enhancable runspeed bonus. I considered taking Flurry, but with 165% recharge, I am Shadow Maul'ing every 5 seconds anyway, so Flurry is kind of extraneous. Also, Flurry sucks. It does terrible damage and the secondary effect is Disorient, which means your proc options are limited to the melee sets only. 5) Musculature Radial Alpha. The +runspeed boosts Sprint, Swift, Lightning Reflexes, Super Speed, and supposedly the Thrust proc. It also gives you a bit of extra END recovery and increases your END drain from your damage aura. 6) Ageless Core Destiny OR Clarion Radial Destiny I didn't get Clarion, because I wanted powers that would be up 100% of the time. However, the +runspeed boost would bump your speed quite a bit for the 75% of the time it was up. The issue is that without Ageless, you will be running out of END a lot. This can be mitigated by dropping one of the Concealment powers (along with 7.5% runspeed and LOTG) to get Power Sink. Also, a tank with natural mez protection doesn't really benefit from the main power of Clarion. Fortunately, in groups I notice a lot of blasters and defenders will give me Clarion anyway. Final results: Running Sprint AND Superspeed (no temp buffs), I have 81mph perma unsuppressed movespeed. Which is pretty good for a fully functional build that can tank almost all the content outside of starred TFs which I have not tried yet, with 165% global recharge before Ageless and pretty decent damage from procs. You also have 90% Smash/Lethal/Energy resist, 80% Fire/Cold resist, and 50%ish negative resist. 20% defense to everything, and 300%ish regen. Surprisingly functional for a concept build that spends around 10 slots on runspeed. Tanker - Electric Armor - Dark Melee.mxd

So this topic has inspired me to try to create a build with as much unsuppressed runspeed as possible. TL;DR: 81mph perma unsuppressed runspeed. This can be increased with the Supergroup Base Runspeed buff (1hr) and Clarion Radial Destiny (75% uptime). Screenshot is in combat. Here's what I came up with. I've tested it over the weekend, and it is surprisingly fun, and effective! May I present Zippy-Zap, a time traveling speedster who can inflict entropic damage by vibrating really fast. By the way, @Ultimo, I find your project to recreate the Justice League very amusing because I have a project to recreate the Legion of Doom from the old Super-Friends cartoon as a sorority of bratty teenage supervillainesses. Zippy is an Expy of Professor Zoom, who actually isn't in the Legion of Doom, but I already made expies of Black Adam and Deadshot anyway, so why not. The build is linked below. Note that for some reason, MIDS Reborn displays runspeed wrong for me, starting with a base 21mph rather than the actual 14mph, which screws the display in the editor. 1) Electric Armor. I know a resist set does not scream "Super Speed", but COH does not exactly animate defense vs resist all that well, so it's not really interfering with the aesthetic so much. The main thing is that for our mitigation set, we need one of Elec Armor, Bio Armor, or Super Reflexes, because these are the sets with a Swift analogue built-in. Elec Armor has one advantage: with this many resist armors we have no problem filling them with the 2-set bonus from Aegis, which gives +7.5% runspeed. I did actually seriously consider going Super Reflexes instead, but I very much dislike clickie mez protection since I tend to forget it. 2) Dark Melee. Because of Shadow Maul. One neat thing I discovered while making this character: If you color Soul Noir with pure yellow, it looks like energy melee. Note: Because I am planning to use Shadow Maul a lot, and because I am picking a resist set, I have decided to make her a Tanker, which gives higher resist caps and dramatically increases the cone radius and target cap of Shadow Maul. This isn't as contrary to a Speedster's concept as it sounds: A speedster has no special offensive power and they serve as very good distractions for enemies. It amuses me because a part of Zippy's character concept is to be constantly taunting opponents, like Spider-Man, so being a Tanker will let her do that a lot. I also picked Soul Mastery, but that's not essential, it just does more damage than Mu Mastery (cones proc more often, and Obliteration gets an extra damage proc from -tohit) and I am planning to have incredible mobility to position the cone anyway. 3) Concealment pool This gives 3 defense powers to mule LOTG and the Gift of the Ancients proc, which is not unique. I admit I tend to like this pool for characters with no defense powers in their primary/secondary sets to mule LOTG. But you know, it does give us a second travel power in the form of Infiltrate, which this build gets up to a permanent 97mph (the runspeed cap without Super Speed/Speed of Sound). This lets you jump over the occasional building without having to build up speed first. Also, it lets Zippy vibrate her teammates into invisibility, which I always found useful for helping a lowbie. 4) Super Speed pool If we could get more than 4 pool powers, I would totally pick Speed of Sound instead, but we cannot. Zippy gets hasten and Super Speed. Now, Whirlwind is a very cool super speed power, but it's not very useful so I decided to skip it. We need Super Speed to get the +30% runspeed cap boost, and also so we can slot the Thrust proc, which gives an unsuppressed, enhancable runspeed bonus. I considered taking Flurry, but with 165% recharge, I am Shadow Maul'ing every 5 seconds anyway, so Flurry is kind of extraneous. Also, Flurry sucks. It does terrible damage and the secondary effect is Disorient, which means your proc options are limited to the melee sets only. 5) Musculature Radial Alpha. The +runspeed boosts Sprint, Swift, Lightning Reflexes, Super Speed, and supposedly the Thrust proc. It also gives you a bit of extra END recovery and increases your END drain from your damage aura. 6) Ageless Core Destiny OR Clarion Radial Destiny I didn't get Clarion, because I wanted powers that would be up 100% of the time. However, the +runspeed boost would bump your speed quite a bit for the 75% of the time it was up. The issue is that without Ageless, you will be running out of END a lot. This can be mitigated by dropping one of the Concealment powers (along with 7.5% runspeed and LOTG) to get Power Sink. Also, a tank with natural mez protection doesn't really benefit from the main power of Clarion. Fortunately, in groups I notice a lot of blasters and defenders will give me Clarion anyway. Final results: Running Sprint AND Superspeed (no temp buffs), I have 81mph perma unsuppressed movespeed. Which is pretty good for a fully functional build that can tank almost all the content outside of starred TFs which I have not tried yet, with 165% global recharge before Ageless and pretty decent damage from procs. You also have 90% Smash/Lethal/Energy resist, 80% Fire/Cold resist, and 50%ish negative resist. 20% defense to everything, and 300%ish regen. Surprisingly functional for a concept build that spends around 10 slots on runspeed. Tanker - Electric Armor - Dark Melee.mxd

OK, and I am providing the perspective that they are in fact useful to a whole section of players. The question is why they are pooled together on the AH despite the attuned ones being so much more useful. That they are useful to a whole bunch of people is a completely relevant answer.

The real, proper reason is because without the pooling mechanic there would likely be a severe shortage of IOs because of our small player population. This is the main rationale for all the pooling in the HC AH. Without the pooling mechanic, either the non-attuned or the attuned market would regularly end up short. On live, the massive scarcity gave marketeers a huge advantage over buyers - not quite enough to control the market, but the regular players found it that much more difficult to afford good builds. It also meant that getting some very low-supply-high-demand IOs was more of a luck thing than offering enough inf (based on whether you happened to find one on sale on any given day). There actually is an example of IOs on the HC AH that are separated based on whether you catalyzed them. These are the Winter sets and the ATOs, separated between the rare and very rare versions. If you check the AH, this does not actually produce a logical price difference between them. The rare ones often sell for the same amount or more than the very rares, because some people are not aware of how it works or perhaps even the existence of the VRs. Occasionally the lack of an available VR will force impatient players to spend dramatically on the rare version. Separating them does not produce a substantial benefit for these, so why bother doing it for everything else? The attuning pooling actually has a very happy side effect: It encourages people to sell crafted enhancements and buy attuned ones from the AH. This keeps stock available and reduces the power of marketeers further. If I find, for instance, a proc recipe in a good set I want to use, my best bet is to craft and sell it on the AH and then buy the attuned version. This creates one seller (me) and one customer (also me). Two transactions also means that the market takes a cut from both, which keeps inflation down. So much win! Attuned enhancement are not more useful than unattuned ones. Top end builds often use a mix of the two. There are several sets whose bonuses are not particularly vital except in the top end lvl 50 content, so we use +5 boosted IOs for the enhancement bonuses and enjoy the set bonuses in lvl 50 content. For content we exemplar down for, we attune and use only the more important set bonuses (LOTGs, +recharge, +defense). I spend around 100 million or so on a top end build solely on boosters, which is around 20 or so non-attuned IOs.

I am being totally serious here: Clown Mastermind. I was actually one of those who requested this on live only to be shut down by the revelation of Positron's coulrophobia. I love clowns but no so much that I was willing to make the lead dev terrified of playing their own creation.

I think a certain group of players on Everlasting would be very grateful for Owl heads. Or at least Owl masks.

This has been requested since the dawn of the game. The voices amplified dramatically every time there was a major nerf, especially the first City of Blasters nerf. It has never been seriously considered, and one of the reasons actually is that it might be technically very difficult to implement. Whether an AT/Powerset respec should be available is controversial, but the debate is rather quashed by the very real possibility that it might simply can't be available. The Live devs actually discussed this I think, looooong ago. Basically your character's AT and powersets are supposedly kind of really hard to edit without possibly causing a major issue. I understand how this sounds weird, but an interesting parallel is a case in Red Dead Online where a GM tried to solve a player's problem by deleting their knife and re-granting it. But this bugged out their character in a way that was impossible to fix: all interactions with the knife (skinning animals, etc) were disabled even though they had one in inventory. The case was escalated through CS and even the devs looked at it, only for them all to say "We're not even sure how to fix it". Knowing this, however, the COH devs provided a whole bunch of compromises, including the normal power respec and the ability to respec your body shape and gender. Basically you can now respec almost everything that they can allow you to, from a technical perspective. As suggested, there are some workarounds we, the community, have to prevent the case you are discussing. The Test server will let you try out a full build with very little time investment. You can powerlevel a new character. Or in the worst case scenario, you can re-level and experience the magic of the game from scratch.

Totally understand this, which is why I am asking on the background and info on how hard it is to edit the game. I want to know about the experiences of those who have tried. Yes I agree on not removing the old faces. I would simply like to have an additional upscaled face as an option. My favorite faces are those from the early issues or the vanilla release, but they are very low-res, especially compared to the costume pieces that came later which I am very fond of. But also, several of the tights patterns are low-res enough to show right through even the simple geometric designs; the pixelation is that obvious. If it is merely a matter of editing the pattern textures with a higher-res version, I think I could even do that myself (not an proper artist, but I have experience in and can do texture editing and AI upscaling). But I suspect it is not so simple to put into the game, otherwise one of the servers would probably have done it already.

How difficult is modelling for this game? I'm asking because it seems that our devs have available pretty decent programmers but not as many artists. Which is a little odd considering modding communities for other games tend to have the opposite problem: lots of 3d artists making visual mods but relatively few actual programmers messing with the nuts and bolts. It feels to me that 3d art is one of the roles where manpower is more scalable - more programmers does not scale that well due to bugs and interactions with existing code, but more costume parts, etc does not interfere with each other. Is the HC team really short on 3d art volunteers and the few art guys they have a crazy overstretched? At the same time, I am wondering on the feasibility of improving some of the face textures, especially the oldest ones which were made for computers in 2004. Near the end of the game's life they added several new faces that have much higher resolution. Could we feasibly update the other faces and low-rez character textures using AI upscaling? Am asking for a little background, since I am not familiar with this myself. Please do enlighten me.

Actually I think it is already one of the best powers in an APP and it alone pushes the entire set to the top or second best. I think rather than just telling you your idea is bad I should explain in detail. Please consider the following: IW is an epic power pool power, which usually have longer cooldowns (double or more) than equivalent powers in primaries and secondaries. You cannot expect it to perma just from SOs. Compare similar buffs like Soul Drain in Soul Mastery. It completely closes a major weakness while active which is normally impossible for the AT without incarnates. Normally you need to use Clarion Destiny to get mez protection, giving up Ageless. Even without IO sets, it gives 50% uptime purely with two +5 recharge IOs. This is very good for an APP buff that closes your lack of Mez protection. This is even more so since it is a controller APP, meaning you can use your primary mezzes to proactively prevent your enemies from mezzing you. The practical limits of recharge are in the +250% to +300% range, using Hasten and sets. With a 90 second duration and 360 second base recharge, It is entirely feasible to have IW perma or very close to perma by putting two +5 recharge IOs in it and getting 150%-200% global recharge from IO sets. This is made easier by the fact that several Controller secondaries have +recharge buffs, such as Time, Kinetics, and Rad. By taking IW you can take Ageless Destiny instead of Clarion, which will reduce its cooldown even further. Considering this, IW is amazing. I am serious. Psionic Mastery is one of the best APPs. If you draw too much attention to it, the HC devs are more likely to nerf it than buff it. Most click buffs in the APPs are impossible to perma, or very weak if they are, or have ridiculous END costs. For an APP click buff to be usable all the time is relatively uncommon.

I note that powers you cast on friendly targets - Resist, Defense, Movespeed, Endmod, and Heal - do not have purples. They sometimes do have PVP IOs, with normal IO scaling. VR sets generally occur in sets you use on enemies - the four damage categories and mezzes. Pet damage is a bit of a gray area, but I believe the devs added those in fairness to Masterminds, who would be severely lacking in places to stick VR sets if they didn't. Obviously not all the set categories that you use on enemies have a VR set, but it seems the OG devs assigned them to categories which are common across specific ATs. I think that VR set categories were chosen so that each AT would have a more-or-less equally varied range of VRs to choose from. Mezzes had to be included because controllers had very few proper attacks.

EDIT: Scratch this. It has been pointed out to me that Athletic Regulation was hugely nerfed last year, while I was away from the game. I would also like to point out that a /bio sentinel (and only the sentinel) has Athletic Regulation, which, with Offensive Adaptation (from the same pool, and you will want to use it anyway), Swift and Sprint will put you at the normal (non-super speed) runspeed cap and it is insuppressible. You can in fact do a Synapse-like character with elec blast/Bio (or "blazing fast" and be Fire/Bio) and run around at top speed while in combat. Bonus: If you use the "No FX" option in /bio the only FX you will have is lightning-like tendrils over your arms. Unlike Kinetics, you don't even need to recast because Sprint is a toggle and Athletic Regulation is an Auto power. The downside is that you won't be a melee, which might dampen your fun, but you could also just take Flurry for fun.

Homecoming Devs, please consider a Minimum FX option for all armor powers. The VFX is very nice and cool, but the problem is that it turns a character into a ridiculous lightshow. This is fine if this is in the character concept, but not every Rad Armor guy, for instance, might like the idea of their radiation visibly leaking out of their body when they just wanted the bonus from Alpha Barrier. Please let me protect myself without giving all my friends cancer. Look in the comics. The entire Justice League, except for Firestorm, does not have auras. And even then, Firestorm has one aura, his flaming head. He doesn't have three different flaming auras from Fire Shield, Plasma Shield and Burning Aura. Similarly, ice armor, while there is already a minimum FX option, still shows little ice crystals. It's cool, don't get me wrong, but I might not want that effect if my character idea is a person with a sheet of ice skin like Iceman. Iceman does not have protruding ice crystals. Please let us express our powers through our costumes rather than our power auras. This is especially grating on the epic power pool armors, for which the selection is highly limited. Some powersets have no equivalent epic armor, and we're forced to use one of the options available. Please let me turn off my Dominator's Frozen Armor graphic. Please also add a version of Scorpion Shield without the vibration effect. I know it's called the Minimum FX version, but that's still a lot of FX. Ideally, this would also apply to damage auras (barring the ring effect showing the power radius), but I could understand if there is some reason the devs would insist on a visible representation of a damage power. Of course, I am not advocating the removal of the option to display the legacy auras. If people want to look like a Christmas tree that should be their prerogative. But I would like the option of turning them off in the power customization screen for my character. Additionally, I don't believe that this would require significant onerous graphic work, because the exact same "No FX" option can be copy/pasted onto a whole bunch of different powers. Homecoming devs, please consider my suggestion. I love making costumes, and I would very much like not to have them obscured by power auras.

Hi Devs, please consider this. Eyebeams are a very common power for energy-emitter-style supers. At the same time, they are not universal. Example characters include Superman, Martian Manhunter, Darkseid, the cartoon iteration of Starfire, Cyclops, Thanos, and a number of cosmic-level characters. The game already has eyebeams, but I would like a larger pool (highly limited right now) and it would be nice to use the Beam Weapons animations that the Praetorian Olympians do. Alternatively, it would be nice to have alternate animations for the Energy APP that are entirely eyebeams.

Yes please, devs. Please give us a Super Strength alternative. Please consider this: The current iteration of SS, with Rage and double-stacked Rage, has sentimental value for a lot of players and there will inevitably be a LOT of opposition to change it. This iteration is generally considered to be overpowered for scrappers due to Rage stacking and the fact that the crash is less punishing to a non-tanking class, whereas it's generally considered okayish (if problematic) for brutes/tankers. Rage sucks as a mechanic which the entire set has to be balanced around, especially double-stacked Rage. This means that without Rage the set is severely underpowered (Seriously, the DPA on Jab for instance is atrocious) It also means that Rage applies a disproportionately high bonus to epic power pools which are not balanced around Rage. A new powerset can have all the base damage buffed so that people with SUPER STRENGTH do not hit like wet noodles when Rage is off. Seriously, legacy Super Strength is more like Rage Melee. This would be much better for inexperienced players who may not understand how the set is balanced and just want to be Superman. Therefore the best solution is to create a new powerset, the same way the Live devs created Willpower (and later Bio Armor) to sidestep the sentimental value of Regen and the needed changes to scaling. A new powerset can have its own balance (attacks, attack speeds, more/different AOEs) and make use of the newer animations, such as the amazing Atom Smasher animation in Rad Melee. Please consider adding this as a alternate animation for Footstomp regardless. A new powerset can change non-Rage fundamental aspects of Super Strength's balance, such as the possibility of making Hand Clap a damage power A new powerset can be used as an alternative to Super Strength for Tankers and Brutes, adding even more to the game, whereas rebalancing Super Strength will not add anything new to Tankers and Brutes and likely will annoy a whole chunk of them regardless of how well done it is. I proposed, ages ago, a new Epic (Praetorian) Archetype based on Statesman/Tyrant for the benefit of all of us who want to play Superman/Shazam/Black Adam without the stupid Rage mechanic. I am aware that such an archetype may be prohibitively difficult to program, so a next-best solution is a new powerset. I think that your set would be easier to program (to accomplish this, the devs would have to program in a conditional stun into every attack in the game) and would be just as fun without the additional stun in BU. Perhaps shorten the stun duration on Hand Clap (ie, make it a secondary effect) and turn it into a damage power.

While I respect your desire to slow down and keep Hover speed with Evasive Maneuvers on, I would like to say that I very much do NOT want the +fly removed from Evasive Maneuvers while in Hover. You can Null the Gull it away if you like, but *I* pile every +fly on Hover that I can and consider the +fly on Evasive Maneuvers to be a valid buff that I do not want removed especially considering the alternative, to run the power Fly in combat, is stupidly END-heavy. This is very much not ideal for me. Changes you want to accommodate your niche playstyle (with respect, it is niche even though I consider your perspective valid) should not affect the rest of us.

1) Yes, and yet it is still more useful than the VEAT inherent. 2) VEAT and Khelds are indeed the least played ATs but individual powersets within other ATs are played less, and those powersets get tweaks all the time. Issue 27 Page 1 buffed a bunch of near-unused blaster secondaries and energy melee. At the same time, Kheldians have received consistent attention while VEATs have received next to none. Every time kheldians are affected by across-the-board changes, they are similarly buffed (flight changes) while Omega Maneuver didn't get an update with the nuke changes nor Bane Spiders/widows with the Assassin's strike changes. With the Tanker update, Tankers are starting to do similar damage to VEATs!

I think, if they merely moved part of the buff to lower levels, the fact that lvl 50s can benefit from that too will result in equal performance before changes. Scrappers are already top-tier (if not outright number one) at lvl 50 max IOs, so we don't want to buff that tier any more.

Hi Homecoming devs, please please do a balance pass at least for VEATs. I will admit I am personally invested due to my main being a Crab. But the crab spider is the VEAT with the largest number of issues easily. I cannot objectively comment on issues for widows, fortunatas and banes, but allow me to list the main issues I have with my character. I would welcome other's comments on their VEATs. 1) The custom crab backpack has a greenish shine inherited from the non-custom one. Please give us a matte option or change the shader to be less green - not all of us want to be green. Also, this doesn't affect me since I LOVE it, but I believe lots of people want to remove the crab backpack. Also, alternate crab backpacks (from NPCs) would be appreciated, even though I would understand if this is very low priority due to difficulty in implementation (Isn't the Crab Backpack just a fancy weapon, though? I don't know how it works) 2) Omega Maneuver is incredibly weak even though it is a t9, to the point where most builds skip it. Please consider making it more useful 3) Crab attacks are almost always weaker than the equivalent Wolf spider attack due to animations. Please consider speeding up the animations because there's a lot of pausing, aiming etc. 4) Please, please let us customize the attacks. At the very least, please let us recolor the energy blasts, and Serum. 5) The AT inherent is practically nonexistent. Even Khelds have a more useful inherent. 6) Without controls or buffs, the Crab basically has no way to keep pets alive in high-end content. They die almost instantly. Having them is nice for pylon testing but their practical use is very low. Please consider raising the priority on the VEATs. I understand that powerset revamps and balances are important, but VEATs are an entire AT, while powersets are largely subsets of ATs, and yet we receive very, very little attention except as part of other sweeping changes.

People who play regen over WP and then complain it sucks are too attached to the powerset name. History lesson here: Regen was not supposed to ever be changed. It is not supposed to have additional mitigation. It is not supposed to be buffed. The reason is why we have willpower. Regen was one of the most controversial powersets because of the binary nature of its mitigation. Either your regen exceeds incoming damage or it doesn't; if it does you are unkillable and if it doesn't you die pretty much instantly. So Cryptic (and later Paragon) nerfed and buffed regen over and over. But tons of people didn't want change, especially those who got used to the clickies. So instead, they made a new set, with a complete rework, giving it scaling regen (to combat the binary problem), resists and defense. And to add to the number of "natural" sets they called it Willpower. Willpower is what regen would look like if it were properly reworked, which is why both sets are so similar. Willpower is the Regen that works. Regen is supposed to be sort of a legacy set, and hence is not supposed to be changed. In fact, they added a new version of regen, Bio Armour, which is regen but with more adaptability. You can play that instead if you want. What people need to do is get off this obsession with the powerset names, and just pick Bio or Willpower. You are no less Wolverine or Deadpool (be honest here, most regen players are trying to be one of those two, often with the costume and knockoff name) just because you went claws/willpower instead of claws/regen. in fact by asking for a rework you will be screwing over the few who still like regen the way it is.