DrunkFlux

I wouldn't call someone selfish or selfless for not taking or taking leadership, I would however add a few points. Leadership Maneuvers can level the playing field for non-incarnates at higher level difficulties. Leadership: Tactics can do so twice as effectively often, assuming it's just given an endurance reduction enhancement (usually what I do). Leadership Maneuvers and Tactics are must-haves for the new hard mode difficulties higher than the lowest setting. Enemies at the higher settings get lots of defense, if you cannot hit them, your damage PLUMMETS exponentially. A character with only 20-30% chance to hit just as well have almost no dps at all, as they just miss to often, enemies may even out-regen them. With a 20% increased to-hit from the mobs, you need the ENTIRE team to have maneuvers to reliably counter that to bring it within reason. I just flat-out don't like the new difficulty mode past the lowest setting purely for that reason alone. As a result, I can never recommend more than 2 star, purely on numbers alone. I drew the conclusion on the AEON hard mode TF, and also drew it even more-so on the hard mode ITF.

I'll have to watch later but, can instantly tell one problem; You need more leadership power stacks. You need SIX maneuvers stacks and 3 leadership TACTICS stacks. I only saw significant leadership stacking from you in that buff bar of yours. I honestly.....don't really have interest in the max difficulty for that reason tbh. It's just maxing the numbers for sake of inflating them.

One of the things i've noticed about farming AE is unlike on live, recipies DO drop in AE. This actually helps stabilize the market. On live, recipies did not drop, but influence was still being generated, and generated in massive bulk. This resulted in the value of influence plummeting severely, to a point it was almost completely useless.

I admit I'm not 100% in agreement with just making more and more hardcore content. If largely from my fear of the catch-22 it creates; Newer chars of mine are not going to get to level up with ITF anymore, everyone will only pick hard mode, which non-50s are not good enough for. This simply makes leveling them take longer. As it is, the rewards are nothing but cosmetics, why would I care for that as much? But also I feel a hair frustrated I guess. I only went into the ASF twice, due to it's length being a bit on the long side. While I might enter hard mode ITFs, i'm not honestly as interested in them. While they are appreciable challenges, I have alts to level to, and I don't like using AE to max my characters. It's not as fun or entertaining, the highest I'll PL a char in AE is around 20-30 level range, after that, I'd rather get a feel for the characters powers. At the same time, somehow I feel leveling can be faster in +4 PI teams and its even faster in +4 ITF classic. But no one will do +4 ITF classic anymore, it'll only be hard mode, guaranteed(complacent gamer syndrome, feeling of need to do hard mode because they can, and thus, have to).

I was hit 5 times in a row on my bio armor character for a 1-shot, and some players are trying to tell me it is auto-hit. Question Lemming was this not-auto hit on the new version? If so then that means the person telling me it is, is a liar.

Small Spoilers below. A thought/idea for the void crystals, because to me, they violated the most important rule of challenging gameplay; avoid auto-killing the player with no warning. Before the crystals only damaged players/killed them if they were not full health, but now it's capable of one-shotting players who are not high resistance builds vs dark energy. It's allegedly auto-hit also. This is outright unfair to melee builds who are using defense, as other than firing barrier off just before it dies or just staying away while everyone destroys the crystal theres nothing else that can be done. Contrast this to the final boss and his judgement, that can be avoided, is telegraphed and dodgable, or the nictus possession attempts that can be countered before disaster strikes. The void crystals just explode and can by-pass the one shot rule. Instead of having there explosion just do multiple damage-tics bypassing the one shot rule, let there be a bomb or something that drops for players to avoid so damage CAN be avoided. Unavoidable damage like that just means scrappers/stalkers or defense based brutes/tankers have to stay away from the crystals and let ranged toons or dark resistance tankers take the hit. Since it is kind of punishing, once again I'll reference the when difficulty is fun video: Solve that one issue and I'd say the ITF is very close to golden for it's hard mode challenge.

So they punished non-farmers and nothing else. Well *Slow Clap*. Afterall, non-farmers deserve to be poor and never, ever get IO'd out to ever get to participate in the newer content. Why don't they farm more!? They deserve that! *Please note my sarcasm here since some don't detect it on the internet* Well, onto checking other avenues for influece I guess.

Honestly the change just makes it harder to max out chars who've hit vet levels 20-30+ where they already have a majority of incarnate powers maxed out. This really just devalues empyrean merits more than anything. Not sure why they did this when they already stopped people from getting veteran levels in AE.

Things will change little for me, due to my playstyle on my blasters. Simply, I never relied entirely on smash/lethal/energy defense, and my builds had high defense in other things to as a result. Enough so, that 1 purple insp can kick me to soft-cap vs everything. One blaster also has support hybrid(actually for teammates), which results in very frequently having very high defense vs everything. She still mops the floor with everything lightning fast on her own. It's just a change where a minor adjustment is all thats needed to deal with it. Funnily enough, I already played in the way players will have to adjust to.

I never built my toons to have only smash/lethal defense. Even my blaster(the "High overall performer") had high defense vs everything. She couldn't take a hit but I almost never got hit anyways, still carefully monitored HP through fights. Since I tend to try to cover all holes anyways, not sure this change effects me any.

Hmmmm, i'll share this video of some experience I had from star trek online, counteryolo explained two years ago a game-breaker that made architect entertainment look like a joke. Watch the last section: Admiralty System So, what I want you consider, and understand admiraly was nerfed for a reason. You could get 30,000 dilithium every 10th tour of duty, additionally, you could get extra dilithium for bonuses with the admiralty missions. You needed very, very little time to put these "admiralty missions" in. No cost, no drawbacks. You don't even need to play actual missions to use it. You only needed 1-2 minutes per character to get a bunch of missions. Counteryolo went absolute insane with the system, he wasn't the only one. I USED THIS SYSTEM LIKE HE DID. I wasn't anywhere near as insane the operation for farming dil like him but I used it for my first ships when I was unemployed. 500 dilithium was worth 1 zen at the worst the market has been for a long time. When I started it was aroud 250 dilithium per 1 zen. 1 zen = 1 real life cent so 100 zen = 1 dollar. He was earning 60 dollars worth of zen/month even if you went by the worst dilithium to zen ratio. Before the market crashed it'd have been more then that. Rich players with tons of characters and tons of admiral-rank characters could break it. Jem'hedar characters were instantly admirals on creation. Admiralty got nerfed to assure you got no free dilithium with tour of duty anymore. All you got was "bonus dilithium" from ferengi(still had to grind it) and fleet-only dil from kdf(only good for fleet holdings). Architect entertainment wasn't as bad as this but I'm in the same mindset as he was: I could think about that, whats preventing players from making an alt exclusively just to power level to vet level 100 in AE for free E-merits and then just convert them to merits? Then dump a ton of items on exchange for instant huge cash, and also still have extra influence? An AFK fire farming toon could easily be used this way, your making almost free money. Not as bad as what admiralty was in STO, but excessive farming imo does this to economies, it eventually breaks them. I've some thoughts: How will this effect pricing of items on auction that are purchased mostly with Merits? Will they go up drasticly in price or drop? Fewer merits means fewer items being purchased, this means those items may see lower supply and thus higher cost. This means general influence gains will become less valuable in content everywhere. OR will prices remain the same or will they go down because people cannot afford the cost? Prices rarely go down in my experience. They didn't with nerfs to AE on live. I'm still of the feeling AE was horrible for the game market. I share the concern some may move on but I'm also left feeling it was a ticking time bomb no matter what was done. Players are to dependent on it for influence and the economy was to heavily effected. Only time will tell I guess.

Anytime a toon of mine was 50...I never entered them in AE, I only entered AE to hit 50 then I stopped entirely. I admit I relied on extra E merits ect to get extra inf to. This change is imo pretty badly thought out since it punishes everyone for the actions of a few exploiters exploiting an overpowered leveling/inf grinding system.

Least favorites: Nemesis and Ralaruu, for comparable reasons of what I feel is closer to fake difficulty. The trouble with both is, they aren't truely challenging so much as designed to say to defense (and to-hit also case of nemesis) that it's useless. It's bad design to outright take away options completely. Nemesis vengeance buffing is overpowered and tedious to deal with; after cleaning up a mob of nemesis, you must wait for the buffs to clear from the next mobs, which are always certain to be buffed; the vengeance on death that the lieutenants have has a massive radious. At least there is a counter, if annoying one that breaks gameflow. But.... ....Ralaruu are even cheaper; the overseers (all eyeball enemies in fact) have 200-300% to-hit rating. There is no way to get such a high amount of defense to counter that. Not even a tanker with all the locational defense IO's possible + elude can do that. I wouldn't be surprised if sucha to-hit exceeds the defense hard-cap. It's simply unfair and annoying. It's a good thing both villain groups aren't very common. Favorites: Malta Operatives, Arachnos, Banished pantheon I love enemies that present a challenge that you can deal with. Malta Operatives have a nice variety of tricks that you have to watch out for, mostly focused on CC and endurance drain. They require some amount of thinking and killing them in order as well as smart power use. I have a special love for them specifically for that reason. Arachnos are similar to Malta Operatives, but take variety to an even heavier extreme, there isn't a build in the game that can perfectly counter them because they have a bit of everything. High defense? Some rank widows, especially tarantula queens and fortunata mistresses can debuff defense with dominate, which is a psi-only attack with no locational, making them priority targets. If you have poor endurance resistance then the Mu become priority targets. Bane spiders are like RE4 chainsaw maniacs, able to inflict horrifying damage such you simply MUST deal with them. Only the brute force mechanical spiders are generic enemies. They also have a tremendous amount of lore backing them up. Not to mention another bias; My main on live was an arachnos widow, and I'm enjoying the new Arachnos widow I made a few weeks ago. Banished Pantheon possess a wide array of nasty tricks from anti-melee storm summoning, psionics, I think radiation and darkness abilities. They are in many ways brute force, but they have nasty secondary effects and are a group you simply cannot just casually yolo. Like Arachnos you have priority targets to deal with, there isn't truely a way to make a build completely invincible against them, and they have excellent lore and even star in an incarnate trial, when the rest of them are exclusively focused on praetorians. I also find there outfits to be especially unique; you cannot actually replicate them currently, but I'd happily make an ex pantheon or even banished pantheon themed character if it was possible.

One of my favorite blasters is a water/time who doesn't use hasten. She still has high cooldown reduction. Only thing I don't use typically in many builds are procs; I prefer having more defense and benefits. This is also due to uncertainty of the future of procs that I prefer not over-relying on them; https://www.midsreborn.com/builds/download.php?uc=1454&c=672&a=1344&f=HEX&dc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asten and procs are sacrificed in favor of effectively every other category a blaster could have. Granted this build lacks CC from temporal, but except in hamidon encounters in lady grey it isn't as important. Low damage resistance also, this just leads to me carefully monitoring health while I blast away. This is actually fairly common in my builds, high defense and leadership, low damage resistances and a tendency to not over-invest in procs. Hasten is usually only an extra; cooldown and feel for powers and how much of a difference it makes is what decides if I skip it. If hasten only removes a few seconds from a key power like say, my T9, then I won't bother with it. This build has 112.5% cooldown reduction global without hasten, and uses agility for higher endurance recovery and defense. My seismic/temporal manip blaster though is cooldown reduction to the maximum, so hasten is a clear pick.

Well a thought that never comes up, theres also plot alignment and character theme alignment to. Some characters of mine aren't compatible with others for sure, but it's true of anyone. I think it's smarter for higher flexibility in some ways, as I couldn't help but feel bothered by a conversation one toon had with another(though I let it pass, as I don't involve them in active plots anymore and haven't for a long time); like say, Toon A makes claim x problem is already solved, end of story. Toon B says otherwise. Player of toon B is put off by Toon A and potentially rper A. It's even more-so if Toon B in rp's very internal struggle is affected by X problem, a core part of there motivations in life, the reason they exist and were made by roleplayer B. That many of the characters behavior is affected by that issue, and it's not something easily resolved(or even intended to be). Which can create frustrations, of course there are different ways it might be resolved, discretion or otherwise, like Roleplayer B may just decide to use arms length. Or may already be doing so ahead of time if they know Roleplayer A already and figure plots incompatible or even serious RP not very compatible(for any number of reasons). It likely isn't a big deal in such a case. In the event someone's taking part in plots actively then there likely needs to be an agreement made.

Well at the time, my thoughts was also if a lot of people make the same bid I was thinking it cannot immediately process them, honestly maybe or maybe not on that(do we know for sure if say, 20 people all make the bids at the same time and price? or a few hundred?, probably wasn't the case for me though). Honestly it's not the end of the world for a bid to not immedietly go through, on work days prices tend to be more stable than on weekends, which is when I normally mess with the auction house; I am on an odd schedule and I actually work a weekend day, and two of my days are off during the normal work week. This changes the market a bit for me.

In regards to being told how to play all the time: This can apply to any archtype, in fact I was recently told my night widow was gimp purely for not being a corruptor/defender when it came to support. Granted the same tools acted like everyone wasn't taking them for granted(as if they needed to be worshipped constantly just for playing support archtypes), as if the mastermind wasn't around and I didn't exist, but being told I didn't matter was kinda insulting(didn't help I mistook one of them as the kin when it was the mastermind, it was still rude they acted like everyone else didn't exist). I only find tankers/brutes annoying when they are gathering more than the target cap, and i think it's because many of them fire farm most of the time, and never actually come to the realization that there is a cap of 16. It mostly effects people who are leveling more than people who are already at max level with alpha slot though, and lower level teams. I admit I feel fire farms are the "Big game hunters(A money map in starcraft)" of city of heroes; they teach bad habits in players. Big game hunters in starcraft generally taught players to only mass one unit armies without scouting, upgrading, or doing any fundamental and also not expand. Fire farms teach players to ignore the agro cap and often disregard the entire team, rely on incarnate powers in builds ect.

SR is only troublesome for scrappers/stalkers and only due to it's AoE defense coming especially late, at level 35, with it's passive at being at 28(which effectively makes almost zero difference, defense is usually only effective at about 30%+ by itself, and needs to be at 40%+ to truly be effective by itself). With it's AoE defense being what I'd call cardboard until 35 for those two AT's, it can be very off-putting for a lot of players, frankly I think the third toggle should be in the same tier as what brutes and tankers have. But my SR tanker says a lot about any claim that SR is a "gimp" set, she out-tanks a lot of nasty situations, in fact I only had a few deaths on her and I was tanking even when I was leveling her, often holding agro even with the mobs being +5 to her. Tankers and brutes SR is 100% fine for them, it's just the power set order for stalkers and scrappers that needs to be looked at, sentinels to but sentinels are garbage anyways and need a look serious look at.

Ok, I will make some corrections, they were still saying it was well more then that, but seems both sides were wrong here; at least one of them was claiming it was well over a million :/. Now I admit, i'm even angrier at myself for this mistake.

So I had an arguement with some people in help and while one person being erroneous about prices wouldn't be so bothersome, multiple people spreading misinformation bothers me to no end. They made claims the prices were far, far higher(like millions for rares). So I wanted to clear up some things: Crafting components are seeded(corrected, this is a far better word) to prevent hyper-inflation. Prices are about 10k(average price remains usually 500, occasionally hitting 1000) for common, 50k for uncommon(average tends towards 5-10k) and 1 million(though average tends towards 500k) for Rare. If the purchase isn't going immediately it's because other people are bidding for the same or higher then those(though if same, may take a lot of people bidding?). Bidding for higher then that will get you the components instantly, but your effectively wasting influence doing so. Anyone who claims the prices are higher either have not been on homecoming during it's first days, or is lying. This is why 90% of the time components are usually less than the prices listed above. Edit: So I was actually wrong to a degree; price for rare is 1 million as the cap. That said, rather than remove this post, I'll keep it here; the prices were being exaggerated significantly higher than some of the people in chat.

So I looked up today just now on google specifying homecoming, and I saw one post for an option to propagate costume color changes across colors, when it kind of just hit me. What about a system in-game to change all costume slots on a character to a completely different set of costumes at the press of a command/button? And also an option to tie saved costumes to specific characters and an improved sorting tool for already saved costumes? It'd save tremendous amounts of time for those who need more than 10 costume slots to be able to change multiple slots to pre-saved costumes on demand, it'd serve as a work around for the game engine limit of only 10 costume slots.

I often use an analogy for high power/overpowered characters. This applies to dragons/gods/demons to. A racing game, and the heavy weights. The heavyweights in racing games are the cars/characters/craft with the highest top speed, and the worst handling and acceleration. If they do not compromise in handling and thrust, they sacrifice in other categories. These require care, lots and lots of care. Collisions when they occur(and they occur more if your inexperienced) are much more unforgiving. High power characters are heavyweights. They require care and caution in approaching roleplaying. Often also discretion even when your on them casually. My most overpowered characters can if I mishandle them cause tremendous cringe. I rarely involve them in major plots, if they are involved, it's likely more indirect for a reason, if I ever get them directly involved, it's usually with an intent to knock them down a peg intentionally, OR as indirect antagonists. I think this way partly inspired by star treks' Q. Q in star trek, for those who have never watched The Next Generation, is an omni-potent being who can change things at literally the snap of a finger. He has generally no real limits to his abilities. He bends and changes reality on a whim. What makes people enjoy his plots is how he uses those powers; to prank lesser beings. He's not a good guy, so much as a prankster teacher. His lessons range from teaching humility (like in Q who) to teaching moments like being careful what you wish for or even out of the box thinking. If Q was just a fixer in every single episode without any lessons taught, he'd have been far less interesting and even just creating a snooze. Often, my most roleplayed characters are significantly less powerful, though still very, very capable in there own right. Alma may be able to mop the floor with council and displays immense talent, but she's young and inexperienced, she makes up for with raw talent, but her talent outstrips wisdom somewhat. Thats just an example, but my characters make mistakes because I want them to be more human like. And it creates room for plotlines that you do not see when your character is in a perceived utopia. Sometimes I even distort things on people, with one character of my own, due to not seeing the whole picture, draws a conclusion that is in contradiction to what's happening, only to reveal the problem shortly after. Though I try to also provide opportunities to show other perspectives(though I try to do this with other roleplayers). I call that the "perspective rule", simply, not all of my characters have all the facts of one another. Only if they are in the same off-screen locations and regularly run into one another. Thats harder to do with a more powerful omni-potent being, hence why I rarely mess with them(though I do have them). I think also, the more powerful a character is, the shorter their lifespan as interesting characters in plots. The brighter a star burns, the quicker it burns out. O type stars explode before planets even form around them. Super overpowered characters can become boring in only a few sessions. Or even just one session. So little story telling gets involved with them as a result. And this also applies when a person hears of your characters stories from others. It can hurt roleplay with them before they even get involved with your plots. So this means even MORE care has to be taken with them. This applies even WITH a well crafted backstory. It's not just backstory, but HOW you roleplay the character actively.

Depends on the character theme, though chars I don't rp often it can also be a result of my altitus; many minor alts tend to collect dust. But for unplayable characters; Mystic Chaos/Amanda of the Wild (Same toon, diff iterations) For a character thats currently hard to roleplay and I have shelved, is a character who thematically is so overwhelmed with "Magic pollution" she'd become horribly mutated. However, the character she was most friends with was also roleplayed by someone who've I come to despise(a godmoder and also RL beliefs are to extreme and dangerous, even terrifying), this also got in the way of another character rp'd by a different friend as they hang out with the person I despise. This has resulted in the character being effectively shelved; as much as I enjoyed the character I havent really been able to move them forwards much. It also didn't help that same player wanted to push the development 'against' the planned character development arch for the character; she's trying to regain her humanity, he wanted her to get rid of it. Not to mention it was I who got the player who ruined it all into this game to begin with. I'd need to visit on it sometime with a mage themed toon. But it is to me a tragedy that still scars my account a little, I do not want to get rid of the character, but I've a hard time wanting to rp her because of how badly a friendship was ruined. This is also a result of redundancy; two other characters are similar in theme, although not anywhere as severe, both are also much more powerful playstyle wise, this has further compounded the situation shelving the toon even further. Ultimately, until I really get back into RP in a major way in this game this character is just going to remain shelved. I can think of a character in a comparable situation in star trek online to the above; the same friend came from STO, but I have fixed the toon by effectively "Aborting" and retconning everything said above person had ever rp'd with me, and even outright killing some sides of the character I was trying to kill off to begin with. But it's unfortunate that I'm unsure what to do with Mystic Chaos.

As a major fan of water blast, and it's high overall performance, I could see a case, besides geyser and steam spray are both fire damage :). Everything in water is a good power, so you have some very good options for a very high damage and versatile build that still has knockdowns, self heal to supplement your secondary. And if your roleplaying, could rp it as like gasoline or oil blasting or something :).

I think on OP chars it boils down to whether or not if the person rping the OP character seems to insist on being in charge of everyone and everything that toon is about, and like I mention above if they don't respect other players boundaries. Or when a player seems to want out of a plot, trying to drag them into it or if they rp something affecting someone else mentions they are NOT ok with, they then try to cover it up by saying they didn't say that(even though it's plainly in view of everyone). It really does boil down to the player IMO. The problems of an OP character become more apparent with a bad RPer than it does a good one. OP characters are like heavyweights in a racing game; sure they seem fun and have the best top speeds, but if your bad at the racing game, you'll still score last or heaven forbid get lapped by everyone. Starting small helps. And even if your toon is 50, theres nothing wrong with them remaining IC wise balanced or grounded. Besides, it's more satisfying when you give say, that high over-all performer of yours say, flaw of inexperience/arrogance just enough and then deliberately put them in a situation they cannot just blast their way out of :D.