Veracor

If you designate one Tanker or Brute on the team to be the one to hold aggro, they're the only person that actually needs Ambrosia (usually only two or three). They can flip the Titan to face away from the team, and can optionally hover to also prevent its footstomp from being used. Everyone else can just kill it in its back/ankles and then rush the four objects in the back before people start dying to cascading defense failures that come from all the ambushes that activated as the Titan was taking damage. The person holding the Titan's aggro should probably also bring green inspirations, as Ambrosias alone may not be enough depending on powersets and the team's damage.

The league is teleported outside of a building when three of its terminals are activated, with a several second delay usually. Each terminal gives 30 points when activated. If the league activates the third and fourth terminal at the same time, they can get an extra 30 points before being teleported out. This can sometimes result in that phase of the itrial being one building visit shorter.

It's normal for this time of year to see a downtrend in activity, especially during earlier hours of the day. Aside from that, the overall population has been stable between older players leaving and newer players joining. I'm still seeing the expected attendance in my daily content but most of the globals I'm seeing now are from 2021 and 2022. The 2019-2020 attendees that I used to see regularly are often absent from the game now (except for a small set that entertains themselves via infinite numbers of badgers). Usually the holiday downtrend fixes itself by the third week of January, but I think new content typically drops around that time anyways and drums up interest. I guess we'll find out!

There was a secondary exploit involving the different "Teleport to AH" powers that was tied to the old enterbasefrompasscode functionality. Basically the original devs took some serious shortcuts when they made these and you could break into mapservers that you had no business being in which led to some additional exploits. Sounds simple but apparently it was a nightmare to fix on the backend. Homecoming changed the enterbasefrompasscode stuff back in i27p1 when they made LRT an accolade, and simultaneously opted for just disabling the AH teleport powers; most people were using base portals and LFG queue to get around anyways.

Old School LRSF is a boring slog in my opinion, but I like the two hard mode TFs introduced so far -- those are quality pieces of content for SGs and groups of friends to organize for. However, 4-star is not PUG-friendly. 4-star is something with actual difficulty for already-established groups that take the time to reflect on their gameplay and builds and make the effort to improve. 99% of the content in this game can be PUG'd or soloed, so it's nice to have something that can actually kill that one player who always runs off and tries to speedrun a mission without their team. If I had one complaint about the hard modes, it would definitely be the number of unskippable cutscenes, especially in Aeon where the cutscenes are literally just monologues that don't handle or disguise any entity movement or spawning. That number (for repeatable content such as task forces) should always be zero if everyone on the team has seen them already, much like how BAF and Keyes work. Also, the argument of "Splitting an already-small playerbase" isn't really a thing in my anecdotal experience, as (1) The people who choose to run hard modes weren't going to be joining random PUGs or MSRs anyways and (2) You're splitting these players off from a block of content that can be 99% soloed. This might not be necessarily be true for everyone, but it is what I have observed with the majority of hard mode enjoyers. ... Related tangent: I don't mind when someone says "I can't do it" because of timezones or because of not knowing enough people. But it irritates me when someone says "I refuse to do it" because there's literally nothing holding them back from learning a game like this and getting better at it. This isn't an RTS where there's APM and peripheral vision checks, nor is it an FPS where there's aiming and hearing checks. A player that can't navigate high speeds in maps can still be a good player in a team by learning game mechanics and to hit Barrier when the leader calls for it, and a player with visual disability can still use macros and follow commands to target and position correctly. Don't lock yourself behind the mindset that you refuse to do something because it's too hard or you're too old. Learn, self-criticize, and adapt -- don't use video games merely as a way to wallow after a bad day at work. All games are systems, and there is glory to be had in truly understanding what makes them tick!

I am a tank main. I live to tank. I spend 99% of my time here on my tank. I justify this preference by analyzing my gameplay to try to be the best possible tank my team could ask for. My hobby of being punched in the face is often marginalized by Destiny and the high levels of player power, but moving the team quickly and controlling aggro on more than one group is still useful. Tank/nuke/support is a trinity that exists among a small section of players. It isn't enforced due to the inherent low difficulty of this game, and it isn't enjoyed by most as it invalidates many ATs and powersets, but the speed and power of a trinity-focused team far outclasses the hodgepodge of other ATs you usually see in a team. An organized tank (be it a Tanker, Brute, or Scrapper), a Fire Blaster, and a Cold Corruptor can carry whatever the rest of the team is through the majority of task forces, and it becomes very apparent in iTrials when the league splits up for badges. That said, I don't think the trinity should be required or even leaned into for future design. When you look at 4-star Aeon runs for example, the number of compositions available for a time-efficient run are slim due to Barrier chains greatly narrowing the possibilities. It sucks if a new piece of content comes out and your main/badger/whatever can't contribute well, or even participate to any unique effect, because the content is so skewed towards a small selection of powersets. If the trinity should ever be designed for, then it needs to be done in some way as to not say "better luck next time" to the majority of powerset combinations -- especially at this point in the game's life when people have long settled on their character choices. I do feel bad for the people that wanted to be healers in this game, though. It's a legit role in other games, but here if players are at least moderately aware of their surroundings then there's almost no situations for a healer to shine over another buffer or debuffer. This was different very early in the game's life when player power levels (especially enhancements) were much lower, and thus healing was much more on par with other methods of support. Perhaps the nostalgia towards the holy trinity comes from this moreso than the meta that the trinity design actually causes in gameplay.

Don't use a computer/laptop with integrated graphics. There's a specific line of integrated graphics, Intel I believe, that doesn't handle OpenGL very well, particularly with how the game renders water planes and sewer fx. I would also personally recommend against the AMD RX 5000 series for graphics cards, sometimes called Navi. I tried this one and got microstutters like crazy on CoH, and no setting seemed to fix it. Ended up having to send it back.

Each critter maintains a list of enemy targets that it has non-zero threat to. Threat is gained by vision, damage, directly taunting, or allies in the group fighting, and is lost overtime based on time and distance. The threat loss from time is static, but the threat loss from distance is greater if the enemy target is far away, especially when out of line of sight. Hence, enemies that teleport away are at risk of forgetting about the fight if no substantial debuffs or taunt were applied to them. Note that there is a very low threat threshhold that must be passed before the critter will attack -- that's what you're observing when you run past a mob and they see you, but haven't built enough threat to begin attacking. Staying in their vision increases that threat until they attack; if you're close, that threshhold will be reached almost instantly. The actual "threat" list that the critter maintains works like a leaderboard when there are multiple enemy targets. The critter initially picks the first person to generate threat with them, and anyone else that generates threat goes on the list below them. If the person with the second-highest threat value becomes twice as much as the current person, the critter switches to them, and then the next second-highest threat must become twice that to cause another aggro switch (even if it's the first person trying to get aggro back). The reason why this function exists is to stop an AV from rapidly flip-flopping between two tanks. Lastly, if what would be the current target is already at their aggro cap, the critter will merely attack the next most-threatening target on the list until a space opens for the current target (with the Homecoming update, the critter may still throw a few attacks at the aggro-capped primary target, but will largely attack the next person on the list). For building threat, the AT's scalar multiplies with damage, debuffs, and taunts being applied. For damage this is straightforward: damage is multiplied, i.e. if a Tanker were to somehow not have their inherent of Gauntlet, the Tanker would be doing 4x as much threat to an AV as they are doing damage, since Tankers and Brutes have a threat scalar of 4. For debuffs, this is not as well understood: the AI's interpretation of the threat caused by various debuffs is different -- for example, the AI thinks RechargeTime and Slows to be extremely threatening while it thinks Damage and Resistance debuffs are not very threatening. It does appear that the duration of the debuffs also play a role in the threat that they cause. For the "taunt" effect in particular, the AT scalar is multiplied with the duration, which is effectively how threat is internally stored. This is why a slotted Taunt (as in the power) from a Tanker is extremely sticky: when the Tanker uses this, they're effectively splatting a threat value of 80+ seconds on a target, which far exceeds the threat caused by, say, a Blaster's raw damage. It should be noted that Tanker's Gauntlet and Brute's Punchvoke have their own unenhanceable taunt that all of their attacks apply (Tanker: 15 seconds AoE, Brute: 13.5 seconds ST), so even if the Tanker or Brute doesn't use Taunt, just their auras and attacks should be enough to hold aggro over a Blaster. However, a low-damage Tanker or Brute that isn't using the power Taunt may get their aggro stolen by a Scrapper's damage, as Scrappers have the next highest threat scalar of 3, and especially if the Scrapper has their own taunt aura (such as Bio) or is applying slow debuffs (such as Ice). The Scrapper may have enough juice to overcome the unenhanceable 15/13.5 second taunt that is being applied by the Tanker/Brute's attacks. This page has a list of the different AT scalars that the mechanic of Threat gets multiplied by: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Threat As to how exactly Threat stacks per target, I am uncertain. It appears to decay faster the higher it has been stacked, but this is merely non-experimental observation. It is entirely possible that it just doesn't stack and only uses the highest threat applied by a single instance (after regular decay).

Bump, been having this forced redraw and delayed damage very often in iTrials. Nothing gamebreaking but can be irritating for some events (such as UG bomb badge).

Try not to get frustrated at powerlevelled newbies. They probably learned about the game from an experienced player who was just powerlevelling their own alts to 50 and merely offered to do the same to their new friend, not realizing it's cutting a ton of contacts out for a new person and leaving them at the hands of LFG to figure out what to do. The saddest AE baby I've ever encountered in iTrials didn't even know there were zones other than Atlas Park and Ouroboros -- they thought Atlas Park was Paragon City and that Ouroboros was a DLC from live. Sometimes there's a lot of stupid to unpack. Best you can do as a content leader is to have patience and then journal the experience afterward for comedy (after redacting names of course).

Bio is okay I guess.

Pure chance. I was randomly scrolling through imgur's "user submitted, newest first" out of boredom in February 2019 and saw someone post an image of CoH's login screen. They were posting about news of the secret server getting found out. I wasn't too into CoH back in the day for a numer of reasons but thought it would be interesting news to follow, if just to see how the situation legally panned out. Two months later Homecoming launched.

Thanks to everyone who made effort to show up at the voting booths to recast their votes! It was a lot of work but it feels good to have done the Community Choice thoroughly and in-person. Your time was not wasted! Congrats to all five bases! I'm happy so many people showed up to check them out!

Congratulations to the winners, the finalists, and everyone who entered! All of the bases in this contest were fantastic to tour! As one of the judges I helped go through all 74 of them, and let me tell you, what a rush for anyone looking to get into building their own base! Ideas and inspirations were everywhere! Well done everyone, and thank you @Dacy and @Easter Bunny very much for bringing the Homecoming Base Contests back!

Nice! I like posts with hard data. It has certainly felt to me that for the last two years there's been a constant stream of new globals showing up and a similar stream of older globals no longer showing up, as players come and go. But it has never felt like one was greater than the other, excepting events. Good to have a data-driven response though for when some negative nancy says that "Homecoming is dying," and I anecdotally feel that the population is stable.

In Page 6, Titan Weapon Tanker now has to redraw their weapon before they can perform an attack, and this does a client-side root. This feels bad but doesn't impact melee combat too much because the attack animations will compensate for it. However if you open a fight with Taunt (and many self-respecting Tankers do), you get client-side rooted by the redraw and then also rooted by the Taunt animation, because most Tankers won't be in immediate melee range to queue the actual rooting of an attack power into it. And this can happen every 15-45 seconds or so which feels awful and clunky. A quick video showing the long delay between opening with Taunt and being able to move, due to the double rooting caused by the new redraw: A video showing the new redraw rooting getting overridden by an actual attack chain, this only works at melee range and it looks screwy: It is possible to interrupt the rooting of the new forced redraw animation by popping an inspiration as soon as you open with Taunt, which prevents the client-side part of the rooting: Or you can use a ranged power like Combat Teleport instead of an inspiration, which (depending on power) may mess with your camera: So I understand the original hacky weapon system was redone from the ground up and it is likely a bug, but if this was intentional then please give an option to simply remove the weapon redraw like how Titan Weapons used to be implemented prior to Page 6. The now-mandatory double rooting feels really bad during gameplay (I ran a few iTrials with it). --- Bonus bug: Crushing Blow (slow) now deals its damage at the end of its animation instead of when it hits an enemy. This may be a return of an old timing bug with Crushing Blow from Issue 27 Page 1. If I remember correctly Crushing Blow was tinkered with in Issue 27 Page 2 to fix it. Combined with the animation rooting of the new weapon redraw, and given that many TW attack chains begin with Crushing Blow for Momentum reasons, this new extra bug makes your character freeze in place and then ignore the afterdelay of Crushing Blow, making attacks more difficult to chain because they come out in such a quick order after the redraw rooting. A video showing the new Crushing Blow (slow) bug, I used Taunt first to put myself in combat so that the rooting from redraw isn't a factor: And here's a video the Crushing Blow (slow) bug being used in tandem with the client-side redraw rooting:

All of the Interfaces are stacking like this and have been for many months, it's just apparent on Hamidon because he doesn't resist Degenerative at all and the Reactive stacking is overshadowed by actual Resistance debuffs from players and BP Lore pets. I think Interface going beyond four stacks may be a side effect from the proc-reliance fix it had a while ago, and I'd even argue that it's a happy side effect because it helps pet powersets contribute more in level 50 content. But a bug is a bug, and Interface has a long history of not working right. So it looks like we have three issues working in tandem to delete the poor blob from the game: Hamidon's entity class is not resisting Maximum HP debuffs. Interface abilities are stacking more than 4 times from different sources. Reverberant is applying 33+ stacks of Degenerative Interface in one go for some reason. Nice.

I can confirm Reverberant is acting funky and applying far too many Interface stacks, with multiple Reverberants sometimes able to instantly defeat Hamidon from full life if their owners have Degenerative Interface. This has been happening sporadically since Page 4 dropped (When Symphony was introduced) but it's only been since last month that we've pinpointed it to Reverberant for further testing. Everything involving Symphony Control looks normal in City of Data to me so I don't have any speculation on the technical reason for the bug. However I did notice that Hamidon's class (Boss Hamidon) doesn't appear to have any resistance to -maxHP effects like iTrial and hard mode AVs do (Boss Praetorianarchvillain) which may explain why we've only noticed it in Hamidon raids and not elsewhere, but this by itself wouldn't be responsible for Hamidon dying so quickly. If anyone doubts the screenshots, here is an old unlisted video of it happening back in September, long before we had figured any cause for it. In this video I was mousing over Hamidon's health bar to monitor his hit points and you can see Hamidon dying instantly from his maximum HP being reduced from 40k to 0 in just a few frames: @CapnFreedom Nice job with the findings and details!

I'm not certain, but I believe the defense self-buff to the Tanker that Evasion provides is being considered a debuff on the enemy when the combat routine calculates the threat that is being applied. Otherwise I have no idea why SR seems to be so sticky. I believe this is also the case for Invuln but nowhere near as extreme. Unfortunately SR Tankers are very rare to see in content so I haven't had much chance to compare aggro with them. Super Reflexes might actually generate more threat than Ice Armor. Also, Bio being a sticky armor set is a bit of a misconception. Bio has a damage aura and a taunt aura, but the damage aura generates almost no threat (like most damage auras, actually, which is why Dark, Fiery, and Elec don't hold aggro by themselves very well) and the taunt aura's debuffs aren't considered particularly threatening to the AI. What Bio having two auras does is grab the initial aggro up to twice as fast which is why people think it's a sticky set akin to Ice, but speaking from experience, the single-aura sets like Radiation, Shield, and Willpower that have other effects on their taunt auras will inherently generate more aggro than Bio (as will Invuln due to the aforementioned feature/bug).

I haven't noticed anything wrong with threat since the fixes years ago and I do a lot of tanking. Do you have your Taunt slotted? Taunt needs to be slotted if you want it to reliably win over auras/gauntlet/damage, especially if you're fighting anything that is using the level 50 Praetorian entity classes such as iTrial mobs and "hard mode" AVs. Also, some AVs do have at least a few attacks that disregard threat and target random people; don't confuse that with losing aggro. Aura-wise, some sets like Ice Armor and Super Reflexes will pull extraordinary amount of aggro over other sets. Others will inherently pull a bit more aggro than others such as Invuln and Willpower. A few Scrapper sets have taunt auras as well, but their mags are lower so it's much harder for them to peel off of Tankers and Brutes unless they're spamming Confront and had aggro to begin with (to gain aggro, your combined threat must become twice the amount of the current target's threat).

Posting a sexist comment and then tripling down on it, confirming bad intent, after numerous negative responses telling why you were wrong was what made me chime in, and that tripling down is what I had quoted specifically. My personal player opinion of your longstanding negativity on these forums had little to do with it -- I do not tolerate willful bigotry, harassment, or griefing in Everlasting TFs. That is where I draw the line. In response to my post you sent me a private message in response (because apparently you didn't want others in the thread to see it) admitting to me that you think it's funny to piss other people off, that you don't care about what others think, and then reiterated that you do not accept anyone's explanation of why you were wrong in the thread. I didn't care to respond to this message but it did make me feel better confirming 100% that I had not made a mistake. After receiving no reply from me, you then sent me another angry message telling me to go ask Sundew (as if I hadn't already), and "if you value her opinion at all." Yes, I very much do value the opinions of women as equally as I do with men, that's why I said what I said and stand by what I said. The weird thing though, is that the one post I made in that thread was the only response I gave. I never responded to you further in the thread, in PMs, or anywhere else, mostly because others had already said what I would have said. Apparently I've been living rent-free in your head for ignoring your flamebait and whatever other negative comments you've said about me since. And today you sent me this private message, completely unsolicited: To which I merely clicked Report and went back to running my Hamidon raid (which had overfilled 20 minutes early once again). Take the advice of the others here and get some help. You are not happy.

Cascade Archipelago. Great views, tasty fruit, free water, and lots of trampolines. No need to work and plenty of light. Fun for the whole family! Just don't ask about the giant eyeballs. Or why the water is red.

Would love to have a 4th build slot.

Reverse-altitis player here. Did you know that Hero Merits also cap at 10,000 if you decide to convert 500,000 Reward Merits to them? And I would assume Villain Merits too, but I'm still working on that one. I'll consider rolling a second character when I have 10,000 of every salvage.

The content team decided that Faultline should be an optional hidden boss (no badges), accessed by having a team leader with the Master of Sequencers badge talk to and insult Cobalt Arachne on 4-star difficulty. There you will have to fight the entire dev team in a tiny phased room with a countdown timer until that dimension mapserves. I recommend focusing Captain Powerhouse down first to avoid his Nerfmode aura stacking too much if your team is comprised of high-performing powersets. Successful completion of this fight awards ten Prismatics and a prestige Faultline pet (accolade power) that stabs you whenever you break something.