DrRocket

Roderick The normal travel powers does not detoggle you, but the P2Vendor flights does. My Fire/Axe Tanker has 10 toggles, so the decision to get the P2 vendor power was a difficult one, but thelure to get an additioanl combat power won. I just haave to plan my landing spots more carefully, and the team can wait till I toggle-up. I also purched all the teeleports for the P2 vendor which makes this issue less painful

Just a proposal By now I have a variety of alts and have all classes represented at level 50, still working in getting all their incarnate slots to level 4, and IO set them to tip top. But when I play my defender, a lot of the "handicaps" to the class does not strike me as logical. I know that other classes such as the controllers for instance shares many of these issues as well. So I look at a Defender, and wow are they classy, and have real showy powers, and the name says it "Defender" When I buy the primary set of powers, which are usually are forms of Buffs, I sadly discovered I could not buff myself but only others. I figure that at one time this was done so Defenders would be more focused in playing other classes' "nurse" than any other activity. Made sense to an extent. But explain to me, how a status effect helpless defender is of any support when any AOE effect takes them out of the picture? On the other hand with the new IO set and Incarnate system, the need for Defenders has greatly diminshed ( there is no more the posting of TF looking for healer and the entire team is waiting for a defender to sing up). The price of being a group "nurse" was the deep penalty of them being able to solo as effectively and comfortably as the melee classes. So why not remove the "nurf" on Defender and other classes primaries? Why not let these previosuly regarded as support classes, to come to age and enjoy their full potential? Especially since thier "nurse" role is no longer truly needed? Lets talk about Defender secondaries, I am sure Controllers and others have their issues to. The Defender's secondary power set is acquired at full price, just like any other class acquires their powers, but it is the only class whose set performance is nurfed by 50%. I interpret this as I pay full price but only get half of what I paid for. Of course that is when I am in a team of 8, must be once again the punishing incentive to play a nurse doctrine. And when alone the nurf is only 20%. Once more, remove the nurf, let the Defender be respectable and fully able to contribute in a team and capable when alone. When I play my melee classes, I tend to play Scrappers incidentally, but I actually farm with a Fire/Axe tank quite well and effectively. I often hear Defenders moan about the pitiful damage they do, and laughed about it, and then thought, they can't even defend themselves when under attack, like say from an ambush which is often are spawned right over you. I stopped laughing. I for one, in a team would welcome the extra firepower from a Defender when doing thinkgs like AV fighting and Hami; also would be nice to be able to depend on them when it matters (there i snothing more demoralizing when my health is really low and the defender is status effected out of the fight). Incidentally as a Scrapper, I tend to hang back a bit and deal with all mobs that threaten the support staff, since they are unable to effeectively defend themselves, just think a cheap shot status effect to make sure they are helpless (especially after they already gobbled their break frees) and then murdered. For the Controller, you all got to give them some DPS, it is insane to try to solo with them. If anything why not give one or two shifts in damage to their control attacks? At low levels, it took me forever to kill a yellow mob, and by the time he finally when down, my enduranc eleves were at the fumes level. Just a thought, I really want all classes to be as flexible and enjoy ease of play as much possible, think of this metric: "All classes should be able to farm as well, but they all accomplish it differently" Now go over each class, and redo their power sets that would enable them to accomplish it. For instance let the peviously regarded support classes enjoy MAG 4 inherent or through a common defensive power or a buff that works on them so they are not that totally vulnerable and can be heroic. Melee Mag protection tends to be 8 or better in the case of tanks. Just a nice Christmas thought...

I could not agree more with regards to defense based characters and the streak breaker... Here you are in a normal TF, lets say Lady Gray. When you get to the Hero One portion, there may be dozens of Rickti going at you, so all of them are mostly missing, after all itis possible for them to roll a 5 or less (5% of the time), but after ten rounds, the great majority of them will "by design" strike you and then its lights out. The player is simply out of luck. I play a Storm Defender, when it gets to survive the spammed use of Status effects, it all comes down to not being hit; because when they do hit, its over, and my character is essentially murdered. So the streak breaker on the NPC side is a bad thing all together. I do have a question, my MM had a 56% defense versus AOE and Ranged, yet when I was doing Lady Gray, every Rickti Mentalist nailed me every time, never missed a status effect attack, what gives? At first, I thought, well he got lucky and rolled the 5%, I survived because of my pets, and then he Status Affect hold me a second time, nailed me, and a third time and then he died because my pets finally overwhelmed him. Now I can buy the 5% chance, but rolling 5% chances three in a row? Sure it is possible, but really? Then I moved into another room, and guess what Held by the very first try of the Mez boss, and again, and again. I went to powers, and checked my defense and it was almost at 60% for both range and area; be mindful I hover high to force attacks on me to be ranged or aoe. I would appreciate if anyone can explain, what I am missing with the Rickti mentalist mechanics, are there status effect auto hit?

I play a Necro/Dark MM I love life drain and it is a key power towards the survivability of my pets and thus me. I have installed the 6 aura IOs to make them tougher, and I follow them within 20 feet and spam the aura heal while having life drain as a secondary personnal heal and enemy debuffer. What I really need is a new command button: "All Attack what I target" Pets automatically target what is being targeted by me, as it is I have to retarget, then click on all pets attack. This consumes valuable time, when trying to keep them healed while also trying to take care of other team members, and be aware of the combat environment, it does get rather hectic. Incidentally, I disagree with OP on changes, I like very much the ranged attacks for my pets, pretty good when fighting aerial foes.

I particularly like to fly, it does make me feel kinda super... My problem is that there is no reason to buy fly or any travel powers, when you can go to the P2 vendor and buy them there. Those movement abilities are much faster than the regular power fly and they even provide some semblance of protection to boot. I am not advocating the removal of travel powers from the P2 Vendor, I fully embrace the reason for them being there for they solve a large number of old day game mechanics quite well. That said, I believe that if a player buys a travel power through the proper character development system such as flight and super jump, that those powers performance should be noticeably better (faster) than the ones you can purchase with influence. For instance the normal flight should be as fast as what it is now with afterburner, to make it competitive with the purchased ones, and then boost-up afterburner. Since I am not a fan of super jump and super speed, I can't really advice what the new performance parameters can be since I have insufficient understanding to benchmark them. But I am sure other players, who do, can provide reasonable suggestions to complete my proposal here.

Colleagues and fellow gamers: As I engaged in a Numina TF over the weekend, it occurred to me Why not let the hunt missions be done in parallel rather than in series? One of the reasons, Numina feels slow and perhaps somewhat boring is the go somewhere and kill a number of bad characters. And then we go one area at a time, and burn time like there is no tomorrow. Now since many players knows the what to defeat and where, why not allow the defeat counters of all zones activate right after the CoT mission in Perez Park? Sure the mission originally display may say kill 10 Clockwork in Atlas, but as they being serviced all the other zones are being serviced, so when Atlas is done and the next zone may have already been serviced, perhaps the third or fourth zone may say defeat 2 family in IP for example. By doing this, it would actually make the TF more fun, and encourage more plannig and team work. What do you all think?

Before it seems I am just criticising the game, I want to declare that I do enjoy the game and recognize the many fixes and improvements in it that i smaking the game so much more fun to be played by the many different types of players. Now lets talk about the TFs, I was making fun with other players that Citadel sends you to Independence Port for many of the missions and he is stationed in Talos, then get this Penlope who is based on Independence Port has most of her missions in Talos. Synapse is in Skyway and most of the missions are in Steel Canyon. Numina, good grief, is the great tour of Paragon. So while I am not criticing the game by any means, I believe at the time this and otehr TFs were made, the concept of "time sinks" were needed within reason but content did not quite exist for it was in the process of being created; this makes the difference from a newly established game versus a long ago established game. With the revival of COH by Homecomming, there has been many QoL improvements such as ATT, TT, MT, rocket boards, etc which mostly concentrates in making the inter mission travel less grindy. Kudos for the effort! But if the time and effort is available why not relook at the TFs and limit the missions to the zone the hero is at, Positron all happens in SC, Synapse Sky, Penny IP, etc. It would be a QoL type improvement, also goes easier on new players trying ot learn the maps. I just got a friend to get into the game, and he is a first timer, and Positron sends the team to faultline... Another improvement can be on the nature of the missions within the TF, be nice to reduce the copy-paste feel, Citadel go to IP hit council base get 1 computer, next mission the same as before but 2 computers, next mission the same as before but 3 computers, and yes the next missoin same as before but 4 computers. Why not just have the go for the 4? and do away with the other 3, best yet change the other 3 to something else all together would be great. Just the Augistine TF, tha tone is repetitive and just down right ugly, kill 50 mobs here, then again somewhere else, why 50? Numina at its worse had 20. Just thinking aloud, I don't think the game needs time sinks anymore, so why not remove the old time timesink tricks? Thank you

Yes, I am a role player, and need more space to properly set my charactr in context. Thank you for this very good suggestion

Wow I support that! I am getting to be very old, and my eyes are not quite what they used to be, and when it gets to hand to eye coordination, well I am not tops as I used to be. The issue of missing the #1 attack and tray 1 happens more often to me than I like, especially when I am excited in the middle of heated combat. So please, please give me a tray number lock, that would be so awesome for me an old timer... Thank you, thank you for this very awesome suggestion

I feel your pain, but... When I IOd my MM there are 6 auras you can slot that gives a lot of toughness to your pets, that is they don't die as easily. I play a necro/dark MM, Since I follow my pets within 20' I spam my dark heal area effect, and keep my pets and myself continuously healed. You be surprised how effective this is, the difficulty is keeping your pets from spreading out instead of keeping focused on a target. I wish there was a command that would auto-target them to whatever I am attacking, instead of having to target, command them to attack my target, and then try to keep them healed. Another survival technique is at 50+ is to IO in such a way to have at least 45% defense versus ranged and aoe, that means you don't get hit much, you use hover and stay above melee range. The aoe defense is critical, since you are within 20' of your pets, you are going to be spam AOEd, the high defense coupled with your spaming PBAOE heals will keep you alive and going. But it is true, with mean AVs despite it all, your pets can and will go down. Once I have a 25% loss, I click on passive and retreat to a safe place. Afterwards I recast my missing pets, buff them, and then go back to taking care of business. Hopet his helps V/R

I believe a great QoL besides increasing damage, is to re-define all Axe attacks that has knockback to be instead knockdown, its crazy to have to be chaing the mob you knocked away so by the time you get to them they are back on thier feet and your knockback did nothing but harm you, since the tanker is getting beat up by other mobs and you are wasting time chasing a mob. Another thought I had, was back in medieval days, Knights used axes because they could pierce through armor much better than a sword could, would be interesting if axe attacks would have a smash and lethal resistance debuff. Just some thoughts

At risk at sounding ungrateful, I do recognize that Homecoming developers and staff has bent over backwards in giving us better and faster ways to get around, especially in between missions. Yet I do enjoy very much participating in ITFs, yet to get to Cimerora I have to go out of my way to a university campus (not nearby a tram), then zone in the midnight club, and then walk thru it, and zone in past the doors, then finally zone in to Cimerora. I get the colofulness of it and that during live there was a need to make it appear that content and maps were larger by using travel as a mechanism. I like to believe in Homecoming this practice is no longer observed, as made evident on the many ways to transport or be transported around. With this in mind, why not qive us a Quality of Life improvement and give us a portal to Cimerora? Would be nice if our bases could have the beacon to Cimerora, but it would be also good, and perhaps simpler, if the Orouboros portal would have Cimerora as a destination, since Orouboros is all about time and space manipulation it would make ample sense Just a thought V/R

You can achieve your wish woth a free to set up super group base, it does take alittle bit of work to maintain but it is possible. I hope this helps V/R

I agree with the OPs identification of the problem I think it would be simple just to shift up the amount of damage of the attack, instead of making all sorts of changes. That is if the attack does moderate damage, the corrected version does superior or high damage. This way it artificially compensates for the long graphic timelines. Just trying to keep it simple. V/R

I recently rolled my first Sentinel, and I totally adore it. I was going to recreate my blaster from the live days, but in my mind good damage at moderate range and status effect protected! Sign me up! The only thing I would really like to see added to the Sentinel is a snipe attack, so the sentinel can assist the team they are serving in to pull mobs in a tasctical manner. Otherwise I have no issue with the attack ranges, for that indeed differentiates the combat performance between sentinels and blasters. I have no issue with the damage of the two being comparable. Regards

Interesting problem you have. The first thought that came into my mind, is how well populated is the server you play at. Also another consideration is how robust is the farmer population in such server. My expereince at Evergreen is its highly populated and if you step into an AE building it's plumb full of fire/spine brutes, which means the farmer population is alive an well. As many other responders have pointed out, many folks get the recipe, especially orange and purples and craft them to get maximum influence gain. You can't blame them for it, why sell a recipe for 50K when you can sell the crafted item for 5M instead, after spending 2.5M in materials? In my case when I do farm, not often, I find it boring, and I don't care to craft, I immediately sell the recipe in AH as I get them, but I am sure I am a rare situation. A suggestion to you is to make friends with an umber of farmers or a farmer super group and make arrangements for the recipes you would like to have, so you get first right of refusal. This practice has indeed worked very well for me. Good luck

It is an interesting concept, I give you that, one that I find myself sitting at the fence. I like the idea to share resources within an account, I do support the concept that there should be no limitations in this respect. Now making incarnate stuff say sellable at the auction house? Parts of it is appealing, and parts of it I have reservations. I personally are an alt-o-holic. I have 11 characters, 3 are 50+3, all three have 3 of the slots at tier 4. I would find it handy to be able to share stuff among each other to make the improvement process faster. But then last night, it hit me, why it would not be a good idea as well. The problem is if you have a very effective class, or one you happen to play very welll, you would wind up playing that all the time and improving the other classes with the spoils earned from the one you plain all the time. At first hand, there is nothing appearing to be wrong, it actually looks all good. But the problem is that I am know having alts at high levels with tier 4 mods and I really do not master them as if I had played that one class all along as they worked their way up. As I said last night, I dusted off my Storm Defender, who is fully IOd, and was mopping up baddies along the way. Then all of a sudden I got ambushed, surrounded, could not move because they were all around me, thus pinned and unable to move. I fought like crazy, but truthfully, I panicked, eventually the standard hold mez die sequence kicked in and I died. In retrospect, I panicked and did not use my character at its fullest, because I do not play it as often as I should for her reputation attained. All I needed to do was to engage my hurricane, and bam they are off me and I can maneuver again! The debuff from hurricane who is IO set slotted would have done it for me, and I would survived, and another duh moment, I have a tier 4 ION judgment, not only could I have survived the engagement, I could have killed them all as well. In short a newby mistake in a very high leveled character. After this long story, is like happened to me, my newbie error can and does impact the rest of my team. If a lot of players are having these virtual experienced tier 4 alts with little actual playing experience, who got their veteran levels by sitting at a farm, can very well become an issue. I think it is a compromise to allow trading within account, while not in the auction house. Just my grain of salt

Good point, but the nice state to be as you describe, does not happen until you reach incarnate. I desire more robustness at much lower levels, despite that today going from 1 to 50 may not take long. But if you are going to take your time and enjoy the content, having some status protection would come handy, since too many mobs spams them. I often regarded status effects as a support class as the "I Win" button to be used by mobs.

DougGraves: Excellent point to something I did not address and that is attack damage, I was mostly focused in survivability. I like the concept of replacing redundant control powers for ranged and possibley AOE damage powers. But perhaps an easy fix, is to increase the damage of the control powers, say just raise them by 1 level of damage delivery, say moderate goes to high. Just a thought

To begin with this is an excellent game and is very much fun, and what went into the game, specifically the various classes clearly were highly considered and addressed. As I look at the game's original classes Tanker, Scrapper, Defender, Blaster and Controller, clearly follows the Gary Gigax teaming concept. As a result the pros and cons of these classes were defined by the developers, based on this old time team gaming concept. Disclaimer: I may often refer to blasters, defenders and controllers, but my suggestion are also meant for their villain counterparts such as corruptors, dominators and brutes. So far so good... When City of Villains was released, new class sets with new balances were made available, and the developers had all the lessons learned on the problems from the first batch of classes to build upon and improve. The developers did a fine job at making very robust classes, and the foundatins for departing from the Gary Gigax concept, and example of this good evolution is the enhancement to the tanks, brutes, scrapper's self heal, self recharge abilities which allows them to operate in both solo and group situations with out much dependency on support, not that the services of support are not appreciated. When I play my fire/axe tanker for instance, especially post incarnate, I can do a 50 mission and not sweat the odds, often I am in groups now with out support classes, and not miss them much. This is not a criticism, it is a compliment! Because it relieves the TF or mission organizer the burden of trying to balance the team for survivability purposes. I no longer see the mandatory we got to have an empath healer anymore statement which was ever present during the live days and the entire group was waiting for a healer to sign up, this is great for flexibility but sad for the empath healer whose services are not as valued as they once were. Once I again, this is not a criticism, its an observation of a trend that I very much like, a trend that gives team organizers a lot of freedom, which is great for all players. So if we are going to depart from the hard core Gary Gigax frame of mind: Tank takes the hits (Warrior), don't hit hard (this is changing "brute" and incarnate), Defender keeps the tank going (Cleric), Blaster/Controller puts the damage and controls the battle (Mage), and Scrappers sneak in a deliver killer damage (Thief). Do note that the other classes follow same concept Blaster/Corruptor, Controller/Dominator, etc. So how can we work on the support classes, so they can be more likely that players would actually be just as happy to play them as opposed to a melee type? After all, check the trend on team compositions from the "live" days to today's, and you will notice a decrease in the support numbers, after all why play them, when there are more robust classes to be played? For example I had a choice between a blaster and sentinel? I had an energy/energy blaster in the live days, so I wanted to reproduce the character for nostqalgia purposes, but then I stumbled on a new class call sentinel. Lets see, Blaster hits hard, wow hard, but even a menion with status effect can lay the blaster low, you hit one minion, and then the status effect spam goes-off at the blaster (at one time selected mobs had ranged effects, now just about all of them do in some form or other), the blaster is, as expected, stunned, held, or whatever and a few moments later dies. Not a heroic picture here. Then good gravy! a Sentinel hits nearly as hard, and has status effect protection! I can really have fun kicking baddies left and right! So I went with the sentinel over the blaster, it frankly was a no brainer. The damage over time of a sentinel smokes the blaster for there is no status effect avoidance down time or run for your life practices and come back for second shot or inspiration "junkie" dependency. So how to envigorate the Blaster/Corruptor? For myself the main reason I stirred away from the Blaster was the total helplessnes to status effects (not a fan that I have to have a tray full of break free inspirations in order to play, when this is not a consideration to many other classes). On the other hand, I do want to keep some semblance of game balance but not in a Gary Gigax mentallity, in other words give the servitude clause on support classes their retirement papers because their "live time" role truly no longer exists as it once was. So for the blaster, they have AIM which temporarely boosts their accuracy and damage, why not say their focus is so great that they get comprehensive status effect while under these conditions, thus if you run accuracy you have say a LT's MAG status protection which last the entire recharge duration. The question what about balance? Good question, here is how balance works: Tank and Brutes get toggles, they are on and don't have to pay much attention to them to be protected, so nice. Scrapper/Stalkers get usually a single activation power that they can place in auto if they are smart, not bad but some attention to it is requried. Blaster/Corruptor: They have to be really playing attention to AIM to keep it going, note that the pluss to accuracy and damage may be gone but the status effect protection persists, it could be toggled if the blaster is wise. Second Balance perspective and the most important: The pragmatic levels of MAG protection does not need to be the same either. I can't find the actual class status effect table that shows what MAG values each class has, but as I remember the Tank had a Mob Elite Boss level set of protection, and Scrappers have Boss level rprotection, so why not give the Blaster/Defender/Controller the means to attain LT mag level? In my case, for the blaster I suggested using AIM as a means to activate teh protection. Lets talk about Controllers/Dominators... You would think that a controller/dominator would know all the ins and outs of status effects and thus should be the hardest to be affected by them, and yet they are just as helpless as the Blaster and Defender class types. So how do we remedy that as proposed for the blaster. I would propose that each time a controller/dominator uses a control power, they activate a temporary MAG level equivalent to a tank, it is rather short lived say 1 minute, but to make it fun, the time is stackable, so if they are spamming their holds or what not their status effect duration increases, so if in that one minute they spammed say 3 other attacks; hold, confuse, and slow for example their status effect timer would increase by 3 minutes. One comment about pets, the fire controller is limited to 3 pets where there is no control over. A master mind has 6 pets or more with total control, a clear case of old thinking versus new thinking. At one time the controller could spawn 5 imps and if they have very fast recharge times, could have a second or even a third batch of imps, which quickly unbalanced the game. I get it. Why not give the controller her 5 imps back, and raise the maximum number of imps cap from 3 to 5? and maybe let the controller control the imps. A bif difference between the controller and mastermind is that the mastermind's pets actually have powers. Other controller classes with pets such as illusion, should have their numbers revised along the lines of the Mastermind. Lets talk about the Defender... They actually have the same helplesness to status effects as all the other support classes, so how do we fix it and keep some sort of balance? My suggestion is to remove the limitation they can't affect themselves. Thus the same buff they can give to any other class, they can give to themselves. The powers with area effect protection such as steamy mist and other like effects provide a full set of status protection, but only at minion level and are stackable. I really could never get my arms around the concept, I know how to make you tougher and heal you, but I just can't figure how to do exactly that for myself. I suspect this was a Gary Gigax based effort to encourage Defenders to focus in being good team supporters which under how the game mechanics were was actually quite needed. It may be required to ensure that the various defender powers that provide status effect protection mitigation be looked at, in order to ensure uniformity across the various subclasses (storm, empathy, kinetic) spectrum about LT level mag protection which are of course stackable. Thinking of clear mind, O2 boost, etc. Lastly let defenders do full damage regardless if they are soloing or not, I get the concept that under the Gary Gigax mindset their damage was reduced as an encouragement to focus in being a good support character. With the new game's environment the encouragement to be support focused is no longer valid. Let me explain, why I believe it is no longer valid: A few days ago, I was playing my Emp/Water Defender, and thinking as I did in live days: "I am going to focus in healing and buffing". It did not take long before I was bored, there was not much healing needed, the tanks and scrappers healed themselves, their mag protections were so outstanding that my clear mind was not even needed. So all I had left to do to was to spam clear minds to other defenders, controllers, and blasters if any in my group, as a result the use of clear mind was hardly ever used. Eventually I gave up being a good healer/buffer and went into the aggressive, did any one died? No, no one died while I did this. Sure I kept an eye in the life bars, so I could stop attacking and do some healing, a mezzed player was instructed to in type in chat, held and they were a click on their name in the team menu away followed by a click on clear mind. So I do not see a logical reason to handicap their damage any further. Now I spoke often in examples of blasters, defenders, controllers but the same suggstions applies to their corresponding classes and no slight to them was ever intended. Thank you for reading and thinking of this Dr Rocket