BlackSpectre

Actually, 2 years from now I plan to be a dev. Well, “dev-light” anyway. I’ll be a brand new programmer learning his first programming language (although I know a couple scripting languages now that I hope will make it easier to learn). I figure I’ll start with C to mess with COH and then learn Swift to make iPhone apps. That’s the plan anyway. Anyway, what do I want to do? Something very boring to most of you… Slash commands. Many slash commands currently have some pretty big bugs in them and I’d like to fix them so that they work the way they’re supposed to or are more useful. I’d also like to make several short aliases for very long slash command names. There are also several brand new slash commands I’d like to make. Slash commands are a fairly low priority for our devs. I totally don’t blame them. They have their hands full working on much more impactful stuff, but someone should tackle them and I plan to be that person (assuming a current dev doesn't beat me to it). Here’s a list of new slash commands I’d like to make: stop_monitor_attribute_all - A missing command that would close the entire monitor attribute window. auto_reply_invite - Invite the player who last sent you a private tell to your team auto_reply_invite_league - Invite the player who last sent you a private tell to your league team_select_next - A missing command that would select the next teammate on your team select _name - A missing command that selects another player on your team by local or global name (useful for regular friends who switch characters frequently) macroslot_image - combines functionality of both so we can switch out icons in a specific macro at will (for rotating text macros) traystickyalt - just a missing command of the sticky set. Not high priority. Volume_fx Volume_music Volume_vo Volume_all window_opacity unignore_all - clears the entire ignore list window_tab - a way to select individual tabs in all the various windows. Would probably do it by number order… 1= first tab from the left, 2= second tab, etc. There’s a good chance it would only work for window names that are exposed to players and not every window. Macro_save - a way to save your existing macros to a default file macro_save_file - a way to save your existing macros to a specified file Macro_load - a way to load your existing macros from a default file Macro_Load_file - a way to load your existing macros from a specified file (this would just be an alias of /bind_load_file) Pie-In-The_sky (if I was an animator/artist): I would make new travel powers... tunneling, shape-shifter run, grappling/web swinging/climbing, ice slide, Gliding, cars, motorcycles. Then, I'd see if I could make a couple current travel powers interact with the 3-D environment (buildings, mountains, walls, etc.). Super Speed would gain the ability to run up and down walls and on top of water, Phase Shift would gain the ability to move through obstacles, phase through floors, etc. No idea of this is actually possible.

I take pics of the Enhancement screen before I RESPEC too. I use my phone, though. More often than not, most of my enhancement slotting remains the same for more than half of my powers. Ideally, a redesign of the RESPEC process would make taking pics beforehand unnecessary, but that would require completely scrapping the current RESPEC process and building something new. One smaller improvement would be to allow enhancements to be moved around from slot to slot and power to power without requiring the enhancement to be placed back into the enhancement tray/bin first. Also, coding in some way to deal with enhancements that don't fit into the enhancement trays would be awesome. There is more than one way to do this, including creating a temporary overflow enhancement tray(s), increasing the number of enhancement trays/tabs, or emailing the extra enhancements to the player's global name, etc. I've read that doing RESPECs inside your SG base or inside an instanced mission can make the RESPEC fail. Friends have had this issue occur (and not just inside SG bases), but like you I've never had a problem doing a RESPEC in my SG base.

Ha! No one actually gave you the commands! Sorry. LOL For close to the same reason, I use this bind: /bind SHIFT+Q "toggle quit" This bind brings up the Quit window with the 3 options to 1) Exit to Login Screen, 2) Exit to Character Select, and 3) Exit to Desktop. After I bound this I saved it in my keybinds.txt file (Options --> Keymapping tab--> Save as Default keybinds button.). You can use a text editor app like Notepad to edit your keybinds.txt file and save it if you like. Typically located in C:\Games\Homecoming\Settings\Live\ I found that merely quitting to character select was not good enough for all of my needs. Also popping up the Quit window saves a ton of time! There's no way to make the actual quitting process any faster. After you've pressed the Exit to Character Select button or issued the quit command, how long it actually takes to get to that Character Select screen is somewhat random (depending on the server load at that particular time of the day). If all you really want to do is Exit to the Character Select Screen, use this bind: /bind SHIFT+Q "quittocharacterselect" Like any bind, you can put it on any key or mouse button. To make it a macro button that you click on, you'd type: /Macro Alt "quittocharacterselect" See https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Quittocharacterselect_(Slash_Command)

So it's our fault. We decided we wanted to beat the game, and focused our attention on designing defensive and offensive character builds. We wanted to beat the game, and we sure did! LOL I remember struggling quite a bit back on Live, and even the first year I joined Homecoming. But those were with characters that had hardly any SOs, let alone IOs or Set IOs. If you monitor the forum, you'll notice that every now and then a new player complains about how hard the game is and how they die too much, or how expensive enhancements are to buy and that the game is unaffordable. For them, this game IS a challenge... and it's for them whom this game is balanced for. To increase the base difficulty level would essentially kill the game for every new player, especially casual new players. But your point is well taken. I feel the same way. I once argued about raising the aggro limit for exactly the same reason. But the reality is that tanks are nigh but invulnerable no matter how many mobs attack them. They are just as untouchable if 2 mobs attack them vs 200 mobs. I argued for some mechanic to be put into place that would make it more and more difficult the greater the number of mobs. Bring some risk back into the game. The devs responded with a novel way to do that, and applied it to some fire powersets in AE that gave a small chance for a small defense debuff with each attack, and also allowed mobs over the aggro limit to attack from range. This DID make attacking a huge number of mobs in fire farms more difficult, but it's easily countered simply by keeping a watchful eye on your defense and jumping around to give the defense debuff a few seconds to wear off, then back to attacking the horde. Personally, I don't think this method should be applied to the game at large. I would prefer a much more gradual or linear decline in survivability occur. The defense debuff ends up having not much affect on toons until SUDDENLY the toons are defenseless! It's like BAM! The more defense debuffs that hit, the more often defense debuffs begin to hit. It's a steep decline curve. I'd prefer something like a small damage boost for mobs depending on how many mobs are attacking a character at the same time, and make it a fairly straight, slightly sloping line until it's just too much for heroes to handle. Additive rather than multiplicative. But this would only allow players to herd a ton of mobs to create more danger for themselves. The idea is that game balance for a mob of 8 to 16 would not be more difficult than it is now, but after 16 the danger increases gradually with each additional mob until you're like "Holy crap! I pulled to many!!!!" I always loved herding a ton of mobs back on Live because I enjoyed the challenge and the big explosions and special effects. I knew that if the team wasn't prepared for a horde attacking that people would die. It made it fun for me... but I do admit I might be an outlier for wanting to create that kind of situation on demand. That said, I think you're right. We need to go up against more AVs and elite bosses in general... groups of them! But maybe make it tied to difficulty level. Fighting at +3 doesn't just make hitting the mobs harder, but it spawns more EBs and AVs. 🙂

You can do this just with pop menus that work for all characters https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Popmenu_(Slash_Command), and you can also use pop menus inside of custom windows. You can also create a text file with the desired macros, and simply use the /bind_Load_File command to load it into the desired character. Macro buttons will automatically be created and placed in your power trays. See the Storing and Transferring Macros section https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Macro_(Slash_Command)

I'd guess the closest thing would be the Joystick keybind profile, but I'm not sure if COH is compatible with that new device. However, if the Rog Xbox Ally is more or less the same as an Xbox controller, it should work. Here's the keybind profile... https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Joystick_Keybind_Profile If you can click around in Options, just go to the Keymapping tab, and then the Keybind profile drop down and select the Joystick one. I know some players have posted their binds for at least the Playstation and Xbox controllers on this Forum. Try doing a search. Here's a couple I found...

@Manga, Would it be possible for the Mids Reborn Installer script to also place an alias to the Mids Reborn script into the Applications folder with a Mids Reborn icon?

I was playing around with it a little and the problem is wacky! @Jerry, while we're waiting for a fix you can still use enough of Mids to make it worthwhile. Although we can't click on the menu items in the User Interface after Mids has started, we can use the keyboard shortcuts built into Mids which will allow us to load in builds, save, etc. For example, to Open a Mids file, press and hold down the Control key and then press the letter "O". Not all of Mids' features have keyboard shortcuts, but enough do to make some of the app's basic features usable at least.

Ah, man! Now I need to look into that again! LOL What I and my SG started doing was getting IOs at lvl 25 or 30, and then when we hit level 50, we RESPEC (to swap those common IOs out for the good ones). We then put the lvl 30 IOs in the SG's storage bins to recycle and use again for our next alts. So now slotting IOs doesn't cost anything! Ended up saving the whole SG millions and millions of inf! I also took one alt and got him the various Memorization badges to craft IOs at a discount in case my SG needed any. https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Memorization_Badges Oh man, I can't farm the Dreck or Carnival maps anymore! It's just too monotonous for me now. If I farm at all, I now need something quick... like a tunnel map or asteroid map. LOL

Really, Ghost? How the heck are you doing that??? Let me look back in my old records, cuz I don't really farm anymore.... Using my level 50 Spines/Fire brute solo, looks like the last time I recorded my inf earnings I was able to earn 500,000 inf per minute. That's 15 million inf every 30 minutes, or 30 mil inf/hr. Does that match what you've been doing?

Oh, right. Increasing damage. That is another thing you can improve. I didn't mention it because you didn't mention that you were not killing fast enough. But damage is very difficult to come by in this game. It's also very important. You can increase the damage output using enhancements, set bonuses, and maybe procs. Once you start on your Incarnate powers post-50, you can take Alpha Musculature Core and Interface Degenerative Core powers for a decent damage boost. Remember what I said... there are 3 basic combat build strategies: high defense/resistance, high def/res debuff, or high damage. Bopper's Survivability Tool might be something you'd like to play around with...

Is it possible to combine the boombox emote with a specific dance emote? I think the boombox used to do a random dance or a dance tied to each random song but now it's always just a shuffle? I recently created a toon where thematically it would be cool to consistently use certain dances but I can now either play the boombox or do a specific dance without the boombox but not both. Any ideas? Something like this should work I think but it doesn't: /bind x "Em Dance4$$Em Boombox"

No, the emotes cancel each other out so you can't make a bind and string them together. It would be nice if you could start the boombox, and then select a dance. But the way it is now, as soon as you select a dance the music goes away.

Nope. Playing the market is the only way to get BILLIONS of inf. I took 15 min of my day and played the market every day for 3 months to get 7 billion. But it usually takes inf to make inf. Before that I farmed. Farming won't earn you billions, but you can earn hundreds of millions. Essentially do this... delete or remove your Double XP buff. Using it prevents you from getting inf. Join a team of 8 doing level 54 missions. Ask if it would be OK to sit at the door for the entire mission so you can level up. You can do this in Architect Entertainment (AE) or in Perigine Island (PI) on a radio mission team. You'll rake in the inf like crazy!

Agreed. It takes very little effort to avoid reading a thread. It's not like anyone is forced to read one (except for our GMs). 😉 Would the ability to hide a thread hurt? Not at all. Is it necessary? Not at all. If thread hiding were a thing, would I complain? Nope. Would I even use it? Nope. If it's not a thing, would I complain? Nope. LOL It's a small, unnecessary little feature that's nice, I suppose.

Your resistances are super low. Maybe that's why I've always had problems soft capping all 3 positional defenses? I max out resistance in smashing/lethal for most characters, and sometimes energy resistance as well. Oh right. Super reflexes has a bunch of +def powers. I think I played that powerset once and didn't like it much. Can't remember why. Your character is very strong in defense, but fairly weak in resistance with only 34.1% S/L resistance. It's a viable way to play, but just know that taking damage will likely be all or nothing. Mobs ALWAYS have a minimum 5% chance to hit you, no matter how high your defense is. That means that you have a 95% chance of avoiding attacks, but there will be times when you will be hit with nearly the full amount of damage. Bam! And remember, a 5% chance is a random roll... which means there is a possibility of being hit multiple times in a row just because the mob was lucky. As such, the more mobs that attack you in a battle, increases the chances that you'll be hit. Also Archvillains have a much greater chance to hit than regular mobs. You could compensate a little by increasing your Hit Points, hoping you'll have enough to not be one-shotted. For your toon, high hit points is more important than high regeneration or healing. 3 to 4 slot Master Brawler and get that absorb up. Absorb is almost the same thing as hit points, basically. Consider Unbreakable Guard +HP global proc. If you have a hold power, Entomb would be good too. Look over this page for any procs you can use https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Set_Enhancements_with_Special_Effects Also this page for set bonuses https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Set_Bonus_Comparison_Tables If you find you're running out of endurance, I'd recommend you 3-slot Stamina using the Performance shifter proc, and performance shifter END MOD, and 1 end mod IO. You'll want to boost the 2 end mods to +5 using enhancement boosters. Your slotting for Health looks good. It might be good enough as is, but I NEVER want to run out of end in the middle of combat if I can avoid it. The same goes for your Enduring power. 3-Slot it with Performance Shifter if needed. Actually, 3-slot Enduring first. Looks like it has a higher % than Stamina. So... things you might improve on: S/L Resistance Hit Points Absorb Recovery You'll need to actually play your character and test them out so see if you can live with how they are built now, or what you'd like to improve. You get a lot of free RESPECS as you level, and they're also fairly cheap to buy in the Auction House.

Kind of. To-hit and Accuracy are 2 different stats. A debuff will hit one or the other, but yes, having more accuracy will help. If I remember correctly, To-hit has a bigger impact than Accuracy. They both are part of the same game mechanic, however. Wow, I totally missed it! LOL Thanks.

Correct. The debuffs stack with themselves. Just remember that after the 6 second duration, the debuff amount from the first attack goes away, then the second attack, and third, and so on. You can always reapply them by hitting the mobs again. There is a limit, though, that is generally speaking (debuff duration / recharge time * debuff amount). So an attack that has a 2 second recharge time can hit 3 times over the 6 second duration (6/2*5.25=15.25). So the maximum debuff would be 15.25%. These are kind of flimsy numbers, but it gets the idea across. And yes, the debuff from your Dark Blast will stack with the debuff from your Dark Star. You want at least 90% accuracy. It would be amazing if you can get those high numbers for all 3 positional defenses. I've always had to focus on just one to get it to the soft cap. If you're using Mids character builder, maybe you could share your build later? Correct. Positional defense is useful more often vs typed defense. Since I've never figured out how to soft cap all 3 positional defenses for a single character, I've always had to choose just one. In that situation, sometimes it makes more sense to build for a typed defense. It all depends on your build, and your character's theme or concept. For example, if I were playing a hero who was cold based, I might choose to have extremely high defense against cold attacks to simulate his powers simply controlling the cold around him. Of course, I'd also build in high resistance to cold damage as well. This means my character would probably be fairly weak to most other kinds of damage and attacks... which actually might be part of his concept. I might intentionally make his defense and resistance against fire attacks very weak, for example. The nice thing about this game is that the vast majority of the content is easy enough to allow making pretty much anything you want, with any numbers in your build. You don't have to have any defense numbers at soft cap to be successful and win the day, for example. And if you play in a large team, it's even easier. Don't forget to have fun with your character and your character's concept. It's one of the things that makes this game so fun to play. A character that needs to rely on others in order to survive can end up making you some great friends. People you just love to play with. I still have 3 friends that I met through this game way back in 2005. We didn't know what we were doing in the early days, so we had to have each other's backs just to survive. That created some pretty strong relationships that led o real life friendships. I still game with those 3 guys today! There's only a few things where a min/maxed character build is needed... and it's mostly for doing task forces on the highest difficulty setting, which is completely optional. Otherwise, even post level 50 Incarnate content is pretty easy if you play in a team or league. I won't lie and say a min/maxed build won't make things easier or allow your character to do difficult things, but there are a lot of ways to have fun with this game.

No. Not really. Sounds like you've been getting good advice. Whether or not to-hit debuffs help you depends largely on your play style. So really, the only advice I have is try it out and see. You can always RESPEC. That said, personally, I've found that single target to-hit debuffs are useful against single targets... but when facing off against groups of mobs, the only thing that matters is AoE attacks because you won't be able to hit all the mobs with single target attacks. Further, the to-hit debuffs aren't that effective unless you STACK the debuffs, which means hitting the same target multiple times. Let's say the typical to-hit debuff from an attack is -5%... to really make it worthwhile, you'd need to hit that target quickly enough to stay up to about 30%. debuff. That means you need to hit that target 6 times, in the meantime, they're hitting you. Then the question is whether or not you'll be able to hit the target 6 times in the span of the battle. That depends on your power's recharge. Also, you'd need hight to-hit and accuracy to ensure that you actually hit your opponents. So you'd need to raise those stats pretty high. On the other hand, defense is always on and doesn't require you to hit anything. So overall, it's the more reliable mechanic and easiest to manage. Sentinels are designed to be more balanced than a blaster or scrapper (who do high damage). In this game, the 3 most applicable strategies in combat are: 1) have high defense and resistance so that you can survive your opponents' attacks, or 2) have high damage and accuracy so you can kill your opponents before the can even get off an attack, or 3) debuff your opponent's to-hit and accuracy, or debuff their resistance and defense. All are effective for survival, but the high damage method is somewhat situational and works best when on a team with other players. The most powerful teams that just shred through opponents are those with super high damage and super high debuffs. There's an old saying in this game "Debuffs are king!" And it's not wrong, especially when paired with high damage. To answer any more questions you have, I recommend you look through the Wiki. Maybe start with this page... https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Attack_Mechanics Hope this helped. P.S. I forgot to mention defense or damage TYPES. Usually a player focuses on one type of defense. These days, the most useful defense types to build for are the positional defense types: Melee defense, Ranged defense, or AOE defense. Which you choose depends on your character's fighting style. Do you fight up close and personal? Then go for melee defense (which protects against melee attacks). If you mostly shoot from range, then get ranged defense (which protects against ranged attacks). AOE defense is the least useful of the 3, but still useful. If you'd rather have high defense against a specific damage type rather than positional attacks, the most common damage type you'll be hit by is smashing/lethal so that would probably be the most useful to build for. After that is Energy defense. Just remember that if you max out one type of defense, you'll be weak against the other damage types. So choose wisely....

I was going to say it doesn't sound right. More than likely it was another app that's installed that's conflicting with the game. At least, that's what I was going to say... but now I think it was just gremlins!

Cool. Thanks @Hedgefund2. Tell me if you think this is right... Since DPS is damage per second, using your table damage numbers would look like this: recharge cooldown (secs) Time span (secs) damage per hit Number of hits possible Total damage DPS (over 60 secs) % increase in damage 0 30 60 10 2 20 0.33 0.7 17.65 60 10 3 (3.4) 30 0.5 50% Does all this look more or less correct? It doesn't take into consideration activation time or animation time, so the increase in actual DPS might be a tiny bit smaller depending. In the case above, I'm dropping off 0.4 from the number of hits possible. That amounts to 7.06 secs, which is more than enough to account for activation time and animation time. So, considering only Hasten without any other enhancements or buffs, there would be a 50% increase in DPS. Just using the raw numbers without considering the time span (or activation and animation times), the theoretical DPS would be 10/30=0.333 vs. 10/17.65 =0.567. Which is a 70% increase in damage per second. The time span along with the cooldown time can make a big difference in the calculations. For example, if you were only able to get in 1 hit, even after Hasten was applied, your DPS would not change at all... but you'd never have less DPS. Anyway, the DPS numbers aside, all I was trying to say is that using Hasten will probably cause you to use up more endurance since you'll typically be able to use the power more often with Hasten than without it. So you should make sure your build can handle it. @Forager, using an attack chain would have exactly the same effect. Since Hasten affects every power in the chain, you'd typically be able to use the entire chain more often... depending on the time span. And yes, since the chain is taking less time, you might be able to add in other attacks if you chose. For me, I typically don't add in other powers to my attack chain on most toons. I just attack faster.

Oh yeah, good point. I was just being fast and loose with my figures. Well, wouldn't it speed up the entire attack chain? I figure no matter what you'll be able to dish out more damage, as long as you can keep up with the faster recharge?

I wish it did. For that matter, I wish it would work with global names too. I figure all that would need to be done is to copy the needed code straight from the /autoreply command.

Just to add onto what @Michiyo said, for its behavior to be more like the /autoreply command that is bound to the Backspace key by default, your bind would need to look like this: /bind backspace "beginchat /tl, " This will start a chat message with the /tell_last command already in the chat box so that all you'd need to do is type in your message and press enter.

Really? Doesn’t Hasten speed up recharge by 70%? Which means you can activate that power more often in the same span of time? You seem pretty sure, care to explain it a bit?