Luminara

Section 31: an ultra-secret organization that conducts extralegal covert surveillance and clandestine missions to maintain the security of the Federation. Trailer: WWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO PARTY, MOTHERFUCKERS! LET'S GET SOME FIREWORKS GOING! RAISE THE ROOF, BITCHES! I can't quite put my finger on it, but something seems... off.

"It came to pass that Amun-Ra sailed through the house of Horus on his way to the Duat, and Osiris spake, 'Behold, Amun-Ra, for the players of City of Heroes and Villains, which they refer to as Cocks, will be Mostly Soloing, as this prophesy foretells, because I have written it after the fact!'. And Amun-Ra spake, ''k.'"

Half an hour of real time is one day in the game. Too short to be viable.

How much damage did you take when you used your support secondary? How much when you were in Bodyguard mode? How much when the enemy ignored you and attacked one of your henches instead? How much when you used inspirations, or base buffs, or amplifiers, or temp powers? How much when you pressed a movement key to put some distance between your character and the scary bad guy with melee attacks? I remember you doing the same things, performing the same warped "tests", trying to use the same flawed arguments, and even playing the same deliberately badly built Marvel and DC rip-offs... sorry, "homages", with your best attacks skipped and damage mitigation powers skipped and more pool powers than primaries/secondaries, as far back as 2006. No you aren't. You're pressing an agenda that never gained any traction on the original forums, with the same shady tactics, and won't gain traction here. You've had 18 years to learn and improve, and all of the improvements Homecoming has made to the game. Move forward.

I can't. I don't team, so I can't apply the appropriate double standard to drive it home.

You can get to level 20 in 20 minutes here, if you ask for a spot on a farm, or a few hours of easy mode solo. It's about as deserving of a reward as not soiling yourself for the same period of time is.

It's been 48 hours, and apparently, we're going to have to finish this without @Diantane. And not even a "Gotta go, sorry", or "Something came up", or even "Later, SUCKERS!". Don't you just hate that.

The Karma IO is set to stack, rather than replace, and has a 10.125s duration/10s activation.

Thank you, Simone.

Well, that's going to rule out... defenders and tankers with more than one attack, all dominators, masterminds, blasters, sentinels, scrappers, controllers, people who use IOs, people who play level 50 characters, people with Incarnated characters, people who play for less than 8-12 hours/day, people with character names over an unspecified limit, people who don't carry extra Awaken inspirations, people who don't zerg, people who do zerg, people who aren't where he/she thinks they should be...

Those ambushes are a lot more entertaining if you're listening to Yakety Sax.

A question has percolated to the top of my brain... @Diantane, were you going to communicate when you intend to stop replying to this thread, or just suddenly disappear (like you've always done in the past)?

@Snarky is the resident neck romancer.

Yes, but it's usually subjective, based on a variety of factors rather than a direct 1:1 comparison and analysis. Primaries and secondaries in Co* are all individual. Even the ones that appear to be clones have differences. Factors like hit rolls, special mechanics (Crits, Containment, Scourge, Fury, Chance to effects, to name a few), even the spawns themselves, what's in a spawn and how the spawn is arranged, can alter how a set performs. And the players themselves aren't identical, either. The same build in different hands will always give different results, due to differences in reaction time, responses, play style... Even something as basic as general perception can sway how a set is viewed (sets with Smashing or Lethal damage are frequently spoken of poorly, because many people "know" that "everything heavily resists those damage types" (despite data collection and analysis proving otherwise)). Personal preferences muddy the waters even more. Some people consider a set "unplayable" if it doesn't have a minimum number of proc-slotting opportunities, or a specific type of power (a Hold, or a PBAoE attack with a minimum X' radius), or a power that can be slotted with the Achilles' Heel proc. There are people who build characters completely reliant on multiple click powers to keep their attack chains fluid, instead of leaning into IO set bonuses, and other people who eschew anything more complicated than setting a single power on auto-fire, and people who bind all of their keys to inspiration combination and consumption binds, and people who use inspirations so infrequently that they forget they're there. Attempts to quantify the performance spread tend to be tainted by personal play style, preferences, build patterns (yes, this is a real phenomenon), expectations and perceptions, despite the best intentions and efforts. There is a bottom of the barrel in Co*, but the barrel is very shallow and where a set ranks is as much determined by the individual player as it is by raw performance. What someone else might rate top tier, you might find to be lackluster, and vice versa. So don't sweat it.

With all of that chrome, you bet your ass they need buffing.

But the banana walks with the purple buffalo in the spring.

NCSoft didn't. NCSoft was the publisher. Publishers don't make games, they finance and market them. NCSoft had nothing to do with balance decisions or how the meta evolved. Referring to Cryptic, the development studio, that being the people who actually worked on the game, not NCSoft, the publisher, they absolutely did strive, constantly, for balance in all of its multitudinous forms. Cryptic was obsessed with balance. Cryptic had such a massive hard-on for balance that they preferred to leave less powerful sets languishing rather than risk over-buffing them. Cryptic brought the hammer down on six-slotting one category of SO in a power with ED, for balance. Cryptic instituted the Global Defense Nerf, for balance. Cryptic spent almost as much time trying to achieve perfect balance between sets and powers, between players and NPCs, as they did creating content. Paragon was just as anal-retentive about balance. The Homecoming developers are big fans of balance, too. You strike me as someone who's never looked at a patch note in his/her entire life. If you had, you'd see the detritus of the endless struggle to keep everything balanced. Or, at least, not made such a ridiculous statement as that. That's the first thing you've said that sounds correct. Paragon had a plan for the future. It was called "more Incarnates". We've read the AMAs, we know what they were planning. We also know they weren't planning to redesign the game around IOs. They wanted the Invention system to give players a way to become stronger than the SO balance. They specifically stated that IO sets were intended to allow players to develop their characters laterally, to become more powerful without requiring an increase to the level cap. That was the primary goal and expressed purpose of the Invention system. Had the economy not been horrendously fucked, the game we're playing now would've been exactly how the game would've evolved then. Fully kitted-out characters, ROFLstomping teams, people soloing *Fs with their favorite characters, everything we're enjoying now. That was always the plan. You don't know who worked on the game, you don't know how hard Cryptic and Paragon, and now Homecoming, struggled to maintain balance, you don't even know what changes were made for the sake of balance, much less why. So don't try to con anyone with the mysterious insider with earth-shattering revelations schtick. You know nothing that the rest of us don't already know, and less than anyone participating in this thread, so save . Neither are you. That's... the whole point... of balance...

Your proposal is to make the game feel more challenging... by forcing players to use the strongest enhancements after level 35... You think buffing critter powers by 1.5% will compensate for mandatory player power increases of nearly 40% per slot (a level 50+5 IO (53%) gives a ~38.5% increase in enhancement value over a +3 SO (38.3%) (and note that this is only the math for single attrib IOs. multi-attrib IOs offer even more enhancement value despite the ostensibly lower value per attrib))? I would very much like to see the calculation you used to derive a result of 1.5% = 38.5% * <number of slots>.

That was enough information for me to figure it out. The Toxic Defense portion isn't respecting Enhancement Diversification values. Base Defense for this power as a defender is 7%. Three +0 SOs enhances the power by 60%, but ED reduces that to 56%. 7 * 1.56 = 10.92 7 * 1.60 = 11.20 It's not ED capping on Toxic. Don't know why, but that's what's going on.

Neither. I'm not... ambitious enough to be a developer (by which i mean i'm fucking lazy). And they've never answered any of my PMs, nor do I use Discord. I read what they post, observe their actions and decisions, and extrapolate the next points on the graph.

It's possible that it will be repurposed in some manner, but not as a rent and maintenance fee. The problems with prestige were twofold: first, it restricted many players from having or fully utilizing bases; and second, it utterly and completely failed as an anti-inflationary measure. Removing prestige solved the problem of widening access to bases, while simultaneously realizing the dream of "player housing" that was often given nods and smiles by Cryptic and Paragon, but never actually addressed; and the problem of inflation was handled in other ways, so prestige wasn't necessary as an anti-inflationary tool (which, again, it failed to achieve anyway). In the modern game, the lack of paid base ownership and upkeep has also been a factor in balance and design. Because bases are free, several changes could be made to permit players to more fully utilize them. Several base portals were moved to more advantageous locations, for example, and the Long Range Teleporter power could incorporate base ownership into its utility, which grants players wider access to bases and greater freedom when moving between zones, or even across hero/villain/Praetorian boundaries. Removing prestige also allowed creative players to flourish, and a thriving base-building group of players has developed as a result of that. Not having to grind for prestige, not having to be afraid that "messing up" would cost them a month of play time they'd have to invest in grinding more prestige to fix something, has opened up doors for players interested in bases, from the first-time tinkerers who simply want a place to sit down and relax between missions, to the artists who can build bases that rival anything seen in film. There are even players who do little else but build bases, some simply for the enjoyment of creation, some as a means of in-game income, some to grow their base-building muscles to new heights by answering the challenge of making what someone else envisions. Reintroducing rent and maintenance at this point would have a disastrous effect on these players, and we would all be worse off for the loss. The owner of the license isn't interested in remuneration or profit on this intellectual property, so the licensing agreement for a free-to-play model was acceptable to them. The HC team isn't interested in turning the game into a profitable enterprise, either. No-one wants money out of this. No-one. Additionally, the player base here isn't large enough for a subscription model to work. There are currently ~50 people investing time in this project in some capacity. If we presume there will be 5000 players guaranteed to pay $15/month, that only comes out to ~$1500/month for each person on the HC team, and that is presuming that they're all given an equal slice of the pie, rather than an hourly wage, a salary or a tiered pay structure. That's not really the kind of pay that would compensate them for giving up their careers. And on the subject of careers, there's nothing to indicate that they want to stop what they're doing and do this for a living. This is a hobby for them, what they do when they're not doing their jobs. Furthermore, the conflation of money with improvement is erroneous. There are far too many bad games out there in the wild, developed by people paid to do it, to believe that hiring a developer or two (which would be all they could afford), or putting the money into their own accounts, would make the game "better". Money isn't an assurance of quality these days, nor does it buy commitment or familiarity with the engine and all of its glorious flaws. Abandoning the subscription model may not guarantee longevity or quality either, but at least it keeps the game in the hands of people who are passionate about it. The game was restored to life by players who couldn't bear to let it die. The agreement with NC was reached by players who couldn't accept that it had to be stuck forever in a hazy legal limbo. The past five years of development has been done by players. Players are the owners and operators of the Homecoming servers. That's where the game belongs. With the players. Not with someone who's just doing a job, who doesn't care because he/she is going to get paid anyway.

If you're defining all missions of a similar type (e.g. Defeat All) as identical in map, enemy group, spawn composition, location and travel time, then yes, there's a discrepancy which favors hero missions. But all missions aren't identical, so that would be an erroneous conclusion. Even within a type, the completion times of different missions can vary wildly. In this mission, for example, you're directed to a warehouse map for a Defeat Boss mission. The map has one room and one spawn. For most characters, the mission can be completed in less than a minute. Contrast that with the infamous Cake Room cave maps (there are a few variations of the map itself), which are also often used for Defeat Boss missions, and can take 15-90 minutes to complete because you not only have to reach the Cake Room, which can take several minutes by itself, you also have to defeat everything in the Cake Room, which has double-digit spawn points. Average completion times for arcs were datamined for use in determining merit rewards. CoV arcs have lower merit rewards because they can be completed more quickly. The maps are smaller, less convoluted, spawn points less spread out, and the doors are more frequently in the same zone as the contact. In The Unity Plague, those eight contacts to whom you're directed are in eight different zones. CoV doesn't do that. You might be sent to a different zone, or even to that door in Nerva, but you're not sent on a global tour like you would be in hero arcs.

Merits are rewarded according to average measured completion times. Villain story arcs, which were designed without the over-reliance on filler missions typical of hero story arcs, are completed more quickly, on average, resulting in lower rewards. In other words, you can run one stupidly long hero arc or run three to five villain arcs in the same period of time, and the cumulative rewards should be roughly comparable.