Grouchybeast

It depends on the AH price, which depends on supply and demand. I don't think I could even start to make the vaguest guess as to how many players would want how many costumes on how many characters. The good news is that the drop rates can always be adjusted later.

It depends what you mean by 'fully kitted'. It was easily possible to fully IO out a character with sets that would make the character extremely shiny indeed. It was just extremely expensive to make those last few tweaks like PVP IOs and purple sets. We've been spoiled on Homecoming by the cheapness of the market, and it's led to an expectation that every character 'should' have purples, Winter sets, +5 boosts, etc. The IO system doesn't need to be dialled up to 11 on every character for that character to have a good build, in the same way that soloing +4x8 isn't really a minimum necessary performance measure.

It has been scrapped, but I very much doubt that it was because the devs were terrified into it by a few forum posts. It seems rather more likely that they found a way to achieve their goal (which seems to have been to stop people mass-farming Emp merits in AE) without causing collateral damage to the rewards of non-farm AE stories.

That seems highly unlikely. The feedback thread about the shutting down of the AE patrol XP exploit went on for 79 mind-boggling pages and still didn't change their minds.

That would be kind of cool though. I'd definitely respond to a broadcast call for help because a wildly over-levelled Hellion was causing chaos in a lowbie zone. They'd be like DIY Giant Monsters. Badges. There should definitely be lots of badges for this.

That is a really weird analogy. And in answer to the question, I absolutely wouldn't care because I don't get my sense of self-esteem from the scripted opinions of video-game characters. Anyway, I think it's probably more helpful to stick to the actual question, which is, is it acceptable to have sexist creep dialogue in-game that makes some of the players feel uncomfortable? I find the dialogue pretty funny, and for me personally it would be a shame to lose it, but I do like the idea of adding an early option to shut him down, so that he directs his ass-kissing smarminess in a different direction.

Kismet is very helpful for end issues, because every extra attack that lands because of it is an attack that you don't need to make again. Saving end is one of the reasons I slot the Kismet ASAP.

At the very least, it would be nice to have a big upfront warning that the TF needs a Hold power. Missions with specific power requirements are extremely rare in CoX, so there's no reason for players to expect one here. Despite what some people have suggested on the forums, there are new players joining the game, and there are probably people who played on live but never ran a LGTF. On HC, where there are no party size locks on TF, it's much easier to be stranded mid-TF without the required hold than on live. It was even worse before the TF was put back to level 45-50, but there's still a decent chance that a small team might not have a hold.

This always seems so alien to me, because IOs were added in 2007, just three years into the game's life. By the time I started playing in 2008, they'd existed for a year and I basically never used TO/DO/SO in all the time I've played. I did the University tutorial on my first character and thought, well, yeah, this makes sense, why would I ever use something that expires? and that was it. So the basic pre-50 game experience doesn't really feel like it's changed that much to me. On the other hand, I can get very 'hey, you kids, get off my lawn!' about the Incarnate system, so there we are!

On HC, the Incarnate system has had a LOT of the pain taken out of it. It really does just kind of happen in the background while you play whatever content you like. The thing about Incarnates is that I've always found the actual game content to be good fun to play. The iTrials and TFs are not too long and have some fun mechanics. The Dark Astoria solo Incarnate content, grudgingly as it was added by the devs, has an interesting and involving story, and is also quite inventive with the mechanics. The problem on live was that it was spoiled by being tied into an attempt to bolt a grindy MMO end game onto a game that had absolutely no tradition of that, and where the majority of the playerbase didn't particularly want it. But, honestly, the content is good! Try it! (I have a lot of issues with Incarnate powers, but that's another story. For me, they manage to be both overpowered and boring at the same time.)

I finally wrestled the search system into submission and found the couple of threads I remembered from spring last year. I can't speak to the alleged drop inequality (I've never noticed that) but there are screenshots to demonstrate the XP bug. Very bad bug. Leader of group gets less exp and item drops. (uploaded pics for proof) Varying XP?

Good luck with your project, but after previous unfortunate experiences I don't take part in online research unless the researchers are willing to, at a minimum, post their real name and institutional affiliations.

One really key part is that on the live servers, the Incarnate system was a nonsensical labyrinth of different types of XP and currencies, that meant you needed to grind particular incarnate trials in a particular order to make your way through it. On HC is this massively simplified: playing any content will gain incarnate XP that will unlock your incarnate powers in time, and levelling up through veteran levels will give you components that you need to craft enhancements to use those powers. You can still choose to speed the process up by playing incarnate-level content that will give you drops to move you through the process a bit faster, and the guides people have linked above will tell you how. Otherwise you can just keep playing the game, and everything will automagically unlock without you needed to pay any attention to it at all. So rest assured that you won't be screwing anything up by not focusing on the incarnate system right away (or ever). The other key part is that when you finally track down the the UI for crafting incarnate enhancements, there is a ridiculously non-obvious scroll bar on the right that lets you scroll down to see all the alternate recipes to craft each enhancement. Finding that scroll bar is now probably the single hardest part of the incarnate process.

This is a bug that I noticed while duoing story arcs last year. The team leader always gets a different amount of XP in the end-of-mission bonus to the non-leader, even if every other factor is the same (both have the mission arc and the missions complete just fine for both players, both have the same amount of patrol XP, day jobs, etc). You can see the difference very clearly in the game logs. All other XP drops were normal. The way we got round it was simply by switching who led the missions when the difference got big enough to be annoying, until the player who was behind caught up, That was fine for duoing but would be much more tedious on larger teams. I could've sworn that I saw this reported in the Bugs forum, but now I can't find it.

It's a question of overkill. If the team as a whole can land 200% of the damage needed to kill a spawn, then splitting the team into two and having each sub-team engage different spawns would halve the mission clear time (not really, because of the time to travel between spawns, but you get the point). And in a range-heavy team, it can be difficult for a melee character to reach the next mob before the hail of AOEs has wiped it out. If a melee character who can safely engage at +4x8 only rarely gets to land an attack (and when they do, their attack doesn't materially speed up the spawn defeat due to AOE damage overkill), then they effectively might as well just doorsit the mission for all the difference they're making to the mission completion. It doesn't hurt the team if instead they engage a different spawn, and it probably speeds up the mission. Even if it takes the solo melee four times as long to clear a spawn as it would take the team, then it means the group as a whole is defeating 125% of the mobs in the same time. They're still contributing to the team, because they're contributing to the mission speed and success overall, even if they're doing it in a slightly different location.

I think at a minimum it's reasonable to expect people to search the build forums and look at the builds and discussions that already exist. Asking for a build when perfectly viable builds have already been posted does smack of laziness. (Although of course it's fine to say 'I looked at X and Y builds, but they didn't fit my needs for reasons A, B and C.')

Why go with generics, when six-slotting Kinetic Crash hits the ED cap for knockback and gives you a 7.5% recharge bonus on top?

+1 This would be my suggestion, too. They start out with fun powers, and pretty much every power you get on the way to 50 just adds more fun. There's not really any flat spots. (But you should always shout "Pull!" when you Ki Push a mob and shoot them mid air. I swear it actually adds more damage.)

People explained all this a year ago, but this is a very misguided approach to getting maximum utility from Defenders. Defenders have much higher values on the secondary effects from their attacks, which directly adds to their utility as a support toon. For example, when a Defender uses Shriek from the Sonic Attack set, they apply a 20% Damage Resistance debuff to the enemy. That's a 20% damage buff not just to your attacks but to every single attack the party lands in the next 5 seconds. And during that 5 seconds you could fire off Scream, which, guess what, applies a 20% resistance debuff for 7 seconds. Congratulations, you have just done your job as a Defender and buffed the party's damage! The same applies to all the other Defender attack secondary effects, like -Def, -To Hit, -Rech, Slow etc. If you don't use your attacks as a Defender, you are cheating the rest of the party out of a good chunk of your support utility. (To be fair, people will still invite you to join groups, because CoX is not a difficult game, and a lot of the people who play it are very nice and will either assume you're playing some weird concept build, or just that your build is not very good and kind of inoffensively gimped. At the most someone might suggest slotting some attacks, or offer you some inf on the assumption that you're a newbie.)

Probably just you. Wayback Machine capture from the 24/9/20 has the same username, so unless it was changed in the intervening couple of weeks, that's the original name. ETA: I've just realised that usernames stay the same in quoted posts, even if they're later changed, so no, the OP's username hasn't changed.

The Marchand and Mr G arcs are some of the worst, though, because they're not only as confusing as hell if you haven't played the incarnate contact, but they also completely spoiler it for new players. I think they're definitely better saved for an alt.

Could they have been talking about a PVP or a purple set? I think the bonuses on those are always available, no matter how low the exemplar.

To get the most out of blasters, it's best to take a multi-layered approach to mez protection. - Your T1 and T2 attacks, which can be used while mezzed. Slot them up and use them. - Inspirations: purples to buff your defence so you don't get mezzed in the first place, and breakfrees to, uh, break free when you do. Keep some in your tray. Right-click and combine when you see a few boring oranges or yellows that you don't need. (As you level up, turn off smaller insps to keep your tray tidy.) - Powerset selection. Some Blaster powersets come with varying levels of mez protections, so if you're really keen to avoid mezzing, choose your powersets accordingly. - Your own mezzes. You have access to a range of holds, etc from your primary, secondary and epic powers. Use them selectively and proactively on enemies that mez. - IO sets. These can give you appreciable levels of defence to avoid mezzing, and status protection/resistance as well. In combination mez shouldn't be a major problem, even when soloing. (In teams, some kind support toon probably threw a status protection effect and a ton of defence on you already.) It's a bit more complicated than toggling on your mez protection in a melee AT, but in compensation you get all those lovely ranged AOEs.

I haven't had much CoX playtime for a while, but I never really got into converter roulette, and after I came back I just stuck to old-fashioned crafting from recipes and selling the IOs to the impatient. That's very easy, because once you spot a nice seller all you have to do is place stacks of bids before you log off, then when you log in pick everything up, craft and list.

If I had to pick just one storyline blueside, I think it would be the Faultline arcs. It was one of the earlier 'new' arc revamps, but the writing is still pretty decent, and it has a lot of nostalgia for me because I ran them fairly early in my CoX playing life, and loved them. The RWZ also has a good series of arcs following the same interesting storyline, with a satisfying finale. But there are actually a lot of really fun arcs blueside, which fortunately I don't even have to bother typing out because @Gulbasaur wrote a great guide to levelling via blueside story arcs. Have at it! The only really good contact I think it missing from the guide is Provost Marchand in Brickstown, who is level 30-50 and provides something fresh in the slower later levelling. However, his arc is rather oddly positioned in the overall timeline, because chronologically it comes at the end of the series of Incarnate Trials. I imagine it would be very confusing if you'd never played through the Incarnate content. Good arcs, though!