Grouchybeast

To expand a bit on the enhancements... Attuned enhancements will level with you, up to the level cap of the set. So if you've slotted, say, Kinetic Combat, which runs from level 20-35, the basic attribute bonuses of those enhancements will never scale up above level 35 values. You might want to replace these sets with sets that cap at 50, or you might decide you want to keep them because you particularly want the set bonuses. If you slotted a set that caps at 50 (say Crushing Impact), then those sets will now be functioning as a level 50 set. You might still want to replace them, though. You might want to slot a more expensive set with better bonuses. Or you might decide that you don't ever plan to play this character exempted to lower levels, so you no longer care about level scaling. Then you might want to Boost some of the enhancements instead. You can Boost to 50+1, 5-+2 etc up to 50+5, which makes them function as higher level but means that you'll now lose the Set bonuses if you exempt below level 47. Boosting is mutually exclusive with Attuning, and Attuned enhancements can't be boosted so you'd need to replace them. I.e. You can either have higher values, or you can have enhancements that scale with your level. That's purely a personal playstyle choice -- I exemp a lot, so I rarely boost enhancements. You also need to keep an eye on Enhancement Diversification limiting the actual benefit you're getting from Boosting. There are also Very Rare (often called Purple) sets that can only be slotted once you reach 50. These are all Uniques (so you could only slot one set of Hecatomb per character) and have bigger set bonuses than Rare sets. And at 50 you can also use an Enhancement Catalyst to turn Winter sets or Archetype sets into their Superior versions. (You can also buy the Superior versions on the AH, that have already been catalysed by someone else. Check the price difference between Superior and Basic + Catalyst. to see if you can get a bargain one way or the other.) You can respec your character, which a lot of people choose to do at 50, and reassign all your powers and slots. During that process you can save any enhancements you don't want to reslot in the enhancement tray and keep them for another character, or sell them. So the levelling enhancements weren't wasted.

Funnily enough, 'the way you write effects the affect you wish to convey' would also be a valid sentence.

That's really the best part about the CoX market, really. You can make your MIDS build and lowball the expensive stuff on the market. Keep a vague eye on what is filling to make sure you didn't bid too low, and as you level you can slot up the goodies you bought for cheap. As you don't slot the purples until the very end you have the longest time to bid for them. If you wait until the character hits 50 and then fill all the slots at Buy It Nao prices then yes, it will cost you extra inf for the convenience.

I never use Discord unless I'm forced to because some game company has decided that despite having a forum, a website, and a bunch of other social media channels, they're going to put important information out solely via an ugly IRC knock-off with a terrible interface.

"Okay, where are you really from, because it's definitely not Newcastle."

Well, vegetable is a culinary term that just means 'any edible part of a plant', so yes, all of those things can also be vegetables. It doesn't have a specific meaning in biology.

Just based on the way it looks, I think that the reason it brings up so many weird heads is that it's unweighted, and rolled at each level. So the random generator first rolls between the 18 top level head options. If that's true, then the basic chances of getting the different head types would be: 1/18 - any of the standard, unmasked heads 1/18 - a fully masked head 2/18 - a hat or hood 4/18 - some kind of non-Arachnos helmet 2/18 - tank/floating head 7/18 - animal or monster 1/18 - one of the Arachnos faction helmets (or a pumpkin) It could probably do with some tweaking to make it more representative of the full range of possibilities. What I've always thought would be really nice would be to be able to 'lock' a particular part and keep random rolling the rest of the costume.

It would be nice to have a half-xp option at the S.T.A.R.T. vendor, really. The early levels go by so fast these days.

For someone who just doesn't like patrol XP as a concept,, adding more Patrol XP is really the exact opposite of a buff.

I just mentioned you in the patch notes thread, because I thought of you when I saw the patch notes but couldn't remember your name. FWIW, a way to turn off patrol XP seems like a reasonable request and I hope a dev decides to implement it some time.

The only thing I could think of whenever I saw that change in the patch notes was the person who absolutely hates Patrol XP and every time they play they kill their character repeatedly until the Patrol XP is wiped out. I imagine the next time they log in they're going to feel like the devs are targeting them personally.

There's also a long-standing display bug that straight-up shows you prices from a completely different IO. Hopefully that will eventually get fixed whenever the HC devs burn the AH code to the ground and start again. The Market Forum has collected a list of some of the affected items in this thread and this one,. It's probably not complete because IIRC it wasn't possible to find all the pairs sharing prices.

I guess it's difficult for them to put a deadline on beta testing, since it depends on how many changes are deemed necessary. Looking at the past releases, this one was about average, although there have been a couple that were shorter. Yes, the change is in the patch notes, in the Powers and Gameplay Adjustments section, under Miscellaneous.

For a bit of variety, the Twilight's Son Task Force was designed to be run solo, is pretty easy once you get the hang of the maps, and gives 7 merits.

The update has been on the beta server since January the 19th. That's a month, which doesn't seen unreasonable. The Exploration Badge update is in the patch notes: Exploration badges now grant Patrol XP instead of regular XP. The amount of Patrol XP gained is dramatically higher than the previous amount of regular XP previously gained. The amount scales with level, starting with 1.5 bars at level 1, down to 0.25 bars at level 50.

Brawl! Click Brawl!

I'd write more bios if the interface wasn't so frustratingly bad. I'm hopeful that it will be on the list to look at, now, though, since the new player experience is being focussed on and the bio composition window is something new players encounter early.

It's also odd that the Praetoria button is larger than the Primal button. I know it's a forced perspective thing (and possibly a left-over from Going Rogue wanting to promote the new option), but it emphasises the Praetoria button.

Previously I might've agreed, but Homecoming development gets shaped a lot by what the individual volunteer devs want to tackle. There will certainly be new folks with new interests now that they're opening up recruitment after the license agreement.

You can block people on the forums, it's just weirdly hard to find. It you hover your cursor over the poster's name or icon on a post (but not in their profile, for some reason), you'll get a pop-up with an 'Ignore' option.

Procs were in the process of being reworked by the live devs literally as the game was closed. What we have now is the result of the I25 beta that was on the test servers when the shutdown was announced and development stopped dead. I'm pretty sure that if the game hadn't been closed, we'd have seen some further work done on them either in I25 or later. I don't use them, except incidentally as part of a set. They've always seemed to me like a slightly broken edge case, and I don't want to end up with a bunch of broken characters that need to be rebuilt when someone at HC gets round to updating them. But if people really are spending billions on inf on a build then they need to stop buying their IOs from some dude in a trench coat who claims he's selling legitimate surplus Longbow equipment.

Then you could call them Spandau Bullet.

I think that's somewhat unfair. I agree that top-end builds were supposed to be aspirational, and I think that's reasonable for an MMO. But on live the devs were struggling with the results of years of inflation in an economy that had grown up haphazardly starting in a time when MMO economies were less well understood than they are now two decades later. Now, they certainly made some choices that didn't help (AE was bad for the economy in so very many ways), and they stuck to some principles that were detrimental (PVP IOs only dropping in PVP) but they were trying to fix the worst issues. Combining the auction houses gave redside an actual functioning economy. Converters, even in the limited supply on live, did start to bring down the most ridiculous prices.

I love badges, so yay, more badges! Two badges is a great start, and it sounds like now there's the tech in place to check team composition this has scope for a lot of expansion and even MOAR BADGES, which is even better. Some of the role categorization is still a bit odd (poor MMs, classified by their secondary), but as it now has lower stakes tied to it I don't think that it's as big of a deal. Thanks for listening to the feedback.

The reason behind the Role Diversity Bonus didn't make a lot of sense when I read it at first, so thanks for pinning the explanation. A Prismatic Aether is a nice reward idea. It's an easy sell on the AH without needing to get into crafting. And I like the idea of showing new players the principles of how to put a team together, because with the CoH and CoV ATs all available it's a little overwhelming. I'm not sure this is the right way to go about it, though. Firstly, it feels like you're pushing new players towards rolling the Epic ATs, because they'll see that those ATs make it easier to get this bonus. A free Prismatic Aether is a much bigger deal to a new player, and they're likely to chase it harder than a vet who's already sitting on a pile of inf. I don't think we should be making the Epic ATs unusually attractive to new players, because they're a steep learning curve for someone who's never played the game before. Second, this skews towards rewarding teams where the players have a selection of characters they can easily choose from, i.e. vets rather than newbies. (It would also be a bummer for a static team of friends that doesn't hit the requirements.) Third, some of the category choices are odd! This feels like the kind of idea that you have when you're sitting around chatting, and in the abstract it seems brilliant. And when you start slotting the ATs into roles it starts off great: blaster, tanker, controller, defender, all easy, looking good. Then you get towards the end and some of the boxes aren't full, and some of them have too many ATs and you start shuffling ATs around trying to get it all tidy and even. Finally you're left with Corruptors and Masterminds, and a space in Ranged Damage and Support, so you toss them in there and phew, it's done! Again, not the best when you're trying to guide new players. Character creation already explains the AT roles, and those are in conflict with this system in some cases. I guess it could also make people setting up TFs picker about teams, but I guess we won't really know that until it's live. It seems a shame, though, to add yet another factor to juggle when putting together a team for a TF. There's always a shortage of people willing to run teams. I don't think complicating TF team building further is good when the game is hopefully seeing an influx of new players. I mean, at the end of the day, this wouldn't affect me. I mostly solo and duo, and if I do join a TF then I have a bunch of different characters so if someone asks me to swap, I can. An occasional free PA is nice! For me it's NBD, maybe a few more minutes waiting for a TF to start. I can just tool around in the AH while I'm waiting. It's seems like a slightly counterproductive way to approach the stated goal, though.