UltraAlt

Marie Antoinette?! is that you?! I thought you had a little taken off the top?!

Just checked again. Same message.

It will have the new power effect of "wait" and a new "wait" enhancement will be added. If your target is taking damage, a power with "wait" will not go off until the target is no longer taking damage. Over the time that the power is in "wait" status, can not unlock from the current target and it slowly gains additional damage over time. If the target falls before the "wait" period is over, the damage done turns into absorb that is dispersed equally among the characters that are targeting the target when they were defeated based on the damage of the attack itself and the damage accumulated through the "wait" mechanic. I know, what are you supposed to do if a someone has a damage field going? I guess you will just have to "wait" until they are defeated. So you might also want to wait and carefully pick a target.

All the P2W free travel powers are faster than sprint and have more jump in them as well. I don't know about that for sure, but there have been tons of "quality of life" changes here at Homecoming. Go to the P2W vendor and dig around. There is a ton of stuff in there that was held behind subscription and/or the paywall in the past.

more info on the thread over here ::

When I went to the (is it still the beta launcher ... the Homecoming) launcher before logging in (and then later being forcibly disconnected), it was showing that 3 of the servers were down. I can't remember which ones.

checked the donations page and that's closed for the month, so "whew" that isn't the issue.

I started playing just before Episode 2 dropped. I don't see the length of time you have played the game having anything to do with this conversation. Yeah, as soon as characters could change alignements, heroes have been switching to the villian side, villains to the hero side, and back-and-forth (especially with the help of Null the Gull making it easier to switch), so yeah, you can jump-the-fence and get either one you want as easy as a character that started on the other-side-of-the-fence. Not sure about your point on that one either really. Some people may have wanted this. By saying "the community" you imply everyone. I was never for or against this. I frankly never cared about it. You already said you wanted this, so there is no reason to repeat that you are for it unless you are trying to use [mesmerize] on someone ... well I guess you are trying to affect the Community so maybe [mass hypnosis]. Luckly, I have friends that try to keep the [clear mind] going.

Go in the door and to the right. Hide behind the computer island and wait for the thugs to pass. get that glowie. stealth. move to the far left (from the entrance). get that glowie. Get the other one, and head out the door. After clicking the glowies, run back down the hall and fight any enemies that may be delaying the hacker. You can stand so you can click all three glowies in each of the three locations at the same time. In each case, clicking them one after another doesn't restart the progress on the first one you clicked on. I use the old folks option (Golden something or other magazine, I think). That works to. I'm pretty sure I start from the top and work my way down (I now I ask for information on facility security last) There are some delays while the NPC is running conversation by you. The angels (ar they harpies? I thought they were angels) can also be dangerous so avoiding getting them involved makes defeating the Minotaur easier. (so does focus fire, but, yeah ...) WARNING :: Rikti monkey farts are really stinky and you may have to go to a costume vendor to get a new costume after the event is complete as well a shower. It's always hard on teammates when you reek of rikti monkey farts. -- And last but not least.... I strongly suggest always taking the Overwhelming Force Enhancement as the final reward every time you run the SBB.

busted two of these. Original one and the warranty one. Okay and does the job, but not as resilient as other LogiTech hardware in my experience. I use LogiTech keyboards and F310s and I stand by those for sure.

"Only you, .... can prevent every other character on the team from pulling any agro."

quote your sources please to verify this data Not sure what you are asking for here. Do you want an additional set of iconic hero powers pools added in addition to the (hero) epic power pools? There may be a difference in the patron pools. I really don't crunch numbers to see or prove any imbalance. If there is an imbalance, was that imbalance unintentional, related to the power levels of villian power sets, or intentional as a lure to get people to play villain characters? I don't know the answers to that. That being said, I don't think we need a "hero" patron power pool. If the there is a significant imbalance then perhaps the Epic power pools need to be adjusted to a level that they are on par with the Villain power pools, but I'm seeing the need to do that.

I can see why Stun or Disorient would make more sense as the set FX, but what other power set would you give the END Drain to? They came up with the END drain concept during initial game development. I suspect that the concept was just too good to chuck out the window and ended up landing on the electrical powers. Might want to ask Jack or someone that worked on the game during the original development stage.

If you solo, there is no need for it for sure. Taunt has range. Most tanker sets only have on other ranged power and it is only single target. So if you want to grab agro at a distance or if you want to grab some enemy that has run away to fight your allies, then taunt is very useful. And, no, your punches won't be enough to keep all the agro as you aren't going to be able to hit all the enemies in a spread out mob unless you are running around to corral them. If you feel Taunt is worthless because it does not do damage then slot it with Perfect Zinger : chance for PSI damage. Taunt is an AoE and you will have a chance to do minor PSI damage when it goes of. Taunt cost no end. It isn't much, but you can decrease your the recharge time of Taunt and do it more often. Taunt is the Tank Archetype's signature move. I get it on every tank as soon as it unlocks or soon as possible after that. Sometimes I feel I don't have enough defense/resistance slotted up to handle all the agro when it first unlocks. But play how you like and you'll figure out what works for you and that character.

Apparently. we do different conclusions about what defines playing a hero or villain. The poll that I created is about the game mechanics and not about a wish by some players that the game mechanics don't exist. My conclusion in general is malicious intent and self-serving interests that injury others (especially intentionally) are a primary clues as to who is a villain.

I not trying to force you to chose, the game does that when you create a character. You have to create a Hero, Villain, or Praetorian. Once you are in the game, the Character you can create can be a Hero (hero or vigilante), Villain (villain or rogue), or Praetorian. You can switch (but not to Praetorian), but your character is one of these at any given time - they can't be two of these at the same time. Sorry, but that game mechanics.

Another poll with comments or critiques that fall into the ranges listed below to this poll. 1) Troll 2) Harassment 3) Sarcasm 4) Two of these 5) All of these Sometimes it is hard to tell where a poster is coming from or their intent.

"People have been playing City of heroes since it was shutdown." "What?" "Yeah, there have been some private servers running. Someone leaked that it has been going on on the internet." Time passes. "I'm playing on Homecoming." "Oh," I'm saying not too enthused. "Yeah, it's all free-2-play". "Oh," I'm saying still not too enthused. "They got rid of all the microtransactions. You should really check it out." "yeah sure." "You can make a thousand characters per server" "What?" I haven't looked back and felt bad about installing Homecoming. I'm glad to be back in the City again. It's good play a hero. I like exploring the different power sets and he world. I like helping other players by running teams and teaming with them and by trying to help on the /help channel. The Core City of Heroes community was always great. I see a lot of those Core CoH community members here. I feel good about my gaming experience. No goldfarmers to ignore whenever I log in. AE farmers were still ruffling my feathers for a good bit, but I can just overlook the chat without being upset about it. I still really hate the incarnate system, but that is avoidable. I have friends that I game with on a regular basis and we take turns picking content. I run task forces and it is cool to see new players enjoying the experience. The Market has changed, but it's still a mini-game in the City. I have way more character slots than I'm likely to ever know what to do with. Good times. Good times with friends. Good times with people I don't know. There is bad behavior mixed in, but that's life. I love City of Heroes, and I hope Homecoming can keep it this way.

On the more populated servers, the chats were full of people wanting to doorsit to level to 50 and AE babies (new players that had been power leveled to 50) that didn't know how to get out of Atlas park .. and, of course, this was like a harvest coming in for ...you may have guessed it ... the goldfarmers - who were now more numerous and spamming even more than before. I wasn't liking the game too much But I had really loved the game. Sure City of Villains came out in there somewhere. I played in the beta. I played some of the content, but really didn't like it. I guess I like playing heroes. The only real difference it made was being able to make bases, and that was fun. City of Heroes next big move was to go "Rogue". My computer was made to play the original game. The DEVs wanted to create a new game with improved graphics that wouldn't play on my computer. I wasn't in the position to save up for a new computer at the time. I had really enjoyed playing City of Heroes. The DEVs put in setting to dummy down the graphics in Praetoria for old computers. I bought "Going Rogue" because I was supporting the game. I played the beta. I hated it. I bought City of Heroes to play superheroes in Cityscapes of American comicbooks and not some dystopian but super clean version of a 2000 AD future (don't get me wrong. I subscribed to 2000 AD for years) I was not liking my gaming experience as much. Incarnate system. Microtransactions. Goldfarmer influence inflation in the market. Arrogant new players that had a 50 that demanded that they knew more about the game than I did because I was level 25 and they had dinged the first character they made to 50 in the AE the previous Friday. Done. My gaming experience in City of Heroes ruined. I made a costume of a Praetorian clockwork and loaded into all my characters in all 150+ character slots. I changed the bio on all my characters to "Move along citizen, nothing to see here". moved them one at a time, to atlas park next to Ms. Liberty and used [Power:Prestige Utility.Self Destruction] to blow them up before logging each of them out for the last time. I hated what City of Heroes had become. I cancelled my subscription almost exactly a year before the sunset and never logged into my account again. A friend of mine invited me over to his house on the day the servers were shut down. He had continued to play. That was the end for City of Heroes ... or so we thought ... I didn't feel bad about it being shut down. I felt a bit bad for the people that loved it that had lost it. I mourned for what it had been when I enjoyed playing it. [to be continued]

Then something revolutionary happened. We were going to be able to create our own missions. We would be able to add to the insanely awesome gaming experience that was City of Heroes. But there were things creeping around in the background. Gameplay styles and game activity that I didn't agree with. I avoided them as best I could. Teaming was set up so that mentoring/sidekicking could be use to power-level characters. I alway had felt that this was not in the true nature of the game and that it bypassed the experience of being a hero gaining experience and knowledge of the City. It wasn't so hard to avoid being a part of this. Sometimes it was more or less inescapable if one wanted to run on a big team or on a task force. In the background, higher level character were already farming missions by not completing them and resetting them to run them over and over. I felt bad about this, so I avoided it. I loved the game. Goldfarmers were becoming rampant. You couldn't log into the game without a bunch of new goldfarmers spamming their illicit wares. New because the accounts breaking the EULA would be deleted and the ignore list is only so long. Annoying to log into a game I loved to play and have to deal with that from the get-go each log in. But I loved the game. DEVs promised that the AE would only be used for mission creation that behaved like missions in the game itself. Some players wanted it to work otherwise. They were designing power leveling missions on the test server and the DEVs knew it. They made it clear that a 40-ton ban-hammer would be used on anyone making powerleveling/farming missions using AE. AE was released. The 40-ton ban-hammer dropped. The AE Farmers threatened to quit playing if they couldn't farm/powerlevel in the AE. Who knows what other kinds of threats were sent to the DEV team at the time. The Dev's caved. AE Farming/powerleveling was now let loose in the CIty. I hated it. It made the game feel tainted to me. But I loved the game. Around this time, the 14-day trials were everywhere. Before too long, City of Heroes went F2P. [to be continued]

So maybe this is where the answer actually begins. I buy parts and a friend of mine helps me assemble the computer so I can play CoH. I think I was in maybe a week before the drop of Episode 2. Finally, triumphantly, I was able to create my first character in a 3D superhero world! Finally. And the first character I made was character that I had played in a Champions campaign that was a group of supervillains. It was so great. The world looked great. I was excited. Ran out in the streets. Fought Hellions. Was scared to death to /quit out o the game. I thought for sure it meant I would be deleting the character and would have to start over. Luckily, /help to the rescue. More than one person reassured me that I would be okay to /quit out of the game and that my character would be safely where I left it when I /quit out of the game. So I immediately logged back on and started making another character. I made 10 (or whatever the max was back then) on the same server the same day. Wasn't long until I found out I wasn't just limited to the one server, I could make that many on all the servers. I could explore the game in all kinds of different ways. I could have all kinds of powers whenever I felt like playing those powers. It was awesome. But then some archetypes were no equal. I liked playing all the archetypes (tanks less than the other 4). It became clear - he/she who does the damage gets the XP and influence. Defenders and to a large extent Controllers were pretty much screwed. I had a defender that was like level 12-15 that couldn't get enough insp to even by enough training insps to slot up fully - which meant that they could do even less damage than the slotted damage dealers on the team, so getting even less influence. I had to step away from playing those archetypes and fall back to blasters and scrappers which could actually progress in content. But, I was still playing 3D superheroes running around fighting crime and teaming up with a random group of heroes. Good times. I did what I could to help out in the /help channel whenever I could as it had pretty much saved me from a heart attack by using /quit and not knowing what it would do. The market came out. This was a .... yeah again ... "a game changer" for me. My Defenders and Controllers could buy pass the mission influence grind by creating things and selling them to the damage dealers that were making more influence. The market became a huge part of my CoH gaming. It still is. It was great playing characters and leveling up. Getting that "ding". Getting new powers. Defeating foes that could defeat my characters so easily before. I was, and still am, playing for that experience of being able to run around leveling up, learning to use new powers, and helping the citizens of Paragon City - both PC and NPC. Fighting crime on the streets and in missions - helping people on the /help channel. [to be continued next issue]

This is pretty wide and unfocused. So my answer will be in that mode as well. I have been into comic books since I was probably 8 or 9. I wasn't able really to try collect any series until I was a tween. My ability to expand my collecting occurred over time and expanded. In parallel to my enjoyment of comics, I was a gamer. I played board games, chess, etc. This expanded into Avalon Hill tactical board games. Then something happened, a kid that sat in front of me in Geometry class had a copy of the white box set of D&D. The original D&D. Not the Basic D&D starter set with the blue book and the first three levels - the white box with like the first 3 or 4 digest sided books. After that I was at gaming stores looking for more D&D stuff, ran into the original Starfleet Battles, Battle Droids (the original MechWarrior), etc. ".... hey, hold up! This doesn't have anything to do with City of Heroes ...." I'm getting there. I ran into Traveller. The Sci-Fi game of the not-so-far future. Almost immediately, well, immediately when GM'ing the game, I was running a world "5 years from now in the Marvel Comics Universe". After the first successful tour with a military unit (you could pretty easily die during character creation using the original Traveller rules), you could try to join SHIELD. You could this each tour as you progressed through character creation and could continue as a member of SHIELD until your character mustered out of service into actual game play. I wanted to be running a game in the superhero universe with players interacting with and becoming superheroes in their own right. First group of players were very Mercenary minded and pretty much became villains from the get go. Fast-forward to the next gaming group of Traveller players. Same scenario, but players could try to gain superpowers by gaining a mutation. Mutations were entirely random. A mutation event would occur. Players would say a power they wanted. I would roll 3 dice. If they came up all 6's that was the power their character had. No double picking, new power each dice roll. Was somewhat time consuming but had interesting results and this time people actually played heroes. "... but this isn't about City of Heroes..." I know, I'm still getting there. The original Champions RPG finally came out. Sure. Other superhero RPGs came out, but Champions point based character system was incredibly complicated and extremely balanced. That was... sorry... "a game changer". I no longer had to modify a game to create super-heroes. I had a game that was designed for superheroes. I played and ran multiple Champions games interspersed with other RPGs for the next decade+ "... but you aren't even talking about computer games ..." Yeah, computers were progressing over that time as well. The first "computer" game I played was a game about landing a lunar lander on a HP calculator. There weren't home computers that far back in time. So I was there for the TRS-80, the VIC Commodore, Atari 800, etc. Time passes. The guys that I had been gaming with for years were all thinking about ways to bring Champions as it truly should be done to computers in a 3-D game. Can you imagine. Back then wanting a real 3D world you could run around in versus the kind of environments that were around back then? Unheard of. Less time passes. I see an advertisement for City of Heroes. I don't have a computer that can run the game, but I buy it anyway. While I'm saving up to buy parts to build a computer, I'm going through the book on the game figuring out what characters I'm going to make. "Oh, that power, yeah, I know which character I made can do that... and this one.. yeah, and that one too... that would be cool. I have to think of something to match those power sets. [to be continued next issue]

You are fully able to create your own poll. Think you can do better? Create one.

It would be virtually impossible to play equal time between two let alone three, but understood that there is some very small percentage would indicate some level of equality between two or all three. You are free to create your own poll. Be free.