GastlyGibus

So Arsenal Control just dropped, a powerset I and many others have been pining for for ages, and so I just had to do something fun with it. Viral Strain, (how in the world is that name not taken?!?!) the technology origin Arsenal/Poison controller. Heavily inspired by Jonathan Crane aka Scarecrow from Batman, he's a brilliant biologist specializing in virology, who developed an unhealthy obsession with creating the perfect disease, went a bit mad, and fled to the Rogue Isles to pursue his research without moral constraints. Roleplaying a bit with Arsenal, pretending all the grenades/tranquilizers are special infectious agents he's created. Made a bunch of different costumes for him, and I'm quite happy with how they turned out, so I thought I'd share.

Applications are right here. You're more than welcome to apply and show off your amazing skills at creating content. We'll all be here waiting with bated breath.

PvP in this game is dead. I'm sorry, I know a lot of people will say "nu-uh! There's PvP communities!" but they're probably the least active out of all of them. There is a very small fraction of players who do get involved in PvP, but there's no ladders, no real tiers, because it just isn't popular in this game. Endgame is whatever was left at shutdown, which is Incarnate trials, plus some of the "advanced" difficulty task forces. Currently there's only the Imperious TF and Dr. Aeon SF that utilize this advanced difficulty, potentially with plans to add more, but considering the "volunteer" aspect of the game masters, it's not something to expect with any degree of quickness. I'm not trying to sound pessimistic or negative, but endgame and PvP are by far the two weakest aspects of this game, and honestly, that's kind of what drew a lot of players to this game in the first place, the fact that it wasn't this endless grind like other MMOs. The original devs were planning on expanding the endgame to ever-further heights, but then shutdown happened, and what we're left with is only a tiny bite of what was planned.

Yeah, it's a volume thing. It's like scam calls. If you call 1,000 people, even if 999 people recognize the scam and hang up, as long as that one gullible/naive person says yes, that's a payday, and they have programs and bots to automate this process sending out hundreds of thousands of calls/emails/message a day for pennies on the dollar. People always say "how can anybody fall for this?" Sometimes they're old and they just don't know any better, maybe they're really young and don't know any better (a friend of mine in college almost fell for the "you owe the IRS taxes" scam call), or maybe they just really are that stupid. Whatever the reason, all it takes is one click and they get a good chunk of change. Scamming is a multi-billion dollar industry. They wouldn't do it if it wasn't profitable.

Been doing a lot of old contact missions on my new Scrapper, fighting a lot of Nemesis, and it reminded me of something I had wondered about for the longest time. What is up with some enemy groups having multiple versions of the same exact enemy with different names? There's a lot of at-launch enemy groups that do this. With Nemesis, for instance, you have the Chasseur, Armiger, and Lancer minions, who are all identical. Same powers, same descriptions, same behavior, oftentimes the only difference being a palette swap and the name. The lieutenant enemies are all identical as well. The Lance Corporal, Subaltern, Lance Sergeant, Sgt. Major, Lieutenant, Captain, and Colonel are all identical save for different colors. There's a good number of enemy groups like this, mainly the groups from launch. Look at the Clockwork, as another example. The Prototype Oscillator, Line Oscillator, Advanced Oscillator, and Perfected Oscillator are all perfectly identical. Not even a difference in models or colors. They all behave exactly the same, with the exact same powers. Sprockets and Cogs are also identical. The Devouring Earth are particularly egregious with this. The Bladegrass, Razorvine, Blackrose, and Deathblossom minions are all perfectly identical. Fungoids, Deathspores, Deathcaps, all identical. Bedrock and Boulder are the same. Geode, Quartz, and Sardonyx are identical. The Drone, Improved Drone, and Advanced drones from the Rikti are the same. I think you get the idea by now. What's the reason? Are their powers tweaked in some way I can't see? City of Data doesn't have any noted differences, and neither does the Homecoming wiki. Just curious why some enemy groups will have 3-5 of the same exact enemy, sometimes with the same model and colors too, but give them different names.

I've got three more I can share. First we've got a Spines/Nin Stalker, Red Seeker Alpha. A hyper-advanced robot assassin who hunts down its targets to the ends of the earth. Midnight Lightning, a SJ/Elec Stalker. Technically he's a Vigilante, but his story is he's a high-powered mercenary for hire who frequently sells his services to both heroes and villains, and excels at taking down super-powered individuals. And finally, Dragonrock, a BA/SD Brute. He's a gladiator from another dimension, come to primal Earth seeking fame, fortune, and glory in battle. Also my first foray at really taking advantage of asymmetrical costume pieces.

I've played around with this concept before, because it's fun to make characters that sort of defy the conventional appearance. So far, I've only done two, one AR/MM Blaster, and one Elec/Elec Defender, both using the huge model. The Blaster's concept is that he's a sort of robo-cop character, scientifically enhanced for psychic powers and super-human marksmanship who wears very bulky power armor so he can survive against super villains. The Defender also uses the huge model, with the concept being that he was intended as a massive mobile power generator, but quickly gained sentience and learned to use his near-limitless energy potential for defense, and now works as a super-hero to help wherever he's needed. I've thought about making a tiny tanker/melee character, but haven't thought of a concept I'd like yet. It's still a fun idea to play around with, though.

I will come and breathe life into this thread by making yet another request. So I came up with a concept I wanted to do for a while, which is a Broadsword/Fire Scrapper who is a literal knight in shining armor. The backstory I've got for him is that there was a little girl who was gifted with magic in her blood. It was so potent that, even at a young age, she was able to reach out to other planes of existence and commune with otherworldly creatures. When the Praetorian invasion began, with all the destruction and chaos around her, and her family on the verge of being killed, this little girl cried out for help, and thanks to her magic blood, summoned her own guardian angel, a near-indestructible being of magic and might. After saving his "princess" and her family, the knight remained her guardian, and so this little girl tasked him with defending any others in the city who needed his help. The basic theme is that he's sort of an angelic knight, called from some mystical realm as the eternal guardian and protector of his "princess," and so far I've only got two costumes for him, one angelic, and one more demonic (a black knight of vengeance for those particularly nasty criminals who need a good thrashing). You can see the two costumes I've got for him below, and I'd love to see what others more creative than I am can do with the theme. While his costume is very much a literal knight in shining armor, it doesn't have to strictly stay with the medieval theme, and any kind of angelic or celestial warrior theme would also work. Just no togas... because I despise togas. Wings are optional, but very much preferred, unless someone has a much cooler idea.

Figure I should chime in, because it's something I've noticed as well, and it really is starting to aggravate me. I don't like to run my own TF's anymore because of this, since it's an attitude I run into quite frequently, and I'm here to play a game, not babysit a bunch of hyperactive players who can't read or follow simple instructions. The rare times I do run a TF, I very clearly advertise what it's about. I always advertise it as a kill-most, state the difficulty we're running at, and even put at the end of my little recruitment ad, in all caps, "THIS IS NOT A SPEEDRUN." When I have my whole team gathered and we're about to start, I reiterate for the whole team "THIS IS A KILL-MOST RUN. WE ARE FIGHTING THROUGH MOBS TO THE OBJECTIVE. THIS IS NOT A SPEEDRUN." Yet, even after that, there's always at least one player, sometimes more, who decides "fuck that" and runs off to the end and then impatiently says "where are you guys?" or tries to take on the boss by themselves and faceplants. I'm very much of the same mind as Solarverse here. If you want to speedrun on your own teams? Go for it, my dude. It's your team, do whatever you like. I'm not going to sit here and demand that every player in the game must play according to my preferred playstyle. However, when it's my team, I have clearly and succinctly laid out the rules, and you still insist on doing it your way instead? That's a /kick for you. If you didn't want to fight through the mobs, then don't join the team. The issue isn't that people are speedrunning; the issue is that people are deliberately ignoring a team leader's request for a normal run and demanding that their way be done instead. I'd be more than happy to join a TF with you whenever you're on, Solar.

I was going to make a lengthy post, but I see most of the bases have already been covered. I'm usually the guy who tells people to play what they want, and that every set can be "viable" with the right builds and playstyle, but regen is decidedly lacking in that department. It's not that it's completely unplayable, but it needs a lot of work to bring it up to the level of what other sets can do at only a fraction of the effort. If all you're doing is standard +1/x1 solo content, or joining teams, then yeah, it's... okay. You're not going to be absolutely useless. I have a SM/Regen Stalker, mostly kitted out with IO sets, and I enjoy him well enough, but it would also be insane for me to suggest he performs anywhere near the level of my other melee characters. Hell, I have some "weaker" AT's like defenders and blasters who aren't kitted out and can still out-perform my Stalker on survivability and utility. The major problem with regen is just that literally every other set in the game out-performs it by a mile. It finishes dead last in the race, all the time, every time. Willpower replaced regen as the set for getting your health back, because it essentially did everything regen could do but better and with good resistance and defenses to boot. Long story short, if all you're doing is joining casual teams and standard soloing just for fun, then sure. Go nuts. Regen is playable in that sense. However, if you're wanting to tackle the big challenges, like a "Master of X" run or a 4-Star Aeon run, then you're probably going to have a bad time. EDITED TO ADD: The other reason it's such a contentious topic is, as others have noted, regeneration used to be the absolute best set in the game, bar none. Regen would make you into an unkillable god, and this was before things like IO sets and incarnates. Because of this, it got nerfed... and nerfed... and nerfed again... then enhancement diversification happened, IO sets came onto the scene, WIllpower was born, incarnates got added, lots of powerset proliferation, and poor regen just got left behind in the dust.

I don't miss side-kicking or exemplaring at all. It significantly narrowed the scope of players you could invite to your team. You needed at least three other players at or near your own level on your team to side-kick or exemplar anybody else who wanted to join. The current system is a vast improvement, one that I wish more games would utilize. On leveling pacts, I don't remember exactly what was broken about them, only that people reported they were very broken. They were temporarily taken out of the game, and then when the teaming system was updated to auto-adjust players' levels to your own, it removed any need to have leveling pacts in the first place, so the entire thing was scrapped.

You could theoretically make this work. It would still be a gargantuan undertaking, and absolutely would not see the light of day on Homecoming, but it could theoretically work. First off, it would have to be its own archetype. This could be the "primalist" archetype the original devs envisioned many years ago and never made. The inherent power of the primalist would be "Mimic," a single-target power that copies the effects of whatever player or enemy you target. The primalist could be like other epic archetypes, only having one primary and one secondary powerset, and similar to epic archetypes, these powersets would have a wide variety of ranged and melee attacks, armor powers, buffs, debuffs, etc... but the catch is, the damage, damage types, secondary effects, and power FX/animations would all change based on the character you mimicked. For example, I roll a primalist, and I start off at level one with, say, a tier 1 ranged attack and an armor toggle. I use my mimic ability on a fire/regen scrapper. Mimic would then make my tier 1 ranged ability do fire damage and light enemies on fire, and my armor toggle would provide standard smash/lethal resistance, as well as a boost to my regeneration. Throughout the primalist's primary and secondary sets, they could gain access to several powers that functioned this way, changing their attributes, animations, and FX to match whatever character I mimicked last (or potentially on some kind of timer, for balance issues). You could even extend this mimicry to enemy NPCs; electrical effects from Freakshow, enhanced strength from Council, dark powers from ghosts, etc... Obviously, this is never going to happen. The coding and tinkering needed to make this kind of set a reality would be monstrous, something that I'm sure even a fully employed staff of developers wouldn't be able to do without massive effort and time, at least with the limitations of the game's ancient engine, but theoretically, this is how I imagine you could get it to work. Theoretically. 😛

A Controller's inherent power Containment deals extra damage to held, immobilized, slept, or disoriented enemies. Also, Entangling Arrow from the Trick Arrow powerset has -res in it, recently added by homecoming. Everything else? Check the power info. In most cases, unless it's explicitly stated, mez doesn't add extra damage unless you're a Controller, and even then, only the effects listed above count. Effects like fear and confuse, for instance, do not count for Containment's extra damage.

So, I hate to resurrect an old thread, but I was going to come here to report this myself until I decided to search and see if it's come up before. Went to take my tanker for a spin in Crey's Folly, playing around with new powers, and these guys were appearing infrequently throughout the zone. Just wanted to show that it doesn't appear to be some special mission coding like the OP suggested, but rather a bug with the Rikti in general. Screenshots below:

As Wavicle stated, there's a couple things that make the AI go into a "panic" and try to run. I don't know if there's an exhaustive list out there, so unfortunately I can't give a definitive answer, but I will say I've experienced the same on my merc/poison MM when soloing. I think it's a combination of several factors, such as being outnumbered, taking lots of damage, being debuffed, etc.... It could also have to do with the specific boss. Anybody who has done the ITF is surely familiar with how Romulus on the third mission runs around like a lunatic quite frequently. Since trick arrow has so many debuffs and you're playing a mastermind, it could be the combination of debuffs and being outnumbered makes them run. Wish I could say for certain, but the AI works in mysterious ways.