GastlyGibus

There aren't as common as on live, but they still happen. On Excelsior, I've seen the Cosmic Council Supergroup run more than a few, and my own SG Council of the Rose has run them in the past. The guaranteed contests are once a month by the GM team across all shards; player-run CC's are more sporadic and vary. This happens on Excelsior too. I've seen several players with money to spare host impromptu contests in Atlas, mostly because they're bored and have money to throw away. I've even done that once myself. So CC's still happen, just not as frequently as they used to.

Couple things about patron powers: You must be a Villain or a Rogue to unlock them. Being a Vigilante and joining a team for the patron accolade will not unlock patron power pools. You must switch to Villain or Rogue in order to gain access to them. Arbiter Rein is the contact who introduces you to a patron in order to get the arc yourself. Like in live, you may only pick one patron, but the other patron arcs can be completed via ouroboros once you're in the appropriate level range, allowing you to obtain all four accolades if you wish. Arbiter Rein is standing just outside the entrance to the Grandville tower, behind the statue of Lord Recluse. You can talk to him at level 35. Unlike live, completing one of the patron arcs and getting the accolade unlocks all of the patron pools. For example, if you pick Black Scorpion as your patron, completing his arc and getting The Stinger accolade will still unlock all four of the patron pools. Also unlike live, you may freely respec out of patron pools and switch them at will. Before, once you picked a pool, you were stuck with it forever, but now with a respec you can pick another pool if you wish. So for example, if you picked Leviathan Mastery and you didn't like it so much, you can respec and switch to any of the others at will. Unlocking the patron pools sticks with you across all alignments. Although you have to be a Rogue or Villain to gain access to them initially, once you have them unlocked, you can switch to Hero or Vigilante and still have access to them, even during respecs. Once you have them unlocked, they are permanently unlocked for that character. Peacebringers and Warshades are the only archetypes that cannot unlock patron power pools at all. Even if you switch alignment with PB's and WS's, you cannot gain access to them. The inverse is also true for Arachnos Soldiers and ancillary pools. Hope this helps!

Well, actually, this thread is about whether players should be able to flag themselves for PvP or not. Basically being able to opt-out of PvP entirely. I've already explained why it shouldn't be an option. The same tired points keep being made that I've already responded to, so I have nothing further to add.

I'm one of the few who didn't remake their characters from live, it seems. Sure, I missed them, and I thought about it the minute I found out these servers existed, but then I thought to myself "I've already played these characters. I know them inside and out. I want to try something different!" So, in my own personal "head-canon" for my characters, years have passed and all of them have either been defeated, lost their powers, or are otherwise retired. My entire roster now is completely new characters and combos I've never played before. Some of them might be related to the old characters in their backstories, but beyond that, I saw Homecoming as a chance to start fresh and new. That, and... well, I started playing this game when I was really young, and looking back at the characters I made, particularly the names I gave them... I had some really dumb ideas that I thought were best left forgotten. I had a controller literally named "Shitaki Caster." Yes, he was named after a mushroom. No, he didn't have mushroom powers. And no, I don't know what I was thinking back then either. 😛

No, I'm not wrong. It's a player versus player zone. Literally the entire reason for the zone's existence is to fight and kill other players. Going into the zone and expecting people to not attack you is like signing up for a paintball match and getting upset because people are shooting at you. It's part of the zone. It is literally designed to be that way. It isn't "griefing" to use a zone in exactly the way it was intended. You go inside of the zone. The game warns you multiple times that you can and will be attacked by other players. Continuing to play in the zone after the 30 second countdown is you consenting to being attacked. There is no argument here. You're getting upset because people are using the zone for exactly its intended purpose, i.e., to attack other players. PvP is dead in this game because the Issue 13 changes broke it almost irreparably. Assholes exist in every single PvP game in existence, and those games aren't dead because of them. League of Legends has one of the most toxic communities I've ever experienced in an online, player versus player game, and it still remains a popular game. If you don't like getting ganked, either learn to adapt, or don't go in the zone. It really is as simple as that.

I found another one that isn't on the list that @Aberrant linked above that looks like a possible candidate. Gloryhound, located in Croatoa, at coordinates -2574.7 176.3 2834.5, at the very edge of the zone on a mountain. Strangely enough, when I went back to double check, they weren't there. I'm guessing Gloryhound only appears at certain times of the day.

@Zeraphia We're just going to have to agree to disagree then. I'm not even an avid PvP player, but I genuinely like the concept in this game and I wish more people did it. The way I see it, the rewards are meant to draw players in and encourage them to engage. I'm not in favor of removing those rewards by putting them in a new zone or taking away the risk of entering PvP to acquire them. And as others have stated, PvP in this game is already at an all-tome low. Even during peak hours on Excelsior, I rarely see more than a half-dozen players in Recluse's Victory, to say nothing of the barren wastelands that are Siren's Call or Bloody Bay. I've been able to take my scrawny Defender into those zones to get the badges with virtually no resistance at all. If it really is an issue, you can always transfer to another shard to get the badges, or even bring some buddies with you for backup.

No there isn't. You entered the PvP zone. Being attacked is part of the risk you take going in there. Sure, they might be mean-spirited in attacking you after being asked to stop, but they have every right to ignore your requests and keep attacking you. It's like going into a bar and asking the patrons to stop drinking because you're a teetotaler. The only benefits are badges and temporary powers, neither of which are necessary nor required for the game. With the advent of Incarnate powers, the old strategies of using nukes and shivans have become obsolete. There is no content that requires the use of these powers; they are a very apt demonstration of high-risk-high-reward scenarios.

Why is the zone functioning as intended suddenly "griefing" just because it's less active than before? You're in a PvP zone. Doesn't matter if there's a thousand players in it or just one. You're another player, you've entered the zone on your own volition, you're given several warnings on the fact that you can and most likely will be targeted by enemy players in the zone. How is utilizing game mechanics griefing? It's intended to be that way because the rewards are insanely good. The Warburg nukes and Shivan shards are ridiculously powerful, thus the method of obtaining them is significantly more difficult than normal. I'm going to say no to the suggestion of PvP flagging. The few players who do still engage in PvP would get screwed over even more if the rare player who entered the zone was able to just say "nah man." The badges are the incentive for entering the battle zone; taking those away or being able to bypass the PvP aspect would kill whatever interest in PvP this game had left.

I've recently been converted from my normal support playstyle into the Tanker life, so I might be biased when I recommend Tanker. For me, honestly, Tankers are great because they are really good on both teams and solo, and I sometimes like to have my alone time, just rushing into missions without a care in the world and clobbering my enemies into submission. Having an AT that works effectively for both teams and solo is a huge boon for me. And even though you pointed out that there are more Tankers, in my experience I don't run into them as often as Corruptors. It always feels nice when I'm the designated Tank for a team, just being a meatshield and letting your allies clean house. Tankers just make you feel invulnerable, and that's a lot of fun for me.

I really hate to be the stick in the mud here. Truly, I do. And don't get me wrong, I appreciate everything you guys do to keep this game alive and give us (sometimes ungrateful) players cool events and things to do. It's a noble effort and I greatly commend your efforts. However, with that being said, this "Monster Mash" was just not fun. I logged out about twenty minutes in because the lag made the game literally unplayable. In those twenty minutes where I was there, I was able to fire off maybe five whole attacks. I even lowered my graphics settings to the absolute bare minimum. That helped a lot with framerate, but the lag was insurmountable. Having 200 players all crammed together in one spot, all firing off their entire powersets, along with massive spawns of monsters and baddies, just killed the connection. And as I told my league last night, "I didn't wait here to an hour just so I could stand here and lag to death." If at all possible, things like this need to be spread out. If each of the leagues were each put in their own little corner of the map, it might help. But with how bad it was with lagging and connectivity, I just couldn't be bothered to stick around. I hope something can be done in the future to prevent this, but as it stands now, I won't be participating in future Monster Mashes with lag issues like this.

Vanguard. Not even a question in my mind. Vanguard is the only enemy group I've encountered so far that forces me to lower the difficulty to -1/x1. Even just three same-level minions can stack so much -res that suddenly that minion is now dealing 300+ damage with one attack. Not to mention the absolutely sadistic programmer who decided that Vanguard Wizards should be able to cut your max endurance in half for a solid 5 minutes. No other enemy group in the game has caused me more grief or frustration than Vanguard.

GeForce Experience is the program I use for game recording, but good luck trying to get modern recording software to work with a game made over a decade ago. When I've tried to use GeForce for City of Heroes, I've found it only works when it feels like it.

If there's a Rikti Invasion event going on, then it tends to happen incredibly frequently. However, if there's no event going on, a Rikti invasion is only triggered by a team completing the Lady Grey Task Force.Upon completion, a random zone, hero or villain, is chosen for an invasion. Zombie invasions are event exclusive, and as far as I'm aware, have no trigger during normal play. Also, welcome back! Hope everything is as fun as you remember it. 😄

Can also confirm that, neither before nor after the Great Server Crash of 2020 (tm), have I been experiencing any kind of connectivity or lag issues. I'm no IT expert, so unfortunately I can't offer any advice. All I can say is while you and others are reporting an increase in connectivity issues, other players like myself have not had any issues whatsoever. It seems more likely that this is an issue on your end.

This. I constantly see "healer LFT" in the LFG channel, and it takes all of my willpower to not give the snarky response of "what's a healer?" back to them. Seriously. "Healer" doesn't mean anything in this game. Are you a Defender? A Corruptor? Controller? Are you running Empathy? Kinetics? Pain Domination? Radiation Emission? I mean really. This isn't World of Warcraft. We don't have "healers" in this game. We have support. That's one of my all-time favorite things about this game; the diversity of the support role. Advertising yourself as a "healer" tells me virtually nothing about your character or powerset. On another note, I know this will get me flack, and I know people can play what they want, but two big things that irritate me are petless Masterminds and "pure" Defenders. Petless Masterminds, okay, I can understand if you want to challenge yourself, but you're literally just a really weak Corruptor. You have all of three attacks that suck up all of your endurance and do such negligible damage you might as well not even be there, and your secondary is the weakest of the archetypes because of MM modifiers. Same goes for the "pure" Defender builds, usually Empathy, running nothing but their primary and not dealing any damage at all. I understand the game is not that challenging, and I understand there's not a whole lot of content that requires everybody to be playing at peak performance, but you're just slowing things down and being carried by the rest of the team with those two. You may all insult and belittle me now. 😛

Nerf Coyote, they're too good at posting and making the rest of us look bad. :v

Nerf friendliness! This community is too nice and sickeningly optimistic. We need more tryhard jerks!

Nerf Blasters. I kill things too fast and I never get the satisfaction of watching my Beam Rifle's Disintegrate power spread! >:v

Luminara nailed it. Even with two big corporations who have the best of intentions and a desire to cooperate, these kinds of legal proceedings can take years. It's not such a simple matter to just say "hey, can we have the IP please?" and NCSoft going "sure, here you go."

The Imperious Task Force honestly has a lot of good lines. During the "Retake the City" mission: Raserei Ubermenschen Rocket: Do you really think this is going to work? Raserei Ubermenschen Fire: I always think it's going to work. That is what makes me such a loyal subject!

Not a compliment on gameplay, but I was in a costume contest a while ago, and a non-judge player came up to me and gave me 5 million, saying my costume and bio deserved something even if I didn't win. That brightened my day for sure. Another time I was playing my SR/Kat Tanker, and since the majority of missions were kill-all, I decided to run past spread-out mobs, throw an attack to taunt, and then run to the next group so they'd all come after me. One player remarked "what is that? A drive-by tanking?" He later said I was doing a good job. That was my favorite Manti TF that I've been on. 😄

As others have said, they are incredibly useful on teams. You go down in a fight, your team most likely helps clean up the mobs, then when the fight is over you pop a wakie so a team member doesn't have to use up their rez on you. Resurrection powers are useful during big fights, like arch-villains, where you need to be up right now and ready to keep fighting. Wakies are good for standard mobs where you can wait a few seconds for the coast to be clear.

It's a security feature in a world where villains try to take over the world every day. "Oh, Captain Awesome Pants, thank goodness you're here! The council broke into the offices of Super Guns Incorporated and are trying to steal the plans for the Universe Gun! You have to stop them!" [Captain Awesome Pants arrives at the office.] Council: "Seriously, we've been searching for five hours! Who the hell designed this place?? How do I even get out of here? .... and now the heroes are here!? Curse you, office architects!" That's why every time you go to stop an office theft or kidnapping or whatever, you're always there in the nick of time. The villains are just as confused as you and spent the entire time just trying to figure out where the hell they were going. 😛

There was a not insignificant influx of jerk hackers. Something had to be done before we were gone to the americans. 😉