Cobalt Arachne

Virtually everything but the Hami Enhancements (and variants) are on the Reward Merit vendor. Not a very strong point. No, Enhancement Converters exist. If I get a Control VR IO I can just convert it to Melee Damage IO. There is no loot in CoH that is 100% unusable. Except again, Hami Enhancements, but if that's the only existing case made, it's a non-issue because of how marginal they are. Not an intended method, no. That's a 'shortcut' to progression. How did the people you're trading with get their stock to sell? They can't sell you something they didn't obtain, obviously. If nobody plays the game and earns no rewards the entire premise of a player economy stops existing. You can't buy and sell nothing, and nothing is what every single player started with. So no, trading is not an intended method because it can't exist without you or other players playing the game the intended way. It's a dependency.

I'm not looking down on players? That's an incredibly odd take... I'm talking simple economics. Supply & demand. Supply comes from players who generate stock by playing the game. Demand and the subsequent 'player-set' prices comes from impatient players who want to use their Influence to outright purchase the item they want from another player instead of playing game content to earn it normally. Players who just play the game get plenty of rewards. The intended way to gear up is to just play the game, not buy your entire build on the AH. You could enjoy playing City of Heroes without ever stepping foot into an Auction House or ever using /ah. (Anecdotal obviously but... I seldom use the AH in this game. I rarely have more than a couple million Influence cumulatively across my characters due to constant max level costume tweaks, but I do have 10+ maxed out Level 50 characters from just playing the game normally over the years.) Unlike other MMOs, (which often reward players things their character class can never use, to produce a surplus that ends up in the player market), in City of Heroes use of the Auction House and engagement in the player economy is completely avoidable by simply purchasing what you need outright for Reward Merits, a currency that you accumulate from playing regular content offerings and never paying the Auction House premium for convenience. Nobody started this game with giant Influence reserves to outright purchase finished builds (again, unless somebody was being extremely generous with their own Influence and giving it away).

The price on that specific Enhancement is because wealthy min/maxers want to squeeze the ABSOLUTE most out of their build, and that specific one lets them get a LITTLE more % out of a slot. Let's not pretend like that Enhancement is a normal necessity for anybody to play this game. You can run a pair of 50+5 generic Accuracy and Recharge IOs in two slots to get very comparable performance. So no, others having the money to buy fancy special Enhancements does not significantly impact anybody's gameplay experience. You can use a cheap very easily obtainable alternative for ~90% strength. Also another good example of "tax the rich", they want that Enhancement badly, and it can't be obtained doing Architect Entertainment farms, so of course it became an Influence dump luxury purchase.

The plan is that Levels 55+ will get increased rewards, even if it's not ready immediately at Page 3's launch. For now we're working on untangling spaghetti code to make these things even possible, a lot of changes going on under the hood.

The difficulty increase from a difference in Level is not trivial. I wager most AE farmer builds will not be able to just casually turn things up to +5 without major tweaks to their build. +There's no meaning in CoH to relativistic wealth. Another player having more Inf means literally nothing to your gaming experience unless they plan to give it to you. We also do tax the rich by way of forcing them to buy all their Prismatic Aether from other players because they can't be farmed in AE.

A sound Zoe makes when she's annoyed/frustrated, a verbal tic. That is intended, Nemesis Automatons often glitch and say the raw variable names incorrectly, this was a feature present in older Nemesis content, so kept it here.

This one. It revokes the power entirely.

Minotaur scales down to being killable with as few as four people, he's hardly a difficulty beyond the process of gathering Level Shifts for him.

The Tests of Combat repeatable missions added to the Labyrinth in this update can be solo'd at -1x1 Difficulty for full Obol rewards. No risk of being left behind. There's nothing intended to be locked or gated. The costume unlocks are just fancy alt versions of parts you DO have at creation. One purpose of unlocks was to help advertise the new zone's content and give players who a participated a memento for their time. You'll notice the Obol cost for costume pieces is set intentionally very low. This isn't meant to be a grind, it's a content participation check.

stuff

Happy Halloween 2025! Hope everyone got their fill of trick or treating! 👻

We get this wrong constantly on the dev side too, lmao.

One other major factor on my decision making is Character vs. Archetype. If a Character has something that majorly trivializes the content, I'm typically going to add something to specifically counteract it. No single character should ever have that much of an advantage over everybody else in team-focused content, especially if it's only achieved via a single power. (Phantom Army, PBAoE Confuses + Domination, etc.) If an Archetype has something that majorly trivializes the content, I would see that as an issue with the content itself warranting adjustments. Given not every Control AT set gets Confuse, it's unlikely to be something I favor in design, because it favors specific powersets rather than the whole Control AT/role. This is why when I design something intended to be handled by Control ATs, it's always checking for Holds, because every Control AT 100% has access to a ST Hold. TLDR; There should never be any singular character 'carrying' the team (IE: bring this = auto win), if any one person is pulling THAT much more weight than every other player, it needs balance adjustments. Advanced Mode content was designed to challenge everyone together on the whole team, if any one singular element overly compromises that design goal, it becomes something that needs to be addressed.

I'll admit I got my dates wrong on this, the specific run that caused Confuse to get nerfed was on a run where a Dominator was trivializing 4* Dr. Aeon with a single power. I recall very clearly which run it was because the player who was running the Dominator was rather famous, but my memory was off on *when* that run happened. Apologies on the mistake @Championess. The change was indeed Page 4, but because the run that revealed the balance issue was an Aeon, I incorrectly assumed it had happened during Page 3.

If I couldn't defend why I felt an option was the best decision given the various factors, then I wouldn't have committed to that design. If it's something related to my content sphere, I'm always happy to discuss my reasoning for any individual design decisions, or the mechanics behind something. But that's the thing, discussion. I'm open to being convinced of any suggestion. If somebody else's idea is better than mine, then I'm going to choose what's best for the game. But sometimes that involves meeting me in the middle for an actual discussion to explain to me about why their suggestion is worth taking. If somebody can't or won't explain why their suggestion addresses my main design concerns, or they continually argue something unrelated, then we unfortunately hit a dead end.

Edit: I was completely wrong on this, I'll take the L for my memory leading me to the wrong conclusion. Apologies to @Championess for the unfair/incorrect assumptions.

When it can outright invalidate specific content with zero risk? Absolutely. Phantom Army isn't allowed to be universal god tanks for the exact same reason. There's anti-Phantom Army measures in place for pretty much every raid boss. My stance is: We restrict the strength of anything that can circumvent mechanics in a way that isn't conducive to the designed purpose of the content.

I'm not super familiar with procs, they aren't something we use much on critters. I'll dig into this; I'd have to coordinate with Powers team in order to make this possible too. If this solution proves workable, I would be willing to drop the base protections on LT and Minion rank enemies.

The only way I can think of would require tripling (x3) every single Confuse in the game by turning them into a Redirect and two separate conditional powers. Something the Powers team would never sign off on, and the Dev team leads would surely veto that implementation for a number of reasons. Which is why the final solution became simply prevent Confuse from being too centralizing in Advanced Mode by adding a base protection. If people are really dedicated to the idea, you could bring two Perma-Dom Dominators and work in tandem to instantly overcome that Mag 10 protection on any critter. Two Controllers would also work, though they would have a slight ramp-up time (which isn't a problem, since no aggro). To my knowledge almost all player Single Target Confuses are Mag 3, which doubles to Mag 6 in Domination, so two applications would hit Mag 12 and instantly Confuse any ST critter through their Mag 10 base protection. But I know that's not what people want/are asking for. They want to be allowed to drop their big, satisfying Domination-boosted PBAoE Confuses into fresh spawns to render them crippled instantly. Unfortunately, as it stands, Confuse at that level is far too powerful to be allowed in Advanced Mode if it can deployed 100% risk free. If the Powers team were ever to remove the "No Aggro Flag" from Confuses (which as Rudra stated, would be a MASSIVE nerf to their solo capabilities, not a solution I would be in favor of), or new Code team developments make it possible to conditionally control that flag, I'd be happy to reconsider the balancing.

...You mean like the Golden Brickernauts in Advanced Mode Dr. Aeon that have instant-vulnerable to confuse during their countdown and can cause their explosion to instantly clear the entire room of enemies if used correctly? https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=v_goldbrickers.golden_brickernaut_hm.brickernaut_countdown&at=boss_elite This is not possible, the 'Do Not Aggro' flag exists on the power at the top level and is not conditional and simply excludes the power from notifying the critters AI. It's a per power thing, not a per critter thing.

Also want to make clear, there is literally no universal stats to enemies in Advanced Mode that makes them less vulnerable to Mez, except for Confuse. Holds, Stuns, Sleeps, Fears, Immobs, etc should all work the **exact** same in 4* content as they do on regular Level 54 enemies. I never felt that Control needed any challenge added, so there was never any kind of universal anti-Mez stats added, the only exception was Confuse solely because it doesn't generate aggro.

You would have to convince one of the Powers team devs to make this change as it then impacts player balance and only they are permitted to change that. Being honest, I don't think they would be very receptive, the idea of universally changing how Confuse works via hard coded power system changes simply so it can function freely in a very small subset of content is not a small ask. As soon as a discussion changes to "change this on the player's end" it becomes a Powers team topic, rather than a Content team topic.

This statement suggests to me you aren't very familiar with 4* content at all, as there is almost ALWAYS a tank AT in serious runs. What you're describing is the 4* speed run meta; Acting like that's the ONLY team composition that can clear 4* content is straight up incorrect. Every test cycle I lead multiple test runs of 4* content and I let people bring anything they want, and we've finished all of them, every single run. You don't need a composition filled with meta unless you're literally trying to speed run it as fast as possible.

Unfortunately, (aside from the fact I'm not on the Powers team and so I am not allowed to make any changes to anything on players, I can only touch critters), the "Do Not Aggro" is a singular flag that applies to the entire power and is not conditional. To implement this suggestion would involve duplicating every single player Confuse power in the entire game, turning all of them into Redirects, just in order for it to behave differently in a separate context. Generally if the only possible solution is "duplicate every single thing" it's not considered viable and the dev team leads are going to veto it.

That Confuse protection has been a part of Advanced Mode since *Issue 27, Page 4, after the balance issue was made known to me during a 4* Dr. Aeon Strike Force run I was participating on with a Dominator who trivialized the entire thing. The primary reason it is not allowed in Advanced Mode is because many Confuse effects do not cause enemies to aggro, allowing it to be setup with 100% reliability on every single pack of enemies with zero risk or consequence and hurts the enjoyability and challenge of the content. There's very little strategy involved using Perma-Domination Dominators to make Confused buffed-up critters delete themselves without any risk to the team. Unfortunately, it also takes away from the role of the Tank in the team whose job is to absorb the alpha attacks from enemy packs, because you can preemptively neuter everything by having them be Confused before each pull. Edit: My memory was wrong; I could only remember which TF I was on, but the date was wrong.