Cobalt Arachne

The justification for the Confuse limitation was because when you use Confuse you sacrifice part of your rewards, which is usually influence and experience. But in Advanced Difficulty content you're there to earn merits and Aether salvage, so in order to use Confuse you must pick a lower difficulty and sacrifice that reward. Testing demonstrated that these buffed-up enemies handedly tore themselves to pieces when confused. Confuse without a doubt would be the undisputed king of making this content trivial. Think of it like this: If a mobs arbitrary danger value is a 5, most mez makes them locked down, which reduces that danger value to 0. If we look at Confuse, it turns that mob's danger value back on themselves resulting in a -5. That's no problem in normal content but if the danger value is suddenly 500, then that same Confuse makes the swing to -500, which just far too strong to allow completely unmitigated and without any impactful limitations or penalties. If you want to abuse Confuse to its full-effect, you'll have to choose a lower difficulty and thus reduce the rewards you earn which is in-line for how Confuse works with rewards.

The hostless Nictus actually have designed counter-measures baked in for soloists. Defeated Cimeroran Traitor bosses and elite bosses play a very distinct sound and emit a visual cloud of odorous smoke prior to one of the hostless Nictus spawning. These hostless Nictus can't move from where they spawned, and after 45-seconds if they haven't possessed anyone, will wither and die automatically. Their initial range for the body hijacking chain is only 20ft, meaning a player can notice the Nictus is about to spawn, move away to be out of their range, and they'll die on their own. The fancy advanced difficulty mechanics like the Golden Brickernauts in the Aeon Strike Force always have a couple intentional methods added in which to deal with them, the Nictus have them too. You can either: 1. Move away before it appears, then either wait for it wither in 45 seconds or shoot it from outside it's range. 2. If on a team ensure you're somewhere they can respond by either killing the Nictus, or mezzing it (mag 6), which causes the possession to fail and leaves them as sitting ducks. 3. Be a Kheldian; the hostless Nictus can't possess Peacebringers or Warshades since they're already hosts to an energy being. The reward for killing the hostless Nictus (but not if they wither) is a PBAoE 45 second buff that increases everyone's damage by 50%, recharge by 30%, and 64-95% (depends on the level of the Nictus) resistance to Lethal/Negative which is likely to resist cap you for those 45 seconds. So they're not purely a nuisance, and swiftly dealing with them as they appear grants a really good buff to everyone nearby that is specially tooled to be effective against the ITF's baddies. Obviously, unlike the Brickernauts where you just die, failing to deal with a hostless Nictus results in the Nictus taking your body, juiced-up with their energy, to use your own powers against your team, so the benefits/penalties equal out.

It was originally, actually, but since it's meant to be the shallow end of the pool of the advanced difficulty we wanted people to have the freedom to play in it and splash around, so they feel comfortable enough to throw themselves into the deeper difficulties later on.

1. Back items don't scale with body size sliders, so the space has to be there to account for characters who turn the body scale up to max and pick torsos with layers like Jackets, otherwise the weapons would sheath into their spine. If the models were to get upgraded to support scaling back attachment points, I'd adjust the sheathed weapons to take advantage of it. 2. Needing to create countless extra models for actual weapon-fitting sheaths would have condemned this feature to not happening. Other MMOs don't do this either (World of Warcraft being the one that comes to mind) so it was given a pass. There were system limitations, but despite them, we still felt a large amount of the playerbase would appreciate this option.

Next patch the Aether costume requirements for the tiered badges will be lowered to 1/5/10 down from 1/10/25, reducing the minimum required Aether to get all three tiers and the accolade badge down from 300 to 150.

Next patch the Aether costume requirements for the tiered badges will be lowered to 1/5/10 down from 1/10/25, reducing the minimum required Aether to get all three tiers and the accolade badge down from 300 to 150.

Next patch will have Fort Trident moved to the main door of the Freedom Corp building and The Crucible will be accessed from Mercy Island via a door nearby where villains start.

For those unaware, the run animation used in Parkour/Blitz stance is from the unreleased Freerunning power from the unimplemented Utility Belt Origin Pool. So it existed in the game's files, just unused before we attached it something. What this means is, unfortunately, we don't have the source files for the animation and it cannot be edited/adjusted other than simply sped up/slowed down. In City of Heroes nearly all files go through a conversion from their original source to the proprietary format used by the game, and without the pre-conversion source files we're limited to using it as it is. Even with this limitation, we felt it was worthwhile to add as an option for players regardless, since it was just that, an option, and players who don't like the way it looked on their character didn't have to use it. It's also the reason they use default/ninja weapon movement animations because there were no weapon-holding versions of the run, just like Beast Run, but with sheathed weapons being added in this update, we felt it better to give them alternate runs holding the weapons instead of using the setup of hiding the weapons while moving like Beast Run currently does.

Not saying you can't, but you are going into that knowing the extreme grind you're in for and it's work you made for yourself. I'll compare it to people who have 20+ characters with all 1500+ badges, and then complain every time we add any new badges that they now have to do that badge grind 20+ times in a row. What I'm saying is I don't see it as a compelling reason to devalue the only high ticket vanity-only rewards in a game where literally everything else in the entire game is almost trivial to earn.

This is not the kind of reward you should be aiming to get on 20 characters, it's meant to elicit an impressive response when somebody sees a person with one, if it was trivial to get on 20 characters it would not be that kind of reward anymore.

Most aura particles I've looked at are static size and don't scale with model size, so that is likely working normally.

5000 Vanguard Merits only equates to about 4-5 decently successful Mothership raids, it's not really that big a grind for something we see run daily, sometimes even multiple times daily on many servers. Tier 1 costumes are extremely easy to get, most people should be able to buy many Tier 1 costumes by just doing low difficulty (1-2 star) TFs regularly and Incarnate Trials. Tier 2 costumes are meant to be a little costly, but something most people can get fairly reasonably by saving and doing regular content that rewards Aether. Tier 3 costumes are meant to be an 'oh wow' accomplishment, something somebody spent a lot of time grinding (or spending a lot of influence on the AH) to get, in a game where literally everything can be unlocked in hours on a new character if you've got a stockpile of resources. Since the currency is unbound you can do content on various characters and move the Aether salvage to the characters you want certain costumes on. Lots of people have mentioned having dozens of max level characters and wanted something to work towards with them in a game where getting to max level is nearly effortless with little-no max level things to do that give worthwhile rewards; this was something they can work towards as a goal if they really want it. You really shouldn't feel like you need to get Tier 3 costumes for any reason unless you just like the way they look, they are just a vanity item, nothing more.

The reason for the gap is that, currently, back items do not have the ability to scale, so they had to be placed on the character with a little space to account for character's who max out all the size sliders with big torso options like jackets to ensure the weapon didn't end up half-way inside their back. If we ever enhance the models to support back item scaling, I'll implement it into all the sheathed weapons. Shields is on my radar, but is more complex than every other weapon set because it puts the player on a totally different sequencer and alt animation sets, I'm planning to take a crack at it, but it'll be after all the other weapon sets get sheathed support. 👍

For those asking, the reason only Assault Rifle got proliferated with new models is because I started with getting Assault Rifle's sheathed modes done, and ran face-first into the desync knee-firing rifle bug, which would happen on everyone using the sheathed ranged weapons. That forced us to pause proliferating and adding sheathed stuff to Beam Rifle, Pulse Rifle, Archery, etc. until we squashed that FX bug, which ended up being a really nasty hard-coded child FX attachment logic problem. We got it squished, but by that time, Page 4 was nearly finished. Expect proliferated weapon models and sheathed display on the ranged weapon powersets next Page.

Time commitment. If you've never done the ASF on 4-Star vs. default, the normal difficulty ASF can be completed in about ~30 minutes, a run completed on 4-Star will take you closer to ~2.5-3 hours. If you can complete highly difficult content requiring the entire team be maxed-out incarnates consistently, that is the more rewarding option, but we want flexibility and options.

Insurance fraud investigation. 👀

The reason was so that brand new players must learn how to move between city zones before they can be powerleveled to max level, nothing more. Everyone doing their PL'ing in those other zones is expected.

👍

If you're going to do Hamidon later that day and you see somebody advertising for one earlier in LFG, you have to decide to either join the earlier raid, or use a different character on one of the raids. You can't join both on the same character and get full rewards, it's no different here. It's about respecting time commitments; If you decide to do the same content multiple times in a single day on the same character, that's a decision you made, other content in this game has already has the exact same restrictions on their rewards. It also provides some benefits to having built alt characters, which this game is all about.

Good suggestion! I'll adjust the Advanced Difficulty modes so that you always get the max reward for the content you do even if you join a lower difficulty TF earlier in the day, akin to how the Incarnate Trials are set up. It'll still be capped per content, but after adjustment means if you complete 1-Star ASF you'll receive 2 Aether, and then after if you immediately complete 2-Star, you'd receive the difference, which would be 5, for the same total of 7 that is reward total for completing 2-Star outright. Expect this change next build. As for why add goals to the game for players work towards? That's what makes the game healthy and sees people playing regularly. If you're asking about why we don't give everything to everyone for free, that's because we already do, that's already available for literally everyone at all times on Brainstorm. Everyone is welcome to go play on Brainstorm where they can experience everything this game has to offer without any restrictions or effort. As has been mentioned this is purely for vanity costume powers, if you don't care about them, then you can ignore them and sell any Aether you get on the auction house, it changes nothing about your gameplay experience. They don't provide any buffs or make your character stronger. Why have them on a cooldown? The reward restrictions are to introduce some sanity, so people don't feel pressured to repeatedly do same content over and over and over for the rewards. The entire game has always done this, you can't get infinite Hamidon Enhancements doing the same content back to back in the same 18 hours, it's no different here really.

Hello to all UNDEFINED_ORGANIC_TARGETS waiting in here! We're hurdling towards- <TWITCH CLICK> All hail Lord Nemesis! ...Issue 27, Page 4's reveal! In the meantime, seems like this thread could use a- <CLICK WRRR> ...little pick-me-up, so enjoy this early preview of one of the new rewards from the upcoming ERROR:TEASE_DEFINITION_NOT_FOUND system being added with Page 4:

For kicks and giggles one time, I loaded the game up in VorpX on my Oculus Rift and played first person in VR. It was kind of neat, until I got into a mission, remembered I was playing a Scrapper, and phew... Playing melee in first person is not ideal. 😱

Development is still fully underway! The original plan was that we were going to release a small 'Page 3.1' update in January that would've included the almost done things that missed Page 3's release date. However due to circumstance and availability on our dev team changing unexpectedly, it had to be delayed and it was rolled into Page 4 instead. Page 4 is nearing completion and everyone on the team is very excited to pull back the curtain and show you guys what's coming. It's already looking to be a massive update with a plethora of long-time feature requests. This upcoming Page 4 update is a full blown page, and includes a huge amount of stuff beyond what would've been the Page 3.1 update if it had happened in January. The reason we can't commit to dates/reveal things until they're closer to release is because our timetables are not directly under our control. We're all unpaid volunteers who donate our time and expertise to work on the game for free, but how much time we can donate varies a huge amount on a day-to-day basis. We can't commit time that would cause our personal lives to suffer, as that's not long-term sustainable, so we work on the game as much as we possibly can as unpaid volunteers. Our love for this game/its community is the passion that continues to fuel us to work on it, and I can promise you there is no shortage of it on the dev team. Homecoming prides itself in the consistency of our updates, operations, and running the game in a very professional manner, comparable to the game's quality when it was a retail service backed by a publisher. That being said, oftentimes that gives players the impression that our content output should also be equal to a professional development studio, but unfortunately that's not possible since we're not able to work on the game full-time, 40 hours a week, like a paid team would. We thank everyone for their patience, it's not easy waiting sometimes, but we are doing our utmost to ensure it's worth that wait! 💙

It is haha, but it's also not a new animation; At least not on a certain body type...

Fiiiiiiiiiine; Only one more though! 🤔 Me walking to go post a teaser: Also me when my walking IS the teaser... 👀