Cobalt Arachne

This number hasn't changed recently. She's always been the Atlas Park trainer, then later Paragon Studios replaced Statesman in Independence Port with her as the task force contact for the now Ms. Liberty Task Force, and as a result, she also had to replace Statesman in Fort Trident as the contact for said task force. Mostly I think people kind of forgot Fort Trident existed up until recently (for good reason heh).

Not sure what this is referring to, in Fort Trident/The Crucible all of those have minimap waypoints. Except for Quartermasters, which aren't in those zones yet, but will be added next patch alongside tailors in those zones, as well as an update making all Facemaker/Icon tailors able to change body types instead of just the ones labeled surgeons.

The system is designed to be expanded upon, expect lots more costumes later on! 👍

No worries! There's a surprising amount of people who never visit the forums or aren't in the right social circles to know about those convenience bases, so this was provided as a hard-to-miss alternative so they aren't missing out just because they aren't as tuned in. Everyone who's played for awhile should know just how terrible City of Heroes can be at actually explaining itself in-game haha.

You mean the supergroup bases that new players won't know exist and cannot access at all until/unless somebody tells them about it + provides an access code? I don't think there's anything to worry about in terms of the value of player crafted convenience bases, they're still generally superior for size, can be far more function-dense, and also contain portals to most every zone in the entire game vs. only the couple that have Freedom Phalanx/Arachnos contacts. This is just as an alternate convenience with more transparency, so that somebody not in the know isn't at a disadvantage in terms of functionality they have access to.

Aether can be traded like any other unbound salvage, sold on the AH, or placed in base storage bins.

They're using the existing doppelganger tech, if you go into AE and make a test arc that spawns a doppelganger boss of your character, the Nictus will have those exact same powers if they stole your body

We did what we could, but at its core the ITF is still very anti-control by its design, but we did make some efforts to make sure control had some valuable things to do. Spoilers for anyone who doesn't want to know the mechanical changes in the Advanced Difficulty ITF:

Currently each star rank of difficulty removes one additional rank from susceptibility of Confuse, excepting for 1-Star which used to have it for Elite Bosses but was removed: 1-Star - No confusion protection on any mobs 2-Star - EBs, bosses 3-Star - EBs, bosses, LTs 4-Star - EBs, bosses, LTs, minions If you are suggesting a different approach, I would be totally fine with making bosses+ have the Confuse protection at all ranks instead and leaving it off LTs and minions if that's more desireable. Meaning you'd get this: 1-Star - EBs, bosses 2-Star - EBs, bosses 3-Star - EBs, bosses 4-Star - EBs, bosses There has to be a compromise somewhere because of how extremely strong Confuse is and because it incurs no aggro to the user. It's not like other forms of control that actually have consequences for sloppy execution or careless use, so it's not only incredibly potent, but also completely safe.

When was this? On Brainstorm? I can look into increasing the delay between the FX telegraph and when the hostless Nictus spawn if it's not enough to react reliably even when looking for it.

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.