Cobalt Arachne

That's a little different, if they're not there that's due to players being nearby when the zone loads. They won't spawn in that situation until all players have moved far enough away to unload the spawn trigger. (This won't happen on live servers because all zones are loaded before players are allowed in) If you destroy a living dummy/pylon it should re-spawn immediately once the spawn is set to active; If you just destroyed one and it doesn't respawn quickly (10 second timer), let me know.

Which body type? Weapon FX are separate per body type so I'll have to look at the specific ones.

This is currently a technical engine limitation, unfortunately. Back items don't take scaling, so the weapons are not able to be aware of any body slider changes. If that were to change in the future with code improvements, I'd redo all the weapons to take advantage of it, but at this moment not something that's doable.

For balance changes, yes. For pet recipes, no; Mostly because there is an existing pet that is basically a mini Winter Lord already.

I can look into this; You mentioned it's just the Minion-class Vanguard costumes that have this issue?

What I'm reading is more that many players take issue with there being any kind of bias towards a defined team structure at all, not the requirements or rewards.

If the consensus here is that this change will be a negative for the game, we can simply remove the free bonus and drop this feature. The sense I'm getting from reading feedback is that many feel like any attempts to influence the nature of team assembly is antithetical to the nature of City of Heroes.

I don't believe that the x2 Boosters are the ONLY cause of the imbalances, just one of the various factors, it's a complex game with many facets. The team has been having on-going discussions regarding the difficulty of maintaining an SO build while leveling due to various factors. A bit off-topic now, can't say much else yet because decisions about that aren't made, but we're absolutely aware of that Influence deficit and are looking for solutions.

Disagree, that is not an alternative suggestion because it does not achieve the same goal. ATs are not roles. Simply bringing 5 different ATs does not promote healthier team composition balance because all five could technically be the same one or two roles.

If you've got alternative suggestions on any names that communicate the bonus's goal and function, I'd love to hear them! The name can be changed effortlessly, it's a single string to adjust; If somebody has a better sounding idea, please let me know. 🙂

That's fine, if you'd like to suggest an alternative solution to mine that would achieve the same design goals then go ahead I'd love to read it, otherwise I will disagree with you on your point. I believe our players are smart enough to understand the context of the game and know through common-sense that the main roles one is expected to perform when joining a team of strangers does not equate to them being the only things a character can possibly contribute.

As the designer, I spent the time creating the recipes, the mini pets models, and the drop system for the purpose of supporting the Giant Monster system and making it more rewarding for those who like fighting Giant Monsters, ending with it giving them a unique sourced drop they can market to other players. If you can get these rewards by doing non-Giant Monster content, that throws the entire purpose of this feature out the window. Giant Monsters are already one of the most popular activities in the game, despite the fact they reward very little for the relative time spent; So that doesn't really apply here.

Not a simple problem to solve due, one of the primary reasons that low level players are so poor is that Double Experience Boosters turns off their Influence gains and so, as a result, they have no money to buy SOs. Changing boosters is a very complicated/touchy affair, as they're already quite the controversial topic to begin with. We could suggest players not default to using the Double Experience Boosters if they want to earn Influence, but we sort of know how that goes because we're having the Influence problem in the first place.

I've added a level 50 dummy to the level ranged area, and also added dividers so that it's not possible to accidentally hit more than one with AoEs.

So let me explain the reasoning behind this free bonus: In most MMOs on the market, they function with the holy trinity of Tank / DPS / Healer. However, City of Heroes does not function this way, and rather has a more diverse set of roles that players take while playing on a team together. This new bonus is to help guide players who are unfamiliar with City of Heroes to the basic fundamentals of team building and archetype roles, and then giving a small reward to teams that are inclusive and bring every type of player role. Perhaps the name of the reward should be changed to 'Role Inclusivity Bonus'? From experience, chasing rewards can oftentimes work better than tutorials for guiding players to more natural success in their gameplay, so that's why this was decided. Lastly, it puts a little more Prismatic Aether into everyone's pocket for minimal effort, which helps new players by virtue of being able to convert it to influence on the AH which also stimulates the player economy and also teaches new players to utilize the AH while working on their characters. For a new player, a single Prismatic Aether could potentially fund their entire build on SO enhancements; Extremely valuable for somebody just starting out. FAQ: The roles were chosen so that the full classic team of all five Hero or Villain archetypes would complete the free bonus; This is reflected in the challenge icon. One role per AT for simplicity & fairness; There are too many ATs that would count for more and others that would count for less. Epic ATs count for three roles because their inherent powers all deal with teams, so this makes them extremely appealing for team invites and is in-line with their design goal. Corruptors are listed as Damage because their Inherent power, Scourge, only deals with doing more damage, not support. This free bonus was not in any way an attempt to sway or influence Advanced Mode team compositions; This free bonus reward is far too low to have any kind of impact on regular runners of that content. This free bonus is not an attempt to disrupt the City of Heroes element of 'any team can work', because while that's always been true... 'any team can work well' has never been a guarantee and there have been plenty of teams I've joined that have been rough experiences because the composition just wasn't considered while forming the team. While lopsided teams can always work, they shouldn't be considered the ideal or baseline experience to strive for giving our new players.

This would not work because it would mean that people who have amassed lots of Prismatic Aether in the past could simply buy hundreds of new pet recipes the moment the patch goes live instead of actually participating in defeating any of the newly re-tuned Giant Monsters. The point is to promote the new content, if people who have amassed currency from the past doing other activities can simply buy-in to new rewards without participating in the new content, that defeats the purpose of the incentive.

That's a fair concern! The dummies and training pylons are set to respawn within a few seconds; Let me know if they're not immediately respawning upon defeat. Instanced dummies... That's something we can look into but won't be Page 7.

There shouldn't be much difficulty in adding that; I'll look into it.

I'll look into getting this fixed. Thanks for the report!

There's a hard technical limitation there... All Aether costumes have to run on player sequencers, which is what allows them to execute and animate all powers that players can possibly access. For non-humanoid models, if they cannot activate a power because their sequencer doesn't have animation compatibility, the game will simply not allow the activation of the power at all. TLDR: Non-humanoid models cannot activate many player powers, which means they're not compatible as Aether costumes.

The surface's functional test dummies are tooled towards the level 50 player environment, which is typically when players are caring about/running number tests. At least personally, I haven't seen players who are still working on leveling that are also focusing much on their numerical benchmarks.

Lightning was an error on the patch notes; It's already been corrected to 'Murder of Crows'. Sorry for the mix-up!

The Clockwork Blaster setup currently only works for right-hands at this time but we'll be looking into expanding that to both hands.

The new currency was added as "bad luck protection" so that it's not possible for a player who wants a pet recipe to fight many Giant Monsters without ever getting one. For those who don't care about the pet recipes in any capacity, the conversion option was added so they can convert it to something else. Also the name of the salvage was already shortened to "Prismatic Aether", it's in the Page 7 patch notes.

It will be less noticeable in the costume editor but more so in-game when in dark locations. Try them out in Atlas Park at night and you'll notice the difference.