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.