Apparition

Oh, I don't farm because I like it. I farm to give away hundreds of millions of INF per week on top of funding my builds, (which average around a billion INF). I just dislike marketeering even more than I do farming.

I occasionally half-AFK farm on Torchbearer during the day (sue me), and I have lately repeatedly seen a few hours of LFG chat just be one or two people repeatedly ask for a team every ten minutes. Not announcing that they're forming a team, announcing that they're looking for a team. It's counter-productive. Now, I'm not saying that they'll get a full team if they announce something in LFG on Torchbearer (or Indomitable or Reunion), during the workday. That's just not going to happen. But if you announce that you're forming something, I bet that you'll get a couple. Enough maybe for a team of four after a bit of recruiting. Instead they just keep asking for a team for hours. It's actually depressing. Agreed on inner cliques and isolation within those cliques. They're a real problem, especially on smaller shards. Those shards are dying, and people still insist on only playing and recruiting within their cliques. Then they wonder why no one outside of their cliques are on the shard, and why people even within their cliques are slowly disappearing...

IMO, Torchbearer and Indomitable need to merge with Everlasting. That would have two shards that peak at around 1,100 players each during American prime time on the weekends, and Reunion for a shard in Europe. I don’t think that it will ever happen though as, IIRC, it was stated a couple of years ago that no shard would ever be closed.

Brute is good for a first character. If he likes the game after that, then I'd recommend Mastermind to ease him into learning a support role as well, to see the other side of the game.

That depends. Personally, I dislike the fantasy genre a lot, and I abhor PvP. For me in the MMOG genre, that leaves: Champions Online, DC Universe Online, The Secret World, Star Trek Online, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Champions Online has terrible mechanics, been in maintenance mode since around 2010, and has a ton of lockboxes. DC Universe Online is a bad console port with hardly any features that you'd expect in a PC game, and it's plain as day that the PC was an afterthought at best. The Secret World has been in maintenance mode since 2017 or so. Star Trek Online has a ton of lockboxes, and the Star Trek IP itself jumped the shark back in 2017 IMO. Star Wars: The Old Republic is clearly in its last days as it doesn't have anywhere the size of development staff nor budget that it had several years ago (see the 10th anniversary debacle), and pretty much requires a monthly subscription to play. Against those five MMOGs, I'd say that Homecoming can compete. Will it, probably not.

Yeah. And I have. The responses usually go around the lines of: "I'm just too busy for gaming these days." Legitimate. Life happens. Nothing you can do there. "I've already done it all at least a thousand times. Every thing you can possibly do in the game, I've done more times than I can count. I've moved on." "Homecoming has made the endgame too easy. People only do Incarnate trials because they want to, not because they need to." "Too many people only farm." "City of Heroes is just too old now. There are tons of newer, more modern, and better looking games out there. Why would I want to continue playing a dead eighteen year-old video game? Really, you should come join us in DC Universe Online/Final Fantasy XIV/Guild Wars 2/SWTOR/whatever the new hotness is now instead."

I 110% agree. A friend of mine posted a suggestion last year that the AE buildings in Atlas Park and Mercy Island should be closed, and I agree. I also think making double XP free was a mistake. Make it available sure, but make it cost something like 5 million INF a hour... so if you do it, you can afford a build later.

Yep, that's what it is. Another five will get you to 40.

Nope, not that I'm aware of. I do pretty much the same as you... run Kalinda's story arc in Mercy Island, ding level five, and then run five laps of an asteroid fire farm. Ding level 33.

I'm seeing talk elsewhere advising players new to City of Heroes that Excelsior is the only shard/server in all of City of Heroes (Homecoming, New Dawn, Rebirth, and Thunderspy), worth playing on because "even Everlasting is low pop now." This can't be good for the health of the game nor the game's community overall. I think we can all see that the overall Homecoming population is down to about half of what it was a year ago, which has nearly killed a couple of shards. What suggestions can you come up with to help recruit new players?

Doing the mission "Disable the Syndicate Office" in Nova Praetoria from Clockwork A87952. The last mission objective is: "Recover any Syndicate weapons." I hear the glowie... but it's inside a staircase, and is unclickable. It's the last objective so it's on the mission map, so to be sure I checked... and sure enough, the glowie is indeed inside a staircase, making the mission incompletable. FWIW: Zone/Mission: P_Office_30_Layout_03_03 Position: [181.8 18.1 1625.4]

Yeah. Torchbearer's population seems to be higher than Indomitable... up to twice as much... between around 11 A.M. ET and 11 P.M. ET, and then nose dives to lower than Indomitable's population. Seriously, unfortunately, Torchbearer is completely dead late at night and in the morning Eastern Time the past couple of months.

Nope, he doesn't. If Caleb is not defeated during the night, he'll just go invisible during the day and come back out at night. Tested and proven, multiple times.

Excelsior has a... reputation among the people that play on other shards. A not entirely undeserved one. Mainly that PUGs will just up and quit in the middle of TFs, SFs, and trials for no apparent reason and without warning. It's honestly one of the main reasons why I moved from Excelsior to Torchbearer thirteen months ago as it happened to me when I PUGed way too often. I made a thread ranting about it a couple of years ago. A few Torchbearer shard players that moved to Excelsior within the past several months have moved back to Torchbearer, saying the exact same thing. Sure, you'll be able to fill TFs, SFs, and trials, and at a quicker pace, but by the end of it you may have only five players. The reason being that people have reputations on the smaller shard and can't get away with doing stuff like that too often. On Excelsior, it's like the big city where no one knows anyone else, so you can get away with doing stuff like that. So some people are preferring to stay on the smaller shards and not deal with that. YMMV.

The two exceptions to that are Ghost of Scrapyard in Sharkhead (he'll despawn after a half hour), and the Arachnos Flier in Grandville.

I know that soloing a Mastermind gold side is unwise. Praetorian ambushes completely ignore your henchmen and lock right onto your Mastermind itself, leading to a very dead Mastermind. Despite this, I attempted soloing all of Praetoria on a Thugs/Time Mastermind a few months ago. Got up to level thirteen, and did the second Resistance Warden morality mission, "Mind Freedom." I believe the difficulty was set at -1x3 IIRC. Here's how that went: I chose to side with the Resistance and help Seer 1381/Katie Douglas. I was ambushed and overwhelmed by T.E.S.T. squads. Died. Went to the hospital, came back to the mission. There were even more T.E.S.T. squads, and they came to the door. Died. Went to the hospital, came back to the mission. Ate a purple, entered the mission. There were a whole bunch of T.E.S.T. at the door, and they aimed right at me. Before my henchmen even finished loading into the mission (which takes about six seconds), my Mastermind was dead. Went to the hospital, came back to the mission. Ate another purple, entered the mission. Dead. Rinse, repeat literally nine more times until I gave up and deleted the Mastermind in frustration. Any suggestions of how you'd handle that situation differently? Now, generally I'm not one to ask for help. Never have been. But even if I wanted to, I couldn't as this was a solo morality mission. So that's out the window. I could have ate a dozen more inspirations just prior to entering the mission, but even then there were so many mobs I don't even think my henchmen would have survived being spawned into that. I figure though that I'm missing something and I know that I'm far from the best player in the game, so I'm curious.

Right now, on Brute Electric Armor, Grounded provides mag six immobilization protection while on the ground. Please increase it to ten, and twelve for Tankers. Six is just not enough, considering that you only have it on the ground and still get immobilized by everything under the sun. Combat Jumping is pretty much a requirement for the additional immobilization protection, unlike just about every other armor that offers immobilization protection and theirs is not limited to being only on the ground.

Thor and Star-Lord are both children of gods, (sort of?)

@SwitchFade went through and deleted every build and guide he or she ever posted several months ago, as well as every post with any build advice. It makes some threads like this one difficult to read, but c'est la vie.

Out of curiosity, did the TF leader use the Long Range Teleporter or base teleporter from inside the "Defeat the Clockwork Lord and His Minions" mission?

LFG queuing into a zone has its own host of problems, unless you type /teamquitinternal each and every time you use it. If you don't type /teamquitinternal each and every time you use the LFG queue to go to a zone, there's a chance that it may cause either a "BlockingAccept" error when someone tries to invite you, or an "unable to join your team" error. That's why I'm glad that more people don't know about using the LFG queue to travel to zones. I do not play blue side. All of my characters are either Rogues or Loyalists. For the Rogues, when I form a team, I tell people that they have to come to the zone first before I invite them. If I want to join someone else's team, then I either use LRT or the LFG queue (followed by /teamquitinternal), and then send a tell asking to join. As someone who doesn't play blue side, it's caused some issues. Mostly people being impatient asking me, "Why can't you invite me now?!" But nothing major. Still, it'd be nice to see a fix. From what I've been told, that alignment jankiness is the best the system can handle. The original goal by Paragon Studios was to make the hero and villain alignments work like vigilante and rogue now, and be able to go back and forth between all zones and do TFs and SFs. Vigilantes and rogues would be able to actually start and play story arcs on the other side and become essentially the other alignment when in the other side's zones. But it couldn't be done, alas.

None.

On the other hand, Psi damage eats Reichsman and Hero 1 for breakfast. I was on an all VEAT Dr. Aeon SF last night. IIRC, six Widows (Fortunatas and Blood Widows), and two Soldiers. Hero 1 absolutely melted under all of the Psi damage from the Widows.

Also, FWIW, most good Dominator players that I know stay pure villain for the Frenzy alignment power. It's the one truly useful alignment power, especially for Dominators. So The Hive locks out a lot of Dominators.

Do you have any idea at all how blue side privileged the quote above reads? "The Abyss is too far away for pure Heroes to get to conveniently, so people should only raid Hamidon in The Hive. Who cares if villains can't get in? If they don't change their alignment, they're just lazy and need to pay the price." Yes, a zone that all alignments can access is just too far away for the heroes, but for a zone that villains can't access at all? Well, they just have to change alignment, or they're lazy. FWIW, the SG I co-lead on Torchbearer runs Hamidon raids in The Abyss every Saturday. I led the Hamidon raids myself two Saturdays ago. You're, and anyone else for that matter, are welcome to attend. We start forming at 1:45 P.M. ET/10:45 A.M. PT/7:45 P.M. CET.