Apparition

Just a reminder that the weekly scheduled MSR trial will launch from Pocket D in ten and a half hours from now, y'all. You must be level 35+ and have the Member of Vanguard badge to participate. There will be a 200 million INF kill shot prize for the drop ship! I hope to see y'all there.

Interesting. I form raid trials by inviting everyone to my team first, and then sending them to the appropriate team. I never lock the league, nor do I ever lock a team. I've lead two or three instanced mothership raid trials per week since October of last year, and not a single one has ever scrambled teams nor booted players upon zoning into the instance. The worst that has ever happened was that the team numbers were shuffled, but that's only happened twice. Team leaders are all the same, the team compositions are all the same. Hrm.

Yep, they're still there. I see them about once a month, give or take.

Are you locking the league and/or league teams before queuing?

I am the same. I started shortly after Issue 3 launched, when all there was was blue side. When red side was added in Issue 6, that quickly became my new home. I still had some blue side toons to play with my friends that preferred playing blue side before side switching was added, but I much preferred the Rogue Isles. Now all of my toons are Loyalist or Rogue.

Just FYI, on the LFG MSR Raid section, the league being shuffled and people dropping only occurs if you form leagues without working around the league bug, which also impacts zone MSRs and Incarnate trials. It sucks and will hopefully be fixed. But, as I said, it impacts everything that leagues are used for, and there are a couple of different ways to work around it. I've formed and lead over a hundred instanced MSR trials on Excelsior, and what you described has never happened on any of them. https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/19547-how-to-form-leagues-around-the-league-bug/

Yeah. Once you are finished with Neutropolis, go to Imperial City, take the Underground Entrance A to Underground Imperial City, talk to the Doorman, and off to First Ward you go. Then from there you can go directly to Night Ward. I have a level 34 Blaster in Night Ward who has yet to set foot on Primal Earth.

Yep. And I would like to see some new Incarnate content where you have to be in melee range in order to deal any damage. Turn the tables a bit.

Realistically, without malefactoring down and joining someone else’s gold side team (good luck with that), or heading to Pocket D and power leveling, the highest you can get to is about level 40, I am afraid. I went back and re-read all of the AMAs. Paragon Studios wanted to eventually add two new zones to Praetoria. One was a level 40+ zone set in Praetoria’s Neo Tokyo. Tokyo rebuilt after the Hamidon Wars. The last was an Incarnate only zone dealing with Praetorian Hamidon.

You already can. Go to the Announcements forum, and click the Follow button on the upper right hand side, and select to be notified immediately.

I agree. I just brought it up because adding Incarnate level content is not as straight of a win as it would seem.

I agree. However, I don't expect it to happen for a long time, if ever. This is a volunteer team running the game on limited time and resources. Even then, if they do spend some of that limited time and resources on Incarnate level content, not everyone will see it/use it, and some people will get upset. I don't understand it myself, but a lot of people resent the Incarnate system. Heck, Massively OP, which was extremely influential in bringing the game back to us, ran an editorial several years ago stating that the Incarnate system was the worst thing that ever happened to CoH and should have never been added. There were even comments made on that article by people agreeing, saying that the Incarnate system drove them off from CoH. You see similar comments along those lines on the Homecoming forums even.

It gives Controllers something to do. /s

I think that the Incarnate Alpha and Destiny abilities are fine in pre-Incarnate content. I know that if it wasn’t for the Clarion Destiny, I would not be playing Blasters nor any Corruptor, Controller, nor Defender other than Sonic Resonance. I hate getting mezzed that danged much. Actually, people argued to restrict everything else but the Alpha abilities from regular content when it was all first in beta, but Paragon Studio insisted that they were all fine because they assumed that they could and would keep adding more and more Incarnate content to the point that Incarnate PCs would stop playing regular content. But it is what it is now.

You can access the Praetorian story arcs via Ouroboros Flashback as either a hero/vigilante or rogue/villain. Red side is the better side. The story arcs are better, the zones are better, and originally the red side ATs were better than the blue side ATs. I am biased though, as I find blue side mostly dull and boring. But yes, the red side story lines are much better over all. As to why more people aren’t running red side: 1. Blue side is substantially easier. 2. Many people prefer dull and boring. 3. “Everyone is blue side. Since everyone is blue side, I will play blue side as well.”

That would not help I don’t think, because quite a few TFs and SFs have signature AVs or heroes that pretty much require the team leader to be at the highest level for the content or malefactored down. That is why I always wait until I am at least the highest level possible, if not higher, before forming a particular TF or SF.

As someone who admins a large web forum, I can guarantee you that most of the "guest" viewers at any time are bots. As to why they would be interested in the game? They wouldn't. They do have interest in creating forum accounts to try to link to various web sites that sell you iPhones, fancy clothes, drugs, or pirated content though. The web forum that I do admin... about 25,000 bots are automatically blocked per week, mostly from eastern Europe and Asia. I would not be at all surprised if the numbers are the same or higher for Homecoming.

If you go to Z'ha'dum, you will die.

That brings bad flashbacks of seeing all those level 50 Empathy Defenders with only their tier 1 attack back in April/May/June of last year. *Shudder.* The best were the level 50 Empathy Defenders with only their tier 1 attack and the full Medicine power pool...

Well, Hail of Bullets is bugged and is reduced in damage by 70%, and something tells me that it may not be fixed for a while. In the meantime, I need a new Blaster. I would like something that does decent single target damage, decent AoE damage, and isn't Fire Blast. (Not that Fire Blast isn't great, it's the top ranged attack set for a reason. I just find it boring, probably because everyone and their mother plays it.) Any suggestions?

Here is one post, there are others.

They tried it with the Page Four update, and Captain Powerhouse said that it is just too hard coded into the game that it would break it.

I can confirm that Hail of Bullets, at least on Blasters, only does the secondary portion of damage. It completely negates the 70% lethal damage.

Word is, that is why NCSoft canned City of Heroes. When DC Universe Online came out in January 2011, the number of City of Heroes subscribers took a big hit. I know a lot of CoH players didn't/don't like DCUO, but a lot of CoH players did. When Star Wars: The Old Republic landed in December 2011, the number of City of Heroes subscribers took an even bigger hit. It was so bad that CoH was barely profitable. Yeah, yeah. "It was profitable!" Barely. Then when Marvel and Gazillion announced Marvel Heroes in 2012, NCSoft saw the writing on the wall for City of Heroes and decided to close it down before it stopped being even barely profitable to save face. FWIW, I took periodic breaks from City of Heroes to prevent burn out... playing Tabula Rasa, DC Universe Online, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. But I maintained both of my CoH subscriptions during those breaks.

Yep. Look at the Tabula Rasa emulator. NCSoft shut it down in 2009. In 2013, an emulator for Tabula Rasa started up... and when NCSoft got wind of it, they immediately nuked it and salted the earth. That was four years after the shutdown. That's why SCoRE kept Resurgence so secretive, because if NCSoft got wind of it back in 2013, they would have nuked that and salted the earth as well.