SurfD

I could totally see a pair of low HP Hellions Lieutenants being all like "screw you Cape, we offer our blood to Baal as a sacrifice, now DIE", and then they both die and a Behemoth Demon boss spawns in. Same thing could easily work with Circle of Thorns at pretty much any level they exist at. No reason that the "Upgrade to Boss" mechanic needs to necessarily be a "fusion" at all.

Sorry, but this is a pretty bullshit argument. There is ABSOLUTELY no way you are "experiencing the original leveling curve" AND "having plenty of time to get all the things you want to do in" simultaneously without artificially blocking your progress rate by turning off EXP. Literally all of the content in the game is hard locked into 5 level blocks, and even solo with no EXP modifiers, questing through most single zones will easily have you blowing through 5 levels without much problem. Unless you are stealthing through everything and only clicking glowies/killing bosses, and ignoring task forces completely, you will EASILY outlevel probably 2/3s of the content available at any given 5 level block range. And that doesn't even touch on the whole "well don't group for content either" cause that just makes you level faster argument in a social game. Maybe some of us don't actually want to play City of EXP Frozen Social Outcasts. And sorry, but no, turning off EXP is basically a shitty hack of a solution. It does not improve the organic flow of the leveling process (because you just completely stopped leveling), and it also basically gimps your progression since you get no real benefit from turning EXP off. And while Ouro is a somewhat viable alternative, it still doesn't preserve the natural flow of basic contact interaction. Ouro is basically just forced instancing of mission content as you have to return to ouro every time you complete a mission or arc in order to set up and start the next one. To use WoW as an example, since you decided to throw it in for no reason whatsoever: Imagine WoW if every zone had a hard cap on it's level range, and all the quests in the zone simply shut off the instant you outleveled them. What's that? You out leveled this awesome level 20 to 25 zone while you were only half way through it? Nope, sorry, you can't just take your level 26 toon and continue with your questing experience, get lost and bugger off to the next available level 26-30 zone. What? You wanted to continue with the available story in this zone? Ok, but now you have to unlock a special gimmick mechanic through the Bronze Dragonflight so you can warp back in time and experience this zone only at level 20-25. Oh, and you have to repeat the process for every. singe. quest chain. And by the way, only about 3/4 of the quests in the zone are actually available through this mechanic. The rest of them? Well, sucks to be you, maybe you should have disabled EXP when you hit level 25. It makes no sense in WoW. Currently, I can go to any zone I want, at any time I want, and complete any quest I want, and nobody cares that I am a level 90 god stomping the crap out of a level 30 quest zone. It makes no sense in CoH either, for the exact same reasons. Nobody should care that Captain Atomic takes some time out of his busy schedule saving the world from intergalactic threats to beat the tar our of a local level street gang who stand absolutely no chance against him. Basically the only reason this mechanic exists in CoH is to forcibly drive you to the next level range of content, even if doing so could potentially cut you off from a multi part story arc until you get to ouro. Hell, the only reason it possibly needs to exist is because there is the potential of being able to effortlessly curb stomp your way through a low level story arc for a pitiful handful of merits, which is a pretty damn weakass reason, since you can basically do that right now ANYWAY simply by setting the difficulty to as low as it gets before you fire up your Ouro flashback. It won't take a level 40 character noticably longer to stomp their way through a level 20 mission chain than it would a level 20 character with the mission set to -1. And even the argument that new players might end up doing an arc and not realizing they are getting no reward from the critters is weak. I mean, practically everyone who has ever played a role playing game EVER understands that it is possible to outlevel content. You would practically have to be new to the entire concept of how 99% of RPGs work for this to come as a surprise (and somehow I doubt that there are many people who are complete RPG neophytes who also simultaneously managed to discover a MMO as niche as Homecoming), not to mention that the way the conning system works should be brutally obvious to anyone with basic common sense by time they are level 5 or so (what? Grey Mooks give you nothing? Mind. Blown!) CoH is the only RPG I have ever encountered that literally just straight up goes "nope, not letting you do that any more, move along" when you out level content. And there is basically no reason for it to do so.

While we are at it with suggestions, how about normal, feathered bird tails? I mean, we have proper feathered wings, and proper Eagle / Raven heads in the game, but the only bird tail option is the Phoenix? Doesn't quite match theme.

Couple of problems here: Now, I may be wrong, but as far as I know, the game has no checking for "front vs back" positionals, so your Stalker/Scrapper idea wouldn't work. The game literally has no way of knowing if you are in front of or behind a target, only that you are "facing" them. Also, both of those passives would be overkill unless there was some kind of internal PPM on them. Stalkers with permanent 100% to crit from behind would be absolute monsters when paired with any kind of tank, and would feel crazy under-powered when soloing by comparison (where it's basically impossible to get behind something after the first hit), meanwhile Scrappers would basically have a permanent extra 15% chance to crit because they would always be able to stay "in front" of the target, which would kind of be a bit overpowered. Might be viable if there was a PPM rate on the extra crit chance, and it was changed to "target" based? - Scrapper gets their full bonus if the target is targeting the scrapper, reduced bonus if the target is targeting someone else. - Stalker gets their 100% crit chance with a PPM limit when the target is NOT targeting the Stalker, and get a reduced bonus (either lower PPM or Lower Crit % Chance) when the target is targeting them). (reduced bonus helps so the Stalker doesn't get completely boned out of the effect while soloing). As for your Tank replacement, I believe I recall someone mentioning that the combat code does not allow for reflected damage, so Deflecting Flex wouldn't work. Maybe something like "Right Back At Ya", which returns a % of damage that was (or would have been) taken in the last X seconds could work, but I have no idea if it would be possible to code something that, as it would need to be able to figure out damage that COULD have been taken even though it wasn't (since most tanks are built to avoid and mitigate the shit out of everything these days).

How do you determine when Proc chance starts to drop off due to slotted Recharge? For example, with Dark Regen, is there an amount of recharge you could slot for without losing too much proc chance, or is that not really possible due to Dark Regen being a base 30 recharge?

Why though? I mean, the "Inactive" contact list already exists. This is where all of your unlocked contacts go when you out level them. Literally the only difference would be that now, when you hit that call button on them they still have their missions available for you, instead of telling you they are too insignificant for you to bother with.

I don't know. Sometimes the ambushes spawn a little TOO fast. I was doing World Wide Red on my Mastermind, didn't know that one of the missions near the end spawns a Kronos Titan GIANT MONSTER as an ambush when you zone out of the mission. Thing must have spawned practically right on top of me, as it killed most of my summoned minions before I even finished loading the city zone, then proceeded to kill me as I desperately attempted to fly away. Maybe what they need is some kind of Warning Message that could display to let you know an ambush is after you?

I believe the issue he is attempting to address is something like the following: - Ability damage (generally speaking) uses Recharge Rate as it's baseline for determining a power's damage and ignores the "animation" part of the cast time as a factor (not the "arcanatime" as you mentioned, which is basically the "global cooldown" on abilities that prevents you from just activating all your abilities at once). - This means that a power with 12 seconds recharge and a 3 second attack animation has the same damage coefficient as a power with a 12 second recharge and a 6 second animation. - In the above example, both powers will have the same DPA and the same DPS until you reach enough global haste to halve your cast times. - once you hit enough global haste, the power with the 6 second animation is HARD CAPPED in a rotation, as you can not use it more often than it's animation. Meanwhile, the power with the 3 second animation continues to increase in effective DPS/DPA as you continue to increase global haste. - in effect, the 12secRech/3secAnim power has the potential to be significantly more DPS/DPA than the 6secAnim power if you can push global recharge high enough, even though on paper both are "equal" because they are baselined on only their recharge rate.

This is not ambiguous. It means exactly what it says. It does not mention MISSIONS at all. It does not mention MOBS IN MISSIONS at all. It mentions only one thing, the contact. Out leveling a contact is not ambiguous. It is well established that once you exceed a contact's level range, they simply pass you on to another contact in the next range and then stop talking to you entirely unless you have an active story arc. Not out leveling a contact literally means exactly what it says: You can still get missions from a contact once if you have exceeded the 5 level block range they exist in. That is all. And yet you immediately go hareing off into "but what about the level of the missions" and "but the Mobs might eventually turn grey" arguments. AGAIN. I am sorry reading comprehension is difficult for you, but there is no ambiguity here. You simply insist on overthinking the question and then blaming everyone else when they point out that you are over thinking it.

Heck, I would even be happy if they could simply modify the crafting code so that it could treat the contents of Salvage Racks as if they were part of your personal storage while inside the base for crafting purposes. It drives me nuts when I have a half dozen recipes i could craft, but first i have to spend 5 minutes fetching crap out of salvage racks before I can make them.

Umm, the OP was not Ambiguous in any way. They literally had ONE singe proposition in their statement: Being unable to outlevel contacts. There was nothing ambiguous about this at all. And your original reply literally did not address this proposed issue AT ALL. Your entire original reply was basically to complain about issues with Scaling for Difficulty to all level ranges, which had NOTHING to do with what the OP suggested. Like, absolutely nothing. The suggestion in question was simply to allow contacts to keep giving you missions, even if you have out-leveled the contact and their mission range. Scaling for difficulty was never mentioned by the OP. You just assumed he was talking about having all contacts give you missions scaled to your level, when all he wanted was for contacts to still talk to you once you had out leveled them. And quite frankly, there is absolutely NOTHING in the game that actually indicates that having a Contact give you missions well below your level is not possible, as we know for a fact that literally every contact who has a Story Arc will continue to give you missions in that story arc, even well after you have outleveled the arc entirely, to the point where they have no issue handing you missions that cap out at level 15 while you are level 30. All the OP wants is to be able to continue getting missions directly from a contact (regardless of if they are 10 or 30 levels below you and filled with grey mobs or not) instead of having to go through Ouro to flashback them. (Think of it like the equivalent of Superman still taking time out of his day to occasionally stop generic purse snatchers. Everybody wants to insist that he should be doing "bigger" things, but he still does it simply because he can. He doesn't care that the difficulty is completely trivial compared to his current power level). Nothing in the game indicates that this couldn't be done relatively easily, as it most likely simply requires clipping out the code that tells them to stop talking to you once your level is >X.

I commented on this in my thread about streamlining the story experience on the suggestions area, but the Praetorian "story" flow is really pretty badly messed up. The above quoted post has a fairly concise listing of the order everything more or less went down in, but you will notice, for example, that even though the Game can basically pass you directly from First Ward to Night Ward as what appears to be a seamless story arc, there is, infact, around 4 Incarnate Trials and like 2 full zones worth of story arc content (the entire Dark Astoria Incarnate arc + The entire "who will die" set, that takes place between the First Ward and Night Ward stuff.

I doubt bases take up even a fraction of the amount of info space that AE takes up. I mean, think about it: Creating a really elaborate base takes a lot of time and effort, and is going to be well beyond the scope of the needs of the average player. As well, the average player is not likely to have more than 1 base. A single base is more than enough space to set up a a decent sized communal stash for shuffling Enhancements/Salvage around on your alts. So at worst, you might have one SG base for every player in the game, and most of them are just going to be large, mostly empty rooms with a dozen or so containers and maybe the Trainer/Vendor NPC. Maybe slightly higher, but I doubt it. AE on the other hand, a single player can easily have multiple missions, and those missions can easily contain WAY more stuff than a typical SG base.

I think part of the problem is that a lot of contact related missions actually hardcap their level range. For example, it is impossible to actually outlevel a "story arc" conact once an Arc has been triggerd. You will always have access to that contact until you finish the arc. However, lets say that contact exists only in the level 30-35 range. Their missions will actually hard cap at level 35 difficulty. So, say you unlock a 6 mission story arc at level 35, then get sucked into a few Task Force runs because you need those, and end up coming out the other end at level 38. That ENTIRE mission arc will now be basically useless as it will still be locked to level 35, with grey or blue cons. I mean, sure, you could bump yourself up to +4 or something to compensate, but the rewards are still going to be level 35 for mission completion. Now, I can't say for certain that ALL contacts behave the same way (since you out level them and they stop giving any missions other than already started arcs), but I imagine they probably do.

It definitely needs to be some kind of "grant buff with moderately long duration" ability instead of an "aura" that falls off as soon as you are out of range. I mean, you want the ultimate experience in why "group fly" is basically useless? Take a mastermind with all 6 pets, and then try to successfully attack several of the Flying Hamidon seedlings with them using the Group Fly temp power you get after killing one. Your pets will be all over the place falling out of the buff, and trying to move from one seedling to the next without losing half of them is an exercise in masochism. Easiest fix would be to make the "aura" of Group Fly apply a "flight" buff that lasts for around 2 minutes, and refreshes every 10 seconds or so when in the aura.

How about no. Do you have any idea how annoying it is to try to send messages to someone with a Frankenname? Special characters are pretty much the bane of naming in literally every MMO i have ever played. SOOO glad I don't have to deal with that crap in CoH.

Right, but that's the problem, as has been mentioned: Those villains simply don't HAVE that higher scale. Like, take your Council example. There are a few task forces where you run into council (citadel is a good example) and every so often you run into a minion who is like 10 levels lower than everything else in the TF. That is because that minion has a hard cap on his level range. He is hard coded to exist between X and Y level ranges, and even if the content he is spawned in is Y+10, he is still stuck at Y. There are hundreds of mobs in the game with hard coded level ranges like that, which straight up breaks any ability to have them dynamically scale to any level you want. The only solution would be for someone to go through every critter in the game, and make sure it had a full data set for all it's stats for level 1-54, which would likely take wayyyy more time than you might imagine.

Yeah, a lot of it has to do with the thing I mentioned earlier, where the "current state of the world" is always "after the latest big thing". In most MMOs (like WoW), 95% of the "new" content for the "Latest big thing" is restricted to the latest Expansion "world". WoW adds an expansion, expansion comes with whole new set of maps to explore, previous existing areas get maybe an incredibly tiny tweak here or there, but for the most part remain unchanged. CoH on the other hand, major events just re-write giant chunks of the world after every one, but leave story arcs in some locations (like Nightward/First Ward) or certain Task Forces (which are basically fixed level content as far as level ranges go) completely untouched. So you end up with wierdness like playing in a world where Statesman is dead, only to accidentally stumble into a taskforce where he is not, with no real indication that this task force is "previous issue" content, and the like. At the very least, maybe it would be worthwhile to go through a lot of arcs that are heavily dependent on which issue they belong in and making it more clear that "this taskforce or this arc" belong in X issue.

And? Maybe instead of bitching about a readily available way to quickly get around, you could, oh, I don't know, actually TALK TO YOUR BLOODY GROUP? While some of our characters might be psychic, the players sure as hell aren't. We aren't mind readers nor are we able to see the future. If you have TT, tell people, don't just expect them to predict that you will drop it at any given time. Let them know while you are clearing the mission that you have TT available and can pop it when the mission is over. If you just randomly pop it without saying anything, of course half your group is going to be gone to a Supergroup Base before they realize it. This isn't a SG base problem, its a YOU problem. And if people Base Port after everyone already knows TT is waiting, then that is their problem, and they can just catch up as they can.

StarWars is a terrible example to use though. It was 3 distinct arcs, each of which was more or less completely self contained. Besides, despite the fact that they are labeled "episode 1-9", the original release order of the trilogies with "Original", "Prequel", "Sequel" was always the way it was intended, it was never intended to be released in complete chronological order from start to finish. Now try to imagine how well StarWars would have been received if the release order had been something like A New Hope, followed by Return of the Jedi, then a random episode from the First Trilogy, then the entire 3rd trilogy, then another random episode from the First Trilogy, then Empire Strikes back, and the last episode from the First Trilogy. Trying to make any sense of that mess would be maddening.

Wait, what? Since when did it hit the enemy with a CAR? I played a good bit with several toons Brawling the crap out of stuff during that bit, and I never saw a car. The "surprise" bit was always launching them away and then popping them with some kind of firecracker (distinctly different from the Freem Power Torrent blast).

Actually, this doesn't seem to be entirely true. I was just in a Nemesis invasion league that was started by a level 23ish player. When I lamented about my inability to use my higher level powers (Level 50 Stalker), the leader passed me the Star. The max level of the League didn't adjust automatically. I had to manually select one of my own level 50 missions as the "active" mission before it changed the Sidekick/Exemplar settings for the league.

While I agree that referencing events and temopral shenannigans does happen fairly often in the genre (re: See issue #353 bubbles and the like), this is an order of magnitude worse. From a pure player perspective, as you level through the game, it would be like reading a Superman Comic and being explicitly told that "Superman is Dead, Doomsday died killing him" on the first page, and then like 3 pages later with absolutely no explanation randomly encountering Superman stopping a bank robbery (not Clone Superman, or Super Boy, or Steel pretending to be Superman, but actual Superman). And when you ask him about Doomsday, he's like "who?". And then 3 pages after that, seeing Superman and Doomsday dukeing it out on a live televised broadcast, while a second TV simultaneously covers his Funeral. And then 3 pages after that, having everybody gossiping about this new hero in town, who goes by the name of Superman. It goes WAYY beyond just "this happened in a previous issue" kind of things, as 90% of the time the issue date of specific content is never mentioned. I mean, sure, they do occasionally give you the "this content took place in Issue X notice", like with the Praetor Marchand After the Fall arc heroes get, but that doesn't really explain why they just hand you you level 35ish content that actually takes place AFTER several dozen level 50 Incarnate/TaskForce arcs. Like, take the ENTIRE First Ward / Night Ward collected story arcs. As soon as you hit the correct level this can be just thrown at you by having the initiating contact simply pop up in your contact menu, regardless of what faction you belong to, or if you even have the vaguest clue how to get to First Ward in the first place. First Ward (30-35) takes place like 1/3 of the way through the Praetorian story arc, AFTER the entire Praetorian Leveling Experience, several depreciated story arcs, and 3 incarnate trials (level 50 content), and Night Ward (35-40) is like 2/3 of the way through the Praetorian arc, with yet more Incarnate Trials and Arcs in between it and first ward. Yet it's entirely possible to just get handed First Ward content and then segue directly from First Ward to Night Ward without ever discovering that you just skipped a HUGE amount of content that comes before and between both.

I know this is probably WELL beyond the scope of the awesome job the team has done reviving the game, but has anyone ever seriously looked at doing some kind of "streamlining" for the major story content in the game? Specifically, a large quantity of the "incarnate" and "praetoria vs primal earth" content just seems to be a huge mess of a clusterf&@* when it comes to trying to figure out what happens when. I mean, I have seen guides that show you how you could "experience" the full arc of the Praetoria content (from first contact through to fall), and the level ranges are just crazy. Its all over the place with do this level 20 arc, followed by this level 50 strikeforce, then the entire Gold Side leveling experience, then a level 30 Task force, followed by this entire level 30-40 zone, followed by these 3 Incarnate trials, then 2 more low level arcs, then another strike force, then more incarnate content, then back and forth and back and forth. Its an absolutely insane mess and utterly bizzare as, say, a new player just leveling through content where you randomly encounter praetorian arcs that may be completely out of sequence and are completely lost regarding what is going on. I have no idea what a good solution would be. I realize that with the way the game is designed, it probably isn't realistic to try to re-arrange the level ranges of, in some cases, entire zones worth of content to make their temporal flow better in regards to the overall praetorian/incarnate content (and that the game isn't like WoW, where episodic content is restricted mostly to it's own "expansion", but rather the current state of the overall CoH "world" is always considered to be after the events of the latest big thing) but maybe it wouldn't be too difficult to add some kind of "storyteller" NPC attached to an Ouro like interface that could give you all of the relevant stuff in order with level / difficulty adjustments for being soloable might work?

That is rather odd. I have been Rogue on my Stalker for almost a month now doing TF's and groups and I can't ever recall having seen this warning message pop up. Does it only occur when you use an actual "door" to exit the area? Cause I do like 99% of my travel through a Teleport Hub supergroup base.