Peacemoon

Yep I’ve used that trick too, works really well! I play Earth/storm and there’s a lot you can torture the enemies with behind a wall. Quicksand, rain and earthquake..! As mentioned it’s particularly good at low levels for accuracy. My unslotted aoe immobalise has 95% accuracy on same level mobs that are in quicksand.. it’s amazing! Also as a patch, it doesn’t have a to-hit check itself. I think I only dropped it later on in favour of more diverse powers, and also better slots and bonuses.

Quicksand also has -25% def. The only problem with the power really is it sits in a great set of powers, and takes ages to cast!

People are allowing themselves to be advised because they want what is best for the game and these servers. They understand the HC team have not made this decision lightly. Basically they are acting responsibly putting the good of the community above any personal needs.

Haha! Yes Black Swan it was.. 😆

I just spent almost 2 hours trying to find Black Swan on the Maria Jenkins mission. The one with the floating islands and the heavy fog. I didn’t realise you could enter the big sphere at the back of the map until clearing the whole map and exploring everywhere multiple times! 😞 It gets worse, I am a dark/dark/soul controller and the shadow enemies are resistant to negative. Ahh!!! Help me feel better heroes, what’s the dumbest thing you’ve done on CoH? (Homecoming or live!)

Mind control/illusion control or Mind control/mercs (these soldiers were sent to arrest me.. now they fight for me!) Storm/Empathy might be fun. Although you’d be killing things with gale, lol.

Great reply from r0y. I’m not sure about his ordering in terms of power though. Dark, storm and rad are definitely my favourites.

Peregrine island was effecting my character as well. I went there for the first time after a GM rescued me from Galaxy City and got stuck on the loading screen there too. That was when it become more than just a nuisance and I started running the tests described above. Have to confess I’ve not made any villains yet so hasn’t tried port Oakes.

As for which zone could do with more badges, can I vote for Crey’s Folly? It’s an amazing setting, really dark and gritty. I love the theme of commercial pollution and things gone wrong. I would really love more things to do there.

I’m not aware this is possible, sorry. The only thing I can suggest is changing it into a more obnoxious colour so it’s visible. The colour palette is more limited for nature powers though, but it’s still possible! I seem to remember having mine as a blue/purple on live and had no difficulty spotting it.

Thanks, I was getting close to doing that! quick update: I’ve been able to fix the issue by lowering the graphics down to minimal (and just using some custom options to upgrade character texture in isolation). This has fixed it. It seems to be loading the world zones which my computer can’t always handle. But no idea why Galaxy City... but anyway. I suppose my PC is pretty old, but it does run most games comfortably (like WoW, etc.) on regular settings. If anyone reading this has a similar issue, try lowering your graphics to minimal to see if it will load. If it does (and minimal goes really really low!), then you know where the problem lies. Then you can inch up the settings till you get to a point which works and looks okay.

I really enjoy badges that I can quietly get on with solo in times when I just play by myself (and want to). I really enjoy using Ouroboros to access and play storyarcs and love that you can get badges by doing them. I love it when you get random badges you weren’t expecting! No matter what the criteria is I always find that pretty cool. I know you can get badges for setting different challenge criteria on Ouroboros (like no enhancements, etc) but haven’t quite got into that yet. It’s going to be difficult! Speaking of which it would be so cool if there were more challenge mode badges available outside of Ouroboros. Example doing TFs with no enhancements or buffed enemies, and getting more merits and badges as a result. Same content but at a higher difficulty. I don’t mind some grindy badges. I don’t mind ‘kill 200 vampyrs’. I can tolerate ‘kill 200 Family bosses’, but hate things like 1000 rikti monkeys! Also wouldn’t it be great if you could see more badge unlock requirements ingame? I use a lot of websites to find out accolade requirements!

Update. Have installed CoH on my husband’s PC and have been able to log into Galaxy City on some throwaway alts. So this confirms it’s not network issues, the game per se, or my characters. Am now trying to update my graphics drivers. My graphics card is AMD mobility Radeon HD 5800 series and struggling to find an updated driver. The latest driver we can find is July 2015 🥺

I'm fortunatetly getting a new computer soon within the next week or so (Corona permitting!), so I'll try again then and hopefully it should work. It just felt really random and wasn't sure if this was only effecting me?

Hi Tahquitz, thanks for getting in touch. I've just tried re-validating the files, but still having the same issue when trying to log into Galaxy City. I don't know why as all other zones work fine. It has happened today, and two weeks ago. I have tried on the 64, 32 and safe mode clients. I have raised a support ticket thank you. Would like to figure out what is going wrong as there are some badges from Galaxy City I would like to obtain (for the accolades). Thanks again.

Frosticus is right here. Just to add that AM from Rad is a PBAoE buff on a long recharge, so you wont have to target any allies specifically. It also helps yourself and you're not really expected to get the whole team with it. Poison and Storm both have single target heals which require you to target an ally to fire. Rad and Dark heals are PBAoE around the caster.

Hey, I’m having a recurring issue with trying to zone into Echo: Galaxy City. Everytime I try the loading bar zips up to about 30% complete, and then just hangs until I time out. My character then becomes stuck as every time I try to log into the game the same happens. I run on the 32bit client with just regular graphics settings. Is there something wrong with the zone? A GM kindly rescued my character last time (my brother was keen to see Galaxy City again for old time sake so I travelled there a few weeks ago and first had the issue). I just realised that for the Pupil history badge I need a monument from galaxy city, so thought I’d try again and hope that it wouldn’t happen again... unfortunately it has. The character in question is Svarteir on Everlasting server. Any help would be appreciated, thank you.

Thanks, yes Assault Rifle was issue 0 and I remember it being top tier*! Its interesting how some sets have aged more than others. Rad/ has hardly changed but remains awesome. It’s only weakness really being offensive toggles that can be turned off if you get mezzed, and two powers focused around a dead teammate! Although this makes me want to get Vengeance from leadership just so when I let someone die on purpose fail to keep a valued team member alive, I can activate a chain of powers to buff the team, use their corpse as the host to a nuclear explosion, and then bring them back to life suitable mutated and more powerful! Bit gutted about the flamethrower powers. I still might give /AR a try just for concept, and just try to maximise its strength by loading up on aoe powers for team settings. The nice thing about Homecoming is you can play 2 parallel characters and then just stick with the one you like best, thanks to being able to rename so easily!

Thanks for this. Yes you’re right about the -res Im just being stupid! I've Googled Beam Rifle guides but can’t see any guides on all the powers, if anyone can point me to somewhere I’d be grateful. The newer powersets seem to have powers that interact with each other a lot more, so just trying to get my head around it. Ideally I wanted to skip 2 or 3 blast powers, as wanted to pick up leadership and fighting (my defender is an engineer in an armoured suit - I want him to be tough!). So charged beam is definitely on the block, but not sure about the others. Like you say, each one seems to bring something different to the table. I'm sort of figuring it out as I go along and might just end up respeccing later once I know more. I just like to build!

See I like Beam, and he’s level 11 with Beam at the moment. I don’t argue that it seems to have stronger ST damage and debuffs but.. Rad/ already has strong debuffs, is it necessary? I like the idea of more aoe attacks in a team setting Im still trying to get my head around disintegrate - is there a guide anywhere about how to make best use of how this power interacts with the others? What are the most skippable powers in /Beam? Thanks both.

Hi all, I know strictly speaking both are viable sets, but could anyone list the pros and cons of each and how they compare? I have a theme in working on with Rad as primary. I like the idea of the beam rifle but I also like the idea of a flamethrower focused assault build. Any tips and tricks people could share? Im really hoping to be able to add quite a few pool powers, so the more I a can skip but still be effective at core jobs, the better. I’m going to be looking at some possible builds myself now.

Its noisy because it keeps casting the single target immobalise, which has a 4 second recharge and does low DoT damage. To be honest the pet would be more effective if the recharge was made 15 seconds or removed completely. The immobalise is the howl it does!

Skippable would be: Stone Prison, although useful when soloing, especially at low level. Quicksand, although the -25% defence and auto hit is a great way of buffing your accuracy on high level mobs before doing your aoe controls. But it is not needed and has a long cast time. Salt Crystals, because Earth has so much control this is largely superfluous. For AoE control your best power is Stalagmites and then Stone Cages // Earthquake and Stone Cages (particularly as Stone Cages does not prevent knockdown anymore) // Volcanic Gases. So thats 3 AoE lockdowns on seperate cooldowns. Also Earth Controller is extremely powerful with -Def. Almost every power does -20% Def (largely not commented on/forgotten), which makes it the ultimate facilitator in terms of lockdown and setting up for your allies to obliterate everything.

Call of the Sandman has always done this with aoe sleeps. I didn’t play beyond issue 21 and this proc was firing multiple times many moons ago. We can argue as to whether it’s balanced or not, but it firing multiple times is not a result of PPM. It has always done this, as I used it on live in mass hypnosis before these proc changes. It is % chance to trigger for each target hit by sleep. Personally I agree with other posters that this is not a warranted change, unless it’s much more powerful now procs have changed to PPM. I never used to get healed for 50% due to this proc. It was always in the region of 5-20%. Which was quite nice for my mind/storm with no self heal. Given how powerful other procs can be in other powers, this is a strange choice to change, unless it’s the start of a much wider proc review. The build up proc in tactics uses the same mechanism as call of the sandman. Whereby if you’re in a full team you are getting the build up much more frequently than if you are solo. Like how Sandman heals more frequently in an aoe power rather single target.

Agree here and this matches my experience. Big teams are often very steamrolling the mobs. Other than placing down a tar patch or a freezing rain there is rarely time to do much. However my memory is this is exactly how the game was when live. I never played after about issue 21, but IOs definitely made a difference, but they did make the game more fun also. Also remember we have people with amazing builds farming solo +4/x8 maps. Well, if most ATs are capable of doing that solo, imagine what 8 players could do, even if they aren't all capped out? Of course I've also joined lots of teams, particularly at low level, which have not been that great and there have been lots of wipes (old school teams I think of them!). In a strange way the game can be more before level 25. There are quite a few ways the HC team could increase the challenge to the game. This is probably worthy of its own thread but these would include: 1: New content designed specifically for small teams of 4. By capping the players to 4 you force teams to make some sort of decisions about what types of characters you want. In keeping with CoH's amazing gameplay, you would need to make sure that there are a thousand ways of completing the content. I.e. no 'requirement' for a tank. 2: Increase the amount of enemies able to spawn from x8 to like, x16 (not sure how feasible this is). Even if you can't increase the spawn sizes due to mechanics, maybe just make spawns 100% bosses at x16. 3: Disable things like incarnates when doing challenge content. I've never had incarnates, but there seems to be a consensus it is unnecessary power creep.. Really with this our imaginations (and the flexibility of code!) are the only limits to what is possible. I tend ot favour solutions which wont blanket effect the entire game. Its sort of nice if 'regular CoH' plays like it always did and as woudl be expected, but that there are options to either overtune or access super challenging stuff to increase difficulty and rewards. Oh I just thought of a new idea. More rewards for completing a TF with a small group of no more than 4, and/or certain affixes applied. I think ouroboros arcs you can stipulate no inspirations, no enhancements, etc? Imagine if you could turn those sort of affixes on for double or triple the merit rewards for a TF? Yes it might not be the most efficient farm, but it would unlock some very challenging options and give people a bit of an incentive to suffer it as well!