Faultline

RMT is a thing, which Homecoming already has to deal with a fair bit. Paying real money to skip large portions of a game has become the norm in the microtransactions era, so a lot of players don't even see a problem with it, but we are not going to be adding anything that costs large amounts of influence that encourage people to head to the nearest RMT seller to acquire.

This is the most important advice on this thread. I keep seeing messages from players saying the ASF is too hard because of the exploding Brickernauts and instant-death patches -- which explicitly don't exist in the base difficulty. These are not your standard difficulty settings, they actually change how the fights work.

I would make a modificaton to the above to use time since the first obelisk is hit, rather than time elapsed in the mission. Otherwise you can zone in, watch an episode of something on TV, and come back to do the trial with vastly reduced ambushes.

The formula can be tweaked easily and without a patch, so feel free to drop feedback on that; there are 16 spawns on the map that are eligible to detach, so it's not difficult to come up with a table of ambush chances that covers all 64 possibilities (1-8 obelisks, 1-8 players). Doesn't need to be a simple additive formula either, feel free to go nuts.

Fastest run has now dropped to 18 minutes. Median on all difficulties (not just Malicious) currently sits at 98 minutes. Mission5 (the ripples one) has predictably the largest variance, going between 304 seconds for the fastest run, 33 minutes median, to over 9 hours for the slowest (though most likely someone just went to sleep and left their character AFK in the mission; this is why we take the median and not the average).

The secret battle reward never required no deaths, we're not that evil.

Next patch, and because the expectation was that killing the AVs for extra rewards would be the normal path, but nobody's doing that, so just killing the 12 AVs is enough extra effort for the badge, no need to add the no deaths condition.

Median, not average. Floating around 60 minutes at the moment. Will likely go down as people get used to it.

Well the ambush chance is dropping to 1/4 of current on the next patch, so if you want a crazy ambush fest, do it now. The current chance is 1% * obelisks * players, every 30 seconds, on 16 spawns -- that ended up being waaay too much. It's being dropped to 0.25% * obelisks * players.

The TF can be completed in as little as 27 minutes (actual datamined time) in the lowest difficulty, so the 40 merits aren't out of line; it'll go up some but those expecting 100+ merits at once on completion will probably be disappointed. On Relentless it can certainly take two hours, but then each AV drops 3 astral merits (5 astrals convert to 1 empyrean, 1 astral converts to 2 merits) so you're talking 6 extra merits per AV fight starting on the very first mission. Mission 5 alone has 12 AVs, that's 36 astrals / 7 empyreans / 72 merits right there. You can currenly start the ASF on Relentless, fight to mission 5, quit, and still walk away with the equivalent of 100 merits; if those were moved to mission completion instead, you would get nothing. Players will just need to get used to the idea of getting the reward over time during the course of the TF rather than a massive bulk payout in the end.

Those are the death puddles left on the ground after a Shimmering Essence spawns, is left alone 30 seconds, and is absrbed by Ripplesurge. They don't spawn at all on Villanous. The blue orbs from the King Midas fight should be just as bad, and also don't spawn on the default difficulty setting.

The letterboxing code ignores the window size and just renders the bars up to 3000 pixels horizontally for some reason. Fine for up to 1080p, not enough for 4K. Fixing next patch.

You're insane. Good job!

Confirmed, the "No Epics" challenges are trying to reward the badges NoEpicPowersSL8 and NoEpicPowersSL9 which don't exist. It should be rewarding NoEpicPowersatSL8 and NoEpicPowersatSL9.

The clue should still award after mission completion, just get her to the computer.

To my knowledge, nothing changed about them. But that arc is getting a minor revision in January, so I'll add a note to check the NPCs.

Not intentional, but not fixable either: the timer type used for those buffs was changed to one which doesn't tick while the powers are disabled, but apparently that means any time remaining on the original timer type is ignored.

That is because the Boss version of Minotaur/Cyclops (regular and incarnate alike) are currently ignoring rank reductions; they spawn as Bosses even when the difficulty settings dictate they should spawn as lieutenants. This is a bug and will be fixed, critters should not ignore rank reduction outside of Task Forces and explicit exceptions.

That is very strange, what is your character name and server? I need to pull it from the database to see if I can reproduce this behavior.

All the story arcs are getting their merit rewards revised when we're back from break, so this is only going to be annoying and painful during December. There's many arcs that reward no merits because they have an attached reward table (everything in Dark Astoria, the Incarnate arcs, the SSAs) and all those reward tables need to be found and modified. We just ran out of time.

"Can't" is probably putting too much faith in the fix. But it should at least stop the most common cases of using high FOV and cutscenes to trick the cursor into teleporting you into an unreachable spot.

Wiki is incorrect, reward is working as intended. 3-34: 160 merits, 27-48: 120 merits, 51-69: 70 merits, 72-99: 50 merits, grand total 400 merits.

That arc is maximum level 45. The badge is only for arcs that are maximum 50. Try one of the Brickstown arcs, the first one I know works for sure because it's how I got them.

Correct, Sister Solaris is an incarnate arc, but it was using non-incarnate versions of those enemies. The main difference is that they have higher tohit.

Tasks Cavern of Transcendence Revamped spawns to scale with team size. The obelisks now drop Take a Breather again. The map now has a minimap. Known issue: didn't get pigged. Will be on the Staging patch later today. Critters Minions of Igneous Tweaked the FX of the critters slightly to add variety; previously, minion/lieutenant Magmites and lieutenant/boss Pumicites looked identical. Powers Seismic Blast Fixed Descriptions of Seismic Blast attacks to state they grant two stacks of seismic pressure. Added ShowInInventory and ShowInManage parameters to Seismic Blast's Redirect powerset (both set to False). This should stop showing the list of redirect powers in the Power Management screen. Increased the duration of the CancelMods effects in Seismic Stress Release to match the Lifetime of Shockwaves Buff (45s). This should prevent Seismic Pressure from building up while Shockwaves is active. Set Free to True and DoNotSave to False for Shockwaves Buff. This should fix the Training bug experienced when Shockwaves is active while leveling up. Stone Armor Fixed the description of Geode. Temporary Powers Coral Amulet (reward from the Renault SF) now summons the correct entity. It was using the actual villain critter, limited to levels 24-31, instead of the pet critter which covers the whole 1-54 range.