Zhym

This is fantastic. A deep drive down memory lane! I assume that making quote tags work is somewhere in the to-do list. It'd also be cool if we could link directly to posts. (I just stumbled across Positron's "All that crap is grey to me, no XP" post, for example. I can link to the thread, but not the post.) And it'd be really great if the archive had the same look and feel as the old forums, for extra strong nostalgia sake, but I'm just getting greedy now. :)

He's Vet Level 215 and my badger (and my profile image on the forums), so I guess that means he's my "main": I ran him through almost all the blueside and redside as he leveled, pausing XP along the way and using tip missions to do the alignment changes. I've played this toon a lot (Madeleine in Atlas Park tells me I've played him for a total of 1,047 hours, though some of that was AFK farming for a damage taken badge). As for why I've played this toon so much, I think it's because the toon hits the magic combo of theme and being fun to play. "70s Man" is a concept I can run with in RP when I feel like it, and DP/MC is an absolute hoot to play.

Thanks, but I wouldn't know what to do with it (other than buy Aether to get mini mode, of course). And I mean that literally: where do people with that kind of scratch even keep it? Mail? Alts that are nothing but inf mules? Market bids for items that no longer exist?

I have a Nature MM I really like, and a Sonic Defender who debuffs really well, so I recently figured hey, why not roll up a Nature/Sonic Defender? I will be heavily copying this build, so thanks! One question about Entangling Aura, which I really enjoy on my Nature MM. I take it this build doesn't have it because it doesn't really fit the support role, but if you had to give up a power for EA, what would you drop?

Whirlwind would make them scurry...but it doesn't scan.

I'm trying to work up some lyrics, but so far I'll I've got is: Trolls and Skulls and Lost gonna scurry When I take them out with my Flurry When I take them out with my Flurry with the Rage on top That's it. And, really, "Flurry" isn't the power to strike fear in the hearts of bad guys.

Okay. First “The Farmer and the Cowman,” and now this? Are people just trolling for @Oklahoman likes now? ’scuse me, all. I’m going to go see if there’s a post where I can reply with “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” and be on-topic.

Yeah, that's the part I was hoping to avoid.

Does that mean making sure that slot 6 in tray 2 has whatever the current incarnate slotted power is? If so, I'm not quite getting how that's better than what I'm doing now, which is moving my active incarnate power to the tray slot once I've made the power active. Or am I missing something?

Is there any way (e.g., a fancy macro) to have a power tray slot activate whatever power happens to be slotted, as opposed to being tied to a specific power? For example, one of my toons has Ageless, both Barriers, a Clarion, and an Incan for the Destiny ability. If I try to put each of those powers in a power tray, that's five power tray spots, only one of which can be active at a time. It'd be great if I could just have a power tray slot for whatever Destiny power happens to be active. Is that something that's currently possible? Or should I be posting this as a suggestion?

I don't think so—but you can also start the SSAs through the LFG tab (under "Story Arcs").

Fair point. I'm probably thinking more in terms of badge runs, which do seem to have a more limited set of people who run them—probably because badge runs must be a PITA to run given how susceptible many of them are to griefers. Speaking of which, I know you don't do Keyes and Underground trials. Am I right that it's also been ages since you ran a TPN, or have I just not been on at the right time?

Did you miss the part where I said "after you've built all the Alpha slot powers you need?"

I'd quibble a bit both with the premise that Homecoming losing so many players is a huge problem and with the conclusion that the way to get them back is to add more things to grind for. Yes, Homecoming doesn't have as many players as it had in March 2020. No surprise there: it was "new" again, and most of us were home all day because of the pandemic. Homecoming will never have that many players again. Is that a problem? Well, I play almost exclusively on Excelsior, where it still doesn't take long for TFs and iTrials to fill. Hami raids and MSRs are also routinely full. And of course there's all that content that can be played solo. If Homecoming's population drops to that of a ghost town, I'll still be incredibly grateful that I could log into that ghost town and play all that solo content that I missed so much after NC Soft took it away. But the loss of players is felt a bit around the edges. Less popular activities, like Hami Bud "raids" in First ward and Recluse's Victory runs, don't seem to happen as often than they used to. And we're increasingly reliant on a handful of players who run iTrials on a regular basis. If @Oklahoman, @STiTcH, and @Confusion got bored with the game and left, parts of the game would practically collapse. Excelsior would be...well, like most of the other shards. Fortunately, they don't seem bored with it yet. And there's plenty of stuff to do even when there isn't a raid or an iTrial going. By another metric, Homecoming's population is just fine: they're still getting enough donations each month to pay the bills, and getting them fairly quickly. Homecoming is never going to be the next big thing, even if talks to have legitimate use of the IP eventually resolve. Maybe it's okay that it's a niche game that a few hundred people love and no one else cares about. But suppose we grant the premise that population loss is bad. I really don't think it's a lack of locked content or enough things to grind for that's keeping people away. And adding NPC costumes that are locked behind a new currency isn't going to bring anyone back. Personally, I think Homecoming's biggest barrier to population growth is that it's gotten kind of unfriendly to new players. I don't mean "unfriendly" in that we're intentionally hostile and mean when a new player shows up, but the way the game is structured now isn't really newbie friendly. For example: just yesterday, someone who joined a Hess TF asked how to get to Striga, and it took me a moment to remember the smuggler's submarine and where it is, because what I usually do is use the macro to hop to the Excelsior Transportation Zone base and use a teleporter there. Until recently, using LFG to get to Cimerora quickly was another piece of arcane knowledge kept from the uninitiated. And don't get me started again on Homecoming's weird economy, which new players can't possibly be expected to understand unless someone explains it to them. Someone who wants to try this game they've heard about, where you can be a superhero and fight bad guys, is quickly going to become lost in what Homecoming is now. NPC costumes locked behind a new currency doesn't solve any of that. In fact, it makes it worse by complicating the game even further. What would bring more players in? Beats me, and this post is too long already. New content is always good, but new content has just turned into the next thing to farm (see: Aeon, which is just full of wonderfulness and challenge but is usually just sped through for the rewards. The only reason people do the AWESOME Hero 1 fight now is because it rewards Aether...so I guess I'm glad Aether exists, if just for that). And because I think it's mostly casual players we're losing, adding more hard modes isn't the solution either. Maybe there isn't a solution. Maybe that's even okay.

So I'm exploring Kallisti Wharf, and I hop to the top of the hospital and notice this: CMH? Cole Memorial Hospital? Sure enough, that's the same logo the hospitals in Praetoria have. Is there something about Kallisti Wharf they haven't been telling us? Yes, I know that the boring answer is "asset reuse." But I like conspiracy theories better.

And incarnate shards are right there, sitting around with nothing to do after you've built all the Alpha slot powers you need.

The idea that purely cosmetic things like costumes are something that need to be "earned" through game play, as opposed to just being a new, cool thing players can do, seems to be a philosophy shift. There used to be lots of things in Live you had to earn, mostly through hitting a certain level (e.g., travel powers at 14), doing certain arcs (e.g., Member of Vanguard stuff), or both (e.g., cape missions at 20, auras at...whenever those became available). And then there were all the things locked behind Paragon Points, which had to be purchased with real money. With Homecoming (or possibly SCORE), that all seemed to go out the window. Since they don't need to worry about profit, they don't need to push the "grind." You did content because you wanted to do content. Want to powerlevel to 50? Fine! Have an XP multiplier to make that even easier. Want to do every single story arc? That's cool too! Have a "disable XP" setting. And here, while you're at it, have a store full of stuff you used to have to buy with real money, all for reasonably priced amounts of inf. Enjoy! Of course, powers are still level locked. If you're a fire blaster, there's no way to get Inferno until you're level 32. But there's a difference IMO between gaining powers as you gain experience and locking cosmetic features behind a new currency that, at least initially, people need to grind for. I don't know if this shift is related to AE farming, to the idea that there's not enough to do at level 50, or what. If it's the former...well, farming isn't my thing, but if people have a good time with it, good for them. If it's the latter, it shows rather a lack of imagination. Here. Let me say it with a meme: When you're bored at level 50, you're bored with CoX. A new currency's not going to fix that.

While that makes sense in the moment, over time it's how you end up with eleventy dozen different currencies. Every time devs want to introduce something new that rich players can't just buy, do they add yet another new currency? It would get silly after a while. As for where prices for the PAPs will end up, I think supply will soon exceed demand by quite a lot. There's some artificial demand at the moment from badgers who need to get 150 of them to pick up four new badges. But I can't imagine there are enough people who are invested in buying enough NPC costumes to keep demand up after all the badgers have gotten their badges.

It's kind of a shame you sped through the ripples, because there's some really fun stuff in there. My biggest complaint about the Aeon SF is that there's not really a solo mode. It's so chock full of fun writing and Easter eggs that it really rewards being able to slow down and poke at the corners. But of course most groups want to zoom through it as quickly as possible to get to the rewards. Which is fine! I wouldn't want to make seven other people wait on me while I read all the text. But it would be nice if it were possible to do in a "solo mode" where I could read all the text but not, say, get my ass kicked by Apex. Along similar lines: one of these days I'm going to organize a kill all MLTF. I've never seen one, and I'm curious how long it would take and if there's any appeal over the standard speed run.

There are teams in Praetoria? I've never seen one in the wild. I think I assumed that being gold side stopped the teaming function from working or something.

I don't run TFs or iTrials,* but as a player, here's my general approach: If it's a TF that needs a particular build or alignment (e.g., a 4-Star Aeon), I'll PM to ask if I can grab an alt. This is especially true if it's likely to fill quickly. I've sometimes tried to switch to the alt, and by the time I'm back not only has the team filled but I missed the "Full!" message. If it's an iTrial, I usually just join with whatever alt I have on. Then once I'm in the league, I may ask if I can alt depending on how full the league is and whether it seems like it's about to kick off. Since you mostly run iTrials and MSRs and it's hard to keep track of who you're supposed to be waiting on, I think it would be completely reasonable to say that you won't hold spots except for people alting after they've joined the league—and then only between runs or if the player asked first. * Well, okay, there was that Dilemma Diabolique I ran one time, when everything seemed way harder than it should have been, until sometime near the end when someone asked, "You know that this iTrial can take 16 people, right?" That certainly explained why our team of 8 had such trouble. We got through it, though. Successfully, even.

Let me check my alts, my pockets, my couch cushions...nope. I definitely don't have a spare 20 billion inf sitting around. My combined character wealth across all my alts is about a tenth of that. I am really curious where the market will settle for these things. On the one hand, they're hard to get. On the other hand, the things you can do with them are limited. With "mini mode" pretty much unreachable as a practical matter, I'll stop caring about them at all once my badger has gotten all the badges. Will that be the typical response, or will there be enough costume collectors to keep these things expensive? We'll find out.

1000/1500??? Yeah, that's a long-term reward all right. At that kind of price, my "little" character will stay 4' tall. Which is too bad, IMO, because it would have been cool to have a mini-mode for that toon. But I really don't see myself running enough content of any sort to rack up 1,000 PAs.

With the "common" NPC costumes costing 10 aether each, I'm guessing the "very rare" costumes like "mini mode" will be at least 100. Collecting 100 prismatic aether through mission completion bonuses would take about 5,000 missions. That's rather a lot of missions. For example: my badger, who has completed every story arc red side, blue side, and gold side at least once,* has completed a total of 2,874 missions per the info kiosk. If he'd been eligible for prismatic aether for all of those missions, he'd have amassed a grand total of about 57 of them by now. (Now I'm really curious how many missions @Snarky has completed with his "do all the missions"...er, mission.) *Except Westin Phipps, because seriously—screw that guy.

To clarify, I'm talking about this: The "Blobby" and "Mini" costumes aren't NPC costumes. They're more like costume parts or auras. I have a toon for which the "Mini" costume would be great; ideally, he should be about a foot tall, but the smallest you can make a character is 4'. I get why really small character models would create issues with the game geometry and PvP. I'm really excited that there's going to be a way to make him look more like his "true" size. I'm less excited that the option is locked behind a "very rare" costume set intended "to serve as long-term prestige goals for extremely dedicated players." That part seems like a change in philosophy of what costume options should be available at character creation, IMO.