Zhym

It's kind of buried in my "rant" (sorry it seems like one; I really didn't intend it that way), but I have no problem with permanent purchasable Halloween costumes. What bothers me is that there's something that looks a lot more like a regular costume feature—i.e., being able to make your character model smaller—that is now locked behind a new hard-to-get currency.

Apologies if this was in the beta feedback thread and I missed it, but have the devs said why they introduced another "currency" into the game? We already had inf, merit rewards, empyrian merits, astral merits, vanguard merits, and probably others I'm forgetting at the moment. What was missing that prismatic aether solves? Is it mostly that we need a different reward for hard mode? Page 4 also seems to represent the first time that Homecoming has had costume options that have to be unlocked. I really appreciated the fact that unlike live, which had various costume options you had to unlock in one way or another, in Homecoming you could build whatever costume you want at character creation. The new costume options changed that. I'm not talking about the NPC costumes, which are basically like having Halloween costumes year round—having those be lockable is fine. But at some point soon there's going to be a "mini" costume mode. That would be perfect for one of my characters, who is already as small as the slider will allow, but should really be much smaller. But I won't be able to use it unless I collect a bunch of aether first (just how much is still TBD). So, from my own perspective anyway, it's kind of disappointing to see Homecoming embrace costume options that have to be purchased.

I get the love for the new revamped ITF. And to some extent, I share in it. But I'm still a fan of Aeon over ITF. It's just so darn fun. The writing is great, the challenges are challenging and varied, and, if you do the optional content YOU GET TO FIGHT HERO 1 AND ALL OF VANGUARD. Ahem. Pardon me. I just really enjoy that alternate dimension with Apex (who is also a nice Easter egg if you read the CoH comics), Hero 1, and PsiCurse...and that's just a part of the Strike Force. Can ITF be done more quickly? Probably. But there's something about Aeon I just love. (I just wish there were a low-rewards solo mode, because there's so much going on in that Strike Force that you never get to see.)

Oh, yes. I have a character with Stealth and Infiltration, which seems redundant (and is), but Infiltration as an LOTG mule doesn't seem like a wasted power.

I usually slot it in Sprint for that reason (or did, when the Celerity Stealth IO was needed for "full stealthiness"). Most NPC escorts are so slow that I have to turn off Sprint anyway or they won't keep up with me.

Personally, I'm chuffed to see Barrier getting some love now. For the longest time, it seemed like everyone already had soft-capped defense and possibly hard-capped resistance, so Barrier was seen as superfluous. If you needed it at all in an iTrial, one person was plenty. The requirements for Really Hard Way runs, for example, usually listed Clarion being needed, not Barrier. But now? Barrier is getting its day! We'll see if it lasts, or if people discover that other Destiny powers are useful for the hard mode ITFs. But for now? It's a festival of Barrier! If it really is the case that the only way to make it through a 4-star ITF is for everyone to be running Barrier, then the problem isn't Barrier, it's that something is very broken with the 4-star ITF.

ASF was pretty rough right after it came out, too. I figure we're still in the period of figuring out optimal strategies for running ITF challenge modes. Once we get there, the death rate will probably go down some. Yeah, I did a lot of alting this weekend to try to scrounge up Aether one or two at a time. (Then I joined a 4-star ASF and racked up 30 in one go. Sweet!) On the one hand, some of my characters finally saw a bit of action for the first time in a while. On the other hand—well, I'm not sure what the cool-down accomplishes, since most of us have enough alts to get around it. But the same argument applies to all the other cool-downs, I suppose, so at least Aether isn't unique in that regard.

I just figured all those mobs conned gray to him. No XP.

That's not true, at least not everywhere. The building fires in Mercy Island, at least, do damage. For example, the fires on the buildings at the bottom of the walls in Darwin's Landing and on the building up in Mercy itself (which will have fires if someone has completed one of Operative Kuzmin's missions, if I remember correctly) both do damage. Screenshots:

I will say that the new ITF challenges bring a new level of excitement to PUGs. "Excitement"...yeah, that's one word for it, anyway.

The lava pools in The Crucible don't do any damage, either. OMG—it's holograms all the way down!

Here's another one: Ms. Liberty actually has super hearing, and the whine of all those server cooling fans from the AE building was driving her crazy, so she had the Atlas Park branch shut down.

Maybe it was a localized phenomenon that only happened in the Atlas Park AE. No one could explain why for certain, but the theory that got the most traction was that it was related to the sheer number of people running simulations in that location. Of course, then you'd need to put a cap on the maximum number of people who could use the AE in Pocket D, since it usually seems pretty busy too.

What's the existing story for the AE in Mercy? ETA: Never mind. I finally read the fine patch notes.

Somewhere, there's a magical setting where I'd be able to hear glowies but other powers wouldn't deafen me. Maybe we could have a separate slider just for glowies. Or "ambient sounds" versus "power sounds."

Am I wrong, or do the fires at the smoking ruins of AE in Mercy Island not do any damage?

Now that's what a destroyed AE should look like!

AE just sort of disappeared from Atlas Park and Mercy Island without any in-game explanation. Aside from whatever confusion that's causing players who don't read the forums (or the patch notes), it seems to me that there was a missed opportunity to add some story around the change. So: if you were writing the story, how would you have removed AE from Atlas Park and Mercy Island? (I'm not asking whether AE should have been removed; I'd appreciate it if people would leave debate about that for other threads.) For my part, I think "destroyed by a supervillain" is a classic, at least for the one in AP—especially if an event could have been tied to it. But maybe instead of it being destroyed, Aeon decides to shut them down? Maybe the one in AP is busy and profitable, but the margins aren't what they're looking for (there might be some room for pointed satire of the Live shutdown in this version of the story). Are there any good story lines you can think of that would remove the Atlas Park and Mercy Island AE locations and replace them with something else?

That's the "ask in the game chat" part. (By "everyone in the new Fort Trident," I mean the NPC contacts, not the players in Atlas Park.)

And they shouldn't be required to, IMO. The forums should supplement the game, not be a required part of it. The biggest example of the game pretty much requiring access to the forums is how players are expected to make money—i.e., by getting reward merits and turning them into inf either by selling converters or building IO set enhancements from recipes. There's nothing in the game that would give a new player even the slightest idea that they should do that. They either have to visit the forums or have a friendly player tell them in chat. AE's disappearance from Atlas Park is in a similar category. I just checked, and everyone in the new Fort Trident acts like it's been there all along. If you want to know what happened to AE, you have to go to the forums or ask in the game chat. Personally, I think more could have been done to give some in-lore continuity to AE's disappearance. But at the very least, the Longbow Info Guide should be able to give an answer to the question, "Hey, what happened to AE?" I won't promise that many AEers would get far enough to see that option or read the answer, but it would at least be something in-game to say why the heck AE has been replaced by a Freedom Corps base.

I'm not a GM, but my hope is that part of what the GMs are looking for is whether the character shows any creativity. @dtjunkie's Hammer Corps and Lords of Rock, for example? Those are awesome, fun, clever character concepts, and any system that found them infringing would be horribly broken, IMO. They're off the chart on the creativity scale and only minimally affect (or reflect) copyrighted characters or actual people. The gold standard for Superman homage/parody, IMO, is Tsooperman. It's been a while since I've seen him in the game, but it's a brilliant mashup of the Superman character and the Tsoo. Is it technically derivative of Superman? Absolutely. But there's enough creativity there that I have a hard time seeing any reasonable GM saying, "Nope! Copyrighted!" I have a character called Splendidman. He's an Inv/SS tanker who can fly, has super speed, laser eyes, and frost breath. One of his costumes—the first one I made, I admit, but which I now only bring out for special occasions or when I'm soloing in maps—would look very familiar. Most of his costumes now aren't quite such blatant rip-offs of the original, though. Here's his current look and description: Infringing? I really hope not. I've managed to get him to 50 and run him in a bunch of iTrials without a problem. I think there's enough creativity there to turn him from "copy" to "fair use homage/parody," but of course, I would, wouldn't I? But if I made a character named 5uperman, put him in a Superman costume, and gave him Superman powers? Or made a claws/regen scrapper named WoIverine (with a upper-case i instead of a lower-case l)?* Clearly infringing, and I suspect that if I could even pick that name, the character wouldn't last past the first time someone felt like reporting it. *BTW: don't do this. Claws/regen kind of sucks. Mostly the /regen part. I also suspect that the further you get from a copyrighted superhero character, the better—at least partly because turning a non-superhero into a superhero shows that creativity I'm talking about. So maybe non-superhero literary characters or real people would be more likely to fly (as it were) than properties that DC or Marvel would be likely to sue over. As long as it's done in taste. (Would "Evil Undead Mister Rogers", an axe-wielding zombie in a cardigan and tennis shoes, survive being reported? I don't know...but suddenly I kind of want to make the character and find out.) The wacky thing about copyright law is that it's really hard to tell what's fair use and what isn't until a court tells you (after very expensive litigation). So I do get why Homecoming would err on the side of caution. But whether it's because most players aren't prone to reporting every "infringing" character they see, or because the GMs are pretty good about distinguishing blatant copies from homage and parody, it doesn't seem like HC has a heavy hand about this—which, as someone who likes to play "homage" characters, I appreciate.

Welcome home! First of all, Corium is a great character concept. As for enhancements and leveling, it depends on how you're going to be leveling. Although it's possible to grab an XP booster at the P2W vendor and grab a whole bunch of levels quickly through DfB ("Death from Below") and the Task Force Commander TFs (Positron, Synapse, etc.), I wouldn't recommend that for the your first toon back. Slow down and enjoy the content. But if you do level up quickly in teams, you can pretty much just rely on SOs until you hit about level 27. That's when some good uncommon IO sets open up. Speaking of which, invention enhancements are good, but IO sets are where the real action is thanks to the set bonuses. Load up on those as soon as you can. The wiki has lots of information about what the set bonuses are, but it's hard to go wrong. Any IO set is better than not using IO sets. BTW, you don't ask about money, but the way the economy works is kind of weird if you aren't used to it. The inf you get from beating up bad guys is a pittance compared to what you can make on the market. The easiest way to make your first million inf is: (1) get a jump pack, (2) tour all the exploration badge locations in Atlas Park for the 5 reward merits (and the Passport travel power), (3) convert the reward merits to enhancement converters at a reward vendor (there's one in City Hall), and (4) sell the enhancement converters on the market. For more money, repeat the process by getting access to Ouroboros and collecting all the exploration badges in Echo: Atlas Park and Echo: Galaxy City. Re: badges, some of them do things. The "Big Four" are Received the Atlas Medallion (+5% End), Freedom Phalanx Reserve Member (+10% Health), Task Force Commander (+5% Health), and Portal Jockey (+5% End, +5% Health). But there are other badges with effects. The unofficial wiki has a list here: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Gaining_Hero_Badges_with_Effects. The Day Job powers also have effects. The ones I usually get first are Monitor Duty (log out next to a portal), which grants a teleport to base power, and Caregiver (Hospital) and Professor (University) for the Physician badge. Once you have that and have been logged out in a hospital or university for long enough, you get a rez power that you can use on other players. Oh, and if you want to hunt badges, the wiki is your friend. So are the Vidiot Maps, I'm told, but I never managed to get around to installing them, and I've done fine.

And there should be dialogue. "This guy just walked in and took out our entire base single-handed, right? Including, like, people way above our pay grade." "Yeah." "And the boss wants us to stop him." "Uh-huh." ... "So. Do you see him anywhere?" "No. No, I most certainly do not." "Good. Let's go grab some coffee at Drenched Donuts. I'll buy."

I really, really like this idea. The building is still there, it's just Freedom Corps moving in. It takes care of all the "what happened to AE?" questions organically through game play instead of relying on the meta of asking in chat or having to read the patch notes.

Yeah, I’m not a fan of “your stealth is totally irrelevant” ambushes. It’s much more fun when an ambush arrives, looks around, and then just stands there like, “Why were we sent here, anyway?” while my stalker stands right there next to them. A close second is when the ambush arrives and runs past my stalker on their way to where he used to be. Anyway—this arc resulted in a couple of deaths even at +1/x8 (and then turned down to x4) for my fully T4’d DP/MA blaster who usually burns through, say, the DA incarnate content (or did pre-patch). The biggest issue I had, though, was that there’s a spot in the last mission where I had no idea for a while where the heck I was supposed to go. There was no map available (boo!) and the exit from the room was fairly hidden. I eventually found it, and now I know where it is if I run the arc again, but it was a serious, “Well, WTF am I supposed to do now?” moment there for a while. There really should be a map available. The other thing that confused me was the part of one mission where you have to go back and “guard” the door (basically, clear out new spawns). It’s so rare to have to retrace your steps in a mission that at first I thought there was another exit in the last room. It might be useful to have a prompt of some sort indicating that yes, finishing the mission means going back to the original entrance.