Zhym

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.

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.