Zhym

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.

In one of the Valentine's Day tip missions, you can misdeliver a valentine from Desdemona (Eve Salvatore) to Johnny Sonata. When you do, he says, "Somethin' about her is familiar though... Salvatore... Eve... Eve... why is that name so familiar?" Okay, I give up. Why would that name be familiar to him?

I agree: market manipulation is wrong. One might even call it...villainous. @Snarky, aren't you always saying that the game needs more villains?

Where does that happen?

I still find the placement of First Ward and Night Ward in these timeline lists confusing. What happened in BAF, Lambda, Sutter, and Keyes that puts them before First Ward? I get that they debuted in Issues just before First Ward was added, but I don’t see much in the trials themselves that have to happen before First Ward. Vanessa DeVore’s First Ward arc involves getting in and out of Cole’s Tower before Marauder shows up and squashes you. Marauder is weakened post-Lambda (see Provost Marchand’s Primal Earth arc) so it seems to me that that mission happens before the Lambda trial. And more practically, it just makes more sense to me to run First Ward and Night Ward at the relevant character levels. For the most part, First Ward seems like it’s happening just after the Responsibility, Power, Crusader, and Warden lines (mostly because Seer 1381 is now Katie Douglas). If there’s anything about that that breaks continuity, it’s pretty subtle. To me, the advantage of being able to run First Ward and Night Ward in character level order outweighs whatever narrative hiccups that would create. And what else is a Praetorian going to do after level 20?

That probably depends—do we get to slot our powers with IO sets, or are we talking SOs…or even unenhanced? Some of the sets are a lot less useful without a real-world version of the auction house to draw on. (Then there’s me, driving around town looking for the exploration badges that will get me the 5 reward merits to use to buy enhancement…converters…that don’t exist in real life either. Damn. I’m overthinking this again, aren’t I?)

Hm. This is the second month I've tried to donate and gotten this message after filling out my credit card info. Has anyone else seen this? Any thoughts?

On a related note, it would be interesting if origin mattered somehow. It used to matter a lot back in the early days of live—your origin determined your initial contact and the contacts they’d give you. When offered a choice of introductions to new contacts, picking the right one could be the difference between having a place to buy enhancements you could use at a good price vs. not being able to use their enhancements at all. But between the reduced importance of SOs vs IOs and the ease of buying SOs at any vendor, plus the near irrelevance of the origin contacts, origins are almost meaningless now. The only things I can think of where origin matters anymore are the P2P attack powers (e.g., Nemesis Staff, Blackwand) that have bonuses for certain origins. I don’t know whether we’d want origin to matter more—most of the changes that have made origin irrelevant are positive QOL changes IMO. But maybe it would be fun to have something to make Agent Six less lonely, for example.

I don't remember what else, but the starting point used to be Fort Darwin. For me, at least, starting out in a far corner of Mercy Island—where the walls of Mercy proper loomed over you—created a great feel for your character being a nobody who had to fight to get out of the (almost literal) gutter. Moving the starting point to Mercy made sense for creating a more central starting area with amenities similar to what heroes get in Atlas Park, but a lot of atmosphere was lost in the process.

Fort Darwin was so appropriately named back when it was where villain characters started out. The number of times I ventured out from there, got my butt thoroughly kicked, and ran back to the relative "safety" of the fort (and had to look Kalinda in the eye as it became increasingly clear how lame I was as a villain)? Well, it sure gave me a feel for how dangerous the rogue isles were. It wasn't the same when they moved the starting point to somewhere safer and cleaner—and Longbow of all things took over Fort Darwin. Feh! I do like that there's an arc you can do to reclaim Fort Darwin. I just wish the arc weren't so repugnant.

Some of the zone GMs could definitely do with a power boost. Poor Adamastor is the biggest example. Every hour or so, he gets summoned just to have his butt kicked, sometimes in a matter of seconds (seriously—I've seen Adamaster get taken down in less than 10 seconds. Multiple times). No wonder he's cranky! The Council War Walker is in the same category: fairly easy to spawn, quick to kill with a halfway decent team. Eochai and Jack aren't as big a problem, IMO. They're easy kills, but since they can't just be summoned every hour, they're at least hard to find sometimes. Not every GM needs to be Hamidon (which has its own power-creep related issues), but I think it would be fun if Adamastor and the War Walker, at least, were more formidable opponents. (Personally, I'd like to see Sally get a stealth buff so that she still disappears if hit even once, but also does 500,000 hp of auto-hit unresistable AoE damage before she does. My headcanon is that she finally gets fed up with being a punching bag and decides to unleash her true power...)