Zhym

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...)

Whenever I play my my Beasts/Nature MM for the first time in a few days, I forget about Entangling Aura. I’ll get through entire mission arcs before realizing, “Oh, yeah—I could have taken most of the minions and lieutenants out of combat if I’d remembered that toggle.” On my Beam Rifle/Devises blaster, its the Gun Drone that I usually forget.

So I'm running the Dark Astoria arc the other day and I get to that annoying Sister Solaris mission. You know the one. No, not the one where you have to hunt for the hostages hidden like Easter eggs in a smoke-shrouded Cimerora. The other one, where you're basically running a mini version of the second-to-last ITF mission, but all by yourself. Oh, sure you could accept help, but who does? Anyway, it's you versus an army, which sounds cool. But in reality, it just means fighting a buttload of Talons, Minotaurs, Cyclopes, etc. to get to the end. It can be kind of a slog on a character without a good AOE attack, IMO. And on a Beasts/Nature MM...well, I didn't feel like dealing with it. So I told Sister Solaris, "I will handle the army alone!" and then autocompleted. Needless to say, I didn't get the badge. Serves me right. I didn't actually earn it. But it did get me wondering: are there any badges that you can get even through autocompleting a mission? I know you can't get the AV kills by autocompleting the Tina Macintyre/Maria Jenkins missions (which makes sense—you aren't really defeating them). But apparently the "Bailout Hero" badge can be had by autocompleting Dream Doctor's mission instead of running the Dilemma Diabolique trial. Are there any others?

A week or two ago, I had just hit 50 with a MM and didn't want to deal with this mission. So as soon as Mender Ramiel tells me to go talk to Lady Gray, I think, "Yeah, I know how this goes. Autocomplete!" Then I realize I had only autocompleted the part where I talk to Lady Gray. Not the part where I have to go fight the Honoree. Oops.

That's not too bad. On the general principle that all Sentinel powers must suck, Sentinels have this: I took it for theme reasons. Pro tip: never take powers for theme reasons (at least if you want useful powers).*

This seems to be it. I did some testing and sure enough, my pets will stay put until I get a certain distance away (I didn’t measure, but it was just about where I could no longer see them), at which point they’d teleport to me and go back to following. Thanks! ETA: I measured how far I could get from my pets (in Atlas Park, at least), and it was about 500'.

Is it normal for pets not to remain where they are when told to "stay?" I just leveled up a Beasts/Nature MM, and occasionally it would be useful to have my pets stay at the door while I stealth to the end. Having the pets (who have no stealth) run with me slows that down. I could dismiss them and re-summon when I get to the end of the map, and sometimes I do that. But if I try to get my pets to stay then run off, eventually I'll find that they've been trying to follow me, and getting into fights on the way. Is that expected behavior, or am I doing this wrong?

Oh, man. I remember when City of Heroes was like this (and only City of Heroes, because Villains hadn't even been released yet). No AE, no market, and you had to wait until level 14 to get a travel power that was faster than hovering. It was the age of Taxibots! It was a simpler time, before the Arena. Before...ED. I'd probably enjoy the nostalgia value of playing an "Issue 0" version of CoH. At least, for the first hour or so. Then I'd probably be begging for the "modern" Homecoming again. I agree that many of the additions to CoX over the years weren't fully thought out in terms of game balance, and that characters filled with IO sets in every slot probably aren't what the original designers had in mind when they introduced them. The relative cheapness of IO sets (or the ease of making money in the market and AE—take your pick) created game balance issues and blurred the lines between ATs (the fact that I have multiple softcapped blasters, of all ATs, is evidence for this). I believe that someone with no history with the game would look at it and say that it's completely out of balance at the moment. But it's still fun despite all that. Is it easy to make an overpowered character? Sure is. Fortunately, we're playing superheroes! Being overpowered is on theme. Anyway, there's no way back to the days of Issue 0. That's probably a good thing, all considered.

My thoughts are more about making the game newbie-friendly than recruiting. A lot has already been said about fire farms, so I won't repeat it accept to say that I agree that powerleveling, while useful to old hands who just want to see what a particular build plays like at level 50, isn't really a great way to get newbies into the game. The bigger problem, IMO, is that Homecoming's economics are completely non-intuitive to a new player. What new players expect, I think, is that by fighting bad guys (or, for villains, good guys), they make influence, which then allows them to buy upgrades. And in fact this was how City of Heroes worked for a long time. But now, the way to make any decent amount of money is through the market. The easiest way to do that is to grab some quick Reward Merits by touring Atlas Park's badge locations, using them to buy converters, then selling the converters. There's your ~1 million seed money. After that, making more money is a matter of either continuing to turn Merits into Converters into Inf, or you need to craft enhancements. We're all used to this by now. But for the new player? I don't think it helps the new player that crafting and the market are not optional. I haven't played any other MMORPGs in long enough to know if that's atypical for games now, but it sure seems weird to me. Alas, I don't have a good solution for how messed up (IMO) Homecoming's economics are—certainly not one that wouldn't break things further. But I do think that the current method of making money is really confusing to a new player, especially one who doesn't check in with the forums to find out how they're supposed to do it.

Greetings from the future! I just ran into the same problem while running this as a Flashback mission. The three soldiers you need to rescue can be injured. If one is defeated, the mission goal will still show one less soldier to recover but the next phase of the mission won't trigger. So to complete the mission, you need to rescue all of the first three soldiers without any of them being defeated.

Good times, man. Good times.

Rage isn't mandatory. I didn't take it in my Superman blatant ripoff homage build.

Sure, you can get a reasonable Batman facsimile with an SJ/Nin stalker, at least in terms of the fighting style and the uncanny hiding ability. But the Batarang? The Bat-grapple? The Batmobile, Batcycle, Batcopter? Okay, maybe many of these are Silver Age add-ons and not absolutely necessary to really "being" the Bat, but the grapple as a mode of transportation is a pretty big part of the character, IMO. And the character really does suffer from CoH's lack of a "Vehicles" travel power.

There are so many. I remember, when The Incredibles came out shortly after City of Heroes was released, how simple and unimaginative CoH powers seemed compared to those in the movie. Elastigirl has no in-game analogue at all. Violet could be a bubbler with invisibility, but force fields that enemies (and objects) bounce off of have so many more uses than mere +def fields. Dash's only real power is super speed, but he can use it to hit people really fast and run on water; in CoH, it's just a travel power with a (comparatively) mild attack rate bump. (Super Speed is one of the powersets that really pales in comparison to what it means in the comics—compare it to the Flash, for example, where super speed also means phasing through walls, traveling through time (and royally screwing up timelines in the process), etc.) Frozone would probably be an ice blaster, but here again, you've got things like using the ice blast as a travel power (creating a snow pile and sliding down it, for example). Mr. Incredible is the only one who could easily be reproduced in game, and that's because he's your basic "big, strong, and tough" hero. But even here, I don't think anyone in CoH can take out a helicopter by throwing a car. You could plausibly make a CoH version of every one of those characters except Elastigirl, but I think the CoH mechanics would make for poor copies of everyone except Mr. Incredible.

I think you're right. If a thread involves posting MIDs builds, it's probably more likely to get moved. Maybe the Archetypes forum could be renamed "Builds and Archetypes" to reflect how the forum is actually used?

I recall a few months ago that Tom Cat, Tom-Cat, and Tomcat were all on Excelsior at the same time (the latter version of which was mine; I'm not sure which was created first). I'm still a little sorry we didn't all get together and form a team. We could have run Bobcat's missions.

Nearly all discussions of archetypes involve discussions of powers. That doesn't mean that any discussion of powers is necessarily about archetypes. And while the main "Archetypes" forum does have lots of discussions of powers, so does the General forum. I mean, it's a popular topic of conversation! Getting picky about it being posted in the right forum seems like an unproductive and unsatisfying battle to me. Maybe if the forum were named "Archetypes and Powers," that could make sense, although then I'd wonder why the top-level forum had subforums for ATs but not for powers. 🙂 (And now I'm waiting for this thread to get moved to the Suggestions & Feedback forum.)

I agree with some of your complaint, @Snarky. It seems like a GM has recently decided that any discussion of powersets belongs in the Archetypes forum. Personally, I don't see it—as you mention, a discussion about Dark Armor isn't about any particular AT or about ATs in general. Powers ≠ ATs. And it seems like discussions of powers have been getting moved more recently than they used to, too. I'm all for putting posts in the right place, but this seems like misfiling to me.