Zhym

Thanks for this. It's made running CoH in the background for AFK badge farming much less stressful for my computer.

Buy? They won't even let me in to Drenched Donuts! Every time I even try the door, I'm told that I cannot enter!

I think this is right. I had my UI zoomed in ('cause I'm old, and functioning eyesight ended up not being one of my superpowers—or even normal powers) and couldn't read the badge names. When I reset the UI to 100%, the badge names were all visible. I'm guessing the UI scaling changes a lot of variables that not everything handles well.

I dunno; having seen a lot of "olde style downtowns" pop up in the suburbs, complete with faux-weathered facades, that part seems pretty believable to me.

Kristof Jaeger is like the proverbial pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie.

Just to clarify: I know the count doesn't reset with each badge. I just meant that if I were starting with zero damage, it would take a little over nine days of damage farming with CoT Guides to go from no damage-taken badges to having all of them. I'm at almost 69 million damage taken now, so I should have the badge sometime Tuesday unless I stop farming and, I dunno, actually play the game.

Well, that plus listening requires a different sort of attention than reading. You don't have to look away from the battle to hear someone say "WHOA!" But really, anyone who is paying attention and listened at the start of the TF should be watching the health bars at that point anyway, not all the FX on the screen.

I, for one, appreciate that Oklahoman doesn't use Discord. I used it once to get Really Hard Way (and possibly Triple Threat—I can't remember now if I got that on one of Oklahoman's runs or a RHW run), but I really prefer not having to fire up Discord to play CoH. I suspect that the BAF Keep 'em Separated badge is actually teaching people the wrong lesson: that there's plenty of wiggle room around the "same time" timing. Thing is, though, the timing on Triple Threat is a lot tighter and the AVs have much better regeneration. So people can kind of get away with not watching chat in BAF and still sneak away with the badge. In Magesterium, not so much. The timing for Triple Threat is so tight that it's hard to get even if everyone is paying attention to chat and attacking only when told. Without Discord, you need both a good group and luck to get that badge.

Thanks for this. I eventually figured out what I was missing about the CoT Guide method, which was that Rest caps regen (because of course it does—that's the point). My blaster has been enjoying the tender mercies of a couple of CoT thorns for the past several days, taking about 449,000 damage per hour. At that rate, it would take about 222 hours—or a little over 9 days—to get the badge from zero. So I stand corrected: it is possible to get this badge without multi-boxing (hooray!). I do still think that 100,000,000 damage is a bit over the top as a badge target, though, and am skeptical that anyone would get it through normal adventuring. Maybe a regen tanker could, after years of play, but Homecoming's faster leveling and greater number of alts makes even that seem unlikely, IMO.

I'm generally not a huge fan of most of the overarching game lore—it seems like the more a story has to do with the lore, the less agency a player has (I'm looking at you, Who Will Die?). And the game has already explored a lot of "What if?" through Praetoria ("What if Statesman were evil?") and time-travel portals ("What if Recluse won?"). But there are a few things where the existence of Ouroboros raises not only "What if?" questions but, "Why not?" The most obvious is, yes, the death of major NPCs, which the existence of Ouroboros complicates (usually resulting in some sort of timey-wimey rationalizations of why although we can change history, these events can't be changed). But almost any story arc offers a "what if?" For example, what if someone traveled back in time to prevent the development of portal technology on Primal Earth, thus preventing contact with Praetorian Earth? Does Praetoria continue on peacefully (if oppressively) under Cole's truce with Hamidon? Does the lack of portal technology change Primal Earth in any way, save for incarnates having a lot less to do? The First Ward story arc is also one where, once a character has gone through it all, there are several places where someone who finds out what was happening all along might want to go back in time and change a few things, or at least avoid some forms of carnage (I mean, at the very least you might be able to save Katie Douglas some additional trauma). As far as I know, there's only one flashback arc (Laura Lockhart's) that really plays with the implications of time travel. It's really well done though, IMO. And this isn't really a "go back and change the past" what-if, but what if Praetorian characters could stay loyalists when they come to Primal Earth? The options now are to go hero or villain, but either way, they eventually end up opposing Cole's invasion. But what if they, I dunno, agree that the invasion is necessary for the survival of both Earths? It would be interesting to have dueling iTrials: some trying to stop the invasion, some trying to make it happen.

After what happened to Overbrook, Eastgate, Venice, White Plains, Baumton, Astoria, and Woodvale—not to mention the level of everyday theft and property destruction—I'd expect that any insurance company in Paragon City has either long gone bankrupt or gotten very good at not paying out claims.

They're probably more for backup in case someone finally manages to take out Terra Volta or blow the Faultline dam. With the main sources of power being such juicy targets for villainous activity, is it any wonder that there would be a push for distributed solar energy at some point in the city's history?

You’re more concerned with the direction the solar panels are facing than the fact that they’re on a building in Dark Astoria?

Working from memory here, but check Events.

For SOs and basic non-set IOs, the simple rule is at more than three, the effects diminish sharply. For enhancement sets, that all changes because the enhancements typically boost multiple effects (damage/accuracy, damage/recharge, etc.) and are designed so that having the whole set won’t trigger ED. And a Hami origin basically counts as one of each of the two things it boosts. But with basic SOs and IOs, stop at three. I usually go for enhancement sets by the time any powers have 5 or 6 slots, so I don’t have a recommended basic slotting, but Dmgx3, Acc, End, Rech seems a reasonable approach. But really, you’ll get much better results out of an uncommon enhancement set, which shouldn’t cost much money.

And just to complicate things, one of the big advantages of the Alpha incarnate power is partially ignoring ED.

What if Manticore realized he had a whole bunch of non-lethal options in his quiver? What if the player had any effect at all over what happens in Who Will Dieeee?!?!?!?!1?

I was pretty sure Oro missions were the only thing a person could do while in them, but I didn't think regular missions prevented idle logouts. Something to test! ETA: I started a tip mission and went for a walk, and my character hadn't been logged out when I got back. Huh. I thought for some reason it was only Flashback missions that prevented logout. Good to know! BTW, the Dagger of Caernoz is a redside tip mission. But the Lost and Found Oro arc starts with a CoT mission, so that works well for getting some Guides to hit you if you're a hero and don't want to switch alignments. The only tricky part is that there are also Rikti patrols that will kill the CoT (and might wander by while you're resting), so you have to hunt those down. But if you get the right map, the Rikti don't seem to venture into the prison room, so that works pretty well.

Can you do tip missions while in a Flashback mission? If not, how do you keep from getting logged out? My badger does have a Preventative Medicine proc and the Panacea +HP proc, so those should add a good buffer. I'll try this out and see how much DPS he can actually sustain while resting. And it sometimes amazes me what a person can accidentally become an expert in. :)

By "every possible HP bonus that exists in the game," do you mean five +0.75% health set bonuses, five 1.125% bonuses, five 1.5%, five 1.875%, etc? That seems awfully expensive! And a lot of work. I may not want Immortal that much. ETA: I finally figured out that rest caps +regen (because that's kind of the point), and so the CoT Guide method doesn't require a healer—just boosting HP as much as possible and optimizing the number and level of Guides to come as close as possible to the toon's regen without going over. My badger's regen currently maxes out while resting at 134.78 hp/sec with his main build; the best I could do by maxing HP would be 153.88 hp/sec. That's probably not a big enough difference to make the time and expense of a second build worth it. So—what's the best blue-side mission to get a CoT Guide hitting you?

Nice! Out of curiosity—what was the "slow way?" Did you need to multibox? How long did it take? My badger is about to get the last of his day job badges, and so far it looks like getting Immortal might involve months of standing in fires. But his regen is kind of rubbish.

This post on the current "quickest" way to get the Immortal badge (through 50 hours of AFK three-box farming) got me thinking: First, I wonder if anyone has gotten the Immortal badge since Homecoming started up other than by multiboxing. Is it even feasible to do it that way? My badger is a DR/MC blaster who can handle about 40 dps, or roughly 144,000 damage per hour. He's managed to take a little over 5,000,000 points of damage. So to get him the Immortal badge without multiboxing would take about 659 hours of standing in fires. That's technically possible, but it seems a little ridiculous. I could make a second build around maximizing HP and regen, but even that probably wouldn't cut down the farming time for the badge. Second, the Immortal badge doesn't seem like it could be gained in normal play—not the way the game is played today. In the early days, when people might have thought of the game play as fitting the tank/damage/healer trio, maybe it made sense to think that players could take and be healed of 100 million (before Issue 16, 1 billion!) points of damage through regular game play. But now that the focus is so much more on avoiding damage than taking it, does anyone get the Immortal badge except by farming it? Take my badger, for example. It's taken him 623 hours of game play (since January) to take that 5,000,000 or so points of damage. At that rate, he could expect to get the badge through normal game play about 11 years from now. A badge that can only be obtained through farming, and can only be had in a reasonable amount of time by multiboxing, seems kind of broken. Whether or not multiboxing is allowed or tolerated, the devs surely don't want to encourage it, right? So how would I suggest fixing it? I'd probably set 10,000,000 damage as the modern "Immortal" level. That's enough that it's not easy to get and is still an accomplishment (or Achievement, technically) that doesn't require multiboxing. My badger would still have to AFK damage farm for 34 hours or so to get that, but he could also get there through lots of game play. Here's the progression I'd suggest: Badge Current Dmg New Dmg Tough / Stoic / Slammer 100,000 100,000 Indestructible / Hard Case / Big Dog 250,000 250,000 Adamant / Ironman/Ironwoman / Laughs it Off 1,000,000 500,000 Unbreakable / Iron Willed 10,000,000 1,000,000 Nigh Indestructible / Concussed 25,000,000 2,500,000 Invulnerable / Marvel of Modern Medicine 50,000,000 5,000,000 Immortal / Challenger of Gods 100,000,000 10,000,000 That roughly doubles the damage needed for the next badge at each level. If you want to keep Born in Battle as hard to get as it is now, that could be changed to require the Unbreakable badge instead of Ironman/Ironwoman. But the new level of 500,000 would also reduce the number of people who have to damage farm to get Born in Battle (which I'm guessing is about everyone). What do you think, sirs?

I was with you until these points. A no-market restriction makes sense if you want to play old-school: the market makes the game a lot easier to play and vastly improves QOL, but it's also kind of broken and overpowered (when the inf received from missions and enemy defeats is essentially meaningless, that's a sign that something is really unbalanced, IMO. In this case, it's happens to be unbalanced in a way that most players like). So having a character use only drops and enhancements they can buy from regular vendors using inf that drops? That's a very Issue 0 challenge, and I applaud it. But not teaming with anyone is a bit too much. I get why it would be cheating to join most groups, since you'd still be taking advantage of the market and its cheap IOs, you'd just be doing it indirectly. But if you could find other players who are also playing the "drop challenge," that seems entirely within the spirit of the challenge. As for deleting on defeat: nope, not my jam. I am not and will never be that hardcore.

Oh, great. You realize you just cast a "Summon @Snarky" spell, right? Any moment, I expect him to show up and post a rebuttal, at least for PuGs.

I soloed every arc on redside once. The next slow-path character (and first real badger) I rolled up did most of the arcs again, but there are a few that I just find too distasteful. Westin Phipps, for example, is just a little too evil to enjoy helping, and Jezebel Jones's second arc is a bit too close to sex trafficking; Lt. Harris is even worse, IMO, but I still did it because it has the cool side effect of clearing all those Longbow out of Fort Darwin. And then there are a few that I think are just silly or aren't worth the effort of going through brokers to get to. But I'd say I've done 95% of the redside contacts at least twice. In a few cases, once was enough. Others, I could run over and over again (Vernon Von Grun, I'm looking at you—and listening to you perfecting your evil laugh). You have a point about the 1-4 content setting the stage. I just don't think they're good as missions. There's so little variety—and it's even worse if you slow things down and do both Burke and Kalinda, since they have basically the same arcs of "Go kill snakes. Now kill some more snakes. Next, kill even more snakes." The saving grace is that the missions and arcs are short. I actually don't mind them that much. But if I were trying out redside for the first time, they'd leave me completely underwhelmed. I just broke out of the Zig, and the exciting, dangerous, and (one hopes) lucrative world of villainy is about...clearing snakes out of tunnels? I could easily see someone deciding to go back to playing their hero at that point. Which is a shame, because it gets a lot better fairly quickly. Many of the best-written and most fun arcs in the game are redside (I listed some of my favorites here). But as much as the early content sets up the factions and your character's (temporarily) low position in this world, it doesn't do a great job of showing what fun redside can and will be.