Zhym

BTW, this thread linked in Oklahoman's signature is directly relevant here:

I ran an 8-member blaster team tonight and got it, so it seems to be fixed now.

I almost forgot these guys: I created the second one after a big outage (due to Homecoming's hosting provider) a few years ago.

Great thread idea. Here's my main, 70s Man. I won't say his outfit wouldn't stand out in 2024, but he's wearing street clothes. He also has a fancier outfit for the disco: Then there's Mediocre Fred. He's inspired by a Smothers Brothers song. He's a werewolf. His human form started as the first guy below, but then I decided to play off of the name "Fred" and give him a bicyclist outfit. Finally, this is The Bureaucrat, with his standard outfit, ready-for-action jacket-free look, and a nice sweater vest for Casual Friday:

Is that from monster hunting in general, or specifically Scrapyard? Scrapyard was such a weird mega-event that I'm not sure what to make of drop rates on that one. But if the drop rate is supposed to be 10%, that would mean there's a 90% chance of getting at least one drop after defeating 22 GMs and a 99% chance after 44. There's a 50% chance at 7. So if we're seeing numbers in the 22-44 range without a drop (Scrapyard excepted), it seems like it's not a 10% chance, whatever the patch notes say. I haven't battled enough non-Scrapyard GMs to do those numbers personally, though.

I did quote that language at the top of the thread. :) And I've been getting reward merits at an insane pace—so it's definitely not the case that there's a 10% chance of getting the pet recipe every time you get reward merits. Whether that's WIA is a different question, of course.

I really enjoy teaming with my Kin/Sonic Defender. Teams love speed boosts, and Sonic has some nice debuff for when you aren't making everyone go zoom. I never feel idle or useless with that character. That character does have Siren's Song, which is a big AoE sleep, but she doesn't use it when teaming (because there's not much point). It comes in handy when she solos, though.

When I saw the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about the average age of most Homecoming players. And then I thought, well, that's actually probably a bit low...

I ended up getting the pet recipe after about 160 kills or so. My working theory is that it's tied to the criteria for getting the badge: if your team doesn't get enough of the damage percentage, the drop roll doesn't even happen. But that's just a theory.

Before the latest issue dropped, it wasn't that hard to spawn Scrappy with a bit of Scrapyarder hunting and then take him down with a team of 4 or so. If that's still the case after Tuesday's patch drops, it shouldn't be that hard to get the badge. It might even be easier, since it seems like you have to be on a team that gets a certain percentage of the damage on him to get credit for the badge, and Big Damn Leagues actually make that harder to do.

From the patch notes: What does that mean, exactly? I thought it meant that if you got enough credit on defeating a GM that you received reward merits, you also had a 10% chance of getting a recipe for a mini pet version of that same monster. But I joined Scrapyard Beatdown 2024 for a while today, and after defeating Scrappy about 70 times, I don't see any pet recipes. So now I'm wondering if I'm reading the patch notes wrong.

At least they're exploiting the new content. The first time I logged in after the patch went live, It wasn't 30 seconds before I saw someone in LFG looking for a fire farm. All that new stuff—and still, there are people just doing fire farms.

I usually find that Sprint + Athletic Run (or, if you're into weird running stances, Beast Run or Ninja Run) is more more than adequate for moving around missions. Combat Jumping adds a nice bit of vertical movement, and it also gives some defense and is a LoTG mule, so most of my characters have that as well. A jetpack gets me any flying I need.

Is anyone working on adding the Issue 27 Page 7 badges to this?

Wait—in Mage-Killer Tatiana's new arc, you're supposed to beat up Stephanie Peebles? Damn. I may have to skip that one. Beating up little old widows to take their wedding rings is a bit too much on the Westin Phipps side of villainy. (Seriously. Screw that guy.) And, yeah, I know that but still.

Interesting to see reactions that it was too long and too short. :) I agree with @cranebump, though, that it seemed a little too much for a "Personal Story." I figured it would be more like the Dark Astoria or Praetorian personal stories—a little bit of behind-the-scenes exposition that our characters couldn't be expected to be privy to, short and straightforward, maybe with a chance to kick some butt with a completely overpowered hero á la Emperor Cole or Anti-Matter. I agree that it's really well done. But I also agree that it would be more engaging if there had been a way to have the player's character be an actual protagonist instead of riding along for someone else's story. It's a problem I think CoX has fallen into at times: leaning too heavily into the lore and the major NPCs like Statesman, etc. I play because I want to play my toon, not because I want to be a bit player in some NPC's story. The great thing about CoX not being a Marvel or DC property is that none of our characters have to play second fiddle to Iron Man or Superman. So why would CoX introduce Iron Man or Superman equivalents for us to play second fiddle to? But I digress a bit.

Piercing Shot is lots of fun in the BAF iTrial, though. The escaping prisoners line up so nicely for it.

"Enjoy some of the canonical reasons for notorious changes, and a heaping bathtub full of foreshadowing!" Anyone know what this is referring to, or have a Cliffs Notes version of what the heck happens in Piecemeal's Personal Story? I played it, and I still have no idea what was going on there. I imagine it doesn't help that it's been ages since I ran The Freakish Lab of Dr. Vahzilok. All I know is there was something involving teleporting, the matrix, the Arena, and a quick side trip to the Rikti homeworld. But the lore references and foreshadowing went right past me, alas.

I took both Pistols and Dual Wield for just that reason. Also, if you're leveling slowly through missions as I did with my DP/MC blaster, having one attack with -DEF and another with knockback is mighty useful. Dual Wield and Ki Push combine nicely for crowd control at early levels. At later levels, I still use Pistols and Dual Wield a lot, even though Executioner's Shot and Piercing Rounds are higher damage, just because they're so fast.

Have you seen what's going on in Paragon City? King's Row is overrun by Lost and Skulls, the Tsoo and Warriors are running amok in Talos Island, and there are actual alien invaders in Founder's Falls! Something would be very wrong if the police stations weren't in a state of emergency. Oddly, the Atlas Park station seems pretty quiet. I guess the police aren't all that interested in the Skulls and Hellions. More seriously: The sirens in police stations that have them seem to originate from the jail cells. In Atlas Park, you can't go to the jail area, which probably explains why there are no sirens there. Everywhere else I've looked, though, you can go into the jails and the sirens are on. I wonder if the stations were repurposed from the safeguard/mayhem missions, where the alarms would make sense, and the alarms just weren't removed from the city zone versions of the stations.

And kill snakes. Don't forget the killing snakes. So very, very many snakes at early levels.

Wow. I suddenly have so many AE arcs I want to run now.

If you're talking about getting to the Ouroboros zone at Level 1, you can already do that. You just need someone to open a portal for you so you can go get the badge that gives you the travel power. If you're talking about being able to run flashback missions—well, that really is a narrow level window. You can't flash back to missions that are still in level range. That's logical: you can't flash back to the present. Since the first level range for flashback missions is 1-9, we're only talking about having to wait about five levels to do flashback missions. And it's not like there's a lack of things to do in CoX during those five levels (or, as others have pointed out, just get those levels quickly). People who want to be able to do flashback missions between levels 10 and 14 but don't want to pause XP to do those same missions before they outlevel them seems like kind of a niche market.

I've only done that once. It was a name I had back one of the Live servers but someone had already taken by the time I got to Homecoming. So instead of Canned Heat (fire blaster police robot, of course), I named him Canned.Heat. Otherwise, if I have a character concept and the name is taken, I just choose a different name. If the name I wanted was a wordplay or concept name, the fact that it's taken just means that my concept wasn't as original as I thought it was. I did realize after I'd created one character that there were other characters with similar names. In fact, at one point I think Tomcat, Tom Cat, and Tom-Cat were all on the server at the same time. I have no idea why we didn't team up.