Completist

Not a bad question, but in this case I'm addressing the overall story arc ecosystem. The game progresses so fast (at least for the first 40 levels) that you usually can't complete a contact in the time you have with them. For example today I made a new guy and played through Matthew Habashy's arc with a level 3 stranger. Stomped through a few missions, had a good time, and then couldn't share progress on the subsequent contact because she out-leveled it. In a bigger team with better XP we'd all have been kicked to the curb. A small example, but indicative of the overall issue. Content is already a mixed bag. Running unpredictable missions from a contact who you might outlevel before getting their merit-granting arc isn't ideal. OK, sure, you can, but it has an opportunity cost. Running Ouro missions means missing out on the level-appropriate missions your contacts could give you; being locked into TF mode and unable to hop into a MSR or TF; and can't play with friends or teammates of lower level. Ouro is a great feature for content completionists but it is not the ideal way to play. I'll grant you that. And maybe at the end of the day it's okay that people want to do the same stuff over and over again. But that is kinda what I'm getting at. If story missions were more accessible and more reliably rewarding (wider level ranges is one way to help accomplish that), maybe you'd see more than just a fraction of the playerbase running them. So you guys have plenty of criticism, but still, do you think it would make the game worse somehow to open up access to story missions? Or is it just not worth the trouble?

CoH has a TON of content that is impossible to see without disabling XP. Why not increase the story arc/contact level ranges so that you can access them for a wider breadth of content? I want to be able to complete lower-level story arcs without outleveling the contact. I anticipate a few hasty responses to this: Enemy groups don't go high enough: Some content doesn't work because enemy groups are limited to a specific range of levels. OK. So maybe every arc can't just last until 50. But they could at least be expanded beyond their current one-zone range, typically only 5 or 10 levels. Atlas Park could at least stay viable until 15. Or, (and I realize this one requires more work,) story arc instanced missions could auto-sidekick people down to the max level of the enemy group, the way TFs work. You can just disable XP. While this is semi valid, it isn't reasonable. Dirty casuals like me want to progress while they do content. I've done the completionist, disable-XP-and-do-all-the-content thing. IT IS VERY LONELY. There is a reason that the vast majority of mission teams you see are running in P.I. and Grandville. Those are the level ranges were you can play as intended: progressing slowly enough to actually follow the story content to conclusion. It simply doesn't work at low levels; you outlevel the contacts and get sent to another zone. And that's a shame, because some of those early arcs are fast and fun and dramatic--killer content that we mostly miss out on. And let's be honest: It feels bad to throw away XP just to see the story. I earned it, why shouldn't I get it? (A "bank" on XP that prevented your effective level from increasing until you chose to would mitigate that, and doesn't sound too hard to implement. But that's getting away from the main thrust of this post so I'll move on.) You can run them in Ouroboros. Not really! Have you tried it? It's pretty annoying. Flashbacks work like TFs, locking out characters of too low level. You can't just hop into a pickup group in the middle of an arc. Great for story completionists but too much hassle for people still on the grind. Also pretty lonely. It's a lot of work for something many people don't care at all about. That is true. Not everyone has the dream, like I do, to be able to pick any contact of my level and do their missions without getting arbitrarily kicked to the curb if I level up too much. To level meaningfully by following one contact's missions to conclusion, one after another. To be able to hop into a new zone and team up with somebody many levels higher who might be doing the same missions as me. Or even just see a bigger variety of missions when I'm inevitably tagging along with characters in the mid-40s range. I think it is a worthy goal. There's so much content that is only seen by a tiny fraction of characters; it's a waste. Changing it seems "simple enough": just raise the contact level caps as high as they can go. For example, those Atlas Park 1-5 contacts could go 1-15 instead. Those Faultline arcs that players are somehow supposed to cram into 15-19 can be stretched to 29, the max level for Lost enemies. Etc. Later, if faction caps can also be increased, say, by turning Lost into Rikti or introducing higher-tier Hellions, story arcs could be stretched even further, opening up more content for characters of every level. I can't see any reason why you wouldn't want to, e.g., allow a 40th level character to complete a mission for his level 20 contact, but feel free to comment if you think otherwise. Maybe if a later-level story arc refers to an earlier one, you would need to keep those arcs' level-ranges sequential. But that has to be the exception rather than the rule. And if the devs think it's not worth their time and effort, I volunteer! Point me at the code and the tedious individual number-changing. I'll do it. That's my pitch.

The brackets should be bigger on red/blue side, too! Changing it would probably stray too far from 'classic CoH', whatever that is, but I'm all for it. Locking story content after you level up means going to new areas for new contacts, which is irritating when you're playing in a group. The usual vet response here is "just do it in Ouro", but Ouro doesn't have all the content, just the story arcs. In Praetoria that problem is exacerbated, because are prevented from playing with the rest of the player base until you're "done" with the story. And the difficulty is tuned for big teams/high difficulty which, like you said, generates a high amount of XP unless you've got it turned off. I think it would be a reasonable compromise to un-cap only the Praetoria arcs, which would also spread that content over a much higher level range for players who want to stay gold and do it all.

The major issue is the large amount of content in very limited level brackets. If they simply got rid of the level cap on all those arcs, players could play through the story of Praetoria without skipping every possible mob or disabling XP. That would be huge.

Hmm @Rudra and I usually agree but I dee-clare this has struck a chord. First: My experience of petless MM comes from running mercs/traps until around 20. So the story of being exhausted by greens and blues, while true, is from the lower levels where slots are scarce. Once slotted up in the 30s you can confidently take on whites and yellows with those basic attacks and secondaries and only sometimes have to run away to rest. Second: Comparing MM attacks has to temp powers is problematic. Instead compare any of the T3 single target attacks with Arcane Bolt: They're equivalent. And thus: Look. The truth is MMs damage comes from their pets; they don't need strong ranged blasts. And those attacks do have uses: aggroing foes to trigger bodyguard, finishing off stragglers, giving you some buttons to push. Or just the satisfaction of shooting some dudes. But they are weak powers, numerically, especially the ones that don't have additional debuffing/utility effects. If they were better in the first half of the level progression, I don't think anyone would notice and we wouldn't be having this conversation. But lots of people do notice, and many don't bother slotting more than one of them. What would be the harm in making them good?

I think this post is right on the money. Have you ever tried Petless MM? It's pretty "hilarious" running out of stamina trying to kill a group of 3 green enemies. I don't think petless has to be viable, mind you, it just goes to show how meaningless the attacks are. I have never understood why MM attacks are both hugely expensive AND do terrible damage. At most one or the other, come on! I dunno, you give them some boost like, when a pet dies, they do more damage for 15 seconds stacking up to 6 times. Or synergy bonuses with each other like the Fighting Pool has. Like Lost Deep said, roughly, there shouldn't be a half-dozen pool powers you are inclined to take before even considering three of your Primary AT powers.

Also if customizations aren't enough because you want to get away from melee/slashing damage in particular, try Fire Melee (a couple fire sword powers plus a couple more in power customization) and Psionic Melee (psi-blades).

Done right and it wouldn't be too different than how it is now. Boomtown is 11-19 currently. Let's say instead it automatically levels you up to 15 and the spawns could be 14-20. In the south part of the map you'd see easier spawns and in the north part you'd be in danger until you've out levelled the zone. Something like that?

I think the hazard zones represent a great opportunity for experimentation. E.g. Changing Boomtown a little bit wouldn't ruffle many feathers. And if it doesn't work they can undo it. I don't think they need to be co-op, despite being all on the blue side... that is what the rogue alignment is for. But let's say you auto-level every player in Boomtown up (but not down) to level 20: facing those big piles of dudes in the 18-24 range could present a fun alternate way to team up and gain levels. Eventually everyone outlevels it and moves on to something else. (I personally love the idea because it reminds me of the really old days.) Seems like a simple way to revitalize a handful of zones, and get more use out of content currently limited to an incredibly narrow level range, without changing much of anything. Before DFB we used to do sewers; wouldn't it be cool to just hoof your new character over to Perez Park and start killin' skuls on a big team?

I think this is a fun idea, but have the winner become the Quartermaster in Atlas Park, instead of the generic longbow agent that is there normally. That keeps plot-important Ms. Liberty (and other trainers) where they belong but let a superfan be part of the game for a few months. Or practically forever, the next winner gets to be a quartermaster in another zone, and so on.

Why, though? Just because? The Praetorian alignments are for level 1-20 characters. You can still do that Wards content after choosing to become a hero or villain. This is like someone saying "I hate only being level 2 after the tutorial, can we get some more missions so I can get to level 5 in there without having to grind?" It's counter-logical. If it's frustrating, just play the game as intended instead? I get that choosing to stay Praetorian until 50 is a weird challenge (I do the same kind of thing badge collecting at low levels), but adding full support (~15 levels of content) for a teensy minority of stubborn/dedicated players seems, well... kinda silly, let's say. A Praetorian TF at the appropriate level range would speed up progression, encouraging players to skip over all the deeper Praetoria story, i.e., the reason you picked goldside in the first place. Dubious. An endgame TF could be cool, but not if it's limited to Praetorian characters... see my bafflement, above.

I played in the CoH beta and I played on and off for the life of the game. Never a full-time MMO player, or maybe just a short attention span, I would take months-long breaks from the game before coming back to it (while NCSoft happily took my 8 bucks a month or whatever it was). Anyway. Early on I made a self-insertion character of myself. I made a normal guy (Dark/Regen scrapper), in jeans and a T-shirt, named EP, which is what I go by in real life. On one of those long hiatuses the devs instituted a name release feature, so a bunch of the characters I hadn't logged in for a while had to be re-named to other things. Which was mostly no big deal. The name "EP" didn't get taken by anyone, but because they changed the name policy for new heroes requiring at least 3 characters (letters or punctuation) and I was no longer grandfathered in, I still had to change it. It bugged me, because at the time there was a Lore character named M1--does anyone know what happened to that guy? Did they rename him to Blue Steel maybe?--but my character had to run around with the name "EP?" until the end of time.

That would be too good, or more accurately, balancing it would necessitate an unviable damage nerf. Most support options have some built-in self buffing; making a general "buffs apply to the caster too" inherent would give some (like self-healing self-Fortitude empaths) much more potent defense than say, a blaster (to say nothing of corruptors and defenders). Meanwhile powersets without single target ally buffs (e.g. Dark Miasma) would get no benefit at all. You'd have to reinvent the wheel and modify powers ad hoc for every power set. What you really want is a simple Inherent that adds a little survivability--just enough to make up for being forced into melee, without competing with actual Defense sets--and then count on the Support secondaries to manage aggro as much as they currently do. And yeah, /Empathy would be comparatively harder to solo, but that's nothing new. At least you'd do good damage while punching dudes and relying on your Aura heal to stay alive. And they could do great damage! Even top tier (ignoring further AT bonuses like crits) wouldn't necessarily be unbalanced; unlike a typical melee character whose defenses are mostly toggles, this AT would have to pause their attacks to use their secondary powers, making their overall damage lower than a scrapper or blaster but still very potent.

It's a new AT: Who says it has to do poor damage? We can pick whatever melee scaling we want. Try 0.9 or 1.0 and tweak the buff/healing numbers to balance it out. Support + Assault could be cool, but would share roughly 75% of the same powers with a corruptor or defender which makes it harder to justify a whole new AT unless the Inherent was really something. I'd rather repurpose Assault in a Manipulation/Assault AT or Assault/Pets AT.

When flying, the Dreadful Discord effect shoots out in front of you instead of aiming down at your targets. Also, it bugs me that the power notes refer to Damage over Time as "dot" but I assume/hope that will be fixed before everything is baked in. Really neat powerset.