mechahamham

I remember suggesting something similar back on the Live message boards. UI work is harder than it seems, especially because CoH doesn't use any kind of widget toolkit, but something like the suggested changes would make the Power window a LOT more useful and usable. Especially when you're doing events that result in lots of temporary powers (Halloween and its feasts of Costume temp powers), the Power window becomes almost completely unusable.

This is Jim 'Thunderhead' Bartlett: He's a hero who fought in World War 2 against the Nazis. Your contact tells you this about him: Given that the minimum draft and enlistment enlistment age in the U.S. was 18 at the end of WW2, and that 1945 was 80 years ago as of 2025, this storm/electric defender who likes to melee against 5th Column super soldiers is AT LEAST 98 years old. In 2004, when this arc was brand-spanking new, his minimum age would have been a slightly more realistic 77 years. (I've personally met people that age who remarkably still play tennis.) 21 years later, his appearance and behavior is a little less believable. But this is a game about superheroes, time travel, and other impossible shenanigans. We have several immortals in the cast of characters for Paragon City and its surrounds. I suggest that we alter the text of the mission to reflect Mr. Bartlett's advanced age. "Mister Bartlett is amazingly spry and active for a centenarian, perhaps because of his powers. If he tries to help you fight the 5th Column, keep that in mind. Your priority will be getting him to safety."

Khelds: Very tied to the story and to get any traction at lower levels, it seems like you need to be willing to use the different forms. I DO NOT WANT my characters to look like alien crabs or squids. I've heard of people levelling human-form Khelds, but it seems like a real pain in the tuckus. Spiders: Very tied to the story, even moreso than Khelds. I don't HATE the playstyles, but I do dislike psi blast, which nixes Fortunatas. I'm not super-excited about the Crab animations nor the Bane mace animations. With villains you can either take or leave the 'Toady to Arachnos' story as you want, but with Spiders, it's much harder to leave that behind, and that's unappealing as well. After the shutdown, I promised myself I'd never make an MMO character tied to a particular in-game story again. I've yet to find a character idea that makes me think Spiders or Khelds would be the way to play that idea. Tanks: I hate herding. I've also found that I dislike being responsible for agro. Dominators: I dislike the 'Feast/Famine' playstyle of Domination, and the only alternative to that seems to be Perma-dom. Additionally, if I want sheer DPS, Blasters are right there. I consider myself a career Blaster. If I want control, Controllers are great and come with a ton of debuffs or buffs. Defenders: Seem so middle of the road to me. If I want to buff or debuff, Controllers are there and come with control powers. If I want to blast, Blasters all the way. If I want to play with pets, I don't loathe masterminds. So no real dislike, it's just there are always better options for me. Corrupters: Same issue as with defenders. I have a few more corrupters than my 1 defender on Excelsior and have even levelled two of them to 50.

There's always a noodle of spaghetti touching something it shouldn't in CoH. For the most part, I feel like this is reasonable. In other games, if pets go down, it's a very big deal and you need to drop everything to get the pet back up ASAP. CoH has a little of that, especially for MMs who spend their time in bodyguard mode. And I agree that 'zerg rush' tactics suck. They're not fun to play. They're not fun to watch. They're 'cheaty' in that they break the *intent* of the game mechanics if not the rules. Especially in the later game, though, mastermind pets just tend to go splatter, though. (That's something that keeps me, personally, from playing non-monster masterminds. The limp bodies of the summons make it feel like I'm failing at something, even if I'm doing okay.) Frequent resummoning is just a thing. If Page 3 makes them more durable against 35+ enemies in general, that's great, and I think the system as it exists here is reasonable and it *shouldn't matter* if there's a nominal recharge or not on the upgrade powers. If Debuff-type Masterminds are still resummoning during or after every fight in 35+ content, that kinda says to me that the durability is still not where it needs to be.

A thought about the henchman upgrade powers. They all have zero recharge time and a moderate endurance cost. Even if you chain cast an upgrade on already summoned minions, it takes a bit for it to deplete your endurance bar. At this point, why are the upgrades not auto/passive powers?

I re-tested Necromancy specters spawn and despawn time with a stopwatch on that same 28 mastermind, and they last just right at 30s now as of Build 2.

This bothers me because Numina didn't actually die. Her body was obliterated in the fight with the Red Threat, but her spirit was durable enough to stick around and keep the Red Threat locked down from the inside. From: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Midnighter_Archivist_Badge#The_Death_and_Rebirth_of_Numina It makes sense that something that's effective against spirits, like the Ghost Slaying Axe, would be effective against her, but if something is effective against the unholy, say Holy Shotgun Shells, it probably shouldn't do extra damage against her. Problematically, we don't really have a distinction between 'Spirits', 'True Undead', and 'Unholy' in the game. Perhaps we should take this opportunity to make one?

Testing on a 28 Necro/Cold mastermind. The patch notes and power description both say that the spectre pets now last 30s. I can't get mine to stay around that long. They seem to reliably poof after 25 seconds, even if not being attacked. Is this maybe being level-scaled, and higher level MMs have longer-lasting spectres? Subjectively speaking, 30s seems too short a duration for these summons. 90 is too long on Live IMO, but 30 is not quite long enough to finish an even-con fight, especially for MMs who have to watch end usage by rationing their attacks. My suggestion is that a flat 45s, regardless of MM level, is more along the lines of what is appropriate. -- Edit -- I thought to boost my MM's level to 50, and sure enough the pets do last at least 29s at 50.

The bug is that the NPCs are too far away to be identified and are getting LOD culled on top of that. This seems like something Lore-important rather than just scenery.

So, looking through the chainlink, with character detail turned all the way up, I still had to be told that the people inside were from the original cover art. LOD is culling MOST of their appearance at that distance. Zooming all the way in, where a single chain link is obscuring most of the view, their heads are maybe a single pixel or two wider. If you're watching the 'System' chat channel, you can see their names: Mighty Monk, Goldie, and Kamakiri. Again, I had to be told who they were. Also, 'Leave it to the professionals.'?! Punk! Do you have ANY IDEA how many Shivans I've splattered? I was tossing these guys into the dumpster at level 1, literally. And you're a Vanguard Captain? What are you if not a professional?! I really want one of the NPCs here to offer an explanation as to what's going on, or even who's fighting inside, and this is the only thing any of them will say.

This is a reasonable way to do things, IMO, as I mentioned in a post up above. I don't like it, but that's a personal dislike and not a 'I think you're horribly wrong'. What would be unreasonable would be something similar to 'People have been asking for X, so we've added X only to this new max-level content. You're expected to create a character and then level before you can have X'. (Warcraft is SUPER guilty of this with their 'Allied Races' shtick. Let's not go down that same path.)

I think we don't know yet exactly how much 'grinding' or 'gating' is going to be required. Going to Unitas' argument about the Witch Hats, I feel like that's a valid way to do things even if I don't personally like it. If you have a special costume piece that's obviously tied to one faction, but then more generic versions, then getting the generic versions at creation and then the specialized version as a reward is reasonable. The problem comes when the costume pieces are pivotal to a character concept, as Kitsulot mentioned. The generic witch hats didn't come out until MUCH later than Katie's TF. If you wanted to be a witch with a witch hat, you had exactly one way to obtain one. A good example here are the various wings that were introduced way back when. For probably most characters that have them, wings are a body part rather than a costume to be worn. If I want to make, say, a fairy pistoleer, and fairy wings were still tied to a very rare drop recipe, grinding and grinding, or paying huge sum of influence would be the only way to have such a character. In fact, to my recollection, the biggest complaint about making the wing recipes more widely available was entirely about having a wing recipe drop no longer be a huge financial windfall. If a class of costume pieces arises that inspire new characters, but those characters can't really have that look until they're effectively 'raid level', then those costume pieces may as well not exist. They're for bragging rights only and not about roleplay, character ideation, or the like. Going by the screenshots, this particular set of pieces looks to be very gladiator-themed, and we already have the Roman costume pieces. Characters can at least be created with a similar look. I can't be in other people's heads, so I can't imagine how important a particular piece is to the idea of their new characters. If we EVER end up discouraging someone from creating a new character because they can't start with a costume piece that's integral to their idea, I think we've failed.

I'm really sad that we've crossed back over into the 'Here are costume parts you've got to grind for' territory. We were already headed that way with hologram powers, but now I can't tell people that all costume parts are unlocked on character creation any more.

As I've mentioned in other threads, I don't powerlevel or farm at all. I usually avoid the PI ToT league unless I'm on a character over 25 that simply can't solo the EBs, which isn't really a problem after last year's changes. I love door-to-door ToT and did it for most of the month entirely solo, with frequent breaks to run Dr. Kane's House of Horrors with the requisite team of 4. On the teams that I form, I make a point of fighting through the entire house rather than skipping ahead to only the boss fights. If my character can manage it, I stay behind on other teams that did skip to clear the mansion of monsters and zombies. I occasionally broke off to help fight Eochai and Jack in Atlas Park. If someone advertised for a Banner/Deadly Apocalypse event, I tried to join even if the character I was on already had those badges. I love the 'Whispered Rumors' tip mission. I love visiting player-created Haunted Houses. I love seeing characters in Halloween-themed costumes. I love changing my own costumes for the holiday. I had EXP turned OFF for my characters for most of the month. Now, a few days out of the event, I'm looking forward to next October. I love it that much. If you reduce or remove the event, you're stripping that much enjoyment away from *me* that has zero to do with powerlevelling characters. Don't take that away from me.

I love that we've got some more color to the various spawns in Brickstown. The Crey encounters where they're threatening or even killing civilians are chilling and will fill even the kindest hearts with rage. And then there are these hosers: When you attack the Council soldiers, these asshats get to run away to the nearest door like civilian NPCs. I want to arrest this guy, even if I don't get experience or influence for it. On my less patient characters, I want to arrest this guy into a greasy smear on the asphalt. Can we adjust these guys so that they have the same level and abilities as like a level 1 Hellion? Barring that, can we make them go into the 'hands behind head' pose after we've taken out their supersoldier friends rather than just getting to run away? (I'd also like to rough up the council trainees that tend to appear in the East part of the zone, but I suspect that would likely be more development effort.) Thank you for helping me to stamp out fascism.

The name alone gives me a cold chill. And sadly not the kind that gets you paid sick leave. There it is. There's the awful horror movie. Wow, I wish I could say I hadn't lived through that a few times.

I really feel like the auction listing needs a major reorganization and optimization. The way it's currently done smells like the Paragon devs used an unordered 'select * from items where category = 'something'' when what they needed was to add on a series of parameterized clauses onto the query. 'order by parameter1, parameter2, etc...' I'm not privy to the code, though. If it were me, I'd also 'flatten' the tree-view listing a bit. Rather than have a tree for 'Enhancements', just bump the different enhancement types to the top level of the tree. The most major change I'd make would be to acknowledge the fact that the consignment store buckets enhancements regardless of levels or attunement. Rather than a separate listing for each level of enhancement, have one listing per enhancer, and then have it select the player's level as the default to purchase, with an option to change the level or to purchase pre-attuned. This is is some pretty serious SQL plumbing and UI work, though, and as we know, UI work is a LOT harder than it seems like. Additionally, unoptimized, uncached SQL can be a huge drain on computer resources and we know for a fact that this is something that HC can struggle with since they're using a hosting facility rather than the far more expensive option of maintaining their own servers.

In the Rogue alignment tip mission 'Steal the stolen items!' from the 'Auction Notice' tip, Shock Treatment tells me that she's going to kill me, but then fails to change alignments: She accompanied me for the rest of the mission. Interestingly, she showed as 'Orange' alignment while hostage to the Wyvern agents in the mission, and actually got debuffed when I used Devour Psyche against them, although she didn't attack me then, either.

I kinda figured we'd get endless night, and the pumpkins-in-windows textures with this maintenance. Are we not doing that this year?

The Impounder badge is currently awarded for 100 vehicles destroyed during Mayhem Missions. This is actually DOWN from 200, pre-Issue 16. The problem with this is that exploding cars and trucks in Mayhem Missions is one of the most fun things you can do as a villain, but you can knock those 100 cars out in only 3 missions or so. I'd like to suggest adding higher tier badges for destroying progressively more and more vehicles: Wrecker Service -- for 200 vehicles "You've shown the utmost dedication in removing vehicles from the streets of Paragon City... not running or otherwise." Uninsured Motorist -- for 500 vehicles "Every major automotive insurance policy provider has officially included you by name in their 'Not Covered' clauses." Unsafe at Any Speed -- for 1000 vehicles "Cars and trucks are inanimate machines without consciousness or feeling. Why, then, do the people of Paragon claim they can hear their vehicles screaming in terror whenever you're nearby?" Difficulty: Easy - Medium We don't really need new badge art for these... just recolors of the existing Mayhem Mission badge. It's currently a silver steering wheel on the red inlay with a gold border. I recommend recoloring the steering wheel to be Copper/Silver/Gold/Black to match the badge tier.

I had a fun UI glitch featuring this window a few days ago in Brickstown. The Deadly Apocalypse/Banner event was up at the same time as the Prison Break event. The Banners info that usually sits in the nav bar got sucked into the event window: (Screenie in that linked post)

What you're seeing here is LOVE. 'Professional' (hah!) game companies are often, but not always, in a contest of 'How much labor can we wring out of these schlubs because they think they're doing their dream job?'. Outside the development team, there is no love for anything other than green paper. There are exceptions to this rule, and you can always tell by how polished and well-crafted their titles are. CoH has been in the hands of its playerbase for many years now, and the changes that get made, the care that is taken to engage with the community, the level of polish and management that goes into addressing problems like those we've been experience... these are all done by players who don't have to be here if they don't want to. They're doing it for the love of the game, love of the craft, and love of the community, and WOW does it show. No development situation is perfect. I wish we could be paying folks full-time wages for the outstanding work they're doing. Right now, though, the love shows. Thank you for your hard work during a difficult few weeks, devs and GM staff!

I managed to get a video capture of a glitch I've been seeing with my Necro/Marine MM: https://files.catbox.moe/ii82xg.mkv Enemies spawned by Trick or Treat knocking can get stuck in an animation loop where they come out of the door, fade away, and then come out of the door again. My mastermind pets can target and attack them, as shown in the video, but they can't attack me. If I set my pets to aggressive and target through them, I can attack and debuff as well. It seems to be more likely to happen when I drop Tide Pool just right up against the door, but can happen without. It's less likely to affect enemies without feet like ghosts, but seems to affect witches, vampires, and werewolves better than 75% of the time. It affects the EBs as well as the other spawns.

This is basically how I do the vast majority of my ToTing. Bricks is my favorite zone for it, but Founders and RWZ are also good.

Welcome to our city! The others are giving you great info, so let me balance it with some examples of stuff that might be difficult or more challenging. 1. The game is extremely solo friendly. Almost everything except for those Taskforces/Strikeforces and Raids will scale down so that a solo player can complete it. That said, it's ENORMOUSLY easy to jump on a pick-up team (sometimes called a 'PUG' or 'pick-up group' for a half hour or so and gain a tremendous amount of experience should you want it. Don't force yourself. Just be aware that it's there should you ever want it. Now, a mistake I see people fall into quite often is that they boost their difficulty settings without realizing they have done so. If you talk to a Hero Corps Analyst or Fortunata Fateweaver, be aware that they'll very happily boost your difficulty settings to where you can't complete missions any more. There is also the 'Noteriety' settings in your chat command/emote menu. These will let you set those same team-size, level, boss, and arch-villain preferences. When in doubt, change these back to a level of +0 or -1, a team size of 1, solo bosses off and solo arch-villains also off. Don't be afraid to ask for help in /chat if you think you've accidentally changed these settings. When you get a bit more experienced in the game, you may find yourself wanting to increase the difficulty a bit. That's a good time to start experimenting. Be sure to take small steps, though, and find your own comfort level. 2. As others have mentioned, the melee oriented Archetypes, Brutes, Scrappers, and Tankers, are the easiest classes to just 'pick up and play'. You're fairly durable, whack your enemies at close range, and have lots of armor-type powers to keep you alive. Sentinels run fairly close. You have ranged powers rather than melee powers, but the same kinds of armors. Some other MMOs tend to make out 'Priest'-type classes to be strong soloers because they can heal and buff themselves. That's not necessary to solo here... AT ALL. Those armor powers are the solo-oriented buffs. Healers, Buffers, and Debuffers can be significantly more challenging to play and are frankly much more group-oriented. These are Defenders, Controllers, Corrupters, and Masterminds. You end up needing to understand how and when to use their powers to get good use from them. That said, if you build skill with them, the right character with the right power choices can be surprisingly effective soloers. An Empathy/Psionic Defender is EXTREMELY team oriented and will likely struggle to solo in a lot of situations. A Dark Miasma/Darkness Controller brings a tremendous amount of power to a team, but if played intelligently. can solo ridiculously well. Again, other MMOs will have you believe that Healing is all-important. It is not the case here. This is a game of damage multipliers. If you stack enough positive damage multipliers on yourself or your team and enough negative multipliers on your enemies... they simply don't do anything to you that requires healing.