Android

I just dropped: Nutjob Hippo

The name Beatnik is available, and I hope somebody makes good use of it (beret and stripes a must).

Yeah, you can often see Crey doing super-shady stuff in the back alleys of Seven Gates, as well as Crey tanks testing their armour out on the street. Man, I would hate to live in that neighbourhood.

Something I've wanted since the days of live: is it possible to add the Hero Corps chest symbol / harness (I guess it would all have to be one thing considering how chest options work at the moment) to the creator? I ask because it seems(!) like it should be a relatively simple addition and would make a perfect costume option for Rogues doing missions in Paragon City ("hero for hire" work, essentially).

I generally love Sentinels more or less as they currently function (and don't really recognise a lot of the problems players seem to report - you give up some damage for a lot more survivability, which seems a fair trade-off to me), but I'd like to see defensive opportunity reworked or thrown in the can altogether. Once I have a Sentinel at 50, I automatically dump the T2 power during respec because defensive opportunity effectively becomes useless once you've maximised def/res with IOs (and while I recognise that some players find it useful before 50, I always find myself reaching for the damage boost from offensive even on low-level characters). So I think, really, my only fix for the AT would be to dump defensive opportunity completely and then add something new to compensate; either give offensive opportunity a significant damage boost (effectively replacing Build Up for Sents) or keep it as-is and increase base damage (I voted for boosting to 1.000, but certainly wouldn't complain if it was higher). A Sentinel's damage can be made pretty respectable with the right slotting and Musculature/Assault, but it'd be nice if we could trade what I, personally, find to be a fairly useless mechanic for better DPS.

I never really noticed it on live, but since coming back to CoH for Homecoming, I've noticed that Brickstown actually seems more like the "bad part of town" than Kings Row (which is where I based the backstories for all my vigilante characters back in the pre-beta days). I'm particularly thinking of Seven Gates, which is a neighbourhood literally in the shadow of a prison. It's rundown, overflowing with criminals (The Council is openly recruiting on the street), and filled with the kinds of tenements you also find in KR. I also think it's interesting that it's the only zone (that I can think of) where you can run into running street battles between various villain groups (usually the Freakshow, I think?) and the cops. So I'd have said KR back in the live days, but playing through Brickstown this time around changed my mind. EDIT: Remembered you also see cops fighting the Skulls in KR, but I'm pretty sure that was added with the new superadine arcs. I'm not sure when the street battles were introduced in Brickstown.

I guess Mafioso just make for great villains (even if the reality is pretty far removed from the pop culture tropes), and they have a long history in comics. I love Marvel's Maggia, for example. Besides, even if you're not particularly into the Family as an enemy group, what you outline here is exactly what I'd love to see. Throw in some new costumed supervillains for heroes to fight and some themed superheroes for villains to go up against (I'd love to see some kind of costumed "Gangbuster" branch of the PPD, for example), and it would all feel amazingly comic-booky. That last part is also a great idea and would combat that "I'm not villainous enough" feeling some players get. There should be an opportunity for villains to become the new crimelord of KW at the end of the arc, or at least part of it.

I like the idea of it being a zone that primarily revolves around gangs like The Family or the Syndicate. This means the current devs can avoiding dipping too much into what Cryptic had planned with Battalion (problem there, of course, is the pressure to live up to what would or might have happened on live), and it gives some attention to groups that didn't get a lot of air time in the original game. It might also be nice to have arcs that actually feature Sebastian Frost as an AV (for heroes) / ally (for villains). He appears in City of Villains for about five seconds and is just a really uninspiring NPC. We could, at least, face off against muscle-for-hire types hired by Frost (I'm thinking villains along the lines of Rhino, Shocker, Sandman, etc.) To build on some of the ideas already presented here, what about an over-arching storyline focused on a gang war between The Family and misplaced Syndicate, both trying to take control of the zone as new territory? This means Praetorian lore can be skipped over quickly (what more do you need to know than "Syndicate were Praetorian, now they're here") and allows for plenty of story options on both blue and red side. If you chuck in some cool supervillains for good measure the whole thing could take on a really cool Spider-Man flavour (I have always loved those 1980s Spider-Man arcs about gang wars between Kingpin / Hammerhead / The Rose / and so on). I really love the feel of the arcs that get heroes from levels 1-15 (the Skulls stuff in Kings Row in particular), and it'd be nice to have more stuff like that at a higher level but with a lighter tone. There are already zones that can make you feel like Superman (most of the stuff in the 40-50 range) or Dr Strange (Dark Astoria), and we have early arcs that have a very Batman / Daredevil flavour (like that early KR stuff). It would be great to see a zone focused on capturing a kind of Spider-Man feel. Gang wars, colourful supervillains etc. That's what I'd like to see, anyway! EDIT: I've just taken a spin around KW, cause I realised I'd never actually been to the zone, and having now seen how it's laid out, it'd be even better if The Family had control of the rundown villain side of the zone, while Syndicate had control of the hero side (with intermittent gang wars on the middle island).

Yep, though that doesn't mean the problem isn't on my end (I'm using a mac and my OS is pretty old, so that could be the problem I guess). As per the original post, I've heard anecdotally that I'm not the only person who has experienced this problem though.

Posting at the request of a GM. I took the Ninja APP (can't remember if that's the exact name but you'll get what I mean) on my Beam Rifle / Energy Aura Sentinel. I noticed shortly afterwards that the FX on Beam Rifle were now firing out of my character's feet instead of the gun. I asked on /help, some folks said it had been discussed there a little bit and was in some way linked to the katana in the Ninja pool. I tried a respec to ditch the pool, but it didn't work (katana costume option still shows up in the costume creator, so it causes the same bug). So I played around a little - depending which katana model you pick, the FX on Beam goes wonky in any number of ways (some of them make the FX come out of your head, some out of your feet). There are two models I found that don't seem to bug Beam - one is the Fire and Ice Elemental Sword, the other is one of the tech-looking swords. Most of the others seem to cause the bug. This isn't a huge problem for me as I'm happy to just use the tech sword that doesn't make the Beam FX buggy, but could see it being annoying for a player who wanted to use one of the models that does. EDIT: Worth saying, I haven't got an AR Sentinel high enough to check but I imagine there might be a similar issue there.