America's Angel

Top 10 Ranked 6/13/2021: 1 Madvillain 2 Alouu 3 Ridicc. (+1) 4 America’s Angel 5 magecow (+1) 6 T Mart 7 Blackhearted 8 mjb (+15) 9 Seductive 10 Mushroom Ranks are calculated by Elo Score. Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZetLGnWhKXeE9o_5KG3ZI-rpdhde5YigzQlorIsOR4k/edit?usp=sharing Reasons for movement: We ran another Beginner's night on Everlasting. Had a great turnout again. Highlight of the event was mjb bringing his MA/Stone brute...and coming first with it! Wish I'd grabbed a picture of it doing Eagles Claw. As always, if you're interested in seeing your name in the top 10, taking part in our weekly Sunday Fightclub events, or learning more about 1v1 melee fights, then feel free to join up to our discord, here: https://discord.gg/knq839NUM4

Yeah it turns out my last post was inaccurate. The ski slopes weren't fixed, they were just rounding to the nearest 1/8th of a second.

I'm really impressed when people play characters with complex human motivations/emotions that differ from the player. Because usually it's one or the other - either they're carbon copies of the player and therefore have depth, or they're nothing like the player, and are just a cardboard cutout.

The mace epic having a magic wand option would be neat. (Could use the Broadsword taunt animation for the blasts.)

What's doubly interesting is that you can't blame Empathy's lead on Defenders as being due to Empathy being good in PvP. (Because most PvP emps are controllers.)

I'm not sure how SR can compete with Invuln and Shield. They have more res, more health, and do +dam. (And in Invuln's case, a huge heal.) Better DDR and bonus recharge in quickness?

Yup! (Here's how the other ATs compare...)

@M3z you should check out MJB's videos, above. They show that melee can be viable in small scale stuff just as much as it is in 1v1s. In Zone PvP, stacking taunt for -range is one way of countering your opponent's Jaunt. This is what it looks like in practice: Here's what my psy/em with Intuition, and a whole bunch of +range bonuses look like vs stacked taunt... Melee being able to seriously neuter the best evading power in the game, reduce the range of all ranged foes' attacks, as well as dish out loads of damage themseles (their epic attacks now have increased crit chances from the ATOs, remember) means Melee is in a very good spot right now.

Scrapper - 66.93 = 3.3465 HPS per PT Proc Brute - 74.96 = 3.748 HPS per PT Proc So if you have four of them on a regen brute, you're looking at an extra 14.992 HPS.

According to the T&C you should be fine. People in the same household can play up to 3 accounts each at the same time. (So you and your wife could run 6 accounts in total between you, provided your server doesn't have more than 1500 people online.) I'm not sure if GMs can see your computers' physical MAC addresses to verify this, though. From the looks of the exchange, above, it seems they can only see public IP addresses. Hopefully I'm wrong, though. (And yeah, kudos to @GM Impervium. Had nothing but good experiences with them. ^^).

Yeah same. I don't play a character until I've AFK farmed them up to the right vet level to slot them out with IOs and Incarnates. I skip the 1-50 stuff the same way most people skip the tutorial. This makes my POV hugely biased, so I try and always bear this in mind when discussing game balance. Congrats on 1000 rep.

The weird thing about CoH is that the majority of people play 1-50 with SOs, the game is balanced around 1-50 with SOs...yet nearly all talk on the forums/discord/etc about whether a powerset is viable in PvE or not is based around IOs and Incarnates. We saw this disconnect recently with the Rune of Protection change. Most of the pushback to it was from people who wanted to cycle it with Melee Hybrid with high global recharge IO builds. This had no impact on the dev team's perspective...because the game is not balanced with IOs or Incarnates in mind. The only place where IOs/Incarnates should be looked at is in those fringe cases where some sets are rendered borderline obsolete due to them. (Keyword borderline). Currently that's the case with Empathy and Force Fields. So, the solution I feel is to come up with new categories (Team Healing, Team Defensive Buffs, etc) and put in new IO sets that will help those sets perform well at 50 with IOs. One idea I had for Team Healing was along the lines of the Sudden Acceleration "KB>KD" IO. Except it could be "Healing>Absorb" or "Healing>Regen" or "Healing>+HP". (Possibly a unique IO, so you have to make a tactical decision about where to slot it.) In addition to this, you could also have the set bonuses provide insane global recharge. Of course, I don't know how you would implement this without also buffing Pain, Thermal, Cold, the Medicine power pool, etc. But an idea worth exploring IMO.

I know what you mean. My account is like 90% characters I've PL'd to 50...and then abandoned.

PvP RPing Ski Slope AFK Farming whilst working from home I don't really run regular PvE content all that much these days. (Tbh, even back on live I still behaved this way. I prefer treating CoH as a sandbox rather than a theme park.) Still having a blast, though.

I'd suggest Soul Storm, it lets you take a snipe, and that snipe (Moonbeam) has an extra damage proc over the other scrapper snipes.

On Scrappers, EM does much more burst damage than Street Justice. That's the reason to take it. Don't get me wrong, Street Justice on Scrappers is a good set, but it doesn't compare to EM.

Can you remember which zone you experienced Travel Suppression in? If you've experienced travel suppression in zones recently then that was 100% a game bug and you should report it here: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/32-bug-reports/ (If it was in an arena match then you likely just had the option for it switched on. It's switched off by default.) The reason Scrappers are better than Brutes for zones is because Brutes struggle to build fury in zones, and scrapper crits are VERY good for burst damage. (Which is king in zones.) Using an EM scrapper, for example, you can hit your enemy with a procc'd out epic hold to hold them in place for a few seconds. That's time enough to close the distance, hit Total Focus (with the Critical Strikes ATO slotted), follow up with a Critical ET, and then follow that with a Crit Snipe. This chain will drop most squishies. A Brute by comparison will probably want to do: Stone Cages>KO Blow>Fossilize, or TF>ET>Fossilize. This does a decent chunk, but it's not enough to drop squishies. I'd say for zone play a stalker is better than a brute. Stalkers do better burst damage, and can evade easier. Stalkers are kinda OP in zones tbh. You should never die on one if you know what you're doing.

Before Issue 13, Travel Suppression didn't exist. Travel Suppression was turned on in PvP on during Issue 13. From this point onwards it remained active in PvP zones until the servers were closed. (Although you could opt to have it disabled in arena matches.) Travel Suppression was turned off by the Homecoming devs back when they launched. It has remained off ever since. It's not been brought back in a recent patch. I'd be surprised if it ever returns. Speaking as someone who currently plays melee characters in PvP, the lack of travel suppression is a good thing. You have to remember travel suppression affected attackers, too. So, if you hit someone with a melee attack, your travel will be suppressed. This makes it harder to chase people to land follow-up attacks. With travel suppression gone, you are now able to chase enemies easier. For PvP zones you probably want an EM/Regen Scrapper. For 1v1s with movement allowed you probably want a claws/fire scrapper. If you want to do Fightclub (1v1 melee vs melee no moving) then there's a whole bunch of viable stuff. (This is why most people with an interest in PvPing on melee tend to gravitate towards Fightclub. It's more balanced than melee vs ranged in zones, and closer matches the PvE play experience.)

Movement is no longer stalled after attacking. That was a feature called "Travel Suppression" that was introduced by the live devs. It has since been switched off by the Homecoming devs. (And rightly so!) Whether melee is in a good spot depends on what you're using it for. Melee is good in 1v1 fights as well as in PvP zones. The only area where melee isn't so hot is in 8v8 arena matches where kills are determined by spikes, and taunt is banned. (Taunt reduces your enemies range by 75%, and it stacks.) EM on brutes is poor. If you want to go with that combo I suggest going EM/Regen Scrapper. It'll do well in 1v1 versus other melee characters, and it will also do well in zones. (Epic hold>TF>ET.)

Apparitions do -1000% fly Flight does +100% fly Evasive Manuevers does +400% fly So you don't have enough to protect from the attack.

Non-Mind Controllers and Masterminds who use empathy in their secondary benefit from all of the team buffs when soloing. If Defenders/Corruptors with Empathy are significantly underperforming relative to other defender/corruptor sets when soloing at +0/1 on SOs then that's something that might need looking at. If this is the case, then allowing Defenders/Corruptors to self-buff with Clear Mind/Fortitude/etc when soloing might be something worth considering. (Possibly even on MMs/Controllers, too.) In terms of the buff values, though, the reason empathy's buffs are worse relative to other buff sets is because it is the best healing set in the game. The recharge on the auras are a little excessive and could do with being reduced, and CM could probably be switched from mez resistance to mez protection, but I don't see much else to change beyond this. Just to touch on this one line in particular. The point of me listing all that stuff was to show how utterly unbalanced level 50 with IOs and Incarnates already is. And why we should try to ignore it when discussing game balance...unless we want all that stuff to end up on the chopping block, too. Which is why I suggested the Team Healing IO sets as a way of boosting Empathy in the end game without affecting how the set is balanced in 1-50 on SOs.

Empathy players don't have trouble soloing at+0/1 when playing 1-50 on SOs. Empathy players are hugely useful to teams at +0/8 when playing 1-50 on SOs. These are the metrics by which the the devs balance the game. So empathy is fine. If you believe empathy should be balanced around other metrics, you need to make a case for this. And you cannot do it in isolation for Empathy, you must apply this same metric to every other set in the game. So, for example, if Empathy should be balanced based on how it performs at 50 with IOs and Incarnates, then you have to look at how EVERYTHING balances at level 50 with IOs/incarnates. So you would need to revisit: Everyone being able to softcap defense The sheer amount of global recharge IOs provide Armour sets being able to plug their res holes easily Damage procs Miracle, Performance Shifter, Numina, and other endurance-woe-curing globals All alpha slots All other incarnates Trying to balance the above would most likely result in a huge bunch of nerfs. A better approach would be to accept the following: Empathy is fine playing 1-50 on SOs (the recharge on the auras is a little long, but that's pretty much it) IOs (and possibly Incarnates) don't benefit empathy as much as they do other power sets. So the issue is IOs, not Empathy. The solution is twofold. Create a new category of IO sets called Team Healing. Set every power that heals others to this category. Have this category able to slot both Team Healing IO sets and regular Healing IO sets. Create a bunch of badass new sets in the Team Healing category that will boost empathy in the endgame in such a way that "empathy players aren't useful at 50" becomes untrue. That's the better approach, IMO. Because the main thing switching people off from Empathy is that team-mates don't really need healing in a world of IOs and Incarnates.

CoH isn't balanced around the endgame/IOs. It's balanced around 1-50 on SOs. In that context, empathy is fine. If you think empathy should be rebalanced based on how it performs at 50 with IOs and incarnates, then that is a much bigger discussion, as every other set in the game will need to be looked at/balanced in the same way.

Fantastic. Excited to test these.

Top 10 Ranked 6/6/2021: 1. Madvillain 2. Alouu 3. America's Angel 4. Ridicc. (+3) 5. T Mart 6. magecow 7. Blackhearted 8. Seductive 9. Mushroom 10. Kencian Ranking is based on ELO score. (Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZetLGnWhKXeE9o_5KG3ZI-rpdhde5YigzQlorIsOR4k/edit?usp=sharing) Reasons for movement: We had a special guest come and join us at the Fightclub event this week... Ridicc is based in France. So he's a rare sight at our events due to them starting at 11pm his time. His EM/Regen is not to be messed with! (As I and several other Fightclubbers found out!) As always, if you're interested in seeing your name in the top 10, taking part in these events, or learning more about 1v1 melee fights, then feel free to join up to our discord, here: https://discord.gg/knq839NUM4