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Add Super Speed for extra hilarity. Anyone ever tried flying while using Titan Weapons? Had me in tears. I play almost exclusively animal alts so…Beast Run hilarity. Actually I rather like it, since if I have a rabbit at a very small size he feels more like he is scurrying quickly, and so on.

Playing any short character in "City of Tall People" where the animation doesn't point upwards a bit more leads to hilarity. On my small DB/WP scrapper: Every attack looks like it's taking them down by the groin or lower. My girlfriend says I like look like I'm kneecapping people all the time, especially all the 7' tall Council. I must be the boon of the prosthetics industry though. The best one was the attack that thrusts both blades forward and I was aiming at a mob behind the one directly in front of me. Looked like I shoved the blades dangerously past the first guy's bits to skewer his buddy behind him in the nuts. I was laughing so hard I had to explain it to my confused girlfriend…who proceeded to laugh. If you're short in this game, you are truly a vicious person; at least according to the animations. 😱

My first 50 coming back on HC was a rad/rad defender. He 50'd faster than my dom and my scrapper; no shortage of people wanting him on teams. So support still has value in some people's minds 0-50 and even for basic 50+ PI radio roflstomps. The incarnates might not need it or care, but the lowbies tagging along do. And something I've noticed playing the above rad/rad defender and a mind/psi dom: the debuffs and controls DO make a difference. I can watch mobs melt faster when I get my rad toggles off sooner. Less deaths and near deaths happen when my dom controls that mob we accidentally aggo'd without anyone noticing at first. I think the trick to feeling like you shine is to not back-seat play…learn to get in sooner. Don't player a defender, play an "offender." Learn the patterns of the team and time the debuff just as the tanker gets things under control or that scrapper dives in. Pre-emptively lock-down that second group everyone ran by accidentally. Follow the tanker into the fray with your PBAoE debuff (except KB ones!); I learned a long time ago that often standing next to the tanker is often the safest place to be, not on the edges. Adapt, be daring, and STILL be useful.

Thanks for the explanation; didn't mean to pour salt in a wound or open up a verboten topic.

Can someone explain what SCORE is, at what's the controversy with SCORE and "Leo"? (And is "Leo" aka "Leandro"?) I keep seeing these terms/names used without explanation…

Jeez, keep some challenge on Homecoming…and force people to use some strategy once in a while. Next someone will ask for Night Widows to have their Smoke Grenade nerfed… Tell all the Voids and Quantums to go home… Or to have Succubus confuse removed… Or force the Roman Surgeons to use children's bandages… May as well just give all the badguys NERF weapons and call it a day. It would certainly end the vicious Game Balance arguments…

According to Apple, Mojave is the upper limit for a mid-2012 Mac Pro (big cheese grater). In the Mac Pro line, a Late-2013 Mac Pro is required for Catalina. You're probably thinking of a MacBook Pro (laptop). On a mid-2012 Mac Pro, to even go to High Sierra I had to get an aftermarket video card recently that supported Apple's Metal technology (most Macs of this type did not have the higher-end Apple video card required). Basically, the mid-2012 barely makes the cutoff for Mojave. Besides, as stated above, I'm in no hurry to get to Catalina until apps I need catch-up...need Controllermate at minimum, or a similar app (of which essentially none exist). And by the time I get forced to get a new Mac, it'll all be ARM-based which will probably cause all kinds of havoc, as mentioned above.

Let's hope Parallels or VMWare support the move to ARM with their offerings. I almost went that route to play Homecoming until I saw the Mac-specific loader. But then again, I have the benefit of an old XP image for Parallels, and CoX-on-XP-on-Parallels on even my "Mid-2012" Mac Pro probably outperforms the PC rig I had back when I played. 🙂 But…this doesn't bode well for folks with more modern Macs. Given my needs, I can't skip off to PC land. And not everyone will run out and buy Parallels to run CoX. This mid-2012 Mac cannot go farther than Mojave so it can always stick around as a CoX game machine if pressed. (I have OTHER reasons to worry about new Macs. I rely heavily on Controllermate and Xkeys for ergonomic improvements as well as gaming, and Catalina broke that…so I'm not even in a hurry to upgrade to a newer Mac for that reason.)

This might seem silly or naïve but: Is the game still balanced against SOs, or is the gold standard IOs now? I feel like alot of forum dwellers here are talking in terms of fully-IO-kitted, or even pretty nice semi-kitted in the lower levels, builds. To me, HC feels like City of Gods in this way and if one is merely on TO/DO/SO their entire 1–50 that they are somehow lacking and not playing correctly. Is the HC expectation that everyone is wealthy and has IOs even well before 50 and that is the basis of balance discussions?

It's not about "leadership" as much as complainers: up the diff, only pick Council, get here quicker, the one who enters the mission and starts playing without the rest of us, and I could go on and on. I am a manager at work, I prefer to be passive when playing CoX. Let someone else call the shots, get the mission, pick the diff, decide whether the outlier is being an *sshat and to kick them (if they don't, then who am I to complain...maybe it's a buddy of theirs...). I can solely concentrate on doing the best I can for the team in the mission, then enjoy the little breaks between missions. Things that irk me about other player's "style" when I am "leader" don't bug me when I'm just tagging along. Maybe it's an over-active sense of "responsibility" or maybe it's analysis paralysis. I just know it lessens my enjoyment. Someone in this thread mentioned people not chatting on teams. What's that all about? On Live, people had fun, cracked jokes, and bantered. Teams now are quiet as a graveyard. That silence really sucks the fun out of teaming sometimes and really makes leadership feel like a job that requires maximum efficiency and minimum downtime.

I always play all of my alts to 50, I have yet to quit one alt. Some slower than others. I play on concept, so that drives my playing not how uber or difficult the alt is to play or team or solo. Most of my alts will hit 50 and then stop, no incarnates, no set IOs (beyond basic utilitarian one-offs like Celerity: Stealth, etc.). I saved many custom-made MIDS files from Live (provided by a wonderful in-game friend); am rebuilding those. About a dozen of them, and those will be my only incarnates. Eventually. When I win some sort of in-game lottery. 😜 As for "how far I incarnate" the goal is always T3 for the powers that give a level shift. The others will depend on how often I play that incarnate alt after that. I rarely T4, though I am well on my way on one of two incarnates I have right now just because I play/grind them alot.

+1 👍

Exactly my point. 🙂 I do get it if people want to do FPS-style super-tactics, or just casual chat time play with IRL friends or something (though I still wouldn't use Discord). Just not my thing. And yeah accents never work well over VOIP unless you are already familiarized with them. This is true of even corporate-level chat systems like Teams, Skype, WebEx, etc.

Love the B5 reference…one of my favorite shows! And so true!

Discord is a company I refuse to support for similar reasons why I don't use Twitter, Facebook, or any other "social media." Corporate over-reach, nefarious activities allowed, etc. Using it supports it in my mind, so I don't use it. I don't even trust them to handle security and privacy appropriately…so heck no. But I'd also avoid ANY voice because it breaks immersion. It is absolutely weird when the voice does not match the character (especially the gender benders out there). Like reading a good story you read where you make up voices and looks in your head, I do the same thing in-game. Granted, the chat doesn't always match either, but I can imagine most of the time, or mentally cordon tat off for sake of immersion. I used some voice (Ventrillo?) back on Live a couple times and it was too bizarre. On the upside, no one has ever asked/forced me to Discord on a team. Downside is HC Support really encourages its use, so it makes getting issues resolved a little awkward sometimes.

Never did like leading on Live, less so on HC (or as I call it, City of Gods). Causes me anxiety, quite literally. More relaxing to let others lead. Of course, I don't like leading people IRL either…making it virtual doesn't change people's behavior towards leaders and often makes it worse. All my "leadership" experience has been decidedly negative. I'm sure it's a case of 99% of people are great, 1% are bad. But I have a knack for attracting that 1%. Or maybe I just have less tolerance for *sshats than most people? (A comment to which I won't disagree.) I do really appreciate those brave souls who think leading is easier than joining…wish there were more like you! *bows* I also really appreciate the leaders who repeatedly allow me to tag along, I'm quite grateful.

Definitely would have lost my mind… Finding HC in the midst of the mess the world is—COVID, fires, smoke from said fires, earthquakes; all just in California where I live—has been my therapy. It was therapy during an emotionally brutal divorce back before the snap. It's cathartic to get to play a good guy and make a difference beating-up evil goons. It's equally cathartic to play a villain because "why not, the real world seems like that, F'em!" It's therapeutic to play a robot or an animal instead of a human being, to remove yourself from yourself. Cheap. Therapy. Something more positive to concentrate on for a while. Someplace to escape to for just a couple of hours. Escape.

I'd say "depends on your playstyle." I enjoyed playing a Mind/Psi dom through 50, even limited to SOs. More of a team setup and playstyle, solo'ing him isn't as much fun to me. Turned-around and rebuilt him as permadom (with the help of a friend, and on a relative budget) and enjoy him even more. I find my playstyle and this build meshed well: lots of AoE control to help teams, fair bit of damage when control isn't needed. I control or blast (or melee!) as the team/circumstance allow. Very tactical. I've played an SO-only Earth dom and those are (BOOM) just alot (RUMBLERUMBLE) of fun (GURGLEGURGLE).

@jubakumbi, love your SIG. I always remember the version Lisa says to Bart on the Simpsons (likely paraphrased or slightly butchered in my memory): "How non-conformist, in a conformist sort of way..." I find this topic interesting because yeah, HC seems to be (from my perspective) rich (more-influence-than-God), IO-decked-out, AH-playing, PL'ing/farming, min/max'ers. And since I don't fall into ANY of those, it does sometimes feel like I'm on my own or somehow not effective enough for "teaming with the gods." HOWEVER, I don't expect anything to change due to my lament…was like that when I arrived, that's what the culture is. I was happy enough to play, so I play over here in my little "oldschool" corner and enjoy myself while gods walk by. Thankfully I got some starter cash at random for a cool costume, kept my old Hero Builder files (made by someone else; I'm inept at it), and re-created a couple of my IO'd incarnates. That will keep my cash flow up for playing all the alts that will never walk with the gods (will never see an IO set or incarnate content), but will still be fun to me. Not sure why I should try to force my "culture" on the obviously prevailing one; or why others keep raging against the machine. I already know I wouldn't change any minds here. *shrug* As others have hinted: you enjoy your style, I enjoy mine. We might not agree, but we don't have to in order to have fun.

On Live I had a lively group of friends (oddballs all of them) and we had two themed SG's and costumes, think it was on Virtue: "Evil Girl Scouts" (redside) A group all dressed in matching pink-n-purple, all females, all small and girly, shoulder cats, and all manner of silly cuteness. I generally play animal alts, so I played a little pink-n-purple cat that was the mascot that was run through the Gene Splicer 2000 (how else would you get a cat in those colors!?!). Second costume was the cat turned into a big drooling monster (never let the girls at the GS2000 without supervision). All had Girl Scout cookie names or otherwise thematic names. The only "adult" was a "huge" body type in the same girly costume but looked like a guy…named "Den Mom" who RP'd pretending to reign-in the supervillain kids. And we'd stand around sometimes and accost, badger, threaten to kill, bully, and all sort of related RP (in Local) to sell cookies...near the ferries. "Flock of Seaguls" (blueside) We all had white-n-grey costumes, birds, and white-n-grey power colors. And real corny seagull pun names. Steven Seagull, Gene Seagul (two thumbs up!), you get the idea. Instant laughs when enough of us gathered in one place and started shouting "MINE!" in local. I haven't developed a set of friends like this on HC (yet); that takes time. But those days *were* a blast and Virtue was always "RP light"-friendly for this sort of thing.

If the OP is talking about the Mercs that I think were based on the original Ideazon Zboard, the "butterfly" keys for the movement keys (WASD+QE) are an ergonomic touch that dropped out gaming favor for some reason (the equally ancient Ideazon Fang falls into this category). I have my first Zboard still in use and a brand new, never opened stored in the closet as a backup bought years ago. Wish I could find a Fang at a decent price. I would be really sad if I lost access to my butterfly keys for gaming. 😞 Not sure why the gaming keypads these days don't use the butterfly shape/arrangement as it is MUCH more comfortable on long gaming sessions. I also find it less likely to cause mis-keying during movement as well.

+1, if you're lucky enough to have Parallels already. That's what I did. I was squee'ing too because I can't make an IO build to save my life, but I saved all the MIDS files for ones a friend made for me back on Live (when I had a dedicated gaming PC). The PC died about 6 years ago, but my current Mac will play CoH as well or better than that PC anyway. 🙂

Okay, I have to ask the obvious: Besides the Vidiot Maps and the sound mods, what other mods are there? For example, has anyone made an in-window clock? I used to use HeroStats for that; always found it annoying not to know what time it was IRL while playing. Feels like Vegas, where they try quite intentionally to keep you from the current time. 😜

FF/FB defender here (redside). A whole 14 of us! My forum reading would lead me to believe FF is superfluous in an IO-dominated game. So far though, he's quite the terror. 😈 I plan to take him to the incarnate game just to see how the build performs. Apparently my habit of building based on theme has me building lesser-used combos…

I've never had one with an IO build or permadom but I did find earth/earth actually great fun, nonetheless. I'd love to have one really kitted out. Just...have to run with the speakers turned down low. LOL.