Zect

IMO, a competently built and played endgame blaster should have the following: At least 200 raw ST dps (approx. a pylon time of 5:13) and the recharge and eps to sustain this indefinitely At both ranged and melee. Blasters should still have well developed ranged attack chains even if blapping, because there are situations where melee is difficult or unfeasible. Without lore pets, because lores are difficult to keep alive in many situations. They should be treated as a bonus, not reliable dps. I consider this a bare minimum acceptable figure. Optimized blasters can get over double this. Viable brutes, sents and scrappers typically hit at least 200 as well, and they are armored, so there is no reason you cannot outdo them. Well developed aoe dps (generally nuke + 2 aoe powers) Capped tohit chance vs relative level +3 enemies Again, a bare minimum figure for 90% of what you can expect to encounter. You will have to fight enemies that are at a relative level of +4 to you in hardmode tf's and the later itrials, and there are enemies with defense buffs, e.g. Romans. A substantial amount of defense, generally 20% def to all and between 32.5% to 45% to selected types/positions Traditional defense strats are: ranged-only hoverblasting, S/L only, S/L/R, and rainbow (all typed defenses except psi, at least SLEN if not fire farming). Choose based on power layout and playstyle. Ample secondary defense stats (S/L/exotic resists, max HP, healing/absorb procs, regen or hps, etc.) - the more the better. Sure. However, doing so always comes at the cost of DPS loss due to playing more cautiously, disengaging, waiting for armored characters to initiate, animation time lost while positioning/jousting/healing/using controls instead of attacks, using defensive insps instead of offensive ones, dying due to user error, etc. Defense enables you to play more aggressively, function better in suboptimal teams (few/badly played support characters), avoid dying and losing critical buffs, helps support characters softcap you, and compensates for human error. The last one is a big one. When you play without defense, you are more reliant on your own skills to survive, and people tend to overestimate their own skill level (cognitive bias). None of us are as good as we think we are, and I frequently see players who scoff at defense faceplant and proceed to lose hybrid/lore/hasten/other critical buffs. Of course, don't go the opposite direction and cripple the build to softcap, either. Without DDR and heavy layered defenses you cannot sit and take hits indefinitely like an armored AT. Ultimately, while defense is not a panacea for survivability challenges, some level of defense is recommended and beneficial for all blasters. The type and amount of defense varies based on playstyle. The bare minimum I consider acceptable on any build is approximately 20% def to all, roughly the amount you get from weave, CJ/hover, maneuvers, and both +3 uniques. This requires very little slot investment and takes powers most blasters will want anyway for lotg mules, mobility and resistances. With this amount of defense, a defender non-powerboosted fort will almost softcap you. Vengeance + the weakest level of barrier core will softcap you. We see how even when not aiming to softcap, defense amplifies the effectiveness of other defense buffs. Beyond that, you can chose whether to pursue more defense. Each defense strategy has its own drawbacks, and some sets have a power layout more suited to one over the other. Ranged-only hoverblasters and S/L/R have to be cautious in hardmode ITF, for example, because every nova and fluffy has negative ranged aoe blasts. Recently I have been playing a lot of rainbow blasters, and they shrug off stuff other blasters have to be cautious against. But when they do get hit, the driver has to respond quickly because with no res from an APP shield they die in 1 hit instead of 2. The one defense strat I do not recommend is pure S/L defense. It is very brittle, especially in the page 5 environment.

The forumites do not seem to have given you a straight answer yet, so here it is: The etiquette is that there is no etiquette. You form what you want, when you want, where you want. If it "steps on" someone's scheduled timeslot and they are unhappy, they can deal with it. Nobody owns an exclusive right to run X content at Y time, however established or customary their presence is. The right that other people do have is to not join your team, or to prevent you from joining theirs. So, for example, if you chose to organize a baf in the ass end of the storm palace for some reason and people decide not to hike there, and nobody joins, that's just the logical consequence of your decision. If you form something while someone else is forming the same thing, and chose not to do the sensible thing and merge, and people decide to go with the more established leader's league over yours, that is also their right and you can deal with it.

I find it hard to believe the people crying "woe, woe be to the farmer" are using words like persistently and ceaselessly alienated. This is what I mean when I talk about an entitled victim complex. Imagine if people who did TF's on live claimed to be persistently and ceaselessly alienated every time merits from TF's got balanced. Let's take a more objective look at farming by looking at the many buffs, direct and indirect, that AE farming has received over the years: Addition of normal inf and loot drops even in non-dev's choice missions This is the big one. AE farming dramatically outperforms everything that's not a marketeer or a very good hardmode TF speedrunning team for making money, while requiring far less investment and effort than either. Addition of incarnate xp New farming maps Powerful new powersets to farm with (modern builds make fire/kin trollers on Live look feeble) Powerful new IO sets to farm with (you would need some very wonky build decisions to get softcapped to F/C on live without winter IO's) Numerous gameplay changes, such as the PPM system and resist IO set bonuses, that benefit many builds, but farming builds most of all Free multiboxing to increase farming efficiency, especially AFK farming If your point of comparison is live, as it should be, farming has been massively buffed. It just turned out that the buffs went a little too far in a handful of cases, and had to be dialed back slightly. If you still feel persecuted, it's probably a sign that you should peek out of the AE building sometime, and take a look at the big picture.

Not opposed to methods of fast leveling in principle. However, they must be equally accessible to all players and playstyles; not arbitrarily reserved for an exclusive, pampered few. (Also, the implied suggestion new players should be forced to slog through the game while veterans cruise to 50 is illogical. Experienced players should know how to level efficiently; new players are the ones who should be directed to powerlevelling methods, to help get them up to speed.) Thumbs down for elitism and discrimination!

Excellent suggestion! There should also be bonus rewards if you have incarnate powers but run without them, to compensate for the slower killtime, so that players are not economically disadvantaged simply because they choose to play differently.

One of the charms of CoH in its early days was the idea of the "hero's journey" - that you start off as a rookie, grow in stature and experience, and become a renowned champion. The hero that started off fighting street toughs and gang bangers would go on to discover megacorp misdeeds, unravel ancient conspiracies, battle ever mightier foes, and save the world. In time, that concept was gradually chipped away by the relentless focus on powerlevelling, on rushing to endgame, on skipping to this and that. Eventually, it was abandoned entirely, and the playing field was instead given to people who would rather play dress-up. The dress-up faction is so politically powerful now that they constrain the game - I suspect one reason HC does not offer cosmetic bragging rights rewards, for example, is because the above faction demands access to every costume piece from the moment of character creation. As someone who enjoys both, I'm frankly ambivalent. I appreciate the possibilities of having capes and auras, and other costume pieces, at character creation. A lot of my designs wouldn't look right at level 1 without something as simple as a scarf or aura (try making a convincing ghost without one, for example). And thankfully I no longer have to do all my costume brainstorming on the one specific alt that has every piece unlocked. At this point, restoring the old requirements would just further disadvantage people who are not powerlevelling and take more than 1 run of an AE farm to get their desired look. It shouldn't be done. However, I'd also support restoring the game experience of those who enjoyed the hero's journey. A game mode that gives extra rewards for players who play under the old restrictions, perhaps also with restrictions on leveling speed or the order the content must be done in, would help them enjoy their desired playstyle without being excessively disadvantaged. It was taken from us, and we'd like it returned.

Munitions Mastery is balanced. Survelliance is a highly valuable and effective power for tough single targets. Body armor gives less res, but costs no end, does not suppress while mezzed, and is available as the first choice in the set (most sets only offer resist toggles as the 2nd choice; the ones that do offer it as the 1st tend to have less desirable powers). The other powers are useful as set mules. I'd love to hear what set you think is better than the one that offers all the above, plus a mini-nuke. Let's not contribute to power creep, the biggest problem with this game. P.S. I gave you a thumbsdown for failing to mention the one actual buff the set needs - the LRM needs to come out of an actual rocket launcher.

It amuses me how, even after all these years, market manipulation still gets blamed for everything, and how the remedy is to cut off one's nose to spite one's face by forgoing a much higher income stream to farm AE tickets, just to stick it to the purported marketeer. As someone who actually did and does market manipulation, both on Live and here, I can tell you that manipulating the salvage market is not all that easy, nor all that profitable. Rare salvage on HC is a high volume and fast-moving market, it strongly resists attempts to move the needle. And even if I could buy at 500k and sell at 700k, that's still only a profit of 1.3 million per 10-stack. That's peanuts. The real reason is probably some imbalance in the ratio at which salvage to recipes drop, due to all the ToT EB's being farmed, (either dropping more recipes or less salvage than standard, or dropping more orange and purple recipes than normal) causing demand for rare salvage to rise higher than normal. You may have noted purples dropped in price lately.

That's not how capitalists see things, though. It's not good enough to make more money than last year; you need to make enough to justify the investment, and be competitive vs other potential investments. If you're making 25 cents per dollar invested, but say, BDO is making thrice as much, then the lights get turned off and the servers go to BDO instead. I see some people blame a culture clash, but I doubt anything like that was the critical factor. Cultural differences do not stop liberal democracies from investing heavily in authoritarian dictatorships. They do not stop repressive regimes from seeking critical technologies from their ideological rivals. And in the case of Korea and overseas markets, they are more than happy to sell everything from tanks to Poland, to cars to China. Samsung will even sell chips to Apple, one of its chief rivals. The only motivation involved in the game's closure was one of the oldest humanity has known - greed. CoH player numbers had been stagnant the last few times they reported player numbers, hovering at under 300k active subs. The premium server was deader than dead (you probably don't even remember it existed). The expansion zones were a no man's land. In hindsight, the death of the game should have been obvious to anyone willing to see. Which is why it may be for the best if Homecoming never gets that coveted "official successor" recognition that they have been in talks with NC for since forever. No offense, devs. You do a very great job here, far better than can be expected from a fan-run private server (especially on the technical and networking side - there's real professionalism there.) But history has proven that entrusting everything to 1 single group, be that NCSoft or SCoRE or whoever else may come, sooner or later invites disaster. What's best for the future of the game is to ensure that if someone mucks it up, others can carry on the torch. Rather than having one particular server be declared "the official one" and cause everyone to congregate there while legal action shuts down all competitiors, I'd prefer to see a healthy community of many different private servers.

I'm personally pleased that winter packs will no longer be discounted during the event going forward - an excellent and thoughtful change by the devs. Discounted packs give a large advantage to players that have the disposable income to spare during the event. If you have just 100 million inf, just buying 10 discounted packs for the 2 sets you want may mean putting other character-building opportunities on hold for a while. If you have 100 billion inf, you can easily afford to stock up and sit on them until the summer without affecting your regular play in the slightest. It's a year's worth of income from a few clicks. I like seasonal events and things that get players to log-in together in general, but not ones that give undue and excessive advantage to those who are already privileged. You can have some advantage, but let's keep it within reason. And before you start, I marketeer myself, but that doesn't stop me from seeing the massive balance issues this causes. As a matter of fact, it makes them all the more obvious. If a discount is desired, it can be applied by reducing the price of the winter packs year-yound - a win-win situation, and one that's far more transparent and equitable. In fact, the only better change would've been for the developers to announce, on Jan 1, that not only will winter packs no longer be discounted in future, but their price will permanently be reduced to, say, 2.5M inf, so that all the speculators who stocked up would lose money. 😁

A 2xp weekend sounds good, provided that AE is excluded, or it will just turn into AE farming weekend. It would be a great chance to equalize leveling speeds for AE and non-AE players! Alternately, a double drops weekend sounds good too (again, excluding AE). There have been many adjustments to exp gain on HC, but reward rates are still very low for most content.

1. That's not an intentionally stupidly high bid, that's someone attempting to type 2,000,000 (i.e. the same price as the rest of the set) and accidentally adding an extra 0. 2. Hypersonic has a decent 2-piece bonus (2.25 E res, one of the highest rates of res per additional slot) but it's also rather niche. So it's not always well-stocked compared to popular sets - note the small number for sale in your image. Items with small stocks and low volume are more vulnerable to wild price fluctuations. 3. The AH interface is broken and frequently displays incorrect prices or sales from different items. Sometimes the incorrect prices are interspersed with correct prices. You may see 3,000,000 100,000 3,000,000 100,000 100,000 Where 3,000,000 is the "real" price for the item and 100,000 is the sales for some other item that the AH is feeding to you as lies. An apparently reasonable bid of 110,000 will take forever to fill.

Corrs and trollers have the same buff/debuff scalar, 0.75 of defender values. However, corrs are a better AT than trollers. If you last played on Live, i25/Homecoming power creep massively improved blast sets. Snipes in combat cast faster, are uninterruptible, and gain bonus damage from tohit buffs up to 20% tohit. All nukes are crashless and have standardized damage. The proliferation of damage procs and powerful new sets that slot in attacks offer many ways to vastly increase defense and damage. (All these changes benefit Blasters too, if you're still interested in them! Gone are the days when fire/MM/mace was the only viable blaster.) Corrs also have access to Soul Drain, which trollers do not. The metagame has shifted in a direction that plays to corr strengths but devalues troller ones. Modern CoH is much more fast-paced and dps-heavy than it last was on Live, making controls less relevant and firepower more relevant. You can putz around casting aoe holds on things... or you can drop a blizzard and apply the strongest hard control - death. Corruptors are an S tier AT. Controllers will never be truly bad since a a buff/debuff set is the most powerful set to have in CoH. But unless you're doing builds and strategies that specifically play to troller strengths, using powers corrs can't get, like tanking hardmode ITF with PA, corrs outshine them by so much it's not even funny.

Thumbs down because I (and the majority of the playerbase) already regularly farm in AE. It's the best way to level, and the 2nd-best to get loot; that's promotion enough. The general idea has merit, though. I'd like to see it applied to things that are actually unpopular. Specifically, anything redside or goldside, PVP (base raids included), any itrial that's not lam/baf, a lot of old TF's and storyarcs, etc. I would actually do a lot of this content if it paid anything reasonably decent, say 50-100 M/hr. And I want an option to exemp down with travel powers disabled in a hazard zone and go on a mission to find an objective or hunt a boss, etc. Bring back the "hazard" in hazard zones. Now I know someone will come along and say, "but you don't need xp/inf to do those! You should do content for the fun!" Which is the silliest non-argument ever in game balance. Loot and other rewards are an intrinsic part of the fun in games; the anticipation, the delayed gratification, the rush of dopamine when you get what you waited for, are every bit as important as the process of achieving the goal itself. Loot is to content as seasoning is to food. Saying people should do content "just for fun" is like a terrible chef claiming that if the food is good enough it don't need no seasoning. Season the ****ing food!

The ideal forum would have no reactions allowed at all and mandatory anonymized usernames - regardless of your login, everyone would show up as "Player ######", with the digits changing every time you post in a different thread. This way, posts are judged based on their content as opposed to the poster. Unfortunately, this forum allows reactions that show approval, so things like thumbsdown have to be allowed as a counterbalance.

I don't know why people in this game have such an entitled, paranoid siege mentality. Every little change and balance tweak is perceived as an assault on their way of life, as though they were persecuted minorities living under an authoritarian government. God forbid you make a few million less per hour from your AFK farm! If a dev really wanted to make your life miserable, there would be only one AE building in the game, in RV... and there will be no drones guarding the doors. Homecoming team is not anti-farming, nor anti-anything, for that matter. The biggest buffs to AE farming are still implemented in the game: allowing non-Dev's choice AE arcs to drop normal loot and grant incarnate xp. Any adjustments downward pale in significance to these absolutely massive buffs that make AE farming far more powerful on HC than it ever was on live. So until you can explain why this remains the case, put your toys back in your pram. My rad/fire still rakes in the billions. (The only remotely iffy change I've seen is moving AE buildings out of the starter zones - I find the implied "new players should be directed to the rest of the game, while vets can be allowed to farm" a troubling double standard. What's good for one is good for all. Besides, vets should know how to fend for themselves; new players are the ones who need to be introduced to powerleveling and moneymaking opportunities.)

I haven't used the ignore function on this forum, but I'm all for anything that allows people to curate their online experience more efficiently. I would add that quotations should also be ignored (a common blind spot of forum software), and there should be no trace of their presence anywhere - some platforms, like Discord, still show notices such as "2 ignored messages". An ignored person should vanish from your experience entirely.

Even disregarding the tendency of official MMO forums to attract the detritus of their player base, online forums, especially ones with an upvote/downvote system like Reddit, generally become unipolar on most issues. People do not come for a discussion in good faith; they want to commiserate with those who share their perspective, and have their worldviews and biases reinforced. Disagreement is seen as a threat, and people will loudly screech for you to support or defend your viewpoints, while blithely disregarding the evidence you have provided and failing to provide data of their own. It was largely this way on the official forums, too, and the forumites whose names I still recognize have aged like fresh milk in the years since. Unfortunately, we do sort of have to participate, because I've been told this is where the devs get their feedback from. If you don't speak up, you won't be heard, and Homecoming will reflect only the views of the noisy minority. So get out there in suggestions and feedback, be active on the beta server, post in the Beta forum before an upcoming patch, and post after each patch letting the devs know which changes you liked and which you didn't.

Oh, don't get me wrong - fully agreed on that. Without humblebragging, let's just say that I also do a variety of things that don't pay anywhere near what I consider a decent wage, just for fun. (Though, devs, does there have to be such a distinction? Why can't the content that's fun also be lucrative? Making money is fun, too, and enhances the fun of anything that gives it. I want to make a modest 50 million/hr street sweeping in Perez with my petless MM, roleplaying a domme who's whipping wayward youth into shape. Surely that's not all that much easier than sleepwalking through yet another Hami, or logging in my alt accounts to park in AE with burn on auto? Why do I even need alt accounts? Homecoming team, please? Anyway...) My advice was in the context of the post I was replying to, and their playstyle has some limitations that make TFs and/or farming less efficient than usual. Specifically, no 50's and a preference for levelling over endgame, so no tinpex nor hami, a restricted WST selection, most likely little ability to solo TF's, and not killing level 50 mobs means no purple drops which puts a dampener on most varieties of farming. So if the TF's and storyarcs they've been doing haven't provided the necessary income, my suggestion is to marketeer more. If it's not possible to have fun efficiently, the next-best plan may be to do the really unfun but efficient nonsense for a bit, so you can return to having fun with a full wallet ASAP. Now back to my BDSM RP I go.

More measures to deal with leeches are definitely highly necessary; freeloaders are a drag on everyone's experience, and ruin the fun of the game. However, rather than removing players from the team/league (which can cause issues when waiting a long time for leagues to form), I'd be more supportive of a system that cuts off the flow of rewards to characters not engaged in combat for more than a certain duration (afk or not), then resumes them instantly once they return to combat.

There are still a lot of cheap 5-10k recipes to convert (or even sell directly) - you just need to expand your horizons a little. I don't know why people here are telling you to play story arcs and TFs. That's a common noob trap. Merit rewards, regardless of source, are based on a formula of 20 merits/h (though some content, like Tinpex, ignores the formula). With i25/Homecoming power creep, it's closer to 50/h, or 10 M inf/h at current market rates. That's peanuts, and you have to deal with diminishing returns. The top sources of income in this game are, in descending order, 1) marketeering, 2) AE farming and 3) hardmode content (though with a decent team, and I mean sub-hour 4* ITF decent, #3 can overtake #2). I suggest getting the highest-leveled character you have to 40, doing Market Crash, crafting and selling the purple you get for capital. That should enable you to marketeer more effectively. Be wary of blindly following advice from this forum. If you look at the predictions given in this thread for the effects of i24 on the market, nearly all have been proven wrong.

FF is now among the most overpowered support sets (imo right behind the king and queen of kin and cold). My personal favorite is to pair it with something offensive - with /sonic you output the same amount of -res as a full-fledged debuff set, while effortlessly softcapping to all positions and none of your powers have the typical high recharge requirements of support sets, opening up possibilities for innovative hasteless builds. Also, I don't know why that build up there has vengeance. The purpose of vengeance is a wipe preventer. Someone dies, you venge and make it very hard for anyone else to die. On a set that is already defensively oriented, the focus should be on getting as much offensive power instead.

Something that gives you +1 power slot is not a "QoL change", my dear. It's a massive buff to one of the most popular power pools. What a terrible and poorly-thought-out suggestion!

I'm not opposed to this... in principle. Of course, the ideal and vastly preferable situation would be a balanced and fun leveling experience, that does not favor any specific group of players. There is strong reason not to skip the leveling and gearing process entirely: the experience of leveling is a kind of delayed gratification, and scientific research shows that delayed gratification and anticipation generally enhance the pleasure of a reward (what people usually call a "sense of achievement", although leveling isn't really an achievement in the usual sense). No surprise that most people do not regularly play on Brainstorm, even though you can already give yourself whatever stuff you like there. It's less fun. But if this situation is too difficult to achieve, or if there's no will to implement it, then we may as well do away with the whole thing together. Allowing some players to effectively level much faster than others creates an imbalance between different kinds of playstyles and content that detracts from the enjoyment of all. An option to "start character at X level" would equalize the disparity that currently exists between different kinds of playstyles, and ensure everyone gets to enjoy the game equally. Only Homecoming team can decide whether they want to keep striving for a balanced game environment - including reward balance - or abandon this challenge entirely. Recent changes suggest they may be attempting the former, so I'm not ready to throw my weight behind this suggestion yet. After all, I don't want the rest of the servers to be as populated or active as Brainstorm.

Really enjoying the page 5 changes to fire armor and Burn, especially the fix to the bugged proc rate and spawning of multiple burn patches. Delightful change! The rad melee aura fix was pretty nice, too, as well as the sentinel AT revamp. I especially like how it was accomplished without upping the aoe cap or making other changes that would've increased the aoe power of sentinels. Sentinels are now a powerful and effective class with their own niche, without worsening the stale meta of mass-aoeing of hapless enemies in giant clumps. At this rate I can't imagine what a full-fledged issue would look like!