Zect

Currently, the "incarnate" descriptor on content is just shorthand for "level 50 with a story related to Cimerorans or Praetoria". It doesn't mean "designed to challenge characters with incarnate powers". Which is disappointing, because I too am a big fan of the latter. However, if there was more such content people would probably whine about being persistently and constantly oppressed, or how the mission is no longer solo-friendly because contained two +1 Lt's and a minion. Won't anyone think about the casuals and the soloists? 🤪

One thing I like about CoX is that your build and power selection are generally static. When you run into a fire-immune enemy, you can't just pull out a water sword from your backpack and go on your merry way. Perhaps you'd need to pull out some long-forgotten temp power, use inspirations strategically, or play more cautiously. Perhaps you'd learn a thing or two about not relying on fire attacks too heavily, or even have to ask for help from a friend (cooperation! Heresy!) It rewards good build design and players who take effort to develop adaptable builds fit for multiple situations. And build design, accept it or not, is a major part of the game and its appeal. (Incidentally, this is also why respeccing powersets is a stupid idea. Let's hope the spaghetti code prevents it from ever being technically feasible.) The game offers some ways to overcome this, like multiple builds, unslotters and respecs, all at a small cost or with some limitations. That's because while nobody should have to live with a build mistake forever, there needs to be a little bit of friction between the player and the easy out of just picking whatever's best right now. Those limitations help make the gameplay challenges more about thoughtful strategy and design. Incidentally, one thing that turns me off the lolpvp in this game is the meta of slotting and unslotting enhancements (with enhancement unslotters) depending on the opponent. I want to be playing the game, not messing with the enhancement screen. It would be a severe QoL hit to the rest of the game if the pve meta became one of constant respecs for whatever powers are best suited to right now. The current situation is ideal, being neither too restrictive nor too permissive, and no changes are needed. If cost is the issue with respec recipes, the Beta server is available for your use any time, for free.

There's a lot to unpack here, but I want to point out that most modern missions in CoX do not have fail states, except itrials which are not solo content anyway. Even when the game says "fission mailed", you typically still get loot as usual and the story arc progresses just with different contact dialogue ("failing forward"). The enemies can't actually win; the only way you fail is by giving up. Therefore, the correct way to interpret posts like this is to understand that they are less about not being able to complete the content, and more about the content not being convenient or low-effort enough for the poster. Lol. Lmao, you might even say.

Def vs. corr dps comparisons are set-specific (even power-specific). That's because a large portion of Defender dps comes from procs. Therefore, how proccable your blasts are plays a significant role in how well you are able to compensate for def's lower damage scalar. Fire blast is nowhere as good on a fender as it is on corrs, for an obvious example. No scourge, no procs. (This in turn introduces other complications that muddy the picture even more, like how agility alpha is usually a dps loss for highly procced fenders.) @Erratic1's theorycrafting is only accurate for characters with nothing slotted and no powers active, btw. The damage buff that vigilance gives you is the same as other damage buffs in the game, not an increase to the damage scalar. It counts against def's (lower) damage cap and is additive with enhancement damage slotting. In practice, that 30% is much less significant if you reasonably assume that most attacks are already at around 189-200% of base damage from slotted enhancements (then add in things like assault and assault hybrid that both corrs/defs like to run, etc.) Anyway, in my experience from those cases where I have played the same sets on both corr and def, the def has never even come close to matching corr dps in a solo situation. It's generally around a ~20% dps loss for the higher-dps defenders. Though, that doesn't mean that fenders are necessarily bad; they are just more specialized. As a defender, your party is your dps. And while corrs may be better all-round characters, if the team is light on support I would rather be on a def than corr.

I wouldn't skip it. Not only does it give DDR, it gives -special to enemies in it. So their debuffs are weakened, and when you get hit by the debuffs, you further resist them. (This illustrates how the most recent suite of buffs has made the set objectively overpowered: not only has its main deficiency, i.e. a lack of offensive debuffs, been removed, it now has strong counterplay against its main counter, def debuff. Not that this should discourage anyone from exploiting the situation to the fullest! It is a monstrously overpowered set now, just one that's often underestimated because its powers are subtle and its strength is biased towards the defensive end of the scale.) Slotting depends on what alpha and how much global rech you have. FF, unlike most support sets, has the option of viable hasteless builds because none of its critical powers have super long recharges. If working with customary permahasten levels of recharge and agility alpha, one membrane brings the recharge into every-spawn territory while providing respectable levels of def.

Blasters do more dps than corruptors. My beam/TA/munitions munches a pylon in ~2:20 without summoning lores; you do the math on how much dps that is. However, corruptors are an S tier AT. They are just much better all-round, without being too far behind blasters damage-wise. 8 corruptors can do anything except Hami. For Hami you need 50 corruptors. Some AT's edge out corrs slightly for specific applications and situations, like farming, but ultimately in CoX the most powerful thing anyone can have is a support powerset.

The repel should be seen as part of hurricane's balance tradeoff: it's an extremely powerful debuff (-tohit, -range) in the highest-dps support set, but requires you to use terrain and movement to keep enemies debuffed effectively. If the repel could be disabled, the power would be far too strong and need rebalancing. Frankly, the repel should not be disabled on repulsion field either, but all of those buffs to force fields were a bad idea anyway.

This is fun and thematic, but it's an extremely powerful buff to a set that's already strong in aoe damage, greatly increasing the efficiency of its area attacks, so it should not go out without severe nerfs to the rest of the set. More generally, reverse-repel panders to the un-fun, stale mass-aoe/speedkill meta that dominates the game. We should be suggesting ways to shake it up and make different playstyles viable, not further reinforce the same old boring thing that everyone is forced to do. I'd like to see more situations where knockback and repel (the normal kind) are viable, for example. Two thumbs down for a bad suggestion. But thumbs up for the "immersion" pun, so you only get one 👎.

Reading this thread makes me nostalgic for the days, circa 2008, when the general public was just discovering that it was possible to muster enough dps to overcome the... 95 hps or so? that a level 50 AV regenerates, and it instantly became the favored e-peen stroking activity of forumites. It's fun to look at the insane amount of power creep that's happened since then; in the modern age, good dps characters easily spit out 300-400 dps without deploying lores. Anyway, define "best". Though whatever your definition, controllers are unlikely to be it at least as far as AV's are concerned, due to 1) their very low dps and 2) inability to stack vast amounts of confuse that doms can. Some builds, such as ill/cold, are still competitive for killing GM's without lores since in a loreless situation with GM's, -regen is more relevant. Though I don't know anyone in 2022 who's still impressed by that; people have moved on to undermanned runs of hardmode TF's.

This is a great suggestion on all fronts. Numbers, as objective measurements of truth, are valuable; there should be more of them where possible. That said, the moral panic about "elitism" is amusing. Here's a more rational take: paranoia about elitism is grossly overblown in most MMO's and especially in CoX. Here, you can already see what powers and IO's people have before even starting a TF, and the highest tier of incarnate power they have crafted, yet this elitism is nowhere to be seen. It is far less of a concern than people make it out to be, and not one at all in CoH. More importantly, viewing other players' performance numbers is vital to the utility of this feature. Numbers are worse than meaningless without a scale of reference. I have no idea whether 100 dps is high or low, nor how high nor how low, unless I can compare it against the dps output of other characters. In practice, the real reason people are averse to seeing performance numbers is not "elitism", but egotism: they are afraid that the cold, hard facts will reveal themselves to be less stellar players than their imagination makes them out to be. For the sakes of such players, perhaps an optional feature to hide the facts can be added. This would preserve their ego, while not taking anything away from those of us who value truth and data.

Cimerorans are the antimez enemy faction, and /dark is the set with neither -def nor +tohit to counter their defense buffs and it also loses the -tohit cone that dark miasma (the Corr/def version) gets. I don't know what gave you this impression, but you will be neither the cornerstone of hard controls, nor that of debuffs. That said, Wormhole/shadowfall are always useful, Dimension Shift may actually be valuable on a 4*, and Fade offers not only valuable res but rare defdebuff resist - it is one of the few sources of defdebuff res in the game that can be applied to other players. So while you have picked a choice that is far from optimal, it will still be valuable, provided you play to your strengths - heavy defenses, one of the best rezzes in the game, and the ability to reposition enemies for more efficient killing. I do. 😁

Just for that, I'm going to label servers. Excelsior is the teaming server. Not that other servers do not form teams, but Excel is the only server where LFG pops at all hours of the day. Case in point, an MoUG launched at something like 2 am Pacific today. That's the power of Excel for you. Excel also has a somewhat different pug culture from the other three. People tend to talk less, and focus on the fighting more. I used to view this negatively, because I am not a big fan of the soul-less modern MMO experience which can best be described as "being alone, together". Recently, however, I have come to appreciate it because frankly there are not a lot of people I want to talk to. The more efficient gameplay is a neat side bonus. Note, however, that Excel players on the whole are not any better or skilled - any efficiency gains are merely because they spend time fighting rather than talking. As can be attested from the Lv 37 stalker and fire/therm corr who skipped both shields spotted in a 2* ITF, they are every bit as stupid as the average CoX player! Everlasting (the dev who choose this somewhat cumbersome name will always regret passing up the chance to call it Eternal instead, I suspect) is the RP server. Not that RP does not happen on other servers, but Everlasting is the only one where you can go to Pocket D and find people hanging around the bar for you to chat up and cyber with. You will, somewhat occasionally, see people type in (( )) to indicate OOC, or give their LFG ad a little in-character flair, and I think it gives the server a kind of kitschy charm, like going to a theme park and seeing the employees dressed as mascots. So Excel and Everlasting are, very very approximately, the Freedom and Virtue of yesteryear, with every other server being ghost towns as always. Beyond the above, any labels are probably not too accurate. People farm on every server. People beg to sit on every server. People do run content on every server. I can't speak to pvp specifically though. As for merging servers, that should never happen, and not just because the current setup gives me 4x the chance to snag coveted names. It is always better to have more servers than fewer ones. Even beyond Homecoming itself, I want to see other private servers flourish and take the game in different directions. A multitude of separate communities, catering to many different audiences and playstyles, and creating a healthy competition among themselves to appeal to players, is the best future CoX can have. In game and IRL, diversity is strength.

This is a fantastic idea! In addition, I'd also like to see the following: Separate redside and blueside WST (so that each week would have a red WST and a blue one, and you could do both and get the rewards) - to increase participation in redside. iTrial WST - additional VR or R on completion (in addition to the normal drop table) and 4 empyreans; lam/baf can't be the WST. iTrial rewards are far slower than grinding out empyreans via vet levels. First-time completion bonus of 200% merit and arc xp for every storyarc, trial and TF in game - this way, players would actually have a reason to do them with characters other than the main badging one. Reinforcing alignment for the first time on a character each week gives 200 merits - some of them morality missions are dope, and I haven't seen them in years. The reality is that there are a handful of activites in game that pay out anything decent: marketeering, farming, hami, tinpex, the WST, and good teams running hardmode TF's. Everything else gives a pittance of xp and loot, and this is reflected in the much more limited set of commonly run activities on Homecoming (it's either the above, content with unique rewards like the FP TF's, or very low-effort content like MSR's which is basically designed for sitters). It's time to spread the love and make the neglected parts of the game more rewarding - and hence, more fun.

Much like real-world warfare, open-world PVP boils down to less about the combat itself, and more about the strategy and metagame element. i.e. who fights better matters less than 1) who can get more friends online, 2) motivate them and 3) assemble them in the right time and place. Just ask EVE Online players! I only bring this up because when talking about PVP, people tend to have an fantasy about a world with a perfectly level playing field where "only skill matters" (skill selectively defined as how well you perform in a 1v1 deathmatch with no external elements nor strategy involved). Not only is this fantasy already unrealistic in the best of circumstances, open-world PVP is intentionally as far away as you can get from it. That said... why the hell not! And even if I can't see playing on such a server long-term, I think enabling pvp everywhere or in selected zones could be fun as an occasional event. Consider this for April Fool's next year, devs. And remember to disable the drones around Miss Liberty. 😈

To add to this very valid point, boxing and kick are potentially valuable slot mules for KC, biting cold, AA, and FF (My 90% res to all 45% def to all except psi invuln tanker would like to remind you that 3x FF = 3% EN res). People who ask for buffs often neglect to consider the full potential of the powers and sets under discussion!

This game is so full of failures, flaws, limitations and letdowns, it’s easier to list what to keep rather than what to change. There are exactly three things CoX does well, and which deserve to live on in a sequel. They are 1) the character creator, 2) the IO system, and 3) the casual pug culture. Each of these has its issues, yes, but broadly they are each strong enough to make a game worth playing. Everything else, and I mean everything - everything else gets completely revamped.

I have no particular opinion on the suggestion. I am just here to point out the amusing assertion that it will reduce the number of AE doorsitters, which you and I know it won’t. People doorsit because they are lazy/entitled, and that’s two power sets you can’t respec out of!

It will take a while to burn through the stockpile of purples. I have thousands not even crafted.

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.