Zect

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!

That line in Full Auto stuck me as an oblique reference to the old, old style of nukes, which had 5-8 lines of "X% chance to deal Y damage", resulting in much more variable damage than modern nukes, which are a single application of a flat amount of damage. Saying you might get lucky and get extra damage is the glass-half-full way of saying you'll never really know how much damage this attack does. 😏 Regardless, assault rifle's dps output is just fine (yes, even ST) and not in need of any buffs.

The -res has not been reverted and I'm really curious 1) what problem with FF, exactly, this change is meant to fix, and 2) why the game needs more -res flying around in any form when debuff sets are already overwhelmingly powerful and mobs are already falling over before non-meta builds can get off key powers. Do certain people feel the set lacks offensive power? Well, that would be like criticising a mallet for not being pointy enough; it's a complaint that should be dismissed out of hand without any consideration. This change is comparable to adding healing arrow to TA, except worse, because -res is far stronger than heals ever will be in this game. To compound this, -res is a debuff that jives neither with the set's mechanical nor conceptual identity (as a defensively oriented, force field wielding set). By the way: debuff sets with aoe -res powers have them on recharges of 90s or more. Repulsion bomb's is only 30s. If this disastrous change needs to go through, the recharge of repulsion bomb needs to be lengthened to reflect how it is now sleet-lite (Force Bolt's recharge could use a look-at too).

I have mixed feelings on this change. On one hand, the rationale behind "being able to always pick a power from the primary or secondary" is a good one. It also means that players who do not AE powerlevel are less disadvantaged than those who do, in the sense that certain sets are significantly less enjoyable to play before key powers are obtained - not only do players who enjoy non-AE content level slower, they spend more time in the less-fun part of the leveling sequence. On the other hand, the ability to skip the T1 from the secondary disproportionately benefits some sets over others. Corruptors (which are already an S-tier AT) can now skip weak T1 powers from their secondary eg. infrigidate, time crawl and essentially gain a power slot. Hopefully, the developers will take note of which AT/powerset combos benefit the most from being able to skip T1 powers, and balance them appropriately so that they do not become too powerful.

Do you also think that other aspects of burn (like hitting 4 targets even when the power description clearly says 5) were intended, simply because they were "known and accepted" for many years? If not, then your selective reading of the facts reveals your clear bias. Devs are often reluctant to make beneficial, necessary changes for fear of upsetting the playerbase, especially when that playerbase pays fees and generates negative press that upper management and investors are highly sensitive to. Regardless, a semantics argument seems silly. Bugged or not, one thing we can all agree on is the fact that the proc rate of burn was too high and needed to be lowered to something more reasonable. As for me, there is no spin here - merely a hope for a game that is enjoyable by all, rather than a select few players.

Further playtesting has proven that these changes are both overpowered and unecessary -- to a set that, contrary to what a few players believe, is already powerful, well-balanced, highly effective. The prime offender is the -res on repulsion bolt/bomb. Adding the most valuable offensive debuff to a set with some of the strongest defenses completely upsets its balance. The set now applies aoe -15% res on a 30s cooldown and an extra 20% essentially permanently to single hard targets. There is essentially no more tradeoff in exchange for FF's forbidable defenses. I warn you that the other set with strong +def/-res, Cold Domination, is already the #1 support set in 4-star hard mode ITF speedruns (albeit cold leans more towards the offensive rather than defensive side of the equation). I can support some of the smaller changes - adding special resist to dampening bubble, for example, to give the set something unique that doesn't completely overpower its weaknesses, but the -res is a clear mistake. Remember, buffs, once handed out, are nigh-impossible to revoke, because the playerbase will cry bloody murder. Buffs to offensive power in particular are especially problematic and led to the high-dps speedkill meta now prevalent on homecoming, where many sets are actually disadvantaged due to being unable to fire off all key powers before the engagement is largely over, destroying the fun of many players and disadvantaging their playstyles. These changes should be reverted before the problem is allowed to start anew; or, if you must add them, they should be added very gradually, with an eye to making the set undertuned on release and increasing them later only if necessary (-5%/-7.5% for repulsion bomb/bolt would be more reasonable).

This is a completely unnecessary buff. Force fields is an extremely powerful and effective set, especially in the new hard mode TF's. It's alright that force fields is not widely played; not every set must be popular. Superfluous buffs contribute to the inexorable power creep that makes content unfun. There is no need to homogenize the support sets further, nor pander to the current high-dps meta, by adding -res on sets that do not need it. All of these changes should be reverted.

Extremely pleased with the improvements to Burn. Specifically, fixing the well-known proc activation bug that gave this power far more dps than it should ever have. Bravo!