Soyuz

One other thing I did like about the arc. For the Cortex mission you have the choice of going in via the front door, or via the roof (given as a dialogue choice at the end of the Wasting Disease mission). Choose the roof - the NPC dialogue is hilarious when you do that.

I've only played through this arc twice, and haven't had the "pleasure" of failing the mission yet. Got lucky, I suppose. It sounds like you have a valid point there though - of all the places they could have given you a dialogue choice, that one would top the list.

Is it harder than most of the launch content? Yes. Is it completely unbalanced? Not really. I can't speak for the experience on large teams, but I just soloed it on a pool-power-challenge character and the only real problem was Cortex. Got myself a Shivan for that guy, but looking back on how the fight went I could probably have handled him by just stocking up on purples in advance (or teaming up, but I don't like to inflict my gimp-ness on people). It's a bit like the Night Ward content, or dealing with Malta. You might be able to chew through Council with the difficulty cranked way up, but you'll have to dial it back a bit for some of the tougher enemy groups. No shame in that. As for the dialogue, it's lengthy in places but I preferred it to the old "The Sky Raiders have stolen Weapon Q and must be stopped! They're over there. Go get 'em." approach. Overall I'd give it 4/5. An excellent first effort, I thought.

Thanks for all the replies so far. It's been very helpful. Part of the problem I'm having is that (I think) you can only have four pools! There's so much more I could do if I could dip into more of them. As it is, I knew the bulk of my offence was going to come from the Fighting pool, along with Tough and Weaver for defensive purposes. That's one pool. I wanted Sorcery for Rune, as the ultimate back-up plan in case of mez, plus I just like Mystic Flight. That's two. I wanted Acrobatics (pending the feedback from this thread) from the Leaping pool, whih also gets you Combat Jumping for protection from immobilisation. That's three, leaving only one other pick. I agonised over the Flight pool, but ultimately I only wanted it for Air Superiority. Like Luminara, I really rate it as an attack for its guaranteed ability to knock targets off their feet. I had a Claws scrapper on retail who used to chain it with Focus to keep tougher opponents bouncing. It worked really well to stop Paragon Protector bosses from popping MoG, for instance. That whole strategy of defence-by-control has let me take an Ice/Atomic/Force blaster to level 48, mainly solo and deliberately going after the tougher challenges... like Malta and the Night Ward. A Zeus Titan can burn her down in seconds if I'm not careful, but she's also pulled off some really unexpected feats, like surviving the multi-boss ambushes in the Warriors arc. Back to Pool Boy though. Unfortunately, if I'm taking Sorcery and Leaping then Air Superiority is the only thing I would want from Flight and it seems like a waste to take a whole pool just for the one power, even that one. I was initially thinking Medicine as a fourth pick, but the slow animation times seem like a problem, so at the moment I'm trialling the Concealment pool (basically, trial and error led me to the same choices as Player2). I figure I'll get further by stealthing some missions than I would by marginally adding to my survivability with Aid Self. Plus there's Group Invisibility for teams, Misdirection for soloing and Phase Shift as a panic button. But I really, really wanted the Speed pool too...

SO I went mad recently and decided to start a challenge character. The rules are simple. Only those powers you have to take from the primary and secondary. From 4th level onwards, only pool powers. There's a very clear warning to potential team-mates in the character's bio, I have macros explaining the situation and the character's name is "Pool Boy". I didn't want to mislead anyone. That said, I do want the character to be able to solo. My question is this: Does Acrobatics actually work? What mag is a typical mob hold and will Acrobatics stop at least one? I know it's not going to be the same as a proper mez protection power - it doesn't stop Stun or Sleep, according to Mids, and the hold protection is only Mag 2 - but if it'll stop a single hold, it will allow the character to function at the lower difficulty levels. Has anyone got any experience of building a character like this, and if so, do you have any suggestions? Other than avoiding Malta and the Night Ward.

Ouch. He's certainly a cranky one. Mind if I ask what settings you're using with the cel shader top get it to look like that? Whenever I try it, it ends up looking like a dog's breakfast.

I want to go to Manny's floating gas station now, and I don't know why.

This, basically. I have no objection to an optional setting to increase difficulty, but I would prefer to see development time spent on developing new content. There are old hazard zones that are crying out for it, not to mention Kallisti Wharf.

If it's an old rant, I can understand why. TA's numbers were terrible before the patch and Ninjas are apparently made of paper, so keeping them alive would have been... problematic. I had a Bots/TA MM on live and to be honest, it was a bit of a grind. I was slotting my henchmen and their upgrade powers for recharge, they died so often - and Bots are considered a durable set. A couple of SG-mates playing a Bots/FF and Necro/Dark (back when CoV was new and MM's were the new toy everyone wanted to play with) commented on how quickly I got my henchmen up and running at the mission door one day and asked why I'd slotted that way. "For when I have to resummon in combat", I said. "You have to resummon?" was the reply. And it was true, they didn't have to all the way thorugh that session, while I was spamming arrows and resummoning like a mad thing. That brought home to me just how badly TA lagged behind the other sets. (Eventually you got OSA, which the bots would light up almost instantly, but it was the only bright spot in an otherwise lacklustre set.) TA works now, though! While it synergises well with defence-based sets, I'd be willing to bet it's solid mitigation for just about any flavour of henchman or team-mate you care to mention. Good to know, thanks. I had suspected, but wasnt sure.

This sounds like an amazing concept. I generally don't run my characters through Ouroboros, but now I just might. It also has the benefit of mainly using existing content, which hopefully means less workload for the Homecoming team (and therefore more chance of it happening?). I suppose it depends on whether there are enough existing arcs that could benefit from a different ending.

This explains a lot! I'm probably the last person to realise this, aren't I? Oh well.

I was in Blyde Square the other day, playing around with Group Fly which I'd just picked up and giving the 'bots some practice against the Outcasts who were menacing people in the general area, when a bunch of +1 (level 15) Skulls went by me with Ascendant in hot pursuit! I'd been lucky enough to see Prestidigitator's Act in Atlas Park a few days previously and I knew of Ascendant's routines (although I never saw one, being on a different retail server) so the coincidence made me smile. I dropped a couple of trick arrows on the Skulls to slow them down and set the 'bots on them, and they were in the Zig in short order - mostly Ascendant's work, I have to say. Then I looked around and noticed a hero face down by the base portal. I dropped a wakie on them and we had a quick chat while their head cleared (they'd been AFK when their ambush spawned). If it hadn't been for Acendant, I'd never have noticed them. Thanks, Ascendant! ------------------------------------------------- On a more serious note, I wasn't aware that Ascendant's player had passed. That actually came as more of a shock than I'd have thought possible. I never met him, but you have to appreciate anyone who puts in that amount of effort and creativity just on the off-chance that they'll entertain a few others. That goes for Prestidigitator too, and anyone else doing similar routines that I haven't mentioned.

The Badges forum turns out to have a link to a handy badge tracker site, which lists three badges for Echo:Galaxy not mentioned in the old wiki. I should really have checked there first.

Mind if I ask how you got that one? I have a character it would be perfect for, so I collected all the Galaxy badges listed here (https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/CoH_Exploration_Badges) but Galactic Explorer wasn't awarded. Is there somewhere else I should be looking? Also, absolutely love the costume. Which back piece or temp power is that?

This is the part that always amazes me. I was overjoyed simply to find that Paragon City was back at all, but that it's in active development and such professionally managed development at that, is simply astounding. A heartfelt "Thank you" to everyone involved.

It had to be said. I'm odd, in that I don't go out and deliberately roleplay much, but all my characters have a concept and therefore a bio. I try to give each one a distinct voice, but I'm not sure just how successful I am in that endeavour. 1024 characters can be pretty limiting though. I find myself picking my words *very* carefully, since each character counts.

It's just amazing to have it back, isn't it? It's been twelve years since I last played on live as well. In all those years I never found a game or a community like it.

If the game wasn't fun, I wouldn't be playing it. My personal opionion is that any hope of creating even a rough semblance of balance between AT's and even powersets within AT's went out of the window years ago. The problem is that there are too many variables to take into account now. You don't just have to understand the powerset, you have to understand the way it interacts with every possible pool power, IO set or unique, epic pool or incarnate ability. When it comes to resistance and defence, for instance, the maths behind CoH offers accelerating returns on investment. For example, if you have no damage resistance to start with, then to double your survival time in combat requires 50% resistance (it's a bit more complex than that because of health regen, but we can ignore that for the purposes of discussion). If you already have 50% resistance though, to double your survival time again only costs you another 25%. To double it again from there, 12.5%. To double it again after that, 6.25%. Each %age point of resistance adds more survivability than the one before it. Originally, this was controlled for by the fact that you could only run one defensive toggle at a time. Passives within sets didn't overlap, and pool powers offered no passive or click defences, so the maximum you could get in any individual area of +Def or +DamRes was one passive plus one toggle. When they allowed you to run all your toggles at once (necessary because tanks need mez protection and the devs seem to have misunderstood their own meta), this created problems (100%+ smash/lethal resist), which led to nerfs. Caps were introduced, resist and defence powers were nerfed across the board, pool defences stopped being of much use to the squishier AT's they were intended for and Stamina started to be a must-have in most builds (except regen. Nerf regen etc...). That was just the effect of being able to stack pool powers with primary/secondary defences. Layer IO's on top and things get much more complex. Add in Epics and Incarnates and things get more complex again - probably by orders of magnitude. Never mind Issue 5, the game wasn't balanced at launch and any possibility of reining it in probably disappeared with Issue 3. I have no illusions about that genie ever going back into its bottle either - IO's, Epics, Incarnates and stacking toggles are here to stay. I don't think the player base would have it any other way (even if I secretly yearn for an I3-style server, but I think that's just me). In other words, game balance is broken and likely to stay that way. Given that we are so far away from the original vision for the AT's, and given that many are so much more powerful than they were originally, does it really matter if we convert most ally-only buffs into PBAOE's? I think probably not.

Bots/Storm MM?

If IO's, Epics and Incarnates haven't broken it yet, then allowing FF and similar sets to self-buff certainly won't. If IO's, Epics and incarnates have broken it, then what does it matter? Personally I think the game broke a long time ago, but those other changes are not going to be rolled back. The only exception I think is Masterminds. They're already pretty tanky and have a permanent team with them, so the ally-only nature of certain sets actually works pretty well for them.

Useful. Thanks!

The latter. I used to play on Victory during retail, before the European launch, and never switched. It helped that the Eurocore SG was there though, otherwise finding teams could have been tricky. I think I may just have to give it a try, as you suggest. All the servers show a light load when I'm typically able to play!

As per the title. Currently I'm on Reunion, but I'm thinking of switching to Everlasting for the RP (obviously). However, there's little point if players from my own time zone will be thin on the ground! European players, do you find plenty of others logged in when you are, or is the server a bit of a ghost town for you?

Same here, also on Windows 10. I wouldn't say I disliked Tequila particularly, but the new launcher does seem better. Faster to launch and a cleaner, more useful UI. I particularly like being able to see shard status without having to log in to the game first, and the forum links etc. at the top are sometimes handy.

The binary nature of mez in CoH has always been one of its weakest features. It's also forced some major unintended design changes on the game. When the game launched, it only had one mechanism that would help you if you were hit by a mezzing attack - mez protection. This is what Tankers and Scrappers have. Under this mechanism, you have a mez threshold which an attacker has to exceed in order to mez you. It's still very binary, but the values are high enough that if you have Tank or Scrapper type mez protection, you probably don't have to worry much about mez in practice. I played from open beta to the end of 2008 and I don't think I ever had a toggled-up Tank mezzed in all that time. There were no Break-Free inspirations. There was a mez protection insp, but you had to pop it before you were mezzed - no power, including insps, could activate when you were mezzed. Mez also dropped all running toggles. The fact that you were de-toggled was actually a real problem for Tanks and Scrappers, ironically. At launch, the game only allowed you to run one toggle at a time (or was it one defensive toggle? I forget) and past a certain relatively low level, Tankers found they couldn't do their job if they didn't run their mez protection toggle 24/7. If you tried running a damage resistance toggle instead then you jumped into a spawn, got held/slept/stunned, lost your damage resistance toggle anyway and were unable to protect the team. This left them with sets full of toggles they couldn't use at mid to high levels. This led directly to Issue 3, which fixed the issue by allowing you to run as many toggles as you wanted to. Unfortunately that introduced a slew of other problems, because there were no damage resistance caps in those days. Certain Tanker sets, in combination with the Fighting pool, could actually give you >100% smashing/lethal resistance. The devs responded by introducing resistance and defence caps, then noted that Tankers could still hit the caps "too easily" and a round of nerfs to defensive powers began. Pool powers, which were initially intended to provide some protection for Blasters, Defenders and Controllers, were nerfed hardest, leading to a counter-intuitive situation where they were little use to those AT's and of most use to Tankers, who could still use them to hit or get close to their S/L caps. Even powers like Stealth used to give fairly significant chunks of defence. I'm going by dim and distant memory, but a figure of 7.5% springs to mind (half that if you broke stealth by attacking). Given that ED wasn't around at that time, you could triple that value if you 6-slotted for defence. In the post-ED, post-IO world, the figures such powers offer are derisory by comparison. Issue 3 was also the point where Stamina stopped being a nice-to-have. All those toggles could tire a body fast. It's a pity, because I actually rather liked that earlier design - or I would have done, if it had worked. Tankers and Scrappers required a bit more thought to play in a know-your-enemy kind of a way, but because you only ran one toggle at a time, you theoretically had a lot more build freedom. Meanwhile, the squishier AT's had ways to get reasonable, but not ridiculous defences if they needed them, by dipping into the Fighting ot Stealth pools. It didn't work though. IMO they should just have made the Tank and Scrapper mez protection toggles into autos instead, but they wanted to keep the possibility of a Tank being de-toggled by enough mez. Like I said though, I never saw it happen. ------------------------------------------------ That's all ancient history. The game now has other mechanisms for dealing with Mez. Break-Frees show that the engine allows for click powers that can activate when mezzed. Blaster T1 & T2 attacks also. Mez resistance is now a thing. This shortens the duration of mez, but doesn't change your mez threshold. Toggles which don't drop when you're mezzed are now possible. Metabolic Acceleration from the Atomic Manipulation set is a great example, being a mez resistance toggle that doesn't drop when you're actually stunned, slept or held. It would be pretty useless if it did, when you think about it. ------------------------------------------------ If I was getting radical and wanted to make the mez situation less of an on-off switch than it currently is, I might do something like the following. Make mez resistance much more common across all AT's. Put it into autos, or into toggles and clicks that ignore mez. Make those same powers enhanceable for mez resistance. Give every character an inherent Break-Free power of short duration. Slottable for recharge, but by no means perma-able. Lower, but do not remove the mez protection level of those powers that currently offer it. If mechanically possible, set a separate, higher and AT-dependent threshold for dropping toggles. That creates a game where every character has some form of defence against mez, but also one where mez doesn't necessarily leave you completely helpless. Enough mez will de-toggle you, but that first hold or stun won't necessarily mean game-over. Enhanceable mez resistance means that it's harder to mobs to overlap holds, giving you at least some freedom of action, and the inherent Break-Free gives you an escape option. If you play a Tanker, Brute, Stalker or Scrapper you might actually end up briefly mezzed from time to time, but fully dropping your toggles would be as hard as it is right now (e.g. very hard indeed).