[Katie Hannon Last Night: It was my fault]

if it had been +4 or something I could see announcing it but +2 is a pretty usual diff to run at

[Loose Ends (Possible Spoilers?)]

16 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

 

I wouldn't object to Manti going dark but do you have any specific reference to "ye olde lore bible" that we can check?  I hate Manti almost as much as I hate Scirocco - Manti is a low grade bat/iron man clone - tech billionaire with a shit ton of toys (which in today's world seems laughable)

 

I may be missing out on Lore/Mission arcs but I've seen nothing past Mot eating them. If there is something I would love you to point me at it. I do note that  you say "presumably" so I <presume> that you may be filling in gaps inyour own mind rather than quoting actual lore. Forgive if I am wrong.

 

If you do all of dream doc's missions (including the one where he sends you to actually do the DD trial) he'll have some dialogue that provides minimal followup; Scirocco and Mistral escape and return to grandeville, dominatrix is in custody and mis lib wants to help her, etc. We also see during the trial that supers Mot consumed aren't like, instantly devoured; they get trapped in there for a while

 

re: manticore, there is a lot of stuff in the Lore AMAs from various years about it. It's vague and sometimes contradictory, because it's different writers talking about their ideas for a storyline that obviously never got finalized. But their idea seems to have been that Scirocco and Mistral would go hero (replacing or getting their own TFs, etc), Red Widow would take Scirocco's place in arachnos, and manticore would become something of an evil vigilante either as the head of wyvern, or trying to take arachnos down from the inside (again, it's unclear.) All the lore bible/ama stuff is hosted on the HC wiki if you want to dig through it

[Loose Ends (Possible Spoilers?)]

People with superpowers could evidently survive for a while inside Mot while it consumed them, so she presumably is freed in the DD trial

 

The idea was apparently (per ye olde lore bible) that she and scirocco would do a full face turn after DA, with manticore joining arachnos. But yanno, game shutdown

[Why is Kinetic Melee still bad?]

It’s fine in the sense that you’ll do damage and the games easy so performance doesn’t really matter, but compared to other/similar sets (e.g. energy melee) it’s basically just worse.

 

and if we’re honest that might be okay; DP is an example of a set that isn’t high performing but is still satisfying to play. KM by contrast is both low performance and frustrating, since its animations are long and it has pretty limited aoe. It would be nice if it got an energy focus-esque mechanic to speed some of the later attacks up a bit

[What's the status of the Praetorians as of the end of I23? (Big spoilers, obviously.)]

also, they talked about the stuff with tyrant in the lore AMA a million years ago; essentially the idea was that he'd be imprisoned on primal earth, and then during the battalion invasion get the opportunity for redemption by sacrificing himself in the final battle.

[What is your favorite story archs and other kinds of content others may not know about for leveling?]

I liked Dean-O Mac during his arc, but loved him when he popped up during the Mr. G arc

 

it's neat how he progresses from a sort of annoying lackey to a character who seems like your friend

[What's the status of the Praetorians as of the end of I23? (Big spoilers, obviously.)]

Battle Maiden is captured in the Apex TF, but freed by malta because they want her nanotech weapons. You see this at the end of one of the DA story arcs, if you're curious.

 

Diabolique gets like, disintegrated or something by dream doctor at the end of her trial.

 

If you do Dream Doc's mission to do the DD trial, he mentions that Dominatrix was freed from Mot and that Primal Miss Lib wants to rehabilitate her, but there's no more follow up on it.

 

It's mentioned during... I think Number Six's arc? That Shadowhunter was believed killed by the Praet devouring earth, and you meet him in night ward so that tracks, but you also meet a hamidon-converted version of him so either he got rezzed or it's a continuity error

[Is it worth it to run this Difficulty Setting?]

if your goal is just getting as much exp per time as possible, you want to be fighting as many mobs as possible. Many lower-level mobs will be more rewarding than a few higher-level mobs (outside of cheesy EB farms anyway); they have a harder time hitting you and you do more dps by virtue of being able to aoe more.

 

assuming you can do -1x4, you will likely find that much faster leveling than 0/1x2; plus it's just way more fun to fight a dozen goons at a time, even if they're weak

[Sleet]

change is barely noticeable, really; it doesn't change the use case for sleet and while intellectually I know the value is lower, in practice you still get the fun of 'drop sleet on mobs, see bigger damage numbers'

 

and I think it's probably good that there's more reason to think about which AT you're picking

[Billboard]

There was a contest way back when to design new billboards and this was one of the outcomes of that

[Instance Mother Ship Raid]

Idg why people are so concerned with gatekeeping the most casual possible content

[Is Psionic Mastery any good?]

the psi pet is okay but it'll be disappointing if you're expecting the penny yin nexus

 

harmonic mind is kinda laughably overpowered but if you're already not having trouble with endurance you might not need it

 

both the cones are narrow (30 degrees) and not very well suited to a melee AT imo, but the ice one does hit substantially harder

[The Officially Unofficial Weekly Discussion #70: What are some combinations of existing power mechanics you would like?]

Oh right yeah, dark

 

still, it seems like a property you could

give to some lesser-used sets to get them some more shine

[The Officially Unofficial Weekly Discussion #70: What are some combinations of existing power mechanics you would like?]

it would nice if there were a couple more attract effects in the game; the one on axe cyclone is super fun and it could really give a other other underperforming sets some distinctive flavor (like cmon just make black hole and aoe attract already, and watch everyone start wanting a grav controller)

[I grind like a bitch, and I still can't keep my holes filled]

Back-In-The-Day(tm) each hero could only have one sidekick, so it was possible to group with people well below your level in a way you can’t really do anymore. To prevent degenerate power-leveling you wouldn’t get exp from mobs more than +5 to your character (iirc)

 

it was nothing to do with the distribution of exp within groups

[I grind like a bitch, and I still can't keep my holes filled]

it might be nice if SOs decayed over a longer timeline (say, five or ten levels); they still wouldn't replace basic IOs for anyone knowledgeable but they wouldn't be quite so much of a trap purchase for newer players

 

broadly though this isn't really a solvable problem; the game has a lot of systems and that's part of the charm, even if they can be confusing.

[Do You Prefer to Take it Slow? Introducing Steady Indom]

Reality is that even most ‘kill most’ groups would have passed for speed runs in a prior era, just because we are so much more powerful

 

i I did a +4 ITF the other day that killed damn near every Roman we could find and still finished in about 45 minutes

 

I don’t think there’s any coming back from that unfortunately, at least on HC. My advice to people new to the endgame is just to play a dps character and embrace the faceroll, at least at first

[Unpopular idea - alternate group wide player buffing.]

Cold buffs (and most/all similar spammable buffs) are aoe also

 

OP may wish to like, actually give some of these ATs a go before solving any more of the problems of yesteryear

[Day Jobs: personal value]

mostly I just try to keep my jetpack full and my marketer's teleport charged (easy these days since we have so many teleport options)

 

after that, ouro for the ease of use and recipe bonus

[Report Costume Issues Here]

is it intentional that the 'spectrum' chest/glove visuals aren't available for robe/jacket/etc upper bodies? I had a whole idea worked out and then discovered I couldn't make it the way I wanted :mad:

 

edit: upon review, it appears spectrum is available on jackets, but not for robes? It's possible I'm losing my mind because I could swear it wasn't there before

[ChatGPT writes a character background]

All chatgpt and similar generative models will ever be able to do is mimic; they can mimic some stuff pretty well right now, and in the future it seems likely they'll be able to mimic more things. But that's all they do, and imo people will find their limits pretty quickly (stable diffusion for example is already starting to have problems filtering input that was generated by the engine itself.)

 

it'll have applications for writing very formulaic material (like say, level 1 support, or clickbait news) but it's never gonna replace human authorship because it can't

[ChatGPT writes a character background]

it's hard to manage "show, don't tell" in 1024 characters, especially given the limited emotes/expressions COH avatars are actually capable of. Too many people structure their bio like a character sheet, which is boring; the trick to a good character description is to let other people imagine as much of it as possible. I like to write little vignettes about the character, rather than provide the whole background.

 

people definitely do notice when you write a good one, though

[Is relying on procs good game design?]

On 2/17/2024 at 1:50 AM, Grouchybeast said:

 

Procs were in the process of being reworked by the live devs literally as the game was closed.  What we have now is the result of the I25 beta that was on the test servers when the shutdown was announced and development stopped dead.  I'm pretty sure that if the game hadn't been closed, we'd have seen some further work done on them either in I25 or later.

 

I don't use them, except incidentally as part of a set.  They've always seemed to me like a slightly broken edge case, and I don't want to end up with a bunch of broken characters that need to be rebuilt when someone at HC gets round to updating them.

 

But if people really are spending billions on inf on a build then they need to stop buying their IOs from some dude in a trench coat who claims he's selling legitimate surplus Longbow equipment.

 

yeah I mean, things were even worse w/r/t procs before they moved to a PPM system

 

the current iteration is... pretty good? Procs might be a little too strong, but they serve a relatively important purpose in that they create an opportunity cost to just running the same IO sets over and over again. A lot of the time it's a good-to-obvious trade to give up another set bonus in favor of loading up an attack with procs, but at least there's a tradeoff. If procs got significantly devalued there wouldn't be more build diversity, we'd just be back to running the same 5-6 slot IO sets in those powers.

 

also I dunno how people are spending a billion+ on builds anymore; only ATOs and purples are really run more than 2-3mil/slot, and if you're running a proc-damage-oriented build you can't have all that many purples

[ChatGPT writes a character background]

man chatgpt's bout to put all the hardworking bio writers out of work

[Is the Croax's build list still current?]

you could quibble with the list but it's all pretty feelycraft; like ice and energy are basically interchangeable defensive sets, why are they in different tiers? Is the lack of an end management button really enough to drop shield down a tier? Why are all the resist sets lumped into the same tier even though /rad is pretty clearly superior to the others? etc.

 

(I do think his primary rankings are a bit better)