ZemX

Nope, it has a radius as well and that is 30ft. It's baffling. I almost want to go to test server right now and try it. 🤪

I know, right? Who could possibly turn a worldwide threat into mere politics?! Inconceivable! 😈

From what I hear, a whole ton of people logged in when HC went live or shortly afterwards, coming over from games like WoW to look about. They then got bored and left. There might be quite a few names nobody has used in two years. But the flipside is... what's the harm? This sort of thing is common in MMOs. I've been thinking of playing SWTOR again recently and I know, when I go back, I'll probably be picking new names for any characters I have there. It's been over a year. Might be two. Not a big deal though to me. If someone wanted one of those names and was actively playing? Good for them. If I cared that much, I'd have kept playing. I think it's a small thing either way that people are making into a much bigger deal than it is. If it never happens, it won't be the end of the world for me either.

Nope. Your "stuff" belongs to the Homecoming team and so does mine. If they decide it's not your name after two years of inactivity then nobody is taking anything from anybody. You abandoned it and someone else picked it up.

Bit of a false equivalence. One person being asked to "think up a new name" is an active player. The other is someone who returned to the game after two years of not logging in even once. And it's probably a rare case on top of that. Of all the people who haven't logged in in two years... how many do you actually think are EVER coming back? How many people came over to the game in 2019 because a friend told them about it.. and then they left after a day because everybody kept laughing at them when they asked how to calculate their gear score?

Hmm... nope. The effect is tagged as ignoring resistance and player teammates are autohit by the power. But maybe it used to be resistable and that's a holdover. I just can't imagine 25 feet is the correct range. That's the range on ... Caltrops and it's barely enough to throw them out in front of you. I've never taken Team TP myself, so I have no idea how far you can actually teleport with it. I've only heard it has less range than Teleport. But if the range given in the power description isn't the actual teleport distance... what is?

I think I hate this more than all their combined debuffs. Hell, even solo I have trouble telling how many of them are in a spawn unless I cycle through them with the Next Target key. I'll kill one and turn to leave only to then realize there were two of them nearly on top of one another and impossible to tell apart.

It's confusing to look at in City of Data. It says the range of Team TP is... 25 feet?! That can't be right, right? But it also says +310% Teleport in the effects section whereas most other teleport power just have +100% Teleport effect. What on Earth does that mean?

Okay then... we can stop there. Nobody was talking about Team TP. If that's what you were talking about, it completely explains why you think teleportation sucks. When "everyone" says Teleport is the fastest travel power, they mean "Teleport" from the "Teleportation" pool and nothing else. Team TP isn't even close. And nobody is trying to tell you it's faster than being pulled across a zone by ATT. Don't be ridiculous.

Did... you think I said Gold isn't harder than blue? I'm not sure what to make of this. I was just commenting on WHY some missions are harder than others. It's because they are newer. The devs made things progressively more difficult as they went, probably in response to hearing people complain about how easy the game was over the years. New content is new enemies AND new missions.

Then you need more practice. 😈

It's actually really interesting. I think the more commonly held belief that gold is harder than red is harder than blue is really just "newer content is harder". The devs making the missions simply refined their craft as they went. They created more interesting enemies and more difficult missions because people were all the time saying how boring easy everything was.

Yeah, but the same applies to Fighting's Tough/Weave. Defensive minded ATs are a little better than offensive ones with these buffs. Support classes are even better, of course, with Defenders being kings. It's better to look at how they are different. As you've noted, Leadership is AoE. But the big difference is really that Fighting has Tough and Leadership doesn't. Weave is slightly better personal defense than Maneuvers, but it's not a team buff either. But that resistance to smash/lethal is nice. You'll want to decide if that's worth more than a few minor team buffs that might stack with others. If your job on a team is offense, but you're not likely to get a lot of aggro... maybe go Leadership. It also provides +dmg and +tohit, which Fighting does not. If on the other hand you may reasonably get a fair amount of aggro, Tough... is nice. You can't do damage if you're dead or spending time patching yourself up instead of attacking. There's no one answer. But I'd look at it in those qualitative terms first before worrying over the buff modifiers.

Two years and all you have to do is log in once to any server to restart the clock? Seems pretty reasonable to me for a game nobody has to pay for.

Meh. I wouldn't have wanted my Live toons back if I could have them. I enjoy playing the game, not getting to the end of it. My characters are in my head and I rather enjoy re-creating and playing them from Level 1 again. I have their builds saved in Mid's and their costume files. That's not absolutely necessary, but it helps. If I ever have to start over somewhere else, I won't be too broken up at having to start over. I'll just be glad I can.

Short? It's a 100ft radius and it can hit 16 targets. It's the fastest way to take a scattered mob and bunch it up for AoE obliteration. That said... it's like Knockback sometimes. Some people know how to use it on a team. Some don't. And some embody the phrase, "When all you have is a hammer... everything looks like a nail." Sometimes it just isn't necessary. I've seen people take an already fairly bunched up spawn and just move it to their location for no good reason, screwing a few of their teammates out of AoEs already in progress. It's a great tool though if you are smart how you use it on a team. Solo, I imagine it's quite good. I usually can't find the room for it because I'm not much a fan of Teleport for travel.

Don't forget to watch the right amount of Television!

I'm not keeping a log or anything, but what has worked passably well for me is just keeping the hcwiki page for each villain zone I am working up in a browser. The page for each zone lists contacts, including unlockable contacts, and their ranges. One thing to be aware of: Sometimes the level range listed for a given contact spans several story arcs which each have their own limited level ranges. This is the case for Dr. Graves in Mercy, for example. He's listed as 5-19 on the Mercy Island page but clicking over to his own page reveals his three arcs are 5-9, 10-14, and 15-19. If you miss his 5-9 arc, you end up having to do all three in Flashback... which is what happened to me. Lesson learned. Anyway, for example: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Mercy_Island Looking at this you know to do Kalinda and Burke first, stopping XP at 4 if necessary. Then Kuzmin, stopping at 7 (by the way, the followup choice here is either/or. Recommend FireWire while you're leveling and then Webber in flashback to avoid a certain issue with a contact disappearing later... but this is the only situation I ran into redside like that). While it's possible to finish an arc once you've started it, even if you exceed its level range, resist that temptation unless you know it's the last arc of the last contact in that level range. I missed Billy Heck's second arc in Port Oakes this way and had to Flashback it as well. You can occasionally check your progress in Ouroboros to note if any arcs are not complete. This covers just the story arcs and not the side missions. Each contact often has some series of side missions that are little more than Newspaper-ish style one-offs. I still do them, but they're a bit of a chore for no real payoff in story/lore, so if you know from the wiki that you've done the story arcs, and none of the one-off missions have a badge, they are pretty skippable. This is another good guide but it only lists arcs the author thought of as worthwhile. Still... worth looking at for the zone progression at least and hints about where to pause XP. Also gives a nice macro button for toggling XP.

There might be a couple things you can't do now with IOs that you could do back then with pre-ED slotted SOs but on the whole I think we're hilariously more powerful now than back then. I don't know how people can still, with a straight face, manage to complain about ED. But in game, the old "debate" occasionally kicks up, and people start cursing Positron's name again somehow.

The one that the Talos do that annoys the shit out of me is... I don't know what it is. I call it.. "fill my entire camera view with a cascade of dirt" power. I don't think there's another power in the game that completely obscures the whole screen when it is fired at you. But that one does.

Seconded. I would go minimal on dark armor effects to avoid obscuring costume and add some purple to the primary attacks. Should look wicked spinning around and slashing in combat. Build Up and Savage Leap even give you some growls to go with the visuals.

Oh, I remember those guys. Rangers? The ones with the arm blades? At least those were the ones who seemed to give me the most trouble. Lot of people say redside or goldside is harder but the real reason is just that newer content tends to be more difficult than older content. Some of the newer arcs blueside can kick your ass too.

Thing to keep in mind with Staff is that there isn't, currently anyway, a "no-redraw" option. This makes active secondaries less attractive because it means you'll be putting away and redrawing that weapon a lot. Theoretically all weapon animations were supposed to have been normalized so that whether you were drawing-then-attacking or just attacking with the weapon already out, the animation time was the same... but I am not sure that was ever done for Staff Fighting, which came quite towards the end of the game on Live. SR is pretty attractive then because the only thing that will cause redraw is Practiced Brawler. No other click-activated powers in the set. It's also nice when paired with Staff's Guarded Spin (+def to melee/lethal) because it stacks up melee defense. You can then focus more on ranged/AoE def bonuses while enjoying early soft-capped melee defense while leveling. Same is true for Ninjitsu, although it also has a click-heal and some other click powers (if you take them). Pairing with a typed-defense secondary means stacking up lethal defense with Guarded Spin... which is less protective than melee positional defense. Then again, if you do want to pair it with a hybrid resist set like Rad Armor, that can work too since with a little melee def bonus in IO sets added to Guarded Spin you can easily soft-cap melee while enjoying the good resist/regen/recovery the secondary gives you.

It has several effects. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=brute_defense.radiation_armor.radiation_therapy&at=brute Notice there are two lines for endurance (self only) and two lines for heal (self only). Look over on the right and you see different icons. The smaller effect stacks up to ten times. The larger "replaces existing effect", which is a fancy way of saying it only happens once. The larger one is the only thing you see if you hit nothing. The smaller effects stack up for each enemy you hit. There's also damage and debuff that happens on all enemies hit by the power. So it's really nice it has a base 3.0 accuracy. ETA: Actually, the other thing to notice is that the power hits YOU in addition to enemies. That's why you get the one heal/end effect if you hit nobody. Because you never hit nobody. You always hit at least yourself since self is autohit on this power. It's also why the target limit is 11, not 10. It's so you can hit yourself and then 10 other enemies. All the effects listed have to have a condition preventing damage and debuff from affecting you (!target.isFriend?) It's weird... but it works.

It's never NOT thematic for an assassin to stab someone in the back. It might make even MORE sense when that someone is being distracted by one of your teammates. In a practical sense, Hidden AS is still a great opener. The whole reason Hide comes with such a large suppressible AoE defense bonus is precisely to help you land a Hidden AS while stuff is exploding around you. Hidden AS has other benefits such as the tohit debuff and chance to terrorize, both of which can help you land the strike after AS, which thanks to the ATO has a good chance of being another crit. People who are only comparing DPA between quick and hidden AS are missing that most of Hidden AS's animation time can be done before the fight starts. It even gives you a do-over if you miss, leaving you hidden and still able to do a normal Hide crit with your next best attack. On a team, it's still a good idea to try to reach the spawn a couple seconds early to get set up and started on that AS though. AoE defense, no matter how good, is no guarantee you won't be hit by splash and interrupted. I do this on teams all the time and most of the time I have chewed through a boss in just a few hits and have moved on to something else before the rest of the team has managed to defeat the rest of the spawn. If I hadn't, everyone would have to focus on the boss last. That's the thing I keep reminding people on: AoE steamrollers kill minions first, LTs second, and bosses last. A good team has a balance of people doing AoE and people doing ST on the harder targets. They meet in the middle and the spawn is down faster because of it.