BadMinotaur

I would love to have hero patron pools, and the chance to run missions for some signature heroes to get them would be icing on the cake. My only request there would be to make them all more interesting than Black Scorpion's arc =P

Thank you for this recap and refocusing the conversation. If Homecoming had something like Reddit Gold, I'd toss some your way for this.

It's already been addressed several times in this thread why people are making this complaint. The answers range from "the situation is much different than Live" to "it isn't necessary but managing player expectations is important." No one is trying to make anyone "bend" a certain way, because real life people aren't cartoon villains who exert control for no reason. We only play as them in this video game instead =P

You do have to consider though the knowledge of people returning to CoH. Having played City of Heroes before, players knew that names were at a premium, and would be looking to lock some down. Now granted, I try not to assume the worst of people and I generally think that most people who did make placeholder characters only locked down names of their old mains (this is what I did, I nabbed about 3 or 4 names I had on Live). I guess what I'm getting at is, I don't think we should be comparing the name policy of Live with Homecoming -- Live had a slow trickle of players over many years, and Homecoming had a huge initial surge. And even if the player numbers are lower than Live's, the players coming in had a different mindset and different knowledge when they returned. Even if we still assume the best of incoming players, I feel like the situations are dissimilar enough that Homecoming should find its own solution, independent of the past. (though that's something I feel strongly about in general -- I don't think we all agreed with how things were handled on Live, and even if we have different ideas on how things should go moving forward, I don't believe "it worked on Live" should be the sole basis of keeping things the same)

To be honest, if someone has a character at 50, that name should be locked down tight. Every other part of the policy I'm ambivalent on, but once you hit 50, you 100% deserve to keep your name, no matter what. Haven't played in a decade? I don't care, you keep it.

Comparing Homecoming names to Live's old system doesn't work, because we had limits on the number of characters we could have; and if you wanted to claim more names than your initial allotment, you had to have a separate account (which meant purchasing a new game). That vastly limited abuse. And when CoH Freedom came about, you still had to buy character slots. In Homecoming, we can make a ton of characters, and we can make as many accounts as we want, because it's all free. It's not a fair comparison in the slightest.

I think this is a very reasonable solution. I usually focus on one character at a time, so this would let me not worry about losing the name of one of my low-level alts because I decided to focus on someone else for a spell.

I believe Mids is taking into account that Total Focus has a chance to crit and is adding the estimated average damage from that crit to TF. Concentrated Strike can't crit, so looks like it has less damage in Mids if you don't have the "Ignore Extra Damage" option ticked in Configuration.

I have a friend who told me he was having difficulty clearing the Cortex mission solo on his level 24 Illusion controller. So I hopped on my level 28 Dark/Rad controller and we started the mission at +0/1. The recovery debuff was insanely punishing -- even without my Rad toggles off, as soon as Accelerate Metabolism wore off we were out of endurance against the normal mobs. Before this, my controller never had an issue with endurance (in the low levels, I usually slot End Reduction in most of my powers). The fight against Cortex was not a fun fight for us. Both of us were one-shotted when we found him (Cortex was hidden down the stairs so we didn't know to be smart about our approach until it was too late). We were able to get to the clones phase, but with no endurance left, we died pretty often. I had to switch to my level 50 IO'd out brute just to finish the encounter, and even my Brute ran out of endurance. Thank goodness I was at the defense soft-cap or else I'm sure my Brute would've died too. I think most of my gripes with the mission are related to endurance issues. Without those, I felt like the fight would have been challenging but not frustrating. (I see that it looks like Viral Cocktail might've been scaled back some, here's to hoping that does the trick!)

While I generally agree with the suggestion in the OP, I do want to chime in and say that "target dummy DPS" is always going to be higher than actual DPS; in other MMOs I've played, it's the role of the DPS players to strive to bridge the gap between target dummy DPS and actual DPS as much as possible. In this way, it's a bit of a minigame -- you have to adjust your rotation and position to respond to changing circumstances. This is, to me, part of the fun challenge of playing DPS. Things will always tank our DPS. Whether it's enemies dying before we can get off a killer BU+Blaze, or Illusionists phasing, there's many things that affect our DPS numbers negatively. As DPS, I feel the challenge presented to us then is to take those lumps and still come out as death machines, even if our actual DPS doesn't match the theoretical DPS.

My big question is this: would this change make the Clarion Destiny Incarnate power less "necessary" for solo squishy builds? If so, I'd support this change -- I'm always about letting players have more options and not feel like they have to take a specific power. (of course, they'd still feel like they have to take a shield, but at least there are more options available for that)

I was mentally switching between three others and two others to cap it out. The reason I settled on three was so that players who wanted to dip heavy into those pools were rewarded for taking choices that normally they might overlook -- as an example, someone who wants to beef up Jump Kick may consider picking up Acrobatics or Spring Attack to finish buffing it, two powers they might not have otherwise thought about. That said, three other powers may still be too many for the full power boost -- I'll be happy as long as I can use Flurry or Jump Kick without feeling like I'm gimping myself 😃

Good evening everyone. I'm sorry if this kind of topic has been posted a lot, I checked the last four pages to see if there was any recent discussion about this and didn't see anything. The suggestion is pretty simple -- I think it would be really fun if Flurry, Jump Kick, and Air Superiority took a page from the Fighting pool and had their strength increased with each other power you took in their respective pools. It would encourage people who want to build specific types of characters (like the ever-popular speedster) and reward them for going all-in on a power pool that is flavorful for them. Maybe cap the bonus at having three other powers (so you'd take four powers in that pool total and don't feel like you have to take everything for your theme), and have the capped Damage-per-Activation Time be similar to the maxed-out Boxing power.

Holy crap, that brings back memories.

Guys, calm down. The devs haven't taken any kind of moralistic stand against AE farms; they're just disincentivizing it because it's causing a lot of server stability issues. They're trying to get things running smoothly for us. They could've just turned it off entirely and accomplished the same thing. In the OP, they talk about making some missions Dev Choice and having those grant full XP. Who is to say they would not grant Dev Choice to specific farm missions that don't overload the server? They're crowd pleasers and so far they seem like they've just been trying to make the game work, rather than taking a stand on any kind of playstyle. Give them some credit, I'm sure the AE farms aren't permanently going away.