Miss Magical

When I first started playing a few months ago, I had the same impression as a new player that you had. Everyone seemed to be moving far too fast, and the missions I did seemed to require no teamwork nor cooperation. Most of the game seemed about soloing team content, begging for power leveling in the LFG chat or playing 1 single mission over and over again for hugely imbalanced rewards. I did start to enjoy the game a lot more when I became more familiar with the plethora of teleport options and ways to get around. And there is still content where cooperation and teamwork are valued, although you have to go out of your way to look for it. Ironically, those teams that moved far too fast for me to keep up at first ended up being one of them. My experience with the community has been similarly mixed. The people in-game, actually playing the game, I have found to be mostly fun and approachable. The forums are much more insular, elitist and touchy, and home to at least a few hardcore vets who have had a very long time to get used to what the game is like and are deeply prejudiced against anyone they perceive as challenging the status quo. Case in point, I actually saw a post here that said something along the lines of (paraphrased) “why does everyone have this fetish for popularizing the game? I just want to have it to myself. I don’t want to have to share it with the class of 2021.” Classy. This forum saw a 6 page debate over asking for tells versus broadcasting for invites to content. And let’s just say that one of the Homecoming developer’s own story arcs opens with a literal super-powered war that broke out over a forum disagreement, complete with suicide bombers and chemical weapons. I don’t want to sound too negative, because for the bad there is, there’s a lot of good, too, and still a lot of unique things you can do in this game and no other. But I can definitely understand that sense of alienation you feel — even as someone who did not play during the game’s time of live service.

I did like absorb pain for its stated purpose. It's nice to be able to click a hero and instantly put them back at full health. On the other hand, such situations have been very rare in my experience so far. There's saving people from Antimatter's disintegration on a badge run, I guess. It was great on that Posi 1 I did last week where none of the characters had any defenses whatsoever, and I was the only thing keeping the team functioning. The rest of the time, even if someone does die, it's only a speedbump at worst. Hence I don't think this suggestion fixes the issue, because if there aren't more opportunities to heal, then better, different or unique healing tools aren't going to make any difference in the end. Powers that solely benefit others and are useful in only a tiny fraction of the content are always going to be a hard sell. The malus on absorb pain that prevents me from healing myself seems unecessary, too. If anything, it should give me a damage buff because I'm now madder. Personally, what I would prefer to get is more content where healing and especially long-range targeted healing is valuable. NPC's that you have to keep alive under constant heavy damage, enemies that focus fire on teammates, irresistible and autohit damage, etc. Or, make the healing powers dual-purpose - make absorb pain deal damage in an aoe around the target equal to 50% of the HP healed, for example. That would add an interesting minigame of trying to time your heals and judging the target's position to deal good damage.

I also think there should be extra rewards for challenge settings. Maybe something like +X% merits for having no insps, +Y% inf for having enemies buffed, etc. And perhaps one day, a "disable level shifts" and "disable incarnate powers" setting with rewards to match. It makes no sense to me that players who enjoy challenge are penalized with slower run times and fewer rewards, while AE farmers are able to make many times the same rewards (inf, drops and exp). More balanced rewards that incentivize a variety of playstyles instead catering exclusively to a handful would be great.

What I would really like is to be able to clean up the city, permanently, for real! You can already do this in Atlas Park. If you do the introductory mission chain straight out of the tutorial, some areas which used to spawn Hellions plotting arson start to spawn PPD patrols instead. This system doesn't seem to have been expanded beyond the starting zones, which is a bit of a pity. Maybe one day, in the far future...

When I soloed, I looked up the Homecoming wiki, choose a level-appropriate zone, and looked at contacts in it. Then I would do storyarcs from contacts that seemed like people my character would personally associate with. I personally found it interesting to add a roleplaying element of choosing stories thematically appropriate for my character, and when I look back at my list of souvenirs, I can see not just a list of random missions completed, but a hero or villain's career as they rise through the ranks. I initially used these guides, but quickly abandoned them in favor of my own research on the wiki. They leave out plenty of good content. Case in point, the hero one omits: The entirety of Who Will Die? (10-50) The entirety of Pandora's Box (30-50) Keith Nance, Jenni Adair & Roy Cooling, which cross-reference each other (all 20-29) Agent Watkins (20-29) I would personally suggest these over Synapse, Moonfire, or the Shadow Shard in the very crowded 15-30 and 40-50 ranges. The villainous guide doesn't direct you to contacts that are somewhat out of the way and may require prior setup to access. For example, to be able to do the Slot Machine's 2nd arc (which is mechanically uninspiring, but has a cute twist near the end), you need the Gangbuster badge by level 34 or less. Neither guide mentions narrative elements that could be problematic; for example, in the middle of the First Ward story, there is one mission where your character very unambiguously kills people to progress. That could be a deal-breaker for certain characters but isn't mentioned. These are the kind of tips I'd personally find useful in a "good missions guide". That's not to say that all the suggestions are bad; a lot of them are well-deserved. Just be aware that plenty of info is missing from these guides.

I would love to see pull-in mechanics like this. Harpoon power someday maybe?

I would love a longbow Cataphract that I can ride. Doesn’t even need to be dyeable or anything; some hack that replaces the character model with the robot model is good enough (I see it has animations for being summoned, unsummoned and flying, presumably for group fly).

I'm not sure why level shifts were even allowed to work outside of incarnate trials in the first place. With IO sets, or even incarnate powers, there is usually a little thought as to which one works best for your playstyle or powersets and some kind of tradeoff involved. With the level shift, which buffs everything by a huge amount, I'm left wondering how exactly this adds to the gameplay experience. Their huge power has far-reaching effects for game balance and the "just don't use it" argument falls flat on its face since there is very strong incentive to use them. If I want to play on a level-shift-less team I have to put up with longer recruiting times, manually check each player, hope they don't equip one out of combat and handle the resultant MMO drama if someone does and I need to deal with it. That's why some people are even leveling characters to 44 and turning off exp there, just to ensure a level-shift-less experience. The reward for this hassle is a lower reward rate (due to slower killing speed) simply because I choose to enjoy the game differently. Level shifts outside of incarnate trials should never have been implemented because they negatively impact the gameplay of a significant minority of players without any benefit to the majority that cannot be accomplished in a more equitable way. Yes, I said no benefit. If the content is too hard without the level shift, the player can reduce the difficulty. If rewards are too low without the level shift, either because you reduced the difficulty or your kill speed has been decreased, the developers can buff reward rates globally. Level shifts outside of incarnate content serve no purpose.

Hah! A respectable attempt but you’ll have to try harder.

This thread has been an interesting read. As a new player, I was never aware of any expectation for me to stick with the group all the time. I mean, I do, especially if I don’t know the mechanics or where to go, or if my character isn’t capable enough to solo yet. But if I know what I am doing and absent any specific requests from the party owner, I do often take things into my own hands. To me, it just makes sense to split up if there are multiple objectives in an area and you can handle them individually. eg. if we’re trying to fill up 6 terminals on Keyes, or if there are 8 Security Chief? and we have to figure out which is the real one, or if whole groups are dying before I can get most of my debuffs out. On maps where I am very familiar with spawn locations, I sometimes move ahead to group enemies the way I think will be beneficial. Nobody so far has taken an issue with what I do, although I do keep an eye on the group and go back if it seems that would be more productive instead. But I have, a few times, run into the behavior I think is being discussed. And in those cases it is very obvious because when you run up to the person to give them a buff, or if you join them to make the split in players more even, they deliberately run away from you or run further ahead with the half-killed spawn trailing behind them. I never could figure out what these people were trying to do. It can’t be to impress anyone, because soloing taskforces at maximum difficulty or killing faster than characters who are still leveling is not hard to do in the first place.

I am not especially experienced, however I only keep rare salvage and salvage used for base empowerment station buffs. Generally, only rare salvage is worth enough to be worth keeping and sorting to me. Common and uncommon salvage can be had on the AH for 150 and 2000 inf apiece respectively which isn’t significant. The only recipes I craft and keep are purples. All other recipes, even if they are for IO’s I want to use, I vendor or sell on the AH. I use a lot of attuned IO’s, and since buying from the AH gives attuned enhancements but crafting does not, I prefer to sell everything and buy back what I want from the AH.

Asking for complete builds to copy and use has always felt like asking someone else to pick out all your clothes for you: highly likely to invite disappointment because it’s not what you wanted. I do find it useful to look at builds because they sometimes provide new ideas on how to achieve certain goals. I just don’t copy the entire thing wholesale.

As a newer player, I quickly learned that in this game tanks, and melee characters in general, have a lot more survivability than required in normal gameplay. There don't seem to be any enemies that hit hard enough to require the defenses they have. Conversely, there are enough low-hanging fruit to increase survivability that you don't need to specialize for it -- a steadfast protection unique and Gladiator's armor unique is an easy 6% def to all for 2 slots; that's almost 4/5ths of a fully enhanced Weave. My first tank was a Fire/SS, which is the defensively weakest armor set, and I was able to solo an ITF at 54x8 on it, on a build that did not have softcapped defense (only 16% def to all). To die on that character I have to mismanage my endurance, or turn on challenge settings like no insps/enemies buffed/player debuffed. That goes to show how overtuned armor defenses in this game are. I do take key powers from the primary on my defenders and tanks, but I prioritize damage wherever possible, usually not by slotting directly for it, but by stuffing attacks full of procs. I find that in this game you can have 75% of two things instead of 100% of one and 0% of the other, and the former is far more effective. That's because you've left out the very important second half of that aphorism up there: "Jack of all trades, master of none, but better than a master of one."

I was impressed with the paper DPS of Banished Pantheon pets until I read more carefully the fine print in the spreadsheet: this DPS was measured by testing against Rikti Pylons. Rikti Pylons apparently count as +0 enemies to level 50 characters. Higher-level enemies resist the -res debuffs that Banished Pantheon apply due to the level difference and will take less damage than expected. The BP are probably still good, but I wonder whether they are "nearly 100 DPS more than the next-best option" good.

I skimmed through the list and didn't see Shauna Stockwell and Eagle Eye mentioned. These two are my favorite low-level contacts by far. They do something that I have found very rare for heroic stories in this game, that is tell an arc suitable for a street-level hero. They're set in the stark industrial wasteland of King's Row, and they actually manage to make the Skulls, a low-level street gang, seem like a credible threat, both to the hero and the city. The Skulls may not be able to lift buildings or punch through concrete, but they ruin lives through addiction, coercion, corruption and terror. There is plenty of flavorful dialogue, and the missions are full of little details and neat touches such as the one where the enemy tries to lay a trap for the hero by showing a completely empty mission map at first! In what other arc can you see druggies queuing up to buy a fix, only to flee when you show up to arrest the dealers. The arcs end on an unresolved note asking you to see Back Alley Brawler's personal story in a solo mission. I always wonder what that was leading up to as it seems to have been planned future content that will never be realized now that live service has ended.