Pleonast

The idea of having all enhancement drops being a usable origin for the character receiving it would also greatly improve quality of life for new players. Long gone are the days when we were expected to grind particular groups in order to get the right kind of drops.

Note to all, I’m not talking about slotting enhancements at lower levels, I’m talking about slotting enhancements by new players; players who do not have a high-level character who can fund new alts. It’s next to impossible to earn enough influence through your contacts’ missions to keep all your slots filled with valid DOs or SOs. The game is balanced around having your slots filled. It’s doable, especially for experienced players, but this topic is about players who are leveling up their first character. It’s unfair to expect them to have that expertise. They have extra friction that every one of us avoids on our alts, unless we’re doing some personal challenge.

Is there an in-game way to get a list of the badges a character has and the current progress on the others? I feel like the whole badge mechanic is too opaque and dependent on careful reading of the wiki.

The core advancement loop is 1. Talk to contacts. 2. Do missions. 3. Gain a new power or slots. New players expect to be able to fill those slots. The game is balanced around those slots being filled with DOs or SOs, depending on level. Whatever the mechanism to fill those slots, this loop should be straightforward for new players. I don’t think it currently is, and new players are hitting this pain point. Adding “you must do these other things to fill your basic gear” really breaks the core advancement loop for some players. Let them worry about once they’re max level. I think that reducing the price of DOs and SOs by 90% is simple way to let players unfunded by a max level character to access them easily with minimal disruption to the overall economy. But any other mechanism that stays within that core loop is helpful.

That would work as well. But that way is probably a net influence source. New players basically spend all their influence until they reach max level. Letting them get more stuff for it doesn’t change the total economy much at all. Once a player reaches max level, all those basic enhancements are purely vendor trash. Increasing the drop rate increases the total influence income of the server.

I’ve seen enough of posts like this one, to convince me there’s a problem. Maybe we need to improve the in-game guidance for new players to get influence. But the underlying problem is that basic enhancements (TO, DO, SO) are too expensive for new players who are unaware of the influence meta. Super cheap basic enhancements are not going to undercut the IO or IO set markets. They won’t make the game too easy, since they are the balance point at the appropriate levels. But they will make the game a lot more accessible to new players, especially ones more interested in heroing than marketing.

I see your points, but I’m not talking about early levels. I’m talking about a new player who is at that the point in the leveling curve where the game is balanced around characters having SOs. And generally a new player (that is, one without a max-level character) will not be able to afford fully slotting out SOs. Sure, it’s still playable, but I’m not sure why we need a friction point around accumulating enough influence for basic enhancements. Every veteran player skips past that by funding their alts. Why? Because it is difficult to self-fund while leveling, and it’s so easy to just send a few million influence to each alt. We’re all avoiding the issue in a way a new player cannot. I think it’s an unnecessary pain point for players without a max-level character.

I feel that one of the worst pain points for new players is the enhancement system. Even if they understand what enhancements they want, they don’t have the funds to acquire them. Eventually their influence catches up to their wants, but do we really want the new player experience gated by influence? So what would happen if the cost of TOs, DOs, and SOs were reduced to one tenth their current price? Then new players would have enough influence to buy and experiment with these basic enhancements. With minimal impact on established players, since these enhancements play almost no part in the end game except as an unneeded influence source. Thoughts?

The new gamma slider is awesome! I can finally get a good gamut on the in-game brightness. But I’ve noticed a side effect: some of my costume color choices are now looking a little questionable. After adjusting yet another color on a costume, I finally realized why—the gamma. This is a good thing. Anyone else notice things with a better gamma than they did before?

The great thing about a Tanker is that if you get distracted by something (phone call, bio break, tennis lesson, etc), you can just leave the character in the mission. They’ll still be there when you come back, maybe with some new friends pantomiming a fight.

Don’t forget a Civilian’s one power, Immawalkinghere: Auto, Self, while Walking, Heroes get pushed out of your way. But seriously, I’d love for a lot of the civilian clothes be available for costumes.

Ha, like Super Strength could ever supplant Kinetic Melee as the suckiest Tanker secondary. /grumpyKMtanker

Remember, the auction house is PvP—it is players directly competing against each other. Whether or not it should be, it certainly is now, except for some seeding.

If I were doing a self challenge, it’d be something like this. * Powers: must pick the next primary power whenever possible. If not, then the next secondary power. If neither of those, the next power from a single pool set. Your last power pick must be from an epic power pool. Only temp powers that are mission-required may be used, except that Day Job and Safeguard powers are allowed. * Slots: no power may have more than one slot more than any other power. Fill them in pick order. * Economy: enhancements, inspirations, salvage, and recipes must be only from drops and self made. Send excess to another character if you need to free up inventory. No auction house for any reason. No influence from other characters or players. * Supergroups: no bases, yours or anyone else’s. * Travel: allowed are sprint (or equivalent), pool power if your picked pool set has one, and monorail or ferry. No base portals or Ouroboros. * Missions: radio scanner only. No resets, no regular contacts, no Ouroboros, no architect. No teams. Set to whatever difficulty you prefer. Street sweeping is allowed. * Hospitalization: before you leave the hospital after being defeated, you must mail all your salvage, recipes, unslotted enhancements, and inf to another character. Keep your inspirations. For me, the fun part would be tightly keeping to that character’s theme, as chosen by the power set selection. And then playing the role of a self-made hero protecting the city against threats. YMMV, of course.

It’s why we can’t have Regen Tankers.

The Homecoming devs have done a great job balancing the economy. Far better than Live. But I’d like to see even more smoothing out of the obtaining and the auction-house pricing of enhancements. Here's an idea. The first time a player (that is, a global I.D.) completes a task force in a month, they get a special merit. That merit can be used to buy any one IO recipe, which used or traded as normal. Benefits: * Every task force gets run regularly. Because a global ID can only get the merit from a particular task force once per month, there’s no incentive to run only the “easy” ones. * Salvage is still needed. Because the enhancements need to be constructed from the recipes. * Smooth out prices of recipes and enhancements. Because any recipe or enhancement that is too expensive will quickly be brought down in price by entrepreneurs who will easily increase the supply. * Remove the converter lottery. Because you won’t need it to make inf. It’s weird for the game’s economy to have so much randomness. * Create a clear path to outfit a character: do task force, make the enhancement you want. Would this work? Is it possible to implement?

Exemplaring (and closely related Ouroboros missions) means you need to be thinking of a leveling build. At level 5 with only four powers, you’ll have your two level-1 powers. I hate relying on P2W, so my level-2 power is an attack and level-4 is a travel power. From there, level-6 is a third attack, and then I take mitigation powers whenever possible. Tanks just don’t need much mitigation before level 10; you’ll do better killing faster.

My Willpower Tanker had four pillars of survival: Defense (na, na, you can’t touch me), Resistance (ha, ha, you didn’t hurt me), Regeneration (meh, I’ll walk it off), Persistence (heh, you’re not even trying). Long solo fights always devolve to a bunch of minions punching me because they blew their endurance early and don’t recover fast enough to do any more. I’ve heard it called the Homer Simpson tactic; let them clobber you until they’re too tired to clobber anymore. My point—don't mess with the baseline; players have built their characters around it. Instead, give players more and specific options to make their personal difficulty harder. Like a choice of buffs for every mob in a mission. Or a random buff for each mob. As a potential reward, each mob drops an inspiration matching their buff.

I like Willpower. It’s very generic, without any great strengths, but no weaknesses either. It has some defense, some resistance, some regeneration, some recovery. Pairs well with everything.

So, my main character, created 2019-04-30, while in the middle of the "Save Kadabra Kill and Sigil" mission from Heather Townsend just now earned the badge Passport while in the middle of combat some with some Knives of Vengeance. Looking at the wiki page ( https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Passport_Badge ), this does not make any sense. Is this a bug, or is the documentation wrong?

Is it possible to have an enhancement that changes a click power into a toggle power? There'd have to be careful consideration about which powers, but it'd be similar to the enhancement that changes knockback into knockdown.

So true. Two-player teams are the best teams.

It's not for everyone, but no set is. Here's what I like. 1. Quick Strike: light damage and knockback to give yourself some space. 2 & 3. Body Blow and Smashing Blow: medium damage and stuns to give yourself some time. 4. Taunt: hey you, it's a taunt! 5. Repulsing Torrent: cone knockback to push minions into corners and give yourself time and space. 6. Power Siphon: nice buff if you have room to take it. 7. Burst: fun all-around blast. 8. Focused Burst: great range attack for taking down flyers and runners. 9. Concentrated Strike: the POW! attack. My attack pattern goes like this. First, target a boss. Run next to it and Burst. Then run to the angle that gives the most mobs or wherever you want to herd things and Rep Torrent. While two powers charge, hit the boss with Conc Strike, Smash Blow, and Body Blow (on a team, Taunt and/or Focus Burst). Then repeat with the AoE and Cone, and back again to popping the boss. The boss will be stunned. There's a lot of running to the best position, hence the "Kinetic" part of the name. I love the back-and-forth, to-and-fro when using Kinetic Melee. It requires good situational awareness (Scrapper-lock is counter-indicated) and I get into the zone of being wherever I need to be. It pairs well with Willpower, another powerset that has a nice variety.

I can understand why they want to make changes slowly. I think there needs to be a "big picture" look at what we want this game to be going forward. I think there needs to be a lot fewer timesinks -- low drop rates and other artificial scarcity add very limted gameplay.

Actually, I propose increasing the max notoriety level adjustment without changing the purple patch. No one would have to play at +5 or higher. And if they did, they'd suffer the effects of the purple patch. Relatively little coding work for vastly harder play as an option.