The Caretaker

Error, and corrected in the pipe.

That's why we test. I ran Valeria mission 2 with a friend and hit the wall with those EB spawns. You can only get so much perspective locally with certain ATs and power choices. His T4 Blaster got flattened and fundamentally changed the momentum. I didn't experience that until then.

Lots of feature creep and power creep did eventually open that gap up. Toolkits expanded, and Controllers got a few things (Looking at you, /Time, dear Lord) but the other ATs starting getting a lot of sustain and survivability bumps that made the Support aspect of the game less and less needed, to where certain powersets and playstyles (Healer types) really fell off the map in terms of play and desirability.

It's being reduced to 52. I think that's an agreeable midpoint. 51 at -1.

That's a miss on my part. I'll own that. I thought the DA missions ran at 54 because they were incarnate content. I scaled them up, and now I realize that was a mistake so I will scale them back. On that note though, I see no reason to flatline them to 50. If this in Incarnate content, There should not be an option to run them at 49, level shift-less or powered up. So I will reduce the minimum level to 52, so that a "new" incarnate will still function without a level shift. Holdover logic from when these were upscaled from Marcus Valerius. Rarely does a timer cause a mission fail, so I'm going to leave them there. What you have to try and see, from a certain point of view, is that the subjective impression left from Live is that "In order to make our content harder, enemies just got more HP, one or two annoying extra powers, and rip apart Defense with enhanced ToHit". It was an unsustainable path forward. We want to give you guys something fun, different, fresh, and engaging without simply wasting your time in a fight (More HP) or undoing the benefits granted from a system (+ToHit to unravel the softcap builds) or badly implemented mechanics that just frustrate (Avoid this, ya Green Stuff 😠 ) In order to give the players even a modicum of interesting new mechanics, we first have to change the expectation that all content is explicitly soloable. To make everything soloable means a LOT of very fun, interesting, or otherwise experimental mechanics leveraged against that playstyle are impossible to implement. And before I take my place on the stake to be burned, just understand that: I'm trying my very best to find the line here. I'm already making and have been making changes based on feedback, including the most recent posts above yours. Not every AT can solo. So I'll mention once again that the argument for solo play limits the arguments to "typical" cases of ATs designed for the task. I cannot accommodate a Petless Mastermind's ability to solo, even if that's a hyperbolic statement. Mind/Empathy would also not be a super-fun time solo in Incarnate Content. (and that's not a knock against either build - but rather if you're making it work, then you're far better at the game than most, and your situation is unique.) Then again, a soloplay experience can be completely overrun by a single AT with the right IOs. If I were to design for soloability, I'd have to pick some metric for my baseline, which will automatically exclude some at one end of the spectrum and then cause others at the other end to complain that the game is too easy. HOWEVER, the game is designed as an MMO, and that Mind/Emp inviting a single other person suddenly changes the ENTIRE dynamic. Unless they invite the Petless MM, which could make things in fact even harder than if the Petless MM never came along. The moving parts are really interesting like that. The ITF became a benchmark for a real problem: The way Cimerorans were designed gave average run of the mill Controllers a maybe-shot at being effective with help from their secondaries, while Dominators had a straight-up miserable time in many configurations. So we're looking, aggressively, at trying to design enemies and experiences that have opportunities for everyone to shine, and to bring an acceptable amount of risk. (To date, we designed a few of these things before we had solid data of how they'd be received. Ravenna Conclave's design is inferior to [********* **********] coming in the near future.) The future looks bright, but in City of Lone Wolves we're still balancing the sheets. We need to test, implement, and design engaging content that allows a wide variety of team compositions to have epic experiences against a future world-threatening apocalyptic fight for their lives. We are a City of Heroes (and Villains... and Displaced Bizarro Dystopians), and it needs its heroes to work well solo or as a group. We want to bring sexy back team dynamics back to the forefront and remind people of the incredible interactions and force multiplication shenanigans that come with it. TL;DR: I'm adding a patch to the pipe that will make the tasks Minimum Level 52, not forced to 54.

I see what you're saying. The encounters are tuned just fine at +0/x1-8 which are acceptable soloing standards as far as I'm concerned for an Incarnate. The soloing argument is really an impossible thing to accommodate because a Mind/Emp soloing this (or any) content shouldn't and can't have the same capacity as a claws/fire scrapper. All content in this game is team content as far as I'm concerned. If that Mind/Emp wants to run a task and it's too hard, that's not really the content's fault, OR the player's fault, or the archetype's fault. Some tasks challenge convention. The content is designed with the idea that there's a pool of free agents (hopefully!) that can be recruited to assist. Difficulties can be adjusted. To the person pointing out that their tank was having little success with crowd control in Hand Clap - that approach works well on other groups - it just so happens that this group has been given more utility to challenge you. I think the Incarnate Cimerorans are in a fine place for +0, and with level shifts factored in, get a tad easier over time. You can certainly solo it, but knowing that the wide diversity of character options leads some to be team-support specialists, trying to accommodate it becomes a real universe-brain endeavor. Tankers can put out an impressive amount of damage, but in my eyes, they are specifically designed to help ensure the survival of their teammates as a primary function. The thing I'll have to look into later, is the question I can't answer at this second. Are DA repeatable missions explicitly defined as "solo incarnate" or is that a socially accepted use for them?

The changes to Cims regarding CC were for controllers and dominators to have a greater role. The utility in a tankers toolkit, solo, may not see as much. However there was a definite mentality of "control need not bother" in the ITF and we sought to address that. One of the big offenders was the Shout, which IIRC was changed in effectiveness by rank. @Cobalt Arachne may need a summoning for more deets.

Definitely don't want to be misinterpreted here, so know I mean this with a smile - this group is hard to solo and that's OK - its another step towards preparing players for target prioritization, situational awareness, and team composition. As for their CC, one of the goals with Hard Mode ITF was that Cimerorans were nigh-impervious to control and making control archetypes have a purpose was very high on the list. This change to Cimerorans trickled back to regular enemies as well, if I'm not mistaken, to make control useful even in the regular ITF. Try bringing a controller or dominator along and see if there's an appreciable difference.

Some slight changes are coming to the repeatable Incarnate Missions in the next patch, including Ravenna Conclave repeatable missions added to Sideris that unlock AFTER you complete Valeria's arc. All maps have been upgraded to the larger size versions as well for all missions.

I'll look into this as time permits.

That would require buffing regen, and regen is already top tier.

Update: Won't be a page 4 feature but something is possible, just needs a big data sweep. No promises!

Actively working on that. A lot of people's submitted costumes are in my local development branch as I develop custom textures to make them unique.

Brilliant guys, I didn't even think about using this tech (it gestated well after this power was made) looking into it, no promises.

I may defer these typos to @Booper or @CaptainPowerhouse In the development workflow, I'm leaning away from making powers changes - they go through more iterations and so changes I make may get lost or cause conflicts. @Booper can you make a note of these if I don't?

I understand it's not for everyone. My contributions to Aeon when taking over for Piece was the original smelting cauldron, in fact most of the original ship mission, the AU-Rifter vacuum power, the ripple dimensions, and Becky's upgrades. But Cobalt can claim the lion's share of the credit. He took it all the rest of the way. I don't think small, I think in broad strikes and he details. I can claim credit for 80% of Valeria though.

Everything I do for the game is a love letter to the lore. Play some of it, for better or worse!

This time, I will be the first post after a red name! #dreamfulfilled

Don't you worry, one step at a time :D

I made an attempt to simply expand it with a more flavorful variation of the same. So now, it will say "Hello, {PlayerName}, what brings you by today?"

Current edits: "Omnicore possesses neither the patience nor the tolerance for anything that does not advance her quest for the perfect weapon. Very little is known about her, which is more due to her being buried in her work and not talking to others than any mysterious or controversial reasons. She has spent years of her life working to create the perfect weapon, incorporating her successes into her armor design incrementally. If you look closely, you might notice that Omnicore is the weapon herself, and her research is integrated into her body... Or, her original body is integrated into her research. It's nearly impossible to tell now."

This particular issue is a legacy problem that persists across a LOT of contacts, requiring either 1) A better generic statement or 2) A lot of customized work to fix individually. At the moment, it's down on the priority list but not forgotten.

I'm going to leave this as dialectical flavor.

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