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Ouroboros is cheating.

I usually take them, but mainly because I have no idea what else I'd do with the power slots.

Take your time with it. The game has a deceptive amount of depth, so don't try and take it all in at once. Always feel free to ask questions if things don't make sense or you want some tips.

I don't know about inf, but drops are distributed randomly across a team. For that reason, I find that characters I can comfortably solo on end up much better off than those I can't. Maybe that's what the OP is seeing? I'm like 99% sure damage has nothing to do with it. Not to say support toons haven't been shafted a bit though.

No, I get very anxious on voice. 😞 I think it's started to get common on Reunion for larger events, so I'm finding it harder to join them.

Happy Birthday! 🎈

Yeah, don't worry about declaring buffs. Experiment for yourself who you find the buff is most effective on and fire it on them as often as you remember.

Echo-ish Sovera. When people bring in the "Not worth the limited Dev Time" or similar argument, it's just hot air. (Though the discussion here isn't dead-ended, as some get) I like this forum for the ideas, though. Even if not implemented, they're fun to think about. HAVING SAID THAT: I think the proposed changes would make for a really cool set, but kinda of an extreme change when taken as a whole. I don't think SR is perfect, for reasons stated, but I also don't think that powersets should be ironed out to perfection - situational weaknesses make the game a game. I just see things like late AoE defence as the cross we have to bear for the best positional defence set, rather than bad game design. Though I wouldn't lose any sleep if Evasion found its way further down the levels for scrappers one day. Consolidating the three auto powers is a cool idea, though, and might go at least an insy winsy bit of the way towards dealing with the above. I do like the thought of a slow toggle debuff like Reaction Time. Less sure about adding a charge attack to an armour set, but I suppose shield charge is a thing. Does Super Reflexes thematically equate well enough to Super Speed to work that in? Edit: thinking about it, the cottage rule kicks in hard. Having a lot of spaces for defence sets could be seen as a major strength of the set that you'd be removing, especially for a skippable slow power. Though my MA/SR scrapper wouldn't say no to an AoE damage power...

same

You still are. It's just a crowded corner.

❤️❤️❤️ Well now I'm going to call them Clickey Clacks too!

You should be able to introduce yourself directly to the ones I mentioned. They may even appear in the Find Contacts window.

I think the next newer contacts happen at level 15: Graham Easton and Laura Lockheart in Steel Canyon. You can tell they're new because their faces don't look like they've been melted by sadness. There will probably be some ranges where you need to fill the gaps with older content. But the majority of the time there should be something quality to do.

I think Lunchmoney just figured out a loophole in this contest...

I don't think you know what you're saying. Nerf Regen.

I wish. 😭

28. Don't worry, I'll look after you all.

We can no longer be best friends.

God yes. As a teacher, this annoys me way more than it should. Shortcuts only make sense when you know what you're cutting short. If all you know is a shortcut, then the theory of the thing is obscured. I know a lot of easy tricks in the profession I teach, but showing them to my students won't make them professional. Very much a 'give a man a fish/teach a man to fish' distinction. (Addendum: I do appreciate that it doesn't really matter in CoH. Just one of those personal bugbears, formed from my work habits, that I carry around everywhere.)

For sure. I try to assume the best in people, especially online, but sniping still happens. I see it around this topic in game too now and then. But overwhelmingly, I think the community does mostly share a live-and-let-live sentiment, which is evident in this thread. In game, people will rally to defend people's playstyle, and it feels good to see. It just doesn't look that way sometimes. Edit: going back through this thread, there were literally only two posts that I could construe as being anti-PL. And even then, neither were presented as arguments.

I'll try and weigh in here, but it's a hard topic to untangle. I agree that 'old school' is a misleading term. I used it in my first post in this thread, but I don't feel great about it. I'm not sure what word would capture the playstyle better though... Maybe playing progressively? (Edit: I don't like that either) When I read these threads, I don't think they're meant as a stab towards others. There's a difference between people not relating to another playstyle and outright offending another playstyle. I find it's very easy to vocalise why I don't relate, but if ever I do I mean no offence. You do you. But there's something that feels esoterically wrong about trying to play gradually through content right now. Something just doesn't work and it's easy to feel disenfranchised. It's really hard to put our finger on what's up with it: Is it the game? Is it the community? Is it me? It's kind of a weird blend of all those things and more, in little parts. I think it's ok if people want to come here and try to untangle that, but it's difficult. I think these threads come up because the OP is struggling to find their place and their playstyle - we've seen the OP here has tried some things that have worked, and that's awesome, and maybe this thread was something that had to happen to get there. If you take it as being a personal attack, I think that's on you.

I wondered the same thing. For the iddy biddy bit of coding I've ever done, I'd hardly have to think twice about changing something like that but influence is probably anchored in place by all sorts of connections beyond comprehension. I wonder if negative influence was ever going to be a thing, though. That has Jack written all over it. I dread to think.

Yeah, my head was going in the same direction. That would iron out a lot of the game for me. If you hand them space station components before you hit them, we'll finally have the moonbase in no time.

That's fair, but yes, we have different root expectations of the game. My frame of reference for calling it easy is thinking back to what the market was like on the old servers. I was and still am a fairly casual player, and trying to kit out a character on live was absolutely impossible. I think I had a few cheap sets at best. With the same playstyle now and being a little bit clever about how I sell things, I can easily start kitting out my characters at level 30, all self-funded. Homecoming has implemented some extremely effective strategies for keeping the costs down. I don't particularly enjoy the market and I'm not playing CoH in order to marketeer, so it's more that the market isn't the obstacle it used to be I appreciate. I don't know whether free IOs (assuming the free versions can't be traded) would crash the entire market or hurl prices sky-high, but it'd definitely be an extreme impact one way or the other, depending on how players respond. Either I'd feel like there's less to earn and less value in doing stuff, or we'd start sailing back towards live prices. It'd be a good way to push players out either way. Edit: on that last point, I do wonder how much the free-everything is responsible for low playerbases on other servers. I know I find it a deterrent. But it's probably just that people gravitate towards where the players are anyway, so I don't know if it would have an impact on HC's players. It's a bit deeper than this for me. We already do have a lot of control of our XP gain, which is cool, and I tend to find the pace of the game is pretty good even at double XP, with a few exceptional pockets. The trouble is, unless you're well versed in the game and all its content, you don't really know what you're in for until you're doing it. It's hard to preemptively adjust your XP for content you're about to do. For example, if you do strings of contacts like The Hollows or Faultline or the Praetorian starter arcs, the game doesn't really give you any warning that you'll outlevel contacts if you pass certain levels. Your character then has to time travel for some undefined reason to carry on the plot. Or worse, in the case of Praetoria, you have to leap over a bit of plot and can only fill the gap later. The stories in the game are generally really good. The delivery of the stories, often very bad. An ideal story progression system would be one where you don't need to consult any meta knowledge to engage with the stories, like contact level caps or having to fill anything you might have missed by time travelling. What would matter is that progression doesn't disrupt how I interact with with the world, and how I interact with the world doesn't delay progression - CoH's system falls flat on its face trying to juggle the two. Given the choice of the two, I'll turn off XP now and again if it means that progression isn't getting in the way of the stories. A brutal, sledgehammer fix would be giving all content a 1-50 level range, but that would come with its own problems. So I don't really know what a good solution would be. I know I'd give any number of my eight legs for a better contacts interface.

Wow, good work! I can see this being really useful getting started with unfamiliar sets.