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I absolutely agree. As players we can create efficiencies within our means - it's a significant aspect of gameplay in CoH -but we should not expect the game itself to become efficient so that we don't have to. Efficiency and convenience are good decisions for players to make, but not always good choices for game designers to make.

The power can act as a click self-rez. You do not need its effects to be active when you die for it to work.

I'm more than happy to see this thread turn into a convoluted metaphor contest.

I think this has been changed to just advance the objective if the hostages die. RIP the old speedrun strat.

I can clarify my position a little bit - it comes from somewhere a lot more fundamental than 'who can fly and how'. I thiny any pay-to-win is a violation of the integrity of a game, and the Paragon Store was a significant violation of that integrity for CoH. The veteran rewards, at least, were gimmicky. The P2W vendor is a vehicle by which that monetarily gated content can be made available. It's a bit of a sledgehammer solution to a problem and now that problem is solved. I don't think the P2W vendor should be the way to solve further, minor scruples that people have. I'd like to see the P2W inventory dispersed across less 4th-wall-breaking NPCs - there could be a jetpack vendor, a weapons master, npcs to teach the travel modes, and XP modifiers given to the Fortunas/Hero Corps Analysts. I concede that nothing from the Veteran Rewards and Paragon Store should be gated - that would be bruising. But I don't think the inventory should be expanded. That, plus the status quo of character-defining travel being within builds, is my opposition. If it did happen, I'd not be up in arms about it. I'd probably just mutter something to the effect of 'there goes the neighborhood' and be on my merry way.

I love Praetoria, and I play it through the low levels often. I die a whole lot more, for certain, but it's a gteat way to get to know my character and feel rewarded by getting them right. Ambushes (across the whole game) are a bit cheap for breaking two game rules; seeing through stealth and often not being tauntable. I don't think it's ok for a game to suddenly have a particular circumstance have its own rules in contrast to everywhere else the game operates. I think this is one of the many opportunities for AI changes, to give players a few more options for dealing with ambushes. It would be great if players could cleverly set up a stealthier 'divide and conquer' strategy.

There's something really neat in this idea for stategic, burst damage gameplay, and it's something I'd need to feel out by playing it to know how much I like it. There are some circumstances that could be tricky though. For instance if you fire off Total Focus just as someone else fires off an AoE stun, your attack will only do half damage. And I think it would need to be ironed out according to Siolfir's point as well. You might end up with a sort of diminishing returns for your attacks. A low-to-mid level may struggle that bit more against a boss, when there are no other targets to turn to. The other thing, from a more centric game design position, is to wonder why this is the case. How come a superhero is less effective against a defenseless foe? The setting still needs to play a role in these decisions, gameplay mechanics can't exist in their own numerical vacuum. Perhaps the idea would work better for a psionic set, where the stunned minds of enemies are less impressionable. 100% agree, though, that this is a wonderful field to freely discuss these things. I love the ideas that come out of threads like this.

These are great options! I could see Lunge being a really cool mainstay for melee characters. I'd flesh it a little bit in such a way that it doesn't cause weapon users to need to redraw, which might be a bit of technical thought. Throw perhaps needs something to set it apart from the inherent origin powers, though maybe it being slottable is enough. Perhaps a stun or knockdown for some slight cc?

There was a fairly recent idea for a danger sense pool which could have some powers that affect what can be seen on the map. It could throw in some mild defence autos (which aren't present in pool powers), so it isn't just a load of throwaway powers and maybe a mez resist at tier 5. Maybe that's a touch unbalanced... The origin pool powers have a nice shape to them so far.

I think this is a pretty wild contrivance.

You're a brave man. I have a speedster but I just cannot bring myself to pick Whirlwind.

I do not. The game still has to function as an RPG, and obey its own rules therein. Where a character's ability is innate or intrinsic to the character, that belongs to their build and not to a store. Going forward, the P2W store should only provide extrinsic abilities. Providing jetpacks works in that sense. It breaks the rule in places like animal transformations and ninja and beast run, but I don't think that the slippery slope away from the game as an immersive RPG and towards the metagame should continue.

Teleport as a travel power could do with a look at, I think. I wonder if it would work as a toggle instead of an active press?

My knee jerk reaction was "god, I really don't need more free power slots that I wouldn't know what to do with." I echo folks wishing the attacks were a bit juicier. I'm taking the Force of Will pool thematically on a stalker and Wall of Force is underwhelming. I've tried it with a complete set of Positron's blast and also loaded with four damage procs, but it doesn't have much kick to it either way.

I'd argue the opposite to that first statement; I think over-simplicity is what makes characters irrelevant. I don't dislike the Apex TF, I think it's cool, but I wouldn't include it as a gold standard of challenge done well. Maybe the right ball park for me, but I wouldn't like to see the same thing often. I think the best example of a cool boss fight is the golem fella at the end of Dr Kane's House of Horrors, who has a pair of nasty AoE attacks that he fires off every now and again and which get progressively worse. You could rush him and get it done with easy-mode, but then you miss out on the extra reward for killing zombies. If you chose to do it the harder way, then you need to start preparing to go in and out of the AoE zone to dodge it, especially if it takes longer to kill the zombies. The challenge is a choice, and it's incentivised by an extra reward. Perfect. I'd like to have options for content that needs the extra attention and gets the extra reward, but not replace the easy-mode stuff.

I think theme should be a consideration within builds. I don't think the p2w vendor should provide character-defining powers.

As it stands, this server can't actively promote itself for legal reasons. A referral scheme like that could be construed as a promotional campaign and may not go down well. In the future, maybe. I don't know what those bonuses could look like, though.

If I see you there I'll give you a high five, friend!

I don't think balance is exclusively the way to go. Players should always win the numbers game, even if by a large margin. Maybe that gap could do with getting narrower in places, but there's no point in punishing less-than-decked-out builds. Rather, I think challenge comes in the form of requiring teams to change up their tactics, players to be alert of their situation and to encourage imaginative ways to solve unique problems. A bit of a nebulous statement, I'm sorry.

I know I bring this up often, but I'm not nearly as militant about this stuff as I may come across. I enjoy most of the game a lot. I do things in my own way and there's still so much content I've not yet done. I'm happy for the forseeable future. There are a lot of great challenges in CoH, particularly the near-sunset boss fights and iTrials. They're few and far between, but they show the game had a direction to start testing its players. Great stuff. I brought this up in another thread that I feel that the game handled the endgame poorly. Or rather, the endgame mostly belongs to a different era of CoH, predating the current level of powercreep. We have a kind of challenge valley right there, where builds and strategies don't matter and we AoE roflstomp our way through. I struggle to get excited about this stuff, it feels like routine rather than playing a game. it always feels like my characters hit 50 in a whimper. Suddenly most of their powers and strategies don't matter much, their strengths are passive and they don't feel powerful when those parts of the game got so sad and tired of themselves. Yet they're disproportionately rewarding. I do that stuff on solo as and when I can, but it's no more interesting than lower level content. But I think that valley is where opportunities for development could get really exciting. I'd love to see a balance pass on all level 50 content for incarnates and opportunities for more difficulty options and diverse challenge settings. I'd also like to see incentive for doing things a harder way - merit bonuses for doing content under debuffs, for instance. Something that might make PUGs think twice about just picking the path of least resistance. Most of the suggestions I get behind are places where challenge is added to places that there currently is zero challenge. AI tweaks to smarten up later-game villains, Street Sweeping and Hazard Zones brought to life and made rewarding and anything that could make support and crowd control powers have more utility.

There are folks out there like Bubblewrap who are deploying their innovations to coxg (I think), simply because it's in-line with the more easily available Ourodev builds. Homecoming's build isn't so available. I don't know if Bubble plays much on Homecoming anymore, but I know they're not averse to their work ending up here once it's in a working state.

I'll be tracking my furthest knockback.

I think its a good thing that we have different servers taking different approaches to how the game changes. Certainly of you prefer the cut of another group's jib, go to them. I'm in perpetual astonishment that we have any changes happening at all, and volunteers happy to do it. I don't particularly need dramatic overhauls of content (pay no heed to my posts in the suggestions forum ...) so Homecoming's slow-and-steady, thoroughly tested approach suits me.

There was really good stuff in the works toward the end of CoH's life. The final arc of Pandora's box was great fun and was the first thing to kill off my main in a long time. The devs got really imaginative with boss fights and it was great to see Market Crash follow the trend. The challenge in these comes from unique strategies and encounters, which I think are great but is a highly demanding act to follow for HC. For me, the dissatisfaction comes from a kind of 'unchallenge valley' that starts at level 47 and ends at iTrials, incarnate content and some of the newer stuff. If you imagine the graph of challenge to level, it grows more-or-less steadily from 1 to 46, then drops dramatically at 47 - 50, then shoots right back up into incarnate content. There's a lot of content that falls into that valley, and which is disproportionately rewarding for how easy it has become. It's endgame content that doesn't feel endgame and I find it hard to get excited about unless I solo it. It's in that valley that I think there is room for improvement. However, that isn't the majority of content. I love lower level stuff and I love the incarnate content. It's just that the older level 50 stuff feels like a mismatch.

Much though I don't think highly of power levelling, I don't believe charging for it is a slippery slope to real monetary transactions. That distinction, I'd like to think, is clear enough. I also appreciate that charging for powerlevelling at a fairly high price is actually a deterrent for PLing as a noob trap. I think it would be exactly what prevents level 50s who don't know what they're doing. My only real reservation here is the opportunity for scammers. But I just encourage folks to be careful with their inf, record their transactions with screenshots and try to find farmers with good repute.