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Players down in the bowl would be out of range to aggro anything up on the sides, and if they're close enough then the lip of the ramp means they're not in LoS either to get aggro. Nobody down in the bowl obtains aggro from the sides unless they go up and purposely pull them down - which is fine. I would love it if more players did that. I'm grabbing mine from up in the bomb areas. Add to that that once I'm down onto that slope, the herds often end up getting culled from visibility because there's a maximum number of entities being rendered (actually, if I can change this, please tell me how), so I don't even know what my herds are doing. I just have to trust that they're still chasing me down until they've crossed that shelf. If that shelf area around the bowl didn't exist and the bowl were large and flat, this wouldn't be an issue. The geometry is the challenge here. If there's 20 minutes left after the bomb and Ukon phase, I can normally manage about 8-12 herds in a raid, with 17 mobs per herd. (That's if I go non-stop. If others are herding too, I'll fight a few between herds which will lower that number, so I can actually get some rewards.) So let's say about 150 mobs altogether and whatever rewards they give. If I find I'm yoyoing to try and aggro interrupted herds, I reckon that number drops down to 5-7. Trying to taunt mobs off a player takes longer than the whole herd all together, because of that dang slope into the bowl. In that one time I kept seeing the same player interrupt my herds, I barely managed to contribute anything. That's frustrating - I have one job in an MSR, for which I get rewarded less than those in the bowl, and I'd like to be able to get on with it. If others have herding strategies that don't involve breaking LoS, I'd love to hear them.

When LoS is broken, the mobs will attack the next threatening thing, so if someone hits (sometimes even just comes near) a group I've been herding in, they take the aggro. I can taunt them again, but now I have to remain in their line of sight to keep aggro, which means they take a lot longer to come to me. At the last part of the herd, there's the slope down where it's very easy to lose line of sight whether I want to or not. So I end up either frustratingly yoyoing up and down to try and get that group down, or ditching that group altogether and moving on. I have been on raids where there's only been three people herding, others where it's only me. If one person is circling the middle, then you never know if they're going to interrupt your herd or not. I've definitely had it where I've repeatedly seen the same player interrupt three or four herds in one raid. That's an impact, on the respect of the people herding if nothing else.

Less about being solo, more about being on the sides. Since the Rikti are mainly ranged, the best way to herd the rikti down into the middle is to break LoS and get them to gather at a few points on the way down. It means it's very easy for someone else to steal aggro if they're fighting up on the ledge and not in the middle. Trying to wrangle the aggro back off them just makes a mess. It only takes one person up there to make the tankers' lives slow and miserable, whether they're in the team or not. If the herds are coming in slower, then it does deprive the whole league of all rewards. In some parts of the ship, the tankers get no rewards whatsoever so they're not going to want to be any more slowed down than they already are. (I say tankers well aware that other ATs are capable of herding the MSR. I didn't mean to misreprisent)

You’re right. I’ve not appreciated how cool this is nearly enough.

Awesome! it would be sweet to randomly and rarely encounter something like this around the city.

This thread makes me think of something Abraxus said, that we tend to pick apart gameplay and playstyles here on the forums waaay more than we do in game. For all these things we're talking about - KB, Group Fly, Whatever - people have clearly had bad experiences with them and others have figured out how to use them to the team's advantage. Our feelings towards them are coloured this way. My entire experience of group fly has been someone turning it on accidentally during an office map, we all got confused for a moment, then the guy said 'oops' and that they're planning on respeccing it out. I've never gone and seen Null about it because it's literally not even occurred to me that it could be a problem. Knowing now that it benefits MMs, I might even get it myself and be aware of my playstyle around other people. This thread has made me aware of that, so that's great. Though I'd rather see Group Fly changed, I think. I was absolutely ignorant, but ignorance in of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's just how we learn and progress. Our attitudes towards ignorance can be destructive. We've all had bad experiences with knockback. Knockback done well should be unnoticeable - we notice bad knockback. I imagine that most of us aren't people who have carefully thought through how they'd use knockback (I kb>kd most of my AoE knockbacks and I feel that I'm not in the minority here), so most of us have a kind of focusing effect bias on those bad occasions. We need to be aware that a sweeping 'always kb>kd' unspoken law is overkill as knockback has a place and is part of the game, but also to remember to be polite when players may not understand strategy from the perspective of a tank or melee player. Similarly, let's not state that a team wiping because of bad knockback makes the team bad. CoH is an easy game, but there are still plenty of circumstances that can wipe a team and knockback is absolutely a contributing factor. Mix that in with being lower level, the enemy group being malta or the difficulty being a touch too high for the group, and you have a recipe for failure. If a storm defender is throwing around gale and enemies are being knocked off ledges, into other groups, or just generally scattering I'd say "steady on the knockback" and see if things improve. If it doesn't, I'd send a tell to see if they understand what they're doing. If it continues to the point that matey boi is clearly trolling, then the kickhammer comes out. So far, that's not happened. It's not a big deal. Edit: Though I am going to add that fighting up on the sides during an MSR is absolutely troll behaviour and the wrong person got punished, if that story is to be believed. Please don't do it; I don't care whether you're capable of it or not. I don't want to have to waste my time on my tanker having to wrangle my herds off you so I can get them down into the middle for everyone to fight.

Could the power grant people near to you a flight temporary power, appearing in the temporary power popup tray like Mystic Flight's teleport effect? That way it's clear when it's been turned on by someone, less intrusive than a popup and the player has total control over when they want to fly and when they don't. Edit: Just saw this was already suggested.

A money sink is an economical mechanism to try to balance currency entering the game with currency leaving the game, in order to prevent inflation. I can’t think of an MMO that has managed it well, as players will find optimal ways to bring money in. There is a badge for spending a large sum in the tailor. I wouldn’t call the badge progress a sustainable money sink, however, as once the badge is achieved then the sink no longer exists. Smaller, more regular sinks would be a better choice, such as the loot packs. Other currencies like the merits earned in game also help to prevent inflation, as you can now compare the influence cost versus labour cost to purchase something.

There are badges for all the Atlas arcs, Mercy arcs, RWZ arcs and Praetorian zone arcs. I can’t think of any others. This would be really neat - maybe not necessarily for a zone, but for arcs that deal with particular villain groups. Or both.

There are quite a lot of variables that exist between the ATs (base damage, resistance cap, strategies, inherents, etc) that skew how powersets work. A melee set on a scrapper is very different to a melee set on a tanker.

I think trying to rebalance existing rewards against different playstyles is a losing battle. I’m all for distinct rewards to encourage playing in a variety of ways, though. How that would work with smaller teams, I don’t know. It probably doesn’t need to. I like smaller teams because they give my scrappers a chance to actually hit a few things with more than two punches; I dunno if I need to be rewarded more than that. But as we’ve seem from many other MMOs, too many currencies spoil the broth.

WE’RE SORRY.

I know Lost Ninja has three boxes running simultaneously somehow, with inputs shared between them. In fact, I’ve seen it in action and it’s pretty dang sweet. You’d need to ask him, though. I dunno if he keeps his superpower a secret.

I don’t mean to add fuel to a needlessly contentious issue, but this confused me... If the strategy is to herd groups to obstacles in order to mitigate too much KB, surely it’s the same effect as just slotting KB>KD. Except that obstacles aren’t always available on outdoor maps and herds seldom do as they’re told. Ranged groups doubly so.

Wot?

There’s still a process of unpacking how models in CoH work. They use a proprietary file type. If OuroDev, HC or even NCSoft manage to reveal how this works, I know I’ll be wanting to contribute 3D assets. I expect a quality check will be involved to keep things graphically consistent and the polys optimised, but that’d really open things up.

Yeah, that’s news to me too. Crazy I see group fly so rarely that it doesn’t even occur to me to see Null and switch it off. Group fly does need a stern talking to. https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/11600-lets-talk-about-group-fly/

You’re right, of course. Trouble is that the hopes here are diametrically opposed. As Steampunkette just demonstrated, we can throw the same arguments at each other from different perspectives. I don’t think we need to snipe over it. I’m just concerned that little reward for gameplay isn’t very sustainable.

Gotta back Steampunkette on that one. I impose a lot of challenges, but that’s to avoid my power tray being filled with OP ‘i win’ buttons rather than for any sense of reward. I don’t think you can just pretend to reward yourself.

Man, people have really chosen some strange hills to die on.

There’s one in the top left. huzzah!

Let me give an example of the sort of content-to-reward I imagine. Keeping in mind that progress towards this could be account-wide (if not at least shard-wide). Let’s say there’s three new hats: The Rogue’s hat can be unlocked by making all the different choices in the new Rogue arc across multiple playthroughs, whether on the same character or across different characters. The Vigilante’s hat is unlocked for the same reason, but for the new Vigilante arc. The Philosopher’s hat is for all possible choices made. It’s something to encourage us to try doing things differently and be uniquely rewarded for certain content, rather than just a counter. It would also encourage light roleplaying with use of alts, which is pretty core to the game. It’s also not hard and doesn’t require a lot of investment. You could do it in less time than it takes to run some taskforces. The original unlock method for the Cabal hat wasn’t far off this. It required the Ten Times the Victor badge, which (once upon a time) took some decent players and team coordination. It wasn’t a grind, it was a challenge. I feel that the game at the moment encourages grinding more than unlockables would, with most rewards being XP, inf and merits. Many players have found the few efficient bits of content for time/reward and run them repeatedly every day. That’s a grind to me. The fact that you have to make the decision to pick less effective ways to gain rewards isn’t great design.

I have a T3-only Demons/Storm MM (You'll find my build in Steampunkette's thread above, but Plainguy has done it better. Mine is just affordable). Works fine. Significantly more useful in teams than my Bots/FF MM, just gets exhausted quickly and lacks any mez protection.

If your shard has a good channel for socialising, invite folks that way I suppose. People wanna socialise in an MMO, that's normal, but CoH has no natural, intuitive way to do so. LFG and Help fill that role immediately, and it takes someone to point out how to access the social hubs for it to move into the right spots. Reunion is so quiet on those channels that a bit of chat there is welcome to me.

I'm extremely pro this idea. This would be such a nice mechanic to add a little bit of interest to GM and AV fights, and bring some more value to cc powers.