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Taxibot MVP.

I replaced some of the Kinetic Melee sound effects with those from some of Reichsman's attacks, which are far more gentle to listen to but still have that 'momentum then whack' sound. Some trial-and-error later, they match up pretty well. However, after I got my KM/bio to 50, I just put them to bed and left them there. Even have half a mind to reroll them as a MA/Bio, just for how tedious the KM animations are. Having done it, I'd definitely not pick it for a speedster build.

If you're in an SG with a medporter in the base, the option to go to base will be available alongside the hospital option when you die. If you then leave the base through the normal entrance, it will plop you right outside the mission. This title gave me flashbacks to The Hollows in the early days.

I don't think it would improve quality of life at all. I for one would be lost all the time.

Phwoah, what a question... With infinite technical knowledge and infinite man-hours, I wouldn't say it's out of the question at all. Those are huge and obvious restrictions. I looked at the map for a while after reading this. There's a lot of space doing nothing in between the war walls and the zones don't actually tessellate. It could be resolved, but some stretching or extending of the zones might be necessary. Some new areas would be needed, such as the bridge/tunnel between Steel and Boomtown. If Peregrine Isle were added to this borderless city, then there are whole shores that would need to be considered. Thematically, some zones don't sit well together. Crey's Folly and Eden would be particularly odd zones to try to consolidate into their neighbours, right down to having a different 'tint'.

I usually 'feel out' a build up to 50 rather than plan ahead, with the exception of my Warshade who uses the popular human-only build found here and a nearly-petless MM where I wanted to make sure it could work. I usually eat through at least two respecs per character. That MM needed high end IOs slotted as soon as possible in order to be effective. She needed a respec around about lvl 38, but even so I could keep most of the stuff i had slotted and either store/sell anything that I'm no longer using. It's pretty expensive for a casual player, but it's really fun having access to bonuses and that extra 'oomph' from sets. I think my 50 defender, however, is yet to use a respec but since they were my first 50 on HC and I've barely touched them since, they're still on an SO build. They'd need a respec if I wanted to kit them out properly.

I have issues with Twinshot/Graves, but difficulty isn't one of them. I'm sure I remember dying a few times on the Manticore mission, but I don't equate that to bad design.

This is a cool idea! I might try a character themed around the four elements and have them change between elementally-themed outfits as their relevant power is used. Would just need to figure out a build that makes use of the elements through pool powers and epic pool powers.

Onga Bonga!

I don’t think there’s any solid reason to change what AE does, but I disagree with OP and a few others that the rest of the game needs to be accelerated to match it. (Edit: reread and realised OP wasn’t actually saying this directly. Sorry to misrepresent) XP in normal content is only bad in relation to AE farming, but in of itself the pace of the game is great. I’ve been playing with dxp, but might drop to 1.5x or 1.75x just to pace things better. Maximising efficiency isn’t the same thing as playing the game to me. I’m in no rush to create level 50 characters; the game starts at level 1 for me. I don’t feel like I should be earning something for every minute that I play. I enjoy traversing the city, it’s part of the game and I don’t want missions to be delivered to me at the snap of my fingers. Heck, I even enjoy Oranbega and the Shadow Shards and I hold an issue with some of the ‘QOL’ travel options, which water down the immersion to me*. I much prefer to do contacts when they’re available at my level rather than through Ouroboros. AE is a great option for those who play the game for the high end content, but don’t keep taking the game away from those of us who want the slower pace, immersion and adversity (what little of it is left). What would be the point of this wonderfully detailed world if we’re encouraged to avoid it? *I’m talking about the TUNNEL network giving access to Firebase Zulu. Portal corps has an enormous, clearly expensive and insanely high-tech portal in their headquarters, with sandbags and watchtowers ready to stop Rularuu invasion forces. One day some jesters turn up like ‘plop’ here’s a piddly little yellow thing in the centre of populated areas that does the same job. It bothers me greatly.

I'm talking about those actual lmgtfy links that you see now and then. Maybe it's just me, but they've got a patronising tone to them. Pointing someone to the right wiki article is no bad thing, especially when there's a lot of information to devour. There are definitely other wrong ways to deliver information too and as you say, some topics are significantly hot. DfB for instance brought out the worst in people for the first few weeks of HC and that was rife with new players or players trying to refamiliarise themselves with the game. But there's degrees of the issue here - a discussion like this one of two different opinions is fine (until it clogs up the help chat, then maybe it just needs to go to tells) but when it gets to childish name calling then there's a whole new problem. Usually the questions asked don't have space for differing opinions ("How do I get to Peregrine Isle?") or they might be questions that can't be found online or just need confirmation ("Can I unlock patron powers blueside" (You can't)) I'd not advocate that someone who doesn't want to stop and hand-hold a new player be forced to take the time to do so in any way. But I like to feel helpful.

On more than one occasion I've seen folks ask for help over something and be met with a cascading torrent of information. The AH, enhancements and crafting tend to be the biggest culprits here. The trouble (or the really great thing) is that everyone approaches these things in different ways or engage with it to different depths, so a lot of the advice that you get is dramatically different. Some folks, as you've seen, are a little more zealous about their approach than others. So you'll get guides that give a quick overview of a subject that makes whatever it is you're trying to learn seem simple, or you'll get a guide that talks about the same thing buts scrutinises it down to, like, hexadecimal memory addresses. You'll see all sorts if you look through the builds here on the forums. I dunno how Devil's Avocado you're being, but I can't agree with this at all. There are topics that are too in-depth to go into in game and need a good solid guide, but if you don't know how in-depth the question is you're asking I don't see the harm in asking the help channel. Besides, it's always a good conversation starter if nothing else. I get more angry at those 'lmgtfy' links. They're just so snide and dismissive.

I think they meant 'many more people than prior to AE' or 'than on live' rather than that there are more people who PL than those who don't. I'd take a lvl 50 newbie over an overpowered veteran who storms ahead of the team without communicating it. I can deal with wipes better than I can deal with unsolicited ghosting of missions.

I went through the exact same thought process. My only reservation is that now I'd have a power slot per character that I won't know what to do with.

Speak for yourself.

You can double-click on the name of the option you want to play and it should launch right then and there, regardless of what the launcher is doing.

This seems to happen when changing resolution settings to borderless. I just swapped between monitors and all of my settings reset then and there.

I swap the strafes and turns too, but I do all of my looking around with the mouse (right click+drag). I could easily go without turning on the keyboard. WERD makes an irritating amount of sense and I haven't felt this betrayed since I put the arrow keys behind me. Only thing I'm finding is a bit of a pinky stretch between the neutral position and ctrl. I'd almost wish the windows key wasn't where it was, but I suppose something could be done about that to turn it into another ctrl key? I may have to try it soon.

On the polarising opinions surrounding PLing and AE, I share the offending butthole's purist disposition. I have very strong opinions about I should be playing the game and it's a very special case where I toe the line outside of what I think is correct. But those opinions are for me. They're more like self-imposed challenges rather than playing the 'correct' way. Honestly, the way I play can feel like quicksand at times. I wouldn't want to impose that on anyone else like some preacher-of-the-true-way because the true way can be tedious, especially by your fourth 50. The only time I've come close to this to this was when a new player got to 20ish on redside via DfB and then was totally lost. The community was offering advice, but the amount of things to do at level 20 was information overload (IOs, switching sides, DiB, TFs, Ouroboros...). Three of four of us, randoms, went back over early arcs with him so he could pick up the game at a better pace. For the few times that I have been in farms, much though I felt guilty about breaking my own rules, I found that I could get to know people more than I could on PUGs in normal content because there was time to chat. There's plenty to be said for the value of farms in the community.

Yeah, but after 300 it just starts to look sad.

By the same token, the old farming popularity of Fire/Kin trollers toons might explain that.

That about Hami is a very good point. For the first point, even at lower level stuff and even against malta, it's rare to see that kind of strategy much though I would like to. On the other hand, I remember it from pre-IO CoH and how it got quite frustrating then. Maybe there's just no pleasing me! I was thinking about it, and some of the mechanics I'm thinking of do exist in some way. Lord Recluse at the end of MLTF is an obvious one or the last fight in Operative Renault's TF where you need to pay attention to whirlwinds that could knock you about. It's little things like that that I find make boss battles interesting. I'd love to see more things like it, maybe added into old bosses, but again that's a huge ask for a very low-priority and presumably difficult task.

I don't think this is really a topic about farming or farming builds anyway.

I want to like the cel-shading, and mostly I do. But the way the war walls turned out bothered me immensely, and since they're so ubiquitous there was not much escaping it. I played about for a while but couldn't get satisfied. If anyone's managed to get it to a state that many of the the effects don't look... um... chunky (? I don't know how to describe it) I'd love to see screenshots. Actually a cel-shade screenshot thread would be pretty handy to see what people make of the settings. Does that already exist somewhere?

Oh absolutely, I don't think I could have emphasised enough how unrealistic it would be to expect whole new game mechanics and strategies. Undoubtedly, such things would transform the game away from what it ever was and perhaps was ever supposed to be. Just a pipe dream of mine. This is the distinction between types of difficulty. A strategic difficulty would fail because I as a player made a mistake, did something wrong or didn't coordinate as a team. You can learn and improve for next time. In this case, it's just that the mobs had numbers that beat the player's numbers. Once the battle of attrition is over and you've eaten through your break frees, there's not much more you can do. The level you're at might not allow for any more mez protection than you have already. When an enemy you were once ploughing through now takes a handful of seconds to bring down, it feels like artificial difficulty. Too much of this would absolutely be frustrating, especially when there's more effective content. I like the idea of an optional, incarnate-balanced extra-challenge mode, maybe even one that's incentivised with incarnate drops or a few extra merits. In any case, there's still so much pre-50 content I haven't touched that this game isn't going to run out of good times for me for a long while.