Astralock

Honestly, no, not at the moment, outside of BAF trial. However, Player-1 has stated that they're working on making all henchmen equal level to the Mastermind. They are fine on 1* and 2* hard modes though.

Different servers, or different shards? There is a difference.

I would agree to this if e-mail storage is limited back down to 20 messages.

Yep, it's definitely against the Terms of Service. People definitely do it though. Number Six stated on Discord that he caught someone AE farming on seven accounts in PI on Excelsior one night a month or so ago.

Mastermind. Great for soloing, good for teams. It can do just about anything.

Not all teams on Excelsior are wordless. I've seen some impressive rage quits.

That would be one way to get me to leave and never come back.

Besides, Freedom had open world PvP fifteen years ago.

Number Six has made quite clear that that will never happen. Running additional shards other than Reunion doesn't cost any additional funds as the four North American shards share the same hardware, and some people prefer playing on small shards.

It's all good. I got to see the Get Smart opening again for the first time in years. Good stuff.

Exactly. I have multiple failed runs with three to five people under my belt because of that. The last one was with a Fortunata, Scrapper, two Defenders and a Controller. It took over a half hour to just get that many. When it came time for the vines, a Defender and Controller ignored instructions to not stand in front of the tree and were repeatedly killed as a result. The remaining three of us just couldn’t keep the vines down. I am just really tired of struggling for people for the first or second Treespec even during peak hours when it’s the WST, and sometimes not getting enough to start or failing just so I can unlock and solo a story arc.

In a way it was. Shortly after the leak of the "secret" server in April 2019, documents for a proposed City of Heroes 2 using Unreal Engine 3 by Paragon Studios submitted to NCsoft back in 2008 leaked. Strangely enough, it looked a lot like Going Rogue, including the Destroyers mob group. NCSoft eventually rejected the proposal for CoH 2, and I very strongly suspect that a lot of the ideas Paragon Studios had for it were repurposed into the Going Rogue expansion. At least as much as the aging Cryptic engine allowed.

Hell would have to freeze over first for that to happen. It will never happen. Rebirth's developers want a game more closely hewed to how the game was running while Paragon Studios was in charge. Thunderspy's developers, as far as I know, hate AE and completely removed it from their game. They also have more of a "let's try everything and see what sticks" development approach. New Dawn's developers throw in everything *and* the kitchen sink and completely disregard balance. In addition, they all hold a bit of animosity towards Homecoming. Then there's the really tiny servers like Unity and Island of Villains, in addition to probably dozens of private servers. It's just never going to happen. The source is out there, people will do with it what they want.

Because the CoH server software cannot handle more than 2,500 accounts concurrently. You can throw a supercomputer’s hardware at it, it just doesn’t matter. For the first five months or so of Homecoming, we were at or near 10,000 concurrent accounts during peak hours. That demanded a minimum of four shards. That’s why we have five shards.

You can use Incarnates including Interface and Lore pets on a GM, not so much a first or second Treespec. Not to mention having more powers.

This is a selfish suggestion and I doubt that it will go anywhere, but it can’t hurt to ask: Remove the first and second Treespec badge requirements from Arbiter Leery. All of the other unlockable red side contacts can be unlocked solo, (even the Ghost of Scrapyard defeat badge for Crimson Revenant). Trying to form a PUG first or second treespec even on Excelsior when they are the WST is like trying to pull teeth. I have never gotten more than five people for them, and half the time I can’t even get three people. I would just like to be able to do Arbiter Leery’s story arc without spending over a half hour recruiting for a second Treespec when it’s the WST, only to get four people, and then have it fail because we can’t take down the vines in time…

Farmers generate wealth. Merchers redistribute wealth (usually to themselves), but don't create it unlike farmers. That's a massive difference.

Excelsior is the de facto “unofficial PvP shard” now and has been for at least a year as the vast majority of PvPers moved to Excelsior in late 2020 and throughout 2021. So what should Indomitable’s branding be now?

Again, it’s been said that making Group Fly disabled by default would mean that it would not work on your henchmen and pets, even if you went and enabled it later.

Developers have said before that adding the option to the Options window is not possible without a ton of work, so it's Null the Gull or bust. Also, making Group Fly disabled by default is also a no-go as it would automatically disable Group Fly on pets and henchmen making taking the power pointless. Just have to make it a habit to go to Pocket D and visit Null the Gull on new characters. I do it at level six on every new character I make.

Especially when said damage is auto-hit to everyone within 30 feet.

When two or three ATs are essentially being told that they're not welcome on many runs, that's not "great." That's bad design.

The relatively new "Master of the Eden Trial" is extremely unfriendly to melee players on the team, to the point that having a melee player on the team is an actual liability. The lowering of the Ambrosia inspiration's effectiveness and the Crystal Titan's auto-hit Foot Stomp of 1,154 points of Smashing damage and 874 points of Unique damage (with only 60% of the Unique damage resisted with an Ambrosia inspiration), means that anyone within 30 feet of the Crystal Titan will be two shot at best. Not to mention the Crystal Titan's auto-hit Prism Blast. Most teams I'm seeing for it are having one Brute or Tanker with some form of flight to keep the Titan taunted at range, and Scrappers and Stalkers need not apply. Some teams, even Brutes need not apply. If they do join, they're essentially a carry slot. I'd suggest a rethink of this. The Apex Task Force and certain Incarnate trials (Lambda, Underground, Minds of Mayhem), are melee unfriendly as well, but you don't automatically fail them if a melee player dies.

I submitted a petition about this last night, but was advised by GM Crumpet to post a bug report and to attach my chat log. Yesterday afternoon, I led a +3 kill most Moonfire Task Force on the Excelsior shard with a friend and six PUGs. It went well. The eight of us were on the last mission, "Defeat Arakhn." We defeated Arakhn and got the "Mission complete!" on the screen, along with a pop-up window with "Strike Force complete" with the number of deaths and the time it took. I received the Alien Fighter badge, and 32 reward merits. Nine seconds later while we were still clearing out the mobs around Arakhn, all eight of us DCed. When we logged back on, the task force was complete. However, all eight of us had our characters rolled back to the state they were just prior to entering the final mission. We lost all XP, INF, and drops earned during that mission. More importantly, we also lost the badge and reward merits. @Number Six stated that there were no mapserver crashes during the past two days, so I have no idea what happened. The entire chatlog for the Moonfire Task Force is attached to this post. If you go down to line 14,247 at 17:05:17, you can see that I earned the Alien Fighter badge, and 32 reward merits. Then at line 14,308 at 17:05:26 is the last line inside the mission. The next line, I just logged back on. FWIW, the character name is Astralock Nine. You can clearly see if you look at my character now that I do not have the Alien Fighter badge and do not have the 32 reward merits from it. Also, I had unlocked the Alpha slot during the final mission, and when I logged back on, my Alpha slot was back to 92%. As I mentioned in the petition, I'm not expecting anything to be done about the missing XP, INF, badge, nor reward merits. Just wanted to make you aware that this happened. Moonfire TF chatlog 2022-11-06.txt

Yeah. Sean McCann wrote most of the missions added after Issue 16 until sunset, including the SSAs.