macskull

FWIW those “all procs all recharge and HP no defense no resistance awful recovery” 4-star builds are usually built with a specific team composition in mind, but they are also extremely capable in regular content. Sure, you’ve gotta crutch them along with things like amplifiers, recovery serum, and inspirations, but the cost of those things is a drop in the bucket compared to the inf you make from just making things die.

The Tanker changes + Fury changes + aggro changes + Burn nerf really did it in for Brutes. Sure, if you already have one there’s not really a reason to roll a Tanker to replace it, but if you’re making a new farmer I wouldn’t recommend a Brute to anyone.

Mids has been incorrect about this specific IO since before the original game shut down. Mids is at the top of the “do not trust this” list, followed closely by ingame info. Hell, sometimes even City of Data is wrong.

My characters are also easy to identify and have a system to their names - when you right-click on the character and get the global, they all say macskull or one of my other accounts!

I would drink that, ngl.

Check the links in my signature, which has historical data for player counts over the last two years. Any "seasonal variation" that exists in a game with a population the size of Homecoming's is so small that it's basically imperceptible. You are correct in that the population has increased compared to what it was immediately before the announcement (roughly 55-60% higher), but it's also around half of what it was at the peak shortly after the announcement.

The population is lower now than any time in the last four and a half months, it is definitely not increasing.

It was changed in Issue 22, which was released about 8 months before the game shut down. The behavior you’re describing (which also let you do things like put Membranes in Mind Link and Vengeance, or Centrioles in Thermal/Sonic shields) was around for a long time and many people don’t know that it ever got changed.

IOs predate VEATs by over a year. Mind Link has never allowed recharge enhancements, but it's always been affected by the recharge portion of set IOs. It used to be affected by Hami-O's with a recharge aspect, but that was fixed sometime before shutdown.

These two methods of preventing boosts are functionally equivalent from a player-facing standpoint. Considering the slotting oddities with Hami-O's haven't been possible since Issue 21 (22? I don't remember), there's zero reason for the power to behave as it currently does.

With a 50-player cap in the zone, a handful of people who aren’t actively involved in the event absolutely can result in failing. The raid leader can adjust their strategy to mitigate this risk but then that falls onto the raid leader to 1) correctly guess whether there are enough potentially “AFK” players in the zone for it to be a problem, and 2) communicate the change in strategy to the group at large, who may not be familiar with the new strategy. This wasn’t at all a concern when the zone cap for the Hive and Abyss was accidentally bumped way up in early/mid 2019 but it became one once the 50-player cap was restored. This would not solve anything and would more likely than not cause the raid to fail, because half the people on the league will have TP prompt on so they’ll get blasted too, and instead of killing Hami you’ll just have a full-health Hami with three or four sets of mitos which you’ll then have to meticulously clear or give up and wait for a zone reset. And if you do manage to recover from that, the dead people in the bowl already got their hit in so they’ll still get credit for the defeat at the end as long as they don’t move. EDIT: I don’t particularly care about the arguments around the one or two people at a raid who aren’t on the league. The zone cap at 50 and league cap at 48 are incompatible with each other, much like how hot dog buns come in packs of 8 and hot dogs come in packs of 10. A full zone is always going to have at least two players who aren’t on the league. There may be a perception from some on the league that those players aren’t participating, but a cursory glance at name colors during the entire event should make it obvious whether that’s actually true. A good raid leader should already be doing this. An instanced raid does not make things more difficult for soloists; rather, it makes things easier for the raid leader and significantly minimizes the risk a griefer poses to the event. EDIT 2: Even if an instanced Hami raid accomplished nothing else, it would still provide a solution to the dozens and dozens of wasted man-hours spent across the servers each and every day by players waiting around to secure a spot at a raid.

Liking an idea and then later being opposed to that exact same idea because of why someone wants it is kinda yikes. At that point you’re no longer opposed to the idea on its merits but because you want things to continue to be difficult for that person.

Also, different leaders do raids differently and I ain’t trying to do a Hami raid the slow way on a different server. P.S.: @Mayaedits get back to work

This is the biggest reason I don’t come to Hami raids much anymore. My time is limited and having to get to the zone 30-60 minutes early to have a chance at even getting in is a non-starter. Sometimes I’ll show up closer to the start time and get in but usually the zone is long full and I’m off into the depths of AE farming again. +1 for instanced MSR. Griefers are still gonna grief but at least if they’re being obvious about it the leader will have an easy way to make sure they don’t end up on one of their raids again.

Global chat doesn’t have chat bubbles like other chat channels because the global chat server is completely separate from your local character and the rest of the game.

It’s a problem unique to chain powers. In this case, Storm Blast is the only blast set that has this limitation, which makes its AoE clunky and inconsistent. I’ve brought this up to the powers team already and was told that it is unlikely to be changed because Chain Lightning has several benefits from being a chain power. About the only reasonable benefit I can see out of it is that it has a theoretically larger AoE area than a standard targeted AoE, but I don’t know that the larger potential radius ends up making much difference in practice and it comes at the expense of proc rate and that 5% chance to just be a dud. Even some kind of “second chance” mechanic would be good.

To the OP: have you tried to talk to the person holding the name? How do you know this person is “camping” your name?

Slowing down the game doesn’t make it harder, it just makes it slower.

Can’t speak to most of the discrepancies without seeing your ingame and Mids slotting, but the discrepancy in mez resistance is easy to explain - Mids and the game express those values differently. Mids gives you the actual mez resistance value, and the game displays it as the final % duration based on the amount of mez resistance you have. The way the game displays it is arguably more useful since it doesn’t require you to do any math. The formula is here, and using your Mids numbers your 70% hold resistance equates to 58.82% duration. Discrepancies between Mids and the game are always due to one or more of a few things: Ingame and Mids power selection (or powers in use) does not match Ingame and Mids slotting does not match Mids has the wrong info on a power (this one is common)

Any power that applies both defense and enhanceable resistance is flagged to ignore outside buffs, otherwise the resistance portion would be affected by the caster’s damage bonus. Powers that apply unenhanceable resistance do not need this flag, which is the case for Scorpion Shield.

Those people should probably see a doctor, the number of dogs inside a person should be zero.

All that is showing is that the -res is applying to the target, it doesn’t show the actual accuracy or hit rolls for the patch itself so it isn’t really useful for what we’re looking for here.

Turns out the Tanker version of this power also has the same limitations, except that one is a level 44 power pick so you’re even less likely to have the extra slots available to give it the attention it needs to perform well. If you’re looking at Mids for data, most of the Page 7 powers changes aren’t on there - Dominator Sleet used to have a 90 second recharge and now it’s 2 minutes along with other nerfs that Sleet as a whole got. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is a case of “oops accidentally gave a critter power to players” since the pet the epic version of Tar Patch spawns is named “Tar_Epic” and it’s flagged to allow enhancements. This seems to be a conscious design decision.

I’m coming from this with the perspective of having to pay a slot tax for the accuracy that’s required. I don’t know if the summoned pet inherits accuracy buffs from the caster but I’d assume it doesn’t since many summoned pets don’t. Ideally I maximize the accuracy and recharge with as few slots as possible. Tar Patch is unique among area -res patches because it will continuously require hit checks for the most desirable part of the power to work. It takes slow sets but unfortunately only one slow set has both acc and rech in one power and that’s a 4-piece so you’re not getting much out of it. That pretty much leaves you with common 50+5 IOs or the acc/threat/rech D-Sync/Hami. Sure, the cost is going to be variable, and you might get lucky if you run enough Aeons or hard mode LGTFs, but at the end of the day no matter how you slice it you’re having to spend the time or inf or rely on luck just to get a power that still performs worse than the power it’s based on because of an arbitrary design decision.

Hi it’s me! I would have submitted this as a bug report but it is apparently Working As Intended so I am here to lay out a few things so that others may understand how ridiculous this power is. Dominators got access to Tar Patch with the new Dark Mastery pool in Page 7. Sounds cool, good new thematic match for some existing builds. Of course, since Tar Patch is an epic power, it must be strictly inferior to the in-set version for reasons that are still unclear. Generally this is accomplished by a recharge time penalty on the order of 2-3x the source power’s recharge. In-set Tar Patch has a 90 second recharge, so the epic version is set to 180 seconds. This change alone isn’t particularly egregious but it does already put epic Tar Patch at a disadvantage from a usability standpoint. If it was just this difference, I would probably have just shrugged and moved on. BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Dark Mastery’s version of Tar Patch is not only slapped with a three minute recharge, but it has a few other key differences that aren’t immediately obvious but make it an objectively worse power even if it wasn’t already on an obnoxiously long cooldown: The power has a reduced radius of 15ft instead of 25ft (epic Sleet is the same way, 10ft instead of 20ft). The resistance debuff requires a hit check to work. This makes no sense since the rest of the power effects are autohit. On a power like Sleet the hit roll is annoying but not a problem because once a tick lands the target is debuffed for a further 30 seconds, but because of how Tar Patch works the power must make a successful hit roll every 0.5 seconds for 45 seconds. This already means the power is at best 95% as effective as the in-set version during its half-as-much uptime. That’s the best case scenario, which will only happen 0.0063% of the time (and no that’s not a typo). The power takes accuracy enhancements to account for point number two, but in order to actually maximize accuracy and recharge you’re forced to turn to multiple enhancements which cost 350-400 million each just to still get worse performance than the in-set version. Come on, we can do better than this.