macskull

Oddly enough, despite the often off-topic discussions in LFG, I still have no problem using it to find groups.

This is my Fire/Cold Corruptor (Defender numbers would be even higher). If I could self-buff with the shields while still being able to use Sleet, Heat Loss, and Benumb as often as I do, it would be absolutely bonkers.

Microfilaments are also nice if you don't plan on devoting extra slots to travel powers - a level 50 Micro gives you 33.3% to both travel speed and endurance reduction, while a level 50 travel/end IO only gives 26.5% to each. With boosters you can make that a 50+5 which gives 33.1%, but then again you can combine Hamis to level 53 and get 38.3%. It's all a matter of how much you're willing to spend per slot.

The HC market is functional enough that seeding isn’t needed (except for items which can’t be obtained any other way than through the market, that wouldn’t make any sense). Locking rewards behind specific content isn’t great because it shoehorns players into playing a specific way. Options are good and the Homecoming team has (mostly) done a good job with that.

I think we've pretty exhaustively covered the "why" behind that, though.

Those numbers were also from before TA got a rework. I'd wager the number is quite a bit higher now, but of course we haven't seen new numbers in three and a half years. I think at the end of the day... yes, it would be easy to make those AoE buffs also apply to the caster, but it's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. Each set with these AoE buffs does just fine solo and doesn't really need the help, Could probably have made the argument for Force Fields but with the recent buffs that set is actually pretty damn good now.

To be fair, Empathy as represented in those numbers is kind of an aberration. In those stats it was far and away the most popular Defender primary, but for Corruptors it was in the bottom five and it was square in the middle on Controllers - but Kinetics was the most popular secondary for those two, by quite a bit. Empathy's also a little weird in that it's the only support set that doesn't have even a single enemy-affecting power. The reason those buffs were made AoE wasn't to make teams more powerful, but rather (and this is a direct quote from the release notes for the patch where the change was implemented) "[t]o make buffing easier for Teams and Leagues." That's it. It was a QoL change so people with short-cooldown ally shields didn't have to spend thirty seconds every few minutes chasing down and buffing each teammate individually.

You can slot those enhancements starting at level 7, and you can buy the packs at level 1 if you have enough inf. I think just about the only thing in the game that could be considered "end-game rewards" is Incarnate stuff (salvage, Empyrean/Astral merits) and those are all account-bound so they can't even go onto the market in the first place.

If you think that's messy you should see how crits, Scourge, Containment, and Domination are handled, especially for pool powers. It's a much more elegant way of doing it, but it's also very limited - Fiery Embrace's bonus damage is affected by enhancements in the source power as well as damage buffs on the character, and can be adjusted on a per-power basis, while Molten Embrace provides a fixed amount of damage determined by the source power's recharge time and areafactor.

There's nothing seeded on the market that could be considered "end-game rewards." That's, uh... that's the reward merit system.

I think the core of that argument is that allowing ally-only buffs to affect the caster would result in disproportionate performance increases for a handful of sets (which, to be quite honest, don't need them) while offering no benefit to others. What I'm curious about is why AoE mez protection buffs seem to be frowned upon by the powers that be, or at least why their application is inconsistent. Increase Density is the only formerly-single-target-but-now-AoE mez protection buff but only the smashing and energy resistance portion of it is AoE. Meanwhile Empathy, Sonic, Therm, Poison, and Pain (and I'm sure I'm forgetting some) have ally single-target mez protection with side effects which should be AoE but aren't.

Stalkers don't get Fiery Embrace at all, so it wouldn't make any sense for them to have the flags on their powers. EDIT: I suppose it sort of makes sense that the Scrapper patron powers don't have the flag since Scrappers and Stalkers share patron power pools - the Scrapper ones aren't a copy of the Stalker ones but instead are literally the exact same powers - but Scrappers have had Fiery Aura since Issue 12 and there's no reason the heroside epic pools shouldn't have the Fiery Embrace flag. Also also, I don't think any pool powers have the flag either.

That's Thunderspy, and they're reeeeeeeeeeally weird about balance but then call Homecoming unbalanced because of things like Kinetics on MMs (which is unironically one of the worst MM secondaries because of how hard it is to effectively leverage its powers on an MM). They've got some cool ideas but a lot of their changes are so off-the-walls bananas that I can't really see it as anything more than an occasional playground.

Fiery Embrace used to work like Embrace of Fire (the Dominator version) and gave a straight damage boost. The exact boost varied by AT but for Scrappers it was 100% boost to fire damage for 20 seconds and 80% boost to all other types of damage for 10 seconds. In Issue 18 it was changed to add additional fire damage to all your attacks (but the old +dam version was kept in PvP). The way this is accomplished is by setting a "global chance mod" from 0% to 100% for any power with the "Fiery Embrace" tag in order to tell the game to add the extra fire damage. Unfortunately this means adding that information to every single damage power Scrappers can use so it's probably an oversight that Scrapper epic and pool powers don't have the tags, especially since Fiery Embrace's description says it "causes all your damaging powers to do bonus fire damage." TL;DR: FE used to affect pool powers back when it was a damage buff and those powers never had the correct flags added to them when FE got changed 13 years ago.

The initial testing was something like "pick up glowie and get it from point A to point B, if you die you drop it" but that was hard to test without full teams.

Issue 27 Page 5, not Issue 5. So... about 10 months ago. Capture the Flag and Control Points don't do anything, IIRC. We did some testing with objective based SG PvP early last year and it was fun but it needed quite a bit of polish to be ready and I don't think it's a priority since most of the PvP changes on Homecoming have been the result of a single dev's spare time.

I'm sure you didn't intend it, but your entire post is a great argument for doing away with the name release policy altogether. You say I am "part of the problem" (but conveniently ignored the part of my post where I said I'd let someone have a name if they asked for it) but no one's been able to demonstrate that there is even a problem in the first place. The name release policy was announced in May 2019 with the intention of being implemented within a few weeks of that announcement, but here we are over four years later and we've only recently implemented the "warning" phase. Why? The team wanted to make absolutely sure they did it right so no one lost names accidentally. That should tell you how attached players are to their character names or, at least, how attached the HC team presumes them to be. I don't think a character-based login timer is the right way to go. I could have a low level character that I only play rarely because the group I play with only gets together one or two nights every few months. I could primarily focus my attention on two or three characters while having a much larger number that I play less often, but that doesn't mean I want the names of those other characters to suddenly get snatched up by someone else. Account activity is probably the way to go, if the policy is actually implemented in the first place. Now that being said (and this is anecdotal evidence, so take it how you will) I occasionally see posts on the forum or on Discord about how someone is returning to Homecoming after not having played in years. I know if I was someone who'd played for a while, left for whatever reason, and came back a couple years down the line to find all my characters had had their names taken, I probably wouldn't bother continuing to play. I haven't really seen a good argument for a name release policy other than "I want a name someone else already has." You can't really make an argument from a cost or database size perspective, since that character occupies what is basically a single entry in a database which ends up being essentially meaningless in the grand scale of the entire game. As far as how other games have handled name release for inactivity, I'll present two examples: City of Heroes during its original run and WoW. City of Heroes: The original version of the policy came out about a year and a half after launch in late 2005. Players with inactive accounts, where "inactive" was considered "unpaid for at least 90 days," had names released (among other things like removing SG membership) if the character was under level 35. Maintaining a paid subscription, even if you didn't log in, prevented this from happening. The original policy lasted about six months before it was stopped. The policy was brought back in late 2007, but only affected characters level 5 and under. Both versions of the policy were enforced via a script manually run during server maintenance, but this was an infrequent occurrence. The aforementioned script was only ever run twice, because the development team decided the policy didn't free up an appreciable number of names. While the name release policy technically continued to exist even after the game went F2P, it was never enforced for the reasons I mentioned above. WoW: I don't know what the original policy was, or if there even was one, but as of 2018 if your account hadn't been active for two expansions or four years, whichever came sooner, names were released for all your characters. At some point between 2018 and 2022 that policy changed and now only requires your account to be inactive for two years before releasing all character names.

It takes longer to get to 50 now, even using those methods, than it's taken any time in the last four years, and the pace is downright glacial compared to some points when the game was live (15-minute 50s, anyone?). You're also assuming that just because "it is no big challenge to get to level 50" (it never was) that a person can't have developed an attachment to a character name or concept, and I know I would be more than a little upset if I came back to the game after a year away and the characters I'd played for years had lost their names. I don't like the name release policy, period. I am 100% camping on some good names on characters I don't play, and would absolutely give one up if someone asked for it, but that has never once happened to me. Besides, at the end of the day, it shouldn't really matter what level the character is, or whether I'm attached to them or not - I came up with a concept and/or a name and the name happened to be available, so I took it. If you come up with a great idea and you find out the name's already taken by someone who hasn't played the game since 2019, you can do what everyone else does in that situation and... come up with a new name.

Maybe I'm smoking crack and the last year has been a fever dream, but wasn't PvP in SG bases re-enabled in Page 5?

The problem with this is you would be taking an already-small PvP population and spreading them out over even more places.

You've probably already seen how vehemently opposed players are to something like that based on responses in this thread. I think, for the most part, this game is very easy and casual and a game like that tends to attract the sort of person who isn't interested in the level of challenge PvP brings.

I'll usually roll a new character or change up the build on an existing one if I find out about an interesting power combination - my Energy/Fire Stalker is a result of that. Unfortunately, it just so happens that a lot of what I consider interesting ends up as the target of a bugfix or nerf...

I don't think it would. It would be a nice bonus for people who already PvP, but rewards you can already get more reliably from other sources aren't going to attract new players.

This is a pretty common misconception. I already mentioned it a few pages back in this thread, but the only PvE-affecting change made solely because of PvP was reducing the tick rate of Hurricane. People like to point at travel suppression as an example of something PvP caused, but 1) some travel powers already had negative side effects while they were running to discourage their use in combat and 2) travel suppression doesn't really exist in PvP anymore but it's still in PvE. On the other hand, people conveniently skip over the improvements that made their way to PvE but were originally implemented for PvP reasons, like toggles not dropping while mezzed or melee attacks gaining an across-the-board 40% range buff. As to your last point, making everyone exactly the same is, I supposed, balanced in a way, but it's pretty boring, especially for a game that prides itself on variety and customization. You're always going to run into a rock-paper-scissors situation in PvP and that's not necessarily a bad thing (and that's why teammates exist). It's also worth pointing out that between instant level 50s, accolades purchasable at vendors for 10k inf, and an extremely affordable supply of enhancements on the market, the barrier to PvP in this game has probably never been lower. More on-topic, though: Prismatic Aethers are like... 4 million inf on the AH? I'm not opposed to having them drop from PvP defeats but it would probably be tied to a timer or rep like PvP IOs are and even if you wanted to farm them you wouldn't be able to make them at a meaningful speed compared to just doing PvE or buying them from the AH.

I'll elaborate: the PvP community at large cannot stop toxic players from being toxic any more than you can stop people from engaging in catgurl ERP in Pocket D on Everlasting. The organized PvP community, as it existed, did a fairly good job of policing itself ingame and the more toxic members of that community often found themselves unwelcome, but there's no similar amount of organization or community for zone PvP - anyone can go into Recluse's Victory and talk shit in broadcast, hit you with -jump, and Wormhole you into a dumpster. As I said earlier though, enemy chat is disabled by default in PvP zones so if the shit-talking is what you take issue with, that's as simple as restoring the default chat settings or placing the offending player on ignore. If you take issue with how they are playing the game your best bet is to report them and hope the GMs agree that what they're doing is griefing. Or, I dunno, leave the zone and come back in a little bit when they're bored because they can't find anyone to attack. Here's a video of some early alpha gameplay of CoH. If you watch a few seconds past the timestamp in the link, you'll specifically hear the arena and PvP mentioned. Just because it wasn't originally in the game doesn't mean the game wasn't built for it. If your argument for "the game wasn't built for PvP" is "there was no PvP when the game launched," then I suppose you could apply that same logic to levels 41 through 50, respecs, being able to run more than one defensive toggle at the same time, badges, capes, auras, multiple costume slots, or the entirety of CoV. PvP was added to the game about a year after launch, which in the grand scheme of things isn't long at all (less than eight months after respecs were added, about six months before CoV, two years before Inventions, and five years before the Incarnate system). You say lots of changes were made to PvP to try to balance it like that is a bad thing - games with a healthy PvP scene continually made balance passes and adjustments to ensure "what's good" is continuously changing so the meta doesn't get stale. Luckily, changes to the game which were made solely for the sake of PvP balance didn't affect PvE (except for Hurricane's tick rate getting nerfed, that one I will concede). PvP in this game is not perfectly balanced, nor is it perfectly balanced in any MMO. Sure, you could add a game mode where every player just gets to pick an NPC's predetermined powers and everyone has exactly the same build, but that's... boring and runs counter to everything that makes this game unique. "Some builds aren't viable in PvP," I hear you say, and to that I agree you may have a point - but that's also true for lots of things in this game. If I'm wanting to fire farm I'm probably not going to do it with an Empathy/Archery Defender because there are better options. If I'm trying to solo an AV I want a build with lots of single-target damage and some -regen, and not every character is going to have those things. PvP's no different. I did not say any of those things. PvP does have its issues, but they're fewer and less significant than they've been at any time since Issue 13. I don't really buy the player toxicity argument either - every PvPer had to start somewhere and they probably also encountered their share of toxic players but they wanted to understand what was happening in the game and why it was happening so they could get better, instead of going "that person was mean to me, so I'm not coming back." I'm also not complaining about how PvPers are treated so much as the type of responses the very mention of PvP tends to elicit on these forums, on Discord, or ingame - just from this thread alone we've got responses running the gamut from "PvP can die in a fire" to "I would rather get AIDS" to "I'd sooner gouge out my eyeballs with anthrax laced sponges." That kind of attitude may well stop an interested player from even trying to PvP.