macskull

Nah, it's human nature to find a way to get the results you want with the least amount of effort. The original intent of the developers is kind of irrelevant since players almost always end up doing things in a way the developers didn't foresee. Hami raids are a great example of this - both the old style and current raids were "solved" by players in ways the developers hadn't intended. Task force rewards are another example - originally with Issue 9 every TF gave a chance at a random drop out of the same pool so the rewards were the same regardless of whether you did a Katie Hannon that took 10 minutes or a Dr. Q that took 3 hours. Guess what option people chose? So the reward merit system was implemented, with a nominal formula of "x merits per minute" to encourage people to run a wider variety of content. It worked, but people quickly figured out what content was more "worth it" from a merits per minute standpoint. TL;DR: As long as there are completion rewards for content players are going to game out ways of maximizing those rewards while minimizing time spent.

I think it's less to do with a few peoples' power fantasies and more to do with trying to keep game systems functional in an environment that had maybe a few dozen concurrent players at most. Incarnates were enough of a grind on live even when you could routinely field a league, but when you've got maybe 40 or 50 players online regularly that becomes a lot harder. Same thing for Hami raids - you pretty much needed every online player in the same zone at the same time to pull it off. None of this is even mentioning the market yet - without salvage and enhancement bucketing you have no little to no supply, so you're forced to grind out merits to buy stuff. TL;DR: Most of the "easy mode" QoL changes that happened post-shutdown were less about making things easy and more about making things functional with population orders of magnitude lower than Homecoming's. The population is dropping. It's been on a slow but steady decline since April, but weekend peak player counts are still around 1700-1800. Homecoming's "throttled back on farming" several times over the last four and a half years - cutting AE XP in half, getting rid of AE mission/arc completion XP bonus, removing double inf while exemplared, etc., etc. As far as IOs go... no, IOs were added to give characters more flexibility and build customization instead of a homogenous "3 damage 1 acc 1 end 1 rech" that everything ended up with on SOs. The fact the IO system was mostly inaccessible to a large chunk of players was a failure, not a feature.

I've done a few PuG 4* runs and have decided they're too hit-or-miss to be worth my time. I don't know if I'm looking an an hour or three hours when I start, which isn't an acceptable range of time since the completion rewards don't change based on how quickly (or not) you finish. Yeah, sure, I could get a handful of PaPs, but my care level about costumes is approximately zero and if I did want one of the prestige costumes I could easily just buy the PaPs instead. Aeon's nice because you can gamble at a 500m inf enhancement, but I can also just do the SF at default difficulty and finish it in like 30 minutes with a team of randoms. Re: task force/flashback difficulty settings - until I get some sort of additional reward from using them I'm going to continue to not use them.

The post-shutdown changes to the Incarnate system did far more to break balance than the post-shutdown economy changes. Back on live Incarnates were an awful, awful grind, designed to reel in paying subscribers and keep them paying. The inability to afford things for many players wasn't an intentional feature, it was an unintentional side effect of an ingame economy gone horribly wrong. If Homecoming went back to the pre-shutdown implementation of the market and merit vendors, that'd be the end of Homecoming as we know it. Rebirth uses the same market system as the game did when it was live, and there have been multiple times I've gone over there looking for a specific purple recipe or enhancement and finding a sales history stretching back months. At that point it doesn't really matter how much inf you have, because there's no supply and you're forced to grind out the enhancements you want in a different way.

Kick and move on.

The defense got rolled into the toggle, but the scaling resist and DDR didn't, unfortunately.

Anecdotal, of course, but I do see plenty of "steamroll" or "kill-most" or "[insert difficulty that is not +0]" task forces forming on Excelsior. I think a lot of the QoL stuff is just because there's no need to keep a subscriber base locked into the grind to keep subscriptions going, and the P2W store does a pretty decent job at serving as an inf sink to keep AH prices low. Re: lower-level travel powers and such... when travel powers were still unlocked at level 14 you were basically shoehorned into taking a prerequisite power at some level between 6 and 12, and a travel power at 14. Getting to 14 and finally unlocking that travel power felt like an accomplishment, and there is something to be said about that sense of accomplishment, but when that accomplishment comes at the price of the everything before it feeling crappy, I'm not sure how much of an accomplishment it really is.

Sure, but they're claiming the game's moving toward "no challenge whatsoever," when that is demonstrably not the case. (That's also glossing over the fact that this game's never been challenging at a basic level once you understand how it works.)

Hello, it’s me, hard mode content

Not exactly on-topic but to be entirely fair heroes did have some pretty significant advantages in PvP for a long time. Between IOs, the I13 changes, and various other changes since then, that's basically gone away, but it wasn't entirely a fair fight for a long time.

That's because in an MMO context when someone says "holy trinity" they're almost certainly talking about tank/dps/heal. Also, for what it's worth, the difficulty system is only marginally effective at making things harder. If an 8-person team is steamrolling at +0 they will probably have an easy go of it even when raising the difficulty to +4. Task force and flashback settings can increase the challenge but if there's no tangible reward for utilizing those challenge settings people aren't going to use them. There's a reason hard mode content dumps extra rewards onto you, and sometimes even those are barely worth it. At the end of the day, this game is - and pretty much always has been - easy, which is also why it's so popular. The game attracts a playerbase that isn't looking for a challenge (which is also one of the reasons PvP never took off in this game). The people who want things to be harder are a vocal minority, but I think giving them what they want isn't a bad thing as long as that increased difficulty is optional. Hard mode settings do a great job of this, but PuG hard mode content isn't all that common because people simply don't want to deal with it.

I'm a little confused by the OP asserting they miss the holy trinity in this game when this game never had it to begin with. There was only one "healing" set in the game at launch and 20 years later you can say there's two, maybe three, but the healing from those sets has never been the primary draw from a gameplay standpoint. The basic combat mechanics of this game have been virtually unchanged since launch and they're so simplistic that stacking buffs and debuffs has made healing an afterthought since the get-go. "Healers" in this game are, and have always been, noob traps. Healing is an acceptable form of damage mitigation at lower levels where players don't have key powers, the slots for the powers they do have, or enough enhancements to fill those slots, but by the time you get out of the low 20s (especially now that higher-tier powers are available earlier) it's kind of unnecessary outside of niche content, and other support sets offer strong buff/debuff ability while also providing enough healing for those occasions where it's needed. Perhaps what OP is really missing is team diversity and an era where low-DPS buff and debuff characters had an actual role, and I think they might have a point there, but I would argue Issue 18 kind of blew the doors off team AT diversity once you were able to play any AT on either side. Prior to Issue 18 if I wanted to play a buff/debuff character blueside I would roll a Defender or Controller because those were my options, but once that barrier went away there wasn't really much of a reason for me to not simply roll a Corruptor. The same thing happened with Tankers and Brutes: Tankers were pretty much dead in the water compared to Brutes until Tankers got turbo-buffed, and now it's Brutes that lack identity.

I don't think it's using Scrapper numbers because the power is set up correctly to use the Stalker crit attributes. I think there's something wrong with how the power is executing. Fault uses two redirect powers: a cone power to deal damage, and a targeted AoE power to stun. I would guess what's happening is that activating Fault takes you out of hidden status before the redirect powers activate, which means Fault is always using unhidden crit chance. You could test this by getting an 8-person team together and seeing what that does to Fault's crit chances when hidden - if they go up as expected on a team, there's your answer.

There are no Stalker attacks that have a 50% crit chance when not hidden. Fault has standard Stalker AoE crit chances - a flat 50% when hidden and 10% base when unhidden (up to 31% depending on team size). EDIT: Okay, misunderstood the wording in the post. I played around on the test server for a while to see if I could duplicate this and what do you know? While hidden I hit 120 targets with Fault and got 9 crits for a crit rate of 7.50%. I only counted the targets which had damage dealt, not the ones which were stunned, because the effects are applied by separate redirects. I tried it again with Hide turned off and got 13 crits on 94 targets for a crit rate of 13.83%. The unhidden crit chance being higher than the expected 10% can be explained away by the small sample size, but unless I was extremely unlucky small sample size can't explain away the low crit rate while hidden. Even if I was generous and gave the hidden crit rate the same roughly 40% margin of error I got while not hidden I would still expect, on the low end, a crit rate four times higher than what I actually got. I don't see anything immediately wrong with the way the crit tags are displayed for the power on City of Data, so I wonder what's up with this one.

Storm does well solo when paired with powers which keep enemies in Storm Cell or Cat5, and does well on a Corruptor with those same caveats but it performs poorly on teams because it relies so heavily on location-based patches and DoTs to deliver its damage. On a team that's moving even somewhat quickly the setup time means you're often corpse blasting and are only getting a fraction of the potential damage from your nuke. It's a shame, I really wanted to like my Storm/FF Corruptor but it just feels so icky on teams.

Leveling pacts were apparently very broken. Post-shutdown they experimented with allowing up to 8(?) players in a single level pact but ended up disabling the system again entirely. Re; sidekicking and exemplaring, I don't miss that even a little bit. Your mentor gets teleported across the map? Have fun when those grey-conning mobs are suddenly 30 levels higher than you! Want to run a task force but don't have enough people in the native level range to support exemplaring the higher-level characters? Guess you're doing something else! Hit level 46? Better be ready for a deluge of "will you bridge for me?" tells!

That makes two of us, then.

To be fair a lot of people who play this game tend to get upset if they can't just stand in one place and mash buttons.

That's kinda why being in task force mode doesn't kick you from the team when you log out - it was designed to support a single team running content across multiple play sessions. Of course, that's not something that happened often, but luckily now even the longest content in the game (4* content with a PuG that doesn't know wtf they're doing) only takes a few hours.

I dunno, based on this thread I'd say most people don't even know the channel exists. It's also not in your chat windows by default which means people just aren't going to see it unless they want to (which isn't the case for LFG, help, or general chat).

2009 (which should tell you exactly how likely it is to get people to switch over to using it for AE farms).

Just double-checked ingame and PB does boost Acrobatics' hold protection for the roughly 15 seconds it's active.

You said "45% defense brings you to a point where most critters are at the 5% minimum," which is only really true if you count even-con or lower minions as "most critters." Yeah, my addition to your post makes things more complicated, but it's a pretty common thing to see "45% defense means mobs only have 5% chance to hit" around here, and then people get confused when they find out most things still have a >5% chance to hit.

Don't forget enemies also have accuracy multipliers based on relative level and rank, and accuracy is factored into the hit chance equation after the 5% minimum clamp, so unless you fight exclusively even-con or lower minions everything will actually have a greater than five percent chance to hit you, sometimes more than double that, and there's no amount of defense you can add to reduce that higher chance. Also also, in addition to making you immune to (resisted) -res debuffs, being above 100% pre-capped resistance will make you immune to damage debuffs.

So patrol XP, at least, functions the same way it did back on live. I'm also not aware of any "XP boost" that's been added post-shutdown either, unless you include the XP boosters but those are optional.