macskull

This is way too well written to not be a troll, but just in case it isn’t: /jranger

Developer intent rarely survives interaction with the players. A great example of this is the current Hamidon raid - the way players figured it out after it was redone for Issue 9 wasn’t the way the responsible dev had intended for it to be completed, but here we are 18 years later. Let’s not act like inspiration use is some game-breaking thing. This game has never been particularly challenging outside of cases where players self-impose restrictions. In cases where a dev is concerned about inspiration use trivializing something that is supposed to be a challenge, they can simply disable inspiration use just like the various advanced difficulty settings do… but it’s worth pointing out that when you disable inspiration use you basically just shift the meta from a mix of Blasters and Corruptors to a mix of Blasters and Corruptors with a single Tanker or Scrapper thrown in.

Agreed they’re not a problem, but “if they haven’t been touched yet they aren’t going to” is not a great argument. It took HC what, four years to implement the name release policy they announced? The fact some of these changes haven’t already happened is more due to HC’s glacial pace of updates.

The RMT enhancements did leverage PPM, but the calculation was different and didn't factor in recharge at all.

This consensus does not exist. Proc nerfs are a solution in search of a problem. Fun fact, prior to I24 recharge wasn't a factor at all in PPM calculations, and powers just used their base recharge time. The initially proposed changes as part of I24 were going to factor in global recharge in addition to slotted recharge, but a number of people wisely pointed out this meant some external buffs would actually make your character less effective, so they ended up going with the "modified recharge time" formula in use today.

At least given the info in your post, you're trying, which is more than a lot of people can say. What you're experiencing is just the unfortunate reality of this game's early-level gameplay, especially when solo. It's rough, it's slow, and it isn't particularly fun. Teaming makes the experience a lot smoother.

Base raids as they originally existed would be incompatible with the changes made to base building post-shutdown and many current bases would either need to be completely redesigned or built from the ground up with base raid pathing in mind.

This is mostly limited to their ability to make new models. Seems like they can do pretty much everything else, and you definitely don't need to be able to make new models to put out more frequent and smaller updates. Adding more people to the team without fixing their processes and eliminating bottlenecks just means more stuff is getting bottlenecked.

It's not necessarily that it's a way or the only way, it's that it's the easiest way, especially if you're recruiting in LFG where you are putting the call out to a large group of players with unknown builds and skill levels (and when I say "builds" I don't necessarily mean "they have all the expensive sets," I mean "they have goofy power picks and wacky slotting"). PuG runs of 4* content can sometimes take literal hours and if you're in that situation you want to give yourself the greatest chance of success possible. I've seen people doing 4* runs with things like "no Cold/Nature/Kin" or "Defenders only" or "no Barrier" and they're all able to complete the content, but those groups are recruiting entirely outside the game so you'll never see the posts in LFG. If you're interested in seeing other types of runs, form up a team on your own.

As I understand it, much of what's holding the HC team back from being able to do really big things is the lack of people familiar with some of the software they're using for modeling, the newest version of which is around 8 years old. The number of people who are experts with 3DSMax 2017 and who also play City of Heroes and who also have the time and energy and desire to do free dev work in their spare time is tiny. That being said, that's only really holding them back from making new models and animations, and they've done a decent job at working with what they've got. It's not the lack of volunteers that's making the release cadence so slow, it's the processes they're using.

3 per server, so technically 18.

Believe it or not, it is possible to be happy to have the game and a volunteer dev team while also being unhappy at some of the choices that dev team has made. "You should be happy you have anything at all" is nothing more than a cop-out to deflect criticism. I'm not going to simply go like "oh okay this is fine" when it's not, though when I provide feedback and criticism I try to make sure it's constructive and well thought-out. I also feel the need to point out the post you're replying to was simply pointing out things the HC team has said they're going to do that they aren't doing.

Since pretty much right after Homecoming spun up six years ago, they said they were going to handle updates with smaller, more frequent "pages" instead of issues like the retail run. The first year or two they seemed to be getting that right, but now we're looking at 1-2 releases per year which doesn't really jive with what they said they were trying to do. There have been three updates since the NCSoft license agreement was announced a year and a half ago, and one of those updates was 90% done before the license agreement happened, so there really have been only two.

In my mind there are two barriers to faster updates: There's a single point of failure in the process for pushing patches during closed and open beta. Right now the entire patching process is handled by one person, so if that person has to drop off the face of the earth for weeks at a time to find the Ark of the Covenant or whatever... everything stops. I've lost track of the number of times a closed beta cycle has sat without patches for literal weeks. That's fine for the live version of the game, but when a lot of the closed beta patches (specifically on the powers side) are pushed with bugs that make it impossible to accurately evaluate the changes, having to wait 1-3 weeks before the issue is addressed with another patch contributes greatly to tester fatigue. Hell, closed beta for page 2 had a whole bunch of changes to [redacted powerset] which ended up not making it to release, but there was not a single closed beta patch for those changes that wasn't broken in some way. The way the closed beta process works on Homecoming leaves it susceptible to schedule slip and feature creep. Cryptic and Paragon would drop the entire update at once on closed beta and tweak things from there, so testers could jump in wherever they wanted to start. On Homecoming, things are added piecemeal to closed beta and it can often take upwards of six months between the first changes showing up on closed beta and the update going to open beta. It makes it hard to keep track of what's changed, what hasn't, and what's new when the process is stretched out over such a long period of time. The extended timeline is also probably seen as an excuse for a dev or two to go "oh we're nowhere near launch for this update and I have this feature that's almost ready to go, let's throw that at the testers and see what happens." If Homecoming isn't going to wait until they have the entire update's worth of content tester-ready before they push it to closed beta, they should at least have a clear and transparent cutoff date for new additions or major changes so the process isn't stretched out across several months. There's also a third barrier which has more to do with a subset of the dev team than the Homecoming team as a whole: The approach to powers balancing and tweaks is "numerical changes are boring." Numerical changes might not be the most exciting, but they're also the quickest to implement and easiest for testers to evaluate. Homecoming's powers team design philosophy results in changes no one asked for getting thrown onto closed beta, going through several wildly different iterations, and ultimately getting pulled completely in many cases, which is a waste of both tester and dev time.

It's pretty straightforward - if enhancements increase duration then magnitude is a fixed number and level differences affect duration, and if enhancements increase magnitude then duration is a fixed number and level differences affect magnitude.

Ehhh, on their own they’re not great unless you have stuff to stack them with, and they tend to have a shorter duration and longer recharge than control set holds.

FWIW this is still a thing, but it's mag 100. It very much still exists, but teams these days have so much defense flying around you're not likely to get tagged with it - but if you do, you're at the mercy of your teammates for the 15 seconds or so it lasts since you'd need half a tray of breakfrees to get out of it.

If people enjoy using knockback because it lets them fulfill some sort of power fantasy by watching things go flying, I'm totally fine with that, but they can do it on their own time. On the rare case I'm running a team and run into someone using indiscriminate knockback I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and ask nicely for them to stop doing it. If they choose not to, my second ask is just me kicking them from the team.

IOs are optional and there isn't any content balanced around their existence, so I don't buy this argument. At any rate, one of the devs has already come out and said that players are expected to use the market even if all they're doing is upgrading their SOs as they level.

If this were true, the lead powers dev wouldn't have pushed back so hard on letting Sudden Acceleration be non-unique, or we'd have an option at Null the Gull to convert all KB into KD. If you dig around and find Galaxy Brain's old Blast set comparison charts, you'll find that Energy Blast goes from almost dead last to solidly middle-of-the-pack when you add KB/KD enhancements. AoEs with guaranteed KB are the exception, not the norm. No matter how good your intentions, if the AoE you're using doesn't have guaranteed KB you're almost certainly going to cause scatter unless you slot KB/KD.

I was being literal. I'm not the type to make a claim without evidence though, so as I was working on this post I loaded in a fresh level 50 with some patrol XP and zero debt. From the time I first died to the time I got The Unbroken Spirit (the 200k debt requirement for the accolade) was a grand total of... 38 seconds. Here's the chat log to prove it. [11:19:08] Congratulations! You earned the The Unwavering badge. [11:19:21] Congratulations! You earned the The Unyielding badge. [11:19:46] Congratulations! You earned the The Unbroken Spirit badge. I'm confused here. In one sentence you're saying you agree that it's a waste of time and energy to cherry pick stuff from zones, but in the very next sentence you talk about an optimal path and popmenu which does exactly that.

Getting the debt badge takes all of two minutes on a level 50 character provided you have some patrol XP stored up, and even if you don't you'll get enough from getting the exploration badges that die/repeat/die/repeat is quick. The OP's thought exercise here is "how do I get <insert accolade(s) here> as efficiently as possible?" Whether someone likes doing a certain thing (such as dying for a debt badge, or side switching to do the easier of two equivalent accolades) is irrelevant in that context. Sure, if you're doing the TFC task forces you'll make progress towards those defeats, but the only time I've got TFC on a character on Homecoming is the time I did it before I knew about the mayhem mission contact.

Just give us the option to disable salvage by rarity. It doesn't need to be this ridiculously complicated.

If all you're trying to do is get the passive accolades and you don't care about the merits for getting the exploration badges, going to every single badge and plaque in zone is the inefficient play. You've already got to get some explores and a plaque in Atlas Park for the accolades. If you're starting the Spelunker badge mission from Ouroboros, exiting Ouro into Atlas Park is the play since it puts you in a good location to quickly get those clicks and you can then head through the gate to Perez Park, where you can get your badge on your way to the mission door. While true, if you're already a higher level it's far faster to just blow through gray-con mobs in open zones. Tankbuster in Crey's Folly Gearsmasher in Echo: Faultline Unveiler: the arc you mentioned is still probably the fastest way to get this All this being said, the defeat badges for Freedom Phalanx, and specifically Unveiler, are the reason I do High Pain Threshold instead. This is the guide I've been using to get the four passive accolades + Demonic Aura for years now. It is a little outdated since it was written while /enterbasefrompasscode was still a thing and doesn't account for some of the streamlining of travel between some zones, but it's still my go-to.

The “code limitation” of being able to convert HOs is that if they were convertible they’d be power-unique so you’d only be able to slot one of a given enhancement type in a given power and you’d likely lose the ability to combine them. Given these limitations I’m fine with the system staying how it is. The small percentage of players who absolutely need that extra couple percent enhancement value in their powers can pay more or wait, or just run the content that drops the stuff they want.