[The Officially Unofficial Weekly Discussion #72: What content you do that you don't enjoy but do for a reward?]

Accolades.

[Plz incorporate City Info Terminal in the Character Selection screen]

The reason this isn't going to be enabled on Homecoming has less to do with functionality and more to do with the sheer database size. There might be an API-connected alternative one day, but the current version of CIT is way too resource-heavy to run on HC.

[Current thoughts on the market]

I have a few thousand PAs sitting around between a few characters. I've never bought anything more than the 10 PA costumes with them, but I've also never sold any of them. I'm just lazy.

[Advanced Mode Lady Grey Task Force]

Playing with enemy names and health bars always showing is really helpful. Yes, the heavies have a different FX below 25% but it's not immediately obvious and doesn't really tell you how much HP they have left, so it's not useful as anything other than a general "hey, watch out" warning.

[Enhancement Managment]

1 hour ago, Abathar said:

Damage Aura for electric blasters will not except endurance sets or endurance reducers.

Which set(s) are you trying to slot? The power accepts Blaster archetype sets, universal damage sets, melee AoE damage sets, healing sets, and endmod sets, but it won't accept endurance reduction enhancements because the power costs no endurance.

[Moving Vanguard characters to Homecoming?]

58 minutes ago, starro said:

As homecoming person can I go create a character over there?  Open to anyone to play?  Anything cool or different or is it just self-contained server?

No, it's a closed alpha/beta server.

[What's Exciting About Rebuffing?]

17 hours ago, PyroNugget said:

the Homecoming AoE one and done buff was like pure heaven to me

That wasn’t a Homecoming change, it happened back on live.

[Patch Notes for March 26th, 2024]

20 minutes ago, Grandfeatherex said:

did this just kill tequila support? it keeps saying to update before launching the game (which i keep doing) and wont load, the HC launcher works but i don't like that launcher

The manifests used by third party launchers are updated via a different process and can sometimes lag several hours behind. Tequila isn’t officially supported anymore and at some point won’t work at all, might as well get used to the HC launcher.

[Is Empathy Dead?]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/492043333

 

Hey look, here's an example of a "healer" being actually useful.

[Is Empathy Dead?]

On 3/16/2024 at 3:59 PM, Shadow Metal said:

but if you think empathy isn't a good end game set, you've either never played it or played it poorly

lol

 

You necroed a two and a half year old thread for that? 2.5/10, needs more effort

[Mandela Effect]

On 2/16/2024 at 12:18 PM, Water said:

Anyone else got some good Mandela Effects, game related the better?

People insisting XP/inf while teamed used to be split based on damage dealt.

[The mysterious market forces]

1 hour ago, Ukase said:

I don't have the tools to see how many of that influx are still playing. But, one thing Yomo has said a number of times, "competition is good for the market". 

 

TL;DR: still double the population from before the announcement, but about 70% of peak numbers from early January. If the current trend continues we will be back at pre-announcement player numbers by June.

[We all need to leave this game. It's too good]

[No one plays hardmodes because they suck]

1 hour ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

I don't get where this poster is coming from. It's not a 1 or 0 proposition, there's a scale for a reason.

I'm not entirely convinced OP isn't trolling, looking at post history they disappeared for like three years and then came back recently. Every thread they've started since then has been an absolute banger.

[No one plays hardmodes because they suck]

People don't play hardmode because it is actually difficult and requires high levels of coordination to be consistently successful without wanting to suck start a shotgun and I'd wager the vast majority of this game's players don't actually want a challenge.

[Recluses Victory 2.0]

I said it on Discord, but unique enhancements that can only be obtained through PvP merits or bought/traded on the AH might be another good incentive to earn PvP merits - think things like universal debuff sets. People will, naturally, complain that they have to go into a PvP zone to get them, but... they don't have to if I can sell them my drops. I'd be more than happy to have someone else pay me to PvP.

[No one plays hardmodes because they suck]

Nope. I'm more than happy to let other players subsidize my builds so they can get their PA costumes. You don't wanna run the content, that's fine, but everything about hard mode stuff is entirely optional.

[Pumpkin patch needs a severe nerf]

1 hour ago, TheSpiritFox said:

A real hardmode would have involved more involved mechanics requiring actual team coordination

Yeah, go ahead and wander into a 4* PuG where no one talks in team chat and let me know how that one goes.

[Sleet]

1 hour ago, ShinMagmus said:

Sorry to the players who feel that *one* of their sets should have kept breaking established formula, but -22.5% Res is what you get from AoE debuffs on Corr/MM/Controller.  The sole exceptions to this are both HC reworks but they math out to similar totals: which are Trick Arrow having the -Res in the AoE power biased up (and the -Res in net arrow biased down), and Force Field... which has lower values split across its 2 powers because that set is strong enough now and would be pretty insane with higher debuffs.

And Freezing Rain, which gets to break the rule Just Because.

 

EDIT: I feel obligated to point out that it's not the change in the -res/-def values I take issue with because I always expected that to go this way. It's the change to stacking which was unexpected and pretty unnecessary since it's now the only pseudopet that behaves that way.

[Sleet]

55 minutes ago, arcane said:

Yes, they could have slightly buffed the Defender version of the most powerful set in the game instead of slightly nerfing the Corruptor version. Which would have been a terrible idea. Imagine buffing Cold at this point in the game’s history…

Hey, they did try to change Frostwork into an absorb, so they did try to buff Cold. Also… gestures broadly at Blasters. The AT-specific differences are kinda whatever though, it’s the stacking change that’s the weird one, which means Cold now has what is objectively the worst location-based AoE -res power.

 

25 minutes ago, MonteCarla said:

Should Cold Dom (a bit of a Swiss Army Knife set) have a better Res debuff than say Sonic Resonance, which is meant to have Resistance debuffing as one of its core features? I'd say no.

It doesn’t. Cold takes several seconds to get the same -res as Sonic, and one of those two powers has a recharge time on the order of minutes. Meanwhile all Sonic has to do is throw Disruption Aura on the Scrapper once at the start of the mission and occasionally toss Sonic Siphon at things.

 

That’s the difference - Sonic can lay down that much -res with almost no setup time while also giving mez protection to the caster and entire team. Cold requires setup time to get there. Yes, Burnout exists but due to its long recharge that’s the exception rather than the norm. The lead powers dev has explicitly said powers and sets aren’t balanced around the existence of Burnout and the decision to allow debuff stacking via power/Burnout/power is intentional.

[Sleet]

Just now, Apotheosis said:

There isn't much of a debate as if to the bug should've been addressed, but more as to the way in which is was handled. 

The debate, from my perspective, is whether there was an actual “bug” in the first place, and it ended up being handled with a “trust me, this is how it is supposed to work.”

[Sleet]

There seems to be some misunderstanding in this thread about exactly how Sleet works, specifically with the way it stacks (or doesn’t stack). The previous behavior was the debuff was set to “replace,” so every tick of damage that hit would refresh the debuff for an additional 30 seconds (which realistically resulted in a 45-second debuff). It is now set to ignore new applications, so it will never last for more than 30 seconds after the first tick of damage. Multiple applications of the power from the same caster still stack because different pseudopets are considered different “casters.”

 

The change in stacking rules is, to me, a far more impactful change than reducing the -res. Reducing the -def on non-Defenders really only hurts lower level characters and Masterminds (who are the ones who need the -def the most, go figure). The change on the stacking rules means that not only is the debuff duration 1/3 shorter than it used to be, but the amount of time you can overlap debuffs with different applications is now much shorter.

 

My point of contention with the way the change was handled is that we were essentially told “actually, Sleet was just copied from Defender Freezing Rain and has been wrong since 2005” when pointing out the power was originally on Corruptors so should have been adjusted upwards on Defenders instead of downward on every other AT. Because there’s zero way to prove that is either true or false, we are unable to argue with that justification (but, like… why would the devs have copied a power from one AT to another in a different powerset, take the time to change the name and icon of the power, but not change the debuff scaling?). The stacking change, though? That was definitely not a bug, and the fact that Freezing Rain wasn’t changed and also got its -res boosted for Defenders rubs me the wrong way, especially since you can’t seriously argue that Storm needed the help.

[Expand requestexitmission options]

I like.

[[OPEN BETA] Patch Notes for March 8th, 2024]

Are the alpha/beta values for XP on critter trip mine and time bomb being raised, since the interrupt is being removed? The current live server values give no additional XP when adding trip mine to bosses, and 1% additional XP when adding time bomb to bosses. That made sense before because the powers were broken, but now they’re powers the critters will actually use.

[Why do we have bad PUG experiences?]

Why do we have bad PuG experiences? Because this game is deceptively complicated and I would venture to guess the majority of players never grow their understanding of the game beyond "see enemy click button." There's also the issue of communication - for example I was on two PuG Aeon SFs today. Both were advertised as speedy, but on the first one the team leader said "come here" right as they started the TF, expecting the entire team to go to the contact instead of the door to the first mission, then got upset when people zoned into the mission and started finding scientists instead of escorting Becky - because apparently the team leader wanted the badge for that even though it was advertised as a speed run and the leader had said nothing about it before actually starting the TF. Needless to say we didn't get the badge, the team had mostly no idea what was going on, and it took us nearly 40 minutes with things like the Brute using Fold Space on the lines of enemies in the last mission, except pulling them all away from their spawns so no one knew which mobs were actually the ones we needed to defeat. I turned around and immediately joined another team that finished in just over 20 minutes despite virtually no talking in team chat the entire time.

 

TL;DR: The PuG experience isn't always bad, it's just wildly inconsistent and we remember the bad teams more than the good ones.