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macskull

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    2018
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Everything posted by macskull

  1. Not a quirk, the surrounding mobs are basically "attached" to the target. Would be super cool if they were all flagged to take damage from Levitate, but as it stands any other mobs that get yeeted by Levitate will only take fall damage (which makes this super funny to use on level 1 mobs in AP as a level 50).
  2. I gave this feedback a while ago, but I'll post it here again for those who are new to the changes and are reading through this thread - I have a Demons/Cold MM that I used to test out the CoT and Council reworks. Even at +3x6 the CoT weren't a huge threat - until the bosses got lucky hit rolls with their nukes and I went from a pack of MM with 6 full-health pets to no pets and dead MM in about three seconds. The reworked bosses definitely give you that "oh shit" moment.
  3. I could probably entertain that argument for the old version of FA back when it was a straight tohit buff instead of the mediocre combined tohit/acc buff it is now, but even with the tohit debuff resistance the power's still not great. It's a power in an epic pool and by the time you're at a high level you're probably rocking so much acc and/or tohit that you don't need the extra from FA, and it's not like NPC tohit debuffs are common anyways. The endurance reduction at least takes FA from a complete dud of a power (for PvE anyways) to one that I might consider picking for a few seconds before I laugh at myself and take a different epic pool anyways.
  4. I'm still not sold on why exactly non-Defender Sleet needs its debuff values adjusted downward (instead of raising the Defender values) considering the values have been the same since CoV launch when it was added as a Corruptor-only set, especially considering that Freezing Rain is getting its -res increased for Defenders in the same patch. Re; Frostwork... this one's gonna be polarizing. Losing the only non-Incarnate source of +maxhp is going to be a sore spot for people who play melee ATs without significant +maxhp in their armor sets, but making it into an absorb makes the power more widely useful. Even with moderate slotting the current version of Frostwork is largely wasted on most characters. That being said, changing it to a click absorb should probably come along with a reduced recharge time.
  5. Yes and yes. The epic ATs intentionally count for multiple roles. Each AT aside from epic ATs can only fill one role, and this was the best way to fill those roles while keeping the non-epic AT distribution relatively even.
  6. The alternative during this balancing pass was to change it to have the same recharge as the Soul Mastery version, which several of the closed beta testers pointed out really torpedoed the power. The new power ends up with similar uptime as old Soul Drain on most builds.
  7. To be fair OP's post does not make any mention of real money, only ingame currency. (Sidebar, I have no idea what metrics they use to determine whether an account is involved in RMT things but whatever they are can't be that good because I had two or three accounts banned for it back in 2019 despite those accounts only containing a single level 1 or 2 character that had never seen any more inf that what could be earned by killing a few Hellions in AP.) EDIT: Apparently it's just one account, but still.
  8. On the other hand, this breaks things for people who pick up lower-level missions and then intentionally outlevel them for badge-farming purposes. 0/10 would not have a good time getting the Croatoa ghosts defeat badge.
  9. Not a bug, the fast travel menu is a macro and /cleartray doesn't remove macros.
  10. Here's the biggest reason why this sort of thing is probably way down on the list of priorities for the dev team: the level ranges of existing factions (and critters within those level ranges) exist for a reason. Trolls might be challenging for a level 6 character, but a complete non-issue for a level 50 character. You'll notice that some factions straight-up don't span the entire 1-50 level range, and for the rare ones that do, the types of enemies you see and the powers they have change quite a bit (look at PPD for a great example of this). If you want a contact's missions to remain at the intended challenge level outside of their original level range, you need to give the PPD/Family/Longbow/Arachnos treatment to pretty much every enemy faction in the game.
  11. The already-small PvP population is fractured enough as it is. Non-alpha incarnate powers were disabled in PvP zones at the request of the players, and it's a way simpler solution than trying to figure out how to rebalance every single incarnate power with a PvP-specific version.
  12. Here you go! It’s also in my signature along with some explaining of how it works. Of note, we did pass the 4000 player mark multiple times over the weekend, especially since this is a long weekend for much of the US.
  13. There's definitely some survivorship bias with the forum population, and the current long-term playerbase at large. Yes, we're seeing peak numbers that are double the highest points we've seen in the last two years, but how many of those players are going to stick around? If combing through the various channels on the Homecoming Discord is any indication, there's a not-insignificant number of people who are put off (i.e., they try out the game and abandon it within a day or two) by various aspects of the game because of how outdated or clumsy they are. New players don't need to be gated, they just things explained for them ingame (without having to go to external resources like the wiki or CoD) in a way that isn't overwhelming. The character creation text descriptions, tutorial, and even the first few story arcs don't do a great job of it, and that's assuming you don't "incorrectly" pick the "wrong" starting AT or elect to start in Praetoria. The pop help stuff is a step in the right direction but I don't even remember if that's enabled by default (and for someone who knows even a little about the game you get the tips so often that it's almost annoying).
  14. The level 50 unlock requirement was changed to level 20 back on live, and is gone entirely now. Historical unlock gates are completely irrelevant now because they don't matter. The game lets you pick any archetype right from the get-go, and save for a cursory description and some not-really-accurate basic stat displays the game does an extremely poor job of telling you much about the archetypes. There's nothing that says "these archetypes are new-player friendly" or "these archetypes are probably not ones you want to try as your first character because they're kinda complicated." If you pick one of the epic ATs (again, there's no way to know these are the epic ATs unless you've played before) the game straight-up skips the tutorial without even asking, and that's where you get introduced to the basic gameplay elements like navigation, missions, contacts, using your powers, and the con system. There are a ton of systems in this game that don't make themselves apparent and aren't intuitive. Hell, some new players aren't even aware there's a help menu (which, while we're on the subject, is still full of outdated information that hasn't been relevant in over 15 years). We know what a "regular" AT is because we play the game. A new player with zero experience isn't going to know that, and they're not going to know that picking a Kheldian or a VEAT is going to automatically skip the tutorial. Even as experienced players we still find ourselves going to CoD or the wiki to figure out how things work because the game just isn't good at presenting information to the player.
  15. You must be real fun at parties. The text descriptions for powers were always vague and sometimes outright incorrect to the point of being next to useless, if the powers even had them. Looking at Blasters, for example, only Archery has the text descriptions. I've seen it mentioned or implied a few times in this thread that the Homecoming team has been removing those text descriptions, but I'm unable to find any source for this, and some of the sets they have worked on still have the descriptions. EDIT: Took a look at the Wayback archive version of CoD and it does show that text description for most powers, so I'll concede that it was likely done post-shutdown. That being said, it still takes all of two seconds to look at the differences between two powers and figure out which one you want to take, and now you can make a more informed decision with actual, (usually) correct data. I don't see a downside here. EDIT EDIT: Also, like... please don't rely on ingame help chat for actual help. The ingame help channel is about as reliable as a Ford Pinto.
  16. Virtually none of the market/economy-related QoL stuff came from Homecoming. What we have now, including Market Crash, is a product of the 2013-2019 timeframe when most people thought the game didn't exist, and even during that time period those changes underwent significant tweaking. Market Crash was initially supposed to be a one-off event but over the course of time it evolved into its current form - and I seriously doubt Market Crash makes up a statistically significant amount of the purple recipe supply when you consider you have to be level 40 or higher and only get a purple on the first completion per character. There are other things that existed at one point post-shutdown but that were removed before Homecoming was even a thought in someone's mind - ATOs and Super Packs dropping from mobs was a thing for a while, so was Empyrean merits for every veteran level. There are also features that exist on other I27-based servers but Homecoming chooses not to implement, like forum-claimed coupons which give you enhancements ingame.
  17. Oh, I'd also add that the ingame economy faced one problem after another pretty much from the very beginning: Players who'd been around for a long time had amassed billions of inf before IOs existed because there wasn't anything to spend it on once you hit level 50. No one had any idea what anything was worth when Issue 9 launched so prices were just kind of arbitrary at first until people figured things out. Hero and villain markets were initially separate, which meant villains had a much smaller supply to compete for, and items that were trash drops blueside (hello, pet sets) were incredibly expensive redside. There was initially no way of getting certain recipes other than completing task forces or trials, unless you bought them from someone else who had. On live, AE missions earned XP and inf but gave no salvage or recipe drops, so people were earning comparatively insane amounts of inf without getting drops, so those players used their buying power to buy out the supply from non-AE players, driving prices up further. PvP IOs only dropped from PvP defeats, and once people started farming them, the drop rate was lowered and a lockout period was added, sending prices for certain pieces through the roof (remember not being able to get the Gladiator's Armor +def unique on the AH because everyone sold it off-market for 3-4 billion inf? I do). There wasn't an alternate method to get purples or PvP IOs from sources other than the market or drops until relatively late in the game's life, and the going rate for these alternate methods, especially for purples, was prohibitively expensive and time-consuming - 20 alignment merits which meant it would take a minimum of 40 days per recipe.
  18. @Clave Dark 5 I'd quote you but the wacky way in which you format your posts means I can't really do that so... They were working on fixing it. First the market merger with Issue 18, and then enhancement converters were added to the game in late 2011 and IO prices were starting to come down in response throughout the first half of 2012. We never got to see that through, unfortunately.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
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