macskull

I definitely wouldn't bother taking Ageless Radial solely for that last 5% regen debuff resist, but it might be worth it for all the other debuff resists to stack with Ailment Resistance.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've been asked to stop using KB or repel in the 18 years I've been playing this game, and I have spent a lot of time on Energy Blast and Storm Summoning characters. If you're using KB well, no one on the team is even going to notice you're doing it.

The people who are using KB in a way that actually benefits the team aren't the ones getting asked to stop using it.

Middle of the pack is better than dead last, though.

Sort of. Looking back at Galaxy Brain’s blast set testing, Energy was pretty much dead last out of the box but moved up to the middle of the pack with KB/KD converters. The base set does have some issues which converters don’t solve, but you do at least get decent performance if you’re willing to pay the slot tax.

The behavior you’re describing is exactly how the power is supposed to work. No bug here.

The real answer to your question is yes, importing your old characters from the live servers is possible, especially if you have Sentinel+ exports. Unfortunately, Homecoming does not offer a way for users to import these characters.

Every player has the exact same limitations. You refusing to do something because you don’t like it is not the same as that option being unavailable to you. At the end of the day though, does it really matter if a player is using emails as inspiration storage? All that extra work for slightly faster completion times? No.

Entirely nuking the forums would probably be a simpler and better option, since the GMs seem to have zero desire to actually action bad apples in any meaningful way.

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.