macskull

Speaking about the US here, but 21 wasn't chosen arbitrarily (sure, it was based on dubious science but that's not the point) and while the individual states technically can set their drinking age however they want, there's federal money tied to keeping it at 21 so that's where it is everywhere.

All this and its duration is only 30 seconds instead of the 60 seconds the in-set versions get. Conserve Power at least had the same 90-second duration the old in-set version had. EDIT: I suppose I'll just plug this now, because I've said it elsewhere before - this change and the new sustains in the new pools are cool, and I understand the epic recharge penalty is a thing (even if I vehemently disagree with it), but the 8-10 minute recharge timer takes what should be tempting power picks and kneecaps them before they've even left the gate.

You're not missing anything, it's just not a number you're going to hit without some outside buffs.

Some of the reworked bosses have critical KB which is unresisted. To the OP's point, based on the wiki's list of enemies with knockback powers, 4 points is enough to cover about 80% of all NPC knockback powers, while 8 points is enough to cover about 95%.

Correct - until a situation arises where I'm unable to play for a while, at which point I have to hope my character names haven't been taken by someone else when I come back. For some of those characters, that could be as little as 90 days, and I have absolutely been absent from the game for longer than that in the past few years through no fault of my own.

Reaching level 50 is a completely arbitrary distinction and has no correlation with commitment to a character. I leveled multiple characters to 50 in less than fifteen minutes back on live but I can guarantee you I had zero attachment to any of those characters. Meanwhile, I have characters on Homecoming that haven't reached 50 despite me playing them routinely since 2019 that I'm probably more attached to now.

If your team is staying together to the point where everyone's getting a benefit from Faraday Cage, they're also probably close enough that they'd get the benefit from Sonic Dispersion. I also don't think that Faraday Cage would have ever existed with the live dev team considering when they made ally buffs AoE they explicitly left out click mez protection buffs. That's probably something that could stand to be revisited, and I do agree that Clarity requires more work to manage than Faraday Cage, but those weren't the two powers I was comparing.

I'm on the side of the fence that thinks literally nothing good can come of the name release policy, but there are plenty of downsides. "Just get your character to level 50 and its name will be safe forever!" Sure, but there are plenty of players, even veteran players, who roll so many alts that they could play for years and never get to level 50. Are they any less invested in those characters than I am because they did not level them to 50? "Names from inactive players should be able to be taken by active players." Sure, it makes sense at face value, but if for some reason a player was unable to get into the game for an extended period of time (maybe they're unable to play due to an extended medical issue, maybe they're in the military and are on a deployment without internet access, maybe their computer broke and they're not in a financial state to replace it, the list goes on, but it's really no one's business except theirs) and they returned after that absence only to find the names of the characters they liked had been taken by someone else, they'd probably be justifiably upset. Here's my philosophy on it, summed up: "the negative effects of an existing player losing the name of their character outweighs the negative effects of a new player not getting the name they want." Besides, even with a 20-character limit the name box can still fit almost 3x1045 possible combinations. If you're unable to find a name you like with that many possible combinations, you might want to come up with a name that's actually original.

Gonna hard disagree with a few of those things - Faraday Cage might have better stats than Sonic Dispersion but you have to be pretty much constantly casting Faraday Cage as your team moves where Sonic Dispersion comes along with you and requires no extra time to manage other than initially turning it on. Clarity plugs the sleep/confuse/terrorize holes from Sonic Dispersion and allows the teammate it's used on to leave your immediate area and still retain mez protection. Sonic is a seriously slept-on set. I've been saying for a while whenever this sort of thing gets brought up is that the only real "help" Sonic needs is a recharge time reduction on Liquefy (which we are thankfully getting now), cast time reductions on Sonic Siphon and Clarity, and a serious revisiting of the endurance cost of Sonic Repulsion. As it stands, the only sets that can put out more -res than Sonic are Cold and Poison. Cold requires setup time and/or Burnout to achieve the higher numbers, Poison requires you to be in melee range of the target and strategically use Envenom such that you stack both primary target and secondary target effects (and if there is no other target to do this, Poison just barely edges out Sonic). Meanwhile, in order to apply that same amount of -res all Sonic has to do is put Disruption Field on the Scrapper or Tanker once at the beginning of the mission, and then throw Sonic Siphon every 30 seconds.

For what it's worth, minimum team sizes going away was a post-shutdown thing so I would hardly say this game is unique because it doesn't force team sizes. That being said, this bonus does not force anything. It simply means you may occasionally get a little extra reward for doing the exact same stuff you're already doing in the exact same way you're already doing it. Additionally, teams of as few as two characters can still qualify for the bonus with the current AT distribution.

There were more people, but they were also spread out across more than a dozen servers. Before the current Homecoming population spike it wasn't uncommon for fully half the online players to be on a single server (Excelsior), which was never the case back on live. Even now when it's bumping up against 1500 players Excelsior still has about a third of the total online players.

Nah, the change makes sense, and a lot of it is just standardizing names to what many people already call the pools anyways.

Interestingly enough, the patron pools have different powers for every AT yet they all share the same names. This is a really weird thing to be upset about, since it has exactly zero impact on gameplay or anyone's characters in general.

That's missing 10-15, and sure there's coverage past that point, but it's not in the neat 5-level increments like heroside gets (specifically missing the 30-35). Hell, there's also the 40-45 range, which is covered by the shadow shard TFs heroside. I guess the point is there's a lot more content - and therefore a lot more variety - blueside, and I can't really think of a good incentive that would bring more people to play villains. Hell, even the current chance at 500 million inf d-sync roulette on the Aeon SF isn't enough to get significant numbers of people there.

There are gaps in the strike forces redside as well. Task Force Commander has a nice progression every 5 levels, but that progression just isn't there for villains.

Nah, that's the only reason I'm doing it - and I have been making placeholder characters to keep names for the ones I'm particularly invested in. Moving everything back to Excelsior as soon as the extra XP on the other servers goes away.

I suppose it is leaving money on the table but so is taking the extra time to have someone switch or find a different teammate instead of just starting the task force and getting the merits.

Ah finally, the arc that generated the quote in my signature!

Here's an additional quote from a dev during closed beta feedback for this, to give some more context: And another, which I can't directly quote here due to its context but in essence said the reward is set to one PA to "discourage any exclusion behavior."

I haven't been twelve in decades and I still think it's funny. 'Course, the entire time during closed beta people were saying "this is going to cause some issues" and were always countered with "but it's a real thing!" If you have to say "it's a real thing, we promise!" maybe the name isn't the best idea.

The little footnote at the bottom of the OP should tell you the answer: More Prismatic Aether for everyone without any action needed!

The rewards from this system aren't significant enough that I'd be expecting people to intentionally swap characters to get the bonus, which is kind of how it was intended. One PA every 18 hours isn't nearly enough to get me to swap.

When this addition initially went to closed beta I kept track of all my task force team compositions on Homecoming for about a week and something like 40-50% of teams I was on would have qualified for the bonus anyways without anyone intentionally switching characters. Especially with the 18-hour character lock, this really isn't anything other than a small reward for the times it does happen.

Nah, it's been a running joke since it went onto the test server during closed beta.

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).