macskull

Kheldians and VEATs should be prompted on whether they want to play the tutorial, just like every other AT - and they should also tell you in the character description that these ATs automatically start as heroes and villains, respectively. If we're going through the trouble of giving Kheldians numbers instead of question marks in the character creator as a way to better explain them to new players, there is zero reason they should automatically skip the tutorial. Or at least give the epic ATs a note saying something along the lines of "not recommended for new players." EDIT: I also confirmed the new unlock method for Long Range Teleporter works as described in the patch notes but I find myself agreeing with the person on Discord who said that having LRT unlock for either getting 10 exploration badges or a zone's exploration accolade is a better alternative. With the way the unlock is implemented in this build getting the Atlas Park exploration accolade gets me credit for 8 of the 10 badges but I still have to go hunt down the remaining two, and none of the connecting zones to AP (or the lower-level zones accessible via train) have two badges that are particularly close to the areas where you'd enter those zones. I went to the Hollows to grab the last two and even the two closest to the AP entrance required me to navigate around enemies that were up to eight levels higher than me. The addition of athletic run and the raptor pack made getting those two badges faster but it was still risky and I wouldn't expect it to be intuitive to a new player.

I don't know if Tanker ATOs have always been this expensive or what, but I was surprised.

Yikes.

According to the linked post, there were about two million characters in mid-2022. Let's say there have been an additional one million characters created in the year and a half since, which is probably a gross overestimate but whatever. Also keep in mind those two million characters probably already contain multiple duplicate names since that's all names across all five servers. Now, let's do some back of the napkin math, using some assumptions to make things easier: We'll assume there are no duplicate names, and we'll assume every one of those characters is on a single server. Based on the limitations of the character name field (20 total characters, no consecutive spaces, no spaces at the beginning or end, alphanumeric characters only plus one of three possible special characters, names are not case-sensitive), you have 2,840,316,982,931,772,359,523,246,788,905,305,801,901,473,792 (which we'll simplify to call 3x1045) possible unique names. Even if we're being generous and saying there are three million names in use, the three million (3x106) character names currently in existence represent 1x10-37% of the possible names and that's only on one server. Using the later data of "something like 700,000 names in the less than 6 and inactive grouping," that represents 2.33x10-38% of possible names. That's infinitesimally tiny. I have plenty of low-level characters I am not actively playing with names saved for a point in the future, whether that's "I've finally found a concept that matches this name" or "there's a powerset coming out soon and I have the perfect name for a character that uses it." I would almost certainly let someone else have one of the names if they asked... but in almost five years (and another five years back on live) I have not been asked for a character name one single time. It could free up hundreds of thousands of names. Or it'll free up a handful. Or someone who has been out of the game for a while will come back, find their name taken, and get pissed and leave. A new player getting frustrated that the name they want isn't available is unfortunate, but so is a returning player finding out their favorite character's name was taken while they were gone and they had no say in the matter. It should be clear to any reasonable person which of those two situations is worse.

I definitely feel like it was the original intention that the updates were smaller, more-frequent updates given the smaller dev team, but that definitely hasn't been the norm past 2020 or so. Page 7 was in closed beta for something like six months before it made it to Brainstorm, and I feel like pages 5-7 are all big enough that they could have been their own issue. I guess at the end of the day it's just arguing semantics though, since an update's an update.

Good catch. I thought that was weird so I double-checked. It looks like I grabbed the screenshot during an extremely small window of time where the combat attributes window hadn't updated my totals yet even though I'd used the power. Here's another screenshot with the same character, showing the bonuses working correctly. If you monitor your combat attributes you'll notice they usually take a fraction of a second to update everything and I just had an unfortunately-timed screenshot. I also enabled the option to show power recharge timers and see my recharge times reduce while the buff is active.

The regeneration bonus is unique (just like every other single-enhancement regeneration or recovery bonus), but the status resistance portion stacks up to five times (just like every other single-enhancement status resistance bonus).

The ring around the power icon suggests it is a targeted AoE power instead of a PBAoE power. I'm guessing this was changed for the experimental build and was never put back to the correct icon afterwards.

I wasn't, but I checked on a Brute as well. Same thing. The "fury taunt" icon that shows up in the buff bar is unrelated to Cross Punch and often shows up whenever you use any of your attack powers. Tankers have the same thing happen with their Gauntlet power.

I checked City of Data and the power data looks like it's supposed to. I checked on the beta server to be sure and I'm getting the expected 10% recharge buff and 10% tohit buff, according to this screenshot: However, there's no icon that appears in the buff bar when these bonuses are active. An argument could probably be made for that to show in the buff bar, but the bonuses are working like they're supposed to, and this is far from the only stat-enhancing bonus that doesn't show up in the buff bar.

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.