macskull

I suppose that was more directed at the “ignore the BS and play what you enjoy” poster, even though the OP expressed their frustration that even though they enjoyed the idea of Kinetic Melee they didn’t like the idea of being stuck with a low-performance set. I really only take issue with that sort of attitude because it’s incredibly dismissive and especially in help/general chat ingame it is often given as an answer without answering the actual question. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard “is x or y better?” being followed up with “anything is viable, play what you want.” Like, sure, you can do most content with most builds (when built right and played the right way) but that isn’t actually answering the question that was asked. To be clear here, I don’t think people that think you should play whatever you want are problematic (hell, I’d put myself in that category too). If someone enjoys soloing -1x0 on their Empathy Defender using only Brawl, that’s great, I’m glad they’re having fun.

The “play what you want” crowd has got to be one of the most unhelpful segments of this game’s player base. It is entirely possible for someone to like the way a low-performing set looks or feels while also wishing that set performed well, and just saying “well, get over it” isn’t constructive at all.

Not a bug, the various sprint powers stack with other run speed powers.

I also don’t like the enemy group buffs (they’re either inconsequential or annoying, neither of which actually makes them harder) or player nerfs, but I have no idea why OP decided to focus on a specific scenario in a specific piece of content when neither that scenario nor that content has been affected by those changes. There are plenty of legitimate gripes about how poorly the Homecoming team handles power balance but this one misses the mark big time.

The Anti-Matter in the Keyes trial should count for badge credit. Same with any of the other AVs.

RNG is fine as long as it’s not too random. Summer Blockbuster is a good example - you know that if you pick the enhancement set you’ll get a specific set and they all sell relatively well, and if you don’t get the one you want you’re only a few converters away from it. The d-sync/Hami is an example that’s similar but not done as well because 1) you can’t convert them and 2) there’s orders of magnitude of price difference between the good and bad pieces. The adjustment to drop table weighting and new ways to unlock them seem to have helped a little but the odds of coming out with an enhancement that’s worth 10k at best while the completely useless Empathy Defender that your team carried through the entire TF comes out with the 350 million inf threat/rech/acc are too high.

That’s one thing I think Rebirth has done well - putting content-specific set enhancements behind those badges. It might not necessarily get more people to run the badge content but it absolutely gets players who don’t want to run it to subsidize builds for the players who do.

Until we're in a situation where the no-incarnates no-temp powers no-deaths "Master of" badges are actually needed for something, you're going to continue to run into this kind of issue because people just don't run them very often. There's no incentive for doing so aside from a badge which doesn't grant you anything, and content where a single death ruins the badge for the entire team - in a game oriented around teaming - is Bad Game Design. The "no deaths" requirement is so binary that I don't think there's anything you can do to fix it.

Me reading through this thread, trying to figure out WTF “new changes” the OP is talking about, then seeing they have exactly one post and it’s this absolute gem…

The requirement imbalance is intentional. It’s to get more players to go redside and do the SFs.

What’s really strange is it looks like none of the stuff that was getting that kind of reaction from testers made it into this update. Weird, huh?

It’s not impossible to disable it by default, it would just require a little more work - like, giving players the Power_DisallowGroupFly token by default. Pets would still be affected, so this is an “everyone wins” scenario. ”If I have to go out of my way and remember to do this thing so a rarely-taken power doesn’t affect me, so can everyone else” isn’t a great argument either. Just because you’re okay with being inconvenienced doesn’t mean everyone else needs to be.

“Everyone else should have to go out of their way to change a setting so my build doesn’t annoy them” isn’t a good argument. People don’t turn off Group Fly at Null the Gull because running into someone who actually takes and uses Group Fly is rare - and if they’re on a task force they can’t go there and disable the setting if they even wanted to. Honestly, the simplest solution to this issue is to make Group Fly disabled by default so the people who want to use it need to go talk to the bird. You believe incorrectly. It has never worked that way.

If you’re concerned with efficiency, not really.

FWIW those “all procs all recharge and HP no defense no resistance awful recovery” 4-star builds are usually built with a specific team composition in mind, but they are also extremely capable in regular content. Sure, you’ve gotta crutch them along with things like amplifiers, recovery serum, and inspirations, but the cost of those things is a drop in the bucket compared to the inf you make from just making things die.

The Tanker changes + Fury changes + aggro changes + Burn nerf really did it in for Brutes. Sure, if you already have one there’s not really a reason to roll a Tanker to replace it, but if you’re making a new farmer I wouldn’t recommend a Brute to anyone.

Mids has been incorrect about this specific IO since before the original game shut down. Mids is at the top of the “do not trust this” list, followed closely by ingame info. Hell, sometimes even City of Data is wrong.

My characters are also easy to identify and have a system to their names - when you right-click on the character and get the global, they all say macskull or one of my other accounts!

I would drink that, ngl.

Check the links in my signature, which has historical data for player counts over the last two years. Any "seasonal variation" that exists in a game with a population the size of Homecoming's is so small that it's basically imperceptible. You are correct in that the population has increased compared to what it was immediately before the announcement (roughly 55-60% higher), but it's also around half of what it was at the peak shortly after the announcement.

The population is lower now than any time in the last four and a half months, it is definitely not increasing.

It was changed in Issue 22, which was released about 8 months before the game shut down. The behavior you’re describing (which also let you do things like put Membranes in Mind Link and Vengeance, or Centrioles in Thermal/Sonic shields) was around for a long time and many people don’t know that it ever got changed.

IOs predate VEATs by over a year. Mind Link has never allowed recharge enhancements, but it's always been affected by the recharge portion of set IOs. It used to be affected by Hami-O's with a recharge aspect, but that was fixed sometime before shutdown.

These two methods of preventing boosts are functionally equivalent from a player-facing standpoint. Considering the slotting oddities with Hami-O's haven't been possible since Issue 21 (22? I don't remember), there's zero reason for the power to behave as it currently does.

With a 50-player cap in the zone, a handful of people who aren’t actively involved in the event absolutely can result in failing. The raid leader can adjust their strategy to mitigate this risk but then that falls onto the raid leader to 1) correctly guess whether there are enough potentially “AFK” players in the zone for it to be a problem, and 2) communicate the change in strategy to the group at large, who may not be familiar with the new strategy. This wasn’t at all a concern when the zone cap for the Hive and Abyss was accidentally bumped way up in early/mid 2019 but it became one once the 50-player cap was restored. This would not solve anything and would more likely than not cause the raid to fail, because half the people on the league will have TP prompt on so they’ll get blasted too, and instead of killing Hami you’ll just have a full-health Hami with three or four sets of mitos which you’ll then have to meticulously clear or give up and wait for a zone reset. And if you do manage to recover from that, the dead people in the bowl already got their hit in so they’ll still get credit for the defeat at the end as long as they don’t move. EDIT: I don’t particularly care about the arguments around the one or two people at a raid who aren’t on the league. The zone cap at 50 and league cap at 48 are incompatible with each other, much like how hot dog buns come in packs of 8 and hot dogs come in packs of 10. A full zone is always going to have at least two players who aren’t on the league. There may be a perception from some on the league that those players aren’t participating, but a cursory glance at name colors during the entire event should make it obvious whether that’s actually true. A good raid leader should already be doing this. An instanced raid does not make things more difficult for soloists; rather, it makes things easier for the raid leader and significantly minimizes the risk a griefer poses to the event. EDIT 2: Even if an instanced Hami raid accomplished nothing else, it would still provide a solution to the dozens and dozens of wasted man-hours spent across the servers each and every day by players waiting around to secure a spot at a raid.