Yomo Kimyata

This happens to me occasionally on live as well, and it's not restricted to Monty. I've had failures reaching Sam Wilcott, the angry young man in Faultline as well. I have not been able to establish a pattern, but it seems to happen about 10-15% of the time.

tl;dr I like consistency, and I would like it if proc activation was consistent across all powers and ATs. If this is so, then I really don't like the idea of adaptive recharge. If the point is to make "signature" powers more available, ok. Cutting recharge time in half with the corresponding proc reduction, fine. If the point is to make procs less effective, ok. Cut PPM in half, fine. I'd be grudgingly all right if the proc rate varied on what the actual recharge time is. If it took twenty seconds to recharge because you only had one opponent, then having the proc rate based on twenty seconds for the next activation seems fair. If it took two minutes to recharge, then having proc rate based on two minutes (which feels like how things currently are) seems fair. If all proc activation times are based on an eight second recharge (which I don't know) regardless of how long the power works, the devs have declared that procs are going to be ineffective in every power that uses adaptive recharge, and that effectively procs are not going to be consistent across all powers. It's the opposite of tanker proc rates being higher on AoEs (due to actual effective area being higher than the area used for the proc formulas), and that is (imo rightfully) being revoked. Would it be possible to get some dev clarification on how adaptive recharge actually works with respect to procs?

Are there any guidelines on this? Have they changed the formula? Does the power now consider the recharge time to be 8 seconds, or 240 seconds, or does each proc work off the actual recharge time of the power (so procs should always be expected to activate on the activation of a power that was fully saturated on the previous activation?)

I'm a little sad about that; why not give it to enemies as well?!

The turkey's a little dry.

How would I do it? I'd ask myself (and a wide variety of other players): What makes each AT unique, and why would someone choose to play one versus another? With respect to tankers, they are an armor/melee AT, like brutes, scrappers, and stalkers. I would consider those four ATs to be similar in play, and I see there "should" be a gradient of increasing damage and decreasing safety from left to right. I'd also consider stalkers to be a bit of a fringe due to aspects of their uniqueness. Why play a tanker versus a scrapper? You prefer more safety over more damage. Why play a scrapper versus a tanker? You prefer more damage over more safety. (Yes, I'm leaving brutes out in the cold here. I love brutes, but I can't figure out a way to make brutes unique. I'd love to see something change about the inherent.) This tradeoff between safety and damage has pretty much gone the way of the dodo. It's why sets like dark melee and kinetic melee were designed with less damage, since those sets provide safety (accuracy debuffs and damage debuffs to enemies), but under Homecoming it's irrelevant. Safety is easy to come by, and damage kept getting amped up over the years since SCORE came out of hiding. In my opinion, this safety/damage balance was real on Live, but went away when the game went private because the powers that be didn't care about balance. I see the changes in tankers a mea culpa of sorts and they are clawing back some of the incredible damage buffs that were given the tanker AT. Now, I realize that one's opinion on this may depend on what you have experienced and what you are used to. If all you know are tank-mage tankers from Homecoming in the past few years, then yes, this feels like a horrible unfair nerfing since tankers are "supposed" to be immortal AND do great damage. If you played Live and had a conception of what tankers were "supposed" to be (immortal and not so great damage), then you might say, "huh, yeah I guess it makes sense to bring back some sort of tradeoffs." There are 13 ATs right now, and each one has its uniqueness, but tankers, brutes, and scrappers are relatively interchangeable in my eyes in terms of fundamentally what they do. Personally, I think tankers were ridiculously buffed because the directors of Homecoming really *liked* being immortal AND doing more damage. I don't have any problems with pulling some of those buffs back, mainly because I am not pegging my concept of "tanker" as "tank mage".

Ain't nobody got time for that.

Don't. Stop.

Only power in Dark Armor that needs recharge and it is up all the time, so you are good with ... Even just Pendulum and Axe Cyclone and it feels like it is always up, but if you want a third option I'd use Cleave. The beauty of that proc is that it has a chance to activate on every target, so I generally only put it in AoE attacks. It actually has a decent synergy. Axe Cyclone pulls them all in to debuff and mez range. The proposed buffs for Cloak of Fear are welcomed although overly generous imo, and when the next patch comes out you might like it more. Or not.

Speaking for me, Homecoming is the only video game I play that keeps changing for reasons other than the profit motive. I speak of it as an art project, but maybe I should use a metaphor of a poker game. SCORE was holding a secret poker game for years, and they invited their buddies, and they played what they liked. Eventually, they made the poker game open. Now, to me SCORE and Homecoming seem to like to play poker like "Hearts Wild" where most of the players end up with five aces and they all high-five and split the pot. That's fine, and that can be fun. Me, I like to play things with a little more strategy, so I'll come to games and when it's my turn I'll ask, hey, can we play seven card stud? And they're like, nah, but you can start your own table. So it's up to me to put together my own table, and that's ok. Listen, SCORE really likes to play Hearts Wild! Poker may be a bad metaphor, since CoH isn't a zero sum game. And Hearts Wild can be a fine game, but sometimes you run into house rules like "If you have blonde hair, you get an extra ace" or "Whoever sits closest to the fridge has to get beers for everyone else" and those might seem arbitrary. But SCORE and their buddies still are struggling with adjusting those house rules, because they all have blonde hair and have their seats far from the refrigerator. And I get frustrated when my suggestions to change some of those rules are seemingly ignored (and sometimes elated when years later some of those suggestions are finally implemented). Now, the article seems to have written by a person who wants to play Plant Controllers Wild, because they are a plant controller kind of person. That was a house rule that was pretty arbitrary (and IIRC was left over from Live) and finally has been revoked. Now the author is absolutely right in describing the current state of play, and I'm not just talking about specific speed runs. Any ITF you run, people dash through, gather up crowds with their blonde tanks for nuking, run on to the next objective. Shoot, EVERY TF is like this to some extent. I'm at the point that if I'm unfamiliar with a TF I'll just solo it with one of my optimized characters for the play experience, but that does take a long time. I can try to recruit a specific slow team to learn together, but I'm a pick-up kind of entity, and the amount of time it takes to put together a slow team is untenable, even on Excelsior (and impossible otherwise). I'm probably way too self-righteous about this, but I do accept how Homecoming works because I understand how and why it works, and I can't expect the devs to adjust the rules how I expect them to because they are not working for the profit motive. And there is nothing I can do to change how they do what they do, so I accept it and try to make it work for me. Eliot and Bree have not achieved my exquisite level of serenity about this, so I think the article is pretty dickish and self-centered. but again, that's just me, in my glass house, throwing stones.

Oh no, I agree with you that the devs don't seem to have a direction. And I feel the same way as the author that the directions that they do go don't mesh with my personal vision of the game. My point is, and I've said this many time, it doesn't matter! This is their game and they are not beholden to anyone, and they seem to be making changes to what they or their buddies want. I detest the way they run closed beta because they really don't want constructive feedback and they are just going to do what they think is cool and fun for them and if it happens to be cool and fun for me too that's a happy coincidence. But criticizing them for not knowing who they are balancing for is ignorant arrogance in the first degree. They don't need to be balancing for anyone because they are under no obligation to make their numbers because at this point it's all a big art project. And I suspect that the author, who presumably deals with for-profit games almost exclusively, is being a bit obtuse and dickish in assuming that they should be doing it the author's way. Anyway, I'm just throwing stones in my glass house!

When the article mentions: "a complete failure to understand or establish whom the game is being balanced for, much less why" it is pretty telling that they don't quite know what is going on. There is no revenue stream. There is no need to enhance shareholder value, to gain eyeballs, to enhance retention other than if the current devs happen to want to keep people around. The author seems miffed that the devs are doing whatever the hell they want because it is not what the author wants. There IS no need for balance -- devs can, in fact, make this into City of Tankers if they want to. I feel that I have sufficiently slandered the devs and the author of the article, so my work is done here.

I'm not convinced of that. If it is something people have done a lot of times, they tend to run it quickly, jump ahead to hot spots, etc. There really isn't a lot of "oh gee, look at that!". I have to agree that the meta is speed regardless.

For a single power pick pool, it is definitely the best bang for the buck.

If this is already possible, please let me know! This is a purely selfish idea based on something that would serve me and my game play. I love the Reveal power in missions, probably too much. It's useful to know how the corridors are going to work out. However, once Reveal is used, then you cannot see where you have already been. I would love it, LOVE IT, if you could hit Reveal at the beginning of the mission, see the layout, then hit Unreveal so that the fog of war comes back. I believe that sometimes (always?) the fog of war resets if you leave the mission then reenter, but ugh, effort.

Fair enough, it's a question of semantics, but I personally think it's the right word in this case since a basic game mechanic worked differently for tanks in some of their powers, and will not in the future. Now that I've gotten past my initial knee-jerk reactions to the patch notes, I'm seeing a lot of what I'm calling fixes rather than nerfs. Plant Control, for example. I'm all for a fair and consistent playing field. I'm ok with nerfing overpowered stuff and boosting underpowered stuff, although I do think the Homecoming devs really tend to buff too much overall and tend to do it very selectively, but my opinion and $5 can get you a cup of coffee (and it hurts to type that!). Won't someone think of the poor Hellions?!? I get it why people get really mad when the bank finally gets around to fixing the broken ATM that was giving out too much money, but at the end of the day, maybe that machine should have been fixed right away once they initially noticed it was broken.

I, for one, am really looking forward to more power ports. Plant/Kinetics on a tanker is going to be crazy!

If I am reading this correctly, this means that proc rates specifically for tankers were artificially high? Isn't this a fix, making procs work the same regardless of AT?

Huh, I would have sworn that when the patch notes were first published that there was a short specific list of tanker powers that were increased in cap for the patch, but that seems to been edited away and I'm certainly not going to check back and forth between test and live to see which powers were affected. That's what I was referring to and the language is really odd if they were only referring to the old cap buffs. As for powers that had previously been given cap buffs, yes, the suggested changes would be a nerf from current levels but still a net buff from a couple of years ago. So I hear you.

Target caps increased. Doing less than full damage to additional targets that didn't take any damage before, and laying down gauntlet to additional targets that didn't take gauntlet before. I find it difficult to categorize this as a nerf.

I was pleased to pick up Necrocomicon on Everlasting, and I can go a couple of ways with it. This is what I decided, for now:

Even if that is what is happening, which I'm not sold on, I'm not concerned for two major reasons: 1. There is no limit on the number of loot-related items entering the system, and there is kind of a limit on items leaving the system. For an example, let's take lvl 50 D-Sync Provocations, which seem to be trading over 200mm. Let's round it up to 250mm. There are currently 67 for sale. Could I buy every one of them at 250mm per? Sure. Could I buy every one of them at 2bn per? Sure, although it's a major pain in the butt to buy things for the inf cap. However, let's say I did buy them all at 250mm and reposted them at 500mm. Who is going to buy them? They are kind of a niche item, although extremely useful in a few specific powers. I'd argue that anyone who was willing to buy them at 250mm probably isn't going to rush out and pay double because -- There are more of them entering the system every day. Every one who runs a Aeon or a Lady Grey has a chance to get one as a drop. There are six servers now that share the /AH, and anyone on any of those servers can get one. How many enter the system a day? Your guess is as good as mine, but I'm going to make up a number and say a lowball estimate is ten. Can I buy ten of these a day? Well, for now, sure. But not forever because I'm not earning 2.5bn inf a day. So eventually I'd have to give up supporting the market. This is an extreme example, since they are very rare items and can't be synthesized (through converters) or purchased (through merits) by other methods. My long-winded point is that the daily flow of items in is going to be higher than outflow, over the long term. This universe has so much stuff and there is only more stuff coming in every day. 2. This particular forum has plenty of people who love nothing more than Market PvP(lol) and who also have plenty of inf. Most of them are very familiar with the simple algorithms of the /AH, and they would love nothing more than to outbid me by 1 inf or undersell me by 1 inf, so for such a scheme to work other knowledgeable market participants would have to either ignore it, or not see it, or collude. It's easy to manipulate a market in the very short term, like hours, but again over the long term it's not feasible. There is also a 2a. There's really nothing I can do to stop anyone in the short term from doing this. It's how the /AH works. I'd love to step in and rain on someone's manipulation parade, but I really don't because most of the time I never even notice. Sooner or later, aggregate market forces will tend to equilibrium. That's my two cents

I'm more a member of the "Know-Nothing Party".

Is this the first documented usage of the "Wet" effect?

I'd expect tankers to get Fulcrum Shift first, but then again, I'm sure that's in the works.