Yomo Kimyata

Unfortunately, I'm going to call this contest short. I'm simply not going to have the time or interest to do it in the way I had envisioned, and rather than do a half-assed job I'm going to call it a draw. Everyone who had left their global in the thread with their pick will be getting a generous participation prize. I hope to occasionally drop in every once in a while and drop some deep thoughts on various scrapper primaries and secondaries, but they are all winners. Just like you all! Well except for you there in the corner. Happy hunting!

Market PvP(lol) tactic, and a sound one. For the cost of 250k, someone just hid the last prices. Given that most/all sellers of brain storm ideas are selling at sell-it-nao prices, hiding the price keeps someone like me from seeing what the highest outstanding bid is and beating it by 1 inf. Of course, this only lasts until the next person sells. Right now they are just over 25k on the board.

Tradition.

I hear you, but I do not believe in the slightest they are trying to do the most good for the greatest number of people. I believe they are trying to do things they want, and they are putting in a small amount of effort to listen to people. And I get it -- 90% of the suggestions board on this site is: "Someone else got something and I want that plus a bonus". The hardest part about managing ANY group activity is weeding out the folks who want to get special treatment. But I can't even pretend that the volunteer devs on this project are trying to do the most good for the greatest number of people. That's what I would do, personally, and that's one of my greatest beefs with the Homecoming team. But the truth is that they work on projects that they want, for reasons that they want it. And that's their right because this Homecoming is their game. It's not mine. It's not PK's. It's not a meritocracy. It's an "I'm in chargeocracy" and honestly that's understandable.

Ah, maybe I was thinking of an earlier time, or a completely different venue. Thank you. I think the thread thing was something that bit them in the ass. "Oh, I, as a dev, personally want to be able to get all my incarnates extremely quickly. But I want to feel I earned it! Let's make incarnate threads really easy to get, either directly or through giving away empyrean merits." People farm both incarnate threads and empyrean merits. "MY THREADS ARE WORTHLESS!!! ME WANT MORE LOLLIES!" "Hmm, I think they are being childish, but let's face it, I also want more lollies."

Don't play what you don't want to play is my advice, but here are a few rambling thoughts: Scrappers are relatively squishy in comparison to brutes and tanks for a number of reasons, this is true. If spending most of your time in close combat concerns you, start focus on a defense-based secondary and look to soft-cap your melee defense. a % of defense works the same on a scrapper as it does on a tank. Ninjitsu, Shield Defense, Super Reflexes are all positional defense, and are probably going to be a little easier to learn. Energy, Ice, Stone are damage-typed defenses and may be a little bit more difficult but I find them to be overall better sets. As previously mentioned, there are four primary sets that have a (very effective) +melee defense power. Personally, I like layered protection. Defense, resistance, healing, knockdown, mez are all good ways to keep alive, and I try to avoid builds that are all in on only one of those. Ask yourself how you will be playing, and at what difficulty. If you are teamed up all the time, then the only thing other people will expect of you is that you are going to go medieval on mobs. If you want to be soloing +4/x8 TFs, you'll probably want to spend most of your attention on protection rather than maximizing offense. Pick any primary that interests you -- they all work -- but if you want more bang for the buck look at sets with good AoE powers. And if you like range, try the ridiculous new version of Battle Axe. I've built a hover-blasting scrapper that floats just out of range and throws axes in near perfect safety. It was poor testing and planning by the devs, but they are going to do whatever they want to do.

I swear, I had to check to make sure that one of my alternate personalities didn't write this. Except for the AE ticket thing. Farming tickets is clearly the future of this game!

The only way I would not vehemently oppose this if they made it so that you could add certain items to the Character Items menu and then be able to pull them off the menu on any character linked to your account. Character Items is already kind of an exploit, but you don't really notice how exploitable it is until you open a bunch of packs. But it's kind of a moot point, since I highly doubt something like this would ever be implemented.

Just seeing this in print from someone other than me makes me giddy. Ticket farming! Something for the devs to nerf in 27:6! But I don't think it gives you a specific one? IIRC you can choose type (magic or tech) and level (low, middle, or high) but not a specific one.

It's just you. Not saying that there is anything wrong with you, but the system appears to be working as intended. Since this is a player-based economy, you can only buy an item if someone else has put it up for sale. This is a relatively rarely used item that has a tremendous supply (I get it all the time when I'm playing rare roulette). I never bother listing it because 1. if I sell-it-nao I'll get a crummy price. If I sell ten of them I'll get even worse prices. and 2. There's not enough demand for me to list one or more at what you may think are reasonable prices. If I made and listed ten at 2mm each, how long would it take for me to sell them? A week? A month? Not worth it. and 3. I'd rather spend my time and effort on making and selling things that are more profitable and also more in demand. If, in fact, 20mm was the lowest price that one of the ten was listed at, I could understand someone thinking "Well, in order for this to be worth my time, I'll just list this at 20mm and check back next year." That's not how I operate, but I can see it. It's not about what's reasonable value, unfortunately. If it were, then Force Feedback +recharges would be at 5mm, because those things are gold! In the future, you could try putting in a bid that you think is higher than the other outstanding bids (it looks like someone is bidding 1mm, so anything higher than that) and wait until someone comes in and sells-it-nao so you will be first in line. But if you want it now, you have to buy what's available at the price it is available. Alternately, as mentioned above, there are plenty of ways to make this with converters with high probability and low cost. Happy hunting!

If the problem is that new players cannot afford SOs right off the bat, a simple solution appears to me that they should remove SOs from vendors until the player has reached a high enough level to be able to afford them. Something like, I don't know, level 22 or something like that. Then we could add some sort of enhancements that people could use at a low level, but make them less powerful and less expensive. Then people could use them while they were training to a high enough level. I'm not sure what we should call them though. Also, a really low-effort. low-programming time way to help people is to add a new message to the loading screen tips that says to email @Yomo in game for 20mm start-up capital.

Spectral has a higher % rate, but Cognitive is far more amusing in my book. Although Fear counts as “control” with respect to a lot of things (including Control Core Hybrid), it does not count for the extra damage for a controller’s inherent ability.

IIRC, the dynamics of Terrorize is that they cower in place unless they are damaged or otherwise affected. Then they either make an attack or run away a short distance before cowering again. So I guess that it's more accurate to say that Fear is a weird hybrid of immobilize, stun, AND sleep. Regardless, they should stay in the immediate area, although probably not right next to you. In practice with CoF and OP is that while both Fear and Stun can be in play at the same time, the movement from Stun seems to overwrite that of Fear (probably because the effect is applied more in my build). So in play I get a big group of enemies that initially cower, then stand up and wander aimlessly for a few seconds in Stun mode, then go back to cower mode.

Specifically this combo, I've only played at length on my fear stalker (Dark/Dark/Body). It works pretty much as expected. Cloak of Fear is a mag 2 Fear with an 8 foot radius, meaning it will affect minions only by itself. It also has a -to hit effect which affects all opponents. It needs a lot of help with accuracy and with endurance reduction. Invoke Panic is a mag 3 fear with a 20 foot radius, which means it will affect minions and lts by itself. There is no -to hit effect. It also has below normal accuracy, and with a 60 second base recharge can be up pretty often. Mix them together, and you can get a mag 5 fear that will take down bosses (or AVs with the purple triangles down). Now, keep in mind that Fear is kind of an odd bird, mez-wise. It's sort of a combination of stun and immobilize. Just by standing there and Invoking Panic whenever it comes up will pretty much can keep up to 10 targets "mostly" out of action. But it requires a lot of investment in accuracy/to hit and in endurance reduction, because this is a hungry hungry hippo. On another note, and I may write more about this on another thread, there is a lot of synergy between Cloak of Fear and Oppressive Gloom, thanks to procs. Unspeakable Terror proc in Cloak of Fear adds % for mag 2 stun which makes Oppressive Gloom more effective. Absolute Amazement proc in Oppressive Gloom adds % for -to hit which makes Cloak of Fear more effective.

I'll bet you that you can play CoH on it.

The most important thing about my guide is that I referenced Bopper's guide:

The Windfall (https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Windfall) power covers a lot of this. However, the Windfall power AFAIK currently only drops from Hero/Vigilante Packs, at approximately a 5% chance to drop from any given pack. I wouldn't really care if the Powers That Be figured out a way to periodically distribute this power, like if you log in on the first Tuesday of the month you get one charge. I would, however, object if the power were, say made available for purchase, unless the price was appropriately high.

You shouldn't call it "regen", IMO. By diminishing the name, you are taking away respect and power. Call it by its full name: Regeneration P. Coltrane.

Open your eyes, blood sucker! Useful sets: Kinetic Combat (Melee): Oh yeah! You want to 4-slot it (skip the KB proc) for the S/L and melee defense, but a touch of F/C resistance and some health doesn’t hurt at all. Sometimes I’ll ride this pony all the way to level 50, but generally I’ll add a slot or two to frankenslot it. 2-4mm/piece.

Also Devs: Unless you're a tanker, in which case we are making your hitbox one square pixel. And since we haven't done this in awhile, let's double the range of all your powers.

You can get travel powers earlier, but you can’t slot a Celerity et al Stealth IO until 12. The bottleneck is not when you can get the travel power; it is that the four main travel sets don’t start until 15. Grumpy old bastards unite!

I've been taking a break, but if you say my name three times, it summons me back from the dark realm. I believe that the issue with salvage (and you can see it now in common, uncommon, as well as rare) is that the sell-it-nao supply has dropped significantly. I don't know if this is because farmer activity has dropped or if people have been spending most of their time on the beta server, but there simply is not as much salvage coming into the system and sold at 5 inf on a daily basis as there used to be in the recent past. So there is a bid-offer gap (which I've noted many times) that is as wide as it has ever been in salvage. As a result, I see two things happening. People who are used to buy-it-nao are reaching in order to get their salvage nao. If there is a print at 1mm, does that mean that the next available piece of salvage was offered at 1mm? Almost certainly not. The second thing is that buy-it-soon(tm) people (like me) who are used to putting in bids and having them fill overnight are not getting filled. So they pull their bids and put in higher bids, so we get upward creep. I do not think people are buying significant blocks of salvage at one price then listing them higher. First of all, the number on offer doesn't support it, and I generally do monitor that at various points during the day. Maybe a few hundred here or there. Second, it hardly worth it to do it in bulk, since there is always a risk someone will underoffer you. I mean if you can't be bothered to drag and drop a thousand salvage for a few mm profit, why would you expect someone else would be? I think that this is just a case of supply and demand working its way out, and because of the blind bid system where trades generally print at a level (sometimes much) higher than the offer, people find it easier to blame a Shadowy Cabal (which is one of my SG names, by the way) to explain something they don't understand. Maybe I'm wrong? But anything that would get people to start farming AE for tickets would amuse me to no end, so maybe I'm simply trying to hoodwink you all. Anyway, back to my slumber. Enjoy your hover blaster battle axe ninjas!

Hi I'm stepping away from the game and the forums for a bit. No fears, I will be back to pick a winner and to give inf to anyone who wants it! happy hunting!

Tru dat.

Followup question: Would this have been a better movie if Walter were, say, a 40 foot alligator?