Ukase

My preferred characters are typically not truly villains. They tend to have come about their morality, or lack of it, organically - but they aren't evil, just pragmatic and opportunistic. Scratching and clawing their way from level 1 with nothing to as much influence as they can earn by level 50 t-4 in all 6 slots.

I did mention that some folks had no issue paying to play other games. The question will be - will they keep paying if the game fills the same kind of void? Whatever it is - it's got to be somewhat different and offer something HC doesn't. Even though I've got some "free" goodies for being on CoT's kickstarter, they're going to be charging money if/when they finally get things going. Am I going to pay to play that game when I can play this one for free? I have to wait and see. I'll certainly see what they did with my $75. But odds are, once more cash is expected to part ways with my wallet, unless there's some reason to keep playing, I'm not going to keep paying.

So, I was reading all this ...and really, just fascinated, and impressed with the level of detail with all the maths. Good stuff, and it's posts like these that can plant a great seed and turn a casual player into a real nerd, and that can't be a bad thing. Really good stuff!

At present, no way to get level 53 recipes. A pigg diver might be able to shed some light, but my best guess is there were plans at some point to make them available.

Personally, I think HC is a huge disruption. Why? Because it's essentially free. Some folks donate, but the window closes quickly, so it's free for most of us. So..I get that most of us can afford a different game, and would likely fork out some cash to investigate a new game - but how many would continue to do so? What void would those games fill that HC:CoH doesn't? In order to succeed long term, there has to be some sort of competitive advantage. Whether it be content, or compelling game play, or some other facet of gaming, there has to be some offering that the others don't have, or don't do as well. Even though I was in the initial kickstarter for CoT, how long has it been, for this volunteer staff? A damn long time. I'm not complaining - just stating a fact. Even though they're all essentially volunteers, they've yet to complete, and it will still be another year - AT LEAST - before a Beta is ready. To be fair, they are in Alpha stage now, if I read correctly. But given that HC is free...how are these Successors going to compete when they'll have to charge money - while HC is free? And odds are, at least a few of those folks are using the spare time they were putting into the game into playing this one. I don't know this, but I suspect it's the case. As for Ship of Heroes, I'm connected with McGeever on LinkedIn. The dude is every bit as legit as Jack Emmert, as far as game executives go. That said, the concept of a bunch of heroes on a ship just sounds silly to me. I'll probably wait until the ship lands. So, yeah, I read the article on Massively, and I do think that HC is a big problem for any game company that's going to try to capture and keep market share with a free game like this available. But - hey, I've certainly been wrong before.

I apologize if I was in error. I honestly didn't realize there was a patch on the 19th!

Honestly, I didn't even know they existed until I set out to get all the badges back on live. I must have played for a couple of years before I was aware of them. As far as I can tell, the game never calls attention to souvenirs, and it's under the tab called "Clues". Because of this, and my familiarity with the content, there's never, ever been a reason to look in there and see what's there. Aside from the badges for them, they're useless to me. Until now, I guess, explaining how this PsychoMetronChrono thingie gets destroyed.

There's Agent G, a blue side contact in Faultline, and there's Mr. G, a red side contact in St. Martial.

What may not be widely known is that Rebirth has things set up in such a fashion where they encourage multiple accounts. It's not an unusual thing for some players to have 8 accounts on at the same time. The reasoning is partially due to the tiered reward system, which I would think most are familiar with. Once you get to that tier with the hero/villain packs, getting 2- 4 packs each week, with 8 accounts...you can get your ATOs & purples now, for free fairly quickly. And the outrageous 5 reward merits and 250K for one converter exchange...and the packs tending to have a lot more reward merits than HC's does, for sure, your alts can do the converting when your primary runs out. The folks there are every bit as knowledgeable as many are here, and yes, they have some clueless folks there (and here) as well. But overall, the community is the same, just smaller. It's like one SG over there.

I completely agree. I have no idea why HC uses Discord. Never even heard of it until HC made it's existence known. But, it's their game, I get to play for free, so I'll deal with it if/when I need to. That said, I read the patch notes here in these forums. There's never been a patch where the notes haven't been in the forums. It may not be instantly, like as soon as the servers are up, but within 15-30 minutes.

To this day - until this post, I have never, ever read a souvenir!

I have this page bookmarked and find myself referring to it prior to slotting a proc. To work the formula, I have to have Mids open to see the specific values. Rule of thumb - a superior Winter-O, a very rare (purple) - those have a 4.5 ppm and can reliably be slotting in any single target power with a base recharge of 10 seconds or more. If you slot a recharge in that power, you'd have to plug in how much of a recharge boost you've put in to determine the odds of the proc firing. Using procs, you're best off relying on global recharge from set bonuses, rather than specific recharge IOs in that power with the proc (s), unless the recharge is long enough to allow them and still have the proc fire consistently. Caveat: if you stumble across a build in the forums or reddit or whatever - half of these folks are so clueless about procs (and builds in general) that they genuinely have no idea how bad their builds are. If a build has a proc in it - verify the odds before you slot it. If it only has a 12% chance of firing, I see no reason in using it. Opinions will vary, however.

Really? Let me think when I first did this...Eden Trial was the weekly...I tried to look back, but they screwed up the weekly tf displays so I can't look back, only forward. My guess is the Eden was about 6 weeks ago, and it was the time before that one..so maybe 4-5 months ago, about 19 weeks. Stitch & I and a few others ran at least 20 of them, maybe even 50. It was a lot. Made a small fortune off the 53 cytos. (They're all in the same bucket - a Hami-O, a Titan-O, a Hydra-O, as long as they have the same buffs & same level, they're in the same bucket.

oh my. For a fellow who spends as much time in the AH as I do, I should have realized this was the point of confusion. <smacks own forehead>

Because I am often mistaken or wrong, or I might misunderstand words even when English is my native tongue, I figured I would spend some influence and actually prove this is not accurate before I do any correcting - even though I was pretty sure @macskull is mistaken here, or misstated things. So - as we can see below, I over-paid for some trash-O's (hami-Os). I slotted the level 48 Titan O first - then combined it with a hami-O with no issues. My best guess is Mac was trying to unload some micros for more than they're worth. Good play.

I saw this doing Agent G's final mission today. If I'm supposed to destroy the PsychoCronoMetron and it's in the helicopter - why don't I see it in the helicopter? Why can't I target the helicopter to destroy it? Seems like something is not adding up. Done this mission at least 4 times and it's the first time I've noticed this.

So...let me see if I can clarify something here. There are Single Origin enhancements that can drop as high as level 53. Pictured below: You cannot boost these. (the ones that are 53.) And then there are Invention Origin enhancements: These can be boosted to 50+5. Now, if somehow, someway, you encountered an IO that was level 53, the game would probably let you boost it to 53+5, but they don't exist in game, outside of some glitch unknown to me. Now, this is a "Hami-O", or Hamidon Origin enhancement. This can be combined with Titan-Os (from Eden trial) and Hydra-Os (from the Abandoned Sewer Trial) as well as Synthetic Hamidon enhancements, provided they buff the exact same attributes. They are also bucketed in the AH identically when they're the same level. Example: a level 50 Hami-O that boosts Accuracy and Damage (Nucleolus) can be combined with a level 48 Synthetic Nucleolus, or a Titan-O that boosts Accuracy and Damage, with a 90% chance of successful combining, to get a level 51 enhancement. The cap for these is 53, and they can't be boosted either. As to the HC Paragon Wiki, yeah, we could stomach a lot more info in there, but the forums, if your "search-fu" is strong, can be very helpful. As can the help channel, if you're on when the right folks are on. That's hit or miss. But for the most part, if you can deal with the occasional troll who didn't quite read your question correctly, you'll get the answers you seek here in the forums.

In that level range, there is no other Accurate Defense Debuff set. Analyze Weakness is a 30-50 set. Shield Breaker is a 10-30 set. You might be able to get somewhere with a level 30 IO, but I'm not in game to verify.

Never take a break. Folks took a break from live - and we saw what happened. Never, ever take a break!

That's hilarious. Scrappers are trash, man. Low HP, random crits. Better off with a brute. Or a blaster. never a scrapper. They're weak. Feeble. And certainly not loved. Blasters get the most love here on HC.

Just my opinion, but it makes no difference to me if your avatar is short, fat, male, female, naked or not. I'm zoomed out so far - I honestly can't tell whose costume looks like what. That's why I use the RNG for the costume creator most of the time. Costumes are ...well, meaningless to me. Rebirth does a lot of things "right" - as in, in the spirit of the way the old CoH was played. But, I like the improved incarnate system, getting those lumps of Emp merits & threads. I do like the cheaper converters. I also like being able to sell or trade away surplus catalysts. Ya can't do that on rebirth. But - hey, nothing says you can't play here and there.

I'm omitting contacts that don't give story arcs, FYI. Also omitting the ones on that initial table in the original post. I encourage you to review the Homecoming's version of the Paragon Wiki. (Pronounced like WiFi, of course) https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Main_Page Obviously, you can forgo Shauna Stockwell and Eagle Eye if you like, until you're level 20. level 1-7 (Atlas) Matthew Habashy Officer Fields Sondra Costel Aaron Thiery Level 5-19 (Atlas) Level 5-9 (Hollows) Twinshot David Wincott Flux Level 7-20 (Kings Row) Shauna Stockwell Level 10-14 Eagle Eye Julius the Troll Level 12-14 Talshak the Mystic

Correct assumption.

Yeah, hate to pile on, but the a farm brute, built properly need absolutely no assistance from any other character, empath or even another brute. The only reason to have the other character in the map is so the other character can gain some inf, some threads & emps, drops - that kind of thing. An emp still has utility in this game. But if a brute needs an emp, they're better served doing a respec and building the brute properly so the emp isn't needed. Use the other account the emp is on and play the game while the brute sits in the map with burn on auto. Reset, repeat. I could see a case for maybe using the emp for levels 28 to vet level 3, though.