BasiliskXVIII

Well, of course. I remember the NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, for instance, but I don't think that that is an aspirational target for difficulty. Soulslikes just happen to be very prominent in gaming culture, and a really good example of difficulty moderated by skill. They also tend to be an example of what players who are looking for a "hard mode" typically bring up. One could even bring SimCity(2013) or Daikatana into the picture, which were hard to play for a variety of reasons utterly unrelated to gameplay, but they don't exactly make the point. It's like if someone was looking for an example of a large aquatic mammal, people will tend to gravitate towards the blue whale. Even though others exist, that's the example that will tend to spring to mind.

I will grant you that, I meant it more in the sense of mastery as a function of active play, rather than build-side. No matter what your build is, a hit is always a hit. The game runs an RNG, and if it decides an attack hits you, you can run through the map with the projectile homing behind you until it lands. There's no dodging or blocking, the best you have is attack chain optimization and potentially timing. It's possible for someone playing a Soulslike to get good to the point where they can run through the game without ever getting hit. In CoH you're beholden to the will of the RNG. To your 801s example, there's not going to be a "Let Me Solo Her"-type character who can run that mission unleveled and unslotted, relying on their proficiency alone. Because of that, there isn't that kind of incrementalism that is the reward for soulslikes. If the condition for winning is "don't roll three ones on a die in close succession" there's no way to improve your skill at that on the fly. The best you can do is either throw yourself against that challenge again and again until the RNG plays nicely with what you want (which isn't mastery, it's obstinacy), or pull out, rework your build and restart, which is an extremely long work loop that I don't think is actually appealing to a significant number of players, particularly in light of how godawful the respec tool is.

I think the fundamental problem here is that you're treating games as a monolith. You can make Poker harder by not letting players see what cards they have and making them play blindfolded. This doesn't make it a better game or more fun (beyond perhaps the novelty factor) because it undermines the core game loop. Games derive their enjoyment from very different kinds of reward loops. Some games are built around mastery: Dark Souls, for example, is about reading animation tells, managing stamina, learning boss patterns, and steadily refining your execution. There, difficulty creates tension and satisfaction because you can directly express skill moment-to-moment and improve through repetition. The problem is that at it heart there is no mastery of City of Heroes. It is at it heart more akin to Stardew Valley or Factorio than it is to Ghost of Tsushima or Shadows of the Colossus. The core appeal isn't moment-to-moment execution, but long-term progression, build experimentation, and sandbox expression. You refine your build, experiment with power choices, and enjoy the power fantasy of becoming stronger rather than the adrenaline of narrowly winning a fight through pure mechanical precision. More crucially, every attack rolls a die. Streakbreakers exist in the game to ensure that even if you succeed win the roll (or lose it), if you've done so too often, the attack hits or misses anyways to ensure statistical stability and specifically to prevent the kind of mastery-based gameplay that some people want. You can fine-tune mitigation, optimise defense and resistance layers, prioritise targets smartly. But once you're actually engaged in combat, you’ve mostly made your meaningful decisions already. The moment-to-moment fighting is a controlled math problem, not a reactive skill test. That’s why tuning City of Heroes to create high-stakes, high-failure-rate combat simply doesn’t work. You can absolutely make the numbers harsher (give enemies bigger attacks, more mez, more health, etc...) but that doesn't deepen the gameplay. It just moves you closer to the coin flip zone, where an encounter becomes "you either survive the alpha or you don't," and where failure is often just a reflection of build mismatches rather than execution errors. Dark Souls/Shadow of the Colossus/Ghost of Tsushima works because you lose because YOU failed: your dodge was mistimed, you misread a tell. City of Heroes doesn’t give you that same lever. In CoH, you lose because the numbers no longer favour you. That's not mastery, that's rolling a die. The game isn't broken because it's not punishing. It's built around accessibility, progression, and casual empowerment. And those are legitimate game design values, just as much as the deliberate punishment loops of Soulslikes are legitimate. One design isn’t automatically superior to the other just because it happens to align with current taste in certain circles.

As you pointed out, whole overhauls of content are non-trivial. Adjusting text is simple. I do think they should take a good look at the legacy content to at least bring it to the standard of CoV, but that's a project that would need a whole commitment to take on. It's triage... Save the guy you can save with stitches rather than the one who needs open heart surgery.

Ok, but that's several orders of magnitude more that what I'm asking for. All I want is for the contact dialogue not to outright lie to you, saying "this mission will be harder than most, you may want a team" when there's nothing about that mission that is more challenging. A good example of this is the "Take the Shadow Seed from the Council" mission, which warns "I'd really recommend gathering as many allies as you can before you enter this one." in that exact text colour, and the only reason I can think of is because it features two named bosses (not in the same group), which do downscale appropriately to LTs if that setting is enabled. The following mission does exactly the same thing. I recently did 1-50 on a character solo and ran into a handful of these. Some make sense, while others don't. Along this same token, cleaning up the missions that say you need a teammate to activate multiple glowies at the same time should also be tidied up. The flipside of this is the newer content, which is deliberately tuned to be a bit harder and a little more unforgiving. And it's just handed out blithely as one contact among many. Sure, some legacy missions will be more difficult because it comes from before standardization, but when the intention is "this contact will offer more challenge than average", adding a little warning doesn't seem unreasonable. I do think that as a long-term goal, cleaning up the mission text and clarifying the actual objectives should be added onto the to-do list, and again, that's something that could be done 1-2 missions at a time as they come up. But just cleaning up the up-front text is low-hanging fruit that should be reasonably easy to fix in short order, it just needs the will to do so.

For the most part it isn't about hoarding them but because I don't use them. They get slid off to a different tray, and basically forgotten. Every now and again I'll go "oh, I have that thing" and use one, but they basically just get in the way.

Is it really, though? We're literally talking about finding and editing text strings. It's always at the end of the mission dialogue, almost always in a mission arc or badge mission, and for the most part should be findable with search. I'm not sure how contact dialogue trees work, but if multiple contacts are referencing the same dialogue sheet, then changing one should change them all. Sure, it's not *no* work, but I doubt it's nearly the amount of work that writing a story arc is. It seems like it should be at least feasible. In theory, it shouldn't even be necessary to get rid of all of the warnings all at once, just sneak changes to a few missions into each release as you find them. Maybe throw together a thread on the suggestions board asking players to submit missions with unnecessary warnings. And honestly, if bringing in new players is part of the intended goal of this server, then filing down pain points to getting them enjoying the game should be a fairly high priority.

This is one of the things I think Homecoming could improve on. A lot of the post-HC content is notably more difficult than default, and doesn't come with any particular warning that engaging with these arcs means a more difficult experience which may require you to have a cleaner build or a team to play with. This combined with the fact that legacy content still occasionally adds warnings like "This mission will be tougher than usual, you may want to bring a team" and is otherwise trivially easy by modern standards means that signalling is an absolute mess. It would be nice to see an effort to clean these warnings up and communicate the expected challenge of a mission better.

The rule is, in essence, that powers shouldn't have their core functionality changed, and instead their strength or additional effects should be changed. The name comes from the example given: How would you like it if tomorrow you logged in and, say, Build Up now built a small cottage at your chosen location, instead of adding to your damage? It's a silly example, admittedly, but it's to prevent such wholesale changes from happening. I *could* overturn it, in specific cases, if it were truly needed, but in the case being discussed here, it is not truly needed. Personally, I think it's a decent rule of thumb, but it was adhered to too strictly, and frankly this was probably in no small part due to the fact that there was no money for Cryptic in fixing old powers when new ones could be sold. The result being that powers which were created with a different model of the game in mind were retained as irrelevant fossils when they probably should have been revamped into something less bad.

Have you tried using GIMP at all? It's got the ability to open and export to both .psd and .dds files natively. I know it's a bit of a ballache to need to open a separate program just to save to the format you need, but it might at least give you a workaround you can use for now until your plug-in gets fixed.

Plus, since the game doesn't handle duplicate names per server, consolidating means that of the people who share names between the servers, one or the other is going to lose it. Somehow I doubt that'll go over well.

I'm starting to think you're just trying to get a rise out of us.

I think there's an argument to be made that if a change has been made which has upset you to the point that you feel motivated to leave, a post which outlines what you don't like before you leave is at least giving the devs a data point that they don't get from simply not logging in ever again. "This update went live and active player count is dropping" is arguably less of an actionable feedback than "This update went live and player count is dropping and we've had ten people post on the forums about leaving because they hate what happened to their tanks," or whatever. (I'm not saying this as a doom and gloom about P2, I think it's generally fine, this is meant only as example) However, OP also didn't give any such feedback at all. "Not what I used to know" is hardly something that can be fixed.

I would say that it isn't uncommon in comics that an enemy is suddenly significantly more powerful, but especially if there is a justification on the way I think it would be more true to the setting to add atmospheric dialogue (or *more* atmospheric dialogue) from NPCs such as in the street fights or some mention in missions about where someone goes "WHY ARE THEY SO POWERFUL, THEY'RE JUST SKULLS?!" This would give context to the fact that yes, this is a change, and yes, it is a departure from the status quo. These aren't intended to be the same group of thugs that you ran into at low levels.

That's not what enshittified means. Enshittification is a specific process which happens when a service starts with good, user-focused design to entice users to adopt the service, then focuses their attention on business customers at the expense of regular users, and then finally gradually degrades their user experience for everyone by adding features intended to provide value for shareholders in the form of increased advertising, restricting features previously available to all users behind subscriptions, or adding low quality "bells and whistles" to a product to justify major price hikes. Homecoming doesn't have business customers, and doesn't do paid subscriptions. This isn't systemic decay due to capitalist exploitation, this is is an update you don't like.

One exception to this is the Super Stunner, who will immediately activate a power with a 25' radius AoE and recovering health per target hit while also flatlining your recovery. They will always do this, and the only way to prevent their resurrection is to make sure nothing's withing 25' when they die. https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=freakshow.super_stunner.reserve_power&at=boss_grunt

Took a fair amount of work, but I got my Staff/Regen Stalker into a place I was happy with.

Nope. You can get Sister Psyche or you can get Yin, either works. Same with old Posi and Posi 1/2

When you have a list of people you want to make sure are ignored at all costs, and a list of people who are just annoying loudmouths or maybe just people having a bad day, having two lists - one that's a perma-ban and one that's a timeout would be a good way to handle that. I don't want to temp ban the people who being hateful. But being able to temporarily sideline the people who decided to use LFG as a place to discuss their preferred way of cooking steak? It's not offensive, but I'm not here for that discussion, I'm looking for people to run a WST.

You've made a point to say "A timeout feature is not necessary because there is the ability to remove and add people at your own discretion." That, whether you want to admit it or not, is either a misunderstanding of the usage of intent and value of a timeout, or it's a bad faith way of saying "this doesn't affect me, therefore it isn't necessary." I'm choosing to assume the former. There is no one on the planet to whom "oh, gee, you mean I can write a note and choose to go back at a later time to remove them from the list" is some kind of revelation. Believe it or not, most of us have encountered pens and paper before. This is saying "I can walk up these stairs just fine, why should anyone need a ramp?" If you're fortunate enough to be the kind of person for whom the ignore list is a barrier from only mild annoyances, then congratulations. But for others, it can be a shield against genuinely hostile or upsetting behaviour. Expecting them to simply clear their ignore list sporadically is asking them to voluntarily compromise their own comfort and safety. And yes, there's definitely people on this game for whom "I blocked them because they were being hateful" is common enough behaviour that they couldn't identify who was blocked for that reason and who was blocked for another reason. When the suggestion is "we want to be able to do X without a workaround", replying with "here's a workaround to do X" is not a solution, it's a dismissal. I think you’re misunderstanding the request because you’re treating ignore purely as a convenience feature. In reality, it functions as two systems at once: a convenience system for muting annoyances, and a safety system for protecting against actual hostility or harm. The goal of the suggestion is to let players manage those two uses more independently and effectively.

So just to be clear—you don’t use the ignore system, you admit you don’t understand the need for the feature, and you openly don’t care whether it gets implemented. And yet, somehow, you still felt the need to weigh in, explain why no one should want it, and offer an entirely unsolicited lecture on personal note-taking habits. You’re not engaging with the suggestion—you’re just policing the act of suggesting itself. If a feature doesn’t affect you and you have no insight to offer, maybe consider that the most helpful thing you can do is not comment.

If nothing else, what would be a nice feature is an easy way to ignore with a note. We have got a player notes feature which is mostly only accessible if you're face-to-face with that person. Having an option to bring up their player notes page from the friends and ignore lists would be a good way to split the difference. Why did I ignore this guy? Let me check the note I left myself in the function already coded into the game explicitly to allow that exact functionality. "Oh, this guy said hateful things in chat about my ethnicity/sexuality/alignment." "Oh, this guy has the worst possible takes about Star Wars." One of those is worth a second chance to free them from the list. The other absolutely does not.

In this case I'm talking more about the process of earning them. I'm ok with there being a hero and villain version of the badges, even though I do actually have a hero for which "Arachnos Agent" would work. I just don't think you should only be able to earn the badge as a Rogue/Villain if there is a heroside equivalent strapped to it. Also there's a few Crey offices in Paragon. I'm surprised the one at [-2481.7 4.4 703.2] in KR hasn't been given the "Crey Employee//Crey Test Subject" day job. It's got a lot of open space beneath the building that seems ideal for a day job location.

I haven’t seen any recent suggestions on this, and a quick search didn't find anything relevant, so I thought I’d bring it up. The “Crey Test Subject” badge (hero-side) is the counterpart to the “Crey Employee” badge (villain-side), both earned by logging off inside the Crey building in Nerva Archipelago. If you do this as a Vigilante, the day job time accumulates normally—but you won’t be awarded either badge unless you flip fully to villain to receive “Crey Employee,” then flip back to get “Crey Test Subject.” This seems like a relic of how the system was originally built. At the time, the game didn’t have the ability to handle alignment-aware badge names, and it would’ve been strange to see a hero rewarded as an “Arachnos Agent” or a villain as a “Shop Keeper.” But now that the game does support alignment-aware badge equivalents, this limitation feels unnecessary. What makes it even stranger is that the day job power does apply regardless of your alignment. So you can be a Vigilante parked in an Arachnos base, earn the Arachnos Agent day job power, but not receive the Arachnos Agent//Cannon Fodder badge—even after the time bar fills. It’s inconsistent and makes alignment-flipping via Null the Gull feel like a workaround for outdated logic. This isn’t a big, flashy issue—but it is a time sink, and it makes the Vigilante and Rogue alignments feel clumsier than they need to. Since the badge system already has parallel entries for both sides, could these restrictions just be removed? Let the badge be awarded based on alignment at the time the bar fills, and let characters earn the proper badge without the extra step of flipping sides. It would make the system feel smoother and more modern.

There is -Healing Resistance, which the Destiny Incandescence incarnate power grants. Its effect is +healing in practice. I don't know if any other powers in the game offer it.