BasiliskXVIII

I do think some are easier than others, mind you. For example, Beasts don't think get major model changes, instead picking up a breath aura which wouldn't be nearly as difficult to transfer to others (though admittedly there's very few NPCs using the same "beast" skeleton to swap for. Thugs and Mercs would also be a lot easier to transfer over since their costumes are just basic humanoid, and model changes are simply handled by adding costume pieces. That said, I don't think Devouring Earth would be a fantastic choice for beasts. Players have a very specific idea of what Devouring Earth "feel" like, and I think even if we assume that it's mostly straightforward to simply use completely different models, which given the animations for the pets assume a quadruped, it probably wouldn't be (your pets would behave really weirdly any time they went to do anything) it wouldn't at all feel like Devouring Earth do, with specific resistances per enemy type, emanator pets and the like. That said, I do think it would be nice at the very least to get the vanity pets as an alternate option for the beasts MM. Sure, they're just palette swaps, but going with black wolves vs. grey or a black panther vs. a lion would be nice alternatives, since the colour tintable options only change the colour of your "scream".

There's also Enchanted Impervium, which is a separate salvage drop. The exact reason it is enchanted and its properties are currently undefined, so as far as we know it could take the position of just about any fictional metal. Possibly multiples if there are different enchantments.

I don’t have much to add in general, but this take is a bit concerning to me. I don’t think moderation should be based on a list of 'approved' or insults, or whether an insult is, by your metric, sufficiently insulting. Personally, I’m not offended if someone calls me an idiot either—but I wouldn’t use that as the standard for how others should behave. Intent matters. If I were to call someone a 'cup of flat diet Coke' with intent to denigrate, it’s still an insult—even if the phrase itself isn’t on a list of bannable terms or even particularly rude. Whether you personally find it offensive isn’t the point. The goal of moderation should be to set expectations for respectful interaction.

Not quite there yet, but working on it. But I agree the plaques would benefit from being highlighted in some way. Even if it's not bright white, giving them something like a shiny bronze finish instead of the patinated brown would be a great idea. I've been through the history badges enough at this point to have a rough idea of where the majority of the plaques are, and sometimes even then they're hard to track down.

Maybe, but I used to work tech support, and you just can't assume. It's better to verify on the easy things than to spend forever chasing zebras

Might be a silly question, but have you closed your client and restarted after saving the changes?

For future reference you really want to stay out of the argument, then the best way to do that is by not commenting in the thread. See, when you present a suggestion that's super obvious and has been made in every one of those threads that you claim to be tired of, then what you're actually doing is making a passive-aggressive swipe, thereby starting the argument. No. Stripping the visuals takes away what makes their theme to you. But the limits of your imagination are not a fair restriction to impose on others. If the manifestation of Stone Armour on my character were something like that the rock armour shows up, then about 5-10 seconds later fades away with a persistent "crumble" effect to let you know it's still running that's more than sufficient to indicate, to me, that you have empowered yourself with rocky armour and that either it has incorporated itself into your body in such a way as it is not obtrusive, or that it's just accepted as present without needing to be visible. Energy Aura mostly behaves in this way, where activating the armour initially shows big spinning whorls of energy, but eventually fades down to a subtle glow. Plus, if you actually like one of the armours, such as, let's say, Crystal Armour, but find that the misshapen lumps of the crystal form of rock armour are a detraction, this would also empower you to display the armours that you like without needing everything on at all times.

Ah, the post directly above yours was talking Triage beacon, so I thought that's what you were talking about. For Dark Regen specifically, if it worked the way OP was probably hoping, it would theoretically proc on multiple targets every time the power fired, giving you a big chunk of +HP and +End for each target hit whenever the power was used, much in the way that it works with Theft of Essence.

Dropping it in Triage Beacon means it can proc on anyone hit by the Triage Beacon, making it quite a bit more useful, especially for MMs.

You're the one who inserted yourself into the argument. But the only reason that the set has a distinct set of strong visuals is that it has been decided that they do. The whole premise of power customization is that you're not forced to be bound to what the developer decided was the best way to represent their idea of the power was. Until it came along, invulnerability also had strong visuals, making you look like a walking light show. Or worse, if you were a villain, some kind of weird negative-light show. It isn't as though what the game chooses to depict as "stone" actually looks like stone—it's a representative abstraction. It's a low-poly blob with some gritty textures on it which kinda reads as stone because we've been primed to accept it as such by seeing the name "rock armor." They have already given the option to do away with Ice Armour's big clunky visuals by replacing it with auras that give the impression of frost forming on your body. Even if the "baby's first 3d modeling practice" rocks are considered an *absolutely essential* way of representing the powers in Stone Armor, there are so many ways that they could made less obtrusive. Have them appear and then fade them out after a few seconds and give the character the "crumbling" aura so it's clear that the rocks are there, but you're not being forced to see them. Or even have them pop up for combat only, like how they do it for spines-not my favourite option, but still an improvement.

Aspiring to be good, working to try to better yourself, and maintaining a moral code is not a Mary-Sue.

This ignores the fact that mechanically, Stone Armour is extremely different to Invuln. If your objective is that you want to try the set and not necessarily that you simply "have a stone armour concept" but you don't like the visuals there's not a lot you can do. For a game where the ability to express how your character looks is such a well-developed aspect, the idea that "you'll have a strong armor set, but you'll look like someone glued poop to you" feels wrongheaded. If Ice Armour can get a variant without ice, I don't see why Stone and Bio can't do the same. Especially when, as you point out, the armour can very easily be represented by the costume.

Honestly, all of the Hazard Zones from launch are like this. Even Boomtown, which is probably the easiest to get around, has these absurdly impossible megalithic retaining walls dozens of stories tall. Meaning that if you want to get to a mission in the Powderkeg or Cannonade districts without flying or teleporting, you need to memorize a labyrinth of ramps to reach the summit. This was Super Speed's supposed balancing factor - it was faster than any of the other travel powers except possibly Teleport (which was a massive End drain), but its lack of vertical movement made it substantially slower in a lot of places.

I've been thinking about this some more and I'm not sure I can agree with this premise. Every group is obviously going to be only as strong as their weakest link, so in the real world we have to make some allowance for the fact that there may be some failures in the lower branches. But there's plenty of groups who've been around forever and who provide an aggregate good. Think about your municipal humane society or homeless welfare groups. At larger scales there's organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and the Red Cross/Red Crescent. Habitat for Humanity. The thing is that the news doesn't report on "Group does nothing controversial, continues to make world a better place", and even if they did, let's face it, people wouldn't read it.

Starfleet, at least as depicted up until TNG era. Yes, there's some asterisks where badmirals go rogue, but for the most part, the organization is shown as being a morally good, stabilizing force whose purview is intended as primarily diplomatic and peace-keeping, which follows the rule of law and upholds and enables self-determination among its citizenship. The knights of the round table might be another in their original form. The inevitable problem with this kind of question, though, is that any long-standing organization which stands for good in media, inevitably gets some cynic behind the reins and goes "well, this isn't realistic, we need more drama. So let's smear crap all over this." Sure, but I'm also not playing City of Murky Real World Bullshit. If we can accept that anyone would live in Paragon City at all with all of its constant alien, zombie and Nemesis invasions, where crime is so overwhelmingly prevalent that you can stand on any street corner in the city and see at least three active assaults, attempted murders, or extortion attempts, and yet still accept that there's a functioning municipal government and police infrastructure then it really feels like we're already conceding that the way things work in the real world is not how they work in Paragon City. And that doesn't even account for the superpowers. I can acknowledge that in the real world, someone who got godlike powers like Superman would basically inevitably turn into a despot. Or they would give up on all the crap and go to live as a hermit somewhere. Best case scenario, Paragon City should turn into The Boys, worst case, Kingdom Come. Because there's just no way that someone with that much power is gonna happily look out for the public good indefinitely without eventually reaching a breaking point and deciding that they're done with humanity's crap. Even if they started with the best intentions, that's gonna get worn down real quick. Look at any bureaucrat. Give the average person the authority to say "no" to things, and overwhelmingly they will use that power at any time. And yet no one is jumping up to say "well, superheroes are unrealistic!" They are. We all know they are. That's the fantasy, that bad people are held accountable and that good people are so inexhaustibly good that they can't be stopped. I just want to be able to suspend that disbelief to a hero group too.

A bit of a different type of AI generation, I asked Suno.com to create for me a '90s-era cartoon theme song for my SJ/Energy brute speedster, Neon Fist. It took a couple of tries, but I like the result I got: https://suno.com/song/12cd365d-4da4-4e7b-b3ce-d928d8977618?sh=vxQ5NZ6ujhDQyoKU

I think a "gang war" among Longbow isn't necessary, and the Homecoming Devs have already said with the Warriors overhaul that they don't really want to retread that ground. But it might make a decent future story arc or something, where the tensions within the group brings you into a position where you're forced to bring a reckoning against them. Ms. Liberty might be hubristic, and maybe that could be played up as being made worse with the death of Statesman, feeling the weight of the legacy heavy on her shoulders, but I don't think she's so far gone as to be irrecoverable. And it might be a good chance to give her some more character development, where she gets to admit she's been blinded and resolves to do better. Yeah, but that's why it's fiction, right? The whole premise of superheroes is "what if someone with power was actually a decent human being, too?" Which, as reality shows us, is clearly fantasy. Maybe the problems with (insert virtually any group intended to be responsible for the public good here) are not resolvable. But so long as City of Heroes is supposed to be leaning into wish fulfillment, can't it give us that too?

The various Devouring Earth emanator pets each seem purpose-built to counter a specific type of build. Fungi grant heavy control resistance, shutting down dominators and controllers. Quartz hand out massive +ToHit, ruining the day of defense-based tanks and scrappers. Cairns pump up resistance, blunting DPS builds. While they rarely stop or even significantly slow a well-balanced team that's already steamrolling, they do tend to have a measurable effect in smaller teams and solo content. Each of these creates a meaningful interaction that forces players to account for them—either by working around them or prioritizing them as a threat. And then there’s the Tree of Life. Sure, it gives a hefty +500% regeneration rate, and can stack but realistically, that’s only a real problem for low-damage builds, and even then, it's rarely the kind of thing that swings a fight. By the time the tree’s effect is noticeable, the Devouring Earth enemy benefiting from it is usually at death’s door already. Compared to the fungi, quartz, and cairns, the tree feels more like an afterthought—something that exists, but rarely changes the equation the way the others do. So why not give those poor, hapless Herders and their trees something more impactful? If every other Devouring Earth emanator can directly counter a major AT category, it makes sense for the Tree of Life to do something similar against debuffers. While a -Special effect affecting heroes would be neat, giving a chance to mess with heals and buffs as well as debuffs, it wouldn't much affect PCs outside of melee range—where the defenders and corruptors usually hang out, making it much more of another way to ruin melee's day. However, a bank of debuff resists like what are offered by FF's Damping bubble? Even if it's not 100% counterplay against everything a support character brings to the table, it would at least give corruptors, defenders, MMs, and controllers something to keep an eye out for, in the same way that the DE offer something for most other ATs. The Devouring Earth is among the most mechanically interactive groups in the game, with plenty of built-in "handle this or suffer" elements across different builds. It only seems fair that debuffers get the same kind of counterplay that control, defense, and DPS builds already deal with. Right now, the Tree of Life is the least impactful of their pets—giving it some proper teeth would make encounters with the Devouring Earth feel even more dynamic, rather than just being another regenerating speed bump on the way to victory.

Longbow's entry to the game with City of Villains was intended as a way to deliver a heroic group for villains to fight in lieu of tearing through hordes of colourful caped heroes. From the start there were missions that showed some indications of some not-very-nice people within Longbow, (Lt. Harris obviously comes foremost to mind) but for the most part they were "the good guys" alongside groups like Wyvern and the Legacy Chain. Enough so that when the RWZ was revamped, the intro to Vanguard missions made a point of showing that Longbow doesn't like their policy of "we'll do anything it takes, including working with villains, to push the Rikti back," as a way of contrasting the "shades of grey" morality of the new Vanguard group over the "pure white" heroics of Longbow. Now, player interpretation isn't necessarily in lockstep with the game's portrayal. They are, after all, an American-based paramilitary organization operating within the boundaries of a sovereign nation. In the heat of the Iraq War and some uncomfortable parallels to acts which were seen as not entirely legitimate, this obviously coloured perception of the group, but at least on paper and in intent, they were supposed to be good people attempting to do good things — to the point where Ms. Liberty is positioned as a figurehead of the organization. With Going Rogue, though, there was an increasing turn towards portraying Longbow as much more vigilante-aligned. I've been running a lot of tip missions, and there are an awful lot which depict Longbow "taking the law into their own hands", many with paper-thin justifications. Now, the Doylian explanation for this is that they're already established as a 1-50 level group, making them easy to slip into content in any level range, and it's an opportunity to give hero characters more opportunities to deal with them for badge progress and such without needing to go villainside. But I do feel like there's something disappointing about this. I think Longbow are pretty boring to fight in the game, and I don't actually love their concept that much, but as one of the few groups that we have that are supposed to be unabashedly good, it would be nice to see a bit more of that from them as well. I suppose what disappoints me most is that it feels like there aren’t any truly untarnished NPC factions of "good guys" left in City of Heroes. Nearly every faction, even those that were once positioned as paragons of heroism, has been shaded with moral ambiguity, corruption, or outright villainous tendencies over time. And while complexity in storytelling is valuable, there’s also something to be said for having at least one group that represents the ideal of unwavering, incorruptible heroism. Longbow, for all their flaws, could have filled that role—but instead, their increasing drift into overreach and self-righteous vigilantism has made them feel indistinguishable from many of the other factions operating in the game. It would be nice to see a storyline where Longbow actually acknowledges and addresses the problem elements within their ranks, not just as a convenient excuse for more combat missions, but as a genuine reckoning that allows them to come out stronger, more principled, and ultimately better. Heroes should be allowed to stumble, but they should also be allowed to rise again, and I think City of Heroes could use a few more groups that remind us what that looks like.

I try to stay away from the direct references to comics, but I don't deny that there's a few which are inspired by some of my favourites. Sherd, for instance, my Psi/Shield scrapper found a magical potsherd and gained the ability to make psionic constructs with them. Replace "potsherd" with "ring" and "psionic" with "hard light" that's just Green Lantern. But, his costume looks nothing like GL's, he's a Scottish archaeologist, and in every aspect other than the most simplistic breakdown of the character, there's very little tying the two together. In general, that's where my personal line is - a kind of Watchmen-like reintepretation of the character is fine, but much beyond that I would feel is cheesy. Even a case like Deadpool vs. Deathstroke I feel would be too close, even though they've developed into very different characters since.

batlh Dajatlhta' ta' qol!

You also said, in the big title there at the top, that you wanted is made so that players couldn't buff a player not on their team, so there's more than a little understandable confusion. Wow... There is a hell of a lot of vitriol there for something that the majority of players consider a nice gesture of assistance to others. For one: No, it often isn't possible to not buff you and buff the person next to you if you're in a crowded area. Almost all buffs are AoE now. Second, with the exception of the original Sonic buff graphics and SB, people tend to overwhelmingly appreciate buffs. If you're driven this far into apoplexy by someone trying to help, there's plenty of low pop servers you can go to where you generally don't even need to worry about running into anyone.

And well it should, as a Greek word that's pluralised with Latin rules. (Though I will point out that "octopuses" is an entirely valid way of pluralizing "octopus") So, in honour of the octopus, let's take a completely random-ass language, utterly divorced from any context or origin, and pluralize "Kronos" with that, then. I'm suggesting Amharic. Multiple Kronos Titans are now Kronosoch.

If you speak to the S.T.A.R.T. Vendor either in Atlas/Mercy or Pocket D, there's several options to reject inspirations of certain kinds, whether by type (yellow, red, blue...) or by size (small, med, large) You also get a few badges for rejecting insps. (Unconcerned/Apathetic/Couldn't Care Less). Note that this only cancels drops of other kinds, so if you would get a light purple insp, and you've set to reject it, then you just get nothing.

I'll give you this: I absolutely hate being turned into a monkey. It's the stupidest f'kin thing ever, it takes me out of combat and keeps me from playing the game. It was worth a few laughs the first two or three times it happened on live, and then became nothing more than a "you do nothing for a minute" button. So I don't go get the Secondary Mutation power. I have it on exactly zero of my characters, and I'm fine with that. I have never, and I mean not even once, felt I was missing out on anything valuable by not using it.