BasiliskXVIII

More specifically, it's a suggestion in a suggestion forum, which means it's implicitly asking for people to point out why it might be a bad suggestion. While I'm free to suggest that a mode be added where every sound effect in the game be replaced with a sound effect of a screaming goat, even if it's optional, that would be a terrible idea and I'd expect to be told as much. Some feedback on this forum is overly critical and overly conservative. I don't think any in this particular thread has been.

The problem is that at its heart, this isn't really a hard mode. 99% of the time, players don't die. This does nothing to change this fact. If you're facerolling your way through +4/x8 content, then you can turn on this game mode and get bonus rewards, whatever they are supposed to be, for the risk of something happening that doesn't really happen. The enemies don't suddenly get instant-kill attacks, the whole thing is predicated on the player failing first. if that doesn't happen, then you're asking for something for nothing. Farms become even more ridiculous, because their whole appeal is tons of rewards for no risk. But it's also a "fail more" system. You try to push your limits, you die, and now your limits are lower, making you even less likely to succeed. As a result, if anything, this encourages people to play easier game modes, not harder. Why play at +2/x5 if you can turn on "hard mode" and play at +0/x1 instead for the same benefits? This is just a compounding mess of problems disguised as a suggestion to fix a problem that it doesn't even fix.

Sorry your findings haven't met the rigorous qualifications to meet the high standards of a prestigious publication like The New England Journal of Medicine *checks* The City of Heroes: Homecoming General Discussion forums there, OP. Rest assured, I still found it interesting and informative nevertheless.

Given that it's implicitly not a guide, but a table of endurance usage by armour set, it seems to perform that function absolutely perfectly. Especially when taken as something that someone has compiled for fun, out of casual interest, and shared their findings out of generosity in case anyone else is curious. It also makes a terrible helicopter, but I'm not going to gauge it on that metric either.

That's only relevant if you're aiming to create a comprehensive guide, though. Things like Bio Armour's efficient mode would be almost impossible to factor in in a way that would perfectly reflect its contribution, especially in a way that doesn't mean you have to dig into advanced calculus to factor. At most, I'd say it would be worth adding a dagger next to any sets with end-modifying abilities that could change the subjective performance, with a little disclaimer explaining this.

I suppose I may as well pitch in my top 5: 1. The intersecting problem between wanting to experience the story and wanting to play in a team. Only the team leader gets the context from any of the task forces, You can read the mission information while you're in the mission, but by the time you've read a paragraph of what's happening, someone's stealthed through the mission and completed it. The game frequently feels like it's not entirely sure whether it wants you to solo or team. 2. Contacts. Can we just make them so that they get added to your contacts roster if you talk to them? It seems like my characters are always getting their contact chains dying out in the late teens/ early 20s, leaving me with Laura Lockheart, Graham Easton, Montague, etc, but none of the older contacts that'll give the badge missions or older story arcs. 3. Stupid long rez animations. When I've died and have gone to the hospital, that "resurrection" animation feels like it lasts about three years. Worse are Freakshow and Circle Demons who leave you twiddling your thumbs as they go through their rez cycle where you can't target them until they're fully rezzed and then spent a few seconds to compose themselves. Also, as far as animations go, why is it that doors don't work until the third or fourth time you click them? 4. How it seems like the focus for HC-made content at non-50 levels appears to be aimed exclusively at 50s who are exemplaring down with all their incarnate stuff and set bonuses or teams who aren't running those missions. Came back, made a villain, and started playing through the arcs, got to Doc Buzzsaw. Ran through the first (original) arc with minimal difficulty on my Beam/Poison corr. Then I get to the Lab of Doctor Vahz arcs, and I'm like "Oh, I don't remember this". It was a bloody meat grinder. Throwing myself at the game again and again and again cause I couldn't find anyone who'd care to help and, as it happens, a Beam Rifle/Poison corruptor on SOs isn't phenomenally survivable out of the box. Getting slammed with bosses in spite of my difficulty setting because the game can't figure out how to downscale enemies that spawn in, while also being forced to deal with the Kraken at the same time? Every mission was like a new excuse to rage quit. 5. Constant junk clearing. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of recipes are actually used for anything. You can slot lower level recipes while levelling up for some bonuses, but generally you zip through the 10-30 levels fast enough that it's not worth the effort, and certainly not the rare salvage to bother with them, meaning that you're frequently having to just ditch all the junk you keep accumulating.

I like kill-alls, Since fighting enemies in this game is the majority of the gameplay, kill-alls are the content which give you the most gameplay per mission. Especially among Task Forces, there's nothing more dire to me than joining a "speed" TF where you go to one place, wait for someone to run through to the objective, and then leave, and then do this again a dozen times. At least with kill-alls, I have a reason to be there. There's definitely a few maps that I would prefer never to see on a kill-all, like the laboratory with three elevators on one floor, but overall, I like them better than the alternative. I will say, though, that I'd really love to see HC add some tools to give us better ways to mitigate the annoyances of things like stuck enemies and lost mobs, but given that any suggestion which could make this problem better tends to be the kind of thing that farmers also want to make farms go smoother, there's no point to suggesting any such thing in the suggestion forums or you'll just be labeled a filthy farmer.

This is kinda what OP is talking about though. You turn stealth on, and you have the option of being very translucent and less translucent, or you have the option for almost completely invisible and less translucent. There's no "translucent out of combat and opaque in combat" option except for Stalker Hide. Like you said, I worked hard on my costume, I want to see it! As it is, using stealth this is as opaque as I get.

You can also use the little drop-down menu to choose what is displayed on your map. You can turn off everything that isn't the ferry, which will leave on the ferries as the markers.

Instead of /loc, use $loc. So you might say something like "Babbage is up in Skyway at $loc", which will put in chat the clickable link with your current location.

That is really close to one of mine, made after Mako was being a dink - formerly Carcharodon on Excel (name's free now if anyone wants), and now remade as Shark on Victory.

"'Ey Lois! I'm gonna take over Paragon City! Pretty freakin' sweet!"

A Few of my Favourites: Blast Hazard: Energy/Energy Blaster Chinook: Storm/Storm Corruptor Dungeness: Arachnos Soldier Mamba: Beam Rifle/Poison Corruptor

So, I had this thought while on a Synapse today. Paragon is in Rhode Island. Both Lord Recluse and Statesman are originally from Paragon City. Regional accents have been generally getting weaker over time but being from the early 20th century, they probably both have fairly thick Rhode Island accents. Which means that both Statesman and Recluse probably sound kinda like Peter Griffin...

So, in short, what you're saying is that the default assumption is that you're going to be disruptive and that it's only after you prove otherwise that you are accepted. That's the crux of my point. I can't think of many other secondary effects which have that reaction, if any. No one's logging in with a Fire/ blaster and having people go, "oh hell, DoT? There goes the team." No one's expecting you to prove that you can leverage the -acc in dark blast properly or ruin the run. I love my Energy/Energy blaster, but he's solo-only because I'm not willing to be the scapegoat if something goes wrong. And judging by the replies to the thread in question, KB very much is part of what makes Synapse awful. Clocks are weak to KB, so even effects that are normally knockdown send the little toys scattering, which frustrates and causes problems with location effects and exacerbates everything.

It also feels just plain weird to say "well, what if people start ostracizing players with KB powers not turning them off," when there's a whole dang thread that's been kicking around the top of the general forum since the change of the WST this week that is about, among other things, how intolerably awful that KB makes the Synapse TF.

I did one yesterday, worked just fine.

My personal cutoff is "if the high-tech gadgets were taken away, would they be forced to retire?". If you take away Iron Man's suit and make sure he can't replace it with other technological gadgetry, he doesn't have a lot to offer on the battlefield. Batman, on the other hand, is fully capable. Punisher's fine using low-tech gadgets, too, (with low-tech in this case meaning guns that you could buy at any gun shop) so he's also natural. But Green Lantern, even as a capable combatant probably wouldn't keep going, as seen when Guy Gardner loses his ring and goes on to fail at being a vigilante until he steals a yellow ring. I don't think it's a perfect system - the default state of Arachnos Soldiers as natural kind of breaks it - but for me, that's my guideline.

I managed to get my name here, so I'm a happy lizard.

Or simply add a free toggle called something like "hold back" to the sets with a lot of knockback like Storm Summoning and Energy Blast that does -KB, -DMG. The problem that Captain Powerhouse points out in the linked thread, that anyone who refuses to turn KB off in team content will be made a pariah, is fair, but it ignores the fact that this already happens. I was in a Posi TF this afternoon with someone who accidentally misclicked and fired off a power and did KB, and even with no one saying anything about it (and I'll admit I didn't notice) they promptly dropped into chat "sorry about the KB, I haven't got the inf for the proc yet," 'cause they knew that some teams will get outright hostile about things like that. I love the KB on my Energy/ blaster, I've even slotted powers with the Kinetic Crash set for extra KB, but I'll never take it into a team, simply because I don't want to deal with the people with a bug up their ass about it. With my Storm/Storm corr, half of my powerset barely gets used in teams because I don't want the hassle of juggling a solo and a team build. And KB only adds to safety if it's controlled. As long as the majority of debuffs in this game rely on keeping enemies within a fairly tight radius to keep them affected, Scattering enemies to the four winds might offer a bit of breathing room, but if that means they suddenly become un-debuffed you're making things much more painful on the retaliation. Ran Synapse yesterday, and with their KB weakness, the Brute's Thunderstrike kept sending his clustered mobs scattering out of target AoE toggles. The result was that the clocks would get up, shoot him now out of range of debuffs, and then run back in, usually getting a melee hit too before they got debuffed again. He faceplanted a few times from this before finally giving up on TS altogether. There wasn't much to be done for that but to accept it and roll on, but it was the perfect example of why KB kinda sucks for team content. Do I think KB gets more hate than it deserves and that it's a lot of fun if done right? Absolutely yes, without a doubt. Do I think that it's fair that players using KB-heavy sets need to invest in a multi-million inf enhancement for each of the powers that they want to use in a team or get shat on? No, not really.

"Follow-up counterplay" in this case meaning "pop an awaken, cause you got one-shotted outta nowhere."

I mean, that kind of suggests the question, then, of whether it's fair to assume that not-level-50 content is mostly getting completed by fully built, IO'ed, and Incarnated characters playing them through flashback. Are the people who aren't rushing to 50 to IO themselves out and instead trying to run their alts through story content and exploring the character as they grow now officially "doing it wrong"? A level 30 character who's built with SOs is not at all the same thing as a level 50 character with set bonuses and Incarnate levels flashing back to level 30.

So, I ended up going with a Beam Rifle/Poison Corruptor and I'm finally up to 30 with her, mostly soloing, but running some TFs in between too. I figured I'd bring my impressions here in case the title catches someone's eye and they're curious. I've skipped a lot of the "help other people powers" as is my wont as a Corruptor. I've only got a very few IOs slotted, so this is basically my impressions on SOs: The game is entirely different before and after Venomous Gas. I was squishy AF before, and now I can barrel into crowds with near impunity, even unslotted. Almost everything is click-based, so it can get pretty dang end-hungry. Slotting for end reduction is nearly a must. Having good targeting binds is a must, because you'll want at least a targetnear bind and a targetnext bind on tap to maximise the use of Weaken and Envenom. Poison Trap is not nearly the same as the version from Traps. It seems to get a lot of stick because of that. However, the Lockdown Proc gives it a decent bit of usefulness in controlling minions, and its deployment time is much faster. It needs to be slotted for Accuracy to make the most out of procs though. Beam Rifle is not an ideal choice for primary. I built the character before seeing Uun's advice on that one. However, it is also very single-target focused and its cones can be leveraged by hopping out of melee and back in so it's at least manageable. Neurotoxic Breath is a lifesaver at lower levels both to help group enemies up and to help get away when you're getting overwhelmed (Which will happen often enough). Its usefulness drops off a lot as enemies get more powerful ranged attacks, though. Weaken's -Special blows my mind. Even with the Corruptor's weaker modifiers, judicious use against enemies with annoying status effects turns 5-10 second holds to 1-2 second holds, Which is good because you're SUPER vulnerable to Mez. It's pretty hard to justify using your secondary for most mobs in team content since they just melt so fast and the AoE is so tiny. Even Alkaloid is so slow to deploy that it's hard to use where you'd want. It's a weird, very glass-cannonny build, but I am having fun with it because it is quite different. I really would like to see the AoEs of the main debuffs to get improved radiuses, similar to what Acid Arrow got in /TA. I'd even be willing to give up the stacking of the ST and AOE components if that were the necessary cost. Weaken especially, if it had a decent chance to hit whole spawns instead of one guy, maybe two if you're lucky, would improve the survivability a lot.

I haven't played in a long while. I'm getting back into the game, tinkering with some alts, and was thinking about running a /Poison Corr. I know back on live it was generally considered a pretty poor secondary. But then, so was Trick Arrow, and I know that's gotten a fair amount of love since moving over. Has it gotten any love? Or were the haters on live just wrong?

I'm inclined to say that making the practically unusable sets into something usable, even if it's just in those circumstances where you hit your cap on 3.75% Ranged Def sets, and you would be looking at the trivial 0.625% Ranged Def on Pulverising Fisticuffs just to eke out a tiny bit more, if it didn't cap out at level 25, would be a good first step in this. It would at least help sort out "what's not used because it's garbage" from "what's not used because it's impractical?" Honestly, the more I think of it, the more I wonder if IOs even need levels. I don't know what the general consensus is on this, but for my part, I'm not seriously looking at set IOs (with the exception of procs) until I can slot level fifties anyway. Having an IO for every level in a given level range might have been fine on live, but there's a lot less supply and demand happening on Homecoming. So why not just get rid of all of the leveled IOs, and have one recipe for each set that's attuned as soon as you craft it? If the worry is about catalysts losing their place, then maybe the IOs can level up with you but don't scale down unless they're catalysed. Being able to use my drops as I get them because the recipe I get at level 30 is just as good as the one I'll get would be a lot more fun than selling them off, and would make buying expensive salvage pieces a lot more appealing. .