CoeruleumBlue

I mean I wouldn't want Clear Mind to be a PBAoE, I would want it to stay single-target, just let you use it on yourself. Like I said above I don't want all the sets to become exactly the same, I just don't find it as attractive to play the support sets where you can't use every buff or heal on yourself when there are ones you can.

Basically this. Also, what about all the alts who are literally supposed to be the same character? What if I make a crab spider and bane spider just to have the backpack on one and not on the other? What about PvP builds who are unlikely to ever do all the TFs but would get accolade badges for that that make them stronger? What about when they release some kind of new power set or change old ones and that makes me want to play a different character, which ties into the alts one, but you can't blame someone in that case since it isn't the same as when they made the character? And yes, I do think making the badges account-wide would incentivize people to play all of the content once and then replay their favorite content and WTFs/WSFs. Importantly, I also think it would incentivize people to play more AE missions. Part of the reason I joined this game to begin with is I wanted to make and play custom missions, but it seems like no one is doing that because people are too busy chasing accolade badges and such. I mentioned the Maximum Power Principle and people said badges aren't a great incentive to play if people aren't chasing them on all their characters. Exactly. I think if the badges were more rewarding people would chase them more instead of just giving up. The Maximum Power Principle means people are mostly just ignoring the badges because they think there are better rewards elsewhere, but if people thought the badges were better rewards, they'd go get them more. Personally, there is plenty of content I love replaying but there's some I think is super tedious like Citadel Task Force and I don't want to replay that to get the Task Force Master badge on different characters. Manticore on the other hand is pretty fun, Posi 2 is fun, Lord Recluse is awesome, ITF is OK but that's the one I end up doing at least once on each character anyway, it just gets boring having to play all of the content repeatedly when you already know it and I think that's why a lot of people don't even play it to begin with, because they have a lot of alts and they know they never will so they give up. More importantly: I also think it runs against the design of the game to just go collect the badges on your one badge character. Lots of content literally requires different classes and powersets to play, but if you switch characters you don't get the badge. That's probably a lot of why the game has been made way easier over the years with letting people pick Incarnate powers to do things their class wouldn't normally be able to do and the like, specifically because of badge hunting. So I suggest making badge hunting not so important to the game. I want to play more custom missions. And also, regarding a post above where someone said he'll only log onto his cold theme characters during the winter for example: maybe not everyone tries to use every theme in the game to make characters with. Maybe someone has for example 50 or 100 vampire characters with different powersets and classes because they just really like vampires and they want all the vampire badges. What then? The game should be nice to them too, not punish them for being really obsessed with vampires, since it's fine if they're obsessed with vampires. And even worse if some of them are just supposed to be the same person but different builds.

My scrappers who die at level 1 can't use a bunch of enhancements. All the good ones are locked to at least level 17. Wait, we have another thread about that.

My scrappers all suck by themselves because they keep dying and my defenders are great by themselves because they don't. There's a joke I've heard, "controllers and defenders get pets starting at level 1, they're called scrappers."

Why would that make any sense at all whatsoever? If the enemy is weakened by a raygun or a psychic scream or getting hit by a boulder or whatever they are objectively weakened. The powers that don't work on yourself were mostly just based on Empathy and the idea that you have to have an empathic link. What next, do you want Controller, Defender, and Corruptor powers to not do damage, or get rid of the -rech and -tohit since that gives you extra protection too? This is the stupidest idea I have ever heard. I want powers to represent real things happening, not totally video-game-ified mechanics like "if you're a support class your powers can't help yourself at all" even though they were always designed to help yourself, even some of the powers in Empathy.

This isn't the problem though. The problem is some sets work great on yourself and others don't. Time and Rad are actually sets that work great on yourself and no one is asking for an individual heal at all on them because of that. People are just asking for the powers that can't be used on yourself to also be able to be used on yourself. The auras work on yourself and for that reason they are better for using solo than the individual heal powers, notice no one is actually asking for the reverse. I think it would be OK for sets to only have an individual heal if you can use it on yourself. Controllers are already OP, people just don't take sets like Empathy, Thermal, or Electric except for really specific content because you can't use many of the powers on yourself and controllers aren't good main healers. I pretty much only play Pain Domination, Electric, and Storm Summoning on defenders now and even then I'm annoyed the buffs don't apply to yourself unlike the buffs from literally Time and Rad which do and which can be perma-ed fairly easily.

There are entire support sets where every power in them can affect yourself. I've just been preferentially using those except for a few specific builds that I heard are how the game used to work where you really need healing on content without incarnates and I picked Pain Domination for most of those. This is part of why I think we need badges to be account-wide, because those builds are probably never going to run all the content in the game, but even with that, just making it so things like Clear Mind, Enforced Morale, O2 Boost, or Spirit Ward from Sorcery can work on yourself would make them much more useful in my opinion. Because of what you said, it's basically just better to take debuffs than buffs except for the sets where all the buffs also work on yourself, which also often have debuffs. The only sets that don't have debuffs are also ones where all the buffs don't work on yourself which tends to make those not favored.

Yeah making brutes more control-oriented than tankers would probably be the clearest way to differentiate. That's probably also a lot of why I wanted to use Dark Melee on brutes even though someone said only use it on tankers once. The other part is everything in the set has to have you attack for it to work, some of the other melee sets legitimately have passive effects, and none of them are blocks. Someone said there should've been an archetype with control set primaries and armor secondaries, but just switching to basically melee controls and doing that on brutes probably works. That would also give some use to the random control powers that are already in some melee sets that don't involve procs or gimmicks such as the Boggle in Psi Melee.

No. Haters gonna hate. Excuse me while I find extra knockback procs and add more to powers that don't have it.

There's always new content and you can make more content in AE. I think no one plays all that content specifically because they don't want to redo it on all their 200 alts, especially when people barely do it. I barely can do all the content on my one main. I don't think people want to play every single story in the game over and over on all of their characters, especially when, and I think I probably should have included this in my OP, the game is not designed that way. The game is designed for people to have different characters who do different roles and take them to different content. Making it so you only get the badges on your one character works against the way the game is designed. I want to see the story, not have people just give up. Plus, there are always weekly trials and TFs. People will always run the weekly ones repeatedly. There are even badges for running the weekly ones repeatedly but how can I do that when I haven't even done all the main ones on my main character, I have alts, and there are also fun AE missions to play? In thermodynamics and some of its applications, there's something called the Maximum Power Principle. A complex system such as an organism or an economic agent doesn't do what maximizes their total energy, they maximize their total power. I believe the Maximum Power Principle is actually just making people ignore almost all the of the content in favor of farming. There isn't too much content, but there's too much content compared to the perceived rewards. You could play all the task forces or strike forces on each of your alts to get 5% health and 5% endurance on each of them, or you could just play each of the task forces or strike forces on your best build for that particular one and just play weeklies when they come up some other times which have good value as well. So I do actually think this game is just suffering because of not following the Maximum Power Principle just makes people farm all day and not do anything else, even though there's no reason farming should be against the rules since it's basically the same as DFBs or ITFs. Declaring farming against the rules doesn't encourage people to play through all of the content either because people just perceive it's inefficient to do so. Even if there are dedicated hero players and dedicated villain players who don't want to play through all of the content for the other side, they can still already earn all the accolade powers anyway, so that part is fine. I think people want to play through the whole story, I just think they are disincentivized to because of low perceived rewards, and due to the fact no one else is playing through it, so no one wants to sit down and play through it all alone.

I would like to be able to swim in water. Does the engine let them change water? The engine probably just forces people from a walk animation to a swim animation on water. That's annoying. I hope someone can change that. Even though I've considered trying to apply to do dev stuff, I don't think I could recode all of water.

I'm under the impression brutes are mostly just better against the big boss, and tankers are better against the mobs, but since brutes can still fight the mobs, I always go with them. I also don't think they're all supposed to be Hulk. Tankers are more supposed to be like Statesman which is like a Superman kind of character, and most of my brutes and tankers are things like psi melee/shield defense, dark melee/stone armor, or radiation melee/bio armor that are not really found on any of the main comics characters, I mean if I just wanted to play someone else's character I'd go play the Marvel or DC game, but even Statesman isn't exactly like Superman any more than Homelander from the Boys is (the fact Statesman's name reminds me of Homelander is not very helpful sometimes, especially since he's also a stand-in for the guy who seems to be based on Elon Musk in Champions.) But yeah I do think I have a way to easily differentiate brutes and tankers, use brutes if you like tanking big bosses more and tankers if you like tanking mobs more. That still definitely keeps it as a brutes fans vs. tankers fans war as it probably always will be, but I do think they're already easy to differentiate, and they don't have to be based on preexisting characters like the Hulk or Superman either.

Hello, I think basically every badge you get other than the badges for reaching levels, veteran levels, and incarnates should be account-wide. I think this would encourage people to play the story content instead of just farming all the time. It's probably actually good farming is allowed on Homecoming and most private servers because there's basically no difference between fire farming or farming ToT and official content like DFBs anyway, and the ridiculous amount of farming and people not knowing the content is simply due to there not being much incentive to play it. I believe that if most badges were account-wide, this would encourage people to play the story content to get them, and it would also discourage things like people spending all month farming Trick-or-Treat for the prismatic aethers and badges (which you get from the badges.) Once you got the Halloween badges, you would have them for all your characters, so just replaying those events would be the same as anything else you could replay, and if they make a new set during the middle of spring you want to use on a vampire character you still have Vampiric Heritage for that character. You should probably also be able to pick any version of the badge you want once you earn it, the hero one, villain, or Praetorian, once you get a hero, villain, or Praetorian character to level 20. Praetorians should have two level 20 badges, one for Resistance and one for Loyalists, and once you get the Resistance one you should be able to treat Resistance alignment like Rogue/Vigilante and take Resistance characters out of Praetoria or change their alignment, same for Loyalists. If someone only likes Resistance or Loyalist they can just make those and still play the main game instead of running tutorials or fire farms over and over again, same as if someone only likes Heroes or Villains, but you still have to do it once per alignment. I have legitimately seen someone start in Praetoria on a character that wasn't supposed to be Praetorian just to get a title, which is not the same as a badge, but now she can't ever change her title if she switches alignment. You should really be able to switch to Praetorian both because that's canonically what Maelstrom did and also just for the titles and badges if you want them because it's literally just a cosmetic, you can literally name a hero Mr. Badguy and put him in an Arachnos suit and name a villain Mr. Goodguy and put him in a blue and gold tights and cape outfit, who cares. Likewise, I also recommend a change to patron badges. You should have to do the specific patron unlock to get a powerset but that should be account-wide too. I can barely ever get patron unlocks and I've never actually been in a single one that's played all the way through, and people seem to never want to do Ghost Widow's, I'm guessing because it probably involves a lot of psionic damage and most builds don't want to deal with that. With this rework I think people would play through all of them, including Ghost Widow, and no one would have to sit around waiting for an outleveled patron unlock and also not get to actually see the story. I'd also let villains do the Law Enforcer day job or give them their own version. That way Loyalists in Praetoria can also have a version (but it can probably display differently than the villain version.) Every other day job can be totally alignment locked or not necessarily have an equivalent since you can just switch anyway, except for Praetorians who want to stay in Praetoria, or if you want to become Praetorian, but see above. Those are just my ideas, thanks for your consideration!

Making Black Hole into another mez seems good to me, considering Time Manipulation, Traps, and some other sets are full of mezzes. I would consider turning some of the phase shift powers into Placates or something to be honest. I always imagine that someone would take Black Hole and Phase Shift and go tank all the enemies, but then I think that would be stupid, because their team could do nothing and they would probably take forever to kill them. So I recommend just making it a Placate or something to be honest, or a perception debuff, maybe also add a Fear if they're in the Dark Dimension or whatever. Holds are well and good, but it needs to be something that makes people feel like they just got yeeted to the Ghost Realm or something, not just another hold in my opinion, not even a hold with a repel.

Geothermal Spring was supposed to be a renamed and re-graphiced Triage Beacon from Traps basically, definitely not a renamed Spirit Tree, since I like the idea of having a ground-targeted heal on the earth support set. Traps - Unofficial Homecoming Wiki Maybe the one you said could be named Rough Ground can be Sandstorm and that can be similar to Caltrops and also be what the support pet can get? Yeah, I guess the basic template for how I'd personally want an earth support set to work is just take Traps and replace all the things that are actually traps rather than just devices with things similar to Storm Summoning, change all the minor damage to smashing or fire instead of lethal or toxic, change the elemental resistances from Storm Summoning to smashing/lethal/energy/psionics. Like I just see Earth Control and go like, I would like a secondary set that shields you with rocks instead of trapping them in rocks and has a couple of armors, some minor damage on debuffs, and a support pet. I'm sure I was horrible at designing it other than vibe-wise, and the fact I designed that ticked off people who I'm sure actually just want the earth support set to be a straight up armor toggle set with literally nothing to press in the whole set except the toggles (though even that would probably be a minor improvement over mud healing conceptually from my personal subjective point of view.) But yeah taking ideas like Shoal Rush from Marine Affinity is probably a good idea because Earth/Marine is nice both mechanically and conceptually in my opinion. Earth/Rad feels like I'm just going to drop it in an MSR and get up and make coffee and do something else for 20 minutes even if that's an exaggeration, Earth/Time is a fun idea because of geological time but just feels like too many of the exact same holds, slows, and debuffs, Earth/Dark also feels like a fun idea but basically the same problem as Earth/Rad, Earth/Marine is probably my subjective favorite out of all the ones I've actually made with Earth Control since this doesn't seem super passive and the strengths and weaknesses of water are close enough to earth, but in practice it basically just seems like a set for buffing and healing the pet with a couple of nice debuffs, which will only be used for the pet and possibly your teammates. Poison might be fun but thematically weird. Trick Arrow makes me go like what the heck since there isn't a single heal in there, that is basically the opposite of Earth Control and giving yourself a tuned down second control set instead of a tuned up second support set in my opinion.