Lunar Ronin

Agreed. If you want actual search results, try Brave Search, Kagi, and/or Mojeek.

DuckDuckGo and Yahoo! are essentially wrappers for Bing, so it's not at all surprising that they would show the same search results as they all use the Bing search engine. As for why Bing has deprioritized the Homecoming Forums, no idea. I checked the robots.txt file to see if Homecoming is blocking Bing for some reason, but nothing there. But Bing is a pretty bad search engine anyhoo. There are actual search engines: Bing, Brave Search, Google, Kagi, Mojeek, and Yandex. Others are either a wrapper for Bing, or are metasearch engines (meaning they search multiple search engines for you simultaneously). FWIW, I personally use and recommend Kagi, although it isn't free. Brave Search and Mojeek are my secondary recommendations. Bing and Google are just bad, especially since the LLM wars started.

There seems to be this belief among some (particularly MMORPG players that started with or after WoW), that "If a server has under 2,500 people on, it isn't a MMORPG." That's despite the fact that at most only one City of Heroes server back on live had 2,500 people concurrently on (Freedom), and that was only during the first few years of live. I've seen quite a few posts on the CoH sub-Reddit over the past few years saying things along the lines of, "Homecoming should merge Everlasting, Torchbearer, Indomitable, and Reunion into Excelsior. Rebirth, Thunderspy, and New Dawn should all shut down and everyone should play on Excelsior!" It's quite annoying.

People talking in in-game channels hasn't been a thing in any MMORPG since Discord became popular. You could have 10,000 people on a shard, and most in-game channels would be as quiet as a church mouse. Just is what it is.

It's been stated on here by developers quite a few times over the years that, except for Reunion, consolidating the shards would save no money nor infrastructure as the four North American shards share physical hardware. They could save money by shuttering Reunion, except they use the hardware in Europe as a backup anyway. Secondly, Excelsior is very laggy compared to the other shards, especially the three lowest populated shards. It's nice playing on a shard without all of the lag that comes from being heavily populated. Thirdly, each shard has its own personality and sub-culture. I personally don't care for the personality and sub-culture of Excelsior. Others don't care for the personality and sub-culture of Everlasting. You would also lose the personality and sub-culture of Torchbearer, Indomitable, and Reunion. To sum up: Consolidating shards would result in the loss of shard culture and personality for three shards, and you'd lose players who do not want to play on heavily populated shards and would rather leave the game. In addition, you'd gain nothing.

There used to be a Twitch streamer that just streamed the LFG channel from all five Homecoming shards along with Rebirth, Thunderspy, and New Dawn simultaneously 24/7. It only lasted a few months though before he or she pulled the plug on it. It was a neat idea though.

Thank you for proving my point.

The OP doesn't care about any of that. Lordporkbone already stated that he or she plays on Excelsior, and just incredibly selfishly wants to force everyone on Torchbearer, Indomitable, and Reunion to move to Excelsior or Everlasting so he or she would have even more people to play with. It doesn't work that way. People who still play on Torchbearer, Indomitable, and Reunion today intentionally chose to play on those shards, and do not want to play on Excelsior or Everlasting. I played on Excelsior for years, and left for Indomitable because I found the player base on Excelsior increasingly toxic. Not to mention the heavy lag and shard issues from playing on a heavily populated shard that the lower population shards just don't have.

Well, that would be one way to get me to leave. Not everyone wants to play on heavily populated shards.

We have been discussing this a bit on the Homecoming Wiki Discord server. Chriso has been directly translating parts of wiki articles from the English on the article to French. Why, when he or she obviously understood the English well enough to translate it, no one knows. Another question is why only translate some of the article instead of all of it. Either way, it's making a bit of a mess.

The only time you ever need to dismiss henchmen is when you're about to enter the final mission of the Tin Mage TF. There's few or no beacons for henchmen to follow in the Praetorian underground area, so henchmen never make it through the doors. When you're outside the last underground door, then you should resummon, re-equip, and re-upgrade your henchmen ASAP. Other than that, there's never any need to dismiss henchmen. If you're just taking out trash, like most of BAF, or Underground, it's fine to keep henchmen on aggressive. When outside during the TPN Campus Trial, you want to keep henchmen on a very tight leash so that they don't attack cameras or Praetorian citizens so you'll need to carefully control them. When inside the buildings, you can set them back on aggressive. As for putting henchmen on passive, you do that when the league is trying to obtain certain badges. Like for BAF on Keep Them Separated or Triple Threat on the Magisterium trial, should a league leader order people to stop attacking when the AVs are at 5%, you put your henchmen on passive at 6%. Same for Avatar Assassin badge in The Underground trial. For Bunker Buster on the Keyes Trial, just put your henchmen on passive for that part. Some Incarnate trial leaders will tell you to dismiss your henchmen thinking that they will somehow cause certain badges to fail, like Avoids the Green Stuff or Avatar Assassin. They won't unless the Mastermind is played badly, but you should respect your Incarnate trial leader's wishes for that trial. Generally, Incarnate trial leaders that ask for henchmen to be dismissed don't play Masterminds or rarely play Masterminds and don't understand the AT.

There is now a wiki for Stars Reach, collecting all known information about the game.

The AE building.

Yeah, the henchmen aren't impacted by the +rech, but Electrical Affinity has so many other tools in its toolkit between heals, +absorb, +dmg, +to-hit, -dmg, +resistance, AoE mez protection, among other things. It's one of the top two secondaries for Masterminds, IMO.

No, the build just won't be as easy and you'll have to build around it, that's all. Electrical Affinity is one of the best Mastermind secondaries, if not the top. It gives great heals, absorb, and buffs, while providing AoE mez protection for you and your henchmen. Sonic Resonance is good as well. The only issue with Sonic Resonance on a Mastermind is the lack of a heal. It can be a drag to wait around for your henchmen to heal back up. Of course, you can dismiss and resummon them, but then you have to re-equip and re-upgrade them as well. However, taking the Aid Other pool power rectifies this issue.

Try verifying/validating your files. Sounds like a corrupt PIGG.

Sure. Run a traceroute from your computer to cityofheroes.dev (the Victory server domain name). It'll clearly show that it's on the west coast of the United States.

Err, no. Victory is located on the west coast of the United States. It would be merged with the other four North American shards in Canada.

Victory is a server using the Homecoming code started by two former Victory server players from live, named after their original server. The reborn Victory server is actually a day older than Torchbearer. One of the those two that started the reborn Victory server is Michiyo, one of the City Council here. The plan has been to merge Victory in with the other Homecoming shards and have Victory become the sixth shard of Homecoming. There's been some delay, but it should still happen I imagine.

By people who obviously have little to no experience with advanced modes. Or they would realize that that defense and resistance is coming from stacked Barrier Destinies.

I'll answer your second and fourth questions. 2. For Alpha, either Musculature Radial (for extra damage for your henchmen and extra endurance for yourself), Intuition Radial (extra damage and range for your henchmen, and extra defense debuff, slow, and to-hit debuff for yourself), or Agility Radial, (for extra defense and extra endurance - but only if you don't care much about procs). For Interface, it procs on all of your henchmen's attacks. You generally want either Degenerative Radial or Reactive Radial, although there's some value in Diamagnetic Core. It's generally a good idea to take two Interfaces as only up to four of the same Interface can stack, so I usually take Diamagnetic Core and Reactive Radial. For Judgment, Pyronic Core. Accept no substitutes. For Destiny, if you don't have any AoE mez protection from your secondary Clarion Core is a good way to go. A mezzed henchman is a useless henchman. If you do have AoE mez protection in your secondary, then Barrier Core or Rebirth Radial would be options depending on your needs. For Force Field though (along with Sonic Resonance), I would go with Ageless Core just because it is such an endurance hog. For Lore, that's mostly up to you. Quite a few decent choices here - Longbow Core, Banished Pantheon Core, Carnival of Shadows Core, and others. Now, the important one. Hybrid. The only Hybrid that works for Masterminds out of the box is Support Core. There really is no other choice for Masterminds. Assault can work on henchmen, but is very fiddly and IMO not worth it. Just go with Support Core. Melee doesn't work at all on henchmen. 4. A +1 level shift would make your minions level 49, your lieutenants level 50, and your boss level 51 essentially. One thing to be aware is that Incarnate content buffs up your henchmen to be essentially equal level to your Mastermind. As a result, Masterminds are more powerful in Incarnate content than regular content.

Experience and Infamy values from both defeated NPCs and mission completion bonuses at +3 and +4 difficulty settings outside of advanced mode were lowered by approximately three percent in Issue 27, Page 7, IIRC. The change was intentional, but never documented in the patch notes for some reason.

There's a pre-compiled Piglet executable on the OuroDev Git (which requires an account to access), and in the OuroDev Discord server, pinned in its #piglet-development channel.

It looks like the Titan Network forum is down. I got that message as well, just from trying to peruse it as a guest. How long the forum has been down and when it may come back up, I have no idea.

I absolutely hate respeccing in City of Heroes. So I have a full level 50 character build made in Mids' Reborn before I make a character. If it's a character with power sets that I've never played before, I'll take it for a spin on Brainstorm for a few to several hours to get a feel for it, and either make adjustments in Mids' Reborn as needed or scrap the idea of the character all together if the power set(s) don't jive with me. For non-Praetorian characters that aren't on a static team, I'll just make the character and power level it to level 50 as there's no real reason not to do so unfortunately, and I already know the character from either playing the power sets before or from having taken it for a long spin on Brainstorm. For Praetorian characters, I'll just go with the build I have but use SOs while leveling, and then start slotting IO enhancements at level 32. The one exception was a Storm Blast/Sonic Blaster character I played on a semi-static team which I used SOs with to level 50, as I wanted to see what that was like with a team. I hadn't used SOs past level 32 since around 2009.