srmalloy

Being able to use the power on a target further away isn't a benefit? Cone AoEs get a longer cone, covering more area; ranged AoEs, whether location or targeted, get the same effect that a range boost to a single-target ranged attack does -- you can hit targets further away. To use M30 Grenade as an illustration, you're still shooting the same grenade, you're just using a bigger propelling charge.

The price is the same, so it doesn't really matter, but it's easier not to have to remember to get the proc at the minimum level for the set. I think I've got one character where I didn't bother attuning a KB protection IO because the recipe dropped as level 11, and it was the only one of the set I slotted, so it wasn't worth using a catalyst on.

The two exceptions to this being a) enhancements that are just procs (unlike the LotG Def/global recharge), which have the same effect regardless of level, and b) enhancements that you're only slotting one from the set into a power, in which case you're better off buying it not attuned at max level and boosting it to +5. For the pure procs, though, since they have the same effect regardless of their level, and it's mildly inconvenient to have to remember to buy one at the bottom of its level range, and attuned and regular are the same price, you might as well buy attuned just for convenience.

The regionalization, and the slew of anime-themed costume pieces. But they didn't really do anything with the gameplay to make it more attractive to the Korean market. When the first MMOs were released in Korea, there were virtually no home computers that had the graphics capability to run them, so the publishers worked out deals with the 'bangs' (internet cafés) to supply computers if they'd make their games available. This created the fundamental difference between Asian and Western MMO styles. Where with a Western MMO, a player would go home, fire up their computer, log in to the MMO, and either meet people there or solo, in Korea you'd get together with your friends, go down to the bang, sit down at adjacent computers, and play as a group. So Asian MMOs gravitated quickly to being team-centric once you were out of the starting zone, while Western MMOs remained solo-friendly. So the whole playstyle of 'City of Hero' was going up against what the Korean market expected an MMO to be, which meant that it would be a rude and lengthy uphill climb to get even a tiny sliver of the market, and it wasn't deemed worth the effort.

The ability to do this was added to the game with, IIRC, issue 18 (Going Rogue); one example I remember is a mission that had you searching the flowering bushes in the plaza of Nova Praetoria, which were glowies, but only you and your teammates could see the glowie visuals. The devs had made a start on updating the rest of the game to use them -- Matthew Habashy's and Aaron Thierry's arcs in Atlas were some of the ones that got rolled out, but the Destroyer of Worlds sacked the studio before more use could be made of the functionality.

... And the "Family Boss Defense" bug has been reported at least five times already. It's easy to search the forums to see whether a bug has already been reported, so you can add to that thread rather than adding another, but I suppose that it's even easier to just assume that you are the first one to ever see the problem and post away.

If you're just using common IOs, switching from three 50 IOs to two 50+5 IOs drops you about 3% in overall damage boost, and you're still over 90%.

Back before SOs were made available all the way to the start, I would burn a respec at 22 -- use TOs up until 12, then slot 15 common IOs, and at 22 respec to pull them all out to go into base storage for other new characters, replacing them with 25 IOs, which would be used until replaced piecemeal with sets (unslotters pulling them out to go into storage), and the last of the common IOs replaced with 50s. But my time on Live gave me a better sense of how to make a build that's at least acceptable, so I rarely need to burn a respec to fix a character.

Unfortunately, your character data is saved on the server, not the client -- "never trust the client" is almost a mantra of game design; the moment you put any long-term record for a game character on the client computer, someone will hack it to give themselves godmode. The only way that it could be done would be if you had a Sentinel+ archive for the character, and even then it would have to be loaded on the server directly. The HC devs decided from the start not to go that route, because of the opportunity to hack the Sentinel+ files, and instead had everyone start from scratch on a level playing field, which I believe to have been a much better decision.

The Radeon control panel says 21.2.3 is the most current, which I'm on, and I never turned on any of the Radeon-specific optimizations. I also doubled the RAM from 16Gb to 32Gb, replacing the old RAM completely; that didn't solve the problem On the supposition that one of the installed mods might have bad files, I moved the whole data folder out of the Homecoming folder after the first crash post-memory-upgrade and tried again; the client loaded my character enough to see that her demons were still summoned and buffed before it crashed again.

I don't believe so, but I'll have to check after I get home.

My Ice/Cold Corruptor was given power choices while training that included Freeze Ray, and I noticed that the icon showed a translucent cylinder around the figure, while the power is a Hold. Checking the power icons legend to be certain, the icon for the power is using the Sleep iconography; the cylinder around the figure should be solid for a Hold.

If I remember it correctly, the old MoG was "heal to full, drop to 10% health, and take 10% damage from everything but Psi", which I read as "Keep everything the same except take 10x damage from Psi"; this makes my Psi/EM Blaster quite happy. (she also enjoys the minotaurs in the ITF when she keeps doing normal damage while the rest of the team tries to nickle-and-dime them to death)

I think it was more of a case of 'what can be done within the limits of the game engine?' -- Praetoria went live far enough ahead of the closure of Paragon Studios that the devs were able to make a start on rolling the new features seen in Praetoria back to the rest of the game. The rework of Atlas Park shows what they had been able to get done -- all of the building changes with the new reflective windows, and the open-world instanced missions from Matthew Habashy and Aaron Thierry (Twinshot's extended tutorial arcs were basically just tweaked versions of existing mission types). Unfortunately, with the exception of the partial development of the unreleased issue that was polished and released by SCORE, we don't really know what the devs had planned with regard to further changes to the story and missions of the game.

Appearing embedded in the floor is also something that happens rarely when using an elevator in a door mission; it was a problem back on Live until the devs implemented a check that identified players who'd exited the elevator into the floor and repositioned them to yank them out of the floor.

One of the things I remember from live was, when running a Blaster, targeting the team's tank to attack their target, which putatively made it less likely for you to pull aggro. The problem was that, in the hail of special effects, you often had no idea what target you were focusing on.

Radeon RX 5600 XT. The video drivers I was using were installed more than three months ago, and it was only after I started getting the crashes that I updated them, but it made no difference.

You don't stay in a base when you log out; you're deposited at the base portal of the zone you entered the base from. This is one reason why the Monitor Duty day job icon appears when you are close to a base portal, not when you are in a base, despite the description "log out in your base to earn progress towards this badge"; you just have to be near a base portal.

They're not affected by Fear powers?

This was an ongoing issue with the Positron TF; it seemed like every time I ran it, the team was made up of four exemplar/anchor pairs, and the client was still unstable enough that it was a crapshoot whether we'd make it past the middle of the TF without having someone crash or disconnect, with a 50% chance that it would be an anchor, causing their paired exemplar to be ejected from the TF. If it happened in the first two missions, we'd generally restart, but later in the TF we'd just bull through.

Recently, I have been experiencing occasional -- sometimes almost back-to-back -- crash issues. Not just the client falling on its face, but the whole computer -- black screen and reboot. The crashes occur when finishing a transition; I've had it happen when entering a mission, leaving a mission, zoning into my base, zoning from my base to another zone, zoning with the tram, zoning with TUNNEL, and once when accepting an Assemble the Team during a Manticore TF. What makes it odd is that I have only been able to make it occur with my Demon Summoning Masterminds; when trying to replicate it with a Robotics Mastermind, or a character of any other AT, I can't get a crash. With further experimentation, simply summoning all my pets and running around zoning repeatedly failed to cause a crash; when I used Enchant Demon to buff my pets, I was able to get a crash four zone changes later. Testing using only Abyssal Empowerment did not cause a crash; the problem appears to be related to the use of Enchant Demon. I have not yet done tests summoning only one grade of pet (i.e., demonlings, demons, demon prince), applying Enchant Demon, and zoning repeatedly. Curiously, when a crash occurs, the Homecoming launcher shows the regular Homecoming client as 'not installed' when first started after the reboot, but clicking on the 'download' arrow appears to refresh something, because it shows 'Ready' within a second after clicking. Thinking that the issue might be something on my end, I upgraded my video drivers, and also wiped and completely reinstalled the game, although I did retain the mods I have installed: Vidiotmaps, the 'MoreMaps4U' i24 map update, and BernardTheBeast's sound mod to make the Demons less annoying. I will have to test removing each one in turn to see if one of them is the issue, but the problem does not occur anywhere else in the game except for loading into a new zone, and only with my Demons MMs. If I dismiss my pets before zoning, the problem does not occur, but taking the time to resummon and buff them all for every door mission in a TF gets tedious.

As long as you don't care about the inevitable shitstorm from people who see their pet feature not getting the priority they feel that it deserves, regardless of how much work it entails or how many other things break in the process, etc.

Which immediately reminds me of:

This is probably not going to be an issue for non-pet characters, but is it possible to change the way mouse targeting works -- the change to a red pointer to indicate that your pointer is over a targetable mob -- to exclude mobs that are between your character and the camera, but not displayed on screen? With my Masterminds, it's become tedious to have to perform camera gymnastics at mission doors and glowies to get the blue hand allowing you to click on the door/glowies, because my pets always run up behind me, and their target boxes for clicking on them extend up into my field of view even if they're hidden off the bottom of the screen.

IIRC, it's a condition imposed by NCsoft as part of the negotiations the Homecoming group is engaged in. With video hosting sites monetizing the uploaded video, this is making money off of NCsoft's IP, with Homecoming being complicit in enabling it by operating the rogue servers -- grounds for NCsoft to drop a C&D order on the negotiating table and go home. So Homecoming is aggressive in shutting it down when they find it, the same way they're careful to only accept donations to cover their operating costs.