srmalloy

The best commentary about the community was something I remember from an ITF back on live, when we had a woman and her five-year-old son on the team. She said that CoH was the only online game she felt comfortable about letting her son play without supervision, because of the quality of the community. And when I tried playing other MMOs -- Aion, Tabula Rasa (both before NCsoft killed CoH), and SWTOR -- I was severely depressed by how rude, vindictive, and foul-mouthed the chat channels were. Yes, there were still courteous and helpful players, but they were far and away the minority. And I have to wonder if it's the setting itself that brings out the good behavior of the community. Well, that and the complete absence of adversarial loot, which inherently fosters jerk behavior.

It's far too late to do anything about it this year, and it only seems to be an issue when ToTing in a league and knocking on a door when another part of the league is already fighting, but is it possible to tighten up where "trick" mobs spawn? When your're solo, or in a group small enough that you're only knocking at one door at a time, any "trick" mobs will come out that door, or a door immediately adjacent to it (i.e., double, or occasional quad doors). If you have a league that's hitting several doors at once, and already fighting a spawn at another door, that's no longer the case. If you get a "trick" response from knocking, the spawn will almost always come out a door where there are already "trick" mobs present, and that door can be several doors over, or even on a different floor of the building where you're ToTing. For example, if you're at the 'murder motel', and you knock at the door on the ground floor closest to the bottom of the stairs to the upper level, get a "Trick" result, and there are other characters already fighting a spawn in the adjacent corner of the upper level, the mobs spawning from the 'trick' will spawn on the upper floor where the fight is going on, even though it's more than fifty feet away and up one floor. Once you have mobs spawning out a given door, other characters clicking on the door they came out of will get mobs spawning out that door as you would expect, but knocking on a door and getting the resulting mobs spawning somewhere else significantly dilutes the perception and effect of a "trick" result.

You are door-knocking in a level-appropriate zone, aren't you?

And it depends a lot on the character. I have an Elec/Elec/Elec Sentinel that I just took out on a round of the doors on an office building in NW Kallisti Wharf, and got three EB Vampires to verify what I remembered from last year; the only thing that makes the EBs different from the other mobs is that they're a sack of HP that takes longer to drop. They come out the door, and as soon as I see Lightning Field doing damage, they get their End taken away from them, and then it's just spanking them while I watch to see if any of them try to run. The Ancient Vampires spent virtually all of their time shaking from the shocks, and at 0 End the rest of their abilities are neutered.

This is a problem not limited to the Halloween EBs. You also see it in the Rikti zone raids and Nemesis invasions, where mobs teleporting in can attack you while being completely immune to being attacked — in the case of the Rikti and Nemesis, you get "Invalid Target" floaters and the attack fails to go off, while with the Halloween spawns your attack goes off, but you get the "Unaffected" floater over your target(s). In all of these cases, the salient point is that, while you can target them, you are unable to attack/damage them, while the converse is not true; they are able to attack and damage you the moment they appear, while you have to wait to be able to damage them.

Given the existing 'rate of exchange' for inspirations, where you can take three identical inspirations and convert them to a different inspiration of the same tier, I think that allowing two of the same inspiration to merge and bump up a tier is too good. I would like to see an option in the 'combine inspirations' menu for you to be able to, instead of converting to a different inspiration of the same tier, to convert them to the same inspiration type of the next tier up.

Except for the stupid 'throw your pistol into the air, catch it, and fire' animation for Piercing Rounds; that one needs to die the real death.

That would be double-plus ungood.

Which is elitism in the other direction. The Group Fly proponents say "Well, you can just go to Null and turn off Group Fly on yourself", while the people complaining about it say "Why should I have to go out of my way to stop other people from imposing their power choices on me?" And while I can see both sides' arguments as having merit, with the simplest solution to make the 'make me unaffected by Group Fly' setting the default for new characters, my personal view is that Group Fly was originally intended as a way for a team member to extend a movement ability to their teammates who lacked it (à la Grant Invisibility), and that its use by Masterminds was a "meh, it works well enough, we don't need to clean it up" decision by the Paragon Studios devs when City of Villains was being developed; no one thought about it being used 'selfishly' by Masterminds without considering their teammates, so no effort was put into working out some way for a Mastermind to spread their travel power to their henchmen without affecting anyone else.

While the proviso 'when not in combat' appeals to me because of specialized situations like the AFK Robotics MMs at the 'murder motel' in PI turning on Group Fly and leaving their henchmen on Aggressive hovering in the courtyard generating lag and attacking anything that comes within their detection range, I don't think that it solves the problem, because there are 'legitimate' (putting it in quotes because I know that there will be Robotics MMs who will yell about how leaving their bots hovering to attack autonomously while they go AFK is a legitimate tactic) situations where you would want to have your henchmen flying with you. It's an interesting idea, but I think it needs more work. Automatically giving an MM's henchmen the same movement speed as the MM, and the same travel power as the MM, addresses the problem differently -- pathing is still going to leave the henchmen lagging behind in complex environments, but it gives them the capability to keep up and cluster around the MM without involving an additional power that also reaches out and affects other people around them. Is it a good solution? No. Is it workable? I think so, but I don't know enough about the internals of the henchmen's movement code to know how automatically giving them a full travel power will affect everything else.

Peregrine Island is the 'go to' location for the 'murder motel league' because it's impossible to level out of it; in any other zone, once you ding past the zone level range, you become unable to get a response when knocking on doors. Kallisti Wharf has the same lack of a level cap that PI does, but its architecture, while objectively better than the other blueside zones, does not have a tight door cluster like the 'murder motel' buildings do. There is a 'murder motel' building in Dark Astoria as well, but I don't think the Halloween event extends there; if trick-or-treating were enabled in Dark Astoria, it would create a second focus point for ToT leagues that would also be free of the risk of outleveling; unfortunately, the building is considerably further away from the hospital than the one in PI is, so it would probably attract many fewer people (particularly the people who bring out low-level characters solely to take advantage of the firehose of XP for leveling, who would otherwise encounter problems getting back from the hospital to the 'murder motel' after defeat), which would make adding DA to the ToT event much less attractive as a strategy to pull people away from the PI .

That there are people posting music declared to be "royalty free video game music" does not absolve the HC staff from performing due diligence to protect against inadvertent copyright infringement.

Back before Containment, reaching 32 and getting your pet power was the point at which a Controller was able to viably solo again; from about level 12 to level 31, the damage output of a Controller lagged waaaaay behind that of other ATs; depending on the powerset, they could more or less run base-difficulty content solo, albeit at a very slow pace due to their limited damage output or long recharge on their more effective powers. With Containment and IO sets, that's less true, although there is still a significant jump in damage output when they get their T9 power, Uun is correct in that the squishier pets require more buff-and-heal support from the character's secondary powerset in order to keep the pet(s) alive to take advantage of that increased damage.

Both new tunes and player submitted tunes run up hard against the need for the HC staff to ensure that a new tune does not have a copyright that Homecoming would be violating by adding it to the game. If you don't have the artist and name of the piece, but just a recording, it becomes considerably more complex. As a baroque and obscure example of how complicated this can be, Peter Schickele, in his album "P.D.Q. Bach on the Air", has a section "What's My Melodic Line", where the (purported) listeners to the radio station send in the score to any work written between 1600 and 1750, challenging the "virtuosi di Hoople" to play the piece after being given its name. Three works are named, all by the baroque composer Archangelo Spumoni, and four are played (one is a misidentification); each one has a completely different score, and they're all the same piece of music, just scored differently. I don't think the resources of the HC staff are up to doing copyright searches on random music to ensure that they're not setting Homecoming up for a violation of copyright claim. The last two suggestions, though, just depend on the animation resources available to the HC staff, along with a determination that they're worthwhile enough additions to devote the work to.

Plot it out fully -- say you have 500 HP, and you take 100 damage. With a 60% IH, you'd drop to 400 HP, then 'instantly' heal back to 460 after the delay. If you have 50% resist and 60% IH, you'd drop to 450 damage, then 'instantly' heal back to 480 after the delay. Yes, you're getting less benefit from your IH, but that's because you're not taking as much damage in the first place, so there's less for it to heal.

Guess again. Resistance is also resistance debuff resistance, so if you apply a 50% resistance debuff to a target with 90% Resistance, they resist 90% of the debuff, resulting in a net of 5% debuff to their resistance (see the wiki for Resistance (Mechanics)). Now, if it was an unresistable debuff, then it would be the strongest power, but if it's resistable, it's not going to do much against the targets you would most want to use it on.

That's what I normally do, although it can take a bit for them all to respond; GoTo/Passive is faster, but then you have to put them back on Defensive or Aggressive afterward. *shrug*

There's already a popmenu out there for summoning your lore pets, whatever they may be, so it should be possible to make a similar popmenu file for the vanity pets, either as one big list (unwieldy) or grouped in sets by the source of the pet (i.e., anniversary pets, monstrous aether pets, S.T.A.R.T. pets, etc.). So you could have a single icon to pick from all the pets you have, and see the ones you don't have.

With one exception. There used to be a Cone Range enhancement; this was taken out and folded into the Range enhancements, so that if you slot Range into a cone attack, it increases the depth of the cone, allowing you to hit targets further away. Because it doesn't change the cone angle, this increases the beaten zone for the cone attack, although the maximum number of targets doesn't change. Boost Range will do this to cone attacks like Full Auto and Flamethrower, allowing an Assault Rifle character to really reach out and touch someone.

Range enhancements and Boost Range; unless I'm doing something like 'See that dot?' shooting, such as from Imperious north across the E/W valley to the courtyard on the other side in Cimerora, the mobs will almost always react. And ask me how I found out that the Malta Gunslingers with their pistols can outrange Snipe+Boost Range. This is shooting from a distance in excess of 250 yards. Although when I am doing the really extreme-range shooting, with some mobs it can be amusing that I take one shot, and the spawn is all "Fred fell down. How about that.", and it's not until I take the second shot that they aggro on me. Shooting like this is how I found out (while going after Council war walkers for the badge) that there is a maximum range for badge credit -- IIRC, it's about 210 yards -- and if you're shooting from farther out, you'll still get the defeat message and XP/inf/drops, but you won't increment the defeat count for badges.

I've made this type of suggestion before, where Instant Healing is changed from a click that gives a big boost to regeneration to a toggle that makes incoming damage work similarly to how Spectral Wounds does. Spectral Wounds does X amount of damage, then if the target is still alive a short while later, Y amount of that damage heals back. Instant Healing would work in a similar way -- you take damage, and a second or so later, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' heals. I'm not sure how the internal mechanics would work in the game code, but it would add a step before damage is applied to the character where a heal based on the incoming damage gets put in the event queue with a short delay. So if you had your IH slotted to bring its heal to 60%, and you took 100 points of damage (after any Resistance was applied), a short time later (a second or thereabouts), you'd be healed for 60 points. The queued heal only happens once for each time you're damaged, so a 60% heal from IH acts like 60% resistance with the proviso that you have to survive taking all the damage first, before IH will restore you. Depending on how the power gets balanced, the entire amount could be enhanceable, or there could be enhanceable and unenhanceable parts.

Well, it's completely understandable that they should be salty about what happened.

As I recall, it was a moderately complicated issue to fix. Making pets survive zoning was easy; the problem was that they would become uncontrolled, and be hostile to everything, attacking the pet owner and their team. It would be necessary to go back into the pet code and winkle out what the solution to reasserting control after zoning was, and carry that across to other pets. And there's a surprisingly large number of 'ancillary' pets that this would need to be applied to -- Dark Servant, Force Field Generator, Seeker Drones, etc. -- and you've got oddities like the Acid Mortar from the Traps set, which already gets pulled out of missions with you if it hasn't run out of mortar charges when you exit (a bug having been fixed with that, where the base, but not the mortar proper, was drawn after exit).

Depending on the situation, follow mode isn't a panacea. When I've had my Necro/Marine MM on Rikti Mothership raids, despite having my henchmen set to Follow, I will almost always see one or two halfway up the side of the bowl whacking on some random Rikti that hadn't even made it down into the bowl where I was standing, much less attacked me. So you can still get shafted by your henchmen's target fixation; ordering them to a location near you, then using Soul Extraction, then releasing them to Follow again, or ordering them to attack a particular target, is the only way to really be sure.

My Grav/Traps controller plays completely differently on teams than when solo, given the normal "rush rush rush" mode of most teams. Solo, it's almost lazy, and I take it as a bit of a failure if one of the mission mobs gets an attack off.