srmalloy

I haven't had it happen on Homecoming, but back on Live I remember one mission at +0 where every single spawn on the map was +1... except for the boss spawn, which was -1. I guess that was why he surrounded himself with tough guards.

The Citadel Task Force is the best argument I've seen for adding a Slaver digging tool to the game -- use Reveal, point the tool at the end room, press the trigger button and hold it, then just wait until it's finished coring a tunnel straight to the end room. If there happen to be any Council in the way of the beam, well, that's just collateral damage.

Spawns in missions should be ±1 to the modified level of the mission, so if it's a level 50 mission, and you have your missions set to -1 level, you should be getting spawns of level 48-50. If you're getting spawns above your level with missions set to -1, then that needs to be reported, with the contact, mission name, and so forth in the report. That said, there are some missions where, due to mission constraints or design bugs, some mobs spawn above or below that range -- a particular named boss whose level range bottoms out above the mission level, for example, or the quirk where you'll get random level-14 spawns in level 20+ missions because there's a bad mob type in a spawn definition.

It's not a crafting material, but I remember when I first joined Homecoming, you could reliably sell Essence of the Earth inspirations for 10,000 inf, and now I see sale histories running around 10-100, with the track record of selling the extras I get during a Hami raid showing the occasional 500, or even more rarely 1000, but not more than that, with occasional sale history runs as low as 1.

Well, to start with, the fact that you have completely different rigging -- Thugs/Mercs/Ninja/Undead all follow the basic humanoid rigging for costuming, but Demons, Beasts, and Robots all have unique rigging that doesn't line up with the existing costume piece location points, so just giving all MM henchmen their own costume slot tied to the existing costume creator completely shafts Demon Summoning, Beast Summoning, and Robotics, because it wouldn't work with them. So you'd need to have four separate customization interfaces, with separate sets of customization options -- Necromancy pets should still be visibly undead, regardless of their customization, for example. And you would potentially need three versions of the customizations for each henchman type so that the upgrade status of a henchman is visible. Then all of the art for the customization would have to be completed, and tested against all of the animations to ensure that they remain consistent -- the fully-upgraded Assault Bot has a missile launcher that extends up from its back to fire; if you customize it to no longer have this rocket pack, what new animation is required to replace it, and will it be different for different customization choices?

I already reported this in the Typo thread.

Western society are "guilt" cultures; Korean society, as well as Japanese and Chinese society, are "shame" cultures. In a guilt culture, morality is internal, so that if you do something wrong, as you describe, you are expected to admit it, and where possible make amends for it. In a shame culture, morality is external, and to a great extent, it's not that you are moral, but that you are perceived as moral. That is the principle behind 'face' -- you are expected to feel shame if people believe that you have broken the societal rules, or sometimes even made choices that make it easy for you to break the societal rules. For example, it's shameful for a woman to live alone in Iran, because then she could be a prostitute. It doesn't matter whether she is or not; that she didn't actively work to not look like a prostitute is sufficient reason to shame her. So in shame cultures you can have a lot of public virtue signaling and concealed duplicity. And the shame doesn't just fall on the individual -- it also falls on the individual's superiors, who should have noticed their subordinate's failings and corrected them. In business, it manifests itself as impairing the reputation of a manager who promoted a subordinate, who then became lax and failed to perform their new job properly; the manager should have corrected the subordinate or picked a more appropriate subordinate to promote. As a result, shame cultures tend to be more collectivist, where collective action (like social rejection or imprisonment) is taken when shaming is not effective. And it's not regarded as virtuous to defend your innocence is you can't easily prove it; you're expected to accept your punishment and try to avoid the appearance of guilt in the future. And it is an oversimplification to label Western society as a monolithic 'guilt' culture -- for example, Catholicism is more shame-oriented, while Protestantism is more guilt-oriented. And it can go deeper than that -- conservative protestants are much more shame oriented than progressive protestants.

Primal, a level 50 MM; I don't have any Praetorian characters low enough level to have not made the hero/villain choice moving to Primal Earth.

I logged onto a character I hadn't played in some time, and they had three Valentine tips lingering from the last event. I delivered one to Nightstar, then picked another one that was to be misdelivered to Archon Burkholder, with the directions "Board Transit". Apparently, the CTA transit is not considered 'transit' for this purpose, which sort of jerks over the Praetorian characters who have not yet left Praetoria when they get this type of delivery from the Valentine event; I'm not sure what making the CTA stations 'transit' for these purposes would entail, but it seems only fair to give Praetorians a way to deliver/misdeliver valentines to recipients they would otherwise be unable to reach.

I my opinion, it's more the perceived damage to their 'face' from their having made the decision to shutter the game, and then having the game's player community prove that their decision was a bad one, instead of just accepting that NCsoft management had made their decision and that was the end of it, as proper subordinates would in Korean culture. As long as we're just going off to our corner and playing with their cast-off game, we're no threat to their face, and they can ignore us.

When you're at the holocostume vendor and open the window to buy or convert aether, the menu still shows "Monstrous Aether Conversion", instead of "Unstable Aether Conversion". The actual conversion selection does show 'Unstable Aether', however.

I'm not sure whether it's a bug or WAI, but "Mark and Recall" is unusable when your character is flagged as "Only Affecting Self", even though it's a power that only affects your character. Is this because it spawns a pseudo-pet at the mark location or something similar, so that the game identifies it as affecting something other than just you, and if so, should this be changed?

And that's how we get venereal diseases resistant to many drugs... 😁

And add a new power to Beast Mastery that lets you use one of your henchmen at range:

To a point; you can only accumulate 10 bars of Patrol XP before it stops. And as a corrollary to this, the change where exploration badges stopped awarding XP directly and started awarding Patrol XP changed how my characters approach exploring the city. Previously, I would run around completing the badge and plaque sets for zones as soon as I could expect the character to survive getting them; now, I only run around enough to accumulate ten bars of patrol XP, then play through enough content to run that down to a bar or two, then explore more to build up the reserve of patrol XP again, rinse and repeat -- and as a result, I have characters at 50 who have not fully explored all the zones even just blueside, much less changing alignment to vigilante and running through redside, or going goldside for those zones.

Okay, so without breaking how the game is currently for power levels, the HC staff can change leveling so that you get two enhancement slots at 30, 31, and 33, then you get three at 50 and three more at veteran level 1. Now you can six-slot your level 49 power without using a respec to do it. You're not looking at how the process of a respec works. You select all your powers first, then after all your powers are selected, you allocate your additional enhancement slots into any of the powers you've chosen -- so at your first opportunity to place additional slots, you can place them in the power you picked last (your level 49 power choice); you can six-slot that power before you put slots in any other power.

The northernmost of the Bicentennial plaques in Independence Port begins "Paragon's involvement in World War 2 began on December 7, 1941, when Nazi German supersoldiers struck Independence Port." Unless Paragon City's history changes the entire history of WWII, Hitler didn't declare war on the US until December 10, 1941, doing so as a response to the US declaring war against Japan on December 8th, so arranging to have supersoldiers attacking Paragon City the same day as Imperial Japan struck Pearl Harbor would have required Japan to have revealed their plans to Germany, breaking the secrecy of 'Operation Z' (the planning for the Pearl Harbor attack), and attacking on the 7th, prior to Germany declaring war against the US, would have created the same outrage against the Reich as the Pearl Harbor attack did against Japan. The text of this plaque should be changed to have a date of December 10th or later -- as much as two weeks later, to allow the supersoldiers to be transported to the US coast, unless Hitler had advance knowledge of the attack to be able to pre-position the supersoldiers.

On the incarnate powers Create tab, particularly with the Lore option, the number of choices can push the other categories off the screen. The existing interface opens a category to your choices when you click on it (i.e., clicking on 'Alpha' opens the submenu for all the types of Alpha boost); can this be modified so that clicking on an open category closes it (i.e., when Lore is open showing all the types of Lore pets, clicking on 'Lore' again closes the Lore category?) It's not a big issue, just an annoyance, so I don't think it should be given a high priority to change.

I haven't tested it recently, but I remember this being an issue with Rain of Arrows, as well -- the mobs in your beaten zone would aggro when you started the animation, not when the attack went off, even if you were attacking from outside their normal aggro range (i.e., so they wouldn't notice you before the attack fired -- at least, that's the theory)

About the only thing you need to remember is that you can only benefit from five of the same named bonus from your set bonuses. The name part is important -- the LotG Def/+Rech bonus is named "Luck of the Gambler: Increased Recharge", while there are other 7.5% recharge set bonuses (Sting of the Manticore 5-piece bonus, regular Defiant Barrage 5-piece bonus, regular Command of the Mastermind 4-piece bonus, Panacea 5-piece bonus, etc.), which have the name "Huge Recharge bonus", and you can have five of each; five LotG bonuses (if you have enough powers to slot Def into), and five of the Huge bonus. Blood Mandate has a "Small Increased Fire/Cold/AoE Def Bonus" and a "Huge Increased AoE/Fire/Cold Def Bonus" among its bonuses; each of those gives 1.88% to Fire and Cold defense -- but because they have different names, you can benefit from each up to five times, for a max of 8.9% Fire/Cold Defense bonus. And this comes straight from Castle, one of the Paragon Studios devs, back on Live. But you'll still find people who say you can only benefit from five of the same numerical value of bonus -- and they're wrong. The names of the bonuses you have aren't displayed in the Enhancement Set page on the Homecoming wiki, but they are displayed in the information window that pops up with /infoself.

You get a free level 15, 20, or 25 IO if you do the crafting tutorial — you get an IO you can slot. So if you do the tutorial at 12 when it unlocks, you'll get a recipe for a level 15 IO; wait until 17 to do it, and you'll get a level 20 recipe; you don't get a level 25 recipe unless you're 22+. It was viable to do it at 12 back on Live, because you'd been slotting TOs up to that point, and a 15 IO was better than a +1 DO — and getting a free Acc IO was gold, because AH prices were insane; I think Luck Charms would peak around 30k each from time to time, and when the south end of the Hollows got reworked to put the Coralax there as part of making it a "kinder, gentler hazard zone", you couldn't go down there and mug green-con Madness Mages for Luck Charms any more, because the boss spawn rate sucked and they were hard to find, instead of there being at least one in half the spawns.

I have a slightly different view — I would like to see the "login" badges, like the anniversary and holiday badges, where the only requirement is to log in with the character, be awarded to all characters for an account at the time of login. So if you had, say, fifty characters during the anniversary event, logging in with any of them would award the badge to all fifty, but a character you created after the event was over wouldn't get the badge. Some people are getting way up in the number of characters they have, and even just logging each one in and out can consume a lot of time and tedium.

I've taken low-level characters out there to get the badge and merits as a one-time boost, trading the merits for convertors to sell, but beyond that, I'll generally wait until the character can survive touring the rest of the zone for the exploration badges and plaques, which usually means at least 25.

I can't really speak to this because the only character I have with Womhole is a Grav/Traps Controller, and it's hard to tell any KB from Womhole from the KB the mobs get from landing in the middle of the Trip Mines she puts down as a target for the Wormhole.

One thing that I think needs to be looked at is IO scaling, so that, while the high end doesn't change, the bottom end doesn't disicentivise slotting even common IOs at lower levels because they're no better than TOs.