Seed22

Im very glad to see this. It’s honestly what I wanted most. For all the flak I give, I know when to acknowledge an awesome moment and this is most certainly one of those. Here’s hoping it’s a solid 2025 for you all and CoH!

After really ramping up my exposure to new releases in 2024 and beating a good number of games with fun and fair but challenging bosses via mechanics, I wondered if that’d be something you all would want for CoH? It doesn’t have to be exclusive to HM. I usually find myself just fighting to not fall asleep at a lot of the older climactic fights either in TFs or arcs in CoH and I was wondering, what if we gave them appropriate but escalating mechanics for their levels? With light mechanics being the lower levels all the way up to very in depth and challenging ones by Incarnates and HM. I think this would go a long way to making all ATs more desired for teaming, as some mechanics would be able to be mitigated via CC or reduced via debuff(still would need to react and dodge though or interact in some way with it) An example for low level: Giving the frostfire mish a little makeover to introduce empowering flame pillarsand ice…somethings, the flame would boost FF’s damage and res, while the ice would slightly impede the team’s recharge or vision(could be mini blizzards that float around the room). You’d have to destroy the pillars(4) while trying to survive against frostfire. Simple introduction to boss based mechanics. What are your thoughts?

My Cold/Ice, my pride n joy build since I’ve been reworking some of my 50s(getting better at the game does that) has 2 travel powers. Teleport and Super Speed, along with fold space by ehhh I dunno 25+? He also puts out Corr without scourge damage and is HM 4 viable and easily steamrolls on his own. Having multiple travel powers early isn’t always bad. It really depends on the set. What IS bad is having terribad power picks(like dual wield on Dual Pistols or no hasten), but even then? Not really. Seems you just had some bad experiences with Synapse, which really sucks.

Resist based armors mostly only go for resist, Max HP, and recharge for heal clickies. Defense is a happy accident and usually melee but not a focus.

I do. It’s one of the reasons I don’t make alts anymore. It’s kinda like being stuck between two terrible choices, and no, time away has not helped me want to level organically or even farm again. If anything, it’s doing the opposite effect. Least I’ve been blowing excess inf on HM viable builds for existing 50s because proc bomb madness is surprisingly fun for short bouts. But this has nothing to do with OP’s question. OP, what you’re seeing is vet levels. They give empyrean merits and/or threads used for incarnates every 3 levels up until 99. Anything after is for fun

The low levels here ARE a waste of time. They’re utter shit. Full stop. this game needs a serious overhaul of its’ leveling experience. Right now it’s outdated trash, not like endgame is expansive, it’s definitely not, but it sure beats, “Beat up 10 of X in zone and talk to random contact here”. Which tends to be a good deal of the leveling. You still can go through this and be dogshit at the game too, in fact a good deal of some of the worst players I’ve experienced have never touched AE. It’s why I never waste time PuG’ing 4*, as while it’s not difficult, people really struggle with the basics of this game to where i don’t trust the gamble.

It seems like most people really enjoyed it actually. Yeah a few bad apples mucked the water but honestly this was a great idea to do. I think it would probably have a few bad apples trying to just sow chaos now, but there would be a lot of genuine passionate and well thought out feedback if they did it today. Otherwise this game to me development wise is a lost cause* and an AmA is a waste of time filled with glazing and softball questions that accomplish nothing. *If a few people is enough to go “this isn’t a worthwhile endeavor” then honestly nothing of substance can ever be addressed. Leading to a vicious spiral of wanting to address an issue, being met with but one or two people might say something mean so no, over n over until CoH reaches some sort of mediocre hellscape where everyone who cared about the direction of the game is gone. That’s a little tinfoil hat-y but still.

You know what’d be impressive but will never happen? A roadmap.

It’s not even in the same quantum time zone or omniverse as old school WoW raiding. 4* is very VERY tame in difficulty. To the point where you can be inebriated and run it damn near flawlessly (done so when it came out. Barrier cycling is the best! 😀) WoW raiding has in depth mechanics. 4* has *checks notes* standing in 4 corners and DPSing some adds sometimes. I just used it as a loose example of what a super survivable build would be used for as that’s the only content where I could understand one thinking about going all in on defense for(they’d be wrong to do so for that too but at least I could follow the logic) But the core principle still applies; Defense on a non defense based armor with no DDR is not how you build Bio. You can kind of look at it and tell that’s not how it’s supposed to go. It’s a hybrid regen based armor with a smattering of other bits like res and a tidge of defense. Lean into its’ strengths is all I’m saying, OP.

Only questions I would ask would pertain to balance direction, so questions they won’t give concrete answers on. And not to be mean, but the only people I am truly interested in hearing from about all things CoH minus the power direction listed above is the original team. Since it was them who did a lot of what I enjoy in CoH pre shutdown. Still do it if you and them want to I guess.

Who are you hearing this from? It’s pretty mediocre as a set overall thanks to over correcting the numbers. You’ll rarely see, even here, modern TW builds as a result of this. But there’s a shining light at the end of this tunnel OP. Because WP has bonkers recovery, you can afford to cycle the proc chain you will definitely need to reach competitive numbers in AoD->WS->Follow Through->Rend Armor. Not exactly the chain but those are your 4 powers that comprise all of your DPS. Proc them. Proc them well.

My arc I was mostly done with got lost in a move at the end of the year. I may take time to rewrite it, as I wasn’t completely happy with it. Or I’ll just continue on my hiatus and just get to it whenever I feel like getting back into CoH in earnest.

I usually work off of the best builders in the game’s knowledge of the set plus my own experiences. Here’s why they and I say chasing def is not a great use of your slots: In any team at endgame, you will be well over defense cap and res due to barrier cycling. In solo, literally most incarnate mobs shred defense. You should prioritize: Max HP Recharge Regen(via Max HP capping since regen scales with this) Some smattering of defense. You can turtle up, which is nice and dandy and all till 4*. Then that holds up a lot less and you’ll be defaulting to barriers for protection, or probably even incarnate mobs. All it takes is a few -DEF hits and you’re on your way to pain town. The clicky absorbs help, hence my emphasis on Recharge. But it’s not the absorb that’s the star of the show here, it’s the residual regen in my experience at endgame. That absorb is getting chewed up in an instant if you let barrier slip. This is of course for true endgame content like iTrials and 4*. Building for defense compromises on what Bio ACTUALLY needs, which is what I listed, plus is a waste thanks to support and barriers, which will be in abundance. You CAN do it, just like I can skip hasten on every build. To some it’s right, but for minmaxing, if that’s the goal here, it’s ill advised.

Defense doesn’t benefit Bio nearly as much as this defense oriented forums think it does. Remember, Bio has NO DDR. This means its’ defense will be debuffed to all hell in nanoseconds and you’ll fold instantly. Defense should be an afterthought for Bio after pumping recharge, regen and Max HP(not necessarily in that order. Personally start with Max HP and Recharge) for your survival CD’s. Every build prioritizing defense will and does die constantly in actually difficult content if they’re not life supporting off team buffs and more importantly a whole tray of T3 purp insp.

Couple things: -Proc bomb TS -Drop weave. Probably tough too given the auto power can mule -Six Slot Zap. Two winter pieces then 4 procs -Drop Havoc Punch -I think LR can be proc bombed since its not a psuedo pet like the stalker version but if not 5 piece apoc Thats just the few things I could glean on first glance

Seems like HC is 1-2 with these enemy adjustments. That’s not difficulty you’re highlighting, that’s overtuning. Real difficulty doesn’t look like that. But that’s an easy fix, just tweak the numbers again and it can easily go 2-1 on the revamps. Will it happen? That remains to be seen. I’m personally not a fan of these revamps, not because “moar harder bad” this game is and always will be a joke in difficulty, because it’s meant to be more of a laid back type of game(why I had it in my rotation of games to begin with post relaunch besides nostalgia from shutdown days), but because it may mean being forced to team for everything eventually down the road. If I have to form a team every time I want to solo more than a mob of 5-6 enemies(I usually solo +1x8 to just relax every once in awhile), I’m not going to be too happy about that and will drop this game like a bad habit, nostalgia or not.

Placate is nice to grab if you can but it’s not a must have. It’s great for triple crit madness though. Example: TF->ET->Fast AS w/Stealth proc->ET->Placate->TF-> Fast ET You get 4 crits actually here, my bad. You get two fast crit ET’s and two crit TF’s. Start with TF. this is one example of what placate can do for you. It’s also insane on ice melee for stalkers.

So this part actually is very important. If you want to test something like this, all of your builds NEED to be min/maxed. You can’t test the full potential of a set without first getting to its’ full potential. Without minmaxing, the test are effectively heavily skewed and not painting an accurate picture of performance.

As much as I hate to be a stick in the mud, it’s corruptor. That’s the best support, but if you’re talking strictly between troller and fender it truly depends on the performance of the team and how well they capitalize on said support. A troller at or near 50 will mitigate the damage wholesale via solid CC, which the team could capitalize on for smooth times ahead. On the flipside, a fender can mitigate the damage via overpowered buffs and debuffs that neuter the mob in their own way, allowing the team to continue in relative soft safety while contributing better damage outside of procs. I’d have to give it to the fender given the current meta, if Corr wasn’t an option.

The internet makes it insanely hard to get humor, so please accept my apology!

I got the sentiment the first time, but my post addressed your first point of him not doing research along with the comment about interacting with the forums. I’d appreciate you taking your own advice when it comes to my post. It’s a long one but it addresses everything and then some.

No, they did plenty of research. But it wasn’t based on any concrete data or scientific analysis, it was, as he stated VERY early on in the video if you saw it, that it was based on a bunch of videos and some articles from both major and minor sites. Alls to say, it wasn’t anything concrete. I dunno, if he interacted with these forums, he’d have to interact with ALL forums. You all are biased here for CoH, which, I mean makes sense given its the CoH forums. If you’re biased, what do you think other community forums are like? Look, you didn’t like the video because it put your favorite game low on a list. That doesn’t make his video bad or y’all’s opinion on where it should be ranked any more or less valid. It’s literally almost a satirical meme tier video that for some reason has a few here’s jimmy’s in a ruffle. Hell, I’ve told some of you here who read the video game section of the forums about games that I consider absolute bangers of this year releases and last year’s releases, and have been met with dismissals. Didn’t wig out, just shrugged and went back to playing the games I enjoy. If anything, like Ronin said before, you want it to rank higher? Get it more visibility. Get CoH more favorable articles. That’ll see it ranked way higher. It’s not like he hates the game, it just, based on his criterion, fell to that rank. It is what it is 🤷🏾‍♂️

I’m glad to see HM 4 being done by some different comps. That’s always been an issue of mine, the lack of variety in teams. I always figured different teams would take 3+ hrs to get through it without barrier cycling, glad to know that’s not true. I still have a major hangup with HM in the form of it leaning too much into stat based difficulty, making trash mobs “difficult”(not really) at the expense of mechanical depth. To date, HM LGTF is the most mechanically demanding(relative to only CoH) HM in game. I hope for the next HM, it approaches FF14 levels of mechanical depth. Not exactly reaching it, but showing that’s where they’re headed, so they can slack on what I consider artificial difficulty with over reliance on stats, which are largely ignored in support meta teams(mostly corrs and fenders), or barrier cycling(common meta practice) Smaller teams won’t add anything of note, as others have said.

-Mass email of items -Seemless cross faction play(WoW has this mostly so I include it here) -Sell all option enhancements in stores(SOs. There technically is one in the AH so this is kind of a half issue but having it on stores would be great.) These are just the three I can think of off the top of my head. BG3 I believe has character descriptions. Most other action oriented games do not unfortunately. I haven’t played as many tactical RPGs but I’d imagine they have something. Not too sure though. But to be fair to those who don’t, its’ kind of easy to see what the enemy does after one or so encounters in other games. In game enemy descriptions really only fit MMOs I think.

Raising the level cap doesn’t usually fix an issue of difficulty, if ever solely. It would require actual walls to be implemented into CoH via enemy mechanics that check your level of understanding as a player incrementally along the path to 50( mobs that play like experienced players would, prioritizing targets and becoming heavily resistant to player taunts being a possible example) This would of course also require revamps and large efforts, understandably. I get why it wouldn’t happen. The IO system IS indeed fine…and I’m not advocating its’ removal to clarify. It’s just…think of it like a max level mage in WoW stomping around their starter zone. Now imagine that for the entire game. It can be fun, especially if you want to turn your brain off and just smack some goons. But even with that, I still would find it weird that when I want something that at least equals me in power without being artificially difficult(dangerous mechanics and modest stat boost instead of 100% stat boost and the same mechanics you saw in lower tiers of the same content) there isn’t anything in game for that. TLDR: IOs and incarnates are kind of out of place in a game like this imo. They should not be removed, but maybe there should be more mechanics driven encounters over stat boosted enemies that account for this.