Tiresias

Every time I try to play my Fire/Fire/Fire Blaster I find myself feeling like I lack for options beyond blow up the world and end right back up on my Dark/Ice/Dark Defender again, grateful for the complete overage of options in combat (and ludicrous number of things to manage). Strangely enough, I enjoy my Ice/Ice/Dark Blaster more than any other Blaster build. It feels like playing a Controller but with actual damage.

Some of us like the theme. I have a D&D campaign setting where an individual's race means nothing in terms of personality; there are lawful good demons and chaotic evil angels to be found everywhere. In keeping with that, I have a lot of characters that take after fantasy tropes, including nephilim (angel/demon hybrids), orcs, werewolves, liches, etc. I also have characters that look like government agents (my Controllers and Dominators), some in environmental suit-type mechs (including one that looks like the Doomslayer), and a few characters with "plainclothes" costumes, like my Peacebringer, who wears a sweater vest and a plaid skirt. In other words, the people playing angels or demons may just have that one character among many with that theme.

As someone who recently returned, I LOVE the change. The camera functions like you would expect it to from playing other tab-target MMOs. ...And that's probably why the change was made: to accommodate new and returning players. The vast majority of people will find camera "snapback" disorienting, and for your character to not move in the direction the camera is pointing when you press "W" to be annoying -- just like I did before the recent change.

On Excelsior in just the past week: Winterdark for my Miasma/Ice Defender Sharptalon for my Pistols/Time Manip Blaster Seizures for my Elec/Elec Controller (that one REALLY surprised me) Weirding for my Illusion/Darkness Controller (another one that REALLY surprised me what with Dune being all the rage these days)

Keep in mind that it's a "chase" item with a pity system attached (the MAs). Even if you don't get a direct drop, you can still collect enough pity items to get them over a long period of time.

Champions Online is a truly fantastic game that would benefit from a "Homecoming"-like server where a group of passionate people are running the game in a similar way. I remember how much I enjoyed playing until the pivot to free-to-play (it may have been one of the first, if not THE FIRST, buy+sub game to make a F2P conversion). For a long time you could pay a monthly sub to keep playing the game as originally intended, but that wasn't making enough money so the sub went away. This resulted in my many, many freeform characters being stranded, unable to be played unless I paid $15 PER CHARACTER to continue to play them. That was utterly unacceptable to me, so I haven't played the game since. While the storyline was pretty simple, the gameplay was spectacular. In many ways it played like City of Heroes but with the system updates you would expect from a game 5-ish years newer. If you have never played the game it's like worth checking it out, but I wouldn't get too heavily invested in it. Frankly, CoH has a better endgame on the Homecoming servers.

I do have a signature character: a Dark Miasma / Ice Blast Defender that is a replica of the first CoH character I played way back in the original game. My primary alt is a Radiation Emission / Radiation Blast Defender that is a replica of my main alt from the original game. Both are optimized for group play and designed to turn large packs of enemies into sitting ducks, but the DM/IB Defender does a better job of it thanks to all the slowing effects from Ice Blast. Still, they are two different themes: the DM/IB is a female Nephalim (half demon, half angel) with a magic origin, while the RE/RB is a male mecha with a science origin. Sometimes I'm in the mood to roleplay one or the other. When the group just needs me to blow stuff up, I play my "GD Peacebringer", which is a build you can read about on the Kheldian board.

I feel like the problem with Kheldians isn't Changeling, it's the modularity of the class making decisions you make for one form worthless for the other forms. Consider, if you will, the Druid class from WoW, which is similarly modular. The difference is that in WoW, you can build a single form of a Druid to do everything it needs to do for viability in a primary role: you can build a Bear Druid to tank, and it will tank as well as any other tank, and you can largely ignore the other forms except for utility. You don't really get to do this with Kheldians. Sure, I've seen Human-only builds that function "fine", but we all know that tri-form is optimal, and the optimal way to play tri-form is via the "Changeling" build. Getting upset at people for doing what is optimal is both unreasonable and unfair. The better solution is to make the "forms" extensions of the baseline Human form and NOT have all of the benefits of Human form "shut off" in the other forms. "Changeling" exists SPECIFICALLY to allow Human form to use its abilities alongside the other two forms -- all at once. The problem arises from the fact that this is NOT how the class was designed. There needs to be a reason to change forms and STAY in that form for at least 15 to 30 seconds so that the form shift is MEANINGFUL. I don't have any specific ideas, but I DO feel like Human-form toggles should stay active in the other forms so that those forms can feel like they are fully-fledged characters in their own rights, but that are lacking critical elements that making staying in any one form permanently sub-optimal (but still viable!). Honestly, the easiest way to stop the whole "Changeling" problem is likely to give Human form a short cooldown like the other two forms; in other words, you can't shift back to Human for 2 to 4 seconds after transforming.