Reiska

On your tank, click it once and it works the same as it always has. Except that now you still get a bonus benefit after turning it off that you didn't before. I guess it does have a longer recharge now. Were you actually using it that frequently for it to be a problem?

Yeah. Granted, that only compounded the problem; it was a problem on some level as soon as co-op existed (July 2007, as mentioned). Of course, it's well documented (or used to be; I admit to not knowing if the receipts are still around anywhere) that CoV AT design was ... something of a mixed bag and that there were some fundamental disconnects between what Cryptic intended with the AT designs and how we actually ended up playing them. (I remember seeing, for example, at one point - I think Jack himself said it - that Masterminds were supposed to be the relative "tank" class of CoV, not Brutes.) In a vacuum CoV's ATs are better designed than CoH's, but - somewhat intentionally given CoV's underlying conceit - less consideration was given to how they perform in a group setting with each other, and of course none was given whatsoever to how they perform alongside CoH ATs, and 20 years later, there's a lot of baggage inherent in that.

The damage change was probably an automatic consequence of the arc increase due to how the engine actually calculates damage. In any event, it's a 3.8% damage loss for a 50% arc increase; personally, I'll take that trade as someone who likes the power for its aesthetics. 😛

The core problem here is that there are four melee archetypes in a game that really only has firm concept space for three of them, and that truly fixing the melee AT imbalance is impossible without radically reinventing the gameplay role of Brutes, who were never designed (by Cryptic/Paragon) to exist in the same meta as Tanker and it shows in how they radically step on each others' toes. Even as Homecoming is willing to go a bit further with sweeping gameplay changes, I suspect it's a bridge too far for them (for good reason), but the consequence of that is that either Brute or Tanker will end up being strictly non-optimal to the hardcore optimizer crowd. On Live, it was Tankers; now, it's Brutes, and by all impressions I've seen these partial rollbacks of Homecoming's Tanker buffs do not change that. And even if Homecoming was willing to radically reinvent one of the game's most-played ATs and almost certainly piss off everyone playing it, what niche is there for them to occupy that doesn't instead step on the toes of Scrappers or Stalkers? The unfortunate reality is that Brute's design was a mistake all the way back in October 2005, became more of a mistake in July 2007, and has never stopped being a mistake. But it's a mistake we're stuck with. And I say this as someone who likes the AT and played it extensively on Live.

If I'm reading correctly, they merged the functions of Hibernate and Icy Bastion into a single power. So if you want the "old" Icy Bastion, just click it twice and you have it.

I'd believe it. The most egregious one anyway is Malaise (who I'm almost positive should be an EB) having four copies of himself, but I think that mission might have carried a warning. 😛

There's barely any aligned language to remove anyway, all it amounted to was a couple replacements of the word "hero" and removing "sadistic" from the description of Dominator's inherent. None of the other villain ATs' descriptions clearly align them. In general I think the villain descriptions were much better written than the hero ones, but if someone were going to do a fuller rewrite it should be someone with broader experience than me. A good AT description at character creation should clearly and unambiguously communicate to the player: The expected role of that AT in general terms, e.g. Blasters are damage specialists How that AT differs from other ATs that share similar power sets, e.g. the varying niches of Scrapper/Tanker/Brute/Stalker/Sentinel, Controller vs. Dominator, Corruptor vs. Defender Some sense of how difficult the AT is to play for a new player, especially in a solo context (e.g. Controller and Defender have limited damage output, EATs should absolutely have a "not recommended for new players" tag) And no, I would absolutely argue against renaming any ATs at this point.

Yes, I would say they should. Since I'm bored I took a stab at doing a light rewrite of all of them to clean up both gendered and aligned language without changing the substance of the descriptions too much, which I'll stick behind a spoiler tag since it's long. I kept most of the substantive text unaltered, but removed aligned language in a few instances (except from EATs) and shifted all of the descriptions to second-person (I chose second-person because most villain descriptions were written this way and they were written later). Anyone can feel free to use these as a starting point for further cleanup/rewrites 🙂

It also means you lose access to your alignment power for a week of real time, however much that matters.

I'm going to preface this report by saying that I'm aware some of the missions in the Night Ward arcs give the player a warning about them being higher than normal difficulty and recommending that you form a team for them. Generally CoH gives that warning when a mission contains one or more Elite Bosses, which sometimes (but not always) downgrade to Bosses (not Lieutenants) when you have solo bosses disabled. That's not what I'm referring to; the missions with that message can be left alone. However - and I apologize that I can't name specific missions as I ran all the arcs over the course of about a week and didn't take notes - there are a number of missions that don't give that warning and still spawn Bosses, sometimes multiples at once, regardless of your notoriety. It isn't clear if these would all be EBs when run with bosses enabled or not; I didn't think to reset the missions to check that. Most of the missions affected by this also give you NPC allies, which I suspect were maybe intended to compensate for the increased enemy difficulty... except the "No Bosses" setting does successfully cap your NPC allies as being lieutenants, and so when you get to the bosses, they pretty much melt.

Checking in as someone else who also has this bug, yes I have saved my settings, and I usually have to reload them when I zone into a mission because of this bug. Without knowing the underlying code I'd wonder if it's a symptom of CoH being originally designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio.

These are not mutually exclusive positions, it can be possible for both Plant Control to be overpowered and Mind Control to be underpowered. I definitely remember Mind Control being considered as being pretty bad on live as far back as my memory of live goes (issue 4), and I also definitely remember Plant Control being considered to be the best control set basically from the moment it went live and people being surprised it didn't get nerfed when it got proliferated to Controller. I assume people like playing Mind Control because to someone who doesn't know the game, it's the most obviously thematic controller primary.

Yeah, it would not have surprised me at all if in the hypothetical universe where CoH didn't shut down, Paragon would have progressively revamped some issue 0 content to have more of this stuff over time; they were doing little revamps to older content all the time, like The Hollows in issue 16 for instance. I do think it'd be a good stretch goal for Homecoming to go through and clean up issue 0 content still, streamlining out some filler and maybe introducing a little more map variety without actually changing the overall plot of those arcs.

I had a long elaborate reply typed up and then crashed my browser and lost it, so I'll just retype the tl;dr version of what I was going to say: If new players are expected to interact with the AH to sustain their influence flow (and I think they should be), then fixing the massive problems with the AH UI needs to be a higher development priority The game used to obliquely hint at the connections between certain villain groups and certain origins through the issue 0 hero contacts' biases in what villain groups were involved in their arcs and what enhancements they would sell after you did enough missions for them, but this link was broken when they were made to no longer sell enhancements New players don't have the institutional knowledge to know that it is a bad idea for them to give up all influence gain from defeats in exchange for double experience; you can argue that this should be intuitive or obvious, but the value of specific amounts of currency is not immediately apparent until you've played for a while Regarding confusion of the system, "Should we even keep enhancements tied to origin?" is a question that I think needs to be asked, but one I don't have an opinion about, nor does it have an obvious correct answer; if enhancements were no longer tied to origin it would be even more of a vestigial mechanic than it already is An idea I saw no one in this thread suggest is extending the usable level range of DOs and SOs beyond the current +3 to -3 range; if it were up to me I'd suggest +3 to -5 instead, and also reducing the bonus degradation per level from 10% to 5%

Interpreting what Jimmy said in this way is taking his words in bad faith IMO. What they're actually saying is that feedback on features which are no longer part of the build is noise. I do agree that they could do a better job of formally stating, for example, why they decided on particular changes between builds or why certain things are off the table (like, for instance, the AoE immobilize arguments in the Assault Control thread). In this case the people making those comments are upset that the original bonus with the aether *isn't* making it live, so from their point of view they *are* worse off. But yes. In 20 years of playing MMORPGs I have yet to see a single game update in any MMO that I have been 100% pleased with. Every single change will have both fans and detractors.