Reiska

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.

I remember feeling that redside story arc merits were undertuned even back in the Live days, and it's compounded further by the fact that they don't have expansion zones like the Hollows, Faultline, Croatoa, or (until I27 Page 7, anyway) Striga Isle, all of which give a bonus pack of merits for completing all the zone's arcs. So I'd be inclined to agree that villain story arcs should give more merits than their content length would otherwise justify.

Penny Yin more likely I'd bet, and in sheer cash value, 1 aether is currently worth somewhere in the ballpark of 11-12 merits. Anyway I would have preferred a solution that retained the aether reward while removing the incentive for dark patterns in team formation, to be clear. But at least you removed the incentive for dark patterns in team formation.

I was operating on the assumption that the power description text is static text and designed in a way that it *can't* show level-scaled damage figures. Other posters have already noted that the in-game power details window is often misleading, inaccurate, or simply information overload. Either way, I'm not married to Damage Scale as a unit either; *any* consistent unit is fine.

Yeah, immediately directing newcomers to Mids would be information overload. But I think you could do a lot better than the current disclosure without overwhelming players. Simply disclosing the damage scales and base cooldowns of powers in game in place of the "Damage: Moderate" etc. tags would go a long way. (Never mind that some sets are missing even those; Battle Axe, for example.) Something like, taking Broadsword/Hack as an example: Before: You Hack your opponent for a high amount of damage. This attack can reduce a target's Defense, making him easier to hit. Damage: Moderate. Recharge: Moderate. After: You Hack your opponent with your Broad Sword. This attack can reduce a target's Defense, making them easier to hit. Damage Scale: 1.64. Base Recharge: 8 seconds. You'd need to edit the tutorial a little bit somewhere to explain what a damage scale actually *means*; most current MMOs express the power of special abilities as a comparison to auto-attack damage, but we don't have autoattacks here to use. Still, the basic idea of "higher damage scale = stronger" is intuitive. FFXIV actually uses a similar concept as Damage Scale in how it presents ability information to players; they call it potency there, and at least for physical abilities, potency 100 is equal to 3 seconds' worth of autoattack damage. Note that you don't necessarily have to present the numbers in the same decimal form as they're used internally; if you think it'd be easier for players to digest, you could just as easily say "Damage Scale: 164" instead of 1.64 - at the end of the day it's an arbitrary number that lets you compare powers across sets. You could just as easily revive the old player measure of Brawl Index and use it as the basis, but given that the current devs typically use Damage Scale in patch notes, it's probably best to just present that.

+1 to both of these. I don't see any real reason why we can't (or shouldn't) replace the vague descriptors with the numerical Damage Scale, or a number derived from it but made more player-friendly somehow. As for Mids Reborn, well... it's a great tool built on extremely legacy code that runs very sluggishly.