Sniktch

Perma rage already had a downside, the damage and endurance crashes. But, as I recall, the ability to bypass the defense crash was purposely left in by Castle after he removed the ability to bypass the damage and endurance crashes, because the defense crash breaks the power, resulting in the situation we see now where SS is gimped. Rage is not a standalone power you can take for any melee set. It's built the way it is to work with SS, which is an underperforming set otherwise. Even with perma rage, SS is still not the best set, but at least it's comprable to other sets. There's no reason that rage can't be fixed so that works the same way that it did on live. Constantly popping Inspirations every two minutes is not an answer. we can't balance a power set around having an unlimited supply of a certain inspiration. That wouldn't be a viable answer for other sets, and it's not one here. Unstoppable was mentioned as a similar situation, but it isn't. Having played an Inv/ SS tank since I1, the solution ended up being just don't take Unstoppable, because the crash made it a worthless power. Now that's fine, because invuln is still a very viable set without it. But SS is a completely different animal, the defense crash means you pretty much can't use rage in high-level content if you are tanking, and without rage SS is completely broken. The defense crash just needs to be removed, plain and simple. SS still won't be the best set after that, but at least it will be on par with other sets. I note you clipped the math where I explained that the total Endurance cost for the power was ~30 END - 5 for activation and 25% max Endurance for the crash; since every character starts with 100 END, the 'base' crash is exactly 25 END. Yes, you can get upwards of 15 max END from accolades and the Body APP, but that at most pushes the crash to ~30 END, which STILL means you're paying 10% of the power's END-over-time cost plus 10 seconds of piddling damage. 10 seconds of crap damage every two minutes does not equal 270 END worth of downside. And you are completely incorrect regarding the Rage crash being unfixed - it WAS fixed on Live around the time Incarnates got released. While Invuln is not the best set to use as a benchmark, it's what I had at the time; as i said, it didn't mean insta-death in a BATF or Lambda if it crashed. It meant I used some Inspirations if still in combat, and paid attention to my Rage time left so as to not start a fight with Rage close to falling off, and if I got stupid, I paid the price. That's called balance. Eliminating the defensive aspect of the crash breaks the balance, unless it's replaced with something equally harsh.

The swastika is a manji - a religious symbol across several Oriental cultures - rotated 45 degrees. EVERY symbol has offensive connotations somewhere, because humanity has been across its history fairly monstrous.

Do the animation times match up? If so, yes, that is indeed a REALLY good idea.

Perma-Rage HAS to have a downside. There's a reason Assault is expensive for a non-damaging toggle; realize if a full team is running that, you've got a damage buff equal to Rage. yes, it's whole-team, but that still gives you a rough benchmark for how much EPS Rage should 'cost'. .32 EPS times 8 players minus a 10% premium for team-buff equals 2.29 EPS for an 80% damage buff. I'll use Targeting Drone for the ToHit buff despite it being a Blaster power, because using Focused Accuracy x4 tips way over into 'holy crap' terrain and the overall numbers are pretty close - that gives us 2.6 EPS. The power lasts 2 minutes - a total END cost of 312 for the full duration if paid as a toggle. The actual cost is ~30 END between activation and crash, 10 seconds of single-digit damage, and a hefty DEF debuff. I agree the DEF debuff severely penalizes Defense sets, and that's an issue. The problem is, how can it be made 'set-neutral' without breaking it upward? Changing it to -Resist punishes Resist sets. Changing it to -Recharge penalizes sets with slow recharge. Throwing every debuff in the world on it in tiny amounts make it not bite hard enough to matter. -ToHit during the crash? You're already doing zilch for damage, so why do anything but Taunt? Taking it away entirely reduces the penalty too much, because the crash HAS to hurt to pay off the other 90% of the power's END cost. It has to be noticeable and significant, something you always keep in the back of your head. Otherwise, it's guaranteed to be the 'effectively a toggle' situation. And this ties in to why the devs always resisted Super Strength Scrappers - if it's this much of a can of worms on Brutes and Tanks, toss crits into the mix and it's run like hell time. My .02: Split the crash evenly between Resist and Defense; -10% all Def, -20% all Resist, neither portion resistable. The reason unresistable is because any set that specializes WILL have enough debuff resist to at least halve the portion of the penalty that matters to them, more likely cut it to almost nothing - and splitting it already halves the penalty. 2:1 Resist/Defense because that's the way they tend to scale, all types because hitting any specific type would invite a corner-case. It's not AS rough on a single-style-focused set of defenses, while still being painful to layered sets - rough parity. Is it the best answer? Probably not. But it's AN answer, and at least worth poking the numbers. Also, I think I need to point out that the stacking preventing the debuff from triggering WAS fixed on Live, just very quietly; it was still a shitstorm on the forums, but I clearly recall the net effect on my SS/Invuln then. It made things harder, but not auto-lethal; it meant I had to pay attention to the situation and as Solvernia said pop purples occasionally if we were still mid-fight. As to his way of saying it...well, I hereby award 10 out of 10 Walter Sobchak points.

If you Ouro those, you can still get Psyche's TF at the very least, along with Calvin Scott and possibly a Statesman version of Hero's Hero.

Not mechanically feasible. IOs cannot take away parts of a power's codebase, and changing the performance from 'stack' to 'overwrite' would be exactly that. Let me save you some time on creating a third iteration of this: If Rage gets changed, it will NOT be by an IO, as it CANNOT be done that way. Period. Now, as to the merits of making Rage overwrite or a toggle, mechanically, that is doable - but it would be universal, and would be rather busted in sum effect. Matt Miller AKA Positron regularly fielded this particular want, and his answer was always the same - "if we made it a toggle or no-crash, we'd have to AT LEAST quarter its effect". Same reason why Targeting Drone for /Devices Blasters has no damage buff at all and slightly less ToHit buff than Rage. To put it another way, if you want Super Strength to have Build Up as a toggle or a no-crash permaclicky by only having 3 level 25 or higher Recharge IOs, how are you going to NOT extend that benefit to every other set with Build Up?

You mean, other than the players and developers that didn't like that the servers were being crippled by this? And again, the people hosting the server are screaming about the resource hog! Since you say "group", the agro cap does not apply to groups, but individual characters. 8 players can each have up to 17 mobs on them. That's 136 critters. 8 tanks or brutes should be able to pull 136 critters to a center location for everyone to go crazy on them. And pets also count, if these were 8 MMs, in theory, we would be talking 6 pets + MM * 8 = 56 targets for the AI to focus on, so up to 952 critters (mind you, the pets will likely die fast.) The change can be weird when a single player is trying to get the hate of many critters, and the 18th and 19th sit there doing nothing, but should there be any other viable target, those guys will just turn and attack them instead. All of this. Please note, excessive number of active AIs on max-efficiency AE farm maps is why AE now has a 50% XP rate - to severely de-incentivize one person using up a whole server core on their own. The aggro cap wasn't just to slow down PLing, it had a mechanical purpose.

Villains DO gain access to APPs at 35 - with the notable exception of the VEATs, who ONLY can access Patron pools, and thus MUST do one of the arcs if they want an APP of any type.

Because Controllers have a lower base damage scale than Dominators, plus Dominators have a secondary that is damage as opposed to support.

Mechanically unfeasible - the way the KB to KD IOs work is to actually reduce the power's knockback magnitude by 99%, which means that unless it's a mag 100, it's always less than 1 but more than 0, thus knockdown but not knockback. The only difference between KB and KD is magnitude - the only difference between knock-UP and knockDOWN is the vector. This is why KO Blow sends enemies ragdoll flopping, but Air Superiority flapjack-flips them - Air Sup is a mag .67 KU, and KO Blow is a Mag 2 KU. An IO that changes a click with a fixed cost, fixed duration, and ending crash to a toggle with a per-second cost, no max duration, and no cost is beyond the engine's capabilities AFAIK.

Simple fix for the devs; Make the rewards the same as normal missions. I never noticed I got more for doing AEs, but that's probably just me not noticing it. :/ ...way to read the thread. AE is currently 50% LESS XP than live. The thrust of the thread has been people gnashing teeth over this, versus people explaining repeatedly that the max-efficiency farm can LITERALLY use up an entire core on the server for ONE INSTANCE. To clarify, if 224 people do the max-efficiency farm, NOBODY ELSE WOULD HAVE ANY SERVER SPACE LEFT. #225 tries to do it? Server CRASHES. Why? Because the processing needs of active AIs do not follow a linear curve, they follow a geometric curve, and the max-efficiency style farms use A LOT of active AIs at once. Especially when they're trying to all go to a single spot on the map and all trying to aggro on a single entity despite the aggro cap. So no, AE isn't getting set back to normal XP, unless ambushes and patrols get taken away from AE toolkit, which may not be possible for the Homecoming team, and if it was, then the response from the farming segment of the community would be howls for pitchforks, torches, and blood.

Seconding ALL forms of costume proliferation that are possible and not spine-breaking - a good example: Male and Huge have access to four Full Helmet options females don't - the eyeless, big-mouthed alien head, with metallic and elongated versions. Full Helmets, as far as I'm aware, use the same attach node across all bodies - thus why the Critix helmet's available to all three 'genders'. Some pieces might not be able to be mapped across - Bolero, for example; I think it's actually part of the torso mesh at points, not just attached on - but anything that CAN be opened? Please.

One thing this does lose you is the ability to stack Sprint and Ninja/Beast - the effect is bigger than it looks. However, I can definitely see the benefit of more choices.

Gonna puncture some myths, here - there is MORE THAN ONE KIND of AE farm. This? This is one kind. THIS KIND IS NOT THE PROBLEM - at least from a server mechanics perspective. Why? Because it's not spawning double-digit quantity 8-player-sized ambushes and patrols at once. Going in one second from 0 active AIs to over 200, all of them checking aggro, checking pathing, checking LoS, checking Z-clearance, moving as fast as possible to a single location, and there running into a wall-o'-death that easily maxes out the aggro cap for the player putting it all out, generating possibly double-digit defeat notices per second, and we haven't even touched on the cluster-fuck that happens when someone hits the aggro cap, an AI backs up out of AoE range, and the player is damaging an AI that can't properly trigger aggro on them because of that cap! THAT is the kind of AE farm that causes server issues. The problem is...you can't just disable that type of farm. Why? Because the only way to do it is put a hardcap on ambushes and patrols per-map, which A: we don't know if the Homecoming team knows how to do, and B: there'd be a lot of howls for blood from players 'outraged at this loss of creative freedom', despite their only published AE mission being 'BIG XP STROM145009!' or equivalent. Because they don't want to lose their max-efficiency reward generator - and it IS max-efficiency, not just for XP but for ALL generatable resources they can drop. Why? Because if you can kill 11 minions in the time it takes to kill one boss, you're better off nailing the minions, because that's more XP - but also 10 more checks of the drop tables. This system just leverages that to the max, and in the process makes the servers shriek. Honestly, I'm tired enough of the arguments I say just slap an "I win" button in the P2W vendors, but the cost is you forever after have a GenericHero/Villain# name and costume.

I can second this - I've played with folks who were, in fact, experiencing CoX for the first time, and said so. Just because we're cranky old farts doesn't mean the kids are ignoring our home...and I, for one, DO NOT want them to 'get off our lawn', or be driven away by DFB/AE fatigue.

One thing I recall from the first run was seeing people do art of their characters or commission others to do so. In that vein, one of my friends, though not a Cities player, is an excellent artist trying to make it work as a career. https://www.staycrazy.art/ Not sure of the etiquette of this, but Crazy's a good guy with quite a talent and a sharp, kinetic style. So if you peek at his site and think it'd fit your character and want something drawn, he takes commissions. Another friend IS a Cities player, and an excellent artist; she's a bit people-skittish for various reasons, but MAY take commissions if approached carefully and gently. https://www.deviantart.com/niekitty

As far as I can see, they lowered Morality merit awards across the board - 20 per, no matter what alignment you're reinforcing. Honestly can't argue with that, as 50 per reinforce with no tip cooldown made ignoring the market way too easy.

Honestly, I go Common 25s across the board until I've got sets at necessary levels - for me, the most common is 30 to enable Exemplar/Malefactor play without losing stuff. Everything beyond that is pure gravy; a 25 IO gives 32% to a 'big' stat, whereas an even-level SO gives 33%. So close as to not matter, and the INF you save by never having to replace until you're ready to set is substantial. Plus, with the Merit values and costs at the levels they are, getting those 'best-in-slot' Set pieces is pretty easy; I've got a 31 that's already got a Miracle, Numina's, Steadfast Res/Def and Knockback protection, 4 out of 5 Doctored Wounds for a self-heal, Performance Shifter proc and END Mod in Stamina, and a Karma Knockback protection, with enough Merits and salvage on-hand to get the 5th piece of Doctored Wounds. Just need to ding for more slots.

I think the reason they removed the align merits from SSAs is because it overly incentivized being Hero/Villain; because Align Merits were basically worth 100 Reward Merits, Who Will Die part 1 gave a MASSIVE reward for 10 minutes of minimal risk, whereas a Rogue/Vigilante could only get 20. Add in that at SSA launch, they were on a daily timer and Morality missions were basically every other day, and you had Hero/Villain being able to haul in the equivalent of 300 merits to a rogue/vigilante's 90. Add in that the hero/villain powers are just flat better than the rogue/vigilante ones, and the mechanics pushed even hard RPers to bow to the necessity of being Hero/Villain only. As it sits now, it's much more balanced overall across the alignments.

Cities has Cyrus Thompson. An old man, forcibly retired because if he ever uses his powers again, it'll kill him. And when the Freedom Phalanx - and OUR CHARACTERS - aren't fast enough to save the day... he does, knowing full-well the result. Every storyline from CO I remember, outside the Vibora Apocalypse, is "you win, hurrah". And even Vibora is 'fixed' via time travel. Cities has multiple storylines where the end isn't happy...because our characters aren't perfect, the contacts aren't perfect, and people make mistakes. Villains has even more. And those flawed victories are what ends up being character-defining, to me - knowing Terra got turned into a literal monster because we got too complacent is the kind of thing that drives a hero ever-harder, or reshapes them into something different. They cause us to write stories, to try and feel and think like these characters would. To look at a life through someone else's eyes. CO's stories don't do that. CO's 'click, charge, sustain, combo' combat is...interesting, to some degree - but it's buried under a mountain of unclear stats, and a lot of sets actually have powers that don't work with the main stat of the others; the chain attacks in their Super Strength are a perfect example. They're ranged, so they use one Super Stat for damage, but all the rest of the set uses Strength. Control tools are neutered to literal uselessness; IIRC the longest-lasting hold is 4 seconds, IF that critter doesn't get damaged the whole time, with a crippling level of diminishing returns on repeated applications. Buffs are almost an afterthought, and debuffs are iffy at best. The game is essentially heal/tank/DPS, whereas Cities is 'do what you aspire to'. Base-building. CO's was as much of a bolted-on kludge as PvP was for Cities, and it showed. In Cities, the small circle of friends I ran with regularly had multiple bases for our multiple ideas, ranging from a Kings Row strip-club to a leaky, rusty, dingy ship. They all felt different, unique, a lot more interesting than CO's 'one room, three furnishings, call it bases' thing. And unlike CO's, Cities bases had functionality - zone TPs, SG storage, hospital, buff machines, a place to craft outside the universities and abandoned labs, etc. Scale. Cities felt BIGGER. Millenium City could be crossed in about 2 minutes as I recall - Paragon City, it can take that long for one NEIGHBORHOOD. And that lends a sense of both scale and cohesion; in CO, you got 'more space' by going to OTHER PLACES. Nevada, Canada, that jungle island, Vibora Bay, and undersea...actually, i think that's the whole list. And each one was about the size of maybe Kings Row. Cities, it's ALL Paragon City. Different aspects, but you feel like you're in a PLACE, not scattershot 'world of X' thrown at the dartboard. Mechanics. CO's numbers system is almost intentionally obfuscatory - half the sub-stats are deceptive, the opther half are unexplained. In Cities, after the Real Numbers update, things are very, very explainable, very clear. Even with ED in place. Same with IOs. And the fact that as long as it's basic IOs or 'lower', it's 'no-farm availability' makes it very newbie-friendly, as well as reliable for old-timers. Cities has no 'gear check' content - everything CAN be done with SOs only. It may take more time, more effort, but as long as you are the level required, you're in. CO has literal gear-score checks all over the place, so sometimes even being the requisite level isn't enough - and I don't put this on the same level as 'need to do Story Arc X to access SF Y'. because there's an actual universe-canon reason for that, not an arbitrary 'need x Rare IOs to play' bar. Teaming. CO's 'teaming' was a kludge - some things could be shared, others couldn't, and if you were different levels, tough shit - the lowbie was getting no XP. Cities, with Auto-SK/Exemplar, made sure there were no shenanigans while also making sharing very, very easy - you had it? You did it? You shared it, no button-pushing required. Compare this to quite a few other MMOs - The Old Republic and FFXIV come to mind - where all main-story content is solo-only unless it's team-only. This is something Cities avoided...by not really having an overarching main story, only broad themes and smaller arcs. So yeah...a lot of subjective things, some objective ones.

Your first morality mission as Hero or Villain only gives those 50. It's doing a Morality having already confirmed yourself as a Hero or Villain that gets you an Alignment Merit. However, the Merit Vendors will trade 50:1 reward to alignment (or vice-versa) freely.

First flight. First scrapperlock. First TF/SF. Meeting someone who became a friend, meeting another through them. Still being in constant contact with them both to this day. Seeing a level 50 stop to throw a buff or heal on a lowbie who's in over their head, without just winning the fight for them. Seeing the 50 team up - and exemplar down instead of SKing the lower-level up. Seeing a dev actually playing their own game - not just doing Pocket D chatter, actually out on the streets. Seeing players toil, sweat, and strain to write their stories, and seeing them get recognized over the farm-maps in Architect. Seeing young and old, new and veteran, casual, hardcore, RP, grindhead, all finding their place in the city we called home. And even though it didn't stop it then, seeing Atlas Park and Mercy Island multi-instanced by all the people carrying a torch, trying to keep the lights on just a minute longer.

...I never thought this day would come. So many have said it already, but....jackleg or not, it's gonna feel good to be home. Mountain of alts, mains were Billy Boy (SS/Invul Brute), Marci Raver (Thugs/Poison MM), Sniktch (Kat/SR Scrapper), Veronica Sellers (MA/Dark Scrapper), Frostrose (Plant/Thorns dom), Ssilyia (Claws/Nin Stalker), Sprghagh (Axe/EA Brute), Sherlina (Mace/Fire Brute), Big Jersey Mike (Shield/SS Tank), Mel B (Street/Will Scrapper), Biff Webb (melee Crab), Laetitia Dolores (Elec/Elec Brute), and a host of others.