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The first time you repeat one of those arcs, you can claim an extra 20 merits. After the first repeat, you can repeat an arc once per week for 20 merits.

So your argument is: people don't want to play the game they were given... a game that gives them what they want... so we should just give them stuff they want so they don't have to play the game? You don't need to buy anything to pew-pew with energy bolts... unless you pick an AT that doesn't have energy bolts, at which point the game lets you buy energy bolts (Plasmatic Taser).... but maybe you want those to be free too? Maybe you should buy an analogy, because this free one seems to only be 4/7 complete.

From my MM (not a Corruptor) I found that 4-slotting Undermined Defenses (reasonable set bonuses, plus Recharge), a level 50+5 Accuracy and a %-Res piece was optimal. Any %Damage wasn't noticeable compared to getting a "damage boost" via -Res for the henchmen. There is a slight subtlety (for me) for the choice between Achilles and Annihilation: Enemy critters can only have one %debuff from a particular (proc) source at a time, a second application from anyone simply extends the duration of the debuff... my MM happens to have a lot of powers that take Annihilation, so (when solo) there is a balance between maybe extending the duration of a smaller -Res, or maybe getting some periods of a bigger -Res. I find Poison Trap to be excellent for Superior Entomb's Recharge /%+Absorb.

Is Dull Pain not a thing? EDIT: If this is about wanting a sustain... I don't see the need. In my experience, Invulnerability doesn't need to run all of its (resistance, travel) toggles all the time. and as a practical matter slotting them with Resistance, Resistance/Endurance gets them pretty good values and lower End costs. No matter the AT, there probably should be some Endurance reduction in attacks. For Regeneration: The large Tanker/Brute HP pool already puts them high on the HP-refill side, a single slot of Power Transfer %Heal is shockingly good for those ATs. The contribution to slotting a single Healing/EndMod pieces in Health/Stamina goes far (for all AT), even before considering IO globals. The only hard-to-get bit of 'layering' survivability for Invuln from my PoV is Absorb... if a desired change to Invuln is requested, a choice between a +Absorb and Dull Pain makes more sense to me than to ask for a Sustain.

I don't use the changeling exploit, I don't mind that it exists, I do wish players would only use it solo. The Kheldian HEATs can be IMO a pretty miserable AT to play, at least once I've experienced their arcs. Many ideas have been kicked around in the HEAT subforum, I get the sense that the reason the changeling exploit hasn't been addressed is: Folks literally can't figure out how to disable it without somehow eliminating/highly restricting a key feature of the AT (i.e. changing forms) The HC powers team hasn't (through reluctance, blind spots, whatever) demonstrated a willingness to directly increase damage output on the scale that would be necessary to otherwise make Kheldians compete with non-control ATs I am putting very little judgment behind the second bullet point... it's more that because the Nova form attacks don't ever really become better than low/mid-tier blasts, and the Dwarf form isn't supposed to be a DPS form I get the sense that the powers team is pretty stymied about what an alternate to changeling would even look like.

Hero/Villain merits are a currently just a 'higher denomination' of Reward merits. The $50 bill to the $1 bill as it were. The game has a cap on 9999 Reward merits, so a merit vendor allows players to effectively exceed that cap. It is also a convenient way to email merits between alts on an account.

I never called players dumb. Stubborn about what they won't do, sure. Unclever because they can't figure out how to play only the content they want without figuring out how to do it. You are going to have to explain how each of the following is simultaneously true: A player who doesn't want to play content (which rewards them with powers, slots and means to get enhancements for the powers and slots), and A player who wants a full-kit character with all powers, slots, and their preferred enhancements It looks like one of the poster-children is a player that only wants to play level 50 content... and won't accept anything less than a fully-slotted character... which if is the case, that sort of player is pretty much skipping over a LOT of the game's content just to grind their preferred content. There is nothing wrong with this, but let's not pretend that such a playstyle is being kept behind some gate... Play level 50 content and leverage the rewards from that.

If a player is playing content (even Farming! even below 50!) the game provides a LOT, even if that player never visits the AH. One simple example: Merits can be converted into recipes and some IOs directly. My initial HC character simply ran a lot of content via Ouroboros well below level 50 and accumulated hella many Merits. That character did have something not currently available: the ability to earn Inf at the expense of XP, but I wasn't earning much Inf relatively speaking (such as level 49s could at that time). This ended up funding my next character, and so on. I don't think I decided to make some bank on the AH until maybe my fourth character, as I was having too much fun playing the game without the AH. The "magic" about having a level 47+ is this: once level 50 common IO recipes drop, each of them vendors (on average) for 100Kinf, so it takes little time to accumulate Inf... of course if the player eschews content that rewards merits and also ignores the AH completely, that's being stubborn as opposed to clever. For those two stubborn forum members who insist on never leveling their large stable of alts above 30, and also insist upon upgrading SOs... and complain about these choices... again, I'd judge that to be a "not clever" strategy. If the game is a grind for them, it isn't because they can't afford what they want.

So why would people not ask for free badges, free XP, etc.? For anyone who has played to level 50 and beyond, there is no "grind" involved with getting 99%+ of what is available on the market. Especially not if they've played thousands of times over the course of twenty years.

The mechanics of the game are pretty well-understood (by me, for me), so my (solo) enjoyment has been coming up with a concept, translating into a new AT/primary/secondary and running with it. The Homecoming variant has a tremendous number of Quality-of-Life-over-Live improvements which allow for all sorts of drudgery to be side-stepped. In particular, I find the changes to the market and other means of earning enhancements to have been life-changers.

This is the combination I've decided to try... I also haven't tried an Elec Controller yet. The character is still low level, and I'm mostly soloing to get a feel for the Primary poers. Eventually I will reconfigure the character to work in more of the Secondary, I like that this is a bit of a balancing act with when to take the ally-affecting powers from the Secondary.

There is no need for more Incarnate powers IMO. The Incarnate system was one game tacked onto another game, with (on Live) extra grind for subscribers. In terms of "Game Lore"... I don't love the Incarnate add-ons, mostly because the Live dev team essentially broke the 'evergreen' nature of the CoX content. Dark Astoria was reworked... I'm still not a fan, but I can't argue that it was (next to Terra Volta) probably the least engaging of the Hazard zones. Praetoria was canonically destroyed... this is far more upsetting, since the First Ward story demonstrated just how to make an 'evergreen' zone. Let's not talk about Galaxy City. All signs were pointing to the Live dev team growing both bored and desperate, which was a deadly combination for a narrative game.

One of the few things I'd change: Critters should have some amount of travel suppression like players do. I find it especially frustrating on fliers that zip away at super-speed. I understand that the original dev team had a fascination with HUGE body types often having superspeed and an immunity/resistance to almost all forms of control, so I see the grounded ones as more of a lol focused at players... but rando Cabal etc. that simply make an attack and then hightail to some corner of a map is pretty annoying.

As noted by @Uun, in order to really maximize Dominator performance it is necessary to achieve perma-Domination. Writing only for myself: I find it somewhat tedious (and repetitive) building for perma-Dom... at which point I've got great controls but damage can be a bit of a dog's breakfast. This leads to me being somewhat bored by them. One of the things about perma-Dom is that depending on the approach to achieving perma-Dom it may not scale down well for any given build. In high-level/endgame content, there are (or were) some places where a Dominator could really shine, but it feels like this is far less common (to me, anyway). Confuses in particular used to be top-notch, mileage varied for other controls.

MMV, but I've been using a SG base to store salvage. Most of the SG inventory space is for Salvage, as I keep about 10 each on hand. I see the occasional 'jankiness' with the alphabetic order shifting, but I find it to be a pretty minor thing, as no rack has that much variety in it. If things become really confusing (say on an enhancement storage with lots of variety) all it takes is a closure and reopening of the storage item to fix it. The 'jankiness' doesn't seem to be an apt description for what was originally described as 'tedious', and the jankiness is almost entirely due to the underlying database and not much else. The personal storage for salvage takes some getting used to knowing what is on which tab, but I don't think it is the most confusing part of the game.

I tried the Sorcery pool with one MM 9for flavor), I found it to be extremely meh: The Travel power is nothing special for MMs Spirit Ward seems like a good fit for the henchmen, but in practice I found it to not make much of a difference except at the lowest levels with few slots Arcane Bolt isn't really needed, unless the MM attacks themselves are a poor fit Enflame also seemed like a good fit for Henchmen, but I was underwhelmed. Rune of Protection is a panic button, with a spot for a couple of mule IOs... and requires two other prior picks!

Renaming is no big deal, from my PoV. I've taken a few characters I leveled up but didn't love and created new characters (same name and costume) but different AT/primary/secondary and given them the original's name. I've renamed beloved level 50s when I have thought of a better name for them.

Invention salvage is fungible (by tier), so it takes little effort (and the market vig) to convert owned salvage into desired salvage.

I like the evergreen nature of this discussion. Some excellent points were recently repeated about how Inf isn't a problem once a player is playing the game with their level 50... and how nobody really cares if a character isn't suited to the gills with IO sets (before or after level 50). There are very few instances of characters that are difficult to play without IO sets, unless the player is making poor build choices or similarly poor choices when it comes to content. To be a little salty: if a player simultaneously feels like they are very clever character builders, wants to skip to an end-game build, and is also short of the means of kitting out the cleverly designed character... I'm thinking this hypothetical player isn't really that clever. Skipping the effort to unlock all those slots and powers, and skipping the effort to be able to slot those powers... there really isn't much of a game left is there? I absolutely recognize that until the level 50 common IO recipes start to drop, Inf from regular play is pretty dry... even if the AH is used to market things made from merits. But below a certain level (I'd say ~23) there isn't IMO much of a need to try to leverage things that can be bought on the AH. The game is easier with IO sets at this point, but it isn't at all mandatory.

In the past I've made an entirely selfish suggestion for the Presence pool: adding AT conditionals to both Pacify and Provoke: 1) Pacify gets conditionals that allow it to work like the similar powers for Banes and Stalkers 2) Provoke gets conditionals that allows it to work more like the Taunts/Confronts for Widows, Dwarfs, Tankers, Brutes, Scrappers Provoke changes is less important to me, but making it an auto-hit for those ATs would be something. I'd like Pacify to be able to trigger the Hidden status for the ATs that get the Placate power from their AT sets. The pool versions can be more endurance hungry if the devs are bent out of shape about ATs having access to such powers at level 4, but usually Taunt/Confront/Pacify is a relatively low-level pick anyway... so who would really care? Personally, I'd like to see each of the legacy power pools still stuck with a level 4 / 4 / 14 / 14 / 14 progression get some attention... if only to downward adjust the level at which the third power can be chosen. I thought by now the same team that reworked the travel pools and lowered the level tiers for primary/secondaries and epics would have done something to Presence and Medicine (especially).... Leadership's Tactics isn't particularly overpowering between levels 4 and 14, and to be honest I wouldn't really care if Cross Punch was available at level 4 without having to take a pre-requisite. And with regard to the Fighting pool... it seems crazy that the attacks in the Fighting pool got "synergy" but the healing from Medicine did not.

My least favorite outdoor map is OUTDOOR_RUINED_02A. The objective still find places to hide on it from me. Oddly I rarely have trouble finding all the hidey holes on Oranbega maps. I dislike the tech "Lab" rooms, because the critters will find ways to hide. My absolute least favorite Council caves are blue side, in Tobias Hansen's arcs... the critters move around and hide themselves, making it very difficult for me to 'defeat all' to find the last objective.

I went with a Claws/Dark Scrapper, and leaned into the Presence Pool. I want to note that I delayed Cloak of Fear until level 41. (pre-i28p2) YMMV if you want it earlier now, but by leveraging KB protection pieces/set bonuses I still don't think it is a necessary power to take early. I suppose I could have taken it as early as lvl 30 (I skipped Soul Transfer) but that is when I took Unrelenting, followed at 32 by Hasten. I took Pacify at 12, Intimidate at 14 and Invoke Panic at 24. The only Claws attacks before level 22 are Strike, Spin and Followup. Claws fit the theme of my character.

I like the Presence pool, but the big problems are IMO: 1) The first three powers are orthogonal to each other, and you must take two of them (to get the 4th or 5th) 2) Aside from a casual chance at doubling up a single-target with 2 different Fears, there is no synergy to the powers 3) Intimidate and Invoke Panic are both first selectable at level 14 (no reason to force delay of Intimidate so long IMO)

I have a somewhat different take on (relating to something I don't like) I kinda wish that the devs would put more obvious focus on bringing all ATs up to a common level of performance (including non-changeling HEAT) instead of knocking some AT down that think are over-performing. I'm not talking about specific outlier powers. It bothers me not-at-all if through build and slotting choices if solo ATs can reach similar levels of mission completion times (at similar difficulty settings). I think a case can be made that Blasters are over-performers, except possibly when solo in +Nx8 content. They generally don't have endurance problems, they don't have crashes, and they've got more ability to slot a wider variety of IOs than most any other AT, and their inherent actually is a (slight) fix for the one things they might be susceptible to (controls). I don't want to see Blasters nerfed, but let's not pretend that Tankers had been the only recipients of "over-tuning" since Live. The only "hand-slap" I think Blasters have gotten in the HC era is the same one everyone got with respect to Rune of Protection.