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You don't need to "play with numbers", you literally could use one unslotter to test. I'm not even sure it is "creative joy" to slot every character's Fitness pool the same way, but if that is your yum so be it... but it is almost certainly bad advice for anyone else. My point is: You are almost certainly NOT getting any Quality-of-Life improvements by sinking 10 slots into Health and Stamina. Consider moving a couple of them to Swift, Hurdle or Sprint.

If this is the strategy for EVERY character, I highly encourage doing some analysis. Specific to Endurance, it is entirely like that moving two of those slots to a power to get a +MaxEnd bonus yields better results than a fraction of a percentage point of more Recovery. For Regeneration, if a character has relatively low HP those fractions of improvement of time-between-ticks may not be noticeable.

The Homecoming game makes it very easy to slot powers with very useful Enhancements (including IOs) for next to no effort... It still requires effort however.

I want to believe that my 'level 50' build will be nearly optimal... For me... But I still experiment with taking out certain pieces via unslotters to see if something is making a noticeable difference. I will also run with toggles off to check how important those powers are. There are a handful of powers that have very vocal proponents, but via my own experimentation have found to have value only in corner cases. e.g. Hasten is a power that I'll include only for reasons specific to a particular build rather than plan to include it on EVERY build. I make an effort to experiment with powers as I level characters. Sometimes this affects my plans for slotting, sometimes it affects my choice of when/if I take a power.

AFAIK, all my characters "hover blast" strictly for flavor (i.e. the character is a 'default flier') or for movement on maps. There are a limited number of AV fights and situations when I plan to keep flying during the fight (if the power is available): typically Marauder for squishy AT, and Diabolique because she flies herself. In the Homecoming era, especially because enhancements and globals are easily available, partially because of when (primary, Secondary, Travel) powers can be chosen in a build, I consider Hover-blasting to be a relic strategy of a bygone era. As others have written, or implied: I believe that if the choice is being made to "hover-blast" for defensive reasons, a Sentinel will probably be more satisfying... if the player can get into a mindset where they accept that the will end up being "near" enemy mobiles. If "max damage" is the goal, then self-buffing defenses on a Blaster should be the build goal... and the way to achieve the max damage is to embrace the melee/PBAoE parts of the Blaster secondary, not by ignoring teh secondary in favor of an out-moded offensive strategy.

Beam Rifle is IMO good on any AT. It takes a little bit of effort to master the mechanics to land on the most effective play style. This is one of those sets where I think it is especially valuable to level up with the set to see how it works. Rushing to 30+ with it will probably lead to disappointment.

26 for Katie Hannon feels right. There is a miserable cave escort mission in there, so it isn't exactly able to be sped through.

We might think this, but in fact the opposite is true. These types of powers are what I was referring to in my "pseudo-pets are a bad place for %procs". This is mostly because of the way 'recharge' works for the pseudo-pets' "attacks". A power like Caltrops isn't a terrible place for %damage, if you can "hit" a large number of enemies when the power is immediately "cast"... but subsequent ticks of the power aren't good for %damage. Unslotters are cheap, so I recommend experimenting with slotting pseudo-pets. There is a surprisingly wide variety of effectiveness of %damage in them.

I think you are looking at the Penny Yin TF. With practice, it can be soloed under 10 minutes... without clearing. Trying to clear at +4x8 would probably drive most 'speed' players crazy, because of Freak resurrections. Enemy placement is always the same AFAIK within the Signature story arcs. The cut scenes might be hard to tolerate.

Generally, %proc friendly: Inherent recharge times greater than 16 seconds (more slotted recharge lowers %proc chances) AoE (AoE have lower individual %proc chances, but with more targets potentially being hit spawn clear times improve) henchmen/pets, provided those have a side effect common to most of their powers self-affecting %procs (and some Globals, like Kismet's +ToHiT) are best in Auto powers, or powers that will always be toggled on. Generally %proc are wasted in: Powers with short inherent recharge times, 8-seconds or less. Toggles Pseudo-pets (although as near as I can tell, "on cast" %proc rates generally work as expected, provided there are actual targets affected in the cast area) Low accuracy powers (including some "auto-hit" powers) Also, be aware there is a difference between a "global" effect and a "%proc" effect. Some people call things like the Luck of the Gambler Def/Global recharge a "%proc", but it is a "global". EDIT: Sometimes a power is called "proc-friendly" if it can slot a large number of different %damage pieces... but not all such powers are a good place to put %procs, see above. For example... fast-recharging single target holds can take a lot of %damage pieces, but the actually chance for %damage may be so low that some of those slots are probably better used elsewhere in a build.

It's extremely easy to play a character on SOs only, or even to only slot what your enemies drop. Furthermore: since enough players craft IOs for badges, it is near-trivial to pick up IOs at bargain prices. Aside from the miracles that are the Homecoming Auction House, converter roulette, and fungibility of items, Homecoming has a LOT of quality-of-life tools that make self-funding/equipping characters completely viable. Some examples: Fast travel options to missions/zones TF / Explorations/ Giant Monster merit rewards Catalysts drops I have been almost exclusively self-funding and self-equipping my characters since 2020. I could make MOAR Inf, and to some extent I have been doing so... just not in a planned way... but my goal is more like "steady state". I do leverage drops to "bank" enhancements and catalysts in a SG base, and I usually have my characters dump 200 MInf for starting funds in email for future use as soon as they've made that much back from regular play... so none of my characters are starting from 'scratch', but as @Yomo Kimyata points out... only the first character really won't have this as an option. As an aside: almost all the final builds I post can look incredibly expensive... and I suppose they might be if someone wanted to buy every one of the enhancements from the AH. In practical terms, it is rare that I actually put any Inf into a character at level 50, except for crafting recipe costs and occasionally buying HO/DSyncs that I don't have lying around. Occasionally there is some piece I want that is so specific to a build that I don't have one, or the prices on the AH are simply too low to not BIN of course. Some element of planning ahead makes a HUGE difference.

Yes. It is even "viable" to play the game with lower level characters. If the original, inherent method of gaining powers isn't immediately satisfying. P2W offers lots of attacks and boosts for low-level characters. ATO, OF, Winter, and attuned PVP pieces can all be slotted at low levels. P2W offers some freebie enhancements too. DFB and DIB offer boosts, beyond XP.

I like the red side content a LOT more than blue side: Contacts keep you in the same zone, generally Unlockable contacts are somewhat natural Writing is better The zones are more creative (I'm not going to revisit claims involving players feeling like they lack agency, done that elsewhere) But I play more blue side, because PUG. The things about Red Side that irk me: In-zone travel is more difficult This is a direct outcome of the clever zones, but it is annoying to (effectively) require a flight power for several of the zones (Mercy, Grandville). Several arcs (or ideas) just sort of dead-end or are side-stepped or are otherwise difficult to understand what is going on in the lore. For example... All these years later and I have no idea what is going on in Nerva, and I feel like Sharkhead has more secrets. I miss not having a nonAbyss Hazard Zone. I recognize that Blue HZ are generally seen as failures, yet I feel like and under-the-mountain zone had potential.

My initial reaction is that this feels like it could only be a problem for players that have either "too much" or "not enough" of whatever. If the former: Those players already have enough, why make it easier for them to accumulate MOAR? INF can get most anything in the game, and transferring (enough) Inf is trivial. If the latter: I can totally see how it would be annoying to have a small amount of stuff that you want to transfer to another server or another character without using email, SG base, whatever... but trust me: if you intend to stick around in the game, this really won't matter. The in-character limits for a lot of the 'transferable' stuff are quite high, plus there are a LOT of slots in the auction house available... so unless I was playing as a complete pack-rat and NOT wanting to have a SG base for storage I feel like I could hoard so much stuff that I couldn't even imagine wanting to transfer most of it between characters... and if I did, it would probably just be enhancement pieces and I think I would use email. If it bothered me that much I'd use a SG base. I recognize some things that can be accumulated are intended to be difficult to transfer, but those are relatively few.

Would it be possible to add a tiny %drop chance to Monstrous Aethyr to the level-less spawns, especially in Croatoa? Ideally there would be some way to %reward the players on the team that actually defeats the final spawn that resets the Grim Vale event, but anything to get players to actually clean up that event would be welcome.

I think there is an unstated assumption that Supergroups and their leaders are constantly active, hive-minded cogs that all spin together as some sort of eternal machine that progresses in a uniform way towards completely agreed upon goals. That is not how it was on Live. As I mentioned above: get in a group with a more-or-less absentee SG leader, and you are working as a serf who can get kicked from the SG at any time... and you will lose your precious SG badges. Of course I suppose you can try to join another SG and instantly be granted all their badges? Yay! /s No matter what "good vibes" people are attributing to the prestige-era of SGs, it ultimately became a measuring contest.

A couple of empirical truths about a lot of "x8" content: 1) it rarely needs 8 players to complete 2) 8 players can get in each other's way There are reasons why this might not be obvious to a new player, or for a character with less than a full kit of enhancement slots... But players not huddling up on each other isn't a wrong play style for teams.

Reporting as a long time Energy Melee/Invulnerability Tanker from back in the day when Unyielding had the player rooted... As I recall, the explanation for this AI behavior (which was mostly fixed on Live, but not entirely) goes something like this: If the AI for a mobile has that mobile on a travel vector (with some speed value) of some kind, and that mobile then gets a Disorient effect placed on them, the game keeps the mobile going on that path. This is the "baked in" effect I believe. The OP request isn't unreasonable: but I offer some words of caution... I don't know that any such effect (if implemented) would really make a difference for mobiles that already resist such things (e.g. Hypersonic War Wolves) and the queuing effect of status effects might still not have the end effect we want. There could also be an issue with allowed slotting for Disorient powers... My take: This can be annoying, but it is far less annoying than it ever was... except for high-speed mobiles that already have inherent resists to slows and immobilizes anyway (War Wolves, Igneous Minions, etc.) which will zip away stunned or not.

Here is my Mind/Poison Build. I have fun.

I just got off the phone with my totally real Canadian BFF GM (you don't know them) and they checked the logs of the super-secret SG prestige that was implemented on the "page 23" (I was into it before it was cool) and I was informed that my SG "Flicking Fetch Plastic Heathers" has MOAR SG prestige than anybody else, and that it will be mathematically impossible for anyone to ever exceed our totals, because that is simply NOT how things work in this high school server.

I hear ya. There are easily dozens of things a SG can do. Not just for themselves and their members but also for other players: Hosting leagues, earning merits for Purples/ATOs, running arcs, going to PVP zones... I just don't see what "SG Prestige" is necessary to: I know the players and SGs that have the most impact on Torchbearer because I play in their regularly hosted content and team with them. I know the kewl base builders because they advertise and/or have invited me. I don't need to have some arbitrary "leaderboard" added to the game, and if this was added back to the game, I would never check it.

The entire SG could collect Prismatic Aether's and parade around in a common costume... Of course that has already been done...

What is stopping any SG from having "long term goals" now?

I certainly remember working for SG prestige back on Live, and then the SG leader went incommunicado and the rest of us were pretty much SoL. It isn't like we could take our prestige with us. In one case, it took sooo long for the auto-promotion to kick in so that I could do anything with the base, the salvage racks were bugged because they still had base crafting salvage in them! Asking for a return to Prestige is asking for a whole lot of pain we haven't had to deal with for four years of Homecoming.