Dazl

Thanks Laucianna for pointing that out. If the start time keeps changing, the raid leaders may not even be able to get in.

Waiting till *:45 to form the league is to keep the raid in the scheduled 10pm start time frame. In the past when we started invites early and started when the zone was full we found the 10pm raid was becoming the 9:30pm raid and if left unchecked that would become a 9pm raid. I understand they do it like that on Everlasting, but they don't tend to get the start time creep like we can. Since we do 1 bloom clears, our worst case scenario is a triple bloom. We can usually can clear it by regrouping once or twice, sometime not at all. Just depends on luck and if people are focused. I can understand why Foxfyre and company started the raid keeping it as a 2 bloom for the reason you stated, but also probably due to people coming back and being a bit rusty at hami raids. It is the safest way to run the raid and would have made sense in the beginning. Moving to a one bloom raid might have caused the devs to give us a sideways glance but as I pointed out to them, like any other content in this game the more you do it the more efficient you become at it. It's not that the raid is simple (there have been many cases of failures) we are just well practiced. We will do a 2 bloom raid if we don't have the numbers, it doesn't happen often but if we have to we will do it to avoid a multi-bloom. If anything I would think Hamikazi raids would be a bigger red flag for the devs. Other raid leaders and I have asked the devs for an instanced Hami, like the MSR. My suggestion was to have different difficultly levels like 2 bloom, 1 bloom, hamikazi, triple and quad bloom clear raids and have them adjust the rewards based on the difficulty of the instance, but I'm not very hopeful. Heck at this point I would be happy if they just fixed this broken league system.

In terms of who are the current care takers of the raid that would be the following. Varine @Nicodemous Bain Jenny Quark @Hunter Smith D Lyra @MsAligned Dazl @Dazl We also have great group of people helping target and lead the tank team. We could always use more people to learn to help and even lead the raids as well. We don't have the deep bench of raid leaders like Everlasting. If anyone is interested please contact any of us.

Clearing the yellows is absolutely the most important part of clearing a multi-bloom. Keep in mind though the greens are going to keep healing the yellows you are trying to kill. If you are lighter on melee you may not be able to burn the yellows down fast enough. So the greens are a major threat too. The blue mito’s are the lowest threat. So we have the tank and melee teams focus on the yellows. The range team only on the blues and everyone else dog pile the greens. It’s not easy but an interesting experience once in a while. Good thing with the 1-bloom raid is the worst case you only get a triple bloom if you fail.

I guess as one of the main leaders of the 10pm Hive Hami, I should help provide some clarification. The 10pm Hami raid was started by Foxfyre and company using the standard 2-bloom clear method like so many Hami raids. It’s probably the safest way to do the raid with the highest success rate especially with lower numbers of people. Considering the probable dev intension was clearing all 4 mito blooms, only having to do 2 rounds is pretty cool thanks to incarnates. It's important for people to understand the reason to clear the mitos with Hami blooming new rounds at 75, 50 and 25% health, and how that is going to make killing hami harder. The system works well, and everyone tends to end up coming back together on the greens before killing the hami. It’s sort of a dance, with everyone working together. If you never do at least the 1-bloom clears, you will never be able to clear multi-blooms. BTW we found focusing on the yellow and green mitos works best for clearing a triple bloom. Another thing most people may not know is this raid is tanked totally different than all other raids. The tank team leader D Lyra started this process back at the begining with Foxfyre. There are normally 7 tanks and one mender. Six tanks are assigned to each of the yellow mitos and will join the melee team when their mito is cleared. The last one tanks the hami and it changes each round and is not limited to just tanks. When I started leading the raids a couple years ago it was the standard 2-bloom clear system. I had done raids on Everlasting and Torch and had seen both 1-bloom Everlasting “Fast Sue” and Hamikazi raids. By far the best Hamikazi raid I’ve seen is the Saturday Midnight on Everlasting (killing hami twice with the same lores). I wanted to bring these things to Excelsior, but the old leadership wasn’t too happy about it. Changing the raid from the 2-bloom clear to the 1-bloom clear was a major battle at the time and is now the standard for Excelsior and Everlasting raids. We use half the league lores each round and this system seems to provide the best time vs merits reward with minimal failure. Sure, we have done Hamikazi’s from time to time, but it’s just not as efficient as the 1-bloom clear for us. Funny how when I pushed for the 1-bloom clear over the 2-bloom, I was trailblazing new ground, now if we don’t do it Hamikazi style I’m old school. That’s fine, I’ll take old school. It’s good to have diversity, if people want to do Hamikazi raids in the Abyss God bless you all. I wish you nothing but success.

What if you keep the calendar, but make it only editable by homecoming mods? We could submit requests and homecoming mods can add them to the calendar.

Congratulations Homecoming, it's been a long time coming. I hope you use this to get the word out to the old players who haven't joined us yet and those who haven't even heard of us.

I saw a post, possibility on MMORPG.com about CoH returning. Then got an email from former team mates during live. Glad I got back in shortly after Homecoming launched and didn't miss too much.

I couldn't agree more. If there could be only one fix to the league system, this would be the one I would love to see. I had this problem with the hami raid on Excelsior tonight. Range leader got disconnected and the new team leader didn't respond to my tell to pass the star when I got the leader back. Fortunately I held off inviting new people alt'ing and I had enough room to move the range team members to other groups to get the leader back to the top, otherwise I would have had to kick them all and then re-invite them once the leader was back in place. The devs and the homecoming team have done great things to improve this game, but the league system really needs to be fixed over some of this other fluff stuff.

Not being deliberately antagonistic, I just have a different opinion. Getting rewards for something you can do afk is quite a bit different then doing something with a group for a reward. Sure any team or league effort will have people contributing at various levels but most people work together to complete the task. Even solo content (outside of AE) requires you to focus and interact to complete. If someone feels there is no difference between afk and a solo/group focused activity, then we will simply agree to disagree.

Looks like the Dev's disagree, nice try though.

Technically you didn't really "earn" the emps, they are a gift given at certain leveling milestones. I understand though, everyone gets a trophy.

There seems to be a bit of hyperbole about the impact of this change and the fallout it will create. It’s a transaction that never should have been allowed in the first place. There are plenty of merits to be had, if you want them go earn them. This only takes away the 4100 free merits you would get if you sold all the vet emps. While that is a decent sum, it’s not game breaking and can be earned relatively quickly over time. Even more so after the change because you will have new ways to earn them, along with the tradition methods. Why do you think so many of us do hami raids?

You can send Transcendent merits to your alts to build out their incarnates.

I do agree that some of the cost for items on the reward vendor should be adjusted. ATO's and purple recipes should only cost 50 merits, and regular IO recipes should be 25. Winter IO's and ATO's both cost 100 merits, and they are not close to being the same value. As I asked before if you can't buy emps with merits, why can you sell them for merits? Isn't the incarnate salvage supposed to be account bound. In the end it's not really that many emps. If you just farmed for the 20 emps you would get 160, which is only 1600 merits. It's pretty easy to earn that outside AE.