DSorrow

What's your endgame? Recharge for the sake of recharge isn't worth it, but going for more recharge to enable a better attack chain, get a perma buff or something else could very well be.

In my opinion the importance of balance in games is basically set by a couple of development choices: the existence of PvP and what kind of difficulty the PvE part should have. If PvP is a big focus, then I think it's quite obvious that outside of specific rock - paper - scissor pairings, whatever character / equipment / powers the players can choose, the combinations should be closely balanced. As far as PvE goes, balancing should depend on the level of difficulty at different stages in the game. The more difficult the game is supposed to be, the more important balance becomes because content balancing has to be done against top-end performance in order to keep things challenging, and if certain classes / powers / specs can't get anywhere near the required performance, they'll simply be blacklisted. When it comes to games like CoH, which are by most metrics very easy and casual, I still think it's important to keep balance to a level where everything is at least in the same ballpark. My reasoning for this is pretty simple: it is definitely an issue if some powersets feel noticeably weaker than others even if numerically they'd be "good enough". The unfortunate truth is that good balance is pretty much impossible to achieve through buffs only, so nerfs have to happen every now and then. Currently, though, I'd say CoH is in a pretty good place balance wise and, excluding TW, I'd say all of the outliers could be fixed with a couple of buffs.

I like to look at this the other way around: 20 million inf is such a small amount, why not get the extra +Rech? In general, a lot of the time purple sets are very efficient slotting choices given the powerful procs and the very useful +10% Rech. However, sometimes other choices such as Basilisk's Gaze, Obliteration and so on might be better slot-by-slot depending on what goals the build has.

None of my characters have full T4s. This happens mostly because none of my characters have Judgment as I don't like the effect having it has on gameplay (plus, it's often pretty hard to justify concept wise) and I take the T3 Lore just for the +1. The rest of the incarnate abilities are usually a mix of T3/T4 depending on how much benefit the upgrade from T3 to T4 would yield.

Generally I only use voice chat in a couple of cases. Primarily, if I'm just sitting in a voice channel with a bunch of my buddies while we play sometimes the same game, sometimes everyone playing their own. With total strangers, though, I only use voice comms if extremely quick comms are necessary, but this doesn't apply to CoH.

You mean revert the stealth reversion of the stealth nerf?

Exactly. There are a multitude of reasons for power leveling, including: leveling up feels too slow characters are more fun at 50 optimizer mentality: many players just prefer the most time-efficient way of achieving whatever it is they want to achieve etc. The way I see it, very few if any of the underlying causes will be gone if power leveling is restricted, and I agree with your assessment that many people would just go to other games where they don't have to suffer through whatever it is they dislike about CoH's leveling up process. The optimizers still wouldn't do "regular teams" because joining a lvl 50 radio team would still be much more efficient than running missions <50. In my opinion, if anything, removing AE would reduce the number of available teams and most likely make the IO economy painful for average players.

I don't announce any buffs, even longer cooldown AoE clickies. Anyone who doesn't need the buffs will be off on their own ahead of the rest of the team, and those who do probably stick to the core group which should be easy to cover on the go. For single target buffs I tend to prioritize the people who might benefit from them the most, usually by a very heuristic check of their powersets: +Rech for anyone whose powersets rely on long cooldown powers, +Dmg for damage dealers, and so on.

I believe this should be put into the development pipeline with Carp Melee.

My Scrapper's all gone to the Americans.

I do think the OP is right about the change, though. However, I have fortunate news for them: when HC was launched the new devs secretly undid this nerf. It wasn't documented in the patch notes, but I instantly noticed that my Scrapper's performance was now again exactly the same as before! Obviously you can't verify this within the game because the change was made in the base stat modifyers, but if you have been pushing your Scrapper to the limit, you'll know. Just try playing +4x8 and you'll see the similarity in the evade states.

I think one of the big issues in leveling traditionally is how character development feels very slumped in the 10-22 range. Enemies get seemingly more powerful quite quickly as you enter the DO range, but the same increase in power doesn't quite translate to player characters. More often, it seems like the access to a larger variety of powers without SO/set IO level enhancements to offset the additional endurance costs your character is out of Endurance. At the same time, you're also losing Beginner's Luck so instead of getting more accurate, the development is the complete opposite. So far I have 9 50s on Homecoming and I've powerleveled one character to the mid 20s. I like playing through story arcs and taking it slow because I feel next to no attachment to a character at 50 if it's been PLed all the way. However, that's me and even then I have to note that I prefer playing with DXP on. If I wanted to play PvP, I'd most likely PL several PvP only characters to 50 because the types of builds and powerset combos PvP characters have wouldn't most likely fit a character theme. These characters would just be tools for PvP. Having said that, it's not difficult for me to imagine people might feel this way about PvE, especially if like me they'd have somewhere around 3 dozen or more 50s between legacy CoH and HC. At that point there isn't much you need to learn about a powerset, especially if you've tinkered with your character builds yourself and you've probably done most of the content a bunch of times anyway. The next two characters I'm planning to play to 50 would do a story arc only playthrough. One on blueside to catch arcs like new Faultline I haven't done in a decade and another on red, just to get my 3rd ever villain 50...

Strongly agree with this. I'd really dislike seeing a return to the hard teammate requirements. Wouldn't mind mechanics that are really difficult to pull off solo, but simply making them outright impossible just seems unnecessary.

I take Aim always on characters whose main functionality is dealing damage and depending on the build for other ATs. On my Ice/Fire Blaster I cycle Aim > attacks > BU > attacks seamlessly so that one of the two buffs is always active, but on my Thermal/Sonic I haven't taken Aim at all. Currently I prefer slotting Gaussian's in Aim over Tactics on characters who have both because it gives me better control over when the proc happens. While I get more procs in Tactics slotting it in Aim allows me to time the proc for heavy hitters (and combat in general) which makes it feel more impactful.

This basically sums up my discontent with many of the T9s. From a design point of view I think most of them are flawed in two ways: Adding a huge amount of a stat most builds already have a lot of, be it +Res or +Def, is just pointless. You could just as well pop an inspiration or two, reach the hard or soft cap, and end up with the exact same survivability but without the crash. The hard crash of Unstoppable and any others like it. Those are some of my most hated gameplay mechanics, especially when we can't see the remaining time by the second. I don't want to pause gameplay for an unknown amount of time just because the crash might mess things for my whole team if it happened in a fight. I don't mind the more lenient crashes that just take 50% of your Endurance because you can quite easily play around them happening even mid combat. Overall, though, most of the traditional T9s just offer so little benefit in the IO world for their cost (power pick and crash) that I probably wouldn't pick any of them. As for outliers, Parasitic Aura is great because everything it does stacks nicely with the rest of the set and there's no nasty crash. OWTS is also cool, the crash can be worked around and it stacks well with Shield's other stats. WP and Rad Armor also look like they have usable T9s, but I haven't played either set on HC so can't really comment on them. Scrapper/Stalker Ice Armor seems to have an excellent T9, but I also haven't played that so I'm just looking at the numbers here. I think most T9s should move in the direction of Icy Bastion: stats that temporarily (though, meaningfully) round the armor set in areas where it's lacking, and with cycle times that are closer to 30/180 than 180/1000.

I don't want to sound all tin-foily, but perhaps you should consider the possibility that the whole of Paragon might be a simulation. I know, I know, not really an orthodox position to hold, but just consider it. Then there's also the case of real fake doors plastered all over the city, but I don't think we're ready to go that deep yet.

I feel like Ice suffers from being a "first generation" layered armor set. It has a bit of many different sources of mitigation, but it doesn't quite stack up to the survivability or offense of newer sets such as WP or Bio. Personally, I think the main culprits of Ice's problems are the following: The base Def values for S/L/E/NE seem a bit low, they could use a tiny bump. Also Glacial Armor should be available sooner for Tankers. Having three defensive holes (Fire, Toxic, Psi) is a bit much. The set's DDR is far too low (for my liking) for a set whose damage mitigation is mostly dependent on Defense. Energy Absorption does allow you to buffer up, but this isn't a very applicable strategy in situations where it can't be saturated (AV fights). Hibernate as a T9 is a bummer, Icy Bastion is great. For a layered set, I find that the recuperation powers are kind of lacking. Hoarfrost works much better as a +MaxHP tool than heal due to its long recharge, and Hibernate is, well, boring and in my opinion completely antithetical for a Tank. I really like how the set does a bit of everything, but at the same time I think it either needs to either improve meaningfully in a select few areas or just do everything a tiny bit better. Some ideas for improving Ice Armor: Increase the DDR values. Improve the base values for S/L/E/NE Def slightly. Shift some Cold Resistance to Fire (for example swap the Cold and Fire Res values in Permafrost). Give Energy Absorption a Heal effect that scales based on the number of targets or give Hoarfrost an Absorb Over Time for its duration. Hibernate needs a whole rework, personally I'd just change it to give immense amounts of +Heal/+End/+Absorb Over Time while basically capping your Debuff Resistances for 10 seconds. Essentially, you'd be rendered invincible for a short time while regenerating health and shedding debuffs but remaining able to act. All of this at the same time might be a tad much, but at least some of this would be nice.

This is what enables the nostalgia for me. One and a half decades ago so many things were different: MMOs were new and the grind was a core part of the experience back then, plus I was a school kid with all the free time in the world to devote to the grind. These days, MMOs aren't new, grinding isn't a core element of all MMOs, and most of all, I really can't spare several hours every day playing games. If the grind was a necessity, I'd have to find another game because given my limited schedule, the game just couldn't live up to what I'd expect based on memories.

I'd agree with you if CoH was a game that promoted playing just one main character, like vanilla WoW or something.

I don't really follow the reasoning here. With or without DXP there are certain ways of playing that result in faster or effortless leveling up. Regardless of whether we had the option for DXP a portion of the players will always choose the path of least resistance and essentially nothing the developers can do will make these players choose story arcs over PLing and doorsitting. In all honesty, I think taking DXP out would increase the number of people who choose to PL because a change like that would double the difference between PLing and "just playing" in absolute terms (5 hours vs 25 hours is now 10 hours vs 50 hours). That would just make PLing even more appealing.

I'd say it depends on your overall build. If you have a bunch of Def already, then CJ adds up nicely on top of that but on its own the +Def is very meager. However, it is also a nice combat movement ability and costs practically nothing to keep toggled. Assault on the other hand is a pretty expensive toggle that adds very little incremental damage to a Blaster, but it does affect the whole team and extra damage is always useful.

I'm all for more challenge options, but anything that arbitrarily and forcibly extends a grind that in itself isn't challenging doesn't make the game harder. Leveling up to 50 isn't hard because you don't need any special skills to accomplish it, so doubling or tripling or halving the time it takes to do it doesn't change the difficulty or challenge. That is, unless we are talking about the challenge of fitting game sessions into your calendar to get to 50/unlock incarnates/[insert goal] in reasonable real time. With that out of the way, I think the veteran rewards are in a good place. For the periods in my life when I'm extremely busy with stuff and can barely get an hour of gaming a week, it's a blessing when I can just run whatever content I want and still progress my incarnate abilities. If I have more time, I can choose to do iTrials to get there slightly faster, which is also great. We're still far away from instant 50s and instant incarnate unlocks anyway. The thing is, one of my favorite things about CoH is that a play session is never worthless from a progress point of view. Because all IOs are tradeable every bit of influence is a direct step towards a piece of a build. Thanks to vet levels, every bit of XP is a step towards an incarnate ability. I absolutely love not being gated from a category of rewards because I can't commit to a raid/any other specific content category or want to do something else instead.

I think this just sounds unnecessarily complicated because we already have a profanity filter and an ignore feature. Adding single words and phrases to a filter list in order to cover everything you don't want to hear is extremely cumbersome, and if the whole message gets filtered based on a keyword, you'll probably end up filtering out mostly neutral chat with a longer list. Personally, I just don't really see any added value in this as you can already permanently rid yourself of trolls and idiots via /gignore, which is much more effective than a list of keywords to filter out certain vaguely defined topics usually discussed by trolls and idiots.

It's not a long list and pretty much analogous to my RL pet peeves: People sharing incorrect information about the game's mechanics / something else and refusing to acknowledge they were wrong when it's pointed out. People who think trolling is funny. Fishing annoyed reactions out of others hasn't been funny since first grade. People complaining about how others like to play (farming, PLing, speed runs, whatever) when said gameplay isn't an exploit or otherwise violating any rules. Lack of initiative, e.g. mindlessly spamming LFG for long periods of time rather than starting your own team. Sense of entitlement: nobody owes you a full build, farm runs or anything else. If you're nice about it, there's a very good chance you'll get what you want, though.

Several others already addressed many of the problems Elec has, so I'll just highlight what I think are the main issues that have been raised. Lacking a true T3 blast, Elec has pretty low ST damage. This could be mostly fixed by giving Tesla Cage the Freeze Ray treatment. Short Circuit and Ball Lightning could do with some front loaded damage. Some of the animation times are horribly slow, which at least for me makes the set feel very clunky to play. At minimum, I'd look at reducing the animation times of Thunderous Blast and Short Circuit to somewhere in the <2 seconds range. The secondary effect isn't very useful or even interesting. I really like the idea of adding chaining damage to Elec Blast, so what if it worked like a Corruptor's Scourge but checked the opponent's Endurance instead of their HP? A minor chance for chaining at full Endurance so it's not useless against targets that resist -End/-Rec and something significantly higher when the target is at 0 with a sliding scale in-between. The -End is now useful even if you don't drain things to 0 and it would be worth to enhance it even if you wouldn't go all out. Oh yeah, and Voltaic Sentinel should stick around for a longer time.