DSorrow

1. Patently false. I haven't farmed a single minute on Homecoming but I have 8 50s with no-limits IO builds. 2. I don't really understand what you want here. +0 mobs that reward the same as +4? I'm on board for making rewards scale better with enemy difficulty because right now there isn't any incentive to fight stuff like the Vanguard. However, the way difficulty works in CoX is pretty binary: either your numbers are better than the opponent's or they're not and skill isn't involved all that much beyond planning your build because the game doesn't have many active mechanics such as aiming, dodging or parrying. 3. 100 merits for 1 top of the line IO is actually extremely reasonable. Consider an arbitrary build: 24 powers between your primary, secondary and power pools plus Health and Stamina and 67 freely assignable slots for a total of 93 slots you most likely want to fill with something. If we assume you want to slap a purple / PvP IO / ATO in each slot - which is an extremely exaggerated assumption, by the way - you'll need 9300 merits to get everything. For the sake of simplicity, we'll also assume that you get no useful drops and you won't even use the inf gained from drops to trade for enhancements, so you're left with merit gains to complete your build with. Considering that there are plenty of activities in the game that reward you with a rate of roughly 1 merit per minute, we get an extremely conservative estimate that it's going to take you around 9300 minutes or 155 hours of gameplay to obtain maxed out gear. However, once you factor in influence and enhancement drops, converters, activities with much better than 1 merit/minute reward rates (Tin Mage / Apex / Hami / etc) and the fact that even a top of the line build isn't going to have a 100 merit IO in every slot, you're probably looking at 70-80 hours maximum unless you specifically spend your time in low reward activities. 4. IOs and incarnates being confusing at first is maybe the only thing I'd agree with here. While Incarnates are pretty straightforward, the IO system is extremely intricate. However, the IO system is a bonus. You can do any content in the game with just SOs, though maybe not solo, in undersized teams or at high difficulty settings. Even if you understand very little about set IOs, slap on any set build that makes any sense (i.e. powers slotted for their primary purpose: no defense debuff sets in damage powers and so on) and it's going to be better than an SO build. If you want a beautifully optimized and executed build, it's going to take a while to learn how to build those, but you'll often find volunteer help with that kind of stuff if you ask nicely on an AT forum. The builds you see on the forums generally aren't built for the standards required by the game, but something much, much, much higher: the standards required by hardcore veterans who are pushing the limits of what can be done. Sure, 800 million builds are great fun to play with but you'll do more than fine with a 50 million build and even an 800 million build is actually quite accessible if you're willing to commit for what I consider a rather reasonable amount of time.

In my opinion a default TF is basically +0 to +2 (depending on the team comp) and defeating enemies on the way to objectives. If you're about to stealth a lot, want to defeat all, crank the difficulty higher or otherwise do something "unusual", then it's usually worth mentioning to manage people's expectations.

Generally I find the difficulty of CoX pretty good. After all, this is my "relax and kill skuls" game to contrast stuff like Sekiro or Dark Souls. That said, I think Galaxy Brain proposed a couple of great difficulty options that I'd like to see added: Advanced enemies. These could be a generic enemy group like the legacy Void Hunters (Incarnate Hunters?) who appear within others to simplify designs, but more importantly I'd like them to spice up combat by using AoEs you have to move out of and such. Buffing the enemies or just having insane stats themselves is boring, but making combat more interactive would be cool. Harder TFs sounds good and we kind of have that already with TFs such as Apex. Would be cool to have L50 versions of all TFs, though, with some added difficulty. Difficulty/rewards balancing. This is pretty obvious, but it would be cool if people had an incentive to fight stuff like Rularuu and Vanguard. Finally, I'd like enemy groups such as Vanguard looked at a bit. Having an enemy group that can stack ludicrous amounts of -Res pretty much instantly is dumb because the only counter-strategy is to nuke them faster than they nuke you. Also this right here.

I understand your frustration, but you aren't really contributing to a non-toxic environment with comments such as "grow up": Similarly, dismissing evidence because you don't understand it doesn't come across as very constructive: Finally, evading accountability when contrary evidence becomes overwhelming is a poor practice in general: I'm all for a good discussion, but if you want to have one too you can't hold others to a higher standard than yourself.

I really like Fly. Basically all of my characters end up with either CJ/SJ or Hover/Fly depending on whether they're melee or ranged based. Both options give good combat maneuverability (CJ more than Hover) while Hover is usually better for leveraging ranged cones and staying out of melee range. While I wouldn't mind Fly having a slightly higher speed cap, I don't think it's problematic right now because what you lose in speed vs. other travel powers you can make up in route selection. Speedsters and Super Jumpers are bound by map geometry while a Flier can just go straight from point A to point B, and in my experience the travel powers end up being roughly equally fast over time. Flat maps are won by SS, medium geometry maps by SJ and very vertical / unconnected area types by Fly.

No need to get hostile, buddy. Your test is flawed and doesn't show anything that's applicable or relevant in the 50+ game. If you want to compare "better damage", the best way to do so is to measure consistent DPS against targets such as Rikti Pylons. This is the easiest way to account for inherent powers, procs, debuffs and such, none of which are properly represented in your test. If you want to compare pure numbers, a Blaster with scalar 1.125 will do more damage than a Corruptor at 0.75 even with Scourge, as on average Scourge gives you 30% more damage [source] (0.75 * 1.3 = 0.975 < 1.125), but in reality this is even less as either much of the double damage ends up being overkill or the enemy is never alive with very little HP left so your overall proc rate is actually quite low. So, Scourge doesn't "literally double the damage of your attack", unless you mean it does that less than 30% of the time, and even then it doesn't always functionally do anything. Additionally, to get as close to an apples to apples comparison here, you'd have to account for Blaster's Defiance. Finally, if you factor in debuffs, you have to take into account that they consume a significant amount of time the Blaster gets to spend on attacks (let's say, 10-20% of your overall animation time), but at the same time the Blaster has access to BU which provides a considerable increase in overall damage. Yes, if they all had access to the same attacks. This isn't really the case when you compare Blasters and Nova Form or Scrappers and Blasters, so it's another variable you have to account for in a test. However, for a Blasters vs. Corruptors comparison this isn't really an issue so the chart shows that Blasters do more damage. In summary, your test is just far too simplified to be representative of an actual in-game scenario at level 50. Looking at the behind the scenes variables such as the damage scales, some common sense and actual play-testing all support a case which is opposite to what you claim.

I've been pretty inactive with the market lately. I'm sitting on something like 4 billion inf plus a hoard of useful enhancements and I'm not going to have a new 50 any time in the foreseeable future. Once the Tanker changes pass to live I'll probably get back to the leveling and marketeering world.

Looks good to me. Ran a few checks with the iterative method I've always used and this matches all my results while being much more simple and user friendly. Thumbs up!

While the new enemy mechanics sound interesting, I'd start with just adding some powers across the board to most enemy factions if the advanced enemy option is toggled: additional offensive powers to reduce the downtime of enemies -> increase in incoming dps defensive toggles to increase the meaningfulness of control powers to suppress them priority targets with crowd control / debuff abilities For example, advanced enemies for Council could add stuff like: Warwolves: Savage Melee single target attacks for all, Foot Stomp for bosses Vampyri: Dark Embrace for all, AoE mezzes / Darkest Night type of stuff for bosses Soldiers: Body Armor / basic mez protection (mag 3) for all, Leadership for bosses And so on. The feel of the faction still stays the same, but most enemies just come with a couple of additional abilities that make them either more resilient or dangerous. Additionally, having the setting on should probably increase rewards from the enemies at least slightly.

I haven't farmed in AE or anywhere else so far on Homecoming because I know from experience in retail CoX that it's very likely I won't ever get into characters I just power leveled to 50 and leveling up with the DXP is plenty fast (15-20 hours to 50). Besides, if I'm going to play a character to 50, I'm going to get all the passive accolades so getting them done while leveling ends up being roughly as efficient as PLing to 50 and then getting the accolades. Also, with most builds I can usually tell pretty early on if it's something I actually like playing, and it doesn't feel as bad to abandon a mid 20s character as it does abandoning a 50. However, if somebody else wants to farm, then it's good to have that option for them. For example, I could see myself PLing characters to 50 if I was interested in PvP and I wanted to roll something new purely for PvP.

For me the issue is simply practical, back in the day I had all the time in the world for playing video games so even without the QoL changes progression wasn't an issue. Nowadays adulting keeps me busy most of the day so I welcome any and all changes that remove or reduce what I call pad-time, such as running from place A to place B to be able to do the thing I actually wanted to do. While I can't speak for anyone else, I don't think it has any added value to require getting badges for the field crafter, running between WW and the nearest crafting table, or having to go to a specific location for a respec so I'd rather spend those couple of minutes to kill skuls.

Any details on this? I'm hoping for a reduction in some of the most extreme resistances (most notably Psi and Lethal) some enemies have.

I fully IO all my 50s with basically inf-is-no-object builds, mostly because I find the search for ultimate power the most interesting thing to do in end game. However I do remember how daunting all the IO stuff felt when it first came out. Right now I have a lot of experience in planning builds so it's pretty fast to make a great build when I basically have a default set in mind for most typical build goals. Also making money off the AH is quite trivial once you know what you're doing so basically the cost of planning a build and getting the inf for me is a handful of hours of playtime, and usually less actual time than it takes to get to 50. Plus, I actually find tinkering in Mid's fun in moderation.

I generally don't give a crap about what other players do in a team so long as it isn't disruptive. Want to solo a branch of a cave? Go right ahead if you can do it and your absence doesn't put the rest of the team in trouble. If the team leader sets some ground rules that don't allow that, I'm fine with that too so long as they're stated up front and not after the fact. By default I expect something between a speed run and defeat all: go basically as fast as possible without skipping fights unless someone has invisibility and can stealth the objectives.

I'd say they are pretty accurate in terms of SO slotting. When you bring in IOs the charts are pretty meaningless as it's much, much easier to increase survivability via IOs than it is to increase damage. For example, a Blaster that's essentially defenseless with an SO build can be soft capped to several damage types (mine is soft capped to S/L/E/F/C) with IOs which is basically a 10 fold increase in survivability. IOs can get nowhere near that kind of increase in the offensive department. I'd say no to both. Brutes going from 90% to 85% cap doesn't really affect a whole lot of builds, but affected builds would take 50% more damage than before the nerf. Same with Tanks going up to 95% as that doubles the maximum survivability of Resist based sets and gives them a higher survivability cap than is achievable with Defense, though, this might or might not be fair considering Def allows you to avoid debuffs and CC, but it still seems a bit much to me. The current plan for Tank changes seems like a pretty good route, in my opinion. Tanks will have an easier time to build defensively, but they won't be obsolete in fully buffed teams thanks to their improved offensive potential. Given how similar Brutes, Tankers and Scrappers are, I don't think it's even possible to attempt to make all of them completely unique ATs, so the effort should probably be spent on making them somewhat different takes at the same thing (melee damage + survivability).

I evaluated this quite a while ago, but from what I remember mag 4 protects you from ~95% of KB and mag 8 from ~99%. I go for 4 on my squishies, but for a melee character I'd go with 8 unless you have a slot to spare to go for 12.

My default slotting for Leadership is the following: Maneuvers: Luck of the Gambler (Def/End, Def, +7.5% Rech) Assault: 1x EndRed Tactics: Adjusted Targeting ToHit/End (+5) Vengeance: LotG +7.5% Rech Victory Rush: garbage, I never pick it Sometimes I might slot a full set of Red Fortune in Maneuvers for the +Ranged Def, Tactics might get 5/6 Adjusted Targeting or 6/6 Gaussian's but it depends on the build.

As much as I'd like just a couple of extra slots in some of my builds, I have to agree with some previous posters that the limited number of slots is one of the few (and best) limiters of power in the game, so I'll also go with a no.

I'd probably do that too if I wanted to maximize my influence efficiency. 30mins to 1 hour of playing the market per week gets me around 600-1000M by the time a new character hits level 50 so I opt to just get most of my sets from the WW at buy-it-now prices because it's quick and convenient, plus at least for me there's no other use for inf.

That's just how the market works. WW looks for the lowest listing under a bid to match a seller and a buyer: e.g. item A is three listings from three players at 50, 55 and 60 inf. A fourth player puts in a bid at 59 inf so the eligible sales are the ones at 50 and 55 of which 50 is chosen because it's the lowest. In your case there just seems to be enough listings below your price to satisfy the market's demand that your item won't move.

This is a point I'd really like to highlight. I don't farm merits, AE or anything else but all my 8 50s are fully kitted out. My most expensive character up to date was my Blaster whose build is basically 100% comprised of Winter sets, ATOs, purples and interesting uniques/globals at a total of 800M buy-it-now, with my average build probably coming in at around 600M. Inf is spectacularly easy to make if you spend a little time researching the different methods, and even if you don't, getting a fully maxed out build doesn't take all that long even through normal gameplay. Consider that a build with 2 full ATO sets (1200 merits), 4 five piece purple sets (2000 merits), 50 rare IOs (2500 merits) and the rest generic IOs costs a total of 5700 merits. Most TFs reward you with around 1 merit per minute so those alone get you there in 5700 minutes or 95 hours. Once you factor in random drops, influence gain and veteran level ups that can be converted into merits, even if you don't spend all your time in semi-efficient activities such as the 1 merit/min TFs, I'd find it extremely unlikely it would take much more than 100 hours to get there. If you're willing to settle for a 100-200M build that is still far ahead any SO build, you can get there in a couple of dozen hours. Hell, even a frankenslotted 10M IO build is massively better than a pure SO build and achievable by doing the Market Crash once (<1h). I still think the baseline performance of sets should be balanced around SOs, but I agree with @Sir Myshkin that at this point it would be quite stupid to completely ignore the general implications of IOs (global recharge and survivability increases, mostly).

I agree that the accuracy mechanics can be very frustrating at times. I'll never remember the cases where I win a fight because I was lucky and hit 3 attacks in a row at 40% hit chance, but I can easily recall at least two instances from last week only where I ate dirt after missing several attacks at 70% hit chance. This is probably why enemies using Elude seem much more annoying that those using Unstoppable because against the latter you can usually make small but steady progress instead of having 95% of your attacks do nothing. Just having better animations / sound effects for misses would do a lot because randomly having my character shoot a beam 90 degrees off target feels much less immersive than having the same blast deflect off the target, but implementing this would be a huge effort to take care of an ultimately minor annoyance. The clamped 95% max hit chance is also, to me, an annoying relic of old times because it basically never works to change the outcome of any situation but just adds an unnecessary bit of irritation. There was a discussion about this point already a few months ago, though.

+1 Eclipse Scythe from NG2 pls.

Stone Armor to me is completely unplayable mostly because: it restricts movement, something which I absolutely hate most of the powers look like crap, quite literally it relies way too much on its T9 which comes with huge -DMG and -Rech so not only do I get to use my coolest powers less often, they are also less powerful no customization for GA GA makes 4 powers in the set mostly obsolete I can't really come up with anything I actually like about the set. At minimum I'd like better power customization, reduction in the self imposed debuffs (especially the -Jump) and some synergy with GA and the other toggles, but I feel like the Stone Armor needs pretty much a complete overhaul to feel good.

The only issue I have with the blue flames is that sometimes they're pretty much impossible to notice under all the player generated effects, other than that I quite like the mechanic as it stops the AV fight from following the generic pile up on AV and smash 1-2-3 formula.