Mjolnerd

I'd actually prefer if we had fewer "everybody drop everything and do this instead" moments. I'm just trying to shop, I don't want to fight a basketball with spider legs, and then another, and another, and another as they spawn one at a time because I'm off somewhere minding my own business. Boy, I'd really like to get a TF going, it's too bad there's a Nemesis invasion happening so nobody is going to respond to my attempts to form a team until that ends 20 minutes from now. Wow, this is a great team we've got, let me just grab another mission for us and oh no the tank just quit because someone is summoning Adamastor for the hundred-and-third time today. Most zone events are just two dozen people standing around begging for an invite and then spamming attacks for ten minutes against a slideshow caused by everyone's overlapping particle effects being on-screen at once anyway. If the giant troll in the Hollows had some kind of a trick to beating it besides "keep damage up until its health bar runs dry," or there were maybe some kind of a consequence for not beating it successfully, or if it were... I don't know, anything besides "big version of small thing, big thing need more hitting before die, everybody get merit yay" I might be more enthusiastic. As it is, this would just be another thing getting in the way and sapping precious time I could be using to play the content I actually want.

Well, they're not going to throw out months of work and start over from scratch solely because Snarky doesn't like it unless you tell them that Snarky doesn't like it. Maybe ask to speak to a manager?

Agree 100%. "Not for me" is not the same as "bad."

Thinking of it as a "nuke" might not be the way to go. I understand it's a T9 power from set with "blast" in the name and we've kind of been trained to think "blast set last power = big big boom many mobs die right now," but there's no reason that has to be true every time. Overall the whole set feels a little less literally-blasty than most, almost a hybrid blast/control set, and I kind of like that about it -- different sets being, y'know, different, and playing differently in ways other than "this one debuffs this, but that one debuffs that instead" is nice.

I wanted to create an alien character, but a fun, friendly, uncynical one. Less Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Independence Day, more Guardians of the Galaxy or Hot-Rodding Teenagers from Dimension X. So this is Inter-Galactica, my new gravity/energy dominator.

Raise the minimum level for the Summer Blockbuster event by 2. Not because it needs it for balance or anything, I just think it would be funny if you had to be 17 or else you wouldn't be allowed into the theater. (Though it would mean some blood and cursing and nudity could be added to the event, so there's that.)

Obviously I'm grabbing it. Here's what I'm thinking so far:

Synapse gets a lot of hate, and it deserves most of it, but I maintain that any problems it has, Citadel has too but worse. It's just the exact same mission over and over. Synapse at least has the decency to ask you to do the same thing over and over again on slightly different maps. Citadel is just defeat all Council in base, defeat all Council in an identical base, defeat all Council in another identical base, defeat all Council in literally the same base you just left, defeat all Council in base, defeat all Council in base, somebody asks how many more times we have to defeat all Council in base and nobody is sure because the whole TF has blurred together into a single monotonous megamission, defeat all Council in base, defeat all Council in base, defeat all Council in base, defeat all Council in base, defeat all Council in base plus a bland uninteresting boss fight.

Jokes aside -- like that movie, for example! Ha! ZING! Got 'em. But seriously, jokes aside, Catwoman is known for using a particular weapon. A weapon which is already represented in the game, not with enough assets to be a powerset on its own already but enough that it would represent a pretty significant head start compared to developing a new set from scratch (accidental pun!). And which players have been asking for as a full powerset non-stop since those assets were introduced as part of another set. I'm not on the Beta server or Discord, but if that isn't a reference to some kind of "whip combat" set, I will eat my hat. Wait, no. I like my hat. If it's not whips, I will force myself to sit down and watch the Catwoman movie all the way through from beginning to end as punishment.

As... basic as this might make me, I'm going with the ITF. It's short enough that you don't have to block out a whole day for it (Faathim, the original Posi), but not so short that it feels like it's the same length as an average contact mission (Penny Yin). It's challenging enough that everybody needs to pay attention because some teamwork and communication is required, but even the boss fights aren't so hard that every single thing the team does has to be perfect and error-free. There are multiple paths to victory, both literally and tactically, depending on team composition and just general preference. It's mostly fighting Roman centurions, but you've also got dark-energy space squids and cosmic shadow lobsters and paramilitary fascists and vampires and werewolves and robots, and oh yeah also here's a minotaur and a cyclops too. It's a ridiculous silly mix of disparate enemy types that also somehow make sense together in the context of that particular story. It's easy to forget when you're on your six-thousandth speedrun of the week, but that moment when I ran my first ITF and came around that bend at the top of the hill after fighting hundreds of Bronze-Age soldiers with swords and the occasional Warcraft monster, and suddenly BOOM "surprise, there's a pair of hundred-foot robots and an army of Nazis here!" might be the most comic book-y thing CoH ever did. And that dramatic reveal was accomplished without a hamfisted cutscene or anything, just a clever layout of the level map. I know it's not an especially deep cut, but sometimes the obvious choice is obvious for a reason.

This thread is a fairly perfect illustration of the exact reason I never, ever team on any of my many, many tanks: Nobody can agree on what good tanking actually means, but they're all absolutely certain they're the only one who knows how to do it. And they all want to complain loudly whenever someone else does it "wrong."

Released or found available Omegarilla, Ape-X Predator, and Skulldug.

At this point I think we're discussing a larger issue, namely one of philosophy. As a consequence of the game being brought back after shutdown, the player base is nowadays mostly made up of hardcore fans, with very few casual ones -- those people all moved on a decade ago. But there are really two kinds of "hardcore fans": The professionals who are invested in all aspects of the game as a game to the point that they've "solved the puzzle" of making everything as effective and streamlined as possible -- we employ this tactic, I go here and use my carefully-cultivated attack chain, you target a particular enemy and use this power and only this power, everybody gets a million Inf and we move on to the next spawn ten seconds later because we followed proper procedure and did things the best way possible. The romantics who are invested in playing whatever they're playing right now because they think the powers are fun and the costume they made for it looks cool, or for some other, personal reason that's isn't PEAK PERFORMANCE DAMMIT and haven't actually taken the time to math out the most efficient possible sequence of attacks to use at any given moment, they just pop the basic ones off as they're recharged and use special ones for special situations. Obviously it's a spectrum and everybody is going to fall somewhere in the middle, but the game dying and being resurrected is by its very nature going to attract mostly people on the extremes -- the most hardcore of the hardcores, even if for very different reasons. And of those, the ones like us here who would actually take time out of their day on the regular to argue about game-related issues on an internet message board? The extra-most-hardcorest of the hardcore. Frankly, it's a game and most people just don't care that much. The forum crowd for any type of entertainment represents the ends of the bell curve. Unfortunately, that means we find ourselves in a situation where a bunch of MLB All-Stars are trying to share a field with a beer league softball team just looking for an excuse to get out of the house on a Thursday night. One side feels like their time is being wasted playing with people who can't hit an 80mph fastball in a million years, the other thinks the first is taking things way too seriously by throwing pitches they know full well are impossible to hit in a game that's supposed to be for fun. And, to some degree, they're actually both right.

Technically it also had an arena, not that anybody was going to notice (or care about) one of those disappearing from the game.

My understanding was that, basically, there were two starting zones that fundamentally served the exact same purpose, and more importantly, served the same 1-5 level band. This meant splitting new players, who might not know about all of the tools available to them to find a team (plus some of the tools we have now didn't exist at the time), into two different zones, which led to them having a hard time finding teams, and therefore, being less likely to keep playing and/or paying. Of the two, the one that saw vastly more traffic was Atlas, largely because most players who actually knew the difference between the two starting zones were choosing the one that had other players, costume contests, and the big cool statue in it, not to mention easier access to the Hollows, which is where pretty much everyone was going to end up anyway due to the way contacts were structured at the time -- everybody wanted to introduce you to David Wincott. If you're going to make one of those two redundant, you do it with the empty one. Skyway, for all its flaws, at the very least serves a level band that no other zone completely overlapped with. Not that that matters much in the modern game, but it was a bigger deal back on live.

Released Voidstriker, Catman Dude, and Knuckle-Dragger.

I got bored at work and went on a name-checking spree tonight. Kept a few for myself (some will probably be released later), but these I'm just going to leave here for whoever wants them: Codecracker Coal Minor Dragonetta Gamblin' Man Gold Miner Gold Minor Roulette Wheel Rushin' Roulette Silhouetto

I could see insects making a decent control set too -- holds/immobs/slows presented as swarms of normal-sized bugs crawling on or flying around an enemy, maybe a location AOE that fills the space with BEEEEEEES (the animation could be, like... literally tossing a beehive that shatters on the ground?), and a single giant spider or maybe a trio of big ol' wasps or something as a T9 pet.

The auction house isn't accessible from bases or mission maps, but your in-game email is. I make sure to keep a dozen or so Awakens (or bigger) in my inbox at all times. Whenever a Rez insp drops I usually just send it to my global at the first opportunity, so I can access it from any character on the account and also so it's not taking up valuable space in my tray for something I may need to access quickly in the heat of battle.

There's a Digimon named after the singer from Disturbed?

I'm all for eliminating currency types; we have way too many already, most of them do almost nothing, and we certainly don't need new ones (Prismatic Aether Particles, I'm looking at you). I would like to see the separation of Incarnate XP types make a comeback, though. I can't even remember the last time I saw someone recruiting for any iTrial besides a BAF or the very (very, very, very) occasional DD. I think once someone got a LAM going? I legitimately might not have ever seen someone even attempt to put together a Keyes or TPN even one time since Homecoming launched. Nobody has any reason to form (or join, before anyone jumps in with a "why don't you organize them yourself?") anything but BAF after BAF after BAF these days. The "anything you do provides Incarnate XP for everything" approach made sense when the entire "community" consisted of like six people, but now that HC is "public" and has enough players to actually form iTrials, it's limiting things and making the game smaller.

P2W vendors in more places. Not a lot more places, I don't think there should be one in every zone or anything; I just don't want to have to sit through multiple loading screens, fight the lag caused by a million people forming a BAF in Ouro (seriously, people, there's a whole zone that was redesigned just for Incarnate stuff to happen in it) and another million crowded around Ms Liberty, then sit through even more loading screens to get back to where I was before, every time a booster or jetpack runs out. Maybe just in places that have sort of become "hubs." I'm thinking, like, near the train station in Talos and maybe inside the Vanguard base in the RWZ. I'd suggest Portal Court too, but that's only one loading screen away from Talos.

They're like buffalo wings, but cute and fluffy.

Nothing, but for some players the in-game advantages aren't as important as the details of the character being right. Imagine if you couldn't change your costume or adjust your biography after character creation. Neither of those things provides any advantages in pure gameplay terms either.

Usually I'll respec. Once I remade the character from the ground up (I decided it would work better as a corruptor instead of a defender with the same sets), leveled to 50, moved what enhancements I could over to the new version, sold the others and used the money to replace what changed. Then delete the old one. I actually do that fairly often, but only once on a level 50. Usually if I need to do a full "delete and restart" I catch it somewhere around level 25 or so.