Mjolnerd

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.

Kinetic Melee. I don't care if it only does 95% (or whatever) of the damage some other sets do -- it does enough. And I like the animations. People complain about the handwaving and "gathering energy" motions, but I love them. You just have to create the proper justification for them in your head, is all.

I get wanting to just have everything unlocked, to remove the "grind" aspect and reduce time sinks since HC isn't chasing subscription dollars and doesn't need to pad the length of things like NC/Cryptic/Paragon did. I also get wanting to give players goals, things to work toward so they have a reason to keep coming back day after day, week after week, month after month, if nothing else to keep the servers populated and give players other players to team with. The trick is balancing the two. Personally, I think there's been some... over-zealousness on both ends. A lot of the things that are easy are a bit too easy (remember when you had to run different content to get different kinds of Incarnate XP, so people did all of the different iTrials available instead of just BAF, BAF, BAF BAF BAF, BAF BAF BAF BAF BAF and maybe if there's time afterward also a BAF or two?). The things that are a grind are a bit too much of a grind (Prismatic Aether Particles). None of that is a deal-breaker for me, but it's all stuff that could be improved. Really, I think my main issue with PAPs is that we already have about six thousand different kinds of currencies in this game, some of which have people actively asking for new things to spend them on -- could this functionality not have just been a new thing we did with Incarnate threads instead of yet another altogether new kind of salvage to manage?

I like the idea. Common in warehouses, never in caves, maybe a small chance in Council bases but not likely. Maybe even put them in "break rooms" inside police stations or banks in mayhem/safeguard missions.

I'm curious -- what's not easy about the current system for that? It's not that I don't think there's room for bio-editing to be improved in the form of making it more... I guess I'd say "robust," but I can't think of a way to make the process any easier than it already is.

You're right -- it was taken over by the Council around issue 3 and after that they only appeared from time to time in special missions (mostly Portal Corp stuff that sent players to alternate Earths). BUT There was a storyline in issues 15 and 16 in which they returned. It started with the Dr Kahn TF (and Barracuda SF) in 15, and when 16 went live they actually showed up on the streets again. 5th Column Wiki Page

You know what small, tiny, minuscule change I'd love? For "Judgment" to be spelled correctly.

I've said it many times before, and I'm going to keep saying it. Discord is fine as a chat client, but I cannot fathom how everyone on Earth has decided it's the best way, or even a good way, to disseminate and/or archive information someone might need to refer back to more than an hour or so after the fact. Just set up a website already, people.

I also know nothing of the code, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were deliberate -- if there were some line in there that made one in a hundred or one in two hundred or whatever enemies just break and run by design for the sake of spice and/or challenge and/or immersion. Older versions of Dungeons & Dragons used to have "morale checks" during combat so that if certain things occurred, you'd roll some dice, and every once in a while an NPC combatant would just say "eff this, I'm not dying here" and leave. Yes, we all have expectations as players of a video game, and we need to suspend our disbelief to a point in order for the game to function properly, but with regard the fictional reality presented within that game -- its' "kayfabe," so to speak (he said, sliding his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one finger), Castle wasn't wrong. If I'm standing in fire, my first response is going to be to, you know, not do that. And if there's a nine-foot angry meat mountain who's the source of that fire, and he's also already reduced thirty-five of my co-workers to paste with his bare hands, then once I've made the decision to run away (either to save myself or to go get help), him saying mean things to me isn't likely to change my mind. And if I'm cornered with no choice but to fight that angry meat mountain, and I have a gun, then no matter how many nasty remarks he makes about my mother I'm absolutely going to stand as far away as I can and shoot instead of getting in nice and close to both stand in fire and be within reach of the bare hands he used to reduce thirty-five of my co-workers to paste.