SeraphimKensai

Welcome back, I was speaking to someone recently who was a newer player while doing a few Council missions. It gave me the idea for this week's thread. Back in Issue 3, the 5th Column and the Council were seen for 1 day in-game openly fighting to the death. Afterwards the 5th Column was retired, albeit temporarily when they came back via ouroboros in i11. This was the first time in game where npcs would fight each other which I always thought was a cool idea to include as a lot of enemy factions hate each other based on lore. Today it seems there are story connections for the 5th Column and Council as individual enemy groups spread across the whole game. How do you feel about the 5th Column and Council in the game? Are their missions interesting? Do they have a good variety of mob types? Do they present a reasonable challenge? What are your favorite 5th Column/ Council story arcs? Least favorite (guessing a a lot of you will say Citadel here due to the repetitive kill all's and long travel distance/zone changes)? If you were to change anything about the 5th Column or Council what would it be? Do you have any other thoughts on the 5th Column/Council? As always thanks.

Not a build but I'd factor in several small groups of winter IOs and a winter's gift to get your slow res up to 95-100%. Stack resistance and recharge as you want energize up whenever you need it. I'd probably go with soul mastery for darkest night as even with brite modifiers it still is a huge mitigation amount reducing incoming DPS. On brutes I f I have room I like to fit some damage procs in as well and let fury boost my regular damage.

That's right there was no PvP when the game launched; however, my understanding is that there was pvp in an early alpha version of the game. Look for 2002 or 2003 E3 videos and discussions of the game play. It was removed prior to the closed beta, but planned to be brought back later on when development had the time to give it more resources.

I'm "retired" from PvP so my knowledge could be outdated, but what is toxic in the pvp community? I'm generally curious as my whole experience with pvp from a community aspect overall has been people helping people. Sure I may have been ganked a few times in zone but it doesn't cost me cost or repair bills and I went through the door by the big sign now entering a pvp zone. I feel the pvp community has gotten a bad reputation in general over the years, but in my experience they share builds, coach people in PvP strategy. I know multiple pvpers over the years myself included that have completely outfitted characters with full sets of IOs or power leveled countless alts for people that had shown an interest in actually pvping. I'm not trying to point fingers or what not, just generally curious as it seems to me that pvpers in this game have been the most ostracized and persecuted group of players in CoH's existence.

Back in the days of Guardian...we did this. There were a group of several SGs that actively promoted it (Twilight Avengers on heroside and Haunt on villains side among others). We would have hardcore pvpers bringing in people just interested in learning and wanting to do try it out and learn.. we'd bring teams on comms and coordinate offensive/defensive strategy and have a blast. We called it the Guardian Wars and it actually lasted a couple years or so. It was amazing seeing PvP zones full with people. It was not uncommon for the zone to be filled with about a 100 or so people. The guys at Haunt did a great job documenting it with screenshots and videos as well. Here's an old video I found of one of the lesser attended rounds. Basically you get interest on both sides and show people you are having fun. If they are you are having fun they likely want to have fun too so invite them to come have fun as well.

The ones in the stop the ritual mission were made that way on live if memory serves correct because a few players put some tanks with damage auras around the entry point and just went to work with a continual supply of do with essentially no risk to them. So it might be similar logic to what you're seeing.

This reminds me of a D&D session where I was playing as a homebrewed Treant (living tree) that could eat things and transport them to a pocket dimension and recall them by regurgitation in the state they were albeit covered in sap. It promptly ate our dwarf fighter in the party and won the rolls to do so, so one of our party rerolled and made a new character. During an encounter with a boss, my Treant puked up the dwarf fighter after his half elven ranger died in the fight. The player was able to resume playing the fighter albeit had a -2 penalty put on his dex rolls until he.was able to bathe. Definitely down for stuffing npcs into a bag of holding.

My take on it is similar to where Mac was hitting on. During live I lived and breathed pvp in this game but that was mainly out of camaraderie playing with my old pvp team. That was the heyday of CoH for me. After CoH died and came back a couple of my old team popped in for a bit to check things out but ended up leaving after the nostalgia wore off. @nojiyo stayed for a while and even got fairly heavily involved in the Indom PvP scene before the population started dropping. The rest of my old team either was busy with work, kids, university. I stayed to Everlasting and aside of the occasional zone/arena match there have stayed pretty much retired from CoH PvP because it just didn't feel the same without the old team. PvP in this game has always been fairly polarizing. Even on the live servers the pvp population was maybe 10% of the main population. I don't think prismatic aether's would really entice people to PvP. I mean hell the devs even gave everyone free lvl 50 toons (Temporal Warriors) to pvp with and you see they don't get used by the general player base too often. I'm not opposed to prismatic aether's being a pvp reward, but if they did they would need some of limit per character defeat within a time frame otherwise people would farm them in hidden areas and complain if someone came by and killed them in a pvp zone (just like people complaining about getting killed when they go get shivans, nukes, or are badging in PvP zones).

Honestly a limitless agro cap without a limitless target cap would kill farming on things like the meteor map as even with 90% resistance and 45% defense enough mobs would still be overwhelming to a player. Take that into other content especially hard mode TFs, teams could pull more agro then they could effectively handle. Tanks/brutes would probably like an increase but in general content it could cause issue with Squishies especially while solo. Probably not a good idea to raise.

I've honestly always thought that the CoV patrons should have TFs that unlock after you've done at least phase 1 of their respective patron arcs.

The only time people shut off steamy mist or any other AoE stealth power is during escorts. But if they were at the other end of the map it's not your fault they lost contact with the npc. Especially if combat status dropped and they were running stealth. Then again for that particular mission it doesn't matter the outcome as it still advances to the next mission. And as others have said regarding the AoE stealth toggles, they all also offer some degree of resistance/defense and purposely skipping them is like running a race with lead shoes.

Here's the CoD page: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=temporary_powers.temporary_powers.chain_gun Showing as a single target there as well.

This is what I do myself. I think it's more rewarding to help someone understand how to make a build as opposed to just giving them one. It makes them better players.

What about Mot?

I play dual Necro/darks myself (I also have a Necro/ea), but I can't help but wonder how Necro/nature has an end issue? I play nature on several other toons and the 74.5% pbaoe end discount on Overgrowth should resolve it by itself. Then there's also Life Giving Spores that gives endurance. Am I missing something here?

The crazy thing is for every 100 million Yomo gives out they make 400 million back.

First off- when I first saw the thread I was thinking oooo we get to talk about Siren's Call pvp bounties. Then I realized it wasn't pvp related and was about player generated feats to test other players for a prize. Well....that could be done as is now albeit with a degree of trust... You could use the forums as a place to issue the bounty, but then would need someone as an intermediary with overall pretty good trust that would be responsible for holding the bounty prize until the bounty has been completed with proof. Probably not the best way about going about it as it would be a lot of work for someone to track the open bounties and that a reward had been deposited and then have to watch the evidence to determine whether the bounty had been met. That might be too much responsibility for one person. Alternatively they could use the forums to open the bounty and the person completing it with proof could get paid directly from the person who placed the bounty but then again we arrive at a problem of someone reneging on a deal. Otherwise could have a system similar to Eve's bounty system (but then again that's mostly for PvP).

I made a plant/ta shortly after the trick Arrow changes a few years back and since then it's one of my favorite lvl 50s. I took it on a ton last night and it still did great (although no OSA at that level). At upper levels it does a ton of damage. I've had people mistake my plant/ta for a blaster while pugging and accusing me of using cheat codes. I also like plant/dark but for more survivability, that combo becomes pretty tank like. It's hard to pick a bad pairing with plants.

@Yomo Kimyata answer 8 contradicts answer 4. Your post states 100mm, but answer 8 states 20mm. And thanks btw.

This thread has piqued my curiosity. @Chance Jackson what would you propose as powers for each of the new praetorian patrons? would the available powers shift based on AT like existing ancillary power pools and patron power pools? What numbers would you suggest for balancing? What slotting options would be available?

The minus defense does help, but at end game there's a lot of players with tactics and other tohit buffs that the -def on quicksand might not matter too much. If only the slow on quicksand also slowed recharge like artic air, the. It'd be a must take everytime. Sadly it only prevents flying and jumping and slowing run speed. You also can't enhance the defense so no Achilles proc in it as it only takes slow IOs which is odd because the base power slows down mobs that don't resist it by 90% which is the slow cap out of the box.

You could go to the test server make a lvl 50, give yourself every interface and grab a power analyzer and do some testing. Then you could watch in real time the stats of the mobs change as you test the various interface options. My understanding and I could be wrong is that most of the effects of various interface incarnate powers are now working as intended.

I've been in that same position looking for a speed that suddenly ends up on +4, and I inspect players set bonuses and it becomes obvious they intend the people with optimized builds to carry the team through +4. I've experimented with a team like that by intentionally having to go AFK for 10 minutes just to watch how many people die and see the chat chatter. To the point that when I came back people may as well said praise Jesus he's back. I'm definitely a fan of people advertising the difficulty at recruitment and sticking to it as my playtime gets limited and I'd rather not be manipulated into carrying a team of that wasn't my intent.

It stopped because the GMs that did it retired. Someone else asked how to get it back and there was a lengthy discussion about interest and willingness to champion projects. No official member of the Homecoming team stepped up to revive it, so I've been doing it Unofficially for the last 38 weeks and still ongoing. I'm always up to new topic suggestions for future weeks. I post each weekly topic in the General Discussion sub-forum. I haven't done it on discord as I don't have a lot of playing time in general, and there's no sticky thread to show the consolidated topics we've had since I took over as once again I've been doing it unofficially.

they used to have that before globals came out. So I'm sure its possible to do again.