Fade

It's pretty niche, but what about a temporary debuff available from the P2W vendor (now the P2L vendor, I suppose)? If Stamina gives a +25% recovery bonus, grab an anti-Stamina -25% recovery temp power.

What I like about this system: More Prismatic Aethers earned, especially during the lower levels, seems like a good thing. I like seeing what I call a "rainbow team", when every member of a team has a different archetype symbol on the team window, for aesthetic reasons. What I don't like about this system: The specific roles assigned to the archetypes are too limited. In an attempt to be "fair" to the archetypes that are designed to specialize, the system is unfair to archetypes designed to do multiple things well. The "Corruptors don't count as support" argument is like beating a dead horse at this point. I feel like the roles provided here make sense from a game design perspective but not a game play perspective. I have never looked at a team and thought "This team is well balanced, except we need more melee damage. No blasters allowed, no brutes allowed, get me a scrapper or a stalker only!" "Support" being a single category feels limited. I think there's a difference between offensive support (damage buffs, resistance debuffs), defensive support (defense and resistance buffs, damage and tohit debuffs), healing, and endurance (recovery buffs or outright +endurance effects). Most support sets have a mix of capabilities, but may focus on one way over another. This system defines role as something you are, rather than something you do. At the very least, this idea is clearly divisive. I don't think all-support teams, or all-tank teams, or what have you, are any less "healthy" than a more balanced team. I do agree that it is unhealthy if characters that focus on a particular role feel like they have no place in the game. But I think this isn't solved by being the tag-along so the rest of the team can get more rewards, and has to be solved with game design. If controls (for example) feel inadequate in the late game, more situations where they are useful must be introduced. I don't want to be the guy who feels like he has to switch characters in order for everybody to get a 3 million influence bonus. Likewise, I don't want to be the guy who thinks about his teammates "I wish you were playing a different character." The system incentivizes speedrunning shorter TFs multiple times with different characters over playing a single longer TF. This also doesn't do anything for mission teams. Overall, I think the negatives outweigh the positives on this one.

Honestly, I think that would be for the best. I know the dev team is trying to do something nice for the players, but I think this idea needs a bit more time in the oven. I don't know whether trying to promote more balanced teams in some way is something we should strive for, but if we do decide to do that, here's how I would tweak the system as presented: As for "what counts as a well-balanced team", the game already tells you what ATs do what roles, on the character creation screen. In this section of the character creator (which I skip every time) we have listed roles that perfectly match the roles in this new system, plus "Pets" which isn't so much a role as a playstyle. Clicking "support" gives you a list of the archetypes that someone, at some point, considered the full list of archetypes that can fulfill a support role. While I can see why it might be seen as "unfair" to give the classic ATs like Corruptors more roles than a more focused AT like Scrappers, I think it's more unfair to not recognize their full contributions to a team. Personally, I'd align the roles listed here with the roles for the system. Simultaneously, I'd limit each player to "counting" as only one role at a time for the system - not as something a player has to choose (so player's don't have to "queue as support" or whatever), but as something calculated in the background. This would mean that it requires a 5 person team to get this bonus, which I don't love but makes more sense than assuming one player is performing three roles at a time.

Ok, cool. To be clear, I was more focused on whether those ATs could count for multiple roles at the same time, rather than whether they could count for any one role as needed to fill out a team. But it sounds like the answer to my questions is "yes" either way. As for whether non-epic ATs should count as multiple roles, I can see both sides on this one. On one hand, I play my corruptors specifically to bring support to a team. The game already tells you during the character creation process which ATs can provide what roles, and it seems silly to disregard that and have a much more narrow focus of what each AT is doing. On the other hand, this doesn't change the way the game is played at all. It's only used for getting a bit of bonus rewards. And the end goal clearly seems to be nudging players towards playing "classic" teams of one of each AT, so I can see why there's exactly one traditionally Hero AT in each category and one traditionally Villain AT in each category. Ultimately I'm not going to worry about the design too much, just make sure things are working as they're intended to be working.

Does a team of two, one Warshade and one Arachnos Soldier, count as a full "diverse team"? Is it meant to?

Here's a followup screenshot to show the similar issue. My UI scale is at 116%, and turning it down to 100% did "solve" the issue, though the game is unpleasant to play with the UI at that size, so I set it back to my preferred size. I'd be happy to check the "two line badge name" theory, but I can't find any that are long enough to break into two lines.

I've also experienced this issue. It doesn't happen with other games or programs, it is a City of Heroes thing, and has been a thing on both of the computers I've played the game on since Homecoming started. No idea what causes it.

I'll chime in and echo Number Six's points. I play on Torchbearer now, and played on Triumph on the original servers. I prefer a smaller crowd for many reasons, which I don't have to get into here (I don't want to get into some kind of big server/small server slapfight). Suffice it to say, if I wanted to play on Excelsior, I'd be playing on Excelsior. If there was only one shard from the very beginning, I imagine I'd be playing on it. But as the system works now, a shard merge would show a callous disregard for my personal preferences, and it would be a faith-killer in the Homecoming team. That's why Number Six says people would quit over having more people to play with - not because more people is bad, but because the choice is removed from players like myself. Its comforting to see that the Homecoming team is not considering such a measure.

I mean that two players can stand next to each other, and one might see the NPCs while the other sees only empty space.

NPCs can be present for some players and absent for others, based on active or completed missions - some examples include Laura Lockhart, Aaron Thiery, Lt. Harris, and multiple NPC contacts in Praetoria. There's also a scene with Marauder surrounded by police near Manticore and Swan depending on your progress on the Provost Marchand story arc (the blueside level 30+ arc, not anything that takes place in Praetoria).

People are giving a lot of great suggestions in this thread. I dig a lot of the Sonic/Symphonic ideas, and using Leviathan Mastery or Force of Will as well. While the Water/Mental blaster might be closer to what the OP originally asked for, I think some kind of sound-based set would be even more interesting. I like the idea of pairing something with Storm Summoning, or even Empathy might be suitable as a psychic-ish support set.

Is a water blast/mental manipulation blaster off the table?

He also likes to hang around about 5 feet from an NPC having their purse stolen by a Hellion, near the parking lot behind City Hall. When you aggro the Hellion, he says a quip and runs off, and the NPC calls him useless.

To be clear, Discord.io is not the same thing as Discord. Discord.io seems to be a tool that some Discord server admins could use to create custom links to their Discord servers.

I dig both ideas, though I suspect permanent versions of Envenomed Dagger and the buffs (Offensive Amplifier, etc.) would likely be too powerful.

I think having some free (both in terms of influence cost and endurance cost) toggle powers available at the Pay 2 Win vendor would be a great way to implement it. That way anybody could pick up all the ones they want, use them when they're desirable, disregard the ones they have no interest in, and maintain any costume visuals they already enjoy on their characters.

Just gonna throw a link to a similar thread I made awhile back in here. Seems like maybe it was under consideration for a bit but newer, shinier ideas popped up and this got put off to the side.

Uh oh!

The game I played the most during the time between the live server shutdown and the Homecoming startup was Warframe, and that game was (and is) great in a lot of ways. I'd suggest taking a page or two from Warframe's book for some endless waves type missions. They have two mission types that would fit particularly well in CoH with limited modifications to the mechanics: Defense missions are about protecting an object from waves of spawns that are pathing directly to it. Enemies can attack players or the object, and if the object is destroyed, the mission fails. This one would probably work as-is with very little alteration, but would work on limited arena style maps that would need to be purpose-built for it, like the Terra Volta reactor. Survival missions involve picking up life support devices, which spawn at random locations on a map or from defeating enemies. This kind of design keeps players from picking a tasty chokepoint and camping there until the end of the universe. Survival maps in Warframe are the "normal" map types and are much more similar to normal CoH map types as well, with relatively linear paths that may branch at points. For CoH, though, the "life support" justification of the system wouldn't make as much sense, but the mechanics are solid - a bar slowly ticks down, and defeating specific enemy spawns or clicking on randomly spawning glowies partially refills the bar.

Hopped onto the Beta server to test out the new Effect: Flames power (the one bought with Prismatic Aether Particles). I was playing my corruptor with Fire Shield from Flame Mastery, which uses the same visual effect as the new Effect: Flames power. I found that when I had both powers toggled on, and then toggled either power off, the visual effect associated with the power turned off. This could result in Fire Shield still providing its buffs, and consuming its endurance, but with no visual feedback. The issue was first noticed using the default power customization themes (Original, Bright Flames, etc.) for both Fire Shield and Effect: Flames. Messing around in the tailor, I found that if Fire Shield is using a different power customization theme than Effect: Flames (say, leaving Fire Shield on Original and changing Effect: Flames to Bright Flames) both effects become visible at the same time, and as a result do not affect each other when toggled on or off. When using the same customization theme with different colors (setting both powers to Bright Flames, but turning the colors of one power red and the other power blue), only one power was visible at a time and toggling one power off turned off the effects for the other. I also tested this on my dominator using Mind over Body from Psionic Mastery and Effect: Psionic, but the bug did not occur (turning off one toggle caused a momentary visual effect drop, but the effects of the other power immediately activated). I have not yet tested using any other archetypes.

I see where I went wrong. I was missing the highlighted parts of the following (using Entropic Aura from Brutes as the example): 100% chance 2.25 second Taunt (Mag 3) if !target.HasTag?(Raid) && (target>enttype eq 'critter') 100% chance Apply "Execute Power" (all affected targets) ● Redirects.Inherents.Fury_Proc_Aura So in Raids, you get the 2.25sec taunt. Otherwise (including raids, or no?) you get the standard Fury proc, which includes a 13.6sec taunt. Meanwhile, the Scrapper is still only getting a 2.25sec taunt from Entropic Aura because they obviously don't get the Fury proc. Interestingly, the Scrapper version of Entropic Aura also has the "if !target.HasTag?(Raid)" tag on it. Seems to be true of other taunt auras as well, even though they all seem to work outside of raids, so I'm not sure if that tag means what it seems to mean on the surface. But anyway, all of that was a diversion from the point of the OP, so that's my bad.

Brute's Entropic Aura seems to be limited to 2.25 sec as well: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=brute_defense.energy_aura.entropy_shield&at=brute

For specifically the T-shirt request, that option is (somewhat) available. Set your character's torso texture to Bare Chest (or to any other option, like Tights, for a layered look), and use the Tshirt pattern (where you might otherwise select Stripes, or Blend, for example). Unfortunately, I can't get into game at the moment to take an example screenshot, but that combination will get you the look you're describing (if you don't mind a hint of nipples poking through your shirt). That said, there are a number of other female-only patterns that would work well for males (and presumably huges too). Athletic, Belly Tee Short and Belly Tee Long on the torsos, and Athletic Shorts on the legs, would work great as-is and only need to be enabled for those body types in the code.

A possible neat mechanic: The single target blasts create little ghosts, that linger around for a little while (say, 6 seconds to be conservative). The AoE attacks can damage those ghosts, and when a ghost is defeated by its owner, it causes an additional little AoE attack around itself. Perhaps one of the single-target attacks can, instead of summoning a ghost, be cast on a ghost to consume it for a self-heal or endurance bonus. On second thought, 6 seconds is VERY conservative for the lifetime of the ghosts. It seems like the Necromancy ghosts can last for 90 seconds, though there is a limit of 1 active per attack. Maybe they could last for 15 seconds? The point is essentially that they could be a temporary resource to be used, rather than an army to be slowly summoned over the course of a fight.