[So Long, and Thanks for All the GMing!]

Thanks all. I hope to one day return to helping the wonderful people in our community.

 

Until then, remember to be excellent to each other, and to yourself!

[It’s the people stupid!]

On 11/29/2019 at 10:51 AM, Solarverse said:

Being tolerant of this as you suggest only enables this behavior on a psychological level. Flocks of a feather stick together. If the A-hole personality is stamped out as soon as it shows it's face, i t discourages this behavior...we all know that if there is no consequence for behaving badly, then people will go on behaving badly. This is one of the many things I love about this community....bad behavior is not tolerated and will be met head on. Those people either change their behavior or they leave.

 

Your stance on the subject is honorable and I respect that, however, I don't believe that will accomplish the goal of keeping this community free of trolls and toxic behavior. The only people who can keep this community the way it has been since its release, is us...the great community that I have come to know over the years who hold bad behavior from people accountable.

Oh, don't mistake my meaning. You can react with compassion and still not tolerate bad behavior. All I meant by that is not making a judgement on a single interaction. Perhaps the person is just having an off day or had a lapse in judgement. Hence my suggestion to report bad actors, those violating the CoC. I applaud the community's self-policing efforts, but the Homecoming team are here to enforce the rules. We do not tolerate toxic behavior. We don't want it on our servers. We're well aware it isn't conducive to a fun experience. And we will take action to those who can't behave themselves.

[How do I enhance my character for lower level content?]

Enhancements effects, besides set bonuses, are reduced by a certain percentage when you exemplar below level 32, so higher effective enhancements will be better even when exemplaring, up to a 41.5% bonus if exemplaring below 45.

 

More specific details can be found here: https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Exemplar_Effects_on_Enhancements

 

Note that the chart listed on the above page does not mean if you're 25 and exemplar to 15 that your enhancements are dropped by ~61%. You divide the value of your exemplared level on the chart by your character's real level, so in that case it would be 0.391 / 0.733 = ~0.533. You multiply the enhancement's value by that. IE a 33.3% SO is reduced to ~17.75%

[Endurance drain on Mobs]

Also keep in mind that both debuffs and endurance drains reduce significantly against enemies at higher levels than you. At +2 they're still pretty effective, but beyond that things start tapering off pretty rapidly. At +4 enemies take less than half of the effect of any debuffing. That means you need around 210% total endurance recovery debuffing to stop a +4 enemy from recovering endurance, assuming they have no endurance recovery buffs or resistance to it (most sub-AVs don't). Also keep in mind it's possible for enemies to tick up their endurance at the same time they're hit by a endurance drain/recovery debuff power, and if this happens they will get that endurance after the drain/debuff apply due to the way the back end stuff work. 

[It’s the people stupid!]

7 hours ago, Solarverse said:

Now, if we could just drop a nuke on WoW, it would rid the world of the a-hole population once and for all.

Condemning another community in the same breath as claiming City's is such a good one leans a bit hypocritical.

 

Focus on the positives. There are fantastic people in pretty much every gaming community. The majority of any large gaming community are the quiet masses that generally just ignore the vocal minority. Managing tens of thousands of people is pretty difficult, let alone millions. Could they do better? Sure, but so can we, and so can everyone else.

 

You want to prove our community is one of the best? Curb the knee-jerk reaction of attacking something you don't agree with. Be inclusive. Be patient. Seek understanding. Forgive that everyone has bad days. Anyone who is willing to play by the rules should feel welcome to join into the community without seeing something they may love being condemned. Treat others with respect even if they don't seem terribly inclined at the moment to reciprocate. And if someone isn't willing to play by the rules and wants to be a toxic person? Notify us using the tools available and let us do our part. These people almost always are seeking to disrupt the norms and get people riled up. Don't fall for the ruse if someone simply doesn't respond to reason.

 

Being a fantastic community means staying positive, especially when it's easy and tempting not to. It means responding to criticisms objectively. It means responding to aggression with compassion. It means doing so for everyone, not just our fellow City dwellers.

 

I'm thankful for the City community. I have been since I found it. I hope that I always will be.

 

Be excellent to one another.

[Ever run out of missions?]

1 hour ago, Chris24601 said:

One thing I’ve been curious about is how story arcs you can no longer access factor into your maximum arc count.

There's very few cases where this can actually happen, but if the contact shows in your active tab with the green book icon, it counts. If they don't, it probably doesn't but I don't know for sure on that.

[Ever run out of missions?]

There's a few limits. One of them is that you can only have 5 (or is it 7?) active major story arcs at once. There's a limited number of unique missions in the game. It is possible to do them all. But there's ways to repeat missions, be it through Ouroboros, the radio/paper missions, or straight repeatable mission contacts. You'll never run out of missions you can do, but you may run out of missions you haven't done already.

[Just discovered this after years of wanting to play again.]

Welcome back to your City!

[Storm Kick not giving defense bonus]

FYI: The crit chance bonus was converted to defense for Tankers and Brutes when proliferated, as those ATs can't crit. You can disagree with that design decision and offer constructive feedback regarding it, but this is absolutely not an oversight or bug.

[Solo all Blueside Archetype]

9 hours ago, parabola said:

Well they seem to be giving the 'we haven't been introduced' text rather than the 'I don't have any more missions for you' one. However checking the lists of missions for these contacts they are indeed the same missions that I've done for others so that must be it. I had no idea the contacts worked like that, it seems odd - why have all these different contacts pulling missions from the same pool? I'll move on to the next level range with a reasonably clear conscience :).

The original game design (as in alpha stages) was much, much more Origin heavy. Some of that old system lingered, as with the original blueside contacts. The older contacts have one of the five origins and gives you missions (mostly) related to that origin. This starts quite obviously in the original starting contacts, and muddles a bit as you get introduced to more contacts. Real story-arc contacts like the ones that are far more common today didn't really exist in the early game. It was a learning step for the studio, a method of doing things that they moved away from gradually until you really didn't see it anymore by the time redside hit where every actual contact is basically a, or part of a story arc and all the fluff missions were found in the newspaper/radio system instead.

[Should powersets be cloned and then significantly modified?]

5 minutes ago, biostem said:

I wonder just how difficult it would be to add mutually exclusive power choice options at different tiers, similar to have SR has - like you could pick up haunt, or you could take a cone hold or something...

Technically speaking? The code exists, so probably not very. Making both choices comparable for balance and compelling options? That's an entirely different story. What could you replace Controller's T9 pet with that would be comparable and still fit the kit of a controller and the purpose of the T9 pets? Choices like this almost always end up being akin to "Yeah, you technically have a choice, but option X is objectively better in 90% of play."

 

Is this a bad thing? Subjective. Some people will appreciate a choice even if one option is definitively worse. Is that something the team would be happy with? Based on their reaction to Sentinel's SR thing, doesn't seem like it. That said, I would personally pick mutual exclusivity over cloning the entire set if something like this was to be considered. It makes more sense, is probably less work and is more player friendly.

[Taskmaster Gabriel]

I'm asking for confirmation but Gabriel may have been removed in i25 due to the DA arcs being added to Ouroboros and his function being largely irrelevant as a result.

[Lets "Shatter" some melee attacks]

1 hour ago, Galaxy Brain said:

My OG thread discussing slightly toning down a certain... advanced weapon set had some fun discussion 😉

Can confirm.

[Solo all Blueside Archetype]

6 hours ago, parabola said:

I'm not sure this works as you say. I've now got a bunch of the level 9-14 contacts who aren't interested in talking to me at all. I've done pretty much everything else so I need to move on if I can't get them to give me missions (although if there is a way of interacting with them it will mean that I've missed stuff in the level 5-9 range and that would leave me with a 'do I start over' dilemma).

What a contact says will tell you why they aren't giving you missions. Check paragon wiki against what the contact says when you talk to them. It could be possible their missions are from a pool and you've already done them all. I believe all contacts have a unique message for outleveled vs all missions completed. And honestly almost all the old fluff missions are about the same as radio missions. So if you feel guilty about them not having those missions for you, you could just run a few radio missions. 😉

[Blaster Tier 9 powers]

In regards to fire, specifically, I'm rather against giving it yet another ranged AOE. That it was a PBAOE always seemed to be a balancing factor for compensation of the rest of the set. In the modern age of no crashes and IOs and incarnates that's less of a thing. I don't really have a lot of investment either way, personally, but people do tend to dislike their iconic powers changing on them and I get that. There is a loss of fine control when you have to target a mob to center it vs it being centered on yourself. That you need a target at all can be a drawback to some people as well.

[Will the Leveling Pact feature be coming back?]

I can't speak to long term plans. I can say this is highly unlikely any time Soon™ unless someone takes it upon themselves to write a completely new function (or massively rewriting the current one) in a way that plays nice at scale.

[Name Release System]

5 minutes ago, FDR's Think Tank said:

I think this only really is targeting people who have, for whatever reason, left the game.

Mostly, yes. That was certainly the intended targets when Paragon did their own version of it. It does also put pressure on people who have the inclination to sit on hundreds of very low level characters with super common names. They either invest time in those alts via leveling them or logging into them regularly, or risk losing the names they aren't really (actively) using.

[Solo all Blueside Archetype]

7 minutes ago, parabola said:

I've found that there are contacts you simply can't get introduced to no matter what which is irritating (unless I've missed something).

Most normal contacts no longer require an introduction, in that you can just walk up to them and they will give you their missions. This is not exclusively true, but if you're trying to get a specific contact you might try just going to talk to them, assuming you haven't already.

[stealth and escorts]

2 hours ago, siolfir said:

For combat escorts, oh HELL NO on the +perception

They could give them the ignore stealth flag instead, like Rikti drones have.

[Suggestion that may backfire: Neutral Alignment Zone Accessibility]

1 hour ago, FDR's Think Tank said:

Can Rogues do Newpaper Missions in Paragon and Vigilantes do Radio Missions in Rogue Islands?

Nope. You don't even have access to the newspaper/radio on the opposite side. You DO have the "right" one and can pick up missions from it however.

[Auto-select new mission when talking to a contact]

3 hours ago, EmmySky said:

its not even yellow anymore when I return so my 'passive' waypoint is gone, too.  

Yeah if you don't actually set your active mission (making it a red waypoint) that will happen. Zoning tends to clear your set waypoint (any yellow marker).

[Winter event schedule?]

49 minutes ago, Display Name said:

What are the other Events that were available through CoH?

https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Category:Special_Events

[Converting attuned IOs]

It picks a random level of the set's range for each conversion. It's a known issue for certain sets. No idea if\when it will be addressed.

[Waagh! I want my old stuff back!]

26 minutes ago, AboveTheChemist said:

It was simpler than that, really. There were no uploads that I recall, at least not of character data. It was simply a matter of specifying your character archetype, primary/secondary/pool powersets, origin, level, and perhaps another minor detail or two. Then one could add screenshots and text-based character descriptions to describe the character in as much or as little detail as desired. It was more of a way to flesh out a character backstory and/or document their ongoing story than it was a repository of build data about the character.

It was essentially a Crey styled VirtueVerse. A wiki of sorts for character concepts from the purview of the totally legit corporation with no ulterior motives whatsoever.

[The Current PUG Meta (aka ramblings of an old man)]

3 minutes ago, Gulbasaur said:

You young powersets and your newfangled quality of life powers.

 

Back in my day...

You'd have been Regeneration or endurance starved! Oh wait Regen was only for scrappers back then.

 

Then just endurance starved!