GM Sijin

Let's not assume we know the minds, capabilities or knowledge of others, including one another and those responsible for updates to Homecoming. Argue the merits of the idea, not the traits of others. My thoughts on the idea as raised are a little lengthy (sorrynotsorry). TL;DR? I'm not a fan of changing a less straightforward set instead of educating players on how to make it work well for them. I'm against the change. You cite that Twilight Grasp is better because you can position it yourself. I say that's a mixed blessing when the cast time and time to heal from cast start are drastically higher than Transfusion's (by measure of how quickly things happen in combat). By the time you move to your target (assuming they aren't also moving) and your heal goes off players could have been defeated. Transfusion is, by the numbers, the best aura heal in the game. Sure, it can be a challenge to use in some situations but that's a major part of the reason why it's such a powerful heal. But if your team won't work with you to help you help them that's on them, not you or the powerset. Also making transfusion and twilight grasp behave the same does not make them equal without also adjusting (nerfing) Transfusion's superior time to heal. Kinetics is my favorite support set, and has been since I discovered it late in 2004. It continues to be even after they add new support sets. I understand the frustrations of trying to deal with people who don't understand how the set works, or don't consider just how effective transfusion is as a heal and don't enable you to use it for their benefit. I understand how frustrating it is to have both heals off cooldown and see someone rez with an awaken, then run away instead of to an enemy so you can pop their health and endurance straight back (near) to 100%. I understand the frustration of a blaster standing what looks like exactly one pixel outside of the radius of your transfusion at 20% health constantly. This is why the casual build on my Kinetics D has the medicine pool. Because there are players who don't know to, or simply won't play to your strengths even after you've explained it. I'm okay with that. I still prefer the challenge of using the set. I understand the inherent risks of being in melee are a balancing act against the power of the set. Blaster doesn't want to risk getting in the fray? No FS pegging their damage to the cap for them. No effectively infinite endurance (though that's a lot easier to do self-buffed these days with sets & incarnates). You want the heals to affect both areas? Okay, but it would probably end up looking something like: 25% of the healing around the player, 75% of the healing around the target. Reversed for Grasp. This means you're healing less effectively any time the targets aren't in the stacked effect of the auras. In practice this would probably prove to be an effective nerf to both powers. I say it would be this way because the auras would probably have to be separate entities and could potentially both heal the same target without new code to prevent it from happening. Having two heals at that potency double-dip would be excessively strong. Having two aura areas doing the same amount of healing even without double dipping is probably also not something that they'd consider balanced either, so you're looking at some other kind of (potentially) negative trade-off for what you're suggesting either way. I'm really not a fan of this for a lot of reasons, most of which being that I don't want BOTH target positions to have to matter for the healing when I'm playing my Kinetics. I love having to make sure I'm targeting the right thing and it's in the right place to land my heal. That's an incredibly engaging part of the set for me, despite the occasional frustrations it can bring about. It helps Kinetics stand apart from other sets all the more. I also don't want to legitimize people not understanding way the the sets play causing changes to the sets. I don't want to homogenize support sets. I don't want the theme of those Kinetics powers to be diluted. Not every set is going to be fun for every player. That isn't a problem. It doesn't automatically mean the set needs to change to accommodate the playstyle of the player, and not just because this is impossible to actually apply to any large group of players. But because the sets should be different. There should be as vastly a different feel between sets as is possible while keeping the sets effective. This leaves room for the widest array of playstyles to find something they enjoy, and those who have less narrow preferences benefit from a wider variety of gameplay to delve into. A set that is more difficult to use does not necessarily mean it's less effective, especially when those sets are generally designed to be more potentially effective than simpler sets. In practice due to player behavior it may seem less effective, but when your team knows how to play into the strengths of Kinetics? It shines incredibly brightly. Hence its popularity despite these challenges.

Lusca's head can't be affected by player's attacks at all until all the tentacles are downed.

I can't say what the devs are doing, or talking about, or considering, but I can tell you they read the forums. They also get ideas the GMs find particularly compelling forwarded to them from the discord. They do consider player feedback, hence why the test server is housing bigger 'experimental' changes for long periods of time so that players can get in there, play with them, provide feedback and help guide changes.

And here I thought you meant Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter...

The client has little, if not nothing to do with it. The issue is that active ambushes (the kind that actually track down your characters and follow them) cause constant pathfinding on top of normal combat related checks which are relatively processor intensive and entirely server-side. Individually this isn't a big deal. When hundreds of players are on missions that spawn a lot of these kinds of ambushes, it stresses the servers available processing power significantly. This would have to be overcome somehow before missions such as these would be viable as new content. Likely requiring significant and completely new code for handling active ambushes pathfinding.

RIP quick and easy, soloable merits (and exp!) on all my new characters.

Technically nothing they do regarding Homecoming is their jobs, being unpaid volunteers. Expanding that, and addressing the topic of the thread, the issue is a lot of things are an unknown. And things aren't usually actually 'possible vs impossible.' The tend to rather be degrees of plausible or feasible. Programming languages and engines tend to be pretty flexible, and often times knowing if something is strictly possible requires either a high level of knowledge of all involved systems, or experimentation, neither of which is perfect. It's also quite impossible to devs to lay out "this is literally everything that's possible/impossible" or even come remotely close to such a list. Finally you have the social aspect of the weight of a developer reply, and more importantly player's assigned expectations to those replies. If a dev said something was possible, that isn't necessarily an indication of it being considered acceptable but it can be taken that way. And even if a dev say something appears to be acceptable, that isn't a promise that it will be implemented. Things come up. Ideas that seem sound may prove to be difficult for a variety of reasons, many of which may escape the understanding of many players. And no matter how they word it there will be those who interpret it as a promise to implement the feature, or at least are upset if the features don't happen for whatever reason. This isn't to say we won't ever see more feedback from the team, or more likely from community reps. The reality is they're busy people, dealing with a pretty huge project on top of a project, on top of their actual jobs, and family lives, and time to spend with their friends and do the other things in life they enjoy doing. Every moment they're here on the forums reading and responding to ideas is that much less time they have available to actually do the things we'd like them to. This is why I brought up community reps, as when things settle for the team they're the most likely candidates to engage the community directly. They can filter and bring information to and from the devs in a much more focused manner, freeing up the dev's time to do... development. Lastly, the level of focused feedback does exist. It's just more of a test feedback loop than a proposed feature feedback loop. The test server has had two very specific feedback runs so far: snipe overhaul and now tanker AT overhaul.

I would be surprised if they did, however you cannot get door missions in PvP zones or call contacts to pick up missions in those zones, ergo ambushes should not be able to spawn in those zones as they are always triggered after either picking up a mission or finishing a door mission. This may not be the case for hazard zones unless they were changed to fall in line with PvP zones (which may be an automatic thing using the same system, I'm not sure). If not, a level 50 could get a door mission in a hazard zone, go there, do the mission, come out, be auto exemplared to the zone max and get ambushed by level 50s because that's the level of the mission they were on. Hazard zone level auto exemplaring could also interfere with regular taskforces, and the daily rewards being specific to them would skew the reward system to favor blueside as villains only have one hazard zone and it's not exactly friendly to all levels.

I believe that is how it works, yes. Could drop a suggestion to have it changed on the suggestion forums! Either lower the time to something a little more friendly for often played characters (12-18 hours) or add a variable for tracking it and award it after 24 hours of total logged out time instead of it having to be all at once.

Nope! GMs are generally not heavily involved in the dev process and when we are it's typically either a hush hush situation or something that the community already knows about. Mostly just trying to encourage ideas on both side of the spectrum!

Something a lot of game designers have to learn the hard way. Or just choose to ignore. Though you could say it's difficult to manage because the amount of tedium involved is obnoxious. As a note, though, and this is a 'generally speaking' thing: Singular, niche MASSIVE inf sinks are far less effective than more universally desired smaller ones. Not that you can't have both.

Beat me to the cheeky response. HP/resistances aren't likely to change on GMs as a note. I have mixed feelings about making them just show up on the map, but maybe have them pop on the map if engaged by players or something? I enjoy having to hunt to find them, personally, but that's when they aren't actively being made dead.

Good suggestion! It might be a little weird to implement due to being a default keybind for +camrotate but they might be able to figure something out. Now, this isn't what you want, buuuuuuuut this command would let you set a few keybinds/macros to teleport specific distances (IE: "powexec_location camera:30 Teleport" will teleport you 30 yards feet in the direction the camera is facing) Powexec_Location: Added /powexec_location, a client-side slash command to allow use of location targeted powers without having to click. Usage: /powexec_location loc power loc is a location specifier. There's several different things you can use here: me or self - Both target the power on yourself. target - Your currently selected target. If you have no target, the power is not activated. direction:distance direction can either be one of six cardinal directions relative to the player: forward, back, left, right, up, down, -or- it can be a number. If it's a number, it is taken as an angle in degrees. 0 is straight in front of you, 90 is right, etc. It can also be camera, to indicate the direction the camera is facing, including elevation. distance is either a number in world units (feet), or the keyword max, which means to use the maximum range of the power. power is the name of the power, just like what you'd use with /powexec_name. You can put quotes around the name to make it look cleaner if you want, but they are optional. Useful examples: /powexec_location me Fire Imps /powexec_location target Tar Patch /powexec_location camera:max Teleport

These changes way overbudget the power. I could see the second part happening to make it a strong single-target ability once you have FS. At best I'd say a poison weaken style treatment where it's a reduced power small AOE around the target. Otherwise the recharge/duration/endurance cost is going to have to change to compensate. Counter-Suggestion: Give Siphon Power a synergy with Fulcrum Shift in that if FS is already on the target Siphon Power does something more. What that is? I don't really care personally, just throwing out the idea to make both powers more usable in situations where they normally are mediocre. An example though? On top of the normal effects of Siphon Power, it will also do an additional X -damage%, split evenly among all the valid targets with Fulcrum Shift applied to them, eating the FS debuff to make it require a new cast of FS to get another benefit from the synergy. For example, if that 'pool' of extra debuff potency was 80% the end effect is that it's slightly stronger against the target cap (80/16=5%), individually speaking, but is significantly stronger against a single target. Granted that sounds like a nightmare to make work. And would probably have to be reconsidered for PvP. See above about the AOE effect, it's going to cost you endurance and/or duration/recharge. Stackable, enhanceable self +recovery on top of +rech/spd and a -rech/spd debuff? Yeah you're probably going to take a hit on duration or recharge for that, too, more than likely. At the cost of at least halving the duration or doubling the recharge and upping the endurance cost, maybe. Status protection buffs are not usually AOEs for a reason. Plus these protections already exist in ID, so seem a bit superfluous to just slap onto IR as well. In general your complaint about accuracy, while certainly a valid point, is drastically offset by the potency of the powers. Transferrence is a fairly unique ability that renders endurance woes mostly obsolete. Yeah, one every 20 will miss, but a full-endurance heal for potentially your entire team is incredibly powerful (reduced only by the state of the game post-incarnate/IOs). And Transfusion is the strongest aura heal in the game. Dark's is the same healing (or slightly more depending on AT, unintentionally I believe) but is slower firing and has lower base accuracy. Siphon Power is better than a lot of people give it credit for in the early game, since +damage is fairly rare until the mid-late 20s (at which point you're looking at having transferrence) so it's more of a buff to total damage out, relatively speaking. I agree that Inertial Reduction and Repel could be made more attractive. I also don't think it's terribly necessary though, as the set functions very well with them as they are. Anything that makes Kinetics more potent is going to be a hard sell for the sake of balance. They'll almost definitely have to have a drawback. As for this: https://paragonwiki.com/wiki//jranger

THAAAAAANNNNK YOOOOOUUU.

This sort of thing doesn't fit terribly well into the narrative to be a significantly common occurrence. I could see a select few named Outcasts showing up souped up, but you'd almost need an entire arc (or AU/portal corps mission as was done for many groups) explaining why a street-level group is suddenly showing up way above their normal power level. I'm not really a fan of not explaining advanced enemies showing up outside their normal power level like that. On top of other suggestions I wouldn't mind seeing something never/rarely seen in the rest of the game added. To borrow from something that's really common these days as an example, that was being added to the game more frequently near its closing: Telegraphed deadly attacks that are autohit and fall well outside the typical area/damage formula and AOE size limitations. These attacks could be added to named/end of mission bosses. A couple easy examples: Large AOEs (circular PBAOEs, player-targetted AOEs, checkerboard style, inverse cones, etc.) that give players some time to react but are universally dangerous (ignore damage resistance or do flat % damage) that force some/all of the group to move. Fast firing forward facing cones that have some sort of mechanic to make them survivable for whoever is tanking while the rest of the group has to be pretty wary (even if they're tanky) that make tank vs group positioning matter. Basically forcing players to pay attention to something they normally don't have to. I say this knowing full well that some of this may be difficult/impossible to implement due to engine limitations (non-standard shapes for telegraphs, faced cone telegraphs and special damage mechanics to name a few). And that there will be those who, for a variety of reasons, aren't a fan of this style of mechanic. I'm hoping to encourage people to think outside the typical CoH mechanics box. The more ideas we can come up with, the more likely we are to find that perfect storm of something that can be implemented that the devs would be excited to add. Whether as an 'advanced' difficulty mode or not.

Bit of a divisive topic among the community. Plenty of people prefer them either way, so it's pretty unlikely that the click powers are going to be changed into toggles. See also:

Toggle effects are turned off for the duration of a hard control, meaning a toggle mez protection is more vulnerable than a click because their mez protection, if overwhelmed, shuts off until they are no longer mez'd. It's certainly less damaging than it once was where the toggles themselves toggled off, but toggles are still impacted by hard controls where clicks are not. As for #5, it's true that it isn't a significant advantage but there are rare situations where it does come up. "Oops, forgot my toggles." being the prime example. It's honestly more of a counter from the 'big' negative of having to remember to activate the click than it is an advantage over toggles, I will admit.

Back on topic por favor. As for this: Gross simplification. Click mez protection powers: Cannot be shut off, short of the player being defeated Cost significantly to slightly less endurance over time, depending on total recharge Keep their effects active in the case that you are affected by a hard control, where toggle effects are suppressed for the duration of the hard control Can be stacked for higher protection, on top of doubling up any other effects they grant (this is actually fairly important for shield defense in particular) Can be activated while under the effects of control effects They have other disadvantages than "have to remember" as well, such as the endurance requirement coming in larger chunks and requiring investment in recharge to make permanent. Overall I don't personally think there's a real need to add another auto power activation toggle, but I certainly wouldn't complain if they opted to do so. Having it limited to only those who have an active defense is probably a lot more work than it would be worth, though. Better to just let it rain, as it were.

Yep. And the hybrid & interface powers. Doesn't help if you aren't teamed with someone though.

Great suggestion! Last I heard this is a work in progress. Unfortunately it isn't as simple as copy & paste and done and on top of that the team is pretty busy. We'll have to continue to be patient on this front.

Yeah I believe the issue is the entire model/animation system in CoH is proprietary and if Cryptic/Paragon had specialized tools to work with them, they aren't available now. Work is being done, probably by multiple groups on this front (I'm only aware of OuroDev, but I wouldn't be surprised if others were taking a crack at it too) but I have no idea where any of them are.

This would be in bad faith, so you can probably imagine what the answer to that is. I understand your point, but people are going to try to game any system. I'd honestly be surprised if that hasn't already been done. I'm not sure why anyone would risk anything over something as trivial as a costume contest, but there's a lot of things that people do that I don't understand. C'est la vie.

This is fine to do if you know someone willing to be your stand-in!

I suspect the fact that any key interrupts it is an artifact of the binding system where you can make any key activate an ability. Arguably, this is lazy design. It would be nice if only certain types of commands issued by the client interrupted the countdown (chatting, power activation and movement primarily). I've always found it obnoxious that you can't alt tab out of the game without interrupting the countdown. There's ways around that, but it's still annoying.