GM Sijin

Having the shield out overrides a lot of emotes and changes other animations. Not a bug, just a limitation with the set.

If there's any attack power set that I'd be okay with being toned down a touch, it's Titan Weapons. I believe the issue with the set is mostly in that it simply scales better than every other set in the game. Individual attacks hit harder, but when you only have a few attacks that is pretty balanced out. When you start getting more attacks to fill every moment of your momentum with attacks, the damage skews. When you start piling on recharge to nudge out the weaker attacks from that chain/increase the frequency you get your big hits more reliably, it skews further. TW breaks the model with the momentum mechanic. This means that any time TW is sitting still wailing on things for the entirety of their momentum, they're moderately stronger than other power sets. Single target, AOE, doesn't really matter since they have strong attacks in both regards. When they aren't, they lose that advantage and in some cases are moderately weaker. Other powersets have semi-similar mechanics (combos) but their effects are far less pronounced. That makes this is fairly unique to TW and difficult to balance in a way that feels right. Solutions that impact the maximum output far more than the minimum output are probably the best approach, since that scaling is where the difference comes in. Though I'd be fine with the set losing one/both of its DoT effects as part of a solution, personally, as those always felt a little excessive/out of place. And yes, I've played the set. I played it when it was brand new on live. I've leveled 3.5 TW characters (same powersets twice) and I'm going to be making a TW/Ice scrapper and/or tanker soon to see how that combo sits with me. I've done content solo and in groups at all levels. At very low levels in group play with a decent spread of DPS I tend to feel far less effective. Conversely at high levels I tend to feel more like the Juggernaut no matter what the team comp is (though a couple good support behind a TW scrapper is, frankly, stupid). That's fairly consistent, too, as there's few situations where I feel ineffective at all, and pretty much all of those times when I do it's because my chance to hit has tanked. I've had people comment about the performance of my TW characters. Not just positively, either: I've had someone opt to politely leave a team I was on because they felt it wasn't fun playing with a TW brute, and have had people complain about it a few times. So yes, there are people who do care. I'd love to see numbers on relative performance in a variety of areas. Low level, mid level, high level; no recharge, some recharge, permahasten+; stand and fight, routine mob packs, sparse mob packs; minimal/no movement required, moderate, lots of movement required; a variety of paired sets; etc. That would be far more useful than our anecdotal commentary, and all but required if you really want to approach actually balancing the set. But even with that the general consensus on how to balance the set, assuming a reduction is deemed appropriate, would probably remain pretty similar. I don't mind it being a top tier set in every category, personally. But I also won't be upset at all if it's toned down slightly so that it isn't as much of an outlier across the board at the top end of builds, especially if there's enough practical evidence presented to suggest it is.

This topic has veered a little too hard. There's far too much talk about markets, economies and exploits and far too little talk about whether or not the zone limit of 50 is appropriate for the raid zones. Incarnates and IOs have already trivialized raids at their intended player targets of a single league, I personally see no need to trivialize them further by allowing four times the players. As much fun as more rewards for less effort is.

Helpless? No. You have options. You can still control your character. You can use a large variety of inspirations without needing to hit a break free first. You can still activate other powers. You have one less toggle you need to re-activate to get back up to 'not gonna die' mode. You can run to buy time. Can you save all situations? No, but your chances are a lot better than if you got knocked back or stunned/held the moment your toggles dropped. It's also not another toggle draining your endurance if you get hit by -recovery, thus increasing the chances you'll detoggle if you were at low endurance. These are real advantages. I've made use of these advantages in my time playing the game. Price point is about 7x too high but otherwise that's not inaccurate. You can also opt for Acrobatics, which is certainly available to anyone. Me, I'd rather 4 slot the power ASAP and keep recharge DOs in it up to date if I thought I needed permanent status protection prior to 22. Valid opinion, but I have conversely never thought that ignoring the tools available to you is a good part of a solid argument for change. If you hate getting knocked back, you have options. Required options, if you're a fire/dark armor character by most people's measure, I suspect. I will say that I agree that set IOs shouldn't be the only recourse available. Fortunately in this case they certainly aren't. I also contend, however, that active mitigation's design is not flawed in the least. It adds meaningful choice. Something that's becoming a lot more rare in games.

Cel shading is a comic book-esque graphical style. Borderlands utilizes it. You can enable it in game by going to graphical options, enabling experimental settings and then enabling cel shading in the section that appears below it.

This doesn't work without expanding the 'in combat' mechanic. Current state it relies on you being attacked or attacking. If you're playing a pure support character that doesn't use aggro abilities in a team this can break. If your'e playing a mastermind that doesn't use aggro abilities, this can break. This also makes kiting too powerful in my opinion. In trouble? Run away, abuse line of sight. If you can keep them off you for 8 seconds even if they're still tracking you, you get rest level regen/recovery without actual risk. I'm assuming you intend the damage vulnerability effect of rest to not apply since you'll have it on you until you wade into a pack with the change proposed. Further, I don't like losing control of when I'm allowed to rest. If I'm support I don't want to be screwed out of resting to recover endurance after a crazy encounter because the tank doesn't stop pulling. I know when I can safely rest in combat and wouldn't be happy to lose that option. Finally I also don't want to have to wait a good chunk of time after combat to rest if I need to. Distance between packs isn't usually significant. And that good chunk of time is going to have to be equal to or less than the interrupt/activation time on rest (6 seconds, currently combat mechanics are 8 seconds) or it's going to be a worse experience for me in a lot of situations where I'd use rest.

I'm less familiar with the reasons behind Wet Ice. As far as I'm concerned it could be made to accept both defense and resist enhancements, though you certainly don't need more cold resist on ice armor. The benefit you get from purely defense enhancements is minuscule, but sets provide other bonuses and it should be a consideration. My guess is the fear in the original design would be that players weren't aware of just exactly how little defense they were getting from enhancing the power. That's no longer the case, and hasn't been a good long while. We can see pretty much all the numbers now, and can make informed decisions based on those.

And then there's the road/district design. Or just Skyway City in general. The sewers? The near complete lack of fire departments? The huge building to parking disparity? Hospitals with literally only one entrance/exit that require the use of stairs? The design of office spaces? The randomly placed and nearly-non-existent-in-other-areas power lines? The fact that Independence Port doesn't actually work for large ships? If this was reality Paragon City would be a testament of "And this is how you DON'T do <insert literally anything> design in a city..." Assuming the vast cave network just beneath the surface of pretty much every inch of the city didn't collapse first, anyway. This is a game based on comic books, not a reality simulation. You'll probably want to check your expectations at the door, else you'll be nitpicking 'till your face turns blue.

If you 'hate' it, then you have ~10 other armor choices to play. You also have the option of 4-5 slotting the power and putting DOs in there to get it permanent. Respecs are a-plenty in Homecoming. Also generally status protection isn't available until 8-12 so no it isn't 20 levels of a hole compared to toggles. This is true, however the flip to this is click powers are generally far less impacted by endurance drain/-recovery debuffs. Pros and cons. Different isn't necessarily worse. SR in particular also has resistance to slows. I'd like to introduce you to Steadfast Protection and Karma knockback protection, available starting at level 7 and can be slotted in any power that accepts resistance or defense sets and can be unslotted or respec'd out of and resold to recoup the majority of any expense (or just kept for future uses). This is a far better suggestion than homogenizing the defensive sets. I don't necessarily agree it's needed, but I still prefer seeing far more of this sort of solution, working within what the power is instead of fundamentally changing how the power works. (Hello, cottage rule) And this probably has a lot more to do with the defense to resistance disparity on brutes/tanks than the fact those sets use active mez proteciton.

Regarding Kuji-In Rin, the reason it doesn't accept resistance enhancements is because it's a click that is easily stackable (solo you can achieve 2+ stacks permanently with normal builds). If they allowed the power to accept resistance enhancements the psi resistance would almost definitely be reduced moderately to the point where it was equivalent or even inferior with typical generic IO slotting.

TL;DR? Skip to the last line. Process improvement is not really akin to powers balance. The general concept might kind of apply, but the concept as a whole does not. The former involves iterating on the steps of a known process that creates a definable result by incorporating new knowledge and technologies as they become available, removing wasteful steps and ensuring consistent output so that the results of changes to said process can be measured. This doesn't really apply to designing how a power works because the point isn't to make the power as efficient as possible. It can apply to how you manage programming teams, or how a business approaches change management, or any other number of business practices, but it does not plug neatly into managing powers balance. First of all you'd have to define what improvement is in regards to a power in an objective, measurable manner in order to apply iterative process improvement systems to it. That'll be a hard sell given how subjective the topic of powers balance is. Is improvement making it more powerful? Well eventually you reach a point where more does literally nothing because you've already made the game a pointless exercise in pressing your I-Win-Button. Is it achieving identical performance across powersets? Well there's only one reliable way actually achieve that: homogenize the sets to remove variability, which makes for a bland, boring play experience with little replayability. Is it how fun a set is to play? Well that's subjective and can't really be measured, especially since it's a perception that tends to change with familiarity, typically on a bell curve. Without an objectively measurable output to any "process improvement" the entire process improvement system fails. Which is why it is not a literally universally accepted system. It's fantastic for what it's good for, but doesn't apply well to everything. That tangent over with, I believe the core of what you're getting at is making sure a powerset is performing well, which starts with a question to determine if there is a problem, not a problem to determine a solution. Such a question might look like this: Is Shield Defense reliably under-performing in a variety of general scenarios compared to other defensive powersets? Prove that question as true, objectively, and we'll have something to really work with. If you can't/won't directly address this question, or something reasonably like it, you're not going to do much to encourage change. Note that 'performing' in this context doesn't necessarily mean numerically. If a set performs as well as any other, but is universally loathed to play, that's a pretty good indication that part of the design of the set is probably a bit askew. So allow me to address the topic now at hand as directly as I know how to to hopefully prevent any further derailing: Regarding Active Defense, is there something that appears to suggest it performs poorly in the context of providing Shield Defense with status protection compared to every other defensive powerset?

With all defensive abilities save Elude and (near) fully kitted, yes. A tanker can get away with less. Giving it to PB may open the door to a little more build diversification outside of tankers. Not sure it would given the nature of defense, but it might. It'd also make SR a tiny bit less susceptible to CDF if they detoggle or get hard mez'd through PB.

Some facts to help steer the discussion to objectivity rather than subjectivity. Most/all of this has been brought up before, if perhaps with less specific details. All defensive set active mitigation have 120 second duration and 200 second recharge. This means that: 2 even level SOs makes it nearly permanent: 1.716+(200/1.666) = ~121.764 2 level 35 IOs makes it permanent: 1.716+(200/1.696) = ~119.641 1 level 50+5 IO and another 16% global recharge make it permanent (IE: 1 LotG and 1 very rare +10% set bonus or 2 +8.75% recharge set bonuses, or any number of other combinations) The power can be double stacked permanently with ~244% total recharge, so if you have permahasten and two recharge in Active Defense you have it more than double stackable, meaning you have over a full minute to remember to refresh your active mitigation before it drops. The power can be triple stacked at max recharge, almost permanently (200/5)+1.716 = 41.716, 120/41.716 = ~2.88 (~5.2 seconds downtime on third stack) Low level concerns? A level 12+ tanker can perma this with 5 slots, and nearly perma with 4, using even-level recharge DOs. Is this a little build-prohibitive? Sure, long term, but if your concern is not getting CC'd ever at low levels it's a viable temporary solution you can respec out of later. Lower level enemies in general have less crowd control, so you shouldn't need 100% uptime in most situations. Knockback can be a little troublesome in some enemy groups, but if that's too much of a concern I'd like to introduce you to a little something called Steadfast Protection, available as early as level 7, which you can just slap in Deflection and unslot later. It should cover 90+% of knockback situations you'll encounter pre-22. Active Defense itself grants fear, repel and confusion protection on top of the "standards", with a hefty amount of defense debuff resistance that's made more valuable by it being a click power. Turning this power into a toggle removes the ability for shield defense to hit the cap for defense debuff resistance and severely limits its protection against this debuff, even if not triple stacked: 17.3 (battle agility) + 17.3 (grant cover) + 21.63 (active defense) = 56.23% (one stack, max value if changed to a toggle) + 21.63 = 77.86% (two stacks, achievable self-buffed with 100% uptime, comparable to non-elude SR) + 21.63 = 99.49% (95%) (three stacks, overcapped). On top of this, it loses the higher-than-everyone-else-using-toggle-powers protection to mezzes if stacking it. The endurance cost/second values are as follows: No recharge: ~0.052 Permanent: ~0.087 Doublestacked: ~0.173 Max recharge: ~0.249 Compare this to the standard 0.26 end/sec of defensive armor toggles. Active mitigation cannot be disabled prior to its duration running out. Toggles can be dropped due to endurance issues. Active mitigation can be activated while mezzed, toggles cannot. The disadvantages? You spend 1.716 seconds every time you click the ability instead of just once while activating, and you have to remember to click the ability (or, presumably, something else since it might be more important to have this on auto than any other click). Also the endurance cost, while generally significantly smaller over time, comes in one bigger chunk which can cause problems if you don't manage your endurance when it's time to refresh. I'm not sure, given everything above, the toggles have any actual advantage over Active Defense at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure for Shield Defense in particular it would be damaging to the set's potential to turn it into a toggle given what you trade for the convenience of not having to remember to click. Less convenient does not equate to less effective unless that is the only difference. As has been reiterated a number of times, it isn't. If anything this topic has convinced me that Practiced Brawler could maybe use a little defense debuff resistance added to it as well.

The Manifest is just XML and is quite small. And while it would be possible to do that I suspect that's not a solution they'd like to implement at this time. This might be something that could be implemented, but the thing is Homecoming's isn't the only manifest, so however this works would have to be pretty generic and not interfere with other manifests. It would likely have to be something as simple as "select list item X on manifest load". Honestly they'd like to replace Tequila with something better, so I'm not sure we'll see much in the way of changes to it at this point.

Just because a powerset doesn't fit into your playstyle as well as another powerset does not mean the powerset needs to change. If you dislike the active mez protection playstyle, the solution is to not play the sets that have active mez protection. There are other people that prefer that style of mez protection and changing it will not be a straight win across the board. This same logic applies across the board. Don't like playing support? Defender/Corruptor/Controller probably isn't for you, that doesn't mean the ATs need to be changed. Homogenization of powersets and ATs is antithetical to what City of Heroes is about.

The order of the items is dictated by the manifest, ergo it has to be the same for everyone. They could change the manifest to have the 64 bit option be the top option, but then anyone who wanted to run the 32 bit option by by default would be in the same situation. There might be a case for asking for the order to be swapped, but I have absolutely no data to support that, personally.

Ghost of Scrapyard and You Potter's Field Edition By GM Sijin Scrapyard not spawning on your server? This guide should help you get past that. If you just want the 'how to' skip to section II. I. Understanding how it works Soon we will see a new spawn method where you can get the Ghost of Scrapyard to spawn by defeating Scrapyarders in the zone. Until then, or if you want to spawn him the old fashioned way, here is what you need to know regarding his Potter's Field spawn location, which seems to be the problematic one that gets stuck. The protesting Scrapyarders will spawn randomly at 4 general locations and make their way to the rally point near Scrapyard's spawn point (green circle). They travel along paths as roughly outlined in the below image. Once they reach the rally point they will pick up signs and then path back to their spawn points. On this image the spawn points on the right side are straight north of the rally point which is the large tree in the graveyard with metal 'signs' around it and the sledgehammer statue nearby. The Ghost of Scrapyard will only spawn if a large number of protesting Scrapyarders (hint: it's more than a single person can aggro) are within the rally point at once. Scrapyarders that are not part of the event do not count. Needs confirmation: Uncertain if the protesting Scrapyarders will count if they are in combat. Also uncertain if they have to have picked up signs to count. Okay, but why doesn't he spawn normally here? The short answer is because not enough miners gather in the rally point at once. The long answer is that there's a lot of enemies they can encounter on their way to the rally point, and a lot of terrain they can get stuck on. Compounding this issue, the miners will return from the rally point to their spawn points after getting their protestin' signs, as already mentioned. Because the rally point requires so many of them to be within its radius at a time to trigger the spawn, what tends to happen is only (part of) 1-2 groups wind up being in the radius at a time. This is caused by them getting stuck on terrain and/or getting delayed/defeated by normal zone spawns. This results in situations where you have protesters that spawned, made it to the rally point, wandered back to their spawn point and probably a bunch that are stuck on the hills, as those circled in the image below. Another ~6 are stuck at the bottom of the hill in this example, obscured from being shown in the image. II. 'Fixing' the spawn You'll probably want at least two high level/damage players, but the more you have that can follow instructions, the easier the last step will be to pull off successfully. This may be very difficult to manage solo as a caveat, except maybe for an incarnate+ level character. Your tasks are fairly simple: Clear all non-protester enemies out from around the spawn points and the paths the protesters will take to get to the rally point Optional: At least one player parking near the rally point will prevent the majority of respawns along the paths, a good job for a lower level/damage player. This can help in case your kill squads get far enough away that respawns can happen. Now the hard part: As many of the protesters in both north and south locations, including ones stuck on rocks/walls, need to be defeated as quickly as possible without aggroing any newly spawned protesters. For this reason it may be best to pull the protesters a short ways away from the spawn points if possible Occasionally the entire spawn of miners will be on one side, in which case the other side should still have one person there to prevent normal respawns from aggroing any protesters that respawn on that side. The goal is to get as many of the newly spawned protesters to arrive at the rally point at roughly the same time as possible. If this is done correctly the Ghost of Scrapyard will spawn. Alternatively you could try to aggro and drag the protesters into the rally point. This'll require at least two people. If they count while in combat, Scrapyard should spawn fairly quickly if both people are near aggro capped. Let me know if that works! If not you can try to disengage by flying straight up and seeing if they'll count once they drop aggro, though they may spread out significantly.

In a more serious answer to the issue with boxing and kick (and pool attacks in general) is that their recharge times are far too fast making their DPA far too low. Their recharges could easily be tripled, end costs increased to balance and damage put into a place where the DPA was not ridiculously smol. Same could be said for Flurry which suffers from this a lot more than the other pool attacks. Then again at that point they may outclass some T1/2 powers except for the end penalty. Balance is hard.

"Missing" characters is almost always caused by the client borking its record of your characters locally. This can usually be solved by moving other characters into the slots the character(s) were in, or closing the game and deleting your COH\accountname\playerslots.txt file. Note that the latter option will undo any reordering and restore your character list on all servers to their defaults.

Due to the self healing part of the power Regrowth is flagged to not require a target, and thus, doesn't care if you have a target or not. Cones that do not require targets just fire straight ahead of your character. It's possible they could change this, but currently it's working as intended.

I disagree! 🤪

New AT: Legion. Spawns copies of itself until the client/mapserver decides it has had enough. Every mission is a timed mission!

I believe it's 20. Not much else for pure defense, but Ice armor/cold domination, energy aura and shield defense are primarily defense but do have some resistances. Stone is heavy on defense but it also does resistances, and there's a sort of forced aesthetic to the set if you want to be highly effective. WP and Bio both have some defense elements but are a little more resistance leaning. I think Arachnos Widows are fairly defense-focused as well, but I'm far from overly familiar with them.

RIP Carnado. Torchlight vigil when?

To answer this specifically, no this is not currently possible. It would require a redesign of, at the very least, the character database and the way the respec and builds systems work. Probably a lot more than that knowing City of. In short: A prohibitive amount of work would be required.