Call Me Awesome

On a few occasions I've had strong teams split into either pairs or 4 man groups to clear maps faster. With the right group this can drastically speed up kill all missions, however with a typical PuG it can be a disaster as you get people dropping like flies after they split off and over aggro. For most PuG's it's best to stick together for mutual support and to increase kill speed. A team that's worked together and knows each other is a different story... my old SG on Live would typically break into pairs of damage & support to rapidly clear.

I seem to recall it made it Live for a few days but possibly I'm wrong. I do absolutely remember it though. Seismic Smash as a large AOE... fantastic.

Absolutely. I don't have a real preference on HOW it works but I do agree it would be a great QoL option. I'd just prefer not having to devote a slot on every KB power to get it. Right now I have 4 KB-KD IO's on my Peacebringer and just deal with the occasional KB from other powers. My Fire/EM blaster however only needs to convert the APP power Bonfire... a FANTASTIC power as KD, a mostly useless/situational one as KB. (Popcorn is better than Stir Fry after all) On the other hand some characters would want to have a KB "positioning" power along with other KD powers so the option is good. Hmm, I wonder if it's possible to tie it to Power Customization like as an alternate animation?

Unfortunately the bug that turned all Tanker attacks into AOE with full damage didn't last long.☹️

Options are always nice, but as I recall costume pieces tend to be a pain to get right across various sizes of avatars. I'm sure it's doable, the question is how much of a PITA it would be for a volunteer Dev team with a lot already on their plate.

Personally I never get Hover, it's another power pick and limited use. For my flying characters who use it in combat I just use Mystic Flight and manage my end usage. It saves one power choice, accomplishes the same purpose and doesn't require loads of movement bonuses to be functional. I think the last character I had with Hover was before the pool changes allowing a travel power with no prerequisite.

And we all know what works best with a Fire/Rad... another one of course 😀 Building an ultimate team I've wondered if maybe 6 Fire/Rad, 1 Fire/Kin and 1 Fire/FF would be optimal... Kin buffs and mez protection coupled with crack monkeys and massive debuffs.

It was roughly similar to my own situation, I had thousands dating from the mid 80's up to the early 2000's when I got the decree that they had to go. Outside of a few with a little value the bulk went for less than 5c per. 35 large boxes (about 30" square) full only brought a couple hundred. I did have a few gems, New Teen Titans #1 for example, but only about 20 were really worth much.

I've watched prices creep upwards the last few months, back in May and June very few things were more than 1 million per IO and premium stuff like Miracle, Numina, LOTG 7.5%, Gladiator's Armor and the like were running in the 4-6 million range. As the player base gets more solvent prices are naturally starting to rise. I haven't gone shopping for a character in a month or so but the last build I did I noticed many things were going above 2 million and the premium ones were bringing closer to 9 million. I'd expect to see this continue but it won't get to the insanity level we had on Live in the late game due to the greater availability of all drops, particularly the PvP IO's which were in nearly non-existent supply on Live due to the extreme lack of popularity of PvP in this game. Even purples are becoming semi-available now, although most seem to be going in the 15-25 million range. The answer to price spikes IMO is Merits. Run a few TF's and use those merits for the expensive stuff and save your inf for the more available IO's.

Guess I should've hung onto mine, I had the series back when it came out. Then I got more domestic aggro about all the boxes of comics in the basement so they all had to go... for way too little $

Which in a game would be somewhat... problematic. 😉

Shield/Stone Melee would be effective; Stone feels like it hits harder than anything else and it has loads of soft control with knockdowns. Fair warning, it's an endurance hog so you'll need to mitigate that in your build. Grab the Miracle and Numina +recovery procs, a few recovery/+endurance set bonuses and you should be ok. Personally I'm partial to Stone Melee but it isn't everyone's cup of Joe. That said it DOES hit hard and has knockdown, knockUP, Stun and a Mag 4 HOLD. Other sets will out damage it, some may offer more utility but it will get the job done. Fault is one of the cornerstone powers... no damage but it's an AOE knockdown and it will take several damage procs. It's recharge is enough that the procs tend to fire most of the time, I find it's a decent damage power on top of it's soft control once proc'd up. If one proc hits you're getting roughly Stone Fist damage, two of them doubles that and I find more often than not they all hit. Unfortunately Shield's taunt/+damage aura won't boost the damage of procs and Stone Melee is lacking in AOE damage ability outside of Tremor... which is mediocre damage with knockdown.

Well, the only Melee Support that comes to mind offhand is a Tank... support by controlling the attention of the mobs. Shield is quite good at getting attention and keeping it while surviving until the team can eliminate the threat. As far as a complement there's lots of choices and few bad ones so you're likely to be quite effective. One caution is that Shield will tend to be a bit endurance heavy so you may want to consider a lighter endurance secondary. I found that Shield/Fire worked quite well on Live. I also found that the Scrapper Broadsword/Shield combo was very good albeit end heavy, I'd expect much the same as a tanker. Of course the Scrapper numbers benefited much more from Parry than the Tanker version will. Still, it's an iconic pairing, I'm playing the Scrapper version again here on Homecoming, a BS/SD barbarian named Gortak. Basically pick a secondary you like and run with it. Elec/SD is popular on Stalkers, Scrappers and Brutes and should work well on Tanks as well. I use my Elec/SD Stalker to clear the Comicon Farm asteroid map in under 5 minutes even handicapped by not having a taunt aura.

I seem to recall this AT was proposed by the Devs prior to shutdown alongside the Sentinel and eventually rejected after play testing showed the concept was problematic.

A global KB-KD proc would be a beautiful thing, as a suggestion simply change the Overwhelming Force IO to a Global instead of creating an "orphan" IO or another new set. That solves the KB problem and allows those who want to selectively keep KB to use the Sudden Acceleration IO instead. Admittedly I don't know of any specifics but since we already have other global effect IO's in the game (LOTG 7.5% recharge for example) it should be doable without much trouble.

Personally I rarely use it for anything and never read them. On the other hand, I don't have anything against them either, it really doesn't matter one way or another. If it's a trivial change then yes, if it's more complicated then there's lots of other things WAY higher on the priority list. I do occasionally check the powers tab so I know what to expect from teammates and the IO list, while mostly useless, does indicate if someone has an extensive IO build. That list would be more useful if it parsed itself like "+10% S/L/M defense, +110% recharge" and so forth giving a total of the bonus.

That's the point, they were extremely difficult back then. No Kelds were allowed either.

How about the level 1 races? Roll a new level 1 (pre vet awards) and run from Atlas to the courtyard in Portal Corporation Perigrine Island. Your only travel power was Sprint and the typical route was AP-Steel-Talos-PI Ferry. If ANYTHING spotted you then you were off to the Hospital and disqualified. If you could do that then avoiding aggro in the Hollows was cake.

Slide up a couple forums to the Tools, Utilities & Downloads then go to Mid's Hero Designer.

Always was referred to as Weekly Task Force by all I knew which abbreviates to WTF.

Shards and that entire Shard based tree are relics of the original Incarnate implementation. When the other Incarnate powers were introduced for some reason the Dev's introduced an entirely new system for creating them. Having two completely separate systems of Incarnate salvage is pointless and confusing. All Shard related drops should be converted to Thread drops and Shards should be removed from the game. Threads are a relatively abundant resource that can be used to create ANY Incarnate power. Using Shards it will take a minimum of 4 weeks as I recall to craft a T4 Alpha... you needed to run the Weekly TF to get the salvage for a T3 and you needed two T3's to combine with a salvage piece made from two WTF drops... thus you had to run 4 Weekly TF's for the salvage needed to craft a T4 Alpha. Oh, and the Shard salvage from the WTF only dropped the first time you ran the WTF, try again next week for the second piece.

Every other mission I can think of in a TF with a time limit simply advances to the next mission if you fail. The Lady Gray mission where you're supposed to lead out the two idiots? Let them run into battle and get killed, it's much faster and you go on to the next one.

Ok, so fail the mission and go on. Really I absolutely DESPISE "kill x number of y" missions in the first place and worthless grays on top of that?

Better still would be to completely drop all the Gray hunts, they're worthless and only serve to waste time and pad the TF length. Replacing all of them with an extra door mission or two would greatly improve the TF.

By default I tend to grab Mystic Flight on most characters; yes it's a little slower than SS/SJ but it offers more control and really, the speed issue is seldom important. Most of the time Fly (or Mystic Flight) will get you to the mission door nearly as fast as if not faster than SS/SJ characters. Outside of having to get from one end of IP to the other the speed difference isn't enough to matter. Does it really matter if it takes you another 10 seconds to get there? Likely you'll be waiting on some of your team anyway and nothing else comes close to the mobility of Fly. If you're masochistic enough to go to the Shadow Shard other travel powers aren't very effective... not a major issue since most players avoid that zone. The few exceptions are typically Tankers with CJ/SJ as the travel power and that's more of a flavor thing than anything else. Flying is simply much more convenient than any other travel power. I had very few characters with SS at Shutdown and none here on Homecoming; the only reason I'd get it is to stack with a stealth power. I had it on my Dark/Dark Defender (Shadowfall + SS = Invis) and my Plant/Storm Controller (Steamy Mist + SS) on Live. The SS/SJ combination is problematic because it uses two of your four power pools; quite a few builds may not have an extra pool to devote to it. Back on Live over the course of the game I tried every travel power and eventually settled on Fly for the majority. A Granite Tanker is the only character with TP and only used it for combat mobility... I had Fly for the actual Travel power... thanks to the -speed/-jump of Rooted or Granite you're almost forced into TP in combat. Since IO's became a thing and near Granite levels of toughness became possible on more mobile powersets I don't see any point in Stone Armor anymore so TP goes back into the abyss from whence it came.