Vanden

Issue 25 added contacts that let you do that once you earn the Villain Disruptor badge for heroes, and some other badge for villains, don't actually know which one there.

It was gonna be part of i24.

Yeah, this change makes tip missions pretty pointless. Still better than newspaper missions if you've gotten the Mayhem/Safeguard temp power for your level range, but there's very little reason to do them now.

Ascendant.

No level minimum, you get them from doing TFs, story arcs, and defeating giant monsters.

Defenders have possibly the lowest raw damage in the game, so from a pure effectiveness standpoint it's best to choose your secondary based on its secondary effects, like the -Recharge in Psi and Ice, or the -ToHit in Dark.

I was right, I definitely do not have the right mindset. I'm more of a "clean your plate, lick the spoon, and suck up all the crumbs off the table cloth" kind of guy. :) You and me both. We're the kind of player that this change hurts the most.

With the cost reductions you mentioned, it felt to me like 50 merits kept pace with the purchasing power tip missions had in the old days, but 20 merits puts us behind where we were. That's pretty much exactly what the 50 merits per alignment mission did. On Live, one alignment merit would get you most rare recipes. Some, like LotG +Recharges and uniques were two, and PvP and Purples were more expensive, but for the most part 50 merits/alignment mission was keeping pace. If you were to skip past as much of the tip missions as possible, only defeating the mobs you had to (especially at -1, x1, no bosses), it was pretty likely you'd run out of tips. That's where buying them would come in.

You're just buying the tip, you still need to do the mission.

Yesterday's change to the reward merits for Tip missions is the first thing the Homecoming team has done that I really don't agree with. Before yesterday, reinforcing your alignment as a Hero or Villain gave 50 Reward Merits; now it gives 20. This is a huge nerf. Now I understand that setting your difficulty to the lowest level and buying tips with the supergroup base computer would allow you to grind out merits extremely quickly, and maybe for that, 50 merits (40 if you buy all your tips) was too much. But for players like me who liked to run tips at a leisurely pace, this is a huge disservice. Tips allowed us to work for a good reward at a leisurely pace without having to commit to teams or locking us into a TF. It seems likely to me that the real concern here was the aforementioned lowest-difficulty tip-speedrunning method, so limiting alignment missions to one per day, or removing the ability to buy tips so players had to clear more enemies to get them drop, is a much better option. It would curb the highest-payout methods of doing tips without punishing the more deliberate methods players like myself used.

That's not cool; those merits were incredibly useful. That's a huge nerf. I would much rather they have reinstated the timer or limited it to 1 morality mission a day, because grinding those missions isn't fun.

Rogue and Vigilante morality missions give 20 merits now. With the reduced merit prices in i25, that's pretty much equal to the amount they got on live compared to an alignment merits.

This is a change they made for i25. Buyers can buy recipes at any level, regardless of what level the seller’s item is. For example, if someone puts up a level 50 Thunderstrike recipe, but you want it at level 40, you put a bid on a level 40 Thunderstrike and that level 50 recipe is converted to a level 40 recipe when you buy it.

Not a bug, alignment merits have been mostly phased out in i25. Hero and villain morality missions give 50 reward merits, which can now be used to buy virtually everything; uncommon recipes are 20 merits, rare recipes 50, and purple recipes, PVP recipes, and attuned enhancements cost 100. Since reward merits do everything now, alignment merits only exist to be converted to and from reward merits at a rate of 1:50, to make it easier to email reward merits between characters.

I ran an Eden trial yesterday on Torchbearer, and encountered two bugs of note. The first bug we found was that attempting to run the trial with a time limit caused the trial to fail instantly; we made two attempts with the "Silver challenge" time limit for the TF and as soon as we set foot inside the door mission we were booted out in failure. Starting the TF with no challenges for our third attempt enabled let us do the mission as normal. The second bug I can't verify, but a teammate reported that they chose the Titan enhancement award at the end of the trial and didn't receive it. Since Titan enhancements have been buffed to be as strong as Hamidon enhancements (though they drop at -2) and can be combined with Hamidon enhancements in i25, I feel like this is probably the more concerning bug of the two we encountered.

Back on the Live servers I had a Mind/Psi permaDom, and I don't think Mind Control needs a true pet. If the set's damage is lacking I think a better option is to just boost the damage of Mesmerize, Dominate, and Levitate. Also, just as a QoL, remove the delay on damage from Levitate. Before i6 it was synched with the moment that an enemy hit the ground, but since they added ragdoll it never synchs properly. What I think the set could really use is a change so that Interface Incarnate abilities that add DoTs to your attacks don't affect Mesmerize, so taking those abilities doesn't make Mesmerize useless.

Transfers were turned on for about a minute before they broke something and had to be turned off for now.

Alpha slot powers are not buffs attached to your characters, they're like global enhancements that affect every valid power you have. They won't show up in the combat monitor.

If you're only interested in whether the Story Arc gives merits at all, the answer is every story arc gives reward merits.

Also, Combat Jumping is not the one with knockback protection, that's Acrobatics. And you don't need to grab that power any more, since knockback protection IOs can be easily had for merit rewards.

Reward Merit costs are greatly reduced on the i25 servers; it's generally 20 merits for uncommon recipes, 50 for rares, and 100 for Purple/PVP/AT items. The loss of alignment merits for reinforcing your alignment isn't so bad in light of that, but it kind of ruins the rewards for doing signature story arcs because they haven't been replaced with anything there.

Did you ever take a screenshot while teamed with this player? Screenshots in CoH have a bunch of metadata that includes the names of everyone on your team when you took the screenshot.

You can still get perma-Hasten with global recharge buffs from IOs, but it's kind of just a novelty since the amount you need is actually greater than the boost from Hasten itself.

The message to talk to Wolfe is just part of the error message when using the /respec command; it doesn't necessarily mean you can get a respec from him. On the live servers at least, respecs earned from trials needed to be redeemed using an NPC, but the /respec command was usable with the free respecs that were granted every now and then by the devs to keep those NPCs from being overcrowded.

Jump Kick is only a 20% chance for Knockdown (technically knock-up), compared to Air Superiority's 100% chance. It also looks goofy as hell and lacks AS's -Fly effect.